Natural Law for the Nobility? The Law of Nature and Nations at the Erlangen Ritterakademie (1701–1741)

Abstract

By the middle of 1708, Europe’s newspapers were full of reports of a diplomatic incident between Great Britain and Czarist Russia. Because of its unpredictable consequences, this socalled Matveyev (also Matveev or Metveyev) incident not only caused a great sensation all over Europe, but also put great diplomatic pressure on the relationship between the British Queen Anne and Czar Peter the Great of Russia. In the end, however, it helped to clarify the issue of diplomatic immunity: how it was to be understood and what practical impact it had on the interaction with envoys sent by foreign princes or states. It thus contributed ‘to shape an important component of modern international relations’.1 Hence the event also reveals that the right of diplomatic immunity – understood as inviolability of the ambassador’s person, his home and vehicles, his luggage and letters, and including the exemption of the ambassador and his staff ‘from both civil and criminal litigation’2 – was, by the beginning of the eighteenth century, far from being interpreted in completely the same manner at European courts, even though the principles of extraterritoriality and diplomatic immunity had been discussed at least since the fifteenth century and put in writing by Hugo Grotius during the 1620s.3 On the evening of 21 July 1708, while on his way to a soirée with other foreign diplomats at Somerset House, Andrey Artamonovich Matveyev (1666– 1728),4 special envoy of Peter the Great to Queen Anne, ‘was stopped by three men who