During the summer of 1654 the relations between the Emperor and the King of Sweden exacerbated. The reason for the dispute was the status of the Town of Bremen in the Principality of Bremen, new acquisition of Sweden, where Field Marshall Hans Christoffer Königsmarck, an experienced general, was the Swedish province governor. The imperial chancery decided to express dissatisfaction in writing, therefore the secretaries of the Emperor prepared a special edict on the matter: “the very name of Königsmarck was listed there without any titles. Because of this disgraceful omission the King of Sweden commanded to reprove the imperial chancery. Königsmarck, with his usual courage, stated that he never feared the imperial cannons, thus he was not afraid of imperial paper and ink.”

Parallel to the war of soldiers and generals, yet another war was waged: the conflict of diplomacy pursued by the state chanceries. The great diplomatic congress in Münster and Osnabrück, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, has been considered a new page in the history of diplomacy. A characteristic feature of the professionalization of diplomacy was the wider use of both ancient and new acts and privileges in the current political struggle. Accordingly, this required a thorough analysis and authentication of the sources. Diplomats and historians working on the acts from the archives created a new branch of the research – the auxiliary sciences of history. The concept of bella diplomatica (diplomatic wars) was born. Equally important were the efforts of the administration to arouse appropriate and positive sentiments among the population towards the government – as Anna Maria Forssberg showed recently on the example of Sweden in the second half of the seventeenth century, i.e. when the information began to flow faster and newspapers started to play a role similar to today's.

It is apparent that during writing of De rebus, Pufendorf was much more interested in the matters of diplomacy than in the description of military actions. The diplomatic intrigues, quarrels concerning the order of precedence, errors in the titles and the coat of arms on the seals were much more engaging for the Historiographer Royal than setting ranks in some battles. For us, however, it is almost terra incognita. Chapter by chapter, Pufendorf discusses the long-forgotten instructions for the ambassadors or envoys.