The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (26 page)

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
Schola
e,
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.
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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

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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.
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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

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.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.

Justinian too favoured the Blues, and before his succession spent much time and energy in securing their support. It was probably while doing so that he first met Theodora. She was by now in her middle thirties, as beautiful and intelligent as ever, and with all the wisdom and maturity that had been so noticeably absent in earlier years. He was at once captivated and, within a short time, enslaved. He made her his mistress and fathered a child who died in infancy, but this was not enough: despite her background, he was determined that she should be his wife. Inevitably, there were obstacles. One was a law which specifically forbade the marriage of senators and others of high rank to actresses; another, far more serious, was the implacable opposition of the Empress. On her husband's accession she had abandoned the name of Lupicina in favour of the nobler - if less original - Euphemia; but she was still essentially the peasant she had always been and, having finally found in her immediate entourage someone of still baser extraction than herself, she was determined to do her down in any way she could. While Euphemia lived the marriage was impossible, even for Justinian; but in
524,
fortunately for him, she died. The old Emperor made no difficulties; he never attempted to stand against his nephew. Within weeks he had given his approval to a law permitting retired actresses on whom high dignity had been conferred to marry anyone they liked. The way was now clear, and in
525
the Patriarch in St Sophia declared Justinian and Theodora man and wife. Only two years later, on
4
April
527,
they were crowned co-Emperor and Empress, and when on
1
August old Justin finally succumbed to the cancer from which he had long been suffering, they found themselves the sole and supreme rulers of the Byzantine Empire.

The plural is important. Theodora was to be no Empress Consort, spending her life quietly with her attendant ladies in the
gynaeceum
and appearing with her husband only at the most solemn ceremonies. At Justinian's insistence, she was to reign at his side, taking decisions and acting upon them in his name, giving him the benefit of her counsel in all the highest affairs of state. She had come a long way in five years; her future appearances on the public stage were to be very different from those of the past.

What the people of Constantinople thought of Justinian's marriage to Theodora is not recorded. If Procopius's account of her early life has any truth in it at all, there must have been many who saw it as a disgrace to the Empire. One suspects, none the less, that there were others prepared to adopt a less censorious attitude. Justinian had never acquired the common touch: he had always seemed somehow remote from his future subjects, chilly and withdrawn. Here at last was a sign that he was human, just like anyone else.

But to be human is not necessarily to be popular. However splendid the games in the Circus, however open-handed the largesse scattered to the crowds celebrating his second Consulship in the year following his accession, however generous the financial aid made available to cities stricken by earthquakes - there were nearly
5
,000
casualties at Antioch in
528,
and half as many again at Laodicea in
529
- Justinian was never loved. His extravagances were all very fine, but they all
had to be paid for. So did the
war with Persia, which began when he had been only a few months on the throne and smouldered fitfully on till after the death of King Kavadh in
5 31;
so did the 'Everlasting Peace' with which it ended, signed with Kavadh's successor Chosroes in September
532,
which provided for the payment by the Empire of an annual tribute - though it was never so described - of
11,000
pounds' weight of gold a year. So too did the monumental construction programme, which Justinian had begun in his uncle's reign with the great church dedicated to Mary the Mother of God at Blachernae, where the Walls of Theodosius ran down to the Golden Horn, and which he had continued with the rebuilding of no less than seven others - many of them originally founded by Constantine - commemorating early Christian martyrs who had met their deaths in and around Byzantium. This alone would have been an impressive achievement; but it proved to be only the beginning. In the first days after his succession he continued with a foundation of his own, erected in grateful memory of two more martyrs, St Sergius and St Bacchus - a church which, by the originality of its architecture and the sumptuousness of its carved decoration, ranks in Constantinople second only to St Sophia itself.
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