Societies in transition in early Greece: an archaeological history

Abstract

historical documents that not only corroborate, but often significantly complement, the information provided by Pagani. The most valuable among them may be the letters written by Trevisan’s son, Marcantonio, a future doge who accompanied his father during the mission. One of them offers fascinating insights into the lengthy and complicated trade agreement negotiations that took two-and-a-half months to conclude. In this letter, sent during a layover in Crete, Marcantonio Trevisan finally felt free to speak about the Egyptian sultan, describing him as an egomaniac, avaricious and choleric by nature, and all this endorsed by the fourth character trait that was his ignorance (è superbissimo, avarissimo, colerico et la quarta, che inchandisse ogni cosa, è ignorante). The volume also includes three colour illustrations. One is the illuminated frontispiece from the ducal commission of Trevisan’s embassy; the other two are from the sixteenth-century manuscript preserved in Paris that contains the only known surviving copy of Pagani’s account. Benedetti and Musacchio compare the two drawings taken from the manuscript to the famous 1590 volume De gli habiti antichi, et moderni di diverse parti del mondo, illustrated by Titian’s cousin Cesare Vecellio, and point out remarkable similarities between the figures of the Mamluk sultan and his courtiers in both volumes. The only thing the reader may find missing in this small masterpiece are the maps that would allow us to follow the movements of the embassy through geographic space, also capturing its progress in time. To top the superbly contextualized account that Benedetti and Musacchio offer in this volume, one would have to delve into the surviving unpublished Mamluk, Ottoman, or Persian primary sources in order to find the additional documents that can shed even more light on the embassy from the perspectives of other powers involved directly or indirectly in this mission.