La ciudad representada. Poder y fábula en el Madrid de los Austrias

The genealogy of the modern European state cannot prescind from the founding and consolidation of the capital of the Catholic Monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, the case of Madrid proves to be paradigmatic in the study of the civic and civil practices that contributed to the development of the notion of persona ficta and to the efficacy of its institutional implementation. In this article, we will study the link between the ceremonial rituals of the Madrid of the Villa y Corte, the process of the centralization of the potestas carried out by the Habsburgs, and the gradual disappearance of the true communitas of the urbs regia: that is, its effectual civic convivium, strategically displaced and made invisible —even to the present day—by the pompous courtiers of baroque political representation.