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his superior, had a special interest in the welfare of those
frontier provinces. Only to mention a few historical events of
Sultan Kait Bey's reign, we find that in 1488 he assisted the
Circassians to resist the encroachments of Alaeddoulet, an Asiatic
prince who had allied himself with the Osmanli to threaten the
province; the consequence was a war in Cilicia by sea and land,
which broke out in the following year between the contending powers.
Only a few years earlier the same province had been the scene of the
so-called Caramenian war in which the united Venetian, Neapolitan
and Sclavonic fleets had been engaged. (See CORIALANO CIPPICO,
Della guerra dei Veneziani nell' Asia dal 1469--1474. Venezia
1
796, p. 54) and we learn incidentally that a certain Leonardo
Boldo, Governor of Scutari under Sultan Mahmoud,--as his name would
indicate, one of the numerous renegades of Italian birth--played an
important part in the negotiations for peace.
Tu mi mandasti. The address tu to a personage so high in office
is singular and suggests personal intimacy; Leonardo seems to have
been a favourite with the Diodario. Compare lines 54 and 55.
I have endeavoured to show, and I believe that I am also in a
position to prove with regard to these texts, that they are draughts
of letters actually written by Leonardo; at the same time I must not
omit to mention that shortly after I had discovered
these texts in the Codex Atlanticus and published a paper on the
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