Early Modern Diplomacy across the Religious Divide: Justification, Defamation, Obfuscation, and Misapprehension
An international conference
Dubrovnik, 16–17 May 2025
The conference will explore the ways in which early modern authors thematized diplomatic relations, especially cooperation, between state and non-state actors of different religions or confessions. In other words, the conference will explore different discoursive strategies used to represent contacts and treaties with “infidels,” “heretics,” or “schismatics:” notable examples include diplomatic relations between Christians and Muslims, various Christian denominations, as well as between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Such discourses were produced by different agents (e.g., diplomats, chancellors, lawyers, propagandists, religious figures, and, sometimes, even by the princes themselves); they were expressed in different media (e.g., diplomatic speeches, historiography, pamphlets, visual arts, pageantry); and meant for different audiences (e.g., domestic elites, religious establishment, foreign courts, co-religionists in general). Regarding their content, such discourses could have had an apologetic intention and therefore involved different attempts at justification, relativization, or obfuscation of the politically sensitive diplomatic ties across the religious divide. However, in other cases, such diplomatic relations were used to defame a certain state and involved accusations and vilifications, most often articulated as some form of betrayal of the “true” religion. Importantly, this dynamic was typical not only of Christian Europe but also of Muslim countries, that is, it can be observed in the broad area encompassing Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean.
Within the aforementioned framework, the conference will address the following topics:
Content of discourses: What kind of arguments did the early modern authors use to justify or relativize diplomatic contacts across the religious divide? What strategies of obfuscation and denial were used to hide such contacts? Equally so, what arguments were used when attempting to criticize and vilify a certain actor for such foreign policy? What were the ideological roots of such discourses – which legal, religious, and political traditions did they rely upon? What kind of contacts with the religious Other (e.g., establishing an embassy, trade agreements, alliance, submission) invited justification and/or criticism? How did the conceptualizations of such diplomatic contacts change through time, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century? Which factors – religious, political, cultural – influenced such change?
Context: Who were the authors, but also sponsors or patrons, of various discourses regarding diplomacy across the religious divide? What were they trying to achieve, i.e. what was their intention? In which media did they articulate their positions – and why in that specific media? How were diplomatic contacts with the religious Other represented to different audiences, ranging from the domestic to the international ones? What was the role of religious authorities when it came to such discourses? How can the processes of remembering and forgetting earlier conflicts and discrepancies be traced in diplomatic discourses and how did they balance past and present between the early modern players of diplomatic relations?
Reception and Consequences: What was the reception of such representations, i.e. how were they seen by different domestic and international audiences? Were there concrete consequences – if any – of such discourses, especially those seeking to defame a certain state (e.g. religious or economic sanctions, crusade, casus belli) or a specific political actor (e.g. a ruling prince contested for allying himself with the religious other – non-believers, papists, heretics, schismatics, etc.)? How did those accused react, were there polemics? Were there specific arbiters, most obviously religious authorities but also political figures (e.g. Emperor, Sultan), whose reaction was particularly important in such situations? How did the collective memory of “others”/former friends or enemies influence diplomatic processes, and vice versa?
We invite researchers to send a maximum 300-word abstract and a short CV for twenty-minute papers, or suggestions for panels of three papers, addressing the questions above. Please send these documents to smallst.conference@gmail.com. The deadline for submission is 31 October 2024. Applicants will be notified of the acceptance of their proposal by 20 November 2024.
The conference is jointly organized by the ERC project “The Diplomacy of Small States in Early Modern South-eastern Europe” and the CASA, Institute for Historical Sciences in Dubrovnik. The ERC project will be able to cover a moderate level of travel costs, provide accommodation in Dubrovnik for the duration of the event, and offer catering.