achieve a religious accommodation that would enable
Western and Eastern Christendom to present a united
front against the advancing Ottoman Turks, with Emperor
John VIII Paleologus himself leading the Orthodox dele-
gation at the Council of Florence in 1438. Prestige was
also an important motivator, particularly where principals
were involved, as at the FIELD OF THE CLOTH OF GOLD. The
youthful French ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII in
1533 dignified their mission on behalf of FRANCIS Iwith a
commemorative double portrait by Hans HOLBEIN the
Younger.
Ambassadors often left valuable accounts of the coun-
tries they visited: the German Sigmund von Herberstein,
an envoy to Russia in 1517 and 1526, wrote Rerum Mus-
coviticarum commentarii. Others who left descriptions of
this then little-known country were the Englishmen Sir
Jerome Horsey, Elizabeth I’s envoy to tsars Ivan the Terri-
ble and Feodor I in the 1580s, and Giles Fletcher, English
ambassador to Moscow in 1588. Roger ASCHAM, who ac-
companied Edward VI’s ambassador to CHARLES Vthrough
Germany in 1551, kept a journal in English during his
travels, the bulk of which, sent home as a letter to a friend,
was published as A Report ... of the Affaires and State of
Germany (1553).
Envoys also traveled beyond the bounds of Christen-
dom. The accession of Sultan Mehmet II in 1451 brought
a flurry of embassies to his then court at Adrianople,
among them envoys from Venice, Ragusa (Dubrovnik),
the Knights Hospitaler on Rhodes, Serbia, and Constan-
tinople. The importance of contact with the SUBLIME PORTE
(as the Ottoman seat of government was called) grew in
the 16th century as the sultan’s power spread across the
Mediterranean and menaced the eastern European heart-
lands. The suburb of Pera, north of the Golden Horn, be-
came an established diplomatic quarter. One particularly
well-documented embassy was that of Ogier Ghislain de
BUSBECQ, the envoy of the Holy Roman Emperor, in
1555–62. At the end of the 15th century John II of Portu-
gal sent Pero da COVILHÃas his ambassador to Africa with
letters for the legendary Christian ruler Prester John. In
1615 Sir Thomas Roe (c. 1581–1644), who might be ac-
counted one of the earliest career diplomats, was sent as
envoy to the Moghul emperor Jahangir to consolidate a
commercial treaty on behalf of the EAST INDIA COMPANY,
following up that successful mission with an equally suc-
cessful embassy to the Ottoman Porte in 1621–28. An-
other early career diplomat was Sir Henry Wotton
(1568–1639), famous for his punning witticism “An am-
bassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good
of his country.”
The usefulness of having a permanent representative
abroad was first demonstrated by the consuls who were
maintained by the Italian city-states with trading interests
in the Levant to act as the eyes and ears of their paymas-
ters there. Venice in particular took the lead in setting up
an organized diplomatic service; the reports (relazioni)
made by its representatives at the end of their term of of-
fice were formally read out in the Senate and provide an
invaluable record of the evolution of European diplomacy.
In the second half of the 15th century similar arrange-
ments began to be made by other Italian states, and the
practice later spread to Spain and northern Europe, a
process accelerated by the outbreak of the Wars of Italy in- One condition of the 1521 treaty between Holy
Roman Emperor Charles V and Henry VIII was that they
should mutually appoint ambassadors. The professional
diplomat Eustache Chapuys spent 16 eventful years from
1529 as imperial representative in London, while on the
English side credit for the development of a formal diplo-
matic service is mainly due to Cardinal WOLSEY. Although
the legal position of diplomats resident in foreign courts
was at first sometimes ambiguous, and they could be vul-
nerable to accusations of spying, there were such clear ad-
vantages to all parties in having someone to keep an eye
on other princes while working to maintain a peaceful and
mutually satisfactory status quo that the system was
steadily formalized from the early 16th century onward.
See also: CONSTANTINOPLE
Further reading: Garrett Mattingley, Renaissance
Diplomacy (London: Cape and Boston: Houghton-Mifflin,
1955; several later editions); Joycelyne G. Russell, Peace-
making in the Renaissance (London: Duckworth, 1986); ∼,
Diplomats at Work: Three Renaissance Studies (Stroud,
U.K.: Sutton, 1992).
Discalced Carmelites See CARMELITES, REFORM OF THEdissection Little dissection of human cadavers took place
before the Renaissance. Consequently, much of the
anatomical knowledge of antiquity was derived mislead-
ingly from the study of Barbary apes, domestic animals,
and the occasional human corpse. The main source of
bodies for Renaissance students were those presented for
autopsy. Outside this, anatomists were forced back on
their own resources. As a result medical students, as in
Bologna in 1319, found themselves prosecuted for grave
robbing. Although arrangements were made in 1442 to
allow the medical school to receive two executed corpses
annually, the supply remained quite inadequate. Conse-
quently, VESALIUS could still be found a century later
haunting cemeteries and competing with marauding dogs
for skeletal remains. In his entire career he seems to have
seen no more than six female corpses, although it is a fe-
male corpse on the dissecting table in the crowded theater
depicted on the woodcut title page of the first edition of
his De humanis corporis fabrica (1543; see illustration p.
491).
Even when corpses were available, the anatomical
custom of the day did little to advance knowledge. The ac-
tual dissection itself was often conducted by an illiterate114422 DDiissccaallcceedd CCaarrmmeelliitteess