Most retellings of Pamplona’s medieval unification collapse it into one clean sentence: in 1423, King Carlos III el Noble decided the city’s three warring boroughs should become one, and so they did. That sentence is missing four earlier treaties. The Privilegio de la Unión that actually worked was not Pamplona’s first attempt to make peace between the Navarrería, the Burgo de San Cernín, and the Población de San Nicolás. It was the fifth attempt in a hundred and fifty seven years, and the only one that held.
That gap matters because it changes what earned the credit. Read the 1423 charter as a single inspired royal decision and you miss that nearly every mechanism inside it, a governing council split by borough, a shared archive, equal rights across all three districts, had already been tried in some form and had already failed, one borough at a time, going back to 1266. The remarkable thing about 1423 is not that a king finally thought to unite the city. Three failed agreements already show the boroughs and the crown had thought of it repeatedly. The remarkable thing is that this particular version of the deal worked, and kept working, for four hundred and thirteen years.
What follows draws on the surviving 13th through 15th century agreements themselves, as catalogued in Príncipe de Viana, Navarra’s own historical review, through historian María Ángeles Irurita Lusarreta’s foundational study of Pamplona’s medieval municipality and Luis Javier Fortún Pérez de Ciriza’s 2023 Real Academia de la Historia article on the Privilegio’s disputed authorship, cross-checked against the Ayuntamiento de Pamplona’s own published archive and the dedicated historical record of the 1276 Guerra de la Navarrería.
Four Treaties, Four Failures
Before 1423, Pamplona was not one city but three, stacked on the same hilltop above the Río Arga: the Navarrería, native born and built around the cathedral; the Burgo de San Cernín, founded under a 1129 charter from Alfonso el Batallador and settled by Frankish merchants; and the Población de San Nicolás, a mixed overflow district first recorded in 1184. Each had its own mayor, its own flag, its own walls, and its own laws. For the full story of how those three towns formed and why they eventually went to war, see our account of San Fermín’s medieval roots.
The peacemaking attempts started early, and none of the first four held.
In 1266, jurados from all four bodies then sharing the hilltop, San Cernín, San Nicolás, the Navarrería, and a fourth, smaller district called San Miguel, signed what the surviving document calls a simple treaty of peace and friendship. It broke within a few years. In 1276, the standoff turned into open warfare, the Guerra de la Navarrería, and the Navarrería was razed so completely that only the cathedral was left standing, sacked but upright. San Miguel and the city’s judería were destroyed alongside it. The district sat abandoned for roughly fifty years, its reconstruction not beginning in earnest until 1324.
In 1287, with the Navarrería still in ruins and San Miguel gone from the record entirely, a second peace agreement was signed, this one only between San Cernín and San Nicolás. It was a more detailed pact than the 1266 treaty, and it stayed nominally in force for the next hundred and thirty six years, all the way until the 1423 union, without ever formally including a reconstituted Navarrería in its terms. By 1327, once the Navarrería had been rebuilt enough to have a mayor and twelve jurados of its own again, that borough sent its own representatives to negotiate a narrower deal with San Cernín and San Nicolás: an agreement over shared boundary lines and land, not full political union.
Even the two-borough peace was fraying by 1390. That year, Carlos III el Noble himself, thirty three years before the union that would make his name, had to issue royal ordinances forcing San Cernín and San Nicolás into what the surviving text calls a single community and university forever. A king was already using the word forever in 1390. It did not hold either.
What the Winning Deal Actually Said
On September 8, 1423, Carlos III signed the document that finally worked, written in Romance Navarro and later elevated to the force of law before the Cortes de Navarra, the assembled Estates of the kingdom. In its own preamble, the charter states that the Universidades, the corporate governing bodies of the Burgo, the Población, and the Navarrería, had petitioned the king directly, asking that their three jurisdictions unite perpetually into a single body, in order to end the debates, disputes, injuries, and killings of the times before.
The document runs twenty nine chapters. Several of its provisions are stranger and more specific than the usual one-line summary of the Privilegio de la Unión suggests.
Governance was split by arithmetic, not sentiment. The new council held ten seats: five jurados from the Burgo, three from the Población, and two from the Navarrería, elected every year on the Sunday nearest September 8. The office of alcalde rotated: the jurados nominated three candidates, the king chose one, and the honor passed between the three former boroughs year by year, so that no single district held the mayorship twice running.
The new city hall’s location was not an accident. Chapter three ordered it built in the moat before the Torre de la Galea, a stretch of ditch on neutral ground that had belonged to none of the three boroughs, what the document calls tierra de nadie, nobody’s land. We cover what was actually built on that spot, and what survives of it today, in our piece on Plaza Consistorial. Until construction finished, the newly unified council met at the hospital attached to the church of San Cernín.
The charter even specified the city’s coat of arms down to the brushstroke. Its own text, translated from the original Romance Navarro, describes a field of azure, at the center a silver lion passant with a red tongue and claws, ringed by Navarra’s own arms, a gold chain on a red field, and above the lion a gold royal crown, marking that the kings of Navarra were customarily crowned in Pamplona’s own cathedral. That description is still, six centuries later, the coat of arms of the city.
Smaller provisions did the quiet work of erasing three identities into one. A single oak chest was ordered built within ten days to hold the union’s seals and privileges, locked with three separate keys, one held by the ranking regidor of each former borough. Boundary markers between the districts were to be torn out within the same ten days, each borough’s individual coat of arms removed and replaced with the new city’s arms. New fortifications between the boroughs were banned outright going forward: existing walls could be kept in repair, but nobody was permitted to build a new one against a neighbor again.
The Man Who Probably Wrote It
Carlos III signed the Privilegio, but he almost certainly did not draft it. The royal secretary Simón de Leoz produced the physical parchment and its copies, but he had no legal training, which made him an unlikely author for a document this dense with procedural law.
In a 2023 article for the Real Academia de la Historia, historian Luis Javier Fortún Pérez de Ciriza made the case for a different author: Lope Jiménez de Lumbier, a career royal jurist who had served the crown for roughly thirty years by 1423, including a stretch as alcalde de la Corte Real, the kingdom’s highest judicial post below the throne itself. Jiménez de Lumbier is the only officeholder named in the Privilegio’s closing formula who was neither a nobleman nor a churchman, a detail Fortún reads as a signature of sorts.
There is a paper trail behind the theory. Two weeks after the Privilegio was completed, on September 25, 1423, Jiménez de Lumbier received a payment of three hundred libras “de gracia especial” from the crown, a bonus equal to three quarters of his four hundred libra annual salary. Two colleagues who had also spent that summer in royal service noticed the gap and complained. Three months later, the king smoothed it over with smaller grants of a hundred libras each to all three men. It is not proof. It is the kind of paper trail a modern investigator would call motive and opportunity.
The men who took office under the new charter are named in the record too. Simón Clavería, formerly alcalde of the Navarrería alone, became the first alcalde of a unified Pamplona. The first ten jurados were Miguel Laceilla, Martín Cruzat, Juan Zalba, Salvador de Roncesvalles, and Martín Lumbier for the Burgo; Domingo de Orbaiz, Juan Palmer, and Martín Miguel Ezcaburu for the Población; and Martín de Moriello and Arnaldo de Ezcároz for the Navarrería, the exact five, three, two split the charter demanded.
What’s Left of the Deal
The Privilegio de la Unión governed Pamplona’s town government, essentially without interruption, from September 8, 1423 until September 7, 1836, four hundred and thirteen years, longer than the United States has existed. It outlasted every one of the four agreements that preceded it combined.
Pamplona still keeps the date. Every September 8, the Cuerpo de Ciudad, the city’s traditional civic body, parades in formal dress with the Comparsa de Gigantes y Cabezudos, dantzaris, txistularis, and the municipal band La Pamplonesa to the cathedral, the same building that survived 1276, for a floral offering at the tomb of Carlos III and his wife Leonor. A medieval market fills the streets around the Plaza Consistorial the nearest weekend, and the Ayuntamiento opens the original document, still held in its archive, for public viewing. In 2023, the six hundredth anniversary of the signing, the Cuerpo de Ciudad procession itself was formally declared a Bien de Interés Cultural, a protected piece of Navarra’s intangible cultural heritage rather than just an informal custom.
The union’s fingerprints are still on the map. Streets like Calle Nueva trace the gaps where internal walls once stood between the boroughs. And every July, the modern encierro crosses the exact seam where three separate town governments once ended: the route through the Ayuntamiento stretch runs directly over ground that, until 1423, belonged to nobody at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Privilegio de la Unión?
The Privilegio de la Unión was the charter King Carlos III el Noble signed on September 8, 1423, merging Pamplona’s three separate medieval boroughs, the Navarrería, the Burgo de San Cernín, and the Población de San Nicolás, into a single city with one government, one coat of arms, and one set of laws.
Was 1423 Pamplona’s first attempt to unite the three boroughs?
No. Pamplona’s boroughs had already tried and failed to make lasting peace four times before 1423: a broken 1266 treaty among all the boroughs, a 1287 pact between only two of them, a narrower 1327 boundary agreement, and a 1390 royal ordinance that also failed to hold permanently. The 1423 Privilegio was the fifth attempt, and the first to last.
Who actually wrote the Privilegio de la Unión?
The royal secretary Simón de Leoz produced the physical document, but historian Luis Javier Fortún Pérez de Ciriza has argued the true drafter was Lope Jiménez de Lumbier, a career royal jurist who received an unusually large bonus payment two weeks after the charter was finalized.
Is the Privilegio de la Unión still celebrated in Pamplona?
Yes. Every September 8, Pamplona’s Cuerpo de Ciudad processes to the cathedral in formal dress, a medieval market fills the streets near Plaza Consistorial, and the original 1423 document goes on public display. The procession itself was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural in 2023.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.