In the spring of 1188, Alfonso IX, exclusively King of León, summoned a Curia Regis under the magnificent legionense church, today San Isidoro Collegiate Basilica. Representatives of the clergy and nobility attended this meeting, and for the first time in history, the representatives of the cities, that is, the “ciues electti " also attended or, in other words, the plain state, that is the common people, a fact that confirms the text of the Leonese Magna Carta, which begins with this very wording: “In the name of God. I Don Alfonso, king of León and Galicia, having held Curia Regis in León, with the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela, Pedro Suárez and bishops and magnates of my kingdom and citizens elected from each of the cities, have established and confirmed under oath that all of my realm, both clergy and lay people would respect them with the decency set by my predecessors.”
The Curia Regis in 1188 is considered “the closest institutional precedent to the Cortes.” There, the "decrees" were born, a policy set where by the protection of person and property stands out against the abuse of power. The rights, provisions, guarantees and freedoms that encourage its contents require strict compliance with the law at all levels of society, from the monarch himself to the last citizen. So much so, that the legislative text cited contains the same promise of Alfonso IX of conducting "neither peace nor war nor pact without the advice of the council of bishops, nobles and good men, whose advice I must abide by.”
Since 1988, a monolith placed in the convent cloister of the Collegiate Basilica of the Doctors of Spain, stands witness to the minutes of Parliament accrediting the "decrees" in León in 1188, which determine a form of government that, as the Magna Carta in question textually concludes, "all the bishops also promised, and all the knights and citizens confirmed by oath, to be faithful in my council, to maintain justice and preserve peace in my realm."
For those seeking an explanatory foundation of the origins of the Curia Regis, let us note briefly that social instability, continuous confrontations with Castilians, Almohads and Portuguese, numerous economic difficulties, conflicting loyalties and his stepmother, Urraca López de Haro’s, designs on the throne for her son, the Infante Sancho Fernández, in short, the distressing and overwhelming inheritance received by Alfonso IX, who was barely sixteen years old when he came to the throne, led the Leonese monarch to convene the 1188 León Curia, concilium regis which brought the situation back under control and led to, as has been stated, the entry of the bourgeoisie in the Curia Regis, which from that moment became one of the representative areas of the realm, and whose presence, given its strong leadership and growing economic activity, as well as being clearly decisive, made possible the emergence of two new legal concepts: procuradores and pesquisidores (prosecutors and coroners).
Indeed, the realm of León is the European pioneer in this kind of assemblies. In Germany, the bourgeoisie made an appearance at the Diet in 1232. In England, this sector of the populationachieved representation in Parliament for the first time in 1265, and in France, one hundred and fourteen years later, in 1302.
On June 18, 2013, UNESCO granted the 1188 Cortes of Alfonso IX the title of "Memory of the World," a very just official recognition summarized in this most honorable title: "León, Cradle of Parliamentarism.”