Outlaws and rebels

Abstract

There is a seeming paradox in the general picture of political tranquillity which Valencia presented in the later Habsburg period. On the one hand, as the spokesman of the Estates declared proudly to Charles II, ‘in more than 400 years which have elapsed since the conquest, not one noble has ever been convicted of treason or disloyalty’. On the other hand, as he went on to say, the problem of lawlessness was worse in Valencia than in any other part of Spain, such that people lived ‘under a common misapprehension that the feuds and banditry in Valencia were something to do with the area, and came from the climate or the stars’. Of course the phenomenon of banditry was a general one throughout the Mediterranean states in the early modern period. Its sheer scale has impressed some historians, who have tended to see it as an authentic movement of mass revolt – the revolt of the nobility against the centralizing tendency of the successors of St Peter in the Papal States or the protest of a wretched peasantry against the seigneurial reaction in seventeenth-century Naples. In Valencia it is perhaps more difficult to see any such coherent direction in the random but repeated acts of violence which stain the judicial records of the age. One bandit gang freed two conscripts in an unpopular levy of 1643, another broke up a chain-gang on its way to the galleys, but these are isolated incidents which confirm the general rule that Valencian bandits rarely attacked the Crown or the government.