‘Unions et germanies’: Armed Mobilisation, Plebeian Politicisation and Historical Memory in the Kingdom of Valencia (Fourteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)

From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)

Mariana Valeria Parma, University of Buenos Aires

Although the ‘Unions et germanies’ were forbidden, popular movements arose in the Kingdom of Valencia that expressed themselves mainly through judicial means, but sometimes also resorted to arms. Analysis of the actors’ capacity for agency is therefore complex. In particular, the Germania(1519–1522) revalued the participation of the urban majorities in public affairs, based on the armed and legal mobilisation of the city’s artisans. Other grievances throughout the Kingdom of Valencia strengthened the movement. The conflict was radicalised, giving rise to armed actions against privilege that redefined its trajectory. The classist writings of the chroniclers repudiated this collective violence. The adoption of rational choices to achieve objectives reveals the political subjectivity created by the war, which marked the memory of the commoners. A widespread resistance kept alive their banners, which became the cultural substratum of later struggles. The essay rescues the forms assumed by plebeian political identities in the sixteenth-century conflict, inscribing them in the cycle of collective action that began with the Union (1347–1348) and ended with the Second Germania (1693), also comparing the potentialities of these dissimilar experiences.

Medieval and early modern Western Europe experienced a wide variety of revolts. All of them were firmly defeated and punished, but some, because of their qualities, survived the oblivion to which they were condemned by chroniclers and apologists of the victors. This article focuses on the politicisation of the subalterns in the context of these disruptive actions. It takes as its object of study the forms, practices and languages through which alternative constructions of power were expressed. Furthermore, it revolves around the continuity of traditions of struggle that transcended the barriers of time; the memory that the subalterns held about the political forms that emerged during past conflicts, their functions in the face of new challenges and their legacies for the future. In particular, the history of the Kingdom of Valencia was marked by persistent levels of conflict, which can be revealed by following the traces of several experiences of armed mobilisation that took place between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. These conflicts were called ‘unions’ or ‘germanies’ by the bodies of power that ultimately incorporated them into the list of violent and criminal associations forbidden by the legal codes. In the face of this condemnation, the re-construction of the complete cycle of collective action re-signifies the importance of each struggle and its political qualities.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15533

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