Page 291 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Negotium agendum

bishops of Rome. This potential was briefly realised with the prolonged
expedition to Italy and Sicily by the emperor Constans II from 662 to his
death in 668. 203 Throughout the fifth century, the politics of the western
kingdoms were essentially provincial: contact with imperial authorities
was largely with senior civil and military magistrates at Arles, rarely with
the imperial court in Rome or Ravenna. 204 After Justinian, every western
ruler had to be mindful of distant Constantinople.

New terminology

Just as the dominance of France in early modern times bequeathed to
modern diplomacy a heavily Francophone vocabulary, so Constantino-
ple’s position affected language of political communication in the early
Middle Ages. From the early sixth century, the standard Latin term for
an envoy, legatus, came to be displaced by a new term, legatarius.The
first attested users of the term were Greek-speakers or translators from
Greek, including the legatarius Anthimus, sent by either the imperial or
the Ostrogothic court to the Frankish king Theuderic I. 205 Italian and
Gallic authors of the sixth century continued to use legatus,but legatarius
appears in the extant correspondence between the Frankish royal court
and the imperial court of Constantinople, written in the 540s and 580s; it
appears to have been adopted by the Frankish chancelleries in imitation

203 Popes: e.g. Gregory the Great, Registrum xiii, 41. Constans II: Liber pont., 79; Paul the Deacon,
Historia Langobardorum v, 6–12; Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, 1987),
263–5. Frankish concern at the presence of Constans: Bede, HE iv, 1: the Neustrian maior domus
Ebroin detained Hadrian, the abbot sent in 664 by Pope Vitalian to accompany Theodore of
Tarsus to Canterbury, on suspicion of undertaking a mission from Constans to the Anglo-Saxon
kings, detrimental to the Frankish kingdoms. (Ebroin detained the north African Hadrian, not
the Greek Theodore, possibly because Hadrian’s monastery was at Naples, which Constans
had visited (W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), 13–14;
J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1975), 63–4; Wood, Merovingian King-
doms, 176); perhaps also because Hadrian had previously travelled through Gaul twice diversis ex
causis.)
204
Gillett, ‘Accession of Euric’, 31–2.
205
Greek speaker: Anthimus, De observatio ciborum,inscriptio; c. 511–533 (nb. c. 64: nos Graece dicimus).
Translators: Epiphanius, Historia tripartita vii, 24.9; x, 33.1; xi, 15.18; after 553 (Epiphanius’
origins are not known, but he was employed by Cassiodorus to translate large amounts of Greek
material; legatarius is not used in Cassiodorus’ own writings); Rusticus deaconis,Synodicon in
Acta conciliorum oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz (Berlin, 1922–3), i, 4.2,p. 63 line 2; after 565
(on Rusticus: Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ed. A. Di Berardino, trans. A. Walford (Cambridge,
1992), ii, 747). The only attested user who may antedate the early sixth century is the glossator
Placidus, Liber glossarum, 550, line 8; ?mid-fifth century.
Legatarius continued to be used also in its traditional sense as an heir; ThLL vii, s.v. 1101;
Niermeyer, Mediae latinitatis lexicon minus (Leiden, 1984), s.v. 593–4.
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