Absolutist political order in sixteenth-century Spain

The absolutist political order in sixteenth-century Spain is presented as a transformation of political authority: the sovereign became absolute, while the nobles and cities lost the power to resist or constrain him. Its significance in the account extends beyond institutions. It marks the end of an older political and chivalric world, and helps explain why the mock chivalry of romances could become a target for Cervantes’s satire.

The concentration of royal authority

The account attributes the establishment of absolutism to the policies of Ferdinand and Ximenez. The sovereign was made absolute, while the Church and the Inquisition were adjusted to help preserve that arrangement. The change is described not simply as an increase in royal power, but as the dismantling of competing sources of political authority.

The nobles, who had formerly resisted absolutism as they had fought the Moors, were stripped of political power. The cities suffered a similar fate, and the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon were swept away. The Cortes retained only the function of granting money at the King’s direction. Together, these changes describe a political order in which representative bodies and historic liberties remained in name or form, but no longer exercised independent authority.

A transition between political ages

The account places this transformation within a broader passage from old chivalrous Spain to a new Spain that had become exceptionally powerful. The old order, it argues, had already passed away by Cervantes’s boyhood. In the later literary commentary, chivalry’s political life is said to have ended with the fall of Granada; because chivalry was understood as essentially republican, it could not survive under the system that replaced the free institutions of medieval Spain.

This is an interpretive distinction, not a claim that centralized government and chivalric romance were identical. The account argues that the political conditions sustaining the old chivalry had disappeared, even as romances continued to circulate. Their popularity therefore represented, in its view, not the survival of the old institution but a distorted imitation of it.

Social hierarchy in the novel’s world

Several episodes make status and authority visible through personal relationships. In the story told by Dorothea, her parents are wealthy peasants who have gained some standing through their resources, yet their lower birth remains a source of anxiety when a duke’s younger son pursues her. Dorothea rejects the idea that her status as his vassal gives him a right to dishonor her: she distinguishes service from enslavement and asserts that humble birth does not erase her self-respect. Her account exposes the pressure that rank and family honor exert on marriage, while also giving her a forceful claim to moral equality.

A different negotiation of status appears when Sancho Panza reasons that being an old Christian is sufficient to qualify him for a count’s title. Don Quixote answers that, as king, he could grant Sancho nobility regardless of ancestry or service. The exchange treats rank as both inherited social distinction and something a ruler might bestow, revealing how imagined royal authority can make advancement seem at once arbitrary and attainable.

Cervantes’s target and the political contrast

The literary commentary rejects the familiar claim that Cervantes destroyed Spain’s chivalry. Its argument is that the genuine institution had already disappeared under the political order that displaced the older liberties; what Cervantes ridiculed was the degrading mockery of chivalry embodied in the romances and their imitators. The distinction gives the satire its political edge: the book attacks a popular fantasy of knightly identity without representing the centralized state as a restoration of the older chivalric world.

The same account connects the romances’ extraordinary popularity to the spread of printing and describes them as a powerful cultural phenomenon. Their persistence alongside a transformed political order creates the contrast at the heart of its interpretation: the language and trappings of chivalry remained widely available, while the political conditions associated with the older ideal had been lost.