Historians have developed the idea that after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the confessional dimension—i.e., the choice between Catholicism and Protestantism—became less important in international relations and diplomatic life. This collection takes up the question over a long period of time by studying specific cases where the religious question remained essential for diplomatic practices and action. These eleven serious and erudite studies are based on extensive documentation, often handwritten. They are accompanied by numerous notes, providing access to historiographic traditions that are sometimes less well known, such as Polish or Hungarian.
This collection shows how certain European diplomacies took a close interest in populations based on their religious convictions, activating solidarities that overlooked borders. This work also pays great attention to minor, sometimes secret, agents involved in information gathering and negotiation, especially churchmen, who were practiced in traveling and given the possibility to travel around Europe.
The first part focuses on the very active papal diplomacy. It attempted to intervene during the interregnum and royal elections in Poland, promoting the need for a Catholic ruler. However, it also considered potential non-Catholic candidates—e.g., from Brandenburg and even Muscovy—and in such cases sought to impose a conversion (Dorota Gregorowicz). During the siege of Vienna in 1683, the Holy See encouraged a gathering of all Christians against the Ottoman Empire, the “common enemy of Christendom.” On the other hand, Innocent XII later reproached the imperial power for waging war against Catholic France and for keeping soldiers from Denmark, Brandenburg, and Brunswick in Hungary, the latter having supported the Protestant community (Béla Vilmos Mihalik). Cristina Bravo Lozano's study shows how Rome wanted to counteract the legislation passed in Ireland against Catholics despite the Treaty of Limerick of 1691. In particular, a Franciscan was assigned the task of sensitizing the Catholic powers, some of whom were allies of England, against the France of Louis XIV. While general negotiations were taking place at The Hague (1709) and then at Gertruydenberg (1710), the monk sought to raise the Catholic negotiators’ awareness of the Irish question.
In the second part, we follow clerics employed as diplomats. Katharina Beiergrößlein follows the fate of Robert Barnes, an English clergyman who, under suspicion of heresy, fled from England to the continent. There he soon became an emissary for Henry VIII, who was seeking support from the Protestant princes for the Great Matter, the annulment of his marriage. A Dominican, Diego de la Fuente, was the confessor of Gondomar, Spain's most influential representative in London during the time of James I, and he was able to establish himself as an active diplomatic agent during the ambassador's absence from 1618 to 1620 (Ernesto Oyarbide Magaña). Rubén González Cuerva shows how the Capuchin Diego de Quiroga followed the Infanta María Ana, the new wife of Ferdinand II's eldest son, to Vienna and tried to resist the influence of the Jesuit Lamormaini, the emperor's confessor. In this way, he worked for the union between the two branches of the House of Habsburg, the Trojan horse of Spanish diplomacy, and acquired greater influence than the ambassadors sent by Madrid.
A third part recalls how Catholic ambassadors in Protestant countries obtained the right to have a chapel, a fact that did not fail to attract their coreligionists who attended mass and found spiritual support from their chaplains. This gave rise to incidents and controversies, but also to much thinking on extraterritoriality. London serves as an example here, as in the time of James I: in 1623, when hundreds of people were attending a Jesuit's preaching at the French ambassador's house, the floor collapsed and ninety-five people died (Roberta Anderson). Charlotte Backerra analyzes the situation in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, where there were seven embassy chapels, and compares it to the case of Salzburg, where the archbishop expelled Protestants from his principality in 1731–32, causing diplomatic upheaval but no lasting crisis. A fertile investigation revealed the installation of chapels for imperial ambassadors in Protestant lands: in Stockholm, where this led to the arrest of a chaplain in 1671; in Copenhagen, where the Catholic minority enjoyed relative freedom; and finally in Dresden. After first working with Jesuit missionaries who knew the country and the language well, the imperial diplomats chose their chaplains from the Austrian and Bohemian clergy instead (Martin Bakeš and Jiří Kubeš).
The Protestant world displayed similar solidarities. Thus, Steve Murdoch shows that, despite Sweden's strong Lutheran identity, its diplomacy did not hesitate to employ Calvinist Scots in the early seventeenth century. In the same way, the links between Sweden and Transylvania remained strong, as shown by Pál Ráday's missions to Charles XII at the time of the Rákóczi insurrection in the early eighteenth century (Gábor Kármán). These remarks highlight just some of the contributions of these prolific studies that explore an important subject in a new way.
