The Classes of Nobility

The most widely accepted classifications of types of nobility appearing in Spanish documents from the fourteenth century onward were the product of syntheses developed by Spanish jurists who read the classical and ecclesiastical texts on this subject and then disputed each other in print. According to these authors, there were three classes of nobility. The first, primary natural nobility (nobleza natural primera), included all classes of entities, animate and inanimate. Because God created all the categories, they all had intrinsic dignity and importance. Each species of entity contained better and worse representatives. The best representatives were called “noble.” The connection between this idea and the chain of being is clear. What is noble in the natural world is that which most closely approximates the eternal Idea of it. This first category of nobility formed a background for all viewpoints and was not actively disputed.

The second class of nobility, natural secondary and moral nobility (nobleza natural secundaria y moral), was unique to human beings. It came to individuals either through direct inheritance from the first fathers of humanity or because, through great acts of valor or wisdom, the individuals had restored their bloodlines to the purity characteristic of the first fathers. This class of nobility was also called nobility of blood (bidalguía de sangre).

Humans were initially created by God in a state of purity. In this original state, all human actions were right actions, for nothing could have caused them to be otherwise. But humans were also created with the ability to sin, and through sin they fell from this original state of purity. Those humans whose behavior most closely approximated that of the first fathers of humanity and who, through all generations, maintained a steadfast commitment to right actions and reverence to God were considered to be noble: “Nobility is nobility that comes to man by lineage” (Alfonso X [El Sabio] [c. 1265] 1848).

In this view, nobility was the closest approximation to the original purity of creation, and it was transmitted genealogically. Those who through sin, heresy, or disloyalty stained their bloodlines were no longer noble. Such people were, of course, the immense majority.

There were two categories of people who could claim nobility of blood. The first consisted of the magnates, those extremely famous and wealthy Spanish families whose background and nobility could not be questioned because of their social power. The behavior and social prominence of another lesser group suggested that they, too, were noble, though they did not have the power and wealth to force public recognition. These people petitioned the ruler for letters patent of nobility (executorias). In theory, the ruler could neither absolve people of their sins nor purify their lineages; but as God’s lieutenant on earth, he had the power to examine the records of a person’s behavior and family background. If these records indicated that the person was truly noble, the ruler could grant the letters patent that “recognized” (not created or granted) that nobility. Nobles who gained their status in this manner were called nobles by letters patent (hidalgos de executoria) but were also considered to be nobles by blood (hidalgos de sangre).

The third class of nobility was civil political nobility (nobleza política civil). This kind of nobility was granted to individuals by a ruler in recognition of their service to the crown. It was a prize of honor awarded by the state to its servants because of their superiority in the use of the sword or the pen. Such people were also called nobles by grant (hidalgos de privilegio). There were numerous categories of grant (Isasti [1625, 1850] 1972, Moreno de Vargas [1636] 1795, Nueva recopilaciôn… [1696] 1918).

Thus there were three major roads to socially recognized nobility: proper genealogy combined with general public recognition of it, proper genealogy and right actions recognized as such by a ruler, and service to a ruler sufficient to merit a grant of nobility. In theory, all three rested on the same basic principle: the genealogical transmission of material purity of blood that caused right action and belief. The purity/nobility relationship was the core of this naturalistic explanation and justification of human behavior and hierarchical social structures.

Double Meanings

A key to the operation of this system of concepts was the multiple meaning of biological/physical terms. Blood was a physical substance circulating through the body and, following the humoral theory, was a direct cause of an individual’s character and actions. Certain qualities of blood were important in the concept of nobility: purity, clarity, and cleanliness. It was not blood itself that made right actions, but its purity, clarity, and cleanliness. Purity of blood was not conceived as a metaphor in any sense; it was felt to be a specific physical property. Purity of blood resulted from genealogy and consanguinity.

The antitheses of these concepts helped to bound this conceptual universe and set its social context. The opposite of nobleman was commoner, and the opposite of the nobility was the populace. The quality opposed to purity/clarity/cleanliness was impurity or (the term most commonly used at the time) mixture. The opposite of nobility was thus mixture, meaning both physical mixture of noble and non-noble blood (creating impurity) and the social mixture arising from unknown genealogical background (always assumed to mean mixed noble and commoner elements). By the same logic, the state of purity had to be proved, for purity was the exception. The ordinary human condition was mixture.

A number of ambiguities must be dealt with at this point. First, as we have seen, there are two Spanish terms that we translate as “nobility” in English: nobleza and hidalguía. My understanding is that bidalguía came into use later and that the term emphasizes the social implications of nobility. The derivations of these terms supplied by jurists of the period are highly fanciful.

Ambiguities in the meanings of blood do not end with nobility, since ideas about blood expand into the realm of fertility, racial differences, and so on. There were also complex debates about the nobility of women, especially when a noblewoman married a commoner or a commoner woman married a nobleman.

Principles and Social Realities

A much deeper ambiguity centers on the sources of nobility themselves. In the ideal model, nobility was a direct genealogical transmission from the first fathers of humanity, who were created pure in blood. By this genealogical principle, anyone who was noble had to be directly descended from them. Yet the theoretical systems also recognized the possibility that people could, through right acts, restore purity to their bloodlines. This view is much harder to rationalize theoretically within the genealogical principle. After all, if purity of blood directly caused noble behavior, how was it possible for someone with impure blood to act in such a way as to purify it? The difficulty is great and its logic is readily understood. The legitimacy of noble privilege was given a naturalistic justification in a genealogy that supposedly placed it beyond the reach of most people. After all, a privilege that anyone could receive would be no privilege at all. Thus the whole idea of nobility was tied to the genealogical principle.

Yet a social system that could not accommodate social mobility could not survive. The active and often wealthy servants of the monarchy who were not noble had to be dealt with, even at the expense of logic. The idea of royal “recognition” of nobility was an attempt to paper over the granting of noble status to nonnobles. It covered the breaching of the system by claiming that these new nobles had been noble all along but memory of their genealogy had been accidentally lost. Thus in a society in which the efficacy of the idea of nobility as the legitimation of inequality depended on the genealogical principle, people were becoming noble all the time. And by 1600, noble titles were being bought and sold.

Impurity also was fraught with ambiguity. In one sense, impurity was the expression of human sinfulness, something created in our original “nature.” Here it had a genealogical sense. Yet nobles were, theoretically, always in danger of losing their purity. But if purity of blood directly imparted nobility to behavior, how could behavior leading to impurity arise? Social reality had to be dealt with. Any social ideology that does not allow powerful people to fall from preeminence is exceedingly vulnerable. There had to be an idiom for downward social mobility as well.

These ambiguities in argument about purity of blood and nobility reflect, in part, the necessity of adjusting a theoretical system to the complexity of a real society. While the legitimacy of nobility rested fully on the genealogical principle, the system had to accommodate the rise of nonnoble families and the fall of noble ones.

All the theoretical contortions notwithstanding, the genealogical principle could not account for social mobility. When egalitarian doctrines came to prevail in Europe, they did so, in part, by forcing this problem to its limits. If the nonnoble could rise and the noble could fall, then the environmental principle, not the genealogical principle, was the paramount force in society.

The continual tension between the genealogical and environmental principles is a fundamental characteristic of the humoral/environmental system for explaining “human nature.” The two principles contest each other’s turf but neither can displace the other. In Hippocrates they collaborate; during the Old Regime studied here, genealogy is argued against environment; and during the Enlightenment, as we shall see, environment comes to be argued against genealogy. And this nature/nurture debate has not yet ended.

The Social Context of Nobility

According to the great lawmaker and compiler of legal codes Alfonso X (El Sabio) ([c. 1265] 1848:vol. 1, Title XXI), society was naturally divided into three estates: clergy, military, and laborers. The first two estates were noble by definition; they could not have been otherwise, since it was their nobility that made them preeminent in religious and military matters. To hold a position of significance in the church or in the military, a person had to be noble. Within the nobility, there were distinctions of reputation, wealth, and power.

By the fourteenth century these principles were embodied in characteristic social institutions and patterns of social conflict. The documentation of claims to nobility became an extremely important function of the state; heraldry and genealogical investigation flourished as never before or since. All families that could make claims to nobility did so and insisted on the issuance of letters patent.

Because of their crucial role in military actions and governance in the late part of the Reconquest in southern Spain, the military orders (originally established for the Crusades) came to exercise important control over the process of granting letters patent. Ambitious individuals with sufficient wealth to receive a proper education found that admission into the military orders was a vital step. To secure admission an individual had to prove his nobility.

If the applicant did not have an established claim to nobility, the military orders instituted a complex investigative process. Genealogical research was undertaken to ascertain that there was no Moorish, Jewish, or heretic mixture in the man’s background. Testimony was sought from acquaintances regarding his behavior, and investigators visited his town of origin to see his properties and to discuss his reputation with townspeople, especially to see that neither he nor his family had engaged in nonnoble occupations. The investigative panel then determined the nobility of the applicant, subject to royal confirmation.

There were other avenues to the social recognition needed for ascension to higher statuses (preeminently through the church), but this example suffices to show how fully developed the administrative/legal apparatus surrounding grants of nobility was. The gatekeeping function of nobility was considerable and carefully exercised.

In any such institution, great opportunities for abuse exist. Enemies could make false claims about an individual’s background and people could falsify their own claims to nobility. By the seventeenth century, letters patent and privileges were easily bought and sold. With enough money a person could become noble by either bribery or direct payment for a title (Caro Baroja 1966).

The nobility gained center stage with the beginning of the definitive administrative centralization of Spain in the fifteenth century. The issuing of letters patent, the development of complex rules for dealing with nobility, and the elaboration of legal concepts of nobility began to appear in great numbers by the time of Henry IV (1454–74). A significant number of claims to nobility were considered by Philip II (1527–98) and his successors. Philip was particularly concerned with the problem of recognizing the “native” nobility in countries then incorporated in the Spanish empire. He used grants of nobility as part of a strategy of political alliances to operate his highly heterogeneous realm.

The central role of nobility effectively came to an end by 1700, when wealth became more important than titles. Once wealth could purchase nobility unproblematically, the social value of nobility began to decline (Caro Baroja 1966). This is not to say that society was becoming less stratified by 1700; rather the idiom of stratification was shifting from an aristocracy of blood to an aristocracy of wealth. Although wealth had obviously always been important to a family that aspired to nobility, by this time wealth alone, unadorned by title, could provide great social eminence. The social power of the genealogical principle had been undermined.

Blood and Nobility in the Basque Country and Castile

Despite a shared conceptual framework and the use of the same literary and legal sources, the various regions of Spain appropriated and developed the concepts surrounding nobility in different ways. All accepted the causal role of purity of blood in creating existing social arrangements. Despite their use of common concepts for thinking about and legitimating social structures, regional political economy and the course of historical events ultimately differentiated the Basque Country and Castile so completely that they developed mutually opposed political ideologies. This point, central to the understanding of the process of ethnogenesis, shows that, even within an agreed-upon conceptual framework, highly differentiated social implications can be drawn from the same humoral/environmental theories.

Nobility in the Basque Country

The Spanish Basque Country is composed of the provinces of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, and Alava, to which Navarra is often added, all in the northeast corner of Spain. There are three other Basque provinces on the French side of the border. Speakers of a language unrelated to any other currently used in the world, the Basques have been in the news in recent years because of the political strife surrounding them, especially the waves of ETA terrorism. The Basque Country has a long history of provincial customary law and has characteristic institutions for local and regional government. The issue of nobility in the Basque Country was first joined in the development of these bodies of customary law.³

The conflict occurred in a resolutely political context: the forced development of a comprehensive written code of customary laws (fueros) acceptable to the Spanish monarchy. Until the time of this codification, the reigning monarchs had generally observed the customary laws without having a compilation of laws to refer to. The result was continual friction, since the actions of the monarchy were regularly held to be in violation of the fueros by the Guipúzcoan government and the monarchy always suspected that the Guipúzcoans were establishing legal precedents to avoid complying with royal wishes.

These laws were written down only when the persistently divergent interests of the crown and the province threatened their very existence. Apparently the first attempt to write down some of the fueros in Guipúzcoa was made in 1397. Subsequently the body of written fueros was elaborated and recompiled as the changing political situation warranted, until in 1696 the crown demanded a definitive compilation to which no more could be added. These bodies of customary law, unwritten and then written, were of such importance that new monarchs, upon taking the throne, had to swear to uphold them.

The specific history of the fueros of Guipúzcoa is less important herp than their political context. The compilations were organized as attempts to develop a comprehensive doctrine of provincial rights with legitimating philosophical and legal arguments. The written fueros were essentially defensive documents, and they became more complete and strident in their claims for provincial rights as the monarchy’s desire to eliminate those rights increased. The maintenance of these fueros into the late nineteenth century was permitted by the unique strategic importance of the Basque Country in Spain (Green-wood 1977).

In this defensive process, Basque jurists both compiled laws and set them in a comprehensive historical, geographic, and ethnographic context. A ruler who swore to uphold the fueros simultaneously ratified the Guipuzcoan view of history and ethnic identity. And in this view of history, the concept of nobility occupied a central place.

Nobility appeared early in the compilation in the second chapter of Title II. The document contains a comprehensive theological, legal, and historical argument, peppered with references to earlier thought on the subject. The three types of nobility were specified in detail and then an important step was taken. The Guipúzcoan Basques claimed that they were all hidalgos de sangre because anyone born in Guipüzcoa of Basque parents was noble:

This interesting claim to collective nobility had multiple implications and justifications. The supporting arguments offered were mainly historical. The compilers of the fueros claimed that the Basques were the oldest inhabitants of Spain and were lineal descendants of Tubal. The second title of the fueros states:

Thus they argued an unbroken genealogy back to the fathers of humanity, an argument widely made in other tracts as well (Echave [1607] 1971, Isasti [1625, 1850] 1972, Zaldivia [1517] 1944). The physical purity of blood is an important element in this view. After the Flood, humanity had been purified of all but original sin. Those who could claim an unbroken genealogical connection to such figures as Tubal could assert their purity of blood and thus their nobility. Genealogy here attests to humoral purity.

The fueros also argued that the Basque area had never been overrun by the Moors, and that the Basques not only defended the area against them but were active participants in the Reconquest of Spain. Claiming to be widely known for their staunch Christianity, they used these combined religious and military arguments to support their claim that their genealogy went back to the beginning of time and that it had never been contaminated by Moorish, Jewish, or heretic mixture.

The fueros and the supporting commentaries did not stop with this historical argument for lineal purity of blood. All of the sources carefully documented Basque participation in the Reconquest and encounters with the French (including Roncesvalles) and many others, all showing the preeminence of the Basques in military struggles. Great detail regarding the battles themselves was given, and most royal oaths to uphold the fueros mentioned Basque military prowess. The religiosity of the Basques and the large number of learned men the Basque Country had produced were also documented. Thus the fueros approached the proof of nobility from the side of right actions as well as genealogy. By their consistent right actions, the Basques legitimated their claims to nobility of blood.

Collective nobility is a most peculiar idea. A major function of nobility is to exclude most of the population from participation in elite institutions. The Basque claim to collective nobility by purity of blood forced the Basque jurists to argue that many people whose social roles would be direct impediments to nobility—farmers, fishermen, coopers—were noble. The Basque jurists pursued this position aggressively:

This argument represents a fascinating play on the genealogical principle. To place their claim to nobility beyond the historical reach of the Spanish rulers, the Basque jurists argued that Basque nobility was a direct unsullied inheritance from the first fathers of humanity. But in the empirical world Basques necessarily occupied all social strata, many engaging in nonnoble occupations—a direct contradiction of the concept of nobility. To deal with this problem the jurists suspended the behavioral side of nobility entirely and stressed only direct genealogical connections to the first fathers of humanity. This strategy shifted the social function of the concept of nobility from an explanation of social stratification to a legitimation of regional ethnic rights.

The Basque claims were not made or taken lightly. The theorists of monarchy, even as far back as Alfonso X in the thirteenth century, argued that only a very few people, and perhaps no one currently, enjoyed nobility unless it were confirmed or granted by the monarchy:

The monarchy argued that any special privileges the Basques enjoyed must have been given to them by rulers. In other words, the rulers rejected the Basque claim to nobility of blood without royal confirmation, thereby rejecting the Basque claim of a unique ethnic identity. Had the Basques accepted this royal view, it would have been only a short step to a royal argument that Basque nobility was really only civil political nobility and could be revoked by the monarchy. In their counterargument, the Basques claimed to have been noble long before there were any Spanish kings to grant nobility.

At stake in this argument was an important political principle. If Basque nobility were subject to royal confirmation, and particularly if it were defined as civil political nobility, then the ruler who had confirmed or granted it could conceivably choose to revoke it. Arguing that their nobility was natural secondary and moral nobility without need for confirmation, the Basques moved politically against the rights of the Spanish rulers to exercise unconditional political power in the Basque Country. For hundreds of years this argument was a major ideological support to the demand for a semi-autonomous administrative regime in the Basque Country which would operate on the principles embodied in the fueros.

This is not to say that social hierarchy was absent in the Basque Country. The Basque Country was as socially stratified as the rest of Spain. Many noble Basque families that shared the collective nobility of all Basques were also civil political nobles with personal privileges that had been granted by Spanish rulers. Social classes and social conflict were certainly not unknown in the Basque Country. To romanticize the Basque past on the basis of a literal reading of the fueros is an error, a point amply developed in an unfortunately uneven book by Alfonso Otazu y Liana (1973).

The pro-fuero argument was not that all Basques were socioeconomically equal but that all Basques shared equally in a noble genealogy and the rights that arose from it. Collective nobility stressed the genealogical principle in its most radical form and treated the differing social positions of Basques as accidental environmental effects. In the Basque view, the concepts of nobility by virtue of purity of blood and collective genealogical equality were directly linked. Collective nobility became a naturalistic justification for a particular set of political arrangements in which the Basques were singled out for special treatment.

Nowhere is the manipulation of these principles clearer than in the Corografía… de Guipüzcoa of Father Manuel de Larramendi ([c. 1754] 1969). Writing when nobility as a social ideology was on the wane and egalitarian ideas had begun to spread, Larramendi shifted the ground of the debate to stress the egalitarianism inherent in the idea of collective nobility and a representative form of government under the system set up by the fueros. All Basques are equal, he argued, because all are descendants of the same ancestors; and they are superior to the Castilians because they are all genealogically noble and Castilians are not.

The intellectual foundations of the democracy he advocated are not those of contemporary democratic thought. Among Basques a unique degree of human equality was asserted to exist. People from all stations in life had similar claims to human dignity, claims supported by the Basques’ reading of the egalitarianism of Christian salvation. But this equality existed, theoretically, only because of purity of blood, because of the unsullied Basque genealogy. Thus the Basques saw themselves collectively as an elite. Their only equals were the monarchs and nobles of the rest of Spain. The common people of Spain were inferior to them because their blood was impure. The genealogical principle here takes a racial turn. Perhaps the most apt comparison is with the “democracies” of antiquity, which limited participation to a certain group of people.

Basque collective nobility was an extremely difficult problem for the monarchy. In swearing to uphold Basque customary laws—as the Spanish monarchs repeatedly did in an attempt to contain their fiscal and military problems—the monarchy actually ratified the Basque view of history. Royal subjects in other parts of Spain complained bitterly about Basque rights, arguing that such rights should either be extended to all subjects or withdrawn from the Basques. It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that the fueros were officially canceled. And now, with the new constitution, the fueros are once again a political reality.

Nobility in Castile

Castile is the central region of Spain, made up of the provinces of Avila, Burgos, Logroño, Santander, Segovia, Soria, Valladolid, Palencia, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Guadalajara, Madrid, and Toledo. Its historical trajectory was quite different from that of the Basque Country. Not only did Castile dominate Spain politically from the late fifteenth century on, but earlier it was almost completely overrun by various Muslim groups (called Moors in the literature). Parts of it were under Muslim control for periods of from 150 to 700 years. A substantial Jewish presence in Castile is also well documented (Caro Baroja 1978).

The ink and blood spilled over the Moors, Jews, Old Christians, Moriscos, Christianized Muslims, and converted Jews is familar enough. It is important to understand, however, that the arrival of the Muslims and the subsequent intermixing of populations forced the question of nobility to take a distinctive form in Castile. Except for a very few preeminent families with wealth, property, and documents sufficient to forestall questioning of their ancestry, virtually no one in Castile could simply assert nobility by virtue of genealogically transmitted purity of blood.

In this historical context, the role of the confirmation of nobility of blood through letters patent and the granting of civil political nobility became tremendously important. By judicious use of these powers, the monarchy could partly control the powerful and militarily dangerous families that were competing with the crown for power. At the same time, the Reconquest offered a field of honor on which wealthy and ambitious men could do battle. Through their valor they could win the gratitude of their rulers—gratitude that took the form of letters patent or grants of civil political nobility.

Thus the Castilian conception of nobility was almost exclusively military. This attitude could be seen as far back as Alfonso X. Of course, such nobility could be won by only a small segment of the population, since wealth, education, and staff were needed to mount a successful military career. Nobility thus became the principal symbol for social hierarchy. While genealogical connection was obviously important and a broken genealogy could eliminate a family from the ranks of nobility, de facto social eminence or military virtue was necessary for a successful claim to nobility.

Once the major noble families were well entrenched in Castile, their various lines quickly came to control both military and religious institutions. They participated in the establishment of bureaucratic procedures for determining nobility and for granting letters patent. These procedures were used effectively as a device to keep nobility and its privileges a significant monopoly of the few against the many.

The privileges of a nobleman were very considerable. The following list is typical:

At least on the ideological level, the confirmation of noble status clearly carried significant social benefits in Castile. How extensively these rights were actually exercised cannot be inferred from this kind of documentation, but the ideal rules show that nobility conferred social preeminence. By implication such documents also indicate the vulnerable social position of the nonnobles in Castilian society.

In the logic of this system, the rulers and their lieutenants occupied a crucial position. Since virtually all nobility required confirmation or was granted as an honor, the control of nobility became a central instrument of monarchical control in Castilian society, helping to forge an alliance between the nobility and the monarchy against the segments of the population that had wealth and power but were not loyal to the crown.

The Castilian system rested firmly on the principle that human inequality was a profoundly important “natural” element in society. Because men were not naturally equal, the rulers, clergy, and nobility governed in the interests of the majority who were their inferiors. In this case the genealogical principle was used to exclude most classes of people from access to positions of power. Purity of blood was here an instrument of social hierarchy, while in the Basque Country it was used as an instrument in defense of regional rights.