This is a study about resistance and obedience in mid-seventeenth-century Castile and the nature of the state that people were either resisting or obeying. Usually they were doing both, and that, in large part, is the point: Resistance was framed by the language of obedience; indeed, few of the figures in this study would have admitted they were resisting authority. Much of the study concerns institutions, for it was the tools of litigation, jurisdiction, and legal precedent that enabled individuals and corporations successfully to resist the Crown. The very structures of old-regime Castile provided them with the means for challenging royal orders.

The study uses military recruitment as a means with which to analyze the relationship between ruler and ruled, between the king and his kingdom, between rey and reino. It argues that the nature of this relationship posed both an enormous obstacle to the centralization and administration usually thought necessary for raising an army, whilst it also provided individuals and corporate institutions with sufficient rights and capacities to dissuade them from rebelling, thus contributing to the survival, despite all odds, of a system of rule sometimes regarded as having been in perpetual decline.

The common good, one of the fundamental measures of law in early modern Spain, assumed the coexistence of authority and liberty and required that both king and kingdom be accountable to that criterion. “As observance of the law does not diminish the majesty and power of rulers, neither does obedience toward kings diminish a people's liberty,” contemporary theorist Calixto Ramírez wrote.