Fuero - WikiHQ

thumb|[[Ferdinand II of Aragon|Ferdinand the Catholic confirming the fueros of Biscay at Guernica in 1476]]

(), (), (), () or () is a Spanish legal term and concept. The word comes from Latin , an open space used as a market, tribunal and meeting place. The same Latin root is the origin of the French terms and , and the Portuguese terms and ; all of these words have related, but somewhat different meanings.

The Spanish term has a wide range of meanings, depending upon its context. It has meant a compilation of laws, especially a local or regional one; a set of laws specific to an identified class or estate (for example , comparable to a military code of justice, or , specific to the Roman Catholic Church).

In the 20th century, Francisco Franco's regime used the term for several of the fundamental laws. The term implied these were not constitutions subject to debate and change by a sovereign people, but orders from the only legitimate source of authority, as in feudal times.

Characteristics

thumb|left|upright|King [[James I of Aragon receives from Vidal de Canyelles, Bishop of Huesca, the first compilation of the Furs d'Aragó (the "Fueros of Aragon"), 1247]]

Fuero dates back to the medieval period: the lord could concede or acknowledge a fuero to certain groups or communities, most notably the Roman Catholic Church, the military, and certain regions that fell under the same monarchy as Castile or, later, Spain, but were not fully integrated into those countries.

The relations among fueros, other bodies of law (including the role of precedent), and sovereignty is a contentious one that influences government and law in the present day. The king of León, Alfonso V, decreed the Fuero de León (1017), considered the earliest laws governing territorial and local life, as it applied to the entire kingdom, with certain provisions for the city of León. The various Basque provinces also generally regarded their fueros as tantamount to a municipal constitution. This view was accepted by some others, including President of the United States John Adams. He cited the Biscayan fueros as a precedent for the United States Constitution. (Adams, A defense…, 1786) This view regards fueros as granting or acknowledging rights. In the contrasting view, fueros were privileges granted by a monarch. In the letter Adams also commented on the substantial independence of the hereditary Basque Jauntxo families as the origin for their privileges.

In practice, distinct fueros for specific classes, estates, towns, or regions usually arose out of feudal power politics. Some historians believe monarchs were forced to concede some traditions in exchange for the general acknowledgment of his or her authority, that monarchs granted fueros to reward loyal subjection, or (especially in the case of towns or regions) the monarch simply acknowledged distinct legal traditions.

In medieval Castilian law, the king could assign privileges to certain groups. The classic example of such a privileged group was the Roman Catholic Church: the clergy did not pay taxes to the state, enjoyed the income via tithes of local landholding, and were not subject to the civil courts. Church-operated ecclesiastical courts tried churchmen for criminal offenses. Another example was the powerful Mesta organization, composed of wealthy sheepherders, who were granted vast grazing rights in Andalusia after that land was reconquered by Spanish Christians from the Muslims (see Reconquista). Lyle N. McAlister writes in Spain and Portugal in the New World that the Mesta's fuero helped impede the economic development of southern Spain. This resulted in a lack of opportunity, and Spaniards emigrated to the New World to escape these constraints.

Aristocratic fueros

During the Reconquista, the feudal lords granted fueros to some villas and cities, to encourage the colonization of the frontier and of commercial routes. These laws regulated the governance and the penal, process and civil aspects of the places. Often the fueros already codified for one place were granted to another, with small changes, instead of crafting a new redaction from scratch.

Date

1125

1127–47

1129

1133

1145

1147

1152

c. 1154

1157

1169

1173

1175

1181

1198

1198

Grantor(s)

Gutierre Fernández de Castro and Toda Díaz

Pedro González de Lara and Eva

Estefanía Sánchez

Alfonso VII

Íñigo Jiménez

Osorio Martínez and Teresa Fernández

María Fernández

Manrique Pérez de Lara

Martín and Elvira Pérez

Sancha Ponce

Ponce de Minerva

Gonzalo, Constanza and Jimena Osorio

Pedro Pérez and Fernando Cídez

Ermengol VII of Urgell

Gutierre Díaz

Froila Ramírez and Sancha

Grantee(s)

San Cebrián de Campos

Tardajos

Villarmildo

Guadalajara

Yanguas

Villalonso and Benafarces

Castrocalbón

Molina

Pozuelo de la Orden

Villarratel

Azaña

Villalobos

Almaraz de Duero

Barruecopardo

Villavaruz de Ríoseco

Cifuentes de Rueda

Basque and Pyrenean fueros

Approach

In contemporary Spanish usage, the word fueros most often refers to the historic and contemporary fueros or charters of certain regions, especially of the Basque regions. The equivalent for Occitan usage is fòr, applying to the northern regions of the Pyrenees.

The whole central and western Pyrenean region was inhabited by the Basques in the early Middle Ages within the Duchy of Vasconia. The Basques and the Pyrenean peoples—as Romance language replaced Basque in many areas by the turn of the first millennium—governed themselves by a native set of rules, different from Roman and Gothic law but with an ever-increasing imprint of them. Typically their laws, arising from regional traditions and practices, were kept and transmitted orally. Because of this oral tradition, the Basque-language regions preserved their specific laws longer than did those Pyrenean regions that adopted Romance languages. For example, Navarrese law developed along less feudal lines than those of surrounding realms. The Fors de Bearn are another example of Pyrenean law.

Two sayings address this legal idiosyncrasy: "en Navarra hubo antes leyes que reyes," and "en Aragón antes que rey hubo ley," both meaning that law developed and existed before the kings. The force of these principles required monarchs to accommodate to the laws. This situation sometimes strained relations between the monarch and the kingdom, especially if the monarchs were alien to native laws.

This tradition of "laws before kings" was enshrined in the legendary Fueros de Sobrarbe, claimed to have been enacted by king Iñigo Arista in the 850s in the pyrenean valley of Sobrarbe. Although a 13th-century fabrication, the Fueros de Sobrarbe were subsequently used as the legal foundation for most Navarrese and Aragonese Fueros from the 13th century onwards. They enshrined the traditional principle "laws before kings" both in Aragonese and Navarrese law, justified the right to rebel against illegal royal decisions, and legitimised the existence of specific institutions such as the Justicia de Aragón.

Fueros in the High and Late Middle Ages

The Fueros de Sobrarbe first appear mentioned in the context of the ascension of the House of Champagne to the Navarrese throne. In 1234, when Theobald I of Champagne inherited the Navarrese throne from his uncle Sancho VII of Navarre, he was pressured by burgers and nobility alike to swear he would abide his decisions by customary law and honour their customary rights and privileges. As a result, Theobald I appointed a commission to codify said laws; this resulted in the first written general fuero, the Fuero General de Navarra, enacted in 1238 and which drew its legal foundation from the fabled Fueros of Sobrarbe to justify the king's authority being subjected to the Fuero.

The accession of French lineages to the throne of Navarre brought a relationship between the king and the kingdom that was alien to the Basques. The resulting disagreements were a major factor in the 13th-century uprisings and clashes between different factions and communities, e.g. the borough wars of Pamplona. The loyalty of the Basques (the Navarri) to the king was conditioned on his upholding the traditions and customs of the kingdom, which were based on oral laws.

Relations with the crown and rise of absolutism

thumb|upright|Fuero or law compilation of Biscay (16th century)

thumb|upright|Compilation of the Fueros and Acts of Aragon (1592)

thumb|190px|1704 compilation of the [[Constitucions of Catalonia|Constitutions of Catalonia]]

Ferdinand II of Aragon conquered and annexed Navarre between 1512 and 1528 (up to the Pyrenees). In order to gain Navarrese loyalty, the Spanish Crown represented by the Aragonese Fernando upheld the kingdom's specific laws (fueros) allowing the region to continue to function under its historic laws, while Lower Navarre remained independent, but increasingly tied to France, a process completed after King Henry III of Navarre and IV of France died. Louis XIII failed to respect his father's will to keep Navarre and France separate. All specific relevant legal provisions and institutions (Parliament, Courts of Justice, etc.) were devalued in 1620–1624, and critical powers transferred to the French Crown.

Since the high Middle Ages, many Basques had been born into the hidalgo nobility. The Basques had no uniform legal corpus of laws, which varied between valleys and seigneuries. Early on (14th century) all Gipuzkoans were granted noble status, several Navarrese valleys (Salazar, Roncal, Baztan, etc.) followed suit, and Biscaynes saw their universal nobility confirmed in 1525. Álava's distribution of nobility was patchy but less widespread, since the Basque specific nobility only took hold in northern areas (Ayala, etc.). Biscaynes, as nobles, were theoretically excluded from torture and from the need to serve in the Spanish army, unless called for the defence of their own territory (Don Quixote<nowiki>'</nowiki>s character, Sancho Panza, remarked humorously that writing and reading and being Biscayne was enough to be secretary to the emperor). Other Basque regions had similar provisions.

The reach of the was not limited by the territory.

Biscayans in other parts of the Crown of Castile had extraterritoriality.

They could take the appellations in cases involving them to the ("Biscay Hall") at the top court of Castile, the Chancillería de Valladolid ("Court of last resort () of Valladolid").

The Castilian kings took an oath to comply with the Basque laws in the different provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa. These provinces and Navarre kept their self-governing bodies and their own parliaments, i.e. the diputaciones and the territorial councils/Parliament of Navarre. However, the prevailing Castilian rule prioritized the king's will. regular Matxinada revolts in the 17-18th centuries) and mounting tensions between the territorial governments and the Spanish central government of Charles III and Charles IV, to the point of considering the Parliament of Navarre dangerous to the royal authority and condemning "its spirit of independence and liberties."

Despite vowing loyalty to the crown, the Pyrenean Aragonese and Catalans kept their separate specific laws too, the "King of the Spains" represented a crown tying together different realms and peoples, as claimed by the Navarrese diputación, as well as the Parliament of Navarre's last trustee. Pérez escaped to France, but Philip's army invaded Aragon and executed its authorities.

In 1714 the Catalan and Aragonese specific laws and self-government were violently suppressed. The Aragonese count of Robres, one strongly opposing the abolition, put it down to Castilian centralism, stating that the royal prime minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, had at last a free rein "for the kings of Spain to be independent of all laws save those of their own conscience."

The Basques managed to retain their specific status for a few years after 1714, as they had supported the claimant who became Philip V of Spain, a king hailing from the lineage of Henry III of Navarre. However, they could not escape the king's attempts (using military force) at centralization (1719–1723). In the run-up to the Napoleonic Wars, the relations between the absolutist Spanish Crown and the Basque governing institutions were at breaking point. By the beginning of the War of the Pyrenees, Manuel Godoy took office as Prime Minister in Spain, and went on to take a tough approach on the Basque self-government and specific laws. Both fear and anger spread among the Basques at his uncompromising stance.

The end of the fueros in Spain

thumb|320px|Spain in 1850, with the colors representing the different [[bailiwicks: the Fully constitutional Spain (brown), most of the former Crown of Castile; Incorporated or assimilated Spain (green), the former Crown of Aragon, including the Catalan-speaking lands; Foral Spain (blue), the Basque-speaking territories; and Colonial Spain (yellow)]]

The 1789 Revolution brought the rise of the Jacobin nation state—also referred to in a Spanish context as "unitarism", unrelated to the religious view of similar name. Whereas the French Ancien Régime recognized the regional specific laws, the new order did not allow for such autonomy. The jigsaw puzzle of fiefs was divided into départements, based on administrative and ideological concerns, not tradition. In the French Basque Country, what little remained of self-government was suppressed in 1790 during the French Revolution and the new administrative arrangement, including the imposition (fleetingly) of alien names to villages and towns—period of the National Convention and War of the Pyrenees (1793–1795).

Some Basques saw a way forward in the 1808 Bayonne Statute and Dominique-Joseph Garat's project, initially approved by Napoleon, to create a separate Basque state,

In the eighteenth century, when Spain established a standing military in key areas of its overseas territory, privileges were extended to the military, the fuero militar, which had an impact on the colonial legal system and society. The fuero militar was the first time that privileges extended to plebeians, which has been argued was a cause of debasing justice. Indigenous men were excluded from the military, and inter-ethnic conflicts occurred. The fuero militar presented some contradictions in colonial rule.

In post-independence Mexico, formerly New Spain, fueros continued to be recognized by the Mexican state until the mid-nineteenth century. As Mexican liberals gained power, they sought to implement the liberal ideal of equality before the law by eliminating special privileges of the clerics and the military. The Liberal Reform and the liberal Constitution of 1857's abolition of those fueros mobilized Mexico's conservatives, which fought a civil war, and rallied allies to their cause with the slogan religión y fueros ("religion and privileges").

For post-independence Chile, the fuero militar also was an issue concerning the rights and privileges of citizenship.

List of fueros

Fueros of Navarre
Fors de Bearn
Furs de Valencia
Fuero de Oreja
Catalan constitutions

Notes

References

Llorente, Juan Antonio Noticias históricas de las tres provincias vascongadas. Tomo II, Capitulo I. (1800) Available (in Spanish) online through the Digital Library of the Sancho El Sabio Foundation.
"Los Fueros de Navarra: Exposición" - discussion of fueros on the official web site of the Navarrese government (in Spanish).
Much of the discussion of the Basque fueros comes from :es:Nacionalismo vasco in the Spanish-language Wikipedia; last updated from the version dated 11:44 23 Sep, 2004.
Fueros de la Rioja, a collection of the local Medieval charters of several towns in La Rioja, in old Castilian or Latin.
Fuero at the Dictionary of the Real Academia Española.

External links

A digitized version of Amalio Marichalar, Marqués de Montesa, Historia de la legislación y recitaciones del derecho civil de España : Fueros de Navarra, Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa y Alava, 2ª ed. corr. y aum., ("History of the legislation and recitations of the civil law of Spain; 2nd edition corrected and augmented") Madrid : [s.n.], 1868 (Impr. de los Sres. Gasset, Loma y compañia) p.; 8º mayr is available on the site of the Biblioteca Nacional Española.