Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (37 page)

Vigilius was ambitious, but he had no deeply rooted ideals; and the discontented Augusta simply required a candidate. It looked like perfect synergy could be orchestrated for Belisarius’s army in Italy. After winning the papal throne that he so coveted, Vigilius could bring Monophysitism back into the womb and the communion of the Church. Bring back not only the individuals such as Anthimus (who had disappeared into thin air),
but the ideas: he would revoke or tone down the pronouncements of the Council of Chalcedon. He wrote to the Augusta to commit himself.

Vigilius left for Italy with precise instructions for Belisarius, but it was too late. In June 536 a pope who pleased the Goths had been installed: his name was Silverius. Because of the war, Constantinople could not consider that its representatives had ratified the election, as had been the case for the popes enthroned in peacetime. The situation was further complicated and destabilized by the fact that the Goth king who had chosen Pope Silverius was soon deposed by the local aristocracy and died (not unlike Pope Agapetus, who had died right after completing his mission in Constantinople). On the stage of history, Justinian and Theodora kept finding themselves playing opposite new characters on the scene—no one had yet equaled their long run on stage and their focused strategy.

When a capable new Goth king, Witigis, ultimately started his long reign, Pope Silverius was left without protection while Belisarius’s troops advanced up Italy, even conquering Naples, just a few days’ march from Rome. Finally, Silverius agreed to support Belisarius. In December 536, he opened the doors of the Eternal City to the general.

This was a great military achievement for the
restitutio
; Justinian rejoiced that his empire was finally Roman in fact and not just in name. The first Rome and the Rome-on-the-Bosphorus were once again directly ruled by a single emperor, as had been the case under the Constantines and the Theodosiuses. It was the best possible augury for the full reconstitution of a unified empire.

But Theodora had a different view. In her palace on the Propontis she had planned not the conquest of the city of Rome, but the political correction of the papacy. So she immediately set out to test Silverius’s character. She wrote to invite him to court and to exhort him to restore Anthimus to the patriarchal seat in Constantinople. The pope gave the lady Augusta a stern reply: “I shall never rehabilitate a heretic who has been sentenced for his wickedness.” But the people around him heard him moan: “Now I know what shall be the cause of my death.”
²⁵

HEODORA’S CLEAR SIGHT
and the initiative she showed in the winter of 536–37 made Justinian more of a spectator than an actor. Constantinople’s pressure on Rome and Italy was pushed by Theodora, the least Western and the least pro-Roman of rulers. Unable to tolerate Justinian’s docility in the face of Agapetus’s actions and Pope Silverius’s later response, she took over. As long as Egypt and the Near East were in the hands of the Monophysites, it made sense to simply mark time and compromise with the papacy. But with Egypt and the Near East pledged to Dyophysitism—which was perceived as foreign if not outright hostile—action in the West could no longer be delayed.

Theodora wrote to Belisarius in Rome what no other woman—empress or not—had ever dared: she ordered the general to remove Pope Silverius. “Vigilius, our dearest, who has promised to reseat Patriarch Anthimus, is with you,” she added. But the general hesitated. He was heard mumbling words such as “the Augusta shall be accountable for it to Jesus Christ.”
¹
A military man, Belisarius recognized that Silverius had, after all, kept his promise, throwing open the gates of Rome for him. But more than that, he was thinking about the impending arrival of the Gothic army: tens of thousands of soldiers under the direct command of Witigis, the new king. They were going to set siege to Rome, and he was expected to hold it with only five thousand men. Complications on the ecclesiastical front were not welcome.

In the meantime, there were rumors of secret pacts between the
pope and the besieging Gothic soldiers. Antonina, Belisarius’s wife, was particularly inclined to listen to such rumors; perhaps she even fomented them. She was being encouraged to act by the Augusta: they had a separate correspondence that was at cross-purposes with the direct official negotiations between Belisarius and the pope.

One day in March 537, Silverius went up the Pincio hill for one of his regular meetings with Belisarius, but this time something unusual happened: the pope was separated from his retinue and taken to a private chamber, where he saw a surprising yet domestic scene. Reclining on a triclinium was a woman, the patrician Antonina. Seated at her feet was the commander-in-chief of the imperial army in Italy, her husband, General Belisarius. Other people were also present. Antonina spoke first, saying, “Well, Mr. Pope Silverius, what have we done to you and all the Romans that you should be so anxious to hand us over to the Goths?”

Silverius’s quill would have found the right words for replying to a letter from Theodora, but he may not have been able to answer Antonina. The meeting ended with Silverius stripped of his office and reduced to the status of a simple monk; the city was in shock when Vigilius was crowned pope. It was the most “female” installation of a pope in all of Christian history.
²

Antonina, not Belisarius, turned out to be the one who “contrived the impossible”
³
in the name of the empress. Perhaps the general had wanted to show that he obeyed only Justinian, or that he recognized the honor of Silverius’s rank; but Theodora must have been displeased when she heard about his comments and his behavior. Her latent suspicions about the general turned into open dissatisfaction that grew and sharpened in the following years.

Silverius’s deposition looks in retrospect like an egregious abuse of power, just as it did at the time; but there might have been a precedent. Since the fifth century it had been customary for the election of the pope to be ratified by the imperial authority. Once the Western empire dissolved, it was Italy’s “barbarian” king, acting as the representative of the sovereign of the new Rome-on-the-Bosphorus, who gave his consent. But, as we already noted, Silverius’s election had been sponsored
and approved by a Gothic king who was in a state of
war
with Constantinople and so, in the eyes of the emperor, the election was invalid. Vigilius was thus presented as the legitimate successor to Agapetus, not a replacement for Silverius.

It was still unclear whether this operation would, in the short term, help Belisarius’s soldiers be welcomed into Italy, as everyone in Constantinople fervently hoped. In the long term the intervention might or might not be a concrete improvement for the Eastern Monophysites, for whose benefit it had been staged.

Silverius’s removal was a weighty event. He was transferred—actually deported—to far-off Lycia in Asia Minor; then he was returned to Italy so his position could be reexamined. The official reaction at the palace alternated between displays of Christian virtue and feigned shock and ignorance about the events surrounding the deposition. Silverius was finally exiled, probably at Vigilius’s and Theodora’s behest, to the island of Pontia (now Ponza) in the Tyrrhenian Sea, where he died. He had shown the clairvoyance that the blessed were believed to possess: he had immediately understood that the first letter Theodora sent him had signified his doom. The Catholic Church worships him as a confessor of the faith; like the Monophysite John of Tella who died in an imperial prison in Syria, his victory was not of this world. (Nor was it for the same idea of Christ.)

As late as the summer of 536 a rehabilitation of Monophysitism seemed impossible; but now new things were changing. Apparently, Vigilius had secretly written to the Augusta that he did not believe that Jesus Christ had two natures. Rather, he interpreted Christ as being “one composite unit resulting from two natures,”
⁴
just as she would have wanted. But once again events took a different turn. Not, this time, because of any sudden deaths, as in the stormy period from February 535 to May 536, when the church leaders of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Rome had died (Rome actually lost two popes in that period). Instead, for the first time in her decade-long tenure, Theodora wondered if she had made a mistake with her point man in Rome.

It soon became clear that after becoming pope, Vigilius, the great
Western aristocrat, was running into personal obstacles. Among other things, he was being blamed for having gotten the papal seat in an irregular way; the seat had already been within his grasp in 532 and might have become his in any case. There were also theoretical and political snags because the Western, Roman world was solidly antiMonophysite. Vigilius complained of the local pressures, and he procrastinated. He feared that any hurried actions favoring Anthimus and the Monophysites might ultimately ruin his chance of success and frustrate the promises he had made to Lady Augusta. But Theodora knew from past experience that a change in direction could succeed only if it was swift.

Despite all her work, Rome was once again a problem for the empress. Even though Justinian had rejoiced prematurely at the end of 536, he and his wife didn’t really hold Rome firmly. Perhaps for the first time, she saw the stage of power as different from that of the theater, where the unexpected was codified and where misadventures were always resolved in a tidy disentangling of the fictional knots. In real life, the number of protagonists kept shifting and the pacing could not be controlled. The time never came when the audience could be dismissed and the players could leave the stage—events were just too big and lengthy and complicated.

From the Euphrates to the Danube, from Italy to North Africa—on all sides of the central city of Constantinople was a web of issues and events continuously evolving and affecting one another reciprocally: political and military issues, economic and legal questions, religious and social problems, public and personal matters. One example of this complexity was Vigilius’s approach to the theological issue dividing Monophysites and Dyophysites. It was not possible to isolate and analyze each single phenomenon; the world that the restoration was expected to cure refused to sit still for an examination by and therapy from its two chosen physicians, the “sleepless” Justinian and the “merciful” Theodora.

Not even simple military issues were easy to settle. The generals who conducted the Italian campaign were split: some, like Belisarius,
were “Justinianean,” and some were apparently “Theodorean.” (The latter may have been responsible for intelligence-gathering and espionage for the empress, who held latent, parallel power.) This led to operational conflicts and liaison gaps that were painfully evident, for example, when the imperial troops abandoned the city of Milan in 539 and the Goths retaliated, flattening the city walls and slaughtering the civilian population. The resulting depopulation of the area left room for Ticinum (now Pavia) to emerge as a regional power and later become the capital of the Longobards.

Milan had been the Roman capital of the West from 286 to 402 and had remained the leading city of northern Italy; among those killed there was the praetorian prefect for Italy, Reparatus, a brother of Pope Vigilius. The conquerors quartered his body, say the historians, and fed it to the dogs. We do not know whether the two Augusti in Constantinople wore mourning (as old Justin had done for the Antiochians after the earthquake of 526) or showed any Christian remorse for the residents of Milan, a city that had stood as “an outpost against the Germans and the other barbarians.”
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No one could deny that the new Gothic king, Witigis, was a belligerent character, but he was also a skilled diplomat. He sought alliances among the northern populations—such as the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Longobards—and elsewhere. He boldly noted that the “emperor of the Romans had plainly never been able to make war upon the barbarians in the West before the time when the treaty had been made with the Persians,”
⁶
by which he meant the Endless Peace (of the fall of 532).