CÁDIZ

CÁDIZ. The Spanish city Cádiz is located in the southwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula, close to the Strait of Gibraltar, between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. This location explains the historically strategic position of the city in international trade routes that linked Europe, Africa, and America. The commercial activities in the city started with the Phoenicians three thousand years ago, and trade financed the first defensive walls built to protect the city against pirates in the Middle Ages. Commercial specialization was reinforced by the fact that land and water for agricultural purposes were scarce and by the large bay suitable for use by numerous heavy ships.

Between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries fishing and trade with North Africa were the main economic activities of the Cádiz inhabitants (1,255 in 1465). Both fishing and trade attracted merchants and fishermen from northern Spain (Biscay) and Italy (Genoa in particular). In the fifteenth century peace on the Iberian Peninsula and Castilian expansion into the Atlantic favored the transformation of a village of fishermen into a larger city. The end of the Granada War against Muslim Spain in 1492 and the Castilian conquest of the Canary Islands and America increased enormously the strategic and commercial importance of Cádiz in the crown of Castile.

Growing trade and wealth in the sixteenth century stimulated manufactures, guilds, religious and educational establishments, and cultural life. Commercial prosperity also spawned numerous attacks from Portuguese, North African, and British pirates or corsairs in the second half of the sixteenth century.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries merchants and institutions of Spanish American colonial trade moved from Seville to Cádiz because its geographical and commercial conditions were better adapted to increasing shipping tonnage and the value of commercial exchanges. Cádiz became the only legal center allowed to administer the Spanish monopoly of trade with America from the establishment in 1717 of the Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) and Consulado de Comercio (Mercantile Association). Despite the end of the legal monopoly after 1765 and 1778, Cádiz remained a major center of Spanish colonial trade until the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. Between 1778 and 1788 exports from Cádiz increased 400 percent and came to represent 72 percent of all legal exports sent from Spain to its American colonies. The crown protected colonial revenues by installing the military headquarters of the Capitanía General de Andalucía (a regional department of the Spanish army) in Cádiz in 1768.

The increasingly multicultural mercantile community of the city, composed of hundreds of merchants from the rest of Spain, France, Italy, Ireland, England, Germany, Russia, the Low Countries, Portugal, and the American territories, enjoyed religious and cultural protection from royal officers. Immigration increased the total population of a city characterized by low fertility rates and led to the city's demographic growth from 30,000 inhabitants in 1709 to 77,500 in 1791, with a density of nearly 9,000 inhabitants per square kilometer in 1791. Foreigners represented approximately 15 to 21 percent of the total population on average, most of them involved in colonial trade. Spanish merchants by and large worked as commissioners for foreign merchants, who benefited most from Spanish colonial trade in the city. Nevertheless, research in notarial archives has revealed that important percentages of foreigners did not return to their countries with the profits from colonial trade but stayed in the city, married, and founded families who lived in Andalusia for several generations, thus reinvesting their wealth and maintaining commercial networks in Spain.

See also Commerce and Markets ; Spain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bustos Rodríguez, Manuel, ed. Historia de Cádiz: Los siglos decisivos. Madrid, 1990. A general overview.

Fernández Pérez, Paloma. El rostro familiar de la metrópoli: Redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700–1812. Madrid, 1997. A study of the mercantile community of Cádiz in the eighteenth century, with a focus on multicultural coexistence, gender, and the creation of networks of family groups in the firms.

García-Baquero González, Antonio. Cádiz y el Atlántico 1717–1778: El comercio colonial español bajo el monopolio gaditano. 2 vols. Cádiz, 1976. An economic study of Spanish colonial trade in Cádiz.

Pérez Serrano, Julio. Cádiz, la ciudad desnuda: Cambio económico y modelo demográfico en la formación de la Andalucía contemporánea. Cádiz, 1992. A specialized book on the demography of the city in the transition from early modern to late modern times.

Paloma FernÁndez PÉrez

CÁDIZ

CÁDIZ , Atlantic seaport in S.W. Spain. Certain historians have identified Cádiz with the biblical *Tarshish; Jews may have been living there during the period of Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula. A Jew, Samuel of Cádiz, was among those allocated properties in the area after its reconquest and resettlement in the 13^th century. The Jewish settlement increased in importance when the island on which Cádiz was situated became linked with the mainland by silt from the Guadalquivir. More about Cádiz Jewry is known during the 15^th century. The Inquisition's ruthless handling of cases from Cádiz tried in 1481 in Seville shows that a community of *Conversos existed there at this time. When the Jews were expelled from Andalusia, those of Cádiz moved to Castile. A number of Jews – Moses and Isaac Aben Zemerro among others – were granted safe conducts to settle their affairs in the city. According to the chronicler Bernaldez, 8,000 Jews left from Cádiz, mainly for North Africa, on the expulsion from Spain (1492). The 1877 census showed 209 Jews in Cádiz, mostly from Morocco, but no permanent community was formed (jc, Oct. 8, 1886).

bibliography:

Baer, Urkunden, 2 (1936), 58, 424; Baer, Toledot 552 n. 141; García y Bellido, in: Sefarad, 2 (1942), 5–93, 279ff.; idem, in: Ars Hispaniae, 1 (1947), 137–66; idem, La Península Ibérica (1953), 467ff.; Sancho de Sorpranis, in: Sefarad, 13 (1953), 320–8; Suárez Fernández, Documentos, 35, 57, 257, 467.

[Haim Beinart]

Cádiz Port in sw Spain, on the Gulf of Cádiz; capital of Cádiz province (founded 1100 bc). It became an important port for shipping routes to the Americas, and in 1587 a Spanish fleet was burned here by Sir Francis Drake. It has a 13th-century cathedral, art and archaeological museums. Industries: shipbuilding, sherry, olives, salt, fishing. Pop. (2000) 138,006.