A Diamond or a Bear: the Spanish Court’s Practices of Gift-Giving with Extra-European Embassies

Abstract

By the seventeenth century, the Spanish court had developed a well-established practice of gift-giving to foreign representatives. The richness and variety of such gifts pretended to foster the hegemonic and prestigious image of the Catholic king. However, those agents not pertaining to the medieval framework of Christendom posed several challenges: how to compare and commensurate their rank and dignity with European examples? How to adapt (and to what extent) the local system to quite different tastes and cultural backgrounds?