La historia de Guillén de San Clemente, un embajador hispano en el corazón de Europa entre los años 1581 y 1608

Abstract

Guillén San Clemente y de Centelles (c. 1539-1608), the Spanish ambassador to the imperial Court of Prague between 1581 and 1608, is a key figure when trying to understand, from the Spanish perspective, the Hispanic Habsburgs’ hegemony in European policy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim of this article is to make public such an important diplomat, who to this day, has remained almost entirely unknown. Many of San Clemente’s dispatches sent to the Madrid Court, about political issues, diplomacy, society, economy and the war of his time, have survived – several thousand documents in fact – and are housed in the Archivo General de Simancas (Valladolid, Spain).