Catholic missionaries, Armenian communities and the Austrian ambassador: Political and diplomatic communication in the religious conflict in south of the Russian Empire, 1755-1760

Abstract

The article mainly concentrates on the state religious policy during the final period of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna's reign. The role of the Board of Foreign Affairs in the solution of the conflict between Austrian Capuchin missionaries and Armenian Gregorian community in the towns in the south of the Russian Empire, complicated by the intervention of the Austrian Ambassador N. Esterházy, is studied for the first time in historiography. The proposed research bases on little-known materials of the collegiate investigation of the conflict. Taking into account the information extracted from sources, the article reconstructs the conflict situation and traces the political and diplomatic communication, in which the Foreign Board was the organizer and the most important actor. Most attention is paid to the characteristics of the interaction of the collegium with other actors, and communicative features are revealed in each specific case. It is shown the inclusion in the communicative toolkit of language and concepts that reflect the trend of religious tolerance in Russian domestic politics. The author states in conclusion the flexibility and variability of communication built by the diplomatic department at different levels, the reflection in it of the ethnoreligious processes inherent in the development of the Russian outlying territories of the early modern period, the mastering of the discourse of religious tolerance by Russian diplomacy on the eve of the aggravation of the “dissident issue” in Rzeczpospolita Polska (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth).