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 •e Th 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’..