Pulcheria might have been expected to take more of a back-seat role in the imperial set-up since the marriage of her brother to Eudocia in 421. She was certainly spending more time in the imperial family’s secondary palaces in the suburbs of Constantinople, such as the palace of Rufinianae on the shore of the Sea of Marmara. This was one of numerous accommodation choices available to her, she and her sisters being the owners of a string of impressive private properties within the city, so many in fact that districts of Constantinople were named after them – the ‘Pulcherianiai’ quarter, for example. Yet Pulcheria did not fade into the background completely after her brother’s marriage, a fact that is underlined by his allocation to her of a praepositus augustae – a counterpart to the eunuch major-domo who served as his own chief of staff – and her own armed escort for trips out into the city streets.74
Pulcheria also continued to be a staunch advocate for Marianism, and in 431, had scored a sweet triumph over the new bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, with whom she had a relationship as antagonistic as her mother Eudoxia’s with John Chrysostom. Nestorius had been appointed in 428, two and a half years after the death of Pulcheria’s old mentor Atticus, and was outraged when he discovered only five days into his new post that Pulcheria had been allowed regularly to enter the sanctuary of the Great Church to receive communion along with the priests and her brother Theodosius II. Wading boldly into the increasingly fractious relationship between church and state in late antiquity, Nestorius apparently ordered Pulcheria to be turned away at the gate in future, and from that day on, it was open warfare between the empress and the bishop, who vehemently objected to the practice of calling Mary the ‘Mother of God’, rather than the ‘Mother of Christ’. Urged on by his sister, Theodosius II reluctantly convened an ecumenical council at Ephesus in June 431, to settle the matter, and Nestorius’s arguments were defeated by a close ally of Pulcheria’s, Bishop Cyril of Alexandria. Four years later, Nestorius was banished to an Egyptian monastery on Theodosius’s order. Nestorius himself, though, was in no doubt who was really behind his defeat, nor were the empress’s supporters, who had crowded into the Great Church after the triumph at Ephesus, chanting support for her championing of the Mariologists’ view:
Long live Pulcheria! It is she who has strengthened the faith! … Long live the orthodox one!75
Pulcheria’s sister-in-law Eudocia was perhaps a less enthusiastic endorser of the latter sentiment. Court tittle-tattle about the frosty relationship between the two women was so widespread that a story of how Pulcheria, in a black humour, had once tricked her gullible brother into signing his wife into slavery was still doing the rounds in the Byzantine court centuries later.76 Such tales did the imperial mantra of concordia no favours, so the arrival in Constantinople of Galla Placidia’s eighteen-year-old son Valentinian III in October 437 for his wedding to Eudocia’s fifteen-year-old daughter Licinia Eudoxia was an opportunity for the Theodosian dynasty to put on a display of family loyalty. To celebrate the union between the western and eastern imperial houses, the father of the bride appeared next to his daughter and new son-in-law on a special gold wedding coin, inscribed feliciter nuptiis (‘happy nuptials’). Theodosius II and Valentinian III were depicted holding an orb, to promote the image of an empire united, and after being joined in marriage, the young couple headed off on a honeymoon tour equally divided between their home territories, wintering in Thessalonica and then arriving the next spring in Ravenna, where they were greeted by the groom’s sister Honoria and Galla Placidia, who had remained there to deter any attempt by Aetius to take advantage of her son’s absence.77
While Valentinian III and Licinia Eudoxia were receiving the congratulations of their western subjects in 438, the bride’s mother, Eudocia, set off on a trip of her own. A new friendship was the catalyst behind her sudden departure, though if things were as bad between her and Pulcheria as sources indicate, she surely welcomed the opportunity to put some distance between herself and her sister-in-law. The previous year, Eudocia had made the acquaintance of Melania the Younger, the famous ascetic heiress who, thirty years previously, had sought the help of Stilicho’s wife Serena in an inheritance dispute, triggering a slight altercation over Melania’s refusal to remove her veil in Serena’s presence.78 Driven from Rome after the Goths sacked the city, Melania had eventually wound up in Jerusalem, where she founded a women’s monastery on the Mount of Olives, and another one for men near the Church of the Ascension. In 436, she went to visit her uncle, who was in Constantinople in anticipation of Valentinian’s and Licinia’s wedding, and during her stay she was permitted audiences with the emperor and empress. The connection between the two women was so auspicious that Melania urged Eudocia to come and stay with her in Jerusalem.79
The opportunity to emulate Helena in making a journey to the Holy Land was an obvious priority for Eudocia in accepting Melania’s invitation. As with Helena’s own pilgrimage, it was the ancient equivalent of a good photo-opportunity for the ruling dynasty, the chance to court popularity with a display of religious devotion and generous munificence on the part of the empress. So Eudocia set off, armed with gifts and donations for the churches in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the region, and after being met by Melania at Sidon, was duly installed as a guest in the Mount of Olives monastery. From here, she sallied forth to embark on an itinerary of carefully chosen public appearances, no doubt distributing money and taking an interest in the construction of various church-building programmes, following the example of Helena, whose Church of the Ascension was just up the hill from her monastery accommodation.80
Many ancient tourists to the Holy Land brought back mementoes of their travels. When Eudocia made a triumphant return to Constantinople in the summer of 439, she brought with her a particularly impressive souvenir. During her visit, she had specially requested to attend the dedication of a vast church, built to house the relics of St Stephen, the first martyr, whose bones had been identified on the say-so of a Palestinian priest in 415. Melania’s loyal biographer presented her as the mastermind behind the shrine, but that Eudocia had some stake in the shrine’s construction is strongly suggested by reports that Eudocia brought Stephen’s relics back to Constantinople with her. To be the guardian of holy relics conferred a powerful distinction in antiquity. It was a satisfying coup for Eudocia to return to Constantinople with her own, admittedly more modest, version of Helena’s True Cross, and perhaps she permitted herself a smug satisfaction in being their courier rather than Pulcheria, though it was Pulcheria who was the one to actually deposit the relics in the church of St Lawrence in Constantinople. An ivory panel of uncertain date and subject matter preserved in Trier may well be a representation of the actual moment of the relics’ arrival at their destination, greeted by an elaborately dressed Pulcheria, who stands at the centre of the scene, holding a cross as though the master of ceremonies.81
Eudocia did not long bask in the glow of her achievement. Within a year, her relationship with her husband had deteriorated drastically. A new supremo was calling the shots in Theodosius’s court, the eunuch chamberlain Chrysaphius, who, thanks to his closeted access to the emperor’s inner sanctum, was said to have usurped even Pulcheria in her brother’s confidence. He set about exploiting that influence to the full. Not long after Eudocia returned from Jerusalem, Chrysaphius reputedly began aggravating the problematic relationship between the two empresses, fanning the flames of Eudocia’s jealousy of her sister-in-law, slyly reminding her that Pulcheria had her own praepositus, while she, the emperor’s wife, did not. That Pulcheria soon stopped appearing in public in Constantinople, confining herself to one of the imperial palaces, seems to confirm that Chrysaphius’s baiting had the desired effect. Within two years, Eudocia too had fallen victim to the poisonous palace atmosphere, accused of having committed adultery with the magister officiorum, Paulinus. Theodosius was outraged and ordered Paulinus’s execution. Eudocia fled back to Jerusalem, where she would live out the last eighteen years of her life.8
2
Writing from exile in 451, the embittered bishop Nestorius put the whole affair down as divine punishment on Theodosius and Eudocia for their heretical behaviour.83 Christian authors of the sixth and seventh centuries, however, remembered Eudocia more warmly and dismissed the charges against her as the fabrication of heretical historians, asserting that Eudocia was ‘wise and chaste, spotless and perfect in all her conduct’. Describing Eudocia’s retirement years in Jerusalem, one sixth-century historian wrote that he was sceptical of the rumours that surrounded her flight, and pointed out that she continued to endow churches and monasteries just as she had while staying with Melania. Theodosius’s anger over the supposed affair did not fade, though, and he dispatched his domestic equerry Saturninus to execute two clerics in his ex-wife’s service. Eudocia retaliated by ordering the death, tit for tat, of Saturninus, a piece of impertinence for which Theodosius deprived her of the services of an imperial staff.84
With Eudocia’s old ties to the imperial court severed, she was able to establish a new, second life for herself in Jerusalem, with her own household rules and an identity separate to that of her husband and the imperial court. She thus joined an elite roll-call of Roman empresses such as Livia and Domitia Longina who had also contrived to forge relatively independent lives in retirement. Eudocia’s example proved an inspiration for her own granddaughter by Licina and Valentinian III, who was named after her. This younger Eudocia would endure several unhappy betrothals and dynastic marriages, before fleeing her Vandal husband Huneric in 471, and trekking to Jerusalem, where she is said to have fallen on her knees before the resting place of her grandmother and embraced her tomb, which had lain in the empress’s beloved shrine of St Stephen since her death in 460. One hundred years later, an anonymous Italian traveller known simply to historians as the Piacenza Pilgrim, who was undertaking a religious tour of the holiest eastern sites, wrote of visiting the tomb of Eudocia and remarked on the way in which the memory of both she and Helena still lived on in the Holy Land, Helena as a charitable guardian of the poor, and Eudocia as a friend of Jerusalem, the construction of whose city walls she had helped to fund. To be compared with Helena was the best epitaph Eudocia could have asked for.85
While Eudocia forged a new life for herself in Jerusalem, Pulcheria was plotting to get her old one back. In 450, her chance came, thanks to a fatal horse-riding accident suffered by Theodosius II on 28 July, and the execution that same year of the powerful Chrysaphius. Into her brother’s shoes stepped a grey-haired junior staff officer named Marcian, whose candidacy was heavily backed by military bigwigs Aspar and Zeno, both hoping to secure powerful positions of influence for themselves by parachuting Marcian on to the throne. The other key player in Marcian’s elevation was Pulcheria herself, who apparently realised that with Theodosius II having failed to provide a male heir, there was only one way to keep imperial power in the family. Having spent the past thirty-six years of her life carving an identity for herself on the back of her public vow of virginity at the age of fifteen, Pulcheria now bowed to the inevitable and married for the first time at the age of fifty-one. On 25 August 450, she and Marcian appeared at the Hebdomon parade ground on the coast outside of Constantinople, and in view of the troops, Pulcheria personally bestowed the diadem and the purple military paludamentum upon her new husband, effectively crowning him the new Augustus. Not since Agrippina Minor was immortalised in marble at Aphrodisias, placing the laurel crown on her son Nero’s head, had a woman been seen directing the coronation of an emperor.86
Pulcheria had compromised her vow of chastity but not broken it. Marcian agreed to her condition that the union would not be consummated, and to silence the cynics, gossipmongers and critics who surely spotted comedic and political ammunition in Pulcheria’s U-turn, gold coins were commissioned showing Marcian’s and Pulcheria’s union being blessed by Christ himself, who stood like a father-figure between them. It was a striking departure from previous imperial coin iconography. A near identical format was used again some forty years later to commemorate the marriage of a Byzantine emperor and empress – Anastasios and Ariadne – where once again, it was the empress who legitimised the imperial succession of the emperor in question. But for at least another 400 years after that, no such portrait appeared again in imperial art.87
Marcian’s leadership was tested almost immediately by the pressing diplomatic and military problem presented by the Huns. Under the leadership of their new leader Attila, the Huns had been bent on terrorising both the eastern and western courts for the past decade. Uninterested, as the Goths had been, in acquiring a permanent settlement within the empire, and with their services as mercenaries no longer required by Aetius in the west, the Huns’ principal demand was money, and Attila adopted a policy of effectively blackmailing the Romans to give him enough gold in return for not attacking their fortresses and pillaging their territories. Attila adopted a highly aggressive strategy towards Theodosius II’s court in particular, and after a bungled Roman assassination attempt against the Hunnic king, in 450 the Constantinople court adopted a more conciliatory tack, and enough gold was stumped up to persuade Attila to go away.
The rise of the Huns had meanwhile created problems of a different kind for Galla Placidia, now aged in her early sixties. The past seventeen years since Aetius had exploited Hunnic military might to assume authority over her son’s affairs, seem to have been spent quietly by comparison to the domestic turbulence affecting Pulcheria and Eudocia in the east. Ever since the death of Flavius Constantius in 421, Placidia had remained unmarried, and though there is no evidence that she adopted the monastic way of life favoured by her nieces in Constantinople, she had nevertheless proved herself a committed servant of the Christian God. She exchanged letters with Pulcheria and Theodosius II on the controversy over miaphysitism – the ongoing debate over the true nature of Christ.88 She was also a regular correspondent of Pope Leo I, and during the 440s had teamed up with the pontiff to assist with repairs of the church now known as the Basilica of St Paul-outside-the Walls, built by her father on the site of St Paul’s tomb in Rome. A heavily restored inscription on the triumphal arch pays tribute to her efforts.89
Most of her time was now spent in Ravenna, but in February of 450, Placidia came again to Rome with other members of her family to take part in celebrations in honour of St Peter and also preside over the reburial of the remains of her infant son with Athaulf, little Theodosius, whose silver coffin had been exhumed from its resting place in Barcelona and brought to Rome for reinterment in the family mausoleum next to St Peter’s.90 Around the same time, a scandal involving her daughter Honoria was brewing. Thirty-two-year-old Honoria had grown up into a recalcitrant imperial princess, causing enormous embarrassment to her mother in 434 by getting pregnant by her estate manager, Eugenius, at the age of sixteen. Eugenius was executed, and Honoria packed off in disgrace to Constantinople to live in the conventlike surroundings of her cousin Pulcheria’s palace, where she gave birth to the baby who would be heard of no more. On being allowed to return to Ravenna, now demoted from the imperial rank of Augusta, a respectable but dull husband was found for her, Herculanus Bassus, who would not object to her tainted past and could be trusted not to use the marriage as a stepping stone to power. But rebelling furiously against her relatives’ marriage plans for her, Honoria took the drastic and melodramatic step of writing to Attila and offering him money to intervene in her predicament. She enclosed her ring with the letter and sent it via her eunuch Hyacinthus, whom Valentinian later tortured and beheaded on discovering his sister’s treachery.91
Attila’s emotions on receiving Honoria’s letter must have been something to behold. Having recently come to a peace deal with Constantinople, his eyes were already swivelling greedily to the riches potentially on offer from Ravenna, and Honoria’s letter unwittingly showed him how to play his ace. Interpreting the message and the enclosure of the ring as a de-facto offer of marriage, he pledged, mock-heroically, to avenge his bride, a
nd provocatively dispatched several Hun embassies to Ravenna between 450 and 451, insisting that Honoria and her share of imperial power – what he called the ‘sceptre of empire’ – should be delivered to him forthwith. A curt response was issued by Valentinian III, who pointed out that it was not within Honoria’s power to receive the so-called sceptre, since the rule of the Roman Empire belonged not to females but to males. Attila of course had no expectation of his demand being met, but planned to use it in any case as an excuse to declare war on the west. Honoria herself meanwhile had been handed over to her mother for punishment, but instead of imposing a sentence of death as Antonia once had on her wayward daughter Livilla, Galla Placidia contented herself with insisting that Honoria marry Herculanus, whereupon presumably she retired to a quiet life on one of his estates, and was heard of no more.92
Attila continued to press his claim to Honoria, even after he suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of Aetius in the French region of Champagne in 451. It was not the end of Attila’s ambitions in the west. He managed to milk Valentinian’s territories of at least another year’s worth of plunder after the setback of 451. But he found in Marcian, the new husband of Pulcheria, a much more tight-fisted proposition than his predecessor Theodosius II, and once Attila had committed himself to a western campaign, all pay-outs from Constantinople were stopped completely. Attila lived only another two years before dying ignominiously in 453 of a nosebleed which choked him while he lay in a drunken sleep on his wedding night.93
The scandal caused by her daughter’s folly was also to bring down the final curtain on Galla Placidia’s life. While Pulcheria went on to be acclaimed publicly as a ‘New Helena’ for her part at the seminal, faith-defining meeting of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and died at the age of fifty-four in July 453 to an outpouring of grief from the faithful in Constantinople, Galla Placidia’s own passing seems to have passed almost unnoticed in the reportage of the tense disintegration of her son’s government. She died a few months after her daughter Honoria’s disgrace and hasty marriage to Herculanus Bassus, on 27 November 450 at the age of around sixty-two. No details of her last days survive, nor the cause of her death, nor the place of her burial.94
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