Difesa della neutralità e ‘arte del negoziare’: Carlo Ruzzini al Congresso di Utrecht (1711-1713)

Through the analysis of the correspondence with the Senate, the essay reconstructs the mission of Carlo Ruzzini at the Utrecht congress (1712-13) as an extraordinary ambassador, to defend the reasons for the 'neutrality' of Venice and to ask for congruous compensation for damages suffered by the republic in the war of Spanish succession. The political and diplomatic career of the future doge was certainly out of the ordinary, winding from the initial European embassies to the peace of Carlowitz (1699), from the delicate mission to Utrecht to the negotiations of the Treaty of Passarowitz (1718). Surely among the major protagonists of the Venetian politics of the early eighteenth century, his personal and political trajectory has not yet been the subject of an exhaustive historiographical investigation. Ruzzini was a participant and attentive observer of the Utrecht congress and its subtle 'mechanisms': in the dispatches and in the final ‘Relazione’, the news on current negotiations alternated with lively portraits of European ministers, comments on their diplomatic style, observations on the protocol and the negotiation procedures. Observations and judgments that appear in tune with the diplomatic literature of the early eighteenth century, starting from the famous text by François de Callières, La maniere de negocier avec les souverains (Paris, 1716), in which the diplomatic "representation" of the Baroque age gives way to the centrality of the art of negotiation.