Painter to the Queen
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Courts and Courtiers in a Global Context, vol. 3
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Ruben Gonzalez Cuerva, Francesco Caprioli (eds)
- Pages: approx. 190 p.
- Size:178 x 254 mm
- Illustrations:3 b/w, 1 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2025
- € 89,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-61180-8
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- Forthcoming (Nov/25)
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- ISBN: 978-2-503-61181-5
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The global interactions between courts tended to follow diverse paths, so that indirect diplomacy must be formalised as analytic tool to grasp how early modern empires came together and negotiated, by pushing the boundaries of their courtier cultures and agents.
BIO
Rubén González Cuerva is tenured scientist at the Institute of History of the Spanish National Research Council.
Francesco Caprioli is postdocoral fellow in Early Modern History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
Summary
The classic model of early modern diplomacy suggests the exchange of missions between royal courts and sovereigns, but recent scholarship emphasises that many cross-imperial contacts transcended this scheme. Whether missions were sent from Manila to Mangalore, from Sanlúcar de Barrameda to Marrakesh or from Buda to Vienna, regional authorities or local notables managed and conducted exchanges of their own with tacit or indirect control by their sovereign court. Given the breadth and variety of this typology, which goes beyond the anecdotal exception, this collection sets out to reveal how such indirect diplomacy functioned and developed throughout the first period of globalisation. And of course, many of the actors in these exchanges had contact in some degree with the court, the hub of diplomatic activity. Exploring the further reaches of court cultures therefore will provide a useful opportunity to clarify how diplomatic actors negotiated in socio-political frameworks alien to their own traditions by denying a formalised and ritual approach, many derived from court culture, to discreetly advance their dealings. In so doing, we argue for a change in the way historians think about indirect diplomacy as a scarcely institutionalised practice or unrelated to the court. Indeed, this collection affirms how indirect diplomacy was a peculiar model of diplomacy implemented by early modern empires according to their political and cultural needs.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Indirect Diplomacy and Sovereign Courts
Rubén González Cuerva & Francesco Caprioli
1. The Spanish Monarchy and Muslim Polities
The Court and the Stronghold: The Distrustful Political Communication between Tunis and La Goleta (1535-1570)
Rubén González Cuerva
Court, Nobility, and Diplomacy: The Relations between the Spanish Monarchy and the Saadian Sultanate of Morocco at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century
Miguel Soto Garrido
Religious Figures as Indirect Agents: The Case of Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios in Morocco (1600-1605)
Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra
Negotiating Difference between Manila and Mangalore. Colonial Ethnography and Intercultural Diplomacy in the Diary and Drawings of Miguel Antonio Gómez (1776-1777)
Diego Herrero García
2. The Limits of the European Diplomatic System
Brussels and the ‘Politics of the North’: The Dispatch of Burgundian Agents to the Tudor Court, 1559-1567
Javier Hipólito Villanueva
Diplomatic Agents and Stakeholders between Madrid, Rome, and Naples in the Time of the Viceroy Castrillo (1653–1658)
Marcelo Paulo Correa
Local Truces and Minor Memories: The War between Portugal and Spain (1640-1668) and the Construction of the Past within Frontier Communities
David Martín Marcos
A Third Party: Gábor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania and the Habsburg–Ottoman Peace Negotiations 1624–1627
Gabor Kármán
Afterword
Indirect Diplomacy in the Context of New Diplomatic History. The Cause of Decentralizing Diplomacy
Hillard von Thiessen
