‘The Queen of England wants to bombard Livorno’: The Anglo-Tuscan Crisis at the Turn of the 18th Century (1696–1707)

Abstract

The government of Cosimo III de’ Medici promoted diplomatic strategies that were essentially aimed at preserving the neutrality of his dominion, so as to protect the economic interests of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany from conflicts between the great European powers at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1696, this policy came into crisis when William Plowman, an English merchant active in Livorno at the end of the seventeenth century, plundered a number of French ships in the Levant, thus triggering a chain effect that caused the consequent Tuscan diplomatic crisis with England. The controversy, which went on for several years, became increasingly popular in English royal circles, until it reached its peak in 1704, when rumours spread in Livorno that the English fleet was ready to bombard the Medicean port. Drawing on sources preserved in Florence, Venice and London, as well as an unpublished correspondence collected by Giovanni Battista Adami, the Tuscan procurator involved in Plowman’s liberation in 1699, this article aims to analyse the policy of neutrality pursued by the Grand Duchy of Tuscany during the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) through the international clamour provoked by the Plowman case.