El patrimoni reial al País Valencià a inicis del segle XV

Abstract

Till now, we have not dedicated much time to the study of Valencian Medieval Royal Patrimony. Very little information is in fact available on the villages that formed it, on the type of royal taxes applied, on the goods possessed or on the value of the taxes collected, as well as on the part taken by the royal administration. This work has been realised with the purpose of filling this gap. It analyzes in details the existing sources about this ordinary royal tax system in Valencian counties at the beginning of the XVth century. A manuscript of the General Baillif of the reign -dated between 1414 and 1416, and probably related to the proclamation of the new monarch Ferran I -­allowed us, adding it to documents of the local mayor, to reconstruct the exact composition of the royal tax system applied in each of the cities of the Valencian patrimony realm during that reign. We also managed to determine its economic value as well as the quite important identification of quantity and quality of monopolies and royal prerogatives that the crown reserved for herself. We have also included the study of a dozen of Saracen towns and villages chat formed the so-called Ancien Patrimony, which is the particular seigniory of the crown during that decade and is, thus, a source of receipts for her. In this very precise case, we have drawn the tables indicating the types of receipts and their value. Finally, we can find in this article some general considerations on monarchy receipts, by that time, in Valencian counties, and a couple of conclusions on the really weak value or importance of this tax system, compared with the increase of the extraordinary parallel tax system, acting as much trough direct requests of the crown as trough commercial taxes of the Generalitat and the grants of the Spanish Parlia­ment. The work ends with a map of the Royal Patrimony at the beginning of the XVth century and some graphs representing the receipts, separately for each town, in the Valencian counties.