In the National Museum for Anthropology in Madrid a conference took place between 14 and 16 November 2022 under the title "Indirect Diplomacy: Contacts between Empires beyond the Court". From among our colleagues, Gábor Kármán participated at the event.

The conference, organised by the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (CSIC) aimed at widening the focus on classic diplomatic history and studying all those forms of maintaining contacts which go beyond the institution of envoys sent from one ruler to the other.

Gábor Kármán, who was one of the five invited keynote speakers of the event, shortly presented his starting ERC project and then elaborated upon the political manoeuvres of Gábor Bethlen, prince of Transylvania, which aimed at guaranteeing the security of his country by interfering in the peace negotiations between the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires in the 1620s. The lecture not only presented Bethlen's methods, which were rarely used by any other tributary of the sultan, but also the way of achieving the status at the Sublime Porte that made his successes possible, in spite of his rather weak position and the strong Ottoman pressure he had to endure in the first years of his rule.