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

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 Sanlucar 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.