Petitions, Justice, and Royal Authority in Late Medieval Castile

In the fifteenth century, the Crown of Castile witnessed an unprecedented influx of petitions, as tens of thousands of Castilians traveled to royal courts to present petitions to their monarchs. This dissertation focuses on petitioning for royal justice as a perspective from which to study the social and political life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on hundreds of unstudied records, I analyze not only the content of Castilian petitions, but also the ways in which royal responses to these petitions functioned on the local level of the town and village. By tracing the social lives of the so-called “letters of justice” that were granted in response to petitions of grievance, I analyze the ways in which Castilians employed these royal decrees in local conflicts. Also inquired are the local reactions to the presentations of these documents, including expressions of obedience, “obedience without compliance,” and violence. I demonstrate that while many petitioners obtained royal decrees in order to exert pressure on opponents, the presentations of these documents in Castilian localities had a substantial performative component as public events intended for the eyes of the community. Furthermore, thousands of decrees circulating in public spaces provided the monarchy a mechanism for disseminating notions of royal authority. My research suggests that the royal institutions encouraged the proliferation of decrees by maintaining a high level of responsiveness and accessibility, thus rendering petitioning a path of action suitable for generating swift interventions into local conflicts. In this respect, this dissertation draws attention to the consolidation of royal authority as a process of intensifying communication between rulers and subjects, rather than a top-down assertion of power. It demonstrates that petitions of grievance became sites for the enactment, circulation, and negotiation of core ideas about the monarch, the subject, and the law. When they obtained and presented royal decrees, thousands of Castilians turned themselves, in a sense, into agents of royal authority, asserting the monarch’s right to intervene in local jurisdictions. The proliferation of royal decrees in Castilian villages and towns intimately affected the political life of these communities, marking new possibilities for political protest, negotiation, and participation.PhDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138464/1/israeli_1.pd