bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2006) — Summer 2006 // Été 2006, pp. 5–7
THE AMBASSADORS: FROM ANCIENT
EGYPT TO RENAISSANCE EUROPE,
THE MEN WHO INTRODUCED THE
WORLD TO ITSELF, by Jonathan Wright,
Harcourt, Inc., 2006, 400 pp., $31.00.
Some say mercenaries are the second oldest profession; I would argue that, in fact, it’s diplomats. In the Stone Age, when two wandering bands of hunter-gatherers encountered one another, they had three options: attack, run away, or send out an emissary to find out more about the other group, whether their intentions were hostile and, if not, whether they had anything worth trading. Those brave souls who tried to test this third option were our professional ancestors. Although, 500 centuries before the Vienna Convention, they were as likely to become the entrée at a state dinner as the honoured guest. Wright’s professed aim in his book The Ambassadors is to show the role of the ambassador as a cultural explorer, who “allowed the world to meet itself,” relaying back to his own people information and assessments about the peoples and countries he had visited, and conveying to his hosts the best possible impression of his own country. To this day that is still the primary function of the political officer. Wright’s survey starts with the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians of 1400 BC and meanders on to the 18th century. Many of the missions he describes will be familiar to bout readers: Priscus’ Mission to Attila in 448, Luitprand of Cremona’s dyspeptic embassy to Constantinople in 968, and the mid-13th century Franciscan-led embassies to the Mongol court in Karakorum. But Wright also brings in a lot of other material including: a chapter on Chinese diplomacy; a 3rd century BC Indian manual on statecraft (guaranteed to get any ambassador who followed its instructions PNGed or worse); accounts of some First Nations’ embassies, as well as much material on the early modern period, which has fallen outside the scope of my own articles.
There is some fascinating stuff here. A Castilian envoy, Gonzalo de Clavijo, visited the court of Timurlane in Samarkand in 1404, where he witnessed the last days of a tyrant of Stalinesque proportions. Although Timurlane’s reputation for architectural innovation rests on his propensity for building pyramids from the skulls of his victims, he may — judging from Clavijo’s account
– have inflicted something even worse on the world, the strip-mall. Wishing to create a market area where merchants from across his empire could display their wares, he ordered the tearing down of a swath of houses from one side of Samarkand to the other, which was then rapidly fitted up with glassed domed market stalls. Property owners protested, but Timurlane’s suggestion that his idea of recompense could include mass beheadings quickly ended the discussion. The Reformation created some interesting diplomatic situations. For diplomats from Roman Catholic countries, a posting to Elizabethan London must have been like a cross between Riyadh and Moscow in the Soviet days. Roman Catholic services were forbidden, but their practice was (barely) tolerated in diplomatic premises. The English authorities did not, however, welcome English old believers attending mass at the French or Spanish missions, and often sent spies to find out who was present. Their actions could be very intrusive and led to some punch-ups, and worse, between Elizabeth’s spies and members of the French and Spanish missions. As a result diplomatic immunity was often tested to the limits. The Spanish ambassador was also believed (probably with good reason) to be plotting Elizabeth’s overthrow (while he was trying to find out if she was plotting against the Spanish in the Netherlands). His dispatches were regularly intercepted and he was frequently called on the carpet by the English Privy Council to explain them. English discomfort with clandestine masses held in embassy chapels endured to the late 18th century. During the 1780 Gordon riots protesting Catholic emancipation, mobs trashed the chapels of a number of embassies from Roman Catholic countries.
It was not until the 15th century that states (initially Italian ones) began to establish resident embassies in each other’s capital. (Wright erroneously sees ancient Greek Proxenia as their precursors, but – as these were normally nationals of the city-state in which they were resident, chosen to represent the interests of another state – their modern equivalent would be Honourary Consuls). Resident Ambassadors proved particularly valuable in the Ottoman Empire, where the Sublime Porte had the sublime habit of reneging on agreements, as soon as a visiting envoy had departed. But even residency had its perils. European Ambassadors were not above bribing Ottoman officials to get them to reject the credentials of a newly arrived ambassador from a rival state. One other peril facing Ambassadors in Istanbul – which Wright curiously omits to mention
– was the dungeon in the Castle of the Seven Towers, where diplomats were consigned should their country happen to find itself at war with the Ottomans. There are some interesting characters here, not all of whom are a credit to our profession. Wright perhaps plays up a bit too much the tired old stereotypes of diplomatic high living, intrigue and obsession with protocol. On the other hand, some of his characters are textbook illustrations of the merits of maintaining a professional foreign service, rather than choosing someone with good connections or a convincing line of patter. The Elizabethan freebooter Thomas Sherley is perhaps one of the worst. He managed to convince the Shah of Persia to appoint him as a special envoy to arrange an alliance between Iran and Europe against the Turks. Even if there had been any Western interest in the project (there was not – the Austrians were feeling too battered by recent encounters with Ottoman power, while the rest of Europe enjoyed the Austrians’ discomfiture), Sherley was clearly lacking in tact and discretion. He openly quarreled with other members of his delegation, ran up huge debts, then took a new assignment as Austrian ambassador to Morocco. There his — at best shaky – grasp of protocol failed him. When invited to a state banquet, he rode his horse into the palace and refused to dismount. Amazingly he survived and managed to persuade the King of Spain to award him an annual pension of 3,000 ducats. The era of the professional was thankfully dawning. Wright gives an interesting sketch of the career of Sir Henry Wotton, author of that wonderful quip that an ambassador is an “ …honest man sent to lie abroad for his country”. Unfortunately this reached his master James I in a Latin translation wherein the pun was lost. James was not amused. The king however was not above making his own faux pas. Shaken by his narrow escape from what would have been the 9/11 of his day – Guy Fawkes’ plot to blow up Parliament (and most of Westminster) – James wrote a tract equating the Papacy with the Antichrist. He had it richly bound and distributed around Europe. It was Wotton’s job to deliver it to the Doge of Venice. Wotton had persuaded himself that the Venetians were ripe for conversion to Protestantism, and actually reported back with a straight face that his Majesty’s book had been gladly received. In fact the Doge ordered the book locked away and forgotten.
Wright often captures quite well the conditions under which ancient, medieval and early modern ambassadors operated, and provides some stirring accounts often in their own words, of their experiences. That said, this book’s weaknesses tend to outweigh its attractions. Wright profusely thanks his editors — he has no less than three of them. For what I am not sure, as they failed him badly. If his theme is indeed to portray ambassadors as discoverers and explorers, he does not stick to it but wanders into all sorts of digressions. Some interesting – in his account of the 18th century Swiss philosopher Vattel’s writings on the Law of Nations, you can see the thinking that culminated in the Vienna Convention. Others are irritating and only marginally relevant, such as, his overly-long-winded accounts of the origins of the 4th Crusade, and the Thirty Years War. Moreover the material is often poorly ordered, meandering around geographically and chronologically, with little apparent continuity. It’s hard sometimes to discern if indeed the book really does have a central theme or is just a collection of tales.
One would also have assumed that Wright’s editors’ duties would included some elementary proof-reading and factchecking, but no. The book is riddled with irritating factual errors, and frequently Wright makes a statement in one section which contradicts what he says elsewhere. Wright assumes the first Russian ambassador to England, who had the misfortune to be shipwrecked off Aberdeen, sailed from the Baltic. That should have taken him nowhere near Aberdeen. Another 150 years were to pass before Russia had an outlet to the Baltic. Ivan the Terrible’s relations with his neighbours being what they were – terrible — Russia’s only window to the West was Archangelsk on the White Sea. Wright places Baghdad on the Tagus River
– i.e. in Portugal. As anyone who watches the nightly news should have grasped by now, Baghdad actually lies on the Tigris. He refers to a Persian mission to China in the 8th century, no Persian state existed at that time — as Wright makes clear in a subsequent chapter when he mentions the 7th century Arab conquest of Persia. He speaks of 9th century Viking territorial gains in Moslem Spain. The Vikings carried out a couple of raids there, but never seized any territory. To say the Thirty Years War, which wiped out one-fifth of the population of Germany, cost “tens of thousands” of lives, seems a bit of an understatement.
While Wright is a professor of history, and provides an impressive bibliography and even a critical apparatus, his grasp of his material can be uneven, particularly when dealing with antiquity or the early Middle Ages. In his account of Priscus’ mission to Attila, Wright correctly perceives that Attila’s aim was not only to extort gold from the Romans but also to demonstrate his ability to overawe them. However, he misses the main Roman objective (which Priscus and Maximus achieved)
– buying time by dragging out the diplomatic process. The Romans knew, from long experience, that they could outlast any barbarian warlord’s attempt to build up a powerful confederation. Attila’s death a few years later proved the rightness of this course. In his treatment of Luitprand’s mission to Constantinople in 968, Wright breezes over the Byzantine Emperor Nicephoros’ insistence that only he could be legitimately be addressed as Emperor of’ the Romans as “absurd bickering about … royal titles.” It was not. A key element of East Roman foreign policy — one clearly enunciated in Constantine VII’s transition brief to his son Romanus II – was that the Byzantines should never allow a foreign ruler to assume that any sort of parity existed between himself and the Emperor of the Romans. Nicephoros was heir to an unbroken institutional tradition going back to Constantine, Augustus and indeed to Romulus and Remus. No such institutional continuity lay behind the claims of Luitprand’s master, Otto, to the Western Roman Empire, which had disappeared in 476. Otto’s objective was to demonstrate that his imperium was the equal to that of Constantinople, by gaining a marriage to an Imperial princess. That objective was not met, but one would hardly know that when reading Luitprand’s despatch. While Wright only imperfectly grasps the significance of the two Emperors’ respective positions, he does at least recognize Luitprand’s achievement in managing, nonetheless, to portray his mission as a success — of course that would never happen today, in Canada, in our foreign service.
In his treatment of the 13th century Western missions to the Mongols, Wright provides a good description of the journeys and experiences of Fr. Carpini and Fr. Rubruck. He notes their objectives of trying to learn more about the Mongols and avert a further Mongol attack on Europe, but he totally misses their key objective of trying to forge an alliance between the Mongols and the West against Islam. Likewise, when describing Raban Sauma’s mission from the Mongol court to Europe in the 1290s which shared this aim, Wright fails to mention the earlier alliance against Islam, formed in the 1250s, which had come to grief at Ayn Jalut.
Wright makes frequent forays into areas such as ancient and medieval history and foreign policy, which do not always seem well informed. His discourses on the Crusades are misleading, and while he has read the standard work on Venetian/ Byzantine relations, he seemingly fails to grasp their complexity. Wright correctly describes the early Islamic doctrine of holy war, under which there could be no peace between the Dar-el-Islam and the Dar-el- Harb — only temporary truces. However, he goes on to claim that the West in the 8th and 9th centuries had nothing to offer the Islamic world. This is not only contradicted by his earlier tale of Harun-ar-Rashid wooing Charlemagne with the gift of an elephant, but ignores the very vigorous commerce that had quickly grown up between Europe and the Islamic world, flooding Europe with Islamic coinage, in exchange for slaves, furs, grain, timber and high quality weapons. This trade was a major engine in the recovery of the European economy following the fall of the Roman Empire.
In sum, this book is a disappointment. With better editing and organization the material is here to write a good introduction to the history of diplomacy and the evolving role of the diplomat – but who allowed Wright to persist in using a word like “diplomatist”? That said, it’s not all that bad a book to take along, if you need to pass the time, say on that long cattle-class flight
– aboard an EU black-listed airline — to some grotty little country. You will soon be counting your blessings that you are not on some two-year journey into Central Asia, perched on a Mongol pony. bout de papier Vol.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2006) — Summer 2006 // Été 2006, pp. 5–7. Read the rest of this issue →
