In his famous tale, The Three-Cornered Hat, one of her favourite sons, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833–91), described his native Guadix in the last days of the ancien régime: ‘Our ancestors still lived in the old Spanish way, supremely slowly, proud of their ancient traditions, at peace with God, their Inquisition and their friars, with their picturesque inequality before the law, with their privileges, customs and personal immunities.’ The story is about a miller who made friends with his powerful neighbours, among them the bishop and the corregidor, whom he royally entertained in his delightful garden, regaling them with the fruits of the season. That way he got things done: ‘Could Your Lordship get them to reduce the taxes they're asking off me? Would Your Worship just sign this little certificate for me? … It is true I punched so-and-so today, but he was asking for it and I hope you put him in gaol, not me.’ But things eventually began to turn sour for the miller as the corregidor began to pay too much attention to his wife. In the course of his amusing little tale, Alarcón delicately reconstructs for us the Granada of his fathers, where private and public obligations were hopelessly entangled, where authority belonged to a man rather than to an office.

One of the features of the early modern period in Europe was the gradual shift from a society of this kind, structured in terms of caste and family, of corporate bodies like estates of the realm, guilds and communes, towards one more familiar to us today, where the individual is the cornerstone of the commonwealth, linked to his fellow man by largely anonymous ties of professional obligation which are regulated through money.