Multilayered networks: the political geography of Italian diplomacy in the early Renaissance (1350-1520 ca.)

As recent research has convincingly argued, late medieval and early Renaissance Italian diplomacy was a flexible political activity in which a full range of dynamics until now mostly considered separately – negotiation, information-gathering, representation, and communication – interacted in a process intimately linked to political and cultural transformations of power and authority. A map of diplomacy centred on the Italian peninsula between 1350 and 1520 results in a very complex picture of political protagonists and diplomatic features. International and infra-national, formal and informal political actors as well as territorial and non-territorial powers contributed to a geography of diplomacy which was both multilayered and multifaceted, everything but rigid. Finally, no straight or rigid boundaries separated what historians later defined as ‘diplomacy’ or ‘politics’, or ‘international’ or ‘internal’ politics. This paper aims at offering a survey of these different protagonists and their dynamics, and how the building of a cluster of diplomatic and political alliances and networks slowly produced both a hierarchy of polities and powers, and a grammar for their interactions.