los antiguos reinos de León y Castilla, 1: 132). On many occasions during the reign of Fernando IV, these brotherhoods were also confirmed, with some modifications in their norms, as both Álvarez de Morales (Las hermandades, 43–49) and González Mínguez (Contribución) have pointed out. González Mínguez identifies up to ten letters of fraternity between 1295 and 1300 that established coalitions between cities; to these he adds the publication of a new letter (written on a folded broadside sheet of paper according to the norms of the chancery letter) that describes a fraternity created in 1296 in the area of Álava and La Rioja (Contribución).15 All those are brief letters in which cities and towns express their will to protect themselves from desafueros, which is to say, from the interruption of their local legal codes by foreign agents, in the midst of a recrudescent civil war that lasted until 1304. The desafuero is, technically, the violation of the local charters and privileges of a given city, which is to say, its legal regime. Most significant in this chain of letters is an explicit will to oppose the violence of nobles by means of a system of defense based on the law and juridical proceedings. This manner of using the force of the law to oppose the physical violence of the so-called “feudal evil-doers” (malhechores feudales) is key to the expressive modes of citizen groups, who, nonetheless, also possessed the military means to engage in violent resistance. For these groups, the future of their presence in the monarchical courts was, precisely, the rise of language and juridical aesthetics, the integration or displacement toward the political space defined by the law and their participation in it through the investment of their collective voice and documents.
The Hermandad of 1315 is, to my mind, the most interesting and explicit of all of them, and it is probably the one that develops an important poetics of order with the most clarity. In these poetics there is a specific event that brought about the necessity to construct the fraternity. In the version offered by the Cuaderno de la Hermandad, a conflict is mentioned that separates the high nobility of the local governing powers from those who these sources call hidalgo knights and good men (hombres buenos) of the cities. The high nobility is the traditionally jurisdictional nobility that possesses lordships and that postulates a clear jurisdictional division of the kingdom. The king’s tutors, who with María de Molina formed the regency council, divided up, quite precisely, the jurisdiction of the kingdom, which limited the citizen powers’ capacity for action (Sánchez-Arcilla Bernal, Alfonso XI). The Cuaderno presents the Hermandad as a society of mutual aid meant to protect itself from this circumstance in a way that unites police control, educative structures, and juridical violence.
In the first moments of this conflict, the hidalgo knights and the bourgeoisie seemed to have looked to group themselves independently from each other. Perhaps around 1285 the Confraternity of Santa María de Gamonal was created in Burgos with the goal of concentrating the power of economically powerful merchant families, expressing thus their will to emerge as political subjects. The Confraternity of Santa María de Gamonal—that “de los mercaderes” [“of the merchants”] as it became known later (Pardo de Guevara y Valdés, “Introducción”)—possesses a constituent rule. The versions of the code of Santa María de Gamonal conserved in the National Library in Madrid (MS 22.257, MS 22.258), however, date from the fifteenth century, even though the confraternity traces its foundation and its rule to 1285 and seems clearly to have taken its cue from the codex of the Cathedral of Burgos that contains the rules, lists, and portraits of the confraternity of the knights of Santiago de Burgos, which we discuss further on. The makeup of this confraternity is exclusively bourgeois, and its rule speaks explicitly of the privileged social class (whose identification was often ambiguous and imprecise) of hombres buenos, which in summarized accounts could be considered the class composed of members of the bourgeoisie who, for the most part, possessed the means and elements of representation of the urban knights, and who, with their growing economic power, aspired as well to a certain administrative power, something that, in effect, they succeeded in achieving from the fourteenth century on.
The specifically hidalgo fraternities, “que ffizieron los ffidalgos apartada mientre” [“that the hidalgos created by themselves”] in Valladolid (1299?) (Cortes, 1: 164), whose statutes are said to have been amended without giving a determined date, in the Castilian cities of Torquemada and Villa Velasco, seem somewhat imprecise, although they were clearly in force on some occasions. Of this fraternity of hidalgo knights there does not seem to be any notice other than the one that gives the Ordenamiento of the Cortes of Carrión of 1317. Both seem to be directed at substantiating a concrete aspiration that frequently appears in the court orders during the minorities of Fernando IV and Alfonso XI and that consists of the allocation of one or more (up to sixteen) knights, both hidalgos and bourgeois, “para consejar e servir a mi e a la Reyna mi madre e al infante don Enrique mio tio e mio tutor” [“to advise and serve me and the queen my mother and Prince Enrique my uncle and tutor”] (Cortes, 1: 164). Even though this company and council are linked, above all, to the cities, after 1315 and in 1317 the hidalgo knights begin to join, and in 1317 there is a specific reference to one of the knights who serves as a tutor (ayo) for the minor king, Alfonso XI.16
From early on, the knights adopted the form of a juridically established and defended political alliance. This is the clear sense of the important cuaderno that we must now analyze more closely. Bound as an addition to the record of the courts of Burgos of 1315, the rubric denominates it as follows: “Cuaderno de la hermandad que los caballeros hijosdalgo y hombres buenos de los reinos de Castilla, Leon, Toledo y las Extremaduras hicieron para defenderse de los tuertos y daños que les causasen los tutores durante la menor edad de D. Alfonso XI, aprobado en las Cortes de Burgos, celebradas en la era MCCCLIII” [“Cuaderno of the fraternity of the hidalgo and hombres buenos knights of the kingdoms of Castile, León, Toledo and the Extremaduras, constructed to defend said fraternity from the offenses and injuries that the royal tutors might cause them during the minority of Alfonso XI, approved in the Court of Burgos, celebrated in the era of 1353 (=1315)”] (Cortes, 1: 247–72). This cuaderno is the first document in which the institutional confraternization between these two categories of knights is established, for which are recognized specific rules and oaths on the part of the queen regent, the king’s tutors (the princes Juan and Pedro), and the ricos hombres.
The Cuaderno de la Hermandad, as well as the fraternity itself, can be deemed a part of the juridical practice of a poetics of order. The distribution of the Cuaderno, as well as its redaction, reveals an urgent desire to reorder the lay chivalry so as to establish relations of power that might allow them to contest the high nobility (Cortes, 1: 285, 31). This fact is unusual, together with the weight of the political crisis and of the historical circumstances mentioned throughout this chapter. The Cuaderno is a realization on the part of the urban knights that their political function, as citizens and representatives of a civitas, corresponds to a civil and political life that transcends the specific localization of the urbs. Against this specific localization, the hermandad distributed itself throughout a great number of cities that cover the historical domains of the kingdom of Castile and León, from the extremaduras (i.e., the old borders—extremadura is the term which was used to mean “border” in the vocabulary of the war of reconquest) to the kingdom of Toledo, all of Castile, and all of León; all the jurisdictional domains in which the high Castilian nobility still claimed jurisdictional power.
The so-called chivalric imaginary was introduced in full form within this project through an attempt to fashion a juridico-political application of the chivalric fable (with its pedagogical subfable included), in which the knights of different social backgrounds attempted to construct for themselves a public hope whose tendency toward institutionalization was contractually manifested in the Cortes. The public hope of chivalry was, in this context, the possibility of contributing to the objective regency of the kingdom while maintaining control of municipal power.
What the public hope of chivalry proposes is the incorporation of a bourgeois lifestyle into public life, and not a specific function. There is no idealism in this position. Likewise, I do not posit this as a dramatic
