The Place of Naples in the 17th-Century Spanish Empire

Karl Marx contended that the Spanish monarchy should be grouped “in a class with Asiatic forms of government”, considering it nothing more than the “agglomeration of mismanaged republics with nominal sovereignty at their head”. But while denouncing it as “despotic”, he noted that Spanish sovereignty “did not prevent the provinces from subsisting with different laws and customs, military banners of different colors, and with their respective systems of taxation”.1 Marx partly subscribed to a “black legend” concerning Spanish rapacity and incompetence, an image whose origins date from the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule in the waning decades of the 16th century and which subsequently gathered force in England and other Protestant countries threatened by Spain’s purported aspirations to universal monarchy.2 This disparaging image would be disseminated across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, finding special resonance in Naples, the efforts of the Spanish crown to contest it notwithstanding.3 Yet Marx, as a careful historian, could not help but recognize the legal and customary pluralism that flourished in the lands under Spain’s dominion. Marx explained this phenomenon away as a strategy typical of “oriental despotism”, which is more than satisfied “to allow these institutions to continue so long as they take off its shoulders the duty of doing something and spare it the trouble of regular administration”.4