This contribution focuses on Ambrogio Spinola's correspondence with members of his restricted family, conserved in Brussels (1600-1629) from a gender perspective. The aim is to highlight the results of interactions between men and women, based on relationships between individuals (hierarchies, struggles for power, collaborations). In this regard, these letters make it possible to capture Ambrogio Spinola at the crossroads between the different worlds that were his own (Genoa, Flanders, Madrid). The place of his family (especially his mother Polissena and his sisters) is essential as a constant space for emotional life, but also as a fundamental financial network. The same goes for the relationship between Ambrogio and his wife Giovanna Baciadonne. It is thanks to the latter that we can ask about the role played in military enterprises by women through their dowry. From the letters exchanged with and about his sons and daughters, we question Ambrogio's attitudes as a father and pater familias (a role that refers to a precise Italian humanist literature, but also to the paternal function in the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation). Fatherhood is therefore an important dimension of masculinity that integrates that of the military and of the war chief. At the very center of these interactions, there is the idea of individual and clanic honor