Messianic and Utopian Influences on Imperial Spain

a Comparative Study in the Works of Tommaso Campanella and Pedro Fernández de Quirós

Roure, George M.

Roure draws a novel connection between Tommaso Campanella’s utopian ideas for Imperial Spain and Catholicism and Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós’ vision of an idyllic society and a mythical city of New Jerusalem in the antipodes.
The book presents newfound evidence suggesting Spain experimented with Messianism to secure their empire in the late Renaissance. The case is made that the Spanish monarchy contemplated Campanella’s Messianic ideas and sent Quirós to initiate them on the imagined Terra Australis Incognita. Campanella and Quirós shared idiosyncratic beliefs that by means of divine providence Spanish power would imminently transform the world, elevate humanity to a higher spiritual plane, dominate politics and religion, and prepare for the second coming. The work advances our understanding of previously unknown links amongst Campanella’s religious solutions for idealising temporal government, Quirós’s objective of a utopian society in the great south land, and Spain’s tentative experimentation with Messianism. It also permits the drawing of inferences on the possible rationale behind political messianism in the contemporary world.