The ‘Deserving Foreigner’: Venetian Protection in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

An online lecture by Umberto Signori

The Haifa Centre for Mediterranean History (HCMH) presents a joint online lecture with the Department of General History of the University of Haifa.

This presentation sets out to analyse the process of evaluating people’s right to protection in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean and reveals how people identified themselves. By focusing on claims of protection made by migrants who moved in and around the Ottoman Empire, the talk provides important insights into the different ways in which people from various social backgrounds could prove to be deserving of Venetian protection, while examination of orders issued by the Ottomans demonstrates the role of the early modern diplomacy.

Umberto Signori holds a doctorate in Early Modern History from the University of Milan. His work explores issues of mobility, diplomacy, protection, and procedures of identification in the early modern Mediterranean from a perspective of the rights claimed by foreigners.