Royal service, the common good and politics in Castile, 1250–1350

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of service in Castilian political culture between 1250 and 1350. Many interactions between different elements of political society were discussed and understood in terms of service, from holding office to military service, grants and royal taxation. The study traces the development of phrases which harnessed the discursive power of service through royal documents, Cortes records, political writings and letters. I argue that service was sufficiently resonant that it ought to be considered the central ethic of political interaction between the king and the kingdom. Moreover, by regularly justifying actions because they were “God's service and mine, and the profit and safeguard of all my land,” Castilian kings made a discursive link between service and the common good. By contrast with England, where parliament considered “the profit of the king and the kingdom,” the Castilian formulation left service more closed off in political discourse: it was only for the king to decide what contributed to his service. Concluding that the moral discourse of service acted as a powerful force for integration in Castilian politics, this article contributes to a broader debate about the role of political language in shaping the development of late medieval polities.

KEYWORDS:

• Castile
• political history
• political language
• common good

Though almost three decades have passed since Rosemary Horrox’s resounding declaration that “service has some claim to be considered the dominant ethic of the Middle Ages,” one might wonder whether scholarly assessments of medieval European politics have taken enough notice.¹ In Britain, the mid-twentieth-century focus on affinities has seemingly been left behind, and the “New Constitutional History,” for all its clear progress in understanding systems of political thought, leaves service somewhat absent, perhaps wary of the accusation of reducing politics to patronage.² Likewise, Castilian historiography’s “constitutional turn” has emphasised consensus, pacts and contracts as a way to nuance narratives of conflict and seemingly incommensurable royal and noble politics.³ Working from another perspective, various historians have analysed the discursive and ceremonial aspects of authority, building on a long-standing debate over the sacred or “unsacred” nature of Castilian kingship.⁴ Surprisingly, however, service does not feature prominently in these discussions, with writers like François Foronda preferring a wider notion of privanza (“favour”) to describe forms of political association.⁵ Elsewhere, merced (“grace”) has been explored more systematically in terms of its construction of “political emotion,” particularly in the later Middle Ages.⁶ Isabel Alfonso touches on service and its role in political reciprocity in her important 2002 article on the justifications for the noble revolt of 1272.⁷ Finally, service receives some attention from Tamara Somoza in her short article on the fifteenth century, though her analysis focuses on the urban politics of Ávila rather than the role of the ideology more widely.⁸

In the present study, I take a closer look at the role of service, and especially service to the king, in Castilian political life in 1250–1350. I argue that historians have overlooked the centrality of service to the conceptualisation of relationships at court and throughout the kingdom. Many of the major structures that dominated the relationships between layers of hierarchy were conceptualised in terms of servicio. An expanding network of royal officers drew the nobility in more consistently while referring constantly to service; grants of land and privileges to concejos and noblemen were justified by specific or general services. These grants could also be confiscated for falling into a state called “disservice” (deservicio). Meanwhile, documents, legal tracts and normative works (like Mirrors for Princes) drew on service as a fundamental and unquestionable ethic to support assertive claims for the monarchy. As we shall see, some striking formulations were produced that even elevated service to a universal ethic, with religious, communitarian and moral overtones. In response, various elements of political society adopted this language where they could, in order to negotiate their terms of engagement with the king. The fraught century between 1250 and 1350 is thus an ideal period to examine the evolution of political languages, especially because this was the first century in which Latin played little part as a dominant language of royal documentation and historiography, meaning that vernacular politics took on particular significance.⁹ A critical part of this, as we shall see, is the shifting pattern of references to service, in which political circumstances forced different usages in a bid to claim legitimacy.

On the face of it, the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are a challenging period to investigate in terms of political ideas, discourses and languages. Amid the noise and confusion of the dislocations between Alfonso X’s (r. 1252–1284) consequential reign, the rebellions he faced, and the minorities and civil wars that followed until 1325 and Alfonso XI’s (r. 1312–1349) no-nonsense re-assertion of power, historians have often, quite naturally, invoked conflict and confrontation as the key dynamics among kings, nobles, towns and churchmen.¹⁰ Identifying aspects of ideological consensus or widespread ethics amid fragile loyalties and frequent confrontation can thus seem fraught. However, an exciting historiographical change is afoot, with recent studies emphasising the growth of royal power culminating with Alfonso XI and the reciprocal development that took place with other powers like the church and the nobility.¹¹ Meanwhile, Francisco Hernández’s 2021 magnum opus contributes astonishing detail to our knowledge of the revolution in government in the early years of Sancho IV’s reign.¹² It is hoped that a discussion of political language can contribute to the understanding of these transitions. As “neo-constitutional” historians have argued, we should not ignore the world of ideas, vocabularies and languages, since these are fundamental to the way in which political behaviour was framed and understood.¹³ The terms in which politics was carried out and imagined had important consequences for the array of possible action and the expected outcomes. When it comes to investigating the role of service in Castilian politics, we have to ask: why did Castilians refer so often to service, and what did it mean to them? How contestable was the notion of service, and could anyone justify their behaviour using it? Finally, what might the distinctive formulations in the Castilian ideology of service tell us about Castile’s particular development as a political entity?

If we are to answer these questions, we must confront the rocky terrain of the Castilian documentary landscape. From the outset, we must acknowledge that the vast majority of our sources for political language are of royal origin, whether in documents from the royal chancery, chronicles produced under the king’s patronage or legislative acts. Even the records of the Cortes are problematic as “true” records of the words and ideas deployed when the major controversies of the day were debated, because they survive only in the form of the king’s answer to petitions. The obvious problem created by the official nature of our sources is that the words and ideas they deploy might be products of the generic expressions habitually used by chancery scribes, while their contents can mislead by implying consensus where it was lacking or by omitting contradictory details.¹⁴ Accessing an authentic voice for wider political society can thus seem challenging, if not impossible. However, this article suggests that careful reading of the many petitions and Cortes records can provide glimpses that kings were responding to requests using the language deployed by townsmen, nobles and churchmen. Moreover, we are fortunate to possess other documentary survivals, often preserved in the archives of the Crown of Aragón, which show that service was used in the writings, letters and documents of other political parties beside the king. It is thus wise to reject a rigid “top-down” interpretation of political discourse, which instead can be understood as evolving in dialogue. Indeed, combining these sources allows us to investigate whether service was a formulaic linguistic construct, or whether it had meaning and power that could impose moral obligation on various parties in Castilian politics. That is to say, is it appropriate to regard service as an ideology, as well as a mode of political speech? In its exploration of these themes, this study begins with an overview of the meanings of service in medieval Castile and especially the multiple ways of imagining service to the king, before looking more closely at the operation of this idea in the Castilian rhetorical landscape.

The meanings of service

Service was fundamentally a personal relationship between two individuals. It was unrestricted in that the servant could legitimately be asked to obey the lord in any task, provided that the task was commensurate with the servant’s own station.¹⁵ This was so deeply entrenched in medieval life and thought that it was hardly felt to require spelling out. In his Castigos, a book of advice written to his son, Sancho IV (r. 1284–1295) encapsulated a simple truth that “it is a natural thing and one proved by reason … that vassals should by right serve, obey, safeguard and honour their king.”¹⁶ Royal officers and recipients of grants operated comfortably within this framework of understanding, in which serving the king was at once duty, a sure path to reward, and in a sense a reward in itself through the influence it afforded. These were characteristics that many would choose to emphasise, given the opportunity. For example, infante Enrique “el senador” (1230–1303), a much-maligned figure in the vernacular chronicles for his scheming and opposition to the narrative’s heroine, María de Molina (d. 1321), was a powerful player at court following his return from long imprisonment in Italy. The chronicle alleges that, on his death in 1303, he tried everything to keep his lands from returning to the royal demesne. However, this is disproved by his surviving will, which emphasised the “loyal and true service” (servicio leal e verdadero) he did to Fernando IV (r. 1295–1312) and María de Molina and ordered all royal grants he had received to be returned to the realengo.¹⁷ The cultural value of service was an important tool used by political figures to defend their legacy, just as opponents would try to undermine claims of having served loyally.

Beyond the broad and open-ended notion of serving one’s lord, service could also acquire more formal characteristics through the tenure of a defined office. As John Sabapathy has shown, this period coincided with a far-reaching process of expansion in institutions of all kinds since the late twelfth century, bringing with it a proliferation of officers.¹⁸ There were innumerable points of contact between ecclesiastical offices, postholders in military orders, conciliar officials in towns, and household officials of private lords: for example, lords of all kinds used adelantados menores to administer estates and carry out judicial functions.¹⁹ Though it is challenging to ascertain whether this proliferation carried with it a change in attitudes to service, it is clear that serving through office became a more frequent feature of Castilian political life, including for the most eminent noblemen. The writings of Juan Manuel (1282–1348) offer insight into the attitudes of a royal officer, though this evidence must be used with great caution. Juan Manuel became adelantado mayor of Murcia in 1284 at the age of two, and went on to hold various other great court offices throughout his life, including the adelantamiento of Andalucía and the post of mayordomo mayor.²⁰ When considering what he wrote about his attitudes to service, we must remember that its later production from the mid-1320s onwards makes it sure to be coloured by his growing confrontations with the adult Alfonso XI.

That Juan Manuel derived status from his royal offices is evident in his writings. He did not hesitate to mention his positions as adelantado mayor of the Frontera and Murcia in the prologues and omitted them when no longer in post.²¹ The content of his work is even more revealing. In his Libro enfenido, Juan Manuel wrote that great men should serve good kings loyally and “derive great honour from the momentous things that happen to the king.”²² The idea of service is connected with presence at the king’s court: the great man should follow the court, ensuring that the king and his courtiers desired him to stay. All the while, “through the good and loyal works that he does in the service of the king in the great events which occur, he will show how much he does for the king’s service.”²³ It might be tempting to dismiss these statements as driven by the demands of the genre and as disingenuous imports from Giles of Rome; surely, historians have argued, Juan Manuel’s actions in rebelling against a succession of Castilian kings speak louder than his platitudinous words.²⁴ However, we ought to take these passages more seriously than that. In the Libro de las Armas, written after 1335, Juan Manuel describes an emotional meeting he had with the ailing Sancho IV. These passages are full of highly wrought language and direct speech, the purpose of which was clearly to capitalise on the prestige afforded by close confidence with a dying monarch. At the passage’s conclusion, Juan Manuel writes,

and may God demand of me on pain of my body and of my soul if, through the goods and nurturing that he [Sancho IV] gave me, I did not serve him, his son Fernando [IV] and his grandson Alfonso [XI] as loyally as I could.²⁵

Whatever the political purposes of writing such a text, it is fundamental that it was through royal service and proximity to the king’s prestige that Juan Manuel claimed power and status. His writings project a moralised vision in which service to a higher lord is both honourable and desirable.

In addition to service through vassalage and formal office, perhaps the furthest-reaching understanding of service was the obligation to fight for a lord in person. Military service in Castile operated on two levels: individual and collective. Both individual knights and town communities understood themselves to have formal and informal contracts to provide military service. These could come from various places: the Fuero viejo, for example, set out that a knight who received a salary, a horse or a breastplate from his lord ought to render three months’ service.²⁶ Likewise, those who received tenancies from the king were obliged “to make war and peace at his command.”²⁷ The Fuero real underlined the king’s expectations, condemning “the magnates, noblemen or anyone else who hold land or moneys from the king, and have a duty to attend the host with cavalry, but do not bring as many as they should.”²⁸ Though we often lack detail around the frequency and nature of military mobilisation, there is clear evidence that obligations of military service were meaningful to Castilian political society. In 1289, when the knights of Cuenca gathered together to form an association, they revealed that they considered “service” in a highly military sense: “and we do all of this so that we might be better prepared to go into the service of our lord king Sancho in this war.”²⁹

Military service was therefore embedded in the most basic terms of the relationship between lords and vassals and, more importantly, between king and his subjects. Unsurprisingly, military service could be replaced by cash payment from an early date: bishoprics in León were recorded paying fonsadera in the mid-twelfth century, and from the thirteenth century payment in lieu of attending the king’s fonsado (host) became much more common.³⁰ In Castile, however, the idea of service found itself represented in the fiscal system in another, unique way. By the end of the thirteenth century, any extraordinary tax approved by the Cortes was called a servicio. The origins of this nomenclature are somewhat obscure, though it certainly arose during Alfonso X’s fiscal innovations to fund his bid to become Holy Roman Emperor. In 1258, a double moneda was raised for this purpose, while collection of a tax explicitly called a servicio began at the Cortes of Burgos in November 1269, for the marriage of the king’s son, Fernando, to Blanche, daughter of Louis IX of France.³¹ Servicios soon became the most important fiscal instrument in the king’s accounts alongside the moneda forera, being levied increasingly frequently and in greater numbers, even as inflation and avoidance diminished yields.³² Since the process of naming the tax is unclear, it would be imprudent to read too much into what it means for the overall understanding of service in Castile. The term is conceptually related to the idea of “aid,” a common name for tax in medieval Europe, but there were undoubtedly more direct words in Castilian available to express “aid” alone.³³ What we can say is that there was some connection between the payment of taxes designed to assist the king with his ongoing costs and the idea of service, and that this, being the most important business of many of the meetings of the Cortes, could not fail to contribute to the conception of service as a central tenet of the relationship between king and political society.

Service in royal discourse

Since the various meanings of service were all beneficial to the king’s interests in one way or another, it is unsurprising that kings would seek to amplify them. In the first place, kings wrote and thought of service in terms of their servants and officers. The Partidas certainly demonstrate this in terms of the thought-world of Alfonso X’s court, with long discussions on daily service in the household and exceptional service in battle, but we can also point to passages in other normative texts like the Cien Capítulos, written at Sancho IV’s court in the mid-1280s, which argue that “the people are the king’s weapons and aids for his service.”³⁴ What is particularly important for our purposes is to investigate how widely held assumptions about service could be mobilised politically. As various historians have demonstrated, service was ubiquitous, largely unquantifiable and generally uncontroversial in the Middle Ages.³⁵ Despite this, or perhaps especially because of these characteristics, the occasions when political actors drew attention to service provide revealing insights into the functioning of politics at the centre.

The rhetorical power of describing services rendered was regularly displayed at meetings of the Cortes. To take one example, at Valladolid in 1293 Sancho IV began the proceedings with a long acclamation of various services rendered to him, including the defence of Jerez, the conquest of Tarifa and resistance to a rebellion from infante Juan (d. 1319). The preamble to the Cortes document declares that Sancho called the meeting to reward these actions: “thinking on the many good services which the kings from whom we descend received from the knights and the other good men of our towns of Castile.”³⁶ Invoking service in public meetings in this way was mutually beneficial for the king and the subjects he addressed. The preamble inscribes the king as the just recipient of his subjects’ services and shows what he could achieve through them, but it also celebrates the actions of specific subjects and thus elevates them. However, Sancho was careful to balance the services of his subjects with his own achievements in defending the kingdom, such that the effect was less to demonstrate the king’s indebtedness to the kingdom than to highlight his voluntary grace in calling the assembly as a reward. Service, then, was a convenient rhetorical tool: it bolstered and recorded prestigious actions on the part of king and subject, but also established a strict hierarchy and drew attention to the monarch’s will.

Service was thus fundamental as a justification for the some of the king’s most important acts of generosity. Kings chose to frame their actions as rewards for service, as Fernando IV did when he began his adult rule at the Cortes of Medina del Campo in 1302: the preamble to the Cortes ordinance declared that he gave its contents “understanding that what they ask me for is right and contributes much to my service, and because … manifestly they served me and serve me still as good and loyal vassals should serve their king and their natural lord.”³⁷ Here, Fernando signalled the connection between service and the developing concept of naturaleza: the idea that the king was the “natural” lord of all those born in the kingdom and thus entitled to their service.³⁸ Rewarding service was important for any lord, but the rhetorical significance was especially acute for kings because their “natural” lordship over the kingdom bound them to the whole population. Moreover, in practical terms, royal grant-making was especially liable to be criticised if diminishing the realengo was felt to be contributing to the tax burden. In the 1370s, the usurper Enrique II faced this complaint regularly, but demonstrated his belief in the justificatory power of service on one occasion in 1373 by responding,

We cannot excuse ourselves from showing favour to those who have served us, and from now on we shall maintain our affairs in a way that secures our service and the benefit, honour and safeguard of our kingdoms.³⁹

The emphasis on reward for service was critical for kings in justifying their patronage decisions, and this is confirmed in the documents bestowing grants. In justifying a gift, the stock phrase was “for much service which he did and does for us,” but often monarchs spelled out at greater length what service they were choosing to recognise.⁴⁰ These varied widely, from prayers offered by clerics of a church to specific military feats or acts of loyalty. One vivid example comes from the defence of Tarifa in 1294, when Alonso Pérez de Guzmán (d. 1309) had defended the city, even sacrificing his heir for the cause.⁴¹ Sancho IV declared his gratitude in January 1295 that Guzmán had chosen “to give your blood and offer your firstborn son for my service and for God’s before that.” Hoping that these deeds would set an example, Sancho concluded by affirming his desire “to give graces to you which will be commensurate with your services.”⁴² He delivered on this commitment with the grant of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.⁴³ Guzmán later continued to be a source of support and financial aid to Fernando IV, for which he received due reward, receiving Véjer in 1307 following his provision of 55,000 doblas de oro to the king.⁴⁴ Rewarding service that struck the king as beyond the usual obligations was thus important for kings and political society alike.

In fact, service lent a vital additional quality to the meaning of royal grants: as well as rewarding past actions, discussing service ensured that grants would establish relationships for the future. On one level, this can be seen when kings used gifts to endow strategic allies. We get a direct picture of how contemporaries understood endowments in certain documents, such as the grant of Osuna and Cazalla made by Sancho IV to the Order of Calatrava in 1285. The military orders had been instrumental in supporting Sancho’s rebellion prior to his accession to the throne, and the document begins in conventional terms of rewarding service. However, it goes on: “and so that the order can be richer and more prosperous and can have more with which to serve us, we give them … .”⁴⁵ Sancho’s understanding was that a more powerful ally would benefit him, especially if it meant they were stronger near Seville, the major bastion of support for Alfonso X throughout the troubles of 1282–1284. Sancho again invoked endowment when making his most generous grant to an individual, namely Diego López de Haro (d. 1310). When honouring his favourite in 1286 with the towns of Cerezo and Grañón, he mentioned “the desire we have to elevate his estate.”⁴⁶ Moreover, grants operating as forward-looking symbols of a new and better relationship of service were especially important when it came to reconciliation between kings and former opponents. For example, when Alfonso XI faced down the challenge of Juan Manuel and Juan Núñez (III) de Lara (d. 1322) in 1331, he emphasised that future service and his generosity went hand in hand: “the king pardoned them for all their transgressions and assured them that it was his will to maintain them for his service, and he said that he would show them great favour.”⁴⁷

The standout feature of service in royal discourse, then, is its ability to transcend the straightforward performing of concrete actions in the hope of patronage. Consider the following moment in 1305 when Fernando IV gave a routine response to the Murcian council’s petitions about the city gates. He ordered them “to consider my service there” and, having allocated 15,000 maravedís from the moneda forera of the region, he exhorted the council to spend it “in the way which is most my service.”⁴⁸ The language might sound oblique, but it is worth unpacking carefully. In this instance, we can see that the royal service takes both a very narrow and a very broad interpretation. On one level, the king’s service could encompass such minute details as repairing city fortifications, therefore potentially justifying close royal oversight of realengo lordships, even where a concejo was used to self-regulation. On the other, Fernando’s insistence that his subjects “consider my service” suggests a wider ethic of royal service, in which the king’s interests in any number of circumstances ought to be contemplated.

This breadth tapped into a wider meaning to service, which elevated it to a general moral standard. This is seen in the common use of the phrase “it is my service,” or the opposite, “it is my disservice,” to pass swift judgement on actions good or bad. At the Cortes in 1301, for example, Fernando IV described how his weighing-up of concessions was informed by the twin virtues of justice and service: “I, understanding that what they ask for is just and that it is a great service for me … confirm and give … .”⁴⁹ Later, at the beginning of his adult rule, Alfonso XI did not find it necessary to spell out his reasons for disbanding the hermandades beyond the simple statement, “it is my disservice” (es mio desservicio).⁵⁰ The key point, then, is that the language of service was sufficiently capacious to be used as a general label for good or bad behaviour.

The notion of royal service as a signifier for general good spawned various phrases to exploit its power. In 1306, following the agreements of Torrellas two years earlier, Fernando IV ordered the Andalusian concejo of Gibraleón to accept Alfonso de la Cerda (d. 1333) as their lord. In trying to resist, the council sent a representative who, said Fernando, “wanted to talk about things which were great service for me.” Their claim rested on their privileges and on showing him “how much it was my service for you [the council] to be mine before any other lord.” This argument was well received: “I thank you very much for this and I hold you in service.”⁵¹ Their claim was ultimately unsuccessful, as the king stated the necessity of upholding the negotiated settlement. What is interesting for our purposes, however, is that this high-stakes exchange reveals the perceived rhetorical power of the language of service: while the exact words used by the concejo are unknown, there is every possibility that they would have understood the resonance of this term when appealing to the king’s grace. We can say with even more certainty that whoever drew up the document clearly thought that referring to the king’s service would placate the aggrieved townspeople. The phrase tengo vos en servicio is rare, but it appears that this sensitive moment called for a grand expression.⁵² Later, Alfonso XI was particularly keen to remind his subjects of the esteem he placed on his service as a general benefit. To take just one flashpoint, in 1328 he thanked Pedro López de Ayala for capturing some vassals of the rebellious Juan Manuel who had tried to treat with the king of Granada “against my service” (contra mio seruicio), and concluded, “I thank you and hold you in service for it.”⁵³ We can therefore see the language of service being deliberately elevated to a general good in royal documents and exchanges in the Cortes.

Royal service and the common good

The wide interpretation we have seen, in which service is not only waiting on the king in his household, nor doing his bidding in war or in office, nor paying his taxes, but instead making a broader contribution to his general wellbeing, has far-reaching implications. Castilian kings were clearly tempted to imply that their service was something that every subject should desire. This brings the discussion of service into line with a much broader set of discursive changes in European politics, generally gathered under the heading of the “common good.”

The emergence of this cluster of concepts into the political arena has been well studied, both in Peninsular and European contexts. There are three traditions that contributed to the idea of a common benefit and the argument that this should be the goal of political organisations. The first was the Roman law concept of the utilitas publica or utilitas populi, which provided a clear statement of the primacy of this good over private gain.⁵⁴ Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies encapsulated this: law should be promulgated “not for private benefit but for the common utility of the citizens.”⁵⁵ The second major tradition was from non-legal Roman thinkers, especially Cicero and Seneca, whose notion of common utility was taken up by a few writers before the thirteenth century like John of Salisbury and Peter Abelard.⁵⁶ The third ingredient came from Greek philosophy, with the concept of koinonia (community) imported from Aristotle in the thirteenth century. The good of that community was rendered in the Latin phrase bonum commune, though there was a host of other related terms and translations. Though related in their implications for how political theorists conceived of the earthly polity, bonum commune and communis utilitas were distinct in scholastic thought: the first expressed a kind of moral virtue, and the latter the substantive benefits engendered from this virtue.⁵⁷

When these concepts were rendered into the vernaculars of different European polities, they took on different associations and often blurred these boundaries. In the Low Countries, for example, communis utilitas was rendered gemein oirbaer or proffijte.⁵⁸ Meanwhile, French translations often remained close to the Latin roots (bien commun, bien public and utilité publique). Alternatively, they used phrases like comun preu or proufit commun, bearing closer resemblance to the Anglo-Norman commune profyt.⁵⁹ As time went on, there was an increasing willingness to use these terms as instruments of governance. Commune profit was first used in English legislation in the Statute of Winchester I of 1275, while Burgundian, Habsburg and Capetian monarchs deployed these terms in their ordinances from the early fourteenth century.⁶⁰

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Castilian political discourse saw its own versions. Bien común, a rendering of bonum commune, appeared in thirteenth-century sources, but much more common in legislation was the translation of utilitas communis as pro común or pro comunal.⁶¹ The Partidas are a clear example of this: having interpreted the Roman Law concept of the Lex Regia as the handing over of sovereignty to the Emperor “to maintain and defend lawfully the common good of all,” the text argues that the king should be able to justify his actions in terms of the common benefit and pursue the common interest before his own (the lex digna vox).⁶² It must be said, however, that by the end of the thirteenth century the common good had far from achieved the dominance in political discourse that it was to enjoy later in the Middle Ages. Indeed, as Robert Burns put it, the common good was one among several constraints that kings were bound by God to respect, along with natural law, divine law, reason and the other duties of kingship.⁶³ When approaching political discourse in 1250–1350, then, we must consider the common good in its relationship with other pressures and concepts. The key issue in this study is the connection between the nascent sense of common good and the king’s service, because, despite its centrality to royal argumentation at the time, this rhetorical strategy remains under-acknowledged by historians of the period. While service has on occasion been included in lists of other terms often bound up with “utility,” there has been little thorough investigation of its distinctive quality or implications for the development of the Castilian political system.⁶⁴

An eye-catching feature of Castilian politics is the increasingly frequent appearance of the following phrase in Cortes preambles: kings promised to legislate on “things which were God’s service and mine, and the profit and safeguard of all my land.”⁶⁵ This phrase emerged quite suddenly, but became habitual at the same time as calling the assembly to secure taxation became routine. Whereas Alfonso X’s Cortes documents made little reference to service, as we saw earlier Sancho IV began the 1293 Cortes of Valladolid by reflecting on the services he had received. Then, in the main body of the petitions, he acknowledged that enquiries made to assess tax were damaging: “it is not our service or the good of the land.”⁶⁶ Just after Sancho’s death, this language referring in one breath to the royal service and the common good found its way into the preamble of a Cortes ordinance for the first time. At Valladolid in 1295, Fernando (or his guardians in his name) declared that he granted the cuaderno “because we know that it is God’s service and ours, and the very great benefit of our kingdoms and the betterment of the state of all our land.”⁶⁷ Though absent in 1297, this language soon returned and became a constant feature of Cortes documents throughout the rest of his reign and that of Alfonso XI, appearing in 1298, 1299, 1300, 1301, 1302, 1305, 1307, 1308, 1313, 1315, 1317, 1318, 1322, 1325, 1329 and 1338.⁶⁸ There was some occasional variation in the phasing: in 1301, for example, the king eschewed the usual reference to divine service, while in 1338 service was invoked in the negative to condemn disservice against God and the king and damage to the land. Yet it is abundantly clear that the royal service and the common good were regularly invoked together as the justification for the king’s actions and to condemn or encourage others’ behaviour.

Similar phrases crop up frequently in the documentation. In 1268, to take an early example, Alfonso X wrote to Murcia that he intended to uphold their customs “in the way that is to our service and to the benefit of the city.”⁶⁹ The most typical formulation, seen on numerous occasions in the royal documents, was the promise “to order many things which are a great service for me and the benefit of all my land.”⁷⁰ Where it would be more appropriate, such as after a rebellion, the opposite could also be deployed, linking the royal disservice with harm to all: “it was greatly to our disservice and the damage of our land.”⁷¹ The chronicles echo the idea that calculations were supposed to be made on the basis of both the king’s service and the good of the kingdom. María de Molina is frequently depicted seeing the most virtuous path: “she understood that it was the service of the king and the good of the land.”⁷² We have direct evidence that these are the exact terms in which she wrote: in her 1312 letter to Jaime II of Aragón (r. 1285–1295), she recounted how infante Juan and Juan Núñez de Lara “spoke with me about many things which were the service of God and of the king my grandson and the great benefit and tranquillity of all kingdoms.”⁷³ Jaime was himself acquainted with the centrality of these phrases to Castilian political culture. Only the month before, he had written to Juan Manuel: “we understand that it will be the service of the king don Alfonso and the good of Castile and your honour and profit.” By contrast, Juan Núñez accumulating power “would not be the service of the king of Castile nor the good of the kingdoms nor our service.”⁷⁴

Multiple stock phrases therefore emerged in royal discourse and beyond in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, intended to convey an argument that serving the king was tantamount to fulfilling the common good. The servicio de Dios e del rey appeared frequently alongside the pro de la tierra in providing justification for a variety of great and small political acts, from assembling the Cortes to seeking peace with rebels or foreign kingdoms. The sudden appearance of this phrasing is perhaps best explained by the concurrent dramatic expansion in royal taxation, which began with Alfonso X’s fiscal innovations to pay for his bid to become Holy Roman Emperor in 1258.⁷⁵ Kings needed new linguistic forms to justify their immense fiscal demands, and they found in service an ethic which could bind every one of their subjects and which they could connect to both the service of God and the common good.

There are interesting parallels with expressions being used around the same time in the English parliament. While, as we have seen, notions of common profit were typical everywhere, in England we to find discussion of “the state of the king and the kingdom” (status regis et regni), which, by the reign of Edward II (1307–1327), was elided to “the profit of the king and kingdom.” This transformation, argued Mark Ormrod, was “the consequence of the implied sense of mutual interest and betterment to be had from equating the status regis with the status regni.”⁷⁶ What is revealing about this parallel is that, although “the profit of the king and kingdom” was a uniquely English formulation, the same implied mutual interest underpinned the way in which Castilian kings described service. Their decision to justify actions by stating their simultaneous contribution to the king’s service and the general benefit in effect argued that there should be no meaningful distinction between the king’s good and the kingdom’s. The Castilian formulation was nevertheless different, reserving “service” for the king and “benefit/good” for the realm. This had several important effects. On the one hand, it must be said that the connection is not quite as explicit as in the English case, perhaps diluting its impact. At the same time, however, the Castilian formulation gave kings access to a notably sacral register, with a link between divine and royal service: “for the service of God and the king.” Perhaps most importantly, refraining from referring to “the profit of the king and the kingdom,” instead invoking “the service of the king and the profit of the kingdom,” reserved greater discretion to the king because it was only for him to decide what contributed to his service. In any representative institution there was bound to be a contest over who defined the common good, but it appears that Castilian kings held an advantage by insisting that their own service be included in any calculation.

The significance of the language of royal service in Castilian discourse is now becoming clear: kings frequently invoked the common good and their service together to link their interests to those of the people. To explore the political ramifications of this discursive link, a comparison with England suggests that we ask: did retaining the language of service for the king’s benefit over “profit” or “good” make it more difficult for others to appropriate? And what impact did this have on the resultant structures of political interaction in Castile? Establishing how far various actors in Castilian political society understood, accepted and deployed language about serving the king is vital if we are to avoid an overly top-down interpretation of political language, but it is a difficult task. The paucity of documentary survivals from noble archives, for example, makes any substantial overview of their choice of words nearly impossible. Other seemingly straightforward sources are deceptive. The Cortes cuadernos are opaque because they record not the actual words of the procurators, but rather the king’s responses. This left ample opportunity for whitewashing of the language used by petitioners or subconscious channelling into royalist discourses by clerks steeped in chancery phraseology. Documents of royal issue are naturally subject to the same distortion; we are thus forced to work hard to uncover any trace of the language deployed by municipalities or ecclesiastical institutions. Finally, we must bear in mind the objection that any adoption of royal language by other parties might be merely formulaic or cynical, devoid of any moral weight or feeling. Although, on one level, this objection can be overcome if we acknowledge that repeated usage of such morally charged language, even if not always meant authentically, would embed political truths more deeply and incentivise others to use the same terms, it is worth investigating how far and how widely royal service had ethical force in this period.

First, there are clear signs that the language we have discussed bore some relation to the way in which political society understood the decisions reached in the Cortes. The vernacular chronicler, for example, recorded that servicios were levied in 1300 “because they understood that it was the great service of the king and the profit of all the land.”⁷⁷ Granted, the chronicler was no neutral observer: writing in the mid-fourteenth century with a distinct motive to legitimise Alfonso XI’s rule, he is perhaps to be expected to parrot royal terminology more readily than others. Nevertheless, there are indications that the chronicler used language that bore at least some relation to that of actual political agents. His account of 1287 describes how a group of knights approached the king to complain; since he would not hear them, they wrote down their grievances, which the chronicle purports to reproduce verbatim. Most of their complaint focused on the king’s excessive patronage of Lope Díaz de Haro (d. 1288). They lamented the damage done by Lope Díaz “which was to the great diminishing of his [the king’s] lordship and was much his disservice.”⁷⁸ Significantly, they emphasised the legitimacy of their cause in terms of service, describing themselves as victims “who served and deserved very well.”⁷⁹

Other documents demonstrate that various elements of political society considered the king’s service as a general good. For example, a 1289 enquiry into the taxes in Zamora, composed by a local tax collector, Miguel Lorenzo de Salamanca, described how he had spoken to “good men who desire the service of the king.”⁸⁰ In 1292, the concejo of Palencia argued that the taxes resulted in disservice for the king and damage for them: “the king and our lord the bishop [of Palencia] were not served as they ought to be and the village is extorted and our inhabitants receive many damages.”⁸¹ In 1290, local customs were compiled in Seville, putting the royal service alongside the good of their city in the process of electing the council: “understanding that it is the service of God, and our lord the king, and the infante don Fernando, his first son and heir, and the good and safeguard of the said city and its territory … they shall install twelve knights and twelve good men of the city.” The same ends were to underpin all their actions: “these shall observe and guard above all the service of God and our lord the king, and all his rights entirely. And furthermore that they shall observe and guard the benefit and safety of the council of Seville and all its territory.”⁸² Clearly, then, it was possible to adjust the second half of the king’s stock phrases, replacing the “benefit of the land” with the interest of a relevant locality; the first half, however, always remained the same, suggesting it was ill-advised to neglect the king’s service when trying to justify an action in the general interest.

Another concrete demonstration of the power of service came with the hermandades.⁸³ The founding documents of the hermandad of the councils of Old Castile in 1295, that of Jaén, Baeza and Úbeda in the same year, various Andalucían towns including Seville, Córdoba and Jaén in 1313, and the hermandad of 1315 all invoked the idea of “the service of God and of the king.”⁸⁴ The 1282 hermandad which supported the rebel infante Sancho is a notable outlier, preferring to refer to the service of God, Mary and the celestial court, but only the “honour and safeguard” (honra e guarda) of the king and infante Sancho.⁸⁵ Indeed, this reinforces the point that it was difficult for anyone else to invoke the king’s service unless plausibly serving the king. Occasionally, hermandades developed this language in novel ways, such as when the council of Cuenca created its brotherhood during the minority of Fernando IV, declaring themselves.

all aligned of one heart and a sound will to the service of God and Holy Mary, and of our lord, the king don Fernando, and our lady, the queen doña María, his mother, may God defend them from evil and maintain their service for the good, safeguard and honour of the council of the said city.⁸⁶

That they used such elaborate formulae of their own making suggests that these discourses were part of their own lexicon. While the brotherhoods’ decision to justify their actions in terms of the mutual interests of the king’s service and their specific good was clearly a tactical move to legitimise their associations, it nonetheless demonstrates the reach of these ideas beyond the royal chancery.

Furthermore, royal service was in the vocabulary of other crucial actors. Letters sent from Castile to Aragón are especially fruitful because incorporation into the archives of the Corona de Aragón preserved them in greater numbers. For example, we find the bishop-elect of Ávila, Sancho Sánchez, promising Jaime II in 1312 to do what “is the service of God and the king Alfonso your nephew and the profit, safeguard and expansion of his lordship.”⁸⁷ In 1303, infante Juan rebuked Jaime for holding audiences with Fernando IV’s enemies because “it was not for your benefit nor honour, nor your service or that of the king don Fernando.”⁸⁸ In fact, the same ideas were being used on all sides: that same year, two of the same enemies denounced by Juan, Diego López de Haro and Juan Núñez de Lara, showed no hesitation in deploying the language of royal service. Diego’s address to Jaime ran, “I commend myself to your grace as a lord whom I would serve well,” while Juan Núñez declared that a meeting “is the great service of God and you and the good of all the land and the tranquillity of your estate and that of the king don Fernando my lord.”⁸⁹

Finally, the vernacular chronicles give tantalising glimpses that service could occasionally achieve widespread use, even subversively so. We have already seen how the grassroots backlash against Lope Díaz de Haro was apparently expressed in terms of the king’s service, and this occurred in other flashpoints. For example, in 1308, rumours circulated that Fernando IV desired revenge not only against rebels, but against those nobles (infante Juan, Pedro Ponce de León and Fernán Ruiz de Saldaña), who had failed to dislodge his enemies from Tordehumos.⁹⁰ The words placed in infante Juan’s mouth by the chronicler are most revealing: hearing about the king’s violent intent, he said to Fernando, “we tell you that we will not stay with you in any place, and if you wish to direct our service, we will serve you in one location, and we will do this to protect you from error and ourselves from danger.”⁹¹ The assumptions at play here repay close attention. As this study highlights, the key ideology for the proper functioning of the royal machine was service, and any attempt to repair the government would rely on it. However, the nobles’ fear made the proximity that service implied problematic, and hence the proposal was for a kind of distant service. It is clear from this episode that, even amid deep political ruptures, service could not fully be ignored.

Similarly, the famous confrontation at Grijota later in 1308 saw a group of disaffected nobles speaking about service while opposing the king.⁹² The assembled rebels declared that they wanted to say things “which are greatly your service and the benefit of the land.”⁹³ Their demands were typical of tropes found everywhere in medieval Europe: the king managed his affairs poorly “especially because he keeps bad men in his counsel and his estate.”⁹⁴ They insisted that they wanted “to reform the offices of the royal household and all the kingdom, and for the king to give them to whom they desired.”⁹⁵ The king’s indignation at these requests was reinforced by his councillors, who themselves used service as a barometer for correct intent. Diego López de Haro, the mayordomo mayor, said that Fernando should not throw out even the lowliest man of his household at their bidding because “it seemed that they did so out of their own ill will rather than for his service.”⁹⁶ In the end, though, the king was forced to reorganise his officialdom on their terms. Fascinatingly, the chronicler suggests that Fernando’s submission came out of fear that the rebels’ slogans could spread. He writes that the king feared “a great scandal throughout the whole land with the cry they [the nobles] had taken up, in which they said that they did what they did for his service and for the good of the land.”⁹⁷ On the basis of everything we have seen, this fleeting reference to the potentially broad appeal of the rebels’ subversive definition of service must be taken seriously. Here we have an embattled king facing a courtly revolt over the management of his household, and yet what threatens him most is the possibility that the language most central to his legitimacy might be turned against him.

All these examples provide ample evidence that the language of service was relevant to the concerns of non-royals and available for their use in certain circumstances. The king’s subjects might highlight the king’s service legitimately to make a petition in the Cortes or at court. At other times, service was used to legitimise political associations like hermandades, though only when they could credibly claim to support the king. Finally, the moral force of service could become problematic amid serious dislocations such as those faced by Fernando IV, when the risk arose that the king’s service and the common good could justify widespread resistance. However, it ought to be acknowledged that, overall, the number of occasions when the king’s subjects took it on themselves to proclaim the king’s service was low by comparison with the vast number of petitions that made requests for other reasons. This chimes with Ormrod’s observations regarding the king’s profit in England: although some petitioners did occasionally connect their grievance to the general good, it was highly unusual.⁹⁸ For Ormrod, this is explained in the case of parliamentary petitions by the restraints of the supplicatory form, which allowed petitioners to present a grievance but not to suggest its solution, and more generally by the overall structure of deference which meant that it was not for a subordinate to invoke the higher good. As a result, before the 1320s, invoking common profit against the crown was an action of outright dissent, and could be interpreted as close to treason. Those wishing to make more modest challenges would have to find other forms.⁹⁹

The value of this comparison is the light it sheds on the way servicio operated in political discourse: if it was difficult for English political society to describe “the state of the king and the kingdom,” then these avenues appear to have been even more restricted for Castilian subjects, whose political language tied their specific good not only to the king’s good, but to his service, with all its connotations of hierarchy and obedience. Certainly, we ought to remember that lords themselves had servants and thus a concurrent notion of their own service, but it was rare that they could use this as a justification for major political actions. Though Juan Manuel in his Libro de las Armas recalled that, at Sancho IV’s deathbed, he spoke with the king about affairs touching “his service and mine” (su servicio et mio), in practice when it came to speaking to kings he employed a careful separation: a letter to Jaime II advocated a course of action since “it would be to you, service, and to me, great benefit and honour.”¹⁰⁰ Service, then, remained closed off in political discourse: it was above all for the king to decide what would contribute to his service and how that would relate to the benefit of the wider community. Indeed, whereas the English parliament was gradually to build self-confidence in defining the common good, this would not be possible to the same extent for any Castilian representative body apart from the crown. Even long into the fifteenth century, when the common good had become a much more routine feature of European politics, Castilians were still found mediating their claims through the concept of royal service.¹⁰¹ On one level, then, the development of Castile as a polity can be read through its lexicon: the overwhelming emphasis on service formed part of a politics focused on kings, however weak, and their relationships with the favourites who served them, while the entry of towns into the political arena occurred without the discursive power afforded to the parliamentary commons in England to define the common good.

Conclusion

I have argued that the prevalence of service in Castilian discourse gives it every right to be considered the dominant ethic of the kingdom’s politics in this period. Service was a ubiquitous and flexible concept, applicable to the habitual behaviour of servants and officers, the justification for handsome rewards, military service, paying tax or any kind of unspecified action that the king judged to support his interests. This generality, combined with the rhetorical habits of monarchs, established the royal service as something to be considered almost indistinguishable from the common good. The latter phrase, in the infancy of a long and famous life in late medieval politics, was also flexible and contested, referring just as easily to councils, regions, institutions, loose fraternities and kingdoms. Nevertheless, by justifying political actions because they were “God’s service and mine, and the profit and safeguard of all my land,” Castilian kings ensured that interest groups who wished to invoke a general benefit often could not avoid remarking on its natural connection with the royal service, itself linked with serving God, and hence reinforced the king’s position as the focal point for political engagement. Despite the difficulties of the source material, there is enough evidence across the surviving documentary records, letters and political writings to conclude that, although used in different contexts for different purposes, serious contenders in Castilian politics accepted the centrality of service for the functioning of the realm and its orientation primarily towards the king.

Far from being accidental, it was fundamental to the operation and development of the Castilian polity that different parties interpreted their interests through the perspective of the royal service. When we survey the role of service in the century after 1250, it becomes evident that it was a critical ingredient in the evolution of Castilian political structures. The emerging strength of the ideology of service was profoundly important in a century in which a king who pushed things too far began to fail; in which one of his sons, but not the certain heir, emerged as the exponent of reaction; and in which two successive minorities complicated the whole question of royal service. Despite the conflicts that erupted, and which have drawn so much attention, service was part of a royal discourse that tended towards integration. The strength of this discourse, which justified some of the king’s most controversial decisions and allowed the equivalence of the king’s interests with the overall good of the kingdom, connected various strands that are otherwise too easily depicted as headed directly for structural conflict with the crown. Though noble and urban power structures grew in complexity and territorial influence, both in competition and dialogue with the crown, their interface with the royal centre was debated through the overall conceptual framework of service. The language of service was therefore both open to political society, in that they used it when petitioning or justifying their actions, and closed, in that ultimately it was the king’s decision what did or did not fulfil his service (provided that he was in a position of sufficient personal authority, as Fernando IV found to his cost). This tension between openness and exclusivity drew Castilian political society together around the person of the king, and was to be a fundamental dynamic throughout the narrative of Castilian politics in 1250–1350. Because of this ethic and the structures it underpinned, opposition to the king in Castile did not produce a constitutional watershed moment like England’s Magna Carta in 1215 or an affair of the Leagues, as France did in the 1310s. Even the noble rebellion of 1272–1273, which has attracted comparison with English constitutional crises, did not result in a repeatable formula for regulating royal claims.¹⁰² Instead, service dominated the moral logic of Castilian politics over the long term. Ultimately, though Castile contained many of the same components as other European polities, they were configured in different ways and negotiated using different terms.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and All Souls College, University of Oxford.

Notes on contributors

Laurence McKellar

Laurence McKellar completed his doctorate in History at Exeter College, University of Oxford, in 2022. His thesis, entitled “Centre and Locality: The Political Structures of Castile, 1275–1325,” examined the evolving relationships between central and local structures in a fraught period of civil war and minority. He is interested in the operation of power in the past in various aspects, including institutions, geopolitics and languages. He was a Stipendiary Lecturer in History at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 2020–2022.

Notes

1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated. See Horrox, “Service,” 61. For a sustained examination of service, inspired directly by Horrox, see Curry and Matthew, Fifteenth Century, I. See also Dodd, “Henry V’s Establishment,” 35–76.

2 Watts, “Conclusion,” 353–54; Carpenter, Wars of the Roses; Powell, “After ‘After McFarlane’,” 1.

3 See e.g., Foronda and Carrasco, El contrato político; Nieto Soria, El conflicto en las escenas; Nieto Soria and Villarroel González, Pacto y consenso.

4 Ruiz, “Unsacred Monarchy,” 109–44; Nieto Soria, “Origen divino, espíritu laico y poder real,” 43–101; Arias, Triumph of an Accursed Lineage, 24–27.

5 Foronda, “La privanza,” 73–132.

6 See Jara Fuente, “Con grande amor e lealtad,” 152–54.

7 Alfonso, “Desheredamiento y desafuero,” 124.

8 Somoza, “La noción de ‘servicio al rey’,” 219–25.

9 The language of service continued to evolve and dominated Castilian discourse well beyond 1350, but such developments, with different source materials and new political contexts that emerged in the reign of Pedro I, lie beyond the scope of this paper.

10 O’Callaghan, History of Medieval Spain, 358, 401; Torres, “Teoría y práctica,” 9–87; Nieto Soria, Sancho IV, 12; González, Fernando IV, 9; González, Poder real y poder nobiliar; Sánchez-Arcilla, Alfonso XI, 12.

11 See Monsalvo Antón, La construcción del poder real, 156–57; Arias, “A Kingdom without a Capital?,” 456–76; Salazar y Acha, “La evolución de la Casa del Rey,” 80.

12 Hernández, Los hombres del rey, 735–38.

13 See Carpenter, “Introduction,” 1.

14 Linehan, History and the Historians, 527.

15 Horrox, “Service,” 63.

16 “Cosa natural es e de razón prouada … que los vasallos deuen por derecho seruir e obedescer e guardar e honrrar al su rey.” Castigos, 130.

17 Benavides, Memorias, doc. 240; Arias, Triumph of an Accursed Lineage, 110.

18 Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability, 5.

19 Jular, “The King's Face on the Territory,” 114.

20 Blecua, Juan Manuel, 10–21; Vázquez, “El adelantamiento murciano,” 105–22.

21 Vázquez, “El adelantamiento murciano,” 195.

22 “tomar muy grant onra en los grandes fechos que al rey acaescieren.” Vázquez, “El adelantamiento murciano,” 159.

23 “por las obras buenas et leales que fara en seruiçio del rey en los grandes fechos que acaesçieren, mostrara quanto el cunple para seruiçio del rey.” Vázquez, “El adelantamiento murciano,” 160.

24 Arias, Triumph of an Accursed Lineage, 116.

25 “Et Dios me lo demande al cuerpo et al alma, si por los vienes et la criança que el en mi fizo, si lo non serui lo mas lealmente que pude a el et al rey don Fernando, su fijo, et a este rey don Alfonso, su nieto.” Blecua, Obras completas, 135.

26 Fuero viejo, I, 3, 1.

27 García Fitz, “La organización militar,” 67; Grassotti, Las instituciones feudo-vasalláticas, 542.

28 “Los richos omnes, o infançones, o otros qualesquier que touieren tierra o morabedís del rey, et le ouieren de fazer hueste con caualleros, et non leuaren tantos como deuíen.” Fuero Real, IV, 19, 4.

29 “E todo esto fazemos porque estemos mejor guisados para yr en servicio de nuestro sennor el rey don Sancho para en esta guerra.” Chacón, Colección diplomática, doc. 29.

30 García Fitz, “La organización militar,” 74.

31 Ladero, Fiscalidad y poder real, 56.

32 O’Callaghan, The Cortes, 138–39.

33 Harriss, King, Parliament, and Public Finance, 36; Watts, Making of Polities, 75.

34 “El pueblo son armas del rey e ayuda para su servicio.” Haro, Libro de los cien capítulos, 94.

35 Horrox, Richard III, 1–6; Curry and Matthew, Fifteenth Century I, xviii.

36 “catando los muchos bonos seruiçios que rreçibieron los rreyes onde nos venimos delos caualleros e delos otros omes bonos delas nuestras villas de Castiella.” Cortes, I:106.

37 “Et yo entendiendo que me pidien derecho e que es muy grant mi seruicio, et porque … sennalada mientre siruieron e siruen a mi assi como uasallos buenos e leales deuen seruir a su sennor natural.” Cortes, I:162.

38 See Estepa, “Naturaleza y poder real,” 163–82; Monsalvo Antón, La construcción del poder real, 301; Martin, “De lexicología jurídica alfonsí,” 125–38.

39 “non podemos escusar de fazer merced alos que nos seruieron, e de aqui adelante gelo guardaremos asi commo cunple a nuestro servicio e a pro e onrra e guarda de los nuestros rregnos.” Cortes, II:263.

40 “por mucho servicio que nos él fizo e face.” Benavides, Memorias, doc. 80.

41 Rosell, “Crónica del Rey Don Sancho Cuarto” (hereafter CSIV), 89.

42 “dar la vuestra sangre y ofrecer el vuestro primo genito hijo por el mio seruicio e de dios delante” … “fazer en uos mercedes que sean semejantes al vuestros servicios.” Salazar, E-6, fol. 95.

43 Benavides, Memorias, doc. 102.

44 Benavides, Memorias, doc. 392.

45 “por muchos servicios e buenos que nos ficieron e fazen e por que la orden sea mas rica e mas auondada e ellos ayan mas algo con que nos seruir damos les los castillos … .” Salazar, O-20, fols. 11–12.

46 “sabor que habemos de lebar la su facienda.” Salazar, N-8, fols. 8v-20.

47 “Et el Rey dixo que les perdonaba todos los enojos que le avian fecho fasta allí, et que fuesen ciertos él et Don Joan Nuñez, que era su voluntat del Rey de los querer para su servicio, et que les faria merced granadamiente.” Rosell, “Crónica del Rey don Alfonso el Oceno,” 240.

48 “catastes y mio seruicio” … “en aquella guisa que sea mas mio seruicio,” CODOM V, doc. 30.

49 “yo entiendo queme pedian derecho e que es gran mio sseruicio … confirmoles e otorgoles … .” Cortes, I:146.

50 Barrios, Documentos, doc. 103.

51 “que queria fablar con ellos cosas que eran muy grand mio servicio” … “quanto era mio servicio de seer vos mios ant que de otro señor” … “esto vos gradesco ya mucho y tengovoslo en servicio.” Benavides, Memorias, doc. 374.

52 There are some scattered examples: Alfonso XI in 1328, CODOM VI, doc. 115; Pedro I to Murcia in 1361, CODOM VII, doc. 89. The phrase was more common under the Catholic Monarchs, e.g., in 1476 Isabella wrote, “tengo vos en mucho e señalado servicio.” Pretel, “En torno a la sublevación,” 1356.

53 “uos lo gradesco mucho et uos lo tengo en seruicio.” CODOM VI, doc. 99.

54 Kempshall, Common Good, 14.

55 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, V, 21.

56 Kempshall, Common Good, 15.

57 Kempshall, Common Good, 24–25.

58 Stein, Boele, and Blockmans, “Whose Community?,” 160–62.

59 Dounot, “Le bien commun,” 103.

60 Dounot, “Le bien commun,” 103.

61 Carrasco, “El bien común,” 62.

62 “para mantener et defender derechamente el pro comunal de todos.” Partidas, II.1. See Tierney, “‘The Prince Is Not Bound by the Laws’,” 391–93.

63 Burns and Scott, Siete Partidas, II.10.

64 Carrasco, “El bien común,” 65–66.

65 “cosas que fueren seruicio de Dios y mio y pro y guarda de toda la mi tierra.” O’Callaghan, “Las Cortes de Fernando IV,” 320.

66 “non es nuestro seruicio nin pro dela tierra.” Cortes, I:110.

67 “por que sabemos que es seruicio de Dios e nuestro e muy grand pro de todos los de nuestros rregnos, e meioramiento del estado de toda nuestra tierra.” Cortes, I: 131.

68 Cortes, I: 135–444.

69 “en manera que sea a nuestro seruicio et a pro de la cibdat.” CODOM I, doc. 38.

70 “Para ordenar con ellos muchas cosas que son mio grand seruicio e pro de toda la mi tierra … .” Pereda, Documentación, doc. 420.

71 “era muy grand nuestro desservicio e dano dela nuestra tierra.” Burgos, Archivo Municipal de Burgos, Fondo Histórico, 129.

72 “entendia que era servicio del Rey é pro de la tierra.” Rosell, “Crónica del Rey don Fernando Cuarto” (hereafter CFIV), 149.

73 “fablaron conmigo muchas cosas que eran a servicio de Dios et del Rey mio nieto et a muy grant pro et asesego de todos los regnos.” Blecua, Juan Manuel, doc. 255.

74 “Ca entendemos que sera servicio del rey don Alfonso e bien de Castiella e honra e provecho vuestro” … “que no seria seruicio del rey de Castiella ni pro de los regnos ni servicio nuestro.” Blecua, Juan Manuel, doc. 253.

75 See Ladero, Fiscalidad y poder real, 56–86.

76 Ormrod, “‘Common Profit’,” 225.

77 “porque entendian que era muy grand servicio del Rey é pro de toda la tierra.” CFIV, 117.

78 “que era muy grand menguamiento de su señorío, é que era muy grand su deservicio.” CSIV, 76.

79 “que sirvieran e merescieran muy bien.” CSIV, 76.

80 “Omnes bonos que querien seruicio del Rey.” Gaibrois, Sancho IV, doc. 258.

81 “nuestro sennor el Rey e nuestro sennor el Obispo non eran seruidos assí commo devíen e la villa es peyndrada e nuestros vezinos recíben muchos dannos.” Gaibrois, Sancho IV, doc. 435.

82 “entendiendo que es seruiçio de Dios, e de nuestro sennor el rey, e del infante don Ferrando, su primero fiio e eredero, e pro, e guarda, e onrra de la cibdat sobredicha e de su termino … que pusiesen doze caualleros e doze omnes buenos de la cibdat” … “viesen e que guardasen primeramente el seruiçio de Dios e de nuestro sennor el rey, e todos sus derechos conplidamente. E otrosi, que viesen e que guardasen pro e guarda del conçeio de Seuilla e de todo su termino.” González “Ordenanzas, usos y costumbres,” 274.

83 Hermandades were associations of towns and prelates which emerged as early as the twelfth century but exercised particularly significant influence in the later years of Alfonso X’s reign. See Asenjo González, “Ciudades y hermandades,” 103–46.

84 Benavides, Memorias, doc. 3; Suárez, “Evolución histórica,” 5–78; Sanz, “Cartas de Hermandad,” 419–24.

85 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Uclés, carp. 260, núm. 10.

86 “todos abenidos de un coraçon et de una sana voluntad, a servicio de Dios et de sancta Maria, et de nuestro sennor, el rey don Ferrando, et de nuestra sennora, la reyna donna María, su madre, los que guarde Dios de mal et mantenga al su servicio para pro et guarda et onrra del concejo de la cibdat sobredicha.” Chacón, Colección diplomática, doc. 36.

87 “es servicio de Dios e del Rey don Alfonso uuestro sobrino e pro e guarda e acrecentamiento de su sennorio.” Blecua, Juan Manuel, doc. 250.

88 “non era vuestra pro ni vuestr [sic] onrra ni vuestro servicio ni del Rey don Ferrando.” Blecua, Juan Manuel, doc. 47.

89 “me acomiendo en vuestra gracia como a sennor a quien de buena mente seruiria” … “es gran servicio de Dios e vuestra e pro de toda la tierra e asosiego de vuestra fazienda e del Rey don Fernando mio sennor.” Blecua, Juan Manuel, docs. 65, 67.

90 CFIV, 156.

91 “vos decimos que non entrarémos convusco en una villa, é si nuestro servicio oviéredes menester, servir vos emos todos en uno en una comarca, é esto farémos nos por guardar á vos de yerro é á nos de peligro.” CFIV, 157.

92 At Grijota in 1308, a group of nobles led by infante Juan and Juan Núñez de Lara demanded a complete reorganisation of Fernando IV’s household in one of the most significant challenges to royal authority in the period.

93 “que son muy grand vuestro servicio é pro de la tierra.” CFIV, 158.

94 “señaladamente por que trae malos omes en su consejo é en la su facienda.” CFIV, 158.

95 “los oficios de casa del Rey é de toda la tierra que los querian ordenar, é que los diese el Rey á quien ellos quisiese.” CFIV, 159.

96 “ca más parescia que lo facian por mal querencia, que non por su servicio dél.” CFIV, 159.

97 “grand escándolo en toda la tierra con la voz que avian tomado, en que decian que lo facian por su servicio e por pro de la tierra.” CFIV, 159.

98 Ormrod, “‘Common Profit’,” 228.

99 Ormrod, “‘Common Profit’,” 229–31.

100 Blecua, Obras completas, 136; “seria a vos servicio et a mi grand pro e grand honrra.” Juan Manuel, doc. 257.

101 Somoza, “La noción de ‘servicio al rey’,” 219–25; Jara, “‘Con mucha afecçión’,” 55–82.

102 See Bjerke, “A Castilian Agreement,” 75–93.