ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the diplomatic role of Roxandra Sturdza, the period of the Congress of Vienna and her involvement in the philhellene movement in the 1820s. Her activities on behalf of the cause of the Greeks are constitutive of her role as a 'goodwill ambassador': lobbying on a large scale and organizing fundraising campaigns. Roxandra Sturdza spoke and wrote with almost equal ease in Russian, Greek, German, French and Italian, a talent that would greatly facilitate her life in European courts. Roxandra Sturdza's writings, as well as witness accounts, all tend to show that she did not consider her communication skills as instruments for her own social recognition, but merely as a tool for the advancement of her own family. In terms of the history of sensibilities, one will recall her exceptional education that spanned the southeast, east and west of Europe, the attraction she felt towards the sublime universal of the mystics, and her Phanariot ancestry.
