In all and each one of the Castilian cities the oligarchies aspire along the Last Middle Age to control the urban power. However, these elites, configured and consolidated along this period, are different in each city. They depend ultimately on the specific economic, social and political processes of each urban ...
(Show more)In all and each one of the Castilian cities the oligarchies aspire along the Last Middle Age to control the urban power. However, these elites, configured and consolidated along this period, are different in each city. They depend ultimately on the specific economic, social and political processes of each urban system.
In an entire group of cities, generally located in the north half of the Castilian Kingdom, the patricians were compound fundamentally for merchants, money changers, transport companies and artisans that constitute, already at the end of the Middle Age, an important financial class. As such, they don't only monopolize the urban springs of power, but rather of years behind come also controlling the economic activities of their city. They are detected controlling the nets of urban supply, exercising as contractors and exporters, as investors in municipal and real, sure rents, credits, transports, banking and loan.
In spite of it, the analysis in its ways of life throws similarities and uniformities with other elites “noble” very significant. The merchants also look for to be meant of the rest of their neighboroughs becoming joint in a way of life and of a specific mentality, distinctive of their condition of dominant class. And, the same as it happens in other cases, in the purest logic of the feudal system to the one that belongs the medieval city entirely, this form of life and mentality seeks to reproduce that of the dominant feudal class. It is not, therefore, bourgeois, but deeply aristocratic.
The analysis in the ways of life and social aspirations of these “gentleman-merchants” it will demonstrate to what extent the grade of “aristocratization” of the urban elites in the XVth century Castile was deep
(Show less)