Page 33 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and political communication

in the Histories of Gregory of Tours and the Chronicle of Fredegar demon-
strate; evidence from the later sixth century is drawn upon below for
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comparative purposes. But the envoys of the Merovingian period trav-
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elled between relatively stable political blocs. Their predecessors in the
long fifth century grappled with traditional tools in situations of recurrent
novelty.
The geographic scope of this study is the former western provinces
and Constantinople. It is not a study of ‘Constantinople and the West’;
it is a central characteristic of the period that political communication
was multilateral, not radiating from one imperial centre. The former
western provinces, though divided among a multiplicity of states, shared
with each other and with the east Roman empire a common history
and culture which included, among other things, uniform practices of
political communication. In an important sense, negotiations among the
various states, including the eastern imperial court, were not foreign
relations but the internal negotiations of a cultural and diplomatic bloc. 15
Political communication throughout this bloc was conducted within a
variety of contexts, both geopolitical and social. To modern eyes, these
contexts include both foreign relations and internal governmental ad-
ministration, but those distinctions do not necessarily hold fast for the
period of transition between empire and kingdoms. It is useful to sketch
the major routes of communication discussed in the following chapters.
At the highest level of administration and formality, the courts of the two
halves of the late Roman empire communicated through formal channels
including embassies, in order to maintain the complex relationship be-
tween two centres representing one authority. As the western provinces,
and finally Italy, came under the rule of multiple kings, the role of the
western emperor in this relationship was assumed by the barbarian courts,
especially that of the kingdom of Italy; the propaganda of the Ostrogothic
king Theoderic refers to utraeque res publicae, Eastand West. 16
A second venerable and formal channel of communication was that
between the Roman empire and the empire of Iran, which the Romans
referred to as Persia, ruled and reinvigorated by the Sassanian dynasty
since the early third century. Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries,
the forms by which relations between the two ‘superpowers’ were con-
ducted evolved, developing more elaborate diplomatic concepts and

13
On Gregory and Fredegar: below, chapter 6.
14
Notwithstanding the internal divisions of the Merovingian kingdom into Teilreiche: Ian Wood,
The Merovingian Kingdoms,450–751 (London, 1994), 54–5, 60–3, 88–101.
15
Cf. Garth Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Prince-
ton, 1993), 6 on the Byzantine and Islamic ‘commonwealths’.
16
Cass., Variae i, 1.4; cf. Maximianus (below, n. 82): geminum . . . regnum.
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