León

That pride could not hold off a long decline. Bad harvests, famine and peasant debt marked the 14th century, and the plague of 1349–1350 carried off more than a quarter of the people of the district. The suburbs grew again in the 15th century, yet by 1500 León held only four or five thousand people, against fifteen thousand in Salamanca. When the Comuneros rose against Charles V in 1520, the two great local houses took opposite sides, the Guzmán with the rebels and the Quiñones with the king, and each used the war to settle its own feud. Afterwards the city lived off the farms around it: a spinning mill set up in 1749 with the backing of the king's minister had closed within twenty years, and with some 5,500 souls León was one of the smallest cities of the Meseta. It roused itself in April 1808, among the first Spanish cities to turn against Napoleon, and in 1833 it became the capital of its own province.