Monastic foundations in Sanlúcar de Barrameda: an image feudal power in the way of the church to India

Abstract

This article analyzes –in its Atlantic frame–, why the dukes of Medina Sidonia invested efforts and resources in certain relevant religious foundations in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, their seignourial court-city. Specially, it relates, in the one hand, the facilities granted by the dukes in Sanlúcar to welcome some religious orders –Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits– with the role played, in the other hand, by this city in the route to the Indies, taking also into account the Medina Sidonia’s seignourial interests. Our hypothesis is that the interest of the Medina Sidonia’s in founding convents and houses of those orders in Sanlúcar was that those foundations acted as mirrors for the Medina Sidonia’s self-image of power, whose reflections ought to reach America.