Martín de Azpilcueta (1492-1586)

Abstract

Accustomed as Europeans were, in the centuries before the discovery of America, to constant prices and wages, and even tended to the fall due to lack of cash, in a context of permanent economic recession, the arrival of American wealth catapulted an inflationary process of such magnitude that it gave rise to the most singular conjectures about its origin and no less arbitrary administrative dispositions to mitigate its consequences. It corresponded to Martin de Azpilcueta and other Spanish-American scholars to explain the relationship between the presence of the American treasury and the observed inflationary process in a coherent way.