of the poetics of order, of the variations texts invoke to configure a power base underpinned by the concepts of sovereignty, domination, and subjection.
These poetics of chivalric order have a specific importance. They question nobility as a theological-political category. It is the hypostasis of theological nobility in civic nobility. While the former is uncreated and permanent, chivalry allows for a foundation of nobility, imposes a fundamental variation in the order of existence in society, and opens alternatives to the transformation of forms of dominion within the kingdom and, subsequently, within the state.
The chapters that follow will examine this scarcely studied dimension of chivalry that is fully integrated into a process of transformation manifested through a dialectic between nobility and bourgeoisie. As I will show, chivalry offers a privileged vantage point from which to explore this dialectic.
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
