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If in most matters of government the kingdom was left to its own devices, in the realm of defence it was required to play a more active role in support of the Monarchy. The policy of the Union of Arms, elaborated under the Count Duke of Olivares in the 1620s, aimed to spread Spain's military burden a little more evenly instead of allowing it to fall mainly on an exhausted Castile. The scheme came spectacularly to grief, of course, in Catalonia, where it provoked the great revolt of 1640. And that fatal decade saw revolts throughout the peripheral provinces – Portugal, Naples, Sicily, even Aragon if we count the abortive conspiracy of the Duke of Híjar. Standing like a rock in the tempest was Valencia. In the Cortes of 1626 the kingdom agreed to give 1,080,000 lliures for the Union of Arms. In 1630 and until 1642 ‘voluntary’ levies raised and equipped by senyors and towns in reply to requests from the Crown became a new and regular feature of the Valencian scene. Combined with ordinary recruiting on the open market by commissioned officers, these campaigns may have drained 12,000 or 14,000 young adult males from the kingdom by 1637. From 1637, in fact, the policy took a new turn, when a form of general conscription was introduced – one man was taken from every 100 households to serve a summer campaign against the French, who were then intensifying their pressure along the Pyrenees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Third Estate of seventeenth-century Valencia consisted of four cities (Valencia, Alicante, Orihuela and Játiva), and some 29 ‘royal towns’ with representation in the Cortes. These varied in size from the capital with its 12,327 households to the remote mountain community of Castelfabib with a mere 154. Within this spectrum Castellón de la Plana believed itself to be ‘very big and populous, having 1,500 households’. In fact, the average size of the nine politically most important towns, excluding the capital, works out at just under 1,300, with the median being 1,350. In social composition they ranged from the metropolis with its ‘1,500 houses (at very least) belonging to the lords and great men of the kingdom’ (according to the exaggerated claim of Antoine de Lalaing) and its churches and convents which (thought Escolano) ‘must certainly occupy a third of the superficial area’, down to the overgrown village of Villarreal, few of whose 459 families ‘can get by without working for a living’ and the seaport of Villajoyosa, most of whose 350 families ‘are working people, occupied in tilling the soil or fishing’. The royal towns were not, then, a homogeneous social group – any more, indeed, than the senyors. But they formed a clearly defined political and juridical category – the ‘voice of the people’ as expressed through the Third Estate. Compared with the multiplicity of works on rural society, good urban studies are something of a rarity in early modern European history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]