Evelina del Mercato
My name is Evelina, and I am a PhD student for DiplomatiCon since September 2023. After graduating with a Bachelor's degree at the University of Palermo in History and Philosophy, I moved to Bologna, where I earned a Master's degree in Medieval History with a dissertation entitled 'Il monastero di San Sisto di Piacenza. Dalla fondazione alla sostituzione della comunità monastica femminile (IX-XII secc.)'. I investigated the fiscal origin of the San Sisto female monastery's estate and the various political interests of different actors in it that caused the substitution of the female community. During the research, I explored numerous Italian archives, such as the State Archives of Cremona and Piacenza and the Biblioteca Palatina of Parma, where I dealt with sources from various periods. Here, I had the chance to become well-versed in reading different types of handwriting and to become passionate about archival research.
It is due to the experience in the archives that, after graduating, I felt it was worthwhile to apply for the research assistant position in DiplomatiCon, even though the topics covered in the project differed in themes and time frame from those I had deepened for my dissertation. Nonetheless, I immediately found the main purpose of the research interesting: re-write a history of the diplomatic contacts between the Italian polities, the Crown of Aragon, and the Mamluk Sultanate according to the methodologies advocated by the Connected and the New Diplomatic History. What caught my attention the most was the intention to emphasize the points of contact rather than the ones of conflicts, challenging the historiography that sees these powers exclusively as competitors for religious, cultural, and trade reasons. I worked on the project as a Research Assistant from January 2023 to August 2023. During this period, I searched the archives of Modena and Mantua, looking for sources attesting to diplomatic relations and contacts of various kinds between the Sultanate of Egypt and Syria and the Marquises of Mantua and the Dukes of Ferrara. By searching multiple archival collections, according to the times dynastic, political, and trade networks, I found evidence of contacts, sometimes even unexpected, between the two Italian polities and the Sultan of Cairo and his functionaries.
The longer the research in the archives went on, the more I got attached to the archival exploration and the project's themes. For this reason, I also decided to apply for the position of PhD student once my task as a research assistant had come to an end. As a PhD student, I am now involved in Work Package 2, the aim of which is, on the one hand, to show how diplomatic relations among those Mediterranean powers were not only conducted on a state base but also involved different agents such as ambassadors, translators, merchants, pilgrims; and on the other to enlighten how these same agents contributed to weaving a pervasive network of diplomatic contacts. In so doing, the WP2 involves not only the ‘classic’ geographies, a network of diplomacy and archives often taken into account by historiography, such as the well-connected merchant cities of Genoa and Venice or powerful institutions like the Crown of Aragon or the city of Cairo, but it considers new ones as well, the so-called broader Iberic and Italian networks.
In particular, I will focus on the so-called broader Italian network, namely all those – so to say – Italian peripheric or inland areas, cities, and principalities (Lucca, Pisa, Siena, Mantua, Modena, Milan, etc.) that historiography often overlooked in their contacts with the East, in favor of major merchant cities like Venice. Indeed, during my archival research, I had the chance to grasp a little part of what seems to be a wide network of contacts and different types of diplomatic agents sent to Egypt and Syria. This network also involved those peripheric and inland cities. By shedding light on this side of the coin and by involving those ‘new’ geographies and sources of various tenors and kinds (instructions, letters, notarial records, etc.) I will enlighten unexplored paths and spaces of interplay between the broader Italian network and the Mamluks Sultanate. I will also show how exchanges among individuals of various backgrounds and from different geographic and political contexts originated diplomatic interactions and diplomacies. To do so, I will acquire knowledge about the origins, backgrounds, and social status of the agents that, from the Italian side, intertwined a relationship with the Mamluks: Who were those agents? Who was in touch with whom? How often did they maintain these diplomatic relations? How did they build their networks? What was their role, and how influential were they in those networks? I believe that these questions are a paramount step in understanding how the broader network cities used those more layered structures of diplomacy and informal agents to build diplomatic contacts with an Islamic state such as the Sultanate of Egypt and Syria.
To answer these questions, I will interweave two research methods: I will conduct a prosopographical exploration of the archival sources to acquire information about the identities, origins, and social status of the people involved in the diplomatic activities. I will also explore and relate sources of different tenor and provenance, in order to find through them evidence of contacts among the individuals. At the same time, it will be essential to use the collected data to comprehend how these people came into contact, how frequently, and what their roles were in those networks. In this case, I will benefit from the quantitative methods of the Social Network Analysis: by becoming well-versed in inferential statistics applied to SNA, I will be able to interpret the sources on a quantitative basis, which will allow me to graphically represent the social structures by using applications such as RStudio, a statistical package that allows to process data to obtain graphical representations.
My goal is to conduct my research in accordance with the principles of New Diplomatic History and Connected History, as the whole project aims to do. Indeed, as mentioned above, I will challenge the previous studies on diplomacy, particularly those that focus on broad-scale, state-to-state diplomatic interactions, switching the attention to the agents that contributed to weaving a pervasive network of diplomatic contacts. Moreover, I will include in my study not only new geographies but also their archives, documentation of different types, and studies about them that I will consider together with the historiography and documentation regarding the more popular and studied ones. I think that the approaches and methodologies mentioned above are pivotal to conducting research that aims to challenge the previous historiography on inter-religious contacts and diplomatic relations: indeed, by applying to my work the methodology promoted by New Diplomatic History and Connected History I will try to reinterpret the relationship between Muslim and Christian powers, according to a historiographic perspective that strives to highlight connections rather than conflicts, I will enlighten unexplored paths and spaces of interplays and I will contribute to outline a Connected History of the Mediterranean Area in the Medieval period.