Page 267 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Negotium agendum

away from central government and onto the shoulders of land-holders.
In Cassiodorus’ Variae, cities and land-holders were, as under earlier
imperial law, required to provide public services (munera) to support the
cursus publicus, such as the provision of additional horses. 83 The gov-
ernment continued to maintain its own staff for land- and boat-post;
public rowers (dromonarii) for the river-post, co-ordinating with land-
post by horse and maintained at government expense, are explicitly at-
tested for the river Po, which brought travellers to the royal court in
Ravenna. 84 Yetin one injunction, Theoderic orders municipal officials
of the city of Pavia to provide boat transport and provisions for foreign
envoys travelling to court. 85 A more general provision appears in the
Burgundian law code, the Liber constitutionum, under the title ‘Against
the refusal of hospitality for the envoys of foreign peoples and for trav-
ellers’, which obliges all classes to provide accommodation for envoys of
the royal court, legates from foreign peoples, and those travelling (pre-
sumably to the court) on private business; foreign envoys are entitled
also to food. 86 Transportis notmentioned as partof this public levy;
itmay still be provided from governmentresources, or perhaps is now
the private responsibility of travellers themselves. Subsequent early me-
dieval law codes and formulae contain similar provisions. 87 Several sixth-
century literary sources may describe private provisioning of embassies
as a public levy. 88 The requirementfor landowners to provide hospital-
itas to travellers and envoys seems not to come directly from imperial
law, butrecalls similar munera. The shiftin provisioning of travellers on
official business in the early medieval kingdoms probably proceeds from

83 Imperial practice: CTh viii, 5.64; xv, 3; Jones, LRE, 462, 749, 832–3, 1349 n. 22. Cass., Variae
xii, 15.6–7 of 533/7 (for the city of Squillace in Bruttium, Cassiodorus as praetorian prefect
commutes the costs of provision of annona and paraveredi to the government through taxation
concession).
84 Cass., Varaie ii, 31; iv, 15.
85 Cass., Variae iv, 45, before September 527. For the municipal authorities involved: Liebeschuetz,
Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 124–5.
86
Liber constitutionum, ed. L. R. De Salis, MGH Legum sectio i,tom. 2.1 (Hanover, 1892), xxxviii,
2 (convivia regis), 3 (legatis . . . extranearum gentium), 7 (in causa privata iter agens). On Liber constit.
xxxviii and hospitalitas: Ganshof, ‘Merowingisches Gesandschaftswesen’, 177; Goffart, Barbarians
and Romans, 40–50, esp. 41–3, 48. The limits of hospitalitas are briefly outlined in Collectio Avellana,
116.3, 158.2 ( = Hormisdas, Indiculi of 515, 519).
87
Marculf, Formulae i, 11; for Frankish, Lombard, and Anglo-Saxon law codes: Barnwell, ‘War and
Peace’, 136 n. 49.
88
Ennodius, Vita Epiphani, 149–50: provisions given to Epiphanius and Victor of Turin by incolae
as they travel to Lyons (Ennodius twice mentions that goods had to be bought by the hosts to
provide for the travellers); this is described as personal hospitality rather than fulfilment of a levy.
Gregory of Tours, Hist. vi, 45: the procession of the Frankish princess Rigunth to Spain where
she is to be married to the Gothic prince Reccared, accompanied by a magna legatio from Spain,
travelled expense de diversis civitatibus in itinere; this royal procession, however, may not reflect usual
practice.
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