296 SERENISSIMA
military measures to contain the Muscovite invasion, those 21 / 2 millions lavished
on the Crimea represented good value for money. Overall, the cost of sending
embassies abroad was roughly matched by that of maintaining foreign embassies
in Warsaw. Together they constituted about one-fifth of the state's expenditure.
If the Polish school of diplomacy produced its most distinguished practitioners
in the early years of the Republic's existence, its outlook and traditions were not
analysed and expounded until the end of the sixteenth century. Christopher
Warszewicki (1543-1603), or 'Varsevicius', had the distinction of publicizing
them throughout Europe.
Christopher Warszewicki belonged to that most brilliant of Polish genera-
tions, raised in the cosmopolitan circles of 'the Golden Age', where Renaissance
ideals mingled with the highest affairs of state. He was almost the exact con-
temporary of Chancellor Jan Zamoyski. His elder brother, Stanislaw, a convert
to Catholicism, was a prominent Jesuit, founder and rector of the Jesuit
Colleges at Wilno and Lublin. Both brothers studied in Wittenberg, but whereas
Stanislaw returned to Poland as a royal secretary, Christopher served as a page
in the Viennese court of Ferdinand, King of the Romans. In 1554 he witnessed
the marriage in Winchester of Mary Tudor and Philip II of Spain. In the 1560s,
he was Secretary of the Bishop of Poznan, and in the reign of Stefan Batory
(1576-86), a regular envoy of the King to Muscovy and Scandinavia. In between
times, he was variously in the service of the Papal Nuncio to Poland, of Henry
III in France, and of the Emperor in Prague. Owing to political activities on
behalf of the Habsburgs at election times, he repeatedly fell from grace, and died
in Cracow in 1603 after the last of a long series of exiles. As an author, he pub-
lished a wide variety of serious works — from a guidebook to Venice (1572.), to
Turcicae Quatuordecim (Fourteen Orations on Turkey, 1595), De optima statu
libertatis (On the best form of Liberty, 1598), and De Cognitione (On
Knowledge, 1600). His reflections on diplomacy appeared as De Legato et
Legatione (On Ambassadors and Embassies), published in Cracow in 1595, and
thereafter many times reprinted, in Rostock in 1597, in Liibeck in 1604, and in
particular in George Forster's pocket edition in Danzig in 1646.
In the practice of diplomacy, Warszewicki advocated a straightforward policy
of honour, piety, prudence, and magnanimity. In his view, the ambassador is a
Christian missionary as well as a servant of the prince. In the long run, virtue
and honesty pays. 'God does not will protracted success to those who deal in
impiety and fraud', he wrote. Or again, 'To behave like a King, is to attract
many men by one's bounties, even when one knows that few are really faithful
... to direct one's wrath more against things than against persons, and not to
be moved by the ingratitude of others.' Whilst drawing the distinction between
prudent reserve {dissimulatio) and deliberate deceit, and excusing a certain mea-
sure of prevarication (mendacia quae dicuntur officiosa), he none the less insists