Brothers : Princes Emanuele Filiberto, Tommaso and Maurizio of Savoy between Politics and Personal Relationships

In the delicate context of the Pax Hispanica, the children of Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, and the Infanta Catalina Micaela of Spain spent their lives torn between education, ambitions, and political inclinations dictated by the changing balance between France and Spain. This chapter reconstructs the complex intertwining in the relationship between the cadet brothers Emanuele Filiberto, Tommaso and Maurizio of Savoy in relation to their father’s choices, and the competing duties of their maternal kinship to Spain and their elder brother Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy. The analysis focuses on political and literary texts dedicated to each prince: a letter addressed to Emanuele Filiberto, a naval commander for the Spanish monarchy, by Tommaso Campanella in 1614; a Discorso contro il Turco written the same year by Giovanni Botero for Maurice of Savoy; and I Campeggiamenti dedicated by Emanuele Tesauro to Tommaso of Savoy, a general in Flanders. What emerges is a complex framework within which the three brothers acted, interacting with their eldest brother from a young age, with particular attention to his correspondence with Emanuele Filiberto, with whom he had shared a three-year stay in Spain. The chapter also places these cadet princes in the context of the lives and interests of their sisters Margherita, Isabella, Maria Apollonia and Francesca Caterina of Savoy, all of whom were pro- Spanish and important in the political-ideological sphere of the Duchy of Savoy in the first half of the seventeenth century.