Procopius confines his story to wars, not peace. As a result, he gives us only the tip of the iceberg for the story that follows Belisarius’s conquest of Africa. The long history of Byzantine rule in Africa is familiar to few. For a century after Justinian, however, the province lived through its least prosperous and most challenged age since the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.
Roman generals
Most writers make much of the fact that Berber raids rendered life miserable for a generation of Roman generals, without pausing to realize that the Berbers’ increasing organization, self-awareness, and self confidence was a sign not of the decline of civilization but of its spread. As early as 508, a man named Masuna was called “king of the Moors and the Romans” (rex Maurorum et Romanorum) in an inscription on stone far off in the western part of what is now Algeria, almost at the Moroccan border, and this inscription is one of more than 100 discovered from that period, far beyond the reach of Roman taxation and government. The Berbers, more than halfway to civilization on that evidence alone, became in the sixth century a force to be reckoned with in and beyond the Maghreb, and they remain so today istanbul day trips.
Without ever holding power in their own name, without ever being objects of more than grudging toleration by their rulers, they have made a name and place for themselves and have kept at least some cultural traits undiminished far more effectively than many other peoples of late antiquity.
Carthage eased back into its old new role of provincial capital for the most part well. It was a fresh idea that the metropolis of state to which it looked should be Constantinople and not Rome, but Rome was now—and for the rest of the middle ages, at least—over and done with as a city to which others would look as a seat of any worldly power. Ideas and people moved back and forth now mainly from southern Italy to Africa to Constantinople, and this new Carthage would touch a significant piece of the history of the Christian churches in the sixth and seventh centuries.
Resolute in their attachment to Chalcedon and to western ideas generally, the Carthaginian Christians at first reinforced Justinian’s biases, thus making it less likely still that ecclesiastical peace would come to the eastern realms. When Justinian made his final bid to pacify the east, however, it was precisely through Carthage that some of the most ardent western resistance to compromise came, thus fatally weakening Justinian’s efforts at a crucial stage. The most articulate opponents of his edict against Theodoret, Ibas, and Theodore of Mopsuestia were African—Liberatus of Carthage and Facundus of Hermiane. No sooner had Justinian liberated Africa’s orthodox Christians than they turned on him. By the end of the sixth century, the inclusion of Carthage in Constantinople’s theological world had done much to drive another wedge between Latin west and Greek east. An Arian Carthage would have been to Justinian’s advantage in many ways, had he but the vision to see it Historians from Herodotus to Procopius.
QUAGMIRE IN ITALY
Theodahad, supreme ruler in Italy at the moment of Justinian’s invasion, is a character straight out of Evelyn Waugh. If the stakes in Italy from the 530 s to the 550 s had not been so high, his story would be grimly funny.
Theodahad was the son of Theoderic’s sister Amalafrida. She spent more time in Constantinople than Theoderic did, living there as a com¬panion to the empress Ariadne4 before coming west to Theoderic’s realm, and Theodahad was probably born there. (Amalafrida was the one who died in prison when her second husband, the Vandal ruler Thrasamund, left her widowed in Africa in the 520s.) Theodahad appeared by about 510 as a local strongman in Tuscany, using his connection with Theoderic to dominate and domineer the land he lived in. His presence was felt as far south as the northern suburbs of Rome, but there’s no sign that he was active in the city itself, which was shrewdly left mainly to the old aristocrats and their families.
Theodahad is known for two things: Platonism and brutality. The Platonism is usually treated by scholars as a mild surprise, but if Theoderic could boast of his attachment to civilitas and his long colloquies with his learned ministers, it should not be a surprise that another member of the family would choose ancient philosophy as his claim to dignity and reputation. It’s unlikely that Theodahad saw much of Plato in the original Greek, but not impossible that he had a house philosopher to read for him and adorn his dinner parties; that would have been a very Roman thing to do.
