ABSTRACT
But before examining the documents regarding Don Giovanni, let us consider the Medici network more generally. Between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a time when the Grand Duchy was arming its role among more powerful European neighbors as a mid-sized territorial state, diplomatic connections continued to develop with every Italian and European power. In addition to strictly diplomatic correspondence there were letters to and from a battery of ducal secretaries, including letters from informers, semipermanent as well as ad hoc, petitioners of every variety, and local ocials holding posts of every description. e emergence of the Medici bureaucracy and its communication network has been described in precise detail by Alessandra Contini as a particularly signicant episode in the emergence of state institutions. Closely connected with the diplomatic correspondence, but constituting a separate body of documents, is a rich collection of handwritten newsletters, dating from the origins of the Medici Grand Duchy in the 1530s to its end in 1737. Places of origin of the newsletters range from the “Levant,” that is Constantinople, to Flanders, Holland, Hamburg, Poland, France, Britain and so forth. Written anonymously and according to widely varying criteria
ocial dispatches from the Medici representatives abroad, but not necessarily. How they arrived at court in Florence is rarely perfectly clear, except that they reected once again the dynasty’s tremendous thirst for information and attempts to procure the best possible, at whatever cost.
