The Rise of a Tax State: Portugal, 1371-1401

This paper uses the case of fourteenth-century Portugal to question a common assumption of “fiscal history” literature, namely the linear relationship between war-related fiscal demands increase the level of taxation. It is shown that this relationship is not straightforward and that not all wars decisively affect fiscal systems. In fact, as some contemporaries suggested, the effects of war on state revenues are essentially negative. As such, the rise of a tax state does not necessarily imply higher revenues. These two general contributions are grounded in a revision of the fiscal bargaining that took place between sovereign and subjects and in a revision of the existing quantitative evidence for the period 1367-1401. The paper makes use of unpublished data and also offers a critical review of the adoption of sales taxes (sisas) as a form of permanent taxation.