Justicia de Aragón

The office was abolished in 1711 when the Nueva Planta Decrees unified the Spanish monarchy, but was reinstated in 1982 with the passing of the Statute of Autonomy of the Autonomous Community of Aragon of 1982.

As a legal scholar, Martin Sagarra apparently penned a historical account of the office of the Justicia which Antich de Bages quotes from liberally.

Antich de Bages then elaborates that this ancient right was abolished in the Privilege of the Union of 1347 (a charter negotiated by Peter IV of Aragon).

According to Antich de Bages, this privilege allowed royal subjects to rebel if the king violated the charters and customs of Aragon and, for this reason, Peter IV had ordered all traces of it be destroyed.

It is for this reason that Ralph Giesey believed that Sagarra must have written his work after 1348, and that what he was describing was not some ancient rights, but the customary law of his time, which had been just been codified and modified by the Privilege of the Union of 1347.

[6] It is generally believed that neither the Kingdom of Sobrarbe nor its legendary Fueros ever existed, and that at best they were used in subsequent centuries to justify customary law and medieval institutions, and at worst they were blatant fabrications.

[7] The cartulary of the Fueros de Sobrarbe themselves, if there ever was one, was already lost by the time they began to be used to justify certain limitations to royal authority, but the Fueros themselves gave legal grounds to force the monarch of Aragon (and in parallel, the king of Navarre) to grant the nobility and cities of its territory vast freedoms, including legal rights and tax and military exemptions.

The specific contents of the Fueros weren't even spelt out clearly until the 1580s, when Jerónimo Blancas elaborated a set of six charters in latin, but for centuries before this, the Fueros had used to justify the subordination of the aragonese crown to the laws of the land ("laws before kings"),[8] the right of Aragonese freemen to ignore or "rebel" against royal orders deemed illegal either by the recipient himself or, once the institution was firmly established, by the Justicia, thereby enshrining a pervasive legal principle in most of the Iberian peninsula, including the crowns of Navarre and, to some extent, of Castile.

It is in this context of asserting the rights of nobility and urban corporations that the Fueros of Sobrarbe begin to be mentioned in legal documents after the 13th century, when jurists and legal historians start to use them to justify the legitimacy that certain medieval institutions of Navarre and Aragon (the Justicia, the beyle, the regular gathering of their respective parliaments,...) would be grounded in the (by then) ancient Fueros of Sobrarbe.

Taking advantage of the dynastic change, some time after 1234 the city of Tudela would have manipulated its own charter at several points so as to assert its rights and weaken royal authority.

Because the new monarch lacked a firm power base in his new kingdom and was more focused on defending the regency of queen Blanche of France than on his Navarrese affairs, Teobaldo I agreed to quickly settle all disputes between the crown and cities of Navarra, and in 1237 confirmed the (now) manipulated charter of Tudela.

[17] Finally, it appears unlikely that a charter such as the Fuero de Sobrarbe, allegedly issued in the 800s to what would have then been a small rural settlement, would grant its inhabitants rights and privileges better suited to 13th century nobility and cities.

Eventually, it became customary to invoke them to justify the existence of all local and regional institutions that safeguarded nobility and city against royal abuses of power.

[19] As a matter of fact, the first historical mention to the Justicia appears independently from both the navarrese monarchy and the fabled Fueros of Sobrarbe, in a privilege granted by king Alfonso the Battler to the inhabitants of Zaragoza in 1115.

[20] Said document mentions a certain Pedro Giménez acting as Justice of the King' charged with overseeing that the legal rights granted by the monarch were enforced.

That year, the Aragonese Corts held in Ejea confirmed the Justicia as a mediator and adjudicator in any legal disputes concerning the crown and those groups protected by the Fueros (charters) of Aragon.

As the 18th century jurist Juan Francisco La Ripa put it, the right of Manifestación "freed the person who had been detained or arrested from the duress of torture or of immoderate imprisonment".

If the judge or officer refused to hand over the prisoner to the Justicia, they were deemed to have incurred in "contrafuero" (an illegal action against the charter itself), and could themselves be charged and arrested.

[22] Sometimes the Justicia would place the accused under house arrest or, in some cases, put him in the so-called "prison of manifestados", famous for their mild conditions.

The right of Manifestación only existed for chartered citizens of Aragon, namely nobility, clergy, burgers and villains, but neither women, minorities, nor serfs.

According to the list of Justicias given by Jerónimo Blancas in his Aragonensium rerum commentarii, a certain Fortún Ahe held the office either in 1275 or 1276, and was allegedly followed by Martin Sagarra and, subsequently, Pedro Martínez de Artasona.

[27] During the reign of Alfonso V of Aragon, the Aragonese Corts of 1442 (convened in Zaragoza) took advantage of the king's money needs to fund his Italian wars against René of Anjou, and obtained the concession that the Justicia could not be dismissed by any royal power.

[31] Initially, Philip II was reluctant to find a guilty party, but because the scandal following the assassination threatened with paralysing his own government,[32] he eventually dismissed and had Pérez arrested.

In April 1590, before being formally sentenced, Pérez escaped the castle of Turégano where he was being imprisoned, and fled to Aragon, where he used his Aragonese ascendency to invoke the right of Manifestación.

At that point Antonio Pérez and some of his followers escaped to France, but the Justicia de Aragon Juan V was captured alongside a few other officials, and Philip II had him beheaded in early 1592 accused of abetting the riots and organising an open rebellion.

[40] Indeed, when the troops of the rival French claimant, the Duke of Anjou, invaded Aragon in 1707, the Justicia Gabín was imprisoned and dismissed from his office.

The following year, Philip V of Spain passed a Nueva Planta Decree that abolished both the office of the Justicia and the Fueros of Aragon.

During the 19th century, the ancient office of the Justicia became a focal point of Aragonese regionalism, deep in symbolism for its historical independence and opposition to what were perceived as royal abuses of power.