This collection comes out of a conference that met at the University of Lausanne in December 2009. It is concerned primarily with Switzerland as an arena of diplomatic activity for other European states in the late medieval and early modern periods. As the title of the volume suggests, the focus here is on personnel, on the individuals who served, their identity and their cursi honorum, rather than on policy and high politics. In pursuing this broadly prosopographical approach, the contributors display particular interest in the process by which men were chosen for diplomatic service and how they and their families benefited from it. The studies here cover a very long chronological expanse, stretching from the early fifteenth century through to the French Revolution, a stretch of time given unity by the general focus on the affairs of the Swiss lands, and by the oft-repeated contention of the editors and contributors that the early modern period saw at best proto-professionalization among those serving as diplomats--the transition to a genuinely professional diplomatic corps in Europe would have to wait until the nineteenth century.
It is a slightly peculiar collection of essays. The editors seek to situate them amid the "new" diplomatic history of the past decade or so, but in truth the essays here are reasonably traditional in their historiography. That is not meant as a criticism, because these studies do tell us considerably more than we previously knew about diplomats and diplomacy in the Swiss Confederation. All but three of the contributions center on Switzerland, and all but two are explicitly concerned with the representatives of non-Swiss states stationed within the Confederation. Despite the importance of Switzerland in the matters of the immediate neighborhood (Savoy, France, the Duchy of Milan), there is no escaping the impression that the Swiss lands were a political backwater, and this was reflected in a number of ways. The sovereigns of Europe did not send men of high rank or importance to represent them in Switzerland, nor was an embassy to the Confederation considered a plum assignment. What is more, the employment of resident ambassadors and the dedication of significant bureaucratic resources to constant diplomatic activity that became prevalent elsewhere in early modern Europe appear to have been altogether absent in the Swiss milieu. For those who were sent to Switzerland, there was a distinct sense that they were being sent to a backward and even exotic locale, with ambassadors complaining of the region's peculiar political customs, its perceived corruption, and its unfamiliarity with the conventions of diplomacy. It is telling, for example, than none of the studies here examine the diplomacy of the Confederation or of individual cantons abroad--the Swiss do not appear to have dedicated resources to such activity.
After a cursory introduction by the editors, Jean-Marie Moeglin offers a synthesis of recent scholarship on the role of envoys and ambassadors in late medieval diplomacy, emphasizing the gradual emergence of residency and the increased importance placed on diplomatic representation as courts became sedentary and face-to-face meetings between monarchs became rare. Eva Pibiri examines the ambassadors sent to Berne by the Dukes of Savoy in the fifteenth century, focusing on a small number of representative cases. Aureliano Martini looks at the figure of Antonio da Besana, a former podestà of Bellinzona chosen by Duke Francesco Sforza to be the Milanese ambassador in Luzern. It was a difficult assignment, given the prickly relations of the Duchy with its Swiss neighbors, the quarrels between the various cantons, and the cultural differences between the Italian and Swiss cultural milieus. Klara Hübner's contribution focuses not on ambassadors but rather on the auxiliary personnel who accompanied missions to the towns of the Swiss Confederation in the fifteenth century. Ambassadors in the Confederation engaged in "interior" diplomacy between the various constituent members, as well as "external" diplomacy to European courts, and the personnel that traveled with them differed accordingly, from Läufer (who traveled on foot) to Stadtknechte. Guillaume Poisson looks at the Swiss subjects who served as translators and secretaries for the French ambassadors at Solothurn in the seventeenth century, roles that came to be monopolized by a small number of families. Claire-Marie Domenech contributes a short entry on the protocol surrounding a visit of Swiss ambassadors to the court of Louis XIV in 1663, making use of a tapestry depicting the event. Andreas Behr shoes how the Lombard Casati family came to dominate the diplomatic representation of the Spanish crown in Switzerland in the seventeenth century. In the only English-language essay in the volume, Christopher Storrs examines the men who served as diplomats for the British kings in the eighteenth century. He confirms the suspicion that Switzerland was, both for the crown and for the men sent there, a relatively unimportant posting that most envoys regarded as a stepping stone to more important and rewarding assignments. The subject of Fabrice Brandli's contribution is the residence of French ambassadors in Geneva from 1679 until the annexation of Geneva by France in 1798. Geneva was not an upper-echelon posting in the French diplomatic and service and the monarchy's representatives in Geneva tended to reflect the commercial orientation of the Genevan city-state. But this did not stop them from trading in crude anti-Semitic stereotypes about Geneva as populated by underhanded traders and financiers.
An additional two essays are outliers in that they do not deal directly with Swiss affairs. Anne-Brigitte Spitzbarth offers a systematic look at the men chosen for diplomatic service by Philip the Good of Burgundy. Philip selected a combination of generalists and men with expertise in a particular region or competency, and paid heed to both the skill and the social status of the men in question. Antonio Trampus considers Venetian diplomacy in the Republic's period of decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the process by which embassies were converted into consulates and the studied neutrality of Venice rendered her little more than a diplomatic observer.
Finally, by way of conclusion, Christian Windler seeks to tie together some of the disparate lines of analysis pursued in these essays, stressing once more that in the period covered by this collection we do not yet see diplomatic professionalism and that the rewards for diplomatic service were often realized by patronage rather than in immediate remuneration.
A recurring theme of this collection is the great diversity of people involved in diplomatic representation. The focus of the studies here goes beyond those who might strictly be considered "diplomats" to include translators, secretaries and "auxiliary personnel." The broad category of activities that might be considered "diplomatic" in nature were carried out by a highly varied array of individuals. Of course, as the editors' introduction stresses, the terms "diplomacy" and "diplomat" had not yet been coined in the period under consideration here and thus bringing the diplomat into question, as these essays do, requires that the historian engage in a degree of creative anachronism. A number of realities of the ancient regime are brought into relief in the course of the volume: the significant regional cultural differences (especially between Swiss lands and other European states), the pervasive importance of social hierarchy in diplomatic representation and protocol, the enduring importance of loyal service to the prince and patronage networks in personal advancement, and the universally incomplete development of the absolutist state and early modern understandings of sovereignty. Taken together, this volume is an interesting and varied collection that testifies to the great range of diplomatic activity in the early modern period, but also one, due to the small scale and relative unimportance of diplomacy in Switzerland (conceded repeatedly in these pages), that might have limited application to the broader history of the conduct of foreign affairs in early modern Europe.