Dana Caciur, Discussing regional customs: The conflict between Filippo Bragadin and Cussein Potoclia and the Morlachs of Dalmatia in the mid-sixteenth century (original) (raw)
Sultans and Voivodas in the 16th c.: Gifts and Insignia
The Journal of International Social Research / Uluslararası sosyal araştırmalar dergisi, 2007
The territorial extent of the Ottoman Empire did not allow the central government to control all the country in the same way. To understand the kind of relations established between the Ottoman Empire and its vassal states scholars took into consideration also peace treaties (sulhnâme) and how these agreements changed in the course of time. The most ancient documents were capitulations (ahdnâme) with mutual oaths, derived from the idea of truce (hudna), such as those made with sovereign countries which bordered on the Empire. Little by little they changed and became imperial decrees (berat), which mean that the sultan was the lord and the others subordinate powers. In the Middle Ages bilateral agreements were used to make peace with European countries too, but, since the end of the 16 th c., sultans began to issue berats to grant commercial facilities to distant countries, such as France or England. This meant that, at that time, they felt themselves superior to other rulers. On the contrary, in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, European countries became stronger and they succeeded in compelling the Ottoman Empire to issue capitulations, in the form of berat, on their behalf. The article hence deals with the Ottoman's imperial authority up on the vassal states due to the historical evidences of sovereignty. * This paper is a revised version of Maria Pia Pedani, Doni e insegne del potere concessi dai sultani ottomani ai principi rumeni nel Cinquecento, in L'Italia e l'Europa Centro-Orientale attraverso i secoli. Miscellanea di studi di storia politico-diplomatica, a cura di
2025
This volume offers a source-based analysis of the complex interactions between the Venetian administration of the coastal town Spalato (Split) and its hinterland under Venetian, Hungarian, and Ottoman rule. Employing a microhistorical approach, Sadovski studies the military importance, economic dynamics, and social changes in the Dalmatian hinterland in the later medieval period. This book also explores multilingualism, highlighting how Slavic languages as well as local laws and customs were integrated into the Venetian administration. In doing so, it broadens our understanding of the Venetian maritime empire and proposes a new way of thinking about hinterlands – in cultural, social, linguistic, and legal terms alongside economic and political aspects. https://brill.com/display/title/71215
Matters Worthy of Men of State: Ethnography and Diplomatic Reporting in Sixteenth-Century Venice
Sixteenth Century Journal, 2020
The sixteenth- century Venetian Republic not only had more permanent diplomatic representatives than any other European state, it was also unique in requiring its ambassadors to deliver a final report, or relazione, on the states in which they had served. Although relazioni were intended to assist statesmen in foreign policy decision- making, over the course of the sixteenth century, ambassadors devoted increasing attention to ethnographic topics, including the customs, religious observances, foodways, and dress of the states on which they reported. Through an examination of the relazioni and their reception, this article addresses the questions of why ambassadors increasingly emphasized ethnographic material and how this new emphasis was debated among Venetian elites. The shift in the nature of diplomatic reporting did not go unnoticed by contemporaries; it engendered a vigorous debate about both the parameters of political knowledge and the nature and reliability of eyewitness versus textual authority.
The documents concerning the feud between the Patriarch of Aquileia and the Counts of Gorizia (1267–1277) are evidence of how written laws show that the ritual forms and gestures of the customary system of confl ict resolution were not only maintained but were regularly inserted into the ritual formulas of written law. Above all they document how the customary system of confl ict resolution, in its ideal image and through rituals, refl ected social values based on the mediation of the community, reciprocity and the propensity to achieve a lasting peace. This is a general structural aspect of confl ict, while the local or articular aspect is shown concretely through the struggle for resources, in the interweaving of single circumstances, where those who succeed in forming the greatest number of loyalties, differing and often contrasting alliances, are the ones who prevail. In our case this was clearly better accomplished by the Counts of Gorizia than by the Patriarchs of Aquileia. Key words: feud, vendetta, homage, truce, peace, Patriarchs of Aquileia, Counts of Gorizia, Momiano, Pietrapelosa, Istria
Between 1584 and 1588, the Florentine merchant Filippo Sassetti sent a whole sequence of letters from India to his friends and the grand ducal court in Florence. 1 He informed his correspondents about local Indian plants, animals, the mechanisms of commercial exchange and Indian social structures and politics. Apart from publishing and editing letters, the scholarship so far has focused on linguistic, geographic, medical and ethnographical issues related to his letters. 2 This article focuses on a set of rarely explored resources: the valuable objects sent with Sassetti's letters to the grand duke Francesco de Medici (1541-87) and his brother cardinal Ferdinando (1549-1609). 3 The letters are exceptional, since they allow one to reconstruct the origins and itineraries of the items that Sassetti describes in detail. None of the objects survived in Florence but some of them are traceable to the Medici inventories of the sixteenth century. In their eagerness for exotic novelties, the Medici brothers did not stand alone. By the end of the sixteenth century, it was a sign of erudition and power for the noblest princes of Europe to install large collections of artificialia and naturalia in their palaces. 4 The complex collections served as mirrors of the outside world and reflected the erudition and power of the "ideal" prince. 5 In order to show their young dynasty's claim to rule in the European concert of powers, the Medici used their collection as a means of propaganda. 6 The importance of exotic items within early modern princely collecting has been illustrated by various recent exhibitions. 7 The Medici brothers' quest for rarities must be viewed in this context. Sassetti was their medium of transfer to receive the coveted plants and galanterie. The Sassetti case is a prime example of a multifaceted transfer of goods and knowledge in the second half of the sixteenth century. 8 The letters written by the agent of this intercultural exchange, Filippo Sassetti, illustrate how closely interwoven the transfers of medical, social, economic, artistic and political knowledge-today largely studied separately-actually were. The documents found in the Florentine archives complement the letters and demonstrate the reception of the exotic items within the court milieu. Filippo Sassetti came from an old Florentine merchant family. Trained at the University of Pisa and a member of the Accademia Fiorentina, he was an intellectual who became a merchant out of need rather than interest. In the service of Florentine bankers linked to the grand ducal court, he travelled to the Iberian Itinerario volume XXXII (2008) number 3
Review of 'Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350-1520
Reviews in History, 2016
In 1372 Renatus Malbecco, a Milanese ambassador, arrived in Avignon for a meeting with Pope Gregory XI. His embassy was evidently unwelcome: he was 'received with insults' and promptly sent away. An observing diplomat recounted this event in a couple of terse lines. A little over a century later it was the turn of Ludovico il Moro of Milan to dismiss a visiting envoy. This time, however, the equivalent observer narrated the events in dramatic form, describing the speech, movements and manners of the participants described for a neighbouring prince (p. 152). The language of diplomacy had become richer, its description thicker, its nuances more telling. These linguistic changes lie at the heart of Lazzarini's book, which explores developments in Italian diplomacy over a long 15th century, taking in the period of the Papal move to Avignon, the subsequent Conciliar era, and the aftermath of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Her ambitious monograph aims to find an alternative to narratives of diplomacy focused on the development of resident embassies in this period (and in particular to the variants of that narrative linking permanent diplomacy to the 'rise of the modern state'). It explores instead other chronologies and changes, most importantly as they relate to text, language, narration and their nuances. This is a richly-documented contribution to the now not-so-new 'new diplomatic history', which has sought for some 20 years to situate practices of diplomacy in their social and cultural context. Studies in this field