On 15 October 1518, Mercurino Arborio de Gattinara knelt before Charles, King of Castile, shortly to become King of Aragon and emperor elect, and thereupon between the hands of the young Habsburg monarch took the oath of office as ‘Grand Chancellor of all the realms and kingdoms of the king’. In rising to his feet the new chancellor could hardly have surmised, beyond the obvious burdens and difficulties of trying to keep in harness so many diverse lands, the specific problems involved in trying to impose a Franco-Burgundian conception of the chancellorship upon a variety of realms each of whose chancelleries stood at a different stage of growth or decay. As former head of Margaret of Austria's privy council as well as President of Burgundy, i.e. the parlement at Dole, Gattinara had for the past ten years been thoroughly exposed to Franco-Burgundian administrative practices.2 Furthermore, as a self-conscious disciple of Justinian and a renowned Turin lawyer for ten years prior to his service with the Habsburg dynasty, Gattinara had developed a driving mastery of detail, an eye for the practical issues in a situation, a promptness of thought, a mind that sought to shape, order, improve. With these qualities and experience he would now attack his formidable responsibilities.

As is evident from an examination of the remnants of his private archive at Turin, Gattinara invited memoranda from subordinates at the beginning of his chancellorship as a means of informing himself about the needs, problems and resources of the lands and institutions under his master's lordship.