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When Sources Do Not Line Up
Late Antiquity, roughly spanning the period from the ascension of Diocletian in 284 to the decline of the Merovingian Empire in 751, has always appealed to me because it sits between familiar worlds. It is close enough to classical Rome to feel recognizable, yet distant enough that the political, military, and cultural landscape often looks very different from the one suggested by older schoolbook narratives of “decline and fall.” Although the period is still sometimes lazily grouped under the label of “the Dark Ages,” the work of scholars such as the great Peter Brown has shown how misleading that framing can be: Late Antiquity was not simply an age of collapse, but one of transformation, adaptation, and cultural reinvention. The eastern frontier of the Roman Empire is especially fascinating in this regard: a zone of cities, fortresses, roads, armies, allies, and rival imperial ambitions, where small episodes can reveal much larger problems of power, evidence, and interpretation. Historical reconstruction is not simply copying events from a textbook. The further back one goes, the less often “what happened” is a clean, agreed-upon sequence. Historians may have only a battle name, a few commanders, scattered dates, brief or biased accounts, and modern debates hinging on small details. Modern books often turn this material into smooth campaign narratives, but the evidence underneath is usually fragmentary, contradictory, and shaped by authors’ agendas, audiences, and knowledge. This is best explained in a case study: The twin battles (?) of Thannuris and Mindouos. The events associated with Thannuris and Mindouos on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire in the late 520s are a case in point. They belong to the early Iberian War between Rome and the Sasanian Empire. The war began over influence in the Caucasus, especially in Iberia (roughly today's Georgia), but quickly drew in the fortified frontier of northern Mesopotamia, where both empires tested each other's defenses. In the contested zone between Roman Dara and Sasanian Nisibis, Roman fortification efforts led to clashes which difficult to reconstruct in detail. The specific difficulty is how to connect the surviving accounts of 528. Procopius, in History of the Wars, describes a Roman attempt to build a fortress at Mindouos, a Sasanian response, Roman defeat, the capture of Coutzes (a frontier dux from Phoenice Libanensis), and the destruction of the works. Pseudo-Zachariah places the disaster opposite Thannuris and describes a Sasanian trap with trenches and obstacles. Malalas confirms a major defeat and names commanders. Procopius' The Buildings complicates things further by hinting that Thannuris may not have been a single location. Later historians have tried to reconcile these accounts, but no consensus has emerged. Are Thannuris and Mindouos two names for a single confused event, or two separate actions? Did Procopius misattribute locations, or have later interpreters merged distinct episodes? Or are modern scholars overcomplicating what sixth-century sources saw as one event? This is what I call the
