The norms and rules underlying contacts and exchanges between political entities in the premodern Islamic world do not always seem clear to readers unfamiliar with the subject. While it would be tempting to apply the common legal understanding, that views ‘international’ interactions through the prism of the dar al-islam vs. dar al-harb opposition exclusively, the texts and accounts at our disposal offer a more complex and nuanced picture. Two things are clear: first, most of them take some kind of sovereignty (mulk, saltanah) as an essential precondition to participate to ‘diplomatic’ exchanges, and second, within that frame, the notion of sovereignty is inevitably attached that of territory. Using instead the concept of ‘diplomacy’ as an analytical frame, the paper aims to investigate the basis of elite communication and relationships between political elites in the premodern Islamic world, as presented by different, but dynamic and interconnected discursive registers. While giving attention to a variety of registers however, the paper will focus on the “spatial” register. The concept of “discourse of place” will be essential to this study. The paper takes as starting point the case of the Mamluk sultanate, ruling in Egypt and Syria from the 13th to 16th centuries, which has left us with the most diverse (but also most numerous) kind of sources. Of prime interest here are the administrative sources produced by secretaries working for the Mamluk state chancery, as well as the copies of letters in their collections. Those sources, combined with the works of the masalik wa’l-mamalik (human geography), offer a window into Mamluk understanding — real or imagined — of their potential interlocutors. Essential for this analysis are the geographic knowledge, representation, and description of those different parties. To illustrate this, the paper will focus on the case of Mamluk-Indian diplomacy, and will show specific cases of how both regions shared a common understanding of their sovereignty, territory and how those would determine — and facilitate — their contacts and relationship, and how this is well illustrated in their shared vocabularies and spatial representations.