The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

In memory of my father, William Noel Wright

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

THE ANCIENT WORLD

CHAPTER I ‘Glorious Hermes, Herald of the Deathless Gods’

CHAPTER II Greeks and Indika

CHAPTER III A Sanskrit Machiavelli

CHAPTER IV The Son of Heaven

THE MIDDLE CENTURIES

CHAPTER V Charlemagne’s Elephant

CHAPTER VI Byzantium

MEDIEVAL

CHAPTER VII The Crown of Thorns

CHAPTER VIII A Rooftop in Naples: Europe and the Mongols

CHAPTER IX The New Diplomacy

RENAISSANCE

CHAPTER X Reformation

CHAPTER XI Schisms

CHAPTER XII ‘An Iliad of Miseries’: Europe and the Ottomans

TOWARDS THE ENLIGHTENMENT

CHAPTER XIII Wotton versus Sherley

CHAPTER XIV The Physics of Diplomacy

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Irksome as they were, the misadventure of Iosip Grigor’yevich Nepea did not really bear comparison with the very worst moments in the chaotic history of diplomacy. Nepea, a Russian ambassador to the English court of Mary Tudor, was not slain by an Iroquois hatchet (which is what happened to a French envoy in North America in 1646), nor was his hat nailed to his head (the fate of Turkish ambassadors to Vlad the Impaler in the fifteenth century). Nonetheless, his sea voyage from Russia in 1556 was riddled with bad fortune.

‘Contrary winds and extreme tempests of weather’ separated the ships in his convoy soon after their departure from the port of St Nicholas. One crashed into rocks off the Scandinavian coast, while another was forced to put ashore and winter in Norway. His own ship drifted ever northwards and, on 7 November 1556, it was smashed to pieces at Pitsligo Bay in Aberdeenshire. The ambassador survived but he was given a boorish reception by the local Scottish inhabitants. His entire cargo ‘was by the rude and ravenous people of the country thereunto adjoining, rifled [and] spoiled’. When news of the disaster reached the English court, two men, Lawrence Hussie and George Gilpin, were charged with locating the ambassador and escorting him to London.

They found Nepea in Edinburgh on 20 December and immediately arranged for heralds to be sent to the site of the shipwreck. It was hoped that they might persuade the locals to return the plundered goods, but they met with little success. A great deal of wax was turned in, but there was no trace of the falcon, the jewels, or the ‘twenty entire sables, exceeding beautiful, with teeth, ears and claws’ that Nepea had intended to present to the queen.

The ambassador travelled south, and late in February 1557 he approached the English capital. Finally, after months of hardship, a moment of pageantry more befitting his ambassadorial rank was in prospect. A London draper, John Dimmock, witnessed the spectacle of Nepea’s entry into the city. Twelve miles outside the city walls, Dimmock remembered, the ambassador was greeted by eighty eminent merchants, all sporting gold chains. With their liveried servants in tow, they escorted Nepea to a house four miles further down the London road and showered him with gifts of gold, velvet and silk.

The next morning, after taking in a local fox hunt, he was led into town. He was greeted by the eminent Catholic nobleman Viscount Montague, ‘diverse lusty knights, esquires, gentlemen and yeomen’, and another delegation of merchants who presented him with a ‘footcloth of Orient crimson velvet, enriched with gold laces’. They proffered a horse, which Nepea duly mounted and rode to Smithfield, where he was received by the mayor and his aldermen, all dressed in scarlet. With ‘people running plentifully on all sides’, they rode together towards the ambassador’s well-appointed lodgings in Fenchurch Street.

There were many visitors to these ‘richly hanged and decked’ rooms over the next three months. Bishops and government ministers called for ‘secret talks and conferences’, and London society was regularly to be seen ‘feasting and banqueting him right friendly’. Nepea was shown ‘the most notable and commendable sights’ in the capital, from St Paul’s, to the Guildhall, to the Tower of London. On 25 March he was finally granted an audience with Queen Mary and her husband, Philip II of Spain, at Westminster. After meeting the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Privy Seal, Nepea presented their majesties with the few sables he had managed to salvage from the shipwreck, and read the letter of greeting sent by his master, Ivan IV.

After enjoying a ‘notable supper garnished with music’ arranged by the city’s merchants on 28 April, Nepea began to prepare for his homeward journey. On 3 May, ‘after many embracements and diverse farewells, not without expressing of tears’, he set sail aboard the Primrose Admiral, headed for Gravesend. He carried with him ‘certain letters tenderly conceived’ from the king and queen, and a fine haul of gifts: for himself, a gold chain and some gilt flagons; for the tsar, scarlet, violet, and azure cloth, and a male and female lion. Of inestimably greater value were the tales he took home and the impression he left behind.1

Throughout history, ambassadors would be in the vanguard of cultural discovery, and Nepea’s visit to London was a defining moment in England’s relationship with Russia. He was an extraordinarily unusual visitor, and it is unlikely that many, if any, of the people who lined the streets of London on that day in February 1557 had so much as seen a Russian before. There had been a time when the kingdom of Rus, centred on the old capital of Kiev, had enjoyed thriving cultural, economic and dynastic links with Europe. However, with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century (a catastrophe to which we will return), sustained, meaningful contact between Russia and the West had been all but lost.

Then, in 1480, Tsar Ivan III pronounced Muscovy’s independence from its now much-weakened Mongol overlords, secured a prestigious marriage to the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, and set about expanding his kingdom’s territories. Novgorod was taken in 1478, Pskov in 1510, and the city of Smolensk was seized from Lithuania four years later. From the end of the fifteenth century Russian envoys began appearing regularly in Europe, and Italian architects travelled east to ply their trade, but England was slow to emulate such encounters.

Finally, in the early 1550s, adventurers such as Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor began the search for a north-east land route, via Russia, to the riches of Asia. With an eye to seeking out new markets for English cloth, a group of aristocrats and merchants funded an expedition in 1553, with Chancellor serving as the voyage’s pilot-general. His ship was separated from the rest of the convoy and arrived at the Baltic port of St Nicholas towards the end of August. He travelled south, and after a few weeks reached the tsar’s court in Moscow. Ivan was asked if he would allow Englishmen to ‘go and come…to frequent free marts with all sorts of merchandise, and upon the same to have wares for their return.’ The tsar agreed and in 1555, after Chancellor’s return to England, Queen Mary granted a royal charter to the Muscovy Company.2

That May, Chancellor once more embarked for Moscow, carrying letters of trading privilege for the tsar’s signature. His companion on his homeward journey was none other than Iosip Nepea. When the ambassador’s ship crashed into the rocks in Pitsligo Bay, Chancellor perished trying to save the lives of Nepea and his entourage. Consolidating economic ties was the very purpose of Nepea’s embassy to London, but there was far more to be gained, cultivated and experienced from the exertions of ambassadors than commercial aggrandizement. They would also furnish that most precious of ambassadorial commodities: observations and descriptions of places that few, if any, of their countrymen were ever likely to visit.

Over the course of millennia, from the cuneiform civilizations of the ancient near east to the empires of the modern era, it has been the ambassadors who have allowed the world to meet itself. They would embark on missions of faith and trade, of politics and love, but wherever they journeyed they would as likely as not report back on everything – the moralities and the myths, the plants and the animals, the fashions and the foods – they encountered.

In the 200 years after Nepea’s embassy, dozens of ambassadors would shuttle back and forth between the two countries. One of them was Giles Fletcher, who began his embassy to Moscow in 1588. His ‘cosmographical description’ of the country was unsurpassed in its breadth and detail for almost two centuries. Fletcher painstakingly catalogued the humdrum – ‘the length and breadth of the country…the names of the shires’, the rivers and lakes. He noted the times when different plants were sown, offered a digest of Russian history, itemized the country’s chief exports (furs, tallow, honey, iron and salt), and commented on Russian costume and diet (a penchant for apples, peas, cherries and cucumbers). It is difficult for us to appreciate just how revelatory the accurate reporting of such basic information was to Tudor England.

Fletcher, like so many future visitors, was perhaps most taken by Russia’s changeable climate. In winter, he recounted, people were wary of holding a pewter dish lest their fingers froze against it. The sight of frozen corpses in sleds was commonplace, and many unlucky individuals ‘lose their noses, the tips of their ears, and the balls of their cheeks’. In especially hard winters ‘the bears and wolves issue by troops out of the woods, driven by hunger, and enter the villages, tearing and ravening all they can find, so that the inhabitants are fain to fly for safeguard of their lives.’ Yet summer would bring a new face to the woods. Everything was ‘so fresh and so sweet, the pastures and meadows so green and well grown…such variety of flowers, such noise of birds…that a man shall not lightly travel in a more pleasant country’.

The owls were uglier than in England; the soldiers did not march nearly so well; the nation’s religion was mired in superstition, although the concentration of political power in the hands of the tsar was a marvel to behold. Russia, Fletcher concluded, was, by turns, baffling, beautiful and bizarre.3

Of course, ambassadors like Fletcher and Nepea rarely travelled out of sport or fascination (though a few indubitably did). Kings and queens hardly ever recruited them out of some benign commitment to enhancing the wealth of human knowledge. They were usually sent, out of naked self-interest, to do their society’s bidding. Often, they were greeted with fear, as the embodiment of an alien civilization. Their accounts could be flawed, sometimes mired in prejudice. Descriptions such as Giles Fletcher’s portrait of Muscovy were always imperfect. Amidst measured descriptions of flora and fauna, there would be diatribes against Russian drunkenness, cruelty and poor hygiene.

Imperfect observations were better than no descriptions at all, however. Moreover, the forging of a crass, unfair stereotype was every bit as important to the interplay of cultures as a dispassionate survey of a nation’s topography or diet. There would be moments of misunderstanding and embarrassment, but there would be just as many of clarity and insight. Through the efforts of ambassadors, civilizations would compare and contrast one another, prejudices and affinities would emerge, admiration or loathing would result. A staggering array of ideas and commodities – from coffee to perspective painting, from fashion trends to Galilean astronomy, from tulips to the theories of Ptolemy – would be exchanged.

Isolated, exotic individuals that they often were, ambassadors rarely failed to make an impression on their hosts. Whether monks or noblemen, whether surgeons or Renaissance poets, such ambassadors carried the enormous burden of representing their entire culture. To Tudor England in 1557, Iosip Nepea was Russia. To Russia in 1588, Giles Fletcher was Tudor England. It was through their deeds and misdeeds that one society began to fashion an understanding of another.

In 1637, another unlikely ambassador journeyed to England. Jaurar Ben Abdella had been born in Portugal. Abducted as a child and sold into slavery, he had been taken to Morocco and, after ‘the manner of those nations,’ had been ‘distesticled, or eunuch’d’. Happily, he had won favour with the emperor and become one of his most trusted counsellors. When he arrived in London as the Moroccan emperor’s envoy, the writer George Glover took a moment to reflect on the benefits of such traffic between nations. It was good for trade, he quickly suggested, and it ‘conserves and makes peace, love and amity with princes and potentates, though they are far remote from each other’. But it also ‘acquaints each nation with the language, manners, behaviour, customs and carriage of one another.’ ‘By these means, men are made capable of understanding and knowledge, and therefore prefer knowledge before wealth and riches, for the one soon fades, the other abides forever.’4

Glover, hopelessly idealistic as he might sound, was entirely correct. By the time Iosip Nepea arrived in London in February 1557 there had been sixty centuries of ambassadorial endeavour. He was heir to the vibrant, neglected tradition that is the subject of this book.

The book has a very simple purpose: to demonstrate just how influential ambassadors have been in the encounters, collisions and rivalries between the world’s disparate civilizations.

Negotiating a path through the history of the ambassadors is an awkward task, so it may prove helpful here to briefly map out our itinerary. To help find our bearings, we have quite deliberately begun close to the end of the story, in the relatively familiar world of Tudor England, with the journey of an ambassador who bears at least a passing resemblance to the diplomat of the modern world. As well as recounting the momentous cultural contributions of ambassadors, the book also examines how the business of embassy – the rituals and the protocols, the problems and the purposes – reached this point. How did issues such as diplomatic immunity, diplomatic precedence or diplomatic gift-giving develop? How did societies decide what qualities an ideal ambassador ought to possess?

The book is divided into five sections, progressing from ancient Greece to the European Enlightenment, each of which represents an extended historical moment to be explored. The first section, concerned with the ancient world, turns its gaze towards ambassadorial endeavour and its repercussions in classical Athens, Mauryan India and Han dynasty China – three of the storm-centres of diplomacy from the fourth to the first century BC. There are journeys that put Iosip Nepea’s to shame, and shifts in the political tectonics of the world, but there are also insights into the humdrum detail of the ancient ambassador’s lot and the less than edifying spectacle of one such ambassador fighting for his professional life.

The next section moves us forward to the ninth century AD – one of the high water marks of diplomatic history – and takes the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic caliphates and the emperor Charlemagne as its points of departure. The places where diplomacy thrived, the crucibles of ambassadorial endeavour, had a habit of also being the most important places in the world at any given time, and the history of the ambassadors maps out their rise, fall and vicissitudes.

The next sections visit the Middle Ages – homing in on the ambassadorial adventures provoked by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century and the rise of the ‘new diplomacy’ in fifteenth-century Italy – and the religious upheavals and worldwide explorations of the sixteenth century. A final section brings us to the dawn of the modern ambassadorial age in the period of the European Enlightenment.

What follows is a sketch of that vast history, and nothing more. It is a sketch that takes the European experience of diplomacy as its principal focus: a sketch that takes the very term ambassador (a late medieval invention) in its broadest sense. Here, we aim for the marrow of the ambassadors’ history, for the resonances and the fractures, for the things that remained the same and those that shifted – for the texture. That, and accounts of some of the most extraordinary episodes in human history.

If that is the structure, what is the purpose? To repeat, all that is really aimed at is a demonstration of the vital, very often surprising, role that ambassadors have played in the encounters between civilizations. They offer a prism through which some of the grander themes of history – shifting world-views, awakenings and reawakenings of cultural knowledge, the agonizing choices that polities habitually face between isolation and engagement – can be explored.

The ambassadorial tradition is more ancient and various than is sometimes supposed. It is almost unfeasibly diverse. Embassy was about cultural encounter, and it would sometimes be wondrous. But it could just as easily be appalling, as when Hernando Cortés, posing as an ambassador, set about the destruction of Aztec civilization. Embassy brought peace, but it was often little more than the prelude to war or political takeover.

Those same Aztecs usually only sent out ambassadors in order to threaten their neighbours. First, they would demand the payment of tribute and the erection of a statue of one of their gods in the local temple. If their advances were still being rebuffed after twenty days, more ambassadors would arrive, talking of the unhappy consequences of resistance and, to show how little they feared military engagement, providing their hosts with weapons. After another twenty days, a final party of ambassadors arrived, assuring their hosts that, very soon, their temple would be levelled and their entire population enslaved: a promise the Aztecs were especially good at keeping.

Embassy brought gifts but then, even in the guise of gifts, it also brought threats and insults. When rumours spread that an Ottoman sultan lacked the wherewithal to complete the erection of a new mosque, the shah of Persia mischievously sent him chests of rubies and emeralds. This was not done out of generosity, but to sneer at the sultan’s predicament. The sultan, fully understanding that an insult was intended, ordered the gems to be ground up and added to the mortar being used to build the mosque.

Embassy would forge marriages and alliances but it sometimes left humiliated victims in its wake. In 1160 the Byzantine emperor Manuel was looking for new wife, and envoys were sent out to peruse the likely candidates. One of them, Melisend, the sister of Raymond III, count of Tripoli, had grown excited at the prospect of so prestigious a match. In truth, she had been kept in reserve in case a more suitable alliance with the ruler of Antioch failed to materialize. The ambassadors who had recently seen ‘the girl and admired her beauty’ suddenly changed tack and abandoned negotiations when news arrived that the Antioch marriage had been confirmed.

The Byzantine chroniclers simply invented a story to conceal this rather disreputable episode of diplomatic matchmaking. ‘Severe illnesses beset the girl,’ the chronicles report, ‘and she was in serious danger…her body shuddered and shook extremely…The radiance of her appearance, which previously gleamed beautifully, was shortly altered and darkened. Seeing her, our eyes filled with tears at such a withered meadow.’ It was an utter fiction. Melisend had undergone no such transformations; she had merely, and on a sudden, been supplanted in the emperor’s affections.5

Sometimes embassy was spectacular. In 1162 that same Byzantine emperor received an ambassador in Constantinople ‘with magnificent banquets…charmed him with horse races, and according to custom set alight some boats and skiffs with liquid fire and absolutely gorged the man with spectacles in the hippodrome’.6 Sometimes it was dull, or even became a chore. The Venetian nobility were in the habit of retreating to their villas on the island of Murano whenever a new ambassador was about to be appointed.

The ritual was often splendid, but diplomatic dignity was just as often dispensed with. The Renaissance monarch Francis I was in the habit of accompanying visiting ambassadors on a horseback journey through the streets of Paris where he set about pelting his subjects with eggs and rocks.7 The history of the ambassadors was ultimately about this balance between the impressive and the mundane, the triumphs and the disasters.

It might also be assumed that the history of the ambassadors is one of ever-evolving sophistication and complexity, culminating in the clockwork diplomacy of the modern world. It would be an arrogant assumption to make. Almost every society that has opted to investigate rather than to shun the rest of the world has mounted the same debates about what qualities a good ambassador ought to possess, about the elaborate rules and rituals of encounter. They have faced the same tensions between suspicion of the outside world and an urge to confront it; between behaving decorously towards other peoples and making sure to assert their cultural superiority.

Among the oldest surviving written records of diplomacy are the Amarna letters, several hundred clay tablets discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. Their faded cuneiform inscriptions record the relations between the rulers of Egypt and the greater and lesser kingdoms of the ancient Near East – Babylon, Assyria, and the rest – during the fourteenth century BC.

The letters show kings despatching ambassadors to complain about their fellow rulers’ use of disrespectful language, about the failure to send envoys to enquire about their health. When the merchants of one king are robbed and killed by the subjects of another, swift justice is demanded: the culprits are to be bound and returned with the money they have stolen; and the murderers are to be executed. If such measures are not taken, future travellers, ambassadors included, will be at risk, which threatens to bring diplomatic relations between the two kingdoms to an abrupt end. Nor are insults to the royal dignity any more likely to improve diplomatic relations: one ruler is utterly devastated when his brother’s name is mentioned before his own on a tablet.

One monarch suggests to another that, if he is going to take the trouble to send him gold, then it might as well be of a decent quality and in the same quantities as his father used to supply. A letter from the Cypriot kingdom of Alasiya warns the Egyptian king not to complain about receiving insufficient levies of copper. As a matter of fact, so prodigious an effort has been made that there is not a copper-worker left alive on the entire island, and suitable gifts are expected in recompense – namely, silver, sweet oil, an ox and a specialist in eagle omens.8

The Amarna letters reveal a consummate understanding of the value and vagaries of diplomacy. The motivations that would so often inspire ambassadors’ missions – the fostering of trade, the payment of tribute, the search for alliances, the scolding of rivals – are all present, as are the pride, rivalry and petulance without which human diplomacy would be unrecognizable. Perhaps the story of the ambassadors provides an antidote to that thriving modern disease: the assumption that the past is either a quaint curiosity or an inevitable route-march to the present.