The Scripting of Domination in Medieval Catalonia

The Scripting of Domination in Medieval Catalonia is an anthropological analysis of historical data pertaining to medieval Catalonia and the way in which its castle-lords enforced serfdom in the eleventh century at the tip of a sword and then how they worked with the Count of Barcelona to institutionalize bondage using legal documents. This form of serfdom was onerous and lasted more or less unchanged until the fifteenth century, when it was only slightly modified by King Ferdinand of Aragó-Catalonia.

Furthermore, in addition to this internal oppression of its own people, the Aragó-Catalonian State taxed its people to finance imperialism abroad, extending the extortionary practices it exercised on Muslim Kingdoms in Spain to states in North Africa and the Mediterranean, becoming in the process what Dr. Mendonsa calls the Extortionate State.

These historical data are analyzed in light of theories of political economy, agency and action theories, and a general approach Mendonsa develops in a forthcoming work that analyzes how aggrandizers began to fabricate institutions of domination once property became a significant historical-material condition of the Neolithic. The present work looks at the manufacture of rules of domination in the more limited context of medieval Catalonia and Aragón between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.