During the fifteenth century the influence of the Castilian cortes declined sharply, and this was paralleled by its increasingly unrepresentative nature. The attendance of the first and second estates was irregular since the king only summoned those individuals whom he wanted to attend and the clergy and nobility took little interest in cortes proceedings. Thus, meeting irregularly and only when summoned by the king, the cortes was frequently nothing much more than an assembly of representatives of the third estate (procuradores) and royal officials, its main functions being to vote taxation and to present petitions, often evasively answered, to the king.
Forty-nine towns were represented in the cortes of 1391, but by the mid-fifteenth century this number had decreased to a maximum of only seventeen towns. These were all royal towns, the inhabitants of noble and ecclesiastical lordships being theoretically represented by the first and second estates. In practice, therefore, complete regions, such as Galicia, the Basque provinces, Asturias and Extremadura were not represented.
The selection of procuradores was controlled by the urban oligarchies, although the king himself occasionally intervened to nominate individuals. The cortes of Zamora of 1432 formally reaffirmed what had for long been practice—namely, that no non-noble could be a procurador. By this time, too, the procuradores' expenses were being paid by the Crown. In general, therefore, these procuradores were not necessarily more representative of the interests of townspeople than bishops were of the inhabitants living in their lordships. They could readily agree to taxes which they themselves did not have to pay, and the oligarchies they represented, proud of their participation in the cortes, could even expect to derive some benefit from agreeing to royal requests to spend other people's money.
A. MacKay
World History
