and administrative matters.92 Likewise, as the offices of veguer and batlle were political appointments that did not require any particular judicial training, each veguer or batlle would have as a member of his staff a legal expert (iurisperitus) who had received formal legal training and with whom the veguer or batlle was required to consult in deciding cases. This consultant would be the one to try the case and evaluate the evidence, though pronouncing the verdict remained the prerogative and duty of the veguer or batlle himself.93
The kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon possessed similarly overlapping local and regional judicial institutions and officers. The kingdom of Aragon had its own system of bailes (corresponding to the Catalan batlles) and merinos, with a dozen merinados located throughout the kingdom by the late thirteenth century and numerous smaller bailíos within the larger merinados. But unlike Catalonia, where veguers and batlles exercised moderate to broad judicial and administrative authority, the function of the Aragonese merinos and bailes was primarily administrative. The judicial responsibilities of these two officials were more limited than those of their Catalan counterparts, generally restricted to trying cases involving royal properties, collecting fines or settlements, and arresting defaulters on judicial fines. Merinos might also detain malefactors but only in response to a specific royal order and not as a function inherent in their office.94 Most civil and criminal cases in the later medieval kingdom of Aragon—those that did not touch directly on royal properties or officials—would have been heard by a justicia, an official charged with hearing both civil and criminal cases in a given locality. The Aragonese justicias were technically royal appointees but were drawn from the caballero class of a given locality and so tended to serve local political interests and the prohombres of their towns—a tendency that was at its strongest during the last two decades of the thirteenth century, when the Aragonese uniones temporarily won extraordinary concessions of political and judicial autonomy from the king.95
Another official of the Aragonese judicial system who appears frequently in the following pages was the zalmedina, an office that was peculiar to the districts of Zaragoza and Huesca. In Zaragoza, where there was no justicia, the zalmedina seems to have been the major judicial official, probably exercising jurisdiction similar to that of justicias in other territories. The situation is less certain in Huesca, which had its own justicia, but it is clear that the office was more than merely honorific, as the zalmedina is the first administrator named in Pere II’s 1278 privilege to the city of Huesca. When we take into account that the zalmedinas, unlike other Aragonese judicial officers, were elected to their positions by the town’s leading citizens, rather than appointed by the king, and were subject to regular local assessment, it is reasonable to conclude that these officials were the product of special concessions won by local factions in these two important urban centers. Nevertheless, the zalmedinas do appear regularly in the cases in the following pages, indicating that their judicial authority was on a par with that of the justicias elsewhere in Aragon or with the veguers and batlles of Catalonia.96
Finally, the administrative apparatus of justice in the kingdom of Valencia was Aragonese in form but Catalan in substance, reflecting the tension between the interests of the early the Aragonese seigneurial settlers on the one hand and the monarchs’ rapid centralization efforts on the other. Royal justice in Valencia was primarily the responsibility of bayles, royal judicial and administrative officers answering to the bayle general, who himself answered to no one but the king. Originally appointed to protect the royal patrimony, the bayles’ legal competence was rooted in civil cases, but the bayles also claimed jurisdiction over all civil or criminal cases that touched on royal interests or over the strategic territories of sea and coastline, as well as all cases where both parties were Jews or Muslims.97
The bayles’ increasingly broad jurisdictional claims brought them into frequent contact with another important group of judicial officials: the justicias. Created by Jaume I to mediate conflicts between urban residents and the king, the Valencian justicias were charged with hearing and judging both civil and criminal cases throughout their town and its surrounding district “with the counsel of the wise men [probi homines] of the city” and aided by an assessor trained in law. Valencian justicias had jurisdiction over cases between Christians and Jews or Muslims, and their mixed criminal and civil jurisdiction eventually resulted in the office being split, in 1321, into more specialized offices that did not appear elsewhere in the Crown territories at that time: a justicia criminal, a justicia civil, and eventually a justicia de trescientos sueldos. Like the Aragonese zalmedinas, Valencian justicias were held accountable to the cities and towns that were their seat, serving only one-year terms, after which they were required to present an accounting of their actions for audit. And also as in Aragon, the Valencian justicias were drawn from the nobility or the urban patriciate, and their authority was closely bound to the municipal councils; the justicias therefore tended to represent those interests, acting as a counterbalance to the authority of the king’s bayles.98
The jurisdictional map in Valencia was further complicated by the presence of the office of procurator general (later governor general), the monarch’s leading judicial and administrative representative for the kingdom of Valencia as a whole. The procurator general was assisted by lieutenant procurators stationed throughout the kingdom who handled judicial affairs in much the same way as the veguers in the Catalan territories. The procurator was supposed to have jurisdiction primarily in cases involving the public good—that is, those cases touching on matters of public order, the defense of borders and of royal property, the defense or prosecution of royal officials, and certain high crimes such as treason, sodomy, counterfeiting/forgery, or heresy.99
Procedure: Civil, Criminal, and Inquisitio
The cases dealt with in the following chapters come from a variety of these courts—courts of veguers, batlles, justicias, procurators, and even the royal Audiencia. But since these were either arms of royal justice or subject to appeal in the royal courts, and since, by the reign of Jaume II, the royal courts had adopted the procedural rules of the ius commune, a litigant would be subject to a similar process no matter which of these courts her case was heard in.100 And while Romano-canonical procedure prohibited a woman from acting in court on behalf of anyone but herself or her minor children, women did regularly engage with these procedures on their own behalf as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses.
The procedure that litigants and witnesses would be subject to in the royal courts of the later medieval Crown of Aragon is well illustrated by a fourteenth-century investigation of a charge of official misconduct, conducted in the court of Bernat Dalcamora, the lieutenant procurator in the Valencian town of Vall d’Uixó. Although the elements of procedural law varied slightly throughout Western Europe and over the course of the high and later medieval centuries, a civil suit usually began when a plaintiff presented to the judge either an oral or a written complaint (the libellus). In 1302, Maria, daughter of Miquel de la Serra, appeared in person to lodge such a complaint against the justicia of the town of Cabanes d’Arc, Bertran Maçquefa. According to Maria’s accusation, Bertran had, with the assistance of his companions Bernat Maestre, Bernat de Bonet, and Bertoli Maçquefa, set upon her one Sunday after mass, publicly denouncing her as a whore. They then proceeded to administer a public beating, pulling her hair, hitting her with their fists, and kicking her. Eventually, they expelled her from the town, prohibiting anyone from giving her aid or shelter, on pain of a fine of sixty sous.101
If the judge in the case deemed the complaint worthy, the court’s next action would be to summon the defendant and give him or her the opportunity to file a formal response to the articles of the libellus. In this particular case, the lieutenant procurator summoned all four defendants into his presence separately, where he had the denunciation read out to them. All four exercised their right to respond to the charges,
