The half-annate (media anata) was a separate revenue derived from offices and other royal grants: the return to the crown of half the salary of one’s first year of income. Except in the case of ecclesiastics, it superseded the earlier mesada, or month’s pay paid by a new appointee. Presented as an emergency measure following Piet Heyn’s seizure of the treasury fleet, the half-annate was decreed in 1631, empire-wide, for every beneficiary of the king’s grace, from a minor receiving a plain soldier’s plaza, to the royal infantes, the king’s sons. (Bushnell KC)