Beyond Sovereign Courts. Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy

, Brepols, 2026 Hardback, Pages: 203, Size:178 x 254 mm, Illustrations:4 b/w, Language: English. ISBN 9782503611808.

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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 Sanl car 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 Rub n Gonz lez 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) Rub n Gonz lez 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 Jer nimo Graci n de la Madre de Dios in Morocco (1600-1605) Miguel ngel de Bunes Ibarra Negotiating Difference between Manila and Mangalore. Colonial Ethnography and Intercultural Diplomacy in the Diary and Drawings of Miguel Antonio G mez (1776-1777) Diego Herrero Garc a 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 Hip lito 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 Mart n Marcos A Third Party: G bor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania and the Habsburg-Ottoman Peace Negotiations 1624-1627 Gabor K rm n Afterword Indirect Diplomacy in the Context of New Diplomatic History. The Cause of Decentralizing Diplomacy Hillard von Thiessen