Madrid, the Capital Nobody Owned

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When Philip II moved the Spanish royal court to Madrid in 1561, he was not choosing the country's grandest city. Toledo, Seville and Valladolid all had older claims, established church hierarchies, wealthy merchant classes and, crucially, entrenched local nobility who expected the crown to answer to their interests. Madrid, by contrast, was a modest town with no cathedral of note and no powerful resident aristocracy, sitting near the geographic center of the Iberian Peninsula on the high, dry Meseta Central plateau. That obscurity was the point. A capital with no existing power base of its own could be built up entirely as an instrument of royal authority, beholden to the crown rather than to a bishop or a ducal family who had been running the city for generations before the king arrived. Madrid remained the capital from that choice onward, with one interruption when the royal court relocated to Valladolid from 1601 to 1606 under Philip III before returning to Madrid for good, and the city's later growth into a metropolis of the size Spain now has was a consequence of the decision rather than a reason for it.