La repoblación del Reino de Granada a finales del quinientos: las instrucciones particulares de 1595. II. Documentos

Abstract

The visit which took place in 332 locations around the Kingdom of Granada in 1593, and which were carried out in order to check the progress of repopulation implemented after the expulsion of the moriscos, resulted, two years later, in a new set of “Regulations” or “Instructions” for the year 1595, which established new rules as to the repopulation process.

However, along with general regulations, which had been edited on various occasions, the aforementioned visits also created some vastly detailed documentation which had remained unknown up until now. Using this unedited documentation as a basis and fortifying it with various other sources, this article intends to offer an overall impression of the Kingdom of Granada towards the end of the sixteenth-century, concentrating principally on four main themes from which arise various important conflicts: water and irrigation, the aristocratic regime, the corrupt behaviour of the burocracy and the relations of dependence between town and country, all of this is to take place, logically, withing the context of repopulation; this analysis also intends to deal with other areas of debate such as the reinstating of religious properties which were destroyed by the moriscos, the delimitation of municipal boundries and the sale of the tierras baldías.