any internal hierarchy: it designated neither a master nor any other type of vertical structure. The displacement that it sought was the moment in which the contract was validated through the incorporation of the signatures of the regency council, which had convened the court, and it was sewn into the resulting ordenamiento. In some way, these strategies of chivalric solidarity enter the space of sovereignty yet remain, at the same time, outside of it. The relationship of exteriority preserves the meaning of the Hermandad, but it is also one of the reasons for its fungibility.
The manner in which the chivalric civitas operated outside of the vertical hierarchy while seeking to participate in the space of sovereignty had relevant consequences. Perhaps the first and most important of these was the search for a way to speak about chivalry that was different from that which tended to be used in monarchical discourse; in this search, chivalry aimed to abandon its condition as an object of regulation to elaborate on its own conditions of possibility, its own rules, its own and subjective system of control (Rodríguez-Velasco, El debate). The voices of the knights themselves, for example, whether nobles or of bourgeois extraction, seem to have wanted to explore this possibility.
One could try to explore, in fact, a poetics of chivalric order just as it was practiced in the realm of the urban knights, independently of its links to nobility, and exploring its political ties based on the idea of fraternity. The poetics of knightly fraternity are very closely related to the poetics of fraternity in the scope of bourgeois alliances of the Middle Ages and the societies of protection and mutual assistance.
The majority of the bourgeois organizations, with the exception of the societates militum previously mentioned, were constituted as fraternities, confraternities, or chapters of artisanal or trade guilds. The definition of these groups by Antonello Mattone is perfect: “a universitas, an association of individuals with the same statutes, the same rules, the same saints, the same aid organization” (“Corporazioni, gremi e artigianato,” 21). In almost all European cities—throughout the kingdoms of France, the Italian domains, the Holy Roman Empire, Flanders in particular, and elsewhere—the guilds consolidate a large part of municipal activity and organize the urban space around them effectively.13
In cities like Bologna or Naples, as well as in others such as the Castilian city of Ávila, the gremial and artisanal fraternities form their statutes based on their interaction with the ecclesiastical centers of power, be they the cathedral chapter or the neighborhood parishes. The Bolognese confraternities of Santa Maria della Vita and of Santa Maria della Morte, founded respectively in 1260 and 1336, received their statutes either from the parish church or from a Dominican convent, because of the preaching of Venturino of Bergamo (Fanti, Confraternite e città, 1–60; 61–173). In the city of Naples, during the times of Charles of Anjou (1266–1285) and Charles II (1285–1309) and then during the Aragonese period at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the gremial and artisanal guilds, like that of Santa Marta, also presumed a reorganization of the urban space in function of the processional ceremonies of the different times of the year or of certain happenings related to the guild itself. The statutes and the processional system were based on ecclesiastical rites (Vitolo and Di Meglio, Napoli angioino-aragonese, 147–209). The entire organizing process of these guilds was dependent on the religious and liturgical calendar and submitted to it as a political form of theological organization. In the city of Ávila, for example, the Chapter of San Benito was organized as a fraternity in which the artisanal and guild bourgeoisie established direct relations with the cathedral chapter and with the three Benedictine reformist groups (the Cluniacs, the Cistercians, and the Premonstratensians); their statutes and related documentation were handled by the ecclesiastical entities (Sobrino Chomón, Documentos and Documentación medieval).
It would be misguided to argue that these congregations lacked any political element. The Italian guilds and some of the confraternities founded in the city of Seville, for example, had so much political force by the end of the fifteenth century that they ended up being dominated by sectors of the nobility that needed to assert their political presence during the development of the city. The most striking aspect of such fraternities is that their poetics are clearly linked with political theology; they composed their statutes with ecclesiastical rigor and rhetoric, employing church calendars and adopting the ecclesiastical organization of time, its hierarchical vocabulary, and, in the end, its doctrine.
The organizations of lay knights were radically separated from the dominant form of bourgeois association. They expressed their political will through textual strategies and apparatuses that passed for chivalric discourse, for juridical ethics and discourse, as well as urbanism and the practice of the urban space. These fraternities should be understood as a desperate search to construct a voice, and the documental modes of articulating this voice, to submit it to the juridico-political space of the courts.
The bibliography on knightly fraternities in Castile is sufficiently abundant, beginning with the older works of Julio Puyol y Alonso, and then later the various analyses of C. González Mínguez, Antonio Álvarez de Morales, Julio Valdeón Baruque, Miguel Ángel Ladero Quesada, and Manuel Fernando Ladero (above all regarding the fifteenth-century Hermandad).14 On the other hand, these were not the only social movements of bourgeois confraternity. The different fraternal movements that arose in the middle and the end of the fifteenth century, such as Galician irmandiños and Levantine germanías, all accompany a process of vindication that some have considered revolutionary. All of them, like the previous groups mentioned, are founded in a semantics of fraternity that promises to yield significant analytical fruit.
As Eloy Benito Ruano and Álvarez de Morales have pointed out, the denominations of fraternity are as nonspecific and unsystematic as many other terms found in medieval sources. Their meaning depends on context for the construction of discourse. The term hermandad subsumes many diverse alliances that may lack any common link, thereby setting in motion a series of semantic resources that tended to localize the corporation itself. Brotherhood, fraternity, confraternity—hermandad, cofradía, confraternidad—all these nouns point to the same roots, frater and germanus, wherein a horizontal relationship is manifested. The semantics of fraternity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cannot be addressed (even by the members themselves) without acknowledging its significance within horizontal associative medieval systems. The fratres of medieval institutions configure spaces in which this horizontality does not imply an absence of hierarchy, even though it is manifested above all through the chapter or the rule of the statutes of the institution itself. Verticality does not inhere in the physical individual, but rather in the juridical person created by the contractual movement organized according to written regulation. This is how conventual or monastic rule functions among monks, or among the double rule—military and monastic—of the friars of the military orders. The fact that interurban fraternities, formed by city procuradores working on behalf of their various citizens, adopted these semantics indicates the necessity to examine how this horizontal and statutory structure refers to itself, and the way in which these poetics were elaborated.
The first fraternities of which the logs and ordenamientos account for are the Generales of 1282, in support of King Sancho IV against his father Alfonso X, and those of 1295. In the first of these, the expression carta fraternitatis is used, which later was substituted by the expression hermandad (Álvarez de Morales, Las hermandades, 40–41). Antonio Álvarez de Morales describes in great detail the general features of these fraternities, as well as their constitution and the systems of representation it advances. Those of 1295 were formed upon the death of Sancho IV, and they confirm María de Molina as regent while Fernando IV was a minor (1285–1312, reigned after 1295) in the Cortes of Valladolid of 1295. Article 12 of the Cuaderno de Cortes de Valladolid de 1295 reads in part: “Otrossi las hermandades que fizieron los delas uillas de nuestros regnos de Castiella e de Leon e de Gallizia, e de Estremadura e del arçobispado de Toledo otorgamos las e confirmamos las asi como las fizieron” [“With respect to the fraternities formed by citizens of the cities in our realms of Castile, León, and Galicia, and of Extremadura and the
