Habsburg Madrid
Until the middle of the sixteenth century, Madrid was a boring, provincial Castilian town, with barely twenty thousand inhabitants, whose main problem was how to kill time. The only political activity in the city was the occasional session of the Cortes, a traveling royal court and parliament, which would sometimes visit there, but whose decisions and pompous proclamations had no real impact on royal politics anyway. The concept of defending that city against a possible enemy was interesting, based mainly on a bluff: the city was surrounded by numerous towers and seemingly high walls, but they were mostly made of mud and had no real fortification value. The kings from the Austrian Habsburg dynasty, which at that time ruled Spain from nearby Toledo, loved that town very much and visited it from time to time, mainly because there were excellent hunting grounds in its vicinity.
Nevertheless, when King Philip II declared Madrid the new capital in 1561, it was a huge surprise. The king moved to Madrid, followed by an endless retinue of nobles, civil servants, ambassadors, monks, ladies of the court, sycophants and swindlers, that is, all those who maintained the functioning of that great maritime empire with possessions on four continents.
Of course, the city then faced a huge housing shortage for all those civil servants. The solution was to activate an old idea that was used as a temporary solution in similar situations, especially in military campaigns or when hosting a traveling court. The Regalia de aposento decree was passed, which stipulates that all owners of houses with a first floor must hand it over to civil servants, and that they can keep only the ground floor for their own needs. Although clearly damaged both materially and in terms of the loss of their own comfort and privacy, the residents of Madrid, at first, accepted such a fate without too much grumbling, but their attitude changed dramatically when they realized that this unpopular measure would not be temporary this time, but by force opportunity, becomes a permanent solution. The city grew and grew, more and more people came and no matter how much was built, the lack of housing for state bureaucrats became bigger and bigger. Under the greatest pressure were those citizens who are building new houses and who will have to give half of the newly built housing space to some unknown important government officials, …unless they somehow manage to fulfill this obligation.
Houses of malice
But as everyone in Spain knows very well, every law has a loophole, or as they say – a trap. The rich managed by making monetary donations to the state, according to some provision of an article, they were freed from the obligation to transfer their housing. Members of the poor majority had to be more cunning and show more inventiveness. Their chance was to build a house that would be declared “unfit” or “indivisible”. In the decades that followed, making such ill-fitting, indivisible houses became Madrid’s most prized architectural skill. Houses were built with large “passages”, “corridors”, “inner courtyards” and other similar rooms, which would become residential as soon as the royal commission passed that officially stated the “unsuitability” of the house. The most valued was the skill of hiding floors, so houses were built that look like one-story houses from the outside, but actually two floors are hidden behind the wall, and one or two more in the steep sloping roof. In order to somehow mask it, bizarrely large doors were made, the windows were arranged vertically in a complete mess, so from the outside it was impossible to guess at what height the mezzanine structure is located. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it was at this time that Spanish popular literature was dominated by the “picar novel” that celebrated the mangup ingenuity of the ordinary, small, resourceful man. Nothing in real life was more picaresque than Madrid’s residential architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is believed that around a thousand such enigmatic houses were built in Madrid during that period, whose number of floors, function and area could not be understood in any way. Such houses were officially called “houses with an inappropriate division”, colloquially “houses with a castle”, but over time the Mangup name casa a la malicia – house of malice – was established, which is an expression that is still used today.
Later, the authorities came to their senses and introduced a tax for those citizens who did not offer hospitality to the court camarilla, and could have, if their house was more suitable. The tax was calculated in a very complicated way and the owners of “houses of malice” had to raise their inventiveness to an even higher level, in order to avoid or reduce this tax. The official entrance was in one place, but there were other, hidden entrances, from the yard, through someone else’s passage, from another street, and the like. The result was total urban chaos.
But everything comes to an end, including the golden age of Spain. Conquest of continents, Indian wars, pirate adventures and public burnings of infidels – all this, already in the eighteenth century, was only a romantic past. The empire weakened, the court shrunk, the king’s attendants built their own houses, and those “unsuitable houses” that had been an advantage up to that time, now became a disadvantage. Madrid was in urban chaos, and people lived in houses that were deliberately made to be unsuitable. With great difficulty, the houses were listed and given addresses, in a process that lasted about eighty years, and Mesonero Romanos, a Madrid writer and chronicler of the city, who gave names to hard-to-recognize streets related to their role in the city’s history, had his hands full. In the new circumstances, the “houses of malice” as impractical for real life were demolished and new ones were built in their place, sensibly designed, adapted to real needs and boringly aligned with established urban planning principles.
“House of Malice” on Redondilla Street
How many “houses of evil” are left in today’s Madrid? Of course, considering how they are made, they are neither easy to define nor recognize. Some say there are only three left today, others say there are two, and still others dispute that. But everyone agrees that there is at least one more – the one at the corner of Redondilla and los Mancebos, in the La Latina neighborhood. The house has undergone some alterations in the past, but the arrangement of windows and doors has not been touched and is as enigmatic as it was in its “most evil” period. Despite the fact that today we have an open view of both street facades, it is not possible to figure out where the mezzanine structure is located between the ground floor and the first floor. Each imaginary horizontal is cut by some doors or some windows, placed at illogically different heights. How many floors are there actually? Are there internal stairs that change the elevation of the first floor? In a similar chaotic arrangement are the skylights – “badges”, enigmatically placed at different heights. An on-site visit does not solve the puzzle. One can barely glimpse through one of the windows, but there is still no explanation. The ceiling is set unexpectedly high, and the interior looks uninhabited and may be undergoing some reconstruction.
Let’s not forget that the house had some reconstructions before and we don’t know what was changed. What did she look like in the beginning? Did the first owner manage to outwit the zealous Habsburg tax collectors?
The history of the “house of malice” is not unknown to Madrid’s professional public, it is even a source of certain national pride as the embodiment of the “picare” spirit and ingenuity of the Spanish people. However, although there is only one such house left, it has not been put under protection until now, as far as I know. To be honest, it would be really awkward to put under cultural protection something that was made with the intention of being “anti-architecture”. Be that as it may, we should expect the last trace of such architectural antics in Madrid to disappear soon. This, of course, will not be the end of fraud with the number of floors in residential buildings in Europe, but nowhere has it been as successful and as massive as in Habsburg Madrid.
