In 1445, John II of Castile awarded a sizeable estate southwest of Toledo to Gutierre de Sotomayor, a favored noble supporter. The land and its jurisdiction, however, were not taken from royal lands or following due process; rather, they belonged to the city of Toledo as a result of purchase from an earlier monarch. The city’s council consequently protested the grant and initiated a lawsuit for the return of its property. At stake was an issue central to the nature of kingship in Castile — the monarch’s use of “absolute royal authority.”J. B. Owens examines Toledo’s lawsuit, known to contemporaries as the “Belalcázar lawsuit,” from its inception to its conclusion during the reign of Philip II, more than 120 years later. He treats the case as a microhistory that illuminates judicial procedure at the highest levels in Castile while revealing the tension between competing visions of “justice,” the universally acknowledged fundamental attribute of kingship within the monarch’s realms. He argues that the monarch was most effective in employing the language of “absolute royal authority” as justification for an action when the action coincided with widely accepted norms consistent with the provisions of written law. While reviewing many episodes in Castilian history for their effects on monarchs’ behavior — for example, the comunero revolt in 1520 – 21 — he also uses the long duration of the suit to argue against a putative era of “early modern state-building.” In addition, he disputes the centrality of clientage as a means for monarchs to control their realms. Clientage, he observes, represented weakness rather than strength and, when coupled with a perceived disregard of due process and justice, damaged the monarch’s influence.Owens skillfully traces the Belalcázar suit through a judicial process that moved in fits and starts depending on the protagonists’ reading of political conditions. Among other things, marriage, death, family ties, and formal and informal positions at court affected the timing of initiatives related to the suit or decisions to stall the proceedings. At root, however, remained the core issue — was the monarch’s use of “absolute royal authority” to reward a favorite with land owned by another party “just,” or did it represent corruption in government and thus injustice?After years of effort, ultimately Toledo lost the case. Despite a favorable verdict by the Chancillería of Granada, the Council of Castile in 1568 reversed the decision and banned further appeal. To stunned city councilors, the verdict demonstrated the effectiveness of the defendant’s aristocratic connections at court. It also strengthened fears about the monarch’s reliability in living up to his promises in general. Thus, Philip II’s use of his absolute royal authority had the paradoxical effect of weakening his leadership and reducing his ability to secure support for the fiscal resources needed to sustain policies at home and especially beyond Castile during “the first global age.”The long chronological sweep of this work enables the author to trace both the shifting participants and the changing broader contexts at court and elsewhere in Castile. In so doing, he provides substantial evidence for his argument refuting the notion of expanding state authority. “There was no ‘absolutism,’ no ‘state,’ no ‘bureaucracy.’ Hierarchical, rigid, authoritarian, seemingly ‘bureaucratic’ forms of Crown administration proliferated because they did not work” (p. 7).Owens’s study develops an important reason for Spain’s growing domestic and international failures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Local notables (such as those on Toledo’s city council) lost confidence in monarchs’ commitment to “justice” and due process — this meant a loss of trust in royal credibility and thus a suspicion of fiscal initiatives. Added to economic and fiscal weaknesses arising from Castile’s limited range and volume of exports, as well as its loss of international competitiveness, this loss of trust provides a fuller explanation of Castile’s long years of travail.“By My Absolute Royal Authority” rests on a foundation of archival material, other primary sources, and a host of secondary studies. The author deserves great credit for working through an intimidating set of court records and for clarifying Castilian judicial processes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for historians of lesser patience. He substantiates his claim that in the Belalcázar suit, the procedure largely comprised the story, and he demonstrates the value of examining what he calls “an extended trouble case” for which no clear precedent had been established in law. Most of all, however, Owens documents, rather than merely asserts, the centrality of justice in Castilians’ evaluations of a monarch’s actions.Students of Spanish history will particularly appreciate Owens’s insights into the nature of monarchy in Castile. His discussion, moreover, will challenge political historians of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries throughout Europe who endow the “state” with wishful authority.