Vecindad y guerracorporaciones milicianas y el concejo de la ciudad de Murcia, 1700-1769

Abstract

In the time frame of the 18th century, within the uniformising and centralist current promoted by the Angevin dynasty that had recently arrived in the Hispanic Monarchy, there was an accelerated process of dissolution of the city as a republican entity, a consignee of political, economic and defensive autonomy. These events coincided with an acute phase aimed at achieving a monopoly over the instruments for the exercise of legitimate violence, an ambition that had distinguished the different Castilian kings during late medieval and modern times. Philip V and his successors perceived a propitious situation to achieve this aim, in a century plagued by practically uninterrupted military conflicts, and sustained by the establishment of new agents and institutions of the Crown in the territorial sphere. A quasi-revolutionary and transformative movement, whose effects on municipal autonomy fully affected the balance of the system of negotiation and exchange between the monarch and the patrician elites of the cities. In this context, the primary objective of the present thesis is the investigation of the phenomenon of the militia corporations in the Castilian local space, and their correlations with the military and militia corporations established in the central area of the monarchy. The city of Murcia has been taken as a study sample, given the stability of its organisational and institutional framework in the field of defence, and the operational survival of a municipal armed corporation, the Militia of the Parishes, directly attached to the Council. Starting from a diachronic approach that seeks to link with the works and designs already published on the subject, we have tried to carry out the research from a new perspective, broadening the approach to urban militia entities from the social or political field, or the aspect of citizenship/neighbourhood, to other complementary aspects such as their interrelations with the military, legal and institutional fields. The formation and implementation of the Provincial Militia regiment in the kingdom of Murcia has been addressed, together with the evolution of the positions and entities within the Council, arbitrated to make this challenge possible, together with the diversity of tasks delegated by the king in the military field, such as recruitment and assistance to the royal troops in transit, or stationed in the city. The evolution and consolidation of the military/militia corporate phenomenon in the modern age took place on the basis of a legal corpus issued by the different kings, determining the creation of a specific charter for its components, which were endowed with those of royal ascription, being imitated by the councils with respect to the armed corporations of a local character. This situation also defined the position of the individual, in terms of the military services rendered to the monarch and his insertion in the political community, either as a subject or as a resident of a town, and was related to the variations produced as the armed corporations were created, transformed or disappeared, generating new links and the affiliation to another charter. The monarchy broke some of the collaborative and emotional ties of the neighbour with respect to his town, through the service of arms and the defence of the immediate community, to replace them with others of a higher territorial and emotional dimension, the homeland beyond the locality and the neighbourhood. From the second third of the 18th century onwards, there was a change in the paradigm of domination, which could be seen through the incursion of the Bourbon administration into the areas hitherto reserved for the cities' political, administrative and defensive autonomy. Its effect determined the dissolution/absorption of the old municipal armed corporations, through the structure of government of the king in the Castilian territories, as in the case of the force of the parishes in Murcia, and the simultaneous implantation of one of their own attached to the Crown, the Provincial Militia. This process was tackled by means of a simple exercise of patrimonialist sovereignty typical of the Bourbons, almost without any negotiation with the local elites, modifying the previous models of mediation and exchange.