by Jackie burns

The Republic of Venice is known to posterity as a great patron of art, music, and literature. Home to one of the most liberal governments during the Renaissance up to the fall of the Republic in 1797, Venice was viewed as a commercial titan with a culture unique unto itself. Its survival was due in part to both geographic and geo-political power balances and how the Venetians were able to adapt. A metropolis built over the waters of the Adriatic, Venice was forced by its natural environment to use the waters as the main source of economic aggrandizement and consequently political security. By the 14th and 15th centuries, Renaissance Venice was channeling her energies into commerce; the Republic was put into direct contact with powers from all over the world.

It is no wonder then, with such an internationally dependent polity, that the government saw it beneficial to establish permanent fixtures in all important seats of power to speak on behalf of Venice. The volume of business transactions consistently transpiring between Venetian merchants and other states, let alone its geo-political position as a main Italian city-state and holder of lands far beyond the lagoon, made it essential that the Venetian government know what was both the political and economic climate from Constantinople to London. The creation of a permanent diplomatic corps abroad is directly related to the geopolitical reality of the day in Venice, as well as the necessity of accurate information on economic issues that made a mercantile state like the Republic successful. It thus must be seen as the precursor for all modern diplomatic organizations of the present era.

The idea of an ambassador is not a concept that Venice invented, as much as a Venetian might protest to the contrary. Rulers often sent official delegations to other important heads of power to communicate political intentions, to create alliances, gather intelligence, or discuss war between two political entities. The use of “envoys and emissaries to convey messages from one ruler to another probably goes back to the beginning of history…in the second letter to the Church of Corinth, the Apostle Paul describes himself as an ambassador.” However, the official international recognition of ambassadors was not codified until the Congress of Vienna in 1815. So where does that leave Venice in the history of diplomatic machinations? In all, Venice refined and systematized the notion of an ambassador to an extent that made it an enviable model for the powers it had relations with. Eventually the example would be replicated in many, if not all other states.

The true birth of the Venetian concept of diplomacy came during the Renaissance. At this point in history, the Italian peninsula was fragmented into territories controlled by various city-states. Each had its own manifestation of government and power, whether a powerful family such as the Medici in Florence or the spiritual and temporal authority the Pope wielded in the Papal States. Venice was neither, but organized as a republic. Because of the way the government was set up, with rotating positions in the government and the checks and balances employed by the nobility upon their rule, it was able to sustain itself. Venice seemed to have acquired a monopoly of that rarest of Renaissance commodities, political stability.” With the problems of power from within relatively calm, the enemies from without were dealt with in a much more organized fashion. Venetians had a sense of civil service, and, “because it did so, Venice developed the first systemized diplomatic service known to history, a network of agents who pursued the interests of the republic with fidelity, with a realistic appraisal of risks, with freedom from sentimentality and illusion.” If the Republic did not have such a stable government, the Venetian system of sending ambassadors would have probably been much more complicated, not to mention laden with career diplomats who could potentially get cozy in one post for too long.

The success of Venice’s ambassadors and the strength they brought to the state was not a phenomenon ignored by other powers. Their systematic diplomacy “…was passed on to the states of central Italy…vulnerable to external threats and consequently [they] put an even greater premium than the Venetians upon accurate information and negotiation.” Venice taught other states that diplomacy meant the ability to better size up your opponents, as well as your allies, and subsequently meant smarter decisions about war and trade. The peninsula itself was an ideal place for the use of diplomacy to spread, for as Phillip Bobbitt explains, “[it] was a perfect laboratory for such a new society: the principal political actors spoke a common language; they were physically proximate; none was so powerful as to make diplomacy irrelevant….” The Venetian model brought much prosperity to the Republic, often in an indirect manner, and through the replication undertaken by other governments, the system was able to grow and spread, much to the benefit and prestige of the Venetians themselves as anyone else employing ambassadors.

Venice used it to foster peace among her surrounding Italian city-states. After the Peace of Lodi in 1454, Venice, Florence, and Milan signed the Treaty of Venice. These northern Italian city-states were each very powerful, and the diplomatic maneuverings achieved in this document created “…a collective security organization designed to make the status quo of relatively diffused power and equality among the major political units a permanent condition of the system” and it served as “the ground rules for conducting inter-state relations during the remainder of the century.” Both Florence and Milan created permanent missions to foreign states that were comparable to the Venetian diplomatic machine, although not nearly as strong. Because each of these states had effective ambassadors and negotiators, they were able to use this Venetian conception to create mutual assurances of peace between the city-states.

Sir Robert Peel the Younger once defined diplomacy in general as “the great engine used by civilized society for the purpose of maintaining peace.” The men that governed the Republic of Venice, and ran the diplomatic core it had seen grow over the centuries as an essential political entity, knew the value of its representatives.
They not only assured the peace, as Peel has stated as their main function, but also provided the way to gage the competitiveness of the surrounding societies in both the political and economic domains. The Republic of Venice was driven by its economic goals and ventures, and needed the information collected by its civil servants abroad to make better business decisions. The model was so successful that other Renaissance powers soon began to pay homage to the idea by copying it, and is still a vital tool that nations wield in international relations on a day-to-day basis.