Charles V and the Castilian Assembly of the Clergy

Book excerpt: The Castilian Assembly of the Clergy has been overlooked in the scholarship on church-state relations and representative institutions in the early modern period. This oversight has distorted our understanding of political practice, royal finance, and church-state relations in sixteenth-century Castile. By examining the negotiations for subsidies between the crown and the Assembly, this book illuminates the dynamics between church and state and the limits of royal control over the church, and it challenges long-held conventions about the monolithic structure of the Spanish church and its subservience to the crown. The negotiations for subsidies also demonstrate the importance of consensus in the political process and how the Assembly sustained itself and its privileges for centuries through collaboration with the crown.