Conflicts between lineages, factions and villas
With and against everyone
As we have seen, Gipuzkoa towns started to emerge over the top of the early medieval valleys from the 12th century onwards. This represented shattering the valleys due to the segregation of the hamlets that had become towns subject to provincial rights, giving rise to confrontations and law suits between the new towns and valleys controlled by the local nobility.
Across Gipuzkoa there were confrontations between lineages, between lineages and villas, and between lineages and their own farm workers. Rather than factions, it would be more accurate to talk about pressure groups consisting of diverse members brought together in alliances depending on the particular conflict.
Faced with the Parientes Mayores progressive loss of influence over the region, their economic resources and their people, lineages adopted a double strategy: on the one hand, to make alliances between themselves against the power of the villa, and on the other, to join up with the emerging urban oligarchs. This second option turned out to be more effective for maintaining and reforming the main ancestral homes, although it didn’t prevent a return to war, both in Gipuzkoa and the rest of the Basque region.
Triumph of the urban model
At the same time, the Castilian King saw beyond his conception of Gipuzkoa as a border point between Navarra and Castile, giving Gipuzkoa a new economic and administrative organisation, and attempted to strengthen his interests in the Land of Gipuzkoa against the nobility controlling the valleys.
Therefore, the villas, allied among themselves and with the monarchy, also triumphed militarily thanks to their alliance with the Crown (1456), began to develop, through a series of publications, a relationship that was fundamentally political, characterized by equality and horizontality (at least in theory) between their members in the organization of the region. The creation of an assembly – the Juntas Generales - that met periodically, along with extraordinary meetings and the appointment of a permanent representative, the deputy-general, created the political and judicial basis of what we now know as the Historic Territory of Gipuzcoa.
Thanks to their family alliances, many noble bloodlines were part of the new model.
