Fifteen Eighty Four

We live now in a time in which more and more people vouch for building up walls and barriers to deter the movement of people as it is seen with suspicion; as if mobility were the cause of all contemporary problems, a harmful activity that would break up societies and transform them away from their alleged pure and immutable nature. There is a large debate around mobility, as it is also acknowledged as a positive and constructive force. The constant movement of people, ideas, and all sorts of goods is essential for our survival, as the pandemic reminded us not long ago. However, mobility and its challenges are nothing new; they were, for instance, at the cornerstone of the Spanish Empire, the first-ever global empire.

Global Servants studies the worldwide mobility of low-echelon Spanish imperial officials from 1580 to 1700 to understand how their experiences of government shaped the ruling and imagining of the far-flung and diverse empire. The book argues that officials’ pathbreaking, extensive, and ceaseless global circulation was central to the cohesion and functioning of the empire. It allowed for officials’ self-fashioning as faithful subjects, as well as for the physical and ideological overcoming of the far-flung geography of Spain’s empire and the incorporation, and sometimes exclusion, of diverse subjects across the globe. Furthermore, officials’ interactions with very different peoples and cultures spawned a form of cosmopolitanism that has largely remained concealed and which unified the various societies around an imperial mission of enforcement, defense, and expansion of the crown’s rule and spread of Catholicism. In the end, this is a story of how imperial power, which aspires to be universal and homogeneous, was practiced in heterogeneous ways.

By combining multiple sources from archives that are rarely examined together, the stories of various itinerant officials are reconstructed. Global Servants traces the endeavors of men such as Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, a famed Basque soldier who fought in the Low Countries, then served in Peru, Panama, the Philippines, and back in Spain, in Córdoba, Asturias, and finally in the Canaries, where he died; Pedro Ordóñez de Ceballos, an Andalusian merchant and adventurer who, after traveling through Africa and Jerusalem, embarked for America, where he founded new cities and became an ordained priest; however, while sailing back home, his ship was forcefully driven eastwards, taking him through Asia, India, and Africa, and back to America; and Pedro Esteban Dávila, the illegitimate child of the marquis of Las Navas, who, without the support of his father, had no option but to tirelessly serve the king, either in Europe, Manila, the Azores, or Buenos Aires. The text also highlights women such as the Italian-born Teresa de Aguilar, who followed her father to Cartagena de Indias, where she married a young Mexican official who took her to New Mexico. There, the Inquisition accused her of Judaism, mainly on the grounds of her unusual customs, particularly her ability to read in multiple languages, which were seldom seen in that region.

The book analyzes both how mobility was possible and the effects of such mobility. It thinks of mobility first in a highly material sense, looking at the technologies that allowed for sailing across great distances on unknown seas and establishing a transatlantic empire for the first time in history. The overcoming of never-experienced-before distances challenged the prevalent assumptions of the world and allowed for new forms of global imagination and representation. Despite its diversity and extension, the world could be thought of and, more importantly, experienced as one.

Once officials reached far-away places, and sometimes even before they started their journeys, the ruling of the scattered empire was only possible through their networks of patronage. These webs of patrons, clients, and brokers adapted to the new circumstances. They evolved from their face-to-face and local nature to expand across oceans and continents in order to articulate individuals who could be located miles away and often unknown to each other. Through this global economy of grace, officials acquired knowledge and resources, enemies and friends, that defined their activities a long way off their homelands.

Officials’ activities in these foreign settings granted them experience, perhaps their most valued and unique feature. This imperial knowledge, which steamed from their undertakings on the ground, was highly prized by the monarch and his councilors and by contemporary scholars. This grounded experience fostered a new epistemological milieu that favored concrete and sensorial knowledge. Moreover, the particular and dispersed experiences of the officials were codified and collected in the imperial archives in Simancas, mainly in the form of Informaciones de méritos y servicios, from where the global empire could be gauged.

Among the key responsibilities of the imperial officials, the imposition of royal authority and the suppression of dissent stood out. Whether in Manila, Oaxaca, Chile, or the Peninsula itself, these royal servants were at pains to assert the law of the Spanish king, exposing the fragility of imperial power. Officials had at hand a vast repertoire of tools for fulfilling their duties, from negotiation to extermination, which in turn signaled different understandings of the subjected (or hoped to be subjected) population and of the requirements for belonging to the imperial polity. Those attitudes and actions were informed by an immense number of stereotypes and notions about rulership and governmentality that circulated across the empire and by their own experiences of similar events in disparate settings.

While officials’ ceaseless mobility was essential for bonding the empire together, many people resented such movement, particularly when it could turn into trespassing, crossing beyond the accepted imperial limits. From conquistadores who went Native to Mediterranean sailors who converted to Islam, the history of the Spanish Empire is full of men and women who, willingly or unwillingly, abandoned their culture and, even more worrisome, their religion, putting the imperial mission into question. However, because the definition of too much movement and the acceptable boundaries varied according to the different settings and persons involved, the standard against which mobility was measured changed and was redefined in every discussion. In other words, the debates on people’s mobility were instrumental for every party’s own definition of what it meant to be a “true” Spanish.

Ultimately, their mobility and myriad experiences provided officials with a complex understanding of the global empire, a polity that, in spite of its diversity and large extension, they could envision and act upon as one coherent unit. Officials, thus, developed a particular strand of cosmopolitanism that allowed them to embrace difference, acknowledge a shared humankind community, and transcend local boundaries to establish links with the universal. This particular form of cosmopolitanism was structured around two disparate projects, which oftentimes converged, but others did not: that of universal Catholicism and that of a universal empire. Therefore, a Catholic ethos (an evangelizing project but also an ethic commitment and identity trait) and imperial rivalries (the constant disputes for power and global hegemony and the perceived threats against Spanish dominion) organized Spanish global thinking. Most remarkably, this cosmopolitanism was not exclusive to intellectuals and philosophers who would outline its characteristics from their desks, but it emanated from the bottom up. Cosmopolitanism was lived and practiced by lower-ranking officials and many other marginal subjects worldwide whose global citizenship has been traditionally overseen.

Mobility made the Spanish Empire. The circulation of early modern officials, and of society in general, was truly impressive, and its effects powerful. Officials’ incessant movement was a positive force. It brought closer regions separated by land and sea and set the ground for imagining a common and connected world. Members of the monarchy understood that they belonged to a global polity, and they acted accordingly. This emphasis on the global dimension of the empire neither neglects the importance of the local histories nor implies that imperial rule and the colonized societies were the same throughout the world. On the contrary, the Spanish Monarchy was defined by its heterogeneity, and the local processes had their own particular dynamics, origins, and consequences.

By looking at the whole of the Spanish Empire, and not just one of its regions, as most historiography has done, Global Servants challenges our understanding of the empire and how imperial power was constructed and maintained. Moreover, such global mobility and consciousness force us to rethink the place of what is today Latin America within the Spanish Empire and what was colonial about it. The matter of the specificity of the imperial experience in the Americas is indeed extremely hard to solve. It requires a holistic approach and breaking away from the teleology of the national historiographies and their victimizing narratives in order to better see who and how was included or excluded, exploited or protected, and how such categories could change or rather remain unaltered. The limits and characteristics of the global empire were discussed simultaneously in multiple locations and by different actors, and the outcomes of such conversations were not locally refrained but reverberated across the world.