Fertile negotiators: the Venetian family-embassies at the court of Louis XIV

Early modern ambassadors bore eyewitness to the most intimate moments of royal family life, reporting back to their princes on hangovers, quarrels, illness, birth and death. Yet, largely unremarked by scholars, diplomats also sustained family lives within the embassy and at court. Ambassadors’ children were conceived and born, raised and trained in an itinerant household; ambassadors’ wives were hostesses but also mothers, far from their own family networks. This article shifts the current focus on gender and the diplomatic power couple in the New Diplomatic History to demonstrate the importance of studying the entire diplomatic family’s experience of life abroad, particularly the role of mothers and children. Focusing on two case-studies of Venetian ambassadors to the court of Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century, the article demonstrates that families created opportunities for diplomacy. That ambassadors took advantage of these is shown in both their premeditated and opportunistic actions. Moreover, investigation into potentially unique baptisms of ambassadorial children at Versailles demonstrates that ambassadresses were also alive to the opportunity presented by a lack of precedent to enhance their status at court, manipulate ceremony and assert the rights of the Venetian Republic, all in the name of their child.