Mediazione politica e ricerca naturalistica nel viaggio in Polonia di Michele Mercati

International audienceThe article focuses on 12 letters written in Bytom by the papal doctor Michele Mercati to the cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini at that time legato a latere in Poland. These letters reveal an involvement of the physician in a field apparently very distant from his specific competence : the political mediation. First, the article reconstructs his specific political role in a thorny international affaire. Second, it considers his diplomatic intervention in relation to the cultural and political activities he carried out during the Polish journey. Through this analysis, situated at the intersection of two very dynamix historiographic field, we would like to shed a new light both on diplomatic practices and the identity of the political mediator and on the complex profil of physician at the early modern period