The Rise of Modern Diplomacy 1450 - 1919

M.S. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317894018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Though international relations and the rise and fall of European states are widely studied, little is available to students and non-specialists on the origins, development and operation of the diplomatic system through which these relations were conducted and regulated. Similarly neglected are the larger ideas and aspirations of international diplomacy that gradually emerged from its immediate functions.This impressive survey, written by one of our most experienced international historians, and covering the 500 years in which European diplomacy was largely a world to itself, triumphantly fills that gap.

CHAPTER ONE

The ‘New Diplomacy’ of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

THE NEW DIPLOMATIC WORLD TAKES SHAPE

In western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the major states were becoming stronger, more united and more militarily effective than ever before. Side by side with this went a tendency for the relations between them, or more accurately between their rulers, to become closer and more continuous. It is hardly possible to trace the beginning of this process even to any approximate date. Perhaps it can be detected as early as the later twelfth century, when the Plantagenets in England, in their struggle with Philip Augustus of France, made alliances with Aragon and the Guelph dukes of Bavaria, while Philip had the support of the Holy Roman Emperor. It can be seen with greater certainty from the first decades of the fourteenth century. By then Anglo-French rivalry was drawing Scotland at one geographical extreme and the Spanish kingdoms at the other into its orbit. Moreover, the establishment of Angevin rule in Naples from the 1260s onwards had now brought the Italian world into a closer political relationship than before with France and, to some extent, with much of western Europe. The eastern and even central parts of the continent, it is true, were still remote from the west in their political concerns. Italy's political connections to the east centred largely around the complex struggles of the newly established Angevin kings of Hungary with Naples and Venice; while from the reign of the Emperor Charles IV (1346–78) the political centre of gravity in the Holy Roman Empire moved perceptibly eastwards, and the bonds linking the German world to the conflicts of its western neighbours slackened somewhat. Moreover, northern Europe was still a largely self-contained political sphere. The Scandinavian world was an inward-looking one, linked politically to the rest of Europe only by the tendency of Denmark and Poland to cooperate against the threatening power of the Hanse cities and by the desire of the Danes to protect their trade against the Dutch and English. Europe was therefore still far from being a unified political system; but by the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in the 1330s the continent was equally far from being a mere agglomeration of states, each indifferent to and unaffected by the actions of its neighbours. Europe was already divided into a number of fairly unified and effective regional state-systems — England and France with their allies or satellites in Spain, Scotland and the Netherlands; Italy; the Baltic; the German world — within each of which relations between monarchs were becoming closer and more continuous and between which political contacts, though looser and more intermittent, were tending to grow.¹

A century and a half later, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, many of the fundamentals of this situation had not changed. Many of the same lines of alliance and cleavage were still visible — the readiness of France and Scotland to combine against England; the tendency of England to look to Flanders or Castile for allies against France; the French interest in Italy, particularly in Naples, and the opposition it aroused. There were still around the periphery of Europe many small or relatively underdeveloped states — the Scandinavian kingdoms, Poland, Scotland, Hungary, Portugal, not to mention the remote and almost unknown Russia — whose role in international relations was secondary, whose outlooks and interests were limited, and who often reacted to the initiatives of the greater states rather than taking any of their own. Even for the greater monarchies political horizons were still much narrower than they were soon to become. The best-known political and diplomatic memoirs of the later fifteenth century, those of Philippe de Commynes, show how limited as yet was the scope even of French foreign policy. In them Burgundy, the Netherlands, England and, in his later years, Italy figure prominently; but relations with Spain count for little and the Ottoman empire — the greatest political and military success-story of the age — hardly appears at all.

Italian beginnings

Nevertheless, by the middle of the fifteenth century there were clearly taking root in Italy new diplomatic techniques and institutions. These formed the basis of a system of interstate relations recognisable as the direct ancestor of the one which exists today. That this system should appear first in any developed form in Italy is not surprising. By the mid-fourteenth century most of the Italian peninsula was divided between a fairly small number of relatively well organised states — the duchy of Milan, the Florentine republic, the kingdom of Naples, the Papal State, the Venetian republic, at a lower level of importance Mantua, Genoa and perhaps one or two others. These competed with one another intensely for power, for territory, in the last analysis for survival. It was therefore essential for their rulers to watch closely each other's doings and to be as well informed as possible about each other's policies and ambitions. Moreover, these states were geographically small compared to the great European monarchies, and they had at their disposal relatively large numbers of highly educated men. In Italy it was therefore possible to raise day-to-day government to a high pitch of efficiency, to control the territory of these states effectively from a single centre, in a way which was still quite impracticable in France, Spain or the growing Habsburg Hausmacht. One aspect of this type of government — unified, consistent, well-informed — was that its foreign policies were more continuous and better organised than any hitherto seen.

Fifteenth-century Italy, then, was in miniature what in the following hundred years most of western Europe and later the rest of the continent was to become. In the acuteness of its rivalries, and in the expression which it gave them in the new form of organised professional diplomacy, it pointed out the direction which the entire continent was later to take. By the last years of the fifteenth century can be seen the first clear signs that the sort of close and continuous interstate relationships already in existence in Italy for two or three generations were spreading beyond the Alps. The French invasion of Italy in 1494, that textbook dividing-line in the history of Europe, quite suddenly sharpened the rivalries and focused the ambitions of the major powers of the continent. When in 1495 fear of French power brought together the Spanish kingdoms, the Holy Roman Emperor and most of the important Italian states in the Holy League (which was joined by England in the following year), this was a new departure in the history of the continent. Though the league proved disunited and short-lived and rapidly betrayed the hollowness of the pompous verbiage with which it was surrounded, it was none the less a portent; there was no mediaeval precedent for so ambitious and geographically wide-ranging a combination of states. Comparable alliances were soon to follow it, their composition changing with kaleidoscopic suddenness. All of them were more or less ineffective; but their very existence showed that Europe had now entered a new political age. These alliances, moreover, both demanded and were created by a new system of diplomacy and new techniques of diplomatic organisation, by a diplomatic network which, from its Italian roots, was now beginning to embrace more and more of Europe.

The relative modernity of this diplomatic network can be seen in several ways. In the first place it was now beginning to be generally, though slowly, recognised that the sending and receiving of diplomatic representatives was an attribute of sovereignty, a right to which only rulers were entitled. In the middle ages this had been very far from the case. Then ‘all sorts of principals sent diplomatic agents to all sorts of recipients’.² Until far into the fifteenth century, and in many cases much later than that, diplomacy was still a game played not merely by sovereigns but by a wide range of people and institutions, many of them surprisingly humble. A procurator (essentially a representative empowered to negotiate on behalf of his principal) might well be sent by a group of merchants, or even a single one, to deal with a ruler against whom they had some claim or from whom they wished to extract some grant or concession. Thus in England Sir Thomas More gained his first diplomatic experience when in 1509 he negotiated with the municipal authorities of Antwerp on behalf of the Mercers Company of London. Such an agent might equally well be despatched by a ruling prince to deal with a private individual rather than a fellow-ruler. These relatively plebeian origins of much of the web of diplomatic representation which was beginning to cover Europe can be seen in the fact that until the seventeenth century the title ‘ambassador and procurator’ was very widely used. It was only in the age of Richelieu that the more dignified term ‘plenipotentiary’ drove ‘procurator’ out of use.³ Throughout the fifteenth century, and even in Italy, then, a variety of individuals and entities continued to send and receive diplomatic agents — nobles, bishops, the college of cardinals (as distinct from the papacy) individual condottieri. There are numerous instances of a sovereign power receiving diplomatic representatives from its own subjects: Venice for example received many sent by dependent cities within its own territories.⁴

In France, until the accession of Louis XI in 1461, great feudatories continued on occasion to conduct diplomatic relations of their own with foreign states; and their right to do so seems to have been often at least tacitly recognised. Thus, under Charles VII, Louis' father, the duke of Orleans sent an ambassador to Venice, while the Comte de Foix sent others to Castile and Navarre and also received embassies from them.⁵ By fthe later fifteenth century, however, this situation was under challenge. More and more, as they consolidated their control over their own territories, rulers in western Europe became unwilling to allow their subjects this sort of freedom, with the threat to their power and the security of their territories which it clearly involved. Louis XI, in one of his first acts as king, asserted firmly that he alone could send and receive ambassadors in France. The duke of Burgundy, the greatest of his vassals, was too powerful to be deprived of his former rights in this respect. So was the semi-independent duke of Brittany, though he was forbidden to have diplomatic relations with any enemy of France. Nevertheless, Louis was able to assert with considerable success his claim to a monopoly of French diplomatic relations, particularly as his control of the postal system gave him an important weapon against efforts by any noble, however great, to conduct a personal foreign policy.⁶ After his death in 1483 the duke of Orleans, himself a member of the royal family, still negotiated on his own account with the pope and the duke of Brittany and corresponded privately with the imperial ambassador to France; the principle that only the king should have a foreign policy was not yet completely victorious. However, when in 1497 Orleans proposed to act in this way in Lombardy, Charles VIII, now of full age and as jealous as his father of his prerogatives, successfully threatened him with exile if he persisted.⁷ The idea that non-sovereign individuals or entities could send and receive diplomatic representatives was thus still very much alive at the end of the fifteenth century. A hundred years later Alberto Gentili, in his De Jure Belli libri tres (1598), one of the first great works of international law, could still speak of those sent by rulers to their subjects or vice versa as forming a distinct class of diplomat (though he placed them in the lowest of the three categories into which he divided diplomatic agents).⁸ Even as late as the early eighteenth century the duchy of Milan was sending ambasciatori to its ruler, the king of Spain.⁹ From the end of the fifteenth century onwards, however, the idea that only sovereigns could play the great game of diplomacy was slowly crystallising and gaining acceptance.

The most striking characteristic of the new breed of diplomats was the fact that more and more of them were ‘permanent’. In other words, many of them remained in post at the court of some foreign ruler for a considerable time, transacting business and transmitting information over a period of at least months and often years. They did not, like almost all their mediaeval predecessors, visit a foreign court merely to conclude a specific piece of business, to negotiate, sign or swear adherence to a particular treaty, or to add additional lustre to a coronation or a royal marriage. There is, inevitably, a certain grey area in discussion of this development. How long must a diplomat remain in any post for his mission to qualify as a permanent one? Also the position of a diplomat sent originally on some special and temporary mission could easily become difficult to distinguish from that of a permanent representative if conditions changed, new problems arose, and he had to be sent new instructions and his stay prolonged. Sometimes, again, at least in the early stages of this new development, a man might for quite a long period perform all the functions of a resident ambassador and even be addressed as such without any formal accreditation: in such cases he might himself be uncertain of his precise status. Sir Thomas Spinelly, for example, when he represented Henry VIII in the Netherlands in 1514–17, found himself in this position.¹⁰ But of the reality and importance of the development there is no doubt. Occasionally, though rarely, it is recognised in contemporary terminology. The ambassador sent to Rome by the duke of Savoy in 1460 is apparently the first to be officially and explicitly described as permane...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The ‘New Diplomacy’ of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
• 2. Old Regime Diplomacy at its Height, c. 1600–1789
• 3. Coming to Terms with a Changing World, 1789–1919
• 4. The Balance of Power
• 5. The Quest for International Peace
• Conclusion
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index