Comunicazione e conflitto: la diplomazia italiana del primo Rinascimento attraverso una lettera del 1494

Late medieval Italian diplomacy has for long been a classic theme of the history of the state: modern diplomacy was born in Renaissance Italy, and was deeply connected to state-building. In the last decades, however, this grand narrative has been profoundly revised: instead of looking for the birth of the first permanent resident embassies seen as the antecedents of modern diplomacy, recent research on the Italian peninsula has focused on the links between power and diplomatic interaction. Information, negotiation and communication are the building blocks of such an innovative ‘new diplomacy’, and diplomatic letters provide the flesh and blood of this change. This paper introduces the richness of diplomatic correspondences by presenting and analysing a letter written by a Ferrarese ambassador in Rome on the eve of the Italian Wars.