La Nobleza Titulada Castellana en la Conservación del Imperio Español en Tiempos de Carlos II, ed. Porfirio Sanz Camañes

Recent decades have witnessed a small historiographical revolution regarding the Spain of the last Habsburg, Carlos II (r. 1665–1700). Hitherto largely dismissed as a near terminal case saved only by the arrival of the Bourbons, historians have been identifying more vigour in Carlos’s Spain than used to be the case. But not everything in that polity has been reassessed so far. Particularly striking is the case of the higher reaches of the Spanish nobility, the titled nobles and grandees. In a reign in which some contemporaries thought Spain had become an aristocratic republic, and in which the number of new titles exceeded that granted in any other reign, that titled elite has been dismissed as a factious, selfish bunch of individuals and families, devoid of any sense of the greater good of Spain and its global empire or monarchy. But there are signs that this last bastion of the older historiography is yielding before the revisionist assault: Porfirio Sanz Camañes has assembled a collection which seeks to demonstrate the positive contribution of that elite to the survival of the Hispanic Monarchy. A brief Introduction makes clear what the collection is—and is not—about: it is not much concerned with the economic foundations of the nobility or their señorial powers, a subject which figures largely in the older Spanish historiography, since it was such a bone of contention during the breakdown of Spain’s antiguo regimen in the nineteenth century. The Introduction also identifies key themes and usefully summarises the arguments of the seventeen essays which follow. The essays are distributed into four themed blocs, although as with all such schemas one might query the location of individual essays: court, patronage and client networks; servants of the king, from local office to viceroyalties; lineage, family and matrimonial strategies; and the idea of nobility, honour and cultural constructions.

In the first bloc, Juan Sánchez García de la Cruz considers one of the grandest grandees, the eighth duke de Medinaceli, and the networks and patronage which facilitated his rise, briefly, to the position of chief minister in the 1680s but did not prevent his fall. For his part, Ramón Sánchez González looks at Medinaceli’s successor as chief minister, the count of Oropesa (promoted grandee first class in 1690), arguing (with reference to a long-running debate in Spain) that Oropesa was not a valido. He also addresses Oropesa’s management of his estado, which was confiscated during the War of the Spanish Succession, when Oropesa joined Philip V’s rival for the throne, the future Emperor Charles VI. María Soledad Gómez Navarro discusses Cardinal Portocarrero, the archbishop of Toledo who played a key role in the politics of the succession in the years either side of 1700, seeking to suggest that Portocarrero was an able minister, viceroy, ambassador and diocesan archbishop. Finally, in this first bloc, Enrique Solano Camón assesses the career between 1685 and 1705 of Antonio Ibáñez de la Riva Herrera, who as bishop of Ceuta, archbishop of Zaragoza, president of the Council of Castile and viceroy of Aragon demonstrated an awareness of the need for reform to tackle Spain’s problems and who, like Portocarrero, supported the Bourbon succession.

In the second bloc we leave the Court. Yolanda Fernández Valverde considers the Dávila Enríquez family as hereditary town councillors in Cuenca and Albacete (New Castile) in the last years of Carlos II’s reign, revealing how one family managed to maintain, even improve its position in the difficult circumstances of the seventeenth century. In that sense, Fernández accepts the traditional image of later seventeenth-century Spain. The family was not titled, and while nothing is said about its place in the larger Hispanic Monarchy, nonetheless this is a very good local study. Manuel Rivero Rodríguez returns us to a Court family, that of the eighth duke of Alburquerque, but as viceroy of distant New Spain and Sicily, offering some invaluable insights into not only the role of grandees but also the nature of Spain’s empire, suggesting that Olivares’s so-called union of arms (as articulated by the late John Elliott) was by no means dead in the water after Olivares’s fall in 1643. With David Rex Galindo we are back with the untitled nobility, in a study of Don José de Garro, a Basque who held various governorships in Spanish America and Spain before becoming captain general of Vizcaya. We remain in America with Francisco Javier García Bresó and Porfirio Sanz Camañes’s joint essay on Melchor Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, count of la Monclova, viceroy successively of Mexico and Peru between 1686 and 1705, and one of the imperial proconsuls who oversaw the successful Spanish response to the Scottish attempt to establish a colony in central America at the end of the 1690s.

In the third group, Carmen-María Fernández Nadal discusses the marquises of Canales de Chozas, a family which achieved a title (1680) via careers in defence of the Monarchy in the bureaucracy and diplomacy, Canales being expelled from London in 1699 following his protest against the second Partition Treaty. For her part, Asunción Retortillo Atienza considers the career of Pablo Spínola Doria, third marquis of los Balbases, his allies and others in both his native Genoa and in Spain where he too served, in the military and as diplomat. Antonio López Amores considers the political career of a Sardinian noble, the marquis of Villasor, for whom loyalty to the Crown went hand in hand with closer links—achieved by means of marriage alliances—with Castilian noble families. Juana Salado Santos, in one of the more self-consciously conceptual contributions, and one which more directly challenges the thesis of decline, considers the career of Francisco Ronquillo Briceño, count of Gramedo (1677), but saying relatively little about him as titled noble. For his part, Miguel Gómez Vozmediano explores the career of Iñigo de la Cruz Suárez Manrique de Lara, providing a good account of the family, its titles, including that of count of Frigiliana, the life and career (including military service), of both Iñigo and his father under Carlos II and Philip V, Iñigo’s subsequent disgrace, his authorship, including of a treatise on the Military Orders, and his administration of his señorio. Señorial administration is also the focus of Ignacio Atienza Hernández and Francisco Ledesma Gámez’s study of efforts to cut costs on the duke of Osuna’s estado in the 1690s, in the context of a debt crisis due in part to the family’s service to the Crown in the previous century and a half.

In the final set of articles, Rubén González Cuerva discusses the significance of the response, inside and outside Spain, to the death of the duke of Béjar at the siege of Buda (1686); he explores the implications for understanding what it meant to be a noble as well as the link between Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs. David García Hernán suggests that values articulated in Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo’s Caballero Perfecto (1620)—service, loyalty, obedience—continued to shape perceptions of the nature of nobility in seventeenth-century Spain and the behaviour of nobles for the rest of the century. Finally, Adolfo Carrasco Martínez, with reference to a portrait now in Madrid’s Prado, considers the competing influence of inheritance and individual character in the construction of his own image by Gregorio María de Silva Mendoza, fifth duke of Pastrana and ninth duke of Infantado, in an essay which locates itself within the recent interest in representation.

This is a wide-ranging collection, one which makes good use of pertinent primary sources, including the section of Spain’s Archivo Historico Nobleza in Toledo which houses noble archives such as those of the Osuna, and of an impressive growing body of Spanish-language studies of Spain’s early modern nobility. As noted above, many of the studies are not confined to the reign of Carlos II but also embrace that of Philip V, not all of the subjects of the essays were grandees or títulos, while some contributors do accept that late Habsburg Spain was in difficulty, although arguing that this offered an opportunity to serve, to prosper personally and to help preserve the Monarchy. Some other aspects of noble life—including economic circumstances—and culture might have been more fully discussed. This is not an exhaustive, definitive study of the public role of Spain’s aristocracy in the reign of Carlos II. (And, as elsewhere in Europe, not all members of that group pursued public careers anyway) But the collection represents a major advance in our understanding of that elite and its place in late Habsburg Spain and its empire. Faction and fighting for place certainly characterised the conduct of the upper nobility—as they did elsewhere—but these essays, some of them small biographical gems, make it much harder to deny the role of títulos and grandees in the survival of the Spanish Monarchy to 1700. Unfortunately, there is no index.