The invention of the cortes model
By John Keane
This is the first part of a keynote address, delivered in the presence of King Felipe VI, at the conference to commemorate the International Day of Parliamentarism hosted by the Inter Pares: EU Global Project to Strengthen the Capacity of Parliaments (Cortes Generales, León, Spain, June 30, 2023).
The second part of the keynote discussing past and current threats to parliaments can be read here and the third part on the future of parliaments as watchdogs here.
More than eight centuries ago, in these magnificent sandstone cloisters where we are gathered, a young king convened the world’s first parliament of representatives. The beginning was breathtakingly unexpected, a surprise so startling and precious that later generations jostled to lay claim to its fame. In England, politicians and historians have long been fond of saying that their House of Commons is the Mother of Parliaments. The ‘little room’ in London’s Palace of Westminster, said Winston Churchill a century ago, serves as ‘the shrine of the World’s liberties’. The parliamentary historian and aspiring Liberal politician A.F. Pollard repeated the claim that parliaments were ‘incomparably the greatest gift of the English people to the civilization of the world’. My La Vida y Muerte de la Democracia (2018) politely questioned this English prejudice. It showed how, in the spring month of March 1188, in the walled, former Roman town of León, a full generation before King John’s Magna Carta of 1215, Alfonso IX did something extraordinary: he invented an instrument of government soon to be called a cortes, or parliament. A politically autonomous space where differences of opinion were freely debated and laws made peacefully based on negotiated agreements among representatives of various social interests drawn from a wide geographic radius.
The remarkable invention came laced with ironies. The cortes was among Europe’s first precious gifts to the world of modern representative democracy, yet the unfashionable word ‘democracy’ played no role in its birth. The world’s first parliament stood for the open acceptance of differences, yet it was a child of recolonisation and empire building. Its birth was a moment in the Reconquista, a bitter military struggle of Christians to snatch fields and towns from the Muslims of northern Iberia, to set Spain on a course to become the greatest political power in early modern Europe.
At the epicentre of these ironies stood King Alfonso IX of León (1188-1230). At the ripe age of seventeen, returning from exile in Portugal, he accepted the crown of a kingdom beset with military, monetary and morale troubles. The young king was inexperienced, wet behind the ears, but he caught his doubters and foes off guard. He sprang a big surprise. Was he the bullfighter so sure of his coming demise that fear lost its grip and courage enabled his fightback? Did exile teach him the art of historical timing, the precious sixth sense of knowing what will work and what won’t work in any given circumstance? Had he been inspired by the royal meeting (curia) convened in neighbouring Castile the year before, when town representatives (maiores) were among the dignitaries who assembled to confirm the right of accession to the throne of Queen Berenguela, whom he later married? We can’t be sure.
What’s clear is that Alfonso chose to fight his way out of a tight corner by convening a first-ever meeting with representatives of the leading local estates. Gambling with his crown, making compromises that might have destroyed his kingly powers, young Alfonso IX turned to the local nobility, the warrior aristocrats who were committed in their bones to the reconquest of their lands. He called as well on the bishops of the church, the estate that saw itself as the guardian of souls, and the spiritual protector of God’s lands; and he summoned the citizens of the towns (cives), moneyed ‘good men’ (boni homines) respected for their role as elected officers of the town councils called fueros.
It was from inside this medieval triangle comprising the nobles, bishops and urban citizens – the representatives of soldiers, souls and money – that the modern practice of parliamentary representation was born. It was one of those magical moments when the participants couldn’t possibly have known the world-historical significance of what they were doing.
What happened in León wasn’t breaking news. This wasn’t yet the age of breaking news, but the first-ever cortes, as contemporaries soon christened it, radically altered the poetry of politics. It gave a new meaning to the word itself, which until then had been the local term for both the town where a king resides and a city council whose representatives made proposals and demands and granted services to a monarch.
As for the word representation (procurador), there’s an outside chance that locals had absorbed the notion from local Muslims, for whom a legal representative (wākil) was a religious judge chosen by a merchant to act in his stead, for instance handling his lawsuits and acting as the merchant’s banker and postmaster.
The members of the first cortes were certainly familiar with the Latin term procurator. It referred to a man who acts as an agent of another man, with his consent. It referred to someone authorised to appear before a court to defend another person in a lawsuit or dispute. It was used as well to speak of an official (known as the procurador general) who took care of the property and wellbeing of the city, or who acted as a guardian of the interests of the poor (procurador de pobres).
A great refusal
The León parliament transformed the language of politics. It was also a great refusal of divine, absolute monarchy. This cortes was no gathering where monarchs waved the flags of courtly pomp to impress their subjects on bended knee. Against the backdrop of war, the old medieval custom of convening meetings such as the German Hoftage and English witanegemots to swear fealty to a sovereign’s will was cast aside. Tough bargaining among conflicting social interests in the presence of the monarch was the new custom. A parliamentary monarchy was born.
The first parliament was held in the cloisters of the church of San Isidoro, named in honour of the good bishop of Seville famous for his maxim that only those who govern well are true monarchs. It produced up to fifteen decrees (the authenticity of several is disputed) that together amounted to something like a constitutional charter.
The king promised that in matters of war and peace, pacts and treaties he would hereon consult and accept the advice of the bishops, nobles and ‘good men’ of the towns. It was agreed that property and security of residence were inviolable. The representatives accepted that judicial proceedings and the laws they produced would be respected; and that the king’s realm would be guided, wherever possible, by the good customs (mores bonos) and general laws inherited from earlier times – the so-called Book or Liber Iudicorum from the time of the Visigoths. It was also agreed that there would be future assemblies of the king and the estates.
We need to pay attention to the profound historical and political significance of what happened in León. The assembly was the first recorded gathering of all three estates; the interests of the towns had hitherto been ignored in meetings convened by the monarchs of the region. We could say that the surprise inclusion of the towns was the beginning of many centuries of social and political struggle to equalize parliamentary representation – a struggle that’s nowadays still unfinished. But there was more.
This assembly of representatives of the nobility, church and towns promised a new way of governing. The cortes method of handling power supposed that guarantees of fair play could foster political deals among conflicting interests, thus avoiding the use of naked force. In striking contrast, say, to ancient Athens, where citizens feared division and supposed that democracy required a unified sense of political community, the cortes rested on the opposite precept: on the inevitability of competing and conflicting interests. And, for the sake of the common good, the desirability of forging peaceful compromises among them.
Putting things more abstractly, we could say that the cortes redefined politics in four ways. Its embrace of representation had insurgent, disruptive effects. It sharpened people’s sense of the contingency or alterability of power relations. The cortes questioned arbitrary power. It radicalised the old feudal notion of the contractual right of vassals to resist unjust treatment by their overlords. The cortes encouraged representatives to muster the courage to tell the king to go to hell.
Well before the age of party politics, the cortes also underlined the point that representatives don’t necessarily share the same realities and that parliaments are therefore spaces in which reality itself becomes contestable and negotiable. The cortes anticipated Cervantes. It destroyed the metaphysics of reality: within its walls, representatives affirmed that things always have at least two sides- that the windmills of hard reality are inescapably shaped by interpretations that lend them significance.
But the cortes had a third important effect: it offered the possibility of turning disagreements about reality into binding agreements in support of a common good. During these years, Spain was not yet a country. It was very much an invertebrate polity, to use the words of Ortega y Gasset, a space paralysed by social divisions, rebellions and threats of war. The cortes offered a positive alternative: combining social divisions into a more integrated polity, supported by people with straightened spines; a people bound together by their reliance upon parliamentary negotiations and agreed laws backed by the king.
Finally, the cortes created the space for long-distance government. It widened its footprint. It improved the chances of reaching workable agreements among otherwise mutually hostile groups by limiting the numbers of decision makers, some of whom were required to travel great distances. The cortes showed that representative governments could rule their subjects at arm’s length without losing their trust and consent. The government of large territories was possible exactly because the representatives involved in making decisions were entitled to snap at the heels of the monarch, to defend their respective interests in his presence.
The next part discusses past and current threats to parliaments. Please continue reading here.
About the author
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and Professorial Fellow at the WZB (Berlin). His latest book is The Shortest History of Democracy (2022), which has already been published in more than 12 languages.