%0 Journal Article
%A L. J. Andrew Villalon
%D 2025
%C Berlin, Germany
%I Peter Lang Verlag
%J Mediaevistik
%@ 2199-806X
%N 1
%V 38
%T “For the Sake of the Patrimony”: Proliferation of a New Property Tenure-Mayorazgo-in Late Medieval Castile (1260–1505)
%R 10.3726/med.2025.01.01
%U https://www.peterlang.com/document/1673028
%X This article explores a form of Spanish property tenure known as mayorazgo designed to protect a family’s economic well-being by rendering its property both inalienable and indivisible. Evidence indicates that mayorazgo made its appearance around the mid-thirteenth century in the central and largest Iberian kingdom of Castile. At first exceedingly rare, the new tenure began to expand in the opening half of fourteenth century, then became firmly established in the second half of that century. Its rapid expansion occurred during a period of intense conflict, both domestic and foreign, and, at least in part, because of this turbulence. During the final century of the Middle Ages (1400‒1500), mayorazgo proliferated enormously until it became the primary tenure by which Castilian aristocrats held not only landed property and the seigneurial jurisdiction (señorio) attached to it, but also their rents, titles, the family name and arms, and a wide variety of items with special significance to their families, including arms and armor, furniture, books, jewelry and clothing, etc. The article explores not only the properties normally placed in mayorazgos, but also the provisions that usually appeared in documents establishing them. Throughout the later medieval centuries, an estate of this kind was legally based on the power of royal dispensation. The first national statutes that actually defined and regulated mayorazgo were not enacted until the Cortes of Toro (1505), generations after the tenure’s initial rise to prominence.
%K mayorazgo, entail/entailment, Castile, kingdom of, War of the Two Pedros, Pedro the Cruel, Enrique II, royal dispensation, cortes/laws of Toro (1505), Primogeniture, señorio