The Justicia de Aragón (; ; ; Justice of Aragon) is the name of an important public office that existed in the Kingdom of Aragon from the beginning of at least the 12th century until 1711, and again from 1982 onwards.
The Justicia was the most prestigious and powerful office of the Kingdom of Aragon aside from the kingship itself. The task of the incumbent was to ensure that the laid down rights (Fueros) and the customary law of the land were observed. The Justicia had extensive judicial and executive powers, and acted as a zealous counterbalance to royal authority within the Crown of Aragon. The Justicia was also speaker of the yearly meeting of the Cortes de Aragon (the Aragonese parliament), was charged with the swearing-in of new monarchs, and could veto any action by any official (including the king himself) if the Justicia deemed it to be against the Fueros of Aragon. The office was abolished in 1711 when the Nueva Planta Decrees unified the Spanish monarchy, but was reinstated in 1982 with the passing of the Statute of Autonomy of the Autonomous Community of Aragon of 1982. Its modern duties are those of a regional ombudsman.
History
Origins of the Office
Since at least the 15th century, the origins of the office of the Justicia have been used to explain why royal authority in Aragon was so tightly bound by a set of legal traditions that the Justicia was charged with overseeing. Broadly speaking, there were two largely compatible theories regarding the origins of the office of the Justicia, both of which placed its origins at the onset of the kingdom of Aragon itself.
Iñigo Arista and the first Justicia
The first theory can be traced back to the scholarly work of Martin Sagarra. Sagarra is believed to have been a legal scholar active either in the 1270s or in the 1340s. In his Glossa de Observantis Regni Aragonum (written in 1450–1458), the legal historian Johan Antich de Bages claims Martin Sagarra himself had been Justicia sometime between Fortún Ahe, said to have held the office either in 1275 or 1276, and Pedro Martínez de Artasona, who is known to have served as Justicia in the Cortes of Aragon held in 1281. As a legal scholar, Martin Sagarra apparently penned a historical account of the office of the Justicia which Antich de Bages quotes from liberally. This work by Sagarra is now lost, but it apparently claimed that the office of the Justicia had been created at the same time as the kingship itself. Sagarra traced back the office of the Justicia to the reign of Iñigo Arista (c. 790–851), who according to him had only accepted his election as king of Pamplona under the condition that a judge be elected to adjudicate any disputes that may arise between the king and his subjects. This judge would be the original Justicia. Furthermore, according to Sagarra, Arista promised the king would never abolish the office of the Justicia, and that if any monarch did so, its vassals had the right to depose him and elect a new king, even if the latter were a pagan. Antich de Bages then elaborates that this ancient right was abolished in the Privilege of the Union of 1347 (a charter negotiated by Peter IV of Aragon). According to Antich de Bages, this privilege allowed royal subjects to rebel if the king violated the charters and customs of Aragon and, for this reason, Peter IV had ordered all traces of it be destroyed. In fact, Peter IV himself is famously said to have torn a copy of these ancient charters with his own dagger once the Privilege of the Union of 1347 was passed. It is for this reason that Ralph Giesey believed that Sagarra must have written his work after 1348, and that what he was describing was not some ancient rights, but the customary law of his time, which had been just been codified and modified by the Privilege of the Union of 1347. However, at least one copy of these ancient charters survived, which was studied first by Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad (active in the 1450s) and ended up in the hands of legal scholar Jerónimo Blancas in the 16th century, and was eventually rediscovered in the 19th century.
