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
