The municipal accounts in the crown of Castile (14th-18th century)

Abstract

Through an approach close to the history of the institutions, this paper intends to study one of the most unknown municipal officers in Spain. We refer to the contador, comptroller or accountant, who was in charge of the control and supervision of the incomes and expenses in the main Spanish City Halls from the Middle Ages up to well entered the 19th century. First of all, the origin of the job is explained. It was related to the creation of the Supreme Auditing Board of the Royal Exchequer (Contaduría Mayor de Cuentas de la Real Hacienda) in the middle of the 14th century as an answer to the need to control and supervise the accounts presented by the municipal administrators and collectors. The paper studies the presence of municipal accountants and the evolution of their duties through all the Ancien Régime in some of the most important cities of the Castilian Crown, as Seville, Cordoba, Jaén, Murcia, Madrid or Toledo, as well as in those of the Aragonese Crown. The research pays special attention to identify the differences and similarities between the Castilian municipal contadores and the rationales, i.e., municipal accountants, comptrollers and other account officers of the Aragonese Crown. To meet this objective, the author uses basically the specific bibliography that has appeared in recent years in Spain on the municipal finances in the period under study, completing this overview with the examination of the content of the ordinances and municipal by-laws approved in that time. They have been seldom used up to now to carry out methodological approaches as the one pursued in this study. Once this overview has been accomplished, the paper analyzes some essential features that characterize the municipal contador's job. Specially we have considered the period they performed their position, the system of appointment, the oath they had to make to take up their post, their number, their salary, the qualities required to be an accountant, and their functions. Among latter following were to be found: to examine the municipal accounts, to register the payment orders and to control the collection of funds. These functions are basically the same that at present the comptrollers of the Public Administration at its local level perform. But in the five previous centuries few Town Councils disposed, like Toledo, that their contadores were professional life officers with a fitting salary. The usual thing was that this post, like others, was drawn each year among the aldermen. Consequently, lacking generally in specific training, they used to limit their functions to the examination of the accounts presented by the administrators and collectors during one or several days once a year.