The Role of „Secret Correspondence” in 17th Century Habsburg–Ottoman Diplomacy

Abstract

For the Habsburg Monarchy it was very important to collect and evaluate up-to-date information on the Ottoman Empire. It became necessary in the 1620s to organize, alongside couriers and other channels of correspondence, a cost-effective and sustainable system with which to transmit news and, in part, intelligence. In this essay, I present the “institution” known as the “Secret Correspondence” and the history of the organization and reorganizations of the system. I also establish a typology of the people involved in the correspondence. In the first half of the seventeenth century the “Secret Correspondence” had to be reorganized several times.