Procopius wrote the history of Justinian’s wars in the 550s. At that moment the Hephthalites were being destroyed at the other end of the world by İstemi and Khosrow I. He did not know that. He knew what the Persian frontier knew. For this reason he is worth reading beside the Chinese chapters rather than after them.
Content
On the Hephthalites he says three things that the eastern sources do not. They are of Hunnic stock, but they had long lived apart from the Huns, in a good land. They are the only Huns with white bodies and faces. Their aristocrats keep retinues of personal servitors, the following that the Iranian and Turkic world knows as the comitatus.[1]
Each of the three is a different kind of statement. The first is a classification. Greek writers classified nearly every steppe people as Huns. The second is a description of appearance. It is what a frontier hears rather than what an observer sees. The third is an institution, and institutions travel. A retinue of sworn men around a lord is attested from Iran to the Orkhon.
Reliability
Procopius is the western half of a pair. The Zhou Shu derives the Hephthalites from the Great Yuezhi and puts their king’s seat in a walled city west of Khotan. Procopius derives them from the Huns and places them beside Persia.[2] Neither writer had seen them. Both wrote down what the nearest frontier said.
Turkic Atlas sets the interpretations against each other under the Hephthalites. It tells the war that ended them from the eastern sources alone.
References
Sources
- Zhou Shu (Book of Zhou), juan 50
Literature
- Peter B. Golden, An Introduction to the History of the Turkic Peoples (1992)
- Aydogdy Kurbanov, The Hephthalites: Archaeological and Historical Analysis (2010)
Articles resting on this source 3
What links here1
- Places
- Viminacium
Cite this article
Yavuz, Emre-E. “Procopius.” Turkic Atlas, revised 8 November 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/procopius/
Last revised: 8 November 2026
