is documentary, and its juridical formulas are clearly oriented toward the obtaining of a voice of authority, or in the procedural language of the time, the achievement of an “authentic person” (Partidas 3.18). The phrase “sepan quantos este quaderno vieren” [“may all those who see this cuaderno know”] that opens the Cuaderno, situates it in the linguistic sphere of a growing chancery style that both the knights and hombres buenos wished to adopt, and whose rules are set forward, with all the formulary models placed at the disposition of its end users, in Partidas 3.18. One of the major theses of this documentary writing is the secularization of the chancery universe that is proposed in this cuaderno. While the great majority of chancery documents were redacted by literate clerics, citizens often claimed in the Cortes their right to gain authority as literate laymen representing the cities.
The Cuaderno de la Hermandad is far from being an independent documentary piece. It comes bound within the Cuaderno de las Cortes de Burgos de 1315, whose thirty-first article confirms, promulgates and therefore gives juridical life to the Cuaderno: “Otrossi vos otorgamos e uos conffirmamos la hermandat que en estas cortes ffiziestes todos los ffijos dalgo e los delas çibdades e villas de todo el sennorio de nuestro sennor el Rey en la manera quela ffiziestes” [“We authorize and confirm, and in the manner in which you formed it, the fraternity that you, all the hidalgos and men from the cities and villages within the territory of our lord the king, formed in this court”] (Cortes 1: 285, 31). The only significant formal difference between the constitutional log and the cuadernos that confirms it is the sacred invocation or protocol with which all court cuadernos begin: “En el nombre de Dios Amen” [“In the name of God, Amen”] or similar formulas. These formulas serve to sacralize the juridical moment. Such sacralization is absent in the Cuaderno de la Hermandad and is only manifested in the individual attitudes of those who sign at the instant in which they do so (Cortes, 1: 261–72). The dependence of this cuaderno on court cuadernos was permanent, marked by an enormous degree of anxiety, given that the hermandad repeatedly requested that the Cuaderno be confirmed in successive Cortes during Alfonso’s minority. These petitions took place in Carrión in 1317 (Cortes, 1: 311, 28); in Medina del Campo in 1318 with reticent response from the council of regency (Cortes, 1: 332, 9); and in 1325, in Valladolid, although Alfonso, by this point king, clearly excludes from his confirmation the cuadernos for the hermandad “Otrossi les otorgo los quadernios que les dio el rey don Ffernando mio padre en las cortes que el ffizo, aquellos que non fablan de hermandades” [“I authorize the cuadernos given to my father, the king Don Fernando, in the Cortes he held, with the exception of those that speak of fraternities”] (Cortes, 1: 388, 40).
Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain direct access to the original version of this cuaderno of twelve paper folios sewn into the cuaderno of twenty parchment folios corresponding to the Cortes of Burgos. The location of the original (or originals) is unknown, and I have also been unable to locate the copies mentioned by academic editors in their magnificent work of 1861. It is from this 1861 edition that I have obtained all the material that I have with respect to the Cuaderno, plus some eighteenth-century copies. It would be inappropriate to speak about the material differences between both logs, or to theorize about the multicolored plaits from which were hung, at the time, the wax seals of the royal chancery.
Independently of its formal characteristics, the institution adopts, for its writing, an aesthetics very close to that of the cuadernos themselves, and in such a way that petition and concession or rejection are alternated. In the case of the cuadernos, this alternation is produced in each article, while in the Cuaderno de la Hermandad the petition consists of twenty-five articles that are conceded and sworn to in their entirety. Their order is initiated with a prologue, a primeramente, followed by the formula otrosí for each petition—a formula derived from the juridical Latin alterum si.
The Cuaderno begins with an affirmation of the poetics of fraternity, followed by an introduction, the twenty-five regulatory articles of the fraternity, and ends with the signatures of the members and procuradores of the fraternity and the oaths taken by both the members of the brotherhood and procuradores and the regent and the tutors. The hidalgo and villano knights express their will to attenuate “los muchos males e dannos e agrauiamientos que auemos rreçebidos ffasta aqui delos omnes poderosos” [“the many evils, and harms, and ruthlessness that we have suffered until now from powerful men”]. In the end, their stated goal is that “todos abenida miente ponemos e ffazemos tal pleyto e tal postura e tal hermandat que nos amemos e nos queramos bien los vnos alos otros e que seamos todos en vno de un coraçon e de vna voluntat para guardar sennorio e seruiçio del Rey e de todos sus derechos que a e deue auer, e para guarda de nuestros cuerpos e delo que auemos e de todos nuestros fueros e ffranquezas e libertades e buenos vsos e costunbres e cartas e quadernos que auemos todos e cada vno de nos” [“we all by our own and shared will, hereby oath, and express the right, and promulgate, and create a fraternity so that we should love and esteem one another, and that we should all be of one heart and of one will to protect and serve the king and all the rights that he has and should have, and to protect our bodily persons and our possessions, as well as our laws, exemptions, privileges, liberties, customs, letters, and court logs that each and every one of us has”] (Cortes, 1: 248).17 The initial criterion for this juridico-political defense, for the preservation of the exercise of power in the interior of the cities and, after all, for the preservation of the civitas as well as “de todos e cada vno de nos,” is a poetics of fraternity. Fundamental to the ordo, then, is the common expression of fraternal love, presented through the horizontality that is pointed out in the community: to be “of one heart” and “of one will” and to “love one another” according to the Christian notion of love toward the neighbor. This theory of a power group that is based on love is not self-explanatory. It is, nevertheless, a fundamental philosophy in the constitution of ordo and of the fraternity.
In what strategy of power can this theory be found? It could be proposed as the secularization of a theological concept, following the known thesis of Carl Schmitt. This love, then, would be a hypostasis of caritas and the eleventh commandment in which Christian synthesis is substantiated. How is the process of secularization manifested? How do these texts make sense of it?
Love is a bond that does not require a special localization and that can be extended liberally in the common space designated by the ordo. Love, as the Cuaderno points out, is the desire of group unification and is extended as much as the group itself is extended. The signatories of the Cuaderno also signed this will of love. Love is, then, a juridical concept of political rationality. According to Partidas 4.10.10 “el verdadero amor passa todos los debdos” [“true love overrides all (legal) bonds”] (Martin, “Le mot pour les dire”; Heusch, La philosophie de l’amour and Les fondements juridiques de l’amitié), which means that the acceptance or expression of this feeling is superior to whatever other bond (debdo) of those that are manifested in the translation of natural law to political law.
Partidas 4.27.4 speaks in particular of the love of friendship, that is to say, the horizontal love in the aforementioned point of the Cuaderno. It is about a love that “segund la costumbre de España . . . pusieron antiguamente los fijos dalgo entre si, que non se deuen desonrrar, nin fazer mal vnos a otros” [“according to the custom of Spain . . . persons nobly born agreed among themselves that they must not dishonor nor do injury to one another”]. Similarly, this love of friendship can disappear from among the natives of a land, “quando alguno dellos es manifiestamente enemigo della [de la tierra] o del señor que la ha de gobernar e mantener en justicia” [“when any of them becomes the open enemy of his country, or of the lord whose duty it is to govern it and maintain justice within its limits”] (Partidas 4.27.7). If love of friendship is the glue that holds together the horizontal order, its sense, however, is found beyond this horizontality in the system that is superstructurally ordered: the land—a prenational conception of the nation—and, above all, the sovereign.
