Plain English
Words these pages use because Procopius and the other writers of the time use them. Where a word is a later historian’s, the definition says so.
The two sides
- Eastern Roman Empire
- The half of the Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, which outlasted the western half by nearly a thousand years. Its people called themselves Romans.
- Byzantine
- The name historians gave the Eastern Roman Empire long after it was gone, from Byzantium, the old Greek name of Constantinople. Nobody at the time called it that.
- Ostrogoths
- The eastern Goths, a Germanic people who came out of the Balkans under Theodoric and ruled Italy from 493 until this war. Their cousins the Visigoths, the western Goths, ruled Spain.
- Arian
- A kind of Christianity which held that the Son was created by the Father, and so was less than him. The Goths, the Vandals and the Lombards were Arians. The Empire and most Italians held the Catholic creed, which says the two are equal.
- Catholic
- Here, the creed of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, held by the emperors and the popes, as against the Arians.
Peoples in the armies
- Isaurians
- Mountain people from southern Asia Minor, now Turkey, inside the Empire, who served in its armies.
- Huns
- Nomad horsemen from beyond the Black Sea. By Justinian’s day the name covered several such peoples, and many of them fought for the Empire as mounted archers.
- Heruls
- A Germanic people from the Danube, many of whom fought for the Empire for pay.
- Gepids
- A Germanic people on the middle Danube, neighbors and enemies of the Lombards.
- Lombards
- A Germanic people from the Danube. They sent soldiers to fight for Narses in 552, and in 568 came into Italy themselves and took most of it.
- Franks
- The Germanic people who ruled Gaul, now France, under kings of their own. Both sides in this war courted them, and they kept faith with neither.
- Alamanni
- A Germanic people of the upper Rhine, ruled by the Franks in Justinian’s day.
- Burgundians
- A Germanic people in the Rhône valley, conquered by the Franks in 534.
Offices and titles
- Senate
- Rome’s ancient council of the great landowning families. It still met in Rome under the Gothic kings, and its members were the richest men in Italy.
- Consul
- An old Roman office that was by now an honor. It gave its name to the year, and Belisarius held it in 535. Justinian let it lapse after 541.
- Patrician
- A title of the highest honor, given by the emperor.
- Eunuch
- A man castrated as a boy. Eunuchs served in the emperor’s palace, and a few, like Narses, rose to great power.
- Pope
- The bishop of Rome. In this war the popes were subjects first of the Gothic king and then of the emperor, and both sides tried to use them.
- Pallium
- A band of white wool worn over the shoulders, the sign of a pope’s or an archbishop’s office.
- Pragmatic Sanction
- A law an emperor issued in answer to a request. Justinian’s of 554 laid down how Italy was to be ruled after the war.
Money
- Centenarium
- A hundred Roman pounds of gold, about 72 of today’s pounds. Large sums were counted in them.
- Gold piece
- The solidus, the Empire’s gold coin. Seventy-two were struck from a Roman pound of gold.
The sources
- Procopius
- Procopius of Caesarea, Belisarius’s legal secretary from 527, who saw much of these wars himself and wrote their history in eight books, the Wars. He also wrote the Secret History and a book on Justinian’s buildings.
- Secret History
- A book Procopius wrote in secret, about 550, and could not publish. It blames Justinian, Theodora, Belisarius and his wife Antonina for the age’s disasters, and historians use it with care.
- Book of the Popes
- The Liber Pontificalis, lives of the popes kept by the church in Rome. Some lives were written soon after the events they tell.
- Cassiodorus
- A Roman senator who served the Gothic kings as a minister and wrote their official letters, which he collected as the Variae.
- Jordanes
- A writer of Gothic descent who wrote a history of the Goths in Constantinople, about 551.
- Agathias
- A lawyer and poet in Constantinople who carried Procopius’s history on from 552 to 559.
- Moors
- The Roman name for the Berber peoples of North Africa, outside and inside the old provinces, under kings of their own. Procopius uses it, and it is not the later Spanish sense of the word.
The east
- Sasanian Empire
- The Persian empire of the Sasanian kings, from 224 to 651, covering modern Iran and Iraq and more, with its capital at Ctesiphon, near modern Baghdad.
- Zoroastrian
- The old faith of Iran, taught by the prophet Zoroaster, and the religion of the Sasanian kings. It held that the dead should not defile the earth, so the dead were left to the birds.
- Lazica
- A small Christian kingdom on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now western Georgia, long under Roman protection.
- Arab allies
- Arab kings of the desert frontier who fought for the two empires: the Lakhmids, from al-Hira on the Euphrates, for Persia, and the Ghassanids, in the Syrian desert, for Rome.
- Blues and Greens
- The two great fan clubs of the chariot races in Constantinople, with their own seats, colors and street gangs, and a hand in politics.