Breeding Techniques and Court Influence: Charting a ‘Decline’ of the Spanish Horse in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

Despite the traditional reputation of the Spanish horse as a naturally abundant, high quality animal found in the Iberian Peninsula, Iberian monarchs had routinely expressed concern about a scarcity of horses as early as the thirteenth century. An initiative in the mid-sixteenth century to improve horses for the royal court reveals top-down breeding directives to address concerns about scarcity, making use of an infrastructure of royal stables and studs stretched across multiple dynastic and imperial territories; at the same time, these directives document competing and changing visions of the best methods for breeding horses to keep up with court demands. Notably, a preference for importing and crossbreeding in the sixteenth century shifted to a preference for maintaining individual strains of domestic equine stock in the seventeenth century. While the external demand for horses from Spain remained high to supply an expanding court culture in Europe throughout this period, the realities of developing and maintaining horse populations within Iberia suggest dynamic rather than static influences on the horse’s type, adding new complexity to the historic value of this courtly animal and our understanding of it.

Notes

1 David Vassberg, Land and Society in Golden Age Castile (Cambridge, 1984), p. 163.

2 R. H. C. Davis, ‘Medieval Warhorse’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), Horses in European Economic History: A Preliminary Canter (Reading, 1983), pp. 4-8; Roman Zámečník et al., Landscape for Breeding and Training of Ceremonial Carriage Horses at Kladruby nad Labem (Czechia), UNESCO World Heritage Site 43 COM 8B.27, National Stud Kladruby nad Labem and Czech Ministry of Agriculture (2018), p. 147: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1589/documents/ [accessed 10 September 2019].

3 Walter A. Liedtke, The Royal Horse and Rider: Painting, Sculpture, and Horsemanship, 1500–1800 (New York, 1989), p. 29.

4 David S. Barnes, ‘“Until Cleansed and Purified”: Landscapes of Health in the Interpermeable World’, Change Over Time, vol. 6, no 2 (2016), pp. 138-52. See also Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity (Chicago, 2012); Justin E.H. Smith, The Problem of Animal Generation in Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2006); Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge, 2012).

5 Here I am speaking in terms of an ‘ecotype’ or environmentally adapted niche, based on gene flow in hybrid populations and sharing a common ecological context. This differs from a ‘breed type’, which indicates genetic traits consistently inherited due to the active elimination of unwanted trait expression in the breeding population in order to attain homozygosity. For the oriental argument, see Fernando de Sommer d’Andrade, A Short History of the Spanish Horse and the Iberian “Gineta” Horsemanship for Which This Horse Is Adapted (Lisbon, 1973).

6 José Aguilera, El caballo español e hispano-árabe en la historia y en los manuscritos de Al-Andalus (Cordoba, 2006), p. 43.

7 Claudio Corte, in Il Cavallerizzo (1573), for example, describes the qualities of the horses used by Spanish light cavalry (ginecti). For the Barb argument, see Deb Bennett, Conquerors: The Roots of New World Horsemanship (Solvang, CA, 1998).

8 The term is closely related to the name of a type of mounted soldier with North African and Muslim background originating in the realm of Aragon (jineti), although later becoming generalised as the term for any rider (jinete). The actual horse used by these soldiers is less well documented beyond being used primarily in light cavalry. See Hussein Fancy, Mercenary Mediterranean: Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon (Chicago, 2018), pp. 16-38.

9 Jaime Lira et al., ‘Ancient DNA Reveals Traces of Iberian Neolithic and Bronze Age Lineages in Modern Iberian Horses’, Molecular Ecology, vol. 19, no 1 (January 2010), pp. 64-78. Lira et al. trace ‘dun’ striping and colouring genes in Iberian-descended horses in the Americas to a primitive ‘marismeño’ horse population tied to the Guadalquivir marshes where the Cordoba Caliphate bred horses.

10 For the Celtic type argument, see Carolyn Willekes, The Horse in the Ancient World: From Bucephalus to the Hippodrome (London, 2016), ‘Methodology’. The article by J. Cañon et al., ‘The Genetic Structure of Spanish Celtic Horse Breeds Inferred from Microsatellite Data’, Animal Genetics, vol. 31, no 1 (February 2000), pp. 39-48, compares the Celtic influence of northern Iberian horses, commonly considered closer to the wild ancestral tarpan, to Andalusian gene pools, and finds little genetic basis for this distinction.

11 For the baroque argument, see Sylvia Loch, The Royal Horse of Europe: The Story of the Andalusian and Lusitano (London, 1986), pp. 29, 52.

12 A term coined by anthropologist and linguist Kenneth Pike (‘On tagmemes, née gramemes’, International Journal of American Linguistics, vol. 24, no 4 (1958), p. 273) to describe ethnographic approaches, emic methodology focuses on the perspective of the subject from within the social group under observation (related to the aims of participant-observation in fieldwork). It is contrasted to an etic methodology, which prioritises the analytical categories of the outsider or observer of the same social group’s values, behaviour and language.

13 Veterinary histories include: Cesáreo Sanz Egaña, Historia de la veterinaria española: albeitería, mariscalería veterinaria (Espasa-Calpe, 1941); Manuel Jiménez Benítez, El caballo en Andalucía: orígenes e historia, cría y doma (Madrid, 1994); Miguel Abad Gavin, El Caballo en la historia de España (Salamanca, 2006); Eduardo Agüera Carmona, Córdoba, Caballos y dehesas, Colección Ecuestre Almuzara (Cordoba, 2008). Court histories include: Francisco A. Rivas Rivas, Omnia Equi: caballos y jinetes en la España medieval y moderna. Colección Ecuestre Almuzara (Cordoba, 2005); Carlos Gómez-Centurión Jiménez, Alhajas para soberanos: los animales reales en el siglo XVIII: de las leoneras a las mascotas de cámara (Valladolid, 2011); Juan Aranda Doncel and José Martínez Millán (eds), Las caballerizas reales y el mundo del caballo (Cordoba, 2016).

14 Juan Carlos Altamirano, Historia y origen del caballo español: las caballerizas reales de Córdoba (1567–1800) (Málaga, 1998).

15 Rebecca J. H. Woods, The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, c.1800–1900, (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018); Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses Since 1800 (Baltimore, 2003); Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart, Breeds of Empire: The “Invention” of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, 1500–1950 (Copenhagen, 2007); Peter Edwards, K.A.E. Enenkel and Elspeth Graham (eds), The Horse as Cultural Icon: The Real and Symbolic Horse in the Early Modern World (Leiden and Boston, 2012); Donna Landry, Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture (Baltimore, 2008); Monica Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship (University Park, PA, 2017); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford, 2004); Suraiya Faroqhi, Animals and People in the Ottoman Empire (Istanbul, 2010).

16 Edmund Russell, Greyhound Nation (Cambridge, 2018), p. 22.

17 In ‘The Knight with No Horse: Defining Nobility in Late Medieval and Early Modern Castile’ (forthcoming in The Sixteenth Century Journal), I detail a social history of the horse as key to evolving definitions of noble status in early modern Spain. Horse scarcity, used to justify regulations, comprised a language of negotiation between king and elites over the meaning of nobility, demonstrating negotiated limits of centralised power and evidence of social mobility.

18 Ignacio Ezquerra Revilla, El Consejo Real de Castilla en el espacio cortesano (siglos XVI–XVIII) (Madrid, 2017); idem, ‘Espacio cortesano, dominio eminente del rey y administración en la Castilla moderna: las licencias de saca’, in Aranda Doncel and Martínez Millán (eds), Las caballerizas reales y el mundo del caballo. The foundational ordenanzas of the Council of Castile in 1385 reserved to the king permissions for ‘licencias de saca’ and as a result, ‘Caballo y territorio eranentes interdependientes’.

19 The Crown of Aragon invited the establishment of a Papal Inquisition under the Catholic Church to combat heresy in the thirteenth century, a body tasked with regulating heretical activities — originally Albigensian, though later revitalised to target Jewish, Muslim, and Protestant converts. The Catholic Monarchs sought and received special permission to establish a Spanish Inquisition in 1478, envisioned as a means of uniting their diverse, inherited kingdoms under a single legal code and operating independently of the Church in Rome. The Consejo de Inquisición was given oversight in the Crown of Aragon in 1483, and in certain respects became a tool for regulating border territories. Pilar Sánchez, ‘La Inquisición y El Control de la Frontera Pirenaica en el Aragón de la Segunda Mitad del Siglo XVI’, Historia Social, no 11 (1991), pp. 3-22; E. William Monter, Frontiers of Heresy: the Spanish Inquisition from Basque Lands to Sicily (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 86-8.

20 Carmona Ruiz and María Antonia, ‘El Caballo Andaluz y la Frontera del Reino de Granada’, Cuadernos de Historia de España, 80 (December 2006), pp. 55-63; Juan Carlos Galende Díaz, El Control del ganado equino en España durante la Edad Modern: El Libro de registro de caballos de Toledo del año 1535 (Toledo, 2008).

21 2 May 1493, ‘Pragmatica ordenando a los que esté nobligados a mantener caballos que los mantengan, disponiendo que para tener mula o macho de silla será imprescindible poseer un caballo’, in A. Gomariz Marín, Colección de documentos para la historia del Reino de Murcia. Vol. XX. Documentos de los Reyes Católicos (1492–1504) (Murcia, 2000), pp. 147-51

22 9 March 1534, ‘Pragmática sobre caballos y mulas en que manda que todos los que quisieren andar cabalgando anden a la brida o a la jineta en caballo o yegua de silla con excepción de los eclesiásticos, mujeres, embajadores, correos y mozos de cuadra, que podrán seguir usando mulas y trotones; con otras cosas que se especifican’, in Quadernos de las Cortes que su Magestad de la Emperatriz y Reina nuestra señora tuvo en la ciudad de Segovía el año de M.D.xxxii. Juntamente con las Cortes que su Magestad del Emperador y Rey nuestro señor tuvo en la villa de Madrid en el año de M.D.xxxiiii. Con las declaraciones Leyes y decisiones nuevas y aprovaciones hechas en las dichas Cortes. Assi mismo la premática de los cavallos que se hizo en Toledo. Con la declaración despues hecha en las dichas cortes de Madrid. Año. M.D.xxxiiii. (Salamanca: casa de Juan de Junta, 1543), fols 31v-33v.

23 Archivo General de Simancas [hereafter AGS], Camara de Castilla, Diversos, vol. 17, fol. 4, Carta de Don Rodrigo Mexia a S.M. en que prometió la raza de caballos que susante pasados le había dejado muy disminuida, 14 November 1562.

24 José Martínez Millán and Santiago Fernández Conti (eds), La monarquía de Felipe II: la casa del rey. Volumen I, Estudios (Madrid, 2005), p. 240. The head of the stables, the caballerizo mayor, became one of the King’s closest advisors by the end of the sixteenth century. Both the Duke of Lerma (1552–1625) and the Count-Duke of Olivares (1587–1645) held this position before they became powerful political favourites.

25 AGS, Sitios Reales (Obras y Bosques), Aranjuez, legajo 251-1, no 48, ‘La Horden de Don Antonio de Toledo Cauallerizo Mayor del Principe m/o s/r deha en las yeguas y potros y padres q dan para ellas es lo siguiente’, c.1554.

26 I. Cardinali et al., ‘An Overview of Ten Italian Horse Breeds through Mitochondrial DNA’, PLOS ONE. 11(4) (2016); A. Criscione et al., ‘A Genetic Analysis of the Italian Salernitano Horse’, Animal, vol. 9, issue 10 (October 2015), pp. 1610­16; A.M. Guastella et al., ‘Genetic Analysis of Sicilian Autochthonous Horse Breeds Using Nuclear and Mitochondrial DNA Markers’, Journal of Heredity, vol. 102, issue 6 (November 2011), pp. 753-8; B. Jemmali et al., ‘Genetic Diversity in Tunisian Horse Breeds’, Archives of Animal Breeding, 60 (2017), pp. 153-60.

27 Miguel Abad Gavin, El Caballo en la Historia de España (Salamanca, 2006), p. 60.

28 Letter from Lope Hurtado de Mendoza to Philip II, AGS, Estado 375, fol. 50, as cited in Almudena Pérez de Tudela and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ‘Renaissance Menageries. Exotic Animals and Pets at the Habsburg Courts in Iberia and Central Europe’, in K. A. E. Enenkel and Paul J. Smith (eds), Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts (Leiden, 2007), p. 434.

29 Elisabetta Deriu, ‘La Tanca Real XV–XVII’, in Aranda Doncel and Martínez Millán (eds), Las caballerizas reales y el mundo del caballo.

30 Maurizio Vesco, ‘La regiarazza di cavalli e le scuderie monumental in ella sicilia degli asburgo’, in Aranda Doncel and Martínez Millán (eds), Las caballerizas reales y el mundo del caballo, referring to: Archivio di Stato di Palermo, Tribunale del Real Patrimonio, Lettere viceregie, reg. 518, c.26v; R. Guccione Scaglione, ‘Relazione del vicere Juan de la Cerda duca di Medinaceli a Garcia de Toledo 1565’, in Archivio Storico Siciliano, series III, V (1952–53), p. 107.

31 C. J. Hernando Sánchez, ‘La gloria del cavallo: saber ecuestre y cultura caballeresca en el reino de Nápoles durante el siglo XVI’, in José Martínez Millán (ed.), Felipe II: Europa y la Monarquía católica, Congreso Internacional Felipe II (1598-1998) (Madrid, 1998), vol. 4, pp. 277-310.

32 AGS, Secretaria de Guerra, Sección Supplemental, legajo 244, ‘Relacion y advertimientos cerca de la Raca de las yeguas y potros de la caualleriza de Cordoua’, Papeles Concernientes a las Reales Caballerizas de Cordoba, 1572–1762.

33 Archivo General de Palacio [hereafter AGP], Sección Administración, legajo 1, fols 305-02, ‘Reales Cavallerizas de Cordova Año de 1572’.

34 Elisabetta Deriu, ‘La Tanca Real XV–XVII’, pp. 189-90.

35 AGS, Casas y Sitios Reales, legajo 273, ‘Relacion de los cauallos y potrosen la caualleriza de Cordoua a 15 abril 1584’. Sitios Reales Cordoba Real Caballeriza.

36 AGP, Seccion Administracion General, legajo 1045, ‘Dependencias de la Casa Real, Caballerizas, Capilla de las Reales Caballerizas, Caballerizas de la Reina, Caballeriza de Napoles’ (1611); AGP, Seccion Personal, caja 873, expediente 40, ‘Pedro Rejedel Picador y Proveedor de las R/s Caballer/zas de Cordoba’.

37 AGS, Casas y Sitios Reales, legajo 251.2, fols 5-30; AGS, Obras y Bosques Segovia, legajo 1, 1556. The Bishop of Cordoba, Leopold of Austria, was the illegitimate son of Maximilian I, grandfather of Charles V, and a well-known horse breeder. Friesland formally became part of the Habsburg Netherlands territories in 1499, where Margaret of Austria, served as Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands (1507–15 and 1519–30). She provided central support for her nephew, Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor, and refuge for his sister Isabella of Austria, queen-consort of Denmark, when her husband Christian II was deposed in 1523. The dynastic connection to Denmark is more suggestive than certain; however both daughters (Dorothea and Christina of Denmark) pursued their claims to the Danish throne under the aegis of their uncle Charles V, despite their estrangement from the Danish people over religious reforms. The merging of Habsburg and Oldenburg houses in this instance at least opened lines of communication, across if not within dynastic lineages. The firm hand and interest in hunting and martial pursuits was evident in the Oldenburg successors in Denmark, notably Queen Dorothea of Saxe-Lauenburg and her son Frederick II (r. 1559–88) who founded the royal stud in what is now Frederiksborg Palace beginning in 1560 and later expanded by his son Christian IV with purchases of Iberian horses.

38 A gift of a horse as a means of securing intra-dynastic allegiances is evident in the case of Isabella of Austria, the grand-daughter of Charles V. Gifts to the stables of the Archduke Albert in the Netherlands included several notable stallions, one of which achieved a certain immortality in a taxidermied state in honour of his service and is still on display at the Porte de Hal. See Ingrid Cartwright, ‘On the Bit: Prince Maurits, Simon Stevin, and the Spanish Warhorse, in Pia Cuneo (ed.), Animals and Early Modern Identity (Abingdon, 2017), p. 169; and René Vermeir, Dries Raeymaekers, and José Eloy Hortal Muñoz (eds), A Constellation of Courts: The Courts and Households of Habsburg Europe, 1555–1665 (Leuven, 2014).

39 Mario Döberl, ‘The Royal and Imperial Stables of the Austrian Habsburgs during the Early Modern Period’, in Aranda Doncel and Martínez Millán (eds), Las caballerizas reales y el mundo del caballo, p. 215. Döberl reports from Viennese archives that Guillén de San Clemente y de Centelles (c. 1539–1608), Spanish ambassador to the Imperial court in Prague between 1581 and 1608, attempted to transport thirty Hungarian and ten Bohemian carriage horses to Spain in 1589, and planned to send 150 more back to Spain in 1598. Due to standard restrictions on the sale and transport of horses between kingdoms, ambassadors had a privileged view into market values and access to horses.

40 AGS, Camara de Castilla, libro 121, fol. 22v, records thirty Spanish horses sent to Maximillian II’s stables in 1551, as cited in Pérez de Tudela and Jordan Gschwend, ‘Renaissance Menageries’, p. 434.

41 Archduke Charles of Austria received gifts of Spanish horses from Philip II in 1568, and founded the stud in Lipica on his return from Spain.

42 AGS, Sitios Reales, Cordoba Real Caballeriza, legajo 273, 2-50, ‘Don diego lopez de haro dize que la causa porque en la caualleriza de cordoua se agastado los tres anos passados mas dinero’, 1583.

43 AGS, Secretaria de Guerra, Sección Supplemental, legajo 244, 15-4, 30 August 1590.

44 AGP, Administración general, legajo 1305, expediente 10, 28 August 1593.

45 Don Juan of Austria served as Captain-General of the Netherlands, 1576–78. A work designed by Jan van der Straet, Equile, seu speculum equorum, depicted the range of horses in the royal stables in forty distinctive prints, executed after the artist’s death between 1578–80. Stradanus (Jan van der Straet), Eqvile, sev, Specvlvm eqvorvm: in quo omnis generis generosissimorum equorum ex varijs orbis partibus insignis delectus / ad vivum omnes delineati à celeberrimo pictore Iohanne Stradano Belga Brugensi (P. Galleo, 1600).

46 Relazione di Germania … 1605–1607 fatti da Roderico Alidosi, as cited in Döberl, ‘Royal and Imperial Stables of the Austrian Habsburgs’, p. 199.

47 AGS, Seccion de Guerra, Sección Supplemental, fol. 244-2, ‘Instrucion original de la caualleriza de Cordoua 1572’.

48 AGS, Seccion de Guerra, Sección Supplemental, fol. 244, ‘Consulta de la Junta de la Caualleriza de Cordoua’, 9 August 1583, Papeles Concernientes a las Reales Caballerizas de Cordoba, 1572–1762.

49 Alonso Carrillo Lasso, Caballeriza de Cordova (Cordoba: Salvador de Cea, 1625).

50 William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, A New Method, and Extraordinary Invention, to Dress Horses, and Work Them according to Nature: As Also, to Perfect Nature by the Subtility of Art; Which Was Never Found out (London: Printed by T. Milbourn, 1667), p. 92.

51 Carrillo Lasso, Caballeriza de Cordova, p. 16.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Renton

Kathryn Renton

Kathryn Renton is a Lecturer at Occidental College (Los Angeles) and Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles). She received her Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a co-founder of the Equine History Collective (www.equinehistory.org). Her research, supported by fellowships from The Social Science Council, Renaissance Society of America, The Newberry Library, The Huntington Library, The John Carter Brown Library, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture, incorporates environmental and animal studies into the cultural history of the early modern period, focusing on Spain and the Iberian World. She has contributed articles to Authority and Spectacle in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia: In Honor of Teofilo F. Ruiz edited by Gen Liang and Jarbel Rodriguez (2017), The Sixteenth Century Journal (2019) and Horse Breeds and Human Society: Purity, Identity and the Making of the Modern Horse edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfield (2020).