A Difficult Transition: Portuguese State Finances Between Later Medieval and Early Modern Times, c. 1415–1530

Abstract

Following the framework set up by the Bonney-Ormrod model, this chapter offers a political economy of early modern Portugal, i.e., how the Crown built a new fiscal ethos under the challenges of a key period to a new enthroned dynasty: the Avis household. This becomes evident when we analyze a specific context of an “organic institutional development,” which portrays the debate on the state of finances from the military advances in Ceuta, in 1415 to the effective colonization of Brazil, in 1530. These hundred and fifteen years were decisive in redefining the purpose of state finances. Moreover, this period is key to understanding a tendency to value chivalric activity and a more intense military action as part of a strategy of expanding the domains and a broader cultural and political affirmation strategy as a “new center of power and diffusion of cultural trends.” Based on a combination of fiscal sources with parliamentary debates and royal chronicles, what we will see is that this policy was two-folded: it was conceived to establish a new status quo of permanent war and expand its economic domain by reinforcing and expanding landlordships. Besides, it took advantage of an ongoing fiscal dynamic, boosted by commercial activity and warfare, built to provide political sustainability to the new group in power, and institutionalizing of a redistributive income policy within the group of the king’s favorites.