The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  At the subsequent inquiry, the examining magistrates - possibly acting on the Emperor's instructions - laid the blame not on the monophysite intruders but squarely on the shoulders of the harmless old Patriarch Macedonius. For the people of Constantinople, the vast majority of whom staunchly supported the decrees of Chalcedon, this transparently unfair attack on their beloved Patriarch was the last straw. They marched threateningly on the Palace, and there is no telling what might have ensued had not Macedonius responded to Anastasius's terrified appeal and hurried to his side. Some sort of reconciliation was hastily patched up, and the crowd dispersed.

  It was a narrow escape, and should have been a salutary lesson; but the Emperor was now too old to change his ways. Macedonius - to whom he probably owed his life - was quietly exiled like his predecessor, and on 4 November 512 the fateful clause 'who was crucified for us' once again echoed through the great basilica. On this occasion the violence was far worse; by the time order had been restored the floor was covered in the blood of the dead and the wounded. A similar incident the next day at the Church of St Theodore resulted in further casualties; but on the 6th the orthodox mob was ready. At a huge rally in the Hippodrome they called death and destruction on all heretics, then poured out into the city to make good their words. Again the imperial statues were hurled to the ground and smashed; among the many houses burned to the ground were those of the Praetorian Prefect and the Emperor's nephew Pompeius. The rioting continued for another two full days; then at last Anastasius acted. Presenting himself in the Circus before some 20,000 of his furious subjects, he slowly removed his diadem and laid aside the imperial purple. He was ready there and then, he told them, to lay down the burden of the Empire; all that was necessary was that they should name his successor. Alternatively, if they preferred, he would continue in office, giving them his word that he would never again give them cause for dissatisfaction. The tall, white-haired figure was still handsome, the voice firm and persuasive. Gradually, the clamour ceased; once more, the situation had been saved.

  There were plenty of other threats to the peace during the long reign of Anastasius. A three-year war with Persia resulted in the loss of several important strongholds along the eastern frontier, while repeated invasions by the Bulgars into Thrace obliged him to build a defensive wall across the thirty-odd miles from Selymbria (now Silivri) on the Marmara across to the Black Sea. Most dangerous of all was an insurrection led by a military adventurer of Gothic origins named Vitalian, who gained much popular support by claiming to be a champion of orthodoxy against a monophysite Emperor and who on three occasions advanced with his army to the very walls of Constantinople. None of these threats, however, had important long-term effects. It has seemed worth describing the religious riots in considerably greater detail than any of these simply to emphasize once again that aspect of daily life in the Byzantine Empire which it is hardest for the twentieth century to comprehend: the passionate involvement shown by all classes of society in what appear to most of us today to be impossibly abstruse niceties of theological doctrine. That such points should preoccupy deeply devout and scholarly men like Anastasius need occasion no particular surprise; that a plebeian mob should be inflamed to fury not by political slogans but by such questions as the relation of the Father to the Son or the Procession of the Holy Ghost puts a greater strain on our understanding, but is true none the less.

  Some time towards the end of his reign, old Anastasius was consumed with curiosity to know which of his three nephews would succeed him on his death. Superstitious as always, he invited all three of them to dine with him in the Palace, and had three couches prepared on which they could afterwards take their rest. Under the pillow of one of these he slipped a small piece of parchment, on which he had inscribed the single word R EG N U M; whichever nephew chose that particular couch would, he believed, in due course assume the throne. Alas, a sad surprise awaited him: two of the young men, whose affection for each other seems to have gone somewhat beyond family feeling, chose to share the same couch; that which Anastasius had secretly marked remained unrumpled. From that moment he had no doubt that the next Emperor would come from outside his own line; but he still longed to know who it would be. After fervent prayers for a sign, it was revealed to him that his successor would be the man who first entered his bed-chamber the next day. Now the Emperor's first visitor was normally his personal chamberlain; that particular morning, however, it chanced to be Justin, Commander of the Excubitors, come to report the carrying-out of certain imperial orders. Anastasius bowed his head. It was, he knew, the will of God.

  So runs the legend; and we may well imagine the old man reflecting, not perhaps for the first time, that the Almighty moves in a mysterious way. Justin was a Thracian peasant, now aged about sixty-six, uneducated and illiterate. Like Theodoric, he is said to have possessed a stencil -though of wood rather than gold - into which was cut the word LEGI, 'I have read it'; since only he had the right to use purple ink, his actual signature was unnecessary. Even then, according to Procopius,1 the Emperor's hand had to be firmly guided across the page. The same source tells us how he and his two brothers had walked to Constantinople from their home at Bederiana - a village some sixty miles south of Naissus (Nis in present-day Yugoslavia) - 'with their cloaks slung over their shoulders .. . and when they reached the city they had nothing more than the cooked biscuit that they had brought with them from home'. His wife, Lupicina, had even humbler origins; she was a slave, and had already been the concubine of the man from whom Justin had bought her.

  Despite, therefore, his signal service during the war in Isauria and his undoubted military capabilities, the new ruler was scarcely of imperial calibre. Procopius even goes so far as to compare him to a donkey, 'inclined to follow the man who pulls the rein, wagging his ears steadily the while'; but this is surely an exaggeration. Justin had, after all, risen from being a simple soldier to Comes Excubitorum, commander of one of

  1 For this and the following references, see Secrett History, vi-viii.

  the crack palace regiments. He certainly seems to have possessed plenty of self-confidence and ambition, and not a little peasant cunning. According to another report, when Anastasius finally expired, at the age of eighty-seven, on the night of 9 July 518, the chief eunuch Amantius had his own candidate for the purple and confided his plans to Justin, supplying him with a considerable quantity of gold with which to bribe the soldiers. Justin, however, kept the money for himself and alerted his men to stand by their arms. The next morning, as the people poured into the Hippodrome and the Senate debated the succession behind closed doors, fighting broke out. The Excubitors were brought in to restore order, and of their own accord began to call for their Comes as the next Emperor. He first refused; but when the Senate, taking as usual the line of least resistance, joined their voice to that of the soldiers, he allowed himself to be persuaded.

  A report that the regiment then formed a protective screen around its commander, drawing back to reveal him in full imperial regalia, suggests that despite appearances to the contrary Justin was not entirely unprepared for his elevation; even so, one may still wonder how it came about that so rough and unsophisticated a man should have obtained the support he did. First of all, he was uncompromisingly orthodox, standing four-square against the Anastasian party with its monophysite leanings and openly championing the Blues against the by now highly unpopular Greens. Second, he was well-liked and respected by the army and could be trusted to deal firmly with any renewed attempts at insurrection by Vitalian, who was still at liberty in Thrace. But his greatest advantage was his nephew, the real power behind his throne, the eminence grise who guided him more infallibly than any of those secretaries who steered his faltering pen across the wooden stencil. It was this nephew who, quite probably, engineered his uncle's elevation to the purple; it was he who dealt with Vitalian in typically Byzantine fashion, inviting him to Constantinople, lulling his suspicions by awarding him the Consulate and the rank of magister m
ilitum and then having him quietly assassinated; it was he who carried through the reconciliation with the Papacy after a thirty-five-year schism; and it was he who celebrated his own Consulship in 521 with the most lavish games and public spectacles in the Hippodrome that Constantinople had ever seen. No less than twenty lions, thirty panthers and an unspecified number of other exotic beasts were fought and killed - so much for Anastasius's reforms - in the vast circus; the equivalent of 3,700 pounds of gold was spent on decorations, stage machinery and largesse to the people; and the chariot races were of such superlative quality and aroused such excitement that the final contest had to be cancelled for fear of serious public disturbances. The contrast with the austere, penny-pinching days of the previous reign was dramatic, the message clear: the Empire stood on the threshold of a new and glorious age - an age in which, under a once-more benevolent God represented by a noble and dazzling Emperor, it would regain its lost territories and recapture its past greatness.

  But the symbol of that age, and the identity of that Emperor, was not Justin; it was his nephew Justinian.

  Justinian was born in 482, in a little village called Tauresina, not far from the birthplace of his uncle. His first language, like Justin's, was almost certainly Thracian, which was to become extinct a few hundred years later; but that whole region of the Balkan peninsula had long been thoroughly Romanized and the boy was probably bilingual in Latin at an early age. We do not know how or when he came to Constantinople. It was almost certainly at Justin's behest, when he was still a child: he was later known as a man of wide education and culture, of a kind that he could not possibly have acquired anywhere outside the capital. His schooling completed, his uncle must have arranged a military commission for him; for we find him as an officer in the Scholae, one of the palace regiments, at the time of Anastasius's death. By now, too, it seems that Justin had formally adopted him as a son, on which occasion he had abandoned his original name of Petrus Sabbatius and had assumed, as a mark of gratitude and respect to his benefactor, the name by which he is known to history.

  But all this is little more than speculation. It is only from 518 onwards that we have firm historical evidence for Justinian's extraordinary career. One of his uncle's first actions on assuming the purple was to raise him to the rank of Patrician and appoint him Count of the Domestics, a position which gave him access to the innermost circles of power; and it was from this moment, that his effective domination began. Even if Justin did not owe his elevation to his nephew, he immediately showed himself willing to be guided by him in all things, and for the rest of his life thereafter - apart from a few months in 524-5 when Justinian was gravely ill - was content to be his mouthpiece and his puppet.

  To Justinian, then, belongs the credit for what was incontestably the most important achievement of his uncle's reign: the healing of the breach with Rome, which had begun with the pinning of the sentence of excommunication on to the robes of Patriarch Acacius in 484. That breach was, in his eyes, an affront to the essential unity that lay at the heart of his entire political philosophy: as there was one God, so there must be one Empire, and one Church. Justin had not been on the throne a month before he wrote (at his nephew's dictation) to Pope Hormisdas, informing him of his accession - an honour, he somewhat disingenuously added, which he had been most unwilling to accept. The Pope replied, equally cordially; further exchanges followed; and on 25 March 519 a papal embassy arrived at Constantinople, having been met at the tenth milestone by a reception committee headed by Justinian himself. Two days later, in St Sophia, Patriarch John declared the Churches of the Old Rome and the New to be one and indivisible, and solemnly read a sentence of anathema on a whole string of heretics, including Timothy the Weasel, Paul the Stammerer and his own predecessor Acacius, 'formerly Bishop of Constantinople, who made himself accomplice and follower of these heretics, together with all who persevered in their fellowship and communion'. Finally the names of Zeno and Anastasius, together with those of the Patriarchs Euphemius and Macedonius - who had never veered from the orthodox path and had indeed suffered exile for their beliefs - were ceremonially struck from the diptychs.1 The schism was at an end. The cost, from the Byzantine point of view, had been an almost unconditional surrender, involving the sacrifice of two innocent reputations; but to Justinian it was a small enough price to pay for a reunited Church.

  Only a year or two after this - the date is uncertain, but it must have been soon after 520 - there came the second great turning-point in Justinian's life: his meeting with his future Empress. Theodora was not, to put it mildly, an ideal match. Her father had been a bear-keeper employed by the Greens at the Hippodrome, her mother some kind of circus performer, probably an acrobat; and these antecedents alone were more than enough to debar her from polite society. But they were not all. While still a child she had joined her elder sister on the stage, playing in low knockabout comedy, farce and burlesque. Already attractive and vivacious, she was also an inspired mimic; thus she soon acquired an enthusiastic following and before long had graduated to being Constantinople's most notorious courtesan - though we may doubt whether, even in her most abandoned moments, she altogether deserved the description of her by Procopius, surely one of the most outspoken pieces

  1 These carried the lists of the orthodox faithful whose names were regularly remembered bv the early Church during the celebration of the Eucharist.

  of vilification ever directed against a queen or empress in all history:

  Now for a time Theodora was still too immature to sleep with a man or to have intercourse like a woman, but she acted as might a male prostitute to satisfy those dregs of humanity, slaves though they were, who followed their master to the theatre and there took the opportunity to indulge in such bestial practices; and she remained some considerable time in a brothel, given over to such unnatural traffic of the body . . . But as soon as she reached maturity she joined the women of the stage and became a harlot, of the kind that our ancestors used to call 'the infantry' . . . The wench had not an ounce of modesty, nor did any man ever see her embarrassed: on the contrary, she unhesitatingly complied with the most shameless demands . . . and she would throw off her clothes and expose to all comers those parts, both in front and behind, which should rightly remain hidden from men's eyes.

  Never was any woman so completely abandoned to pleasure. Many a time she would attend a banquet with ten young men or more, all with a passion for fornication and at the peak of their powers, and would lie with all her companions the whole night long; and when she had reduced them all to exhaustion she would go to their attendants - sometimes as many as thirty of them - and copulate with each in turn; and even then she could not satisfy her lust.

  And although she made use of three apertures in her body, she was wont to complain that Nature had not provided her with larger openings in her nipples, so that she might have contrived another form of intercourse there. And though she became repeatedly pregnant, yet by various devices she was almost always able to induce an immediate abortion.

  Often in the theatre, too, in full view of all the people . . . she would spread herself out and lie on her back on the ground. And certain slaves whose special task it was would sprinkle grains of barley over her private parts; and geese trained for the purpose would pick them off one by one with their beaks and swallow them. And when she rose again to her feet, so far from blushing she actually seemed to take pride in this performance.1

  So it goes on, the sanctimonious old hypocrite clearly relishing every word he writes. Clearly too, his account is to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Procopius loathed both Theodora and her husband, and this is not the only passage in his scurrilous Secret History in which he sets out to destroy the reputation of one or the other. There is no suggestion that he ever witnessed Theodora in action; thus his authority can only be the gossip of the market place, and that, we may be sure, lost nothing in the telling. All the same, such billowing black smoke must presumably issue from some sort of a fire
; and there can be little doubt that Theodora was, as our grandparents might have put it, no better

  1 .Secret History, ix, 10-12.

  than she should have been. Whether she was more depraved than others of her sort is open to question.

  In any case she soon began to look around for better things, and so became the mistress of a moderately distinguished civil servant, whom she accompanied to North Africa. Once there, the two had a violent quarrel. Theodora was dismissed and, still according to Procopius, worked her passage home in the only way she knew. At some stage on her return journey, however, she found herself in Alexandria; and it has been suggested that while there she came into contact with the leading churchmen of the city - something which would go a long way towards explaining the pronounced monophysite tendencies which she was to display in later life. She may even have undergone some sort of religious experience, for she certainly seems to have been a changed woman by the time she returned to Constantinople.

  One characteristic that remained constant, however, was her strong attachment to the Blue party and her hatred for the Greens. The story is told of how, after her father's death when she was six years old, her mother at once remarried in the hopes that her new husband would succeed to his predecessor's job as the Greens' bear-keeper. But she was disappointed: the post had been given to another applicant. Threatened with destitution, she appeared one day in the Circus, her three little girls accompanying her with garlands in their hair, and appealed to the assembled populace. The Greens, who might have been thought to have some moral obligation to the widow of their old employee, ignored her; but the Blues - more probably out of a desire to show their rivals in a bad light than from any genuine sympathy - took pity on her and found employment for her husband. From that moment on, Theodora's loyalties were fixed; for the rest of her life she never wavered.