1397–1441) was a Venetian merchant who spent over two decades in Egypt and wrote a treatise on the recovery of the Holy Land.
In that year, he saw in Cairo some 200 French and Italian prisoners from the Battle of Nicopolis who had converted to Islam and were being given to the Sultan Barquq by a Turkish emir.
[1][2] In 1409–1410, the Sultan Nasir al-Din Faraj sent Piloti and another envoy to Giacomo Crispo, Duke of the Archipelago, to negotiate the release of 150 Muslim merchants who had been captured by Pedro de Larraondo [es] near Antalya.
[3] He began the work, which he labels a tractatus, in 1420 and completed it in 1438, before learning of Sultan Barsbay's death on 7 June that year.
[5][4] Only a single manuscript copy of the French version is preserved, now MS 15701 in the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique.
[6] The Latin title of the treatise is De modo, progressu, ordine ac diligenti providentia habendis in passagio Christianorum pro conquesta Terrae Sanctae ('On the manner, progress, order and diligent preparation to be kept in the passage of the Christians for the conquest of the Holy Land').
A fleet of 120 ships under Venetian control could take Alexandria (which was suffering from population decline) and enforce an embargo on trade with Syria.
He displays firsthand knowledge of Muslim belief and practice, but his view of Islam was conventionally Western.
[3] Its overview of the Egyptian economy is of great value to the historian and Piloti's economic knowledge compares with Francesco Balducci Pegolotti's Pratica della mercatura.