The Diplomacy of Small States in Early Modern South-eastern Europe

Introduction

This project aims at producing a synoptic analysis of the foreign policy of small states in early modern South-eastern Europe. For centuries, the rulers of the Crimea, Moldavia and Wallachia, Ragusa, Transylvania, and Cossack Ukraine had to cope with their difficult geo-political situation of being at the borderlands between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

Objectives

The project will be the first attempt at writing a comparative history on the following questions:

1. What kind of strategies did these small states follow in order to overcome their vulnerability and survive on the frontier not only of empires but also of civilisations?
2. What was the impact of being placed at cultural borderlands upon their diplomatic practices?
3. How did they try to overcome the problem of having to communicate and present themselves in two radically different political languages (i.e., of their powerful Muslim and Christian neighbours)?
4. How did the agents of diplomacy function in this peculiar geo-political and cultural context, and how did it shape their status, practices, and the kind of social gains available to them?