"By My Absolute Royal Authority": Justice and the Castilian Commonwealth at the Beginning of the First Global Age is a study of judicial administration. From the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, the kingdom of Castile experienced a remarkable proliferation of judicial institutions, which historians have generally seen as part of a metanarrative of "state-building." Yet, Castile's frontiers were extremely porous, and a crown government that could not control the kingdom's borders exhibited neither the ability to obtain information and shape affairs, nor the centrality of court politics that many historians claim in an effort to craft a tidy narrative of this period. Castilians retained their loyalty to the monarchy not because of the "power" of the institutions of a developing "state," but because they shared an identity as citizens of a commonwealth in which a high value was given to justice as an ultimate purpose of the political community and a conviction that the sovereign possessed "absolute royal authority" to see that justice was done.