L'italiano lingua «imperiale» nel Mediterraneo?

After Francesco Bruni’s influential studies, Italian has often been defined as “a language without an empire”, that is to say as a language whose international diffusion has not been supported by armies, statal bureaucracy and centralized systems of education. This interpretation fits more in the case of Renaissance Europe, whereas its application to the Mediterranean context is problematic, since the use of Italian in the Ottoman Empire for diplomacy with the West transformed this language into a powerful communicative tool, at the service of one of the main political and military subjects of the Early Modern World. The rapid and long-lasting success of “Imperial” Ottoman Italian has been prepared by the vernacular translations of diplomatic documents in the Medieval Levant and North Africa, by which a technical vocabulary and set of formulas developed, eventually to be used by the dragomans of the Porte.