Rethinking Violence in Valencia and Catalonia

Prior to the commencement of this book’s planning, a recurring conversation between us, its editors, focused on the dearth of qualitative studies analyzing violence in the Medieval and Early Modern Crown of Aragon. While there have been various quantitative studies of crime in different observatories, such as those by Pablo Pérez (1990) and Rafael Narbona (1992) in the case of Valencia, as well as works investigating topics such as the death penalty (Sabaté, 2021) and the wars in which the Crown of Aragon took part (Saiz, 2008; Lafuente, 2014; Fancy, 2016), the everyday violence has been overshadowed by these more prominent topics. David Nirenberg’s (1996) influential work, which utilized Aragonese documents to examine the violence between religious communities in the Late Middle Ages, was a major milestone in European and American historiography in the mid-1990s; however, this did not lead to a similar trend among local researchers.

This book does not seek to fill any gaps in the historiography which would require years of systematic and diligent research, but instead to reveal the potential of Valencian and Catalan sources for studying pre-industrial violence in a qualitative manner. The authors of this book focus on practices, phenomena and episodes that are often excluded from the historical narrative, such as revenge, warfare from below, torture and banditry, which are addressed in the eleven chapters of this volume. Drawing on historical anthropology and microhistory, the authors illustrate the richness of the information available in the documents of the Crown of Aragon, which has been largely neglected in European historiography. It is hoped that this book will not only provide further academic contributions to this field, but also spark a trend of responses and studies in other regions similarly ignored by the dominant historiographical narrative.

The book’s first central theme is violence, a highly complex and multifaceted concept which has proven difficult to define and delimit in the field of social sciences. While its material expressions that involve deliberate physical harm are relatively straightforward to classify, in recent decades, many researchers have used the term to refer to a range of diverse social phenomena, from genocides and war crimes to issues related with symbolic violence (Bordieu, Passeron, 1970), such as hate speech and microaggressions. This ontological vagueness of the term and its broad scope of phenomena has led to a variety of definitions and approaches for studying it (Walby, 2013). Sociology, anthropology, political sciences, criminology, and security studies have all examined violence from both macro and micro perspectives, often without a common basis or any sort of interaction between them. As such, it is clear that the notion of violence is highly contested and requires further exploration.

Historians, for our part, are the first to be affected by the shortcomings of the social sciences. Ever since the Annales school, first (Chartier, Bordieu, 2019), and the British Marxists, later (Burke, 1992), introduced the tools of social theory to the study of history, our research has gradually assumed, at times excessively enthusiastically and at others with censurable slowness, its terminology, and methods. However, the observation of the past with tools of the present entails notable dangers – the greatest, our conceptual and methodological dependence on other disciplines. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, the volume of available documentary evidence gradually diminishes as we go further back into the past, which makes the acritical incorporation of new theoretical frameworks and concepts perilous. Prior to the nineteenth century, we do not have the systematic records that are basic to the contemporary social sciences, such as censuses, fiscal information or systematic macroeconomic data.

In this book we have taken on board a restricted definition of violence. The common, central element of all the cases and trials analysed in it is interpersonal physical aggression, in the form of peasants’ revolts, banditry, piracy, witchcraft and the repression of social deviation in general. We have focused on this facet of violence, and not on others, because the phenomena we are analysing were identified as violent at the time. The language contained in judicial proceedings, in letters and literary sources, to mention a few of the types of documents to which the authors of this book have resorted, speak in the same terms as we do: ‘aggression’, ‘war’, ‘enmity’, ‘hatred’, ‘murder’, ‘punishment’, ‘execution’. The fact that contemporary sources understand the events they are describing in the same way as we do, as events marked by violence, reduces the risks inherent in making interpretations that are too far away from the material reality, which is just the opposite of what this book sets out to do: to point out how cases of extreme violence occurred on a daily basis in the premodern period, in very diverse areas and across the whole of society.

The second axis of this book is that it examines episodes that lie outside the scope of traditional historiographical discourse. In recent years, historians have become increasingly interested in the analysis of violence in pre-industrial Europe, but studies typically focus on three main areas: the role of violence in the formation of states between the High Middle Ages and the emergence of polynational monarchies in the Early Modern period (Tilly, 1990); the role of warfare in social transformation, from the development of taxation systems to finance war efforts, to the institutional and logistical structure of armies, to the effects of war on civilians (Contamine, 2000; Wilkinson, 2004); and the prevalence of violence in society, as well as the capacity of authorities to contain it, as revealed through a mass of judicial records, using both quantitative and qualitative methods (Chiffoleau, 1984; Gauvard, 1991).

However, a common trait of the previously mentioned historiographical lines is that none of them make violence or individuals the primary focus of the issue; they consider it an integral part of the largely impersonal historical processes on which they concentrate. Without it, the first feudal rulers would not have been able to privatize the power which formerly belonged to the state, and the Early Modern monarchies could not have strengthened their positions without resorting to violence or, at least, the fear of it. Additionally, warfare and crime cannot occur without violence; it is their condition of possibility. If disputes between states were to take place peacefully, they would stay within the realm of diplomacy; and, if interpersonal disputes were to be settled without any aggression, they would be addressed in civil lawsuits. Even so, these studies view violence as a means or a transgression, but they neglect to analyze how it happened on an everyday level and, more importantly, why individuals either perpetrated or experienced it.

Violence was pervasive in preindustrial societies. In addition to major historical processes and institutional history, everyday life was characterized by events and patterns of behaviour with a strong connection to violence. However, the study of it has posed challenges in terms of methodology and approach; the most prominent being the unnecessary – and potentially damaging – separation of quantitative analysis and qualitative approaches. This division is often reflected in the emphasis researchers place on certain factors when attempting to explain the cause of violence. Whereas microhistory, historical anthropology, and the history of emotions tend to prioritize individuals’ culture and ideology as explanations for aggressions, rows, insults, and humiliations, social and economic historians put more weight on the historical agent’s broader milieu.

Why not consider both material factors and conventions, customs, traditions, and beliefs as potential influences on individuals’ everyday lives? Although the explanation of the outbreak of revolts, for instance, stems on changes in the economic system (Thompson, 1971), qualitative historical studies may be more revealing when statistics are not available or when a case study is the only viable approach. In pre-industrial societies, socio-economic and political inequalities, harsh living conditions and difficulty in social mobility could all contribute to a climate of insecurity and social tension, which in turn led to interpersonal conflict. In addition, further research into the structural aspects of everyday violence, its prevalence, and how it has been quelled since the advent of modernity can also provide insights to understand its function. This volume focuses on the latter, on individual episodes and events, and tackles the issue of violence from a cultural and anthropological perspective.

Furthermore, we shall direct our focus towards their protagonists – figures on the edges of history, of whom we have limited information. In 1976, Bronislaw Geremek published a study of outcasts in Paris between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, in the context of the Annales school’s historiographical renewal, investigated a largely neglected group. Other authors, utilizing microhistory, interpreted the concept of margins differently and decided to focus on figures not necessarily poor and alienated, but excluded from more traditional historiography. In this regard, judicial sources can prove to be highly valuable – for example, the trial of the miller Menocchio, examined by Carlo Guinzburg in 1976, or that of the Occitan peasant Martin Guerre, studied by Natalie Zemon Davis in 1983, provide us with novel perspectives on the lives of preindustrial populace. In the realm of Hispanic historiography, figures such as Catalina de Erauso, ‘the standard-bearer nun’, and the invisible line between transvestitism and transgenderism in the Early Modern period, have been the subject of research from this viewpoint (Calvo, 2015).

All the cases mentioned above are inseparable from violence. The relationship between the preindustrial states and marginalized people was, in general, coercive: repression, imprisonment and banishment were usual recourses in the management of a problematic group. For its part, the judicialization of cases like Martin Guerre’s frequently involved resorting to violence in the form of torture and execution. Moreover, they focus on events, trials and individuals who until very recently were not at the heart of the historical narrative. Neither Menocchio nor Martin Guerre were outcasts, but well-to-do peasants. Their presence was however camouflaged by the vast anonymity of the social mass. In a similar manner, the people mentioned in the chapters of this book rarely appear in the broader historiographical narrative and the violence they experienced or inflicted has been ignored, removed from the focus of historiographical interest.

The historians of the Crown of Aragon, the area on which we are focusing, have largely been tributaries of historiographical currents that arose north of the Pyrenees, and the aforementioned perspectives of analysis were incorporated in their repertoire at a relatively late date. However, there were precedents – some remarkably early – in the recovery of episodes that were situated on the edges of history. It is the case of Joaquim Miret i Sans, who pointed out the existence of crime and marginalization in the medieval Catalan world with his Sempre han tingut bec les oques (1905–1906), and of Joan Cortada, who rescued the trial of the seventeenth-century bandit Joan de Serrallonga from oblivion and then reconstructed his story (1868).

The study of violence in the medieval and modern Crown of Aragon is now well- established, thanks to consolidation of the paradigms and methodology of social history in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the field has yet to be fully explored by academics, given its potential. To the studies cited and the start of the introduction, we should add others such as Teresa Vinyoles’s study of marginal crime in medieval Barcelona (Vinyoles, 1990), Josep Torro’s works on what part played aggression both during the Christian conquest of the Sharq al-Andalus and throughout the creation of a new social and political order in the conquered lands (2001, 2006), and the articles by Mark Meyerson (2004, 2022) and Ferran Garcia-Oliver, the latter included in a monograph, on violence against minorities (2019). Recently, Vicent J. Escartí, alone (2021a, 2021b) or with Rafael Roca (2021a, 2021b), has coordinated various volumes that focus on the figures on the edges of the history of the Crown of Aragon. Our volume is part, therefore, of a new trend that sets out to rescue processes, social practices and forgotten figures for historiography, but whose study is extraordinarily revealing with respect to the preindustrial period.

The book begins with Guillermo López Juan’s chapter, in which he analyses revenge as a transverse phenomenon in the religious communities of the Iberian Peninsula in the late Middle Ages. Based on three particular cases and on complementary archive documentation, the author shows how Muslims, Jews and Christians shared the same culture of honour that, when an individual suffered an aggression, obliged his closest circle to offer a violent response. López Juan tackles the question from the point of view of historical anthropology, comparing the three cases of revenge with one another, and establishes parallels with similar episodes in that same period and the present. The chapter concludes that, in the context of a society in which the private exercise of violence still enjoyed legitimacy, the social values that justified it were common to the popular classes, regardless of the individuals’ religion.

After that, in chapter two, Pablo Sanahuja observes the reaction of the Muslim aljamas in the kingdom of Valencia to the outbreak of the War of the Two Peters between Castile and the Crown of Aragon in the middle of the fourteenth century. The war and the arrival of Castilian troops made it possible for some communities of Muslim peasants in the kingdom, who had been vassals of the kings of Aragon for barely a century, to negotiate new fiscal and governmental conditions with King Peter I the Cruel in exchange for helping in the war effort against their former monarch. Others, on the other hand, remained loyal to King Peter IV of Aragon. At the end of the war, the disloyal communities suffered punishments and also the reprisals of their Christian neighbours, who had been the victims of their raids for a decade. Sanahuja demonstrates that the rural Muslim communities, in a state of subordination and subjected to a harsher fiscal and governmental regime than their Christian counterparts, had the capacity for political action, and were on the verge of breaking their vassalage agreements in order to obtain higher status.

In chapter three, Miquel Faus makes a case study of the death of Pere Comte, the son of a Valencian merchant, at the battle of Aljubarrota (1385). Enlisted in the company of Pedro de Ribagorça, son of the Marquess of Villena, and armed like a knight, Comte fought on the losing Castilian side. The judicial proceedings that began in the civil court of Valencia to decide whether or not he was dead and to thus be able to execute his inheritance, offers a previously unknown view of the battle: that of the soldiers, squires and servants who accompanied him, and who on their return testified in favour or against the parties involved. The experience of the medieval soldier, generally inaccessible for us, is shown to us here thanks to a strange and formidable documentary source. The chapter also reveals how those individuals, who belonged to the social elites but not the aristocracy, moved in the social circles of the nobility and tried to emulate their behaviour for the purpose of consolidating their status.

Javier Fajardo devotes chapter four to the reconstruction of the activities of the Genoese pirate Battista Aicardi, ‘Scarrinxo’, on the shores of the Crown of Aragon in the middle decades of the fifteenth century. The Italian aspirations of King Alfonso V the Magnanimous, as well as the Crown’s historic rivalry with the republic of Genoa for commercial control of the western Mediterranean, led to the outbreak of an intense naval war between the two. While the Catalan admiral Bernat de Vilamarí was blockading the ports of Genoa, Scarrinxo was constantly carrying out attacks against Valencian, Catalan and Balearic ports, leaving an abundant trail in the documents in the form of correspondence, maritime warnings, resolutions to take steps and complaints to the king about the lack of safety on the coast. The abundant documentation of the period, as well as the author’s exhaustive analysis, allow us to observe particular details about naval warfare and its main protagonists, whose activities were perceived ambivalently: as legitimate, by the governments who promoted them, and as criminal, by those who suffered them.

In chapter five Francesc Granell analyses the influence of the local context in different depictions of episodes and figures in the Centenar de la Ploma (The Hundred of the Feather) altarpiece, one of the crucial Catalan Gothic paintings in Valencia in the early years of the fifteenth century. The characteristics of the work allow us to glimpse that not only were the painter and the commissioners not oblivious to contemporary events, but they tried to express them on the altarpiece through the updating of biblical scenes, from the Golden Legend and the conquest of the Muslims of the kingdom so that they would have some connection to the present. Events like the crusade against the Barbary Coast at the end of the fourteenth century, the mass conversion of the Jews in the peninsula, the failed attacks against the Muslim population of the kingdom, and the dynamics of otherness between religious communities seem to have played a decisive role in how some figures in the scenes were depicted, systematically ‘Saracenized’. The altarpiece therefore stands as an artistic and historical artefact that ‘synchronizes’ – in the words of the author – past and present, for the purpose of recalling mythical scenes of Christianity and of the foundation of the kingdom, but also to spread ideological values and principles.

The use of torture by the Spanish Inquisition is the main theme of chapter six. Jacob Mompó, its author, studies how the Holy Office resorted to different forms of torture during autos-da-fé, generally not as a punitive mechanism, but to obtain a confession from the prisoner. The author fills his analysis with primary sources from the extremely rich inquisitorial records, specifically those of the Tribunal of Valencia, whose conservation is virtually unparalleled in the Iberian Peninsula. The chapter shows that the institution resorted to torture in a meticulously regulated way throughout its history, from the beginning to its dissolution. By that time Enlightened literature was campaigning for the introduction of other methods of interrogation, if not directly for the abolition of torture at any stage of the judicial proceedings. The victims, who generally belonged to the lower classes, confessed systematically to what they were being accused of; in the face of initial refusal to confess, the torments increased in intensity, for the purpose of the prisoners assuming a guilt that they were already presumed to have.

Vicent Escartí, known for his studies on medieval and modern Catalan literature, has recently studied homosexuality in the Valencian society of the period in depth. In chapter seven, the author focuses on a sodomy trial in the year 1581, of the Morisco Gregori Xeus, and he makes an interesting introductory study. Escartí contextualizes the persecution of homosexuality in the kingdom of Valencia in the Early Modern age, including not only the Christian notions of it, but also the popular beliefs that linked it to the occurrence of natural catastrophes, epidemics and wars. The prisoner, from his doubly subordinate status, that of Morisco and homosexual, is presented to us through the trial as an atypical historical subject in the sources, but perhaps so not so much on a social level. The inquisitorial trial, marked by interrogation under extraordinarily cruel torture, ended with the execution of Xeus, who had no option but to confess his crimes.

The protagonists of chapter eight are the women accused of witchcraft in two regions of Catalonia, El Vallès and El Rosselló (Roussillon), in the first half of the seventeenth century. Agustí Alcoberro associates the persecution of witches with the natural disasters of the Little Ice Age and the pressure from civil society to put an end to the hailstorms, the torrential rains and the seasonal fogs, for which they were held responsible. The peculiarity of Catalonia in the period was that the judicialization of climate crimes, those that were attributed to the alleged witches, corresponded to royal jurisdiction, led by batlles and veguers, who generally acted compelled by local society. The weather conditions and the population’s anxiety due to the practice of witchcraft unleashed several waves of repression between 1614 and 1629 in northern Catalonia, which culminated in dozens of trials and various executions.

Àngel Casals devotes chapter nine to Guillem de Josa, a Catalan bandit in the mid sixteenth century who belonged to the lesser nobility. Josa’s career is an example of the political and social function of banditry in the Crown of Aragon in the Early Modern period: thanks to excellent political and family connections, the gentleman bandit, as Casals calls him, was able to spread violence the length and breadth of Catalonia in the middle decades of the century, both personally and as a member of different gangs in political competition. After murdering his wife and her lover in 1548, Josa used the complex contemporary clientele-based and jurisdictional network to escape from his enemies and at the same time improve the status of his family, formed of legitimate and illegitimate children that he tried to advance socially. Temporary exile in 1558, achieved by his mother and her protectors, took him to the Low Countries in the service of the monarchy, then to Naples and finally back to the Iberian Peninsula in 1567, where he would be murdered a year later, the victim of a revenge killing.

The chapter authored by Víctor Jurado undertakes a comparative analysis of the nobility’s loyalties and allegiances within the structure and functioning of factions prevalent in sixteenth-century Catalonia. To begin with, it scrutinizes the utilization of violence in the European society of the Ancien Régime by means of a historiographical inquiry into the topic. Subsequently, it examines its employment in the client networks led by Luis de Requesens, the right-hand man of John of Austria, on the one hand, and in those patronized by the nobles who protected bandits, on the other. Jurado argues that, despite the similarity in the loyalty mechanisms of both forms that aim to achieve specific benefits, the primary difference between them lies in the leadership of each clientele. In the case of Requesens, the exercise of violence is legitimately carried out in the name of the king, in an international context. Conversely, in the context of factional struggles, actions are chiefly driven by the interests of the patron.

The book concludes with the chapter by Alejandro Llinares Planells about banditry in the kingdom of Valencia in the seventeenth century. Basing himself on an exhaustive theoretical framework and on ample archive documentation, taken from works of literature, judicial proceedings, official correspondence and diaries, the author breaks with a classic historiographical concept imported artificially to the kingdom of Valencia: the one that distinguishes between the banditry of noblemen, bandits from the lower classes, and armed gangs who were rivals, locally and in their comarca, for political, economic and social primacy. Llinares establishes revealing connections between, on the one hand, the nobility, the hired killers and minions that it used on the violent side of the political arena, and on the other the banditry that took place among the lower classes of society, who engaged in large, insufficiently studied clientele networks. The author offers an interesting perspective of the Valencian social scene of the time, marked by violence on all levels: from the corridors of power to the local confrontations, via the everyday insecurity and the movements of travellers and goods. This climate of violence, according to Llinares, crystallized in a particular stereotype; that of the Valencian as an individual not only inclined to violence, but also an expert in using it.

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