ABSTRACT
Diplomacy has traditionally been assumed to have its origins in Ancient Greece, most notably because of the role that envoys or ambassadors supposedly played, both in creating and solving the problem of the relationship between city-states. Despite this early reflection on the responsibilities of an envoy, it would take another 2000 years for a concept to be invented to exclusively denote the field of managing relations between political entities. Due to the fact that the concept of diplomacy is first formulated in French during the last decades of the eighteenth century, most attempts to write a history of diplomacy tend to separate what we might call the conceptual history of diplomacy from any of the other aspects of its past. Within the academic field of history, so called Diplomatic History is one of its most ancient and esteemed subfields.
