Ezekiel, Freiherr von Spanheim

In 1656 Spanheim became tutor to the son of Charles I Louis, Elector Palatine.

As ambassador of the Great Elector he spent nine years at the court of Paris, and subsequently devoted some years to studies in Berlin; but after the Peace of Ryswick in 1697 he returned as ambassador to France where he remained until 1702.

In 1702, he went on his final diplomatic mission, as the first Prussian ambassador to England, where he served until his death in 1710.

[4] His major works are Disputationes de usu et præstantia numismatum antiquorum (Rome, 1664; in 2 vols., London and Amsterdam, 1706–17) and Orbis Romanus (London, 1704; Halle, 1738), which Edward Gibbon used as a source for his monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

He also edited with Petavius the Opera of Cyril of Alexandria and of the Emperor Julian (Leipzig, 1696).