Aristocracia y monarquía en los reinos de Castilla y León: el caso de la familia Lara

Abstract

Between the twelfth century and the fourteenth, there was a fundamental change in the basis of the Lara family s power. At the outset, their influence derived primarily from personal access to, and control over, the monarch; throughout the twelfth century, the family s wealth rested heavily on possession of the royal offices known as tenencias, which were the principal fruit of courtly influence. But from the middle of the thirteenth century, the aftershocks of the reconquests of Seville and Córdoba, and the expansion of royal administration, meant that symbiosis was increasingly supplanted by a confrontational political climate marked by an acceleration of patrimonial accumulation by aristocratic lineages such as the Laras. The new structure of aristocratic power would long outlast the Lara family itself, surviving well into the modem age and finding expression in a culture in which, more than in any other western European society, the authority and values of nobility were dominant.