Charles V and the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy. Negotiations for the Ecclesiastical Subsidy (review)

This important new study, the product of extensive archival research, sheds valuable light on the role of the relatively unknown Castilian Assembly of the Clergy under King Charles V (1516–56): the institution that represented the political interests of the ecclesiastical estate and was responsible for negotiating the fiscal obligations of the Church to the Crown, notably the payment of the subsidio and excusado. In the first half of the sixteenth century, these taxes amounted to 3.6 million ducats (or 7 percent of royal revenue), exceeding that collected in ordinary taxation via the servicio voted by the Cortes, thus demonstrating the importance of the assembly to the history of government and taxation. The author argues that, far from being a docile, subservient institution at the mercy of the Crown’s fiscal needs and, by extension, those of the centralizing state, the assembly “defended ecclesiastical liberties and hampered royal attempts to extract more money from the church” (p. 5) via means of collaboration and negotiation. He examines in detail the strategies that the assembly’s representatives—principally senior members of Castilian chapters who exercised considerable autonomy within the Church’s wider structure—employed to protect their privileges and restrict their contributions toward the defense of Catholicism in the Mediterranean and northern Europe. These included the cesación a divinis or suspension of Divine Offices (including the administration of the sacraments, thereby endangering the spiritual foundation of the monarchy), the redress of clerical grievances, the verification of the value of diocesan incomes as a basis for the subsidy, and finally recourse to Rome as the ultimate arbiter. The protracted negotiating process more often than not resulted in concessions being granted by the Crown to release the funds, although there were still overall benefits for royal finances. The phenomenon (a) sheds light on the often-overlooked hierarchical and jurisdictional divisions within the Spanish church (including that between bishops and their chapters) that undermined its exercise of unified authority and (b) reinforces the contention that church-state relations throughout the Habsburg period were not always harmonious, but riddled with tensions and conflicts. Sean T. Perrone rejects traditional state-building theories and concepts of absolutism to explain the relationship between the ruler and his subjects in sixteenth-century Spain and instead posits a pluralistic view of the political sphere, based on consensus and shared partnership between the Crown and autonomous, intermediate corporate bodies, as illustrated by its dealings with the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy. In so doing, he foreshadows the refeudalization theories in relation to the decentralization of the state in the second half of the seventeenth century. This is a carefully researched and clearly argued study that makes an important contribution to our understanding of royal finance, governance, political practice, and church-state relations in sixteenth-century Castile.