5 - The imperial propaganda campaign of 1526–1527

Summary

Standing at the headwaters of bureaucratic differentiation, the late medieval chancellery exercised an amalgam of functions–judicial, diplomatic, administrative–that later ages would gradually sort out into discrete departments. Certainly by 1500 the properly judicial aspect had been so clearly distinguished as to be removed from the more secretarial functions of the chancellery. Within the latter branch the chancellor, as official spokesman of the ruler, could expect at a moment of crisis or accelerated diplomatic activity to exercise the functions of a propagandist for his monarch. Examples of medieval chancellors consciously acting as propagandists, if not many, are still significant: one thinks of the imperial brilliance of the Hohenstaufen chancellery under Rainald von Dassel and Piero della Vigna; or more recently the Florentine chancellery under the direction of Coluccio Salutati whose missives trumpeted the majesty and virtue of the infant Arno republic from the Baltic to the Bosphorus. In his exercise of an acknowledged monopoly of official rhetoric the chancellor sought to promote the prince or polity that he served. It is in this tradition that we need ultimately to judge the feverish activity of Charles V's Grand Chancellor within his chancellery during the latter half of 1526. Moreover, the crisis created in imperial affairs by the League of Cognac had the dual effect of reconfirming the role and policies of Gattinara and of allowing his chancellery to operate as a fairly coherent body for what would appear to be the last time.