A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch

These kinds of challenges to the established order, combined with the fact that some Protestant countries discounted the authority of the pope in underwriting the legitimacy of precedence rules, rendered Julius’s ranking increasingly irrelevant. No longer codified or inscribed in any legal framework, precedence became contingent, a matter of continual negotiation. The result of this situation “was bitter, often unedifying, sometimes comic battles over precedence.”⁴ Different European courts observed different rankings, depending on the state of their relations with particular countries. At the start of a treaty negotiation, representatives would deliberate to establish rules of precedence for the duration of the conference. Europe’s most powerful monarchies, especially France and Spain, competed for precedence on these multiple diplomatic stages.⁵ In this way, the fluidity of the hierarchy allowed individual ambassadors the possibility of distinguishing themselves professionally by achieving a higher rank for their states. To adapt the metaphor used by diplomats themselves, ambassadors functioned not only as actors in the “theater” of diplomacy, enacting the prestige and dignity of the political entities they represented. They were also, to some extent, its authors, helping to determine the “script” of precedence that regulated diplomatic relations.

      Given the highly theatrical quality of diplomatic life in early modern European courts, the spectacles performed on courtly stages for audiences including visiting and resident ambassadors might appear superfluous. Yet entertainments remained important social events for the diplomatic community, where any favor or honor bestowed upon an individual ambassador was sure to be witnessed by the assembled public. Centered on a theatrical spectacle, diplomats’ behavior in the viewing stands constituted a second level of dramatic performance in meta-theatrical relation to the event onstage.

      Performing in the Theater of Diplomacy

      When an ambassador took his seat for a court entertainment, he was every bit as much a part of the spectacle as were the dancers on the stage. As spectator accounts suggest, the host court took care to choreograph the arrangement of the audience to signal the relative importance of its attendees. Each spot in the spectators’ gallery carried significance. Viewers could interpret the composition of the audience space as a spectacle in its own right. Spectators were also conscious of their own position as objects of fellow audience members’ gaze, a fact that transformed their experience of watching the entertainment into a kind of performance as well.

      Courtly spaces of all kinds were of course highly theatrical. Works on courtiership, such as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, urged aristocrats to present themselves in society in such a way as to appeal to the eyes of fellow nobles. Courtiers experienced their mode of being in society as a form of acting, as inhabiting a role.⁶ For those who also worked as diplomats, self-presentation took on an additional layer of complexity. As Timothy Hampton has observed: “The courtier dissimulates in order to represent himself effectively at court. The ambassador, by contrast, represents himself while representing another.”⁷ The doubled representation carried out by ambassadors “elicited new types of self-presentation and a necessary rethinking of traditional modes of acting.”⁸

      The theatrical dimension of diplomatic work remained a constant theme of literature on diplomacy throughout the early modern period. In fact, the conception of the diplomatic arts as a form of public theatrical performance marks even the earliest treatises and manuals for ambassadors, such as Bernard du Rosier’s Short Treatise About Ambassadors (Ambaxiator brevilogus, 1436).⁹ The demands on an ambassador’s performance skills grew increasingly exigent—and more complex—with the emergence of “permanent diplomacy,” or the practice of maintaining resident ambassadors in foreign courts.¹⁰ As Europe’s society of diplomats expanded to fill these new permanent roles, the number of ambassador’s manuals also burgeoned. Often echoing the courtier handbooks that proliferated in the same time period, these works advised the ambassador on his self-presentation at the host court. The portrait of the perfect ambassador that emerged from this corpus of texts emphasized external qualities: physical beauty, eloquence, the ability to dance, sing, and ride.¹¹ He should have a personal fortune sufficient to furnish his embassy in accordance with the prestige of his sovereign (and to keep him free from the temptation of bribes).¹² The manuals also argue for the importance of less tangible virtues such as prudence, knowledge, and noble blood, though even these interior traits are justified by their contribution to the successful outer performance of diplomacy. Juan Antonio de Vera’s treatise on the “perfect ambassador,” for example, explains how good verbal skills can make up for a lack of knowledge, allowing the ambassador to “divert [the conversation] as dexterously as possible away from subjects that he does not know well.”¹³ Even the requirement that an ambassador be of noble rank was explained by a pragmatic concern for his ability to perform his role as representative of his sovereign in a convincing manner, as when Alberico Gentili concludes that “it is scarcely probable that a man of ignoble station could assume the personality of one of noble rank, much less that of a prince.”¹⁴

      This more elaborate external enactment of pleasing behaviors served not only to project a positive image of the ambassador’s sovereign but also to conceal or deflect attention away from the resident ambassador’s primary activities: gathering and disseminating information. The most contentious virtue ascribed to the ambassador was that of prudence, described by most authors as the talent to hide anything that might be detrimental to his country’s image and political objectives. In other words, the diplomat had to excel at dissimulation.¹⁵ The nature of the ambassador’s work was understood as inherently duplicitous. In De officio legati (c. 1490), the first text to expound upon the duties of a resident ambassador, humanist author and translator Ermolao Barbaro described the diplomat as the perfect embodiment of moderation and discretion.¹⁶ Fully assuming the role of his state’s representative, he was simply “to do, say, advise, and think whatever may best serve the preservation and aggrandizement of his own state,” while secretly gathering intelligence for his monarch.¹⁷

      This early conception of the resident ambassador’s work recalls Henry Wotton’s often quoted line: “The ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”¹⁸ In this view, a sovereign and his ambassador and delegates acted in concert to work toward a shared goal. As such, they behaved as what Erving Goffman has labeled a “performance team,” or a group of individuals who coordinate their roles to project an agreed-upon image to an unsuspecting public.¹⁹ By contrast, in the decades following Barbaro’s work, other writers characterized the ambassador as a free, independent performer not bound to such close cooperation with his master or the other members of his delegation. Niccolò Machiavelli’s letter of “Advice to Raffaello Girolami” (1522), for example, suggested that the ambassador might work for his own private interests as well as for his monarch’s. To this end, it was doubly important that he “acquire great consideration” in his host court, which he could do “by acting on every occasion like a good and just man; to have the reputation of being generous and sincere, and to avoid that of being mean and dissembling, and not to be regarded as a man who believes one thing and says another.”²⁰ This quintessentially Machiavellian piece of advice highlights the paradoxical nature of diplomatic performance in which the ambassador dissimulates in order to maintain his reputation as an honest person. In a book of maxims titled Ricordi (1530), Florentine jurist and diplomat Francesco Guicciardini echoed this idea. He wrote that, although “frank sincerity is a quality much extolled,” deception is sometimes necessary and thanks to a good ambassador’s “reputation for plain dealing,” “his artifice will blind men more.”²¹ In the diplomatic scenario, Guicciardini reminds us, it is not only the ambassador who can deceive. Some sovereigns conceal their true political intentions from the agents they dispatch to enact them, “judg[ing] it better only to impart what they would have the foreign prince persuaded of, thinking they can hardly deceive him unless they first deceive the ambassador who is the instrument and agent for treating with him.”²² The extreme theatricality of diplomatic practice as described in these texts conjures a scenario in which all men—even those supposed to be on the same political “team”—are in reality acting for their own self-interest, professional prestige, and even financial gain in the form of gifts. In this context, the comparison of ambassadors