A Map of Crime in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

S PANISH arbitristas, from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, attacked repeatedly the hordes of bandits and idle vagrants, estimated by one writer at I 50,000, whom they saw both as a parasitic drain on the nation's resources and as a symptom of an economy lacking in opportunity and hampered by unfavourable social attitudes.' Yet, in spite of the continuing belief in its relevance as a factor in the country's economic decline, with the exception of the work that has been done on bandolerismo in Catalonia,2 virtually nothing is known about crime and vagabondage in Habsburg Spain. Attention has been drawn to the subject largely on account of its connexion with the picaresque novel, while historians have interested themselves in justice rather than in delinquency. What little is known comes either from the novel or from the statute book. Yet an analysis of the incidence and distribution of crime has obvious and important implications for the more general social and economic picture. At one level, it offers the chance of reimposing an overall pattern on an age tantalizingly deficient in global figures and so permits some assessment of the relative condition of different parts of the country on the basis of a homogeneous set of data, as previous attempts exploiting figures for population, taxation, and emigration have done;3 at another, it might inject some precision into the characterization of Spain as an otiose and vicious republic (Gonzalez de Cellorigo), and provide a measure of reality against which to relate the preoccupation of writers of the Golden Age with idleness and delinquency as the all-pervading evils of their day.