We have seen how both René's career in the service of the House of Savoy and other rulers and the pursuit of his own transregional interests required of him a life of perpetual motion between Italy and transalpine Europe. The spatial dimension of his rights and responsibilities affected his family relationships, his political networks, and his finances. We now focus more explicitly on how the transregional dimension of René's authority imposed upon him a particular understanding and practice of lordship.

The most recent studies of René as a feudal dynast have situated him in the context of changing structures of domination within the Sabaudian lands without considering the transregional dimension of his lordship. François-Charles Uginet depicted René as the representative of ‘an aristocratic class whose continual concern was to maintain its own dominance in government’ and to ‘affirm its authority’. He was ‘one of the last exponents of the old feudal order in the Sabaudian states, who saw a position as the prince's natural counselor as his birthright’. For Uginet, however, René's ‘ingrained cowardice and his frequent preoccupation with his own personal interests’ prevented him from properly expressing his class consciousness. Alessandro Barbero has likewise situated René in a moment of historical transition, while challenging the idea that the transition automatically led to greater princely power. He first analyzed the Challant family in light of Federico Chabod's model of the historical transformation of the medieval aristocracy into a class of officials who mediated between the Prince and the ‘paese’.