Judean hagiographies are unusual. Some are unexpectedly structured: a saint’s life in the form of a history text. Others offer surprising content. Expected hagiographic stylizations, for example, often depict moments in which the saint is offered money for a miracle. In such cases the saint invariably refuses. Judean saints, however, accept gratitude willingly – often with cash amounts recorded. The peculiarities of these works have regularly been examined on literary and theological grounds. In this dissertation I propose a different approach: socio-economic context. The monasteries that produced these texts were utterly dominated by the environment of Christian Jerusalem. Although often commented upon, the unmined implications of this reality hold the key to understanding these hagiographies. It is only by examining these monasteries’ ties to – and embeddedness within – their peculiar context that we can perceive the mindset that produced such baffling texts. Lengthy historical, literary, and archaeological analysis force Judean hagiography to give up its secrets. These works were in fact not odd at all. Rather, they were hyper-specialized, a unique adaptation to a unique environment. True, we do not see their like in other eastern regions over the span of late antiquity. Yet this is to be expected. Nowhere else can we find the particular conditions that brought these works into being. Nor can we understand the Judean works absent their milieu. It is only upon the foundation of layers of context that these hagiographies stand high enough to view. They were, most accurately, Holy Land hagiographies: a label as unique as the land that produced them.

The basic aim of the thesis is to investigate whether the Romans of the East (Byzantines) during the 6th to the 8th centuries were interested in the Latin west and the imperial rule over it. In the first part of the work, the various discourses concerning the origins of the Justinianic conquest or reconquest of Africa and Italy articulated in the contemporary sources are identified and evaluated; the only one which cannot be shown or supposed to have been officially articulated is the discourse of a source of Pseudo-Zachariah Scholasticus which makes African and maybe also Italian exulants complaining in the imperial court about the local rulers responsible for the Vandal and Gothic wars. After some other preliminary studies (e.g. concerning the so-called problem of Theodericʼs constitutional position), it is concluded that the emperor Justinian was not interested in an ideologically founded restoration of the empire, but made the western wars because of his contacts with western aristocrats. In the second part of the thesis, the presentation of the Justinianic western wars and western events or realities in the works of the Byzantine historians from Marcellinus Comes and Procopius to Theophylactus Simocatta (the 6th to the early 7th centuries) is investigated and an attempt is made to explore...