An account of the Spanish Infanta Maria Annas (1606-46) journey to Vienna to marry Prince Ferdinand, King of Hungary and Bohemia and future Holy Roman Emperor.
This tract describes the final leg of the journey (Maria Anna having originally set out from Madrid in 1629) from Naples, across the Papal States to Ancona where she was received on board a Venetian squadron and sailed along the Adriatic coast to Trieste. At Trieste, she was met by Archduke Leopold and then travelled overland to Vienna. On her arrival, she celebrated her marriage to Ferdinand on 20 February 1631. Maria Anna was considered intelligent and capable and, after Ferdinand became Holy Roman Emperor, she regularly governed in his place when he was away on military campaigns. The union, which further cemented the ties between the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs, was cause for celebration in the Iberian peninsula where this tract, published in Seville in the same year as the marriage, was evidently issued to spread the news of the happy event. Its nature as popular newsletter most likely explains its rarity.
With contemporary manuscript foliation in the upper outer corners of the leaves ("449" and "450"). Unstitched and edges untrimmed, scattered foxing, else very good. Palau 257999; USTC 5012456 (5 copies); WorldCat 928677536 (2 copies).