| Sumario: | It is a well-known fact that political relationships between the nobility and towns in fifteenth-century Castile possessed a basically conflictive nature. John II's minority and the continuous episodes of civil war that followed one another during the reigns of John II and Henry IV, until the triumph of the Elizabethan party in 1480, facilitated the use of violence by the nobility, especially as an instrument for the appropriation of royal justice and revenues, and the illegal seizure of districts under municipal jurisdiction. While not denying this reality, the aim of this work is to analyze the way in which the towns tried to solve these conflicts not only by exerting their own violence but also by implementing other resources of an ideological-discursive nature. The use of those referents (and of their frame of reference) not only led to a decrease in noble violence but even to the generation of mechanisms and practices of cooperation between the towns and the nobility. This cooperation tended to satisfy the interests (even if purely opportunistic) of both sides.
|