"The Catholic Ambassador will Sing the Mass": Ambassadorial Service and Venetian Celebrations after the Battle of Lepanto (1571)

This chapter uncovers the often ambiguous world of symbolic actions of foreign ambassadors in Renaissance Venice at times of the Veneto-Ottoman war of Cyprus (1570–1573). I argue that foreign diplomats’ involvement in Venetian festivities at that time illustrates the extent to which symbolic diplomacy became a highly contested field to negotiate inner-Catholic rivalries; rivalries that, at least to some of the foreign ambassadors residing in Venice at that time, seem to have mattered at least as much as the conflict with the Ottoman Empire. I centre my attention on the Catholic ambassadors’ participation in these festivities, and the symbolic implications of such performances. On the basis of extensive archival research in Florence, London, Mantua, Modena, Rome, Simancas, Turin, and Venice, I argue that the Spanish ambassador’s symbolic practices were fundamentally important to all Catholic representatives residing in Venice. The diplomat’s ceremonial functions and their perceptions by other ambassadors shaped policies among Catholics in a way that seems to have been more important to contemporaries as current scholarship might suggest. Ambassadors’ participation, absence, activities, passivity or diffidence in Venetian civic performances sheds light on how Catholic policies were negotiated against the background of an inter-religious war.