The Legal Logic of Wars of Conquest: Truces and Betrayal in the Early Modern World

Abstract

By definition, the term "conquest" implies the dominance of one political community over others.By definition, too, "conquest" denotes war, and histories of conquest tend to feature episodes of extraordinary brutality, including the complete destruction of civilian settlements.This basic understanding of conquest as political dominance through warfare brings unity to narratives about historical settings as diverse as Inner Asia under Mongol assault, Muslim and Christian advances across the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish takeover of indigenous South America.The history of the early modern world has sometimes been styled as a history of invasion, occupation, and the sweeping cultural and institutional consequences of both.These basic assumptions about the nature of conquest deserve closer scrutiny.Rather than the stark opposition of conquering and conquered societies or the clear-cut dominance of victors over vanquished, early modern campaigns of conquest depended on, and also gave rise to, pluripolitical formations.Conquering and conquered societies boasted multiple corporate entities and jumbles of overlapping jurisdictions, and these plural structures guided the strategies and determined the pace and designs of conquest.Campaigns of conquest also produced new patterns of association in fragmented political fields, from experiments in confederation to the construction of fragile networks of alliances.The overwhelming power of conquerors and the catastrophic defeat of the conquered could coexist with the persistence of indigenous polities' autonomy and often produced powerful constraints on the actions of imperial rulers.A closer look at conquest reveals, too, that peace pacts formed an integral part of the process.Whether labeled as imperial projects or not, conquests enlarged composite polities, and truces created allies and established tributary arrangements such that zones of relative, if unstable, calm sat adjacent to frontiers of open warfare.Parties to truces recognized