An Emperor's Secrets

The Greatest Builder In Christian Antiquity Was One Of History's Greatest Politico-Religious Murderers

By Jill Kamil
9 - 15 April 2009
Issue No. 942
Courtesy Of Al-Ahram Weekly Online

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.

Back in the 1990s when I was writing my guidebook Aswan and Abu Simbel, I noted that in the year 537 Justinian sent Narses, commander of his troops in Egypt, to close the temple of Isis on Philae, the last outpost of paganism on Egyptian soil (let me add that Philae strictly belonged to Nubia). He did this by confiscating the revenue of the temple, throwing the priests into prison, and establishing garrisons between Aswan and the Second Cataract. The temple, I added, was converted into a church by Bishop Theodorus in 577. These were interesting facts, but I did not then realise that Justinian reserved especial hatred for worshippers of the "Great Goddess" Isis. He subjected her worshippers to torture or forced suicide, and Procopius describes trials behind close doors and terror descending on whole communities of pagans all over the Christian world.

As for schools of philosophy and a liberal education like those of Alexandria and Plato's academy in Athens, which were centres of philosophy, religion, humanities and literature for hundreds of years, Justinian's decrees ordered their total destruction. His malice was such that he turned against astrologers, "... whipping them on the back and parading them on camels... though they were old men, and in every way respectable, with no reproach against them except that they studied the science of the stars while living in such a city."

Justinian's policy of temple destruction also supported forced conversions and, as a result of his persecutions and pogroms, a reputed 70,000 people throughout the empire, from Syria, through Egypt as far as Spain, were forced to convert to Christianity. In Egypt, where the old Roman fortress had earlier been remodelled by Emperor Arcadius (395-408) to accommodate his Melkite forces, there is evidence that they converted to Christianity through baptism. One of the earliest surviving churches in the world, that of St Sergius, was dedicated to two Roman soldiers (Sergius and Bacchus) who were martyred in Syria in 303. It was planned in accordance with early church rituals, which is to say that Melkite candidates for baptism were first received in a small antechamber and then descended into a baptistery where they were immersed in water, and only when the rite was completed were they allowed to enter the church and receive the Eucharist.

Other churches in Old Cairo that were built in honour of foreign saints were that of St Barbara, a young martyr from western Asia who converted to Christianity and was tortured for her faith. In nearby Al-Damshiriya there is a monastery complex built in honour of a saint known as Abu Seifein, or "he of two swords", who was a Roman legionary named Mercurius who defied the emperor Decius, refused to worship idols, and suffered a martyr's death. In other words, the identities of sainted individuals to whom many churches in today's largely Coptic area of Cairo were originally dedicated were not local saints, but those from western Asia. No fewer than 42 were constructed under imperial control, and were only taken over by Egyptians after the Eastern Roman Patriarch and his Melkite army evacuated the country following the arrival of the Arab army in the seventh century.

Not surprisingly, Egypt had no shortage of political and religious activists. Samuel of Qalamun was one of them. Like saints Pachomius and Athanasius before him, he was well respected for his piety and his fame spread far beyond the semi-circle of barren land where his monastery in Middle Egypt is located. It has a large keep, built so as the monks could protect themselves. From whom? In the light of Procopius's Secret History one is encouraged to suggest that this might have been more for protection against intolerant Melkite forces than against Bedouin raiders. Samuel, and others like him, was regarded as a dissident by the imperial government, and was captured and flogged time and again. In one terrible and humiliating confrontation he lost an eye.

Justinian retaliated to such national uprisings by ordering his army put down all those with "dissenting doctrines, which are called heresies". They were ordered, time and again, to abolish their beliefs on threat of punishment for disobedience, and even loss of their right to will property to their children and other relatives. Justinian employed all available methods to impose Chalcedonian decrees on Egyptian Christians, in the mistaken belief that doctrinal differences lay at the root of the problem. However, that was not the issue at all. National feeling was intensely opposed to foreign occupation.

I am reminded of a chapter in my Christianity in the Land of the Pharaohs in which I wrote about George of Cappadocia, a cruel tyrant who hounded out and persecuted Egyptian Christians. I described how soldiers from the imperial corvees, 3,000 in number, were brought into Egypt and marched to the monasteries of Nitrea in the eastern Delta, which were then occupied by some 5,000 monks. They gave the monks the option of taking their places as loyal supporters of the imperial government and adopting their doctrinal creed, or dying. I wrote, "The monks who refused were slaughtered, and so began a scandalous period in Egyptian history when the Christian government of Constantinople, with stakes, swords and chains, attacked monasteries. Bishops hid behind the altars and terrified monks were reviled, kicked and trampled."

And so the mighty Justinian, whose lavish fabrics of silk were woven at Antinoe in the Fayoum, and who built grand churches, assumed the role of an oppressor of the first order. Multitudes were arrested by his armed forces. The Old Roman fortress of Babylon in Old Cairo became a prison. Alexandria was dominated by a Chalcedonian patriarch and his imperial forces, and Egyptian Christians were expelled from that great city where St Mark the Evangelist was martyred. The banks of the Nile and areas of the inner desert were turned into a nightmarish spectacle of horror, the population humiliated. Resentment against the foreign government erupted into riots in some areas; the nationalists were temporarily placated with promises, and then when riots broke out again, troops massacred them.

Reacting against Justinian's persecutions, and no longer able to tolerate the nightmarish saga of torture, whippings and exiling, Egyptian Christians strengthened their own ecclesiastical organisation and, in the year 570, formally broke away from the imperial church of Constantinople and founded its own national, or Coptic Church, with its own Pope and Patriarch resident at Wadi Natrun. And still the oppression continued. Egypt had two patriarchs, one representing Egyptian Christians who were deeply hostile to Byzantine rule, and the other, the patriarch Cyrus (known as Makaukis) at Alexandria, representing the Byzantine Church, who was one of the worst oppressors of Egyptian Christians.

Now, thanks to Procopius's Secret History, I know more about the drastic and merciless steps taken by Justinian to wipe out religious diversity, not only in Egypt but "to the ends of the earth", ordering expeditions of his forces into the Turkish mountains, to Lebanon and Syria, deep into the Sahara, to remote areas of the Libyan desert, and all along Egypt's Nile Valley. Procopius reveals the extent to which Justinian enforced his ruthless laws, and one can envision Egyptian Christians and emboldened zealous Egyptian monks fighting for their country's freedom from oppressive occupation. Little wonder that when the Arab general Amr Ibn Al-'As marched his army into Egypt in the seventh century, Copts (Egyptian Christians) aided him in expelling from the country, the despised foreign patriarch and his powerful Melkite army.

References:

Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Procopius, Secret History, Chicago.

Christianity in the Land of the Pharaohs, Jill Kamil (2002.) Hardback: Routledge, Paperback: The American University in Cairo Press

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