Order and Chivalry. Jesus D. Rodriguez-Velasco

4.10.10 “el verdadero amor passa todos los debdos” [“true love overrides all (legal) bonds”] (Martin, “Le mot pour les dire”; Heusch, La philosophie de l’amour and Les fondements juridiques de l’amitié), which means that the acceptance or expression of this feeling is superior to whatever other bond (debdo) of those that are manifested in the translation of natural law to political law.

      Partidas 4.27.4 speaks in particular of the love of friendship, that is to say, the horizontal love in the aforementioned point of the Cuaderno. It is about a love that “segund la costumbre de España . . . pusieron antiguamente los fijos dalgo entre si, que non se deuen desonrrar, nin fazer mal vnos a otros” [“according to the custom of Spain . . . persons nobly born agreed among themselves that they must not dishonor nor do injury to one another”]. Similarly, this love of friendship can disappear from among the natives of a land, “quando alguno dellos es manifiestamente enemigo della [de la tierra] o del señor que la ha de gobernar e mantener en justicia” [“when any of them becomes the open enemy of his country, or of the lord whose duty it is to govern it and maintain justice within its limits”] (Partidas 4.27.7). If love of friendship is the glue that holds together the horizontal order, its sense, however, is found beyond this horizontality in the system that is superstructurally ordered: the land—a prenational conception of the nation—and, above all, the sovereign. It is these superstructural elements that allow the survival of love. Without them, the horizontality itself would also cease to exist.

      Contractual love consolidates the group through feelings whose juridical conditions link the “fijos dalgo” to the chivalric nobility. The law expresses it with infinite clarity, but at the same time it is not inventing the link. On one hand, it designs it as a custom, a consuetude, a use whose juridical value is recognized (Partidas 1.2.1–3). Only the nobles can situate themselves within a discourse of love with valid contractual weight in the political space. Love ties more than whatever other “bond,” and the acquisition of political bonds corresponds to this category. On the other hand, this idea also belongs to so-called court literature, which is the chivalric and noble literature that developed in all of Europe since the beginning of the twelfth century.¹⁸ In it, the capacity to love itself is exclusive to the nobility, while the rest of the estates (ordines) have a link with the eroticism that is tied only to the capacity to reproduce. In Alfonsine discourse, a third element is incorporated that plays the role of theoretical language: the inclusion, within the juridical code, of Aristotle’s Ethics. The first philosophy of fraternity, along with it its constitutive strategy, is predicated upon this complex framework regarding the political philosophy of love.

      The strategy is twofold. On one hand, upon writing a love contract into its institutional document, the Hermandad is also situating itself in the double horizontal and vertical alliance that relates to the nobility and the sovereign respectively. The Hermandad is therefore including itself in the space in which the resolution of political objectives takes place, that is sovereignty. On the other hand, the Hermandad is representing itself as a chivalric congregation that functions in line with the referential network of court culture, a network that is linked to that which I am here calling the public hope of chivalry and that is constructed through chivalric fables.¹⁹

      The Cuaderno de la Hermandad is divided into twenty-five articles or claims on behalf of its knights. The main part deals with points on which the Hermandad expresses its fears concerning the material absurdities and juridico-political arbitrariness of the nobles and tutors that participate in the council of regency. The fraternity unites against these absurdities and arbitrariness and seeks to establish a regimen of law that might allow its members, as a political collective recognized by the regent power (and the king as a last resort), to participate in the power sphere as a means of control of the regents and tutors. The first and second articles, for example, request the right of the Hermandad to challenge the power of the tutors, even the regent, in case either one of them caused physical or material harm to any member of the fraternity through the violation of fueros and derechos (rights). In such a case, the Hermandad would reserve the right to make these damages known to legally constituted officials, which in Castilian society were the royal land merinos (administrators) and the alcaldes (mayors). Their intention was to be able to demand their rights and even force the loss of position for the tutor who committed an injustice and did not correct or remedy it according to the fueros and rights defended by the officials of justice.

      The Hermandad did not only establish rights and privileges to defend itself from the exterior. Some of the points of the Cuaderno de la Hermandad sought consolidation of the fraternity itself. In this search for consolidation of its principles of solidarity is, perhaps, where we best perceive the fraternity’s desire for institutionalization. We could take, for example, articles 3 and 4, in which the penal consequences are prevented in case “alguno o algunos delos que ssomos en esta hermandat ffizieren tuerto a algunos delos que ssomos en ella” [“any of us in this fraternity should commit some injury to other members”] (Cortes, 1: 250), while at the same time they establish a regime of protection on behalf of the Hermandad, not only for its members but also for the territories, municipalities, or local powers toward which the fraternity plans to extend its influence:

      Otrossi ponemos tal pleyto e tal postura entre nos que omme ffidalgo desta hermandat que non mate nin mande matar por ssi nin por otre a omme ffidalgo nin cauallero nin omme delos que moran en las villas desta hermandat e de ssus pueblos ssin le ffazer tal cosa por quel deua matar con derecho, e quando querella ouieren del por cosa quel aya ffecho tal commo esta que dicha es, que gelo enbie dezir o lo enbie desaffiar o menaçar ante conçeiera miente, e quel non pueda matar nin ffazer mal ffasta nueue dias ssi ffuere delos ffijos dalgo que moran en las villas, et ssi ffuere delos otros delas villas quel non maten nin le ffagan matar ffasta doze dias.

      [We stipulate and agree that no hidalgo of this fraternity may, by himself or through another, kill or order killed any other hidalgo, knight, or man dwelling in the towns or villages of this fraternity unless such a killing is justified by lawful right; and should one wish to lodge a complaint against someone for something that he has done or said, that person must be informed of this or challenged, and if he is a hidalgo living in one of the towns he may not be killed nor harmed for a period of nine days; and if he is a non-noble living in one of the towns he may not be killed for twelve days] (251)

      The Hermandad presents itself as a guarantor of official discourse and as a cohesive group that functions with the same legal regime as that developed to protect itself from the exterior. It also organizes itself as a specific power group that not only calls for the resolution of the problems that may surface from within, but that also anticipates the possibility of implementing “alcalles desta hermandad” [“mayors of this fraternity”] (251), or in other words officials created to resolve the conflicts produced both within the Hermandad and in its territories. In the construction of this power group, “la justiçia e la hermandat” [“law enforcement and the fraternity”] (251), that is to say, the group of justice administration officials and the officials of the Hermandad itself, would essentially function as a seamless judicial and police body. This group would keep watch not only for the protection of the group as such, but also as guarantor of the differences of social class within the group itself. The separation of classes and the configuration of the group as a system of solidarity among those same classes produce a fascinating tension between more seigneurial forms of identification within more immovable states and a modernity derived from the hybridization of the group and establishment of official powers (mayors or justices) that are not necessarily tied to any of those estates.

      The Hermandad constructs itself in these parts of the Cuaderno in the first person with respect to the administration of violence: “e ssi otro delos que non sson desta hermandat matare o mandare matar a alguno o algunos delos que ssomos enella sinon commo dicho es, que todos los dela hermandat o los que y acaesçieren quel matemos por ello e le derribemos las cassas e le astraguemos todo quanto ouiere con las justiçias del Rey” [“and if those who are not members of this fraternity should murder or order the murder of any of those of us who are members (unless as stipulated), then all those of us within the fraternity or those who are present shall kill that person, destroy his houses, and raze as much as is permitted