6. Conclusions

First we summarise and draw together the various findings from our case studies to reconstruct how musics of Asia may have figured in the imaginary of Italian readers in the late fifteenth century. Then, we re-emphasise the broader point of our study, which is that Italian musical culture and experience in the fifteenth century was inflected by internationalisms stretching well beyond the kind of medieval Schengen Area formed by the commonality of Latin and the Catholic Church in Western Europe. Research to uncover these musical connections and relationships in fifteenth-century Italy is only at the beginning; probably there is much more to discover, and also a weighty task at hand to understand the implications of this broader, global perspective for the history and historiography of music in Italy more generally in the period.