El carrusel de los obispos. Redes eclesiásticas en la Monarquía católica

Abstract

The royal patronage was configured as a space for mobility of bishops not only among the dioceses of continental Spain, but among all the kingdoms and territories of the Habsburg Monarchy, including America. In this context, the examination of the careers of the Spanish prelates who were bishops in Sicily (sometimes before or after occupying Neapolitan sees) allows to reconstruct well-drawn and narrow routes, which hardly communicate with each other. The investigation of these trajectories is a clear demonstration of how ecclesiastical careers woven a warp through the domains of the Habsburg Monarchy over which a web of close relations and exchanges of religious, cultural, and political experiences was woven. There is no doubt that the redistribution of the resources of the ecclesiastical patronage constituted, in fact, one of the avenues – along with the granting of nobility titles, public offices and pecuniary favors- – that guaranteed the loyalty of individuals and groups (family and clientele) to the Crown, in this case from the common adherence to the Catholic confession and its institutions.