Medieval Treaties and the Diplomatic Aesthetic

Abstract

The charters of medieval diplomacy are essays in formulating a lingua franca of documentary communication. Through the process of realizing a mutually authentic textual object, they make negotiation visible. This essay examines some examples in detail from treaties concluded between England, France, and Portugal, in the context of a broader methodological intervention: to join the forces of New Diplomatic History with the study of material texts as visual culture.

THIS ESSAY BRINGS two strands of scholarship into conversation with one another: the New Diplomatic History and the study of material texts as visual culture. What follows is an examination of a significant point of contact for these two discussions: the documents of diplomacy and, more specifically, treaty ratifications in late medieval Europe. A central premise of New Diplomatic History is that it involves an understanding of diplomacy as an expanded field—in other words, there is more to diplomacy than treaties.¹ As this analysis will suggest, there is also more to treaties themselves. Letters of procuration, articles of agreement, and treaty ratifications all have allusive and symbolic elements, and even these most canonical sources of diplomatic history belong also to cultural history. The first part of this essay will explain some of the motivations for my choice of method and sources; the second part will offer some specific illustrative examples of that method in practice. There are important precedents for discussing both diplomacy and diplomatics in structural terms, without reference to (even widely variant) political content, and the analysis in these examples draws from and seeks to expand on them.

Diplomacy and Textual Objects

This approach returns with new eyes to some of the most traditional subject matter of "Old" diplomatic history, by bringing some of the conceptual framework that inspires the expanded field of diplomacy back to the centre of that field, and by integrating that framework with the analytic practices of art history, visual culture studies, and the study of material texts. In doing so, this analysis also draws from long-standing practices of the so-called auxiliary sciences of diplomatics and palaeography, as well as some of the intellectual innovations of their recent practitioners. Scholars of diplomatics have always devoted attention to the material aspects of their documents, while palaeographical literature, by definition, concerns itself with the visual culture of letter forms, developing a specific vocabulary for their description; in both cases, the conceptual and theoretical implications of these methods are increasingly explicitly voiced.²

The analysis of medieval treaty documents contributes to the themes of The Medieval Globe's special issue on a straightforwardly practical as well as a more conceptual level. Ratifications constitute clear instances of exchanged impressions in the most literal sense: through these documents, which formally conclude diplomatic negotiations, two chanceries exchange impressions of their seals of central government. More broadly, the examination of these documents flags a critical question about the role of objects in the globalizing process. If one significant framework for conceptualizing that process is the exchange, and therefore an agreed investment of value, in particular objects—such as silk and porcelain, and of course silver and gold ("intrinsically the most useless of metals")—then administrative documents number among those objects, and they played a role in the context of territorial expansion both within the west Eurasian system and beyond it.³ The value of documents, too, is constructed rather than inherent. Like gold, their principal value relies on their assigned status by mutual or multilateral consent.

There is no such thing as a pure document, however—no documentary bullion, as it were. Even neighbouring polities such as the kingdoms of western Europe often had very different documentary conventions. It is here that close visual and textual analysis can contribute to the broader discussion about how objects more generally participated in the globalizing process. How chanceries managed to participate in a shared system of diplomacy, conducted in part through these objects, calls attention to its problematic aspects, and also demonstrates some material and conceptual practices of resolution.

The analyses in the second part of this essay therefore concentrate on a small number of examples of a particular class of document: late medieval treaty ratifications exchanged by the English royal chancery with the kingdoms of Portugal and France, for which ratification documents survive on both sides. This material is revealing for specific reasons. In the first instance, these documents operate along well-established lines. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries documentary practices already had a very long history, and the textual, visual, and material conventions of charter production were relatively firmly fixed in chanceries across Europe.⁴ Chanceries shared some, but by no means all, of these conventions with one another. England, France, and Portugal all had developed systems of documentary production, but their chanceries issued very different kinds of charters from one another. These charters projected authority and were able to exert control within their jurisdictions through their own specific textual, visual, and material conventions. Such well-established conventions therefore allow for a clear examination of how chanceries responded when pushed to be self-conscious about those conventions.

The system of diplomacy that produced treaty documents had also been fairly firmly established by the thirteenth century.⁵ Treaty documents generally assumed a double nature: articles of agreement, negotiated and sealed by representatives; and ratifications, sealed and exchanged by the parties themselves. The relative logistical standardization of the diplomatic process did not extend to a material standardization of its products, however. Diplomatic charters themselves remained idiosyncratic, varied attempts at a lingua franca of visual communication. What emerged differed each time with respect to visual detail, but they share an underlying structural similarity: the eventual document manifests a kind of visible negotiation, the process of realizing a mutually authentic object.

The English royal chancery can offer some particularly suggestive examples. In the first place, England's documentary culture differed from that of much of continental Europe in an important respect: although notaries had by this time long since gained a foothold there, England remained the "land of the seal."⁶ Notarial instruments never became as widespread, nor did notaries ever play as central an administrative and even social role, as they had for centuries in the notarial cultures of southern Europe.⁷ England's diplomatic correspondence therefore demonstrates a chancery's approach to negotiating such a significant difference. English diplomatic practice has also been particularly well studied, most notably by Pierre Chaplais, who published many documents that now invite analysis from new perspectives. Most relevant here is his English Medieval Diplomatic Practice, particularly the second volume of facsimiles and commentaries.⁸ Much understanding of how diplomatic encounters actually worked depends on his research, but he himself notes that the facsimile volume pays less attention to treaties than he would have wished, given the difficulties involved in their reproduction. When he does discuss them, or their subsidiary documents, "particular attention has been paid to the formulae used and to the handwriting, in an attempt to ascertain the part played by English and foreign clerks in the drafting and engrossing of the originals under consideration."⁹

These documents can also be approached in a way that is interpretive rather than deductive. Chaplais's efforts to deduce the choreography of a document's production—"the part played by English and foreign clerks"—extend equally to other elements of the documents' material character, such as sealing, seal attachment, and decoration. He aims to understand the specific logistics of diplomacy, the realities of human bodies in space down to the very moments when and where pen touched parchment and metal touched wax. To this end, he looks to untangle the roles of the representatives of each communicating party; he therefore uses formal analysis as a diagnostic for a creator's regional origin. Nevertheless, there remains the expressive possibility of choice. Scribes, artists, and authors often adopt unfamiliar languages and conventions, both verbal and visual, as is already well known from a diverse range of examples, from scribes in northwestern Europe to painters in Nasrid Granada.¹⁰ The creative imitation of "foreign" styles can work across time as well as space, as is shown in both paleographical and art-historical scholarship.¹¹ The departure from routine chancery practices therefore allows for the observation and interpretation of active choice.¹²

The documents of diplomacy demand such active choice. The vast majority of charters produced by a chancery of central government are instruments of domestic sovereignty, while diplomatic documents demand the creation of a charter with recognizable authority in (at least) two contexts.¹³ A document that crossed contemporary jurisdictions needed to work in the visual language of the recipient as well as that of the issuing chancery; often, to address recipients of equal or higher status, rather than its sigillant's own subjects; and, finally, to evoke authority beyond the sigillant's own jurisdiction. This brief required discrimination among those aspects of a charter that had universal as opposed to local force, but also among those that related specifically to the act of communication, as opposed to the exercise of executive power. As authentic charters operating outside their native jurisdictions, treaty ratifications required their creators to devise a visual language that transcended the authority of the very chanceries that issued them: in other words, to create a "diplomatic aesthetic."

Two Examples: Windsor and Troyes

Late medieval European treaty ratifications structurally recall the more elevated public instruments issued in the name of a territory's ruler to its subjects, generally following the format of the highest grades of document: royal charters, privileges, or letters patent. This was by no means an obvious development or the only option. Some of the earliest treaty documents took the form of chirographs: duplicate agreements written on the same parchment sheet and then divided into a copy for each party. Several of these survive from the twelfth century, recording alliances between England and Flanders.¹⁴ The material nature of a chirograph therefore suggests an occasion of mutual contact, even if a fictive one. The inscription of two copies of the text, on what is initially the same sheet, reinforces the document's symbolic connection to presence and performance, to an oath taken in person, in which both parties meet face to face. By contrast, the forms of later ratification documents suggest absence—or, rather, presence through representation—even when their texts specifically call for oath taking. Each party confirms, in his own name, the articles agreed by representatives, in a document in which he is represented by his seal.

In the case of the Treaty of Windsor (May 1386), documents survive for ratifications issued by both João I of Portugal (r. 1385-1433) and Richard II of England (r. 1377-1399), along with articles of agreement sealed by the two Portuguese proctors.¹⁵ Richard's ratification and João's both appear as royal charters of confirmation, but they look very different from those more typically issued in their names. João's in particular looks unlike any other document issued by his chancery in script or format—in everything except the sealing (August 1387; Figures 9.1-9.3). In fact, the charter itself was written in Richard's chancery, then signed, notarized, and sealed in Portugal before its return to England (Figure 9.4). The two ratifications were therefore prepared under the same direction, and mirror each other in design.

At first glance, not surprisingly, Richard's ratification (February 1387/8) looks more like a typical product of his chancery. It was written in a relatively constructed

Figure 9.1.

Ratification of the Treaty of Windsor. Kew, The National Archives, E 30/311 (reproduced with permission).

Figure 9.2.

Detail of Figure 9.1: initial letter.

Figure 9.3.

Detail of Figure 9.1: seal.

Figure 9.4.

Detail of Figure 9.1: notarial mark.

hand, on parchment; it was originally sealed with the Great Seal, attached on red and green braided cords; and it had the name of the supervising clerk, Burton, inscribed in the lower right-hand corner (Figures 9.5-9.6). It begins with the same language as an inspeximus charter—that is, a charter whose author declares that he or she has inspected and confirmed an earlier charter, a form often used to validate privileges granted by predecessors. Here, the peace treaty is the confirmed document, initially incorporated smoothly into what would have been a common English formula. And yet, ultimately, there are differences to this formula that go beyond the content of the charter confirmed: if the first line is familiar, the last is not. The ratification is dated the twenty-fourth day of February, AD 1387, and in the eleventh year of Richard's reign, where usually only the regnal year would have appeared. So the text combines its own chancery's dating system, which draws its meaning from the history of royal power, with the universal chronology of sacred history. The document also includes a validation clause, which signals its unusual methods and signs of authentication: "In witness whereof, we have commanded our present letters to be written and issued in the form of a public instrument by the notary public mentioned below, and we have had them confirmed by the affixing of our Great Seal."¹⁶ In addition to the Great Seal, then, Richard's charter also bears a notarial sign and attestation. With this, the chancery has merged an English confirmation document into a hybrid record, imbricating the different practices of author and recipient, and the impressed and inscribed image as modes of validation.

Below the main text of the document, in darker ink, is the notarial mark and attestation of John de Bouland (Figure 9.7). He is the same notary whose mark

Figure 9.5.

Ratification of the Treaty of Windsor. Lisbon, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, PT/TT/GAV/18/3/25 (image provided by ANTT, Tratado de paz, amizade e confederação entre D. João I e Ricardo II, rei de Inglaterra, denominado tratador de Windsor.).

Figure 9.6.

Detail of Figure 9.5: initial.

Figure 9.7.

Detail of Figure 9.5: notarial mark.

appeared on the treaty's articles of agreement (Figure 9.8), as well as on other documents he attested.¹⁷ Although his attestation notes that he holds his position of notary public by apostolic authority, his signum incorporates imagery that is heraldic rather than sacral: a crowned hart in a diamond, with three fleur-de-lis terminals each containing a letter of his first name and a lower expanded terminal bearing his patronymic; compare, for example, the notarial sign on the Portuguese ratification (Figure 9.4).¹⁸ The full signum is visible on the articles of agreement, while the plica of the ratification partially obscures it, along with the last line of the attestation, because the execution of the two forms of authentication followed the order described in the document: notarial mark and attestation; folding; sealing with the Great Seal. Notarial practices had a far more long-standing and important place in Portuguese documentation than in English, although there, too, these practices changed and developed over the course of this period.¹⁹ Yet Portuguese royal charters did not conventionally bear notarial attestations, either; rather, they bore the king's seal and sign manual. So Richard's ratification does not, in fact, mimic precisely the conventions of its recipient chancery, either.

However, on the structural level of representational mode—rather than of specific represented signs—the document does conform to the conventions of Portuguese royal charters, in that it has both inscribed and impressed signs of authentication. This, too, represents a departure from the English royal chancery's usual process: not only notarial practices, but graphic symbols more generally figure far less in English documents than in those of continental Europe.²⁰ So, in this final treaty ratification, the chancery signifies validity both within and beyond its own jurisdiction through the creation of an amalgamated charter: textually an inspeximus by letters patent, formally a notarized royal charter; to be confirmed (muniri) by the impression of the Great Seal, but proclaimed (publicari) through its inscription as a public instrument. In this instance, the "diplomatic aesthetic" has produced neither an English nor a Portuguese document, but one that invokes an idea of common authority. Indeed, within England, notarial practices were most developed to deal with matters that involved foreigners, ecclesiastical circles, and curial litigation.²¹ This is clearly an example of the first case, but the last may be relevant here as well. The presence of a notarial attestation suggests universality, in part through its allusion to an overarching sovereignty.

Ratification documents for the Treaty of Troyes (1420) between Charles VI of France and Henry V of England also survive from both sides, and these again take the form of large royal charters and letters patent.²² The French document kept in the English Exchequer Treasury of Receipt is written in French in a current hand, leaving no vertical space for an initial; rather, the scribe has left spaces within the

Figure 9.8.

Articles of Agreement for the Treaty of Windsor. Kew, The National Archives, E 30/310: detail of notarial mark (image used with permission).

top line alone (Figure 9.9). In these spaces, the words "Charles" and "Perpetuelle" appear in a large gothic display script, with intricate strapwork composing the back of the "C," as well as decorating ascenders throughout the top line. Within the body of the document, a more subdued display script calls attention to the initial words of clauses. The document is then sealed in green wax on red and green silk cords (Figure 9.10). For the English ratification, housed in the French Trésor des chartes, the document's scribe writes in Latin and adopts a more constructed treatment of the script (Figures 9.11-9.12). Here, too, the initial words of the treaty's clauses stand out in textualis display script, one line high, and space in the top line has been left for the king's name, as well as for the first letters of each word in the royal style, and the "A" in "Ad perpetuam rei memoriam." The king's name written in gothic display script, about two lines high, fills this space, along with penwork initials to the royal style, a penwork initial "A"—a fictive scroll in grisaille—about four lines high, and a few cadels of the same height. Here the scribe has left space for an initial letter, of five lines with an outward curve at the right to accommodate the bow of the "H" in "Henricus"; the elaborate letter, in ink alone but very fine, more than fills this space, extending out into the upper and left margins, as well as the top line of the text space. The initial has reserved decoration of three fleurs-delis in the backstroke, and of three lions, modelled in grisaille, in the bow. A crown surrounds the top of the letter, inscribed "fides / pax / iusticia" across the band. The document has then been sealed with the Great Seal in dark green wax, attached on a braided cord of brown silk (Figure 9.11).

Although the conventions of French and English documents correspond more closely than English and Portuguese ones, Henry V's charter is just as idiosyncratic as the Windsor ratification, if in a very different way. Some of its visual features

Figure 9.9.

Ratification of the Treaty of Troyes. Kew, The National Archives, E 30/411 (reproduced with permission).

resemble charters and letters patent issued by the chancery to domestic recipients at around the same time: the seal itself; the wax colour of the sealing (though not the colour of the cords); and the decorative cadels. Some of the decoration has domestic analogues as well. For example, a charter of incorporation issued to the Merchant Taylors' Company in 1408, with pen-flourishing to the "H" of "Henricus," which is then surmounted by a crown bearing the legend "Souereyne" similar to that on the Troyes ratification, if less elaborate.²³ The script differs, however, and has been identified by Chaplais as "an English ('Secretary') hand."²⁴ It has some features (single-compartment "a," looped ascender on "d," "g" as a bucket rather

Figure 9.10.

Detail of Figure 9.9: seal.

than a figure "8") more reminiscent of a formal French document, including display script for initial words of clauses rather than scribal elaboration of their initial letters, a pattern not normally adopted by the English chancery at this stage. Here, the negotiated aesthetic emerges not from competing modes of validation but from competing concepts of design.

Letterhead and "Extraordinary Fireworks"

Diplomacy in general, and treaties in particular, perennially involve the construction of authority through cultural forms—ceremonies, oaths, exchanges of gifts—that have performative, linguistic, visual, and material elements. These cultural forms have included everything from elaborate ritual to exchanged works of art, to artists as diplomats or as diplomatic gifts themselves, to staged encounters with architecture and landscape.²⁵ Like many of the most famous diplomatic gifts of portraiture, late medieval treaty ratifications allowed for the exchange of the royal

Figure 9.11.

Ratification of the Treaty of Troyes. Paris, Archives nationales de France, AE/III/254 (public domain).

image—in the form of a seal. And, furthermore, their "diplomatic aesthetic" offers a framework for understanding the broader material and visual culture of diplomacy. One can also see them as the nuclei of spectacular ceremonies, the permanent fragments of larger, lost, performances.

A much later account of the Russian ambassador's delegation to London in 1662 vividly evokes such a setting:

[The ambassador's] retinue [with] their caps of fur, tunics, richly embroidered with gold and pearls, made a glorious show. The King being seated under a canopy in the Banqueting-house, the Secretary of the Embassy went before the Ambassador in a grave march, holding up his master's letters of credence in a crimson taffeta scarf before his forehead. The Ambassador then delivered it with a profound reverence to the King, who gave it to our Secretary of State: it was written in a long and lofty style. Then came in the presents borne by 165 of his retinue … These borne by so long a train rendered it very extraordinary. Wind music played all the while in the galleries above.²⁶

Figure 9.12.

Detail of Figure 9.11: initial.

Grand ceremonies could also attend the "conclusion or proclamation of a treaty." For example, a fifteenth-century Venetian source records such an event involving about forty boats adorned with heraldry, as well as trumpet music, "extraordinary fire­ works," bonfires, processions, "splendid" costumes, and "pageants and mysteries."²⁷

The importance of these material and visual aspects of diplomatic negotiation can be implicit even in analytic studies that at first seem far removed from medieval cultural history. For example, a recent study of international law uses a "domestic analogy" to illustrate two of the subject's fundamental questions: why do states comply with international law, and why should states comply with international law?

Suppose that I, as a university professor, lend a book to a student. The book is not returned, and I ask for it back. If it is still not returned, despite increasingly urgent informal requests, I might write to the student on University notepaper. [… T]he shift into the University context increases my power as against that of the student [and] shifts in the context of the dispute, in the factors and types of argument that are relevant, and the relative power of me and of the student, have been effected through the use of language. [… I]t is by no means the case that the persuasive power of the law depends upon the immediate availability of some means of enforcement.²⁸

In fact, not all the shifts in this scenario are effected through the use of language; or, rather, of language in isolation from its material manifestation. The analogy begins with a visual example: the university notepaper. This is a revealing choice, as visual language often plays as central a role in encounters that, although they pre-date international law as such, share its salient feature of evoking authority in the absence of unambiguous sovereignty. The analysis of diplomacy's central texts—looking at these, too, as material and cultural objects—tests the functional modalities of writing practices.