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On 15 December 2025, DiplomatiCon Webinars welcomed Elisa Turrisi, who delivered a fascinating presentation entitled Trade, Networks, and Integration: Catalan and Valencian Agents in Late Fifteenth-Century Palermo.

Elisa Turrisi is a PhD candidate in Cultural Heritage at the University of Palermo, where she is conducting a research project entitled A City at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Palermo and Its Urban Elites in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century. She obtained her MA in History and Civilizations from the University of Pisa in 2021 and earned a diploma in “Archival Science, Paleography, and Diplomatics” from the State Archives of Palermo in 2023. In 2024, she spent a semester as a visiting researcher in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Barcelona. Her research focuses on the Sicily and the Crown of Aragon during the Late Medieval period, with a specific focus on merchant mobility and integration.

In the second half of the fifteenth century, the Catalan civil war (1462–1472) and the gradual redirection of Valencian trade routes fostered intense mercantile and institutional mobility toward Sicily. Turrisi’s contribution reconstructed, through notarial and fiscal sources as well as documents from the Royal Chancellery of Palermo, the settlement patterns of Catalan and Valencian merchants and officials in the capital of the Sicilian kingdom. These groups, attracted by an open urban environment well connected to Mediterranean networks, established themselves through powers of attorney, insurance arrangements, and familial alliances. During her presentation, Elisa also examined the role of some of these individuals, as vice royal ambassadors in peace negotiations with the Sultan of Tunis. Her presentation demonstrated how fifteenth-century Palermo functioned as a strategic hub for elite mobility, and as a space of economic citizenship within the Aragonese Mediterranean.

The discussion of the seminar was opened by Alessandro Rizzo, who is a postdoc at the University of Barcelona, where he is conducting research on the relations between the Crown of Aragon and Muslim powers. In 2018, he obtained his PhD at the University of Liege, in cotutelle with the University of Aix-Marseille, with a thesis entitled Le Lys et le Lion. Diplomatie et échanges entre Florence et le sultanat mamelouk (début XVe-début XVIe siècle). Rizzo’s research interests include the history of the Medieval Islam and inter-confessional diplomacy, with a specific focus on the relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Christian polities of the Western Mediterranean.