FOCUS QUESTIONS

• What were the major features of the colonial political system and the institutions
  through which it operated?


• Why was the Spanish crown unable to enforce much colonial legislation?


• What was the relation between church and state, and how did it affect the re-
  formed clergy, divisions within the church, and the clergy’s moral decline?


• What was the colonial structure of class and caste, and how did it refl ect the social
  construction of race?


• What was the status of colonial women, sexual behavior within the colonial
  structure, and changing views regarding free choice in marriage decisions?

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5

State, Church, and Society

T

HE POLITICAL ORGANIZATION of the Span-
ish Empire in America refl ected the
centralized, absolutist regime by which
Spain itself was governed. By the time of the con-
quest of America, Castilian parliamentary institu-
tions and municipal rights and exemptions had
lost most of their former vitality. The process of
centralization begun by the Catholic Sovereigns
reached its climax under the fi rst two Hapsburgs.
In Castile there arose a ponderous administrative
bureaucracy capped by a series of royal councils
appointed by and directly responsible to the king.
Aragón, which stubbornly resisted royal encroach-
ments on its fueros (charters of liberties), retained
a large measure of autonomy until the eighteenth
century. Even in Castile, however, Hapsburg abso-
lutism left largely intact the formal and informal
power of the great lords over their peasantry. In
Aragón, in whose soil feudal relations were more
deeply rooted, the arrogant nobility claimed a
broad seigneurial jurisdiction, including the right
of life and death over its serfs, as late as the last
decades of the seventeenth century. This contrast
between the formal concentration of authority in
the hands of royal offi cials and the actual exercise
of supreme power on the local level by great land-

owners was to characterize the political structure

of independent Spanish America as well.

Political Institutions of the

Spanish Empire

FORMATION OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION

The pattern of Spain’s administration of its colonies

was formed in the critical period between 1492 and

1550. The fi nal result refl ected the steady growth
      of centralized rule in Spain itself and the application
      of a trial-and-error method to the problems of co-
      lonial government. To Columbus, Cortés, Pizarro,
      and other great expeditionary leaders, the Span-
      ish kings granted sweeping political powers that
      made these men almost sovereign in the territories
      they had won or proposed to subdue. But once the
      importance of these conquests was revealed, royal
      jealousy of the great conquistadors was quick to
      show itself. Their authority was soon revoked or
      strictly limited, and the institutions that had been
      employed in Spain to achieve centralized political
      control were transferred to America for the same
      end. By the mid-sixteenth century, the political or-
      ganization of the Indies had assumed the defi nitive