Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Note on the Maps
- Chapter 1 Rethinking the Hispanic Monarchy in the First Global Age
- Chapter 2 John II's Controversial Reward
- Chapter 3 The Catholic Monarchs and the Legacy of John II
- Chapter 4 Rebellion Against Crown Administration as a Defense of Absolute Royal Authority
- Chapter 5 Pursuing Justice: Due Process, Procedure, and the Adjudication of a Major Lawsuit in the Absence of Coercive Muscle
- Chapter 6 Making Judgments: Letrado Theories and Interpretive Schemes
- Chapter 7 Philip II, The Great Fear, and the New Authoritarianism
- Chapter 8 The Paradox of Absolute Royal Authority
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Chapter 1 - Rethinking the Hispanic Monarchy in the First Global Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Note on the Maps
- Chapter 1 Rethinking the Hispanic Monarchy in the First Global Age
- Chapter 2 John II's Controversial Reward
- Chapter 3 The Catholic Monarchs and the Legacy of John II
- Chapter 4 Rebellion Against Crown Administration as a Defense of Absolute Royal Authority
- Chapter 5 Pursuing Justice: Due Process, Procedure, and the Adjudication of a Major Lawsuit in the Absence of Coercive Muscle
- Chapter 6 Making Judgments: Letrado Theories and Interpretive Schemes
- Chapter 7 Philip II, The Great Fear, and the New Authoritarianism
- Chapter 8 The Paradox of Absolute Royal Authority
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The Topic and Its Importance
This book focuses on judicial administration. During its “Golden Age” from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the kingdom of Castile experienced a remarkable proliferation of judicial institutions, which historians have generally seen as part of a metanarrative of “state-building.” Yet Castile's frontiers were extremely porous, and a Crown government that could not control the kingdom's borders exhibited neither the ability to obtain information and shape affairs nor the centrality of Court politics that many historians claim in an effort to craft a tidy narrative of this period. It was not the “power” of the institutions of a developing “state” that kept Castilians loyal to the monarchy. Contemporaries expected that rule by a monarch who possessed “absolute royal authority,” which is what I mean by “absolute monarchy,” would provide the best means of obtaining good government, which they defined as the ability to provide for the commonwealth (res publica, república) justice, domestic tranquility, and peace. Castilians remained loyal because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and they believed that the sovereign possessed “absolute royal authority” to see that justice was done. This expectation of royal justice served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- 'By My Absolute Royal Authority'Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005