City Knights: Urban Networking and City Life in Late Medieval Iberia

Abstract

political conversations. Such uprisings are not merely masses of individuals challenging current powers and governments. They also raise the question of whether urban expressions and demands for a civil voice imply a turning point in the struggle for power. These struggles have also propounded, whether explicitly or implicitly, that civil life is a horizontal one in which the concept of fraternity —perhaps only a shadow of revolutionary fraternite— has played and is still playing an important role. Slavoj Žižek first considered that this horizontality was one of the pitfalls of the movement because it hampered them from establishing a likely list of demands. This reading is more appropriate, as many scholars have argued, to the uprisings in the West than to those that received the awful name of the Arab Spring or the Arab Awakening —awful because it is none other than a patronizing, Western, orientalist expression of current prejudices about countries with a Muslim majority. Horizontal organizations, however, have a major advantage: they are more prone to expand and to reach, by capillary communication, larger portions of society that normally imagine themselves existing outside of