SEVILLE

SEVILLE. The Andalusian city of Seville, located fifty-four miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, was the hub of the Spanish empire for much of the early modern era. In 1503, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón established the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) in Seville and thereby launched the ascent of this provincial capital. The number of households doubled between the censuses of 1534 and 1565, and the local population was amplified by droves of foreign traders, sailors, and slaves. The population peaked at over 100,000 at the end of the sixteenth century, making Seville one of the three largest metropolises of Europe and the single most populous city in Spain. A catastrophic plague in 1649 reduced that population by almost half, and it would not recover until the early 1800s. Seville's preeminent position within the empire formally ended in 1680 when the monarchy named the coastal city of Cádiz as the official port for the Indies trade. In its imperial heyday, Seville was notorious for its ostentatious public displays and for the active underworld described so vividly in Golden Age classics by Mateo Alemán (Guzmán de Alfarache, 1599), Miguel de Cervantes (Rinconete and Cortadillo, 1613), and Tirso de Molina (El burlador de Sevilla, 1630).

Seville lies along the east bank of the southwesterly flowing Guadalquivir River, which empties into the Gulf of Cádiz. A countryside rich in natural resources produced high-quality olive oils, wines, and citrus fruits for export to Europe and the Americas, while pine trees provided raw materials for local shipbuilding. The main industries of early modern Seville—soap and ceramics—were located in Triana, a neighborhood across the river, connected to the city center by a single wooden bridge laid atop a string of boats. Triana also housed the castle of the Inquisition, which was founded in Seville in 1480. In the eighteenth century, tobacco production flourished at Seville's Royal Tobacco Factory (1757), the setting for Bizet's Carmen (1873–1874) and the current site of the University of Seville.

Royal interests were represented in Seville by an official called the Asistente and by a royal tribunal (Real Audiencia). Honored by four royal visits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Seville was transformed into the court for five years under the first Bourbon, King Philip V (ruled 1700–1746). Local government was led by an aristocratic ayuntamiento ('city council') comprising thirty-six veinticuatros and fifty-six lesser-ranked jurados. The council's jurisdiction extended over many neighboring towns and villages, although Seville's territory shrank considerably as the Habsburg kings sold independent status to many of those towns and villages for much-needed cash. The most serious challenge to local authority took place in 1652, when a popular uprising began with bread riots and ended in a bloody crackdown. Seville was the seat of a wealthy archbishopric and a powerful cathedral chapter, and perpetual tension existed among the city's religious, municipal, and royal authorities.

Seville's enormous Gothic cathedral (completed 1506) dominated urban life, and its Giralda—a minaret redesigned as a bell tower—symbolized the city. Until the 1500s, Seville had retained its medieval Islamic character, but the urban fabric changed dramatically as the imperial metropolis burst the seams of the old medieval city. New neighborhoods developed outside the old walls, city gates were expanded, and wide, straight avenues replaced narrow, twisting lanes. In 1572 the Casa Lonja (House of Trade, the present-day Archive of the Indies) was built to store New World goods. The Lonja joined the cathedral, Alcázar ('royal palace'), and archbishop's palace as the physical center of power. The Plaza de San Francisco was another important urban nucleus, as the site of the main Franciscan monastery (now destroyed), the Royal Audiencia, the city jail, and the town hall begun in 1527 in the elaborately decorative Plateresque style. Seville's sixteenth-century humanists found inspiration in the Roman ruins of nearby Itálica, and grand urban projects (notably the Casa de Pilatos and the Alameda de Hércules) completed Seville's conversion from an Islamic to a Renaissance city.

Urban development was predominantly religious in the 1600s, a century marked by the founding of dozens of new religious institutions, by the growing popularity of Holy Week and Corpus Christi, and by wide popular support promoting the cause of the Immaculate Conception. The baroque church of San Salvador was begun in 1674, and the 1670s also saw the construction of two spectacular hospitals for the poor, the Hospital de los Venerables and the Hospital de la Santa Caridad, both founded by noble patrons with fortunes from New World trade. The new architecture of Counter-Reformation Seville was filled with masterworks by the local painters Francisco de Zurbarán (1598–1664), Bartolomé Murillo (1617–1682), and Juan de Valdés Leal (1622–1690) and the sculptors Juan Martínez Montañés (1568–1649) and Pedro Roldán (1624–1700).

SEVILLE

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