nuevo ideal desgajado de la práctica cotidiana. En segundo lugar, que la única forma de conocer el alcance de dicho ideal y del proceso de profesionalización es analizar las prácticas que la encarnación del oficio exigía y la medida en que el ejercicio del mismo fue modelando el comportamiento de los individuos en el cargo e incluso desarrollando una identidad específicamente asociada a este. Dicha identidad se construiría en torno a una serie de hábitos y pautas de comportamiento que les señalarían como adecuados para el cargo, les identificarían con el estatus y las características propias del mismo y les proporcionarían una serie de herramientas de negociación que facilitarían su ejercicio.
The juicio de residencia, similar to the sindacato procedure, attributed a proactive and crucial role to the population in the process of holding officers accountable. However, this popular control has been twice silenced: firstly in the very sources produced by the Crown and secondly by the predominant historiographic interpretations of the residencias as either ineffective, or subjected entirely to the purposes of the royal apparatus. The present article claims both the existence of a certain control of the population over the accountability procedures and its ability to shape these mechanisms in practice and even in the legislation. It addresses the perspective of the urban population on the functionality of the residencias, as well as the modifications introduced in the procedure that strengthened the position of the people as accusers, witnesses and even the symbolical judges, since the end of the 15th to the 17th century in the Hispanic Monarchy.
The Italian sindacato was a procedure that from the end of the twelfth century held major officials accountable and exposed them to public control. While the sindacato presented citizens with the opportunity of bringing forward their claims against officials, the evidence of these claims and their outcomes are sketchy. Recent historiography often portrays this procedure as a rhetorical device of civic order and legitimation that only produced real consequences when used as a tool for the political purposes of the elite. The article focuses on Siena, often singled out for the popular character of its governments, as a unique case to test the actual popular participation and oligarchical involvement in sindacati and their significance in relation to the sindacati in other communal cities. First, it analyzes the wide spectrum of participants in the procedure and, in particular, the interests at play for common actors. Second, it explores the direct relationship between sindacati and other institutions and systems of accountability within the city, as well as their interdependent transformations over time. The result is a revision of sindacati that reintegrates the agency and participation of popular actors. The sindacato appears then as neither a zenith of communal democracy nor a crooked tool in the hands of oligarchical interests, but rather as a central act of civic life articulating a wide range of interests among all sorts of citizens, which allowed for its symbolic relevance to perdure until the Renaissance and beyond.
El presente artículo aborda el estudio de los continos reales incidiendo tanto en su carácter de oficio regio, como elemento clave para entender el desarrollo de la figura del oficial en la época premoderna, como en el valor que el cargo tuvo en las estrategias familiares y personales de aquellos que lo ejercieron. Para ello se combina la visión conjunta del reino que proporcionan los archivos reales con un estudio concreto de la oligarquía de Valladolid. Este último estudio se apoya a su vez en un doble enfoque: por un lado la prosopografía de las élites vallisoletanas y, por otro, el análisis de sus redes sociales. El resultado es una aproximación a la integración real de estos servidores regios en la sociedad local que permite comprender el papel que este cargo pudo tener en sus trayectorias personales, así como el interés de los monarcas por nombrar como continos a determinados individuos. Como oficio, su flexibilidad e indefinición permitía variar los servicios y condiciones en función de las necesidades tanto de la monarquía como de los sujetos implicados.AbstractThis article analyses the royal continos by addressing both the nature of the office as a key element in the development of officialdom in the pre-Modern era, and the way in which holding the position of contino affected personal and family strategies. This study includes a global perspective on continos in the kingdom by exploring royal documentation, as well as a case study of the oligarchy of Valladolid. This specific case is based on a double approach: on the one hand, the prosopography of urban elites, and on the other hand, the analysis of their social networks. As a result, it combines an analysis of the impact of the office on these royal servants’ personal trajectories and integration in a local context, as well as the king’s rationality behind the appointment of these officials. The contino office was particularly flexible and its indefinite nature allowed a degree of variability in the service and conditions based on the needs both of the monarchy and of those individuals involved.
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