Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (49 page)

The only person excluded from this hypothetical succession was—paradoxically enough—the emperor who sat on the throne and was to outlive Theodora. But he wasn’t the one to put a stop to the project. Antonina was solely responsible for the failed marriage. She set off for the capital, not because she was caving in to Theodora’s insistent letters, but to request money and soldiers for the war, as Belisarius’s envoy. But when she reached the capital in the summer of 548, Theodora was already dead. Antonina wept at the empress’s tomb, but then she did only what she herself wanted.

The woman who had been Theodora’s “favorite Patrician” disregarded the childhood betrothal and the forced cohabitation of Joannina and Anastasius, even though it meant censure for her teenage daughter. With Theodora dead, Antonina believed that she could reshuffle all the cards, and she refused to allow her daughter to marry into Theodora’s family. She separated Joannina from her beloved and took her home. In spite of all that had happened, Antonina still believed that she could round up a
genuine
blueblood for her daughter.

We do not know who Joannina and Anastasius finally married. Theodora had forced the teenagers’ situation, and Antonina heaped wrong upon wrong by forbidding her daughter a wedding that would have made her respectable and that remained the only realistic option. Belisarius could not intervene, though he suffered, sources report, as “misfortune fell upon his own house.”
¹⁹

At Theodora’s death in June 548, no one foresaw that the young lovers Joannina and Anastasius would end up apart. The empress probably also considered that her family’s future would be ensured by the daughter born to her sister Comito and the late general Sittas, and here she was right. In 548 this niece, Sophia (“wisdom”), was eighteen. By this age, girls from good families like hers—and power had made Theodora’s into an excellent family—had had their marriages arranged already. The perfect choice had been made for her: she
was betrothed to a nephew of Justinian, son of the emperor’s sister Vigilantia Secunda.

Born around the year 520, the groom was about thirty years old in 548. His name was Justin, like the unpolished founder of the dynasty, but unlike his namesake he was a reluctant warrior. On the other hand, he had a passion and a talent for palace procedures; by modern standards, we would call him an enlightened bureaucrat. The imperial couple must have considered him trustworthy, and they agreed to his marriage with Sophia, fancying it a sequel to the alliance between their respective houses. And indeed, after Justinian’s death in 565, the throne passed to his man, Justin II, and his wife, Sophia.

This second imperial couple was to be less famous than Justinian and Theodora, but their representation
as a couple
was far more emphatic than that of their illustrious predecessors. Sophia’s portrait appeared on coins, an honor Theodora had never had. Shown sitting on the throne next to her husband, Sophia was a symbol and a personification of wisdom. In his propaganda, Justin II could in all honesty say that wisdom inspired his rule (although he turned out to have a devastating psychological disorder).

The imperial couple was also portrayed together on a work of art known as the Vatican Cross [
fig. 45
], a masterpiece in gilt silver enriched with embossing and precious stones that the couple donated to Rome at the time of Pope John III (pope from 561 to 574). The piece, which contains a relic said to be part of the true cross, is designed as a symbolic representation of salvation. In the center is the lamb, on the vertical arm are two images of Christ Pantocrator, and at both ends of the cross arms are portraits of Justin and Sophia, their palms open in a typical gesture of prayer. Christ the Judge and Pantocrator is aligned with the sacrificial lamb, so that Justin and Sophia, earthly potentates, are shown giving tribute to the most high and yet most humble miracle of divine power.

In the Vatican Cross, imperial, secular authority is set below religious authority; it marks a big step toward the medieval cult of relics. This is confirmed by a poet of the time, the African Flavius Cresconius Corippus, who describes Sophia as she wove the funeral robe of
Justinian in 565.
²⁰
Like one of the saintly women at the tomb of Jesus—a favorite theme in the ivory diptychs of late antiquity—Sophia/Wisdom prepares the ritual celebrations for another person. She doesn’t make history or make the ritual; she is not a creator but merely a less distinguished descendant of an illustrious family.

45. Reliquary cross of Justin II and Sophia in embossed gilt silver with gemstones, c. 570, Treasury of Saint Peter, Vatican City.

That funeral robe actually emphasizes the difference between the triumphant patriarchs and the epigones who merely celebrated them. The robe wrapping Justinian’s body when it went into the limestone sarcophagus [
fig. 35
] was decorated with scenes of his victories, perhaps recalling the brilliant Chalkê mosaic where he and Theodora were shown rejoicing at the victories over the Goth and Vandal “barbarians.” Now the Chalkê mosaic is gone and in 1204 the “most Christian” Western crusaders stole Justinian’s wonderful funeral garment and lost it. They entered the church of the Holy Apostles—the model for
St. Mark’s basilica in Venice—and despoiled the tombs. How much of the glory of the West is nothing but the glory of followers?

Sophia was a ruler of great character, and some historians have claimed that she held more real power than her famous aunt. Certainly, as Justin’s mental health began to weaken around 574, she held on to the reins of the empire, preparing the transition to Tiberius that formally took place in 578. Justin II was a man of the palace, but his successor was an army man; the idea of a warrior on the throne had seemed like an ominous threat to Theodora at the time of the plague in 542, but Sophia eventually made it happen. Sophia may have planned to marry Tiberius, not for love but out of devotion to her aunt Theodora’s lesson that marriage was the key to continuity of power. She succeeded in maintaining part of her power, at least, in a world that continued to evolve toward the Middle Ages, with the decline of theaters, hippodromes, and factions, with the breaking up of the mosaic “of the thousand cities,” with the progressive loss of the Justinianean ideal of restoration.

Ironically, the imperial throne of Constantinople—which had stood for brilliant glory, sleepless responsibility, and stubborn continuity—became a sickness: overwhelmed by his duties, or perhaps by the unbearable heritage of his past, Justin II suffered repeated nervous breakdowns and lost his mind. Justin II is remembered not so much for his deeds on the throne as for the words he spoke when he said farewell to it. He expressed a new, medieval version of the concept of imperial excellence: “Do not rejoice for the shedding of blood. … Do not return evil for evil. … Be thou before everyone what you are before thyself. … May whoever has wealth rejoice in it; as to thyself, give to those who have not.”

It was his farewell to his Byzantine successors and to the great tradition of power, a tradition that would live on only in the Slavic cultures.
²¹

ENESCIT MUNDUS
, “the world grows old,” wrote Saint Augustine
¹
more than a century before Theodora lived. His words have often been taken out of context, as if they applied to the whole late-ancient world. But if the aging had been real, that world would have been dying or even extinct by the year 550. Instead, this period marked not only the end of the old world—the one that had allowed Theodora to follow her unique and stunning career—but something more: the new concepts that she fostered, and the generations that she launched, show the first glimmers of the new.

Further proof of this can be found in the life of the great Cassiodorus, an intellectual and statesman in Italy. After King Witigis was deceived by Belisarius and surrendered to him, Cassiodorus left the court of Ravenna and stepped away from political life. It was the end of one world for him, but it was also a new beginning, because he could finally devote all of his time to leisurely intellectual pursuits. He retired not to some idyllic or idealized countryside, but to a Christian monastery he himself founded in Vivarium, near his native town of Squillace (in Calabria). It was around 550, and Cassiodorus was about sixty years old. He lived on for almost four further decades, time that he spent in contemplation, reading, and writing. He remained famous down through the centuries for his
Institutiones
(Institutions), a clear, in-depth study and comparison of the Holy Scriptures and the liberal arts that became the basic text for intellectual speculation throughout the Middle Ages.

The world grew old, but Theodora’s matrimonial strategies kept it fresh, just as the imperial couple had renewed Constantinople by rebuilding it. The city might have seemed too grandiose and sumptuous a setting for the remaining population—the 542 plague had wiped out almost half the empire—but Constantinople was to remain a jewel of the Mediterranean for centuries to come. New strategies also came from Emperor Justinian after he recovered from his bout with the plague. In 543, at the age of sixty, he began the “second term” of his very long autocratic rule. He governed from 527 to 565, so his second term lasted twenty-two years—longer than the first. As he had in 527, he inaugurated his new term with religion, but otherwise this fresh start had very little in common with his first inauguration.

In 527 he had had many adversaries to subdue, but in 543 Monophysitism was the only problem left. The emperor seemed to be seeking reconciliation at a higher level now, instead of simply making statements to please his own Dyophysite group. This was partly because the evasive behavior of Pope Vigilius in Rome showed that the deposition and the humiliation inflicted on Silverius had been in vain. In the end, the imperial couple must have acknowledged that they themselves were at fault, and perhaps they connected their guilt to the emergence of the plague, which many had perceived as divine punishment for their despotism. One wonders whether the ghost of Silverius haunted Justinian’s sleepless nights, just as the ghost of the Roman senators Simmacus and Boetius—executed in a fit of rage—had tormented the last years of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric in Ravenna. The Constantinopolitan rulers must have pledged to avoid despotic and violent action in the future. The emptier, slower world where they now lived called for study and patience as they grew older.

Justinian and his contemporaries believed that the good was to be found in the One, but which One
was
the good? A single solution had to be found for this problem, a solution that could be valid for the whole Ecumene, from the remote bishoprics of Sardinia to the lively theological schools of Africa or the Levant. Unfortunately, Justinian had only a few good thinkers around him in 543 (that was another difference from 527);
the only solid theological thinker he had to help him was Theodore Askidas, metropolitan of Caesarea in Cappadocia. So the emperor himself studied this problem, piling tomes and rolls of religious writings atop other documents in his study regarding tax collection, the military, and the legislative work of the empire—management of the empire was neglected in favor of the theological enterprise.