Breeding Techniques and Court Influence: Charting a ‘Decline’ of the Spanish Horse in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

Despite the traditional reputation of the Spanish horse as a naturally abundant, high quality animal found in the Iberian Peninsula, Iberian monarchs had routinely expressed concern about a scarcity of horses as early as the thirteenth century. An initiative in the mid-sixteenth century to improve horses for the royal court reveals top-down breeding directives to address concerns about scarcity, making use of an infrastructure of royal stables and studs stretched across multiple dynastic and imperial territories; at the same time, these directives document competing and changing visions of the best methods for breeding horses to keep up with court demands. Notably, a preference for importing and crossbreeding in the sixteenth century shifted to a preference for maintaining individual strains of domestic equine stock in the seventeenth century. While the external demand for horses from Spain remained high to supply an expanding court culture in Europe throughout this period, the realities of developing and maintaining horse populations within Iberia suggest dynamic rather than static influences on the horse’s type, adding new complexity to the historic value of this courtly animal and our understanding of it.