Part III
8
Alejandra B. Osorio
During the seventeenth century the staging of ceremonies centred on the body of the Spanish king was an essential aspect of monarchical rule in the New World viceroyalties. These ceremonies were also important to the political self-fashioning as head cities (capitals) of Lima and Mexico City in the Kingdom of Peru and New Spain. Although the royal ceremonies that commemorated the passing of one king and proclaimed the succession of another were far less frequent and regular than the viceregal entries that marked the beginning of each new viceroy’s tenure in office, royal or kingly rituals were nonetheless of great symbolic significance for the creation and cultural maintenance of political allegiances to the distant monarch. The figure of the king and the ceremonies that surrounded his body and image were important elements of a ritual or theatrical idiom of imperial rule that staged the political relationship between the distant monarch and his subjects as one of intimacy and benevolence. In other words, the ceremonies created and managed a royal presence that could be seen, heard and touched. The effect of this royal theatre appears to have been the cultivation or confirmation of strong fidelities towards the king among all segments of the New World body politic.
Royal ceremonies were also useful for the capital city’s self-fashioning as the head city of the composite body politic or republic of their respective viceroyalties. New World viceregal capitals such as Lima and Mexico City developed and cemented their identities as the head city (or cabeça) of the composite body politic or republic of their respective viceroyalties thorough the staging of these grandiloquent ceremonies. As I have argued elsewhere, the ceremonies of the royal exequies and the king’s proclamation constituted important currency in the production of viceregal Lima’s courtly aura during the period of its dispute with the former Inca capital of Cuzco for the title of head city of the Viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century.2 I will suggest here that, as in the case of Lima, cities in the Spanish Habsburg Empire more generally competed openly for status, favours and/or privileges, and for predominance over other cities within their own jurisdictions (kingdoms, viceroyalties, provinces and so on) as well as in the larger empire.3 As in the European empire, cities in the New World viceroyalties such as Lima and Mexico City (as well as provincial ones such as Tlaxcala) actively sought membership in the Cortes of Castile in Spain.4 An important element in this competition among urban centres was ceremony. The staging of grandiloquent public ceremonies was seen as a reflection of the relative wealth, power and influence at court of the city in question and was compared, therefore, to those performed in other cities. By the seventeenth century the display of the king’s simulacra in these events constituted an important form of cultural capital in all cities of the empire. For example, at the close of the seventeenth century, Lima’s royal ceremonial life, established The City of the Kings as the indisputable centre of Spanish imperial power in the Viceroyalty of Peru, thus sealing its reputation as a kingly or royal city and as the legitimate ‘head’ of all the rest.5
The King’s Body and Royal Ceremony
It is well known that the Spanish kings never visited their American dominions. Nevertheless, in imperial America, the unseen king was widely seen as the legitimate ‘head’ of the Spanish Empire’s vast body. Historians have noted that American cities remained loyal to the monarchy even as the Creole Wars of Independence began in the early nineteenth century. In the case of Lima, its royalism had much to do with the city’s mercantile privileges under the crown, but it was also a reflection of the persuasiveness of its baroque political culture or representational ‘machine’ (maquina).6 After a period of violent civil war and rebellion that followed the conquest, from the 1570s onwards American viceroyalties were characterized instead by a growing political stability where the Spanish monarchy successfully ruled this territory and exercised its imperial power with legitimacy and sovereignty until the nineteenth century, despite trying moments of economic crisis and dissent.7
Central to the cultural viability of the imperial political system was the presence of the king in the form of simulacra.8 The Habsburg Empire was a worldwide and utterly disparate composite of old principalities, kingdoms and former empires that had enjoyed an independent, separate existence for centuries with political institutions and traditions of their own. In the Spanish political theory of the period, the king as head of the political body or republic, constituted the driving principle, and this principle was expressed and impressed through the elaborate ceremonials and writings that endowed his figure with an aura of sovereign power and benevolence.9 A fundamental issue for the composite Spanish monarchy from Charles V forward was, therefore, how to make the monarch present in his many remote dominions and in this manner unite them.10 The manner in which the king’s simulacrum was deployed was not so different from those baroque technologies of the church that reproduced and disseminated countless ceremonials and images of God Almighty, the Holy Eucharist, Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, the martyrs and the saints.
It has been argued that, while in the seventeenth century the image (or idea) of the king was clear for a European, it was less so for a Creole or an Indian for whom the royal image must have been ‘fairly confused and unreal’.11 Still, since the late sixteenth century the clarity of the king’s image to ordinary European subjects was also increasingly mediated by simulacra, and this shift in the technologies of royal representation may have been linked to the political demands and lessons of imperial rule overseas. In the seventeenth century royal ceremonies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean increasingly privileged the king’s simulacra over his earthly body. With the exception of Madrid and certain other Castilian sites of the Spanish Habsburg royal court, in Spain the king became increasingly ‘absent’ or invisible, allowing him to become more powerful. The king’s invisibility was due in part to a new system of ritual life that increasingly resembled sacred rites and sought to render the Spanish king more present through the use of his simulacrum in ceremonies in order to exercise his powers.12 It was also after Philip II that Spanish monarchs considerably diminished their travels outside of their peninsular possessions, adopting a ceremonial style similar to that previously established in the New World.
This ritual use of the body of the king – on both sides of the Atlantic during the same period – may be seen as a logical consequence of the political challenges faced by the Spanish monarchy given the vastness (and therefore complexity), remoteness and diversity of their empire, which meant that the sovereign could never hope to visit all the dominions in person. In addition, the transitory figure of the viceroy as alter ego of the king was insufficient to impress upon subjects the idea of a universal monarchical sovereignty above and beyond the viceregal sphere. In short, the shift in the technologies for representing the sovereign from the actual body to the simulacra – which is nearly always explained in the historiography in terms of its internal European logic – was always indispensable in the New World possessions. It is surprising, then, that the figure of the Spanish king and his role in the creation of loyalties in distant overseas possessions remains largely unexamined.
Kingly or royal ceremonies served the dual purpose of making the absent king present to his distant imperial subjects and binding both in a reciprocal pact that was made real and true by means of the simulacra. Since (unlike in many parts of Spain) the king’s body was never produced in the New World, his simulacrum – a copy for which there is no original – in effect made him a hyperreal king for most American subjects. The proclamation of the king was an important moment to swear allegiance to the monarch as well as renew the political pact between king and subject.
The sworn faith to the king as sovereign lord in the seventeenth century entailed the obligation to assist not only with actions and resources but also to commit one’s life to defend Him. What is significant here for our analysis is the act of ‘swearing’ rather than the ‘faith’. In the New World Empire the oath of allegiance to the king was renewed annually at the ceremony of the royal standard, celebrated in Lima on 18 January to commemorate the city’s founding by Francisco Pizarro in 1535 and in Mexico City on 13 August, the day that Tenochtitlan finally fell to the Spanish forces led by Hernán Cortés in 1521. The oath was also central to the king’s proclamation. In general, the royal exequies allowed city and vassals to publicly display their grief and sorrow over the death of their beloved king, while the king’s proclamation required a public assertion of allegiance to, and love for, his successor. In short, the ceremony marking death and succession linked in ritual time public demonstrations of grieving and celebration, while also renewing a political pact. These rituals assisted in establishing among vassals an emotional tie to, and identification with, their sovereign. The royal presence and emotional identification was repeated in different venues and contexts. In New World cities, from the early days of their founding by the Spanish, the king was ‘personally present’ in several instances: He presided over courtly ceremonies in either his portrait or royal banner; His voice was heard every year when his oath to the city was enunciated by the most senior royal magistrate; His will was publicly announced by the royal town crier every time the ceremony of the pregón was performed; and His seal and signature ‘Yo EL REY’ (‘I the King’) graced official imperial paperwork.
The Seventeenth-century City as Theatre of Royal Power
The baroque was an epoch not only of ceremony and splendour but also of the enclosed space, that is, of theatre. As a cultural manifestation, the baroque was primarily an urban phenomenon where the city became associated with the inner or enclosed space of the production of culture. One of the main features of this urban baroque culture was its love of ostentation, such as luxurious modes of dress, lavish display of riches, magnificent and draped structures, and splendid ceremonies. As in European baroque societies, New World urban centres became the power base of local ruling elites. In Europe, new urban centres of power such as Madrid and Paris gained importance and centrality as monarchs made them the seats of their courts, and urban migration, produced by the economic transformation of the countryside, swelled their populations.13
In Spain’s overseas empire, the creation of new viceregal centres like Lima and Mexico City – linked to smaller cities and ports in intricate urban networks and the unprecedented imperial relocation of Indians into Indian towns known as pueblos de indios or reducciones, manifested the new principle of rule as civitas or the political life lived in cities. This ancient but renewed concept of rule regarded the city as the place of civil life, cultural production and political power.14 At around this time the idea of ‘ritual’ as a political sphere for the exercise of power was also developed. The central urban space of the plaza and its adjacent streets, most particularly in the Spanish New World, became the stage for the baroque theatre-state that was thought capable of ‘bring[ing] something into being’. Neoplatonic theories based on the principle that to see is to believe lie at the heart of this theatrical political practice. Initially derived from religious liturgical grammar, by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that grammar had become a liturgy of state centred on the figure of the monarch. While the ceremonial grammar that governed these representational technologies was based on a European matrix, in the New World from early on this grammar was shaped and transformed by local conditions and circumstances, often transforming its (original European) meaning in the process.
In the New World, the physical and symbolic centre of imperial power was the Plaza Mayor. In general the New World plaza acquired a somewhat distinct form and function from Iberian plazas, since in most American cases all political and religious powers were physically concentrated around this urban core space.15 In Mexico City the Plaza Mayor coincided with a similar open space – in form and function – found in front of the Aztec Templo Mayor.16 In Lima, on the other hand, the importance of the Plaza Mayor as the centre of power was established upon its founding in 1535, when Francisco Pizarro allocated prime lots for the Cathedral, the royal houses, the cabildo and the jail, assigning the remaining plots surrounding it for the privileged residences of fellow conquistadors.17 Irrespective of the origins of the New World plaza, by the seventeenth century, this core space of political and religious power was enlarged to include the city streets adjacent to it that now housed an ever-increasing number of great churches, convents and commercial arcades.
This central space of power was ritually traced on a regular basis by the pregón or publicación, that is, a slow-moving procession of luxuriously mounted city notables who accompanied the royal town crier in his public announcements of important events. It was through this ritual mapping that over time this central urban space acquired political meaning. All ceremonial events began with the arrival of a royal charter (cédula real) announcing the occasion and specifying the manner and limits of the particular ceremony to be performed. The date, nature of the event, and protocol to be followed were then communicated to the city in the ceremonial procession of the pregón. Readings of the cédula real were marked by additional rituals that surrounded the artefact with much the same pomp and circumstance as if the king himself had been present. Since the procession always travelled the same route and stopped before the same official buildings, the pregón traced what Michel de Certeau calls a ‘field of operation’, which is an authorized space in which power was performed or ‘staged’ and understood as such.18 Over time, this ritual created an authorized space or stage in which imperial power was exercised. This ritual mapping of the city centre also provided a historical genealogy of founding and imperial rule embroidered into a narrative of power via the pregón’s processional route. This ‘narration in acts’, as it were, generated an aura around the Plaza Mayor that was widely recognized and appropriated by elite and plebeian alike.19
It was in this urban core space of power that (once funding was secured for the ceremony) the city embarked upon the construction of elaborate sets, ephemeral structures and decorations. The city’s main buildings were dressed up with ephemeral additions such as arches, walls, altars, plants, colours and drapes. This staging also required new lighting, fresh smells, different sounds and carefully designed costumes for all to wear. As the term ‘baroque’ still connotes today, royal ceremonials sought to fill every nook and cranny with allegorical elements relating to the ceremony in question, thus creating an enclosed and draped space in this urban core. This temporal theatrical space would, moreover, reveal certain political truths to all present. In the parlance of the period, ‘theatre’ was in this context used metaphorically to mean the place where something or someone was exposed to the estimación o censura (the regard or censorship) of the world. This notion was encapsulated in the concept of the Theatrum Publicum. In this theatre of public scrutiny, ostentation was the principal marker of status, power and authority, and appearance became a highly valued and discriminating social marker. To a certain extent power was constituted and accumulated in this ‘theatre’.
The Economy of Favours of Imperial Rule
Grand public celebrations were always expensive endeavours for the officiating city. Royal attempts to curb ceremonies generated an endless procession of decrees advising on cutting costs and reducing displays of magnificence.20 As a rule, however, cities (and individuals) went into great debt to stage these ceremonies in the appropriate manner required by the occasion. This was due in part to the fact that public ceremonies were central to an economy of favours that regulated all social and political relations at the time, as well as part of a sizable dynamic economy of conspicuous consumption – a fact that has received almost no attention in the historiography for the overseas possessions. The magnificence of the ceremony also sent a strong message to rival cities that the officiating city had achieved economic dominance and social magnificence. Cabildos (municipal governments) fostered the collective image of their cities and built a historical memory of their constitution as a body or harmonious community through the performance of elaborate civic rituals, and also published chronicles of these events known as relaciones de fiestas. These relaciones functioned as a script for this theatre of power, and it is largely thanks to this script that we may glimpse its workings. These published accounts constituted not only a social commentary on how the city should ideally function but also provided a political model that could be drawn upon and compared with those of rival cities or theatres, as these publications were widely circulated throughout the empire. In short, the reluctance to curb ceremonial expenses should be understood in the context of the political significance that the ceremonies and the circulation of the relaciones de fiestas had for the power viceregal capitals like Lima and Mexico City exercised over smaller provincial ones, but also for smaller cities like Cuzco, Tlaxcala or Puebla de los Angeles, as these celebrations were also seen as opportunities for gaining royal favours from the king and his court in Madrid.
The actions of the Viceroy of Peru, Count of La Monclova on the occasion of the royal exequies of the Queen Mariana of Austria reveal the importance of the royal ceremonies in this economy of favours. The Pragmática de los lutos of 1693 strictly regulated the ceremonial to be observed in royal exequies, severely limiting the amount that could be spent in them.21 Notably, the king had specifically ordered that this Pragmática be strictly observed during his mother’s funeral celebrated in Lima in 1697. The viceroy did not honour the king’s wishes, however, arguing that the order was too recent and the form of ceremony it proscribed too uncertain.22 In order to circumvent the royal orders and thus continue with the celebration of the exequies as had become customary by then in Lima, the viceroy personally assumed the expense of the catafalque and of the rebuilding of the cathedral’s cupola, destroyed in an earthquake earlier that year.23 A similar logic based on this economy of favours seems to have governed the city of Tlaxcala’s celebration of the exequies of Charles II and the proclamation of Philip V in New Spain in 1701. In the New World only principal cities (cabezas de reynos y provincias) enjoyed the privilege of staging royal exequies with a catafalque. On 1 May 1701 Tlaxcala, a secondary city, staged a grand ceremony for the royal exequies of Charles II with a catafalque, against imperial legislation. The city’s motives were to show their love, loyalty and gratitude to their dead king Charles II and allegiance to their new king Philip V, while also pressing forward with their claims for membership in the Cortes of Castile, a privilege the city officials hoped would (finally) be granted by their new monarch.24 Although baroque displays of wealth have often been interpreted from a purely economic rationale of cost and benefit, such calculations often ignore the fact that through these public displays of wealth and luxury cities, viceroys and subjects stood to benefit politically in the longer term in the form of privileges and favours granted by the new king.
The King’s Proclamation
Among the more majestic and costly ceremonies staged in viceregal cities were the royal exequies and the king’s proclamation. In the Spanish Habsburg dominions, these ceremonies constituted paramount occasions for cities to display their power and wealth to other cities and to demonstrate loyalty to their king. For example, great displays of grief during royal exequies were seen as a form of public and individual repayment for mercedes (favours) granted by the deceased king. Likewise, gratitude and anticipation was manifested in the luxurious dress worn by the alférez real (standard bearer) and his entourage during the new king’s proclamation ceremony.
Philip IV’s proclamation was celebrated in Lima on Sunday, 6 February 1622, nearly two months after Philip III’s royal exequies had taken place. In the prolonged interregnum between the exequies and the proclamation, processions of clergy, cloaked in black, engulfed in incense and accompanied by the mournful music of church choirs, filed through the city’s streets day and night. This mournful atmosphere, however, rapidly switched to one of exuberance, as the city prepared to acclaim the new king. On Friday, 4 February, a pregón announced that on the next day all residents should go out and cheer the news of Philip IV’s proclamation with special fiesta torches, fireworks and other joyful inventions according to ‘the possibilities and desires of each’. Immediately thereafter, and in contrast to the sad tolling of bells marking the exequies, the cathedral’s bells were rung joyously, people shed their mourning robes for colourful and luxurious clothing, and buildings changed their black drapes for rich and colourful Persian rugs, Flemish coverlets and Chinese silks. Gold-embroidered velvets were hung from windows and balconies, from which the ladies could eye the scene in the main square.25
The entrance of the alférez real into the Plaza Mayor holding the luxurious royal standard, featuring the royal coat of arms on one side and Lima’s coat of arms on the other, marked the beginning of the Act of Proclamation. Accompanied by two alcaldes ordinarios and cabildo members, the alférez climbed the stairs leading to the podium where the king sat enthroned. Standing before the king’s portrait, the alférez bowed three times, waving the royal standard after each bow. Kneeling before the president of the audiencia, he then declared: ‘This City of the Kings comes in fulfilment of what His Majesty orders, and in accordance with this obligation and her fidelity, to raise standards for her King, and natural Lord, the King Don Philip IV, whose name may God protect for many years’. The king, ‘speaking through the voice of the oidor’, acknowledged the city’s fidelity and love as manifested by its ‘great demonstrations of jubilation, and fiestas, and such excessive expenses’ and pledged both to uphold its old privileges and grant new ones in the future. Taking the royal standard from the alférez real, the oidor stepped up before the king and exclaimed: ‘¡Castile, León, Peru, for the King our Lord Philip may God keep him for many years!’ The people shouted in response: ‘¡Long live the King our Lord Philip the Fourth; may the King live for many happy years!’26
In the cédula real or Royal Charter sent to Lima announcing the death of Philip IV and the succession of Charles II to the throne (dated 24 October 1665), the regent queen mother explained that the custom of the king’s proclamation dated back to the raising of the standard for Philip I ‘The Handsome’ with the cry, ‘Castile, Castile, Castile for the King our lord!’27 This tradition may be further traced back to medieval Ávila, where kings were first elected by the nobility and later proclaimed by the people. After their ‘election’, new monarchs pledged to the nobles to uphold the fueros (privileges) of their city and of their kingdom and to grant new ones. In the public proclamation, the people were convoked to view and approve of their new ruler and to pledge to defend, love and honour him. The proclamation was, therefore, a public oath of loyalty between the king and the people. Following this tradition, and once the cédula real had arrived with official news of the death of the old king and the succession of the new, audiencia and cabildo members in the New World cities met privately in their respective offices to read the announcement and acknowledge the new king. A scribe recorded the event and sent it to the new king as testimony of the city’s approval of his succession.28
8.1 Catafalque built in Lima for Philip IV’s exequies in 1666 Source: Antonio de León Pinelo, Solemnidad Funebre y exequias a la Muerte del catolico…Rey D. Felipe Quarto (Lima, 1666). Copyright © Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
The King’s Portrait
In the royal exequies the portraits of the king’s forefathers and the royal coats of arms on the catafalque (Figure 8.1) connected the dead king to his ancestors and the great royal houses of Europe; the single royal portrait placed on the throne under a gold canopy in the centre stage of Lima’s Plaza Mayor located the living king in the heart of the city. Chronicler Roman de Herrera placed singular importance on the size and ornamentation of the frame of Philip IV’s portrait exhibited in Lima during his proclamation in 1621.29 From the Renaissance, gilded frames were markers of status. The frame was an essential aspect of the virtue of the image, bestowing social honour on the personal image enclosed within its borders.30 In Lima, Philip IV’s portrait showed him with his upper body inclined and dressed in purple – a posture and colour associated with royalty. Although the portrait was of the king’s entire body, Herrera emphasized its upper half – more specifically his face – noting that his half-smile (also a royal gesture) conveyed a look of authority.31 The chronicle that recounts Charles II’s proclamation in 1666 also notes that the king’s portrait (Figure 8.2) ‘represented majesty, empire, and dominion’.32 Descriptions of the portraits of both Philip IV and Charles II emphasize the kings’ eyes, suggesting that one could perceive the essence of the king in the vivid depiction of his expressive eyes.33
It is in this description of the king’s eyes as essence of his character and rule that we may appreciate the unique value of the king’s simulacrum. Even if the king were bodily present, most mortals could not look him in the eye, and in this sense the portrait of the king was very unlike the king himself. The simulacrum enabled a contemplation of, and intimacy with, the king that was otherwise unavailable. This intimacy was accentuated in the eighteenth century, when person-sized portraits, like those of saints, were distributed among the population.34
In 1641 Antonio de León Pinelo explained that the face revealed the nature of a person as a whole, both in the spiritual and physical realms, ‘because everything is condensed in the body, and in [the face] is concentrated all the perfections that are distributed throughout the other members’.35 In Pinelo’s view, one could penetrate a person’s soul through his or her eyes. Citing Ovid, Pinelo argued that the face was the locus of affection communicated through the eyes of men and women.36 He described the head as comprising the whole body, although its limits were understood to end at the collar.37 The notion of the head as the total sum of the body is reflected in the political theory of the time where the king embodied, as the head, the totality of his kingdoms and powers.38 For Pinelo, to show one’s face was to uncover (descubrir), both in the sense of discovery and in the sense of revealing oneself to others.
During the seventeenth century, both in Spain and in Lima, as in the rest of the empire, royal portraits increasingly presided over royal ceremonies in place of the absent king. The success of this substitution is illustrated by the incident that occurred during the Neapolitan rebellion of 1647, when the rebels themselves saved the royal portraits of Philip IV from the flames of the burning royal palace they themselves had torched, lowering their royal standards immediately thereafter as a gesture of obedience and respect.39
8.2 Maquina built for Charles II’s Royal Proclamation in Lima in 1666 by Fray Cristobal de Caballero Source: Aclamacion y pendones que levanto la Muy Noble y muy Coronada Ciudad de los Reyes Por el…Rey D. Carlos II (Lima 1666). Copyright © Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
In contrast to those in Lima, during the proclamation ceremonies in Mexico City the presence and image of the king was mediated by the presence of his alter ego, the viceroy. The king did not preside his proclamation in his portrait. In his stead a royal banner was placed on the luxurious throne under a palio (canopy) placed in the middle of the stage built for such events in the Plaza Mayor. This was also the case even in instances when the Real Audiencia presided, in place of the absent viceroy, as during the proclamation of Philip IV.40 This ceremonial mediation was further emphasized by the pasadiço or tunnel-like structures built along the city streets for the numerous processions that made up this ceremony. Such structures were necessary due to the torrential rains that often flooded the city of Mexico (which was built on a lake) and the ensuing muddy conditions that threatened to ruin the expensive ceremonial garb worn by all participants on these festive occasions. In addition, stands were also built along these wooden streets in order to protect the viewing public. These structures became, over time, permanent features in the ceremonies, creating a fixed distance between the observing public and the official members of those communities participating in them.
The Relaciones de Fiestas and the Constitution of New World Republics
Printed accounts of the royal ceremonies performed in viceregal capitals of the New World Empire constituted cultural capital with regard to provincial cities. These printed accounts of public ceremonies, or relaciones de fiestas, became in effect books of ceremonial etiquette exported to other cities as models for local celebrations and as evidence of the power and stature achieved by the officiating city.41 These accounts also constituted an extension of the performances, since their elaborate descriptions were one more ‘monument, [a form of] literary architecture’ erected to preserve the memory of the ceremonies.42 These accounts were sponsored by the cabildo, the audiencia, on occasion the viceroy, and prominent citizens. In the New World as in Europe, they constituted an important historical source of the city’s construction and of its becoming an orderly republic.43 The accounts were also distributed as gifts to local authorities and notables in the city. Printing presses throughout the empire produced these books, which fostered a collective image of the officiating city while also building a historical memory of their constitution as a community. It could be argued that these relaciones enjoyed an even more prominent place in the life cycle of cities like Lima where the physical city, frequently devastated by earthquakes during the seventeenth century, was substituted in the public imagination (and the historical record) by the magnificent ephemeral structures built for these occasions. Be that as it may, in all cases as these buildings lingered in the pages of books, the images of the New World city’s ephemeral architecture as evidence of the power and majesty of the king and the magnificence of the city was made permanent.44
Conclusions
Up until the mid-sixteenth century, Spain had no capital and the king moved around the peninsula with his court.45 After 1561 Philip II settled his court in Madrid and the city began rapid growth.46 According to John Elliott, Madrid then became an ‘artificial city of courtiers and bureaucrats, deriving its rather fertile prosperity from the profits of empire which flowed into it from all over the world’.47 New World cities, however, became significant urban centres decades before Madrid was established as the capital of a vast empire: Mexico City in 1521, and Lima in 1542 with the creation of the audiencia and its designation as a site for the residence of the viceroy and his court. Rather than ‘artificial’48 in Elliott’s sense, perhaps a more accurate term to describe such cities would be ‘modern’. In the first Spanish dictionary, Sebastián de Covarrubias defined ‘modern’ as that which is newly made, noting that what is ‘newly made’ lacks the authority of ‘antiquity’.49 ‘Modern’ is clearly a name for new cities consolidated in the seventeenth century such as Lima, Mexico City and Madrid. Elliott also noted that the rule of such a vast empire required the creation of an expansive bureaucratic structure, although an administrative structure might best describe the armature constructed by the Habsburgs to rule such a vast and disparate amalgamation of possessions.50 Both seventeenth-century viceregal capitals in the New Wold, Lima and Mexico City, became modern cities of administrators, courtiers and merchants heavily dependent on the wealth that flowed not only from the Peruvian and Mexican interior but also from the South Sea, that is, from the transoceanic trade with Manila and the patronage from the Royal Court at Madrid.
According to Anthony Pagden, between 1581 and 1640 the Spanish monarchy was in flux; the creation of a capital city during this period was a manifestation of a new legal concept of ‘a single law, or ius publicum for all the several states’ within its monarchy.51 Unity for the disparate composite of kingdoms, provinces, duchies and principalities in the Spanish monarchy was provided by the figure of the king. When the king settled in Madrid after 1561, the city became ‘a centrifugal structure, which the king sought to hold together by a carefully organized institutional system of viceroys and councils’.52 Something similar had occurred in the New World decades earlier. Elliott and Pagden concur that the image of the king was of paramount importance during this period, as ‘in his own body he embodi[ed] unity’. To cultivate and retain allegiance and loyalty in crown subjects, the king’s sovereign aura was represented in different forms in his various realms.53
During the seventeenth century the Spanish monarchy increasingly relied on ceremonial representations of the king on both sides of the Atlantic. The king never travelled to the New World, however, so the living king was never produced for or beheld by New World subjects. The absence of the original (biological) king conditioned New World understandings of, and political relations to, royal simulacra, which in this context were effectively real. Since the referent was never seen in the New World, the simulacrum became true by virtue of an absence. In Lima this royal absence was compounded by the viceroy’s absence in the celebrations of the royal exequies and proclamations in the seventeenth century making the royal portrait the protagonist in these ceremonies. In Mexico City, on the other hand, the presence of the king’s alter ego, the viceroy, required the use of the royal banner in its stead. In both cases nonetheless, the king as the head of the imperial political body was known to his subjects through objects or simulacra: portraits, emblems, royal insignia and the royal seal, as well as words on objects, such as the cédulas written on papel sellado and prominently signed ‘Yo EL REY’. In his royal simulacra the king in the New World was everywhere all the time.
The hyperreality of the Habsburg king was revealed to his New World subjects in ceremonies centred on his royal body, which served the dual purpose of making the king present and binding loyal and loving subjects to him.54 The ceremonial display of royal simulacra is not best understood, as some modern historians and critics have claimed, as instances of ‘colonial exaggeration’ or as instruments of ideology. Instead, the royal simulacrum was the very means by which ‘obedience to his majesty’ was achieved.55 José Antonio Maravall, José Díez Borque and other scholars have argued that the celebration of royal exequies provided the monarchy with one more occasion to exalt majesty and power, manipulating from above the emotions of its vassals. In a similar vein, literary critic Angel Rama has argued that as the ceremonial centres of the empire, colonial cities were ‘the prime instruments of social communication, through which [they] directed the public dissemination of social ideologies’. Like Maravall, Rama claimed that baroque public displays of royal power – including the triumphal arches erected for the arrival of viceroys – illustrated the ‘ideological functioning of colonial intellectuals’ and ‘exemplify the manner in which they sought to conjugate diverse social forces, and typify their constant exaltation of (and quest for patronage from) those, like the charismatic figure of the viceroy, who embodied royal power’.56 But the presumption that these rituals were mere instruments for the dissemination of elite ideals in their quest for personal patronage misunderstands their political role in the exercise of monarchical rule as well as the exercise of power of ‘head cities’.57 Such understandings also ignore the fact that through the performance of those ceremonies cities developed and cemented their own political culture or civitas. Ultimately, costly elaborate ceremonies were central to the political practice of generating allegiance and obedience to the monarch developed by the Habsburg monarchy that afforded the dynasty a long and (relatively) peaceful dominion and enjoyment of a very large and profitable empire for nearly two centuries.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the editors of this volume, particularly Laura Fernández, for their support while writing this article. I am also indebted to Carlos Lechner for taking time to read various drafts, for his suggestions, discussions and many edits. Research for this article was supported by a Mellon Foundation Strategic Investments in Research and Teaching Grant, a Paul W. McQuillen Memorial Fellowship from The John Carter Brown Library, a Travel Grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, and Wellesley College Faculty Grants. My deepest appreciation to all of them for their generosity and support.
2 ‘Aura’ is used here to mean an ‘original’ in possession of ‘authority’. See W. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York, 1988), pp. 217–24. Also see A. B. Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis (New York, 2008), pp. 35–56.
3 See Fernando J. Bouza Álvarez, Imagen y propaganda: Capítulos de Historia Cultural del Reinado de Felipe II (Madrid, 1996), pp. 95–140; Osorio, Inventing Lima; J. Baber, ‘Empire, Indians and the Negotiation of Status of City in Tlaxcala 1521–1550’, in E. Ruiz Medrano and S. Kellogg (eds) Negotiation with Domination: New Spain’s Indian Pueblos Confront the Spanish State (Boulder, CO, 2010), pp. 19–44; A. González Acosta, Crespones y campanas Tlaxcaltecas en 1701 (Mexico City, 2000).
4 See W. W. Borah, ‘Representative Institutions in the Spanish Empire in the Sixteenth Century’, The Americas 12(3) (1956): p. 252; and Guillermo Lohmann Villena, ‘Las Cortes en Indias’, Anuarios de Historia del Derecho Español XVIII, no. 1, ser. 1 (1947), pp. 655–62.
5 Lima was also known as ‘The City of Kings’.
6 See Osorio, Inventing Lima, pp. 1–35; also M. Suárez, Desafíos transatlánticos: Mercaderes, banqueros y el estado en el Perú virreinal, 1600–1700 (Lima, 2001); and D. Studnicki-Gizbert, Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (Oxford, 2007).
7 J. J. E. Rodríguez O., The Independence of Spanish America (New York and Cambridge, 1998), Introduction.
8 This was, of course, a medieval political notion established in the Siete Partidas; see Partida II, título I, ley V.
9 See D. de Tovar Valderrama, Instituciones políticas: Alcalá de Henares, 1645 (Madrid, 1995) and E. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1981).
10 X. Gil Pujol, ‘Una cultura cortesana provincial: Patria, comunicación en la monarquía hispánica de los Austrias’, in P. Fernández Albaladejo (ed.) Monarquía, imperio y pueblos en la España moderna (Alicante, 1997), pp. 225–58; J. H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past and Present 137 (Nov. 1992), pp. 48–71.
11 M. Carmagnani, Alicia Hernández, Ruggiero Romano, Para una historia de América I. Las estructuras (Mexico City, 1999).
12 See C. Lisón Tolosana, La imagen del Rey: Monarquía, realeza y poder ritual en la Casa de los Austrias (Madrid, 1991) and A. Feros, Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Cambridge and New York, 2000), pp. 81–7. María José del Río Barredo argues that while Philip II created a ceremonial that made the Spanish king ‘invisible’, the transformations of courtly rituals implemented by Philip IV – and particularly by his favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares – made the king more ‘present’ in seventeenth-century courtly ceremonies in Madrid; M. J. del Río Barredo, Madrid: Urbs Regia: La capital ceremonial de la Monarquía Católica (Madrid, 2000), pp. 45–51.
13 A. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (Minneapolis, 1986), pp. 114, 241; Río Barredo, Madrid, Urbs Regia; R. Strong, Splendor at Court: Renaissance Spectacle and the Theater of Power (Boston, 1973).
14 See A. Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 11–28 and 44–5.
15 See R. L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven and London, 2000), pp. 19–44 and 169–76.
16 F. Cervantes de Salazar, México en 1554 y Túmulo Imperial (Mexico City, 1978), Cap. XXIV.
17 Libros de Cabildos de Lima [LCL], ‘Fundación de Lima’, I.
18 M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1988), pp. 122–4.
19 Pagden, Lords of All the World, pp. 44–5 and A. Rama, The Lettered City (Durham, 1996), pp. 1–16.
20 Spain issued ordenanzas regulating the excessive cost of these ceremonies in 1588, 1674, 1684, 1691 and 1693. See Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de las Indias (1681), libro IV, título XIII, ley x.
21 ‘Don Melchor Portocarrero…Conde de la Monclova…Por aver dado forma su Magestad…a los Lutos, y Pompa funeral en Cedula de veinte y dos de Marzo de mil seiscientos, y noventa y tres [Lima, 1695]’.
22 Bernardo Romero González de Villalobos, Fvneral Pompa…Reyna…Mariana de Avstria…Lima… (1697).
23 The queen mother had died on 30 October 1696.
24 González Acosta, Crespones y campanas.
25 Archivo Histórico Municipal de Lima (hereafter AHML), Libro de Cédulas y Proviciones (LCP) III, part II, ‘Relacion de la solemnidad y fiestas…en el nombre del Rey nuestro Señor Felipe quarto [1621]’.
26 AHML, Libro de Cédulas y Proviciones (LCP) III, part II.
27 Aclamacion y pendones que levanto la Muy Noble y muy Coronada Ciudad de los Reyes Por el…Rey D. Carlos II (Lima 1666).
28 Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Lima 110, ‘Relacion de la Jura de Felipe II’.
29 AHML, LCP III, part II, ‘Relacion de la solemnidad y fiestas……en el nombre del Rey nuestro Señor Felipe quarto [1621]’.
30 R. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1980), p. 92.
31 AHML, LCP III, part II, ‘Relacion de la solemnidad y fiestas……en el nombre del Rey nuestro Señor Felipe quarto [1621]’.
32 Aclamacion y Pendones…por el…Rey D. Carlos II.
33 The portrait of Carlos II depicted him as a young boy, ‘with eyes like stars’; Aclamacion y Pendones…por el…Rey D. Carlos II, ff. 36–36v.
34 Anónimo, Solemne Proclamacion y cabalgata Real……Felipe V……Lima, 1701.
35 A. León Pinelo, Velos Antiguos i modernos… (Madrid, 1641), f. 72.
36 See, for example, Ovid’s ‘The Art of Love’, in The Erotic Poems (New York, 1982), pp. 166–238.
37 León Pinelo, Velos Antiguos i modernos, fols. 78v–79.
38 See Tovar Valderrama, Instituciones políticas; and Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies.
39 Gil Pujol, ‘Una cultura cortesana’, p. 233.
40 Arias de Villalobos, Obediencia que Mexico, cabeza de la Nueva España dio a la majestad católica del rey Don Felipe IV, en su real nombre. See also, L. A. Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque, 2004).
41 Charles V was one of the first European monarchs to use the printing press and public representations of the monarch as a political instrument; their importance as political artefacts developed in Peru and Europe at the same time; see Strong, Art and Power, p. 74. See also H. Watanabe-O’Kelly, ‘Festival Books in Europe from the Renaissance to the Rococo’, Seventeenth Century (Durham) 3 (1988), pp. 192–7, and B. Mitchell, The Majesty of the State: Triumphal Progress of Foreign Sovereigns in Renaissance Italy, 1494–1600 (Florence, 1986), pp. 1–18.
42 A. Bonet Correa, ‘La fiesta barroca como práctica del poder’, in El arte efimero en el mundo hispánico (Mexico City, 1983), p. 51.
43 F. R. de la Flor, Barroco: Representación e ideología en el mundo hispánico (1580–1680) (Madrid, 2002), pp. 165–70.
44 G. Botero, The Greatness of Cities (1606). Translated by R. Peterson (London, 1956).
45 See C. W. Sieber, The Invention of a Capital: Philip II and the First Reform of Madrid. PhD dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1985. See also C. Segura, ‘Madrid en la Edad Media. Génesis de una capital (873?–1561)’, in S. Juliá, D. Ringrose, C. Segura, Madrid: Historia de una capital (Madrid, 1995), pp. 11–158.
46 D. Ringrose, ‘Madrid Capital Imperial (1561–1833)’, in Juliá, Ringrose, Segura, Madrid: Historia, pp. 161–325.
47 J. H. Elliott, Spain and Its World 1500–1700 (New Haven and London, 1989), p. 18.
48 The use by Elliott of the adjective ‘artificial’ to refer to Madrid could imply that older cities were more legitimate or organic. The historiography on Lima, for example, also concurs with this notion. Jorge Basadre, for example, citing Vallaux explained that there were two types of capitals: natural and artificial. For this author, Paris was an example of a natural capital, whereas Madrid and Lima were examples of artificial ones; see J. Basadre, ‘La multitud’, p. 52. Cited in J. Basadre, Vallaux, La Geographie de l’Histoire (Paris, 1922).
49 S. de Covarrubias Orozco. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española…Madrid…M.DC.XI.
50 Elliott, Spain and Its World, p. 18. I make the distinction between bureaucracy and administration because a bureaucracy requires independent institutions from the king staffed by functionaries who are not dependent for their appointment or promotion to offices on the patronage system operant at the time in the royal court. An administration, therefore, best describes the structures implemented that allowed the Habsburgs to order, manage and rule their empire.
51 Pagden, Lords of All the World, p. 45.
52 Elliott, Spain and Its World, p. 170.
53 According to Elliott, one very effective image championed by Philip II, for example, was that of ‘the supremely just king, remote but – when necessary – available’, which provided the ‘indispensable safety valve in societies subject to social and financial exploitation and administrative abuse’; Elliott, Spain and Its World, pp. 170–71.
54 On the hyperreal nature of the baroque in the Mexican context, see S. Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019) (Durham, NC, 2001). See also Baudrillard’s ‘The Precession of Simulacra’, in his J. Baudrillard, Simulations. Translated by P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman (New York, 1983), pp. 1–79.
55 See D. de Saavedra y Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político-cristiano representada en cien empresas (4 vols. Madrid, 1945), vol. 2, p. 21, 57 and 67.
56 Rama, The Lettered City, pp. 23–4.
57 See Maravall, Culture of the Baroque; Bonet Correa, ‘La fiesta barroca’, pp. 45–78; J. M. Díez Borque, ‘Relaciones del teatro y fiesta en el barroco español’, in J. M. Díez Borque (ed.), Teatro y fiesta en el barroco. España e Iberoamérica (Madrid, 1986), pp. 11–40.