2013_4_Kármán

Volume 2 Issue 4 CONTENTS

Gábor Kármán

Gábor Bethlen’s Diplomats at the Protestant Courts of Europe

This paper addresses the phenomenon that the contacts of Prince Gábor Bethlen with non-neighboring rulers were almost exclusively maintained through diplomats who came originally from a foreign country and had very little to do with the Principality of Transylvania. Through a reconstruction of ten diplomats’ biographies, I identify several categories. The Czech/Palatinate group consists of three people (Ehrenfried von Berbisdorf, Jan Adam Čejkovský z Víckova and Matthias Quadt), the Silesian group of two (Weikhard Schulitz and Heinrich Dreiling), and three of Bethlen’s envoys could be identified as “wandering diplomats,” displaying certain facets of an adventurer’s character (Jacques Roussel, Charles de Talleyrand and Lorenzo Agazza). The remaining two (Zygmunt Zaklika and Hermann Beckmann) seem to be a category unto themselves, one having a Polish background, the other coming with Catherine, the prince’s consort, from Berlin.

The biographies of the diplomats show certain similarities, especially those within the Czech/Palatinate group, who had to leave their original country due to the collapse of the rule of Frederick of the Palatinate after the Battle of the White Mountain, and served several rulers in the years to come. Their loyalties lay primarily with the Protestant or the Palatinate cause and they served the rulers who seemed to be able to support this – sometimes even assuming tasks from several of them during one and the same journey.

The custom to employ foreigners for the Transylvanian diplomacy with non-neighboring lands must have been motivated by the fact that they were expected not so much to negotiate specific issues as to map out possibilities for cooperation and give general information concerning the prince’s intentions. Although the system changed in the later decades of the seventeenth century, this may be the result of the fact that in this period far fewer politically engaged emigrants came to Transylvania than in the 1620s.

Keywords: diplomacy, Protestantism, Transylvania, Thirty Years’ War, cosmopolitans

“For a state which lacked almost every resource for the conduct of sustained hostilities, Transylvania had done surprisingly well from the Thirty Years’ War.”1 This assessment by Geoffrey Parker, one of the leading experts on military history in recent decades, reflects an interest in Transylvania’s participation in the most comprehensive European wars of the seventeenth century; an interest which unfortunately has remained virtually unanswered by Hungarian historiography. In the field of military history new research has been available since the 1960s (although not translated into languages of international circulation), but the summaries on Gábor Bethlen’s (1613–1629) diplomacy, due to the lack of recent primary research, could not go beyond the results of nineteenth-century history writing.2 In the last few years, a number of historians have started to take up the challenge of this hiatus in historiography, and the first very promising analyses about Bethlen’s Ottoman contacts have already been published.3 The present study focuses on another field, the prince’s diplomacy towards the Protestant rulers, which brought the principality to the attention of European rulers in the late 1610s and 1620s and rendered the participation in the armed conflicts on the Holy Roman Empire’s territory possible. Also, I have chosen a method other than classic, event-based diplomatic history: I aim to discuss some specificities of Bethlen’s foreign policy through an analysis of the pool of persons he sent to diplomatic missions in this particular direction. Using the classic sources of diplomatic history, but focusing on the practical part rather than on the content of the negotiations allows me to discuss such phenomena as the selection criteria and the loyalty of the mediators of Bethlen’s contacts with faraway European rulers, who almost all came from a foreign country, and they changed their loyalties at least once during their lives.

Bethlen’s Diplomats: the Two Main Groups

The few historians who devoted any attention at all to the performance of Gábor Bethlen’s diplomatic corps were not very impressed by what they found. In his revisionist biography about the prince, Gyula Szekfű went so far as to label them “substandard,” and Kálmán Benda, who dedicated a short study to their persons in 1981, also reached the conclusion that Gábor Bethlen did not have the necessary number of reliable and educated diplomats at his disposal, who could have efficiently represented his interests at foreign courts or even could have helped his endeavors with their council.4 According to him, the prince thus had to formulate his conception about foreign policy on his own, and in many cases he could not even assume that the skills and erudition of his envoy would at least be enough to follow his instructions without major blunders.

Benda is undoubtedly right in the sense that Gábor Bethlen had no such assistance by his side as Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1611–1632) in the person of Axel Oxenstierna, or some German princes, such as Georg Wilhelm of Brandeburg (1619–1640), whose secret counselors not only took part in shaping foreign policy but virtually supervised it themselves, with very limited interference on the part of the elector.5 His conclusions about the diplomats’ skills should nevertheless not be taken for granted: taking into consideration the prince’s different expectation towards various groups of his representatives and the divergent tasks they had to fulfill leads to the conclusion that the overall picture is far from being so dark as Benda painted it. Also, if the number of cases is extended, we get a more realistic image of how many missions failed because of the incompetence of the diplomats, and what the true relevance of these blunders was in Bethlen’s foreign policy.

The example of Márton Boncziday, quoted by both authors, is quite characteristic.6 The postal envoy of the prince, whose activities are documented from the early 1620s on, negotiated with Johannes Nicodemi, an agent of Axel Oxenstierna, in Königsberg in January 1629.7 The report of the Swedish secretary painted a quite sad picture of Boncziday, who provided no new information during the talks, which were in any case seriously hindered by the fact that the Hungarian envoy could not speak Latin. At the same time, Boncziday seemed to have been upset about the small amount of gifts he was sent by Oxenstierna. Nicodemi noted that after the initial problems he started to doubt whether Bethlen, who had been known as a cautious man, would have trusted any important issues on this envoy.8 In all likelihood, Nicodemi’s judgment was right: there is no data that the prince would have given a diplomatic mission to Boncziday, and he did not claim this either. In his first letter to Oxenstierna, he only stated that he came to Königsberg to deliver the letter of Catherine of Brandenburg, the consort of Gábor Bethlen, to her brother, the elector; and as the Swedish chancellor stayed in the nearby Elbing, it seemed to be useful to visit him as well. It is quite likely that the princely credential letter that would have been necessary for his acknowledgment as a diplomat was substituted in this case by a letter of Paul Strassburg, the diplomat of the Swedish king at Bethlen’s court, to the chancellor, which was taken to the Baltic region by Boncziday and which mentioned the postal envoy’s name in the post scriptum.9 The story of the arrogant, greedy and immature diplomat, who could not even speak proper Latin, may be a shock for the reader of Nicodemi’s report, but it probably did not have such a great impact on the image of Bethlen among the exponents of contemporary Protestant politicians as was suggested by Szekfű and Benda. In any case, we find no trace in Axel Oxenstierna’s correspondence that the Transylvanian envoy’s performance would have influenced his attitude towards Gábor Bethlen.10

We also have to take into account that Benda concentrated, apart from the embassy in Constantinople, on the diplomats the prince sent to Western European courts. This is in spite of the fact that the contacts with the neighboring empires and the results that could be achieved there must have played a much more important role for Bethlen than the negotiations with the leading circles in the Netherlands, England or Sweden. Although the structural specificities of the embassy in Constantinople, the only resident representation that the principality maintained, caused some problems and allowed less motivated diplomats to abuse the lack of very strict princely control, in this specific period we find several highly skilled Transylvanian resident envoys and ambassadors who knew the ways of politics at the Sublime Porte very well.11 Experience mattered much more in this diplomatic milieu (the most important for the principality) than the diplomats’ ultimate lack of humanist Latin education or the limits of their outlook, which did not cover all the subtleties of the conflicts in the Western parts of Europe, even if these diplomats maintained some contacts with the English and Dutch governments as well through the diplomats of these powers stationed in the Ottoman capital.12

Similarly, Bethlen had no serious reason to complain about the diplomats sent to negotiate with Emperor Ferdinand II. These people, mostly recruited from among the prince’s supporters in the Kingdom of Hungary, may have also lacked the outlook encompassing the situation in the Western half of Europe, but they did not necessarily need this to fulfill their tasks either. In the peace negotiations closing the successive armed conflicts in Hungary it was much more important to be an expert in Hungarian law, on which the legitimation strategies of the prince’s interventions were built, than to know the legal details of debates conducted in faraway corners of the Holy Roman Empire. The negotiations with the representatives of Ferdinand II were usually centered on concrete questions, and thus local knowledge played a very important part in them. Contrary to this, the main goal of the prince’s diplomatic contacts with Protestant powers in Western Europe and Venice was to recognize their common interests and produce a treaty that would provide the framework for later cooperation; the details of which in any case had to be postponed to later talks. This was all that the constantly changing military situation, and the distance between the power centers allowed – it should not be forgotten that it took months for a letter from the Netherlands to reach the princely capital of Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia, Romania).

The problems of cooperating with the Protestant powers are well illustrated by Gábor Bethlen’s attitude to The Hague alliance. Although the prince’s envoy, Matthias Quadt was present in the Netherlands in the late autumn of 1625, when the English, Danish and Dutch representatives concluded their treaty, he had no official credits to negotiate about the details of cooperation. One year later he returned and collected the signature from the rulers of all three countries on the treaty recognizing Bethlen as an ally; however, by the time he returned to Transylvania, the prince had concluded peace with Ferdinand II, and the military situation of the Protestant powers had also turned so critical that any further effective cooperation became impossible.13 Distance excluded the possibility that Bethlen would be able to work out a detailed plan with the leading Protestant powers, and so the main function of the diplomatic missions was to inform each other about the parties’ intentions. The prince learned whether he could count on military activity in the rear of his adversary, the Habsburg ruler; whereas the Protestant powers of Western and Northern Europe were advised to expect a diversion by Bethlen that would keep a part of the emperor’s forces occupied.

On account of the above, two distinct groups can be identified in Bethlen’s diplomatic corps, of whom the prince had markedly different expectations. For the one it was important to know the specific situation very well and work while keeping an eye on precise details; for the other, it was necessary to think in broader terms and be able to support his argumentation with the current political vocabulary of Western Europe. This dual character of Bethlen’s diplomacy is well illustrated by the mission sent by the prince to Brandenburg during the summer of 1625: whereas István Kovacsóczy and Ferenc Mikó, the chancellor and treasurer of Transylvania, were responsible for giving a final form to Bethlen’s marriage contract with Catherine of Brandenburg, it was Matthias Quadt who was entrusted with the negotiations about political cooperation (his journey to the Netherlands was the continuation of this mission).14 For the tasks of the latter group it seemed best to employ people (such as Quadt) who came from the Holy Roman Empire or Western Europe. Apart from Boncziday, the self-appointed envoy, every other diplomat of Bethlen who visited European Protestant courts and rulers was a foreigner in the Principality of Transylvania. Among them, several groups can be identified on the basis of their origin and the way they came to Bethlen’s court.

The Czech/Palatinate Group

The most numerous group among Bethlen’s diplomats is made up of those who after the fall of Frederick V of the Palatinate as king of Bohemia were forced to emigrate either from the territories of the kingdom or the Silesian German principalities that supported the rule of the “Winter King.” After the Battle of the White Mountain, many military as well as political notables came to Bethlen, among them some of the highest rank such as Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, who had played a leading role in the government at Prague and arrived at Bethlen’s camp with the remnants of the Bohemian army in the second half of 1621, accompanied by Margrave Johann Georg of Hohenzollern, Duke of Jägerndorf.15 A great many of these people did not stay long: Thurn himself left for the Sublime Porte in 1622, after the conclusion of the Peace of Nikolsburg, and a year later went over to Venetian service; nevertheless, he continued to maintain his contacts with the prince of Transylvania.16

Unlike him, we know of two emigrant noblemen from the lands of the Bohemian crown who went over to Bethlen’s service and were commissioned to travel to the Netherlands on his behalf. Ehrenfried von Berbisdorf was not unknown to Bethlen, because he had already been one of Johann Georg’s envoys to Bethlen in 1621. He joined the prince in the company of the Margrave of Jägerndorf, and in early February 1623 he was already in The Hague, where he presented Bethlen’s message to the Staten Generaal.17 This Bohemian nobleman, sentenced to death in absentia by the Habsburg government, later entered Danish service. He received his appointment as Generalproviantmeister in June 1625 but could hardly have started his military service when he was entrusted with a mission to Transylvania by King Christian IV (1588–1648) in August of the same year. He received his letter of recredentials from Bethlen in December 1625, and revisited him as a diplomat of the Danish king in the summer of 1627. Between 1629 and 1631 we find him in Swedish service, after which he disappears from the sources.18 One year after Berbisdorf, Bethlen was represented in The Hague by Jan Adam Čejkovksý z Víckova. This Moravian nobleman, earlier the leader of the Vlachs’ uprising in Moravia, later continued his activities for the Protestant cause in Brandenburg until his death in 1628.19

Nevertheless, the best known person from the Czech–Palatinate emigration was undoubtedly the oft-mentioned Matthias Quadt. He had also come to Hungary in the retinue of the Margrave of Jägerndorf, and it is very likely that, unlike Berbisdorf and Víckov, he had been in Johann Georg’s service already before the outbreak of the war. The estates of his family, an old noble kin with more than hundred branches, were in Berg in the Rhineland, and many of his relatives stood traditionally in the service of the Catholic elector of Cologne; however, Matthias’s branch, who used the by-names von Wickrath or von Zoppenbroich, settled in nearby Jülich and served the Protestant elector of Brandenburg instead.20 Matthias’s father had already had a counselor’s rank in Brandenburg, and his brother served in the elector’s army during the 1620s.21 It can be thus assumed that it was before the 1620s that Matthias came into the service of Johann Georg of Jägerndorf, who was the elector’s uncle. It is in any case clear that during the margrave’s stay in Hungary Quadt was already one of his most trusted men.22 He must have offered his services to Bethlen after Johann Georg’s death in Lőcse (Levoča, Slovakia) at Upper Hungary, on March 12, 1624, and, unlike the two Bohemian emigrants, he also stayed in the Transylvanian prince’s employment until his death.23

Although Bethlen always referred to Quadt as the captain of his German infantry, his activities in the field of diplomacy are much better known than his military contributions. He could only have been in the prince’s service for a few months when he was already sent on his first mission to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden; he was captured and turned back by Polish authorities in the early autumn of 1624.24 In the summer of 1625, he was on the road again: first, as noted above, he went to Brandenburg, and from there to Lower Saxony to meet Christian IV of Denmark in his camp at Nienburg. On November 1 he was already in Bremen, and in the middle of the month he reached The Hague, from where he started the long journey back to Transylvania at the end of December.25

The following year he left the country again: he went to Berlin, and from there to the theater of war in Lower Saxony, where he met Christian IV again.26 This time, after his negotiations with the Danish king, he did not continue his journey towards the United Provinces, but rather returned to Berlin and tried to make contact with Gustavus Adolphus, who had been in Western Pomerania at the moment; however, a personal meeting could not take place.27 In August, Quadt was already in The Hague, from where he went to London in early October in order to collect the signature of King Charles I (1625–1649) on the treaty acknowledging Bethlen as a member of The Hague alliance. After the unexpectedly lengthy, but eventually successful procedure, the envoy left the English capital at the end of December, and by late February 1627 he also managed to get the signatures from the Staten Generaal and the Danish king.28 We do not know exactly when he arrived back to Gábor Bethlen, but as I noted before, he was late: his formal success did not bring any fruits in practice, as by the time the treaty reached him, the prince of Transylvania had already concluded peace with Ferdinand II.29

Originally a soldier, Matthias Quadt seems to have had all the necessary skills for a diplomatic career as well. He not only seems to have been confident moving in the highest circles of European Protestant politics, but his surviving speeches also testify to his rhetorical skills and familiarity with the contemporary political language of Western Europe.30 This is less surprising if we take into account that Ludwig Camerarius, a legal scholar of distinguished erudition, and at that time one of the leaders of the exiled Frederick V’s foreign policy, referred to Quadt as an outstanding person and his friend.31 Nevertheless, we do not have any information indicating that he would have continued his career as a diplomat after his return to Transylvania in the first half of 1627. The reason for this cannot be an illness, otherwise there would not have been so many rumors circulating in Transylvania about poisoning when Quadt eventually died in October 1628 in Gyulafehérvár, after a three-day fever. Both known accounts of his funeral on December 1 of that same year show the high favors he enjoyed at the Transylvanian court: apart from Bethlen and Catherine of Brandenburg, many aristocrats listened to the funeral orations in three languages and watched Quadt’s remaining two battalions shoot a salvo for their deceased commander.32

The Silesian Group

Martin Opitz, one of the most important figures in the history of German Baroque prose, was not unfamiliar with Transylvania: he spent some time in the principality in the mid-1620s as a guest of Gábor Bethlen. In 1630, he recommended two of his fellow countrymen staying at Gyulafehérvár to Martin Schödel, a Hungarian student who was going home after visiting foreign universities: Weikhard Schulitz and Heinrich Dreiling.33 Although geographical factors would not necessarily motivate to separate them from the Czech–Palatinate emigration (as Silesia was also a land of the Bohemian crown and Jägerndorf a part of the province), in their case we cannot be sure whether they also came to Bethlen with the wave of emigrants after White Mountain or on the invitation of the prince, similarly to Opitz. Also, unlike Berbisdorf, Víckov and Quadt, they seem to have been only in the service of Bethlen and no other Protestant ruler during the 1620s.

Heinrich Dreiling, an alumnus of Heidelberg University, started to assume diplomatic commissions in the service of the Transylvanian prince in mid-1626: it was then that he visited Gustavus Adolphus. On the way back, he fell into Habsburg captivity, which motivated the Swedish king (who at that time was not yet a belligerent party) to file an official complaint. Before September 1627, Dreiling was back in the principality again.34 After Bethlen’s death, Dreiling continued to receive diplomatic commissions. Cornelis Haga, the resident ambassador of the Netherlands to the Sublime Porte, recommended him in January 1630 as a representative of Bethlen’s successor, Catherine of Brandenburg (1629–1630), in Constantinople, claiming that there could hardly be a more able and faithful person than him in Transylvania. Dreiling duly received the commission and was in Constantinople already in April of that same year.35 In the early 1630s, he visited the Swedish king again. We do not know when he left Transylvania, but he seems to have made peace with the Habsburgs, the only one of Bethlen’s foreign diplomats to do so, because in the mid-1640s we find him in Vienna.36

We do not know how much influence Dreiling had at the princely court, in contrast to Schulitz, whose political activities are well documented. Although the emigrant, better known in Transylvania under the Latinized form of his name, Scultetus, became really powerful later on, under the rule of Catherine of Brandenburg, he had a hand in the principality’s foreign policy already as a court physician to Gábor Bethlen.37 The young Calvinist nobleman, born in the Silesian town of Trachtenberg, came to Transylvania in the early 1620s.38 The medical activities of this talented doctor are well documented: he received a series of highly important tasks, such as the autopsy of Johann Georg in 1624, but was also asked to cure the illnesses of the prince himself. Although he was thrown into prison in late 1628 and later exiled due to intrigues at the court, Bethlen was forced somewhat later to invite the Silesian doctor back to his country, due to his worsening hydropsy.39 Schulitz had lengthy debates about the right treatment with a Moravian doctor sent to Bethlen by Emperor Ferdinand II, which he later put into writing as an apology for the failure. He could not save the prince’s life, but generally must have been considered a good doctor, because János Kemény notes that among contemporaries he was rumored to have a familiaris spiritus of his own, who gives him counsel.40

Contrary to most of Bethlen’s other diplomats, who represented the prince at various European courts, the Silesian doctor only mediated between Brandenburg and Transylvania; but he managed to cover the distance between the two countries three times in only one year. He set out for the first journey in March 1625 and in April could report the prince’s offer of political cooperation to Elector Georg Wilhelm. He was the first envoy through whom Bethlen raised the idea of the marriage with Catherine of Brandenburg. For reasons unknown, Schulitz was not the only one commissioned with this task. Ferenc Listhius, whose credentials were issued only four days after those of the Silesian doctor, also delivered a message similar to Schulitz’s when he came to Berlin accompanied by Péter Bethlen, the prince’s nephew, who had set out to visit foreign universities. The answer, which was couched as yet in vague terms, was given to both of them and they took it together back to Transylvania.41 The prince’s next letter was delivered during the summer by Schulitz alone, and in August he could report that the proposal for marriage seemed to have good prospects.42 The Silesian doctor returned to Transylvania but in January 1626 was received as envoy at the elector’s seat again. He arrived somewhat later than the solemn embassy to escort Catherine to Transylvania, but he left Berlin together with them.43

It seems that Schulitz’s political activities were interrupted even before his temporary exile, only to come into full bloom after the death of Gábor Bethlen, in the political crisis of 1629–1630, during the conflict between Catherine, who became the ruling princess, and István Bethlen, the governor appointed to assist her.44 Schulitz came to be one of Catherine’s most important counselors, and stayed in contact not only with the princess, but also with the envoys sent to assist her from Brandenburg. One of them, Secret Counselor Levin von dem Knesebeck, noted about him that he was a “faithful and honest man, shows such a loyalty towards the princess that could not be any greater.”45 In light of this, it is quite surprising that the assassination of the Silesian doctor on his way back from the Sublime Porte in December 1630 was organized by people also belonging to the princess’ circle and not to that of István Bethlen. It was István Csáki, the main advisor and most probably the lover of Catherine, who hired the people who captured Schulitz by a bridge near Porumbák in southern Transylvania and threw the bound doctor into the icy River Olt. His body having been fished out of the river, Schulitz was buried in the Franciscan church at Nagyszeben.46

“Wandering Diplomats”

Jacques Roussel and Charles de Talleyrand were the diplomats who elicited the greatest number of ironic comments from analysts of Bethlen’s foreign policy. The two Huguenot emigrants visited the Sublime Porte in 1629 on the prince’s behalf and continued their journey from Constantinople to the Russian tsar. Their ideas about the creation of an anti-Polish front in Eastern Europe met with the spirited approval of Cornelis Haga, the Dutch resident ambassador to the Porte, but their mission remained without success and hardly only for the reason that by the time they reached Moscow, Bethlen had already been dead.47

Gábor Bethlen was neither the first nor the last European ruler for whom Jacques Roussel offered to obtain the Polish throne. The Huguenot lawyer, who had for a while been a teacher of Greek language and librarian of the academy at Sedan, had already made a similar offer to Richelieu, but the cardinal did not believe Roussel when he latter claimed ambitiously that he could make a Polish king of anyone he wanted. According to an anonymous account of his life, which does not show much sympathy for Roussel, he came into contact with Bethlen already before 1629 and the French emigrant, who claimed to have excellent contacts with a number of Polish magnates, was employed as an expert on Polish issues by the prince. For the diplomatic mission best known to the historiography related to Bethlen, he arrived in Transylvania from Venice (from where he also received an annuity) in the company of Talleyrand. The latter, who came from a prominent family of the French Huguenot aristocracy (his full title was the Comte of Grignols, Duke of Chalais, Marquis of Excideuil and Baron of Mareuil and Boisville), left his homeland most probably due to the execution of his brother Henri for his participation in the Chalais conspiracy (which was named after him). Their cooperation later took a rather extraordinary turn: because of an insult against his person, Roussel had the Marquis arrested on the charge of spying in Moscow, and Talleyrand was sent to Siberia. The French aristocrat was only released in the mid-1630s at the intervention of King Louis XIII.48

Gyula Szekfű and others suggested that it must have been Bethlen’s illness, which became preponderant in his last year, that deprived him of his proper judgment so that he gave credit to these adventurers.49 This is not only contradicted by the statement of the anonymous manuscript biography of Roussel (which was not known to Szekfű) that reports an earlier contact between the prince and the Huguenot lawyer. Also, it seems that it was not only the prince and Paul Strassburg (who stayed at his court as the Swedish king’s diplomat) who were impressed by the eloquence, erudition and cosmopolite worldview of the French adventurer.50 From Moscow, Roussel went on to Germany, where, after presenting the letter of the kaymakam (the grand vizier’s deputy) to Gustavus Adolphus, he received a commission from the Swedish king to represent the latter’s interests in Poland and Muscovy as a Swedish royal counselor. During 1631–32, while based in Riga, he maintained an extensive correspondence with the Cossacks and the Polish estates gathering for the diet, thereby causing a huge scandal in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.51 Later he visited Moscow again, this time in Dutch service, and with the tsar’s letter of recommendation went to Constantinople again. He wanted to continue his journey to Transylvania in 1634, but the new prince, György Rákóczi I (1630–1648), did not grant him entry into the country. It was in the Ottoman capital that he died in plague.52

Roussel’s contacts with Gustavus Adolphus show nevertheless that those rulers who employed the French adventurer as a diplomat did not necessarily trust him fully. In 1630 the king and his chancellor agreed that although Roussel was beyond doubt a very clever man, he also seemed to be a rather strange and inconsistent person, and therefore they could not be sure which of his generous offers could be taken seriously. In any case, the benefits that could be won through him seemed to be larger than the damage he could cause, and this was the reason he received a commission from the otherwise rather skeptical Gustavus Adolphus.53 It can be assumed that if we had direct sources about Gábor Bethlen’s plans in giving accreditation to the two French diplomats, they would show similar motivations. The potential damage Roussel and Talleyrand could cause at the Sublime Porte was prevented by Bethlen’s other representatives there: the French diplomats’ activities were constantly monitored (or, according to their own account, hindered) by one of the prince’s ambassadors, Kelemen Mikes, who was sent there in their company.54 An analogous example can be found in the case of Lorenzo Agazza from Vercelli, Savoy, who was Bethlen’s representative to Venice in 1621. Although we know of no negative description of him similar to those of the French diplomats, we can still assume that it was the earlier, rather adventurous career of this Italian envoy that motivated Bethlen to send his other two men with him to the Serenissima. Thus Gáspár Szunyogh and Illés Vajnay could at the same time keep an eye on Agazza, who had earlier been in the service of the duke of Savoy, the kings of Denmark, Bohemia and various German princes, and who also applied for an office in Venice.55

Individual Emigrants

It is not easy to place Zygmunt Zaklika in the typology described above. He also came to Bethlen from Protestant courts in East Central Europe, but he could also be connected to the “wandering adventurer-diplomats,” if not due to his far-fetched political visions, then at least due to his rather extravagant behavior, which led to his arrest in Brandenburg at the turn of 1626. He came from a Polish Calvinist family and was most probably a relative of the similarly named sixteenth-century politician, who visited Hungary several times and even spent some time in the prison of the Habsburgs for his support of István Báthory’s election as king of Poland.56 It seems that Zaklika had good contacts with the Calvinist elite of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth: he was an envoy of Prince Janusz Radziwiłł to Livonia and Muscovy. As the Lithuanian magnate maintained correspondence with the Protestant rulers of Europe, we can assume that Zaklika came into contact with Bethlen through him.57

According to his own testimony, Zaklika joined Bethlen’s service in 1624 (that is, four years after Radziwiłł’s death). He was commissioned twice by the Transylvanian prince to travel to the Netherlands and visit Frederick V on his behalf. During the spring of 1625 he reached The Hague and negotiated with the exiled king-elector.58 His mission in the autumn of the same year, however, took many unexpected turns. Travelling through Polish territory and Brandenburg, Zaklika reached the camp of Ernst von Mansfeld, and later that of Christian IV in late November.59 From there, the Polish envoy decided not to continue his journey, according to his own testimony because he learned that Matthias Quadt was also on his way with the same assignments, and instead returned to Berlin. The Brandenburg counselors, who had already been suspicious of him because of his earlier awkward behavior, listened to a number of self-contradictory statements about his instructions and intentions, and then decided that he must be a spy and arrested him. He was held in custody for more than three months, until Bethlen’s response to the very detailed description of Zaklika’s blunder arrived, in which the prince identified the Polish nobleman as his agent and apologized for his incomprehensible behavior.60 After he left Berlin, we have no information about him: he may have continued a military career in Bethlen’s service, but (not surprisingly) he received no further diplomatic commissions.

Finally, we can treat Hermann Beckmann as a category of his own: he came to Transylvania as the secretary of Catherine of Brandenburg, but we find him in Berlin again a short time after the wedding, which took place in March 1626: in July he informed the elector there that his sister had been elected princess of Transylvania by the estates of the country with the stipulation that she could only rule after her husband’s death.61 From Brandenburg he went to Wolfenbüttel to meet Christian IV, and probably before going back to Transylvania received a new message from Bethlen ordering him to visit Gustavus Adolphus; in mid-September he was already on his way back from the king’s camp in Prussia.62 After this, he disappears from the sources.

Emigrant Diplomats for the Protestant Cause: Gábor Bethlen’s System of Diplomacy in European Context

Apart from being almost exclusively of foreign origin, there is another striking phenomenon that can be observed about Gábor Bethlen’s diplomats at the Protestant courts of Europe: most of them served more than one ruler during their lifetime. Even if we disregard the extreme cases of Roussel and Agazza, the majority (Berbisdorf, Quadt, Víckov and Zaklika) also changed their professed loyalty at least once during their careers. This makes the example of Schulitz the extraordinary one, and makes one wonder whether it was his profession as physician that provided peculiar circumstances for him, or that we might just miss some information on earlier assignments from a Silesian prince that would fit him into the general picture.

In the seventeenth-century system of diplomatic representation, the employment of foreigners as envoys was a well-established practice. If we take into account that more than half of the diplomats representing Sweden were born outside the territories belonging to the Swedish Crown, Bethlen’s example is far from extraordinary, because the prince never trusted foreigners with diplomatic assignments to the neighboring empires, thus making their ratio among the total number of his envoys less than 30 percent.63 Even their change of loyalties was no exception in contemporary European diplomacy. The example of Ludwig Camerarius, which is much better documented than any of Bethlen’s diplomats, shows that it was no problem for emigrant diplomats whose loyalties were not connected to the dynastic interests of a specific ruler but rather to the Protestant cause, to serve even several such rulers at the same time, if the latter seemed relevant to pursuing their agenda. Thus Camerarius, who was one of the leading politicians of the Palatinate emigration in the mid-1620s, wrote regular reports to the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna. What is more, in 1626 he officially entered Swedish service, but nevertheless did not sever his contacts with Frederick V but continued to support him with political advice.64 When Víckov visited the exiled elector in The Hague as Bethlen’s envoy and returned to Transylvania with a detailed description of the opportunities for the two rulers to cooperate, it makes no sense to ask whom he was actually representing. Forced into emigration because of his earlier commitment to Frederick V, he was even personally interested in the issue that the two rulers were negotiating through him, the establishment of a Protestant, anti-Habsburg alliance.65 Similar motivations may have been at work in the case of Berbisdorf and Quadt as well: as long as they were working for the Protestant cause (and thus to put an end to their exile), it could not have mattered to them whether they were fulfilling the assignments of the prince of Transylvania, the king of Denmark or the elector of Brandenburg.

Berbisdorf is an especially illustrative example of this flexibility inside the same camp: he worked for the same task, the mediation between Transylvania and the Protestants of northwestern Europe, before and after 1625, and only the person who signed his credentials changed. One could suggest that this solution was motivated by the lack in Western and Northern European courts of people who would have been familiar with the circumstances at the southeastern borders of Latin Christianity. Examples such as that of Sir James (Jacob) Spens, however, warn against such an interpretation. This Scottish nobleman, after having served as an ambassador of the Swedish Crown in London between 1613 and 1620, and again between 1623 and 1626, was sent to Gustavus Adolphus as the diplomat of Charles I in 1627.66

It is probably the career of Paul Strassburg that offers the best illustration that in the Protestant politics of the 1620s an envoy was not necessarily expected to be loyal to the dynastic interests of the ruler who sent him, which otherwise would have excluded the possibility of him subsequently representing various princes. He visited Gábor Bethlen for the first time in 1625, at the request of Heinrich Matthias von Thurn, but indirectly representing Frederick V. In 1627 he was received in Königsberg as the envoy of Catherine of Brandenburg (at that time not yet as a ruling princess). From there he went to Royal Prussia to meet Gustavus Adolphus, who gave him the title of court counselor and sent him back to Gábor Bethlen’s court to represent him there in 1628.67

With the cases of these diplomats in mind, who changed their loyalties to specific rulers, another phenomenon, found in the career of Quadt, is perhaps less surprising. During the autumn of 1625 it was not only the offers of Gábor Bethlen that were on the table of the Brandenburg Secret Council, but also the question of sending a representative to The Hague conference, where the alliance of Protestant powers was to be concluded. The question was raised whether a Brandenburg diplomat, who could inform Christian IV about the intentions of the elector, should accompany Matthias Quadt on his way to the northwest. As those secret counselors who had any experience in matters of diplomacy were on other missions or lying sick in bed, the decision was made to give this task to Bethlen’s envoy. Apart from negotiating with the Danish king on Bethlen’s behalf, Quadt thus also handed him Georg Wilhelm’s letter; what is more, he gave a summary of some new developments in the elector’s secret diplomacy. Although Quadt was representing two rulers at the same time, Christian IV regarded him unambiguously as the envoy of the Transylvanian prince and avoided referring to him as Georg Wilhelm’s diplomat even in his response to the elector.68 The envoy’s loyalty towards the prince of Transylvania thus was not questioned by anyone due to the fact that during his mission he also took on assignments from another ruler from the Protestant camp.69

Conclusion

It was thus not an extraordinary situation that the diplomats representing the prince of Transylvania at the European Protestant courts were mostly foreigners connected to his person and not to the principality. This trend seems to have changed in the following decades. The rather rare Transylvanian diplomatic missions in the 1630s were still mostly assigned to people of foreign origin: the prince was represented at the courts of Sweden and France by Heinrich Dreiling in 1632, Heinrich Meerbott in 1634 and 1637, and Johann Heinrich Bisterfeld in 1638–1639. However, apart from them it was not only Boncziday who continued his activities, but in 1632 and 1634 other Hungarians, Pál Csontos and Balázs Bálintffy, were also entrusted with diplomatic missions.70 In the 1640s, then, missions to Western and Northern Europe were usually granted to Hungarians, and the same trend can be observed under the rule of György Rákóczi II (1648–1660, with interruption). This change could be interpreted so that in the 1640s there were already widely traveled, well-educated people with experience of peregrination available to the prince, such as János Dániel, who delivered the news of György Rákóczi I’s death to Protestant principalities on behalf of his son and successor.71 At the same time, there was a number of diplomats in the service of György Rákóczi I and II from Hungary and Transylvania who are not known for their eminent backgrounds. Even Ferenc Jármi, who was the prince’s envoy to the peace congress of Westphalia, had no better background than any of those people having politically relevant offices under Gábor Bethlen.72 This renders an alternative interpretation more likely: namely, that the huge migratory wave of politically competent persons in the 1620s was not followed by others later on, and the princes simply ran out of foreigners who could be used as diplomats. The few exceptions to this rule had diverse backgrounds. Constantin Schaum came from the circle of Comenius and used his network during his mission to the Protestant rulers of Europe; thus, he shows similarities with the Czech–Palatinate group in Bethlen’s time. On the other hand, Tymoshka Akudinov, who sought assistance for his aspirations concerning the Russian throne and received the pass of the prince of Transylvania to travel to Sweden as his envoy, belongs in the category of adventurers.73 The fact that they were employed by György Rákóczi II and were exclusively used for long-distance missions and never in relations with neighboring states, suggests that it was not the principal fundaments of the system of foreign policy during Bethlen’s reign that changed in the following decades but only the available personnel.

Archival Sources

Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (Warsaw) [Central Archives of Historical Records]

Archiwum Koronne Warszawskie [Warsaw Crown Archives]

Metryka Koronna [Crown Registers] Libri Legationum

Arhivele Naţionale ale României Direcţia Judeţeană Braşov [National Archives of Romania, County Directorate Braşov]

Primăria oraşului Braşov, Socotele alodiale [Municipality of the town of Braşov, Domanial Accounts]

Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Munich)

Clm 10375

Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (Munich)

Kasten Schwarz

Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin-Dahlem)

I. Hauptabteilung Rep. 11., Rep. 21., Rep. 24.

Brandenburgisch–preussisches Hausarchiv Rep. 32., Rep. 33.

Krigsarkivet (Stockholm) [War Archives]

Biografica

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (Vienna)

Ungarische Akten: Allgemeine Akten

Staatenabteilungen: Türkei I.; Polen I.

Rigsarkivet (Copenhagen) [State Archives]

Tyske Kancelli, Udenrigske Afdelning [German Chancellery, Department for Foreign Policy]

Riksarkivet (Stockholm) [State Archives]

Oxenstiernasamlingen [Oxenstierna collection]

Diplomatica Transylvanica

Riksregistraturet [State Registers]

Skrivelser till konungen Gustaf II Adolfs tid [Letters to the king: The time of Gustavus Adolphus]

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