Castilian Towns Research Articles

“Libros de privilegios” from the Castilian Towns of 13—14th Centuries

Modern medieval studies consider the “Libros de Privilegios” as an important and very informative source for the history of medieval municipal administration and the town chanceries. These manuscripts, being essentially cartularies, constitute a special group of legal texts originating from the city. The features of their codicology, paleography and illumination make it possible to study the development of document management practices in cities. The article compares the “Libros de Privilegios” from four towns of the Kingdom of Castile — Toledo, Seville, Murcia and Lorca. Ordered by concejos to municipal scribes, they testify to a common vector of development of municipal government in different towns, regardless of the time of their inclusion in the Kingdom of Castile. The books of privileges considered in the article were compiled in the period from the last quarter 13th century until the end of the 30s of the 14th century, although the Fuero of Toledo taken as a basis in them was formed and was issued in the form of a charter in the first quarter of the 13th century. After the consejos received from the king the Fuero of Toledo in the version of 1222 as a fundamental document regulating local legal life, they later either independently selected documents for inclusion in their «Libros de Privilegios» (Toledo, Seville, Murcia), or determined a sample for copying (Lorca).

Urban Development and Muslim Minorities in the Middle Ages: the Path to Invisibility

The long existence of a Muslim population under Christian rule (Mudejars) in the kingdoms of medieval and early modern Iberia gave way to the development of a number of boundaries between religious and social groups. Urban boundaries, both physical and socio-religious, were continuously redefined. Residence in towns in the Iberian kingdoms could vary from contiguous housing to separate neighbourhoods based within real or imagined boundaries. Mudejars in Castile had the possibility of building new mosques, thus breaking canon and local laws, whereas in Aragon, Jewish communities paid for their right to rebuild synagogues continuously. Invisibility was a very important tool to marginalize groups that were perceived as a possible threat, so the only requirement for mosques and synagogues was not to be set apart from surrounding houses. On the other hand, restrictions on minority visibility in Christian spaces included the inauguration of previously inexistent secluded neighbourhoods in northern Castilian towns. The geographical setting of the closed quarters established after the Castilian Cortes of 1480 contributed to the invisibility of the religious minorities, resulting in the long run in their exclusion from urban life.

Los hombres de negocios en la ciudad de Soria durante el siglo XVI

En una línea de investigación orientada a profundizar en el conocimiento de la estructura socioeconómica de las ciudades castellanas en el siglo XVI, el presente artículo se centra en la caracterización del grupo social dedicado a los negocios mercantiles y financieros en esta época en Soria, ciudad de tamaño medio y punto central de una extensa región donde se producía gran cantidad de lana de ganado trashumante destinada a la exportación. Se presta particular atención a la identificación de los mercaderes sorianos que participaron en empresas de exportación de lana a Italia, Francia y Flandes. Y luego se analizan otras vías de participación en el negocio mercantil lanero abiertas a estos mercaderes. Se demuestra que muchos de ellos fueron también propietarios de rebaños trashumantes, y que además se dedicaron a otras muy diversas actividades económicas, entre ellas la fabricación de paños. Finalmente, para situarlos mejor en la jerarquía sociopolítica de la Soria del momento, se aportan datos sobre su grado de riqueza y composición de sus patrimonios

Juntar al pueblo: sobre las dimensiones espaciales de la movilización popular en las ciudades castellanas (siglos XV al XVI)

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar las dimensiones espaciales del conflicto político en las ciudades castellanas de fines de la Edad Media, tomando como referencia la forma en que el espacio fue apropiado durante las movilizaciones populares y las transformaciones sufridas en el espacio político durante el movimiento comunero. Se argumentará que las distintas modalidades de apropiación del espacio por los comunes son significativas en si mismas y permiten conocer, al menos en parte, las concepciones políticas de quienes las practicaban.

El ascenso sociopolítico de los judeo-conversos en la Castilla del siglo XVI. El ejemplo de la familia Beltrán en Soria

Se analiza el proceso de integración y ascenso social y político de la familia de un judío soriano convertido al cristianismo después de un breve exilio en Portugal en 1492. Se sigue la trayectoria de cuatro generaciones de esta familia, dando cuenta, entre otros aspectos, de las actividades económicas desempeñadas por sus distintos miembros, de sus actitudes hacia la religión cristiana, y de su política de concertación de matrimonios. Se demuestra que su incorporación al grupo oligárquico soriano fue temprana y vino facilitada por su rápido enriquecimiento durante la primera mitad del siglo XVI. Finalmente se advierte cómo asumieron pronto los ideales y el modo de vida de la nobleza castellana, realizando importantes inversiones en compras de tierras y señoríos.

Guarding the frontier: Castilian settlers on the border with Granada in the fifteenth century

ABSTRACTThe border between the Crown of Castile and the Sultanate of Granada lasted for two hundred years, from 1246 until the conquest of the latter in 1492. Due to the scarcity of available written records, very little is known about the Castilian frontier towns and their inhabitants, who guarded the border. It has often been assumed that these guards were professional soldiers exclusively devoted to the defence of Castile. However, the study of unpublished documents from the early sixteenth century indicates that many of them were, in fact, settlers who combined their military duties with other civilian occupations, especially agriculture. This paper analyses the composition of the population of Olvera and Archidona, two Castilian towns on the border with Granada, during the second half of the fifteenth century, and shows the fluid nature of these late medieval settlers, who performed regular military service and spearheaded the colonisation of newly conquered territories while retaining their primary role as farmers.

This Happened in My Presence: Moriscos, Old Christians, and the Spanish Inquisition in the Town of Deza, 1569–1611 translated by Patrick J. O'Banion

Reviewed by: This Happened in My Presence: Moriscos, Old Christians, and the Spanish Inquisition in the Town of Deza, 1569–1611 translated by Patrick J. O'Banion William A. Christian Jr. This Happened in My Presence: Moriscos, Old Christians, and the Spanish Inquisition in the Town of Deza, 1569–1611. Edited and translated by Patrick J. O'Banion. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2017. Pp. lxxx, 184. $26.95 paperback. ISBN 978-1-4426-3513-5.) This fascinating book provides in English translation ninety-two Inquisition documents about the Moriscos in one small New Castilian town. Deza had 1,600 inhabitants, of which about 400 were Moriscos, who were in contact with a nearby zone of Aragón where Moriscos in higher concentration maintained customs and religion.1 The documents range over the period from 1569, when because of the rebellion in the Alpujarras region of Granada, Moriscos in general became more suspect, and 1611, when those of Deza, along with most of the others in Spain, were expelled to North Africa. The material includes denunciations to visiting inquisitors, confessions in order to receive edicts of grace, a sample sentence in a prominent case, and letters of prisoners to their families for help and to authorities for pardons. Patrick J. O'Banion, in addition to making the fluent translations, provides an introduction for non-specialists that sets the town in the context of Spain in the second half of the sixteenth century: its Old Christians, converted Jews, the Inquisition, and the monarchy. The book is arranged for use in undergraduate classes, with study questions at the end of chapters (which this reader tended to find difficult to answer), a timeline, a cast of about 150 characters, photographs of the town as it is now, a glossary of terms, bibliography, and index. This Happened in My Presence will acquaint students with a diverse set of everyday people from four centuries ago, set them to work like detectives, inform them about Muslim customs, and give them a sense of cultural interactions in a small town at a time when neighbors held excessive power over one another. They will face the hard issues historians face when assessing accusations, denunciations, [End Page 148] denials, and confessions in a context of coercion, and see at close hand a run-up to ethno-religious cleansing. But the book is not just for students. It will be enjoyed by non-students as well, for it provides some of the intimacy and detail of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic Montaillou. This reader was left with many questions and a few suggestions for the second edition. He would like to know if the exceptional character with a sensational confession, Román Ramírez the younger, was tortured. He would like to know more about the relations of the Duke of Medinaceli with his Morisco subjects, who hoped he would rescue them (perhaps a telling document could be found from a different kind of archive). He would have liked to see the complete set of letters from jail intervened by the Inquisition in 1611, and especially to have the text of at least one of the Edicts of Grace, given that such edicts provided the people of Deza with specific items of behavior or verbal propositions to denounce or confess. This story is set over 400 years ago, but worldwide there are many places now in which saying the wrong thing, performing the wrong ritual, or believing in the wrong God can get one jailed, exiled, or killed. William A. Christian Jr. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain Footnotes 1. For nearby villages in the mid-twentieth century, see Susan Tax Freeman, Neighbors, the Social Contract in a Castillian Hamlet (Chicago, 1970), and Carmelo García Encabo, Reyes Juberías Hernández, and Alberto Manrique Romero, Cartas Muertas: la vida rural en la posguerra (Valladolid, 1996). Copyright © 2018 The Catholic University of America Press

“They will know our hearts”: Practicing the Art of Dissimulation on the Islamic Periphery

From the early sixteenth century, religious and legal authorities provided Spanish crypto-Muslims with guidelines for practicing taqiyya, the Islamic art of dissimulation. As theory collided with local realities, however, local actors innovated practice in the face of the continued divergence between an internal desire to practice Islam and external pressures to conform to Christianity. This article explores these tensions by analyzing the posthumous endowments of two wealthy Morisco brothers from the Castilian town of Deza who succeeded in convincing both Christian neighbors and the Inquisition of their sincere conversion to Christianity. The town’s Morisco community, however, viewed the brothers’ bequests as secret acts of Islamic charity. Such perceived efforts to enact taqiyya not only eroded Christian confidence that true converts could be discerned from false ones but also threatened to destabilize the Moriscos’ own religious identity and their relationship to both Christianity and Islam.

Controlando el regimiento. La nobleza de Talavera de la Reina y sus métodos de intervención política en el concejo en la Baja Edad Media

How can political power be controlled in a village -Talavera de la Reina- where the most important municipal public offices -the regidurias- are not subject to transfer from fathers to sons? This was an unusual problem in most Castilian towns by the end of the Middle Ages, but in Talavera it constituted one of the main political issues for the town’s power elite since the introduction of the regimiento at the end of the 14th Century. The aim of this paper is to analyse the solution given to this problem by the dominant group, principally composed of the nobility of the village. In this sense, the strategy followed by the nobility of Talavera de la Reina was focused on two goals: to drive out the common elite as competitors for power and to ensure the access of the members of the nobility to the town council government. This was the reason why they developed a process that guaranteed them the control over the lists of candidates to replace vacant positions inside the regimiento. This system was based on the election of the applicants among the members of the noble lineages of the village, but the aspirants could not be a relative of the deceased officers. According to this process, the best positioned members of the families that composed the regimiento were on a kind of waiting list, expecting their turn to gain access to the highest office in town: a regiduria. The main consequence of this practice was the development of a complex network of social and political relationships and alliances between the families of the dominant group whose main goal was to achieve the control of the government of the village.

Technologies of the Afterlife

In August 2011, I attended the exhumation of Severiano Clemente González, conducted by the Forum for Memory in the Castilian town of La Toba, Guadalajara. Mr González was one of the over 130,000 civilian victims of the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco dictatorship (1939–1975). Even after Spain’s democratic constitution in 1978, most families could not recover their loved ones, owing to an unofficial ‘Pact of Silence’ whereby major political actors agreed not to legislate, litigate or discuss the still controversial past in the public sphere (Encarnación 2014). Since 2000, however, civil society organisations such as the Forum for Memory and the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) have been leading a series of forensic exhumations – modelled after similar state-led interventions in Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe (Ferrándiz 2010; Rubin 2014).

El reforzamiento de los vínculos comunitarios a través de la fiesta en las ciudades castellanas en el marco de cuadrillas y cofradías. Siglos XV-XVII

During the pre-industrial period, festivals of very different kinds took place in the European towns. Very often these festivals were organized by the urban authorities, which used them as a means of legitimization of the established social order. However, festivals with a much more popular base were also organized, whose main aim was to reinforce the solidarity links between the participants. That was the case in many festivals organized by the confraternities, but also in some festivals organized by the quarter communities ( cuadrillas ) in certain towns. In this article the author analyses a very original festival celebrated since the Middle Ages to the present day in the Castilian town of Soria on the first Sunday after the Feast of St. John the Baptist, that was organized by the quarter communities ( cuadrillas ) of the town.

El concejo de Peñafiel. Gobierno y sociedad en una villa vallisoletana en la Edad Media

We propose a diachronic analysis of the urban council of Peñafiel, a castilian town in Valladolid, attending to formal transformations of this government institution from its origins in the XIIth century to the end of the Middle Ages, when it reached its more or less definitive structure. In last term, institutional development here presented refers to the dynamics of social and political order experienced in this town during these centuries, offering a typical example of seignorial towns of the Crown of Castile, in order to observe the phenomena of counciliar power's oligarchization and progressive interference of the seignorial authority into municipal sphere.

Judíos y redes personales en Tierra de Campos durante la segunda mitad del siglo XV: un Cuaderno de Minutas de Avecindamientos de Villalón

In the middle decades of the fifteenth century Jews were registered as local citizens in the municipal council records of individual Castilian towns. Traditionally, a citizen was recorded as belonging to a parish or parochial neighborhood within the local political community; this would exclude Jews by definition as they were designated separately as a religious caste. The study of unpublished documents related to the Castilian locale of Villalon –characterized by the economic importance of its fairs promoted by the 4th count of Benavente– in the region of Tierra de Campos during a period of general political disorder, records that the municipal council assigned citizenship to Jews in relation to their community ( aljama ) through which specific aspects of their lives were regulated, and by which the local council rather than other political instances assumed control of that community. With the help of other primary sources, these documents reveal the suggestion of personal networks in which Jewish physicians play a key role.

La incidencia de los conflictos banderizos en la vida política de las ciudades castellanas a fines de la Edad Media: el caso de Cuenca

A contribution to the study of political conflicts in Castilian towns at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age. The strong presence of the nobility, which was characteristic of the social and political structures of many Castilian towns, meant that inter-factional struggles were often of particular importance. On the basis of information provided by unpublished sources, the author shows that such inter-factional conflicts persisted without interruption in the town of Cuenca during the three first decades of the sixteenth century. He alludes to the main facts of the conflict, the composition of the factions, and the objectives that their leaders hoped to attain with their struggles.

Scott K. Taylor . Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2008 . Pp. xi, 307. $55.00.

Scott K. Taylor's intriguing new book asserts that two phantoms haunt Anglo-American scholarly understanding of Spanish social history. The first is the legacy of literary scholars' studies of the so-called “honor plays” of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, and other luminaries of Spanish “Golden Age” drama. The second is a long tradition of twentieth-century English-language anthropological studies of the phenomenon of “honor” in Iberian societies. Together, according to Taylor, the literary and anthropological studies undergird a pervasive obsession with the supposed centrality of “honor”—and, as a corollary, the obligation to resort to violence to defend one's honor—as an organizing principle of Spanish society at all levels. But, Taylor dares to ask, what if our traditional conceptions of honor's place in Spanish society are misguided? To conjure up and then exorcise the ghosts of Spain's supposed “honor code,” this book puts the values and behaviors enacted on the Golden Age stage and codified in modern anthropological studies to the empirical test of seventeenth-century historical sources. Specifically, Taylor's analysis is based upon intensive study of the surviving records of 477 seventeenth-century Castilian criminal trials, ranging in date from 1600 to 1652, in which what Taylor terms the “rhetoric of honor” came into play. Of these cases, the majority (313) come from a remarkable cache of surviving trials pertaining to the central Castilian town of Yébenes, located along the busy Royal Road in the montes of Toledo. The remaining 164 cases come from locales across the crown of Castile, representing the associated trial records that survive alongside those of the royal “Good Friday Pardons” granted annually by the king to a certain number of convicted criminals. Taylor skillfully uses these sources to move the reader back and forth from the depth of insight into the workings of the rhetoric of honor in a specific town to the comparative breadth provided by the cases drawn from other cities and villages across Castile. Taylor divides his analysis into five thematic chapters, addressing in turn “The Duel,” “Honor and the Law,” “Men,” “Women,” and, finally, “Adultery and Violence.”

Political participation of local elites in the government of Castilian towns during the Late Middle Ages. Factions and conflict of interests (Paredes de Nava, end of the 14th century-beginning of the 15th century)

This article approaches to the forms of political participation into the government of the Crown of Castile by the municipal elites during the Late Middle Ages. We have chosen as object of research for this purpose the struggle between urban factions for the counciliar government happened in Paredes de Nava, a seigniorial town upon the infante Fernando of Antequera, in 1401-1403. In base of this case, we can observe a great number of factors whom influenced the alignment of these elites throughout these conflicts, beyond the existence of more or less formalized structures able to channel urban political concurrence.

Comercio y finanzas en una ciudad castellana de la segunda mitad del siglo XVII: los negocios de Juan Mateo Gutiérrez en Soria

This is a contribution to the social and economic history of Castilian towns during the second half of the seventeenth century, based on the study of the financial and commercial activities of a merchant from Soria, a city with many owners of transhumant shee and consequently an active wool market. The author pays attention to his main economic activities: wool trade; wholesale distribution of imported merchandise; credit sales of bulls to cart-drivers; short-term loans; administration of collected royal taxes, and transhumant sheeprearing, among others. Attention is also paid to the social and political profile of this merchant, and proves that, although he attained a high economic position, as it can be deduced through the analysis of the composition of the patrimony he left at his death, that he to be accepted in the local oligarchy.

The Participation of the Nobility in the Government of the European Towns during the Late Middle Ages. A Comparative Study

In the western European towns the presence of members of the nobility in their institutions of local government was not a very widespread phenomenon during the Late Middle Ages. It can only be perceived in a great scale in very few regions, mainly in the kingdom of Castile and in Italy. In this article the author gives account of the main signs of the political control that the nobility exercised over the institutions of local government in the Castilian towns. He then pays attention to the important differences that in this respect existed during the Late Middle Ages between these towns and those of other kingdoms of western Europe, where the nobility didn't participate in the institutions of local government. He proposes some exemples taken from the kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon, the German Empire, France and England, leaving out of his consideration the case of the urban republics in Italy because of their specifical character, derived from their important degree of autonomy.

Fama publica, infamy and defamation: judicial violence and social control of crimes against sexual morals in medieval Castile

Control of crimes such as the sin of lust was one way in which the elites at the head of Castilian town councils emphasised their good government. Among all the such crimes, sodomy was considered to be the most terrible, which brought major misfortunes to the population, and against which it was necessary to avenge. For those accused of this crime, or who actually committed it, it meant exclusion from society. For the urban Castilian elites this struggle was a way of justifying themselves as a governing group. Defence of society against sodomites is related to the political context and to the internal struggles of the urban elites. In the lawsuits analysed, there is clear repetition of a series of words related to individual reputation and social esteem: fama, honour, Buena fama, fama publica, infamia. These can be shown to be vital to the defence of the accused, and also frequently recur in the legislation itself. Rumour was also used as propaganda to shape public opinion and to discredit rivals in the struggle for urban power.

Las corporaciones de caballeros hidalgos en las ciudades castellanas a fines de la Edad Media. Su participación en el ejercicio del poder local

The author gives account of the existence in many Castilian towns during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of associations of noble urban knights, that played an important role in the regulation of the access to the exercise of power in the local scene. He analyses the way some of these associations were organised. Then he gives account of the fact that in many Castilian towns the privileged state of the urban nobles sent deputies to the assemblies of the town council. And finally he pays attention to the role played by some ot these associations of urban nobles in the election of several officers of local government, as, for example, the regidores (aldermen) and the Parliament deputies.