In this study I offer a new method for determining to what extent Spanish political prose writers should be considered Machiavellian, based not on their own self-fashioning, but on the observable appropriation of Machiavelli's vocabulary and theoretical framework used to deal with the unpredictable and the contingent in political life. As such, this new method allows us to make historically valid judgments regarding the scope of Machiavelli's influence over the subsequent political discourse in Spain. This method reveals that Maravall, over half a century ago, was in part correct, because he recognized that many Spaniards incorporated important aspects of Machiavellian thought; his over-generalizations are explainable because he was writing before the ideological reading of Machiavelli, employed in this study, had fully developed. Maravall simply lacked the tools necessary to pinpoint not only the specific Machiavellian borrowings but a general acceptance of key changes to the tradition ushered in by Machiavelli that Spaniards would later incorporate into their own political discourse. On the other hand, I argue that more recently historians such as Fernández-Santamaría and Bireley essentially brought the Counter-Reformation anti-Machiavellian tradition up-to-date. They accepted the anti-Machiavellians' descriptions of the so-called “doctrine” or “school” of Machiavelli and his supposed followers and, as a result, their own self-characterization by contrast to this invented doctrine.

As I have demonstrated throughout this study, the breadth and depth of Machiavelli's impact in early modern Spain have been vastly underestimated until now. Machiavelli's texts changed the face of Spanish political thought. His general reorganization of the traditional dichotomies between virtue and vice, king and tyrant, controlled the parameters of the discussions found in the political essays written in Spain from around the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the Baroque and beyond, both in and around the courts of the successive Hapsburg monarchs, but also abroad, in important centers of the Spanish empire such as the Netherlands, Portugal and Mexico. Many of the Spanish political writers of the early modern period demonstrate a direct familiarity with Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses.