Fiscal Policy in Early Modern Europe

Portugal in Comparative Context

Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351256469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book will examine the gradual assembly and consolidation of Portuguese fiscal policy in the second half of the fifteenth century, providing a comparative analysis of the Portuguese State's finances and fiscal dynamics with other Western European monarchies.

This book examines relevant aspects of the Portuguese Royal finances, particularly the different instruments employed to provide income and the rubrics involving all types of expenditure between the reigns of Afonso V and Manuel I at the dawn of Modern Ages. The analysis of Portugal's case will also serve as a main conducting wire to a broader fiscal examination of other Latin-rooted Mediterranean and North Atlantic kingdoms.

This book will be of interest to students and researchers of economic history, fiscal history, economic theory and history of economic thought, as well as students of Medieval History, the history of the Western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula.

1 Introduction

1.1 In the name of the Portuguese economic and fiscal history

This work is the result of an initial desire to investigate the organizational structure of state finances in Portugal during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which resulted in my Ph.D. dissertation – a wish awakened by reading a classic (Rau, 2009) of Portuguese economic historiography, recently reprinted, for one of the disciplines within the scope of the University of Porto’s Ph.D. program in history back in 2009.

Observing the structuring and consolidation of the Casa dos Contos as the Portuguese central fiscal structure of the period, we were struck by some of the sources used for that study and in particular the politico-economic context of the mid-fifteenth century, which stimulated the research at that moment. There were some studies regarding the kingdom’s revenue-centralizing mechanism. However, little is known about the organics of fiscal organization and the internal tax collection network effectively constituted. The reigns of Afonso V, João II and Manuel I are important in this sense, i.e., from the perspectives of finance, credit and economic dynamics, as Portugal seeks to recover from an extremely exhausting period for the treasury. The wars against Castile for the kingdom’s maintenance at the end of the fourteenth century,¹ the various monetary devaluations that followed this period and the political developments related to these events, such as the financial reform implemented by Duarte I (1433–38) in 1435, the administration of intense military activities on three fronts from 1448 onwards – internal, external and overseas – allied to the large amount of costs with the royal entourage, all these events led us to a simple questioning: would there be enough income to carry out all these initiatives in a “relatively short” time period or, put another way, would it be possible to do all of this at the same time?

As time passed, more and more questions arose but the key issue was: with new challenges, new expenses (the extension of the Portuguese presence in Morocco and the Atlantic expansion) but also new and powerful income sources, would it still require some extra credit, internal or external? Where did these extraordinary revenues come from? In order to elucidate many of my doubts about fundamental Portuguese economic features and concepts, economic history and, more particularly, economic history studied and produced in Portugal, I chose to follow this path.

It is quite clear that much has already been done in this branch of history. However, it also seems that, mainly in Portugal, there is still room for contributions to the study of finances and taxation, in the relations between those who collected the taxes, those who paid and those who managed them, within a dynamic of resource circulation: how they get to the central office in Lisbon, how they were applied, where and how they were centralized in terms of spending, what was the logistics behind this administrative apparatus and what would be the consequences of these processes, both for those who channeled these financial resources and for the receivers of these reserves in some way. In general, studies of the process of public and private financing in the Portuguese medieval economy have been scarce, just as fiscal history (within the same chronology) as well as the concept of “public debt”. A few years ago, in a historiographical balance, this same “lack of works” in this area was mentioned, besides the difficulty with the available sources (Gonçalves, 1999: 107).

It is also worth noting the development of these studies all over Europe, in Spanish institutes or in France, with cooperation between the various research units and departments within the Ministry of Economy of that country. In Italy, with a variety of research centers and universities, whether in the field of economics or history, supported either by the government or by relevant private foundations, or even in England, in centers like Cambridge, Oxford, York, Reading and the London School of Economics. Although from a peninsular perspective, the Spanish fiscal and economic history, closely linked to the Portuguese and of many common characteristics – albeit with all the problems faced by the central governments and autonomous communities –, and even with severe financial restrictions that scientific research has been submitted to recently in that country, it is still capable of progressing. On the other hand, in Portugal the integration between history and economics, particularly with regard to studies related to the Middle Ages and early modern periods, both in scientific terms and in institutional terms, is still lacking a major collective, connected and coordinated effort. A better effort between the faculties of economics and history all over the country is mandatory, together with the Center for Levies and Customs’ Studies, linked to the Taxation and Customs’ Authority, collaborating more with seminars, congresses, Ph.D. programs, grants and funding for fiscal studies, in this period and others, which holds as much value as modern or even contemporary discussions, whether on state budgets, expenditure cuts or revenues’ maximization.

We do believe that more intense work and greater attention to Portuguese economic history and fiscal issues – within a broader comparative framework, particularly related to the process of developing a fiscal and administrative machinery capable of sustaining and benefiting from Portuguese overseas expansion – would lead to lucrative efforts to realize financial dynamics. In addition, it would also be possible to establish connections through the consequent process of colonization and management of the respective discovered regions, which would assume the “Lusitanian tax gene” in its economic and financial matrix. We can extend this relation to Brazil, a possible partner in this search for alternatives to the historiographical debate, and, at the same time, to resume contact with Brazilian historiographical production in this field, traditionally more focused on North and Central European schools (France and Germany) than on its own Iberian origins, thus undertaking a kind of “reconversion”. Other future works may emerge following this contribution, to back, to a great extent, more studies related to this particular area, as well as medieval and early modern Peninsular History in a wider perspective.

1.2 Structuring process

In terms of methodologies and definitions for this book’s organization, the initial idea was to revisit the Contos’ studies and the kingdom’s economic administrative organizational structures as a pragmatic strategy related to the purpose of competing for Ph.D. grants, in which we succeeded. Subsequently, as the first bibliographical readings were taken, the lack of balance was evident in all aspects of the available economic historiography and its general approach, from concepts and theories, to the technical terms. This in itself has taken a lot of effort and time to identify and eliminate this handicap as soon as possible. On the other hand, all this commitment elicited great rejoicing from studies in this area. On first sight, we had chosen to study the financing sources of the Portuguese Crown during the reigns of Afonso V and João II and to understand the internal structure of these finances and the prominence of each component – own assets, ordinary and extraordinary revenues, requests and loans, confiscations and other businesses related to the Crown – in order to try to determine some degree of revenue predictability.

However, through a previous sources’ analysis, we realized that it would be useful for this volume to widen the observation spectrum a bit, to better comprehend the changes, and even for comparative purposes. To achieve that, we used, albeit more broadly, the sources of Manuel I’s reign, although from some points of view, these sources have already surpassed the “limits of the Middle Ages”, as well as it mixed some “overseas’ income”. Despite any chronological issue, it resulted in something positive, especially in terms of comparison of values and comparative scale benchmarks. The criteria for the sources’ selection was simply to have clear and feasible revenue and expenditure numerical data that we could work with, which would allow the composition of a budgetary table framework – albeit rudimentary –with gaps to be filled.

Confronted with the limitations imposed during the Ph.D. research process and thesis writing itself, the most realistic and achievable option was made to reconstitute this taxation network through the numbers and values found. It is clear that this volume, at that point, would not be more complete and comprehensive due to those issues. Nevertheless, after a few years and lots of tension involved in that writing process, it turned out to be more constructive to properly observe, identify and compare the Portuguese taxation system with other Western European Monarchies’ economic and fiscal dynamics, with more time available to do all the required reading and research with no regrets, whether personal or professional, regarding casual imperfections.

1.3 Sources utilized

To this end, we sought to use the Royal Chancery’s records of the kings previously mentioned, as well as the documentation of the Leitura Nova,² regarding some acquittance letters, which were the primary element for the volume content. Although a large number of these letters were already published by Anselmo Braamcamp Freire (1903–1916), the retrieval of many others in the Torre do Tombo archives, as well as in the Cascais’ Municipal Archives, was of a fundamental importance for the assembly of a better and broader comprehensive perspective, with the help of tables and graphs produced with the data compiled and processed in a databases, with several of those letters found, some of them already transcribed and published in previous works elaborated in the same scope.

It is also important to emphasize the importance of Portuguese medieval sources’ transcription and edition for different periods, such as the royal chancelleries prior to 1531 concerning Morocco (Azevedo, 1915–1934), the Portuguese Oceanic expansion (Marques, 1988), as well as the period influenced by the Infante Henrique, o Navegador, known as Henry the Navigator³ (Monumenta Henricina, 1960–1974), which have greatly reinforced the main set of documents used, altogether with collections of laws compiled, mostly related to officers’ conduct and procedures of fiscal nature (Carneiro, 1818). All this production related to the history of law served to complement the financial activity with the necessary legal support for the exercise of tax collection, whether ordinary or extraordinary. In this sense, Maria José Ferro Tavares’s studies on the currency (1974) were also indispensable, since the kings’ monetary policy, mainly through devaluation, was one of the most important instruments of financing. As the requests to the kingdom and the currency devaluation were systematically debated in parliamentary assemblies, we closely followed Armindo de Sousa’s work (1990).

Beyond these great value sources, we worked with other great contributions already printed. The Portuguese kings’ chronicles, written both by Royal chroniclers and noblemen which served those monarchs, of other deeds (Zurara, 1915, 1942, 1978, 1997) and related to each of those reigns were of great use. In fact, many of them served as primary sources in several sections quoted by the sources’ collections cited earlier, and some “originals” were elaborated by Rui de Pina (1977, 1989), Garcia de Resende (1973, 1991) and Damião de Góis (1905, 1949), chroniclers of the reigns of Afonso V, João II and Manuel I, respectively.

Another initial and unavoidable reference was Vitorino Magalhães Godinho’s essay on public finances and State structuring (2009: 123–173), as well as the studies that João Cordeiro Pereira (1991, 2003) devoted to the state’s first budgets known for the 1500s. Moreover, as useful work material, we used Teresa Rodrigues’s studies on the Royal Treasury’s administration (1982) during the reign of Afonso V, as well as Jorge Faro’s manuscript (1965), which not only brings a precious set of documents regarding a set of State revenues and expenditure between the 1380s and 1460s, but engages the analysis of some of those. For the subtopics, we followed Maria José Ferro Tavares’ Ph.D. thesis on the Jews in Portugal during the fifteenth century (1982), as well as Virgínia Rau’s studies on several foreign merchants’ families (1968), mainly Italians who were present in Lisbon, and António Dias Farinha’s work on a Portuguese Jewish banker (1994).

From the abundant foreign bibliography, and regarding economic and fiscal background, our central references were the studies coordinated and edited by Richard Bonney (1995, 1999) and other scholars (Ormrod, Bonney & Bonney, 1999) at the European level, essential for the perception of theories, concepts and technical terminology, as well as the understanding of different realities within medieval Western Europe, in order to properly construct a solid comparative view. We have joined to this benchmark set the studies of Antoni Furió (1999), along with essays directed by Denis Menjot & Sánchez Martínez (2006), Manuel Sánchez Martínez, both alone or co-edited with other scholars (1996, 1997, 2008, 2009) and Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada (1982, 1991, 2009, 2011) that accur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of maps
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Toward a fiscal model: building a framework
• 3 European fiscal panorama during the later Middle Ages and early modern times: comparisons
• 4 A Portuguese “Fiscal X-Ray”: one study, two moments
• 5 The geography of early modern Portuguese fiscal dynamics
• 6 Administrative and fiscal structures in Western European context
• 7 Conclusion: a contribution for further Portuguese early modern fiscal studies
• Index