Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (40 page)

Finally, it all came to an end. With the help of a eunuch who had been the go-between for Antonina and Theodosius,
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Theodora’s agents were able to locate Theodosius. The
Secret History
describes how Antonina, who had come back to Constantinople with her husband, was called before the empress for a surprise reunion:

[Theodora] summoned Theodosius to Byzantium, and upon his arrival, straightway concealed him in the palace; and the next day, calling Antonina to her, she said, “Oh dearest Patrician, yesterday a pearl fell into my hands, such as no man ever saw. If you wish, I should not begrudge you the sight of this, nay, I shall show it to you.” And she, not comprehending what was going on, begged
her earnestly to show her the pearl. And she brought Theodosius out of the room of one of the eunuchs and showed him to her. And Antonina was so overjoyed that she at first remained speechless with pleasure, and then she acknowledged that Theodora had done her a great favor, calling her Savior and Benefactor and Mistress in very truth.
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Antonina clearly gave special emphasis to the term
despoina
(lady, mistress), which had come into use at the palace with Theodora of all people—an ex-actress. And the empress seemed to feel real affection for her, calling her “dearest Patrician” (whether or not the attitude was prompted by self-interest).

Great prospects were opening up for Theodosius, Antonina’s lover and godson. People spoke of him as a future Roman general. Meanwhile, a true military man, Photius, was languishing in a dungeon. And Belisarius? The conqueror of the Western kingdom had already made his peace with Antonina. His concerns were ultimately overcome by his fear of the empress and his wish to live an untroubled life: his present position was good and he had the prospect of untold future riches. It was the winter of 541–42.

Photius tried to escape from his isolation several times, but Theodora’s hardened soul doomed him. Once he fled to Constantinople’s Blachernae temple dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and another time to the basilica of the Holy Wisdom. In both instances he was denied sanctuary: “the priests of the Christians, smitten with terror, stood aside and conceded everything” to the empress.
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Only in 544–45, fortified by a “true dream,” was he able to reach Jerusalem. The general became a monk, leaving behind the secular world and Theodora’s vengefulness. This genuine general turned into a monk, and at the same time an aspiring general disappeared: Theodosius fell ill and died—it was “a sort of justice.”
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While all this was going on, enemies had not been attacked. Resources had been lost, for the love of a woman. Private matters took priority over public emergencies. Ten years after the great wave of expansionism
that had followed the Nika victory, the very structure of the empire seemed confused, devalued, obsolete. In early 542, Emperor Justinian was sixty years old, Antonina at least fifty, and the empress Theodora and Belisarius were a little over forty. No new leaders were emerging, and ancient institutions were fading away, including the thousand-year-old office of consul. The last man named consul was Flavius Anicius Faustus Albinus Basilius in 541; after him, the title became merely ceremonial.

In Italy there were homegrown uprisings; in the fall of 541, the stubborn Gothic resistance got a new leader. He was thirty-year-old Baduila, known as Totila, “the Immortal One,” and he was to continue the war against the Romans of Constantinople. Hostilities against the great king of Persia, Khosrow (nicknamed “the Immortal Soul”), were to resume in the spring.

The Christmas festivities of 541 were celebrated by the Dyophysite patriarch Menas; meanwhile Pope Vigilius in Rome gave no signals that confirmed that Theodora had been right in insisting that he be pope. In fact, the empress had written to Pope Vigilius pressing him to make good on his promises and bring back Patriarch Anthimus, whom everyone believed was lost or had disappeared. Vigilius had replied to the Augusta: “Never. Anthimus is a heretic and an anathema. No matter how great my unworthiness, I am still successor to Agapetus and Silverius.”
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Theodora had been deceived. She had placed a man on the papal throne in faraway Rome who turned out to be a true Dyophysite after all; and in her own city she had failed to defend Anthimus, who was a very moderate Monophysite. The time for action seemed to have turned into a time for waiting. It was unbearable for her to consider the mistakes she might have made or wrongs that had been done to her. Only venting her anger could lift Theodora from her deep feelings of discontent. And then even that changed.

N ANOTHER AGE
, there would be an empire, the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, on which the sun never set; a thousand years earlier, there was an emperor who never shut his eyes. He personally worshipped wisdom (
sophia
in Greek), which he prized because, among other things, it was an attribute of his model sovereign (King Solomon of the Bible). But his propaganda machine preferred to emphasize his insomnia. That emperor, of course, was our Justinian.

Emperor Justinian’s political vision was not always perfectly sharp: he fell under the spell of the myth of Rome, for example, unlike Theodora, the “most intelligent of all and of all times,” in the words of her contemporary John the Lydian.
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But it wasn’t in Justinian’s nature to retreat from anything. Justinian surveyed the big picture and also focused on each of the goals he had set for himself, goals that satisfied both the dignity of his imperial persona and the ambition of his individual ego.

Gazing ahead at his vision of the restoration, or just staring into the dark during one of his late-night work sessions, Justinian was, paradoxically, almost like a groping blind man. He might really have seemed blind to the people who died in his wars or were captured in his many arrest dragnets; such things might have caused another king (Witigis, for example) to literally review his plans. But his obdurate blindness allowed him to press on. In the end, it meant continuity, whatever the human or financial costs, across the whole Ecumene.

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The war being fought along the Persian border was not the only problem in the East. During a rebellion in Armenia in 538, Sittas, Comito’s husband and Theodora’s brother-in-law, had died, and the empire lost an excellent general. Meanwhile in Italy, as earlier in Africa, the management of the conquered territories was turning out to be a daunting challenge: it was a heavy price to pay for the prestige of victory. Some advisors suggested that the Italian peninsula, weakened by years of war, should not be expected to produce much tax revenue. But the emperor unleashed his ruthlessly efficient functionaries, who were able to extract money even from the generals on the battlefield by monitoring the use of their budgeted funds and requesting an account of expenditures to discover any possible waste.

Belisarius had earned such great prestige with his victories and he hadn’t even been arrogant enough to usurp power when he conquered Ravenna; but the palace feared that other officers might do so. To avoid similar concentrations of power, the palace prudently installed multiple generals in Italy, each reporting separately to the emperor. Justinian and his councilors would lead the military operations from the palace in Constantinople, which was two seas (the Adriatic and the Aegean) away and several weeks distant from real-time events. It was a cumbersome solution, not a wise one. Meanwhile, Baduila, also called Totila, was starting to react: the new Gothic king was a valiant military leader and a true politician, and his influence was seeping down the peninsula.

Theodoric had envisioned an Italy with a peaceful multi-ethnic population, and Justinian nostalgically tried to create a restoration, but Totila thought primarily in social terms: historians have even called him “revolutionary.” He worked to win the support, approval, and loyalty of the local population. Instead of working through the Church or the great landowners represented in the Senate, he instituted economic measures to protect the social strata most vulnerable to the emperor’s restoration plan and to his tax collectors (small landowners and farmers, and the freed slaves who were prospective recruits for the Gothic army).

Soon, Belisarius’s brilliant Italian victories were nothing but a
memory, and the “Romans” of Constantinople began to seem like foreigners, while the Goths unexpectedly seemed “Italic.” Territories slipping into the hands of the Goths meant less tax revenue for the empire, and revenue suddenly seemed more important than winning the consensus of the population. Even though consensus in Italy was the reason Justinian had sacrificed a definitive rapprochement with the Eastern Monophysites in the spring of 536.

Justinian wasn’t losing sleep only because of news about the valiant Totila or the sardonic Khosrow. If he was wandering the halls of the palace like a blind ghost or a robot, it was partly because of unexpected news that delayed the plan for security and unity based on squeezing North Africa and Italy militarily and fiscally. The news came from the north, from the area near the Danube, where the emperors had traditionally set the nomadic tribes of the Asiatic plains and the steppes against one another, buying their loyalty and nonbelligerence with gold. But even this custom was about to end.

In 540, the Huns had broken through the empire’s defenses with an invasion into Macedonia, Thrace, and Greece. Then the Bulgars, a nomadic tribe of Turkish stock, had crossed the Danube and invaded the Balkans, setting fires and devastating the region. They had taken tens of thousands of prisoners, all subjects of the empire. They had even hit Tauresium, the emperor’s birthplace.

The social fabric around Constantinople was disintegrating. With so many men dead or deported, the survivors had to be taxed more heavily, in part to guarantee their military defense. After years of building excellent fortifications along the distant eastern and African frontiers, suddenly the very outskirts of the capital needed protection. With diligence and application, Justinian proposed new building works, called for his engineers and studied the waterways, the contour lines, the lay of the land, and the construction materials needed. He was preparing what would become future archaeological ruins.

At the start of the 540s it must have looked like the restoration would never be completed, given the resources that were available. Constantinople had issued a clear, inflexible message in solemn
proclamations of principle formulated in both Latin and Greek by the imperial chancery, and the message was emphasized by the swords and arrows of its armies. But it got an equally clear and inflexible reply, both military and political. For the Goths were a proud people, the Moors of Africa were ungovernable, and the popes were lofty. The Persians sought conflict, the Armenians had rebellion in their blood, and the nomad tribes in North Africa were volatile. So the emperor’s actions got equal but opposite reactions. Only the Vandals of Africa had truly succumbed to his might. (When some criticized the Vandals for their “effeminacy,”
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it seemed less a justification of their defeat than an attempt to belittle the emperor’s victory.)

At that point, Justinian must have reflected on the many emperors who had preceded him and had revealed so little of themselves, starting with his uncle, the illiterate Justin, who was almost reticent before his people in the Hippodrome. Justinian must have intuited that all his proclamations made people perceive him as a “disturbance” or an element of “confusion.” He must have asked himself whether his uncle Justin had better grasped the essential secret of imperial power. His reign was pervaded with incoherence, especially regarding the Monophysite issue. The law said that the Monophysites were heretics banished from the capital and from most other cities, but in fact they were protected by the empress Theodora: they had their headquarters in the palace of Hormisdas and they worshipped in the nearby church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus. So they lived in the very heart of the Sacred Palace.

A cursory look at the empire and the Ecumene would have shown that the principle of unity to which Justinian clung as tightly as a suppliant clutches an altar for sanctuary was being denied or thwarted everywhere. And yet the emperor did not change his beliefs. Divinity lay in the One. He even wrote about it in solemn words: “Nothing pleases merciful God more than the unanimity of belief on the part of all Christians on the matter of the true, immaculate faith.”
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The communion of the Church was a communion in
one
Church. There was no space for anyone else.