Hidalgo (nobility)
Legally, an hidalgo is a nobleman by blood who can pass his noble condition to his children, as opposed to someone who acquired his nobility by royal grace.
In the frontier towns that were created as the Christian kingdoms pushed into Muslim land, the caballeros, and not the magnates who often were far away, came to dominate politics, society and cultural patronage.
[5] When challenged, an hidalgo de sangre may obtain a judicial sentence validating his nobility from the Royal Chancillería of Valladolid or Granada, if he can prove that it has been accepted by local society and custom.
In Asturias, Cantabria and other regions of Spain every seven years the King ordered the creation of padrones ("registers") where the population was classified either as hidalgos nobles, and therefore, exempt from taxation due to their military status or pecheros (from an archaic verb, pechar, "to pay")[9] who comprised the estado llano ("lower ranks") and were excluded from military service and had to pay taxes.
On March 22, 1697, Charles II of Spain issued a royal cedula that, among other matters, extended to the indigenous nobles of the Philippines, the principalía), as well as to their descendants, the preeminence and honors customarily attributed to the hidalgos of Castile.
By the time of the reign of the House of Bourbon, over half a million people enjoyed tax exemptions, putting tremendous strain on the royal state which wasn't calling their services to arms but relied more on professional armies and costly mercenaries.
Attempts were made to reform the title and by the early nineteenth century with the forced levies to military service of all citizens by conscription without any minimum requirements of nobility or pay or loyalty by honour but by coercion on desertion, it had entirely disappeared, along with the social class it had originally signified and most of its centuries-old developed code of honour in the nation's social culture.
In the novel Cervantes has Don Quixote satirically present himself as an hidalgo de sangre and aspire to live the life of a knight-errant despite the fact that his economic position does not allow him to truly do so.
[13] Don Quixote's possessions allowed to him a meager life devoted to his reading obsession, yet his concept of honour led him to emulate the knights-errant.
