A Little Critical Edition
(text with light footnote markers; apparatus below)
Editor’s Preface
The following letters survive only in a single, damaged dossier copied in a late eighth- or early ninth-century hand, preserved (so the catalog claims) in a monastic library on the Mediterranean littoral. The original exchange—if it existed—would almost certainly have traveled indirectly, passing through merchants, clerics, interpreters, and the practical censorship of “polite diplomacy.” The Latin is uneven, the Greek marginalia fussy, and several key terms (especially those touching law, titles, and “the realm”) appear to have been “normalized” by a later scribe who wanted the world to look more orderly than it was.¹
Whether the correspondence is authentic, embellished, or a clever monastic teaching-text, it remains valuable as a window into a shared late antique anxiety: how to live when the old categories still name the world, but no longer fully govern it.
Letter I — Ebroin to Muʿāwiya
Neustria; carried south by a mixed caravan of traders and churchmen. The scribe notes: “translated by a Greek clerk at a port.”²
To Muʿāwiya, ruler in Damascus and over the sea-roads,
I write from a land where the word Roman³ still has power, though Rome herself has become a memory that people use like a tool. Our bishops speak the Latin of books, but the people pray in tongues that split like branches. In one town a man will call himself “Roman” to claim a legal privilege; in the next he will call himself “Frank” to claim a sword-right.
You govern lands where cities still stand thick with stone and habit. Our cities are smaller and our countryside larger—so large that the village saint can feel nearer than any king. The calendar is as mighty as the sword: feast days, fasts, processions, the holy anniversaries that tell even an illiterate farmer what time means.⁴
There is another trouble: writing itself. A charter can settle a dispute for a generation—or create a dispute for five generations, because ink outlives memory and makes liars into lawyers. In my realm, to write is to invite argument; yet without writing we are ruled by rumor.
Tell me, then: what do your peoples speak in markets, in courts, in prayer? How do you command an empire where language is a frontier? And how do you keep the old learning without letting it become an elite’s private weapon?
—Ebroin, major domus (as the scribe styles him)⁵
Letter II — Muʿāwiya to Ebroin
Damascus; dictated, then rendered into a careful Greek for transmission. A later marginal note complains: “too philosophical for a practical dispatch.”⁶
To Ebroin, bearer of the realm’s burdens,
Your questions strike the true nerve: culture is governance long before governance is law.
In my lands, tongues stack like stones.⁷ In the market you hear Arabic, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian—each with its own humor and curses. In the old offices, the registers still breathe in Greek and other scripts because the machine of administration was built that way. A ruler who tries to pull out every old beam will bring the roof down on his own head.
So I have not made one tongue by force. I have made one direction: orders must arrive; taxes must be counted; soldiers must be paid; courts must not become private theaters for revenge. If a community prays as it has prayed, I do not uproot it merely to display power. But I require that disputes be settled without turning roads into graveyards.
You speak of saints. Here, too, holy places create loyalty stronger than coins. People obey what feels sacred. A wise ruler does not trample the sacred; he builds paths around it, and sometimes builds with it.⁸
As for learning: the old books are sharp knives. They can cut bread or throats. I have learned to honor scholars without letting scholarship become a separate kingdom.
Language is a frontier, you say. Then treat it like one: staff it, patrol it, translate across it. Interpreters hold realms together.⁹
—Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān
Letter III — Ebroin to Muʿāwiya
Ebroin shifts to identity, law, and the countryside’s “micro-civilizations.”
Muʿāwiya,
If interpreters hold realms together, then I am ruling with frayed rope.
Our Latin is changing. The clerks preserve the old forms, but even they pronounce words differently from their grandfathers. The people’s speech has drifted so far that Latin sometimes feels like a liturgical costume—worn on feast days, removed for daily work. The gap between altar-language and hearth-language grows.
And law: we keep Roman law like an heirloom cup—brought out to impress guests—while the everyday drinking is done from wooden bowls. In practice, many judgments are bargains: compensation, hostages, marriages arranged to turn blood-feud into kinship. The old jurists wrote of citizens and contracts; our world thinks in families and oaths.
Yet monasteries are becoming our strangest institutions. They are not merely holy; they are archives, schools, granaries, and diplomatic channels.¹⁰ A monastery can outlast three kings. It can store letters like these. It can teach a peasant’s son to write, then place him as a clerk in a great man’s hall, and suddenly a family with no Roman ancestry has Roman tools.
Tell me: in your realm, what replaces old Roman identity? Do people become “subjects,” “believers,” “communities,” “tribes”—and which word truly commands their loyalty?
—Ebroin
Letter IV — Muʿāwiya to Ebroin
Muʿāwiya answers with a late antique theory of identity and “portable authority.”
Ebroin,
You search for the single word that replaces Rome. There is no single word. **Rome does not die in one blow; it breaks into usable pieces.**³
In my lands, identity is layered like armor. A man may be of a tribe, of a town, of a confession, of a language, and of an empire—depending on which danger approaches. When a tax collector comes, he is a “villager.” When an army comes, he is “of this city.” When a priest speaks, he is “of this confession.” When honor is challenged, he is “of this blood.”
A ruler’s task is not to erase these layers, but to ensure they do not become rival sovereignties.
You mention monasteries. Here, too, institutions that seem “spiritual” are also infrastructure. They feed travelers, preserve learning, and—most importantly—shape the calendar. Whoever shapes time shapes obedience. A week that returns predictably trains a population in predictability.⁴
Coinage matters as much as sermons. A coin is a small piece of authority you can carry in your pocket. When coins change—weight, marks, language—people feel the state’s hand in their palm.¹¹ Public ritual is also a kind of currency: processions, proclamations, the ruler’s name spoken in the right places.
So what replaces Rome? In some places: habit. In others: worship. In others: the simple fact that the frontier must be held, and someone must pay for it.
—Muʿāwiya
Letter V — Ebroin to Muʿāwiya
Ebroin leans into “texture”: clothing, gendered piety, literacy, and village-worlds.
Muʿāwiya,
Your image—identity as armor—fits our north as well.
I watch culture change in small things first. The old Roman styles persist in bishops’ clothing and in the language of charters, but the great men dress for riding, not for forums. Even the way people sit in halls—who gets the bench near the fire, who stands, who eats first—becomes a constitution written in gestures.
Women shape the realm in ways men pretend not to notice. A marriage can end a feud more effectively than a battle. A noblewoman’s patronage of a saint can transfer loyalty from one family to another like water redirected into a new channel. When a woman becomes abbess, she can rule land with a steadiness some counts cannot manage.¹²
Yet the countryside is full of tiny civilizations: villages where customary law is older than anyone can remember, where disputes are settled under a tree or beside a shrine, where the world’s edge is the next river. To them, “Rome” is a word from sermons and “the realm” is a rumor that arrives with soldiers.
How do you govern cultural variety without turning it into cultural war? How do you keep difference from becoming defiance?
—Ebroin
Letter VI — Muʿāwiya to Ebroin
Muʿāwiya replies: tolerance as technique; the state as a web of practices; translation as power.
Ebroin,
Do not confuse tolerance with softness. Tolerance is often a technique of stability, not a feeling.
First: name the backbone. In my experience it is four things:
routes (roads, ports, passes, messenger chains),
revenue (predictable collection, predictable spending),
armed force (paid, disciplined, not private),
public meaning (ritual, calendar, authority spoken aloud).
If communities differ in language, clothing, prayer, marriage customs—let them. But if a community claims the right to block the road, refuse the treasury, raise private armies, or proclaim a rival authority, then difference has become secession.
Second: translation is power. Whoever translates decides what counts as the same. If you translate poorly, you create rebellions by accident. If you translate well, you can make many peoples hear one command without forcing one tongue.⁷
You describe villages where “the realm” is a rumor. Then make the realm visible in gentle ways before you make it visible in harsh ones. Let the first face of authority be a fair court, a repaired bridge, a grain store that opens in famine, a coin that is trusted.¹¹ Later, when you must show the sword, people will already have learned that the realm is not only punishment.
This is late antiquity’s secret: empires do not survive by being huge; they survive by being habitable.
—Muʿāwiya
Apparatus & Notes
¹ Dossier + “normalized” terms. The Preface’s claim mirrors the manuscript’s own self-conscious corrections: titles and “realm” terminology shift across hands (see note 5).
² Port translation. The colophon-like note indicates mediation through coastal scribal culture, likely Greek-speaking.
³ “Roman.” The Latin varies: Romanus / Romanicus / legis. A gloss paraphrases: “those who claim old privileges.” The identity is as much juridical as ethnic.
⁴ Calendar as governance. Later marginal summary: “Who orders feasts orders obedience.” This theme recurs (Letter IV).
⁵ Ebroin’s title. Manuscripts disagree: maior domus, rector, procurator. The inconsistency reflects cross-cultural mismatch of offices and later scribal “dignifying.”
⁶ “Too philosophical.” A marginal complaint (Greek) suggests later readers expected dispatch-style brevity, supporting use as wisdom literature.
⁷ “Tongues stack like stones.” Likely a translator’s metaphor; another hand offers “roof-tiles.” The phrase signals layered multilingualism in markets vs. offices.
⁸ Sacred sites as infrastructure. A gloss: “Build roads around shrines; do not break the shrine and lose the road.”
⁹ “Interpreters.” Gloss expands interpretes beyond translators: brokers, notaries, customs officials—cultural “routers” of people, taxes, and disputes.
¹⁰ Monasteries as archives/granaries. A ninth-century marginal note: “true in our day,” hinting at possible retrospective emphasis rather than invention.
¹¹ Coin vs. seal. One witness reads sigillum (seal) where another reads nummus (coin). Either way, the point is portable authority: money or document-mark as state-in-the-hand.
¹² Women, patronage, and abbesses. A later hand underlines the abbess line and adds: “Here is the quiet power.” This reflects monastic interest and may amplify female institutional agency.
Mini Apparatus Criticus Edition
(select lines only; not exhaustive—just enough to feel like a printed text)
Editor’s Preface
The following letters survive only in a single, damaged dossier copied in a late eighth- or early ninth-century hand, preserved (so the catalog claims) in a monastic library on the Mediterranean littoral. The original exchange—if it existed—would almost certainly have traveled indirectly, passing through merchants, clerics, interpreters, and the practical censorship of “polite diplomacy.” The Latin is uneven, the Greek marginalia fussy, and several key terms appear to have been “normalized” by a later scribe who wanted the world to look more orderly than it was.
App. pref. 3: regnum AB : res publica CD (bis)
App. pref. 7: “normalized” add. C (gl. “emendatum ad morem nostrum”)
Letter I — Ebroin to Muʿāwiya
“…where the word Roman still has power…”
App. I.1: Romanus A : Romanicus B : legis C D
“Our cities are smaller…and the village saint can feel nearer than any king. The calendar is as mighty as the sword…”
App. I.6: “village saint” A : om. B : add. C (“sanctus loci”)
App. I.7: “calendar” A C : “feasts” B : “weeks” D
“…a charter can settle a dispute…because ink outlives memory…”
App. I.11: “ink outlives memory” A : “scriptum manet” B : “writing is a net” C : sententia tantum D
—Ebroin, major domus…
App. I.subscrip.: maior domus A : rector B : procurator C : om. D
Letter II — Muʿāwiya to Ebroin
“In my lands, tongues stack like stones.”
App. II.2: “stack like stones” A : om. B : “lie like tiles” C (ex gl. Gr.) : sententia D
“…in the old offices, the registers still breathe in Greek…”
App. II.5: “registers” A C : “accounts” B : “tables” D
App. II.5: “Greek” A : add. C (“et Syriac”) : om. B D
“…build paths around the sacred…”
App. II.10: “build paths around it” A : “avoid offense” B : “honor it publicly” C : sententia D
“Interpreters hold realms together.”
App. II.14: interpretes A C : notarii B : “brokers and scribes” add. C (marg.) : sententia D
Letter III — Ebroin to Muʿāwiya
“…Latin sometimes feels like a liturgical costume…”
App. III.3: “liturgical costume” A : “church-cloak” B : “altar-tongue” C : sententia D
“…Roman law like an heirloom cup…”
App. III.6: “heirloom cup” A : “old vessel” B : “ceremonial law” C : sententia D
“Monasteries…archives, schools, granaries, and diplomatic channels.”
App. III.11: “granaries” A : om. B : add. C (marg. “verum hodie”) : sententia D
App. III.11: “diplomatic channels” A : “safe-houses” B : “letter-stores” C : om. D
Letter IV — Muʿāwiya to Ebroin
“Rome does not die in one blow; it breaks into usable pieces.”
App. IV.1: “breaks into usable pieces” A : “is divided” B : “is repurposed” C : sententia D
“Whoever shapes time shapes obedience.”
App. IV.8: “shapes time” A : “orders feasts” B : “orders weeks” C : sententia D
“A coin is…authority you can carry in your pocket.”
App. IV.11: nummus A B : sigillum C : paraphr. D (“auctoritas portatur”)
Letter V — Ebroin to Muʿāwiya
“…the way people sit in halls…becomes a constitution written in gestures.”
App. V.4: “constitution” A : “order” B : “custom” C : sententia D
“Women shape the realm…”
App. V.6: “women…shape” A : add. C (sublineatum) : shortened B : sententia D
App. V.7: “abbess…rule land” A C : om. B : sententia D
Letter VI — Muʿāwiya to Ebroin
“Tolerance is…a technique of stability…”
App. VI.1: “technique” A : “policy” B : “discipline” C : sententia D
“…the backbone…routes…revenue…armed force…public meaning…”
App. VI.4: fourfold list A : threefold B (om. “public meaning”) : fourfold C : sententia D
App. VI.4: “public meaning” A C : add. C (marg. “ritus”) : om. B D
“Translation is power…”
App. VI.9: “translation” A : “interpretation” B : “the brokers decide sameness” C (marg.) : sententia D
“…a coin that is trusted.”
App. VI.13: nummus A B : sigillum C : paraphr. D
Appendix: Stemma Codicum (as referenced)
Ω
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α β
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A B C D
Editorial Introduction
(in the manner of a Loeb/Teubner preface—compact, skeptical, and a little pedantic)
1. Title and Scope
This volume presents an epistolary dossier purporting to record a correspondence between Ebroin (mayor of the palace in Neustria, active in the later seventh century) and Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān (ruler of the Umayyad Caliphate, r. 661–680). The text survives in late copies and cannot be verified by independent contemporary citation. It is therefore edited here as literary-historical evidence: a witness to how later readers imagined governance, culture, and legitimacy in the “middle time” between Roman universality and medieval plurality.
2. The Witnesses and Their Character
We posit an archetype (Ω) not because it can be reconstructed in full, but because several shared errors and parallel structures strongly imply a common ancestor rather than independent invention. From Ω descend two recensions:
α (port-recension) preserves multilingual texture, administrative detail, and vivid metaphors; it is “Mediterranean-facing,” shaped by translation culture and mercantile routes. From α derive:
A (Coastal Codex): fullest rhetorical version, with Greek marginalia and interpretive glosses; best for “texture.”
B (Merchant Copy): abridged, practical, sometimes dropping metaphors and compressing lists—likely produced for use rather than preservation.
β (monastic/school recension) tends to smooth political roughness into moral counsel, regularize terminology toward “Roman” models, and extract sententiae (maxims). From β derive:
C (Monastic Library Copy): most heavily corrected; frequently substitutes res publica for regnum and occasionally softens pointed remarks about clerical power.
D (School Excerpt / florilegium): often preserves only aphorisms and summary tags; context is sacrificed for reusable doctrine.
This division accounts neatly for the distribution of variants such as nummus/sigillum (“coin/seal”), regnum/res publica (“kingdom/commonwealth”), and the recurring phenomenon of sententia tantum in D.
3. Language, Translation, and the Problem of “Original”
Although the dossier is preserved in Latin with Greek marginalia, internal features suggest translation layers. The Greek glosses in A sometimes preserve images (“tongues stack like stones”) that appear calqued from a Semitic idiom, while C’s Latin often exhibits the “flattening” typical of later editorial taste: less metaphor, more moral clarity. The editor must therefore resist treating the Latin surface as a single authorial voice. The text is best read as a corridor through which multiple scribal cultures pass: courtly, mercantile, and monastic.
4. Genre and Function: Diplomacy or Didactic?
The most important question is not “did Ebroin and Muʿāwiya truly exchange letters?” but “what did later readers want such an exchange to teach?” Three features argue for a didactic afterlife:
Balanced antitheses (“victory vs. justice,” “lineage vs. habit”) recur with a regularity that resembles rhetorical training.
The repeated marginal summaries (“Order is a kind of mercy,” “Who orders feasts orders obedience”) align with school extraction practices.
D’s form—maxims shorn from narrative—suggests classroom or pulpit use.
In short, the dossier behaves less like a cache of dispatches and more like wisdom literature dressed as diplomacy.
5. Historical Plausibility and Anachronism
The letters contain many elements broadly congruent with the later seventh century: the coexistence of old administrative structures and new rulers; the political force of saints and calendars; the centrality of roads, ports, taxation, and payment; and the mediation performed by interpreters and notaries. However, certain emphases—especially the “monastery as archive-granary-diplomatic node”—may reflect eighth–ninth century monastic realities projected backward. C’s marginal “true in our day” is telling: it reads like a reader recognizing themselves in the past.
Accordingly, the editor treats these letters not as direct reportage but as late antique themes refracted through early medieval institutions.
6. Editorial Principles (Text Constituted)
This edition is intentionally modest: it aims to produce a readable “best text” while preserving the dossier’s layered transmission.
Primary base: A, for richness and the least moralizing interference.
Control witness: B, for likely earlier brevity and practical phrasing.
Secondary: C and D, mainly to document normalization and sententiae extraction; adopted only when A/B appear defective or incoherent.
The apparatus criticus is selective: it records variants where they illuminate recension character (α vs. β), ideological smoothing, or key cultural terms (Roman, realm, coin/seal, interpreters). Minor orthographic fluctuations are ignored.
7. On Key Terms
“Roman” is treated as a contested sign: ethnic, legal, and cultural at once. The variant set (Romanus/Romanicus/legis) is a feature, not a nuisance.
“Realm” (regnum/res publica) signals ideological posture: post-Roman pragmatism vs. Romanizing nostalgia.
“Coin/Seal” (nummus/sigillum) captures the late antique shift toward portable authority, whether monetary or documentary.
8. Conclusion: What the Dossier Reveals
Whatever its origin, the correspondence dramatizes a shared late antique problem: how to make difference governable without making it a war. Its most persistent claim is cultural rather than military: that calendars, language, ritual, and the small technologies of trust (coin, charter, court procedure) are what allow an empire—or a kingdom, or a commonwealth—to feel habitable.
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