Ambassador or rogue? : the labyrinth of Habsburg diplomacy in the light of a murder in Constantinople

During an extensive research on the circumstances of Simon Reniger’s appointment as Habsburg ambassador to Constantinople, a crime started to excite my interest. The offence had been committed during the term of the previous resident ambassador, Alexander Greiffenklau but it caused a lot of difficulties even at the time when Reniger came into office. Namely, in the autumn of 1646, Greiffenklau killed a certain Don Juan de Menesses, an adventurer of dubious origin, who – according to Habsburg informants – had been involved in conspiring against the dynasty within the Sultan’s entourage. In my paper, I want to describe what led to Menesses’s murder and what kind of consequences can be drawn on the basis of the crime as to the diplomatic cooperation between the Spanish and the Austrian lines of the Habsburg dynasty in the last years of the Thirty Years’ War.