A Triple-headed Serpent: A Story of Theodora, Empress of Byzantium
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By and large history has not been kind to her, and she has often been depicted in fiction as a heartless, indeed vicious, woman. This is to a large extent due to Procopius, a historian who was her contemporary and who had a jaundiced view of her. On the other hand, she and Justinian have both been declared saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church. My own view of her resides somewhere between sinner and saint.
There is general agreement that she was an actress, the daughter of a bearkeeper and an actress, did take part in a dramatic appeal to the Greens to reinstate her stepfather, did have a lewd pantomime involving pecking geese, probably was a courtesan at best and a common whore at worst, did go to Africa with Hecebolus, was thrown out by him, did travel back via Alexandria, did meet Severus and Father Timothy, was catechised and confirmed by them, did eventually reach home via Antioch, was employed as a spy, did meet Justinian, and did become empress at his side. She had an illegitimate daughter whose name and paternity are not known.
It is true that Justinian convinced his uncle to change the law so that he could marry this common actress and that he adored her all his life and referred to her as “our most pious consort given to us by God”. She was an ardent defender of the rights of women and influenced Justinian in changing the legal framework to be more supportive of women’s rights.
Cappadocian John was Justinian’s tax collector and he was brought down as I have described. It is a matter of historical record that he went to a fortuneteller who told him that the mantle of Augustus would fall upon him; it is also a fact that, at his ordination, he borrowed a robe from another monk, whose name was Augustus. I didn’t invent that, believe it or not. (Whether Theodora also visited the fortune-teller, however, is not on the record.)
Narses the eunuch is a historical person. He rose through the administrative ranks to Grand Chamberlain, was sent to Italy to make war on the Goths, and did truly eventually become a successful military general with the nickname “Hammer of the Goths”. He did have the last great military triumph in Rome. He may or may not have had a great treasure, and he may or may not have incited the Lombards to invade Italy. Amalasuintha was murdered in her bath, no one knows how or by whom. My money is on Narses.
Belisarius was a great general and my reports of his battles are based on fact. So too is the tale of his relationship with Justinian, alas. He did marry Antonina, who was an actress and the daughter of a charioteer, and she went with him on campaign.
Antonina did have a son named Photius who rode with Belisarius, apparently detested his mother, and acted toward Theodosius as I report. It is not known who his father was.
What, or where, was Byzantium?
Originally, Byzantium was the name given to an ancient Greek city founded on the site of modern Istanbul by Greek colonists from Megara (a town near Athens) in 667 BCE and named after their king, Byzas. The Roman emperor Constantine made it his imperial capital, referring to it as the New Rome. It was named Constantinople after his death. After the fall of Rome to the Barbarians, usually dated AD 476, Constantinople remained the capital of the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, which outlasted the fall of Rome for a thousand years. This was later termed the Byzantine Empire. The citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire, which Justinian sought to reunify with the former Western dominions, did not refer to themselves as Byzantines, nor did they call their country Byzantium, but I use the term to avoid confusion with ancient Rome.
The Byzantine civilisation was a great and remarkable one, according to Bridge (1993: vii): “… without which neither western civilisation as we know it nor that of Russia nor eastern Europe could have existed”. Yet for a long time little was known about it (Gibbon disparaged it), and it is only within the last hundred years that historians have begun to reassess its greatness and value.
Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks, becoming the capital of their empire, in 1453. The name of the city was changed to Istanbul in 1930, following the establishment of modern Turkey.
What were the Greens and Blues?
Chariot racing with teams of four horses was a major sport, indeed an absorbing passion, which came down from the Greeks to the Romans and then to the Byzantines. The Hippodrome in Constantinople was a Roman circus, attached to the Imperial Palace, where races were regularly held. The gatherings in the Hippodrome, although they had no legal or constitutional basis, served as a kind of popular parliament where the voice of the people could be heard and the Emperor could communicate with the people.
There were at one time four chariotracing teams, backed by factions of fanatical suppporters: White, Red, Blue and Green. By the time of Justinian there were only two, the Blues and the Greens, but they had become far more than simply sports teams. They also gained powerful influence in military and political spheres. Rivalry between the factions often erupted into gang warfare, with the opposing gangs being known as the Blue or Green partisans. (Think Italian football clubs with links to the Mafia.)
My accounts of the Nika riots and the various wars are as accurate as I have been able to make them.
The influence of Procopius
Procopius is considered to be the main historian of the sixth century. Hailing from Caesarea, he had legal training and accompanied Belisarius on numerous campaigns as his legal adviser cum secretary. He was thus a contemporary of the main characters in this narrative. Procopius wrote eight books about the wars of Justinian, a panegyric work on the buildings of Justinian, and a scurrilous little book originally entitled Anekdota (i.e. unpublished stories). This manuscript was discovered in the Vatican library centuries later and published in 1623 at Lyons under the title The Secret History.
The Secret History purports to tell the unvarnished truth about important and powerful people with whom the historian had become disillusioned. It appears naïve to me to accept what a historian writes as accurate merely because he was present at the time. Eyewitnesses are notoriously undependable anyway, and by the time he wrote The Secret History, Procopius was clearly a hostile witness. In my unflattering portrayal of him, I have perhaps wreaked some small revenge for the damage he did to Theodora’s memory.
About the Hagia Sophia
On its completion, the magnificent building ordered by Justinian was considered to be the eighth wonder of the world. It is not named for a saint; “Hagia Sophia” means “Holy Wisdom” – in full, the Holy Wisdom of God, which refers to Christ as Logos. The cathedral was Christian for around a thousand years. When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, it became a mosque; the altar and iconostasis were removed, some of the mosaics were plastered over and four minarets were added, singly over time. It served as a mosque for almost 500 years. Kemal Ataturk had it secularised and declared a museum in 1935.
Over the years, the church suffered much damage and has had to be restored several times. The great dome collapsed in the earthquake of 7 May 558 and was reconstructed, even higher than before, using lighter materials, by Isidorus the Younger, a nephew of Isidorus of Miletus, who had built the first dome. Byzantine iconoclasts wreaked destruction on some of the holy images.
The Church of the Holy Apostles no longer exists. The mosaics at Ravenna, however, have survived and are world-famous.
Some imaginary additions
Belisarius had an enviable reputation and historians agree that his one failing was to have allowed his wife to cheat on him with Theodosius, a young man whom they adopted as a godson. I have suggested an alternative explanation for Antonina’s relationship with Theodosius. There is no historical support for this, but psychologically it makes far better sense than the assumption that this was the one blind spot in the make-up of Belisarius.
There is also no record of Theodora ever suffering a phantom pregnancy and subsequently becoming clinically depressed. She did however greatly desire a child by Justinian, and it seems to me to be a plausible event. It is my impression, which I share with Aetios, that she did have fortitude.
M
arié Heese
Stilbaai, 2011
Thanks
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the following people: first, Melanie and Fanie Cilliers. Their support, particularly during the time when I could interest no publishers, helped me to keep going. Thanks to Mart and Koos Meij, who made it all happen. Thanks again to Alida Potgieter, my publisher at Human & Rousseau, for her belief in me and for telling me exactly what was wrong with the first draft; particular thanks to Ann and Louis Hiemstra for generously sharing their medical expertise. Any errors will have been caused by my not listening properly.
Thanks to two nameless external readers, who both prompted rewriting; to Louise Steyn, for making me rewrite some more when I thought I was done, and for meticulous editing; and to the team at Human & Rousseau for their contributions to making this book, especially Michiel Botha, whose cover designs are superb.
Thanks to my friend Amanda Botha for her tireless efforts on my behalf. I am grateful to Joan Hambidge for permission to use her poem: “Istanbul, a meditation”, and to Charl JF Cilliers for translating it beautifully.
As always, I would like to thank my husband, Chris, to whom this book is dedicated. Without him, this book and my life would have been much diminished.
Selected sources
Print media
Amery, Heather & Patricia Vanags. 1979. The Time Traveller Book
of Rome and Romans. London: Usborne.
Bridge, Antony. 1993. Theodora: Portrait in a Byzantine landscape.
Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers.
Bury, J.B. 1958. History of the Later Roman Empire,
Vol. 2. New York: Dover.
Cavendish, Richard. 1980. The Great Religions. London: Contact.
Cesaretti, Paolo. 2004. Theodora: Empress of Byzantium.
New York: Magowan.
Clement, H.A. 1936. The Story of the Ancient World. London: Harrap.
Defoe, Daniel. (1722) 2001. A Journal of the Plague Year.
New York: The Modern Library.
Durant, Will. 1950. The Age of Faith. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Evans, James Allan. 2002. The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Fauber, L.H. 1990. Narses, Hammer of the Goths.
New York: St Martin’s Press.
Freely, John. 1996. Istanbul: The Imperial City. London: Viking.
Freeman, Charles. 1996. Egypt, Greece and Rome.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Graves, Robert. 1938. Count Belisarius. New York: Literary Guild.
Herrin, Judith. 2001. Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Herrin, Judith. 2007. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval
Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Holy Bible, King James version.
Hunt, Sara (ed). 1995. Heroines: Remarkable and Inspiring Women.
Long Island Sound: Saraband.
Laidlaw, Ross. 2010. Justinian: The Sleepless One. Edinburgh: Polygon.
Lamb, Harold. (1952) 1963. Theodora and the Emperor.
New York: Bantam Books.
L’Aver, James. 1969. A Concise History of Costume.
London: Thames & Hudson.
Lawhead, Stephen R. 1996. Byzantium. New York: HarperTorch.
National Geographic, Vol. 164, No. 6. Dec 1983. “Byzantine Empire”: 709-739.
Norwich, John Julius. 1997. A Short History of Byzantium. London: Penguin.
Parrinder, Geoffrey. 1964. The World’s Living Religions. London: Pan Books.
Procopius. The Secret History. (Ms completed 550; first published 1623.) 1981. Translated & edited G.A. Williamson. London: Penguin.
Reader’s Digest Association, The. 1964. The Reader’s Digest Book of the Human Body. London.
Reed, Mary & Eric Mayer. 1999. One for Sorrow. Scotsdale: Poisoned Pen Press.
Reed, Mary & Eric Mayer. 2005. Four for a Boy. Scotsdale: Poisoned Pen Press.
Rodgers, Nigel. 2005. Life in Ancient Rome. London: Hermes House.
Rosen, William. 2007. Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. New York: Viking.
Smith, Huston. 1958. The Religions of Man. New York: Harper.
Struik. 1988. The History of Christianity. Cape Town: Struik Christian Books.
Sullivan, Vanessa Anne. 2009. Increasing Fertility in the Roman Late Republic and Early Empire. Unpublished M.A. thesis in History. Raleigh: North Carolina State University.
Online sources
Orthodoxwiki
Wikipedia on key topics
The end
By the same author
The Double Crown: Secret Writings of the Female Pharaoh (2009)
The Colour of Power: A story of Theodora, Empress of Byzantium (2011)
Human & Rousseau
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Copyright © 2012 by Marié Heese
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Available in print:
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ISBN: 978-0-7981-5633-2
Epub edition:
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e-ISBN: 978-0-7981-5890-9
ISBN: 9780798161879 (mobi)
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Map 1
Map 2
List of Characters
Quote
Prologue: A visit at dusk
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 532 No easy thing
Chapter 1: A particular question
Chapter 2: A litany of penitence
Chapter 3: Impostors
Chapter 4: What do you know of Amalasuintha?
Chapter 5: A better empress
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 535 Possibly she expected a kiss
Chapter 6: God is not pleased!
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 535 A job well done
Chapter 7: A tremulous joy
Chapter 8: A staggering blow
Chapter 9: We have built for the ages
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 538 & 539 A man among men
Chapter 10: I am not pleased!
Chapter 11: The trap
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 541 I have failed the Empress
Chapter 12: Intrigues and stratagems
Chapter 13: The black flood
Interlude
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 542 Walled about by the bodies of the dead
Chapter 14: Please, God!
Chapter 15: You think I have become weak
Chapter 16: Fighting on several fronts
Chapter 17: A miracle has occurred!
Interlude
Chapter 18: Extraordinary news
Chapter 19: We don’t want to bother the Emperor with this
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 547 I did not want to go
Chapter 20: When you walk inside, is it shadowy … ?
Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 548 The Lord will not take her unshriven
Epilogue: Narses the eunuch: his journal, AD 580 I have outlived my time
Author’s note
Thanks
Selected sources
By the same author
Copyright Page
ra, Empress of Byzantium