Procopius of Caesarea

Procopius was a Greek-speaking historian from Caesarea in Palestine. He served as legal adviser to Belisarius, the leading general of the emperor Justinian I, and went with him on campaigns against Persia, the Vandals in North Africa and the Ostrogoths in Italy. He is the principal historian of the 6th century.

He wrote three very different works. The History of the Wars, in eight books, narrates those campaigns. On Buildings praises Justinian's construction projects. The Secret History, found in the Vatican Library and first published in 1623, is a bitter attack on Justinian, the empress Theodora and Belisarius that he could not publish while they lived.

In the Wars (4.14) he records that in 536 CE, while he was with the army in the west, the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, for the whole year, and that from then on war, plague and death did not leave humankind. Modern ice-core and tree-ring studies link this to volcanic eruptions that cooled the Northern Hemisphere, and the Plague of Justinian broke out a few years later, in 541.