Relazioni Degli Ambasciatori Veneti Al Senato 15 Volume Set Series I, II and III

These editions of reports sent back by Venetian ambassadors to the Great Council of the Republic in the sixteenth century were edited by Eugenio Albèri (1807-78) and published between 1839 and 1863. (Reports from earlier centuries had been destroyed in a fire at the Doge's Palace in 1577.) As Albèri notes in his preface to the first volume, a law of 1296 decreed that all embassies and legations should submit a written report to the Council at the end of their mission, and the surviving records provide an invaluable resource for both political and economic historians. The fifteen volumes are divided into three series, on relations with European states outside Italy, with other Italian states, and with the Ottoman Empire. Ranging from a mission to France in 1492 to an embassy to Savoy in 1601, the reports cover all the significant political events in sixteenth-century Europe.