The Empirical Empire

Arndt Brendecke is a professor of early modern history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. He received his training in the history of the Holy Roman Empire but then shifted focus with his habilitation (second doctorate) to the Spanish empire. This work, which originally appeared in German in 2009, offers an insightful historical sociology of knowledge. According to Brendecke, the Spanish kings strove to gather the full information (entera noticia) about their newfound empire, spurred by Francis Bacon's dictum that “scientia potestas est” (knowledge is power) (p. 12). The kings needed the information to justly award fealty and punish treachery, and the vassals responded primarily by affirming their loyalty rather than describing matters with unbiased precision. In fact, when the visitador (investigative judge) Juan de Ovando inspected the Council of the Indies from 1567 to 1574, he lamented that from this body “one neither has nor can have any intelligence (noticia) of American matters” (p. 2). Brendecke's story oscillates between these two poles. On the one hand, the royal desire to understand and control the far-flung realms encountered stark limitations, especially in discerning reliable facts from the cacophony of opinions reaching Madrid. On the other hand, these ritual communications with the kingdoms lent the crown powerful if fallible tools to undercut opposing “neo-feudal” forces (p. 103).To frame his subject, Brendecke draws inspiration from the jurist and sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who is currently all the rage in Germany. Brendecke argues that early modern participants were assigned a role in civil or criminal litigations and that they were all heard in similar fashion by judges and ultimately the king. The author claims that thus integrating all interested or aggrieved parties created legitimacy for the justice system. Yet early modern Spaniards were well aware that powerful special interests often manipulated or hijacked this process, stalling the communication between king and vassals. For this reason, the crown set up councils or courts composed of several judges and even nonjudges (de capa y espada) of diverse backgrounds. The rulings of these bodies often noted dissenting opinions, providing the king with the greatest plurality of viewpoints and neutralizing harmful interests. Such a conciliar regime, historians have often noted, tended to reach decisions at glacial speed, if at all. The alternative was to reduce the complexity of the system by selecting a few ministers—the favorites, visitadores, or junta members. They needed greater trust, another key Luhmannian term, to serve the king's interests. Otherwise special interests weighed in excessively, hindering the all-knowing monarch, or “the spider in the web,” from offering just solutions and as a result cementing the discourse of the “blind, deaf, confused” king (p. 42).To break free of this trap, the crown employed mediators and visitadores. They desired to accumulate the most objective descriptions about the kingdoms. They drew up maps and ordered more rounds of reports detailing land and people. The visitadores took from the late medieval church the lengthy standardized questionnaires that aided them mnemonically and guaranteed that they heard from all participants equally. As streams of knowledge flowed to the palace, kings and ministers idealized both Emperor Augustus's book of all empire (liber totius imperii) and the one room that contained the entire knowledge of the world (p. 52). Visitador Ovando himself became acutely aware of the limitations on information gathering. He suggested to remedy the Council of the Indies' shortcomings by appointing a cosmographer to gather all facts about nature. He also charged several councillors with accepting bribes and with laziness. Yet nine councillors had passed away by 1567, and the issuance of stern punishments petered out at this point. In addition, the massive outpouring of decrees posed another challenge for the crown. The council was expected to select the suitable royal communications to the Indies for a new collection of royal laws. By this time, about 10,000 decrees filled 200 books, and the council lost track of many of them. Yet the project moved ahead slowly, and the crown published the Laws of the Indies only in 1680.Brendecke has written an incisive and very readable history of imperial knowledge management. The scholar has delved deeply into Spanish archives to add substantially to current debates on empire, visitas, and corruption. While he offers keen analysis of the palace operations in Madrid, his command of the literature on the viceregal courts of the empire is perhaps a little bit weaker. Brendecke's examination of the court in Mexico City, for instance, rests almost entirely on two volumes of Lewis Hanke's edited collection Los virreyes españoles en América durante el gobierno de la Casa de Austria (from 1976 and 1978), although historians have spilled much ink on this subject in recent years. Yet a book of such ambitious scope cannot include all publications. Important references to medieval and early modern England, the Holy Roman Empire, the Papal States, and France more than offset this very minor weakness, adding unique perspectives to early modern history. Students, generalists, and specialists alike will find this outstanding book a very rewarding read

Body politic · Colonialism · Empire · Feudalism · German · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Roman Empire · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Classics · Historical Studies in Latin America · Historical Studies on Spain · History · Law · Philosophy

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