This book focuses on judicial administration. During its “Golden Age” from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the kingdom of Castile experienced a remarkable proliferation of judicial institutions, which historians have generally seen as part of a metanarrative of “state-building.” Yet Castile’s frontiers were extremely porous, and a Crown government that could not control the kingdom’s borders exhibited neither the ability to obtain information and shape affairs nor the centrality of Court politics that many historians claim in an effort to craft a tidy narrative of this period. It was not the “power” of the institutions of a developing “state”...

Among members of the Royal Council dissatisfied with John II’s incapacity in the 1440s was one of the reign’s principal chroniclers, bishop Lope Barrientos. As a model of proper royal conduct, he offered a description of king Henry III, John II’s father and predecessor, which established a standard by which the reign of his son could only be considered a disaster at every point. The latter mismanaged his estates, had too many unreliable, venal officials and counselors, was undervalued by aristocrats and little regarded by humbler peoples, and maintained so little justice that none felt secure.

He [king Henry III]...

John II left his heirs, Henry IV and the Catholic Monarchs, Isabella and Ferdinand, a bitter, dangerous, and widely followed quarrel between the city of Toledo and the heads of the House of Sotomayor, now counts of Belalcázar. Although John also bequeathed royal institutions and laws to resolve such conflicts, Crown officials lacked the capacity to do so. The history of the Belalcázar case, as the litigation was increasingly known, reveals that John had further bequeathed an influential group of magnates who were capable of pressuring rulers to observe more personal relationships with their great vassals, which could be used...

This chapter argues that the Comunidades, the great uprising of 1520–1521, involved an attempt to establish, through the familiar use of rebellion to force negotiation, a monarchy whose exercise of “absolute royal authority” would sustain good government and justice. Historians have justifiably given more attention to the Comunidades rebellion than to any other violent confrontation in Castilian history prior to the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century. I stress the rebellion’s importance because the conflict and its development reveal the nature of this monarchy as a regime in which the character and ability of the sovereign were crucial...

The officials of a Crown judicial institution would now try to resolve, without sufficient royal coercive muscle, a dispute made serious by its ties to groups—territorial aristocrats and local notables who governed major municipalities—that tended to employ different interpretive understandings of justice and absolute royal authority. I avoid any tendency to consider these officials as the bureaucrats of the emerging “Spanish” state or the royal law courts known as audiencias, with their letrado justices and other personnel, as important components of any bureaucratic hierarchy. During his long reign, Charles V gave these audiencias an extraordinary role in the...

A trial provides a forum in which the significant issues are frozen in a way that makes them resonate with the parties, and in high profile contests, among those with similar concerns. The trial sorted the fluid mix of different interpretive schemes available within the Castilian cultural environment into starkly contrasting positions. When they realized that the only chance to keep Toledo from regaining the viscounty of Puebla de Alcocer probably lay in the outcome of the judicial proceedings, the duke of Béjar’s lawyers increased their efforts to improve their case. By the time of the Granadan audiencia’s second decision...

This chapter challenges the view that Philip II enjoyed sufficient information and the capacity to implement policies. This challenge undermines the contention that his “centralization” constitutes a chapter in European “statebuilding” characteristic of an “early modern” era of European history. Instead, in the midst of a series of major political, military, and religious crises early in his reign, the king and his advisers, with a combination of anxiety and arrogance, often managed affairs in ways that appeared arbitrary and sapped support for royal policies. Sensing opposition within the commonwealth, the king appeared reluctant to grant too much authority to the...

Authoritarian and arbitrary conduct became increasingly common in the governments of the rulers of the Habsburg dynasty, and was a factor in the remarkable seventeenth-century decline of the Crown’s capacity to obtain adequate support from the leaders of Castile’s commonwealth. Frequent recourse to royal assertions of the monarch’s authority to violate the law or more direct threats, such as the threat Philip II sent to Toledo’s council, did not eliminate alternative interpretations of “absolute royal authority.” These interpretive schemes retained a substantial place in Castilian political thought and continued to shape the actions of political leaders in ways that compromised...