Diplomatic personae: Torquato Tasso on the ambassador

ABSTRACT

This article examines Torquato Tasso’s Il Messaggiero [The Messenger] (1582), by focusing on the political subject matter, as discussed in the final part of the text through an imaginary dialogue, that is, the figure of the ambassador, the framework of his office and its relationship with power. Tasso’s dialogue features the nature of the ambassador as a figure incarnating his own ‘self’, while simultaneously representing his prince and acting on his own behalf within a specific political context, an external dimension, namely, the ‘international’. Such a condition of alienation is one of the origins of the office’s ‘conflicting obligations’ toward the prince and toward its conciliatory function. We should indeed discuss the diplomatic personae or a divided persona. Tasso rejects the concept of the ambassador as a mere executor of policy, which is a striking departure from the previous general conception of the ambassador. The paradoxical conclusion that emerges is that the messenger, or the ambassador, is not a simple messenger. Tasso’s text and its context is the article’s epicentre. However, this article concerns the possible links between certain ideas and discourses regarding the ambassador’s persona and the growth of diplomacy as a part of the rise of the ‘international’.

KEYWORDS:

• Torquato Tasso
• ambassador
• diplomacy

Acknowledgements

I must acknowledge the debt of gratitude I owe to Richard Devetak from the University of Queensland for his generous support when I first began to work on this project. I would also like to acknowledge the positive and very helpful feedback I received from Ian Hunter, Chris Reus Smith, Ryan Walter, Lorenzo Zambernardi, and two anonymous referees. Any errors remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Richard Devetak, ‘Historiographical Foundations of Modern International Thought: Histories of the European States-System from Florence to Göttingen’, History of European Ideas 41, no. 1 (2015): 64.

2 Torquato Tasso, Il Messaggiero. Dialogo del Signor Torquato Tasso (Venice: Bertrando Giunti e fratelli, 1582). As far as I know, Il Messaggiero has never been translated into English. Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection with the Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue, trans. Cames Lord and Dain A. Trafton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), does not include Il Messaggiero. I include quotations from Torquato Tasso, Il Messaggiero, in Torquato Tasso, Dialoghi, ed. Bruno Basile (Milan: Mursia, 1991), 33–104, where the ‘diplomatic’ part of the text ranges from page 88 to page 104, or paragraphs 193–262. For a historical, philological and literary analysis of the text in the entire context of Tasso’s dialoghi, see the critical edition by Ezio Raimondi, Torquato Tasso, Dialoghi, 3 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1958). Cf. also, I Dialoghi di Torquato Tasso, ed. Cesare Guasti, 3 vols. (Florence: Le Monnier, 1858); Torquato Tasso, Dialoghi Scelti, ed. Gustavo Rodolfo (Milan: C. Signorelli, 1930); Torquato Tasso, Dialoghi, ed. Ettore Mazziali, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1976).

3 ‘The word international, it must be acknowledged, is a new one; though, it is hoped, sufficiently analogous and intelligible. It is calculated to express, in a more significant way, the branch of law which goes commonly under the name of the law of nations’; Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 296. I use the word indiscriminately, while remaining conscious of the problem of anachronism.

4 Raimondi noted that ‘in a sense, it composed a dyptich’ with Tasso’s Il Gonzaga, overo Del piacere onesto; Ezio Raimondi, ‘Introduzione’, in Tasso, Dialoghi, 23.

5 Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy. The Structure of Diplomatic Practice 1450–1800, ed. Daniela Frigo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 8.

6 Using the concept of diplomatic persona, I draw particular inspiration from Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 3 (2007): 571–600.

7 ‘Les ambassadeurs sont une espèce à part, marquée par des singularités très tranchées, et ces singularités sont encore rehaussées par la situation et le caractère personnel et politique du souverain qui les envoie ou qui les reçoit’. Stendhal, Pages d’Italie (Paris: Le Divan, 1932), 294.

8 On diplomacy and the concept of alienation, see James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). The volume is not confined to diplomacy in the conventional sense, to say the least.

9 Representations of the ambassador’s fluid identity, and the relationship between the diplomat and the self emerges in Early Modern Diplomacy, Theatre and Soft Power: The Making of Peace, ed. Nathalie Rivère de Carles (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

10 I will be using the masculine pronoun throughout the paper because the earliest ambassadors were generally men and texts make few references to women diplomats, with perhaps the exception of Renée de Guébriant’s 1645 mission; cf. Gemma Allen, ‘The Rise of the Ambassadress: English Ambassadorial Wives and Early Modern Diplomatic Culture’, The Historical Journal 62, no. 3 (2018): 617–38. If the practice of establishing resident embassies was first adopted in the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century, then it should be noted that the first female ambassador, Barbara Para, Ambassador of San Marino to Italy, was appointed almost six century later in 1992; cf. Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana, serie generale, no. 296 (1992), 33. Alexandra Kollontai was appointed Soviet ambassador to Sweden in 1932, and she is often considered the first woman ambassador of the modern era. However, in November 1918 Rosika Schwimmer was appointed as Hungarian minister to Switzerland by Prime Minister Mihály Károlyi, reportedly the first woman ‘ambassador’ of the modern age; cf. Notable American Women. A Biographical Dictionary, 1607–1950 – Volume 3, ed. Edward T. James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 248.

11 I am indebted to Ian Hunter, ‘Conflicting Obligations: Pufendorf, Leibniz and Barbeyrac on Civil Authority’, History of Political Thought 25, no. 4 (2004): 670–99.

12 Gentili contests Tasso’s concept in his De Legationibus Libri Tres (Londini: Excudebat Thomas Vautrollerius, 1585), 125–7. Comparing Tasso and Gentili on diplomacy, Pirillo concludes that ‘for Tasso the diplomat had no autonomy with regard to his own sovereign, and must agree with him in every choice’; Diego Pirillo, ‘Tasso at the French Embassy: Epic, Diplomacy, and the Law of Nations’, in Authority and Diplomacy from Dante to Shakespeare, eds. Jason Powell and William Rositer, (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 146. See also Diego Pirillo, The Refugee-Diplomat: Venice, England, and the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), chap. 5.

13 See inter alia Stefano Andretta, Stéphane Péquinot and Jean Claude Waquet, De l’ambassadeur. Les écrits relatifs à l’ambassadeur et à l’art de négocier du Moyen Age au début du XIX siècle (Rome: Publications de l’École Française de Rome Scuola Tipografica S. Pio X, 2015); Maurizio Bazzoli, Stagioni e teorie della società internazionale (Milan: LED Edizioni, 2005), esp. pp. 215–67; Stefano Andretta, L’arte della prudenza. Teorie e prassi della diplomazia nell’Italia del XVI e XVII secolo (Rome: Biblink, 2006). Cf. Paolo Prodi, Diplomazia del Cinquecento. Istituzioni e prassi (Bologna: Patron, 1963).

14 Alessandro Manzoni, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) (New York: Collier & Son – Harvard Classics, 1909), 78, 79.

15 Cf. Carlo Bajetta, Elizabeth I’s Italian Letters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2017), xxiii. On Tasso’s life see esp. Giovan Battista Manso, Vita di Torquato Tasso, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1995 (1621)); Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, 3 vols. (Rome-Turin: Loescher, 1895 (1785)); and Claudio Gentile, Tasso (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2007).

16 Cf. Charles Baudelaire, Sur le Tasse en Prison d’Eugène Delacroix, in Charles Baudelaire, Les Épaves (Amsterdam: À l’enseigne du Coq, 1866), 113–4. There has been much controversy as to whether Montaigne visited Tasso in the prison hospital in Ferrara; cf. Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso – Volume 1, 324–35, and more recently Ayesha Ramachandran, ‘Montaigne’s Tasso. Madness, Melancholy and the Enigma of Italy’, Forum Italicum 47, no. 2 (2013): 246–62.

17 Luigi Firpo, ‘Introduzione’, in Torquato Tasso, Tre Scritti Politici, ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin: UTET, 1980), 77. The text is the Discorso intorno alla sedizione nata nel regno di Francia (1585) [Discourse on the Sedition arose in the Kingdom of France].

18 The absence of the ambassador from Eugenio Garin’s pantheon of Renaissance characters is a dazzling emblem of Martin Wight’s respectable comment: ‘Is it more interesting that so many great minds have been drawn, at the margin of their activities, to consider basic problems of international politics, or that more great minds have not been drawn to make these problems their central interest?’; Martin Wight, ‘Why is There no International Theory?’, International Relations 35, no. 2 (1960): 37. Cf. Renaissance Characters, Eugenio Garin ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

19 Daniela Frigo, ‘Prudenza politica e conoscenza del mondo’, 24, 27.

20 Piernatonio Serassi, La vita di Torquato Tasso – Volume 2, ed. C. Guasti (Florence: Barbera, Bianchi e Comp., 1858), 53.

21 One of the recent brilliant examples of an extremely long tradition, to be quoted here, is Massimo Rossi, Io come filosofo era stato dubbio. La retorica dei “Dialoghi” di Tasso (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2007), 30, where the Dialoghi are considered to be a ‘pretext’ for ‘the construction of rhetorical machines and literary organisms’ and, therefore, ‘have no interest for the history of ideas’.

22 As far as I know, the only study integrally devoted to this part of Tasso’s text is Dante Fedele, ‘Uno scritto sull’ambasciatore del secondo Cinquecento. Il Messaggiero di Torquato Tasso’, Il Pensiero Politico 51, no. 1 (2018): 113–25.

23 Torquato Tasso, Le lettere di Torquato Tasso – Volume 4, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1854), letter no. 1235, 302. He was writing to his confident, Antonio Constantini, in Mantua in March 1590.

24 Tasso to Maurizio Cataneo in Rome, 30 December 1585; Torquato Tasso, Le lettere di Torquato Tasso – Volume 2, ed. Cesare Guasti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1853), letter no. 456, 478.

25 Garrett Mattingly, ‘The First Resident Embassies: Mediaeval Italian Origins of Modern Diplomacy’, Speculum 12, no. 4 (1937): 423–39. The pioneeristic treaty on the Venetian resident ambassador by Ermolao Barbaro (1489) is mentioned by Tasso which, however, did not have the possibility to read it (‘ne le mie mani non è pervenuto’); see Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 89. Cf. Ermolao Barbaro, Tractatus «De Coelibatu» et «De Officio Legati», ed. Vittorio Branca (Florence: Olschki, 1969). See also, Luigi Robuschi, ‘Il De Officio Legati di Ermolao Barbaro ed il Pensiero Politico nella Venezia di Fine ’400’, Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti 152, (2013–2014): 257–301.

26 Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 200.

27 Cf. Daniela Frigo, ‘Il Rinascimento e le Corti: Ferrara e Mantova’, in Il Rinascimento italiano e l’Europa – Volume 1, eds. Giovanni L. Fontana and Luca Mollà, (Costabissara: Angelo Colla Editore, 2005), 314. For a critical evaluation of the smaller Italian states in the Renaissance, that is, other than Naples, Rome, Venice, Milan see, in the same volume, Giovanni Tocci, ‘Il Rinascimento in provincia’, 387–413.

28 Cf. Amedeo Quondam, Questo povero cortegiano. Castiglione, il libro, la storia (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000), 334.

29 In saying that, we do not necessarily need to assume the periodization and narrative positions on the history of early modern diplomacy inherited from, inter alia, Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1955); Donald Queller, The Office of the Ambassador in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Matthew Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993); L’Invention de la Diplomatie. Moyen Age-Temps modernes, ed. Lucien Bely (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998); or Lucien Bely, L’Art de la Paix en Europe. Naissance de la Diplomatie Moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2007). For a discussion, see Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict. Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Catherine Fletcher, Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome. The Rise of the Resident Ambassador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Dante Fedele, Naissance de la diplomatie moderne (XIIIe-XVIIe Siècles). L’ambassadeur au croisement du droit, de l’éthique et de la politique (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2017).

30 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 47.

31 Martin Wight, Systems of States, ed. H. Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press in association with LSE, 1977), 30.

32 Mattingly, ‘The First Resident Embassies’, 427.

33 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 95.

34 Ibid., 88, 93.

35 Ibid., 88.

36 Ibid., 88.

37 Ibid., 88. If one keeps in mind Edgard Garin’s comment, Il Messaggiero confirms a peculiar position in Tasso’s writings: ‘The doctrines [of Tasso] do not say anything, though faithfully presented, and seem to be deprived of a soul’. Eugenio Donadoni observed: ‘“His speculation is outside time, it has no history”’; Edgard Garin, History of Italian Philosophy – Volume 1 (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2008), 522. Donadoni added: ‘He [Tasso] has no interest for the problems of his times: no presentment on future’s problems’; Eugenio Donadoni, Torquato Tasso. Saggio critico – Volume 1 (Florence: Battistelli, 1920), 27. Francesco De Sanctis agreed: ‘Tasso was not an original thinker, neither threw a free view on the formidable problems of life’; Francesco De Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2015), 203.

38 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, p. 92.

39 Coleman, A History of Political Thought, 202.

40 Wight, Power Politics, eds. Hedley Bull and Carsten Hollbrad (Leicester: Leicester University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1978), 137.

41 Cf. Riccardo Fubini, ‘L’ambasciatore nel XV secolo. Due trattati e una biografia (Bernard de Rosier, Ermolao Barbaro, Vespasiano da Bisticci)’, Mélanges de l’Ecole Française de Rome 108, (1996): 665.

42 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 93. This formula reappears in a different form in the marvellous consolatory letter to the widow of the Tuscanian ambassador to Ferrara; Torquato Tasso, Lettera consolatoria (Bologna: Giovanni Rosti, 1588), 7.

43 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 93.

44 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 94.

45 Cf. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (Venice: Appresso Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1556), 269. ‘As a king’s courier; yet was not content | To say, embassadors no wrong e’er underwent’; Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso – Volume 2, ed. Trample H. Croker (London: Printed for the Editor, 1755), 19.

46 François de Callières, De la manière de négocier avec les souverains (Amsterdam: La Compagnie, 1716), 88. Cfr. The Art of Negotiating with Sovereign Princes (London: Printed for Geo, etc., 1716) reprinted in F. de Callières, The Art of Diplomacy, eds. M. Keens-Soper and K. Schweizer (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1983). The only subsequent English translation is faulty; cfr. François de Callières, The Practice of Diplomacy (London: Constable Limited 1919), 111.

47 Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, 35.

48 The above-mentioned qualities are mentioned in Luigi Firpo’s deprecatory description of Tasso in his ‘Introduzione’, in Tasso, Tre Scritti Politici.

49 Firpo, ‘Introduzione’, 12.

50 For Leopardi, Tasso was ‘the greatest philosopher of his days in terms of contemplation. But who could be less naturally disposed than he was to the practice of philosophy? … And who less of philosopher than he was in practice … ? Conversely who is less of a philosopher in theory than certain carefree and imperturbable men who are always happy and calm, who yet in practice are the very model and type of the philosophical character and life. In truth, since nature always triumphs, it generally happens that those who are most philosophical in theory, are in practice the least philosophical, and those least disposed to philosophy in theory, are the most philosophical in fact. And you might then say that the aim, the intention, and the whole philosophy in theory along with all its precepts, etc., has no other target actually than to make the life and the character of those who possess it like that of those who are not naturally capable of it, an effect which it achieves with difficulty’; Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 1808. For a comment in relation to Il Messaggiero see Antonella Gatto, ‘Il Tasso rivoluzionario. Note intertestuali sul dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare’, Italies. Revue d’Études Italiens 7, (2003): 115–35.

51 Juan Antonio de Vera, Le Parfait Ambassadeur (Paris: s.n., 1642), 21. Supporting Tasso’s concept of diplomacy, the Spanish ambassador calls Tasso ‘divine’; Juan Antonio de Vera, El Embaxador (Sevilla: De Lyra, 1620), 13. See also the dialogical construction of the 368 page treaty by Giorgio Hertz, Idea del perfetto ambasciatore. Dialoghi historici e politici (Venice: Giorgio Hertz, 1654).

52 Gasparo Bragaccia, L’ambasciatore (Padua: Bolzetta, 1627), 61.

53 Ibid., 61.

54 ‘Ambaisada’ is a Provençal word of Gallic-Latin origin with Germanic influences, which means roughly ‘service’. Thus, the ambassador would be someone who serves; cf. Giuseppe Galasso, ‘Le relazioni internazionali nell’età moderna’, Rivista Storica Italiana 111, no. 1 (1999), 8.

55 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 96–7.

56 Ibid., 101.

57 For a critical view on Tasso’s moral attitude see Luigi Firpo, Il pensiero politico di Torquato Tasso, in Gino Luzzatto et al., Studi in Onore di Gino Luzzatto – Volume 1, (Milan: Giuffré, 1950), 177.

58 Cf. Fedele, Uno scritto del secondo Cinquecento, 123.

59 Cf. Bazzoli, Stagioni e teorie della società internazionale, 236.

60 Fortini, Dialoghi col Tasso, 29. It has been also noted that ‘Tasso is exemplary for his discussion of his own psychic condition, evincing a self-analysis unparalleled by any contemporary – and matched in its representational power only by the character of Hamlet’. Interestingly, a lost Elizabethan play entitled Tasso’s Melancholy ‘may have served as a model for Shakespeare’; Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia. Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 20.

61 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 98.

62 Ibid., 50.

63 Ibid., 99

64 Abraham de Wicquefort, L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions – Volume 2 (Amsterdam: Chez T. Johnson, 1730 (1682)), 22. A resident ambassador at the French Court, Wicquefort served for thirty-two years as a Dutch diplomat.

65 Alberico Gentili, De Iure Belli Libri Tres (Hanoviae: Excudebat Guilielmus Antonius, 1598), 457.

66 Alberico Gentili, De Legationibus Libri Tres, 11.

67 Ibid., 11.

68 Cf. Giovanna Scianatico, L’idea del perfetto principe. Utopia e storia nella scrittura del Tasso (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche, 1998), 120.

69 Della precedenza, in Tasso, Dialoghi – Volume 3, ed. Ezio Raimondi, 487–8. Luigi Firpo believes that this quotation reveals ‘a conformist [Tasso] subject to the principle of authority’; Firpo, ‘Introduzione’, 27.

70 Fortini, Dialoghi col Tasso, 29, 54. For a specific examination see the entry ‘Tasso, Torquato’ by Emilio Russo in Machiavelli. Enciclopedia machiavelliana – Volume 2, ed. Gennaro Sasso (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2014), 589–90.

71 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 99.

72 Ibid., 101.

73 ‘Confidential Instructions by Niccolò Machiavelli to Raffaello Girolami, on His Departure, 28 October 1522, as Ambassador to the Emperor Charles V, in Spain’, in Niccolò Machiavelli, The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolò Machiavelli – Volume 4 (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 422.

74 Ibid., 422.

75 François de La Rochefoucauld, Collected Maxims and other Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 79.

76 Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 102.

77 Ibid., 101–2.

78 On the argument that diplomats are not just messengers, see Giulio Talini’s article, ‘Saint-Pierre, British pacifism and the quest for perpetual peace (1693–1748)’, History of European Ideas 46, no. 8 (2020): 1165–82.

79 See Maria Nadia Covini, Bruno Figliuolo, Isabella Lazzarini, and Francesco Senatore, ‘Pratiche e norme di comportamento nella diplomazia italiana. I carteggi di Napoli, Firenze, Milano, Mantova, e Ferrara tra fine XIV e fine XV secolo’, in De l’Ambassadeur, eds. Stefano Andretta, Stéphane Péquinot and Jean Claude Waquet, 132. Cf. Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict.

80 [‘E se l’ambasciatore altro non fosse che semplice riportatore de le cose dette, non avrebbe bisogno né di prudenza né d’eloquenza, e ogni uomo ordinario sarebbe atto a quest’ufficio; ma noi veggiamo che i principi con diligente investigazione fanno scelta de gli ambasciatori. Dobbiamo dunque conchiuder ch’altro lor si convenga che portare e riportare semplicemente parole e ambasciate’]; Tasso, Il Messaggiero, 102.

81 Ibid., p. 103.

82 See the superlative Timothy Hampton, Fictions of Embassy. Literature and Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

83 Niccolò Machiavelli, Opere – Volume 2, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997), 731.

84 Machiavelli, ‘Confidential Instructions by Niccolò Machiavelli to Raffaello Girolami’, 423.

85 Wicquefort, L’Ambassadeur et ses fonctions – Volume 2, 3.

86 Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace – Volume 2, ed. Richard Tuck (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 912.

87 Antonio Gramsci, Selection from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoofrey Nowell Smith (New York: International publishers, 1992), 172.

88 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks - Volume 3, eds. Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 72.

89 Ibid., 72.

90 Ibid., 73–4.

91 Ibid., 72.

92 Raymond Aron, Peace and War. A Theory of International Relations (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966), 5.

93 Ibid., 5.

94 Ibid., 5.

95 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 474.