What is a hidalgo? I'm taking Spanish lit and it keeps coming up
The short answer is that in most cases, if your literature is Siglo de Oro lit, it means a member of petty nobility.
Without the cultural background, you can sort of think of it as “being given a noble title/peerage and not having an estate”.
The term is sometimes seen as fidalgo but it comes from hijo de algo “son of something/someone”. Originally, hidalgos (and hidalgas) were children of a specific kind of nobility, usually descendants of people who fought in the Reconquista. The term existed in what is modern day Spain and Portugal, but at the time it would have been Castile, Aragon, Leon, Galicia, Asturias… but focusing on some bigger city areas, but also including (technically, at the time) the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, and the Kingdom of Portugal.
EDIT: Most hidalgos came from what is now Northern Spain because the Reconquista was against the areas under Muslim control, the last bastion of this was Granada in Andalusia, in Southern Spain.
The Reconquista went on for a while and Castile and Aragon were joined by the marriage of Isabel [Isabella] of Castile and Fernando [Ferdinand] of Aragon but were considered different kingdoms at the time. In Aragon and other parts of Spain, you might also see the word infanzón and not hidalgo but in some contexts it’s sometimes synonymous with caballero which is “knight” or “gentleman”, though originally that term meant “horseman” or “someone who owned horses” aka someone with money enough to afford a horse and stables.
The title kind of lost most of its meaning because some kings were like “oh I like you, good job, here have a title”, and most of them didn’t hold actual land.
In Siglo de Oro time, the hidalgo was a kind of… specific symbol. It referred to a noble who usually didn’t have money or land.
Some did, but more didn’t. And they sort of became the symbol for Spain itself at the time.
The hidalgos that did have money tended to be first-born. In Spain there was the system of “primogeniture” which is “first born (son) takes most of the money and estate”. That usually left very little for the other siblings. It was really common for the first-born to become a don of the estate while male siblings typically went into the clergy, or the military. A female sibling often ended up marrying someone at her station or above, or became a nun (that’s not always how it went, some women were really instrumental in running the actual estates as far as giving orders or balancing the finances, but traditionally, or at least in a lot of fiction from the time, they were used as pawns for men).
The terms don “lord/sir” or doña “lady/madame” were used for them. You sometimes would see la doncella which shows up now more in fairytales but meant “maiden” or “young (unmarried noble) lady”… at that time that title was used for (in a lot of cases) the nobility who had land.
Because they were nobles, in some way, shape, or form, some of them were tax exempt and if the Inquisition got involved in some way, they were exempt from torture (though historically the Inquisition did more land/money seizures than torturing people, and really their job was related to the subject of heresy).
A hidalgo who didn’t have the estate usually was considered noble in name but didn’t have the financial standing. In some cases, they had less to eat than the poor, or even some slaves. In some of Cervantes’ works the hidalgos were really poor; it’s implied that Don Quijote was closer to what we would consider the middle class, economically… he had some land (or at least a house), and a horse (though not a lot of money to feed Rocinante very well)… so he had land, but he certainly was not rich.
Most dons or doñas in the traditional sense were lords or ladies of an estate who oversaw tenant farmers or the administration of lands in some aspect, and the lesser ones served under the bigger lords like counts and dukes etc.
The hidalgos came to represent Spain which was having this huge literary cultural boom but were really poor at the time because most of the profits that they were getting from colonies was going to fund the Holy Roman Empire (the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V [Charles V] was descended from Isabel and Fernando making unified Spain part of the Empire and Spain was seen as the heart of Catholicism outside of the Vatican/Rome), specifically money from the Spanish colonies was going towards all kinds of conflicts and wars with the Lutherans and Protestants in Germany, and Carlos V had more of a presence in Flanders than Madrid.
(I probably got one or two of the historical facts wrong here and there so please correct me if I’m wrong; the literary aspect of it all I’m pretty sure I got right)
