For empires to exist, they must be endlessly created and recreated. Stories of powerful men who shape the world with the stroke of a pen are fictions – and these themselves must also be collectively created by the many. As John Milton wrote in 1651, “a king has not made us, but rather, we the king.”1

This chapter provides the first overview of the gobierno petition-writing process. It focuses on how subjects would create and structure these documents, devoting particular attention to the contributions of many intermediary figures: formal and informal assistants, translators, and procurators, as well as notaries and others. It frames petitioning as a paper ritual emulating the vassal–ruler encounter in which the subject’s voluntad flows to the heart and mind of the monarch, and asks how these lifeless papers could come – through a scaffolded series of legal fictions – to contain this volition. Specifically, vassals might reach to the fictions of notarial truth and signatures to seal this will to manuscripts. The result was that a wide range of subjects, even illiterate ones, might partake in the petition-and-response system. Moreover, the social backgrounds of these intermediaries could be quite diverse, meaning that before these texts even reached the court this dialogue was already touched by many actants.

Beginning with the mysterious problem of the so-called “caste system,” this introduction questions the ubiquitous scholarly understanding of the monarchy as a cabal of lawmakers determined to legislate every detail of vassals’ lives. It introduces a very different perspective – namely, that subjects submitting gobierno or administrative-legislative petitions not only prompted the vast majority of the empire’s dizzying thousands of royal decrees – including those concerning novel categories of human difference. It explains how both liberal-era and Habsburg mythologies of Spanish imperial rule envisioned the king as the primary author of these texts, and proposes a labor-oriented, Actor-Network Theory-inspired alternative explanation. It introduces the petition-and-response system, explaining that early modern participants sought intimate lord–ruler dialogue, in which vassals and lords endowed their writings with voluntad or volition, in order to save the consciences of all involved. It also argues that in order for this communication to thrive, a number of legal fictions – including the transfer of voluntad across the globe – was necessary. Also lurking in the distance was violence against the saboteurs of this ruler–ruled dialogue. Lastly, this segment introduces the source material and book structure.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This chapter argues that although in the 1490s to 1540s council ministers’ operations were considerably patrimonialist, determined largely by each member’s family interests, by the 1540s to 1590s the Council became substantially more impartial. This occurred in large part due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council’s fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid’s anxieties about women’s sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. More concretely, monarchs and ministers feared that some of their colleagues and subalterns would become the playthings of court women, who themselves had connections with vassals seeking their cases’ resolution. The actions of indigenous artisans here were particularly notable, as subjects regaled female courtiers with their exquisite goldwork. The resulting backlash against powerful women ensured that gobierno petitioning did not become the domain of the powerful few in the 1500s, and the fiction of the council as mere instruments for the monarchs persisted strongly throughout the second half of the century.

By September 1588, Pedro Rengifo had been living and languishing in Spain for some four years; an illness was partly responsible.1 He had petitioned for a three-year renewal on his expired travel license and made clear his desire to return to Peru, complaining that his long stay in Madrid had bankrupted him.2 There is little information about the ordeal of his return, other than that he left with his legislation in hand. The mestizo was in Lima by October 24, 1592 at the latest, when he and his wife, Juana Rodríguez de Castro, received yet another power of attorney – this time to petition the Charcas High Court for privileges on a client’s behalf.3 Once home in La Paz he clearly thrived, for between 1597 and 1599 he appears to be lending considerable sums of money and selling llamas, wheat, and wine to local merchants and officials.4

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. Damiana, a black woman, soon joined him, sweeping the floor, and kindling a fire in the hearth.

This chapter explains the council and king’s ratification of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. It outlines the pathways through which vassals of all social backgrounds suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council’s overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions’ vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a multistep archival methodology, this chapter demonstrates how scholars can match vassals’ petitions to decrees, then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire’s agenda from the ground up. It considers the lawmaking royal signature, as well as some vassals’ dangerous decision to attempt its forgery. Lastly, it reflects on the nature of the de partes/de oficio divide in decree production, the number of gobierno royal decrees, and the costs of their production for vassals.

Petitions were deeply material objects, despite the era’s idealized fiction of the frictionless lord–vassal encounter of wills. This chapter describes how sixteenth-century subjects managed to send their petitions to the royal court, through a daunting and often informal network of couriers. These agents moved petitions, helped and hindered by weather and geography, mastering ocean currents, perilous winds, riverine systems, and mountain paths. Here, the labor contributions of non-Spaniards was highly evident, as Indigenous communities, Afro-descendant rowers and muleteers, and others dominated many of the empire’s most daunting and crucial routes. Many sovereign indigenous and Afro-descendant subjects also sabotaged this mail system from the outside, sometimes in conjunction with British pirates and others. This chapter describes how imperial denizens coped with such sabotage, not least internal interference. It also describes the weakness of the official postal system, the supremacy of merchant couriers, the consequences of antipiracy armadas, and express services. It highlights the complex iniquities and limited successes of this dialogue, revealing that, despite constant obstacles and against all odds, the empire’s communications system – even though slow and often inconsistent – preserved the fiction of vassal–ruler dialogue.

This chapter further explores the relationship between knowledge, archives, and power, picking up when the monarch established Madrid as the capital in 1561. This enabled ministers to establish the first European rational factual archives to exercise dominion over overseas domains. My main argument is that the Council of the Indies and, starting in the 1580s, the special imperial boards managed to create three improved spheres of imperial administration thanks to these pioneering factual archives, in the areas of war, finance, and Franciscan affairs. I analyse how royal ministers largely succeeded in implementing various decision-making innovations: understanding the Indies in a synoptic way, improving the allocation of scarce financial and military resources, and identifying dubious requests coming from the New World. In addition, I underline how already in the 1590s this limited but important archival revolution had unexpected social and epistemological consequences within the administrative field. There was the expansion of the power of the secretaries, notaries, and other subordinates whose work and archival expertise allowed the ministers to successfully if selectively improve their most important decisions. This chapter also underscores the important role of secretaries’ wives as archival custodians.

For decades, two sophisticated historiographies, postcolonialism and critical archival studies emphasized that knowledge is power and that archives are power. These two formulas have been subject to recent criticism from a small group of renowned researchers, who stress that knowledge and archives do not possess such a linear and direct relationship with domination. It remains for us, therefore, to explore how, and in which specific social contexts, knowledge and archives allow administrations to achieve more power. This chapter follows the Council of the Indies during its nomadic existence, from 1524 to 1561, in which ministers prioritized communication with vassals (along with a subsequent incoherence of imperial policies) over an assertive, coherent program. This chapter also explores the decision-making technologies of this nomadic council, especially how it applied limited textual hermeneutics to petitions. It also follows the extraordinary juntas: committees which occasionally convened to solve imperial crises and which applied more sophisticated knowledge-based decisions to Indies problems. Nonetheless, I argue, the Council’s members recognized the inefficacy of its theological approaches and its largely nonarchival hermeneutics, setting the stage for reform.