Page 54 - Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West 411 - 533

Envoys and Political Communication,411–533

‘foreign’ embassies into ‘internal’ communications; an integral part of
the process of ‘Romanisation’ was the use of conventions of communi-
cation by the elites of former independent regions as a means to display
their participation in the political system of the empire. 84 In an obvi-
ous, political sense, the establishment of the kingdoms was a process of
‘de-provincialisation’. Regions that were once imperial dioceses or
provinces now constituted autonomous polities representing regional
interests. The interaction among the kingdoms and the empire, now
no longer partof a single, hierarchical system, can be called ‘foreign
85
relations’. But the ‘shifting frontiers’ of the post-imperial West are not
to be understood simply as a redrawing of the traditional limes along new
86
military border-zones between the empire and the kingdoms. The west-
ern kingdoms had a marked propensity to replicate the former administra-
tive borders of the Roman provincial administration. 87 The antithetical
terms Romania and barbaricum which appear in fourth-century sources
have no equivalents in the fifth and sixth centuries; indeed, sources from
the western kingdoms refer to their polities and the eastern empire jointly
as res publicae and regna. 88
More important to the present context are the continuities in cultural
and political practices which overlaid military and administrative borders.
Inhabitants of former provinces, now the subjects of new rulers, could
approach imperial authorities, expecting and sometimes receiving the
emperor’s aid. Perhaps the best-known embassy of late antiquity is that
of the ‘groans of the British’ to the magister militum Aetius in or after 446,

84 For recentwork on ‘Romanisation’: Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial
Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge, 1998); Ando, Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty; Ramsay
MacMullen, Romanization in the Time of Augustus (New Haven, 2000).
85 Braund, Rome and the Friendly King, 6, usefully suggests that the foreign relations of the late empire
can be understood in the light of the ‘client’ kingdoms of the late republican period.
86 For the quoted phrase: Hagith S. Sivan and Ralph W. Mathisen, ‘Introduction’, in Ralph W.
Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan (eds.), Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 1996), 1–7; see
the chapters by Drinkwater, Harries, and Olster, and esp. David Harry Miller: ‘Frontier Societies
and the Transition between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages’, 158–71.
87
As one example, note the letter of Remigius of Rheims to Clovis, congratulating his assumption
of the administration of Belgica secunda; Ep. Austr. 2. Clovis’ later conquests are conventionally
recognised as roughly prefiguring the borders of modern France, but it is more pertinent to note
that they reintegrated most of the two imperial dioceses of Gaul and the Seven Provinces.
88
For the dichotomy of Romania and barbaricum: Scolies Ariennes sur le concile d’Aquil´ ee,ed. and
trans. Roger Gryson (Sources chr´ etiennes 267; Paris, 1980), [Epistula Auxenti de fide,vita,et obitu
Ulfilae] 37–8, 165. For other attestations (some sixth century, but not with regard to the western
kingdoms), see the entries s.vv. in ThLL ii, 1733; Lewis and Short, 222;G.W.H.Lampe,
A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford, 1961), 289, 1219; Henri Chirat, Dictionnaire Latin–Franc¸ais des
auteurs chr´ etiens (Turnhout, 1954), 110, 725. Barbaricum was a variantof the classical barbaria. Res
publicae:asatn. 16 above; cf. the letters of the Burgundian king Sigismund to either Anastasius or
Justin I, which strive to portray the Burgundian realm as within the termini of the empire (Avitus
of Vienne, Epp., 78, 93, 94).
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