Isabella experienced the most loyal and magnificent reception from the inhabitants of Seville, where she established her headquarters. The first days of her residence there were consumed in fêtes, tourneys, tilts of reeds, and other exercises of the Castilian chivalry. After this she devoted her whole time to the great purpose of her visit, the reformation of abuses. She held her court in the saloon of the Alcazar, or royal castle, where she revived the ancient practice of the Castilian sovereigns of presiding in person over the administration of justice. Every Friday she took her seat in her chair of state, on an elevated platform covered with cloth of gold, and surrounded by her council, together with the subordinate functionaries and the insignia of a court of justice. The members of her privy council and of the high court of criminal law sat in their official capacity every day in the week, and the queen herself received such suits as were referred to her adjudication, saving the parties the usual expense and procrastination of justice. By the extraordinary despatch of the queen and her ministers, during the two months that she resided in the city, a vast number of civil and criminal causes were disposed of, a large amount of plundered property was restored to its lawful owners, and so many offenders were brought to condign punishment, that no less than four thousand suspected persons, it is computed, terrified by the prospect of speedy retribution for their crimes, escaped into the neighbouring kingdoms of Portugal and Granada.
The royal audience, or chancery, the supreme and final court of appeal in civil causes, was entirely remodelled. The place of its sittings, before indeterminate, and consequently occasioning much trouble and cost to the litigants, was fixed at Valladolid. Laws were passed to protect the tribunal from the interference of the crown, and the queen was careful to fill the bench with magistrates whose wisdom and integrity would afford the best guarantee for a faithful interpretation of the law. An attorney was provided at the public expense, under the title of “advocate for the poor,” whose duty it was to defend the suits of such as were unable to maintain them at their own cost. The sovereigns testified their respect for the law by reviving the ancient but obsolete practice of presiding personally in the tribunals at least once a week. “I well remember,” says Oviedo,[b] one of their court, “to have seen the queen, together with the Catholic king her husband, sitting in judgment in the Alcazar of Madrid, every Friday, dispensing justice to all such, great and small, as came to demand it. This was indeed the golden age of justice,” continues the enthusiastic writer, “and since our sainted mistress has been taken from us, it has been more difficult, and far more costly, to transact business with a stripling of a secretary, than it was with the queen and all her ministers.” By the modifications then introduced, the basis was laid of the judiciary system, such as it has been perpetuated to the present age. The law acquired an authority which, in the language of a Spanish writer, “caused a decree, signed by two or three judges, to be more respected since that time than an army before.”[51]
[1479-1480 A.D.]
Whatever reforms might have been introduced into the Castilian judicatures, they would have been of little avail without a corresponding improvement in the system of jurisprudence by which their decisions were to be regulated. This was made up of the Visigothic code as the basis, the fueros of the Castilian princes, as far back as the eleventh century, and the Siete Partidas, the famous compilation of Alfonso X, digested chiefly from maxims of the civil law. The deficiencies of these ancient codes had been gradually supplied by such an accumulation of statutes and ordinances as rendered the legislation of Castile in the highest degree complex, and often contradictory. The embarrassment resulting from this may be imagined.
In 1480, Dr. Alfonso Diaz de Montalvo was charged with the commission of revising the laws of Castile, and of compiling a code which should be of general application throughout the kingdom. Although the many innovations which were introduced in that age of reform required the addition of two subsidiary codes in the latter years of Isabella, the Ordenanças of Montalvo continued to be the guide of the tribunals down to the time of Philip II, and may be said to have suggested the idea, as indeed it was the basis, of the comprehensive compilation, Nueva Recopilacion, which has since formed the law of the Spanish monarchy.
Under the profuse reigns of Juan II and Henry IV, the nobles had introduced themselves into every great post of profit or authority. They had ravished from the crown the estates on which it depended for its maintenance as well as dignity. They coined money in their own mints, like sovereign princes; and they covered the country with their fortified castles, whence they defied the law, and desolated the unhappy land with interminable feuds. It was obviously necessary for the new sovereigns to proceed with the greatest caution against this powerful and jealous body, and, above all, to attempt no measure of importance in which they would not be supported by the hearty co-operation of the nation.
The first measure which may be said to have clearly developed their policy was the organisation of the hermandad, which, although ostensibly directed against offenders of a more humble description, was made to bear indirectly upon the nobility, whom it kept in awe by the number and discipline of its forces, and the promptness with which it could assemble them on the most remote points of the kingdom; while its rights of jurisdiction tended materially to abridge those of the seigniorial tribunals. It was accordingly resisted with the greatest pertinacity by the aristocracy; although, as we have seen, the resolution of the queen, supported by the constancy of the commons, enabled her to triumph over all opposition, until the great objects of the institution were accomplished.
Another measure, which insensibly operated to the depression of the nobility, was making official preferment depend less exclusively on rank, and much more on personal merit, than before. The sovereigns, instead of confining themselves to the grandees, frequently advanced persons of humble origin, and especially those learned in the law, to the most responsible stations, consulting them, and paying great deference to their opinions, on all matters of importance. The nobles, finding that rank was no longer the sole, or indeed the necessary avenue to promotion, sought to secure it by attention to more liberal studies, in which they were greatly encouraged by Isabella, who admitted their children into her palace, where they were reared under her own eye.
A Spanish Noblewoman of the Fifteenth Century