The Ambassadors: From Ancient Greece to the Nation State

An authoritative and entertaining account of the earliest ambassadors, who were at once diplomats, explorers and chroniclers of exotic civilisations.In this book of extraordinary journeys and epochal encounters, Jonathan Wright traces the ambassadors’ story from Ancient Greece and Ashoka’s empire in India to the European Enlightenment and the birth of the nation state. He shows us Byzantine envoys dining with Attila the Hun, 13th-century monks journeying from Flanders to the Asian steppe, and Tudor ambassadors grappling with the chaos of Reformation. He examines the rituals and institutions of diplomacy, asking – for instance – why it was felt necessary to send an elephan…