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Prokopios called his secret work, but Anekdota ["unpublished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:
- 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.
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.