The permanence of the chivalric subject’s individual affects, grounded in his history, memory, and lineage, is secure within the political discourse of the knightly corporations that concern both the nobility and the bourgeoisie. This chapter’s examination of the knighthood ritual allows the formulation of an important question: how is it possible to create a political and juridical apparatus designed to facilitate the construction of an ordo? This inquiry unveils myriad strategies and theses on the repercussions of the knighting ritual. Medieval Castilian writers, working from very different textual spaces, or perhaps exploring their own textual spaces in search of the best vantage point from which to view the problem, explore different theses on power relations, on domination, and on subjection that derive from each ceremonial proposal and knightly investiture.
Ultimately, the construction of the ordo is the creation of a social and political category. Regarding its form as well as its presence and mission within society, this category is crucial and has continued to be crucial since its creation. The creation of knighthood and chivalry through ritual, through this interior and exterior transformation of the chivalric subject, is also the creation of a subjectivity, an identity that has—throughout history and into the present—a political and moral mission of key manifestations in Western civic and moral relations.
The importance of this category explains the complex, extensive, and extraordinarily varied system of critiques and debates surrounding the creation of mechanisms of power and knowledge relative to chivalry. These critiques are frequently based on the enactment of a language game, of a “final vocabulary” (Rorty) that inserts into political tradition a manner of speaking about chivalry and about its political and juridical problems. On other occasions, the apparatus goes beyond setting a form of expression and advances a complete hermeneutics of rituals and their related forms.
In any case, this is one of the manifestations of the poetics of order, of the variations texts invoke to configure a power base underpinned by the concepts of sovereignty, domination, and subjection.
These poetics of chivalric order have a specific importance. They question nobility as a theological-political category. It is the hypostasis of theological nobility in civic nobility. While the former is uncreated and permanent, chivalry allows for a foundation of nobility, imposes a fundamental variation in the order of existence in society, and opens alternatives to the transformation of forms of dominion within the kingdom and, subsequently, within the state.
The chapters that follow will examine this scarcely studied dimension of chivalry that is fully integrated into a process of transformation manifested through a dialectic between nobility and bourgeoisie. As I will show, chivalry offers a privileged vantage point from which to explore this dialectic.
CHAPTER TWO
Poetics of Fraternity
This chapter focuses on the rarely studied political space where citizen groups advance their own forms of incorporation and governance to secure participation in a network of power structures. These urban groups sought to express themselves as a constituent part of a social class, or ordo, and operate within the framework of a social category that was hitherto reserved for the creation of nobility. These groups aim to interfere in the construction of the ordo known as chivalry. The intervention of these urban groups within the sphere of chivalry offers a new perspective on the poetics of order and valuable insight on how this social class is reconfigured by the individuals and groups who wish to belong to it.
For its inquiry on this social dynamic, this chapter relies on entirely different data from those in the previous chapter: transcripts of citizens’ petitions in Cortes meetings. These transcripts reveal voices—or the collective voice of a social group in formation—in an inchoate moment and reveal not only what these voices say and how they express it but the difficulties in articulating themselves in public, in finding resonance within the political sphere that secures sovereignty. While considering this testimony, it is important to notice the developmental process and the motivations underlying these voices. Throughout this learning process, urban knights, who belong in large measure to the bourgeoisie, although nobles also participated to a lesser extent, as they transform themselves into a collective voice. Throughout this process, which manifests itself as a kind of chivalric apprenticeship, urban knights found themselves pitted against the empire of an official system of expression that was held together by the same clerics who were in charge of transcribing, on most occasions, the testimony given by urban knights. The objective of the clerical transcription of a citizen knight’s official petition was to present an accurate account, but it also adapted the petition to the hieratical forms of juridical aesthetics. In the discrepancy between the original content and the imposed content, clerical form is a dialectics of power that influenced the development of urban chivalric groups.
It is enormously difficult to isolate the original agency encoded within the testimony of urban knights. Among many reasons, it is difficult because documents themselves feature a vocabulary that often makes it unclear to whom the knights allude. It is necessary to be cognizant of how this vocabulary is being read and whether it becomes a gateway to a political and juridical space.
Some of these doors lead to a conception of the space of the city as a sociopolitical rather than simply spatiophysical referent; they highlight the civic, political, and human dimension of the urban sphere within which the knights giving testimony operated. Another way of referring to this space is to speak of its heterotopic dimension. I will refer to this dimension by means of the Latin word civitas, which points to the city as a space that cannot be localized at one specific point, but that imposes its political presence as a builder of otherness with respect to the governmental rigor imposed by the sovereign power. As we will see, the space itself of the heterotopia in which civitas is manifested is the ordenamiento (court record, ordinance), the book in which voice is articulated. The portability of the ordenamiento, its textual mouvance, and the ordering and use of its cartularies are some of the expressions associated with this civic heterotopia that transcend time and place. It is thus necessary to study these texts as a heterotopic project of the civitas.
Correlative to civitas is urbs. If civitas is the term that indicates the civil and political life of citizens (closely corresponding to the abstract Greek concept of polis), urbs is its material presence, the construction of its space, its engineering, as well as the concrete human and physical practice of those. This is the second crucial aspect of this inquiry, and to understand it adequately, I will examine how civil chivalric groups reinvent themselves around an urban space. This does not imply an irreconcilable difference between these two concepts, as I will show in my analysis of practical social organization within the urbs in Chapter 3.
Here, I will analyze the questions raised by a cuaderno produced in Castile in 1315, to constitute a “hermandad de caballeros hidalgos y villanos” (brotherhood of noble and urban knights). This regulatory text, the Cuaderno de la Hermandad, defines the hermandad or brotherhood, as a fraternity of urban knights who belonged to the nobility, or hidalgos, and the non-noble urban class, or villanos. This document is also essentially a dislocation of urban chivalry, an expression of civitas outside the space of urbs, given its participation in the processes