Negotiating Power and Privilege: Written Law, Monarchy, and the Nobility in Medieval Aragon

This dissertation examines the making of Aragon’s first law code in the mid-thirteenth century. The kingdom of Aragon, situated in northeastern Iberia, was part of the composite monarchy known as the Crown of Aragon, which by the end of James I’s reign (1213-1276) included Catalonia, parts of southern France, as well as the Iberian kingdoms of Valencia and Mallorca. A version of this thirteenth-century law code is called the Vidal Mayor. Composed around 1247 by the bishop and jurist Vidal de Canellas, the Vidal Mayor contains both laws and a rich commentary on contemporary society, touching on myriad aspects of daily life from rainwater management and tree felling to religious conversion and the minutiae of the nobility’s military obligations. This dissertation focuses primarily on the fraught relationship between the Aragonese crown and the nobility during this period, while also bringing a new approach to our understanding of what the text of the Vidal Mayor was and is now in its surviving vernacular form.

By analyzing both the laws and the commentary found in the Vidal Mayor, in conjunction with documentary evidence and James I’s autobiographical narrative, the Llibre dels fets, I argue that law took center stage in conflicts between the two most powerful political forces in the region, namely the crown and the nobility. While the crown aimed at centralizing its power, the nobility struggled to preserve its customary privileges and patrimonial assets against the influx of ideas about unrestricted royal power coming from the universities. In demonstrating that the Vidal Mayor arose as a product of negotiation between varied political forces, not as an imposition from the crown, this dissertation further deepens our understanding of how law was negotiated at the local level and the fundamental role it played in mediating relations between the crown and the nobility.