Concentration of Land, Conditionality, and the Power of the Count-Prince

As assemblies regularized after the 1160s,^[934] the first question is how land and power were distributed before and around that date. Surrounding counties were absorbed in the eleventh century, after the counts of Barcelona gained de facto independence from the French crown around the turn of the millennium.

However, expansion occurred in the context of conditional landhold­ing patterns. The type of landholding was crucially important in deter­mining the continuing control of the ruler over his subjects and his capacity to penetrate into local judicial structures. A conditional system of land tenures was applied to lands of the Spanish March that were integrated into Catalonia, where the count-prince retained the right to revoke a grant. The process was codified when Ramon Berenguer IV published the Usatges, around 1150; this described fief law and other customs and remained in effect until 1716.26

The count-princes accordingly asserted control over much territory also through judicial means, by claiming sovereignty over castellans.^{[937] [938]} They won a series of suits held after the 1170s using archival documents demonstrating original comital grants.

In both concentration and conditionality, Catalan count-princes were more limited than their English counterparts, but more effective than in Aragon or than later Castilian kings. Some vassals, like the count of Foix, could occasionally muster greater forces than the count-prince. Vast estates, “sometimes as much as one fifth of the conquered territory” had to be granted to the Church. This meant that bishops too were summoned as feudal vassals, as they were in England, and not in their ecclesiastical capacity.^[941] Otherland was sometimes granted allodially, i.e. unconditionally. But both feudal and allodial lands “owed some form of political allegiance - the evidence is conclusive that owners of allods had to swear allegiance to the Crown.”^[942]

The system, moreover, had some important differences from the trad­itional system of feudalism, as Thomas Bisson argued.^[943] Conditionality in landholding was somewhat weaker in Catalonia than in England, which undercut the ties between ruler and ruled. Especially after 1202, the count-princes could not restrict landlord power over peasants or secure peasant access to royal courts, as in England.^[944] Further, they did not control the countryside as English kings controlled the counties through their courts;^[945] towns, the nobility, and the Church remained the direct overlords. Catalan noble rights were thus stronger than those demanded in Magna Carta.³⁵ This affected parliamentary representation and territorial anchoring, as we shall see.

Nonetheless, land reverted to rulers when heirs were lacking, both for peasants and for county vassals, though evidence is not systematic. Catalan lords owed military service, but count-princes often had to pay for offensive wars, which they usually did by granting lands. Aragonese lords, by contrast, were less burdened by such duties, given their allodial status. Consequently, the count-princes relied on them less, drawing support mostly from the Catalans.^[946] This greater control over the Catalan aristocracy also meant that aristocratic clans were less fractious in Barcelona than they were in Italian city-states, originally stemming oligarchic pressures relatively better.^[947]

8.3