Until after the mid-sixteenth century, no one debated public brothels’ legality or suggested closing them. They generated a large income for municipalities in Spain, and some of this profit funded charitable Catholic institutions.29 Hints of future repression emerge in the 1560s, when Phillip II began to mandate stricter sanctions against bawds and ruffians, which led to their prosecution in New Spain, under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Mexico (chapter 1). However, enforcing laws against independent procurers might have served not to suppress selling sex in general but instead to protect the licit income of crown or municipal brothels. The tide began to turn definitively against legal brothels when devastating syphilis outbreaks inspired preachers and clerics to interpret this plague as a divine punishment for lechery. Iberians understood syphilis as a new sexually transmitted disease in the late fifteenth century. It spread rampantly in the context of the Italian wars (where men and women of various nations gathered for both battles and sex) in the 1490s and continued to debilitate armies over the course of the sixteenth century and beyond.30
Spanish brothels enjoyed their greatest prosperity in the mid-sixteenth century, but the ongoing incidence of syphilis led Phillip II to compose and enforce more intrusive regulations in 1570.31 After this point, on some kind of regular basis, brothel workers endured periodic medical inspections and had to leave the brothel for treatment if doctors found any trace of the pox. These reforms also warned against clandestine whores as destructive disease vectors, but this condemnation did not limit their clientele. Instead, by the late sixteenth century, working outside the brothel allowed elite concubines to avoid crown-mandated venereal-disease inspections.32 Despite increasing regulations, most men apparently did not understand how they might catch syphilis. And even if rudimentary condoms existed in this era, they would have been very expensive for many public women. Instead of fearing syphilis, as clerics suggested, clients took a blasé attitude toward the physical and mental devastation that this disease could cause.33 A late-fifteenth-century doctor warned that men could safely “sleep with a sick woman” if she only had bubas (sores and rashes) in her mouth, as long as he did not kiss her. Some courtly, libertine men even bragged about their sores, rejecting any notion of shame for this alleged divine punishment for their sins. A humorous poem observed that all men, even friars, prelates, and the king, enjoyed membership in the “brotherhood of bubas.”34 In the 1520s, observers still spoke of La Lozana’s beauty, and she continued to attract many paying lovers, despite the fact that “she couldn’t wear glasses if she wanted to” because “the pox” had “eaten away part of her nose.”35
Cognizant of syphilis’s rampant spread, Spanish municipalities began founding hospitals to treat and quarantine syphilitics by the early sixteenth century. Mexico City had an institution that treated syphilitics by 1539, called the Hospital del Amor de Dios, although no archives record if the viceroyalties mandated health inspections among those marked as selling sex.36 In Valencia, Spain, around one hundred people a year entered the syphilis hospital. Later, the annual total increased to several hundred men and women. By the end of the century, three or four individuals slept in every available bed.37 The inmates were not all brothel workers, but only these women had to endure exams due to their occupation. Seville also converted a plague hospital to a “hospital de bubas” in 1586.38
As syphilis provoked fears of divine retribution, Jesuit preachers started to speak against the corruptive influences of brothels in Seville. First, the Jesuits demanded the closure of Granada’s brothel, and then they turned their attention to Seville. They rejected the historic justification of legal brothels as a “lesser evil” that prevented widespread sodomy or adultery.39 Jesuits began “invading” the Seville brothel after 1616, and their desire to preach sermons in these legal businesses greatly disrupted the trade. Enthusiasm increased for “reforming” women, and clerical moralizers heartily embraced a familiar discourse of female brothel workers as victims in desperate need of redemption. This rhetoric also led to the opening of homes for so-called “repentant” women. Seville’s city government devoted a great deal of time and effort to Jesuit proposals to reform the brothels, but by 1619, with the proclamation of strict new regulations, the brothel had declined precipitously. Women chose to abandon it for clandestine work, in a conscious choice to avoid the proposed frequent medical exams, sermons, and forced religious holidays that prevented them from earning a living.40 By 1620, only eighteen women lived in Seville’s once prosperous and large brothel. The fate of Seville’s brothel may have had an influence on the almost invisible American brothels, as most Spanish immigrants passed through or spent time in this port.
Philip IV’s motivation for decreeing brothel closure derived from the overpowering influence of his favorite, the Count Duke of Olivares, the members of the Jesuit order, as well as writers who argued that legal whoring opened the door to the devil’s influence and who held that earthly law must acknowledge divine law and not promote sin.41 Some Spaniards expressed an understanding of the reign of his father, Philip III (1578–1621), as an era of moral laxity and felt that Spain would prosper if the land returned to a time that they perceived as more virtuous.42 In response to these pressures, on February 10, 1623, the young king made the following ruling:
Prohibition of brothels and public houses of women in all the towns of these kingdoms. We order and command, that from here forward, that in no villa, or settlement in these kingdoms, will be allowed or permitted, a brothel or public house, where women earn money with their bodies . . . we command that all be closed. 43
The king charged his counselors and judicial officials to take particular care to carry out this order, with the threat of losing their offices and paying substantial fines. Many believed that in practice the criminalization of brothels increased social chaos. In 1631, Seville’s municipal authorities observed that their city suffered from far more street violence and disorder since the 1623 decree. They begged the king to allow a legal brothel again.44
Mourned and mocked in songs and poems, including Francisco de Quevedo’s “Feelings of a jaque on the closing of the brothel,” this ruling did not slow down transactional sex. Instead, public women appeared ever more frequently on the streets, and some observers claimed that several hundred brothels remained open in Madrid.45 These women provided ongoing inspiration for the poems, novellas, and plays composed by literary masters including Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcon, and Lope de Vega, as well as anonymous songs. Travelers to Spain in the seventeenth century described a widespread disregard for marriage and monogamy and believed that Madrid hosted thirty thousand public women, more than any other city in the world.46
Late in life, Philip IV noticed that his mandates had not decreased the number of “lost women” in his kingdoms. In 1661, he discerned that whores proliferated in the streets, plazas, and even up to the doors of his own palace. Their numbers “grew every day.”47 The king still believed that the lack of morals in his kingdoms caused his own personal misfortunes as well as national disasters. Both national and family calamities peaked around this time, with the death of two male heirs to the throne and the defeat of the Spanish army at Dunkirk. In desperation, Philip ordered law enforcement to identify the sexually active single women living in their jurisdictions, to visit their lodgings, and if the authorities found that they had no licit occupation, to incarcerate them in the women’s jail.48 Although these reforms coincided with the fact that Queen Isabel had a son late in 1661, ultimately Carlos II’s profound mental and physical deficiencies ended the Spanish Hapsburg dynasty with his