UCLA

Within late medieval Castilian royal chronicle narratives, the ways in which rulers were shown disempowering subjects, and what it meant for them to do so, evolved significantly between the mid-fourteenth and mid-fifteenth century. Narratives of removals from power at royal hands were most often framed by depictions of judicial procedures. Yet what that justice looked like, and how rulers acted through it to separate person and power, changed a great deal during this period. Those changes were consequences of two key eras of innovation in judicial institutions and expressions of royal authority, one in the final decades of the fourteenth century, and another after 1420. Depictions of rulers stripping specific possessions as punishment for crimes gave way to rulers deploying their authority, justified in terms of their interests, to arrange limitations on the capacity of rivals to exercise power. Using royal chronicle narratives as lenses in this way allows for a reinterpretation of two important late medieval political developments in Castile. They are the origins of new conceptions of political power among the nobility, as well as a strengthened and more proactive form of royal authority. In those accounts, united by consistent judicial framing but adapting to the innovations noted above, each reinforced the other. The rise of a more active king, with firmly defined authority, raised the profile of the suspensions of the exercise of power he arranged. But, as the close connection between the two attests, royal authority did not advance in isolation. It did so alongside changes in how the power it confronted, mainly that possessed by subjects, was envisioned as well. By the middle of the fifteenth century, a much more robustly conceived royal authority, and its exercise, sat at the center of chronicle narratives, and political discourse more broadly, regarding removals from power. However, it did not gain that position simply by imposition over, or by driving out, either older views or the claims of other political players. To be effective, it was also redirected toward newly defined actions, freeing rulers from limitations older forms had imposed.