An Immoderate Appetite for Empire: The Multiple Lives of Paolo Morosini's Defence of Venetian Expansion

Abstract This contribution looks at two iterations of Paolo Morosini's Letter to Cicco Simonetta (c.1470). The Letter was composed as a direct response to Milanese and papal critiques of Venetian expansion and was first part of a culture of diplomatic letter writing and persuasive rhetoric, intended to have an immediate political effect on hostile foreign views of Venice. Forty years later, Morosini's Letter had a second life as a humanist text when Giovanni Corner translated it into Latin and donated it to Marino Sanudo's library. This article argues that Corner's translation signals a kind of turning inward for Venetian defence of empire, now aimed at the city's own political class, which had significant reservations about the course of actions that led to the war of Cambrai. The Letter and its dual context allows an analysis of the way that two languages of power, humanism and diplomacy, intersected in the way that Venetian political elites defined and defended their empire in the changing systems of political communication in Renaissance Italy.