THE HOLY REPUBLIC AND ITS PRINCES - The Habsburg Pact of Kingship and the Political Theology of the City in Sixteenth Century Segovia

THE HOLY REPUBLIC AND ITS PRINCES
: The Habsburg Pact of Kingship and the Political Theology of
           the City in Sixteenth Century Segovia

                          Seonghek Kang
                 PhD Student, Department of History

Project Preliminaries
• Problematization: In the historiography of the Golden Age Spain,
  how does one account for the coexisting phenomena of expanding
  central royal authority, and the salience of the participatory,
  republican political culture?
• Parameters: mid-late sixteenth century Segovia, networks of urban        Alcázar (royal
                                                                                castle) of
  elites & administration, civic religiosity, state ideology & political       Segovia &
                                                                            stained-glass
  culture, rebellions and political negotiation                                seal of the
                                                                                Crown of
                                                                            Castile in the
• Keywords: early modern Castile, Habsburg Spain, political                  throne room

  theology, republicanism, School of Salamanca, Comunidades of
  Castile

• Historiography:
    • Maravall, José Antonio, Las comunidades de Castilla: una primera revolución
      moderna (1963), Martínez Gil, Fernando, La ciudad inquieta: Toledo
      comunera, 1520-1522 (1993)
    • Nader, Helen, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Hasburg Sale of Towns, 1516-
      1700 (1990), Thompson, I. A. A., Crown and Cortes: Government, Institutions
      and Representation in Early-Modern Castile (1993)

• Sources:
    • National archives: Archivo Histórico Nacional, Archivo de Real Chancillería de
      Valladolid, Biblioteca Nacional de España
    • Municipal archives: Archivo Municipal de Segovia, Archivo de la Catedral de
      Segovia
    • Printed manuscripts

The Place and the Period: The Sixteenth Century Segovia
• About 15,000 population, 3rd largest in the Meseta Central
• Center of wool & textile production in central Iberia
     • Growing commercial contact: Low Countries, northern Iberian trade route
     • Influx of rural migratory workers

• 11th century Christian reconquest & repopulation; coronation of Isabel I
  as the queen of Castile in 1474
• Bishopric & center of Villa y Tierra de Segovia
• With Toledo & Salamanca, center of the Revolution of the Comuneros of
  Castile (1520-21)

Renaissance Republicanism in ‘Absolutist’ Spain: the Revolt of
   the Comuneros (1520-21) and its Legacy in 16th c. Castile
• Crisis of dynastic transition: foreign regency, revenue collection, political
  representation
• Municipal bureaucrats, lower nobility, educated professionals, urban
  workers, monastic clergy
     • landed aristocracy initially divided/ambivalent

• Uprising in Toledo, Segovia & Salamanca; expansion into 13 out of 18
  cortes-represented cities of Castile by September
• Demands: recognition of the revolutionary Santa Junta, regularization of the
  cortes generales, fiscal & administrative oversight, royal & administrative
  indigenization
• Military defeat in the Battle of Villalar, April 1521

Reconciling: Urban Administration & Political Culture in Castile
After the Comuneros
• Subjects: appointment of urban officials & family
  networks
• Judgeship (alcaldía), delegates to the                        cortes
  (procurador), council magistrates (regidor)
• Background, influential families, ties to the crown
• Representation in the national estates general (cortes
  generales)
• Civic religious culture

                                      Fuero (charter of self-government) de Sepúlevda, 11th c.   City hall (Casa consistorial) of Segovia, xvii c.

Worshiping: Civic Religiosity & Political Culture in a Counter-
Reformation City

• The destruction of the Cathedral of Segovia
  (1520) & reconstruction
    • Who paid? Who staffed the chapterhouse?
      Influential donors?

• Chapels & patrons: who were the influential
  ecclesiastical families? Ties to the urban
  oligarchy?
• Local devotions; members & patrons of the
  confraternities

                                                Sepulcher of Diego de Covarrubias (1512-1577), bishop of Segovia & jurist

Conversing: The City in the 16th c. Castilian Political Thought
• Contemporary intellectual discourses concerning the
  Spanish polity, rights of man, political legitimacy
• Neo-Aristotelian political theory,     the   School   of
  Salamanca & Jesuit arbitrastas
• Anthropology of the town squares: triangulating the city
  and citizens’ self-rule within the man, the kingdom, and
  God
• Theories of social contract & resistance: salience of
  municipal republicanism in the ideology of the
  ‘absolutist’ Spanish Empire                                Portrait of Diego de Covarrubias, El Greco

Research Reflections
• Purpose: “an explanatory illustration of… firstly, the
  plurality and mutual compatibility of political cultures
  and aspirations normally conceived as inherently
  conflictive in the modern political language…
  Secondly, to demonstrate the dynamics of dynastic
  stability and self-legitimization through contractual
  accommodation within the distinctive setting of early
  modern composite monarchies… An account of how a
  nascent monarchy created a new pact of kingship with
  its initially resentful inhabitants…‘hegemony through      Chapel of the Maldonado family, Cathedral of Salamanca

  soft-power’.