Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 349, questions 18.

After 1453, I asked for listener questions on any subject you were interested in, and lots

focused on the siege itself and the aftermath, but plenty of others came in on topics far and

wide across the podcast narrative. So today let's tackle these. To give them some shape,

let's go in chronological order from oldest to newest.

Listener L asks, how do we know that the secret history was written by Procopius?

As I recall, it was found in the Vatican in 1623, and that was the only copy we have.

Do we know how it survived and how it was found? Just in case you need

reminding, Procopius is the historian of Justinian's reign. He wrote a long official history,

but then also published a secret history for his friends to enjoy. In it, he details the faults

and failings of Justinian, his wife and court.

Listener L is correct that the secret history was found in a manuscript

called Vaticanus Gracus 1001.

A scholar working at the Vatican, Niccolo Alemanni,

had been put in charge of cataloguing and editing Greek texts, and within the pages

of this manuscript, he found an unknown work attributed to Procopius, and so he published it.

You'll recall from episode 342 that the first Greek printing press was established in 1495, while Bessarion's

library of Greek texts was finally open to the public in the 1580s. So now in 1623 there were

enough scholars and enough of a market for this work to be done.

How did the text survive in the Vatican archives for so long?

I suppose the Vatican is one of those rare places with the resources to maintain a vast collection of texts and the copyists needed to preserve them.

Why had it not survived anywhere else? Presumably because it was not a widely

...