THE MEDIEVALKING has been called “the source of justice.” But in the kingdom of Aragon, kings could not readily perform this role due to the peculiar legal character of this kingdom, with collections of historic laws, or fueros, taking a preeminent role over a town, locality, or civil estate, and which as a system is known as the foralidad. So this chapter will explore concepts such as power and authority but without engaging explicitly with the framework of Christian ideology that underpins much of the rest of this book. It focuses on the extension of judicial sovereignty of the Aragon kings; parallel to this Christian ideology is relevant in the context of the project of religious unification of Iberia at the time of the Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabella. The inquisition courts at the service of building a Catholic Spain also served the royal assumption of plenipotential power (merum imperium) in Aragon, despite strong resistance. In this sense, judicial submission of the Aragon kingdom to royal power can be seen as the counterpart of forced insertion elsewhere in Spain of the political plan to achieve religious unity. As we shall show, one way to break the power of territorial rights in Aragon was to control the exercise of criminal justice through an obligation to consult the jurists of the king.

Legal practice in Aragon can be partly inferred from the kingdom's legislation, which, occasionally, regulates its institutional workings, often at the king's instigation, but documents relating to judicial practice can also be revealing. Some trial documents, relating to a juncture in the proceedings, and, more so, the texts of sentences, show that judges, when taking a decision, could consult experts in law whose designation varied from one court to another. Study of trials and Aragonese legislative texts demonstrates when and why legal consultation took place. Sources indicate that consultation could be demanded by the different parties or by the judge. It could also be imposed by the will of the king when he believed such activity useful in establishing sovereignty where it was not yet acquired in the late fifteenth century.