Domination: Chapter 9

9. Fabrication, Imperialism and the Extortionate State in Catalonia

The Rationalization of Rule

In twelfth century Catalonia communication between government officials and locals was less legal than it was informal, based on customs, the spoken word, of reminders, sometimes spilling over into intimidation. The Catalan legal system was profoundly affected by the increased use of convenientiae and written documents. Though presumably informal settlements continued to occur, the definition of evidence changed in formal court settings e.g., seigneurial, comital and ecclesiastical. The new legal system was moving away from the other means of settlement and toward a new officialdom. And in comitally-supervised settlements there was a shift from oral to written procedures; from the more or less oral placitum to a court based on the book. Before the document explosion of the eleventh century, in the ninth and tenth centuries, there was a working legal system organized by comital officers. These codes and practices were recorded in the Liber Iudiciorum. Yet, this was largely an oral system, with testimonies and oaths being given at assemblies (placita), though documents were admitted as evidence. This was variously presided over by counts, viscounts, bishops, abbots and secular judges. Wrong was assessed to one of the litigants or a judicial decree was issued. The proceedings were documented in writs called notitiae. Other writs were variously called recognitio, professio, exvacuatio and conditiones sacramentorum.
The Forum Iudicum, or the “Gothic Book,” as it came to be known, was a law book held by later counts. Legal representatives of comital law referred to the codes contained in the book to make legal decisions, the Forum Iudicum being openly consulted by judges. This was done in a formulaic fashion. Citations were largely procedural, rather than having to do with the interpretation of law. There was a bit of ritual or public display in this, the book acting as a relic and symbol of the past. Hence, it appeared to those present that things were being done “by the book.”
Legal changes produce concomitant changes in social life. That is, law affects social status and relations in society. Legal creation is more than a learned masquerade. It is the power to transform. Paul Freedman says of Catalan relations:
Legal teachings and innovations influenced relations between Lords and peasants, even when not describing an already-established actuality. The act of categorization can be shown to have had real-world influence on the mobilization of seigneurial power, its legitimization, the behavior of state authority, and the lives of the peasants (italics original; 1991:220).

This change, however, was not uniformly directed or felt in society. It was asymmetrically directed and legal change sponsored by élites had differential effects in society. As a case in point, written documents came into widespread use after the period of blatant cruelty (1020-1060). Writing gave brutality a distinctly legalistic cast. Through the Power of the Pen, paladin abusers became dignitaries and honored citizens. Documents became evidence, in a legal sense, even if the holder of the document could not read them. When legal conflict came up, documents proved essential. Bensch says:
In 1207, one donor was forced to declare that no document relating to the property in question remained in her possession, and later in the century documents were drawn up to record the transfer of charters kept in a box from one party to another for safekeeping. Even for those with the most rudimentary understanding of Latin, the manipulation of written texts already played a critical role in the business activities and judicial system of Barcelona in the eleventh and 12th century (1995:376).

This “new law” (increasingly comital law) was fashioned by the powerful in society. Voluntary settlements were nominal. In fact, the prohoms, local notables, had much more power to effectuate a desired result than peasants did. When such notable men appeared at a hearing to give evidence, act as signatories or intervene as official mediators (adiutores) or give judgment, they possessed cultural force embedded in their manner of speaking, dress and demeanor. It was asymmetrical justice. Formal procedures of adjudication had given the weaker party some protection. But the role of the prohoms expanded significantly. The collective weight of the prohoms claiming the privilege of interpreting local customs shifted the balance away from equality toward domination.
Writing was a poleconomic tool of the élite. By codifying custom, writing it down in their own way, formulating the words and phrases according to real or fabricated maxims of some ancien régime – Roman, Carolingian, canon or Visigothic – they could move law in the direction of their interests to the detriment of the illiterate class, those who merely signed the document with an X. Élites were doing the interpreting of ancient law, selecting or rejecting of its parts and its encoding. Law in their view became the law of the land, be it the seigneurial castrum or the larger domain of the Count of Barcelona.
Romanization of the legal process spurred state power. By the mid-twelfth century written evidence was well on its way to replacing ritual as authority, the latter being demoted to the status of mere ceremony. Monarchy had come to focus on written law and genealogy as testimony of valid claim. Until 1220, both compromise settlements and this new formalized justice system existed side by side. After this date, private compacts and evacuations lost ground. Traditionally, they were used for minor disputes, particularly over common walls and gutters between neighbors. Important cases were now settled by officialdom. Arbiters were still employed, but now they tended to have formal legal training and “they reached decisions fully exonerating or condemning the litigants.” Bensch sees this as a more efficient system, with a scribe being permanently attached to the court as of 1227. He says, “The transformation of the vicar from a ruggedly independent, often defiant delegate of comital authority to a dependable agent of justice presiding over regular courts reached its conclusion in the early thirteenth century, lending stability to local administration but also undermining the authority of prohoms and the method of dispute resolution they promoted” (1995:80).
This formalization of law had been going on for centuries by the time poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries decried the rise of legal sophistry and the confusion created by lawyers using Roman law to slow the legal process. In other words, the legal process was seen as having legitimately become dominated by the state and the élite estates e.g., the high ecclesiastics, nobles, knights and leading bourgeois.
A strong royal framework of legality had emerged after the chaos of the seigneurie banale. It was a royal system supported by rural lords and urban patricians. The count set up town councils to aid in governance. The men who acted as consuls were not unlike prohoms. They had élite interests, not those of the peasantry. Once more, Bensch notes that they were more formal in settling disputes, following the line of reasoning that this was an improvement. He sees the use of Roman law in the vicar’s court and town councils as a positive step. The consuls and the vicar were vying to dole out normative justice. I’ll bet they were vying for poleconomic positioning too. They were agents of a new form of domination, or rather an old one that had preceded the iniquities of the seigneurie banale. But just because legal processes became formalized and fell back into the bailiwick of the count-king in Barcelona, we must not automatically assume that this was not an exploitative system. Increased royal domination was still domination. Bensch hints at this later, saying that in spite of the organized and dependable nature of comital justice, below the surface, a tense, drawn-out struggle for power took place within the city. Professor Bensch indicates, however, that the change was positive. He sees secular urban courts as an improvement over the arbitrary justice of the castle-lords. He says:
The legal transformations behind the revival are multiple and intertwined: the promulgation of the complete Usatges with a marked regalian tone by count Ramon Berenguer IV, probably between 1149 and 1151; the infiltration of Roman and canon law into Catalonia in the twelfth century; and a renewed interest in Visigothic law…the distinctions between the various legal traditions are largely irrelevant, for they all Reinforced the power of the vicar and promoted the use of documents, the summoning of witnesses, and the dispensation of authoritative judgment (1995:80).

After 1250, the new legalism of the state gave rise to a cohort of lawyers, the iurisperiti. Over the next forty years, thirteen individuals appeared in Barcelona charters having the title of iurisperitus (lawyer). The professionalization of law was proceeding both within the auspices of the Crown and of the noble community. Romanizing formulae were being memorized and put to use. Prominent burghers who were knowledgeable in law were often appointed to assist the vicarial courts of Barcelona, attaching magister to their names. Members of the urban patriciate slowly absorbed the new legalism. They came to see the value of a knowledge of Roman and even canon law. This tied burghers ever more closely to the king and gave them access to public office and entrepreneurial opportunities. Royalist rather than republican sympathies provided a distinctive legalistic coloring to Barcelona’s patriciate. By the thirteenth century, some were called advocats or barristers and the lesser lawyers doing the legal paperwork were notaris. The rise of notaries or scribes at this time was a wide-flung phenomenon. Baldwin notes:
within the Mediterranean cities appeared the profession of notary, who attended to the legal side of business by translating documents, keeping records and certifying contracts. The notaries’ place in Bologna in the late thirteenth century is attested by their palace in the center of town. By that time a special school and curriculum had emerged to teach notarial science, for which Bologna was renowned. The result of these communal and notarial schools was to create a small but increasingly influential class of literate laity, which would have been an anomaly in an earlier period. The movement began in Italy, but by the thirteenth century all of western Europe was feeling its effects (1971:32).

Along with the new legalism, was there a new compliance? It depends on the class of the accused and his relative power vis-à-vis the accuser. We might keep in mind that in a stratified society, there are different levels of “withdrawal power.” The reader should not get the impression that the legalization of poleconomic life in medieval Catalonia led to conformity on the part of the accused, even those convicted. Presumably the peasantry had less wiggle room, but I’m sure they did have their ways. But it was élites who could more easily ignore a verdict (L. iudicium) of the placita and other judicial fora. For example, the case in 1017 of Hug I of Empúries and the Countess Ermessenda. He claimed land she possessed. In his complaint against the countess, Hug had not used normal procedure and confronted her directly. When she had suggested a placitum, he countered with the offer to settle the matter by a trial by battle (between a knight from each camp). She parried, citing the inappropriateness of this settlement process in Gothic law. Hug, who allegedly had little respect for the fine points of legal procedure, seized the land by force.
Ermessenda initiated a standard legal proceeding with a complaint against Hug. A placitum was held but Hug was a difficult participant. The judges had to devise ways to keep him at the hearing. When the verdict went against him, Hug and other aristocrats of his region refused to accept it. He simply walked away and the only recourse at that point would have been the sword, but the records end there and we do not know how the case was resolved, if at all. In the absence of a strong public authority and powerful troops to back up its judicial judgments, avaricious lords with their own knights could defy higher authority. If one or more of the parties to a dispute were unwilling to accept the judgment of the court, the proceedings would devolve to the level of violence.
Open expropriation of the peasant surplus and the direct exploitation of the peasantry had to be legitimized. This was done by juridical means. The power of the lord over the servile peasant was usually expressed in jurisdictional terms. The rich and powerful intuitively understood that to remain rich and powerful they had to limit entry into their class. This was true of town oligarchs and of the rural seigneurs. They were aided by those men who profited from being at the periphery of their power. Hilton says that the seigneur controlled the means of making money and was helped in this by the conservative elements in the community. Hilton rightly zeros in on the legal and administrative structures noting that through the courts of the castrum either the lord or the village notables operated a deliberate policy of breaking up accumulated peasant holdings to prevent a significant enlargement of the property on behalf of the wealthier peasants. This legal framework had commercial ramifications and served to maintain the status quo in the community.

 
Centralization and New Forms of Power

Legal conditions were falling more and more to comital control. The corts of Catalonia and the cortes of Aragón had two noble chambers, but no equivalent of the House of Commons. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries in Catalonia, Aragón and Valencia, the cortes held legislative powers. From the fourteenth century they exercised the right to authorize taxation and to make changes in the law.
After the seigneurie banale, the Crown was becoming more solidified, though bureaucratization was slow, creeping from personal rule to the rule of law. Even at the joining of Aragón and Catalonia, the king’s rule was still quite personal, even arbitrary. But the political theory of the Usatges and the Peace of God, supported by the church and Barcelona, was growing, leading to territorial consolidation and the spread of public authority. The delegation of royal powers to the countryside would eventually be institutionalized. The structure of domination was being written, so to speak, in royal statutes:

So while the old curial title of “seneschal” became hereditary and honorific in the Montcada family, ministerial functions in diplomacy, justice, and finance evolved in the king’s court among the more enterprising knights, such as Bertran de Castellet in the time of Ramon Berenguer IV or Guillem Durfort in that of Peter II, but especially among the secular clerks and scribes through whose labours professional literacy became indispensable to government (Bisson 1986:51).

As with bureaucracies everywhere, it was the “behind-the-scenes” worker bees who laid the foundations for formalized domination. This formalization of government was preceding to the chagrin of the military élite of Old Catalonia, the one social cohort that had ceased to prosper in the late twelfth century, but it was lingering on nonetheless.
Even before 1200, the Count of Barcelona was keeping records and other counts began to follow suit. Their household governments were also being bureaucratized, using written communication to extend their power geographically and to provide a record of what was said and transacted. This extension function of written documents was important in uniting Catalonia’s geographically separated countships, a decentralized model that even extended into the Aragón-Catalonia alliance: Catalan and Aragonese government remained mostly decentralized, and at the very best the unions constituted a federation of secular and ecclesiastical lordships. The federation produced a network model that struggled for rationalization into a genuine system that would work with the unified Arago-Catalan dominion.
The reality of the realm was more disorder than canonists and secular lawyers would have liked, but written documents prevented it from becoming too disorganized and fragmented. Part of the problem was that the castle-lords who had received comital fiefs came to regard them as private property. There was always poleconomic tension between these independently-minded Men of the Sword and the shaky public authority of the Count of Barcelona and lesser counts. Written documents provided some “glue” to the tenuous hegemony.
A century after the end of the “time of troubles” (1020-1060) the count-kings 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 vicars. This court became the “hub of justice” in the city. Vicars assumed important new judicial and supervisory capacities (remember these were the same officers renown for promoting extortion in their role as “revenue farmers” for the Crown).
 
Box 9.1. Genealogies of Counts and Kings

Counts of Barcelona

(Overlapping Claims)
Bera 801-820
Berenguer ca. 830- ca.835
Bernard of Septimania ca. 820- ca. 844
Sunifred I 844-848
William son of Bernard 848-849/50 (by seizure)
Alleran 848-852
Odalric 852- ca. 858
Humfrid ca. 858-864
Bernard of Gothia 865-878
(Appointed by Carolingian Emperor)

Guifre the Hairy
(Wilfred I) 870-897 (killed in battle)
Guifre II
(Wilfred II Borrell) 897-911
Sunyer 911-947 (abdicated, dying in 950)
Miro 947-966
Borrell II 966-992
Berenguer Raymond
Borrell III 992-1017
Berenguer Raymond
I (the Crooked) 1017-1035
Raymond Berenguer
I (the Elder) 1035-1076
Raymond Berenguer
II (the Fratricide) 1076-1082
Time of confusion 1082-1097
Berenguer Raymond
III (the Great) 1097-1131
Raymond Berenguer
IV (the Saint) 1131-1162 (Also Count of Provence)
 
Box 9.2. Kings of Aragón & Catalonia

Alfons I (the Chaste) 1162-1196
Pere I (the Catholic) 1196-1213
Jaume I (the Conqueror) 1213-1276
Pere II (the Great) 1276-1285
Alfons II (the Liberal) 1285-1291
Jaume II (the Just) 1291-1327
Alfons III (the Benign) 1327-1336
Pere II (the Ceremonious) 1336-1387
Joan I (the Hunter) 1387-1395
Martin (the Humane) 1395-1410
Fernando I 1412-1416
Alfons IV 1416-1458
Joan II 1458-1479
Fernando II 1479-1516

Alfons I (1162-1196) assembled a more efficient royal fiscal administration to deal with wayward bailiffs. He knew his domains better than ever before – and such knowledge gave him power. With his death and those of his chief accountants, this efficiency waned, reverting to a lack of professionalism in auditing and accounting procedures, yet it limped along. By the death of Jaume I (1213-1276) the bureaucratization of rule was well under way. Besides the sheer mass of documents accumulated by this time, this process showed the following characteristics:
 Centralization;

 Use of litigation, where written evidence assumed primacy over oral tradition;

 Assembly-line production on paper, mass copying and standardization of diplomatic form, formulas, abbreviations, punctuation and terminology;

 Use of classification by region, sub-units and cross-referenced through toponymical and subject indices;

 Abstracts and extracts;

 Records management through registration systems that produced summaries and authentication e.g., the use of author names, addresses, dating, purpose statements, authorizations and witnesses.

The Count of Barcelona was able to bring the government together by using written documents, archives and retrieval systems and by institutionalizing a more rational accounting structure. The seigneurie banale was raw despotism. What we see afterwards is a slow process of institutionalizing the cruelty of the seigneurial reign of terror. De facto mistreatment of tenants becomes de jure. Violent mistreatment becomes ius maletractandi. While the seigneurie banale favored situational oppression by the élite element in Catalonia society, over time that torment became formalized and directed from Barcelona through a more organized system of offices. Professor Bensch and I view the same historical scene somewhat differently. A “dependable agent” for him is a positive step; whereas I would ask, “in what way is he dependable?” In answering my own question, I would say that the system of domination and extraction of value from poor people simply became formalized – moving the exploitation from the level of the countryside and castrum to the urban court – from the hands of the rural seigneur into those of the burgher in vicar’s robes. Moving from a face-to-face system of exploitation to a more formal one, where exploitation was embedded in law books and legal procedures may not be a positive step when viewed from where the peasant sits (or stoops). Somehow, from that perspective, a distant urban bourgeois vicar doesn’t seem to be a better extortionist.
In addition to newly institutionalized oppression in the national government, there were new players in the game of dominance – members of the urban burgess class. We have seen some trends: a shift in power from rural to urban and from the lordship to the Crown. Connected to the Crown, increasingly, were financially sound urban merchants capable of supplying the king with the wherewithal to pursue his goals.
Whereas in the earlier days bailiwicks were awarded based on feudal relationships and trust in the bailiff based on sworn fidelity, later writs speak of bailiwicks being bought and sold. They were also awarded to creditors to cover the Crown’s debt. A bailiwick could be sold (vendere) by promising the Crown some predetermined part of the revenues. Clearly, for a bailiff with a “sharp pencil,” this was an advantageous way of doing business because the bailiff often had a fair degree of management leeway, at least in some administrations. From time to time there were reports of a crackdown by Crown auditors to check fraud and sometimes stop the unfair oppression by the bailiff of peasants in his domain.
Furthermore, since some of the received goods were perishables, bailiffs sold them on the open market, yet another exchange that could be fiddled to his advantage e.g., by selling them below value to a family member or friend and then taking a kickback. Also, the type of coin taken in such a sale could be juggled, taking valuable coins and exchanging them for inferior or debased coins in the private accounts of the bailiff. Bailiffs could “play the market” by “selling” goods to an associate for a low price, who would then hold them till the market was better, splitting the difference with the bailiff. Men in Barcelona did not compete for bailiwicks for nothing.
With regard to fiscal accounts, they were often written in note form and later recorded in administrative registers, such as the Libri Computorum Domini Regis. That transcription offered another change for alteration, as the originals (one level of transcription already) were discarded. Even these, written on paper, tended to disappear in time. Thus the oral script register discarding of the oral record was a process that favored those doing the recording and discarding. When it was completed, the register book was the final authority, as one chronicler put it: “as it is written in the book of accounts of the Lord King.” The justification for these records lay with the bailiff and his scribes.
But true accountancy in a system in which the bailiff was collecting rents in kind, services and coin of various kinds and values was extremely dicey. There was not much in the way of routine reckoning from bailiwick to bailiwick. This enabled a falsification of accounts by the bailiff as dues in kind, those provided through service and cash of varying amounts and quality of coin were computed, one kind being converted into another. Off-books income was part of the bailiffs’ game.
As tenure of bailiwicks was foreshortened the Crown developed better auditing procedures to foil malfeasance by bailiffs, though this system of accountancy was not as rationalized as many in Northern Europe. The accounting procedures were better under some administrations than others and generally remained more personalized and ad hoc than in the north. In northern terms the accountability of the Catalan count-kings was not so much backward as culturally different. As Bisson says of Catalan government:
the burden of traditional practice weighed heavily on fiscal administration. The delegation of autonomy of accounts remained vulnerable to financial urgency and baronial pressure, the auditors incapable of drawing a clear line between ordinary and extraordinary finance. Better perhaps than any other such records of their time, the early fiscal accounts of Catalonia evoke the disturbing ambiguities of an evolution from patrimonial exploitation to public administration. They offer precious witness to a distinctively Mediterranean administrative culture in its formative age (1984:I:57-58).

In 1151, accounting in the royal bureaucracy took a new turn. In that year, a grand survey was compiled for the old comital domains being directed by Bertran de Castellet. His approach prescribed the obligations of the tenants in the count’s lordship and also specified the shares of bailiffs and vicars charged with collecting renders. “This marked a step toward accountable service in the count’s domains,” according to Bisson. Indeed, he elaborates:

It is likely that the survey of 1151 was preparatory to a more demanding supervision of the bailiffs, for soon thereafter audits for individual domains were being recorded in written forms that became regular in the 1170s. By that time the inquires into the deportment of functionaries had been in progress for many years, quite long enough to prove that tighter surveillance would not suffice to transform territorial lordship into administration (1998:75-76).

How the Crown used Documents to Dominate

In the twelfth century Count Ramon Berenguer IV sought to reestablish his judicial authority, codifying many customs and practices in a new compendium of the law of lordship and fiefs known as the Usatges de Barcelona. He also instituted the institution of the capbreu or inventory. It was to include statements (querimoniae) of what the office-holders had seized from peasants, as well as statements of account (computa). Bisson notes:
What was apparently new at that time was – to speak of an innovation of territorial lordship in our terms – the idea of administrative review, the idea that prescriptive accounts (such as capbreus) should be supplemented so as to afford periodic statements of collection and balance by means of which the ruler’s courtiers could form better judgments of the quality of service (1998:79).

A text can become a “rally flag” for an organization or a cohort of “true believers.” In Catalonia, the Count of Barcelona deftly used the Usatges in this fashion, building a political system that could effectively counter the aggrandizement of the Sword, the piety of the Cross and the eagerness of the Purse. By writing a text like the Usatges, the “blur and buzz” of real human behavior in the past becomes concentrated and framed in a certain way, usually one advantageous to the writer, writers or class of writers.
I have said that documents can be used as political tools or even as weapons. Let me illustrate that with a case from Francia. A jurisdictional dispute arose between the diocesan bishop, Bishop Arnoul of Orleans and the Abbot of Fleury. The bishop claimed the right to try a case concerning a monastery and the Abbot of Fleury said it should be referred to Rome. To break the stalemate, the abbot methodically set to work researching his case. He put together all his arguments in two collections of texts between 991-994. His research was organized in favor of monastic liberty contra episcopal authority. His documents claimed the right to refer any dispute between the bishopric and a monastery to the pope. Armed with these texts, the abbot set off for Rome. His presentation of the case, backed up by researched texts, won him a privilege of giving Fleury an exemption from the coercive power of the bishopric. His case, as presented in Rome, was no different from that which he had been making for years in letters directed to the pope, but the mere fact that his ideas were now documented and arranged in a logical format based on research gave his argument punch.
The Count of Barcelona could not rule effectively by sending armies to force every minor rebellious prince to his knees. That would have been an impossible task. More effective bureaucratic administration was the key option and written documents greatly facilitated this, as governors and churchmen and lay governors began to rely more and more on public records. They could consult public archives; but more importantly, records (or copies) could be transported to a point of crisis in the countryside. Thus, rule of law could be taken to areas the central government was trying to tame, and there were many frontier towns in early Catalonia.
As the castle-lords were busy formulating a new world of peasant domination, so too did the Count of Barcelona reformulate his relation to them and the people at large using documents to establish feudal ties with rural magnates, to provide town franchises and to record the proceedings of legal actions, courts and later parliamentary doings. As with the Frankish society of its roots, life in Catalonia was transformed into one largely dependent on the written word for its religion, legal system, government and learning.
Roman archives did not survive intact. Medieval scribes wishing to use Roman law as a justification for present practices had to rely on scraps of parchment, scattered documents and glosses. Thus, the medieval record was creative according to McCrank. In other words, scribes had to interpret and interpolate quite a bit, and there were thousands of forgeries designed to re-create Roman law in the image held in the mind of the scribe and/or his employer. Baldwin notes that this had been done prior to the seigneurie banale and its aftermath:

The initial problem for the formation of legal science was the assembling of authoritative legal texts, but for the Romanists this task had been performed long ago. In the sixth century the Emperor Justinian at Constantinople had ordered the compilation of all Roman law into four major books: the Institutes (an elementary legal manual), the Digest (a collection of legal interpretations of the great classical jurists), the Code (legislations), and the Novellae (new laws). The total collection was known as the Corpus iuris civilis and embodied the highest expression of the Roman legal genius for centuries (Baldwin 1971:71).

The Corpus iuris civilis (a.k.a. the Justinian Code) was available to students of law in the eleventh century and greatly influenced how Catalan law was put together, but again Catalan scribes had optional law codes and could cherry pick which laws they wanted to support their case. Nevertheless, the Justinian Code was supportive of lex regia and would have been used extensively by comital lawyers. However, it did not come as a unified bundle, but with glosses and interpretations by contemporary jurists. Deciding which documents were the most important – fiscal records, privileges, titles to land and castles, treaties, decretals, glosses, summae – and then guarding them was a political act, obviously one with economic consequences. In a Weberian sense, Catalan officialdom was becoming rationalized with the preservation of hegemony in mind. McCrank notes that these governments, from Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1072) through Ramon Berenguer III (1097-1131), were beginning the process of using writing as a way to wield power across greater distances.
As Brian Stock has commented, “the new was often camouflaged in the vocabulary of the old.” By sifting through ancient customs, by combining old usages with newer practices, one could compile a cultural frame that was conducive to current poleconomic interests of the recorders. The fabrication or maintenance of domination could be accomplished in this recording-storage-retrieval process when the status of the oral informant and the recording agent (or his employer) were poleconomically asymmetrical.
The political history of Catalonia comes to us through documents, which are always imperfect and slanted records. Written documents leave out most of what happened in the day. Furthermore, not all primary records that were once created made it into our hands. Some were accidentally lost, but we must also ask who was preserving what and why. There had to have been poleconomic reasons why some documents were created in the first place and, beyond that, why some were protected and preserved more than others. Also, if records were destroyed deliberately, and they were, why was this done and by whom? These factors create a bias in the written record and taint our understanding of the emergence of a written culture. The clearest instances of preserved written records come to us from the papal chancery, royal chanceries and the lay notariate. Religious documents served to bolster the poleconomic strength of the Church; the same being true of royal records and reports; and the lay notariate’s instruments were preserved because of their importance to commercial development, providing, as they did, evidence as to ownership and rights to income relating to property.
After the Time of Insecurity (1020-1060), there was a need for order. Documentation provided a sense of this and Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1072) seems to have understood the political value of writing and textuality. By reforming how business was conducted, with greater forms of control, precision of language and written documentation, the count could more effectively rule and the monasteries could more easily control their donated properties. This was a time when both secular and ecclesiastical princes developed an “obvious forethought of the future,” as Professor McCrank put it. He notes that “a search was under way for older authority, precedents, proof and evidence, whatever its source, to compile the new codified and authoritative law.”
The Usatges de Barcelona was a law code traditionally attributed to Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1072), but it was really put together a hundred years after his reign. Fernández-Armesto says it was “cunningly predated to give it enhanced prestige” though it contained some genuine eleventh century ordinances pointing at the regulation of knightly violence. It was likely authored later and attributed to an earlier date to acquire a patina of antiquity:

(The Usatges) included the forbears of most of the great baronial families of the mid-12th century. Law was good if it was old; by presenting a program as the work of the count’s ancestors, the compiler insulated him from attacks. Second, the code includes elements that have been seen as part of the formulation of a ‘theory of the principate,’ including a declaration of the Peace within distinct territorial boundaries, a call for stable coinage, export controls on sales across the frontier, and the use of the Romanist appellation princeps. According to this theory, after his great conquests in the late 1140s at Almería, Tortosa, Llerida, and Fraga, a triumphant Ramon Berenguer IV set out to create a territorial principality, beginning a survey of his domains and reconstructing the comital court. The Usatges form a part of this rethinking of comital power (Kosto 2001:279).

Propaganda does not always work. In this case, comital distortion appeared as a façade behind which Ramon Berenguer IV (1131-1162) and his compilers were attempting to construct a new conception of territorial power using an amalgam of custom and Romanist law. Perhaps the land barons saw value in the Usatges too because they used the book to their advantage from time to time by citing appropriate passages to support their interests in specific cases, usually concerning castle tenure. This is a good Catalan illustration of a wider principle: that élites can use codes and legislation to their advantage by selective reading and sifting through the rules to pick out those that foster their vested intersts. In this specific case, the castle-lords were able to use the count’s own propaganda against him by selecting those conservative passages supporting their jurisdiction and making them the central issue of the Usatges, not the regalian program that was the true interest of the count. As Professor Kosto put it, in the constitutional debates of the twelfth century, the “count lost control of his own weapon.”
Once custom was written down it could be modified only by a new redaction and was assumed to have existed in that form for all time and the natural evolution of customary ideas and procedures was thereby arrested. Documents functioned to record customs and memory and to project praxis into the future (the past & present aspects of documents). Furthermore, they acted to permit laws and practices, encoded on parchment and paper, to be transported from the castle keep to outlying areas (their spatial extension aspect). In fact, the Count of Barcelona had multiple copies of important documents made, as did other magnates, so as to be able to take them to moots and court proceedings, or to store them in the countryside for local reference. The spatio-temporal aspect of written documents allowed élites and their clerks to fabricate a self-service poleconomic order, one that maintained a hierarchy of domination that lasted some four hundred years.
This “constitutional crisis” lasted for most of the last quarter of the twelfth century. Some barons claimed exemption from the Statutes of Fondarella (1173), claiming that they had not sworn to uphold them. Others pointed out the newer statutes were in contradiction to the Usatges. One written code was being used as a weapon against another.
It was a constant struggle between the state-formation desires of the comtes and independent-minded paladin lords. Some barons, such as the Count of Urgell in 1187, were persuaded to institute a Peace and Truce based on comital law emanating from Barcelona (the Statutes of Fondarella instituted in 1173 by Alfons I, the Chaste, 1162-1196 ). Others were more recalcitrant. It was an ongoing struggle between territorial hegemony and that of independent fiefdoms. The barons were required to swear allegiance to Barcelona under oath, but it was difficult to enforce such symbolic niceties. At first, the effect of the statutes was to drive a wedge between those magnates loyal to the king and those opposed to public authority based in Barcelona. Yet in time royal power was enhanced by the process. Thomas Bisson noted that the 1173 decision to transform the old diocesan Peace into an instrument of royal territorial law was of fundamental importance for the future of Catalonia.
The count’s next move was to revise the statutes to make them more in accordance with the Usatges, which he knew were more respected by the baronial cohort. He also made some minor concessions to the barons hoping to win them over. The revised text was published in 1192 at Barbastro. The barons, however, saw this as another attempt to spread the overlordship of Barcelona. The king also sued some magnates, and went to war in Urgell (1186-94), though the details of that struggle remain unclear. The barons remained uncomfortable with a king and his entourage who seemed to be living high, while taxing the countryside to promote their own pleasure. Furthermore, they felt that their access to booty had been cut off by administrative fiat.
The king was fighting the forces of particularism (independent-minded castellans) and attempting to institute his wide-flung suzerainty. This was a time when the castle-lords were raiding each other for animals and loot and there were barons who disagreed with the policies coming out of Barcelona. In the early thirteenth century the House of Barcelona tried to get the Statutes of Fondarella amended to allow for raiding those lords who were not commended by the count-king.
One apparent strategy with regard to documents, the converse of forging them, was to lose them or claim that if not written, a royal action had no force. In 1188, the king promised not to levy the general tax called bovatge. Later, the subsequent king claimed that the withdrawal of the bovatge had not been “formalized” and imposed it again. This led to further conflict between the magnates and the Crown, so much so that in 1205 Pere II (the Great, 1276-1285) solemnly renounced the new taxes, retaining only customary encumbrances on his own domains. Furthermore, as a concession to the lords, he promised to reserve the appointment of vicars for knights of Catalonia to be chosen by general consensus and consultation with the lords and that the vicars had to swear to rule lawfully. These and other points were incorporated into a charter, similar to the Magna Carta, but there is no evidence that the charter of 1205 was ever disseminated, let alone observed. The magnates and castle-lords had independent ways.
The barons wanted some control over the appointment of vicars. The king agreed to this in 1205 at Girona. He would henceforth only make such appointments with the advice of the “good men” and only those of Catalonia could be vicars. It seems, however, that such “agreements” were widely disabused by both sides. The king continued to act arbitrarily without consulting the barons. The latter kept on with their violence and looting. In spite of the resistance of the barons, the Peace and Truce evolved slowly into territorial public administration.
Catalan history is filled with ideological contrivances that perpetuated privileged lives for the few and insecurity for many. The divine right of kings was a common one. In 1464, for example, Joan Berenguer de Masdovelles portrayed those rebelling against the Crown as abandoning Christianity. His logic: since the king was divine (or at least divinely appointed), to oppose him is to oppose God.
As part of the rationalization of administration, monks copied documents into a codex for easier retrieval. These copies could also be carried by traveling justices of the peace – to multi-site courts to litigate disputes. Documents produced there could also be brought back to the central archives. These many pieces of paper could then be classified according to name, date, place, subject and organized in a fashion that would allow easy retrieval. In essence, Barcelona was taking the state to the countryside.
The House of Barcelona also took it to the urbanites. The king turned to the townspeople (burgenses), granting them specific protections in the statutes of 1198. By the reign of Pere II (1276-1285), they were being invited to the periodic corts.
Also, in 1197 the king instituted new territorial-based taxes to be collected by vicars. He justified these with an urgent necessity of the Saracen war. Holy War became a stock excuse for seeking funds by the king.
In addition to using written documents to get across a political message, the counts of Barcelona used art. Not only were words used as political power, but also the documents of the cartulary were accompanied by illustrations or drawings, and were thus called illuminations. The artwork was calculated to project a powerful image of comital and kingly power. The count-king is not depicted alone, on his throne, holding his symbols of office, which was the standardized image of a king; but rather was drawn as an administrator, one actively involved with others in the work of ruling. In one picture, the accountant Ramon de Caldes sits just to the right of center, reading a document to the monarch, who is surrounded by his courtiers while a seated scribe works at a desk on the right. This is a depiction of a working king, one actively involved in administering a kingdom, presumably for the benefit of the people. This is an image of king as governor. Furthermore, the focal point of the artwork is not the king, nor any person in it, but rather it is the document being held. It is as much a proclamation of the value of documentary power as it is of royal power and the two are clearly linked pictographically. This is art as power, art as representing the written word as power. Kosto says, “The care taken to make the work a lavish production, its organization, and its artistic program allow the cartulary to transcend its administrative functions by expressing various conceptions of comital and royal power: the prince as territorial sovereign, as lord, as member of the court, or as administrator. Text and image combine to communicate more than the mere content of the documents (2001:285).
Not only were the counts attempting to use documents to create a more structured state, but also they preserved them for future reference. Archives had existed since Roman times, but became increasingly important in the formative years of the Catalonia State. The popes kept archives and, along with the efforts of Charlemagne, were direct continuators of Roman administrative practices. Rosamond McKitterick notes that also the Merovingian royal government should be considered as “firmly tied to the written word.” Also, the Visigoths preserved several of the administrative practices of Roman Spain in which writing played a key role.
Long-term retention of documents was thought commensurate with long-term rule. In the fabrication of domination, ecclesiastical scribes produced a variety of documentary tools for an enlarged court system and this increased litigation that relied on written documents as evidence, which was unheard of during the previous eras.
By binding loose parchments into codices it was thought that preservation and portability would be increased. This was especially desirable for judges to carry with them on circuit rounds. By the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276), mobile archives had been invented, both in loose charters in moveable chests and copies in even more portable volumes, in addition to local repositories of records for reference by traveling judges.
This archival rebuilding process continued during the reign of Ramon Berenguer III (1096-1131). It was part of a rationalization of rule, with a consolidation of comital manses northeast of Barcelona and a tightening of accounting over revenues and a revival of documentation, which included greater standardization and more continuity in the extant series of the cartulary. This effort at rationalization of rule was coupled with a renewed offensive against Islam and a resuscitation of incomes from the lucrative parias (tribute payments) from Muslim kingdoms. Now there was more money flowing through the administration and hence a greater need for accountancy.
Cartularies were a source of royal power. But this power was not extant in a body of dead letters. It had to be created through organization. Scribes were enlisted to shape society, create culture and formulate poleconomic reality. For example, because of the unification of Catalonia and Aragón:
Ramon Berenguer IV and his spouse, Queen Petronila of Aragón, had a critical need to codify more than cartularies to restore order, consolidate their realm, and reform it for the new era. They had to revamp the entire legal system, accommodate customals and Roman law through such efforts as the codification of the Catalan Usatges, and secure their archives as well as make them work with the scriptoria and chanceries that generated records. Unification was an enormous task, with an enlarged span of control three times the former magnitude. Moreover, this had to incorporate two Latin-based cultures with two vernaculars and more than six regional dialects (not counting the supra-Pyrenean complex), a sizable Jewish minority, and a third kingdom in which Muslims constituted the majority (McCrank 1996:I:279).

As the historical-material conditions changed, documents were added to the royal archives to update the Crown’s control over heretics, Jews and Moors. These additions also dealt with the regulation of prices and interest payments to Jews and mundane matters like the prohibition of tournaments. Jews were also prohibited from being vicars or judges. Others instituted the Inquisition. Also, there was the supportive work of Pere Albert, reinterpreting the Usatges in favor of the Crown, with respect to homages, fiefs, procedures and the power of castle-lords. Additionally, there was the Costumes de la Mar, for which Barcelona was later to become famous. Jurists tried to ground these changes in Romanist and canonist principles. In Aragón, a similar process was afoot in the codification of the fueros.
Historical preservation is a form of fabrication. The first line of preservation is what is written down and what is not. Beyond that scribal activity, the way documents are arranged, which documents are kept and which are discarded – all lend themselves to providing a certain slant to history. Thus, this preservation process has poleconomic power.
Having an organized archive with properly filed documents gave the Count of Barcelona and later the King of Aragón-Catalonia a legal edge on the unruly upland counts and castle-lords. It allowed the count to win court cases and spread his hegemony, eventually over all the land. Convenientiae and archived texts were a source of reference for political leaders trying to maintain the power of the State. Another form of political documentation came out of the legislative process, once the Count of Barcelona established the Catalan corts. From about 1301, in Catalonia there was increasing solemnity of the notarial record into which were incorporated letters of summons, together with summations of legislative and administrative procedure, pointing to a new recognition of the corts as a celebration of the associated powers of king and the estates.
The corts could alter the documentary record to benefit the interests of its aristocratic members in what appeared to be normal legislative change, even under the guise of being democratic (we will see this process still at work in the modern day administration of the American government in chapter 10). In the resistance to royal power in Catalonia, in 1412 for example, the corts demanded a new compilation of Catalan law. It was written in both Latin and Catalan by order of the diputació (the permanent delegation of the corts). This took place under what appeared to be a system of checks and balances between the key estates of the realm: the nobles, the urban bourgeoisie, the church and royalty. Since 1299, the count-kings had had to swear to abide by corts-produced law. No statute could become law unless ratified by the legislature. No royal member could be a member of the corts. On the surface, this seemed to be a system where there was a degree of liberty for Catalans.
With the formation of the Aragón-Catalan Crown, additional tensions were drawn into the political scene in Barcelona. Again, written documents were the basis of rule, with new twists in administrative procedures. Early in the fifteenth century, a veritable constitutional program was formulated. A new series of documents were written up based on resolutions by the corts. They stated that, henceforth, the king’s council (audiència) would be chosen by the legislature and that they should judge independently of the king. Recognizing the foundational nature of the Usatges and Constitucions of Catalonia, the king and his audiència were prohibited from making any judgment that countermanded a written code.
A conqueror was not done when the last arrow flew or the sword cut through the last of human flesh. A second battle always had to be fought, in early times in an oral re-definition of the situation; in later times, with the Pen. Professor McCrank says of the Kingdom of Aragón/Catalonia, “The paperwork attending to king Jaume’s conquest and reorganization of this mixed Christian-Muslim kingdom was extensive. An array of lawyers and scribes was more vital to his achievement than were the contingents of crossbowmen and knights. Thousands of documents went out to settlers, franchisers, and officials; thousands more proliferated at local levels (1996:I:294).
As the Catalans pushed into Muslim territory and established New Catalonia, documentation continued to play a key role in administration. Texts like that of the Regiment de la Cosa Pública was written by the jurats of Valencia and became a “manual” of government there and in Barcelona. Once these documents contained the ideas and embedded interests of the rics-hòmens in government, they became standard points of reference for further rule. Thus, over time, a base of written documents accumulated in Catalonia that codified élite concepts and procedures that enabled their continued creation of inequity in society.
 
The Legalization of Oppression: Internal Extortion

What the Sword had carved out, the Pen began to secure for the nobilitas of Catalonia for “all time” and with greater and more burdensome rents. The castle-lords became the scriptwriters, while the serfs were the actors in the play of feudalism. Who was at the top of society changed throughout European history: at times it was the king, his court and counts; at others that level of public authority ebbed away leaving a new “top,” that of the castle-lords. In spite of this ebb and flow, for the peasant there was always “someone” up there with a Sword. At times that is all the noble held in his hand; but at other times he held a book, that contained the rules of governance, which of course his scribes had written. Sometimes it was the king’s scribes writing, at others it was the clerks of the nobility. The peasants had no scribes.
Documentation was part of the process of exploiting peasants. Hilton makes the point that the intensification of exploitation and the increased documentation are not unconnected because these documents were the by-product of the administrative activity involved in the organisation of the thirteenth-century baronial estate.
In essence, feudalism in Catalonia was a time in which each person had to be documented, through oath or writ, as having a set place in a hierarchical order. The castle-lord was in such an élite hierarchy vis-à-vis the counts above and the milites castri below. The knights ruled over the peasantry. Under the seigneurie banale, peasants of the castellany were now asked to place themselves, under oath, in some permanent status, some immutable role in society. And it was a subservient role, to be sure. Peasants became serfs, as castle-lords demanded that they swear “documented” allegiance.
In the long haul, the Pen proved more powerful than the Sword, which in the later Middle Ages simply became a symbol of the aristocracy. This was a legalistic assertion of lordship that was to change the relation of lord and tenant and that between lords. It would even draw the Count of Barcelona into the new order of things, as he eventually began to compete with other landed magnates by giving out fiefs of land to attract and retain principal supporters. This more legalistic assertion of lordship would do more to impose serfdom than the direct violence of the eleventh century. While in the Period of the Sword (1020-1060), domination came with the sound of hoofs; later it was ushered in with the scratching of the Quill. Penning in key terms, phrases and clauses to contracts, scribes were able to capriciously fashion contracts to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
This imperious penmanship continued through the eleventh through thirteenth centuries to constantly refine documents to the benefit of the lords. This often came in the form of an oath made by the peasant, for example the 1129 deposition: “I promise, my lords, that I will reside on this land of Cocola and that I will be yours, as a man ought to be to his best lord.” As historical-material circumstances warranted, the lords simply changed the conditions of the depositions. Bonnassie notes the factors leading to create wealth for the lordship: technical progress, the conquest of new land and a corresponding increase in agricultural production. But this was not shared with the peasantry. The sociocultural context of the era was such as to make it impossible for peasants to benefit for long from the new wealth born of their work. No longer had slavery disappeared in Catalonia, than new chains were forged binding the peasant class to the land, condemning them to a sentence of hard labor with little remuneration. Furthermore, the creation of the powers of the ban or seigneurial jurisdiction prepared the new servitude, which was all the harsher because farmers had, for a short span, been able to believe themselves to be free.
Superior knowledge of the law and the customs of the land can be a powerful poleconomic tool. In a world of constructed rules, the writer has power, as does the person who understands the rules themselves and the alleyways between them to permit behavioral scope. Both writing and comprehending the law then becomes doubly powerful. For example, in 1171 the Bishop of Urgell complained that Ramon of Castellbò had detained episcopal tenants by illegal means. Ramon replied that some of the men were “his men” and others were held “by common custom,” which amounted to saying that he held a territorial right of jurisdiction. In this new world of feudalism, those with power could find “this or that” legal justification for their power grabs.
“This or that” often lay in the mists of time. The castle-lords began to search the past for legitimizing evidence to support their privileges and right to rule. As had occurred elsewhere in Europe, Catalan jurists began to study Roman law, selecting snippets of legal phrasing to justify the formation of a new legal code for Catalonia. The new codes relating to land and commended serfs were formulae of servile dependence and attachment to land that had been forcibly taken. The glove of law was being slipped over the fist of oppression.
The lords pointed to the writing of certain jurists of the past to confirm their thesis that servitude should remain intact. Legal strategists sought to elucidate particular points of law supporting domination and to describe and underscore the privileges of the lordship using Catalan custom and practice as rationales. Remember, many of these customs and practices had been committed to paper and could be used as precedents. In addition to law and custom, moral arguments were made i.e., that it was correct to maintain a poleconomic order that kept a “proper” balance between the estates.
By using Roman law, the castle-lords were constructing a mental edifice backed by paper writs, one that defined status and relations in self-interested ways. This allowed a sharper distinction to be drawn between those considered legally free and those who were legally unfree. Roman law was interpreted to mean that a free man could lower his status by means of a written agreement – by way of adscripticius, the inscription of his status, binding him to the soil. Thus, by using written documents and court proceedings, the tyrannical lords of the seigneurie banale were codifying procedure and routinizing transactions of oppression.
These “rights” of the lord were fabricated over time based on legalist interpretations of past customs, especially Roman law. Latin texts were used by élites to dominate the peasantry. Any infraction of these rules could be treated as a breach of contract, putting the serf in jeopardy of physical harm or fines or both. The indemnities placed on the remença serf often exceeded the means of the average peasant to pay and they were continually raised to insure this:
1070 – 2 ounces of gold
1072 – 6 ounces of gold
1079 – 2 pounds of gold
1090 – 5 pounds of gold

Shrewd landlords would have understood the impact of a codified form of custom on the minds of those accustomed to submission. If the lords were writing new law, why were they doing so? Basically, they were trying to turn their short-term gains into permanent ones. Once the oppressive base was established, those with Sword Power could begin to build Pen power. Kosto describes this for Catalonia, saying tenants:
had to pay a yearly sum consisting of a portion of the profits earned from the land or, rarely, a fixed quantity of produce. From the mid-eleventh century, there begin to appear in the contracts new elements that recall the terms of castle-holding agreements, including promises of fidelity, prohibitions against choosing another Lord (senior) for the property, and statements that the land was to be held in service and fidelity. Provisions that limited the contracts to grants for life or for the life of the beneficiary … gave way to language that implied perpetuity (my emphasis, 2001:108).

The lords were looking to firm up their patrimonies – to find long-term security in the written word. But some peasants sought the same. We see peasants seeking adscripticius, perhaps to be understood by the logic of the adage: any port in a storm. Some peasants offered themselves as the lord’s property to fix their dues and achieve a degree of security in a hazardous world, even enserfing their offspring and future generations. The downside of this “security” was that they could not make any unauthorized departure from the land. The advantage to the lord in written adscripticius documents was to be found the specificity or fine print that could be included. Kept in the castle, such a document could be used as a point of reference in any judicial proceeding later. For example, if a serf ran away and it could be shown in the document that there was no statute of limitation on the time the lord had to retrieve him, then the serf was never free no matter when and where he was eventually found. Freeman notes that the castle-lords were trying to circumvent comital law and place peasants under their own jurisdictions. Newly enserfed peasants had to renounce their former rights and submit to a new legal code, a private legal structure of the castle that was fabricated based on usurpation and a privileged interpretation of Roman law. As lords assumed the ownership of lands, peasants placed themselves under the jurisdiction of these élites through acts of commendation. They would be required in the presence of witnesses to place their mark on a written document stating that they were the “lord’s man.” This legally tied them and their family to a given piece of land and the lord-owner.

Oral Custom to Written Law

Ancient local custom, that established in the Marca Hispanica after the time of the Visigoths, was oral in nature. Oral history and traditional customs did not disappear once the lordship began to use written documents. The feudal bond between vassal and lord was enacted orally and ritually but written documents added specificity to the property rights and other privileges involved in the relationship. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, property relations became more important. Oral bonds become translated into written ones, as it became increasingly clear to castle-lords that solidity of patrimony through time could best be accomplished by wielding a Pen rather than a Sword. Ceremonies of investiture, designed “to ratify” according to traditio (tradition) came to be translated into written terms like festucare. This word written down in a document harked back to the Salic practice of exfestucatio. These terms derive from the Latin word festuca, meaning the reed or rod used as a symbol in performing various legal actions in ancient times (literally, “a piece of straw”). Throughout Feudal Europe one of the several things a lord could place in the hands of a newly made vassal was a straw, a twig or a short stick as a symbol of the bestowal of power. The receipt of the festuca symbolized the vassal’s formal acceptance of the establishment of a contract made between him and his new lord. Translating custom into written form was an act that provided the writer with power. The impact of such a document on peasants steeped in local beliefs often appeared to be one more symbol of authority and hence was powerful. Was the legal superstructure insignificant or tangential to the control of the community by the lordship? My view is that it was a momentous tool at times, but not the only one in the toolbox. There were economic and military tools as well. Status was important to the villagers themselves and that would have set up some degree of self-regulation e.g., if from time immemorial “everyone” had helped with the harvest of the lord and a given “deviant” refused to participate, s/he would have come under heavy community pressure, perhaps even accusations of witchcraft.
My experience from living in African villages tells me that once a person gets a reputation for being a deviant, it invites other sorts of labeling that can make his or her life very uncomfortable. Most of the time, people tend to gripe and grumble, but they go along with the crowd.
In the twelfth century, in the church, as in government, there was a shift going on from office based on sacral criteria to secular criteria, one based on rights, not rites. This was the widespread shift from liturgy to law. In this process, written law became increasingly important. Whereas in late antiquity, estates in society had been ranked based on their nearness to God, increasingly poleconomic power was to take over the ranking. Society was starting on the road to secularism.
I am mainly concerned, however, with the development of the state in Catalonia and its merger with Aragón, when it was much less personalistic than in the early days. Until late in the thirteenth century, rule by counts was done from horseback, as they visited their constituents and conversed face to face. This was because they had dispersed castles and important men to visit and renew their relations. By the thirteenth century in Northern Europe, personalistic administration was being rationalized and bureaucratized. This was much less so in Catalonia. Bisson says, “It would have been difficult to maintain a central account when the bailiwicks of Catalonia were being granted and their receipts recorded at different times of the year and, in some cases, not even at yearly intervals. Moreover, the king cannot have had much use of knowing his net domain proceeds when in practice he assigned payments on local revenues so freely that the accounts only exceptionally showed balances in his favor” (1984:I:153). In this loose administration, the king could play his poleconomic games, the Holders of the Sword could speak their minds over a glass of wine and the Men of the Purse could line their pockets more easily while in office. This was a personalistic system with a great deal of wiggle room for all concerned.
The less bureaucratic ways of these early times – horseback and homage, so to speak – slowly saw the advent of written documents in Catalan administration, but they did not completely transform the system into a rational bureaucracy. Initially, writing was used to confirm oral commitments, personal relations and to record bonds said to be firm – sort of a “documented personalism.” In other words, orality and documentation co-existed functionally.
Even the traditional concept of domain accountancy was not for purposes of cost analysis or budgeting; but rather was to verify rights and fidelity. It was a system based on personal relations between the count-king, his inner circle and the field representatives of the Crown. It was a system, in a time of economic expansion and its accompanying avarice, which did not lend itself to the control of graft. In such a system, the kings were reluctant to insist on the direct accountability of domains in the way that was already normal in Northern Europe. In this more feudalistic system, fiscal management for increased profit and efficiency was in its infancy. Control of domains, a vicarage or bailiwick, were given to noblemen known to the king or to creditors, practices that belied rational control.
To be sure, it was a “loose” accounting system. The notariate and scribal culture of the day did not lend itself to efficient accountancy, orderly auditing or clear numerical description of precisely what was happening in the king’s domains. Bisson describes less than rational scribal practices, a system with practical limitations: “scribes, it seems, helped to endow the most local occasions of account with ritual solemnity, summarizing the calculations in narrative rather than linear or itemized form” (1984:I:156).
Documents were used to confirm feudal rights and duties. For example, the count in possession of several castles could commend one to a junior, giving him responsibility over its maintenance and security in return for fidelity. This set up a chain of command. Documents were the paper trail of this authority structure, making explicit who controlled what for whom and for how long. And the documents showed the nature of tenure. Did the recipient receive full rights of alienation (rare), or usufructory rights or merely the right to take rents from the tenants. There was a myriad of variations in this regard.
Catalan documents fell into three groups: those dealing with civil and criminal law; those that concerned feudal customs; and others pertaining to sovereignty. The latter established that the Count of Barcelona derived his authority from God (non est potestas nisi a Deo). 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 codex also notes that he held these powers for the good of the people. Yet he had dominion e.g., no one could construct a castle without his permission. His princely authority lay in the fact that “the world cannot live without justice.” Unfortunately, this ideal was not born out by comital actions in the history of internal and external aggression by the state.
Of course, state leaders claimed special circumstances in Iberia i.e., as good Christians they had to fight the infidels. God was unfurled as a military banner ahead of the Crown’s aggression against Muslims and as a general raison d'être of governmental authority. But the nobility too claimed to have God on their side. As both rushed to reap the benefits of their defeat of Muslim forces in Majorca, En Nunyo Sanç, Lord of Roussillon and Cerdagne, who had made the largest contribution to the victory and had claimed the largest reward, declared: “the king ruled by virtue of God’s grace,” and that nobles such as himself were “equally blessed.” Surely, he said, he was a vassal of Barcelona’s House, but also held such a position by divine election as well. Fernández-Armesto says, “The Count of Empùries, who spoke after (En Nunyo Sanç) in council, made this point explicitly on his own behalf and that of his kinsman, Guillem de Montcada: God has “made them” and they held land not only of the count-king but also “of their own allod.” Indeed, all the dominions accumulated by the House of Barcelona were and would be circumscribed by a fudged line between sovereignty and suzerainty” (my insert, 1992:45).
The count developed a regalian theory of power (potestas regius), which shows up in the Código ó Compilación de los Usatges and also the increasing Romanist thinking of his jurists. The use of written documents was of great use to the Crown. It helped the count to eventually establish a strong central government in a land of individualists. The absolutist position temporarily won out over social contract theory (the pactista philosophy) – the view that governance should be based on a contract between the key estates in society, but with the establishment of the corts social contract theory gained ground.
Documents were used to firm up offices, duties and social, political and economic relations. Ramon Berenguer I (1235-1276) not only had unbridled castle-lords to deal with, but his mother, Ermessenda, was a power-hungry thorn in his side as well. She had ruled as regent after the death of her husband, Count Ramon Borrell III (997- 1017). She was a daughter of the Count of Carcassone to the north of the Pyrenees and had pretensions to rule herself and certainly wanted to elevate the name of the House of Barcelona to rival those in Francia.
In a desperate effort to find allies among the lords to counterbalance his mother’s efforts and to cement his hold on the shaky feudal hierarchy, the count turned to the written agreement. In 1054, he sought out the notoriously fickle Count of Besalú, who came to Barcelona and swore fidelity (iurare fidelitatem) to become a man of the Count of Barcelona. The proceedings of the placitum were duly recorded by Ramon Berenguer I’s scribes.
Though it was not always effective, Ramon Berenguer I saw the value of the use of the written word to cement social relationships. During his reign, his scribes entered an era of scribal creativity and experimentation. There is a debate among historians of the area as to whether the count was a great innovator in this documentary revolution (Kosto’s position); or whether he was imitating the revolution already underway among the castle-lords of the area (the position of Bonnassie). I do not want to get mired down in this “primacy” debate. Rather, what is more important from my point of view, is this: a revolution was under way in which élites, great and lesser lords, were all (within a decade of each other) scrambling to document their dominance and privileges in the poleconomic hierarchy. Furthermore, over time, the “scramble” increased, as can be seen in Box 9.3.

Box 9.3. Castle-holding Agreements among
the Lay Aristocracy (1025-1174)
Dates Number of Agreements
1025-1049 3
1050-1074 20
1075-1099 29
1100-1124 29
1125-1149 35

The bureaucratization of rule also had a time factor. Early documents were bounded time-events in that they dealt with specific events and once the time frame of that event expired, they became dead letters, with no further value in a poleconomic sense. Convenientiae began a new process. They imposed no time limits, describing relationships that were meant to extend into an indefinite future. The count-king would not rule for ten years – kingship was to be eternal. The scribes and legalists were creating the authority of governance out of granite; not clay. The documents were prospective. They indicated an expansive futurity and the lasting structure of the state. The documentary language implied permanency and perpetuity. Rule was being written in indelible ink. Documents had become a tool of public administration. Kosto says, “The shift in literacy was not one from memory to written record, but from memory to imagination, from the use of writing to reconstruct the past to the use of writing to construct the future. Was this part of a rethinking of time itself?”
There was a rebirth of the public notariate and accompanying Italian practices that came to serve as a legitimating force for the new state. The language of scriptor publicus (count’s scribe) began to appear in documents in the mid-twelfth century. Written documents were coming from on high to deal with the problems of society below. Beginning as networks of individual agreements (convenientiae), scribal work was to coalesce into a bureaucracy. The count’s scribes were doing legal research, keeping records, creating archives, producing manuscripts and performing accounting functions, all of which contributed to the formation of a new state over and above that of baronial power.
The shift from an oral to a written culture had consequences. This gave rise to an increasingly professional corps of scribes and judges in the first half of the eleventh century and the importance of all kinds of legal documents corresponded to the decline of the comital placitum. The power of the written word and bureaucratic organization in this process of centralization can be seen in a single negative case. Ramon Berenguer III (1097-1131) had to absolve the guardians of the castle of Arraona from their oath and homage to him because he was not able to locate the document or scripturum. If the document had never existed it might have been easier for the count to win his case.
Corruption in office led the Ramon Berenguer IV (1131-1162), appropriately called “The Saint,” to step up the attempts to rationalize office-holding. The excess of extortion by his office-holders led him, in 1151, to dispatch a group of auditors on a survey of Old Catalonia. This resulted in a “Domesday Book” for the area, novel in its scope and form. Since most of the graft came because dues were not fixed (the administrator could easily skim), this remarkable inventory was an effort to reduce discretionary exactions. Nevertheless, it would have been next to impossible to completely rein in corrupt tax collectors, as they were the ones who made the rounds and aggregated the earnings. Like all ruthless opportunists, the vicars of Barcelona and other corrupt office-holders could find opportunities in official roles that allowed them to line their pockets at the expense of the Crown and, more importantly, the people.
Archives became very important to comital jurisdiction. The count could refer to them in cases of dispute over privileges and property. For example, in 1180 Alfons II (1285-1291) had to sue the castle-lord Pere de Lluçà for the right to access the castles of Lluçà and Merlès. Pere claimed they were his allodial property. In this case, as with many others, the power of documents prevailed. Drawing on his royal archives, Alfons II produced documents proving Pere’s ancestor had held them in fealty from Ramon Berenguer I (1035-1076).
Between 1249 and 1274, the king experimented with a series of charters trying to reach a just balance between royal authority and local autonomy. He also freed the paciarii (police) from supervision by the vicars to enable more just administration in the countryside. The paciarii were local men given the responsibility to enforce the rulings of the vicars. Apparently, his idea was that new charters and administrative procedures would alleviate the tension between the Sword and Crown. He was not altogether correct. In 1278 civil war broke out between the upland counts and castle-lords fighting against royalist troops. This civil war ended when King Pere II (1276-1285) defeated the rebels at Balaguer (1280), but wisely gained their trust through skillful negotiating tactics.
Élites were advantaged by this in two ways. First, they had the wealth to employ scribes and legal researchers to ferret out those aspects of Roman law that supported their position. Second, there was a great deal of disorder and mystification of legal terminology and this lack of systematization gave the application of law an arbitrary nature and that vagueness allowed much “wheeling and dealing” by élites and their scribes. Confused terminology and a lack of concreteness in legal practice and documentation created a state of affairs that advantaged aristocratic fabricators.
As I mentioned before, in the thirteenth century a House of Lords (corts) was instituted in Catalonia’s governmental structure. Historians situate the birth of the corts of Catalonia in an assembly called to the legat pontifici, Cardinal Pere de Benevento in Lleida in 1214. But it wasn’t until the reign of Pere II (1276-1285) that the Catalan corts were formally instituted. This was an evolutionary culmination of the shift from orality to documentation to legislative decree. As the corts were dominated by big upland baronial and ecclesiastical landlords, it was a step in the direction of a social contractual approach to governance. The documentary progression from convenientiae to corts was slow, but all along with the same intent: to provide legitimation for governance. When rule became more bureaucratic and less personal and when the corts were organized to involve the country’s magnates, compromise was necessary. In 1214, this led to a revision of the statutes, incorporating some concessions to dissidents e.g., the confirmation that the late king had eliminated disagreeable taxes.
I have shown that written documents significantly contributed to the formalization of rule and that castle-lords also used them to document and legalize the gains they had achieved by intimidation and violence in the seigneurie banale (1020-1060), a “firming up” of oppression that was acceded to by the state. I have deemed this “internal extortion,” the extraction of value from serfs through Sword Power validated by Pen Power. Let us now turn to what the state did once it was organized and merged with Aragón to become the Crown of Aragón.

A Pariah Ideology

Violence was and remains a fact of life, but generally, people make the distinction between legitimate violence perpetrated by the state and illegitimate forms. The latter is called piracy or brigandry or some such label that indicates that the majority of people – society – is against this form of violence. This is the binary contrast H. A. Ormerod sets up in his discussion of piracy in the ancient world: “Throughout its history the Mediterranean has witnessed a constant struggle between the civilised peoples dwelling on its coasts and the barbarians, between the peaceful trader using its highways and the pirate who infested the routes that he must follow” (1927:13). His dichotomy can be schematized like this:

Box 9.4. Ormerod’s Schema
Good Bad
Social Anti-social
Socially good
aggression Piracy
Citizen Barbarian
Peaceful trader Avaricious criminal
Civilization Criminality
Legitimate use of
violence by state Illegitimate use of
violence by outlaws

This is an unrealistic view of the world of the counts and count-kings or of our present world. Sometimes extortion can be part of state behavior and defined by officials to be legitimate. We could, following this line of logic, say that state piracy is possible. According to Marshall B. Clinard, this analogy between organized crime and state behavior can even be extended to multinational corporations operating in the Third World today. Needless to say, there is a blurry line between official and criminal behavior and one man’s necessity is another man’s outrage, which recently has dominated media coverage of the United States’ war against Iraq.
Self-seeking officials within the Extortionist State operate under structural constraints, but can engage in amoral or criminal behavior by corrupting the structure and/or knowing the structural side streets and passageways in which they can pursue their clandestine operations. Some have called these Pariah States.
In the final chapter I will look at the nature of opaque governance and poleconomic operations behind closed doors in the American government. In the present chapter I want to focus on the Crown of Aragón, the state that emerged out of the unification of Aragón and Catalonia. Certainly Arago-Catalonia is a prime example of a Pariah State in the Middle Ages. In the twin domains of the Crown of Aragón, the métier of the élite had always been war, plunder and imperialism, but there were less adventurous economic pursuits as well. Barcelona’s preliminary economic base had long been the agricultural output of the hinterland. Resident traders bought farm goods and transported them to the city. Too, there was a fishing industry, before shipping and long-distance trade and conquest became prime forces in Barcelona’s economic history. In the twelfth century mundane economics changed to become more imperialistic. The city was transformed from an undeveloped backwater town to a long-range emporium through a commercial revolution, which was, in large part, fueled by wealth obtained through extortion.
In the sociological literature, organized crime is portrayed as being synonymous with “corruption, murder, extortion, terror, manipulation, and guile” and as being “involved in conscious, willful, and long-term illegal activities.” To apply this definition to the activities of Catalonia-Aragón we only need to change one word – “illegal.”
Notice how Mahan’s statement below applies with equal fluidity to the way in which the Crown and the urban patriciate operated poleconomically in al-Andalus and the Mediterranean:
OC (organized crime) generates profit for gangsters by corrupting the authority structure. From corporate criminals to pirates, the pattern is similar. Their goal is entrepreneurial. They are bonded by necessity for secrecy. They use violence as a tool and as an expression of power. They are constrained by the opportunity structures, but they take advantage of them as well (my insert & emphasis; 1998:237).

The characteristics of organized crime as outlined by Adadinsky show a striking similarity to the activities of the Arago-Catalonian state in its relations with the Muslims world. Both consist(ed) of:

 Non-ideological – profit is the driving force, a trait shared with most economic corporations.

 Hierarchical – a few at the top dominate and reap most of the benefits.

 A lack of transparency – secrecy is needed to maintain a limited membership and curtain access to profits.

 Organizational commitment based on loyalty – disloyal members are dealt with severely as they threaten to make the organization transparent.

 Organization perpetuates itself – new recruits are trained by members to a normative structure.

 Willingness to use violence and bribery – violence, corruption, deceit and extortion form organizational essence.

 Having a specialized division of labor – different talents are organized to reach an organizational goal.

 Monopolistic – market control is vital because the primary goal is maximizing profits.

 Code of honor – forms the basis of group ethos.

Again, the only word that needs to be changed in Adadinsky’s definition is “illegal.” Essentially the Extortionist State of medieval Catalonia-Aragón operated as an organized crime syndicate.
The Count of Barcelona reformulated his authority, just after the seigneurie banale. Over the next two centuries this project was carried forward by successive counts building up the Catalan State, which eventually merged with Aragón. During that transition, Barcelona developed an expansionist ideology. The count-kings became involved in two kinds of extortion: external and internal. State extortion was somewhat like what goes on in the Mafia, but with slightly more transparency.
Initially, state income came from loot taken and tribute exacted from Muslim principalities to the south. This wealth was invested in more wars and the expansion of Barcelona’s maritime economic, which led later count-kings to colonize many outposts in the Mediterranean and to extort tribute from port cities along the Barbary Coast. This can be viewed as State Piracy, a form of self-interestedness clothed in the legal fictions of the state.
You could almost forgive the aggrandizement on the part of the monarchs of Barcelona had they cared for their people, but toward what social good did this extortion money go? Very little. Mostly it supported more war, imperialism, high living for the king and his viziers, construction of monumental architecture and kingly tombs. Barcelona also loved parades and ceremonial frivolities organized to bolster the prestige of the state. Little went to aid human security in Catalonia-Aragón.

External Extortion and the Reconquista

When the Moors invaded Iberia, an apocalyptic atmosphere came over Christendom. All sorts of prophecies and explanations of the loss of so much Christian land were expounded. Both Christians and Muslims were relying on diviners, oracles and prophecies to orient themselves in the chaos of war. Some showed darkness ahead; others divined light if sin could be expiated and the path of righteousness trodden. Booty may have been important in the Christian response, but the search for it was covered in a veil of piety. The Prophetic Chronicle said, “Our hope is Christ…that the enemies’ boldness may be annihilated and the peace of Christ be given back to the Holy Church.” It did not seem to matter that there had been precious little “peace” in the land prior to the invasion of the Muslim south. But now there was a theological justification for the exercise of preexisting warfare and pillage.
The ideology of the Reconquista was born in eleventh and early twelfth centuries. For Catalonia-Aragón, the Reconquista was mainly about taking back land in Valencia and Mallorca. The Book of Feats of Arms (Llibre dels feyts) concerns the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276) and stresses nationalism and the importance of conquest in the national character. This chronicle contains a first person account of the Catalonian Reconquista. It was composed in Catalan by an unknown author, though Jaume is thought to have written at least some of it between 1244 and 1274. It chronicles many adventures.
This military adventurism was part of the larger Crusades. Pope Gregory saw several advantages for Christendom in the Crusades. Of course, they were intended to liberate the Holy Land, but the pope reasoned that they also could help unite Christendom after the divisive disputes over his reform movement. Then again, he felt that papal prestige would rise at a time when his rule had its dissidents e.g., those supporting the German Emperor. Also, he hoped the Crusades would work toward terminating the schism between the two halves of Christendom – east and west, as well as provide an outlet for restless knights who had been ravaging their own people and lands prior to his call to Holy War.
Then there was booty, which could pay the expenses of a strike into al-Andalus and also produce a profit. Loot was an important motive in the crusades, involving the taking of slaves, gold, silver, precious stones, exotic cloth, sheep and cattle. For example, one-fifth of the plunder went to the count-king and the remainder was divided among the expeditionaries, the dependents of those who had been killed in battle and those who had stayed behind to guard the castles and domains of the castle-lords.
The count-king had a more pecuniary outlook, clothed in papal and chivalrous rhetoric. Certainly religious fanaticism and military valor became the dominant values in Spanish society during the Reconquista, however, the count-king was mainly interested in receiving parias, or protection payments in gold. The Muslim south had gold that was being transported over the Sahara Desert from West Africa into Iberia. Parias were paid by Muslim leaders in the south to thwart invasion by the Catalonians and Aragonese.
At this time, the County of Barcelona was not only being constructed as a lineage in a political sense, but also as an economic powerhouse and extortion was good economics. To an extent, the counts and count-kings participated in an extortionate protectorate over nearby petty princes of al-Andalus. The Crown had functioned as a channel for tribute (parias) and would act as a directorate for hostes et cavalcatas (military campaigns) against al-Andalus, their object being to find loot and land. This was a larger state-sponsored version of the exaction exercised by the castle-lords of the seigneurial banale. Both the rampages of castle-lords and the imperialism of the state must be seen in the cultural context of a medieval fascination with masculine adventure and in the Christian crusading mentality.
There was the flow of wealth into Barcelona, but there was a counter flow. That involved settlers taking up land in former Muslim territories that were conquered. Some settlers were moving south. The Reconquista also provided many commoners with the opportunity to acquire noble privileges. Some settlers were moving “up” to become ciutadans honrats. Honors were meted out to those who either earned them in war or paid for them. Derek Lomax says that Christians were interested in loot, rustling and land-theft and even though they claimed to be fighting for God they were often cruel and deceitful.
The Reconquista was a deliberately planned campaign, albeit it a long and disjointed one. When land was reclaimed, Christian settlers were brought in and (sometimes) Muslim farmers were expelled. Others were kept on as conversi workers. At other times, Christians moved into existing Muslim communities.
New Catalonia lands gave the Crown some breathing space by relieving it of the burden of having to supply too many fiefs from its own holdings. The Reconquista movement led to the availability of much booty, gold and land for paladin knights and adventurous nobles. As the Reconquest progressed it was exactly the availability of large tracts of land that made it unnecessary to resort to the benefice – the conditional grant of land in Old Catalonia – as the sole or even chief means of rewarding or creating a mounted force.
When adventurers settled down in New Catalonia, they set themselves up, just as their forefathers had done in Old Catalonia in the past, as providers of fiefs in return for loyalty and military service. In so doing, they passed on the ethos of feudal loyalty.
New Catalonia gave upwardly mobile noble sons and milites a chance at acquiring a landed estate. In this way, they could use violence to procure a patrimony that, in time, would become legitimized and clothed in the raiment of landlordism. Thus, plunder was defined by the state as a legal quest for finances. Time and effort on the part of the new owners transformed their ill-gotten gains into a respectable freehold. As I mentioned earlier, these landlords did this by perpetuating “noble” manners and by reproducing clothing fashions, an equestrian lifestyle, speech patterns, élite patronymics, etc. War plunder became the time-honored privilege of its owners. By definition, a noble had land and a personal and familial history of militaristic adventure. Raiding the Saracen south gave Catalan aristocrats and petty knights a chance at both.
Arago-Catalonians organized to make such raids and sometimes the clergy were involved, though some clergymen resisted. Under Count-King Alfons I (1162-1196), in 1164, the Cistercian abbot, Raimundo, formed many volunteers into a religious cofrade (confraternity) and they began to fight the Muslims as it had been hoped the Knights Templar would do. Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) took the new Order under his papal umbrella and approved its rule. These “real friars” were charged with the responsibility “to fight the enemies of the Faith” and were given a rule of life (regula) based on that of Cîteaux, but modified to facilitate warfare. There were other lay confraternities convened by Alfons I for military purposes e.g., Belchite (1122) and Monreal del Campo (ca. 1128) but lacking a religious base, they tended to die out after their fighting was over. In fact, in Arago-Catalan times, other orders wilted in the shadow of the Templars and Hospitallers who flourished in Iberia more than anywhere else in Europe.
While not all clergymen fought, the church, primarily in the form of monasteries, was active in claiming new lands in the Reconquista. After the Sword conquered, the Cross came in to develop the land. For example, Tarragona’s plain was considered a great despoblado, described in eleventh century charters as a “horrible and vast wasteland” where no human nor sheep grazed. Yet, the monks moved there and began to improve the land.
The Reconquista was a slow process. Christians held between a fifth and a quarter of Iberia in 1100 and by the thirteenth century the greater part was ruled by Christian Kings, Granada not being taken until 1492. But slow or not, crusading was a very profitable adventure for the imperialists of Arago-Catalonia.

The Extortionist State: The Mediterranean

The twelfth century was a time of expansion and turnaround, when Barcelona “leaned seaward, towards a destiny like Venice’s or Genoa’s.” It became a maritime power, its merchants becoming involved more and more in shipping and the government increasingly in “kickback farming” throughout the Mediterranean and southern Iberia. These were imperialistic activities designed to plunder certain areas and extort tribute from those wealthy regions that feared such pillage. Barcelona’s Crown led the way into governmental brigandry in al-Andalus and then expanded their executive banditry into the Mediterranean Sea.
Sometimes imperialists from Arago-Catalonia conquered islands or took poleconomically strategic ports by force, but at others they established treaties under threat of force. These provided a stream of revenue from North Africa and Mediterranean ports. Sometimes, to avoid the appearance of boldfaced exploitation, exacted payments went under several guises. For instance, in the 1271 treaty between Arago-Catalonia and Tunis, tribute was obscured as a payment for the loan of mercenaries. Similarly, in 1274, 1309 and 1323 treaties with Morocco and a 1309 treaty with Bejaïa, payments were couched as being for troops or galleys or both. Another treaty with Tunis of 1301 hid the tribute as compensation for a despoiled shipwreck.
Sometimes it was concealed as a continuation of the sums demanded by previous rulers – in short, well-established protection money. Often these treaties were defined to be economically beneficial for foreign merchants and governments, but foreign governments were required to make full payment even if scripted “economic ventures” produced insufficient profits to make such payments. This was common in North Africa and was an extension of the Catalan habit of bleeding Moorish neighbors of protection money.
This was imperialistic stake-claiming par excellence. And much of it involved slaving. For instance, in 1243 a special toll was applied to commerce between Tarragona and the Barbary Coast. The cargo was human, the only commodity mentioned on the shipping manifests.
In addition to receiving protection payments, Arago-Catalan imperialism in the Mediterranean was intended to create colonies or commercial zones that would feed revenue back home to Barcelona. One such colony was Sásser (Sassari in Sardinia). The Sards were disposed in 1329 and King Alfons III (1327-1336) set about the rationalization and formalization of this takeover. Between 1330 and 1333, he gave out 166 allodial honoraria (c. onores), made up of land proprietorships and jurisdictional privileges to knights, notaries, office-holders and others who had been involved in the conquest. In addition, he granted 1,393 fiefs, which were land grants with only rights in usufruct involved. Clearly, warfare in the Mediterranean was a venture with an economic payoff at the end of the road. Not only did adventurers get new land, but they were able to enslave the locals and export them for profit. Between 1370 and 1442, thousands of Sards, for instance, were indentured and shipped to foreign lands.
The imperialistic assault on the Mediterranean provided Barcelona with strategic points d’appui of economic warfare, stepping stones across the sea to the lands of saints and spices. Following an aggressive imperial policy, Crown pirates plundered the Mediterranean taking Majorca, Minorca, Sicily, Malta, Gozo, and laying title to Sardinia and Corsica. Crown piracy was justified citing illegal piracy as a raison d'être of attack and also the invasions were framed as an aid to the anti-Saracen cause. In 1311, Jaume II (1291-1327) wrote to the pope justifying the growth of the Crown’s imperialism in the Mediterranean in terms calculated to appeal to the crusading fervor of the Council of Vienne. He claimed that Arago-Catalan conquests were going forward because “the Christian army” might always have islands to stop at on their way to and from the Holy Land.
The House of Barcelona turned eastward to dominate Sicily, Sardinia, Alicante to the south of Valencia and the Balearic Islands about the same time as Catalonia and Aragón were forming alliances that would lead to building the nation of Spain. These Mediterranean jewels came under the control of the last kings of Aragón-Catalonia, Pere III (1336-1387), his son Joan I (1387-1395) and Martí I (1395-1410). King Martí left no living heir so an interregnum ensued in 1410, lasting two years and involving much maneuvering with “Fernando de Antequera of the Catalan House of Trastàmaras being elected king at the Compromise of Casp in 1412.” When he died in 1414, his son Alfons IV (el Magnànim) came to the throne, ruling till 1458. The marriage of Ferdinand II and Isabella of Castile, unofficially dated at 1469, was the beginning of Aragón-Catalonia’s merger with Castile and the emergence of the core of the new nation of Spain.
And while the warriors went forth into foreign lands, the scriptwriters were busy eulogizing the feats of those warriors and state-sponsored piracy. In their tales, aggrandizement was defined as an honorable and chivalrous adventure, even as a religious calling. Pirates were clothed in the raiment of dogooderism. The Argo-Catalans organized a “coalition of the willing” among mercenaries from other nations and “real” Catalan pirates in their domination of several Mediterranean island communities. Some of these were mercenary groups wherein Catalan was the lingua franca and others were pretenders to the Crown of the foreign territory in question. There was much at stake. One of the main financial backers of Crown involvement in the conquest of Sicily, for example, were corn dealers from Catalonia who hoped to conquer enough of the corn-producing areas of the Mediterranean to create monopolistic control of the corn market.
This poleconomic adventurism was romanticized in Catalan literature. One such laudatory chronicle (Tirant lo Blanch) concerning external raids was written by Ramon Muntaner (1265-1336) who participated in the campaigns in the East. The book is partly based on the exploits of Roger de Flor, who commanded the Gran Companyia Catalana (Catalan Company) and the infamously brutal Almogaver mercenaries in their exploits in Constantinople. This commander was glorified in his success there, being named “Mega-Duke and later Caesar,” in what surely had to be an inflation in congratulatory terms. However, the Catalan Company was successful in defending Constantinople against the Turks, acquiring “immense booty” in the process.
Such writing exalted military exploits, piracy, imperialism and violence e.g., the brutal assassination of Roger de Flor and his aides and the retaliatory assault by his remaining captains in what became famously known as the Venjança Catalana (Catalan Vengeance). The Catalans went on to conquer the duchy of Athens, which they made into their headquarters from which they launched a successful attack on the duchy of Neopatria. As late as 1348 the Catalans ruled Attica, Boeotia and Thessaly until they were eventually thrown out by the Lord of Corinth in 1388. In these chronicles the warlike escapades of the Catalans is elevated to heroic dimensions.

 
State Piracy

State piracy took place in the Mediterranean arena, where individual piracy was rampant. Furthermore, personal piracy overlapped with “official” duties of the state. Piracy for individual nobles was an opportunity that lay not too far out of bounds in early Catalonia. We can see this in the case of Count Pons Hugh de Ampurias, who lived between 1277-1313. He sometimes cooperated with the Count of Barcelona, at other times was at odds with him and eventually, in 1311, was accused in a Barcelona court of being a sodomite. This was a terrible accusation, since sodomy, which covered all possible illicit sexual contact between males, was thought to be so heinously unnatural that it was seen to be the source of earthquakes, famine, pestilence and the like. Accusations of sodomy for men, as with witchcraft imputations with women, were convenient political weapons; for example, the charges of sodomy brought against the Knights Templar in 1307 when the French king wished them disbanded, an action reluctantly agreed to by Jaume II (1291-1327).
It so happened that Count Hugh Pons was one of the few nobles who supported the Knights Templar in their fight to survive the political accusations coming from the papacy and Philip IV of France. From this crisis on, Pons was on the outs with King Jaume, a conflict that reached a breaking point in 1293 when the king began to construct several fortifications near the Ampurias border, while refusing to allow Pons to do likewise on his side. This was coupled with many minor poleconomic squabbles and the ongoing interference of the count-king in the affairs of the Country of the Ampurias.
By 1309 Pons had had enough. He appointed his son, Malgauli, to be his heir and went off to become a merchant-pirate in the Mediterranean. He had been an admiral in the Catalan-Argonese navy and it seems that he still had control of five galleys, which he had used in the “legitimate” service of the king. Now he put them to use as a private pirate.
In his piracy he angered the pope and the Venetians by attacking their merchants ships. They complained to Jaume, who was seen as responsible for this wayward count. Pons was also said to have traded with the Saracens, but this was a common enterprise for Catalan merchants and appeared to be a trumped up charge.
At this point, the Count-King of Barcelona accused Pons of stealing the five galleys from the royal navy. Pons was ordered to appear before a formal tribunal and Barcelona assured the Venetian legislature that the king had attacked Pon’s castles, burning one. If convicted, Pons could no longer have been a count and would have lost his political rights as a noble, forfeiting any property, which Barcelona could then confiscate. At this point, the other barons of Catalonia turned against Pons and supported the king. However, the case hung in the air, as it seems that Pons never returned to stand trial, remaining a pirate for the rest of his life.
Private piracy overlapped with and evolved into state piracy and legitimate trade. Professor O’Callaghan says that in the reign of Jaume I (1213-1276) “the Catalans, after initially profiting from piracy against Tunisian ships, developed more legitimate commercial relations with Tunis and established merchant colonies there. (The king) encouraged this, as it was a source of wealth for the crown as well as for his subjects, and from time to time the emirs sent him gifts of money as a sign of their friendship” (my insert, 1992:384).
In a suggestive manner, the payment of this tribute laid a foundation for imperialist ventures by future kings. Pere II (1276-1285) followed his father, Jaume the Conqueror (1213-1276), to the throne and interpreted the gifts of the emirs of Tunis as regular tribute. They were defined as payments to be made on a customary and ongoing basis. Spontaneous gifts had become regularized tribute. Some of the Moorish leaders balked at this and others betrayed the Iberians in their attempts to place puppet emirs in power. Such rebels were rewarded with violent raids, the exercise of Sword Power.
Tribute was often put to use by adventures who lived raucous lives. As was the custom in Catalonia, the Barcelonese conquerors of Majorca threw lavish banquets as a way of broadcasting success in plunder and garnering social status. Fernández-Armesto says:
Theirs was a world of status linked to consumption, measured in costly feasts and ostentatious displays of loyalty to the mainland dynasty. At least seventy-six craftsmen and decorators were employed – some Moors, some Greeks a few specifically slaves – to adorn the city chambers for the banquets. Two “painters of altarpieces and battle flags” decorated hangings to celebrate the obsequies of the mainland queen. And large sums spent on defense against the pretensions of the extruded island dynasty included the pay of eleven surgeon-bargers to serve the fleet. A society so abundantly supplied with quacks and craftsmen must have wallowed in surplus wealth (1992:50).

Piracy was not defined as a bad thing if they were your pirates. Jaume I (1213-1276) was forthcoming about the role of the state in banditry. In his autobiography, Book of Deeds, the monarch revealed that he saw maritime war as a means of gallantry and adventure, a romantic exercise in chivalric deed par excellence. In this book, the count-king elevated maritime banditry perpetrated by the government over and above land-based exploits. He romanticized seagoing raids with exaggerated rhetoric. Fernández-Armesto hints that perhaps the monarch sensed a little known “honor” among the “rats and hard-tack of shipboard life.” The count-king glorified the crushing of Majorca, Sicily and the other areas conquered in the Mediterranean, relishing in the renown these victories brought to him personally, to the Crown and to Catalonia. His writing displayed a dark sense of dynastic destiny. He gloried in imperialism, blessed it because it was being perpetrated by the church and hyped it as a means of poleconomic advancement for Catalonia. In other words, state piracy was portrayed as beneficial to Aragón-Catalonia by a king acting as a spindoctor.
I have presented the violence and extortion of the castle-lords and of the state. That of the latter I have deemed internal and external, with that directed outward going forward under the banner of Christendom, but really being about hard political and economic realities. In essence, to engage in wars in foreign lands to acquire territory, establish fonduks and receive protection money, the count-kings of Catalonia-Aragón operated in ways that perpetuated war as a way of life and did little to help the poor and downtrodden of their society with the wealth accumulated through violence. It went to two sources: (1) into the pockets of those already well off; and (2) back into the war machine.
In the next chapter we will explore whether this continues in present-day American governmental behavior, the actions of office-holders and government agents in the opaque bowels of what has been deemed the military-industrial-complex by the late President Eisenhower and the state management system by the Professor Melman.

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