Ferran II of Aragon, better known as Ferdinand the Catholic, has gone down in history as a smart guy. With his lights and his shadows, of course. And although his successes were probably many more than his mistakes, he did not stop perpetrating what in our eyes today would be some outrage. But it is a mistake to judge the past with the eyes of the present, although it is now very fashionable to do so and demand sanctions and apologies from a furious and puritanical revisionism.
Anyway, where we were going. Fernando found himself in the line of succession to the Aragonese crown after the death of his half-brother Carlos, Prince of Viana. And in those turbulent times he had to spend part of his childhood and adolescence, until his early youth, contemplating the ravages of the Catalan civil war that took place between 1462 and 1472. Fratricidal war and for a while take that king away from me, but with ramifications that they make it medieval and modern at the same time, since there are historians who have wanted to see a popular and revolutionary bias in some combats in which the Busca and the Biga clashed and where the still valid concept of the bad Catalans was coined for whom did not support the rebel faction opposed to Juan II of Aragon, Count of Barcelona. Come on, almost always, that if you have broken the oath owed to the king, that if taxes and money, that if the homeland and here we govern ourselves and that if for noble my ladies wills.
This comes to mind that a mature and forty-year-old Fernando, already crowned king and more than made the government and power, came up with a procedure to distribute positions and perquisites without encouraging rival factions or party grievances: insaculation, which left for very established in the privileges of 1498 and 1499. King Ferdinand was fine and very Catholic there.
The thing is simple and consists, in reality, of a lottery among various candidates considered capable for a certain position. The names are placed in a bag or similar container and, by means of written papers, colored balls or any other similar system, the mayor, the judge or the conseller who plays is chosen. Which results, when named, de-insulated. And yes, the language has these things…
The insaculation worked in Catalonia, for certain positions, until the New Plant Decree. And of course there is a trick, which consists of who and how the list of possible beneficiaries is made. But it is not without its advantages that it is known that chance determines between equivalent assumptions, if not equal, who is going to be primus inter pares. Of course, it makes Cainite competition and wild promises pretty useless. And since they all go in the same bag, it leaves the party of each one in a clear second term.
Given that we do not cease in the effort to vindicate the uses prior to the War of Succession, perhaps it would not be bad to recover the system of insaculation to appoint ministers, for example. And we could even export the method and solve once and for all the already chronic crisis of the government of the judges of the kingdom. At least, we would save ourselves from being as embarrassed as in these almost four years –I say this because of the General Council of the Judiciary– and we could even launch a patriotic lottery, much better than the Grossa, to see who and with what skills could Enter the lottery to be conseller. Seen what has been seen, neither age nor past convictions are an impediment.
