ABSTRACT
Speaking of the figure of the viceroy in his magnum opus on the government of the Indies, Juan de Solórzano Pereira, one of the most eminent of seventeenth-century Spanish legal writers, asserted that the "highly honored and preeminent" office of viceroy had been created "so that those vassals who live and reside in such remote provinces need not go seek their king, who is so far away, having his vicar nearby to ask for and get all those things they could expect and get from their king." For this reason, added Solórzano, the viceroys had to be obeyed and respected as persons who stood in place of the king, even when they committed some wrongdoing or exceeded their powers and instructions (even though the king might punish them afterwards), and this was so because it always had to be presumed that anything done by the viceroys had to be judged as done by the king who appointed them. 1 These words by Solórzano sum up perfectly the way in which the Spanish Crown conceived of the rule of its remote American possessions and the privileged position that viceroys occupied in the power structure of a political formation of an imperial nature such as the Monarquía Hispánica, as the Spanish empire was known by contemporaries. 2
