An emperor's secrets

From Al Ahram Weekly :

The greatest builder in Christian antiquity was one of history's greatest politico-religious murderers, Jill Kamil discovers

The Byzantine emperor Justinian, far from being an enlightened patron of the arts as his reputation suggests, was a tyrant. The man famous for founding great buildings all over the Christian world, including Santa Sophia in Constantinople, San Vitale in Ravenna and the Church of the Transfiguration on the site of the Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai; this powerful leader who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire from 527 to 565, was an autocrat who "... without hesitation... wrote decrees for the plundering of countries, sacking of cities, and slavery of whole nations for no cause whatever..." Justinian's actions were such that "... if one wished to take all the calamities which had befallen the Romans before this time, and weigh them against his crimes... it would be found that more men had been murdered by this single man then in all previous history."

I chanced upon this remarkable information while browsing the web. First, let me hasten to assure you that this is not one of my regular pastimes. My personal library contains most of the books I need for my research; I am within easy reach of many libraries. I am one of that older breed that prefers a book in hand to browsing the web.

Anyway, I thought I knew as much as I needed to know about Justinian's rule of Egypt.

I knew, for example, about his (incomplete) 13th edict, in which he tabled drastic measures to exercise political control over his richest province by appointing a governor with both military and civil power in place of a prefect who hitherto held complete control. This information was included in a chapter of my book, Christianity in the Land of the Pharaohs, in which I added that, as a result of his reorganisation, wealthy and powerful magnates emerged in Egypt who, through successive generations, filled the highest positions in the land. Such families had their private army of mercenaries (Melkites, or "emperor's men") who regarded the local population, especially itinerant monks, as fanatical heretics who did not adhere to the doctrinal decrees tabled at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. What I did not know was the extent of Justinian's misrule until, while scrolling down a long list on the World Wide Web under the key word "Justinian" last week (with view to tracing the main lines of artistic development in Mediterranean art in the sixth century), my eye fell on the words "The Secret History ".

Now, as any journalist knows, words like "secret", "clandestine", "furtive" and "underhand" are bound to catch a reader's attention. And I am no exception. I double-clicked the words, and up came a history written by one of the most important historians in the early Byzantine era. His name is Procopius, and he glossed over the facts of Justinian's rule in his early histories, finally putting the full truth to pen and paper only in his later years because he was well aware of the danger of writing "the truth about certain persons" in the certainty that, if found out, which he was sure he would be, he would inevitably be put to a "most horrible death".

I was fascinated. I printed out the document for easy reading and spent the rest of the evening in an armchair learning about Justinian's ruthless campaigns of religious tyranny throughout the Christian empire, supported by the Byzantine church-state alliance. Procopius describes his campaign to stamp out pagans, exterminate religious dissidents, and arrest, crucify, torture or humiliate prominent citizens. The Secret History makes horrific and absorbing reading.

Justinian the great, clad in glittering robes as depicted in mosaics, carvings and icons, savagely persecuted Manichaeans, Jews, and Egyptian Christians whom he regarded as heretics, declaring of the latter that "it is enough that they are alive". Along with Gnostics (from the Greek word "gnosis" meaning knowledge) they were persecuted, anathematised and systematically and progressively oppressed. As for Gnostics, he regarded them as practitioners of sorcery, magic and idolatry "stricken with the madness of impure Hellenes", and he burned their literature and deprived them of their rights of possession, reducing them to penury. Justinian ruled an age of complete intolerance and intense persecution. According to Procopius, he was a fanatical tyrant, who conducted trials that resulted in more executions than acquittals. I must admit that I did not know of the extent of the persecution and sufferings of the Egyptian population in the sixth century until last week, when Procopius's Secret History laid bare his policy.

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