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 XIIIe 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
