Justinian

APPENDIX I

THE ETHNIC AND LINGUISTIC BACKGROUND OF JUSTIN AND JUSTINIAN

Historians have tended, perhaps too uncritically, to accept Procopius’ assertion that Justin and his nephew Justinian were of Thracian stock. I would suggest that this needs some re-examination.

Gibbon points out that Justinian’s original name, and that of his father — Uprauda (Upright) and Ystock (Stock) respectively — were Gothic; evidence, surely, that their owners were also Gothic. Settler-groups of Goths (a Germanic tribe), known as ‘Moeso-Goths’, had been established in the northern parts of the Eastern Empire long before the great Gothic migration across the Danube in 376. (It was for his countrymen living in the East Roman province of Moesia Secunda that Ulfila translated the Bible into Gothic c. 350-60.) Justinian’s and his father’s home village, Tauresium, could well have been such a community (especially considering the pair’s likely Gothic origins), a Gothic enclave within the Latin-speaking province of Dardania. As Justinian’s uncle, Justin, hailed from Bederiana (the district in which Tauresium was located) and very possibly from Tauresium itself, he too could well have been of Gothic, rather than Thracian, stock. Also, I strongly suspect that Justin was not his original name. (‘Justinus’ is an eminently appropriate appellation for a Roman emperor; but for a peasant?* It’s as though Thomas Hardy had named his yeoman character, Gabriel Oak, ‘Marmaduke’ Oak!) Hence my borrowed, and Gothic, name for him — ‘Roderic’. I suggest that Justin, and later his nephew Justinian, would have first arrived in Constantinople speaking, in addition to their mother-tongue of Gothic, basic Latin, but no Greek.

I have suggested that Justinian had slave progenitors. In his Anekdota, Procopius affirms that Justinian was descended from slaves and barbarians; but the Secret History is such a biased source, and one so motivated by malice, that its findings have to be regarded with the greatest suspicion. However, in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia of 1888–1892, the article ‘Justinian’ contains a statement that the future emperor was ‘of obscure parentage, and indeed slave-born’, citing, inter alios, the scholars Isambert and G. Body. On the strength of this, I felt justified in making slave parentage a feature of the story. The article also mentions that Justinian’s ‘original name was Uprauda’, confirming Gibbon’s observation.

If (as on the evidence seems likely) Justin’s sister Bigleniza was married to a Goth living in a Gothic community, it is not unreasonable to suppose that she too was of Gothic origin — an inheritance that would be shared by her brother. (Admittedly, ‘Bigleniza’ is not a particularly Gothic-sounding name, which is why I have hinted in the story that she may have had some Thracian blood.) In the end, perhaps, any attempt to define Justin as either a Goth or a Thracian runs into the sand. As Robert Browning says in Justinian and Theodora (in the context of Belisarius’ birth c. 505), ‘Romanized Thracians were much mingled with Gothic stock by this time’ — which allows me, I think, to present Justin in the story as of Gothic rather than Thracian origin.

* The names of his companions on that youthful journey to Constantinople were Zimarch and Dityvist.