Movimientos sociales en el ámbito urbano en los siglos XIV y XV: la Corona de Castilla y el Sacro Imperio

Abstract

ABSTRACT This dissertation deals with the question we entitle: ‘Movimientos sociales en el ámbito urbano en los siglos XIV y XV: la Corona de Castilla y el Sacro Imperio” (‘Social movements in urban scope in XIV and XV centuries: the Crown of Castilla and the Sacred Empire’). Our objective is to analyse the social conflicts linked to politic fights in Castilla and the Empire generally, describe several particular cases briefly and contrast them. Firstly, we introduce a chapter about the evolution of researches and its tendencies according to the researchers and the specific time in XX century. We must mention that we have studied some of these researches to write this dissertation; of course, we have also added several conclusions we determined ourselves. Secondly, we have written a chapter about general items linked to ‘social movements’. Actually, we focus the description of terminology on specifying the ‘social movements, which we have also called ‘conflicts’, and differing the elite group (nobility and bourgeoisie people) and the ‘común’ (people who paid taxes and belonged to work corporations). After that, we continue classifying medieval conflicts generally, according to several author’s contributions; the three main categories are: ‘against lords’ (“antiseñoriales”), ‘urban-power fights’ (“luchas por el poder urbano”) and the category referred to conflicts which were caused by ‘confessional fights’ (“luchas de religion”), against the Jewish community specially. To finish this chapter, we introduce two more points about general features of medieval conflicts and the mention of several particular cases in Europe, specially: Flanders, France, Italy, England, some examples of Castilla we are not going to describe extensively and some ones of Aragon, which we are only going to ennounce. We must emphasise that all of these characteristics and categories are not absolutely different from each others, in many cases they cannot be separated. Thirdly, we describe the general structure of power institutions in Castilla and the Empire, in order to understand the politic dimension in which social conflicts happened. Then we analyse briefly some cases we considered interesting, we are focusing in Palencia (in Castilla) and in Hildesheim, Núremberg, Zurich, Strasbourg, Colony, Lübeck and Braunsweig (in the Empire). Eventually, our conclusion is the next: there were ‘against lords’ conflicts and ‘urban-power fights’ ones, whose tendency evolved along XIV and XV centuries, according to politic and social transformations we describe in our dissertation.