Lorenzo Gritti (diplomat)

Lorenzo Gritti (* 1498 in Constantinople ; † September 6, 1539 ibid) was a Venetian ambassador to Constantinople.

Lorenzo Gritti was the natural youngest son of a Greek woman and the Venetian Doge Andrea Gritti . Lorenzo and his two brothers were born when the Doge was working as Bailò in the Ottoman capital.

The Council of Ten allowed him to take care of the property there of his brothers Alvise and Zorzi, who had died in December 1538. The Spanish ambassador Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was suspicious, however, because he suspected that Venice wanted to leave the alliance against the Ottomans. The Council of Ten sent Lorenzo Gritti as envoy to the Sublime Porte in January 1539 , after Sultan Suleyman had assured him of safe conduct to negotiate peace. Gritti left Venice at the end of February to negotiate with the Ottoman dragoman "Jonus". On March 21st, he left Adrianople (Edirne) to return to Venice. On April 8, 1539, he reported his negotiations in Adrianople to the Signori capi . The negotiations did not lead to their goal until 1540, when Venice agreed to pay 300,000 ducats in damages. Gritti reported that he had been able to get in touch with Aias through the mediation of the dragoman , the translator. The latter was evidently authorized to promise a three-month armistice in order to give Venice the opportunity to send a real ambassador to the port. Venice decided on Piero Zeno, who had already worked as Bailò and who had good contacts in the Ottoman capital. But he died on July 25, 1539 on the way to Constantinople in Sarajevo . Aias then extended the armistice until September 20th. In the meantime, Gritti had sailed back to Constantinople and he wrote a letter complaining about the disastrous work of two other negotiators. The new ambassador Tomà Contarini had to wait three weeks, but the Ottomans set unacceptable conditions. Only Alvise Badoer managed to buy the extremely expensive peace the next year.

By the time the peace treaty was signed in October 1540, Gritti had already been dead for over a year. It is reported that he suddenly died of the plague in bed .

Remarks

1. ↑ Theodore F. Jones: The Turco-Venetian Treaty of 1540 , in: Annual Report of the American History Association for the Year 1914, Vol. 1, Washington 1916, pp. 161–167, here: pp. 162–164 ( digitized ).
2. ↑ Spain: February 1539 , British History Online.
3. ↑ Kenneth Meyer Setton: The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571 , Vol. III: The Sixteenth Century to the Reign of Julius III , American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia 1984, p. 448.
4. ↑ Diarii udinesi dall'anno 1508 al 1541 di Leonardo e Gregorio Amaseo e Gio. Antonio Azio , Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie , Venice 1884, p. 466.

predecessor	Office	successor
Flavio Orsini (Bailo)	Venetian envoy to Constantinople 1539	Vincenzo Zantani