On Friday, April 7, 1595, a solemn procession accompanied the body of Pasquale Cicogna, the eighty-sixth doge of the Venetian Republic, to his final resting place. 1 Ducal funerary processions traditionally involved more than a thousand participants, including Venetian magistrates, ecclesiastics, representatives of the confraternities, and foreign diplomats; many thousands of spectators looked on. 2 A guard of Arsenalotti, workers from the state shipyard, carried Doge Cicogna's bier out of the Ducal Palace and into Piazza San Marco, the political and religious heart of the city and as such the central space for governmental ritual. 3 Ducal funeral ceremonies were supposed to be a formal celebration of republican values, underlining the durability of the Venetian state despite the mortality of its doges. But the moment Cicogna's body left the palace the procession was interrupted. In the palace courtyard, in front of the members of the Signoria, the republic's highest executive council, 4 "all the boys and common people shouted 'Viva, viva, Marino Grimani!'" in a show of enthusiasm for one of Cicogna's
Journal of early modern history 19 (2015)
AbstractThis special issue, an exercise in integrated Mediterranean history through the lens of diplomacy, demonstrates that diplomatic genres and practices associated with a European political and cultural tradition, on the one hand, or an Islamic tradition, on the other, were not produced in isolation but attained meaning through the process of mediation and negotiation among intermediaries of different confessional and social backgrounds. Building on the "new diplomatic history," the essays focus on non-elite (e.g. Christian slaves, renegades, Jewish doctors, Moriscos) and less commonly studied (mid-and high-ranking Muslim officials) intermediaries in Mediterranean crossconfessional diplomacy. The issue argues that the early modern period witnessed a relative balance of power among Muslim-and Christian-ruled polities: negotiations entailed not only principles of reciprocity, parity, and commensurability, but these were actually enforceable in practice. This challenges the notion of European diplomatic supremacy, prompting scholars to fundamentally rethink the narrative about the origins of early modern diplomacy.
Protectionist legislation traditionally excluded immigrant merchants from Venetian trade, yet by 1600 the commercial balance of power had changed. This article argues that immigrant merchants with strong ties to the northern trading world were able directly to influence Venetian legislation. It does so by examining the collective petitions for commercial privileges submitted by Netherlandish merchants and the ensuing reactions of Venetian institutions, such as the Venetian Board of Trade (Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia). Through targeted collective actions, the Netherlandish merchants found ways to mitigate the inequalities imposed by the Venetian government on immigrant traders and to obtain significant communal trading privileges.
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