City councils restricted tavern wine sales to control Morisco drinking and wife-beating

Evidence

On September2, 1521, we find the ayuntamiento (city council) of Baza voting to ban the sale of wine in taverns to prevent drunkenness. (Apart from its intrinsic interest, this bylaw provides a possible though not unambiguous early attestation of the use of the word morisco in the sense of morisco (2) discussed in the previous chapter.) … It was resolved that because in this city the sale of wine in taverns (bodegones) gives rise to problems of many kinds, with Moriscos and other ill-disposed (mal vinientes) persons foregathering in such places, and getting drunk, brawling and disputing, so that the Moriscos neglect their own affairs and spend the whole day in the taverns, and when they do go home, they beat their wives, in order to avoid these troubles, and many others which might be mentioned, it was resolved and decreed that all those in this city who have wine of their own production should sell it in their own homes, and not supply it to tavern-keepers. … The city fathers were concerned to make sure that their own domestic supplies were assured in periods of scarcity! But they were trying, with what success we do not know, to limit the availability of wine to the new drinking classes that had been brought into existence by the conversions. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s recurring interest in sumptuary/moral regulation of newly converted or subordinated groups, and to the complaint-driven moral panics of the immodesty article.
• SHARE: The 1521 Baza tavern ban, with its odd blend of paternalist moralism and elite self-preservation of wine supply, would interest a historian of early modern Spain.