Thieves' Guild - Depictions

Depictions

A central feature of Cervantes' story Rinconete y Cortadillo, set in 16th Century Seville, is the city's strong and well-organized thieves' guild built to the model of the medieval guild. As in any other profession, a young thief must start as an apprentice and slowly work his way to become a master craftsman—in this case, a master thief. No one could come into a city and start on a career as a thief without belonging to the local guild (as Cervantes' protagonists soon find out), which would have been in many cases true also for a medieval tailor or carpenter wandering into a strange city. And the thieves have their own church where they go to pray (shared with prostitutes)—which indeed was often the case with respectable professions in a medieval city.

Using this novel to claim that such Thieves' Guilds are historically based faces difficulties. Rinconete y Cortadillo is a picaresque novel — a work of satire. The 'Thieves' Guild' being the analog of the ruling class - all the outer show of piety, respectability, even charity and ideals of justice, but robbing and killing all the same. Given this context any attempt to link this novel with a historical social reality is problematic.

The Medieval Underworld by Andrew McCall gives historical accounts of various historical criminal organizations. The closest to fictional Thieves' guild tropes arose in France - the Cours des Miracles. From this group the concept of the "King of Thieves" or "King of Beggars", who supposedly held power over all criminals in a given city, may have its origin.

Andrew McCall also gives a historical view on the life of a thief in the period. Theft was rarely a career, most often it was opportunistic. Due to brutality of medieval justice, habitual thieves would tend to have short careers. A first offender might be maimed or branded. A second offence (attested by the marks of the first) typically led to execution. A maimed man would often become a beggar and so the association between beggars and thieves existed. However, associations like the Cours des Miracles were exceptional and associations like the one described in Rinconete y Cortadillo are fictional.

Modern fantasy fiction and role-playing games took up the concept extensively, starting with the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story "Thieves' House" by Fritz Leiber, in 1943, and further stories set in Lankhmar.