Venetian Merchants as Diplomatic Agents: Family Networks and Cross-Confessional Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the prominent Venetian merchant Giacomo Ragazzoni and his brothers Placido and Gerolamo, reconstructing their role as ambassadors, agents and information gatherers in sixteenth-century Constantinople, London and Paris. Operating as a ‘family consortium’, the Ragazzoni used diplomacy as a tool of social mobility, networking their way into the Venetian patriciate by serving several different patrons without much concern for their religious affiliation. On the one hand, their case highlights the importance of family networks in sixteenth-century Europe, warning against the anachronistic application of modern distinctions between public and private, political and domestic, to early modern diplomacy. On the other, it provides new evidence about the role of merchants as cross-confessional intermediaries. While publicly the Ragazzoni always stressed their adherence to the Tridentine orthodoxy and to the Renaissance ideal of the pious merchant described by Leon Battista Alberti and Benedetto Cotrugli, their private correspondence reveals a keen ability to move across religious borders, keeping contact with Protestant England and with several Italian reformers in Venice.