Jakob Ludwig Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim de Pourtalès (24 October 1853 – 3 May 1928)[1] was a German aristocrat and diplomat who served as the Ambassador to the Russian Empire in Saint Petersburg from 1907 to 1914.

His father spent a number of years in Venice creating a collection of Renaissance sculpture, which included works by Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Riccio, and paintings by old Italian masters.

Pourtalès was deeply involved in the 1914 July Crisis, which was a series of interrelated diplomatic and military escalations among the major powers of Europe in the summer of 1914 that ultimately led to the Great War and started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

Her maternal grandparents were Pauline de Castellane and Count Maximilian von Hatzfeldt,[14] who spent ten years from 1849 to 1859 as the German Minister to France and who signed the Treaty of Paris in 1856 which ended the Crimean War.

[1] In 1824, his grandfather Count Karl von Pourtalès (who married Marie Louise Elisabeth de Castellane),[17] a Royal Counselor, purchased the estate of Schloss Glumbowitz which included a classicist palace.