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165 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322849.c007 7 Don Carlos de Tezcoco and the Universal Rights of Emperor Carlos V Ethelia Ruiz Medrano English Translation by Russ Davidson When reflecting on the sixteenth-century conquest and subjugation of extensive and far-flung sections of the Americas, it has generally been emphasized that the European presence in Mesoamerica followed the steady overseas expansion of the Spanish kingdoms . Thus colonial domination may be explained in part as a mercantilist venture through which the Iberian kingdoms annexed first one territory and then another, along with the people who inhabited them. Nonetheless, it should also be emphasized—as others have done—that the rights and symbolic acts “legitimating ” the incorporation of the American colonies to the Crown of Castile stemmed as well from the attempt to annex them not as mere colonies but as veritable kingdoms. This legal and juridical distinction is critical, for it underlies the further understanding that the integration of Spanish America into the royal patrimony of Castile carried with it a broad-scale effort to legitimate Castilian rule over the long term.1 From this vantage point, the incorporation of far-off territories, as well as the creation of the juridical mechanisms needed to bring them under effective control, are key elements in the unfolding of a universal political project. Moreover, this project was hardly an empty gesture. On the contrary, the imperial policies implemented by the Crown in its European and American kingdoms encompassed lands, governments, and population centers as diverse and removed from each other as, for example, the cities of Tezcoco, in Mexico, and Ghent, in the Low Countries. On February 14, 1540, Emperor Charles V made a triumphal entrance into the city of Ghent, accompanied by a large retinue that included his sister, a high-placed ETHELIA RUIZ MEDRANO 166 papal envoy, and numerous princes and noblemen from the Low Countries, Spain, and Germany. The royal procession, behind which a powerful army inched its way forward, exhausted more than six hours before reaching the city (Brandi 1993: 336). However, in visiting the land where he had spent his early childhood, the emperor was doing more than paying a courtesy call on his subjects. At that time, revolutionary agitation was sweeping Ghent. In the recent past, a sister city, Antwerp, had overtaken it as a center of wool production, seriously damaging Ghent’s economy. Like all cities and kingdoms under the rule of Emperor Charles V, Ghent was obliged to pay a series of steep taxes to the Crown, which desperately needed such revenue to finance an ongoing war with France. The government of the Low Countries was in the hands of Charles V’s sister, Queen María, who had delegated to leading members of the Flemish nobility the task of requesting, through representatives of the city, payment of the taxes owed by Ghent. The city, however, had been refusing to make such payments since before 1539 (ibid.: 235). Ghent, while subject to the governing authority of the Low Countries, was itself governed by a special council or tribunal composed of nobles, as well as by “three members,” or corporate bodies, that represented the city’s citizens, guilds, and weavers. These representatives argued that both the Flemish nobility and the queen failed to take Ghent’s former privileges into account and requested—in light of its depressed economy—that the city be relieved of this fiscal burden. Their objections did not stop at simply lodging a protest but flowered into open rebellion, capped by the city’s attempt to form an alliance with the emperor’s immediate enemy, the French king, Francis I (ibid.). During the autumn months of 1539, Ghent’s citizens went to the extreme of burning the constitution Charles V had granted them in 1515: “pieces of the ripped up document were set on fire in hats and coats while people, carrying on and yelling, waved them about.” These heretofore loyal citizens of the empire also directed their ire at Queen María, publicly proclaiming that she would do better to confine herself to a convent than to govern them (ibid.: 235–36). The revolt that flared in Ghent threatened to extend across the entire region of Flanders. Faced with this danger, the emperor decided to march against the city. On February 17, 1540, with his troops positioned in different parts of Ghent, he commanded that all of the rebellion’s ringleaders be sought out and taken prisoner. In response...

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