Articles by Luciano Piffanelli
in "Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West", ed. by I. Lazzarini, L. Piffa... more in "Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West", ed. by I. Lazzarini, L. Piffanelli, D. Pirillo (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2025), p. 396-422.
This chapter addresses the problem of peace and peace treaties in Leibniz’s thought. This kind of analysis is quite challenging since Leibniz only very sporadically made explicit references to peace and he never formulated a coherent discourse on it in a systematic work. Thus, the goal here is to carve a path through Leibniz’s numerous writings, so as to propose, in two different but interrelated sections, a non-fragmentary reading of his plentiful and heterogeneous output. The first part investigates the relationship Leibniz established between jus naturale and jus gentium, emphasising the merging between the two; against the idea of disjointedness that has traditionally characterised the interpretation of his thought, the second part proposes instead a composite reading of it, so as to present the way in which peace, the pacification process, and peace treaties can be interpreted as intertwined in Leibniz’s outlook on interstate relations.
Diplomatie en lune de miel. Le voyage de noces du grand-duc Jean-Gaston de Médicis dans les Provinces-Unies (1698)
Le contexte géographique et politique au sein duquel la guerre de Trente Ans naquit et se dévelop... more Le contexte géographique et politique au sein duquel la guerre de Trente Ans naquit et se développa fut large et diversifié. Sans aucun doute, l’Europe centro-septentrionale fut le théâtre principal des affrontements, mais certains des moments saillants du conflit (notamment dans sa phase franco-habsbourgeoise) eurent lieu dans le nord de la péninsule italienne. Pour différentes raisons diplomatiques, les Médicis y furent largement impliqués et le grand‑duc Ferdinando II arriva même à envisager – quoique vainement – la création d’une nouvelle entité supra-étatique qui aurait dû présider au maintien de la paix en Italie et en Europe. En mettant en résonance une riche documentation d’archives et une large bibliographie, l’article suit et analyse ces développements du point de vue toscan : il se concentre en effet sur la série de conflits qui, entre 1613 et 1649, contribuèrent au succès militaire et diplomatique de la France de Richelieu et de Mazarin tout en déterminant un changement dans la politique internationale des grands‑ducs Médicis, qui passèrent de protagonistes diplomatiques à médiateurs des négociations. Ainsi, n’ayant jamais été véritablement appréhendées dans leur dimension diplomatique complexe et globale, les guerres de succession de Montferrat et de Mantoue (1613-1617, 1627-1631), la guerre de la Valteline (1618-1639) et la guerre de Castro (1641-1649) s’avèrent être des cas particulièrement utiles pour reconstruire et évaluer l’implication diplomatique des Grands‑ducs de Toscane pendant la guerre de Trente Ans. De surcroît, elles offrent un cadre intéressant pour aborder certaines connexions entre ces dynamiques diplomatiques et l’univers politique, philosophique et scientifique de l’époque.
dans Daniel Baloup et Benoît Joudiou (dirs), "Une mer pour les réunir tous Études sur l’histoire de la Méditerranée (IXe-XVIIe siècle) offertes à Bernard Doumerc", 2024
The essay helps understand the conception and the definition of "spheres of influence" in medieva... more The essay helps understand the conception and the definition of "spheres of influence" in medieval and Renaissance Italy, leading to a better appreciation of their territorial ambiguity and their concrete political gambles.
in Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives, ed. by Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian J. Maxson (New York: Routledge, 2019), p. 117-141, Jul 9, 2019
(postprint)
dans Correspondances urbaines. Les corps de ville et la circulation de l’information (XVe-XVIIe siècles), F. Alazard (éd.), Turnhout, Brepols, 2020
Im Rahmen der Erneuerung der Studien zur politischen und diplomatischen Geschichte Italiens analy... more Im Rahmen der Erneuerung der Studien zur politischen und diplomatischen Geschichte Italiens analysiert dieser Beitrag die Dynamiken des frühen Quattrocento mit dem Ziel, ein neues Licht auf die verflochtenen Beziehungen zu werfen, die die Republik mit den Legaten von Bologna unterhielt, die in den zwanziger Jahren des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts aufeinander folgten (Carrillo, Condulmer, Alamanni). Die vorliegende Studie zeigt daher anhand der Schnittmenge von Archivdokumentation und vorhandener Bibliographie Elemente und Wirkungen der florentinischen Diplomatie mit diesen päpstlichen Vertretern auf und zeigt nicht nur die Bedeutung solcher Verhandlungen im Konflikt mit Filippo Maria Visconti, sondern auch, dass bestimmte sukzessive politische Entwicklungen gerade in diesen Verbindungen grundgelegt waren.
Le but de cet écrit est de proposer quelques premières réflexions au sujet du commissaire-orateur... more Le but de cet écrit est de proposer quelques premières réflexions au sujet du commissaire-orateur ('commissarius seu orator') florentin, figure hybride dans le profil de laquelle les stratégies de gestion de la politique étrangère se mêlaient aux besoins de défense du territoire soumis à la juridiction de Florence. Nous voudrions donc esquisser ici le profil de cet envoyé amphibie et, eu égard à ses fonctions de représentation, information et négociation, montrer quelques éléments de sa nature diplomatique, et son rôle actif dans la gestion des conflits. Parmi les réponses aux 'causae urgentissimae' qui stimulaient constamment l’ingénierie diplomatique de la République, la solution – toute florentine – trouvée de façon extra-ordinaire dans les 'commissarii seu oratores' permettait de gérer les dangers aux bornes du territoire et les nécessités de négociation avec les capitaines et condottieri au service de Florence, aussi bien qu’avec ceux qui étaient, à l’occasion, ennemis de la République. Avec des modalités assez fluides, ces fonctionnaires rentraient dans la grammaire de la domination florentine et se trouvèrent à opérer entre les incessantes crises territoriales florentines du XVe siècle et les besoins diplomatiques des États italiens.
T. Deswarte, B. Dumézil, L. Vissière (éds), Epistola 3. Lettres et conflits, Madrid, Collection de la Casa de Velázquez, 2021
Dans le cadre d’une réflexion commune sur l’usage politique du moyen épistolaire en temps de conf... more Dans le cadre d’une réflexion commune sur l’usage politique du moyen épistolaire en temps de conflits, l’article analyse les lettres écrites par une catégorie particulière d'opérateurs militaires florentins : les commissaires envoyés aux campements militaires ("chommissari in chanpo").
Investimento fondiario e 'sustanze' di famiglia. Evoluzione del patrimonio agrario di un Gonfaloniere di giustizia tra Cosimo e Lorenzo de’ Medici
Livres by Luciano Piffanelli
The catastrophic humanitarian crises produced by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are, once again, ch... more The catastrophic humanitarian crises produced by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are, once again, challenging and subverting the international order created at the end of the Second World War. Such crises have led government officials, political analysts as well as scholars to envision ‘a post-American world’ inevitably dominated by global conflicts, ‘clash of civilisations’, and arms races. In today’s world, when international humanitarian law is utterly brushed aside, it is more important than ever to retrace the ‘political grammar of agreements’ that Europe developed over its history to contain war and achieve peace.
Nonetheless, the need for a more nuanced understanding of the past and of its diplomatic arrangements is paramount to better question and qualify these events. Indeed, the history of diplomacy has often been reduced to a series of isolated events grounded in some celebrated peace treaties seen as the prelude to the alleged “universal” and “modern” international order. Countering this one-dimensional and Eurocentric narrative, this volume conceptualizes peacemaking as a flexible and multilayered phenomenon rather than a straightforward and predetermined activity leading to conflict resolution. Consequently, across a wide range of case studies—not limited to Europe but including the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds—peace treaties reveal themselves to be a heterogeneous set of successful and failed agreements, thereby recovering their complex history throughout the medieval and early modern periods.
Therefore, focusing on the pacification processes and possibilities behind peace agreements, settlements, truces, leagues, and other forms of diplomatic arrangements, the 22 chapters of this book reframe diplomatic treaties as historically contingent instruments and peacemaking as a political grammar, whose complexity is reflected in its variety of forms and sources. Drawing on both diplomatic history and international relations studies, this volume sheds new light on peacemaking practices and imaginaries, and traces the central role that peace, treaties, and peace treaties have played in the political and cultural history of the Western world.
Moving from the “long and great Italian war” (Goro Dati) waged in the first half of the fifteenth... more Moving from the “long and great Italian war” (Goro Dati) waged in the first half of the fifteenth century against Filippo Maria Visconti by a shifting coalition of powers, this volume extends to the whole Italian context its analysis of the military and ideological conflict between Florence and Milan, whose roots date back to the previous century.
Based on a rich documentary corpus and a large bibliography, the book also pays attention to the implications of this long-lasting conflict on the political, diplomatic, and cultural changes in Renaissance Italy, and has a twofold goal. First, it offers the reconstruction and the analysis of the origins of these anti-Visconti wars, which are investigated through an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, this study presents a wide and new interpretation of this war by clarifying some of the dynamics of that “long Quattrocento” lasting until the mid-sixteenth century.
In the wake of the New Diplomatic History, the perspective adopted by this study is chronologically and methodologically broader, allowing the author to tackle the issues posed—and the possibilities offered—by working on diplomatic history today, on both narrative and epistemological-disciplinary level.
News by Luciano Piffanelli
2025 Special issue of Legatio: The Journal for Renaissance and Early Modern Diplomatic Studies
... more 2025 Special issue of Legatio: The Journal for Renaissance and Early Modern Diplomatic Studies
« “I DO.” “I DO.” THEY DIDN’T. FAILED NEGOTIATIONS IN MARRIAGE DIPLOMACY (15th-18th C.) » (eds Anna Kalinowska and Luciano Piffanelli)
Please send your expression of interest or abstract of max. 300 words to legatio@ihpan.edu.pl by 31 May 2022. Notification of acceptance will be sent no later than 10 July 2022. If accepted, full papers should be due by 1 September 2023
Winter Seminars in Palaeography and Archival Studies
Archivio di Stato di Firenze & The Medici Archive Project
The two centuries that include the fall of Byzantium under the Ottomans, the discovery of the New... more The two centuries that include the fall of Byzantium under the Ottomans, the discovery of the New World, and the breaking of the unity of the Christian west experienced ways of negotiating conflicts, shaping political identities, and defining ideas that would prove paramount for the further developments of political interactions and diplomatic practices in Europe and beyond. Agreements, leagues and peace treaties periodically coagulated the innumerable diplomatic negotiations between the many polities provided of authority, autonomy and agency into legally binding texts. Such formal agreements were highly public: one after the other and more or less inclusively, they gave rhythm to conflicts, openly regulated hierarchies of power, and drew boundaries among the political actors on the scene. However, although their rhetoric was grounded on durability and formality, their political content and textual nature were extremely fluid and fragile: reversibility and change were the norm, and they were open texts, constantly adapted and re-adapted to changeable circumstances and contexts. Our aim is to investigate Renaissance European treaties, agreements and leagues by looking consistently to their ways of addressing crucial issues of political identity, authority, territory, sovereignty and power. We will address them as a discursive and cultural corpus of acts of practice, as an increasingly articulated and changing repository of powerful notions about identity, space, coexistence, and interaction, and will investigate who was allowed to have a voice in the negotiating process.
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Articles by Luciano Piffanelli
This chapter addresses the problem of peace and peace treaties in Leibniz’s thought. This kind of analysis is quite challenging since Leibniz only very sporadically made explicit references to peace and he never formulated a coherent discourse on it in a systematic work. Thus, the goal here is to carve a path through Leibniz’s numerous writings, so as to propose, in two different but interrelated sections, a non-fragmentary reading of his plentiful and heterogeneous output. The first part investigates the relationship Leibniz established between jus naturale and jus gentium, emphasising the merging between the two; against the idea of disjointedness that has traditionally characterised the interpretation of his thought, the second part proposes instead a composite reading of it, so as to present the way in which peace, the pacification process, and peace treaties can be interpreted as intertwined in Leibniz’s outlook on interstate relations.
Livres by Luciano Piffanelli
Nonetheless, the need for a more nuanced understanding of the past and of its diplomatic arrangements is paramount to better question and qualify these events. Indeed, the history of diplomacy has often been reduced to a series of isolated events grounded in some celebrated peace treaties seen as the prelude to the alleged “universal” and “modern” international order. Countering this one-dimensional and Eurocentric narrative, this volume conceptualizes peacemaking as a flexible and multilayered phenomenon rather than a straightforward and predetermined activity leading to conflict resolution. Consequently, across a wide range of case studies—not limited to Europe but including the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds—peace treaties reveal themselves to be a heterogeneous set of successful and failed agreements, thereby recovering their complex history throughout the medieval and early modern periods.
Therefore, focusing on the pacification processes and possibilities behind peace agreements, settlements, truces, leagues, and other forms of diplomatic arrangements, the 22 chapters of this book reframe diplomatic treaties as historically contingent instruments and peacemaking as a political grammar, whose complexity is reflected in its variety of forms and sources. Drawing on both diplomatic history and international relations studies, this volume sheds new light on peacemaking practices and imaginaries, and traces the central role that peace, treaties, and peace treaties have played in the political and cultural history of the Western world.
Based on a rich documentary corpus and a large bibliography, the book also pays attention to the implications of this long-lasting conflict on the political, diplomatic, and cultural changes in Renaissance Italy, and has a twofold goal. First, it offers the reconstruction and the analysis of the origins of these anti-Visconti wars, which are investigated through an interdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, this study presents a wide and new interpretation of this war by clarifying some of the dynamics of that “long Quattrocento” lasting until the mid-sixteenth century.
In the wake of the New Diplomatic History, the perspective adopted by this study is chronologically and methodologically broader, allowing the author to tackle the issues posed—and the possibilities offered—by working on diplomatic history today, on both narrative and epistemological-disciplinary level.
News by Luciano Piffanelli
« “I DO.” “I DO.” THEY DIDN’T. FAILED NEGOTIATIONS IN MARRIAGE DIPLOMACY (15th-18th C.) » (eds Anna Kalinowska and Luciano Piffanelli)
Please send your expression of interest or abstract of max. 300 words to legatio@ihpan.edu.pl by 31 May 2022. Notification of acceptance will be sent no later than 10 July 2022. If accepted, full papers should be due by 1 September 2023