The mandatōr deriving from the Latin word for "messenger", was a subaltern official in the middle Byzantine Empire

Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centred on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania to its inhabitants and neighbours, the Empire was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State...

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The mandatores were a corps of messengers for special duties attached to the bureau of all senior civil and military officials, such as the thematic stratēgoi

Strategos

Strategos, plural strategoi, is used in Greek to mean "general". In the Hellenistic and Byzantine Empires the term was also used to describe a military governor...

, the commanders of the tagmata

Tagma (military)

The tagma is a term for a military unit of battalion or regiment size. The best-known and most technical use of the term however refers to the elite regiments formed by Byzantine emperor Constantine V and comprising the central army of the Byzantine Empire in the 8th–11th centuries.-History and...

, the logothetes

Logothete

Logothete was an administrative title originating in the eastern Roman Empire. In the middle and late Byzantine Empire, it rose to become a senior administrative title, equivalent to a minister or secretary of state...

 and others. They were then headed by a prōtomandatōr , a mid-level official.

These officials must be distinguished from the honorary dignity of basilikos mandatōr (Greek: βασιλικός μανδάτωρ, "imperial mandatōr"), which was one of the lower court titles (fourth from the bottom, between the vestētōr and the kandidatos). According to the Klētorologion

Kletorologion

The Klētorologion of Philotheos , is the longest and most important of the Byzantine lists of offices and court precedence . It was published in September of 899 during the reign of Emperor Leo VI the Wise by the otherwise unknown prōtospatharios and atriklinēs Philotheos...

of 899, its insignia was a red wand

Wand

A wand is a thin, straight, hand-held stick of wood, stone, ivory, or metal. Generally, in modern language, wands are ceremonial and/or have associations with magic but there have been other uses, all stemming from the original meaning as a synonym of rod and virge, both of which had a similar...

. Together with the other lower rank classes, the basilikoi mandatores were designated as the basilikoi anthrōpoi ("the emperor's men"), and headed collectively by a dedicated official with the title of prōtospatharios

Protospatharios

Prōtospatharios was one of the highest court dignities of the middle Byzantine period , awarded to senior generals and provincial governors, as well as to foreign princes.-History:...

 tōn basilikōn.

Both the simple mandatores and the basilikoi mandatores, as well as the prōtomandatores, are attested in the 7th–11th centuries. They seem to have disappeared thereafter. The French Byzantinist Rodolphe Guilland suggested that they were replaced by the tzaousioi

Tzaousios

The tzaousios was a late Byzantine military office, whose exact functions and role are somewhat unclear.The term is derived from the Turkish çavuş, meaning "courier" or "messenger", and was in use by the Byzantines perhaps as early as the late 11th century. In the 13th–15th centuries, it became...

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