ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author makes a comparison between the relative security and peacefulness of his present lives and the unstable and turbulent lives of most people in late medieval and early modern Europe. It provides a rough typology of violence in late medieval and early modern Spain, with a special focus on what the author has described as official violence: that is, violence from above that was often sanctioned by the law or articulated as conflict among the upper classes. Through a series of vignettes, he has shown how lower social groups were drawn into the conflicts of the nobility, the Crown and middling sorts. The chapter outlines the course of political life in late medieval and early modern Spain. Most of the civil strife occurs mainly because of competition for political power and financial resources.
