Venality and Seigneuries in seventeenth-century Portugal: The sale of the town of Punhete to Secretary Diogo Soares as a case study

Abstract

This article examines the sale of seigneuries in Portugal during the period of its incorporation into the Habsburgs’ composite monarchy. It contributes to the historiographical debate on venality in that kingdom, in which numerous historians are now examining the sale of offices, privileges, and honours by the Crown, as in other European monarchies. The article focuses on the commercialisation of seigneuries, which also developed in Portugal, albeit to a lesser extent than in other European territories of the Spanish Monarchy such as Castile, Naples, or Sicily. To this end, it offers a case study of the sale of the town of Punhete (modern-day Constância) to Diogo Soares, Secretary of State of the Council of Portugal during the reign of Philip IV. The analysis first explores Soares’s social background and career trajectory, before examining the process through which the seigneury was sold and an entail (morgado) established—both understood as strategies of social advancement within the estate-based society of the Ancien Régime.