Eduard Fischer von Röslerstamm

This paper is an introduction to scientific discourse and an analysis of a small letter from Antoniotto Adorno, Doge of the Republic of Genoa, to Amadeo of Savoy, Lord of Piedmont and titular Prince of Achaea, which is dated back to 1391. The document comes from the collection of the famous historian and paleographer Nikolay Likhachev and is currently stored in the Western European Section of the Archive of the St. Petersburg Institute of History (Russian Academy of Sciences), where it is part of a small corpus related to the history of the Ligurian region of Italy. The letter is a sheet of thin paper with a clearly visible watermark and traces of a red wax seal. An analysis of the document’s appearance and diplomatic features allows me to conclude that the letter belongs to a special type of private correspondence of secular rulers, which began to enter into circulation in Europe just at the end of the 14th — beginning of the 15th centuries. The content of the message is quite laconic — Antoniotto Adorno informs Amadeo of Savoy that he is ready for any development of events, however, the essence of these events remains a mystery due to the lack of access to other parts of the correspondence. In this article, on the basis of the historical context, I put forward a hypothesis that the topic of the rulers’ correspondence was the potential assistance that Genoa could provide to Amadeo in his attempt to gain de facto control over Achaea. At the same time, the document is also a letter of credence from an envoy named Bertino Prohanna, who had to deliver Antoniotto Adorno’s answer to Amadeo of Savoy.