CHAPTER III
MARKETING
Wool marketing in Italy and Aragon. Early exports of Spanish wool to England.
Organization of the export trade by Ferdinand and Isabella. The Burgos Con-
sulado or Trade House. Its foreign branches. Its contact with the Mesta at the
Medina del Campo fair. The Mesta and the trade with the New World. Organi-
zation of the domestic wool trade. Dealing in ‘ futures.’ Middlemen. Trade
policies of the Hapsburgs.
Wherever the migratory sheep industry appeared, the herds-
men soon carried on a thriving trade in the markets and fairs
along the routes of the flocks. The southbound autumn journey
of the migrants usually coincided with the period of town fairs of
the harvest season, and large sales of pastoral products were
usually made. A large part of the supplies necessary for the
shepherds and their charges were secured in the near towns in
exchange for wool, skins, meat, and cheese. The sheep owners
among the Berber nomads were always active traders.1 In the
uplands of southern France and in Navarre, trade between passing
shepherds and wayside townsmen had become so active that it
was necessary to regulate it carefully, in order to prevent the sale
of stolen animals by the shepherds, and to check possible viola-
tions of strict gild rules by local merchants in their dealings with
the herdsmen.2 The Navarrese towns protected themselves
against these intrusions of strangers in the local markets by assess-
ing taxes or Iezdas upon goods thus brought in.®
The pastoral products of the migrating herds in southern Italy
had, from the early Middle Ages down to the eighteenth century,
been sold exclusively at the annual fair in Foggia under strict
royal supervision. This was the solution of what to the mediaeval
1 Bernard and Lacroix, Nomadisme en Algérie (Paris, 1906), p. 207.
2 Cavaillès, “ Une fédération pyrénéene sous l’ancien régime,” in the Revue
historique, cv, p. 29; Alonso, Recop. Fueros Nav. (Madrid, 1848, 2 vols.), ii, pp. 353 £f.
3 Yanguas, Die. Anliguedades Navarra, ii, p. 200; Coello, Impuestos de Le6n y
Castilla, p. 650; Munoz, i, p. 239.
30
MARKETING
ɜɪ
ιni∏d was undoubtedly one of the chief objections to the whole
practice of large scale sheep migrations, namely the inevitable
promiscuity of unregulated marketing activities. The difficulties
in the way of imposing the time-honored trade regulations upon a
large and mobile group of pr<5ducing merchants, or rather market-
ing producers, were all too obvious. The operations of these
itinerant trader-herdsmen covered all corners of the realm; and
it was undoubtedly this very characteristic, and the consequent
impossibility of enforcing any of the exacting stipulations which
were held by mediaeval public opinion to be so indispensable in all
economic relations, that led to the insistence upon the restriction
of all their marketing to one point. It has been said that the con-
centration of the winter products of the migrants in the royal
warehouses at Foggia, for sale under the supervision of crown
officers, was largely for fiscal purposes. More especially, how-
ever, was it intended to facilitate the inspection of quality, the
maintenance of prices, and the regulation of supply which were
the essence of the local market in the later Middle Ages.
In the case of the Aragonese migrants, attempts were made to
check their marketing activities by severe restrictions, and espe-
cially by the imposition of heavy export duties, not upon the
sheep, since these would supposedly return to Aragon, but upon
the supplies carried by the shepherds.1 Such measures, it was
hoped, would prevent trading in goods the export of which was
forbidden, and would, in general, minimize a form of commerce
which, because of its movement through sparsely settled border
towns, was difficult to regulate. After the union of Castile and
Aragon this curiously mediaeval policy was continued. A cus-
tom house was maintained at Huelamo in the Castilian province
ɑf Cuenca, on the main route of the Aragonese flocks to their
southern pastures. Even the movements of the flocks and their
Supplies a short distance across the border were carefully observed
≡∙nd restricted. In order to guarantee their return, all animals
1 On several occasions the Aragonese kings undertook to assess tariffs upon the
5leeP> but they were promptly reminded of certain acknowledged exemptions.
'-*■ the arguments by an attorney of the Saragossan Casa de Ganaderos in 1693, in
* broadside beginning, “ Senor, Don Juan Franco y Piqueras also Brieva, Colec.
e Grdenesi p. ɪʒɪ, n. 3.