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
