Introduction

Authoritarian and arbitrary conduct became increasingly common in the governments of the rulers of the Habsburg dynasty, and was a factor in the remarkable seventeenth-century decline of the Crown's capacity to obtain adequate support from the leaders of Castile's commonwealth. Frequent recourse to royal assertions of the monarch's authority to violate the law or more direct threats, such as the threat Philip II sent to Toledo's council, did not eliminate alternative interpretations of “absolute royal authority.” These interpretive schemes retained a substantial place in Castilian political thought and continued to shape the actions of political leaders in ways that compromised the sovereign's policies and administration. In the face of historiographical emphases on “reason of state” theories or on treatises for courtiers and other royal servants, it must be stressed that many members of the political kingdom sustained an ideology of absolute royal authority within a framework of consultation and consensus. They viewed this interactive process as necessary to maintain the collaboration essential for competing parties to reach some of their goals and achieve the best possible result during a challenging era. Both of the interpretive schemes of Castile's cultural environment about absolute royal authority, which were brought into conflict over the course of the Belalcázar lawsuit, remained significant despite the ratification of one of them by Philip II's regime. The continued creation of institutions to exercise such authority throughout the global Hispanic Monarchy produced greater complexity, and this made it increasingly less likely that one particular view would predominate.