From Trent: What Happened at the Council (p. 210):

Another strong personality had meanwhile at last arrived at Trent, where he would from this point forward play an important role. In the General Congregation on May 21 Count Luna made his formal entrance to the council chamber and took his assigned place. He would prove a sharp thorn in the legates’ side. The long interval between Philip’s naming him for the office and his arrival was due in part to a bitter dispute with the French over precendence among the envoys, settled at last by an uneasy compromise.

John O’Malley does not provide the details of the precedence dispute, but one can imagine that it involved priorities that readers circa 2010 would dismiss as ritualistic rather than substantive, based on the competition for glory between the two crowns (those of Philip II of Spain and the the child Charles IX of France), and having nothing to do with the important business of the council. But we should not be too hasty to dismiss Luna’s standing on ceremony as an empty relic of inherited orgueuil.

The contest between France and Spain, heralded by rivalry between the kings of Aragon and the dukes of Anjou for the control of Sicily and Naples, two centuries earlier, began when the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, repulsed the last Arabs from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the Fifteenth Century and, at roughly the same time, marrried one of their daughters into the Hapsburg family. Their Most Christian Majesties, François I and his son, Henri II, were soon surrounded by the Hapsburg heir to Spain, His Most Catholic Majesty, Charles I, better known as the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The reach of Hapsburg power was not greatly diminished when Charles detached the sovereignties that had come together in his person, ceding his Central European possessions to his brother, Ferdinand, and everything else (including the Low Countries, which came into the family through the extinction of the dukes of Burgundy) to his son, Philip. Philip’s grip on Spain was about as firm as any monarch’s, but the relation between title and authority in Charles’s other domains was fluid and even conjectural. France, meanwhile, was slipping into a series of civil wars, in which religious reform served as something of an opportunistic pretext. The times, in short, were unsettled for both sides.

The thing about diplomatic protocol — who goes through the door first, who gets to sit down in front of whom, who can wear a hat and when — is that it mollifies the rankling urges of self-importance that can lead to awkward, even catastrophic physical skirmishes. Protocol settles power by obviating violence. There are always loopholes and exceptions, and doubtless Luna’s argument with the French made much of these. But established diplomatic precedents about precedence (often hammered out in treatry negotiations) made it possible for international business to be conducted without overtures of protracted jousting.

So it is with the Rules, so often maddening and counterproductive, with which our representative assemblies govern themselves — Rules about which the voting public is never invited to comment, much less make decisions. So it is with the order of business at a corporate meeting, and the parade of executives that conducts it. It is true that we have cast aside a good deal of what we think of as aristocratic posturing — behavior that reflected the old grandees’ sincere belief that they must present themselves as heroes — but when we fail to honor the procedural compromises that make political life possible, we become no less obstructionist than the intransigent nobles of the ancien régime.   

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I don’t know anything about the annual conference at Davos beyond what I read here and there, and I’m never quite sure of its importance. But I hope that someone has been taking notes about the evolution of its diplomatic arrangements, even if no one in attendance would call them that. I gather that the meetings used to be very breezy, but then were saddled with prestige, not to mention pro-bono invitations to nice people with no money, and that now they’re getting simpler again. My leading question for the historian of protocol at Davos would be this: who has precedence, the person with the greatest personal fortune or the person who controls the greatest corporate resources? I suspect it’s the latter.

On very bad days, I fear that the new world order, one that will supplant the nations that we know, is being born at Davos.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2013 at 10:56 am.