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Of kings, bishops and monks
The middle ages
An example of this wish to maintain
the strength of the Royal land of
Portugal was the implementation of the
inquirições, a control system over the
estates that sought to discover which
privileges were at the basis of the
concessions, and to find out if the lands
that should belong to the king himself
were being usurped.
“Besides these royal attempts,
the great centre
of conflict came from the
citizens themselves and
their councils”
In the Galician cities, the greatest
instability that bishops had to face did
not come, as in Portugal, by the hand
of the king. It is true that monarchs
founded, especially during the second
half of the 12th century and first half
of the 13th, several villages in order
to counteract the great power of the
religious lords, as the case of Monforte
in 1199 and Sarria in 1228. The
process was not always easy, as the
example of Monterrei shows: king
Alfonso IX had to yield on his pretension
of creating the royal village due to
the pressure of the rich monastery of
Celanova, which had founded Verín
in 1183, although this did not happen
with his grandson Alfonso X, who
reached this goal one century later.
The desired effects did not happened
either in the coastal villages, since the
all-powerful archbishop of Compostela
got all the rights over them, such as the
case of Pontevedra, founded in 1169.
Only in A Coruña, although through the
payment of a rent to the archbishopric,
could a large royal port be established,
with exemptions in 1208 and 1210.
Ferrol followed this at the end of the
century.
Besides these royal attempts, the
great centre of conflict came from the
citizens themselves and their councils,
who repeatedly tried to get rid of the
estate of bishops, in order to depend
on the Royal lands. The cities of Lugo,
Ourense and Santiago reached this
goal, but always for a short time:
finally, the temporary arrangements of
power lead to an agreement between
the monarch and the bishops, where
the cities were returned to their former
religious lord.
But conflicts did exist, and they were
not always docile: in the case of
Compostela, the scenery was the
castle of the Rocha Forte, property of
the cathedral and which controlled
the way out of the city towards the
coast and its ports. In 1309 the
council refused to accept Berenguel de
Landoira as archbishop; after several
months where he was not allowed to
enter the city, he took advantage of the
arrival of some negotiating emissaries
of the council, ambushing and killing
them, and in this way being able to
get the estate of Compostela again.
The opposite happened in Ourense
one century later, in 1421: a popular
uprising ended up with the death of the
bishop Francisco Afonso, drowned in
the Miño river.
In other occasions, curious as it may
seem, the greatest headache for the
bishopric authority came by the hand
of religious institutions. This happened
in the case of Mendicant orders
(Dominicans, Franciscans and their
feminine order, the Poor Clares), which
settled in the different Galician and
Portuguese cities since the beginning
of the 13th century. Opposite to
other monastic orders, Benedictines
and Cistercians, the Mendicants
preferred to settle in cities, and were
very oriented to predication. Their rise
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