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