Three emperors at Constantinople in the early sixth century—Anastasius, Justin, and Justinian—entrusted delicate negotiations in the Red Sea region to members of the same family. One of them, Nonnosus, wrote about his activities in an account available to Photius and took care to place them within the context of the work done by both his grandfather and his father.1 These civil servants must have been well known and trusted at the Byzantine court, and their embassies, five in all to the Arabian peninsula and one to Ethiopia, imply a high level of competence in the culture and presumably languages of the region. The history of Nonnosus and his family opens up a unique perspective on Byzantine efforts to influence and control Arab tribes in southwestern and central Arabia both directly and indirectly (through the Ethiopians).
Nonnosus’ account begins with a brief allusion to a mission led by his grandfather, and then includes more detailed accounts of overlapping missions led by his father and himself. The text that Photius read and summarized was clearly available to Malalas when he wrote his Chronography not much later than Nonnosus was writing. Later Theophanes Confessor also had access to Nonnosus’ work when he was composing his Chronography early in the ninth century. Although Nonnosus does not register the diplomatic events in chronological order, it is possible, despite his somewhat confusing cross-references, to segregate the several embassies comprehensibly.
First, the family. Nonnosus tells us that his father’s name was Abramēs. 2 This is a variant of the Greek form of his father’s name, Abramios, in the Martyrium of Arethas §27. The name, but not the person, also appears in Procopius as Abramos for a king of Ḥimyar we know as Abraha.3 This name may be rendered as Abraham, as indeed it appears in Syriac precisely with reference to Nonnosus’ father.4 It is obviously Semitic. Whether it means, as Müller thought when he prepared the Nonnosus testimonia for his Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, that Nonnosus was a Syrian may be doubted. But a near eastern origin is likely. In view of the missions in which this family was involved, it would be reasonable to assume that the family was not only Arab but conversant with sixth-century Arabic, then in its formative period,5 and perhaps Sabaic and Syriac as well. All these languages would have been useful for ambassadors to the Arabian peninsula. Since Nonnosus himself, unlike his father and grandfather, was also dispatched to Axum in Ethiopia, where he was formally received by the negus, who received him while standing in a royal pavillion on top of four elephants,6 it is possible that this diplomat of the third generation had taken the trouble to master Ge‘ez, the classical Ethiopic language of the Axumite court, which is itself another Semitic language. Familiarity with local cultures was nothing new in the appointment of governors and military officers throughout the Roman and Byzantine empires, but a diplomatic specialization across three generations of one family was most unusual.
Nonnosus reports that the emperor Anastasius had sent his grandfather on an embassy to the Arab phylarch Arethas (Ḥārith), with whom he concluded a peace treaty. There can be little doubt that this is the peace treaty assigned by Theophanes to the year 502/3: “Anastasius made a treaty with Arethas, the father of Badicharimos and Ogaros ….” For the previous year Theophanes recorded a broad Arab invasion into Phoenicia, Syria, and Palestine when Badicharimos launched a fierce campaign after the death of his brother Ogaros (Ḥujr). How or where Ogaros died is beyond knowing, but the devastation that Badicharmos wrought understandably attracted the attention of Constantinople,7 not least because about the same time (502) the Persian Shah, Kawad, revoked a treaty between Persia and Byzantium that had been in effect for more than half a century. Ḥārith, the father and phylarch, was the Ḥujrid ruler of Kinda in central Arabia,8 and he had to take account of his Arab enemies, the pro-Persian Naṣrids of al-Ḥīra, who would have been responsive to Kawad’s decision to renew hostility against Byzantium. He would therefore have been disposed to make a settlement with the Byzantines after the Ḥujrid invasion of Palestine.
Anastasius acted at once and dispatched an expert, Nonnosus’s grandfather, who, as we know from a later Syriac source, bore the name Euphrasius.9 So far as can be told from Photius, Nonnosus did not even mention his grandfather’s name, but it points to Mesopotamia, and perhaps an origin for the family not far removed from al-Hīra itself and the Arabian peninsula. In view of the success of Euphrasius’ embassy, it seems that Anastasius chose well.
With this background from 502 it is hardly surprising that Nonnosus’ father, Abraham, was dispatched by Justin to ransom two Byzantine duces whom the forces of the Naṣrid sheikh al Mundhir had captured along with their soldiers. Procopius reports that these two officers were Timostratus, brother of Rufinus, and John, son of Lucas.10 Nonnosus names them both as the duces (he calls them stratêgoi) who were the prisoners of war whom his father managed to recover by paying, according to Procopius, an extravagant ransom. Abraham went subsequently with al Mundhir southeast of al-Hīra to participate in a conference that the sheikh convened in 524 at Ramla. It may be that this was not far from the homeland of Abraham’s family, descended from Euphrasius, since we already know that another of the delegates to that conference, Symeon of Beth Arsham, definitely came from southern Mesopotamia.11 Hence Abraham and Symeon may have spoken to one another in the same language, Syriac or Arabic, or possibly both.
There is no way of telling where al Mundhir’s forces had captured the two duces, but the narrative in Procopius implies that it was somewhere in central or northern Arabia, where none of the Byzantine officers or client phylarchs were strong enough to resist them.12 Relations between al- Ḥīra and Kinda were inevitably unstable, because Persian support for the Naṣrids had to be balanced against Byzantine support for the Ḥujrids as secured by Euphrasius in 502. Malalas reports that al Mundhir, with a force of 30,000 men, had pursued the Kindites of Ḥārith southwestward into the desert, where he captured and killed “the phylarch of the Romans.”13 It has sometimes been supposed that Abraham’s negotiations on behalf of Justin in 524 led to a peace treaty with al Mundhir, but Nonnosus makes no mention of anything other than the recovery of the two prisoners, who, he says explicitly, had been held according to the law or custom (nomos) of war. It was during Abraham’s next mission to Arabia, early in the reign of Justinian, that he actually did conclude a peace treaty, but this was with the ruler of Kinda, Ḥārith’s successor.14
At least as far as can be told from Photius’ summary, Nonnosus introduced this second embassy of Abraham out of chronological order. Photius explictly states that it had occurred before Nonnosus’ own embassy for Justinian, even though that is mentioned first. The confusing structure in the patriarch’s summary arises from the appearance of the Kindite phylarch Kaïsos (Arabic Qays) in both missions. The peace treaty that Abraham negotiated provided for the remission of Qays’ own son, Mu‘awiyya, to Constantinople as a hostage.15 Justinian then sent Nonnosus himself to bring Qays to the city as well. He identifies this man as a descendant of Ḥārith, with whom Abraham had negotiated in 502,16 and he goes on to identify him correctly as a ruler of two Saracen tribes, the Chindenoi and the Maadenoi—precisely the peoples of Kinda and Ma‘add in central Arabia. Now that Qays’ son was a hostage in Constantinople, Justinian evidently wanted to bring the phylarch himself there. The motivation for this mission is unclear, but it may well have represented an effort to remove a powerful leader who might have been open to solicitation from the Persian side as represented by the Naṣrids. In any case, it is clear from Nonnosus that he failed to bring back Qays, and so Justinian sent his father Abraham back to Arabia to try again.
Abraham succeeded in bringing out Qays and, at the same time, to transfer Qays’ phylarchy to his two brothers, Ambros and Iezidos, whose Arabic names were obviously ‘Amr and Yazīd. This was a brilliant piece of diplomacy that allowed Justinian to enlarge his influence in Arabia by personally appointing the new rulers of Kinda and Ma‘add, which are both explicitly named in Nonnosus’ report. In Constantinople Justinian expressed his pleasure with the new arrangements by formally bestowing upon Qays the hegemony (hêgemonia) over the three Palestines as well as the tribes that had been subjected to him previously. From Nonnosus’ Greek, at least as reported by Photius, there appears to have been a clear administrative hierarchy in which Qays’ hegemony ranked above the phylarchies of his brothers, and it included their subjects in Arabia as well as those who resided in the Palestinian lands.17 Since Procopius reports that the Jafnid Abūkarib was phylarch of Palestine later in the reign of Justinian, he must have operated under the general hegemony assigned to Qays.18
Nonnosus’ failed mission to Kinda was but one part of the twofold diplomatic assignment that Justinian had given him. The other had been an embassy to the king (negus) of Ethiopia in Axum. Inasmuch as this king is explicitly named in Greek as Elesbaas, we can be sure, from his appearance in comparable Greek renderings (above all in Procopius and the Martyrium of Arethas19), that he is the negus known from inscriptions at Axum as Ella Asbeha, or, as he was generally known, Kālēb,20 the energetic Christian ruler who launched an invasion of the Arabian peninsula in 525 to wipe out the savage Ḥimyarite monarchy of Arab converts to Judaism.21
After his victory over the king, Yūsuf As’ar Yath’ar, Kālēb left behind a contingent of Ethiopian Christians in charge of Ḥimyar under a certain Sumyafa ‘Ashwa‘, whom Procopius knew as Esimphaios. This man was soon overthrown by another Ethiopian Christian in the occupying army, Abraha from Adulis. Despite Kālēb’s abortive attempts to remove Abraha,22 the aging negus soon resigned himself to a monastic life of piety.
It must have been between his Arabian victory and his retirement to a monastery that Kālēb received Nonnosus in Axum, a city that Nonnosus calls Auxoumis and Procopius Auxōmis.23 It is clear from Malalas that Nonnosus took a lively interest in the exotica of the royal ceremony as well as in the memorable scenes he encountered as he made his way from the port town of Adulis to the capital. At Aua, he saw a herd of 5000 elephants grazing in a vast open space that not even the natives found easy to penetrate.24
But Nonnosus’ visit principally reflected a policy that Justinian had devised in his early years as emperor. This was to strengthen Byzantine opposition to Persia by intervening in Arabian affairs with the help of Ethiopia.25 Procopius is explicit about Justinian’s decision to appeal to the Ethiopian Christians, both those in their native highland of East Africa and those who had been settled in Arabia, to join forces with the Byzantines. The three missions of Nonnosus’ father Abraham must therefore be seen in the light of Justinian’s effort to gain support in the Red Sea territories.
Joëlle Beaucamp has recently and compellingly argued that this kind of interventionism in the region did not characterize Byzantine foreign policy before Justinian.26 But there were clearly adumbrations of it in the mission of Euphrasius under Anastasius as well as in Abraham’s first mission, which took place under Justin. We can readily accept Procopius’ report that Justinian was the first to lobby both the Ethiopians and the Arabs as a means of thwarting the Persians, but there is no doubt that the Persians had themselves been active well before that in supporting the cruel regime of the Jewish rulers of Ḥimyar, whose anti-Christian policies had ultimately led to the pogrom at Najrān. That would not have escaped the notice of Anastasius and Justin. Both emperors, like their successor Justinian, had ample need of the energy and talents of the family of Nonnosus.
502 |
Euphrasius, sent by Anastasius to Ḥārith (Arethas) of Kinda and concludes peace treaty. |
523/524 |
Abraham (son of Euphrasius) sent by Justin to al Mundhir at al-Hīra to ransom two captured duces and to participate in the conference at Ramla. |
ca. 528 |
Abraham sent by Justinian to Qays (Kaïsos) of Kinda, concludes peace treaty, and arranges for Qays’ son, Mu‘awiyya, to go to Constantinople. |
ca. 530 |
Nonnosus, Abraham’s son, sent by Justinian to Kinda to have Qays himself removed to Constantinople; Nonnosus then sent, as part of the same mission, to Axum to meet the negus Ella Asbeha (Kālēb). |
ca. 530/531 |
Abraham sent again by Justinian to Kinda because Nonnosus had failed to remove Qays. Abraham successfully negotiates transfer of Qays to Constantinople and arranges for his brothers, ‘Amr and Yazīd, to assume his phylarchy in Arabia. |