Los parientes mayores

Abstract

The study of the Elders, as the oldest noble families in Navarre were called, brings us back to the conflicts between noble families which, apart from being conflicts between nobles, were also disputes to define the social structure of the Basque historical territorial is in the modern era. In such struggles, the elders pretended to monopolise the condition of nobility. However, and at least in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, such conflicts ended up by defining communities based on territorial rights structured around a collective element. The elders and other lineages and then looked for –and found– to ways of being of higher value. The house –the domestic culture–, the Catholic confession and the service to the monarchy then became the keys to the hierarchy far more than a common juridical status.