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Research project

DIPLOWIDE - Widening the origins of global diplomacy: Triangulating archives and diplomatic practices in early 18th-century Eastern Europe

This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.

DIPLOWIDE research project proposes a new, dialogic, and comparative inter-state framework for studying the early 18th century diplomacy, based on the methodology of “triangulating archives.” This involves the study of diplomatic relations not from the prospective of particular national frames, particular sets of bilateral relations, or particular actors, but rather as processes of movement and the continual (re)translation of texts, norms, and practices through the shared institution of the chancellery. As such, it involves collaborative research, through a team of scholars with complementary linguistic, technical, and geographical expertise, and the ability to work across multiple national and multiple disciplinary frames.

In concrete terms, DIPLOWIDE proposes to deploy this approach through two overlapping case studies. The first is the 1714 mission of Sefer Shah Aga, sent by the Crimean Khan Kaplan Giray—but also representing the Ottomans—to establish peace with the Polish King and Elector of Saxony, Augustus II, following a Russian-Ottoman peace treaty. Since, as mentioned above, no archive survives from the Khanate itself, this mission can only be reconstructed through “triangulation” with documentation available in the Turkish and Polish archives, by the reports of French diplomats in Poland-Lithuania, and accounts from Saxon agents - presently preserved in Dresden - who actually accompanied Sefer Shah back to Crimea.

The second case, meanwhile, involves two inter-related Ottoman missions from the following decade: those of Durri Ahmed Efendi to Safavid Iran in 1721 and Nişli Ahmed to Moscow in 1723. They are of particular interest since, firstly, they were the subject of two of the earliest sefaretnames, or Ottoman diplomatic travel accounts, an innovation of the period; secondly, they involved complex diplomatic manoeuvring between the Ottomans, Habsburgs, Russia, and the French Compagnie des Indes following the collapse of Safavid Iran.

By reconstructing these two cases through archival “triangulation,” DIPLOWIDE will investigate the following questions:

1) How and why do internal materials from one state chancellery find their way into foreign archives?

2) What role do state chancelleries play in the collection, control, or dissemination of information (news, spy reports, dispatches etc), and how does this vary between states?

3) Under what circumstances does the interactive nature of diplomacy foster chancery practices that transcend the distinct confessionally- and linguistically-based bureaucratic traditions of individual states?

4) Conversely, what are the limits to this process, and under what circumstances do elements of inter-state “incommensurability” become entrenched?

5) Finally, how might the answers to these questions re-centre the history of the region of Eastern Europe?

The principal investigators invite to learn more about Sefer Shah Agha's mission in 1714 in a recently published piece on the SICE blog.

 

For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.

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