Meet the Team!

When Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, a few years ago now, wrote to me asking me if I was interested in participating with them and Roser Salicrú I Lluch to a project on the interconnected story of diplomatic, political, and economic contacts between the Italian polities, the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluk Sultanate, I did not hesitate for a moment. Not only the company was good, but the idea looked great since the beginning. At the time, I was working on Italian diplomacy in the early Renaissance, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable with the idea that the whole thing could be limited to inter-peninsular or even inter-European contacts. The late medieval Italian system was, of course, a very peculiar one: made by many polities and powers involved in a tight network of communication and conflict in which everyone spoke and most of all wrote in the same language, it could be seen as a self-sufficient one. Moreover, also thanks to the particularly rich landscape of its sources, Italy was traditionally linked to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century idea of the late medieval emergence of permanent embassies and formal ambassadors: the Venetians, the Milanese, the Florentines, the Genoese, both merchants and politicians, and the extremely rich records (from the diplomatic correspondence to the final relations) that are preserved in the Italian archives all were considered the building blocks of the so-called ‘birth of modern diplomacy’.

But of course, Italy was not a self-sufficient system, and we are no longer talking about the origin of a ‘modern diplomacy’ that looks increasingly unable to explain the complexity of late medieval (or even early modern) diplomacy. On one hand, since the early Middle Ages, the Italian powers were open – willingly or not – to foreign influences, both peaceful and agressive: from the Lombards to the Byzantines, from the Carolingians to the Normans, from the Swabian to the Angevins and the Aragonese, the French and the Spanish, Italy has always been traversed and changed by ‘other’ cultures (as most of Europe, actually…). The Italian peninsula was also, as it still is, a country with hundreds or even thousands of miles of coastlines, projected out into the Mediterranean, and deeply linked to its cultures since the antiquity. On the other, my own research, together with many others’, was telling me that diplomacy was a much more flexible and complex practice than the simple model of a ‘modern diplomacy’ born during the Renaissance from a chaotic Middle Ages let us suppose, and that there were no closed systems in it. The appeal of looking beyond my own comfort zone was getting increasingly strong.

Source: Archivio di Stato di Mantova, Archivio Gonzaga, b. 86.17

I am a political scholar and I specialised on the Italian system of powers: the structure and political agency of the different polities, their cultural and political languages and ruling practices, their social features have always been my research field since my University years at the Scuola Normale in Pisa, and then in Milan. Some bizarre life choices (such as marrying a physicist who took me first to Switzerland, then to Scotland, with several spells in France) gave me the opportunity of meeting many different university environments and many lovely friends in the meanwhile. Therefore, broadening my experience has become a defining feature of my intellectual journey; and the idea of getting on board of the DiplomatiCon project was too good to be abandoned.

In DiplomatiCon, my contribution is to provide a scholarly background to the research of the PhDs working on Italy from many angles (Evelina del Mercato and Gianluca Ratti in Antwerp and Michele Argentini in Liège) and to work and learn from all the others: the Mamluk and Catalan specialists among us (Frédéric Bauden, Malika Dekkiche, Roser Salicrú, and the PhDs, Marta Manso Rubio, Queralt Penedès Fradera and Giacomo Mastrogregori) and those who not only are expert of medieval Mediterranean history but also know how to put it into a sophisticated system of Social and Spatial Networks analysis through the DiplomatiCon Database (our colleague Iason Jongepier and our postdocs, Margo Buelens-Terryn, Davor Salihovic, and Bogdan Smarandache). As for myself, I’m starting to connect my personal research with all the new information that comes from the archival systematic survey conducted by the PhDs students and thinking in a new way about information gathering and informal contacts in the context of a pioneering diplomacy such as the one with the Mamluk Sultanate. The interconnectedness of the Mediterranean political and economic society starts to emerge in a way that was, at least for me, only imaginable: now it becomes real.

One more thing: in this adventure, I’m being exposed to the intricate and fascinating world of the Digital Humanities. This is something I’m definitely not familiar with, and it is not easy. However, the construction of a multilayered database (thanks to an extremely interesting dialogue with Laurent Simon) and its use as producer of Social Network Analysis and Spatial Network analysis have been challenging and illuminating at the same time. I’m on a learning path, and I have great expectations about the final results of this journey.

Source: Archivio di Stato di Torino, Trattati diversi, mazzo 1

I am one of the newest members at DiplomatiCon (EOS project n° 40007541), having joined the team as a postdoc last October 2023. I am very pleased to have joined this project, in part because its emphasis on documents and the modalities of diplomacy aligns very closely with my own interests. Being here has provided a wonderful opportunity for meeting colleagues working on diplomatic activity across the medieval Mediterranean from multiple perspectives. It has also provided a great opportunity for exploring later Mamlūk sources.

About me: prior to joining DiplomatiCon, I was based in Paris at the équipe “Islam Médiéval” of the Unite Mixte de Recherche (UMR) 8167 Orient et Méditerranée, where I began my first postdoc under the supervision of Sylvie Denoix (CNRS, Équipe “Islam Mediéval”). During my two years there, I further developed my research on negotiations between Christian and Muslim rulers aimed at ensuring the protection of juridical minorities in each other’s territories. Additionally, I supported the project Les mots de la paix/Terminology of Peace in collaboration with the project director and co-founder, Sylvie Denoix.

I completed my doctoral dissertation at the Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of Toronto, in 2019, under the co-supervision of Mark Meyerson and Linda Northrup. In my doctoral research, I explored the shared conventions and discourses through which Christian and Muslim sovereigns in the Eastern Mediterranean advocated for the protection of their co-religionists living beyond their own territories from the 7^th to the 13^th century. Up to now, I have focused mainly on the Ayyūbid-early Mamlūk period (roughly 1174–1382), seeking evidence for the evolution of diplomatic protocols and practices and the impact of diplomatic agreements on daily life.

For the DiplomatiCon project, I am carrying out several tasks under the supervision of Frédéric Bauden, while based at the University of Liège:

I am supporting the next stages in the development of the project’s database in coordination with Laurent Simon and Davor Salihović, and in collaboration with other team members specializing in Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Their expertise has shaped my understanding of the technical aspects of building a database and how the DiplomatiCon database might be used in research projects. Getting a hang of the database’s potential functionality and the complexity of data entry and management has made for an exciting challenge!

Like the research assistants, doctoral students, and two other postdocs in the project, I am also collecting and entering data for the database. Currently, I am scanning modern editions of texts composed in the Mamlūk period (1250–1517), comprising chronicles, regnal biographies, and chancery manuals for any evidence of diplomatic contact between representatives of the Cairo Sultanate, Italian polities, and the Crown of Aragon. I am still building my Arabic vocabulary, but my current knowledge of the language is adequate for quickly detecting the topics that appear throughout these works.

As I flip through these editions, I come across references and accounts dealing with administrative appointments, military campaigns, calamities and natural disasters, the conditions of Christians and Jews, the lives and legacies of eminent leaders and scholars, and poetry citations. Indices are useful for finding references, but these are not always complete so it is important to check these editions page by page. After a bit of practice, it becomes easy enough to spot Arabic umbrella terms for Western Christians, like al-Faranj (“the Franks”), at a glance. If I find any such references, then I undertake a close reading of the section in question to determine if the encounter described is relevant to the project.

The Mamlūk period marked a significant increase in the production of literature, so we have far more numerous historical sources and records at our disposal compared to the earlier Ayyūbid or Fāṭimid periods. Yet, despite this efflorescence of literature and diplomatic activity, I have found only two references to Mamlūk-Italian-Aragonese negotiations in the seven sources I have hitherto perused. Some authors writing in the Mamlūk period were simply not interested in Western embassies. However, a lack of records does not necessarily reflect a lack of contact. We know from many other sources and studies that the sultans of Egypt and Syria negotiated widely and maintained diplomatic relations with their neighbors as well as their more distant counterparts across Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Some authors writing in the Mamlūk period [1250–1517] were simply not interested in Western embassies. However, a lack of records does not necessarily reflect a lack of contact.

Whereas some sources offer sparse details on diplomatic encounters, many of the remaining thirty-three Arabic sources I have yet to peruse are known to contain abundant references to negotiations, and many even include copies of agreements. I am confident that the project will be flooded with records from the Mamlūk side, as it currently abounds in Central and Western Mediterranean records.

Within the framework of the project, I am also further developing my own research on legal frameworks for medieval diplomatic agreements. In particular, I am relating juridical discussions on the legal status of Western Christians entering Islamic territories under safe conduct to clauses protecting them found in diplomatic agreements. An example of such a clause can be seen in an agreement negotiated by the Mamlūk sultan, Baybars (r. 1260–1277), and the Hospitaller Order in 665/1267:

It is incumbent for merchants, wayfarers, and those who arrive in and return from both sides to remain safe from the Islamic side and from the Frankish and Syrian Christian side in the territories to which this truce applies; this safety extends to their persons, possessions, animals, and all that pertains to them.

To investigate this connection between legal discourses and diplomatic agreements, I am incorporating the study of legal and chancery manuals that circulated in the Mamlūk period. Many of these texts include references to amān, a loosely defined concept of safe passage. I am analyzing these alongside the specific clauses found across the corpus of Mamlūk-period agreements to determine how the latter might have been informed by juridical discussions, or at least how those charged with drafting agreements participated in a shared legal milieu. In this regard, understanding the transmission of legal and diplomatic knowledge at the Mamlūk court and the training of chancery scribes is essential to my research.

Finally, I am also available as a resource for three of the project’s doctoral students, Michele Argentini, Queralt Penedès Fradera, and Marta Manso Rubio, to aid with technical issues involving the entry of data into the project’s database and, as needed, to provide recommendations for readings and research and writing support. I see this role as an opportunity for fruitful intellectual exchange as Michele, Queralt, and Marta always have interesting insights into Aragonese and Venetian diplomatic practices to offer. That’s all from me for now. Peace out! ✌

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.

For someone who wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Frédéric Bauden on the diplomatic relations between the Mamluk sultanate and Florence and who was trained in the field of Mamluk Diplomatics by reading the works of Malika Dekkiche, DiplomatiCon can only be the best project to join.

My interest in Near Eastern studies had started some years before, during my Bachelor’s (University of Turin) and Master’s (University of Pisa) studies. At that time, I took my first steps into medieval documents in Arabic, studying this language at the University of Damascus and writing a final thesis on a Mamluk scroll (20 meters long!) kept at the Florentine State Archives. As a student of a degree in European History, I became interested in studying the exchanges between the two shores of the Mediterranean.

After completing my Master’s degree, I did my PhD at the Universities of Liège and Aix-Marseille, with a research stay at the University of Chicago. Somehow, the history of my PhD ran parallel to building the academic and friendly relationships that led to the creation of DiplomatiCon. Thanks to another project, the i‐LINK0977 (The diplomatic exchanges between Islamic Mediterranean powers and Christian European powers in the Middle Ages), funded by the CSIC (Spain) in collaboration with the two universities where I did my doctorate, I could meet Roser Salicrú i Lluch, who is also one of the PIs of DiplomatiCon. This collaboration continued in 2018-2020, when I carried out postdoctoral research at the Institució Milà i Fontanals in Barcelona, learning a lot about the relations between the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluks. Right at the end of my PhD, I also met another PI of the project, Isabella Lazzarini, when she visited the University of Liège as a member of my thesis committee. Her works introduced me to the world of the New Diplomatic History.  

After discussing my thesis, I started my postdoctoral career at the University of Bonn, a path I have not left since… At the Anne Marie Schimmel Kolleg of Bonn, I found myself in an environment animated by professors and researchers specializing in different aspects of the Mamluk sultanate. For the first time, I identified myself as a “Mamlukist”, as people around me used to say. My research as a Mamlukist specializing in the relations between Cairo and Christian powers continued by working for the CSIC in Barcelona, the University of Liège, and the University of Munich. During those years, I studied diplomacy's symbolic and practical aspects between the sultanate and several European powers. In particular, I focused on concepts such as jihād, or the dichotomy between dār al-Islām (abode of Islam) and dār al-ḥarb (abode of war) that are still evoked today by the mass media in representing the relationship between Muslims and Christians (often in a too simplistic way!). With a perspective on the present, I therefore try to understand what principles made diplomatic and interreligious dialogue possible in the late medieval period.

My role as a postdoc within DiplomatiCon is to learn a lot from the PIs and the other team members, especially in the field of Digital Humanities. Then, I try to share my research experience with the members, providing a comparative perspective with powers that DiplomatiCon does not directly deal with, such as the Kingdom of France, the Republic of Florence, and the Military orders.

Here, I can finally see the northern and southeastern shores of the Mediterranean connected!

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I probably would have pursued my study in journalism or political sciences… but that was the plan before my bag and my Master thesis on the Battle of the Camel was stolen… Sometimes some dramas can lead to great things! Instead, I rewrote my thesis in a much better way than the first one, and I went to Cairo… And from there everything changed!

This was the start of a long adventure leading me from the Université de Liège, to the IFAO in Cairo, the University of Chicago, the University of Ghent and finally the University of Antwerp. Along the way, I was introduced to Mamluk Sultanate and Mamluk documents, I learned about the intricacies of the Cairene chancery. I discovered many ways to communicate, and the power of blank spaces on a sheet of paper.  But even more importantly, I became fascinated by the shared culture of interaction throughout the Islamicate World, from India to Mecca, from Iraq to Maghrib, from Anatolia to Cairo.

During my Ph.D. years in Cairo, I truly developed a passion for this city. It was great to be there while working on the Mamluk Sultanate and to be able to wander through the streets of Islamic Cairo and enjoy the monumentality of Mamluk architecture…so many buildings still mentioned in our sources that may have hosted foreign envoys to the Mamluk capital.

Though at the time, I was mostly interested in the documents involved in the exchanges rather than the people. My Ph.D. thesis, Le Caire, carrefour des ambassades (defended in 2011 at the university of Liège) indeed concentrated on the chancery practice and the establishment of a manual of diplomatics aimed at a better understanding of official correspondences in the 15^th century Mamluk Cairo. Through my research I was able to highlight the complexity of diplomatic communication and to reveal how chancery rules provided a reader to diplomatic relations – and  hierarchies – this through the close study of internal and external features of the documents. Those rules have further helped me reevaluating the relations between the Mamluk Sultanate, the Timurids, the Qara Qoyunlu and Qaramanids; this beyond the mere message of the letters they were exchanging.

Ever since, however, I have increasingly turned my attention to the context of the exchange of letters and therefore to the field of diplomacy. A first step in this process was to get a better sense of the sultanate’s various type of exchanges. This was accomplished through the organization of a great conference hold in Liège in 2012 and that resulted in the publication of reference volume on the topic. Mamluk Cairo, a crossroad for Embassies (2019), which I edited with Frédéric Bauden, is the consecration of this effort. It gathers 28 contributions by specialists of the various powers and polities in contact with Cairo during the period of the sultanate. Two aspects surprised me greatly at the time, namely the lack of further reflection on the concept of diplomacy in the premodern Islamic context and the bias within the field imposed by the so-called Islamic conception of the world (dār al-islām/dār al-ḥarb).

All my academic efforts of the last decade have concentrated on these two aspects. As part of the first, I have increasingly addressed the question of space and Islamic basis attached to the practice of diplomacy in my research. My forthcoming volume A History of Diplomacy, Spatiality, and Islamic Ideals (Routledge, 2024) is the result of a workshop I have organized in 2021 and present six chapters on the themes of Spatiality throughout the Islamicate world – from Andalus to Baghdad – in the longue durée – from 13^th to 19^th century. Concerning the second aspect, my monograph A World of Realms, Kings and Men. A History of Mamluk Diplomacy in the 15^th century (to be published by EUP) presents a study of intra-Muslim diplomacy in the 15^th century that concentrates on the discursive registers of political elite communication and exchanges. 

My research has so far concentrated on intra-Muslim contacts in the Eastern part of the Islamicate world (Egypt/Syria; Anatolia; Iraq/Iran; Hijaz and India). But to get the full picture, it became more and more clear to that I could not avoid the Mediterranean any longer, nor the contacts that took place between the Mamluk sultanate the Latin Christian mercantile powers… And from this observation is born DiplomatiCon.

My first idea of DiplomatiCon was in fact much less ambitious, and merely aimed to reevaluate the diplomatic contacts between the Mamluks and Venice and possibly Genoa against the dār al-islām/dār al-ḥarb background, and this through the study of the agents involved in the exchanges and their networks, and the working methods. I was also particularly interested in the question of diplomatic space(s) and geographies that were involved in those contacts. When the EOS call for application came out at the end of 2020, it seemed to be a good opportunity to give DiplomatiCon some concrete— collaborative —shape.

EOS research project is a Belgian program that encourages Flemish and French-speaking institutions’ collaboration. It is thus logically that I contacted Frédéric Bauden at the University of Liège, who agreed to collaborate as expert of Mamluk documents. And when it appears that EOS also allowed international partners, two names directly came out as obvious partners: Isabella Lazzarini from the University of Torino and Bologna as expert of Italian diplomacy and Roser Salicrú from the CSIC in Barcelona, as specialist of the Crown of Aragon and Western Mediterranean Diplomacy. Thanks to them, the project thus further developed as to include both the various Italian polities, such as Venice and the Northern principalities, and the Crown of Aragon. As for the specific methodological basis of the project, it is influenced by the New Diplomatic History, the Connected Histories and the Digital Humanities— a last expertise we were still lacking, until my colleague in Antwerp, Iason Jongepier, GIS specialist, accepted to join the team.

Beyond bridging my own family history, DiplomatiCon represents many opportunities for me to test various assumptions concerning Islamic and Mamluk diplomatic history but also the place of the Mamluk sultanate in Mediterranean history. The switch of focus from the state-level and the common narrative for example will allow to bring some nuances to the antagonist story of the contact between Latin Europe and the Islamic World that has prevailed especially through the study of diplomatic networks across the Mediterranean. I am particularly interested in the Mamluk networks outside Cairo and Alexandria. The mapping of those networks and their intersections may also contribute to the various discussion within Mediterranean history concerning certain monopolies there, and more importantly it may help reviewing the place of the Mamluk sultanate within the Mediterranean basin. Last but not least, I am also particularly interested in seeking and highlighting various geographies of power that were produced throughout contacts in the Mediterranean.

Within the project I am in charge of the Mamluk Diplomacy. I will concentrate on its redefinition throughout the study of its networks and geographies. But next to my own research, I am also (co)-supervising a great team in Antwerp working on the Broader Italian Diplomatic Network (Evelina Del Mercato, PhD), Mapping Italian Diplomacy (Gianluca Ratti, PhD), Mapping the Iberian Diplomacy (Giacomo Mastrogregori, PhD), Dalmatia/Ottoman borders dynamic (Davor Salihovic, PostDoc) and Mediterranean Geography (Margo Buelens-Terryn, PostDoc).

I have been fascinated by the Islamic world for as long as I can remember. The fact that Egypt and Turkey were the first non-European countries I visited when I was a child surely had something to do with it: the exoticism of their culture, the intricacies of their art, and their long history left their mark on me and fuelled that necessity of knowing more.

So, when I entered university, as part of my Bachelor’s degree in Humanities at Pompeu Fabra University (2006-2011), I took several courses on the History of Islam, Medieval Iberia and the Coexistence of the Three Religions, and the History of the Silk Route, since they were my main fields of interest. At the same time, I studied the Arabic language for three years as a complement to my Undergraduate studies, firstly in the Official Language School in Barcelona and afterward at King’s College London (2008-2009), during my Erasmus stay, with a short study stay in a language school in Marrakech, where I could experience the Arabic language in everyday life.

It was during my Master’s degree in Chinese Studies at Pompeu Fabra University (2011-2014) that I better understood the role of the Arabs in the development of the Silk Route, along with exploring the characteristics of medieval Islamic travel literature with my MA Dissertation. Moreover, thanks to a six-month stay at Beijing Foreign Studies University (2013), I could travel to Xi’an and visit the Muslim Quartier that still exists nowadays. I remember as if it were yesterday how astonished I was to enter the Great Mosque of Xi’an, a marvellous example of the adaptation of the Islamic religion to Chinese architecture!

However, it was thanks to completing a Master’s degree in Medieval Cultures at University of Barcelona (2013-2015) that I finally came into contact with the topic of Medieval Diplomacy between Christian and Muslim powers, especially with my MA Dissertation. Under the supervision of Roser Salicrú i Lluch, I analysed the treaties signed between the Crown of Aragon and the Muslim sultanates of the Western Mediterranean between 1336 and 1345. Conducting this study, which led to the start of a PhD, allowed me to acquire a deep understanding of the sources preserved in the Archives of the Crown of Aragon (ACA), as well as the historiographical background and skills necessary to analyse the nature of the diplomatic contacts established between those Christian and Muslim powers. Furthermore, it enabled me to participate in several projects that had a major impact on my formation, especially in the case of the International Research Project “The diplomatic exchanges between Islamic Mediterranean powers and Christian European cities in the Middle Ages: new methods for the analysis of documents” (i-LINK2014-0977), coordinated by Roser Salicrú i Lluch and funded by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), with the participation of the University of Barcelona (Mercè Viladrich), the University of Liège (Frédéric Bauden, Élise Franssen) and the MMSH-Aix-Marseille University (Mohamed Ouerfelli).

For these reasons, when I heard about the DiplomatiCon project, I could not help but be willing to participate! I first joined the project as a Research Assistant from February to August 2023, as part of the group in charge of surveying the Archives of the Crown of Aragon, the largest and most important documentary repository for the diplomatic contacts between the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluks, to discover still unknown documentary evidence and systematically organise it in a tailor-made database created for the project. Due to my previous experience in that archive, under the supervision of Roser Salicrú i Lluch, I coordinated the work of the other research assistants while examining the Royal Letters from James I (1213-1276), Peter III [IV] (1336-1387) and a group of letters from the reign of James II (1291-1327), as well as several chancery records preserved from the reign of Peter III [IV] (1336-1387), the most prolific king in terms of chancery records (with over 1.200 volumes!).

From September 2023, I am based at the University of Liège as a PhD student under the supervision of Frédéric Bauden and Roser Salicrú i Lluch, taking part in the Work Package 4 of the DiplomatiCon project, devoted to the study of translating culture. Indeed, under the project’s framework, my thesis aims to focus on the translators, interpreters, and brokers involved in the diplomatic exchanges between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Crown of Aragon, as well as in the translating process comprised of those contacts and its implications and significance, both in linguistic and cultural terms. Nevertheless, keeping in mind the long duration of these contacts, together with the vast amount of documentation preserved in the Archives of the Crown of Aragon, it will concentrate mostly on the period between the reigns of James II and Peter III the Ceremonious (1291-1387), since it seems to be the most prolific time in terms of diplomatic relations between both powers. It can be useful to understand how the foundations of these relations were laid.

It will pay attention to how these translating agents appear in the documentary sources, in terms of social and work categories, to establish a sort of terminological categorisation, and it will strive to conduct a prosopographic survey, with the identities, origins, social environments and networks of these translating agents at the centre of the analysis. Moreover, it will engage in an innovative approach with the study of the translating process, which will focus not only on the linguistic terms of these translations but also on the cultural transposition implied in those contacts and the social and legal horizons they had to deal with. To this extent, it will deal with unofficial records and narrative sources, which can offer a more exhaustive comprehension of the various stages of these translating processes.

Ultimately, it will strive to shed light upon the role that translators, interpreters, and brokers played in the configuration and development of the diplomatic exchanges between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Crown of Aragon in the context of the Late Medieval Mediterranean. In this sense, the continuous collaboration with my colleagues Evelina del Mercato, Gianluca Ratti, Michele Argentini, and, especially, Giacomo Mastrogregori and Queralt Penedès Fradera, who are also working in the context of the Crown of Aragon, is essential to achieve a more comprehensive, articulated and realistic picture of the diplomatic exchanges between Christian and Muslim powers in the Medieval Mediterranean. 

I am Davor Salihović. This particular summary of my profile has of course already been written, word for word. It sits in several different volumes of Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel, none of which can be directly cited, at least not in these few introductory words, since each new character changes the location of the text in the hexagons of the library. What follows, however, can be found quite easily, as parts of the text with which I continue are apparently located on page 274 of Volume 18 located on Shelf 3 on Wall 2 of Hexagon 00fihytwvwe17… and page 55 of Volume 28 on Shelf 5 on Wall 1 of Hexagon 0tb15dtif5x2… of Borges’s library.  This is clearly but one of many that I or chance alone may have put together, in any case contingent on a great many things. And what these things comprise is as good a question as any, one that is sure to be answered in the best possible way by the scientific method. I have been interested in posing such questions and finding answers about the world we found ourselves in from a young age, about as many phenomena as one encounters and gets baffled by at that time. This being practically everything, I remain absorbed in the fascinating world of physics, astrophysics, electrical engineering, and evolutionary biology, the world of mathematics, probabilities, and statistics. All of these offer either tools or theories, or indeed both, that one can use to share in or improve upon the interpretation of the intricacies of the universe, but what these books of whatever particular shelves of Borges’ Library have me most involved with is history, the most intimate of all human endeavours in finding answers about ourselves and our world. Intimate, indeed, as one is bound to query the past to understand the present through musings and methods that only past-dependent present may have furnished. History therefore seems to be as good a mirror as any to reflect not only what we have learned about our universe, but how and what we have hoped to learn about it and what became of this hope.

In short, then, I am a historian by trade. As a historian, I have always tended to incorporate at least some of my interests in other sciences into my research, and have so regularly worked with what may be characterized as quantitative or, particularly nowadays, computational or digital history. My first undertakings in serious research had to do with pre-modern demographics, demographic transitions, marriage and birth patterns in pre-industrial and early industrial communities. What I found most rewarding and interesting at the time, though, was going beyond the traditional methods of demographic history, building networks of godparenthood of a small commune in 19^th-century Istria and creating models that explain these networks. From then on I delved deeper into such interdisciplinary approaches and the application of computational methods in my research. Following my studies in Croatia, I studied medieval history in Budapest and was awarded my PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Prof Nora Berend. During this time, my primary focus has shifted towards the medieval history of South-East Europe, particularly the frontiers and frontier societies at the time of Ottoman conquests in the fifteenth century. In both my MA and PhD theses and most of my published work, I try to explore the political, cultural, and social makeup of the areas of the Western Balkans contiguous with areas of recent Ottoman conquests. In exploring the interaction between the politics of the local populations, the Ottoman Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, and the Republic of Venice, I try to understand how societies adapted to new circumstances in political, demographic, cultural or other ways, what emergent phenomena resulted from these adaptations and how they came about. The theses of my PhD dissertation largely rely on the spatial history of these regions, that is on the use of GIS and spatial analyses to outline the structure and understand the purpose of networks of frontier castles. Unsurprisingly, my work in this area has taken me to the archives all over the Balkans, Italy, and Central Europe, allowing me to indulge my interest in source editing.

I have applied further quantitative, particularly statistical methods in my research on medieval inquisitions and systems of control over religious dissidents. As a member of the DISSINET research project hosted at Masaryk University, together with my colleagues, I explored the spatial distribution of Waldensianism and other such movements in medieval northern Italy, and especially the patterns of denunciations, the establishment of social control through dynamic interactions between the institutions and the populace, and the sex-based peculiarities of inquisitorial procedures. In addition to spatial analyses, this research relies first and foremost on techniques of social network analysis and pioneering inferential statistics for network data.

Illustration: The network of correspondence and negotiations about peace between Venice, Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire during the 1460s. This visualization highlights those individuals or institutions that occupied prominent roles in diplomatic exchanges. It suggests that mediators played a pivotal role and hints at how space as well as latent personal or political networks influenced the flow of information.

I continue in a similar vein in DiplomatiCon. Whereas methodologically my work continues to rely on the application of spatial analysis, statistics, and social network analysis, substantively it builds on my previous work on the history of diplomatic or other sorts of relations, contacts, exchanges, and adaptations across the confinium multiplex of the late-medieval Italian-Central European-Balkan-Ottoman context. By examining the dynamics of networks of cross-border exchange and the spaces that it required and built, I hope to shed more light on the emergent phenomena that eventually came to characterize the frontier and near-frontier societies. This encompasses not only those who inhabited the frontiers but those who reacted at a distance, too, as naturally the coping mechanisms of the locals and the coping politics of the distant centres influenced each other in a runaway positive feedback, one that was often in the hands of those ‘in the field’, as it were. In that sense, I aim to extend the set of methods that one might call upon in investigating these phenomena, by finding inspiration in the corpus of work on complex systems and the recent developments in that field. Being an in-house specialist on statistics and social network analysis of sorts, I also hope to collaborate with my colleagues in the team, offering whatever help I may in these matters.

The probability that this text above has come about by pure chance is roughly 1/26⁶³⁸⁰ , which is so infinitesimally small that it is practically zero. The famous monkey sitting at a typewriter (and understanding, if not speaking, just enough English to compile this) would indeed therefore require infinite time to write it. Although it may have seemed as long to me, I managed to accomplish this in slightly less time, allowing myself to surmise that there may well be something there that brought just the right lexicon to my mind, these and not some other grammar, or tenses, or stylistic peculiarities. This, of course, is my fascination with the kind of history DiplomatiCon strives to investigate, one that I find far more intimate than a random person might. Just imagine then the probability of finding a similarly inclined group of people.

Two years ago, Roser Salicrú i Lluch contacted me about the DiplomatiCon project. I was automatically interested in it because it gave me the opportunity to work with colleagues on an important and interesting project about diplomatic activity in the Mediterranean, which was and is a field that aligns perfectly with my interests. Moreover, I was looking forward to focusing on the research world.

After finishing my bachelor’s degree in Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, I enrolled for a master’s degree in Management of Cultural Heritage. I interned at the Catalan Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (ICRPC-CERCA), a research institute created by the Generalitat de Catalunya and Universitat de Girona (UdG). While doing the internship in which I had the chance to research in different areas related to modern history and cultural heritage, I realized that what I enjoyed the most was research and that I wanted to focus my career on it. 

Before starting my PhD position at DiplomatiCon, I had already been working on the project as a research assistant. From February 2023 until August 2023, I spent seven months in the Arxiu de la Corona d’Aragó (ACA) in Barcelona along with Alvit Martínez Civit, Eudald Blanché Coll, Adrián Arjona, and Marta Manso Rubio intending to identify unpublished archival material relevant to the project, that is diplomatic relationships between the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluk Sultanate, and to document and record basic information about these documents in the DiplomatiCon Database.

As a PhD, I am based in the Université de Liège under the supervision of Frédéric Bauden, along with Marta Manso Rubio, Michele Argentini, and postdoc Bodgan Smarandache. However, I will be in Barcelona to pursue the archival word needed for my thesis. Under the DiplomatiCon framework, the thesis aims to work on the actors and agents who handled the relations between the Crown of Aragon and Mamluk Egypt. It will concentrate on the 14^th century, specifically on James II’s reign (1291-1327), although the gaze will be wider and spread from the end of the 13^th century to the end of the 15^th century. Focusing on this period, during which the sources are richer and the contacts seem to have been deeper, will allow us to achieve the PhD’s goals better and contribute to the DiplomatiCon project’s global results.

Focusing on the actors and agents in the contacts during the 14^th century will allow us to understand the connections between both worlds better and demonstrate that the Mediterranean’s diplomatic relationships went beyond religious differences. The main goal is to identify the network of actors and agents who performed diplomatic relations on both sides of the Mediterranean and to understand how they were organized, the role they developed, and the way they were addressed to others.

To investigate the most relevant actors and agents of the diplomatic contacts between the Crown of Aragon and the Mamluk Sultanate in the medieval Mediterranean, I am using, and I will use during the following years, a variety of sources: royal letters (Archive of the Crown of Aragon), chancery registers (Archive of the Crown of Aragon): Sigili secreti, Curie, Diversorum, Legationum, Regum Sarracenorum, Guerre Sarracenorum, etc., Historic Archives of the City of Barcelona, Notarial Archives of Barcelona, private documents, travel and pilgrimage accounts, merchant guides and diaries, chronicles, other narrative sources.

Finally, being part of a collective and collaborative project, my PhD and research will benefit from the results of the other PhDs involved, both in Liège and Antwerp, and simultaneously take advantage of them. All PhDs are in contact, and we try to help each other by recommending bibliography and giving support on any matter. So, I am enjoying working with my wonderful PhD colleagues: Evelina del Mercato, Giacomo Mastrogregori, Gianluca Ratti, Marta Manso, and Michele Argentini.

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!

When one is asked to write a piece to present oneself, one is usually tempted to start from the beginning; but one is also told that readers need to be engaged and reading that I am soon to be 29 or that I have a cat is hardly engaging. So, I will begin from the end, which means explaining my role in DiplomatiCon. Now, this project is large and multifaceted and it was born with the non-trivial task of confronting once and for all the idea of a very defined and continuous Christian-Islamic divide in the late Middle Ages, theorising the existence of a consolidated but informal network of people that allowed frequent and non-occasional contacts between the Islamicate world (in our case, that of the Mamluk Sultanate) and European powers (the Crown of Aragon and the polities of Italy). Anyone with even just an inkling of interest in the history of Mediterranean civilizations will realize this is a monumental task; luckily, there are a fair few of us to try and tackle it. At my end, I will contribute by looking at Italian sources produced by those of travelled and traversed the lands under control of the Mamluks (Egypt, Syria, Palestine and the Hijaz), with the aim of discerning and understanding how these people thought of the space that surrounded them and how they used it, claimed it and occupied it; if and when it was possible for them to do so. Moreover, I will also investigate when they had little or no agency in space or sphere of influence production in the exchanges and contacts with those who militarily and politically ruled the lands they visited, the caste of the Mamluks.

I think it is fair to provide a small example of what I will likely be dealing with. Olivia Constable has written a book on the truly international institution of the funduq or fondaco, a book that informs us on how European merchants traveling to Alexandria would have lived in a territory controlled by the Mamluks. Reading Constable (or, more simply, some of the edited sources she concludes from), we are reminded immediately of the agency European merchants would have had in imposing a sphere of influence in Alexandria at the tail end of the 1400s. Many polities had a fondaco (for example, there was a Catalan fondaco and two Venetian ones); Christian merchants from Europe would have used these places not only for lodging but also as bases for their commerce, as one of the main functions of the fondaco was the housing of wares. These large buildings were considered a safe heaven for Christian travellers, who also could live per their usual habits (like consuming alcohol or pork meat). At night, though, the conditions appeared to change considerably: whoever was housed in the fondaco would have been locked in at night. This means a great deal of agency during daylight and almost none after sunrise, when the space, paradoxically now necessarily occupied by Europeans, was effectively reclaimed by the Mamluk controllers who made the fondaco institution into something akin to a prison.

Source: Saint Mark preaching in Alexandria of Egypt, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini (1507)

Very interestingly, we can also observe this paradox of agency by reading Italian pilgrimage sources written at the end of the 15^th century: Pietro Casola, a Milanese pilgrim very fond (luckily for me) of detailed descriptions of the space that he inhabited, goes to great length to explain how the agency of the pilgrims in reclaiming a space – in this case neither political nor commercial, indeed an almost purely personal one – was completely annulled as soon as they were allowed to step foot off the Venetian galley (as much perilous as it was safe, in a sense) when they finally had reached the port of Jaffa. After an exhausting round of petty bargaining with – I have to imagine – the somewhat amused Muslim lords of Gaza, they were finally allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre. There, the pilgrims would have been locked in for the entire night, which they spent praying. From disbarred entry to a delayed exit, the agency of European pilgrims in visiting Jerusalem seems to have been sometimes present but just as often almost non-existent, in a striking parallel that I think makes us ask ourselves how much we can speak, if at all, of European space and influence in Mamluk territory and especially if we are to talk of claimed or reclaimed social space, or just of the allowance of one.

Recently, I was asked specifically how I would do this and the people I was in conversation with both chose the word operationality, which seems all but a term one would use to refer to historical research. On the contrary, it indicates something that we all need to keep in mind when considering forays into medieval history, which is the fact that sometimes abstracting human behaviours even in a faraway period, such as the 15th century, can be fascinating and thought-provoking, but eventually we must crash down to Earth and explain how we are doing the things we said we were going to do. In case of my own research, this means, I believe, the need for a deep understanding of social dynamics between people of different cultures even on a micro-scale level, with the aim of having a greater clarity on the myriad of the dynamics that we can presume must have existed on such a large geographical scale. To even get close to achieve this and being able to better visualize it, I will use the wonderful tools of Geographic Information Systems, in the hope of developing questions (and to answer them) by creating multilayered maps of different territories and spaces. Presumed spheres of influence and abstract, but hopefully perceived and described borders and diversified places will be then visualized to not only describe Christian places qualitatively, but also to understand these quantitatively. This is why I intend to draw as many different maps of as many other territories and cities as possible, in the hope of comparing extension and importance of Christian space in Mamluk territory and especially in the hope of widening our understanding and knowledge of spaces and places not yet well explored in the scholarship.

In their massive 16^th century painting the venetians Gentile and Giovanni Bellini represented Saint Mark preaching in Alexandria of Egypt. To most observers, the city where the classically dressed patron of Venice is preaching looks at least unlikely. Saint Mark is supposed to have been in Alexandria in the first century CE, but the Bellini brothers instead depict a more modern, imaginary square, dominated by a church that is a mix between Saint Sofia at Constantinople and Saint Mark in Venice. Minarets and towers surround the church, in an anachronistic connubium. The crowd, listening attentively, is composed of both typical Italian Renaissance men and of white turban’s wearers, indicating an ottoman crowd. It is safe to say the Gentile Bellini (that died in 1507) likely had never seen Alexandria in the 15^th century, and in his attempt to transpose a Greek-Roman antiquity into his own modernity, he had resorted to depicting the city as an entrepot of Italian and Ottoman architecture, as he had been to Constantinople before his passing and, some say, even to Jerusalem. Gentile and Giovanni Bellini clearly had their own set of biases, artistic needs and a manifest disinterest for representing (or even simply re-inventing) a probable image for Alexandria in the 1^st century. Still, even as contemporaries, the Bellini brothers struggled to bring forth an image that clearly delineated a 15^th century identity for the Egyptian port-city that Venice itself had relied on for so much of its trade.

In this sense, hopefully my attempts at representation can be more fruitful. 

Hi there!

I am Michele, one of the PhD students for DiplomatiCon. I grew up between Venice and Padua, and these cities also marked my academic path. I earned my bachelor’s degree in History at the University of Padua. Then, I moved to the University of Venice for my master’s degree in History from the Me. Here I graduated with a thesis about the overlooked conflict that happened in 1537-1540 between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, titled “La guerra turco-veneziana 1537-1540: la stretta di due imperi sulla Serenissima (The Turkish-Venetian War 1537-1540: The grasp of two Empires on the Serenissima)”. I analyzed the various stages of the military crisis, the financial innovations introduced by the Venetians to raise money for defending their maritime possessions, and the divergences between the city’s ruling councils and the disagreements within the patriciate. To be able to have further information about the political climate in Venice through the years of the war, I studied the diplomatic letters of the Mantuan ambassador residing in the city, Benedetto Agnello, who informed his duke with almost daily dispatches about what was happening in the councils and what were rumors circulating through the Venetian calli.

The study of these documents from the State Archives of Mantua sparked my curiosity on the figure of ambassadors, their role, and their correspondence, and made me want to further research on the matter. When I heard of the DiplomatiCon project and that it was looking for PhD students, I thought: “This is the perfect fit!”, it aligns perfectly with my interests but adds a fascinating twist: the relations with the Islamic side of the Mediterranean. I knew I had to apply. And here we are, starting from September 2023 I am part of the Liège-based team – which includes PhD students Marta Mansio Rubio, Queralt Penedès Fradera, and the postdoc Bogdan Smarandache. Under the supervision of Frédéric Bauden and Isabella Lazzarini my role in the project is within Work Package 2, the one devoted to Diplomatic Networks. In particular, I am focusing on the diplomatic relations between the Republic of Venice and the Mamluk Sultanate, from the late 14th century to the end of the Cairo Sultanate in 1517. In this period, the Serenissima held the most important position in the commerce with the Eastern Mediterranean, but the scope of my project, as is the scope of the bigger DiplomatiCon endeavor, is to detach from the trade-centered narrative and switch to diplomacy and the ways of interactions among the two sides of the Mediterranean.

The project will analyze the perspectives of both the diplomatic agents and the state actors, regarding the complex dynamics of relations between Venice and the Mamluks, about, for example, but not limited to, the issue of Cyprus, the relations with the Ottomans and other troublesome neighbors, and the opening by the Portuguese of the Ocean route for the spice trade, and how these developed through time. In my research I will highlight the intertwined nature, formal and informal, of Venetian agents, their roles, their connections, the extent of their networks and their ways of interaction.

To pursue my investigation, I will conduct extended research in the Archives and Libraries of Venice to collect information about the agents involved in the diplomatic exchanges between the two powers. Unfortunately, though, most of the documentation produced by the Venetian diplomatic agents themselves, such as dispatches, after-mission relations, etc., up until the first half of the 16th century was destroyed in two fires in 1574 and 1577 that interested the Ducal Palace, the location at the time of the chancellery and the archive. Therefore, other sources are needed to unveil the networks of the agents of Venetian diplomacy in the relations with the Mamluks. For the institutional part, there are multiple official records of the decisions of the ruling councils (Senato Misti/Secreta/Mar, Consiglio di X, etc.) that are paramount to study because they show the perspective of the state actors and illustrate the framework within which the agents had to operate. Private documents, like letters and notarial deeds, can be used in conjunction to help shed light on the people acting in situ, that is in the territories under Mamluk rule. These documents can be found in the collection of the Procuratori di San Marco, who as executors of wills in their documents merged the personal papers of the testators, and in private archives that over time found their way into the State Archives or in the Archive of the Library of Museo Correr. Finally, chronicles, diaries, and travel reports must also be included in the range of sources that will be used. All in all, the collection of information about the people involved in the diplomatic exchanges with the Mamluks, will be essential in composing a prosopographical study of the diplomatic agents from Venice operating in the Eastern Mediterranean.

(Don’t) blame it on my Catholic upbringing and background, but let’s start with a confession: in high school, geography was one of my least favorite subjects. Besides, in a hypothetical situation where we travel together, there are better options than trusting me for the orientation or map reading skills (unless you like detours). However, I fell in love with history at a young age. My passion was only enhanced by the engaging and enthusiastic history teacher who guided me through most of my high school career. Despite my fondness, I will still prove a disappointment with history questions on a quiz: dates and names don’t necessarily stick with me. The stories, the ordinary people with their ordinary lives, stay with me – and that prompted me to study history at the University of Antwerp. (I wavered for a long time between psychology and history, finally choosing the latter because I thought I would bring the former home too much. This has already given colleagues and myself a hearty laugh; after all, we rarely leave our research at the door when coming home.)

My first love

Here’s another confession: by the end of my Bachelor’s degree, I was head over heels for nineteenth- and twentieth-century history; from a paper on the relationship between the Antwerp police and the population in the second half of the nineteenth century, a Bachelor’s thesis on noise pollution in the same temporal and geographical setting, to a Master’s thesis on a Belgian civil servant in the Congo just before and after independence, to a PhD on the lantern lecture circuit in Antwerp and Brussels in the first decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, I discovered that if you put ‘social’ in front of ‘geography’, the subject suddenly becomes interesting (gasp in Spanish).

My first introduction to GIS (Geographic Information Systems) during my Master’s year was not love at first sight: we didn’t understand each other very well. However, its usefulness for my PhD to represent the Antwerp and Brussels network of lantern lectures at different geographical levels allowed me to take more time and get to know each other better – and we soon clicked. I will not say that our relationship is perfect (which one is?) but overall, we are quite happy with and strengthen each other. My more mathematical background from high school, which had already faded by then, suddenly became a useful experience again. Starting my second year as a PhD researcher, I was given the opportunity to teach with my co-supervisor, Iason Jongepier, a module on GIS and spatial analysis to Master’s students (the same one I had struggled with two years earlier, being a student myself). Meanwhile, we are five years later and still doing this together – it’s like they say: time flies when you’re having fun.

My second love

Time flew by, and suddenly, I had to start thinking about life after my PhD. In love with history, but above all with historical research, I was not yet ready to leave academia. The 4.5 years of my doctorate represent an intense, loving, and, at times, stormy relationship with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While they will always have a special place in my heart, now was the time to discover if we are truly ‘meant to be’. Using the following quote to dismiss accusations of cheating is a bit controversial, but as Ross Geller from Friends would say, “We are on a break!” Time to fall in love again.

At that moment, the DiplomatiCon vacancy for a postdoc with knowledge of GIS crossed my path. At first glance, a move to DiplomatiCon may seem rather illogical or far-fetched. In retrospect, this was my ideal next step (to a subsequent, as yet unknown destination). First, I can cross the boundaries of my ability and knowledge about GIS and challenge and further develop myself in its historical applications. I now get the chance to travel even further into the past and marvel at this (for me) largely unknown period and geographical region. Again, I must confess that medievalist friends of mine had been trying to convince me for years that the Middle Ages were a catch (so let’s find out!).

During my studies, our education gradually incorporated more courses on the Islamic world. As part of the transition year, I missed some of them but came into contact with them enough to be stimulated by them. Even to such an extent that, if I had not started a PhD, there would have been a real chance that I would have gone for a second Master’s in religious studies (with a focus on interreligious contacts) (or, as I was wavering again: the Master’s in gender and diversity). Therefore, I was immediately charmed by DiplomatiCon’s approach to connected history. The Mediterranean region is the ideal testing ground for this. Lastly, coming as a PhD researcher from a group project (B-magic) and finding a new place as a postdoc in a new team only made DiplomatiCon more attractive. Being meaningful to PhD students in a way that a certain person (read: Iason Jongepier) had been to me (as a PhD student), first as a postdoc and then as a professor, was a role that strongly appealed to me. That Iason would become my co-supervisor again made me feel right at home. Malika Dekkiche, as a promoter, only strengthened this feeling.

Despite the atypical match, everything about DiplomatiCon felt right (opposites attract, don’t they?). DiplomatiCon, in other words, checked off a lot of boxes from my mental list of green flags for ‘dating historical subjects again’. My second love, therefore, doesn’t look much like my first at first sight, but it has become clear that I have a type.

I have a type

‘Behind the scenes’ supporting tasks, such as building and supporting the DiplomatiCon-net website and blog, bring me great fulfillment. Writing and doing final editing were things I already enjoyed as a student at the Antwerp student magazine dwars. Contributing ideas on translating our output to the public requires a refreshing creativity that provides some fun variety. Moreover, I love collaborating with people (and not spending time alone on my research island) and accompanying the PhD students from the University of Antwerp, Giacomo, Gianluca, and Evelina, on their journey into the wonderful  (but sometimes, let’s be honest, frustrating) world of GIS combines the core elements ‘supporting’ and ‘people’. In turn, I am also very much looking forward to learning more about the Mediterranean in the (late) Middle Ages from the three of them and all the other experts on the team. This may still seem like an exciting trip into the unknown sometimes. Still, I have great confidence in my experienced guides and look forward to going on that adventure with them.

Although my time with the project will probably be the shortest compared to the other members (until February 2025), I will also develop my research within the project. Fictional stories can also tell us more about how people in the late Middle Ages viewed the relationship between the various political powers in the Mediterranean and how space was experienced. Floris and Blancefloer is one of these. I will also delve further into Middle Dutch travel narratives of travelers to the Mediterranean to better understand the sources the PhDs are working with. According to the ‘leading by example’ principle, when working with sources myself (since I am not familiar with the Italian and Spanish languages), I can explore and look out for more GIS applications.

Together with Iason, we will also monitor one of DiplomatiCon’s end goals or outputs: the delivery of a historic Gazetteer. In addition, we will also be working together to conduct our research on Portolan maps. First, we will collect, date, and georeference them and then analyze them (content-wise): which Portolan maps are related? What toponyms, symbols, and flags are depicted on them? Are these always the same cities, or does this change over time? I’m excited to explore this together.

Enough about my love life

Although the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are my first and greatest love, your first love is not necessarily (or rarely) your last. As the creators of Temptation Island would claim, sometimes you have to take the ultimate relationship test. Sometimes you need to discover other worlds before finding each other again, or to realize you’re better off as ‘just friends’. Sometimes, you fall in love all over again, and that’s how life goes. Where I end up after my interesting and challenging trip to the late-medieval Mediterranean is still unclear. Maybe I will return to my first love, or perhaps that second one will be the one I end up with; who knows. Or, as is often the best option, balancing between ‘both’ is not such a bad idea either.