Page 29 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

Embassies and envoys were important during the fragmentation of the
Westbecause disunity gives rise notonly to conflictbutalso to com-
munication. Throughout antiquity, relations among the Mediterranean
states and neighbouring powers had been managed by peaceful commu-
nications and alliances as well as by warfare. For several centuries, when
the entire Mediterranean basin was subject to the Roman empire, for-
merly independent regions interacted politically with each other only
little, looking primarily towards their common master, the emperor or
his provincial representatives. In the fifth century ad, however, the west-
ern half of the empire was divided into several autonomous regions under
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the control of monarchs, the barbarian kingdoms. The political unity of
the empire was replaced by a multiplicity of powers, and constant politi-
cal interaction again became necessary throughout these former parts of
the empire. Political communication and negotiation were the inevitable
products of the break-up of the empire, and were fundamental to the
nature of the barbarian kingdoms and of the Roman empire in the fifth
and early sixth centuries.
Relations between the fifth-century states were undertaken in a variety
of ways, some continuing classical practices unchanged, others products
of their time. The empire and the kingdoms established formal alliances
which, to the extent that they can be understood from the limited sources,
resemble the truces, defensive and offensive alliances, and ‘friendships’ of
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the Greek states and the Roman republic. Hostages, as in classical antiq-
uity, were held in order to facilitate cultural and political ties as much as to
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provide sureties. Pseudo-familial ties, including both marriage alliances
among royalty and military and civilian elites, and ‘adoption-in-arms’ of
one ruler by another, were a new development in imperial foreign affairs,
influenced or imported by the influx of barbarian aristocracies. The func-
tion of these alliances, however, was appreciated by Romans, not least
because of traditional Mediterranean practices of aristocratic marriage ties

4
Despite its pejorative overtones and Romanocentric perspective, I find ‘barbarian’ the most con-
venient label for these states; it has the virtue of being a contemporary term. The designations
‘successor’ and ‘post-Roman states’ are only superficially more neutral; they imply a break and
new start which down-plays the cultural and other continuities from imperial to early medieval
times. ‘Post-imperial’, restricting discontinuity to the form of overarching political structure, is
more appropriate. ‘Germanic’ is quite misleading; see Michael Kulikowski, ‘Nation versus Army:
A Necessary Contrast?’ in Andrew Gillett (ed.), On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approaches to Ethnicity
in the Early Middle Ages (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 4; Turnhout, 2002), 69–70 n. 2.
5
For overviews of recentwork on foedera, see Walter Pohl (ed.), Kingdoms of the Empire: The Integration
of Barbarians in Late Antiquity (The Transformation of the Roman World 1; Leiden, 1997), with
papers by Pohl, Wirth, Heather, and especially Chrysos.
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David Braund, Rome and the Friendly King: The Character of the Client Kingship (London 1984),
12–16; A. D. Lee, ‘The Role of Hostages in Roman Diplomacy with Sasanian Persia’, Historia 40
(1991), 366–74.
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