The Art of Ruling the Spanish Empire, or How to Find the Virtuous Mean of a Ruler’s Emotions

The concept of love as the defining element in political relations of domination and subordination appears again and again in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish political literature. Despite this ubiquity, modern historians have tended to ignore its importance and significance, probably because the idea of love as a quintessentially political concept does not fit well with our modern understandings of politics and emotions. In this paper, therefore, I intend to rescue love—along with the closely related emotions of anger and fear—from the historiographical oblivion into which they have been cast and to examine the political aspects of these quintessential human emotions in order to elucidate the extent to which they contributed to the development of a Spanish imperial and colonial system of rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  This paper argues that the skillful manipulation of a ruler’s emotions, above all love and anger, became an efficient technology of power that created in the Spanish subjects a predisposition towards obedience based on the threat of punishment and the hope for mercy. In a society lacking effective means to exercise power and authority, political control had to be exerted more through persuasion and consensus than through violence.

While we tend to see emotions as private and universal feelings, in the early modern era emotions were seen as having an essential social component, an idea deeply rooted in Aristotelian and Senecan philosophies.  I compare the imperial theory coming out of the center of the monarchy with the actual political practice that developed in the viceroyalty of New Spain by examining the ways in which some of these ideas operated during significant moments of crisis in the history of the viceroyalty: the 1624 overthrow of viceroy Gelves, the 1660 Tehuantepec Indian rebellion, and the 1692 Mexico City riot.