9 - Administration – structures, personnel, finance

Summary

INSTITUTIONAL ORGANISATION

Since the early modern period, a slang term for a civil servant in Madrid has been ‘un covachuelista’ (cueva = cave), named after the little chambers hollowed out of the great rock on which stood the medieval royal Alcázar, used to accommodate the offices of the secretaries and scribes. The troglodyte metaphor for a bureaucrat may appeal to the modern sensibility; but a more malleable one is provided by the arboreal image, so familiar to the seventeenth-century hidalgo, with its discrete branches permitting the naming of parts, and appropriate for the wooden world of an armada.

The structure of any Habsburg military institution was basically tripartite, having (as it were) its roots in a parent body of ministers, usually a council or tribunal, a trunk of professional administration and the many branches of a command corps. The Flanders Admiralty was organised according to principles which had been tried and tested by the time of its re-establishment by Parma in 1583. Farnese naturally introduced similar tenets to those which informed the army of Flanders, which he had commanded since 1579. Analysis of its administrative structures, during both chronological manifestations (1583–1610 and 1622–1700), therefore reveals conventional patterns common to the military institutions of the Spanish System. Sibling plants, varying only in their size and importance, sprang up all over the Hispanic world in its imperial heyday.

On paper, at least, its morphology was straightforward and rational, with clear delineations of authority and responsibility.