(PDF) Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies. A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire

(PDF) Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies. A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire
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Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies. A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire
Alejandra B Osorio
2018, Radical History Review
October 11, 2025
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Abstract
National geographies (and narratives) have characterized the boundaries of the his- toriographies of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Empire, producing works that are too often limited to case studies of nation-states (Spain, Italy, Peru, Mexico, etc.). Atlantic studies proposed an alternative to national frameworks for the writing of history that created new (anachronistic) frontiers for the study of empire. The notion of colonial and understandings of the geopolitics of modernity as one of centers and peripheries further obscured the wider workings of the Spanish Empire. Through an analysis of the political culture in various locales of the Spanish Habsburg world, this article proposes new approaches for thinking and writing such histories of empire while reflecting on the limits that the analytical and conceptual frameworks of colonial Latin American and Atlantic history pose for the study of a vast empire with possessions well beyond these geographical locations that was yet to become colonial.
Key takeaways
AI
National frameworks limit the historiographical analysis of the Spanish Habsburg Empire's vast geopolitical landscape.
The article critiques the anachronistic frontiers created by Atlantic studies in understanding empire.
Political culture in the Spanish Empire operated through hierarchical interdependence among metropolitan centers.
Ceremonial practices reflected and reinforced monarchical authority across the empire's diverse locales.
The notion of colonial versus non-colonial spaces complicates traditional understandings of empire and modernity.
Figures (1)
Figure 1. Dynasty of the Peruvian Empire. Antonio de Ulloa, Relacion historica del viaje a la America meridional, segunda parte, Madrid, M.DCC.XLVIII (1748). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Brown University
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REFLEC TIONS ON THE PREMODERN

Of National Boundaries
and Imperial Geographies
A New Radical History
of the Spanish Habsburg Empire

Alejandra B. Osorio

The Spanish Habsburg Empire was a vast urban empire ruled through royal
paper and ceremony by an absent king. Its possessions in Asia, America, Europe,
and northern Africa were physically articulated through a complex web of cities,
towns, and ports. This intricate matrix of urban spaces was culturally and politi-
cally integrated by a rich ceremonial life that shared a common ritual grammar
that borrowed from and traveled across many spaces, geographies, and times. These
cultural exchanges created a cultural idiom that operated throughout the empire in
similar ways. The political culture that by the seventeenth century characterized the
Spanish Habsburg world was the result of new technologies of empire made up of
sophisticated deployments of royal simulacra; the creation of new centers of power
and spaces for its exercise; the design and implementation of new urban patterns
and the relocation of cities and populations; the production and use of censuses
(padrones), geographical surveys, maps, histories, grammars, and dictionaries; and
the wide circulation and use of royal paper, letters, and printed reports, all now
classified and stored in newly established archives.1 Studies of empire tend to see
these technologies as later developments of the “modern” nineteenth-century Brit-
ish Empire.2 Furthermore, national geographies (and narratives), more often than

Radical History Review
Issue 130 (January 2018) doi 10.1215/01636545-4217907
© 2018 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

100

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101

not, characterize the boundaries of the historiographies of the Spanish Empire, with
case studies limited to Spain, Portugal, Italy, Peru, Mexico, the Philippines, and so
on.3 In the 1970s and 1980s, Atlantic studies proposed an alternative to national
frameworks for the writing of history that, as it turns out, proved to be as problem-
atic as well, in that it created new (anachronistic) frontiers for the study of the Span-
ish Habsburg world. In addition, the notion of colonial and understandings of the
geopolitics of modernity as one of centers and peripheries have further obscured the
wider workings of the Spanish Empire.
Through an analysis of the political culture in various locales of the Spanish
Habsburg world, what follows is a reflection on the limits that the (still) prevalent
analytical and conceptual frameworks of so- called colonial Latin American and
Atlantic history pose for the study of a vast empire with possessions well beyond
either of these geographical locations, including one that had yet to become colonial.4
As Jack P. Green and Philip Morgan argued, “Atlantic history is an analytic
construct and an explicit category of historical analysis.” It was developed by his-
torians to “organize the study of . . . the emergence in the fifteenth century (and
the subsequent growth) of the Atlantic basin as a site for demographic, economic,
social, cultural . . . exchanges among and within the four continents surrounding the
Atlantic Ocean.”5 While the use of an Atlantic framework can be traced back to the
1870s (Herbert Baxter), a more recent iteration took shape in the 1970s and 1980s
(Bernard Bailyn, James Lockhart, Aida Altman, and John Elliott), and another in
the 1990s and 2000s (Jorge Cañizares, Tamar Herzog, and Pedro Cardim, among
others), that have, in tandem with national boundaries within the four continents
surrounding the Atlantic, since become the privileged, if not exclusive, site for the
study of the Spanish Hapsburg world. This emphasis on Atlantic dynamics and loca-
tions has overlooked or simply ignored the role and influences of Spain’s Pacific-
Asia and African possessions.6 Moreover, the scholarly fragmentation of the Spanish
Empire into European, Atlantic and/or American, and Asiatic parts has resulted
in problematic delineations of space based on future geographies and geopolitics.
Furthermore, national understandings have anachronistically reinforced binaries
such as center-periphery, metropolis-colony, and original copies/derivative, and have
shaped ways to think history and historical processes derived from national and
progressive histories.
Within such national frameworks, the sign colonial Latin America was
invented as an index of everything that is not modern, and it is routinely opposed to
the sign modern Latin America. The rise and expansion of this modern are, further-
more, always associated with the rise of the West, and the role of Spain in the forma-
tion of the modern spirit is often obscured (or simply ignored) by the leading roles
accorded to England, Germany, France, and Italy. In my previous work, I suggested
a different narrative of modernity and empire where so- called colonial or periph-
eral locations like seventeenth-century Lima, Manila, or Naples were metropolitan

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102 Radical History Review

centers with their own spheres of complex influence and activity. A more productive
way, therefore, to describe and think (about) the imperial relationship among these
various bodies of the Spanish Empire (be it the Viceroyalty of Peru, Lima and the
Iberian Peninsula, or Madrid and Manila) is as “a composite rule conditioned by an
unequal interdependence among . . . hierarchically ordered metropolitan centers.” 7

The Antiquity of the Newly Made Modern
This interdependence of hierarchically ordered metropolitan centers in the seven-
teenth century was modern, defined at the time as the newly made without the
authority of antiquity.8 More important, this modern of the newly made was based
not on a deep immemorial (original) antiquity or past, but on seventeenth-century
concepts of greatness as outlined by Giovanni Botero (ca. 1593) that included geo-
graphical location near navigable waters, urban architectural magnificence, the
presence of a nobility, the concentration of commercial wealth, a representative and
popular heterogeneity, a cosmopolitan culture, and the wide availability of luxury
goods for consumption by the lower strata of society, as well as new(ly made) gene-
alogies, all of which were arranged differently in the various locations of this vast
empire.9 The greatness of this modern resided in its capacity to approximate (in form
and content) classical antiquity, but because its inspiration was now found in the
“true” faith of Catholicism, it was thought to be superior to that of pagan antiquity.10
The seventeenth-century modern, lacking the authority of antiquity, conse-
quently developed a new epistemology that conferred authority to the newly made
by connecting it to new understandings and a new materiality of antiquity, evident,
for example, in period translations of architectural treatises, such as Sebastian Ser-
lio’s I sette libri dell’architecttura (ca. 1534).11 This process is also found in the his-
tories of Spain written in the sixteenth century that not only highlighted the new
importance of the city but also (re)invented its ancient history. This new history
(reflected in the writings of, e.g., Florián de Ocampo and Juan de Mariana), among
other things, intended to locate the deepest ancestral origins of the Spanish people
in the Iberian Peninsula, at the same time making them the founding peoples of
other locations in the empire, such as Sicily.12 This search for new ancestral origins
and ancient authority in a deep antiquity served as justification (foundations) for a
new political project, granting the monarchy legitimacy by establishing deep his-
torical roots in its various possessions.13 This authority of the newly made, based on
an antiquity of recent creation, was partly derived from the invention of new and
diverse genealogies, such as that of the Imperio del Peru (Empire of Peru) that wove
into one seamless continuous line of imperial descent Inca emperors and those of
the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (see fig. 1).14 Beyond new genealogies, the creation
and organization of archives to house and order the massive bodies of royal paper-
work being produced worked to classify and structure the empire as founts of politi-
cal legitimacy and local identity.15 These genealogies and archives, furthermore,

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 103

Figure 1. Dynasty of the Peruvian Empire. Antonio de Ulloa, Relacion historica del viaje a la America
meridional, segunda parte, Madrid, M.DCC.XLVIII (1748). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library,
Brown University

worked in tandem with the production of knowledge — through the elaboration of
maps; the writing and publication of (local and imperial) histories, grammars, and
dictionaries; and the formation of a historical memory and of local imperial corpo-
rate identities — further anchoring the empire’s authority (and that of its cities and
communities) in a deep past of recent creation.
As is well known, beginning in the fifteenth century new territories were
incorporated into the Spanish monarchy through aggregation and integration.16
Those incorporated through aggregation retained their laws and privileges, while
those incorporated by integration became accessory to an existing crown. Initially
the New World territories were incorporated as accessory to those of Castile and
subject to its laws. With time, however, aggregation came to be viewed as a superior
form of political organization, and the protection of the “law and custom” (ley y
costumbre) of each place became the governing practice, even in territories such
as those in the New World of America that were acquired through conquest.17 By
the seventeenth century, American elites in New Spain and Peru insisted that the
concessions of sovereignty were made to Spain by the Aztecs and the Incas, reflect-

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104 Radical History Review

ing their voluntary aggregation to the Crown of Castile. Through these claims, New
World elites hoped to attain and ensure rights and privileges equal to those of other
kingdoms of the Crown, increase their respective autonomy before the Crown,
deepen their local powers, and consolidate the new stature of their respective
kingdoms within the empire.18 The incorporation by aggregation also allowed the
American kingdoms the creation of antigüedad (antiquity) by making it possible to
claim the existence of ancestral genealogies (a deep past) upon which to build their
own ancient history and assert their own dominance over other kingdoms (a form of
traslatio imperii) in the empire.19
The greatness of this modern of the newly made resided, as noted, in part in
its semblance of a classical antiquity, now rooted in its inspiration by the (true) Cath-
olic faith.20 The Catholic universal monarchy of the Spanish Habsburgs promoted
many of their subjects to sainthood in Rome. The actions and image developed by
the Spanish Habsburgs in seventeenth-century Rome were themselves attempts to
identify with the first Christian emperor of antiquity, Constantine.21 Beatification
and canonization cases were manifestations of a pietas hispanica promoted through
the cult of saints, part of a political theology where the power of the prince was
legitimated by his defense of Catholicism.22 The seventeenth century saw fifteen
canonizations of Spanish Habsburg saints from all corners of the empire.23 Beati-
fication and canonization cases were often also tied to larger processes of creating
a local antiquity and thus used by kingdoms to establish their own Christian gene-
alogies with Rome. Placing saints in Rome required (and reflected) resources and
influence, and the ability to successfully install a Spanish Habsburg subject in the
Catholic pantheon translated into symbolic (and material) capital in the court in
Madrid, locally and in the empire.24 For example, the canonization of Santa Rosa de
Lima in 1671 (the only American saint before the eighteenth century) consolidated
the viceregal City of the Kings (as Lima was then known) as the legitimate head of
the vast viceroyalty of Peru. Furthermore, Rosa’s designation by the monarch as
patron saint of all overseas territories and the Philippines transformed the viceregal
capital into the symbolic head of the Spanish Empire.25 Such genealogies were not
limited to Rome and Catholicism. The Spanish Habsburgs legitimated their power
by fashioning themselves descendants of Aeneas.26 Likewise, new genealogies were
created and used in new possessions by local indigenous lords, like the caciques of
the valley of Lima, who invented an Inca descent for their cacicazgos, even when
their office and domains were recent products of the Spanish conquest.27
This necessity to establish antigüedad became an issue for cities throughout
the empire. In 1596 in Madrid, established in 1561 by Philip II as the permanent
site for his royal court and the administrative center of the empire, Fray Domingo
de Mendoza, promoter of the canonization of Isidro Labrador (later the patron saint
of the Villa of Madrid), requested funds to publish a history of the “things distin-
guished and memorable, ecclesiastical and secular, of the antigüedad and nobility

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 105

of this villa [of Madrid] performed in the present and the past in the principal cities
and villas of this kingdom.”28 This history, in addition to extolling past events and
accomplishments of the Villa of Madrid (and of its candidate to sainthood), also
established its origins in an ancient settlement presumably founded by the Greeks.
Leaving aside the veracity and politics of these claims, the importance of hagiogra-
phies of urban saints (and of candidates to sainthood) and chorographies partially
rested on their printed accumulation, which contributed to augmenting the city’s
prestige, defined not only in terms of its close relationship to Catholicism but also
by their ability to establish an ancestral relationship to a deep classical antiquity.29
While it is by now accepted that the discovery of the New World and the
extension of the Holy Roman Empire posed new (and unprecedented) challenges
to existing forms of political rule in the Old World, the historiography has been
less prone to noting that many of the solutions to these new political challenges
were introduced and (often) worked out in the New World context before they were
introduced and became established practice in the European empire. 30 This lag
in understanding is due in part to the frameworks used to write the history of this
period. From a center-periphery linear perspective this scholarship takes Europe
to be the origin and center of all cultural and political production. So, too, national
historical frameworks treat the various geographical locations of this large empire
as if they too neatly coincided with discretely bounded (geographical and political)
national spaces (Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Italy, Spain, etc.), as previously noted.
Such Eurocentric and national frameworks treat local circumstances in isolation
of larger (and more complex) processes of interaction, often limiting the scope and
magnitude of the exchanges and cultural formations that took place in spaces that,
more often than not, transcended not just oceans and continents, but also (what
were to be) future national boundaries.31 One outcome of such an approach has
been a general understanding and acceptance that cultural forms, political institu-
tions, and social and economic structures were produced in Europe first and then
exported to imperial peripheries, where they were received and at most negotiated
during their implementation according to local circumstances.32 The concept of an
Old World juxtaposed to a New(ly discovered) World has further masked the new-
ness (and thus modernness, as this concept was then understood, by associating the
new with peripheral and underdeveloped) of the political culture that came to rule
over the Spanish Habsburg Empire as a whole after 1519.
The notion of an original Europe with derivative overseas possessions also
stems from notions of the Spanish monarchy as a historical unchanging continuum
that began with the (late medieval) reign of Isabella and Ferdinand, the Catholic
kings under whom the discovery of the New World took place, and ended with the
last (absolutist) Bourbon in the nineteenth century. Rather than see the Spanish
monarchy as a historical monolith, however, 1519 should be understood as a moment
of rupture not only in the history of the Indies (broadly defined), but also in that of

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106 Radical History Review

Europe. In 1519 Charles I de las Españas became Charles V Holy Roman Emperor.33
In America, in 1519 Hernán Cortes launched his conquest of Tenochtitlan.34 These
two events served as points of departure for all sorts of new relationships, prac-
tices, and understandings not only between America and the Iberian Peninsula,
but also for all the European possessions under Charles V’s dominion as both Holy
Roman Emperor and King of Spain.35 Understanding 1519 as a series of ruptures
further suggests that the political culture developed in America after 1519 (and post-
1570s in the Philippines) did not derive from knowledges or practices already in
place and well established in Spain or its European possessions and merely copied
and negotiated by its so- called colonies but, rather, that forms of rulership, laws,
urban structures and practices, and ceremonial performances — in other words, the
entire political culture under the Spanish Habsburgs — were more broadly devised
coevally in this new worldwide context and developed over time through mutual
influences. Such a reframing suggests that familiar dichotomies — East-West, center-
periphery, colonial-metropolitan — are later elaborations, as they did not pertain to
the seventeenth-century Spanish imperial geopolitics.36

The City, the Plaza, and the Present Invisible King
The proper functioning and cohesiveness of the body politic of the vast Spanish
Habsburg Empire were ensured by the royal image. The “presence” of the king
in his various dominions was central both to the cultural viability of the imperial
political system and to the unity of its society.37 Surprisingly, few works to date have
undertaken the study of this royal presence in the imperial political culture that
unified the empire across oceans and continents and its role in the creation of alle-
giances (or love and obedience in the parlance of the time) to a distant Spanish mon-
arch.38 Yet, from Charles V on, a fundamental new challenge to monarchical rule
was how to make the king present everywhere, all the time, and accessible to various
audiences throughout its far-flung dominions.39 Meeting this challenge required the
development and implementation of new technologies of rulership, representations
of power, and new spaces for the exercise of that power, now always from a distance.
It has been argued that, while in the seventeenth century the image (or idea)
of the king was clear for a European, this was less so for a Creole or an Indian in
the New World context, owing in large part to distance and form.40 Nevertheless,
since the late sixteenth century, the clarity of the king’s image to ordinary European
subjects was also increasingly mediated by simulacra. More important, this shift
in the technologies of royal representation may have been linked to the political
demands and lessons of imperial rule abroad. The king’s invisibility, both in Europe
and abroad, was due in part to a new system of ritual life that closely resembled
sacred rites and that sought to render the Spanish king more present in ceremonies
in order to exercise his monarchical powers.41 In addition, after the establishment
of Madrid, Spanish monarchs considerably diminished their travels outside their

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 107

peninsular possessions, thereafter adopting a ceremonial style that allowed for the
exercise of rule through simulacra, the precursor to which had already been well
established in the cities of the New World. With some exceptions in Madrid and
certainly other Castilian sites of the Spanish Habsburg royal court, in Spain itself
the king became increasingly invisible, yet more powerful (and present) throughout
his worldwide possessions, regardless of distance.42
Intimately connected with the presence and power of the monarch was that
of the city of his courtly residence. As the image of the king worked to centralize
culture and politics around his body and simulacra, the establishment of a fixed
residence for his court and for the administration of the empire in 1561 in Madrid
worked to establish a stable center for his empire. This model of centralized orderly
imperial political rule had, however, already been established (and thus amply
rehearsed) in America with the creation of the viceroyalties of New Spain in 1535
and Peru in 1542 and the designation of Mexico City and Lima as their respective
capitals and seats of their viceregal courts and royal administration.43 These prior
experiences abroad suggest that they helped to shape not only Philip II’s designs
(and understandings) of Madrid as the new political center for his empire, but also
how the replication of such designs and understandings throughout the Spanish
Habsburg world ultimately tied king and city into one space for the exercise of
legitimate monarchical rule in absentia. Moreover, this suggests how similar urban
designs and ceremonial uses of urban spaces, together with certain forms of archi-
tecture (churches, convents, palaces, and royal houses) provided essential physical
permanent places, as well as spaces for making the absent king present in his world-
wide dominions. This production of space (the repetition of urban patterns in mul-
tiple locations of the Spanish world) worked in tandem with time — the repetition of
a calendar of kingly ceremonies (and the various writings that contained them) — to
endow and connect specific cities with the aura and authority of the Spanish king.
This simultaneously conferred new degrees of power and authority on the celebrant
cities themselves throughout the empire.
The privileged space for the exercise of kingly power from the sixteenth
century on was therefore the “theatrical” of the city, now also conceptualized as
an orderly space for the ostentatious exhibition of powers. In the Spanish overseas
possessions (as would increasingly become the practice also in Europe), the stage
for this new political cultural practice was the plaza. The central actor in this new
public political theater was the absent king, who nonetheless was always omnipres-
ent in his simulacra, in buildings, and in the numerous ceremonies celebrated in his
name and honor. The deployment of the king’s simulacra in this new stage of power
was analogous to those technologies utilized by the Church in that a variety of ritu-
als reproduced and disseminated images of God Almighty, the Holy Eucharist, Jesus
Christ, the Virgin Mary, the martyrs, and the saints, all enclosed in (or framed by)
magnificent architecture and grandiloquent ceremonies.44 By the seventeenth cen-

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108 Radical History Review

tury, the plaza was both the central space of urban life and the privileged site where
the ever-present absent king exercised his power.
Spanish Habsburg ceremonies in Europe and their overseas possessions
increasingly privileged the king’s simulacra over his earthly biological body, and the
privileged space for its deployment was the plaza. The plaza as the stage for royal
ceremony was not particular to the New World, as these ceremonies were also per-
formed in the plazas of European and North African cities of the Spanish Habsburg
monarchy.45 The New World plaza, however, acquired a form and function some-
what distinct from Iberian and European plazas, since in most American cases (as in
the Philippines) all political and religious power was physically concentrated around
this central urban space. In viceregal capitals of the New World Empire, the space
of the plaza containing both the royal palace and the cathedral physically estab-
lished the Catholic king’s sovereignty (and presence) over his dominions.46
Recent studies have suggested that the significance of the plaza as a center
of political power in the New World, in some cases, preceded the arrival of the
Spanish, as with Mexico City/Tenochtitlan.47 In others, such as Lima, the plaza’s
centrality was established upon its founding in 1535 when Francisco Pizarro, after
allocating prime lots for the cathedral, the royal houses, the Cabildo (municipal
building), and the jail, assigned the remaining plots surrounding it for the privileged
residences of his fellow conquistadors.48 A similar process was followed in the case
of Manila after its founding in 1571.49 In the peninsula, on the other hand, the Plaza
Mayor in Madrid began to take its shape as the political and symbolic center and
heart of the empire only in the 1580s. This occurred after the publication of the
1573 ordinances that regulated discoveries and settlements in the Indies, which con-
tained several references to the shape, size, location, and aesthetics of New World
plazas, further suggesting that the structure and aesthetics of the new Plaza Mayor
in Madrid followed those of already existing and recently planned plazas in the New
World.50 In all cases, such designs and material constructions were manifestations
of the imposition of spatial order by the monarch on the city and on the societies
contained by its jurisdictions. Plazas and the surrounding buildings associated with
kingly power, therefore, constituted one more instance of the exercise of the Spanish
king’s power.
Irrespective of the origins (and shape) of the plaza, by the seventeenth cen-
tury, as cities grew and became more economically and socially complex this core
space of political power also expanded to include streets adjacent to it, now occupied
by increasing numbers of great churches, convents, commercial arcades, additional
plazas, and in some cities the halls of the Inquisition. This core space of power was
regularly ritually mapped by the pregón or publicación, a slow-moving procession
of luxuriously mounted city notables who accompanied the royal town crier in his
public announcements of important events, always originating in the royal houses
and performed before the same buildings. The pregón also worked to create simul-

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 109

taneity across vast spaces. Matías Bocanegra explained in 1649 how the Inquisition
tribunal had ordered that “all the cities, provinces and head cities” in the viceroy-
alty of New Spain deliver a pregón on January 11 proclaiming the celebration of
the auto-da-fé being performed on that date in Mexico City. This pregón was to
take place on the same date and time all over the kingdom as the ceremony per-
formed in the viceregal capital, so that, as Bocanegra noted, “the feelings of every-
one in the entire kingdom were simultaneously [a vn tiempo los animos de todo èl]
moved to acclaim the exaltation of the saintly Catholic Faith.” 51 By always visiting
the same spaces and stopping before the same official buildings, the pregón in the
city traced what Michel de Certeau calls a “field of operations,” or an authorized
space for the exercise of power. Overtime these processions created an official space
in which imperial power was exercised (and understood as such), while also provid-
ing a historical genealogy of founding and imperial rule. 52 This field of operations
quite literally worked to transform the city into a palace by making the royal house
(and the plaza) the central focus of all political life. 53 The broad acknowledgment
of such core spaces of power was clearly articulated in 1668 by the slave Tomasa,
who explained in detail to the judges of the Extirpation of Idolatry in Lima how
she bolstered her popular divinations by using this same space. Tomasa explained
that she conjured coca leaves and invoked the “seven devils” around the main plaza,
while calling aloud the streets adjacent to it and all the buildings that surrounded it:
“The cathedral, the archbishop’s residence, the viceregal palace, the ecclesiastical
chapter, the Cabildo, and the gallows.”54
This reach of monarchical power within the city (and metaphorically there-
fore in the larger kingdom) varied, however, from place to place and was condi-
tioned by local circumstance. In Madrid, the residence of the monarch and of his
voluminous royal court, the space traversed by processions was much larger than
in other cities of the empire as it included the streets that connected several lateral
plazas and palaces, the Plaza Mayor, and the plaza of the royal palace, as well as
their numerous surrounding buildings. In Manila, a much smaller city than either
the capital of the empire, or the two American viceregal capitals of Mexico City and
Lima, the reach of the image (power) of the king was, in contrast, greatly reduced
by the smaller field of operations created by these processions, as the space they
traveled was limited to a few blocks around its main plaza.55 Furthermore, as only
the seat of an Audiencia Real (royal court of appeals) and the governorship of the
Philippines, Manila enjoyed a lower status, as it had a smaller number not only of
Spaniards but also of high-ranking officials than did viceregal capitals.56 The reach
of imperial power in Manila was further restricted by the fewer resources it had to
spend in these ceremonies than those available in Mexico City, Lima, Seville, or
Madrid.57 On the occasion of the ceremonies celebrated in Manila in 1668 com-
memorating Philip IV’s death and his succession by Carlos II, the parish priest
Francisco Deza explained that the city was unable to match the magnificence dis-

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110 Radical History Review

played for this occasion by “the other cities of Spain, and of the Indies” because vari-
ous disasters (an earthquake, a monsoon, and the attacks from the “barbarous . . .
Chinese king of Isla Hermosa”) had dramatically reduced the city’s Spanish popula-
tion to a mere fifteen Spaniards and severely depleted many of its resources.58

Simulacra, Kingly Aura, and Imperial Rule
Shortcomings and disasters notwithstanding, king and subjects regularly came
together in plazas throughout the empire to celebrate and cement a political pact
that bound them both in a political compromise.59 The display of the king’s simula-
cra (particularly his portrait, but also his royal banner) in this theatrical urban space
became important cultural capital that cities accumulated and used to compete for
royal favors and privileges at court. The proclamation of Carlos II celebrated in
Madrid on October 8, 1665 took place in several plazas in the villa. The first cere-
mony was carried out in the center of its Plaza Mayor, on a stage five feet in height,
thirty feet in length, by twenty feet wide, with a wide staircase twelve feet in length
covered with rich carpets. The Duke of San Lúcar and of Medina de las Torres,
Count of Oñate and Villa-Mediana, and Royal Postman General of Spain, accom-
panied by the Corregidor de la Villa, secretaries of the Ayuntamiento (city council),
and four heralds, carried the banner of the kingdom of Castile onto this stage.60
Facing the “balconies from which his majesties witness the Fiestas,” the most senior
magistrate called aloud: “Silence, Silence, Silence! Listen [Oid], Listen, Listen!,” to
which the Duke, waving the royal standard, responded: “Castile, Castile, Castile, for
the Catholic King Don Carlos the Second; of this name, our lord, God save him!”
In turn, the people on the plaza below proclaimed: “Viva, Viva, Viva!” According to
the chronicler, the discordant voices of the people proclaiming their new monarch
became harmonious in their expression of loyalty for the new king. This procla-
mation in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid was performed not before a portrait of the
king, but before the aura of his body inscribed in the window (place) from which he
regularly watched ceremonies on the square. A portrait of the dead king Philip IV
dressed in mourning was displayed under a luxurious canopy by one of the plaza’s
main gates, the Puerta de Guadalaxara, located a few feet away from the stage used
for the proclamation.61 The chronicler noted how, as the king’s subjects came in
and out of the plaza, they gazed at the portrait of “their majesty” in bewilderment
and to placate “the need of their eyes” to look at their beloved departed king one
more time before accepting his death. Beyond this gate and the Plaza Mayor, the
cavalcade of officiants traveled to the plaza of the royal palace, where another stage
had been set up “following the model of that set in the Plaza Mayor,” and where
the “same ceremonies as in the first were repeated.” This proclamation in the pal-
ace plaza, however, had been graced with the additional authority afforded by the
physical presence of the young king Carlos II, who watched them from one of the

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 111

palace balconies. For the chronicler, the physical presence of the king had made it
the “best” event of that day.62
Proclamation ceremonies on the other side of the Atlantic also placed the
king in the heart of the city. For the proclamation of Philip IV in Lima in 1622, the
chronicler Roman de Herrera noted how the king had been “carried” by Leandro
de la Reynaga Salazar, the city’s most senior alderman, from the Cabildo to a throne
set for the occasion on a stage in the center of the main plaza. The king’s portrait,
described by Herrera as a trasunto vivo del Rey (lifelike copy of the king), had
“comfortably” sat through his ceremony on a throne placed on a stage twenty yards
long, fifteen yards wide, and two-and-one-half yards high, richly decorated with
taffetas, satins, and silks, with a smaller stage on its top, measuring fourteen yards
long by eight yards wide, with four Doric columns that supported the canopy under
which stood his throne atop a Persian rug. As in Madrid, the king’s proclamation had
been carried out by the most senior magistrate (oidor), who, standing on the stage
and facing the comfortably seated Philip IV, called out, “ ‘Castile, Leon, Piru [sic],
for the King Our Lord Philip May God keep him for many years!’ To which, the
people down on the plaza proclaimed in response: ‘Long Live the King Our Lord
Philip the Fourth; May the king live for many happy years!’ ”63 This royal presence,
always displayed in magnificent ceremonies, over time allowed Madrid to become
head of the kingdom (caput regni) as well as head of other cities (caput urbium) in
Castile. Such becoming took time, however, as Madrid succeeded in establishing
itself as the symbolic capital only after 1606, when Philip III moved his court there
from Valladolid, and the villa finally began to be seen and referred to as the head of
other cities in Castile and as the heart of the monarchy and of the empire. Courtly
ceremonies played a decisive role in allowing Madrid to set the tone that came to
characterize it as the ceremonial capital of the empire.64 In similar fashion, by the
seventeenth century royal ceremonies also sealed Lima’s kingly reputation and rank
as head city among cities of the kingdoms of Peru and capital of the viceroyalty.
This ritual use of the body of the king in simulacra on both sides of the
Atlantic during the same period may be seen, therefore, as a logical consequence
of the political challenges faced by the Spanish monarchy given the vastness (and
therefore complexity) of its empire, which inevitably meant that the king could never
hope to visit all his possessions in person. To offset this physical impossibility, many
realms were governed through the figure of the king’s alter ego, the viceroy.65 The
transitory figure of the viceroy as the king’s alter ego was, however, insufficient to
impress upon distant subjects the idea of a universal monarchical sovereignty above
and beyond the viceregal sphere (which was, again, inevitably limited by the sheer
vastness of the dominions viceroys themselves ruled over, as in the cases of New
Spain and Peru, but also due to the complex nature of the figure of the viceroy
himself, as in the case of Naples).66 Furthermore, in possessions such as the Philip-

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112 Radical History Review

pines, a governorship part of the viceroyalty of New Spain, the absence of a viceroy
altogether made this image all the more irrelevant as a venue to impress the idea of a
universal monarch on his subjects.67 In short, the shift in representational technolo-
gies for presenting the sovereign, from his actual body to simulacra — almost always
explained in the historiography in terms of its internal European logic — was indis-
pensable in the New World from the very moments of discovery and throughout its
conquest and settlement.

Ceremonial Time, Ostentation, and the Exercise of Power
One answer to the physical impossibility of rule was the establishment of a com-
mon ceremonial calendar, centered on the king’s body. The Spanish Habsburg cer-
emonial calendar, characterized by its grandiloquence, marked the life cycle of the
monarchy. The performance of ceremonies centered on the king and his royal fam-
ily established a common ceremonial time and temporal structure for the empire
that produced simultaneity among kingdoms while also working as a foundation of
a shared imperial identity. These baroque ceremonies, performed in every corner
of the empire in honor of the king with very similar form and content, were a new
urban phenomenon associated with the inner or enclosed space of the production of
culture, and reflected the renewed ancient principle of rule via civitas that regarded
the city as the place of civil life, cultural production, and political power.68 One of
the main features of this baroque culture was its emphasis on ostentation, reflected
in luxurious modes of dress, lavish displays of riches, magnificent and draped struc-
tures, and splendid ceremonies.69 Urban ostentation derived in part from the rapid
expansion of cities into large and complex urban centers in the seventeenth century
due to migration and the growth of the power base of new local ruling elites who
partook in the many facets of transatlantic commerce and trade, and who promoted
new patterns and habits of consumption.70 Furthermore, official baroque ceremo-
nies aimed to radically transform urban spaces literally into a theater, understood
metaphorically at the time as the place where something or someone was exposed to
the regard or censure of the world: the theatrum publicum. In this culture of public
scrutiny, ostentation served as the principal marker of status, power, and authority.
Appearances in such a context therefore came to possess a highly regarded social
value. More important, monarchical power was both constituted and made manifest
through the external magnificence of these ceremonies.71
Baroque ostentatious displays of wealth have often been interpreted from an
economic rationale of cost and benefits—calculations that often ignore how these
public displays of wealth and luxury politically and materially benefited cities (as
corporate bodies), officials, and subjects alike. Grandiloquent ceremonies were part
of a sizable economy of conspicuous consumption that fueled commerce and pro-
duction of all goods related to and necessary for their performance. Nonetheless,
such ceremonies have been seen as excessive investments in superfluous material

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 113

goods that ultimately only drained the local and royal coffers, leaving behind little
of value.72 Ostentatious ceremonies also continue to be seen as part of a large propa-
ganda machine orchestrated from above by a society of spectacle, fond of exhibiting
its wealth and representing itself in attempts to lure and appease disparate (lower
status) constituencies to the spheres of power.73 Such understandings, however,
underestimate the many productive aspects of ceremonies, as they not only worked
to construct a common sense of empire, as noted, but also promoted commerce
and consumption (as well as production) and often were also occasions for signifi-
cant urban renewal. The required grandiloquence of royal ceremonies often meant
that new buildings be built; old ones refurbished, painted, and fixed; streets paved;
and the city in general cleaned up, particularly in spaces such as plazas used on a
daily basis as market centers. In places like Lima and Manila, recurrently destroyed
by earthquakes, or Mexico City, regularly affected by floods, or Panama City, fre-
quently destroyed by corsair and pirate attacks, royal ceremonies presented new
opportunities for urban renewal.74 When news of the birth of the prince Felipe
Próspero (born November 28, 1657) arrived in Manila in 1658, the cathedral had
been in ruins for over a decade following a devastating earthquake in 1643. The
news of the royal birth and its required celebrations moved Don Sabiniano Man-
rique de Lara, governor of the Philippines, to personally finance its reconstruction
and embellishment, as well as that of adjacent buildings also in need of repairs, in
order to make them “deserving” of such an important occasion.75
Staging royal ceremonies also required that the interior and exterior of the
existing buildings facing the streets traveled by the numerous processions also be
repaired, painted, lit up with special ceremonial torches, and hung with luxurious
tapestries; in other words, it was necessary to dress them up to reflect the magnitude
of the respect, love, and loyalty felt for the king by his subjects as their legitimate
lord. Such efforts to reflect loyalty and magnificence often meant that ephemeral
constructions were larger than existing spaces could accommodate, making struc-
tural modifications to existing buildings necessary. The dimensions of the catafalques
built for royal exequies reflected the majesty of the deceased king, symbolically con-
tained in the urn placed in its center covered in rich brocades and a luxurious pillow
containing the royal insignias of monarchical power (helmet, crown, and sword),
with surrounding paintings that narrated the life and achievements of the departed
monarch. As a rule, these structures were placed inside cathedrals, which usually
faced a plaza. For the exequies of Charles V celebrated in Mexico City in 1559, how-
ever, the catafalque was erected inside the Franciscan Church located several blocks
from the main plaza, as the cathedral was deemed to be too small for such an occa-
sion. According to the official chronicler Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, not only
could the Franciscan temple accommodate a much larger catafalque, but its location
also provided a much larger physical space to traverse in the city for the numerous
processions that took place during the royal mourning. This larger urban space trav-

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114 Radical History Review

eled by the procession allowed more people to witness and participate in the public
mourning, making the ceremony, according to Cervantes, even more majestic. On
this occasion, in the interior of the Franciscan church, the chapel of San José de
los Naturales (Saint Joseph of the Indians) was structurally transformed by remov-
ing fourteen intricately carved stone arches and pillars that would have obstructed
the view of the catafalque built in the central nave of the temple. These structural
changes, according to Cervantes, not only made it possible to exhibit and appreciate
the magnificent catafalque in all its grandeur, but also corrected the church’s origi-
nal layout, dramatically improving its interior space “for posterity.” 76
Beyond capital improvements and economic gain, however, the magnificence
of kingly ceremonies also sent a strong message to rival cities of the community’s
economic dominance and social magnificence. Municipal governments fostered a
collective image of their cities and built a historical memory of their constitution
as a community through these elaborate rituals and widely circulated published
chronicles.77 Published accounts of past kingly ceremonies were consulted and used
to model processions on past ones performed in other cities of the empire. In 1689,
when the Spanish viceroy in Sicily, the Duke of Uceda, was called to organize the
exequies for Queen Maria Luisa de Orleans, his library contained a complete col-
lection of illustrated chronicles of the exequies performed in the capitals of the
empire for King Philip IV (deceased in 1665), including those executed in Mexico,
Palermo, Naples, Rome, and Madrid, that could serve as reference for his designs of
the queen’s funeral.78 Staging royal ceremonies such as the exequies or the procla-
mation was always an expensive endeavor, therefore, and the monarchy repeatedly
(and unsuccessfully) attempted to curb lavish displays of luxury and the expenses
incurred in these celebrations. Noncompliance was often due in part to shared
understandings of ostentation as the fount of order and justice and of the greatness
of those who exhibited (practiced) it.79 Chronicles of this period all emphasize the
social virtues of luxury, grandeur, and power characteristic of ostentation, which
as previously noted was also an important element in the competition of cities for
royal favor.
Competition for royal favor and higher status was widespread in the empire.
After the Neapolitan Revolt of 1647, Messina, claiming to have obtained its rank
as city and privileges from Charles V around 1535, in an attempt to preserve (and
increase) its rank and privileges before those later obtained by the cities of Palermo
and the viceregal capital of Naples, demanded to be granted new favors in reward
for (and in accordance to) its sustained and thus proven loyalty to the king during
the conflict.80 A better-known case is the petition made in 1580 by the city of Lisbon
in the kingdom of Portugal to King Philip I of Portugal (Philip II of Spain), asking
that he relocate his court from Madrid to the Portuguese city, a request the city
reiterated in the 1620s.81 In the New World, the most notable case was the dispute
that the city of Cuzco filed against the viceregal capital of Lima in Madrid in 1621,

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 115

petitioning the king to relocate the viceregal court to the Inca city.82 Similar peti-
tions were made in New Spain by Tlaxcala and Puebla de los Angeles against Mexico
City.83 In all these cases arguments about antigüedad and (generous) loyalty were
advanced as the basis for deserving the privileges and benefits petitioned to the
monarch.
One outcome of such urban competition and shared understandings of
ostentation as manifestations of power and grandeur was that not just cities but
individuals across the empire often went into great personal debt to stage ceremo-
nies with the greatest magnificence allowed by their collective resources.84 In the
New World, only cabezas de reynos y de provincias (principal cities) enjoyed the
privilege to stage royal exequies with a catafalque. Tlaxcala, a República de Indios
(Indian Republic) considered by the monarchy to be vasallos de excepción (vassals
of exception, due to their role during the conquest), did not enjoy such privilege.
Nonetheless, against legislation, in 1701 the city of Tlaxcala staged a grand ceremony
to mark the death of Charles II and proclaim his Bourbon successor King Philip V,
in order to show its people’s love, loyalty, and gratefulness to Charles II and their
allegiance to the new Bourbon king Philip V, as well as pressing forward with their
claims for representation in the Cortes of Castile — a privilege they hoped would be
(finally) granted by the new monarch.85 On the occasion of the exequies celebrated
in Lima in 1697 after the death of the queen mother, Mariana of Austria, Viceroy
Count of La Monclova ignored the 1693 Pragmática de los lutos (royal decree regu-
lating official mourning practices) that strictly specified the ceremonial to be fol-
lowed in royal funerals and set limits on the amount that could be spent.86 Notably,
the king had specifically ordered that this pragmática be strictly observed on this
occasion. The viceroy, however, arguing that the decree was “too recent” and the
form of ceremony it proscribed still “too uncertain,” did not honor the king’s wishes.
Instead he personally assumed the costs of designing and building the catafalque,
as well as providing for the reconstruction of the cathedral’s cupola destroyed by an
earthquake earlier that year.87 These actions gained the Viceroy Count of La Mon-
clova stature, further consolidating his power in the city while also allowing him
repayment of the many favors the king had granted him, including his appointment
as viceroy of Peru. Similarly in 1668, the governor of the Philippines, Diego Salcedo,
donated 4,000 pesos of his own funds for the celebration of the exequies of Philip IV
in Manila, to provide mourning dress for the royal infantry, and cover all costs of an
elaborate nine-day public worship (novenario) ceremony celebrated in the royal cha-
pel of the city’s cathedral.88 While the actions of both the viceroy and the governor
were part of an economy of favors, they were also based on the notion (and deeds) of
a prince (ruler) as architect and builder of the city rooted in humanistic thought and
education, an understanding that often moved rulers to personally finance building
projects as a reflection of their virtues and as political acts to consolidate their power
over their domains.89

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116 Radical History Review

The Baroque and a Radical History of a Modern Empire
The baroque is “understood as the aesthetic counterpart to a problem of thought of
modernity” (stretching from the sixteenth century to the present), or “the problem
of appearances and the reality they purport to represent,” 90 and as a “distinctive
modernity” that afforded venues of participation and political agency in ritual and
rumor.91 Ritual, on the other hand, “is not something rationalism leaves behind”
but is instead “at the [very] heart of rationalism and modernity’s effort to mark an
ontological break with the past.”92 As such, the baroque modern did not simply rep-
resent political power, for it was not an instance of an illusion of power but, rather,
embodied it. Equally important is that, as a cultural phenomenon, the baroque
was not born in Europe and (imperfectly) copied in European peripheries but was,
rather, created and transformed by complex cultural, social, political, and economic
exchanges that cannot be understood within linear, center-periphery frameworks
of cultural production and dissemination or as a derivative colonial phenomenon.93
Cultural exchanges in the Spanish Habsburg period created a cultural idiom that
operated throughout the empire in similar ways.94
The Spanish American baroque’s endless quest for “radical renewal” made it
“aggressively modern.”95 Furthermore, in my view, the Spanish Habsburg baroque
and modernity were from their inception all about distances — geographical, social,
political, economic, and cultural — and the conscious quest to lessen, while also
rationally ordering, such distances and differences. This was undertaken in the new,
rationally ordered spaces of the city street and the plaza, and in imperial ceremo-
nies celebrated throughout the empire. It was in these spaces and structures that a
distant king exercised his new imperial power and authority. The many ceremonies
dealing with the body of the king (his royal proclamation and royal funeral, or the
ritual of the royal standard that required an annual oath of allegiance to the mon-
arch) were not simple representations of the king’s power, therefore, but instead con-
stituted central instances of his exercise of monarchical rule. The baroque spectacle
(ceremony and architecture), in other words, did not create an alternative medium
for the dissemination of propaganda (as baroque culture is often seen) but, rather,
was the medium in which political, social, and cultural issues were played out, con-
tested, transformed, and cemented into practice throughout the empire.
Walter Benjamin underscored the centrality of the baroque in reconstruct-
ing an archeology of modernity. Like others, however, he located the origins (under-
stood as a rupture of a linear narrative of historical writing and ways of knowing)
of modernity in the twentieth- century Holocaust.96 Such understandings of the
genesis of modernity have proved instrumental in notions of original (Europe) and
derivative (colonial) knowledge and culture, where “staging the modern has always
required the non-modern, the space of colonial difference.”97 The case of the Span-
ish Habsburg Empire, however, problematizes this understanding, given that the
extension of the Holy Roman Empire (however symbolically) beyond the confines of

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 117

Europe after 1519 produced a rupture similar to that outlined by Benjamin, requir-
ing the invention of new practices of political rulership and thus of newly made
knowledge. Furthermore, the space of cultural difference (broadly defined) was first
modern and imperial before it became colonial. The political ceremonies of the
Spanish Habsburg world were not, therefore, techniques for the construction of the
nonmodern or the non-West but part of a baroque machinery of legitimation that
allowed newly created places, such as Manila, Lima, and Madrid, but also older ones
like Lisbon and Messina, to constitute themselves as metropolitan centers with their
own spheres of power.98
Understandings of such ruptures in history and modernity, however, cannot
be best achieved within frameworks that limit their scope of operations geograph-
ically or conceptually in anachronistic ways, as is the case with Atlantic history.
Although the term Atlantic is widely used, and despite the fact that it encourages
connections of “nations, peoples, and events,” it is still unclear whether Atlantic
history “has yet fulfilled its . . . promise to change the field,” as more often than
not the idea of the Atlantic, rather than raising new questions or introducing new
methodologies, has simply either repackaged old issues into new boxes or produced
works that do not truly “connect different lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean.” 99
Something similar has occurred with the historiography on empire, where the term
is quite regularly used, yet few studies actually engage in new methodologies for its
actual study in ways that are not anachronistic or ahistorical. Moreover, simply con-
necting disparate narratives is not always enough, as it can just as simply reify old
understandings and geographies of center/periphery in the Spanish world.100
In short, a framework that privileges the Atlantic as the category of analysis
(be it circum-, trans-, or cis-Atlantic) can at best only hope to tell half of a much
more complex story of a vast empire, as it necessarily limits how this first modern
Spanish Habsburg empire can be imagined and the questions that can be asked, if
for no other reason than the fact that at the time there was no notion of a coher-
ent Atlantic,101 but also because the Atlantic framework has yet to alleviate “the
frustration of trying to write a colonial history [in the case of British America],”
and, I would add, any prenational history, “within historiographical traditions
centered around modern nation-states.”102 Notions of an “early modern” Atlantic
predicated on nation-state notions of space, geography, place, identity, and politics
simply reinforce (artificial) boundaries that limit what historians ask, trace in the
(national) archive and the very archives they consult, and therefore imagine and
ultimately write.
At the core of this, of course, is the issue of the very language, or the words
and concepts, used by historians to write these histories. Lima is a case in point:
understanding Lima’s role in the larger empire beyond the nation and the Atlan-
tic reveals a more complex set of political and economic relationships.103 Such an
approach, furthermore, also greatly problematizes the city’s typical position in the

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118 Radical History Review

national historiography as either a space divorced from the interior of the viceroy-
alty (or of the nation) it sought to represent and govern, or as peripheral to Mex-
ico and/or as a colony to Europe, both prevalent understandings in the history of
so- called colonial Latin America that further privileges Mexico (and Europe) as
normative.104
Beyond language, there is also the issue of framework. Linear notions of
colonial space as constituted by corridors and enclaves existing along “routes that
connected places of greater and lesser importance” might prove useful for thinking
about early moments of Spanish penetration and settlement of the New World, but
they are less so for understanding the workings of large consolidated segments of
the seventeenth-century empire.105 Furthermore, if the “representation of impe-
rial space as a composite of corridors and enclaves continued beyond periods of
early reconnaissance and settlement,” and “the presence of multiple imperial inter-
ests yielded landscapes of tangled routes rather than one of abutting or overlapping
spheres,” such occurrences need to be carefully historicized and contextualized,
as this was not the norm throughout the seventeenth century.106 Multiple impe-
rial interests were the product, in part, of competing sovereignties that did indeed
generate conflict, but such conflicts were never cast in linear, monolithic terms of
colonials fighting the colonizers.107 Notions that “the legal conflicts of colonized
and colonizers were further shaped by the tensions that divided the two sides” are
therefore at best reductionist and at least problematic.108 Such an approach can lead
to notions that “knowledge was built locally by people in the periphery.”109 Knowl-
edge, however, was not produced only locally by those in the periphery (any more
than it was only produced by those in the centers) because notions of centers and
peripheries were not rigidly set and thus regularly shifted. The dependence of those
centers on peripheral forms and/or contents of knowledge, and vice versa, was never
unidirectional or static (in other words, not all corridors led only to Rome). Such
relations were dynamics of exchanges that changed over time according to specific,
historically contingent circumstances.110
As is well known, the Spanish Hapsburg Empire was made up of a worldwide
and utterly disparate composite of old principalities, kingdoms, and former empires
that enjoyed independent, separate existence for centuries with political institutions
and traditions of their own—realities that shaped and conditioned all social, political,
economic, and cultural relations among all these different jurisdictions in complex,
nonlinear ways. In addition, within the empire the story was further complicated by
the intricate hierarchy of cities (and their many constituencies) that comprised and
governed the continents, each with different rights, privileges, and obligations, as
well as the (shifting) hierarchical relations among them, all of which extended beyond
the proper confines of the spaces named New Spain, Peru, America, Italy, Spain, and
so on. Furthermore, colony (or colonial) did not exist as a concept or category in the
Spanish Empire until late in the eighteenth century, and even then, its meanings var-

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 119

ied vastly from those held in the British, French, and Dutch empires.111 As such, the
Spanish Habsburg Empire is not best defined by the often-cited characterization of
empire taken from Edward Said, as “a relationship, formal or informal, in which one
state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society.”112 The
genesis of the Spanish Habsburg Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
reveals, as previously noted, an imperial relationship among various bodies of the
empire (be it the viceroyalty of Peru, Lima, and the Iberian Peninsula, or Madrid
and Manila) “conditioned by an unequal interdependence among . . . hierarchically
ordered metropolitan centers.”113 One consequence of such a relationship was that
the East-West division of the world (which seems to be the underlying framework
for many of these concepts and understandings) was a later development, as it did
not obtain in places like Habsburg Lima, New Spain, or even Spain, as already sug-
gested, but neither did the notion of Europe as the singular center with America (or
Asia) as its de facto periphery. Nor was there one absolute center of power during
the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth centuries in the Spanish world, as once
again the case of Lima illustrates. The fact that Madrid the imperial capital was a
new creation in the 1560s is not a trivial fact. Luis Felipe de Alencastro, in his study
of slavery in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Brazil, finds that, rather than one
unified subject, there were instead many Brazils, each one with different relation-
ships to various places in Africa and Portugal.114
Understanding the nature and workings of empires before they became colo-
nial requires a new lexicon, as the language (or the frameworks) the historian writes
in cannot simply be ignored or simply reversed, because words have meanings that
are historically contingent (and produced). As such, words and concepts are laden
with political meanings and limitations, potentially obscuring as well as misrepre-
senting what they intend to elucidate.
A radical history of the (early) modern Habsburg Spanish Empire must deal
up front, empirically and conceptually, therefore, with the fact that colony is not
synonymous with kingdom or province, colonial does not translate into viceregal,
and New World does not always imply periphery, in simple seamless and ahistorical
ways. Finally, such a history must also face the fact that “Latin America” is ulti-
mately present only in Miami, Florida.

Alejandra B. Osorio is associate professor of history and former director of Latin American stud-
ies at Wellesley College. She is the author of Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South
Sea Metropolis (2008). She is currently working on a new book tentatively titled The First Mod-
ern: Imperial Baroque Modernity in the Spanish Habsburg World, which examines the pro-
duction of an imperial political culture under the Spanish Habsburgs. Her research has been
supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Carter Brown
Library at Brown University, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, the Tinker Foundation,
and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States
Universities. She is a member of the editorial board of Renaissance Quarterly.

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120 Radical History Review

Notes
Research for this essay was made possible by the generous support of a Paul W. McQuillen
Memorial Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the Andrew
Mellon Foundation Strategic Investments in Research and Teaching, the National Endowment
for the Humanities, Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and
United States Universities, and faculty grants from the Office of the Provost at Wellesley College.
I would also like to thank the comments and suggestions I received from my colleagues Kate
Grandjean, Ryan Quintana, and Nikhil Rao.
1. For relocation of cities by the Habsburg in Europe, see Arnade, “Carthage or Jerusalem?”
On archives and new forms of writing and memory, see Bouza, Corre manuscrito; and
Bouza, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory.
2. See, e.g., Richards, Imperial Archive.
3. For a similar issue in the historiography of the Portuguese empire, see Subrahmanyam,
“Holding the World in Balance.”
4. Burkholder, “Spain’s America.”
5. Green and Morgan, Atlantic History, 3.
6. See Hulme, “Beyond the Straits,” and Leibsohn and Priyadarshini, “Transpacific: Beyond
Silk and Silver.”
7. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 156.
8. For a seventeenth-century definition of modern, see Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozco,
Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española . . . Madrid . . . M.DC.XI (1611), Biblioteca
Nacional de España, Madrid.
9. Botero Giovanni, Delle cause della grandezza e magnificenza delle città (1588), published
in Spanish in 1593. See Diez libros de la razon de estado: con tres libros de las causas de
la grandeza, y magnificencia de las ciudades de Iuan Botero. Tradvzido de Italiano en
Castellano, por mandato del Rey . . . por Antonio de Herrera . . . En Madrid, Por Luyz
Sanchez MDXCIII. Biblioteca Nacional de España. See also Gil-Pujol, “La fuerza del rey.”
10. Fantoni, “Una ciudad con forma de palacio,” 11 – 12.
11. See Sebastiano Serlio, Tercero y quarto libro de Architectura de Sebastian Serlio Boloñes:
En los quales se trata de las maneras de como se pueden adornar los edificios, con los
exemplos de las antiguedades. En casa de Ioan de Ayala (1563), Biblioteca Nacional de
España.
12. Gómez Martos, “La justificación mítica de las ciudades,” 180. See Juan de Mariana, Historia
general de España (1601), Toledo, Spain, Biblioteca Nacional de España; Florián de
Ocampo, Los cinco primeros libros de la Cronica general de España (1553); and Ocampo,
Las quatro partes enteras de la Cronica de España que mando componer el Serenissimo
rey don Alfonso llamado el Sabio (1541), Zamora, Spain, Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Also see Kagan, Clio and the Crown.
13. For the Renaissance roots of the prince as the architect of a political renewal closely linked
to the novelty of antiquity, see Fantoni, “Una ciudad con forma de palacio,” 6 – 7.
14. See Estenssoro, “Construyendo la memoria.” Also see Lupher, Romans in a New World; and
Hampe Martínez, La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinal.
15. Ordenanzas del Peru-Tomo Primero (Duque de la Palata), 1685, John Carter Brown
Library, Brown University, Providence, RI; Francisco López y Martínez, Noticias del sur:
Despacho, y felices sucesos de la Armada . . . en el gouierno del . . . duque de la Palata, . . .
virrey . . . de los Reynos del Peru (1685), and López y Martínez, Noticias del sur,
continuadas (1688), John Carter Brown Library. See also Fernández- González,
“Architecture of the Treasure-Archive.”

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Osorio | Of National Boundaries 121

16. Elliott, “Europe of Composite Monarchies.”
17. Mazín Gómez, “Architect of the New World,” 27 – 28.
18. Ibid., 28.
19. Estenssoro, “Construyendo la memoria”; Osorio, Inventing Lima.
20. Fantoni, “Una ciudad con forma de palacio,” 12. This is evident in Gregorio de San Martin,
El triumpho mas famoso que hizo Lisboa a la entrada del rey don Phelippe Tercero
d’España y Segundo de Portugal . . . compuesto por Gregorio de San Martin . . . en Lisboa:
por Pedro Craesbeck (1624), Biblioteca Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. See, e.g., its
introduction and canto 2, verse 45.
21. Pagden, Lords of All the World; González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 33, 39.
22. See Coreth, Pietas Austriaca.
23. González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 196 – 242.
24. See Dandelet, Spanish Rome; and Osorio, Inventing Lima, 133 – 57.
25. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 102, 121 – 43.
26. Tanner, Last Descendants of Aeneas.
27. Charney, Indian Society in the Valley of Lima.
28. All translations are mine. Quoted in Río Barredo, Madrid Urbs Regia, 106. San Isidro
was canonized in 1622 along with Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and
Philip Neri. See Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 99, 107, 180 – 86, 217; González Tornel, Roma
Hispánica, 209 – 19; and Osorio, Inventing Lima, 121 – 43.
29. See Osorio, Inventing Lima, 41, 54, 137, 154, 157; and Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic
World.
30. Elliott, Spain and Its World; Pagden, Lords of All the World.
31. This historiographical fragmentation is also both the product of graduate training that
produces Andeanists, Mexicanists, Hispanists, and so on, with distinct areas and methods of
inquiry, and area studies that segregate the so-called non-West from the West.
32. Negotiation is an important trope of colonial Latin American history. See, e.g., Ruiz
Medrano and Kellogg, Negotiation with Domination; Díaz, Virgin, the King, and the Royal
Slaves of El Cobre; Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent; and Wernke, Negotiated
Settlements.
33. Carrasco, La empresa imperial de Carlos V.
34. See Pagden, Hernan Cortes.
35. See Maltby, Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. This rupture affected not just Europe
and the Indies, however: Charles’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor also posed a threat
to its neighboring, rivaling Ottoman Empire. See Sahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of
Süleyman, esp. 81 – 87.
36. See Osorio, “El imperio de los Austrias españoles y el Atlántico.” For the origin and uses
of colonial in the Spanish Empire, see Burkholder, “Spain’s America: From Kingdoms to
Colonies.”
37. This was a medieval political notion established in Las siete partidas del Rey Don Alfonso X
(ca. 1265); see partida 2, title I, law 5, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El
Escorial, El Escorial, Spain.
38. Recent studies, such as Cardim et al.’s collection Polycentric Monarchies, identify the
circulation of capital as one of the central backbones that unified the empire, while Arndt
Brendecke in Imperio e información locates it in discursive practices contained in official
reports and administrative documentation.
39. Gil-Pujol, “Una cultura cortesana provincial,” 232 – 33.
40. Carmagnani, Hernández, and Romano, Para una historia de América.

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41. Lisón Tolosana, La imagen del rey; Río Barredo, Madrid Urbs Regia; Osorio, “King in
Lima.”
42. Lisón Tolosana, La imagen del rey; Osorio, “King in Lima.”
43. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 35 – 55. For the evolution of capitals in Italian Renaissance
principalities, see Fantoni, “Una ciudad con forma de palacio,” 11 – 18.
44. See De la Flor, Barroco; Sebastián, Contrarreforma y barroco; González Tornel, Roma
Hispánica; and Coreth, Pietas Austriaca.
45. See Bodart, “La piazza quale ‘teatro regio’ nei regni di Napoli e di Sicilia.” For the northern
African possessions of Mazalquivir and Oran, see, e.g., Alonso Acero, Oran-Mazalquivir.
46. Because of the patronato real, or Spanish monarchical control over its church in the Indies,
the Spanish king was the de facto head of the New World church. The patronato real
was granted to the Spanish kings in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI in the Inter caetera bull,
which ceded to the Spanish crown full and perpetual dominion in the Indies in return for
undertaking the task of bringing its peoples into the Catholic faith. In 1501 Pope Alexander
VI granted the Spanish monarchy the right to the church tithes from the Indies, to finance
their evangelization. In 1508, Pope Julius II, in the bull Universalis ecclesiae, granted
Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors the right to present to Rome candidates, from
archbishops downward, for church posts in the Indies with the understanding that one of
the king’s nominees would always be chosen. The crown was to have further control over
the building and endowment of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and hospitals (initially
in the New World but later in Europe as well), all to be financed with revenues produced
by the tithe collected in the overseas possessions. The crown came also to control the
movement of all churchmen to its overseas empire, as the royal treasury paid their journeys.
Finally, in 1538, the crown successfully claimed the right of inspection, with veto power,
over all papal dispatches to the Indies. After the creation of the Council of the Indies in
1524, the running of the patronato fell under its jurisdiction.
47. Lowe, On the Plaza; Escobar, Plaza Mayor; Wagner, Box, and Morehead, Ancient Origins
of the Mexican Plaza.
48. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 1 – 34.
49. Miguel López de Legazpi founded Manila on June 24, 1571, day of Saint John the Baptist,
as the “Head City of all others conquered and to be conquered in these lands.” In 1596,
the king granted the city the title of “Noble and always Loyal with the privileges enjoyed
by Cities Heads of Kingdoms,” and a coat of arms. P. Pedro Murillo Velarde, Geographia
historica, de las Islas Philipinas, del Africa, y de sus Islas adyacentes. Tomo VIII. En
Madrid. En la oficina de D. Gabriel Ramirez. Año de M. DCC. LII (1752), 51 – 52,
Biblioteca Nacional de España. See also Elizalde Pérez-Grueso, “Sentido y rentabilidad”;
Díaz-Trechuelo, Filipinas, 71 – 117; and Doeppers, “The Development of Philippine Cities.”
50. See Crouch, Garr, and Mundingo, Spanish City Planning in North America, 1 – 19; and
Escobar, Plaza Mayor, 33, 92 – 103.
51. Matías Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee: Celebrado . . . en la . . . ciudad de Mexico . . .
11 de abril de 1649 . . . Mathias de Bocanegra de la Compañia de Iesus (1649), unnumbered
manuscript, Biblioteca Nacional de España.
52. De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 122 – 24.
53. Fantoni, “Una ciudad con forma de palacio,” 8.
54. Section Hechicerías e Idolatrías 1668, bundle 7, doc. 6, fol. 18, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima,
Lima, Peru.
55. See Aclamacion real, y pvblica, de la coronada villa, y corte de Madrid; en cuyo nombre
leuanto el Pendon de Castilla el . . . Duque de San Lucar . . . por su Augusto, y Catolico

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Rey Carlos II (1665), and Prensados fastos, descriptivos mapas . . . nacimiento . . . Phelipe
Prospero . . . Manila (1660), Biblioteca Nacional de España.
56. This was also the case of Cuzco, the former center of Inca rule. Spanish Cuzco contained
a much larger indigenous population than Lima, its nobility was, however, smaller and its
officials of lower ranks than those in the viceregal capital, all of which prevented it from
successfully surpassing Lima in status. See Osorio, Inventing Lima, 35 – 80.
57. See Francisco Moya y Torres, Lealtad empenada finesa de amor y bizarria . . . Manila . . .
festivas aclamaciones . . . del Rey . . . Don Carlos Segundo . . . (1678), Biblioteca Nacional
de España. See also Albardonedo Freire, El urbanismo de Sevilla.
58. Cenotaphio real de la Catholica magestad de Philippo Qvarto . . . y del aplauso . . . con qve
celebraron la . . . Aclamacion . . . [de] Carlos Segundo . . . Escriviola . . . Francisco Deza . . .
en Manila . . . (1668), Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
59. Anino, Leiva, and Guerra, De los imperios a las naciones.
60. The Corregidor was the chief royal agent in the city, presiding over city council meetings
and acting also as an appeals magistrate.
61. Unlike with the French and English monarchs, there was no interregnum between
the death of the Spanish king and the taking of power by his successor. See Varela, La
muerte del rey, 49 and 109 – 32; and González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 246 – 58. See also
Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies; and Giesey, Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance
France.
62. Aclamacion real, y pvblica. At the time, Carlos II was three years old, and his mother,
Queen Mariana of Austria, ruled as regent until he became fourteen, the legal age for young
Carlos to rule. Because of his poor health, however, Mariana remained influential in the
court until her death in 1696. For the announcement sent to the kingdoms and provinces of
the king having reached his legal age to rule, see Indiferente 430, L. 41, “El Rey, al virrey
y audiencia, 25 de noviembre de 1675,” fols. 393 – 93r, and “Al Duque de Berlanga, 25 de
noviembre de 1675,” fol. 417, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain.
63. Quoted in Osorio, “King in Lima,” 447 – 48, 467 – 70. The portrait of the king also graced his
proclamation in Manila’s plaza; see Cenotaphio real, fol. 12.
64. Río Barredo, Madrid Urbs Regia, 124.
65. The kingdoms ruled by viceroys in the seventeenth century included Brazil (1640); Cataluña
and Goa (1580 – 1640); Mallorca, Naples, Navarra, New Spain, and Portugal (1580 – 1640);
and Peru, Sardinia, Sicily, and Valencia. See Cardim and Palos, El mundo de los virreyes.
66. See Guarino, Representing the King’s Splendor; Bouza, Imagen y propaganda, 33;
Cañeque, King’s Living Image; and Osorio, “La entrada del virrey.”
67. The Audiencia of Manila was established by Philip II in 1583, with a jurisdiction that
included “the Island of Luson, the rest of the Philippines, the Archipelago of China, and
the mainland of it, discovered and yet to be discovered.” See Recopilación de las leyes de
los reynos de las Yndias (1681), book 2, title 15, law 11, Biblioteca Nacional de España. The
governorship of the Philippines was under the jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of New Spain,
as already mentioned. Also see Herzog, “La presencia ausente.”
68. Pagden, Lords of All the World, 11 – 28, 44 – 45. Also see Duerloo, Dynasty and Piety.
69. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 104 – 25.
70. Antunes, Globalisation in the Early Modern Period; Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation upon the
Ocean Sea; Bauer, Goods, Power, History; Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos.
71. Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 3 – 5, 12 – 88; Bourdieu, Distinction; Fantoni, “Una ciudad con
forma de palacio.”
72. De la Flor, Barroco.

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124 Radical History Review

73. González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 253; López López, “Las ceremonias públicas y la
construcción de la imagen”; Rivero Rodríguez, “Una monarquía de casas reales,” 57;
and Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. See also Debord, Society of the Spectacle. For a
productive view of the baroque, see Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, and for the
political powers of the royal portrait, see Bodart, Pouvoirs du portrait.
74. This was the case not just in the overseas empire; see, e.g., Varallo, “Margaret of Austria’s
Travel.”
75. Prensados fastos, fol. 12r.
76. Cervantes Salazar, México en 1554, 183, 184.
77. See Knighton, “Music and Ritual in Urban Spaces.” See also, e.g., Giovanni Battista
Confalonieri, Relacion del aparato que se hizo en la ciudad de Valencia para el
recebimiento de la serenissima Reyna Doña Margarita de Austria desposada con el
Catholico y potentissimo Rey de España Don Phelipe Tercero . . . En Valencia: en casa de
Pedro Patricio Mey (1599), Biblioteca Museo Nacional del Prado.
78. Fray Francisco de Montalvo, Noticias fvnebres de las magestvosas exeqvias, que hizo la
felicissima ciudad de Palermo, cabeça coronada de Sicilia, en la mverte de Maria Lvysa
de Borbon nvestra . . . Reyna de las Españas, de orden del . . . Dvque de Vzeda, Virrey,
y Capitan General deste reyno, execvtada por . . . D. Lvys Riggio, Principe de Campo
Florido, del Habito de Santiago, Maestro Racional del Real Patrimonio (1698), Biblioteca
Nacional de España. See also González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 257.
79. See Saavedra y Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político-cristiano, empresas 21, 31.
80. Marc Antonio Sestini, La felicita cadvta, la costanza affinata, la republica disordinata.
Dialoghi . . . in Perugia . . . MDCXLVII (1647), 11, Biblioteca Nacional de España.
81. Bouza, Imagen y propaganda, 95 – 120.
82. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 35 – 37.
83. Baber, “Empire, Indians, and the Negotiation of Status.”
84. See Galasso, Quirante, and Colomer, Fiesta y ceremonia.
85. González Acosta, Crespones y campanas Tlaxcaltecas. This right was ultimately never
granted to the city.
86. Bernardo Romero González de Villalobos, Fvneral Pompa y Solemnidad de las Exequias . . .
Mariana de Austria . . . Lima . . . por Joseph de Contreras . . . 1697 (1697), John Carter
Brown Library. This pragmatica was based on an earlier one from 1588; see Prematica, en
que se da la orden que se ha de tener en el traer de los lutos en estos Reynos. En Madrid. En
casa de Pedro Madrigal (1588), Biblioteca Nacional de España.
87. Romero González de Villalobos, Fvneral Pompa y Solemnidad.
88. Cenotaphio real.
89. Fantoni, “La ciudad con forma de palacio,” 9.
90. Egginton, “Baroque as a Problem of Thought,” 143.
91. Childers, “Baroque Public Sphere,” 165 – 67, 181 – 82.
92. Nelson, “Ritual Practice for Modernity,” 80.
93. Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde.
94. Green, “Baroque and Neobaroque,” 150. For the scope of a Catholic aesthetics throughout
the empire, see Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Mission.
95. Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, 9.
96. See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic
Drama.
97. Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, 3.

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98. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 155 – 57. See also Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan, and
Clossey, “Merchants, migrants, and globalization.”
99. Chaplin, “Expansion and Exceptionalism,” 1432, 1439 – 40.
100. This is the case with Levy and Mills, Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque, where the very
structure of the book serves to reify a problematic geography of cultural production. See
Osorio, “Lexikon of the Baroque.”
101. Elliott, History in the Making.
102. Games, “Atlantic History,” 744.
103. See Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation upon the Ocean Sea; and Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos.
104. The normativity of the “colonial Mexican” case for understandings of colonial Latin America
can be found, for example, in Brading, First America, and more recently in Cañeque, King’s
Living Image. For a study that challenges notions of Manila as peripheral in the Spanish
empire, see Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan.
105. Sellers-García, Distance and Documents, 3, 5, 14.
106. Benton, “Spatial Histories of Empire,” 24 – 26. So-called peripheral areas of eighteenth-
century New Galicia (present-day southwestern US) were, for example, culturally and
legally integrated to the larger empire. See Cutter, Legal Culture of Northern New
Spain.
107. Such Manichean understandings of the historical unfolding of the Spanish Empire are
represented, for example, in Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, and more recently in
Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions.
108. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 1 – 3, emphasis added. For alternative understandings
highlighting the ambiguities and complexities of this process, see Clendinnen, Ambivalent
Conquests.
109. Sellers-García, Distance and Documents, 1 – 21.
110. See, e.g., Barrera- Osorio, Experiencing Nature; and López Lázaro, Misfortunes of Alonso
Ramírez.
111. Burkholder, “Spain’s America.”
112. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 9.
113. Osorio, Inventing Lima, 156.
114. Alencastro, O trato dos viventes.

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References (231)
W. McQuillen Memorial Fellowship from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, the Andrew Mellon Foundation Strategic Investments in Research and Teaching, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and faculty grants from the Office of the Provost at Wellesley College. I would also like to thank the comments and suggestions I received from my colleagues Kate Grandjean, Ryan Quintana, and Nikhil Rao.
For relocation of cities by the Habsburg in Europe, see Arnade, "Carthage or Jerusalem?" On archives and new forms of writing and memory, see Bouza, Corre manuscrito; and Bouza, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory.
For a similar issue in the historiography of the Portuguese empire, see Subrahmanyam, "Holding the World in Balance."
Burkholder, "Spain's America."
Green and Morgan, Atlantic History, 3.
See Hulme, "Beyond the Straits," and Leibsohn and Priyadarshini, "Transpacific: Beyond Silk and Silver."
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 156.
For a seventeenth-century definition of modern, see Sebastian de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española . . . Madrid . . . M.DC.XI (1611), Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.
Botero Giovanni, Delle cause della grandezza e magnificenza delle città (1588), published in Spanish in 1593. See Diez libros de la razon de estado: con tres libros de las causas de la grandeza, y magnificencia de las ciudades de Iuan Botero. Tradvzido de Italiano en Castellano, por mandato del Rey . . . por Antonio de Herrera . . . En Madrid, Por Luyz Sanchez MDXCIII. Biblioteca Nacional de España. See also Gil-Pujol, "La fuerza del rey."
Fantoni, "Una ciudad con forma de palacio," 11 -12.
See Sebastiano Serlio, Tercero y quarto libro de Architectura de Sebastian Serlio Boloñes: En
Gómez Martos, "La justificación mítica de las ciudades," 180. See Juan de Mariana, Historia general de España (1601), Toledo, Spain, Biblioteca Nacional de España; (1541), Zamora, Spain, Biblioteca Nacional de España. Also see Kagan, Clio and the Crown.
For the Renaissance roots of the prince as the architect of a political renewal closely linked to the novelty of antiquity, see Fantoni, "Una ciudad con forma de palacio," 6 -7.
See Estenssoro, "Construyendo la memoria." Also see Lupher, Romans in a New World; and Hampe Martínez, La tradición clásica en el Perú virreinal.
Ordenanzas del Peru-Tomo Primero (Duque de la Palata), 1685, John Carter Brown Library, Brown University, Providence, RI; Francisco López y Martínez, Noticias del sur: Despacho, y felices sucesos de la Armada . . . en el gouierno del . . . duque de la Palata, . . . virrey . . . de los Reynos del Peru (1685), and López y Martínez, Noticias del sur, continuadas (1688), John Carter Brown Library. See also Fernández-González, "Architecture of the Treasure-Archive."
Elliott, "Europe of Composite Monarchies."
Mazín Gómez, "Architect of the New World," 27 -28.
Ibid., 28.
Estenssoro, "Construyendo la memoria"; Osorio, Inventing Lima.
Fantoni, "Una ciudad con forma de palacio," 12. This is evident in Gregorio de San Martin, El triumpho mas famoso que hizo Lisboa a la entrada del rey don Phelippe Tercero d'España y Segundo de Portugal . . . compuesto por Gregorio de San Martin . . . en Lisboa: por Pedro Craesbeck (1624), Biblioteca Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. See, e.g., its introduction and canto 2, verse 45.
Pagden, Lords of All the World; González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 33, 39.
See Coreth, Pietas Austriaca.
González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 196 -242.
See Dandelet, Spanish Rome; and Osorio, Inventing Lima, 133 -57.
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 102, 121 -43.
Tanner, Last Descendants of Aeneas.
Charney, Indian Society in the Valley of Lima.
All translations are mine. Quoted in Río Barredo, Madrid Urbs Regia, 106. San Isidro was canonized in 1622 along with Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, and Philip Neri. See Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 99, 107, 180 -86, 217; González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 209 -19; and Osorio, Inventing Lima, 121 -43.
See Osorio, Inventing Lima, 41, 54, 137, 154, 157; and Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World.
Elliott, Spain and Its World; Pagden, Lords of All the World.
This historiographical fragmentation is also both the product of graduate training that produces Andeanists, Mexicanists, Hispanists, and so on, with distinct areas and methods of inquiry, and area studies that segregate the so-called non-West from the West.
Negotiation is an important trope of colonial Latin American history. See, e.g., Ruiz Medrano and Kellogg, Negotiation with Domination; Díaz, Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre; Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent; and Wernke, Negotiated Settlements.
Carrasco, La empresa imperial de Carlos V.
See Pagden, Hernan Cortes.
See Maltby, Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. This rupture affected not just Europe and the Indies, however: Charles's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor also posed a threat to its neighboring, rivaling Ottoman Empire. See Sahin, Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman, esp. 81 -87.
See Osorio, "El imperio de los Austrias españoles y el Atlántico." For the origin and uses of colonial in the Spanish Empire, see Burkholder, "Spain's America: From Kingdoms to Colonies."
This was a medieval political notion established in Las siete partidas del Rey Don Alfonso X (ca. 1265); see partida 2, title I, law 5, Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, El Escorial, Spain.
Recent studies, such as Cardim et al.'s collection Polycentric Monarchies, identify the circulation of capital as one of the central backbones that unified the empire, while Arndt Brendecke in Imperio e información locates it in discursive practices contained in official reports and administrative documentation.
Gil-Pujol, "Una cultura cortesana provincial," 232 -33.
Carmagnani, Hernández, and Romano, Para una historia de América.
Lisón Tolosana, La imagen del rey; Río Barredo, Madrid Urbs Regia; Osorio, "King in Lima."
Lisón Tolosana, La imagen del rey; Osorio, "King in Lima."
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 35 -55. For the evolution of capitals in Italian Renaissance principalities, see Fantoni, "Una ciudad con forma de palacio," 11 -18.
See De la Flor, Barroco; Sebastián, Contrarreforma y barroco; González Tornel, Roma Hispánica; and Coreth, Pietas Austriaca.
See Bodart, "La piazza quale 'teatro regio' nei regni di Napoli e di Sicilia." For the northern African possessions of Mazalquivir and Oran, see, e.g., Alonso Acero, Oran-Mazalquivir.
Because of the patronato real, or Spanish monarchical control over its church in the Indies, the Spanish king was the de facto head of the New World church. The patronato real was granted to the Spanish kings in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI in the Inter caetera bull, which ceded to the Spanish crown full and perpetual dominion in the Indies in return for undertaking the task of bringing its peoples into the Catholic faith. In 1501 Pope Alexander VI granted the Spanish monarchy the right to the church tithes from the Indies, to finance their evangelization. In 1508, Pope Julius II, in the bull Universalis ecclesiae, granted Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors the right to present to Rome candidates, from archbishops downward, for church posts in the Indies with the understanding that one of the king's nominees would always be chosen. The crown was to have further control over the building and endowment of cathedrals, churches, monasteries, and hospitals (initially in the New World but later in Europe as well), all to be financed with revenues produced by the tithe collected in the overseas possessions. The crown came also to control the movement of all churchmen to its overseas empire, as the royal treasury paid their journeys. Finally, in 1538, the crown successfully claimed the right of inspection, with veto power, over all papal dispatches to the Indies. After the creation of the Council of the Indies in 1524, the running of the patronato fell under its jurisdiction.
Lowe, On the Plaza; Escobar, Plaza Mayor; Wagner, Box, and Morehead, Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza.
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 1 -34.
Miguel López de Legazpi founded Manila on June 24, 1571, day of Saint John the Baptist, as the "Head City of all others conquered and to be conquered in these lands." In 1596, the king granted the city the title of "Noble and always Loyal with the privileges enjoyed by Cities Heads of Kingdoms," and a coat of arms. P. Pedro Murillo Velarde, Geographia historica, de las Islas Philipinas, del Africa, y de sus Islas adyacentes. Tomo VIII. En Madrid. En la oficina de D. Gabriel Ramirez. Año de M. DCC. LII (1752), 51 -52, Biblioteca Nacional de España. See also Elizalde Pérez-Grueso, "Sentido y rentabilidad";
Díaz-Trechuelo, Filipinas, 71 -117; and Doeppers, "The Development of Philippine Cities."
See Crouch, Garr, and Mundingo, Spanish City Planning in North America, 1 -19; and Escobar, Plaza Mayor, 33, 92 -103.
Matías Bocanegra, Auto general de la fee: Celebrado . . . en la . . . ciudad de Mexico . . . de Iesus (1649), unnumbered manuscript, Biblioteca Nacional de España.
De Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 122 -24.
Fantoni, "Una ciudad con forma de palacio," 8.
Section Hechicerías e Idolatrías 1668, bundle 7, doc. 6, fol. 18, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Lima, Peru.
See Aclamacion real, y pvblica, de la coronada villa, y corte de Madrid; en cuyo nombre leuanto el Pendon de Castilla el . . . Duque de San Lucar . . . por su Augusto, y Catolico Rey Carlos II (1665), and Prensados fastos, descriptivos mapas . . . nacimiento . . . Phelipe Prospero . . . Manila (1660), Biblioteca Nacional de España.
This was also the case of Cuzco, the former center of Inca rule. Spanish Cuzco contained a much larger indigenous population than Lima, its nobility was, however, smaller and its officials of lower ranks than those in the viceregal capital, all of which prevented it from successfully surpassing Lima in status. See Osorio, Inventing Lima, 35 -80.
See Francisco Moya y Torres, Lealtad empenada finesa de amor y bizarria . . . Manila . . . festivas aclamaciones . . . del Rey . . . Don Carlos Segundo . . . (1678), Biblioteca Nacional de España. See also Albardonedo Freire, El urbanismo de Sevilla.
Cenotaphio real de la Catholica magestad de Philippo Qvarto . . . y del aplauso . . . con qve celebraron la . . . Aclamacion . . . [de] Carlos Segundo . . . Escriviola . . . Francisco Deza . . . en Manila . . . (1668), Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.
Anino, Leiva, and Guerra, De los imperios a las naciones.
The Corregidor was the chief royal agent in the city, presiding over city council meetings and acting also as an appeals magistrate.
Unlike with the French and English monarchs, there was no interregnum between the death of the Spanish king and the taking of power by his successor. See Varela, La muerte del rey, 49 and 109 -32; and González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 246 -58. See also Kantorowicz, King's Two Bodies; and Giesey, Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France.
Aclamacion real, y pvblica. At the time, Carlos II was three years old, and his mother, Queen Mariana of Austria, ruled as regent until he became fourteen, the legal age for young Carlos to rule. Because of his poor health, however, Mariana remained influential in the court until her death in 1696. For the announcement sent to the kingdoms and provinces of the king having reached his legal age to rule, see Indiferente 430, L. 41, "El Rey, al virrey y audiencia, 25 de noviembre de 1675," fols. 393 -93r, and "Al Duque de Berlanga, 25 de noviembre de 1675," fol. 417, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain.
Quoted in Osorio, "King in Lima," 447 -48, 467 -70. The portrait of the king also graced his proclamation in Manila's plaza; see Cenotaphio real, fol. 12.
Río Barredo, Madrid Urbs Regia, 124.
The kingdoms ruled by viceroys in the seventeenth century included Brazil (1640);
Cataluña and Goa (1580 -1640);
Mallorca, Naples, Navarra, New Spain, and Portugal (1580 -1640);
and Peru, Sardinia, Sicily, and Valencia. See Cardim and Palos, El mundo de los virreyes.
See Guarino, Representing the King's Splendor; Bouza, Imagen y propaganda, 33; Cañeque, King's Living Image; and Osorio, "La entrada del virrey."
The Audiencia of Manila was established by Philip II in 1583, with a jurisdiction that included "the Island of Luson, the rest of the Philippines, the Archipelago of China, and the mainland of it, discovered and yet to be discovered." See Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las Yndias (1681), book 2, title 15, law 11, Biblioteca Nacional de España. The governorship of the Philippines was under the jurisdiction of the viceroyalty of New Spain, as already mentioned. Also see Herzog, "La presencia ausente."
Pagden, Lords of All the World, 11 -28, 44 -45. Also see Duerloo, Dynasty and Piety.
Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 104 -25.
Antunes, Globalisation in the Early Modern Period; Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation upon the Ocean Sea; Bauer, Goods, Power, History; Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos.
Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 3 -5, 12 -88; Bourdieu, Distinction; Fantoni, "Una ciudad con forma de palacio."
De la Flor, Barroco.
González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 253; López López, "Las ceremonias públicas y la construcción de la imagen"; Rivero Rodríguez, "Una monarquía de casas reales," 57; and Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. See also Debord, Society of the Spectacle. For a productive view of the baroque, see Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, and for the political powers of the royal portrait, see Bodart, Pouvoirs du portrait.
This was the case not just in the overseas empire; see, e.g., Varallo, "Margaret of Austria's Travel."
Prensados fastos, fol. 12r.
Cervantes Salazar, México en 1554, 183, 184.
See Knighton, "Music and Ritual in Urban Spaces." See also, e.g., Giovanni Battista Confalonieri, Relacion Tercero . . . En Valencia: en casa de Pedro Patricio Mey (1599), Biblioteca Museo Nacional del Prado.
Fray Francisco de Montalvo, Noticias fvnebres de las magestvosas exeqvias, que hizo la felicissima , Virrey, y Capitan General deste reyno, execvtada por . . . D. Lvys Riggio, Principe de Campo Florido, del Habito de Santiago, Maestro Racional del Real Patrimonio (1698), Biblioteca Nacional de España. See also González Tornel, Roma Hispánica, 257.
See Saavedra y Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político-cristiano, empresas 21, 31.
Marc Antonio Sestini, La felicita cadvta, la costanza affinata, la republica disordinata. Dialoghi . . . in Perugia . . . MDCXLVII (1647), 11, Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Bouza, Imagen y propaganda, 95 -120.
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 35 -37.
Baber, "Empire, Indians, and the Negotiation of Status."
See Galasso, Quirante, and Colomer, Fiesta y ceremonia.
González Acosta, Crespones y campanas Tlaxcaltecas. This right was ultimately never granted to the city.
Bernardo Romero González de Villalobos, Fvneral Pompa y Solemnidad de las Exequias . . . Mariana de Austria . . . Lima . . . por Joseph de Contreras . . . 1697 (1697), John Carter Brown Library. This pragmatica was based on an earlier one from 1588; see Prematica, en que se da la orden que se ha de tener en el traer de los lutos en estos Reynos. En Madrid. En casa de Pedro Madrigal (1588), Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Romero González de Villalobos, Fvneral Pompa y Solemnidad.
Fantoni, "La ciudad con forma de palacio," 9.
Egginton, "Baroque as a Problem of Thought," 143.
Childers, "Baroque Public Sphere," 165 -67, 181 -82.
Nelson, "Ritual Practice for Modernity," 80.
Gruzinski, Les quatre parties du monde.
Green, "Baroque and Neobaroque," 150. For the scope of a Catholic aesthetics throughout the empire, see Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Mission.
Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World, 9.
See Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History"; Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic Drama.
Mitchell, Questions of Modernity, 3.
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 155 -57. See also Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan, and Clossey, "Merchants, migrants, and globalization."
Chaplin, "Expansion and Exceptionalism," 1432, 1439 -40.
This is the case with Levy and Mills, Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque, where the very structure of the book serves to reify a problematic geography of cultural production. See Osorio, "Lexikon of the Baroque."
Elliott, History in the Making.
Games, "Atlantic History," 744.
See Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation upon the Ocean Sea; and Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos.
The normativity of the "colonial Mexican" case for understandings of colonial Latin America can be found, for example, in Brading, First America, and more recently in Cañeque, King's Living Image. For a study that challenges notions of Manila as peripheral in the Spanish empire, see Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan.
Sellers-García, Distance and Documents, 3, 5, 14.
Benton, "Spatial Histories of Empire," 24 -26. So-called peripheral areas of eighteenth- century New Galicia (present-day southwestern US) were, for example, culturally and legally integrated to the larger empire. See Cutter, Legal Culture of Northern New Spain.
Such Manichean understandings of the historical unfolding of the Spanish Empire are represented, for example, in Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches, and more recently in Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions.
Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 1 -3, emphasis added. For alternative understandings highlighting the ambiguities and complexities of this process, see Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests.
Sellers-García, Distance and Documents, 1 -21.
See, e.g., Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature; and López Lázaro, Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez.
Burkholder, "Spain's America."
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 9.
Osorio, Inventing Lima, 156.
Alencastro, O trato dos viventes. References
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FAQs
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What analytic frameworks hinder understanding of the Spanish Habsburg Empire?
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The paper reveals that dominant frameworks, like colonial Latin American and Atlantic history, obscure Spain's Pacific-Asia and African influences, creating anachronistic boundaries since 1970s.
How did urban centers like Lima and Manila function as imperial capitals?
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Urban centers represented complex networks of interdependence, where cities like Lima and Manila served as hierarchical metropolitan centers with unique cultural and political significance established in the seventeenth century.
What role did royal ceremonies play in imperial power dynamics?
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Royal ceremonies established a physical and symbolic presence of the king, crucially reinforcing monarchical authority and local identities via shared celebrations in plazas from Madrid to Lima.
How did genealogical claims influence perceptions of legitimacy within the empire?
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The emergence of diverse genealogies, such as Inca origins linked to Spanish Habsburgs, gave rise to local antiquity claims, enabling elites to assert both autonomy and legitimacy within the imperial framework.
What impact did the shift in representation from king's body to simulacra have?
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The transition to simulacra facilitated the king's omnipresence across vast territories, allowing for consistent exercises of power and enhancing cultural coherence, evidenced by ceremonial practices throughout the empire.
Alejandra B Osorio
Wellesley College, Faculty Member
Alejandra B. Osorio is working on a manuscript tentatively titled "The First Modern: Baroque Modernity in the Spanish Hapsburg World, ca. 1519-ca.1700." It examines the role played by the king's figure and body in the establishment and consolidation of a political culture in various cities in Europe, America and Asia that made ruling and imagining this vast empire possible. She teaches courses in Spanish American history, gender and feminist theory, urban history, and comparative empires. She is the author of Inventing Lima. Baroque Modernity in Peru's South Sea Metropolis (2008).
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