Historians, when writing about history,
not only discuss the theoretical facts that are being proposed as
the timeline, but also the means by which they arrived at their
ideas. Generally, they draw their conclusions about history by
reading "sources," or earlier accounts of the matter at hand. In
some cases these are eye-witness accounts, in others, accounts told
to a scribe by a witness, and so on.
Historians try to make a distinction between sources as "primary"
and "secondary." A primary source is not necessarily an eye-witness
account - though it would be nice if it was - but is defined by
historians as one that cannot be traced back any further and does
not seem to depend on someone else's account. Secondary sources are
those that are essentially copies or "re-worked" primary sources.
Often, they consist of material from several sources assembled
together with commentary or additional data.
Well, obviously this could present a problem if the primary source
is completely falsified.
Primary sources can legitimately require interpretation and
assessment; this is the role of a good secondary source, providing
the distinction between source and interpretation is made clear.
Indeed secondary sources - analyses - are vital to the average
reader who may not have the necessary linguistic, historical and
cultural background to assess the primary sources.
But, all too often, historians deal with their sources exactly as
Huysmans has described, which bears repeating:
Events are for a man of talent nothing but a
spring-board of ideas and style, since they are all mitigated or
aggravated according to the needs of a cause or according to the
temperament of the writer who handles them.
As far as documents which support them are concerned, it is even
worse, since none of them is irreducible and all are reviewable. If
they are not just apocryphal, other no less certain documents can
be unearthed later which contradict them, waiting in turn to be
devalued by the unearthing of yet other no less certain archives.
[Huysmans, 1891, Ch II].
Let's talk about the Emperor Justinian now. A reader of the
Catholic Encyclopedia will discover the following
praises of Justinian:
The thirty-eight years of Justinian's reign are the
most brilliant period of the later empire. Full of enthusiasm for
the memories of Rome, he set himself, and achieved, the task of
reviving their glory.
The many-sided activity of this wonderful man may be summed up
under the headings: military triumphs, legal work, ecclesiastical
polity, and architectural activity. Dominating all is the policy of
restoring the empire, great, powerful, and united. [...]
Justinian also acquired immortal fame by the impetus he gave to the
arts. If any style can ever be ascribed to one man, what we call
Byzantine architecture, at least in its perfect form, owes its
origin to Justinian and the architects he employed. His activity in
building was prodigious. He covered his empire from Ravenna to
Damascus with superb monuments. All later building in East and West
was derived from his models; two most famous schools, our medieval
(Gothic) and the Moslem styles, are the lineal descendants of
Justinian's architecture. Of his many buildings may be mentioned
the two most famous, the church of Our Lady (now the El-Aqsa
mosque) at Jerusalem and, by far the most splendid of all, the
great church of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) at Constantinople.
This church especially, built by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore
of Miletus, and consecrated on 27 December, 537, remains always one
of the chief monuments of architecture in the world. [...]
Justinian died in November, 565. He was undoubtedly the greatest
emperor after Constantine, perhaps the greatest of all the long
line of Roman Caesars.
Indeed one may question whether any state can show in its history
so magnificent a ruler.
His glorious memory lasted through all the ages after him and his
portrait gleams still from the mosaic in S. Vitale at Ravenna,
where he stands in his toga and diadem, surrounded by his court,
with a bishop at his side the very type of the majesty of Christian
Rome on the Bosporus.
He sounds like a veritable paragon, eh? Of course, everything
wasn't all positive, as the Catholic Encyclopedia notes:
The Catholic cannot applaud the great emperor's
ecclesiastical polity, though in this, too, we recognize the
statesman's effort to promote peace and union within the empire.
[...]
The Corpus Juris is full of laws against paganism (apostasy was
punished by death), Jews, Samaritans (who began a dangerous revolt
in 529), Manichaeans, and other heretics. The decrees of the four
general councils were incorporated in the civil law. There was no
toleration of dissent.
True to the ideal of Constantinople, the emperor conceived himself
as "priest and king", supreme head on earth in matters
ecclesiastical as well as in the State. [...]
And all through his reign he fell foul of the authority of the
Church by his attempts to conciliate the Monophysites. [...] These
heretics filled Syria and Egypt, and were a constant source of
disunion and trouble to the empire. Justinian was one of the many
emperors who tried to reconcile them by concessions.
Justinians ecclesiastical "confusion" is blamed on his wife:
His wife Theodora was a secret Monophysite; influenced
by her, the emperor, while maintaining Chalcedon, tried to satisfy
the heretics by various compromises. [...] In all this story
Justinian appears as a persecutor of the Church, and takes his
place, unhappily, among the semi-Monophysite tyrants who caused the
long series of quarrels and schisms that were the after-effect of
Monophysitism. His ecclesiastical tyranny is the one regrettable
side of the character of so great a man.
What is a Monophysite?
Monophysites believed that Jesus' human nature was transformed,
subsumed, into a Divine Nature, thus the term "monophysite," or
"one-natured."
This idea was in direct conflict with the dogma adopted by the
church that in Christ, there is ONE divine Person, and TWO distinct
natures: one fully human and one that was fully divine.
The earliest instances of monophysitism were not condemned and
were, in fact, advocated by a number of prominent Church leaders,
like Cyril. The monophysite view that Jesus had a single nature was
eventually condemned at the Council of Chalcedon (451) which
asserted that Jesus had both a Divine and a Human nature combined
in a single person. Some tried to avoid being condemned as heretics
by asserting that Jesus may have had two natures technically, the
Human nature was so subsumed by the Divine nature that the
practical effect was a single nature.
Well, it is easy to see why this was so touchy a point. If Christ
was supposed to have been transformed into a Divine Being, then of
course, his "heirs," i.e. the Emperors, would have to be similarly
transformed and would not be able to be just a normal human with
claims to another "divine nature" that he could put on and take off
at will.
A genuine schismatic movement of Monophysites did not appear until
after the Second Council of Constantinople (553) which required
acceptance of the formulation decided upon at Chalcedon and some
simply refused. They were the precursors of the present-day Syrian
and Armenian Orthodox churches. In 1984, the patriarch of the
Syrian Orthodox church (Mar Ignatius Zakka II) met with Pope John
Paul II and together they signed a new declaration which stated the
difference in their dogmas were more apparent than real and
ultimately based upon cultural and linguistic "inadequacies."
Getting back to Justinian, regarding his great building
projects:
Naturally these great enterprises demanded great
expense. Justinian's subjects frequently complained of the heavy
taxes; many people in the lands he conquered back thought that the
glory of being once more Roman citizens was bought too dearly when
they realized how much they had to pay to the Roman
exchequer.
One of the things that Justinian is most famous for was his legal
code:
The most enduring work of Justinian was his
codification of the laws. This, too, was an important part of his
general scheme. The great empire he was reconquering must have the
strength of organized unity. He says in the edict of promulgation
of his laws that a state rests on arms and law ("De Justin. Cod.
Confirmando", printed in front of the codex).
The scattered decrees of his predecessors must then be collected in
a well-ordered and complete codex, logically arranged, so that
every Roman citizen could learn at once the law of the empire on
any subject. This codification was Justinian's great work. He made
many new laws himself, but his enduring merit is rather the
classification of scattered older laws.
The Catholic Encyclopedia finds that it cannot avoid mentioning
Justinian's scandalous life and basically blames it on his wife
because, of course, she was a Monophysite:
The emperor's private life is somewhat clouded by the
scandals told of his wife, Theodora. She had been a dancing-girl;
there is no doubt that she had led an immoral life before her
marriage in 523. She was also a Monophysite. But most scholars now
reject the scandalous account of her married life given by
Procopius in his "Secret History". And in January, 532, at the time
of the Circus revolution that nearly wrecked the state, it was
Theodora's courage and presence of mind that saved the situation.
For the rest she had a hand in all her husband's policy;
administration, diplomacy, church affairs, etc., felt her influence
for twenty-one years. If she did not dishonor Justinian by
infidelity she certainly led him into semi-Monophysitism (see
Diehl, Theodora, imperatrice de Byzance," Paris,
1904).
It is said that the reign of Justinian was a turning-point in Late
Antiquity. It was the period when paganism finally lost its long
battle to survive, and when the schism in Christianity between the
Monophysite east and the Chalcedonian west became
insurmountable.
From a military viewpoint, it marked the last time that the Roman
Empire could dominate the known world. Africa and Italy were
reconquered, and a presence was established in Spain. When
Justinian died, the frontiers were still intact although the
Balkans had been devastated by a series of raids and the Italian
economy was a disaster.
Now, let's come back to Procopius mentioned above as having
slandered Justinian and Theodora with his "Secret History."
Procopius of Caesarea was born in the late fifth century in
Palestine. Nobody knows who his parents were or where or how he was
educated. It is known that he was qualified for civil service in
Byzantium by virtue of some sort of legal and literary training. As
early as A.D. 527 he became counsellor, assessor, and secretary to
the great General Belisarius, whose fortunes and campaigns he
followed for the next twelve or fifteen years.
To Procopius we owe thanks for his eyewitness's description of
Belisarius's wars, in eight books. Of these, two deal with the
Persian war, two with the Vandalic, three with the Gothic; Book
VIII concludes with a general survey of events down to A.D.
554.
Procopius wrote about more than military matters, however. He is
the best authority for the history of Justinian's reign, and the
historian, Gibbon, regretted the fact that the histories subsequent
to Procopius were written by less intelligent and insightful
individuals.
Procopius was evidently widely read in all the greatest of the
Greek historians and geographers, and he was familiar with the
works of the famous Greek poets and orators. But his unique value
lies in the fact that he personally knew the people, the places,
and the events of which he wrote.
Procopius' approach to his task is critical and independent though
it is clear he was required to please his employer and certainly
the Court. His account of "Justinian's Buildings" was completed in
A.D. 558 or 559 and it is thought that he wrote it either by
imperial command or to vindicate himself from suspicions of
disaffection. In an extravagant way, he credits Justinian with all
the public works executed in the entire Eastern Empire during his
reign.
What we are most particularly interested in is the third of his
books. This work is scandalously famous and there has been a great
deal of controversy as to whether it was authentic and what were
Procopius' motives in writing it. This book is most commonly known
by the title of "Arcana Historia" (the secret history). It is a
supplement to the other history, carrying the narrative down to the
year 558-9, where it breaks off. Into it, as into the pages of a
private journal, Procopius pours his detestation of Justinian and
Theodora; even Belisarius and his wife are not spared.
One expert describes this book as "a satirical attack on
Justinian." and the Catholic Encyclopedia says:
It is a bitter, malignant, and often obscene invective against all
the powers of the Byzantine Church and State, apparently the tardy
revenge of an ill-conditioned man of letters for a lifetime of
obsequiousness. The indiscriminate violence of the pamphlet betrays
the writer's passionate indignation, but spoils his case. The
authenticity is now generally allowed, after a great deal of not
unbiased discussion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
(The "Anecdota" was first published in 1623.)
We ought to note that the Secret History of Procopius was not
published during his lifetime and most certainly not during the
lifetimes of those about whom he was writing. That pretty much
demolishes the theory that it was a "tardy revenge of an
ill-conditioned man ... for a lifetime of obsequiousness." What
good is revenge if there is no one to receive it or to enjoy it?
Yes, it was certainly vitriolic and pornographic in parts. For a
long time, translations from Greek were only available into Latin
and Gibbon - in Ch. 40 of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -
wrote about Theodora that "her arts must be veiled in the obscurity
of a learned language ", and then went on to quote the passage in
Greek with Latin comments!
Procopius tells us in the introduction to The Secret History that
he is going to provide explanations and additions that he could not
previously reveal for fear of retribution from Justinian and
Theodora. Since both before and afterward, Procopius wrote
approvingly of the emperor, (keeping in mind that the Secret
History was kept secret) it was suggested in the past that he was
not the author of the work. Due to expert analyses, it is now
generally accepted that Procopius did, indeed, write it. The text
shows no contradictions in point of fact between the Secret History
and Procopius' other works and the linguistic and grammatical
analysis makes this a conclusive opinion.
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