Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  The last western emperor was fourteen-year-old Romulus Augustulus, installed in a coup d’état led by his father Orestes, the Magister Militum of what was left of the imperial army. The real military power, though, was held by a barbarian chieftain named Odoacer, who, at the urging of his men, killed Orestes, entered Ravenna and occupied the palace. Odoacer felt sorry for the terrified boy-emperor and sent him into a comfortable exile on an estate in central Italy. In Constantinople, Emperor Zeno watched events with dismay, but lacked the resources to intervene.

  Odoacer did not claim the title of western emperor for himself. He sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople, along with a polite letter to Zeno, telling him there was no longer any need for a separate empire in the west. Instead, Odoacer offered to rule Italy in Zeno’s name. Zeno accepted the realities of the situation, probably intending to rectify the matter at a later date. He awarded Odoacer the Roman title of patrician, but within Italy, he was referred to as rex, or king. Imperial rule was upheld in principle, but in practice, it was lost.

  Today we see this as a critical moment, but few people felt that way at the time. The Roman senate continued to meet, Roman magistrates were still appointed, but the western emperor had become so irrelevant that no one really noticed his absence. It was only clear in retrospect that a breach had occurred, and that the long chain of western Roman emperors that reached back to Augustus had been broken forever. A new kind of Rome would slowly grow up around the broken columns and temples of the ancient world, and people would wonder how it had ever been possible to build such colossal things.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Deep State

  The empire in 565, at the death of Justinian.

  Justin and Justinian

  JOE AND I arrive in Istanbul on a cold January night. I watch the needle on the taxi speedometer waver between 160 and 180 kilometres per hour along the airport freeway, and recall reading somewhere that Istanbul is the road-fatality capital of Europe.

  The driver nodded confidently when I gave him the name of our hotel, but it turns out he’s never heard of the place, so he pushes his vehicle through the side streets of Sultanahmet, hammering the horn, pulling over occasionally and asking shopkeepers for directions. When he finds the hotel, he seems glad to be rid of us.

  The hotel’s sunken reception area is decorated with Ottoman antiques and cushions and several sleeping cats. I see an exposed slab of Roman brickwork with its characteristic red stripes. The wall once belonged to the imperial palace complex that dominated this entire district in the Byzantine era. Going up a spiral staircase, we find a quiet garden with flowers, palms and a cypress tree. A crumbling Ottoman hamam is attached to the back. Joe loves the place, and so do I.

  It’s late, so we dump our bags and go out looking for a restaurant. The fog from the Bosphorus has drifted across the city. The streets are empty and hazily lit. We round a few corners and enter a large open square and there it is, the Hagia Sophia. It is a mountain of a thing, veiled by the night fog, humped over like a giant on its haunches, preparing to stand up. The building is closed for the day and the square is empty, so we have the great church all to ourselves. Looking up, we can just see the lip of the massive dome. Joe asks me who built the Hagia Sophia.

  Kenan Kahraman/Shutterstock

  ‘It was the work of thousands of labourers,’ I reply. ‘Probably slaves.’

  ‘No, I mean, who designed it?’

  Joe wants to be an architect. He told me this a year ago; out of the blue he announced that Frank Lloyd Wright was his hero and that he wanted to make great buildings like Wright did.

  ‘It was designed by two engineers,’ I reply, ‘whose names I can’t quite remember right now. In those days the architects never got the credit. All the glory went to Justinian, the emperor who made it happen. He’s the guy everyone remembers.’

  ‘Why do they remember him?’

  ‘Well, because he built the Hagia Sophia, he reconquered Italy and North Africa, and he fell in love with the most controversial woman in the city.’

  I look over at the darkened site of the Hippodrome across the square.

  ‘Justinian also survived the bubonic plague, and murdered a tenth of the population of Constantinople in an afternoon. And he did all these things while hardly ever travelling further than a square mile from where we’re standing right now.

  ONE DAY, IN THE LATTER PART of the fifth century, a pig farmer named Justin left his home town of Bederiana and joined his two friends on the road heading east to the great city of Constantinople. They were young men from dirt-poor families, and they owned nothing other than the goat-hair satchels they carried on their backs, filled with hardtack for the long journey.

  Justin and his friends had never seen a big city before and were amazed when they entered the metropolis, with its thronging crowds and fine buildings and statues. They were strong, fine-looking young men and soon found positions at the Great Palace with the imperial guard. In time, Justin rose to become chief of the emperor’s personal bodyguard, a position of great responsibility and influence, which put him in daily communication with Emperor Anastasius himself.

  Justin married a former slave girl named Lupicina, but the couple were unable to have children. So Justin invited his sister Vigilantia to send her twelve-year-old son, an ambitious boy named Petrus Sabbatius, to join him in Constantinople. Justin adopted Petrus as his own son, and gave him the cognomen Iustinianus or ‘Justinian’. Conscious of his own illiteracy, Justin sponsored the boy’s education in Greek and Latin culture. As he entered his twenties, Justinian was appointed to a palace regiment, where he was well placed to observe the currents of imperial politics swirling around the emperor.

  Anastasius was by now an old man, and contemplating who among his three nephews should succeed him. A story was told that he arranged for three couches to be set up in his chamber, and under one of them, he hid a small piece of parchment with the word ‘REGNUM’ written on it. Anastasius resolved that the nephew who took the special couch should be the one to succeed him. But when the three nephews entered, two decided to share a couch and the seat with the royal message was left empty. Anastasius took this to mean that none of his nephews were fit for the throne.

  That night Anastasius prayed for guidance and decided that the first man to enter his bedchamber the following morning would be his successor. When morning came, the first man at his door was Justin, the chief of his guards. Anastasius died childless in July 518 and Justin, the former pig farmer, was crowned as Justin I.

  Another, less colourful, version of events suggests that Justin won the throne more straightforwardly, through his command of the palace guards and by his sizeable donations to influential senators. It’s possible that Justinian, not Justin, was the hidden hand at work here.

  The sixty-eight-year-old Justin lacked experience in diplomacy and was hampered by his illiteracy. A wooden stencil with the letters legi (‘I have read it’) was crafted for him, allowing him to sign off on a document by tracing the word onto the page in purple ink. Justin came to rely heavily on the advice of his clever nephew, and in this way Justinian became his uncle’s regent, the de facto ruler of the Roman empire, while still in his thirties. In 521 he was awarded the old republican title of consul, which was celebrated with public games: twenty lions and thirty leopards were fought and killed in the Hippodrome. As his uncle slid into dementia, Justinian assumed more of the imperial tasks. He healed a diplomatic rift with the pope in Rome and established good relations with powerful senators.

  PROCOPIUS, THE COURT HISTORIAN who is the best source for this period, records that Justinian was a plain-looking man, ‘neither tall nor too short, but of a medium height, not thin, but inclined to be fat. His face was round and not ill-favoured, and showed colour, even after a two days’ fast’. Justinian’s growing authority in the palace was matched by his influence on the streets of Constantinople, through his connections to the powerful racing factions of the Hippodrome: the Blue
s and the Greens. The two factions kept horses, recruited charioteers, ran the betting action and used entertainers to amuse the crowds between events. Greens supporters tended to come from the inner city, Blues from the outer suburbs and the countryside. Over time, the Blues and the Greens evolved into powerful sporting institutions, running political and criminal enterprises on the side. Aristocratic families often paid the factions to shout political slogans at the Hippodrome, and to intimidate opponents.

  Both factions had street gangs, known as partisans. The Blue partisans shocked respectable society by adopting the appearance of Huns: the front of their scalps were shaved, while their hair hung long and wild at the back. They sat among the crowds of the Hippodrome, wearing expensive, embroidered robes with tight cuffs and billowing sleeves to accentuate the muscles on their arms. Outside the track, they ran protection rackets and indulged in petty theft and street violence with impunity. Justinian, far from cracking down on the violence and disorder, openly courted the Blues’ support.

  Procopius, like many Roman aristocrats, secretly disdained the lower-class emperor and his ambitious nephew, who was clearly angling to succeed his failing uncle on the throne. Then, in 525, Justinian shocked the city by declaring his intention to marry the most scandalous woman in Constantinople – the former prostitute, dancer and comedian Theodora.

  The Bear-keeper’s Daughter

  JUSTINIAN’S NEW PARAMOUR was a child of the Hippodrome, the daughter of a bear-keeper from the Green faction who died in 505. When Theodora’s mother remarried, she came to the Hippodrome with her three daughters to plead with the Greens to give the bear-keeper’s job to her new husband. The Greens gave her short shrift, so she turned to the Blues, who happened to be looking for a new bear-keeper, and who granted her wish. Her eight-year-old daughter Theodora never forgot this act of charity, and remained loyal to the Blue faction all her life.

  On reaching puberty, Theodora was enlisted by her mother into a theatrical troupe where she became a comedian, a burlesque dancer and a prostitute. She gave birth to her first child at fourteen. Described as the most beautiful woman of her age, she became a courtesan to powerful Roman senators. After a stint in Carthage, where she shared the bed of the local governor, Theodora is said to have entered an ascetic community in the desert and experienced a religious conversion to Monophysitism, the branch of early Christianity that believed Jesus’s divinity superseded his humanity. Monophysitism had been condemned as a Christian heresy, but Theodora was by nature a partisan warrior, and she lent her support to the Monophysite cause for the rest of her life, as she did to the Blues.

  At twenty-one, she returned to Constantinople where she lived modestly in a small apartment. She likely met Justinian at a social event in the capital. Theodora was, by then, in her mid-twenties. Justinian was in his forties. The two fell hard for each other and began living together in the Bucoleon Palace, on the shores of the Marmara. Justinian took to calling her his ‘sweetest delight’ or by the literal meaning of her name, ‘the gift of God’.

  The couple were anxious to legitimise their union, but faced two obstacles: the first was a law from Constantine’s time, prohibiting marriage between a man of senatorial rank and an actress. Justinian persuaded his uncle to alter the law, making it possible for an aristocrat to wed an actress who was ‘penitent’. The second problem was the stubborn opposition of the emperor’s wife, who was already embarrassed by the family’s lowly origins and wanted no further controversy. When she died in 524, Justin was too senile to offer further objections and the path was open for Justinian and Theodora to be married the following year.

  JUSTIN SLID DEEPER into dementia and died in 527. Justinian and Theodora were invested as emperor and empress in August that year, in a ceremony that climaxed in a triumphant procession to the Hippodrome, where they were acclaimed by the crowd. But upper-class Romans were incensed by the partnership of the upstart emperor and the whore from the Hippodrome, even if they had to smother their disdain under a veneer of deference. Well aware of their derision, Justinian and Theodora took pains to enforce imperial protocol, delighting in forcing the aristocracy to kneel at their feet and kiss the hem of their robes.

  Procopius found them so insufferable he poured out his repressed bile into an extraordinary document known as the Secret History. While Procopius’s official histories are fairly sober accounts, his pen almost seems to fly out of his hand as he records the sins and shortcomings of the imperial couple. Theodora’s famous sexual exploits excited his particular interest; he describes in detail her most notorious performance piece, a burlesque parody of Leda and the Swan:

  She removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin . . . Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above onto her private parts, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat.

  Procopius never risked publishing his Secret History, which remained a secret until the manuscript was discovered mouldering away in the Vatican library in 1623. Its publication more than a thousand years after it was written titillated and scandalised Europe.

  There would be other clever, powerful Byzantine women, but none quite so colourful as Theodora. Normally, an empress could only assume power when a functioning male emperor went missing. Theodora was the exception; her authority arose alongside her supremely powerful husband, who seemed happy to share the workload. Justinian lovingly acknowledged the influence of his glamorous wife in one of his decrees: ‘we have taken as partner in our counsels our most pious consort given us by God’.

  They were cut from very different cloth. Theodora never forgot her lower-class origins. After her death, a senior bureaucrat named John Lydus wrote that she was ‘more formidable in her understanding and sympathy towards the wronged than any other individual ever’, whereas Justinian apparently never gave a moment’s thought to distracting questions of social justice.

  Theodora enjoyed luxury, eating well and sleeping late. Accustomed to performance, she relished the public and ceremonial aspects of her role, while Justinian lived modestly and mostly confined himself to the palace, working long hours, neglecting sleep. In modern terms, Justinian could be described as a workaholic, a perfectionist and a micro-manager. His restless mind touched almost every aspect of daily life in the capital. ‘Our subjects are our constant care,’ he once nobly proclaimed. And indeed Justinian often spoke of his people as creatures subject to his will, not as free Roman citizens. It’s hardly surprising the senatorial class, accustomed to their ancient liberties, came to deeply resent the unsleeping autocrat in the Great Palace.

  Mosaic of Justinian, Church of St Vitale, Ravenna.

  Creative Commons/Petar Milošević

  Codex

  IT WAS WHISPERED in the court that the source of the emperor’s energy was demonic; someone claimed to have spied on Justinian in the palace late one night, and to have seen him rise from his throne, detach his head and walk about the corridors as a decapitated body. One courtier declared he’d seen the emperor’s face hideously dissolve into ‘a shapeless mass of flesh, without eyebrows or eyes in their proper places’, before the fleshy lump recomposed itself.

  The emperor’s true energy source was his colossal ambition, driven by a massive ego that he never bothered to conceal. Justinian enjoyed boasting about his accomplishments, often proclaiming that no one but he could have achieved such mighty things. This bedrock of self-assurance allowed him to bring talented individuals into his inner circle and encourage them to act boldly, confident he would remain the dominant figure among them. Theodora was more suspicious of Justinian’s talented lieutenants, and worked to undermine those she worried might secretly harbour ambitions to take the throne for themselves.

  Justinian elevated an illiterate, low-born bureaucrat known as John the Cappadocian to act as his chief minister.
John was, begrudgingly, acknowledged by Procopius as ‘a man of the greatest daring, and the cleverest of all men of his time’. He streamlined the empire’s bloated bureaucracy and introduced dozens of new taxes to fund Justinian’s ambitious programs. The taxes and anti-corruption measures largely fell on the senatorial class, who seethed with resentment, not least because John so obviously enriched himself corruptly at their expense. The prefect began to attract powerful enemies, including Theodora, who saw him as a rival for the emperor’s ear on domestic matters.

  At Justinian’s instigation, John set up a ten-man commission to sort through the entire corpus of Roman law. The Roman legal system was one of Rome’s greatest civilisational achievements, but by the sixth century, the code had grown into a gigantic hodge-podge of conflicting and out-of-date laws that hobbled the administration of justice, which in turn undermined the authority of the state. Justinian complained there was no end to its complexity: ‘We have found the entire arrangement of the law which has come down to us from the foundation of the City of Rome and the times of Romulus, to be so confused that it is extended to an infinite length and is not within the grasp of human capacity.’

  Since John was illiterate, the real work of the commission was done by the lawyer Tribonian, who was guided by the elegant formulation of the ancient Roman jurist Ulpion: ‘The commandments of the laws are these: live honourably, harm nobody and give everyone his due.’

  The commission got to work, discarding contradictory and redundant laws, reassembling what was left into a more coherent form, and introducing new ones as needed to supersede the confusion.