Mortality of the Black Death in the Kingdom of Navarre

Some good estimates of mortality in the Black Death come from the Kingdom of Navarre in north-eastern Spain. They are based on two types of registers of royal income organized according to the main administrative divisions of Navarre into five merindads.

One type of register records the special tax called ‘monedaje’, a name that refers to the fact that it was levied to finance the launching of new coinage when a new king had acceded to the throne. These registers are particularly valuable because, with the usual reservation in respect of underenumeration, they comprise also the poor and destitute classes, both those who paid reduced amounts and those who were too destitute to pay anything at all. Monedajes were levied both in 1330 and 1350 but, unfortunately, the records of the monedaje of 1330 are extant only for the Ribera area of the merindad of Estella in central-western Navarre. For this reason, comparison of the registers in order to estimate the mortality caused by the Black Death can only be performed for this area.

The other type of register that can be used for demographic analysis records the annual collection of rents from the royal estates in Navarre and is basically a cadastral type of material. The royal system of rent collection had two main forms but only the one called ‘pechas capitales’, which was collected according to households (pechas) registered by the name of the householders (capitales), can be considered for possible demographic usefulness. The system of pechas capitales was mostly used in the highlands in the Pyrenean regions, in the merindads of Pamplona (Montañas) and Sangüesa. The use of these cadastral registers in demographic studies is problematic because they register only the households in the villages that held royal land in the form of tenancies, whether large or small, and paid rents accordingly. They leave out the large segments of the rural population that cultivated the lands of other seigneurs; they leave out the exempted class of gentry (hidalgoes) and the freeholders (francos) who did not owe rents; and most seriously, unlike the monedajes, they leave out the countryside’s proletarian classes, those who did not pay rent because they held no or insignificant amounts of land and could not bear any tax assessment.