Muslims and the Law in the Crown of Aragon in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Tortosa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/etfiii.37.2024.39222Keywords:
Royal Jurisdiction; Religious Minorities; Muslims; Crown of Aragon; MunicipalitiesAbstract
This article seeks to expand on the themes of this monographic dossier by considering the strategies by which Christian-ruled municipalities sought to influence royal administrative policy-making governing resident non-Christians in the later fourteenth century. An extraordinarily rich case from the Catalonian city of Tortosa illustrates in detail what we can usually only perceive very faintly in other contexts. We observe how urban leaders, after failing to convince the monarchy to prioritize the well-being of the Christian community by increasing the visual differentiation of resident Muslims, orchestrated a successful legal campaign to prosecute sexual relations between Christians and Muslims. The case illustrates how, irrespective of the monarchy’s theory of exclusive jurisdiction, customary legal history and the application of certain strategies could empower constituencies to shape the administrative conditions of religious minorities, even within urban spaces that were under the monarchy’s direct authority.Downloads
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