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Appealing to the enemy, breaking boundaries 169

of them, concealing the memory of betrayal. And when they were “seen”,
as in the book by Hans Pfeffermann, published in Switzerland in 1946,
in which the author inspected (not without imprecisions) the philo-
Turkish actions of the Renaissance popes, the volume was ostracised
in Italy and considered offensive and tendentious.
Thus Ricci writes a history of problematic contacts, of ambiguity,
negotiating material that is extremely fragmentary and discontinuous,
attempting to make absences explicit, to make silences speak. In the
texts taken into consideration, «everything and the contrary of everything
can be found: peace and war, alliance and suspicion, curiosity and
rejection» (p. 98). The author leads us in such a knowledgeable way
through a sequence of episodes, of dossiers, often connected to each
other in a single narrative thread, a red line that links each chapter to
the next, giving a unity to the story. In fact, each one can also be read
individually, but undoubtedly a complete reading of the book sheds
light on aspects that help the reader to reconstruct the overall
framework, «letting them interact in a kind of system» (p. 12). All
Giovanni Ricci’s skill in narrating history emerges; telling stories with
gusto and elegance, and with the awareness of someone who knows
and is familiar with the sources, giving the reader a completely
enthralling plot. Instead, on the level of content, Ricci lays bare the two
sides of the coin: Christians willing to make alliances with the Turks
to the point of finding them on home territory; and Turks who, on the
other hand, declined these offers, in this way revealing themselves to
be less accustomed to aggression than is generally supposed. In some
cases those that did arrive were fakes, like when they processed in
great pomp in Naples, under threat as it was from Louis XII in 1499:
probably this was all an act by which Frederick of Aragon intended to
let the French king know he was not alone. Or again, when a fake
ambassador appeared dressed as a Turk in Ferrara in 1576 to offer
the crown of Jerusalem to Alfonso II d’Este, who welcomed him and
received him with all honours: probably a trick, perhaps orchestrated
by the Medici to mock the Duke who, falling for the prank, nevertheless
revealed his openness to this kind of thing.
The book in great part hinges on the history of Italy between the
fourteen and fifteen hundreds, with the Italian wars as background,
wars that made Italy into a true battlefield. On the stage there were
precarious and short-lived equilibriums, political vendettas, alliances
that were redrawn across the board from time to time on the basis of
calculation, advantage and marked by the conviction that one party’s
enemies might be friends to the other. It was a political situation, that
of the Italy of the time, that was shot-through with rivalries and
ambiguities. We might think of Venice, in Spanish spheres defined as
the “concubine” of the Turk, who was deeply hated in Italy and who

n.45 Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVI - Aprile 2019
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)