Abstract

Catalunya emerges as a general community when the collection of customs and practices, i.e. usatges, most frequently used in the Cúria or Comital Court of Justice of Barcelona, namely, the Usatges de Barcelona, began appearing in written form as of the 12th century, which was when they were extended as general law to all Catalan counties. This Catalan law, which fully and directly shared in the European culture of ius commune, contained its own unique, common provisions regarding succession. In Medieval and Modern-Era Catalonia, successions depended on and affected the tangible and intangible assets of families, households and individuals, such as, in the latter case, their political power, social prestige, belief in the afterlife, the lineage’s honour, etc. The family and household were legal persons with legal rights and obligations and were therefore also active and passive subjects of succession. Their variable conception is comprehensible if we compare them over time to the preceding or contemporaneous models of the Roman family as a legal organism; to the Catholic Church as a natural society based on the communion of love among its members; to the Germanic model of the family as a living social unit continuing after the death of the parents; or to the feudal model of a closed family and the family as a military-political entity organized around a specific patrimony. In the Modern Age, we also see the bourgeois model of the family as a social unit or that of the wealthy farmers’ stem household perpetuated as the genealogical line entrusted with preserving and increasing the patrimony with which it is identified. The political dimension of inheritance or succession law as well as its ability or inability to settle inheritance issues can best be seen in the case of the royal house or family, in the wars or conflicts arising from the exceptional circumstances of the death of a monarch without legitimate descendants, as occurred with Kings Martin I, the Humane, and Charles II, the Bewitched. This article chronologically sets forth the history of inheritance law in Catalonia to explain how, through its varied, specific laws and regulations and their respective practices, issues and conflicts of various nature have arisen and been settled: transfer of familial and communal powers, consolidation of social networks, disposal of private or collective patrimony, salvation of the soul, etc. The article thus highlights the historic process of the birth, evolution and crystallization of Medieval and Modern Catalan society though its basic unit, the household, a complex legal entity associated with specific rights, a name, certain material and symbolic capital and an inheritance model.