Defining ritual and citizenship in the later Middle Ages

Exploring citizenship through a ritualizing lens means not only considering the role of civic rituals in the building of civic identities but also examining whether citizenship was construed and experienced as a ritual. However, both citizenship and ritual elude precise definitions and have given ground to theoretical and historiographical discussions that have disclosed the plural significance of both notions.

As medieval jurists had defined ritual as a custom or a tradition,Footnote ⁷ the restrictive definition of rituals as sacred ceremonies emerged only in the early modern period.Footnote ⁸ During the twentieth century, the social sciences revised the scope of rituals in the ordering of society. In contrast with microsociology, which identifies ritual with any repetitive human action,Footnote ⁹ historians have – particularly since the 1980s – been deeply influenced by different anthropological traditions when approaching rituals.Footnote ¹⁰ Exploring pre-modern rituals through their connections with symbols, ceremonials, and the sacred, historians have supported anthropologists’ claims and insisted on the need for rituals to include emotion and dramatization to modify the meanings of daily life.Footnote ¹¹ Without emotion, repetitive and formalized human interactions become codified actions rather than rituals.Footnote ¹² Although close agreement with anthropology may have delayed the attempt to fix the historical definitions of ritual,Footnote ¹³ Edward Muir and Richard Trexler fostered a field of study that has retraced a diversity of case-studies and contexts to unravel the multifaceted nature of pre-modern rituals.Footnote ¹⁴ In their search for the historicity of rituals, historians have more recently portrayed them as determinate social expressions and as creative processes that weave the interaction of social bodies.Footnote ¹⁵ Beyond codification, ritual thus acts on social links using symbols and standardization to contribute to the social order. As an aspect of social language, ritual is essentially performative; it creates and communicates meaning beyond modelling or representation.Footnote ¹⁶

From within the fabric of social links, ritual manifests itself through standards and symbols, emotion and transformation, repetition and performance. These elements featured prominently in pre-modern forms of citizenship. As the institution in charge of defining the relationships between an individual and his or her community, citizenship in Europe was far from homogeneous in these times. It emerged in a plurality of forms that sealed the inclusion of different citizens into their urban communities,Footnote ¹⁷ mostly through performative and symbolic actions that used emotion, representation and repetition to construe belonging. These actions were practices that determined inscription within the fabric of the local – an inscription that was the primary pact of belonging for many and underpinned further institutional recognition.Footnote ¹⁸

The Informacions disclose the intricacies of these pacts in pre-modern cities such as Barcelona, which allows us to analyse how citizenship and ritual, two defining elements of medieval urban life, nurtured one another. These sources provide two scales of analysis through which to offer a systematic rethinking of citizenship in terms of ritual. On the one hand, the bureaucratization of the procedure codified in writing the actions of a good, reputed citizen and thereby promoted a standardized image of this figure. This first scale of analysis appeals to ritual as a means to create standardized symbols for the community. On the other hand, the voices of sworn witnesses reveal the Barcelonese's conceptions of the obligations of every individual towards the citizenry.Footnote ¹⁹ Witnesses conveyed such conceptions through narratives that gave drama and intensity to the functions of the social link.Footnote ²⁰ Their testimonies show how belonging was understood in relational terms and they portray the good citizen as an actor who plays a role that they all knew well in the streets, squares and residences of Barcelona. These witnessing acts, albeit bureaucratic, sanction the public dimension of the links that made a citizen and describe them through emotional and performative metaphors that had a ritualizing effect. The following offers a detailed reading of the Informacions to approach how these two ‘scales of ritual’ unfold and determine the extent to which ritual used language to enrich the meanings of citizenship.

The templates of citizenship: Barcelona and the birth of the standardized citizen

In the 1400s, Barcelona hosted a vibrant merchant community that placed it at the centre of Mediterranean – and European – commercial exchanges. Barcelonese merchants were present in Flanders, North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, whereas foreign merchants, most notably Tuscan, settled in a city that had become an important centre of redistribution from northern Europe to Constantinople.Footnote ²¹ Furthermore, Barcelona was a decisive political, social and economic actor within the Principality of Catalonia. As a royal city, it provided the crown with constant economic support. In return, Barcelona was allowed to develop its own municipal fiscal system and, in this way, assert its political autonomy by the last third of the fourteenth century.Footnote ²² Within the walls of the city, however, the Council of the Hundred and the oligarchy that ruled it struggled to govern a community that became increasingly troubled. Although the dynamism of the city ensured a constant flow of immigration from inner Catalonia, growing inequalities led to discontented popular movements and to the progressive polarization of the urban community into popular (the Busca) and oligarchic (the Biga) political parties that announced the tensions that would later disrupt the whole country during the Catalan Civil War (1462–72).Footnote ²³

The decades between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries witnessed the consolidation of urban power and its autonomy while paving the way towards a conflictual society. This context triggered a reassessment of the relationships between the municipal authorities of Barcelona and the Barcelonese themselves and, therefore, a redefinition of the citizen. In earlier times, a citizen was to the authorities an inhabitant who deserved fiscal privileges (whose charter was fully copied in the municipal acts upon reception). The emergence of the Informacions materialized a renewed imaginary of citizenship that ritualized social links and placed them at the basis of the social and institutional negotiations that engendered a citizen.

The first element of this ritualization lies in the standardization of a citizen, which was arranged through the formulaic clauses, questions and answers that structured the Informacions. The notaries of the city and the witnesses themselves conceived of a template of citizenship that generated a model of the citizen through regularity and repetition. As rituals themselves,Footnote ²⁴ this template was flexible, adapted to a diversity of circumstances and evolving over time. The process of standardization was not immediate; there were hesitations about how to portray the citizen, and these hesitations can be retraced through the early Informacions in which witnesses were loosely interrogated not only about the origins of their ties with candidates but also about the residential situation and the family of the candidates. It was only in 1407 that a real template based on one major question began to structure citizenship reports more systematically. Witnesses were now confronted with the following question: ‘asked whether he [the witness] knew or had heard that [name of the candidate] is a citizen of Barcelona, that is, that he has his own domicile in the city in which he lives continuously with his whole company, as it is expected from a true citizen’.Footnote ²⁵ Witnesses could freely answer this question by generally portraying the citizen and giving details about his or her residence,Footnote ²⁶ his or her family in the city, his or her contributions to civic services and his or her intention to remain. Most importantly, the template itself clearly placed stable and continuous residence at the core of the understanding of citizenship.Footnote ²⁷

In time, this template of citizenship evolved to take a different form. By the 1430s, citizenship interrogations were no longer structured by one major question focused on the continuous residence of the candidate but were built around a few more specific questions. To be sure, this alternative form of template existed in earlier years but was used only on rare occasions, mostly with foreigners who had recently settled in the city.Footnote ²⁸ However, it became increasingly common from the late 1420s and had become the normative template of the Informacions by 1430. Witnesses were first asked whether the candidate had a domicile in the city (tinga casa ne alberch) and were then guided to elaborate on the habits of the candidate through other questions, such as the span of time that the candidate had been living in the city, his or her marital status, the nature of his or her stay in the city (whether their housing was owned or rented) and his or her origins. The shift in the template from a question that strictly equated citizenship to continuous presence in the city to a more precise understanding of the actions that certified civic life points to the administrative evolution of the procedure, and this shift showed the extent to which the Informacions themselves had been a theatre of negotiations where Barcelona and the Barcelonese agreed on the terms of citizenship. The standard citizen who emerged from these negotiations was, however, far from uniform. Witnesses always had the opportunity to emphasize the efforts of candidates in complying, despite their limitations, with the standard requirements, while specific clauses were created to normalize the urban experiences of more uncertain candidates, such as young merchants, serfs, peasants and the poor. Under the broad umbrella of the standard citizen, that is, the inhabitant (truly) committed in some way to the community, a language of codes permitted the emergence of social norms of citizenship that afforded most, if not all, candidates the opportunity to develop and manifest their own legitimate forms and proofs of belonging. Social (and linguistic) conventions made the laws of citizenship available to all citizens.Footnote ²⁹ From mere spectators of citizenship practices, the witnesses in the Informacions became actors in the social staging of citizenship; through their depositions, they uttered the diverse ways in which one could be a citizen and approved them on the public stage. Overall, the Informacions empowered an audience of witnesses to sanction many different citizens and to represent the diversity of the Barcelonese citizenry. They did this by using emotional and representational tools that explicated the different ways that good and true citizens had to perform citizenship through a stable residence, family attachments, legal, social and economic independence, economic and military commitment and, most pertinent to this study, attendance at civic and religious rituals.

Memory and oblivion: the performing citizen

‘As the principal actor in rituals, the people control the keys of memory – which are those of oblivion. Memory and oblivion: These two essential poles determine the social link, and as such their existence is revealed as necessarily ritualized.’Footnote ³⁰ In her inspiring essay on the uses of ritual in historical analysis, Claude Gauvard places the social link at the core of social life and conceives it in terms of memory and oblivion. In this way, she insists on the collective and individual agencies that generalized ritualized behaviours through which community values were fostered and (fragile) peaceful relationships protected. The Informacions show how the narratives of citizenries depended on this fine balance between the elements that should be remembered and reproduced and those that were better hidden and forgotten. Through memory and oblivion, witnesses came to mix performance and emotion in their representations of the good and true citizen of Barcelona. Their depositions therefore became illocutionary (and perlocutionary) acts that enriched the scope and possibilities of conventional citizenship practices.Footnote ³¹

Among the practices of citizenship, a stable residence was of the utmost importance. In the thirteenth century, King Peter the Great's privilege Recognoverunt Proceres sanctioned that anybody living continuously within the walls of the city for one year and one day was to be considered a citizen of Barcelona.Footnote ³² However, witnesses in citizenship interrogations evaluated candidates’ stable residence in ways that were not restricted to temporal criteria. Some candidates were accepted as citizens after having lived in the city for decades, whereas others were depicted as having recently settled in the city. Since a stable residence concerned not only the past residence of the candidates but, more importantly, their intention to remain in the city, witnesses narrated candidates’ residential conditions by using resources other than the mere calculation of days, months and years. They appealed to their memory and recollections to underscore candidates’ relocations to and within the city. Some recounted how they had witnessed the candidate purchasing or renting a habitation. This recollection was a particularly valuable resource that allowed candidates to optimize the symbolic strength of the witnesses that they had chosen. Even more than written documents themselves,Footnote ³³ oral testimonies that attested to the production of such documents displayed and proved the daily functioning of urban social networks and the intricate role played within them by both candidates and witnesses.Footnote ³⁴ Through their depositions, witnesses narrated the moment when these documents were produced, which created imminent proof of the candidate's presence in the city. These types of witnessing acts were therefore especially interesting to candidates with weaker cases, such as the young merchant Joan Samaler, a native from Perpignan who had been living in the city for only a few months when he requested a citizenship charter. Since he had decided to purchase his own residence in the city four weeks before his request, he brought as citizenship witnesses all those who had contributed to this important move: a witness to the signature, the intermediary Ramon Hospital; the former owner of the house Pere Artaguil; and the notary who had supervised the contract and conserved it. All of them mentioned in their statements how they participated in the contractual moment of the purchase.Footnote ³⁵

Witnesses’ memory as spectators of civic life was also at play when they recalled how much candidates had brought to the city. In this way, they pictured their effort to transfer to these Barcelonese houses the hearths that they shared with their families. Transforming streets into stages, moves from beyond the walls to the beating heart of the city could be theatricalized in citizenship testimonies. ‘Guillem Miró has come here with the intention of staying until the end of his life, and this seems quite convincing since the aforementioned Guillem keeps bringing beds, boxes and other things he might need every day’,Footnote ³⁶ recalled the silversmith Joan Vergés when testifying on behalf of a new neighbour. In a similar style, the builder Francesc Palagrí stated that he had recently rented a house to the candidate Francesc Sastre, a peasant from the village of Olessa de Montserrat. Since then, he could see how the candidate ‘moves things from his village of Olessa de Montserrat into here [Barcelona] every day’.Footnote ³⁷ In witnesses’ depositions, theatricality was used in a large array of social situations to make up for the potential weaknesses that the candidates might have had. In 1433, Bernat Ferrer, an honoured citizen of Barcelona, requested a charter. His witnesses knew well that he lived between Barcelona and his landed properties in the town of Mataró. His performance of citizenship, therefore, did not relate to his stable residence. Rather, it rested on his own convictions, for he paraded his citizenship by publicly claiming the exemptions from which he believed he was supposed to benefit. ‘[H]e [the witness] has seen many times how officers wanted to confiscate the merchandise he [Bernat] was taking in and out of the city, and Bernat would deal with them by saying he was a citizen of Barcelona’, as stated by the sailor Gabriel Arnau.Footnote ³⁸ Furthermore, Bernat staged his honourability by riding his horse in the streets of the city, as the scribe Andreu d'Olmella had sharply perceived: ‘Interrogated whether Bernat lives here as any other citizen of Barcelona, and he, the witness, said that he has seen him many times in Barcelona, on foot as well as on a horse.’Footnote ³⁹

These examples show witnesses presenting themselves as passive viewers of the social spectacle of citizenship. However, seeing, hearing and remembering were recognized as active sources of knowledge through which social links were created and strengthened. Through their knowledge, sight and hearing, as much as through their public depositions, witnesses empowered themselves as makers of the community:Footnote ⁴⁰ ‘My lord, my sight is rather poor and I cannot discern anybody, but I often hear Berenguer, as well as his wife and his daughter, in this neighbourhood, and I cannot say anything else’, confessed the blind peasant Pere Canyes when interrogated about the habits in the city of his neighbour Berenguer Desmas.Footnote ⁴¹ Through his deposition, Canyes was able to appeal to his weakness to firmly integrate the candidate and himself into the daily life of the community to which they both belonged. The Informacions gave witnesses the opportunity to turn shared experiences into performative memories that stated the candidate's bond to the community while also strengthening their own. Such mechanisms were in play, for example, when the blacksmith Joan Mastort evoked his remembrance of the young candidate Antoni Berenguer being breastfed in Barcelona.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, clauses such as ‘we were both baptized in the same baptismal font’ allowed witnesses to picture their confidence in the candidate's truthful citizenship while displaying their own intimate ties within the community through imagined memories that were most likely forgotten.Footnote ⁴³

Another stance of ritualization lies in the role of family in the narration of the citizen since family ties enabled witnesses to portray a citizen in emotional terms.Footnote ⁴⁴ The relationship between family and citizenship was apprehended in multiple ways by the Barcelonese and went beyond marriage to a Barcelonese woman within the walls of the city. Thus, when asked whether the candidate had wives and children, witnesses took the opportunity to use their recollections to describe the richness of Barcelonese households, which included not only wives and children but also parents, uncles and aunts, cousins, brothers and sisters – kin who had been obtained in Barcelona or brought from the Catalan countryside or beyond. Family in the city emerged from the Informacions as a space of love and care and the best channel for witnesses to explore how emotional relationships contributed to shaping the morality of a citizen. The notary Berenguer Alamany displayed in his testimony the details of the life of his client, the merchant Joan Bartalot. In his words, Joan had long wanted to establish himself on his own in Barcelona, but he had been living for a long time with his father-in-law, the furrier Oliver Borrassà, with whom he was in business, because Borrassà had no other children and needed his support.Footnote ⁴⁵ The young sailor Gabriel Salvador had long provided for his whole family, that is, his sick father, his mother and his three sisters. After his father's death, witnesses recalled, he had become the sole head of a destitute family that ‘had little from the things of this world’. However, he had recently managed to settle marriage arrangements for two of his sisters and remained devoted to his mother's care.Footnote ⁴⁶ Effort, love and tenderness became citizenship values to the extent that they were perceived through the pitiful and admiring eyes of the Barcelonese. They commiserated with their neighbours, whether they shared streets in the most humble areas of the city, such as Gabriel Salvador's witnesses and neighbours, or whether they were all part of dynamic merchant communities. Ramon Alter's witnesses praised the efforts and intelligence of this Provençal merchant: ‘I would pray to God so that every citizen in Barcelona would be like him.’ They also pictured him as a lonely father and a widower who took care of his little daughter assisted by a servant and a wet nurse who lived with him.Footnote ⁴⁷

Together with memory, oblivion and silence were part of the linguistic acts with which witnesses narrated social links and imagined a good citizen. This fact was particularly true when testifying to serfs’ citizenship reports. At a time when tensions between discontented peasants and feudal lords in the countryside were increasing, the position of serfs within the walls of the city became extremely delicate. The city of Barcelona and many of its oligarchs were feudal lords themselves. In this context, serfs were accepted as citizens with extreme suspicion: charters were granted to those who could certify that they had duly redeemed themselves before settling in the city and requesting the charter. For fugitive serfs, it was necessary to prove that their lords had not been publicly seeking for them during the last year.Footnote ⁴⁸ This situation turned citizenship charters into cherished proof of redemption for serfs who had come to the city, as no citizen could be in a servile condition. Citizenship witnesses could use their testimonies to protect with their discretion the candidates whom they knew to be serfs but believed to be good citizens. The peasant Ramon Carbonell was close to the candidate Joan Sunyer whom he had known ‘for more than XVIII years since they both had been baptized in the same font’. This point notwithstanding, he seemed to have only heard that Sunyer was a serf to Lord Bernat de Cruïlles and could not say anything about whether the candidate was being pursued by his lord.Footnote ⁴⁹ Tailor Antoni Amill understood citizenship as an act of socialization, as suggested by his witnesses, who all recalled how often they met at his place in Barcelona to eat, drink and enjoy themselves (haver plaer). In these meetings, Amill had admitted that he was a serf, a remensa. None of his friends, however, seemed to have heard or knew whether he had ever been pursued by his lord.Footnote ⁵⁰

Bartolus of Sassoferrato believed that the cives comitatenses, that is, the peasants who settled in the city as citizens,Footnote ⁵¹ could never acquire the civil dignity of those cives civitates who were born within the walls of the city, and Francesc Eiximenis compared all people of servile condition to cats and dogs – necessary to urban life but unworthy of it.Footnote ⁵² The good and true citizen was born to serve and to commit exclusively to the city. However, the Informacions show that what mattered to the Barcelonese was the capacity to act as a man with no other bounds than those imposed by civic life. As a result, the narratives of citizenship that they created imagined a citizen who seemed free and was able to fulfil the civic duties that were expected from any citizen.

Rituals within the ritual? The festive citizen

Through their testimonies, witnesses themselves became actors in the social spectacle of citizenship. Their narratives captured the diversity of candidates, and they adapted them to the criteria of the standard citizen. Dramatization, emotion, sharp memory and convenient forgetfulness helped witnesses portray citizens as individuals who were living stably in the city and being economically active, devoted, committed to the city and morally good. Through language, the Barcelonese created an image of citizenship that placed social links at the core of urban belonging and resulted in the emergence of true and trusted citizens. Overall, an aura of ritual developed around citizenship, which materialized as much in the oath that witnesses gave before testifying (per lo sagrament que fet he) as in the solemn promise of newly certified citizens to remain forever within the walls of Barcelona.

Thus far, I have been concerned with how the power of ritualization was woven into the very fabric of citizenship performances; what remains to be examined is the role of ritualistic festivities in the making of citizens and the definition of citizenship. From the immediacy of the urban scene, candidates, witnesses and authorities identified attendance at rituals as a crucial citizenship practice. However, ritual was only narratively included in witnesses’ citizenship testimonies in the cases in which candidates were highly mobile, that is, forced by their personal and professional circumstances to live between Barcelona and their landed properties in other areas of Catalonia. Under these circumstances, involvement in ritual practices was presented by witnesses as a persuasive alternative to a stable residence. Since glassworkers such as Francesc Satorra or Pere Pujalt had their workshops in the locality of Bigues, a few miles away from Barcelona, they often had to leave their residences in the city. Their witnesses, however, did not forget to note that these candidates would always be sure to be present for the major urban festivities, the so-called festes anyals (Easter, Pentecost, Christmas and a local festivity – in the case of Barcelona, Saint Eulàlia on 12 February). The weaver Pere Ponç, who had known Francesc Satorra for two years when testifying to his citizenship, admitted that ‘he has a workshop of his own in Bigues, close to Granollers, and he comes and goes, but there is always a woman keeping his house in Barcelona, and he always comes back for the festes anyals, to celebrate them with his wife and his children in the city’.Footnote ⁵³

This strategic appeal to rituals was seldom integrated into citizenship narratives: it appeared in 26 instances of the 391 reports that constitute the Informacions. These few cases, however, profile in precise terms the features of the festive citizen. They appear as mobile individuals who often travelled for professional reasons and had a second residence beyond the walls of the city. Some were craftsmen and merchants, but the majority were peasants (15), who owned small properties in the surroundings and whose principal motive for applying for citizenship was the tax exemptions that it provided when accessing the Barcelonese markets. More importantly, the scarcity of mentions of the candidates’ presence in the rituals of the city should not blur the fundamental connection between rituality and belonging. Rather, the fact that rituality was only mentioned when stable presence was in doubt suggests how central the participation in rituals was to citizenship practices, because it was perceived as the most convincing alternative to the principal measure of a citizen: residence.

Attendance at rituals as a means of citizenship proof insisted on the physical presence of the good citizen. For example, during the festivities of Santa Eulàlia, the patron of Barcelona, citizens and inhabitants were called to illuminate their windows at night to preserve order in the city, as Barcelona opened its gates to people coming from beyond its walls to receive the plenary indulgences that were promised from Rome.Footnote ⁵⁴ The umbrella of religious pardon promoted a powerful performance of civic service and identification.

Processions such as those organized for Corpus Christi and on the more extraordinary occasions of royal entrances call for an analysis of the social scope of rituals, considering, for instance, the agency of craftsmen as festive citizens. These performances cannot be captured from the Informacions. However, as Miquel Raufast has shown in his studies, craftsmen found in these processions the perfect stage from which to assert their civic relevance, both socially and politically.Footnote ⁵⁵ Being in charge of dances and theatrical performances, craftsmen started to parade at the precise moment when the king, entering the city, pronounced his oath and promised to keep and respect the privileges of Barcelona. On behalf of the whole citizenry, craftsmen were thus responsible for solemnizing the ritual that guaranteed the continuity of citizens’ legal sustenance. Artisanal professions paraded afterwards throughout the city and followed the order dictated by social and economic predominance, that is, the most relevant and prestigious professions marching closest to the king – or the host – in the celebrations of Corpus Christi.

As with all the other citizenship practices, every citizen found his or her way (according to his or her capacities) to comply with civic ritual. They were all able (even mobile candidates) to be present at major festivities, to attend regular mass on Sundays as some witnesses detailed when noting the presence of candidates in the festes anyals, and perhaps to illuminate their windows on the eve of Saint Eulàlia. Some of them had the opportunity to perform their political and social relevance in public processions. Honoured citizens could choose to display their power in exclusive ceremonies, such as in tournaments, in which only a few participated, to be seen by the whole reunited citizenry. In May 1400, for instance, the treasurer of the city (clavari) noted in his records that he had paid the painter Berenguer Laupart for his services. Laupart had prepared beautiful red curtains for the decoration of the Plaça del Born, where certain honoured citizens, on behalf of the city (per aquesta Ciutat), were to celebrate a tournament to honour the first entrance of Queen Maria into Barcelona.Footnote ⁵⁶

Bringing together the agencies of municipal authorities, candidates and witnesses, ritual (ritualization and rituality) became one of the cornerstones of medieval citizenship. While ritualized relationships within the local communities of knowledge that emerged from the Informacions allowed for the official recognition of the multiple ways in which the Barcelonese could create belonging, thereby ensuring to many the right of being a citizen, rituality turned urban life into a spectacle by publicly staging the hierarchies that ruled the citizenry. In Mervyn James’ words, the rituals of citizens and the ritualization of citizenship promoted the social wholeness of the citizenry while leaving space for the social differentiation of the citizen.Footnote ⁵⁷