‘Unions et germanies’: Armed Mobilisation, Plebeian Politicisation and Historical Memory in the Kingdom of Valencia (Fourteenth-Seventeenth Centuries)

Abstract

Although the ‘Unions et germanies’ were forbidden, popular movements arose in the Kingdom of Valencia that expressed themselves mainly through judicial means, but sometimes also resorted to arms. Analysis of the actors’ capacity for agency is therefore complex. In particular, the Germania (1519-1522) revalued the participation of the urban majorities in public affairs, based on the armed and legal mobilisation of the city’s artisans. Other grievances throughout the Kingdom of Valencia strengthened the movement. The conflict was radicalised, giving rise to armed actions against privilege that redefined its trajectory. The classist writings of the chroniclers repudiated this collective violence. The adoption of rational choices to achieve objectives reveals the political subjectivity created by the war, which marked the memory of the commoners. A widespread resistance kept alive their banners, which became the cultural substratum of later struggles. The essay rescues the forms assumed by plebeian political identities in the sixteenth-century conflict, inscribing them in the cycle of collective action that began with the Union (1347-1348) and ended with the Second Germania (1693), also comparing the potentialities of these dissimilar experiences.