Download PDF | (Princeton Legacy Library_ 5081) Donald E. Queller - Office of Ambassador In The Middle Ages -Princeton University Press (2017).
265 Pages
PREFACE
The study of medieval diplomatic history, in general, and of diplomatic institutions, in particular, has not received the scholarly attention which would seem to be warranted by such an important area of activity. M.A.R. de Maulde La Claviére’s old, massive, and erudite La diplomatie au temps de Machiavel, which is actually broader in chronological scope than the title indicates, has been for almost three-quarters of a century the dominant work in the field.
Despite the author’s vast learning, it suffers from conceptual weakness and a tendency toward anachronism. Francois L. Ganshof’s volume in Renouvin’s Histoire des relations internationales devotes three chapters to the techniques of diplomacy which represent a broad culling of information from secondary materials. Taken for what it purports to be, it is a useful work, but it is not a major scholarly effort by this eminent medievalist.
Much more successful is Garrett Mattingly’s Renaissance Diplomacy. Only lightly endowed with scholarly apparatus, it is nevertheless a learned work. Mattingly is amazingly accurate even in treating subjects upon which he had relatively little data—and upon which other noted scholars have gone badly astray. One may supplement his work or criticize his emphasis, as I do in the case of the resident ambassador, but what he has chosen to do has been done with exquisite insight and precision.
I had at one time thought of limiting the present study to the period before 1436, the date of Bernard du Rosier’s treatise on the ambassador upon which Mattingly leans heavily, but I have overlapped Mattingly’s work somewhat, and my study has developed an emphasis and style quite different from his. Other authors have treated well other highly limited topics. G. P. Cuttino’s English Diplomatic Administration, 1259-1339, which traces the rise of the office of custos processuum, is an excellent example of a specialized monograph. So is Joycelyne G. Dickinson’s study of the Congress of Arras.
Many more examples could be given of good and bad monographs, some of them supplanted by more recent works, or of general treatments of the history of diplomacy which have little or nothing to say concerning diplomatic institutions, but enough has been said here to indicate the large gap which the present work is designed, in part, to fill. The subject of this study is the evolution of the office of the ambassador from the late twelfth century until the end of the fifteenth.
It is founded upon a variety of types of sources. Absolutely basic are the diplomatic documents themselves: letters of credence, powers, instructions, reports, and, to a lesser extent, treaties, truces, and other conventions. Not all such documents for a period of over three centuries could be examined, of course, but the footnotes will reveal that a considerable sampling of unpublished and published documents from various places has been used.
The bulk of the diplomatic documents, it is true, has been drawn from Venice, Flanders, and England. A great Italian city-state, a powerful county, and a national monarchy are thus abundantly represented. Not many differences in the development of the office of the ambassador are found in these various lands or in others from which a smattering of evidence has been drawn. Uniform development of the ambassadorial office is what we should expect among states which exchanged ambassadors, for the very nature of ambassadorship, as contrasted, for example, to chancellorship, demands a certain uniformity of practice among states.
The intensive use of diplomatic documents of different provenance, I am sure, would have added little of value. Chronicles have been used as supplementary sources, especially when the author was an experienced diplomat, such as Villehardouin or Commines. Maulde La Claviére also used these types of sources liberally (although I believe he relied more upon chronicles than official documents), but his failure to use legal sources prevented him from reading his documents with a technical eye and led to his misunderstanding of the juridical character of various envoys. I have therefore placed heavy reliance upon legal sources, the Corpus juris civilis, the Corpus juris canonici, and various less official writings by lawyers.
Treatises on diplomacy are rare and of doubtful value, although some use has been made of those by Bernard du Rosier and others who had some diplomatic experience. Such esteemed theoreticians as Thomas Aquinas and Christine de Pisan simply did not know very much about diplomatic practice, although they are occasionally cited as authorities. Doubts sometimes even arise whether the experts on ceremony at the Roman curia, such as Johannes Burckhard, actually report what was customarily done, rather than what they would have liked done. I have tried to write not a theoretical account based on theoretical works, but an account of how envoys actually were employed based upon diplomatic sources. Legal and theoretical works have been used only insofar as they enlighten the diplomatic sources.
The occasional dicta of medieval lawyers and theoretical writers on sovereignty and the droit d’ambassade and the more lengthy arguments of modern authorities who follow them are simply not relevant to diplomatic practice in the Middle Ages. They do not enlighten, but obfuscate; they contradict what the official documents conclusively prove—that diplomatic agents with whatever title were sent and received for pragmatic reasons without regard to sovereignty. No doubt there was developing a concept of sovereignty, but it had no significant bearing upon the right to send or receive ambassadors or other diplomatic envoys.
The diplomatic game was open to anyone who had sufficient power at his command to enter it. Today, after living for several centuries under the influence of the concept of sovereignty, we have ambassadors to the United Nations, which, if I understand the concept of sovereignty (and I am not sure that anyone does), is not a sovereign power. Grotius himself recognized that in the course of a civil war one people might almost become two for purposes of international affairs.*
The modern scholar also runs the risk of error if he tries to distinguish sharply between diplomatic and political institutions or between public and private ones. The scholarly mind has a tendency to classification that was alien, it seems to me, to the practice of the Middle Ages. Medieval rulers, churchmen, lawyers, merchants, and others took such devices as they found available and used them for whatever purposes they thought suitable without much consideration for classification.
Such a device was plena potestas, the use of which in diplomacy is a central theme of this study. Its introduction in the late twelfth century transformed the medieval diplomat who received it from a mere messenger into an agent with authority to bind his principal. Sometimes the diplomatic plenipotentiary received the broadest and most unrestricted powers to commit his principal, but as the frequency of communication between principals or between principal and agent increased, it became common practice to withhold plena potestas until the principal had approved any draft conventions made by his envoys.
Every professional historian tries, insofar as possible, to grasp medieval diplomatic practice on its own terms, to avoid distorting the data to make it conform to his own preconceptions and those of his own time and place. Maulde La Claviére, too fine a scholar to deny his data, sometimes was guilty of judging medieval practices which did not conform to his preconceptions as extraordinary or even bad. No historian studying an age long past, of course, can enter into the mind of that age with complete success.
He cannot really, as Collingwood would have him do, rethink the thoughts of the writers of his documents and the thoughts of those whose acts are described in them. The historian is of necessity a man of his own age, and his frames of reference are in large part those of his culture. The historian cannot really get inside the mind of Villehardouin, although he can make an effort, through immersion in the sources and literature on the Fourth Crusade, to view events as Villehardouin viewed them. It is his twentieth-century mind that attempts to rethink those thoughts, however, and it cannot be made a tabula rasa.
It is good that it cannot. Not without reason do statesmen appeal to history for a truer evaluation of their acts than their contemporaries can give. Removed from the passions of the day, sometimes provided with data unknown to contemporaries, standing on the shoulders of his predecessors, and equipped with a more comprehensive view of the nature of man and society, the historian would lose much if he merely rethought past thoughts.
Yet, cognizant that he cannot escape his frames of reference—nor would he wish to do so—the historian must be empathic enough to attempt to reconstruct the frames of reference of the past and to understand them. Then, recognizing these as his own constructions with all their limitations, he should bring to bear upon his subject every resource of his mind formed by his life in the present and his study of the past. However inadequately, this is what I have attempted to do.
My chief interest has been to determine how diplomatic representation was used in the Middle Ages to conduct relations among states. The discovery of new devices, such as plena potestas, offered new opportunities to overcome conditions that hampered diplomatic activity, such as the slowness of transportation and communication. A society undergoing great economic and political changes, on the other hand, adapted its diplomatic techniques to suit the changed conditions.
A greater intensity of diplomatic relations and the possibility of more frequent communication between principal and representative resulted in a more restrained use of plena potestas and a greater dependence of the ambassador upon the will of his principal. As diplomatic contact among states became ever more frequent, the ad hoc representative became imperceptibly a resident ambassador.
This transformation, in turn, worked another in the functions of the ambassador, for the resident, less adequately informed of the intentions of his principal than the ad hoc envoy, became less useful for purposes of negotiation but more important for gathering information. Thus the institution of the diplomatic representative reacted to changes in the society of which it was a part and to changes within itself in order to remain functional and to comport more adequately with the ever evolving patterns of society.
Since I have employed in my study of the ambassadorial office documents from all over Western Europe for a period of over three centuries, I suspect that I have not avoided errors insofar as I have touched upon the substantive history of international relations. For these I apologize in advance and recall to the reader to whose specialty I may have done violence that my concern is basically with whatever my documents show concerning the institution of ambassadorship.
I have had some difficulty in attempting to find a principle for the consistent handling of medieval proper names. One cannot easily tell when a place name has become a surname. As a place name it might be translated from the Latin to the vernacular, but more restraint should be exercised in translating surnames. Some given names are customarily translated.
Others have no translations. Under which name a medieval author should be listed in the bibliography has been a problem sometimes, but not always, settled by usage: e.g., “Durandus, Gulielmus,” but “Gratia Aretinus.” I have tried not to be haphazard in these matters, but I am not sure that I have succeeded.
It is my pleasant duty to express my gratitude for Fulbright fellowships to Belgium and Italy and for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship for study in Venice. Without the archival work which they allowed, this study would have been badly truncated, if not impossible. I am deeply appreciative, not only for the opportunities provided, but for the expressions of confidence which these grants implied. I am also grateful to the University of Southern California for a succession of small research grants which have greatly facilitated my work.
I owe much to the helpfulness of archivists and librarians beyond number, but especially to those of the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, the Rijksarchief of Ghent, the Bibliothéque Royale, and the Archives du Royaume of Brussels, where I worked for considerable periods. The staff of the library of the University of Southern California has also been most helpful, especially Miss Marion Schulman, who has shown a great talent for identifying mangled references.
It is a particular pleasure publicly to offer my thanks to the historians under whom I have studied. Gaines Post gave me my start on the subject, has consistently made available to me his great knowledge of representative institutions, and has always encouraged me with his friendship and example. Charles Verlinden was especially helpful in introducing me to archival research in Belgium, and has continued to earn my gratitude by reading manuscripts and suggesting European journals in which they might be published.
I am also grateful for the tutelage of the late Robert L. Reynolds and the interest and encouragement of the late Garrett Mattingly. If the present work earns the approbation of such scholars as these, I shall have achieved my aim.
Donato E. QUuELLER
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