Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World 9780198835691, 0198835698

Table of contents :
Cover
Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the Early Modern World
LITERARY-DIPLOMATIC CULTURE
DIPLO-LITERARY STUDIES AND THE NEW DIPLOMATIC HISTORY
LITERARY ENGAGEMENTS
TRANSLATION
DISSEMINATION
DIPLOMATIC TEXTS
PART I: LITERARY ENGAGEMENTS
1: The Place of the Literary in European Diplomacy: Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks
INTRODUCTION
GENTILI ON THE ANTIQUITY OF EMBASSY
EUROPEAN CONTEXTS AND COMPARISONS
CONCLUSION: CONSCIOUS MYTHMAKING
2: Distinguished Visitors: Literary Genre and Diplomatic Space in Shakespeare, Calderón, and Proust
INTRODUCTION: ‘MAMAMOUCHI!’
‘GREAT AMBASSADORS, FROM FOREIGN PRINCES’
‘AN AMBASSADOR FOR MYSELF’
CONCLUSION: ‘FOR A YOUNG MAN, A MEMORY WORTH KEEPING’
3: Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas
INTRODUCTION
COLONIAL ALLIANCES: DRAKE AND THE CIMARRONS
REBELLION AND THE LAW OF NATIONS
VITORIA AND COLONIAL ENMITY
DAVENANT AND COLONIAL TRAGEDY
CONCLUSION: MAROONING THE LAW OF NATIONS
4: Diplomatic Pathos: Sidney’s Brazen Fictions and the Troubled Origins of International Laws
INTRODUCTION: LAW AND THE LIMITS OF PERSUASION
LEGAL IDEALISM AND DIPLOMATIC PRACTICE
LEGAL IDEALISM AND PROTESTANT MISGIVINGS IN GENTILI AND SYDNEY
LAW, LITERATURE, AND DIPLOMATIC ASPIRATION IN A FALLEN WORLD
PART II: TRANSLATION
5: Translation and Communication: War and Peace by Other Means
INTRODUCTION: MERCURY AND THE PRE-HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
COMMERCIO ET IMPERIO: SELF-INTEREST, COMMUNICATION, AND THE REGULATION OF LIFE IN COMMON
POLITICAL AMBASSADORS AND TEXTUAL WARRIORS
TRANSLATION AND DIPLOMACY BETWEEN PARTICULARS AND UNIVERSALS
CONCLUSION: DIPLOMACY, TRANSLATION, AND GENERIC THIRD SPACES
6: The Politics of Translation: The Lusiads and European Diplomacy (1580–1664)
INTRODUCTION
PHILIP I I AND THE LUSIADS
SIR RICHARD FANSHAWE’S ROYALIST TRANSLATION AND ANGLO-PORTUGUESE DIPLOMACY POST 1655
CARLO ANTONIO PAGGI’S LA LUSIADA ITALIANA: GENOESE DIPLOMACY AND MERCANTILE AMBITIONS
CONCLUSION
7: Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France
INTRODUCTION
TRANSLATION AND DIPLOMATIC SIGNALLING
FORMING A PROTESTANT LITERARY COMMUNITY
CONCLUSION
PART III: DISSEMINATION
8: Books as Diplomatic Agents: Milton in Sweden
INTRODUCTION
THE EARLY LIFE OF DEFENSIO
THE ANGLO-SWEDISH TURN
THE IMPACT OF DEFENSIO
THE SEQUEL
CONCLUSION
9: Diplomatic Knowledge on Display Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere
INTRODUCTION: THE ANJOU MATCH PUBLISHED
COMPLETE MANUALS OF CRAFT KNOWLEDGE
DOCUMENTS AS MANUALS OF CONDUCT
THE STAGE AND PUBLIC CIRCULATION
THE ENDS OF DIPLOMATIC KNOWLEDGE
CONCLUSION
10: A Diplomatic Narrative in the Archive: The War of Cyprus, Record Keeping Practices, and Historical Research in the Early Modern Venetian Chancery
INTRODUCTION
DIPLOMATIC AND SCHOLARLY INFORMATION IN THE VENETIAN SECRET CHANCERY
DIPLOMATIC RECORDS AS HISTORICAL SOURCES: THE CASE OF THE WAR OF CYPRUS
CONCLUSION
PART IV: DIPLOMATIC DOCUMENTS
11: Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts: Literary Representation and Diplomatic Practice in George Turberville’s and Thomas Randolph’s Accounts of Russia (1568–9)
INTRODUCTION
TEXTUAL AMBASSADOR: TURBERVILLE’S POEMS AND VERSE LETTERS
AMBASSADORIAL TEXT: THOMAS RANDOLPH’S DIPLOMATIC REPORT
CONCLUSION
12: Diplomatic Writing as Aristocratic Self-Fashioning: French Ambassadors in Constantinople
INTRODUCTION
DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE AS A SOCIAL PRACTICE
THE AMBIGUITIES OF AMBASSADORIAL SELF-FASHIONING
CONCLUSION
13: Negotiating with the Material Text: Royal Correspondence between England and the Wider World
INTRODUCTION
EPISTOLARY CULTURE AND THE SOCIETYOF PRINCES
THE CEREMONIAL CONTEXT
DECORATED TEXTS AND DIPLOMATIC COMMUNICATION
CONCLUSION
14: Ritual Practice and Textual Representations: Free Imperial Cities in the Society of Princes
INTRODUCTION
THE SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS OF RECORDING URBAN DIPLOMACY
THE CEREMONIAL RECORDS OF PRINCELY VISITS TO THE IMPERIAL CITIES
CONCLUSION
Bibliography
MANUSCRIPTS
PRINTED SOURCES
SECONDARY SOURCES
Index

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C U LT U R E S O F D I P L O M A C Y A N D L I T E R A RY W R I T I N G I N T H E E A R LY M O D E R N WO R L D

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Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World Edited by

T R A C E Y   A .  S OW E R B Y A N D J OA N N A C R A I G WO O D

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930087 ISBN 978–0–19–883569–1 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements This volume originates from an international research network, ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ that was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant no. AH/K001930/1). None of this would have been possible without its support. The essays presented here were written predominantly, but not exclusively, by members of the network. Other members have contributed essays to different publications arising from the project but have contributed to the content of this volume through our discussions over the years. We are grateful to all of them for their insights. Our especial thanks go to Joad Raymond and John Watkins who have selflessly shared their experience and wisdom as members of our steering committee. We are also grateful to Keble College, Oxford; The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities; and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge for their support of the network’s events. The inclusion of images in Chapter 13 was made possible by a grant from the Scouloudi Foundation in association with the Institute of Historical Research. The contributors would like to thank the staff at all of the libraries and archives listed in our Bibliography for their assistance over the years.

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Contents List of Figures List of Abbreviations Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the Early Modern World Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood

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I .  L I T E R A RY E N G A G E M E N T S 1. The Place of the Literary in European Diplomacy: Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks Joanna Craigwood 2. Distinguished Visitors: Literary Genre and Diplomatic Space in Shakespeare, Calderón, and Proust Timothy Hampton 3. Lines of Amity: The Law of Nations in the Americas Mark Netzloff 4. Diplomatic Pathos: Sidney’s Brazen Fictions and the Troubled Origins of International Law John Watkins

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I I .  T R A N S L AT I O N 5. Translation and Communication: War and Peace by Other Means José María Pérez Fernández 6. The Politics of Translation: The Lusiads and European Diplomacy (1580–1664) Catarina Fouto 7. Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France Peter Auger

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I I I .  D I S S E M I N AT I O N 8. Books as Diplomatic Agents: Milton in Sweden Joad Raymond

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viii Contents 9. Diplomatic Knowledge on Display: Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere András Kiséry 10. A Diplomatic Narrative in the Archive: The War of Cyprus, Record Keeping Practices, and Historical Research in the Early Modern Venetian Chancery Fabio Antonini

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I V.   D I P L O M AT I C D O C U M E N T S 11. Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts: Literary Representation and Diplomatic Practice in George Turberville’s and Thomas Randolph’s Accounts of Russia (1568–9) Jan Hennings 12. Diplomatic Writing as Aristocratic Self-Fashioning: French Ambassadors in Constantinople Christine Vogel 13. Negotiating with the Material Text: Royal Correspondence between England and the Wider World Tracey A. Sowerby 14. Ritual Practice and Textual Representations: Free Imperial Cities in the Society of Princes André J. Krischer Bibliography Index

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List of Figures 1 3.1 13.2 13.3 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4

James VI/I to Sultan Ahmed I, 17 January 1617 206 Elizabeth I to the Emperor of Cathay, 4 May 1602 215 James VI/I to the Emperor of Japan, 11 April 1614 216 Map with places mentioned in Chapter 14 221 Title leaf of one of the Cologne books of ceremonies (1740–97) 226 Letter of Duke Augustus to the council of Braunschweig, 1627 228 Title page of a so-called ‘Aufwartungsbuch’ (‘book of courtesies’) of Schwäbisch Hall 230 14.5 Cologne book of ceremonies (1740–97), fos. 88v–89r 232 1 4.6 Bremen by Matthaeus Merian, c.1641235

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List of Abbreviations BL CSPF

British Library Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Arthur J. Butler and Sophia C. Lomas, 23 vols (London, 1863–1950) EHR English Historical Review HJ The Historical Journal JEMH Journal of Early Modern History JMEMS Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies JMH Journal of Modern History LP Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. John Sherren Brewer, James Gairdner, and Robert Henry Brodie, 23 vols (London, 1862–1932) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004; online edn, October 2008) P&P Past & Present RBK Lloyd E. Berry and Robert O. Crummey (eds), Rude and Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth-century English Voyagers (Madison, 1968) RR Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme StP Studies in Philology TNA The National Archives ZHF Zeitschrift für historische Forschung

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Notes on Contributors Fabio Antonini completed his doctoral research as a member of the ERC-funded research group ‘ARCHIves—A Comparative History of Archives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’ at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research concerns the relationship between archival practice and the writing of history in early modern Venice, the development of the archive as a locus for historical research, and the role of information networks in the formation and defence of civic historical identities. Peter Auger is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham, having previously held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. His various shorter pieces on Du Bartas’ reception history support the arguments made in Du Bartas’ Legacy in England and Scotland, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. His current research is on Franco-British poetic relations during James VI and I’s reign and multilingual literary practices. Joanna Craigwood  (University of Cambridge) works on the relationship between English literature and diplomacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She has published variously on the diplomatic contexts for literary theory, Sidney, and Shakespeare, and on diplomats as book collectors. She was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded international network ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ and has given invited talks on literature and diplomacy in Europe and the US. Catarina Fouto  is Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at King’s College London. She has published on Portuguese vernacular and Neo-Latin literature and the culture of the early modern period. Her interests include the history of the book and censorship, the history of literary theory, translation studies, and the reception of classical and medieval literature in the early-modern period. Catarina is a member of the international research group Seminario de Poética Europea del Renacimiento (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), a member of the editorial board of the journal Portuguese Studies and serves on the Committee of the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) at King’s College London. Timothy Hampton is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California at Berkeley, where he also directs the Doreen  B.  Townsend Center for the Humanities.  He is the author of Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2010). His other books include Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance France (Ithaca, 2001) and Writing from History: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, 1990). Jan Hennings is Associate Professor of History at Central European University, Budapest. His research has focused on early modern diplomacy, especially in Russian-European contexts. His current work explores Russian-Ottoman exchanges, concentrating on the establishment of the first Russian resident embassy in Constantinople at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Before moving to Budapest, he had held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College Oxford, and taught history as a Visiting Professor and Gerda Henkel Fellow at Sabancı University, Istanbul. His publications include Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016), and he is a co-editor (with Tracey  A.  Sowerby) of Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (London, 2017).

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Notes on Contributors

András Kiséry is Associate Professor of English at The City College of New York (CUNY). He has written about early modern English literature, political culture, and the material text, as well as about early twentieth-century German and Hungarian scholarship on the history of communication. He is author of Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016) and co-editor of Formal Matters: Reading the Materials of English Renaissance Literature (Manchester, 2013), and Worlds of Hungarian Writing: National Literature as Intercultural Exchange (Madison, 2016). He is now working on two longer projects, about early modern English literature and the European book trade, and about the birth of media studies in early twentieth-century century sociology, history, and philology. André J. Krischer studied history, philosophy and English literature in Cologne and Bonn. André is a Lecturer in British history at the University of Muenster, Germany, where he is also a Principal Investigator in the DFG-Collaborativ Research Centre ‘Cultures of Decision Making’ (SFB 1150). He is interested in the cultural history of diplomacy and foreign relations in the early modern world, the visual history of religious violence, the history of bureaucratic and parliamentary procedures of decision making, and the history of political crime. He has recently published a book on treason and treason trials in England from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. Mark Netzloff is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (New York, 2003), the editor of John Norden’s The Surveyor’s Dialogue: A Critical Edition (Farnham, 2010), and the co-editor of Early Modern Drama in Performance: Essays in Honor of Lois Potter (2017). He recently completed a book, Writing Beyond the State: English Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern Europe, which is forthcoming with OUP. José María Pérez Fernández teaches at the University of Granada. He works on the relations between translation, diplomacy, and the book trade, their role in the construction of the international republic of letters, and the early modern idea of Europe. He is particularly interested in general processes of communication and how financial and mercantile activity mirrored the ways in which these exchanges took place. During a recent tenure as Berenson Fellow (2017) at Villa I Tatti he worked on a monograph (with Edward Wilson-Lee), on Hernando Colón’s library (forthcoming with Yale UP in 2019). He is currently working on a new book titled Communication, Community, and Commerce. Joad Raymond  was born and schooled in Cardiff, and found his way to Queen Mary University of London via UEA, Oxford, and Aberdeen. He is the author and editor of numerous books on the history of news, cheap print, Milton, and angels, most recently, with Noah Moxham, News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016). He has just completed a two-volume edition of Milton’s Latin defences for OUP, and is writing a book on the history of news communication for Penguin. He is also engaged in various projects in the creative arts. Tracey A. Sowerby (University of Oxford) researches early modern political culture and religion, with a particular focus on diplomatic practices and cultures. She was principal investigator on two diplomacy-related projects ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’, funded by the AHRC and ‘Centres of Diplomacy, Centres of Culture’ funded by the British Academy. She is the author of Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: the Careers of Sir Richard Morison

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c.1513–1556 (Oxford, 2010) and is co-editor, with Jan Hennings, of Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World c.1410–1800 (London, 2017). Christine Vogel is Professor of European History (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries) at the University of Vechta (Germany). Formerly she was a research assistant at the University of Rostock and an associate member of the GRC-Research Group ‘Self-Narratives in Transcultural Perspective’ at the Freie Universität Berlin. She was awarded a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship by the Humboldt Foundation and was a visiting fellow at the Université Paris IV-Sorbonne in 2009–10. She is the author of Der Untergang der Gesellschaft Jesu als europäisches Medienereignis: publizistische Debatten im Spannungsfeld von Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung (Mainz, 2006), and co-editor with Peter Burschel of Die Audienz: ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2014), and, with Claudia Garnier, of Interkulturelle Ritualpraxis in der Vormoderne: diplomatische Interaktion an den östlichen Grenzen der Fürstengesellschaft (Berlin, 2016). John Watkins is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. His research focuses on sovereignty; cultural and diplomatic exchanges between England, France, and the Mediterranean; and the classical and medieval underpinnings of early modernity. His books include  The Specter of Dido (New Haven, 1995); Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge, 2002);  After Lavinia:  A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca, 2017); and with Carole Levin, Shakespeare’s Foreign Worlds:  National and Transnational Identity in the Elizabethan Age (London, 2009). With Kathryn L. Reyerson, he is the co-editor of Mediterranean Identities in the Premodern Era: Entrepôts, Islands, Empires (Farnham, 2014).

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Introduction Literary and Diplomatic Cultures in the Early Modern World Tracey A. Sowerby and Joanna Craigwood L I T E R A RY - D I P L O M AT I C C U LT U R E To Renaissance writers the close relationship between literature and diplomacy was self-evident. So much so that the Italian exile and professor of civil law Alberico Gentili devoted a chapter of his magnum opus on embassies to a discussion of ambassadors of literary attainments. Recognizing that a large number of distinguished litterateurs from every field of learning had undertaken diplomatic missions, his list included eminent theologians, philosophers, and jurists. Many were ancient authors such as Aristotle, Cicero, and Diogenes, but several, including Ermolao Barbaro, Guillaume Budé, and Francesco Guicciardini, were Gentili’s near contemporaries.1 Gentili could easily have added many names to his list for a significant number of early modern European diplomats were writers including some of the foremost political, legal, and literary authors of the European Renaissance, men such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Bernardino de Mendoza, and Thomas Wyatt. This emphasis on the literary accomplishments of early modern ambassadors should come as no surprise: high among the skills early modern diplomats needed were oratory and eloquence and much of an ambassador’s work was textual—writing reports, composing speeches, writing letters.2 Indeed, for Gentili, as for so many humanists, literary writing and political service were not mutually exclusive spheres of activity, but could be meaningfully interwoven. He believed that the attention of ambassadors ‘can always be brought to the responsibilities of public life, especially if their literary activities are not widely divorced from those responsibilities’ and that an ambassador’s literary education should ideally be directed towards serving the common good. Gentili wanted well-educated ambassadors whose literary studies would bear on ‘practical politics 1 Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, ed. Gordon  J.  Laing, 2 vols (New York, 1924), II.159–61. 2  See for example Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, IL, 2002), chs. 4–5; Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1620 (Oxford, 2015), esp. parts II and IV.

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and [. . .] the administration of high offices’.3 The authors of other diplomatic handbooks also made this association. Ottaviano Maggi outlined an extensive list of subjects and authors that an ambassador should read, including literary texts, in preparation for diplomatic service.4 The links between literature and diplomacy went much deeper. Many diplomatic commentators and theorists found that literary tropes provided a language that helped them to make sense of diplomacy itself. For the French civil lawyer and occasional diplomat Jean Hotman distinguishing between ‘An Ambassage and a Comedie’ provided a useful way to explain the singular representational identity required of an ambassador, for during an embassy ‘a man cannot [. . .] play diuerse partes vnder diuers garments’ without risking both his and his master’s honour.5 One century later, Abraham de Wicquefort also considered the relationship between comedy and diplomacy. With a hint of satire, he recommended that an ambassador ‘ought to have the Tincture of the Comedian’ for ‘there is not a more illustrious Theatre than a Court; neither is there any Comedy, where the Actors seem less what they are in effect, than Embassadors do in their Negotiation’.6 Whereas for Hotman parallels with the stage highlighted the need for straight dealing, at least as far as it concerned only taking on one mission for one master at a time, for Wicquefort they suggested the highly performative, dissimulative practices of contemporary diplomacy. The use of a literary vocabulary when trying to comprehend diplomatic activity was not limited to the—admittedly numerous—diplomatic manuals produced in early modern Europe.7 A wide range of European diplomats found that literary tropes provided a useful repertoire with which to describe and analyse the performative political cultures they encountered at foreign courts. For instance Sir Thomas Roe reported of the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir that ‘this sitting out hath soe much affinitye with a theatre—the manner of the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on—that an easy description will informe of the place and fashion’.8 Deploying the analogy to London public theatres helped Roe to explain the hierarchical use of space within Mughal court ceremony.9 On other occasions employing theatrical tropes permitted Roe to downplay the political significance of his acceptance of robes of honour from the Mughal Emperor, commenting that the cloak would have suited an actor playing Tamerlane, or to denigrate his political rivals, such as the Persian 3 Gentili, De legationibus, II. 159–61. 4  Ottaviano Maggi, De legato libri duo (Venice, 1566), Book II, esp. 55–7. 5  Jean Hotman, The Ambassador (London, 1603), F7v. 6  Abraham de Wicquefort, The embassador and his functions, trans. J. Digby (London, 1716), 294. 7  For a survey of the handbooks see Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome: the Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge, 2015), 38–42; H.  Kugeler, ‘ “Le parfait ambassadeur”. The Theory and Practice of Diplomacy in the Century Following the Peace of Westphalia’, D.Phil. thesis University of Oxford (2006). 8  The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–19: as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, ed. William Foster (London, 1899), 87. 9  On Mughal ceremonial see Stephen P. Blake, Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal and Ottoman Empires (Cambridge, 2013).

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ambassador, whom he described as ‘rather a Iester or Iugler then a Person of any gravety, running vp and downe, and acting all his woordes like a mimick Player’.10 Roe’s links to English dramatists11 go some way towards explaining his choice of strategy, but other European diplomats, without comparable connections, invoked similar parallels too. Many ambassadors found a descriptive vocabulary for diplomacy that was drawn from literature and drama useful because they perceived close resonances between the representational and performative nature of the two activities, resonances that helped them to understand the cultural relativism at play between their host and their home courts. Ogier de Busbecq, the Imperial ambassador to Sultan Suleiman I in 1555, likened his own actions as ambassador to acting and used the genre he invoked to add further layers of meaning, writing that he processed to take leave of the Sultan after his failure to secure a permanent peace between the Emperor and the Ottomans ‘as though I were going to play the part of Agamemnon or some similar hero in a tragedy’.12 On the surface Roe and Busbecq’s adoption of a dramatic framework for their analyses may appear to be inflected by exoticism, the reaction of an ambassador to the unfamiliar phenomena he encountered in a polity with a far different normative system.13 However, such analogies are also frequently found within intra-European diplomatic discourse, and dated back to the use of actors as diplomats among ancient Greek city-states, as early modern commentators knew.14 These references even extended to using the plots of plays as an analytical short hand. Hence Christopher Mundt could liken the actions of Otto Truchess von Waldburg, Cardinal of Augsburg, to those of Davus in Andria.15 Despite shifts in the attitudes with which contemporary commentators and political actors approached diplomacy, literary and dramatic tropes remained a useful conceptual tool for making sense of the processes and practices of inter-princely and interstate relations throughout the early modern period. From the hermeneutic manipulation of proto-novelistic narrative to make sense of a sixteenth-century Portuguese-Vijayanagar encounter to the late-seventeenth-century employment of the emerging literary-aesthetic term ‘genius’ to describe diplomatic wit, diplomatic discourses drew on evolving literary references, genres, and values.16

10  Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 300, 334. 11  On Roe’s possible links to English poets and dramatists see Colin Mitchell, Sir Thomas Roe and the Mughal Empire (Karachi, 2000), 55–9. 12  The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, Imperial Ambassador at Constantinople, 1554– 1562, ed. Edward S. Forster (Oxford, 1927), 64. 13  For this interpretation see Jyotsna G. Singh, Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: ‘Discoveries’ of India in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1996), 19–51. 14  Pat Easterling and Edith Hall (eds), Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession (Cambridge, 2002), 332–3. For knowledge of this ancient practice see An Apology For Actors (London, 1612), C2v–C3r. 15  TNA SP 70/5, fo. 126v [CSPF I 977]. 16 Hannah Chapelle Wojciehowski, ‘The Queen of Onor and her Emissaries: Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Dialogue with India’, in Brinda Charry and Gitanjali Shahani (eds), Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550–1700 (Farnham, 2009), 167–91 (168–79); London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/0510, Matthew Prior to the Earl of Jersey, July 8/18, 1699.

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One reason for the use of literary parallels in diplomatic descriptions was undoubtedly the increasing preponderance of literary men among those serving their princes abroad from the fifteenth century. Indeed, the careers of Renaissance diplomats bear out Gentili’s confidence that literature and diplomacy were compatible, even complementary, as so many were renowned poets, dramatists, translators, and polemicists. Others were influential literary patrons and many moved within literary circles. Diplomats’ minds also no doubt turned to literary parallels so regularly for the simple reason that literary composition was embedded within diplomatic culture in many parts of the early modern world. A brief examination of the uses of poetry within diplomatic practice highlights just how integral literary composition and texts were. In the areas once dominated by classical Chinese, poetry that drew upon a shared logographic system frequently paralleled the official negotiations and provided a means of commenting upon them.17 Korean envoys to China were sometimes tasked with composing poems as part of their missions, while by the end of the eighteenth century, poetry was still sufficiently closely linked to Chinese diplomacy that the Quianlong Emperor personally composed a poem to celebrate George McCartney’s embassy.18 Poems were exchanged within and alongside letters between princes in Islamicate Eurasia, while European queens might send poems to one another as gifts.19 Poems were written to celebrate important and unusual diplomatic gifts: the giraffes that al-Mu’izz of Tunis and Lorenzo de Medici received from the Mamluk sultans were celebrated in verse.20 Meanwhile polemical verse could continue hostilities in the absence of open war.21 As several of the essays in this volume suggest, the prestige attached to poetry made it a useful vehicle for building cultural capital and, thereby, diplomatic benefit. Another reason was the centrality of humanist rhetorical culture to the development of both European diplomacy and literature during this period.22 Scholars have long known that early modern Europe adopted the Roman practice of referring to ambassadors as orators, and that they were accordingly expected to be eloquent.23 Humanist rhetoric—the art of speaking and writing well and persuasively informed by the studia humanitatis or the study of grammar, poetry, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy—influenced developments in Italian diplomacy.24 Humanist oratorical displays served as cultural gifts between Italian city-states in ritual 17  For example Liam C. Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars: Envoy Poetry and the Sino-Vietnamese Relationship (Honolulu, 2005). 18  Dane Alston, ‘Empire and Emissary: the Hongwu Emperor, Kwŏn Kŭn, and the Poetry of Late Fourteenth-Century Diplomacy’, Korean Studies, 32 (2008), 104–47. 19  Cihan Yüksel Muslu, The Ottomans and the Mamluks: Imperial Diplomacy and Warfare in the Islamic World (London, 2014), 36, 333n.22; Peter C. Herman, Royal Poetrie: Monarchic Verse and the Political Imaginary of Early Modern England (Ithaca, 2010), 68–71. 20 Doris Behrens-Abouseif, Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Culture in the Medieval Islamic world (London, 2014), 113, 141–2. 21  David Carlson, ‘Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and Henry VII’s Humanists’ Response’, StP, 85 (1988), 279–304. 22  Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2009), 14–44. 23  Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1955), 186; Donald  E.  Queller, The Office of Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1967), 60–76; for example Hotman, Ambassador, C2v: ‘in many places Ambassadors are called Orators’. 24 Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 16, 101–52.

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performances bound up with diplomatic honour and shame.25 The humanist absorption of a classical cultural heritage characterized by shared stories, Ciceronian rhetoric, and linguistic and syntactical borrowings from Latin created the cultural connections and common political language that allowed first Italian and then wider European diplomats to negotiate fragmented political geographies.26 By the late sixteenth century, northern European writers were already parodying the established diplomatic exploitation of classical rhetoric and literature.27 Humanist oratory became such a powerful part of European diplomatic ritual that early voyagers to North America drew on it as an interpretative framework for understanding rituals of encounter among indigenous societies.28 Captain John Smith describes the leader Powhatan as greeting him with ‘a great Oration made by three of his Nobles’ on his arrival in what would become Virginia as ‘a publike confirmation of a perpetuall league and friendship’.29 Despite his ultimate inability to understand or adequately convey indigenous speech, which he reframes within classical humanist reference sets, Smith’s accounts do also show that stylized oratorical performances were integral to Powhatan diplomatic ceremony: ‘if any great commander arrive’, Smith recounts, ‘2. or more of their chiefest men make an oration, testifying their love. Which they do with such vehemency and so great passions, that they sweate till they drop, and are so out of breath they can scarce speake.’30 Likewise when the Portuguese chronicler Rui de Pina praises Prince Jelen of Senegambia for his oratory on a visit to King John II in Lisbon, his words may reflect the fictional imposition of humanist expectations on this written account, but they may also reflect the skilful negotiation of European rhetorical ritual by the African prince.31 After all, as the Italian diplomat Gaspare Bragaccia pointed out in 1626, the ambassador ‘must possess practised eloquence to know how to persuade in both speech and writing’ making him in essence a ‘man of language’.32 D I P L O - L I T E R A RY S T U D I E S A N D T H E N E W D I P L O M AT I C H I S TO RY As the web of diplomatic discourse informed by humanist intellectual culture engaged with many of the same concerns as early modern literature, current scholarship is increasingly recognizing the importance of understanding the dialogue 25  Brian Jeffrey Maxson, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2014), 85–106. 26 Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict, 7. 27  Warren Boutcher, ‘ “Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscán’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature 52 (2000), 11–52 (45–9). 28 Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 5–8. 29  John Smith, A True relation of such occurrences and accidents of note, as hath hapned in Virginia (1608), in Philip Barbour (ed.), The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, 1580–1631, 3 vols (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), I.65. 30 Smith, A Map of Virginia (1612), in Barbour (ed.), Complete Works, I.167–8. 31  Rui de Pina, Crónica de El-Rei D. João II, ed. Alberto Martins de Carvalho (Coimbra, 1950), 92. For an assessment of Pina’s account see Ivana Elbl, ‘Cross-cultural Trade and Diplomacy: Portuguese Relations with West Africa, 1441–1521’, Journal of World History, 3 (1992), 188–92. 32  Gaspare Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore (Padua, 1626), 123.

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between these spheres.33 Timothy Hampton first compellingly demonstrated the powerful symbiotic relationship between the overlapping diplomatic and literary cultures of early modern Europe. Diplomatic culture was semiotic and symbolic in nature, invested in the production of signs, shaped by practices of communication, interpretation and linguistic exchange, and plagued by problems of reading and writing. That was both why literary skills, tools, and comparisons were so useful to diplomacy and why literary texts provided so powerful a lens through which to read and reflect upon diplomatic practices.34 The depiction of diplomatic activity within literary texts—Hampton’s ‘diplomatic moment’—in turn allowed writers to reflect on their own analogous ability to represent, on their semiotic practices and limitations, and on the genre conventions that framed and controlled such multilayered scenes of negotiation.35 Hampton has shown how responses to the new practices and discourses of diplomacy that emerged as Europe increasingly adopted resident embassies shaped the evolution of three major genres—the essay, epic, and tragedy.36 His Fictions of Embassy inspired widespread interest in what he has called a ‘diplomatic poetics’: a way of reading literature that acknowledges its role in negotiating relationships between polities and a way of reading diplomacy that takes into account its fictional and linguistic dimensions.37 Hampton’s emphasis on the links between humanism and diplomatic culture and his interest in the changing techniques and structures of representation that eventually lead to resident diplomacy might seem to imply that the literarydiplomatic synergy was unique to European Renaissance culture. While there was undoubtedly something distinctive about the literary impetus within the diplomatic cultures of European princes and the diplomatic impulses within Renaissance literature, a close relationship between diplomacy and literature also existed in many other parts of the world. At the most basic level the use of skilled writers within diplomacy was not an exclusively European phenomenon. As research on other areas has established, many non-European societies valued literary accomplishments in diplomatic circles and believed them advantageous to diplomacy. Scholars frequently served alongside military men as envoys in Ottoman-Mamluk diplomacy.38 Literary skill in Persian and Arabic was prized in many parts of Asia, while Islamic princes used allusions from a shared literary tradition when writing to each other.39 It is important to acknowledge the dynamics of diplo-literary culture in other parts of the globe. Yet no volume can be comprehensive in its geographic coverage and this volume is no exception. Some parts of the world have left insufficient written sources from this period to permit analysis of the links between their literary and diplomatic cultures; and there is a relative paucity of entirely extra-European research into literary-diplomatic relations within Anglophone 33 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 12. 34  Ibid., 6–72. 35 Ibid.; Timothy Hampton, ‘The Diplomatic Moment: Representing Negotiation in Early Modern Europe’, Modern Language Quarterly, 67 (2006), 81–102 (82). 36 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, passim, but see 6–7 on diplomatic genres. 37 Ibid., 2. 38 Muslu, Ottomans and the Mamluks, 27, 73–4, 157. 39  For example Colin Mitchell, ‘Safavid Imperial tarassul and the Persian inshā’ Tradition’, Studia Iranica, 26 (1997), 173–209.

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academia. Instead, this collection invites readers to make comparisons between literary-diplomatic cultures in different parts of the early modern world by incorporating several essays that examine the relationship between literature and diplomacy in missions beyond Europe. In doing so, it aims to question the exceptionality of the relationship between Renaissance humanism and literature and to encourage future research into other regions. Over the last decade literary critical interest in diplomacy has built broadly alongside and in response to Hampton’s diplomatic poetics. Scholars have examined performances of plays, masques, and rituals before ambassadors, as well as the (sometimes controversial) consumption of diplomatic affairs through public stageplays, with an eye to the analogies between theatrical and diplomatic performance discussed above.40 They have started to reconstruct the relationship between diplomatic service and the composition of poetry through instances in which the cross-cultural exposure of embassies influenced national poetic traditions, diplomatic agendas and sources shed new light on poems, and poetic form and expression helped negotiate diplomatic difficulties.41 They have started to scrutinize sermons serving diplomatic agendas, the composition and circulation of polemical prose and news for diplomatic ends, and the use of narrative and rhetorical techniques and anecdotes from history, biography, and prose fiction to make sense of diplomatic events.42 Finally, they have begun to bring a literary toolkit to bear on diplomatic documents and activities, highlighting the aesthetic, formal, rhetorical, fictional, narrative, and material qualities of diplomatic writing and thought.43 At their best, these recent 40  For example András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016), ch. 2; Nathalie Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Peace (London, 2016); Joanna Craigwood, ‘Diplomatic Metonymy and Antithesis in 3 Henry VI ’, Review of English Studies, 65 (272) (2014), 812–30; John  H.  Pollack, ‘Native Performances of Diplomacy and Religion in Early New France’, in Joshua  D.  Bellin and Laura L. Meikle (eds), Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832 (Lincoln, NE, 2011), 81–116; and select references in notes 44–9. 41  For example Lovro Kunčević, ‘The City whose “ships sail on every wind”: Representations of Diplomacy in the Literature of Early Modern Ragusa (Dubrovnik)’, in Tracey A. Sowerby and Jan Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, c.1410–1800 (London, 2017), 65–79; William Rossiter, Wyatt Abroad: Tudor Diplomacy and the Translation of Power (Martlesham, 2014); essays in Jason Powell and William Rossiter (eds), Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Farnham, 2013); Susan Brigden, Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest (London, 2012); Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford, 2008), 6–36; Kelley, Beyond the Bronze Pillars; Alston, ‘Empire and Emissary’. 42 For example Hugh Adlington, ‘Donne and Diplomacy’, in Jeanne Shami (ed.), Renaissance Tropologies: the Cultural Imagination of Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008), 187–216; Rosanna Cox, ‘ “The mountains are in labour, only mice are born”: Milton and Republican Diplomacy’, Renaissance Studies, 24 (2010), 420–36; Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016); Katherine M. MacDonald, ‘Diplomacy and Biography in the Wars of Religion: Charles Paschal’s Life of Guy du Faur de Pibrac (1584)’, in Bruno Tribout and Ruth Whelan (eds), Narrating the Self in Early Modern Europe (Bern, 2007), 23–40. 43  For example Sabine Lucia Müller, ‘William Harborne’s Embassies: Scripting, Performing and Editing Anglo-Ottoman Diplomacy’, in Sabine Schülting, Savine Lucia Müller, and Ralf Hertel (eds), Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East: Performing Cultures (Farnham, 2012), 11–26; Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (London, 2011); Thomas V. Cohen and Germain Warketin (eds), Things Not Easily Believed: Introducing the Early Modern Relation =RR, 34/1–2 (2011); Charry and Shahani (eds), Emissaries, part 1.

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studies have steered a course between the highly context-specific and isolated character of earlier historicist readings of literary works within diplomatic settings44 and the generalizing and imprecise New Historicist use of ‘diplomacy’ in its broadest social meaning to denote the negotiation of any power relations.45 Books by John Watkins on pre-modern marriage diplomacy, Ellen Welch on French diplomacy and the performing arts, and Christopher Warren on literature and the law of nations have compellingly placed readings of individual works within the wider relationship between early modern literary and diplomatic culture.46 The field they have helped initiate brings together a constellation of recent interests within early modern literary studies: translation, travel writing, networks, cross-cultural encounter, rhetoric, letters, news, espionage, the law, the material text, the archive, cultural and political history and theory, and new forms of historicism. Meanwhile there have been significant developments in scholarly approaches to the history of diplomacy.47 The work of Donald Queller and Garrett Mattingly dominated studies of late medieval and early modern diplomacy for much of the later twentieth century. Over the last two decades or so, there have been repeated calls for new methodological and theoretical approaches to diplomatic history; John Watkins placed literature at the heart of his appeal.48 The ‘new diplomatic history’ that has emerged integrates broader concerns—such as ambassadors’ agency and ritual action—into a field that was once dominated by the study of bureaucracy and foreign policy.49 Historians continue to analyse the traditional documents, foreign policy decisions, and peace congresses that have always been at the heart of diplomatic history, but do so using new methodologies and asking new questions.50 This necessitates rethinking our approaches to a range of diplomatic texts and opens up new avenues through which to do so. In common with literary studies, for instance, diplomatic history has experienced a ‘material turn’ that explores the significance of the material artefacts and environments associated with negotiations, 44  For example Paul Sellin, So Doth, So Is Religion: John Donne and Diplomatic Contexts in the Reformed Netherlands, 1619–1620 (Columbia, 1988). 45  For example Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (London, 1980), chs 1, 3. 46  John Watkins, After Lavinia: A Literary History of Premodern Marriage Diplomacy (Ithaca, 2017), chs 5–6; Ellen R. Welch, A Theater of Diplomacy: International Relations and the Performing Arts in Early Modern France (Philadelphia, 2017); Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford, 2015). 47 See Tracey  A.  Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass, 14/9 (2016), 441–56; Jan Hennings and Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Introduction: Practices of Diplomacy’, in Sowerby and Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy, 1–21. 48  For example Karl W. Schweizer and Matt J. Schumann, ‘The Revitalisation of Diplomatic History: Renewed Reflections’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 19/2 (2008), 149–86; John Watkins (ed.), ‘Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ = JMEMS, 38/1 (2008), esp. 1–14. 49  For example Karina Urbach, ‘Diplomatic History since the Cultural Turn’, HJ, 46 (2003), 991–7; Torstan Riotte and Markus Mösslang (eds), The Diplomats’ World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 2008). 50  For example Lucein Bély, La société des princes, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1999); Daniela Frigo (ed.), Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, 1999); Christoph Kampmann, Maximilian Lanzinner, and Guido Braun (eds), L’art de la paix: Kongresswesen und Friedensstiftung im Zeitalter des Westfälischen Friedens (Münster, 2011); Carlo M. Bajetta, Guillaume Coatelen, and Jonathan Gibson (eds), Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Basingstoke, 2014).

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and could profitably be extended into the textual world of diplomacy, as Tracey Sowerby’s contribution to this volume demonstrates.51 The mutual relevance of her analysis of the ceremonial diplomatic reception of decorated letters and Hampton’s discussion, in his chapter, of the diplomatic significance of the destruction of two material ‘ambassadors’—a royal portrait and a text—in Calderón’s 1628 play El Príncipe Constante exemplifies this kind of shared interest. Lucien Bély has encouraged us to view early modern international relations as occurring within a ‘society of princes’, where the familial interests of individual rulers dictated the foreign policy of their countries, even as those same polities developed sophisticated bureaucracies.52 Bély’s emphasis on dynastic concerns has helped to highlight the importance of sociability and familial networks at the highest levels of diplomatic activity. More recent scholarship has also viewed diplomacy as a socio-political process and placed more weight on the importance of individual diplomats’ actions and networks.53 It has often defined ‘diplomat’ more broadly than earlier scholarship, incorporating the interpreters, secretaries, and other actors who served below the level of accredited ambassador into our understanding of the diplomatic process.54 At the same time, scholars have recognized that nonprincely polities engaged in asymmetric relations with the ‘society of princes’. The strategies they adopted in order to gain diplomatic recognition have profound repercussions for our understanding of these polities’ diplomatic reports and ceremonial records.55 These findings about the identities, networks, and transactions of early modern diplomatic actors inevitably affect our understanding of how literary products and skills might fit into this complex, multi-dimensional, and contingent diplomatic landscape. Diplomacy was both a written and a performative activity. By paying attention to diplomatic performances, particularly the meaning of ritual within diplomatic audiences, historians have shown the non-verbal means by which relations between princes were mediated. Ceremonial gestures, titles, and spatial hierarchies all

51 For example Harriet Rudolph and Gregor  M.  Metzig (eds), ‘Material Culture in Modern Diplomacy from the 15th to the 20th Century’, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte, 17 (2016); Nancy Ulm and Leah R. Clark (eds), The Art of Embassy: Objects and Images of Early Modern Diplomacy = JEMH, 20/1 (2016); Mark Häberlein and Christof Jeggle (eds), Materielle Grundlagen der Diplomatie: Schenken, Sammeln und Verhandeln in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Konstanz, 2013); Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East (Leiden, 2015). 52 Bély, La société des princes. 53  For example Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds), Akteure der Aussenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne, 2010). 54  For example Daniel Riches, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: BrandenburgSwedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2013); Martje van Gelder and Tijana Krstić (eds), Cross-confessional Diplomacy and Diplomatic Intermediaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean = JEMH, 19/2–3 (2015). 55  On asymmetry in diplomatic practice see Tilman Haug, Nadir Weber, and Christian Windler (eds), Protegierte und Protektoren: Asymmetrische politische Beziehungen zwischen Partnerschaft und Dominanz (16. bis frühes 20. Jahrhundert) (Cologne, 2016); André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft: Politischer Zeichengebrauch in der frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006).

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contributed to the construction of international relationships.56 Moreover, symbolic diplomatic communication and its negotiation has been conceptualized as constituting cultural exchange between the representatives of the normative systems in question.57 The relationship between this symbolic sphere and the textual world of diplomacy has important implications both for our interpretation of literary depictions of diplomacy and for our understanding of diplomatic and para-diplomatic texts. At the same time, literary-critical attention to written diplomatic texts could further expose their symbolic dimensions and linguistic manipulations. The dynamics created by these developments and the need they have generated for concerted interdisciplinary collaboration to investigate the international context of early modern literature and the role of literature in early modern diplomacy inspired the research network and activities from which the current volume has emerged. Organized by the editors of the current volume and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Textual Ambassadors: Cultures of Diplomacy and Literary Writing in the Early Modern World’ brought together scholars from different national academic traditions and different disciplinary perspectives.58 Our aim was to excavate the relationship between diplomatic practice and literary culture in the early modern period and to develop the nascent interdisciplinary field of diplo-literary studies by building upon recent developments in both literary studies and the ‘new diplomatic history’. Since its formation, many of the network’s members have published the books, collections, or essays that have initiated this field and we have benefited from each other’s insights in conversation and in writing.59 Yet individual literary studies necessarily give a dispersed and partial picture, whilst the few previous collections bringing together work on literature and diplomacy lacked the involvement of historians and so the fuller engagement with historical research achieved by this interdisciplinary network and volume.60 The interdisciplinary essays in this volume address core emerging areas within diplomatic poetics. Each of the volume’s four sections—on literary engagements, translation, dissemination and diplomatic documents—focuses on a specific aspect of the literary-diplomatic relationship, moving from the traditional materials of literary study to the traditional materials of historical study, while retaining the 56  William Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, JMH, 52 (1980), 452–76; Ralph Kauz, Jan Paul Niederkorn, and Giorgio Rota (eds), Diplomatisches Zeremoniell in Europa und dem Mittleren Osten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Vienna, 2009), 1–32; Peter Burschel and Christine Vogel (eds), Die Audienz: ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2014); Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016). 57  For a seminal discussion see Christian Windler, ‘Diplomatic History as a Field for Cultural Analysis: Muslim-Cultural Relations in Tunis, 1700–1840’, HJ, 44 (2001), 79–106. 58  Grant reference no. AH/K001930/1. 59  For example, Watkins, After Lavinia; Sowerby and Hennings (eds), Practices of Diplomacy; Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe; Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’; Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations; Raymond and Moxham (eds), News Networks; José María Pérez Fernández, ‘Translation, Diplomacy and Espionage: New Insights into James Mabbe’s Career’, Translation and Literature, 23 (2014), 1–22. 60 Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern Diplomacy; Powell and Rossiter (eds), Authority and Diplomacy; Charry and Shahani (eds), Emissaries.

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conversational engagement between literary and historical scholars and approaches established by the network. All of the essays share the common endeavour to establish new frameworks for understanding the relationship between early modern literature and diplomacy that—alongside the findings below—will structure this emerging field. Some essays draw on theories or methodologies from other areas that shed new light on the field, as Joanna Craigwood does with myth theory, José María Pérez Fernández with theories of cross-cultural communication, and Fabio Antonini with the social history of the archive. Others reconceptualize central premises of the field, as Joad Raymond does with diplomatic geographies and Andras Kiséry with diplomatic publics. Still others establish new models for literary involvement with diplomacy, informed by fuller readings of the politics of dramatic space (Timothy Hampton), the fictionality of the law of nations (Mark Netzloff and John Watkins), or the local circumstances of translation (Catarina Fouto and Peter Auger). The final essays of the volume in turn propose new methodological approaches to diplomatic documents, as Jan Hennings re-examines their genres, Christine Vogel their rhetoric, Tracey Sowerby their material qualities, and André Krischer their ritual histories. Part I of the volume, on ‘literary engagements’, privileges discussions of literary representations of diplomacy and draws out the toolkits and structures of thought that literary culture brings to diplomacy. Building on the essays in this section, we maintain that literary ability was crucial to both diplomatic practice and ambassadorial prestige; develop the ways in which depictions of diplomacy and international law provided genre-shaped places for cultural reflection on the rapidly changing and expanding diplomatic sphere; and propose that the literary sphere held such central place because it gave diplomats the tools to negotiate the pervasive ambiguities of diplomacy. The essays in Part II examine ‘translation’ as a special case of literary endeavour that can illuminate the intercultural space inhabited by diplomats. Drawing on this section, we argue that translations exemplify the potential of literary texts both to provoke competition and to promote cultural convergence between political communities; and that translation reveals the existence of diplomatic third spaces in which ritual, symbolic, or written conventions and semantics converged despite particular oppositions and differences. In Part III (‘dissemination’), the focus shifts to ways in which texts both circulated within diplomatic contexts and disseminated diplomatic knowledge more widely. We propose that the geographies of literary-diplomatic exchanges, performances, and interpretations were translocal as much as they were transnational; that within Europe there was increasing public consumption of diplomatic material; and that the archival afterlives of diplomatic records imposed narratives that significantly shaped their interpretation and dissemination. The fourth and final section, ‘diplomatic documents’, re-evaluates our approaches to key texts produced by the diplomatic process in the light of literary methods and developments in the ‘new diplomatic history’. We conclude from it that diplomatic documents possessed symbolic capital; that they were produced, archived, and even redeployed in creative tension with the social and ceremonial worlds that produced them; and that sensitivity to generic conventions can radically reshape our interpretation of diplomatic encounters.

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The remainder of this Introduction details these findings under headings that are organized by section but that often draw on evidence from across the entire volume. Together, these findings for the field act as a guide to the points of interaction between literature and diplomacy in the early modern world. L I T E R A RY E N G A G E M E N T S The importance of oratory, performance, poetic composition, wide reading, and writerly skill to diplomatic work made the display and manipulation of literary abilities crucial to both the projected prestige and habitual practices of early modern diplomats. Whilst such scholars as Hampton and Isabella Lazzarini first made this connection,61 the collaborative endeavours of our network have allowed us to establish it over an unprecedented geographical scope and range of literarydiplomatic activity, and it underlies the diplomatic work examined throughout this volume. From the circulation of English polemic across Sweden to the literary genre of Russian diplomatic reports and the rhetorical manipulations of French diplomatic letters from the Ottoman court, our essays paint a newly global picture of the manifold intersections between diplomacy and literature across three centuries of world history. The volume opens with an essay on this central relationship between literary abilities and diplomatic practices within Europe. Drawing on theories of myth and myth-ritual to make sense of previously unstudied accounts of the origins of diplomacy in English, Spanish, French, and Italian diplomatic handbooks, Joanna Craigwood provides a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between humanist ways of thinking about diplomacy and the literary character of European diplomatic ritual. Her essay shows how these origin myths related the invention of diplomacy to the invention of rhetoric, poetry, and song, intertwining the foundational identity of the institution with the first acquisition and display of literary abilities and products, and so naturalized literary display within diplomatic ritual. The centrality of literary skills, techniques, and tropes to early modern diplomacy informed analogies and reciprocities between the spheres that made literature an especially powerful cultural space for reflecting on diplomacy. When works of imaginative literature portrayed diplomatic events, they not only commented on them directly, but also reflected upon their own comparable representations, and in the process offered their tools back again to diplomacy. This mutual reflection and influence—captured by both Hampton’s ‘diplomatic moment’ in literature and Warren’s work on literary form and international law—has also recently been independently observed by scholars working in the field of International Relations. Paul Sheeran has read literary texts ahistorically for ideas about contemporary IR, whilst Deep Dhatta Ray has argued that some texts become so engrained in political culture that they shape international relations, allowing him to locate the 61 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy; Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict. For other examples, see above 1–5.

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very foundations of Indian diplomacy in the pre-Mughal epic Mahabharata.62 Part I of our volume further develops the ways in which literary genres—together with their associated narratives, styles, techniques and moods, conscious fictionality, performativity, and rhetoric—reflected on and shaped early modern diplomatic and international legal narratives and expectations. Timothy Hampton advances his own seminal work on diplomacy and literary form through analysis of the intersecting spaces of dramatic and diplomatic performance. Reading public and private space in plays by Calderón and Shakespeare, he argues that early modern drama enabled genre-inflected thought about evolving diplomatic topologies as international political culture increasingly intruded upon national political spaces. Mark Netzloff then responds to Warren’s call to investigate further the connection between tragic narratives and international criminality.63 Reading Francisco de Vitoria’s treatise on Spanish colonialism, De Indis (1532), alongside accounts of Francis Drake’s 1572 alliance with the escaped slave nation of Cimarrons in Panama, Netzloff interrogates the fiction of ‘lines of amity’ beyond which European treaty agreements did not hold, arguing for the perceived inevitability of tragic outcomes in the European colonies. John Watkins is (like Netzloff ) interested in fiction and the limits of international law, but examines the role played instead by a literary and rhetorical quality—pathos—in shaping narrative expectation about treaty outcomes, underlining the structural role literary devices beyond genre could play in organizing expectations of diplomatic action over time.64 Pathos (he argues) repeatedly expressed the conflict between extravagant hope and disillusioning experience about treaties, both in such fictional texts as Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century epic romance Arcadia and in wider diplomatic culture. Watkins’ contribution highlights how early modern diplomats might turn to fiction-making in order to comprehend their own experiences of the failures of international law. Yet as Hampton reminds us, diplomacy also allowed literary fiction to make sense of its generic development over time, underlining the mutuality of the relationship between the spheres: for Proust, he concludes, the nostalgia-laden figure of the diplomat who inhabits the modern novel brings from his early modern past into this dominant modern genre the very possibility of performance and writing. In effect, literary genres and their associated narratives, tropes, styles, spaces, and qualities provided ways of organizing the multiplicities of spaces (Hampton), times (Watkins) and actors (Netzloff ) through which diplomacy operated. Ways were needed. Diplomacy, whilst always beset by uncertainties, was particularly marked by ambiguity in the early modern period, while it was undergoing rapid changes and expansion, but before it became fully professionalized. As the geographical reach of diplomatic networks expanded, whilst cross-cultural knowledge of the norms governing political behaviour remained limited even within a continent, it was often unclear what diplomatic rituals involved, who should participate in them, or who 62  Paul Sheeran, Literature and International Relations: Stories in the Art of Diplomacy (Aldershot, 2007); Deep Datta-Ray, The Making of Modern Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism (London, 2015). 63 Ibid., 30. 64  Compare Craigwood, ‘Diplomatic Metonymy’.

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even was sovereign. At the same time, ambiguity has often been valued in literature as the basis of subtlety, depth, richness, and longevity, presenting opportunities for interpretation, creativity, and reinvention over time.65 What we mean by ‘literature’ and ‘literary’ remains—paradoxically—ambiguous too, here and throughout the volume: distinctions between literary and historical writing were not clear in the early modern period; to be ‘literary’ then meant to be a person of learning and implied knowledge of philosophy, science, history, and classical and contemporary literature; and a wide range of fictional and non-fictional texts rightly form the material of both literary and historical studies today. Yet a working definition of the terms for our purposes could be writing, and associated qualities, that involved imaginative, formal, and rhetorical shaping of material. Understood in this way, literature and literary tropes and skills proved so very valuable to diplomats in this period because they helped negotiate diplomatic ambiguity.66 Diplomatic ambiguities could be unproductive, leading to fears, confusions, mistakes, and conflicts. In these cases literary forms, tropes, skills, and tools could help rationalize or contain these effects, placing them at one remove, as dramatic form did for contested political spaces (Hampton), tragedy for negotiations with non-state agents, stateless persons, and colonial subjects (Netzloff ), and pathos for treaty failure (Watkins). Literary skills could also help diplomats negotiate unproductive ambiguities through open-ended performances, texts, and interpretations, or rhetorical and narrative re-appropriation, as (for example) Christine Vogel argues elsewhere in this volume. Yet ambiguities could also be productive for diplomats seeking subtle persuasions, convenient double meanings, manipulations of truths or agreements, or flexible commitments—and literary works and experience provided models and toolkits (rhetorical, narrative, creative, interpretive, and so on) for manipulating and interpreting richly valuable ambiguities. Mercury—divine ambassador, orator, and trickster—provided a mythical pattern for the pragmatic exploitation of literary skills (Craigwood) and such manipulations of unfixed meaning appear in virtually every essay in this volume, whether (for example) in the narrative shaping of materials from the Venetian archives (Fabio Antonini), the poetic styling of Scottish translations from French (Peter Auger), or the international re-interpretations of Portuguese epic (Catarina Fouto). T R A N S L AT I O N The essays in Part II build upon the recent move in translation studies from a universalizing tendency towards a more context-specific approach that privileges the contingent social and political circumstances in which translations were undertaken.67 65  For example Lisa Otty and Andrew Michael Roberts, ‘ “Dim-conceived glories of the brain”: On Ambiguity in Literature and Science’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 54 (2013), 37–55; William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930). 66  With thanks to Jan Hennings for introducing this idea to discussion among network members. 67  For a concise discussion of recent scholarship see Carol O’Sullivan, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Methods in Translation History’, Translation Studies, 5 (2012), 131–8.

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Recent studies examining the relationship between translation, print culture, travel, and the book trade have highlighted the transnational nature of early modern literary communities and the close relationship between the literary cultures of particular polities.68 Given the centrality of translation to the European Renaissance,69 these studies suggest the critical need to excavate further the ways in which diplomacy and literary translation interacted. Diplomats, translators, and interpreters were at the forefront of cultural translation between polities;70 their privileged place as agents of cultural exchange offers an important window into the overlapping diplomatic and literary cultures of the early modern world. For example, several Ottoman diplomats and dragomans undertook translations that engaged Ottomans with European political and religious ideas and history and vice versa.71 They and their European peers often translated creatively, producing ‘tradaptions’ and translations that can be considered acts of authorship on the part of the translator,72 meaning that the circumstances of their missions could profoundly influence the target texts they produced. As Auger suggests in this section, translations represent ‘durable literary moments’ amid otherwise ephemeral, shifting political alliances. These translations exemplify the abilities of literary texts to contribute to both competition and convergence between nations, as well as epitomizing the relationship between diplomatic activity and patriotic sentiment. Pérez Fernández argues that—just as the ceremonial battles fought at early modern courts could serve as a substitute for military conflict73—para-diplomatic translation could also constitute war by other means. Catarina Fouto’s study of the reception of Luís de Vaz de Camões’s The Lusiads brings this into sharp focus. Rival editions and translations of this influential celebration of the Portuguese empire claimed the poem for competing Spanish and Portuguese visions of Portugal’s place in the international order, whilst a range of European translators used it to signal their polities’ hostility towards Habsburg imperial ambitions after 1640. The Lusiads was sufficiently malleable to serve conflict, connection, and patriotism in different diplomatic contexts. 68 For example Carmine di Biase (ed.), Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period (Amsterdam, 2006); Sara Barker and Brenda  M.  Hosington (eds), Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 (Leiden, 2013); José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2014); Tania Demetriou and Rowan C. Tomlinson (eds), The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660 (Basingstoke, 2015), 22–40. On ‘transnational’ as it pertains to early modern literature see Warren Boutcher, ‘Intertraffic: Transnational Literatures and Languages in Late Renaissance England and Europe’, in Matthew MacLean and Sara Barker (eds), International Exchange in the Early Modern Book World (Leiden, 2016), 343–73, esp. 353–5. 69  Jane Tylus and Karen Newman (eds), Early Modern Cultures of Translation (Philadelphia, 2015). 70 E.  Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Oxford, 2012), 165–86. 71  Tijana Krstić, ‘Of Translation and Empire: Sixteenth-century Ottoman Imperial Translators as Renaissance Go-betweens’, in Christine Woodhead (ed.), The Ottoman World (Abingdon, 2009), 130–42. 72  On tradaptation and authorship see Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007). 73 Toby Osborne, ‘The Surrogate War between the Savoys and the Medici: Sovereignty and Precedence in Early Modern Italy’, International History Review, 29 (2007), 1–21.

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Literature can work as a form of cultural diplomacy because it invites readers to imagine foreign cultures and peoples. Works, like The Lusiads, that served as national epics could be used to comment with particular power on the relationship between polities. Poetry likewise participated in a nuanced textual diplomacy: it could be central to cultivating cultural and politico-religious links within the European society of princes. Translators strategically adapted their poetic voices to cohere more closely with the rhetorical, formal and structural strategies of their interlocutors, as Auger observes. Examining a series of ‘thick’ translations between the French court and Scottish king, Auger argues that cultural convergence was forged between the French and Scottish courts not just through shared texts, but also through shared stylistic features. Aspects of verse composition and translation such as structure, prosody, and diction became a means of diplomatic signalling, creating shared Protestant bonds and identifying shared communities of ‘others’. The essays in this section collectively suggest that there were diplomatic ‘third spaces’ in which the common language might be one of ritual, symbolic, or written exchange—or a combination of the three—and not purely oral. Later essays reinforce this point by showing diplomats’ careful analyses of unfamiliar ceremonial forms (Hennings), the symbolic value of written records (Krischer), and the importance of the material qualities and ritual reception of letters sent from Europe to the Middle East and Asia (Sowerby). Such diplomatic third spaces do not presuppose communities of shared interests but rather describe emerging communities in which conventions and semantics converge, and might also comprehend a community of enemies, as Pérez Fernández argues. His exploration of transnational diplomatic and textual networks that shared common translators and texts proposes that the aggregation of diplomatic third spaces within networks underpinned a growing international community, as the symbolic capital of translation was used to demarcate a scholarly and diplomatic elite. By approaching translation through a communicative turn, Pérez Fernández clarifies the ways in which literature both created diplomatic communities and formed a means of articulating difference within and between those communities. Translation occupies a special place within literary-diplomatic relations because it exposes what polities and cultures can and cannot share. D I S S E M I N AT I O N Ambassadors moved texts across borders as writers, consumers, patrons, and clients; some even promoted the spread of writing technologies.74 The dissemination of texts, particularly printed polemic and news, became an integral to the ambassador’s duties.75 Concurrently, the household of the resident ambassador was a hub for the 74  Martin Lowry, ‘Diplomacy and the Spread of Printing’, in L. Hellinga and J. Goldfinch (eds), Bibliography and the Study of 15th-century Civilisation (London, 1987), 124–37. 75  For example Marika Keblusek, ‘Book Agents: Intermediaries in the Early Modern World of Books’, in H. Cools, Marika Keblusek, and Badeloch Noldus (eds), Your Humble Servant: Agents in Early Modern Europe (Hilversum, 2006), 104–7; Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘ “All our books do be sent into

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exchange and collection of books.76 Existing work on the literary productions involved in early modern diplomacy predominantly focuses on the entertainments and exchanges embedded in the conduct of court diplomacy, but embassy journeys and households, together with the wider networks of intermediaries who serviced diplomatic relationships, also formed transmission networks for diplomatic knowledge and information communities through which texts accrued meaning that extended well beyond the court.77 Venice’s diplomatic interpreters, for example, not only produced and circulated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created transimperial networks of kinship and patronage that ultimately shaped the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant.78 To understand the literary-diplomatic relationship fully, we need to integrate court-centric accounts with a fuller understanding of the non-courtly production, circulation, reception, interpretation, and re-interpretation of literary-diplomatic texts and performances. Joad Raymond opens this section of the volume with an illuminating example of such ‘translocal’ diplomatic geographies emerging from three texts: John Milton’s international polemic Defensio (1651), which he wrote while Secretary of Foreign Tongues for the English Commonwealth; the English ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke’s journal of his embassy to Sweden recounting conversations about the Defensio; and Milton’s Defensio Secunda (1654). Whitelocke’s account of the role the Defensio played in the reception of his embassy in a small town whilst he was journeying through Sweden demonstrates the local reach of international polemic and reveals the responses it elicited in lower as well as higher levels of government. Other essays in the volume also gesture at the importance of extra-courtly contexts: Pérez Fernández’s translation-centric networks, for example, had translocal as well as transnational dynamics. Taken together with this section’s attention to local publics’ consumption of diplomatic material, these examples suggest the importance of further research into the local and translocal geographies and networks of literarydiplomatic exchange. With the proliferation of print and the growing circulation of written news in Europe came increased public dissemination of diplomatic knowledge. András Kiséry’s essay examines the growing public appetite for such knowledge. Looking at the popular print handbooks and public stage plays of seventeenth-century England, he finds that the possession of expert diplomatic knowledge became a form of cultural capital. Publics wanted to know about the specialist, semi-secretive, and gradually professionalizing world of diplomacy—and so consumed it in fictional and non-fictional, print, and stage incarnations—because it helped them other countreys and translated”: Henrician Polemic in its International Context’, EHR, 121 (2006), 1271–99; essays by Elizabeth Williamson and Tracey A. Sowerby in Raymond and Moxham (eds), News Networks. 76  Joanna Craigwood, ‘Diplomats and International Book Exchange’, in Ann Thomson, Simon Burrows, and Edmond Dziembowski (eds), Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2010), 57–69. 77  For example Diego Pirillo, ‘Venetian Merchants as Diplomatic Agents: Family Networks and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe’, in Rivère de Carles (ed.), Early Modern Diplomacy, 183–203. 78 Rothman, Brokering Empire.

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socially and professionally to be able to talk foreign politics. In his essay, Antonini connects this phenomenon with the increasing production of diplomatic paperwork and increasingly managed state repositories, as ruling elites manipulated public political debate, and as state officials privately fed a burgeoning market for ambassadorial reports with manuscript copies that re-appeared throughout Europe in libraries, political compendia, and historical writings. Antonini and Kiséry’s nuanced understandings of the formation and nature of the political publics for diplomatic material help revise our existing narratives and historiography about the emerging European public sphere and suggest the value of further research into the public consumption of diplomacy outside Europe. New interest in the social history of the archive has drawn attention to the practices, processes, and transactions that underpinned documentation, record keeping, and the formation and expansion of official archives in early modern Europe.79 Understanding the social and material history of diplomatic documents is vital to the way we read them and the histories—both early modern and modern—that make use of them as sources. Antonini makes that point powerfully in his essay on the Secret Chancery of the Republic of Venice, first opened to the city’s state historians during the sixteenth century, and the role of that archive in shaping historical narratives. The outbreak of the War of Cyprus in 1570 was a pivotal moment in Venice’s diplomatic relations, marking the breakdown of the Republic’s relations with Constantinople and its entry into league with the major Catholic powers of Europe. The ambassadorial records dating from this period were amongst the first to be recorded in a new series of archival registers that—as Antonini shows—heavily affected the way in which details of the war were relayed from the archive to the reading public by state historians. Later in the volume, Vogel argues that the dissemination of diplomats’ texts was shaped as much by their efforts of self-promotion as by their official obligations, whilst André Krischer shows the importance of documents and their storage to diplomatic ritual. Attention to the material and social histories of diplomatic texts, and the narrative shaping imposed by those histories, is necessary both if we are to appreciate their early modern socio-political functions and if we are to use them sensitively as sources today. D I P L O M AT I C T E X T S The final section of the volume is inspired by two interrelated questions: how, methodologically, should we approach the texts that were produced through diplomatic practices? and what can literary perspectives contribute to our understanding of diplomatic documents? The essays in this section discuss the documents that were at the heart of diplomacy—letters and diplomats’ reports. Scholars have a tendency to use a range of different genres of documents—including letters, relazione, ceremonial accounts, contemporary histories, travel reports, and literary 79  See for example Alexandra Walsham (ed.), ‘The Social History of the Archive: Record-Keeping in Early Modern Europe’, P&P, 230 (2016), issue supplement 11.

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texts—when constructing their analyses of early modern international relations. By treating such texts with little discrimination historians have misunderstood the degree of cultural incommensurability at play between polities with very obviously different normative systems. But, as Jan Hennings demonstrates, paying closer attention to generic conventions can transform our interpretation of these sources. Just as literary writings used the narrative and stylistic resources of different genres to comprehend diplomatic events (Hampton, Watkins), so too different dynamics shaped the content and tone of the various genres of diplomatic writing. Appreciating the conventions adopted in these different genres often reveals a complex picture: a diplomat who might dismiss the foreign culture he encountered at his host court as ‘barbaric’ in memoranda might nonetheless dispassionately analyse the ceremonial means by which that court functioned. In other words, diplomats could recognize common value-systems or semiotic codes at work in different normative systems. Indeed, as Vogel suggests, painting the ‘other’ as barbaric could be a useful selffashioning strategy for ambassadors who were eager to prove their usefulness or make excuses for their failures to politicians at home. This section demonstrates the benefits of applying insights and methodologies from the ‘new diplomatic history’ to the analysis of diplomatic texts. Vogel’s essay addresses the implications of an ‘actor-centred’ focus for our approaches to ambassador’s letters. In her case study of the letter-writing practices of the French ambassador Pierre Girardin, who served in Constantinople in the 1680s, Vogel warns against taking a narrow bureaucratic approach to ambassadors’ reports. Diplomats needed to maintain their place within aristocratic society while abroad; their strategies of dissemination, as much as the epistolary etiquette they used, were vital means by which they did so.80 By placing diplomatic letter writing within the broader aristocratic sociability of early modern Europe, Vogel highlights that individual diplomats’ concerns for self-promotion shaped not only the contents of their missives, but also the archival record that has come down to us. As André Krischer shows, this concern was shared by towns too, whose efforts to exploit the social aspects of diplomatic practice in order to gain symbolic capital generated their own diplomatic texts. As Vogel also stresses, the ambassador’s act of recording ceremonial encounters was itself a cultural transaction. Recognizing the performativity of diplomatic encounters and the complex relationship between the act and its recording necessitates developing new forms of textual analysis and/or new analytical categories. In her wide-ranging examination of Italian Renaissance diplomacy, Lazzarini framed diplomacy as a political language marked by two components, one rational, one emotional, which she broadly maps onto verbal and non-verbal means of communication.81 However, the supposedly ‘rational’ and the symbolic forms of politics cannot be easily separated, nor should they necessarily be, as scholars such as 80  On epistolary etiquette see Giora Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204 (2009), 33–88. On aristocratic culture and diplomacy see Hillard von Thiessen, ‘Diplomatie vom type ancien: Überlegungen zu einem Idealtypus des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftswesens’, in von Thiessen and Windler (eds), Akteure, 471–503. 81 Lazzarini Communication and Conflict, see esp. part IV.

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Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger have highlighted.82 Their interconnectedness is evident in André Krischer’s discussion of the ceremonial registers of the Free Imperial cities of Germany, where ‘writing was crucial for the symbolic dimensions of urban diplomacy’.83 Polities trying to claim diplomatic status could use the records of their transactions with diplomatic actors to further their claims to status within the international society of princes, as these cities did. Their ceremonial registers not only recorded diplomatic interactions, they also inscribed diplomatic precedents, becoming textual representatives of the treatment that the cities and their diplomats could claim in the future. Krischer and Sowerby, like Antonini, highlight the importance of considering how letters, relazione, and other diplomatic texts could, and sometimes did, have diplomatic utility beyond their initial purpose. Combining an analysis of diplomatic ceremonial and material texts, Sowerby advocates a multidisciplinary approach to princely correspondence. Addressing the complex interaction of epistolary etiquette, ritual practice, and the ephemeral material world of early modern courts, she argues that the (often highly decorative) letters English monarchs sent to non-European princes are best understood not simply as expressions of magnificence, but as a reflection of the recognition of visual and material culture as a communicative mechanism in its own right. Their material features were intended to articulate specific messages—sometimes simple, sometimes more complex—that complemented or complicated the words of the letter and that could be used to claim, not just reflect, the relative status of sender and recipient. Moreover, the physical form of royal correspondence was shaped by the ritual actions with which they were received and the material environments in which these rituals occurred across the early modern world. Whilst the essays in this section show how much literary perspectives have to offer our readings of diplomatic documents, the essays elsewhere in the volume demonstrate the extent of the connections between the literary and diplomatic spheres, helping to explain why diplomats and their documents possessed such literary qualities. Taken together, the four sections point to valuable areas for future research. Literary style as a diplomatic tool (Auger, Watkins and Vogel) is virtually untouched in existing research. Further work on genre (Hampton, Netzloff, Fouto, Hennings) could transform existing understandings of diplomatic documents and contribute to developing new formalist interests within literary criticism.84 The gendered availability and associations of different genres and styles should feed into much-needed future research into gender and early modern diplomacy.85 82  Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008), 63; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Zeremoniell, Ritual, Symbol: neue Forschungen zur symbolischen Kommunikation in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit’, ZHF, 27 (2000), 389–405. 83  See Krischer in this volume 236–7. 84  See Frederic F. Bogel, New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice (London, 2013). 85 Work on early modern diplomacy, literature, and gender is suggestive but limited: Edward Wilson-Lee, ‘Women’s Weapons: Country House Diplomacy and the Countess of Pembroke’s French Translations’, in Demetriou and Tomlinson (eds), Culture of Translation, 128–44 ; Bella Mirabella, ‘ “In the Sight of All”: Queen Elizabeth and the Dance of Diplomacy’ and Mark Hutchings and Berta Cano-Echevarría, ‘Between Courts: Female Masquers and Anglo-Spanish Diplomacy, 1603–5’, Early

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Approaches from translation and literary studies will provide new insights into the means, strategies and limitations of cross-cultural diplomatic communication (Pérez Fernández, Sowerby). Literature has more to tell us about the translocal geographies of diplomacy beyond courts and centres—in translocal exchanges and networks and local publics (Raymond, Kiséry)—and in the process about paradiplomatic actors of both genders and all classes. Investigations into the social, material and ritual histories of diplomatic texts and archives (Antonini, Krischer, Sowerby) need expanding to other polities. Finally, more could be done to connect the diplomatic value of managing ambiguity with the central place literature held within conceptualizations of early modern diplomacy (Craigwood)—or to propose another reason for crossovers between the literary and diplomatic spheres that these essays show to be extraordinarily rich and far-reaching.

Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama, 15/1 (2012), 65–89, 91–108; Madeline Bassnett, ‘ “All the Ceremonyes and Civilityes”: The Authorship of Diplomacy in the Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, Seventeenth Century, 26 (2011), 94–118; see also Watkins (ed.), Toward a New Diplomatic History.

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PA RT I L I T E R A RY E N G A G E M E N T S

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1 The Place of the Literary in European Diplomacy Origin Myths in Ambassadorial Handbooks Joanna Craigwood I N T RO D U C T I O N Myths are the shared stories communities tell to explain aspects of their world, nature, history, or social, political and religious customs. They are not only narratives of central importance to a community but also reveal core elements of that community’s beliefs and practices. That makes the mythical accounts of the origins of diplomacy that appear in early modern European diplomatic treatises a telling site for exploring the beliefs that underwrote diplomatic practice.1 Diplomatic origin myths circulated—along with the treatises that contained them—among European political elites. They expose beliefs prevalent within that international community about the foundational relationship between diplomacy and the literary arts. The myths present the invention of diplomacy as synchronous with, and often related to, the invention of rhetoric, and sometimes also poetry or song. Rhetoric and poetics were in turn the cornerstones of early modern European literary theory and practice, and these two arts—of speaking persuasively; and writing poetry or literature—were perceived as inseparable.2 By emphasizing these connections, diplomatic origin myths constructed a community-wide narrative that intertwined the primary, foundational identity of the political institution with the acquisition and display of literary skills, abilities, and products. These myths can therefore help us understand what was distinctive about the relationship between early modern European literature and diplomacy. As cultural, art, and musical historians have established, European diplomatic practice involved the exchange or display of portraits and other art works, of skilfully crafted tableware, 1  For the importance of myths, including origin myths, to early modern society, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: the Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, 1972); Frank L. Borchardt, German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore, 1971), esp. 1–27. Diplomatic origin myths have not been studied. For general definitions and approaches, see Robert A. Segal, Myth: a Very Short Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2015), 1–10. 2  Brian Vickers, ‘Rhetoric and Poetics’, in James Hankins (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), 713–45 (715).

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jewellery, and decorative ornaments, among other objects, and even the loan of artists, as well as the production of literary works and exchange of material books. Political messages were encoded in clothing, carriages, the construction and use of architectural spaces, and musical and operatic performances, as much as they were in the more literary plays and masques that made use of costume, space and music.3 But diplomatic origin myths expose perceptions about an essential connection between diplomatic and literary abilities that uniquely underlay literary displays and exchanges amongst these wider cultural interactions. Theories of myth that analyse their social function (functionalist theories) are broadly concerned with how myths promote and sustain social structures, institutions, and hierarchies.4 Such a functionalist approach would suggest that diplomatic origin myths sought to naturalize literary abilities as unalterable features of the institutional norms and frequent hierarchical disputes of European diplomacy. At the same time, myth-ritual approaches view a community’s myths and rituals as inseparable and mutually reinforcing,5 and suggest further links between the narrative provided by the origin myths and diplomatic practices that historians are increasingly analysing in terms of socio-cultural ritual.6 Together, these two theoretical perspectives provide a conceptual connection between widespread humanist literary ways of thinking about diplomacy in the period, as identified here and elsewhere by Timothy Hampton and others,7 and the literary character of early modern European diplomatic practice and ritual also evident in this volume.8 Origin myths occur most frequently in European diplomatic manuals under accounts of the ‘antiquity’ of embassy, though they are sometimes also implied in discussions of the necessity of embassy to political life, or in discussions of the (real or imagined) etymologies of central diplomatic terms. They are most common in those classically influenced treatises that seek to sketch out an ideal ambassador, rather than in those treatises that offer more pragmatic accounts of diplomacy based on recent history and contemporaneous example.9 ‘Antiquity’ accounts of the political art are also the most recognizably mythic in character: they tend to reinvent classical myths or biblical stories or both to reflect on the origins of early modern European diplomacy. They typically endow diplomacy with moral and religious 3  For an overview of this literature see Tracey  A.  Sowerby, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic History’, History Compass 14/9 (2016), 441–56. 4 Segal, Myth, 126–36; the proposer of functionalism Bronislaw Malinowski is discussed below. 5  Ibid, 61–78; myth-ritualists René Girard and Walter Burkert are discussed below. 6  See Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016), 1–7, for a survey of both English and German-language scholarship on political and diplomatic ritual. 7 Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in the Early Modern World (Ithaca, 2009); Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanists and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 2002), 99–152. 8  See also Brian Jeffrey Maxson’s discussion of humanist oratory as an essential part of fifteenthcentury Florentine diplomatic ritual in The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2014), 85–106. 9  The widest-ranging recent discussion of these handbooks is Heidrun Kugeler, ‘ “Le parfait ambassadeur”: the Theory and Practice of Diplomacy in the Century following the Peace of Westphalia’, D.Phil. thesis University of Oxford (2006), 25–80; the seminal survey Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1955), 181–91.

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authority, and relate its invention to the civilizing of brute and warring nature and the origin of human socio-political institutions. Their fundamental function is to ensure adherence to contemporary diplomatic rules and rituals by presenting the breakdown of these contingent customs as an inevitable path to widespread human brutality and anarchy. The connection between the origins of diplomacy and of rhetoric and poetry that is of central interest to this volume appears within this wider framework of mythic belief. The classical myths, and to a lesser extent the biblical stories, that are recycled in the treatises effectively oppose the combined appearance of the diplomatic and literary arts with a pre-civilized humanity that is amoral, irreligious, anarchic, bestial, and warring. In this way they additionally imply that without a rhetorical and poetic—without a ‘literary’—skillset, diplomatic relations risk break down, and war and anarchy could once more prevail. Placing literary skills at the heart of diplomacy in this way naturalized the display of literary skills—oratory, theatricality, wit, poetic sensibility, power over the bon mot and the mot juste— within the ceremonies that negotiated diplomatic competition and honour. This chapter will begin with a detailed reading of just such an account of the antiquity of embassy by Alberico Gentili, in his 1585 treatise De legationibus libri tres (Three Books on Embassies). It then places that account within its broader European cultural moment, drawing on El Enbaxador (The Ambassador) by Juan Antonio de  Vera y Figueroa and L’Ambasciatore (The Ambassador) by Gasparo Bragaccia, both published in the 1620s. In conclusion, it will draw on an example from James Howell’s 1664 Treatise of Ambassadors to ask whether it mattered that such appropriations of classical myths involved a level of historical and fictional consciousness about the process of mythologizing diplomacy. GENTILI ON THE ANTIQUITY OF EMBASSY Gentili roots diplomacy firmly in the mythical past in his chapter on ‘the reason for embassies and their antiquity’ in De legationibus.10 He notes that the RomanoJewish historian Josephus attributes the origin (origo) of the institution to God, whose angels are ambassadors, and references the human ambassadors sent by Moses in the Old Testament.11 He seriously considers the accreditation of the institution to the historically mythical and purportedly ancient Assyrian king Belus, whose name had come to stand for the vague ancestral origin of kingship, and whose invention was bound up with euhemeristic explanations of the Babylonian God Bel Marduk as an historical personage.12 He repeatedly stresses the antiquity, age, 10  Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres (Hanau, 1594; repr. New York, 1924), 56–9. Translations and page references given in this chapter are from the companion volume to this facsimile reprint except where otherwise noted: De legationibus libri tres, introd. by Ernest Nys, trans. by Gordon J. Laing, 2 vols. (New York, 1924), II.51–3. 11 Gentili, De legationibus, II.51. 12  On ancient and medieval sources on Belus as both mythical origin of kingship and euhemeristic explanation of Bel (Baal) Marduk, see J.  D.  Cooke, ‘Euhemerism: a Mediaeval Interpretation of Classical Paganism’, Speculum, 2 (1927), 396–410 (400–5); Seznec, Survival, 14.

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and absolute necessity of embassy through his use of emphatic vocabulary, often employed in the comparative or superlative.13 In this way he endows the institution with the apparent importance and inevitability of both tradition and need. The sources he draws on for his account might be described as religious, historical, and literary, but to Gentili all held historical value. When ‘writers relate’ (scriptores tradunt) that the oldest form of government, kingship, began under Belus’s son Ninus, for Gentili, those scriptores—a word covering authors, narrators, and historians—could as easily include the Roman poet Ovid as the ancient historians Herodotus, Justinus, and Jordanes.14 Nestled within these evocations of a remote and mythical past, Gentili gives his opinion that embassy began when men first formed discrete political groups with commerce, laws, and eventually compacts: The conclusion to which I have come is that it was after the separation of the nations, the foundation of kingdoms, the partition of dominions, and the establishment of commerce that the institution of embassies arose. So long as men were in so primitive a state as that depicted by Lucretius in his incomparable poem, they were incapable of respect for the common good, nor did they know enough to adopt customs or laws of a reciprocal nature. Later, those having contiguous territory began to form friendly compacts, and to refrain from doing injury or violence to one another. Such is the statement of the case in Plato’s Protagoras. But since it was inevitable that obligations and negotiations should arise between organizations having such reciprocity of rights as exists between nations, commonwealths and kings, and since those organizations are either unwilling or, as often happens, unable to meet (certainly states can not meet), it was absolutely necessary [. . .] that others should be appointed, who by representing the organizations would be able to transact the necessary business. These representatives, moreover, had to be persons such as we see ambassadors are.15

Like other diplomatic theorists, Gentili uses this account of origins to legitimize the diplomatic practices he describes by presenting the alternative as a pre-civilized state of mutual violence, lacking law and even the capacity to form social groups. Gentili’s sources are important to understanding the connection between the origins of diplomacy and the origins of rhetoric and poetry implicit in his account. Marginal notes give two of these as Book 5 of the Roman poet Lucretius’s firstcentury bc epicurean epic De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), and Book 1 of De inventione (On Rhetorical Invention), the earliest rhetorical handbook written 13  ‘antiquitate’ (antiquity), ‘antiquior’ (more ancient), ‘antiquissimus’ (most ancient), ‘vetustate’ (age), ‘vetustius’ (older), ‘vetustissimi’ (oldest), ‘necessitas’ (necessity), ‘pernecessarium’ (absolutely necessary), ‘quod incumbat’ (what was necessary). Gentili, De legationibus, I.56–8, II.51–3. 14 Gentili, De Legationibus, I.57, my translation; Laing translates ‘scriptores tradunt’ as ‘the literary tradition is . . .’, Gentili, De legationibus, II.52. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller, rev. edn G. P Goold (Cambridge, 1977) 4.212–13; Herodotus, Histories, ed. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, 1920), 1.7.2; Gentili’s printed marginalia references ‘Justinus, Jordanes and others’. He uses ancient poets as historical sources throughout De legationibus; on this practice, see Christopher N. Warren, ‘Gentili, the Poets, and the Laws of War’, in Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann (eds), The Roman Foundations of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire (Oxford, 2010), 146–62; Daniel Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Erudition, Ideology, and the ‘Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War (Toronto, 1990). 15 Gentili, De legationibus, II.51.

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by Cicero, the Roman politician and orator whose works and example were central to early modern ideals of statesmanship, and equally central to the European Renaissance in classical literature. In a typically syncretic move, Gentili then compares both with the version of the foundation of political systems given in Plato’s philosophical dialogue Protagoras. These three sources were amongst the most famous classical texts circulating in early modern Europe, and would have been well known to the learned, humanist-educated readership of Gentili’s Latin treatise.16 Book 5 of De rerum natura gives an account of the origin of the world from chaos and of human society from a primitive beast-like existence. The book concludes with the invention of first poetry (‘carmina’) and then the other arts and it is within this narrative framework that Gentili places the invention of embassy.17 Lucretius describes early humans using stereotypical Greek markers of human savagery and places them within the hostile state of nature Gentili evokes.18 The foundation of kingdoms, the division of lands, and the establishment of laws follow, although for  Lucretius these prompts to envy, competition, and endless cycles of war mark human decline over time.19 Yet, for the poet, bird-like song and music—the precursors to poetic song or lyric poetry (‘carmina cantu’)—are amongst the earliest arts and Lucretius connects these with a state of pleasure, pastoral peace, and friendship that contrasts with the surrounding wars.20 The association is still on his mind when he first alludes to the formal development of Western poetry: Already men had, under treaty pacts, Confederates and allies, when poets began To hand heroic actions down in verse.21

Poetic and historical memory is of later date than the first treaties and alliances (and lyric poems) which, as Lucretius points out, can only therefore be rationally (‘ratio’) inferred, but the earliest surviving verses record the earliest known diplomatic exchanges. Western epic becomes the first historical record of European diplomacy in Lucretius’s account of the continent’s co-evolving diplomatic and poetic traditions.22 Gentili’s marginal reference to Book 1 of De inventione by Cicero provides a comparable narrative for the interlocking history of rhetoric and diplomacy. In the origin story for rhetoric given in this rhetorical handbook, eloquent words— coupled with wisdom—first persuaded savage and beast-like humans to embrace the gentler arts of civilization. Without the fluent influence of wise rhetoric, Cicero 16  On the importance and reception of Lucretius, see David Norbrook, Stephen Harrison, and Philip Hardie (eds), Lucretius and the Early Modern (Oxford, 2016). 17 Lucretius, De rerum natura, rev. edn Martin F. Smith (Cambridge, 1982), book V, lines 1444–5, 1451. 18  Ibid., book V, lines 925–1010; Robert A. Williams, Savage Anxieties: the Invention of Western Civilization (New York, 2012), 106–7. 19 Lucretius, De rerum natura, book V, lines 1105–51. 20  Ibid., book V, lines 1379–1415. 21  Ibid., book V, lines 1443–5. Translation: William Ellery Leonard, Of the Nature of Things: a Metrical Translation (London, 1916). 22 Lucretius, De rerum natura, book V, lines 1446–7.

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argues, humans could not have founded cities, cultivated integrity, or maintained justice.23 Diplomatic negotiation closely follows the foundation of political and legal systems, just as it does for Gentili: ‘this is how eloquence appears to have first originated, and further advanced, and likewise afterwards become concerned in the most important business of peace and war to the greatest benefit of humanity’.24 The treatise’s introductory words on the historical importance of the verbal art accordingly emphasize its diplomatic uses: historical records show Cicero that ‘many wars have been extinguished, many most enduring alliances and most holy friendships have been cemented by deliberate wisdom much assisted and facilitated by eloquence’.25 Gentili’s claim that ‘such is the statement of the case in Plato’s Protagoras’ is both misleading and revealing. The dialogue’s origin myth does indeed recount the acquisition of the civic or political virtues by humans who—as for Lucretius and Cicero—live in a state of continual strife with the animal kingdom, and with each other, because they lack the skill to wage successful war or band together in cities.26 Seeing this, the king of the gods, Zeus, commissions his messenger Hermes to deliver justice, respect, and wisdom to all men. Yet this myth emphasizes the friendly ties required for domestic, not interstate, politics, and the acquisition of ethical, not rhetorical, political virtues.27 At the same time, its wider dialogic context reveals the rationale behind Gentili’s comparison with his other sources: in content, form, and style, Protagoras repeatedly addresses the alignment of the political virtues with rhetorical and poetic ability. The historical Protagoras was amongst the earliest of the fifth-century bc touring Greek educators known as the sophists, whose role evolved from that of the itinerant poet, and whose teaching emphasized the connected skills of speaking well and living well.28 In Plato’s dialogue, the semi-fictionalized character Protagoras draws these same links between good private and political behaviour, rhetorical skill, the poetic tradition, and the appreciation of good poetry.29 The main debate of the dialogue is whether virtue is teachable, but another major thread is how to pursue philosophical discussion and teaching—through dialogue, speeches, stories, or poetic analysis.30 A section of the debate is even conducted through the analysis of a poem by Simonides, following Protagoras’ claim that ‘the greatest part of a man’s education is to be skilled in the matter of verses’ and their critical evaluation.31 23 Cicero, Rhetorici libri duo qui vocantur de inventione (Leipzig, 1915), Book I, Sections 2–3. 24  Ibid., Book I, Section 3, my translation, with debt to C. D. Yonge. 25 Ibid., Book I, Section 1. 26 Plato, Protagoras, in Laches; Protagoras; Meno; Euthydemus, trans. by W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA, 1924), 322a–c. 27  Gentili’s ‘friendly compacts’ (amicitiae) above echoing the ‘friendly ties’ (φιλίαι/philiai) of 322c. The virtues are discussed 322c–323a and further dissected throughout the dialogue. 28  For the biography and philosophy of the historical Protagoras, see C. C.W. Taylor and Mi-Kyoung Lee, ‘The Sophists’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (online edition, Winter 2016) [https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/sophists/, accessed 2 January 2017]. 29  On speaking and acting well see (for example) Plato, Protagoras, 312c–d, 318e–319a; on sophistic teaching and poetry 316d; on learning goodness through good poetry 325e–326a. 30 Ibid., 336b, for example. 31 Ibid., 338e–339a. The analysis follows to 348a. Protagoras cites poetry, especially Homer, in support of his arguments throughout the dialogue.

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Protagoras and his discussant Socrates end up aping each others’ argumentative and analytical styles, and the dialogue ends inconclusively.32 So when Protagoras recounts his origin myth in service of his argument about virtue, he is also making a point about style and persuasion and their vital relationship to the acquisition of political virtue. He asks his audience whether they would prefer him to argue in the form of a fable (muthos or myth) or an exposition, and when they defer to him, chooses the origin myth as ‘the more agreeable way’.33 By employing a pleasing literary form and style, Protagoras uses his argumentative frame to illustrate his sophistic programme of teaching political virtue through persuasive speech. When Hermes, the god Gentili elsewhere calls divine ambassador, delivers political virtue to humankind within that myth, the messenger god’s other roles as patron of oratory and wit, literature, and poetry resonate with this wider context.34 Literary associations and abilities explain the connections Gentili draws between the poet Lucretius, the orator Cicero, and the origin myth given in Protagoras, as much as their accounts of the (implicitly diplomatic) original political solutions to anarchic warfare. Myths recounting the origins of socio-political institutions are especially well suited to sociological explanations of myths, which emphasize myth’s function in consolidating such ephemeral social practices by granting them long-standing and unquestionable authority. As Bronislaw Malinowski first argued, ‘myth comes into play when rite, ceremony, or a social or moral rule demands justification, warrant of antiquity, reality, and sanctity’.35 Gentili’s origin myth justifies the political practices and social codes of early modern European diplomacy in just this way by presenting diplomacy as a doubly-ancient divine gift: one necessary to the very first formation of human society, and one recounted in venerated biblical and classical sources. By implying that without diplomacy anarchic violence would once more reign, Gentili presents the contemporaneous diplomatic institutions and practices he describes throughout his treatise as a social necessity. The allusive insertion of the original human acquisition of literary ability within this mythic account is powerfully naturalized by remaining an unspoken and unquestioned assumption, inseparable from the account’s cited authorities and inflecting descriptions of diplomacy throughout Gentili’s treatise.36 Some theorists have gone so far as to argue that myth and its associated rituals serve the specific social function of diffusing human aggression and securing peace. ‘Behind all [mythical] themes’, René Girard wrote, ‘one can detect the outline of reciprocal violence, gradually transformed into a unanimous act’, whilst ritual 32  At ibid., 343c, Socrates apes sophistic analysis of poetry and at 345 he departs from dialogue to give a long speech. 33 Ibid., 320c, though in the end he makes his point both ways, following the myth with an exposition. 34 Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, I.7–8, where he is included among Deorum nuncii and legati sacri. 35  Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Myth in Primitive Psychology’, in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (London, 1974), 93–148 (107). 36 See Joanna Craigwood, ‘Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy’, in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke, 2011), 82–100; Warren, ‘Gentili’.

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enacts and re-enacts that transformation.37 Myth-ritualists such as Girard have posited various relationships between myth and ritual, but Walter Burkert’s flexible model for their interactions seems most productive here. He has argued that myth and ritual evolved separately but can act in symbiosis, with myths justifying the sometimes ludicrous dramas involved in ritual behaviour, and the anxieties and sanctions surrounding ritual practices lending lived weight to mythic stories.38 This model explains how early modern diplomatic origin myths and practices could be mutually reinforcing despite independent genealogies: the nagging threat of anarchic brutality guaranteed adherence to ceremonial form, whilst the anxieties that persistently dogged diplomatic performances fed that threatening mythic narrative. In other words, Gentili’s origin myth ratified diplomatic ritual as a means to channel interstate aggression without continuous recourse to war (war of course still happened), whilst diplomatic practice appeared to confirm the essential truth of such myths, by repeatedly displacing that aggressive competition into its own high-stakes and rule-bound non-martial sphere. Although the various sacrificial models employed by Girard, Burkert, and others for understanding ancient myth-ritual displacements of human aggression do not map easily onto early modern negotiations of interstate aggression—for they exist within different cultural-historical moments—the early modern process of displacing martial violence onto diplomacy nevertheless echoes features of ancient narratives. The sending away of an individual—the diplomat—who stood in for his society, its aggressive desires, and its need to avert a bloody end, as he undertook a ceremonial contest, transmutes earlier mythic patterns.39 For Burkert, the function of ritual ‘is to dramatize the order of life, expressing itself in basic modes of behavior, especially aggression’ (my emphases), while myth ‘explains and justifies [associated] social orders and establishments, and in so doing it is related to ritual, which occurs by means of social interaction’.40 If the diplomatic contests over powers, precedencies, concessions, and favours justified by ambassadorial handbooks’ mythic accounts of societal peace dramatized interstate aggression upon the diplomatic stage, then the diplomat’s arsenal comprised ready wit, persuasive words, rhetorical flights, and the theatres of precedence and proximity to power, among other verbal and bodily performances of influence and supremacy. The incorporation of the original human attainment of literary ability within the myths alerts the handbooks’ readers to the absolute centrality of such manipulations of words and their effects—the skills essential to literary art—in the successful completion of this surrogate war.

37  René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London, 1995), 93–4; Walter Burkert likewise sees ritual and its associated myths as a means to channel human aggression, though through preservation in ‘as-if ’ behaviour, rather than through temporary sacrificial elimination. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley, 1982). 38 Burkert, Structure and History, 57. 39  Ideas that appear variously in Girard, Violence and the Sacred and Burkert, Structure and History and Homo necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. by Peter Bing (Berkeley, 1983). 40 Burkert, Homo necans, 33.

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E U RO P E A N C O N T E X T S A N D C O M PA R I S O N S Gentili, his diplomatic handbook, and the origin myth he wrote into it, belonged to an international political and intellectual community. Born and educated in Italy, Gentili emigrated to England because of his protestant religious beliefs, via Germany, where he left (and later visited) his brother. He taught at Oxford, and published prolifically on law and international law, eventually becoming Regius Professor in Civil Law at the University. During this period he also advised the Privy Council on a high-profile Anglo-Spanish diplomatic case, and accompanied an English embassy to Saxony led by another Italian migrant to England, Sir Horatio Pallavicino. He later delegated his teaching duties and moved to London with his French protestant wife, where he acted as advocate to the Spanish embassy, defending the Spanish crown in its legal disputes with its rebelling Dutch provinces, which were brought before the Admiralty Court in London.41 Gentili’s biography exemplifies the internationalism of the community engaged in diplomatic thought and work in early modern Europe.42 Gentili’s ambassadorial handbook, and its origin myth, accordingly circulated within a transnational political and intellectual elite. Written in Europe’s international language of scholarship and diplomacy, Latin, it was not only published in London in 1585 but also republished for continental consumption in Hanau in 1594 and again in 1607, with extant editions spread across European libraries as far as Russia.43 Gentili’s writings had lasting impact on European diplomatic and international legal thought, evident (among other ways) in a marked influence on the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist regarded as the founding father of modern international law, Hugo Grotius.44 The international dissemination of De legationibus was typical of the Europe-wide circulation of diplomatic handbooks and the ideas contained within them. As Hampton argued, ‘the uniformity of much of this writing constitutes a methodological advantage to the extent that it makes possible for us to posit a web of diplomatic discourse into which virtually every humanisttrained writer would have come into contact’.45 Ambassadorial handbooks originated in the humanist rhetorical and civic concerns of Renaissance Italy and spread with them across Europe, shaping a shared humanistic diplomatic culture.46 41  Artemis Gause, ‘Gentili, Alberico (1552–1608), Jurist’, ODNB. 42  On the role of exile and diaspora communities in diplomatic secretarial and translation work, see Warren Boutcher, ‘“Who taught thee Rhetoricke to deceive a maid?”: Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, Juan Boscan’s Leandro, and Renaissance Vernacular Humanism’, Comparative Literature, 52 (2000), 11–52. 43  London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1585; Hanau: Wilhelm Antonius, 1594; Hanau: Wilhelm Antonius, 1607. For library holdings, see English Short Title Catalogue and Universal Short Title Catalogue entries for these editions. 44  See Theodor Meron, ‘Common Rights of Mankind in Gentili, Grotius and Suárez’, American Journal of International Law, 85 (1991), 110–16; Peter Haggenmacher, ‘Grotius and Gentili: a Reassessment of Thomas E. Holland’s Inaugural Lecture’, Hugo Grotius and International Relations, 45 (1992), 133–77. 45 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 12. 46  Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 101–27; Hampton, Fictions of Embassy, 16.

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Later in this volume, José María Pérez Fernández makes a case for El Enbaxador (The Ambassador), by Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, as one of the most influential diplomatic handbook of early modern Europe. Published in Seville in 1620, the Spanish original was translated into French in 1635 and Italian in 1649. The treatise circulated widely in all three versions.47 Like Gentili, Figueroa conjectures that diplomacy began with the first formation of social institutions—‘when men began to dwell in houses and establish ownership’—because it was needed to manage and negotiate human wrongdoing. ‘Necessity was its inventor’, Figueroa writes, ‘when the goddess Pandora scattered evils and sufferings throughout the world’.48 Casting the seeds of the institution back into Pandora’s mythical box, Figueroa goes on to discuss its attribution to the reputed first king, Belus, and to Palamedes, a Trojan war alternative given (he writes) by ‘the poets’.49 Like other diplomatic theorists, Figueroa underscores the importance of diplomacy for co-existence amid evil and suffering. Elsewhere Figueroa writes eloquence into this peace-making function. Mercury, the Roman incarnation of Hermes, messenger god and patron of eloquence, serves as his original figure of the perfect ambassador. Figueroa’s handbook takes the form of a fictional dialogue between two friends in a country garden, its setting drawing on an influential Roman tradition of situating intellectual and literary activity within rural retirement. At the outset of the diplomatic material, Julio/Jules invites his friend Ludovico/Louis to develop ‘the pattern of a Perfect Ambassador’ in a rural idyll more pleasant than many already renowned for the intellectual pursuits of men of letters.50 With these prompts to appreciate both an ambassadorial ideal and the dialogue’s garden setting, Louis’s answering description of a nearby fountain featuring Mercury is clearly intended to introduce the subject of the treatise through a mythic pattern and patron: This beautiful garden can accept your praise without vanity. And this Mercury who dispenses crystal liquid from the snakes on his caduceus into these two basins of the fountain fits well with your wishes, since Mercury has always favoured Ambassadors, from having performed that office for Jupiter, on whose business he was so often employed.51

Fountains were ‘particularly dense signifiers, with functions that were structural and moral as well as purely aesthetic’ in early modern literature, as Hester Lees-Jeffries has argued, and could raise questions of how to read.52 For Figueroa, Mercury serves as the handbook’s source of inspiration, like those most famed of literary fountains, on the Muses’ home at Helicon, whose crystalline waters granted poetic 47  See Pérez Fernández below 88–9; Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, El enbaxador (Seville, 1620); Le partfait ambassadeur, trans. Nicolas Lancelot (Paris, 1635); Il perfetto ambasciatore, trans. Mutio Ziccata (Venice, 1649). 48  Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, trans. Nicolas Lancelot (Paris, 1643), 53, my translation. 49  Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, 53–4. 50  Ibid., 28. 51 Ibid., 28–9. 52  Hester Lees-Jeffries, England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2007), 2.

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inspiration.53 In a visual evocation of a metaphor that was already a commonplace by 1620, the statue highlighted in printed marginalia as ‘Mercury, the figure of an ambassador’, god of oratory, is the treatise’s ‘fountain of eloquence’, from which its words will flow.54 Persuasive speech remains important as Louis describes the statue in more detail, discusses its symbolism, and synthesizes several myths into his account of the origin of the caduceus. Listing the conventional accoutrements of the god—a winged hat, a cloak over one shoulder, a purse, a goat, and a cockerel, and in his left hand the staff entwined with snakes known as the caduceus—Louis claims that these symbols represent the essential characteristics of an ambassador: ‘loyalty, alacrity, diligence, generosity and eloquence’.55 His interpretation stretches the symbolism and passes over Mercury’s less respectable qualities, but also allows him to conclude with an eloquence implicitly linked to the final symbols, which are both closely associated with Mercury’s heraldic office: the cockerel, herald of dawn, and the caduceus, the herald’s staff of office.56 The caduceus is the only symbol about which Jules asks for further information and in reply Louis reads it emblematically as a sign of peace associated with persuasive speech through a syncretic account of its mythic origins that glancingly acknowledges the role of unifying interpretive frameworks in making sense of myth: ‘this or that etymology all tend to the same end’.57 Louis first recounts how Apollo, god of music and poetry, gave Mercury the golden staff in return for his present of a lyre to Apollo; he claims that this was ‘after the theft of the cow Io’ but that conflates two myths.58 In the first, newborn Mercury crept out of his cradle looking for adventure; stole his brother Apollo’s cattle and hid them in a cave; and killed a tortoise and used its shell to create the first lyre. When the theft was discovered, he pacified Apollo by playing his lyre while singing flattering songs, and then presenting it to his brother in return for gifts. The caduceus came to the god of rhetoric from the god of poetry, in exchange for the lyre, the traditional accompaniment to poetic performances, giving lyric poetry its name. In the second myth, the wife of Jupiter, king of the gods, set the monster Argus to guard his lover Io, who was disguised as a cow. Jupiter sent Mercury to kill Argus and free Io, which (according to Ovid) he achieved, armed with his sleep-inducing caduceus, by first lulling the monster to sleep with music,

53  ‘Helicon, n. 1.’ in OED Online gives sixteenth-century descriptions of Helicon’s waters as both crystalline and bringing poetic inspiration (OUP, December 2016) [http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/ 85580?redirectedFrom=helicon, accessed 2 January, 2017]. 54  For references to fountains of eloquence, see, for example: Pliny, A President for Parentes, trans. Edward Grant (London, 1571), sig. I.i.r; Pedro Mexía et al., The treasurie of auncient and moderne times, trans. Thomas Miles (London, 1613, second part 1619), book 2, p. 153. 55  Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, 29. 56  The link is implied both by position in list and the unsuitability of any of the other symbols to stand for eloquence. The winged hat stands for alacrity; the purse and probably goat for generosity/ liberality (drawing on the goat as a symbol of fertility); it is less clear where loyalty and diligence are derived from the symbols, though possibly the hat and cloak represent a kind of livery associated with serving Jupiter loyally and diligently. 57  Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, 31. 58 Ibid., 30.

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talk, and stories.59 Louis then explains that the snakes were added to the staff later, recounting two possible origins, both (he argues) to the ‘end’ that Mercury’s ‘principal ornament’ is a ‘symbol of harmony’ and the ambassador a ‘Minister of Peace’.60 The degree of interpretative self-consciousness with which Louis presents his account of Etymologie and Symbole alerts us to the further suggestions he has planted through his otherwise odd confusion of the cattle-thieving and Io myths. These myths do not present Mercury as a peacemaker but as a cunning thief, trickster, liar, trader, aggressor, and, above all, skilled orator. Figueroa’s combination of the stories highlights what they share: the persuasive powers of his mythic original. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Apollo makes peace with Hermes/Mercury because he is flattered by a song that—like many of the god’s words in the Hymn—is both ‘crafty’ and ‘artful’: ‘Slayer of oxen, trickster, busy one, comrade of the feast, this song of yours is worth fifty cows, and I believe that presently we shall settle our quarrel peacefully.’61 Armed with his caduceus, and mixing words with music, the eloquence of the god to whom Homer gives the epithet ‘Argus-slayer’ (Argeiphontes) was deceptive and deadly, shadowing the darker realities of diplomacy in the face of monstrosity and a world of suffering. With the caduceus as their fountain, it is no surprise that Jules and Louis later argue that eloquence is the most important attribute of an ambassador, ‘since eloquence is the soul of persuasion, and persuasion the very essence of the Embassy’.62 In L’Ambasciatore (The Ambassador), printed in Padua in 1626, Gasparo Bragaccia makes the connections between Mercury’s oratorical and ambassadorial capacities still more explicit. He adopts the second-wave sophistic (2nd century ad) orator Aelius Aristides’ account of the origins of rhetoric in his speech ‘To Plato: In Defence of Oratory’, taking its now familiar narrative of civilization from anarchy and drawing out its implications for the combined origins of rhetoric and diplomacy. In Bragaccia’s version, humans were struggling to survive because they were not as strong or self-sufficient as other animals, and would have died out had Prometheus not appealed to Jupiter in the world’s first ambassadorial oration. Jupiter, ‘instituting the very first post of ambassador’, sent his son Mercury to humanity with the gift of rhetoric; with this eloquence, humans were able communicate effectively, form political communities, and so escape from bestial existence. Interpolating comments about embassy into his source’s account, Bragaccia makes explicit what many of his contemporaries imply in their mythical allusions. ‘Anyone who considers the idea behind this story [of the origins of oratory]’, he claims, ‘will easily understand that Aristides regarded it as the origin of the office of the Ambassador.’63

59 Anonymous, ‘Homeric Hymn to Hermes’, in The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White (London, 1914); Ovid, Metamorphoses, book I, lines 668–721. 60  Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, 31. 61  Anonymous, ‘Homeric Hymn to Hermes’, line 435. For examples of the hymn’s references to his crafty and artful words see lines 160, 460. 62  Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, 181, 182–3. 63  Gasparo Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore (Padua, 1626), 24. P. Aelius Aristides, The Complete Works, trans. Charles A. Behr (Leiden, 1986), I.78–150.

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In a move that reflects the period’s complementary use of religious mythology to legitimize diplomatic practice, Bragaccia turns from classical myth to the Christian tradition—to ‘higher philosophizing’ as he writes—for an alternative origin in angels. God (he suggests) put the idea of diplomacy into human minds as an earthly symbol of those ‘ethereal Ambassadors’ who make God’s will known, and convey to our hearts divine goodness and beauty, knowledge thereby implicitly associated with Jupiter’s original enabling gift of eloquence.64 His Christian-Platonic framework for understanding the political institution was almost certainly influenced by Torquato Tasso’s late sixteenth-century dialogue concerning diplomacy, Il messaggiero (The Messenger), which posits a spiritual model and origin for earthly ambassadors within a more comprehensively realized neo-platonic philosophical framework.65 In Tasso’s version the ideal ambassador is also compared with the perfect orator: when the in-dialogue Tasso complains to his interlocutor, a spirit, that it is almost impossible to describe the perfect messenger, just as it is the perfect orator, the spirit compares heavenly messengers and heavenly orators. This prompts Tasso to make the parallel structural, by asking the spirit to teach him ‘the nature of an ambassador, and the purpose of the office, in the same way as others have done for the orator’.66 In a similar vein, Figueroa drew on biblical mythology to add religious weight to the relationship between eloquence and diplomacy.67 A mytheme connecting the origins of civilization, diplomacy, and literature appears in various forms in influential diplomatic handbooks transmitted widely across Europe. Its chameleonic power to appear in different mythic guises—in various versions of the first establishment of political communities, or stories of Mercury’s antics, or angelic models—is if anything evidence of its strength and cultural saturation. Such transnational cultural beliefs about the relationship between diplomatic and literary skills were also evident in humanist writings about literature and politics, which in turn drew on the same stock of legitimizing origin myths.68 These myths were both consumed by a transnational, humanist-educated community and products of the conversations and ideas already circulating within that political and intellectual elite. They provided origin accounts that perpetuated and sanctioned beliefs about the inseparability of literary and diplomatic ability in that community. Many members of that community were practicing diplomats. Author of the influential, multi-edition Arte of Rhetorique (1553)—which uses the Ciceronian myth of the oratorical origins of civilization—Thomas Wilson’s trajectory from rhetorical theorist to ambassador and then later secretary of state reflects the applied realities of these transnational mythical and theoretical circulations.69 64 Bragaccia, L’Ambasciatore, 24. 65  Written in 1580, printed without permission in 1582, and revised and reprinted 1586; for the textual history, see the edition of the dialogues by C. Guasti (Florence, 1838), I.viii–x. 66  Torquato Tasso, I dialoghi (Florence, 1858), 324–5; see also 332–3. 67  Vera y Figueroa, Le parfait ambassadeur, 183. 68  Wayne Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, 1995), 25. 69 Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (London, 1553), sig. A3r–[A4v]; see also Alastair Blanshard and Tracey A, Sowerby, ‘Thomas Wilson’s Demosthenes and the Politics of Tudor Translation’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 12/1 (2005), 46–80.

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The wider saturation of the ideas underlying the mytheme is evident in the explanation of why ambassadors were called orators given by another cosmopolitan member of the early modern diplomatic community: the Italian-born, French ambassador to Poland, England, and Switzerland, Carlo Pasquale:70 The ambassador is very justly called an orator, not because he is sent to soothe the perturbations of the mind with song, nor to lure the ears with foolish delights, nor even to thunder out against anyone with drum-like speech, but because he is sent to tame minds with the weapons of eloquence; and through this term he is constantly reminded of his duty.71

Pasquale’s evocation of soothing songs and alluring verbal delights places diplomatic eloquence on a continuum with the rhetorical qualities and characteristics of poetry. His reference to thundering speech suggests the judicial, deliberative, and epideictic set pieces of formal oratory. The persuasive weapons ambassadors wield are part of the same verbal spectrum and demand the same skills. Such theoretical perspectives on the relationship between myth and ritual as Burkert’s help explain the connection between humanist ideas about diplomacy and diplomatic practice in early modern Europe. Hampton has convincingly established the significant interface between literature’s rhetorical, mimetic, semiotic, narratological, and fictive concerns and humanist theoretical discourses about diplomacy.72 The mythic encapsulation of that relationship in the origin accounts discussed here allow us go a step further and conceptualize it as fundamental to the core beliefs that underwrote the rituals of diplomatic practice. Brian Maxson has shown that fifteenth-century Italian states placed enormous weight on the skilled and learned delivery of orations within diplomatic ritual. When on one occasion the Florentine Signoria were unable to respond to the imperial ambassador with a Latin oration, their lack of literary skill brought ‘disgrace’—in the words of one contemporary—while successful performances conferred ‘honour and profit’.73 Displays of literary skill served as cultural gifts honouring both recipient and sender and constituted ritual performances of status that informed subsequent negotiations. Jan Hennings has demonstrated the importance of verbal and nonverbal ceremonies that relied on the skilled symbolic manipulation of words and bodily performances in establishing diplomatic influence in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and Russia. As he wrote, ‘the relationship between ceremonial symbols and mechanisms of power was closer and of greater importance than it is today’.74 The symbiotic and mutually reinforcing relationship between myth and ritual provides us with the theoretical framework we need to connect the discourses Hampton identified with the prestigious demonstration of literary and theatrical abilities in diplomatic ceremony. 70 On Pasquale’s diplomatic career and interests, see Katherine McDonald, Biography in Early Modern France, 1540–1630: Forms and Functions (London, 2007), ch. 2. 71  Carlo Pasquale, Legatus (Rouen, 1598), 5, my translation. 72 Hampton, Fictions of Embassy. 73 Maxson, Humanist World, 86, quoting the fifteenth-century biographer Vespasiano da Bisticci. 74 Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe, 16.

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C O N C LU S I O N : C O N S C I O U S M Y T H M A K I N G In his 1664 ‘Treatise of Ambassadors’ James Howell synthesizes the range of origin accounts given in the European ambassadorial handbooks preceding his own: Some draw their antiquity from Belus the Father of Ninus; but Josephus makes them more ancient, and refers their Original to God Himself, who was pleasd to create the Angels for this Ministry; Therfore Embassy in Greek is calld Ἀγγελιη, as being derivd by  imitation from the Hierarchy of Angels, who are made the Ambassadors of the great King of Heven upon extraordinary occasions, either for revelation of the successe of Kingdoms, as the Archangel Gabriel was to Daniel; Or for the declaring of some rare and signal thing, as He was sent also to the Blessed Virgin of the Conception of our Saviour, &c. Now, ther is no Order or Goverment in this lower World as well Ecclesiastical as Secular but it is had from the Pattern of the higher, in regard that God Almighty created the Elementary World, and appointed the Goverment therof to conform with the Architype and chief Pattern, or Ideal Form of the same conceavd at first in the Divine mind, and prescribd to the Hevenly Kingdome. Herunto alludes the Fiction of the ancient Pagans; For Aristides tels us, that in the first Age of the World, wheras Mankind was infected by Brute Animals, wherof some were far stronger, others swifter, others were Venemous, which made Mankind become often a prey to Birds, to Beasts and Serpents, Prometheus being sollicitous and studious for the safety of the humane Creture, became Ambassador, or Orator to Jupiter for declaring the misery of Mankinde; Herupon Jupiter resolvd to send his son Mercury to teach Man Rhetorik, that is, to speak well and movingly; but with this restriction, that he shold not communicat this Art to all, but to the excellentst, the wisest and valiantst sort of men: By means herof they came down from the mountains, and forth out of Caves and places of fastness, and by means of that Art of Rhetorik or Eloquence they united themselfs to civil Societies and coalitions. Hence it may be inferrd that Mercury the God of Eloquence was the first Ambassador.75

Many of these stories are recognizable from the accounts discussed above: Belus, ancestral kingship, and the oratorical civilizing of brute humanity from Gentili, among others; Christian-Platonic archetypes from Tasso; Aristides’ history of the origin of rhetoric from Bragaccia; and Mercury as original figure of the ambassador from Figueroa. Howell openly articulates the syncretizing and universalizing trend of early modern European accounts of the origins of diplomacy. He explicitly frames the account of Jupiter sending Mercury to teach humanity rhetoric—thus initiating political society and diplomatic exchange or ‘civil Societies and coalitions’—as an allusion to angels as the heavenly form of earthly ambassadors (‘Hereunto alludes . . .’). He re-applies Bragaccia’s argument, via Aristides, about the relationship between the invention of rhetoric and diplomacy to other mythic accounts and especially to Christian myth. When Howell offers up an interpretation of the true meaning of this mythic ‘Fiction of the ancient pagans’, he expresses a consciousness, common among his contemporaries, of mythmaking as fiction-making. For Malinowski, reading myth 75  James Howell, Proedria vasilike a discourse concerning the precedency of kings: [. . .] whereunto is also adjoyned a distinct Treatise of ambassadors &c. (London, 1664), 184–5.

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as fictitious is incompatible with its social function, because such readings undermine community belief in mythic stories as a ‘statement of a bigger reality still partially alive’.76 Yet for Howell, pagan fiction revealed divine ideas; for Figueroa, different origin stories about the caduceus exposed the same underlying truth; and in Gentili’s source text Protagoras, muthos is a persuasive way of making a true philosophical point that might equally be proved through logos (philosophical reasoning). In Republic, Plato gives the fictional origin myth as his example of the ‘Noble Lie’ in politics: he argues that inventing such myths as ‘poets claim and have persuaded us to believe’ happened is justifiable because these myths ‘indoctrinate . . . the community’ to ‘care even more’ about their institutions.77 Jean Seznec argued that it was the adoption of such ancient moral, as well as natural-scientific and euhemeristic, explanations of the hidden truth behind classical myth that allowed it to survive into the early modern period.78 The appreciation of myth as poetic fiction co-existed with—even supported—belief in myth’s power to express truths and underwrite socio-political institutions. It is appropriate that the origin myths that linked literary skill to diplomatic practice were themselves poetic fictions that supposedly balanced noble lies with underlying truths. For that combination of lies and truth is at the heart of how literary practices and productions related to early modern diplomacy: they gave diplomats the tools to create persuasive fictions in the service of political ends that they needed to believe were ultimate goods. Diplomacy has always required its practitioners to unite a belief in the fundamental goodness and integrity of their patriotic and peace-seeking work with continuous practices of conscious deception that range from exaggerated projections of negotiating superiority to secret spying and outright lies. At the same time, that patriotic adherence to their polity’s agenda aligned diplomats with state-bounded political and language communities in competition with the international political community that valued and evaluated their verbal and theatrical skills and working practices. The origin myths that underpinned those skills and practices had to carry out further imaginary work, creating and shaping an international diplomatic community that—despite language barriers and pronounced national variations in diplomatic ceremonial form—could still agree to place shared value on the skilful negotiation of those ceremonies, and on the literary abilities that skilful negotiation required. The handbooks’ projection of fictional yet supposedly truth-bearing origin myths onto the institution of diplomacy in such a way as to create and perpetuate an international community and its values was itself a skilful manipulation of fictions and narratives, of ‘noble’ lies. Those fictions in turn persuasively placed the abilities associated with literary writing at the very heart of the non-fictional resources—the ambassadorial handbooks—and the historical practices of European diplomacy.

76  Malinowski, ‘Myth’, 100, 126. 77 Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford, 1993), 414b–415d. 78 Seznec, Survival, 4.

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2 Distinguished Visitors Literary Genre and Diplomatic Space in Shakespeare, Calderón, and Proust Timothy Hampton I N T RO D U C T I O N : ‘ M A M A M O U C H I ! ’ Toward the end of Molière’s 1670 play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme we learn that a great ambassador from Turkey has come to visit the ambitious but foolish bourgeois Monsieur Jourdain. The ambassador appears, and after a riotous scene in which Jourdain is taught to speak ‘Turk’ and given the title of Mamamouchi (which, we are told, means ‘knight’), the wealthy bourgeois agrees to give his daughter’s hand to the noble ambassador, who, it turns out, is her beloved Cléonte, in disguise. The scene of persuasion is punctuated by a musical ‘Cérémonie Turque’, in which, through a mixture of French, Italian, and Spanish, the ‘ambassador’s men’ singingly affirm that Jourdain is a Muslim. The play then ends with a ballet (music by Jean-Baptiste Lully) in which characters from diverse ‘nations’ dance together and recite or sing lines in different languages.1 Molière’s play offers an ironic send-up of some of the main themes of Renaissance diplomatic culture. The motif of the ambassador as a distinguished visitor, accorded respect through the protocol of entries and rituals, has now become a joke. Moreover, the distinction between the ‘foreigner’ and the local is turned inside out, as the most familiar of characters, the local boy Cléonte, is integrated into the domestic circle of the Jourdain family only after he has been cast as a mysterious foreigner. Perhaps even more interesting is that the conclusion of the play involves a moment of generic hybridity, at which a fairly conventional plot of a comedy opens out into a musical and dance extravaganza. This hybridity is a structural necessity. The conventions of comedy, with its scenes of unmasking and re-establishment of domestic order, cannot accommodate the social difference that haunts the world of the play. Since Jourdain is never cured of his desire to rise through society, the play can never involve an unmasking of the disguised young gallant as would be conventional in a comedic plot. Nor can Molière draw on another trope of comedic convention, which is the revelation that a seemingly familiar or humble character 1 Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, ed. Jean Serroy (Paris, 1998).

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is, in fact, a noble. Here, that convention is turned against itself as the ‘prince’ is in fact a familiar of the family. Thus the play cannot achieve comedic closure and, instead, opens out into a ballet. The ballet resolves the tension between otherness and community that dominates the plot by showcasing linguistic diversity and national difference, harmonized through dance and song.2 What follows explores the intersection set up by Molière between the plot motif in which a domestic location or closed space is intruded upon by a ‘diplomatic’ figure from the world of international politics, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the generic multiplicity of early modern theatrical texts. We are accustomed to associate ambassadors with great public events, with harangues, entries, and pageants. Early modern literature and art feature any number of scenes of public diplomatic encounter, from Vittore Carpaccio’s ‘Life of Saint Ursula’ cycle to the negotiations in Renaissance epics between rival factions. My concern here will be to study what happens when the ambassador leaves the public world of the council room or the ceremonial ritual and enters more intimates places—the world of the small court, of the family, or domestic enclave. This essay will look at two plays, one by Shakespeare and one by Calderón, arguing that a thematic tension in drama between international politics and national politics is registered at the level of literary form as a play of conventions between contrasting literary genres that are evoked and appropriated. Then, the final section will trace the themes of space, genre, and diplomacy into the world of the modern novel, showing that the early modern tension between international and national political spaces is reworked as a contrast between some larger political world and the discrete private space of the home. This focus on the intersection of a particular transgressive action and the literary genres that represent that action raises the topic of the role played by artistic (here, specifically, literary) production in the figuring forth of new types of political community. As the traditional model of Christian community (and the Holy Roman Empire) began to be placed under pressure in the sixteenth century by both the rise of modern nation-states and the Reformation, a new politics of space emerged—a politics in which diplomacy played a central role. Most discussions of this question limit themselves to a concern with how emerging national identities ‘build’ their communal experience through the manipulation of material or symbolic lines of force, as if the ‘content’ of new national communities were mere raw material, waiting to be picked up and minted into national identity Thus, for example, Benedict Anderson’s well-known discussion of the establishment of distinct national identities focused on the rise of national vernaculars, furthered by the technological innovation of moveable type. To the extent that national space has something to do with art, it is through the history of the novel—the characteristic genre of modernity—that Anderson sees collective identity being forged. 2  Roman, Shakespearean, and Italian Renaissance comedy often find resolution in moments of recognition, when foolish aristocratic fathers realize that their daughters should, in fact, marry those young nobles whom they most love. Thus, for example, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, once the magic of night has evaporated, Egeus is finally forced to accept Lysander as his eventual son-in-law.

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This account elides the struggles over community that took place in literature at the moment of the emergence of the new vernaculars—struggles that predate the dominance of the novel in literary culture.3 Similarly, in his discussion of art and nationalism, Anthony D. Smith argues that it is only at the end of the eighteenth century that modern national identities emerge fully, and that the role of art in this emergence prepared the terrain through an ‘archaeological’ exploration of forms of heroism and belonging that can be appropriated by new nationalist ideologies.4 Yet as both Mark Netzloff and John Watkins have demonstrated elsewhere in this volume, literary discourse both shapes and lends weight to the imagination of diplomatic space at the very birth of modern international law.5 Diplomatic law, they note, seems in many contexts to be shot through with the language and structures of tragedy. This essay argues for a similar imbrication of literary discourse and diplomatic action, suggesting that at the centre of the European canon of dramatic literature there is a confrontational politics worked out at the level of form. Moments when established spatial and generic boundaries are transgressed make that politics legible.6 Drama is the natural laboratory for such a project. In contrast to the visualized cosmic scope of the epic or the urban world of the emerging narrative prose traditions, dramatic literature necessarily unfolds within the literal space of the stage, even as it attempts to project many types of spatial dispensations—seascapes, battlefields, mountains, great halls—into the imaginations of spectators and readers. The space of theatrical action is limited, practically, by the space of performance. Yet imaginatively it is constantly changing. Through the dynamics of entries, exits, and sudden shifts of scene, drama continually asks us to reflect on the constitution of space, and of who is ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of a particular community or group. The movements of the ambassadorial figure—the classic border crosser—constantly bring our attention to these issues of limit and transgression, of border and territory. And they are registered in literature, as this essay will show, in the ways in which various generic registers are blended.7 3  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), chs 2, 5. 4  See Anthony  D.  Smith, The Nation Made Real: Art and National Identity in Western Europe, 1600–1850 (Oxford, 2013), 5–20. Smith’s focus is on the visual arts. See, in particular, his chapter 5. That Smith’s useful work focuses overwhelmingly on thematic questions suggests that much remains to be done to account for how artistic form and genre structure national space, history, and identity. 5  See Watkins, ch.4, esp. 75–83 below; Netzloff, ch. 3, esp. 62–8 below. 6  For a somewhat different account of scenes of intrusion in early modern culture see Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago, 2000). Helgerson shows that European artists in a number of different media registered the pressure placed by increasingly oppressive national political regimes on domestic and local communities. This essay asks how the intrusive actions of figures of international authority and identity raise questions about the literary definition of domestic space. For a stimulating comparative exploration of the role of drama in the establishment of national identity in England and Spain, see Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, 1988). Although I use the term ‘international’ throughout this essay, it did not become common in diplomatic and political discourse until after the period I am discussing here. 7  M. M. Bakhtin argues that the ‘literary chronotope’ is ‘charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ in ‘Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 84–258. On the theatre as the

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The movement of the ambassador from one zone of action to another is not only a literary issue. Practical advice literature by working diplomats during the early modern period often dealt with the changing role of the ambassador as he moved from ‘public’ functions to ‘private’ spaces. Thus, for example, Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa’s 1620 dialogue on the ambassador—best known, in its widely circulated French version, as Le Parfait Ambassadeur—features a discussion between the two interlocutors, Louis and Jules, about the behaviour of the ambassador in situations outside of the public eye. Jules asserts that in public ‘He is required to keep the gravity that is due his function.’8 However in private visits, banquets, and civil conversations, ‘even though he remains the same ambassador, he must temper the serious manner that he uses in public [. . .] attempting rather to appear that which he is, rather than that which he resembles’.9 Figueroa’s clumsy, slightly oxymoronic formulation that the ambassador must strive to ‘appear that which he is’ suggests the complex subjectivity of the ambassador. In public, he is a sign, a representative of his prince who speaks, in some measure, with the prince’s voice. When the ambassador crosses into private space, suggests Figueroa, he is free to discard that mask. Yet he does not simply ‘become himself ’, slipping into some relaxed modern space of informality. He simply gives over one form of performance for another. This formulation suggests that the world of the diplomat is shaped by diverse interacting zones of activity, each characterized by a different regime of performance. The theme of diplomacy provides a political focus to the spatial displacements of drama, even as dramatic form invests diplomatic movement with symbolic meaning. ‘ G R E AT A M B A S S A D O R S , F RO M F O R E I G N P R I N C E S ’ Few dramas are as deeply concerned with both the spatial and semiotic nature of diplomatic activity as is William Shakespeare’s play The History of Henry VIII (1612, presumably co-authored with John Fletcher). Rooted in chronicle accounts of Henry’s rejection of Katherine of Aragon to marry the young Anne Boleyn, the play depicts the emergence of the English monarch as a powerful unifying figure. It narrates a shift from the centrifugal world of early modern diplomatic activity to the establishment of the powerful figure of the Tudor monarch—father to Shakespeare’s own former queen, Elizabeth and great uncle to James VI/I—who site for the emergence of a new sense of psychic interiority, see Katherine Eisamen Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1995). 8  Juan Antonio Vera y Figueroa, Le Parfait Ambassadeur, trans. Nicolas Lancelot (Paris, 1643), 324: ‘Il est obligé de garder la gravité qui est deuë à sa dignité.’ 9  ‘Bien qu’il soit toujours le mesme Ambassadeur, il doit pourtant temperer la façon serieuse dont il use en public [. . .] tâchant de paroistre plutôt ce qu’il est, que ce qu’il ressemble’ (324–5). On the complex organizations of space in early modern court society, see Marcello Fantoni, George Gorse, and Malcolm Smuts (eds), The Politics of Space: European Courts ca. 1500–1750 (Rome, 2009); Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen and Konrad Ottenheym (eds), Beyond Scylla and Charybdis: European Courts and Court Residences Outside Habsburg and Valois/Bourbon Territories 1500–1700 (Copenhagen, 2015). On narrative forms and space, see Michel de Certeau, ‘Spatial Stories’, in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984), 115–30.

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can embody a new English identity. It presents this material by focusing on two signal moments in Henry’s reign, the downfall of the ambitious Cardinal Wolsey, who is brought to account by a nobility envious of his power, and the rejection, humiliation, and eventual death of Katherine of Aragon, which clears the way for Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn.10 The two movements of the play are linked by a moment in Act 4, scene, ii, in which, following Wolsey’s death, Katherine’s gentleman usher Griffith recounts the cardinal’s early years and rise to power. It is a moment of reflection on the act of storytelling. We see the humanist chronicler praised for his ability to depict the life of a great historical figure. Griffith’s account demonstrates the power of historical narrative to shape our perceptions of the political world—as Shakespeare is himself doing before our eyes. For it elicits Katherine’s sympathy: ‘Whom I most hated living, thou has made me [. . .] / Now in his ashes, honour’, she says. ‘Peace be with him’ [72–5]).11 Yet the emphasis on Wolsey’s narrative biography (indebted to the de casibus tradition of lives of ‘great men’, going back to Plutarch) stands in tension with a concern for the disruptive power of performance. We can see this early on, when Wolsey sponsors a party at York palace. As the music is heating up and the dancers begin to whirl, there suddenly appears ‘A noble troop of strangers’, described as ‘great ambassadors / From foreign princes’ (I.iv.53). This group turns out to be a band of masquers, led by Henry himself, disguised as shepherds and pretending to know no English. They successfully join the revelry and a moment later the King is dancing with Anne Boleyn. The meeting of Henry and Anne seems to be Shakespeare’s invention. Yet it is important, not only because it recasts diplomatic engagement as personal interaction but also because it offers a reflection on the relationship between diplomacy and space.12 When Henry VIII pretends to be a foreign ambassador, domestic space is being penetrated by two figures at once—both a king and an ‘ambassador’. It is as ‘ambassador’ that Henry is able to crash the party and as a ‘king’ that he dances. Shakespeare recasts the encounter between a prince and his subject as an encounter between closed space of the aristocratic house and the newly mobile class of ambassadors that began to appear with increasing frequency in the courts of Europe in the sixteenth century. The joke, of course, is that Henry VIII is not an ambassador, but rather a national monarch who will grow in stature as the play unfolds. Inside his diplomatic—international—disguise, there lies the figure who will dominate England. Thus the entire tension in the play between English identity, on the one hand, and the international political sphere of the Holy Roman Empire 10  According to George Cavendish’s 1558 Life of Wolsey, Wolsey first achieved fame for his diplomatic prowess, probably around 1508. See Two Early Tudor Lives, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven, 1962), 10. On the complex dispensation of space in the Tudor court see Tracey A. Sowerby, ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Space in Diplomacy at the Tudor Court’, in Johannson and Ottenheim (eds), Beyond Scylla and Charybdis, 47–63; on the importance of ‘intimacy’ in the same context see Malcolm Smuts and George Gorse’s ‘Introduction’ to The Politics of Space. 11  All citations from Henry VIII come from the edition by Jay L. Halio (Oxford, 1999). Act, scene and line numbers are indicated in the text. 12  Compare diplomacy and seduction in Henry V, V.ii.

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and the Vatican, on the other, is emblematized in this moment. Henry’s emergence from disguise, like a butterfly from his cocoon, depicts, in miniature, his emergence through the play as a dominant royal figure. England replaces Empire. Yet this moment also showcases a mixing or hybridity of literary genres. In a play that is deeply concerned with issues of national identity and the nature of representative authority Shakespeare gives us a tripling of the notion of representation. By pretending to be a foreign ambassador the King is a prince who is representing himself as an agent who in turn represents another prince. He becomes a simulacrum of a simulacrum of his counterpart or double from abroad. The allegory of representation is then pushed a step further when the masquers announce that they are, in fact, shepherds, who have been lured from their flocks by the reputation of the beauty of the ladies of the court. This fiction within the fiction of the embassy within the fiction of the play underscores the transparency of the whole trick by evoking the heavily mannered fictions of the literary pastoral that was so influential in sixteenth-century court culture, from the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro (1489) to the Arcadia of Philip Sidney (1590). In this generic excess lies the comedy of the moment. The layering on of ever more levels of disguise generates a kind of silliness that nevertheless reaffirms the relationship between fiction and space in the play. For if modern ambassadors are like classical shepherds, figures on the edges of bounded states, living on the move, this particular group of shepherds can only enter Wolsey’s house because they are literary shepherds, rather than real ones. Drama effects the juxtaposition of otherwise incompatible spaces of political and literary action. Because the play is interested in the intersection of different zones of diplomatic action and different political identities (the king residing inside his disguise as ‘ambassador’), we should not be surprised to see a focus on the material signs of authority, which can only function correctly if they are not moved or displaced. Wolsey’s abuse of power links the performative dimension of representation, seen already in the reference to the revelling King, with the paraphernalia of power, which he appropriates and moves about at will. This is seen in the climax to the accusation scene, where Wolsey is brought low through the revelation that his very diplomatic correspondence involved an attempt to displace his master. Thus the charges are read by Norfolk: ‘Then, that in all you writ to Rome, or else / To foreign princes, Ego et Rex meus / Was still inscribed: in which you brought the king / To be your servant’ (III.ii.312–15). The very syntax of Wolsey’s correspondence suggests the extent to which his ‘ego,’ as it were, has been placed in equality with its master—quite literally out of place in the sentence. Having equalled the King and sought to ‘embody’ Papal authority as legate, Wolsey seizes the signs of royal authority, the material manifestations of kingship: ‘Then, that without the knowledge / Either of king or council, when you went / Ambassador to the emperor, you made bold / To carry into Flanders the great seal’ (318–19), adds Suffolk a moment later. This seizure of the signs of authority is then completed when we learn that Wolsey has conducted diplomacy ‘without the king’s will’, and that he has had his ‘holy hat . . . stamped on the king’s coin’ (324–5). Thus the problem with diplomacy—or with corrupt diplomats—is that they manipulate the signs of authority by setting

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them where they should not be. A king can play at being an ambassador, but an ambassador cannot be a king. It is significant that Henry’s intrusion into the party at York Palace can only come through a masquerade of muteness, a fiction that he and his men cannot speak English. For his muteness, which enables his eventual courtship with Anne Boleyn, contrasts directly with Wolsey’s reassuring statement, upon the arrival of Cardinal Campeius from Rome, that Henry has now submitted his case to ‘the voice of Christendom’ (II.ii.87), and that the learned men of the Christian kingdoms have given ‘their free voices’ on his problem, which they have now sent (as ‘one general tongue’ [II.v.94]) in the form of ‘This good man, / This just and learned priest, Cardinal Campeius’ (II.v.95–6). It is in light of this linking of diplomatic abuse and linguistic politics that one may read the other great confrontation scene in the play, Wolsey’s dramatic encounter with Katherine, in her chambers, where he proposes to inform her of the judgments against her. He begins in Latin, the language of authority—quite literally, the ‘one general tongue’ of Christendom, spoken by Campeius. Yet she stops him immediately with the objection that ‘A strange tongue makes my cause more strange, suspicious / Pray speak in English’ (III.i.43–4). This image of the ‘foreign’ queen, Katherine of Aragon, asking to be addressed in the language of her adopted land instead of in the language of the Church and of ‘universal’ Christendom turns inside out Wolsey’s attempt to align himself with the ‘voice’ from abroad. It is the tragic analogue to Molière’s comic staging of diplomatic multi-lingualism, with which I began. It underscores the tension in the play between, on the one hand, an international community (and ‘voice’) embodied by either the Church or the Holy Roman Empire and, on the other hand, an emerging national identity that will come to be embodied by Henry, and, later, Shakespeare’s queen Elizabeth. Katherine is caught between these forces. The tension between two linguistic registers underscores the tragic nature of Katherine’s situation: in a play about emerging national identity she is the victim of her own foreignness, the ‘true’ Englishwoman who cannot be recognized as such. These questions of spatial politics, diplomatic culture, language, and national identity all converge in what is surely the saddest moment in the play. This comes when, following the disgrace and death of Wolsey, Katherine has left the court and lives in retirement and ill health. She is visited by Charles V’s ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, or Caputius, as he is known, in the play, by his Latin name. Katherine recognizes her visitor as a diplomatic agent and potential ally: ‘If my sight fail not, / You should be lord ambassador from the emperor, / My royal nephew’ (IV.ii.109–11). Her following comment that ‘the times and titles are now altered strangely / With me since you first knew me’ (113–14), prepares the way for his own admission that he does not, in fact, come as an emissary from her nephew, the Emperor Charles V, but as a private messenger from Henry, ‘Who grieves much for your weakness and by me / Sends you his princely commendations / And heartily entreats you take good comfort’ (118–20). The exchange underscores the pathos of Katherine’s fall from power. It stages a mock diplomatic encounter between a former queen and a former ambassador who is now on a domestic errand, firmly under the control of

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the king. The pathos lies in the fact that she mistakes him; she believes he is a legate, whereas he is merely on a mission to cheer her up. ‘That comfort comes too late’ (121), she laments, before entreating him to ask the king not to dismiss her staff and servants after her death. Caputius’s mission both recalls and contrasts with Henry’s interruption of Wolsey’s party. Both characters come as messengers, into private spaces. Caputius’s errand marks out the spatial transformations that the play is narrating, taking us from the unstable world of international politics—the world of Wolsey, of Pope, and Empire—into a world of private drama, into a space now firmly under the control of the newly self-confident Henry. Like Henry in the party scene, Caputius is an agent of national centralization mistaken for an international diplomat. The shift in political fortunes and the displacement of international diplomacy by national political culture may be read in miniature in the powerful moment when Katherine mistakes her ex-husband’s errand boy for a great ambassador from a foreign prince. ‘A N A M B A S S A D O R F O R M Y S E L F ’ Calderón de la Barca’s El Príncipe Constante, or The Constant Prince, is one of his most frequently translated and performed works. Walter Benjamin went so far as to single it out as emblematic of the Baroque martyr play. Yet while it is certainly a play about martyrdom, it is also a play about the relationship between international diplomacy and domestic politics. And it raises the question of how the native forms so important to the Spanish literary tradition respond to and represent the emerging world of international diplomacy in the seventeenth century.13 El Príncipe Constante appeared in 1628, two years after the failed project of the Count-Duke Olivares to bind the Spanish provinces together in the so-called ‘Union of Arms’. Spain had just passed through what John Elliott calls the ‘annus mirabilis’ of 1626, which saw victory at the Siege of Breda, the expulsion of the Dutch from Brazil, and the defeat of the English at Cadiz.14 Olivares was optimistic that these triumphs could lead the way to a truly unified Spanish state, and he used the spectre of foreign attacks as propaganda to further his ultimately unsuccessful nationalizing agenda. The play draws on an episode from fifteenth-century Portuguese history. Here are the bare bones of the plot: the Portuguese prince Fernando is fighting the Moors in North Africa. He is captured in battle. The Moorish king is willing to release him, but only in return for the city of Ceuta, that enclave on the north coast 13  All references will be to the edition of El Príncipe Constante by Fernando Cantalapiedra and Alfredo Rodrígues Lópes-Vázquez (Madrid, 1996). My translations. The play consists of three acts or ‘Jornadas’. Act and line numbers will be included in the text. Benjamin’s discussion is in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, 1985), 128–42. Virtually none of the criticism on this play focuses on its uses of diplomacy. 14  J.  H.  Elliott, ‘Foreign Policy and Domestic Crisis’, in his Spain and Its World, 1500–1700: Selected Essays (New Haven, 1989), 125.

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of Africa that has played such an outsized role in Spanish-African relations over the years. The play traces the struggles between the two warring sides over the destiny and eventually the body of the captive and constant prince.15 Inside this political drama there is a love story which, of course, is Calderón’s own invention and which is built around a group of stock characters from literary worlds outside the medieval chronicle literature on which he draws for the main setting. The counterweight to the captive Christian prince Fernando is the Saracen princess Fénix. The question of whether Fernando can be ransomed is explored in parallel to the question of whether, and whom, Fénix will marry. Fénix is in love with a Saracen captain named Muley, who is brave but timid. By chance, early in the play, Muley meets Fernando, the Christian prince, in battle. Fernando knocks Muley off his horse. On seeing Muley’s courage and learning of his love for Fénix— which Muley explains in a beautiful speech as the battle rages all around him—the sentimental Fernando generously returns the horse to him and lets Muley go free. However, Muley’s love for Fénix is fraught with difficulty. In the very first scene we see her in a conventional domestic scenario, surrounded by her handmaidens and just emerging from the bath. Suddenly we are informed that the Moroccan king Tarundante is interested in her hand. The scene of the bathing princess in her garden is interrupted when Fénix’s father, the Moorish King, appears carrying a picture, a framed portrait of Tarundante. This picture, he explains to Fénix, has been sent by the Moroccan king. It is an ambassador. It stands in for Tarundante, who cannot be present to press his own embassy for her hand. It is in fact such a faithful likeness that it cannot even be called a likeness. It seems to be the man himself—‘a handsome original’ (I.84). Moreover, despite the fact that it is painting, it can speak its embassy merely by its presence. It is, ‘an Ambassador who speaks mutely’ (I.91) one of those great Calderonian oxymorons.16 It conjures shades of Shakespeare’s ‘mute’ king / ambassador Henry VIII, crashing the party at Wolsey’s palace. And what it says is that it wants to ‘make a peace treaty’ (I.83) with Fénix’s doubts about Tarundante. The picture raises a problem for Fénix and Muley. For by receiving it—as Fénix is compelled to do by her father—she is in the situation of someone who has received a live ambassador. The act of receiving the picture confers legitimacy on Tarundante’s courtship. As a result the jealous Muley, who is watching from the wings, believes Fénix to be unfaithful. He confronts her and tells her that she should have died, rather than receive the painting (thereby introducing the 15  Calderón builds on earlier plays on the same material, most notably El Bastardo de Ceuta by Juan Grajales, as well as historical accounts, but the theme of diplomatic representation is Calderón’s addition. See A.  E.  Sloman, The Sources of Calderón’s ‘El Príncipe Constante’ (Oxford, 1950). Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 2, lucidly recounts the historical events. On the wider representation of history in Calderón see Anthony J. Cascardi, The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón (Cambridge, 1984), ch. 9. 16  ‘Es del Infante / de Marruecos, Tarundante; / a rendir a tus pies viene / su corona, Embajador / es de su parte; y no dudo / que Embajador que habla mudo / trae embajadas de amor’ [‘It is from the Infante / of Morocco, Tarundante; / he comes to place his crown / at your feet, it is an Ambassador / from him; and I have no doubt that / that this Ambassador who speaks mutely / brings embassies of love’] (I.86–92).

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theme of a martyrdom for love, that echoes with the plot involving Fernando’s subsequent martyrdom). Now, he says, she must prove her fidelity to him by destroying the painting. She vows to throw it in the ocean, as she puts it, ‘to quench its flame’ (I.458). Tarundante’s ‘mute ambassador’ appears in Act 1 of the play. It is then paralleled, in Act 2, by a second diplomatic figure. This is the prince Enrique, the real life ‘Henry the Navigator’, who comes to ransom his brother Fernando. We learn that the Portuguese king Duarte has died of grief over the capture of his son, and in his will has dictated that Ceuta should be exchanged for Fernando’s freedom. However the negotiations fail because—and this is the great ideological centre of the play— the captive Fernando does not, in fact, want to be ransomed at all. He believes it is unacceptable for him to allow himself to be exchanged for an entire city, when he knows that the inhabitants of Ceuta will be forced to convert to Islam. Thus Henry’s embassy fails. And we are treated to a dramatic scene that exactly parallels Muley’s demand in Act I that Fénix destroy the painting. This time defiant Fernando grabs the text of the ransom offer out of Enrique’s hands and eats it on stage. Thus Calderón’s play seems to understand diplomatic negotiation as a dangerous or problematic activity. It gives us two parallel situations in which diplomatic figures come from outside the immediate world of the characters to negotiate their fate. And in both cases the character refuses the overture. Diplomacy fails and the material tokens of diplomatic mediation (which Shakespeare’s Wolsey had sought to control) are quite literally obliterated from the world of the play. At one level this seeming rejection of diplomacy recalls Shakespeare’s negative depiction of Wolsey’s diplomatic manipulations in Henry VIII. But it also has something to do with the politics of literary genre, with the ways in which literary form registers the pressure of political life. The two embassies are in parallel, but they work in two different generic registers—registers that would have been familiar to Calderón’s readers and viewers. The love of Fénix and Muley is threatened by the ‘mute ambassador’ of the blustering Tarundante, who pushes his way into the domestic space of the princess Fénix. Here we are in the world of aristocratic courtship, made legible through the cultural mediations of chivalry. Generically, the Muley/Fénix story would have been familiar to Spanish readers from such texts as El Abencerraje, the so-called ‘Moorish’ novel of the 1560s, in which a Christian knight aids a Moorish noble in the pursuit of his lady. Similarly, the parallel intrusion that is the arrival of Enrique to ransom his brother Fernando in Act II is presented as an annoyance, a distraction. Fernando calls the ransom documents ‘vain powers’ (II.1416). And when he has eaten them he sheds his very identity, stripping naked and declaring that no single letter should remain as evidence of his Portuguese nobility. The scene stages the intrusion of diplomacy and politics into the private space of spiritual life, in which Christian conscience takes priority over political exigency. This is the world of the Christian martyr; it evokes the literature of Spanish spirituality, from Saint John of the Cross to Saint Teresa of Avila. In both of these registers Calderón is asking us to think about the tension between a grand narrative of Spanish conquest—represented now as international politics

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and displaced onto Portugal—and the literary forms that give expression to private domestic and spiritual experience. The parallel plots come together in Act III. For there a messenger bursts into the King’s chamber to announce that two more ambassadors have arrived simultaneously and both seek entrance. First we see Tarundante, who announces, ‘I have come from my kingdom / as an Ambassador for myself / to see you, beautiful Fénix.’17 The other is Alfonso, king of Portugal, who now comes in person, replacing his brother Enrique, to seek the release of Fernando. Both kings dispense with their representatives, coming, themselves, as representatives of themselves. The scene turns into a wild conclave of monarchs, with Alfonso and Tarundante engaging in a shouting match for precedence of entry before the Moorish king. He eventually allows Alfonso to speak first, out of courtesy to his status as a stranger. However, of course, Alfonso’s embassy fails, since, as we know, Fernando has no interest in being ransomed. By contrast Tarundante is provisionally successful, as he compels Fénix’s father to promise him her hand—despite Muley’s melancholy protestations to the audience in a series of asides. Here, again, the comparison with Henry VIII is instructive. As in the case of Henry’s interruption of the party at York Palace, Calderón gives us a scene of diplomatic intrusion that is marked by a kind of semiotic excess. Henry comes as a king disguised as an ambassador disguised as a shepherd. The layering of identities creates a moment of generic interruption, a comic, pastoral moment in a historical tragedy. In Calderón, an instance of too many kings coming as ambassadors produces a ridiculous shouting scene that borders on comedy and troubles the generally sombre tone of the martyr play. Henry comes as a mute; Tarundante and Alfonso come as shouters. Fernando resists all attempts to ransom him and dies a martyr for Christian Europe. The play ends with him appearing as a vision in the sky, and inspiring the Portuguese to defeat the Moors and take Fénix prisoner. This they do, and then agree to exchange her living body for the dead body of the martyr Fernando, thus linking the two plot lines perfectly. In the final passages, in this play that is so obsessed with failed diplomacy, we finally see a successful diplomatic negotiation and an exchange of bodies. The twist, however, is that the Portuguese will only release Fénix on the condition that she be allowed to marry her beloved Muley instead of the unsympathetic Tarundante. And the play ends with a resolution that extends the dialogue of genres it has flirted with throughout. The stark triumph of religious dogmatism among Christians is paralleled by a comedic celebration of true love among the Moors. ‘My cares are all gone’ (III.2953), concludes Fénix eight lines before the end, as she exits. Calderón thus sends the ambassador into the closed community of the aristocratic household and the private space of the individual believer. El Príncipe Constante raises questions about the impact of grand narratives of royal power and political negotiation on the forms of private life. It does so by depicting diplomatic action as an intrusion—a repeated intrusion—that is destined to fail. Yet through that 17  ‘Embajador de mí mismo, / Fénix hermosa, por verte / desde mi reino he venido’ (III.2095–7).

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failure the play is able to yoke together motifs from such diverse literary genres as the Moorish love story and the Christian martyr tale. Through their difference from the world of intrusive international diplomacy these genres emerge as genres that will help to shape new forms of personal experience, or what will come to be called ‘private life’.18 As in Henry VIII—indeed, in an even more pronounced and programmatic fashion than in that play—we see the work of literary form through the structural parallel between the two negotiation plots, turning the raw material of diplomatic history into a meditation on genre and space. The spatial function of diplomatic action—its capacity to cross borders—becomes, in the aesthetic text, the capacity to yoke together the imagined worlds of different literary conventions. In this context, we can suggest that the form of these plays involves an attempt to mediate the relationship between the public world and the private or domestic world at a time of shifts in political power from old models of empire to an increasingly defined national/international world. C O N C LU S I O N : ‘ F O R A YO U N G M A N , A M E M O RY WO RT H K E E P I N G ’ The dramatic motif of the intrusive diplomat works to mediate the tension between domestic and national space posed by an increasingly international political culture in the early modern period. Dramatic texts register the intrusiveness of the outsider figure through moments of generic multiplicity or crossing, where pastoral interrupts historical tragedy, or where the Moorish romance intersects with the literature of martyrdom. This essay’s discussion of such texts closes with a leap ahead to a much later period in literary history and a quite different literary genre—the novel. Diplomatic figures begin to appear in European narrative prose as early as Mateo Alemán’s 1599 picaresque novel Guzmán de Alfarache. In early novels they are often depicted as figures of power who can convey prestige and money on lowborn characters. By the middle years of the nineteenth century, in such texts as Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir, they begin to gather about themselves a certain air of nostalgia, functioning often as signs of some earlier social or ethical world, now disappearing under the pressure of modern society.19 The second volume of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu begins with a meditation on the role played by the ambassador Monsieur de Norpois in the life of the narrator. We are taken back to childhood, to the evening when Norpois first came to dinner at the narrator’s house. Fabulously wealthy, accomplished in his service to France, Norpois, like a number of other novelistic ambassadors, is slightly old fashioned; the narrator’s mother finds him to be ‘un peu “vieux jeu” ’.20 18  See, for example, Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, 1989), and the history of the ‘private’ that followed this work. 19  See Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2010), epilogue. 20  Marcel Proust, A l’ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs (Paris, 1987), 17.

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The narrator remarks that his language is characterized by quaint turns of phrase that have mostly gone out of fashion. Yet he takes on a crucial role in the larger structure of the novel. For we learn that he does two things that will determine the destiny of the narrator. First, we are told, he comes to dine on the day when, for the first time, the narrator has been allowed to go to the theatre to see the famous actress La Berma in a production of Racine’s Phèdre. The experience, which will be central to the narrator’s thinking about art and performance, was, in fact, the result of a conversation in which Norpois had persuaded the narrator’s hesitant father to give in and let him go: ‘It was, for a young man, a memory worth keeping’, affirmed Norpois.21 Even more important, we learn on this occasion that Norpois has persuaded Marcel’s father that the boy’s literary ambitions should be taken seriously. Whereas the father has been orienting his son toward a career in diplomacy, Norpois believes that a writer can have as much influence over events as can a diplomat: ‘Well, I would never have believed it’, says the father. ‘Old Norpois is not at all against the idea of you doing literature.’22 Proust’s young narrator stands at the crossroads between diplomacy and literature. Norpois’s intervention makes a literary career, and therefore Proust’s autobiographical novel itself, a possibility. Norpois brings into the claustrophobic domestic world of Proust’s sickly narrator a triple association—with diplomacy, with performance (as theatre), and with writing. In this regard he is the perfect heir to the performing, intrusive diplomats we have seen in Molière, Shakespeare, and Calderón. The link between diplomatic intruders and generic mixing, between the diplomat as performer and border crosser, on the one hand, and the resources of literary form, on the other, is embodied in this aging, old-fashioned French aristocrat who wanders into the space of the quintessential modern novel. In Norpois’s ‘mission’ Proust offers a reaffirmation and a comment on the tradition of dramatic diplomats studied earlier. For Calderón and Shakespeare, the intrusive diplomat brings a kind of excess of signification, a thickness of meaning that unsettles the closed spaces and genres of domesticity. For Proust, the diplomat brings the possibility of literature itself.

21  ‘C’était, pour un jeune homme, un souvenir à garder’ (377). 22  ‘Et bien! Je ne l’aurais pas cru. Le père Norpois n’est pas du tout opposé à l’idée que tu fasses de la littérature’ (378).

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3 Lines of Amity The Law of Nations in the Americas Mark Netzloff I N T RO D U C T I O N One of the abiding fictions underwriting the history of international law is the idea of lines of amity. According to many traditional accounts, the European states system was able to take shape and retain a coherent form over the course of the early modern period by bracketing off the conflicts that took place between states in regions outside Europe. Territorial conflicts, acts of piracy, and other forms of extraterritorial violence that took place ‘beyond the line’, that is, west of the Canaries and south of the Tropic of Cancer, did not infringe on European interstate treaties or otherwise affect the amity among European states. Although the origin of the amity lines is typically attributed to the FrancoHabsburg treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis of 1559, this document, whose predominant concern was a division of French and Spanish control over Italy, does not include any discussion of the rival states’ competition in the Americas within the text of the treaty.1 The textual form of the treaty effectively replicates the elision of colonial contexts from the purview of European politics. Nonetheless, Cateau-Cambrésis attained a central position as unstated policy through its citation as precedent in subsequent treaties, such as the Franco-Spanish Peace of Vervins (1598) and the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of London (1604). In diplomatic practice as well, the justification of amity lines by Cateau-Cambrésis held a status as established fact: Marie de Medici, Regent of France, defended the right to seize the vessels of rival European nations in a 1611 document by arguing that ‘as is evidenced by all treaties since the time of King Francis, beyond the line and on the American coast there is no peace’.2 The intrinsically fictive character of the amity lines is even more apparent when analysed in practical terms that expose the uncertainty of their supposed location. The line separating Europe from other regions was, to begin with, double rather than single: a western division keyed to the Canary Islands or Azores in addition to 1  Frances Gardiner Davenport, European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648 (Washington DC, 1917), I.219–21. 2 Wilhelm G. Grewe, Epochs of International Law, trans. Michael Byers (Berlin, 2000), 156.

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a southern boundary running along the Tropic of Cancer. The southern line, situated immediately north of the Caribbean and the entirety of Southeast Asia, conveniently subsumes the profitable sites of West and East Indies within the lawless realm of licensed piracy. The western meridian was far from self-evident and remained an unsettled point of contention among European states throughout the period. As many as fourteen rival candidates were offered as to what line marked being beyond the line in the first place.3 In practice, as illustrated by examples such as Sir Francis Drake’s raid on Cadiz, the state of war nominally confined to spaces beyond Europe was integral to the informal and quasi-sanctioned violence that permeated European international relations as well. The amity lines held an imaginative currency because they served as a moving horizon that could maintain a conceptual boundary separating Europe from its messy entanglements across the globe. In fact, as Garrett Mattingly noted, there is a surprising paucity of references to lines of amity in early modern diplomatic correspondence, evidence of a lack of distinction between European and nonEuropean spheres of interstate relations.4 Contrary to the way in which the lines of amity attempted to bracket off the extra-European world from the law of nations, European and global contexts were in reality mutually constituted and in dialogue with one another throughout the period. As Antony Anghie argued, instead of the Westphalian model of sovereignty extending around the globe, ‘sovereignty was improvised out of the colonial encounter, and adopted unique forms which differed from and destabilized given notions of European sovereignty’.5 Lines of amity can be viewed within another framework, one that better recognizes the impact of global relations on the European interstate system, and that is the aim of this essay. Competition among European powers over spheres of influence and commercial advantage in other regions across the globe also enabled unexpected alliances, forms of amity that traversed lines of nation, confessional identity, and race. The initial section of this essay will examine a historical incident that is perhaps better known through its reworking in dramatic form and popular culture: Drake’s alliance with the nation of Cimarrons, or escaped slaves, in Panama in 1572. This incident raises questions regarding Drake’s own status as a diplomatic agent and the extent to which he could arrogate authority in forging such informal alliances. More importantly, this example challenges the exclusion of the Cimarrons from international law. Rather than being categorized as escaped slaves, and thereby dispossessed of political rights, the Cimarrons’ alliance with Drake marks their position as political agents. Even if not recognized as a nation within the states system, they can nonetheless take on the attributes of sovereign authority: making alliances, negotiating with foreign powers, including their former Spanish 3  Bertrand Westphal, The Plausible World: A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place and Maps (New York, 2013), 141. 4  Garrett Mattingly, ‘No Peace Beyond What Line?’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 13 (1962), 145–62. 5 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2005), 1. Also see China Miéville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (Leiden, 2005), 169–83.

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overlords, and exercising agency through the strategic use of violence. The alliance of a privateer and escaped slaves thereby transforms the premises of the lines of amity, creating new connections that not only traverse colony and metropole but additionally complicate the extent to which non-state agents, stateless persons, and a range of colonial subjects wield political agency in the unstable political domain of the Americas. Countering the implications of Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons, the second part of this essay will examine the means through which the lines of amity remained entrenched in the European political imagination throughout the early modern period. In his study of the emergence of a European legal order, Carl Schmitt argues that the ‘spatial order of states’ and balance of power within Europe required the separation of extra-European regions from the international order, as a result of which these spaces were relegated to a status as ‘incidental and peripheral’.6 With the increasingly territorial definition of states, ius gentium was restricted to ius inter gentes (law among nations) if not inter gentes Europaeas (among nations of Europe). In this scenario, ‘whoever lacked the capacity to become a “state” was left behind’. Echoing Alberico Gentili’s refusal to recognize the legal status of rebels and other non-state actors, as discussed later in the essay, Schmitt concludes that ‘ “Statehood” is not a universal concept, valid for all times and all peoples’.7 The European definition of the law of nations reasserted itself by reconstituting an imagination of the lines of amity that denied the political and historical contemporaneity of regions beyond Europe. This transformation was accomplished through a narrative strategy that relegated colonial history to its own tragic register. Similar to John Watkins’s illuminating discussion of the pathos and pessimistic reversals found in Gentili’s work,8 the unsettling complexities of European rivalries beyond the line produced a compensatory reaction that enforced a tragic ending to an alternative framework of the lines of amity, with alliances traversing Europe and the Americas, which was an important implication of Drake’s relations with the Cimarrons. As a counterpart to Valerie Forman’s productive linking of tragicomedy with global trade, wherein this generic model offers a comforting framework for reconstituting forms of order unsettled by global encounters, and the more hopeful connection Christopher Warren draws between tragedy and international legal personality, the examples analysed below impose an irredeemably tragic template for imagining colonial encounters.9 These will inevitably end badly, unless, of course, these non-European cultures can be subsumed under the dominion of European imperial powers. The latter sections of this essay will analyse the tragic reversals found in two texts: Francisco de Vitoria’s De Indis (1532) and William Davenant’s The History of Sir Francis Drake (1659). Canonized as the founder of international law in the 6  Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York, 2003), 126, 184, 136. 7  Ibid., 129, 130, 127. 8  See John Watkins below, ch. 4, esp. 75–83. 9  Valerie Forman, Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern Stage (Philadelphia, 2008); Christopher Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford, 2015).

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twentieth century, and seen as a prototypically modern forerunner of later versions of international thought, Vitoria is important to any discussion of the early modern law of nations.10 However, these modern readings often neglect to acknowledge how his critique of Spanish dominion in the New World suddenly pivots at the end of his text in order to justify a legal order he has already proven to be illegitimate. Vitoria accomplishes this reversal through a redefinition of ‘amity’: no longer serving as a model of similitude and alliance, the term instead offers an insidious way of defending Spanish colonialism under the guise of diplomacy, free trade, and the defence of the innocent. Davenant’s dramatic entertainment The History of Sir Francis Drake rewrites the episode of Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons in order to provide a spectacular precedent for representing England’s nascent imperial identity, ensured through entrance into the Spanish Caribbean. Davenant’s text ultimately contains the implications of an English alliance with the Cimarrons by ending the entertainment with a threatened act of sexual violence that relegates the Cimarrons to a position outside of civil society and the law of nations. Although Cromwell’s Western Design for wresting the Caribbean from Spanish control was unsuccessful, it did provide England with a foothold in Jamaica.11 The Jamaican Maroons, like the Panamanian Cimarrons before them, were important diplomatic agents in their ability to negotiate with competing European forces, and their complex political status reveals the generally unrecognized position of such non-state agents and stateless persons in the global workings of early modern diplomacy. COLONIAL ALLIANCES: DRAKE A N D T H E C I M A R RO N S In 1572, Sir Francis Drake set out on a mission to intercept the annual Spanish shipment travelling from the silver mines of Peru, a convoy that was transported overland at the Isthmus of Panama and shipped from the Caribbean.12 The geography of this conflict supports Lauren Benton’s argument that it is more accurate to see the lines of amity and enmity structuring global relations as following the paths of trade routes rather than demarcating a strict boundary separating Europe from a  sphere beyond the line.13 Drake’s encounter with the Cimarrons was made possible by an accident of geography: one Cimarron settlement (palenque) was 10  See James Brown Scott, The Catholic Conception of International Law (Oxford, 1934). For a survey of recent discussions of Vitoria, see Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Vitoria and Us’, Rechtgeschichte, 22 (2014), 119–38. 11  See David Armitage, ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, HJ, 35 (1992), 531–55. 12  The original narrative of Drake’s voyage was published in Sir Francis Drake Reuiued (London, 1626). For recent discussions of Drake’s alliance with the Cimarrons, see Cassander L. Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge, 2016), 58–83 and Miranda Kaufmann, Black Tudors (London, 2017), 56–89. 13  Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2010), 106.

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strategically located about thirty miles west of Nombre de Dios, a route closely approximating the location of what is now the path of the Panama Canal. Accounts of Drake’s voyage often elide the contributions of the Cimarrons, emphasizing the incidental nature of the alliance in order to limit their role.14 Drake did not stumble upon a helpless community in need of his intervention, however. The Cimarrons were in the midst of a decades-long struggle against their erstwhile Spanish masters, a rebellion that overlapped with the Dutch Revolt. After initial revolts in 1525, 1530, and 1533, the Cimarron settlements were in a nearly constant state of war with Spanish colonial forces from 1549 to 1582. Despite political settlements reached in 1553 and 1556, this struggle was at its most intense phase in the 1570s when Drake arrived. Even Drake, the experienced slave trader, was impressed by the Cimarrons, a population of around 3,000 that had maintained its political independence for decades.15 Whereas accounts of Drake’s mission relegate the Cimarrons to an instrumental role as guides and informants, the raid might more accurately be seen as a Cimarron effort that drew on limited English support, one spearheaded by Pedro Mandinga, leader of the palenque of Puerto Bello near Nombre de Dios.16 The overland expedition included thirty Cimarrons along with eighteen Englishmen, and it was the former group who ‘did most of the real work’.17 Throughout his voyage, Drake was dependent on Cimarron intelligence, including integral information regarding the path of the Spanish convoy.18 Reflecting the importance of such informants, a Cimarron guide named Diego accompanied Drake on his return to England and later served as a paid crewmember on the circumnavigation voyage.19 So indebted was Drake to the Cimarrons that he owed to them his first glimpse of the Pacific, a moment portrayed in later retellings, including Davenant’s, as England’s entrance into a trans-Pacific world, not only anticipating Drake’s circumnavigation but also promising later imperial dominance.20 The perennial popularity of mythic retellings of this incident conveniently overlooks the fact that Drake’s sublime view of the Pacific is achieved only as a result of the labour of his Cimarron allies. Ultimately, the attempted raid on the Spanish convoy was a debacle. In the first instance, the Spanish, alerted to an ambush, were able to repel the attack, which 14  For example, Kenneth R. Andrews, Drake’s Voyages: A Re-Assessment of their Place in Elizabethan Maritime Expansion (London, 1967), p. 37; Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven, 1998), 61. 15  Ruth Pike, ‘Black Rebels: The Cimarrons of Sixteenth Century Panama’, The Americas, 64 (2007), 243–66. 16  Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main, 1569–80, ed. Irene  A.  Wright (London, 1932), xl–xli. On Pedro Manginga, see Smith, Black Africans, 72–4. 17 Kelsey, Queen’s Pirate, 61. 18  On Drake’s use of Cimarron and other African-born guides, see Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia, 2014), 97–103. 19  Documents, xxxiii; Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen, 98, 99, 103. On the life and career of Diego, a former slave, see Kaufmann, Black Tudors, 56–89. 20  Documents, 300; William Davenant, The History of Sir Francis Drake, in Drama of the English Republic, 1649–60 (Manchester, 2002), 4.61–75. All further references will be to this edition and included in the body of the essay.

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forced Drake and his allies to lay siege to Venta Cruces, a nearby Spanish settlement. Much of what was seized in this raid could not be carried and had to be discarded or destroyed. A subsequent raid, near Nombre de Dios, was more successful, but even in this instance much of the seized treasure was left behind and recovered by the Spanish. Despite their ultimate futility, the raids represented an anomalous innovation in that Drake and his allies extended the maritime rules of plunder and seizure of prize to Spanish territories; they were, in David Shields’s terms, ‘an unprecedented colonial adventure, an impromptu war without state sanction’.21 In fact, the Anglo-Cimarron alliance was more successful in a maritime context. Drake and his Cimarron allies joined forces with the French Huguenot privateer Guillaume Le Testu and continued to mount sporadic attacks on Spanish vessels throughout the region.22 As Edmund Morgan notes, this history unfolded ‘on a scale that transforms crime into politics’.23 This historical alliance also transformed the perceived religio-political identity of the Cimarrons themselves: colonial Spanish documents from this period refer to the Cimarrons as ‘Lutherans’ and describe instances of Cimarrons leading their European allies in the desecration of Spanish Catholic churches.24 Although these accounts are shaped by confessional prejudice, they nonetheless reflect how the Cimarrons’ colonial struggle became inflected by the internecine religious conflicts of early modern Europe. Contemporary documents viewed the Cimarrons’ history of political struggle and negotiation not as beyond the line but rather part of European international relations. Spanish officials in Panama, for example, did not distinguish between European privateers and local Cimarrons as political threats, referring collectively to the depredations of ‘both French and cimarrones’.25 Visitors to Cimarron palenques were surprised by their overwhelming resemblance to Spanish colonial settlements, even while still at war with Spain, a similitude extending to the (stolen) Spanish clothing worn by residents.26 In one of the earliest English texts in the genre of colonial promotional literature, Richard Hakluyt proposed Panama as the location of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, and envisaged a colony whose population of Cimarrons would be joined by English convicts and other migrants supporting themselves through attacks on Spanish shipping.27 Spanish colonial authorities feared the prospect of such long-term alliances: during Drake’s voyage of 1585, Spanish officials speculated that the slaves whom Drake had seized in the Spanish Caribbean would be resettled in Roanoke, granted their freedom, and used to defend the 21  David S. Shields, ‘Sons of the Dragon: or, The English Hero Revived’, in Ralph Bauer and Jose Antonio Mazzotti (eds), Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (Chapel Hill, 2009), 110. 22  The Cimarrons and John Oxenham, one of Drake’s lieutenants, collaborated after 1575. See Pike, ‘Black Rebels’, 259–61, Smith, Black Africans, 82. 23 Edmund  S.  Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 9. 24  Ibid., 13. 25  Documents, xix. 26  Ibid., xli; Sir Francis Drake Reuiued, 56. 27  Richard Hakluyt, ‘Discourse of Western Planting’, in The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor (London, 1935), 142–3.

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fledgling English colony.28 However, Hakluyt’s vision of a pirate utopia was quickly forgotten, in part because the possibility of English alliances with the Cimarrons had already passed when Hakluyt published his text in 1584. The three major palenques of Panamanian Cimarrons all negotiated settlements with the Spanish from 1579 to 1582, putting an end to their decades-long conflict. In exchange for being resettled in self-governing towns, the Cimarrons agreed to suspend any further alliances with the English and return any fugitive slaves who arrived in their communities.29 These treaties reflect the status of the Cimarrons as political agents to whom the terms of diplomatic negotiation and recognition were extended. For their part, the Cimarrons abided by the terms of their agreements. When Drake returned to the region in 1596, the Cimarrons remained loyal to the Spanish crown and refused to join forces with him.30 As recounted in Lope de Vega’s poem on Drake, ‘Dragontea’, which drew on archival accounts of the episode, the Cimarron settlement of Santiago del Principe was instrumental in warding off Drake’s later incursion in the region.31 Despite winning a short-term battle through the relative degree of autonomy they achieved, the Cimarrons lost the larger war that was part of their struggle as a community defined by their escape from slavery. Their treaties with Spain coincided with a dramatic escalation of the transatlantic slave economy: whereas 36,300 slaves arrived in Spanish America from 1550 to 1595, the period of the Cimarron revolt against Spain, that number skyrocketed to 268,600 from 1595 to 1640.32 For Spanish colonial authorities, diplomatic settlement with the Cimarrons not only put an end to a futile military campaign but also channelled Cimarron power to the defence of the colony. Moreover, without the threat of slaves escaping to the palenques, the slave trade could expand unchallenged in the region. R E B E L L I O N A N D T H E L AW O F N AT I O N S Lines of amity provided a necessary conceptual framework for an initial formulation of international law in the early modern period. However, as Schmitt noted, the imputed universality of the law of nations began to decline as a result of challenges to Habsburg Spain’s dominance in the Americas.33 Supporting Schmitt’s argument, one can see that the alliance of disparate groups of escaped slaves, English privateers, and French Huguenot exiles was forged through their shared opposition to Spanish imperial hegemony in the Americas. The long struggle of the Cimarrons 28  Further English Voyages to Spanish America, 1583–1594: Documents from the Archives of the Indies at Seville Illustrating English Voyages to the Caribbean, the Spanish Main, Florida, and Virginia, trans. and ed. Irene A. Wright (London, 1951), 189; see also 204, 206. 29  Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London, 1997), 140. 30  Pike, ‘Black Rebels’, 262–5. 31 Elizabeth R. Wright, Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Phillip III, 1598–1621 (Cranbury, NJ, 2001), 48. 32 Blackburn, New World Slavery, 140. 33 Schmitt, Nomos, 92–9.

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against their former masters was therefore part of a context that extended to the contemporary European settings of the Dutch Revolt and French Wars of Religion. As Benjamin Schmidt has shown, the Dutch were able to imagine the prospect of rebellion against Habsburg authority by seeing an analogy between Spanish colonialism in the Low Countries and America.34 This expanded context of rebellion in Old and New Worlds brought about a reassessment of the political status of non-state agents who were traditionally barred from recognition in the law of nations. The Huguenot political theorist François Hotman offered a model of resistance theory that extended political rights and diplomatic recognition to rebels as well as other non-state actors such as brigands and runaway slaves.35 Hotman’s position quickly prompted a response from Gentili, who argued that rebels and exiles could not sever their bonds of obligation to their home nations. Even if these groups lost the protections of citizenship, they were not granted any compensatory status under the law of nations: ‘rights’, he concludes, ‘are not acquired by offenses’.36 In his codification of the diplomatic relations undergirding the states system, Gentili did not account for the entry of new political actors, even those groups—like the Dutch States General—who might eventually gain sovereign authority through a successful rebellion. Gentili’s representation of the states system as unitary, stable, and impervious to historical change depends upon the creation of stateless persons excluded from the law of nations. The effects of political change on the imagination of international relations are more clearly visible when one juxtaposes Gentili with a text from the end of the period: Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758). In his discussion of rebellion, Vattel moves from an initial prohibition of subjects resorting to violence to a recognition that the outbreak of rebellion ultimately stems from the failure of authorities to redress ‘causes of complaint’, which prompts ‘unfortunate persons . . . to do themselves justice’. A truly popular rebellion with general support cannot be contained through counter-violence but instead necessitates a negotiated settlement so as ‘to give the people satisfaction’. Vattel draws on competing early modern precedents to support his argument: he favours Henry of Navarre’s incorporation of his Catholic opponents within a French polity over the Duke of Alva’s futile attempt to punish a large section of the Dutch populace during the Dutch Revolt.37 The Spanish suppression of the Dutch Revolt ultimately serves to legitimate the cause of Dutch subjects and transform their struggle from a rebellion into a civil war. Vattel presents the scenario of civil war as one which invalidates the claims of all overriding sovereign authority and, as a result, produces the revolutionary conditions for a reconstitution of political foundations.

34  Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, 2001), 68–122. 35  François Hotman, Quaestionum illustrium liber (Paris, 1573), VII (46–54). 36  Alberico Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, trans. Gordon J. Laing (New York, 1964), 77–84. 37  Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations [1758], trans. Joseph Chitty (Philadelphia, 1883), 422–3.

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Histories of international law are often structured around an abiding division of periodization keyed to a specific date: 1648, and the Peace of Westphalia.38 But, as Vattel’s example shows, the legacies of Westphalia stem as much from the concurrent Peace of Münster marking the ultimate success of the Dutch Revolt as the end of the Thirty Years’ War.39 In other words, rather than seeing a post-Westphalian age as one that enshrines the sovereign authority of equal nation-states, we can see another, overlooked legacy in terms of a framework that allows for the entrance of new political actors to the stage of international politics and legitimates the revolutionary conditions enabling the transformation of rebels into sovereigns. This more radical tradition culminating with Vattel provides an alternative framework in which to imagine the implications of the lines of amity. Rather than positing the legal and political character of the colonies as shaped solely by the intervention of European powers, one sees that the influence also worked in the opposite direction. The models of political thought and formulations of the law of nations produced out of the colonial encounter served as an impetus in the development of the character of the European states system itself. The porous boundaries and unsettled definition of the lines of amity attest to how this fiction underwriting interstate relations ultimately calls into question any absolute demarcation of European states from their extra-European interests. The colonial encounter is always already part of Europe’s definition of itself, despite longstanding efforts to isolate colonial history to unrepresented events transpiring ‘beyond the line’. V I TO R I A A N D C O L O N I A L E N M I T Y Vitoria’s De Indis has remained a central text in discussions of the role of colonial subjects in formulations of the law of nations. The canonical version of Vitoria constructed in the twentieth century focused largely on the first half of his text, which surveys and critiques the chief ‘irrelevant and illegitimate titles’ used to justify Spanish dominion in the New World.40 In this section, Vitoria countered prevailing justifications for Spanish imperialism: the universal claims of the Spanish monarch as Emperor of the world (252); Papal dispensation (258); the right of discovery (264); the allowed conversion of Amerindians, even by force (265); the justification of conquest based on the imputed sins of the natives (272); the establishment of dominion on the consent of natives (275); and the conquest as a gift of God (276). 38  Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London, 2003). 39  The Dutch had gained de facto recognition from the Spanish and Archduke Albert following the truce of 1609. See Laura Manzano Baena, ‘Negotiating Sovereignty: The Peace Treaty of Münster, 1648’, History of Political Thought, 28 (2007), 617–41. 40  Francisco De Vitoria, ‘On the American Indians’, in Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrence (Cambridge, 1991), 252. All further references are to this edition and included in the body of the essay.

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As Vitoria pronounced at the end of this section, ‘the barbarians undoubtedly possessed as true dominion, both public and private, as any Christians’ (250). Anthony Pagden has argued that Vitoria based his argument on natural law rather than the imperial or Papal claims of positive law.41 And for Vitoria, one of the central tenets underwriting natural law was the right to property. He counters the view of natural slavery, dating back to Aristotle, which was employed by some of his contemporaries such as Major and Sepulveda (239 on).42 For Vitoria, the rights of the Amerindians as rational subjects under natural law are enshrined through their property rights and ability to order their affairs (244, 250). In a stunning reversal of his arguments, the second half of Vitoria’s text engages in a recuperation of the claims of Spanish imperialism through an offsetting survey of the ‘just and legitimate’ defences of Spanish imperialism (252). Rather than contradicting himself, Vitoria ultimately defended imperial dominion through the very terms of natural law and defence of property that were central to his critique of Spanish imperialism. Vitoria’s recuperation of Spanish dominion was accomplished through a recasting of Spanish imperialism as a form of diplomacy. The keystone of international diplomacy is the law of nature’s view of the inherent sociability of humans and their necessary obligations of friendship and hospitality to one another: ‘amity (amicitia) between men is part of natural law’ (279). The law of nations, Vitoria asserted, dictates unconditional rights of hospitality and refuge, and therefore sanctions Spain’s presence in the Americas as an exercise of their rights to travel and trade. The representation of colonial conquest under the guise of commercial enterprises lacking in territorial aspirations is a perennial rhetorical strategy. For example, Timothy Hampton has shown how Camões depicts De Gama’s voyage to India as ‘basically little more than a sequence of diplomatic encounters’.43 Similarly casting the Spanish as diplomats, Vitoria concludes that his argument ‘is confirmed by the fact that ambassadors are inviolable in the law of nations (ius gentium). The Spaniards are the ambassadors of Christendom, and hence the barbarians are obliged at least to give them a fair hearing and not expel them’ (283). But Vitoria’s model of diplomacy was ultimately predicated on a state of war. Juxtaposed with his emphasis on the inherent sociability underwriting the law of nations is the proviso that resistance to trade and hospitality provokes a state of enmity, which reconstitutes the position of Amerindians, ‘no longer as innocent enemies, but as treacherous foes against whom all rights of war can be exercised, including plunder, enslavement, deposition of their former masters, and the institution of new ones’ (283). The rules of colonial war remain beyond the line of 41  Anthony Pagden, ‘Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians’, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987), 80. On Vitoria and natural law, also see Annabel S. Brett, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, 2011), 11–15. 42  Ibid., 88. 43 Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, 2009), 102.

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civil society and the law of nations, as one sees with the prerogatives allotted to the victor. Despite the fact that Vitoria turns to Roman law (including the writings of Justinian and Gratian) in order to justify his conclusion that ‘everything captured in war belongs to the victor’ (283), his model does not harken back to tradition as much as it innovates models of ius gentium and ius naturale in response to the exigencies of native resistance. European law is not applied to the colonies; rather, its modern incarnation is produced as an effect of colonialism. Whereas the freedoms of travel, trade, and religion are predicated on the implied acquiescence of Amerindians, the threat of native resistance transforms the model of war itself. The lines of amity ensure that interstate European wars remain battles between public enemies (hostis), antagonists whose conflict may be diplomatically resolved in order to renew interstate friendship with the end of hostilities. Colonial war beyond the line, by contrast, creates the category of the unlawful enemy (inimicus), subjects excluded from the rules of war and rights of the law of nations.44 As Schmitt notes, ‘The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.’45 In a tragic irony, as Amerindian cultures take on the attributes of modern European sovereignty (rights of self-defence, a monopoly over the exercise of violence within their territories), they are excluded from diplomatic recognition and rendered as a new category of dangerously stateless subjects. The resistance of colonial subjects transforms them into racialized subjects. As Étienne Balibar has argued, the historical construction of race emerges as an effect of subjects claiming rights for themselves.46 Showing the interconnected histories of European and colonial conflicts, Foucault traced the construction of race as an outgrowth of discourses of ‘social war’ that were previously forged in reference to class conflicts within European states.47 Colonial war represents the tragic inversion of the rules of war guaranteeing the European states system. Gentili and other early modern theorists had ‘made war into a mutual relation between sovereign states in which justi et aequales hostes [just and equal enemies] confronted each other indiscriminately’. Against non-state subjects and stateless populations, however ‘[w]ar is abolished, but only because enemies no longer recognize each other as equals, morally and juridically’.48 The exigencies of colonial war and the resistance of native populations transform a juridical category of the just enemy (justus hostis) ‘to a quasi-theological concept of the enemy’.49 Rebellious Amerindians and escaped slaves, as well as pirates, brigands, and other stateless groups, are rendered as criminal classes excluded from the law of nations. 44  Ian Baucom, ‘Cicero’s Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy, and the Laws of War’, in Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman (eds), States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill, 2009), 124–42. 45  Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 1996), 79. 46 Étienne Balibar, ‘Class Racism’, in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London, 1991), 210. 47  Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York, 2003). 48 Schmitt, Nomos, 124.   49 Ibid.

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The colonial state of war is therefore never recognized as lawful war, not only because the adversary is classified as an unlawful enemy but also through the refusal to acknowledge European involvement as acts of war. Vitoria inaugurates a tradition of innocent imperialism, a rhetorical strategy that insidiously denies the motives of European states in the colonies. Spain’s intent is cast as merely exercising its inherent rights of travel, trade, and negotiation under the law of nations: ‘Since these travels of the Spaniards are (as we may for the moment assume) neither harmful nor detrimental to the barbarians, they are lawful’ (278; emphasis mine). This assumed innocence is not momentary but rather foundational to Vitoria’s argument. Through his representation of Spain as engaging in free trade, he is able to recast native resistance as a violation of the law of nature, a denial of Spain’s freedoms of trade, travel, and refuge. Spanish violence is recast as self-defence exercised in response to native recalcitrance and refusal to engage in commercial relations (282): ‘if war is necessary to obtain their rights [of unimpeded trade access], they may lawfully go to war’ (282). Free trade, ensured through permanent war, is able to ‘secure peace and safety’ (283). In order to sustain European economic interests in the colonies, a tragic register must be imposed on colonial relations. Lines of amity demand lines of enmity, and it is the prospect of resistance to the commercial foundations of empire that enshrines colonial war and reconstitutes Amerindian populations as irredeemable subjects excluded from the law of nations. As Vitoria concedes in the conclusion to his text, even after offering arguments to recuperate Spanish dominion, ‘if all these titles were inapplicable, that is to say if the barbarians gave no just cause for war and did not wish to have the Spaniards as princes and so on, the whole Indian expedition and trade would cease, to the great loss of the Spaniards. And this in turn would mean a huge loss to the royal exchequer, which would be intolerable’ (291). Tellingly, what registers the potential loss of Spanish America as tragic is its economic toll. It is the exchequer—not the crown or church—which, in becoming the subject of a hypothetical tragic ending, reveals itself as the true foundation of Spanish imperialism. D AV E N A N T A N D C O L O N I A L T R A G E D Y Vitoria’s analysis of the claims of Spanish dominion offered a template for English texts reflecting on the repercussions of England’s belated arrival in the Caribbean and consequent rivalry with Spain. His critique of Spanish imperialism inaugurated the longstanding representational tradition of the ‘black legend’ emphasizing Spanish abuses in the Americas later extended by such figures as Las Casas and De Bry as well as subsequent English texts and translations.50 He also provided a framework of innocent imperialism that was even more influential for later 50 See, most recently, Margaret  R.  Greer, Walter  D.  Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago, 2008).

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English texts, particularly those such as Davenant’s History of Sir Francis Drake that followed England’s full entrance into American imperial conflicts with the Cromwellian Western Design. Vitoria’s justification of Spanish imperialism as the defence of innocent Amerindians from their tyrannical native rulers (288) is later transposed to an English liberation of Amerindians from their Spanish conquerors. The English imitation of Spanish precedents, even if marked by competition and ambivalence, demonstrates the mobile, transposable, and coexisting character of identities within imperial contexts. There is a similar geographic and temporal imprecision in Davenant’s representation of the Cimarrons. Distinctions are collapsed among the identities of colonial subjects: the Cimarrons blur together with Amerindians and are situated in Peru, the setting of one of Davenant’s previous dramatic spectacles, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658).51 More significantly, American and Mediterranean contexts are juxtaposed in the reference to the Cimarrons as ‘a Moorish people, brought formerly to Peru by the Spaniards as their slaves, to dig in mines; and, having lately revolted from them, did live under the government of a king of their own election’ (2.3 SD; cf. 3.108 SD and 5.108). The axis linking Incans, Cimarrons, and Moors is their shared resistance to Spanish hegemony, and while these coeval rebellions forge the way for lines of amity to emerge with the English, the prospect of colonial rebellion also links these peoples as potential threats to England’s tenuous imperial authority. The stage direction describing the Cimarrons’ Moorish origins additionally situates colonial slave rebellions in reference to a European context of resistance theory and elective rule. In shaking off Spanish authority, the Cimarrons fashion their own mode of government. Similarly, Vitoria’s defence of the power of Amerindian populations to choose their own rulers (288–9) created a framework that, in a European context, dangerously resembled Protestant resistance theory.52 In the final scene, the lines of amity are redrawn, reconstituting the Cimarrons as violating the laws of nature and consequently lying beyond the scope and protections of the ius gentium. The scene is appropriately described as ‘suddenly changed’: added to the earlier scenic backdrop depicting the ‘rocky country’ of the Cimarrons, symbol of their autonomy and resilience, is the spectacle of an abducted Spanish bride, taken forcibly from her wedding feast, ‘tied to a tree’, and represented in terms implying sexual violence (6.85–90 SD). ‘The worst of licence does best laws invade’, the English lieutenant Rouse reports to Drake, undermining English ‘renown’ and threatening to ‘devour all civil peace’ (6.67, 77). This threat is ultimately dispelled, although significantly through the Cimarrons’ own reassertion of control over their unruly members. Pedro, Drake’s Cimarron guide, takes action, reasserting the bonds of friendship between Drake and the Cimarron King (6.135) and reinstituting an underlying cultural similitude through emulation of an English ‘pattern’ of mercy and justice (6.137): ‘She is as free and as

51  For a discussion of Davenant’s texts, see Richard Frohock, Heroes of Empire: The British Imperial Protagonist in America, 1596–1764 (Cranbury, NJ, 2004), 35–44. 52  Pagden, ‘Dispossessing the Barbarian’, 83.

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unblemished too / As if she had a prisoner been to you’ (6.142–3).53 Pedro reasserts the innocence of English imperial claims, perversely recasting Drake the experienced slave trader as the champion of liberty from bondage. Significantly, he also explains Cimarron depredations as an imitative act of revenge against the Spanish, ‘Who, midst the triumphs of our nuptial feasts, / forced our brides and slaughtered all our guests’ (6.154–5). The conclusion of Davenant’s text transforms the Cimarrons from objects of pity to rebellious colonial subjects. In Aristotelian terms, the primary affective mode of colonial tragedy is not pity but fear. The prospect of slave rebellion haunts the colonial project from its inception, and the revolt of colonial subjects redraws the lines of amity in the process. After all, dramatic imitation, for Aristotle, is predicated not only on the assumption of cultural similitude, that ‘men enjoy seeing a likeness’, but also on a limitation of dramatic character ‘relative to each class’.54 Vitoria had similarly imposed a boundary on transcultural amicitia: although ‘amity (amicitia) between men is part of natural law’, human sociability is grounded on similitude. Citing scripture—‘Every living creature loveth his like’—Vitoria acknowledges the extent to which the recognition of cultural difference fractures the imputed universality of the law of nations (279). Even as Davenant’s text redraws the lines of amity and reconstitutes the Cimarrons as permanent enemies, the tragic framework does not resolve the unsettled question of the status of escaped slaves and other colonial subjects in the law of nations. Instead of negotiating colonial conflict through intercultural amicitia, tragedy offers a more radical alternative. As David Scott argues in his analysis of a slave revolt of a later era, the Haitian Revolution, tragedy serves as a generic template for representing the unresolved legacies of colonial history.55 The everpresent prospect of colonial rebellion not only speaks to the failures of the colonial project; the slave revolt also embodies an imagination of social transformation, providing a framework that is later transposed back to European politics. C O N C LU S I O N : M A RO O N I N G T H E L AW O F N AT I O N S Although Davenant’s entertainment offered a literary response to the Cromwellian Western Design and its aspirations of English dominion in the Caribbean, this project had largely failed by the time of the text’s performance. The role of colonial subjects in successfully warding off English entry into the region provides a historical explanation for Davenant’s transformation of the Cimarrons into rebels and 53  In contrast, in Sir Francis Drake Reuiued (69–70) Drake commands the Cimmarons not to harm any women during the raid on Venta Cruces. As Kaufmann discusses, this image of Drake’s restraint of sexuality is offset with the historical record of the pregnant African captive Maria, taken on the circumnavigation voyage and abandoned on an Indonesian island (Black Tudors, 86). 54 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York, 1961), 55, 81. 55  David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (London, 2004), 21, 135.

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enemies excluded from the law of nations. The English siege of Santa Domingo, the central target for the project, was ultimately thwarted due to the resistance of the city’s militia of freed Africans and mixed-race citizens.56 As was the case throughout Spanish America, freed Africans formed a military class integral to the defence of colonial settlements.57 Spanish colonial authorities similarly negotiated with the palenques of escaped slaves in order to draw on their resources for the defence of vulnerable colonial outposts, as in Panama. In his final voyage of 1596, Drake had encountered the opposition of the Cimarrons of Santiago del Principe and Portobelo, now loyal to the Spanish crown following their diplomatic negotiation with colonial authorities and settlement in autonomous towns.58 The consolation prize of the Western Design was the English conquest of Jamaica. Here, too, the English met local resistance, in the form of the Jamaican Maroons, who engaged in a five-year guerrilla war until they reached a diplomatic settlement allying themselves with the English against their former Spanish allies.59 Ironically, the ostensibly English force responsible for the conquest of Jamaica included 4,000 African slaves and English servants and nonconformists, all impressed into service from the plantations of Barbados.60 English authorities in Jamaica continued to negotiate with the Maroons over the course of the eighteenth century, with a treaty recognizing the autonomy of Maroon communities that was drafted in 1739 and remained in effect for the next century.61 Despite the fact that non-state groups such as the Cimarrons and Maroons remained largely absent from theoretical formulations of the law of nations, in practice they did achieve a status as diplomatic agents to whom the rights of diplomatic negotiation and recognition were extended. Ultimately, this Africanist presence in the history of diplomacy, generally unacknowledged, reveals most compellingly the complex intercultural histories that are rendered invisible through a persistent imagination of European colonies as remaining beyond the line of diplomacy and the early modern states system.

56  Irene A. Wright (ed.), ‘Spanish Narratives of the English Attack on Santo Domingo, 1655’, in Camden Miscellany XIV (London, 1926), 47–8. Drake had met the opposition of the local militia in his siege of the city in 1585 (Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen, 110). 57  Ben Vinson, Bearing Arms for his Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2001), 9, 16. 58  Pike, ‘Black Rebels’, 262–5. 59  Irene A. Wright, ‘The Spanish Resistance to the English Occupation of Jamaica, 1655–1660’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 13 (1930), 117–47. 60  Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), 126. 61  Barbara Klamon Kopytoff, ‘Jamaican Maroon Political Organization: The Effects of the Treaties’, Social and Economic Studies, 25 (1976), 87–105. For a broader history of Maroon communities throughout the Americas, see Richard Price (ed.), Maroon Societies: Rebel Slaves Communities in the Americas (Baltimore, 1979).

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4 Diplomatic Pathos Sidney’s Brazen Fictions and the Troubled Origins of International Laws John Watkins I N T RO D U C T I O N : L AW A N D T H E LIMITS OF PERSUASION Erasmus’s De utraque verborum ac rerum copia was one of the most popular books of the Renaissance.1 Erasmus defined copia as elegant variations on a single theme to ‘embrace in entirety everything pertaining to the case’.2 The variations could be on single words, phrases or whole lines of argument. Like many other Renaissance books about rhetoric, De copia eventually grew into a book that was profoundly engaged with international politics. Several of the anecdotes and examples that illustrated Erasmus’s last major revision (1534), for example, involved peacekeeping: If someone were trying to persuade some king not to undertake a war against the most Christian king of France, he could construct his line of argument with propositions of this sort: first, to engage in war is not natural to man who was born to feel good will, but to brute beasts whom nature has supplied with weapons of a sort. The next proposition will reinforce this one: it is not natural to all beasts, but only to wild ones; and the next again supports this one: and not even wild beasts fight among themselves in the way that mortal men do: tiger does not war with tiger, nor lion with lion; but man does not show to any other animal the savagery that he shows to his fellow men.

In this example, copia unfolds on the level of the proposition as the imagined speaker argues that the king should not go to war against France, since such a war would be unnatural. This is only the start of this example, which continues for several pages with variations around entirely different propositions. A later example focuses on an imagined speaker trying to persuade the pope not to go to war against the Venetians, with variations on the theme that temporal warfare is ‘inconsistent with the dignity of the supreme pontiff ’.3 1  Herbert David Rix, ‘The Editions of Erasmus’ De Copia’, StP, 43 (1946), 595–618. 2 Erasmus, De copia verborum et rerum, trans. Betty I. Knott in Craig R. Thompson (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus, 89 vols (Toronto, 1978), 24.600–1. 3  Ibid., 599.

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Erasmus imagines a world in which humanist counsellors use as many arguments as possible to make the case for peace against kings and pontiffs intent on waging war. But he focuses on the rhetorical process rather than on its end. Erasmus never tells us whether his imagined counsellors prevent war. To the extent that his examples glance at the martial ambitions of Pope Julius II, their hypothetical arguments might fail despite their rhetorical ingenuity. Julius actually did wage war against the Venetians in the 1508–10 War of the League of Cambrai. In 1512, he convinced Henry VIII to join his Holy League against France. Both of these wars figure in Julius exclusus de caelis, a 1514 satirical tract generally attributed to Erasmus that depicts St Peter refusing to admit the deceased pope into heaven. His examples in De copia might be a hint that things would have turned out differently if the counsellors had used arguments like the ones he proposes. But it is more in keeping with a scepticism that runs throughout Erasmus’s work that the examples’ topicality reminds us that even the best rhetoric might prove ineffectual against the pride, greed and ambitions of princes.4 That darker interpretation reinforces a scepticism that underlies much early modern writing about peacemaking. It shadows ongoing negotiations, proclamations of individual truces and treaties and the earliest codifications of international law. In Renaissance treaties, proclamations of lasting and perpetual peace appear alongside admissions that previous agreements between the parties have failed and war resumed.5 The first article of the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), the most important western European treaty of the sixteenth century, subverts its assurance of a ‘bonne, seure, ferme et stable Paix, confederation et perpetuelle alliance et amitié’ with reminders of just how contingent and fragile the peace may actually be: First and foremost—without any prejudice to previous treaties made between their predecessors, which will retain the same force and strength that they had before the wars begun between the Emperor Charles V and the present most Christian King in 1551 and continued since between the aforesaid Most Christian and most Catholic kings, and without any alternation to them, except in so much as it could be otherwise provided by this present treaty—it is accorded and agreed that henceforth there will be a good, secure, firm and stable peace, confederation and perpetual alliance and friendship between the aforesaid Most Christian and Catholic Kings, their children, heirs, successors, beneficiaries, their kingdoms, lands and subjects.6 4  See Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, 1985); Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus’ Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge, MA, 1983). 5  On the concept of perpetuity in treaty language, see Randall Lesaffer, ‘Peace Treaties from Lodi to Versailles, 1454–1920’, in Randall Lesaffer (ed.), Peace Treaties and International Law in European History: From the Late Middle Ages to World War One (Cambridge, 2004), 9–44. 6  Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens, 8 vols, ed. Jean Dumont (Amsterdam, 1726), V.38: ‘PREMIEREMENT (sans deroger toutefois aucunement aux Traittez precedents, faits entre leurs predecesseurs, lesquels demeureront en telle force et vigueur, qu’ils estoient auparavant les guerres commencées entre l’Empereur Charles V. et le Roy Tres-Chrestien moderne, l’an mille cinq cens cinquante et un, et continuées depuis entre lesdits Seigneurs Roys Tres-Chrestien et Catholique, et sans aucune altération d’iceux, sinon en tant que par ce present Traitté pourroit estre autrement disposé) est convenu et accordé, que doresnavant entre lesdits Seigneurs Roys, mesdits Seigneurs leurs Enfants, hoirs, successeurs et heritiers, leurs Royaumes, Païs et subjets, y aura bonne, seure, ferme et stable Paix, confederation et perpetuelle alliance et amitié.’ Translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

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Crafted by diplomats schooled in humanist rhetoric, treaties such as this exemplify the copia that Erasmus prized. Clusters of synonyms attempt to expand their applicability to multiple contingent circumstances. Since a king’s children, for example, might predecease him, Cateau-Cambrésis distinguishes between his children and other possible heirs and successors. These lists also served the rhetorical function of conveying dignity, gravitas, and an assurance that the signatories would make every possible effort to abide by their agreement. That is especially true of the explicit claim that the treaty will establish a ‘good, secure, firm and stable peace’, where the monosyllabic adjectives slow down the prose so that it builds more gradually toward the climactic announcement of a ‘stable paix’. The text then further reinforces the emotional weight of the long-deferred peace with the chain of subsequent variations. It will not only be a ‘stable peace’, but also ‘confederation and perpetual alliance and friendship’. As in Erasmus’s treatise, however, copia sometimes becomes verbal desperation to ward off the likelihood of renewed violence. Cateau-Cambrésis’s parenthesis about its relationship to earlier treaties between France and Spain, for example, implies that the present war occurred despite prior assertions of friendship and alliance. In a more general sense, it concedes that any treaty is good only so long as it serves the interests of the parties who made it. Subsequent treaties can amend or even negate it. The humanist’s longing for a document that initiates a golden age of peace collapses into a lawyer’s understanding of the provisionality of contracts. This essay explores the wider cultural resonances of the realization that the greatest diplomatic achievements, even treaties ending a half-century of war between major powers, were vulnerable to ongoing historical experience. In dispatches, legal treatises and literary works by early modern writer-diplomats, the contingency of agreements between sovereigns undermined the humanist dream that peace might come about through the legal consensus of men of good will. When rulers, ambassadors, preachers, and poets spoke in public, they celebrated ‘a perpetual and lasting peace’ every time belligerents hammered out a settlement. But in private correspondence, they questioned whether or not the signatories would abide by its terms. This conflict between extravagant hope and disillusioning experience manifested itself repeatedly in a pathos, sometime even a despair, that haunted diplomatic culture throughout the period. It surfaced even in the most idealistic legal and literary discourses, including those that imagined literature as a sacrosanct realm insulated from the failed aspirations of quotidian experience.

L E G A L I D E A L I S M A N D D I P L O M AT I C P R A C T I C E The vulnerability of legal agreements between sovereigns challenged confidence in the ius gentium, the elusive ‘law of nations’ that presumably governed relations between sovereigns. Philosophers, jurists, and theologians often spoke of the ius gentium in exalted terms as a sacrosanct part of natural law. According to Francisco Suarez, it had ‘such a close relationship to nature and so befits all nations, individually and

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collectively, that it has grown, almost by a natural process, with the growth of the human race’.7 Hugo Grotius also saw the law of nations as part of the legal order of nature, which would persist even ‘if God did not exist or did not care about human affairs’.8 Catholic and Protestant writers alike embraced the concept. It influenced writers on both sides of the Alps, in England, and on the continent. Richard Hooker argued that ‘the strength and vertue of that law is such, that no particular nation can lawfully preiudice the same by any their seueral laws & ordinances’.9 John Donne noted that ‘in the whole law of Nations every King hath an interest’.10 Sir John Hayward argued that all humanity was duty-bound to punish anyone who violated it: ‘For it is not onlie lawfull but honourable, for any people, either to right or reuenge the breach of this lawe; against them which contemne it, as monsters; against them who knowe it not, as beasts.’11 By the sixteenth century, a widespread consensus about diplomatic credentials, immunities, protections, and conduct seemed to confirm the existence of a law that functioned above the level of the individual polity and governed the relations between sovereigns. William Camden, for instance, observed ‘That by the law of Nations, Ambassadors haue beene so fauoured for the necessity of their Ambassages, as not to be violated.’12 William Gouge also maintained the law of nations underwrote ambassadorial immunities ‘The most sauge and barbarous people that be, will not wrong an Ambassador. It is against the law of Nations to imprison an Ambassador’ however distasteful his message.13 One might even argue that, despite the religious divisions of sixteenth-century Europe, relations between polities unfolded in a more ostensibly legal framework than ever before. Numerous factors forced European courts to find legal answers for questions that had never previously arisen. The proliferation of resident embassies in the years after the 1454 Treaty of Lodi, for example, required continual negotiation of the rights and immunities enjoyed by ambassadors and their servants, who bartered, brawled, and caroused in foreign capitals. The Reformation, as well as increasing contacts between Christian and non-Christian polities, brought other quandaries: could an ambassador maintain a Catholic chapel in a Protestant country? Could the bailo, the Venetian representative to Constantinople who oversaw both diplomatic and commercial affairs, keep a cellar in a Muslim country, where

7  Francisco Suárez, SJ, De Legibus, 2.20.1 in Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suárez, S.J: De legibus, ac deo legislatore, 1612; Defensio fidei catholicae, et apostolicae adversus anglicanae . . . theologica, fide, spe, et charitate, 1621, trans. Gwladys L. Williams (Oxford, 1944), 351. 8  Hugo Grotius, De iure belli ac pacis, ed. C. I. Molhuysen (Clark, NJ, 2005), Prolegomena, 11: ‘non esse Deum, aut non curari ab eo negotia humana’. 9  Richard Hooker, Of the Lavves of Ecclesiasticall Politie Eight bookes (London, 1604), 75. 10  LXXX sermons preached by that learned and reverend divine, Iohn Donne, Dr in Divinity (London, 1640), 699. 11  John Hayward, An ansvver to the first part of a certaine conference, concerning succession, published not long since vnder the name of R. Dolman (London, 1603), 25. 12 William Camden, The True and Royall History of the famous Empresse Elizabeth Queene of England . . . exactly described (London, 1625), book 3, 183. 13  William Gouge, The Whole-Armor of God . . . whereunto is added a Treatise of the Sin against the Holy Ghost (London, 1619), 155.

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drinking was theoretically forbidden? From this perspective, the law of nations not only existed but seemed to be expanding with every such decision.14 Although jurists and divines said much about the law of nations and its presumed inviolability, however, diplomats themselves rarely mentioned it. Given Hooker’s claim that ‘no particular nation can lawfully preiudice [the law of nations] by any their seueral laws & ordinances’, one might expect ambassadors to advise their sovereigns on a regular basis against actions that might transgress it. But I have yet to find one archival instance in which a diplomat actually mentions the law of nations as a reason for undertaking a course of action. Sovereigns, their counsellors, and their ambassadors regularly developed and implemented foreign policy without explicit reference to the Law of Nations, at least as something that might restrict their actions. On the rare occasions they mentioned it, they castigated other polities for allegedly violating it. On 16 May 1535, for example, James V of Scotland requested Christopher of Oldenburg, the head of a Protestant military alliance that included Lübeck, ‘to procure the release of a Scotch ship, which has been arrested by the people of Lübeck contrary to justice and the law of nations’.15 During England’s ‘Rough Wooing’ of Scotland, Gustavus I petitioned Protector Somerset for the restitution of neutral Swedish merchant ships that ‘had contrary to the law of nations been seized and pillaged as those of a common enemy’.16 In September 1580, Baron von Anholt captured Daniel Rogers, Elizabeth I’s envoy to Emperor Rudolf II, on his way to Germany. Philip II encouraged Anholt to hold Rogers for ransom, in part because he enjoyed warm relations with Philip’s nemesis, William of Orange.17 When Elizabeth threatened to take action against the Spanish ambassador Bernadino de Mendoza in retaliation, she and the Duke of Parma, Philip’s regent in the Low Countries, erupted in mutual accusations of violating the law of nations.18 When the English later discovered that Mendoza had participated in the Throckmorton plot against Elizabeth, they consulted with Alberico Gentili and Jean Hotman, both known for their expertise in the law of nations, to clarify the extent of his immunity to prosecution and punishment.19 While the theologians stressed the authority of the law of nations, diplomats registered the ease with which polities ignored it.20 At least in theory, European powers accepted the civil law doctrine that pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept). But the phrase rarely occurs in diplomatic correspondence, where writers are more inclined to accuse other parties of breaking their word. In the absence of an overarching, coercive authority, moreover, there was little they could do about those 14  See Hampton’s discussion of the literary consequences of this same expansion of literary activity above 42–4. 15  LP VIII 724. 16  TNA SP 68/2, fos. 73r–74v [Calendar of State Papers, Foreign Series, of the Reign of Edward VI, ed. William B. Turnbull (London, 1861), 94]. 17  See Mark Loudun, ‘Rogers, Daniel (c.1538–1591), Diplomat and Author’, ODNB. 18  TNA SP 83/14, fo. 54r–v [CSPF, XV, 126]. 19  See Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey, The History of Diplomatic Immunity (Columbus, 1999), 167–74. 20  See Mark Netzloff’s observation (above 54–6 about the ease with which diplomats ignored the legal concept of lines of amity.

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breaches. The predicament was particularly frustrating for lesser European powers. When Henry VIII sought a rapprochement with the French in the late 1520s, for example, the Scottish—traditional French allies in their wars against England— asked their ambassador to the French court to confirm their past agreements: The Scotch ambassador presented four requests in the French king’s council; to which, after consultation, the King gave the following answers: 1. His intention remains the same about the marriage mentioned in the treaty of Rouen, and he trusts that the Scotch king means to fulfill his promise. 2. As to the confirmation of previous treaties between their predecessors, he is not less well disposed to Scotland than his predecessors, but circumstances have rendered it necessary to enter into treaties with England, which he cannot infringe, but he will not refuse any new treaties which do not interfere with his treaties with England.21

The French reassured the ambassador that Francis I was still planning to marry one of daughters to James V. But things get messier after that. The Treaty of Rouen, like most of the ‘previous treaties’ between France and Scotland, was an anti-English defence pact. Although the new Franco-English treaties obviously meant that France would not support Scotland in its future conflicts against England, the French did everything in their rhetorical power to avoid saying that. But the implication was clear: Scotland could no longer count on French support against England. This awkwardness attests to two equally true but contradictory things. First of all, treaties meant something. They signified that, at least historically, there had been an understanding between two powers: they had been able to rely on each other, and one country had even been willing to make sacrifices for another. Their alliance protected them from third-party aggression. But, second, this exchange also exposes their contingency by raising questions about their durability and about the nature, worth and even existence of the law of nations that presumably lay behind treaties. What exactly was it? What were its sources? Who had the power to make such law, change it, and most importantly, punish those who broke it? Did the law exist? Or was it just a manner of speaking, a figment of the theologians’ and the philosophers’ imagination? These questions have vexed international law from the moment of its emergence from medieval canon law. At least in theory, there was a route of appeal for broken treaties in the Middle Ages. Since signatories typically swore to keep their word on sacred relics, breaking it entailed ecclesiastical sanctions. But excommunication and interdict were often ineffectual; they lost their force altogether in a world bifurcated into Protestant and Catholic camps. The Reformation exposed what modern scholars call the anarchical basis of international relations.22 The modern state system was in its infancy, and principalities within the Holy Roman Empire still nominally acknowledged the Emperor’s superior authority in their relations with one another. But western European monarchs—Catholic and Protestant alike—increasingly asserted their sovereignty. As the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals put it ‘this realm 21  LP IV.ii 4700. 22  See Hedley Bull, ‘Society and Anarchy in International Relations’, in Herbert Butterfield (ed.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London, 1969), 35–50.

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of England is an empire’.23 Gallicanism achieved many of the same ends in France. Western European monarchs did not hold themselves answerable to any human authority beyond their boundaries. The questions about international authority after the Reformation and subsequent religious wars inspired an early modern outpouring of treatises on international law.24 They also left a lasting impression on literature, and especially on the epics and epic-romances that ranked among the period’s most prestigious literary productions. Machiavelli and Hobbes carried scepticism about the binding force of the ius gentium to a logical extreme by imagining the international system as a competitive anarchy rather than as a society bound by law.25 What good were contracts that ambassadors crafted between and among states if the signatories only agreed to uphold them as long as they advanced their interests? But some of the period’s most interesting jurists and writers-diplomats recoiled from Machiavelli’s conclusions into frustration, pathos, and despair before the contradictions between their ideals and their political observations. Both treatises such as Gentili’s De iure belli libri tres (1588–9) and romances such as Sidney’s Arcadia (c.1580–6; published posthumously 1593) reveal the diplomatic pathos that surfaced in the Scottish ambassador’s request for confirmation of the Treaty of Rouen. Here too, confidence in a rule of law that ought to bridle the wills of princes has to contend with recurrent instances of non-compliance in what appears increasingly to be an anarchic, even lawless environment. L E G A L I D E A L I S M A N D P ROT E S TA N T MISGIVINGS IN GENTILI AND SYDNEY The remainder of this essay will focus on Sidney and Gentili because the two men were closely enough associated that their understandings and critiques of the law of nations probably developed through mutual dialogue.26 But in addition to the fact that they knew and admired each other, the juxtaposition of a legal text (Gentili’s De iure belli) and a romance (Sidney’s Arcadia) forces into question the tenability of the law of nations’ existence.27 The endpoint of both writers’ complementary anatomies of the emergent international system was a kind of Protestant despair about the futility of noble efforts in a fallen world. Sidney wrote not only as someone 23  24 Hen VIII c.12. 24  See for example, Conrad Braun, De legationibus libri quinque (Mainz, 1548); Pierino Belli, De re militari et bello tractatus divisus in partes XI (Venice, 1563); Ferdinand Vasquez de Menchaca, Controversiarum illustrium aliarumque usu frequentium libri tres (Venice, 1564); Balthazar Ayala, De jure et officiis bellicis et disciplina militari, libri tres (Douai, 1582). 25  See Cornelia Navari, ‘Hobbes, the State of Nature and the Laws of Nature’, in Ian Clark and Iver B. Neumann (eds), Classical Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke, 1996), 20–41. 26  See Joanna Craigwood, ‘Sidney, Gentili, and the Poetics of Embassy’, in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke, 2011), 82–100; Christopher N. Warren, Literature and the Law of Nations, 1580–1680 (Oxford, 2015), 34–6. 27 On literary writing as a source for early modern international legal thought, see Warren, Literature, 27–47.

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with personal diplomatic experience, but as the person hailed by Gentili as ‘a living image and perfect example of an ambassador’.28 Since many of Sidney’s older contemporaries had held diplomatic appointments and had spent more years in foreign service, one might be tempted to dismiss this compliment as the sycophancy of a client. But like other Renaissance writers, Gentili offered his praise in earnest of future accomplishment. Sidney had served with distinction when he conveyed the queen’s condolences to the Emperor Rudolf for the death of Maximilian II. He also met with several other heads of state. He impressed his countrymen on his return with his grasp of European affairs. Presumably this impressed Gentili as well, who had every reason to expect great things of him. Gentili shared Sidney’s Protestant faith and characteristically Leicesterian perspectives on foreign affairs, with a profound suspicion of Spain. Gentili credited Sidney with helping him make up his mind on certain questions, such as the role of the papacy in developing the institution of the resident ambassador. Gentili even dedicated to him his 1585 treatise on the ambassador and the laws of embassy, De legationibus libri tres, which began as a disputation before Sidney and his uncle Leicester when they visited Oxford.29 While Gentili claimed to have learned from Sidney, Sidney learned much from Gentili. The Arcadia project, especially the revisions that make up the so-called New Arcadia (c.1582–4), arose from reflections on the morality of war, the laws of embassy and, more generally, on the legal relations between states. Book II’s revisions develop a fantasy of the ancient Mediterranean as a region of shifting relationships between kingdoms. Wars erupt, parties negotiate settlements, princes contract marriages for their children and everyone spies on everyone else. In a world of contested successions, tyrannical and expansionist neighbours and civil wars threatening to spread beyond ostensible borders, princes form defensive and sometimes offensive alliances. Sidney’s Mediterranean owes something to Herodotus, possibly something to Thucydides, a lot to Heliodorus, and even more to the contemporary European situation. Just as two massive and menacing empires, the Ottomans and the Spanish Habsburgs, framed the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, Iberia and Armenia frame the Sidneian fantasy. Both Sidney’s kingdoms end up with tyrannical, paranoid rulers who are linked by intermarriage, since the King of Iberia’s sister is the mother of Tiridates of Armenia. One could read some of Sidney’s narrative as a topical allegory.30 His story of how the low-born Andromeda married the Iberian king and tricked him into disinheriting his own son, for example, draws on the contemporary accounts about Suleiman the Magnificent and his former slave Roxelana that inspired the Sidneycircle writer Fulke Greville’s closet drama Mustapha (1609). But Sidney was at least as interested in more abstract questions of legal and diplomatic principle as he was in contemporary politics. His fantasy Mediterranean turns out to be a kind of 28  Alberico Gentili, De legationibus libri tres, trans. Gordon J. Laing (New York, 1924), 201. 29  Artemis Gause, ‘Gentili, Alberico (1552–1608), Jurist’, ODNB. 30  For a discussion of domestic topicality in the Arcadia, see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, 1996); Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984), 32–51.

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laboratory with legal and strategic problems for which two heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, provide military and diplomatic solutions.31 Readers coming to this section of the Arcadia often have a hard time keeping track of the countries, rulers, wars, and rebellions. But Sidney’s proliferation of interlaced plots is part of the reader’s education in diplomatic thinking. The world Sidney creates is bewildering, but no more so than the political geographies that aspiring sixteenth-century statesmen and diplomats needed to master. The fantasy element, the fact that most readers were going to come to this Mediterranean world without any prior knowledge or prejudices to guide them, keeps the focus on more abstract questions of sovereignty, governance, the interaction between states, and the nature and enforceability of the law of nations. But instead of dispelling the pathos of diplomatic practice, Sidney’s heroic fictions ultimately enhance it by suggesting the transience of legal settlements, even in the human imagination. In one of Book II’s earliest episodes, for example, the cousins resolve a civil war between the Laecedemonians and the Helots that threatens to destabilize neighbouring lands. Gentili and other jurists generally condemned rebellion as unjust war and did not accord rebels any protections under the law of nations.32 But the fact that the Helots were an independent people conquered and enslaved by the Laecedomians makes the case more complicated and arguably subject to international adjudication. Each of the cousins contributes to the resolution. Pyrocles, for example, finds himself fighting with the Helots, but also weans them from patently unjust martial practices, including the slaughter of old men and women. He later negotiates a treaty between them and the Laecedemonians with clauses covering surrender, seized property, amnesty, and oblivion. Henceforth the Helots and Laecedemonians are to live as a single people with equal rights of citizenship. This merger of citizens, patterned on the treaty uniting the Trojans and the Latins at the end of the Aeneid, supplants the earlier, dubiously lawful, history of conquest and subordination.33 Pyrocles and Musidorus are not commissioned agents of any state. Like Arthegall, an allegorical figure of justice in Edmund Spenser’s English epic The Faerie Queene (1596), and their mutual classical precedent Hercules, they act instead as representatives of an aristocratic honour that—in Sidney’s fiction—serves as the principal force of justice in a troubled world. The Helots cannot resolve their problems on their own because they have been enslaved for too many generations to retain the civic dignity they once possessed as free men. As noblemen of honourable birth and conduct, Pyrocles and Musidorus can mediate between their lawlessness and the Laecedemonians’ tyranny.

31  See Warren’s complementary discussion of how Sidney builds Book III of the Arcadia around legal debates about the law of suppliants: Literature, 48–58. 32  Alberico Gentili De iure belli tres libri, trans. John  C.  Rolfe, ed. James Brown Scott, 2 vols (Oxford, 1933), II.23–4. All further references are to this edition and are included in the body of the text. 33  Aeneid 12. 821–88, in Publius Vergilius Maro, P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed. R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 418–19.

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Here and elsewhere, the heroes’ nobility also allows them to circumvent potential reservations about intervening in the internal affairs of other polities. Whenever anyone violates the law of nations, they are there to offer their services: [In] two moneths space [. . .] we brought to good end, a cruell warre long maintained betweene the King of Bythinia and his brother. For my excellent cousin, and I (diuiding our selues to either side) found meanes (after some triall we had made of our selues) to get such credite with them, as we brought them to as great peace betweene themselues, as loue towards vs, for hauing made the peace.34

This is an odd peacemaking strategy, but it works. They effectively recreate the circumstances of their diplomatic triumph in Laconia. Each cousin chooses a side and offers it military support, but only long enough to gain trust. They then use that trust to forge a presumably lasting peace. Like the opening cantos of Spenser’s allegory of justice in Book V of The Faerie Queene, several of Pyrocles and Musidorus’s forays into Mediterranean politics lull the reader into assuming that the right balance of martial clout, diplomatic savvy, and eloquence will restore order. But that is only the first term of a more complex, ultimately less optimistic view of international peacemaking. Pyrocles and Musidorus are very good at arranging settlements. But Sidney repeatedly questions how long those will last. One crisis of compliance follows another. Immediately after commending the heroes’ resolution of the Bithynian war, for example, Sidney reveals that a prior settlement has unravelled. The episode of the Paphlagonian king may be the Arcadia’s most famous, since Shakespeare transformed it into the Gloucester/ Edmund/Edgar plot of King Lear.35 After the two cousins establish the good brother, Leonatus, on the throne, and reconcile his now-repentant evil brother Plexirtus, they ride off on further adventures. But upon leaving Bithynia many pages later, they learn that Leonatus has only forgiven Plexirtus to be betrayed again by him. Yet even after that second betrayal, Leonatus refuses to allow ‘his kindnesse to be ouercome, not by iustice it selfe’ (Arcadia, fo. 201v). Instead of killing his brother, Leonatus entrusts him with the rule of Trebisond, where Plexirtus continues to betray even his closest allies. Plexirtus is one of Sidney’s most irredeemable villains, just as Edmund is one of Shakespeare’s. He is utterly incapable of upholding a trust. When he betrays his boyhood friends, a pair of brothers named Tydeus and Telenor, they die regretting ‘their folly in hauing beleeued, he could faithfully loue, who did not loue faithfulnes’ (Arcadia, fo. 203r). The pathos of their death translates into personal betrayal the overarching question of the betrayal of states. In a period of personal monarchy, an individual’s fidelity, integrity, and honour played a primary role in international agreements. Whenever the treacherous and paranoid Plexirtus appears in Sidney’s narrative, he undermines its superficial confidence in the possibility of enduring settlements. The legal principle pacta sunt servanda holds only if all parties are willing 34  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London, 1590), fo. 96v. All further references are to this edition and included in the body of the essay (as Arcadia). 35 See, for example, Irving Ribner, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia and the Structure of King Lear,’ Studia Neophilologica, 24 (1951), 63–8.

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to abide by their agreements. Sidney’s fiction exposes the circularity inherent in this basic principle of the law of nations. If honour is lacking, and if, as in Plexirtus’s case, paranoia leads to betraying others before they can betray you, compliance is provisional at best. In the absence of an external enforcing power, treaties will last as long as they satisfy the needs, interests, fears, and ambitions of all parties. Plexirtus’s various alliances and peace settlements are not the only ones that fail in Sidney’s Mediterranean fantasy. The story of the Lydian princess Erona, which critics often cite as Book II’s thematic heart, begins with a bungled marriage negotiation and includes several instances of broken trust.36 When Erona’s rejection of the Armenian King Tiridates’s hand in marriage leads to war between their two countries, she invites Pyrocles and Musidorus to intervene and save her lowborn lover Antiphilus. The cousins kill Tiridates, rescue the lovers, and witness their marriage. They even preserve Armenia’s independence by putting Tiridates’s sister Artaxia on the throne. Once more, they depart for further adventures after having resolved a crisis. But the peace that Musidorus and Pyrocles establish could not be more troubled or short-lived. The Lydian nobility refuse to consent to Erona’s marriage, Artaxia plots revenge against her brother’s enemies, and Antiphilus ends up abandoning Erona for Artaxia, who eventually has him executed.37 Even Pyrocles’ effort to create peace between Dido and Pamphilus, the unfaithful lover who jilted her and dozens of other women, fails miserably. Pyrocles prevents Dido from poking out Pamphilus’s eyes with a bodkin, and then makes both parties agree to go their separate ways without any more violence. But Pamphilus waylays Dido on her way home and would have killed her if Pyrocles did not intervene yet a second time. This episode epitomizes a recurring pattern that exposes the limits of Pyrocles and Musidorus’s peacemaking. The cousin’s superior military skill allows them to resolve numerous fights between individuals and often, by extension, between the countries they rule. But the settlements they negotiate or simply impose hold for only a short time before longstanding antagonisms again erupt. More often than not, the intricate plots of the Arcadia lead to diplomatic despair rather than to confidence or optimism. On a personal level, love, jealousy, and thirst for revenge overcome the heroes’ efforts to reach an honourable settlement between warring parties. The revisions of Sidney’s Second Book—the primary focus so far—deal most explicitly with conflicts between and among different princes. But the larger narrative that frames them complements their unsettling balance between confidence and scepticism with respect to law. Treaties are not the only things that fail in either version of the Arcadia. Sidney’s central characters are all people whose passions subvert their aspirations to nobility and virtue. Beginning with King Basilius’s adulterous, quasi-homoerotic longing for Pyrocles-Zelmane, those who ought to exemplify the highest morality, uphold their country’s laws, and observe the law of nations in their relations with their neighbours find themselves so besotted with love that they 36  See Nancy Rothwax Lindheim, ‘Sidney’s “Arcadia,” Book II: Retrospective Narrative’, StP, 64 (1967), 159–86; Winifred Schleiner, ‘Differences in Theme and Structure of the Erona Episode in the “Old” and “New” Arcadia’, StP, 70 (1974), 377–91; Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia (Toronto, 1982), 103–6. 37 Sidney, Arcadia, fos. 227r –233v.

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degenerate into fools, liars, fornicators, adulterers, and, in the Old Arcadia, even rapists. The lawlessness between and among polities develops as a perverse extension of this lawlessness within individuals. Princes are no more capable of abiding by their treaties and agreements than they are of mastering their own destructive passions. We have no way of knowing how Sidney would have concluded the New Arcadia, but the two and half extant books preserve the Old Arcadia’s basic plot structure. Like the first version, the New Arcadia would presumably have ended with the Pyrocles and Musidorus’s trial. After Basilius’s apparent death, the Arcadians welcome the Macedonian King Euarchus according to ‘the lawe of Nations’ and invite him to cast judgment on the princes who murdered their own king.38 After the erotic and political chaos of four long books, Euarchus’s appearance in his etymological role as the ‘good ruler’ promises a return to law and order. But in this particular case, appearances are so deceptive and the evidence is so misleading that the most honourable judge in the Mediterranean world pronounces judgment against two innocent men, who turn out to be his son and nephew. Vowing never to ‘let sacred Rightfulnes falle’, he orders one to be beheaded and the other to be thrown from a tower (Old Arcadia, fo. 241v). But just when justice seems to be leading to the most barbarous and unjust conclusion, fortune itself intervenes with Basilius’s ‘resurrection’ from a mere sleeping potion. This sudden happy ending resolves the plot, but does not answer the final book’s interrogation into human justice. In the end, nothing but Providence—or, on a metanarrative level, generic caprice—saves the day. The ‘law of nations’ may have encouraged the Arcadians to welcome Euarchus into their land. But neither it nor any other manifestation of human aspirations for justice and order can avert the pending tragedy. The good government that Euarchus figures finally exists only on the order of grace.39 L AW, L I T E R AT U R E , A N D D I P L O M AT I C A S P I R AT I O N I N A FA L L E N WO R L D Betrayal and warfare remain perpetual features of the Mediterranean that Sidney imagines. Any efforts to achieve justice or even order in the region seem doomed to failure. As broken promises impede the heroes’ quest for restitution and justice, Sidney draws closer to his admirer Gentili’s darker tonalities. Poet and jurist alike swerve between proto-rationalist and proto-realist, juridical and Machiavellian, perspectives on interstate relations. Chapters throughout De iure belli typically begin by announcing a legal principle, such as the duty to respect the rights of suppliants or prisoners of war. But as the chapters proceed, Gentili often works his way through so many contrary examples that he either explicitly or tacitly qualifies the principle to the point that it loses its binding force in the face of compelling national interest, particularly when there is a question of security at stake. Cases of a law violated 38  Philip Sidney, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now since the first edition augmented and ended (London, 1593), fo. 223r. All further references are to this edition and included in the body of the essay as Old Arcadia. 39 Sidney, Old Arcadia, fos. 242r–243v.

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often far outnumber instances of the same law observed. So much for international consensus determined by reason. Almost every section of De iure belli descends from legal optimism to an enumeration of failures to fulfil the law in question. Discussing the laws of truces, for example, Gentili asserts that ‘the wording of our agreements with our enemies should be free from every kind of trickery; for all such agreements with princes or with their procurators are made in good faith and by no means admit of knotty interpretation’ (145). In other words, neither party should introduce ambiguities that would then allow them to violate the spirit of the agreement without technically violating its slippery letter. As Gentili notes, truces should be written in the plain, honest speech of soldiers, whose words mean exactly what they intend them to mean. But having made this point, he focuses the rest of the chapter on numerous legendary and historical examples of deceptive truces. He condemns Pericles for proclaiming he would spare his enemies if they lay down their iron, but then slew them anyway since the buttons on their cloaks were also made of iron. The Romans also acted unjustly when they announced that ‘Carthage should be free but transferred the language of the agreement to the citizens [civitas] and not its walls and buildings [urbs], which they ordered to be destroyed’ (146). Although Gentili constantly bases his claim that something is a point of universal legal consensus on Roman practice, he concludes by noting that ‘there are many acts of that Third Punic War in which it is impossible to justify the Romans’ (146–7). Modern commentators have honoured Gentili as a forward-thinking secularist developing his arguments through the rational analysis of particular cases.40 But the more his examples refute rather than support the theses of individual chapters, the more he undercuts his overarching claim that ‘the law of nations is that which is in use among all the nations of men, which native reason has established among all human beings, and which is equally observed by all mankind’. Despite the optimism of such statements, Gentili’s anecdotes and examples tell the opposite story, that all nations violate the law of nations. This self-cannibalizing treatise develops a sense of legal principle less out of observing what mankind has done than what it fails to do. Although Gentili famously ordered theologians to keep silent outside their purview of expertise, he sometimes waxes Calvinistic in his despair over resolving certain questions of international law: ‘Although international law is a portion of the divine law which God left us after our sin, yet we behold the light amid great darkness, and hence through error, bad habits, obstinacy, and other affections due to darkness we cannot recognize it’ (2:7–8). Sidney reaches the same point in his Apologie for Poetrie, when his confidence in the edifying force of poetry comes up against humanity’s inability to live by consistent moral principles: ‘Our erected wit makes us know what perfection is, but our infected will keeps us from reaching unto it’.41 A Protestant through and through, Sidney ends up giving poetry a role suspiciously 40  See, for example, Robert Yellie, ‘Moses’ Veil: Secularization as Christian Myth’, in Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Robert  A.  Yellie, and Matteo Taussig-Rubbo (eds), After Secular Law (Stanford, 2011), 23–42. 41  Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London, 1595), C2r–v.

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similar to that played by law in Luther’s and Calvin’s hermeneutic of salvation. The law cannot save us, because we can never possibly observe it either in the letter or the spirit. It exists instead to convict us of our sinfulness.42 The same forebodings about humanity’s fallen incapacity pervade the Arcadia. As his narrator famously exclaims, ‘in such a shadowe or rather pit of darkenes, the wormish mankinde liues’ (233). Gentili’s and Sidney’s interest in international law arose in part from a Protestant determination to invent a new legal system that might replace the medieval ius commune. But as Protestants, both wrote with a sense that all law—international law as well as the laws of particular nations—existed in a postlapsarian world as an indictment of humanity’s failure to live up to best ideals. These religious forebodings distinguish their realist moments from Machiavelli’s. But they also distinguish them from modern political theorists whom they sometimes resemble. Unlike contemporary realists, neither Sidney nor Gentili could accept the possibility that nothing but anarchy existed beyond the level of the sovereign state. Like modern neo-Grotians, they believed instead that interstate relations unfolded within a legal framework that influenced them in positive, stabilizing ways. But for them, that framework had practical and theological limitations that prevented them from embracing the humanist optimism that characterizes English school international relations theorists and transformational legal theorists. Some even wax utopian about the expansion of the current legal regime though efforts like the International Criminal Court. Several scholars imagine greater future stability underwritten by increasing legal adherence to such transnational institutions.43 In contrast to this evolutionary conception of law, the law of nations evoked by Gentili and Sidney was static. Perfect in its original conception, woven into the order of nature itself, it did not need to evolve with changing historical conditions. But it was also finally incapable of re-establishing a lost, Edenic Golden Age. For Sidney, Gentili, and many of their Protestant contemporaries, the clash between the law’s perfection and humanity’s inability to obey it was the source of continual pathos. In the Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney drew a celebrated distinction between history, confined to the ‘brasen’ facts of experience, and poetry, attuned to ‘golden’ worlds of the imagination.44 For all its rhetorical force, however, that distinction proved untenable even in the Apologie itself, with its broodings on original sin. In the Arcadia, the intractabilities of history, of fallen human nature, continually impinge upon Sidney’s fiction. The treaties, settlements, and agreements that his heroes champion prove even shorter-lived than the ones that Sidney and his fellow diplomats 42 See Andrew Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism (Minneapolis, 1978). Although some recent scholars have stressed Sidney’s doctrinal complexities, the fallibility of the postlapsarian will was common Protestant belief. For an alternative view, see Steven R. Mentz, ‘Reason, Faith and Shipwreck in Sidney’s Arcadia’, Studies in English Literature, 44 (2014), 1–18. 43  Abram Chayes and Antonia Handler Chayes, The New Sovereignty: Compliance with International Regulatory Agreements (Cambridge, 1995); Harold Hongju Koh, ‘Transnational Legal Process after September 11th’, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 22 (2004), 337–54; Harold Honju Koh, ‘The Globalization of Freedom’, Yale Journal of International Law, 305 (2001), 305–12; Joel P. Trachtman, The Future of International Law: Global Government (Cambridge, 2013). 44  Apologie, C1v.

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worked to achieve in the emphatically brazen context of early modern politics. Perhaps Sidney found in Pyrocles’s and Musidorus’s setbacks a consummate expression of diplomatic pathos, a realization that it infected the literary imagination itself. Yet precisely because Sidney’s distinction between history and poetry collapses before the unreliability of human resolution, his works retain the traces of a troubled diplomatic past.45 Both in the world where Sidney served as a young diplomat and in the ones he created as an accomplished poet, the loftiest ideals and aspirations competed against the perceived transience of human resolutions. Instead of evading or transcending history, Sidney’s fictions amplified its most frustrating aspects. For more than any extant letter or dispatch, the broken treaties, resolutions, agreements, settlements, and promises that recur throughout the Arcadia convey despair over the inability of any diplomatic practice to ensure ‘a good, secure, firm and stable peace’. No other source captures so poignantly the darker, Protestant, undercurrents of northern European diplomatic thought. 45  For further discussion of the diplomatic aspects of Sidney’s poetics, see Jason Powell, ‘Astrophil the Orator: Diplomacy and Diplomats in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, in William T. Rossiter and Jason Powell (eds), Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare (Farnham, 2013), 171–84; Roland Greene, ‘Fictions of Immanence, Fictions of Embassy,’ in Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene (eds), The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997), 176–202.

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PA RT I I T R A N S L AT I O N

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5 Translation and Communication War and Peace by Other Means José María Pérez Fernández I N T RO D U C T I O N : M E RC U RY A N D T H E P R E - H I S TO RY O F T H E I N T E R N AT I O N A L C O M M U N I T Y In his El enbaxador Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa elaborated on the reasons why Mercury, the messenger of classical mythology and god of commerce, could also stand as an allegory for the skills required of ambassadors. The purse, caduceus, wings, and other features usually attached to iconic representations of the god in question are, he said: tokens all of them, that explain the parts wished for in the ambassador, to wit, loyalty, readiness, diligence, liberality, eloquence, from which proceed all of the effects of legateship, which are in sum to increase the state and attain the business at hand, to acquire, make and preserve peace, harass the enemy, not with weapons, but with wit and diligence; to please, frighten, threaten, to take and receive oaths, to admonish and to intimate.1

If Mercury stood as a cluster of tokens, Figueroa’s volume also came across as a portmanteau which carried a large variety of contents, genres, and styles. These included essayistic prose, a poetic passage translated from Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, as well as particular case studies to exemplify the tasks and challenges of embassies and the general principles that should guide them. Its transgeneric texture also bore the stamp of political and diplomatic writings by such theorists as Justus Lipsius and Alberico Gentili. In a variety of discursive formats El enbaxador gathered within its covers an encyclopaedic collection of materials, ancient and modern, punctuated with its author’s practical experience. It was translated into French and Italian and became the standard textbook of sorts on its subject for more than a hundred years.2 1  Juan Antonio de Vera y Figueroa, El enbaxador (Seville, 1620), fo. 13v. Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations are mine. 2 See G.  A.  Davies, ‘The Influence of Justus Lipsius on Juan de Vera y Figueroa’s Embaxador (1620)’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 42 (1965), 160–73; Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth, 1955), 181.

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Figueroa was a man of many parts himself. Friend of the playwright Lope de Vega, he was an active member of the literary academies of his age, dabbled in poetry, and penned a biography of the Count-Duke of Olivares, under whom he served as a diplomat for the Spanish crown in Italy during the Thirty Years War. If Figueroa is a good example of the combination of scholarship, literature, and diplomacy, the heterogeneity of his El enbaxador is symptomatic of some of the strategies and paths employed for the production and distribution of similar printed goods within the republic of letters. David Armitage recently claimed that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constitute the pre-history of globalization.3 In line with Armitage, this essay will suggest that during this period Europe also saw the emergence of a heterogeneous constellation of public and private networks, founded not only upon trade and international relations, but also the textual exchanges facilitated by cultural translation and the publishing industry. This essay will survey a series of texts and some of the transnational networks through which they circulated as case studies for the relations between diplomacy, translation, political theory, and literature. As will be seen, the variegated spheres of social and political action, as well as the different disciplines involved in these international structures, resulted in textual and iconic typologies that frequently overlapped with each other. In another recent proposal for a cultural history of international relations, Richard Lebow claimed that the establishment of political relations did not respond to the mere pursuit of material interest, but to the construction and consolidation of ‘identities that offer meaning, order and predictability’ to the communities whose identity was at stake.4 In this reading, diplomatic activity engages in performative acts of semiotic self-construction meant to sustain and defend narratives of national identity. Cultural translation, understood as the appropriation of all sorts of symbolic capital beyond the mere interlinguistic exchange involved in standard modes of translation, was one of the most important strategies in the construction of these identities. If we can view any given culture as a macro-text, a heterogeneous cluster of signifiers,5 then diplomats and translators are among its most important agents of exchange. The complexity of these simultaneous processes of exchange and construction was compounded by the fact that the translators and diplomats involved in them did not always belong within a single group: they frequently acted as members of several different communities, each of which had its own distinctive identity, interests, and agendas. If we can talk about an international society or an international community in early modernity we can certainly contemplate Armitage’s suggestion of a history of globalization that takes the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries as a defining moment.6 The porosity among the iconic clusters that inform the identities of early modern communities was dynamized, to paraphrase Francis Bacon’s famous 3  David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013). 4 Richard N. Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008), 15–16. 5 Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 3–30. 6 Armitage, Foundations, 9–10.

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declaration in his Instauratio Magna of 1620, by the new technologies of print, the nautical compass, and gunpowder, all of which facilitated the intensification of international relations through communication, exploration, trade, and war.7 The texts surveyed below explore theoretical issues and doctrines prompted by a very unstable European environment which was undergoing rapid and frequently traumatic change in the material conditions of daily life and also in terms of social, political and religious values. Each of their translators in turn responded to the alien texts they were rendering by adapting them to the demands of their own communities and the agendas of their patrons. In doing so, the texts and the agents involved in their production and distribution wove a heterogeneous translational network whose hubs structured an early version of what we have come to call the international community. Precisely because their nature is inherently heterogeneous and dynamic, we must contemplate the study of translation and diplomatic relations as a subdiscipline of communication theory, a category into which commerce might also be subsumed. More than on a mere ‘linguistic turn’—the expression used by Armitage in his proposal for a new cultural history of international relations—we should rather found our approach to the development of transnational communities during the age of print, the compass, and gunpowder upon a pragmatic-communicative turn which relies on the way culturemes and discursive typologies were traded as currency among the different agents that peopled early modern Europe. It is true that many of the authors and translators who issued texts in this period did so under the patronage and therefore under the agendas of powerful aristocrats, religious leaders, magnates, or politicians. But many of them also engaged in these activities in pursuit of profit through trade, a motivation which is clearly part of the selfinterested strategies of editors, publishers, printers, and booksellers. Printing shops issued more than mere texts: they produced iconically complex artefacts whose physical design and paratexts also carried a message and determined their reception, use, and transmission and (like Mercury) combined diplomacy with commerce. Translations of political treatises were communicative strategies within these general pragmatics of self-representation—and even more so in an international context dominated by conflict. Literary translation was used both to establish diplomatic alliances and for competitive, international self-fashioning, for instance.8 As tokens of exchange between different communities, the texts that this essay surveys helped to build up symbolic capital for self-representation vis-à-vis the originals whose materials they were appropriating, constructing a common identity (political, religious, linguistic, or otherwise) that relied on the dialectical confrontation with an ‘other’. Such strategies were also apparent in diplomatic ritual and protocol and all other iconic systems employed for the competitive representation of power within the sphere of relations between different types of communities and institutions. Iconic and non-discursive components were used to demarcate a scholarly and diplomatic elite that straddled otherwise distinct linguistic communities. 7  Francis Bacon, The New Organon [1620], ed. Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge, 2000), 100. 8  See Fouto below, 101–14.

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Far from addressing in detail all the challenges posed by these phenomena, this essay will sketch a preliminary series of methodological paths and topics that could be pursued in future research on the construction of international relations and identities through translations that were at once political and commercial. It will start by examining the tropes of communication, community, and commerce in certain political treatises alongside some of the discursive, paratextual, and typographic strategies used by their translators and editors. It will then show that one and the same among these agents could act in different capacities as ambassador, translator, or soldier. The next section will focus on James Mabbe and the diversity of roles he played in his dealings between England and Spain—which included English renderings of Spanish essayistic and narrative prose that addressed the concerns of political theory under the species of picaresque fiction. The conclusion will call for further interdisciplinary research on the discursive and editorial intersection between the particulars of prose fiction and the universals of political and moral philosophy as one of the most significant among the third spaces created by translational agents of exchange. C O M M E R C I O E T I M P E R I O : S E L F - I N T E R E S T, C O M M U N I C AT I O N , A N D T H E R E G U L AT I O N OF LIFE IN COMMON The definition and regulation of civic life in politics, of trade in economic relations, the harmonization of mutual self-interest as the foundation for a life in common, and the principles of humanist rhetoric as communication theory are all brought together in the pervading tropes of language as currency and of cultural translation understood as the exchange of symbolic capital. The vocabularies of communication, commerce, and community pervade the texts that articulate theoretical and doctrinal proposals for the regulation of early modern social, economic and political life. In his Six Books of Politics (1589) Justus Lipsius defined civic life as ‘that which we lead in the society of men, one with another, to mutuall commoditie and profit and common use of all’ [multa commoda siue usum].9 ‘Civil life’, he adds, ‘consisteth in society, society in two things, traffic [commercio] and government [imperio]’.10 A few decades before Lipsius and Figueroa, Fadrique Furio Ceriol had claimed that the best counsellor was not only the wise and virtuous, but also one who was eloquent, persuasive and empathic with others.11 The good counsellor must be a man of elevated and rare wit, who ‘confers and communicates with all sorts of men’. He should be competitive, hungry for knowledge and never shun ‘conversation or communication with alien nations’.12 ‘Counsellors abroad’, or diplomats, must 9  Justus Lipsius, Six Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, trans. William Jones (London, 1594) I.1, 1. 10 Ibid., I.1, 16. 11  Fadrique Furio Ceriol, El concejo y consejeros del príncipe (Antwerp, 1559), fo. 18v. 12 Ibid., fo. 18r.

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‘understand and be understood’, be pragmatically conversant in several languages and communicate with other foreign nations (‘naciones peregrinas’).13 To this rhetoric of communication, community, and commerce within the abstract realm of political theory, we must add the important phenomenon of information as commodity. During these decades of political and military upheaval, the exchange of information became a strategic priority that resorted to a variety of formats for its circulation: from its public diffusion through print—corantos, broadside ballads, pamphlets—to the exchange of secret intelligence through diplomats, translators, and merchants.14 Commerce and mutual self-interest therefore constitute the foundations for civil life at the domestic level. But mutually beneficial as well as competitive political, commercial, financial, informative, and diplomatic traffic was also a fundamental principle in the establishment of the early modern international community. The same sort of vocabulary was also rehearsed by the translators of political treatises, who share with Ceriol’s ideal ‘counsellor abroad’ the virtues of curiosity and eloquence, the skills to understand, be understood and converse with the authors of doctrinal goods produced in alien nations, past and present. And like diplomats, these texts circulated with ease among different communities. In 1557 Sir Thomas North rendered Antonio de Guevara’s Relox de Príncipes (1529) into English from a French translation, L’orloge des princes.15 North’s text went through a new edition in 1568 which also included his rendering of Guevara’s Aviso de privados (1539), an influential treatise on counsel.16 North’s dedicatory preface contains some interesting information on the processes through which the teachings of Guevara, originally of great use and profit to the Spaniards, can by means of their translation and appropriation be made profitable for English readers and for the international community in general. As Plato did with the Greeks, North claims, Guevara has managed ‘to induce a ciuile forme of liuing among the people’. This turns Guevara into one of ‘those which studied to publish any institution, apperteyning either to the honoure of the Goddes, to the reformation of the frayltie of men, or by any other meane to the profit of the weale publike’.17 North combines the languages of political and moral philosophy, the construction and consolidation of communities (‘a ciuile forme of liuing’), with the lexical fields of financial and commodity exchange to promote his translation as a textual ambassador from an alien nation that can be of great use for readers within his community. He berates those false doctrines which ‘impouerish with vnprofitable marchaundise the people’, in contrast with those which are for ‘the profit of the weale publike’.18 In the preface to the fourth book North proclaims that this translation has been taken up 13  Ibid., fos. 20r–21v. 14  For further details see José María Pérez Fernández, ‘The Age of Exchange: Translation, News and the European Public Sphere in the 16th and the 17th Centuries’, in Yolanda Espiña (ed.), Images of Europe, Past, Present and Future (Porto, 2016), 40–52. 15  Antonio de Guevara, The Diall of Princes, trans. Thomas North (London, 1557). 16  Antonio de Guevara, The Dial of Princes . . . with . . . The fauored Courtier, trans. Thomas North (London, 1568). The 1582 edition was also printed by Tottell. 17  ‘To the moste highe and vertuouse Princesse, Mary’, 1568, n.p. 18 Ibid.

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‘for the benefit of my countrey and common weale’.19 He takes the doctrinal capital that Guevara had previously appropriated from Classical Antiquity and makes it common in English: ‘by his holsome doctrine the people of Spayne heretofore edified and by his swete and sauorie writinges we (and sundrie other nations) at this present may be much profited’.20 North’s paratexts thus illustrate how the norms for the creation of a domestic civic community were culled from the classics through processes of cultural translation and then circulated among other linguistic communities through the agendas and strategies of their translators. Not a few of these texts on political theory which were translated into other vernaculars had been originally fashioned as collections of aphorisms by classical authors, accompanied with commentary by the translator or compiler. Editorial intervention was a fundamental strategy in the overall process that led to their translation and international standardization as printed goods. The whole process relied inexorably upon the material conditions that regulated the book trade, the habits of translators, and the way in which editors and publishers designed a new format for the text in question. In 1619 the third edition of North’s version was overseen by Anthony Munday, a well-travelled author and a translator himself—of Spanish romance and chivalric fiction—who had been inducted into the literary world by the polyglot linguist Cladius Hollyband and had cut his teeth as an apprentice in the workshop of the printer John Allde.21 In contrast to the previous editions, Munday’s provided headings on each page, as well as comments and references in the margins. In short, he carefully reframed and redesigned the translation, turning it into a more sophisticated printed artefact with a clear structure that facilitated navigation through its contents. Lawrence Venuti has described the translator as an agent in the construction of ‘a community with foreign cultures’. And Anthony Pym addressed diplomats and translators as agents of exchange that establish ‘intercultural social groups’.22 The diplomat, the translator, the editor, and the translated artefacts—textual and otherwise—create and inhabit third spaces between the communities they bring in contact. In the case of diplomacy, the aggregation of these particular third spaces created by diplomatic exchanges would lead to the weaving of a heterogeneous macro-text, a reticular realm that underpinned an early version of the international community.23 As will be seen, the multiple spheres of contact established through texts, diplomats, publishers, and translators constitute the hubs that structure the cartography of this international community, including the literary genres that evolved out of it. 19 Ibid., fo. 97v. 20 Ibid. Early modern English translators used similar tropes in their paratexts. See Neil Rhodes, Gordon Kendal, and Louise Wilson (eds), English Renaissance Translation Theory (London, 2013), esp. 31–45. 21  Archontorologion, or The diall of princes (London, 1619). 22  Lawrence Venuti, ‘Translation, Community, Utopia’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn (London, 2004), 483; Anthony Pym, Methods in Translation History (Manchester, 1998), x. 23  As Peter Auger demonstrates, Protestantism was among the most prominent and widespread of the transnational third spaces created through translation and diplomacy.

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POLITICAL AMBASSADORS A N D T E X T U A L WA R R I O R S Structured as a series of quotations from ancient authors, Justus Lipsius’s Six Books of Politics illustrates the process of fragmentation, thick translation, and editorial re-arrangement that was central to the codification and distribution of political discourse.24 I use Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of thick translation to describe that modality of translation which goes beyond mere linguistic equivalence, to the point of resorting to extra-discursive strategies.25 It can do so by providing a surplus in the form of amplification, commentary, marginalia, paratexts, editorial intervention, or typographic design. Thick translation can be used to bring the alien culture closer, but it can also be used to occlude it and/or to appropriate the contents of the source text so that it can serve the pragmatic purposes of the translator vis-à-vis his intended readership. In this case, Lipsius was addressing an elite of international Latin readers much concerned about the religious and political turmoil that engulfed Europe at the time. The way in which Lipsius interpreted the political and military situation in the Netherlands and in Europe in general through the lens provided by Tacitus, amounts to an act of cultural translation by means of which the language and rhetoric of the Roman historian were appropriated and refashioned for Lipsius’s intended audiences, the citizens of the international republic of letters. Lipsius was well acquainted with this international network of learned readers and political actors: educated in the tradition of philological humanism, he had also travelled widely on the continent, corresponded with a range of international fellow scholars, and had started his career in the service of the diplomat and statesman Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle in Rome between 1566 and 1569. The distribution of Francesco Sansovino’s republican Concetti politici (1578)— like Lipsius’s Politics, a collection of aphorisms—in English also demonstrates that translators could be agents of exchange within several different communities: Sansovino was rendered into English by Robert Hitchcock (1573–91), a soldier who had also been employed by the Dutch in their conflict against the Spaniards.26 The fact that a soldier was involved in the translation of an important text is a rather revealing phenomenon. For, like diplomacy, translation could become war by other means. In his Theorica y practica de la guerra Bernardino de Mendoza claimed that he had condensed in this volume the experience accumulated during many years as a soldier and ambassador at the service of King Philip II, his 24  Richard Tuck described the Six Books as ‘a complex network of quotations from ancient authorities, principally Tacitus, marshalled into a coherent argument and breathing the spirit of the contemporary Italian Tacitists’ in his Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 47–8. 25 Appiah, in turn, adapted the term from Clifford Gertz’s notion of ‘thick description’. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Thick Translation’, in Venuti (ed.), Translation Studies Reader, 389–401. More recently Anne Coldiron has investigated the relations between translation and typographic design in Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2015). 26  Andrew Hadfield also cites Hitchcock’s translation as an example of the type of republicanism in circulation during this period: see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge, 2005), 52–3. On Sansovino’s republicanism, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 35–6.

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dedicatee’s father.27 Mendoza’s text was almost immediately translated into English by the diplomat Edward Hoby in what can be described as a speech act of war. In his introduction—which he wrote in Spanish—Hoby claimed that he had learned the language on his way back from the 1596 raid of Cadiz, where he had also obtained his copy of the original.28 Two prisoners of war he brought with him helped as language instructors and lent a hand with the translation. One of the most valuable spoils that the translator rendered into his text was an imperial title for Queen Elizabeth, who was referred as ‘Sacra Cesarea Catholica, Real Magd’—a title previously employed only with respect to the Emperor Charles V. Mendoza’s Theorica y practica de la guerra was also translated into Italian (1596, 1602, 1616), French (1597) and German (1667), which turned Mendoza into one of the nodes that connected several international networks. In his capacity as a translator, he provided a link with another important web that had Lipsius’s Six Books at its centre: Mendoza rendered it into Spanish in 1604 with the title Los seis libros de la política, o doctrina civil. The networks that brought together Mendoza, Lipsius, Hoby, and the texts they produced and translated raise fundamental questions about new textual typologies and formats—both in material and also in discursive terms—which involved not just scholarly, clerical, and diplomatic communities, as well as translators and editors, but also military communities. In Hoby’s dedicatory epistle to Mendoza’s Theorique and practise of warre he featured simultaneously as translator, diplomat, and soldier. He invoked two different communities brought together by the text. One was the traditional community of Christian princes, against the infidel ‘other’, the Turk, founded upon the traditional idea of the universal monarchy, which was also embraced by the pacifism of Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, or Andrés Laguna. The other was the community of political, diplomatic, religious, and military interests against a different, much closer, heretic ‘other’, Roman Catholicism, represented by the Habsburg monarchy and its agents.29 Like Mendoza, Hoby also implicitly coupled translation and war with diplomacy. To these he added lexicography: he told his dedicatee that he had used Richard Percyvall’s Spanish dictionary for the task of bringing home the textual spoils he had acquired at Cádiz. Hoby must have taken this volume with him in the military expedition against Spain, as part of the panoply employed in the raid—rather than as a textual ambassador, Percyvall’s Bibliotheca Hispanica was therefore used as a textual warrior.30 Hoby and Mendoza also exemplify how the particulars of war could facilitate the transfer of printed artefacts, which could in turn contribute to the transmission of knowledge, the circulation of ideas, and of course the appropriation of political and military capital. As the troubled situation of Europe during these 27  Bernardino de Mendoza, ‘Al Príncipe Don Felipe, Nuestro Señor’, in Theorica y practica de guerra (Antwerp, 1596), 3. 28  Theorique and practise of warre (Middelburg, 1597). 29 Ibid., A3r: ‘Al muy Illtre y discreto Cauallero Don Iorge Carew, Lugarteniente general de la Artilleria, por su Sacra Cesarea Catholica, Real Magd. Donna Elizabeth nuestra Señora, en todos sus Reyns, Prouincias y Estados.’ 30 Ibid., A2r. Hoby must have used the first version of Richard Percyvall’s Spanish grammar and dictionary (Bibliotheca Hispanica, London, 1591).

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decades demonstrates, the particulars of specific conflicts could become powerful incentives for the generation of new doctrines on domestic and foreign policies. Translation, international relations, and diplomacy—each of them within the multiple spheres in which the discourses that inform them circulate—oscillate between universalist, even utopian, claims, on the one hand and on the other their dialectical counterpart, i.e. the emphasis on the essential difference from the other that contributes to the definition of communities. In the dedicatory epistle that precedes his translation of Mendoza’s treatise on war Hoby reformulated Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, and Andrés Laguna’s dream of a Europe united against the Ottoman foe under the aegis of an imperial ruler—not Charles V in this case, but Queen Elizabeth.31 Alongside these universalist and utopian claims we must take into consideration the evidence which proves that translation and diplomacy can become war by other means, that the third spaces they create can turn into battlefields, in parallel with other cases in which they appear as cultural and political agents of peaceful agreements. If the transnational pacifism woven by the practices and discourses involved in translation and diplomacy could be productively approached with the methods proposed by Venuti, who deals with aspirations for a common language as the expression of a single human community, Emily Apter’s recent approach to translation and world literature raises important methodological questions through the application of concepts such as difference, alterity, and above all untranslatability. She actually devotes one of her chapters to the concept of ‘peace’ as one of the untranslatables that her book approaches.32 Apter’s book, in turn, is to a large extent inspired by the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles.33 A complex and ambitious project, the Dictionary of Untranslatables takes as its starting point ‘symptoms of difference, the “untranslatables”, among a certain number of contemporary European languages, returning to ancient languages (Greek, Latin) and referring to Hebrew and Arabic whenever it was necessary in order to understand these differences’. Although it focuses mainly on the lexicon of philosophy, its comprehensive exploration of ‘terminological networks, whose distortion creates the history and geography of languages and cultures’ can be also used as an epistemological template for the analysis of the complex cultural, linguistic, and political cartography of exchanges within the cluster of early modern European communities.34 31 On Lipsius and his relation to the previous tradition of humanist pacifism represented by Erasmus, Vives, Laguna, or del Corro, see Feros, Kingship and Favoritism, 193. On the relations between translation, diplomacy, and early sixteenth-century humanist pacifism see José María Pérez Fernández, ‘Andrés Laguna: Translation and the Early Modern Idea of Europe’, Translation and Literature, 21 (2012), 299–318. 32  Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability(London, 2013), 3–4, 8; on translation, war, borders, and sovereignty see 99–100; see also Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (Philadelphia, 2013), 13–38. 33  Barbara Cassin (ed.), Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Paris, 2004). Apter translated this encyclopaedia with Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood. Their new English edition foregrounded the concept of untranslatability as it effaced Europe from its title: Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, 2014). 34  Cassin’s ‘Introduction’ to Cassin (ed.), Dictionary, xvii.

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Mendoza was one of the most active agents in the service of the Habsburg monarchy under Philip II and as both diplomat and intelligencer he intervened in England and France during the wars of religion towards the end of the sixteenth century.35 Published shortly before his death, Mendoza’s Theorica y practica de la Guerra was dedicated to the future Philip III, under whom the domestic and foreign policies of the Hispanic Habsburgs became a subject of great public controversy within Spain. Fray Juan de Santa Maria’s República y policía cristiana was a product of the discordant atmosphere at court and beyond. First published in Madrid in 1615, it went through six additional editions in 1617, 1618, 1619 (twice), 1621 (Lisbon), and 1624 (Naples) before James Mabbe published his English translation in 1632. The domestic situation at the Spanish court and the controversies about the foreign policy of the Habsburgs during the Thirty Years War spurred a spate of publications on policy, governance, and international relations which according to Michele Olivari constitute the origins of public opinion in Spain.36 These texts combined political theory and action and some of their authors were—like Santa María— both scholars and political activists. Mabbe taught Spanish in Oxford and he travelled to Spain as secretary with the English legation led by Sir John Digby. Upon his arrival in Madrid early in 1611 Mabbe found the Spanish court engulfed in political strife concerning King Philip III’s favourite, the Duke of Lerma. Santa María was a prominent member of the anti-Lerma faction who defended the role of the traditional councils to temper and counsel the king, as opposed to the new juntas created by Lerma to consolidate his power by staffing them with family and other allies. The historian Antonio Feros has described Santa María’s treatise as ‘the most influential attempt by Lerma’s opponents to challenge the political discourse he had promoted’, which included the dismantling of the ‘arguments in support of the valido as the king’s friend’. Santa María provided a template in ideological terms as he showed the path for the practical application of abstract political doctrine.37 This debate on counsel and the role of royal favourites constitutes the Spanish background for Santa María’s work and of course for Mabbe’s appropriation of its political capital, which he then put at the service of his English patrons. Mabbe’s translation was issued twice in the same year, with different titles, by two different publishers, one of whom was Edward Blount. Both volumes include a dedicatory epistle signed by Blount and addressed to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, whose indubitably Protestant credentials turned him into one of the most trusted 35  De Lamar Jensen, Diplomacy and Dogmatism: Bernardino de Mendoza and the French Catholic League (Cambridge, MA, 1964). 36  Michele Olivari, Avisos, pasquines y rumores: Los comienzos de la opinión pública en la España del siglo XVII (Madrid, 2014), 57–96. 37 Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favoritism in the Spain of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Cambridge, 2000), 222.

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negotiators with foreign Catholic powers. This edition was reprinted again in 1634 by Humphrey Moseley, who reprinted it a third time in 1637—in this case with the same dedicatory epistle by Blount, but addressed on this occasion to Sir Dudley Carleton.38 In political terms, Carleton tried to keep an uneasy balance between his faithful service for the monarchy during Charles I’s personal rule and his defence of the traditional powers of parliament. Mabbe’s political patrons also included Sir John Strangways. With Digby, Strangways supported the impeachment of Charles I’s favourite the Duke of Buckingham in 1626 and that year he responded in Parliament to Dudley Carleton’s threat that the king might turn to ‘new counsels’ by asserting that: ‘all kings that are not tyrants or perjured, will keep themselves within the bounds of the laws of the[ir] own kingdoms and those that counsel them to other ways are vipers fitting to be cast out and pests of the commonwealth’.39 For Santa María in Madrid—who deplored the fact that Philip III left important affairs of state in the hands of his corrupt favourite, the Duke of Lerma—and for Mabbe and his patrons in London—who thought that the monarch should keep within the bounds of law and abandon counsel that suggested otherwise—the solution was a consultative monarchy. And if for Santa María the problem had been the influence of the corrupt Duke of Lerma, for Mabbe and Blount, their respective patrons and dedicatees, the imminent dangers for the commonwealth stemmed initially from the corruption and evil counsel of Buckingham and then from the absolutist drift of Charles I’s personal rule compounded on the other side of the religious and political divide by the unsettling radicalism of the Puritans. Like other ambassadors, their clerks, and the translators associated with them, James Mabbe traded in private and public information—possibly in secret intelligence too—as he traded in literary, political, and religious capital between England and Spain. As an agent of exchange he belonged within larger transnational networks.40 Mabbe’s translations provide a third space of singular range and complexity. He relied on a tradition of theories of counsel and political doctrine that sought to regulate both the ruling hierarchy at the top of the body politic and also the selfinterested exchanges that structured and informed civic life on the ground. The general political doctrines produced under the particular constraints and pressures of domestic controversies, diplomacy, and war, as well as significant social and economic changes, sought to harmonize and regulate self-interest as a general principle that bound individuals to each other through an aggregation of particular acts of traffic in goods and capitals of all sorts—including communication and news exchange. In dealing with the concept of transnational citizenship Étienne Balibar has proposed what he calls a ‘clinical method’ and its ‘epistemological interrogation of the speculative categories that we use in political philosophy (such as borders and 38  STC 14832. 39 William  B.  Bidwell and Maija Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament, 1626, 4 vols. (New Haven, 1991–6), III.370. 40 On Mabbe’s activities as an intelligencer and his networks see José María Pérez Fernández, ‘Translation, Diplomacy and Espionage: New Insights into James Mabbe’s Career’, Translation and Literature, 23 (2013), 1–22; also my ‘Introduction’ to Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish Bawd [1631], trans. James Mabbe, ed. José María Pérez Fernández (London, 2013), 1–66.

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territories, state, community and “public” structures, citizenship and sovereignty, rights and norms, violence and civility) with a consistent affirmation that only singular forces, unpredictable events and dialectical evolutions actually shape history’.41 In other words, Balibar establishes his approach to the relation between individual and community upon a combination of methodological speculation with specific case studies, the processes that created them, and the norms that came to regulate them. ‘Political matters’ Balibar claims, ‘can only be theorized under the constraints imposed by the situation and the changes in the situation that one observes . . . This is not to say that the discourse remains purely descriptive or empirical, but that—precisely in order to be “theoretical” in the way that the political matter requires—it has to incorporate as much as possible a reflection on its immediate conditions, which determine the understanding and use of concepts.’42 The application of this methodological framework to the examination of Mabbe’s Christian Policy, his singular appropriation of Santa María’s textual and doctrinal capital as a template for both political theory and action, does full justice to its nature as a complex, sophisticated hub within a larger, international network of textual and diplomatic exchanges. C O N C LU S I O N : D I P L O M A C Y, T R A N S L AT I O N , A N D   G E N E R I C T H I R D S PA C E S The diplomatic and translational agents examined above, their texts, their iconic artefacts, and their practices, all illustrate the acts of appropriation of symbolic capital involved in the construction of common identities, as described in Lebow’s constructivist cultural theory of international relations. Armitage has also proposed an interdisciplinary approach that takes into consideration new textual typologies, activities, and formats. These should involve translational, scholarly, clerical, and diplomatic communities, as well as military communities alongside publishing and distribution networks. In this regard it needs to be determined, for instance, how Mendoza’s activities as a diplomat, soldier, translator, and scholar, in combination with Hoby’s translation of his essay on war, compare with the humanist tradition of European pacifism represented by figures like Juan Luis Vives, Erasmus, or Andrés Laguna and what sort of insights this contrast can provide when viewed under all these methodological approaches to diplomacy, culture, political discourse, and international relations. A fresh approach to several representative cases of bilateral relations among the different communities that populated Europe in this period should contribute to describe that complex aggregation of particular third spaces mentioned above, the larger reticular composite that sought to make sense of early modern Europe as a common, albeit embattled, culture and eventually of its place in the long history of the continent. 41  Étienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. J. Swenson (Princeton, 2004), viii. 42 Ibid., my emphasis.

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The aggregation of the textual third spaces created by the exchanges in which Lipsius, Mendoza, Hoby and Mabbe, among many others, engaged, and the vocabulary and concepts that circulated among their respective communities, all demonstrate that some of the methods and categories proposed by political philosophers for their examination of the concepts of nation, community, and citizenship in twenty-first-century Europe can also be applied to the description and analysis of the shifting situation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and of the plethora of communities that competed for the redesign of the continent’s cartography during that foundational period. This dialectical liaison between general principles and particulars also extends to other realms, which brings to light the essentially transdiscursive and transgeneric nature of the texts and the concepts that were being produced under these immediate conditions. This could shed new light on the relation between different spheres and activities, such as translation, political discourse, or prose fiction. James Mabbe coupled his interest in how to regulate the power of the ruling elites with the way in which this principle of ‘mutual commoditie and profit’ actually worked for individuals at the lowest social levels. Mabbe was also a translator of Spanish prose fiction: he rendered into English Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (The Rogue), Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina (The Spanish Bawd) and some of Cervantes’s Novelas Ejemplares. Most of these works belong, or are very close to, the new genre of the picaresque, whose plots and characters address the relation between self and society in these new political and economic contexts. What doctrinal treatises formulated in the conceptual language appropriated from the discourse of classical aphorisms, the picaresque explored with the raw particulars of its plots and its socially alienated characters.43 The main concerns of rogue fiction include poverty, vagrancy, crime, prostitution, and in general the struggle of individuals in an urban landscape which upholds the elevated principles of moral and political philosophy as it also requires the reckless pursuit of self-interest for mere survival. Some of these novels, like Guzmán, display a significant variety of textual and generic typologies that combines the languages of moral philosophy, trade, and finance with the narrative strategies and characters of the picaresque and the best-selling Moorish novel.44 The vocabularies of community, mutual self-interest, trade, and communication feature prominently in La Celestina and Lazarillo, one of the founding texts of the picaresque.45 The picaresque fictionalized particular plots and characters that explored the distance between the Ciceronian-humanist ideal of civic life applied to the legitimation of economic and political structures, on the one hand and the shortcomings 43  Timothy Hampton explores similar relations between diplomacy and domesticity in the evolution of drama and the novel. See Hampton above 41–53. On the development of domesticity as a cultural construct within the emergence of the dichotomy public/private and its relation to the novel, see Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2005), esp. chs 14–15. 44 On Guzmán see Michel Cavillac, Gueux et marchands dans le Guzmán de Alfarache. Roman picaresque et mentalité bourgeoise dans l’Espagne du Siècle d’Or (Bordeaux, 1983). 45 See The Spanish Bawd, 30–1, 228 n. 401; Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. F. Rico (Madrid, 2011), 3–6.

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of self-interest as the harmonizing principle for a life of ‘mutuall commoditie and profit’ as Lipsius put it, on the other. If political theory aspired to create a language that could regulate a life in common for both domestic and international communities within a tumultuous environment, and in trying to do so it came up with the uneasy combination of the profitable and the honest in concepts such as reason of state, then the picaresque engaged in the exposure of the reverse side of the moral standards that individuals were supposed to uphold as they also tried to survive in the city and it did so in a new type of verisimilar prose that overlapped with the rhetoric employed for the narrative elaboration and mass distribution of news. La  vida de Lazarillo de Tormes first circulated within the European book market—it was simultaneously published in 1554 in Burgos, Antwerp, Alcalá, and Medina del Campo—as the true report of a series of autobiographical episodes, posing as a long letter composed in the sort of middling style favoured for familiar correspondence.46 Its first English translator, David Rowland, described it as full of entertaining and merry reports, literally ‘a true description of the nature and disposition of sundrie Spaniards’.47 The fact that a translator like James Mabbe was interested in the two types of discourse that were addressing these phenomena at the individual and at the social levels poses interesting questions whose examination could lead to important insights into how international relations, diplomacy, literary discourse, and translation related to each other, most frequently through discursive typologies which were contiguous with each other within a European context. The future evolution of the novel as a transnational genre and of modern political discourse as the foundation for the international community over the course of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries suggests that we do need to look further into this subject.48

46  For details of the middling style employed in classical and early modern epistolography and its diffusion through translation for use in early modern prose fiction see my ‘Translation, sermo communis, and the book trade’, in José María Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee (eds), Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2015), 40–60. 47  The Pleasaunt Historie of Lazarillo de Tormes, trans. David Rowland (London, 1586), Aiir. 48  On the role played by translation and international relations in the development of the novel as a genre during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (eds), The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel (Princeton, 2001).

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6 The Politics of Translation The Lusiads and European Diplomacy (1580–1664) Catarina Fouto I N T RO D U C T I O N In 1612, with the Dual Monarchy (1580–1640) which united the crowns of Portugal and Spain in full swing, one editor of The Lusiads, Domingos Fernandes, reflected on the literary prestige of the Portuguese poet Luís de Vaz de Camões’s (c.1524­­–80) epic and the significance of translation for its circulation among the European elites: The Lusiads are so celebrated throughout the word that the most illustrious Provinces in it were not contented by anything less than to appropriate it to themselves, in the best way that the variety of their languages allowed it, as has been seen by three Castilian translations, one in French, another in Italian, and one other in Latin which remains incomplete.1

We know that Fernandes’ editorial venture was a reaction to the appropriation of The Lusiads by other nations, and most significantly by Spain. Though he clearly thinks that these other languages cannot capture the essential qualities of an ­original still considered the masterpiece of the greatest poet of the Portuguese language, he goes on to propose that these imperfect attempts are ploys devised by Fame to extend the reach of Camões’s creative power. This brief passage illustrates the complexity of political and cultural meanings attached to the translation of Camões’s epic poem and succinctly sketches the chain of reception and translation of this text in early modern Europe. From its first publication in 1572, the significance of The Lusiads by Camões as a symbol of Portuguese imperialism was such that between 1580 and 1659 the epic was frequently reprinted at important moments of political change, rendered in different languages, and made available to different European audiences. The history of this editing and translating of The Lusiads is an excellent case study that illustrates the role played by translation and diplomacy in European cultural and political relations. As José Maria Pérez Fernandez argues elsewhere in this volume, ‘diplomatic activity engages in performative acts of semiotic self-construction 1  Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas de Luís de Camões, principe da poesia heroyca (Lisbon, 1612), fo. 1r–v. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.

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meant to sustain and defend narratives of national identity’.2 Camões’s epic came to be synonymous with Portugal: in The Lusiads, Camões narrates the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India (in 1497–8), the backdrop against which Portugal’s history from her humble beginning as a Roman province, medieval Iberian kingdom, and, finally, imperial nation is celebrated. The agents responsible for the cultural translations analysed in this essay recognized and harnessed the epic’s symbolic potential to represent the relations between their own nations and Portugal. Their translations are effectively performative gestures whereby political relations of dominance, alliance, and compromise were represented to the wider international community, making The Lusiads the object of disputed and contested political meaning. The Lusiads was soon caught up in Philip II’s diplomatic strategy to reinforce the Spanish annexation of Portugal in 1580 to a wider international audience by annexing its most prominent literary-imperial product. In that very year two translations into Spanish were published which can be traced to the Spanish courtly and scholarly worlds. During the Dual Monarchy, the political meaning of translating the epic into Spanish was contested by the republication of The Lusiads in Portuguese (with increasing scholarly apparatus) in an attempt to rescue the text’s original cultural and political context. Both the Spanish and Portuguese versions paved the way for other politically significant translations of The Lusiads in the period following Portuguese independence in 1640: these served the diplomatic objectives of a newly-reinstated Portuguese monarchy; of Britain, a growing maritime superpower; and of Genoa, a small city-state with strong commercial interests in both Portugal and Spain. These translations of The Lusiads were the fruit of the involvement of different diplomatic agents in a political context increasingly hostile to Habsburg imperialist interests. The focus of this essay is this chain of reception and translation within European diplomatic circles. It therefore calls for a nuanced interpretation of the role played by diplomatic agents in this period. My approach in this essay takes into consideration the personal trajectories, allegiances, and agendas of those involved in the translations, highlighting how often the diplomatic, literary, and commercial communities in which these agents moved, overlapped. Related to this biographical focus is a broader contextualized perspective which emphasizes the political, commercial, and diplomatic context for the publication of these translations: translation was used to advance and negotiate agendas at both local and international levels. This essay will show how paratextual materials shaped the reception of the text by the wider intended readership and how cases of textual interference by the translators aligned with their diplomatic and political objectives. P H I L I P I I A N D T H E LU S I A D S The first stop in this journey along the chain of translations of The Lusiads ­commences in 1580, the year of the annexation of Portugal by Philip II. Camões’s reputation in Spain at that juncture is not reflected solely by the two Spanish 2  See above p. 88.

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translations published in that year, authored by the Portuguese Bento Caldeira (a resident of the Spanish court in Madrid) and the Sevillian Luis Gómez de Tapia (a student at the University of Salamanca). Philip II sent for Camões on his arrival in Lisbon in 1581, no doubt intending to commission some work akin to The Lusiads from the poet, as Camões’s earliest biographers highlight. Indeed, the royal ­privilege ( privilegio) for the publication of Caldeira’s translation was signed by the king’s secretary, Antonio de Eraso, while Philip was already on his way to Portugal.3 There the king learned of the death of Camões in June of that same year: in order to hear his epic voice in Castilian Philip could now only rely on translations of the The Lusiads. The urgency in making the epic available in translation serves to highlight its strategic importance: the translation of this poem, both a celebration of Portuguese imperial aspirations and the crowning glory of Portuguese letters, sealed the political translatio imperii which occurred and publicized it at an international level. We now have a clearer understanding of the strategy deployed by Philip II and his successors with the objective of seducing the Portuguese political and cultural elites.4 Jurists from the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá became intimately involved in devising legal propositions justifying the legitimacy of Philip II’s dynastic claims; other intellectuals and writers linked to these academic institutions soon immersed themselves in analogous activities.5 It was equally vital to present the annexation of Portugal at an international level as a peaceful and ­natural consequence of the historical and cultural proximity which existed between the two Iberian monarchies. Eugenio Asensio was the first to suggest that the Spanish translation projects of The Lusiads were part of a much broader political, diplomatic, and juridical front6 and the more recent work of Miguel Martínez has emphasized that translations of The Lusiads in early modern Europe can be understood only when we acknowledge the ‘complexity of its transnational circulation and the historical situatedness of the conflicts over its meaning and ownership’.7 Crucially, in the case of the Spanish translations of The Lusiads there is a vital connection between diplomacy, the university world (the rival and prestigious institutions of Alcalá de Henares and Salamanca), and the courtly world, with each translation being dedicated to patrons representing different factions of Philip’s corte, as Patricia Marín Cepeda has shown.8 Caldeira’s work was dedicated to Hernando de Vega, acting President of the Consejo de la Hacienda (Ministry of Finance) and the Inquisition, while Gómez de Tapia’s translation was dedicated 3  Eugenio Asensio, Luís de Camões: el humanismo en su obra poética; Los Lusíadas y las Rimas en la poesía española (1580–1640) (Paris, 1982), 46. 4  Fernando Bouza Álvarez, Portugal en la monarquía hispánica (1580–1640): Felipe II, las cortes de Tomar y la génesis del Portugal católico (Madrid, 1987). 5  Miguel Martínez, ‘A Poet of Our Own: The Struggle for Os Lusíadas in the Afterlife of Camões’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 10/1 (2010), 71–94 at 73–4. 6  Eugenio Asensio, Estudios portugueses (Paris, 1974), 303–24. This point is now unanimously accepted thanks to Vanda Anastácio, ‘Leituras potencialmente perigosas: reflexões sobre as traduções castelhanas de Os Lusíadas no tempo da União Ibérica’, Revista Camoniana, 15 (2004), 159–78. 7  Martínez, ‘Poet of Our Own’, 87. 8  Patrícia Marin Cepeda, Cervantes y la corte de Felipe II: escritores en el entorno del cardenal Ascanio Colonna (1560–1608) (Madrid, 2015), 114–20.

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to  the young aristocrat Ascanio Colonna, who was studying at the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá (1576–86). These translations were not motivated by linguistic difficulty. A literate Spanishspeaker could reasonably be expected to be able to read The Lusiads in Portuguese: Camões was known in Spain prior to the appearance of translations, and later Philip IV kept copies of Camões’s epic poem and lyric poetry in Portuguese in the Biblioteca de la Torre Alta where he housed a significant library.9 The linguistic similarities between Portuguese and Spanish are the explicit reason the poet and friend of Miguel de Cervantes, Pedro Laínez, gives for praising the translation by Caldeira in the prefatory materials to the 1580 text: ‘[he] would not want anyone to think it easy to translate from a language that differs so little from Spanish as Portuguese, and so disregard how Benito Caldera toiled to achieve this excellent translation’.10 Ultimately, his remark only draws attention to the undeniable similarity between the two languages. The translation by Gómez de Tapia addresses the issue of language in a very different way. The preface, authored by the eminent humanist Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, chair of rhetoric at Salamanca and educated in Portugal, denies Portuguese the status of a language of culture, even though the Statutes of Tomar (1581) ensured that Portuguese would be used in all official documentation and communications in Spanish controlled Portuguese territory.11 In a liminary text highlighting the asymmetry of the bilingualism that characterized Portuguese culture in the early modern period, Sánchez de las Brozas argued that Portuguese ‘presents a natural contrast to the perfection of poetry’. In his view, ‘it was unreasonable that such a treasure as The Lusiads should be read only in its original language’ and, thanks to the work of Gómez de Tapia, ‘the many nations proud of the Spanish language’ (including Portugal and Italy) would be able to read The Lusiads in a language much more apt for the lofty style of epic poetry.12 The reception of the text is further shaped by a genealogical catalogue of the kings of Portugal (fos. 13–16), culminating in the country’s new Spanish ruler Philip II. There Philip’s dynastic rights to the Portuguese throne are reinforced by his direct descent from King Manuel, during whose reign da Gama’s voyage had taken place, echoing both the arguments and figurative representation13 used by Philip’s propaganda to legitimize his claim.14 Miguel Martínez has argued that these Spanish translations neutralized the appropriation of the epic by the Portuguese to promote their right to self-government.15 However, the publication history of The Lusiads in Portugal 9  Fernando Bouza Álvarez, ‘Semblanza y aficiones del monarca: música, astros, libros y bufones’, in José Alcalá-Zamora (ed.), Felipe IV: el hombre y el reinado (Madrid, 2005), 27–44 at 39–40. 10  Los Lvsiadas de Lvys de Camões traduzidos en octaua rima castellana por Benito Caldera (Alcalá de Henares, 1580), fo. A5r. 11  Fernando Bouza Álvarez, Imagen y propaganda: capítulos de historia cultural del reinado de Felipe II (Madrid, 1998), 121–33. 12  La Lvsiada de el famoso poeta Luys de Camões: traduzida en verso Castellano de Portugues, por el Maestro Luys Gomez de Tapia (Salamanca, 1580), fo. 5r. 13  Fernando Bouza Álvarez, ‘Retórica da imagem Real: Portugal e a memória figurada de Filipe II’, Penélope e Desfazer História, 4 (1989), 20–58. 14  Anastácio, ‘Leituras’, 165–6. 15  Martínez, ‘Poet of Our Own’, 76.

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(with and without commentaries) proves otherwise. Between 1580 and 1640, The Lusiads were published in Portugal, in Portuguese, ten times. It is a singular fact that the greatest editorial activity coincided with times of greatest political instability in the Habsburg empire: four times between 1607 and 1613 in the aftermath of a disastrous military campaign against the Dutch and Philip III’s bankruptcy (1607, 1609, 1612, 1613), with another three editions between 1626 and 1633 following the commencement of the Anglo-Spanish War (1625–30) and the defeats imposed by the armies of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. These Portuguese editions of The Lusiads under the Dual Monarchy reveal how Portuguese intellectuals, like Domingos Fernandes, responded to the existence of vernacular translations. They criticized both the ability of the Spanish translators and the quality of the exegetical work of previous commentaries: Manuel Correia denounced them as obscure, untruthful, and ignorant.16 Manuel de Faria e Sousa, in particular, insisted on printing the text in the original despite writing his commentary, intended for an international audience, in Spanish (and instead offered a prose paraphrase of Camões’s text).17 At an international level making the epic available in Spanish allowed the structures and cultural spaces of the Habsburg Empire to serve as important channels of dissemination for a text which had also become a symbol of Portuguese autonomic aspirations. The disputes which brought Britain, France, and the Habsburg Empire into conflict further contributed to the European dissemination of The Lusiads. Paradoxically, the Spanish translations were important for the canonization of Camões in Iberia18 and beyond, helping to publicize Portuguese achievements in a political context that became increasingly hostile to Spanish imperialist interests. This broader diplomatic context is decisive to the understanding of the chain of translations which followed, but the local and individual agendas of the translators were also important. The interplay between these international and personal factors will be the focus of the next section of this essay. S I R R I C H A R D FA N S H AW E ’ S ROY A L I S T T R A N S L AT I O N A N D A N G L O - P O RT U G U E S E DIPLOMACY POST 1655 In December 1640, a coup reinstated a Portuguese monarch to the throne, sparking what became known as the Restoration War, marked by both military confrontation between the two Iberian kingdoms and intense diplomatic activity across Europe: Portugal intended to get the necessary support for the newly instituted dynasty of the Braganzas as well as the recognition of political independence in the international arena. The first European power to support Portugal was Britain, a traditional ally since the fourteenth century and now a rising maritime 16  Published posthumously in Os Lusiadas do grande Luis de Camoens (Lisbon, 1613), π3v. 17  Lusiadas de Luis de Camoens, principe de los poetas de España Comentadas por Manuel de Faria e Sousa (Madrid, 1639), Prologue, col.14. 18 Vítor Aguiar e Silva, A lira dourada e a tuba canora: novos ensaios Camonianos (Lisbon, 2008), 91–123.

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and mercantile superpower that sought to renegotiate the terms of this alliance within the new imperial map of Europe. In 1642, on the eve of the English Civil War, a new treaty was signed between the two countries, recognizing Portuguese independence in exchange for a number of significant commercial concessions. Spain opposed Portugal’s efforts with great skill, showing decisive influence over the Holy See during the pontificates of Urban VIII, Innocent X, and Alexander VII.19 The publication of the English translation of The Lusiads illustrates how the relationship between diplomacy and translation was also shaped by local contexts and allegiances, and how translated texts can gain new meanings at different p ­ olitical moments. A royalist with proven credentials and an excellent linguist with fluent knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and Italian, Fanshawe served as secretary to the ambassador, Lord Walter Aston, at the Court of Spain in 1635 and his presence in Madrid on diplomatic duties there on behalf of the English king, including as chargé d’affaires, can be traced during the late 1630s.20 It was around then, in 1639, that a new edition of The Lusiads was published in Madrid by the Portuguese Manuel de Faria e Sousa,21 with the original text in Portuguese accompanied by a prose paraphrase as well as a substantial commentary written in Castilian.22 Fanshawe used this edition to help him translate The Lusiads into English.23 However, Fanshawe would only devote himself completely to the task of translating the epic poem from 1653, the year Oliver Cromwell’s protectorate began. Forced to abstain from political affairs due to his imprisonment at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, Fanshawe composed his translation in Tankersley Park, in remote Yorkshire, at a time when the terms of the 1642 Anglo-Portuguese treaty were under revision.24 The signing of the new and advantageous Treaty of Westminster in 1654 coincided with Fanshawe’s work as a translator and had a direct impact on his future diplomatic career. The hasty publication of his translation in 1655 had, however, little to do with the desire to take advantage of a crowning achievement of British diplomacy;25 such an ideological alignment from Fanshawe would have made his rapid return to Charles II’s service in 1658 nigh-impossible.26

19  Pedro Soares Martínez, História Diplomática de Portugal (Coimbra, 1985), 149–51. 20  See Peter Davidson’s informative chronology of Fanshawe in Peter Davidson (ed.), The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, 2 vols (Oxford, 1997–9), I.xii–vi. 21  Edward Glaser, The Fortuna of Manuel de Faria e Sousa: An Autobiography (Münster, 1975). 22  Catarina Fouto and Julian Weiss, ‘Reimagining Imperialism in Faria e Sousa’s Lusíadas comentadas’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 93 (2016), 1243–70; Laura R. Bass, ‘Poética, imperio y la idea de España en época de Olivares: Las Lusíadas Comentadas de Manuel de Faria e Sousa’, in Oliver Noble Wood, Jeremy Roe, and Jeremy Lawrance (eds), ‘Poder y saber’: bibliotecas y bibliofilia en la época del conde-duque de Olivares (Madrid, 2011), 183–205. 23 Roger  M.  Walker, ‘Sir Richard Fanshawe’s Lusiad and Manuel de Faria e Sousa’s Lusíadas Comentadas: New Documentary Evidence’, Portuguese Studies, 10 (1994), 44–64. 24  Edgar Prestage, ‘The Treaties of 1642, 1654, and 1661’, in Edgar Prestage (ed.), Chapters in Anglo-Portuguese Relations (Westport, 1971), 130–51. 25 For the suggestion that Fanshawe’s translation was aligned to the diplomacy of the Commonwealth see Martinez, ‘Poet of Our Own’, 78–80. 26 Thomas Earle, ‘As traduções da obra camoniana para Inglês existentes na Biblioteca de D. Manuel II’, in José Augusto Cardoso Bernardes (ed.), Camões nos prelos de Portugal e da Europa, 2 vols (Coimbra, 2015), I.165–74.

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In fact, Fanshawe’s The Lusiad or Portugals historicall poem was printed in 1655 by the very active royalist publisher Humphrey Moseley, whose role in promoting the cultural and literary prestige associated with the royalist faction is well known.27 Alongside his political motivations, Moseley may also have spotted a commercial opportunity.28 Fanshawe’s translation of The Lusiads was the first to reach a market which had already welcomed the publication of other epics, namely Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (by John Harrington in 1591) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (by Edward Fairfax in 1600). Fanshawe clearly signalled to his readers that Camões was an equally important epic poet by including his rendering of Tasso’s sonnet in praise of Camões and The Lusiads immediately before his English translation. Moseley selected his works for publication carefully and the prestige attached to Camões’s epic was certainly something the publisher had in mind. After all, if Fanshawe had translated Horace, Vergil, and Giovanni Battista Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido into English, then by implication The Lusiads were sufficiently important to warrant a translation too. Furthermore, to see Fanshawe’s translation as a mere attempt to hone linguistic skills29 simply does not do justice to the sophistication of his political and cultural translation which effectively reaffirms royalist aspirations in the context of Cromwell’s Parliamentarianism. Instead, we should focus on Fanshawe’s own royalist inclinations and classical background. His engagement with translation between 1645 and 1654 was developed whilst he was most involved in the political affairs of his day.30 His earlier translation of Il pastor fido might be read as a text either encouraging, or offering counsel to the prince of Wales, alerting the future king to the powerful political allegory underlying this pastoral work. Significantly, Fanshawe’s rendition of Camões was prefaced by a translation of the speech by Eumolpus in Petronius’ Satyricon.31 This speech illustrates the rules for composing epic poetry with an account of the Roman Civil War which is written in the style of Lucan’s Pharsalia. Although Fanshawe was prohibited from involvement in any overt political activity, his choice of texts was a clear political gesture. Like Guarini in Il pastor fido, in The Lusiads Camões presents his young prince with carefully selected examples to emulate, and cautionary tales of weak and defiant kings from the history of Portugal. All this struck a chord with Fanshawe, so much so that on several occasions his translation goes beyond the original text to suit his royalist agenda.32 By embarking on the translation of such a text, Fanshawe was effectively 27  David Scott Kastan, ‘Humphrey Moseley and the Invention of English Literature’, in Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Eric N. Lindquist, and Eleanor F. Shevlin (eds), Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst, 2007), 105–24 at 121–3; Nicola Marie Whitehead, ‘The Publisher Humphrey Moseley and Royalist Literature, 1640–1660’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford (2014). 28  Earle, ‘As traduções . . . para Inglês’, 165–74. 29  For this approach see Madonna Letzring, ‘The Influence of Camoens in English Literature’, Revista Camoniana, 1 (1964), 158–80 at 162. 30  Gareth Alban Davies, ‘Sir Richard Fanshawe, Hispanist Cavalier’, University of Leeds Review, 20 (1977), 87–119 at 102. 31  Roger Walker, ‘General Note’, in Davidson (ed.), Fanshawe, II.579–90 at 583. 32  Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 228–9.

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resisting the state of affairs, announcing where his political loyalties lay and endowing the royalist cause with an important cultural contribution. Fanshawe’s political loyalty and his reputation as a connoisseur of Portuguese history—gained from his translation of Camões—paved the way to distinguished diplomatic missions to Portugal in the 1660s. This included the negotiation of Charles II’s marriage to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in 1661,33 which brought an important colonial dowry in exchange for continued diplomatic and military support against Spain. Fanshawe’s intellectual skills aside, his diplomatic success owed much to his popularity among the Portuguese elites, who saw him as a man knowledgeable of their history and culture at a time when the restored Portuguese monarchy sought to secure international support for its cause. After the royal wedding in Portsmouth, Fanshawe was once again appointed ambassador to Portugal. This was the context for the production of a calligraphic manuscript.34 It includes a section, probably compiled during Fanshawe’s missions to Portugal in the 1660s, that opened with a poem devoted to Portuguese royal coats of arms, placing particular emphasis on the presence of the Order of the Garter in them.35 This was followed by selected passages of Camões’s epic in Latin, translated by Fanshawe, interspersed with notes on Camões’s life. The section ended with a six-line poem celebrating the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza. The manuscript continues with much more private material. Though the compilation of the manuscript continued until 1663, it is dated 1655, indicating that Fanshawe started working on the Latin translation whilst he was carrying out the English version. The copy, entitled Specimen Rerum a Lusitanis (Selection of Episodes from the History of the Portuguese), was probably completed in Lisbon during 1663: all this suggests that Fanshawe wished to circulate his Latin translation amongst the Portuguese ­political elite, integrating it within his own diplomatic missions. His choice of rendering selected passages of Cantos III. 53–4 and IV.1–47 is particularly relevant, as they concern the nobility and ancestry of the Portuguese monarchy and the very beginnings of the AngloPortuguese alliance, which dated back to the Treaty of Windsor of 1386 and the marriage of John I to Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt. Their descendants would later lead Portuguese maritime expansion and Fanshawe here revisits the history of this Anglo-Portuguese alliance in the context of renewed political bonds and a celebration of monarchy itself, as a half-Portuguese heir to the throne of England would consolidate a renovated Stuart dynasty. It is this context of shifting political balance in Europe and the rise of Britain as a key player that explains the appearance of a second edition of Fanshawe’s poem.36 33  Roger M. Walker and W. H. Liddell, ‘ “Mercurius Anglus”: Sir Richard Fanshawe’s Reception as Ambassador in Lisbon’, Portuguese Studies, 6 (1990), 126–37. 34  For the edition, see Davidson (ed.), Fanshawe, II.333–62; Thomas Earle, ‘As traduções da poesia de Camões para Latim existentes na Biblioteca de D. Manuel II’, in Cardoso Bernardes (ed.), Camões, I.157–64. 35  Roger Walker and W. H. Liddell, ‘A Commentary by Sir Richard Fanshawe on the Royal Arms of Portugal’, in Helder Macedo (ed.), Studies in Portuguese Literature and History in Honour of Luís de Sousa Rebelo (London, 1992), 155–70. 36  London: Ann Moseley, 1664.

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Translating The Lusiads influenced Fanshawe’s diplomatic career, but though serving as a ‘textual ambassador’ between the two countries, Fanshawe’s version originated in a local context of civil strife which pre-dated his direct involvement in the diplomatic relationship between Britain and Portugal between the 1640s and 1660s. Its publication in many ways helped Fanshawe to establish his profile as a diplomat with knowledge of Iberian languages and certainly pre-disposed the Portuguese elites to sympathize with his objectives in his thorny missions in Portugal. Fanshawe’s translation emphasized the historical and cultural links between the elites of the two countries which, in turn, legitimized their renewed political proximity across the confessional divide. However, it was not as clear an instrument of diplomacy as the next translation. C A R L O A N TO N I O PA G G I ’ S L A LU S I A D A I TA L I A N A :   G E N O E S E D I P L O M A C Y A N D M E RC A N T I L E   A M B I T I O N S In the 1640s, both Portugal and Genoa were struggling for international recognition as sovereign states. For both, diplomatic and commercial relations were instrumental to ensure foreign recognition. Indeed, the activities of Genoese diplomats in Lisbon should be analysed from a local and global perspective, highlighting how political and commercial interests overlap.37 The decisive moment for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two nations happened in 1647, when the Genoese community in Lisbon wrote to the senate of Genoa requesting the nomination of a consul in Lisbon. They recommended that the consul should be a Genoese merchant, resident in Lisbon, whose profile would ensure a degree of social influence among the Genoese and the Portuguese commercial classes. This move to appoint a consul in the Portuguese capital coincided with period of greater independence from Spanish interests38 and a more ambitious expansion.39 After a first failed attempt by Genoese merchants to expand in the commercial spaces of the Indian Ocean40 a new venture the Compagnia Marittima di San Giorgio (San Giorgio Maritime Company) was formed to open Brazil and the Atlantic to Genoese mercantile interests. The first consul, Giovanni Girolamo Ghersi, resident of Lisbon, was one of the leading figures in the Companhia Geral do Comércio do Brasil (1649–64) (General Company for Trade in Brazil), showing how his choice for the post was directly linked to the commercial interests of the Genoese in the Atlantic.41 37  Nunziatella Alessandrini, ‘Consoli genovesi a Lisbona (1650–1700 ca.)’, in Marcella Aglietti, Manuel Herrero Sánchez, and Francisco Zamora Rodríguez (eds), Los cónsules de extranjeros en la Edad Moderna y principios de la Edad Contemporanea (Madrid, 2013), 20–2. 38  Céline Dauverd, Imperial Ambition in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Genoese Merchants and the Spanish Crown (New York, 2015), 23–54. 39  Thomas Allison Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 2005), 117–50. 40  Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘On the Significance of Gadflies: the Genoese East India Company of the 1640s’, Journal of European Economic History, 17 (1988), 559–81. 41  Alessandrini, ‘Consoli genovesi’, 205–6.

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His successor in the post, Carlo Antonio Paggi, was entrusted with the difficult mission of opening up trade in the East Indies to the Genoese.42 Paggi possessed a very different profile to Ghersi. Firstly, his appointment was the fruit of the lobbying of members of the Compagnia Marittima di San Giorgio: during his appointment (for ten years) by the Senate, Paggi received a stipend from the Compagnia, whose commercial interests he defended at the Portuguese court. Despite this involvement with commercial interests, Paggi’s appointment stands out because he was neither a merchant nor a resident of Lisbon.43 The eldest son of Giovanni Battista Paggi, a distinguished Genoese painter, Carlo held degrees in civil and canon law from the University of Perugia and had a keen interest in literature. A member of the Accademia degli Insensati (Non-Sensual Academy) of Perugia, Paggi made the best of his intellectual gifts and literary inclinations to carve a space for himself amongst the Portuguese elites.44 Paggi was received by the Portuguese monarch, John IV, on 6 September 1656 (a few months before the king died), making a lasting positive impression at court. Soon he recognized the strategic importance of the cultural circle comprising important aristocrats, who were directly involved in complex diplomatic efforts mobilized by the new king to avoid Portugal’s international isolation.45 In particular, gaining recognition from the Holy See and Pope Alexander VII was of highest significance and Paggi was surely seen as a potential ally by the Portuguese court, as the Pope had appointed his younger brother, Giovanni Battista Paggi, bishop of Brugnato in 1655.46 Paggi’s decision to publish his La Lusiada Italiana,47 just two years after his arrival, had an undeniable political significance. Despite the aesthetic limitations of the translation and the typographical (and other) errors marring the edition,48 the translation and its author were hailed very favourably by the Portuguese elites, and this success was confirmed with a second edition just one year later. The translation was published by the royal printing house of Henrique Valente de Oliveira in Lisbon. Paggi’s dedication to Alexander VII makes no explicit reference to Portuguese diplomatic efforts and instead justifies the urgency of his own endeavour by insisting on the talent of Camões and highlighting the appearance of a number of translations into other vernacular languages and Latin,49 a point Paggi also makes in his address to his countryman General Gio Giorgio Giustiniani, 42  As Paggi stated in a letter sent to Genoa on 18 August 1659: ibid., 209. 43  Ibid., 207. 44  José da Costa Miranda, ‘Carlo Antonio Paggi, italiano, tradutor de Camões: um genovês em Lisboa seiscentista’, Estudos italianos em Portugal, 45–7 (1982–4), 63–86. 45  For the intricate diplomatic negotiations, see Edgar Prestage, The Diplomatic Relations of Portugal with France, England and Holland from 1640 to 1668 (Watford, 1925). 46 Francesco Luigi Mannuci, L’opera di Carlo Antonio Paggi console genovese nel Portogallo (Rome, 1924), 5. 47  Lusiada Italiana di Carlo Antonio Paggi nobile genovese, Poema eroico del grande Luigi de Camões porthogese, Prencipe de Poeti di Spagna (Lisbon, 1658). 48  Maria Fernanda Mota Gomes, ‘A Primeira Versão Italiana de Os Lusíadas’, Revista da Faculdade de Letras, 2nd series, 19/3 (1953), 49–85; Alessandro Martinengo, ‘Il genovese Carlo Antonio Paggi e la “Lusiada Italiana”’, Annalli Sezione Romanza, 3/1 (1961), 79–99; da Costa Miranda, ‘Carlo Antonio Paggi’. 49  Lusiada Italiana, π3v.

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famous for his involvement in maritime warfare in the Mediterranean.50 This hinges on a cursory labelling of Portuguese as a peripheral language in terms of international communication and the same topics are glossed in the second text, addressed to Giacomo Franzoni, papal treasurer.51 The translation is a truly excellent example of how Paggi negotiated his difficult mission of protecting Genoese commercial interests in Portugal and her empire, whilst not openly recognizing Portuguese sovereignty, which could have jeopardized relations with Spain. Paggi pays lip service to the Portuguese court, whilst using Camões’s text to project Genoa’s maritime ambitions within a global setting. To Giustiniani, Paggi commends his sonnets and odes in Italian praising high-ranking members of Portuguese aristocracy involved in the Restoration government.52 The paratexts of Paggi’s Lusiada Italiana show the extent of his political connections at court at a particularly delicate time for Portugal, after the death of John IV and during the first years of Queen Luisa’s regency. The dedicatees of Paggi’s poems include high ranking officials, such as Raimundo de Lencastre (Duke of Aveiro), Vasco Luís da Gama (descendant of Vasco da Gama, Marquis of Nisa and Count of Vidigueira), Jerónimo de Ataíde (Count of Atouguia), and António de Meneses (Count of Cantanhede).53 Highlighting Paggi’s rapid integration within Portuguese circles, the liminary material also includes texts in praise of the translator by João Soares de Brito (one of the most active critics of Camões in the seventeenth century and author of several apologetic works defending the aesthetics of Camões’s epic poem against its detractors)54 and by Francisco de Santo Agostinho de Macedo,55 himself author of an unpublished Latin translation of The Lusiads, whose Selected Poems include dozens of pages of poetry dedicated to Alexander VII, at whose court he enjoyed considerable status.56 Despite Paggi’s literary interests, the publication of the Lusiada Italiana hides a more far-reaching diplomatic strategy with both local and global aims. Alexander VII was reluctant to support Portugal against Spain on the grounds that it would destroy an important united front of Catholicism at a time of religious conflict. In this context, Paggi goes on to introduce changes in the poem to improve its chances of a positive reception. For example, Paggi introduces a stanza after III. 15: Liguria closes the Italian Peninsula where the land slopes / to the west, where the other / daughter of Janus sits, the other Queen of Italy, / who has for long reigned opposite the other kingdom, / Liguria, who succeeded in dislodging / the Saracens from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the waves of the Iberian Peninsula /: invincible, she fought every one / by herself, relentlessly.57 50  Ibid., π8v–π9r. For Giustiniani, see Kirk, Genoa, 126. 51  Paggi speaks of the ‘oscuritá della lingua’ (obscurity of the language): Lusiada Italiana, π6v. For Franzoni, see Luisa Bertoni, ‘Franzoni, Giacomo’, Dizionario bibliografico degli Italiani, vol. L (Rome, 1998), 289–91. 52  Lusiada Italiana, π5v. 53  Ibid., ππ6r–ππ8r. 54  José Manuel Ventura, João Soares de Brito: um crítico barroco de Camões (Coimbra, 2010). 55  Ilídio de Sousa Ribeiro, Francisco de Santo Agostinho de Macedo (Coimbra, 1951), 7–58. 56  For example Francisco de Santo Agostinho de Macedo, Carmina selecta (Lisbon, 1683), 29–61. Four poems commemorated Alexander’s election and coronation while several others were dedicated to him on the occasion of the conversion of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1655 (385–97). 57  Lusiada Italiana, fo. 41v.

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The passus where this alteration occurs is not innocent either: it corresponds to the well-known geographical description of Europe which culminates with the representation of the Iberian Peninsula as her head and Portugal as her crown.58 Paggi celebrates Genoa for her military efforts against the Ottomans, obliquely criticizing the Venetians’ pragmatic policy of alliance with the Turks. The translation invests this topographical excursus with Genoa’s aspirations within the political map of Europe and the Mediterranean and presents Genoese commercial rivalry with Venice under the guise of service to the Catholic faith.59 This alteration highlights Genoa’s status as a commercial power in the Mediterranean, but Paggi goes further. His decision to translate The Lusiads is significant, given that the poem celebrates da Gama’s pioneering voyage to India, the focus of contemporary Genoese expansionist ambitions. For this reason, Paggi rewrote stanza X. 139, turning it into a celebration of the role of the Genoese Christopher Columbus in the discovery of the Americas. Paggi notes in his address to Giustiniani that Camões’s omission of the Genoese hero had to be amended for posterity: ‘What should be done? To discuss the discovery of the Western Indies and not mention who discovered it?’60 But there is more here than meets the eye: this transformation of Camões’s text occurs in the context of an important prophetic survey of Portuguese imperial territories, including the celebration of the discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese Álvares Cabral in 1500 in the next stanza (X.140). The link which Paggi establishes between Columbus’ discovery of the West Indies and the discovery of Brazil (where Genoese merchants were now involved in trade thanks to the protection of the Portuguese crown) is a subtle move to enhance Genoa’s status as an increasingly global commercial power. Paggi continued to immerse himself in the political and cultural life of Portugal: his letters to Genoa show that he was an astute observer of political events,61 he became a member of the literary Academia dos Generosos (Academy of the Generous),62 and printed other works during his stay in Portugal. Yet, during his appointment, Genoa remained neutral in the Restoration War period, due to her strong historical and commercial links with Spain, which had been strengthened during the period of the Dual Monarchy.63 Paggi used translation to carve a space for himself within the political and cultural elites of the Portuguese court, having successfully negotiated

58  Canto III. 6–20 of Luís de Camões, The Lusiads, trans. Landeg White (Oxford, 1997), 49–52. 59  Paggi depicts Genoa as the guarantor of Christian freedom in the western Mediterranean by including the Tyrrhenian Sea in her maritime sphere of action, while marginalizing Spain’s role in repelling the Ottomans. 60  Lusiada Italiana, A12r. 61  da Costa Miranda, ‘Carlo Antonio Paggi’, 70–3; Nunziatella Alessandrini, ‘Carlo Antonio Paggi a Lisbona (1656–1666): un approccio allo studio delle relazioni diplomatiche fra Genova e il Portogallo’, in Nunziatella Alessandrini, Susana Bastos Mateus, Mariagrazia Russo, and Gaetano Sabatini (eds), ‘Con  gran  mare  e fortuna’:  Circulação de mercadorias, pessoas e ideias entre Portugal e Itália na Época Moderna (Lisbon, 2015), 115–33. 62  da Costa Miranda, ‘Carlo Antonio Paggi,’. 63  Nunziatella Alessandrini, ‘La presenza genovese a Lisbonna negli anni dell’unione delle corone (1580–1640)’, in Manuel Herrero Sánchez, Yasmina R. B. Y. Garfia, Carlo Bitossi, and Dino Puncuh (eds), Génova y la monarquía hispánica (1528–1713), 2 vols (Genoa, 2011), I.73–99.

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a difficult balance between Genoese commercial interests and Portuguese political objectives in the course of his activity as a diplomat and commercial agent. C O N C LU S I O N The versions analysed in the course of this chapter are examples of the uses of translation within different diplomatic contexts, and their survival to this day owes much to publication. Other translations of The Lusiads, also developed in the context of the shifting political and diplomatic alliances in Europe in this period, were not so fortunate: Domingos Fernandes knew French and Italian translations which have yet to be discovered.64 Bernardo Xavier Coutinho has identified frequent references to this French translation in seventeenth-century sources, and has demonstrated how The Lusiads circulated in 1641 at the court of Louis XIV in the context of the visit of the Portuguese ambassador, Vasco Luís da Gama, a leading figure in the Restoration government.65 In his address to Franzoni, Paggi refers to an incomplete Italian translation in Rome,66 and Faria e Sousa also refers to a manuscript Italian translation by a group of Portuguese exiles who took refuge in Italy in 1580 after the Spanish annexation of Portugal.67 Known to Fernandes, Paggi, and to us are the Latin translations, all of them surviving only in manuscript copies, authored by the bishop Tomé de Faria (1622), friar André Baião (1625), and friar Francisco de Santo Agostinho Macedo (completed c.1647). Macedo’s translation (which praised Paggi’s 1658 translation) was commissioned by the Marquis of Nisa in the course of his embassy visit to Paris and, according to surviving manuscript evidence, it would have included a Latin commentary (which was lost) and a biography of Camões (which survives in an eighteenth-century copy).68 The disappearance or non-publication of these translations may well have been the consequence of changing political alliances, a more than likely possibility in the case of the French and Italian translations. The other explanation has to do with the demands of the book market. The lack of interest in a Latin translation by Macedo in Britain is a possibility: Macedo accompanied the Count of Penaguião in his embassy to England in 1652 and the imminent publication of his Latin translation was being advertised there in 1654 in the edition of his theological work Scrinium Divi Augustini, printed by Thomas Rycroft.69 Despite the negotiations with Oliver Cromwell’s government, Macedo was actively wooing potential patrons among the defeated royalist faction, including Sir Francis Browne, 3rd Vicount Montagu, dedicatee of another of Macedo’s theological works.70 A growing consciousness of the cultural contribution of the royalist 64  See n. 1. 65  Bernardo Xavier Coutinho, Ensaios: Varia camoniana e outros estudos (Oporto, 1941), 65–71. 66  Lusiada Italiana, π6v. 67 Valeria Tocco, ‘Recepção de Camões na Literatura Italiana’, in Vítor Aguiar e Silva (ed.), Dicionário de Camões (Lisbon, 2011), 815 col. A. 68  Earle, ‘As traduções . . . para Latim’, 157–64. 69  Earle, ‘As traduções . . . para Inglês’, 165–74. 70 Ibid.

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cause to the enrichment of English letters may have hampered the publication of Macedo’s Latin version in Britain and opened the doors for Fanshawe’s own publication in 1655. Conversely, the existence of Macedo’s Latin translation could have prevented Fanshawe from completing his own Latin version. By 1664, then, The Lusiads had been translated into the most important languages in Europe and this chain of translation can only be understood by analysing the diplomatic agents and contexts which shaped the translations’ appearance. Though pertaining to a literary genre with a limited non-elite readership,71 the potential harnessed by Camões’s text as the symbol of Portuguese imperialism made it an excellent ‘textual ambassador’ in the course of the political disputes which shaped the map of European imperialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The translations discussed in this chapter confirmed crowning moments of diplomatic activity, celebrated new political orders, and were instrumental to the acquisition of political and social capital by diplomats; these texts were used as instruments in the negotiation of difficult diplomatic missions abroad or as ­political statements in internal civil wars. The overlapping of diplomatic, literary, and commercial communities and activities is crucial to our understanding of this process of cultural brokerage, whereby national identities could be carved across Europe through the recasting of texts. 71 Asensio, Estudios portugueses, 303, 306.

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7 Translation and Cultural Convergence in Late Sixteenth-century Scotland and Huguenot France Peter Auger I N T RO D U C T I O N The impact of French on Scots language and literature is well-known.1 During the period of the Auld Alliance (c.1295–1560) French ideas, analogues, and parallels moulded Scottish literary culture, as seen in medieval romances and the works of Robert Henryson, Gavin Douglas, William Dunbar, and David Lyndsay among others.2 Mary, Queen of Scots, who was ‘effectively a Frenchwoman by upbringing’, embodied the Franco-Scottish literary connection in the mid-sixteenth century. She was bilingual in French and English, and wrote poetry in French from when she was seventeen until the year of her death.3 The celebrated scholar George Buchanan was similarly immersed in French culture. His ‘outlook and his humanist ideals were shaped [. . .] by his sojourns in Paris and Bordeaux’ and the Pléiade, a group of French poets whose major figures included Joachim Du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, was a nourishing milieu for his poetry.4 Even once the religious and dynastic crises of the later sixteenth century had removed the mutual benefits of a continued political alliance between Catholic France and Scotland, French writing still provided vital precedents for the cultural renaissance that James VI (Mary’s son and Buchanan’s tutee) encouraged at the Scottish Court in the final decades of the century.5 The historical proximity of two cultures like those of Scotland and France creates opportunities for closer cultural convergence at moments of political significance. 1  For example, Mairi Robinson (ed.), Concise Scots Dictionary (Edinburgh, 1999), esp. xv and J. Derrick McClure, Why Scots Matters (Edinburgh, 1988; rev. edn 1997), 39–42. 2  William Calin, The Lily and the Thistle (Toronto, 2014). 3  Julian Goodare, ‘Mary [Mary Stewart] (1542–1587), Queen of Scots’, ODNB; Bittersweet Within my Heart: The Collected Poems of Mary, Queen of Scots, ed. Robin Bell (London, 1992). 4  I. D. McFarlane, ‘George Buchanan and France’, in J. C. Ireson, I. D. McFarlane, and Garnet Rees (eds), Studies in French Literature Presented to H. W. Lawton (Manchester, 1968), 223, 231. 5  See, for example, R. D. S. Jack, ‘Poetry under King James VI’, in R. D. S. Jack (ed.), History of Scottish Literature, Vol. 1 (Aberdeen, 1988), 125–39.

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The term ‘cultural convergence’ is used by scholars in International Relations and related disciplines to refer to the contested thesis that national cultures adapt to international cultural movements over time through processes such as globalization.6 This essay is devoted to literary gestures towards such assimilation (distinct from evidence of actual, permanent convergence) that specifically achieved the diplomatic ends of expressing shared cultural identity and strengthening political ties. Poetry was a suitably prestigious cultural form in early modern Europe for proclaiming such solidarity through choice of subject matter and poetics, through reflections on current affairs that built common understanding between nations, and through gift-offerings of poems to foreign partners. A good example of such uses from early modern Franco-Scottish poetic relations is Buchanan’s response to the Duke of Guise re-capturing Calais from the English in January 1558 in his Latin laudatory verse ‘Ad invictissimum Franciae Regem Henricum II post victos Caletes’ (‘To the unconquered King Henry II of France after his victory at Calais’), a work that Philip Ford reads as evidence that at this time ‘poetry was being used as an important strategic weapon in the fields both of international politics and of the domestic religious conflicts’.7 As this essay will show, poetry still served a strategic function in subsequent decades once confessional divisions in France had hardened after the bloodshed of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. Literary texts facilitated the ideological formation of international Protestantism by generating cultural capital that increased the movement’s confidence and sense of identity. In particular, poetry could symbolize unity between the Protestant communities in Scotland and France, helping them discover a shared mentality, build personal friendships that created new opportunities for political communication, and promote their alliance abroad. Such poetic strategies for building a transnational community with a shared confessional identity are broadly similar to the methods for constructing ‘forms of nationhood’ that Richard Helgerson has described: both united literary form and content, identifying characteristic discursive and prosodic forms while appealing to a shared sense of the past.8 Examining transnational rather than national communities leads to two significant shifts in emphasis, however. The first is that imitating and translating poetry must be foregrounded as a primary route for pursuing these aims across linguistic and national boundaries. The other, as José María Pérez Fernández stresses, is that these cultural interactions within and between individual courts could be driven by self-interest, fear, and aggression in face of a common enemy as well as more empathic and pacific intentions.9 A good earlier example of an Anglo-French poetic exchange used to pursue hostile political agendas is the late-fifteenth century French humanist ambassador Robert Gaguin’s

6  It is challenged, for example, in Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cosmopolitan Communications: Cultural Diversity in a Globalized World (Cambridge, 2009). 7  Philip Ford, ‘George Buchanan’s Court Poetry and the Pléiade’, French Studies, 34 (1980), 140. 8  Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992). 9  See Pérez Fernández above 93–6.

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interactions with poets at Henry VII’s court.10 In these ways poetry, especially poetry in translation, provided an arena for the international Protestant movement to deal with its allies and adversaries. Early modern translations written in diplomatic settings were a kind of oratorical act designed to make persuasive appeals in specific social, cultural, and political circumstances.11 Translation held the expressive capacity for nuanced performance on the diplomatic stage: just as early modern diplomats could signal meaning indirectly through body language, gesture, costume, and other theatrical techniques, so too they could communicate in poems and translations through prosody, structure, diction, subject matter, rhetorical figures, and page layout. This essay identifies such signals at play in James VI’s diplomatic-poetic performances of the poetry of Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas and Du Bartas’s reciprocal translations that affirmed the existence of a shared literary culture between the courts of James VI and the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre (who would become Henry IV in 1589). James and Du Bartas’s literary friendship began when the Scottish King’s translation of Du Bartas’s L’Uranie (1574, ‘Urania’) appeared in his first collection, Essayes of a Prentise (1584). The poems that were subsequently written and exchanged in manuscript in the late 1580s and then printed in his second collection, His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises (1591)—which included James’s translation of Du Bartas’s ‘Les Furies’ from La Seconde Semaine (‘The Second Week’), his verse epic The Lepanto, and Du Bartas’s translation of it, La Lepanthe—adopt a sophisticated repertoire of literary techniques that overtly bound Scots and French literature together. Through these translations the poets discovered a common voice and literary identity that they could promote to others. They were ‘thick’ translations that not only transferred the words and meanings of particular phrases across languages but also re-created the context of French Protestant suffering.12 Reading these translations as cultural diplomatic objects gives us new ways to understand how they created meaning when they were composed and published. The first section of this essay identifies some of the diplomatic gestures present in James and Du Bartas’s literary encounters in texts which date from two significant years in Franco-Scottish political relations: 1587, when Du Bartas came to Scotland to discuss a possible marriage with Catherine of Bourbon, Henry of Navarre’s sister, and the two poets exchanged poetry in manuscript; and 1591, a year after Du Bartas’s death when the poems were printed in Edinburgh and La Rochelle as Protestant rulers were raising troops to assist Henry in northern France. The second section explores how the equally timely re-publication of versions of these texts in England (1603, 1604) and the Low Countries (1593, 1603) were opportunities for others to announce their participation in the same cause. In particular, the 10  David Carlson, ‘Politicizing Tudor Court Literature: Gaguin’s Embassy and Henry VII’s Humanists’ Response’, StP, 85 (1988), 279–304. 11  On translation and oratory, see Warren Boutcher, ‘The Renaissance’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Oxford, 2000), 49. See also Raymond Cohen, Theatre of Power: The Art of Diplomatic Signalling (London, 1987). 12  Kwame Anthony Appiah, ‘Thick Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edn (London, 2004), 389–401. See Pérez Fernández, 93.

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Dutch ambassador Adriaan Damman used his Latin translation of Du Bartas’s most celebrated work, the creation epic La Sepmaine (‘The Week’), to expand the community of readers around James and Du Bartas. Adopting a poetics of convergence allowed them to participate in the same cultural exchange and so strengthen the cultural foundations of international Protestantism and burnish James’s credentials as the movement’s protector at home and abroad. T R A N S L AT I O N A N D D I P L O M AT I C S I G N A L L I N G As a member of Henry of Navarre’s court and one of Europe’s leading poets after the international success of La Sepmaine (1578, a poem that retells the story of the Creation, based on the account in the Book of Genesis and enriched with natural philosophical information) and the first part of its sequel La Seconde Semaine (1584, of which four parts were completed that narrate the earliest eras of world history from Adam to King David), Du Bartas was a worthy interlocutor with the King of Scotland. Du Bartas’s poetry, like James’s, had courtly origins. The idea for his first collection, La Muse Chrestienne (1574, ‘The Christian Muse’), had come from Henry’s mother, Jeanne d’Albret. After Jeanne died in 1572, Du Bartas found an alternative patroness for the poem in the new (Catholic) Queen of Navarre, Marguerite de Valois.13 He continued to compose occasional poetry for Henry throughout his career, including ‘Accueil de la Reine de Navarre’ (‘The Queen of Navarre’s Welcome’), written when Catherine de Medici and Marguerite visited Gascony in late 1578, and ‘Cantique D’Yvry’ (‘Hymn of Ivry’), which celebrated Henry IV’s decisive victory at Ivry in March 1590.14 James initiated their literary friendship by translating Du Bartas’s L’Uranie, a poem in which the Christian muse Urania convinces the poet of the need for a renewal of scriptural verse. L’Uranie appears as the first item after the dedications in Essayes of a Prentise, making Du Bartas, whom James eulogizes as a ‘deuine and Illuster Poëte’ in his preface, the most prominent of the book’s French voices. Du Bellay and Ronsard can also be heard in the King’s brief poetic treatise, Reulis and Cautelis (‘Rules and Directions’).15 Despite these French presences the collection’s primary purpose was domestic. It promoted literary activity at the Scottish court to readers in the British Isles, who included English recipients of personalized copies

13  The Works of Du Bartas, ed. Urban Tigner Holmes, Jr et al., 3 vols (Chapel Hill, 1935–40), I.10, 212–13, II.3–5; Katherine S. Maynard, ‘The Faces of Judith: Nationhood and Patronage in La Judit of Guillaume Salluste du Bartas’, Romanic Review, 100 (2009), 235–47. 14  Works of Du Bartas, I.477–81, 490–505. A printing of the ‘Cantique’ in Lyon by Jean Tholosan dated 1594 is paired with a poem to the king celebrating his victory at Coutras in 1587, which may also be by Du Bartas but is not printed in Holmes’ edition (I thank Una McIlvenna for drawing my attention to this text). 15  Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh, 1955), I.xx–xxv (xxiii). Quotations from James’s poetry and prose prefaces are from Craigie’s edition; further page and line references are given in the main text.

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such as William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s closest advisor.16 The Essayes also created an opening for Du Bartas to publicize James’s support in France, which he apparently sought to do in July 1585 by arranging for L’Uranie to be printed with James’s translation and Du Bartas’s own translation of James’s ‘Schort Poem on Tyme’.17 From this informal engagement grew a larger cultural diplomatic initiative in the late 1580s. The clearest evidence of the involvement of other elite political figures in their continued literary exchange is the correspondence sent around the time of Du Bartas’s visit to Scotland in the summer of 1587. James had sent an invitation to Du Bartas and Henry in early 1587. The French King wrote back from La Rochelle on 10 April accepting the request and alluding to ‘autres partycularytés’ to be mentioned to the King, i.e. negotiations for a marriage with Catherine.18 Bringing one of France’s most highly esteemed poets to Scotland was a significant cultural diplomatic event in itself that was marked with due ceremony and courtesy. The diarist James Melville writes that Du Bartas: cam in Scotland to sie the King, of whome he was receavit according to his worthines, interteined honourablie, and liberalie propyned [i.e. presented with gifts] and dimissed in the hervest [dismissed in the autumn], to his Majestie’s grait praise, sa lange as the French toung is used and understuid in the warld.19

Melville gives an account of Du Bartas’s excursion to St Andrews in which the bishops, led by Archbishop Patrick Adamson, prepared sermons and a banquet for the visitors. The French ambassador Courcelles reported that such largesse continued until the very end of the visit, when James ‘gratefyed Du Bartas at his departuer with a chaine of 1000v. and as much in redie monie, made him knight, and accompanyed him to the sea side, wher he made him promise to retourn againe’.20 Reports survive from Henry III’s secretary of state as well as from Scottish noblemen who wrote about the event in private.21 Though the marriage never took place, James and Du Bartas remained in communication until the latter’s death in July 1590. In his last letters, Du Bartas expressed his feeling of loss at being parted from James and regret that his country had not been as fortunate as Scotland was in its monarch.22 Poetry provided a reason for Du Bartas and James to keep writing to each other and talk about the common cultural ground on which they stood. It was probably 16  Sandra J. Bell, ‘James VI’s Cultural Policy’, in Peter C. Herman (ed.), Reading Monarch’s Writing (Tempe, AZ, 2002), 155–77; Sebastiaan Verweij, ‘ “Booke, go thy wayes”: The Publication, Reading, and Reception of James VI/I’s Early Poetic Works’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77 (2014), 115. 17  Works of Du Bartas, I.20, 205–6. 18  Ibid., 204. Henri Durel, ‘Du Bartas, Jacques Ier et Francis Bacon’, Cahiers de l’Europe Classique & Néo-Latine, 3 (1987), 75–110 (a facsimile of the letter is printed between 78 and 79); BL Add. MS 38846, fo. 18. Gilles Banderier, ‘Le Séjour Écosssais de Du Bartas: Une Lettre Inédite D’Henri de Navarre à Jacques VI’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 63 (2001), 307. 19  The Autobiography and Diary of Mr James Melvill, ed. Robert Pitcairn (Edinburgh, 1842), 255. 20  Extract from the Despatches of M. Courcelles, ed. Robert Bell (Edinburgh, 1828), 80. 21  Ibid., 80. Cited in Peter Auger, ‘Du Bartas’ Visit to England and Scotland in 1587’, Notes and Queries, 59 (2012), 505–8, nn.3, 6, 12. 22  Gilles Banderier, ‘La Correspondance de Du Bartas’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 68 (2006), 122; The Warrender Papers, ed. by Annie I. Cameron, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1931–2), II.96.

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on arrival in Scotland that James received an exclusive copy of the new Third and Fourth Days of La Seconde Semaine dedicated to him.23 The two sections omitted from that manuscript, ‘Les Trophees’ (ii.iv.1) and ‘La Magnificence’ (ii.iv.2), were sent separately to James in 1589 and both contained references to Du Bartas’s happy visit to Scotland.24 Such insertions, conscious of a Scottish readership (and some of which Melville annotated in his copy), announced his poetry as Protestant verse directed particularly towards Scotland as well to French and other Protestant readerships.25 In addition to these references in Du Bartas’s original verse, there are sustained gestures towards poetic convergence in James and Du Bartas’s imitations and translations of each other’s work, especially Lepanto and Lepanthe. James’s Lepanto is a thousand-line poem in the grand style that celebrates Don John of Austria’s triumph over the Ottomans at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. The poem’s political intentions have been disputed. Peter Herman is one of several critics who detect ecumenical overtures to Catholic Spain in the poem’s subject matter, supposedly ‘a strategy for maintaining maximum diplomatic advantage while avoiding a firm commitment to either side’.26 But the rhetorical thrust of James’s preface explicitly seeks to maintain diplomatic advantage by demonstrating solidarity with French Protestants alone, a reading advanced in recent work by Jamie Reid-Baxter and Astrid Stilma.27 In that preface James wrote that he had begun writing the poem in the same summer that the Treaty of Nemours (‘the league’) had been signed, which restricted the rights of Protestants in France: The nature then of this Poëme is an argument, à minore ad majus, largely intreated by a Poetike comparison, being to the writing hereof mooued, by the stirring vppe of the league and cruell persecution of the Protestants in all countries, at the very first raging whereof, I compiled this Poëme, as the exhortation to the persecuted in the hinmost eight lines thereof doth plainely testifie, being both begun and ended in the same Summer, wherein the league was published in France.  (198)

In the previous sentences James denied that his epic poem was written ‘in praise of a forraine Papist bastard’, despite rumours based on copies that had already been allowed to circulate. Situating the poem in its specific historical moment of French Protestant oppression activated its diplomatic relevance.

23  BL, Royal MS 19 A XI. 24  Warrender Papers, II.9: ii.iv.1.875–6, ii.iv.2.1273–92. 25  Les Trophees (British Library classmark C. 189 d. 8/1 and 2), B6v. On Melville and this copy, see Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘The Nyne Muses, an unknown Renaissance sonnet sequence: John Dykes and the Gowrie Conspiracy of 1600’, in K. Dekker and A. A. MacDonald (eds), Royalty, Rhetoric and Reality (Paris, 2005), 197–218. 26 Peter  C.  Herman, ‘ “Best of Poets, Best of Kings”: King James VI and I and the Scene of Monarchic Verse’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds), Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit, 2002), 81. See also Robert Appelbaum, ‘War and Peace in The Lepanto of James VI and I’, Modern Philology, 97 (2000), 333–63. 27  Jamie Reid-Baxter, ‘ “Scotland will be the ending of all Empires”: Mr Thomas Murray (1564–1623) and King James VI and I’, in Steve Boardman and Julian Goodare (eds), Kings, Lords and Men in Scotland and Britain: Essays in Honour of Jenny Wormald (Edinburgh, 2014), 331; Astrid Stilma, A King Translated (Farnham, 2012), ch. 3.

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It was appropriate that Lepanto’s chief historical source, François de Belleforest’s translation of Pietro Bizzarri’s historical account in Cyprium Bellum (‘Cypriot War’), was French and that the poem has close parallels with James’s translation of Du Bartas’s ‘The Furies’ from La Seconde Semaine.28 Though there is no conclusive proof that the translation of ‘The Furies’ was written before Lepanto, the translation is placed first in Poeticall Exercises and James refers to them as twinned works, identifying both in the preface to His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises as the fruit of his ‘young and tender yeares’ (98). ‘The Furies’ is introduced as ‘a viue mirror of this last and most decreeped age’ (98) in which the poet describes the working of God’s providential wrath on earth through hunger, war, and sickness. A prefatory translation of the ‘Exord’ to the La Seconde Semaine (i.e. the opening of the first section, ‘Eden’) echoes Du Bartas’s invocation to the ‘mightie God’ (l. 1) and even repeats the dedication to Henry of Navarre (‘O SACRED Floure-delis’, line 33) that praises his military strength. James’s translation imitates the violence of the poem’s imagery and diction as, for example, when describing War’s arrival: THE warre comes after, bruzing lawes, And bruzing maners all, Loue-tears, shed-blood, and burning Innes, And raizing euery wall.  (lines 545–8)

Lepanto takes up the same providential perspective as ‘Les Furies’ and quietly brings Belleforest’s translated retelling into line with Du Bartas’s worldview, as the following three examples illustrate. When Belleforest recommends that a general should retreat in adverse circumstances, such as when running low on money or food (‘d’argent, ou de viures’), James instead takes the presence of two of the Furies, sickness and famine, as a divine omen that makes falling back advisable: ‘For sicknes sore or famine great | Then best is to abide’ (lines 227–8, cf. Craigie, I.328). James also isolates the divine agency present at Lepanto when he truncates the list of the soldiers’ qualities in Don John’s speech to his soldiers (‘les richesses, l’honneur, la gloire, la liberté du pais, la foy, & religion Chrestienne’ [‘riches, honour, glory, liberty of peace, faith, and the Christian religion’]) to focus attention on ‘the glorie of God in earth’ (line 489, cf. Craigie, I.331). Finally, public acts of thanksgiving after the battle was won are re-located in James’s telling away from Italian Catholic churches (‘tous s’en allerent à l’Eglise’) to the marketplace, in this way emphasizing the will of individual believers: ‘At last the joyfull tidings came, | Which such a gladnes bred, | That Matrons graue, and Maids modest, | The Market place bespred’ (lines 873–6, cf. Craigie, I.334). The Choruses of the Venetians and the Angels that follow—the latter alluding to the ‘errour vaine’ of transubstantiation, the Catholic belief in a ‘God of bread’ (line 986)—ensure that the reader does not miss the whole poem’s Protestant orientation. And, as promised in the preface, the poem’s conclusion (plausibly a later addition given James’s fears about the poem’s reception) 28  Pietro Bizzarri, Histoire de la guerre, trans. by François de Belleforest (Paris, 1573). The text is quoted extensively in Poems of James VI, ed. Craigie, who discusses the dating of ‘The Furies’ translation on xlviii–xlix.

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‘declares fully my intention in the whole’ to offer support and solidarity to his French Protestant counterparts: Then though the Antichristian sect Against you do conjure, He doth the bodie better loue Then shadow be ye sure: Do ye resist with confidence, That God shall be your stay And turne it to your comfort, and His glorie now and ay  (lines 1025–32)

This exhortation to ‘resist with confidence’ acknowledges Lepanto’s significance as a common reference point for all Christians that transcended confessional divisions. In this telling it became a meditation on the salvation that will greet all ‘Christians true’, directed at French Protestant sufferers. These touches to unite the ideologies of ‘The Furies’ and Lepanto have counterparts in James’s form and rhetoric. Both poems are composed in rhymed fourteeners with line breaks after the eighth syllable that imitate Du Bartas’s alexandrines (with medial caesura after the sixth syllable). In the translation, James keeps the basic shape of Du Bartas’s line: though individual periods in both poems can run on for many lines, each fourteener line and couplet most often contain a complete clause and only rarely do strong caesuras fall elsewhere in the line. This form encouraged a conservative method of translation, as James had advocated in his Reulis and Cautelis, that could retain the French caesuras while allowing an extra two syllables per line in translation to prevent the sense being trimmed. Both poems are printed with identical lineation, line numbering, and use of running headers. Indeed, James’s voices as translator and epic poet can be hard to distinguish: O now inflame my furious Spreit, That furiously I may These Fyrues (mankinds plagues allace!) With furious Pen display. (Translator’s Invocation, lines 9–12) [I pray thee Father] To make thy holy Spreit my Muse, And eik my pen inflame, Aboue my skill to write this worke To magnifie thy name (Lepanto, lines 21–4)

Later in the poems, evocations of howling employ a range of stylistic effects that are found in both throughout, including alliteration, asyndeton, repetition, vivid descriptions, and a climax at the end of the period: Make murmuring, loudlie howle and bray, And rummish fast and rore. Such Pellmell dinnes, and ringing reards, And tempests strange to heare. (‘The Furies’, lines 491–5) The piteous plaints, the hideous howles, The greeuous cries and mones,

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Of millions wounded sundry waies, But dying all at once (Lepanto, lines 625–8)

The words ‘bloodie’, ‘cruel’, and ‘horror’ are typical of shared items of vocabulary elsewhere in the two works. James makes a typically Bartasian digression when he compares warriors preparing for battle to wrights, smiths, glass-makers, painters, and other artisans getting ready for a working day (lines 431–40). Precision with factual detail is another common characteristic of ‘Les Furies’ (for example, in its description of leprosy, hydropsy, anorexia, and other diseases) and Lepanto, as in its accurate estimates of the numbers of troops at the battle (lines 285–9).29 In these ways Lepanto was coded as a poem with structural, stylistic, and ideological principles identical to Du Bartas’s ‘Furies’. It was fitting, then, that Lepanto should have become a French poem shortly afterwards when Du Bartas translated it as La Lepanthe. In a prose preface to the reader Du Bartas praises James’s grandeur and admirable spirit (‘la grandeur, ains l’admirable esprit du Roy d’Escosse’), explains that he felt compelled (‘j’ay este contrainte’) to translate the poem into French, and excuses differences between the two texts that arose when James made further changes to the Scots poem after receiving the French version.30 The translation begins with an original sixteen-line address to James that is printed on a separate page as the ‘Preface du Traducteur A L’Autheur’ (‘Preface from the Translator to the Author’) in the Edinburgh edition and as the opening lines of the poem in the La Rochelle edition printed in the same year. Often the effect of the translation is to hear Du Bartas writing poetry that sounds uncannily unlike Du Bartas. In the following couplet, for example, the pious insistence that only the works of God are a suitable subject for poetry and the use of first-person pronouns and abstract nouns is typical of Du Bartas, but the lines are oddly prosaic, lacking the sense of wonder and might characteristic of his original poetry: ‘Je chante de grand Dieu la justice et bonté, | Un exploit de ses mains non encore chanté’ (lines 17–18; ‘I sing of great God the justice and goodness, | A deed of his hands never yet described in verse’). Du Bartas’s French often departs from the Scots in order to rewrite lines in a voice that adds rhetorical colour and strengthens the imagery, often in slightly different places: This speech did so the Armie please, And so their minds did mooue, That clincks of Swordes, and rattle of Pikes, His speaches did approoue. (Lepanto, lines 553–6) Le son enflambe-cœurs de ces motz heroïques, Est suivi quand et quand d’un branslement de piques, Du tin-tin des estocs, et d’une voix qui sort De tout l’ost sans ardeur, sans force, sans accord. (Lepanthe, lines 369–72)31 29  The figures are, as Craigie observes (I.330, 333), consistent with Belleforest and also agree with Ferrante Caracciolo’s I commentarii delle guerre (Florence, 1581). 30  His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres (Edinburgh, 1591), G4r. For comparisons between James and Du Bartas’s poems, see Poems of James VI, I.283–9. 31  A more literal translation is: ‘The enflaming-hearts sound of these heroic words, | is followed immediately by a swinging of pikes, | by the clinking of swords and by a sound which comes | from the whole army without ardour, without force, without consent.’

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‘Tin-tin’ for ‘clincks’ shows Du Bartas acknowledging their shared poetics by translating back into French prominent literary devices in the Scots that are themselves based on French. This occurs again shortly afterwards: ‘Et leur ton ton-tonant erre: & prompt, rompt le rond | Du plancher estoillé’ (lines 415–16), translating James’s intrusively alliterative and onomatopoeic (and, in these ways, Bartasian) ‘Like thunder rearding rumbling raue | With roares the highest Heauen’ (lines 621–2). Such self-conscious poetic effects evoke not just the crashing of thunder but poetic figures that each writer recognizes in the works of the other. The printed editions flag up this particular exchange with a marginal note recording that Du Bartas’s intention was to imitate the King’s onomatopoeia: ‘I’ay voulu icy imiter l’Onomatopœe de l’autheur’ (O1r, ‘I wanted here to imitate the author’s onomatopoeia’). This moment marks the most blatant of the many gestures that James and Du Bartas made towards a poetics of convergence attesting to a single Protestant tradition of French and Scots divine poetry written in the grand style. F O R M I N G A P ROT E S TA N T L I T E R A RY C O M M U N I T Y This marginal annotation was a strong visual marker of the poetic coalescence between the leading literary figures of Scotland and Huguenot France. It was timely to promote the congruence in the two editions of La Lepanthe printed in Edinburgh and La Rochelle in 1591 because an international coalition involving German princes, England, and Scotland was being gathered to provide support to Henry in northern France.32 Printing editions in both nations helped to broadcast the literary unity between Navarre and Scotland widely beyond both courts and they were conceivably planned as a single publishing event to project James’s support for international Protestantism in France, England, the Low Countries, and Germany.33 Robert Waldegrave, the King’s printer, must have been working under instruction when the Poeticall Exercises were printed early in 1591, probably before Jerome Haultin printed ‘Les Trophees’, ‘La Magnificence’, and Lepanthe together in La Rochelle (see Craigie, I.282). Perhaps Haultin was too: Du Bartas could have given advice about the publication’s timing around the time that the ‘extraict du privilege du roy’ (‘extract from the King’s privilege’) was completed in May 1590 (two months before the poet died). Haultin had received a copy of the poems when Du Bartas travelled through La Rochelle on his return from Scotland and knew to address the print edition to the King of Scotland.34 The printer’s preface specifically recognizes the link between Lepanto and these poems as belonging to James, emphasized in having the address to the king at the ‘La Magnificence’ on the leaf preceding the start of Du Bartas’s translation of the same king’s epic poem. 32  David Scott Gehring, Anglo-German Relations and the Protestant Cause (London, 2013), 133. 33  For evidence that the Poeticall Exercises was sold at the Frankfurt Book Fair, see Roderick J. Lyall, ‘The Marketing of James VI and I: Scotland, England and the Continental Book Trade’, Quaerendo, 32 (2002), 211. 34  Les Trophees ou première partie du quatrième jour de la Sepmaine (La Rochelle, 1591), a2r.

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The three poems in Haultin’s publication serve as a French counterpart to His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises. New readers witnessing the collaboration between James and Du Bartas now had the creative resources to express their literary and diplomatic accord with Scotland and France too. Two Dutchmen took advantage of the opportunity around the time of the Spanish Blanks plot in late 1592 when the discovery of letters hinting at a conspiracy between Scotland and Catholic Spain gave the Low Countries reason to doubt how durable Scotland’s military support would be.35 The Protestant minister Abraham Van der Myl produced a Dutch translation of James’s Lepanto that adopted similar strategies to Du Bartas in expressing solidarity with the Scottish King. As Astrid Stilma explains, Den Slach van Lepanten (1593) is described on the title-page as a poem by the King of Scotland and offers lofty tribute to James in a prefatory ode from the translator to James VI (‘Een Ode des Oversetters van Iacobo den Sesten, Coninck van Schotland’). This translation presents James as addressing the Dutch: ‘the Dutch translator’s message of comfort to European Protestants is presented as having been author(iz)ed by the King of Scotland’.36 Van der Myl’s reading of the poem, guided in its content and style by Du Bartas’s French, amplified the ferocity of the battle, and ‘subtly but consistently emphasized God’s role in the outcome of the battle’ such that the translation is even more direct in its endorsement of the Protestant cause than the original poem was: ‘Van der Myl’s Protestant reading of the poem is a perfectly valid one that is supported by the text, but it was also a politically desirable reading that may well have been prompted to some extent by a wish to believe that James would ultimately favour the Dutch.’37 In emulating the poem’s ferocious rhetoric and its providential outlook, the translation added a Dutch partner to James’s Protestant literary coalition. Stilma notes that Van der Myl had friends in common with the other Dutch writer to participate in James and Du Bartas’s project. Adriaan Damman was effectively a cultural attaché in Scotland, a scholar of classical languages who came to Edinburgh in 1589 and later became Ambassador of the States General of the Netherlands to Scotland.38 He had composed Latin poems to celebrate James’s marriage to Anne of Denmark, printed as Schediasmata (Edinburgh, 1590). The Poeticall Exercises printed in the following year contained Dutch representation through Damman’s commendatory poem in Latin and Greek. Damman’s work as cultural diplomat continued through his Latin translation of La Sepmaine, Bartasias, which survives in a print edition dated 1600 and a fair manuscript copy from 1596.39 A full-page dedication in both texts indicates that the poem was sent as a gift to James and prefatory verses show that the translation was also read by an erudite group of Damman’s acquaintances who received the poem and wrote in praise of it. These included readers in Scotland (Thomas Jack, John Johnston), 35 Stilma, A King Translated, 122.   36 Ibid., 121.   37  Ibid., 114, 123. 38  Ibid., 102, n. 66; Katrien A. L. Daemen-De Gelder, ‘The Letters of Adriaan Damman (†1605), Dutch Ambassador at the Court of James VI and I’, Lias, 31 (2004), 239–48. 39  Ibid., 242–3. National Library of Scotland [NLS], Adv. MS 19.2.10.

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England (Robert Naunton), the Low Countries (Thomas Seget), and the Swiss Confederacy (Georg Rataller).40 Evidence from the manuscript copy reveals other methods through which Damman made his translation converge with James and Du Bartas’s poems. The first is that Damman made substantial corrections in the manuscript copy to produce a text closer to Du Bartas’s French and to James’s conservative principles of translation described in Reulis and Cautelis; gone in manuscript revisions and the printed edition are Damman’s expansions on Du Bartas’s French and his new verse arguments that introduce each section. Second, just as the Poeticall Exercises keyed the composition of Lepanto to a specific political incident, so Damman sought sympathy from his readers by situating his translation among the violence in Protestant Europe that he had experienced. A letter to the reader omitted in the print edition dates the translation’s composition back to 1584, when the author sought comfort in translating Du Bartas while he was in Ghent as the Catholic forces of Alessando Farnese, Regent of the Netherlands for Philip II of Spain, took control of the city. A passage inserted in the manuscript text, which survives in print, re-focuses the translation to 1596, when Damman lost his eldest son Theophilus, who was a captain who died defending the city of Hulst. In the prefatory letter inserted in the manuscript and later printed John Johnston offers condolences to Damman on his loss.41 In these ways Damman re-purposed his translation so that through revision and dissemination he could make a Dutch contribution to a shared international Protestant culture. James’s accession to the English throne in 1603 led his Lepanto to be published again to advertise the king’s poetic talents and Protestant values. In that year His Maiesties Lepanto, or, Heroicall Song was re-printed in London as a new source for James’s English subjects to learn about their monarch. In the same year in France, the final four parts of Les Suittes de la Seconde Semaine (‘The Continuation of the Second Week’) were printed with a dedication to James. And in the Low Countries a new edition of Den Slach van Lepanten made reference to the King’s new title. Finally, Thomas Murray’s Naupactiados (1604), a Latin translation of Lepanto, also propagated a Scoto-French Protestant poetics that publicized James’s concern for international Protestantism.42 English readers before this time may have had the edition of ‘Les Furies’ listed in the Stationers’ Register in 1589 to read, but more likely had to wait for copies of the Poeticall Exercises to travel to London. This happened rapidly enough for Gabriel Harvey to comment in Pierces Supererogation (1593, G4r) that James: hath readd a most valorous Martial Lecture vnto himselfe in his owne victorious Lepanto, a short, but heroicall worke, in meeter, but royal meeter, fitt for a Dauids harpe. Lepanto, first the glory of Christendome against the Turke; and now the garland of a soueraine crowne. 40 Ibid., fos. 227v, 11r, 13r, 228r (Rataller’s poem is absent); Bartasias (Edinburgh, 1600), B6r, B5v, B8r, B6v. 41  NLS Adv. MS 19.2.10, fos. 179a, 10r. 42  See Reid-Baxter, ‘Scotland will be the ending of all Empires’.

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Harvey, who also alludes to the King’s translations from Du Bartas, had read the poem as a ‘martial lecture’, royal and divine poetry that celebrated the ‘glory of Christendome’ and ‘the garland of a soueraine crowne’ that projected James’s support for international Protestantism abroad. The poem was still projecting these messages a decade after its composition. C O N C LU S I O N Yvonne Bellenger describes Lepanto as ‘a European epic [. . .] like a digest of the European idea in the sixteenth century’.43 It was an idea of a Protestant Western Europe that the discursive forms of these poems and their paratexts produced and they did so at moments of particular opportunity or threat. There is no easy way of knowing how much interest Lepanto and its translation may have aroused in the years between the publication of its editions, or how interest may have suffered once Henry of Navarre, who had become King of France in 1589, converted to Catholicism in 1593 for the sake of national unity. More could be learnt about the dynamics and processes of Franco-British poetic relations by comparing them with those of Italian-British interactions, for example through the activities of Giacomo Castelvetro, James’s Italian tutor, to share intelligence and build contacts. The moments in a reception history discussed here, though individually significant, should not be assumed to connect into a continuous narrative of responses to these French and Scottish texts. This essay has emphasized poetic hints, signals, and gestures that were appropriate to specific moments in time and so probably had greatest impact when they were composed and published. There were wider ripples in contemporary culture: around the time that Lepanto was re-printed in 1603 there are other references to the Ottoman wars in the Mediterranean, most famously William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), which Emrys Jones has argued may respond to James’s interest in relations between Europe and the Ottoman Empire. A parallel example is the Merchant of Venice, printed in 1600 at a time when Venice was particularly likely to have been in the popular consciousness due to negotiations with the English.44 As other essays in this collection show, poetry in translation offered early modern diplomatic actors a prestigious cultural form that enabled them to deploy a range of poetic and rhetorical strategies, many of them incidental and overt, to communicate solidarity with foreign partners and, indeed, hostility towards a common rival. This prestige—particularly the prestige of translated verse in the epic or grand style—gave such translations influence in shaping the sense of history and identity that individual, court-based language communities possessed in relation to others. It also made translated poems durable literary monuments that honoured individual monarchs and other members of the nobility as well as the national or 43  Yvonne Bellenger, ‘Sur La Lepanthe de Du Bartas’, in David Cowling (ed.), Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France: Essays in Honour of Keith Cameron (Amsterdam, 2006), 116. 44  Emrys Jones, ‘ “Othello”, “Lepanto”, and the Cyprus Wars’, Shakespeare Survey, 21 (1968), 47–52.

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international movements they represented. Equally significant, however, was the immediate, practical benefit that literary translation provided as a reason for further communication and collaboration, beyond the business of current affairs, that could be publicized and imitated widely—poetry in translation was a topic for conversation as well as a mechanism for bringing cultures closer together. The transnational forces affecting early modern poetic translations were not just a matter of how foreign source material was used, but how authors made appeals to foreign readers. The composition and dissemination of such poetry was energized by its usefulness in the political sphere, and its signals and gestures were often all the more meaningful for being ephemeral.

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PA RT I I I D I S S E M I N AT I O N

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8 Books as Diplomatic Agents Milton in Sweden Joad Raymond I N T RO D U C T I O N Milton never went to Sweden. He expressed no desire to go there. Swedish was not a language he revealed any interest in learning. Yet by various means he participated in extensive cultural and political transactions with the country, and it was one of the places where his voice was heard and his name was known. The purpose of this essay is to look at the reception of Milton in Sweden, and the appearance of Sweden in Milton’s writings, as a study in the interaction between writing and diplomacy. My story concerns international politics, diplomacy, and transnational reading and it furnishes an unusual and detailed example of a diplomatic response to a literary text and of a literary response to that diplomatic interaction. It is therefore an example not only of polemic influencing international relations but also of a concrete feedback loop between a writer and his readers. And while it concerns international relations it is not exclusively metropolitan in focus, as elements of the story occur far away from Stockholm and Uppsala, and thereby shed a distinctive light on the interplay between books in motion, the dispersed embassy of texts and the rhetoric of diplomacy.1 T H E E A R LY L I F E O F D E F E N S I O The story begins with Claude Saumaise, known in Latin contexts as Salmasius, who in 1649 wrote an attack on the English republic and on the regicides who brought it into being, Defensio regia pro Carolo I (Royal Defence of Charles I ). His book is a defence of absolutism in any case where the ruler has a rightful claim to the throne, for lawful kings are answerable only to God: such a king was, he argued, Charles I.  Salmasius’s political argument was complemented with abuse of the 1 Thanks to Tracey Sowerby and Jo Craigwood for inviting me to participate in the Textual Ambassadors project, and for discussions of this essay; thanks to Edward Holberton for conversations about Milton, Marvell, and diplomacy; and thanks to all the participants in the network for dialogues, instruction, and feedback.

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regicides as fanatics, common men, and mastiffs. The book was widely admired and reprinted: there were at least five reprints in 1649 following the first Leiden edition and further editions appeared in subsequent years.2 Salmasius was a French Protestant working at the University in Leiden (he had earlier defended the Dutch rebellion on the grounds that Phillip II of Spain had no lawful jurisdiction in the Netherlands), with a weighty reputation as a scholar and a polemicist; on the basis of the merits of Defensio regia Queen Christina invited him to attend her court in Stockholm in 1650, as she had just accidentally killed her last tutor, the French philosopher René Descartes (his death brought about by early morning tutorials and the Swedish climate). When Salmasius left Sweden a year later rumours circulated that this was because England’s response to his treatise had lowered the esteem in which the Queen held him.3 One place where Defensio regia was popular was Salmasius’ adopted home, the Netherlands. There were editions not only in Leiden but also in Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Antwerp. During 1649, in the months following the execution of Charles I, the tide of opinion turned against the English republic in favour of the English royalists, who made considerable efforts to secure support for their cause there.4 The English Council of State sought to suppress Salmasius’ book, ordered that ships from the Netherlands be searched for copies, and in January 1650 the commonwealth ambassador Walter Strickland persuaded the States of Holland to ban and seize copies of Defensio regia. This had little practical effect, and it did not stop the publication of a Dutch translation at Rotterdam a few months later.5 The Council also ordered John Milton, its Secretary for Foreign Tongues who had been appointed in March 1649 to translate documents and write in support of the commonwealth, to compose a response. Milton was then an accomplished vernacular polemicist and a minor poet. This commission was issued on 8 January 1650, and the Council approved Milton’s manuscript, perhaps having looked at it, on 23 December 1650; it was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 31 December, and Pro populo Anglicano defensio (1651), to give it its full, internationally-oriented title (meaning Defence of/for the English People), was published in late February 1651.6 During the year in which he wrote it Milton was closely involved in diplomatic relations, notably with Spain and with the Oldenburg salvaguardia. His work involved the translation, in both directions, of state letters and the collaborative production of briefing documents. His office was next door to that of the Secretary of State, initially Gualter Frost and subsequently John Thurloe, who was also head of intelligence. The evidence 2 F.  F.  Madan, ‘A Revised Bibliography of Salmasius’s Defensio Regia and Milton’s  Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio’, The Library, 5th ser., 9 (1954), 101–21. 3  Kathryn  A.  McEuen, appendix B, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols, general ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, 1953–82), IV.962–82. Hereafter CPW. 4  On the Anglo-Dutch nexus, see Helmer Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Cambridge, 2015). 5  J. Milton French, The Life Records of John Milton, 5 vols (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949–58), II.274–7; Helmers, Royalist Republic, 45, 60, ch. 4. Also Paul Sellin, ‘Royalist propaganda and the Dutch Poets on the Execution of Charles I’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, 24 (2000), 222–40. 6 French, Life Records, II.286, 335, 350–1.

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suggests that Milton was not closely involved with Anglo-Dutch negotiations while writing Defensio, though after its publication he was increasingly active in that area, and in 1652 he even began to learn Dutch.7 Nevertheless, the Council’s intention in issuing the commission for Defensio was to normalize relationships with, and to undermine English royalist activity in, areas of mainland Europe, and particularly those where Defensio regia was warmly received. These intentions Milton partly accepted, though the work he produced was shaped by multiple intended audiences, including an English citizenry and the Council of State itself. There were plans to print an English translation of the work, though these apparently fell through.8 Defensio is therefore both a work of public polemic and a work of international diplomacy. It contains persuasive arguments (and a good deal of name calling), but it is also a symbolic object, and this is particularly true for the small number of large folio copies that were printed for the purpose of presentation.9 Samuel Hartlib, for example, presented (apparently for his personal use) a copy of the folio edition to the Swedish diplomat Peter Pels.10 We can see this negotiation operating in the way, towards the end of his Ciceronian preface, Milton aligns the English republicans with the ‘antient deliuerers’ of the Netherlands who opposed the authority of Philip II of Spain in 1566. It is their ‘true progeny’ who established the independence of the northern provinces in 1648. He praises them for suppressing Salmasius’ noxious and error-ridden book (‘FrenchLatine faults . . . euery where aboundest’), and remonstrates with the United Provinces for tolerating a royalist who opposed the principles of republican independence. The following quotation is from an early manuscript translation of Defensio by Thomas Margetts, a lawyer who worked for the Council of State at the same time as Milton—and which therefore has a special provenance, personally and institutionally close to the author himself: Worthily therefore the mighty States of Holland, the true progeny of the antient deliuerers of their Country, haue by their edict supprest this tyrannicall Defence, as most destructiue to the liberty of all people, the author of wch himself, euery free Citty ought to prohibite or cast out of their borders, & yt Citty especially wch nourishes so ingratefull & foul an enemy to a Commonwealth by its stipend, the foundations & causes of wch Commonwealth he opposes no lesse then ours, & by one and the same labour striues to shake & ouerthrowe them both, & by wicked rayling defames ye most famous assertors of liberty there, under the name of ours. Now weigh well wth your yorselues, most famous confederate States, & think againe in your minds, who hath put forward this Assertor of Kingly Authority, to write, who lately began to carry himself King-like among you, what Counsells, what endeauors, lastly, what troubles followed throughout Holland, what they might be now, how slavery & 7 Leo Miller, John Milton’s Writings in the Anglo-Dutch Negotiations, 1651–1654 (Pittsburgh, [1992]); Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford, 2000), 285. 8  See Joad Raymond, ‘In the next room’, Times Literary Supplement, 5889 (12 Feb. 2016), 16–17; and ‘Thomas Margetts: A New Milton Manuscript, and a New Defender of the People of England’, Milton Quarterly, 50 (2016), 219–40. 9  For fuller information, see my forthcoming edition of the Latin Defences. 10  EC65.M6427.651pb (A) [formerly: Harvard, 14496.13.4.10F]. The catalogue entry suggests a variant of Madan 2, http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/006121704/catalog [20/7/15].

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a new Lord was prepared for you, & how neare yt yor liberty, maintain’d by so many yeares Armes & Labours, was to be extinct, if it had not taken breath againe by ye most late most seasonable death of that rash young man.11

A marginal note identifies the rash young man as the Prince of Orange. In one sentence omitted from this translation—possibly because it was made after war had broken out between England and the United Provinces—Milton proposes that the Dutch release the impounded—or so he imagines—copies of Defensio regia, so when it is read more widely it will be suppressed elsewhere.12 Defensio was widely read in the Netherlands and in diplomatic contexts. Even before the reprints, the Dutch envoy to London, Gerard Schaep, bought twenty-five copies of the first edition ‘in order to send to various members of the government in Holland [i.e. the province] so they may be acquainted’.13 He submitted an expense claim: this was work, not pleasure. This is the initial international context of Defensio, and Milton’s bullish approach was thwarted in July 1652, when war broke out between the English republic and the United Provinces. The original political and polemical context of the work radically altered at this moment, in effect rendering it out of date. Of course this meant not outright redundancy, but a shifting relationship with political configurations and with readers, and seeing this mobility helps us to understand the book as international propaganda without reducing it to the narrow, modern sense of that word. Indeed this change in diplomatic context changes what the text needs to do. THE ANGLO -SWEDISH TURN At this point the story shifts north towards Sweden. Here it helps to add another context, which involves Mercurius Politicus, the official weekly newsbook of the commonwealth edited by Milton’s friend and colleague Marchamont Nedham. Like Defensio, Politicus spoke to multiple audiences: domestic, including both the political elite and a wide range of ordinary readers, and foreign, both the English in exile, diplomats, merchants, who were an important part of the ‘invisible commonwealth’ in the 1650s, and antipathetic royalists, plus foreign nationals, who constituted a surprisingly large part of the readership.14 Nedham prepared his many readers for the reception of Defensio, and after publication reported its success overseas. In late 1651 (when Milton was licenser for 11  New Zealand, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS 1649, pp. 10–11; see n. 8, above. 12  Defensio (London, 1651; editio emendatior; Madan 2 [see n. 2, above]), 19–20: ‘Idque ego ab Illustrissimis Hollandiæ Ordinibus peterem, ut eam è fisco protinus dimissam, necque enim Thesaurus est, pervagari, quò velit, sinant. Si enim quâ vanitate, inscitiâ, falsitate referta sit, planum omnibus fecero, quò latiùs excurrit, eò arctiùs, meâ quidem sententiâ, supprimitur.’ 13  Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (Oxford, 2008), 237. 14 On foreign nationals, see my ‘International News and the Seventeenth-century English Newspaper’, in Roeland Harms, Joad Raymond, and Jeroen Salman (eds), Not Dead Things: The Dissemination of Popular Print in Britain, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1900 (Leiden, 2013), 229–51.

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the newsbook) Politicus repeatedly reported that Milton was triumphant in Sweden and Salmasius discomforted. The Netherlands was the intermediary staging post for such reports—Nedham had good contacts there. A letter from Delft, dated 8 September, reported that Salmasius had left Sweden because ‘Milton’s book having laid him open so notoriously, he became thereby very much neglected, the Queen not having sent for him, nor seen him for the space of two moneths; so that perceiving a decay of her favor, he came himself and desired leave of departure, which was very readily granted, the Queen having at length understood, how impolitick it is for any Prince, to harbor so pernitious a Parasite, and Promoter of Tyrany’.15 A series of newsletters from Leiden printed in the journal, which may have been written or at least rewritten by Nedham himself, capitalized on these rumours.16 One describes Salmasius’ return to Leiden, making ‘a long halt by reason of his gout and other infirmities in Denmark and Sleswick’. The letter mocks Salmasius for accepting money from both the Queen of Sweden and the king of Denmark—Milton too makes great rhetorical play of Salmasius’ greed, and his acceptance of salt money, a salary flavoursome enough to subdue any principles he may have. He came to Sweden, and saluted the King of Denmark in his way, who gave him a Chain of Gold, and other Jewels for his Book and for the fame of his Learning: that King also as well as the Queen of Sweden, being a great student and lover of Learning Thus you see he hath gotten many Royal Benefactors: yet all this doth him no good, because Miltons Reply lies as a raw indigested gobbet upon his stomack [. . .]17

Milton’s Defensio arrived in Leiden within four weeks of publication, and then in Sweden a week or so later. We know this from the correspondence of Nicholas Heinsius and Isaac Vossius, the former at Leiden University, the latter librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden. Heinsius mentions the popularity of Milton’s book, and Vossius refers to his receipt of a copy and then to the fact that Queen Christina is reading it. She is soon praising it, ‘in the presence of many, she spoke highly of the genius of the man, and his manner of writing’.18 This letter is dated 9 April 1651 (new style), and reveals a market for the book that was intellectual and commercial. By 1653 Milton had an international reputation. He was famous, not as a poet but as a Latin polemicist, read widely across Europe, frequently condemned for his politics, but more frequently admired for the rhetorical skills that vanquished a renowned humanist scholar. By this time the significance of Sweden to the English had grown and the latter needed to secure an agreement that would involve mutual support against the Dutch. Bulstrode Whitelocke’s instructions were to establish 15  Mercurius Politicus, 66 (4–11 Sept. 1651), 1056. 16  Mercurius Politicus, 33 (16–23 Jan. 1651), 554 [i.e. 545], was the first issue to prime readers for Milton’s Defensio. I proposed that Nedham’s voice can be heard in the Leiden letters in ‘“A Mercury with a Winged Conscience”: Marchamont Nedham, monopoly and censorship’, Media History, 4 (1998), 7–18; cf. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford, 2007), 127, 135. 17  Mercurius Politicus, 82 (1 Jan. 1651[2]), 1316–17. 18  Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 238; David Masson, The Life of John Milton, 7 vols, rev. edn (1875–94), IV.317.

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an alliance with the Swedish (a ‘league offensive and defensive’) to ensure that the crown did not support the English royalist cause, and more particularly to enter into a treaty against the Dutch and the Danes (even while peace negotiations with the Dutch were ongoing). The Council agreed that an embassy was necessary, and nominated (without informing him directly) Whitelocke as ambassador extraordinary to Sweden.19 He left London on 2 November, arriving at Gothenburg on 15 November.20 To an Englishman, Sweden was infinitely far away. ‘Sintne loca’ asked Marvell in his poem ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo, then with my Lord Whitlock’, or: ‘is there such a place’.21 Whitelocke did not want to be the Commonwealth’s ambassador. This was prudent, given the high failure rate of embassies and the high mortality rate among ambassadors. Moreover he was still on English waters when he heard news that his wife had given birth to a son. He was also concerned about the financial straits in which the mission would be placed, and about the fact that the appointment seemed timed to exclude him from an active role in domestic politics. He read and recycled and misquoted Sir Henry Wotton’s definition of an ambassador as ‘a wise man sent abroad to tell lies for the Commonwealth’s sake’.22 Fortunately for posterity he kept a journal of his embassy, which he rewrote in various ways, and it provides exceptional insights into the political dynamics of Anglo-Swedish relations, the role of the ambassador under the commonwealth, and into the reception of Milton. From Gothenburg Whitelocke travelled north, though towards Uppsala because the court had abandoned Stockholm on account of the plague. There are several retrospective accounts of that journey, some more closely based than others on his contemporary notes. In all of them he complains of the poor lodgings and provisions the party received on their travels. This was a sensitive point not because of greed or immodesty, but because the commonwealth had learned the importance and runic significance of ceremony and precise titles in the reception of their diplomats, and in the powers of the ambassadors they received. It was a matter not of posturing and punctiliousness but of access and authority.23 The commonwealth (and then protectorate) government resisted some of the traditions of spectacle it inherited.24 Foreign relations and the meeting of emissaries were an exception to this: here the state was concerned with ceremony. Nonetheless, 19  Bulstrode Whitelocke, A Journal of the Swedish Ambassy (1772), I, 1–2. 20  I use the Julian calendar observed in both England and Sweden at this time, while treating the year as beginning on 1 January. 21  ‘Letter to Doctor Ingelo’, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith 2nd edn (2003; Harlow, 2007), 261. 22  Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan: The Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–75 (London, 1975), 143, 286. 23 Robert T. Fallon, Milton in Government (University Park, PA, 1993), 38–40. 24  Derek Hirst, ‘“That Sober Liberty”: Marvell’s Cromwell in 1654’, in John M. Wallace (ed.), The Golden and the Brazen World: Papers in Literature and History, 1650–1800 (Berkeley, 1985), 21–3; Rosanna Cox, ‘“The mountains are in labour, only mice are born”: Milton and Republican Diplomacy’, Renaissance Studies, 24 (2009), 420–36; Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester, 1997), 58–68.

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in 1652 the ambassador from Oldenburg, Hermann Mylius, enquired of Oliver Fleming, the Commonwealth’s master of ceremonies, the correct form of addressing parliament, and was given the plainest title without honorifics. When he asked whether he needed grander lodgings to make an appropriate impression, the experienced Fleming declared it unnecessary, ‘that no attention was paid to outward display; that men in Parliament with incomes of 60, 70 and more thousands of pounds sterling who maintain whole manors nowadays go on foot, without servants, let themselves be served a wretched dinner in an inn (those were his words) and so go on’.25 Fleming’s words bestow a kind of contempt on other states for caring about such vacuities. This may reflect a tension at the heart of the republican regime, but it was one rooted in practical necessities, and not characteristic of the government more generally. Richard Bradshaw, envoy to Hamburg, found himself slighted in 1650 when he was designated merely an internuntium (messenger or intermediary), and the government despatched a new letter which described him as both residentem (resident) and oratem (spokesman or agent).26 Establishing its legitimacy was an important and difficult task for the new republic. While disgruntled, and leading an unhappily uncomfortable party, Whitelocke passed through ‘Orsborough’ (Örebro) on 11 December 1653 and encountered a captain. The episode does not appear in Whitelocke’s so-called diary, but in the Swedish journal, written between 1654 and 1660, probably prepared for the Protectorate Council of State (and printed in 1772). Whitelocke writes: There came to his table, the Captain of the Company heer quartered, whose carryage being somewhat scornefull Wh[itelocke]. inquired what he was, & learnt that he was the son of Salmacius who wrote the booke of defensio Regis, agaynst the Parlements proceedings, & his son att dinner began to discourse liberally uppon that argument; butt Wh. silenced him, yett was sparing in delivery of any opinion in that buisnes, butt declared [it] to be too high for his judgement or for the judgement of this young Captaine.27

This was probably indeed the son of Salmasius. When the scholar went to Stockholm he travelled with his wife and two sons, Claudius and Josias; the family travelled back without Josias, who remained behind and took up a commission in the Swedish army (he would die fighting for Christina’s successor, Charles X Gustav).28 So the reluctant diplomat representing the Commonwealth had a chance encounter with the son of its most prominent detractor while passing through rural Sweden.

25  Leo Miller, John Milton and the Oldenburg Safeguard (New York, 1985), 36–7; see also Cox, ‘Milton and Republican Diplomacy’, 428–9. 26 Fallon, Milton in Government, 39. 27  BL, Add. MS 4902, fo. 48r. This is quite faithfully reproduced in Whitelocke, Journal, I.203. On the relationship between Whitelocke’s various manuscripts, see Blair Worden, ‘Review Article: The “Diary” of Bulstrode Whitelocke’, EHR, 108 (1993), 122–34. 28 See the life of Salmasius in Claudii Salmasii, viri ill. Epistolarum liber primus, ed. Antonio Clementio (Leiden, 1656), lii; Milton, CPW, IV.977.

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When Whitelocke rewrote this account for the purposes of a more general book of essays and reflections upon the business of embassies, he sounded less imperious and more loyal to parliament and to its author, and he indicates that he did in fact debate the case. The Captaine of this Company was a young man, the son of Salmacius Author of the booke called Defensio Regis, an invective against the proceedings of the Parlement of England against the late King Charles which is sufficiently answered by Miltons booke ^Milton. The scornefull carryage of this young Captain induced Wh. to enquire of it, & understanding his pedigree, to use him accordingly [i.e. politely], & att his Table whither the Captain was not unwilling to resort, some discourse was offred by him, to which Wh was not sparing in the ^vindication of the Parlement.29

The discrepancy lies in whether Whitelocke decided that he should snub the captain on account of his youth and his insufficient status or whether his parentage persuaded Whitelocke to argue about Milton’s book. There is every reason to believe that he was in a position to do so. Defensio was by now both famous and a resource in diplomacy. Whitelocke had earlier been involved in negotiations with the Dutch in London.30 Milton and Whitelocke had worked together on the Oldenburg salvaguardia.31 Nothing suggests that they were particular friends, but Whitelocke clearly knew Milton well enough.32 Moreover, Whitelocke was—as his troubled relationships with Cromwell and the Protectorate suggest—genuinely interested in constitutional arguments and particularly the rule of law. Whitelocke’s party, facing poor lodgings in Örebro and the next town, and poor horses and hard saddles, began ‘a kind of mutiny’, which he addressed with an uncharacteristic jovialness. However, five and a half Swedish leagues later (about 59 km) they arrived at Köping. There the Prætor of the town refused to procure quarters, ‘and gave ill language of the Parlement, that they had killed their king & were a Company of Taylors and Coblers’. Whitelocke said to his Swedish guide that he expected ‘satisfaction’, and that ‘he was resolved to trye the respects of her Majesty to his superiors’. He was impressed when his guide fetched both the prætor and the consul, his superior—impressed because he found the urban hierarchy interesting. He made them wait and then expostulated at length while they wept, ‘halfe drunke for sorrowe’.33 In front of his superior the prætor changed his tune: The prætor absolutely denyed the wordes charged uppon him, butt affirmed, that he spake only to this purpose, what lyes doe the Holland Gazets tell us? when they say 29  ‘The History of Whitelockes Ambassy from England to Sweden. with notes theruppon’, BL Add. MS 37346, fo. 72v. The insertions (and perhaps the deletions) are probably by Carleton Whitelocke, son of Bulstrode, in preparation for publication. 30 Miller, Anglo-Dutch Negotiations, 11–12, 50, 57. 31  Letter dated 12 February 1651/2 in J. Milton French, ‘A New Letter by John Milton’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America, 49 (1934), 1069–70; Miller, Oldenburg Safeguard, 74–5, 91–5, 123–5, 178–90, 193, 297. 32  Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford, 1990), 439. 33 Spalding, Improbable Puritan, 140–1. The drinking habits of the Swedes are a repeated theme of Whitelocke’s journal, not least because his instructions from the Committee for foreign affairs forbade him from drinking toasts, on account of the difficulties into which this had led an earlier ambassador. Fleming had advised against it more generally; see Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 60.

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that the Parlement are a Company of Taylors and Coblers, when you see what gallant fellowes they are, by their Ambassador, what a brave gentleman he is, how nobly attended, what a Company of gallant persons waiting uppon him, above 100 in his Company, & he protested that he loved & honoured the Parlement of England & London with all his heart.34

Blaming the Dutch here was easy work, but it showed no less judgement for all that. The Dutch were indeed thoroughly hostile to the English in late 1653, when the countries were at war, and peace negotiations progressing poorly, so the story was plausible and likely to touch Whitelocke’s sensitivities; and because the English press was correspondingly full of anti-Dutch stereotypes. Moreover, attitudes to the Dutch in Sweden were coloured by concerns about the Dutch dominance of international trade. Hence it was a story everyone could agree on; and in a sense mutual antagonism towards the Dutch is what the embassy would be built on.35 This triadic relationship seems complex enough, but it is worth adding that the conversation was probably conducted in French. Within the formal negotiations the Swedes spoke Swedish and Whitelocke and his party English, both of which were translated into Latin; but subsequent and informal exchanges were in French. So the English and the Swedes agreed to blame the Dutch in French.36 The episode prefigures—in its aspersions against the Dutch, the improbable praise of Whitelocke as a representative Englishman, and the recognition of parliamentarian gentility—a conversation the ambassador would have with Queen Christina. Shortly after the Treaty of Uppsala was signed, she invited him to a wedding and danced with him. At the end of the dance she exclaimed: ‘Par Dieu these Hollanders are lying fellowes.’ He asked her to explain her meaning, and she replied: the Hollanders reported to me, a great while since, that all the Noblesse of England were of the kings party, & none butt Mechanicks of the Parlement party, & not a gentleman among them, now I thought to trye you, & to shame you if you could not daunce, butt I see that you are a gentleman, & have bin bred a gentleman, & that makes me say, the Hollanders are lying fellowes to report that there was not a gentleman of the Parlements party, when I see by you chiefly, & by many of your company that you are gentlemen.37

The following morning he went to the Riksdag and watched her announce her abdication. To return to Köping in December 1653: having agreed with the prætor that the English parliamentarians were honourable and the Dutch mendacious, the consul even managed to raise the stakes: ‘The like was attested by the Consull who for proofe thereof, sayd that he had read Miltons booke, & liked it, & had itt at home.’ 34  BL, Add. MS 4902, fo. 48r–v; Whitelocke, Journal, I.205–6; this more closely resembles BL, Add. MS 37346, fo. 74r–v. 35  Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge, 1995), 115–48, 300–2. 36  BL, Add. MS 37346, fo. 86v; Whitelocke, Journal, I.235–6, 242, 249. 37  BL, Add. MS 4902, fo. 140r; Whitelocke, Journal, II.155–6; Spalding, Improbable Puritan, 186.

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Then they—consul and praetor—drank a good store of wine, and were thereafter ‘very seviceable to Wh. & his Company’.38 As the conversation continued, Whitelocke records, he expressed admiration for the distinction between the offices of consul and prætor, not only flattering the two officeholders, but also comparing them to the jurisdiction associated with the offices of those names in Roman times. He learned that they have another chief magistrate, an ‘Aldryman’, which he compares to the English alderman. In the rewritten, essayistic version of the embassy journal, Whitelocke here inserts chapters describing the offices of the Prætor, Consul, and Aldryman. Subsequent chapters reflect on English political culture: on the relative powers of king and protector, on London and the title of Lord, these now having been made stranger by sight of alternatives. When he finally reached the court at Uppsala it was perhaps inevitable that he and Christina should discuss Milton, though their conversation is only cursorily recorded in his journal in an account of a two-hour conversation on 13 February. It was he who raised the topic, no doubt anticipating a favourable response, though he was cautious enough to emphasize style over content: She spake of most noted authors who had written in the Italian, French, Latin, Greek, & other Languages, & before all the rest she commended Petronius. Wh. asked her if she had seen a book lately written in Latin by one Milton, an English man, & how she liked his stile, she highly commended the matter of part of it, & the language. Then she fell into prayse of Germanicus & severall other worthies [. . .]39

It is disappointing that he chose not to record the grounds of her commendation; all we learn is that the discussion of Milton’s Defensio was part of a more extended conversation of a range of writers, including classical authors. The discussion appears to be focussed on style, and Gaius Petronius Arbiter and Germanicus Julius Caesar are golden age authors. The topic avoids (initially) contemporary politics by looking back to ancient Rome and the superficially neutral issue of style.40 Whitelocke spots a conversational opening in this, and, doubtless having read reports of Christina’s expression of admiration for Defensio in Mercurius Politicus, brings up a modern republican author with a pure classical prose style. Whitelocke perhaps sought to remind Christina of her admiration of Milton, or to prompt sympathetic listening, or to elicit a statement of praise for English ingenuity that would then feed into negotiations. T H E I M PA C T O F D E F E N S I O There are several ramifications of these Anglo-Swedish exchanges over Milton’s Defensio. First, they show transnational polemic actually affecting international relations. This is not to say that Defensio had a measurable impact on the success of 38  BL, Add. MS 4902, fo. 48v; Whitelocke, Journal, I.206. 39  BL, Add. MS 4902, fo. 89r; Whitelocke, Journal, I.432–3. 40  I am indebted to Warren Boutcher for this point.

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Whitelocke’s negotiations. However the tone at the Swedish court was shaped by the unexpected success of the tract, notwithstanding the presence of Milton’s antagonist as a tutor to the queen. Moreover, on at least three occasions during the embassy Milton provided a topic of conversation and shaped the terms in which the conversation was held. Diplomacy was conducted through the nuances of language and symbols, and, as Whitelocke’s journal testifies, through face to face communication, as well as impersonal political alignments, and Defensio pervaded these. Secondly, while the public stage—that represented in the satirical sketches of Mercurius Politicus and its various correspondents, and where international polemic had visible purchase, where diplomacy met humanism—may have been concerned with the success of Defensio at the court, Whitelocke’s journal reveals that in small towns 140–200 km west of Stockholm informed local officials were reading Defensio (either in Latin or in Dutch translation) and Dutch gazettes with English news, and militia were being led by a partisan in the affair. Finally, Defensio has a fitting place in a portrait of ambassador Whitelocke. He had been appointed to the newly formed Council of State on 14 February 1649, in the wake of the regicide; he was therefore part of the body that appointed Milton on 15 March 1649. He was genuinely interested—probably more than Milton— in constitutional arrangements. Twice during the commonwealth years Whitelocke offered Oliver Cromwell his opinion about the constitution, advocating a mixed monarchy over a republic and discouraging Cromwell from taking the crown as a means to end the army’s supremacy and parliament’s corruption.41 He voiced similar sentiments to Christer Bonde, the Swedish diplomat, in London in 1655.42 Before or during his journey Whitelocke had compiled a phrase book with constitutional arguments laid out in English, French, and Latin. He records debating the English constitution and constitutional theory more generally with Christina’s Chancellor Erik Oxenstierna, and insisting that England was and would stay a commonwealth.43 Though he probably never left British shores again, having been nearly shipwrecked on his return, he continued to deal with international affairs. He was in 1659–60 a member of the Council of Ten and then the twenty-three member Committee of Safety to which the army handed responsibility for establishing a new political settlement on the eve of the Restoration. Travel and understanding of foreign political structures shaped Whitelocke’s constitutional thinking—perhaps the Venice Council of Ten and the Herren 17 of the Dutch East India Company, but equally, especially given that he was English, local government bureaucracy in provincial Sweden—but it is also materially significant that the book he recalls debating with Captain Saumaise, the consul, prætor, and queen was a polemic about the origins of government, the true basis of political authority, the history of abuses of power, and the supremacy of the law.

41 Spalding Improbable Puritan, 130–1, 133–4. 42  Michael Roberts (ed.), Swedish Diplomats at Cromwell’s Court, 1655–1656: The Missions of Peter Julius Coyet and Christer Bonde, Camden 4th ser., 36 (London, 1988), 148. 43 Spalding, Improbable Puritan, 170, 171.

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The same day that Whitelocke was discussing politics with the consul and prætor, Major-General John Lambert presented to the Council of State a draft of a new constitution, to fill the gap left by the resignation of the Nominated Assembly or ‘Barebones’ Parliament. The Instrument of Government was accepted, and three days later the Protectorate Government was inaugurated, with Cromwell as Lord Protector. When Whitelocke arrived at Uppsala on 20 December, having eluded a planned assassination, and had his first audience with the Queen on 23 December, he had no inkling that the government he represented had changed.44 He first heard the news on 3 January 1654 and from a Swedish source; Christina, with whom he was increasingly familiar, congratulated him on it, though Whitelocke saw it as a threat to the commonwealth.45 His dismay, and the paucity and tardiness of his information, he kept from the embassy journal intended for the government. He would be informed from London by none other than Marchamont Nedham, editor of Mercurius Politicus and friend of Milton.46 The alteration in government produced a new chapter in this Anglo-Swedish dialogue, however. On 30 April 1654, two days after Whitelocke and the Swedish chancellor and his son signed their treaty (which is still in effect), Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda was published at London. Defensio secunda is a response to the anonymous attack on Milton’s Defensio published in September 1652, Regii sanguinis clamor. In defending his work from ad hominem attacks he was forced to defend himself—it was never difficult to persuade Milton to do this— and thus the sequel contains extended reflections on Milton’s own person and career: his polemics had begun to lose their sharp political focus.47 Nonetheless the work is also a qualified defence of the recent change in government, largely achieved through praise of the individuals on the Council of State to whom governance had been entrusted—it was therefore also something of a friendly admonition. In contrast to Whitelocke, Milton did not believe that monarchy was a necessary or desirable form of government, but he did harbour anxieties about the legitimacy of the new government and the direction it might take. While the Anglo-Dutch axis was the most important at the time he was writing Defensio, Sweden had grown in importance to the commonwealth and protectorate between late 1652 and early 1653, and therefore it made an impression on Defensio secunda. As Secretary for Foreign Tongues, moreover, Milton had privileged access to the intelligence of Secretary of State John Thurloe. He had seen and discussed, if not actually contributed to, the accounts of Salmasius’ humiliation in Mercurius Politicus. His virtual presence in Sweden was recounted and rehearsed in his own polemic, not merely as decoration or self-promotion, but because his praise of a 44 Whitelocke, Journal, I.220–1; II.234–43. 45 Spalding, Improbable Puritan, 170, 171. 46  Ibid., 172. 47 Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca, 2007); Joad Raymond, ‘John Milton, European: The Rhetoric of Milton’s Defences’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds), The Oxford Companion to Milton (Oxford, 2009), 272–90.

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queen, and a queen’s praise of him, both offered a moral proof and underpinned his argument that it is the practical failures of monarchy as a system, rather than its conceptual insufficiency, that furnishes most evidence against it. Milton takes as his cue the claim in Regii sanguinis clamor that Queen Christina invited Salmasius with great rewards. Milton agrees that the odds were set against him, as an unknown facing a reputed scholar with many thick books. Moreover, Salmasius was able to take strength from a case that was specious yet plausible, and played on deep-rooted common opinions or superstition, and on the fondness for the name of king.48 However, Milton relates, his own book found eager purchasers— this is true, as it soon appeared in ten pirate editions—and ‘Salmasius, who had but recently basked in the warmest favour, now, as if the mask beneath which he had lurked was snatched away, suddenly sank both in reputation and spirits. And even though he strove with every muscle as long as he lived, he could not afterwards re-establish himself.’49 Here Milton clearly plays upon the rumours spread in correspondence and printed in Mercurius Politicus, that his own vanquishing of the book resulted in the author’s loss of favour, including with the queen herself. In fact this may have been no more than rumour, as no solid evidence points to it. Salmasius stayed beyond the six-month leave he was given by his university, the queen wrote to him warmly and, after his death at Spa on 24 August 1653 (old style), later praised him in the strongest terms to his widow. However, a colleague and a former student spread this account before his death, and it took root, perhaps fertilized by Milton’s deft rhetoric.50 C O N C LU S I O N Milton does not hesitate to flesh out the picture of Salmasius’ fall and his own rise to favour at the Swedish court, praising Christina as an angelic being (cœlestis): For although you had loaded with many honors this man whom you had invited to court and who at that time enjoyed a unique celebrity by reason on his reputation for extraordinary learning and his support of the royalist cause, yet when the reply appeared and you had read it with remarkable impartiality, and after you had observed that Salmasius was convicted of vanity and very evident corruption, and had said many things that were trivial, many that were extreme, some that were false, others that told against himself and contradicted his earlier sentiments (for which, when he was, as the story goes, summoned to your presence, he had no good explanation), your attitude was so plainly altered that from that time on everyone understood that you neither honoured the fellow as before nor made much of his talent or learning, and 48  ‘causa denique speciosa atque plausibilis, inveterata vulgi opinio, sive superstitio dicenda potiùs est, & propensus in regium nomen favor Salmasio vires & spiritus addiderat’. Defensio secunda (London, 1654), 69. 49  CPW, IV.603; Defensio secunda (London, 1654), 69–70, ‘qui modò summo in honore fuerat Salmasius, nunc quasi detractâ, sub qua latuerat, personâ, & existimatione, & animo repentè caderet; séque asserere, tametsi omnibus nervis id agens, quoad vixit postea non valuerit.’ 50  McEuen in CPW, IV.964–77.

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that (what was certainly expected) you were strongly inclined to favour his opponent. For you denied that my attacks on tyrants in any way applied to you.51

Edward Holberton has shown how presentation poetry was used to shape perceptions of the English embassy to Sweden; this fits into a broader pattern in which panegyrics addressed to the queen became part of a late-humanist currency of formulaic rhetorical exercises.52 Milton contributed to this fashion (albeit in prose), praising Christina’s mind and judgement, and comparing her to her father Gustavus Adolphus and to the Queen of Sheba.53 Writing could be implicated in diplomatic activity in various ways. Milton was, after all, a professional translator of the documents of statecraft. And literary texts could inadvertently be caught up in national politics, shaping political language. As Catarina Fouto shows, Luís de Vaz de Camões’s Lusiads was appropriated in the construction of national images and in political struggles, and translations were deployed in radically different political contexts.54 Translating could itself perform a kind of diplomacy through identifying and manipulating the cultural and historical associations between two cultures. But Defensio and Defensio secunda performed a complex task beyond the lubrication of panegyrics or the appropriation of the text of one country in another. Defensio reached, as we have seen, beyond the court, and played a part in broader Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Swedish cultural exchange. It influenced, provided language and a reference point for, political communications in the provinces, even a means of understanding local as well as national government. Whitelocke’s experience suggests a thoroughly blurred line between the sphere of transnational political debate and the practical conduct of diplomacy, and his various accounts, together with Mercurius Politicus and Milton’s Latin prose, suggest a more entangled relationship between writing and diplomacy. To some extent this is feedback—a writer responding to a reader’s response to him—but it is more than that, because the feedback is both literary and diplomatic. The episode indicates the importance of seeing the cultural and literary contexts in which practical diplomatic activity was 51  CPW, IV.604; Defensio secunda, 70–1: ‘Quamvis enim illum hominem eximiæ doctrinæ fama, causæque regiæ patrocinio tunc temporis longè omnium celeberrimum, à te invitatum, multis honoribus affecisses, tamen prodeunte illo responso, & singulari æquanimitate abs te perlecto, postquam vanitatis & apertissimæ corruptelæ redargutum Salmasium, multa leviter, multa immoderatè, falsa quædam, adversùs seipsum alia, & prioribus sententiis contraria disseruisse animadverteras, ad quæ, coram accitus, ut ferunt, quod satìs responderet nihil habuit, ita palàm animo affecta es, ut ab illo tempore neque hominem, ut antea, colere, neque ejus ingenium aut doctrinam magni facere, &, quod erat planè inopinatum, ejus adversario propensiùs favere, omnes te intelligerent. Quod enim erat in tyrannos dictum, negabas id ad te ullo modo pertinere.’ 52  Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions (Oxford, 2008), 6–36; Iiro Kajanto, Christina Heroina: Mythological and Historical Exemplification in the Latin Panegyrics on Christina Queen of Sweden (Helsinki, 1993). 53  CPW, IV.605–6; Defensio secunda, 73–4: ‘Dicerem Adolphi filiam invicti atque inclyti regis unicam prolem, nisi tu illi, Christina, tantum præluceres, quantum viribus sapientia, belli artibus pacis studia præcellunt. Jam inde profectò regina Austri haud sola celebrabitur: habet nunc & septentrio reginam suam . . .’ 54  See Fouto, in this volume, 101–14. One of these translations was coincidentally by Richard Fanshawe, another English Latin secretary of the 1650s, albeit one working for the exiled royalist regime. It was published by Humphrey Moseley, who had earlier published Milton’s poetry.

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embedded.55 Milton’s writing shapes both ends of the dialogue between England and Sweden: Milton writes about the Netherlands, his work is read in Sweden, the English ambassador debates the work with Swedish readers, and Milton writes about the reception of his earlier writing in Sweden, with the clear intent of this being read in Sweden. Or, at least, the intent of having readers across Europe imagining his writing about people reading him in Sweden being in turn read in Sweden, because in the context of the struggle for Baltic trade and the Sound, it mattered that Milton was seen to be big in Sweden. The book was written within the context of diplomatic negotiations, but it took its own life and became an effective participant within the conversation.

55 Daniel Riches, Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Leiden, 2013).

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9 Diplomatic Knowledge on Display Foreign Affairs in the Early Modern English Public Sphere András Kiséry I N T RO D U C T I O N : T H E A N J O U M ATC H P U B L I S H E D In 1655, a handsome folio volume entered the emerging market of state papers, historical documents, secret histories, and memoirs promising insight into the arcana of the Elizabethan and Jacobean state.1 The Compleat Ambassador contains the English correspondence related to Francis Walsingham’s 1570–3 and 1581 embassies to Paris—that is, to the diplomatic negotiations with France centred around the proposed marriage between Elizabeth and (initially) Henry, duke of Anjou, and François duke of Alençon, later of Anjou. The documents in the collection thus represent what was arguably the most important, and ongoing, diplomatic effort of the English government in the second half of the sixteenth century: the struggle to both secure the succession and to stabilize England’s political alliances through dynastic marriage. The proposed match was hotly debated in government circles, but such debates were not to be conducted in public. When in 1579, John Stubbs wrote a vituperative pamphlet against the Anjou match, called the Discoverie of a gaping gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by an other French mariage, publishing and contesting arguments and counterarguments that were made by members of the Council, this was considered a serious breach of the decorum surrounding the discussion of affairs of state, for which Stubbs famously suffered by having his right 1  The Compleat Ambassador, or, Two Treaties of the Intended Marriage of Qu. Elizabeth . . . Comprised in Letters of Negotiation of Sir Francis Walsingham, her Resident in France: Together With the Answers of the Lord Burleigh, the Earl of Leicester, Sir Tho. Smith, and others: Wherein, as in a clear Mirror, may be seen the Faces of the two Courts of England and France, as they then stood, with many remarkable passages of state (London, 1655); for earlier publications see for example Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia, or, Observations on the Late Queen Elizabeth, Her Times and Favorits (London, 1641); and especially the two earlier collections by the publishers of the Compleat ambassador: Cabala, Sive, Scrinia Sacra: Mysteries of State & Government: in Letters Of Illustrious Persons (London, 1654)—which includes a sizeable collection of letters from William Cecil to Henry Norris, the English ambassador in Paris, dated 1568–70—and Scrinia Sacra, Secrets of Empire, in Letters Of illustrious Persons. A svpplement of the Cabala (London, 1654).

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hand cut off.2 The proclamation issued by the Queen rejected Stubbs’s false and slanderous accusations, and concluded on a more general objection to the unauthorized discussion of arcana imperii, to ‘offring to euery most meanest person of iudgement, by these kinde of popular Libels, authoritie to argue and determine, in euery blinde corner, at their seuerall willes, of the affaires of publique estate: A thing most pernicious in any estate.’3 An intervention in public debate that aimed to end public debate, this is a clear statement of what remained the dominant view of public conversation about state business well into the seventeenth century.4 The 1655 volume was produced in a new environment, amidst the booming national popular discussion created by the conjuncture (indeed interdependence) of print capitalism and the eruption of England’s troubles—a discussion which has come to be seen as the emergence of the modern public sphere.5 But the model of the public sphere as a scene of public argument about issues of common concern, of discussion taking place among engaged (whether fiercely partisan or civic-minded) participants does not fully account for the interest in diplomacy in the period, and it would be a very unlikely explanation for the publication of Walsingham’s letters in 1655. While the incident of the Gaping gulf clearly reflected the political anxiety over a looming Catholic threat, why would mid-seventeenth century audiences be interested in the details of past—and ultimately inconclusive—dynastic marriage negotiations? The appetite for information about foreign affairs and diplomacy throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has been resistant to explanation through the category of the public sphere understood as a scene of public-minded debate, driven by the concerned interest of private individuals in how their country was governed. Although the ramifications of international politics and of the continental wars in which England was implicated, the sometimes quite striking analogies between domestic and foreign situations, and the deep sympathies for the cause of fellow protestants all contributed to a demand for news from abroad,6 2  Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: the Courtships of Elizabeth I (London/New York, 1996), 99–194; Natalie Mears, ‘Counsel, Public Debate, and Queenship: John Stubbs’s The discoverie of a gaping gulf, 1579’, HJ, 44 (2001), 629–50. 3  By the Queene (London, 2 September,1579). 4  See Peter Lake and Steven C. A. Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016); Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002); Jeffrey S. Doty, Shakespeare, Popularity, and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, 2017). 5  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 57–67; Joad Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London, 1999), 109–40; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-modern England (Princeton, 2000); Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013). 6 Lisa Parmelee, Good newes from Fraunce: French Anti-league Propaganda in late Elizabethan England (Woodbridge, 1996); Alan  B.  Farmer, ‘Play-reading, News-reading, and Ben Jonson’s The staple of news’, in Marta Straznicky (ed.), The Book of the Play: Playwrights, Stationers and Readers in Early Modern England (Amherst, 2006), 127–58; Joad Raymond, ‘International News and the Seventeenth-century English Newspaper’, in Jeroen Salman, Joad Raymond, and Roeland Harms (eds),

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another, different set of motives also played a role in the widespread fascination with foreign affairs and with diplomatic activity. Busybodies and the vice of political curiosity were the frequent targets of satire, a cultural mechanism that sought to vitiate the public circulation of political intelligence by highlighting its association with social ambition.7 That association was more than mere fiction: the severe limitations of public access invested any piece of political information with an aura of connectedness and inside knowledge. As such information was the currency of patronage relationships, it also held the vague promise of advancement as a reward for its delivery to those who could reward it, and this promise in turn ascribed a general cultural prestige to political competence. Rather than being a scene of argument where social distinction would have been bracketed through the appeal to reason or by the adversarial setting itself (as in the classic, and perhaps utopian models of the public sphere), in the circulation of political arcana and the exchange of intelligence about foreign affairs, knowledge was deployed to accumulate social prestige and cultural capital, a capital whose foundation was the ever receding hope of advancement. And while the norms of secrecy that governed the pre-1640 public sphere were giving way to a new regime of circulation in the mid-century, the intellectual and social prestige of expertise in managing foreign relations remained an important cultural factor throughout the early modern period. C O M P L E T E M A N U A L S O F C R A F T K N OW L E D G E In a 1620 proclamation, King James ordered his subjects ‘from the highest to the lowest, to take heede, how they intermeddle by Penne, or Speech, with causes of State and secrets of Empire, either at home, or abroad’.8 He repeatedly insisted that the esoteric knowledge of politics should be seen as the secular equivalent of sacred, pontifical mysteries. But as the contemporary uses of the words imply, the mysteries or secrets of state could also be understood as the trade secrets of the craft or profession of politics: in his speech in Star Chamber in 1616, James himself called the common law ‘a mystery and skill best knowen vnto’ his audience, just before he would expostulate about his own ‘Prerogative or mystery of state’.9 Trades and professions are distinguished by the mysteries proper to them, a body of knowledge transmitted to new generations of craftsmen, but—paradoxically Not Dead Things: the Dissemination of Popular Print in England and Wales, Italy, and the Low Countries, 1500–1820 (Leiden/Boston, 2013), 229–51. 7  Dennis Quinn, ‘Polypragmosyne in the Renaissance: Ben Jonson’, The Ben Jonson Journal, 2 (1995), 157–69; F. J. Levy, ‘The Decorum of News’, and Ian Atherton, ‘The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, in Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society, 12–38 and 39–65. 8  James Francis Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (eds), Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625 (Oxford, 1973), 497. 9  King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann  P.  Sommerville (Cambridge, 1994), 212; Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of State: an Absolutist Concept and its Late Mediaeval Origins’, The Harvard Theological Review, 48 (1955), 67–8. For mystery as a term used in the sense of craft in other royal proclamations, see e.g. Larkin and Hughes (eds), Royal Proclamations, 579.

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perhaps—also publicized in efforts to claim individual expertise or to stake out a field of expert knowledge.10 Its title and paratexts present The Compleat Ambassador as a textbook for ambassadors, a book of (trade) secrets, not as a political intervention.11 It is not meant as the revelation of the innermost, and most secret workings of the state to the withering, incriminatory attention of a critical audience, as was the 1645 The Kings Cabinet opened, the combatively scandalous Civil War pamphlet which published Charles’s correspondence to reveal ‘how the Court has been Caiolde . . . by the Papists, and we the more beleeving sort of Protestants, by the Court’, and how King, Court, and country were ultimately all cajoled by Henrietta Maria.12 Although it is a collection of letters rather than recipes, and deals with affairs of state rather than of the household, the purpose of the Compleat ambassador has a lot more in common with The Queen’s Closet Opened, also published in 1655, which disseminates ‘Incomparable secrets in physick, chirurgery, preserving, candying, and cookery’13—as another book of useful and practical secrets.14 If the title of this compilation of Walsingham’s letters now reminds us of The Compleat Angler,15 it is because both Isaac Walton’s famous book and The Compleat Ambassador rely on their readers’ familiarity with what by the 1650s had become a generic title for manuals and didactic texts offering instruction in a range of skills, crafts, trades, and professions, introducing readers to the secrets of these trades. The 1635 An Essay of Drapery: or, The Compleate Citizen Trading Iustly, Pleasingly, Profitably is still a rather general treatise on citizens’ virtues, but the titles that rapidly multiplied around the mid-century were mostly dedicated to specific fields of expertise.16 The Practick Part of the Law: Shewing the Office of a Compleat Attorney in the full prosecution of any Action (1652) aims to direct the reader whether ‘thou dost voluntarily goe to Pursue thy right, or art involuntarily driven to defend thy right’, showing ‘the whole progresse of the law in the practicall part’.17 William Leybourn’s The Compleat Surveyor (1653) provides instruction in everything ‘necessary to the Art of surveying’.18 It is introduction for those ‘desirous to practise this art’ (A6v), and its author wishes that the reader ‘may take the same delight and pleasure in the practise of those things therein contained, as I did in the composing 10 Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001); Eric  H.  Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, 2004). 11  William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton, 1994). 12  The Kings Cabinet opened: or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers, Written with the Kings own Hand (London, 1645), A3v. 13  The Queen’s Closet Opened (London, 1655). 14  Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, 2005), 469–505. 15  Isaac Walton, The Compleat Angler or, The Contemplative man’s Recreation. Being a Discourse of Fish and Fishing, Not unworthy the perusal of most Anglers (London, 1653), a short and still relatively straightforward introduction to angling, was revised and published in a second edition in 1655. 16  William Scott, An Essay of Drapery: or, The Compleate Citizen Trading Iustly, Pleasingly, Profitably (London, 1635). 17  G. T. and T. P., The Practick Part of the Law: Shewing the Office of a Compleat Attorney in the full prosecution of any Action (London, 1652), A2r. 18 William Leybourn, The Compleat Surveyor: Containing The whole Art of Surveying of Land (London, 1653), TP.

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of them’ (A4r). Of the range of ‘compleat’ practical manuals published in the 1650s, the one most closely similar to the collection of Walsingham’s letters might be The compleat clark, and scriveners guide (1655), which provides instruction through a large set of sample documents: mortgages, indentures, leases, grants, etc.—‘presidents’ drawn up by eminent lawyers of the past and present, which ‘will be very usefull and profitable to all men’.19 The publishing history of these books also suggests that in the 1650s, booksellers were rushing to adopt this kind of title as a marker of specialized practical manuals produced by experts: The Compleat Attorney was a new and expanded edition of the 1642 The attourney of the Covrt of Common Pleas, the earlier edition of Leybourn’s book was called Planometria, or, The Whole Art of Surveying of Land (1650), whereas The compleat clark was only renamed as it was being published—its intaglio frontispiece still calls it ‘The Conveyancers Light’. Henry Peacham’s 1622 Compleat Gentleman, the first book with such a title, was in the tradition of conduct books purportedly written to guide the education of the nobility but disseminated in print to a much wider audience.20 By contrast, mid-seventeenth-century books promising to ‘complete’ someone do not fashion a perfect courtier, an English gentleman, or even an ideal citizen, these historically changing models of all-round competence and perfection: instead, they create a public face for specific high-skill activities, establishing the expertise required for success in oil painting, accounting, horsemanship, artillery, or chirurgery, for example.21 Walton’s Compleat Angler, a practical guide for the vita contemplativa, is a playful twist on this genre of manuals that promise to provide their readers with the knowledge base of gentlemanly and gentlewomanly occupations. In addition to providing guidance to aspiring practitioners, these books also represented these fields of expert knowledge to a wider public. The title The Compleat Ambassador places the collection of documents in this generic tradition—and should the title’s significance not be immediately clear, the preface to the reader also presents it as a source for education in affairs of state, asserting that the collection ‘may be of great use to those Gentlemen that shall be bred up to serve Princes hereafter in this kind of Honorable Imployment’.22

19  The compleat clark, and scriveners guide (London, 1655), A2r. 20  D.  T.  Starnes, ‘Elyot’s Governour and Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman’, The Modern Language Review, 22 (1927), 319–22. 21  Additional ‘complete’ titles up to 1656 include The Complete Justice (S.l., 1637); Thomas de Gray, The compleat horseman (London, 1639); Gervase Markham, The complete farriar (London, 1639), John Roberts,The Compleat Cannoniere (London, 1639); Henri duc de Rohan, The Complete Captain (Cambridge, 1640); Edward Coke, The Compleate Copy-holder (London, 1641); Henry Bond, The Boate Swaines Art, or, The compleat Boat Swaine (London, 1642); Humphrey Crouch, The Compleat Bell-Man (London, 1650); William Noy, The Compleat Lawyer (London, 1651); Thomas Stirrup, Horometria: Or the Compleat Diallist (London, 1652); Englands Compleat Law-Judge and Lawyer (London, 1655); Giacomo Barozzi, Vignola or the Compleat Architect (London, 1655); W. M., The Compleat Cook (London, 1655); Thomas Moulton, The Compleat Bone-Setter (London, 1656). 22  Compleat ambassador, π1r–v.

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DOCUMENTS AS MANUALS OF CONDUCT There had been a range of publications that offered instruction in affairs of state in general, and in foreign service in particular, since the sixteenth century. Volumes like the Foure Bookes of Offices: Enabling Privat Persons for the Speciall Seruice of all Good Princes and Policies (1606), or A Sixe-fold Politician (1609), indicate that by the turn of the century, ‘politics’ was emerging as a field that was thought to require more than good morals and a well-rounded education.23 The emphasis in these works is on the means, rather than the ends of political action: their concerns are instrumental rather than political in the strong sense of the word. Bacon’s Essays, effectively a conduct book on the practical concerns that arise in handling public business, is not only the best known, but, articulated in the non-systematic form of the essay, also the most pragmatic of such publications emerging around the turn of the century.24 The office of the ambassador was marked out as a special area within political service. Jean Hotman’s treatise about The Ambassador was first ­published in English in 1603, in the same year as the original French, apparently based on a somewhat different manuscript—along with Gentili’s pathbreaking tract, written and published in England in the 1580s, this treatise shows both the expert diplomatic knowledge present in England around the turn of the seventeenth century, and the remarkable interest the public of this still peripheral country had in such knowledge. While political tracts were published throughout the period, the mid-century also saw the print publication of a flurry of political and diplomatic documents that were previously circulating in manuscript. In 1658, the Commonwealth’s Secretary of Foreign Tongues, John Milton, published a collection of political aphorisms called The Cabinet-Council Containing the Cheif Arts of Empire And Mysteries of State: Discabineted In Political and Polemical Aphorisms grounded on Authority, and Experience.25 This title, which in the 1658 print edition replaces the genericsounding Observations Politicall and Civill of the manuscript versions, is very much of its moment, presenting the series of aphorisms as a book of secrets, a manual for the conduct of politics now divulged in print with the—puzzling and politically pointed—endorsement of the man whose job it was to manage England’s image abroad.26 Francis Thynne’s treatise on the perfect ambassador, written in 1578 23  Barnabe Barnes, Foure bookes of offices: enabling privat persons for the speciall seruice of all good princes and policies (London, 1606), John Melton, A Sixe-fold Politician: Together with a Sixe-folde Precept of Policy (London, 1609). See Daniela Frigo, ‘Prudence and Experience: Ambassadors and Political Culture in Early Modern Italy’, JMEMS, 38 (2008), 15–34; Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, P&P, 223 (2014), 100–12. 24  F.  J.  Levy, ‘Francis Bacon and the Style of Politics’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 101–22; Ceri Sullivan, Literature in the Public Service: Sublime Bureaucracy (Basingstoke, 2013), 31–4. 25  (London, 1658). Although attributed to Raleigh, late-sixteenth century manuscript copies bear a dedication signed by the compiler, T.B., to ‘Lord North Threasurer of her Maiesties royall Houshold and of her priuie Counsell’: BL Add. MS 27320, Huntington MS EL 1174. 26  Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Protectorate in 1658’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge, 1995), 187–201.

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using antiquarian research to offer ‘examples for us in all respects to imitate’, and dedicated to an experienced diplomat, was first printed in 1651.27 More practical was the advice on how to succeed on a mission abroad printed as Instructions for young gentlemen; or The instructions of Cardinall Sermonetta to his cousen Petro Caetano, which was in wide manuscript circulation throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.28 Unlike these letters and manuals written to advise would-be politicians, The Compleat Ambassador promises instruction through the documents of a diplomatic mission. In the post-Westphalian era of classical interstate diplomacy, diplomatic correspondence, and ambassadorial relazioni became key resources of the education of diplomats—so much so that by the eighteenth century archival work was proposed as the formal basis of training, a connection which also explains the name of the profession.29 The most influential books on diplomacy also recommended the study of such documents. Callières advises the diplomat-in-training to read the several Memoirs, Instructions and Dispatches which we have of many able Ministers, both in Print and Manuscript, which treat of the Affairs wherewith they were charged; and which, as they inform us of many Facts that are necessary to the Knowledge of Publick Affairs, so they serve to form the Mind of the Reader, and to give him an Idea of the Manner in which he is to carry himself on the like Occasions.30

In 1633 Gabriel Naudé already made a similar suggestion, and listed several suitable printed collections of diplomatic correspondence and ambassadorial relazioni— although for him, these documents were valuable not so much for the insight they offered into diplomatic activity as such, but as the material on which a formal, general political prudence could be exercised.31 The Compleat Ambassador clearly sees itself in this (still incipient) European tradition. A collection of materials that document Walsingham’s most important diplomatic mission, it effectively immerses the reader in the activities of the great sixteenth-century statesman, who famously rose to the office of secretary of state after his return from the Parisian embassy of 1570–3. As the preface to the reader notes: though the English have been hitherto so reserved, as not to make publike the Treaties and Negotiations of their Ambassadors abroad; so that we have hardly any notion of them, but by their Arms, which were hung up in Inns where they passed; yet the French and Italians (who think themselves as wise, and as good Polititians) have frequently done it; which we see and read with delight, as giving better account of Affairs, Times, and Persons, then any History can do. 27  Two editions: The Application of Certain Histories Concerning Ambassadours And their Functions (London, 1651); and The Perfect Ambassadour Treating of The Antiquitie, Priveledges, and behaviour of Men belonging to that Function (London, 1652). 28 (Oxford, 1633), for a list of copies and evidence of reading see Millstone, ‘Seeing Like a Statesman’, 104; further copies of the English translation include BL Sloane MS 1710, fos. 19–22; Harley MS 4228, fos. 98–102; Add. MS 8376, fos. 1–34, 34216, fos. 50–57. 29 Maurice Keens-Soper, ‘The French Political Academy, 1712: A School for Ambassadors’, European Studies Review, 2 (1972), 329–55. 30  François de Callières, The Art of Negotiating with Sovereign Princes (London, 1716), 49. 31  Gabriel Naudé, Bibliografia Politica, ed. Domenico Bosco (Rome, 1997), 164–6, 176.

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While English working documents and correspondence related to diplomatic negotiations were not published in print until after 1640, other, related forms of diplomatic writing were in circulation already around the turn of the century. Political surveys of foreign countries written by returning English envoys were ­circulating alongside Italian relazioni—on which they were also sometimes ­modelled—and were occasionally printed as well.32 T H E S TA G E A N D P U B L I C C I RC U L AT I O N The London stage paralleled and also anticipated print as a critical purveyor of information about foreign lands and foreign affairs. Although he saw Italian, Spanish, and French troupes perform across Western Europe, the Swiss medical graduate Thomas Platter singled out the English as the people who ‘learn from [plays] what is happening in other countries’.33 In spite of the rapidly widening oral, manuscript, and printed circulation of news in the period, recent events ­presented in the theatres could easily be still news to a significant segment of their audiences, making the public stage one of London’s most important news media around 1600.34 But in their efforts to cater to an audience, demand for compelling detail in the foreign settings of their plays, and for stories that were able to make those strange settings familiar, dramatists did not only, or even primarily, rely on news items. Whether reworking earlier plays, dramatizing detailed print narratives, or inventing new plots, they had to research their subject matter. The plurality of ‘sources’ that scholarship discovers behind a play is the evidence of such research. An unfinished manuscript scenario for an early seventeenth-century play even shows a writer using (and citing in the margin) a contemporary cosmography to flesh out the ‘nationall propriety’s’ of Thrace and Macedonia, where the play would be set—listing ethnographical, political, and geographical details: for instance that ‘they shott arrows against heaven when it thundered’, that kingship in Thrace was elective, and also listing names of mountains and rivers.35 Sometimes there were no published sources for playwrights to draw on, and on occasion they clearly relied on materials produced by English diplomats for government use—thus capitalizing on the public, commercial interest in a broad continuum of politic topics that ranged from secrets of state to the topographies of states. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a case in point, as a play which represents Denmark using details (including the 32 Such reports were written by Giles Fletcher, George Carew, Robert Dallington, Thomas Overbury, among others. For further references, see András Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2016), 106–24. 33  Thomas Platter, Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande, 1595–1600, ed. Rut Keiser (Basel/Stuttgart, 1968), 795. 34  F. J. Levy, ‘Staging the News’, in Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol (eds), Print, Manuscript and Performance (Columbus, OH, 2000), 252–78; Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2003), 138–49. 35 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS  X.d.206, fos. 1v–2r. The scenario was written by Edward Dering, See Joseph Quincy Adams, ‘The Author Plot of an Early Seventeenth Century Play’, The Library, 4th ser., 26 (1945), 17–27; Tiffany  P.  Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), 13–15.

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names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) that were only available in England in diplomatic papers.36 And while Shakespeare did not directly advertise his sources in diplomatic papers, others did. In 1655, the year the Compleat Ambassador came out, Robert Baron, the young university- and Inns of Court-educated royalist poet published a historical tragedy set in the seventeenth-century Persian court. To assert his work’s superiority over an earlier treatment of the subject, in his preface to Mirza. A Tragedie, Really acted in Persia, Baron reminded the reader that in 1626, King Charles ‘sent Sir Dodmore Cotton Embassadour’ to King Abbas’s court, and insisted that ‘From a Manuscript of which Embassadours Letter, to a friend of his in Cambridge, I had the hint of this story’, which he then proceeded to develop into the present work, buttressed by over one hundred pages of densely printed historical notes.37 An interesting example of the dramatization of information drawn from diplomatic sources is George Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (1603) and The revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (1610), plays which represent the adulterous affair of Louis de Clermont, sieur de Bussy d’Amboise with Madame Monsoreau (Chapman’s Tamyra, Duchess of ‘Montsurry’) and his death at the hands of her husband. The story has had a rich literary afterlife, from the history of de Thou, the memoires of Marguerite de Valois, and of Pierre l’Estoile, to the nineteenth-century historical novels of Alexandre Dumas père, but Chapman’s plays are remarkable as accurate dramatizations of a story which was at the time not yet publicly available in any form, either in English or in French. It was Chapman’s play that first published the story of Bussy’s betrayal, and he could only have done so by relying on materials produced by English envoys or intelligencers.38 Bussy d’Amboise was a figure reasonably well known to England’s political elite. He led the troops of Monsieur, François, duke of Alençon and Anjou, in the 1578 French expedition to Flanders. He was in charge of the negotiations with Walsingham about the French intervention in the Low Countries, about the possibility of Monsieur becoming the sovereign of Flanders, and as the duke’s envoy, he also participated in the negotiations about the Anjou match.39 Intelligence reports sent to Walsingham often mentioned Bussy, and while the diplomatic correspondence only coheres into something like a fragmentary narrative in archival hindsight, other surviving documents point us to sources from which Chapman may have derived his plot. Other than writing home with news, English diplomats also produced compendia of background information intended to help make sense of the most recent developments. During his political apprenticeship in Paris in 1584, the young 36 Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 89–106. 37  Robert Baron, Mirza. A Tragedie, Really acted in Persia, in the last Age. Illustrated with Historicall Annotations (London, [1655]). The date is from Thomason’s copy. 38  Jean Jacquot, George Chapman, 1559–1634: Sa vie, sa poésie, son théâtre, sa pensée (Paris, 1951), 123–6; George Chapman, Bussy d’Amboise, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris, 1960), xxii–vii; this and the following paragraphs draw on Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 184–205. 39  Baron Kervyn de Lettenhove (ed.), Relations politiques des Pays-Bas et de l’Angleterre, sous le règne de Philippe II, 10 vols (Brussels, 1882–1900), X.673–705.

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Robert Cecil was compiling and updating surveys of the constitution and networks of the French political elite, which described their alliances and loyalties, and provided short narrative vignettes about the most important affairs they were involved in over the past few decades, stories that served to clarify the connections and conflicts among various political players.40 This group of manuscripts mention such momentous events as the death of the King of Navarre, Antoine de Bourbon, father of the future Henry IV, who fell victim to a follower of Henry of Guise while he was pissing against a wall in Rouen, but the compiler also considered Bussy important enough to discuss his complicated family connections and also explain that he was having an affair with Monsoreau’s wife, and was killed by Monsoreau when he was on his way to her. This is where Chapman’s first Bussy play ends. While scholarly consensus has treated the plot of the Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois and Clermont, the hero of that play, the somewhat tedious figments of Chapman’s imagination, Cecil’s note also provides the basics for this revenge plot, explaining that Bussy’s daughter was given in marriage to Baligny on the condition that he will kill Monsoreau, the murderer of her father—which is precisely the situation represented at the beginning of The revenge.41 While Cecil’s 1584 compendium has nothing to say about the revenge itself, on 7 December 1582, Cobham, the English ambassador in France, wrote to Walsingham about it as a fait accompli: ‘I heare told that Balligni hath caused Monsr de Monsoreau to be murdered, revenginge thereby the death of Monsr de Boussi.’42 Chapman’s second Bussy play builds on this revenge narrative, and complicates it by making Baligny unwilling to perform his obligation, and by adding another revenger, Bussy’s brother Clermont, whose reluctance is philosophical rather than cowardly, and who finally performs the task. The name Clermont d’Ambois is usually understood to be lifted from Bussy’s full name and title, but it appears as a name in its own right at the end of Cecil’s note on the family, while in another document in Cecil’s hand, the clan of Bussy d’Ambois also includes a first cousin called Clermont d’Amboise.43 Whether Chapman actually consulted a copy of a document revised by Robert Cecil or not, we cannot know, and the information he could have drawn from it is too fragmentary for it to have been the primary source of his two plays. What these connections make clear is that Chapman was dramatizing information which was considered to be of importance by English diplomats, which would have been circulating in the channels of England’s diplomatic service, and which would presumably have been recognized as such not only by those involved in diplomacy with France, but also by well-informed members of the select audience of Paul’s boys, and by the wider public of political news. These were plays that wore their origins in diplomatic writing on their sleeves, and this may have been an important part of their appeal. Their plots often seem 40  For a well annotated edition of these documents, see David Potter (ed.), Foreign Intelligence and  Information in Elizabethan England: Two English Treatises on the State of France, 1580–1584 (Cambridge, 2004). 41 Ibid., 191–2. More plausibly, Chapman makes Baligny marry Bussy’s sister rather than his daughter. 42  TNA SP 78/8, fo. 115v. 43  Potter (ed.), Foreign Intelligence, 93, 96, 103, 104.

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mere devices to evoke major figures of late sixteenth-century French politics: their names, connections, alliances, and their most important deeds; to produce, that is, a stage version of the kind of material Robert Cecil and his colleagues were collecting and writing up in their reports. The bizarre masque of ghosts near the end of the Revenge is emblematic of this: when Monsoreau (called Montsurry in the play) dies, the stage direction calls for ‘Musicke’, and then the Ghost of Bussy enters, leading the Ghost of the Guise, Monsieur, Cardinal Guise, and Chatillon [the Admiral Coligny, the Huguenot leader murdered in the St Bartholomew’s Night massacre], they dance about the dead body [of Montsurry lying on the stage], and Exeunt.44

This spectral cavalcade—whose participants are identified and commented upon for the audience by the baffled Clermont—places the action of the Revenge right at the centre of late sixteenth-century French politics. Although Monsieur and the Guise are important characters in the two plays, and the murder of the Guise at the King’s command the tragic centre of the Revenge, the Cardinal Guise and Coligny do not even appear in them; but the political factions they represent, and the motives and obligations behind the factional conflict are discussed at length by Bussy, Clermont (who praises the Guise for his participation in the Massacre), and their interlocutors. While the scene shows Clermont as the last survivor of an age of aristocratic factions whose struggles seem now to be reduced to the irrelevance of a ghostly masquerade by the centralization of the monarchy, the late sixteenthcentury connections and conflicts were still considered relevant enough to current affairs by George Carew, James’s ambassador to Paris, to outline them in the relazione about France he prepared for the king in 1609, on his return from his embassy, just around the time Chapman would have been writing the Revenge.45 A closer look at a copy of the documents revised and updated by Cecil also indicates one of the ways in which some members of this audience, and perhaps also Chapman himself, may have accessed such materials. The collection bears the contemporary note, presumably by Robert Cotton: ‘Thes things of France I had of Mr Harrison of Pouls 1594.’46 A set of documents produced for government use around 1579, most likely as apprentice work done by someone at an early stage of his career, ‘these things of France’ escaped from their intended sphere of circulation, and fifteen years after they were written, they were put on sale at the shop of the stationer John Harrison the elder in Paul’s Churchyard.47 How they got there is best explained by Robert Beale’s melancholy note about the dispersal of Walsingham’s papers: as he says, ‘upon the death of Mr. Secretarie Walsingham all his papers and bookes both publicke and private weare seazed on and carried away, perhapps by those who would be loath to be used so themselves’.48 44 Thomas  M.  Parrott (ed.), The Plays and Poems of George Chapman: The Tragedies (London, 1910), 5.5.119 SD. 45  On Carew’s report, explicitly modelled on Venetian relazioni, see Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment, 107–8. 46  BL Cotton MS Vespasian FV, unnumbered preliminary blank leaf. 47 Peter W. M. Blayney, The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard (London, 1990), 28. 48  Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (Cambridge MA, 1925), I.431.

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The letters published in the Compleat Ambassador seem to have followed precisely this path from Walsingham’s archive to a private collection, possibly through the mediation of Paul’s Churchyard, centre of the English booktrade and of the public exchange of political information. Although—as the preface asserts—it was ‘never intended for the Press’, the compilation was already in manuscript circulation outside the central government by the early seventeenth century.49 As Simon Adams and Alan Bryson explain, the correspondence files kept by Walsingham were after his death ‘obtained by Sir Robert Cotton (probably purloined from the state paper office), and numerous copies of them were made’.50 The 1655 book prints one such copy, ‘which hath slept long amongst the papers of Sir Dudley Digges, late Master of the Rolls’.51 It is thus yet another instance of political documents originally intended for government use escaping into manuscript circulation, and then appearing either on the stage or (after the relative easing of the censorship and control of publishing) in print. T H E E N D S O F D I P L O M AT I C K N OW L E D G E Although a proper immersion in Walsingham’s correspondence could prove professionally instructive even centuries later,52 not all readers of these printed collections became diplomats—in fact, manuscript circulation of documents in the seventeenth century was probably sufficient to provide the state apparatus with the papers it needed for preparing men for their missions abroad. But The Compleat Bone-Setter was no more likely to be read by a doctor or chirurgeon than by a layperson: the publication of such compendia of professional knowledge catered to the demand of an audience of the curious as well as of aspiring amateurs and eager dilettantes. The Compleat Ambassador would have been read with equal, yet distinct interest both by rising state servants and by armchair ambassadors and would-be politicians—contributing to an eager conversation about affairs of state. Knowledge about diplomacy was not only expert knowledge that carried the— usually illusory—promise of foreign employment. Political information available outside of government circles was, first and foremost, information circulated by people in political employment to their patrons, friends, familiars: it was knowledge proper to a closed circle of insiders, brought into private circulation outside of its original context. Before the separation of news reporting from intelligence work, bits 49  Originals and copies of the individual letters are in TNA SP 78 and in BL Cotton MS Vespasian FVI. Jason Powell, ‘The Compleat Ambassador (1655) and its Manuscript Predecessors’ in: Textual ambassadors, http://www.textualambassadors.org/?page_id=959#_ftn5, discusses the manuscript circulation. A copy in Dr Williams’s Library, Roger Morrice MS D, pp. 57–810 is dated 27 March 1601, setting the ante quem of the compilation. Conyers Read, Walsingham, I.90–1, n3, still assumes that Digges was indeed the person who compiled and arranged the collection. 50  Simon Adams and Alan Bryson, ‘Walsingham, Sir Francis (c.1532–1590), Principal Secretary’, ODNB. 51  The Compleat Ambassador, 2π1r. 52  Conyers Read, the author of what is still the most detailed exploration of Walsingham’s career, a couple of decades after his deep immersion in Walsingham’s papers ‘helped to set up, under William J. Donovan, the research and analysis branch of the office of strategic services (the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency)’. Adams and Bryson, ‘Walsingham’.

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of information about certain types of political activity were experienced as secrets of state, the secrets of princes and their ministers, access to which was a marker of being an insider, someone connected and someone in the know. Not just the content, but also the form of such knowledge was seen as specialized. Noah Millstone’s recent work has uncovered the early-seventeenth century culture of politic discussion conducted in terms of the interests of the agents, understood to be fighting for advantage, for power, and position.53 Politic analysis—of which the discourse about the reason of state is the most familiar incarnation—claimed to be lifting the veil of ideology, and revealing the true causes and aims of human action behind professed agendas: revealing ‘what men do, and not what they ought to do’, as Bacon put it in a formulation for which we are ‘much beholden to Machiavel and others’.54 Such a mode of analysis was understood as the way politicians interpreted the world—and, as Naudé also suggested, diplomacy was its most appropriate object. An understanding of the interest in foreign affairs, in diplomacy, and in news from abroad in political terms can thus be complemented by an emphasis on its social function. This sustained and ever widening demand might be seen as, in part, a function of the social prestige that came with being accounted competent or authoritative in discussing politics, and knowledge about diplomatic activity was central to the production of this prestige and to the logic of the early popular interest in foreign affairs. What was marketed as a source of expert knowledge was likely used by many or perhaps most readers in sociable settings—not in the business of politics, but in leisurely (if often excited) conversation about it. The most famous of the early publications of diplomatic writing, the series of collections known as Tesori Politici, were clearly addressed to a broad audience. Although they were recommended for the education and information of political professionals by practicing statesmen, the earliest collection, published in 1589, was also advertised on its title page as a volume which will ‘benefit those who take pleasure in understanding and pertinently discussing the business of politics’, or, in another title page ‘discussing the matters of state’.55 As humanistic treatises about one of the ideally versatile courtier’s areas of activity gave way to compendia of specialized knowledge,56 publication contributed not only to the consolidation of the knowledge base of diplomacy, but also to its social recognition. Unlike doctors, accountants, lawyers, priests, teachers, midwives, and even soldiers, diplomats were rarely encountered 53  Millstone, ‘Seeing like a Statesman’ and Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2016), 58–69. 54  Brian Vickers (ed.), Francis Bacon: The Major Works (Oxford, 2002), 254. 55  Thesoro politico, cioè Relationi, instruttioni, trattati dicorsi varii. d’Amb[asciato]ri. Pertinenti alla cognitione, et intelligenza delli stati, interessi, et dipendenze de più gran Principi del Mondo. Nuovamente impresso a benefficio di chi si diletta intendere, et pertinentemente discorrere li negotii di stato (Cologne, 1589). On the series, see Simone Testa, ‘From the “Bibliographical Nightmare”, to a Critical Bibliography. Tesori Politici in the British Library, and Elsewhere in Britain’, eBLJ (2008), 1–33. 56  Frigo, ‘Prudence and Experience’; Maurice Keens-Soper, ‘François de Callieres and Diplomatic Theory’, HJ, 16 (1973), 485–508; Maurice Keens-Soper, ‘Abraham de Wicquefort and Diplomatic Theory’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 8/2 (1997), 16–30.

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by members of the general public: in this sense, the broader recognition of diplomatic expertise was due to publication and to the workings of the public sphere. And while only fools would have mistaken plays for political tracts, the theatre, as an institution which offered compelling models of social and conversational competence to its audiences, while also commenting on the uses of such competence, also informed political conversation and the public’s understanding of politics.57 In a memorable moment in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Sir Politic Would-be tries to excuse himself when he is taken to task for his plan to ‘sell the state of Venice to the Turk’, and is threatened that warrants have been signed ‘to apprehend you and to search your study for papers’. He urges that ‘I have none but notes / drawn out of playbooks . . . And some essays’, and then adds: ‘I but talked so / For discourse’s sake merely’ (5.4.35–47). Talking politics for ‘discourse’s sake merely’, sociably, was a more important form of political discussion than Ben Jonson’s satire would like to admit and more common than we have been inclined to believe.

C O N C LU S I O N Attention to diplomatic knowledge as a form of social and then of cultural capital, produced and reproduced through circulation, usefully supplements discussions of the polarization of public opinion as a force that drove the demand for information about affairs of state. Rather than imagining a civic- or polemically-minded community, then, we should view the public as consisting of self-interested subjects jockeying for attention and social success, and this study suggests that we understand political conversation, and at its centre, conversation about foreign affairs and diplomatic activity, as a privileged field for the competitive display of competence and of being well-connected. This is not to argue that early modern individuals engaging in conversations about foreign politics were simply or merely self-interested careerists rather than concerned citizens: like their twenty-first century successors, they were also capable of acting on various, overlapping, and often conflicted motives. Yet this was one of the sets of forces at work behind the agitated discussion of foreign affairs and the intensifying exchange of political information that is rarely considered. Public interest in diplomacy in particular, and political discussion in general, was not necessarily driven by political motives, and certainly not exclusively by such motives: social and cultural competitiveness also played a role. The politic skills, the analytic competences, and the knowledge of the operations of interstate diplomacy were socially desirable—and they were of course put to political, polemical use in situations that exercised the public imagination.

57  Adam Zucker, The Places of Wit in Early Modern English Comedy (Cambridge, 2011).

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10 A Diplomatic Narrative in the Archive The War of Cyprus, Record Keeping Practices, and Historical Research in the Early Modern Venetian Chancery Fabio Antonini I N T RO D U C T I O N In a 1996 essay on historical and political thought in sixteenth-century Venice, Gino Benzoni argued that the city’s famous relazioni—the reports presented by returning ambassadors on the affairs of foreign courts—were a more valuable indicator of how the Republic saw its place in the world than the somewhat self-aggrandizing and formulaic writings of its humanist historiographers.1 Since their ‘rediscovery’ by historians such as Leopold von Ranke, who placed them at the centre of his scientific enquiry into the political history of Europe,2 the value of these voluminous reports as historical sources has been frequently re-evaluated. In recent years, as we have come to examine the social, cultural, and material worlds inhabited by early modern diplomats, new readings of the relazioni have informed us of the careers and aspirations of the ambassadors themselves, the relationship between the state and its officials, and even the bureaucratic structures of the Venetian government.3 In particular, we can now also trace the circulation and readership of these highly informative texts even after they were submitted to the government, as the burgeoning market for these ambassadorial reports led to numerous copies appearing throughout Europe in manuscript libraries, political compendia, and even historical writings.4 As we consider new approaches towards the construction, materiality, and use of diplomatic texts, it is important to acknowledge that the majority will have spent 1  Gino Benzoni, ‘Scritti storico-politici’, in Gino Benzoni and Antonio Menniti Ippolito (eds), Storia di Venezia: dalle origini alla caduta della Serenissima, 8 vols (Rome, 1992–8), III.787–8. 2  Armand Baschet, Les archives de Venise: histoire de la Chancellerie Secrète (Paris, 1870), 36–7; Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, ‘Leopold von Ranke’s Archival Turn: Location and Evidence in Modern Historiography’, Modern Intellectual History, 5 (2008), 435–7. 3 Donald Queller, ‘The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni’, in John Rigby Hale (ed.), Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), 174–96. 4  Filippo de Vivo, ‘How to Read Venetian Relazioni’, RR, 34 (2011), 42–7.

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far longer stored in chests, cupboards, or shelves than in the hands of the ambassador or prince. As such, each record had an archival ‘afterlife’, during which they continued to inform and instruct long after their authors and recipients had disappeared from public life. In the case of the larger and more public relazioni, this afterlife would often involve circulation within private manuscript collections or printed Tesori, whereby they became objects of significant cultural value as well as tools for the instruction of future government policy. Yet for the many other secretive dispatches deposited exclusively in the government archives of early modern Europe, a growing scholarly interest in the documentary relics of foreign affairs meant that these too were increasingly preserved and presented as objects of historical and study examination, long before the rise of the positivist historians of the nineteenth century.5 This chapter examines how early modern diplomatic correspondence crossed the threshold from ‘live’ document to historical artefact within the archive and the impact this had on the ways in which texts were accessed, interpreted, and used by contemporary scholars. In order to do so, it will consider the records of early modern diplomacy from the perspective of the recent ‘archival turn’ in historical studies, in which the archive is approached as an object of study in its own right and the history of the text is examined in the context of the record-keeping institutions into which they were consigned, organized, and preserved for posterity.6 How did the physical process of archiving diplomatic records in early modern Europe affect their nature and use once their original purpose had passed and what can a government’s approach to their preservation tell us about its sense of historical memory? The Republic of Venice, which by the onset of the sixteenth century possessed a well-established bureaucracy and chancery system—through which the city’s diplomatic papers were distributed, received and eventually archived in situ—serves as a useful case study in this regard. As well as the broad reach of its early modern diplomatic networks, from which a vast collection of ambassadorial dispatches were deposited into the chancery archive, from the early sixteenth century onwards the Republic had instigated a programme of state-sponsored historiography, whose authors were granted unparalleled liberty to consult the historical records of the chancery. As will be seen, their notes, comments, and texts give a valuable insight into the cotemporary perceptions and uses of diplomatic records as historical sources. In particular, the significant role played by the chancery registers in forming historical narratives, such as that concerning the outbreak of the War of Cyprus in 1570, illustrate that the diplomatic papers of the Republic enjoyed a relatively short transition from contemporary record to historical artefact once inside the chancery and that their role as an object of scholarship was far from a nineteenth-century invention. 5 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: a Curious History, new edn (London, 1997), 141–79; Randolph C. Head, ‘Documents, Archives, and Proof Around 1700’, HJ, 56 (2013), 909–30. 6  Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan (eds), Toward a Cultural History of Archives = Archival Science, 7/4 (2007); Ann L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009); Randolph C. Head (ed.), Archival Knowledge Cultures in Europe, 1400–1900 = Archival Science, 10/3 (2010).

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Fabio Antonini D I P L O M AT I C A N D S C H O L A R LY I N F O R M AT I O N I N T H E V E N E T I A N S E C R E T C H A N C E RY

From the early fifteenth century onwards, the majority of Venice’s written diplomatic correspondence was deposited or recorded in the city’s secret chancery (Cancelleria secreta), one of the three main branches of the record-keeping systems of the Ducal Palace. Reports from ambassadors across Europe and Asia, as well as communications with the ministers of foreign princes, were regularly transcribed into the registers of the councils to which they were addressed, which were then locked away under the supervision of a small group of secretaries.7 The collection itself was relatively mobile during the first century and a half of the chancery’s existence, but was subject to a strict series of regulations concerning the accessibility, copying, and use of its contents.8 Alongside the records of government deliberations, these diplomatic papers made up the majority of the secret chancery and its depositories,9 and thus the collection was most commonly accessed and used for the purposes of retrieving information on foreign affairs.10 As such, Venetian ambassadors enjoyed special privileges to access the otherwise restricted collection as they prepared for their missions, including the ability to have copies of sensitive records made by the secretaries.11 Inversely, they were also responsible for declaring and surrendering to the chancery any material which they had taken or created during their residency, under pain of office, as the government hoped to ensure that the secret chancery archive would form the sole repository of information for future ambassadors to consult. The physical construction and arrangement of the chancery archive was thus a pivotal feature of Venice’s diplomatic service. Consequently, as the chancery systems of the Republic developed, a number of new technologies emerged that aided the preservation and accessibility of the city’s foreign correspondence, beginning with a series of cartularies of diplomatic acts which were first commissioned in the late thirteenth century.12 It was during the sixteenth century, however, that the greatest number of indexes and finding aids emerged in order to assist the location of relevant material by Venetian diplomats, as the government became increasingly aware of the importance of the collection as a system of information management for the benefit of the government and its foreign ministers.13 In an additional and 7  Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics (Oxford, 2007), 48–53. A comprehensive history of the secret chancery was first given by Armand Baschet, Les archives de Venise, 155–90. 8  See Claudia Salmini, ‘Buildings, Furnishings, Access and Use: Examples from the Archive of the Venetian Chancery, from Medieval to Modern Times’, in M.  V.  Roberts (ed.), Archives and the Metropolis (London, 1998), 101–7. 9  The city’s court and notarial records were mostly kept elsewhere in the Palace, as the state papers were divided into separate branches. For the origins of this system see Marco Pozza, ‘La cancelleria’, in Storia di Venezia, III.385–7. 10  One of the few surviving visitor logs taken by the chancery secretaries illustrates the predominant consultation of diplomatic material (Venice, Archivio di Stato [ASVe], Inquisitori di Stato, b. 924). 11  De Vivo, Information and Communication, 49–55. 12  Girolamo Arnaldi, ‘La cancelleria ducale fra culto della ‘legalitas’ e nuova cultura umanistica’, in Storia di Venezia, III.874. 13  Filippo de Vivo, ‘Ordering the Archive in Early Modern Venice’, Archival Science, 10 (2010), 241–7.

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important shift in chancery practices, from middle of the sixteenth century g­ overnment secretaries began to produce summaries of foreign ambassadors’ audiences, or esposizioni, made before the Venetian College (made up of the Doge and his councillors), recording the ceremonial and oral exchanges between the two parties in unprecedented detail.14 These esposizioni records, later transcribed into their own fully indexed registers, ensured that oral exchanges within the Palace were for the first time documented for posterity. Despite these developments, the disorder of the diplomatic archives remained a pertinent issue. In December 1551, the government deliberated on the problems caused by the ever increasing mass of diplomatic papers arriving at the Palace, for which their current chancery practices were largely insufficient. Whilst the medieval cartularies had succeeded in preserving the great charters, bulls, and Papal briefs held by the state, the now daily influx of ambassadorial letters and reports, not all of which could be transcribed into the registers of the various councils, remained scattered amongst miscellaneous collections throughout the Palace. Consequently, many were often uncatalogued, damaged, or lost altogether. In order to counter this, the government decreed that one of its secretaries would be responsible for collating, organizing, and transcribing into a single series of volumes ‘all the propositions made by other Princes, both to our government and to our ambassadors, as well as all of our responses and deliberations, [. . .] organizing each within an index’.15 These new registers, known first as the Pandette (Pandects) and then the Annali (Annals), were unprecedented in both size and scale.16 As well as containing copies of reports from the city’s diplomatic network, the Annali drew together every different form of diplomatic document: reports from ministers abroad, letters from foreign ambassadors, and the newly recorded esposizioni of visiting dignitaries, alongside the government deliberations and responses to each. As such, they were a major innovation in the accessibility of diplomatic records for visitors to the secret chancery, who could now consult almost the entire diplomatic activity of the government for a given year in a single location. As well as being designed to improve the efficiency of state record keeping, the Venetian government also indicated that these new registers would ‘commemorate the occurrences of both war and peace [. . .] and all other deeds worthy of memory’: One of the most useful things for the good governance of a state is the understanding of past deeds, through which one can more easily understand which actions to follow and which to avoid. However, due to the fact that due diligence has not been used in the past, not only have we lost the examples of past affairs, but also their reasons and motives, which has caused considerable damage to our state. In this regard, it is important to put these in good order.17 14 ASVe, Collegio, Esposizioni Principi. The audiences of papal ambassadors were arranged in a separate series, the Esposizioni Roma. For a recent study of the esposizioni collections, see Filippo de Vivo, ‘Archives of Speech: Recording Diplomatic Negotiation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy’, European History Quarterly, 46 (2016), 519–44. 15  ASVe, Consiglio di Dieci, Deliberazioni, Comuni, reg. 20, fos. 72v–73r (18 December 1551). 16  Now held in the series ASVe, Annali and ASVe, Collegio, Pandette. 17  ASVe, Consiglio di Dieci, Deliberazioni, Comuni, reg. 20, fos. 72r–73v. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

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This intention was reflected not only in the series’ chosen title, but also in the structure and arrangement of the volumes themselves. Rather than transcribe the secret diplomatic papers as and when they arrived in the chancery—as had been the case with the earlier cartularies—the secretaries who compiled the Annali made a deliberate attempt to piece together the dispatches and decrees in a thematic narrative order, as though a chronicle of Venice’s dealings with the princes of Europe and beyond, with some early entries even being arranged as distinct chapters.18 Indeed, the first secretary in charge of compiling the registers, Alvise Borghi, stated that it was his responsibility to construct the narrative of Venice’s recent foreign affairs from these raw materials, so that future historians might use it as the basis of their great works.19 The notion that the Annali registers would serve as a historical monument to the state, as well as a diplomatic and administrative tool, formed part of a wider trend towards the perception of the secret chancery as a site of cultural and scholarly interest. This had begun in 1515 when the government admitted the first patrician historians in order to compile a favourable account of Venice’s fortunes in the early years of the Italian Wars.20 As the decades progressed, further measures were taken to improve the accessibility of historical information for the succession of state historiographers admitted to the political and diplomatic archives, including the intercession of secretaries as research assistants,21 the creation of new indexes and finding aids, and a more established distinction between those records which remained sensitive political tools and those which had crossed the threshold into historical artefact.22 These developments were accompanied by a gradual intellectual shift amongst the city’s historians, who increasingly considered the records of state as authentic and authoritative witnesses to the past. In 1577, the state historian Alvise Contarini was advised by his mentor, Agostino Valier, that he was privileged to have access to ‘information provided in the archive of the Senate, which is truly of great authority and worthy of being put in great consideration’. This was especially true of the city’s diplomatic papers, as Valier continued: ‘one should profess no greater faith than to the reports of the public representatives given in writing, or on their return to the Senate’, as they can help historians ‘understand the specific causes of things and allow one to think in the same way as those who gave this information’.23 Venice was not alone in these administrative and intellectual developments. In 1588, for instance, the ordinances of the Spanish Royal Archive at Simancas declared that its secretaries must create ‘a book of the curious and memorable 18  This is particularly evident in ASVe, Collegio, Pandette, reg. 2. The thematic arrangement of material can also be seen in the indexes of the later volumes of the Annali. 19  Alvise Borghi ‘Historia Secreta Veneta’ ASVe, Miscellanea Materie Miste e Notabile, reg. 68, pp. 2–4. 20 Franco Gaeta, ‘Storiografia, coscienza nazionalmente e politica culturale nella Venezia del Rinascimento’, in Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (eds), Storia della cultura Veneta, 3/1, dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento (Vicenza, 1980), 76–85. 21  ASVe, Capi di Dieci, Notatorio, reg. 8, fo. 165r (18 December 1530). 22  ASVe, Consiglio di Dieci, Deliberazioni, Secrete, reg. 11, fo. 130r (9 May 1577). 23  Agostino Valier, ‘Ricordi per scrivere le istorie della Repubblica di Venezia di questi tempi, dati a M. Luigi Contarini cav.’, in Giovanni Battista Maria Contarini and Pietro Barozzi (eds), Anecdota Veneta: Nunc Primum Collecta Ac Notis Illustrata (Venice, 1757), 183–4.

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deeds which are contained in this archive, which through reading one may be able to comprehend the essence of things as though reading a history’24 whilst in France Jean Bodin famously stated that ‘the best writers say that they have collected their material from the official records, to obtain more credit for their writings’.25 However, in the case of the Venetian secret chancery archive, these innovations were to have an almost immediate impact upon the city’s historical identity, as the official historians of the Republic took to the archive to narrate one of the most significant crises in its recent history. D I P L O M AT I C R E C O R D S A S H I S TO R I C A L S O U RC E S : T H E C A S E O F T H E WA R O F C Y P RU S The impact of these growing ties between the official historians and the secret chancery upon the city’s historical image was particularly evident in the works of two of their number, Paolo Paruta and Andrea Morosini, whose state-sponsored civic histories were published in 1605 and 1623 respectively.26 Both historians demonstrated a strong working relationship with the secret chancery during their careers. Paruta, who held the office of state historian from 1579 to 1598, was personally involved in a substantial project to rehouse the collection during the 1580s, whilst Morosini, who succeeded Paruta until his death in 1618, was the first of a succession of historians to be appointed as ‘superintendent’ of the reconstructed archive, with new responsibilities for reporting on the state of the collection and its staff.27 In particular, both historians indicated a strong appreciation of the Annali registers as the first point of reference for researching the history of the city within the chancery. Morosini, for his part, left a series of notes which demonstrated that he had used the chancery registers to form a detailed chronology of recent events,28 whilst in 1593 Paruta informed the Venetian government that their registration of documents from the 1550s onwards had rendered the task of researching that period far simpler than for earlier decades. As he explained, the principal advantage of their arrangement was that it helped the historian to ‘order the thread of the historical narrative, in which lies the greatest difficulty’, whilst the detailed transcriptions the Annali contained allowed him to ‘give perfection to that which I have already written’.29 24  José Luis Rodríguez de Diego, Instrucción para el gobierno del Archivo de Simancas (año 1588) (Madrid, 1989), 105. 25  Translation taken from Beatrice Reynolds (ed.), Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (New York, 1969), 47. 26  Paolo Paruta, Historia Vinetiana [ . . . ] Parte seconda, nella quale in libri tre si contiene la Guerra fatta dalla Lega de’ Prencipi Christiani contra Selino Ottomano (Venice, 1605); Andrea Morosini, Historia Veneta, ab anno MDXXI usque ad annum MDCXV (Venice, 1623). 27 ASVe, Consiglio di Dieci, Deliberazioni, Secrete, reg. 14, fos. 74r–75r (17 September 1601). 28  Venice, Biblioteca Museo Correr [Correr], MS Cicogna 2560, fos. 1r–46r. Emmanuele Cicogna first noted the authorship of these notes and their relationship to the chancery registers in his Delle Iscrizioni Veneziane, 6 vols (Venice, 1824–53), III.480–1. 29  Paolo Paruta, ‘Domanda gli annali di Ambrogio Ottobuono per continuare a scrivere la sua storia – Roma, 22 Maggio 1593’, in La legazione di Roma di P. Paruta. 1592–1595, ed. Giuseppe de Leva, 3 vols (Venice, 1887), III.212–13.

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Between them, Paruta and Morosini recounted some of the most significant incidents of Venice’s early modern history in considerable detail, from the city’s participation in the League of Cognac during the late 1520s, to the Interdict imposed by Pope Paul V in 1606. Thanks to their consultation of the newly organized chancery records, the two historians demonstrated a detailed insight into government deliberations and the activities of their diplomats during this time. This was perhaps most apparent in their accounts of the conflict which erupted between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in 1570, when Sultan Selim II turned his attention to the capture of Cyprus from Venetian rule. The outbreak of this conflict—which resulted in the loss of the island despite the famous victory of the Christian fleet at Lepanto in 1571—was a pivotal moment in Venetian diplomacy, not only in terms of the breakdown in relations between the Republic and Constantinople, but also for the city’s entry into an anti-Turkish Holy League with the major Catholic powers of Europe. Both historians dedicated significant attention to explaining the exact causes of the conflict from a predominantly diplomatic perspective, drawing upon their reading of the chancery registers to illustrate the city’s motives and intentions throughout those turbulent early months of 1570. Paruta and Morosini’s access to the chancery registers, a collection which remained closed to all but a small group of patricians during this period, set their accounts in notable contrast to those which had been written in the years immediately following the conflict itself, some of which were published before it had even concluded. These accounts were primarily authored by those with a certain degree of proximity to the events, including secretaries,30 ambassadors,31 and members of the governing elite.32 The majority of these early narratives drew upon eyewitness testimony and word of mouth, as well as the occasional use of diplomatic and military documents which had circulated beyond the chancery.33 This was particularly evident in the case of the Venetian ambassador, or bailo, in Constantinople, Marc’ Antonio Barbaro, who had sent a series of written warnings concerning the Ottoman naval preparations and the Sultan’s intentions towards the island, in early 1570. The most important of these reached the city in early March, informing the Venetian government that the Grand Vizier, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, had sent a çavuş (emissary) to Venice with two letters—one from the Sultan and the other from the Grand Vizier—demanding that the Republic relinquish its claims to Cyprus, which they claimed had been used as a base for Western pirates. Barbaro’s connections at the Ottoman court enabled the secret delivery of copies of these letters ahead of the Turkish ambassador’s arrival by his secretary, Alvise Buonrizzo, 30  Fedele Fedeli, ‘Storia della guerra de’ Turchi contra Venetia, 1570–1573’, Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana [BNM], Cod. It. VII, 1576 (7972). 31 Emilio Maria Manolesso, Historia nova, nella quale si contengono tutti i successi della guerra turchesca (Padua, 1572); Paolo Tiepolo, Storia della guerra di Cipro (1569–1574), BNM Cod. It. VII, 224 (8309). 32  Giovanni Pietro Contarini, Historia delle cose successe dal principio della guerra mossa da Selim Ottomano a’ Venetiani, fino al dì della gran giornata vittoriosa contra Turchi (Venice, 1572); Federico Sanudo, ‘Descrittion della Guerra contro Selim imperatore de’ Turchi l’anno 1570’, Correr, MS Cicogna 3757; Nicolò Longo, ‘Storia della Guerra di Cipro’, Correr, MS Cicogna 3185. 33  See for instance Contarini, Historia, 6–7; Manolesso, Historia nova, 10–19, 22–5.

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who had ostensibly been charged with accompanying the çavuş to Venice.34 This allowed the Republic to respond to the Sultan’s intentions on Cyprus in advance of his declaration. Historians with ties to the Venetian Senate and those with access to the copybooks which Barbaro and his secretary had compiled during their residence at the Ottoman capital recognized his crucial role as informant for the Venetian government. Natale Conti, for instance, recounted in significant detail not only the movements of the ambassador during the war, but also the clandestine letter writing techniques which he had used to smuggle information out of Constantinople, as Barbaro himself had recorded in the papers brought back upon his return.35 The written details of Barbaro’s mission ensured that the ambassador emerged as one of the chief protagonists in the early historical accounts of the conflict and also served to defend his role in convincing the Grand Vizier to dispatch the Sultan’s ultimatum in writing, a tactic which prolonged the Turkish preparations for war and allowed the Republic to ready itself strategically for the oncoming hostilities.36 Many other important details concerning Venice’s diplomatic activity at the onset of the war, however, were consigned to the secret chancery archive before they could be recounted by contemporary authors. This included a number of pivotal exchanges which had taken place behind closed doors, including the arrival of the Ottoman ambassador, Kubad, to the Ducal Palace on 28 March to present the Sultan’s demands in person. Kubad’s entry to the city, anticipated by the Republic thanks to Barbaro’s efforts, was a widely known public event at the time and thus appeared in many contemporary accounts as the moment at which the hostilities between the two states began in earnest. However, whilst the intentions of the çavuş were generally well recounted, the details of his encounter with the Doge and his councillors were largely reliant upon invention, conjecture, or word of mouth.37 For instance, in his 1572 history of the conflict the Venetian diplomat Emilio Maria Manolesso fabricated a customary form of address for the çavuş to use at the beginning of his audience: Most Serene Prince, Most Illustrious Sirs, I declare myself a friend of this most Glorious Republic [. . .] It is with great displeasure that today I make the statement with which my Supreme Lord has commissioned me. If this brings you consternation, I hope that with your great prudence you will understand that I cannot but obey the commandments of his Highness and that you will excuse me. I pray to the Lord, that he gives me grace to bring this negotiation to an end to the satisfaction of all.38 34  Alessandro Barbero, Lepanto: la battaglia dei tre Imperi (Rome, 2010), 74–6. 35  Natale Conti, Delle historie de’ suoi tempi, 2 vols (Venice, 1589), II.74r. One surviving copybook of Barbaro’s letters has since been transferred to the BNM (Cod. It. VII, 390–1), whilst Conti’s likely connections to the ambassador and his papers are noted by Cicogna, Delle Iscrizioni Veneziane, II.366. Barbaro’s later relazioni were also widely circulated. 36 Conti, Delle Historie, 63v–64r. 37  This has even been the case in more recent accounts of the conflict; George Francis Hill, in A History of Cyprus, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1949), III.888, has recounted an alleged declaration spoken by the çavuş which was taken from a contemporary ‘copy’ of the Sultan’s letter held in the National Archives at Kew (TNA PRO 30/25/4, fo. 210r), which bears little resemblance to that held in the Venetian archives. 38 Manolesso, Historia nova, p. 19v.

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Conti, in contrast, staged a damning indictment by the ambassador upon his exit, claiming that: ‘as the ambassador left, pulling at his beard, he declared: “My Lord has been betrayed!”’39 Without a full comprehension of the encounter, however, most of the early historians focussed instead on the public reaction to Kubad’s arrival at the Palace, noting that the new enemy of the city was abused, threatened, and hounded straight back to his ship by a tumultuous crowd after leaving the Palace.40 A detailed summary of the exchanges between Kubad and the Venetian College on that day, however, had been documented for posterity among the esposizioni records.41 These details were subsequently transcribed into the first volume of a new series of Annali registers, which had been re-commissioned by the Venetian government after a ten-year hiatus, just a few weeks after the victory at Lepanto.42 This first volume, compiled in the chancery as the conflict still raged, narrated exclusively ‘the occurrences between the Republic and the Ottoman Turks concerning the island of Cyprus, after the accession of the Sultan Selim to the Imperial throne in 1566’, beginning with the earliest diplomatic dispatches from Constantinople warning of the Sultan’s intentions.43 The esposizione record from March 1570 outlined the finer details of Kubad’s address to a far greater extent than the accounts of contemporary Venetians. Paruta and Morosini, who were able to access it in the secret chancery, subsequently emulated the structure and phrasing of the document in their accounts. Although neither historian repeated the document verbatim, its influence is evident in a succession of key passages. The account of Kubad’s audience opens with a display of formalities by the çavuş: ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fo. 78v 

Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, 42 Morosini, Historia Veneta, 359

Having made his reverences to the Most Serene Prince, and all the College, and having kissed the robes of the Doge, he went to stand at the usual position reserved for the Ambassadors sent from Constantinople, and drew from his breast two letters, saying that the first was from his Lord, and the second from the Grand Vizier, and that in them was written all that which had recently come to pass.

Having introduced himself to his audience, kissed the robes of the Prince, and after giving all due reverence was invited to sit, Kubad presented a bag of gold fabric, which in accordance to his nation’s custom contained the letters from Selim, and said: ‘This, Most Serene Prince, is a letter from my Lord, from which all will be explained.’

Having greeted the Prince and his councillors with a bowed head, kissed the Doge’s vestments, and was invited to sit, Kubad handed over the letters from Selim and Mehmed, which he said contained the thoughts of his Lord, and that which he had demanded.

39 Conti, Delle Historie, p. 63v. 40  See for instance Pietro Giustiniani, Le historie Venetiane (Venice, 1576), p. 330r; Correr, MS Cicogna 3757, fo. 174r. 41  ASVe, Collegio, Esposizioni Principi, reg. 2, pp. 4–5, ‘Espositione di Cubat Chiaus mandato a dimandare il Regno di Cipro’. 42  ASVe, Consiglio di Dieci, Deliberzioni, Comuni, reg. 30, fos. 71v–72r. 43  ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, title page of second section (unnumbered).

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Having been brought into the assembly chamber ‘without any of the honours usually reserved for the diplomats who come to the city’,44 Kubad was simply told that his letters would be translated and that he could leave with the government’s written response for the Sultan. Faced with the realization that his mission would very likely come to nothing, the çavuş proceeded to plead his master’s case: ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fo. 79r

Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, 42 Morosini, Historia Veneta, 359 

The Ambassador, now with a pale face, and a trembling voice, said: ‘The Grand Vizier has told me to say that eleven of the Sultan’s ships have been taken around Cyprus this year, and that the enemies of his Majesty use the island as a point of departure. There have been numerous such disturbances at the confines of our territories, and although all of this has been made clear, we have not yet received any responses to our letters, and no agreement has been reached with your ambassador [in Constantinople], and in the face of this disrespect my Lord has demanded the island of Cyprus.’

Kubad, now with a troubled spirit, continued: ‘Sirs, Mehmed Pasha has instructed me to inform you that there has emerged new reason to break our peace, which he deeply regrets, as he has always endeavoured to preserve it. However, the complaints which frequently reach our court from all directions—that Western corsairs have been given favour in Cyprus, with great damage inflicted upon Muslims as a result—have agitated the spirit and anger of the Sultan against this state, to which the many negotiations with your ­ambassadors have so far proved fruitless.’

Kubad was struck pale in astonishment, and having presented his opening address alongside the letters of the Sultan and the Grand Vizier, he proceeded to explain that which had induced Selim to demand Cyprus.

Unmoved by the ambassador’s claims, the College had their pre-arranged reply to the Sultan translated to the ambassador by their Turkish interpreter. Their letter— in which the Senate declared the island to have been ‘legitimately and peacefully held by the Republic for many years’ and that they would defend it against the Sultan’s unprovoked aggression by the grace of God—was transcribed just before Kubad’s address in the Annali registers and was thus subsequently rendered as speech by Paruta in his account.45 In a final attempt to enter into negotiations, the çavuş attempted to intercede on behalf of the Grand Vizier: ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fo. 79r

Morosini, Historia Veneta, 359

Kubad asked if he could speak, and having been told he could, he said: ‘The Grand Vizier, who is a friend of Your Serenity, has commanded me to inform you that the Great Emperor can send out a thousand ships, but that he [the Vizier] would always make every effort to intercede and return Your Serenity to peace with his Lord.’

Kubad asked if he was permitted to speak, and having been told that he was, he added that Mehmed had commanded him to inform the Republic that the Sultan could dispatch an armada of a thousand ships from Hellespont, but that he would be able to intercede to renew the peace. 

44 Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, 41. 45 ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fos. 77r–v, ‘On 27 March, the Senate decided to respond to the letters of the Sultan in this manner’; Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, 43.

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With no further response from the College and in anticipation of his dismissal from the chamber, the ambassador gave a final plea for safe passage from the city, before making a subdued exit from the Palace.46 Although the two historians’ account of the Ottoman audience did not fully contradict those written by contemporaries, their adherence to the details contained in the chancery record allowed for a new interpretation of the event. This was a largely unprecedented approach to recounting the process of oral diplomacy within Venetian historiography, as the long and eloquent orations common to Renaissance history writing were replaced with a shorter and more colloquial dialogue. More importantly for the narrative itself, however, the çavuş was not portrayed as a foreign antagonist, but rather as a hopeful mediator between the two states—speaking on behalf of the more moderate Grand Vizier, who had previously voiced grave concerns about the likely fortunes of the Ottoman fleet in the event of an open conflict.47 In this archival narrative of the encounter, the shock and dismay of the Ottoman ambassador—who at one stage even asked his interpreter if his master’s message had been correctly translated—threw his dispassionate dismissal by the Venetians into even sharper focus. As historians such as Paruta had noted, there had been many amongst the Venetian Senate who believed that the Republic would be wrong to assume that the Sultan’s threats meant war was inevitable, and that it would be irresponsible to risk losing Cyprus by force if some accord could still be made, yet these voices were overruled.48 Nevertheless, although many of the early historians had noted this deliberate break in the city’s diplomatic approach, few had examined the government’s motives for doing so in any greater detail than having ‘decided that it would be better for the dignity and greatness of the Republic to defend Cyprus against the Turks in open war’.49 The records surrounding this incident in the Annali registers, however, allowed Paruta and Morosini to reconsider the city’s curt reception of the Ottoman ambassador within the wider context of its European diplomacy, as they detailed the hitherto secretive correspondence between Venice and the Catholic powers of Europe regarding the possibility of an anti-Turkish Holy League.50 These discussions had accelerated in early 1570 as successive reports of the Sultan’s intentions arrived from Constantinople and were recounted in unparalleled detail by the two historians with access to the chancery.51 For instance, upon receipt of the Turkish letters and news of Kubad’s departure from Constantinople on 15 March 1570, a month after 46 ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fo. 79v; Morosini, Historia Veneta, 359. 47 Conti, Delle Historie, p. 63v summarized the debate over who had driven the outbreak of war. On Sokollu Mehmed’s opposition to the Sultan’s aggressive policy, see Maria Pia Pedani Fabris, ‘Some Remarks upon the Ottoman Geo-Political Vision of the Mediterranean in the Period of the Cyprus War (1570–1573)’, in Colin Imber and Keiko Kiyotaki (eds), Frontiers of Ottoman Studies, 2 vols (London, 2005), II.27–31. 48 Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, 43–4. 49 Contarini, Historia, p. 4v. 50  See Kenneth Meyer Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204–1571, 4 vols (Philadelphia, 1984), IV.932–54. 51  The exchange of dispatches from Barbaro’s first warning to the arrival of Kubad is recounted in ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fos. 42r–78v; Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, 23–37; Morosini, Historia Veneta, 353–8.

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their initial dispatch from the Ottoman court,52 the Senate instructed its ambassadors in Rome, Spain, and France to pass on details of the oncoming Ottoman demands, as a sign of faith to their potential allies.53 In a dispatch which arrived from Rome on 26 March 1570, the Venetian ambassador Michele Surian relayed a warning that the government’s response to this demand could have a profound impact upon the city’s fortunes in Europe. Pope Pius V, it stated: trusted the Republic would not be fooled by the promises of the Turk [. . .] that they would not lose the reputation which they had gained throughout the world for their strong and study defence [. . .] and that they would not mislead the Christian Princes uniting in this common task and risk losing any of the alliances of which they may have need in the future.54

With the Turkish ambassador now only two days away, the Venetian government discussed their reception of the çavuş: We must not entertain the expedition of the Ambassador sent by the Turks to our Signoria, so as to give no suspicion to the other Princes that we are to enter into any agreements with him. [. . .] Not one member of the College will stand at his arrival, nor give any recognition towards him [. . .] he will be told that his letters will be translated and responded to immediately, after which he will be sent back to his Lord.55

These two records, which immediately preceded Kubad’s esposizione in the Annali register, highlighted the role of international pressure upon Venice’s treatment of the ambassador. The rejection of Ottoman advances needed to be carefully managed, as any suggestion of duplicity by the Venetians might endanger their ability to gather support in the event of an assault on the island; an explanation which was subsequently recounted by the two historians: It was by a general consent of both the College and the Senate that the advice of dispatching the ambassador away quietly, with few and resolute words, accepting the war which he was to denounce against them, was approved of [. . .] The doubt propounded, that the Princes might grow suspicious if the Venetians were to treat of some agreement with the Turks, or if they were to return a slower and less positive answer to this embassy [. . .] that the treaty of the League, which the Venetians greatly desired and which had hopefully begun, might be interrupted.56

In this new interpretation, the entire audience before the Doge, as well as the written response to the Sultan’s demands, had been preordained by the Venetian government, so as to reassure the rest of Europe that the Republic had not, as Pius V had previously warned, been ‘fooled by the promises of the Turk’. 52  Barbaro’s final letters before the outbreak of war were also transcribed in ASVe Annali, reg. 3 fos. 71v–6r. 53 Ibid., fo. 76r–v, 16 March 1570; Morosini, Historia Veneta, 358. 54  ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fo. 76v, report from the Venetian ambassador in Rome, 26 March 1570. 55  Decree by the Venetian Senate, 27 March 1570, ASVe, Annali, reg. 3, fos. 78r–v. Details of their prepared response were sent to their ambassadors in the Papal, Imperial and Spanish courts on the very same day (ibid., fos. 79v–81r). 56 Paruta, Historia Vinetiana, p. 41. See also Morosini, Historia Veneta, 358.

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Paruta and Morosini’s consultation of the secret chancery archive formed the basis of their more detailed accounts of the motives and machinations of Venetian diplomacy at the outbreak of the War of Cyprus. Both the arrangement and details of the diplomatic records transcribed within the Annali registers had been translated into a full historical narrative only a few decades after their creation, thus fulfilling the government’s intention to commemorate the deeds of the Republic by means of its record keeping practices. To a certain extent, the chancery reforms of the sixteenth century had allowed the Venetian state to manipulate its own legacy, by constructing a narrative of the city’s recent diplomacy for its historians to follow. This is particularly evident in the esposizioni records themselves, whose original files demonstrate how the tone, content and phrasing of the interlocutors was often subject to revision by the Republic’s secretaries before their transcription into the registers of the chancery.57 In this respect, Kubad’s exchange with the Venetian College, as recounted by the two historians, was based on a predominantly Venetian interpretation of Ottoman diplomacy, thus manipulating the image of the Turkish ambassador for future generations. This was not lost on contemporary theorists, such as Valier, who recommended a healthy scepticism when approaching the archive, as ‘the ministers of this Republic remain but human and often employ their secretaries, who are not fully informed of events, to report for them and thus they can relay information which may not be entirely truthful’.58 Nevertheless, emerging practices in the creation, organization, and use of chancery records during the sixteenth century had a significant impact upon the way in which diplomatic encounters were both contextualized and explained to future readers of Venetian history. In this respect, the archival management and afterlife of Venice’s diplomatic records continued to shape the image of the city long after their original use and are thus an important consideration for the cultural representations of diplomacy in the early modern period. As record-keeping systems across the continent began to accommodate larger and more organized compendia of diplomatic information during this time, the ways in which these documents were transcribed, indexed, and presented to contemporary visitors had an increasingly significant impact upon the historical image of the government left for posterity. In the centuries before the emergence of centralized national archives, such administrative circumstances would have varied markedly from state to state across the continent, as each government adopted its own unique approach to the preservation and use of its diplomatic material. In order to appreciate the ways in which the early modern historian was able to construct their narratives of contemporary diplomacy, we must therefore first understand the systems of information management with which they were confronted at the time.

57  ASVe, Collegio, Esposizioni Principi, Filze, b. 1.

58  Valier, ‘Ricordi’, 183.

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PA RT I V D I P L O M AT I C D O C U M E N T S

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11 Textual Ambassadors and Ambassadorial Texts Literary Representation and Diplomatic Practice in George Turberville’s and Thomas Randolph’s Accounts of Russia (1568–9) Jan Hennings I N T RO D U C T I O N Muscovite Russia was a terra incognita in sixteenth-century English society but was not entirely unknown to theatre audiences or readers of travel literature. The image of Russia as a ‘rude and barbarous kingdom’ had spawned from reports about the Muscovy Company’s diplomatic encounters at the tsar’s court and soon found its way into Elizabethan poetry and drama.1 In Sidney’s sonnets, for example, Astrophil famously styles himself as a ‘slave-born Muscovite’ to praise the ‘Tyrannie’ of his love.2 In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, the king and a small entourage appear disguised as Russians, or ‘frozen Muscovites’, whose ceremonious bluff is made to be reminiscent of Russian court ceremonial as they are entering the scene ‘in shapeless gear’, with their ‘shallow shows, and prologue vilely penned, and their rough carriage so ridiculous’—these ‘trim gallants, full of courtship and of state’.3 The masquerade marries the themes of geographic distance and cultural difference with contempt for unfounded ostentation.4 Indeed, the stranger from Russia formed part of the storehouse of early modern exotica, stimulating readers’ imagination across a range of genres.

1  RBK. A useful introduction to sixteenth-century English works on Russia is Stéphane Mund, ‘The Discovery of Muscovite Russia in Tudor England’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 86 (2008), 351–73. 2  The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford, 1962), 166. 3  The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd edn (New York, 2008), 822–4. 4  Ibid., 819–20. For a discussion of cultural difference in Love’s Labour’s Lost, see Ladan Niayesh, ‘Muscovites and “Black-amours”: Alien Love Traders in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 32 (2015) http://shakespeare.revues.org/3158; David W. Palmer, Writing Russia in the Age of Shakespeare (Aldershot, 2004), ch. 3.

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Sidney and Shakespeare may have projected such stereotypes of foreign cultural norms in order to mirror and comment upon their own, but they did not pull them out of thin air. Such images were the result of intertextual engagements between literature and diplomacy, a relationship that has recently attracted the attention of literary scholars and diplomatic historians alike.5 Knowledge about Russia was scarce and what was known usually derived from foreign descriptions.6 Many of these accounts emerged in diplomatic contexts but circulated among a wider readership thanks to the rise of an early modern publication genre: travel literature. Ambassadors (or men of letters travelling with them) penned their experiences and observations, often moulding them with other sources, and typically portraying Russian government, religion, and society as manifestly foreign. The most widely read examples of early modern Muscovitica included Sigismund von Herberstein’s Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii which appeared in Vienna in 1549 and was subsequently published in numerous European languages. The Habsburg diplomat had travelled to the Muscovite court twice, in 1517 and 1526, to mediate and confirm a truce between Lithuania and Muscovy, and it was his account that exerted an enormous influence in disseminating the stereotype of Russians who were born to languish as slaves to a tyrannical despot.7 It would be of little help to try to classify the diverse body of published foreign travellers’ descriptions as a coherent literary genre. But important overlaps between these narratives permit the identification of recurring patterns, in particular the ways in which diplomats-cum-travel-writers often used European categories to conceptualize foreign societies in the publications that followed their missions abroad. Not every account was so cautiously composed to observe established convention in style and literary form as were the famous Venetian diplomatic reports, the relazioni.8 But much like the relazioni’s descriptions of the Ottoman Empire, for example, writings about Russia blended an early form of ethnographic description with Renaissance political discourse derived from Aristotelian classifications of despotic governance and deeply invested in the fascination with the ‘other’.9

5  Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy: Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca, NY, 2009). The best study of Anglo-Russian diplomatic encounters and their literary representations is Palmer, Writing Russia. 6  The authoritative guide is Marshall Poe, Foreign Descriptions of Muscovy: An Analytic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Columbus, OH, 1995). 7  Marshall Poe, ‘Herberstein and the Origin of the European Image of Muscovite Government’, in Frank Kämpfer and Reinhard Frötschner (eds), 450 Jahre Sigismund von Herbersteins Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii 1549–1999 (Wiesbaden, 2001), 131–71. For the significance of Herberstein’s work, see Poe, Bibliography, 8–9, 43–44. See also, John M. Archer, Old Worlds: Egypt, Southwest Asia, India, and Russia in Early Modern English Writing (Stanford, 2001), ch. 3. 8 Gino Benzoni, ‘Ranke’s Favourite Source: The Relazioni of the Venetian Ambassadors’, The Courier, 22 (1987), 23; Filippo de Vivo, ‘How to Read Venetian “Relazioni”’, RR, 34 (2011), 26. See Eric R. Dursteler, ‘Describing or Distorting the “Turk”? The Relazioni of the Venetian Ambassadors in Constantinople as Historical Source’, Acta Histriae, 19 (2011), 231–48, for the use of the relazioni in diplomatic history. 9  Marshall Poe, A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (London, 2000), esp. ch. 4 on Herberstein. For a similar pattern in the Venetian relazioni, see Lucetta Valensi, ‘The Making of a Political Paradigm: The Ottoman State and Oriental Despotism’, in

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For the sake of the argument developed here, it is helpful to differentiate these works from immediate diplomatic correspondence. These texts developed their own diplomatic agency, as it were, and became mediators between cultures. In this sense, they were ‘textual ambassadors’, that is, letters from the world of literature composed to negotiate the ways in which Europeans understood Muscovy and nurturing a long-lasting image of Russia. A good example of such textual ambassadors is the poetry of George Turberville which Anthony Cross called ‘England’s first poetic response to Russia’ and Daryl Palmer described ‘as the bridge between the writing of Russian diplomacy and the writing of Shakespeare’s public theatre’.10 Turberville had travelled to Russia as a secretary in the entourage of Thomas Randolph’s 1568–9 mission to the tsar’s court and captured his experiences in a series of eight poems and three verse letters which he appended to the 1587 edition of his Tragicall Tales. The intertextual bridge extended beyond the Elizabethan era. Commentators continued to accept and reproduce his depiction of ‘the barbarous state of society in Russia’, or ‘the rude magnificence of its court and the hopeless poverty and barbarism of its peasant class’, well into the twentieth century.11 Turberville’s verses are just one striking example of such textual ambassadors which also had a long-term impact on modern scholarship in that the historiography of diplomacy is enmeshed with the cultural discourses that are woven into its source materials.12 ‘The Muscovites are rude, barbarous and brutish’, wrote Abraham de Wicquefort, the author of a seventeenth-century diplomatic handbook, lumping the Russians together with ‘the Turks [who] are cruel, insolent and proud’. In matters of ceremony the Russian court displayed an ‘arrogancy that is almost beastly’, according to the author.13 In the eighteenth century, Russian diplomats gradually adopted European discourses of otherness in order to distance themselves from the old barbarous and pompous ways of Muscovite diplomacy or from the Ottomans whom they began to orientalize at the time.14 Nineteenth-century legal scholarship and historians of international law followed this interpretation and described prePetrine Muscovy as an outsider to European diplomacy, as do most standard modern accounts of diplomatic history based on the notion of its perceived otherness and ritualism, instead focussing on Russia’s attempts at rising above its inherited outsider role and at integrating itself into the European states-system as an emerging great power under Tsar Peter I and his successors.15 Anthony Grafton and Anne Blair (eds), The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia, 1990), 173–203. 10 Anthony G. Cross, The Russian Theme in English Literature from the Sixteenth Century to 1980: An Introductory Survey and Bibliography (Oxford, 1985), 3; Palmer, Writing Russia, 76. 11  George Turberville, Tragical Tales (Edinburgh, 1837), iv; James E. Hankins, The Life and Works of George Turberville (Lawrence, KS, 1940), 13. 12  See Archer, Old Worlds, 125. 13  Abraham de Wicquefort, The embassador and his functions, trans. J. Digby (London, 1716), 145. 14  Victor Taki, Tsar and Sultan: Russian Encounters with the Ottoman Empire (London, 2016), ch. 1. The dichotomy between ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarian’ was of course not the reserve of Europeans alone. 15  For a full discussion, see Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and the Culture of Diplomacy 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016), 25–44, 157–8.

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What do these images about tyrannical tsars with their ‘ceremonious stomachs’ reveal about the diplomatic practice of the time?16 Why would one assume that the tsars’ diplomats actually behaved like figures in a play by Shakespeare—‘full of courtship and state’—or that Russian diplomatic culture was in fact fundamentally different from its Western counterpart as many ‘textual ambassadors’ suggest, separating England and Muscovy into distinct diplomatic spheres? This essay juxtaposes Turberville’s textual ambassadors with Randolph’s ambassadorial texts, that is, the diplomat’s direct correspondence with his court in London. Contrasting the papers of Thomas Randolph’s mission with George Turberville’s literary accounts of the same embassy, this essay combines an exploration of diplomatic practice and ceremonial with a genre critique and methodological reflection on the relationship between the textual representation of cultural encounter and its implications for the history of diplomacy. The essay questions central assumptions about Russia’s image as Europe’s cultural other, not in order to rehabilitate it as an insider who was fully integrated in European diplomacy but to offer wider conclusions about the unilateral perception of Russian culture in contradistinction to the reciprocal nature of diplomacy. A close-read comparison of Randolph’s and Turberville’s texts underscores the difficulty of translating pre-conceived notions about cultural difference into each culture’s distinctive symbols of sovereignty and statehood, highlighting the legacy of ‘textual ambassadors’, and the images they conveyed, in diplomatic history. T E X T U A L A M B A S S A D O R : T U R B E RV I L L E ’ S POEMS AND VERSE LETTERS Thomas Randolph travelled to Russia in 1568–9 to negotiate and reaffirm the trade privileges that Richard Chancellor had gained from Ivan IV for the Muscovy Company in the 1550s. The Company gave £1527 to defray the expenses of his embassy, a worthwhile investment, as Randolph succeeded in his mission after a long and difficult stay in Russia.17 An entourage of forty persons accompanied him. Randolph wrote that ‘half were gentlemen desirous to see the world’, among them Turberville.18 The poet’s desire resulted in literary ambition, and it has been suggested that he might have written some of his poetry while still in Russia.19 The title of the collection attached to the Tragicall Tales at least adds the authenticity of temporal proximity. The subheading on the first page reads ‘With some other broken pamphlettes and Epistles, sent to certaine his frends in England, at his being in 16  Quoted in Matthew Smith Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London, 1993), 61. 17  Julian Lock, ‘Randolph, Thomas (1525/6–1590), Diplomat’, ODNB. 18  RBK, 65. On Turberville and the theme of travel as an adventurous enterprise in sixteenthcentury English poetry, see Elizabeth Heale, ‘Travailing Abroad: The Poet as Adventurer’, in Mike Pincombe (ed.), Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000) (Aldershot, 2004), 3–18. 19  Jane Farnsworth, ‘To Russia Without Love: George Turberville as Resistant Traveler’, in Helen Ostovich, Mary V. Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (eds), The Mysterious and the Foreign in Early Modern England (Newark, 2008), 75.

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Moscouia. Anno 1569’ and encourages the reader to ponder advice from the New Testament: ‘Omnia probate. Quod bonum est tenete.’20 The poems and epistles that deal with Russian themes continue the authenticity tactics of the paratext through literary form. The narrators appear to be writing directly from Russia both as the poet-lover in the Petrarchan songs and the travelling gentleman in the verse letters.21 Although varied in form and style, these textual ambassadors authenticate the same observations: the harshness of the land, the rudeness of its people, the tyranny of its ruler—in sum, ‘the strangeness of the place’.22 Jane Farnsworth has shown that the speaker in Turberville’s poems uses Russia as catch-all contrast to the love for his mistress and homeland, a contrast between wilderness and civilization in which barbarous Russia appears incompatible with civilized Europe, even escaping carefully placed references to the classical myths and stories that run through the poems.23 At the beginning, the prospects of his travels seem promising for more mundane reasons connected to the embassy’s mission, as ‘Moscouia is the place, / where all good furres be sold’, and, the speaker hopes, ‘I shall returne / farre better than I goe, / increase of credite will procure / my simple wealth to growe’. Soon, however, the discomfort of voyaging through winter frost and snow and the anxiety of encountering the unfamiliar catches up with commercial ambition, and he announces to his addressee (and, by implication, the reader) that ‘the harde mishappes of trauayle you / by me shall vnderstand, / And whatsoeuer straunge / or monstrous sight I see, / Assure thy selfe at my returne / I will declare it thee.’24 The promise of entertainment and education is followed by a pledge, in the second poem, that no hardship of travel, no austereness, no ‘cruell colde’ made a man forget his friend: ‘No Russie mought the true loue knot vnbinde.’25 This juxtapostion between human relations and adversity symbolized by Russia through different motifs—hostile weather, insurmountable distances, barbarous manners, despotic government, etc.—becomes a main strand throughout the rest of the poems. The speaker declares himself imprisoned in Russia and celebrates the freedom of his mind safely gathered in his love. A comparison between a ‘braue Lady of Russia’, who bedazzles the eye through outward appearance, and his English mistress ‘with [her] kindly shape and kindly coloured cheekes’ reveals the true attraction of the familiar against the allure of semblance that he finds in the exotic: ‘The Russies rude doe deeme right wel of thee, / Mine English eye no paynted image leekes.’26 Moscow with its ‘frozen skie’ creates the menace of a strange world that the narrator withstands for the love he had left behind at home: ‘Yet may no winters force in Russia binde / My heart so heard, or alter so my minde, / But that I still imbrace her beautie most: / I went her friend, and so continue still, / Frost 20  George Turberville, Tragicall Tales (London, 1587), fo. 144. (‘Test all things; hold fast what is good’, 1 Thessalonians 5:21). 21  Farnsworth, ‘To Russia Without Love’, 76–7. I quote the three verse letters from their modern edition in RBK, 75–84, and the poems from the original 1587 edition. 22  RBK, 83. 23  My reading of the poems here is based on Farnsworth, ‘To Russia Without Love’. See also, Palmer, Writing Russia, 76–9. 24 Turberville, Tragicall Tales, fos. 146–47.    25  Ibid., fo. 147v. 26  Ibid., fo. 148.

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cannot freat the ground of my goodwill.’27 But the frozen mighty rivers, the thick snow, and ‘the raging Ocean [. . .] with cruel tide’ denies him passage home: ‘In Russia where I leade my life, / and long againe at home to be. / No force shall cause me to forget / or lay the care of loue aside.’28 Russia serves not as the object but the negative image of his longing: ‘Wounded with loue, and piercing deep desire / Of your faire face, I left my natiue land, / With Russia snow to slacke mine English fire, / But well I see, no cold can quench the brand / That Cupides coles enkindle in the brest, / Frost hath no force where friendship is possest.’29 While the epistles do not adopt the same pronounced Petrarchan topoi as the love lyrics, they employ both the conventions of the verse letter and those of the travel narrative to continue the author’s deeply negative portrayal of Russia, supporting the relationship of distance and irreconcilable difference between the traveller’s home and his experiences in Russia.30 The literary model that springs to mind is Ovid’s verse letters Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto which tell in song the story of the author’s exile in Tomis (Constanta in Romania) on the Black Sea coast, invoking an inhospitable climate, desolate landscape, and constant exposure to barbarian raids, and expressing the narrator’s yearning for his friends and wife and his appeals to them for help.31 It is interesting to imagine that a series of Ovidian topoi re-applied to Russia might have been read very literally over the centuries. Turberville captioned the three letters as follows: ‘The Author being in Moscouia, wrytes [. . .] of the state of the place, not exactly, but at all aduentures, and minding to haue descrybed all the Moscouites maners, brake off his purpose vpon fome occasion.’32 The first letter—to Edwarde Dancie—describes the Russians as a ‘people passing rude’, exploring in very explicit terms their excessive drinking habits, sexual perversions, shallow religiosity, and sinful behaviour, and drawing the epistle to a close with the claim that his accounts were truthful depictions of Russian life: ‘Thus much (friend Dancie) I did meane to write to thee, / To let thee weet in Russia land what men and women be. / Hereafter I perhaps of other things will write / To thee and other of my friends which I shall see with sight, / And other stuff besides which true report shall tell.’33 In the second letter, the speaker goes on to describe land and people in relation to weather conditions, the cold winter, livestock, housing, manners, and so on, occasionally contrasting his Russian observations with the advantages of living in England (‘Of wat’rish taste, the flesh not firm like English beef ’).34 The last epistle, to Parker, gives the perhaps most explicit judgement about the strange nature of the Muscovites, melding observations of everyday life with the stock themes of cruelty, abuse, and tyranny. The speaker is horrified by the absence of laws and justice, likening the repressive government of Russia to that of Tarquinius Superbus (the proud), the last king of Rome according to the legend, whose reign invoked absolute despotism and terror in the mind of a Renaissance reader: ‘In such 27  Ibid., fo. 149. 28  Ibid., fo. 152. 29  Ibid., fo. 157. 30  Farnsworth, ‘To Russia Without Love’, 75, suggests that this was the reason why they, as opposed to the love lyrics, were included in Hakluyt’s sixteenth-century Principal Navigations. 31 Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters, trans. and ed. Peter Green (Berkeley, CA, 2005), xxv, xxvii, xliii. 32 Turberville, Tragicall Tales, fo. 183v. 33  RBK, 75, 77.    34  Ibid., 78.

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a savage soil where laws do bear no sway, / But all is at the king his will to save or else to slay [. . .] Where lust is law, and subjects live continually in dread [. . .] So Tarquin ruled Rome, as thou rememb’rest well.’35 This cultural demarcation from the political errors of civilized antiquity is amplified by adding an ‘oriental other’ that helped to fabricate the imaginary of European civilization, as the speaker compares the Muscovites to Ottomans: ‘The manners are so Turkish like’; as well as to another ‘other’ much closer to home: ‘Wild Irish are as civil as the Russies in their kind; / Hard choice which is the best of both, each bloody, rude, and blind.’ The letter ends with an advice, leaving a hint to the source that Turberville’s textual ambassadors exploited in order to give the author’s first-hand experiences in Russia a poetic frame. The reader should stay home and read Herberstein: ‘Adieu, friend Parker, if thou list to know the Russes well, / To Sigismundus’ book repair, who all the truth can tell.’36 At the core of both the poems and the epistles, then, lies the concept of profound and irreconcilable difference. An escape to cultural assimilation or attempts at mitigating the threat of strangeness by seeking the familiar in the unknown seem futile.37 The leitmotif of Turberville’s texts is Russia as the fundamental other,38 either as the antithesis to the superior comfort of one’s own culture and to the personal commitments as in the poems, or as the object of ethnographic description for the purpose of ‘true report’, as in the verse letters. Turberville rarely points the speaker’s voice to his own activities as a member of an embassy and remains silent—from the distance of the observer—about his interactions in Russia.39 Even the descriptions of travel only serve to intensify the contrast of his own world to the tropes of Russia, the harshness of the cold, rude society, and so on, rather than conveying the image of a traveller as participant observer. The speaker’s action only moves into focus when the theme relates to himself as a writer—to ‘paper, pen, and ink’—and focuses on literary activity. But even here, in the second epistle, for example, the process of writing and the encounter of strangeness coalesce into one stream of experience to lend authenticity to the poetics of difference. The narrator acknowledges that he composes with a broad brush but defends himself by saying that he had rather not share all that he observed in this barbarous place lest his ‘pen would punch and eke offend’: Lo thus I make an end; none other news to thee, But that the country is too cold, the people beastly be. I write not all I know, I touch but here and there, For if I should, my pen would punch and eke offend, I fear. Who so shall read this verse, conjecture of the rest, And think by reason of our trade that I do think the best. But if no traffic were, then could I boldly pen The hardness of the soil and eke the manners of the men.40 35  Ibid., 83. See Poe, People Born to Slavery, 158–9.   36  RBK, 83–4. 37  Also noted by Farnsworth, ‘To Russia Without Love’, 76–7. 38  Among other societies that informed early modern colonial discourse, Archer, Old Worlds. 39  See also Palmer, Writing Russia, 77. 40  RBK, 80.

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And at the end of the last letter, when the speaker turns to Herberstein as a source of ‘true’ knowledge about Russia, he takes leave of his reader with an explicit intertextual gesture: ‘To him (Herberstein) I recommend myself to ease my pen of pain, / And now at last do wish thee well and bid farewell again.’41 How do Turberville’s ‘textual ambassadors’, his self-consciously poeticized, Ovidian accounts compare to the ambassadorial texts that survived from Thomas Randolph’s mission to Russia? A M B A S S A D O R I A L T E X T: T H O M A S R A N D O L P H ’ S D I P L O M AT I C R E P O RT Judged by ‘an account of the great cause of offence given to Mr. T. Randolph’, the ambassador had good reason to vent anger and respond to his inhospitable treatment at the tsar’s court with a lecture on Russian barbarism. Randolph gave a list of the slights he suffered, namely that other Englishmen were not permitted to meet him, that he was kept in his house for four months until the tsar received him, that the correspondence between him and the queen witnessed repeated interruption, and that he was rushed to depart shortly after his valedictory audience. ‘Other discomfortes’, he reported, ‘were muche lighter then these used as well to myself as to my companie.’42 Not uncharacteristic for diplomatic reportage, the account gives strictly descriptive impressions of the ambassador’s activities, and it ends where readers more familiar with travel narratives might expect a corollary cultural interpretation of rude and barbarous conduct. And yet, there is no allusion to barbarism in this text, nor are the author’s offences construed to reveal cultural differences. This also holds true in part for Randolph’s diplomatic report that the Elizabethan writer and editor of geographical descriptions, Richard Hakluyt, published in a volume of his Principall Navigations in 1589.43 Randolph’s brief account describes the embassy’s stay in Russia from his arrival at the border to his departure from the Russian court. In contrast to Turberville’s preoccupation with ‘the strangeness of the place’,44 Randolph displayed a generally more positive, if neutral, view of the country. There is occasional mention of ‘rude manners’ and ‘abominable vices’ of the people he met on his journey to Moscow, but this stereotypical observation neither sets the tone for the text, nor does it refer to ceremony and diplomatic customs.45 It seems that Randolph marvelled more at the whales and their secretion (spermaceti) that he beheld at sea, than he showed excitement for the people he observed on land. A protestant, Randolph described the Orthodox monks he encountered upon arrival with suspicion and little respect, as they ‘are given much to drunkenness; unlearned, write they can; preach they do never, ceremonious in their church, and long in their prayers’.46 41  Ibid., 84. 42  BL, Lansdowne MS 10, fo. 130v. 43 Richard Hakluyt (ed.), Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols (London, 1589), I.399–402. I quote from the modern edition in RBK, 65–70. 44  Ibid., 83. 45  Ibid., 66. 46  Ibid., 66. Similar observations in CSPF VIII 2414, in which Randolph also reported the execution of members of the Russian nobility on order of Tsar Ivan IV.

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The information he gave about his itinerary is scant. The author described, for example, the Dvina river on which his ship was hauled upstream from town to town, and he shared his impressions about the landscape on the way to Moscow: ‘The country is very fair, plain, and pleasant; well inhabited; corn, pasture, meadows enough; rivers and woods, fair and goodly.’47 He also mentioned Kholmogory as an example for small Russian towns and briefly described Vologda with its wooden houses, the ‘castle environed with a wall of stone and brick’, the churches and the monks and wealthy merchants that lived there.48 About half way through the report, as soon as Randolph arrived in Moscow where he expected to meet the Russian monarch, the text changes gears and turns the direction of attention inward. A change of perspective shifts the focus away from the world Randolph observed as traveller to his own activities and experiences as diplomat. The story is no longer about an Englishman travelling to a foreign land but about a diplomatic dignitary representing his monarch abroad. Both theme and author’s activity are one, offering a self-referential depiction of the diplomat’s interactions at a foreign court. This explains why the reader learns virtually nothing about Moscow, its topography, or architecture or about the lives and manners of the Muscovites. Instead the reader is confronted with myriad details of protocol deprived of the cultural overtones that one might perhaps expect in a report about the diplomatic customs of another society. The point is that strictly speaking his report does not pertain to the genre of travel literature. At the centre of attention was the author, Randolph, and his position in the rituals he encountered at the Russian court, not an ‘ethnographic’ analysis of those rituals’ cultural foundation. The information presented served as proof of the diplomat’s correct behaviour which had to be in line with his instructions even if those allowed for a great degree of agency and initiative. Randolph had been advised by the secretary of state, William Cecil, that he was ‘to use such ceremonies as by his discretion shall stand with [the queen’s] honour’.49 The appointment for this mission arguably fell on Randolph because of both his honorary status as gentleman of the privy chamber and his relatively young age which put him in good stead to undertake the strenuous journey to Russia. As a practised diplomat and courtier, he could not only draw on a wide range of experience but also on higher personal status than previous representatives to Russia, exploiting his own acquired social standing for representational purposes.50 Indeed, Randolph’s long diplomatic career, during which he was dispatched on twelve embassies in thirty-one years, has been described as paradigmatic for the development of Elizabethan foreign relations with its emphasis on written correspondence—‘the lifeblood of diplomacy’.51 What did Randolph report from Russia? First, he noted the grant he received from the tsar to defray his expenses before arriving in Moscow. The allowance amounted to two roubles a day for food and drinks, a charge of boats, eighty (‘four score’) 47  RBK, 67. 48 Ibid. 49  CSPF VIII 2272. 50  Lock, ‘Randolph’. 51 Gary  M.  Bell, ‘Elizabethan Diplomacy: The Subtle Revolution’, in Malcolm  R.  Thorp and Arthur J. Slavin (eds), Politics, Religion & Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of De Lamar Jensen (Kirksville, MO, 1994), 269–70.

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post horses, and more than one hundred carts to carry wine and food. He also mentioned the time the embassy waited before travelling on to Moscow and acknowledged, in vague terms, the rank of the person that received them, ‘a gentleman of [the tsar’s] house’.52 This information mattered, as it provided a template for reciprocal treatment of future Russian ambassadors in England. Importantly, it was also indicative of the rank that the Russian court attributed to the diplomat, and, by implication, to his master, the queen, since not every embassy would receive the same amount of provisions as a status token.53 In Moscow, he went on reporting, two gentlemen looked after him to make sure that he suffered no shortage of victuals and to guard his presence until he was invited to attend the first public audience with the monarch. The seventeen weeks Randolph spent in his residence waiting for an invitation by the tsar he described as a kind of house arrest which caused much suspicion regarding the purpose and success of his mission although the daily provisions were plenty. After a long delay, Randolph finally received the invitation for a public audience scheduled for 20 February at eight o’clock in the morning. Two Russian officials (pristavy), who were appointed to accompany the diplomat to the Russian court, collected Randolph who noted their lavish, ‘princely’ dress. They insisted that the diplomat rode on horseback, using the horses provided by the tsar while his entourage had to walk on foot. Randolph occasionally changed the grammatical person in the text so as to shift the attention from subjective experience to a focussed account about the procedure and his role in it although such grammatical turns remain rare: ‘The ambassador (being myself ) was conveyed into an office where one of the  chancellors doth use to sit, being there accompanied with the two foresaid gentlemen.’54 The account continues with a description of the ceremony. Randolph reported the number of courtiers in the throne room—about 300, all lavishly dressed for the occasion—and assessed the political purpose of their presence: the courtiers, who sat around the room in three rows of benches, represented the majesty, and by implication, the sovereign dignity of the monarch before the foreign representative, rather than their own honour.55 Nowhere in the text did Randolph consider the lavish sight as exotic or particularly different from the customs that he was used to encountering at other courts. This was not because of his familiarity with the Muscovite world, or its similarity to England, but because the correspondence remained focussed on his experiences and responsibilities as a diplomat. The report records and construes the ambassador’s performance in response to the tsar’s majesty. Detail mattered. This is why he described how he doffed his hat and took a bow but covered his head soon after, as 52  RBK, 66–7. 53  Compare the seventeenth-century descriptions of diplomatic receptions of foreign embassies in Russia by an exiled undersecretary of Muscovy’s ambassadorial chancellery (Posol’skii prikaz): Grigorii  K.  Kotoshikhin, Russia in the Reign of Aleksei Mikhailovich, trans. Benjamin  P.  Uroff, ed. Marshall Poe (Warsaw, 2014), 81–91. 54  RBK, 68. 55 Poe, People Born to Slavery, 62, provides a useful list of similar descriptions by numerous diplomats.

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he saw no response from the Russian nobles and did not want to compromise his status (and by implication that of his sovereign) by standing bareheaded in front of the courtiers. Two boiars (‘two of the emperor’s counselors’) received the ambassador, as he entered the throne room, walking to the middle of the room and delivering his speech to the tsar. He duly reported that the Russian monarch stood up and asked about the health of the queen as Randolph mentioned her name. The tsar reached out his hand to the ambassador ‘in token of my welcome’, although Randolph was cautious to avoid mentioning whether he performed the kiss of the hand which could potentially be seen as a submissive gesture.56 He presented the queen’s gifts to the tsar as he had been instructed, a ‘rich standing cup of silver, and in it a great number of pieces of plate artificially wrought’, recommending it ‘more for the rarity of the fashion than for the value’.57 The tsar addressed the following words to the ambassador to assure him of his honour upon his departure: ‘I dine not this day openly, for great affairs I have; but I will send thee my dinner, and give leave to thee and thine to go at liberty, and augment our allowance to thee in token of our love and favor to our sister the queen of England.’58 Randolph continued to pay close attention to the rank of the persons he met directly during the procedure, as, according to ceremonial logic, their status mirrored his own standing. The diplomat noted that that the two courtiers who conveyed him out of the throne room were of higher rank than those who had introduced him. Only a few days passed until Randolph was granted a secret meeting with the tsar shortly before he started to negotiate the trade privileges with Ivan’s appointed negotiator and confidant, Prince Afanasii  I.  Viazemskii.59 Another six weeks passed following the secret meeting before the ambassador re-convened with the tsar. The meeting yielded the desired success, and so Randolph reported home: ‘I dealt effectually with him [Ivan] in the behalf of our English merchants and found him so graciously inclined towards them that I obtained at his hands my whole demands for large privileges in general, together with all the rest my particular requests.’60 In order to continue diplomatic correspondence between Russia and England, Ivan announced the dispatch of a diplomatic representative, Andrei G. Sovin, to England. In the introduction to the modern edition of Randolph’s report, the editors wonder about the terse nature of his comments on Russian society and culture and about ‘the silence’ of his report on Ivan’s oprichnina terror (1565–72), a period which was punctuated with land confiscation, mass executions, and violence. But they also acknowledge that his account ‘is the laconic report of a professional diplomat’, and that the Englishman’s report was in fact similar to Russian diplomatic records that stand out for their lengthy descriptions of ceremonial detail when compared

56  RBK, 69. 57  CSPF VIII 2272. 58  RBK, 69. 59  Although Randolph did not name Viazemskii and referred to the ‘long duke’, it is clear that he conducted the negotiations from a letter of Ivan IV to Elizabeth. See Edward  D.  Morgan and Charles H. Coote (eds), Early Voyages and Travels to Russia and Persia by Anthony Jenkinson and Other Englishmen, 2 vols (London, 1886), II.281; RBK, 69. 60  Ibid., 70. For the concessions that Randolph negotiated, see Morgan and Coote (eds), Early Voyages, II.265–76.

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to the amount of information about the conduct and content of negotiations.61 Take, for example, the 1613 Russian embassy to London, headed by Aleksei Ziuzin who gave an account of his mission resembling that of Randolph if not in brevity, then in its pervasive and purely descriptive concern for the same signs of honour. Just as Randolph had inspected social hierarchies and the behaviour of his host as he entered the court of the tsar, Ziuzin observed the scene with an eye for status tokens when approaching King James I, the queen, and their son during the diplomat’s first public audience, noting that: under their royal thrones was made a dais for height, according to the custom of sovereigns. And when the ambassadors had come to the middle of the chamber, King James, and with him the Queen and Prince, stood up from their thrones. And as the ambassador came close to the thrones on the platform the King and Queen came forward from their thrones about a yard and stood on the edge of the platform. And the Prince came down from the first step to the second step. And, having taken off their hats, they bowed to the ambassadors, first the King, and then the Queen and Prince; and the ambassadors made a deep bow from the Great Sovereign Tsar and Grand Duke Mikhail Fyodorovich, Autocrat of all Russia, to King James, and to the Queen and the Prince.62

Earlier Ziuzin had reminded his host that ‘we fulfill our servile task and we always give a worthy honor and praise to his most bright Tsar’s Majesty according to his sovereign’s rank and condition [. . .] So it has come to you to give honor and praise to your own sovereign.’63 Indeed, upholding the honour of a sovereign and recording the ceremonial that established contact and maintained relative status relations between foreign monarchs was central to the professionalism of an early modern diplomat.64 This held true for face-to-face encounters but also extended to chancellery ceremonial and epistolary ritual, as Tracey Sowerby’s contribution to this volume shows. There was a clear sense among the participants in diplomatic exchanges that such customs and manners were reciprocal and mutually intelligible—however different they might appear from court to court and despite anticipated cultural differences. For example, in the royal letter that Sovin submitted to the queen upon Randolph’s return to England, Tsar Ivan reminded Elizabeth that ‘your trustie and faithfull Ambassadour, Thomas Randolphe, wee haue receiued him accordinge to the manner and custome of receiuinge Ambassadours, euen as betweene you and mee brotherhood and frendshippe should bee’.65 Randolph, with whom Sovin had travelled, described the Russian diplomat as ‘a man of good calling and well esteemed of His 61  RBK 62. For a comparison of later Russian and Western diplomatic reports, see Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe, 82–90. 62  Maija Jansson, Nikolai M. Rogozhin, and Paul Bushkovitch (eds), England and the North: The Russian Embassy of 1613–1614 (Philadelphia, 1994), 170–1. 63  Ibid., 157–8. 64  Hillard von Thiessen, ‘Diplomatie vom type ancien: Überlegungen zu einem Idealtypus des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftswesens’, in Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds), Akteure der Aussenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne, 2010), 471–503. 65  Morgan and Coote (eds), Early Voyages, II.281. Ivan’s letter also explains the circumstances that led to Randolph’s delayed first reception. For the letters exchanged between Ivan and Elizabeth, see

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Highness [the tsar]’. At the same time, he anticipated complications, asking whether Sovin would be familiar with the manner and customs of receiving ambassadors in England: ‘What his doings will be, and how he will govern himself who now comes into a new world and school of good manners, they will know by the issue.’66 However, Randolph’s expectations regarding Sovin’s cultural incompatibility were unfounded at least in the English documentation of diplomatic ritual.67 A ceremonial record found among the papers of the English master of ceremonies recounted the reception of Sovin in London in the same procedural tone in which Randolph had described his experience in Russia, that is, without any concern for cultural identity or potential problems that might arise from the irreconcilability of diplomatic norms. His reception was simply staged to ‘salute and welcome [Sovin’s] Honour, and procure His Honourable Enterainment &c.’.68 As in Randolph’s report, the ceremonial record focussed on the treatment of the diplomat in the ritual, on the attributes of honour shown and presents given to him rather than marvelling at the exotic behaviour of the Russian representative. In other words, the narrator’s eye of diplomats’ ceremonial reports tended to focus on the author’s interactions, not on the exotic barbarism that distinguished him from the culture of his destination. As in the sources that Christine Vogel explores in her contribution to this volume, the form of ambassadorial texts followed the function of diplomatic performance, and that was neither aligned with the negotiation of cultural identity nor some form of early modern propaganda used to bedazzle diplomats with a smoke screen of despotic splendour as a cypher for the overwhelming power of the ruler of a wild people.69 C O N C LU S I O N What does the comparison of Turberville’s and Randolph’s accounts reveal about the relationship between Anglo-Russian diplomacy, diplomatic practice, and textual representation? Turberville’s text is based on the notion of cultural exclusivity. His poetics of difference order the world into incompatible spheres of the familiar Rayne Allinson, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and English Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (New York, 2012), 120–9. 66  CSPF, IX 384. 67  For a discussion of Sovin’s mission, see Jansson, Rogozhin, and Bushkovitch (eds), England and the North, 13–14. 68  Igor Vinogradoff, ‘Russian Missions to London, 1569–1687: Seven Accounts by the Masters of the Ceremonies’, Oxford Slavonic Papers, New Series, 14 (1981), 40–1. Compare also the later records of the master of the ceremonies and their descriptions of Russia in the seventeenth century, Jan Hennings, ‘“A perfect Relation of The Reception, Audience, and Dispatch, of All Ambassadors from Foreign Princes, sent unto The Emperour of All Russia”: Pristav, Master of ceremonies und die Dokumentation des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftsrituals in vergleichender Perspektive’, ZHF, Beiheft 52 (2016), 71–94. 69  Similar Daniel B. Rowland, ‘Architecture, Image, and Ritual in the Throne Rooms of Muscovy, 1550–1650: A Preliminary Survey’, in Chester S. L. Dunning, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel B. Rowland (eds), Rude & Barbarous Kingdom Revisited: Essays in Russian History and Culture in Honor of Robert O. Crummey (Bloomington, IN, 2008), 62.

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and the unknown. The authenticity of his descriptions is upheld by claims to ‘true report’ and literary strategies mediated by the paratext, the perspective of the speaker, intertextual reference, and so on: the textual ambassador negotiates an image of Russia and presents it as a topos of the strange cultural outlier. Randolph’s correspondence on the other hand—though emerging from the experience of the same embassy—is a descriptive narrative that translates diplomatic procedure into mutually comprehensible norms of diplomatic protocol. The report primarily describes the interactions of the ambassador at the court of his host rather than offering a sort of ethnographic, or poeticized, account of Russia. Instead of conveying cultural difference, it observes a choreography that mediated reciprocal claims to status, rank, and, by implication, sovereignty. The plain and prosaic records of diplomatic customs more often than not failed to note differences or similarities in protocol according to culture, civilizational belonging, or clashes of identity, as often do their literary representations. Descriptions of ceremonial tend to be self-referential (as opposed to seeking out the exotic in the other) in that they had to describe the author’s success in performing his sovereign’s position in a thoroughly hierarchal political order. In other words, reports of ceremonial had generic characteristics which were quite distinct from the genres on which Turberville was drawing, reworking their long literary history and offering on his part a model for Shakespeare and Sidney. While Turberville’s notion of cultural incompatibility and the topicality of strangeness do not explain the essence of the ceremonies that Randolph described, the commensurability shared between the two courts in their ritual exchanges is not a sign of their cultural identity either. The absence of discursive references to barbarism in Randolph’s descriptions of Russian diplomatic ceremonial does not imply his cultural familiarity with a far-away world, the similarity between England and Russia, or his attempt at appropriating the unknown by seeking the familiar in it.70 Ceremonial self-comparison was an exercise in a shared but transcultural political practice expressing status-relative assumptions about sovereignty and statehood in early modern foreign relations. Diplomatic reports such as Randolph’s served as the medium of ceremonial and also formed part of the ‘social practice’ of self-fashioning that Christine Vogel describes in her essay in this volume. If the Muscovites were indeed ‘full of courtship and state’ in that sense, then this was a sign of their participation in regular practices of diplomacy. However, if the notion of cultural difference fails to explain what was going on in the rituals, then participation in the struggles for honour and prestige does not make Russia an insider in European inter-courtly diplomacy to the same degree as other European dynastic courts. There were different levels of identification. While Russia could easily serve as the strange outsider in cultural representations across various genres, it could also partake in mutually recognizable performances of sovereignty. The Muscovites realized that the significance of ritual action at a court was a matter of  state. Their behaviour gradually fitted into evolving diplomatic conventions, 70  On this kind of self-comparison, see David W. Palmer, ‘Jacobean Muscovites: Winter, Tyranny, and Knowledge in The Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 46 (1995), 326–7; Archer, Old Worlds, 114.

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even if only as responses to ceremonial conflict on the ground rather than a full subscription to the gradually emerging standards among more closely linked courts of Europe. The crucial point is that differences in ritual and disagreement over ceremonial punctilios were at the heart of early modern diplomacy, and not simply a disruptive misunderstanding in protocol: it created an international hierarchical order in which the actors were bound to jostle for the highest ranks, not only in European diplomacy, but also in the Ottoman world, for example, as Christine Vogel’s contribution to this volume demonstrates. Conflict over rank and status, then, arose among rulers and ambassadors in Western Europe, but also between European powers and perceived outsiders such as the Ottoman empire, Russia, or African polities,71 and so ceremonial clashes, a penchant for courtly pomp, and ceremonial reciprocity neither implied complete integration into European diplomacy nor did they indicate the kind of outlier-status that the textual ambassadors’ derisions of Russian diplomatic conduct make us believe. The juxtaposition of Turberville’s and Randolph’s accounts offered here permits us to reconcile the unilateral perspective on a foreign culture (as presented in many foreign descriptions) with the reciprocal and practical nature of diplomacy. But this essay must conclude with a caveat. The neat distinction between ‘textual ambassadors’ and ‘ambassadorial texts’—employed here to illustrate the argument—cannot be upheld as a strict heuristic model for the analysis of foreign travel accounts or diplomatic reports. These works did not represent discrete types of texts; the boundary between them was fluid. Authors often mixed observations of diplomatic practice with the discourse of barbarism.72 What is more, once an ambassadorial text was published or served as primary material for the publication of a travel narrative, it transformed into a textual ambassador, invoking the discursive cultural attributions that the targeted readership expected or projected onto these texts. This interlocking of discourse and practice is one of the reasons why the dialogue between diplomatic history and literary criticism is highly relevant for new approaches to early modern diplomacy. The conversation between the disciplines, as promoted in this volume, helps to disentangle the various functions and inner workings of such texts in order to understand how they determined each other and to bring into sharp relief the bearing of their specific genres on the history of foreign relations and vice versa.

71  Christina Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers: interkulturelle Diplomatie an Gold- und Sklavenküste im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2015), 313–57. 72  See Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe, 154–9.

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12 Diplomatic Writing as Aristocratic Self-Fashioning French Ambassadors in Constantinople Christine Vogel I N T RO D U C T I O N When the French diplomat François de Callières (1645–1717) wrote down his precepts about the Practice of Diplomacy at the end of Louis XIV’s reign he included a chapter on the style and content of diplomatic dispatches. His ideas on the subject were quite clear: The letters which a diplomatist writes to his prince [. . .] should be stripped of verbiage, preambles, and other vain and useless ornaments. [. . .] The best despatches are those written in a clear and concise manner, unadorned by useless epithets, or by anything which may becloud the clarity of the argument. Simplicity is the first essential, and diplomatists should take the greatest care to avoid all affectations such as a pretence of wit or the learned overweight of scientific disquisitions.1

While treatises on the ‘ideal ambassador’ were a well-established literary genre dating back to the fifteenth century,2 Callières’s text stands out both for its extraordinary success in the long run and for the particular context of its creation.3 In fact, debates about the professionalization of ambassadors and their staff had been going on in Europe since at least the Peace of Westphalia. By the turn of the century, however, the French Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Jean-Baptiste de Colbert, marquis de Torcy, had assembled a group of experts involved in diplomacy and foreign policy at the French court in order to implement a formalized training programme for future diplomats. Callières was among the protagonists of those schemes. Their ‘académie politique’ was finally established in 1712 and Callières’s 1  François de Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (Amsterdam, 1716); the English translation is quoted from The Practice of Diplomacy, being an English rendering of François de Callières’s ‘De la manière de négocier avec les souverains’, ed. A. F. Whyte (London, 1919), 136, 138. 2 Heidrun Kugeler‚ ‘“Le Parfait Ambassadeur”: The Theory and Practice of Diplomacy in the Century Following the Peace of Westphalia’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, (2006), 27. 3  For a detailed study of Callières’s extraordinary career and his treatise see Jean-Claude Wacquet, François de Callières: L’art de négocier en France sous Louis XIV (Paris, 2005), 9–173. Pope, Laurence, François de Callières: A Political Life (Dordrecht, 2010).

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treatise might well have been intended by its author to serve as a textbook for the disciples of this ‘political academy’.4 As these facts suggest, Callières’s precepts responded to deficits perceived by Torcy’s reformist circle in actual diplomatic practice at that time. Any random sample of diplomatic correspondence from the reign of Louis XIV might confirm the assumption that ambassadorial dispatches were normally the exact opposite of Callières’s ideal: they were often long and very complicated, full of rhetorical ornamentation, digressions, and seemingly vain flatteries. The ambassadors did not restrict themselves to the basic information needed to adjust a court’s foreign policy, but were much more likely to expatiate on endless ceremonies, futile amusements, and points of honour. Now the question is whether, by interpreting this simply as a lack of professionalism, we do not miss the very point of early modern diplomatic practice and, more particularly, of early modern diplomatic writing. The ‘académie politique’ was a very short-lived institution. It was closed down in 1722 after the death of its main defenders because, as historians have argued, ‘the notion of a formalised diplomatic training and career went against the established practice of recruitment and patronage serving the interests of the high nobility’.5 In this traditional view, the aristocratic establishment appears as the main obstacle to the progress of modern diplomacy as advocated by social climbers such as Callières. It would have taken a revolution to wipe out this ‘old’ diplomatic regime and to finally make room for professional, disinterested diplomats and efficient, rational bureaucracies. Recent research has challenged this modernization paradigm with regard to numerous aspects of early modern culture and politics, particularly in the areas of administration, centralization, and state-building.6 Following the critical reassessment of French ‘absolutism’, diplomatic history has dismissed the teleological, state-centred approach as anachronistic and has thereby profoundly renewed our understanding of diplomatic practice and foreign relations in the early modern period.7 Some historians have instead focused on the various actors involved in foreign relations in order to reassess the specific characteristics of Renaissance and Baroque diplomacy.8 It turns out that early modern foreign relations were not an exclusive matter of a sovereign’s arcane politics, nor were the people involved in it 4  Kugeler, ‘Parfait Ambassadeur’, 169–79; Wacquet, François de Callières, 89; Guy Thuillier, La première école d’administration: l’Académie politique de Louis XIV (Geneva, 1996); Joseph Klaits, ‘Men of Letters and Political Reform in France at the End of the Reign of Louis XIV’, JMH, 43 (1971), 577–97; Maurice Keens-Soper, ‘The French Political Academy: a School for Ambassadors’, European Studies Review, 2 (1972), 329–55. 5  Kugeler, ‘Parfait Ambassadeur’, 179, summarizing research by Thuillier, Ecole d’administration, 111 and Klaits, ‘Men of Letters’, 590. 6  For a recent overview, see John Rule and Ben Trotter, A World of Paper: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State (Kingston, 2014), 27–33. 7 John Watkins, ‘Toward a New Diplomatic History of Medieval and Early Modern Europe’, JMEMS, 38 (2008), 1–14. 8  See, for instance, Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds), Akteure der Außenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne, 2010); Christian Windler, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation und diplomatische Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit: Erträge neuer Forschungen’, in Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Tim Neu, and Christina Brauner (eds), Alles nur symbolisch? Bilanz und Perspektiven der Erforschung symbolischer Kommunikation (Cologne, 2013), 161–85.

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public servants with undivided loyalties. The social logic of personal fidelity and commitment, which was based on the exchange of gifts and services, worked on every level of early modern society including the realm of diplomacy, and it would be very misleading to qualify this pervasive ‘ethos of patronage’ as dysfunctional or mere corruption.9 Hillard von Thiessen has suggested the concept of ‘type ancien’diplomacy, arguing that we must grant early modern diplomats their own, specific professionalism which allowed them to perform efficiently in their particular cultural environment.10 Consequently, he describes the manifold social bonds and mutual obligations that connected the different actors of foreign relations at the princely courts throughout Europe as ‘a single, border-crossing socio-political system that was, moreover, bound together by a set of shared aristocratic values’.11 Thus, early modern diplomatic practice was essentially a question of aristocratic networking and border-crossing patronage, and there was a blurred distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ relations within what Bély has labelled the European ‘society of princes’.12 Accordingly, the correspondence of early modern diplomats must be reappraised within this new historiographical framework. Rather than deficient bureaucratic records lacking the professional style of later centuries, diplomatic letters were a mode of communication practised by noble actors involved in various and diversified kinship and patron–client networks. They were, above all, first-person writings. Diplomatic letters should therefore be included in the category of self-narratives (or ego-documents) which has been created by literary scholars and historians to describe forms and modes of autobiographical writing that were particular to the early modern period.13 Even if self-narratives do not offer any more direct an access to an author’s ‘self ’ than literary autobiographies do, they can reveal early modern self-conceptions and patterns of self-fashioning.14 Stephen Greenblatt’s investigation of Renaissance self-fashioning made it clear over thirty years ago that the early modern 9  See for example Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York, 1986); Birgit Emich, Nicole Reinhardt, Hillard von Thiessen, and Christian Wieland, ‘Stand und Perspektiven der Patronageforschung: zugleich eine Antwort auf Heiko Droste’, ZHF, 32 (2005), 233–65; Niels Grüne and Simona Slanicka (eds), Korruption. Historische Annäherungen an eine Grundfigur politischer Kommunikation (Göttingen, 2010). 10  Hillard von Thiessen, ‘Diplomatie vom type ancien: Überlegungen zu einem Idealtypus des frühneuzeitlichen Gesandtschaftswesens’, in von Thiessen and Windler (eds), Akteure, 471–503. 11  Hillard von Thiessen, Diplomatie und Patronage: die spanisch-römischen Beziehungen 1605–1621 in akteurszentrierter Perspektive (Epfendorf, 2010), 121 (my translation). Also see Barbara StollbergRilinger, ‘Zur moralischen Ökonomie des Schenkens bei Hof (17. –18. Jahrhundert)’, in Werner Paravicini (ed.), Luxus und Integration: materielle Hofkultur Westeuropas vom 12. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 2010), 187–204. 12 While Bély introduced the expression ‘society of princes’ in his La société des princes (Paris, 1999), he has not thereby abandoned his generally state-centred approach to diplomatic history; other scholars have endowed Bély’s concept with a more radical meaning, in order to stress the specifics of pre-modern diplomacy as a set of personal relations between aristocratic agents, see Windler, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation’, 165, 181. 13 For a recent overview of this field, see Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz, and Lorenz Heiligensetzer, ‘Introduction’, in their edited collection Mapping the ‘I’: Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland (Leiden, 2015), 1–12. 14  This is emphasized by Peter Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), 17–28.

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‘self’ was far more complex and multiple than the Burckhardtian notion of modern individuality, yet Greenblatt still focused on the shaping of his protagonists’ identities, their peculiar inwardness, the core of their individuality, as part of a larger poetics of culture.15 In contrast, this essay assumes that the reading of diplomatic letters as self-narratives will not offer us any insight into the diplomats’ interiority. Thus, ‘Aristocratic self-fashioning’ is used here as an analytical category precisely because it merely points to the more or less conscious shaping of one’s own social identity within a particular historical and cultural setting. In this context, another relevant approach is offered by the growing body of scholarship on early modern epistolary practices.16 Diplomatic letters are, of course, perfect examples of the epistolary culture of the French aristocracy studied by Giora Sternberg.17 While the communication of status claims through epistolary ceremonial was an important feature in those letters too, other social and relational issues were also at stake. To complement Sternberg’s approach, then, it is necessary to place early modern diplomatic letters in their larger epistolary context; rather than vehicles of individual and private communication, early modern letters in general were collective social acts generating what Antenhofer and Müller have called ‘communicative circles’ (‘Kommunikationskreise’)—networks of people linked by the exchange of letters on various social levels.18 By enlarging our perspective in such a way a lot can be learned not only about the self-fashioning but also about the multiple social roles and the specific professionalism of the diplomats of that time. Taking French ambassadors to the Ottoman Empire as an example, this essay will argue that the ambassador’s correspondence was not only an administrative duty but also, and maybe above all, a social practice that comprised several layers of communication as yet neglected in diplomatic history. This practice generated specific forms of aristocratic self-fashioning which implied a certain ambiguity of the ambassador’s self—an ambiguity that was closely linked to early modern conceptions of political representation. D I P L O M AT I C C O R R E S P O N D E N C E AS A SOCIAL PRACTICE On 10 March 1687 Pierre Girardin (c.1644–89), French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman court was known, wrote no less than six letters to Versailles. The first was addressed to the king and contained the usual information about the 15  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (London, 1980). 16  See Christina Antenhöfer and Mario Müller (eds), Briefe in politischer Kommunikation vom Alten Orient bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2008); Francisco Bethencourt, Florike Egmond, and Robert Muchembled (eds), Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2007). 17 Giora Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204 (2009), 33–88. 18  Christina Antenhofer and Mario Müller, ‘Briefe in politischer Kommunikation. Einführung’, in Antenhofer and Müller (eds), Briefe, 22.

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political situation in the Ottoman Empire and the ongoing war of the Holy League.19 The second letter was much shorter; it was addressed to Colbert de Croissy, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and contained, amongst other things, the information that Girardin had rented a summer palace on the shores of the Bosphorus that had once belonged to former grand-vizier Kara Mustafa. Girardin claimed it was necessary to have a retreat from the plague which he believed would not fail to strike Constantinople in the summer as it had done in previous years, and that would inevitably bring with it famine and commotion; moreover, he added that ‘this summer house will also facilitate my conversations with the officers of the Porte and the Seraglio (private quarters of the sultan) in order to be informed about what happens and to get the news from the army’.20 The practice of sending ‘supplementary’ letters to the minister along with the official dispatches to the king is well known. William Roosen has already pointed out that these letters often dealt with financial and practical problems and all those details with which an ambassador would not want to trouble the king.21 Even if the contents of those supplementary letters seemed more personal, however, they were not ‘private’ letters but would occasionally be read to the king, too.22 The ambassadors even expected the information they had omitted in their official dispatches to reach the king by way of his minister. This rather complicated procedure makes sense if we consider that early modern bureaucratic practice was structured by the logic of personal allegiance and patronage, with ministers considering themselves loyal servants to their princes rather than to their states. Further down the social architecture of power, an officer’s loyalty was more with his patron than with the abstract notion of a polity, or even with the king. These patronage relationships functioned by the consistent affirmation of the mutual obligation within an economy of gift exchange: the client’s commitment and submission in exchange for the patron’s protection and aid for social advancement. All modes of communication between a patron and his client, and especially their written correspondence, were shaped by the symbolic expression of this vertical relationship. Therefore, even if the ambassadors’ right to address their letters directly to the king was considered a special privilege, this did not imply that they should pass all their information directly to the king. Some issues were simply inappropriate, and since the ambassadors were not directly linked to the king as his clients, it was improper to go beyond a certain degree of intimacy. They would not only have stepped outside their rank but would also have compromised their actual patron, the secretary of state, who acted as a broker for the king’s patronage resources.23 For any hope of social advancement, the ambassadors had to respect the hierarchy 19  Bibliothèque nationale de France [BNF], FR 7168, fos. 79r–82r. Girardin’s ‘Journal de mon ambassade à la Porte’, comprises fourteen volumes (BNF FR 7162–75) and his ‘Memoire touchant les revenus et les depenses de l’Empire ottoman, etc.’ is found in vol. XI (BNF FR 7172). 20  Ibid., fos. 82v–83r. My translation, as are all following citations from the sources. 21 William  J.  Roosen, ‘The Functioning of Ambassadors under Louis XIV’, French Historical Studies, 6 (1970), 311–32. 22  Ibid., 322–3. 23  See Kettering, Patrons. For the ministers and secretaries of state as ‘mandarins-bureaucrats’ see Jeroen Duindam, Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court (Amsterdam, 1997), 140.

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and address themselves first to their immediate patron.24 In fact, Girardin’s remark to Croissy about his new summer residence was not as candid as it might seem to be at first sight. Picturing himself in Kara Mustafa’s pleasure palace while the plague raged in Constantinople, Girardin took the opportunity to reiterate a claim he had already made several times before: I will do anything to continue to satisfy His Majesty in any way that depends on me, and the dangers one is usually exposed to in this country will not prevent me from loving my sojourn as long as I have reason to hope that it will eventually provide me with a quiet establishment in France, or any other place where I might work under your [i.e. Croissy’s] orders.25

In other words: Girardin was ready to endure the hardships of his charge but expected to be rewarded by his patron with a better post in the near future. The records kept in the archives of the French foreign ministry usually end here, that is, with the dispatches to the king and the secretaries of state. Yet this official record-keeping leaves us with an incomplete picture of the practice of diplomatic communication. Thanks to Girardin’s journal, we know that his official letters were accompanied by yet another supplement addressed to Croissy’s secretary François Blondel, sieur de Vaucresson (1661–1725).26 The strategic distribution (or withholding) of information according to the social logic of court networks therefore obviously comprised another level, the relevance of which should not be underestimated, namely the horizontal relationship between actors of the same social status who were linked by kinship or friendship or the same patron. Recent research has shown that this subordinate level of communication was extremely important within the emerging Louisquatorzian administration and the personal relationships on this working level of royal administration continued in practice in the ministerial departments well into the eighteenth century. In this particular case, Blondel acted as Girardin’s ‘friend’ within the department of Croissy, and more generally at court. This did not necessarily mean that both men had strong emotional feelings towards each other.27 They were, however, determined to serve one another and acted confidentially. Before Girardin left France, Blondel had offered him access to the minister’s archives so that the ambassador could study his predecessors’ dispatches in detail. This was perceived by Girardin not as a routine procedure, but rather as a personal favour of Blondel’s.28 In return, Girardin had employed one of Blondel’s brothers, Joseph Blondel de Gagny (d.1726) as part of his household staff.29 During his tenure, Girardin relied on Blondel for all matters that were delicate or confidential and that 24  Girardin explicitly acknowledged Croissy’s patronage and stressed that his father was already attached to the Colbert family: BNF FR 7164, fos. 271r–v. 25  BNF FR 7168, fo. 82v. 26  Rule and Trotter, World of Paper, 243–64, about Blondel de Vaucresson. 27  On friendship in French court society, see Christian Kühner, Politische Freundschaft bei Hofe: Repräsentation und Praxis einer sozialen Beziehung im französischen Adel des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2013). 28  BNF FR 7162, fo. 40r. 29  Ibid., fos. 40r–v. On Blondel de Gagny see Rule and Trotter, World of Paper, 248–61.

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could only be treated ‘off the record’; he took advice from his friend in all sorts of situations and, by this channel, also received unofficial instructions. Above all, Blondel kept Girardin informed of the general opinion reigning at court about his performance and he also tried to influence this opinion in favour of his friend. Blondel’s friendship was indispensable to Girardin even in his communication with their shared patron Croissy. In January 1686, shortly after the ambassador’s arrival in the Ottoman Empire, Girardin had asked Blondel for frequent feedback: ‘Do tell me, I beseech you, if [people at home] think that I am beginning to do my duty, and do not hide anything from me that is being said about me.’30 Blondel obeyed and regularly informed Girardin about the way his dispatches were received by Croissy and the king and how both talked about the ambassador on public occasions. He also gave him advice on the style, length, and contents of his dispatches. In his letter to Blondel included in the package of 10 March 1687, Girardin gives more details about his motives for choosing Kara Mustafa’s palace and also adds that he has been feeding about fifty escaped French slaves over the winter. But instead of asking for a royal gratification to compensate for his expenses, he would rather have his friend second his request for another post. Thanks to this letter, we learn that things were much more concrete than one might have guessed from the allusions contained in Girardin’s letter to Croissy. Actually, Girardin had been promised a place in the royal council after his return from the Ottoman Empire and at this date he was determined to ask for the fulfilment of that promise well in advance. By stressing the dangers and the ‘deadly ennui’31 involved in the post in Constantinople, he hoped to create favourable conditions at court for his request. Still, he relied completely on his friends’ discretion: ‘Pray consult on this matter with Abbé Morel,32 and do both take your time before talking about it to Monsieur de Croissy and encouraging him to plead for a man who sacrifices his health, his peace and quiet and his wealth and who will all his life be entirely loyal to him.’33 The other letters sent to Versailles on 10 March 1687 functioned in quite similar ways. One of them was addressed to Marquis de Seignelay, son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, nephew of Croissy and navy secretary since the death of his father in 1683. It contained details concerning his department, namely French-Levant trade. This letter was accompanied by another one, addressed to Seignelay’s clerk, Sieur de la Salle, whom Girardin thanked for his friendship and asked for feedback about his performance in Seignelay’s department. The structure of communication with the Department of the Navy thus visibly resembled that within Croissy’s Department of Foreign Affairs, although Girardin’s attachment to Croissy and Blondel seems to have been much closer. The delicate question of how Girardin should divide his loyalty and his information between Croissy and Seignelay had been negotiated at the beginning of his mission with Blondel serving as an intermediary.34 30  BNF FR 7163, fo.27v. 31  Ibid., fo. 84r. 32  Morel was another friend of Girardin’s and had served Louis XIV in different diplomatic capacities from at least 1663: Rule and Trotter, World of Paper, 189, 568, n.89. 33  BNF FR 7168, fo. 84r. 34  BNF FR 7163, fos. 190r–v, 7164, fos. 65v–66r. While older research stressed the rivalry and distrust allegedly reigning between the secretaries of state, recent studies emphasize the efficiency of

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Things were different, however, regarding the addressee of the sixth letter of Girardin’s package: François Michel de Tellier, marquis de Louvois, Louis XIV’s war secretary. If the necessity of communicating simultaneously with Croissy and Seignelay already created a problem for Girardin, writing to Louvois was really a delicate affair, as the traditional rivalry between the family clans and clienteles of the Colberts and the Le Telliers was fuelled, in the 1680s, by the blurred responsibilities of the secretaries’ respective departments. Louvois in particular frequently infringed upon Croissy’s domain and corresponded with Louis XIV’s ambassadors in order to obtain military information.35 In his letter of 10 March 1687, Girardin merely informed Louvois about some ancient Greek books and manuscripts the war secretary wanted to purchase on behalf of the king. On other occasions, however, the ambassador passed significant military information on to the war secretary.36 From the ambassador’s point of view, then, his correspondence was, beyond its purely instrumental dimension that dealt with political, economic, and military information, a medium through which his social networks materialised. This was all the more true as, by definition of his post, he was absent from Versailles, the seat of government and the place where the brokering of power and posts took place.37 Yet for his own and his family’s sake, the ambassador still had to pay court to his superiors and this could best be achieved, as Blondel thoughtfully reminded Girardin, ‘by composing extensive dispatches filled with news about all that happens in Constantinople and with the army’.38 Clearly, to these two protagonists of Louisquatorzian diplomatic practice, ambassadorial dispatches were much more than just a rational instrument of bureaucratic communication; they were a means of social networking and advancement. In the case of the ambassador, his letters even had to compensate for all other means of social networking; during his tenure, information was indeed his most valuable currency in the social economy of Louisquatorzian court society and administration. The ambassador’s official dispatches thus cannot be isolated from the rest of his correspondence addressed to various actors at court and even to his family; the information flow between Constantinople and Versailles was actually fragmented according to the social logic of clientage, friendship, and kinship. The whole picture only emerges if we consider all these levels of diplomatic communication. The thorough distribution of his information complemented and, indeed, exemplified the claims of rank and honour that were expressed, on a formal level, by means of epistolary ceremonial. By the strategic portioning and the elaborate diffusion of information, the ambassador fashioned himself as an actor within his social networks, manifesting total loyalty to some and a more distant relation to others.

Louisquatorzian administration. See Rule and Trotter, World of Paper, 192. On Blondel’s functions as an intermediary to Croissy and Seignelay, see ibid., 245–6; 248. 35  Thierry Sarmant and Mathieu Stoll, Régner et gouverner: Louis XIV et ses ministres (Paris, 2010), 246–57. 36  BNF FR 7170, fos. 63r–65r, 348r, FR 7172, pp. 178, 341–508. 37  See Rule and Trotter, World of Paper, 36–43. 38  BNF FR 7169, fo. 344v.

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The strategic organization of their correspondence was not the only way for ambassadors to fashion themselves as devoted clients, loyal friends, and generous patrons. The ambassadors could of course oblige their patrons with valuable and exotic presents, which during the late seventeenth century’s wave of ‘turcomania’ was particularly easy for Girardin and his fellow ambassadors at the Sublime Porte. Yet the most valuable gift an ambassador could possibly offer was information. In fact, the gathering of intelligence was considered in the early modern period one of three raisons d’être of diplomacy, along with negotiation and representation.39 The information contained in ambassadorial dispatches concerned all three dimensions of early modern diplomatic practice. Yet while intelligence reports on the political and military situation of the host country left little room for self-promotion, epistolary reports of representation and negotiation did. In fact, large parts of ambassadorial dispatches were focused on the ambassador’s dealings with other diplomats or representatives of the foreign court and on ceremonial matters. The ambassador actually spent much time and space in his correspondence depicting himself during negotiations and ceremonies, so much so that it could be argued the ambassadorial letters were functionally equivalent to court memoirs as described by Norbert Elias.40 Such letters were naturally not introspective, but concerned with the description of the self in conversation and in interaction, the appropriate relational manner of self-fashioning for a Louisquatorzian courtier. In contrast to Elias’s courtier, however, the ambassador was not only absent from court, he also never acted for himself alone. As Abraham de Wicquefort put it in his late seventeenth-century ambassadorial handbook, ‘The Embassador represents the Person of the Prince his Master; for which reason the Quality of publick Representative is given him, in a Signification which is peculiar to that Character.’41 According to early modern understanding, the ambassador had to act and be treated as if he actually were the sovereign. His representative function was precisely what distinguished the ambassador from all other diplomatic ranks. Wicquefort also stated that ‘there is not a more illustrious Mark of Sovereignty than the Right of sending and receiving Embassadors’.42 Conversely, a ruler could only claim to be a sovereign if his diplomats were treated as ambassadors by other sovereigns. Hence the importance of public ceremonies: when Wicquefort claimed that ‘At Assemblies of Ceremony [an ambassador] cannot quit his Rank without a Crime’,43 he pointed to the fact that an ambassador’s ceremonial performance at a foreign court would

39  Jeremy Black offers convincing arguments for the continuous relevance of these three features in a reasonably comprehensive and workable definition of diplomacy in A History of Diplomacy (London, 2010), 12–17. 40  Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Oxford, 1983), ch. 5, §15. 41  Abraham de Wicquefort, The embassador and his functions, trans. J. Digby (London, 1716), 4. 42  Ibid., 6. 43  Ibid., 294.

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actually decide his master’s status within the society of princes.44 Ceremonies like audiences, processions, and court festivities were crucial moments for any diplomatic mission, as they symbolically staged the relationship between the respective polities. Yet even if every detail of these events was thoroughly negotiated beforehand, unpredictable things could always happen and ceremonial disputes were intentionally provoked all the time. The ambassadors were not simply acting according to a fixed protocol but often had to improvise and cope with unexpected situations or even had to create a scandal themselves in order to enforce their masters’ claims of honour and rank. For all these reasons, ceremonies were critical moments not only for the polities impersonated by their representatives, but also for the ambassadors themselves whose very career was at stake. This is the reason why ceremonial narratives figured so prominently within the diplomatic correspondence of that time. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, things were even more difficult because Ottoman court ceremonial had its own imperial logic and naturally did not cover European conceptions of sovereignty or even the idea of a plurality of sovereigns.45 Early modern Christian Europeans were well aware that they had to cope with a ceremonial order that was not only different from their own, but that also implied their symbolic submission.46 This cross-cultural setting presented supplementary challenges to the ambassadors at Constantinople. Still, cross-cultural diplomatic ceremonies differed from inner-European ones in one crucial respect: while the latter functioned as performative acts within the public sphere of the European princely courts, there was no institutionalized ‘courtly public sphere’ connecting Ottoman and European political elites.47 Therefore, the efficiency of cross-cultural 44  See for example, André Krischer, ‘Souveränität als sozialer Status: zur Funktion des diplomatischen Zeremoniells in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Ralph Kauz, Giorgio Rota, and Jan Paul Niederkorn (eds), Diplomatisches Zeremoniell in Europa und im Mittleren Osten in der frühen Neuzeit (Vienna, 2009), 1–32; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Honores regii: die Königswürde im zeremoniellen Zeichensystem der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Dreihundert Jahre Preußische Königskrönung: eine Tagungsdokumentation (Berlin, 2002), 1–26. 45  Gottfried Hagen, ‘Legitimacy and World Order’, in Hakan T. Karateke and Maurus Reinkowski (eds), Legitimizing the Order: The Ottoman Rhetoric of State Power (Leiden, 2005), 55–83; Konrad Dilger, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des osmanischen Hofzeremoniells im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1967). 46  Ottoman court ceremonial comprised the symbolical integration of Christian envoys into the hierarchical Ottoman world order, e.g. by the distribution of honorary caftans. See Christine Vogel, ‘The Caftan and the Sword: Dress and Diplomacy in Ottoman-French Relations Around 1700’, in Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittman (eds), Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives (Würzburg, 2015), 25–44. For a slightly different appreciation of the problem see Florian Kühnel, ‘No Ambassadour Ever Having the Like: die Übertretung der diplomatischen Rituale und die Stellung der Gesandten am osmanischen Hof ’, in Claudia Garner and Christine Vogel (eds), Interkulturelle Ritualpraxis in der Vormoderne: Diplomatische Interaktion an den Grenzen der Fürstengesellschaft (Berlin, 2016), 95–122. 47 That said, information flows connecting the Ottoman and the Latin-European spheres and cross-cultural social interaction existed to a much larger degree than traditional historiography had acknowledged, as has been shown impressively by John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford, 2013) and by Emrah Safa Gürkan, ‘Mediating Boundaries: Mediterranean Go-Betweens and Cross-Cultural Diplomacy in Constantinople, 1560–1600’, JEMH, 19 (2015), 107–28. Also see E. Natalie Rothman, ‘Afterword: Intermediaries, Mediation, and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean’, JEMH, 19 (2015), 245–59. Yet these contacts did not equal the degree of institutionalization and mediatization reigning within the Christian-European society of princes as described, for

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diplomatic ceremonies did not reside in their performativity, that is their actual taking place as moments of face-to-face communication, but rather in their translation into written texts that would then be diffused within the courtly public sphere of Christian Europe. Ceremonial narratives by European ambassadors in Constantinople were in fact exercises in ‘cultural translation’ which offered the ambassador much room for interpretation and for self-promotion—in fact, much more so than in the case of inner-European ceremonies. The example of Charles de Nointel, one of Girardin’s predecessors, is a case in point. During his tenure from 1670 to 1679, Nointel managed to negotiate new ahdname or capitulations for the French trading nation in the Ottoman Empire.48 These sultanic privileges were the core of Latin-European diplomacy in Con­ stantinople, as they regulated the juridical and economic status of foreign traders in the whole Levant.49 Since French trade had suffered a lot from a significant cooling down of Ottoman-French relations during the 1660s, the renewal after difficult negotiations of the French ahdname by Mehmed IV in 1673 was considered an important success of Nointel’s by the French government. The document itself was to be handed over to the ambassador during an audience with grand-vizier Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Pasha that took place on 5 June 1673. The next day, Nointel sat down to describe what had happened during this ceremony in a detailed report addressed to his superiors.50 At first sight, this document appears confusing as Nointel seems to make a rather ridiculous figure of himself. He describes the grand-vizier as grave and taciturn, and writes that he never even greets his guest. Nointel for his part practically never stops talking, even though he was unceremoniously interrupted every other moment by rather harsh reprimands emitted by his host. The ambassador nevertheless continued to compliment the vizier even while the ceremony was abruptly concluded with the traditional serving of coffee and sherbet and the distribution of honorary caftans. Nointel eventually greets the vizier with ‘a short and mediocre’ inclination of his head as they both left the room at the same moment.51

example, by Volker Bauer, ‘Strukturwandel der höfischen Öffentlichkeit: zur Medialisierung des Hoflebens vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert’, ZHF, 38 (2011), 585–620. An institutionalized ‘courtly public sphere’ was necessary, however, for the performativity of court ceremonial to be effective. For a more detailed discussion of this point, see Christine Vogel, ‘Der Marquis, das Sofa und der Großwesir: zur Funktion und Medialität interkultureller diplomatischer Zeremonien in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Peter Burschel and Christine Vogel (eds), Die Audienz: Ritualisierter Kulturkontakt in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2014), 221–45. 48  On Nointel’s mission see Albert Vandal, L’Odyssée d’un ambassadeur: les voyages du marquis de Nointel (1670–1680) (Paris, 1900); Claude Michaud, Entre croisades et revolutions: Princes, noblesses et nations au centre de l’Europe (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles), scripta varia (Paris, 2010), 265–76. On the following see Vogel, ‘Der Marquis’, 235–9. 49  Halil Inalcık, ‘Imtiyāzāt (Capitulations) II. Empire Ottoman’, in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, vol. III (Leiden, 1971), 1179–89; Edhem Eldem, ‘Capitulations and Western Trade’, in Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), The Cambridge History of Turkey vol. 3: The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603–1839 (Cambridge, 2006), 283–335. 50  Charles de Nointel, ‘aud[ian]ce donnée a l’amb[assadeur] de france par le G[rand] V[izir]’, Paris-La Courneuve, Archives du ministère des affaires étrangères, Correspondance politique [MAE CP], Turquie 10, fos. 236r–238v. 51  Ibid., fo. 237v.

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The ahdname itself was only handed over after the ceremony, in a small corridor, by the reis ül-Küttab (head scribe).52 This last detail alone was telling because, as Tracey Sowerby shows in her contribution to this volume, the ceremonial setting for the delivery of royal letters was an important marker of the consideration a prince was willing to pay for his counterpart.53 While the narration therefore initially seems to point to the symbolic humiliation of the French ambassador by the Ottoman vizier, a more nuanced close reading of the text reveals that it answered instead to a subtle strategy of self-fashioning. Two expressions appear repeatedly under the ambassador’s quill while he describes himself during the ceremony: civilité (civility) and honnêteté (noble virtue). Where modern readers might be tempted to see excessive loquacity and exaggerated flattery, taken within his historical and cultural context, Nointel depicts himself as a master of courtly conversation and the art of complimenting. The Ottoman vizier, by contrast, is portrayed by him as lacking both civilité and honnêteté. This does not simply mean that Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed seemed rude to Nointel. Both civilité and honnêteté were key concepts in early modern tracts concerning the rules of social interaction within European court society.54 By stressing the vizier’s incivility and his lack of honnêteté, by portraying him as the exact opposite to the European courtly ideal of virtuous man (honnête homme), Nointel created (or simply reproduced and actualised) a radical cultural antagonism that was rooted in long-lived European discourses about Ottoman corruption and the ‘Turkish menace’.55 His whole narration tended to exclude the vizier and, by extension, the whole Ottoman polity from the sphere of civilization and humanity. Indeed, in his report he offered his superiors some pieces of explanation for Köprülü’s ‘strange’ behaviour by stressing the fact that the vizier was never free to act as he pleased, as he was constantly being watched during all such ceremonies by the sultan, who was believed to be hiding beneath a small curtained window in an adjacent room.56 The implicit opposition between the sultan’s slightly ridiculous despotic rule and Louis XIV’s just and equitable one is a leitmotiv in Nointel’s correspondence. Thus, in this ceremonial report, Nointel effectively depicted Köprülü as the uncivil servant of a despotic ruler in an altogether barbarous and infidel country. This textual procedure permits Nointel to devalue completely the ceremonial language of his hosts: symbolic humiliations coming from uncivilized barbarians were, of course, meaningless and without consequences. At the same time, Nointel himself stands out even more brightly as a true honnête homme, upholding civility against all odds, fashioning himself as the martyr of (French) civilization in the realm of Ottoman barbarism. 52  Ibid., fo. 238r. 53  See Sowerby below, 209–12. 54  Roger Chartier, ‘Civilité’, in Rolf Reichardt et al. (eds), Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680–1820, vol. IV (Munich, 1986), 7–50; Anette Höfer and Rolf Reichardt, ‘Honnête homme, Honnêteté, Honnêtes gens’, in ibid., vol. VII (Munich, 1986), 8–67. 55  See Felix Konrad, ‘From the “Turkish Menace” to Exoticism and Orientalism: Islam as Antithesis of Europe (1453–1914)?’, in Institute for European History (ed.), EGO: Europäische Geschichte Online (2011) http://www.ieg-ego.eu/konradf-2010-en (last accessed 13 March 2018). 56  MAE CP, Turquie 10, fo. 238r.

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Christine Vogel C O N C LU S I O N

Even a genre as seemingly formulaic as ceremonial reports could be used by ambassadors as an element in an overall strategy of noble self-fashioning. The characteristic feature of diplomatic self-narratives lies precisely in the fact that the ambassador’s self constantly oscillated between his representational function where he incorporated royal majesty, and his more humble status as a client and a courtier. This specific ambiguity of ambassadorial self-fashioning was not, however, restricted to ceremonial occasions; it concerned his everyday business as a diplomat, too. In all his dealings, he had to be aware of his special status and dignity as the king’s representative. He had to demonstrate noble forms of sociability and entertainment within the diplomatic community at Pera, the Christian and European suburb of Constantinople, and at the same time had to know when to shun the Dutch or the English ambassadors because it would be politically appropriate to do so. He had to meet all sorts of informants and entertain a network of spies but, at the same time, could not be on familiar terms with low-ranking or undignified people. From the ambassador’s point of view, then, the main problem was to produce, in his correspondence (as in his practice), an equilibrium between the pompous staging of royal majesty and the demonstration of a loyal servant’s gratitude and modesty. While the latter could be achieved both by epistolary ceremonial and by the strategic distribution of his information within his social networks, the former was a purely textual issue. Hence, all sorts of textual and rhetorical strategies helped the Louisquatorzian ambassador to meet this challenge: stripping his letters ‘of verbiage, preambles, and other vain and useless ornaments’, as Callières demanded in his handbook, was therefore not only unreasonable but also (in its own way) unsuited to the historical state of the profession. In the early modern period, diplomatic correspondence should be studied in the context of aristocratic epistolary culture and network practices rather than in the teleological perspective of administrative history. Ambassadorial letters are interesting not only because of what they tell us about foreign relations, but also because of how they tell it, and to whom exactly. As a consequence, we should not only take into consideration the official letters kept in diplomatic archives, but also as much of an ambassador’s correspondence as we can possibly grasp. Only if we consider that Louisquatorzian ambassadors conceived of themselves as loyal servants to their (ministerial) patrons and as agents within their kinship networks, can we understand certain decisions they took during their missions and certain c­ eremonial performances that may strike us today as comical, if not damaging to their actual political mission.

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13 Negotiating with the Material Text Royal Correspondence between England and the Wider World Tracey A. Sowerby I N T RO D U C T I O N In 1585, the English ambassador Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby, reported that the Danish king Frederick II had ordered that the letters sent to him by Elizabeth I be translated into German and that he kept the originals ‘in his owne secret coffer as ye speciallest iewells he hath’.1 In doing so, Frederick signalled the respect and reverence he accorded the English queen’s correspondence, keeping her original words safe even though translations had been made for practical purposes. Clearly, monarchs such as Frederick attached importance not just to what other rulers wrote to them, but also to the physical object(s) through which royal sentiments were conveyed. This held true even when, as in the case of the majority of Elizabeth’s letters to Frederick, the material text did not hold much intrinsic material worth: it was the mere fact that they were royal letters that conferred value upon them.2 Royal correspondence has long been at the centre of diplomatic studies. Scholars have traditionally focussed on the important messages the texts of such documents contained about the state of inter-princely relations. Despite the recent growth of interest in both material texts and epistolary culture,3 much remains to be said about the material and visual qualities that were an important feature of some royal correspondence. Indeed, material texts were integral to diplomatic and paradiplomatic processes. This essay focuses on English royal correspondence in the Tudor and early Stuart period. First it examines princely epistolary culture before analysing the ceremonial contexts in which royal correspondence moved and the meaning of the decoration that marked a small but significant number of English royal letters. 1  TNA SP 75/1, fo. 169r [CSPF XX 401]. 2  Based on a survey of surviving letters in the Rigsarkivet, Statens Arkiver, Copenhagen [RSA], TKUA, SD, England AII 1, 8, 9. 3  For the scholarly interest in ‘things’ see Bill Brown (ed.), Things (Chicago, 2004); Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford, 2011); Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn (London, 2010); Paula Findlen (ed.), Early Modern Things (New York, 2012).

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Tracey A. Sowerby E P I S TO L A RY C U LT U R E A N D T H E S O C I E T YO F P R I N C E S

Recent work on early modern letter-writing has highlighted the importance of the terms of address, rhetorical devices, and the material features of letters in ­constructing relationships between sender and recipient. The type and quality of the paper, the colour of the ink, the materials with which letters were bound, the way the letter was folded, and the layout of the letter all communicated messages about social hierarchies, such as the ‘significant spaces’ between the leave taking and the signature that reflected the social distance between sender and recipient.4 Moreover, Giora Sternberg’s analysis of ‘epistolary ceremonial’ in Louisquatorzian France suggested that both the layout of letters and textual matters such as forms of address were used not just to reflect, but also to negotiate issues of status, deference, and honour,5 while Christine Vogel’s contribution to this collection demonstrates that the self-fashioning strategies of French aristocratic diplomats have shaped the epistolary archive.6 Princes used letters to navigate status too. They strove on multiple registers to assert, maintain, and enhance their place within the society of princes through the materials, as well as the texts of their letters.7 Princely correspondence, diplomatic credentials, and treaty ratifications were usually written on high quality paper or vellum8 and the sensory impact of a letter might be enhanced by dusting its surface with gold flecks or expensive scent.9 When poor quality paper was used, the sender was usually eager to ensure that the letter’s material demerits were not interpreted as a weakness or a slight.10 Far from all royal letters were substantially enhanced materially. But in those that were, royal magnificence was asserted through simple techniques such as the use of calligraphy, gilding, or other ornamentation to highlight the start of sentences or important words.11 On rare occasions, augmentations to the seal gestured to the writer’s wealth and respect for the addressee, as when the 4  See for example Seth Lehrer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge, 1997); Julie  D.  Campbell, Anne  R.  Larsen (eds), Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters (Farnham, 2009); James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke, 2012); Roger Chartier, ‘Secretaires for the People? Model Letters of the Ancien Regime: Between Court Literature and Popular Chapbooks’, in Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cecile Dauphin (eds), Correspondence: Models of Letter-writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1997), 59–111; Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’, The Seventeenth Century, 12 (1997), 1–10. 5 Giora Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204 (2009), 33–88. 6  See Vogel above ch. 12, esp. 193–7. 7  Lucien Bély, La société des princes, XVIe–XVIIIe (Paris, 1999) proposed that the international community functioned as a ‘society of princes’. 8  For example Christie’s sale 6348 lot 321; TNA E30/1113; Archives Nationales, Paris, AEIII/75, 31. 9  Susan Skilliter, ‘Three Letters from the Ottoman “Sultana” Sāfiye to Queen Elizabeth I’, in Jean Aubin and Samuel Miklos Stern (eds), Documents from Islamic Chanceries (Oxford, 1965), 132. 10  Cecil Papers, Hatfield House [CP] 148/193. 11  See for example BL Cotton Ch. xvii 29, 30; RSA, TKUA, SD, England AII 10–11, Elizabeth to Frederick II, 1 November 1585; James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota [JFB], 1611 oJa.

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Ottoman sultana sent Elizabeth a letter whose seal was enhanced with ‘sparks’ of rubies and diamonds and enclosed in a shell of gold.12 Lesser royals could use their seal’s iconography to express the nature of their relationship with more exalted princes. For instance, after his election to the Order of the Garter the German prince Johann Casimir used a seal that incorporated a garter border on his letters to Elizabeth. This symbolized their shared bond through the English chivalric order over which Elizabeth presided, a bond which Casimir sometimes invoked when discussing their military alliance.13 Yet the elevated status of royal correspondents, who vied to maintain or improve their place in the hierarchy of princes, meant that the same conventions that pertained to letter writing between social elites produced slightly different results. Rulers were equal in the sense that they possessed sovereignty and were members of princely society, but it was recognized that some rulers were more exalted than others. Consequently, some of the features of domestic correspondence, such as deferential spaces between the sign off and the signature, could not be replicated in princely correspondence without the writer acknowledging that she or he held a subordinate position to the recipient. Ambassadors jostled to uphold the status of their rulers in diplomatic ceremonial; it seems highly unlikely that princes would readily cede honorific ground. Indeed in their correspondence with other royals English monarchs frequently used exordia in the form of a salutation to the recipient, thereby ensuring that the recipient was not elevated to a higher dignity. This was then balanced by the royal signature at the bottom of the letter. While diplomatic ceremonial acknowledged that some princes were more exalted than others, monarchs’ letters usually sought to emphasize the shared sovereignty of the correspondents, not least through the language of kinship—cousin, brother, sister—with which they addressed one another. A close examination of the material features of princely correspondence reveals that on occasions where sections of the text was highlighted calligraphically or through material embellishments such as gold, the ornamentation usually reflected the notion of reciprocity among sovereign bodies. In a letter from James VI/I to Ahmed I, the Ottoman sultan’s name was gilded (Fig. 13.1).14 Indeed, in the letters Elizabeth and James sent to non-European princes it was not uncommon for the names of the English monarch and that of the ruler to whom the letter was being sent to be gilded.15 This adhered to the notion of reciprocity in inter-princely relations by visually

12  TNA SP 97/2, fo. 230r. 13  For example TNA SP 81/6, fo. 275v, 81/7, fo. 57v. 14  Bodleian Library [Bodl.] MS Eng Hist b172, fo. 57r. This letter also demonstrates two other common practices: gilding the first word of each sentence and gilding references to God. 15  See Christie’s sale 6348 lot 321; Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnikh aktov [RGADA], fond 35, opis’ 2, d. 4. Reproduced in Olʹga Dmitrieva and Tessa V. Murdoch (eds), Treasures of the Royal Courts. Tudors, Stuarts and Russian Tsars (London, 2013), 20–1. For a discussion of seventeenthcentury English royal letters to Russia see Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East (Leiden, 2015). The originals can be found in RGADA. Photographs are held at TNA PRO 22/60. I am grateful to Jan Hennings for his help with documents in RGADA.

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Fig. 13.1.  James VI/I to Sultan Ahmed I, 17 January 1617, Bodl. MS Eng Hist b172, fo. 57r. The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford.

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acknowledging the mutual sovereignty of the princes concerned.16 Understandably, this strategy was not reserved to the English monarchs—the certificate of the French king Henry IV’s oath to uphold the Triple Alliance similarly gilded titles and names, while the Russian tsars came to have their titles and those of the English queen gilded by the later sixteenth century too.17 Concerns about accurately reflecting the relative status of the corresponding rulers were not limited to the European society of princes. Indeed, royal letter writing conventions in several Muslim polities was carefully calibrated to reflect the status of the recipient.18 For these rulers contact with new European rulers also brought epistolary challenges. Hence in 1618, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir sent a silver impression of his seal in the same bag as, but not attached to, his letter to James VI/I precisely because he was aware that the placement of the seal on his letter would signal whether he thought himself superior or inferior to the English king; it was believed that his chosen strategy would signal the equal sovereignty of the rulers.19 Princes utilized other epistolary conventions to help construct relationships with their peers. The ‘stile, follde or seale’ were all considered key to establishing a missive’s authenticity and meaning.20 How a letter was folded and sealed could indicate its tone. By sealing several of her letters to foreign (especially French) potentates with silk floss—on sheets of paper that had been folded thinly lengthwise and then the resulting strip folded over in half and sealed at one end— Elizabeth signalled that they were ‘familiar’ letters. Sending such missives to the duke of Anjou resonated with the rhetoric of their courtship.21 The practice more generally indicated political intimacy. Hence the thinly folded, flossed letters exchanged between Elizabeth and Henry IV complemented the rhetoric of courtly love that permeated their correspondence.22 Elizabeth was aware that the appearance of her letters held meaning as she gave personal instructions as to how some should be folded and locked.23 Such material strategies could complement textual ones designed to further the amity between princes, such as allusions to a shared literary canon.24

16  The names of other rulers did not receive similarly honorific treatment. See RGADA fond 35, opis’ 2, d. 18. 17  TNA E30/1172. The Russian tsars’ letters to English monarchs became gradually more heavily gilded and ornately decorated across the later sixteenth century. See TNA SP 102/49. 18  Colin Mitchell, ‘Safavid Imperial tarassul and the Persian inshā’ Tradition’, Studia Iranica, 26 (1997), 183–5. 19  Samuel Purchas, Purchas his pilgrimes In fiue books (London, 1625), 591. 20  TNA SP 91/1, fo. 97v. 21  Probably in response to receiving similar letters from Anjou: Heather Wolfe, ‘“Neatly sealed, with silk, and Spanish wax or otherwise”: the Practice of Letter-locking with Silk Floss in Early Modern England’, in Steven  W.  Beal and S.  P.  Cerasano (eds), In Prayse of Writing: Early Modern Manuscript Studies (London, 2012), 169–72, 183. 22  See BL Cotton MS Caligula EVII, fos. 363r–v, 364r–v. 23  CP 30/29. 24 Giuliana Iannacarro, ‘Elizabeth’s Italian: Rhetorical and Semantic Constructions’ in Bajetta, Coatalen, and Gibson (eds), Foreign Correspondence, 174–6; Guillaume Coatalen, ‘“Ma plume vous pourra exprimer”: Elizabeth’s French Correspondence’, in Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi (eds), Representations of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke, 2011), 90–1.

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As Rayne Allinson and others have emphasized, one way in which rulers aimed to deepen their relationships with other princes was through the exchange of autograph and holograph letters.25 Signing a letter established its authenticity and monarchs were keen to stress that ‘our promise delivered in writynge signed with our hand’ ensured ‘the maintenance of our princely word, as in honour we are bound’.26 But sending a letter written in one’s own hand was a more symbolic act, as the time and care taken to write it indicated the prestige and affection in which the writer held the ruler to whom the letter was addressed. Hence a holograph letter was considered more prestigious than an autograph and an autograph more prestigious than one that bore no personal textual intervention from the ruler sending it.27 Holographs were seemingly rare in English diplomacy before Elizabeth’s reign. Certainly, sending and receiving holograph letters was sufficiently unusual in Henry VIII’s reign that those from other rulers were endorsed as such upon receipt while other royals commented when they received a letter written personally by the king.28 Although Elizabeth was a more enthusiastic writer of ­letters than her father, her use of holographs was necessarily still limited: sending too many would have decreased their symbolic value. Autograph letters produced by the secretariat were usually expertly written; their layout suggested care and control. With holograph letters, in contrast, the premium of the monarch’s own handwriting overrode other presentational considerations.29 But would such conventions have held outside Europe? The Shah of Persia or shogun of Japan was unlikely to be able to tell if the English queen or king had signed a letter themselves, let alone if he or she had composed it personally. Due to differences in native scripts the prestige of the holograph, so self-evident within Europe, was almost certainly lost on such rulers and it was the local bureaucratic practices of the court at which the letter arrived that determined whether a letter written in another ruler’s hand was considered prestigious. There was even a danger that holographs might be interpreted negatively as they could suggest that the ruler sending them presided over a less authoritative and sophisticated bureaucracy: autograph, rather than holograph, letters were more easily translatable into other cultures. This raises the important question of how the English government met the epistolary challenges of engaging diplomatic relations with new countries, the bureaucratic conventions of which they initially knew very little about. Even quite basic issues such as opening with a salutation from the English monarch might cause friction when dealing with new polities if a different epistolary tradition dominated in that region. Hence Sir Thomas Roe found that the Mughal Emperor’s servants initially wanted to alter a letter from James VI/I in order to place Jahangir’s name 25 Rayne Allinson, A Monarchy of Letters: Royal Correspondence and Diplomacy in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke, 2012). 26  TNA SP 70/134, fo. 10r [CSPF XI 116]. 27 Allinson, Monarchy, 24. 28  See for example BL Cotton MSS Vespasian FIII, fo. 79, Vitellius BXIX, fo. 29r, Galba BVI, fo. 99r, TNA SP 1/23, fo. 128r–v [LP I.i 69, II.i 1617, II.ii 4525, III.ii 1782]. 29 Elizabeth’s later holograph letters can be particularly difficult to read. Jonathan Gibson has ­intriguingly suggested that Elizabeth’s handwriting was part of her self-fashioning: ‘The Queen’s Two Hands’, in Petrina and Tosi (eds), Representations, 47, 59–60.

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first as that was common practice between Muslim rulers in Asia.30 Yet the letter was seemingly accepted by Jahangir without further incident and subsequent letters followed a similar format.31 Certainly the ambassadors and agents tasked with delivering royal letters at extra-European courts in frequent contact with European courtly society, such as the Muscovite and Ottoman courts, believed that consistency of epistolary practice was important and established trust.32 Concurrently, ambassadors, diplomatic agents, the merchant companies involved in English relations with non-European powers, and even the royal secretaries were keen for epistolary practice to draw upon their experience.33 At the English court, for instance, the secretary thought it acceptable to engage in a form of epistolary practice if letters received from that region utilized the same methods.34 Even more tellingly, men who had been involved in diplomacy with extra-European territories were subsequently involved in preparing correspondence destined for the princes they had visited.35 THE CEREMONIAL CONTEXT Any consideration of royal letters, however, must also examine their place within the broader ceremonial context in which they were exchanged.36 As Jan Hennings’s contribution to this volume demonstrates, there were ways in which the semiotics of diplomatic ceremonial could operate as a ‘lingua franca’.37 This ceremonial vocabulary determined the meaning of diplomatic documents. Diplomatic protocol dictated when letters could be given, to whom, and how, and this could vary across early modern courts. It would be easy to consider princes’ actions towards royal letters simply as an indication of the importance of letters. But appreciating that as material objects they were tools of negotiation within a broader framework of courtly and diplomatic ceremonial is essential to recapturing the ways in which such items were understood by those who produced, presented, received, read, and used them. 30  The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615–19, ed. William Foster [Roe] (London, 1926), 100; Mitchell, ‘Safavid Imperial tarassul’, 176–210. 31  The Register of Letters, &c. of the Governour and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies, 1600–1619, ed. George Birdwood and William Foster (London, 1893), 479. 32 TNA SP 97/2, fo. 95v; CP 30/32; Register of Letters, 48, 103–5, 231–2. The tsars criticized ­perceived breaches of traditional protocol: The Manuscripts of the Earl of Cowper, K.G., Preserved at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire, 3 vols (London, 1888–9), II.177–9. 33  Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007), 42; Allinson, Monarchy, 29, 190. 34  CP 88/55; CP 30/32. 35  Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, ed. Henry Stevens, 45 vols (London, 1860–) [CSPC ] III 801. 36 For the meaning of diplomatic ceremonial see William Roosen, ‘Early Modern Diplomatic Ceremonial: A Systems Approach’, Journal of Modern History, 52 (1980), 452–76; André Krischer, ‘Ein nothwendig Stück der Ambassaden: zur politischen Rationalität des diplomatischen Zeremoniells bei Kurfürst Clemens Augustʼ, Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein, 205 (2002), 161–200. 37  See Hennings above 182–9.

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At a practical level, royal letters were integral to diplomatic ceremonial not least as at many courts their arrival provided the justification for the ambassador to gain an audience with his host. This could be as true at European courts where the ambassador was out of favour or the relationship between princes was tense, as it was at non-European courts.38 It was important for the ambassador—the signifier of the English monarch—to deliver the letter directly into the hands of the foreign prince, as this established unmediated equality between the English monarch and their correspondent.39 The ceremonial surrounding the delivery of royal letters mattered to the prince who received them too. By sending a letter, the English monarch acknowledged the sovereignty of the prince to whom they sent it, just as dispatching an ambassador acknowledged the host prince’s legitimacy. This could be utilized within ceremonial for great effect. Hence in October 1604 tsar Boris Godunov, who was under pressure as the first false Dmitry was gaining support, accepted James VI/I’s letter from Thomas Smith, before handing it to the Chancellor who then exhibited the superscription and James’s seal to the court.40 Because royal letters conveyed the sovereignty of the sender, the way in which they were received was a comment upon the perceived status and dignity of the sender. Francis I received Henry VIII’s letters ‘moste Joyously’ in March 1520 and ‘withdrue hymselff to a Wyndowe and redde the saide lettre’ alone.41 His removal to a more private area within the court signalled the intimacy with which he regarded his relationship with the English king. Within Europe, the prince would commonly admire the royal letter he or she had received before discussing its contents. As these were commonly autograph—and more rarely holograph—letters this was probably intended to demonstrate appreciation for the care and attention invested in the creation of the letter and recognition of the sovereignty attached to it. Even in countries where the language of the original letter was not understood and a different script was used, rulers often made a point of admiring the letters of their peers in order to show their respect for, and interest in, the monarchs who had sent them. Indeed, letters were often physical prompts to wider discussions of the personal and political welfare of their princely authors. Hence, in 1553, ‘having taken and read the letters’ of introduction from Richard Chancellor, Ivan IV of Muscovy ‘began a little to question with them and ask them of the welfare of our king’ Edward VI.42 Looking at royal letters upon their receipt was a standard diplomatic trope not only within Europe, but also in many countries without. Ambassadors viewed reactions to royal letters as a barometer of inter-princely relations. So when Henry II of France received a letter from Elizabeth ‘with the usual thanks’ in February 1559 it was interpreted as a sign of his dedication to ending the war between France and England.43 Such responses could even be taken as an indication of deference by ambassadors at the courts of rulers they considered inferior to their own sovereign, such as when the king of Socotra 38  CSPF, V 435. 39  Sir Thomas Smithes Voyage and Entertainment in Rushia (London, 1605), E4r. 40 Ibid., E4r.   41  BL Cotton MS Caligula DVII, fo. 183r [LP III.i 666]. 42  RBK, 25.   43  TNA SP 70/2, fo. 141v [CSPF I 340].

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‘received with soe much seeming content’ a letter from James VI/I ‘as if hee knewe himselfe not worthy such a favour’.44 Ritualized gestures and performances of familiarity or affection were often ­calculated to intimate that the recipient reciprocated the affection and esteem that the letter represented. When Mary, Queen of Scots, placed a letter from Elizabeth in her bosom after reading it, it was construed as evidence that she appreciated the condolences and support the English queen offered.45 Non-royal elites expressed their respect for, and subservience to, domestic and foreign rulers by kissing the prince’s letters.46 A monarch kissing another monarch’s missive was a rarer occurrence intended to heighten the strength of the amity between them or indicate particular esteem. Hence Francis I kissed letters from Henry VIII ‘with due reverence’ before he read them in December 1518 as he celebrated the Treaty of London and the universal peace it heralded. As a further demonstration of friendship and affection, Francis placed the letters, once read, in his ‘bosom’.47 The existence of a lexicon of ritualized behaviour towards royal letters meant that the range of gestures used to show especial esteem might be deployed to heighten the honour accorded the writer in order to offset unpalatable responses to the discussions initiated by that very same missive. In the summer of 1563 amidst a backdrop of Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth disagreeing over Mary’s ­marriage, her place in the English succession and Elizabeth’s military intervention in France at Le Havre, Mary kissed Elizabeth’s letter ‘for her sake yt commethe from’. In this she followed the lead of the English ambassador, who had kissed it as a mark of deference.48 Mary’s gesture communicated her affection for the English queen, which was reinforced by the site of the audience—her bed chamber— which suggested a more intimate relationship between the two queens; in combination they helped to offset the negative response to the contents of Elizabeth’s letters. Mary’s son, James, used the same trope in November 1614. His decision to kiss tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich’s letter probably stemmed from a desire to enhance the store of honour accorded the tsar in order to secure favourable trading privileges for English merchants and to soften the blow when he refused Mikhail financial help.49 Physical responses to royal letters could also be textualized in order to further mediate princely relations. When Anna, duchess of Saxony, claimed to have fondly kissed Elizabeth’s letter upon receipt for the sake of Elizabeth’s virtues, her reported 44  BL Add. MS 19277, fo. 16v; The East India Company Journals of Captain William Keeling and Master Thomas Bonner, 1615–1617, ed. Michael Strachan and Boies Penrose (Minneapolis, 1971) [EICJ ], 100. 45  TNA SP 52/8, fo. 54v [CSPF VI 558]. 46  Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs Preserved Principally in the Archives at Simancas, ed. Martin  A.  S.  Hume, 4 vols (London, 1892–1899), II 327; Calendar of Letters, Despatches, State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain Preserved in the Archives at Vienna, Brussels, Simancas and Elsewhere, ed. Pascual de Gayangos, 13 vols (London, 1862–1954), V.ii, 43a. 47  BL Cotton MS Caligula DVII, fo. 49v [LP II.ii 4652]. 48  TNA SP 52/8, fo. 80r [CSPF VI 877]. 49  Maija Jansson, Nikolai M. Rogozhin, and Paul Bushkovitch, England and the North: The Russian Embassy of 1613–14 (Philadelphia, 1994), 171.

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action strengthened her wish of deepening the hereditary alliance between England and Saxony, that she expressed in her response, whilst acknowledging her inferior position.50 Such textualized gestures also transcended the boundaries of Europe. Indeed, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir understood well the value of such rhetoric. He wrote that when he received James VI/I’s letter and presents from James’s ambassador Thomas Roe, ‘myne eyes were soe fixed [upon them] that I could not easelye remooue them to any other object, and [I] have accepted them with great joy and delight’.51 In relations with non-European powers, royal letters were most commonly delivered at an audience in which a gift was also presented. This gift had often been paraded through the city in which the court was based before being processed through the royal compound to (and even past) the ruler.52 In such contexts the gift was calculated to convey the wealth of the English monarch and as a sign of the prestige with which they viewed the ruler to whom it was sent. A relatively bare letter, even one with silk threads, would have seemed incongruous when juxtaposed with such gifts. It seems likely, therefore, that the decoration of royal letters and the packages in which they were sent was influenced by an awareness of the ritual form of presentation and the material cultures at play at such moments. The ceremonial used by some of the more minor Asian rulers would also have suggested the need for ornately decorated royal missives. At Socotra, where the king had allegedly pledged his servitude to James, his reply was delivered to James’s representative by four men astride a state elephant.53 At Ternate, the royal agent Henry Middleton received a letter from the sultan after it had been publically read and conveyed to him on a platter of gold under a canopy.54 Ritual canopies or baldaccini were widely used in European court culture to indicate sovereignty in such ceremonies as royal processions. Hence Middleton would have immediately understood the visual markers of prestige on display. The English rulers’ relationships with non-European princes were complicated somewhat by the medium through which those relationships were maintained: the joint stock companies that traded with, and bore many of the costs of the English ambassadors sent to, Muscovy, the Ottoman Empire, and the Asian polities. While there were clear moments at which the specific objectives of these companies and the English monarch were not fully aligned, all of the parties concerned shared the same interest in promoting the dignity and defending the sovereignty of the English monarch. Their objectives in the production of the royal letters that helped to establish and maintain trading links were therefore aligned.55 50  TNA SP 81/1, fo. 107r [CSPF XII 410]. 51  BL Add. MS 4155, fo. 100r. 52  See for example RBK, 302, 323–4; Richard Hakluyt, The principal nauigations, voyages, traffiques and discoueries of the English nations (London, 1599–1600), I.171–2, II.305–6; BL Add. MS 17480, fos. 55r–60r. 53  EICJ, 140. For similar ceremonies elsewhere in Asia see Purchas, Pilgrimes, 153, 320–1. 54  The Voyage of Sir Henry Middleton to the Moluccas, 1604–1606, ed. William Foster (Surrey, 2010), 58. 55 Ogborn, Indian Ink, 27–66 discusses royal letters promoting trade. East India Company representatives keenly protected their king’s epistolary honour: CSPC, II 917.

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D E C O R AT E D T E X T S A N D D I P L O M AT I C C O M M U N I C AT I O N If Fernando Bouza is right to suggest that letters ‘can be interpreted as an external sign of courtly culture’,56 then the letters exchanged between princes are best viewed as textual and material ambassadors between their courts. The specific way a royal letter looked was just as important as the interplay between text, layout, and any system used to secure the document or the way it was delivered and received. As shall be seen, these were not necessarily independent variables. The presentation of a princely letter needed to match the ceremonial occasion at which it was presented. In relations with powers on the fringes of Europe and beyond the ceremonial context necessitated paraphernalia of a luxurious and ostentatious nature that would appropriately reflect the dignity of the sovereign sender. In many cases, the English adapted the presentation of their monarchs’ letters to fit the epistolary conventions they encountered at foreign courts. In Russia, the Ottoman Empire and many Asian polities, royal letters were sealed in a fabric bag of cloth of gold or silk.57 Elizabeth and James’s letters to India, China, and Japan appear to have been treated similarly, as were their letters to the Ottoman sultan. Even James’s ‘blank’ letters that could be addressed to unknown monarchs and were thus destined for uncertain ceremonial contexts appear to have been accompanied by a rich cloth bag. Equally, several letters were conveyed to and from Eurasian territories in boxes. This provided another opportunity to make a visual impression with a ‘handsome painted case’ and provided protection for the delicately illuminated letters within.58 The ceremonial contexts in which diplomatic documents were received meant that the visual and material properties of royal letters could be exploited in order to send additional messages that were highly likely to be seen by the intended recipient of these texts. In particular, the convention that royal letters would ordinarily be perused upon receipt, irrespective of the language in which they were written, created an incentive to express the authority of the writer through the text’s decoration. In a small but significant number of royal letters the material decoration extended beyond gilding, calligraphy, seals and floss to include pictorial elements. The reason for such decoration was articulated by Edward Barton, Elizabeth’s ambassador to the Ottoman sultan. As the sultans did not understand English or Latin and could not appreciate the queen’s eloquence, Barton recommended that more money be spent ‘on the giltinge or paintinge’ of the Queen’s letters to the sultan and his viceroy, so that the recipients could at least ‘take

56  Fernando Bouza, ‘Letters and Portraits: Economy of Time and Chivalrous Service in Courtly Culture’, in Francisco Bethencourt and Florike Egmond (eds), Correspondence and Cultural Exchange, 1400–1700 (Cambridge, 2006), 147. 57  EICJ, 126; Roe, 507; The Voyages of Sir James Lancaster to Brazil and the East Indies, 1591–1603, ed. William Foster (Farnham, 2010), 91–2, 130. 58  CSPC II 286; Roe, 358; EICJ, 126.

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pleasure to see the care taken in ther outward forme’.59 Barton’s disparaging of the sultan’s linguistic abilities should not, however, mislead us. His principal reason for recommending that Elizabeth’s letters to the sultan be decorated lay in the importance of the material letter as a communicative medium. This consideration was not limited to Anglo-Ottoman relations. Elizabeth’s surviving letters to the Russian tsars all contained some form of decorative embellishment. In some cases this consisted of a decorated initial, enhancements to the queen’s name, or floriate embellishments to or above the opening line; few letters are as elaborately decorated as the well-known letter of credence for her ambassador Jerome Bowes.60 The continued use of foliate and floral decoration on Elizabeth’s letters may have been affirmed by the use of similar motifs in the letters she received from Moscow towards the end of her reign.61 By 1601 letters to Russia were ‘lymned by him that was wont to doe other lettres of her Matie’, probably the herald William Segar, who decorated letters to Cathay and other Asian polities.62 The manner in which these letters were decorated was determined by broader diplomatic objectives. At one level, that meant that any illuminations needed to preserve the dignity and express the sovereignty of the sender while simultaneously indicating to the recipient that she or he was held in high esteem. As these letters moved into quite different political cultures the English government needed to ensure that the visual messages on royal correspondence would make suitable fare. Gilding was frequently deployed, no doubt as it was considered a universal mark of power; red and blue, colours associated with royalty, were also frequently used.63 Many letters appear to have been decorated fairly neutrally. For instance in Elizabeth I’s surviving letter to the Emperor of China (Fig. 13.2), which was never delivered, her title was gilded and there was ample gilding in the border to suggest her wealth and red to suggest royalty, while it had the prestige and personal attention of an autograph. Yet the document otherwise relied on neutral floriate decoration.64 Similarly, James’s surviving letters to the shogun of Japan, such as that written in 1614, are adorned with a three-sided border of gold foliate scroll work with red and blue enhancements (Fig. 13.3).65 Abstract floriate ornamentation was also used when James when engaged in correspondence with Shah Abbas of 59  TNA SP 97/2, fo. 95v. Barton implied that the letters were already being decorated. 60  RGADA, fond 35, opis’ 2, d. 4. Reproduced in Dmitrieva and Murdoch (eds), Treasures, 20–1. For a rare early instance of the queen’s name being embellished in a letter to a European prince see RSA, TKUA, SD, England AII 1, Elizabeth to Frederick II, 28 February 1567. 61  See for example TNA SP 102/49, fo. 5r–v; Bodl. Ashmole MS 1538, 1539, 1784, 1785, 1786. 62  CP 88/55; CSPC II 286, 362; Thomas Rundall, Narratives of Voyages Towards the North-West, in Search of a Passage to Cathay and India, 1496 to 1631 (Farnham, 2010), 61. Jansson, Art and Diplomacy, 32–70 discusses the decoration of seventeenth-century letters to Russia. 63 On the significance of colours see Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (London, 1972), 81–5; Janet Arnold (ed.), Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds, 1988), 90–1. Gilding was expected on English letters to the tsar and key Russian politicians by the 1590s. See CP 26/97. 64  Lancashire Record Office, DDSH 15/3/1. For this letter’s place in Anglo-Chinese relations see Rayne Allinson, ‘The Virgin Queen and the Son of Heaven: Elizabeth I’s Letters to Wan-li, Emperor of China’, in Bajetta, Coatalen, and Gibson (eds), Foreign Correspondence, 209–28. 65  See also JFB, 1611 oJa.

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Fig. 13.2.  Elizabeth I to the Emperor of Cathay, 4 May 1602, Lancashire Record Office, DDSH 15/3/1.

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Fig. 13.3.  James VI/I to the Emperor of Japan, 11 April 1614 ©British Library Board (Cotton Charter xvii 29).

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Persia, and other Asian princes.66 It was a common feature in letters from Elizabeth and James to the Ottoman sultans and Russian tsars, where it was occasionally enhanced by dynastic motifs.67 The iconography of some letters visually expressed a ruler’s claims to sovereignty. This was commonly achieved by including the dynastic badges of the ruler sending the letter. Elizabeth’s second letter to Ivan IV of Russia incorporated the English coat of arms, a closed imperial crown, crowned Tudor rose and fleur de lis, Beaufort portcullis, the royal motto ‘dieu et mon droit’, and an ER monogram.68 In later Elizabethan letters, the dynastic badges were more contained. In James VI/I’s reign the border decorations of his letters to the tsars began to incorporate dynastic and royal motifs more commonly, a practice continued by his son.69 Most of Elizabeth’s surviving letters to Russia instead relied on calligraphic ornamentation. In a small number of royal letters the decoration explicitly alluded to broader diplomatic concepts. The text of many royal letters stressed the amity and affection of the English monarch; some visualized it too. On a letter from James to Patriarch Philaret, the brother of tsar Mikhail, James’s textual assurances of his love and requests for the patriarch’s help in furthering amicable relations between the polities were reinforced by a miniature that formed the centrepiece of the three-sided border: a heart-shaped frame enclosing two hands shaking.70 Equally, when James sent Mikhail a letter bearing his portrait in 1623, it represented a token of his friendship due to European conventions surrounding portrait exchange.71 There was, then, a difference between the predominant form of royal letters sent within Europe, which were mostly undecorated but exploited the associations of the monarch’s handwriting and signature, and those sent to those countries on the borders of Europe and beyond that relied more heavily on illumination. This distinction between European and extra-European letter writing was even made at a bureaucratic level, for when the miniaturist and clerk of the signet Edward Norgate was awarded a monopoly on decorating royal letters in c.1625, this was expressly with respect to ‘his highnes lettres to the Grand Sigr: the Emperor of Russia, the King of Persia, the great Mogol, the severall kings in the East Indies and other remote Princes’.72 The knowledge that a letter might not be opened immediately probably inspired a further development in English epistolary practice towards non-Europeans. Across Elizabeth and James’s reigns, the addresses on letters to the Russian tsars became increasingly elaborate. On Elizabeth’s earliest letters to Ivan IV the addresses were similar to many she sent to European princes. The decoration largely consisted of a calligraphic swirl. By the end of her reign, the labels were 66  JFB 1614 oJa; BL IOR A/1/7B, Add. Ch. 56456. 67  See for example TNA PRO 22/60/7, 10, 25, 26, 28–30. 68  TNA PRO 22/60/3. 69  See for example Ol’ga Dmitrieva and Natalya Abramova, Britannia and Muscovy: English Silver at the Court of the Tsars (New Haven, CT, 2006), 215. 70 RGADA, fond 35, opis’ 2, d. 28; Reproduced in Dmitrieva and Abramova, Britannia and Muscovy, 213. 71  RGADA, fond 35, opis’ 2, d. 33. Reproduced in Dmitrieva and Murdoch (eds), Treasures, 55. 72  TNA SP 32/11, fo. 350r.

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becoming more complex visually, as some had decorated borders. This became standard practice in James’s reign when, increasingly, the swag border echoed in miniature the decorative scheme framing the king’s words inside.73 Surviving ­letters addressed to the Chinese, Japanese, Mughal, and Ottoman Emperors, as well as those intended for unspecified Asian princes suggest that this convention was common when dealing with non-European rulers.74 Some borders were written exclusively, or predominantly in gold.75 By the turn of the seventeenth century the English government clearly placed a premium on the outward appearance of royal letters that were travelling beyond the borders of Europe. Even within Europe it was occasionally felt that small augmentations to the appearance of a royal missive, such as using precious materials for the address, would be beneficial.76 C O N C LU S I O N The exchange of royal letters, like the exchange of gifts, was a contested social transaction whose meaning was not stable.77 Once they were in foreign hands, the letters’ meaning could be manipulated and even exploited in ways that the ruler who had sent them had not intended. Just as ambassadors’ letters and reports of the treatment of foreign ambassadors at court had archival afterlives in which they were appropriated and reshaped to suit specific agendas, so too might princely letters. Cities, for instance, could utilize royal letters in order to advance their own diplomatic status.78 Indeed, the way that Frederick II treated Elizabeth’s letters in 1585 speaks to a broader truth: their meaning was not fixed by their ostensible author nor was it immutably fixed during the moment of exchange. By allowing Elizabeth’s ambassador to observe the privileged position he accorded her letters, Frederick was engaging in his own form of diplomatic communication that attached additional meaning to Elizabeth’s missives for his own purposes. Such claims of affection and esteem were further reinforced if, like Frederick, the recipient visibly stored the letter in special chests as they would their jewellery and other precious items. Bouza has suggested that handwritten letters filled the place of gifts in early modern courtly society and implied that we should view them as gifts.79 This is perhaps taking things too far. But the analogy with gifts is useful for helping us to understand the ways in which meaning was constructed both through and ­ ultiple around the letters and for appreciating that an individual letter could have m meanings at once. Moreover some letters were more like gifts than others. With holographs we could see the time taken to write the letter as a gift, while exquisitely limned letters were often works of art in their own right. 73  See TNA PRO 22/60/1–31. 74  For example JFB 1611 oJa; Bodl. MS Eng Hist b172, fo. 57r. 75  BL Cotton Ch. xvii 29–30; BL IOR A/1/7B. 76  RSA, TKUA, SD, England AII, 9, Elizabeth to Frederick, 10 May 1583. 77  Gadi Algazi, ‘Introduction: Doing Things with Gifts’, in Gadi Algazi, Valentin Groebner, and Bernhard Jussen (eds), Negotiating the Gift: Pre-modern Figurations of Exchange (Göttingen, 2003), 9–28. 78  See Krischer below 228–9. 79  Bouza, ‘Letters’, 154.

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Diplomatic historians have become increasingly adept at thinking about forms of symbolic communication such as rituals, but have been much slower to unravel the diplomatic significance of the visual world of early modern courts. Royal letters were an ephemeral yet intrinsic part of that culture. A letter’s visual and material characteristics did more than connote magnificence: they were essential to the texts’ meaning. Such adornments were a very real and often effective means of negotiation that, like so many things in early modern diplomatic practice, was moderated by other diplomatic lexicons such as politicized space, physical proximity, and the cultural credentials demonstrated. The physical presentation of, and response to, such documents, their place in the ritual world of early modern courts, and their subsequent usage were vital to the meanings they conveyed and constructed. These factors interacted with the physical format and visual impact of the letter in complex ways. To understand the role of royal letters in diplomatic negotiations fully a holistic, interdisciplinary approach is needed that takes into account their verbal, visual, and material contents within the broader material, visual, and ceremonial contexts in which they operated. Drawing on the methodology of epistolary studies highlights the material significance of such letters; art historical methods highlight the visual messages they conveyed; literary studies help us to understand the rhetorical devices and literary registers of the letters’ texts; and anthropologically-inflected studies of gifts, material culture, and non-verbal communication allows us to appreciate the way in which the material text was both shaped and its meaning nuanced by other political actors. Royal letters are indicative of a broader need for multidisciplinary approaches to early modern diplomatic practices. Aspects of diplomatic culture are often studied in isolation. Yet in reality they interacted with and shaped one another. Princely epistolary culture is merely a case in point.

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14 Ritual Practice and Textual Representations Free Imperial Cities in the Society of Princes André J. Krischer I N T RO D U C T I O N In January 1738 the council of the free imperial city of Frankfurt received a letter from the Landgrave Ernest Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt (1667–1739) inviting ‘the honourable and wise’ mayors and aldermen of the city to the festivities in celebration of the golden throne anniversary of Landgrave Ernest Louis in Darmstadt. On such occasions it was usual not to go as a whole body but to send representatives instead. This time, two aldermen, Johann Christoph Ochs von Ochsenstein and Friedrich Maximilian von Lersner, and the Syndic Johann Ludwig Burgk were tasked to act as proxies. They took the regular stagecoach, departing from Frankfurt at one o’clock. They arrived in Darmstadt three hours later (see Fig. 14.1), where they were put up in a local inn, which was arranged and paid for by the court. Over the following three days, the Frankfurt delegates were invited to festive divine services, banquets, operas, audiences with the Landgrave and the Crown Prince Louis, and to ‘divertissements’ with the ‘sweet and charming Princess Max’, actually the fun-loving princess Friederike Charlotte. On both evenings, the three Frankfurters were invited to sit at the landgrave’s dinner table. Numerous toasts were made to the honour and welfare of the city of Frankfurt. Alderman Ochs found the drinking so heavy that he could hardly drink any more. The aldermen silently left the feast and returned to their inn only to be invited to rejoin the court to watch fireworks and illuminations in the palace gardens.1 One could read this report as an anecdote: honest and simple burghers of a protestant and commercial city state recount their experiences of court life, courtly libertinage, and alcoholic excess. This would fit with contemporary visual representations that reveal how the magistrate of Frankfurt wanted the city to be seen: as a prosperous

1  Relatio, die abschickung nacher Darmstadt zur unterthänigsten Gratulation bey des dortigen regierenden herrn landgraffen Ernst Ludwig [. . .] betr[effend], 20 febr. 1738 [Relation regarding the mission to Darmstadt to congratulate the ruling landgrave Ernst Ludwig], Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt am Main [ISFM], ‘Nachbarliche Beziehungen zu den Reichsständen der Umgebungʼ, no. 101, unpaginated. All translations mine unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 14.1.  Map with places mentioned in this chapter, from F. W. Putzger’s Historischer Schulatlas (Leipzig, 1897), 22.

and buzzing civic community.2 But there is more to it than that. Alderman Lersner portrayed the trip to Darmstadt as a successful diplomatic mission, and the success lay both in the fact that the Frankfurters were treated with ceremonial honours as if they had a certain diplomatic status and that they were part of the aristocratic celebrations.3 They were, for instance, carried from their inn to the Landgrave’s palace by a state coach, then greeted by the guards and courtiers when they arrived in the palace courtyard. Whereas on former occasions the representatives of the Frankfurt council had had to walk into the courtyard, this time they were allowed to drive into the second and inner courtyard, as far as the stairs leading up to the state apartments where they were welcomed by the master of ceremonies. This sort of reception was a honourable gesture typical of eighteenth-century diplomatic protocol. The audiences, their invitation to the Landgrave’s dinner table, even the covering of their travel expenses, were ceremonial gestures worth mentioning. Indeed, the texts about such occasions were crucial to how the cities and their representatives understood the importance of such occasions: Lersner recorded all of these gestures accurately in his report which was later read out at a city council meeting alongside other political matters.4 This trip to Darmstadt is a good example of the diplomacy of the non-sovereign polities of early modern Europe. Early modern foreign relations were not only dominated by sovereign rulers (usually referred to as ‘kings’) and their ambassadors, 2  See for instance Salomon Kleiner and Georg Daniel Heumann’s series of etchings created for the Frankfurt magistracy, Das florirende Franckfurth am Mayn, oder Wahrhaffte und eigendliche Abbildung dieser Berühmten Freyen Reichs– Wahl– und Handel Statt (Augsburg, 1738). 3 Ibid. 4  ISFM ‘Nachbarliche Beziehungenʼ, no. 101.

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but also, and in fact predominantly, by actors whose political status was ambiguous and unclear. Recent approaches in the German-speaking historiography of diplomacy have principally challenged the notion of an ‘international system’ of ‘great powers’.5 At the same time the epoch-making character of ‘1648’ has been questioned. Whereas older approaches considered this year as the birth of a ‘Westphalian system’ of equally sovereign states, recent research has shown that, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, Europe was shaped by asymmetrical foreign relations.6 Especially within the Holy Roman Empire the Treaty of Westphalia was definitely not the starting point for the emergence of a few sovereign powers, but rather for diplomatic activities on all levels. Referring to article eight of the peace treaty, that allowed all imperial estates to make alliances with foreign princes (‘provided nevertheless that these Alliances be neither against the Emperor nor the Empire’7), numerous imperial estates reinforced their diplomatic activities.8 It also helped that in the French translations of the treaty the legal formula for the statehood of the imperial estates, ‘superioritas territorialis’ (‘territorial superiority’) was deliberately translated as ‘sovereignty’ in order to hurt the position of the emperor.9 All of this encouraged the imperial estates to act more diplomatically: to correspond among each other with letters of state or to appoint envoys (and not just delegates) as their representatives at the imperial diet in Regensburg.10 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Regensburg was a stamping ground for diplomats from all over the Holy Roman Empire.11 Although the political power of the imperial diet was clearly limited, for many imperial estates it was nevertheless important to be represented in Regensburg. This was not only the case with the city of Frankfurt, but also with the landgraves of Hesse-Darmstadt. Even if the latter belonged to one of the ancient princely dynasties of the Holy Roman Empire, it was unclear what this actually meant in a diplomatic context.

5 Christian Windler, ‘Diplomatic History as a Field for Cultural Analysis: Muslim-Christian Relations in Tunis, 1700–1840’, HJ, 44 (2001), 79–106; Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler, ‘Einleitung: Außenbeziehungen in akteurszentrierter Perspektive’, in Hillard von Thiessen and Christian Windler (eds), Akteure der Außenbeziehungen: Netzwerke und Interkulturalität im historischen Wandel (Cologne, 2010), 1–12. 6  Tilman Haug, Ungleiche Außenbeziehungen und grenzüberschreitende Patronage: die französische Krone und die geistlichen Kurfürsten (1648–1679) (Cologne, 2015). 7  Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugensis, Art. 8, First English Translation of the Peace Treaty (1713), available online at www.pax-westphalica.de. 8  Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, ‘Der Westfälische Frieden und das Bündnisrecht der Reichsstände’, Der Staat, 8 (1969), 449–78. 9  Gerhard Oestreich, ʻVerfassungsgeschichte vom Ende des Mittelalters bis zum Ende des alten Reichesʼ, in Herbert Grundmann (ed.), Handbuch der Deutschen Geschichte 2 (Stuttgart, 1955), 317–65, at 331. 10 For the symbolic dimensions of letter writing and titles see Giora Sternberg, ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204 (2009), 3–88; Regina Dauser, ‘Kein König ohne Titel: Titulaturen als Verhandlungsgegenstand auf dem Westfälischen Friedenskongress und in nachwestfälischer Zeit’, in Christoph Kampmann (ed.), L’ art de la paix: Kongresswesen und Friedensstiftung im Zeitalter des Westfälischen Friedens (Münster, 2011), 333–57. See also Sowerby, 204, 218 above. 11 Susanne Friedrich, Drehscheibe Regensburg: das Informations- und Kommunikationssystem des Immerwährenden Reichstags um 1700 (Berlin, 2007).

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Nevertheless, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century diplomacy saw diplomats from all sorts of princes: electors, prince-bishops, even prince-abbesses, landgraves, dukes, and also free imperial cities. Among these actors, sovereigns and their ambassadors were the (western-European) exception, not the rule. In a broader view that includes middle and eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and even Africa, early modern diplomacy was field of asymmetrical practices very different from the state-centred, international system of sovereign nations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.12 This essay focuses on the imperial cities as a telling example of the de facto diplomacy of minor political actors in this field. It first discusses the precarious status of imperial cities in the early modern Holy Roman Empire and the symbolic dimensions of the missions of civic emissaries going to courts. The last section turns to princely visits in the cities and the significance of how these were recorded. Textual representations of missions or visits were not a neutral medium of documentation. Rather, records of ceremonies played an important role as interpreters of ritual practice and often amounted to accounts of symbolic capital. Furthermore, they allowed the civic magistrates to portray the ceremonial acts as they wanted them to be seen and remembered. THE SYMBOLIC DIMENSIONS OF RECORDING URBAN DIPLOMACY There were more than sixty so-called free imperial cities in the Holy Roman Empire, among them comparatively large cities such as Cologne with approximately 50,000 or Frankfurt with 32,000 inhabitants but there were also cities such as Lindau at Lake Constance or Bopfingen in Swabia with only a few hundred dwellers.13 These cities were ‘free’ insofar as they had only the Emperor as their superior and not a prince of the empire like the cities of Berlin or Munich which were territorial cities within the principalities of Brandenburg and Bavaria.14 The status of an imperial city was, at least before the eighteenth century, highly prestigious among urban communities between the North Sea and the Alps. Since the beginning of the sixteenth century imperial cities were members of the imperial diet and because of this they were regarded as imperial estates.15 However, they were clearly treated as second-class members by the princes and their representatives 12  See for example Christian Windler, La diplomatie comme expérience de l’autre. Consuls français au Maghreb (1700–1840) (Geneva: Droz, 2002); Christina Brauner, Kompanien, Könige und caboceers: interkulturelle Diplomatie an Gold- und Sklavenküste im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2015). See also Hennings 175–89 above, and Vogel 190–202 above. 13  For a general outline see Heinz Schilling, Die Stadt in der Frühen Neuzeit, 3rd edn (Munich, 2015). 14  Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire: Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia 1493–1648 (Oxford, 2012), 26; Eberhard Isenmann, ‘Zur Frage der Reichsstandschaft der Frei- und Reichsstädte’, in Franz Quarthal and Wilfried Setzler (eds), Stadtverfassung, Verfassungsstaat, Pressepolitik: Festschrift für Eberhard Naujoks zum 65. Geburtstag (Sigmaringen, 1980), 91–110. 15  Georg Schmidt, ‘Die Städte auf dem frühneuzeitlichen Reichstag’, in Bernhard Kirchgässner and Hans-Peter Becht (eds), Vom Städtebund zum Zweckverband (Sigmaringen, 1994), 29–43.

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who formed the upper houses of the imperial diet. From the perspective of a prince elector or any other imperial prince it was unacceptable that representatives of a civic community, however free, could influence the decision-making process at the imperial diet.16 At the same time, being at the imperial diet had an important value for the imperial cities: it was a symbol of their liberty, even if they had no chance of winning a vote.17 But their sheer presence at the imperial diet, distinguished them from all the other cities who were not allowed to sit there. Significantly, too, at the beginning of the seventeenth century a field of diplomatic practice had emerged which, for the cities, promised to a be a functional means of symbolizing their free status, which was complemented by the practice of sending and meeting diplomats or high-ranking persons at court or in town. Whereas reports from the imperial diets sent home by the cities’ representatives in Regensburg were often not met with much interest—in Cologne they were not even opened after the middle of the eighteenth century18—other diplomatic activities were carefully registered in separate files or even books of ceremony. Of course, urban diplomats could already be found in the late middle ages.19 But it was only in the seventeenth century that urban diplomacy began to be interpreted to have a meaning beyond the impact of the mission. Every time an urban diplomat was received at a princely court as a diplomat (and not, for instance, as a petitioner), this was not only a political, but also and above all, a social success. And as such it was recorded in writing. Although it is not unusual to speak about an ‘early modern world of states’ or about an ‘international system’ in the seventeenth century, in fact polities of this period were primarily not nation-states but dynastic and aristocratic entities that were not engaging in international relations, but operating within a ‘society of princes’.20 And within this society, free imperial cities had a precarious status: they simply did not fit.21 They had no princely head of state and they were, as a civic community, regarded as socially inferior. But they were not simply mere subjects. They were something in between. In contrast to the nineteenth-century international system that knew only sovereign states and private persons, the early modern society of princes could tolerate this ambiguity of ‘in between’. It was accepted that imperial cities maintained foreign relations, but it was also clear that this was not quite the same as if England and France were dealing with each other. Urban 16  Isenmann, ‘Reichsstandschaft’, 94–5. 17 Adolf Laufs, ‘Die Reichsstädte auf dem Regensburger Reichstag 1653/54’, Die alte Stadt. Zeitschrift für Stadtgeschichte, Stadtsoziologie und Denkmalpflege, 1 (1974), 23–48. 18  André Krischer, ‘Reichsstädte und Reichstag im 18. Jahrhundert: Überlegungen zu Reichspolitik und Politik im Alten Reich anhand Bremer und Hamburger Praktiken’, Zeitenblicke, 11/2 (2013), http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2012/2/Krischer/index_html. 19 Michael Jucker, Gesandte, Schreiber, Akten: Politische Kommunikation auf eidgenössischen Tagsatzungen im Spätmittelalter (Zürich, 2004); Klara Hübner, Im Dienste ihrer Stadt: Boten- und Nachrichtenorganisationen in den schweizerisch-oberdeutschen Städten des späten Mittelalters (Ostfildern, 2012). 20  Lucien Bély introduced the notion but used it without proper definition: La société des princes XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1999). 21 Richard C. Trexler interpreted fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine civic rituals in this way in Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1991).

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diplomacy was not a routine or an institution, but every time a worthy event ­ appened it was described in detail and interpreted as evidence of their social h acceptance in a political field defined by aristocratic norms and values. In this field, imperial cities did not represent themselves as a republican alternative, but as a constituent of the society of princes.22 At the core of urban identity were not (only) civic values, but most notably the conviction that an imperial city was part of the nobility and deserved deference as such. Diplomatic ceremonial was considered to act as a conveyor of such claims and of their recognition. Texts such as books of ceremonies were central to the self-fashioning of cities as diplomatic and therefore noble actors.23 Many imperial cities kept books of ceremonies, which not only described, but rather represented and collected different ceremonial events. Frankfurt and the southern imperial city Schwäbisch Hall kept special books dealing with invitations to princely courts on the occasion of funerals, weddings, and christenings.24 Cologne kept very similar books, such as the ‘Protocollum Ceremoniarum’ of the ‘Nobilis ac Liberae Imperialis Civitatis Coloniensis’ (‘Protocol of ceremonies of the noble or free imperial city of Cologne’, Fig. 14.2).25 These books described the treatment of civic emissaries (typically aldermen and syndics, usually not the mayors): how and where they were welcomed, by whom they were met, if they had an audience with the prince or his family, if they were invited to the banquet and other festivities, and how they were finally bidden farewell. The emissaries had to give a detailed account, because their ceremonious treatment was not a personal or private experience, but honours received in their capacity as representatives of an imperial city. These reports were first read out to the councilmen who considered them as important as any other political issue. Then they were added to the books of ceremonies, partly in transcript, partly as original. In any case, these books functioned as collections of rituals transformed into written material. Like medieval charters with important privileges from the Emperors or constitutional documents on parchments and sealed by the guilds, the books of ceremonies were also part of the textual treasure of the cities, kept in oak and iron bound chests in the town halls.26 22  This was also true for sovereign republics. The Dutch republic, for example, needed the stadtholder from the House of Orange-Nassau for ceremonial interactions with diplomatic visitors. See Johann Christian Lünig, Theatrum Ceremoniale Historico-Politicum 2 vols (Leipzig, 1719), 708–15. 23  See also Christine Vogel, 190–202 above. Whereas the ambassador’s disptaches discused by Vogel were meant to be read by others, urban books of ceremony were only accesible by the ruling elite. 24  ISFM ‘Nachbarliche Beziehungenʼ, no. 101; Stadtarchiv Schwäbisch Hall [SSH], Bestand 4, no. 191. 25  Historisches Archiv der Stadt Köln [HASK], Bestand 30, C 612. On the recording of ceremony see Richard  C.  Trexler, The Libro Cerimoniale of the Florentine Republic (Geneva, 1978); Gerald Schwedler, ‘Ritualmacher: Ueberlegungen zu Planern, Gestaltern und Handlungsträgern von Ritualen’, in Jörg Gengnagel and Gerald Schwedler (eds), Ritualmacher hinter den Kulissen: zur Rolle von Experten in historischer Ritualpraxis (Münster, 2013), 13–39; Jan Hennings, Russia and Courtly Europe: Ritual and Diplomatic Culture, 1648–1725 (Cambridge, 2016), ch. 3; Hennings, 175–89 above. 26  André Krischer, Reichsstädte in der Fürstengesellschaft: Politischer Zeichengebrauch in der Frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 2006), 201.

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Fig. 14.2.  Title leaf of one of the Cologne books of ceremonies (1740–97). HASK, Bestand 30, C 612. This item is missing since the destruction of the archive in 2009.

To a large extent, the diplomacy of imperial cities turned on rituals and ceremonial gestures, as these books reveal.27 In many cases rituals were not only the props, the minor points of an embassy, but the essence. Urban diplomacy did involve peace treaties and trade agreements that they negotiated with the emperor, other princes of the empire, and even European sovereigns about all kinds of political issues.28 But there was no mission where ceremony did not play a role, and no report from a diplomatic mission would omit a description of the ritual formalities. From the perspective of the city councils ceremony and any other sort of symbolic communication (for example gallant conversations with princesses) was always an indicator of some basic acceptance of a civic community in the society of princes. In the early modern period, doing diplomacy had not only political, but also social implications and contents.29 For instance, the city of Bremen used every opportunity to contact George I and George II when they visited Hanover, as the diaries 27  André Krischer, ‘Das diplomatische Zeremoniell der Reichsstädte, oder: Was heißt Stadtfreiheit in der Fürstengesellschaft?’, Historische Zeitschrift, 284 (2007), 1–30. 28  Karl Heinz Schwebel, Bremens Beziehungen zu Kaiser und Reich, vornehmlich im 18. Jahrhundert (Bremen, 1937). 29  Christian Wieland, ‘The Consequences of Early Modern Diplomacy: Entanglement, Discrimination, Mutual Ignorance and State Building’, in Antje Flüchter and Susan Richter (eds), Structures on the Move. Technologies of Governance in Transcultural Encounter (Heidelberg, 2012), 271–85.

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of alderman Dr Liborius von Line show. The British king was also the duke of Bremen-Verden, the territorial state surrounding the city of Bremen. There were many open questions concerning trade and tolls. But all reports of these missions included ceremonial descriptions. When the syndic Dr Everhard Otto visited Georg II in Herrenhausen in 1748, he laid a copious account of his treatment by the king and his ministers before the city council. From this it became clear that Otto and the alderman Hieronymus Klugkist were treated with the same comities (visitation by royal ministers, riding in a state coach, audience with the king, mutual assertions of friendship, affection and trust and so forth) as the Prussian and the Danish Envoys.30 As the author of a Iurisprudentia Symbolica (‘The Jurisprudence of Symbols’), a treatise about the use and meaning of symbols in the legal sphere since the ancient world, Dr Otto had considerable insight in and also a specific awareness of the subtleties of ceremony.31 Alderman Line again travelled to Hanover in 1720 and 1723 only to ‘congratulate’ George I upon his arrival in his German territories. He wrote short diaries on both occasions in which he described the manner of his reception at court.32 The ceremonious treatment of civic diplomats could never be taken for granted, however. From a princely perspective, an urban emissary did not automatically have an official diplomatic rank and status. He was, of course, in no case an ambassador, because ambassadors could only represent sovereigns, and imperial cities were not sovereign.33 This was never disputed. But the other second and third order diplomatic grades also did not quite fit: urban diplomats were neither envoys nor residents or consuls.34 In fact, they did not carry any regular denomination. Instead, the diplomatic status of an urban emissary was usually established in the situation when arriving at a court, when treated with ceremonial honours. Consequently, urban books of ceremonies not only contained descriptions by the syndics and aldermen, but also princely letters of appreciation. In January 1627, for example, Duke Augustus II of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (founder of the celebrated library) invited the city of Braunschweig to the christening of his new son. At the same time mayors and aldermen were asked to act as godfathers for the child. The city council commissioned their syndic Dr Johann Camman to Wolfenbüttel. A few days after the baptism, Duke Augustus sent a letter to Braunschweig in which he expressed his gratitude for the mission (Fig. 14.3).35 This letter became part of the Braunschweig’s collection of ceremonial records, as 30  Staatsarchiv Bremen [SB], 2-Z. 20. fo. 4. 31  Everhard Otto, De Iurisprudentia Symbolica Exercitationum Trias (Utrecht, 1730). For a discussion of the genre see Maria Cornelia Schürmann, Iurisprudentia Symbolica: rechtssymbolische Untersuchungen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 2011). 32  SB, 2-Z.18.b.1, 2-Z.18.b.11. 33 The rule that only sovereigns could send ambassadors was popularized by Abraham de Wicquefort, The embassador and his functions, trans. J. Digby (London, 1716), 44. 34  The precise distinction between the different diplomatic ranks was a ceremonial one. See Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Honores regii: die Königswürde im zeremoniellen Zeichensystem der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Johannes Kunisch (ed.), Dreihundert Jahre preußische Königskrönung: eine Tagungsdokumentation (Berlin, 2002), 1–26. 35  Gevatterschafften der Stadt Braunschweig von anno 1616 et annis seqq. [-1671], Stadtarchiv Braunschweig [SBg], B IV 2d, no. 36, p. 13.

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Fig. 14.3.  Letter of Duke Augustus to the council of Braunschweig, 1627. SBg, B IV 2d, no. 36, p. 13.

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it had a meaning beyond the message: it was regarded as a material token of the duke’s appreciation of the city’s representation at the christening, and as such it was added to the files of ceremony concerning the ‘Gevatterschafften dero Stadt Braunschweig’ (‘Godparenthoods of the city of Braunschweig’). It is important that Duke Augustus mentioned Camman’s letter of credence (‘credentialien’): only by such a letter was an emissary turned into a representative, someone who could act on behalf of someone else and whose ceremonial treatment was not a private issue, but a political matter.36 Thus, the recognition of the syndic’s representative status was at the same time an acknowledgment of his diplomatic status as someone who deserved a certain kind of treatment and respect. This was remarkable because Braunschweig and the duke were involved in an ongoing conflict about the freedom of the urban commune. Whereas Braunschweig claimed to be a free imperial city, the duke insisted on its territorial status. This conflict also had a symbolic dimension as there were frictions about ceremonial entries in the city after a duke’s accession.37 It was therefore remarkable that the duke would make concessions to the city in another field of ritual practice. Unsurprisingly, the city added the duke’s letter to their collection of written material supporting its struggle for freedom.38 The next word highlighted in the duke’s letter, however, was the word ‘prasent’ (‘present’). Admittedly in most cases gifts motivated the preferential treatment of urban diplomats. The Frankfurt diplomats also brought a very generous present to Darmstadt. In fact, there were usually such ulterior motives when Imperial Cities were asked to be godparents for princely babies. Christian II of Anhalt, a minor prince of the Holy Roman Empire, was exceptionally frank about his motives in his letter of invitation to the council of Braunschweig to become godparents for his daughter Mary in 1645: a postscript admitted that he was ruined. He offered the civic delegation a honourable and dignified reception at his court and in the presence of members of the local nobility if they would hand over a considerable amount of money (‘eine erkleckliche summa geldts’) in secret.39 Even if the city declined this offer because of the rather mediocre status of this prince, the frank discussion of the deal (money for ceremony) is revealing: a city’s present was not a charitable gift, but an investment which would be returned through ceremonial treatment. To use Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the cities used economic capital to earn symbolic capital.40 36  As Wicquefort, Embassador, 109, put it: ‘They [letters of credence] express their [the legates] character, and make known their Authority and Faculties.’ For the different notions of representation see the seminal work by Hasso Hofmann, Repräsentation. Studien zur Wort- und Begriffsgeschichte von der Antike bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1974), 178ff. 37  André Holenstein, Die Huldigung der Untertanen: Rechtskultur und Herrschaftsordnung (800–1800) (Stuttgart, 1991), 14–15. 38  For the idea of a material dimension of written material in the urban archives see Marita Blattmann, ‘Über die “Materialität” von Rechtstexten’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 28 (1994), 333–54. 39  SBg, B IV 2d, no. 36, pp. 54–6. 40  Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, 1986), 241–58.

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The urban records of ceremony were accounts of this symbolic capital.41 Just as a merchant entered his profits in account books, so the civic secretaries or syndics were ordered to record each and every act of diplomatic ceremony—at foreign courts or within the city walls—in Cologne’s Liber Ceremonium (‘book of ceremony’)42 or Schwäbisch Hall’s ‘Short description of the presents and courtesies shown on occasion of the arrival of emperors, electors, counts and other noblemen’ (Fig. 14.4).43 Books of ceremony can also be found in Augsburg (1527–1824), Lübeck (since 1591) and Speyer (1585–1797), to name just a few examples. Urban books of ceremony served as works of reference and precedents. In a society where symbolic communication played such an important role44, it was vital to know the appropriate rituals for emperors, kings, margraves, prince abbesses, or councilmen from neighbouring towns. Equally, it was important to know what

Fig. 14.4.  Title page of a so-called ‘Aufwartungsbuch’ (‘book of courtesies’) of Schwäbisch Hall. SSH, Bestand 4, no. 45. This manuscript includes descriptions of ceremonies from 1704 to 1782.

41  See Krischer, Reichsstädte, 106ff. 42  Liber Ceremoniarum [1524–1735], HASK, Bestand 30, C 610. 43  SSH, Bestand 4, no. 45. 44  See Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ‘Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne. Begriffe – Forschungsperspektiven – Thesen’, ZHF, 31 (2004), 489–527.

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had been done before on similar occasions so that the city as well as its visitor were treated with all due respect, avoiding any hurtful precedents. In this respect urban books of ceremony were comparable to the notebooks of courtly masters of ceremony.45 Yet the schematic entries of ceremonies also served as proof of honours received during interactions with nobles. In their ongoing accumulation, the entries resembled a collection of precious objects, preserved in writing, or, as in the case of original letters of ceremony from emperors, kings or dukes, consisting of written materials. Especially the practice of collecting original letters was not restricted to cities. The Danish king Fredrick II also cherished letters from Elizabeth I because they came from the English queen. By storing them in a chest, Frederick stressed their material worth.46 A comparable logic also governed the urban communities treasuring of letters and self-authored descriptions of diplomatic protocol. Over time—and most books or files of ceremonies cover one hundred or more years—this collection amounted to a treasure of rituals and letters, a city chronicle from a strict ceremonial perspective, which asserted the communes social acceptance in the society of princes.47 Not by chance were the title pages of the ceremony books often made with much calligraphic care—they were, so to speak, the lid of the (written) treasure chest. The entries, however, were in some cases made sketchily and with haste—which only shows that even the smallest ritual should not be omitted. Whereas in Schwäbisch Hall numerous hands were engaged in making entries, in Cologne only the highly skilled council secretaries were employed in this duty. For instance, in September 1746 the secretaries entered a transcript of the letter of appreciation from the newly appointed chief justice of the imperial chamber court, Carl Philipp, prince of Hohenlohe, imitating (up to certain point) the original letter (Fig. 14.5). On the subsequent page they recorded the planning and accomplishment of a welcome ceremony for the elector Palatinate on the river Rhine.48 The title of the Schwäbisch Hall book makes it clear that the entries of symbolic profits usually stemmed from previous investments: it recorded Aufwartungen and Verehrungen: courtesies received from and presents made by the city elites towards noble visitors. This logic of investment and symbolic profit governed other fields of urban diplomacy too. There were also foreign diplomats in some of the larger imperial cities. But it was often unclear whether this was a princely diplomat for the city or within the city. For instance, the diplomats who went to Cologne (the largest and in its own opinion most important imperial city) in 1673 were there to help negotiate an end to the Franco-Dutch War. Nevertheless, the city council organized a welcome ceremony that created the impression that Cologne was the recipient of all the ambassadors.49 This looked like a delusion of a self-regarding free imperial city. 45  For example Albert J. Loomie, Ceremonies of Charles I: The Notebooks of John Finet, 1628–41 (New York, 1987). 46  See Sowerby, 218 above. 47  On premodern urban scribality as a sort of archive see Rudolf Schlögl, ‘Interaktion und Herrschaftsbildung. Probleme der politischen Kommunikation in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt’, in Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (ed.), Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen (Berlin, 2005), 115–27, at 125. 48  HASK, Bestand 30, C 610, fos. 88v–89r. 49  HASK, Bestand 30, C 610, fo. 105.

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Fig. 14.5. Cologne book of ceremonies (1740–97), HASK, Bestand 30, C 612, fos. 88v–89r.

However, the author of a description of the (alleged) splendid condition of the ‘Freie Reichs=Wahl und Handel=Stadt Franckfurt am Mayn’ (‘Free Imperial and Commercial City Frankfurt at the Main, Place of the Imperial Election’) also took the presence of foreign diplomats in the city as a symbol of its excellence.50 The diplomats were actually concerned with the Princes of the Empire in the Rhine Main Area and had only chosen to reside at Frankfurt for their convenience and comfort. Even so, the presence of residents and other diplomats in the imperial cities were portrayed as evidence of their prestige and noble status, not only by ambitious Cologne, but also by Frankfurt and many other aspiring cities. T H E C E R E M O N I A L R E C O R D S O F P R I N C E LY V I S I T S TO T H E I M P E R I A L C I T I E S Another important and highly prestigious aspect of urban diplomacy was the visits of princes and other members of the high nobility.51 Some books of ceremonies were in fact originally compiled to record such remarkable occurrences and the 50  Johann Bernhard Müller, Beschreibung des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der Freien Reichs- Wahl- und Handels-Stadt Franckfurt am Mayn (Frankfurt am Main, 1747), 116–17. 51  Early modern princes often avoided meeting their peers in public because of predictable conflicts over precedence. See Johannes Paulmann, Pomp und Politik. Monarchenbegegnungen in Europa

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Cologne ‘Protocollum Ceremoniarum’ (‘protocol of ceremonies’) is clearly dominated by entries about diplomatic protocol at home.52 However, most cases that were listed in the books were not actual state visits. The princes were present in the cities for different reasons: some were simply taking up quarters in the town, others were interested in the art treasures and other places of interest within the city walls. However, even if a high-ranking visitor insisted on his incognito, when, for instance, a ruling prince travelled under an assumed name, there was still some occasion for ceremony.53 Especially in those cases where the visitors were interested in sightseeing, the attendance of magistrates was always a ceremonial affair. In 1646, the young Landgrave William VI of Hesse-Kassel (1629–63) visited Bremen. When welcomed by the city’s syndic, he declared he came incognito. Nevertheless, he took it for granted that a guard of honour would stand at the inn where he slept.54 Part of William’s dynastic tradition was an immense interest in the establishment of protestant educational institutions. Thus, he desired to see the local ‘Gymnasium illustre’, which was a university to all intents and purposes.55 This provided an opportunity for a salute from the town watch and a formal reception by the two mayors. Later, the prince watched salmon being fished in the Weser river and walked on the walls of the fortress, officially and ceremoniously accompanied by the learned syndic Dr Johann Wachmann.56 When Cosimo de Medici, heir to the Tuscan throne, visited Bremen on his Grand Tour in 1668, he also asserted an incognito. But this did not mean that his visit went unnoticed and without the typical urban formalities of welcome. In a diary of his tour, his tutor noted down: In this city, the Serene Prince stayed on February 26 and 27. He strolled through the streets, over the fortresses and looked around the rare things [. . .] During his stay, his Highness was respectfully entertained by Mayors, Aldermen and the Governor of the fortress and was presented with two bottles of wine, four fresh salmon, two baskets with different sorts of fish.57

In cases such as these, the urban rituals of foreign relations paid off for both sides: the guest’s curiosity was satisfied, and the local government could publicly act as if zwischen Ancien Régime und Erstem Weltkrieg (Paderborn, 2000), 30–55; princely visits to imperial cities are therefore rare examples of early modern ‘state visits’. 52 Trexler, Libro Cerimoniale, 53–60. 53  An incognito was a shared fiction. It did not mean privacy or even anonymity: the host knew who the visitor really was, but he was expected to treat him according to his different, temporary identity and public character. See Volker Barth, Inkognito: Geschichte eines Zeremoniells (Munich, 2013). 54  Wilhelm  A.  Eckhardt, ‘Landgraf Wilhelm VI. von Hessen zu Besuch in Bremen’, Bremisches Jahrbuch, 66 (1988), 209–18, at 214. 55  Calvinist cities such as Bremen were not allowed to found universities after the peace of Augsburg (1555). 56  Eckhardt, ‘Landgraf Wilhelm VI.’, 215. 57  ‘In questa citta il Ser.mo Principe si trattenne il giorno 26 et 27 del corr.te, nel qual tempo spasseggio la citta, le fortificazioni e considerò le cose più rare di essa [. . .]. In questa dimora, ricevè S.  A.  cortesi rispetti dal Senato e dal Governatore della detta piazza, e fu presentato dai Signori Borgomastri e Senato delle cose seguenti: Due caratelli vino / Quattro salmoni freschi / Due ceste di diversi pesci’, Geisenheimer, ‘Der Bremer Aufenthalt des toskanischen Erbprinzen im Jahre 1668: nach zwei Handschriften des Staatsarchivs von Florenz’, Zeitschrift des Vereins für Hamburgische Geschichte, 17 (1912), 1–53 at 8.

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it was a state visit. Using these rituals, the city’s pretensions to being part of the society of princes and their symbolic communications were maintained. But in this society, symbolic communication associated with the transferring of symbolic capital was never one sided. The noble visitors themselves expected a ceremonial treatment. They paid close attention to the formalities, assiduities, and the traditional urban gifts, consisting of wine and local delicacies. We do not know what Cosimo did with the fish with which he was presented by mayors and aldermen. But he felt highly obligated by their hospitality to give a generous gratuity that was in keeping with his aristocratic status. In both cases, the rituals were not only recorded by councilmen or secretaries, but also by the princes themselves. Obviously, their diaries also worked as accounts of symbolic capital. Remarkably enough, the social logic of symbolic interaction had a sustainable tradition in Bremen and other imperial cities. Whereas in court culture, the interest in ceremony seemingly declined rapidly after the middle of the eighteenth century, the city states of the Holy Roman Empire remained a fertile ground for diplomatic rituals, as their continued attention to their books of ceremonies suggests. The urban magistrates kept up with the times and had ideas how to motivate their noble visitors to continue to interact ceremonially. In 1782, for instance, Prince Frederick of York and Albany, King George III’s second son, came to Germany for as part of his military education in Prussia. Having learned the prince was on his way from Hamburg southwards, the Bremen magistrates tried their best to make him stop in the city for an official welcome ceremony. They first negotiated with the district magistrate of Bremen-Verden in Stade (see Fig. 14.1), Johann Christian von Danckwerth, an expert in religious architecture. However, Danckwerth found this such a good idea that he planned to show the Duke around Bremen himself and hoped thereby to gain Frederick’s esteem. At the same time, Danckwerth asked the city to refrain from all ceremony when the duke arrived, telling the council that they, as a civic commune, did not have the capacity to host a member of the royal family properly anyway. Of course, the city council did not accept this harsh approach. The Bremen magistrate learned what the duke was really interested in—not old churches, but gardens, especially those in the newest fashion of a Jardin à l’anglaise—from a British resident in Hamburg. In the end, all went well for Bremen: after a rather stiff reception of mayors and aldermen in his cantonment, Frederick began to relax when he was invited on a trip to the gardens of the local bourgeoisie in Bremen Newtown, south of the river Weser (Fig. 14.6). The garden of the former Mayor Issak von Meinertshagen lent itself to a relaxed walk. Alderman Wichelhausen’s garden met Frederick’s approval because of a water fountain that allowed hydraulic experiments. In the garden of the advocate Dr Jacob Ludwig Iken he marvelled at the collection of exotic plants and (mostly taxidermied) birds. Frederick enjoyed this horticultural tour so much that he was then much more inclined towards all kinds of ceremony. He officially visited the renaissance town hall (an invitation princely visitors usually declined to avoid the impression of a formal reception) where he had a close look at the interior decoration. He was shown the important charters and constitutions of the city and he again discussed the latest

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Fig. 14.6.  Bremen by Matthaeus Merian, c.1641.

internal revenues with the mayors—obviously a suitable topic of conversation in the later eighteenth century. After this tour he took part in a tasting in the municipal wine cellar where he commended the collection. Subsequently he accepted an invitation to a state banquet at the Bremen Exchange—the mayors wanted to display the city as a centre of trade and finance—at which he proposed a toast to the perpetual welfare of the city. The next morning, during a lavish leave-taking ceremony (the town watch stood in parade, field pieces shot salutes, burghers came to wave goodbye), the duke pledged never to forget this treatment. Johann Christian von Danckwerth watched all this with annoyance.58 The record of Frederick’s visit to Bremen did not differ substantially from other entries of ceremonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was, however, rather lengthy and detailed because its main purpose was to tell a story: about a city state that was perfectly capable of receiving a prince from a royal family and entertaining him to his full satisfaction. If there was a decline of the importance of symbolic communication in the age of enlightenment—a popular assumption which historians are beginning to dispute—those recording ceremonies in Bremen (and in other places) did not hear about this. They continued collecting 58  Relatio die Reception des unter dem Nahmen eines Grafen von Hoya am 29ten Junii 1782 hier eingetroffenen Fürsten Bischofs von Osnabrück betreffend. Prod[uctus] in Plen[o] den 10. Juli 1782, SB, Dd.6.a., fos. 77ff.

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rituals well into the nineteenth century, at least in Bremen and Frankfurt, which maintained the status of free cities in the German Confederation (1815–66). C O N C LU S I O N Most early modern authors contributing to the discourse on the law of nations usually took sovereign princes as their starting point. But in practice the political field of early modern Europe was far more complex. It integrated numerous political actors whose status could not be expressed in the terminology of the law of nations and whose status criss-crossed the dichotomy of sovereigns and private persons. This dichotomy and the clarification of who was a sovereign and who was not was the result of a long-term process of state building. That process had both interior dimensions—in terms of turning a composite and corporative political entity into a state—and exterior dimensions—in terms of transforming a multifaceted and complex web of political actors into the world of states of the (later) nineteenth century. But before that process was complete, early modern forms of political participation and foreign relations were not typically based on legal titles nor even on military or economic power. They were instead based on older traditions that continued to have an effect: on the blurring of concepts, like the translation of superioritas territorialis as sovereignty in the French version of the Westphalian peace treaty; and on the separation of the law of nations (ius gentium) from the law of embassy (ius legationis) and the law of alliance (ius foederationis), which both granted the imperial cities some rights and claims. Early modern foreign relations were typically asymmetrical. This included not only interactions between kings and cities, sultans and tributary states, dukes and prince-abbots, but also between political and non-political actors.59 In the case of imperial cities foreign relations were always a ritual process, a field of practice where ceremonial interaction was not a minor point, but at the centre of diplomatic contacts. Urban emissaries being treated as diplomats (and in practice the status of a diplomat was established by ceremony) or princes accepting a ceremonial reception by mayors and aldermen could be understood in terms of a political and social acceptance of imperial cities by the ruling high nobility. This social factor in early modern diplomacy reminds us of the fact that we are (apart from the westernEuropean special case) not dealing with states but with dynasties and princes who did not form an ‘international system’ but a society of princes. Although this aristocratic network produced problems for republican figurations such as imperial cities in terms of social status, it was at the same time characterized by a tolerance of politico-legal ambiguity which ultimately allowed the diplomacy of non-sovereigns. In many cases, however, this was a question of political prudence, of knowing how to turn an invitation to a courtly festivity into a diplomatic mission, in practice and in written representation. Very often, ceremonial interaction between 59  Symptomatic of the latter was the diplomacy of trading companies in Asia.

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princes and cities was based on a reciprocal exchange of capital: of economic capital paid back as symbolic capital, as gestures of social recognition which were recorded in the urban books (or files) of ceremony. Writing was crucial for the symbolic dimensions of urban diplomacy. Each and every act of ceremony was carefully penned down by the councilmen or syndics engaged in a mission. Ceremony books were chronicles of honour shown to the city within its walls or its representatives abroad. For the mayors, aldermen, and other city officials of the early modern period, ceremonies and books of ceremonies were part of their civic identity. Even if the books (or files) were not open to the urban public, they were the pride of generations of councilmen, who endeavoured to augment the treasure of symbolical capital accumulated by their predecessors. Nearly all cases were read out to the members of the city councils before they were filed. Some cases recorded in the ceremony books or files were transferred to more or less official city chronicles—a practice comparable to the Venetian re-use of diplomatic records to establish the republic’s ‘history’.60 But the imperial cities’ ceremony books were self-sufficient, meant to be filled with reports about ceremony which were regarded as a gain of symbolic capital materialized in writing.

60  Heinrich Schmidt, ‘Zur politischen Vorstellungswelt deutscher Städte im 17. Jahrhundert’, in William Wegener (ed.), Festschrift für Karl Gottfried Hugelmann (Aalen, 1959), 501–21; for the Venetian case see Antonini, 160–172 below.

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Index Abbas I, Shah of Persia  153–4, 214–17 academia dos Generosos 112–13 académie politique 190–2 accademia degli Insensati 110 Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533)  74–5 Adams, Simon  157 Adamson, Patrick  119 Admiralty Court (London)  33 Africa see African Americans; Mamluk Sultanate; Morocco; Senegambia; Tunisia African Americans  67 see also Cimarrons; Maroons Ahmed I, Ottoman sultan  205–7, 206f al-Mu’izz ibn Badis of Tunis  4 Alcalá 99–100 university of  103–4 Alemán, Mateo  52, 99 Guzmán de Alfarache  52, 99 Alexander VII, Pope  105–6, 110–11 Allde, John  92 Allinson, Rayne  208 ambassadorial handbooks see diplomatic manuals ambiguity  11, 13–14, 20–1, 78, 193, 198, 202, 221–2, 224–5, 236 Americas  54, 112 see also African Americans; Brazil; Cimarrons; Caribbean; Native Americans; North America; Panama; Powhatan; Roanoke Amerindians see Native Americans amicitia  30n.27, 63, 67, 70–1 amity lines  13, 54 Ancient Greece  3, 27–32, 39–40, 91–2 Ancient Rome  4–5, 27–30, 32, 34, 39–40, 81 and cultural heritage  4–5, 197 and use of Latin  4–5 Anderson, Benedict  42–3 Anghie, Antony  55 Anglo-Dutch relations see England Anglo-Spanish War see England Anjou see Henry, duke of Anjou; and François, duke of Alençon and of Anjou Anna, duchess of Saxony  211–12 annali (Venetian Chancery codex series)  163–5, 168–72 Anne of Denmark  125–6, 185–7 Antenhofer, Christina  193 Antonini, Fabio  10–11, 14, 17–21 Apollo 35–6 Appiah, Anthony K.  93 see also thick translation Apter, Emily  95 arcana imperii  146–8, 151–4, 157–8

archival management, early modern  17–18, 161–2, 165, 172 indexes and finding aids  162–3 transcription codices, compilation of  164n.18, 172 visitors and accessibility  162–4, 166–7 see also Annali ‘archival turn’  18, 161 archives  7–8, 10–11, 14, 19–21, 59–60, 152, 157, 160–2, 195 Simancas 164–5 see also Venice, Chancery Ariosto, Ludovico  107 Orlando Furioso 107 Aristides, Aelius  36, 39 ‘To Plato: In Defence of Oratory’  36, 39 Aristotle  1, 62–3, 67 Armitage, David  88–9, 98 art  8–9, 25–6, 42–3, 49–50, 53, 150 painting  8–9, 25–6, 49–50 portrait  8–9, 25–6, 49–50, 217 Asensio, Eugenio  103–4 Asia  6–7, 16, 162, 208–9, 212–14, 217–18 see also Assyria; China; Korea; Mughal Empire; Ottoman Empire; Persian Empire; Russia; Southeast Asia; Vietnam; Vijayanagar Empire Assyria 27–8 Aston, Walter  106 asymmetric diplomatic relations  9, 19–20, 221–3, 236 Ataíde, Jerónimo de, count of Atouguia  111 Auger, Peter  10–11, 14–16, 20–1 Augsburg 230 Augustus II, duke of BraunschweigWolfenbüttel  227–9, 228f Auld Alliance, the  115 autobiography  52–3, 99–100 see also self-narrative Azores 54–5 Bacon, Francis  88–9, 151, 157–8 Baião, André  113 Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  43n.7 baldaccini 212 Balibar, Étienne  64, 97–8 and transnational citizenship  97–8 Barbados 67–8 Barbaro, Ermolao  1 Barbaro, Marc’ Antonio  166–7 Baron, Robert  153–4 Barton, Edward  213–14 Beale, Robert  156

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272 Index Belleforest, François de  121–2 Bellenger, Yvonne  127 Belus  27–8, 34, 39 son Ninus  27–8 Bély, Lucien  9, 191–2, 192n.12 Benjamin, Walter  48 Benton, Lauren  57–8 Benzoni, Guido  160 Berlin 223 Bertie, Peregrine, Lord Willoughby  203 biography  7–8, 42, 45, 88, 102–3, 108, 113 see also autobiography; history writing Bizzarri, Pietro  121 Black Sea  180 Blondel de Gagny, Joseph  195–6 Blondel de Vaucresson, François de  195–7 Blount, Edward  96–7 Bodin, Jean  164–5 Bonde, Christer  141 books of ceremonies (urban)  19–20, 221, 224–5, 230–1 composition of  223, 233–4 of Braunschweig  227–9, 228f of Cologne  225, 226f, 230–2, 232f of Schwäbisch Hall  225, 230–1, 230f and urban envoys  223 and princely visitors  232 and princely communications  227–9 and precedent  230–1 see also diplomatic ceremonial; diplomatic documents Bopfingen 223 Bordeaux 115 Borghi, Alvise  164 Bourbon, Antoine, king of Navarre  154–5 Bourdieu, Pierre  229 Bouza, Fernando  213, 218 Bowes, Jerome  213–14 Bradshaw, Richard  136–7 Bragaccia, Gasparo  5, 27, 36–7, 39 L’Ambasciatore  27, 36–7 Braunschweig 227–9 Brazil  48, 109, 112 Bremen  226–7, 232–6, 235f Exchange 234–5 Bremen Newtown  234 Bremen-Verden  226–7, 234 Brito, João Soares de  111 Browne, Francis, 3rd Vicount Montagu  113–14 Brozas, Francisco Sánchez de las  104–5 Bryson, Alan  157 Buchanan, George  115–16 Budé, Guillaume  1 Buonrizzo, Alvise  166–7 Burgk, Johann Ludwig  220 Burkert, Walter  31–2, 38 Busbecq, Ogier de  3 Bussy d’Amboise, Louis de Clermont, sieur de 154

Cabinet-council, The 151–2 Cabral, Alvares  112 Cadiz  48, 54–5, 93–5 Calais 115–16 Caldeira, Bento  102–4 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro  8–9, 13, 42, 48, 53 El Principe Constante  8–9, 42, 48, 53 Callières, François de  152, 190–2 Practice of Diplomacy  190–1, 202 Calvin, John  81–2 Camden, William  72 Camman, Johann Dr  227–9 Camões, Luís de Vaz de  15, 101–5, 107–8, 110–11, 113 see also Lusiads Canary Islands  54–5 Carew, George  156 Caribbean  54–5, 57–60, 65–8 Carl Philipp, Prince of Hohenlohe  230–1 Carleton, Dudley  96–7 Carpaccio, Vittore  42 Casimir, Johann  204–5 Catherine de Bourbon  117–19 Catherine of Braganza  107–8 Catholic League  120 Cecil, Robert  154–6 Cecil, William  118–19, 146n.1, 183 Cepeda, Patricia Marín  103–4 ceremony see diplomatic ceremonial Cervantes, Miguel de  99, 104 Novelas Ejemplares 99 Ceuta 48–50 Chancellor, Richard  178–9, 210 Chapman, George  154–6 Bussy d’Ambois 154–5 The revenge of Bussy d’Ambois 154–6 Charles I, king of England and Scotland  96–7, 131–2, 148–9, 153–4 Charles II, king of England, Ireland, and Scotland 106–8 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor  3, 70, 93–5 Charles X Gustav, king of Sweden  137 China  4, 213 Christian II Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg  229 daughter Mary  229 Oldenburg, Christopher of  73 Christina, queen of Sweden  111n.56, 131–2, 134–5, 137, 139–44 chronicles  5, 44–5, 49, 164, 230–1, 236–7 see also history writing Cicero  1, 4–5, 28–31, 37–8, 99–100 De inventione  28–31, 37–8 Cimarrons  13, 55–7, 60–1, 65–7 civilité, civilisation  29–30, 36–8, 187–8, 201 Cobham, Henry Lord  154–5 Cognac, League of  166 Cohen, Walter  43n.6 Colbert de Croissy, Charles  193–7 Colbert de Torcy, Jean-Baptiste  190–1 Cologne  223–5, 230–2

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Index colonial relations and diplomacy  13–14, 54, 107–8 Colonna, Ascanio  103–4 Columbus, Christopher  112 comedy  2–3, 41–2, 46–7, 51, 53, 127, 159, 175 conventions of  41–2 compared to diplomacy  2–3, 47 see also tragicomedy commensurability  179–80, 186–8 communication theory  10–11, 89–90 Compagnia Marittima di San Giorgio 109–10 Companhia Geral Commercio de Brasil 109 Compleat ambassador, The  146–50, 152–4, 157, 157n.49 Compleat clark, and scriveners guide 149–50 conduct books, conduct manuals  17–18, 150–1 Constanta 180 Constantinople  18–19, 72–3, 166–8, 170–1, 193–7, 199–202 see also Sublime Porte Contarini, Alvise  164 Conti, Natale  167–8, 167n.35 Correia, Manuel  104–5 correspondence see diplomatic documents; epistolary ceremonial; princely letters Cotton, Dodmore  153–4 Cotton, Robert  156–7 Count of Penaguião  113–14 Coutinho, Bernardo Xavier  113 Craigwood, Joanna  10–12, 14, 20–1 Cromwell, Oliver  57, 65–8, 106–8, 113–14, 138, 140–2 Western Design  57, 65–8 Cross, Anthony  177 cultural capital  4, 17–18, 116–17, 147–8, 159 see also symbols, symbolic communication cultural convergence  11, 15–16, 115–18, 120, 124 cultural translation  14–15, 88, 90, 92–3, 101–2, 107–8, 199–200 Cyprus 166–70 War of  18, 161, 165, 172 Damman, Adriaan  116–26 Dancie, Edwarde  180–1 Danckwerth, Johann Christian von  234–5 Darmstadt  220–2, 229 Davenant, William  56–8, 65, 67–8 Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru 66 History of Sir Francis Drake  56–8, 65, 67–8 De Bry, Theodor  65–6 deception  2, 14, 36, 40, 81, 136 see also fiction Delft 134–5 Denmark  134–5, 153–4 Descartes, René  131–2 Dhatta Ray, Deep  12–13 Digby, John  96–7 Digges, Dudley  157 Diogenes 1

273

diplomatic audiences  3, 51, 140, 142, 162–3, 167–72, 184–6, 198–201, 210–12, 220–1 representations of  41–2, 45–8, 51 diplomatic career  4, 53, 93, 106, 109, 183, 191 professionalism  13–14, 17–18, 152, 157, 185–7, 190–3 see also diplomatic rank diplomatic ceremonial, ceremonies  5, 8–12, 16, 18–20, 38, 42, 89, 136–7, 162–3, 168–9, 175, 177–8, 183–9, 198–201, 209, 220–1, 223–36 competition, conflict  15, 27, 31–2, 188–9, 198–9 incognito  232–3, 233n.53 and myth  26–7, 31–2, 38–40 precedent, custom  19–20, 170, 182–3, 186–8, 230–1, 232n.50 and princely letters  20, 201, 209, 213–14 records of  2, 9, 19–20, 186–7, 199–202 titles  9, 136–7, 204–7 see also books of ceremonies; diplomatic audiences; performance; princely letters; symbolic capital; symbolic communication diplomatic documents  7–11, 16, 18, 132–3, 153–4 correspondence  20, 55, 71, 73–4, 112–13, 119, 146–7, 149–50, 152–4, 157, 161, 163, 170–1, 177–8, 182–5, 187–8, 192–3, 198, 202, 204–9, 212–18, 220–2 diaries, journals  17, 136–42, 138n.33, 195, 226–7 in drama  46–7, 50–1 and genre  19, 187 letters of credence  72, 136–7, 204–5, 213–14, 229 relazione (Venetian reports)  18–20, 152–3, 156, 160–1, 176 reports  1, 9–10, 12, 18–19, 119, 140–1, 152–6, 162, 165, 172, 182, 218, 220–2, 225–7 see also annali; archives; diplomatic manuals, diplomatic treatises; material text; princely letters; treaties diplomatic entertainment, hospitality  7–8, 42, 119, 134, 183–4, 186–7, 198–9, 220–1, 225–7, 230–2 excessive drinking  220–1 representations of  45–7 diplomatic ethics see poetics (and diplomatic ethics); prose fiction (and diplomatic ethics); rhetoric (and diplomatic ethics) diplomatic manuals, diplomatic treatises  1–2, 5, 12, 25, 75–6, 151, 190–1 see also Bragaccia, Gasparo; Callières, François de; Gentili, Alberico; Hotman, John; Howell, James; Maggi, Ottaviano; Thynne, Francis; Pasquale, Carlo;  Vera y Figueroa, Juan Antonio de; Wicquefort, Abraham de diplomatic rank  194–5, 198–9, 221–4, 227–9, 236

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274 Index diplomatic theory see diplomatic manuals diplomatic treatises see diplomatic manuals dissemination see circulation of texts distribution see circulation of texts Dmitry, Russian pretender  210 Donne, John  71–2 Douglas, Gavin  115 Drake, Francis  1–2, 54–7, 67–8 representation of  59–60, 66–7 drama  2–4, 7–8, 11, 17–18, 25–6, 42, 53, 67, 88, 159, 175, 177 and history writing  44–5, 48–9, 51–2, 57, 65, 154 and public sphere  17–18, 153 compared to diplomacy  3, 42–4, 46–8, 178 dramatic space  10–11, 13–14, 43–4, 46, 48, 51–2 dramatic form  14, 42–4, 48, 51–2, 67 see also comedy; historical drama; martyr play; masques and entertainments; pastoral; performance; tragedy; tragicomedy Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur  117–27 La Muse Chrestienne 118 La Sepmaine  117–18, 125–6 La Seconde Semaine 117–21 La Uranie 117–19 Le Lepanthe  117, 120, 123–5 Du Bellay, Joachim  115, 118–19 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester  75–6 Dumas, Alexander  154 Dunbar, William  115 Dutch see Low Countries Dutch language  125–6, 132–3, 141–3, 202 Dutch Republic see Low Countries Dutch Revolt  33, 58, 60–2, 93–4, 104–5, 131–2 Dvina river  183 East Indies see Southeast Asia Edinburgh  117–18, 123–6 Edward VI, king of England  210 ego-document see self-narrative Egypt see Mamluk Sultanate Elias, Norbert  198–9 Elizabeth I, queen of England  44–5, 47, 73, 75–6, 93–5, 118–19, 146–7, 182–7, 204–5, 207–8, 211–14, 218, 230–1 correspondence  203–8, 210–18, 215f, 230–1, see also princely letters Elliott, John H.  48 eloquence see rhetoric England, English  17–18, 20, 33, 37–8, 44, 48, 56–8, 71–5, 90, 96–7, 102, 104–5, 108, 113–14, 117–18, 122, 124–5, 131–2, 141, 146, 210–12, 224–5 Anglo-Cimarron relations  54–5, 65 Anglo-Dutch relations  134, 138–9, 142–5 Anglo-Portuguese relations  105

Anglo-Russian relations  175 Anglo-Swedish relations  131, 134, 144–5 Commonwealth government  17, 132, 136–8, 142 Commonwealth Council of State  132–3, 135–7, 141–2 see also Elizabeth I, queen of England; Henry VII, king of England; Henry VIII, king of England; Edward VI, king of England; James VI and I king of England and Scotland; Charles I, king of England and Scotland; Charles II, king of England and Scotland epic  5–6, 12–16, 28–31, 42–3, 46, 59–60, 63, 75, 77, 87, 101, 117–18, 120–8 see also Sidney, Philip, Arcadia epistolary ceremonial  193, 197, 202, 204 Erasmus  69–71, 94–5, 98 De copia 69–70 see also Julius exclusus de caelis Eraso, Antonio de  102–3 Ernest Louis, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt  220 essay  5–6, 87, 90, 98, 138, 140, 151, 159 ethics see diplomatic ethics Europe see Ancient Greece; Ancient Rome; England; France; Holy Roman Empire; Italy; Low Countries; Poland; Portugal; Russia; Scotland; Spain; Sweden; Switzerland expert knowledge  17–18, 158–9 Fairfax, John  107 Fame 101 Fanshawe, Richard  106–9, 113–14 missions to Portugal  107–8 royalism of  106–8 translation of The Lusiads  105, 113–14, 144n.54 translation of Il pastor fido 107–8 Faria e Sousa, Manuel de  104–6 Faria, Tomé de  113 Farnese, Alessandro, duke of Parma  73, 126 Farnsworth, Jane  179–80 Fernandes, Domingos  101, 104–5, 113 Feros, Antonio  96 fiction and diplomatic ethics  82–3, 90, 99–100 and diplomatic mythmaking  27, 39 and textual-diplomatic third spaces  90, 99–100 as means of making sense of diplomacy  13, 16, 43, 47, 76–7, 82–3 in diplomatic accounts, documents and manuals  5, 7–8, 13–14, 26–7, 34, 38 see also genre; self-narrative in diplomatic practice  5–8, 12–13, 38, 46, 82–3, 233n.53 in the law of nations  10–13, 42–3, 54–5, 62, 74, 78–9

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Index prose fiction  3, 7–8, 13–14, 43, 46, 52, 75–80, 90–2, 99–100 see also diplomacy in literature; deception; myths; poetics; novel Figueroa see Vera y Figueroa, Juan Antonio de Fleming, Oliver  136–7, 138n.33 Fletcher, John  44–5 see also Shakespeare, William (History of Henry VIII ) Florence 38 Ford, Philip  115–16 form see genre Forman, Valerie  56 Foucault, Michel  64 foundation myths see myths Fouto, Catarina  10–11, 14–15, 20–1, 144 France, French  12, 14, 16, 19, 33–4, 37–8, 41–2, 44, 52–4, 58–61, 69–71, 73–5, 96, 104–5, 115–22, 124–7, 146, 152, 154–6, 164–5, 170–1, 190–1, 193, 200–1, 204, 207, 210–11, 224–5 see also Francis I king of France; Henry II king of France; Henry III king of France; Henry IV king of France and Navarre; Louis XIV, king of France French language  14, 34, 41, 44, 87, 91–2, 94, 101, 113, 115, 118–19, 123–6, 139–41, 151, 153–4, 221–2, 236 Francis I, king of France  69, 74, 210–11 François, duke of Alençon and of Anjou  146, 154, 207 Frankfurt am Main  220–3, 225, 231–2, 235–6 Franzoni, Giacomo  110–11, 113 Frederick II, king of Denmark  203, 218, 230–1 Frederick, Duke of Yorke and Albany  234–6 Friederike Charlotte, Princess of Hesse-Darmstadt  220 Frost, Gualter  132–3 Furio Ceriol, Fadrique  90–1 Gaguin, Robert  116–17 Gama, Vasco da  63, 101–2, 104–5, 111–12 Gama, Vasco Luís da, marquis of Nisa and count of Vidigueira  111, 113 Genoa  102, 109, 112–13 mercantile interests  109–11 rivalry with Venice  112 Genoese merchants in  109 kings of  104–5, 107–8 genre  3, 5–8, 10–14, 16, 18–21, 41, 46, 50–3, 56, 67, 80, 87, 92, 99–100, 116–17, 176, 178–9, 183, 187–9 Gentili, Alberico  1–2, 4, 27, 33, 39–40, 56, 61, 64, 73, 75–7, 80–2, 87, 151 De iure belli  75–7, 80–2 De legationibus libri tres  1, 27, 33, 39–40, 61, 75–6, 151

275

George I of Great Britain  226–7 George II of Great Britain  226–7, 234 Germanicus Julius Caesar  140 Ghersi, Giovanni Girolamo  109–10 gifts  4, 8–9, 25–6, 119, 135, 184–8, 191–2, 194, 198, 211–12, 229–31, 233–4 letters as  218 orations as  4–5, 38 and poetry  4, 115–16, 119–20, 125–6, 144 Girard, René  31–2 Girardin, Pierre  19, 193, 198, 200–1 household of  195–6 Giustiniani, Gio Giorgio  110–12 godparenthoods 227–9 Godunov, Boris, tsar of Muscovy  210 Gothenburg 135–6 Gouge, William  72 Granvelle, Antoine Perrenot de  93 Greenblatt, Stephen  192–3 Greville, Fulke  76–7 Mustapha 76–7 Grotius, Hugo  33, 71–2 Guarini, Giovanni Battista  107–8 Il pastor fido 107 Guevara, Antonio de  91–2 Relox de Príncipes 91–2 Aviso de Privados 91–2 Guicciardini, Francesco  1 Guise, Francis duke of  115–16 Guise, Henry duke of  154–5 Gustav I, king of Sweden  73 Gustavus II Adolphus, king of Sweden  104–5, 144 Guzmán, Gaspar de count-duke of Olivares  48, 88 Habsburg Empire see Spain Hakluyt, Richard  59–60, 182 Hamburg  136–7, 234 Hampton, Timothy  5–14, 18–21, 26, 33, 38–9, 63 Hanover 226–7 Harrington, John  107 Harrison, John  156 Hartlib, Samuel  133 Harvey, Gabriel  126–7 Haultin, Jerome  124–5 Hay, James  96–7 Hayward, John  71–2 Heinsius, Nicholas  135 Helgerson, Richard  43n.6, 116–17 Hennings, Jan  10–11, 16, 18–21, 38, 209 Henry, duke of Anjou  146 Henrietta Maria  148–9 Henry II, king of France  70, 115–16, 210–11 Henry III, king of France  119 Henry IV, king of France and Navarre  116–19, 121, 124–5, 127, 154–5, 205–7 Henry VII, king of England  116–17

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276 Index Henry VIII, king of England  70, 73–4, 208, 210–11 correspondence  208, 210–11 in drama  44 Henryson, Robert  115 Herberstein, Sigismund von  176, 180–2 Rerum moscoviticarum commentarii 176, 180–2 Herman, Peter  120 Hermes see Mercury Herodotus  27–8, 76 Herrenhausen 226–7 Hesse-Hanau 33 historical drama  8–9, 42, 44–8, 52–3, 56–8, 65, 67–8, 153–6 history writing  7–8, 17–19, 49 and biography  45 and drama  44–5, 48–9, 51–2, 57, 65, 154 and epic  29, 101–2, 107–8 and poetry  82–3, 118, 121 state-sponsored  18, 164–72, 236–7 Hitchcock, Robert  93–4 Hobbes, Thomas  75 Hoby, Edward  93–5, 98–9 Holberton, Edward  144 Holland, Hollanders see Low Countries Hollyband, Claudius  92 Holy League (anti-Ottoman alliance)  166, 170–1, 193–4 Holy League (anti-French alliance)  70 Holy Roman Empire  3, 19–20, 33, 42–3, 45–7, 73–5, 220, 221f imperial estates  221–2 Homeric Hymn to Hermes 36 honnêteté 201 honnête homme 201 honour  2, 4–5, 11–12, 19–20, 27, 38, 52, 77–80, 91–2, 101, 107, 115–16, 121–2, 127–8, 143–4, 147–8, 151, 158–9, 183–9, 191, 193, 197–9, 204, 208, 211–12, 214–17, 220–1, 223–4, 230–3, 236–7 Hooker, Richard  71–3 Horace 107 Hotman, François  61 Hotman, Jean  2, 73, 151 The ambassador  2, 151 Howell, James  27, 39–40 ‘Treatise of Ambassadors’  27, 39–40 humanism  1–2, 4–7, 12–14, 26, 28–9, 33, 37–8, 69, 82, 90, 93, 95n.31, 98–100, 104–5, 115, 117, 135–6, 141, 144, 158–60, 170, 176 vita comtemplativa 150 Iken, Jacob Ludwig Dr  234 India  12–13, 63, 101–2, 112, 213 see also Mughal Empire; Vijayanagar Empire

Innocent X  105–6 intelligence  58, 91, 96–7, 127, 142–3, 147–8, 154, 157–8, 197–8 international law see law of nations interpreters see translation Iran see Persian Empire Istanbul see Constantinople Italy, Italian  4–5, 19–20, 33–4, 37–8, 41, 45–7, 54, 88, 104–5, 111, 113, 127, 152–4 see also Florence, Genoa, Rome, Venice Italian language  101, 110–13 Julius exclusus de caelis 70 ius commune 82 ius gentium see law of nations Ivan IV (the Terrible), tsar of Muscovy  178–9, 184–7, 210, 217–18 Jack, Thomas  125–6 Jahangir, Mughal emperor  2–3, 205–9, 211–12 Jamaica  57, 67–8 see also Maroons James V, king of Scotland  73–4 James VI and I, king of Scotland and England  44–5, 115, 117–22, 124–5, 148, 156, 185–6, 211–12 correspondence  119, 205–18, 206f, 215f Essayes of a Prentise 117–19 His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises  121, 124–6 Lepanto  117, 120–3, 125–7 portrait of  217 Jeanne d’Albret  118 Jelen, prince of Senegambia  5 John II, king of Portugal  5 John (Don) of Austria  120–2 John I, king of Portugal  108 John IV, king of Portugal  110–11 Johnston, John  125–6 Jonson, Ben  159 Volpone 159 Jordanes 27–8 Josephus  27–8, 39 Julius II, Pope  70 Jupiter, Zeus  30, 34–7, 39 Justinus 27–8 Kara Mustafa Pasha  193–6 Kaufmann, Miranda  67n.53 Kholmogory 183 Kings Cabinet opened, The 148–9 kinship  195, 202 Kiséry, Andras  10–11, 17–18, 20–1 Klugkist, Hieronymus  226–7 Köping 138–40 Köprülü Fazıl Ahmed Pasha  200–1 Korea 4 Krischer, André  10–11, 16, 18–21 Kubad, Çavuş  167–72

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Index L’Estoile, Pierre  154 La Rochelle  117–19, 123–5 Laguna, Andrés  94–5, 98 Laínez, Pedro  104 Lambert, John  142 Las Casas, Bartolomé de  65–6 Latin  4–5, 28–9, 33, 38, 47–8, 93, 95, 101, 106, 108, 110–11, 113–18, 125–6, 131, 133, 135–6, 139–41, 144–5, 204 law of nations  7–8, 10–13, 33, 42–3, 54, 60, 66–9, 71, 75–80, 177, 236 Lazarillo de Tormes 99–100 Lazzarini, Isabella  12, 19–20 Le Testu, Guillaume  58–9 Lebow, Richard  88, 98 Lees-Jeffries, Hester  34–5 Leiden  131–2, 134–5 university of  131–2, 135 Lencastre, Raimundo de, duke of Aveiro  111 Lepanto, Battle of  120, 166, 168 see also Du Bartas, Lepanthe; James VI and I, Lepanto Lersner, Friedrich Maximilian von  220–1 Leybourn, William  149–50 Compleat Surveyor 149–50 lies see deception Lindau 223 Line, Liborius von Dr  226–7 lines of amity see amity lines Lipsius, Justus  87, 90–1, 93–4, 99–100 Six Books of Politics  90, 93–4 Lisbon  5, 96, 102–3, 108–11 literary education see humanism literary skills see performance; poetics; poetry; rhetoric literary style see poetics (poetic style) literary theory see poetics; rhetoric Lithuania 176 London  2–3, 33, 97, 126, 134–6, 138–42, 153–4, 178, 185–7 Treaty of (1518)  211 Treaty of (1604)  54 Louis, Crown Prince of Hesse-Darmstadt  220 Louis XIV, king of France  112–13, 190–1, 195, 201 Louvois, François Michel Le Tellier, marquis de 197 Low Countries, Dutch  33, 48, 58, 60–2, 118, 125–6, 132–6, 138–40, 225n.22 Lübeck  73, 230 Lucan Pharsalia 107–8 Lucretius De rerum natura 28–31 Luisa, queen regent of Portugal  111 Lusiads  15–16, 101, 144 English translation of  105 French translation of  101, 113 Italian translations of  101, 110–13

277

Latin translations of  101, 108, 113–14 Portuguese versions of  104–6 and Portuguese identity  16, 101–2, 104–6, 114 Spanish translations of  101–2, 106 Luther, Martin  59, 81–2 Mabbe, James  90, 96–100 Macchiavelli, Niccolò  1, 75, 80–2, 157–8 Macedo, Francisco de Santo Agostinho de  111, 113–14 Madrid  96–7, 102–3, 106 Maggi, Ottaviano  1–2 De legato libri duo 1–2 Mahabharata 12–13 Malinowski, Bronislaw  31, 39–40 Mamluk Sultanate  4, 6–7 Mandinga, Pedro  58 Manolesso, Emilio Maria  167 Manuel, king of Portugal  104–5 Margetts, Thomas  133–4 Marguerite de Valois  118, 154 Maroons  57, 67 Martínez, Miguel  103–5 martyr play  48, 52 conventions of  48, 50–2 Marvell, Andrew  135–6 Mary, Queen of Scots  115, 211 masques and entertainments  7–8, 16–17, 25–6, 41–2, 45–7, 53, 56–8, 65, 67–8, 155–6, 175 material text  7–11, 16, 19–21, 25–6, 50–1, 89, 160–1, 203, 225, 227–31, 236–7 see also books of ceremonies; paratexts; princely letters Mattingly, Garrett  8–9, 55 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor  75–6 Maxson, Brian  38 Medici, Catherine de  118 Medici, Cosimo de  233–4 Medici, Lorenzo de  4 Medici, Marie de  54 Mehmed IV, Ottoman sultan  200–1 Meinertshagen, Isaak von  234 Melville, James  119–20 Mendoza, Bernardino de  1, 73, 93–6, 98–9 Theorica y practica de la guerra 93–6 Meneses, António de, count of Cantanhede 111 Mercurius Politicus (1650–60)  134–5, 140–5 Mercury, Hermes  14, 30–1, 34–7, 39, 87, 89 Middle East  4, 6–7, 16 see also Mamluk Sultanate; Ottoman Empire; Persian Empire Middle East see Assyria Middleton, Henry  212 Mikhail Fyodorovich, tsar of Muscovy  186, 211, 217 Millstone, Noah  157–8

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278 Index Milton, John  131–4, 138, 140–5 linguistic skills  132–3, 142, 151–2 Pro populo Anglicano defensio (1650)  17, 132–5, 138–45 Defensio secunda (1654)  17, 142–5 reputation  135–6, 142 Naunton, Robert  125–6 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)  41–2, 47, 53 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme  41–2, 47, 53 Monsoreau, madame de  154–5 morality, moral philosophy see diplomatic ethics Morel, abbé  196 Morgan, Edmund S.  58–9 Morocco 48 see also Ceuta Morosini, Andrea  165, 172 Moscow  179–80, 182–4, 213–14 Moseley, Humphrey  96–7, 107 Mughal Empire  2–3 Müller, Mario  193 Munday, Anthony  92 Mundt, Christopher  3 Munich 223 Murray, Thomas  126 Muscovy Company  175, 178–9 Muscovy see Russia muteness  47, 49–51 Mylius, Hermann  136–7 myths 25 biblical m.  26–8, 31, 37, 39 classical myths  25, 179–80 origin myths  12, 25 myth theory  10–12 myth-ritual theory  12, 25–6, 31–2, 38 see also Apollo; Belus; Jupiter, Zeus; Mercury, Hermes narrative(s) archivally imposed  11, 14, 17–18, 154, 161, 164–5, 170–2 mythical  25–6, 29–32, 36, 40 historiography and  17–18, 161, 164–5, 172 nationalistic  88, 101–2 shaping diplomacy  3, 7–8, 11–14, 17–19, 26, 32, 38, 40, 44–5, 48, 50–3, 56, 79–80, 99–100, 154–5, 187–8, 192–3, 198–200 see also archives; fiction (prose fiction); history writing; novel; self-narrative; travel writing Native Americans  62–7 Naudé, Gabriel  152, 157–8 Nedham, Marchamont  134–5, 142 networks, networking  7–10, 13–14, 16–17, 88, 93–5, 97–9, 110–11, 154–5, 161, 191–3, 195, 197, 202 Netzloff, Mark  10–11, 13–14, 20–1, 42–3 new diplomatic history  8–11, 19 see also Watkins, John

New World see Americas news  7–8, 16–18, 97, 99–100, 134–5, 141, 147–8, 153–5, 157–9, 197 see also Mercurius Politicus ‘noble lie’ see deception Nointel, Charles de  200–1 Nombre de Dios  57–9 non-state actors  55–7, 60, 64, 67–8 Norgate, Edward  217 Norris, Henry  146n.1 North Africa  48–9, 66 North America  5 North, Thomas  91–2 novel  3, 13, 42–3, 50–2, 99–100, 154 Ochs von Ochsenstein, Johann Christoph  220 Oldenburg  132–3, 136–8 Olivari, Michele  96 Oliveira, Henrique Valente de  110–11 oprichnina 185–6 oratory see rhetoric Order of the Garter  108, 204–5 Örebro 137–8 origin myths see myths Otto, Everhard Dr  226–7 Iurisprudentia symbolica 226–7 Ottoman Empire / Ottomans  3, 6–7, 14–17, 41, 72–3, 76, 94–5, 112, 120, 127, 166–72, 177, 180–1, 188–9, 193–6, 199–201, 208–9, 212–14 capitulations (ahdname) 200–1 correspondence  166–8, 170–1, 204–9, 212–18 depicted as barbaric  177, 180–1, 201 in drama  41, 159 Franco-Ottoman relations  193–4, 196, 199–200 Ottoman-Venetian relations  112, 166–72 see also Ahmed I; Constantinople; Cyprus, War of; Lepanto, Battle of; Selim II; Sublime Porte; Suleiman I Ovid  27–8, 35–6, 180, 182 Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto 180 Oxenstierna, Erik  141–2 Oxford, university of  33, 75–6, 96 Pagden, Anthony  62–3 Paggi, Carlo Antonio  110–13 brother of  110 La Lusiada Italiana 110–12 painting see art Palmer, Daryl  177 Panama  13, 55–60, 67–8 see also Cimarrons paratexts  89–90, 92–3, 102, 104–5, 111, 127, 148–9, 178–9, 187–8 dedications  75–6, 91–2, 94–7, 103–4, 110–11, 113–14, 118–21, 125–6, 151–2

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Index prefatory material  91–2, 104, 107–8, 118–26, 133, 150, 152–4, 157 marginalia  28–30, 28n.14, 34–5, 92–3, 124–5, 134, 153–4 Paris  113, 115, 146, 152, 154–6 Paruta, Paolo  165, 172 Pasquale, Carlo  37–8 Legatus 37–8 pastoral  29, 46, 51–2, 107–8 p. drama  46, 51–2, 107–8 p. romance  46 see also Sidney, Philip (Arcadia) pathos  13–14, 47–8, 56, 71, 75–7, 82–3 patronage  147–8, 191–2, 194–5 Paul V, Pope  166 Paul’s Churchyard (London)  156–7 peace  3, 29–32, 34–6, 40, 54, 65–7, 69, 79, 83, 87, 94–5, 98, 121–2, 163, 169, 211 see also treaties peace treaties see treaties Peacham, Henry  150 Compleat Gentleman 150 Pels, Peter  133 Percyvall, Richard  94–5 Bibliotheca Hispanica 94–5 Pérez Fernández, Jose María  10–11, 15–17, 20–1, 34, 101–2, 116–17 performance  2–5, 7–14, 16–17, 19–20, 25–7, 31–2, 38, 40, 43–7, 53, 88, 101–2, 117, 184–5, 187–9, 198–200, 211 see also diplomatic ceremonial; drama Persian Empire  2–3, 153–4, 208, 217 Persian language  6–7 Peru  57–8, 66 Perugia, university of  110 Peter I, tsar of Muscovy  177 Petronius Arbiter, Gaius  140 Petronius 138 Satyricon 107–8 Philaret, patriarch of Russia  217 Philip II, king of Spain  73, 93–4, 96, 102–5, 126, 131–3 Philip III, king of Spain  96–7, 104–5 Philip IV, king of Spain  104 Philippa of Lancaster  108 picaresque  52, 90, 99–100 Pina, Rui de  5 piracy  54–7, 60–1, 64, 166–7 Pius V, Pope  170–1 Plato  28–31, 36–7, 39–40, 91–2 Protagoras  28–31, 39–40 Republic 39–40 Platter, Thomas  153–4 Plutarch 45 poetics, literary theory  13–14, 20–1, 25, 53, 97–100, 117–18, 192–3 and diplomatic ethics  30–1, 39–40, 81–2 and the law of nations  56, 67, 81–3 diplomatic poetics  5–8, 10–11, 20–1

279

of convergence  16, 117–24 of difference  95, 116–17, 181, 187–8 origins of poetry, literature  12, 25 poetic form  7–8, 115–17, 122, 178–80 poetic imitation  109, 116–17, 120, 178–80, 182 poetic style  13–14, 20–1, 31, 104–5, 115–17, 123–5, 127–8, 140, 190, 192–3 versification  7–8, 14, 16, 115–17, 122 see also ambiguity; Aristotle; fiction; rhetoric; James VI and I (Reulis and Cautelis); Mercury, Hermes; Sidney, Philip (Apologie for Poetrie) poetry as gift  4, 115–16, 125–6, 144 as source  27–9, 34–5 commendatory  111, 125–6, 144 cultural capital and  4, 12, 115–17, 127–8 cultural diplomacy and  4, 7–8, 16, 71, 115, 119–20, 124–6, 177 diplomatic education and  4–5, 30–1, 38 diplomatic influences on  7–8, 83, 101, 115, 117–18, 175 epistolary 178 lyric  29, 35–6, 104, 111, 178 negotiation and  4, 7–8, 115–19 occasional  4, 7–8, 108, 115–16, 118, 120, 135–6 polemical  4, 116–17 written by diplomats  4, 80–1, 83, 88, 119 see also Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur; epic; James VI and I; Lusiads; poetics; translation; Turberville, George Poland 37–8 polemic  7–8, 12, 16–17, 131, 133, 140–3 see also Salmasius, Claudius; Milton, John Portobelo 67–8 portraits see art Portugal, Portuguese  3–5, 14–15, 101 Anglo-Portuguese alliance  105–6 Dual Monarchy  101–2, 104–5 in literature  48, 101, 107–8, 112 Portuguese in Africa  48 Portuguese language  102–6, 110–11 Portuguese Restoration War  105–6 Powhatan, chief of Tsenacommacah  5 Practick part of the law 149–50 Preau, Camile de sieur de Courcelles  119 predestination  75–6, 81–3 presents see gifts prestige see honour princely letters  20, 166–8, 170–1, 186–7, 227–31 autograph  208, 210, 214–17 bags and boxes containing them  168, 203, 205–7, 212–13 ceremonial attached to  201, 209, 213–14 colours used on  214–17 decoration of  204–5, 212–13

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280 Index princely letters (cont.) folding of  204, 207 gilding of  204–7, 213–18 holograph  208, 210 kissing of  211–12 seals used on  204–7 significance of textual layout  204–5 see also correspondence; diplomatic documents Prometheus  36, 39 Prose fiction see fiction; novel Protestantism, international  16, 115–16, 126–7 Proust, Marcel  13, 52–3 A la Recherche du Temps Perdu 52–3 publics, public sphere  7–8, 10–11, 17–18, 20–1, 42, 44, 71, 96, 121–2, 141, 146–8, 153, 158–61, 177, 199–200, 236–7 Queen’s Closet Opened, The 148–9 Queller, Donald  8–9 race  55–6, 64, 67–8 Racine, Jean  53 Phèdre 53 Randolph, Thomas  177–9, 182, 187–8 Rataller, George  125–6 Raymond, Joad  10–11, 17, 20–1 Read, Conyers  157n.52 Regensburg  221–2, 224 Imperial Diet of  221–2, 224 Regii sanguinis clamor (1652)  142–3 Reid-Baxter, Jamie  120 relazioni see diplomatic reports representation crossovers between literary and diplomatic  3, 5–6, 12–13, 46–7, 127–8, 144–5, 187–9, 193, 223–5, 236–7 representative character of diplomat  2, 44, 178–9, 184, 193, 198–9, 202, 224–5, 227–9 self-representation  18, 44, 51, 89, 202, 225, 236–7 see also resident diplomacy; symbols; self-narrative resident diplomacy  5–7, 72–3, 75–6 Restoration War see Portuguese Restoration War Ronsard, Pierre de  115, 118–19 rhetoric, rhetorical ambiguous 13–14 and diplomatic ethics  30–1 communication theory and  90–1, 99–100 ceremonial  5, 32, 38 copia 69 handbooks  28–31, 37–8, 69–70 humanist culture and  4–5, 33, 38, 71, 90, 93, 104–5, 135–6, 144 letters and  10–12, 191, 202, 204, 207, 211–12, 219 negotiation and  74 orations  5, 38

origins  12, 25 skills, eloquence  1, 4–5, 12–14, 29–30, 32, 34–9, 78, 87, 90–1, 135–6, 143, 170, 213–14 strategies  7–8, 10–13, 16, 63, 65, 69, 99–100, 127–8, 131, 202, 207, 211–12 techniques  69, 74, 117, 120, 122–3, 134–5, 143, 191, 204, 211–12, 219 translation and  90–1, 117, 127–8 see also Mercury, Hermes; pathos ritual see diplomatic ceremonial; myths (myth-ritual theory) Roanoke 59–60 Roe, Thomas  2–3, 208–9, 211–12 Rogers, Daniel  73 Rojas, Fernando de  99 La Celestina 99 romance  13, 52, 75, 77, 92, 115 see also epic; Sidney, Philip (Arcadia) Rome  45–7, 113, 170–1, 180–1 see also Ancient Rome Roosen, William J.  194 Rotterdam 132 Rough Wooing  73 Rowland, David  99–100 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor  73, 75–6 Russia, Russians  12, 33, 38, 175, 207, 212–18 stereotypes of  175–8, 182, 187, 189 Rycroft, Thomas  113–14 Safiye, Ottoman sultana  204–5 Salamanca, university of  103–5 Salle, Sieur de la  196 Salmasius, Claudius  131–2, 134–5, 137, 142–4 Defensio regia pro Carolo I (1649)  131–4, 137 gifts to  135 Salmasius, Josias  137–8, 141 Sandoval, Francisco Gómez de, duke of Lerma 96–7 Sannazaro, Jacopo  46 Arcadia 46 Sansovino, Francesco  93–4 Concetti politici 93–4 Santa Domingo  67–8 Santa María, Juan de  96–8 República y policía cristiana 96 Santiago del Principe  59–60, 67–8 Saumaise, Claude, see Claudius Salmasius Saxony  33, 211–12 Schaep, Gerard  134 Schmidt, Benjamin  60–1 Schmitt, Carl  56, 60–1, 64 Schwäbisch Hall  225, 230–1 Scotland, Scots  14, 16, 73–5, 115, 119–20, 124 Scott, David  67 secrecy, secrets  17–18, 40, 91, 97, 147–8, 157–8, 160–1, 164, 166–7, 170–1, 184–5, 203, 229 trade secrets  148 see also arcana imperii secretaries  9, 162–7, 172, 195, 208–9

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Index civic  230–1, 233–4 diplomatic  9, 96, 106, 166–7, 177 for foreign languages (English)  17, 132, 142–3, 144n.54, 151–2 Spanish king’s  102–3 of the Venetian Chancery  162, 164 secretaries of state English  19–20, 132–3, 142–3, 152, 156, 183 French  119, 190–1, 193–5, 196n.34, 197 Segar, William  213–14 Seget, Thomas  125–6 Seignelay, Jean-Baptiste Antoine Colbert, Marquis de  196–7 self-fashioning  18–19, 89, 188, 192–3, 197–8, 202, 204, 208n.29 urban  220–1, 224–5, 234–6 self-narrative  192–3, 202 Selim II, Ottoman sultan  166–70 semiotics see symbols Senegambia 5 sermons  7–8, 119 Seymour, Edward, Protector Somerset  73 Seville 34 Seznec, Jean  39–40 Shakespeare, William  13, 42, 44, 49–51, 53, 78–9, 127, 153–4, 175–8, 187–8 Hamlet 153–4 History of Henry VIII  42, 44, 49–53 King Lear 78–9 Love’s Labour’s Lost 175 Merchant of Venice 127 Othello 127 Sheeran, Paul  12–13 Shields, David S.  58–9 Shogun of Japan  214–17, 215f Sidney, Philip  13, 46, 75–80, 175–6, 187–8 Apologie for Poetrie (Defense of Poesie) 81–3 Arcadia  13, 46, 75–80 Astrophil and Stella 175 sightseeing 234–6 signs see symbols slaves, slavery  55–6, 58–67, 176, 196 Smith, Anthony D.  42–3 Smith, Captain John  5 Smith, Thomas  210 society of princes  9, 16, 19–20, 191–2, 198, 204–7, 224–5, 230–1, 233–4, 236 see also Bély, Lucien Socotra, king of  210–12 Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, Grand Vizier  166–70, 170n.47 Southeast Asia  54–5, 110, 217 sovereignty  13–14, 55–6, 61–2, 64, 71–2, 75–7, 97–8, 109–11, 178, 184, 187–9, 191–2, 198–200, 205–7, 210, 212, 214–17, 221–5, 227–9, 236 Sovin, Andrei G.  184–7 Sowerby, Tracey  8–11, 16, 19–21, 186–7, 201 space  2–5, 10–11, 13–14, 25–6

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in diplomatic audiences  168–9, 184–6, 201, 210, 219 dramatic  10–11, 13–14, 43–4, 46, 48, 51–2 and hierarchies  2–3, 9–10, 56 and genre  42, 46, 50–3 national  42–3, 52 on page  204–5 private 44–53 public 44 third space  11, 16, 90, 92, 95, 97–8 translocality  11, 16–17, 20–1 Spain  15, 33–4, 41, 44, 48, 50–1, 54–62, 71, 73, 75–6, 88, 90, 94–7, 101–2, 105–13, 120, 125–6, 131–3, 164, 170–1 black legend  65–6 Spanish language  34, 41, 90, 93–6, 99, 101–2, 106, 153–4 Spanish Blanks Plot  125 speeches see diplomatic audiences; rhetoric Spenser, Edmund  77–8 The Faerie Queene 77–8 Speyer 230 St Bartholomew’s Day massacre  116–17, 156 Stade 234 stateless persons  55–7, 61, 64 Sternberg, Giora  193, 204 Stilma, Astrid  120, 125–6 Stockholm  131–2, 136–7, 141 Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara  19–20 Strangways, John  96–7 Strickland, Walter  132 Stubbs, John  146–7 Discoverie of a gaping gulf 146–7 Suarez, Francisco  71–2 Sublime Porte  193–4, 198 see also Constantinople Suleiman I, Ottoman Sultan  3, 76–7 Surian, Michael  170–1 Sweden, Swedish  12, 17, 73, 131, 134, 142–3 Switzerland  37–8, 125–6 symbolic capital  11, 16, 19, 88–90, 98, 223, 229–30, 233–4, 236–7 see also ceremonial; diplomatic audiences symbols, symbolic communication  1, 5–6, 9–11, 16, 18–20, 38, 44–7, 51, 209, 219, 226–7, 229–31, 233–6 see also diplomatic ceremonial; symbolic capital Tacitus, Publius Cornelius  93 Tapia, Luis Gómez de  102–5 Tarquinius Superbus, Lucius  180–1 Tasso, Torquato  37, 39, 87, 107 Gerusalemme liberata  87, 107 Il messaggiero 37 Terence 3 Andria 3 Ternate 212 Tesoro Politico 158–9 textual circulation see circulation of texts

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282 Index theatre, theatricality see drama; performance Thirty Years War  62, 88, 96 Thurloe, John  132–3, 142–3 Thynne, Francis  151–2 Tomar, Statutes of (1581)  104–5 Trachtman, Joel  82 trade  28, 56–8, 63–5, 88–91, 99, 109–10, 112, 139, 178–9, 184–5, 200–2, 211–12, 226–7, 234–5 see also slavery tragedy  3, 5–6, 8–9, 13–14, 42–3, 47–8, 51–3, 56, 64–5, 76–80, 127, 153–6, 177 compared to diplomacy  3, 14, 47–8, 50–1, 56, 65 compared to law of nations  14, 42–3, 56, 64–5, 67, 80 conventions of  5–6, 14, 42–3, 48, 50–2, 67 see also tragicomedy; Turberville, George (Tragicall Tales) tragicomedy  56, 107 translation  7–8, 10–11, 14, 20–1, 87, 101, 115, 132–3, 144 and communities  16, 89, 91–2, 95, 97–9, 116–18, 120, 122, 124 and competition  11, 15, 89, 93, 102, 127 and cultural convergence  11, 15–16, 115–18, 120, 124 and diplomatic allegiances  105, 110–11, 118–19, 125 and patriotism  15, 91–2, 101–2, 104–5 as performance  101–2, 117 thick  16, 93, 117 and third space  11, 16, 90, 92, 95, 97–8 tradaptation 14–15 and translators, interpreters  14–17, 88–90, 92–4, 105–6, 169–70 untranslatabiliy 95 see also cultural translation, Lusiads translocality see space transnational literature  11, 14–15, 99–100, 115–17, 127–8, 140–1 travel writing  7–8, 18–19, 176–8, 183 ethnographic descriptions  176, 178, 187–8 treaties  13, 54, 59–60, 67–8, 70–1, 73–5, 82–3, 152, 171, 204–5, 221–2, 226–7 Anglo-Portuguese trade treaty (1642) 105–6 in literature  29, 49, 75, 77, 81–3 Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559)  54, 70–1 Treaty of Lodi (1454)  72–3 Treaty of London (1518)  211 Treaty of London (1604)  54 Treaty of Nemours (1585)  120 Treaty of Rouen (1517)  74–5 Treaty of Uppsala (1654)  139 Treaty of Westminster (1654)  106 Treaty of Windsor (1386)  108 Treaty of Westphalia (1648)  55, 62, 190–1, 221–2, 236 see also diplomatic documents

Tropic of Cancer  54–5 truth see diplomatic ethics Tudor, Henry, prince of England see Henry VIII Tunisia 4 Turberville, George  177–8, 182, 187–8 Tragicall Tales  177–8, 189 turcomania 198 Turkey see Ottoman Empire Turkish menace  201 Uppsala  131, 136, 140, 142 urban diplomacy  19–20, 138, 220 Urban VIII  105–6 Utrecht 132 Valier, Agostino  164, 172 Van der Myl, Abraham  125–6 Vatican see Rome Vattel, Ermer de  61–2 The Law of Nations 61–2 Vega, Hernando de  103–4 Vega, Lope de  59–60, 88 La dragontea 59–60 Venice, Venetians  14, 16–18, 69–70, 72–3, 112, 121–2, 127, 141, 159–60, 236–7 Chancery  18, 162, 168, 172 College 168–72 Ducal Palace  162–3, 167–8 Venta de Cruces  58–9, 67n.53 Venuti, Lawrence  92, 95 Vera y Figueroa, Juan Antonio de  27, 34–7, 39, 44, 87–8, 90–1 El Enbaxador  27, 34–6, 44, 87–8 Vera y Zuñiga see Vera y Figueroa, Juan Antonio de Vergil  77, 107 Aeneid 77 Versailles  193–4, 196–7 Vervins, Peace of (1598)  54 Viazemskii, Afanasii I, prince  184–5 Vietnam 4 Vijayanagar Empire  3 Villegas, Antonio de, El Abencerraje 50–1 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham  96–7 Virginia see Powhatan Vitoria, Francisco de  13, 56–7, 62, 65–7 De Indis  13, 56–7, 62, 65–7 Vives, Juan Luis  94–5, 98 Vogel, Christine  10–11, 14, 18–21, 187–9, 204 Vologda 183 von Ranke, Leopold  160 von Thiessen, Hillard type ancien-diplomacy 191–2 Vossius, Isaac  135 Wachmann, Johann Dr  232–3 Waldburg, Otto Truchess von, Cardinal of Augsburg 3 Waldegrave, Robert  124–5

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Index Walsingham, Francis  146–7, 149–50, 152, 154–7 see also The compleat ambassador Walton, Isaac  149–50 Compleat angler 149–50 Wan-li, Emperor of China  214–17, 215f war of the League of Cambrai  70 Warren, Christopher  7–8, 12–13, 56 Watkins, John  7–11, 13–14, 18–21, 42–3, 56 Welch, Ellen  7–8 West Indies see Caribbean Western Design  57, 65–8 Westphalian state system  54–6, 61–2, 64, 68, 74–5, 152, 177, 221–2, 224–5 Whitelocke, Bulstrode  17, 135–42 Wichelhausen, Engelbert  234

283

Wicquefort, Abraham de  2, 177 The Embassador and his functions  2, 198–9, 229n.36 William VI, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel  232–3 William, prince of Orange  73, 133–4 Wilson, Thomas  37–8 Arte of Rhetorique 37–8 wit  3, 27, 31–2 Wolfenbüttel 227–9 Worcester, battle of  106 Wotton, Sir Henry  136 Wyatt, Thomas  1 Zeus see Jupiter Ziuzin, Aleksei  185–6 Zuñiga see Vera y Figueroa, Juan Antonio de