Into the heart of the empire: Indian journeys to the Habsburg royal court

Abstract

By piecing together the lives of numerous Indian voyagers to Spain, this study explores the role of indigenous peoples of the Andes in the formation of the early modern Atlantic world. The research focuses on these journeys from the kingdom of Peru to the court of the Spanish Habsburg king during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This project continues recent developments in colonial Andean historiography in three main areas. First, it aligns with current works revisiting the problem of Indian acculturation or Hispanization by tracing the emergence of a new class of Indian legal specialists in colonial Peru. Second, this work shifts the emphasis from rural native communities to the urban milieus in which most of these travelers and specialists lived by analyzing new power structures and novel forms of articulating legal and political discourses within the lettered city. Finally, it explores the role of Indians in the development of a legal culture linking distant scenarios of the Spanish Atlantic. Indian participation in solicitation and litigation across the ocean played a significant part in the outcomes of Habsburg state building. Through a series of strategies displayed at the king's court, Indians were generally successful in securing royal decrees ordering viceroys, judges, defenders, and other American authorities to administer justice to native claimants and petitioners. These transatlantic journeys, as any other form of reliance on royal justice and patrimonial power, Indian or Spanish, partially reinforced the hegemony of the Crown. In the process of so doing, however, this sophisticated form of political negotiation helped create and recreate the nature of the Habsburg Atlantic Empire. Travelers were state makers of a very special kind.