Keeping secrets and mapping frontiers : government and image in the Spanish Monarchy / Carlos José Hernando Sánchez

This chapter addresses the relationships between frontier, drawing and secrecy in Spain’s Habsburg monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those relationships were the outcome of the criteria legitimising expansion as well as of the fluctuating priorities around defence by land or by sea and hence around the role of bastioned fortification. Such structures crystallised the construction of military, legal and symbolic frontiers until that conceit was forsaken in twentieth century thinking, historiography and imagery. The political dimension of space which, as Braudel noted, was the primary challenge facing an expansion-minded monarchy, can only be reconstructed from a global perspective. To broach the frontier in the Habsburg court and kingdoms is to broach power as a dialectical interplay of interests, resources and values. Thus viewed, the frontier is a ductile, fluid conceit which, in its stark contrast to the stony immobility of fortifications, questions the applicability of anachronistic notions such as «strategy» and identifies the need to revisit today’s criteria around sovereignty and «propaganda». Power must be viewed in keeping with the values of a political society radically different from our own in every respect, beginning with ceremonial imagery that ultimately affected the portrayal of frontiers and fortifications. Set against courtly rhetoric, the secrecy that shrouded military engineers’ drawings bears witness both to a technique for exercising power in competition with others and to a new approach to reality