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situation is less certain in Huesca, which had its own justicia, but it is clear that the office was more than merely honorific, as the zalmedina is the first administrator named in Pere II’s 1278 privilege to the city of Huesca. When we take into account that the zalmedinas, unlike other Aragonese judicial officers, were elected to their positions by the town’s leading citizens, rather than appointed by the king, and were subject to regular local assessment, it is reasonable to conclude that these officials were the product of special concessions won by local factions in these two important urban centers. Nevertheless, the zalmedinas do appear regularly in the cases in the following pages, indicating that their judicial authority was on a par with that of the justicias elsewhere in Aragon or with the veguers and batlles of Catalonia.96
Finally, the administrative apparatus of justice in the kingdom of Valencia was Aragonese in form but Catalan in substance, reflecting the tension between the interests of the early the Aragonese seigneurial settlers on the one hand and the monarchs’ rapid centralization efforts on the other. Royal justice in Valencia was primarily the responsibility of bayles, royal judicial and administrative officers answering to the bayle general, who himself answered to no one but the king. Originally appointed to protect the royal patrimony, the bayles’ legal competence was rooted in civil cases, but the bayles also claimed jurisdiction over all civil or criminal cases that touched on royal interests or over the strategic territories of sea and coastline, as well as all cases where both parties were Jews or Muslims.97
The bayles’ increasingly broad jurisdictional claims brought them into frequent contact with another important group of judicial officials: the justicias. Created by Jaume I to mediate conflicts between urban residents and the king, the Valencian justicias were charged with hearing and judging both civil and criminal cases throughout their town and its surrounding district “with the counsel of the wise men [probi homines] of the city” and aided by an assessor trained in law. Valencian justicias had jurisdiction over cases between Christians and Jews or Muslims, and their mixed criminal and civil jurisdiction eventually resulted in the office being split, in 1321, into more specialized offices that did not appear elsewhere in the Crown territories at that time: a justicia criminal, a justicia civil, and eventually a justicia de trescientos sueldos. Like the Aragonese zalmedinas, Valencian justicias were held accountable to the cities and towns that were their seat, serving only one-year terms, after which they were required to present an accounting of their actions for audit. And also as in Aragon, the Valencian justicias were drawn from the nobility or the urban patriciate, and their authority was closely bound to the municipal councils; the justicias therefore tended to represent those interests, acting as a counterbalance to the authority of the king’s bayles.98
The jurisdictional map in Valencia was further complicated by the presence of the office of procurator general (later governor general), the monarch’s leading judicial and administrative representative for the kingdom of Valencia as a whole. The procurator general was assisted by lieutenant procurators stationed throughout the kingdom who handled judicial affairs in much the same way as the veguers in the Catalan territories. The procurator was supposed to have jurisdiction primarily in cases involving the public good—that is, those cases touching on matters of public order, the defense of borders and of royal property, the defense or prosecution of royal officials, and certain high crimes such as treason, sodomy, counterfeiting/forgery, or heresy.99
Procedure: Civil, Criminal, and Inquisitio
The cases dealt with in the following chapters come from a variety of these courts—courts of veguers, batlles, justicias, procurators, and even the royal Audiencia. But since these were either arms of royal justice or subject to appeal in the royal courts, and since, by the reign of Jaume II, the royal courts had adopted the procedural rules of the ius commune, a litigant would be subject to a similar process no matter which of these courts her case was heard in.100 And while Romano-canonical procedure prohibited a woman from acting in court on behalf of anyone but herself or her minor children, women did regularly engage with these procedures on their own behalf as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses.
The procedure that litigants and witnesses would be subject to in the royal courts of the later medieval Crown of Aragon is well illustrated by a fourteenth-century investigation of a charge of official misconduct, conducted in the court of Bernat Dalcamora, the lieutenant procurator in the Valencian town of Vall d’Uixó. Although the elements of procedural law varied slightly throughout Western Europe and over the course of the high and later medieval centuries, a civil suit usually began when a plaintiff presented to the judge either an oral or a written complaint (the libellus). In 1302, Maria, daughter of Miquel de la Serra, appeared in person to lodge such a complaint against the justicia of the town of Cabanes d’Arc, Bertran Maçquefa. According to Maria’s accusation, Bertran had, with the assistance of his companions Bernat Maestre, Bernat de Bonet, and Bertoli Maçquefa, set upon her one Sunday after mass, publicly denouncing her as a whore. They then proceeded to administer a public beating, pulling her hair, hitting her with their fists, and kicking her. Eventually, they expelled her from the town, prohibiting anyone from giving her aid or shelter, on pain of a fine of sixty sous.101
If the judge in the case deemed the complaint worthy, the court’s next action would be to summon the defendant and give him or her the opportunity to file a formal response to the articles of the libellus. In this particular case, the lieutenant procurator summoned all four defendants into his presence separately, where he had the denunciation read out to them. All four exercised their right to respond to the charges, and all four individually denied that anything Maria said was true.102
This complaint-and-response was all part of the pretrial phase, designed to help the judge formulate the charges around which the actual trial (litis contestatio) would revolve. The trial itself began with both parties taking calumny oaths, that is, swearing that they were litigating for legitimate reasons, not out of malice, and that the testimony and evidence they would present was genuine. The plaintiff then presented his or her charge and the defendant his or her response to the charges, usually in a written form that incorporated the many statements and revisions made during the earlier pretrial phase. In this case, the lieutenant procurator presented a written summary of the articles (capitols) that he would be deciding in the course of the investigation. The articles in Maria’s case (condensed here for clarity) were as follows: that on the specified day, in front of the church of Santa Maria, Bertran Maçquefa, acting in his capacity as justicia, had confronted Maria and told her that she was to be expelled from the town, apparently without reason; that Bertran had publicly denounced her as a whore, saying: “muyre, muyre, la bagassa”; that he had taken her by the hair and thrown her to the ground, striking her many times with both punches and kicks; that his accomplices had also punched and kicked her; that she had run off and hidden in the house of Alexander de Foix, for fear that the men would murder her; that Bertran had gained the office of justicia by corrupt means; that all four men had broken down the door of the house where she was hiding and, on Bertran’s order, dragged her out and continued to beat and kick her and pull her hair in the public thoroughfare before finally expelling her from town. At the conclusion of this summary was Maria’s affirmation that all these things were common knowledge (fama publica) in the town of Cabanes, and beyond.103
Standard civil procedure gave each of the defendants the opportunity to respond to the charges, which, again, all four defendants in this case categorically denied.104 The next step was for the court to consider the evidence. The day after the charges in this case were read and answered, the procurator’s court heard the testimony of fifteen witnesses—twelve men and three women. Most of them testified to Maria’s public expulsion from town, some to the blows, and more to the fact that they had heard Maria’s loud cries.105 After this, if the case had documentary evidence—for example, wills or deeds of property sale—these would be entered into evidence.106 Since, however, the parties in this particular case had no documentation, the lieutenant procurator announced that he was terminating the investigative phase and was sending a written record of the claims and witness statements to both the parties involved