Los Reinos Mediterraneos y la defensa de la Monarquia de Felipe III

Abstract

Since some decades a renewed attention to the Mediterranean area in the seventeenth century has allowed a more concrete analysis of the political and military dynamics that involved the Iberian and Italian kingdoms in the years of Philip III and Philip IV. Overcoming the idea that the "great history" had left the Mare Nostrum to affect exclusively the Atlantic front, the role of the kingdoms of the Habsburg monarchy was redefined, with the use of human and material resources, in the management of the international policy. Thus, the geostrategic function covered by each territory in the new type of conflict was highlighted: the kingdom of Granada, like that of Sicily or Naples, were involved in the new lines of a polycentric Mediterranean history, a history characterized by the multiplication of protagonists and agents, whose interactions caused sudden shifts in the balance of power.