[BLANK AUDIO] Hello, my name is Xavier Gil. I'm a lecturer of modern history at the Faculty of Geography and History of the University of Barcelona. The subject I am going to address is the Mediterranean as a space of powers. Speaking about history of politics and powers, and the Mediterranean as a space for of owers forces us to examine other types of powers: demographic power, economic power, and, of course, military power. But our subject is political organisation. And if we talk about politics in the world of the Mediterranean, this naturally leads us to the Greek polis, where we find the powerful and influential Aristotle. Here we have an example of the first translation to Spanish, directly from the Greek, of the 8 books on politics by Aristotle. They are translated by Pedro Sim�n Abril, lecturer of rhetoric at the University of Zaragoza in 1584. Secondly, we have Roman law, the influence of which in the west we still see today. When speaking of Roman law, particularly Justinian law, it was Emperor Justinian, who in the 6th and 7th centuries of the Christian era, ordered the compilation of a large body of knowledge documents in the Corpus Juris Civilis and in the equivalent volume of Canon Law. Here we also have two excellent examples of the of the persistence of the legacy of the Corpus Juris Civilis. These two editions from Central Europe, from the mid-18th century, during Rousseau�s lifetime, were published in Frankfurt and Basilea. The geography of the influence and scope of the Corpus Juris Civilis, and its extended influence over time are reflected well in these two works, in these two editions. We�re going to examine the spaces of power in the Mediterranean world in six groups: family, estates and corporations, cities, state, church and empire. The family is the subject covered by lecturer Mar�a Fargas, so we're not going to cover that, rather we're only going to review the figure of the pater familias, a privileged figure in the political landscape of the era, from the normal everyday family to the figure of the king, who was also a pater familias. Then we will examine the estate and corporations. There we will find supra-individual bodies playing a key role, such as the feudal estates, the clergy, nobility, and the third estate, and other groups of a professional nature, guilds, brotherhoods, parishes, which as well as their role in economics, and even in the world of religion, also played key roles in politics and in the municipal arena. The clearest example is the participation of guilds and artisan groups in municipal politics of the Mediterranean cities. In this regard, Venice as a good example of what would be a trend throughout the Modern Era. The famous Serrata is a an oligarchical mechanism through which the Venetian patricians excluded the cities� guilds and artisans from municipal politics. It is a early mechanism from the end of 14th century that marks the path the rest of the cities of the Mediterranean world would start to follow towards increasing oligarchisation of the ruling classes and municipal politics. Thirdly, we have the cities, that were really major players in all of the territories. Culture, the Renaissance life, is essentially urban. Urbanism is a very interesting subject, an aside to the subject of this course, and naturally a major influence in political life. Here we should distinguish between cities subject to the feudal system, such as, for example, the city of Tarragona, whose ruler was the archbishop of Tarragona and the cities under the realengo system, that were under the jurisdiction, often from a great distance, of the crown or empire. This is the case for Barcelona, Naples, and a lot of other cities, Perpignan as well. These cities are representative of our subject, and enjoyed autonomy protected by urban privileges and franchises, which in everyday life translated to a virtual independence, above all in the cities that belonged to the empire, a very distant imperial power with little ability to govern and intervene in the daily lives of these cities. A very typical facet of urban life of the era is the arrival of the rural nobility, who settled in homes in the cities. This is the phenomenon of the urbanisation of nobility, for which there are examples in many of the cities we're dealing with, but especially clearly in Naples. The great city of Naples received the baronaggio of the kingdom, great feudal lords who gradually settled in the city, since they were aware that although their feudal rents came from their rural estates, the centre of political life and the prominent roles were in the city. So the Neapolitan baronaggio played a very important role. In fourth place, we have the state, the modern state, the classic subject in the study of the politics of the Renaissance and the modern era. The general trend in the states, the crown, the great monarchies, or also the smaller duchies, was a growing trend of authoritarianism, and the government acquiring greater and greater power, but not without difficulties and not without internal rebellions. We can illustrate the growth of the state with a very eloquent example, when Machiavelli, acting as ambassador of the city of Florence to the French court, noted the difference between governing a city, with its surrounding territory, like Florence and Tuscany, and governing a large monarchy, with a large territory under its power. The modern state is also the key player in international politics, a political system that has seen growing aggression between monarchies and smaller states since the end of 15th century. A very clear example of this stage and this aggression are the wars that Italy had with, above all, the Spanish monarchy and the French monarchy, the two powers bordering Italy from the end of the 15th century until the mid-16th century. Essentially, the power or influence over Naples and Milan became the puzzle pieces that led to this aggression. The fifth area is the church. The church had two dimensions. The papacy as the spiritual leader of Christianity, the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Saint Peter, who exercised the function of the pastor of the entirety of the Christian flock. But the other facet of the was that it was the �lord� of the day. So the papacy and the papal states played a pivotal role and intervened in territorial and political interests, and the geopolitics of that era. At that time the, the Christian church, the Christian flock, was undergoing the schism of the reformation and the reformed protestant churches that split from Rome. But this did not diminish the role of the papal states as political actors at the time. Lastly, we have the sixth element, the empire The empire also had two facets: the successor of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Empire, which at the time was personified by Charles V, who was the temporary head of the Christian flock, and also, on the other hand, the emperor as crown prince to the empire in the territorially restricted sense of what would loosely equate to present-day Germany. Both of these key players had reasons to work together, but they also clashed and disagreed on many occasions. In this same vein and in this same period, the famous sacking of Rome by imperial troops provides a very illustrative example of this. Throughout the modern era, and this brings us to the conclusion of this session, both the empire and the papacy suffered a loss of international influence. In 1648, the moment that certified this arrived: the Peace of Westphalia and the end of the Thirty Years� War. If, up to that point, the empire and the church had a somewhat disputed international function, a certain amount of recognition, 1648 marked the confirmation of the state as the almost exclusive protagonists of international life. The Pope and emperor continued to be key actors, but they had lost the function of supra-national arbiters, that up to that point, although in a somewhat disputed manner, they had exercised. With the new local and international situation that formalizsd the Peace of Westphalia, we conclude our review of the spaces of power in the Mediterranean world during the Early Modern Period. [BLANK AUDIO] [BLANK AUDIO] [BLANK AUDIO]
