Stafford Poole’s Juan de Ovando covers the extraordinary first eight decades of Spain’s intervention in America, during which the Spanish crown incorporated a dynamic region of western Europe, the Netherlands. A barely constructed Castile now faced both west to its American colonies and north to Flanders as it “groped toward a coherent policy on conquests and imperial expansion,” pursuing the mirage of reconciling “the sometimes violent expansion of its empire with the concept of just war, the rights of native peoples and spreading the Christian faith” (p. 152). Spain, an inexperienced empire-builder on a frontier of western Europe, had to improvise imperial policies (the encomienda) to repay entrepreneurs in New Spain, rationalize the administration of distant American vice-royalties by ill-informed consejeros de Indias in Madrid, and finance its armies in Flanders. Philip II’s government also had to recruit and train civil servants dedicated to proto-national goals—the forging of a...
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