An undercover agent in Rus? Two letters of Niketas Magistros to John Mystikos
An undercover agent in Rus? Two letters of Niketas Magistros to John Mystikos

Summary/Abstract: An abiding feature of Byzantine diplomacy was its awareness of the utility of having native-speakers available to communicate with external elites, whether on grand embassies or for less formal – even undercover – messaging. Instances of this practice are well-known on the secular plane, but there are also cases of churchmen being assigned to foreign societies where they could speak the language. Christian flocks living north of the Black Sea provide examples of this. Against such a background, it is worth considering two letters of Niketas Magistros (‘the Exile’) addressed to his friend, fellow man-of-letters, and fairly frequent correspondent, John Mystikos. Written in the aftermath of a lengthy and apparently successful assignment to ‘the barbarians,’ they congratulate him in allusive and somewhat extravagant vein. Interpreting letters written in such high style is difficult, but it is worth raising three basic questions: where had John’s mission been carried out? How had he communicated with his hosts – directly, in a language they understood, or through interpreters? And if John’s mission had a heavy veneer of preaching, as Niketas’ wording and allusions suggest, do the latter also imply some other, less spiritually-oriented, purpose? That John’s doings as ‘a public servant while cloaked in sober garb’ had been carried out in Rus is overwhelmingly likely. He was most probably engaged in speaking on religious matters, in other words, preaching in the language comprehensible to most inhabitants of his ‘target area’: Slavonic. But it may well be that John’s duties as ‘a public servant’ extended beyond spreading the Word of God. An undercover operation on behalf of Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos may well have been on the agenda.

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