ABSTRACT
The word ‘ambassador’ (from the Latin ambaxiator or ambasciator, a synonym of ‘envoy’) was in recorded use in northern Italy since the early twelfth century. 1 The functions associated with ‘ambassador’, as in the case of ‘envoy’, were often confounded with the tasks performed by other diplomatic agents appointed with titles derived from classical and medieval diplomatic terminology such as nuntius, orator, procurator, legatus, or missus. 2 The first recorded use in England appears to be in Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, written around 1374 and first printed by William Caxton in 1477: in the fourth of book of Chaucer's poem, there are two stanzas describing the mission of Greek ‘[a]mbassatours’ to Troy. 3
