ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with one small part of the remaining 90 per cent, when Miguel de Noronha was serving outside India – namely, the time he spent as captain-general of the galleys of Sicily, during the years 1641–44. The office Linhares was ordered to assume by Madrid in late 1641 was that of captain general of the galleys of Sicily. By the 1640s, all of the permanent Spanish galley squadrons in the western Mediterranean – that is, the squadrons of Naples, Genoa, Sicily and Spain itself -were mere shadows of what they had been in their great days, at the time of Lepanto. When Linhares first arrived in Palermo, rumours of impending attacks on the island were rife. Warned by his spies and informers in various parts of the Mediterranean, the viceroy of Sicily, Don Juan Alonso Enriquez, Admiral of Castile, nervously drew attention in his dispatches to hostile military preparations allegedly underway in a number of places.
