This article examines the relationship between communicative freedoms and the expansion of postal coverage in the Spanish Empire in the early sixteenth century. I propose that these freedoms were among the main pillars of the growth in postal coverage shortly after the voyages of Christopher Columbus. This article seeks to explain how it was possible that European (and non-European) individuals used handwritten correspondence to communicate on a multispatial scale. Through an analysis of sources produced in a wide variety of places, I demonstrate that handwritten correspondence was successfully produced and received in urban, rural, and port environments across different ethnic sectors.
Nelson Fernando González Martínez (Sun,) studied this question.