The Peculiarities of the Spaniards: Historical Approaches to the Early Modern State (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Spanish Habsburgs and Dynastic Rule, 1500-1700 (Routledge, 2023)
Providing a novel research methodology for students and scholars with an interest in dynasties, at all levels, this book explores the Spanish Habsburg dynasty that ruled the Spanish monarchy between c. 1515 and 1700. Instead of focusing on the reigns of successive kings, the book focuses on the Habsburgs as a family group that was constructed in various ways: as a community of heirs, a genealogical narrative, a community of the dead and a ruling family group. These constructions reflect the fact that dynasties do not only exist in the present, as kings, queens or governors, but also in the past, in genealogies, and in the future, as a group of hypothetical heirs. This book analyses how dynasties were 'made' by the people belonging to them. It uses a social institutionalist framework to analyse how family dynamics gave rise to practices and roles. The kings of Spain only had limited power to control the construction of their dynasty, since births and deaths, processes of dynastic centralisation, pressure from subjects, relatives' individual agency, rivalry among relatives and the institutionalisation of roles limited their power. Including several genealogical tables to support students new to the Spanish Habsburgs, this book is essential reading for all students of early modern Europe and the history of monarchy.
This essay deals with rules and attitudes towards the Spanish succession crisis from 1580 to the extinction of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty in 1700. It argues that apart from succession laws, set down in the legal texts of the many different realms under Habsburg authority, attitudes and expectations created implicit rules for the succession. These attitudes and expectations have been distilled by analyzing testaments, representation of deceased relatives in the Escorial and the behaviors towards royal children. This analysis shows that Spanish royal attitudes to the succession differed considerably from codified law, and that the behavior and policies of the kings of Spain were mainly guided by the former. This essay demonstrates, therefore, that in order to understand the development of the Spanish succession crisis, the traditional focus on biology, politics and laws needs to be expanded to include the dynasty’s implicit rules of succession.
The memory of the Habsburg Monarchy in early eighteenth-century Spain
Global Intellectual History, 2018
This article provides a reappraisal of the political and intellectual uses of the memory of the rump Habsburg Monarchy in eighteenth-century Spain. Drawing on newly discovered archival material, this article recovers the impact of Habsburg Spain on the political imaginary of early eighteenth-century Spanish reformers and political economists, and unearths the legal debates of the 1741 Imperial Diet Election concerning Philip V’s claim to the Austrian Habsburg throne. This reconsideration sheds light on the origins of the early Spanish Enlightenment, and emphasises the centrality of the debates of those political economists, jurists, ministers, who propelled Enlightenment reforms in early eighteenth-century Spain.
The Bourbon Reform of Spanish Absolutism: The Government of the Crown of Aragon, 1665-1746
2014
This study of early modern governing practices analyzes the rule of Philip V of Spain (17001724, 1724-1746) in relation to his predecessor, the Habsburg Charles II (1665-1700) and his grandfather, Louis XIV of France (1643-1715). Philip creatively engaged the legacy of both monarchs to create a unique set of governing practices that centralized his authority while also maintaining a significant degree of variation in how he related to his subjects based on their social and political standing. Philip followed a particularist model that allowed him to give specific concessions and privileges only to the subjects who requested them. This approach to governing resulted in an ad-hoc administrative and legal patchwork rife with irregularities, but it circumvented the unavoidable problems of replacing multiple complex systems throughout his kingdoms with a uniform legal system. While Philip’s reforms left some subjects dissatisfied with his reign, it enabled him to cultivate support among ...
From Charles V to Philip IV of Spain: the concepts of Monarchia Universalis and Catholic Monarchy
HISTORY OF EUROPEAN IDEAS, 2024
This text discusses the European system in the modern age, describing the concept of ‘state’ as an object bounded by property rights and its owner’s jurisdiction. In order to maintain the state, it was necessary to keep the inhabitants in a state of submission, through either persuasion or force. State policy consisted in preserving the possessions of the state, improving and increasing it, combining statecraft with the subjects and concert with other state-holders. States were not autonomous units, but domains, and state affairs concerned ways of increasing or maintaining their ownership. When two princes married, they united their states and created a new political and institutional framework, with each spouse taking on the conflicts and alliances of his or her partner, creating entirely new situations. Each peace treaty or alliance was solidly sealed with a dynastic union, as can be seen in the example of the rise of the House of Habsburg, which became the first European power after integrating the inheritances of three great lineages: the Austrian Habsburgs, who contributed fiefdoms and states in Central and Eastern Europe, the House of Burgundy, who contributed states in France and the Low Countries, and the House of Trastámara, who contributed the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.
‘Exempt from time and from its fatal change’: Spanish imperial ideology, 1450-1700
Renaissance Studies, 2012
Spanish imperial ideology took shape with three momentous twists. First, from Basel to Charles V, assuming the narrative of the decline and fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the church as the Fifth Monarchy to claim, first, Castile’s independence from the German empire and, later, its own particular empire. Second, with the recovery of the translatio imperii narrative during Charles V´s reign. Third, in Philip II´s times, when the claim was that the Monarchy of Spain, along with the church, was the Fifth Universal Monarchy, which would last forever. At the same time, neoplatonic and humanist ecclesiological legitimization of the church as a monarchy was applied first to Castile and then to the Monarchy of Spain to imply they were composite bodies tied together by love, not by law, this claim not entailing the existence of absolutism. This essay will explain, first, the humanist basis of Spanish imperial ideology and its transformation from the Catholic Kings, as Isabel and Ferdinand were known, to Philip II; and, second, how and why Philip II changed the imperial ideology and how this ideology denied empire’s corruption and defended liberties and the ‘improvement of sciences’ until the eighteenth century.
The Spanish Habsburg Monarchy was a composite state that needed several individuals of royal blood other than the ruler to govern its constituent parts. Since the dynasty was one of few central institutions, the participation of relatives in rule can be seen as part of state building at an imperial level. This essay analyzes the increasing involvement of relatives and thus the " patrimonialization " of dynastic rule in the seventeenth century. We focus on the career of Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy (1588-1624), nephew of Philip III. His career shows first, how and why the Spanish monarchy went through a phase of increased involvement of royal relatives during his lifetime; and second, how the employment of nephews (and thus the functioning of the Habsburg composite state) took shape in the fraught context of dynastic interests, honor and diplomatic relations with the paternal families of the nephews. Keywords Dynastic rule – state building – Spanish Habsburg Monarchy – Duchy of Savoy – Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy. I would like to thank the reviewers at the Journal of Early Modern History, all the participants at the conference, and my colleagues in the Eurasian Empires program for their insights, help, and encouragement.
2015
Los estudios antecedentes sobre la figura de D. Juan Jose de Austria fueron comenzados por Gabriel de Maura y Gamazo (duque de Maura). Este trabajo ha constituido la base de las obras de gran parte de los autores que han analizado la actividad politica del hijo de Felipe IV durante el reinado de Carlos II, o de personajes de primera importancia con el vinculados. Sin embargo, los analisis del personaje no se han circunscrito exclusivamente a los anos del reinado de Carlos II, sino que numerosos expertos han abordado su trayectoria vital. Todos ellos estan realizados desde una minuciosidad empirica, poniendo de manifiesto de manera exhaustiva los documentos y bibliografia existentes. Actualmente una investigacion sobre Don Juan Jose de Austria solo puede enmarcarse en la perspectiva de los estudios revisionistas sobre la supuesta "decadencia espanola" del siglo XVII. Nuestro equipo de investigacion, liderado por mi colega, el Dr. Jose Martinez Milan, y codirector de la tesi...