Rinconete y Cortadillo

The city of Sevilla

The great Babylon of Spain

Sevilla, at the time Cervantes wrote Rinconete y Cortadillo, was one of the largest cities of Europe, with a population of about 150,000. You can compare this with the c.100,000 of the capital city, Madrid. It stands on the River Guadalquivir. Sea-going ships could sail upstream as far as Sevilla, and it was this facility together with being the centre for the prosperous agricultural region of Andalucía that made Sevilla into the principal shipping port of the Atlantic. Unlike Madrid, Sevilla had been an important centre of population since Roman times. The Moors occupied Sevilla until its liberation by Fernando III de Castilla in 1248 and during that period, many of the distinctive features of the town were established, the narrow streets, the whitewashed houses with their internal patios, the Alcázar with its gardens and, rising high above the streets, La Giralda, the former minaret transformed into the tower of the Cathedral. In the late Middle Ages, Sevilla had become an important port for Mediterranean, North European and North African trade, and a merchant class had settled there from Genoa as well as from other parts of Spain.

The discovery of America in 1492 (Columbus set sail from the not too distant Huelva] gave the town its very particular world significance, and made it even more attractive for Spanish and foreign traders. It acquired a monopoly of transatlantic trade which was exercised from the Casa de Contratación. In 1509, the Casa was made responsible, for example, for registering all passengers to the New World. By the mid-century, following the Spanish expansion into Peru and Mexico, the development of the gold and silver trade and the exportation of goods to the Indies made Sevilla into the hub of a European-wide system of trade and finance. At the Torre de Oro, a massive tower in the defenses of the city, the precious metals arriving from the Indias would be unloaded.

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