Charles V’s Imperial Sovereignty and the Spanish Juristic Thought

• In Event: Hispanic Sovereignties

Abstract

This paper explores ideas about imperial sovereignty in treatises written by Spanish jurists linked to Charles V’s empire. Historians of political thought have paid more attention to theories prefiguring the modern conception of independent sovereign states than those upholding the coexistence of universal sovereign authorities (in the form of the emperor or the pope) with sovereign territorial entities (kingdoms, republics or cities). This explains why the idea of the universal sovereignty of the emperor applied to Charles V has been examined principally from the standpoint of texts that questioned him, as in works arising from the School of Salamanca. The political significance of treatises on the grounds and scope of the political power of the emperor is still largely unassessed. This paper will comment on various examples of juridical literature and show that the categories that those jurists used were current and perceived as binding by some contemporary political agents.

Author

• Xavier Tubau, Hamilton College