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