In September last year, the results of the 11th Student Competition of Academia Publishing House were announced. The jury of experts selected from 40 diploma theses submitted.
In the Humanities and Social Sciences category, Zdeňka Horáčková, a doctoral student at the Institute of Historical Sciences, won with her thesis The Dispute over Piombino and Its Reflection at the Imperial Court in the 16th and the 17th Century, defended at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Pardubice.
This work has now been published by Academia Publishing House under the title The Game of Piombino:Czech and Moravian nobility in the Dispute over the Italian Principality (1603–1634) (Hra o Piombino: Česká a moravská šlechta ve sporu o italské knížectví).
As the title suggests, the book is about the dispute over the principality of Piombino. The dispute had been a hot topic at the imperial court since the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries and took another thirty years to resolve. There were several pretenders among the Italian nobility who wanted to obtain the imperial fiefdom. But the negotiations were not just about inheritance rights. More fundamentally, they reflected Spanish great power politics. Polyxena of Lobkowitz and the Bishop of Olomouc, Cardinal Franz von Dietrichstein, were also involved in this dispute, which reached the highest levels of European politics. Both had Italian relatives among the candidates and thus became their intercessors at the imperial court.
