Significant historical periods are characterized by the frontiers within which a man extends his affections. Multiple monarchies, modern state, nation-state: each involves different patterns of community consciousness; the transformation from one state to the other has at its heart the creation of a new consciousness of community. The capability of a particular perception of community in any given area to stretch to embrace territorial and dynastic expansion and to overcome competing loyalties is an essential key to the development and subsequent cohesion of the state as nation. The consciousness of community is not, of course, singular. Communities coexist, in concentric layers, or in adjacent sectors, imposing different loyalties which are not necessarily mutually exclusive, although they may ultimately be so. The hierarchalization and the rehierarchalization of community loyalties is what the political process, at bottom, is all about. The affective is perhaps the determining dimension in the building of nations in contradistinction to the construction of states. Put another way, political history is contingent on the meaning of patria.

John Elliott's abiding interest in the themes of patria, national sentiment and community has been apparent throughout his long catalogue of distinguished contributions to Spanish and early modern European history. This essay takes up one aspect of the role of nationalism in the configuration of the early modern state to which he drew attention in his examination of the early seventeenth-century Spanish reform movement, but which has hardly been pursued by historians since.