While panderers had a clear punitive threat applied to their actions, public women and concubines did not—their crimes faced moral not criminal sanction. The authorities attempted to legislate over women’s clothes, hair, jewelry, and other markers to make a clear public distinction between sexually controlled women and women perceived as promiscuous.28 For example, in this society only young virgin girls traditionally wore their hair uncovered and displayed its beauty. A covered head signified a sexually active adult woman. But women labeled whores also took pride in showing off their beautiful loose hair, rejecting the standard expectations for a secluded married woman’s appearance.29 The crown often failed in enforcing sumptuary laws or policing fashion. The fact that early-modern women with virtuous reputations imitated the official dress designated for whores has confounded historians since the nineteenth century. Historians, assuming that all women in the past also bought into the official condemnations of non–sexually conforming women, could not grasp why some honorable women actually wanted to emulate scandalous women’s appearance and dress.30 In fact, literary sources such as La Lozana Andaluza (introduction) and La Celestina (chapter 2) portray sixteenth-century courtesans as the cosmetologists of their day, helping women in the arts of hair dye, makeup, facial hair removal, care of their hands, and even dental health.
One fascinating medieval definition does a better job than the sumptuary laws in defining these women, even if it probably misunderstands their lives completely: rameras were “women who don’t spin,” a definition perhaps inspired by La Lozana’s rejection of this feminine task.31 In other words, whores, unlike all other women, neither made their living nor just passed their time by doing needlework. They rejected the essential task of a genteel or hardworking woman.
BROTHELS IN SPAIN
The Siete Partidas’s harsh condemnation of panderers and procuresses may derive from royal patronage of legal brothels, even in this early era of Spanish history. Independent mediators competed with the municipal, crown, and even church ambitions to capitalize on sex for sale.32 Preceding the opening of legal brothels, licensed sex workers operated in Seville and Cordoba and paid taxes to the Islamic rulers.33 Under Christian rule, crown or municipalities or even religious institutions tended toward owning brothels instead of taxing independent women. From approximately 1300 until the late sixteenth century, regulated legal brothels flourished throughout the re-Christianized Iberian Peninsula. Valencia and Barcelona had documented brothels from the early fourteenth century, while Castilian monarchs regulated this institution at least from the mid-fifteenth century.34 They viewed legal brothels as an opportunity to enclose male violence and competitiveness into a bounded area.35 Street-level commercial sex led medieval urban dwellers to make legal complaints mainly because it caused neighborhood violence.36 Brothel regulations stipulated that men had to surrender their weapons upon entering, and thus this separated space served as a possible deterrent to street battles.
Politically, the grant of a brothel license helped unstable or contestable monarchs (including Ferdinand and Isabella) reward those subjects who served them loyally. Those who received monopolistic access to the bounteous brothel revenue could hand down this privilege to their heirs, and thus the recipients of these privileges jealously defended the institution.37 Access to prized crown brothel monopolies actually predated the Christian reconquest. For example, the great “whoremonger” Alonso Yáñez Fajardo received enormous benefits from a royal grant to the brothel monopoly for numerous cities, including all of Granada, six years before its official conquest by the Catholic monarchs.38
Financially, regulating sex work by legalizing only one official brothel in each town or city created many opportunities for the judiciary to collect a huge income in fines, even beyond the steady taxed income brothels generated as successful businesses.39 Iberian brothels made their large profits not for their residents but for their managers, the monarchs, and the municipalities that later received their revenue.40 Collecting fines on all possible minor infractions against the strict brothel regulations generated enough income to fund public offices. Overall, regulated sex work allowed late-medieval and early-modern Iberian authorities to attain the perfect balance between an apparently benign paternalistic tolerance and the possibility of harsher but lucrative enforcement of laws at any whim.41 Legal brothels extended the reach of both Iberian monarchs and town governments and helped consolidate their authority in this era of growth in crown legal institutions. Looking ahead to the second half of this chapter, apparently the Spanish crown either could not or did not want to extend this reach effectively to the Americas.
Despite the tradition of philosophical and theological writings that encouraged humans to control their baser passions, and the view of sexuality as an opposing force to spirituality, in medieval and early-modern Iberia and across Europe, the general population, church, and state voiced a discourse of brothels as a public good, especially from the mid-fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century.42 As a result, clients who visited legal state or municipal brothels received sexual services at a reasonable cost. This society viewed nonmonogamous, transactional sex as a right that all men should have and as a benefit for everyone, not a luxury for the privileged. For centuries, many Spaniards rejected the concept that simple fornication between two consenting unmarried adults was a moral wrong, despite Christian and later Catholic attempts to enforce chastity more and more through campaigns celebrating the Immaculate Conception.43 The common man logically questioned why the king would license brothels if there were something wrong with enjoying “no strings attached” sex.44 Even some women whose husbands frequented brothels seemed open minded about this activity, although many others argued that visiting whores justified financial reparations for the wife. Apparently, one late-medieval wife described her husband with great love and affection, noting that other than the fact that “era putanero mucho de mujeres [loosely translated: he was a real whorehound],” he was as good and pious as Saint Francis, and she would lay beside him for eternity in adjoining coffins.45
What was it like for a man to visit a legal brothel in medieval or early-modern Iberia? Different descriptions survive from male visitors, especially for the highly successful Valencian mancebía, giving the twenty-first–century reader the impression of a pleasurable outing, and the promise of an illusion or fantasy world of illicit sexual excitement operating under fully legal conditions with very strict rules.46 Most municipal brothels, including Valencia’s, operated on the edge or just outside of the central city. In Valencia, the brothel was a small walled quarter containing two to three hundred women, working out of rooms organized along three or four streets. Men entered the brothel via one entrance only, interacting with a guard. The guard would ask men to surrender their weapons and even promise to safely watch over their cash. Once inside the brothel, men observed and admired beautifully dressed, elegant women sitting under bright lanterns in front of their rooms, or they could enter taverns and inns. Spending time with the female residents had a fixed, standard cost.47 In Seville, by contrast, municipal officials rented out simple huts by the Guadalquivir River, and these clustered dwellings functioned as the brothel. The town took care to repair and maintain the buildings.48 Brothels forbade the entrance of non-Christians, so Islamic