Domination: Chapter 8

8. MANUFACTURING THE STATE AND SERFDOM

Early History of Catalonia

We have seen aggrandizers at work in big man societies, as little chiefs, authority chiefs and kings. Now I want to detail the rise of the Count of Barcelona, who fabricated a state out of the chaos of the Marca Hispanica, that wasteland that stood between the Carolingian Empire in Francia and the Muslim principalities in Iberia (see map below). The countship eventually evolved into a kingship, as the monarchs ruled over an expanded domain, Aragón-Catalonia, as well as the land of Valencia they took back from the Moors.
This is a case wherein aggrandizers moved into a dangerous March and forged an incipient state out of the remnants of different politico-legal systems. This comital authority emerged among powerful paladin lords who at times cooperated with the count and at other times ignored his claim on suzerainty and at yet other times fought against the self-proclaimed monarchs in Barcelona.
First we will look at how castle-lords used the Power of the Sword to force the peasantry into de facto serfdom and then used the Power of the Pen to create written documents and laws to legitimize their oppression. In chapter 9 we will see the continuation of oppression, but not so much internally, but rather in the imperialism of what I call the Extortionist State.



Initially, the County of Barcelona was just one of several counties in the Marca Hispanica. The other counts and barons of the region considered the Count of Barcelona as a primus inter pares, but through aggrandizing moves, the early counts of the tenth century were able to put together a fragile hegemony that fell apart in the “time of troubles” (1020-1060, a.k.a. the seigneurie banale) when the paladin lords ran roughshod over the land. After this violent era, the Count of Barcelona reconstituted his feudal authority to forge an expansionist state that stretched into southern Iberia, the Mediterranean and North Africa.
Before AD 1000 the Marca Hispanica, or Spanish March, was inhabited by peoples coming across the Pyrenees to mix with remnants of Iberian tribesmen, Visigoths and Romans that were already there. Initially they came under the suzerainty of the Carolingian Empire, but eventually the counts of the March pulled away and the Count of Barcelona became a primus inter pares in the land, ruling weakly at first, with a great deal of independence being shown by castle-lords. The elevated status of the Barcelona Count came, partly, from the fact that the Carolingian Emperor had named him to be the marchio (marquise) of the whole territory.
Barcelona became the administrative focal point of the Marca Hispanica, now independent of the Carolingians. For the next several centuries, the presence of the Moors to the south was to play a key role in the structure of the poleconomic life of Barcelona and that of Catalonia, then later yet, the Kingdom of Aragón. The close proximity of the enemy made early city fathers cognizant of the need to build a strong defensive infrastructure and also provided a source of booty through frequent raids made by castellans in search of fame, political favor and spoils, some of which were state-sponsored forays (hostes). Soon, some of the Moorish principalities began to pay protection money to the Count of Barcelona, which became a significant source of income for the early comtes (counts).
Free of Carolingia, Barcelona had a new start, but the count still had impudent barons and wannabe paladin lords with which he had to deal. His feeble suzerainty in the area was to come apart in the period between 1020 and 1060 as the lords went on a rampage in search of prestige, power and property, using the sword to take land and enserf peasants on it.
There were essentially three sets of élites in the region: the Comte de Barcelona and other regional comtes; the upland magnates (barons) and holders of castles – the castle-lords; and the urban patriciate (patricii), which at first was limited in its poleconomic impact on government.
An administration was forming that initially was supportive of peasant migrants who wished to settle the area. But a strong élite with its own interests was taking shape as well. The count had inherited from Carolingia the concept of public law (L. publicæ). He was given the responsibility to protect the rights of a free peasantry against any abuses by the castle-lords or invaders. This was an important mandate, one that subsequent counts would not follow. Furthermore, there were local customs developed by the barons to tie peasants to them. “Free” peasants were not entirely so. Many free peasants were slowly becoming subject to customary constraints on inheritance and marriage. These were traditions of lordship that nobles claimed from time immemorial, but before the seigneurie banale (1020-1060) the dues and services required of the peasants was not oppressive by medieval standards. This was partly because the area was a frontier and not yet fully tamed and also because the castle-lords were making a living raiding the Muslim south.
Comital authority was to be a buffer against the aggrandizement of the aristocracy. At this early date, the counts heeded many peasant petitions and were mindful of their grievances and some communities were granted charters of franchise (franquichiae). In theory these early franchises removed endowed communities from seigneurial impositions. They were “legal umbrellas” of comital protection.
The church was also important in the settlement of the Marca Hispanica. It was organized through newly established monasteries and parish churches during which time the area remained a distant province of the Carolingian Empire. Sons and daughters of élite families took up key ecclesiastical roles. Sometimes the church worked with the government and magnate families; at other times against them, but both ecclesiastical and secular self-interestedness would become a factor in the oppression of the peasantry by the “time of troubles” (1020-1060).

Box 8.1. Symbolic Comparison of Nobles & Peasants
High Low
Light Dark
Rides Walks
Does not work Works with hands
Owns much land Tenuous hold on land
Lives in a castle Lives in a cottage.
Has virtue (virtus) Lacks virtue (virtus)
Has a special genius
(Ingenio) Lacks a special genius (Ingenio)
Has breeding (cultura) Lacks breeding (cultura)
Literate Illiterate

The tenth century was a time of resettlement of lands taken back from the Moors. Churches, monasteries, parishes and castles sprang up on re-conquered land and even in the Marca Hispanica. Secular administration came from Barcelona and ecclesiastical organization flowed out of Rome through cathedrals and parish churches. Church and state were closely aligned, as both were staffed by members of the same aristocratic families. Areas were marked out into parishes under control of the Count of Barcelona, his viscounts (vicecomes) and bishops of the church. Near the bottom of the élite hierarchy were encastled lords, though knights were yet below them. Some very wealthy castle-lords I call barons or magnates. They were the great nobles or grandees just below the counts. For protection of self, his familia and castle, the lord relied on trained knights equipped with shield, sword, breastplate and mailcoat. Some lords attached themselves to the church as lay canons (burgh
or layman); others remained more aloof. Brigand lords even raided churches.
The Count of Barcelona was the loftiest prince of the area, with other counts of Osona, Gerona, Urgell, Pallars, Cerdanya, Besalú, Empúries and Rosselló acting as subaltern counts, though this was a cause of much contention over time. Some of these counts and barons refused to support Barcelona, others pledged fidelity (fidelitas) but were lax in behavioral support and some were quite supportive in both word and deed. The latter were his “sworn men” – comtors, vicars and courtiers.

Box 8.2. Catalonian Hierarchy
Count of Barcelona (sometimes, King of Aragón)
Regional counts
Large landholding barons or magnates
or viscounts
Bishops, especially those commanding armies
Castle-lords
Lesser gentry (knights)
Allodists & serfs (collectively, the pobles menuts.)

All in all, up to the “time of troubles” all sorts of élites, secular and ecclesiastical, great and aspiring, fed off of warfare and the spoils it provided, taking over new lands, building fortified towers and castles and raiding even further into Muslim lands to the south and west. This avenue of violent aggrandizement was to dry up when available lands were settled and the Count of Barcelona established an extortionate protectorate over adjacent Muslim principalities, ensuring a steady flow of gold parias (tribute) into governmental coffers. Of course, this made the castle-lords restive.
This tribute fed the comital state, but lessened the war-related income of the castle-lords. This policy by Barcelona meant that the Men of the Sword, the castlans who lived by raiding, were temporarily stymied by the self-interest of the Count of Barcelona. This was to have serious consequences – “blowback” to use a phrase developed much later in history – but one that also applies to eleventh century Catalonia. This count/baron tension came to a head in the form of a decline in the force of public law and the rise of the Men of the Sword in the seigneurie banale. If they couldn't raid enemy territory, they would turn on their neighbors in the Marca Hispanica. Brigandry became popular, even accepted by the noble class.

Fabricating State Law

The fabrication of dominion in the Marca Hispanica was built on maneuvers of the poleconomic players in the world of law. Each of the key poleconomic domains – the Barcelona Count, the regional counts, the barons and the church used different laws and customs to back their claims to rule. Barcelona claimed to rule by virtue of public law derived from Carolingia. From the tenth century on Barcelona counts issued charters, which were the functional equivalent of the fueros of León and Castile. Both were laws or sets of laws deriving from a recognized authority. As Charlemagne had done with his provincial governors, the Count of Barcelona communicated with his field personnel through segels, or “sealed letters of direction.”
This was a time when unwritten customs were still respected, but written law was taking precedence. For this reason, when the dust settled after the lords and knights ran riot in the seigneurie banale, they attempted to justify their unlawful theft of property and enserfment of the peasantry by manufacturing written documents. The Sword was validated by the Pen.
The first known charter was issued by Count Borrel II (954-992). This charter, dated 986, provided the residents of Cardona with security of tenure for their lands and freedom from some taxes and tolls (L. teloneum). In it, the inhabitants of the town were instructed to continue to pay their tithes to the Church of St. Vincent and to maintain the walls and towers of the hamlet for defense against both “pagans and Christians.” Peasants had rights of petition to public authority. For instance, under the ancient comital traditions of the Pyrenees, a community could institute a protest (clamore or rancura) to encourage comital officers to follow legal procedures.
Early comital law was often carried out at a placitum, an official hearing. The documents connected to a placitum were mainly a record of the oral testimony and the memory of witnesses (viditores), pointing backwards to custom and praxis. Such trials (placita) were confrontations between two sides that spoke in favor of their own interests. Advocates, called mandatarii, spoke in the presence of community leaders or men appointed by the Count of Barcelona. Sometimes the count himself presided. At such noble assemblies aristocrats worked out the rules to apply to their poleconomic behavior and to the lesser people in their world, the pobles menuts.
Thus, the franchised city (burgus) represented the national power of the House of Barcelona and was resented by the baronial opponents – the isolated magnates and castle-lords of the countryside. This was a major source of tension all throughout Catalonia’s early history – the conflict between the centralized authority of the House of Barcelona and aristocrats in rural districts.
In spite of this strain, as time passed, Barcelona became symbolic of legitimate public authority. Yet, the countryside was important too. Until late in the thirteenth century, more frequently than not, counts ruled from horseback riding throughout the territory to personally interact with subjects. This was because they relied on dispersed centers, which needed periodic visits by the count and his officers to renew allegiances with local élites. It is noteworthy that traveling on horseback with an armed escort (cavalarii armati) was an important symbol of power in medieval times.
This was dispersed rule, but the process of centralization was at work as well. Written documents became a symbol of centralized authority. They were an important part of the capitulary (document repository) that was kept in the Barcelona castle and in each provincial castle of the count. These documents were necessary for poleconomic rule. They were referred to by the count and his men when visiting his outposts and provided the memory bank for dynastic rule.

Box 8.3. Evolution of the Catalonian State
Comital
authority
derived
from Charlemagne  Seigneure
banale  Reassertion of
comital
authority  Territorial
state
Public
authority Private rule Public authority
Fidelity Power Homage Kingship
Personal relationship between lord
& subject Breakdown in the relation between
count & lord
Personal relationship between lord & subject Institutionalized territorial rule

In the 1180s, the count reorganized his documents to form the Liber Feudorum Maior, the Great Book of Fiefs (ca. 1192-1196). He was aided by the gifted accountant, Guillem de Basa. There were two main tasks: organize charters and create a better accounting of fiscal matters. It was a secular cartulary functioning as documentary justification for the state of affairs that had evolved out of the 1020-1060 struggles with the rapacious lords of the countryside. This was part of the transition from orality to textuality. Documents were a long-term investment, but in the short-term the count had to rely on personal interaction with the lords and even violence at times. The count had knights and could call on the services of castle-lords to support him against anyone who defied his authority or invaded the region. He also used symbols as weapons e.g., pomp, parades and ceremonies. Much of his authority stemmed from tradition, legend and much ceremony in Barcelona, which was said to have developed many royal rites and a love of stately processions.

Status, Power and Poverty

Domination requires defining the nature of the relation between these two “kinds” of people. The original Catalan theory of nobilitas was that of being “nobly born” (nobile genus). Genicot notes that without fail, charters and narrative sources attributed caste spirit and attitude to the nobility. This rigid class was set apart by both arrogance and generosity, though the latter tended to be found only in donations to the church, rather than alms given directly to the poor. Nobles also held special legal privileges (s. privilegium), in that they had a great deal of liberty or freedom from prosecution by those in public office. They enjoyed the right to have an armed following (cavalarii armati), as well as the duty (L. officium) to play a public role in a military, judicial and political sense i.e., to aid the Barcelona administration. They also held the right to receive the sacraments and only they could be buried in a church graveyard and enjoyed freedom from dues and taxes that fell to the common man. Military escorts of armed knights provided them with a physical shield against violence, but they also had a legal shield in self-generated laws and customs.
From the perspective of the Count of Barcelona, the upland barons and castle-lords were always fickle and of questionable fidelity. Some were sworn men of the count’s inner circle (mennada), but others were very independent minded. This made the extension of comital authority a slow process and, at times, difficult. Barcelona’s strength was to take a bit of a roller coaster ride up to the merger with Castile in the fifteenth century.
What is more, the count/nobility line of cleavage was not the only one in Catalonia. Other fissures included: knights (gentry) against the old nobility; merchants (mercatores) and artisans against the urban patriciate (the count’s men); and greater landlords against the remença peasants or against royal agents trying to recover alienated domains. The count had his hands full balancing the contrasting cohorts and their particularistic interests.
There were two divergent theories of governance at work in Catalonia: the pactista approach and the Crown’s absolutist perspective. The latter saw the count (and later the king) as divinely anointed. The Catalan ruling estates supported the pactista philosophy – a view that governance should be based on a contract between society’s key estates. Each estate was to have its own jurisdiction and laws. Of course, both left out the majority of people – the peasants. Aristocrats were content spouting platitudes about noblese oblige or the sanctity of charity and the like. Such inanities were uttered so “high up” that no one in the real world could hear them. The reality was that a small privileged class made up of the key estates of the Crown, Cross, Sword and Purse were living the high life. This secure life was had at the direct expense of the “small people” (pobles menuts) and very little was being done by those in any estate to help the poor in any significant way.
In the poleconomic structure of Catalan society, the people (pobles) had very little representation, if any. From time to time, a given monarch would nod in their direction but they did not have a permanent structural presence in government. They included the vast majority of society – rural farmers and working folk of urban areas. If anything, the gap between these subaltern poor (subdicti) and the privileged few at the top widened as time passed and those of the ruling class managed to institute more privileges for themselves and their factions (bàndols). It was certainly a government for the those who were honored, not for the powerless. The under-representation of the multitudes in government is symbolized by the name of the Barcelona plenary assembly, the Consell de Cent (Council of the Hundred). Those who served were members of the rentier class with having little in common with the great majority of the people or as they were often referred to by members of the class – the pobles menuts – “lesser people.”
Before the seigneurie banale, many castle-lords passively accepted the presence of the County of Barcelona, but did little to support it. A few comtors (members of the inner circle) were ardent backers of the Count of Barcelona, but for most barons there was a natural conflict with the Crown. Yet the castle-lords who were not the king’s homines solidus, his close councilors, often pushed for hereditary tenure of their holdings and independent rights. As the eleventh century began, this tension was growing, as more and more castle-lords refused to obey the count. As the same time, some of the count’s comtors became corrupt and began to think of themselves as provincial lords equal to and/or independent of the law of the realm. A quest for land, riches and prestige (most commonly achieved through combat) were driving the disorder.
When the power of the Count of Barcelona wavered, as it did from time to time through the ages, the local magnates would take advantage and impose themselves as a stronger rentier class on the hard-working peasantry of the countryside. This happened after 1017, when the stream of gold to Barcelona diminished suddenly. With a fragile countship, the barons in their castles became disorderly. In the tumultuous years of the mid-eleventh century, the encastled aristocrats established themselves as masters of the land, where they once had ruled as viscounts and vicars by the grace of the Barcelona ruler. In short, they turned their backs on comital authority.
Certainly, a stronger county emerged from the seigneurie banale. A century later, the upland lords were again complaining about the exactions and oppressive hand of the House of Barcelona. In a way, the count was doing to them what the castle-lords had been doing to the peasantry, each level living off the wealth of those below. Disgruntled magnates tried to impose a settlement whereby Pere I (1196-1213) would renounce any arbitrary dues on the nobility. On the other hand, at this time the counts were still attempting to put the authority structure of their office back together. Slowly, they instituted a new legal system based in the courts of their provincial vicars. In Barcelona, this vicarial court became the “hub of justice.” Vicars assumed important new judicial and supervisory capacities so there had been some improvement in the authority structure (remember these were the same officers renown for promoting extortion in their role as “revenue farmers” for the Crown).
Society as it Developed in Early Catalonia

Stratification in Catalonia dates from at least its invasion by the Romans and Visigoths. Their legal codes were primarily directed to secure the maintenance of privilege “obtained by the accident of birth.” The Visigoth’s Forum Judicum divided society into classes based on ethnicity and socioeconomic criteria:

Nobiles (nobles), all of whom were Goths and were subdivided as:
Primates
Seniores
Viliores (villeins), who could be Goths or Romans and were subdivided as:
Ingenui (freeborn persons)
Liberi (freed persons)
Servi (slaves)

Stratification in Catalonia can be seen in the indemnities required if a person was injured by another. Quoting from the Usatges, Professor Bonnassie says:

Whoever kills a viscount or wounds or dishonours him in any fashion, should make reparation as for two comtors; for one comtor the reparation should be as for two vavassors . (Usatges 4) In the case of the vavassor who has five milites , his murder carries reparation of 60 ounces of refined gold; for wounding, 30. If he has more milites, the composition will increase in proportion to their number. Whoever kills a miles will give a composition of 12 ounces of gold. Whoever injures one, inflicting one or more wounds, owes him 6 ounces of gold in reparation. (Usatges 5;1991:196).

From this book of rules, the Usatges, we can derive the logic that establishes a noble hierarchy with four levels: viscounts (equivalent to the count’s ambassadors or district commissioners), comtors, vasvessores (custodians or administrators of castles) and milites having these equivalencies:

Viscount = 2 comtors
Comtor = 2 vasvessores

(Plus, the number of
milites held increased
one’s status).

This can clearly be seen in Box 8.4, fashioned after Bonnassie:

Box 8.4. Compensation for Murder & Injury
(in ounces of gold)
Death Injury
Viscounts 160 120
Comtors 80 60
Vasvessores 40 30
Milites 12 6
Peasants 6 2

There was stratification at every level of society. Among the counts, the one in Barcelona was supreme, acting as the chief count and eventually becoming the King of Aragón, referred to as the comte rei (count-king, pl. comtes reis). The majority of other comital families in Catalonia were resigned to this state of affairs. Of the Catalan counts, only Pons Hug II of Empúries attempted to fight to retain some semblance of his independence. He was totally defeated in battle by count Ramon Berenguer III (1097-1131) in 1128.
We get the idea that stratification was ancient. Writing as late as the fourteenth century, the Catalan author Eiximensis (ca. 1340-1409) recognized three classes in Catalonia and Castile: mayores, medianos and menores. Box 8.5 shows the content of these classes:

Box 8.5. Iberian Social Classes in the Fourteenth Century according to Eiximensis
Class Name Class Content
Mayores (about 1.5%
of the population) Nobles, high ecclesiastics &
royals.
Medianos (about 19%
of the population) Royal officials, merchants,
lawyers, knights, notaries,
doctors & master-craftsmen.
Menores (this class
comprised
80% of the population). Peasants, hired workers,
servants, sailors, soldiers, friars,
chaplains & beggars.

In early medieval times, the main conflict was between men of the Crown, Cross and Sword. There were constant power struggles over land and its incomes between counts, barons (or magnates), castle-lords and ecclesiastical lords. Eventually, as the cities (especially Barcelona) developed, municipal burghers (burgenses) entered the mix. When Catalonia joined with Aragón under a single count-king, this quest for power was joined by the rural barons of Aragón as well.
As individual aggrandizers struggled, they identified with their peers: Men of the Cross with their “kind;” Men of the Crown with their “kind” and their comtors or “sworn men;” and the Men of the Sword with their avaricious peers and the milites or knights supporting them in battle and their extortion of the people. While these men worked with those in other estates, they strongly identified with their fellows.

I will discuss the various estates, sometimes using simple emblems of their status and power:

 The Crown – for the power and authority of the king, count-king (comte rei) or count, especially the Count of Barcelona. While the symbol of a Crown is not usually used to depict a count, I use it because it is indicated in the Código ó Compilación de los Usatges or the Commemoracions of Pere Albert and other political documents established the Count of Barcelona as non est potestas nisi a Deo – deriving his authority from God. Thus, his powers to fulfill his legal, executive and judicial functions were being defined as royal, as in the case of a Divine King.

 The Sword – for the castle-lords of the seigneurie banale.

 The Cross – for the prelates and abbots of the church, who acted to form ecclesiastical estates in a fashion non unlike that of the castle-lords.

 The Purse – for the franchised city folk led by the entrepreneurial patricians. The urban merchants or bourgeoisie.

 The Pen – initially these were men embedded in the church, ecclesiastical scribes. Later, lay scribes or notaries became widespread and even later, poets and intellectuals took up the pen to both support and decry the other estates and the general frame of society in Catalonia.

 The Plow – peasant farmers, the majority.

But this process of identity invention did not occur in a sociocultural vacuum. Relative to our theme of domination, there existed a cultural hangover from previous eras that provided a hierarchical mental construct that would have framed all such efforts.
Men of these estates operated in a cultural milieu that supported stratification. Their aggrandizing efforts to secure a foothold of power and wealth were esteemed, though this was not always a complete acceptance of their self-interestedness and its excesses; but an overall cultural habitus nevertheless afforded higher-ups, of whatever stripe, respect and deference and few restrictions on their use of violence.
As new lands were settled, over time natural variations in soil, climate and luck in acquiring favorable technology led to economic stratification, but in the Marca Hispanica immigrants of all kinds carried a generalized hierarchy model of society. Based on this cultural format, the weaker members of the area were submitted to a feudal structure by the strong. Thus, even though peasants moved hundreds of miles from their natal areas of oppression, they found that system reproduced in the new lands of the Marca Hispanica and later again in New Catalonia.

The Peasantry

The overriding concern of the peasants with food is summed up in Fernand Bruudel’s sense of them as “a community of grain.” They formed the vast majority of the population. Until the “time of troubles” they had a great deal of freedom compared to serfs in other parts of Europe, sort of “frontier liberty.” Nevertheless, they formed the bottom rung on the social hierarchy.
In a frontier situation like that of the Marca Hispanica identity production was part of the settlement process. Most of the peasants were former slaves or farmers who had existed at the bottom of the social ladder elsewhere. Before the imposition of serfdom, no doubt, newly freed slaves were trying to carve out a new identity as free persons, while some at the knights were trying to move up into the noble class. All were creating an identity space for themselves in the outskirts of European civilization.
“Serf” was not a desirable or acceptable identity for tenant farmers and it is one that they fought, but also one that they ultimately had to accept in the legal system, if not in their hearts. They had survived under local customs that prevailed even in the turbulence of the period after the rule of the Visigoths and the advent of comital power emanating from Barcelona. They had a saying, No et deixis els costums vells pels novells (don’t leave old customs for new ones).
Yet peasants accepted the new tyrannical order. Why? Culture may have played a significant role in this. Looking up from the bottom, they may have seen little chance of overturning a moral order that was thought to be fixed in nature. Peter Burke feels that peasants of early modern Europe were mired in fatalism, particularism and traditionalism. A sort of fatalist passivity prevailed, a moralistic individualism in which human nature was seen to cause injustice, a state of which no man could really escape. Moreover, the clergy were telling peasants that they should really be looking to an eternal reward, rather than benefits in this world.
The lords did little to help the peasantry and ecclesiastical almsgiving was insufficient to meet their needs. As Mollat has noted, the wealthy actually put more pressure on the poor to provide them with rents and services and policed them more heavily in times of trouble. For example, if famine struck, the lords demanded their normal food payments.
Those of the church were supposed to aid the poor, but this was rarely the case. As an illustrative aside, we can see that this has not really changed through the ages. David Graeber recently noted that the poor are more altruistic than the rich, even though the latter have far more resources to give to charities. He says: “Studies of charitable giving, for example, have shown the poor to be the most generous: the lower one’s income, the higher the proportion of it that one is likely to give away to strangers” (2007:32). Archaeological evidence points in the same direction. In ancient times, in times of stress the rich did not feed the poor, but rather hoarded resources and fed themselves.
In the documents from centuries of abuse we hear the cries of serfs and get a sense of the violence and savagery that rained down on them during the Catalan "time of troubles." This can be seen in a quote from Bisson’s Tormented Voices: “the memorials of complain stand distinct from other accounts: they are accounts of violence …(and) arbitrary behavior…Their governing verbs are “to take” (tollere), “take away” (or “steal,” abstulere, auferre), “break (in)” (frangere), “strike” (or “beat,” verberare), “seize” (rapere), “eject” (eiicere), “lose” (perdere), and the like… .”

Relations between Estates

Let’s look for a moment at how those of the Cross and those of the Sword got along. Perhaps the most important driving factor in the relations between ecclesiastics and lay nobles was that each had something the other wanted. In spite of the fact that they competed with each other in life for land, tenants and political favor; they had a basis for creating an alliance. Lay nobles wanted to appear religious, supportive of the church, as this was expected behavior in Christendom and they wanted salvation. Ecclesiastics wanted to build the poleconomic base of Christianity in the frontier.
In the ideal, the church had started out in Catalonia as a protector of the poor against the private desires (L. privatas appentiones) of the rics-hòmens. Early parishes were organized largely by the peasantry. However, in the space of two centuries, the places of worship had passed almost entirely out of the control of the village communities into that of the great families and abbeys. Furthermore, baronial families regularly began to make land donations to the church, sometimes with peasants connected, acts of piety that further cemented the dual elements of the élite stratum – the Cross and the Sword. As a means of mystification, church doctrines impressed on the peasants to follow both their ecclesiastical and lay leaders in defense of their frontier homeland against the Infidels to the south and in governance of the land.
Sometimes lords sought acknowledgements from the Crown, at other times from the clergy. Aristocratic landowners with excess land or those with no direct descendants could strive for secular and ecclesiastical security at the same time. When land was given as a fief to laymen or as a donation to the church, it was frequently given only partially, holding back its use rights, at least for the lifetime of the donor. Also it could be given with the understanding that it would be improved. Again, some of these gifts to the clergy gleaned immediate cash for the donors, with the church acting as a finance corporation. Some of this financing was accomplished “under the table” to avoid the condemnation of the papacy over the question of usury.
Also, bishops and abbots acted as landlords in the manner of castle-lords. However, donated land by itself was of little use to the church, except as a long-term investment. It was labor that was in perpetual short supply. To make the land productive, labor was needed. All estates competed for laborers. The following example from Kosto illustrates the procurement of someone to work church land:
in 1068, Guitard received a grant from Sant Cugat del Vallès of the manse of El Vendrell on the condition that he work the land and return half of the profits to the monastery. The agreement required Guitard’s fidelity to the monastery…this was an increasingly common condition for agrarian contracts. On the other hand, the agreement also included the unusual provisions that the monastery would provide half of the oxen required for working the demesne, as well as 2 sesters of barley every year to defray Guitard’s expenses for transportation (2001:110).

Yet, nobiles wanted to give land to the church for two reasons. Sometimes they got a cash kickback to tide them over in a cash crunch. That was the worldly or short-term reasoning. On a longer plane, there were what Samuel K. Cohn calls “strategies for the afterlife.” It was thought by some that churchmen could provide secure guarantees of eternal life. If not that, then surely they had the means to elevate a donor’s family name in the here and now.
That was the strategizing from the side of the nobles. On the other hand, bishops and abbots had artfulness as well. No doubt ecclesiastical élites manipulated the desire of patrons to establish a public statement of their lineal prestige to the benefit of the church. In Catalonia, this was successful as donations grew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both sets of élites were using each other to augment their particular avenues to status creation and security.
In this history, we see men of high status in this life trying to codify their prestige through various fabricatory means in order to ensure their rights and privileges to dominate others and property. Apparently, for true believers, this fabrication of domination carried over into the next life, as genealogy became more important in defining the boundaries of family patrimony and the importance of an élite name opened more and more doors providinng greater poleconomic opportunities. That is, urban patricians (burghers) and upland lords alike began to invest in donations to the church, in being buried in the parish cemetery, in having elaborate burial and in general, becoming prominent men in the cult of the ancestors, their names inscribed on prominent tombs. Conspicuously, stratification extends beyond the grave. Bensch elaborates this process:
Because patrician houses had such shallow foundations in early thirteenth-century Barcelona, the commemoration of ancestors through masses, chapels, and family tombs had a critical role to play in stabilizing family identity. By connecting family names and ancestors to the traditions of local churches, a spiritual pedigree could anchor and reinforce a thin, wavering bloodline (1995:385).

There was a need to perpetuate the family line with elaborate ecclesiastical rituals and the creation of stylish tombs. If ecclesiastical promises of eternal salvation rang hollow in the ears of some aristocrats, there was always worldly esteem to consider. Dominance in society could be enhanced by symbolic linkage to the church. The augmentation of dominion through alliance with the church could be had by making eye-catching donations, becoming a patron of a tomb in a church or cathedral, having a mass said for one’s family or ancestors, or lighting a perpetual flame at a specially-appointed side-altar. Some élites even went so far as to gather the bones of their relatives from scattered graves to place them in a magnificent churchyard tomb, or better yet, in the cathedral itself.
All this anchored élite families to Deity through public acts of piety. As keeping the family patrimony together became increasingly important to family heads, sometimes subsidized religious rites were not just for individuals, but masses were specifically designated to be said for the parentela, the descent group or family line. With what Bensch calls “the most personalized touch” some élites would buy an expensive purple shroud, which after the funeral would be donated to the church to cover the tomb of a saint, linking the family ever more firmly to eternal life. One enterprising aristocrat went so far as to donate two purple shrouds – one for a saint and the other to be cut into priests’ robes. Evidently, he saw the value of covering his bases in both worlds.
Another strategy to ensure eternal distinction for an élite family was their attempt to secure places for their sons and daughters as ecclesiastical agents. This was a practice of lords from the hinterland, one which the up-and-coming burghers imitated. By the thirteenth century, several urban patrician houses had succeeded in having their sons serve the church. To an extent, for both rural and urban aristocrats alike, local monasteries and churches were simply a dumping ground for unwanted sons and daughters; but, on the other hand, their entry was a status symbol, especially for the urban élite, a sign of their election in this life and a foothold in the next. Their ecclesiastical strategy had both a short-term and a long-term aspect.
Catalonia in the Early Middle Ages was a tiny world and there must have been a great deal of exchange between élites of all stripes. The zenith of the city bourgeois would come later. In spite of minor tensions, men of the Crown and church worked closely together. Bishops went to war riding next to counts and castle-lords, for example. Also the church financed many campaigns against the Moors. The secular activities of such clerics (s. clericus) were not far afield from those of the average castellan of rural Catalonia. Men of both domains saw benefit in working together as protectors of public authority and the House of Barcelona donated a great deal of conquered land to the church, monasteries and military orders.
The Count of Barcelona had a special poleconomic relationship with monastic foundations acting as colonial agents on his behalf. Professor McCrank notes:
there was a comital policy of creating a balance of power between the regular and secular establishment of the church, balancing monastic centers in the countryside with the influence of bishops in their cities. Hence, the house of Barcelona became a major patron of strategically placed new monastic foundations. Through monastic communalism, the counts pursued a policy of colonization, resettlement, and agrarian expansion under the guidance of corporate enterprise that was resistant to both episcopal control and the vested interests of other comital families (1996:2:26).

In this way, monks who were willing to risk their lives and establish a base in the frontier lands were used to attract peasant settlers, spreading the authority of the Count of Barcelona. Lay brothers ran corporate farms or granges, relying on lay tenants for land clearance and development. McCrank continues:

They engaged in tradition of all sorts, held a distinct economic advantage in the form of papal exemptions from diocesan tithing and other privileges, and exploited local resources – both natural and human – to build large monastic domains. The image of small communities of lone monks carving civilization from the wilderness is appealing, but it has also been shown that in France and other areas most land reclamation had been begun, if not substantially completed, before the arrival of the monks (1996:2:31-32).

The Seigneurie Banale: Fabricating Serfdom by the Sword

The seigneurie banale can be defined narrowly or more broadly. In the narrow sense it is the violent usurpation by the castle-lords of public authority in the “time of troubles” – 1020-1060, when the count was supposed to protect the peasantry, but didn’t. Nevertheless, lordly exploitation of the peasantry was not confined to this brief period of defiance of the House of Barcelona. In reality, and in contrast to much of the rest of Iberia and indeed Europe, the Catalan seigneurie banale lasted for the next four hundred years and then was only slightly amended in the fifteenth century.
Also, there was a process of fabricating domination going on in the time before the troubled centuries in Catalonia that existed at two levels: (1) the forming of the House of Barcelona and its tenuous hegemony over the region; and, (2) smaller lordly bannums (commands) wherein the lords fabricated customs and practices that tied peasants to the land in various degrees of servitude and gave the lords rights to extract dues and services from them.
Prior to 1020 these bannums were not especially onerous by medieval standards. The Marca Hispanica was a frontier and peasants needed some protection against foreign marauders and criminals. For such protection they traded part of their surplus and services.
The reason why the bannum became oppressive during the seigneurie banale was due to the disappearance of opportunities to raid and loot the Muslim territories to the south and southeast. Prior to 1020, the lords derived much income from such adventures and did not need to place heavy burdens on the peasantry.
What changed the situation was the fact that the Count of Barcelona established peace treaties with the Muslim principalities, exacting parias (tribute) in gold in return for promises that the raids would stop. This deprived Catalan lords of their main source of income and they turned their violence homeward. Furthermore, as Box 8.6 shows, gold was becoming plentiful in the region during the “time of troubles” and this set off a scramble for status and power among the lords.

Box 8.6. Increase in Gold use in Catalonia’s
Commercial Transactions
Date Percent
1040s 39
1070s 77
1070s in
Barcelona 95

I have detailed this oppression in detail elsewhere (Mendonsa 2008). In this chapter I am focusing more on the legalistic encoding of the oppression than on the rampaging by paladin lords, though for roughly a forty-year period they used threats and violence to place the peasantry in a state of fear, exacting in the process enough wealth to maintain their aristocratic lifestyles.
This was immoral tyranny on two accounts. First, the Count of Barcelona was responsible for the protection of the weak in his domain. He did not stop the berserk storm of violence inflicted on the poor. Though in all fairness, the count could not move against the lordship militarily because they castle-lords and their knights were the only source of combatants at this time in history as widespread use of mercenaries was a thing of the future. Secondly, the bannum was, by definition, a reciprocal agreement between lord and peasant, with the former protecting the latter against bandits, some of whom were neighboring lords. In the seigneurie banale, the many of the lords became bandits.
What concerns us here is how this immoral behavior, the threats, intimidation and actual violence, eventually led to exactions that were justified by laws. After 1060, the count and regional lords participated in a legalization of the oppression carried out during the seigneurie banale at the tip of a sword. This functioned to enserf the peasants, transforming them into codified serfs.

Fabricating Serfdom by the Pen

The establishment of féodalité et seigneurie resulted in the diminishment of the collective rights of peasants. Many local communities had established households that drew on collective resources – pasture, timberlands, meadows, stone quarries, streams – that were controlled as commons by the peasant community. The castle-lords usurped these customary rights. Under the bannum imposed by the seigneurs, use of the commons would have to be purchased. In effect, the seigneurie banale placed a price on things and services that previously had been free or organized according to a communalistic ethos. In this process the scattered surpluses of the peasant economy were concentrated into the hands of the dominant class.
In the seigneurie banale, the landed élite struggled to round out their terrorism and level their subject population to subaltern legal status. Enserfment was the goal. The castle-lords added bannum to their possessions, especially the right to rule in capital crimes, but also the right to fabricate laws to tie peasants to them as serfs. Some free peasants were forced, at the tip of a sword, to sign written contracts that transformed them into serfs, bound to the lord in perpetuity. Temporarily, the landed seigneury took on the functions of a state, holding powers of lordship over land and people. Law was privatized, so to speak.
When the rules became “firmed up” after the worst of the troubles, they favored élites. Land and rights to peasant dues and services were concentrated in the jurisdictions of powerful castellans. The “firming up” process was done by a reasoned choice of regulations that upheld lordly claims and a re-working of others. The castle-lords and their scribes picked through the laws to be found in:
 Ancient customs (costumes)
 Roman law (especially important)
 Visigothic law
 Ecclesiastical (canon) law
 Carolingian law
 Comital law (lex regia)

The “sorting” process led to a new set of codes that was eventually agreed upon by the Count of Barcelona, who needed the support of the castle-lords. This reformulation of law benefited the ruling class at the expense of the newly-defined serfs.
Box 8.7. Permanency of Class Relations before,
during & after the Seigneurie Banale
Class
Structure Before During & immediately
after Long after during the emergence of the Crown of Aragon-Catalonia
Rich & powerful Count of Barcelona Count & castle-lords King
Castle-lords Castle-lords & powerful
burghers
Middling gentry
(miles) Middling gentry (miles) Middling gentry (miles) Middling gentry (lesser burghers & rich peasants)
Poor & powerless Poor & powerless Poor & powerless Poor &
powerless

Words have power. In society, there are those who script codes and those who carry out the scenarios created by the scriptors (scriptwriters). In the Catalan case, the idle rich – the castlans – were the scriptors, those hatching plans that would benefit themselves. Their plans were not socially positive, not designed to increase human security in terms of building institutions and economic means of achieving a better life for the populace. Moreover, these immoral laws were eventually codified in the Constitcions de Cataluyna in the fourteenth century, as well as many interim legal statutes.
These codes created bondsmen or serfs who were known as remenças. This term derived from their requirement to pay a “redemption fine” to leave their lord’s and tenements. This was formalized servitude and it was severe. Professor Freedman says of Catalonia, it “developed a form of lordship similar to that of the rest of Europe but more severely applied.” Moreover, it was to outlast European serfdom.
Serfdom in Catalonia was about tying tenants to land in order to extract the maximum amount of dues and services possible. This cut into any sense of freedom former residents of allodial manses had. In effect, the allod-holder (freeholder) had ceased to be the real master of his land or life under the seigneurie banale. He could no longer alienate his land without the lord’s consent (laus) and usually this was permitted only between tenants of the lord’s domain – within the castrum. The idea was to prevent land from going to anyone outside the legal scope of his ban. Freehold property had expired under the weight of onerous obligations loaded upon it. Under the seigneurie banale, increasingly, castle-lords obtained ownership of land and human beings, which were bought and sold like chattel. Even the donations to the church came with bondsmen attached. Men were giving men to “God” in hopes of saving their eternal souls. Regarding servitude’s causes, Professor Freedman says:
There is only an imperfect dichotomy between the “real” world of economic well-being and the “artificial” world of legal status. Precisely because of their artificiality, determinations of servitude or privilege, backed by institutions and force, changed the condition of the peasantry and explain part of the impetus for the changes between tenth and thirteenth centuries (when freeholders were transformed into serfs – my addition;1991:13).

Freedman goes on to point out that in this time period, farmers were “unquestionably serfs,” that is men tied to the lord through a hereditarily transmitted bond. They were “men of their lords” and not at liberty to leave lord’s bannum. They were homines proprii et solidi – bondsmen. Another term was added to documents – affocati (tied to the hearth) to give greater strength to the bond. Clearly aristocrats were starting about the work of formulating laws – what the people called mals usos – bad customs. These were documents drawn up by the lordship and there was undoubtedly an element of coercion in the making of such vows. Bondsmen were subject to fines if they broke these rules. Behind all this was the raised sword.
When a serf was jurally attached to a castrum, he paid dues to the lord. Needless to say, those rents went up constantly. One of the attractive features of a long-term contract, from the perspective of the tenant, was to acquire security against inflation in his obligations. To get around this, the lords added extra rents such as braçatge (one-sixteenth of the crop) on the crop. Another was the vignogolia, a levy on the wine harvest. These were also subject to price rises over time. They were added on top of regular dues. Such increases worsened the position of the tenants over time (you may recognize this from our discussion of the case of the Scottish Highlands).
The oppression of the lords on the peasantry was about degradation to their self-esteem by treating them as slaves, not allowing them to move about and forcing them to pay arbitrary rents. During the seigneurie banale, things got worse for the peasants. The Pen writing the contracts was held in a aristocratic hand, or more correctly the hand of a scribe, often a monk. Most aristocrats were illiterate at this point in history. As time passed, contracts and convenientiae used to document domination gave way to even more formal authentication e.g., the juridical texts and constitutions of the Crown corts (House of Lords), which formalized the serfdom of the peasantry. The increasingly official oppression of the peasantry congealed into the mals usos of the period between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.
This new servitude did little to the amount of rents paid. Free and unfree paid more or less equally, but the difference came in the increase in liability of serfs under the mals usos and redemption payments. A serf who wished to move out of a lord’s jurisdiction had to pay the redemption fee himself, even if he was moving to be under the dominion of another lord. Furthermore, servile status opened the bearer up to arbitrary law enforcement by the castle-lord, which often led to additional exactions and economic burdens, none of which could be effectively appealed to any higher authority since by the end of the twelfth century the Count of Barcelona and the castle-lords were all more or less reading from the same page.
Homines proprii or owned men were not merely individuals, but whole families could be owned, some by monks and cathedral chapters. How did this situation come about? The answer lies in pledges required of peasants by the lords, made in the presence of notaries. Once recorded, these writs became reference points for continued enserfment. Castellans were able to require those living within their jurisdiction to submit to such registration and documentation.
The linkage between chattel slavery and serfdom beginning in eleventh century Catalonia can be seen in the emergence of the legal concept of ius maletractandi issued by the Catalan corts in 1212, but which de facto began in the eleventh century. This marked the appearance of the concession of a right of mistreatment to lords with respect to their enserfed tenants. It was an inversion of the normal understanding of law as protection. Nobles became exempt from prosecution for mistreating their tenants and they were given the right to disenfranchise peasants for minor delicts and non-compliance. These laws weakened the previous protection of the peasantry by counts and by the church’s sanctity legislation. New charters and writs gave the wielders of the Sword new Pen-power. Relative to the peasants, these written documents were of two types: commendations and recognition charters. In the former, a peasant was converted into a serf – his or her status changed. In the latter, the existing status and obligations of the peasant was confirmed – his or her status did not change, but was recorded so that there was a public record of the relation of the peasant to the lord.
Along with the emergence of legal mistreatment of tenant farmers – ius maletractandi – there was also a linguistic shift. They had been called rusticos previously, but were transformed into remenças (serfs) becoming men lacking manners (cultura), virtue (virtus), luz (light) and ingenio, the special intelligence nobles felt they possessed. Lacking such attributes, which can be summed up in the label nobilitas, serfs also lost the privilege to govern and were eternally assigned to the status of subalternus – “those below.”
Rules changed at the Sword’s tip and were firmed up at the point of the Pen. The feudalization of Catalonia was about aristocrats gaining control of land, labor and dues. Violence and extortion got them part of the way there; but they had to complete their oppression by effecting rule changes. For example, inheritance became more important. Castle-lords wanted the designation of a single heir (hereu). Partible inheritance was now to be avoided, keeping family wealth together, preventing the fragmentation of the patrimony. By 1160, this practice was established and assured the lord uncontested and uninterrupted succession preventing the fragmentation of property.
The lives of tenants also became more onerous as formerly free land was consolidated into large estates. Fields, orchards and vineyards were regrouped into “rational” units to stabilize exaction of dues and services. From these huge estates, many owned by the church, a serf family was given a plot to work. Previously, a free allod-holder who had leased from a monastery or wealthy landowner a parcel situated on the border of his own property could stop working it if he chose. This could be done without incurring any sort of fault, but with the coming of serfdom the tenant no longer had the right to leave his holding. He had become a legally documented remença serf.
Thus, rent contracts became an instrument of tyranny in most cases, as the contract normally indicated that the lessee was to reside “all the days of his life” on the land leased to him and his family (ibi semper stetis dum vixeretis). Tied to his land, the remença serf had almost no rights. He could not sell the lease and on his death, he could only pass it on within his family, thus preserving the lord’s hold in perpetuity. In effect, sons were being born into serfdom and daughters’ marriages were controlled by the landlord under the custom called ferma de spoli.
Feudal aristocrats were not trying to improve the productivity of their farms, but rather they worked to fabricate jural means of securing their dominion over poor farm workers. Rather than bolstering the productivity of his land the lord simply attempted to secure a legal hold over more land and serfs. As Professor Bisson notes, the “most lucrative trade was in lordship.” And some of these aristocratic hoodlums could be very petty in their mistreatment of the serfs and must have had a great impact on the identity of self worth of those so afflicted. For example, lords took all sorts of items from their tenants:
These were household stores of provisions, including substantial measures of feedgrain, wheat, … wine, bacons, and chickens. Berengarius Bonfill claimed to have lost a horse, a plowshare, and an axe. Everyone itemized seizures of clothing, coverlets, towels, and other forms of cloth, shoes, pottery, and utensils for cooking and eating. The list could go on (Bisson 1998:56).

The Emergence of Convenientiae

The written agreements known as convenientiae began in Catalonia with the phrase, Hec est convienientia (“This is the agreement”). During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, these documents were part of a trend of using documents to establish the poleconomic order. The convenientiae were documents, covenants or written agreements commonly used throughout Lombardy, Provence, Languedoc (on the Frankish side of the Pyrenees) and in Catalonia to the south. They can be defined as contracts by which two parties came to an agreement, freely and without the intervention of any public or private jurisdiction, about the definition of the obligations binding one to the other and pledged their fulfillment. They were part of the attempt by castle-lords to cover up (in paper) the injustices perpetrated during the height of the rampages of the mid-eleventh century. Such documents were constructed to legitimize the acquisitive actions of the castle-lords and their milites castri (knights).
Convenientiae tended to record agreements in four steps: default, warning, opportunity to amend and application of sanctions. These were stacked in favor of aristocrats. For example, how could a peasant issue a summons to a castle-lord or count in violation of an agreement? Or more correctly, how could he enforce a summons even if he got an advocate to issue one? Lords could warn (commonere) and demand (mandare) conformity from a peasant because he had the military capacity to follow up, whereas the reverse was not true. Even angry crowds of peasants attacking a castle could rather easily be dispersed by the charge of a few mounted knights. Counts had messengers (missi or nuncii) to deliver summons and the martial power to back up their message. If the peasant sent such a messenger, he was more easily detained or abused (reguardum habere) by the castle-lord than would be the case in reverse. Potestas was the power to command and to punish. Demanding potestas of a castle would be far more difficult than trying to control a peasant’s manse. Settlement of a dispute by ordeal or trial by battle would favor a castle-lord who would have a knight of the castum perform this on his behalf, whereas the average peasant would lack men to back him up.
Convenientiae emerged at the beginning of the seigneurie banale. During the formation of Catalonia, documentation of the poleconomic power structure became important to élites. Kosto says, the trickle of convenientiae that existed between the 1020s and the 1040s “became a flood” from 1050 on. Fewer than fifty survive from the first half of the eleventh century, while over six hundred are preserved from the latter half. In every region, counts, viscounts, bishops, abbots, clerks, castlans, and peasants all took advantage of the new form to record their agreements.
Why did the convenientiae emerge at this time in Catalan history? And why did the convenientiae and other written forms come to replace the older placitum? It appears that this was part of the general breakdown of comital authority, which was the basis of the placitum, and a move toward particularistic settlement of disputes and ordering of relations. Individual lords could have scribes write up documents on an ad hoc basis, one suited to the uniqueness of the situation without reference to public authority. This was a time of innovation and the creation of new ways of recording élite interests and of ordering relationships between each other and property. Kosto says:
Scribes, from Vic and elsewhere, added the term convenientia to these records of dispute settlement, but this does little to clarify matters. It is often impossible to distinguish, on the basis of content, between convenientia, concordia, diffinitio and placitum. Scribes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were released from the framework of their early medieval formularies, which had presented them with the three principal options described in chapter I: notitia, exvacuatio, and conditiones sacramentorum. Faced with a more flexible procedure to record, they failed to create standardized types of records. But they nevertheless created records, and that in itself is significant (2001:102).

Convenientiae framed the new feudal order. They were drawn up to try to regularize the somewhat violent relations between magnates in Catalonia. For example, in 1183 a document was written to govern the relations between Galceran de Sales and Berdat de Romanyà in which the latter promised not to take violent action against Galceran or allow harm to come to him at his castle of Romanyà. For his part, Galceran promised that if any conflict erupted between them, he would not attack Romanyà. In addition, Berdat promised not to establish any new customs (novitates) in the lands subject to the castle and “paid to Galceran the sum of 200 soldi.” It is clear from this case that Galceran was superior to Berdat and that the latter was receiving a fief in return for fidelity and military service.
Clearly convenientiae illustrate relations of power, lords and counts tying knights and lesser men to the castle and to broader military service with promises of land, loot and social elevation. These linkages are explicit in the documents of the day dealing with homage, fidelity, the grant of a fevum, military service and a system of working the land. Convenientiae emerged as patrimonial solidification became important viz., as land became scarcer and conflict between castellans over wealth came to the forefront.
The older oral form was less reliable in terms of proof and evidence in a court of law. Placita and convenientiae operated differently in important ways. The documents connected to a placitum were mainly a record of the oral testimony and the memory of witnesses. They pointed backwards, to custom and praxis. The convenientiae looked to the future. These newer documents established relationships between lords and men with regard to castles, land and privileges and attempted to solidify the relations involved in the protection and exchange of such material wealth and the power it generated. Convenientiae were detailed mechanisms to guarantee the stability of these relationships into the future and to ameliorate any conflicts over property and privileges that might arise. The structure of the placitum world looked back to custom; but the new world of documentation devised in the eleventh century looked forward to a new order of things. And unlike the tenth century comital placitum, the use of forward-looking written documents was an attempt to firm up a family’s hold on property and privileges and this was a much broader phenomenon than the exercise of public or comital law. Castle-lords, bishops, monks and even peasants were scrambling to document their holdings. These were new popular instruments of poleconomic power.

The Remença War and the Sentencia

From the time of Ramon Berenguer I (1017-1035), the counts had been supportive of the barons against the interests of the peasants. This backing briefly faltered in the events leading up to the Remença War of the fifteenth century. Why did this rebellion come to pass? Historians disagree as to the exact mix of causes, but at this time the serfs rallied, became organized, armed themselves and demanded freedom from the weightier mals usos and the ius maletractandi, especially the restriction on their ability to move out of the lord’s jurisdiction. In 1395, there were about twenty thousand remença households who fell under these laws. This constituted approximately a fourth of the Catalonia population and there were many other peasants who were not strictly serfs, but who were subject to some feudal exactions such as contributing toward the maintenance of ruined castles. Times had changed. Most castle-lords were now not involved in combat except in ceremonial jousts. Militarism had become property of the state and was directed externally in importance ventures. Also, intellectuals in the royal court and society were beginning to question the morality of serfdom.
Yet this threat was critical to nobles and the church, both receiving almost all their income from renders paid by serfs. Even the city government of Barcelona owned several baronies nearby. Additionally, individual burghers in Barcelona and other urban areas had acquired feudal rights and, consequently, their interests were interwoven with the rural nobility and clergymen who lived off of the surplus labor of the peasantry. Freedman comments on the peasants’ motives:
What they were opposing was in some respects the increased oppression following the economic dislocations of the fourteenth century. The tightening of lordship constituted a response to a crisis of revenue and perhaps influence. It has been shown, however, that the targets of the Remenças were customs established and routinely levied long before the Black Death and the factional conflicts of the fifteenth century. The ultimate success of the peasants was due to the convergence of war and social conflict, to the unusual (if not always dependable) favor of the king, and perhaps to some division among the powerful about the utility and justice of at least the symbolic aspects of the servile regime (2003:202).

For whatever reasons, the serfs had had enough and there were those in the royal household who supported them, if not always for the right reasons. Aristocrats were divided on this issue. The conservative diputació (executive committee of the corts) and the audiencia (supreme ruling council) were anti-remença to be sure. In their attempts to maintain serfdom, the lords created the fiction that the struggle was, not with the peasantry, but with the Barcelona rulers. It was framed as a constitutional struggle between the independent rights of owners and the Barcelona administration. The disputació cast itself in the role of the protector of Catalan liberties and tradition. Its members claimed the right to dominate remenças by virtue of custom, existing documents and legislation. They also used classic propaganda techniques e.g., in 1462 the Barcelona counselors accused the remenças of being evil men, ones who would upset the hierarchy of God’s realm with a radical egalitarian society.
In that same year, precipitating a civil war, the Catalan diputació sent the militia against the rebellious farmers in Gerona and also against Queen Juana, whom they perceived to be a supporter of the rebels. However, in a break in the fighting in about 1474, it was evident that the Crown’s support of the peasantry was faltering, even though peasant armies had fought with the King Joan II (1458-1479) against the French and others who wished to take advantage of the civil war. In a conference with the Catalan lords held in Gerona, the king agreed with the most onerous symbol of servitude – the right of lords to mistreat their homines proprii with or without cause (ius maletractandi).
Royal support of serfdom became codified. In 1486, it was Fernando I (el Católico, 1412-1416) who proclaimed the infamous Sentencia Arbitral de Guadalupe. This established the legal and social relationships in the Catalan region and stipulated a series of repressive moves to pacify the area and re-establish the principles of authority. The “Sentencia” did away with the compulsory nature of the “Six Abuses” that were a combination of duties that bound the peasants to their grounds as serfs of the castle-lords. However, the peasants still had to pay for each of the mals usos abolished. This policy put an end to an issue that had threatened Catalonia during three reigns.
The remença peasantry disappeared, giving way to the enfiteutico peasantry, in which a peasant enjoyed the right to work the land, but still needed to pay dues to his lord, direct dominion over the land staying in aristocratic hands. The barony also maintained civil and criminal justice and appointed mayors and juries as upholders of the law. Some have argued that the Sentencia mainly benefited the privileged segment of the peasantry, leaving rural conditions largely unchanged. Certainly, the peasant wars were only partially successful with the poorer peasants remaining impoverished and powerless in the face of fabricated domination.
 
SOURCES – CHAPTER 8: CATALONIA

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Amelang, James S. 1982. The purchase of nobility in Castile 1552-1700, Journal of European Economic History 11:219-226.

Amelang, James S. 1986. Honored citizens of Barcelona: Patrician culture and class relations, 1490-1714. Princeton: University Press.

Archer. M. 1988. Culture and agency: The place of culture in social theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barber, Malcolm. 1994. The new knighthood: A history of the Order of the Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barthélemy, Dominique. 1995. Castles, barons and vavassors in the Vendômois and neighboring regions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In: T. N. Bisson (Ed.). Cultures of power: lordship, status and process in twelfth-century Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 56-68.

Bensch, Stephen P. 1995. Barcelona and its rulers, 1096-1291. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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