This article analyses the system of salaries and regular payments in cash during the reign of Alfonso VIII of Castile (r. 1158–1214), a system that many historians consider distinctive to the later Middle Ages but that was already well developed by the end of the thirteenth century and whose origins, even 100 years earlier, we will reveal in the following pages. The salaries used to sustain a permanent army (“soldadas”) and the annual concessions of royal rents and taxes (“situados”) conditioned the development of the political relationships between the king and the nobility, both secular and ecclesiastical. In its origins, the system appears to be connected to some specific taxes, amongst which the salt mines and rents from Toledo stand out; its development is also parallel to the beginning of the leasing out of royal taxes, which led to important changes in the management system of the treasury.
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