Vigilantia
455 – ? · Generation VIII
Vigilantia is remembered for the two emperors closest to her: she was the sister of Justin I, the peasant soldier who took the throne in 518, and the mother of his successor Justinian I. Born about 455, she came from a Latin-speaking family of the Balkan province of Dardania, from the hamlet of Bederiana near Naissus, modern Niš. Ancient writers disagreed about the family’s roots, some calling them Illyrians and others Thraco-Romans, and Procopius describes them as peasants.
She married Sabbatius, and the couple seem to have settled at Tauresium, near Scupi, the modern Skopje, where their son was reportedly born about 482. He was named Petrus Sabbatius. A daughter, also called Vigilantia, followed around 490. Her brother Justin had left the region as a young man to escape its poverty, joined the palace guard in Constantinople and risen to command it. He adopted his nephew, brought him to the capital and saw to his education, and the boy took the name Justinianus from his uncle.
Both of her children’s lines reached the throne. Her son ruled from 527 to 565, and when he died childless the crown passed to her daughter’s son, Justin II.
Her own name is less certain than it looks. No ancient source records it, and Vigilantia is a long-standing assumption drawn from her daughter’s name. A rival name, Bigleniza, was put into circulation by the seventeenth-century scholar Niccolò Alamanni, who cited a Life of Justinian that no other scholar has ever found. Edward Gibbon repeated it, and because it sounded Slavic it fed theories of a Slavic origin for the dynasty. In 1883 James Bryce found a seventeenth-century manuscript containing the same details, but its authenticity was doubted, and the name is now generally set aside.
Place in the family
- Vigilantia was the mother of Justinian I.
- The archive records 3 of her descendants, across 2 generations.
Partners
- Married Sabbatius (435 – ?) — 2 children together
Children
- Justinian I (482 – 565)
- Vigilantia (490 – ?)
Sources
- Vigilantia · Wikipedia
- Justin I · Wikipedia
- Justinian I · Wikipedia