The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

70 chapter three

of divinity and its relationship to man. It mattered deeply, for instance,

whether God’s will was bound (potestas ordinata) or unbound (potestas

absoluta) by reason and good.^125 If bound, then it seemed, as Accursius

argued, that the king’s, too, must be restrained. But it is significant that

over the course of the later Middle Ages, the balance of opinion on such

matters tipped. As the early medieval realism that characterized Ac-

cursius’ solution increasingly gave way to late medieval nominalism and

Averroism — which is to say, as a God approachable through and lim-

ited by reason (logos) became a distant and inscrutable will (voluntas),

as Aquinas turned into Ockham — so the meaning of earthly sovereignty

shifted towards a greater emphasis on absolute and unpredictable will;

towards a more extreme sense of exception, free from any impediment.^126

It is in this evolving theological context that one should understand Fred-

erick II’s claim that he was the lex animata, the living law, and his dramatic

self- coronation in Jerusalem in 1229.^127 Thus, rather than ushering in secu-

larism, as Kantorowicz argued, the language of law — jurisdiction — was

infused with theological assumptions that allowed medieval kings and

royal jurists to make arguments about political sovereignty that ranged

from minimalist and restrained to radical and unbound.^128 The potential

for both was embedded in the late medieval theological tradition. To put

this differently, political sovereignty is not the secularization of theology

but rather an extension of it.^129

Before the arrival of the Hohenstaufen exiles at Pere’s court, Roman-

ist legal traditions had already taken root in the lands of the Crown of

Aragon.^130 In part because of proximity, in part because of a powerful and

aspiring merchant class, significant numbers of Catalan students attended

the schools of Roman law at Bologna and Montpellier.^131 Among those

educated at Bologna, for instance, were the jurists and royal advisors Ra-

mon de Penyafort, Vidal de Canyelles, Pere Albert, and Guillem Çassala.

By the thirteenth century, Romanist legal concepts had penetrated both

local custom and new legislation.^132 Well before its official approbation in

the sixteenth century, Roman law had in practice steadily replaced cus-

tomary law as the common law (ius commune) of the kingdoms of the

Crown of Aragon.^133

For their part, the Aragonese kings clearly understood that they could

employ novel ideas of royal jurisdiction to extend their authority.^134 King

Jaume I, for instance, invoked merum imperium in his newly conquered

kingdom of Valencia.^135 But when he made the same claim in the Arago-

nese heartland, he faced challenges. The well- established nobility, some of