Page 32 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

behalf of their citizens; by and large, such provincial bodies had no mili-
tary counterpart to their supplications. Other levels of public authority
such as bishops, generals, and senior officials, barred from participation
in modern diplomacy by the concept of national sovereignty, also dis-
patched and received embassies on important political issues. There is no
differentiation in vocabulary between ‘internal’ embassies, such as provin-
cial legations to government magistrates, and communications between
heads of state; indeed, some of the most dramatic and detailed accounts of
embassies describe ‘internal’ rather than ‘foreign’ embassies. The conven-
tions which governed these ‘internal’ embassies also determined legations
between rulers; as discussed below, these conventions directly continued
Roman administrative practices. In order to avoid the distracting modern
associations of the word ‘diplomacy’, that term is avoided here, as much
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as possible, in favour of the phrase ‘political communication’. This term
should be taken to encompass formal contact between parties of various
levels of authority concerning public matters. It too imposes on ancient
sources a terminology reflecting modern interests, but it has this virtue
at least, that it avoids referring implicitly to an established set of concepts
which are anachronistic to the period being studied.
The temporal limits of this study are the years 411 and 533, beginning
with the establishment of the first barbarian kingdoms in the West, those
of the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves in Spain; and ending with the com-
mencement of Justinian’s wars in North Africa, Italy, and Spain. These
dates delineate a distinct phase of the history of the western Mediter-
ranean which, for the purposes of this study, had two salient characteris-
tics. On the one hand, continuity of Roman cultural and administrative
patterns provided the modes of political communication: embassies, au-
diences, declamations, and letters. On the other hand, this was a period
of incremental political change as first parts, then all of the West passed
under the government of new monarchies, reaching a brief period of
equipoise before Justinian’s brusque intrusion. The frequent lurches in
political boundaries generated new causes for contact and new combi-
nations of parties in communication. Envoys were special actors in the
politics of this time. Embassies and political communication were impor-
tant in the post-Justinianic West also, as the many references to legations

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By the same token, the term ‘envoy’ is to be preferred to ‘ambassador’; both are representatives
dispatched by a principal, but conventionally ‘ambassador’ refers to a permanent resident in the
recipient’s realm, rather than an agent travelling between parties; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn
(Oxford, 1989), i, 382 s.v. ‘ambassador’ § 2; v, 316 s.v. ‘envoy 2’. The institution of ambassadorial
residence arguably originates in late antiquity with papal apocrisiarii at Constantinople (see below,
chapter 6 atnn. 208–12), but this was the exception rather than the rule. ‘Envoy’ more closely
approximates the terms legatus and
.
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