| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Stafford Poole. Juan de Ovando: Governing the Spanish Empire in the Reign of Philip II. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2004. Pp. x, 293. $37.95. Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo. Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of Juan de Palafox, 1600–1659. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 336. $98.00.
The emergence of what was the best-developed bureaucracy in Europe in the sixteenth century failed to save the Spanish Empire from bankruptcies and precipitous decline through the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. Corruption, struggles for preeminence between factions, insistence on absolute loyalty, the use of cumbersome consejos (councils), and the failure to understand economic principles reduced the efficiency and effectiveness of government. Nevertheless, the emergence of university educated letrados, often from quite humble origins though of certified old Christian blood, provided Spain with generations of well-trained and capable civil servants. These studies on Juan de Ovando, who served King Philip II in the sixteenth century, and Juan de Palafox during the regime of the count-duke of Olivares in the seventeenth century, brilliantly illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of Spain's system of metropolitan and imperial governance. Both Stafford Poole and Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo offer original approaches that advance our understanding of the epoch.	1
Although Poole discovered little information about Juan de Ovando's early years in Cáceres, he shows that in 1545 Ovando won a scholarship to the prestigious Colegio Mayor de San Bartolomé at the University of Salamanca. After years of study under strict monastic discipline, Archbishop Fernando de Valdés of Seville, a fellow alumnus of San Bartolomé, appointed Ovando as his chief ecclesiastical judge. Since Valdés was an absentee archbishop, Ovando administered the archdiocese as a rough enforcer of the faith. In 1564, he received a commission to head a general reform of the University of Alcalá de Henares, where he investigated the academic programs thoroughly and revised the university constitution and statutes. Having completed this mission with great success, in 1566 Ovando received a new commission to conduct a visita (investigation) of the Council of the Indies.	2
Ovando's investigation (from June 1567 to August 1571) concerned internal organization and required him to reach out to the Americas to assemble material on government, trade, missionary work, and other subjects. A questionnaire asked respondents to report on possible abuses by authorities and on the status of Indians. Particularly in Peru, there was continuing anxiety about separatist threats and possible uprisings. Rather than leave policy making to the Council of the Indies, Philip II established the smaller Junta Magna to examine questions in the Americas concerning the future of encomiendas, taxation, finance, royal patronage over the church, and the establishment of the Inquisition. Ovando dispatched questionnaires, commissioned Juan López de Velasco to compile a history of Spanish America, acquired copies of the work of Bernardino de Sahagún, and sought to codify the laws of the Indies. In 1571, Ovando became president of the Council of the Indies, and in 1574 he served concurrently as president of the Council of Finance. Heavily involved in the growing imperial fiscal crisis, he spent his last year of life struggling with the Cortés for funds to pay the bureaucracy, to defend the kingdom against the Turks, and to fight the Protestant heretics in Flanders.	. . .

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