This story from Procopius was particularly salient to our current discussion about the early Merovingians - and honestly, it was just kind of fun insofar as story-telling goes - but it was too long to include in its entirety in our last episode. This left me with the idea that I wanted to share this story with my listeners, but didn't want to crush any given episode with the quoted passage. So why not make the story it's own Bonus Episode?! Anyway, I did exactly that, and here we are - you get a fun story, an extra off-week dose of T+M, and I get to share the first recorded story of either France or England making a claim to being the ruler of the other. Also, there's a REALLY mad, jilted Angili princess with 400 ships and 100,000 men ready to restore her honor, so sit down, buckle up, eyes forward and hold on!

Anyway... Procopius. As mentioned in our last episode, you’ll recall that Procopius of Caesarea was a sixth century Byzantine scholar who wrote mainly about the exploits of Emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius. However, Procopius also took it upon himself – in his series History of the Wars ­– to also discuss the Gothic Wars, a series of conflicts in which he would have had very little direct participation. He more than likely received his information on these events from various Western embassies that visited Constantinople, the city in which Procopius was serving in some sort of upper-level position of power.

With all of that said, Procopius provides a perfect example of some of the problems that present themselves when dealing with history that is nearly 1,500 years old. First off, (and most obviously) Procopius wasn’t speaking and writing English. His texts were in Greek, leaving his words open to argument by translators. This causes plenty of problems in and of itself, but then second, Procopius wrote his histories as stories using phrases such as, “Such then are the facts.” Well, if you’re willing to accept Procopius as “a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian,” well, his claim that his statements and stories are “facts” can lead some to accept everything he says without critical thought. Third, Procopius was certainly afflicted by his own personal interpretations and cognitive biases, just as all of us are. But for those of us who are trying to parse his words in the modern day, we have to add in this extra layer of attempting to understand what may have been on Procopius’s mind as he wrote his histories in a time and place that is completely foreign to our current condition.

With all of this said, we’re left with a situation when reading authors like Procopius wherein we don’t want to believe everything he says, but at the same time we don’t want to dismiss him entirely out of hand, if for no other reason than the fact that there’s just not a lot of surviving sources from the sixth century to pull from. So, we read his stories, we try our best to work through all of the issues I mentioned a moment ago, and we then attempt to use what’s left as a puzzle piece that we can add to the picture and maybe illuminate our understanding somewhat. And if absolutely nothing else, some of what Procopius wrote is just amusing.

As always, the music used for the show comes from Josh Woodward and includes his songs “Bully” and “Lafayette.” For a free download of these songs or hundreds of other great tracks, check out his site at joshwoodward.com. Notes on this episode and a list of sources is available online at thugsandmiracles.com; please leave a comment and be sure to sign up for the e-mail list. Speaking of email, you can write to us at [email protected], you can hit us on Twitter at @thugsandmiracle with no “s” at the end, or you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at @ThugsAndMiracles.