John S. Ott (c2019, 2020, 2021)
Department of History
Portland State University
HST 354U - Early Medieval Europe
Reading Guide 5:
(1) Prokopios, The Wars and The Secret History (excerpts)
(2) Documents from Muslim Iberia concerning the years 711-718
I. Prokopios, Secret History
Background to the text
Prokopios was born in Caesarea around 500 (he died about 554) and received a classical legal education in Greek history, rhetoric, and grammar. He may have served as a lawyer, but we first catch a reliable glimpse of his political career in the service of Emperor Justinian’s top general, Belisarius, whom he accompanied as his adsessor (legal expert) on his wars in Persia, North Africa, and Italy between 527 and 540. Prokopios visited Ostrogothic Rome and was present for the Byzantine siege of the city in 538. He also witnessed the Nika riots in Byzantium (Constantinople) in 532 that resulted in the destruction of Hagia Sophia and the imperial palace -- the subject of our brief excerpt in The Wars -- and seems to have been present in the city for the onset of the pandemic of 542 caused by bubonic plague. The Wars was written over many years, from the 530s until 550s, with revisions and additions. He had completed our excerpt by the mid-540s.
Composed about the same time he had released The Wars, in 550-554, the Secret History is a rare and unusual kind of document. It was written privately as an exposé about an abusive political administration, and in part consisted of material that could not be safely put into The Wars while the emperor and empress were still alive. There are shared phrases in the texts, and references in the Secret History to the “earlier books” of The Wars. The title ‘Secret History’ (Historia arcana) was given to the work by its 17th-century discoverer, a Vatican archivist named Niccolò Alemanni, when he published it in 1623 at Lyon. We don’t know what Prokopios called his secret work, but Anekdota ["unpublished material"] is the title attached to the first clear attribution of the work, in the tenth century. The Secret History completely rewrote the historical reputation of Justinian and Theodora, and gave later historians, especially the eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, a considerable amount of salacious material to include in their histories of Justinian's reign.
Prokopios also authored another major work, known as The Buildings (composed after 554), which was a commissioned panegyric lauding Justinian’s building campaigns. In it he further praises Theodora’s beauty. In sum, no one work gives the full picture of Prokopios's thoughts on Justinian and Theodora.
The material we're reading focuses on the empress, Theodora, a formidable figure and one of the most memorable Byzantine rulers of the Middle Ages. As you read, keep in mind that Prokopios was fully capable of writing material in praise of Justinian, and did so -- as a trained rhetor and court official, this would have come naturally to him. Justinian was hated by many other contemporary writers as well (e.g., the Platonic philosopher Simplikios, who wrote a Commentary on Epiktetos and was forced into exile by Justinian; and by Monophysite authors), and some of Prokopios's observations find confirmation in third-party sources (including some of his basic statements about Theodora). But Prokopios’s polemic is the most thorough-going and detailed account we have. We'll go over Theodora's background in class.
Questions
1) What, according to Prokopios, are some of Justinian and Theodora’s crimes? What are they motivated by? Is it possible to infer other motives in their actions than Prokopios explicitly states?
2) What moves Prokopios to express such outrage at Theodora? What of his sensibilities/ideologies are offended by her?
3) What can we infer about Prokopios’s religious views? About his background and standing?
4) How is Prokopios's portrait of the emperor and empress gendered in the texts?
5) Given how polemical the Secret History is in its treatment of Theodora, what information may be reliable, and why? How can we interpret the figure of Theodora today, given Prokopios’s slanted portrait of her?
II. Documents from Muslim Iberia concerning the years 711-718
Background to the texts
In the year 711, Muslim armies led by Tariq ibn Ziyad, the governor of Tangiers, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from North Africa (what is now Morocco) and landed in Spain. They were joined a short time later by a second force, this one led by the Muslim governor of Iffriqiya, Musa ibn Nusair. In less than two years, their combined forces crushed the last Visigothic resistance and killed the Visigothic king, Roderic (r. 710-712), himself a usurper of the throne. Although Visigothic resistance continued for a time, for all intents and purposes, the dynasty which settled in Hispania about 500 C.E. was brought to its end. The Muslim presence in Iberia, by contrast, would endure for nearly another 800 years.
Our readings consist of a collection of sources that describe the events of 711-713 and after. They are:
Keeping the different texts straight can be a bit challenging, so I encourage you to take notes. They all look at the early period of the Muslim conquest with different lenses, and are in some instances more useful for understanding the times and places in which they were written than for offering a transparent and objective view of the conquest itself. The one exception is offered by the treaty, which is believed to be authentic.
- A Christian-authored Chronicle of 754, one of the oldest Christian sources from this period. Its author was probably a churchman with connections to the Umayyad Muslim court in Córdoba who had access to Arabic sources.
- A Muslim account of the conquest of 711 written long after the event by Ibn 'Abd al-Hakam (d. 871) sometime in the mid-ninth century. It is among the oldest Arabic accounts of the conquest.
- A treaty between one Theodimir, a Visigothic count, and 'Abd al-Aziz, a son of the above-mentioned Musa ibn Nusair. Theodimir negotiated peace between Musa and a cluster of towns in SE Spain centered on Murcia. He then apparently traveled to Damascus, in Syria, to have the treaty confirmed by the Umayyad caliph.
- The final text, the Chronicle of Alfonso III, was actually composed in the 880s for the king of the same name, some 170 years after the events it describes, though it purports to disclose the events immediately following the conquest and subsequent Christian resistance to Islamic rule. The Pelayo (or Pelagius) mentioned in the text was believed to be the founder of the Christian kingdoms that took root in northern Iberia in the decades after 711. This string of kingdoms was located along the Pyrenees (Navarre and Aragón, together with the independent county of Barcelona) and on the coastal lands north of the Cantabrian mountains. Alfonso III ruled the kingdom of Asturias from 866-910, which formed the nucleus of the later Christian kingdoms of León and Castile. He commissioned the Chronicle, and the period in general saw a resurgence of historical writing in northern Spain.