Chapter 17 - Political Identity and Patrician Power in the City of Burgos during the Fifteenth Century

Summary

URBAN POWER has an ever-changing nature, in which different power-groups, not necessarily organized in a hierarchical way, coexist. Of course, there is a hierarchy in which the king occupies the pinnacle, but in the city of Burgos, especially during the convulsive reigns of Juan II and Enrique IV, circumstances forced kings to come to agreements. Urban patriciate and commoners, the clergy and nobility, and even royal officials were involved in a permanent power struggle against the backdrop of the identity of Burgos, focused on privileges and charters. In late medieval Burgos, only the patricians were predominantly urban. This eminently urban power system is a characteristic of late medieval towns, and the way it was produced, and reproduced itself, can only be explained from an urban viewpoint. This feature helps to explain why towns were able to single themselves out from the other feudal powers. During the Late Middle Ages, Burgos, like most Castilian, Iberian, even European towns and cities, built its political identity on the foundation of three parallel and simultaneous processes: the growth of patrician power, forging certain distinctive features of its own identity, and self-expression (which involved finding an institutional language and ceremonial and related political expressions and attitudes).

From the mid-thirteenth century onwards, a simultaneous, dual process can be detected in the Iberian Kingdoms: on the one hand, an evident tendency towards urban governments becoming dominated by an elite, and, on the other hand, a policy from the monarchy that tried to legitimate and fix oligarchic governments in towns led by their respective urban patriciate. So, Castilian kings helped consolidate internal urban political tendencies: the patrimonialization of public offices, the privatization of power, and the crystallization of an oligarchic self-awareness and self-identity of the urban elites at the expense of the aspirations of the commoners.

In Burgos, this process took place between 1345, when the regimiento, the supreme urban authority, was established by the king, and 15 January 1475, when what we can call a “patrician constitution” was given to the city. Developing this particular power structure was not straightforward, as the duration of the process, one hundred and thirty years, clearly emphasizes. 1345 and 1475 represent two great political successes of the elite of Burgos, the latter a sort of culmination of its aims.