Feudalism: Alive and kicking in Mallorca

After King Jaume I and his not so merry men had finished slaughtering much of the population of Mallorca following the thirteenth-century conquest, they ran up against a slight problem. Land was all well and good, but less so if there wasn't anyone to work it. The scale of the slaughter suggests that half the population of the island - put at some 50,000 - was wiped out. Of those who survived, the majority were Muslim converts. Otherwise, there were still some Christians, descendants of the population at the time of the Muslim occupation three centuries before.

In terms of society, the story of the immediate aftermath of the conquest can be styled as a combination of slavery and feudalism. The slaves were the survivors of the conquest, whose numbers, limited as they were, needed to be added to by inward migration, principally from Catalonia, for which incentives of privileges were granted. Privileges or not, the new Mallorcan workforce was subject to the organisational system - Jaume's system of feudalism.

There wasn't one definitive system of feudalism in Europe, but the variants followed a basic principle usually attributed to French nobility, e.g. William the Conqueror. It was a system of privileges, at the heart of which were rights to land extended from above to those below - as in lord to vassal, for example - and which involved a form of mutual protection: the lord would protect his vassal, and the vassal would fight for the lord.

Feudalism is generally considered to be a system of mediaeval times, and indeed its practice in Europe had largely disappeared by the fifteenth century. In Spain, on the other hand - or more accurately in the lands of the Aragon crown - the system of feudal barony, a hangover from Jaume, wasn't to be ended until the early nineteenth century and even then, though legal rights were abolished, property rights weren't.

Earlier this year, the heirs of the Marquis de la Romana informed owners of 125 properties, such as those in Paguera for example, that the "alou" ("alodio" in Spanish) was still applicable. This is a charge payable on the transfer of ownership of a property, and this alou goes right back to the days of Jaume I: it is a mediaeval tax, founded on the principles of Jaume's feudal system.

Under a Balearic law of 2010 the alou was addressed, and ultimate landowners, almost invariably descendants in some form or another of those who engaged in the land grab and distribution that Jaume had facilitated in the thirteenth century, were given five years to renew the alou. Those who didn't wish to simply had to inform the Land Registry, and the tax - hugely anachronistic that it was - would no longer be applicable.

At the time this law was introduced, the president of the Balearic Academy of Jurisprudence explained that it had served a useful function - in the thirteenth century. It was a legal concept linked to the conquest but also to the need for repopulation. But it was, nevertheless, a legal concept that was almost 800 years old.

The law was expected to have seen the withdrawal of the alou in 2013, and there were owners who decided to scrap it. But not all. Later that year, a couple, Xus Sastre and his wife Beatrix, won a court battle after they had been pursued for the payment of 2% alou for the purchase of a house in Es Pil-lari in Palma. The demand, which amounted to 1,800 euros, came from the Marquise de Campo Franco. The couple argued that they had never heard of the tax, though when it came to formalising the purchase, a notary observed that there was a freehold but advised them that the alou would not be charged, as no one bothered demanding it.

The couple, though they won the court case, took the matter further. They raised a petition through Change.org for the eradication of this example of feudalism that had no place in a democracy. How could standards of the thirteenth century still be allowed to apply? The Romanas and the Campo Francos would doubtless argue that they could apply quite easily.

The Més party, though, asked the same question. At the end of 2013, the petition having raised 12,000 signatures, a Més parliamentary deputy said that his party would seek to have the alou abolished for good. It was a "feudal anachronism", and the 2010 law hadn't gone far enough. But if Més were to now introduce a law (and one would think that they and especially Podemos would do so), it would be too late for the airports authority Aena. A court has decided that it must pay an alou of 70,840 euros for having put to use land that was expropriated at Son Sant Joan airport in the 1960s.

Jaume I's legacy is great, and it lives on in some most peculiar ways.