Prophecy as Diplomacy in the 15th-Century Mediterranean

In 1401, the historian and polymath Ibn Khaldūn held a meeting with Timur outside Damascus, as the latter was getting ready to lay siege on the city. The encounter left such an impression on Ibn Khaldūn that he decided to include a transcript of their conversation, as he remembered it, in a biographical portion of his historical chronicle Kitāb al‐ʿIbar. Attempting to appease Timur, Ibn Khaldūn recalled certain prophecies that predicted the arrival of messianic redeemer (al‐qāʾim al‐fāṭimī) and that pointed to Timur as mahdī. Ibn Khaldūn's reference to prophecies in a diplomatic context was by no means singular. Merely a year later, Timur, sent an envoy, a bishop named Jean of Sultaniyya, to the court of Charles IV of France. In a geographical history written in Latin, Jean of Sultaniyya cited an Armenian prophecy predicting the imminent destruction of Islam and identifying Timur as the ruler who would join forces with Christians to reestablish Christianity in the east. A few decades later, the Humanist Greek writer George of Trebizond cited Latin prophecies when presenting Sultan Mehmet II an apocalyptic vision of a future Ottoman conquest of Rome and the unification of spiritual and temporal authority in the person of the Ottoman sultan. This paper will analyze apocalypticism as a political language in the fifteenth-century by focusing on several examples of diplomatic encounters. It will argue that prophecy became a particularly useful language for diplomacy at a historical juncture when new political ideas were being articulated into universalizing imperial projects. [