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e-Journal of Portuguese History

On-line version ISSN 1645-6432

e-JPH vol.16 no.1 Porto  2018

https://doi.org/10.7301/Z00863T3 

BOOK REVIEWS

 

Cardim, Pedro. Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica ( ca. 1550–ca. 1715). Madrid: Marcial Pons, Ediciones de Historia, 2017. ISBN: 978-84-15963-98-1

Irene María Vicente Martín1

1 Postdoctoral researcher, European University Institute, Department of History and Civilization. Florence, Italy. E-Mail: Irene.Vicente@EUI.eu

 

Historians have displayed a renewed interest in the Spanish Monarchy over the last two decades, beginning to re-examine the historical differences in the political organization of the territories and people subjected to its rule, amongst which were Castile, Aragon, the Americas, the Netherlands, and Portugal. Their discoveries about the political capacity of these territories’ institutions for dealing autonomously with different situations have greatly revised certain outdated notions regarding the Spanish Monarchy. Consequently, multiple research studies have identified the limits of royal power, as well as highlighted the importance of a large number of decision-making centers beyond the Spanish Habsburg court. In asking how the Spanish Monarchy managed to remain relatively stable for two centuries, historians have focused their attention on the political and social relationships between the different territories that formed part of the greater whole. The book reviewed here, Portugal y la Monarquía Hispánica (ca. 1550–ca.1715) , is an example of this historiographical debate. Throughout its more than four hundred pages, Pedro Cardim seeks to place emphasis on the relationship between the Spanish Monarchy and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book consists largely of republished articles, with the author recovering much of his past work and using it to reflect on the relationship between these two entities before, during, and after the period known as the Iberian Union (1581–1640). The reason for revisiting his earlier research, he tells us, is the need to systematically re-assess certain central issues that seem to have been forgotten by many academics currently studying the subject.

Pedro Cardim is a researcher at the Portuguese Center for Global History (CHAM—Centro de História de Além-Mar), Universidade Nova, in Lisbon, where he also works as an associate professor. Since completing his PhD about the importance of love and friendship in early modern politics, his main areas of interest have been the history of Portugal, its relationship with the Spanish Monarchy, and the role that the two monarchies played in the development of the early modern world. The book reviewed here is designed to be, firstly, an illustration of Cardim’s academic and professional career and, secondly, a comprehensive study of the political meaning of Portugal within the Spanish Monarchy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The volume is divided into eight chapters, preceded by a brand-new introduction, but provides us with no conclusion or final comments. As mentioned earlier, all the chapters are either articles or extracts from books published over the last two decades in various international journals, textbooks, and compilations of different studies. Nevertheless, this new format, the consequent organization and ordering of the texts within the volume, and the fact that all these articles and chapters have been translated into Spanish create the impression of a united whole. The new introduction also gives us the feeling that we are reading a newly-published work that sets out to pursue entirely fresh purposes, something that it actually achieves.

The first chapter, originally entitled “Portugal’s Elites and the Status of the Kingdom of Portugal within the Spanish Monarchy,” was recently published as a chapter of the collaborative book Monarchy Transformed (Cambridge 2017). In it, the author analyzes how the Portuguese elites negotiated with the three monarchs of the Habsburg dynasty during the period when both kingdoms shared the same king. The distinct nature of each of these kings greatly influenced the behavior of the Portuguese elites, who had to adapt their longstanding customs and behavior in order to continue to enjoy the graces and favors of the Crown. The second chapter, published as “As Cortes de Portugal e a dinâmica política da época moderna,” first appeared in Os Municípios no Portugal Moderno (Colibri 2005). Continuing to delve into the previous chapter’s idea of negotiation between the Portuguese elites and the kings, Cardim offers us a new view of the early modern Cortes or parliament, seeing this as the setting where the decisions of all the actors involved in politics were agreed upon. The third chapter, “Las Cortes de Portugal y la dinámica política en la época moderna” was originally part of the well-known book La monarquía de Felipe III (Fundación Mapfre 2008). In this chapter, the author analyzes Portugal’s loss of its central role on the European political stage from the 1610s onwards, considering the journey of Felipe III to Lisbon in 1619 as a useful case study for understanding this process of change.

With this chapter, the emphasis of the book shifts from its focus on the political actors (i.e. the elites and the Cortes) and moves to a more theoretical definition of the functioning of the Spanish Monarchy, placing heavy emphasis on its progressive identification with Castile and the consequences that this notion had for Portugal. Going deeper into this topic, the fourth chapter, “Todos los que no son de Castilla, son yguales” (Pedralbes, Revista d’Historia Moderna 2008), reflects on the delicate concept of “foreigner” within the Spanish Monarchy and Castile. More concretely, the author studies how some Portuguese manuscripts tried to show the Spanish kings that the Portuguese could be considered much closer to Castile than to other communities, in order to receive better advantages. In the fifth chapter, “A corte régia e o alargamento da esfera privada,” published in História da Vida Privada em Portugal (Círculo de Leitores 2011), Cardim brings the royal court back into the book, now studying this institution from the point of view of the everyday lives of those who were involved in it. In the pages of this chapter, the author explains the changes in the lives, aims and, practices of the people who were close to the king, especially when the Spanish monarchs introduced their own rituals inherited from the Habsburg dynasty. In the sixth chapter, the author jumps to the topic of the American colonies. In “Political condition and identity” (2014), he deals with the political configuration of Spanish America, considering it to be the result of different political traditions, namely those originating from Portugal and Castile.

In the following chapter, “La aspiración imperial de la Monarquía Portuguesa”, published in Comprendere le Monarchie Iberiche (Viella 2010), Cardim returns, once again, to Portugal’s political status within Spain, stressing the hegemonic aspirations and imperial behavior of the Portuguese Crown. In analyzing the use of imperial attributes to represent the king, together with the use of the words “imperium,” “kingdom” and “monarchy” well before and long after 1640, Cardim explains the hegemonic aspirations of Portugal largely in relation to the Spanish Monarchy. This chapter is the only one in which Cardim includes the Portuguese overseas empire, especially while talking about the difficulties that the Portuguese kings had in using the word Empire afterwards to refer to Asia or Brazil. In the last chapter, “Portugal en la Guerra de Sucesión de la Monarquía Española,” published in La Guerra de Sucesión en España y la batalla de Almansa (Sílex 2009), Cardim continues with the development and definition of Portugal after its independence from the Spanish Monarchy. More concretely, he studies the participation of the Bragança dynasty in the War of Spanish Succession (1700-1714), understanding this episode as one of the most crucial events in the history of Portugal, since it led to the international recognition of the new ruling dynasty as well as consolidated the Atlantic character that Portugal was acquiring.

As the reader might have noticed, Pedro Cardim underscores four topics throughout the book: the status of Portugal within the Spanish Monarchy; the importance of the local powers in explaining the governance of Portugal and its overseas empire; the relevance of the Christian faith in the development of early modern politics and the shaping of identities; and the progressive shift towards the Atlantic (especially towards Brazil) that Portugal made from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. All of these represent the main themes worked on by the author but the strategy of bringing them together in this new book offers the reader fresh insights into the political configuration of the Spanish Monarchy as well as its relationship with Portugal. These four points can easily be used to summarize both of these ideas and to offer new understandings of their fundamental importance in Portuguese and Spanish history.

Parallel to these achievements, there are three points that also need to be commented on. Perhaps the most evident of these is the varying length of the chapters, reflecting the different nature of each text. There are at least four chapters (originally journal articles) with less than thirty pages, while the other four are more than twice that length. This sometimes makes the reading of the book rather difficult and unbalanced. This point is closely connected with the second one, which is the different nature of the texts when they were written. These papers have been collected together into this volume without taking into account the manifest differences between journal articles (much more analytical and theoretical) and book chapters (more descriptive and narrative). This imbalance is aggravated even further when considering the order chosen for the chapters, since the two different kinds of texts are not interwoven with one another throughout the book, a strategy that could have given it a more balanced feeling. The third and final aspect relates to the fact that there is neither a conclusion nor a final comment at the end of the volume.

Returning to the main aim of the book and taking all of this into consideration, it is possible to conclude that this work is not only an interesting synthesis of the research that Pedro Cardim has carried out during the last decade, but also a book about the latest insights into the political and social relationship between Spain and Portugal as well as their identity-definition processes in the early modern period, a topic about which, according to the author, there still remains a great deal to be written.

 

Copyright 2018, ISSN 1645-6432

e-JPH, Vol. 16, number 1, June 2018

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