The Requerimiento in the Old World: Making Demands and Keeping Records in the Legal Culture of Late Medieval Castile

Abstract

This article analyses the place of the legal procedure known as requerimiento (requirement) in the social life of late medieval Castile. Drawing on archival sources from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it examines how Castilians deployed the requerimiento and what meanings and functions this procedure assumed, particularly in processes of conflict-management. While much has been written about the requerimiento as a ritual of conquest in Spanish America, the place of this procedure in the legal culture of late medieval Castile has received little scholarly attention. By examining how the requerimiento operated within the world of civic disputes in Castilian villages and towns, this study brings to light a rather unknown background for the more familiar requerimiento, the colonial ritual of the sixteenth century.

The requerimiento (requirement) was among the most famous legal instruments of Spanish colonization in the Americas, a legal ritual of conquest designed to both assert and legitimate rule over others.¹ Upon first contact with indigenous groups, invading parties would read a written statement asserting Spanish sovereignty over the “islands and mainland of the ocean sea,” granted by the pope, by dint of his universal jurisdiction, to the kings of Spain. The statement, whose recitation had to be recorded by a notary, demanded that the addressees obey Spanish rule and allow preachers to indoctrinate them in the Catholic faith. If they did so, the text promised that they would be spared and offered protection as free vassals of the crown; if they did not, war would be waged upon them and they could legally be subjected to a variety of punishments, including enslavement and death.² The instruction to perform the requerimiento was officially given following the Junta of Burgos, which had been convened by Fernando the Catholic in 1512 to address increasing criticism—most notably from the Dominicans—of the Spaniards’ treatment of the indios, and to counter growing concerns over the legality of conquest.³ As Tamar Herzog describes it, the requerimiento “sought to transform Indian resistance to the invasion of their lands into an act of legal disobedience that would validate the launching of just war.”⁴ Along similar lines, Paja Faudree has proposed considering the requerimiento as a performative speech act. Once recited, the statement imposed a new status on indigenous groups, who could now be regarded as usurpers of jurisdiction, while at the same time transforming the relationship between these groups and the Spaniards into one of just war.⁵

While acknowledging the crucial role that the requerimiento came to play in the process of Spanish colonization, this article traces its roots back to the legal culture of late medieval Castile. To do this, I focus not on the content of the statement read by the Spaniards in the Americas, but on what I see as the ritual core of the requerimiento as a legal act; namely, the presentation of a demand or warning to an addressee and its official recording. Drawing on a range of archival, normative, and narrative sources, I demonstrate that in late medieval Castile, the requerimiento was primarily known as a ritual of demand making and record making used in diverse processes of dispute management. Indeed, long before it emerged as a tool for justifying rule over native Americans, the requerimiento was practiced among Castilians—elites and ordinary people alike—in the context of civic disputes. As a legal ritual, the Castilian requerimiento of the later Middle Ages reflected contemporary understandings of lawful conduct, of fairness and appropriateness in conflict, and of the role of speech acts and documents in constituting social relations.

Links between the requerimiento, as practiced in Spanish America, and certain medieval legal traditions have been the subject of a number of scholarly works. According to one hypothesis, the requerimiento originated in Islamic rituals of war. Patricia Seed, the main proponent of this argument, has pointed out a series of similarities between the requerimiento and the ritualized warning that Muslims were instructed to perform before waging jihad.⁶ According to Seed, the main idea of the requerimiento—“summoning people to acknowledge a superior religion or be attacked”—was similar to “the core of the summons as understood in the Islamic legal tradition of the Iberian Peninsula.”⁷ The similarities between these rituals extended to the model of conquest that they prescribed, which offered the occupied protection as long as they acknowledged the invaders’ rule and paid tribute. Seed has suggested that Iberian Christian kings appropriated the Islamic model and applied it in their conquests of Muslim territories. They then, in the sixteenth century, extended this model and adapted it for use in the colonies.⁸

Other scholarly interpretations have connected the requerimiento to ongoing discussions within Christendom about papal jurisdiction, the dominium of non-Christians, and the conditions for just war.⁹ From a legal point of view, one of the challenges associated with the Spanish conquests in the Americas was how to explain the enslavement of the indios and the appropriation of their lands, given the precepts of Roman law according to which such actions were legal only when carried out in the context of a “just war”—with the latter being understood as defensive in nature.¹⁰ In a tract titled “On the islands of the Ocean Sea,” the Spanish jurist Juan López Palacios Rubios, who was also credited with formulating the language of the requerimiento, offered a solution to this conundrum. Asserting the position that “the pope possessed dominium over both secular and spiritual matters, and that this could be exercised over both Christians and non-Christians,”¹¹ Palacios Rubios argued that the inhabitants of the newly “discovered” islands did, in fact, exercise dominium over their lands. But this was the case only until they were informed of the arrival of Christianity. From that moment forward, they had to accept the authority of the church. If they resisted, just war could be waged upon them.¹² Seen in this light, the requerimiento operated as a device through which Native Americans were to be formally informed about Christianity.¹³

Without negating the requerimiento's legal and ideological functions in the Spanish conquests in the Americas, this article draws attention to the significance and role of this procedure in the social life of late medieval Castile. Situating the requerimiento within the world of the Castilian town or village, I analyze how it was deployed by disputants of varied social ranks and what meanings and functions it assumed. The article shows that, in Castile, the requerimiento was an integral element of a range of political and judicial processes, including petitioning the monarch for redress. Moreover, as a tool of dispute management, it often served as a means to circumvent violence, providing parties with a formal and legally recognized venue from which to assert social and political claims or pressure opponents and local officials. Reflecting upon this context expands and gives texture to existing juridico-intellectual accounts of the requerimiento and, in turn, produces a more complex and socially grounded understanding of its transformation in the colonial setting. Rather than morphological continuity—from Iberian to American conquest—the story this article sets out to tell is one of change over time, as a legal ritual known to many from local conflicts in their towns and villages acquired new uses and meanings in the process of colonial domination.

In this sense, the extension of the requerimiento to Spanish America provides a perfect example of the general pattern that Anthony Stevens-Arroyo has identified as “a perceived need to legitimate Spanish society by referring to established medieval practice.”¹⁴ Borrowing from Stevens-Arroyo, the requerimiento can be seen as pertaining to “a kind of political language that employs the grammar of the medieval experience, but with words which have acquired new lexical meanings.”¹⁵ In short, the requerimiento is one example of a broader process in which established Castilian norms were re-signified in the context of conquest and colonial othering. This article thus contributes to a more general rethinking of the legal history of Spanish conquest, one that looks to the shifting meanings of legal practices as they traveled back and forth to the colonies.

What follows is organized around five interlocking arguments: first, that the requerimiento of the later Middle Ages was a ritual of claims making used in a wide array of social and political contexts—not solely in contexts of conquest or just war; second, that although it was performative, the requerimiento in Castile also had an important dialogical component expressed in the production of a public record, in which the response of the addressee was also incorporated; third, that the requerimiento was not confined to the world of the nobility, but was, in fact, performed regularly by ordinary people—for example, as part of the popular recourse of petitioning; fourth, that disputants in Castile employed the requerimiento for a range of purposes, such as publicizing claims, threatening opponents, or putting pressure on local judges and officials; and fifth, that the late medieval requerimiento should be situated against the backdrop of a Romano-canonical procedural tradition of judicial warnings extended to adversaries in civic disputes. In the concluding section, I return to the colonial setting to suggest that when the Spaniards introduced the requerimiento to the Caribbean, they emptied it of some of its original meanings, while also imbuing it with new ones.

1. In Late Medieval Castile, the Requerimiento Was a Ritual of Claim Making Used in Various Social and Political Contexts

That the requerimiento in late medieval Castile was a ritual of claim making is primarily attested to by the existence in various Castilian archives of notarial acts dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that record this ritual.¹⁶ Known in Castilian as testimonios de requerimiento (“testimonies of requirements”), these documents shed light on the basic features of this procedure. To begin with, they show that the requerimiento had to consist of a physical encounter between a claimant and an addressee, in the course of which the former presented the latter with a demand and requested their compliance. Claimants had to conduct this act themselves, or they could employ a procurator to whom full powers of attorney had been delegated. Moreover, the requerimiento had to be carried out in the presence of at least two witnesses and a notary (escribano). The latter would authenticate and read aloud any document presented by the claimant, as well as attest to the act of claim making by drawing up the testimonio, a document that functioned as a record of the encounter.

Like its colonial successor, the late medieval requerimiento was characterized by an interplay of oral utterances and written records. In fact, in many cases, it involved the presentation and reading of several documents. A requerimiento conducted in November of 1468 in the castle of Zafra in Extremadura provides a good illustration.¹⁷ On this occasion, the nobleman Pedro Fernández de Velasco appeared on behalf of Princess Isabel of Castile before the warden of the castle and displayed three documents: a notarized letter of attorney that appointed him to serve as the princess’ procurator, a royal decree of King Enrique IV that affirmed a recent pact made with Isabel according to which the castle of Zafra shall be surrendered to her, and a third document, “a deed of requirement” (escritura de requerimiento) specifying Fernández de Velasco's intention to take control of the castle on behalf of his mistress.¹⁸ The testimonio de requerimiento, a record found today in the royal archives at Simancas, indicates that Fernández de Velasco was accompanied in this act by a notary from a nearby village, and that a number of witnesses—a few men from the castle, as well as one of Fernández de Velasco's own servants—were also present. During the encounter, the notary read the three documents aloud, one after the other. He then recorded the act of claims making and drew up the testimonio. Copies of the three documents were incorporated into this record.¹⁹

Other testimonios describe similar sequences. This suggests that the display, reading, and production of documents was at the very heart of the requerimiento as a ritual. In fact, like Fernández de Velasco, many claimants and procurators would prepare a written statement of demands in advance. In the act itself, they would hand over this document to the notary to be read to the addressee and then copied into the testimonio. “A deed of requirement” (escritura or escripto de requerimiento),²⁰ “a deed of requirement written in paper” (escripto de requerimiento escrito en papel),²¹ “a requirement written in paper” (requerimiento escripto en papel),²² and “a letter of requirement” (carta de requerimiento),²³ were the main terms used in the records to refer to these statements. In other cases, we are told that parties “made a requirement” (fizieron un requerimiento) or simply “required,” without mentioning whether such acts included the reading of a written statement.²⁴ In yet other cases, the language used in the sources creates the impression that the claimant presented the demand orally. In any event, the word “requerimiento” stands in these records both for the document stating the demand and for the ritual of claims making itself.

As the example of Princess Isabel's requerimiento suggests, the requerimiento was part of the Castilian world of diplomacy and high politics. Royal chronicles from the fifteenth century provide multiple examples of this. According to the chronicle of Juan II, this king sent messengers to the city of Ávila to “require” control over certain towers held by the supporters of his cousin and rival, the king of Navarra.²⁵ In another episode, Juan II sends his procurators, including one of the chief royal notaries, to the courts at Navarra and Aragon in order to “require and warn” (requiesen é amonestasen) his cousins not to enter his kingdom accompanied by troops.²⁶ King Enrique IV, we read in another chronicle, sent messengers to deliver a requerimiento to a group of nobles and churchmen who declared their allegiance to his half-sister, Isabel, demanding that they return to his service.²⁷ Similar descriptions are found in other contemporary chronicles as well.²⁸

On some occasions, requerimientos were performed prior to waging war on an enemy. The chronicle of Juan II reports that when the king received news that the king of Navarra and his followers were approaching Medina del Campo “to make certain requerimientos,” he ordered the citizens of the town to take up arms and prepare for battle.²⁹ According to an account written in Burgos toward the end of the fifteenth century, in the beginning of the Castilian succession war, when King Fernando II came to the city to lay siege on its castle, he first “ordered to require and he indeed required” the warden to surrender it.³⁰ Requerimientos of this kind may have also been presented to the Muslim defenders of certain castles in the war against Granada.³¹

Yet, as a legal ritual, the requerimiento clearly encompassed other types of claims and circumstances. Thus, after winning a lawsuit against the Count of Medinaceli, the noblewoman Elvira de Ayala sent her procurator to “require” the count to comply with the court's ruling, which granted her control over the village of Gibraleón. The testimonio suggests that the procurator and the notary surprised the count while he was traveling. The ritual took place in a street in Salamanca, in the presence of some local witnesses, a number of the counts’ squires, and the count himself, who “sat on the back of his mule.”³² In a similar way, the procurator of the noble Diego Fernández de Quiñones traveled to the town of Astorga to perform a requerimiento to another noble, Pedro Álvarez Osorio. Fernández de Quiñones heard that Álvarez Osorio was collecting the purveyance rights (yantar) from a certain village, whose lordship he had recently purchased. On behalf of Fernández de Quiñones, the procurator had a notary read Álvarez Osorio “a written deed of requirement” that informed him of the purchase of the village and demanded that he cease collecting tribute.³³

In the following pages, we shall look more closely into some of the functions and meanings that requerimientos assumed within processes of dispute management. For now, let us just distinguish between two basic scenarios in which late medieval Castilians conducted this ritual. The first involved a claimant demanding that an addressee comply with a royal decree or judicial ruling issued in his or her favor. The second consisted of a demand to desist from infringing on the claimant's rights, to make amends for injuries that the addressee had caused, or to act in some other way so that the claimant's rights could be preserved. In this scenario, no official ruling or decree was needed. Essentially, the requerimiento functioned here as a sort of a warning, a signal that the claimant intended to take further action, often of a legal nature, against the addressee.

2. The Late Medieval Requerimiento Was Performative, but It also Had an Important Dialogical Component

In her study on the requerimiento in Spanish America, Faudree writes that: “in formal terms, the requerimiento appears to be quintessentially performative: as it is read, speech becomes action as social relations between the Indians and the Spaniards are transformed.”³⁴ The requerimiento in late medieval Castile needs to be understood along similar lines. It was performative because it rendered a claim official in a way that transformed the status of the relations between claimants and addressees. Once a requerimiento had been conducted, the addressee could not pretend to be ignorant of the demand, and could be considered as having been given a fair opportunity to make amends. In this sense, the requerimiento established a social fact that, as will be discussed in further detail below, could have both moral and legal significance. Yet, the requerimiento was not just a speech act. While its performative effect certainly depended on an oral communication of the demand to its addressee, the recording of this communication—that is, the production of the testimonio—was equally important. In fact, at least from a legal point of view, the lack of a testimonio could render the entire procedure meaningless, preventing the claimant from demonstrating that a requerimiento had indeed been conducted. The presence and collaboration of the notary were therefore crucial: When notaries refused to record requerimientos or to provide the testimonio to the claimant—something that happened on occasion, whether because the addressee was a powerful or fearful individual or due to some other partisan propensity or hostility on the part of the notary—they essentially neutralized the performative effect that the requerimiento was meant to generate.

According to Faudree, sixteenth-century critics had already questioned the performativity of the requerimiento in America. What authors like Bartolome de Las Casas argued in this regard was that the conditions needed for the requerimiento to function as a performative speech act in fact never existed in the New World, both because in many cases the indios could not understand the text recited to them and because they did not receive the proper opportunity to respond.³⁵ Such criticisms are imbued with new meaning if we remember that, in fifteenth-century Castile, requerimientos did have an important dialogical component. As noted, upon presentation of the demand to the addressee, the latter was requested to declare whether or not they were willing to fulfil it. Furthermore, the notary was obliged to document the addressee's response and incorporate it into his testimony.

Evidence from the fifteenth century indicates that Castilians normally responded to the requerimientos addressed to them, and that many of them took such responses quite seriously. For example, when Princess Isabel's procurator demanded control over the castle of Zafra, the warden showed his obedience to the royal decree by ceremoniously placing the document on his head and blessing the king, a reaction that the notary made sure to record.³⁶ This, however, did not mean that the warden intended to surrender the castle to the procurator. In fact, he rejected the latter's demand, presenting a written statement of his own, in which he declared his intention to turn to the monarch and ask him to reconsider his decree.³⁷ Revealed here is an awareness of the importance of the written representation of the requerimiento. While the warden had no problem disregarding the royal command, he still cared about the depiction of his response in the record, assuming that it might be examined at some point by his superiors. Following the ceremonial protocol and ensuring that it was recorded by the notary allowed him to avoid coming across as categorically insubordinate.

In certain cases, addressees requested time before declaring their official response to the requerimiento, which allowed them to consider their course of action and sometimes to seek legal counsel. In 1417, when the procurator of one of his rivals appeared at his house in Seville accompanied by a notary and presented him with a requerimiento, the Andalusian lord Alonso Pérez de Guzmán called his own notary and instructed him to draw up a statement of response. The latter was then read to the procurator and incorporated into the testimonio. What is interesting about this case is not only the delay in Pérez de Guzmán's response, but also the involvement of two notaries, one from each side. This may indicate that Pérez de Guzmán distrusted the notary hired by his opponent, and it also suggests that the testimonio was the product of a process of negotiation. At least in this case, the two parties seem to have participated together in producing the record. Concerns over the representation of demands and responses may also explain why, in so many instances, claimants and addressees employed written statements. Such statements saved time for the notaries who drew up the testimonios because they could instantly be copied into the record. At the same time, copying such statements allowed accuracy, affording disputants a greater degree of control over how their words were recorded.

3. Ordinary Castilians also Engaged in Requerimientos

It is not easy to find evidence for requerimientos conducted by non-nobles prior to the final quarter of the fifteenth century, but this has more to do with the kind of sources that have come down to us—typically scanty or sketchy when it comes to the political and legal life of non-elite Castilians—than with the latter's lack of engagement in this practice. Indeed, when a particularly rich municipal archive did survive, it is sometimes possible to trace documentation pertaining to requerimientos conducted by commoners earlier in the fifteenth century. Local records from Cúellar, a small town some 50 km southeast of Valladolid, show the people of this town, and particularly the representatives of the municipal council, performing requerimientos in various conflicts and negotiations with neighboring communities and lords over issues such as jurisdictional rights, the usage of resources, and the collection of tributes and taxes. Additionally, on various occasions, claimants from outside Cúellar appeared before the municipal council to present their own requerimientos. ³⁸

One principal venue in which ordinary Castilians commonly performed requerimientos was in the process of petitioning the monarch for redress. In Castile, as in other late medieval polities, overseeing the administration of justice was regarded as a chief royal duty. Furthermore, it was the execution of this duty that provided the monarchy with one of its main justifications for interfering in local jurisdictions. Although petitioning the Castilian monarch for redress became a well-established practice as early as the fourteenth century, it is only during the reign of Isabel I and Fernando II (1474–1504) that we can study it in depth, thanks to the survival (for the first time in Castile) of a substantial part of the royal archives, including tens of thousands of royal registers. These records attest to the massive scale of petitioning under the so-called Catholic Kings and to its increasing popularity as a tool for drawing the central government into local disputes. In fact, in certain years during this period, there were thousands of Castilians who traveled to royal centers to present petitions.

In Castile, the main royal institution that handled such complaints was the Royal Council, which functioned as a court of equity and had the authority to administer justice through an expedited procedure.³⁹ In response to petitions, the Royal Council would issue royal decrees (“letters of justice”) containing commands made in favor of the claimant.⁴⁰ The requerimiento was integral to the petition-and-response process because, after obtaining a royal decree, the petitioner would have to return to his or her locality, present the document to its addressee, and then “require” their compliance with the royal command. Such requerimientos involved notaries and witnesses, and they were conducted according to the same principles previously outlined. Thus, in the final quarter of the fifteenth century alone, the petition-and-response process brought thousands of Castilians to perform requerimientos in front of fellow townsmen and villagers. Drawing on the decrees that they obtained, many demanded that their adversaries pay reparations, return property that had been taken, or otherwise desist from injurious behavior. Others “required” the execution of decrees that summoned their adversaries to trial at the Royal Council or ordered local judges and magistrates to perform their duty by investigating complaints, ruling on cases, or cancelling unjust incarcerations.

Most of the testimonios that such requerimientos produced did not survive, for they were distributed by the notaries to the parties. However, if the addressee refused to comply with the royal command, the petitioner had the right to return to the Royal Council to complain. In such circumstances, to demonstrate that the royal decree had indeed been announced, petitioners would normally submit the testimonio. María González, a widow from Cáceres, did so in 1479, after the royal magistrate stationed in her town refused to carry out a letter of justice instructing him to return four of her oxen that he had confiscated.⁴¹ In a case from 1491, the procurator of Gil Paz, a silversmith from Palencia who was imprisoned for debt, appeared before the Royal Council with a testimonio showing how the local authorities of Palencia refused to release him, despite being “required” by a letter of justice to do so.⁴² The Cámara de Castilla section of the Archivo General de Simancas retains many similar testimonios dating from the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.⁴³

The records also suggest that many petitioners engaged in requerimientos prior to taking their cases to the Royal Council. Alfonso Yañez, a citizen of Andújar, petitioned for redress after his mule had been stolen during an urban riot. According to the petition, after the riot, Yañez approached a certain neighbor who had bought his mule and then resold it, and “required” him to pay the value of the animal. Since the neighbor was not willing to do so, Yañez took his complaint to the Royal Council. He requested that the councilors force the man to pay him reparations.⁴⁴ In a second petition submitted on the same day, Yañez recounted his efforts to recover a large stock of barley that was also stolen during the same riot. Again, he approached the person who held his barley and “asked and required” him to return it or pay its value. Although Yañez repeated these actions several times, this person also refused to make amends.⁴⁵ It was fairly common for petitioners to report that, prior to taking their cases to the Royal Council, they had confronted their adversaries and “required” them to pay reparations. Yucef Arrobas, a citizen of Trujillo, claimed to have contacted the man who had kidnapped him while he was traveling to the market of Medina del Campo, demanding the return of 14,000 maravedís, which he had been forced to pay to his attacker in order to ransom himself.⁴⁶ A similar claim was made by a group of merchants from Cuenca and Toledo, who were robbed on their way to the market in Zafra. The knight responsible for the robbery, they argued in their petition, refused to return their goods, despite being “required” to do so many times.⁴⁷ The representatives of the village San Roman de la Cuba also claimed to have “required” reparations many times before petitioning the Royal Council. The addressee, in this case, was the warden of a neighboring castle who had seized two mules that belonged to the villagers. According to their testimony, a representative of the community approached the warden and demanded that he return the animals or pay their value.⁴⁸

Did such pre-petition requerimientos also involve the production of a notarial record? There are reasons to believe that many of them did. At least in some cases, the testimonios of such requerimientos have come down to us. In other cases, the royal decree mentions the existence of a testimonio.⁴⁹ Abraham Abenjamín, a Jewish petitioner from Toro, claimed that, before turning to the Royal Council, he had approached the royal magistrate in his town and “required” him to investigate his complaint against a fellow Jew. According to Abenjamín, when the magistrate had failed to provide him justice, he tried to obtain a copy of the requerimiento from the notary who had recorded it, but the latter refused.⁵⁰ Although there is no indication that in order to receive a letter of justice petitioners had to perform a pre-petition requerimiento—the Royal Council certainly granted letters of justice to parties who mentioned no such requerimiento—it appears that, at least on some level, it was expected. According to Abraham Abenjamín, he sought to obtain the testimonio of the requerimiento because he believed that it would help his petition.⁵¹ It may well be that the presentation of a testimonio attesting to an earlier requerimiento helped to secure a more favorable response from the Royal Council, because it showed that before turning to this institution, the petitioner had attempted to exhaust other recourses. This could be significant because one of the main justifications for the Royal Council's interventions in local settings was the claimant's inability to obtain justice otherwise. Furthermore, in certain contexts, the testimonio must have helped disputants gain reliability in the eyes of the councilors. It demonstrated the consistency of the petitioner's claim, showing that it had already been communicated to the addressee via a legally acceptable performance of claims making.

4. Disputants Used the Requerimiento to Publicize Claims, Threaten Opponents, and Put Pressure on Local Officials

The late medieval requerimiento generated an event in which disputants came into direct contact with one another. The social meanings assumed by this practice should also be considered, therefore, in relation to the confrontational dynamic that such events sometimes entailed, and in light of their potentially public character. There is no doubt that, for some disputants, the requerimiento provided an opportunity to publicly assert their rights, a gesture that could carry important consequences with respect to questions of honor and reputation. When they “required” the fulfilment of decrees or judicial rulings granted in their favor, as when they confronted their adversaries and presented them with claims and demands without such documents, disputants signaled that they would not remain silent in the face of the wrongs that they had suffered.

The requerimiento was not quite an act of vengeance. However, within the late medieval culture of honor, it could still be registered as a respectable response to a challenge. Indeed, to the extent that the claimant has been unjustly deprived of something, he or she was now demanding it back, a behavior expected from any honorable person. For, in this schema, only the cowardly and the undeserving remained passive when wronged.⁵² What this means is that the intended audience for many requerimientos was not solely the addressee, nor was it always a particular court of justice. Many of these acts were conducted as performances of claims making that were also meant to be seen and talked about by the members of one's community.⁵³ By publicly confronting opponents and local officials, many claimants may have hoped to affect their own public image.

Of course, the confrontational character that some requerimientos assumed meant that the ritual could also come across as a challenge to the addressee, and that it might provoke a hostile and even violent response. A petition presented to the Royal Council in 1489 by the procurators of Ojacastro, a small village in the Rioja region, provides an illustration. In the 1480s, the community of Ojacastro found itself in conflict with the aggressive new lord of the neighboring village, Ezcaray. When the lord's men arrested two villagers for trespassing, the community tried to negotiate their release and, eventually, sought remedy from the Royal Council.⁵⁴ Like many other petitioners, the people of Ojacastro related their efforts to resolve the dispute by “requiring” their opponent to desist from wrong, which in this case meant releasing the prisoners. The description of the procedure in the petition is worth quoting in full.

They sent him messengers and other people carrying letters to ask that he would set them free. But he did not wish to do so. And then they sent a procurator with a proper requerimiento and a notary, so that he would release the said prisoners. And it is said that when he saw the aforementioned requerimiento, he took it in his hands and placed it in his bosom, pronouncing words of menace. And he was on the verge of throwing the said procurator and notary out of the windows.⁵⁵

In this account, the “proper requerimiento” clearly works as an escalating move made by the villagers whose attempts to resolve the dispute by means of intermediaries had failed. What seemed to trigger the lord's anger in this interaction was the officializing effect that the requerimiento had with respect to the community's demand. The recording of the demand making by the notary was a clear signal that the people of Ojacastro were considering launching a complaint to the monarchs. If the first interaction between the lord and the intermediaries appealed to his good will, the “proper requerimiento” was a warning. Certainly, it is possible that the villagers sought to employ this warning as leverage in their negotiation with the lord. The latter, however, clearly perceived the gesture as an affront, an act of defiance that challenged his authority and had to be reciprocated. According to the petition, while the lord eventually did not throw the procurator and the notary out of the windows, he did find a way to make an escalating move of his own: he ordered that the two imprisoned villagers have their heads placed in the stocks.⁵⁶ By telling this story, the petitioners from Ojacastro made the point of portraying the lord's behavior as unjust and unlawful. Whereas they followed the norms of the procedure, their opponent did not. This also suggests that, in the official ideology, the mere performance of a requerimiento was not considered a legitimate cause for vengeance.

As the example of Ojacastro demonstrates, the warning underlying the pre-petition requerimiento could be used by ordinary Castilians to pressure their superiors. This was certainly true for the interaction between subjects and local officials. In 1486, Pedro Bayle and Juan Martín, citizens of San Martín de Trevejo, directed a requerimiento to the judges of their village, in which they demanded the arrest of two citizens who had been spreading false rumors against them.⁵⁷ According to the written statement that the notary presented to the judges, if the latter failed to fulfill their duty in this case, Bayle and Martín reserved the right to complain to the monarchs, as one complains against “those who, despite being in charge of it, do not administer justice nor fulfill the service of their highnesses.”⁵⁸ In such a case, the statement explains, the judges could expect to be punished and pay all the costs related to the judicial procedure.⁵⁹ In a similar way, the archives of various Castilian municipalities retain testimonios de requerimientos performed during sessions of the urban council by citizens who demanded that the aldermen correct certain wrongs or guarantee certain rights. For example, in Seville during the 1450s and 1460s, the jurados, urban officials representing the parishes, engaged in requerimientos of this sort, in which they demanded that the councilmen address a wide range of governmental misconduct and breaches of urban ordinances. Some of these requerimientos preceded complaints that were then brought to the royal court. In 1461, from Madrid, King Enrique IV responded to a series of such complaints, issuing a number of decrees commanding the aldermen of Seville, under the penalty of deposition from office, to attend to a range of pressing problems that the jurados had required them to resolve.⁶⁰

Royal judges and magistrates sent by the monarchy to the localities also became targets of pre-petition requerimientos. The petitioner Abraham Abenjamín, according to a complaint previously mentioned, “required” a royal magistrate in Toro to investigate his adversary, but could not obtain a record of the requerimiento from the notary.⁶¹ Another example is that of Pedro de Escavias, a knight and chronicler from Andújar, who believed that the royal judge stationed in his town was deliberately postponing his ruling in a lawsuit that Escavias was conducting against one of his enemies. In 1477, to support his petition to the Royal Council, Escavias presented a testimonio de requerimiento, showing how he had demanded that the judge stop procrastinating.⁶² In a third case, from 1490, Francisco de Briviesca, a citizen of León, confronted the investigator sent by the Royal Council to León in response to a complaint made by Briviesca himself. Briviesca thought that the investigator was deliberately failing to carry out the investigation. Appearing before this official with a notary, Briviesca demanded that the investigator take more adequate measures. Briviesca warned the investigator that if he did not comply with this demand, a complaint would be made to the Royal Council in Burgos. This threat was, indeed, fulfilled shortly thereafter, with Briviesca presenting the testimonio as evidence to the Royal Council.⁶³ These examples show how Castilians could employ the requerimiento to put pressure on local officials with the aim of negotiating better results for their lawsuits and complaints. When submitted to the Royal Council, testimonios de requerimiento helped to establish the need for a direct royal intervention, demonstrating the petitioner's inability to attain justice from the local branches of government.

5. The Pre-Petition Requerimiento Can Be Situated within a Romano-Canonical Tradition of Pre-Trial Warnings Associated with Fairness in the Resolutions of Disputes

In contrast to the idea that the requerimiento stemmed from the Iberian culture of interfaith conflict, and was a Christian adaptation of an old Islamic ritual, a range of sources suggest that the late medieval requerimiento needs to be situated within a long tradition of dispute management within the Christian community. One set of evidence comes from treatises on judicial procedures. In the thirteenth century, as the new culture of the ius commune was spreading throughout Christendom, several treatises of this sort circulated in the Iberian Peninsula.⁶⁴ The Latin treatise, Ordo iudicarius ad summariam notitiam was particularly influential in this regard.⁶⁵ It is there that we read that the first stage of a proper legal process—prior to the presentation of a complaint to a judge and the request for the summoning of the defendant—is a warning extended to an adversary accompanied by a demand to pay reparations. The treatise explains that such a warning is a matter of integrity.⁶⁶ Justinian's Digest is cited as the source for the instruction.⁶⁷

The Ordo iudicarius had a large influence on various procedural treatises written in Castilian. One of those was the Summa aurea de ordine iudicario, a mid-thirteenth-century treatise attributed to the jurist Fernando Martínez de Zamora. There, we read that “before we take up a lawsuit against our adversary, we must warn him to make amends for what he owes us.”⁶⁸ A similar instruction is given by the jurist Jacobo Junta (de las Leyes) in his widely circulated treatise, the Flores de derecho. For this author, such a warning was a matter of “courtesy and good example” (cortesia e ensinamiento).⁶⁹ The Margarita de los pleitos, another treatise from the same period attributed to Martínez de Zamora, dedicates its very first title to a discussion of “how you should warn the one you wish to bring to judgement.” According to this text, “if you wish to demand [of the adversary] some money, warn them to give it to you; and if they refuse, bring them before a judge.”⁷⁰ Similarly, “if someone wrongs you or your son or your wife or your servant, you should first warn them to correct it.”⁷¹ Whereas the Summa aurea follows the Ordo iudicarius by citing the Digest, the Margarita supports these instructions with references to the canonical tradition, citing clauses from both the Decretum Gratiani and the Decretales Gregorii IX.⁷²

The idea that a demand for amends needed to be extended to an adversary before a plaintiff could approach a judge and initiate a lawsuit continued to inform Castilian works on the judicial procedure, even though—as will be discussed momentarily—it does not appear in the Siete Partidas or in the other major royal codes. In the second half of the fifteenth century, to give another example, the work known as La forma libelandi of Juan de Infante reiterated a very similar instruction to that of the Ordo iudicarius.⁷³ La forma libelandi was a judicial formulary organized according to the different stages of the legal process, which has survived in the form of multiple printed editions from the following century. Relevant to our purpose here is the very first folio of the 1536 edition, printed in Burgos, where the author sets up a model for the initiation of a lawsuit. The model is constructed around a debt recovery case, in which a plaintiff appears before a judge to sue an “adversary, so-and-so.” After the plaintiff recounts how a loan of 300 maravedís that he had given to “so-and-so” was never returned to him, the following words are put in his mouth: “although so-and-so was required (a seydo requerido) many times on my behalf to give back and pay me those 300 maravedís, he refused and is still refusing to do so.”⁷⁴ The resemblance to the pre-petition requerimiento discussed above is evident, even though it should be noted that neither La forma libelandi nor the other works influenced by the Ordo iudicarius suggest that this demand had to be recorded by a notary.

It is difficult to tell why the pre-citation warning did not find its way into the procedural discussions of the Partidas and the other royal codes of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We do not know whether the authors of these works considered such a warning to be optional, or whether there were other considerations preventing them from including it. Interestingly, the Partidas does discuss a number of other situations in which warnings and demands could become part of a judicial procedure. One such instance referred to a husband who suspected that another man planned to commit adultery with his wife: “When anyone suspects another of wronging him, or desiring to wrong him through his wife, and notifies him three times by means of a notice drawn up by the hand of a notary public, and in the presence of witnesses, telling him to avoid associating with her, and warning his wife to avoid speaking with the said man; and if, afterwards, he should find him with her… he can kill the said party without any liability to punishment; although he may not be able to prove that he had committed any offence with her.”⁷⁵ The law proceeds to explain how, in the case of adjudication for adultery, such a warning might help the plaintiff to establish his wife's guilt: if a recorded warning has been made, all that was needed for the husband to prove that adultery had been committed was to demonstrate that his wife and the suspected lover had broken his order and convened among themselves.⁷⁶

There is evidence that some Castilian husbands indeed exercised this procedure. For example, in an adultery lawsuit from 1490, Martín Sánchez, a citizen of the village of Gata in Extremadura, argued that he had “warned and required” (amonestó y requerió) his wife not to speak to a certain villager, whom he suspected of being her lover.⁷⁷ Several witnesses who testified in favor of Sánchez claimed to have been present during this warning, which he conducted “once and twice and several times, before a notary and witnesses.”⁷⁸ Significantly, Sánchez did not have reliable eyewitnesses who could corroborate that his wife and her alleged lover indeed had had sex. By claiming to have performed this requerimiento, he sought to lower the bar of admissible proof: it would be much easier to establish that the two had convened despite his warning than to demonstrate that they had been intimate.

Another place where the Partidas discusses warnings and demands in relation to judicial proceedings is in a section dedicated to excommunication: ”For he whose duty is to do this [excommunicate] must first warn the party whom he has to excommunicate, three times, in the presence of good men by whom he can prove it, if necessary; saying that he should make reparation, and desist from doing that concerning which he is admonished, and if he should not be willing to make reparation, he can then excommunicate him.”⁷⁹ If this account resembles some of the elements found in the pre-citation warning, as delineated by the procedural treatises mentioned, it resonates even more clearly with the canonical procedure known as the evangelical denunciation (denunciatio evangelica). This procedure was developed by the canonists on the basis of the precept of fraternal correction, as delineated in Matthew 18:15–17: “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.”

The evangelical denunciation permitted ecclesiastical judges to adjudicate cases against sinners on the basis of a complaint made by another member of the community, insofar as the sinner had been warned and was given the opportunity to desist from wrong or pay reparations.⁸⁰ Although the denunciatio was primarily designed to correct sinners, not to offer redress to the aggrieved, by the thirteenth century it had become a central mechanism of dispute management that allowed claimants to attain reparations.⁸¹ This process also contributed to the extension of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. As Brian Tierney has noted, “by virtue of the authority inhering in his office as judge, a bishop could hear any complaint involving an alleged sin and could provide a remedy without the plaintiff bringing a formal action.”⁸² The denunciatio was supplementary to ordinary jurisdiction, whether ecclesiastical or secular.⁸³ It involved a summary legal process and was often presented as particularly suited for the poor, as well as for those instances in which it was difficult to attain justice through an ordinary accusatory process. In the fourteenth century, the Italian jurist, Bartolus de Saxoferrato, provided a description of the denunciatio, arguing that this procedure was a matter of everyday life (quotidiana est).⁸⁴ According to him, a claimant must approach his adversary alone, specifying how the latter had wronged him and what the adversary needed to do in order to make amends. If the adversary refused, the action must be repeated, this time in the presence of a witness or two. Only then, after the adversary's second refusal, was it permissible for the claimant to turn to the judge.⁸⁵

In a seminal study on the relationship between the evangelical denunciation and the English Court of the Chancery, Helmut Coing has argued that this ecclesiastical procedure served as a model for the chancellors when they came to construct their judicial forum.⁸⁶ A similar argument can be made for the Castilian Royal Council, an institution that actually shared a number of similarities with the English Court of the Chancery. As we have seen, the Royal Council offered Castilians an opportunity to resolve disputes and gain reparations through a supplementary procedure that did not require a full legal process. When cases did come to be adjudicated before the Royal Council, they were handled using the summary legal procedure. By and large, the proceedings of the Royal Council, like those initiated through the denunciatio, were considered fitting for cases in which justice was unlikely to be attained otherwise.

It would be superfluous, in the present context, to demonstrate that the pre-petition requerimiento performed by petitioners to the Royal Council was modeled on the evangelical denunciation. What the examples discussed in this section are intended to illustrate is that the Castilian requerimiento of the fifteenth century can be situated within a broader Christian tradition of demand making and judicial warnings. In this tradition, claimants were expected to confront their adversaries prior to a judicial escalation of a dispute, demanding that the adversary desist from wrong or pay reparations. Lastly, in some treatises, this warning was associated with a moral value, and presented as the appropriate thing to do.

Conclusion

The evidence presented in this study challenges the notion of the requerimiento as an old ritual of war that migrated from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Instead, it traces this practice to the more mundane context of late medieval mechanisms of conflict management among Christians. While the content of the colonial requerimiento—the demand that native Americans turn themselves into obedient vassals of the Spanish monarchy and allow missionaries to instruct them in the Catholic faith—reflected canonical doctrines of sovereignty and just war, the acts of demand making and record making that constituted the core of this ritual were primarily known to the Spaniards from the world of civic disputes. It stands to reason that at least some of the conquistadores engaged in requerimientos in their home villages and towns. The notaries who accompanied the conquest expeditions were certainly familiar with the procedure.

The transposition of the requerimiento from the world of local conflicts to that of conquest and colonization overseas needs to be thought of in relation to the legitimizing effect that this ritual had within the legal culture of late medieval Castile. As we have seen, in Castile, the requerimiento consisted of the presentation of an official demand to an addressee, which then required compliance. The legitimizing effect of this act rested on the view that opponents were entitled to be given an opportunity to “do the right thing”—to obey a legal command, correct their ways, or pay reparations—before any disciplinary action could be taken against them. There was a medieval tradition that associated granting this opportunity with due process, fairness in conflict, and, to some extent, with being a good Christian. In the first decades following the Castilian invasion of the Caribbean, when criticism of the ill-treatment of the indios began to mount, the monarchy introduced the requerimiento as a mechanism of legitimation intended to portray the colonial encounter in more legal, fair, and Christian colors. In some sense, the Spanish monarchy's claim to sovereignty over the Indies called for something like the requerimiento. For if the inhabitants of the Indies were indeed subjects of the Catholic monarchy, then they ought to be treated according to the principles of due process.

However, within the colonial setting, the requerimiento came to be stripped of some of its original meanings. In Castile, parties engaging in requerimientos tended to belong to the same political community. When one citizen directed a requerimiento to his or her adversary, the meanings of this act were often shaped by the existence of public spectators for whom the ritual signified something within a particular context of a dispute. To be sure, many employed the requerimiento in order to bring the law and its agents to bear upon social relations. But they also used it to render claims official, to publicize conflicts, to challenge and threaten their opponents, and to enact their identities as honorable citizens standing up for their rights. Such functions depended on shared values and understandings, which were largely lost as the requerimiento was inscribed into the process of Spanish expansion and colonization.

Furthermore, as we have seen, despite the combative character that it often assumed, the late medieval requerimiento had an important dialogical component. It was not only that some addressees presented written statements and insisted that they be incorporated into the official record of the encounter. Just as importantly, the production of the official testimonio was often a process that involved some degree of negotiation. Thus, in many instances, the late medieval requerimiento represented a significant element in an ongoing dialogue between disputants, marking a way to avert rather than justify physical violence. The colonial requerimiento was also meant to be dialogical, as indicated by a number of royal instructions emphasizing that the demand should not only be recited to the indios, but also translated into their native languages.⁸⁷ However, it is doubtful that such instructions were actually fulfilled. Judging by the accounts that have come down to us, it seems that many believed that the performative capacity of the colonial requerimiento depended on the recitation of the document alone.⁸⁸

Finally, we should draw attention to the different roles of records in the late medieval as opposed to the colonial requerimiento. In Castile, testimonios de requerimiento were regularly submitted as evidence at court. A claimant's ability to initiate a judicial process was sometimes contingent on the production and presentation of such records. When parties could not demonstrate that they had properly communicated a royal decree to an adversary, the court might send them to conduct a second requerimiento. This did not seem to be the case for the colonial requerimiento. There, when notaries participating in expeditions against indigenous populations took pains to record the recitation of the requerimiento, they did so primarily because record making was seen as an important part of the ritual protocol. It is not clear at all that these records ever ended up in courts, or that there was a real judicial procedure in which they were examined or used to support claims. Like other elements of the colonial requerimiento, the ultimate function of record making was self-legitimation.