End of the second act of Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega, c. 1612-1614), set in 1476. The village is celebrating the wedding of Laurencia and Frondoso with musicians and songs when in walks the knight commander Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, who rules the place on behalf of the Order of Calatrava. He has the groom arrested: Frondoso had once aimed the Commander’s own crossbow at him to defend Laurencia. The mayor Esteban, the bride’s father, intercedes with his staff of office in his hand; the Commander orders it taken from him and beats him with it, as one would a spirited horse. Then he carries Laurencia off. The scene sums up the whole play: a lord who treats the villagers as serfs, hunts their women and turns the symbol of local justice into a stick. Laurencia escapes and, dishevelled and bruised, accuses the men of the council of cowardice. The whole village rises, storms the Commander’s house and kills him. The Catholic Monarchs send a judge who tortures men, women and children to make them say who killed him. They all reply: “Fuenteovejuna, my lord.” The king ends up pardoning them for lack of culprits.
// The theoryThe law at the service of whoever rules
Conflict theory starts from an idea that George Vold formulated in 1958 and Richard Quinney radicalized in 1970: society rests not on consensus but on a struggle between groups with opposing interests, and criminal law is written and applied by those who win that struggle. From this perspective, the question is not only why someone commits a crime, but who decides which behaviors are punished and which go unpunished. The abuses of the powerful tend to remain outside the law, and the responses of the weak, inside it.
Impunity as a cause
The Commander is not an offender under the law of his time: he is a lord with jurisdiction over the village, and his abuses have no judge. The whole play turns on that. For much of it, the peasants have no legal means of defending themselves: the one who should administer justice is the aggressor. Conflict theory describes that very situation, in which the law protects those with power and leaves those without it with no recourse. In the play, the collective violence at the end does not come from nowhere, but from the absence of any other way out. History is more complex: according to Cabrera and Moros, the revolt of April 1476 was planned and had outside backing, starting with the town council of Córdoba, which wanted the village back; there were real seigneurial grievances, but the abduction of Laurencia and the wedding are Lope’s.
// The subjectA lord who knew no limits
Lope draws the Commander as a man convinced that the village belongs to him, women included. He does not hide it: he considers it an honor for the peasants that he should notice their daughters, and sees every refusal as insolence to be punished. His arrogance also leads him to another political mistake: he takes the wrong side in the war of succession, against the Catholic Monarchs. This is dramatic invention: according to Cabrera and Moros, the historical Fernán Gómez served the Monarchs loyally in that war, and their adversary was the young Master Rodrigo Téllez Girón. That double betrayal, of his vassals and of the Crown, is what allows Lope to turn the rebellion into an act the monarchs can pardon. The village does not rebel against order: it rebels against a lord who has broken it.
Lope gives him a fearsome consistency. The play opens with him offended because the young Master of Calatrava does not receive him with the courtesy he believes he is owed, and ends that scene by persuading the Master to take Ciudad Real against the Catholic Monarchs: an affront to his rank weighs more with him than loyalty to the Crown. In Act One, when Laurencia and Pascuala refuse to enter his house, the question he puts to them is an owner’s: are they not his? In Act Two, the aldermen ask him not to rob them of their honor, and he laughs at the very idea that peasants could have any. Shortly afterwards he catches Mengo defending Jacinta, has him flogged and hands the girl over to his soldiers. The pattern repeats in every scene: what is a crime for the village is, for him, a right of office. Conflict theory would describe him as a power that has no need to hide its abuses, because the law that could punish them is his to apply.
Commander Fernán Gómez
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// The crackA collective justice that is also a crime
Conflict theory explains very well why violence breaks out in Fuenteovejuna, but it carries a risk: turning any response by the oppressed into justice. The Commander’s death is also a lynching, with his body desecrated by the crowd, and the play does not hide its brutality. A legitimate cause does not make collective revenge a model.
The play itself also offers a more conservative reading than it seems: the ending does not overthrow order, it restores it. The monarchs pardon the village and take direct jurisdiction over it. Justice comes from above, not from below. Lope celebrates the rebellion against a bad lord, not against the system that had put him there. In history, the village handed itself over at once to Córdoba, and the Crown did not sanction that transfer until 1513.
Collective efficacy and its two faces
The “Fuenteovejuna, all as one” is the literary version of what Robert Sampson called collective efficacy: a community’s capacity to act together in the face of a threat. Research associates it with less crime, because neighbors who trust each other watch, intervene and protect. Fuenteovejuna also shows its other face: when institutions fail completely, that same unity can turn into violence. Prevention lies in never having to get there: institutions that also judge the powerful.
Three key ideas
- Conflict theory (Vold, 1958; Quinney, 1970) holds that criminal law reflects the interests of those with power, and that the abuses of the powerful tend to go unpunished.
- The Commander abuses the peasants and their women without any judge being able to stop him; when he abducts Laurencia, the whole village kills him and protects itself with a collective answer: “Fuenteovejuna, my lord”.
- The crack: a legitimate cause does not make a lynching a model, and Lope’s ending restores order from above rather than questioning it.
Sources · further reading
- Vold, G. B. (1958). Theoretical Criminology. Oxford University Press.
- Quinney, R. (1970). The Social Reality of Crime. Little, Brown.
- Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S. W. and Earls, F. (1997). “Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy”. Science, 277(5328), 918-924.
- Lope de Vega, F. (1619). Fuenteovejuna. In Docena parte de las comedias.
- Cabrera, E. and Moros, A. (1991). Fuenteovejuna: la violencia antiseñorial en el siglo XV. Crítica.
- Benito Ruano, E. (1993, January). “Todos a una (y algunos más)”. SABER/Leer, 61. Fundación Juan March. https://digital.march.es/fedora/objects/fjm-pub:1423/datastreams/OBJ/content
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Comendador Fernán Gómez?
Comendador Fernán Gómez (“El Comendador”) is a villain from Spanish Golden Age, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. “Who killed the Commander?
Why does Commander Fernán Gómez (The Commander) become a villain?
Conflict theory asks who writes the law and whom it protects. In Fuenteovejuna the Commander embodies it, and when the village kills him, the crime changes sides.
Which criminological theory explains Comendador Fernán Gómez?
Comendador Fernán Gómez's case is analysed through Class conflict. Conflict theory holds that criminal law reflects the interests of those with the power to write and enforce it, and that crime cannot be understood without the inequalities between groups. Fernán Gómez de Guzmán, knight commander of the Order of Calatrava in Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega, c. 1612-1614), abuses the peasants and their women with complete impunity, because no one in the village has the power to judge him. When he abducts Laurencia on her wedding day, the village rises and kills him. The play, based on an event of 1476 that historical research describes as more complex (a planned revolt with outside backing), raises the central question of the theory: what counts as crime when justice protects only one side.
