The First Pages on Political Culture in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds

THE FIRST PAGES

Political Culture in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds

with Mario Graña Taborelli and Adrian Masters

Published on 18 February 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. 25 February 2025 sees the joint launch of Mario Graña Taborelli‘s Jurisdictional Battlefields: Political Culture, Theatricality, and Spanish Expeditions in Charcas in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century and Adrian Masters’s We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World. Both authors examine the political culture in the early modern Iberian worlds and reveal that the Empire allowed for dialogue where we least expect it. Whether that is the exchange between the Spanish and Indigenous people in the ‘war frontier’ of Charcas (present-day Bolivia) or the significant influence in governance and law-making that
ordinary subjects were wielding.

Mario Graña Taborelli: Jurisdictional Battlefields

INTRODUCTION

‘O mundo nâo se nos dá em espetáculo; o mundo é o espetáculo que as sociedades constroem, organizando-o e impondon-lhe uma narrativa.’

‘The world is not displayed in front of us as a show; the world is a show that societies build, organising it and imposing a narrative on it.’
António Hespanha¹

At the peak of their careers, three Spanish men of high social status – the holder of a grant of indigenous peoples or encomendero, Martín de Almendras; the fifth viceroy of Peru, don Francisco de Toledo (1569–1581); and the royal official Juan Lozano Machuca – left the comforts of their late sixteenth-century urban lives behind, to travel to remote areas in the company of relatives, soldiers, priests, and hundreds of indigenous peoples and their chiefs, not in search of El Dorado and its promising wealth, but looking to strengthen something less tangible yet still relevant to their future and that of the Spanish monarchy: their political authority. This book describes their journeys, as well as the historical journey of the process of implementation, settlement, and consolidation of the jurisdiction of the Spanish Crown on the borders of Charcas, in present-day Bolivia and the northwest of Argentina, a region that was at the time the jewel in the crown because of its silver mines in Potosí.

Based on the early modern political culture that saw justice as the ultimate purpose of rule, both divine and on earth, jurisdiction is here understood …

Adrian Masters: We, the King

PRELUDE: A Peruvian Mestizo at the Spanish Court

Early morning, on the 26th of January 1588, a porter walked through the southeast courtyard of the royal palace of Madrid. Fumbling with a set of large keys, he unlocked the large doors of the king’s foremost
institution of lawmaking, privilege-distribution, and adjudication: the Council of the Indies. This handyman – his name was Juan de Cendejas – checked if the council had enough candles, paper, ink, and string. He inspected the chamber pots, and adjusted and wound the clock.² Damiana, a black woman, soon joined him, sweeping the floor, and kindling a fire in the hearth.³

Business was about to begin, and the cold, dingy offices took on some life. Juan and Damiana were joined by the council president, six ministers, a secretary, two scribes, a court reporter, a royal attorney, and various young assistants. These paper-pushers shuffled in from the cold past a small but growing group of impatient vassals seeking news about their cases. The secretary curtly promised these subjects he would see to their business, before pulling the doors closed to keep the fire’s warmth in – and prying eyes out.

Inside, the secretary’s assistants laid out a stack of papers on the desk. The fireplace was slowly thawing the room. Ministers began reading by candlelight to the ticking of the clock. Mercifully, it had been a slow week. Work usually flooded in during the fall, when the Armadas brought not …

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MARIO GRAÑA TABORELLI is a historian of the Early Modern Iberian Worlds who works on political cultures, law and social history, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies. Read his essay on the Charcas ‘war frontier’ here.

ADRIAN MASTERS is a scholar of Spanish Colonial history who studies early modern Spanish colonial law, racialization, petitioning, religion, and mobility and teaches at the University of Trier in Germany.

The joint book launch will take place on 25 February 2025 at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image: Mapa de España en 1570 realizado por Ortelius. Via Wikicommons and courtesy of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional (Madrid, España).