Abstract

In the historiography there is a gap in relation to the role and duties attached to the Chaplain Major of Naples, above all for the 16th and 17th centuries. Yet it was during the Spanish age that the Chaplain Major of Naples became a royal official with his own dignity, with ecclesiastical and civil privileges, exempt from the Holy See and from all ecclesiastical courts. The aim of this study is to reconstruct the extensive areas of jurisdiction of the Chaplain Major in the ecclesiastical, political and cultural spheres of the Kingdom of Naples and its capital. The criteria for the nomination of the Chaplain Major were the same used to select the Kingdom's civil and ecclesiastical officials. However, the choice of Chaplains Major, more than for other roles, was directed to favour those who had previous and personal experience in the Court or was of a family linked to it, regardless of the candidate's "nationality". The second part of the study analyzes the dialectic between Naples and Madrid for the appointment of Chaplains through the reconstruction of the dynamics of nomination and the profiles of two Chaplains: Gabriel Sanchez de Luna and Juan de Salamanca.