Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (45 page)

This plague happened 1,450 years ago; one millennium before had come the most infamous similar event, a plague that devastated Athens during the time of Pericles, in 429
B.C.
Little had been learned in the intervening centuries. So it’s no coincidence that Procopius, the leading historical witness of this plague, based his account in his
Wars
on that account of the Athenian plague found in Thucydides’
Peloponnesian Wars
.

Modern scientific and medical discoveries give a different perspective on the phenomenon. The culprit is a lethal bacterium,
Pasteurella pestis
, found in the stomach of the
Xenopsylla
flea (less than a millimeter long), which hides in the fur of black rats. The rats with their bacterial fleas had left their habitat (probably Ethiopia or Arabia) and traveled by boat to Egypt. From there they had spread across the Mediterranean and to the East; everywhere they went, sewers and large mounds of trash left outdoors—just outside the city walls, and even inside cities—served as an ideal medium for the lethal bacterium to grow.

The plague reached Constantinople around Easter of 542, as the imperial couple was assessing the accomplishments of their fifteen years of joint power. It became pandemic, and continued to plague the city and other places for decades. In the sixth century, Antioch was hit four times, at regular intervals: every fifteen years. The face of historian Evagrius Scholasticus (536–c. 600), a resident of Antioch, was disfigured by the infection when he was a child in 542, and then the plague took his wife, children, relatives, and domestics, in the city and in the country.
⁶

The emperor and empress put a high official named Theodore in
charge of the emergency. His task was to ensure a dignified burial for the corpses found in the streets and houses. He had the authority, financial resources, and personnel needed for the task, but soon he lacked space. There were often as many as five thousand victims a day; some days the dead reached ten thousand or more. Ultimately, the plague took about half of the population of the Roman Empire, which had recently been expanded by the military campaigns in Africa and Italy.

Rough estimates suggest that no less than twenty million men and women died, most of them in the cities. These high numbers, and the widespread nature of the epidemic, make it similar to the Black Death in the time of Boccaccio and Chaucer, though on a far greater scale: Paris, the largest European city in 1348, had about 200,000 inhabitants, while Constantinople and Alexandria in the mid-sixth century each had perhaps three times that number.

Ancient death rituals had required that burial sites lie outside the cities, but early Christianity, with its urban worship of martyrs, had brought some cemeteries back inside the city walls. The emergency caused by the plague fully justified a return to the ancient custom: the cemeteries of Constantinople, capital of the civilized world, were soon full anyway. Theodore began to bury the dead in the suburbs, but even that space was soon filled by the waves of corpses. Finally he saw that his workers had no time even to leave the city or dig new graves. At that point, Theodore began to use the towers that punctuated the walls of Sykae (now Galata) beyond the Golden Horn. The towers were put to use not against an external enemy but against an even more formidable, internal enemy. The roofs of the towers were removed and the corpses thrown inside. As each tower was filled, its roof was mortared back into place. The people still living in the city breathed air filled with death, “especially when the wind blew fresh from that quarter.”
⁷

In those terrible days, the moral climate shifted. People devoutly offered pious resolutions and words of repentance. Perhaps some were preparing for the Apocalypse, the anticipated end of the world.
Expecting to die was a distraction from evil thoughts, especially for the Greens and the Blues, who were changed by this tragedy. They began contributing to public health, helping to remove the corpses and attending to the burial rites, regardless of the faction to which the dead had belonged. Years before, in 524, when Justinian had openly displayed his preference for the Blues, the hostility between the two factions had led to a deterioration of social life: people had given up going out in the evening or wearing jewels or sumptuous, official garments. During the epidemic, social life contracted again, but the factions renewed their friendship.

It was extremely rare to find someone in the street without a corpse on his shoulders. Since there were no more burial grounds, the corpses were often dragged to the legendary shores of the Bosphorus and the Propontis. The conventional distinction between Asia and Europe was lost in the common pall of death. Mounds of corpses were loaded into small boats to be dumped randomly on less congested shores, or perhaps dropped into the deep water. It was not uncommon to see disfigured corpses tossed back on shore by the waves, as had happened ten years earlier to the corpse of a usurper to the throne. This sort of disposal helped the epidemic to spread wildly.

It was difficult to replenish supplies, especially food staples, in the city that had once been accustomed to receiving great quantities of all sorts of goods. The business of the administration and the military slowed to a crawl and ultimately stopped altogether. Even Khosrow—who was fighting Belisarius along the Persian border—and other enemies of the empire hesitated to move into lands devastated by a disease that would eventually strike even the palace of Constantinople. Great figures who had molded history for decades died in a just few short weeks: among them were Tribonian, the minister and jurist who had coordinated the writing of the Justinian
Corpus
, and Mār the Solitary, the violent champion of Monophysitism who had dared to reproach the emperor and empress—the one person who had received their apologies.

Finally, the unthinkable happened, and—even worse—the unthinkable rumor spread. Justinian contracted the disease and fell seriously ill.
The fact that this most Christian ruler had been stricken, like an ordinary mortal, truly seemed to be a sign of divine anger. People reflected on what the emperor might be guilty of, and the empire as well. It was a time of sadness, repentance, sickness, and conversion. The fiercest of Justinian’s enemies noted that other rulers before him had fallen ill, regardless of whether the gods had favored them. They were referring to the most stoic and upright of all emperors, Marcus Aurelius, who died of the plague in
A.D.
180. But he had died on the battlefield, fighting the “barbarians,” not shut up inside the palace fiddling with the laws.

These rumors did not escape Theodora’s sophisticated espionage and control system. In this time of emergency, the demands of power forced her to take on a most difficult role. She was personally anxious about her sixty-year-old husband; she beseeched the court physicians to help, and she placed her trust in prayers and vigils. But she also had to find extra energy to put into everything official. It was her duty to perform as empress, even more than as a wife, and to take the reins of command. It no longer sufficed to develop
her own
policies (aligned with Justinian’s policies, or complementary or alternative to them). Now she had to take action on issues—legislative and even military—where her expertise was not as strong, and where there was a greater risk of falling into traps.

She spent hours by her husband’s bedside, out of piety and pure affection. In those hours, she must have bitterly pondered that he, who had given her the gift of purple when it had seemed so impossible, looked like he was close to losing it. He had almost lost it ten years before, during the Nika riots; now history repeated itself. She had to help him as she had done then, hoping at the same time that he could help her. She prayed that he might have lucid intervals so that she could ask his advice and encourage him to survive.

She spent less time on leisure—on sleeping, perfecting her makeup, or taking baths (water was thought to transmit the contagion). And above all, she reduced her expectations. She did not abuse her position of absolute, unshared power; she took no measures that might be interpreted as rejections of Justinian’s wishes, decisions, or decrees,
not even about the issue closest to her heart: the fate of the Monophysites. Theodora prayed publicly for her husband’s recovery and the safety of the empire “in the communion of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”—the very church of the characters she disliked: Pope Vigilius in Rome and Patriarch Menas in Constantinople. In this terrible predicament, she transcended all Monophysite and Dyophysite discord. She played the impartial, merciful ruler. She visited churches and hospices, she prayed over tombs and relics, and she listened to holy monks.

In her efforts to propitiate God and make her husband recover, she probably sought the right prayers and tried to sound out God’s intentions by having intense, frequent meetings with Anthimus. He was the Monophysite patriarch who had been deposed during Pope Agapetus’s visit to Constantinople in 536. Everyone had lost track of him except Theodora. She had saved him by hiding him in the innermost chambers of the palace, and she had visited him regularly. (Paradoxically, Anthimus was kept safe in those same recesses that had meant only hardship to so many of her real or presumed adversaries.) He had become her spiritual “precious pearl” in the years after 536, which were so difficult for Monophysitism.

Theodora must have asked the gentle, stoic Anthimus for prayers of recovery. Eleven years earlier, when she and Justinian had felt invincible, she had prayed for grace from Sabas, who was no less worthy of veneration because he was a Dyophysite. At the time, she had asked for a child for her and Justinian; now she was asking for help only for Justinian.

There had been disagreements between Theodora and her husband, yet “they never did anything without the other.” The Nika rebellion; the relationship with the Monophysites and Dyophysites; the problems with Belisarius, Agapetus, Severus, Vigilius, and especially John the Cappadocian had sometimes set them on different sides but never pitted them against each other. If the unity that Justinian dreamed of existed anywhere in the empire, perhaps it existed in the covenant that these two had made on their wedding day in 525—they
were so different but they were bound together, with each partner acting as “another self.”

Theodora prayed for her husband as someone who did not deserve such suffering. She thought of him and prayed for him with Anthimus, with the other Monophysites hidden in the capital, and in the basilica of the Holy Wisdom, where she was bathed in “an otherwordly light.” She even prayed during the official and operational meetings at the palace. Justinian had triumphantly thought of himself as a new Solomon, but the empress was thinking of another, more appropriate Biblical reference. For her, Justinian had become Job, the upright man who suffers the inscrutable silence or holy wisdom of God.

As Theodora suffered, she did not neglect the continuity and the image of the power she embodied. Her royal banner was still held high, and she continued to carefully assess the men and women to whom she entrusted her projects, scrutinizing them closely and asking others to monitor the movements of courtiers and functionaries at the palace and elsewhere. Of all the important characters from the early Justinianean period—the men who had listened to her in silence during the Nika revolt—only the faithful eunuch Narses had remained in Constantinople. Belisarius, whom she found suspiciously enigmatic, was at the Persian front with his troops. And the up-and-coming Syrian functionary Peter Barsymes, who was busy drawing up plans for an imperial monopoly on silk production and trade, did not yet seem ready for high office.

Justinian and Theodora had so personalized their autocracy—power was so completely centralized in the two of them—that they ended up dismantling the delicate structure of the imperial magistra cies of late antiquity. So there were serious consequences when one of the Augusti dropped out of the mechanism. In a reversal worthy of a theatrical
coup-de-scène
, they had become irreplaceable: the masters of the empire had become its slaves. Theodora’s sleep may have been troubled by nightmares for the first time; her splendid purple shroud metamorphosed into rough brown sackcloth.

+ + +

In addition to her many everyday responsibilities, Theodora also had to address the discomfort of the military chiefs of staff, which was new for her. They were engaged on three continents, not only fighting enemies but trying to prevent the plague from striking their soldiers, all the while calming the troops’ exasperation over the delays in their payments, which were slowed by the raging epidemic.

The generals were aware of Theodora’s total lack of experience when it came to war. With the emperor ill and believed to be near death, with the Italian and Persian fronts open, the endemic North African revolts, and the invasions from the Balkans, the chiefs of staff felt that they could and ought to assume more power. If Justinian were to die, they would not tolerate a successor from inside the palace, such as Anastasius in 491 or Justin in 518. Not since Zeno in 474—almost seventy years earlier—had there been an emperor who could lead an army in battle. Several times General Vitalian had almost seized the throne, but he was finally betrayed and murdered—by Justinian, to boot. Maybe it was no coincidence that a nephew of Vitalian named John was the most active of the warriors conferring about the situation. Rumors, plans for secret correspondence, and denials ran rampant.

The difficulties were felt especially severely in Italy, where lack of coordination and authority was allowing the Goths to regain their territories. With his military skills and his popular anti-aristocratic policy, Totila had taken back almost the entire Italian peninsula. He held everything but a few isolated fortresses and the two most illustrious capital cities—Ravenna, the operational seat where the Senate was located, and Rome, which had immense symbolic value.

The battles that were being fought were no longer devastating massacres that left mounds of dead men on the field. Instead, cities surrendered with few victims, because the imperial generals were experienced in defense. As they saw it, the time for great heroic feats was over; the more soldiers they could keep alive, the more negotiating power they had at the palace. Nevertheless, Italy was a bitter lesson. Belisarius
had returned to Constantinople in the fall of 540, less than two years earlier, with Italy in his hands and Witigis, the Gothic king, in chains. Now everything had to be done again.