* During their Roman negotiations, Attila and Bleda received a human gift – Zercon, a lame noseless dwarf from Mauritania, who had been captured in Africa. He survived as a jester at the court of the Huns performing in a mixture of Latin and Hunnish, to the delight of King Bleda, who dressed him in a suit of armour and screamed with laughter at his skits. Zercon hated it and escaped. Bleda sent cavalry to bring him back at all costs and asked him why he had fled. Zercon replied that it was because he had no wife, at which Bleda, roaring with laughter, gave him a daughter of one of his wives’ maids, presiding over the marriage. Now he was inherited by Attila.
* Aetius and Attila remained friendly. Aetius sent him two Roman scribes to serve as secretaries. Attila sent him Zercon the African dwarf, whom he had never liked and whom Aetius passed on to his original owner, Aspar, the half-barbarian general who had found him in Africa. After that, Zercon vanishes from history.
* Most likely Attila’s haemorrhage was a symptom of oesophageal varices, bleeding veins suffering by alcoholics. He was buried in a coffin, sealed with gold, silver and iron, at a secret site, after the sacrifice of gravediggers and servants. Three sons vied for power: Dengizich was killed by the eastern Romans, his head paraded through Constantinople, then displayed at the hippodrome where ‘the whole city turned out to look at it’. But none of the sons possessed Attila’s prestige, and the confederacy disintegrated, liberating his former allies, the Ostrogoths, who would ultimately conquer Italy itself.
* The people of the eastern Roman empire called themselves Romaioi – Romans; Arabs and Turks called the empire Rum – Rome; medieval western Europeans called them Greeks. Byzantine is an exonym invented by western scholars in the seventeenth century and popularized by nineteenth-century British historians to describe the particular Greek Orthodox culture after AD 500.
* Procopius, legal official and obsequious court historian, knew both Justinian and Theodora, but in secret he wrote
* There were said to be 365 gods, but the chief ones were the gold-handed god Hubal, who offered divinations, the goddesses Al-Lat, Manat and al-Uzza, for whom humans were burned as sacrifices, a couple Isaf and Nailah who had been petrified for copulating there, and Jesus and Mary, all of them under the aegis of the chief god, Allah.
* No longer based around the chunky Roman basilica, this was a new conception of sacred space: a gigantic brick square with its knave 260 feet long, crowned with a sixteen-sided 115-foot dome, still one of the most gloriously successful buildings ever raised. ‘Its interior is not so much illuminated from without by the sun but the radiance comes into being from within,’ wrote Procopius; its dome ‘somehow flies in the air … overlaid with gold’. At its launch, much of the city participated in the procession led by the emperor and his ever more meticulously calibrated courtiers – marking the sacralization of the emperor, the vicegerent of God himself, who now insisted on being approached with elaborate ceremony, ushered by eunuchs, before being greeted with a full prostration like a Persian monarch. It also heralded a new, more popular Christianity in which people participated in a calendar of saintly festivals. All across his empire, monumental sacred spaces were created, in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Sinai and Ravenna, where, in mosaics that still exist, we can see Justinian and Theodora as they saw themselves, he decisive, russet-haired and rosy-cheeked, she skinny, intense, pale, sanctimonious, imperious.
* At Ctesiphon, he celebrated with a vast new palace, funded by Justinian’s gold, where the throne hall boasted an archway 121 feet high, 85 feet across, 164 feet long – for centuries the world’s largest.
* In 1894, Alexandre Yersin, a French scientist from the Pasteur Institute investigating an outbreak of the plague in Hong Kong, discovered the bacillus, named
