SHOC members John Latham‑Sprinkle and Imma Petito recently took part in Small Worlds, Big Worlds: Medieval Mediterranean Perspectives, organised by the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean (SMM). Bringing together scholars from across the field, the SMM provides an excellent forum for exchange between specialists of the Eastern and Western Mediterranean.
Imma opened the proceedings with a paper exploring how Genoese merchants became valued diplomatic partners to English kings during the reign of Edward IV, highlighting their evolving role beyond commerce into the political sphere.
John, together with Andres Mesa, presented research tracing the emergence of sixteenth‑century slaving networks from fifteenth‑century Genoese and Florentine merchant networks spanning the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In a separate paper, John also reflected on the wider implications of these findings, particularly the possibility that credit‑based slave trading with local elites in West Africa was consciously modelled on practices developed in the Black Sea.