Controlling the councilmen. The nobility of Talavera de la Reina and their methods of political intervention in the council in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

How can political power be controlled in a village -Talavera de la Reina- where the most important municipal public offices -the regidurías- are not subject to transfer from fathers to sons? This was an unusual problem in most Castilian towns by the end of the Middle Ages, but in Talavera it constituted one of the main political issues for the town’s power elite since the introduction of the regimiento at the end of the 14th Century. The aim of this paper is to analyse the solution given to this problem by the dominant group, principally composed of the nobility of the village. In this sense, the strategy followed by the nobility of Talavera de la Reina was focused on two goals: to drive out the common elite as competitors for power and to ensure the access of the members of the nobility to the town council government. This was the reason why they developed a process that guaranteed them the control over the lists of candidates to replace vacant positions inside the regimiento. This system was based on the election of the applicants among the members of the noble lineages of the village, but the aspirants could not be a relative of the deceased officers. According to this process, the best positioned members of the families that composed the regimiento were on a kind of waiting list, expecting their turn to gain access to the highest office in town: a regiduría. The main consequence of this practice was the development of a complex network of social and political relationships and alliances between the families of the dominant group whose main goal was to achieve the control of the government of the village.