ELTE Department of Medieval History invites to the public lecture by Ondřej Schmidt titled „The Court of King Wenceslas in A New Light: Editing and Interpreting the Fragmented Correspondence of The Visconti Ambassadors, 1386–87”.

Between 1386 and 1387, the Prague court of King Wenceslas of the Romans hosted ambassadors from Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan. Correspondence of the Italian diplomats was recently discovered in Parma, but unfortunately it has been preserved in a highly fragmentary state. Nonetheless, this unique source provides a fresh new insight into the functioning of King Wenceslas’s court, relations between the Luxembourg dynasty and northern Italy, and transalpine diplomatic practice in the late Middle Ages. Against a broader historical backdrop, this lecture will introduce the Parma fragments, outline the current project of their edition, and explore the possibilities of interpreting this source.

Ondřej Schmidt is assistant professor at the Department of Auxiliary Historical Sciences and Archive Studies, Masaryk University, Brno and research associate, Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. He authored a monograph John of Moravia, the patriarch of Aquileia (published with Brill) and has been working intensively on the correspondence of Luxembourg rulers and the Gonzaga family.

Source: ELTE Faculty of Humanities