2 - Law in Diaspora: The Legal Regime of the Atlantic World

Summary

In the public bathhouses of Castilian towns established in the course of the Reconquest, simple attendance served as a reminder of legal identity. Women and men went to the baths on different days, and Jews and Muslims also had designated days. A bathhouse dispute or crime might come to the attention of one of four local legal authorities – the town magistrate, rabbi, qadi, or priest – depending on the gravity of the offense and the day it occurred. Conflicts among co-religionists would be handled by their communities' own judges; for Christians, these would be secular magistrates, unless the Christians had blasphemed or committed some other crime against the faith, in which case the clergy might step in. If a Muslim or Jew committed a serious crime, secular authorities were likely to assert a claim to jurisdiction. Most Castilians perhaps understood only in broad terms where to locate these jurisdictional boundaries, but they must have perceived clearly, even in the simple rituals of bathing, that they lived in a world of divided jurisdictions and that these divisions represented fundamental differences among them. Many Castilians knew, too, that neither the cultural and religious, nor the legal, boundaries were fixed. Crossing was not easy, but there were routines for doing so, from the weightier matter of conversion to the commonplace legal maneuvering that could be used to move a dispute to a more sympathetic forum.