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Rethinking Centralization: Petitioning and Sovereignty in the Castilian Monarchy, c. 1475-1510

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Catholic Monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, initiated a series of reforms in the central institutions of the Castilian monarchy. Yet, as Yanay Israeli shows in his work, the expansion of royal power in this period was also a process in which ordinary women and men played a crucial role, disseminating a discourse of royal sovereignty that asserted the judicial supremacy of the monarchs and portrayed them as just and capable rulers. 
In this talk, Israeli will analyze royal authority in relation to the practice of petitioning, which intensified communications between the Crown and non-elites. While petitioners––Christians, Muslims and Jews––sought empowerment and support for their own social causes, their participation in the petition-and-response process enhanced the legitimacy of the royal administration. Thus, petitioners were not simply recipients of the monarch’s benevolent power but also important advocates of royal sovereignty in the localities. Based on extensive archival work and the reconstruction of the petitioning process, Israeli explains how royal authority was practiced and negotiated on the ground. By following “letters of justice” that were issued by high royal courts in response to petitions we learn how Castilians of all echelons of society embraced, challenged, delayed, disobeyed and sometimes even attacked royal messengers and decrees. Israeli gives a special attention to these local interactions at the “aftermath” of the petitioning process, as well as the physical aspects of sovereignty-making, from the paper on which royal decrees were written to the long and laborious journeys that many petitioners undertook, over mountains and rivers, to be heard by the court.

Yanay Israeli is an assistant professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the social and legal history of the Iberian world between the 13th and 16th centuries. Israeli's articles have been published by Speculum, Past and Present, Law and History Review, and Viator. Israeli is currently working on his first book, which is a study of royal justice and petitionary practices in fifteenth-century Castile.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities as part of their 2023-2024 Sovereignties Dialogue, a year-long conversation mobilizing humanities research to question, understand, and reimagine sovereignties—bodily, artistic, intellectual, geopolitical—and their global histories, contemporary challenges, and possible futures.