Note 65 — Appendices
Reading edition
The history of the Sevillian trade-guilds begins properly with the fifteenth century, although Gestoso states in his Diccionario de Artífices Sevillanos that he has found a few documents which seem to point to their existence in the century preceding.
When the Spanish Christians pitched their camp before this city, prior to their victorious assault upon its walls, the besieging army was divided according to the various trades of its component soldiery: the spicers in one part of the camp, the apothecaries in another, and so forth. It is therefore probable that the Sevillian trade-guilds were instituted shortly after the re-conquest. The wages of smiths, shoemakers, silversmiths, armourers, and other craftsmen were decreed by Pedro the First in his Ordenamiento de Menestrales. The ordinances of the silversmiths, in particular, are so old that Gestoso believes them to have been renewed and confirmed by Juan the Second, in the year 1416. However this may be, it is certain that the Seville guilds were regularly constituted in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.