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Problems Of Distance, Communications, And Authority: How Charles V And Philip Ii Ruled The Global Spanish Empire, Cody Bryan Mitchell

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

This essay explains how the Spanish (or Castilian) crown during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries managed its worldwide empire. It emphasizes the contribution of, and the tension between, the crown’s two main strategies: political decentralization – or delegation – and imperial centralization. To begin, it contextualizes the issue by exploring the situation at the time and explains how the problems of distance and communication were closely linked. Secondly, drawing on the comments of both contemporary observers and modern historians, this paper examines the approaches used by the Spanish kings in ensuring the optimum reliability of their intelligence networks within Europe …