The Topic and Its Importance

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” that kept Castilians loyal to the monarchy. Contemporaries expected that rule by a monarch who possessed “absolute royal authority,” which is what I mean by “absolute monarchy,” would provide the best means of obtaining good government, which they defined as the ability to provide for the commonwealth (res publica, república) justice, domestic tranquility, and peace. Castilians remained loyal because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and they believed that the sovereign possessed “absolute royal authority” to see that justice was done. This expectation of royal justice served as a foundation for the political identity and loyalty that held together for several centuries the disparate and globally dispersed domains of the Hispanic Monarchy.