Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The King in Lima: Simulacra, Ritual, and Rule in Seventeenth-Century Peru

2004; Duke University Press; Volume: 84; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-84-3-447

1527-1900

Alejandra Osorio,

Early Modern Women Writers

In 1622, King Philip IV was in Lima. Leandro de la Reynaga Salazar, the most senior alcalde, was chosen to carry Him to a temporary throne set on the center stage of Lima’s Plaza Mayor. But the King turned out to be rather heavier than expected. At the last minute, it was necessary to secure the help of three more men to carry His Majesty with the “appropriate decency required by the occasion.”2In 1622, Philip IV was not in Lima. In his stead, a “lifelike copy of the King” (un trasunto vivo del Rey) measuring two yards tall by one and a half yards wide, with an additional half yard for its frame, was carried to the Plaza Mayor for the King’s proclamation ceremony.3 The portrait’s black frame was decorated with gold trimmings, chains, diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and royal topaz, and inscribed on it in golden letters were the words, “Long Live the Catholic King Philip IV for Many Happy Years.” The painting itself depicted Philip’s entire body, with a face like that of an “angel,” where (according to the official chronicler Roman de Herrera) the King’s half smile and expressive eyes “undoubtedly communicated a look of authority.”4When the four men and the King had reached the stage, the royal magistrates and all seated in the surrounding bleachers and galleries stood and removed their hats. The King was then “seated” on the “throne” (described as an elaborate and luxuriously covered chair) under a silken and gold canopy. With the King comfortably seated, the royal magistrates took their seats and covered their heads.The entourage that had accompanied the portrait exited the stage “bowing down—deeply—to the Theater of the King Our Lord.” As this was happening, Herrera tells us, luxuriously dressed squadrons began to enter the plaza, led by Diego de Carvajal, postmaster general of Peru and deputy of cavalry. Mounted companies of musketeers were followed by one hundred artillerymen, who paraded before the “theater,” bowing to the King’s portrait. Two hundred uniformed infantrymen followed, likewise bowing to the King’s portrait. When all companies had entered the square, they formed four blocks of 25 rows of men and saluted their King by firing their muskets into the air. Crowds gathered in the balconies, on the rooftops of surrounding buildings, and in the streets adjacent to the main square watched and cheered this event.5It is well known that the Spanish kings never visited their American dominions. Nevertheless, in colonial America, the unseen king was widely seen as the legitimate head of the Spanish Empire’s vast body. Viceregal Lima was something of a bastion of loyalism even as the wars of independence came knocking in the early nineteenth century. By what means was this colonial loyalty and royal legitimacy crafted in the American kingdoms of the Spanish Empire? While many cultural practices naturalized the exercise of colonial power, I am here concerned with only those ceremonies directly related to the body of the Span-ish king and their relationship to a geography of power.Spanish historian Xavier Gil Pujol notes that the “presence” of the King— even of a physically absent one—was irreplaceable as head and member of the community he ruled.6 A fundamental issue for the composite Spanish monarchy, from Charles V on, was how to make the king “present” in his many dominions, particularly those most distant. Beginning with the rule of Philip II, even in Spain itself the king had become increasingly absent, in part due to a new system of ritual life that sought to render the Spanish king invisible.7 Nonetheless, peninsular subjects could hope to see their king at least once in their lives when he made triumphal entries into European cities, took part in various religious rituals, or participated in the autos de fe.8 In the Indies, however, for colonial officials and local elites alike, making the king “present” and real was rather a different endeavor, since he never ventured across the At-lantic.9 Perhaps surprisingly, the figure of the Spanish king and the workings of his rule in this distant overseas possession remain largely unexamined.I suggest that courtly ceremonies in Lima served the dual purpose of making the absent king present to his distant subjects and binding him and his subjects in a reciprocal pact that was made real through ritual. Since (unlike in Spain) the real king was never produced in Peru, his simulacra—copies for which there are no originals—in effect made him a hyperreal king whose centrality in Lima’s ceremonies seems to have been unmatched by any other American city.10 Furthermore, given that Peru’s viceroy was never present during the courtly ceremonies of the Royal Exequies or the king’s Proclamation in seventeenth-century Lima, these rituals may have been more significant for legitimating colonial rule than the viceregal entries meant to initiate the tenure of the king’s alter ego.11 In short, my contention is that in Lima, the king’s simulacrum was not only the organizing principle of royal ceremonies but also a central aspect of the exercise of monarchical rule. Equally significant, however, was the role of kingly ceremonies in producing Lima as the principal city in the viceroyalty of Peru, more powerful than its rivals.12 The ceremonies around the king’s simulacra constituted important currency in the production of Lima’s courtly aura during its seventeenth-century dispute with the former Inca capital of Cuzco over the position as the head city, or cabeça, of the viceroyalty.13 Lima’s courtly ceremonial life, developed during the course of the seventeenth century, had, by the end of the century, established the city as the indisputable center of all political colonial power in the viceroyalty, as well as the prime cultural referent for the entire Spanish dominions abroad.14François-Xavier Guerra has argued that the “sworn faith” to the king as one’s lord entailed the vassal’s obligation to assist with “actions, [and] riches” and even to commit “one’s life” to defend him.15 I am more concerned here with the “swearing” than the “faith.” In seventeenth-century Lima, the oath of allegiance to the king was renewed annually in the ceremony of the Royal Standard; the oath was also central to the king’s Proclamation.16 While the Exequies allowed city and vassals to publicly display their grief and sorrow over the death of their beloved king, the culmination of the king’s Proclamation required that city and vassals publicly proclaim their allegiance to and love for his successor.17 Since allegiance to one’s lord was based on a personal relationship, as Guerra suggests, the presence of the king in these colonial ceremonies was of great importance. In colonial Lima, the king was personally present in several different ways: he presided over courtly ceremonies comfortably seated in a luxurious throne, his voice was heard every year when his oath to the city was enunciated by the most senior royal magistrate, his will was publicly announced by the royal town crier every time the ceremony of the pregón was performed, and his seal and signature “Yo EL REY” graced colonial paperwork. The Spanish king may have possessed one original—biological—body residing in Spain, but his simulacra resided in Lima, and when deployed in elaborate rituals they allowed his distant loyal subjects to “see, hear, and feel” Him as if He were really there.According to Spanish historian José Antonio Maravall, the baroque was an epoch of fiesta and splendor.18 The baroque was an urban phenomenon; the city not only provided the resources, in peoples and goods, needed to maintain privileged groups but also became associated with culture per se. One of the main features of this urban baroque culture was its love of ostentation: luxurious modes of dress, lavish display of riches, magnificent buildings, and splendid fiestas.19 In European baroque societies of the seventeenth century, urbanism was a crucial element in the power of local ruling elites.20 New urban centers of power such as Madrid and Paris gained importance and centrality as monarchs made them the permanent seats of their courts and as urban migration, produced by the economic transformation of the countryside, increased their populations.21 In Spain’s overseas empire, the creation of new colonial centers such as Lima, and the imperial project of indigenous relocation into Indian towns known as reducciones, manifested the new ideology of rule via civitas—the life lived in cities. This concept of rule, as Anthony Pagden has argued, regarded the city as the center of “civility,” cultural production, and political power.22 Furthermore, the idea of ritual, according to Edward Muir, developed in the sixteenth century. Accordingly, the urban baroque theater-state of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exercised political power through elaborate public rituals capable of enacting or “bring[ing] something into being.”23 Furthermore, the iconography, emblems, allegories, and “hieroglyphs” found in religious and solemn civic fiestas were essential for developing “mental habits” of reading and interpreting symbols that were not only accessible and knowable but also served a didactic purpose in sharing moral lessons with the public at large.24As in baroque Europe, the physical and symbolic center of colonial power in the Americas was the city. In Lima, power was further concentrated in and around the core of urban social, political, and cultural life, the Plaza Mayor.25 The importance of the Plaza Mayor as the center of power in Lima was established upon its founding in 1535, when Francisco Pizarro, after allocating prime lots for the cathedral, the royal houses, the cabildo, and the jail, assigned the remaining plots surrounding it to his fellow conquistadors, their residences a representation of his patronage and personal power as governor of the land.26 By the seventeenth century, this core space of power in Lima had been enlarged to include the main city streets adjacent to the Plaza Mayor, occupied by churches erected by the major ecclesiastical orders—Jesuit, Dominican, Mer-cedarian, Franciscan, and Augustinian.27A significant ritual, which in essence mapped the geography of power in colonial Lima around the plaza, was the pregón, or publicación, a slow-moving procession of luxuriously mounted city notables who accompanied the royal town crier in his public announcements of important events to the city. Courtly ceremonies in Lima were set in motion by the arrival of a royal charter (cédula real) announcing the occasion and specifying the manner and limits of its ceremonial. The date, nature of the event, and the protocol to be followed was then communicated to the city in the ceremony of the pregón. Readings of the cédula real were marked by rituals that treated the artifact with much the same pomp and circumstance deserving of the king. These rituals exercised their “specific effect only when . . . recognized” as such.28 Since the procession always traveled the same prescribed route and stopped before the same official buildings, the pregón symbolically served as a ritual of legitimation by tracing what Michel de Certeau calls a “field of operation,” an authorized official ritual space in which ceremonies were subsequently performed or “staged.”29In Lima, the carefully laid-out conquistadors’ residences and official buildings around the Plaza Mayor provided a historical genealogy of colonial rule embroidered into a narrative of power by the pregón’s processional route. The procession of luxuriously dressed men, slowly riding beautiful horses and accompanied by soothing music, through the “most important” streets in order to deliver announcements at significant buildings, underlined the centrality of the institutions these buildings represented.30 This “narration in acts,” as it were, generated an aura of colonial power around the Plaza Mayor that was widely recognized and appropriated by the elites and the plebe alike.31 In 1668, Tomasa, a black slave, explained to the Extirpation of Idolatry judge that, in order to fortify the power of her popular divinations, she conjured coca leaves invoking the “seven” devils, naming the streets adjacent to the main city square, and calling aloud “the cathedral, the archbishop’s residence, the viceregal palace, the ecclesiastical chapter, the cabildo, and the gallows.”32 As I have argued elsewhere, in colonial Lima the urban ritual space of official power around the Plaza Mayor could also be appropriated by plebeian women of African, Spanish, and Andean descent as a field for the mundane practice of popular magic.33It was in this urban core that (once funding was secured for the ceremony) the city embarked on the construction of elaborate sets and decorations. Lima’s city buildings—particularly those adjacent to the Plaza Mayor—were reconfigured with ephemeral additions such as arches, new walls, altars, plants, colors, and drapings.34 This “staging” also required new lighting, fresh smells, different sounds, and carefully designed costumes for all to wear. As the word connotes today, baroque ceremonial sought to fill every nook and cranny of the urban core with allegorical elements relating to the ceremony in question.Official baroque ceremonies aimed to create radically transformed images of urban space, literally making the city core into a theater. In the parlance of the period, theater was used metaphorically to mean the place where something or someone was exposed to the estimación o censura (the regard or censure) of the world: the Theatrum Publicum. In this culture of public scrutiny, ostentation was the principal marker of status, power, and authority, and appearance became a highly regarded social value. Power was both made manifest in and constituted through the external pomp and circumstance of these ceremonies.35 Moreover, the designs for and writings about new colonial urban centers such as Lima provided social commentary on how the city—and its society— should ideally function. As a result, Spanish and creole chroniclers predictably begin to exaggerate the orderly, unified perfection and the lavish magnificence of the ceremonies and the city. But there was more to the city than its official appearances.Beyond the desired magnificence of baroque representations and perfect designs of the city lay another urban reality: a city of crowded rooms in unimpressive buildings. The callejones (alleys with numerous rooms situated around a common patio) were an important feature of colonial Lima’s housing arrangements.36 Entire families lived in single small rooms, one next to another, turning private lives into public knowledge. These interior spaces—occupied by poor criollos and mestizos, Andean migrants, and people of African descent— were the breeding ground of an urban hybrid culture that coexisted with the courtly culture of official ceremonies in Lima.37 Plebeian alley-dwellers were the targets of the civilizing and disciplining campaigns carried out in the seventeenth century by both the Extirpation of Idolatry and the Inquisition. These callejones lent the city the character of a labyrinth of “interior”—more private—plebeian cultural stages (“mundos interiores”) just beyond the more public stage of colonial power in the plaza.38Callejón culture notwithstanding, during royal ceremonies colonial officials and citizens worked to transform the city into a public political theater, a transformation that implicated many quotidian practices and spaces.Official baroque celebrations were expensive endeavors. Royal attempts to curb the excessive cost of such courtly ceremonies generated an endless procession of royal decrees advising cities to cut costs and reduce their displays of “magnificence.”39 But, the king’s discourse of fiscal contrition seems playfully at odds with the cultural and social meaning of these displays of opulence and the required ostentatiousness of these ceremonies.40 City officials often complained to the king and to other city officials about the strains that these productions put on the city’s budget.41 Nevertheless, as a rule cities incurred huge debts to carry out the celebration in the “appropriate manner” official protocol required.42 Normally, colonial and church officials paid for considerable portions of the ceremony out of their own pockets when city and crown coffers were empty.43 Although many sought reimbursement, few cases ever reached a satisfactory conclusion.44 Nevertheless, since these public celebrations were thought to reflect the “sadness” or “happiness” of the city toward the king, each time the occasion arose cities and subjects alike assumed production costs. The magnificence of the ceremony also sent a strong message to rival cities that their city had achieved economic dominance and “social magnificence.” Cabildos fostered the collective image of their cities and built a historical memory of their constitution as a “body” or harmonious community through elaborate civic rituals but also chronicles and urban histories.45 Thus, the reluctance to curb ceremonial expenses should be understood in the context of the political significance the relaciones de fiestas had for the power that cities such as Lima exercised over smaller provincial ones. Furthermore, such baroque displays of wealth have often been interpreted from a purely economic rationale of cost and benefits.46 Such calculations, however, ignore the fact that through these public displays of wealth and luxury cities and subjects stood to accumulate the symbolic capital required to exert power over rivaling cities, which in turn could bring additional material benefit in the form of privileges and favors granted by their new king. The social magnificence of baroque cities was based on a combination of real wealth, symbolic capital, and patronage from the metropolitan court.Ritual in the seventeenth century, according to Peter Burke, was viewed as “a kind of drama, which had to be staged in order to encourage obedience.”47 Seventeenth-century Lima’s ceremonial calendar included over three hundred annual fiestas.48 Those particularly related to the life cycle of the king and his royal family included the celebration and commemoration of births, marriages, baptisms, and deaths, and prayers for their health and well-being. Those related to the life cycle of the monarchy included the celebration of military victories, royal patron saints, and the new king’s Proclamation. Royal ceremonies provided rulers with an opportunity to momentarily enact utopian designs of urban space and polity.49Two of the more majestic and costly ceremonies staged in colonial Lima were the Royal Exequies and the king’s Proclamation. In the Spanish Habsburg dominions, these ceremonies constituted paramount occasions for cities as corporate bodies—both social and political—to display their power by staging elaborate and expensive ceremonies (which sometimes lasted as long as a year) designed to grieve the passing of one king and celebrate the ascent of another. The ostentatiousness of public ceremonies reflected the city’s power and demonstrated the city’s loyalty to its king. In a similar manner, the magnificence displayed by the king’s subjects, in their dress and in their contribution to the decorations of the city, was thought to reflect the degree of their love for and loyalty to the king. Great displays of grief during Royal Exequies were seen as a form of public and individual repayment for mercedes (favors) granted by the dead king to the city and his subjects. This was also manifested in the sumptuous dress of the alférez real (standard bearer) and his entourage during the king’s Proclamation.In the cédula real sent to Lima announcing the death of Philip IV and the succession of Carlos II to the throne of Spain (dated October 24, 1665), the queen mother explained that the custom of the Proclamation dated back to 1407, when the Duque of Alva, Don Fadrique of Toledo, had raised the standard for Philip I “the Handsome” with the cry, “Castile, Castile, Castile for the King our lord!”50 In medieval Avila, kings were first elected by the nobility and later proclaimed by the people. The custom of meeting in private to organize the celebrations surrounding the death of the old king and proclamation of the new one, according to Angus MacKay, has its roots in the medieval tradition wherein nobles and oligarchs decided in private whether to accept the new king and then “act[ed] out the traditional rituals in public.”51 This amounted to the “election” of the new monarch, who then pledged to uphold the fueros (privileges) of the land and to grant new ones; through the Proclamation, the people accepted their new ruler and pledged to defend, love, and honor him.52 The Proclamation was, therefore, a mutual oath of loyalty between king and subjects.Following this long tradition, after the cédula arrived announcing the death of the old king and the succession of a new one to the throne, audiencia and cabildo members in Lima met privately in their respective offices to read the announcement and acknowledge the new king. This symbolic private election and public acceptance of the new king seems to follow the logic laid out in the account of the Proclamation of Philip II in Cuzco in 1557. The scribe notes several times that his account was made to comply with the dictates of tradition and that it be later sent to the new king as a testimony of the city’s approval of his succession.53In seventeenth-century Lima, preparations for the celebration of the Royal Exequies and the king’s Proclamation could not commence until the official cédula real arrived.54 The death of Carlos II was known in Lima for several weeks before the formal announcement reached the city.55 In spite of the news, and of the grief that the Viceroy Count of la Monclova felt he should formally express, he was nonetheless obliged to await the arrival of the royal charter before publicly announcing the king’s death. The viceroy questioned the initial news of the king’s death, at the risk of subjecting his loyalty to scrutiny, since, according to the chronicler, the newsletter did not possess the authority needed to convene the official mourning. The viceroy’s action is understandable, considering the decision to honor the king’s death in a public ceremony was not his alone. Upon receipt of the royal decree, the viceroy needed first to communicate the death and succession to the audiencia and the cabildo, so that they in turn could acknowledge the death of the old king and approve the succession of the new by scheduling the dates for the ceremonies.56 The royal charter finally arrived on May 6, 1701. At seven o’clock the next morning, the members of the audiencia and the cabildo met privately to acknowledge the charter, and a pregón was ordered to announce it to the city.57In the baroque period, death (like life) was celebrated in a theatrical way. In the late sixteenth century, Philip II transformed the Royal Exequies into an official ritual to be celebrated not only in Madrid but also in all the cities of his realm. This allowed the Spanish monarchy to exalt its absolute power at the same time that it facilitated the invention of a myth of origin for the new Habsburg dynasty.58 The celebration of the Royal Exequies was as much a rite of succession as it was a funeral, and it reminded everyone of their mortality, not least that of the monarch himself, in spite of the fact that his kingship seemed to endure beyond his earthly life.59 It is important to underscore the Spanish king’s mortality, since his vulnerability before death contrasts with the apparent immortality of the French kings. While the elaborate state ritual surrounding the French king’s death was meant to underscore the superhuman or sacred nature of the monarchy, the Spanish ceremonial underscored the king’s human vulnerability before God.60 The colorful regalia worn by the French king signified his immortality, while the black dress of the Spanish king signified his mortality. By never publicly dying, the French king may have created a distance from his subjects that does not seem to have been the case with the Spanish monarch.61 In Madrid, the king in black lay in state for several days, while in the cities of his realms his death was represented by an urn covered with a rich cloth symbolizing the ashes of his decomposed body. His living soul, however, was omnipresent in the paintings and artifacts that decorated his catafalque.62Royal Exequies were exterior manifestations of both loyalty and power. It was expected that those who benefited most from God and the king would make greater demonstrations of sadness or joy. This sentiment was expressed by Pedro Ramírez in a eulogy he delivered on the occasion of the Exequies of Queen Margarita. Ramírez argued that, although all people were indebted to God, their debt depended on how much they had received from him. It followed, therefore, that since queens and kings received the most from God, they had a larger obligation to make greater displays of grief.63 Sadness, however, was not expressed by a show of emotion, but rather by a show of ostentation reflected in the proportions of the catafalque and in the length and quality of the mourning dress. Mourning clothes worn by all in the city were used both to symbolize obedience and respect for the deceased and also to mark the social hierarchy at work in the city.Baroque ceremonial costumes—if we understand these sumptuous mourning dresses as such—were meant to establish or reaffirm publicly the qualities of the persons wearing them. It was also widely held that proper attire preserved the proper order of society. Since 1614, the Spanish crown financed mourning robes for officials.64 However, officials, nobles, and gentlemen were expected to distribute mourning dress to their households, including servants.65 Social differences were evident in the length of the robes and the fabric used to manufacture them. The dimensions of the robe were important. Long robes were associated with authority, and the longer the robe, the more authority its wearer possessed. They should be long enough to touch the ground and wide enough to regulate the distance between rows during the processions, lending uniformity by regulating pace. Important city and colonial officials, for example, wore long velvet robes with great hoods (capirotes) and ample sleeves, while lesser officials wore shorter robes made of mere flannel (bayeta). The poor were expected to wear dark colors and a hat.In his Empresas, the seventeenth-century Spanish political writer Diego Saavedra y Fajardo argued that “appearance” was essential for the proper “division of society” and that “sumptuosity” was the marker of high status or “reputation.”66 Reputation and justice were essential for inspiring and maintaining “la obediencia a la majestad,” both temporal and divine, as well as for preserving the faith—all key elements for the successful governing of the people. Authority was defined as ostentation; wearing the robes reflected one’s status, and distributing robes to one’s household demonstrated patriarchal power.67 Chroniclers of these occasions described the ceremonial clothing at great length and in minute detail—down to the color, shape, and size of each stone adorning someone’s hat. Each detail manifested the power and authority of the person being described. In this physical wearing of power, as it were, lay the foundation of a great deal of regal and imperial power and authority, and we can safely assume of colonial power as well.On October 8, 1621, Lima’s cathedral bell slowly tolled one hundred times, announcing Philip III’s death. Every church bell in the city answered, and the public life of the city came to a sudden halt.68 City and crown officials disappeared from public view until their mourning robes, signs of loyalty and love for the king, were made. All buildings had to be dressed in black, and even interiors had, in some cases, to be dressed in mourning. In Lima’s viceregal palace, the viceroy’s bedroom (down to his bed sheets) had to be black.69 Likewise, the interior walls and windows of all colonial and city offices were covered in black. According to one account, by creating an absence of color and texture—or by eliminating the church and the city from view—the black cloth made real and tangible the passing of the king.70The catafalque was perhaps the only colorful structure in the Exequies. It was a construction of monumental dimensions, and in Lima it was usually placed in the central nave of the cathedral.71 Thousands of candles lit the massive structure on the day of the ceremony, reminding everyone that life (ephemeral as lit candles) burned bright and intense for but a limited time, and that death was inevitable, even for a king.72 The contrast of the darkness of the church and the brightness of the catafalque evoked the triumph of life over death; these symbols could refer not only to the king but also to each one of his subjects.According to Josephe de Mugaburu’s account, Philip IV’s Exequies were celebrated in Lima with as much solemnity and grandeur as in the king’s own court. The ceremonies began with a military procession of five companies of the battalion, each with 100 men dressed in black mourning uniforms. These 500 men were followed by 254 colonial officials, creole elites, and clergy dressed in long black funeral cloaks. An artillery shot was fired every hour on the hour for two days in the nearby port of Callao. The cathedral bells tolled one hundred tolls every hour, answered by all the churches in the city. Mugaburu reports that 2,031 pounds of wax were consumed in the catafalque alone for the ceremony. In addition, each religious order in the city received one hundred pounds of wax—one hundred candles of one pound each—as they came into the cathedral