Order and Chivalry. Jesus D. Rodriguez-VelascoЧитать онлайн книгу.
The Cuaderno de la Hermandad was written within the political context of a regency council, a proceeding that effectively put into a state of suspension the personal sovereignty of the king while, paradoxically, aiming to protect it. The monarch in 1315 was Alfonso XI, a minor at the time of the council. The main participants in the regency council were María de Molina (1265–1321)—who was Alfonso’s grandmother and a perennial member of the council from birth—and two tutors elected from among the most conspicuous members of the highest Castilian nobility, the ricos hombres. These ricos hombres were the same high nobility that consistently resisted any attempt to construct a central jurisdiction embodied by the physical and political person of the monarch.
The hermandad emerged in the middle of this crisis as an associative method for participation in the collective process of sovereignty and, by extension, of the Castilian monarchy itself. The high nobility therefore introduced an exception to sovereignty. The hermandad established itself as a group that might provide its members protection and its twenty-five rules, or articles, addressed the exceptional nature of this ordo.
The Cuaderno issued an odd political dimension in the construction of the chivalric ordo. The hermandad was an attempt to surmount the borders of the social class (the ordo) that enabled the group to participate in the political sphere of a sovereignty in crisis. Through the horizontal discourse of chivalry, the heterotopic practice of civitas imposed a voice and an authority within the political space of the royal courts, which served as the politico-juridical institution in which sovereignty was resolved.
Having considered the host of circumstances associated with the Cuaderno and the regency council to which it responded, I am able to delve into a series of crucial problems related to modes of transformation of the monarchy and the modern state. These problems revolve around the inhabitants of fortified villages and cities, as well as the processes through which urban knights expressed their will to constitute an active part of the sovereign power. The key aspects I will address are: (1) the examination of vocabulary, with the goal of clarifying the social identity of interlocutors claiming their agency; (2) the specific problems presented by the institution of the Cortes as a space in which sovereignty is resolved, as well as its strategies of entry; and (3) the criteria of association and the poetics of fraternity in the process of the construction of civil life. Finally, I will analyze the textual strategies for the creation of this voice and its heterotopic expression based on a close reading of the Cuaderno.
I will trace the poetics of the ordo set in motion on behalf of those individuals and groups who are ultimately subjects of the ordo. The point of such an analysis is to understand the mechanisms of a strategy of self-perception—or of the creation of a phenomenon—and of the formation of the perception of political experience, a process to which the Cuaderno offers privileged access.
The social structure of the group that concerns me is not well defined and I will provide some background on its history and nomenclature. I will refer to this group as citizen knights or urban knights. This is a generic denomination that includes bourgeois knights and hidalgos.
The bourgeois knights descended from urban militias whose traditional role had been to protect borders. Primary sources from medieval Castile refer to these knights in various ways: caballeros villanos (from the villas or cities), concejiles (linked to concejos or urban governments), pardos (the color of their uniforms was brown or pardo), ruanos (from the ruas or city streets), and so on. These were individuals and groups whose families exercised this military function, but who had seen their role limited as the cities became progressively more secure due to the mobility of the border. These knights, however, continued to keep arms and horses, since they were required to display them at the king’s request. They maintained the character of urban knights, but their defensive role had given way to a role in production, generally in commerce and agriculture.
The knights of the lesser nobility, the hidalgos, were still noble knights. They were those referred to, in title 21 of the second Partidas, as the “compaña de hombres nobles” (organization of noblemen) by which chivalry is defined. However the lesser nobility (hidalguía) as a particular category of the nobility was relatively amorphous in the fourteenth century. Hidalgos (from fijo de algo, or “son of something”) were nobles, but after the fifteenth century they became slightly stigmatized, since they were no longer linked to the theological nobility, but rather to a nobility that was politically constituted through chivalry.1 Hidalguía is a liminal state, and therefore relates well to chivalry. Chivalry and hidalguía operate in the same interstice where nobility and non-nobility bifurcate. To be a knight and a member of the hidalguía is a way of facing the nobility, of being in its presence, with a definite precedent. Chivalry and hidalguía are in the presence of theological nobility yet resolutely outside of its sphere.
While villano and hidalgo knights shared a general state of liminality, their separation was, nonetheless, crucial. Each group had a very different perception of the liminality that they shared, and they negotiated their relations with nobility differently. The Cuaderno comprises both groups yet subsequent chivalric institutions practice a definitive separation of these two chivalric categories.
The terminology for the separation of these two categories is often problematic. Sources that refer to social divisions within the city speak of knights, hombres buenos (good men), and hidalgos, above all. The hombres buenos are occasionally on the same level as the knights. This means that in terms of social hierarchy, neither the hombres buenos nor the knights can be confused with the hidalgos. It is also quite common for the hidalgos to be referred to as knights, and in such cases those knights who are not hidalgos are simply referred to as “los de la ciudad” [“those from the city”]. Not all the hombres buenos are knights “from the city,” even though all the knights of the cities seem to have been hombres buenos. Likewise, not all knights are hidalgos, although all hidalgos could have been considered knights.2 This all might seem to be a case of semantics, however it is fundamental to orient oneself within the framework of the juridical sources—in particular, the fueros, or local law codes, laws, and the cuadernos de peticiones de cortes (petition logs of the Cortes). Even with all these caveats, the analytical terrain is far from stable.
A sole denomination may not correspond to a single referent. Even though a certain degree of precision can be achieved, the terms used by scribes and lawyers are occasionally ambiguous. Their ambiguity may issue from the triviality of these terms, which is to say from the lack of precision required when the interpretation of the law is not in doubt. Sometimes, however, the interpretation of the law, as that of the most clearly political texts, is very evidently in danger. It is in these cases that scribes and lawyers offer more detailed descriptions. But these examples are rare. Before the fourteenth century there is not a single one. Before Don Juan Manuel made a distinction between non-noble defenders (“omnes de cauallo”) and noble defenders (“caualleros”) in his Libro de los estados, chapter 91, such clarification had been unnecessary. There are various explanations, but one of them is that the context of a reference sufficed to identify the type of knight intended.
Alfonso X does not develop a true distinction either.3 He legally defines the knight as an hidalgo who has passed through a certain ritual and who lives according to certain rules, all of which form part of Partidas 2.21, in which chivalry is defined as an “organization of noblemen” (compaña de hombres nobles). Alfonso legally creates chivalry and gives an unprecedented meaning; its heuristic power is such that all previous differentiation becomes unnecessary. The titles dedicated to war seldom mention knights, but when they do, medieval interpreters of the law (or their readers) recognized it as a process of linguistic disambiguation: a knight is always a noble knight. In any case, the titles on war in the Siete Partidas—all those after Partidas 2.21, which is devoted to chivalry—are focused on military leaders, who are studied on a case-by-case basis and are situated within their respective spaces of power. The participants in war are neither nobles nor non-nobles, nor do they receive any further qualification. If they are not leaders or knights,