The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (25 page)

his former robes of state - was confiscated and sold. Now at last the capital was quiet; but in Anatolia the war continued for three more years. Only in
496
did peace finally return.

But the Isaurians, insufferable as they were, cannot take all the blame for the continuing unrest in Constantinople. Another major contributory cause was the division of the populace into two rival factions, the Blues and the Greens. Their names came originally from the Hippodrome, where they referred to the colours worn by the two principal teams of charioteers;
1
but the factions themselves had long since left the narrow confines of the arena. Their leaders were by now appointed by the government, who also entrusted them with important public responsibilities, including guard duties and the maintenance of the defensive walls. Thus, not only in the capital but in all the main cities of the Empire, they existed as two independent semi-political parties which combined on occasion to form a local militia. Their political affiliations naturally varied according to local conditions and the issues of the day; at this period, however, the Blues tended to be the party of the big landowners and the old Graeco-Roman aristocracy, while the Greens represented trade, industry and the civil service. Many members of this last group came from the eastern provinces, where heresy was more widespread; thus the Blues had gradually come to be associated with religious orthodoxy, the Greens with monophysitism. But these were loose associations only, with exceptions on both sides, while the populace as a whole gave its adherence, indiscriminately though enthusiastically, to one faction or the other. Anastasius himself at first tried to maintain impartiality, and in
493
was actually pelted with stones by a group of Greens after refusing to release certain of their number who had been arrested after an affray; soon, however, his economic policies - which favoured the manufacturing industries - and his instinctive if only semiconscious tendency towards the monophysites drew him to the Greens, of whom he was finally to become an open adherent.

Hostility between the two demes (as they were called) increased steadily as his reign continued, and the riots of
493
were seen to have been only the beginning of a new wave of internecine strife in the capital. Still worse troubles occurred in
501
during the festival of the Brytae, when the Greens attacked the Blues in the Hippodrome; among those killed was the Emperor's own illegitimate son. (It was because of this that the

1
Originally there had been four teams, but by this time the Reds and the Whites had been assimilated into the other two.

celebration was banned the following year.) Worst of all, however, were the disturbances of
511,
for which Anastasius himself was very largely to blame, and which came dangerously near to toppling his throne. With advancing age - he was now in his eighties - his monophysite sympathies had become more and more pronounced and were now plain for all to see. Patriarch Euphemius was no longer in a position to protest: he had been accused - with what justice we cannot tell - of having given secret support to the Isaurians, and had been banished to a distant region of Anatolia. His successor Macedonius was the gentlest and mildest-mannered of men, but he too was beginning to find dealings with his sovereign impossible.

By now the monophysites had found themselves a war-cry. After the so-called
trisagion
- the words 'Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and Immortal' which occur as a constant refrain in the Byzantine liturgy -they added the phrase 'who was crucified for us', seeing this as the most emphatic statement that could be made of their belief that it was not the man Jesus but God Almighty himself who met his death upon the Cross. In the atmosphere of Anastasius's Constantinople these were fighting words, and tempers ran high when the news spread through the city that they had been heard in the Chapel of the Archangel, which stood within the walls of the imperial palace. But worse was to come: on the Sunday following they were heard again, defiantly shouted during the morning mass in St Sophia itself. The orthodox congregation shouted back, louder still; fighting broke out; and the service ended in uproar.

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 s
ixty 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 a
nd the following references, see
Secret
t 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 militum
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.