Page 297 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Negotium agendum

exclusive authority over secular affairs by bishops; Gregory’s views on
the role of bishops distorts his representation of social structures. 233 One
isolated reference in Gregory describes Franci sending envoys to a king
to express allegiance; it is unclear what body this word represents. 234
The references to municipal legations in Procopius and Gregory of
Tours, though sparse, indicate that by the late sixth century, as for the
medieval period as a whole, the right to send and receive formal lega-
tions remained general, not an exclusive attribute of sovereigns and their
immediate agents. Municipal embassies are likely to have continued for
as long as towns were politically and economically important, whether
under the control of late incarnations of curiae, of comital appointees of
kings, or of their bishops. 235 Embassies sentby towns and bishops, like
the frequent legations among Frankish monarchs, represent the afterlife
of Roman administrative practices of ‘internal diplomacy’.

Two general points emerge from this survey of legatine practices. First,
much of the evidence for the conduct of embassies, and indeed attesta-
tion of individual legations, comes not from documentary material, but
from writers as different as Ennodius, Procopius, Gregory of Tours, and
Fredegar, who exploit narrative accounts of embassies for a variety of
literary strategies. Their exploitation depends upon considerable famili-
arity among contemporaries with the practice and conventions of com-
munication by formal embassies. Knowledge was not merely general but
detailed; Fredegar, in a fabula concerning Justinian, casually mentions a
suppliant bribing the palatine servant who draws the silk curtains to usher
petitioners into the imperial consistorium. 236 Secondly, ceremonial was an
important element in the practice of communication. Negotiations could
occur within the formal situation of audiences, or in informal settings
such as convivia, other public displays, or even talks at the envoy’s accom-
modation; the actual protocol used in any one situation could be variable.
233 Martin Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours: History and Society in the Sixth Century, trans. Christopher
Carrol (Cambridge, 2001).
234
Gregory of Tours, Hist. iv, 51.
235
On authority in early medieval cities, see C. Wickham, Early Medieval Italy: Central Power and
Local Society,400–1000 (London, 1981), 80–92; E. James, The Origins of France: From Clovis to
the Capelians,500–1000 (Houndmills, 1982), 43–63, esp. 56–7; Roger Collins, Early Medieval
Spain: Unity in Diversity,400–1000 (Houndmills, 1983), 88–108; W. Liebeschuetz, ‘The End of
the Ancient City’, in J. Rich (ed.), The City in Late Antiquity (London, 1992), 1–49, esp. 15–25,
35–6; Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, esp. 124–36; D. Nicholas, The Growth of
the Medieval City from Late Antiquity to the Early Fourteenth Century (London, 1997), 1–53, esp.
31; S. T. Loseby, ‘Gregory’s Cities: Urban Functions in Sixth-Century Gaul’, in Ian Wood (ed.),
Franks and Alamanni in the Merovingian Period: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1998),
239–84, esp. 245–9. Vitae sanctae Balthildis, 6 (ed. Bruno Krusch in MGH SRM 2) seems to refer
to hereditary curial obligations, c. 657/65.
236
Fredegar, Chron. ii, 62.
271