Baltic-German
Count Karl Robert Nesselrode, also known as
Charles de Nesselrode, (
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
,
PortugalPortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
, December 14, 1780 - March 23, 1862) was a
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n diplomat and a leading European conservative statesman of the
Holy AllianceThe Holy Alliance was a coalition of Russia, Austria and Prussia created in 1815 at the behest of Tsar Alexander I of Russia, signed by the three powers in Paris on September 26 1815....
. His autobiography was published posthumously in 1866.
He was born in
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
,
PortugalPortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
where his father (d. 1810), a count of the
Holy Roman EmpireThe Holy Roman Empire was a union of territories in Central Europe during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period under a Holy Roman Emperor. The first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was Otto I, crowned in 962. The last was Francis II, who abdicated and dissolved the Empire in 1806 during...
, was the ambassador of the Russian
tsarTsar or czar , occasionally spelled csar or Tzar in English, is a Slavic term with Bulgarian origins used to designate certain monarchs...
. In deference to his mother's
ProtestantismProtestantism is a branch within Christianity, containing many denominations with some differing practices and doctrines, that principally originated in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. It is considered to be one of the major divisions within Christianity, together with the Roman...
he was baptized in the chapel of the British Embassy, thus becoming a member of the
Church of EnglandThe Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England, the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the oldest among the communion's thirty-eight independent national and regional churches...
.
Baltic-German
Count Karl Robert Nesselrode, also known as
Charles de Nesselrode, (
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
,
PortugalPortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
, December 14, 1780 - March 23, 1862) was a
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n diplomat and a leading European conservative statesman of the
Holy AllianceThe Holy Alliance was a coalition of Russia, Austria and Prussia created in 1815 at the behest of Tsar Alexander I of Russia, signed by the three powers in Paris on September 26 1815....
. His autobiography was published posthumously in 1866.
He was born in
LisbonLisbon is the capital and largest city of Portugal. It is also the seat of the district of Lisbon and the main city of the Lisbon region...
,
PortugalPortugal , officially the Portuguese Republic , is a country located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of mainland Europe and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the west and south and by Spain to the north and east...
where his father (d. 1810), a count of the
Holy Roman EmpireThe Holy Roman Empire was a union of territories in Central Europe during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period under a Holy Roman Emperor. The first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was Otto I, crowned in 962. The last was Francis II, who abdicated and dissolved the Empire in 1806 during...
, was the ambassador of the Russian
tsarTsar or czar , occasionally spelled csar or Tzar in English, is a Slavic term with Bulgarian origins used to designate certain monarchs...
. In deference to his mother's
ProtestantismProtestantism is a branch within Christianity, containing many denominations with some differing practices and doctrines, that principally originated in the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. It is considered to be one of the major divisions within Christianity, together with the Roman...
he was baptized in the chapel of the British Embassy, thus becoming a member of the
Church of EnglandThe Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England, the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the oldest among the communion's thirty-eight independent national and regional churches...
. Nesselrode's Germanic roots were emphasized by his education in a
BerlinBerlin is the capital city and one of sixteen states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million within its city limits, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union...
gymnasium, his father having been appointed ambassador to the Prussian court about 1787.
At the age of 16 he entered the Russian Navy where, with his father's influence, he secured the position of naval
aide-de-campAn aide-de-camp is a personal assistant, secretary, or adjutant to a person of high rank, usually a senior military officer or a head of state...
to Tsar Paul, (Russian: Па́вел I Петро́вич; Pavel Petrovich) (October 1 [O.S. September 20] 1754 – assassinated on March 23 [O.S. March 11] 1801), who was the Emperor of Russia between 1796 and 1801.
He then moved to the army, and entered diplomatic service under Paul I's son and successor, Tsar
Alexander IAlexander I of Russia , also known as Alexander the Blessed served as Emperor of Russia from 23 March 1801 to 1 December 1825 and Ruler of Poland from 1815 to 1825, as well as the first Russian Grand Duke of Finland and Lithuania.He was born in Saint Petersburg to Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, later...
. He was attached to the Russian embassy at Berlin, and transferred thence to the Hague.
In August 1806, Nesselrode received a commission to travel in southern Germany to report on the French troops there; he was then attached as diplomatic secretary to Generals
KamenskiCount Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky was a Russian Field Marshal prominent in the Catherinian wars and the Napoleonic campaigns....
,
BuxhoewdenFriedrich Wilhelm Count von Buxhoevden, was born in Muhu, now in Saare County, Estonia. He was an Infantry General of the Imperial Russian Army and a government official. Buxhoeveden commanded the Russian armies during the Finnish War...
and
BennigsenLevin August Gottlieb Theophil , Count von Bennigsen was a German general in the service of the Russian Empire....
in succession.
He was present at the inconclusive
Battle of EylauThe Battle of Eylau or Battle of Preussisch-Eylau was a bloody and inconclusive battle between Napoléon's Grande Armée and a mostly Russian army under General Bennigsen near the town of Preußisch Eylau in East Prussia....
in January 1807, fought by Count Von Bennigsen and assisted at the negotiations of the Peace of Tilsit, (July 1807), whereby Spanish Bonapartist Diego Fernandez de Velasco, (deceased in Paris in the exile in 1811), 13th Duke of Frías, congratulated and seated at table with Napoleon I.
Nesselrode became State Secretary in 1814 and was the head of Russia's official delegation to
Congress of ViennaThe Congress of Vienna was a conference of ambassadors of European states chaired by the Austrian statesman Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, and held in Vienna from November, 1814 to June, 1815. Its objective was to settle the many issues arising from the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic...
, but for the most part Alexander I acted as his own foreign minister. In 1816, Nesselrode became Russian foreign minister, sharing influence with Count
Ioannis KapodistriasCount Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias was a Greek diplomat of the Russian Empire and later first head of state of independent Greece.-Background and early career:Ioannis Kapodistrias was born in Corfu, Count Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias ( – Komis Ioannis Antonios Kapodistrias, in , Conte...
until the latter's retirement in 1822.
For forty years, Nesselrode guided Russian policy and was a leading European conservative statesman of the
Holy AllianceThe Holy Alliance was a coalition of Russia, Austria and Prussia created in 1815 at the behest of Tsar Alexander I of Russia, signed by the three powers in Paris on September 26 1815....
. Between 1845 and 1856, he served as Chancellor. As Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1824, he was a
plenipotentiaryThe word plenipotentiary has two meanings.As a noun, it refers to a person who has "full powers"...
during negotiations with the United States in defining the boundary between Russian America and the American claims known as the
Oregon CountryOregon Country or Oregon was a predominantly American term referring to a region of the Pacific Northwest of North America...
, which was resolved with the Russo-American Treaty of 1824. A century later in 1924,
Mount NesselrodeMount Nesselrode, also known as Boundary Peak 98, 2,474 metres prominence: , is a peak in the Boundary Ranges of the Coast Mountains, located on and in part defining the border between British Columbia, Canada and Alaska, United States...
in the
Boundary RangesThe Boundary Ranges, also known in the singular and as the Alaska Boundary Range, are the largest and most northerly subrange of the Coast Mountains...
of the
AlaskaAlaska is the largest state of the United States of America by area; it is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait...
-
British ColumbiaBritish Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is famed for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . In 1871, it became the sixth province of Canada.The capital of British Columbia is Victoria, the 15th largest metropolitan region in Canada...
boundary was named for him.
In 1849 Nesselrode sent Russian troops to aid
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.3 million people in Central Europe. It borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west...
in putting down the Hungarian revolution led by
Lajos KossuthLajos Kossuth was a Hungarian lawyer, journalist, politician and Governor-President of Hungary in 1849...
.
One frequently overlooked facet of his activity involved Nesselrode's attempts to penetrate Japan's
self-isolationwas the foreign relations policy of Japan under which no foreigner could enter nor could any Japanese leave the country on penalty of death. The policy was enacted by the Tokugawa shogunate under Tokugawa Iemitsu through a number of edicts and policies from 1633-1639 and remained in effect until...
. In 1853 he dispatched
Yevfimy PutyatinYevfimy Vasilyevich Putyatin was a Russian admiral noted for his diplomatic missions to Japan and China which resulted in the signing of the Treaty of Shimoda in 1855....
with a letter to the
Shogun is a military rank and historical title for Hereditary Commanders in Chief of the Armed Forces of Japan. The modern rank is equivalent to a Generalissimo...
; Putyatin returned to St. Petersburg with the favorable
Treaty of ShimodaThe Treaty of Shimoda of 1855 was signed between the Russian Vice-Admiral Euphimy Vasil'evich Putiatin and Toshiakira Kawaji of Japan in the city of Shimoda, Izu Province, Japan, on February 7, 1855...
.
Nesselrode's efforts to expand Russia's influence in the
BalkansThe Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
and Mediterranean led to conflicts with
TurkeyTurkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey
, is a Eurasian country that stretches across the Anatolian peninsula in Western Asia and Thrace in the Balkan region of southeastern Europe...
,
BritainThe United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is a sovereign state located off the northwestern coast of continental Europe. It is an island country, spanning an archipelago including Great Britain, the northeastern part of Ireland, and many small islands...
, the then Kingdom of
SardiniaSardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea . The area of Sardinia is . The nearest land masses to the island are the French island of Corsica, the Italian Peninsula, Tunisia, and the Spanish Balearic Islands...
, the then
Duchy of SavoyFrom 1416 to 1714, the territories of the House of Savoy were known as the Duchy of Savoy . The Duchy was a state in the northern part of the Italian Peninsula, with some territories that are now in France...
and
FranceFrance , officially the French Republic , is a country located in Western Europe, with several overseas islands and territories located on other continents. Metropolitan France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean...
, allied in the
Crimean WarThe Crimean War was fought between the Russian Empire on one side and an alliance of the British Empire, France, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Sardinia on the other. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining...
(1853-1856). Britain and France were concerned by Russia's growing influence and were determined to support Turkey and so restrict Russia.
Further Reading
- Maria Kalergi, Listy do Adama Potockiego, ed. by Halina Kenarowa, translated from French by Halina Kenarowa and Róża Drojecka, Warszawa, 1986.