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CHAPTER TWO

Poetics of Fraternity

This chapter focuses on the rarely studied political space where citizen groups advance their own forms of incorporation and governance to secure participation in a network of power structures. These urban groups sought to express themselves as a constituent part of a social class, or ordo, and operate within the framework of a social category that was hitherto reserved for the creation of nobility. These groups aim to interfere in the construction of the ordo known as chivalry. The intervention of these urban groups within the sphere of chivalry offers a new perspective on the poetics of order and valuable insight on how this social class is reconfigured by the individuals and groups who wish to belong to it.

For its inquiry on this social dynamic, this chapter relies on entirely different data from those in the previous chapter: transcripts of citizens’ petitions in Cortes meetings. These transcripts reveal voices—or the collective voice of a social group in formation—in an inchoate moment and reveal not only what these voices say and how they express it but the difficulties in articulating themselves in public, in finding resonance within the political sphere that secures sovereignty. While considering this testimony, it is important to notice the developmental process and the motivations underlying these voices. Throughout this learning process, urban knights, who belong in large measure to the bourgeoisie, although nobles also participated to a lesser extent, as they transform themselves into a collective voice. Throughout this process, which manifests itself as a kind of chivalric apprenticeship, urban knights found themselves pitted against the empire of an official system of expression that was held together by the same clerics who were in charge of transcribing, on most occasions, the testimony given by urban knights. The objective of the clerical transcription of a citizen knight’s official petition was to present an accurate account, but it also adapted the petition to the hieratical forms of juridical aesthetics. In the discrepancy between the original content and the imposed content, clerical form is a dialectics of power that influenced the development of urban chivalric groups.

It is enormously difficult to isolate the original agency encoded within the testimony of urban knights. Among many reasons, it is difficult because documents themselves feature a vocabulary that often makes it unclear to whom the knights allude. It is necessary to be cognizant of how this vocabulary is being read and whether it becomes a gateway to a political and juridical space.

Some of these doors lead to a conception of the space of the city as a sociopolitical rather than simply spatiophysical referent; they highlight the civic, political, and human dimension of the urban sphere within which the knights giving testimony operated. Another way of referring to this space is to speak of its heterotopic dimension. I will refer to this dimension by means of the Latin word civitas, which points to the city as a space that cannot be localized at one specific point, but that imposes its political presence as a builder of otherness with respect to the governmental rigor imposed by the sovereign power. As we will see, the space itself of the heterotopia in which civitas is manifested is the ordenamiento (court record, ordinance), the book in which voice is articulated. The portability of the ordenamiento, its textual mouvance, and the ordering and use of its cartularies are some of the expressions associated with this civic heterotopia that transcend time and place. It is thus necessary to study these texts as a heterotopic project of the civitas.

Correlative to civitas is urbs. If civitas is the term that indicates the civil and political life of citizens (closely corresponding to the abstract Greek concept of polis), urbs is its material presence, the construction of its space, its engineering, as well as the concrete human and physical practice of those. This is the second crucial aspect of this inquiry, and to understand it adequately, I will examine how civil chivalric groups reinvent themselves around an urban space. This does not imply an irreconcilable difference between these two concepts, as I will show in my analysis of practical social organization within the urbs in Chapter 3.

Here, I will analyze the questions raised by a cuaderno produced in Castile in 1315, to constitute a “hermandad de caballeros hidalgos y villanos” (brotherhood of noble and urban knights). This regulatory text, the Cuaderno de la Hermandad, defines the hermandad or brotherhood, as a fraternity of urban knights who belonged to the nobility, or hidalgos, and the non-noble urban class, or villanos. This document is also essentially a dislocation of urban chivalry, an expression of civitas outside the space of urbs, given its participation in the processes whereby sovereign power is constructed and even preserved. 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, paladins, commanders, members of elite forces, marauders, or other officials, they are referred to simply as those who participate in war, whoever they might be.

Don Juan Manuel, nonetheless, finds it necessary to make a distinction with respect to chivalric vocabulary and its referents. The capacity for social transformation that chivalry places into the hands of the monarchy turns out to be traumatic for him as member of the high nobility with certain jurisdictional privileges to defend. Don Juan Manuel could not halt the growing presence of chivalric culture in the Iberian Peninsula, although he attempted to adapt to this culture by elaborating theories that sought to control the influence that chivalry might have over its own political and juridical universe—especially keeping in mind that the monarch under whose crown he lived, Alfonso XI, took particular interest in the powerful control of the social structure that this chivalric class offered. Don Juan Manuel flatly refused to be knighted by Alfonso XI yet wrote extensively concerning the relationship between chivalry and monarchical sovereignty and the different noble categories, as well as the significance of chivalry within them. Although he was a recognized warrior with expert knowledge of the most modern and effective military techniques, both with respect to the Christian kingdoms as well as those in use within al-Andalus, he chose never to write a military treatise of any sort.⁴ He only began to write exclusively about the values of chivalry and their significance in the political sphere, not in the military, in 1325 (at age forty-three). It is also when Alfonso XI reached maturity and when some of the chivalric interests that informed Alfonso’s politics began to be favored. It is in 1325, in fact, that Alfonso XI sent to Pope Clement V a letter requesting the adjudication of the territories appropriated from the Templars beginning in 1322, as it was his intention to form a new chivalric order on those lands (“pro creando ibidem novo ordine militari”).⁵

Within the city, there was a certain confluence between nobles and non-nobles, even though the number of villanos was generally higher than that of the hidalgos.⁶ The reason for this is the close relation that the non-noble militias had with the constitution of the cities. The transformation of the cities and the resulting relation with the militias occurred primarily after the tenth century. Carmela Pescador’s “La caballería popular,” which studies non-noble militia in León and Castile, explains in some detail the complex processes by which these militias were formed, as well as the different considerations they received by fueros and other legal documents. Pescador’s work explains the fear and hope that this group inspired in local authorities: fear of the power they could exercise and their increasing wealth, and the hope that the same power and wealth could be sufficiently harnessed so they could become a social category with important political as well as military functions, especially from the point of view of Castilian monarchs from Alfonso VI (r. 1065–1109) onward.⁷ The citizen militias accrued privilege after the eleventh century and their growth was undeterred until the reign of Alfonso VIII (r. 1158–1214). The examination of works dedicated to specific geographic spaces, such as the Council of Alba de Tormes, the extremely important city of Cuenca, the city of Jaén, the city of Soria, and above all the city of Burgos, irrefutably shows to what extent the citizen militia acquires, from the twelfth century on (especially at the start of the fourteenth century), a decisive presence within the system of local power.⁸ It is at this time that the phrase hombres buenos y caballeros becomes the subject of a discourse on objective power within city boundaries.

Carmela Pescador speculated on the relation between the formation of the citizen militias in the cities of León and Castile and the formation of similar social categories in other European spaces. For Pescador it is important not to consider this Peninsular social class as exceptional within the broader European context.⁹ Pescador is right to suggest that the popular militia was not a Leonese or Castilian rarity. On the contrary, studies of different European regions show that this class, with characteristics very similar to those in the Iberian Peninsula, also developed along with European cities as they engaged in repopulation and urban reorganization. In fact, the citizen militia was the main agent of repopulation in European cities during the late Middle Ages, which is why it achieved such power and sowed such fear among the governing noble classes. With respect to the Italian Peninsula, the classic works of Gaetano Salvemini, which seek out a clearly bourgeois form of chivalry, are complemented by Hagen Keller’s much more clearly feudal perspective (Keller, “Militia” and “Adel, Rittertum und Ritterstand”; Salvemini, Magnati e popolani in Firenze). These two positions, in reality, turn out to be reconcilable through the studies of Franco Cardini (Guerre di Primavera, Alle radici della cavalleria, L’acciar de’ cavalieri) and Stefano Gasparri (I milites cittadini).¹⁰ Cardini is more interested in the noble chivalric class, while Gasparri discusses in great detail the role of the urban militia populares.

Groups of knights certainly occupied a specific physical space within city walls. This was the case not only in Italian cities or in the cities of León and Castile, but it also seems to have been a constant element with respect to demographic distribution and urban development in European cities as a whole. The case of Nîmes or of Marseilles, as Martin Aurell has shown, was in fact quite similar. In Nîmes, knights occupied the city’s historical center and in particular the old Roman amphitheater, as well as the towers of the gates to the city. These spaces happened to be anthroponymous, given that the military groups and their families adopted as surnames the space that they occupied within the interior of the village. The popular military groups, the milites of the textual sources, appear to have been associated with relatively fixed and unchangeable urban spaces, which render the militia itself a city space.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the Italian, German, or Southern French (namely, Occitan) cities and the cities of Castile and León in relation to their evolution with respect to the weight of the militia. The turres of Florence, the walled zones within the gates, are the space of the societas. The tower is synonymous with, or rather a metonymy of the societas militum, or the institution upon which knightly power was based. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these Florentine societates militum acquired an extremely important share of local power. This power grew to the extent that by mid thirteenth century its presence within the city is fully dismantled. Around 1256, in fact, the definitive abolition of the Florentine societates militum was proclaimed. In the south of France a similarly confrontational situation developed with respect to the presence and sociopolitical violence of the citizen milites. “À l’orée du XIII^e siècle cette situation contraste avec la période précédente où les milites tiraient profit de leurs tours, de leurs portes fortifiées et de leur enceinte pour s’affirmer dans la vie municipale” [“The situation at the beginning of the thirteenth century contrasts with that of preceding century, during which the milites derived profit from their towers, their fortified gates, and their compound and were thus able to assert themselves within public life”] (Aurell, “La chevalerie urbaine” 78).

The abolition of these militia groups as organizations of power, whether they were institutionalized, as in the case of Florence, or not, happened through the destruction of their space, the turres. It is much more than a symbolic element. The societates militum and the citizen militias in general were fully linked to their own spaces. Transforming the citizen space, constructing or deconstructing urban spaces, presumes an argument of transformation of social structures (Lefebvre, La production de l’espace; Soja, Postmodern Geographies).¹¹ Christine de Pizan’s constructing the cité des dames is only a literary manifestation of the intimate relationship that existed between urban organization and its sociopolitical counterpart. We find this same intimate relationship in many Castilian cities. In cities like Burgos or Cuenca, chivalric groups also met in a specific framework of streets, a framework that occupied a central place in the groups’ ceremonies of cooperation and representation.

While in a significant portion of southern Europe, chivalric organizations found their physical and institutional space dismantled over the first half of the thirteenth century, in Castilian cities the opposite was occurring. As Pescador has demonstrated (and others after her), urban military groups progressively concentrated, consolidated, and reclaimed their urban power within the framework of new forms of documentation that allowed their collective voice to be heard. This process began in the second half of the thirteenth century and continued until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when they reached their absolute apogee. The most notable examples of this process, while they are by no means unique or isolated, are the organizations and institutions that began to be founded at the end of the thirteenth century and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the Societies of Santa María de Gamonal and Santiago in Burgos; the Cabildo de Caballeros Guisados de Caballo in Cuenca; the societies of Caballeros Cuantiosos de Jaén; and various other groups in other cities.

Along with these organizations, it is necessary above all to read the petitions that the cities’ procurators made at meetings of the royal Cortes. In general terms, these petitions allow us to examine the processes by which citizen organizations sought out a space of expression within the ensemble of expressive delegation and limitation that makes up the Cortes. In a more specific sense, they grant us unprecedented access to networks of local power and to the social structure of the bourgeoisie and hidalguía, which constituted the most favored urban classes and were the most active in the exercise of local power.

It is also fundamental to develop an adequate understanding of the circumstances by which these processes occurred, mainly because the royal courts were a political and juridical institution that was still quite new at the beginning of the fourteenth century (it was barely a century old) and had been very rarely employed by monarchs. It is principally within these courts, however, that the urban knights manifested their newly found voice and where their poetics of order was configured.

According to José Manuel Pérez-Prendes’s principal argument (Cortes de Castilla), the Cortes executed the liberty of the monarch, as much de jure as de facto, in relation to his subjects. As Pérez-Prendes puts it, the Cortes were the “the king’s governing organ, directed and controlled by him” and not an “organ that limited [the king’s] sovereignty by virtue of a juridical structure that establishes it as such” (Cortes de Castilla, 55). His thesis contradicts the theory of Julio Valdeón, who sees in the Cortes an instrument meant to control, above all, royal politics (“Las cortes castellanas”; “Las cortes medievales”). The workings of the courts have been abundantly studied, from the openly polemical works (from a theoretical perspective) just mentioned to the more descriptive works of Evelyn Procter and Joseph O’Callaghan, which explain the habitual workings of the Cortes, both in internal or juridical terms and with respect to their sociopolitical relations with the exterior (Procter, Curia and Cortes; O’Callaghan, The Cortes of Castile-León). The polemic surrounding the juridico-political character of the Cortes is impossible to understand from an exclusively binary standpoint. The Cortes cannot be considered exclusively as an organ of the king’s government controlled by the king himself. We see in them, rather, the way in which the king introduces a multitude of proposals within the legislative context of the court that are followed by a multitude of decisions. The ordenamientos of the Cortes, however, cannot be read as isolated pieces. If we were to do so, we would conclude only that they present a series of voices (those of the procuradores) that request or even demand something, and a more powerful voice (that of the king) that either grants or denies it. Such a reading leads us to a seriously impoverished perception of the process as a whole.

The court logs, or cuadernos, are in fact a constant spiral of power negotiation. Some cuadernos persistently refer to other previous ones, or to other instruments of a juridical character designed and granted by the king. The procuradores were not satisfied with making a petition to obtain affirmation or denial; in the event of a denial, the successive cuadernos are adamant in this respect, converting it into a recognition of all the procuradores. Some urban groups in power, such as brotherhoods and well-established organizations, were specifically formed following some of those petitions.

Thus, the Cortes fundamentally constituted the space in which the tension among the different power groups was lived, acted out, or performed. They were the place in which the relationship of power among established social groups (the clerics, the high nobility, and, above all, the king) and other emergent groups—which were principally the urban elites constituted by hombres buenos y caballeros—was called into question. It is quite possible that this tension, that moment in which voices were redistributed and the exercise of power negotiated, is seen more clearly in some of the records generated in courts that were not presided over by the king, but rather by a regency council. These records reveal the extent to which the voice of the bourgeoisie could even call into question the legitimacy of the regents and tutors, or of the regency council as a whole, and how the bourgeois corporation of caballeros y hombres buenos is asserting a new discourse of authority in the political and legislative labors of the regency council. The Hermandad of 1315, to which we will soon turn our attention, is perhaps one of the most evident signs of this movement.

Reading the cuadernos in a series allows us to understand the processes by which different procuradores went about constructing a voice for the bourgeoisie. Teófilo Ruiz has shown irrefutably that Castilian bourgeois structures (councils or fraternities, among others) did not presuppose any particular type of democratic manifestation of municipal liberty or autonomy in the exercise of power. He also showed that the kings—especially those from Alfonso X to Alfonso XI (in whom we are most keenly interested in the present chapter)—utilized those spaces of municipal power as an instrument for the consolidation of monarchical control with respect to, above all, the high nobility of ricos hombres (Ruiz, “The Transformation”; Sociedad).¹²

The perspective on the Cortes that it is now opportune to introduce has to do, precisely, with the way in which the celebration and convocation of the Cortes and their written manifestation influenced this mode of control. They accomplished this in a way that compelled urban groups to constitute themselves heterotopically through networks of delocalized cities to correspond with the nomadic nature of the Cortes. This observation will help us to understand the raison d’être of the Hermandad of 1315, as well as other expressions of the urban knights in cuadernos, from orders to depositions to complaints.

The Cortes, which were as much as an instrument by which the monarch explored his jurisdiction as they were a tool for exercising it, were itinerant during the Middle Ages. This means that monarchs did not tend to convene Cortes always in the same place, but rather they held them in different centers, generally urban ones, although at times they were also convened in rural settings) throughout the territory of Castile and León. This permanent displacement represents a double mouvance. It sets in motion not the only the court, but also the documents it issues. Similarly, it sets in motion all those requests that various groups wished to address in court.

The notion of itinerancy admittedly does not give the most accurate account of the problem. It is in fact more appropriate to consider the court in terms of its perpetually nomadic character. Itinerancy (from the Latin iter, “journey”) suggests that the Cortes made stops on a determined path, that they were in the process of going from one point to another, that they were en route. In reality, however, displacement is itself a form of political discourse whose goal is not progress along a route or course, but rather the creation of the space. We can consider the Cortes as part of a politics of nomadism: having politically and jurisdictionally exploited a given center, the Cortes displaced themselves to exploit another, and without having submitted themselves to the circumstances of a specific path or map. In lieu of following a map, the Cortes created one. This creation is manifested in the seriality of the Cortes just as it is presented in the manuscript tomes that contain cuadernos and ordenamientos.

The political and juridical force of this procedure was extreme. It multiplied the body of the king throughout the whole of the political geography. At each one of the settings the king’s body exercised its jurisdiction through the activity of juridical resolution by means of the implementation of the central legal body, and then produced a document in which the new regulation was set for its use there and in other cities. The nomadic courts gave rise to another centripetal movement: their documents emerge from each meeting to be used in all the political geography of the kingdom. The body of the king always represents the center of gravity of the kingdom’s jurisdiction, and this is manifested through the production and diffusion of these documents.

The citizen group or institution that participated in the Cortes had to be prepared to incorporate itself into the nomadic politics of the latter. The representatives of each city were its procuradores. These were the figures who had to seek out the Cortes and displace themselves, regardless of where they may be held, to participate in them. Through this act of displacement, the city procuradores provided both their physical and documental body to the court process, the latter represented by the cuaderno of petitions that expressed their voice within the Cortes.

In the case of the Cuaderno de la Hermandad, its presenters were the procuradores of the city of Burgos, who wished to have their petitions sewn into the ordenamiento produced on the occasion of the Cortes so that these petitions might be granted and validated. It is in this act of binding these cuadernos together that sovereignty manifests itself in the space of the court.

Thus, every petitioning group had to displace itself to reach the site of the court, abandoning its own physical space or urbs. Within the lexicon of medicine, heterotopia is the displacement of an organ or part of an organ with respect to its normal location in the human body. It is exactly this process that the royal courts imposed: the organs had to abandon their functional niches to seek the place where sovereignty was exercised.

It is here that the Hermandad of 1315 showed itself to be quite original, functioning as a kind of medicine for the circumstance. The Hermandad was a civitas, a civil and political entity that effectively overcame the problem of displacement through the creation of a horizontal network that occupied as much geographic space as possible. In the textual analysis I will show how this space came to be occupied, and how the Hermandad expanded to create a network of urban centers. If a heterotopic entity is, according to Foucault’s metaphor, a ship adrift in the middle of the ocean (“Des espaces autres”), the Hermandad constituted a veritable fleet.

The functioning of this fleet was based on strategies of chivalric solidarity. Its originality resided in the fact that the proposal that the Hermandad carried to the royal courts did not define any internal hierarchy: it designated neither a master nor any other type of vertical structure. The displacement that it sought was the moment in which the contract was validated through the incorporation of the signatures of the regency council, which had convened the court, and it was sewn into the resulting ordenamiento. In some way, these strategies of chivalric solidarity enter the space of sovereignty yet remain, at the same time, outside of it. The relationship of exteriority preserves the meaning of the Hermandad, but it is also one of the reasons for its fungibility.

The manner in which the chivalric civitas operated outside of the vertical hierarchy while seeking to participate in the space of sovereignty had relevant consequences. Perhaps the first and most important of these was the search for a way to speak about chivalry that was different from that which tended to be used in monarchical discourse; in this search, chivalry aimed to abandon its condition as an object of regulation to elaborate on its own conditions of possibility, its own rules, its own and subjective system of control (Rodríguez-Velasco, El debate). The voices of the knights themselves, for example, whether nobles or of bourgeois extraction, seem to have wanted to explore this possibility.

One could try to explore, in fact, a poetics of chivalric order just as it was practiced in the realm of the urban knights, independently of its links to nobility, and exploring its political ties based on the idea of fraternity. The poetics of knightly fraternity are very closely related to the poetics of fraternity in the scope of bourgeois alliances of the Middle Ages and the societies of protection and mutual assistance.

The majority of the bourgeois organizations, with the exception of the societates militum previously mentioned, were constituted as fraternities, confraternities, or chapters of artisanal or trade guilds. The definition of these groups by Antonello Mattone is perfect: “a universitas, an association of individuals with the same statutes, the same rules, the same saints, the same aid organization” (“Corporazioni, gremi e artigianato,” 21). In almost all European cities—throughout the kingdoms of France, the Italian domains, the Holy Roman Empire, Flanders in particular, and elsewhere—the guilds consolidate a large part of municipal activity and organize the urban space around them effectively.¹³

In cities like Bologna or Naples, as well as in others such as the Castilian city of Ávila, the gremial and artisanal fraternities form their statutes based on their interaction with the ecclesiastical centers of power, be they the cathedral chapter or the neighborhood parishes. The Bolognese confraternities of Santa Maria della Vita and of Santa Maria della Morte, founded respectively in 1260 and 1336, received their statutes either from the parish church or from a Dominican convent, because of the preaching of Venturino of Bergamo (Fanti, Confraternite e città, 1–60; 61–173). In the city of Naples, during the times of Charles of Anjou (1266–1285) and Charles II (1285–1309) and then during the Aragonese period at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the gremial and artisanal guilds, like that of Santa Marta, also presumed a reorganization of the urban space in function of the processional ceremonies of the different times of the year or of certain happenings related to the guild itself. The statutes and the processional system were based on ecclesiastical rites (Vitolo and Di Meglio, Napoli angioino-aragonese, 147–209). The entire organizing process of these guilds was dependent on the religious and liturgical calendar and submitted to it as a political form of theological organization. In the city of Ávila, for example, the Chapter of San Benito was organized as a fraternity in which the artisanal and guild bourgeoisie established direct relations with the cathedral chapter and with the three Benedictine reformist groups (the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, and the Premonstratensians); their statutes and related documentation were handled by the ecclesiastical entities (Sobrino Chomón, Documentos and Documentación medieval).

It would be misguided to argue that these congregations lacked any political element. The Italian guilds and some of the confraternities founded in the city of Seville, for example, had so much political force by the end of the fifteenth century that they ended up being dominated by sectors of the nobility that needed to assert their political presence during the development of the city. The most striking aspect of such fraternities is that their poetics are clearly linked with political theology; they composed their statutes with ecclesiastical rigor and rhetoric, employing church calendars and adopting the ecclesiastical organization of time, its hierarchical vocabulary, and, in the end, its doctrine.

The organizations of lay knights were radically separated from the dominant form of bourgeois association. They expressed their political will through textual strategies and apparatuses that passed for chivalric discourse, for juridical ethics and discourse, as well as urbanism and the practice of the urban space. These fraternities should be understood as a desperate search to construct a voice, and the documental modes of articulating this voice, to submit it to the juridico-political space of the courts.

The bibliography on knightly fraternities in Castile is sufficiently abundant, beginning with the older works of Julio Puyol y Alonso, and then later the various analyses of C. González Mínguez, Antonio Álvarez de Morales, Julio Valdeón Baruque, Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, and Manuel Fernando Ladero (above all regarding the fifteenth-century Hermandad).¹⁴ On the other hand, these were not the only social movements of bourgeois confraternity. The different fraternal movements that arose in the middle and the end of the fifteenth century, such as Galician irmandiños and Levantine germanías, all accompany a process of vindication that some have considered revolutionary. All of them, like the previous groups mentioned, are founded in a semantics of fraternity that promises to yield significant analytical fruit.

As Eloy Benito Ruano and Álvarez de Morales have pointed out, the denominations of fraternity are as nonspecific and unsystematic as many other terms found in medieval sources. Their meaning depends on context for the construction of discourse. The term hermandad subsumes many diverse alliances that may lack any common link, thereby setting in motion a series of semantic resources that tended to localize the corporation itself. Brotherhood, fraternity, confraternity—hermandad, cofradía, confraternidad—all these nouns point to the same roots, frater and germanus, wherein a horizontal relationship is manifested. The semantics of fraternity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cannot be addressed (even by the members themselves) without acknowledging its significance within horizontal associative medieval systems. The fratres of medieval institutions configure spaces in which this horizontality does not imply an absence of hierarchy, even though it is manifested above all through the chapter or the rule of the statutes of the institution itself. Verticality does not inhere in the physical individual, but rather in the juridical person created by the contractual movement organized according to written regulation. This is how conventual or monastic rule functions among monks, or among the double rule—military and monastic—of the friars of the military orders. The fact that interurban fraternities, formed by city procuradores working on behalf of their various citizens, adopted these semantics indicates the necessity to examine how this horizontal and statutory structure refers to itself, and the way in which these poetics were elaborated.

The first fraternities of which the logs and ordenamientos account for are the Generales of 1282, in support of King Sancho IV against his father Alfonso X, and those of 1295. In the first of these, the expression carta fraternitatis is used, which later was substituted by the expression hermandad (Álvarez de Morales, Las hermandades, 40–41). Antonio Álvarez de Morales describes in great detail the general features of these fraternities, as well as their constitution and the systems of representation it advances. Those of 1295 were formed upon the death of Sancho IV, and they confirm María de Molina as regent while Fernando IV was a minor (1285–1312, reigned after 1295) in the Cortes of Valladolid of 1295. Article 12 of the Cuaderno de Cortes de Valladolid de 1295 reads in part: “Otrossi las hermandades que fizieron los delas uillas de nuestros regnos de Castiella e de Leon e de Gallizia, e de Estremadura e del arçobispado de Toledo otorgamos las e confirmamos las asi como las fizieron” [“With respect to the fraternities formed by citizens of the cities in our realms of Castile, León, and Galicia, and of Extremadura and the archbishopric of Toledo, we authorize and confirm them as formed”] (Cortes de los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, 1: 132). On many occasions during the reign of Fernando IV, these brotherhoods were also confirmed, with some modifications in their norms, as both Álvarez de Morales (Las hermandades, 43–49) and González Mínguez (Contribución) have pointed out. González Mínguez identifies up to ten letters of fraternity between 1295 and 1300 that established coalitions between cities; to these he adds the publication of a new letter (written on a folded broadside sheet of paper according to the norms of the chancery letter) that describes a fraternity created in 1296 in the area of Álava and La Rioja (Contribución).¹⁵ All those are brief letters in which cities and towns express their will to protect themselves from desafueros, which is to say, from the interruption of their local legal codes by foreign agents, in the midst of a recrudescent civil war that lasted until 1304. The desafuero is, technically, the violation of the local charters and privileges of a given city, which is to say, its legal regime. Most significant in this chain of letters is an explicit will to oppose the violence of nobles by means of a system of defense based on the law and juridical proceedings. This manner of using the force of the law to oppose the physical violence of the so-called “feudal evil-doers” (malhechores feudales) is key to the expressive modes of citizen groups, who, nonetheless, also possessed the military means to engage in violent resistance. For these groups, the future of their presence in the monarchical courts was, precisely, the rise of language and juridical aesthetics, the integration or displacement toward the political space defined by the law and their participation in it through the investment of their collective voice and documents.

The Hermandad of 1315 is, to my mind, the most interesting and explicit of all of them, and it is probably the one that develops an important poetics of order with the most clarity. In these poetics there is a specific event that brought about the necessity to construct the fraternity. In the version offered by the Cuaderno de la Hermandad, a conflict is mentioned that separates the high nobility of the local governing powers from those who these sources call hidalgo knights and good men (hombres buenos) of the cities. The high nobility is the traditionally jurisdictional nobility that possesses lordships and that postulates a clear jurisdictional division of the kingdom. The king’s tutors, who with María de Molina formed the regency council, divided up, quite precisely, the jurisdiction of the kingdom, which limited the citizen powers’ capacity for action (Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, Alfonso XI). The Cuaderno presents the Hermandad as a society of mutual aid meant to protect itself from this circumstance in a way that unites police control, educative structures, and juridical violence.

In the first moments of this conflict, the hidalgo knights and the bourgeoisie seemed to have looked to group themselves independently from each other. Perhaps around 1285 the Confraternity of Santa María de Gamonal was created in Burgos with the goal of concentrating the power of economically powerful merchant families, expressing thus their will to emerge as political subjects. The Confraternity of Santa María de Gamonal—that “de los mercaderes” [“of the merchants”] as it became known later (Pardo de Guevara y Valdés, “Introducción”)—possesses a constituent rule. The versions of the code of Santa María de Gamonal conserved in the National Library in Madrid (MS 22.257, MS 22.258), however, date from the fifteenth century, even though the confraternity traces its foundation and its rule to 1285 and seems clearly to have taken its cue from the codex of the Cathedral of Burgos that contains the rules, lists, and portraits of the confraternity of the knights of Santiago de Burgos, which we discuss further on. The makeup of this confraternity is exclusively bourgeois, and its rule speaks explicitly of the privileged social class (whose identification was often ambiguous and imprecise) of hombres buenos, which in summarized accounts could be considered the class composed of members of the bourgeoisie who, for the most part, possessed the means and elements of representation of the urban knights, and who, with their growing economic power, aspired as well to a certain administrative power, something that, in effect, they succeeded in achieving from the fourteenth century on.

The specifically hidalgo fraternities, “que ffizieron los ffidalgos apartada mientre” [“that the hidalgos created by themselves”] in Valladolid (1299?) (Cortes, 1: 164), whose statutes are said to have been amended without giving a determined date, in the Castilian cities of Torquemada and Villa Velasco, seem somewhat imprecise, although they were clearly in force on some occasions. Of this fraternity of hidalgo knights there does not seem to be any notice other than the one that gives the Ordenamiento of the Cortes of Carrión of 1317. Both seem to be directed at substantiating a concrete aspiration that frequently appears in the court orders during the minorities of Fernando IV and Alfonso XI and that consists of the allocation of one or more (up to sixteen) knights, both hidalgos and bourgeois, “para consejar e servir a mi e a la Reyna mi madre e al infante don Enrique mio tio e mio tutor” [“to advise and serve me and the queen my mother and Prince Enrique my uncle and tutor”] (Cortes, 1: 164). Even though this company and council are linked, above all, to the cities, after 1315 and in 1317 the hidalgo knights begin to join, and in 1317 there is a specific reference to one of the knights who serves as a tutor (ayo) for the minor king, Alfonso XI.¹⁶

From early on, the knights adopted the form of a juridically established and defended political alliance. This is the clear sense of the important cuaderno that we must now analyze more closely. Bound as an addition to the record of the courts of Burgos of 1315, the rubric denominates it as follows: “Cuaderno de la hermandad que los caballeros hijosdalgo y hombres buenos de los reinos de Castilla, Leon, Toledo y las Extremaduras hicieron para defenderse de los tuertos y daños que les causasen los tutores durante la menor edad de D. Alfonso XI, aprobado en las Cortes de Burgos, celebradas en la era MCCCLIII” [“Cuaderno of the fraternity of the hidalgo and hombres buenos knights of the kingdoms of Castile, León, Toledo and the Extremaduras, constructed to defend said fraternity from the offenses and injuries that the royal tutors might cause them during the minority of Alfonso XI, approved in the Court of Burgos, celebrated in the era of 1353 (=1315)”] (Cortes, 1: 247–72). This cuaderno is the first document in which the institutional confraternization between these two categories of knights is established, for which are recognized specific rules and oaths on the part of the queen regent, the king’s tutors (the princes Juan and Pedro), and the ricos hombres.

The Cuaderno de la Hermandad, as well as the fraternity itself, can be deemed a part of the juridical practice of a poetics of order. The distribution of the Cuaderno, as well as its redaction, reveals an urgent desire to reorder the lay chivalry so as to establish relations of power that might allow them to contest the high nobility (Cortes, 1: 285, 31). This fact is unusual, together with the weight of the political crisis and of the historical circumstances mentioned throughout this chapter. The Cuaderno is a realization on the part of the urban knights that their political function, as citizens and representatives of a civitas, corresponds to a civil and political life that transcends the specific localization of the urbs. Against this specific localization, the hermandad distributed itself throughout a great number of cities that cover the historical domains of the kingdom of Castile and León, from the extremaduras (i.e., the old borders—extremadura is the term which was used to mean “border” in the vocabulary of the war of reconquest) to the kingdom of Toledo, all of Castile, and all of León; all the jurisdictional domains in which the high Castilian nobility still claimed jurisdictional power.

The so-called chivalric imaginary was introduced in full form within this project through an attempt to fashion a juridico-political application of the chivalric fable (with its pedagogical subfable included), in which the knights of different social backgrounds attempted to construct for themselves a public hope whose tendency toward institutionalization was contractually manifested in the Cortes. The public hope of chivalry was, in this context, the possibility of contributing to the objective regency of the kingdom while maintaining control of municipal power.

What the public hope of chivalry proposes is the incorporation of a bourgeois lifestyle into public life, and not a specific function. There is no idealism in this position. Likewise, I do not posit this as a dramatic revolution. The problem that I am posing is, from the start, strictly jurisdictional. The writing of the Cuaderno is documentary, and its juridical formulas are clearly oriented toward the obtaining of a voice of authority, or in the procedural language of the time, the achievement of an “authentic person” (Partidas 3.18). The phrase “sepan quantos este quaderno vieren” [“may all those who see this cuaderno know”] that opens the Cuaderno, situates it in the linguistic sphere of a growing chancery style that both the knights and hombres buenos wished to adopt, and whose rules are set forward, with all the formulary models placed at the disposition of its end users, in Partidas 3.18. One of the major theses of this documentary writing is the secularization of the chancery universe that is proposed in this cuaderno. While the great majority of chancery documents were redacted by literate clerics, citizens often claimed in the Cortes their right to gain authority as literate laymen representing the cities.

The Cuaderno de la Hermandad is far from being an independent documentary piece. It comes bound within the Cuaderno de las Cortes de Burgos de 1315, whose thirty-first article confirms, promulgates and therefore gives juridical life to the Cuaderno: “Otrossi vos otorgamos e uos conffirmamos la hermandat que en estas cortes ffiziestes todos los ffijos dalgo e los delas çibdades e villas de todo el sennorio de nuestro sennor el Rey en la manera quela ffiziestes” [“We authorize and confirm, and in the manner in which you formed it, the fraternity that you, all the hidalgos and men from the cities and villages within the territory of our lord the king, formed in this court”] (Cortes 1: 285, 31). The only significant formal difference between the constitutional log and the cuadernos that confirms it is the sacred invocation or protocol with which all court cuadernos begin: “En el nombre de Dios Amen” [“In the name of God, Amen”] or similar formulas. These formulas serve to sacralize the juridical moment. Such sacralization is absent in the Cuaderno de la Hermandad and is only manifested in the individual attitudes of those who sign at the instant in which they do so (Cortes, 1: 261–72). The dependence of this cuaderno on court cuadernos was permanent, marked by an enormous degree of anxiety, given that the hermandad repeatedly requested that the Cuaderno be confirmed in successive Cortes during Alfonso’s minority. These petitions took place in Carrión in 1317 (Cortes, 1: 311, 28); in Medina del Campo in 1318 with reticent response from the council of regency (Cortes, 1: 332, 9); and in 1325, in Valladolid, although Alfonso, by this point king, clearly excludes from his confirmation the cuadernos for the hermandad “Otrossi les otorgo los quadernios que les dio el rey don Ffernando mio padre en las cortes que el ffizo, aquellos que non fablan de hermandades” [“I authorize the cuadernos given to my father, the king Don Fernando, in the Cortes he held, with the exception of those that speak of fraternities”] (Cortes, 1: 388, 40).

Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain direct access to the original version of this cuaderno of twelve paper folios sewn into the cuaderno of twenty parchment folios corresponding to the Cortes of Burgos. The location of the original (or originals) is unknown, and I have also been unable to locate the copies mentioned by academic editors in their magnificent work of 1861. It is from this 1861 edition that I have obtained all the material that I have with respect to the Cuaderno, plus some eighteenth-century copies. It would be inappropriate to speak about the material differences between both logs, or to theorize about the multicolored plaits from which were hung, at the time, the wax seals of the royal chancery.

Independently of its formal characteristics, the institution adopts, for its writing, an aesthetics very close to that of the cuadernos themselves, and in such a way that petition and concession or rejection are alternated. In the case of the cuadernos, this alternation is produced in each article, while in the Cuaderno de la Hermandad the petition consists of twenty-five articles that are conceded and sworn to in their entirety. Their order is initiated with a prologue, a primeramente, followed by the formula otrosí for each petition—a formula derived from the juridical Latin alterum si.

The Cuaderno begins with an affirmation of the poetics of fraternity, followed by an introduction, the twenty-five regulatory articles of the fraternity, and ends with the signatures of the members and procuradores of the fraternity and the oaths taken by both the members of the brotherhood and procuradores and the regent and the tutors. The hidalgo and villano knights express their will to attenuate “los muchos males e dannos e agrauiamientos que auemos rreçebidos ffasta aqui delos omnes poderosos” [“the many evils, and harms, and ruthlessness that we have suffered until now from powerful men”]. In the end, their stated goal is that “todos abenida miente ponemos e ffazemos tal pleyto e tal postura e tal hermandat que nos amemos e nos queramos bien los vnos alos otros e que seamos todos en vno de un coraçon e de vna voluntat para guardar sennorio e seruiçio del Rey e de todos sus derechos que a e deue auer, e para guarda de nuestros cuerpos e delo que auemos e de todos nuestros fueros e ffranquezas e libertades e buenos vsos e costunbres e cartas e quadernos que auemos todos e cada vno de nos” [“we all by our own and shared will, hereby oath, and express the right, and promulgate, and create a fraternity so that we should love and esteem one another, and that we should all be of one heart and of one will to protect and serve the king and all the rights that he has and should have, and to protect our bodily persons and our possessions, as well as our laws, exemptions, privileges, liberties, customs, letters, and court logs that each and every one of us has”] (Cortes, 1: 248).¹⁷ The initial criterion for this juridico-political defense, for the preservation of the exercise of power in the interior of the cities and, after all, for the preservation of the civitas as well as “de todos e cada vno de nos,” is a poetics of fraternity. Fundamental to the ordo, then, is the common expression of fraternal love, presented through the horizontality that is pointed out in the community: to be “of one heart” and “of one will” and to “love one another” according to the Christian notion of love toward the neighbor. This theory of a power group that is based on love is not self-explanatory. It is, nevertheless, a fundamental philosophy in the constitution of ordo and of the fraternity.

In what strategy of power can this theory be found? It could be proposed as the secularization of a theological concept, following the known thesis of Carl Schmitt. This love, then, would be a hypostasis of caritas and the eleventh commandment in which Christian synthesis is substantiated. How is the process of secularization manifested? How do these texts make sense of it?

Love is a bond that does not require a special localization and that can be extended liberally in the common space designated by the ordo. Love, as the Cuaderno points out, is the desire of group unification and is extended as much as the group itself is extended. The signatories of the Cuaderno also signed this will of love. Love is, then, a juridical concept of political rationality. According to Partidas 4.10.10 “el verdadero amor passa todos los debdos” [“true love overrides all (legal) bonds”] (Martin, “Le mot pour les dire”; Heusch, La philosophie de l’amour and Les fondements juridiques de l’amitié), which means that the acceptance or expression of this feeling is superior to whatever other bond (debdo) of those that are manifested in the translation of natural law to political law.

Partidas 4.27.4 speaks in particular of the love of friendship, that is to say, the horizontal love in the aforementioned point of the Cuaderno. It is about a love that “segund la costumbre de España . . . pusieron antiguamente los fijos dalgo entre si, que non se deuen desonrrar, nin fazer mal vnos a otros” [“according to the custom of Spain . . . persons nobly born agreed among themselves that they must not dishonor nor do injury to one another”]. Similarly, this love of friendship can disappear from among the natives of a land, “quando alguno dellos es manifiestamente enemigo della [de la tierra] o del señor que la ha de gobernar e mantener en justicia” [“when any of them becomes the open enemy of his country, or of the lord whose duty it is to govern it and maintain justice within its limits”] (Partidas 4.27.7). If love of friendship is the glue that holds together the horizontal order, its sense, however, is found beyond this horizontality in the system that is superstructurally ordered: the land—a prenational conception of the nation—and, above all, the sovereign. It is these superstructural elements that allow the survival of love. Without them, the horizontality itself would also cease to exist.

Contractual love consolidates the group through feelings whose juridical conditions link the “fijos dalgo” to the chivalric nobility. The law expresses it with infinite clarity, but at the same time it is not inventing the link. On one hand, it designs it as a custom, a consuetude, a use whose juridical value is recognized (Partidas 1.2.1–3). Only the nobles can situate themselves within a discourse of love with valid contractual weight in the political space. Love ties more than whatever other “bond,” and the acquisition of political bonds corresponds to this category. On the other hand, this idea also belongs to so-called court literature, which is the chivalric and noble literature that developed in all of Europe since the beginning of the twelfth century.¹⁸ In it, the capacity to love itself is exclusive to the nobility, while the rest of the estates (ordines) have a link with the eroticism that is tied only to the capacity to reproduce. In Alfonsine discourse, a third element is incorporated that plays the role of theoretical language: the inclusion, within the juridical code, of Aristotle’s Ethics. The first philosophy of fraternity, along with it its constitutive strategy, is predicated upon this complex framework regarding the political philosophy of love.

The strategy is twofold. On one hand, upon writing a love contract into its institutional document, the Hermandad is also situating itself in the double horizontal and vertical alliance that relates to the nobility and the sovereign respectively. The Hermandad is therefore including itself in the space in which the resolution of political objectives takes place, that is sovereignty. On the other hand, the Hermandad is representing itself as a chivalric congregation that functions in line with the referential network of court culture, a network that is linked to that which I am here calling the public hope of chivalry and that is constructed through chivalric fables.¹⁹

The Cuaderno de la Hermandad is divided into twenty-five articles or claims on behalf of its knights. The main part deals with points on which the Hermandad expresses its fears concerning the material absurdities and juridico-political arbitrariness of the nobles and tutors that participate in the council of regency. The fraternity unites against these absurdities and arbitrariness and seeks to establish a regimen of law that might allow its members, as a political collective recognized by the regent power (and the king as a last resort), to participate in the power sphere as a means of control of the regents and tutors. The first and second articles, for example, request the right of the Hermandad to challenge the power of the tutors, even the regent, in case either one of them caused physical or material harm to any member of the fraternity through the violation of fueros and derechos (rights). In such a case, the Hermandad would reserve the right to make these damages known to legally constituted officials, which in Castilian society were the royal land merinos (administrators) and the alcaldes (mayors). Their intention was to be able to demand their rights and even force the loss of position for the tutor who committed an injustice and did not correct or remedy it according to the fueros and rights defended by the officials of justice.

The Hermandad did not only establish rights and privileges to defend itself from the exterior. Some of the points of the Cuaderno de la Hermandad sought consolidation of the fraternity itself. In this search for consolidation of its principles of solidarity is, perhaps, where we best perceive the fraternity’s desire for institutionalization. We could take, for example, articles 3 and 4, in which the penal consequences are prevented in case “alguno o algunos delos que ssomos en esta hermandat ffizieren tuerto a algunos delos que ssomos en ella” [“any of us in this fraternity should commit some injury to other members”] (Cortes, 1: 250), while at the same time they establish a regime of protection on behalf of the Hermandad, not only for its members but also for the territories, municipalities, or local powers toward which the fraternity plans to extend its influence:

Otrossi ponemos tal pleyto e tal postura entre nos que omme ffidalgo desta hermandat que non mate nin mande matar por ssi nin por otre a omme ffidalgo nin cauallero nin omme delos que moran en las villas desta hermandat e de ssus pueblos ssin le ffazer tal cosa por quel deua matar con derecho, e quando querella ouieren del por cosa quel aya ffecho tal commo esta que dicha es, que gelo enbie dezir o lo enbie desaffiar o menaçar ante conçeiera miente, e quel non pueda matar nin ffazer mal ffasta nueue dias ssi ffuere delos ffijos dalgo que moran en las villas, et ssi ffuere delos otros delas villas quel non maten nin le ffagan matar ffasta doze dias.

[We stipulate and agree that no hidalgo of this fraternity may, by himself or through another, kill or order killed any other hidalgo, knight, or man dwelling in the towns or villages of this fraternity unless such a killing is justified by lawful right; and should one wish to lodge a complaint against someone for something that he has done or said, that person must be informed of this or challenged, and if he is a hidalgo living in one of the towns he may not be killed nor harmed for a period of nine days; and if he is a non-noble living in one of the towns he may not be killed for twelve days] (251)

The Hermandad presents itself as a guarantor of official discourse and as a cohesive group that functions with the same legal regime as that developed to protect itself from the exterior. It also organizes itself as a specific power group that not only calls for the resolution of the problems that may surface from within, but that also anticipates the possibility of implementing “alcalles desta hermandad” [“mayors of this fraternity”] (251), or in other words officials created to resolve the conflicts produced both within the Hermandad and in its territories. In the construction of this power group, “la justiçia e la hermandat” [“law enforcement and the fraternity”] (251), that is to say, the group of justice administration officials and the officials of the Hermandad itself, would essentially function as a seamless judicial and police body. This group would keep watch not only for the protection of the group as such, but also as guarantor of the differences of social class within the group itself. The separation of classes and the configuration of the group as a system of solidarity among those same classes produce a fascinating tension between more seigneurial forms of identification within more immovable states and a modernity derived from the hybridization of the group and establishment of official powers (mayors or justices) that are not necessarily tied to any of those estates.

The Hermandad constructs itself in these parts of the Cuaderno in the first person with respect to the administration of violence: “e ssi otro delos que non sson desta hermandat matare o mandare matar a alguno o algunos delos que ssomos enella sinon commo dicho es, que todos los dela hermandat o los que y acaesçieren quel matemos por ello e le derribemos las cassas e le astraguemos todo quanto ouiere con las justiçias del Rey” [“and if those who are not members of this fraternity should murder or order the murder of any of those of us who are members (unless as stipulated), then all those of us within the fraternity or those who are present shall kill that person, destroy his houses, and raze as much as is permitted by the king’s justices”] (251–52).

The expression “con las justiçias del Rey” [“by the king’s justices”] must be underscored. The plural indicates both the laws and physical instruments of the laws. It is in this declaration of institutional alliance and coalition with sovereignty and the idea of “justice” where the juridical and political violence with which the fraternity seeks to equip itself is manifested.

The definition Carl Schmitt gives of the sovereign is this: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Political Theology, 5). The expression has a double significance: it is the sovereign who decides what case can be considered an exception, and it is also the sovereign who decides how it is necessary to act in case of a state of exception. The second sense is a correlative of the first.

The capacity of the Hermandad to self-regulate the exercise of violence “con las justicias del Rey” is given at the precise moment in which “el Rey” only exists through the council of regency. Given this, the political body of the monarch is held in a state of suspension; it is, in effect, divided into a varying number of natural bodies until the natural body of the monarch reaches the age at which he can receive the political body. It is in the context of this state of suspension that the fraternity invokes, therefore, a proportional allotment of the king’s political body with the justicias through which he might act and legitimate himself. The fraternity proposes to participate in a sovereign activity, consisting of determining that all attacks on the fraternity itself constitute a state of exception or emergency to which it must rightfully respond through violence.

The strategy of protection and institutional violence is again twofold. The way in which the fraternity situates itself in the liminal and displaced space to which I have alluded on various occasions allows for the two-sidedness of this strategy. On one hand, the expression presupposes the existence of a kind of external shell for the fraternity, making it concrete, providing it with content, or presenting it as continent as it designates those who are in its interior by the exclusion of “los que non sson desta hermandat” [“those who are not members of this fraternity”]. On the other hand, it situates the fraternity within that space of sovereignty in which states of emergency are decided and reacted to. That is the strategic space in which the institution and its direct participation in negotiations of power are created.