Page 31 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

that no one context for the deployment of these skills was distinguished
with a separate title. The individual envoy’s talents in communication
were a partof his paideia, his exertions in undertaking an embassy one as-
pectof negotium; relations between states or other authorities constituted
one facetof res publica.
The modern word ‘diplomacy’ has several connotations which are
anachronistic or misleading in the context of this study. It can mean
the instruments of the modern system of international relations which
originated in the high-medieval contact between Venice and Byzantium,
developed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and further evolved under the aegis of the League of Nations and United
Nations in the twentieth century. These instruments and conventions
include foreign policy formulated by centralised national governments,
bureaucratic control of foreign affairs, permanent overseas consulates,
career diplomats, international conventions, and diplomatic recognition
as an exclusive acknowledgement of sovereignty. Many of these aspects
of modern diplomacy have counterparts in the ancient and medieval
world, but none was institutionalised as they are in the modern world.
‘Diplomacy’ can also mean, more generally, ‘warfare by other means’
(reversing Clausewitz’s dictum): not a cynical statement but an accurate
summary of the deployment by states of non-combatant means to achieve
security or hegemony, a constant and intrinsic complement to actual
military engagement. Diplomacy, in this sense, is strategic; it embraces
for example payment of subsidies to client polities, or involvement in the
domestic politics of another state in order to support an allied regime. It
also includes the exploitation by states of the potential of their military
force as leverage for negotiating their aims. 11
Many of the embassies examined below set out to achieve ‘diplomatic’
purposes in this latter sense; the negotiations of the Gothic king of Italy,
Theoderic, with the eastern emperors to achieve recognition of his rule,
and with other western kings to prevent armed conflict, are examples.
But for other legations, the implications of our term ‘diplomacy’ as the
conduct of state-to-state relationships are inappropriate. Some of the most
interesting embassies of which we have record, particularly in saints’ Vitae,
were dispatched not from heads of state but from local communities such
as provincial cities. Their aims were to negotiate with authorities on

11
For the interrelationship between warfare and these types of diplomacy, see e.g. Hugh Elton,
Warfare in Roman Europe AD 350–425 (Oxford, 1996), 175–98; John Haldon, Warfare,State and
Society in the Byzantine World,565–1204 (London, 1999), 36–9, 277–9. The observations of Edward
N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century AD to the Third (Baltimore
and London, 1976), e.g. 1–5, remain instructive, even if his thesis of a ‘grand strategy’ is not
accepted.
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