Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (47 page)

This scene marked the decline of the most brilliant general of late antiquity, a decline that was perhaps foreshadowed when he neglected
the solemn oaths he had taken with Photius, a decline that began when Photius revealed Antonina’s behavior. Belisarius had paid for his invincibility and his series of conquests with his private blindness.

His decline was perhaps his punishment for having refused Witigis’s offer, for not becoming king of Ravenna and of Italy, for not grasping and reviving the remnant of the Western empire that he had been offered. (Justinian would have had a hard time removing him.) Belisarius kneeling before Antonina confirmed the sinister prophecy inherent in the question that the citizens of Ravenna had asked in 540: Why would he want to be a slave when he could be a master?

His humiliation was twofold. In a perverted role reversal, the greatest craftsman of Justinian and Theodora’s dominion became their servant: once because he was reduced to the status of simple subject, and again because Antonina, in a further irony of history, had become the solicitous guarantor of her husband’s salvation. Theodora again proved herself a shrewd, skilled manipulator, turning Justinian’s benevolence toward Belisarius to her own specific ends. The general was saved, just as the emperor wished; and yet he had been humiliated, just as the empress wanted.

The year 543 of the Christian era dawned on an exhausted, diminished world with a population smaller in ambition and numbers, in strength and in spirit. The Augusti had tried to tame the world with theoretical constructs and military might. They had placed the world on the pedestal of Christianity, as if it were a mannequin, and draped it with the garments and fabric they had cut to fit laws of
their own
making. But the world had not stood still like a mannequin. It had taken them with it, not the other way around. It had opened their eyes to a wider perspective—the world was perhaps even too vast, so vast that it had seemed emptied of individuals and values. Now it behooved them to reflect and to repent, because the public and private misfortunes that had befallen them in the plague year of 542 required contrition and repentance. The time was past when their victory over the African Vandals was presented by the imperial propaganda machine as “the greatest of God’s prodigies on earth.”
¹⁸

They also had to reconsider religious issues and attempt to understand how far they were responsible before God for what had happened to them and their people. Once again they had to face the situation of the Monophysites and of Christian unity. Once again, the operational strategies the two rulers would choose would be different: Justinian would work toward theological clarification, while Theodora would consider primarily her authority over people.

Although they used their usual strategies, it seemed like much more than a year had elapsed since 541, when the last Roman consul was appointed.
¹⁹
Perhaps we ought to consider the year 542 not only as a watershed in the life of Justinian and Theodora, but as a great watershed between two historical eras.

ROM
532 to 541 Justinian’s world had seemed infinitely expandable, but in 542 it ran up against its limitations. The economic and financial burdens of the restoration project had brought it to its knees, and the “Roman” expansion in Africa and Italy had come to a halt. In the East, the Persian empire refused to be dominated. The dome of the Holy Wisdom, perceived as linked to Heaven and protected by angels, seemed architecturally unsurpassable. The emperors had meant to transform their world; now they had to come to terms with it as it was.

The one person who did effectuate radical changes was Belisarius, who had led the armies of the great transformation; but he was altered forever. The humiliation he had suffered in Theodora’s investigation had been further exacerbated by the events that followed.

The empress and Antonina made a pact that served both their interests: they decided to marry off Antonina and Belisarius’s only daughter, Joannina. She was perhaps twelve years old and was destined to inherit what was rumored to be a legendary dowry. The two women betrothed her to Anastasius, a son of the daughter born to Theodora during her controversial acting career. The guarantee that his daughter would play a major role in the future of the empire did not soothe the general’s wounded pride, for he would be forced to become a relative of the woman who had seized every chance to hurt him.

That was not all. In 544, Belisarius was again dispatched to Italy, not as supreme commander but with the diminished title of “chief of
the imperial grooms.” What is more, he was asked to finance the military expedition out of his own pocket. Rumor had it that Belisarius accepted this further insult so that he could finally take revenge on the imperial couple, pulling off a move
against
the palace (the plot that Antonina had perfidiously suggested to John the Cappadocian in 541). But that was not Belisarius’s plan. He did set sail for Italy, though he was unable to contribute effectively to the military operations because he lacked resources and had frequent disagreements with the other generals, particularly Vitalian’s nephew John.

It was only in the summer of 545 that Belisarius was restored to the position of supreme commander
¹
of the military expedition. At this point, he dispatched John to Constantinople with a request for fresh troops and money. The new troops were to assemble in Dyrrachium (now Durrës, Albania), where the Egnatia Road ended at the Adriatic Sea; from there they would reach Italy and move to reinforce the imperial garrison in Rome. But events took a different turn.

John stayed longer than planned in the capital, thereby endangering the military situation, and took this opportunity to forge a family bond with Justinian’s cousin Germanus, whom Theodora loathed. In fact, he married Germanus’s daughter Justina (who was still single “although already eighteen,” as some unkind gossips noted). Given his blood ties to the throne, Germanus held a much higher position than his future son-in-law, but he could no longer bear the isolation he had been driven into by Theodora’s hostility. He married off his children in order to disperse his wealth among them, for he feared that a pretext might be found to confiscate it for the imperial coffers.

He must really have been in a difficult spot if he betrothed his daughter to John: the imperial couple had reason to distrust John as the nephew of the Vitalian whose murder Justinian had arranged in 520. But John was extremely clever: he married Germanus’s daughter and her wealth without falling out of favor with the court; on the contrary, the court granted his requests. He also began a campaign to mend his father-in-law’s reputation in upper ministerial and military circles, which would have a positive effect in the long term.

It might seem that John won over Theodora and Justinian, but in
fact he harmed their program. Instead of acting for the “glory of the Romans,” on returning to Italy he and his men did not rejoin Belisarius, preferring to capture isolated Gothic strongholds in the southern part of the peninsula. He feared that at the chief commander’s side he would be exposed to Antonina’s wrath, and that Theodora might push her to treat him as she had treated John the Cappadocian and Pope Silverius.

In this situation, Belisarius was unable to rescue Rome from its siege by the Goths; even Pope Vigilius had fled the town (as we will see later). The Gothic king Totila spent Christmas Day, 546, in the Eternal City, which had been abandoned even by the last of the despised imperial troops. From his position of strength, the Gothic king proposed to Justinian that they return to the prewar status quo, in the spirit of the relationship between Anastasius and Theodoric. But the Augustus, already suspicious of Totila’s social innovations and unwilling to concede that he had wasted money, time, and soldiers’ lives, referred Totila’s envoys to Belisarius; this delay irritated the Goths, who were seeking real peace.

Totila was also troubled by the demeanor of the great Roman families who had taken Constantinople’s side in an effort to save their caste privileges from the social reforms he promoted. Enraged, he decided to punish the city, so he ordered that the fortified walls of Rome be dismantled.

From his camp in Portus (now Ostia, near Rome), Belisarius sent Totila a letter: a masterpiece of astute rhetoric, it is Byzantine in style rather than late antique. Belisarius replied gently to Totila’s wild fury, pointing out that it’s difficult to create new beauty but very easy to destroy something beautiful. Such destruction, he wrote, is typical of “men who lack understanding, and who are not ashamed to leave to posterity this token of their character.”
²
Whatever the outcome of the war between Goths and Romans, destroying the walls of Rome would not only turn the city back into a “sheeppasture,”
³
it would also earn Totila the scorn of future generations. Is this what Totila was fighting for?

The Goth king, forever worried about his “immortal” glory, “after
reading [the letter] over many times and coming to realize accurately the significance of the advice, was convinced.”
⁴
The walls of Rome were spared, and when, in the spring of 547, Totila and his army left the city to put pressure on the enemy forces in southern Italy, Belisarius was able to reenter the Eternal City and send the city keys to Justinian. The fortifications were almost intact, exactly as he had hoped.

In 540 Belisarius had marched into Ravenna and captured king Witigis; this taking of Rome was the second great trick he played on the Goths. Totila was dazzled by the ancient vision of glory that endured in history: the name of Rome, the impalpable value of classical tradition. The Byzantine “Romans” savored their victory: it was like a fruit that had not been picked too hastily or forcibly, but that had been allowed to ripen with patience, experience, and care—all these were Belisarius’s virtues.

They might not be the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity, but they were positive qualities nonetheless. They could be valuable in other situations as well, since military developments could segue into family strategies and marital politics, as we saw in the case of Germanus and Vitalian’s nephew John. No one knew this better than Theodora, since she herself had orchestrated the betrothal of Anastasius and Joannina. For that reason, she kept a close eye on the imperial grandees, from Belisarius to Germanus, and on their offspring, imitators, and successors—for they too could either reinforce her power or block it.

Once upon a time Theodora herself had been scrutinized closely by the audience as she acted out the amorous trysts of Zeus and Leda; now it was her turn to scrutinize the audience with her attentive eyes. The court was a great theater where there were always new claimants popping up, each with their own strategies that Theodora read only too well. She was watchful, as she had always been, because she knew that marriage alliances meant not only a turnover in generations, but also continuity of power—beginning with
her own
power, without which her life had no purpose.

Irritated, the empress’s enemies compared her to a matchmaker who “regulated all marriages with … authority.”
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This comment
merely proves that her critics refused to concede that this daughter of the theater and the Hippodrome, and her family, could do what was permitted to older, more established houses. In her twenty-odd years on the throne, Theodora absorbed the practical wisdom and the skills that were the heritage of the old families. For centuries, they had used familial ties to protect their superior position and their grandiose political, economic, and military ventures in the Mediterranean. Theodora was attentive and considerate to her relatives; she acted on their behalf and against others. She even acted against the family of Justinian, as we shall see in the story of Praejecta, his sister’s daughter.

Military and conjugal elements are intertwined in this tale, just as they were in the story of John and Germanus’s daughter. In North Africa in the spring of 545, the imperial troops were, as usual, fighting off Berber raids from inland. To support and reinforce the supreme commander—the pretentious and incompetent Sergius—the throne had dispatched Areobindus, a patrician from the senatorial ranks who was the scion of an excellent family. He brought along his wife, the much sought-after Praejecta.