Permanent diplomacy, featuring resident ambassadors empowered to formally represent their sovereign state and bestowed with certain legal immunities, such as exemption from taxes, tolls, and custom duties, is a modern development tracing its origin back to the city-states of fifteenth century Renaissance Italy. Garrett Mattingly tells the story of these developments in “Renaissance Diplomacy” (1955), one of the classics of twentieth century Renaissance studies.
Prior to 1400, the West tended to think of itself as one community, a “complex and protean” unity known as Christendom. The Catholic Church and the shared heritage of Imperial Rome created a common bond across the expanse of western Europe. A combination of Christian faith and Roman pride galvanized a diverse and widespread community numbering in the millions that shared many of the same principles and customs. One aspect of this unity was a desire for a common body of law valid across Christendom.
Our notion of an international community made up of independent, sovereign, and equal nation states would have struck the medieval world as unnatural and anarchic. This system was born in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century when the more or less equal city-states of Milan, Florence, Venice, and Naples were gripped by ceaseless internecine warfare. Highly aware of the precarious political and military balance maintained on the Italian peninsula, the city states began to experiment with unprecedented techniques of interstate diplomacy. Between 1300 and 1450 Italy witnessed a number of new state institutions and modes of behavior that embodied the spirit of the Renaissance. Mattingly says that the centuries-long struggle between the Guelphs (papal) and Ghibellines (Holy Roman Emperor) cleared the way for “the first omnicompetent, amoral, sovereign states” of Renaissance Italy whose key to power and security was force. The system was made of mutually balanced parts in unstable equilibrium. Interstate warfare was endemic to the peninsula. There were no meaningful frontiers or buffer zones. City states lived cheek-by-jowl. The bigger ones absorbed the smaller ones. No one felt secure. “The presence within the limited space of upper Italy of armed neighbors,” Mattingly writes, “equally efficient, agile and predatory, made continuous vigilance in foreign affairs a prime necessity.”
Between 1378 and 1492 this volatile system of competing city states at least benefited from the isolation from the rest of western Europe. “The tallest giants among the Italian states were pygmies besides the monarchies beyond the Alps,” Mattingly says. Warfare on the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century tended to be mercenary, small-scale, and nearly bloodless. Most of the soldiers were hired hands and most of the battles set piece posturing. The importance of skilled ambassadors in such an environment was obvious. Frederick the Great would later say that “diplomacy without arms is like a concert without a score.” The Italians felt the same way. The potential rewards were great and the relative costs were minimal. The diplomat became perhaps an even more important agent for the preservation and aggrandizement of the state than the warfighting general. Moreover, it was considered more prestigious, more noble. “Diplomacy is for rulers,” Mattingly writes, “war for hired men.” The pressures of the Italian city state system led to the creation of resident ambassadors, “an empirical solution to an urgent practical problem,” the author says. Alliances quickly dispersed resident diplomatic agents all across the peninsula. Suddenly, sending and receiving ambassadors was considered a sign of respect.
A pivotal moment in the diplomatic history of the Renaissance occurred with the Peace of Lodi In 1454, which ended the wars between Milan and Venice. It also established a defensive alliance – the Most Holy League – among the leading Italian city states with the object of cementing the territorial status quo and defending Christendom against the Turks, recently victorious at Constantinople. Before the Peace of Lodi resident ambassadors were extremely rare. By 1460 they were commonplace. Yet the League never operated as expected, either at maintaining the peace in Italy or as an effective anti-Turkish coalition. The next half century witnessed six Italian wars before the cataclysmic French invasion of 1494. Mattingly says that “each of the six wars had its roots in the unstable, illegitimate nature of political power in Italy.” The leading city states were ruled by illegitimate despotisms. The author says that the one in Florence was “thinly masked,” while those in Milan and Naples were “naked and brutal.” Only Venice maintained political power that was “legitimate and stable.” Meanwhile, Rome emerged as the “nerve-center of the Italian diplomatic system.” The papal legation received the most accomplished ambassadors in Italy and something like a professional diplomatic corps emerged. According to Mattingly, it was “sheer luck” that the Most Holy League prevented foreign intervention during the decades after Lodi. Nevertheless, these years between the Peace of Lodi and the French Invasion witnessed the flowering of artistic genius across the unstable Italian political landscape.
The first literary treatment of the new diplomatic machinery was published in 1490 by Ermolao Barbaro, a Venetian ambassador at Rome. The essay, titled “On the Duties of the Ambassador,” and written in a style emulating Cicero, argues that the ambassador’s primary mission is the “preservation and aggrandizement” of their state; the means to that mission is the acquisition of allies and privileged information. “The collecting, processing, and packaging of information were the resident ambassador’s main task,” Mattingly says. Reporting on facts and not court rumor or personal prophecy was paramount. Barbaro warns against using unscrupulous means to acquire information and overall has an un-Machiavellian tone for an essay written during the Age of Machiavelli.
What Italy had become in the years between the Peace of Lodi and the invasion of Charles VIII (1454 to 1494), the rest of Europe became in the sixteenth century. Indeed, Mattingly argues that the age of modern diplomacy began with the French invasion of Italy and it remains with us today in broad outline. Like with many important fundamental changes in history, this one was driven by money. Europe was finally recovering from the economic devastation of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century. New methods of mining and the discovery of the New World dramatically increased the money supply. Innovations in shipbuilding dropped transportation costs and improved supply lines. Bigger economies meant more money; more money meant bigger tax revenues; bigger tax revenues meant bigger armies and better weapons.
France was the colossus of the sixteenth century European state system, just as Milan had been for the fifteenth century Italian state system. The king of France was Europe’s chief monarch. Mattingly says that the other major European powers – England, Spain, Austria – all orbited around the French state. France was large, populous (14 million subjects, four times bigger than England and twice as large as Spain), and centrally located. Moreover, the power of taxation was held firmly and exclusively in the hands of the French king. In terms of population and resources, France was equal to the next three European powers combined. Her army was perhaps the best in Europe. Her diplomatic corps, on the other hand, was backward, but it led directly to his involvement in Italian politics. When Ludovico “Il Morro” Sforza, the former mercenary leader and current regent of the duchy of Milan, refused to surrender power to his nephew, he sought military and diplomatic assistance from Charles VIII. The French king was offered the reoccupation of Genoa and the conquest of Naples in exchange for supporting Ludovico’s maintenance of power in Milan. Mattingly says that the entire enterprise was risky for the French because of extended and exposed supply lines across hostile territory, but accepted the offer because “the king was young and silly and had bad counselors.” Charles VIII would end his adventure with no more Italian land than when he started, but Italian politics would be changed forever. The Most Holy League was exposed for the sham that it was and the Italian city states were all reduced to pawns in the larger chessboard of continental Europe. It was said that Il Morro had foolishly “turned a lion loose in his house to catch a mouse.” Now the Italians needed to call in the Spanish bull to drive out the French lion.
Mattingly says that Spain had “the most impressive diplomatic service in Europe” and it paid handsome dividends. King Ferdinand’s ambassadors were a talented and eclectic bunch, many of them serving at the same post for over a decade. Their efforts would result in the first instance of an effective European-wide coalition against France. Italian power politics were thus transferred to a wider arena as the major states of Europe were drawn into a single power system marked by ongoing diplomatic engagement, the sole objective of which was balance of power. It was perhaps best exemplified by the League of Cognac in 1526, which aligned France and the states of Italy, including the papacy of Clement VII, against the Habsburg Empire of Charles V. Mattingly stresses that neither national nor religious interest, nor any other sort of ideology, shaped Quatrocentro foreign policy. Cynics have long claimed that Renaissance diplomacy was based on nothing more than base lies and self-serving, often myopic ambition. The author is more charitable in his perspective. He sees efforts at maintaining European peace, such as the Treaty of London in 1518, led by Cardinal Wolsey, as thoughtful and sincere, even if they were completely ineffective.
After 1525, the Habsburg Empire was the dominant concern of European diplomacy. Habsburg policy was essentially “static, defensive, conservative,” according to Mattingly, which should have made containing it easier than containing France, which was “dynamic, divisive, disintegrating.” Its natural allies were the universal church and the feudal spirit. Habsburg imperial domination was ultimately checked. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Henry II of France and Phillip II of Spain were the principal rulers of Europe as the center of economic and political gravity in Europe drifted toward the Atlantic seaboard. Religious strife intensified across Europe in the 1560s. By 1589 a cold war of sorts had settled across the continent; states maintained resident ambassadors only with their ideological allies. It was only after the Peace of Vervins between Spain and France in 1598 and the peace between Spain and England in 1604 that diplomatic contacts slowly and warily were re-established. After the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, “modern diplomacy really begins,” Mattingly writes. By that point, the author says, European society was “content to accept a society broken up into congeries of autonomous individual states, states which balanced their forces, conducted their wary intercourse, fought their limited, selfish wars and made their limited, selfish treaties of peace according to rules which diplomats worked out for them.” All of Europe had become a “precarious equilibrium” not much different from the Italian system established after the Peace of Lodi almost two centuries earlier.
By the early seventeenth century the post of ambassador was finally recognized as a prestigious and coveted step on the ambitious courtier’s career ladder. In 1620, the Spanish ambassador to Rome, Don Juan Antonio De Vera, published a book called “The Perfect Ambassador.” It would remain a valued vademecum for those in the diplomatic services across Europe for the next century. The most prized attributes of the “perfect” ambassador, according to De Vera, were wealth, noble lineage, fluency in Latin, and good looks. The senior diplomatic services of Renaissance Europe were often able to attract “able, even brilliant men,” according to the author. The pay different ambassadors received at the same court could vary by over fifty percent and the salary was often in arrears. The diplomatic service was thus only for those men of means who could afford it. “Most ambassadors finished their missions poorer than when they took them up,” Mattingly says, “and most of them found that long absence from the king’s court and long association with foreigners were the wrong road to advancement.” The ambassador’s were expected to entertain lavishly, but the primary objective, according to De Vera, was always to maintain the peace; acts of conspiracy or espionage were to be avoided at all costs. Nevertheless, many contemporaries viewed ambassadors as nothing more than “an official liar or a licensed spy.”
Admittedly, Mattingly says, Renaissance diplomacy involved its fair share of spying. Eustace Chapuys, ambassador of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in London from 1529 to 1545, cultivated a wide network of informants, including non-traditional and creative sources, such as innkeepers and merchants. Rodrigo de Puebla, Spanish ambassador in London in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, did so as well. Most used rudimentary cipher techniques, most of which were easily broken. By the end of the Renaissance resident ambassadors had emerged full-fledged policymakers and no longer mere messengers. “They were players,” Mattingly says, “not just the executants, but to some extent the shapers of high policy.”
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