“La Flor del Perú. The Political Culture of the Catholic Monarchy through three expeditions to the Southeast of Charcas in the second half of the sixteenth century”

This thesis examines the expeditions of La Plata encomendero Martín de Almendras (1564-1565), Perú viceroy don Francisco de Toledo (1574), and Potosí royal official Juan Lozano Machuca (1584-1585), from the perspective of the political culture of the Catholic Monarchy in the second half of the sixteenth century. Based on published and unpublished sources, the events are framed within the process of installation, consolidation, and expansion of jurisdiction, understood as the authority to establish law, and deliver justice, in an area, the southeast Charcas border, seen by the Spanish as devoid of law and order. This was a process done through coercion and violence, as well as negotiations and consensus. It involved the localisation of legislation and miniaturisation of politics, as the monarchy was only able to have a presence in such remote parts through a myriad of local agents who accepted yet adapted legislation to circumstances. This complex process was not free of tensions as jurisdictions frequently overlapped and agents had to fight and negotiate them in courts and on the ground. This study also rescues the symbolic dimension of jurisdictional politics analysing rituals and the imagery involved in the theatricalization of power. Finally, this thesis shifts from traditional views that characterise the period and its agents using anachronisms. Charcas’ early colonial history neither prepared the region for modernity, nor was part of a state-building and centralising process that has been associated with the nineteenth-century independent Latin American countries. This study is an invitation to approach the expansion of jurisdiction in the district of Charcas from a multidisciplinary perspective, displaying a different hermeneutic, to explain Spanish expeditions to the eastern border.