Early Categories and Uses

Abstract

The history of representation does not begin with the Middle Ages. For Western society, the origins and uses of representation date back to the frameworks and conventions of ancient diplomacy, first established and exercised in classical Greek and Roman civilizations.1 Our ability to comprehend early medieval papal legation, while admittedly religious and Latin (i.e., western) in focus for this book, requires at least a rudimentary knowledge of diplomatic practices and offices across the ages, if only to identify existing precedents or trends within the Roman Church. Although the present chapter is interested primarily in two early categories and uses of permanent papal representation, it will be argued that the office of medieval papal legate evokes characteristics from earlier Greek and Roman models. As Andrew Gillett noted in his study on envoys and political communications, ‘the conventions covering embassies in classical Greece and imperial Rome, and the administrative arrangements of the latter, form the background to the patterns of political communication in the post-imperial West’.2 To some extent, this same secular administrative model inspired the medieval papacy in its own organization and use of representation throughout western Christendom, lending weight to the argument for administrative, bureaucratic, and legal continuity following the Western Roman Empire’s political collapse in the late fifth century.