Baza, 1525. (A study of the society on a register of cristianos viejos)

Abstract

The demografie sources are slender at the end of the fifteenth century and at the begining of the sixteenth century in the kingdom of Granada. Under the circumstances of the distribution of the mountains of the Baza, that it had ended up as common land, a register of Cristianos viejos was produced between 1524 and 1525 that —in theory— they would be the only ones that would come in the share-out. Leaning on this source with others of the same period, mainly the local minutes, this study is an analysis of the “bastetana” society, settling that would be the third or fourth in numerical importance of the kingdom of Granada (only behind the county town and the city of Málaga and very similar to the cities of Ronda and Guadix). This objective has been tried from a lot of différents points of view: division in marital status, sex, job occupation, and social division of the Cristianos viejos. According to the exploitation of the sources the moorish and slave population for the same period has also been bethered, too. As well as the neighbourhood, the inhabitant or passer-by population is studied too, that it is precisely one of the more problematic aspects of this investigation, with the idea of offering a total account of the population in the analyzed years. All this help us to understand the dinamic caracter of a changing and absolutely non-static society related to the geografie and social mobility.