This cogent book is about more than diplomacy; it gets to the heart of debates about Russia's image and place in Europe. Based on broad secondary and archival research, it demonstrates Russia's active engagement in Europe through the status and respect it received in diplomatic ceremony across the so-called “Petrine divide” (a term Jan Hennings would reject).
Hennings disputes historiographical contentions that Muscovite diplomacy was hyper-focused on minutiae, attributed to its “exotic Orthodox ritualism” (6), and that Peter I transformed Russian diplomacy to the western model. He argues that European states accepted Muscovy in the community of Christian states since at least Westphalia (1648) and that Peter I, in even as radical a step as taking the title of imperator, intentionally “put himself in direct continuity with Muscovite tsars,” a far more effective strategy in the precedent-driven world of diplomacy than promoting a new ideology (244).
Hennings focuses on the ceremonial because, given the difficulty of measuring real military power in early modern conditions, ritual expressions publically “recognized by others” (4) not merely reflected power but produced it. Hardly “vain formality,” diplomatic ceremonial was “a constitutive component of a state's sovereignty and legitimacy” (2–3, 14–15). The many disputes over ritual that Muscovite diplomats raised were not specific to them; all—Spanish, French, Dutch, and Swedish—were capable of disruptive and even violent quarrels over the proper status and attendant honors for their monarch or republic. Yet, since political hierarchy was constantly in flux, they mediated, compromised and won or lost ground, as Hennings shows in superb case studies of Russian embassies abroad or British ones in Moscow. Russia's deft ability to leverage a scandal in Britain in 1708 (the arrest of diplomat Matveev) to win higher international regard shows how skillful a player it had become (220–37). Furthermore, diplomats made strategic use of incognito status, secret meetings, and court entertainments to escape the crushing weight of symbolic precedent (Chapters 3–5).
Hennings contends that to the extent that Russia differed in ceremonial approaches, it was because of its relatively late engagement with European diplomacy, logistical obstacles, and organizational and conceptual differences. Muscovy maintained an antiquated concept of ambassadorial status that caused tensions abroad, and diplomats’ flexibility was constrained because Moscow lacked the postal and courier connections that allowed Sigismund von Herberstein, for example, to correspond with Vienna every few days during his many embassies. Thus, tasked with winning reciprocity and respect in every ceremonial encounter, Russian ambassadors were provided rigid instructions from which they were not to deviate. Those instructions were not, however, “irrational” cultural exotica, but were based on decades-long observation of European practices and precedents by experts in the foreign affairs chancery (Chapter 2). Hennings tracks how Peter I's administration improved communications, record-keeping, and concepts to match European practice.
Hennings sets tropes of Russia as despotic or barbaric decisively in their place. He chronicles their prevalence in Europe from the sixteenth century (Chapter 1) but, based on face-to-face diplomatic encounters, argues that they “had little effect on the inclusion of the tsars in the circle of European sovereigns” (68). Diplomats were a pragmatic bunch, inhabiting a world of “universal Baroque … not oriented towards confessional allegiance, national borders, or cultural belonging” (248). Hennings treats this discourse as a sort of parallel world of travel accounts, invoked in diplomacy only when it could be wielded to advantage. So, for example, after ambassador Charles Howard Carlisle failed to regain British trade privileges in his 1663/64 embassy to Moscow, the embassy's secretary, Guy Miege, deflected attention by playing up “the pride and the rusticity of the Muscovites” (154), a rare intrusion of cultural tropes into the “supranational lingua franca” (248) of diplomatic reports.
Hennings thus helps us see the discourse of Muscovite barbarism more clearly. It certainly existed, but as an entertaining diversion for the broad European readership that loved a good story at a time when the travel account was perhaps the most popular form of literature. Precisely in the decades on which Hennings focuses, European publishers doubled down on the theme of the exotic that had been ambient in travel literature since the sixteenth century (see Benjamin Schmidt's Inventing Exoticism, 2015). But it did not represent cultural or political reality. Hennings shows that these stereotypes did not reflect the cultural acuity of the Muscovite court nor prevent European peers from accepting early modern Russia into the family of European states.
