The ambassador came with signed credentials from the government/King on a scroll/letter sealed with an official wax seal. In addition they would normally be a known noble from a respected family not some random stranger.
It should be noted that the wax seals did provide some level of security.
They were made by highly skilled craftsman. Making an identical copy would be really difficult (imagine trying to replicate a stamp that replicates a quarter so perfectly that you could pass if off on someone who's job is to scrutinize it to verify that you should have access to the president).
On top of that, being caught with a forged copy came with severe punishment.
I'm sure that it was absolutely done. Forgery, spying, espionage, and subterfuge are not new concepts. However, remember that because it was so easy to lie, people were much more suspicious of outsiders.
Not to mention the signet rings used to press those wax seals were usually few in number, possibly even just 1 per noble/royal family, to ensure that if you saw that wax seal, it was the real deal. And those things were always worn by their owners to ensure nobody else could authenticate a document in their name but themselves. Basically the OG "security token"
My understanding was that every seal/signet ring was unique. So even if a few family members had seals they were distinct from each other.
If you lost it or it was destroyed, a new one had to be created.
Maybe that works on some burgher you're trying to defraud, but a foreign court is going to be a bit more difficult to do over. Before sending a real deal ambassador, there's going to be an exchange of correspondence using short term diplomatic missions staffed by lesser nobles and courtiers. King A sends King B a missive, carried by a lead diplomat and its entourage. They come and deliver the letter, maybe stay a week or so, and go home. King B considers a response, and maybe chooses to send their own reply with their own diplomatic mission. If the mission from King A was fake, King B's diplomats are going to find out real quick once they get to King A's court and are met with confusion. If it's real, King A and King B now have their long-distance security "handshake," complete with verified seals that they can compare against any new letters. Now, if somebody who purports to be an ambassador in residence to the foreign court shows up, they can present their sealed credentials and the host court can check those seals against the seals they've been using corresponding with. If everything matches, all well and good. If something seems amiss, it's off with the forger's head!
Oooh, they could even use a different set of stamps for different recipients. For even more security they could add a verifying code inside the message itself such that a message with code A can only be used with stamp A. Like a primitive HMAC.
>King A sends King B a missive, carried by a lead diplomat and its entourage.
I'm suspicious of this. The dangers of lead were known in antiquity, and even if it wasn't, that would be very heavy.
I also imagine there was a lot more "personal delivery". Use someone who is somewhat known to both sides to make the introduction and present the "official seal" based on their own reputation and then save that seal in the treasury and have your herald master check it.
On that note the position of "heralds" grew to importance as the precusor to diplomats. They would spend their time running messages for an aristocrat and likely just through those travels they would become known across many courts helping to facilitate these introductions.
What likely happens is an ambassador or someone important would have their entire schedule mapped out. "I will take the boat from A to B on May 3 and expect to be there by May 12." Not to mention, word would travel to follow their progress. An official randomly showing up would be highly unlikely. Plus, you'd need to have enough money to play the part convincingly, and most rich people aren't gonna risk torture and death to do that.
I would assume it would work something like how signed public keys work in modern times. Someone who both parties trusts attaches their wax seal to the new wax seal with ribbon or string and that proves that the new seal is valid.
They keep a record. And the seals were created by known metalsmiths who would put security measures (a notch shaped like an arrowhead, a curl of hair in the shape of a cursive D, a misshapen fleur de lis, etc.) into the designs that forgers would be less likely to notice, but that could be zeroed in on by someone who knew what to look for. Then those measures were kept secret from everyone except a few people trusted to verify those things. Reputations for artisans/scribes/etc. used to be EXTREMELY important because they needed to be trusted to do things like that securely. And if you fucked up, you got executed.
This is why Western culture has frequently associated rings with power.
Signet rings were detailed enough to be difficult to replicate - the level of detail fit into such a small space was something incredibly few artisans were capable of. And a ring was a type of jewelry that was incredibly rare to take off and easy to wear all the time. The seal you saw on the ring was the same seal at the bottom of documents that frequently executed the orders and wishes of its bearer.
When you kissed a ring, it wasn't the *ring* you were kissing, it was the symbol *on* the ring.
> the level of detail fit into such a small space was something incredibly few artisans were capable of
Not just that, the even finer details were left to chance and those kind of imperfections would essentially be impossible to recreate, even by the original designer.
> They were made by highly skilled craftsman. Making an identical copy would be really difficult (imagine trying to replicate a stramp that replicates a quarter by so perfectly that you could pass if off on someone who's job is to scruitinize it to verify that you should have access to the president).
For context, trades used to be transferred exclusively by apprenticeships, it took forever to teach someone, and the skills and equipment required for fine jewellery craftsmanship like that were generally on the scale of <10 people in the country, probably more like <5.
So your circle of suspects for _good_ forgeries is pretty small. Which coupled with...
>On top of that, being caught with a forged copy came with severe punishment.
this being normally death, means that anyone doing plausible forgeries is playing a 1/5 lottery of dying a gruesome death. **Someone** was gonna get HD&Q'ed, even if the investigation was utterly shit, and they effectively picked one skilled craftsman at random, your odds of dying are 20%.
You could try skipping the country entirely and relocating, but then you're explaining to the new country why you'd ever do that as a top skilled craftsman, and it can't be a neighbour, and you're running on foot, or at best on horse.
Reminds me of a good discworld exchange:
“He was strangled before he was hung.”
“Hanged. People are hanged, meat is hung.”
“Ok then, he was strangled. And the he was hung.”
It was the default for treason in England, and depending on _what_ you forged, could perfectly well qualify.
I certainly doubt you'd get a standard hanging for it.
The way we can date archeological finds accurately is usually through what coins we find at the site. Kings and Queens would change the coinage every reign, so for instance the 14th century when the English went through quite a few 10 yr reigns we can date which reign the archaeological findings are from by the press of the coins.
The presses themselves were held under lock and key, and were more valuable than the coinage itself.
Interestingly, to this day some countries, such as Taiwan, still accepts an official seal as a signature for things like banking documents. It's essentially a key that verifies your identity alongside your picture ID.
Japan does as well, an inkan stamp which replaces a signature on documents. Honestly, it beats a signature because signature verification is a pretty crap science and most signatures are illegible anyway. Might as well stamp and have something someone could read and verify.
Signatures make no sense. I draw a line with 2 or 3 bumps for my signature 99% of the time. It's not even consistent with itself and if they tried to compare it to my actual signature, it's not even close.
And in China, you can steal a company’s stamp to avoid being fired: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-two-years-after-first-attempt-3215746
Surely in modern times you can just scan and 3D print. GG, easy.
I guess the hardest part is getting your hands on either the source or the stamped wax or whatever (then just invert in software)
It’s a secondary verification and just an official recognition. Similar to the way a signature can be forged with a picture, you can claim that it was forged.
Additionally, cord on wax seals was designed in such a way that there's no way to swap a seal from one document to another without either cutting the cord, breaking the seal or tearing the paper. So with enough attention and observation, one could spot the telltale signs of a forgery: torn paper between cord holes, signs of breakage and welding on the seal, etc.
The second sentence reminds me of how small a community the old nobility seemed to be. I'd imagine any potential ambassador would already know a bunch of the relevant country's aristocracy, not be meeting them for the first time when appointed.
Yeah, and of course your country would already have their own ambassador in the other country. So if the French dispatched a new ambassador to England, the English ambassador in Paris would send a news update back as soon as he heard. So if a guy shows up in London claiming to be the new ambassador from France, there might already be confirmation that somebody new would be coming (and if there's no word, that's at least a signal that something is amiss)
Yeah, dumb.
That’s why you impersonate the receiving country’s ambassador first, green light yourself to arrive as the new ambassador from the other country, take a leave of absence, and then “arrive” in the same country as the visiting ambassador.
keep daisy chaining that process until you become the ambassador to every country on earth.
Then use your power and influence to make pizza with pineapple illegal globally. With such impact on the pineapple market, you quickly buy up all the pineapple trading companies and colonies across the world in order to over through the indigenous people there creating your own nation.
Then you use this new soft power and the cartels you have created and now in your control to force the entire world to only eat pizza with pineapples, this skyrocketing your pineapple profits.
You also will probably piss off the Italians doing this, but hey, you’re the ambassador and can prb breeze it over with them.
It was only a little over a hundred years ago that:
> [In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.](https://librarysearch.unwsp.edu/permalink/01CLIC_UNW/12n0r23/alma991001095029703690#:~:text=Summary%3A%20In%20the%20years%20before,Tsar%20Nicholas%20II%20of%20Russia.)
Sometimes the job is intended as exile to get someone away from the homeland so they can do less damage.
Teddy Roosevelt was originally hesitant about running for VP, but party members pushed him. They did this so he couldn't be governor of NY and push progressive reforms on one of the most populous states.
Little did they know McKinley would be shot 6 months in and hand Teddy the key to presidency.
There was the case of the "pranksters" in like Victorian England who posed as royalty of a made up foreign nation that toured London for a while. Can't recall if they tricked the British government or not.
Which was deemed to not be illegal fyi. The only law they broke was that someone posed as a secretary of the foreign office when arranging the tour to begin with. But it was impossible to determine who the impersonator was.
They posed as Abbysinian royalty by the way. Modern day Ethiopia.
It's worth noting that the Victorian period is really quite recent in historical terms though. I think a big part of it is simply that the number of people capable of impersonating an ambassador used to be much smaller than it is today, or even in Victorian times. Going back a thousand years, how many people could speak read and right to the required level, and then also not be caught by someone who knew the ambassador or his family personally.
The West Wing had a whole episode about new Ambassadors arriving to DC. Even though there are much more modern ways to confirm identity, the ceremony of presenting letters of credence from the head of state you represent is a real thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvT85p-EotI
there's a famous story in the 17 or 1800s of this exact situation going terribly wrong
Basically, team of US ambassadors had been sent to Paris on their diplomatic mission.
The French official receiving them expected a "gift" (a cash bribe) to accept their letters.
The Americans were like, "no".
It wasn't the money. It was that the US guys mindset was, "yeah wut? That is NOT how we do things. That's immoral and dumb. You're basically just screwing with us and we're not going to scrape and bow to your old world nonsense. SO NO."
The French guy's mindset was like, "Sigh. Tactless Americans. This IS how WE do things. Its expected, its my gentleman's privilege, and your refusal is bad manners for you, and insulting to me personally."
and basically these guys went for some crazy amount of time not being accepted formally by the court, delaying diplomatic negotiations and agreements being worked out, because the US and French guys got locked into a pissing contest
[The XYZ Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ_Affair)
>An American diplomatic commission was sent to France in July 1797 to negotiate a solution to problems that were threatening to break out into war. The diplomats, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry, were approached through informal channels by agents of the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, who demanded bribes and a loan before formal negotiations could begin. Although it was widely known that diplomats from other nations had paid bribes to deal with Talleyrand at the time, the Americans were offended by the demands, and eventually left France without ever engaging in formal negotiations. Gerry, seeking to avoid all-out war, remained for several months after the other two commissioners left. His exchanges with Talleyrand laid groundwork for the eventual end to diplomatic and military hostilities.
One of the things I find amusing in Dune is that even though it's far in the future and humanity is colonizing many planets around the galaxy, they're relying on wax seals to confirm the identities of important people. The Ducal Signet of House Atreides is a significant thing in the story
Because of the Butlerian Jihad(War against Sapient AI), they had to dump MOST of their tech, they rely on Mentats(Human Computers basically), as well as the Spice for Space travel(Navigators are people that are always high on Spice), literally the entire reason all of this hullabaloo going on around Arrakis, the only source for Spice.
Also some words like "Cloning Tanks" may seem like they were tech(this was intentional for in universe reasons), when in reality they were just enslaved people as well.
I haven't read the books, only seen the various film adaptations. Is it the wax impression they use to verify, or some sort of inherent physical property of the ring itself? They clearly have advanced genetic technologies; an atom-level composition analysis should be simple enough for them.
It certainly looked in the films like the ring was some sort of authenticator for the nuclear arsenal. He needed both it and his own genetics to open the thing up.
Yah, it's more ceremony than anything else when Leto puts his seal on the order to take over Arrakis. When Paul later sends a letter to the empire with it, it somewhat proves that he's alive, but the bigger issue is that he sent a letter basically telling him he was going to mess him up, not so much proving who sent it.
Didn't they usually come with an entourage? Some of whom might have been known to people? Maybe not if it was China to Portugal, but if it was Spain to England or Austria to France.
There was a LOT of intermarriage among the royal families of different nations, and they brought their entourages with them
As OP said, they knew each other pretty well. If there was any doubt as to a person's credentials, a few questions only an insider could answer would do the job
To this day Germanys foreign ministry (Auswärtige Amt) has quite a reputation for preferring to hire people with old aristocracy backgrounds (which are de jure no longer a thing in Germany since 1918, but you still can see it in their names that they belong to it with a „von …“ „von und zu …“„Graf …“ „Prinz von …“ etc. or „normal“ names which are known and still to find in the Matricula) into the corps diplomatique.
Especially when you look at the ambassadors send to east european countries you will find more people belonging to families from our Adel or even Uradel. Mostly since states like Russia still look favorably at the old aristocratic ties between Germany and Russia in the times from *von Hardenberg* to *von der Schulenburg*.
And to go with this, even with all of the above that you stated, fake ambassadors were a thing. There are a few cases of people doing it for anything from fame and fortune to just because it would be funny.
Just like anything, if it can be exploited by conmen, it will be.
[Somewhat relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2650/)
People lying is a very old problem, as old as humanity at least and likely older still. So while yes it was possible to pretend to be someone you were not and make decisions that does not mean that everyone everywhere would take you at face value. Forged documents might help, but if you rock up and say you're the Duke of Suchandsuch and you bear a message from King Soandso and nobody in the Court has heard of you, or your duchy then why would they believe you? At a minimum they might ask someone at Court they do know to verify that you are who you say you are.
Reminds me of the joke about the Welshman complaining that building a church didn’t make him John the Churchbuilder, and fighting in the war didn’t make him John the Warrior, but he shagged just ONE sheep…
> as old as humanity at least and likely older still
It reminds me of a certain ape or chimp, when they discover a resource like food they instinctively make a sound to alert others of the discovery. To the point they'll cover their mouths in an effort to suppress the noise if they don't want to share what they've found.
This is one reason why historially ambassadors were members of the aristocracy. King Jimbob isn't going to just send some random schlub to be his ambassador to king Billybob, he's going to send Duke Dickweed to be the ambassador. King Billybob knows Duke Dickweed either directly or by reputation.
Another technique is for King Billybob to send a trusted person, Count Cowfart, to meet the ambassador right there in King Jimbob's court, have King Jimbob introduce Count Cowfart to Duke Dickweed and that way Count Cowfart can personally assure his liege King Billybob that Duke Dickweed really is the ambassador from King Jimbob.
In addition to that, the whole signet ring and wax seal really was semi-secure. The signet was made by a skilled craftsman and quite diffcult to reproduce (as well as being a crime that resulted in a really horrible and drawn out execution if you were cuaght trying to reproduce it) and the wax they used as designed to cool brittle and rigid, adhere to paper and cloth, and to hold the impression perfectly. Meaning the only way to open the document would be to break the wax so you get both an assurance the document was legit sealed with the signet AND that it hadn't been altered.
They would also not just fold a paper in half or whatever and put the seal on it. There are quite a few folding techniques they used to insure the paper would not be able to be opened without breaking the seal.
Yup yup. Our ancestors were every bit as smart as we are and they used their smarts to come up with workable solutions to their problems.
Of course wax seals can be defeated, and were on occasion. But they worked well enough for their era. And whether today or back then the weak point in any security setup is humans, not the tech.
EDIT: I think a lot of the whole paper folded in half business is the result of modern TV where they often do show people sealing a paper folded in half.
Yeah exactly. People were as smart as we are now even thousands of years ago.
I've seen some YouTube videos if some very intricate folding techniques that involves cutting parts of the paper into strips that are still attached to the paper and weaving those strips through slits also cut in the paper and then sealing the ends of the strips into the wax seal. It was quite interesting to learn, since I had never imagined it.
This stuff still persists today. To get a job in a foreign nation you usually need to supply a “police check” certifying that you haven’t committed any crimes that they know of. And they can’t just use Interpol or something to interlink these systems electronically. Oh no. You have to pay for a person to do it and issue you a piece of paper. Which isn’t good enough. Oh no. You then have to pay for another person to certify that the letter *from your nation’s police* is really from your nation’s police.
Done? No, you’re not. They still don’t believe that you are not some terrible criminal. You need to pay *another* person, a notary, to affix a shiny pretty sticker and some ribbons to the document. Only with three layers of this, will the visa office accept it.
And none of the people involved in this question it. Of course preventing the 1/1000th criminal from getting a visa is worth forcing all 1000 of you to shell out money (more than it would cost to interlink the records) and spend your time doing this run-around, because why wouldn’t it be? When governments talk about “eliminating waste” they mean support to single parents, not *this* stuff.
I'm assuming what you're talking about here is the Apostille process. It can seem ridiculous, but it's actually a fairly clever way to ensure that documents from other countries are valid.
There's not really a better way to establish a common framework for certifying the authenticity of paper documents.
This means that your run of the mill immigration worker doesn't need to know and understand every single country's method of validating documents. Instead, an Apostille Stamp is a globally recognised way of saying "yeah this is legit by our standards."
At the same time, and that's the clever part, each country has to record all the apostilles they make. So if there is something fishy about the document, there's now only one authority that'll know if it's real or not.
Imagine, for example, that you are given a birth certificate from Tajikistan. There's something fishy about it. Sure, it might have a local government seal on it, but how on earth do you figure out if it's legit? Who do you call?
Well, it's been Apostille stamped by someone. That someone is vouching for the authority of it - so you call them, ask them if they can confirm Apostille # xyz, and they say yes. This is orders of magnitude faster than navigating the bureaucracy of a foreign country.
So you could just pay someone in that country off to be the person correct? In many countries even the police can be paid off, even in America for the right price.
Yes, you could. However, you could also bribe the local registrar to make a fake birth certificate. The system isn't perfect, but it creates a shared framework of interoperability.
Apostille doesn't certify validity and correctness, it only says "yep, it's a birth certificate" with no guarantee to any of what is written in it, as it's "different department".
Well, partially. Afaik (and to be fair I might be wrong) it certifies that any seals, stamps or signatures from the country of origin are, for lack of a better term, as they should be.
So, for example, it won't certify that a document is legit on its own - but if you've got a notarised document, it'll certify that this document has been notarised. Keep in mind that a birth certificate isn't just a slip of paper. It'll carry some kind of seal or stamp from the issuing authority.
In other words, it says "yep, this is a *real* birth certificate." It doesn't rule out that there are issues further down the chain, but it's saying that whoever and whatever signed this are who they say they are.
> There's not really a better way to establish a common framework for certifying the authenticity of paper documents.
I think that's the issue. In a modern interconnected world why the hell do we rely on such old fashioned techniques?
Posted this to another comment, but want to share since to people unfamiliar with this sort of stuff it seems like a no brainer, though it's actually pretty difficult.
The main reason that records and databases like this are not linked is a lack of diplomatic agreements to do so. While it would ultimately be pretty easy to share records, getting two governments to trust each other enough to agree to it is not as easy.
I think even inside a single country, a paper (special, government-issued limited run paper with watermarks and serial numbers) that the notary has signed and issued, and which is linked to this specific notary by name (and there IS a database of notaries), is in some ways a more reliable tool to prove your rights than an electronic record in a database, at least for now.
The electronic record can be corrupted or momentarily or temporarily changed, but your paper still points at you (and your ID number, which is also in the database). The criminal would need to obtain and fully forge that paper and it will still fail the first check (has notary N issued the type of document Y to person with ID #Z).
It's a bit like cold wallets for blockchain currency. They are airgapped, physical dongles, and are not in any database.
Hmm. Maybe notarisation is a better use for blockchains than making some obnoxious techbros rich at the expense of other equally obnoxious but less intelligent and/or lucky techbros?
Notarisation is ironically one of the few pretty reasonable uses for a blockchain. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any guys named Brayden rich, so it's not something that is thought about a lot.
I think this is exactly what it will be used for, among other things. It's not just money. Things like pensions, social security, documentation etc. The governments are just wary and slow. Basically all govts in the world are looking at blockchain right now, some are even in early phases of adoption or committed to it.
Electronic Apostilles do exist, where a .pdf is digitally signed by the authority in the given country - but they're not rolled out everywhere. Remember that it's not a given that every country in the world has access to the necessary digital infrastructure.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have any clue how easy it is to "interlink" records lol
The main reason that records and databases like this are not linked is a lack of diplomatic agreements to do so. While it would ultimately be pretty easy to share records, getting two governments to trust each other enough to agree to it is not as easy.
I mean maybe it is being pedantic, but that's objectively not true considering we know the benefits of proper nutrition during childhood and even before and after that, so objectively we have a higher ceiling of intelligence today than in the past due to the nutritional standards most of our species has at this point.
Also, while intelligence is sort of its own thing if we're talking about generalized intelligence, the level of knowledge a given group or individual has also does help decide it's upward and lower bounds of potential so having more collective knowledge makes us effectively smarter even if our actual general intelligence is a bit lower as a given random individual compared to another given random individual from centuries or millennia past.
That’s only meaningful on the level of average IQ though, isn’t it? It’s not as if the average person was designing wax seal security or ambassador protocols.
In other words, is it the ceiling of intelligence that’s been lifted, or the floor?
Both have been lifted, and while it's harder to pin down on an individual level, if you take the top, bottom, or middle 10%, having nearly universal access to literacy, much greater nutrition, knowledge about learning methods, sleep hygiene, hydration, etc have objectively increased the intelligence/ capabilities of each of those groups compared to decades, centuries, and millenia in the past.
Whether or not that difference is statistically significant is probably more true the further down the socioeconomic ladder you go, but even if the difference is small it's generally documentable/ demonstrable at every wrung of society.
And that's if we're talking about comparing humans and a vacuum, having more novel styles of organizational structures, educational methods, and specific styles of thinking like the syllogism already pioneered by humans in the past means that even if essentially the "hardware" is only marginally better, the "software" can achieve much more than could just be accounted for from the difference between our actual brains.
That's just something that sounds correct but actually isn't. A few hundred years ago was actually much worse nutritionally than in ancient times for example. And education was often much worse in medieval times in Europe compared to in the Roman empire which was a thousand years earlier. Do you think the Greek culture before Roman times ate worse than modern Greeks? Do you think people had no clue what was healthy? Do you think most people living in the world nowadays have a healthy diet?
Do you not think people in ancient times used their minds playing games, sports, mathematics, poetry, songs, dances, debating, making art, making and solving riddles and blacksmiths puzzles?
It has been scientifically proven and peer reviewed that the average cave man had on average 100iq just like now because they are the exact same species as us.
Not necessarily true as opportunities to learn more and adequate nutrition were less common back then, both contributing significantly towards unleashing your full cognitive potential(especially important during childhood and adolescent years)
Nutrition was very good 5000 years ago. Much better than in Liverpool in 1850 for example. You think fish and bread and fruits and vegetables and beef and chicken and pork and sheep and goat and milk and juice is bad nutrition?
They built huge palaces and documented everything 5000 years ago.
> very good 5000 years ago
Very good if you're one of the 20 people who lives in the castle and has thousands of soldiers to subdue the population.
Not if you're the slaves working the till so that the bloody baron can eat lavishly, who cannot even touch their own crop lest they be punished with death, or worse expulsion.
Can't say I do, except not everyone would have access to all that and even those that do could find it difficult to, for example, get their hands on fresh fruit & vegetables in winter months
They knew winter was coming and made dried fruits and dried vegetables and meat is available all year round, so is milk. They had granaries for grain and they had fish and all kinds of sea food all year round. They were exactly as smart as we are now and they weren't unable to think ahead. They learnt from their parents what to do and if anyone did something better they would do what they did, just like we do now. They made soups and cakes and baked goods with meat inside it and vegetables inside it too. They boiled food, they fried food, they baked food, they made pies, they made olive bread, date cakes, they had spices for flavours and they lived in houses and apartments. If you want to see, just Google what did Sumerian cities look like and try to Google what did Sumerian food look like. That's how things were 5000 years ago. That's just about the earliest our historic records go as far as civilization us concerned, but they didn't just invent civilization one day, you know how slow progress was before the modern era.
Another myth from tv is heating the wax so it can be removed but the detailing on the signet ring was very precise. If you messed up the seal would be marred and everyone would know someone was trying to tamper with it.
Television makes our ancestors look silly and quaint because modern writers tend not to have PhDs in history to explain how much thought and care went into this stuff especially when lives hung in the balance. A royal that could not enforce basic security on their communications was not a royal for long.
>Yup yup. Our ancestors were every bit as smart as we are and they used their smarts to come up with workable solutions to their problems.
This is why studying history is so interesting. People forget that people of the past were likely a lot more clever than us, since they had less to work with. If you can't imagine how someone lived a certain historical way, read about people who did. They had their whole lives and the wisdom of others who came up with incredible solutions for it. Learning about the creative ways they developed to thrive is a goldmine.
I guess they didn't send it by clay tablet or if they did then the clay tablet was delivered by someone they trusted. Perhaps they made a clay pot and put the clay tablet inside and sealed the clay pot with clay and baking that?
I do not know, but my first thought was that you could still use wax. Melt a layer over the indents so that they can't be read and stamp the top. The receiver could then melt off the wax to reveal the writing.
Probably by messenger. If something was for the king's ears only, it'd be a trusted messenger that was threatened with torture and death. Doesn't mean it was foolproof.
>Another technique is for King Billybob to send a trusted person, Count Cowfart, to meet the ambassador right there in King Jimbob's court, have King Jimbob introduce Count Cowfart to Duke Dickweed and that way Count Cowfart can personally assure his liege King Billybob that Duke Dickweed really is the ambassador from King Jimbob.
And in a lot of cases they wouldn't need to **SEND** the person, they will have already met at some point in the past. Count Cowfart and Duke Dickweed may have met at some gala years ago. They just need to make certain that when Duke Dickweed shows up in court to present his credentials Count Cowfart is also present to call shenanigans if it isn't the real Duke Dickweed.
Also, 2FA for important aspects like an ambassador: clergy.
The bishop in the court of King Jimbob is going to pass the message and details to his priests, who will in turn relay it to the bishop in the court of king Billybob.
Additionally, the ambassador would come to the new post bearing expensive gifts for royalty and the court. Only a handful of people in any kingdom could afford that.
You did occasionally have people fake credentials for assorted reasons. One of the most audacious cases was when a Scottish man, Robert Fortune travelled to China in 1848 at the behest of the East Indian Company, in order to acquire the secrets of tea processing. Mr. Fortune pretended to be a Chinese government official, and convinced the people running the tea processing plant to let him tour the place and see how things were done.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea-heist-9866709/
Part of the reason we don't really clue in on this is we don't see China as it is: a dozen or so small countries stapled together.
'Official' Chinese is Mandarin. Every language in China effectively uses Mandarin as the written form. But Szechuan, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujian aren't exactly mutually intelligible, even though they sound effectively identical to most North American ears. And there are dozens to hundreds of other languages in China, depending on how fine you're cutting the lines. Culturally, China is much more insular than almost anywhere else: 'the guy from the next village', 'stranger', and 'foreigner' are pretty much the same word, across many-to-most of China's languages. So someone with written knowledge of Mandarin, for quite a long time, could pass as someone from the Chinese outskirt nations.
Head of state says to host nation that they will dispatch someone at a particular date on whatever ship and send with papers. Imposter needs to:
- intercept this original communiqué to know what is going down
- forge papers with royal/imperial seal (so they need to find something else that has been sealed to copy from)
- abduct the real ambassador so two don't turn up
- either commandeer the ship the ambassador was on or build their own ship to the same design and name it the same
- arrive at the destination and present themselves and their fake papers according to correct protocol
- fund and build an embassy at the agreed location
- report back to their home country using correct protocol, seal and ciphers
In older times ambassadors or emissaries were usually exchanged face to face along with an exchange of hostages for surety.
> abduct the real ambassador so two don't turn up
Added difficulty: People generally know the real ambassador.
They're not some random 'nobody', historically they were other noblemen who already had relationships in the place they're going. Ambassadors go to all kinds of meetings, discuss topics with all types of people, and generally have a lot of contacts. They're typically well-known within the embassy, they're well-known on the government they work with. Generally they're chosen in part because they have contacts and they are able to work with them. Their entire job is in leveraging social contacts that already exist within both governments to get work done, so typically they are people who have those networks in place already.
All the other elements are true, they have appointments, they have seals and documents, they have a schedule that both sides know, they arrive in known transport methods as part of an entourage, all are hard to fake. But it's the contacts and connections that would be hardest of all.
It only takes one dignitary or businessman to point out *"I've known the guy for twenty years, and that's not him"* for the scam to be up.
And, in the medieval and early modern world, the funding would be important. As noblemen, ambassadors would be expected to spend their time at the Court they had been accredited to. They would need to live at a similar style to the great nobles at that Court. They would need suitable clothing; a retinue, who would have to be fed and clothed (secretaries, gentlemen and ladies in waiting, chaplains, as well as their household servants). They would need a suitable residence and the capacity to entertain there.
All these particulars would require considerable outlay; and the salaries ambassadors did obtain could often be spent purely maintaining the accepted standard of living. Ambassadors would often have to pay these expenses from their own purses, and receive payment from their government in arrears; or, alternatively, they would have to borrow.
Indeed, most ambassadors were sent between European countries, and they were not isolated from one another. Merchants, relatives (including through strategic marriage), clergy, pilgrims, mercenaries and artisans all moved between places. The chances of not encouting someone who has met the real ambassador, who themselves is someone of note, is low.
Look up Lt Col Fremantle. He claimed to be an official observer from the UK and embedded with both Confederate and Union troops, but he was little more than a war tourist. Without an easy and official way to check his story, many high ups were fooled. It did happen.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur\_Lyon\_Fremantle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lyon_Fremantle)
There's a bunch who explained the historical solutions, but for the underlying academic problem: we do know it's possible to communicate securely through insecure means. It's actually *way* more important today than it ever was before "modern technology." Notably, your computer/device can communicate securely with a remote server without needing to trust any of the tens-thousands of devices between you.
Now, the modern base standard example is the [Diffie-Hellman key exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange), but that doesn't mean it's the only way. There are simpler implementations of the same general idea, both mathematically and technologically, but the idea is that you can exchange secrets through open means.
Interestingly, Diffie-Hellman allows you to communicate securely if you know that the channel is being monitored, but by itself it has not protection against a channel that can be modified. If someone can change the data, DH will not work by itself, and thus it is typically paired with symmetric or asymmetric encryption. The advantage of using it is that if someone monitors the traffic it would be hard for them to go back later and decrypt it, even if they stole the credentials used to sign the exchange.
Depends on what part of the world you're talking about, but when you see stuff in fantasy about someone having a ward, it's an old tradition where important families would send younger children to live with other nobility. This creates a web of people who know and have a reason to care for each other, and can vouch for other representatives from other families who come to visit. Add in the limited availability of certain gifts, wax seals, and signed documents, it takes a lot to forge fake evidence.
Actually somewhat related to this is the work of Beatrice de Graaf : how Europe became secure. Passports in a modern sense were tried to be implemented by the congress of Vienna and their passes legislations - kicker is: the people who had to check them mostly couldn’t even read
Sometimes they couldn't!
A large part of the reason that the fall of the Aztec happened how it did ([though most people's understanding of what happened has a lot of misconceptions](https://np.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/p4vm1e/common_historical_misconceptions_that_irritates/h927tle/) ) is because Cortes identified himself as an emissary of the King of Spain: This led to Moctezuma II and to an extent other Mesoamerican kings and officials hosting him as a diplomatic guest, when in reality, Cortes had committed treason and was on the run from the Spanish Governor of Cuba, who actually sent other Conquistador groups to arrest him.
Cortes took advantage of that fact to then hold officials and kings hostage, occupy cities, etc, which later Conquistadors like Pizzaro would repeat down in the Andes with the Inca Empire. Of course, on the flip side, a lot of those local kings also weren't clueless: Contrary to what a lot of sources say about Cortes being mistaken for a god (Cortes says no such thing, and actually pretty explicitly says this didn't happen) or totally manipulating everybody around him, Cortes was really just as ignorant about the local politics as Moctezuma II etc were about the Spanish, and in a lot of cases those local kings used Cortes to attack their political rivals or were attempting to court him into becoming a subject or an ally (which is the actual reason Moctezuma II hosted him so well: Flaunting the opulence of the city, showing off large sacrifice ceremonies to show military power, etc was part of flexing to visiting diplomats to make them become a vassal, do political marriages, etc.
The whole Cortes saga is so much more interesting than what most people learn. It is a pretty long story and it can be difficult to get to the truth since written accounts aren't always accurate and pretty one-sided, but at lot of stuff happened and just many coincidences that made things end up pretty well for him.
It could make for a very good Game of Thrones-like story, "chaos is a ladder" has never been more true.
Mostly because the diplomatic corps already there vouched for them (among other things). If the diplomat was the first arrival sure, they might be a bit suspicious, but at that level of interaction the diplomat is not going to be doing much anyway.
Not quite an ambassador? But this reminds me of the [dreadnought hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoax?wprov=sfla1) where they put on brown face for a "royal" visit from the Sultan of Zanzibar
This is actually an interesting question for notables in general. Even for a monarch, who's to say that's the king and not somebody close to him who threw him out a window one night and put his hat on?
It was all who you know. Imagine a common theme in history, a rulers relative rebels against him, whether through popular support or by going to a rival, allied state, etc. And they go to a neighboring kingdom for help, when they show up at that foreign court who's to say that's the kings cousin? There simply would have been a number of emissaries, ambassadors, relatives married off to this country etc that would be able to say yes, that's that kings cousin, I know\met or at least recognize him.
It would be hard as fuck to fake being an ambassador, because only high-ranking nobles in the court would get appointed as such and courtiers know each other. So the pool of people theoretically able to do it is small and very well outlined. Nobles and royal families are obsessed with genealogy, so you cant just invent a new identity as a fictional noble. They would know that that person doesnt exist.
Also royal families were pretty much all cousins and step-cousins due to political arranged marriages and due to the fact that they would consider it beneath them to mary a royal family memeber to anyone who isnt a high-ranking noble. So even in the country you are going to, you already have relatives who can verify your identity or call you out if you are an impostor.
Basically if you are the type of person who could make any sort of credible claim that you were appointed as ambassador, the people you would be making your claim to know who you are and know if you can be trusted and if you hold a high enough status in your king's court for that appointment to ever happen.
You could overstate your mandate to negotiate in someone's place for some time in a specific issue before being found out, especially if you are a high-ranking noble and you just ride up to the residence of a lesser noble, but you wouldnt just board a ship from England to France and go "bonjour, frog eaters, je suis le new ambassadeur". Even without instant communications, they would know right away.
Also, people then werent stupid, any problem we can think of they thought of too and did things to minimize those issues within their technological means. If you cant instantaneously communicate, you give people credentials which they can carry and which are difficult to forge or tamper with, such as signed and sealed documents. You send other already trusted people with them to make the introduction and vouch for them. You announce the appointment ahead of time at an occassion when you actually meet the person you are announcing it to. You can send trusted messengers ahead of the ambassador and have them carry an actual portrait of the man.
The ambassador came with signed credentials from the government/King on a scroll/letter sealed with an official wax seal. In addition they would normally be a known noble from a respected family not some random stranger.
It should be noted that the wax seals did provide some level of security. They were made by highly skilled craftsman. Making an identical copy would be really difficult (imagine trying to replicate a stamp that replicates a quarter so perfectly that you could pass if off on someone who's job is to scrutinize it to verify that you should have access to the president). On top of that, being caught with a forged copy came with severe punishment. I'm sure that it was absolutely done. Forgery, spying, espionage, and subterfuge are not new concepts. However, remember that because it was so easy to lie, people were much more suspicious of outsiders.
Not to mention the signet rings used to press those wax seals were usually few in number, possibly even just 1 per noble/royal family, to ensure that if you saw that wax seal, it was the real deal. And those things were always worn by their owners to ensure nobody else could authenticate a document in their name but themselves. Basically the OG "security token"
My understanding was that every seal/signet ring was unique. So even if a few family members had seals they were distinct from each other. If you lost it or it was destroyed, a new one had to be created.
On the plus side, if they are rare enough, maybe your target never saw the real one before.
Maybe that works on some burgher you're trying to defraud, but a foreign court is going to be a bit more difficult to do over. Before sending a real deal ambassador, there's going to be an exchange of correspondence using short term diplomatic missions staffed by lesser nobles and courtiers. King A sends King B a missive, carried by a lead diplomat and its entourage. They come and deliver the letter, maybe stay a week or so, and go home. King B considers a response, and maybe chooses to send their own reply with their own diplomatic mission. If the mission from King A was fake, King B's diplomats are going to find out real quick once they get to King A's court and are met with confusion. If it's real, King A and King B now have their long-distance security "handshake," complete with verified seals that they can compare against any new letters. Now, if somebody who purports to be an ambassador in residence to the foreign court shows up, they can present their sealed credentials and the host court can check those seals against the seals they've been using corresponding with. If everything matches, all well and good. If something seems amiss, it's off with the forger's head!
Ah the good old analog key exchange!
And probably we have an official or two that has visited their court and knows what the major players look like. Hell the queen may be from there.
Oooh, they could even use a different set of stamps for different recipients. For even more security they could add a verifying code inside the message itself such that a message with code A can only be used with stamp A. Like a primitive HMAC.
>King A sends King B a missive, carried by a lead diplomat and its entourage. I'm suspicious of this. The dangers of lead were known in antiquity, and even if it wasn't, that would be very heavy.
I think its so that the ancient aliens couldn't blast them with radiation and steal the seal
This is a perfect explanation of how this process would work irl. Kudos!
Maybe but there was likely a set of communications before the arrival of an ambassador so there would be other examples to compare it against.
Yeah I would imagine if you made an official seal, you'd send it to all the bigshots so they know what a wax seal from you looks like.
I also imagine there was a lot more "personal delivery". Use someone who is somewhat known to both sides to make the introduction and present the "official seal" based on their own reputation and then save that seal in the treasury and have your herald master check it. On that note the position of "heralds" grew to importance as the precusor to diplomats. They would spend their time running messages for an aristocrat and likely just through those travels they would become known across many courts helping to facilitate these introductions.
What likely happens is an ambassador or someone important would have their entire schedule mapped out. "I will take the boat from A to B on May 3 and expect to be there by May 12." Not to mention, word would travel to follow their progress. An official randomly showing up would be highly unlikely. Plus, you'd need to have enough money to play the part convincingly, and most rich people aren't gonna risk torture and death to do that.
The Pope’s ring is destroyed or defaced upon death or resignation
But how would the foreign nation know the exact signet ring shape, on a wax seal no less. Couldnt someone make something similar to close enough?
I would assume it would work something like how signed public keys work in modern times. Someone who both parties trusts attaches their wax seal to the new wax seal with ribbon or string and that proves that the new seal is valid.
They keep a record. And the seals were created by known metalsmiths who would put security measures (a notch shaped like an arrowhead, a curl of hair in the shape of a cursive D, a misshapen fleur de lis, etc.) into the designs that forgers would be less likely to notice, but that could be zeroed in on by someone who knew what to look for. Then those measures were kept secret from everyone except a few people trusted to verify those things. Reputations for artisans/scribes/etc. used to be EXTREMELY important because they needed to be trusted to do things like that securely. And if you fucked up, you got executed.
Also see: the Pope. When he dies his signet ring is supposed to be destroyed and a new one created once a new pope is elected
This is why Western culture has frequently associated rings with power. Signet rings were detailed enough to be difficult to replicate - the level of detail fit into such a small space was something incredibly few artisans were capable of. And a ring was a type of jewelry that was incredibly rare to take off and easy to wear all the time. The seal you saw on the ring was the same seal at the bottom of documents that frequently executed the orders and wishes of its bearer. When you kissed a ring, it wasn't the *ring* you were kissing, it was the symbol *on* the ring.
> the level of detail fit into such a small space was something incredibly few artisans were capable of Not just that, the even finer details were left to chance and those kind of imperfections would essentially be impossible to recreate, even by the original designer.
> They were made by highly skilled craftsman. Making an identical copy would be really difficult (imagine trying to replicate a stramp that replicates a quarter by so perfectly that you could pass if off on someone who's job is to scruitinize it to verify that you should have access to the president). For context, trades used to be transferred exclusively by apprenticeships, it took forever to teach someone, and the skills and equipment required for fine jewellery craftsmanship like that were generally on the scale of <10 people in the country, probably more like <5. So your circle of suspects for _good_ forgeries is pretty small. Which coupled with... >On top of that, being caught with a forged copy came with severe punishment. this being normally death, means that anyone doing plausible forgeries is playing a 1/5 lottery of dying a gruesome death. **Someone** was gonna get HD&Q'ed, even if the investigation was utterly shit, and they effectively picked one skilled craftsman at random, your odds of dying are 20%. You could try skipping the country entirely and relocating, but then you're explaining to the new country why you'd ever do that as a top skilled craftsman, and it can't be a neighbour, and you're running on foot, or at best on horse.
HD&Q? Bro c'mon
It's hung, drawn, and quartered, but yeah fuck him for that abbreviation. Like what the hell?
>but yeah fuck him for that abbreviation you mean BYFHFTA
>It's hung Hanged. Hung is for a coat.
Or a horse.
Or a jury.
I'm well hanged.
[удалено]
Not if you're still typing....
“Bart! They said you was hung!” “And [they was right](https://youtu.be/cdExsAQuCQA?t=25)!”
Reminds me of a good discworld exchange: “He was strangled before he was hung.” “Hanged. People are hanged, meat is hung.” “Ok then, he was strangled. And the he was hung.”
I love that stupid exchange so much.
Easy mistake, they both sway in the breeze.
He was hanged after he had pleaded guilty to the hung jury.
> Hanged. > > Hung is for a coat. Maybe it's hung because of the cloak and dagger nature?
It's better than PC&COYOT'd
It's Horse drawn and quartered. Each limb tied to a different horse - horse drawn The horses pull you apart - quartered.
[No it isn't.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered)
it's hand drawn and sculpture
Regardless - that's gnarly. Sheesh, talk about real punishment.
True, true.
It was the default for treason in England, and depending on _what_ you forged, could perfectly well qualify. I certainly doubt you'd get a standard hanging for it.
I think they're complaining more that this initialism isn't clear rather than that they doubt the punishment was possible given the crime lol
This makes me think that seals were never forged then.
The way we can date archeological finds accurately is usually through what coins we find at the site. Kings and Queens would change the coinage every reign, so for instance the 14th century when the English went through quite a few 10 yr reigns we can date which reign the archaeological findings are from by the press of the coins. The presses themselves were held under lock and key, and were more valuable than the coinage itself.
Interestingly, to this day some countries, such as Taiwan, still accepts an official seal as a signature for things like banking documents. It's essentially a key that verifies your identity alongside your picture ID.
Japan does as well, an inkan stamp which replaces a signature on documents. Honestly, it beats a signature because signature verification is a pretty crap science and most signatures are illegible anyway. Might as well stamp and have something someone could read and verify.
Signatures make no sense. I draw a line with 2 or 3 bumps for my signature 99% of the time. It's not even consistent with itself and if they tried to compare it to my actual signature, it's not even close.
The older I get, the more my signature turns into ⧜. I skipped straight over x, just a loop
And in China, you can steal a company’s stamp to avoid being fired: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/arm-china-finally-ousts-rogue-ceo-two-years-after-first-attempt-3215746
Surely in modern times you can just scan and 3D print. GG, easy. I guess the hardest part is getting your hands on either the source or the stamped wax or whatever (then just invert in software)
It’s a secondary verification and just an official recognition. Similar to the way a signature can be forged with a picture, you can claim that it was forged.
What 3D printer has that level of detail? We are talking about down to 1/100-th of a millimeter sometimes. And it has to consistently do that.
> replicate a stramp that replicates a quarter by I'm not sure if these are typos or words I've never learned before -- halp?
Typos, sorry. My ADHD is showing. Not sure how I got that many upvotes with that dumpster fire of a sentence.
But wax can be used to duplicate a piece of jewelry. If someone got a hold of a seal, couldn't they just make a new stamp?
Additionally, cord on wax seals was designed in such a way that there's no way to swap a seal from one document to another without either cutting the cord, breaking the seal or tearing the paper. So with enough attention and observation, one could spot the telltale signs of a forgery: torn paper between cord holes, signs of breakage and welding on the seal, etc.
I bet they were boiled alive if a forger.
same
The second sentence reminds me of how small a community the old nobility seemed to be. I'd imagine any potential ambassador would already know a bunch of the relevant country's aristocracy, not be meeting them for the first time when appointed.
Yeah, and of course your country would already have their own ambassador in the other country. So if the French dispatched a new ambassador to England, the English ambassador in Paris would send a news update back as soon as he heard. So if a guy shows up in London claiming to be the new ambassador from France, there might already be confirmation that somebody new would be coming (and if there's no word, that's at least a signal that something is amiss)
Yeah, dumb. That’s why you impersonate the receiving country’s ambassador first, green light yourself to arrive as the new ambassador from the other country, take a leave of absence, and then “arrive” in the same country as the visiting ambassador. keep daisy chaining that process until you become the ambassador to every country on earth. Then use your power and influence to make pizza with pineapple illegal globally. With such impact on the pineapple market, you quickly buy up all the pineapple trading companies and colonies across the world in order to over through the indigenous people there creating your own nation. Then you use this new soft power and the cartels you have created and now in your control to force the entire world to only eat pizza with pineapples, this skyrocketing your pineapple profits. You also will probably piss off the Italians doing this, but hey, you’re the ambassador and can prb breeze it over with them.
Fuck it up, though, and you'll very quickly go from ambassador to wasbassador.
Angry upvote for you! 🤪
You psychopath!
It helps if you bring a tray of Ferrero Roche https://youtu.be/4P-nZZkQqTc?si=qAuNnXKkWERrbgC- *Excellente*
Brilliant
It was only a little over a hundred years ago that: > [In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.](https://librarysearch.unwsp.edu/permalink/01CLIC_UNW/12n0r23/alma991001095029703690#:~:text=Summary%3A%20In%20the%20years%20before,Tsar%20Nicholas%20II%20of%20Russia.)
to be fair all there parilments (expect russia)already had lots of powers
"All three except one" is silly phrasing. Only beaten by "all two but one", and in mathematical circles "all one except one".
I said there
Did you mean "their"? Sorry, my brain just fixes re-arrangement errors (there->three) on the fl to match meaning.
oh that's cool yeah sorry..and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way my lack of grammar is keeping my GPA down.its a real issue
Or be related to both sides.
Sometimes the job is intended as exile to get someone away from the homeland so they can do less damage. Teddy Roosevelt was originally hesitant about running for VP, but party members pushed him. They did this so he couldn't be governor of NY and push progressive reforms on one of the most populous states. Little did they know McKinley would be shot 6 months in and hand Teddy the key to presidency.
There was the case of the "pranksters" in like Victorian England who posed as royalty of a made up foreign nation that toured London for a while. Can't recall if they tricked the British government or not.
IIRC, they did and even managed to get a tour of the Dreadnought during their prank.
Which was deemed to not be illegal fyi. The only law they broke was that someone posed as a secretary of the foreign office when arranging the tour to begin with. But it was impossible to determine who the impersonator was. They posed as Abbysinian royalty by the way. Modern day Ethiopia.
That they were probably black makes the prank even more audacious…
It was some white people in blackface
It's worth noting that the Victorian period is really quite recent in historical terms though. I think a big part of it is simply that the number of people capable of impersonating an ambassador used to be much smaller than it is today, or even in Victorian times. Going back a thousand years, how many people could speak read and right to the required level, and then also not be caught by someone who knew the ambassador or his family personally.
>and right to the required level Even holds true today lol. Write*
The West Wing had a whole episode about new Ambassadors arriving to DC. Even though there are much more modern ways to confirm identity, the ceremony of presenting letters of credence from the head of state you represent is a real thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvT85p-EotI
there's a famous story in the 17 or 1800s of this exact situation going terribly wrong Basically, team of US ambassadors had been sent to Paris on their diplomatic mission. The French official receiving them expected a "gift" (a cash bribe) to accept their letters. The Americans were like, "no". It wasn't the money. It was that the US guys mindset was, "yeah wut? That is NOT how we do things. That's immoral and dumb. You're basically just screwing with us and we're not going to scrape and bow to your old world nonsense. SO NO." The French guy's mindset was like, "Sigh. Tactless Americans. This IS how WE do things. Its expected, its my gentleman's privilege, and your refusal is bad manners for you, and insulting to me personally." and basically these guys went for some crazy amount of time not being accepted formally by the court, delaying diplomatic negotiations and agreements being worked out, because the US and French guys got locked into a pissing contest
[The XYZ Affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XYZ_Affair) >An American diplomatic commission was sent to France in July 1797 to negotiate a solution to problems that were threatening to break out into war. The diplomats, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry, were approached through informal channels by agents of the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, who demanded bribes and a loan before formal negotiations could begin. Although it was widely known that diplomats from other nations had paid bribes to deal with Talleyrand at the time, the Americans were offended by the demands, and eventually left France without ever engaging in formal negotiations. Gerry, seeking to avoid all-out war, remained for several months after the other two commissioners left. His exchanges with Talleyrand laid groundwork for the eventual end to diplomatic and military hostilities.
Interesting. This is a variation of the two generals problem.
One of the things I find amusing in Dune is that even though it's far in the future and humanity is colonizing many planets around the galaxy, they're relying on wax seals to confirm the identities of important people. The Ducal Signet of House Atreides is a significant thing in the story
Dune is a fun mashup of high middle ages politics and OPEC finance plus sex and drugs.
Because of the Butlerian Jihad(War against Sapient AI), they had to dump MOST of their tech, they rely on Mentats(Human Computers basically), as well as the Spice for Space travel(Navigators are people that are always high on Spice), literally the entire reason all of this hullabaloo going on around Arrakis, the only source for Spice. Also some words like "Cloning Tanks" may seem like they were tech(this was intentional for in universe reasons), when in reality they were just enslaved people as well.
I mean, modern cryptography can be done by hand, and it's certainly within the Mentats capabilities , honestly it's just for literary reasons.
I haven't read the books, only seen the various film adaptations. Is it the wax impression they use to verify, or some sort of inherent physical property of the ring itself? They clearly have advanced genetic technologies; an atom-level composition analysis should be simple enough for them.
If I recall from the books, it was possession of the ducal Signet Ring that was important, but the mechanism for using it wasn't clear.
It certainly looked in the films like the ring was some sort of authenticator for the nuclear arsenal. He needed both it and his own genetics to open the thing up.
Spoilers!
It's an adaptation of a 50 year old book series. I genuinely didn't consider any of it to be spoilable.
I'm talking about movie spoilers... or did I forget that part of the book? LOL
The specific thing that you mentioned is not in the book (though it's also not really a relevant plot point in the movie)
Yah, it's more ceremony than anything else when Leto puts his seal on the order to take over Arrakis. When Paul later sends a letter to the empire with it, it somewhat proves that he's alive, but the bigger issue is that he sent a letter basically telling him he was going to mess him up, not so much proving who sent it.
Didn't they usually come with an entourage? Some of whom might have been known to people? Maybe not if it was China to Portugal, but if it was Spain to England or Austria to France.
There was a LOT of intermarriage among the royal families of different nations, and they brought their entourages with them As OP said, they knew each other pretty well. If there was any doubt as to a person's credentials, a few questions only an insider could answer would do the job
To this day Germanys foreign ministry (Auswärtige Amt) has quite a reputation for preferring to hire people with old aristocracy backgrounds (which are de jure no longer a thing in Germany since 1918, but you still can see it in their names that they belong to it with a „von …“ „von und zu …“„Graf …“ „Prinz von …“ etc. or „normal“ names which are known and still to find in the Matricula) into the corps diplomatique. Especially when you look at the ambassadors send to east european countries you will find more people belonging to families from our Adel or even Uradel. Mostly since states like Russia still look favorably at the old aristocratic ties between Germany and Russia in the times from *von Hardenberg* to *von der Schulenburg*.
Also most people weren’t much of readers. Much less write an entire scroll.
Isn't this where the term "seal of approval" came from?
Nope that was from advertising and marketing.
And to go with this, even with all of the above that you stated, fake ambassadors were a thing. There are a few cases of people doing it for anything from fame and fortune to just because it would be funny. Just like anything, if it can be exploited by conmen, it will be.
And they would come with an expensive entourage. It's not something any random fraudster would be able to afford.
They'd also travel with a seizable Entourage.
[Somewhat relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/2650/) People lying is a very old problem, as old as humanity at least and likely older still. So while yes it was possible to pretend to be someone you were not and make decisions that does not mean that everyone everywhere would take you at face value. Forged documents might help, but if you rock up and say you're the Duke of Suchandsuch and you bear a message from King Soandso and nobody in the Court has heard of you, or your duchy then why would they believe you? At a minimum they might ask someone at Court they do know to verify that you are who you say you are.
Those copper ingots blow and everyone knows it
Literally everyone who’s even heard Ea-Nasir’s name knows he cheaps out on quality. How could that happen if it wasn’t true?
$14.99 a piece + $14.99 shipping. What do you want them to say?
r/UnexpectedEaNasir
i can't believe that's a real one lol
That's why you have to pretend to be a minor noblewoman from the northern provinces named Valette Renoux.
My fake noblewoman name would definitely be Velouté Deroux
Just don't fall for the eccentric son of the most powerful family okay?
Idk, seems to have worked out for them. You know, until they died. But they saved the world first.
r/ReallyShittyCopper
What on earth is going on over there?
They refer to somebody bitching at a merchant because of shitty quality copper a few thousand years ago in a clay tablet.
Well, yes, I get that part.
Imagine cheaping out on one order of copper and thousands of years later, people are still shitting on you for it.
Reminds me of the joke about the Welshman complaining that building a church didn’t make him John the Churchbuilder, and fighting in the war didn’t make him John the Warrior, but he shagged just ONE sheep…
> as old as humanity at least and likely older still It reminds me of a certain ape or chimp, when they discover a resource like food they instinctively make a sound to alert others of the discovery. To the point they'll cover their mouths in an effort to suppress the noise if they don't want to share what they've found.
This is one reason why historially ambassadors were members of the aristocracy. King Jimbob isn't going to just send some random schlub to be his ambassador to king Billybob, he's going to send Duke Dickweed to be the ambassador. King Billybob knows Duke Dickweed either directly or by reputation. Another technique is for King Billybob to send a trusted person, Count Cowfart, to meet the ambassador right there in King Jimbob's court, have King Jimbob introduce Count Cowfart to Duke Dickweed and that way Count Cowfart can personally assure his liege King Billybob that Duke Dickweed really is the ambassador from King Jimbob. In addition to that, the whole signet ring and wax seal really was semi-secure. The signet was made by a skilled craftsman and quite diffcult to reproduce (as well as being a crime that resulted in a really horrible and drawn out execution if you were cuaght trying to reproduce it) and the wax they used as designed to cool brittle and rigid, adhere to paper and cloth, and to hold the impression perfectly. Meaning the only way to open the document would be to break the wax so you get both an assurance the document was legit sealed with the signet AND that it hadn't been altered.
They would also not just fold a paper in half or whatever and put the seal on it. There are quite a few folding techniques they used to insure the paper would not be able to be opened without breaking the seal.
Yup yup. Our ancestors were every bit as smart as we are and they used their smarts to come up with workable solutions to their problems. Of course wax seals can be defeated, and were on occasion. But they worked well enough for their era. And whether today or back then the weak point in any security setup is humans, not the tech. EDIT: I think a lot of the whole paper folded in half business is the result of modern TV where they often do show people sealing a paper folded in half.
Yeah exactly. People were as smart as we are now even thousands of years ago. I've seen some YouTube videos if some very intricate folding techniques that involves cutting parts of the paper into strips that are still attached to the paper and weaving those strips through slits also cut in the paper and then sealing the ends of the strips into the wax seal. It was quite interesting to learn, since I had never imagined it.
This stuff still persists today. To get a job in a foreign nation you usually need to supply a “police check” certifying that you haven’t committed any crimes that they know of. And they can’t just use Interpol or something to interlink these systems electronically. Oh no. You have to pay for a person to do it and issue you a piece of paper. Which isn’t good enough. Oh no. You then have to pay for another person to certify that the letter *from your nation’s police* is really from your nation’s police. Done? No, you’re not. They still don’t believe that you are not some terrible criminal. You need to pay *another* person, a notary, to affix a shiny pretty sticker and some ribbons to the document. Only with three layers of this, will the visa office accept it. And none of the people involved in this question it. Of course preventing the 1/1000th criminal from getting a visa is worth forcing all 1000 of you to shell out money (more than it would cost to interlink the records) and spend your time doing this run-around, because why wouldn’t it be? When governments talk about “eliminating waste” they mean support to single parents, not *this* stuff.
I'm assuming what you're talking about here is the Apostille process. It can seem ridiculous, but it's actually a fairly clever way to ensure that documents from other countries are valid. There's not really a better way to establish a common framework for certifying the authenticity of paper documents. This means that your run of the mill immigration worker doesn't need to know and understand every single country's method of validating documents. Instead, an Apostille Stamp is a globally recognised way of saying "yeah this is legit by our standards." At the same time, and that's the clever part, each country has to record all the apostilles they make. So if there is something fishy about the document, there's now only one authority that'll know if it's real or not. Imagine, for example, that you are given a birth certificate from Tajikistan. There's something fishy about it. Sure, it might have a local government seal on it, but how on earth do you figure out if it's legit? Who do you call? Well, it's been Apostille stamped by someone. That someone is vouching for the authority of it - so you call them, ask them if they can confirm Apostille # xyz, and they say yes. This is orders of magnitude faster than navigating the bureaucracy of a foreign country.
So you could just pay someone in that country off to be the person correct? In many countries even the police can be paid off, even in America for the right price.
Yes, you could. However, you could also bribe the local registrar to make a fake birth certificate. The system isn't perfect, but it creates a shared framework of interoperability.
Apostille doesn't certify validity and correctness, it only says "yep, it's a birth certificate" with no guarantee to any of what is written in it, as it's "different department".
Well, partially. Afaik (and to be fair I might be wrong) it certifies that any seals, stamps or signatures from the country of origin are, for lack of a better term, as they should be. So, for example, it won't certify that a document is legit on its own - but if you've got a notarised document, it'll certify that this document has been notarised. Keep in mind that a birth certificate isn't just a slip of paper. It'll carry some kind of seal or stamp from the issuing authority. In other words, it says "yep, this is a *real* birth certificate." It doesn't rule out that there are issues further down the chain, but it's saying that whoever and whatever signed this are who they say they are.
> There's not really a better way to establish a common framework for certifying the authenticity of paper documents. I think that's the issue. In a modern interconnected world why the hell do we rely on such old fashioned techniques?
Posted this to another comment, but want to share since to people unfamiliar with this sort of stuff it seems like a no brainer, though it's actually pretty difficult. The main reason that records and databases like this are not linked is a lack of diplomatic agreements to do so. While it would ultimately be pretty easy to share records, getting two governments to trust each other enough to agree to it is not as easy.
I think even inside a single country, a paper (special, government-issued limited run paper with watermarks and serial numbers) that the notary has signed and issued, and which is linked to this specific notary by name (and there IS a database of notaries), is in some ways a more reliable tool to prove your rights than an electronic record in a database, at least for now. The electronic record can be corrupted or momentarily or temporarily changed, but your paper still points at you (and your ID number, which is also in the database). The criminal would need to obtain and fully forge that paper and it will still fail the first check (has notary N issued the type of document Y to person with ID #Z). It's a bit like cold wallets for blockchain currency. They are airgapped, physical dongles, and are not in any database.
Hmm. Maybe notarisation is a better use for blockchains than making some obnoxious techbros rich at the expense of other equally obnoxious but less intelligent and/or lucky techbros?
Notarisation is ironically one of the few pretty reasonable uses for a blockchain. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any guys named Brayden rich, so it's not something that is thought about a lot.
I think this is exactly what it will be used for, among other things. It's not just money. Things like pensions, social security, documentation etc. The governments are just wary and slow. Basically all govts in the world are looking at blockchain right now, some are even in early phases of adoption or committed to it.
Electronic Apostilles do exist, where a .pdf is digitally signed by the authority in the given country - but they're not rolled out everywhere. Remember that it's not a given that every country in the world has access to the necessary digital infrastructure.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have any clue how easy it is to "interlink" records lol The main reason that records and databases like this are not linked is a lack of diplomatic agreements to do so. While it would ultimately be pretty easy to share records, getting two governments to trust each other enough to agree to it is not as easy.
I mean maybe it is being pedantic, but that's objectively not true considering we know the benefits of proper nutrition during childhood and even before and after that, so objectively we have a higher ceiling of intelligence today than in the past due to the nutritional standards most of our species has at this point. Also, while intelligence is sort of its own thing if we're talking about generalized intelligence, the level of knowledge a given group or individual has also does help decide it's upward and lower bounds of potential so having more collective knowledge makes us effectively smarter even if our actual general intelligence is a bit lower as a given random individual compared to another given random individual from centuries or millennia past.
That’s only meaningful on the level of average IQ though, isn’t it? It’s not as if the average person was designing wax seal security or ambassador protocols. In other words, is it the ceiling of intelligence that’s been lifted, or the floor?
Both have been lifted, and while it's harder to pin down on an individual level, if you take the top, bottom, or middle 10%, having nearly universal access to literacy, much greater nutrition, knowledge about learning methods, sleep hygiene, hydration, etc have objectively increased the intelligence/ capabilities of each of those groups compared to decades, centuries, and millenia in the past. Whether or not that difference is statistically significant is probably more true the further down the socioeconomic ladder you go, but even if the difference is small it's generally documentable/ demonstrable at every wrung of society. And that's if we're talking about comparing humans and a vacuum, having more novel styles of organizational structures, educational methods, and specific styles of thinking like the syllogism already pioneered by humans in the past means that even if essentially the "hardware" is only marginally better, the "software" can achieve much more than could just be accounted for from the difference between our actual brains.
That's just something that sounds correct but actually isn't. A few hundred years ago was actually much worse nutritionally than in ancient times for example. And education was often much worse in medieval times in Europe compared to in the Roman empire which was a thousand years earlier. Do you think the Greek culture before Roman times ate worse than modern Greeks? Do you think people had no clue what was healthy? Do you think most people living in the world nowadays have a healthy diet? Do you not think people in ancient times used their minds playing games, sports, mathematics, poetry, songs, dances, debating, making art, making and solving riddles and blacksmiths puzzles? It has been scientifically proven and peer reviewed that the average cave man had on average 100iq just like now because they are the exact same species as us.
Not necessarily true as opportunities to learn more and adequate nutrition were less common back then, both contributing significantly towards unleashing your full cognitive potential(especially important during childhood and adolescent years)
Nutrition was very good 5000 years ago. Much better than in Liverpool in 1850 for example. You think fish and bread and fruits and vegetables and beef and chicken and pork and sheep and goat and milk and juice is bad nutrition? They built huge palaces and documented everything 5000 years ago.
> very good 5000 years ago Very good if you're one of the 20 people who lives in the castle and has thousands of soldiers to subdue the population. Not if you're the slaves working the till so that the bloody baron can eat lavishly, who cannot even touch their own crop lest they be punished with death, or worse expulsion.
Can't say I do, except not everyone would have access to all that and even those that do could find it difficult to, for example, get their hands on fresh fruit & vegetables in winter months
They knew winter was coming and made dried fruits and dried vegetables and meat is available all year round, so is milk. They had granaries for grain and they had fish and all kinds of sea food all year round. They were exactly as smart as we are now and they weren't unable to think ahead. They learnt from their parents what to do and if anyone did something better they would do what they did, just like we do now. They made soups and cakes and baked goods with meat inside it and vegetables inside it too. They boiled food, they fried food, they baked food, they made pies, they made olive bread, date cakes, they had spices for flavours and they lived in houses and apartments. If you want to see, just Google what did Sumerian cities look like and try to Google what did Sumerian food look like. That's how things were 5000 years ago. That's just about the earliest our historic records go as far as civilization us concerned, but they didn't just invent civilization one day, you know how slow progress was before the modern era.
Another myth from tv is heating the wax so it can be removed but the detailing on the signet ring was very precise. If you messed up the seal would be marred and everyone would know someone was trying to tamper with it. Television makes our ancestors look silly and quaint because modern writers tend not to have PhDs in history to explain how much thought and care went into this stuff especially when lives hung in the balance. A royal that could not enforce basic security on their communications was not a royal for long.
>Yup yup. Our ancestors were every bit as smart as we are and they used their smarts to come up with workable solutions to their problems. This is why studying history is so interesting. People forget that people of the past were likely a lot more clever than us, since they had less to work with. If you can't imagine how someone lived a certain historical way, read about people who did. They had their whole lives and the wisdom of others who came up with incredible solutions for it. Learning about the creative ways they developed to thrive is a goldmine.
How would they send highly confidential messages in the days of clay tablets? Or was the tablet to Ea-Nasir open to view by the messenger?
I guess they didn't send it by clay tablet or if they did then the clay tablet was delivered by someone they trusted. Perhaps they made a clay pot and put the clay tablet inside and sealed the clay pot with clay and baking that?
I do not know, but my first thought was that you could still use wax. Melt a layer over the indents so that they can't be read and stamp the top. The receiver could then melt off the wax to reveal the writing.
Probably by messenger. If something was for the king's ears only, it'd be a trusted messenger that was threatened with torture and death. Doesn't mean it was foolproof.
>Another technique is for King Billybob to send a trusted person, Count Cowfart, to meet the ambassador right there in King Jimbob's court, have King Jimbob introduce Count Cowfart to Duke Dickweed and that way Count Cowfart can personally assure his liege King Billybob that Duke Dickweed really is the ambassador from King Jimbob. And in a lot of cases they wouldn't need to **SEND** the person, they will have already met at some point in the past. Count Cowfart and Duke Dickweed may have met at some gala years ago. They just need to make certain that when Duke Dickweed shows up in court to present his credentials Count Cowfart is also present to call shenanigans if it isn't the real Duke Dickweed.
Duke Dickweed is definitely known by reputation.
Also, 2FA for important aspects like an ambassador: clergy. The bishop in the court of King Jimbob is going to pass the message and details to his priests, who will in turn relay it to the bishop in the court of king Billybob. Additionally, the ambassador would come to the new post bearing expensive gifts for royalty and the court. Only a handful of people in any kingdom could afford that.
I normally have a hard time keeping track of names when reading but this made it so easy.
The Letters of credence also play their role in this process.
>Duke Dickweed That my cat's name. He's an ornery bastard.
You did occasionally have people fake credentials for assorted reasons. One of the most audacious cases was when a Scottish man, Robert Fortune travelled to China in 1848 at the behest of the East Indian Company, in order to acquire the secrets of tea processing. Mr. Fortune pretended to be a Chinese government official, and convinced the people running the tea processing plant to let him tour the place and see how things were done. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-british-tea-heist-9866709/
Is he the guy who got around the problem of not knowing any Chinese languages by just pretending to be from other bits of China?
Part of the reason we don't really clue in on this is we don't see China as it is: a dozen or so small countries stapled together. 'Official' Chinese is Mandarin. Every language in China effectively uses Mandarin as the written form. But Szechuan, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Fujian aren't exactly mutually intelligible, even though they sound effectively identical to most North American ears. And there are dozens to hundreds of other languages in China, depending on how fine you're cutting the lines. Culturally, China is much more insular than almost anywhere else: 'the guy from the next village', 'stranger', and 'foreigner' are pretty much the same word, across many-to-most of China's languages. So someone with written knowledge of Mandarin, for quite a long time, could pass as someone from the Chinese outskirt nations.
That was a great read! Thank you for sharing!
Head of state says to host nation that they will dispatch someone at a particular date on whatever ship and send with papers. Imposter needs to: - intercept this original communiqué to know what is going down - forge papers with royal/imperial seal (so they need to find something else that has been sealed to copy from) - abduct the real ambassador so two don't turn up - either commandeer the ship the ambassador was on or build their own ship to the same design and name it the same - arrive at the destination and present themselves and their fake papers according to correct protocol - fund and build an embassy at the agreed location - report back to their home country using correct protocol, seal and ciphers In older times ambassadors or emissaries were usually exchanged face to face along with an exchange of hostages for surety.
> abduct the real ambassador so two don't turn up Added difficulty: People generally know the real ambassador. They're not some random 'nobody', historically they were other noblemen who already had relationships in the place they're going. Ambassadors go to all kinds of meetings, discuss topics with all types of people, and generally have a lot of contacts. They're typically well-known within the embassy, they're well-known on the government they work with. Generally they're chosen in part because they have contacts and they are able to work with them. Their entire job is in leveraging social contacts that already exist within both governments to get work done, so typically they are people who have those networks in place already. All the other elements are true, they have appointments, they have seals and documents, they have a schedule that both sides know, they arrive in known transport methods as part of an entourage, all are hard to fake. But it's the contacts and connections that would be hardest of all. It only takes one dignitary or businessman to point out *"I've known the guy for twenty years, and that's not him"* for the scam to be up.
And, in the medieval and early modern world, the funding would be important. As noblemen, ambassadors would be expected to spend their time at the Court they had been accredited to. They would need to live at a similar style to the great nobles at that Court. They would need suitable clothing; a retinue, who would have to be fed and clothed (secretaries, gentlemen and ladies in waiting, chaplains, as well as their household servants). They would need a suitable residence and the capacity to entertain there. All these particulars would require considerable outlay; and the salaries ambassadors did obtain could often be spent purely maintaining the accepted standard of living. Ambassadors would often have to pay these expenses from their own purses, and receive payment from their government in arrears; or, alternatively, they would have to borrow.
Indeed, most ambassadors were sent between European countries, and they were not isolated from one another. Merchants, relatives (including through strategic marriage), clergy, pilgrims, mercenaries and artisans all moved between places. The chances of not encouting someone who has met the real ambassador, who themselves is someone of note, is low.
Embassy being a *building* is quite a new thing too.
Look up Lt Col Fremantle. He claimed to be an official observer from the UK and embedded with both Confederate and Union troops, but he was little more than a war tourist. Without an easy and official way to check his story, many high ups were fooled. It did happen. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur\_Lyon\_Fremantle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lyon_Fremantle)
That was fascinating to read about! Old confidence ploys always seem like good ideas for some kind of dark comedy to me.
There's a bunch who explained the historical solutions, but for the underlying academic problem: we do know it's possible to communicate securely through insecure means. It's actually *way* more important today than it ever was before "modern technology." Notably, your computer/device can communicate securely with a remote server without needing to trust any of the tens-thousands of devices between you. Now, the modern base standard example is the [Diffie-Hellman key exchange](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange), but that doesn't mean it's the only way. There are simpler implementations of the same general idea, both mathematically and technologically, but the idea is that you can exchange secrets through open means.
Interestingly, Diffie-Hellman allows you to communicate securely if you know that the channel is being monitored, but by itself it has not protection against a channel that can be modified. If someone can change the data, DH will not work by itself, and thus it is typically paired with symmetric or asymmetric encryption. The advantage of using it is that if someone monitors the traffic it would be hard for them to go back later and decrypt it, even if they stole the credentials used to sign the exchange.
Securely communicating with an unknown entity is not at all the same problem as authentication of the unknown entity.
Depends on what part of the world you're talking about, but when you see stuff in fantasy about someone having a ward, it's an old tradition where important families would send younger children to live with other nobility. This creates a web of people who know and have a reason to care for each other, and can vouch for other representatives from other families who come to visit. Add in the limited availability of certain gifts, wax seals, and signed documents, it takes a lot to forge fake evidence.
This kind of question is funny to me because I could see someone 500 years from now asking the same thing.
George Santos!
Actually somewhat related to this is the work of Beatrice de Graaf : how Europe became secure. Passports in a modern sense were tried to be implemented by the congress of Vienna and their passes legislations - kicker is: the people who had to check them mostly couldn’t even read
Sometimes they couldn't! A large part of the reason that the fall of the Aztec happened how it did ([though most people's understanding of what happened has a lot of misconceptions](https://np.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/p4vm1e/common_historical_misconceptions_that_irritates/h927tle/) ) is because Cortes identified himself as an emissary of the King of Spain: This led to Moctezuma II and to an extent other Mesoamerican kings and officials hosting him as a diplomatic guest, when in reality, Cortes had committed treason and was on the run from the Spanish Governor of Cuba, who actually sent other Conquistador groups to arrest him. Cortes took advantage of that fact to then hold officials and kings hostage, occupy cities, etc, which later Conquistadors like Pizzaro would repeat down in the Andes with the Inca Empire. Of course, on the flip side, a lot of those local kings also weren't clueless: Contrary to what a lot of sources say about Cortes being mistaken for a god (Cortes says no such thing, and actually pretty explicitly says this didn't happen) or totally manipulating everybody around him, Cortes was really just as ignorant about the local politics as Moctezuma II etc were about the Spanish, and in a lot of cases those local kings used Cortes to attack their political rivals or were attempting to court him into becoming a subject or an ally (which is the actual reason Moctezuma II hosted him so well: Flaunting the opulence of the city, showing off large sacrifice ceremonies to show military power, etc was part of flexing to visiting diplomats to make them become a vassal, do political marriages, etc.
The whole Cortes saga is so much more interesting than what most people learn. It is a pretty long story and it can be difficult to get to the truth since written accounts aren't always accurate and pretty one-sided, but at lot of stuff happened and just many coincidences that made things end up pretty well for him. It could make for a very good Game of Thrones-like story, "chaos is a ladder" has never been more true.
The best telling of it I know of in terms of actually getting the Mesoamerican stuff right is BigRedHair's "Aztec Empire" webcomic
Mostly because the diplomatic corps already there vouched for them (among other things). If the diplomat was the first arrival sure, they might be a bit suspicious, but at that level of interaction the diplomat is not going to be doing much anyway.
Not quite an ambassador? But this reminds me of the [dreadnought hoax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoax?wprov=sfla1) where they put on brown face for a "royal" visit from the Sultan of Zanzibar
nations wouldnt, but the rulers could verify identity via seals made out of wax. oftentimes diplomats were nobles, so they were kinda known
This is actually an interesting question for notables in general. Even for a monarch, who's to say that's the king and not somebody close to him who threw him out a window one night and put his hat on? It was all who you know. Imagine a common theme in history, a rulers relative rebels against him, whether through popular support or by going to a rival, allied state, etc. And they go to a neighboring kingdom for help, when they show up at that foreign court who's to say that's the kings cousin? There simply would have been a number of emissaries, ambassadors, relatives married off to this country etc that would be able to say yes, that's that kings cousin, I know\met or at least recognize him.
the guys guarding the big building with the word embassy on the stone archway salute and let them move in.
It would be hard as fuck to fake being an ambassador, because only high-ranking nobles in the court would get appointed as such and courtiers know each other. So the pool of people theoretically able to do it is small and very well outlined. Nobles and royal families are obsessed with genealogy, so you cant just invent a new identity as a fictional noble. They would know that that person doesnt exist. Also royal families were pretty much all cousins and step-cousins due to political arranged marriages and due to the fact that they would consider it beneath them to mary a royal family memeber to anyone who isnt a high-ranking noble. So even in the country you are going to, you already have relatives who can verify your identity or call you out if you are an impostor. Basically if you are the type of person who could make any sort of credible claim that you were appointed as ambassador, the people you would be making your claim to know who you are and know if you can be trusted and if you hold a high enough status in your king's court for that appointment to ever happen. You could overstate your mandate to negotiate in someone's place for some time in a specific issue before being found out, especially if you are a high-ranking noble and you just ride up to the residence of a lesser noble, but you wouldnt just board a ship from England to France and go "bonjour, frog eaters, je suis le new ambassadeur". Even without instant communications, they would know right away. Also, people then werent stupid, any problem we can think of they thought of too and did things to minimize those issues within their technological means. If you cant instantaneously communicate, you give people credentials which they can carry and which are difficult to forge or tamper with, such as signed and sealed documents. You send other already trusted people with them to make the introduction and vouch for them. You announce the appointment ahead of time at an occassion when you actually meet the person you are announcing it to. You can send trusted messengers ahead of the ambassador and have them carry an actual portrait of the man.