1 Political Community and Just War in the City of Lima

The body politic was a theme which preoccupied humanists and those who professed the scholastic tradition of natural law, but also writers and thinkers of many different hues.2 On the broad differences between the humanist/oratorical and scholastic/theological approaches (in this case applied to Just War Theory), see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999), pp. 16–77. Annabel Brett shows how a concern with political community underlay all sorts of problems: some more obvious, such as why and how republics were founded, but others apparently unrelated, such as whether one should allow freedom of movement to beggars, which touched on the permeability of borders, and who falls inside and outside them; how laws bind individual humans; or the meaning of liberty and slavery, all questions which were dealt with at length by the Spanish Scholastics from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Another approach was that of the humanist authors of political treatises, among whom the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli loomed large. Analyses of the influence of Machiavelli in Iberia in both the literary and intellectual spheres have overwhelmingly focussed on the art of government as represented in Il principe [The Prince] (1513, published 1532), and seventeenth-century anti-Machiavellian rhetoric and reason-of-state approaches to sovereignty, despite abundant evidence that the works which most circulated in the sixteenth century were in fact the Arte della guerra [Art of War] (1521) and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio [Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy] (c. 1517, published 1531), which were published in a Spanish adaptation and translation respectively.3 This is the approach adopted not only in classic studies such as José Antonio Maravall’s ‘Maquiavelo y maquiavelismo en España’, in Estudios de historia del pensamiento español (Madrid, 1983), I, 39–72, and J.A. Fernández-Santamaría’s Reason of State and Statecraft in Spanish Political Thought (Lanham, MD, 1983), but also in Keith David Howard’s recent reanalysis The Reception of Machiavelli in Early Modern Spain (Woodbridge, 2014), despite its important insights in other respects. The material history of Machiavelli’s circulation in Spain is explored in Helena Puigdomènech, Maquiavelo en España: Presencia de sus obras en los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid, 1988). I analyse the impact of Machiavelli in more detail in the following chapter, but for now suffice it to say that the Discorsi, through the lens of the ancient Roman republic, are concerned with republics, republicanism, and the problematic question of how republics form and sustain empires, while the formation of the ruler is a secondary (if still important) concern.4 On the interconnectedness of Machiavelli’s republican and imperial thinking, see Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge, 2004).

For writers who, like Machiavelli, examined the body politic in the real world, through the vicissitudes of history, the overwhelming impression was often one of its fragility. The Discorsi show how prone to flux the political form of a community is: beginning with anarchy, a people might progress through a cycle of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy (the three classic forms of government given by Aristotle) before cascading back until the result is anarchy again. Expanding a political community into an empire made up of various different nationes (meaning peoples, not ‘nations’ in the modern sense) carries even greater risk. For all the noise of Spanish imperial propaganda of Charles V and his successors, there was always a strand of thought acutely aware that empires are not irreversible, and do not last forever. Uncertainty regarding expansion was partly a consequence of the Aristotelian legacy, according to which the most natural political community was a city state. As I.A.A. Thompson has demonstrated, until well into the seventeenth century, the first expression of patria and community was in one’s city or home town, and the reality of its jurisdiction within larger units ‘did not lead to the acceptance of the kingdom, the monarchy, or the empire as a natural community obliging the same loyalty and sacrifice as its component parts’.5 I.A.A. Thompson, ‘Castile, Spain and the Monarchy: The Political Community from patria natural to patria nacional’, in Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, eds, Spain, Europe and the Atlantic World: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 125–59 (p. 128). The Spanish theologian Domingo de Soto (1494–1560), along with many of his fellow Dominicans, showed considerable scepticism towards notions of empire in particular: an empire, he contended, was in essence a very large commonwealth, necessarily limited in space as well as time, which made universal empire a practical impossibility.6 Anthony Pagden, The Burdens of Empire (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 52–53; on opposition to world rule as a distinctively Dominican strain of thought, see Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, pp. 68–70. This prompts the question of how big an empire can grow before it can no longer function as a body politic. The analogy frequently drawn between the Spanish and Roman empires could be problematic and destabilising, and was even further complicated in the Americas by the widespread recognition that the Incas, too, had been empire-builders, with much to be said in their favour.7 See David Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006), and MacCormack, On the Wings of Time. Little wonder, then, that for a writer such as Jerónimo de Román y Zamora, in his historical survey of (many of) the Repúblicas del mundo [Republics of the World] (1575, 1595), as he contemplated the many fallen empires of the world in contrast to the unique stability of Venice, ‘no está la felicidad de un imperio en tener gran potencia, mas en saberse conservar y yr de cada día en mejor’ [the felicity of an empire does not consist of having great power, but in being able to conserve and continuously improve itself].8 Jerónimo Román y Zamora, Repúblicas del mundo (Medina del Campo, 1575), fol. 371r. Survival, let alone prosperity, could not be taken for granted.

The mid-sixteenth-century debates over the legitimacy of the wars of conquest and the rights of dominion over American territory and peoples introduced further uncertainty into what was otherwise a widely accepted convention that the formation of commonwealths was a universal human phenomenon. These controversies, which reached their apogee in the 1550–51 Valladolid Debate between the humanist scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573) and the Dominican Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484–1566), have often been cast as a polemic about race avant la lettre, largely because of Sepúlveda’s identification of the Amerindians with the ‘natural slaves’ written about by Aristotle.9 The classic exposition of this view is Lewis Hanke’s Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study of Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Chicago, 1959). Sepúlveda was not in fact the first to apply Aristotle’s idea – indeed, Tuck regards him as ‘an almost embarrassingly good example of an early sixteenth-century ultra-Ciceronian humanist’ in this respect (The Rights of War and Peace, p. 43) – and in reinventing it he had to attempt a reconciliation with the 1537 Papal bull ‘Sublimis Deus’ explicitly recognising the full humanity of the Amerindians and forbidding their enslavement. The two sides were, however, much less concerned with Amerindians as individuals than as a collective, and it was quite clear that the idea that Amerindian societies constituted true political communities to begin with was not self-evident. The issue, for Sepúlveda, was not so much that Amerindians were inherently inferior, physically, spiritually or intellectually, to the Spaniards – he admitted that they were fully human and even articulated a vague hope that a time might come in which the fruits of their new civility might lead to the Spaniards ‘mitigating their dominion’ – but that their customs and institutions went against the precepts of natural law.10 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demócrates segundo; o, De las justas causas de la guerra contra los indios, bilingual Spanish/Latin edition by Ángel Losada (Madrid, 1984), p. 79. The crux of his argument was that the Amerindian polity was unsuited to self-government, and that the need for evangelisation and to prevent the crimes of human sacrifice and cannibalism justified the waging of war and usurpation of political authority by the Spanish Crown. In response, Las Casas stressed that the Americas were constituted of many diverse peoples and legitimate political communities, most of which were free from such defects. He also relativised the notion of barbarity by positing four categories of barbarism, into which even the Greeks, Romans and Spaniards with their unquestionably ‘political institutions’ might fall because they also practised barbarous customs, and asserted that Aristotle’s natural slaves, who ‘do not have a state nor a politically organised city [and] lack a prince, laws and institutions’, constituted a few nomadic peoples scattered in small numbers all over the world, who could not in any case, according to Christian morality, be compelled to submit by force.11 Bartolomé de las Casas, Apología; o, Declaración y defensa universal de los derechos del hombre y de los pueblos, ed. by Vidal Abril Castelló and María Asunción Sánchez Manzano (Valladolid, 2000), p. 22.

Although neither side ‘won’ the debate conclusively, Sepúlveda’s position on natural slavery and the absence of true Amerindian government emerged discredited. As has been argued recently, the upshot of the disputes was that apologists for the Spanish imperial project were forced to accept the more moderate views advocated earlier by the Chair of Theology at the University of Salamanca, Francisco de Vitoria, in his two Latin relectiones, or lectures, De indis [On the Amerindians], delivered in 1539 and first published in 1557.12 Rubiés, ‘The Concept of Gentile Civilization’, p. 328. Vitoria’s interventions in the disputes appeared to lend support to both sides. On the one hand, he rejected most of the current justifications for the conquests, and went so far as to assert that ‘the Spaniards, when they first sailed to the lands of the barbarians, carried with them no right at all to occupy their countries’.13 Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. and trans. by Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge, 1991), p. 264. On the other, his contention that a limited aggression was justified in order to secure the right of ‘travellers’ to enter, settle, and exploit a territory, and to preach the Gospel, ‘was seen at the time, and has been seen since, simply as a green light to imperialism and colonialism’.14 Brett, Changes of State, p. 14. His approach to the Amerindian commonwealth was similarly ambivalent. Early on in the first lecture he takes for granted that the Amerindians meet Aristotle’s criteria for civility, including a system of laws and government, but later goes on to tentatively suggest that they might be close enough to a state of irrationality to be ‘unsuited to setting up or administering a commonwealth’ (p. 290). The debate over the Amerindians, then, left a number of gaps when it came to ideas of political community, leaving the theme open to further exploration and exploitation by later authors in a variety of genres.

As the above discussion shows, in the Americas at least, the discussion of political community was inextricably bound up from the beginning with Just War Theory; in turn, the American context destabilised thinking concerning both. The official question to be debated at Valladolid was whether it was lawful for the king of Spain to wage war on the Indians before preaching the faith to them, and the full title of Vitoria’s second lecture was in fact De Indis relectio posterior, sive de iure belli [Second Lecture on the Amerindians, or on the Laws of War] and primarily took the form of a discussion of the Christian ethics of declaring and waging a just war, since, as he put it, the Spanish occupation of the Americas was ‘most defensible in terms of the laws of war’ (p. 295). Moreover, while the discussion might have taken shape at court and in the universities, it was also very present and immediate to soldiers fighting on the ground. Ercilla might have been familiar with the arguments of Vitoria and Sepúlveda through his upbringing at court as a page of the future Philip II, and through the legacy of his father, Fortún García de Ercilla, also known as Fortunius Garcia, a brilliant and prolific jurist whose career in the royal administration was cut short by his untimely death in 1534, and who was acquainted with Sepúlveda from his studies in Bologna.15 Diccionario Biográfico Español de la Real Academia de Historia [online] (henceforth DBE), <http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/6748/fortun-garcia-de-ercilla-arteaga>. There is lengthy argument for Ercilla’s engagement with Vitoria in August J. Aquila, ‘La Araucana: A Sixteenth-Century View of War and its Effects on Men’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Indianapolis, 1973). Whether or not Ercilla had absorbed the arguments before his departure to Chile, though, he could not have failed to confront them during the campaign. One of the chaplains accompanying the army from Lima in 1556, Fray Gil González de San Nicolás, soon gained a reputation for fiery preaching inspired by the ideas of his fellow Dominicans Vitoria and Las Casas. No sooner had he set foot in Chile than he began to condemn the war against the Araucanians as unjust, first in a private admonition to the commander, García Hurtado de Mendoza, then in a kind of improvised Valladolid debate conducted with a Franciscan chaplain of opposing views, ‘their books before them’, and finally in writing and in repeated public sermons which held each of the soldiers personally responsible for their participation in and profit from the conflict, with an obligation to restitution.16 Alberto Cruchaga Ossa, ‘Ercilla y el derecho internacional’, in Homenaje de la Universidad de Chile a su ex Rector don Domingo Amunátegui Solar (Santiago de Chile, 1935), II, 155–75 (p. 160); DBE, <http://dbe.rah.es/biografias/34288/gil-gonzalez-de-san-nicolas>. For a different reading, see William Mejías-López, ‘La relación ideológica de Alonso de Ercilla con Francisco de Vitoria y Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’, Revista Iberoamericana, 61.170–71 (1995), 197–217. The turbulent priest was dispatched to Santiago de Chile after a few months, but in 1559 Ercilla, who by now had also fallen foul of Hurtado de Mendoza and was absenting himself from Chile after narrowly avoiding execution for an altercation with another soldier, would meet him again on their voyage from Valparaíso back to Callao. One imagines that the everyday conversations of soldiers at camp or at sea would turn to the opposing views on the war espoused by their chaplains and authorities, and there is evidence that such questions could weigh heavily for many years on veterans’ consciences. This was not least because priests in Peru would, at least into the 1560s, sometimes withhold absolution from veterans and arms traders unless they agreed to indemnify the natives for harms done. In 1568, for instance, Diego de Carvajal, who had fought in Chile in 1565, bound himself by a legal document to pay a sum of reparation to the indigenous peoples to be fixed by a panel of clergymen, ‘since at present it has not been determined whether the aforementioned war is just or unjust’.17 Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, MS Harkness 864 reel 5. A. Tibesar, in ‘Instructions for the Confessors of Conquistadores Issued by the Archbishop of Lima in 1560’, The Americas, 3.4 (1947), 514–34, demonstrates that this is not an isolated case.

The Chilean frontier – and to a lesser extent the border regions of Tucumán in modern-day Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay, which also saw a drawn-out conflict with the Chiriguano (Ava Guaraní) – remained open wounds in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Viceroyalty. They proved an ongoing problem in a region whose principal economic interests in mineral exploitation and commerce depended on a certain degree of peace as well as easy access to indigenous and slave labour, although, as always, there was also profit to be made from the ongoing warfare.18 For one example of this profiteering in Chile, where raids to obtain Reche-Mapuche slaves became crucial to the economy in the seventeenth century, see Nancy E. van Deusen, ‘Indigenous Slavery’s Archive in Seventeenth-Century Chile’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 101.1 (2021), 1–33. Soldiers, clergymen, merchants, administrators, settlers and lobbyists moved continuously between these frontiers and the metropolis of Lima, often bringing alarming news of further unrest, captures of Spanish residents and casualties, propagating their own ideas for military and social reform, importing indigenous slaves, and generally not allowing the inhabitants of Peru to ever lay the questions of just war and relations with the indigenous republics to rest. Chapters 3 and 4 explore how these questions evolved over the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the build-up to the devastating Curalaba Rebellion of 1598 which laid waste seven Spanish cities in southern Chile, and in renewed efforts towards a settlement with the indigenous insurgents in its aftermath.

The wars in Chile and Tucumán were one of many topical issues which were freely discussed on the streets of Ciudad de los Reyes, colloquially known as Lima from the Quechua name for the river valley (Rímac or Limaq), the capital city or señoría of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Studies of colonial literature and culture have long focussed on the network of urban enclaves which tied the Iberian empires together. A particularly influential reading is that of Ángel Rama, whose classic study of the ‘lettered city’ sees the three factors of colonial power, the agents of written production and the city as inseparable. While the case for the interconnectedness of these elements is still a persuasive one, the mechanistic view of their interactions is less so. One corollary of Rama’s view is that colonial cities like Lima are ‘unreal, aloof from the needs of their environment, deep-sea submarines, which are, if not extraterrestrial, at least extracontinental’, ‘the periphery of a periphery’.19 Ángel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Santiago de Chile, 1984), pp. 50, 53. This is difficult to sustain in the wake of more recent historical research. Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, for instance, have expanded the notion of literacy, noting the interconnectedness of oral, visual and written media and different writing systems in this period, all of which leave traces in the written record reflecting a continuous negotiation between many different individuals and communities over meaning. As such, ‘it is possible to view literacy as a crucial arena within which colonial culture was contested and negotiated by native peoples and their Spanish overlords’.20 Joanne Rappaport and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes (Durham, NC, 2012), p. 10. Lima itself housed indigenous intellectuals active in various arenas who acquired their education through formal and informal means, notably the General Interpreter who acted as an intermediary between curacas (hereditary indigenous leaders), indigenous petitioners and the Spanish authorities.21 Gabriela Ramos, ‘Indigenous Intellectuals in Andean Colonial Cities’, in Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, eds, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes (Durham, NC, 2014), pp. 21–38. Nor was ‘colonial power’ a monolith of coherent interests. The ruling classes of the viceroyalties were neither a homogeneous nor a harmonious group and, as Alejandro Cañeque puts it, ‘colonial agendas’ were by no means ‘self-evident’.22 Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (London, 2004), p. 46. Although the book is focussed on New Spain rather than the Viceroyalty of Peru, many of its insights remain relevant, not least because many viceroys went on from Mexico City to govern in Lima.

Lastly, Lima was not in any meaningful sense disconnected from the broader realms of Peru or from wider global interactions. Alejandra Osorio demonstrates that the Lima of this period was in many ways ‘a most modern city’, and one firmly tied to the interior of the continent over which it presided.23 Alejandra Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea Metropolis (New York, 2008), pp. 1–2. It was in fact its newness in which its inhabitants took pride, along with its greatness according not to traditional notions of an illustrious history, Aristotelian norms, or early humanist ideas of utopia, but to the innovations of late sixteenth-century thinkers such as Giovanni Botero. The latter stressed a city’s location, architecture, wealth, teeming population, religious and ceremonial life, noble residents, just laws and popular, cosmopolitan heterogeneity as among the criteria that made a city great.24 Ibid., pp. 4–7. Another concept that might be productively applied to early modern Lima, as it has been recently to Renaissance Lisbon, is that of a ‘global city’. Like Lisbon, Lima could be said to ‘fulfil the same criteria, although not in exactly the same ways, as global cities of the twenty-first century’, namely: i) being ‘the centre of trade flows sending global products back and forth between different parts of the world’; ii) ‘a mixed population’ in terms of geographical origins and ethnicity; iii) some kind of ‘global consciousness’; iv) recognition by other cities and countries as a ‘global city’; and v) being at the forefront of ‘new knowledge, technologies and communications’.25 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend and Kate Lowe, eds, The Global City: On the Streets of Renaissance Lisbon (London, 2015), p. 34. These claims are worth examining in more detail.

The first criterion is not difficult to evidence. Lima had well-developed trading links with other parts of the Americas and Asia and received a steady traffic in slaves from Africa as well as being the first stop on the carrera de Indias, the first permanent transatlantic trade route in history, which conveyed silver from inland Potosí to Lima and its Pacific port Callao, over the Isthmus of Panama to Nombre de Dios or (from 1596) Portobelo, via Havana to Seville. The merchant community of the city was among the wealthiest and most powerful in the empire, operating seven banks and, from 1593, wielding considerable direct influence over policy through its Consulado, or Merchant Guild.26 Osorio, Inventing Lima, pp. 27–31. Neither is the second. Lima’s population was among the largest in the Americas and highly mixed: according to the 1613–14 census, almost half the residents were of African descent, both enslaved and free, followed by ‘Spaniards’ (those of white European descent, regardless of their place of birth), indios from the regions of Peru and Chile, mulattoes and mestizos, and small numbers of East and South East Asians.27 Kenneth Mills and William B. Taylor, eds, Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History (Wilmington, DE, 2002), pp. 165–66; Mariano Bonialian, ‘Asiáticos en Lima a principios del siglo XVII’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines, 44.2 (2015), 205–36. It is difficult to gauge the population of Lima in the period with accuracy. The 1614 figure of 25,454 is much larger than Archbishop Toribio de Mogrovejo’s estimate of 12,790 in 1593 and Viceroy Velasco’s 1600 estimate of 14,262, perhaps because of defining the area of the city differently or because the later census recorded a higher proportion of the inhabitants: see María Pilar Pérez Canto, ‘La población de Lima en el siglo XVIII’, Boletín Americanista, 32 (1982), 383–407. Lima did not have walls until 1687 so it was, in fact, difficult to tell where the city boundaries lay. The census also gives implausibly low numbers for ethnically mixed groups (744 mulattoes and 192 mestizos), suggesting that many were counted with one of the other groups. Contemporary chroniclers and observers tended to give much higher figures for the city’s population, which did indeed increase steadily during the seventeenth century. Population figures consistently underestimate the number of indios (given at around 10% in the census), since this population was highly mobile,28 Osorio, Inventing Lima, p. 24. with regular influxes of temporary workers carrying out their mita, or forced tributary labour, in the city. These were intended to be accommodated separately in the walled-off reducción of Santiago del Cercado, set up during the reign of Francisco de Toledo (1569–81) and administered by the Jesuits, which was not included in the census.

However, while in theory Lima was a city of Spaniards, with other castas, or ethnic groups, segregated into different districts, this was never the reality, or even an aspiration for most residents. Afro-Peruvians and indigenous labourers were as likely to be found in the more prestigious central districts as Spanish households were in the outlying suburbs, households themselves often had mixed inhabitants (although mixed marriages were less common) and, in general, Spanish language, dress and consumer habits were shared among all these groups.29 Paul J. Charney, ‘El indio urbano: Un análisis económico y social de la población india de Lima en 1613’, Historica, 12.1 (1988), 5–33. This is one feature that sets Lima apart from other Spanish American settlements such as Cuzco or Mexico City, which were the sites of pre-Hispanic capitals and remained highly bilingual and bicultural. While what had been the major Ichma/Ychsma-Inca shrine and pilgrimage complex of Pachacamac, along with other pre-Hispanic sacred sites, were not far from Lima, and the valley was irrigated and hosted a sizeable population on the city’s foundation, the religious sites were ransacked and decisively abandoned in 1533.30 Juan Günther Doering and Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Lima (Madrid, 1992), pp. 35–47; Peter Eeckhout, ‘Before Lima: The Rímac-Lurín Area on the Eve of Spanish Conquest’, in Emily Engel, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Lima (Leiden, 2019), pp. 46–81. The site marked out by Francisco Pizarro in 1535 was in the jurisdiction of the most important curaca of the region, although not the site of a major urban settlement, but he and other local indigenous leaders soon found themselves relocated and marginalised. This happened in tandem with a rapid depopulation of the coastal valleys, and by the mid- to late sixteenth century, the vast majority of Indians living within the city originated from elsewhere. In this respect the city was a truly colonial creation and, like Madrid, a city of migrants.

Given this vantage point, it is unsurprising that many kinds of discourse in Lima show signs of a ‘global consciousness’, and that civic concerns are often entangled with issues facing other parts of the Americas and beyond. Lima looked to its seaboard, to the other settlements of the coastline, frontiers and expanding interior, to the cities with which it competed for recognition, and to the South and East Pacific, as well as, of course, to Europe. Lima was also recognised as a global city in numerous ways. It came to assume a pivotal and increasingly autonomous role in policy and decision-making for the whole of Spanish South America, especially during the reign of Philip III (1598–1621).31 See Pilar Latasa Vassallo, Administración virreinal en el Perú: Gobierno del marqués de Montesclaros, 1607–1615 (Madrid, 1997), p. xxiv, and José Manuel Díaz Blanco, Razón de estado y buen gobierno: La guerra defensiva y el imperialismo español en tiempos de Felipe III (Seville, 2010), p. 324. As Chapter 4 explains, Lima was the launching pad for a number of expeditions to explore and conquer the Terra Australis, the as-yet only conjectured new continent, which resulted in abortive attempts at settlement on the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and other South Pacific islands. In the wake of Francis Drake’s attacks on the Pacific coastline during his first world voyage in 1577–80, the city was also forced to take charge of much of the maritime defence of the region and the protection of the silver fleet, founding the Armada del Mar del Sur (South Sea Armada) in 1580. An unstable urban fabric, with frequent demographic shifts due to migration and epidemics, prone to earthquakes, and subject to numerous programmes of urban renewal, it must have felt for much of this period like a city under construction, boasting increasingly splendid architecture and ceremonial pomp as the seventeenth century wore on. As home to the viceregal court, the metropolitan see, which hosted three Church Councils in the sixteenth century, the University of San Marcos, and (from 1584) its own printing press, it was a major centre and generator of knowledge, communications and ‘news’. As Osorio puts it, ‘new technologies of empire’ of many different kinds were pioneered in these centuries, and conventional models of centre–periphery or colony–metropolis do not fully capture this more complex reality, as ‘many of the solutions to these new political challenges were introduced and (often) worked out in the New World context’ first.32 Alejandra Osorio, ‘Of National Boundaries and Imperial Geographies: A New Radical History of the Spanish Habsburg Empire’, Radical History Review, 130 (2018), 100–30 (pp. 100, 105). Recent studies of early modern Iberian globalisation have placed emphasis on the ‘multiple centers’ of this phenomenon, of which Lima as a global city was one.33 ‘Introduction: Iberian Empires and a Theory of Early Modern Globalization’, in Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole, eds, Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (Nashville, 2019), pp. 1–21 (p. 5).

A number of recent studies of litigation, petitions and the process of law-making have shown how this might manifest in practice. For José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Lima was ‘the main gateway into the legal Atlantic’.34 José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court (Austin, TX, 2018), p. 92. Petitioners for recognition, justice and reward included many indios from different regions, who converged and solidified a sense of shared identity en route to present their case in Madrid. This not only contributed to the cosmopolitan feel of the capital, but also shaped a bottom-up model in which petitioners of many classes and backgrounds might feed directly into royal decrees and policies and ‘introduce new concepts and words into the empire’s legislative lexicon’.35 Adrian Masters, ‘A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98.3 (2018), 377–406 (p. 395). As home to the Royal Audiencia, which in this period had jurisdiction over the whole Viceroyalty, Lima itself was the destination of many litigants, and saw the movement of legal specialists, from the highest judges (oidores) to more humble lawyers (abogados, procuradores) around different parts of the empire. The cabildos, or city councils, one representing the república de españoles and the other the república de indios, also settled more local disputes within the city, while the cabildo arzobispal heard cases related to canon law; in theory these worked in parallel, but conflicts between the various bodies were not uncommon.36 Until recently, the indigenous cabildos of the Viceroyalty of Peru were little known because they did not record minutes or proceedings. Karen B. Graubart sheds light on their functioning in ‘Competing Spanish and Indigenous Jurisdictions in Early Colonial Lima’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History [online] (Oxford, 2016) <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.365>. Thus, the city of Lima was a venue on which the most varied interest groups converged, and in which debates and grievances, litigations and controversies of all kinds might be aired with a considerable degree of freedom and participation – a distinctive form of ‘urban dialogue’, to use Jay Kinsbruner’s term.37 Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin, TX, 2005), p. 120. Such interventions show us how in practice the empire was ‘a construction of many and diverse subjects’.38 Masters, ‘A Thousand Invisible Architects’, p. 402.

This period also coincided with the formation of a ‘republic of letters’ in the Viceroyalty, with Lima as one of its centres.39 Sonia Rose, ‘La formación de un espacio letrado en el Perú virreinal’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 655 (2005), 7–14 (p. 8). Although literary production is as old as the city itself, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it began to take on new forms and an increasing self-consciousness.40 Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Marcio Velázquez Castro, ‘Prefacio’, in Historia de las literaturas en el Perú, vol. 1, Literaturas orales y primeros textos coloniales, ed. by Juan C. Godenzzi and Carlos Garatea (Lima, 2017), pp. 6–39 (p. 33). One disputed creation of these years is the so-called ‘Academia Antártica’, or Antarctic Academy, which is first mentioned in the prefatory materials to Oña’s Arauco domado, as Chapter 3 explains, but about which most of our information derives from the 808-line poem, ‘Discurso en loor de la poesía’ [Discourse in Praise of Poetry], which presents itself as the composition of an anonymous female author based in the Viceroyalty, and was published in the preliminaries to Diego Mexía de Fernangil’s Primera parte del Parnaso Antártico de obras amatorias [First Part of the Antarctic Parnassus of Amatory Verse], a translation of Ovid’s Heroides and Ibis penned in Lima but published in Seville. The poem shows an intimate awareness of the poetic theory of the period, and gives a long and eulogistic catalogue of (male) poets writing in the Viceroyalty. Despite its intriguing glimpse into the literary life of the period, the work also acts as a reminder that caution is still needed in drawing conclusions about it. Scholars disagree on whether the Academia was a formal literary society modelled on similar academies in Italy and Spain, or simply an aspiration by the lettered class of Lima to be recognised as such.41 For a useful overview of criticism on the ‘Discurso’ and differing views on the ‘Academia’, see José Antonio Mazzotti, ‘“El discurso en loor de la poesía” y el aporte de Antonio Cornejo Polar’, introduction to ‘Discurso en loor de la poesía’: Estudio y edición [1964], ed. by Antonio Cornejo Polar (Lima, 2000), pp. ix–xxxix. The only book-length study of the ‘Academia Antártica’ to date remains that of Alberto Tauro Uriarte, Esquividad y gloria en la Academia Antártica (Lima, 1948). On the seventeenth-century Spanish literary academies, see Jeremy Robbins, Love Poetry of the Literary Academies in the Reigns of Philip IV and Charles II (Woodbridge, 1997). Since many poets of the Viceroyalty also feature in Spanish catalogues of the time, such as Cervantes’s 1585 ‘Canto de Calíope’ and 1614 Viaje del Parnaso, and Lope de Vega’s 1630 ‘Laurel de Apolo’, this aspiration seems to have found a receptive audience in Europe. Nevertheless, many of the poets referred to remain shrouded in mystery, with most of their works – including other epic poems – no longer extant or at least awaiting further archival research. Moreover, despite the poet’s identification as a ‘señora principal d’este reino, muy versada en la lengua toscana y portuguesa’ [a noble lady of this kingdom, well versed in the Italian and Portuguese languages], her own identity, along with those of other female poets mentioned in the ‘Discurso’, is deliberately concealed.42 ‘Discurso en loor de la poesía’, in Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, ed., Clarinda y Amarilis: Discurso en loor de la poesía / Epístola a Belardo (Lima, 2009), p. 83. The canon it sketches out is, in any case, inevitably a partial one, exclusive of the oral and popular poetry and poetry in indigenous languages which are now recognised as important parts of the colonial literary landscape. As Rodrigo Cacho puts it, ‘locating Spanish American poetry is a work in progress’.43 Rodrigo Cacho, ‘Introduction: Locating Early Modern Spanish American Poetry’, in Rodrigo Cacho and Imogen Choi, eds, The Rise of Spanish American Poetry, 1500–1700: Literary and Cultural Transmission in the New World (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 1–27 (p. 18). See also Cacho, ‘Writing in the New World: Spanish American Poetics and the Literary Canon’, in Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Alexander Marr, eds, The Places of Early Modern Criticism (Oxford, 2021), pp. 125–42.

In this light, the ‘lettered city’ of Lima cannot simply be construed as the ‘protective ring of power and the executor of its orders’.44 Rama, La ciudad letrada, p. 57. There was no consensus of opinion about issues such as just war, defence and the assimilation of diverse ethnic communities, and poets, like others who were able to intervene in written discourses, not all of them members of the elite, could seek to shape as well as be shaped by the plurality of attitudes around them. Unsurprisingly in this light, colonial epic ‘had room for many points of view on the colonial and imperial experience and imaginary’.45 Paul Firbas, introduction to Épica y colonia: Ensayos sobre el género épico en Iberoamérica (siglos XVI y XVII) (Lima, 2008), pp. 9–21 (p. 9). What we do know about the burgeoning literary community around the time of the Academia Antártica suggests that it was keen both to establish itself within the civic environment and to compete with and differentiate itself from comparable European and New Spanish movements – hence the proliferation of poetically resonant terms of classical pedigree which at the same time designate its geographic alterity: Antártico, Austral, ninfas del Sur [nymphs of the South]. The works associated with the Academia share certain characteristics, such as formal experimentation, a penchant for particular Italian, classical and Iberian authors, an interest in Petrarchism and Neo-Platonism and a concern with recording and embellishing the pre- and post-Hispanic historiography of the region and integrating it within world history.46 Some of these traits are explored in Alicia de Colombí-Monguió, Petrarquismo peruano: Diego Dávalos y Figueroa y la poesía de la ‘Miscelánea Austral’ (London, 1985). Broadly, the imaginative resources and genres of the Renaissance are deployed to construct a distinctive literary identity and to explore and elevate their surroundings. To study the epic tradition outside of this context misses out much of the richness that an (albeit still ill-defined) awareness of the works’ horizons of production and reception provides.

For all their ambition and imagination, the poets of the Viceroyalty did face inescapable practical constraints. This is especially true of epic poets, the length of whose works tended to require publication to ensure a readership, whereas shorter pieces, depending on their genre, might circulate easily in manuscript, through musical performance or recitation, in multi-author anthologies, or through the many civic and religious celebrations and competitions at which poetry was performed in cities, which in turn were often commemorated in a subsequent publication. The shortage of paper and printers in Lima made the option of publishing there prohibitively expensive, and to print in Spain authors needed to travel themselves, appoint a dependable proxy or trust to a well-placed patron to negotiate smoothly the complex business of contracting printers and obtaining the appropriate licences. Aspiring authors also faced the threat of censorship: although exercised unsystematically, in Peru it was an activity in which ‘not only the political and ecclesiastical authorities participated, but also individuals of very diverse cultural and social condition’.47 Pedro Guibovich Pérez, ‘La censura de libros’, in Historia de las literaturas en el Perú, vol. 2, Literatura y cultura en el Virreinato del Perú: Apropiación y diferencia, ed. by Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos García-Bedoya (Lima, 2017), pp. 43–63 (p. 43). This meant that when Oña’s first poem riled a number of socially influential figures, they could conspire to ensure that most copies were withdrawn from circulation, as Chapter 3 explains.48 For another case in which censorship of a work in Lima proved more stringent than in Spain, in response to local sensitivities, see Karoline P. Cook’s discussion of the reception of Pedro Mexía de Ovando’s La Ovandina (1621), in Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America (Philadelphia, 2016), pp. 138–62. The underlying difficulty is that, in contrast to an author such as Ercilla, who amassed sufficient social capital and financial liquidity to be able to take control of the publication of his poems on his return to Spain, which in any case proved to be a runaway commercial success, writers of lower status resident in the Viceroyalty, such as Oña and Miramontes, had more limited options. Both were dependent on patronage, in this instance the patronage of the viceroy, to ensure their works’ publication and dissemination and to further their careers, but the viceroy’s rule in Lima was strictly limited, typically extending to no more than eight years, and was constrained by other powerful institutions and by the need to satisfy a juicio de residencia [trial of residence] at its conclusion.49 For a discussion of how vulnerable viceregal patronage (in particular) left colonial intellectuals, see Bernard Lavallé, ‘Los intelectuales de la época colonial entre la subordinación y el poder del discurso’, in Carlos Aguirre and Carmen McEvoy, eds, Intelectuales y poder. Ensayos en torno a la república de las letras en el Perú e Hispanoamérica (ss. XVI–XX) (Lima, 2008), pp. 115–20. It was Oña’s need to push the political and personal agendas of Viceroy García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete, which led to his poem stepping on so many toes, but by the time he ran into trouble, his patron had already returned to Madrid and could no longer offer him protection. Miramontes, on the other hand, had apparently destined his poem for different viceroys at various stages during its long gestation, who receive intermittent eulogies throughout, and the final version was clearly not aligned enough with the interests of his eventual dedicatee, Viceroy Juan de Mendoza y Luna, Marquis of Montesclaros. The autograph manuscript of Armas antárticas, carefully prepared for the press, seems to have remained undisturbed among the marquis’s papers on his return to Spain until it was rescued from oblivion in the twentieth century.50 On the composition and material history of the poem, see Firbas’s introduction to his critical edition.

Nevertheless, while it would be unwise to discount the direct and indirect pressures exerted on the poems by the necessities of clientage, it would be equally unwise to discount the agency of their authors as a result. Even the most panegyrical passages, those in which the viceroys are explicitly exalted as paragons of virtue and wisdom, do not exclude the potential to ‘read a hortatory pressure into the declarative statements’.51 Greene, The Descent from Heaven, p. 133. It is not necessary to read suppressed resistance or subversive irony into these verses to argue that their composers were engaged in seeking to shape, as well as to reflect, a particular image of viceregal rule, all the more so since this did not enjoy the centuries of accumulated convention which had accrued to mirrors of kings and princes. This concern with the figure of the viceroy adds one further layer to the complex political make-up of the poems: he is, after all, the head of the two legally separated repúblicas, de españoles and de indios, which have to be reckoned with in any understanding of colonial political community, and his opinion weighs heavily in decisions about which wars are just or unjust, and which deserve to be prioritised. Beyond the encomiastic passages, the political interests and agendas of Oña’s and Miramontes’s poems are highly variegated, and the spaciousness of epic allows abundant scope to explore them.