The papers of early-modern ambassadors have increasingly been used to study a wide range of topics. My own was in some ways traditional but also different: I wanted to find out the type of information that Philip II’s ambassadors in states not directly involved in the civil war in the Low Countries had of that conflict, and if possible learn something about the informants and what the ambassador did with that information. The results were disappointing in some embassies, but by dint of putting together some of the dispersed papers of the embassy in Venice, they yielded a wealth of material on the manipulation of manuscript news and Guzman de Silva’s use of the embassy in Venice in order to intervene in the politics of the Low Countries and change Philip II’s policy towards them.

Link: earlymoderndiplomacyevents.wordpress.com/2019/02/01/mia-j-rodriguez-salgado-the-london-school-of-economics-and-political-science-iberian-habsburg-diplomatic-relations-with-muslim-powers-in-the-sixteenth-century