The conquest of Naples gave the crown of Aragon which, previously, had had no fixed seat of government, a fixed capital which had profound constitutional implications. With the establishment of the capital in Naples and the permanent absence of the king, who no longer set foot in Spain after 1432, the kingdoms entered a period of great political debate. The physical absence of the sovereign broke with tradition, and was a painful rupture of that mystical union between sovereign and people which had become almost tangible whenever the king presided over the corts he had summoned. This was known as ‘pactism’, at once political ideology, collective mental concept and practice whose historical development in all three states of the crown had resulted in the same basic form with, sometimes, significant regional variations. In Catalonia, ‘pactism’ was essentially feudal in character, being based on the fealty and duties of auxilium and consilium owed to the lord and sovereign. In Aragon, it was more straightforwardly political, founded on the balance of power existing between the sovereign and a strong nobility, and on the former’s ability to control the latter’s aspirations. In Valencia, on the other hand, ‘pactism’ was basically an economic contract. Such differences notwithstanding, in all parts of the kingdom the political and legal principle governing relations between the king and his subjects was an agreement going beyond a mere theory of political philosophy to become the true expression of an identity and traditions which were to be defended and cherished, as legal documents of the time demonstrate.
The death of Marti I without heirs and the ‘election’ of a successor, however, suddenly meant that the parameters of ‘pactism’ could be altered, limiting the powers of the monarchy. In his Recort historial, written in 1476, Gabriel Turell pointed out with satisfaction that as Fernando I had been elected to the throne (rey ab pactes elegit) he was therefore obliged to keep his precoronation promise to respect the rights of the ‘nation’ (tengut servar les libertats). The ‘pactist’ offensive against the Castilian dynasty began in Barcelona in 1412—13 with the frequently asserted claim that royal decisions which did not fall within the bounds of what the Catalonian deputies described as ‘the contracted and agreed law’ (ley paccionada) had no legal force. The offensive was stepped up against Alfonso V both because of the new forms of government which he introduced and because of his absences from the country. Furthermore, between 1449 and 1453, the corts of Perpignan sought to place restraints upon the exercise of royal authority by preventing the king from appointing his own chief officials (the vice-chancellor and the head of chancery), removing the administrative role of the diputacio from royal control and, finally, obstructing the king’s efforts to redeem the royal patrimony, already greatly reduced in size. Such proposals, which undermined the constitution and were an intolerable affront to the monarchy’s dignity, were firmly rejected by Alfonso who, in response, seized the opportunity to replace the increasingly rigid ‘pactist’ system of privileges, rights and franchises with a form of government which better suited the generally felt need for an improved system of justice and security. This enlightened step, which met requirements felt even by his critics, was defined by Alfonso himself as potestat absoluta. Yet, apart from Felip de Malla (1370—1431), who declared that it was better for the respublica to be protected by a good prince than by a good legal system, no Catalan or Valencian legal expert, including Jaume Callls (1370—1434) and Pere Belluga (1390—1436), both royal servants with a training in Roman law, was prepared to lend his support to changes, in the absolutist sense, to the ‘pactist’ system which, in spite of its evident inadequacies, all continued to uphold.