Presión Monárquica y Resistencia Municipal: Jerez de la Frontera contra el Gobierno de Felipe IV

Abstract

This article intends to tell and explain the events happened at Jerez de la Frontera in 1637, when the town council –Cabildo– of the city resisted to the innovations of the Monarchy’s fiscal policy after the war between Spain and France. The first part of the article sheds light on the economic crisis suffered by Jerez since the end of the sixteenth century and pays special attention to the main project of commercial revitalization of the city: the building of a channel between the rivers Guadalquivir and Guadalete, which failed due to the Monarchy’s opposition. The second part of the article tells the events of 1637 and intends to explain the political violence as a consequence of the city’s lack of support of the government. This picture allows situating Jerez in the map of the political upheavals that the historiography has detected in Philip IV’s Castile.