The EUI Diplomatic and International History Working Group hosts a lecture by Carlos Antolín Rejón.
European Premodern Diplomacy was primarily shaped by family alliances between ruling houses, an extensively studied subject. However, there are fewer works on how these dynastic coalitions kept working together and maintained trust among their members. This is probably because historians have traditionally focused on dynastic marriages and their foremost political outcomes (dynastic unions and composite states, succession wars, etc), paying less attention to the inner functioning of family-based alliances and personal relationships within ruling houses.
This work takes the case of a conflicting dynastic alliance –that of the House of Savoy and the Spanish Habsburgs at the beginning of the 17th Century– to analyse the role collateral relatives were expected to play in keeping trust and cooperation between rulers. The aim is to study the different strategies princely houses used to strengthen their political and family relations after a dynastic marriage, like that of Duke Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy with the Spanish infanta Catherine Michelle of Habsburg in 1585.
My argument is that dynastic alliances represented a form of social capital, in the terms of Pierre Bourdieu, and shall be analysed as part of the strategies of social investment produced by the ruling families. According to Bourdieu, social capital is founded on a continuous effort of sociability which, in this case, was to be performed by the sons of the Duke of Savoy before their Habsburg relatives. Only one of the Princes, Philibert of Savoy, managed to keep a close family and political relation with the Spanish Kings, thereby translating his social capital into stable benefits, like rich fiefs and prestigious appointments in Spain. The rest of his brothers, on the contrary, eventually turned to the French King for support, blocking Philibert’s efforts to perpetuate the dynastic alliance with the Habsburgs.
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