yet another. . tribe of steppe-nomads
Like the Huns before them and the followers of Genghis Khan after them, another fearsome Mongol horde — the Avars — swept across Europe in the sixth century, establishing a vast empire stretching from France to the Black Sea, while maintaining an uneasy alliance with the Romans. This precarious peace ended in the following century, when the Avars crossed the Danube, overran the Balkans, and nearly captured Constantinople. They introduced the use of stirrups into Europe, thus facilitating the eventual emergence of the heavily armoured mediaeval knight.
His victory against the Kotrigurs
While keeping essentially to the known facts of this bizarre and fascinating interlude, I have, for dramatic reasons, combined its two separate strands into a single event: Belisarius’ tricking Zabergan into thinking his force many times larger than it really was, followed by his luring the Kotrigurs into an ambush and killing four hundred of them; Justinian’s deal with Zabergan, which actually took place a little later, and his subsequent return in triumph to the capital. For a man of sedentary habits in his late seventies to become actively involved in such a Boys’ Own adventure, is truly astonishing.
Chapter 31
a fresh conspiracy
Apart from invented embellishments concerning the roles of Procopius and the fictitious ‘Horatius’, my description of the plot to assassinate Justinian, and its consequences for Belisarius, closely follows Gibbon’s account. (Chapter 43, Decline and Fall.)
Although the banquet took place in the autumn of 562, and the re-dedication of Hagia Sophia in December of the same year, it seemed appropriate, for dramatic reasons, to have these happen in the story on the same day.
We don’t know if Procopius himself was directly responsible for unmasking the plot to assassinate Justinian; as prefect of the city it would certainly have been within his remit. So it would be surprising had he not been involved in some capacity, especially as we know that he interrogated the conspirators.
Chapter 32
this astonishing outpouring of hate and malice
It is doubtful if Justinian ever read Secret History (Historia Arcana or Anekdota), but if he had, he may well have reacted in the way that I’ve described in the text. It is extraordinary how the author of The Wars of Justinian and On Buildings, in which he gives an objective (and generally favourable) assessment of Justinian’s character, should also be capable of penning a vicious diatribe which, in portraying Justinian as a despicable moral degenerate, and Theodora as a shameless nymphomaniac with perverted tastes, reveals his bitter hatred of the imperial pair. (Belisarius too, comes in for some harsh denigration.) Written towards the end of Procopius’ life, Secret History was probably intended for private circulation among friends, rather than for general publication.
our own Desert Fathers — Antony, Jerome et al.
Born c. 250 in Egypt to rich and pious parents, Antony (‘the father of monachism’) as a young man withdrew into the desert to practise a life of prayer, contemplation, and self-imposed austerities — which attracted the admiration of the many anchorites persuaded to follow his example. In 305 he founded a monastery in Egypt, returning to his desert cell (today inhabited by a venerable priest!) in 311, where he lived — a celebrated hermit — until his death, at over a hundred, in 356.
Jerome was born c. 340 probably in what is now Croatia. Educated in Rome, he travelled to the East where, in 374, he retired to the desert. Here, he spent four years in penitential exercises and study. Ordained priest at Antioch in 379, he became secretary to Pope Damasus, then went on to achieve fame as a polemicist and spiritual director to many pious persons. Best known for his translation of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), he also wrote many letters, treatises, and commentaries on Holy Scripture. He died in 420 at Bethlehem.
a pilgrimage. . To the Church of Saint Michael, at Germia’
As he approached the end of his life, two important things happened to Justinian. He undertook a pilgrimage to the remote Church of Saint Michael at Germia in Galatia, a remarkable undertaking for a man of eighty-one with sedentary habits. And he developed a profound interest in a strange doctrine known as Aphthartodocetism (the belief that Christ’s body was incorruptible) to the extent of trying to impose it as dogma on the Roman Empire in a decree of 565 — the year of his death. Intended to resolve the rift between the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians, it became a dead letter following Justinian’s death.
In his Justinian and Theodora, Robert Browning suggests that the emperor was impelled to embark on the pilgrimage to Germia by some dream or vision, or through the suggestion of some of the monks or theologians whose opinions he was increasingly consulting in an attempt to resolve the anxieties which clouded his final years. I have tried to bring these various strands together in my account of the pilgrimage (of necessity resorting to imagination to supplement the paucity of evidence), which I have also linked to Justinian’s obsession with Apthartodocetism.
Which raises the question: could a man as profoundly religious as Justinian have interpreted the abovementioned doctrine in terms of a materialist philosophy such as Lucretius’ Atomic Theory? That would certainly have called for a conversion of Damascene proportions. Still, stranger things have happened. Paul himself, on the road to Damascus, changed from being the arch-persecutor of Christians, to becoming probably Christianity’s most successful proselytizer. Constantine, as a result of a compelling vision, virtually overnight altered the status of Christianity from that of a persecuted minority sect, to the official creed of the Roman Empire. Darwinism, once equated with atheism, is today comfortably accepted by most leading churchmen, including the Archbishop of Canterbury; indeed the Church of England was among the first to embrace the theories of Darwin. Two of anthropology’s leading researchers were priests — Pere Teilhard de Chardin and the Abbe Breuil. Darwin himself, before embarking on a scientific career, seriously considered the priesthood as a vocation! And it was a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.* Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientific thinkers of our time, has spoken of ‘the mind of God’; even the mighty Richard Dawkins, the high priest of atheism, has conceded the possible existence of superhuman intelligence within the universe. Perhaps, in support of my suggestion, the following could be argued. Viewed in a certain light, Lucretius could be seen to provide the sort of intellectual reinforcement for Aphthartodocetism that Justinian — desperate to find a formula to stave off schism in the Church — may not have found unwelcome.
Read De Rerum Natura”’
This great poem in six books, by Titus Carus Lucretius — a contemporary of Cicero and Julius Caesar — is astonishingly modern in feeling. In proposing that the universe and everything in it is composed of an infinite number of atoms, he is popularizing earlier theories of Democritus, Epicurus, and Leucippus — theories very much in accord with current physics. For Lucretius, life, mind and soul are simply functions of man’s corporeal body, the atoms of which disperse at death. Thus anything like individual survival in an afterlife becomes impossible. He explains contagious diseases by the flying about in the air of minute particles — thus anticipating our knowledge of infection spread by germs. His account of the various types of animal life as they successively appeared on earth strikingly suggests ‘the survival of the fittest’, with parallels to Darwin’s theory of evolution. And all this — developed through the sheer power of intellectual reasoning, rather than by scientific experiment!