The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth-Century Castile (review)

The Limits of Royal Authority: Resistance and Obedience in Seventeenth- Century Castile. By Ruth Mackay (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 193 pp., $59.95.

This book is both a tightly focused study of military recruitment in seventeenth-century Castile and an original, convincing analysis of the nature of Habsburg absolutism that takes into account recent theorizing about the origins and consolidation of the early-modern state. It exemplifies how an archivally based historical monograph can significantly address broad conceptual issues.

Starting from the observation that wartime exposes the true nature of power relations in a given society, Mackay examines the ways in which individuals and institutions were able to resist royal demands for men and money by exploiting the ambiguities and contradictions within the Castilian administrative system. Historians have long asked why Castile did not experience significant popular rebellion in the seventeenth century, despite the severe financial and military pressures occasioned by continuous warfare. Mackay argues that the fragmentation of the Castilian political system, by creating opportunities for negotiation and legitimate resistance, made overt rebellion less necessary or attractive. The Spanish monarchy was a "hybrid" in which centralization and localism, representation and absolutism, and tradition and innovation co-existed in delicate balance; a monarchy allegedly in "decline" was, in fact, strengthened and stabilized through flexibility and respect for the rights of all parties to the political compact.

Mackay begins by analyzing the diffuse nature of authority over wartime recruitment and finance within the royal administration. The Council of State, traditionally entrusted with policymaking in matters of war and peace, and the Council of Finance increasingly encountered challenges from specialized juntas appointed by the Count-Duke of Olivares and from the Cortes, which had exclusive jurisdiction over a major source of revenue--the commodities tax known as the millones. Unclear and conflicting lines of authority facilitated non-compliance with royal orders and expanded the role of the judiciary, which arbitrated competing claims over jurisdiction and precedent. Moreover, responsibility for recruitment increasingly devolved upon local institutions--municipal and seigneurial--that provided additional opportunities for opposition, resistance, and bargaining between Crown and subjects. The Spanish monarchy, in other words, did not experience the political centralization supposedly engendered by the "military revolution"; on the contrary, wartime exigencies further decentralized the political system. Mackay argues, however, that this decentralization was not necessarily a sign of weakness but another manifestation of the "liberty" that Nader has posited as an essential characteristic of the Habsburg political system.¹ Cities, towns, villages, nobles, and even commoners could exercise that liberty to evade, modify, or resist royal demands for tribute in ways that testified to the "fluid, negotiated, and even democratic nature of Castilian absolutism" (135).

Despite the difficulties in raising men and money, the monarchy was able to sustain an effective fighting force on multiple fronts for many decades. Mackay's rich archival sources show how municipalities distributed the financial and personal burdens of military service and how individual men and women responded to those demands. Their alternatives included exemptions, substitutes, fraud, flight, desertion, and occasionally violent resistance, but these forms of resistance were almost always couched in the language of reciprocity and obedience to royal authority. Military recruitment "disclosed a society in which power--even if that meant just the power to say 'no'--was held by a remarkably diffuse and varied collection of vassals, all of whom acted, or said they acted, in the king's best interest" (20).

Carolyn P. Boyd
University of California, Irvine

Note

1. Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516-1700 (Baltimore, 1990).

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