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Venice's Secret Service
Venice's Secret Service is the untold and arresting story of the world's earliest centrally-organised state intelligence service. Long before the inception of SIS and the CIA, in the period of the Renaissance, the Republic of Venice had masterminded a remarkable centrally-organised state intelligence organisation that played a pivotal role in the defence of the Venetian empire. Housed in the imposing Doge's Palace and under the direction of the Council of Ten, the notorious governmental committee that acted as Venice's spy chiefs, this 'proto-modern' organisation served prominent intelligence functions including operations (intelligence and covert action), analysis, cryptography and steganog...
Narrating the Dragoman’s Self in the Veneto-Ottoman Balkans, c. 1550–1650
This microhistory of the Salvagos—an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean—is a remarkable feat of the historian’s craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be publicly assassinated by Ottoman authorities, Genesino Salvago and his brothers started writing self-narratives. When crossing the borders of words and worlds, the Salvagos’ self-narratives helped navigate at times beneficial, other times unsettling entanglements of empire, family, and translation. The discovery of an autobiographical text with rich information on Southeastern Europe, edited ...
Venice and the Dalmatian Hinterland
This volume offers a source-based analysis of the complex interactions between the Venetian administration of the coastal town Spalato (Split) and its hinterland under Venetian, Hungarian, and Ottoman rule. Employing a microhistorical approach, Sadovski studies the military importance, economic dynamics, and social changes in the Dalmatian hinterland in the later medieval period. This book also explores multilingualism, highlighting how Slavic languages as well as local laws and customs were integrated into the Venetian administration. In doing so, it broadens our understanding of the Venetian maritime empire and proposes a new way of thinking about hinterlands – in cultural, social, linguistic, and legal terms alongside economic and political aspects.
Eating Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World
This book examines how the perceived edibility of animals evolved during the colonization of the Americas. Early European colonizers ate a variety of animals in the Americas, motivated by factors like curiosity, starvation, and diplomacy. As settlements increased and became more sustainable, constructs of edibility shifted and the colonial food system evolved accordingly. By exploring the changes in animal edibility identifiable in early modern Spanish, French, and English sources in the regions of Mesoamerica, Greater Amazonia, and the east coast of North America, this book shows that animals, foodways, and settler colonialism are inextricably linked and that the colonization of the Americas was not only the beginning of new empires, but also of a long-lasting colonial food culture that drives both food systems and human-animal relationships to the present day.
Culture and Diplomacy
Diplomats had multiple tasks: not only negotiating with the representatives of other states, but also mediating culture and knowledge, and not least elaborating reports on their observations of politics, society, and culture. Culture, according to the studies featured in this book, is defined as a complex sphere including aspects like systems of communication, literature, music, arts, education, and the creation of knowledge. This edition containing contributions from six conferences held in Vienna and Istanbul by the Don Juan Archiv Wien focuses on the complex diplomatic and cultural relations between the Ottoman Empire and Europe from the time of the early embassies to Istanbul up to "Tanzimat".
Shadow Agents of Renaissance War
Who were the shadow agents of Renaissance war? In this pioneering collection of essays scholars use new archival evidence and other sources, including literature, artworks, and other non-textual material, to uncover those men, women, children and other animals who sustained war by means of their preparatory, auxiliary, infrastructural, or supplementary labour. These shadow agents worked in the zone between visibility and invisibility, often moving between civilians and soldiers, and their labour was frequently forced. This volume engages with a range of important debates including: the relationship between war and state formation; the ‘military revolution’ or transformation of early modern military force; the nature of human and non-human agency; gender and war; civilian protection and expulsion; and espionage and diplomacy. The focus of the volume is on Italy, but it includes studies of France and England, and the editors place these themes in a broader European context with the aim of supporting and stimulating research in this field.
The Postal Revolution
This monograph explores the impact of expanding long-distance communication networks on business, politics, diplomacy, international law, and personal freedom. Trailblazed initially by pedestrian and later also mounted couriers in the context of Italy, postal operations were first and foremost at the heart of the commercial revolution that transformed late medieval banking and commerce. In their next stage, they were also essential to the formation of centralized states and early modern diplomacy. Expanding access to postal services during the Renaissance was likewise instrumental to the inception of the Republic of Letters, while travel by the posts fostered personal mobility. The emergence of the earliest postal networks is therefore presented in this volume as the opening stage of an entire series of subsequent communications revolutions that ushered in the modern era.
Renegade Women
This book uses the stories of early modern women in the Mediterranean who left their birthplaces, families, and religions to reveal the complex space women of the period occupied socially and politically. In the narrow sense, the word “renegade” as used in the early modern Mediterranean referred to a Christian who had abandoned his or her religion to become a Muslim. With Renegade Women, Eric R Dursteler deftly redefines and broadens the term to include anyone who crossed the era’s and region’s religious, political, social, and gender boundaries. Drawing on archival research, he relates three tales of women whose lives afford great insight into both the specific experiences and condi...
Venetians in Constantinople
Historian Eric R Dursteler reconsiders identity in the early modern world to illuminate Veneto-Ottoman cultural interaction and coexistence, challenging the model of hostile relations and suggesting instead a more complex understanding of the intersection of cultures. Although dissonance and strife were certainly part of this relationship, he argues, coexistence and cooperation were more common. Moving beyond the "clash of civilizations" model that surveys the relationship between Islam and Christianity from a geopolitical perch, Dursteler analyzes the lived reality by focusing on a localized microcosm: the Venetian merchant and diplomatic community in Muslim Constantinople. While factors such as religion, culture, and political status could be integral elements in constructions of self and community, Dursteler finds early modern identity to be more than the sum total of its constitutent parts and reveals how the fluidity and malleability of identity in this time and place made coexistence among disparate cultures possible.
