Debt peonage could enslave free landowning cultivators through accumulated censos

Evidence

Such a system created what in effect were debt slaves. The cultivators were free men even with some real estate of their own, but the degree of their indebtedness was such that the fruits of their labor all went to paying censos, dues to the landlords, and other local levies and taxes. Unless crop yields and market prices were high (logically a rare combination of circumstances, of course) the cultivators would probably sink further into debt. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1668

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the wider theme of how credit and debt bondage operated in early modern economies, comparable to sharecropping debt traps described in other agrarian histories.
• DEFINE: Explains censos as bonded debt obligations tied to future crop yields, functioning as a debt-peonage mechanism.