Eudocia (First Wife of Justinian II )


All that is known of the first wife of Justinian II (685-95, 705-11) is her name, Eudocia, and the fact that she had a daughter, who in 705 was old enough to be promised in marriage to the Bulgarian khan Tervel, together with plentiful gifts, in exchange for Tervel’s help in assisting Justinian to regain his throne.[[1]] Tervel was given the rank of Caesar to reward him for his help, and presumably, though it is not mentioned in the sources, his marriage to Justinian’s daughter took place at the same time.[[2]] To have a marriageable daughter in 705, Eudocia was presumably born c. 670, and she must have died prior to 695, when Justinian was mutilated and sent into exile at Cherson, for she was buried not in Cherson but in the capital, in a rose-coloured tomb in the mausoleum of Justinian I.[[3]]

Bibliography:

Nicephorus, Patriarch of Constantinople: Short History, ed. & tr. C. Mango, Washington DC, 1990.

Theophanes, Chronographia, trans. C. Mango & R. Scott, with G. Greatrex, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor: Byzantine and Near Eastern History AD 284-813, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Grierson, Philip ‘The Tombs and Obits of the Byzantine Emperors (337-1042),’ Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 16 (1962) 1-63.

Notes:

[[1]]Nicephorus 42; Theophanes AM 6196, 6198 [AD 703/4, 705/6].

[[2]] See Jonathan Shephard, ‘Slavs and Bulgars,’ in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. II: c. 700- c. 900, ed. R. McKitterick, Cambridge, 1995, 229-31.

[[3]]Grierson, 32, 51.