Based on the example of the Spanish monarchy from the XVIIth to the XIXth century, inserts the concept of "sale of offices" by the State during the Old Regime into a more extensive context of personalized relationships between the King and his subjects, which was the fundamental basis of the political systemsallo. Such relationships were based, in any case, on an exchange of services. Those services were consciously termed as 'merits' and 'graces', and the exchange explicitly conceived as suc h an exchange. Monetary services were just a special case of this broader set of relationships. Continuity between sale and other forms of allocation of State ressources was broken at the end of the XVIIIth and beginning of XIXth century when political "conventions" changed and when ecclesiastical values were received as structural norms of civil political society, transforming the sale of office into a kind of civil simony.