From Royal Hôtel to Street Brawls: The Location, Personnel and Public Problems of the Venetian Embassy in Seventeenth Century Paris

Rather than the dispacci of Venetian ambassadors, this article uses the extremely difficult notarial archives in Paris as new sources for ambassadors’ daily lives, their networks, and servants. Where antiquarian studies identified a relatively stable ambassadorial world, the notarial records show that in fact the Venetian ‘embassy’, the Hôtel de Venise, was very mobile. Equally, the ambassadors faced multiple legal problems related to this mobility. I explore this through examining the legal status of the ambassador and his servants in the face of Parisian legal bodies and officers of the law.