Sea Tithes and the Maritime Commercial Transport in the Cuatro Villas de la Costa de la Mar in the Sixteenth Century

From information provided by documents relative to the sea tithes and wool exports, we try to define the manner in which the commercial channels between Castile and foreign kingdoms were set up during the sixteenth century in the ports of the Cuatro Villas de la Costa de la Mar. These trade flows were shaped by several different factors: the influence of the Velasco family, who was the beneficiary of the rights to the incomes provided by the sea tithes for nearly a century, as well as the peculiarities of the kind of transport available between the ports of the Cantabrian coastline and Burgos. In this work, we also detail how exports and imports were distributed between the ports of Santander and Laredo.