Byzantine diplomacy with the Ottomans: Actors, occasions, and procedures

As an attempt to understand the diplomatic communications of the Byzantine Empire with the Ottomans, this thesis poses questions on the use and role of several methods in this encounter during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It aims to situate the role of Byzantine diplomacy in a broader system of diplomatic networks with multiple challenging actors, thus presenting a practical aspect of foreign politics. By making use primarily of the available narrative histories, both in Byzantine Greek and Ottoman Turkish, which are occasionally underpinned by works from other genres such as epistolographic evidence, rhetorical sources, and official documents, it carries out extensive research on each diplomatic contact and the instruments of diplomatic communication including letter exchanges, political negotiations via embassies, and conclusion of treaties. The emphasis here lies on the kinds of diplomatic practice constructed in a period when Byzantium was shrinking politically against the growing Ottoman power. More specifically, the thesis, on the one hand, looks into various diplomatic strategies that Byzantium adopted in relation to the Ottoman state and, on the other hand, seeks to lay down the influential roles of the envoys as agents in several diplomatic occasions. For that purpose, the analysis is based on a list of all the recorded diplomatic communications between the two political entities, ranging from an embassy of any sort to a simple messenger carrying the message of the political authority or its representatives. Focusing on their networks, careers, positions, and backgrounds, it is argued that the profile of envoys reveals some idiosyncratic elements and patterns in the selection of the persons in charge.