The New Culture of Archives in Early Modern Spain

Historiographical Notes

Today’s approach to the evolution and functions of archives in history, especially in the medieval and early modern ages, arises from the new problems, perspectives and methodologies of the recent ‘archival turn’ in historical studies. ¹⁵ This new historiographical trend proposes a social history of archives as institutions of memory and repositories of documentary heritage with different configurations across time, a history of the people in charge of collecting, selecting, preserving and classifying records, and also of the conflicts surrounding the creation of archives and the political, juridical, social or memorial value of the documents which they preserved. ¹⁶ This approach goes beyond the questions that have hitherto occupied scholars more traditionally concerned with the history of archives, namely legal and institutional historians, professional archivists, and paleographers and diplomatists, yet it nevertheless requires a dialogue between these on the one hand, and political and cultural historians on the other. In this respect, I agree with Filippo de Vivo, Andrea Guidi, and Alessandro Silvestri’s call for an interdisciplinary history of archives, combining the history of institutions, the history of written culture, the history of archival science and more generally the history of information management. ¹⁷

As far as scholarship on the history of archives in late medieval and early modern Spain is concerned, only a few works have embraced this new approach. Traditional historiography has either focused more narrowly on the history of institutions or described more technically the archival collections and documentary genres from the perspective of diplomatics, without problematizing the selection of documents or the representations of social and political order which they embody. From these studies, the archive emerges as an isolated institution, disconnected from the apparatuses of power that created them and even more from the functions ascribed to the practices of writing and documentary production in each historical moment. ¹⁸

This situation has begun to change more recently, thanks in particular to new contributions on the territories of the Crown of Aragon in the late middle ages. Stéphane Péquignot, for instance, has analysed the Archivo Real of Barcelona as an element in the governmental practices and diplomatic relations of King Jaime II de Aragón (1267–1327), while Francisco Gimeno Blay has related it to the uses of written culture under Pedro IV el Ceremonioso (1319–1387). ¹⁹ In addition, Alessandro Silvestri has recently studied the role of the magistri notarii in the management of records in the fifteenth-century Kingdom of Sicily. ²⁰ As far as the early modern age is concerned, Fernando Bouza has published various works on Philip II’s use of archives in claiming the Portuguese throne, on the function of the archive as an instrument of the Spanish monarchy’s modus gobernandi, and on archives as expressions of human memory. ²¹ Bouza’s distinction between ‘archivos’ and ‘archivillos’ – also embraced by Arndt Brendecke ²² – has been particularly useful in dissecting a situation in which the centralizing project of the royal archive of Simancas coexisted with the individual secretaries’ habit of retaining many of their documents in their private homes.

Diego Navarro Bonilla has written several foundational works concerning the uses and representations of archives in this period, on private archives and the archives of spies, and finally on the history and arrangement of the Archivo de la Diputación del Reino de Aragón. ²³ In these works, he demonstrates that early modern archival culture was not confined to the royal archives at Simancas, which have tended to attract most scholarly attention, but also extended to all kinds of institutions and peoples, from the central institutions of the monarchy to the municipalities, hospitals, confraternities, noble houses and other private individuals. ²⁴ Several other works have studied the relation between archives and the institutions that produced them, as well as the legal function of their records. For example, José Antonio Escudero has studied Philip II’s ‘despacho por escrito’, namely the practice of requiring information to be delivered to him in writing, and María Isabel Ostolaza Elizondo has recently discussed the archives of the Kingdom of Navarre. ²⁵

Finally, the royal archives of Simancas have been the object of a particularly rich body of scholarship. This was pioneered by the Archives’ former director, José Luis Rodríguez de Diego, who attributed three major historical functions to Simancas: government, administration and historiography. ²⁶ More recently, Arndt Brendecke’s book on the connections between empire and information has identified the royal archive as one of the instruments that helped the monarchy acquire knowledge of its huge colonial dominions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ²⁷ On the other hand, Marc-André Grebe has written a comprehensive study of the development, organization and use of the Simancas archives, as well as a comparative essay on the functions of different archives in the Habsburg empire, from Simancas to Cuenca (Ecuador) and as far afield as Quito. ²⁸ In this respect, the history of the Simancas archives has also been reinvigorated thanks to its association with wider developments in politics, communication and world history.

Instruments of Government

To understand the nature of the advances made under the Catholic monarchs in documentary production, preservation and organization, it is necessary to begin not only with a series of changes in the dimension and structure of the Spanish monarchy, but also with a more general history of their reigns. First, the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 laid the basis of the later political integration of both realms, which was achieved in 1479. Shortly after, their territories were notably expanded with the conquest of Nasrid Granada and the discovery of the American territories (1492), the recuperation of Roussillon and Sardinia (1493), the conquest of the Canary Islands (1496) and the annexation of Navarre (1512). At the same time, the monarchs restructured their systems of government and justice, resulting in the Royal Council (Consejo Real) as their principal organism, the creation of the Hermandad in 1476 to maintain order in the realm, the regularization of the royal chancery, and finally the constitution of two new Audiences: that of Valladolid, instituted by Juan II of Castile in 1371, and that of Ciudad Real, created in 1494 and definitively installed in Granada in 1504 in order to resolve judicial issues south of the Tagus River. ²⁹ This new form of government machinery, which would become even more complex during the reigns of Charles I and Philip II, increasingly necessitated the promotion of secretaries and lawyers as the principal agents of government by means of writing.

Recent historiography has shifted away from the notion of an emerging ‘modern’ state, and towards that of composite monarchy, a model that required the support of what Carlos Garriga has described as the development of a ‘series of institutional mechanisms’ that led to the ‘composition of complex political formations’. ³⁰ As we are seeking to illustrate here, however, this process also involved the use and technologies of writing. Written communication and information were converted into the indispensable tools of governance, particularly as it encompassed territories as extensive and dispersed as those that made up the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century, and was most notably evident in the unprecedented increase in written documentation. Within this nexus of writing, as José Antonio Maravall has stated, the archive was configured into ‘an essential instrument of bureaucratic technique’. ³¹ This was a process that can be observed not only within monarchical institutions, but equally in other spheres of power, from the seigneurial and ecclesiastical to the municipal and corporative.

While the Crown of Aragon counted on a deeply rooted tradition of royal archives and chancery registers dating back to the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as we have seen, late medieval Castile was very far from achieving such a clear organization. As a result, royal documentation was best preserved in the ecclesiastical institutions (monasteries and cathedrals) that were recipients of royal gifts and privileges. ³² Although Alfonso X had mentioned in his Partidas the existence of a chancery and its registers, the surviving vestiges of these documents now amount only to a single register, covering the years 1283–1286. ³³ In effect, the keeping of registers did not become a regular practice until the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand. By contrast, various medieval Cortes passed legislation on the function of chanceries and the production of registers, such as in the cases of Valladolid (1299), Medina del Campo (1305), Burgos (1315) and Briviesca (1387). ³⁴ The clearest of these regulations was proposed by King Henry II and agreed upon in the Cortes of Toro in 1371, which outlined in detail the Chancery procedures regarding the redaction of various documents, their entries into registers, and the relevant fees. This regulation also demonstrated concern for the preservation of registers in a place where they would be safeguarded, as well as ordering the completion of this task within nine months. ³⁵ These antecedents demonstrate that the royal court had long been preoccupied as much with the proper composition of the various documents emanating from the chancery as with their subsequent preservation.

Despite this, until the second half of the fifteenth century the archival culture of Castile was characterized by a series of unfulfilled projects. ³⁶ It was not until the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand, for instance, that registers were produced with any regularity and the first proper measures for documentary preservation were effectively put into practice. Proof of this was evident in 1484, when Juan Arias, bishop of Segovia, and Doctor Martín de Ávila inspected the Royal Audience and Chancery of Valladolid in order to ascertain whether the procedural documentation was being ‘rightly safeguarded’. ³⁷ One year later, the Ordinances of Cordova laid out the definitive basis of the functioning of this institution, which were later completed by the reforms of Piedrahita (1486) and Medina del Campo (1489). ³⁸ The latter of these included a precise set of instructions for the archives, decreeing that one of the ‘chambers’ of the palace in which the royal audience had its seat should be reserved for that purpose, and that a cabinet (‘armario’) should contain the procedural paperwork and corresponding sentences, ordered chronologically and identified on the outside by summaries on ‘a parchment tag’. Furthermore, the Ordinances stipulated that the same chamber should have another cabinet for the ‘privileges, pragmáticas and all the writings concerning the state, preeminence and rights of our Corte and Chancery’. ³⁹ In Aragon too, the Cortes of Teruel and Monzón enacted a similar separation of archival series for the documents generated by the Diputación in 1427–36. ⁴⁰

These regulations attempted to avoid the typical retention of judicial documentation in the houses of notaries or other authorities. ⁴¹ In fact, the Ordinances established the archives of the Royal Chancery of Valladolid as the archives of the monarchy itself. Proof of this came in the 1509 order mentioned at the beginning of this article, with which King Ferdinand instructed the bachiller Salmerón to search out royal documentation wherever he found it, and take it to this new archive. The decision to designate the castle of Simancas – near Valladolid, the capital of Castile until 1561 – as the royal archive was taken by Charles I in 1540. This was mentioned in a letter from Francisco de los Cobos, secretary of State, to Juan Vázquez de Molina, the Emperor’s personal secretary, dated in Madrid on 26 June. Cobos explained that some documents – namely ‘the writings that licenciado Acuña had under the title of Archive’ – were to be relocated there: ‘this summer I will send the order to set them up in Simancas’. ⁴² Four years later he ordered the Council of Indies to send relevant documents to Simancas, ⁴³ demonstrating his ultimate goal of converting the latter into the archives of the monarchy. As a consequence, the archives of the Crown of Aragon lost prominence and noticeably reduced their activity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ⁴⁴

Once the court was moved to Madrid in 1561, the king named Diego de Ayala as the archivist at Simancas, charged with the recovery of all retrievable documentation, not only concerning royal patrimony and patronage, but also of the different councils that formed the polysynodal rule of the Monarchy. From this point, up until his death in 1594, Ayala frequently travelled to Madrid to gather documents from the different councils and organs of the Monarchy, and at the same time undertook supervision of the various renovations of the castle itself. ⁴⁵ In 1588, along with secretaries Mateo Vázquez de Leca and Gabriel de Zayas, Ayala drew up the Instrucción para el gobierno del Archivo de Simancas, certifying the new status of this documentary depository. This may have been inspired as much by the 1560 instructions to the Archives of the Spanish Embassy in Rome, as Grebe has recently posited, ⁴⁶ as by the Memorial concerning the archives of the Torre do Tombo drafted by the notary Cristóvão de Benavente in 1583 in response to Philip II’s request during his visit to Lisbon, as Bouza has shown. ⁴⁷

The purposes of the Simancas Archive are clearly laid out in these instructions, whilst its functions were regulated in almost every conceivable area. These included: the archive’s staff, composed of the archivist Diego de Ayala – succeeded by his son Antonio, two officials and various subordinates; the procedures for gathering, ordering and controlling the documents; the manner of their preservation and the means of restoration for deteriorating documents; and even the conditions for the consultation of documents. Nothing was left to chance in what can be considered the first full regulation of an archive made by a European monarchy. ⁴⁸ In accordance with this text, the Simancas Archive was conceived with a tripartite function: as a guarantor of authority and a tool of power, as an instrument of administrative management, and as a source for historical erudition. In this respect, Simancas was an instrument of day-to-day governance which received many requests for documents, even though its distance from Madrid did on occasion impact upon its efficiency. Simancas was also, from its inception, an institution of memory, that is, a place intended to preserve the written production of the Monarchy in order to serve the recollection of its history. ⁴⁹

According to Luis Martínez García, Simancas ultimately failed to support the interests of the monarchy because the office of archivist became the patrimony of the Ayala family. ⁵⁰ To this, however, we must also add the notable handicap presented by the Archive’s distance from the residence of the king, as well as the seats of the various Councils. It is for this reason that in 1633 Philip IV came to propose the creation of a new general archive in the royal palace itself, drawing inspiration from the model of administrative management embodied by the unified archives of the Council of Italy created in 1598. ⁵¹ On 13 August 1633, the king wrote to Jerónimo Villanueva, secretary of state, that he had resolved that ‘within the Palace there should be a General Archive along the lines of Simancas in which all the papers of my Councils should be archived, with such order and arrangement, that the documents placed therein should be easily found’. He added that every four years, the documentation in the headquarters of each Council should be reviewed and transferred to said archives, with the prior preparation of an inventory. ⁵² This project, however, was never realized, whilst the letter itself shows that the objectives pursued by Charles I and Philip II in creating the Royal Archive in Simancas had similarly not been completely achieved, and that the distance between Simancas and Madrid had preciptated numerous obstacles in an increasingly bureaucratized government, one which could not be exercised without adequate record-management. As Philip IV revealingly complained in the very same letter, ‘hardly any document sought can be laid hands on’. ⁵³

Mapping the Archives

Besides the impulse given to the Royal Archives at Simancas, other documentary policies were also adopted during the reign of Philip II. Among these were the distinct orders given in 1561 and 1565 to arrange the transfer of registers, account books and other documents relating to Valencia from the royal archives in Barcelona to the Valencian archives, created in 1419. ⁵⁴ In addition, having been informed by ambassador Francisco de Vargas in 1560 of the chaos into which the papers of the diplomatic legation to the Holy See had fallen, Philip II ordered their re-arrangement and appointed the humanist Juan de Berzosa as their archivist in an attempt – as he suggested in a letter to ambassador Juan de Figueroa – to remedy the disadvantages caused by ‘not having the writings and briefs granted by past pontiffs of the Holy See of Rome to our predecessors preserved in an archive’. ⁵⁵ For a similar reason, in 1579 Philip instructed the Council of Italy to remedy the disarray and dispersal of its papers by preparing an inventory. ⁵⁶ Finally, around the same time, the monarch also took an interest in colonial documentation, as indicated in the Ordinances of the Audiences of Quito (1563) and the Philippines (1596), in which he ordered that their headquarters should have a ‘chamber, in which there should be a cabinet for procedural documentation’, specifying that the documents should be classified by year and that, within a deadline of five days after the sentence, the notary should attach ‘a parchment tag indicating the parties and the issues [of the case]’. Repeating the ordinances of the Royal Audience and Chancery of Valladolid, these ordinances also directed that another cabinet should be placed elsewhere in this chamber, to preserve ‘the privileges, pragmáticas and writings pertaining to the state, patronage and royal patrimony, as well as to the preeminence and government of said Audience’. Each of these, of course, must be kept locked, with the keys entrusted to the chancellor. ⁵⁷

However, the measures for the preservation and arrangement of these documents were not restricted to royal archives, or even to its peripheral institutions, but rather reached all spheres of power and social organization – that is, all civil, religious, and even private entities – that required written practices in order to carry out their activities. This can be seen, for instance, in the ordering of municipal archives. The first legislative regulation concerning municipalities dates back to the Partidas of Alfonso X, which established that the public notaries of a city must keep one register of documents and another of income. ⁵⁸ Indeed, many of Castile’s municipal archives thus originated in the thirteenth century. ⁵⁹ However, the defining impulse is found in two pragmáticas authorized by the Catholic Monarchs at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the promulgation of which was likely influenced by three factors: the quest for strong governance, supported by the control of documentary memory; the desire to speed up the justice of first instance of the corregidores, thus relieving the problems of the widespread growth in tribunals; and finally, the monarchy’s intention to rein in the power of the nobility. ⁶⁰

The first pragmática, dated 9 June 1500 in Seville, ordered the corregidores – representatives of royal or seigneurial power – to procure the construction of consistory buildings, municipal jails and strongboxes for their privileges. The latter was to contain the privileges and writings of the Council under three locks, with the respective keys consigned to the mayor, to one of the regidores and to the municipal notary, who should also be charged with control over this documentation and with assuring the return of documents previously loaned out. ⁶¹ The second pragmática, authorized in Granada on 3 September 1501, instituted two register books: one, on ‘papel de marca mayor’, that is, large-format paper, was to contain the privileges and ordinances authorized by the Catholic Monarchs, with a summary of their content at the beginning; the other, in parchment, was for all the privileges and favours obtained by the city throughout the centuries, as well as those granted thereafter. ⁶²

Both measures regulated precisely the preservation of documents at the municipal level, organizing their space within a strongbox. They entrusted the documents to three officers of the council, two of them political and the third – the notary – a documentary professional and guarantor of public faith. They also set a protocol for the consulation of the documents, requiring the presence of all three officers, and for the production of various registers for the documents along with their corresponding indexes. This is not to say, of course, that such practices changed overnight. In 1505, the very same sovereigns promulgated another order regarding the registers of privileges and sentences, as it had come to their attention that the documents which both they and their predecessors had issued were not ‘as well safeguarded as they ought to be, such that the documents can be consulted when necessary, from which derives disservice to us and much harm to the citizens and inhabitants of the cities and their environs’. ⁶³

In agreement with these new trends, at this juncture there were a number of different interventions concerning the compiling, compilation and inventorying of documents in various Castilian municipalities, some of which were due to explicit orders made by the Catholic Monarchs. Thus, for example, in Seville, as a consequence of the royal provision of 28 May 1492, the composition of the Tumbo de los Reyes Católicos was completed between 1494 and 1502, incorporating copies of the city’s various documents as authorized by the Catholic Monarchs. ⁶⁴ At virtually the same time, the Libro de los Privilegios of Seville was also composed, ⁶⁵ a compendium containing a significant portion of the city’s documentary memory, particularly those documents which guaranteed their rights and royal favours. ⁶⁶ In Malaga, where the municipal archives were established at the end of the fifteenth century in parallel with the institutionalization of local power, the documentation held in the strongbox was inventoried on 31 January 1494. ⁶⁷ Shortly thereafter, in 1499, Madrid did the same when Alonso Martínez de Angulo took office as corregidor, since he ordered the local authorities to produce ‘a book into which are copied all the privileges and sentences authorized by the council, and another book in which are copied all the provisions and cédulas’. ⁶⁸ Finally, in 1504, the ordinances of the town of Alcalá added to its laws the responsibility for preparating ‘an inventory of all the privileges and sentences and ordinances and whatever other writings touch on and pertain to said Council’. ⁶⁹ Even though such an inventory did not materialize, so far as we know, this measure points once again to the close relationship between the production of cartularies and municipal inventories, and the consolidation of local power structures at the turn of the sixteenth century.

Later, in 1530, Charles I extended similar measures to American municipalities by means of a royal cédula ordering the compilaton of duplicate inventories of papers and documents in the archives of each town, mandating that one copy remain outside the strongbox for prior consultation, and requiring the three keys of the ‘archives or strongbox’ to be distributed to the ordinary mayor, one of the regidores, and the notary of the town council – exactly the same policy which had previously been established by the Catholic Monarchs for the Spanish municipalities. ⁷⁰

Thus, just like the central and peripheral institutions of the monarchy, municipalities also experienced a greater zeal for the production and preservation of written documents throughout the sixteenth century, particularly for documents legally guaranteeing the titles, favours and privileges of the cities. In both cases, however, it was not sufficient for written memory to simply be deposited in a strongbox, protected by three locks; rather, it had to be kept under particular conditions.

The Order and Uses of Documents

A disorganized collection of documents does not strictly constitute an archive, inasmuch as it prevents their proper consultation and use, yet most of the archival measures mentioned above, whilst not always successfully implemented, did affect the ways in which papers were subsequently ordered and described. This documentary practice took concrete form primarily in inventories, which, as the Italian archivist Elio Lodolini has suggested, serve to condense the internal history of each archive and of its generating institution. ⁷¹

Although the development of inventories varied in response to different circumstances and needs, these were most often descriptive instruments, compiled in a codex format, which contained a summary of the contents of the documents in the archive, alongside an indication of its physical placement within the collection. Philip II perfectly understood the use and value of such inventories, as demonstrated by those commissioned in the ordinances for Simancas – the preamble of which counsels that ‘the memory of antiquity is constituted by writings’. The first, designated ‘Index of the rights pertaining to the royal crown’, concerned the ‘patronage and all and any right and action that pertains to us (the King)’. This was to be prepared with ‘distinction and clarity’, enumerating the different documents by chapter or rubric, whilst indicating in the margin the ‘drawer and book in which can be found each of the writings contained in the said enumeration’. ⁷² The second inventory, called ‘The book of inventories’, was conceived to organize access to ‘every kind of papers that are currently in said archive’, articulating for this purpose a ‘very particular and brief account of what each contains, alongside the number and drawer in which said writing is found’. ⁷³ The third, entitled ‘Account of memorable and curious things’ (‘Relación de cosas memorables y curiosas’), was in essence a history referring to the ‘memorable and curious things that are and might be in the aforementioned archive’, for which the secretaries of the Councils of State and of War were required to prepare, at the end of each year, ‘an accounting of what occurred in that year, which can and ought to be memorialized in the said book’. ⁷⁴ These books, and particularly the first two, responded to the growing necessity of putting the archive in order and representing it graphically. For this, special attention was directed towards the material location of the documents, always with ‘the titles [of the volumes] facing outward so that, without damaging them, they can be identified and [it can be determined] to what office and time they belong’. ⁷⁵ A similar approach to the extension of this new archival mentality can be seen in the inventory that was made of the Archives of Navarre in 1590. ⁷⁶

At a municipal level, we can particularly adduce the ‘memorials of writing’ (‘memoriales de escritura’) of Madrid’s town council, composed between 1481 and 1526. Their production during this time illustrates the importance assigned by a particular institution to its written memory. Although their structure is not completely identical, a certain consistency is evident in both the inventory of 1481 and another created sometime after 1514. Each entry includes the document’s number in roman numerals in the right-hand margin, reserving the left for a brief summary of the content. ⁷⁷ Even more refined is the 1490 inventory which includes documents from 1418 to 1489, noting the diplomatic type of each document, the entity authorizing it, as well as the date and a brief summary of its contents. ⁷⁸ Doubtless, principle and practice are not the same, as corregidor Francisco de Sotomayor noted in 1565 when he wrote that he had found many un-inventoried writings, ‘in poor safekeeping, without any accounting or rationale’. ⁷⁹

Since describing the archive is a means of knowing its potential functions and uses, a notable degree of zeal began to be invested in preparing inventories, at times even prior to depositing the documents themselves, as demonstrated in the 1597 incorporation of papers into the archives of the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca. ⁸⁰ A generation earlier, during the investigations into the activities of Philip II’s former secretary Antonio Pérez – an audit which had been conducted in order to determine whether they contained proof of Pérez’s participation in the 1578 assassination of Juan de Escobedo, secretary of the Council of Finance – the decision was made to search through the documents kept in his desk and list each ‘sheaf’ ‘by their order and letters’. For example, sheaf A contained the ‘papers dealing with the offices of Gonzalo Pérez’, his father; B, the ‘documents dealing with the office of Antonio Pérez’; C, ‘papers dealing with the new country house’; and so on. Different marginal annotations also indicated the movements and use of these documents once they had been confiscated. ⁸¹

As Philip IV indicated regarding the General Archives he attempted to create in Madrid in 1633, each movement of documents required a separate annotation in the subsequent inventory ‘with differentiation and division of their topics’. ⁸² Naturally, inventories differed in their organization of different criteria – some were arranged by topics whilst others by topography – yet each was essential in the location and retrieval of individual documents.

Doubtless, inventories were not strictly an early modern invention – many similar tools can be found during the Middle Ages – yet throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were more clearly refined as a result of the changes then occurring in the archival field. ⁸³ We can consider them as one of the many different tools of control and description that developed at that time when information became a valuable commodity which depended as much on the exercise of power and diplomacy as on the individual careers and activities of many personalities of the time. ⁸⁴ In the same way that a table of contents listing chapters and subject indexes introduced a certain rationality to the use of manuscript and printed texts, ⁸⁵ so too did inventories chart more clearly the location of documents and books in archives and libraries. ⁸⁶

The development of different types of inventory during the early modern age reflects the evolution of archives and their functions during this time. Alongside the Royal Archives at Simancas in the early modern municipal sphere, different town councils organized the so-called ‘books of knowledge’ (‘libros de conocimientos’) into which papers removed from the archives had to be noted, as stipulated in a pragmática of 1500. Thus in Gata in 1525, following the norms of good government laid down by the resident judge, the notary was obliged to indicate for each document ‘the day, month and year in which it is removed and who has taken it’. ⁸⁷ Similar testimonies occur in the Libros de conocimientos of town councils like that of Madrid, which has annotations dating back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, ⁸⁸ as well as those of Santo Domingo de Silos (1536), Cantillana (1550), Toledo (1560), Talavera de la Reina (1563), Los Arcos (1570), Salamanca (1583) and Valladolid (1601). ⁸⁹

With respect to Simancas, the collections of the archive of the Secretariat allows us to glimpse the importance of written documentation; none more so than for Philip II, the bureaucratic king par excellence who, in the words of the royal biographer Luis Cabrera de Córdoba (1559–1623), ‘moved the world from his royal seat’ by means of papers. For this reason, Córdoba adds, in 1566 Philip II commanded Diego de Ayala to ‘review the documents in the fortress of Simancas’ and ‘advise him (the king) of their number and condition’. In addition, Cabrera de Córdoba described the previous dispersal of documents and indicated that Ayala had ‘intelligently brought together many papers from various places’, as well as mentioning that ‘a large number (of documents) were found in a barrel in which the comuneros hid them in 1519’. As explained above, the state of this royal documentation was partly what led the king to strengthen and organize the archive created by his father in Simancas in order to ‘reduce to order and good custodianship the old writings scattered throughout Castile which are at risk of being lost and destroyed, as many have been that are now desired for the service of the Crown and the benefit of its vassals’. ⁹⁰ Indeed, in the forty years of his reign, more than 600 requests for copies of documents were processed, giving an idea of the administrative use of the archive during this time. A large number of these were requests for royal patronage, while others were requests for copies of documents presented by individuals, whether in defence of a certain privilege or favour, or else regarding the provision of an office or litigation. ⁹¹

In 1578–1579, the documents at Simancas, just like those deposited in the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon for which the king had commissioned Cristóbal de Moura in the same year, were requisitioned for examination by the Council of State and the various boards dealing with the issue of the Portuguese Succession. They searched for legal evidence bolstering Philip II’s candidacy for the Portuguese throne. ⁹² Other examples also demonstrate the use made of the papers deposited at Simancas, including: Pedro de Vidarte’s letter of 22 January 1571 to Diego de Ayala requesting haste in sending him the privileges of the town of Ermua that he had sought in the archives for confirmation by the king; ⁹³ the carta ejecutoria of the king, dated in Madrid on 20 December 1573, ordering a copy of another carta ejecutoria held in Simancas which authorized the Colegio Mayor of San Ildefonso to introduce wine in the town of Alcalá; ⁹⁴ and the royal provision of 15 January 1596 arranging payment of the salary owed to the person charged with seeking the patent of nobility conceded to Diego de Bonal, which was to be presented in the audience of the Chancery of Valladolid. ⁹⁵ Equally, the Simancas archive was searched for evidence justifying the Republic of Genoa’s obligation to permit the passage of Spanish troops en route to Milan in January 1606. ⁹⁶

These references, amongst the many others that could be cited, demonstrate Simancas’ function as a ‘current’ (or administrative) archive of the documentation necessary to resolve the various tasks of the Monarchy: dealing with petitions made to the king, adjudicating litigation and restoring violated privileges. Beyond this political or administrative use, the archive at Simancas was also used to write contemporary history, whether affecting the monarchy directly, or else noble houses, religious orders and other institutions. In fact, Philip II’s reorganization of 1566, alongside other contemporary archival operations, was partly intended to facilitate the access of historians to the materials necessary for writing ‘true and precise memories’ of the past. ⁹⁷ As shown by Richard Kagan, Philip II’s attitude towards this function varied over time: in the space of a few years, he refused access to humanist Juan Páez de Castro, dubious of the latter’s intentions in writing royal history, but granted it to Jerónimo Zurita, on condition that he only consult the old documentation relating to the Kingdom of Aragon. ⁹⁸

Later on, however, the king showed himself to be more attracted by recent history, as can be inferred both from the fact that he named his tutor Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella ‘Latin chronicler’ in 1587, and from the attention which he reserved for the compilation of memorable things (‘Relación de cosas memorables y curiosas’) in the Instrucción para el gobierno del Archivo de Simancas of the following year. ⁹⁹ In this second phase, the Cistercian Atanasio de Loera, royal chronicler, was permitted access to documentation in Simancas, with the goal of tracing throughout history the links of the kings of Castile and the Marquises of Astorga to the cathedral of Leon as canons, as well as the historicity of the details surrounding the Battle of Clavijo. ¹⁰⁰ By contrast, the Benedictine Juan Benito de Guardiola was denied access to the archive for his Tratado de la Nobleza (Madrid 1591). ¹⁰¹

Clearly, the historiographical use of archives was not limited to the monarchy’s depositories, and can be traced in many other directions. ¹⁰² It is worth remembering, for instance, that Prudencio de Sandoval, author of an important chronicle concerning the reign of Charles I, made use of the documents preserved in the cathedral of Pamplona and, in particular, the cartulary known as the ‘Round Book’ (‘Libro Redondo’), for his Catálogo de los obispos que ha tenido la santa iglesia de Pamplona (1614). ¹⁰³ In the same way, Francisco de Eguía Beaumont used the municipal documentation of Estella to write his Historia de la ciudad de Estella y su merindad (1644), just as various chronicles and histories of the religious establishments of Navarre used the monastic archives. ¹⁰⁴ In 1631, the papers held in the archive of the Cistercian convent of Santa María de las Dueñas (Seville) were used by the abbess, doña Juana Cortés, to produce the Libro de Fundaciones y Títulos, a manuscript history of the convent. ¹⁰⁵ This is, in brief, a thread we could continue to trace, since a good part of the historical chronicles written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were supported by archival documentation, among which stand out numerous chorographies, virtually inseparable from local historiography, which were notably characterized by the insertion of summarized or even fully transcribed archival documents. ¹⁰⁶

In every occasion, of course, the consultation of documents required permission from the corresponding authority: in the case of Simancas, from the king himself. A case in point occurred in July 1648, when the Viceroy of Navarre denied the Basque historian Arnaud de Oihenart access to the Archive of Accounts, despite the fact that Oihenart had already accessed it on two previous occasions in 1631 and 1637. This refusal did not stem from linguistic disputes over the etymology of ‘Languedoc’, or Oihenart’s hypothesis regarding the genealogy of the kings of Navarre, but simply because it was feared that he would use archival evidence to dispute Philip IV’s right to the crown of Navarre. ¹⁰⁷

Conclusion

Intensifying the advances of the late Middle Ages, the record-keeping policies enacted in Spain during the early modern period, with particular attention to the territories belonging to the former realm of Castile, illustrate the period’s importance in the formation of a new mentality that regarded documents as essential tools of decision-making and the preservation of written memory in various institutions. The measures adopted by the Catholic kings to bring order to the deplorable state of royal records, the laws passed for municipal archives, and the new procedural rules concerning notarial record-keeping all reveal a growing concern for documentary safekeeping and organization. As the monarchy expanded into a global empire – extending to the ‘quatre parties du monde’, as Serge Gruzinski recently put it ¹⁰⁸ – so too did the need to have well-ordered archives increase in scale. Thus in 1530 Charles I established in the American municipalities a model of records-management similar to the one introduced by the Catholic Kings in Iberia. In 1540 he decided that the nascent royal archives would be located in the castle of Simancas, which, he hoped, would house all the records produced by the sovereign and his councils. On this basis, Philip II promulgated in 1588 the Instrucciones para el gobierno of the Simancas archive and also initiated various processes of concentration and re-arrangement of records, such as in the Spanish embassy in Rome, the Council of Italy, and the regional Audiencias of America and the Philippines. This ambitious planning is not incompatible with a certain inefficiency in the functioning of some archives, particularly at Simancas, due to its distance from the Court. Precisely for this reason, Philip IV planned to create a new archive in the Royal Palace in Madrid, close to himself and his different Councils.

Not only did kings and municipalities devote more attention to the preservation of documents, establishing new buildings and spaces for this purpose, but they also attended to their organization. Thanks to the elaboration of a series of instruments for description and control – indexes, inventories, and libros de conocimientos – archives began to change from simple depositories of documents, zealously kept in chambers, cabinets and strongboxes, into organized collections arranged by diplomatic, juridical or even thematic categories. Along the lines set out by Aleida Assmann, we can describe this as a transformation from ‘storage memory’, accumulative and unsystematic, into ‘functional memory’, that is, selective, rationalized and oriented towards both the current and historical uses of documents. ¹⁰⁹ For all these reasons, and in spite of the deficiencies observed in specific cases, these pages have shown that the early modern period constituted a key moment in the history of documentary memory within the territories of the Hispanic Monarchy, in which the archive emerged as a fundamental institution in the exercise of power and administration, as well as in the writing of history. Before the transformations of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when new national archives emerged as the principal sites of research for a range of scholars (including historians and philologues), earlier legislation and practical arrangements for archival management had already formed a part of the new culture of knowledge which had developed during the early modern period. ¹¹⁰