On the Frontiers of the “Catholic Planet”. Baroque Representations of the State of Permanent War in the Hispanic Imperial Totality

Abstract

This article addresses what the author sees as a “technological” peculiarity in the representation of the state of total war waged by the Hispanic Monarchy, especially during the seventeenth century, in the various scenarios in which it sought to realize its ideal of a “planet” rendered—by means of theo-political and military action—entirely “Catholic”. The argument reviews the forms taken by the various discourses of legitimation of those “gigantic designs”—both textual and artis-tic or esthetic—and comes to the conclusion that the representation of open war and violence was not the same in the two poles of conflict—under-stood, nevertheless, according to the geo-strategy of the period, as deeply connected. In effect, for the case of Flanders a type of vision that alternates the ruthless warrior-hero ethos proper to the lordly caste with certain cruder versions presented by soldiers of the theaters and picaresque novels of a confrontation without hope of solution. In the case of the struggle against the American native communities, that “open war” never came to find repre-sentation in the setting provided by the peninsular court and its satellites and the great theaters built for the exhibition of its “greatnesses”, due basically to the manifest asymmetry that existed, in terms of the “military revolution”, between one band and the others.