Page 30 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

and adoption, and the ancient concept of ‘kinship diplomacy’, in which
ties were established between cities or states through the manufacture of
7
common descentfrom prominenthistorical peoples. Baptismal spon-
sorship constituted a new, Christian form of kinship diplomacy which
was to have a vigorous continuity throughout the Middle Ages. 8
The most basic instrument in all forms of contact, however, was the
envoy, the individual who acted as an authority’s representative, and so as
the vehicle for communication. Even formal, diplomatic letters were of
secondary importance to the envoys who bore them as their credentials
and as overtures to their speeches. The political shifts of the fifth century
rode upon the pronouncements and persuasions of countless, largely un-
recorded representatives dispatched by emperors, kings, generals, bishops,
cities, and provincial councils. Examining these individuals reveals how
embassies shaped the framework of events during the fifth century, and
how the demands of communication and negotiation among the west-
ern powers were impressed upon their careers as court officials, clergy,
or provincial magnates.
Embassies were legationes in Latin, in classical Greek; envoys
legati (also, by the mid-sixth century, legatarii)or
. Each term had
9
also a wider range of meanings. There was, however, no classical term
equivalent to the familiar modern word ‘diplomacy’, although the word
10
hasclassicalorigins. Formalisedmanagementofrelations among author-
ities was so ubiquitous a feature of classical and late antique civilisation

7 Ekkehard Weber, ‘Die trojanische Abstammung der R¨ omer als politisches Argument’, in Eckart
Olshausen and Hildegard Biller (eds.), Antike Diplomatie (Wege der Forschung 462; Darmstadt,
1979), 239–55;C.P.Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Andrew
Erskine, Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power (New York, 2001), esp.
256 (on the Trojan origins of the Franks).
8 Joseph H. Lynch, Christianizing Kinship: Ritual Sponsorship in Anglo-Saxon England (Ithaca, 1998),
205–28 on sponsorship by emperors and kings of other rulers. A somewhat different example:
Nikephorus, Short History, ed. and trans. Cyril Mango (Corpus fontium historiae Byzantinae 13;
Washington, DC, 1990), ix: under the direction of the emperor Heraclius, Constantinopolitan
nobles sponsor their visiting ‘Hunnic’ counterparts.
9
I.e. legati (literally, ‘the ones sent or appointed’) was a standard term for military commanders
during the Roman republic and early empire; legationes and legatarii were also used for legacies
and heirs. On the adoption of legatus as the term for envoys (replacing the early republican, and
partly religious, term orator): Jerzy Linderski, ‘Ambassadors Go to Rome’, in E. Fr´ ezouls and A.
Jacquemin (eds.), Les Relations internationales (Paris, 1995), 457–66. The original sense of
as ‘seniors’ or ‘elders of a council’ was retained in late antiquity, and applied also to Christian
presbyters.
A Gothic term for ‘embassy’ is shown by the glosses for and the verb in
the New Testament: airus and airinon, cognate with modern English ‘errand’; the sense is closer
to the Latin than the Greek (airus also glosses

in its root sense of ‘messenger’); Luke xiv.
32, xix.14; Corinthians v.20; Ephesians vi.20 in Die Gotische Bibel, ed. Wilhelm Streitberg, i2nd
edn, ii 3rd edn (Heidelberg, 1919; repr. Heidelberg, 1960).
10
On ‘diplomacy’, see e.g. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy, 17–18.
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