If emperors themselves might be figureheads, their relatives were very active indeed politically and religiously, and in the fifth-century context, this usually meant the imperial women, the empresses and princesses descended from the great Theodosius I. Some learned brilliantly how to play the political game, to manipulate the new Roman order of warlords, bishops, and courtiers. They became so influential that for long periods the empire looked like a matriarchate. In some cases, the Theodosian princesses who effectively dominated the empire for long periods were not only women, but startlingly young women or teenage girls, whose royal blood gave them the authority to overawe far more senior contemporaries. Adding to their potential influence, their royal lineage also made them attractive brides for ambitious generals or courtiers in search of a plausible claim to the imperial title. All the genius in the Theodosian line ended up in its womenfolk.22
In terms of religious politics, the imperial women were so personally invested in particular causes, so active in their respective movements, that the theological conflicts looked like battles between rival empresses as much as between patriarchs. This interventionist theme began early in the dynasty’s history and endured well over a century. Theodosius I married a Spanish woman, Flaccilla, who fought staunchly for Nicene theology against Arianism and exactly set the pattern for the later Theodosian women.
Flaccilla was the mother of the emperors Arcadius, in the East, and Honorius, in the West. Arcadius in turn married Aelia Eudoxia, who was, despite her Greco-Roman name, the daughter of a Frankish barbarian warrior in Roman service. Like Flaccilla, she struggled hard for Nicene orthodoxy while building up the sacred character of Constantinople by importing and publicizing an impressive collection of sacred relics. She also imposed her will on senior appointments. In 403, she allied with the Alexandrian bishop Theophilus to destroy John Chrysostom at the notorious Synod of the Oak.
In tracing the history of the fifth-century councils, three queens, three Augustae, stand out above all as prime movers and manipulators—Galla Placidia and Pulcheria on the Catholic/Orthodox side, Aelia Eudocia for the Monophysites.
THE THEODOSIAN DYNASTY
(Valentinian III married his cousin Licinia Eudoxia)
The lives of some of these women seem almost incredible. One breathtaking example was Galla Placidia (392–450), daughter of Theodosius I by his second wife. Abducted by Goths when Rome fell in 410, she remained a prisoner until she formed a relationship with Athaulf, brother of the barbarian king. She married him and bore his son, raising the prospect of a new Gothic-Roman dynasty. However, her husband died early—an occupational hazard for a barbarian warlord—and she returned to Rome. There she married a prominent general, who used that link to establish himself as emperor of the West. When he also died young, in 425, the thirty-two-year-old Galla Placidia found herself the mother of the new reigning emperor, Valentinian, who was just six years old. In effect, this meant that she ruled the Western empire for another decade. Working alongside the general Aetius, she remained a potent figure in the West until her own death in 455.23
In such a situation of shared power, the personal religious views of the empress and her circle mattered enormously, and Galla Placidia was passionately interested in matters religious and theological. The church and mosaics she commissioned in Ravenna are among the greatest treasures of early Christian art. She was also resolutely Orthodox/Catholic and anti-Monophysite. When Monophysites seemed to be gaining dangerous power within the Eastern empire, beleaguered orthodox believers begged Galla Placidia and her royal son to plead with their imperial kin in Constantinople, which they duly did. On the other side of the partisan gulf, the main court patron of the Monophysite cause before and after Chalcedon was Aelia Eudocia, wife of the Eastern emperor Theodosius II.24
Galla Placidia also left a daughter, Justa Grata Honoria, whose own career was as spectacularly improbable as her own. Together with her lover, Honoria plotted to assassinate her brother Valentinian and take over the empire. When the conspiracy was revealed, she was sent to a convent, but the prospect of that lifestyle appalled her. Seeking an escape route, she turned to a new prospective lover with a solid record of achievement in public affairs: Attila the Hun. Honoria wrote to Attila, offering to marry him if he would free her, and in exchange she would give him title to rule the Western empire. Attila used the correspondence as an excuse to launch his invasion of Gaul, which he presented as an attempt to take his promised bride and dowry.25
That particular plot would scarcely carry conviction in a bad romance novel, and its only excuse is that it actually happened. Pushing the bounds of credibility further, Honoria was not the only Theodosian woman to invite an invasion of her own empire out of personal reasons and family grievance. Just three years after Honoria’s Hunnish flirtation, her example inspired her cousin Licinia Eudoxia to invite the Vandal king Gaiseric to attack Italy. He did so with gusto in the second sack of Rome (455). Although theological issues played no part in these particular soap operas, the stories tell us a great deal about the turbulent independence of the imperial women, their immersion in public affairs, and their absolute conviction that their views should be heard. All those features reappeared regularly in their religious politics.26
Like the patriarchs in their different way, these women were also prepared to imagine futures for the Roman world utterly different from familiar traditions. Once, it would have seemed inconceivable for the imperial capital to move out of Rome, yet Constantine had accomplished just that. So what else could happen? What might the empire look like in another couple of centuries? Might it be a Romano-Gothic or Romano-Hunnish hybrid? Might it be a Christian theocracy run from Alexandria or Antioch? Or even, to take an outrageous hypothetical, might the popes of remote Rome become the patrons of a new successor Western empire ruled by some rough Germanic tribe, even the Franks? The possibilities were limitless.
Pulcheria
By far the most important Theodosian woman in the religious story was Pulcheria (399–453), who was granddaughter to Theodosius I and Flaccilla. She was also the daughter of the Aelia Eudoxia, whom we have met as the enemy of Chrysostom, and sister to the current Eastern emperor Theodosius II. Pulcheria was also a niece to Galla Placidia and cousin to the dreadful Honoria. If genes exist for theology and conspiracy, Pulcheria had both.27
Pulcheria made superb use of the men who dominated the empire, especially the warlord Aspar, and in most cases, she never directly resorted to the appeal of sex or marriage. Instead, she made consistently shrewd use of a vow of virginity she had taken by the age of fifteen. More than just a personal dedication, she made a very public commitment:
She first devoted her virginity to God, and instructed her sisters in the same course of life. To avoid all cause of jealousy and intrigue, she permitted no man to enter her palace. In confirmation of her resolution, she took God, the priests, and all the subjects of the Roman Empire as witnesses to her self-dedication.
This act removed her from the field of plausible royal brides and allowed her to carry on political life as an independent agent. Even better, in contemporary minds, her virginity gave her an aura of holiness and charismatic power. When in 450 she eventually married Marcian, Aspar’s henchman, she did so in order to give him a solid title to the imperial crown and to strengthen her own position in the theological struggles of the time. She married only after receiving a strict promise that he would respect her celibacy.28
Pulcheria’s own spirituality represented a startling blend of beliefs. In official church history, she has been remembered as the holy amazon of orthodoxy, slayer of heresies. But she also said and did things that, if they had come from other women at different times and places, could well have got them burned at the stake. She had a powerful mystical devotion to the Virgin Mary, building churches and shrines to her. During the 430s, Constantinople acquired a dazzling series of new relics of the Virgin, including Mary’s robe and belt and the icon of her painted from the life by St. Luke, and
each was housed in a splendid new building. This Marian obsession was innovative at the time, but well within the familiar trends in church devotion—it was cutting-edge, rather than deviant. But Pulcheria also made astonishing claims about her own status within the church and identified herself with the figure of the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos or God-Bearer. The empress applied to herself exalted titles such as Bride of Christ and acted almost as matriarch of the church, as well as augusta. She became leader or pontifex of an extravagant cult devoted to Mary, and together with her following of virgins and holy women, she played a visible role in the public liturgies of what were already some of the greatest churches of the Christian world. However firm her loyalty to church teaching, her own devotional life was not far removed from that of some of the feminine-oriented Gnostic sects purged from the Christian mainstream two hundred years earlier.29
Although Pulcheria did not officially rule the Eastern empire, she so influenced public policy that it certainly looked like she was in sole charge from 414 through 440. She ruled, in fact, through her position as imperial Big Sister. When her father, Arcadius, died in 408, she was nine, and her brother Theodosius II, the new ruler, was just seven. She clearly matured earlier than he did, and by the time she was fifteen, she was placing a personal stamp on religious policy. She took effective power in 414, displacing the eunuch regime. Her devoted admirer Sozomen records how:
She caused all affairs to be transacted in the name of her brother, and devoted great attention to bringing him up as a prince in the best possible way, and with such information as was suitable to his years. She had him taught by the most skilled men, in horsemanship, and the practice of arms, and in letters. But he was systematically taught by his sister to be orderly and princely in his manners; she showed him how to gather up his robes, and how to take a seat, and how to walk; she trained him to restrain laughter, to assume a mild or a formidable aspect as the occasion might require, and to inquire with urbanity into the cases of those who came before him with petitions.30
Literally, she taught him to walk and talk. By some accounts, she even chose and groomed a wife for him, in the form of Eudocia. If the story is true, Pulcheria would have cause to regret her decision, as Eudocia became a bitter foe.
Pulcheria also ensured that her brother followed the strictest standards of piety and devotion. “She taught him to frequent the church regularly, and to honor the houses of prayer with gifts and treasures; and she inspired him with reverence for priests and other good men.”31 Her efforts paid off richly. Theodosius II himself fasted often, especially on Wednesdays and Fridays.
He rendered his palace little different from a monastery: for he, together with his sisters, rose early in the morning, and recited responsive hymns in praise of the Deity. By this training he learnt the holy Scriptures by heart; and he would often discourse with the bishops on scriptural subjects, as if he had been an ordained priest of long standing.
One later Monophysite story tells how Theodosius II wrote to Egypt’s monastic leaders for advice about his failure to produce an heir. They responded that the lack of a son was God’s plan, as the religious order of the world would change after his death, and God wanted to prevent him having a son who would participate in this wickedness. The emperor and his wife agreed to live together in celibacy thereafter.32
Beyond personal piety, Theodosius II and his sisters showed an attitude to the official enforcement of orthodoxy that would not have been out of place at the Spanish court of Queen Isabella in 1490. Coincidentally or not, the Theodosian family had Spanish roots: Theodosius I grew up in that land, and his wife Flaccilla was a Spaniard. To use a later term, Pulcheria had a crusading mentality. In many societies, young teenage girls develop a fascination with religious devotion, and some plan to become nuns or devote their lives to good works. Pulcheria had very much these impulses, but she also had a well-armed empire to play with. As early as 414, when she was still fifteen, she persuaded her brother to expel remaining pagans from the imperial civil service. In 421, she pushed the empire to declare war against Persia, the other superpower of the age, to avenge the persecution of Christians within the Persian realm.33
The Age of Intolerance
More than most of her contemporaries, Pulcheria had a potent vision of an empire that was not just Christian but militantly and uniformly so, a regime determined to use its full power to enforce orthodoxy. She has an excellent claim to rank as the pioneer of medieval notions of Christendom at their most aggressive. That resemblance grows all the stronger when we think of her Roman, Christian, empire fighting under the banner of the Virgin Mary.
Jews were particular victims of the new regime. Christian-Jewish conflict grew steadily during the late fourth century, and by the 380s John Chrysostom denounced Jews and Judaizing Christians in terms that would have a long and wrenching afterlife. John used the charge of deicide, holding the Jews guilty of the death of Christ, and thus of God himself, a theme later developed by Pope Leo. Of course, this concept was also intimately linked to the ongoing debate over the nature and person of Christ: to talk about killing God made a powerful statement about who or what had died at Calvary. One incident from these years suggests the worsening religious climate. In 388, the bishop of the city of Callinicum, in Mesopotamia, led a mob that destroyed a synagogue. The emperor, Theodosius I, ordered the rioters to rebuild it at their own cost, even if that meant using church funds. Church leaders were appalled, and the great saint-bishop Ambrose of Milan wrote a furious protest against this blasphemy, by which he meant not the original desecration, but the rebuilding. That same year, the emperor prohibited Christian-Jewish intermarriage, on pain of death.34
His descendants built on this tradition. From 415, Theodosius II withdrew the privileges traditionally granted to Jewish communities, and in 425 his government ordered the execution of the last Nasi or head of the Jewish Sanhedrin, from a line that had maintained its tradition for centuries. Theodosius II’s policies—or, we should perhaps say, Pulcheria’s—provoked the destruction of Constantinople’s synagogues and the expulsion of its Jewish population.35 In 439, Theodosius II issued a comprehensive law that excluded Jews and Samaritans from public office and dignity, and it was forbidden either to build new synagogues or to repair existing ones threatened with ruin. Converting a Christian to Judaism meant death for the Jew responsible and the confiscation of his property. Reflecting a poisonous new hostility, a version of the blood libel legend even made an early appearance in these very years. In Syria, a group of Jews allegedly staged the mock crucifixion of a Christian boy, who died of his maltreatment. The emperor, we are told, ordered the perpetrators severely punished. Just how bad things became is suggested by the incident in the 480s when Christian mobs in Antioch sacked a synagogue, digging up and burning the bodies in the cemetery. The emperor, Zeno, was appalled. If they were going to so much trouble, he asked, why had they not burned the bodies of living Jews together with the dead?36
Under Theodosius II, imperial repression was only tempered by the presence at court of another and more moderate voice in the shape of his queen, Eudocia. As the daughter of a sophist or teacher of rhetoric, she remained in dialogue with pagan intellectual circles and tried to provide limited protection to pagans as well as Jews. These differing religious attitudes split the court between Eudocia and Pulcheria, a domestic war that contributed to the growth of Monophysite influence in the 440s. Court rivalries shaped theological debate.37
True Christians and False Christians
Taken alongside the vigilantism of individual bishops in Alexandria and elsewhere, such official policies suggest a radical new intolerance toward religious minorities. This policy change would be so important for the christological debates in vastly upping the stakes at issue, in that the full force of government and law would be turned against the losing side. Theological debate became a zero-sum game, with far-reaching implications in the material world.
The fact that the new Christian empire was willin
g to persecute rival Christian sects demands explanation. Individual Christians might be so zealous as to tolerate no rival faiths, but imperial authorities did not necessarily have to accept such fanaticism, especially when it ran against the practical realities of governing a vast and complex empire. But matters changed toward the end of the fourth century. In the 360s, the utter failure of the pagan revival launched by the emperor Julian the Apostate showed just how strongly entrenched Christianity had become, and official pressures to conform mounted. The church became a dominant factor in imperial affairs, rather than just serving as a humbly grateful recipient of official favors.38
The turning point came under the first Theodosius, who was a pupil of Ambrose of Milan. Theodosius I also came to power as a result of the imperial collapse at the battle of Adrianople in 378, which at the time seemed to herald a near-terminal crisis for the Roman world. Although he succeeded in reconstructing Roman power, he always remained sensitive to the empire’s need for divine protection and the dangers that might befall if God’s patience were tested too far.39
Theodosius I made Christianity the empire’s official state religion and began policies of strict religious conformity. Besides favoring Christianity in general, he showed a strong preference for the faith in its orthodox, Nicene form and hated the rival Arians, who denied the full equality of God the Father and God the Son. He systematically expelled Arian adherents, even in a city like Constantinople, where Arians clearly commanded a strong following. From 380, Arian-leaning bishops were removed from office or forced to conform, and ordinary Arian believers were forbidden to meet in churches. Nonorthodox groups, including Apollinarians, were forbidden from calling their leaders bishops or clergy or describing their meeting places as churches. By the end of the decade, the empire had a whole system of official investigation and persecution in place, a protoinquisition. Other groups were hit even harder. In 382, Theodosius ordered the death penalty for monks of the Manichaean faith.40
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