Page 28 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

as dramatic and pivotal moments; so too do many modern studies, which
incorporate embassies into their accounts and analyses of political events.
It is not usually acknowledged that the relatively few embassies attested
by our sources represent only a small fraction of the constant flow of
legations in the period, and that embassies were so common an event
as to be generally ignored by contemporary authors. As a result, specific
embassies which appear in the sources are often misinterpreted by mod-
ern commentators by being presented as outstanding; modest events are
turned into decisive moments of history. Such reconstructions wrongly
interpret the specific case; but they also misconstrue the general function-
ing of political processes and communication in the period. A ‘diplomatic
history’ of the fragmentation of the Roman West would be profoundly
revealing, but the materials available are very inadequate for the task. The
same envoy cited above, a court servant of Theoderic king of Italy, states
that he himself undertook twenty-five legations for the king; narrative
sources do not record this many embassies for the whole of Theoderic’s
reign, though more embassies are attested to and from the Ostrogothic
2
court than any other western centre of power. Notonly is there a lack
of anything like a representative record of the number of embassies ex-
changed, but the nature of the available sources does not lend itself to
a reconstruction of political events. Most western texts which mention
legations were not intended as records of the issues negotiated, but as
eulogistic monuments to the individuals who carried out the onerous
task of the embassy.
This study seeks to turn this emphasis to an advantage, by focusing
not on ‘diplomacy’ but on its agent, the envoy. The sources foreground
the political and social patterns which determined the conduct of lega-
tions, rather than the issues of negotiation. Examining these patterns
offers valuable insight into the role of communication in the unrav-
elling of imperial authority in the West, a role traditionally overshad-
3
owed by communication’s counterpart, military force. Because many
of the sources are formally eulogistic, they are examined in the chapters
below as much through literary as historical analysis, in order to re-
veal the ways in which the undertaking of embassies fulfilled social
functions.
2
Senarius, Epitaph, line 9.
3
For the identification of communication as a new field of research in late antique and medieval
history, see Marco Mostert (ed.), New Approaches to Medieval Communication (Utrecht Studies in
Medieval Literacy 1; Turnhout, 1999), esp. 15–37, 193–297; Michael McCormick, Origins of the
European Economy: Communications and Commerce,AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001), esp. 15–19. The
study of political communication is a complement, not an alternative, to the study of warfare;
cf. the salutary comments of Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire
(Philadelphia, 2001), ix.
2