THE CROMBERGERS OF SEVILLE The History of a Printing and Merchant Dynasty THE CROMBERGERS OF SEVILLE THE HISTORY OF A PRINTING AND MERCHANT DYNASTY CLIVE GRIFFIN Fellow and Tutor in Spanish, Trinity College, Oxford CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD 1988 Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press, New York ©Clive Griffin 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Griffin, Clive The Crombergers of Seville: the history of a printing and merchant dynasty. I. Cromberger (Family) 2. Printing­ Spain-Seville-History I. Title 686.2'092'2 Z232. C9/ ISBN 0-19-815831-9 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Griffin , Clive. The Crombergers of Seville. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Cromberger family. 2. Printing-Spain-Seville­ History-16th century. 3. Seville (Spain)-Commerce­ History-16th century. 4. Seville (Spain)-Imprints. 5. Bibliography-Early printed books-16th century. 6. Printers-Spain-Biography. 7. Merchants-Spain­ Biography. I. Title. Z232.C93G74 1987 686.2'0946'86 86-33251 ISBN 0-19-815831-9 Set by Litho Link Limited Printed in Great Britain at the University Printing House, Oxford by David Stanford Printer to the University PREFACE THIS book is the first full-length study of a major printing-office in sixteenth­ century Spain. Although we have detailed accounts of the activities of Aldus Manutius at Venice, Christopher Plantin in the Low Countries, and the Estiennes in France, there has been little published about individual Spanish presses operating during the period when those other major figures were printing their books and when Spain was itself a world power. The Crombergers' office is particularly important because it dominated printing in Seville at a time when the city was the largest centre of population in Castile, the hub of economic expansion through the opening up of the Indies, the focus of spiritual reform, and the centre of Castilian book-production. The Crombergers' output of books during the first half of the century was both large and influential, many important literary and spiritual works first appearing under their imprint. Yet their press has received less attention from scholars than it certainly deserves. Spanish printing and the Crombergers' role in it during the early years of the sixteenth century have not, however, been entirely ignored. The period from 1501 to 1520 was studied by the late F. J. Norton in two splendid books, but no scholar has carried this pioneering work into the l 52os or beyond, and even Norton's account of the Crombergers' early activities is necessarily brief, given the wide scope of his history of Spanish printing. 1 The present study is thus intended to fill an important gap in our knowledge of the history of printing in Spain. It is based both on documents, most of which are unpublished, and on a close scrutiny of books printed by the Cromb{'rgers. Information from these two sources has been combined and set in a wider historical context to present a full account of this press. The approach adopted draws upon both that commonly associated with the French historiens du livre (with their emphasis on the role of the book in society, the cultural context of printing, and the book as a commodity) and that taken by descriptive bibliographers working in a more Anglo-Saxon tradition.2 ' F. ]. Norton, Printing in Spain IJOI-IJ20 (Cambridge, 1966); id., A Descriptive Catalogue of Printing in Spain and Portugal IJOI-I520 (Cambridge, 1978). These two books have provided the major inspiration for this study. 2 For a succinct comparison of the French and Anglo-Saxon approaches see Kenneth E. Carpenter (ed.), Books and Society in History: Papers of the Association of College and Research Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference, 24-28 June, I980, Boston, Massachusetts (New York and London, 1983), pp. vii-ix. For a masterly example of the methods of the historiens du livre see Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier (eds.), Le Livre conquerant: du Moyen Age au milieu du XVII• siecle (Paris, 1983), vol.i of eid. (eds.), Histoire de /'edition fran(aise (Paris, 198 3- ). VI PREFACE Despite the small number of studies of early printers in Spain, there is no lack of evidence about the presses, for Spain is rich in notarial archives. One such archive the Archivo de Protocolos in Seville, proved the most useful source of ' . documents for a study of the Crombergers. Some documents from the Arch1vo de Protocolos had already been published by two local scholars, Gestoso y Perez and Hazaii.as y la Rua, and their collections were an invaluable starting-point. 3 Neither author, however, had discovered more than a fraction of the documents contained in the Archivo de Protocolos which are concerned with printing; both died before their researches were completed; and neither attempted to write an account of an individual Seville press or a history of printing in the city as a whole. Given the litigious nature of Spaniards in the sixteenth century, the Archivo de Protocolos is a veritable goldmine of information on many aspects of life in Seville: economics, trade, industry, political and racial problems, institutions, the arts, and even contemporary mores-the frequent documents entitled 'perd6n de virgo' and 'perd6n de cuernos' (pardons purchased from the aggrieved parties by seducers of maidens or by cuckolders), for example, present a view of marital and sexual relations which might cause raised eyebrows among those brought up on an undiluted fare of a certain sort of Spanish Golden-Age literature. The Crombergers appeared before a notary at least three times a week (including Sundays and, on occasion, Christmas Day). They accordingly left a mass of documents: wills, dowry-agreements, contracts for the sale and purchase of land and property, shipping manifests, inventories of goods auctioned or left in the estate of a deceased member of the family, powers of attorney, contracts to print, and even records of gifts from one member of the family to another. Their account books and correspondence unfortunately do not survive, and there are no hard data available about their beliefs or personalities, for the documents held in the Archivo de Protocolos are strictly notarial. The researcher therefore has to read between the lines of these documents if he is to build up a picture of Seville's leading printers. And the Archivo de Protocolos is not without shortcomings of other kinds. It is composed of the in-house copies of documents drawn up in twenty-four notarial offices ('oficios', or 'escribanias')--0ne for each of the twenty-four notaries public who were allowed to operate in the city; it is arranged by notary, and within each office, by year. The lamentable state of the building in which the documents are now housed has resulted in the complete records of some offices having been virtually destroyed by damp. Some whole books ('libros') and many individual documents, were removed by early scholars; papers have been transferred willy-nilly from one book to another (the books are frequently unbound); and some books have, for obscure reasons, been hidden in inaccessible ' See the works listed in 'Abbreviations' below. PREFACE Vil parts of the building by irresponsible researchers. Nevertheless, the archive is at least open to scholars-something which was not always the case. At a very rough estimate, some five million folios survive for the sixteenth century alone. The sheer quantity of the documentation is daunting. There is no index, apart from a useful list of papers concerning the Indies, a catalogue of documents involving Jews or Moors, and the odd indexes made by individual notaries covering a few years of their papers.4 Pike and Hoffman imply that investigation in the archive is somewhat facilitated by the fact that clients generally employed a single notary or small group of notaries whose offices were located near the client's residence.5 This is untrue of the Crombergers, at least, who used the services of seventeen notarial offices scattered all over the city. Occasionally one document contains a reference to another drawn up elsewhere which can then be tracked down with relative ease, but such cross-references are rare. The researcher is therefore obliged to ex'lmine all the books in all the offices for all the years in which he is interested. While this is less of an obstacle for certain sorts of investigation, it makes research particularly tiresome for somebody interested in an individual or a family. It is therefore scarcely surprising that many scholars have been reluctant to use this archive. Nevertheless, Klaus Wagner's recent study of the minor Seville printer, Martin de Montesdoca, shows how productive a systematic scrutiny of this archive can be, and the present book provides further proof of the importance of such sources-something long known to historians of printing in France.6 Other archives containing useful information on the Crombergers in particular or on contemporary printing in general are the Archivo General de Indias and the Archivo de la Catedral, both in Seville, the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, and the Archivo General de la Nacion in Mexico City. The first was used to investigate the family's interests in the Indies.