Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (31 page)

HE VICTORY OVER
the rebels was a grand statement from the couple in power, but it also isolated them terribly. Probably they consulted with their closest military and civilian advisors, and with their spiritual fathers both Orthodox and Monophysite, who urged them to pray. For despite the silence and deference that surrounded them, they knew that they were responsible for the violent deaths of tens of thousands of their Christian brethren. They wondered if unknown enemies still wished them dead. And they might have tried to discover when they themselves would die. How many years did they have left to accomplish the task (both divine mimesis and everyday governance) for which only the groundwork had been laid? Justinian was fifty years old, Theodora a little over thirty. And so they must have decided to consult not just military, civilian, and religious advisors but also the astrologers and magicians that their laws had failed to drive away.

It was an age when people believed that only a saint could foretell the day and hour of his death.
¹
Such illumination was denied to other living creatures, whether they were peasants or emperors; so these people turned to astrology, which was strongly censored and yet still widely practiced.

Thus on some moonless night, or perhaps by the pale light of a silvery full moon, the rulers might have appeared in disguise on the seashore or riverbank. Perhaps they asked about themselves and their destiny, using roundabout allusions to avoid revealing their identities.

The astrologers might have told the emperor an allegory of a palm
tree that rises in the desert and draws water from the deepest springs. He might have deduced that his glory would extend far and wide. He might have been pleased, without stopping to think about the desert evoked in the image. The astrologers might have told the empress an allegory about a diamond, treasure of the East, star of the night, whose adamantine power triumphs over everything. Theodora might have heard these words as a reflection of her role in the Nika events, and a sign of her invincibility as a lady and mistress. She might not have considered that the brilliance of the diamond remains hidden in a jewel case unless it is set in gold. When it stands alone, it is static.

In 532, Theodora stepped into the final, intense third of her life, her last sixteen years. Only now did she see the hidden, nocturnal face of the power that she had longed for “from the depth of her heart,”
²
which had once gleamed up ahead. The purple robe, which turned out
not
to be a burial shroud during the rebellion, lay securely on her shoulders but represented the heavy burden of maintaining the continuity of Roman power throughout the civilized world.

New and momentous challenges kept arising, knotty problems requiring wise answers that could only come from deep reflection—but the answers were needed immediately. Everything moved slowly across the vast expanses separating the thousand cities of the empire. By the time an imperial decision arrived at its destination, the situation had already changed and the problems no longer matched the solution that had been found. A far-flung imperial functionary, now considered the ruler’s “slave,” had to look past the letter of the emperor’s message and grasp its deep underlying meaning; otherwise the message could become no more than an enigma or a mirage. (This is what happens in “A Message from the Emperor,” a short story by Franz Kafka, the writer who has best explored the mysteries of powerful centralized empires.)

The modern historian looks at separate themes—finance, religion, law, the military, and so on—and treats each one independently, but at the time they were all inextricably intermingled. The tangle of issues was magnified by the expansion of time and space to produce an anomalous, almost hallucinatory effect. Neither a deforming mirror
nor an out-of-focus image, it was an unsynchronized vision. Things that had appeared stable now trembled and shook. Things that had seemed indefinite now took on sharp outlines. Looking at the overall picture was like looking at a mosaic portrait by candlelight. Every passing breeze makes the flame flicker, revealing new details in the mosaic: unexpected shadows and bright spots, wrinkles in the face and in the fabric. It’s impossible to be sure about the lines of the drawing or the exact nuances of color.

Justinian was built for analysis more than contemplation. He read every functionary’s report and granted audiences to everyone. But he failed to foresee the Nika uprising gathering right in front of him. He suffered from intellectual farsightedness: he could spot major objectives off in the distance, but couldn’t see the area right around him.

Theodora, on the other hand, was a concise thinker. She was convinced that the experience she had acquired outside of the palace—what she had seen with her own eyes—was increasingly necessary to Justinian, to herself, even to the empire. She had to defend, safeguard, and advise the emperor she had saved. She had given him back the purple that—against all obstacles and expectation—he had originally given to her. Now they were equals.

Theodora no longer needed to win; she had already won. Nor did she have to ask for anything; she simply took. The authority that she had showed at the moment of deep crisis was her greatest insurance. It was no longer a question of her right to the throne: now she had to resolve high-profile issues
from
the throne.

Procopius wrote that Justinian and Theodora “did nothing by themselves, or without each other”: the observation is particularly true for their life after the Nika, when they worked by dividing and conquering. They simulated “conflicting behavior and intentions,” knowing that if they had discordant views, “their subjects could not unanimously rebel.”
³
A more likely explanation, though, is that they each took on separate aspects of government and then presented their achievements to the other in order to provoke a response, as if governing the empire were a card game or a game of wits. In short, they played with power:
power became the child they never had. They shaped it and grew it and groomed it, and exhibited it for one another’s admiration, just like proud parents.

Justinian’s favorite child was the legislative work famous today as the
Corpus Juris Civilis
(Body of Civil Law), a monument to a unique absolutist, imperial, and legislative ideology. To celebrate the second anniversary of the Easter coronation, in April 529 the
Codex Justinianus
(
Justinian Code
) was published; it was a collection of imperial ordinances or “constitutions” from Hadrian to Justinian. In December 533 came the
Digesta
(
Digest
), a compilation of jurisprudence that—thanks to the extraordinary organizational skills of Tribonian—condensed 3 million lines of text into 150,000 lines (a 95 percent reduction). And one month before, the
Institutiones
(
Institutions
), a legal-studies manual containing a summary of the
Code
and the
Digest
, had also been published. (The final draft of the
Digest
had been completed the previous May.) The legislative office was so busy that on November 16, 534, a second, augmented version of the
Code
was published. And the
Code
was followed by installments of the
Novellae
(
Novels
), the new laws that Justinian developed over the years in response to new situations.

In some of the
Novels
we can see Theodora’s influence. Although she lacked specific juridical competence, she could and did recognize the need for laws on issues that were dear to her. What is more, she shared the fundamental goal of the project, which was to give a univocal certainty to law, basing it on Christian principles, stressing its authority, and regulating the life of the subjects during their brief earthly transit toward their longed-for Christian paradise.

In the complex military operations aimed at the restoration in the West—Justinian’s pet project—Theodora’s role was especially noticeable wherever military action might affect the religious cause of the Monophysites. Otherwise, for Theodora the Promised Land was in the East, in the land of diamonds: here one could buy peace with gold rather than risk battles, and conquer new lands by using personal ties or by sharing the faith in the same Incarnate Word.

This outlook was quite different from Justinian’s militarism, which
did lead to a vast territorial expansion for the empire—“from one end of the ocean to the other”—but which caused millions of deaths. By the time Justinian died in 565, the lands bordering the Mediterranean had almost been turned into a desert: much of the “empire of a thousand cities” was reduced to a “wilderness”
⁴
under the imperial flag—just like a palm tree in the desert.

While she must have been pleased with Justinian’s victories, Theodora bore no direct responsibility for field operations, orders to attack, or the shedding of even one drop of blood on the battlefield. She knew little of the indistinct, nameless masses battling to conquer distant lands for the glory of the empire. The shining armor and the clashing swords were like ephemeral and childish fairy tales to her; they were no more real than the old-fashioned, cloying image of a winged Victory that she always saw stamped on coins and imperial medallions.

Theodora’s primary goal was to strengthen her power. Others may have felt that “there is no survival without victory”;
⁵
for her there was no life without purple. And so she was prudent, conservative, and defensive. In calculating all possible reactions to each one of her actions, she also drew on her experience in the Nika events. She sensed that there was strength in continuity, not in initiative or risk.

The woman who chose power and the purple mantle as her burial shroud loved to have wealth and honors bestowed on her, her family, and her loyal followers. She was proud of the fact that provinces and cities in Asia were now called Theodorias, such as the ancient Syrian city of Anasartha, now Khanazir, at the time near the Persian border. She was pleased to see her name joined with the emperor’s in dedications and in monograms atop the columns of wonderful new churches. (Many churches were going up, some replacing the burnt ones in Constantinople, others in the eastern provinces, most of them built to a central-cross plan and filled with light.) And yet, however keen she was to safeguard her power, she also developed policies going beyond the purely personal; she worked for others, too.

She sought freedom of worship for the Monophysites. She would have liked to see them united with the Orthodox Catholics in one single
Church under the emperor of Constantinople, who would lead the Church to flower in the supreme seventh eon. She wanted women to have new status within the family, in harmony with Christian principles that would rule and discipline daily life. She supported curbs on abuses of power in the provinces, where Justinian’s eye could not reach: she remembered the many local Heceboluses out there.

Justinian’s goals were born in sleepless nights spent poring over books; Theodora’s were the result of turning her life experiences into concrete action. There was nothing abstract about it: she shaped her goals to specific situations and individuals, and those individuals were rewarded if they contributed to her cause, or removed precisely, almost surgically, if they created obstacles. Her authority did not depend on any particular ministry; it was a personal quality that was innate to Theodora.

The tools of her power—or of her cruelty as a “bane of mortals,” according to one unfavorable male critic—were discreet. There were rumors of bolts locking the doors “in some secret … dark, unknown, inaccessible … rooms of the palace.”
⁶
Many military officers were imprisoned at length, and they suffered lashes “on their shoulders and back,” a veritable “slave torture,”
⁷
despite their high position in the imperial hierarchy.

Others were gagged. Quite a few notables were forbidden to speak or protest, and were barely able to breathe. One such notable was Priscus, former personal secretary to Justinian, who seemed so arrogant and even downright hostile to Theodora that he was shipped off to a distant exile. He had been at the center of power; now he was forced to become a monk on some parched Aegean island. (Many centuries were to pass before the island would be seen as beautiful and tourists began to flock to it.)

Still others—including those who gave testimony that did not please her—were tortured with whips made of ox sinews. We know of at least one case of torture with a knife: a certain Basianus, a supporter of the Greens, “insulted her”
⁸
in Constantinople. “Without a trial,”
⁹
Theodora ordered him castrated, and he died as a result.

Sometimes, words alone sufficed. Antonina, Belisarius’s wife, used webs of crafty words to serve Theodora, destroying the careers of ministers and even Roman popes who countered the empress’s will. These men were sent into exile and left there to contemplate the ruin of their ambitions.

24. Reproduction of gold medal of Justinian reading
“SALUS ET GLORIA ROMANORUM,”
Constantinople, 534(?).