Giacomo Mastrogregori
Hello everyone!
My name is Giacomo Mastrogregori, and I am one of the six PhD candidates in the DiplomatiCon project. I am based at the University of Antwerp, but my PhD is a joint project with the Institución Milá y Fontanals of Barcelona. My research revolves around the diplomatic interactions between the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluk Sultanate during the fifteenth century. However, before discussing my research, I would like to briefly introduce myself and how I started working for DiplomatiCon.
I grew up in Rome, completing my BA in History and obtaining an archivist diploma at the School of Archival Studies, Paleography, and Diplomatic at the State Archives of Rome. This training provided me with the stock-in-trade necessary to write my BA thesis, which analyzed the unpublished manuscript of an Italian knight of Malta active in the seventeenth century. This research allowed me to explore the history of the early modern Mediterranean, thus increasing my knowledge of an area that was – and still is – often at the core of political debates. As a young activist in student unions and other political collectives, I started understanding how important history and historical narratives are to inform our present conceptions and beliefs. In the case of the Mediterranean, I could realize how current narrations often relied on ideas of the region as historically divided rather than connected. Acknowledging this truly motivated me to move on with my studies and pursue becoming a historian one day.
In 2020, I moved to the Netherlands to study Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. Studying global history and applying this framework to understand the history of European colonialism truly showed me the importance of stepping out of Eurocentric perspectives to question mainstream narratives of Western supremacy and develop more inclusive historical narrations. In Leiden, I became interested in slavery studies and the history of European colonial empires, focusing on their connections with early modern Italian states and society. For this reason, in my MA thesis, I investigated how the missionary activities conducted by a group of Italian Capuchins in seventeenth-century Congo and Angola contributed to maintaining Portuguese colonial rule in the region. During the Master's, I also had the opportunity to increase my knowledge of the Digital Humanities by working for two different projects as an intern and a research assistant.
Source: Tavola Strozzi, view of the city of Naples in Italy from the sea, 1470. Museo di San Martino, Naples, Italy.
From this brief outline of my academic training, the reader can imagine that, despite some previous experience in the world of Digital Humanities, entering the DiplomatiCon project represented quite a shift for me, especially considering my subjects and areas of expertise. Despite this, I felt so engaged with the project that I decided to apply for three of the six PhD positions available! Besides the idea of working on a large international research project, I particularly liked DiplomatiCon's clear stance on the need for a more inclusive historiography of the Mediterranean region. Given my previous experience as a student and young researcher, I felt very happy when I received news that I was headed to Antwerp to take part in this project.
Within DiplomatiCon, I became part of the work package entitled "Mapping Mediterranean Diplomacy". This part of the project intends to highlight all the locations and territories where diplomacy was practiced and performed. The main idea behind this research is that diplomacy, rather than being an activity that invested only in the courts of key political centers, was constituted of several activities taking place in multiple locations. A diplomatic mission's success required mobilizing a variety of people for activities such as information gathering, preparing the voyage, and establishing convenient contacts abroad to ensure the mission could proceed as smoothly as possible along the way and at the final destination. Let's consider this broad array of activities as being crucial for successful diplomacy. Then, it becomes not irrelevant to investigate the different locations where they were taking place, which we may call diplomatic spaces. Either directly or indirectly, these spaces often constituted favorable environments for Christian-Muslim contacts and exchanges. In the field of Mamluk diplomacy with European Christian powers, however, scholars generally focused on the diplomatic negotiations unfolding in the major political centers of the Sultanate, Alexandria, and Cairo. As of today, the interactions taking place beyond the gates of those cities, in locations considered peripheric from a diplomatic point of view, mostly remain unknown.
My research addresses this gap in the literature by considering the diplomatic space of the Crown of Aragon in the fifteenth-century Mediterranean in relation to the Mamluk Sultanate. The Crown and the Italian states represented one of the best-documented and most active polities in the Late Medieval Mediterranean. Catalan merchants, in particular, played a crucial role in the so-called Levant trade that the Europeans conducted with political powers like the Mamluk Sultanate, stretching from nowadays Egypt to Syria, which controlled a great part of the spice trade from the East. Moreover, in the fifteenth century, Catalan traders were sustained by a dynasty that managed to gain control over the main Mediterranean islands – the Balearics, Malta, Sardinia, and Sicily – and, in the second half of the Quattrocento, the kingdom of Naples. Political control over these territories in the middle of the Mediterranean significantly increased the communication and exchange between the Iberian kingdom and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Despite these considerations, the majority of the studies concerning diplomatic contacts between the Crown and the Mamluks focused on the fourteenth century. In traditonal historiography, this period is considered the golden age of Aragonese expansion in the Mediterranean and, thus, the densest of contacts with Muslim powers. The fifteenth century, on the contrary, is often perceived by historians as a period of social and economic decline. In this century, economic crisis and political instability dramatically reduced Catalan prominence in the Mediterranean and its diplomatic activities in the region. Nevertheless, this period also witnessed the consolidation of the Crown's political power in the Italian territories, particularly under King Alphonse the Magnanimous (1396-1458), who even moved the kingdom's capital to Naples. Moreover, the decline of important centers like Barcelona did not imply the end of Catalan presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, nor exclude the emergence of other commercial hubs within the Aragonese sphere, like Valencia or Naples.
No comprehensive study of fifteenth-century diplomatic relations of the Crown's territories with the Mamluk Sultanate exists to this date. Probably, this was also the result of the historiography on the territories included in the Crown of Aragon, which had been generally studied separately, often dividing the Italian territories from the Iberian ones. This resulted in several streams of literature and very few attempts to connect the whole Aragonese space and consider the relationship of the different territories with the center of power, in spite of ongoing debates on whether or not the Crown could be regarded as a "Mediterranean empire".
To address these issues, I want to consider fifteenth-century Aragonese space in its entirety – and specificities – from the point of view of the diplomatic contacts with the Mamluk Sultanate. The main goal of this research is to understand how the extensive presence of the Aragonese in the Mediterranean, both in territories controlled by the Crown and outside of them, contributed to the diplomatic encounter with the Mamluks during the fifteenth century. Revealing whether or not these different territories interacted with the Eastern Mediterranean according to the political agenda of the Crown will be the main challenge. Can we speak of a single Aragonese diplomatic space, or shall we talk of multiple spaces? Follow my journey with DiplomatiCon to find out the answers to these questions!