Writing in 1789, León de Arroyal, one of the lesser-known figures of the Spanish Enlightenment, offered a somewhat unusual vision of his country at a moment when the centralizing policies of Spain's Bourbon monarchy were in full force: ‘We ought to consider Spain’, he wrote, ‘as a country composed of various confederated republics united under the government and protection of its monarchs. We should imagine each town as a miniature kingdom, and the kingdom itself as a large town.’

For all its boldness, Arroya's idea of a confederate Spain, a union of independent city-states or republics, actually belongs to a deep current in Spanish cultural and political life that John Elliott has conceived in terms of the vital and sometimes conflicting tensions between centre and periphery. Other essays in this volume examine the extent to which this enduring theme in Spanish history manifested itself both culturally and politically. This essay addresses the question of centre versus periphery from a historiographical perspective and aims to compare the history produced by the monarchy's official chroniclers – the cronistas del rey – with that written for individual cities and towns.