As stalls in the marketplaces thinned and fewer products were allowed to enter, the dwindling inhabitants of towns and cities – at least the healthy ones – might have to leave their homes every day to see which meager foodstuffs had found their way through the gates. Except for them and the ever-present pregonero shouting aloud the city council’s most recent edicts, the streets were mostly empty. People must have been desolate and afraid as news, true and false, drifted in along with travelers lucky or able enough to squeeze past the guards. “A healthy, upright woman arrived here yesterday at eight in the morning, apparently from Valladolid,” wrote a correspondent from Salamanca, “and by eleven o’clock she had been buried.”1 Better to stay inside than to deal with that. Most artisans, whose workshops were usually in the interior of their homes or in the back but who sold out in front, adding noise and color to streets, were gone. There were no bills of mortality, but no lists were needed for people to know that neighbors had left, died, or had been moved to the hospital. As Defoe’s fictional protagonist remarked of London, “It was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate, and so few People to be seen in them.”2

The aim of this book is to describe, in physical detail, how people in the kingdom of Castile moved, worked, suffered, competed, and starved during the years of pestilence at the turn of the sixteenth century. It begins with the monarchy because everything began with the monarchy, though in the years we are examining, the monarchy was suddenly not quite there. Yet the language and the expectations prevailed; small towns might be rent apart, but they knew themselves to be republics of a republic and they reacted as such, expecting help, petitioning, managing, and obeying, all as vassals of a king. The themes to be explored in this book – memory, custom, law, charity, duty, justice, knowledge, belief – will be found at every stop along the way, but by beginning in the palace, as it were, we can see more clearly how these all functioned in the context of political relationships and ideology. The following glimpses of royal intervention in plague matters concern the new reign of Philip III (r. 1598–1621) and then look specifically at shipbuilding, judicial jurisdiction, and taxes, all realms in which the monarchy had to continue exerting pressure on localities beset by disease. There is something necessarily fragmentary and anecdotal about these examples, but they provide different slants on the ways in which plague pushed the structures of an already pressured state, and how the state pushed back.

During quarantine, what did people do without? Food, for one thing. If they were not starving before the plague arrived, they probably were once it reached their town or reached the towns that normally supplied them. Virtually every plague report, whether from villages or major cities, mentioned that people were hungry, though many, of course, had been hungry before the plague arrived.1 “Consider where we are, the disease hated above all others, and the number of poor people, and you will find hunger and need. And more are dying of that than of anything else, because the land here just yields stones,” wrote a priest from Pasajes. “What little we got from the sea has ceased altogether, and thus those who used to care for the poor are unable today to take care of themselves.”2 The occasional open gate may have alleviated some towns’ needs for some products at certain times, but in general business was bleak. Meanwhile people were starving, “the most cruel of all deaths,” as Don Quijote told Sancho.3

From high above the Castilian meseta, a swallow gliding and wheeling in and out in search of food or shelter or friends might see a clump of buildings, then wide open space, then more clumps, then more space, the occasional river or wetlands, the inevitable church steeples at the heart of the clumps, with dwellings and a town hall huddled around them, and large or small squares where, if the bird swooped low, it might see people going about their business, lingering to talk, fingering the merchandise. Some towns were more beautiful than others, richer, more important, but they all had the same elements, noises, smells, purpose. There was probably some sort of wall, or there had been at some point. There were shrines scattered about the outlying countryside, among the fields, along the roads leading to neighboring towns and villages and then to the city. There were mills on the riverside, poorer neighborhoods on the outskirts. The local aristocrat might have a grand home in the town, or an estate outside. The kingdom was a body, according to the old commonplace, and each of these iterations, each of its parts, echoed the meaning and organization of the whole.

The geographic and political center of any town was the town hall, the ayuntamiento, generally next to or across from the main church. As its name suggests, this was where things came together, where people gathered, where all matters could and should be sorted out. Its dealings were the constant hum in the background, the machinery of good government, though the hum might now and then give way to raised voices. It was where prices were set, processions ordered, hospitals financed, communication centralized. It also was where conflicts played out between governing factions, commoners and nobles, the resentful and the undeserving. The stunned inhabitants of plague-infested villages, towns, and cities might have perceived the ayuntamiento as friend or enemy, but in either case it was the local manifestation of the bedrock of their social and political existence.

The plague would return to Spain, of course, but less frequently as the years went by. The most infamous instance came in 1647–1651, when the disease coincided with fierce hunger, tremendous hardships, and social tumult, especially in Andalusia. Again the figure of a half-million deaths is often used. There was one final sweep in the early 1680s, and then, like most of the rest of Europe, the Iberian Peninsula was at long last left alone.1

And while all of this was going on – while taxes were renegotiated, walls fixed, goods smuggled in and out, fairs canceled, supplies delivered, clothes burned, orders issued, and meetings held – people were getting sick and dying. They died at home, in a hospital, or somewhere in-between, usually just a few days after suddenly becoming feverish, delirious, nauseous, wracked with pain, and suffering from buboes. I began the long, meandering and jumbled passage of the great Castilian plague in the Palace. It ends by the sickbed or, more probably, by a mattress.