The result of a 2016 conference, this volume of essays focuses on the role of non-state actors in diplomacy during the medieval and early modern periods. What emerges is a complex story of consuls, missionaries, and spies contributing to the diplomatic efforts of states even as they pursued other often unrelated and sometimes contradictory purposes. In the spirit of the New Diplomatic History that has taken root in recent decades, the contributions to this volume focus on the process of diplomacy as much as its outcomes and defines diplomacy much more broadly than the official acts of states and their resident ambassadors. States were one type of actor among many—cities, merchant groups, missionary orders, military entrepreneurs, and many others—that carried on their own forms of diplomacy and information gathering. Who constituted an official state actor was often unclear or disputed and various forms of representation also straddled the porous and ill-defined line between official and unofficial diplomacy.
The volume is organized into four parts. Part one problematizes the study of premodern diplomacy both in the context of the New Diplomatic History and premodern legal thinking on the official status of various diplomatic actors. The other three parts then focus in turn on consuls, missionaries, and spies pairing in each part a medieval and an early modern case study. A useful introduction situates the volume in current scholarship and explains its organization.
The two contributions in Part One: Theoretical Foundations provide the reader with broader perspectives through which to consider the case studies that follow. John Watkins offers a useful overview of recent scholarly trends in the field of diplomatic history and how these impact on our understanding of premodern diplomacy. This accessible essay orients the reader, and I am sure will become a starred entry on many undergraduate and graduate student reading lists. Dante Fedele’s examination of political and legal writings about diplomacy shows that while many sought to limit official diplomatic activity to ambassadors, their writings recognized a more complex situation when they debated whether many other actors—clergy, heralds, merchants, consuls, secret agents—who also played roles in diplomacy should receive official recognition.
Part Two explores the diplomatic roles played by consuls, that is representatives of merchant communities (nations) resident in foreign trading cities whose primary tasks included regulating disputes among community members and representing the community in its interactions with local authorities. Louis Sicking’s contribution focuses on the Scania peninsula in modern Sweden in the late Middle Ages when the herring fisheries just off its coast attracted merchant communities from trading towns across the region. This wide-ranging essay focuses on conflict management in this crowded landscape of foreign merchant communities casting light on relations between the consuls and Danish king and the disputed role of foreign rulers in the appointment of consuls. Maurits Ebben examines Dutch consuls based in Spain and appointed by the leading merchants of Amsterdam in the years after the Peace of Münster (1648). While these consuls lacked diplomatic status, Ebben shows they still contributed to Dutch diplomacy by providing valuable intelligence and seeking to influence government policy back home.
Focus shifts to missionaries in Part Three. Jacque Paviot reexamines the thirteenth-century missions of mendicant friars in the Mongol Empire focusing on their role as information gatherers and the cultural differences concerning the rules of diplomacy that caused the Mongols to view the friars as mere messengers and not envoys. In another point of cultural dispute, Paviot identified the symbolic gestures of diplomacy as a fraught flashpoint for tensions. Of particular interest to readers of this journal will be Felicia Roşu’s examination of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino’s role as papal mediator between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and his efforts to arbitrate a territorial dispute between the Habsburg Emperor Rudolf ii and Poland-Lithuania. Roşu convincingly shows how Possevino did his best to align his role as an unofficial mediator with his own political and religious priorities with mixed results. A real strength of Roşu’s study is her explicit efforts to examine Possevino’s activities through the lens of the New Diplomatic History, offering insights that can be applied to Jesuit diplomats and envoys more generally.
Finally, in Part Four, Jean-Baptiste Santamaria and Alan Marshall direct our attention to the secretive world of espionage and its relationship to diplomacy. Santamaria’s focus on late-medieval Burgundy unmasks a world of part time spies, where diplomacy and spying often merged in transnational networks—noble, urban, ecclesiastical—defined by fluid and changeable loyalties. “When those networks are useful” reflected Santamaria “they are part of diplomacy; when they prove to be ineffective or dangerous or are used by enemies, they are considered as treason and espionage” (178). Marshall then shifts our attention to the seventeenth-century free-lance spying economy through a study of two Irish brothers Richard and Igantius White who combined military contracting with selling intelligence information while operating in England, France, and Spain. Their shifting purposes and loyalties led their employers to distrust and even arrest them, yet the information that they had to offer remained tempting enough for governments to continue to employ their services.
More than the sum of its parts, this volume is tied together by two themes that are sustained across the essays and parts. First, the reader gains an appreciation of the sheer variety of premodern actors who straddled in various ways the ill-defined boundary between state and non-state diplomatic activities. Second, the pairing of medieval and early modern contributions breaks down the artificial barriers between the study of diplomacy in these two periods casting light on both the similarities and the differences in international relations between about 1200 and 1650. A conclusion or epilogue might have helped the reader engage further with these overarching themes, but this is a minor quibble and should not detract from a volume that brings together a well-balanced collection of fresh scholarship at the cutting edge of the field.
Beyond pre-modern history, the volume also provides food for thought on whether the formal diplomacy between nation-state actors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is as natural or as normative as it has come to be seen. Perhaps the declining importance of the nation-state in Europe and the new opportunities for non-state actors like non-governmental organizations to participate in diplomacy during the digital age point to a greater role for non-state actors in the future. If so, then the study of non-state actors in pre-modern diplomacy may offer lessons for the twenty-first century.
