Which law-enforcement brotherhood sends an officer with a warrant for Don Quixote?

The Santa Hermandad sends an officer with a warrant for Don Quixote.

The warrant follows Don Quixote’s decision to free a chain gang of galley slaves. He treats the prisoners as victims of injustice and attacks the guards, but the act is legally understood as releasing criminals under royal custody. The Santa Hermandad, a Castilian law-enforcement and peacekeeping organization, therefore orders his arrest.

The episode occurs at an inn after the group’s adventures in the Sierra Morena. When the officer produces the warrant, the priest argues that Don Quixote is insane and may not understand his actions. The officer still insists that his duty is to carry out the order, although the matter is eventually defused and Don Quixote is not taken away.

The name can be translated as “Holy Brotherhood,” which sometimes leads readers to mistake it for a religious tribunal. It was instead an armed policing institution associated especially with Castile. The Guardia Civil is a much later Spanish force, founded in the nineteenth century, so it does not fit Cervantes’s setting.