The Ambassadors
From Ancient Greece to the Nation State
Jonathan Wright

In memory of my father, William Noel Wright

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

INTRODUCTION

THE ANCIENT WORLD

CHAPTER I ‘Glorious Hermes, Herald of the Deathless Gods’

CHAPTER II Greeks and Indika

CHAPTER III A Sanskrit Machiavelli

CHAPTER IV The Son of Heaven

THE MIDDLE CENTURIES

CHAPTER V Charlemagne’s Elephant

CHAPTER VI Byzantium

MEDIEVAL

CHAPTER VII The Crown of Thorns

CHAPTER VIII A Rooftop in Naples: Europe and the Mongols

CHAPTER IX The New Diplomacy

RENAISSANCE

CHAPTER X Reformation

CHAPTER XI Schisms

CHAPTER XII ‘An Iliad of Miseries’: Europe and the Ottomans

TOWARDS THE ENLIGHTENMENT

CHAPTER XIII Wotton versus Sherley

CHAPTER XIV The Physics of Diplomacy

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Irksome as they were, the misadventure of Iosip Grigor’yevich Nepea did not really bear comparison with the very worst moments in the chaotic history of diplomacy. Nepea, a Russian ambassador to the English court of Mary Tudor, was not slain by an Iroquois hatchet (which is what happened to a French envoy in North America in 1646), nor was his hat nailed to his head (the fate of Turkish ambassadors to Vlad the Impaler in the fifteenth century). Nonetheless, his sea voyage from Russia in 1556 was riddled with bad fortune.

‘Contrary winds and extreme tempests of weather’ separated the ships in his convoy soon after their departure from the port of St Nicholas. One crashed into rocks off the Scandinavian coast, while another was forced to put ashore and winter in Norway. His own ship drifted ever northwards and, on 7 November 1556, it was smashed to pieces at Pitsligo Bay in Aberdeenshire. The ambassador survived but he was given a boorish reception by the local Scottish inhabitants. His entire cargo ‘was by the rude and ravenous people of the country thereunto adjoining, rifled [and] spoiled’. When news of the disaster reached the English court, two men, Lawrence Hussie and George Gilpin, were charged with locating the ambassador and escorting him to London.

They found Nepea in Edinburgh on 20 December and immediately arranged for heralds to be sent to the site of the shipwreck. It was hoped that they might persuade the locals to return the plundered goods, but they met with little success. A great deal of wax was turned in, but there was no trace of the falcon, the jewels, or the ‘twenty entire sables, exceeding beautiful, with teeth, ears and claws’ that Nepea had intended to present to the queen.

The ambassador travelled south, and late in February 1557 he approached the English capital. Finally, after months of hardship, a moment of pageantry more befitting his ambassadorial rank was in prospect. A London draper, John Dimmock, witnessed the spectacle of Nepea’s entry into the city. Twelve miles outside the city walls, Dimmock remembered, the ambassador was greeted by eighty eminent merchants, all sporting gold chains. With their liveried servants in tow, they escorted Nepea to a house four miles further down the London road and showered him with gifts of gold, velvet and silk.

The next morning, after taking in a local fox hunt, he was led into town. He was greeted by the eminent Catholic nobleman Viscount Montague, ‘diverse lusty knights, esquires, gentlemen and yeomen’, and another delegation of merchants who presented him with a ‘footcloth of Orient crimson velvet, enriched with gold laces’. They proffered a horse, which Nepea duly mounted and rode to Smithfield, where he was received by the mayor and his aldermen, all dressed in scarlet. With ‘people running plentifully on all sides’, they rode together towards the ambassador’s well-appointed lodgings in Fenchurch Street.

There were many visitors to these ‘richly hanged and decked’ rooms over the next three months. Bishops and government ministers called for ‘secret talks and conferences’, and London society was regularly to be seen ‘feasting and banqueting him right friendly’. Nepea was shown ‘the most notable and commendable sights’ in the capital, from St Paul’s, to the Guildhall, to the Tower of London. On 25 March he was finally granted an audience with Queen Mary and her husband, Philip II of Spain, at Westminster. After meeting the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Privy Seal, Nepea presented their majesties with the few sables he had managed to salvage from the shipwreck, and read the letter of greeting sent by his master, Ivan IV.

After enjoying a ‘notable supper garnished with music’ arranged by the city’s merchants on 28 April, Nepea began to prepare for his homeward journey. On 3 May, ‘after many embracements and diverse farewells, not without expressing of tears’, he set sail aboard the Primrose Admiral, headed for Gravesend. He carried with him ‘certain letters tenderly conceived’ from the king and queen, and a fine haul of gifts: for himself, a gold chain and some gilt flagons; for the tsar, scarlet, violet, and azure cloth, and a male and female lion. Of inestimably greater value were the tales he took home and the impression he left behind.¹

Throughout history, ambassadors would be in the vanguard of cultural discovery, and Nepea’s visit to London was a defining moment in England’s relationship with Russia. He was an extraordinarily unusual visitor, and it is unlikely that many, if any, of the people who lined the streets of London on that day in February 1557 had so much as seen a Russian before. There had been a time when the kingdom of Rus, centred on the old capital of Kiev, had enjoyed thriving cultural, economic and dynastic links with Europe. However, with the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century (a catastrophe to which we will return), sustained, meaningful contact between Russia and the West had been all but lost.

Then, in 1480, Tsar Ivan III pronounced Muscovy’s independence from its now much-weakened Mongol overlords, secured a prestigious marriage to the daughter of the Byzantine emperor, and set about expanding his kingdom’s territories. Novgorod was taken in 1478, Pskov in 1510, and the city of Smolensk was seized from Lithuania four years later. From the end of the fifteenth century Russian envoys began appearing regularly in Europe, and Italian architects travelled east to ply their trade, but England was slow to emulate such encounters.

Finally, in the early 1550s, adventurers such as Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor began the search for a north-east land route, via Russia, to the riches of Asia. With an eye to seeking out new markets for English cloth, a group of aristocrats and merchants funded an expedition in 1553, with Chancellor serving as the voyage’s pilot-general. His ship was separated from the rest of the convoy and arrived at the Baltic port of St Nicholas towards the end of August. He travelled south, and after a few weeks reached the tsar’s court in Moscow. Ivan was asked if he would allow Englishmen to ‘go and come…to frequent free marts with all sorts of merchandise, and upon the same to have wares for their return.’ The tsar agreed and in 1555, after Chancellor’s return to England, Queen Mary granted a royal charter to the Muscovy Company.²

That May, Chancellor once more embarked for Moscow, carrying letters of trading privilege for the tsar’s signature. His companion on his homeward journey was none other than Iosip Nepea. When the ambassador’s ship crashed into the rocks in Pitsligo Bay, Chancellor perished trying to save the lives of Nepea and his entourage. Consolidating economic ties was the very purpose of Nepea’s embassy to London, but there was far more to be gained, cultivated and experienced from the exertions of ambassadors than commercial aggrandizement. They would also furnish that most precious of ambassadorial commodities: observations and descriptions of places that few, if any, of their countrymen were ever likely to visit.

Over the course of millennia, from the cuneiform civilizations of the ancient near east to the empires of the modern era, it has been the ambassadors who have allowed the world to meet itself. They would embark on missions of faith and trade, of politics and love, but wherever they journeyed they would as likely as not report back on everything – the moralities and the myths, the plants and the animals, the fashions and the foods – they encountered.

In the 200 years after Nepea’s embassy, dozens of ambassadors would shuttle back and forth between the two countries. One of them was Giles Fletcher, who began his embassy to Moscow in 1588. His ‘cosmographical description’ of the country was unsurpassed in its breadth and detail for almost two centuries. Fletcher painstakingly catalogued the humdrum – ‘the length and breadth of the country…the names of the shires’, the rivers and lakes. He noted the times when different plants were sown, offered a digest of Russian history, itemized the country’s chief exports (furs, tallow, honey, iron and salt), and commented on Russian costume and diet (a penchant for apples, peas, cherries and cucumbers). It is difficult for us to appreciate just how revelatory the accurate reporting of such basic information was to Tudor England.

Fletcher, like so many future visitors, was perhaps most taken by Russia’s changeable climate. In winter, he recounted, people were wary of holding a pewter dish lest their fingers froze against it. The sight of frozen corpses in sleds was commonplace, and many unlucky individuals ‘lose their noses, the tips of their ears, and the balls of their cheeks’. In especially hard winters ‘the bears and wolves issue by troops out of the woods, driven by hunger, and enter the villages, tearing and ravening all they can find, so that the inhabitants are fain to fly for safeguard of their lives.’ Yet summer would bring a new face to the woods. Everything was ‘so fresh and so sweet, the pastures and meadows so green and well grown…such variety of flowers, such noise of birds…that a man shall not lightly travel in a more pleasant country’.

The owls were uglier than in England; the soldiers did not march nearly so well; the nation’s religion was mired in superstition, although the concentration of political power in the hands of the tsar was a marvel to behold. Russia, Fletcher concluded, was, by turns, baffling, beautiful and bizarre.³

Of course, ambassadors like Fletcher and Nepea rarely travelled out of sport or fascination (though a few indubitably did). Kings and queens hardly ever recruited them out of some benign commitment to enhancing the wealth of human knowledge. They were usually sent, out of naked self-interest, to do their society’s bidding. Often, they were greeted with fear, as the embodiment of an alien civilization. Their accounts could be flawed, sometimes mired in prejudice. Descriptions such as Giles Fletcher’s portrait of Muscovy were always imperfect. Amidst measured descriptions of flora and fauna, there would be diatribes against Russian drunkenness, cruelty and poor hygiene.

Imperfect observations were better than no descriptions at all, however. Moreover, the forging of a crass, unfair stereotype was every bit as important to the interplay of cultures as a dispassionate survey of a nation’s topography or diet. There would be moments of misunderstanding and embarrassment, but there would be just as many of clarity and insight. Through the efforts of ambassadors, civilizations would compare and contrast one another, prejudices and affinities would emerge, admiration or loathing would result. A staggering array of ideas and commodities – from coffee to perspective painting, from fashion trends to Galilean astronomy, from tulips to the theories of Ptolemy – would be exchanged.

Isolated, exotic individuals that they often were, ambassadors rarely failed to make an impression on their hosts. Whether monks or noblemen, whether surgeons or Renaissance poets, such ambassadors carried the enormous burden of representing their entire culture. To Tudor England in 1557, Iosip Nepea was Russia. To Russia in 1588, Giles Fletcher was Tudor England. It was through their deeds and misdeeds that one society began to fashion an understanding of another.

In 1637, another unlikely ambassador journeyed to England. Jaurar Ben Abdella had been born in Portugal. Abducted as a child and sold into slavery, he had been taken to Morocco and, after ‘the manner of those nations,’ had been ‘distesticled, or eunuch’d’. Happily, he had won favour with the emperor and become one of his most trusted counsellors. When he arrived in London as the Moroccan emperor’s envoy, the writer George Glover took a moment to reflect on the benefits of such traffic between nations. It was good for trade, he quickly suggested, and it ‘conserves and makes peace, love and amity with princes and potentates, though they are far remote from each other’. But it also ‘acquaints each nation with the language, manners, behaviour, customs and carriage of one another.’ ‘By these means, men are made capable of understanding and knowledge, and therefore prefer knowledge before wealth and riches, for the one soon fades, the other abides forever.’⁴

Glover, hopelessly idealistic as he might sound, was entirely correct. By the time Iosip Nepea arrived in London in February 1557 there had been sixty centuries of ambassadorial endeavour. He was heir to the vibrant, neglected tradition that is the subject of this book.

The book has a very simple purpose: to demonstrate just how influential ambassadors have been in the encounters, collisions and rivalries between the world’s disparate civilizations.

Negotiating a path through the history of the ambassadors is an awkward task, so it may prove helpful here to briefly map out our itinerary. To help find our bearings, we have quite deliberately begun close to the end of the story, in the relatively familiar world of Tudor England, with the journey of an ambassador who bears at least a passing resemblance to the diplomat of the modern world. As well as recounting the momentous cultural contributions of ambassadors, the book also examines how the business of embassy – the rituals and the protocols, the problems and the purposes – reached this point. How did issues such as diplomatic immunity, diplomatic precedence or diplomatic gift-giving develop? How did societies decide what qualities an ideal ambassador ought to possess?

The book is divided into five sections, progressing from ancient Greece to the European Enlightenment, each of which represents an extended historical moment to be explored. The first section, concerned with the ancient world, turns its gaze towards ambassadorial endeavour and its repercussions in classical Athens, Mauryan India and Han dynasty China – three of the storm-centres of diplomacy from the fourth to the first century BC. There are journeys that put Iosip Nepea’s to shame, and shifts in the political tectonics of the world, but there are also insights into the humdrum detail of the ancient ambassador’s lot and the less than edifying spectacle of one such ambassador fighting for his professional life.

The next section moves us forward to the ninth century AD – one of the high water marks of diplomatic history – and takes the Byzantine Empire, the early Islamic caliphates and the emperor Charlemagne as its points of departure. The places where diplomacy thrived, the crucibles of ambassadorial endeavour, had a habit of also being the most important places in the world at any given time, and the history of the ambassadors maps out their rise, fall and vicissitudes.

The next sections visit the Middle Ages – homing in on the ambassadorial adventures provoked by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century and the rise of the ‘new diplomacy’ in fifteenth-century Italy – and the religious upheavals and worldwide explorations of the sixteenth century. A final section brings us to the dawn of the modern ambassadorial age in the period of the European Enlightenment.

What follows is a sketch of that vast history, and nothing more. It is a sketch that takes the European experience of diplomacy as its principal focus: a sketch that takes the very term ambassador (a late medieval invention) in its broadest sense. Here, we aim for the marrow of the ambassadors’ history, for the resonances and the fractures, for the things that remained the same and those that shifted – for the texture. That, and accounts of some of the most extraordinary episodes in human history.

If that is the structure, what is the purpose? To repeat, all that is really aimed at is a demonstration of the vital, very often surprising, role that ambassadors have played in the encounters between civilizations. They offer a prism through which some of the grander themes of history – shifting world-views, awakenings and reawakenings of cultural knowledge, the agonizing choices that polities habitually face between isolation and engagement – can be explored.

The ambassadorial tradition is more ancient and various than is sometimes supposed. It is almost unfeasibly diverse. Embassy was about cultural encounter, and it would sometimes be wondrous. But it could just as easily be appalling, as when Hernando Cortés, posing as an ambassador, set about the destruction of Aztec civilization. Embassy brought peace, but it was often little more than the prelude to war or political takeover.

Those same Aztecs usually only sent out ambassadors in order to threaten their neighbours. First, they would demand the payment of tribute and the erection of a statue of one of their gods in the local temple. If their advances were still being rebuffed after twenty days, more ambassadors would arrive, talking of the unhappy consequences of resistance and, to show how little they feared military engagement, providing their hosts with weapons. After another twenty days, a final party of ambassadors arrived, assuring their hosts that, very soon, their temple would be levelled and their entire population enslaved: a promise the Aztecs were especially good at keeping.

Embassy brought gifts but then, even in the guise of gifts, it also brought threats and insults. When rumours spread that an Ottoman sultan lacked the wherewithal to complete the erection of a new mosque, the shah of Persia mischievously sent him chests of rubies and emeralds. This was not done out of generosity, but to sneer at the sultan’s predicament. The sultan, fully understanding that an insult was intended, ordered the gems to be ground up and added to the mortar being used to build the mosque.

Embassy would forge marriages and alliances but it sometimes left humiliated victims in its wake. In 1160 the Byzantine emperor Manuel was looking for new wife, and envoys were sent out to peruse the likely candidates. One of them, Melisend, the sister of Raymond III, count of Tripoli, had grown excited at the prospect of so prestigious a match. In truth, she had been kept in reserve in case a more suitable alliance with the ruler of Antioch failed to materialize. The ambassadors who had recently seen ‘the girl and admired her beauty’ suddenly changed tack and abandoned negotiations when news arrived that the Antioch marriage had been confirmed.

The Byzantine chroniclers simply invented a story to conceal this rather disreputable episode of diplomatic matchmaking. ‘Severe illnesses beset the girl,’ the chronicles report, ‘and she was in serious danger…her body shuddered and shook extremely…The radiance of her appearance, which previously gleamed beautifully, was shortly altered and darkened. Seeing her, our eyes filled with tears at such a withered meadow.’ It was an utter fiction. Melisend had undergone no such transformations; she had merely, and on a sudden, been supplanted in the emperor’s affections.⁵

Sometimes embassy was spectacular. In 1162 that same Byzantine emperor received an ambassador in Constantinople ‘with magnificent banquets…charmed him with horse races, and according to custom set alight some boats and skiffs with liquid fire and absolutely gorged the man with spectacles in the hippodrome’.⁶ Sometimes it was dull, or even became a chore. The Venetian nobility were in the habit of retreating to their villas on the island of Murano whenever a new ambassador was about to be appointed.

The ritual was often splendid, but diplomatic dignity was just as often dispensed with. The Renaissance monarch Francis I was in the habit of accompanying visiting ambassadors on a horseback journey through the streets of Paris where he set about pelting his subjects with eggs and rocks.⁷ The history of the ambassadors was ultimately about this balance between the impressive and the mundane, the triumphs and the disasters.

It might also be assumed that the history of the ambassadors is one of ever-evolving sophistication and complexity, culminating in the clockwork diplomacy of the modern world. It would be an arrogant assumption to make. Almost every society that has opted to investigate rather than to shun the rest of the world has mounted the same debates about what qualities a good ambassador ought to possess, about the elaborate rules and rituals of encounter. They have faced the same tensions between suspicion of the outside world and an urge to confront it; between behaving decorously towards other peoples and making sure to assert their cultural superiority.

Among the oldest surviving written records of diplomacy are the Amarna letters, several hundred clay tablets discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. Their faded cuneiform inscriptions record the relations between the rulers of Egypt and the greater and lesser kingdoms of the ancient Near East – Babylon, Assyria, and the rest – during the fourteenth century BC.

The letters show kings despatching ambassadors to complain about their fellow rulers’ use of disrespectful language, about the failure to send envoys to enquire about their health. When the merchants of one king are robbed and killed by the subjects of another, swift justice is demanded: the culprits are to be bound and returned with the money they have stolen; and the murderers are to be executed. If such measures are not taken, future travellers, ambassadors included, will be at risk, which threatens to bring diplomatic relations between the two kingdoms to an abrupt end. Nor are insults to the royal dignity any more likely to improve diplomatic relations: one ruler is utterly devastated when his brother’s name is mentioned before his own on a tablet.

One monarch suggests to another that, if he is going to take the trouble to send him gold, then it might as well be of a decent quality and in the same quantities as his father used to supply. A letter from the Cypriot kingdom of Alasiya warns the Egyptian king not to complain about receiving insufficient levies of copper. As a matter of fact, so prodigious an effort has been made that there is not a copper-worker left alive on the entire island, and suitable gifts are expected in recompense – namely, silver, sweet oil, an ox and a specialist in eagle omens.⁸

The Amarna letters reveal a consummate understanding of the value and vagaries of diplomacy. The motivations that would so often inspire ambassadors’ missions – the fostering of trade, the payment of tribute, the search for alliances, the scolding of rivals – are all present, as are the pride, rivalry and petulance without which human diplomacy would be unrecognizable. Perhaps the story of the ambassadors provides an antidote to that thriving modern disease: the assumption that the past is either a quaint curiosity or an inevitable route-march to the present.

This, then, is a book of journeys, a book about the individuals who, far more tangibly than any impersonal force of history, wrote the human story: the individuals who did as much as any conqueror, merchant, scholar or circumnavigating adventurer to help the world understand itself. Sometimes ambassadors would travel absurd distances, as did the thirteenth-century monks who trekked from Peking to Paris and from Flanders to the Asian steppe. Sometimes they journeyed no further than the nearest Greek city-state, or from one Renaissance court to another. They could be vile, snobbish and stupid, or they could be astute, sympathetic and wise, but, throughout all their missions, ambassadors were an inevitable facet of human history – offering an obvious way for squabbling rivals, potential allies and scattered civilizations to meet.

Ultimately, this book is a sampler of ambassadorial endeavour. A few decades after Iosip Nepea’s mission to London, the otherwise unremarkable Francis Thynne pondered the meandering history of diplomacy. Perhaps weary of his culture’s obsession with all things classical, he devoted a chapter of his book about the perfect ambassador to proving that ‘other nations besides the Romans used ambassadors’. Therein, he calculated that ‘the best kind of persuasion’, the sort that allows us ‘to square our life, either in following virtue or avoiding vice…is to be drawn from the examples of others’. Thynne’s preachifying is best avoided, but his method was sound: ‘I will at this time set down the confirmation of the several matters belonging to ambassadors by examples, with short abridgement, drawn out of many histories.’⁹ As credos go, it serves.

THE ANCIENT WORLD

CHAPTER I ‘Glorious Hermes, Herald of the Deathless Gods’
i. The World of Greek Diplomacy

I swear by Zeus, Gê, Helios, Poseidon, Athena, Ares and all the gods and goddesses. I shall abide in peace and I shall not infringe the treaty with Philip of Macedon. Neither by land nor by sea shall I bear arms with injurious intent against any party which abides by the oath, and I shall refrain from the capture by any device or stratagem of any city, fortification or harbour of the parties who abide by the Peace. I shall not subvert the monarchy of Philip and his successors…If anyone perpetrates any act in contravention of the terms of the agreement I shall render assistance accordingly as the wronged party may request and I shall make war upon him who contravenes the Common Peace…and I shall not fall short.

The oath of the Greek city states when joining

the League of Corinth, 338 BC¹

In the eleventh century BC, during the reign of Ramesses XI, an Egyptian envoy named Wen Amun travelled to Lebanon to buy timber for the sacred barque of the god Amun-re. Much like Iosip Nepea, his journey was plagued with bad fortune. At the port of Dor in the Nile delta he was robbed of all his money, although he quickly made good his loss by seizing an equivalent quantity of silver on board a ship bound for the Syrian port of Byblos.

The prince of Byblos was distinctly unimpressed by the arrival of an Egyptian envoy. He lacked written credentials, he had brought no gifts, so there was little incentive to provide him with precious timber. Wen Amun sent word to his superiors and they quickly despatched four jars of gold, five jars of silver, five hundred ox-hides, twenty sacks of lentils and thirty baskets of fish. The gambit was successful, and Wen Amun purchased his timber from a suddenly much more amenable ruler.

Just before departing from Byblos, the men from whom Wen Amun had seized the silver arrived at court demanding justice. The prince took the night to mull over the envoy’s fate, though he was sure to treat Wen Amun courteously during his temporary captivity – providing him with wine, food and an Egyptian singer. The following morning the prince announced that, wince Wen Amun was an official envoy, he was immune from arrest.

Wen Amun embarked upon his homeward journey only to encounter a storm that forced him to put ashore on Cyprus. The startled local people were intent on massacring the envoy and his crew, but Wen Amun begged for the right to plead for his life with the local princess, Hatiba. Mercifully, one of the locals could speak Egyptian, and he set about translating the envoy’s threatening words. Wen Amun insisted upon his ambassadorial immunity, and warned the princess that killing a Byblian crew would be a calamitous error of judgement. If she killed his crew, the ruler of Byblos would hunt down and kill ten of hers. Once again, Wen Amun skirted disaster and continued on his trek home.

His story is exceptional – a detailed ambassadorial adventure that just happened to survive on a roll of Egyptian papyrus. The sources are rarely so generous. In the centuries since the Amarna period, the work of envoys, messengers and ambassadors had continued, just as it always would. All of the civilizations of the ancient world – whether Vedic India, the Cretan Minoans and the Greek Mycenaeans of the Mediterranean, the Assyrians and Babylonians of the Near East, or the tribes of Bronze Age Europe – had need of envoys. They fostered trade, brokered alliances, carried tribute, and the rest. But, almost without exception, they did so locally, with immediate or none-too-distant neighbours. The era of the continent-traversing ambassador had not yet dawned.

Across much of Eurasia, however, the second half of the first millennium BC can be understood as an era of consolidation. The first great, stable Chinese empires were emerging, coming to dominate the politics of East Asia. In India, by the fourth century BC, the first empire to genuinely hold sway across much of the subcontinent had appeared. In the Near East the bridge between the two continents, the Assyrian empire, had fallen at the end of the seventh century BC, to be replaced by a series of redoubtable Persian empires – the Achaemenids, the Parthians and finally, in the first centuries AD, the Sassanids. The links between these civilizations were fragile, their knowledge of one another limited – but this was soon to change. As in much else, Greece led the way.

Hermes, lover of Persephone and Aphrodite, protector of Perseus and Hercules, was the father of all ambassadors. God of gambling, trade and profit, he traversed the earth like a breath of wind, carrying Zeus’s messages, shepherding all travellers, escorting souls to the underworld. He would announce the weddings of the gods and execute their punishments, binding fire-thieving Prometheus to Mount Caucasus with iron spikes. He would visit all the communities of man to offer rewards for the return of Psyche, Aphrodite’s errant handmaiden: ‘seven sweet kisses’ from the goddess herself ‘and a particularly honeyed one imparted with the thrust of her caressing tongue’. Ancient heralds, aspiring to his eloquence and cunning, would claim to be his offspring. They would carry his caduceus, his serpent-entwined staff, and it would grant them safe passage. Earnest and yet mischievous – stealing Apollo’s cattle on the very day he was born – Hermes was to be the ambassadors’ archetype and paragon.²

The caprices of diplomacy in classical Greece often demanded the talents of a Hermes. In southern Europe, Greece had enjoyed something of a resurgence from as early as the eighth century BC. New cities had sprung up, literacy and architecture had blossomed; colonies had been established throughout the Mediterranean, as well as along the coasts of North Africa and the Black Sea. Political life was rooted in the polis, the proud, fiercely independent city state. There was much that united the hundreds of communities across the Greek world – ties of religion, of kinship and, above all, of language – but there was just as much that divided them. The mightiest states – Athens, Corinth, Thebes and Sparta – were inevitable rivals, and while ancient Greece was not quite a theatre of constant war (as is sometimes supposed) it was most certainly a place of shifting leagues, squabbles and intrigue. The states were often willing to unite in the face of a common enemy – most often the Persian Empire – but diplomacy was just as likely to be concerned with territorial disputes, jurisdictional squabbles or cultural rivalry. It was fertile soil for the exploits of ambassadors. As so often, political rivalries and tensions provided the spark for diplomatic endeavour.

In the fifth century BC, Athens had led resistance to the threat of Persian invasion and won famous victories at Marathon (490) and Salamis (480). She could now claim not only cultural superiority (it was the age of Euripides and Sophocles) but ever-expanding dominion. Her leaders could be boastful. Pericles (495–429 BC) declared: ‘Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer…for our adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every land; and everywhere we have left behind us everlasting memorials of good done to our friends, and of suffering inflicted on our enemies.’³ Here was a rare example of a politician’s swagger being both justified and prescient.

Athenian hegemony was offensive to her rivals. One of the sacred tasks of Greek diplomacy had always been to prevent any one city from becoming unduly powerful. While the comparison may be clumsy and anachronistic, the situation bore some resemblance to that of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Europe, when nations began to strive for a balance of power. Just as the great European states would frown at the pugnacity of Louis XIV’s France so, centuries earlier, the Greeks had acted upon their resentment of Athens and, led by the Spartans, inaugurated the great Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). By its end, Athens’ dominance had been shattered and her empire all but dismantled. The city states of Greece embarked upon yet more decades of destructive feuding, marked by periods of Spartan and then Theban dominance, but most of all by political chaos.

To the north, in 359 BC, Philip II ascended to the throne of Macedon. With consummate timing (peppered with bribery and assassination) he set about spreading Macedonian influence across a confused, divided Greece, conquering lands and amassing tributaries (many of them former Athenian allies). It was now the turn of Athens to grumble at the rise of an overambitious rival, and it fell to Demosthenes, the greatest orator of antiquity, to articulate his city’s mounting trepidation.

In a speech before the senate in 351 BC, Demosthenes lambasted the arrogance of Philip II, and the indolence of the Athenians who sat inactive as Philip was ‘casting his net around us’. He was now ‘drunk with the magnitude of his achievements and dreams of further triumphs when, elated by his success, he sees that there is none to bar his way’.

Demosthenes had a simple solution: Athens should recall its glorious past, cast off the marks of infamy and cowardice and raise new and mightier armies to fend off the Macedonian assault.⁴ Many of his fellow Athenians were less hawkish. They thought it wiser to negotiate with Philip, and so it was that Demosthenes found himself a reluctant member of an embassy to Macedonia in 346 BC.

Athenian diplomacy was remarkably transparent. Tactics were debated in political assemblies before embassies actually set out, and negotiations (usually a series of set speeches and replies) were generally conducted in public meetings, although, as so often in the history of diplomacy, it was common for more private discussions between ambassadors and ministers to carry on behind the scenes. If agreement was reached there would be a formal exchange of oaths, and terms would be engraved on stone tablets. If the news was especially important, copies of such tablets would be displayed beyond the territories of the states most directly involved. After Athens and Sparta reached an accord in 421 BC, copies of the treaty were set up at both Olympia and Delphi.

Given its importance, Greek diplomacy was astonishingly extemporaneous. There was no notion of a distinct arm of government dedicated to foreign affairs, nor of a permanent diplomatic establishment. Men were simply chosen for ambassadorial errands – usually bearing the title of angelos (messenger) or presbeis (envoy or elder) – as and when the need arose. There was scant financial reward, and envoys – typically drawn (as in many cultures) from the political classes – were obliged to bear all the expenses of their retinues, although service as an ambassador did tend to enhance a politician’s reputation. There were few successful Athenian statesmen who had not, at one time or another, carried out diplomatic missions. Demosthenes, by the end of his career, would be a veteran of missions to Thebes and the Peloponnese as well as to Macedon.

Greek diplomacy was also riddled with dissent. Unwilling to trust important errands to individuals, Athens generally favoured the larger embassy, of three, five or ten men. Although envoys were furnished with specific, detailed instructions, the potential for bickering between them was a perennial danger. Within the embassy of 346 BC, Demosthenes was predictably hostile to Philip, insisting that any agreement with Macedon would have to be in the Athenians’ best interests; stringent conditions would have to be met before any treaty could be ratified. Some of his colleagues, notably the orator Aeschines, were more sympathetic to the Macedonian cause, and Demosthenes believed they were willing to give way on too many important points of negotiation. Some sources report that the rival factions even refused to sleep under the same roof during their journey. Upon returning to Athens, a furious Demosthenes charged some of his fellow ambassadors with receiving bribes from the Macedonian king.

One of the accused, Aeschines, sought to counter this threat by launching his own attack on the man expected to lead the prosecution: the politician Timarchus. If he could damage Timarchus’s reputation sufficiently, then Aeschines’ own trial would, at the very least, be postponed. Aeschines opted for a spectacular strategy, accusing Timarchus of having been a gay prostitute. One of the most sensational jury trials in the ancient world would reveal, all at once, how seriously the Greeks took the business of embassy, and just how vulnerable their diplomacy was to the selfish machinations of individual ambassadors. Beyond all that, it furnished an extraordinarily intimate example of an ancient ambassador desperately struggling for political survival.

ii. The Trial of Timarchus

The workings of Athenian justice, if we are to believe the comic playwright Aristophanes, were dangerously addictive. His scurrilous play The Wasps tells the story of Philocleon, who spends all his days serving on juries. He revels in the authority this bestows, enjoying the pathetic spectacle of defendants pleading for mercy ‘Is there any creature on earth more blessed, more feared and petted from day to day, or that leads a happier, pleasanter life’ than a juror, he asks? Some defendants ‘vow they are needy…and over their poverty wail and whine, some tell us a legend of days gone by, or a joke from Aesop…to make me laugh, that so I may doff my terrible rage.’ And when the ‘piteous bleating’ is over, he can return home ‘with my fee in my wallet’, to be greeted by his doting daughter and ‘my dear little wife [who] sets on the board nice manchets of bread in a tempting array’.

His son Bdelycleon fears for Philocleon’s sanity and locks him in the family home. His fellow jurors, dressed as a chorus of wasps, stage a rescue attempt and, although Bdelycleon manages to rout them in a debate, Philocleon’s addiction is not so easy defeated. To ease his father’s discomfort, Bdelycleon sets up a makeshift court and, for want of any human reprobates, the family dog is brought to trial for stealing a piece of Sicilian cheese. The creature is only saved by some trickery on Bdelycleon’s part, whereby Philocleon unwittingly votes for acquittal. Devastated – he had never previously found a defendant not guilty – Philocleon ends the play by getting hopelessly drunk.⁵

The reality of Greek jurisprudence was rather more decorous, but Aristophanes had one thing exactly right: Athenian juries were gloriously powerful. In an attempt to check bribery, they were made up of hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of members, drawn by lot. Even the wealthiest citizen, so it was supposed, lacked the resources to corrupt that many individuals. At trial, a water-clock was set in motion, and defendants and plaintiffs – who habitually represented themselves – would both make lengthy speeches, cite the relevant laws, and call their witnesses. There was no judge (as we would understand the term) to coordinate proceedings, monitor objections, or offer summations. Success rested solely on whether or not a speaker had been persuasive; eloquence was everything.

A jury’s verdict was final and there was no room for appeal. Jurors, who had to be over thirty years of age and free from any outstanding financial debt to the state, were chosen from a list of 6,000 candidates, drawn up at the beginning of each year. They received a small daily stipend for their service and they knew, and revelled in, their own power. As the trial of Timarchus would demonstrate, the linchpins of any competent legal strategy were to flatter a jury, to appeal to its patriotism, and to avoid the heckling in which jurors regularly indulged.

‘Fellow citizens,’ the embattled ambassador Aeschines began, ‘I have never brought indictment against any Athenian.’ However, ‘when I saw that the city was being seriously injured by the defendant, Timarchus, who, though disqualified by law, was speaking in your assemblies, and when I myself was made a victim of his blackmailing attack’, he had been compelled to act. ‘I decided that it would be a most shameful thing if I failed to come to the defence of the whole city and its laws, and to your defence and my own.’ It was an irresistible opening salvo.

The city’s lawgivers, Aeschines explained, had been unflinching when they had established who might engage in public debate and hold civic office. There had been no attempts to ‘exclude from the platform the man whose ancestors have not held a general’s office, nor even the man who earns his daily bread by working at a trade’. Such citizens were welcome to participate. Nevertheless, the same privilege did not extend to the man who ‘beats his father or mother, or fails to support them or to provide a home for them’, nor to the man who had failed to perform military service and ‘thrown away his shield’.

Nor did Athens tolerate the individual who ‘because of his shameful private life the laws forbids from speaking before the people’. The city’s constitution was clear. ‘If any Athenian…shall have prostituted his person, he shall not be permitted to become one of the nine archons [chief magistrates of Athens]…nor to discharge the office of priest…nor shall he act as an advocate for the state…nor shall ever hold any office whatsoever…nor shall he be a herald or an ambassador.’ Aeschines intended to prove that Timarchus was just such a man, unworthy of holding office, and entirely disqualified from directing a legal proceeding.

Timarchus’s profligacy had apparently begun early in life. ‘As soon as he was past boyhood he settled down in Piraeus [the port of Athens] at the establishment of Euthydicus the physician, pretending to be a student of medicine, but in fact deliberately offering himself for sale.’ Aeschines next turned his attention to Misgolas, ‘a man otherwise honourable, and beyond reproach’, aside for his penchant for male prostitutes. He had always been ‘accustomed to have about him singers or cithara-players’ and, learning that Timarchus was ‘well-developed, young and lewd’, he paid him a handsome sum of money to come and live with him. He was ‘just the person for the thing that Misgolas wanted to do, and Timarchus wanted to have done’.

The most damning proof of Timarchus’s guilt had been his unwavering ability to live far beyond his means. Certainly, he had once had wealth, but this had quickly vanished. He had sold his house, south of the Acropolis, to the comic poet Nausicrates, and had disposed of his country estates and slaves. Yet he had still been able to enjoy ‘costly suppers’ and maintain ‘the most expensive flute-girls and harlots’. ‘Does it take a wizard to explain all that?’ Aeschines asked. Other men were obviously paying for Timarchus’ excesses, and it was ‘perfectly plain that the man who makes such demands must himself be furnishing in return certain pleasures to the men who are spending their money on him’.

Aeschines insisted that he was not launching an assault on the beauty of young men. All fathers hoped for sons who were ‘fair and beautiful in person, and worthy of the city’. To be a pretty young boy was not the same thing as being a whore. Nor was Aeschines a stranger to love. As he warned the jury, his opposing counsel would doubtless remind them that Aeschines himself had sometimes ‘made a nuisance of myself in the gymnasia and…been many times a lover’. He might even offer extracts from all ‘the erotic poems I have ever addressed to one person or another’.

Such a strategy would, Aeschines concluded, be foolish: ‘as for me, I neither find fault with love that is honourable, nor do I say that those who surpass in beauty are prostitutes. I do not deny that I myself have been a lover and am a lover to this day.’ Love was one thing; love between men was another; but sex offered in return for monetary reward was altogether different, and it did not befit the leaders of Athens.

Each juror placed his pebble in the appropriate urn (one to condemn, the other to acquit). Timarchus was found guilty, reducing his career to tatters. The defence, mounted by Demosthenes, is lost to us. So too is any possibility of deciphering which of the charges levelled by Aeschines were justified. Nonetheless, the spectacle of an ambassador fighting for his political life still resonates down the ages. More poignantly, and not least by virtue of its grubbiness, the trial of Timarchus also seems to encapsulate the decline of Athenian grandeur and influence. A mighty power had entered its dotage.⁶

Three years later, in 343 BC, Demosthenes would finally bring his original case against Aeschines, charging him with corruption during the embassy to Macedonia. Demosthenes realized just how sensational the trial had become. ‘I do not doubt,’ he told the jurors, ‘that you are all pretty well aware that this trial has been the centre of keen partisanship and active canvassing, for you saw the people who were accosting and annoying you just now at the casting of lots.’

They must not be swayed by such distractions, however. Aeschines was ‘trying to introduce into politics a most dangerous and deplorable practice’. He had been criticized and so he had turned his fire on Timarchus. This was a horrendous precedent, ‘for if a man who has undertaken and administered any public function can get rid of accusers not by his honesty but by the fear he inspires, the people will soon lose all control of public affairs’.

There could be little doubt about Aeschines’ guilt, Demosthenes suggested, and all the jurors had to do was call to mind the duties that any ambassador was expected to fulfil. ‘He is responsible, in the first place, for the reports he has made; secondly, for the advice he has offered; thirdly, for his observance of your instructions; and, to crown all, whether he has done his business corruptly or with integrity.’ Measured against this standard, Aeschines had been an abject failure.

There had been a time, Demosthenes reminded the jury, when Aeschines had been among Philip’s harshest critics, making speeches against him and organizing conferences where the Greek states could formulate a united response to the Macedonian threat. But, in an instant, that had all changed. After an earlier mission to Philip’s court, Aeschines had suddenly lent his support to a peace treaty with Macedon that was patently injurious to Athenian interests. After his earlier patriotism he began using language ‘for which, as heaven is my witness, he deserves to die many times over. He told you that you ought to forget the achievements of your forefathers; that you should not tolerate all that talk about old trophies and sea-fights.’ The only possible explanation for such a volte-face was that Aeschines had been bribed by the Macedonian regime, and as an Athenian jury was well aware bribery was one of the heartbeats of Greek political life.

A second embassy – the embassy that had provoked the trial of Timarchus – had been despatched to Philip with the aim of ratifying that peace treaty but it had failed to secure all of the conditions and provisos that the Athenian assembly had insisted upon. A deeply unsatisfactory treaty had been agreed and Aeschines was solely to blame. This is what Demosthenes had told the assembly upon his return to Athens, but he added that it had been hoodwinked by Aeschines’s eloquence. The ambassador had offered no report, given no reply to the charges levelled by Demosthenes, ‘but he made such a fine speech, so full of big promises, that he carried you all away with him’. Through his efforts, Aeschines boasted, Philip had been entirely won over to the Athenian cause and would now be a valued ally.

This was hardly how Demosthenes remembered the embassy, so ‘I rose, and said that the whole story was news to me. I attempted to repeat the statement I had made to the council, but Aeschines and Philocrates posted themselves one on either side of me, shouting, interrupting, and finally jeering. You were all laughing; you would not listen to me, and you did not want to believe anything except what Aeschines had reported.’

A dishonourable peace had been secured and Philip of Macedon’s ascendancy had continued unchecked. ‘Men of Athens,’ Demosthenes suggested, ‘nothing more awful or more momentous has befallen Greece within living memory, nor, as I believe, in all the history of the past.’ Athens had been duped by Philip of Macedon, a man who ‘has many claims to congratulation on his good fortune…Such achievements as the capture of great cities and the subjugation of a vast territory are, I suppose, enviable, as they are undoubtedly imposing; yet we could mention many other men who have done the like.’ But his ‘greatest stroke of good fortune…is that, when he needed scoundrels for his purposes, he found bigger scoundrels than he wanted’. He had found Aeschines, who had not been cajoled into treachery but ‘had sold himself, and pocketed the money, before he made his speech and betrayed us to Philip. To Philip he has been a trusty and well-beloved hireling; to you a treacherous ambassador and a treacherous citizen, worthy of threefold destruction.’

It was not too late to make amends, however. ‘Today you are not merely adjudging this case. You are legislating for all future time, whether every ambassador is basely to serve your enemies for hire, or without fee or bribe to give his best service to you.’ Philip could be warned that ‘he will have to remodel his methods’ when dealing with Athens. ‘At present his chosen policy is to cheat the many and court the few; but, when he learns that his favourites have been brought to ruin, he will wish for the future to deal with the many, who are the real masters of our state…For the sake of your honour, of your religion, of your security, of everything you value,’ Demosthenes implored the jury, ‘you must not acquit this man. Visit him with exemplary punishment, and let his fate be a warning not to our own citizens alone but to every man who lives in the Hellenic world.’⁷

It was rousing stuff, but Aeschines had prepared a compelling story of his own. From the outset he threw himself on the jury’s mercy. ‘I beg you, fellow citizens, to hear me with willing and friendly mind, remembering how great is my peril, and how many the charges against which I have to defend myself; remembering also the arts and devices of my accuser.’ This Demosthenes was hardly the most attractive of personalities, after all, Aeschines reminded the jury.

During the embassy to Philip he had been little more than a nuisance: ‘All the way we were forced to put up with Demosthenes’ odious and insufferable ways.’ That was as nothing when compared with his boastfulness, ‘the over-weening self-confidence of this fellow’. When the ambassadors were discussing their tactics, one of them had ‘remarked that he was afraid Philip would get the better of us in arguing his claims’. Demosthenes immediately ‘promised fountains of oratory, and said that he was going to make such a speech…that he would sew up Philip’s mouth as with an un-soaked rush’. Sadly, as Aeschines remembered it, events turned out rather differently.

When Demosthenes’ turn came to address Philip,

all were intent, expecting to hear a masterpiece of eloquence. For, as we learned afterwards, his extravagant boasting had been reported to Philip and his court. So when all were thus prepared to listen, this creature mouthed forth a proem [an introduction] – an obscure sort of thing and as dead as fright could make it – and getting on a little way into the subject he suddenly stopped speaking and stood helpless. Finally he collapsed completely.

Philip saw Demosthenes’s plight and generously assured him that his faltering speech was not an ‘irreparable calamity’. He was an ambassador, not an actor on the stage. He should calm himself and ‘try gradually to recall his speech, and speak it off as he had prepared it’. Unfortunately, ‘having been once upset, and having forgotten what he had written, he was unable to recover himself…and broke down again.’ Philip was deeply embarrassed and a herald ordered the ambassadors to withdraw. Demosthenes was mortified, at which point his sour feelings towards the entire embassy began to fester. To deflect attention away from his own risible performance, he suddenly began accusing the other ambassadors of negotiating against the best interests of Athens.

Through the rest of the ambassadors’ stay in Macedon, Demosthenes oscillated between showering Philip in fawning speeches and behaving ‘with shameless rudeness’ whenever he was invited to dinner. On the journey home his mood did seem to brighten. ‘Suddenly he began talking to each of us in a surprisingly friendly manner,’ promising to lend his support to their political careers and even praising Aeschines’s oratorical skills. One evening, ‘when we were all dining together at Larisa, he made fun of himself and the embarrassment which had come upon him in his speech, and he declared that Philip was the most wonderful man under the sun’. It was a ruse, however, an attempt to make the other ambassadors say complimentary things about Philip that he could later use as proof of their treachery.

Demosthenes had never been the warmest supporter of a peace treaty with Philip, and his experiences in Macedonia had only brought him humiliation. He was levelling charges of corruption, Aeschines suggested, as a political strategy, to rouse Athens against Philip of Macedon, and as a petulant gesture of revenge. Aeschines allowed that ‘the peace failed to please some of our public men’, but ‘ought they not to have opposed it at the time, instead of putting me on trial now?…They say that Philip bought the peace, that he overreached us at every point in the articles of agreement, and that the peace which he contrived for his own interests, he himself has violated.’ Aeschines disputed this analysis but, regardless, it seemed unfair to him that ‘although I was but one of ten ambassadors, I alone am made to give account.’

Finally, Aeschines invited the jurors to look around the courtroom. ‘Yonder is my father, Atrometus. There are few older men among all the citizens, for he is now ninety-four years old. When he was a young man, before the war destroyed his property, he was so fortunate as to be an athlete. Banished by the Thirty [Athens’ oligarchic governing body after the Peloponnesian War], he served as a soldier in Asia, and in danger he showed himself a man.’ Then there was his mother, a woman of extraordinary courage, who had followed her husband into exile and shared in his disasters.

Aeschines was portraying himself as the child of proud Athenian parents: ‘I myself, gentlemen, have three children, one daughter and two sons, by the daughter of Philodemus, the sister of Philon and Epicrates.’ He had brought them into court with the other family members ‘for the sake of asking one question and presenting one piece of evidence to the jury’.

For I ask, fellow citizens, whether you believe that I would have betrayed to Philip, not only my country, my personal friendships, and my rights in the shrines and tombs of my fathers, but also these children, the dearest of mankind to me. Do you believe that I would have held his friendship more precious than the safety of these children? By what lust have you seen me conquered? What unworthy act have I ever done for money? It is not Macedon that makes men good or bad, but their own inborn nature; and we have not come back from the embassy changed men, but the same men that you yourselves sent out.

‘With all loyalty I have served the city as her ambassador,’ Aeschines declared. ‘My speech is finished. This, my body, I and the law now commit to your hands.’⁸

Aeschines was acquitted, but only barely, and the damage done to his reputation would be catastrophic. He would always retain the whiff of scandal, ending his career not as an elder statesman in Athens, but as a teacher of rhetoric on the island of Rhodes. Demosthenes would even succeed in mobilizing public opinion against Philip of Macedon, but support came far too late (assuming it would ever have made any real difference). Just as Demosthenes had desired, Athens and Macedonia joined battle and, at Chaeronea in 338 BC, Athens was crushed. In its aftermath, Philip established the League of Corinth, a pan-Hellenic league of mutual defence almost entirely dominated by Macedonian interests.

The trials of Timarchus and Aeschines were rather parochial affairs, but they intersected with momentous political events. Philip of Macedon, whose ascendancy was the catalyst for the whole affair, died two years after the battle of Chaeronea. His achievement was secure and Macedonia was now the greatest power in Greece. His son, Alexander, would extend that influence across much of the known world and, as skilled a warrior as he was, Alexander also knew the value of a diplomatic flourish. The insular relations of the Greek city states were shortly to give way to ambassadorial encounters with the rest of the world that were as epochal as any that had yet been produced – epochal if, on occasion, boozy.

CHAPTER II Greeks and Indika
i. Alexander

A prodigious tolerance for drink was always among the most useful of ambassadorial qualities. Writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great offered unvarnished advice to anyone hoping to serve as an ambassador in London. He ought to be a ‘good debauchee who should preferably be able to drink wine better than the English and who, having drunk, would say nothing that should be kept quiet’.

Drinking wine better than the English was no easy feat. During a trip to Hanover in the winter of 1716, James Stanhope, Secretary of State to George I, served no less than seventy bottles of wine to thirteen diplomatic dinner guests. At the end of the evening everyone but Stanhope – and he had certainly consumed his share – was hopelessly drunk. Stanhope left his guests to sleep off their excesses and went to compare notes with Cardinal Dubois, representative of the French child-king Louis XV, who had been listening to the revelatory table talk from across the hall.¹

Those with less robust livers risked moments of indiscretion and humiliation. In 1673, the French jeweller Jean Chardin attended a banquet at the Persian court in Isfahan. If he was impressed by the food – ‘a collation of fruits, both green and dried, and all sorts of sweet meats, wet and dry’ – he was dazzled by the alcohol on display. Lavish flat-bottomed cups, each able to carry three litres of wine, were filled from fifty golden flagons, some enamelled, others encrusted with jewels and pearls. It all left Chardin with the feeling that ‘no other part of the world can afford anything more magnificent and rich or more splendid and bright’. Impressed as he was, Chardin was also confused. None of the ambassadors present at the dinner seemed to be partaking of the wine, and while the Muscovite ambassador could be seen drinking, it was only from his private cache of Russian brandy. A nobleman at the dinner supplied Chardin with an explanation.

At a banquet ten years earlier, he revealed, two Russian ambassadors had drunk ‘so excessively that they quite lost their senses’. Unfortunately, the shah had then proposed a toast to the tsar, an honour that the ambassadors could hardly refuse. The two men took long draughts from their massive cups but one of them, ‘not being able to digest so much wine, had a pressing inclination to vomit, and not knowing where to disembogue, he took his great sable cap, which he half filled’.

His colleague was mortified by ‘so foul an action done in the presence of the king of Persia’ and urged him to leave the banqueting hall at once. Instead, ‘not knowing either what was said to him nor what he himself did’, he ‘clapped his cap upon his head, which presently covered him all over with nastiness’. Mercifully, the shah and his retinue were not offended, but ‘broke into a loud laughter, which lasted about half an hour, during which time the companions of the filthy Muscovite were forcing him by dint of blows with their fists to rise and go out’.²

Not that the debauched diplomatic banquet was an invention of the modern era. In 327 BC Alexander the Great, heir to the man Demosthenes had so despised, crossed into India. Some cowered at his advance; some resisted it; still others accepted it as inevitable. After suffering a humiliating defeat, two Indian kings decided to send a hundred envoys to offer their submission to the Greek invasion. ‘They all rode in chariots and were men of uncommon stature and of a very dignified bearing,’ the historian Curtius Rufus reports. In their gold and purple embroidered robes, they humbly offered Alexander ‘themselves, their cities, and their territories’.

Alexander eagerly accepted and, in celebration, ‘gave orders for the preparation of a splendid banquet, to which he invited the ambassadors and the petty kings of the neighbouring tribes’. Tapestry curtains, ‘which glittered with gold and purple’, surrounded a hundred gilded couches. It was a majestic spectacle, one more demonstration of Macedonian paramountcy. Until, that is, the alcohol intervened.

An Athenian boxer named Dioxippus was a guest at the festivities. Unfortunately, a Macedonian called Horratus was there too. ‘Flown with wine’, he began to taunt Dioxippus ‘and challenged him, if he were a man, to fight him next day with a sword’. The challenge was gleefully accepted and Alexander, ‘finding next day that the two men were more than ever bent on fighting…allowed them do as they pleased’.

Horratus arrived in full gladiatorial regalia, ‘carrying in his left hand a brazen shield…and in his right a javelin’, with a sword by his side for good measure. Dioxippus carried nothing but a scarlet cloak and a ‘stout knotty club’. To the large crowds that had gathered, ‘it seemed not temerity but downright madness for a naked man to engage with one armed to the teeth.’ They were mistaken.

Horratus launched his javelin, but Dioxippus evaded it ‘by a slight bending of his body’ and proceeded to break Horratus’s long pike with a single blow of his club. Next, he tripped Horratus, snatched his sword and ‘planted his foot on his neck as he lay prostrate’. Only Alexander’s intervention prevented Dioxippus from smashing his challenger’s skull. It was a huge disappointment for the assembled Macedonians, and they set about plotting their revenge. At another feast a few days later, they falsely accused Dioxippus of stealing a precious golden cup. He blushed at the suggestion, since ‘it often enough happens that one who blushes at a false insinuation has less control of his countenance than one who is really guilty.’ A proud man, Dioxippus ‘could not bear the glances which were turned upon him as if he were a thief’, so he quit the banquet, wrote a letter of farewell to Alexander, and fell on his sword.³

Such unseemly events could hardly have impressed the envoys of the Indian kings, and Macedonian pride was doubtless bruised, but a brief moment of humiliation could not mar Alexander’s spectacular achievements. He had quashed residual Greek resentment (even daring to raze the city of Thebes to the ground), conquered Persia, and by the time of his death at the age of thirty-two he had carved out an empire that stretched from the Danube, through Egypt, to the mouth of the Indus River. The pilgrimage he had reputedly made to Troy, to place wreaths on the tombs of the Homeric heroes Achilles and Patroclus, now seemed less like hubris and more like a fitting prelude to a glorious military career.

Redoubtable soldier that he was, Alexander had always honoured diplomacy and had treated its officers with great respect. As a young man he had received a party of Persian ambassadors and had been so affable, and had asked them such pertinent questions, that they thought the much-vaunted abilities of his father Philip were as nothing in comparison with the precocious talents of his son. Years later, the envoys of some other defeated Indian towns visited Alexander to offer their submission. They were surprised to find him still in his armour and without anyone waiting in attendance upon him. At length, a cushion was brought in so that Alexander might rest his battle-wearied body. Instead, he made the eldest of the ambassadors take it and sit down upon it. Delighted by such courtesy, the envoys readily agreed to the terms of surrender that were proposed. Alexander could, as the occasion required, feast, charm or flatter all and any ambassadors.

He had won his empire through a combination of military prowess and diplomatic politesse. The empire was as fragile as it was vast, however. When he died, Alexander’s relatives, counsellors and generals squabbled over his inheritance and a series of smaller Macedonian states sprang up. The easternmost of these was centred on Syria and Persia, where one of Alexander’s most successful generals, Seleucus Nicator (358–281 BC), established a dynasty that would survive until the Roman invasion in 64 BC. Seleucus dreamed of emulating Alexander’s military forays into northern India. Unfortunately, in the period since Alexander’s death a formidable new power had arisen in that region.

ii. Megasthenes

The Mauryan Empire does not enjoy the place it deserves in the popular historical imagination. Between 321 and 180 BC, the Mauryans ruled over 500 million people, easily matching the grandeur of either the Moghul Empire or the British Raj. By the fifth century BC the numerous tribal groups of India had been reduced to four dominant monarchies, or mahajanpadas, who set about battling for primacy. By the beginning of the fourth century BC. the kingdom of Magadha, with its capital at Pataliputra, had emerged victorious. In the wake of Alexander’s military adventures in India, Chandragupta Maurya ascended to the Magadhan throne and, along with his successors, established the first genuine Indian empire, ranging from the borders of Persia to those of Afghanistan and Bengal.

Pataliputra (on the site of present-day Patna) was likely the largest city in the world at the time. Surrounded by 570 towers and a 900-foot moat, it boasted elegant houses, ponds and orchards, plentiful food and hardly any crime. With an army of 3,000 cavalry, 9,000 war elephants and 600,000 foot soldiers, the Mauryans were fully equipped to repulse any Greek invasion. Seleucus realized that his plans to conquer India were stillborn. After suffering military defeat in 305 BC, he instead made a treaty with the Mauryans, abandoning claims to the Punjab in exchange for several hundred battle elephants. With the prospect of hostilities averted, diplomacy was able to flourish.

In 302 BC a Macedonian ambassador named Megasthenes was sent to formalize relations between two civilizations recently at war. He travelled down the Kabul Valley, over the Khyber Pass, and headed across the Ganges Valley towards the Mauryan capital. He would stay there for ten years. While the workaday detail of his diplomatic encounters has vanished, the reports he took home would define the West’s understanding of India for centuries to come, and would be endlessly cited, if not always uncritically, in the works of historians and scholars like Arrian and Pliny. India was suddenly more tangible: a land ‘of such vast extent, it seems well-nigh to embrace the whole of the northern tropic zone of the earth’. It had ‘many huge mountains which abound in fruit trees of every kind, and vast plains of great fertility’.

The Indian people were not hapless savages but, ‘distinguished by their proud bearing’, were ‘well skilled in the arts, as might be expected of men who inhale a pure air and drink the very finest water’. They were generally frugal, but entirely capable of appreciating finery, favouring robes ‘ornamented with precious stones’ and ‘flowered garments made of the finest muslin’. They had ‘a high regard for beauty, and avail themselves of every device to improve their looks’.

There was much to admire in Mauryan culture. Even during military campaigns, those who worked the land were left unmolested, ensuring a steady supply of food. There were no slaves anywhere in the empire and visitors like Megasthenes were guaranteed courteous treatment: ‘officers are appointed even for foreigners whose duty is to see that no foreigner is wronged. Should any of them lose his health, they send physicians to attend him…and if he dies they bury him, and deliver over such property as he leaves to his relatives. The judges also decide cases in which foreigners are concerned, with the greatest care, and come down sharply on those who take unfair advantage of them.’

The sophistication of Indian thought was perhaps the greatest revelation. ‘Truth and virtue they hold alike in esteem. Hence they accord no special privileges to the old unless they possess superior wisdom.’ Death was ‘a very frequent subject of discourse. They regard this life as, so to speak, the time when the child within the womb becomes mature, and death as a birth into a real and happy life for the votaries of philosophy.’ And when the old finally passed on, the Indians did not raise monuments in their honour but considered ‘the virtues which men have displayed in life, and the songs in which their praises are celebrated, sufficient to preserve their memory after death’.

Like so many later visitors, Megasthenes was especially fascinated by Brahmin priests, men who ‘abstain from animal food and sexual pleasures, and spend their time in listening to serious discourse, and in imparting their knowledge to such as will listen to them’. They were much revered, and any man who came to listen to their discussions was ‘not allowed to speak, or even to cough, and much less to spit, and if he offends in any of these ways he is cast out from their society that very day, as being a man who is wanting in self-restraint’.⁴

Megasthenes’ epic survey of Indian life, his Indika, did not survive antiquity intact. All that remain are fragments and the countless references to his work by later authors. His influence was profound, though not uncontroversial. Megasthenes would be criticized for his inaccuracies and wilder speculations. Unversed in Indian languages, he only ever heard stories and reports in presumably imperfect translation. He certainly made gross generalizations about a society made up of hundreds of millions of people, and gave too much credence to the more fabulous stories he heard. He told the Greek world about races of Indians who lacked noses, others whose feet pointed backwards, and still others who had heads like dogs and communicated by barking. He spoke of ants that were the size of foxes, which dug for gold, and of bizarre flying serpents.

All such legends died hard. But Megasthenes also provided accurate accounts of Indian political and social life, Indian philosophy, the Indian judiciary, the Indian diet of rice and richly spiced meat, and he depicted a mighty city about which almost nothing had previously been known. His description of the Indian caste system was flawed – he mistakenly divided society into seven rather than four groups – but the truly momentous thing was that he introduced the West to this hierarchy for the very first time. Ultimately, it did not matter how good or bad his narrative was – although, on balance, it was remarkably good. The justified carping of some critics aside, it was believed, and one civilization’s understanding of another was forever transformed. India was suddenly far more than the mysterious place from which an occasional parrot arrived.

Greek diplomacy was capable of outreach. Far more so, in fact, than its Roman equivalent. On the face of things, the ancient Roman worldview was unapologetically inclusive. Yes, Roman legions might tramp across most of the known world, but in due course conquered peoples would be exposed to the cultural and economic blessings of Roman civilization. The conquered, more often than not, could even aspire to Roman citizenship. Rome’s lawyers had seemingly developed a code of international encounter that defined the procedures for waging war and making peace – the only good war was a just war.

All of this was true, but it hardly dampened Roman superiority and xenophobia. Diplomacy existed solely to expand the sphere of Roman influence. It did have much in common with its Greek counterpart. There was no specialized branch of government dedicated to foreign affairs, and ambassadors were chosen as the need arose, usually from the senatorial class. Like their Greek peers, they were given specific instructions and discouraged from showing undue initiative, and any agreements they reached had to be ratified by politicians back in Rome before coming into effect. Clearly, with such a vast empire, Rome was obliged to despatch many ambassadors, whether to seek alliances, to mediate disputes or to deal with administrative problems. Sometimes, in the field, an emperor such as Marcus Aurelius even conducted his own negotiations.

Ultimately, though, Roman diplomacy was ruthlessly straightforward. There were two preferred ways to deal with enemies and rivals. Ideally, they were to be terrified into submission, either through war or the threat of war. Alternatively, they could be bribed. The notion of cautious, respectful negotiation was often frowned upon. Diplomacy, by many accounts, was the poor, even dishonourable, relation to military conquest, the refuge of the weak emperor. In March 218, as one example among many, the senator Fabius Buteo and four other legates travelled to Carthage in North Africa. They announced that either Hannibal and his counsellors were to be handed over or Rome and Carthage would be in a state of war. They avoided all discussion or negotiation and, when the Carthaginians refused to comply with the Roman demands, they blithely announced that the Second Punic War had now begun. Buteo ‘let war fall from his toga’⁵.

And if there had to be diplomacy, if a foreign nation or tribe had something urgent to relate, the onus was on them to initiate proceedings. In the accounts of his military campaigns in Gaul, Julius Caesar makes few references to the despatching of Roman ambassadors: rather, we are told of foreign envoys, often weeping and prostrated, coming to the Roman camp. Foreign ambassadors, the bearers of congratulations, condolences, requests or apologies, were expected to come to Rome, not vice versa. When the senate was in session, there were regularly hundreds of envoys in the capital, the most illustrious among them being housed and fed, at the state’s expense, in the Villa Publica.

Roman rulers took the number of envoys they received as an index of their prestige and power. Ambassadors from Germany, North Africa and Greece were unexceptional. More noteworthy were the princes who acted as their own representatives – as when Tiridates of Armenia visited Nero to receive his crown from the emperor’s own hands. The exotic ambassador was yet more desirable. If envoys came from as far away as Ceylon, as happened in the reign of Claudius, this was a sure indication of an emperor’s extraordinary fame.

The Roman view of the ambassador’s role lacked nuance. It did not make for the inquisitive, scholarly ambassador. For the most part, while Greece was busy with the inter-state rivalries of Athens, Thebes and Sparta, neither did the Greek notion of diplomacy. But in the person of Megasthenes, at least, a moment of genuine, lasting cultural dialogue had been achieved.

The Greeks were bemused by just how advanced and cultured Indian society seemed. Megasthenes was particularly impressed by its bureaucracy, by the number and quality of officials who oversaw a staggering range of domestic tasks. There was more to the Mauryan genius than this, however. Any fledgling empire, however exuberant, was obliged to look beyond its borders, to potential allies and likely adversaries. History in the West will always flatter classical Greece, but classical India had begun to hone its own ambassadorial skills and to meditate on the nature and ends of diplomacy. Mauryan civilization reached conclusions about its place in the world that were as startling as they were brilliant. Enter Kautilya.

CHAPTER III A Sanskrit Machiavelli
i. Debating Diplomacy

Thus speaks the Beloved of the Gods: Dhamma is good. And what is Dhamma? It is having few faults and many good deeds, mercy, charity, truthfulness, and purity. I have given the gift of insight in various forms. I have conferred many benefits on man, animals, birds, and fish, even to saving their lives, and I have done many other commendable deeds. I have had this inscription of Dhamma engraved that men may conform to it and that it may endure. He who conforms will do well.

Second Pillar Edict of the Mauryan King Asoka¹

Asoka, Beloved of the Gods, was the greatest of the Mauryan emperors. His reign (273–232 BC) began with a string of bloody military campaigns but, tortured by pity for the fallen and displaced, he renounced martial glory and took to the peaceful, reflective path of Buddhism. Legend tells of the Buddhist monk Nigrodha who went strolling in the gardens of the royal palace one day and enchanted Asoka with his calm, almost beatific demeanour. Everyone else struck Asoka as being confused in mind, like perturbed deer, but the monk seemed utterly at ease, perhaps possessed of some wondrous transcendent vision. The emperor invited the monk into his palace and listened to his account of a Buddhist faith that, after his conversion in c.260 BC, Asoka would help to spread across the region.²

He decreed that a series of edicts should be promulgated across his dominions, as far as present-day Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan. Sometimes etched on rock faces, sometimes on towering pillars, these inscriptions proclaimed Asoka’s dedication to a life of virtue, his dream that he, ‘his sons, his grandsons and his great grandsons will advance the practice of Dhamma until the end of the world’.

It was a benign vision. Charities, hospitals and veterinary clinics were to be established, prisoners were to be treated more decently, and even the lot of dumb animals was to be improved: ‘formerly in the kitchens [of Asoka], many hundreds of thousands of living animals were killed daily for meat. But now, at the time of writing this inscription, only three animals are killed, two peacocks and a deer, and the deer not invariably. Even these animals will not be killed in the future.’ The edicts spoke of imperial officers who were to tour the countryside every five years to instruct people in the laws of piety, urging them to honour their parents and friends, to live frugally, and to maintain a bare minimum of personal property. Earlier kings might have indulged in endless ‘pleasure tours, consisting of hunts and similar amusements’, but Asoka would only travel in order to meet his people, to talk to the elderly, discourse with Brahmin priests and distribute gifts.³

The rock-and-pillar edicts were tools of propaganda, and we might question whether Asoka was quite as saintly as he wished history to believe. That he was enlightened and, by the standards of the time, compassionate cannot be doubted, however. He claimed that his task was to ‘promote the welfare of the whole world’, and so he did. He abolished the death penalty, established a sprawling network of wells and rest houses for travellers, and planted shady trees along trade routes. As for ambassadors, they were to continue in their usual tasks – forging alliances and seeking tribute – but they were also to carry medicinal herbs to foreign lands.

The defining diplomatic policy of Asoka’s reign had little to do with military aggrandizement or economic progress; it consisted rather of missionary-envoys being sent to Syria, Egypt, Macedonia and Nepal to preach the tenets of Buddhism. And as we will see in the missions of men like John of Plano Carpini in the thirteenth century, the tradition of the monkish ambassador had a vibrant future ahead of it. When a new king, Tissa, came to the throne of Sri Lanka, he sent envoys to Asoka informing the emperor of his accession. Asoka responded by despatching his son, Mahinda, as an ‘ambassador of righteousness’, charged with winning the new king for the Buddhist faith. He succeeded, and King Tissa was soon erecting a Buddhist reliquary in one of the royal gardens.

Tissa’s sister was an even more impassioned acolyte and announced that she desired to become a Buddhist nun. Lacking the authority to invest her in holy orders, Mahinda sent for his own sister Sanghamitta, who was already a nun. She arrived in Sri Lanka with the requisite paraphernalia and a golden vase containing a branch of the Bodhi tree, under which the Buddha had meditated for seven years before receiving enlightenment. The sapling was planted on a terrace in the royal gardens and to this day remains an object of veneration.

If this was one way to encounter the rest of the world, Asoka’s grandfather had espoused quite another. Chandragupta (reigned 321–298 BC), the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, was a man of humble origins: by some accounts, the son of a peacock farmer. One, presumably apocryphal, story perfectly encapsulates his fearful reputation. Ever wary of assassination attempts, Chandragupta was in the habit of taking a daily draught of poison with his meals, hoping to immunize himself against its effects. One day, when his pregnant wife accidentally imbibed some of the poison, the emperor immediately chopped off her head (hoping to stop the toxins progressing any further), ripped the unborn child from her belly and placed the embryo in the womb of a goat.⁴

Such ruthless efficiency pervaded Chandragupta’s entire political career. It was captured for posterity by one of his most trusted ministers, named Kautilya, who wrote an intricate treatise on how a wise king ought to govern. Kautilya’s Arthasastra was not simply an abstract meditation on devious statecraft, but an account of actual political practice. It is one of the finest works of political philosophy ever written, though it remains undervalued in the West. Its radical meditations on the nature and exercise of political power led the sociologist Max Weber to conclude that, by comparison, ‘Machiavelli’s The Prince is harmless.’⁵ It made a refreshingly candid contribution to an enduring debate, and one that any history of the ambassadors is obliged to fathom. What was diplomacy for? By what rules should it be governed? Which is more important when conducting foreign affairs: moral rectitude or naked self-interest, courtesy or cunning, the urbanity of an envoy or the subtle skills of an assassin? Realism or idealism?

The great Roman orator Cicero (106–43 BC) offered one prescription: ‘There will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and for all times, and there will be one master and one ruler, that is, God, over all, for He is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge.’⁶ When expounding the rules and rubrics of diplomacy, the idealist insists, one must abide by the dictates of a universal moral order. This might be Cicero’s God, Asoka’s dhamma, or even the modern notion of a binding Law of Nations, but in all cases ethical imperatives govern the parleys between societies. Of course, rulers invariably engage in diplomacy to further their own best interests, but there is still a right way and a wrong way to conduct foreign affairs. Justice and fair play are not only worth pursuing in and of themselves; they also foster dynamic, respectful relationships.

Realists regard this as naïve, and look instead to self-interest and contingency. Higher justice is a chimera, they suggest, and rather than genuflecting to a benign Law of Nations, political leaders ought to abide by the grittier realities of the Law of Nature. The strong will always dominate the weak, the pursuit of power and influence is both noble and necessary, and if you do not strive to rule over others, then, in time, others will assuredly strive to rule over you.

Classical Athens, to look backwards for a moment, is often credited with an uncompromisingly realist outlook. In 416 BC, during the Peloponnesian War, the city launched an expedition against the island of Melos, a Spartan colony that stubbornly refused to ally itself with the Athenian Empire. Envoys were sent to treat with the island’s governors. ‘On our side,’ the Athenians began, ‘we will not use fine phrases,’ nor claim that Athens deserves its empire because of past services to the Greek world. When reaching their decision, the Melians should eschew moralizing and ‘try to get what it is possible for you to get…When matters are discussed by practical people,’ the just outcome is always determined by the fact that ‘the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept’.

In the present instance, ‘we rule the sea and you are islanders, and weaker islanders than the rest.’ Any appeal to ‘such a thing as fair play and just dealing’ was given short shrift. The ‘path of justice and honour’ led to danger the path of self-interest to safety. ‘There is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms – alliance on a tribute-paying basis and liberty to enjoy your own property.’ Athens was simply behaving as a great power ought to: expanding its influence so that it might flourish.

The Melians were unconvinced. ‘Our decision, Athenians, is just the same as it was at first. We are not prepared to give up in a short moment the liberty which our city has enjoyed from its foundation for seven hundred years. We put our trust in the fortune that the gods will send…and in the help of men – that is, of the Spartans.’ That trust was misplaced and, after a period of siege, ‘the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age, and sold the women and children as slaves.’⁷

This account of the so-called Melian dialogue comes from the histories of Thucydides (460–400 BC), who is often claimed as a founding father of realist theorizing. Undoubtedly, he offers a skewed account of Greek statecraft. He had a particular view of the nature of Greek political life, a precise (and, to some tastes, compelling) theory about how the affairs of men were governed, and he shaped his histories accordingly. But if he exaggerated, Thucydides, as great an historian as the world would ever know, was surely correct in diagnosing naked self-interest as one of the engines of Greek politics. However, the tradition he inaugurated (which would be carried forward by philosophers such as Niccolò‘ Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes) had a less familiar, but no less vibrant, counterpart in the East, which brings us back to Kautilya’s Arthasastra.

ii. The Arthasastra

According to Kautilya’s theory, in the Mauryan political world everything turned on the character of the king. If he ‘is energetic, his subjects will be equally energetic. If he is reckless, they will be reckless likewise.’ Kautilya advised any reputable monarch to divide his day into segments of one and a half hours. His night-time hours were to be every bit as regimented.

During the first one-eighth part of the night, he shall receive secret emissaries; during the second, he shall attend to bathing and supper and study; during the third, he shall enter the bed-chamber amid the sound of trumpets and enjoy sleep during the fourth and fifth parts. Having been awakened by the sound of trumpets during the sixth part, he shall recall to his mind the injunctions of sciences as well as the day’s duties; during the seventh, he shall sit considering administrative measures and send out spies; and during the eighth division of the night, he shall receive benedictions from sacrificial priests, teachers, and the high priest, and having seen his physician, chief cook and astrologer, and having saluted both a cow with its calf and a bull by circumambulating around them, he shall get into his court.

An approachable king was likely to be a popular king. ‘When in the court, he shall never cause his petitioners to wait at the door, for when a king makes himself inaccessible to his people and entrusts work to his immediate officers, he may be sure to engender confusion in business, and to cause public disaffection.’ He should, therefore, ‘personally attend to the business of gods, of heretics, of Brahmans learned in the Vedas, of cattle, of sacred places, of minors, the aged, the afflicted, the helpless, and of women’. Indeed, the Arthasastra is, in many ways, a primer in enlightened monarchy. Domestic affairs were to be conducted with justice and despatch; measures were to be put in place to protect the population from natural disasters and to safeguard the rights and privileges of merchants.

Justice was never to be arbitrary, but it could sometimes be severe. Torture was a legitimate investigative technique, although it was not to be employed against certain classes of people: pregnant women, priests, ‘ignoramuses, youngsters, the aged, the afflicted, persons under intoxication, lunatics, persons suffering from hunger, thirst, or fatigue from journey, persons who have confessed of their own accord, and persons who are very weak – none of these shall be subjected to torture’.

A terrifying variety of punishments awaited everyone else:

blows with a cane: twelve beats on each of the thighs; twenty-eight beats with a stick of the tree; thirty-two beats on each palm of the hands and on each sole of the feet; two on the knuckles, the hands being joined so as to appear like a scorpion…burning one of the joints of a finger after the accused has been made to drink rice gruel; heating his body for a day after he has been made to drink oil; causing him to lie on coarse green grass for a night in winter.

Those adjudged guilty lost all hope of clemency. Anyone who stole a chicken, mongoose, dog or pig could either pay a hefty fine or have the tip of his nose severed. ‘He who castrates a man shall have his generative organ cut off,’ while ‘any person who aims at the kingdom, who forces entrance into the king’s harem, who instigates wild tribes or enemies against the king, or who creates disaffection in forts, country parts, or in the army, shall be burnt alive from head to foot.’

The flinty character of domestic politics extended to the Mauryans’ dealings with other kingdoms. The empire’s fortunes were not determined by the randomness of fate, Kautilya insisted, but by the decisions rulers made. Kautilya offered a simple but elegant analysis of Indian geopolitics. The king ought to regard his immediate neighbour as his enemy, and the neighbour beyond that as his ally, and so on in a system of concentric circles. He should adjust his policy according to his potency and resources; when strong, he should strike, and when weak he should temporize.

At all times, however, he should do everything possible to gather reliable intelligence, both at home and abroad. A motley collection of spies were to be recruited to test the loyalty of his ministers and to infiltrate subversive factions within society. The state should ‘employ spies disguised as persons endowed with supernatural power, persons engaged in penance, ascetics, bards, buffoons, mystics, astrologers, prophets foretelling the future…physicians, lunatics, the dumb, the deaf, idiots, the blind, traders, painters, carpenters, musicians, dancers, vintners, and manufacturers of cakes, flesh and cooked rice, and send them abroad into the country for espionage’. Agents should also be posted abroad to reconnoitre and sow discord. Astrologers might be despatched to convince dissidents that it was an especially auspicious time to mount a coup. Prostitutes could be sent to seduce rival generals and foment animosity between them.

Ambassadors also had a vital role to play. An envoy’s first duty was to ‘make friendship with the enemy’s officers such as those in charge of wild tracts, of boundaries, of cities, and of country parts. He shall also contrast the military stations, sinews of war, and strongholds of the enemy with those of his own master. He shall ascertain the size and area of forts and of the state, as well as strongholds of precious things and assailable and unassailable points.’ The ambassador’s reception was an excellent way of gauging the intentions of a rival monarch. Promising signs included respectful treatment, being given a seat close to the throne, and enquiries after the health of the emperor: ‘all these shall be noted as indicating the good graces of the enemy and the reverse his displeasure.’

Whatever welcome the ambassador received, he was not to be cowed by the ‘mightiness of the enemy’ and he should ‘strictly avoid women and liquor…for it is well-known that the intentions of envoys are ascertained while they are asleep or under the influence of alcohol’. During his mission he should establish his own network of spies ‘to ascertain the nature of the intrigue prevalent among parties favourably disposed to his own master, as well as the conspiracy of hostile factions’. If this proved impossible he could ‘try to gather such information by observing the talk of beggars, intoxicated and insane persons, or of persons babbling in sleep’. The precise objective of a mission would vary according to circumstances, but likely duties included ‘the maintenance of treaties, the issue of ultimatums, gaining of friends, intrigue, sowing dissension among friends, carrying away by stealth relatives and gems, [and] gathering information about the movements of spies’.

Of course, Kautilya realized that other potentates were always likely to send their own devious ambassadors, so it was important to remain vigilant. There were constant dangers associated with being a Mauryan emperor, and the risk of assassination was taken especially seriously, as Chandragupta’s wife could attest, with poisoning the regicide’s preferred method. The alarm was to be raised whenever

the vapour arising from cooked rice possesses the colour of the neck of a peacock, and appears chill as if suddenly cooled; when vegetables possess an unnatural colour, and are watery and hardened, and appear to have suddenly turned dry…when utensils reflect light either more or less than usual, and are covered with a layer of foam at their edges; when any liquid preparation possesses streaks on its surface; when milk bears a bluish streak in the centre of its surface; when liquor and water possess reddish streaks; when curd is marked with black and dark streaks, and honey with white streaks; when watery things appear parched as if overcooked and look blue and swollen; when dry things have shrunk and changed in their colour; when hard things appear soft, and soft things hard…when carpets and curtains possess blackish circular spots, with their threads and hair fallen off; when metallic vessels set with gems appear tarnished as though by roasting, and have lost their polish, colour, shine, and softness of touch.

Poisoners were also apt to give themselves away, and the king’s attendants should always be suspicious of ‘hesitation in speaking, heavy perspiration, yawning, too much bodily tremor, frequent tumbling, evasion of speech [and] carelessness in work’. Whenever the king was presented with ‘water, scents, fragrant powders, dress and garlands’, servants ‘shall first touch these things by their eyes, arms and breast’.

It was a fitting response to a cynical political milieu. The Mauryans knew of every potential danger because of an unflinching willingness to employ dubious strategies of their own. Just as ambassadors were expected to spy and to agitate, so agents were sometimes sent to kill off troublesome rivals. Pacts and pledges could be negotiated, but it was also entirely legitimate to break them. A trusted policy in the ancient world was for powers to exchange hostages – often including a ruler’s relatives – when they made treaties; this provided some guarantee that the parties would abide by the terms of an agreement. Kautilya recognized the usefulness of such arrangements, but saw not the slightest reason to honour them. If a prince had been offered up as a hostage, that prince should do everything in his power to engineer his escape.

Carpenters, artisans, and other spies, attending upon the prince (kept as a hostage) may take him away at night through an underground tunnel dug for the purpose. Dancers, actors, singers, players on musical instruments, buffoons, court-bards [and] swimmers previously set about the enemy [as spies], may continue under his service and may indirectly serve the prince. They should have the privilege of entering and going out of the palace at any time. The prince may therefore get out at night disguised as any one of the above spies…Or the prince may be removed concealed under clothes, commodities, vessels, beds, seats and other articles by cooks, confectioners, servants employed to serve the king while bathing, servants employed for carrying conveyances, for spreading the bed, toilet-making, dressing, and procuring water.

It might be necessary to serve sentinels with poisoned food, or to bribe them, or to create a diversion by setting ‘fire to a building filled with valuable articles’. The prince would disguise himself as a shaven-headed ascetic, a diseased man or even a corpse. The strategies enumerated by Kautilya were seemingly endless.⁸

Chandragupta and Asoka, grandfather and grandson, inhabited opposite ends of the same philosophical spectrum. Together, they offer a telling lesson in just how drastically, and rapidly, worldviews might change. Diplomacy was always the bellwether of a society’s attitude towards the rest of humanity. Asoka’s optimism and generosity, his policy of conquest through righteousness, were exceptional; in the words of H. G. Wells, among the monarchs that crowd the columns of history, Asoka shines almost alone. The encounters between cultures would more often be clouded by fear and suspicion.

Greeks were tolerated in the ancient city of Alexandria but, as Herodotus explained, ‘no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek or use a Greek knife, spit or cauldron, or even eat the flesh of a bull known to be clean if it has been cut with a Greek knife.’⁹ Muscovite princes would accept the need for relationships with other nations but, well into the seventeenth century, they often refused to shake the hand of a foreigner for fear of infection. During the sixteenth century, Venetians would sell their wares in Ottoman Istanbul, and the Portuguese would trade in Macao, but the communities they traded with would be mistrusted and ghettoized.

Indeed, mention of the Portuguese in Macao brings us to China, the final destination in this survey of the ancient world, and a culture that has agonized more than any other over its dealings with the outside world. One of the duties of history is to puncture lazy orthodoxies, and the travels of one early ambassador do much to confound the notion of unwavering Chinese insularity and xenophobia. Before recounting his tale, however, it would be useful to ponder why that notion is so stubbornly embedded in the Western psyche. To that end, before we visit the Han dynasty of ancient China, a brief detour of twenty-one centuries is called for.

CHAPTER IV The Son of Heaven
i. The Boxers

From now on, when barbarians come to the capital to present tribute, the military population and common people who dare to congregate in the streets to stare and make fun of them, or throw broken tiles and thus injure any of the barbarians, shall be punished with the cangue as a warning to the public.

Hui-t’ung-kuan Regulations, 1500¹

For fifty-five days in the summer of 1900 the foreign legations of Peking, crammed into the southern quarter of the city, lay under siege. Resentment of the Western powers had been simmering in China for decades. They had brought newfangled railways that tarnished the harmony of the natural landscape; they had encouraged hordes of zealous Christian missionaries to chip away at the empire’s ancient belief systems; and they had demonstrated an unwavering ambition to dominate China’s political and economic life.

China had been slow to recognize the extraordinary technological advancements of eighteenth-century Europe. The Chinese simply did not realize how mighty and wealthy the West had suddenly become until they tried to snuff out the illegal opium trade in the late 1830s. China was crushed by British force of arms. In the wake of the First Opium War (1839–42), Britain opened up seaports to foreign trade that were entirely removed from Chinese jurisdiction and also annexed Hong Kong. Further crises and humiliations followed. The Russians encroached upon the empire’s northern territories, internal rebellions scarred the middle years of the century, and in 1860 the French and British even temporarily occupied Peking. But in spite of all their successes, the Western powers were still impatient to carve out spheres of even greater influence and profit within the Celestial Empire.

In 1897 the murder of two Protestant missionaries gave Germany the ideal justification for seizing the bustling port of Jiaozhou. For several years, this same Shandong province had also seen a blossoming of enthusiasm for the so-called Boxer movement. Secretive, illegal martial-arts societies, the Boxers had abandoned their traditional anti-dynastic sentiment in favour of virulent anti-Western rhetoric. With their magical rituals and incantations, and their belief that they were immune from bullets, the Boxers offered an irresistible outlet for decades’ worth of resentment. Their influence spread out across northern China during the late 1890s.

The population was in dire need of a rallying cry. A recent war with Japan had ended in humiliating defeat, the Yellow River had burst its banks in 1898, and two years later the northern reaches of the empire had been ravaged by drought. In Peking, power resided with a reactionary empress dowager, whose counsellors urged her to stop demonizing the Boxers as lawless bandits and instead use them to reassert China’s independence. Early in 1900 they were summoned to the capital.

The diplomatic community in Peking was understandably nervous. Ominous news began to rush in from all sides. The British summer legation outside the city was burned down, the Boxers severed the railway lines between Peking and the coast, and on 11 June the chancellor of the Japanese embassy was set upon by an angry crowd, dragged from his coach and hacked to pieces. His battered corpse was thrown in the gutter and his heart presented to a popular general. By the 13th of the month, Boxers were flooding into the city, attacking churches and the homes of foreigners, and digging up Christian graves. When the German ambassador Clemens von Ketteler set out for urgent talks with the government on 20 June he too was murdered in the street. An officially sanctioned siege of the legation quarter by imperial troops now seemed inevitable.

Outlying embassies were abandoned, and a total of 475 civilians, 450 guards and 2,300 Chinese Christians, stranded in the diplomatic quarter, began their agonizing wait for the arrival of Western troops. Mercifully, they had a good supply of fresh water and rice, as well as ample stocks of pony-meat and champagne. There was also a wealth of tobacco; as one witness remembered it, ‘even some of the women, principally Italians and Russians, found relief in the constant smoking of cigarettes.’ Conditions were terribly crowded, however, and the Dutch minister was obliged to sleep in a cupboard belonging to the Russian ambassador. Morale was bruised when a Norwegian missionary went mad, and the French ambassador infuriated everyone by wandering around the compound, announcing, ‘We are all going to die tonight, we are all lost.’²

The siege provided its edifying sights: professors turning their hand to butchery, Catholic and Protestant missionaries filling defensive sandbags together. And for the most part, the imperial troops showed restraint, although during a single day they did manage to discharge 20,000 rounds of ammunition in the direction of the legations. Finally, on 14 August, relief came with the arrival of Western forces: 8,000 Japanese, 4,800 Russian, 3,000 British, 2,100 American, 800 French, 58 Austrian, and 53 Italian soldiers. ‘We heard the playing of machine guns on the outside of the city,’ someone recalled; ‘never was music so sweet.’³

It was an invincible force, and with the lifting of the siege the Western powers set about exacting their revenge. By the terms of the Boxer Protocol of September 1901, China was to offer an abject apology, pay a huge indemnity for its outrageous behaviour, and desist from importing arms for two years. It was a burden that the tottering Manchu dynasty could hardly withstand. By 1911 imperial China had ceased to exist, and in 1912 a republic was set up in its place. As for the Western powers, they seized every opportunity to expand their political and economic stranglehold on the country. Kaiser Wilhelm offered an especially bullish assessment of the changed situation: ‘Just as the Huns a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation by virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinese will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.’⁴

If the West still cherishes an image of Chinese insularity and xenophobia, one need look no further than the siege of the Peking embassies in 1900 for part of the explanation. The terror and privations suffered by ambassadors, their families and retinues would not quickly be forgotten. In truth, the Boxer Rebellion was the culmination of decades of growing alienation. As early as the end of the eighteenth century, Europe had fallen out of love with China. Heady stories of the majestic Chinese court, revered during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the most cultured and opulent place that might be imagined, were suddenly replaced by the niggardly accounts of ill-humoured diplomats – as ever, the vessels for their cultures’ prejudices.

When a Dutch ambassador travelled to Peking in 1796, there was precious little talk of silk, jade or chinoiserie. Instead, he reported back on mandarins with ‘shrill voices’ who rudely awakened visitors at three in the morning, and of ‘low and dirty’ reception rooms stocked with ‘coarse rugs…a few common chairs [and] a piece of wood with an iron spike as a candlestick’. The elaborate order and ritual of the court had apparently descended into chaos, and palaces were now ‘full of people, great and small, rich and poor intermingled, pressing and pushing without any distinction, so that we were stuck by a scene of confusion’.

The emperor’s horses were ‘shaggy and rather dirty’, and the food served at state banquets was an utter disgrace; pieces of game, ‘looking as if they were remnants of gnawed off bones’, had been unceremoniously ‘dumped on the table’. Here, the ambassador suggested, was the ‘most conclusive proof of coarseness and lack of civilization…However incredible this may seem in Europe, it is too remarkable to pass over in silence. From the reports with which the missionaries have deluded the world for a number of years, I had imagined a very civilized and enlightened people. These ideas were deeply rooted and a kind of violence was necessary to eradicate them, but this reception, joined to all our previous experiences, was a radical cure.’⁵

In fact, the Jesuits who had been tending the mission fields of China for the past two centuries had not been deluding anyone. China was in a dozen sorts of decline, but it had not suddenly become an uncivilized backwater. Europe had simply experienced a shift in fashion, a cultural backlash. The Enlightenment adoration of Confucian philosophy, ceramics and Chinese political genius had given way to talk of Chinese despotism, cruelty and backwardness. The West had decided it was superior, the cradle and guardian of authentic civilization, and China was now a place to be feared, mocked or exploited.

It was to prove a resilient perspective: one that still infects the European world-view, and one that a tragedy such as the Boxer Rebellion only served to reinforce. Millennia of Chinese history were reduced to a stereotype. China was – and always had been – odd, unwelcoming and self-satisfied. But as other stories from the history of the ambassadors reveal, the image is at best a simplistic half-truth. The Boxer Rebellion does not epitomize the history of China.

ii. Chang Ch’ien

Certain negative orthodoxies regarding China cannot be gainsaid. They persist because they are accurate. The Chinese emperor was always hailed as the son of heaven, the mediator between God and mankind, the overlord of all the earth’s kings and princes, although this posture was hardly a Chinese preserve. The rulers of ancient Mesopotamia believed themselves to be gods, and Mongol khans would style themselves the lords of the universe. In 1525, when the Ottoman leader Süleyman the Magnificent sent a letter to Francis I of France, he referred to himself as, ‘by the sacred miracles of Muhammad…Sultan of Sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the dispenser of crowns to the monarchs of the face of the world, the shadow of God on earth…ruler of the White and the Black seas, of Rumelia and Anatolia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Persia, Damascus, Aleppo, Cairo, Mecca, Medina, Arabia and Yemen’.⁶ When the client states of ancient Egypt sent their envoys to meet the pharaoh, they were expected to prostrate themselves seven times on their bellies and seven times on their backs. Whenever letters were sent to the pharaoh, diplomatic convention required these same states to refer to themselves as the dust beneath his sandals.

It is also true that China would often be sublimely uninterested in affairs beyond Southeast Asia, and Chinese diplomacy would sometimes consist almost entirely of raking in tribute from Korea, Vietnam and Japan. This proved to be a disastrous policy at the end of the eighteenth century although, in other periods, one wonders why China should have been concerned with the intricacies of Western political life. Ancient Greece and Mauryan India were also preoccupied with their own regional politics, after all. Moreover, a sense of superiority did not always imply isolation. Throughout its twenty-five dynasties, China was usually delighted to welcome the envoys of distant nations.

As soon as two Persian ambassadors crossed the Chinese border in 1420 they were greeted by imperial officials. In ‘a delectable meadow’ their hosts had set up a platform ‘with canvas awnings, over which were placed tables and chairs’. A meal of ‘geese, fowls, roasted meat’ and fruit was served and ‘after the repast various kinds of intoxicants were served up and all became tipsy’. Drink and diplomacy were combined once again.

A few days further into their journey, the ambassadors encountered a local viceroy, and he was just as determined to provide lavish hospitality. Once again, the ambassadors were ridiculously well fed. To the accompaniment of ‘organs, fiddles, Chinese fifes and two types of flute’, they dined on musk melons and watermelons, ‘walnuts, peeled chestnuts, lemons, garlics, and onions pickled in vinegar’. The feast was rounded off by an acrobatic display, with tricks being performed by ‘handsome boys, with their faces painted red and white in such a way that whoever happened to look at them took them for girls, with caps on their heads and pearls in their ears’.

Festivities followed in every town through which the ambassadors passed until, in mid-December, they arrived in Peking. News reached the envoys that the emperor himself was planning a lunchtime banquet. They rode from their lodgings to the imperial palace and, having dismounted at the first gateway, they were ‘conducted to the foot of the throne’ and ‘made prostration to the emperor five times’. Led from his presence, the ambassadors were now advised to seek out a toilet, ‘lest they should unexpectedly feel the necessity to rise in the middle of the banquet for some need when it would not be possible to go out’.

With such matters attended to, the ambassadors returned to the scene of the banquet, ‘a very extensive courtyard paved most beautifully and exquisitely with cut stones’. Inside a canopy they discovered a ‘magnificent throne, higher than the height of man with silver staircases on its three sides’. Incense burners and eunuchs were posted on either side, and next to them ‘stood stalwart Chinese officers armed with quivers’. Further back came ‘soldiers with long halberds in their hands and behind them yet another body of men with drawn swords’.

The Yongle emperor made his entrance and took his seat beneath a canopy of yellow satin decorated with images of fighting dragons. All was silence as the ambassadors, ‘on the tiptoe of expectation’, approached the throne. Once they had prostrated themselves five more times, the meal got under way. There were yet more acrobats – a troupe of dancers, made up of boys ‘as beautiful as the moon’ – and with the arrival of each new course an orchestra struck up and an ocean of coloured umbrellas were spun around. With the meal of lamb, goose and rice wine complete, the emperor doled out rewards to the performers and retired

to his harem.⁷

The Persian ambassadors had been treated with the greatest courtesy, but the Chinese did not perceive them as representatives of a political equal. From the earliest days of imperial China in the second millennium bc, whenever envoys came to China, whether from Persia, Rome or the courts of Europe, they were seen as the bearers of tribute and homage to the greatest ruler in the world. Such visits flattered the emperor, they were a fitting sign of respect and submission, and it behoved the Chinese court to respond with grace and generosity.

But all the world over, and certainly not only in China, diplomacy has always been a game of power and one-upmanship. When an insult was called for, rulers would turn to less than impressive individuals to serve as their envoys. Louis XI of France once sent a barber on a diplomatic errand to Margaret of Burgundy; another French king disparaged Edward III of England by conveying a message of defiance via a kitchen hand; the citizens of ancient Rhodes were furious when Rome supplied an ambassador who not only lacked the customary rank of senator but was also a lowly gymnastics instructor.

Conversely, when one ruler wished to show respect to another he would select skilled, very often noble, ambassadors, and kings and princes have usually interpreted the arrival of such men as a reflection of their own grandeur. The Roman emperor Augustus would boast of how ‘embassies were sent to me from the kings of India who had never been seen before in the camp of any Roman general’.⁸ One of Elizabeth I’s more devoted subjects reported how English sailors refused to transport Moroccan ambassadors in 1600, ‘because they think it is a matter odious and scandalous to the world to be too friendly or familiar with infidels’. Nevertheless, it remained ‘no small honour to us that nations so far remote and every way different should meet here to admire the glory and magnificence of our Queen of Sheba’.⁹

China, being no different, was always pleased to receive envoys. Despatching ambassadors of its own was an infinitely more troubling proposition, however. Would it not be a sign of weakness or of parity with the barbarian hordes beyond its borders? Often, China decided that it would – but, to return to the ancient world at last, sometimes it did not.

There have been many epic diplomatic journeys. The distances travelled and the time such journeys took are apt to bewilder the modern reader. Envoys sent from ancient Babylon to Egypt traversed thousands of miles of caravan routes, usually only covering forty or fifty miles a day. When the ambassadors of an Indian king sought out the Roman emperor Augustus in 20 BC their outward journey lasted more than four years – a respectable achievement given the curious cargo with which they were burdened: a serpent ten cubits long, a partridge larger than a vulture, and an armless youth who could play the trumpet with his feet.¹⁰ The journey of the Han ambassador Chang Ch’ien was every bit as impressive.

The Han dynasty ruled China, a seventeen-year hiatus excepted, from 206 BC to ad 220. It was a civilization that easily bears comparison with either fourth-century Athens or Mauryan India. Paper was invented, ideologies were forged, and a fiercely efficient bureaucracy was developed. Specialized, well-trained ministers oversaw everything: whether tax collection, religious ceremonial or the observation of the stars. The market places of the Han capital, Ch’ang-an (modern Xi’an), bustled with merchants from across Asia; Buddhist missionaries travelled throughout the empire; and the Han embraced a policy of expansion and discovery. Their armies penetrated south of the Yangtze River, eastwards to Korea, and even into the mysterious ‘western regions’ of central Asia. China was no less assured of its plenitude, but it was open to the world.

The Han emperor had many enemies, notably the aggressive Hsiung-nu tribe on China’s northern frontier. Traditionally, it had seemed more sensible to contain the Hsiung-nu threat than to engage them in battle. Supplying them with luxurious goods – offering them bribes, in effect – also served to blunt their hawkish tendencies. One Han courtier talked of the various ‘baits’ with which the Hsiung-nu could be seduced: ‘to give them elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouths; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their desires’.¹¹

The Han emperor Wu-ti grew weary of this passive, and to his mind ignoble, variety of diplomacy. He decided it was time to join battle with the Hsiung-nu. He would require allies, and who better than a people known as the Yueh-shih? They had been defeated by the Hsiung-nu and forced into exile, though not before the skull of their king had been fashioned into a drinking cup. They would surely crave revenge. Unfortunately, no one knew where they had fled. And so, in c.140 BC, the courtier Chang Ch’ien was despatched as an ambassador to locate their whereabouts.

A man of strong physique and of considerable generosity, Chang was accompanied by a hundred attendants as he set out on his embassy but he was almost immediately captured by the Hsiungnu. He spent the next ten years in captivity, although he seems to have been treated decently, and even acquired a Hsiung-nu wife and son. Finally, he managed to escape and embarked on a journey that would take him further west than any previous Chinese ambassador. He even located the Yueh-shih in present-day Kazakhstan, only to find they had no interest in forging an alliance with the Han. Chang spent the next year travelling around the region. On his homeward journey he was again captured by the Hsiung-nu but quickly escaped and reached the Chinese court in 126 BC. Only two of the hundred servants who had originally set out returned alive.

Chang was elevated to the office of grand counsellor of the palace, but not before providing the emperor with a report of the western regions that shattered the Chinese world-view. His verbal report was enshrined in the imperial histories and provoked decades of further exploration beyond the traditional sphere of Chinese diplomatic interest, usually limited to Japan, Korea, Vietnam and the various tribes on the empire’s frontier. The assumption had always been that, the further one travelled from China, the more barbaric the people became, until one came to the edge of the world and a limitless ocean. But Chang talked of people in the west, in the central Asian regions of Ferghana (in Uzbekistan) and Bactria (in modern Afghanistan), who actually lived ‘in houses, in fortified cities’, who were ‘settled on the land, ploughing the fields and growing wheat and rice’, who made wine from grapes and tended the finest horses Chang had ever seen. Even more astonishingly, he had heard of empires, most likely Persia, even further to the west that had developed the art of writing and traded with a metal coinage.¹²

As a direct result of Chang’s mission, more ambassadors would be sent out in search of allies in the coming years – to northern India, to Samarkand, even as far as the Persian Gulf. Each journey brought more revelations, and the trade routes into central Asia – the fabled silk roads – were refined and extended. As a direct result of such missions, China would be flooded with new imports, whether grapes or pomegranates, sesame seeds or broad beans.

By 92 BC a Chinese ambassador was laying silks at the feet of Mithridates II, king of Parthia, which lay southeast of the Caspian Sea. He returned the compliment, despatching ambassadors to China with an ostrich egg and a troupe of conjurors. Two hundred years after that, the envoys of a Roman emperor brought elephant tusks, rhinoceros horns and tortoise shells to the Chinese court. The links that had been forged in the wake of the Han ambassadors would be sustained. The enduring relationship between diplomacy and gift-giving was already thriving. In ad 638 the Persians were sending the Chinese a ferret that was an expert mice-catcher; a century later, they sent the Chinese four leopards. In the next phase of the ambassadors’ story, this aspect of diplomacy would soar.

THE MIDDLE CENTURIES

CHAPTER V Charlemagne’s Elephant
i. Gift-Giving

Enter the French Ambassadors

KING HENRY

Now are we well prepar’d to know the pleasure Of our fair cousin Dauphin, for we hear Your greeting is from him, not from the king.

AMBASSADOR

May’t please your majesty to give us leave Freely to render what we have in charge; Or shall we sparingly show you far off The Dauphin’s meaning and our embassy? […] Your highness, lately sending into France, Did claim some certain dukedoms, in the right Of your great predecessor, King Edward the Third. In answer of which claim, the prince our master Says that you savour too much of your youth, And bids you be advis’d, there’s naught in France That can be with a nimble galliard won; You cannot revel into dukedoms there. He therefore sends you, meeter for your spirit, This tun of treasure; and, in lieu of this, Desires you let the dukedoms that you claim Hear no more of you. This the Dauphin speaks.

KING HENRY

What treasure, uncle?

EXETER (opening the tun)

Tennis balls, my liege.

KING HENRY

We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us: His present and your pains we thank you for: When we have match’d our rackets to these balls, We will in France, by God’s grace, play a set Shall strike his father’s crown into the hazard […] I will rise there with so full a glory That I will dazzle all the eyes of France, Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us. And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his Hath turn’d his balls to gunstones; and his soul Shall stand sore-charged for the wasteful vengeance That shall fly from them; for many a thousand widows Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands; Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down…

Henry V, I. ii

Before the ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788, potentates were free to lavish tokens of esteem on American worthies whenever they chose. In 1785, the king of Spain sent two especially handsome donkeys to General George Washington in recognition of his military exploits and they were graciously received. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution immediately made such gestures suspicious, even illicit. Henceforth, no American public servant was to ‘accept of any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state’.

So when, in 1839, the emperor of Morocco decided to present the United States with a lion and a lioness (a prodigious gift by any standard), the local consul Thomas Carr faced an awkward decision. He could either offend an influential monarch or transgress the new rules of American diplomatic conduct. Carr valiantly tried to reject the gifts, but was forced to relent when the emperor’s messenger threatened to release the animals into the street. After a few months’ sojourn in the consulate buildings, the lions were shipped to Philadelphia and quietly sold off at auction.¹ Intended as a necessary check on bribery and corruption, the constitutional prohibition had managed, at a stroke, to jeopardize one of the most venerable of diplomatic rituals: the exchanging of meaningful, preferably spectacular, gifts.

For millennia, such exchanges had succeeded in capturing the tensions inherent in any ambassadorial encounter. Those giving the gifts often sought to demonstrate their affection or admiration for the recipient – see what we are willing to give – but they also hoped to hint, rather loudly, at their superiority, at their own wealth, ingenuity and influence – see what we are able to give. To despatch too meagre a gift was a snub, to send too exotic a gift was a boast. Polities were always much more likely to err on the side of boastfulness. Upon receiving presents from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, one tenth-century Muslim ruler had immediately declared: ‘send him a gift one hundred times greater than his so that he may recognize the glory of Islam and the grace that Allah has bestowed upon us.’²

The Romans won favour by presenting gold necklaces to British tribal leaders, while the courts of Enlightenment Europe fastened upon the idea of trading elegant Se‘vres and Meissen porcelain. Fidel Castro would even limit the distribution of certain brands of luxury cigar to enhance their cachet as diplomatic gifts. In the eighteenth century, Frederick William I of Prussia went so far as sending an entire room, a candlelit Baroque confection of amber panels, mirrors and mosaics, to Peter the Great of Russia. Peter had admired the so-called ‘Amber Room’ during a visit to Berlin in 1712. The Prussian king, eager to cement an alliance against Sweden, ordered the room’s dismantlement. In 1717 it was packed into eighteen boxes and made the precarious journey from the Charlottenburg Palace to St Petersburg. Until Hitler’s invading troops tore it down in 1941, it came to symbolize the amity between two great nations.

Presenting something that was particularly evocative of one’s own culture was another shrewd strategy. The Ottoman rulers of Turkey looked to fragrant soaps and carpets, the Chinese to precious silks. In the seventeenth century, the Polish city of Gdansk routinely selected the engraved amber for which it was so renowned, just as the burghers of Nuremberg favoured their city’s humble, but much-coveted, Lebkuchen cakes. Japanese emperors sent a full suit of shogun armour to James I of England in 1613, and an elaborate samurai sword to Queen Victoria two and a half centuries later.

Comparison was everything in the world of diplomatic gift-giving. Monarchs endlessly contrasted themselves with their peers and predecessors. When a Russian ambassador presented James I of England with a ‘rich Persian dagger and knife’ in 1617, ‘the king was very much pleased, and the more so when he understood Queen Elizabeth never had such a present thence’.³ They also compared the different gifts offered up by rival ambassadors. In 1614, when the East India Company looked to recruit an ambassador to send to the north Indian court of the Moghul emperor Jahangir, its gaze settled on Sir Thomas Roe, ‘a gentleman of pregnant understanding, well-spoken, learned, industrious, of a comely personage’.⁴ He left for India in February 1615 with a suitably impressive retinue: a chaplain, physician, apothecary, secretary and cook.

Unfortunately, his diplomatic gifts were decidedly uninspiring. Upon receiving a scarf, swords and some leather gods, Jahangir turned to a visiting Jesuit priest to ask whether James I was really the great monarch he purported to be. ‘Presents of so small a value’ did little to bolster the English king’s reputation. Jahangir had hoped, at the very least, for a cache of precious jewels. As for the coach that Roe also presented to the emperor, it simply did not measure up to the exacting Moghul standard of opulence. Jahangir has his servants dismantle it, replacing lacklustre velvet fittings with silk, and ‘instead of the brass nails that were first in it, there were nails of silver put in their place’.

Roe’s embarrassment turned to utter humiliation with the arrival of a Persian ambassador. Here was a diplomat who truly knew how to impress a Moghul emperor. As well as twenty-seven Arabian horses, nine mules and two chests of ‘Persian hangings’, he offered Jahangir ‘forty muskets, five clocks, one camel laden with Persian cloth of gold…twenty-one camels of wine of the grape, fourteen camels of distilled sweet water, seven of rose water, seven daggers set with stones…[and] seven Venetian looking glasses’. Roe contrasted the two assortments of gifts and confessed to being ‘ashamed of the relation’.⁵

In this delicate game of cultural dialogue and rivalry, nothing was ever quite as impressive as the animals – whether the camels, bears and monkeys despatched to Frederick II of Sicily by the sultan of Cairo in 1228, the ten greyhounds taught to sit on horses’ backs that ambassadors from India brought to the Mongol court a few years later, or even the pandas Ching-Ching and Chia-Chia that Peking gave to Britain in 1974. Animals, especially when transported over long distances or into strange climates, did have a tendency to perish en route. In 1514, when the king of Portugal sent a rhinoceros to Pope Leo X, the creature drowned on its way to Rome. Even when they arrived in perfect condition, the animals were not always wonderfully well behaved. In the tenth century, dogs sent as gifts from the Hungarian king almost bit the Byzantine emperor’s hand and an unfortunate diplomatic incident was only narrowly avoided.

Such risks were well worth taking, however. Animals flattered even the greatest monarch. Very rarely, the gift of a curious animal was rejected. In 693 ad, Arab rulers suggested sending a lion to the Chinese empress. Unfortunately, it was a time of scarcity and famine in the east, and one of the empress’s advisors suggested that an animal that ate such a prodigious amount of fresh meat every day would be an unwelcome strain on the court’s limited resources. This was an aberration.⁶ Throughout the world’s history, possessing exotic creatures was a hallmark of power and influence. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt ordered hunting parties that travelled as far as Somalia to capture monkeys and leopards, and rulers – whether Solomon or Kublai Khan, the Bourbons or the Medici – lavished untold wealth on their menageries.

Giraffes always made for unusually extravagant gifts. The Chinese emperor was delighted with the creature sent as tribute, via Bengal, from East Africa in 1414; four centuries later, in 1827, the pasha of Egypt scored a notable diplomatic triumph by despatching giraffes to the rulers of England, France and Austria. Two of the animals soon perished, but the giraffe that had been shipped to Marseilles and then marched through the French countryside would continue to delight crowds of Parisians at the Jardin des Plantes for the next sixteen years.

Most prized of all, however, was the elephant, a creature that had charmed and fascinated Europe for centuries. To the ancient world, elephants were ‘of all the brutes the most intelligent’, known to ‘have taken up their riders when slain in battle and carried them away for burial’. They were invested with the full gamut of human faculties and emotions. ‘It understands the language of its country,’ the Roman naturalist Pliny explained; ‘it obeys commands, and it remembers all the duties which it has been taught. It is sensible alike of the pleasures of love and glory, and, to a degree that is rare even among men, possesses notions of honesty, prudence, and equity.’ It had ‘a religious respect for the stars, and a veneration for the sun and the moon’, and, according to the Greek historian Arrian, ‘there was even one that died of remorse and despair because it had killed its rider in a fit of rage.’⁷

The typical elephant enjoyed ‘his bath with all the zest of a consummate voluptuary’, and he was endearingly temperamental. If his keepers did not fill his manger with just the right kinds of flowers, he would begin roaring in protest. Even when the requisite flowers had been located, he would refuse to eat if they were not properly arranged, ‘for he loves to have his sleep made sweet and pleasant’. A suitor’s promise of an elephant, Arrian revealed, had even been known to seduce chaste Indian women away from the path of virtue. To present an elephant to a coy mistress served as an irresistible flirtatious gambit.

Elephants also carried an air of menace, of course. They were formidable engines of war, able to turn the tide of any battle and to terrify the hardiest soldier. They would always be associated in the Western imagination with Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps in 218 BC, but their fabled military prowess only added to their mystique. As a result, there was obvious capital to be made from exhibiting mastery over such fearsome creatures.

In 55 BC, the Roman general Pompey treated crowds at the Circus Maximus to a banquet of cruelty and bloodshed, overseeing the slaughter of 500 lions and 400 leopards. Roman audiences were hardly squeamish, but the culling of seventeen elephants that came next was too brutal even for them. Realizing that their lives were in the gravest danger, the elephants sought to gain the compassion of the crowd by letting out desperate cries and wails. Suddenly, the formerly bloodthirsty crowds turned against Pompey and showered him in curses and abuse. It was perhaps wiser to treat elephants with greater respect, making use of them, for instance, as the very finest of diplomatic gifts.

In 1552, Suleyman the elephant trekked across central Europe from Genoa to Vienna. A present from the Portuguese king to the Holy Roman Emperor, it attracted huge crowds in all the towns and villages through which it passed, and inspired dozens of adoring songs and poems.

Three centuries earlier, Louis IX of France had also presented Henry III of England with an elephant, the first such creature to be seen on British soil since the Roman invasions of the first century AD. It took up residence in the menagerie at the Tower of London, already home to leopards sent by the German emperor and a polar bear, a gift from the Norwegian king, that fished for its supper in the Thames each evening. Sadly, the creature died within two years, most likely from overindulgence in the red wine prescribed to warm its blood. Not the worst of deaths, perhaps, but the English king was heartbroken and is said to have nursed his outrageously unusual pet through its final death agonies.

Some elephants travelled even further.

Greece, India and China were the triple pillars of our survey of the ancient world. Turning now to the early medieval centuries, Charlemagne’s Europe, the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad and the Byzantine Empire take centre state. All three mistrusted one another, and such mistrust sometimes engendered hatred. But, as three of the greatest powers in the world, they all realized that they were obliged to maintain diplomatic relations. Their encounters forced a collision between Islam and Christianity, between the two squabbling halves of the Christian commonwealth – and, in the year 801, the despatching of yet another diplomatic elephant.

The death of Muhammad in ad 632 ushered in the era of the rashidun, the first four Islamic caliphs, all of them trusted companions of the prophet. From their Arabian stronghold in Medina, in present-day Saudi Arabia, they oversaw decades of staggering territorial expansion. Jerusalem was taken in 638, and by 641 the Muslim conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt was all but complete. Persia’s armies were crushed at the battle of Qadisiyyah in 636 and its capital, Ctesiphon, was seized: the prelude to the wholesale takeover of the entire Sassanid Persian Empire. Within a few more years Cyprus had been snatched from Byzantium, and Muslim armies had marched as far as Tripoli in the west and Afghanistan and the Indus River in the east.

Military adventures abroad could not disguise factionalism and theological bickering at home, however. Towards the end of the rashidun, rebellion brought Muhammad’s cousin Ali to power in 656. His authority was not universally recognized across the Muslim world, and a period of civil war was only ended by the arrival of the Umayyads, the first great Islamic dynasty descended from one of Muhammad’s closest companions. A new period of expansion began. By 750 Sicily and Crete had been welcomed into the Islamic fold and a Muslim kingdom had been established in Spain. It was in the year 750 that a new dynasty wrested control of the empire from the Umayyads. The Abbasid caliphate, descended from an uncle of the prophet, transferred the capital from Damascus to Baghdad and ushered in one of the golden ages of Islamic history.

Under Abbasid rule, Baghdad was to become a wonder of the early medieval world, a circular city of science and poetry, famous for its bookshops and bathhouses, its chess games and secret cabarets. One observer calculated that it had ‘no equal on earth either in the Orient or the Occident, it is the most extensive city in area, in importance, in prosperity, in abundance of water, and in healthful climate’. Merchandise flooded in from as far away as India, China and Tibet, and one might imagine that ‘all the goods of the earth are sent there, all the treasures of the world gathered there, and all the blessings of the universe concentrated there’. The water was sweet, the trees flourished, the fruit was of perfect quality, and the people were all blessed with bright countenances and open intelligences. No one was ‘better educated than their scholars…more solid in their syntax than their grammarians, more supple than their singers…more eloquent than their preachers, more artistic than their poets’. The only possible conclusion was that ‘Iraq is indeed the centre of the world.’⁸

Harun al-Rashid (reigned 786–809) was the most famous of the Abbasid caliphs, his opulent court familiar to history through the pages of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights. A ruthless politician, patron of the arts, builder of magnificent palaces, Harun was an expert diplomatist.

During the reign of the Byzantine empress Irene, he had marched his troops to within sight of Constantinople and demanded the payment of a handsome yearly tribute in exchange for not attacking the city. Irene had acquiesced but her successor, Nicephorus I, thought it far below Byzantium’s dignity to humble itself before a Muslim ruler. In 802 he despatched an envoy to Iraq with a strongly worded letter, replete with an analogy to the game of chess that any Abbasid caliph was certain to appreciate: ‘The queen who reigned before me gave you the position of the tower and placed herself in the position of a simple pawn. She paid the tribute that was once imposed upon you…This was the result of the frailty and foolishness of women. When you receive my letter, send back the money that you have received from her, and ransom yourself by paying the sums that are incumbent on you. Otherwise, the sword will decide between us.’ For added emphasis, the Byzantine envoys then threw swords at the caliph’s feet. A furious Harun took up his sabre, smashed the swords to pieces and then penned the tersest of replies. ‘From Harun, commander of the faithful, to Nicephorus, the Roman dog: I have read your letter, son of an infidel woman. You will not hear my reply but will see it with your own eyes.’ Sure enough, Harun marched his army northwards and to halt his progress the emperor, distracted by other affairs, agreed to recommence tribute payments. But even before Harun had returned to Raqqa (his new capital), he learned that Nicephorus had reneged on his promise. Having lost all patience, Harun led his troops towards the Black Sea coast where he besieged and conquered the Byzantine city of Heraclea.⁹

Happily, some of Harun’s other dealings with Christianity were more polite. In 801, Charlemagne’s ambassador Isaac the Jew returned from a diplomatic mission to Iraq with an elephant named Abu’l Abbas, after the founder of the Abbasid dynasty. It was a present from Harun to Charlemagne, king of the Franks.

The caliph was eager to recruit allies against rival Muslim rulers in Spain, Charlemagne hoped to make travel safer for Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, and both rulers shared a mighty rival in the Byzantine Empire. Crossing the Alps so late in the year was impractical, but after wintering at Pisa the ambassador escorted the elephant to Charlemagne’s capital at Aachen. The Emperor would dote on Abu’l Abbas for years to come, regularly taking him along on military expeditions. The creature would die in 810 while crossing into Saxony, although his bones would be preserved at Lippenheim until the eighteenth century.

At other times Harun would send Charlemagne ivory chessmen, water-clocks and perfumes, but Abu’l Abbas was his most precious diplomatic gift, exchanged between two of the greatest powers in the ninth-century world. Harun referred to himself as the shadow of God on earth, but he did not underestimate the talents of his compeer in the west.

ii. Aachen

He was broad and strong in the form of his body and exceptionally tall without, however, exceeding an appropriate measure. As is well known, his height was equal to seven of his feet. The top of his head was round, his eyes were large and lively. His nose was somewhat larger than usual. He had attractive grey hair, and a friendly, cheerful face. His appearance was impressive whether he was sitting or standing, despite having a neck that was fat and too short, and a large belly. The symmetry of his other limbs obscured these points. He had a firm gait, a thoroughly manly manner of holding himself, and a high voice which did not really correspond to the rest of his body.

Einhard’s description of Charlemagne¹⁰

In April 799, Pope Leo III approached the Flaminian Gate in Rome. An armed band descended upon him, threw him to the ground and, after trying to pluck out his tongue and eyes, left him bleeding in the street. His assailants, supporters of the previous pope, had hoped to disfigure Leo so severely that he would be unable to continue in his papal duties. They failed and, after recuperating at a nearby monastery, Leo travelled north, to Paderborn, to recruit the help of Charles the Great, king of the Franks. A few months later the pope returned to Rome in the company of an armed escort. It was not the first time that Charlemagne had served as guardian and protector of a vulnerable papacy.

The Franks, however temporarily and belatedly, had filled the political vacuum left by the demise of the western Roman Empire. Between ad 370 and ad 470, Asiatic Huns, perhaps the descendants of the Hsiung-nu that had so troubled Han China, pushed westwards, forcing Germanic tribes into Roman territory. Over the following decades these tribes spread across Europe – the Visigoths into Spain, the Ostrogoths into Italy, the Vandals as far as North Africa.

Rome sought to establish workable relations with these newcomers, even allowing them to settle on lands within the empire. Diplomacy and accommodation had their limits; however, and by 410 the German chieftain Alaric was sacking Rome. The empire, now based in Ravenna, tottered on, but by 476 the last Roman emperor in the West, the sixteen-year-old Romulus Augustulus, had been forced to abdicate and begin his premature retirement in the Bay of Naples. The barbarian Odoacer was now the king of Italy and the future of Roman civilization lay in the east, in the city founded by the emperor Constantine on the Bosporus: the capital of the new Byzantine Empire.

There were many beneficiaries of this dramatic shift in Western politics, among them the Franks who, under Clovis, moved into the territories of Gaul. In the eighth century the Merovingian dynasty established by Clovis was displaced by the Frankish aristocrat-turned usurper, Pippin the Short. The centre of Frankish power now moved 300 miles to the east, from Paris to the Carolingian capital of Aachen, in present-day Germany. Pippin’s son, Charlemagne, proved to be the greatest of all Frankish rulers. Through a combination of military might and subtle diplomacy he outflanked his immediate neighbours – the Bavarian, Breton and Aquitanian tribes of northern Germany – and waged successful campaigns against more distant opponents, among them the Saxons of Germany and the Avars of Hungary. At its height, Charlemagne’s empire stretched from the Spanish border and central Italy in the south, to Saxony in the north, as far as Bavaria in the east.

He also rescued the papacy from the intrusions of the Lombard kings of northern Italy, conquering Lombard possessions from the German border to the lands south of Rome. The Holy See had a new champion: Charlemagne, the mightiest king in Western Europe. On Christmas Day 800, in the church of St Peter in Rome, Leo III crowned Charlemagne as emperor, heir to the Caesars. The pope, in keeping with tradition, prostrated himself before the new emperor’s feet and the crowds let up a shout. ‘Life and victory to Charles the most pious Augustus,’ they chanted three times, ‘crowned by God, the great and pacific emperor.’¹¹

The future kings and emperors of Western Europe would always dream of emulating Charlemagne’s achievement. Napoleon Bonaparte was no exception. Much like Charlemagne, Napoleon was always well supplied with detractors. One of them wrote a scurrilous, rather far-fetched account of Napoleon’s trip to Aachen, Charlemagne’s ancient capital. Napoleon summoned the entire French diplomatic corps to bear witness to this act of imperial pilgrimage. He apparently visited every spot where Charlemagne had walked, sat, slept, talked, eaten or prayed, dragging the foreign representatives behind him.

Napoleon was apparently so intoxicated by the place that he allowed himself to be duped by local entrepreneurs who, in return for handsome rewards, offered up supposed relics of the great Frankish king – a stone on which Charlemagne had once kneeled, a document bearing his signature, a contemporary portrait, a ring he had worn, a crucifix he had used in his devotions.

One German professor wrote to Napoleon, urging him to be less credulous and suggesting that the portrait was a drawing of this century; the diploma written in the last; the crucifix manufactured within fifty years, and the ring perhaps within ten. Napoleon was not amused and, upon reading the professor’s note, despatched officers to his rooms. They woke the professor, forced him to dress and then bundled him into a covered cart which carried him under escort to the left bank of the Rhine, where he was left with orders, under pain of death, never to return to the French Empire.¹²

If the story was a fabrication or, at best, an exaggeration, it was one that hinted at just how long a shadow Charles the Great cast over European history. Perhaps only an Arthur or an Alexander bequeathed a more intoxicating legend.

Charlemagne’s diplomatic acumen was certainly part of that legend, but the one thing that medieval Europe enjoyed even more than celebrating its heroes was denouncing Islam. The Song of Roland was the most famous of the medieval chansons de geste (songs of deeds) that flourished from the twelfth century and made such efficient work of denouncing Muslims as duplicitous, avaricious scoundrels. La Chanson de Roland would principally be remembered for its fanciful account of the murder of a heroic Frankish knight at the Pass of Roncesvalles, high in the Pyrenees. It also offered a typically unflattering portrayal of Muslim statecraft, and the Islamic penchant for subverting the protocols of diplomatic encounter. This would prove to be a staple of medieval European discourse. The elephant, sent from Islam to Christianity, was dismissed as an aberration. Muslim ambassadors managing to deceive as mighty an emperor as Charlemagne was surely more representative of Islamic treachery.

At the beginning of the poem, Charlemagne and his armies have been ensconced in Spain for seven years. They have won endless victories, but the town of Saragossa still remains under Muslim control. On his blue marble throne, King Marsile calls forth his counsellors and asks if there is any way to avert military disaster. One of them proposes a devious plan. The king should pretend to submit to Charlemagne. He should reveal that he is willing to be baptized as a Christian in the emperor’s own kingdom, and promise to pay tribute, only to renege once his troops have departed.

Charlemagne will doubtless require hostages as guarantors of payment, and he will likely execute them when he realizes that he has been deceived, but surely this is a price worth paying. Better that the hostages’ heads be shorn away than the Muslims lose the whole of Spain. Marsile chooses ambassadors from among his most cunning followers, and sends them off to Charlemagne on ten snow-white mules, bridled with gold and saddled in silver.

Charlemagne is in high spirits when the Muslim ambassadors arrive. His catapults have recently battered down the walls at Cordoba and a mighty haul of plundered treasure has been secured. All pagans have been slain or made to convert to Christianity. He is relaxing in an orchard surrounded by his 15,000 followers. The older knights are lying on white carpets playing chequers, while the younger squires fence beneath an eglantine-embowered pine tree.

The ambassadors approach him on foot and launch into a fawning address. Marsile will send him lavish gifts – lions, bears, greyhounds and seven hundred camels – provided Charlemagne returns to France.

It is approaching sunset, so Charlemagne tells the ambassadors to tie up their mules and retire to the tents he has provided for them. The next morning, after hearing mass, Charlemagne summons his counsellors to a spot beneath a pine tree to discuss the events of the precious day. Opinion is divided. The knight Roland reminds Charlemagne of a worryingly similar situation seven years earlier, when Marsile had also sent ambassadors bearing olive branches. In reply, two imperial envoys were despatched to the king, only to have their heads severed from their bodies. The Christians have been fighting for seven years, Roland insists, and they should complete their campaign by besieging Saragossa. As Charlemagne clasps his chin and tugs at his beard, another of his advisers suggests that such ‘counsel of pride is wrong’. Receiving Marsile’s homage would be victory enough.

Charlemagne is convinced, and all that remains is the selection of the ambassador to be sent to Marsile. Some are rejected because they would be too dearly missed; Roland is regarded as far too hot-headed for such delicate negotiations. However, he does succeed in nominating his stepfather, Ganelon, one of his harshest critics. Ganelon is far from happy with being chosen for such a treacherous mission. He asks Roland why he would be so wrathful as to nominate his own stepfather and promises that, should he return safely, ‘I’ll follow thee with such force of passion, that will endure so long as life may last thee.’ Roland offers to go in his stead, fully aware that Ganelon would never accept so insulting a proposal. Charlemagne calls Ganelon before him and presents his staff and glove, symbols of his authority, but Ganelon drops the glove – an unhappy omen. And so the ambassador sets out for Sarragossa. The Muslim ambassadors have succeeded in hatching their plan: Charlemagne has been utterly deceived. They have also managed to sow dissent within the Frankish camp, and Ganelon will not forget the treachery of his stepson. He will turn to plotting with the Moorish king and help to bring about Roland’s death.¹³

The historical Charlemagne was rather less gullible, and he developed an efficient wide-ranging diplomatic apparatus. The Carolingian ambassador – usually referred to as missus or legatus – was a familiar figure throughout the courts of Europe and beyond. Under the Carolingians, there was a steady stream of envoys to Rome, Bulgaria, Constantinople and Scandinavia, to the kings of Northumbria, the emir of Cordoba and the patriarch of Jerusalem. There was no professional diplomatic class, and individuals – whether clerics, palace officials or nobles – were chosen as the need arose. However, there was a tendency to return envoys to places they had previously visited and learned something of: Gervolde, the abbot of St Wandrille on the Seine, for instance, would make several embassies to the English king at Mercia.

There was more to diplomacy than industry, of course. It also demanded glamour. The wonderfully named Notker the Stammerer most likely spent his entire adult life sequestered in a Benedictine monastery. In his biography of Charlemagne, the emperor is portrayed as a master of diplomatic ritual. When a party of Greek ambassadors arrived in Aachen in 812, the palace courtiers decided to have a little sport at their expense. They took turns dressing as the emperor, allowing the envoys to think they were speaking with the mighty Charlemagne. The exhausted Greeks doubtless grew impatient but suddenly, with the appearance of the true emperor, all weariness and irritation evaporated. ‘Charlemagne, of all kings the most glorious was standing by a window through which the sun shone with dazzling brightness. He was clad in gold and precious stones and he glittered himself like the sun at its first rising.’ His sons stood around him ‘like the host of heaven’; next to them his wife and daughters, adorned alike with wisdom and pearls. ‘Had David been in their midst,’ Notker suggested, ‘he would have had every reason to sing out: “kings of the earth and all people, princes and judges; both young men and maidens, old men and children; let them praise the name of the lord.”’ The Greek envoys, overcome by such a majestic sight, ‘fell speechless and senseless to the ground’.

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