Creating Legal Discourse: Lawyers, Litigants, and Neighbors
The ius commune thus added not one but many elements to the question of women’s legal personality in the Middle Ages. It was not monolithic; rather, it reflected an ongoing debate about women’s roles in the society that produced those legal traditions. This debate would be carried on in the later medieval societies that adopted those traditions and reflected in the rulings and writings of the ius commune-trained jurists who adjudicated cases involving women; it was also reflected in a broader legal culture that female litigants themselves helped to shape.
The Courts
Our analysis of women’s interaction with the gender system encoded in the ius commune and the Iberian codes it inspired might well begin at the courtroom door. But which court? By the beginning of Jaume II’s reign, female litigants (or men litigating against them) in the Crown of Aragon were confronted with numerous options. In many cases, the best choice would not have been a secular court at all but the local ecclesiastical court. Canon law, especially sacramental law, touched on the daily lives of all medieval Christians, and since marriage was one of the most heavily regulated sacraments in the later Middle Ages,81 a large number of cases involving women and marital matters—especially petitions for ecclesiastical separation—would not have appeared in the records of the secular courts. On the other hand, traces of these cases appear in the ancillary suits over sex, violence, or property that were the province of the secular courts. Furthermore, it would be a mistake to conflate women’s litigation with marriage litigation. As we shall see in the following chapters, while disputes or agreements with husbands often formed part of cases involving women, marriage per se was not always central to the case, nor were all female litigants married. Moreover, in cases not directly touching on matters of sacraments, theology, or religious practice, the secular courts of the Crown of Aragon claimed primary jurisdiction, regardless of the sex of the litigants.82
For all three major territories of the Crown of Aragon, the ultimate arbiter of secular justice was the king himself. The highest court in the joint realms of the Crown of Aragon was the royal Audiencia, an assembly celebrated every Friday.83 Justice in the Audiencia was administered personally by the king or, if he was away, by his lieutenant-general.84 Litigants with enough money or influence might have access to the Audiencia as a court of first instance, but the Audiencia also served as the final court of appeals for lower courts in all three realms.85 Additionally, records indicate that evocation—the practice of a superior court unilaterally “calling up” a case from a lower court—became more common during the reign of Jaume II. Royal authorities’ stated reason for evoking lower court cases was the desire to safeguard the correct administration of justice, especially in cases where one party was at a disadvantage. To this end, the Audiencia declared itself protector of dependents, widows, the poor, and other miserabiles personae—a category interpreted broadly to include students, travelers, merchants, and others whose expatriate status meant that they lacked the full protection of local law.86 In addition to the Audiencia’s regular meetings, the lieutenant-general also held a special hourlong session every afternoon for cases involving minors, widows and the poor, and civil cases involving sums of fewer than twenty lliures (400 sous).87 These special jurisdictions meant that a substantial body of cases involving women in particular could, at least theoretically, end up being heard in the highest court in the land.
It was, however, a general principle of jurisdiction that both civil and criminal cases should initially be tried in their own locality. In earlier centuries, this probably would have been a seigneurial court or the court of a locally elected official,88 but by the late thirteenth century, it was likely that a woman who lived near a town of any moderate size in the Crown of Aragon would be appearing in the court of a royally appointed judicial representative. In the counties of Catalonia, a litigant’s first stop, if he or she lived in the confines of a town or village, would probably be the court of the batlle.89 By the reign of Jaume II, the batlles were judicial officials who represented royal interests in a given town or village, usually as a counterweight to a locally elected council. The batlle was judge-ordinary for his town or village and the immediately surrounding territory, and was empowered to adjudicate both civil and petty criminal cases, as well as cases between Christians and Jews.90
The batlle could not, however, judge persons of high status or cases that involved bloodshed (either in the commission of the crime or its punishment). For these cases, as well as those originating outside the geographic boundaries of a batllia, a litigant’s court of first instance would be the court of the royal official known as the veguer. The vegueries encompassed broader swaths of territory than the batllies, generally corresponding to the boundaries of older counties or seigneurial jurisdictions. The veguer’s competence was also conceptually broader than that of the batlle, comprehending all types of criminal and civil cases, litigants of high and low estate, and imposition of fines, corporal punishments, or imprisonment. In essence, there were few limits to the type of cases the veguers could hear, which rendered them the most important source of secular justice in their territories.91
Both veguers and batlles might be assisted in their duties by semi-independent lieutenants (sub-veguers and sub-batlles) who reported to them but who were empowered to act on their own authority in judicial and administrative matters.92 Likewise, as the offices of veguer and batlle were political appointments that did not require any particular judicial training, each veguer or batlle would have as a member of his staff a legal expert (iurisperitus) who had received formal legal training and with whom the veguer or batlle was required to consult in deciding cases. This consultant would be the one to try the case and evaluate the evidence, though pronouncing the verdict remained the prerogative and duty of the veguer or batlle himself.93
The kingdoms of Valencia and Aragon possessed similarly overlapping local and regional judicial institutions and officers. The kingdom of Aragon had its own system of bailes (corresponding to the Catalan batlles) and merinos, with a dozen merinados located throughout the kingdom by the late thirteenth century and numerous smaller bailíos within the larger merinados. But unlike Catalonia, where veguers and batlles exercised moderate to broad judicial and administrative authority, the function of the Aragonese merinos and bailes was primarily administrative. The judicial responsibilities of these two officials were more limited than those of their Catalan counterparts, generally restricted to trying cases involving royal properties, collecting fines or settlements, and arresting defaulters on judicial fines. Merinos might also detain malefactors but only in response to a specific royal order and not as a function inherent in their office.94 Most civil and criminal cases in the later medieval kingdom of Aragon—those that did not touch directly on royal properties or officials—would have been heard by a justicia, an official charged with hearing both civil and criminal cases in a given locality. The Aragonese justicias were technically royal appointees but were drawn from the caballero class of a given locality and so tended to serve local political interests and the prohombres of their towns—a tendency that was at its strongest during the last two decades of the thirteenth century, when the Aragonese uniones temporarily won extraordinary concessions of political and judicial autonomy from the king.95
Another official of the Aragonese judicial system who appears frequently in the following pages was the zalmedina, an office that was peculiar to the districts of Zaragoza and Huesca. In Zaragoza, where there was no justicia, the zalmedina seems to have been the major judicial official, probably exercising jurisdiction similar