Las Comunidades de Castilla

The civil war that began in the second half of 1519 and ended in 1521 with the defeat of the comuneros in Villalar constitutes the first modern rebellion in Spain and probably in Europe, much closer to the movements of that new era than to the union revolts of the late Middle Ages. The Communities of Castile does not try to offer a sequence of events but to analyze the factors that internally moved the events, the causes that provoked them and the ends that subsequently inspired them. A line of political thought flows underneath the movement and gives it meaning, without prejudice to the progressive displacement of the ideology of the commune revolution as it advances towards more radical positions. Although it is not possible to attribute to the commoners a systematic doctrine on the organization of human society, their political approaches have coherence and novelty. José Antonio Maravall, in addition to including a study on the image of the Communities of Castile within a social typology of revolutionary movements, also addresses the resonances of the comunero movement that continued to exist a few decades after its defeat in the opinion of popular movements and rural. This work by José Antonio Maravall, which Alianza Editorial republishes on the occasion of the Fifth Centennial of the defeat of the comuneros in Villalar on April 23, 1521, substantially altered traditional interpretations of the rebellion of the Communities of Castile and the way for further research that has only confirmed the success of this new approach.