HAHR 84 3 07 Osorio V2

The King in Lima: Simulacra, Ritual, and Rule in Seventeenth-Century Peru Alejandra Osorio The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. —Ecclesiastes1 In 1622, King Philip IV was in Lima. Leandro de la Reynaga Salazar, the most senior alcalde, was chosen to carry Him to a temporary throne set on the center stage of Lima’s Plaza Mayor. But the King turned out to be rather heavier than expected. At the last minute, it was necessary to secure the help of three more men to carry His Majesty with the “appropriate decency required by the occasion.”2 In 1622, Philip IV was not in Lima. In his stead, a “lifelike copy of the King” (un trasunto vivo del Rey) measuring two yards tall by one and a half yards wide, with an additional half yard for its frame, was carried to the Plaza Mayor Research for this article in Peru and Chile was made possible by a Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship, and in Spain by the W. Burghardt Turner Fellowship of the State of New York. Earlier versions were presented at Harvard University, SUNY–Stony Brook, Universidade do Porto, New York University, and the University of Massachusetts–Boston. I wish to thank those colleagues who made useful suggestions at those meetings. I would also like to thank Alejandro Cañeque, Antonio Feros, Temma Kaplan, Pilar Latasa Vasallo, Herman Lebovics, Paul Gootenberg, Sheryl Kroen, Kirsten Schultz, Mark Thurner, and Kathleen Wilson for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Stuart B. Schwartz, Barbara Weinstein, and the anonymous reviewers at HAHR. 1. Cited in Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 1. 2. “Relacion de la solemnidad y fiestas . en el nombre del Rey nuestro Señor Felipe quarto . [1621],” Cédulas y Provisiones, book 3, part 2, Archivo Histórico Municipal de Lima (AHML). Hispanic American Historical Review 84:3 Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press 448 HAHR / August / Osorio for the King’s proclamation ceremony.3 The portrait’s black frame was deco- rated with gold trimmings, chains, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and royal topaz, and inscribed on it in golden letters were the words, “Long Live the Catholic King Philip IV for Many Happy Years.” The painting itself depicted Philip’s entire body, with a face like that of an “angel,” where (according to the official chronicler Roman de Herrera) the King’s half smile and expressive eyes “un- doubtedly communicated a look of authority.”4 When the four men and the King had reached the stage, the royal magistrates and all seated in the surrounding bleachers and galleries stood and re- moved their hats. The King was then “seated” on the “throne” (described as an elaborate and luxuriously covered chair) under a silken and gold canopy. With the King comfortably seated, the royal magistrates took their seats and covered their heads. The entourage that had accompanied the portrait exited the stage “bowing down—deeply—to the Theater of the King Our Lord.” As this was hap- pening, Herrera tells us, luxuriously dressed squadrons began to enter the plaza, led by Diego de Carvajal, postmaster general of Peru and deputy of cavalry. Mounted companies of musketeers were followed by one hundred artillery- men, who paraded before the “theater,” bowing to the King’s portrait. Two hundred uniformed infantrymen followed, likewise bowing to the King’s portrait. When all companies had entered the square, they formed four blocks of 25 rows of men and saluted their King by firing their muskets into the air. Crowds gathered in the balconies, on the rooftops of surrounding buildings, and in the streets adjacent to the main square watched and cheered this event.5 Introduction It is well known that the Spanish kings never visited their American dominions. Nevertheless, in colonial America, the unseen king was widely seen as the legit- imate head of the Spanish Empire’s vast body. Viceregal Lima was something of a bastion of loyalism even as the wars of independence came knocking in the early nineteenth century. By what means was this colonial loyalty and royal legitimacy crafted in the American kingdoms of the Spanish Empire? While many cultural practices naturalized the exercise of colonial power, I am here 3. Philip IV became king in 1621; his proclamation ceremony in Lima took place in February 1622. 4. “Relacion de la solemnidad y fiestas . del Rey . Felipe quarto.” 5. Ibid. The King in Lima 449 concerned with only those ceremonies directly related to the body of the Span- ish king and their relationship to a geography of power. Spanish historian Xavier Gil Pujol notes that the “presence” of the King— even of a physically absent one—was irreplaceable as head and member of the community he ruled.6 A fundamental issue for the composite Spanish monar- chy, from Charles V on, was how to make the king “present” in his many dominions, particularly those most distant. Beginning with the rule of Philip II, even in Spain itself the king had become increasingly absent, in part due to a new system of ritual life that sought to render the Spanish king invisible.7 Nonetheless, peninsular subjects could hope to see their king at least once in their lives when he made triumphal entries into European cities, took part in various religious rituals, or participated in the autos de fe.8 In the Indies, however, for colonial officials and local elites alike, making the king “present” and real was rather a different endeavor, since he never ventured across the At- lantic.9 Perhaps surprisingly, the figure of the Spanish king and the workings of his rule in this distant overseas possession remain largely unexamined. I suggest that courtly ceremonies in Lima served the dual purpose of making the absent king present to his distant subjects and binding him and his subjects in a reciprocal pact that was made real through ritual. Since (unlike in 6. Xavier Gil Pujol, “Una cultura cortesana provincial: Patria, comunicación y lenguaje en la monarquía hispánica de los Austrias,” in Monárquia, imperio y pueblos en la España moderna, ed. Pablo Fernández Albadalejo (Alicante: Univ. de Alicante, 1997), 225–58. This is also established in the Siete Partidas; see partida II, título I, ley V. 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 his favorite, the count-duke of Olivares—made the king more “present,” if not more visible, in seventeenth-century courtly ceremonies in Madrid; Madrid, Urbs Regia: La capital ceremonial de la Monarquía Católica (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2000). I wish to thank Richard Kagan for pointing this out to me and Jesus Escobar for bringing this work to my attention. 8. Gil Pujol, “Una cultura,” 232–33. See also María de los Angeles Pérez Samper, “El Rey Ausente,” in Fernández Albadalejo, Monarquía, 379–94; William Christian Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981); and Río Barredo, Madrid, Urbs Regia, 23–32, 44–82, 199–234. 9. It could be argued that the new political and geographic challenges posed by the discovery of possessions across the Atlantic drove the distinction between words and things. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 46–77; Angel Rama, The Lettered City (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1996), 3. See also Marie Tanner, The Last Descendants of Aeneas: The Hapsburg and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1993); and Alfonso Sánchez Coello y el retrato en la corte de Felipe II (Madrid: Museo del Prado, 1990). 450 HAHR / August / Osorio Spain) the real king was never produced in Peru, his simulacra—copies for which there are no originals—in effect made him a hyperreal king whose cen- trality in Lima’s ceremonies seems to have been unmatched by any other American city.10 Furthermore, given that Peru’s viceroy was never present during the courtly ceremonies of the Royal Exequies or the king’s Proclamation in seventeenth-century Lima, these rituals may have been more significant for legitimating colonial rule than the viceregal entries meant to initiate the tenure of the king’s alter ego.11 In short, my contention is that in Lima, the king’s simulacrum was not only the organizing principle of royal ceremonies but also a central aspect of the exercise of monarchical rule. Equally significant, however, was the role of kingly ceremonies in producing Lima as the principal city in the viceroyalty of Peru, more powerful than its rivals.12 The ceremonies around the king’s simulacra constituted important currency in the production of Lima’s courtly aura during its seventeenth-century dispute with the former Inca capital of Cuzco over the position as the head city, or cabeça, of the viceroyalty.13 Lima’s courtly ceremonial life, developed during the course of the seventeenth century, had, by the end of the century, established the city as the indisputable center of all political colonial power in the viceroyalty, as well as the prime cultural referent for the entire Spanish dominions abroad.14 10. In Mexico City, the figure of the king and his simulacra, particularly his portrait, seem not to have had the same preeminence; see Linda Curcio-Nagy, “Saints, Sovereignty, and Spectacle in Colonial Mexico” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane Univ., 1993). For the case of colonial Chile, see Jaime Valenzuela, “De las liturgias del poder al poder de las liturgias: Para una antropología política de Chile colonial,” Historia (Chile) 32 (1999): 575–615.

Load more