A New Beginning for the Exercise of Royal Justice and for the Belalcázar Lawsuit

The officials of a Crown judicial institution would now try to resolve, without sufficient royal coercive muscle, a dispute made serious by its ties to groups–territorial aristocrats and local notables who governed major municipalities–that tended to employ different interpretive understandings of justice and absolute royal authority. I avoid any tendency to consider these officials as the bureaucrats of the emerging “Spanish” state or the royal law courts known as audiencias, with their letrado justices and other personnel, as important components of any bureaucratic hierarchy. During his long reign, Charles V gave these audiencias an extraordinary role in the administration of his Castilian domains on three continents. However, when one turns one's attention from superficial organizational charts of Castilian government to the important details and periodic dramas of administrative processes exposed in the present chapter, a picture emerges of institutions that had to function with considerable autonomy, even from direct royal intervention, if the monarch's authority were to be enhanced and the Crown were to receive the kind of broad collaboration from the commonwealth necessary for the government of a global polity during a major transformation of world history. Of course, the existence of these institutions would make it more difficult for the Crown to act arbitrarily. As we have seen, the meaning of absolute royal authority was unstable and depended on human interactions for which political institutions frequently provided a context.