In 1696, Maria Gertrudis, baroness and future countess of Berlepsch, wrote a petition letter from the Madrid court to Johann Wilhelm, elector of the Palatinate-Neuburg, soliciting his protection for her older sister, Anna Elisabeth Wolff von Gudenberg, and her sister's daughter, Catherine von Cramm (1682–1738). The elector was brother to the queen, Maria Anna of Neuburg, married to the Spanish monarch, Carlos II (r. 1690–1700), and whom the countess served. The countess hoped that the elector's favor would ensure her relatives’ future after her brother-in-law's death and ensure their conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. Converting to Catholicism would allow the countess's family to serve in a Catholic court and thus show their devotion to the Habsburg family, especially Emperor Leopold I. The countess of Berlepsch favored a Catholic court environment where her niece, Catherine von Cramm, could obtain a good education, make social connections, increase her family's capital, and support the career of male and female family members. She thus exemplifies how widowed noblewomen in particular helped their female relatives, facilitating access to restricted environments, such as the female household of a sovereign, to ensure their career and their future.

Catherine's mother, Anna Elisabeth, belonged to an old Protestant family of the lower nobility of the Holy Roman Empire, the Wolff von Gudenberg, who were members of the althessische Ritterschaft, a foundation for knights of the principality of Hessen (Bock 2019, 398–99).

In recent years, diplomatic history has undergone a major renewal led by the historiographical movement known as New Diplomatic History that has opened many new multidisciplinary research possibilities. The focus on issues dealing with political communication, social networks, ceremonials, protocols, and cultural issues, among others, has considerably broadened the field. Two crucial elements of this renewal have been the field's transnational expansion—currently one of the most dynamic historiographical perspectives, especially when referring to political networks such as the Spanish Monarchy—and its revisionary perspective on gender, which has shed needed light on the diplomatic roles played by women.

These two aspects will be of primary significance when studying the case of the Italian noblewoman, Anna Colonna (1631–1686), who assumed the politically important role of ambassadress together with her husband. A descendant of the ancient Roman house of Colonna, she was the daughter of Isabella Gioeni Cardona y Córdoba, princess of Castiglione, and Marcantonio V Colonna, prince of Paliano. She became the third marquise of Los Balbases after her marriage to Pablo Spinola Doria (1632–1699), grandson of the famed Genoese military commander, Ambrosio Spinola, whose military achievements for the Spanish crown gained him the title of first marquis of Los Balbases.

The Colonna family possessed immense material and, especially, symbolic and cultural capital in the form of contacts, titles, etc., all of which made Anna Colonna a very important asset to her husband's family.

In early modern Spanish literature, women's travel narratives employed various strategies to contest gender norms that worked to enclose women's bodies and voices. Many traveling women harnessed the public's fascination with spectacle to navigate social relationships and authorize alternative subjectivities. The Monja Alférez, or Lieutenant Nun, emerges as a unique narrative voice, due to her real-life transformation from Catalina de Erauso, a noble Basque daughter cloistered in a Spanish convent, to Antonio de Erauso, the violent soldier whose efforts on behalf of the Spanish Empire in Chile earned official favors from Philip IV of Spain and Pope Urban VIII. Erauso's travel story and singular performance of gender captured the attention of the seventeenth-century public, and the Lieutenant Nun's genre-bending travel narrative continues to attract and confound twenty-first-century scholars.

The construction of Erauso's traveling body in the autobiographical narrative Historia de la Monja Alférez (1625) plays into the Baroque audience's affinity for spectacular oddities and ambiguous identities. Transatlantic travel allowed Erauso to create a body that is both masculine and feminine, durable and vulnerable, scoundrel and innocent virgin. Close readings of the text reveal the productive ways the author uses the construction of this fluid and illegible body to manage relationships with authority figures on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, Erauso's contemporaries and the readers derive pleasure from Erauso's transgressive body and suspenseful odyssey, and these witnesses become part of Erauso's story.

On January 30, 1627, the Franciscan Florence Conry, archbishop of Tuam, Ireland, asked Archduchess Isabel Clara Eugenia, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, to shelter the Irish noble Mary Stuart O’Donnell (1607–?), daughter of the earl of Tyrconnell. Mary Stuart had arrived on her lands “in a very unusual fashion” from the court of Charles I in London: “It would be well that her Highness shelter her in the Palace, as this is demanded by her birth and her age, and by the absence of the Earl” (Jennings 1964, 215). Shortly thereafter, the archduchess, following the recommendations of the Irish archbishop, who was representative for Irish affairs of the Spanish crown, welcomed the young fugitive with open arms into her court. Yet despite her initial welcome, the young countess of Tyrconnell became a perpetual refugee and faced a life full of hardships, forcing her to become an expert in survival tactics.

The lives and fortunes of Mary Stuart and the archduchess could hardly be more dissimilar. Nonetheless, history and literature converge when discussing these two women from different generations and countries in a historical moment marked by international conflicts. Both were transformed into symbols of continuity between the past and the future of their respective kingdoms: as a widow Isabel Clara Eugenia was, in Werner Thomas's view, “the personification of the transition from the archducal regime to the reincorporation of the country into the Spanish empire” (2012, 185) and hence the best guarantee of the house of Habsburg in the Southern Netherlands.

In the preface to his Madame de Chevreuse: Nouvelles études sur les femmes illustres et la société du XVIIe siècle, the nineteenth-century French philosopher Victor Cousin (1868) noted that two women stood out among Cardinal Mazarin's many enemies at the French court: Madame de Chevreuse and Madame de Hautefort. In contrast to the bad press they had received, Cousin's meticulous research led him to discover “two heroines who opposed Richelieu and Mazarin, the two most interesting actresses of the great drama of 1643.” Cousin's good intentions aside, he then went on to spend some ten pages listing all the pejoratives that contemporaries, historians, and novelists in later years had used to describe Marie de Rohan, “the schemer.” Most people are familiar with her image as a seductress thanks to Alexandre Dumas, whose The Three Musketeers features the duchess of Chevreuse as Richelieu's enemy, Anne of Austria's friend, and the lover of one of the musketeers, Aramis.

Marie de Rohan, duchess of Chevreuse (1600–1679) spent a significant portion of her seventy-nine years in cities in numerous European kingdoms that were sometimes at war with each other. Her travels from one European city to another shed light on early modern noblewomen's interest in journeying within and across borders for political reasons.

Women in the early modern period assumed an active part in the global mobilization that took place during that time. Secular women traveled to and from the Iberian Peninsula for family and commercial reasons, to the Indies with their husbands, who often held political office in the colonies, and to the territories of the Spanish Monarchy in Europe, Italy, and the Netherlands, while, in the main, nuns from various orders ventured forth to found convents, traveling by both transnational and transoceanic routes.

This chapter examines the textual embodiments of this travel experience and their discursive keys. It focuses on the paradigmatic case of Sor Jerónima de la Asunción and a community of nuns of the Poor Clares, who voyaged from Toledo, Spain, through Mexico, on to Manila in order to establish the first female convent in the Philippine Islands, one of the most distant outposts of the Spanish Monarchy. The chapter's second aim is to compare the nuns’ experiences as they are recounted autobiographically and biographically alongside other travel narratives in order to highlight their reiterating discursive encoding, the images portrayed of these women travelers, and the communicative interests served by their representation— either by their self-representation or their representation by others outside their community.

Some of the questions raised include: What do these texts emphasize about the traveling conditions for women? What ideological and propagandistic purposes do these narratives serve?

Recent innovative approaches and methodologies in the field of early modern women's studies have contributed to a better understanding of women's roles across European markets, focusing on new dimensions regarding their status and investigating their activities as businesswomen. In particular, scholars have most recently explored women's contributions to commercial and financial transactions in Northern Europe, given that its socio-economic conditions and circumstances allowed for women's greater participation. However, the economies of Southern Europe also experienced considerable activity by women across borders. As one example, early modern Portuguese women in Iberian cities were involved in trade and credit and even continued their husbands’ businesses after their death. Located mainly in Madrid, Seville, and Cádiz, among the most significant economic centers in the Spanish Monarchy, of converso or New Christian (converted Jew) background, the women belonged to prominent merchant houses that conducted international business.

Several of these women, when widowed, became administrators of their credit houses, where they managed family expenses or received payments for different debts owed to their husbands that they then collected, working either alone, with other relatives, or through agents. Sometimes their responsibility ended upon their children's majority of age, but under other circumstances (when they did not have descendants, for instance) women maintained this position until their deaths. Furthermore, some continued to carry out trade or financial businesses and became financiers or bankers.

The adventures and misadventures of Isabel Barreto's early modern voyage to the South Pacific read like the script of a blockbuster film. However, not only has she been ignored as the potential protagonist of a cinematic production, but she has also been maligned, stereotyped, and censored. In addition, as this chapter will show, both the crude summaries of events on the voyage and the timid attempts to vindicate her disregard significant facts and rehearse some inaccuracies. In fact, it appears as though the scant information about Barreto (1567–1612) that has become widely available is mostly reproduced verbatim, neither documenting it nor contrasting it with contemporaneous sources. This investigation challenges those simplifications in two ways. Firstly, it will undertake a scrutiny of events on the voyage, testing what the main sources say and how they say it. Secondly, and more importantly, it will analyze and contextualize the only primary source in which Barreto's agency can be ascertained and that has been disregarded to date: her last will and testament.

On June 17, 1595, having married a seasoned explorer, Álvaro de Mendaña, the young Isabel Barreto sailed from the Peruvian port of Paita on way to settle the Solomon Islands, which her husband had “discovered” in an earlier voyage. Following Mendaña's untimely death in October of that year, Barreto inherited his property and titles, including that of governor (adelantada) of the Solomon Islands.

It is very rare with navies from all nationalities to have had two ships with the same name that were not named after the same person. It goes without saying that ships with the same name cannot serve with the same navy at the same time. That could lead to a lot of confusion. Normally ships are named after for instance naval heroes. After a number of years that ship is struck from the list so the name disappears. Sometimes, only many years later, but also in a continuous line a new ship is given the same name. If you look at the names given with different navies there is mostly quite a long time between two ships that carry the same name. This is also the case with the US Navy ships named Clark.

The then king Willem I decided that there would always be a ship with the name Van Speyk in the Dutch navy and this has been the case from that moment on. Sometimes a Van Speijk is struck from the list and immediately succeeded by a ship that allotted that name. More often an existing ship is rechristened.

As indicated above two ships in the US Navy carried the name Clark. These ships did not only sail in two different eras with totally different global situations but it is most particular that the ships were not named after the same person. Of course this book is about the second ship of this name but it is interesting to briefly discuss the first USS Clark.

In the 1930s, the United States Navy built two classes of flotilla leaders, the Porter class, and the Somers class. Due to the regulations of the London Naval Treaty, these 13 ships had a displacement of 1,850 tons, compared to the 1,500 tons of a “standard” destroyer. When the treaty ended with the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939, the much larger Fletcher class was constructed, making the differentiation irrelevant.

The national ensign consists of thirteen equal horizontal stripes of red (top and bottom) alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton bearing fifty small, white, five-pointed stars. The stars represent the fifty states of the United States of America and the 13 stripes represent the thirteen British colonies that declared independence and became the first states in the Union.

The Tromp-class was a class of light cruisers of the Royal Netherlands Navy. Originally the ships could not be called “cruiser” for political reasons. They were designed as “flotilla leaders” and their intended role was to be the backbone of a squadron of modern destroyers that was planned at the same time (only one of those was completed before the war broke out). The ships were ordered in 1935; Tromp was launched in 1937, and her sister ship Jacob van Heemskerck in 1939.

7 is the lucky number…

The cruiser Tromp was in 1938 the 7th ship of the Royal Netherlands Navy to bear this name. In 1945 an Australian reporter wrote an article on board. He mentions that the crew called her: “The Lucky Ship”.

When based in Australia the ship also acquired the nickname: “The Ghost Ship”. This was the name given to her by the Aboriginals because the Japanese claimed no less than five times that HNLMS ‘Tromp’ had been sunk, whereafter the ship returned to base safe and sound. No single ship, with the exception of the British carrier HMS ‘Ark Royal’, has been claimed to be sunk so often.

Left: The national ensign, carried by all ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy. In harbour or at anchor it was customary to be worn at the staff on the quarterdeck, but at sea it used to fly from the mainmast.

Right: The jack

The commissioning pennant, worn from the day a ship commissions until she is de-commissioned.

Tromp was build at The Netherlands Shipbuilding Company in Amsterdam. (Photo NIMH)

THE SHIP

HNLMS ‘Tromp’ was the first flotilla leader of the so-called “Deckers’ Fleet Plan”, which was passed in 1931. It lasted until 17 January 1936 before the first keel plate was laid down in the yard of the NV Ned. Scheepsbouw Mij. (The Netherlands Shipbuilding Company Limited) in Amsterdam. The launching ceremony was on 24 May 1937 by H.M. Queen Wilhelmina and on 18 August 1938, HNLMS Tromp was commissioned by the commanding officer, Captain L.A.C.M. Doorman on 18 August 1938.

A Military Disaster?

In a ground-breaking article published in 1980, Cheynet pondered whether Manzikert was “un désastre militaire.” Since then, the consensus among historians of the period has been that Manzikert was not a military disaster and that the imperial army seems to have escaped relatively unscathed from the day's fighting on August 26, 1071, with the political and socio-economic consequences of the defeat far outweighing the losses the empire sustained on the battlefield. The rearguard and reserve units of “the tagma of the Hetairiae and that of the nobles” under Andronikos Doukas certainly escaped back to the capital without suffering any casualties, whilst Bryennius's left wing, which included the five western tagmata also escaped with relatively few losses; these units are reported defending the Balkans against the Patzinaks in the following years. Concerning the units of the right wing under Alyates, and especially the Armenian and Kappadokian forces, the sources tell us that a significant number of them managed to make an orderly escape to Trapezounta, Theodosiopolis, and Dokeia. According to Attaleiates, the units under Alyates reportedly pledged their allegiance to the emperor after his release from Turkish captivity.

Furthermore, what is notable is that the prominent men who were reported to have died in the battle were few and relatively unknown figures (Leon, who was epi ton deeseon and the magistros and protoasecretis Eustratios Choirosphaktes), while even fewer were captured alive (the protovestes Basileios Maleses and Nikephoros Basilakes, the latter having been taken prisoner the day before the main battle).5 If we add the elite units of Trachaneiotes and Roussel, which retreated to Melitene before the battle, a significant number of perhaps even twenty thousand men, it seems clear that the actual losses incurred during the battle were limited to the Diogenes's immediate retinue, the Armenian infantry, and the palatine and other elite units close to him, around five to ten percent of the campaigning army.