Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

The warming relations between pontiff and emperor sent shock waves rippling throughout the barbarian kingdoms of the West, especially in Theodoric’s Italy, where the shrewd Gothic king was fully aware that he ruled Italy only because Constantinople had other things on its mind. Theodoric knew that as an Arian ruling a Christian population, his position was weak. If his subjects found common cause with their coreligionists in Constantinople, Theodoric’s kingdom was doomed. Where spiritual victories appeared, armies would soon follow, and Rome for all its decay had not forgotten its imperial glory. If the empire was once again casting its attention toward its ancestral capital, he had no doubt the citizens of Rome would throw open the gates.

If Theodoric had spies in Constantinople, they would have given him the comforting news that Justinian, the guiding star of imperial policy, was increasingly distracted by the attractions of the Hippodrome. Like any city in any age, Constantinople had its fanatical sports fans who would occasionally engage in acts of hooliganism and generally considered the success of their teams to be more important than life itself. Called the Blues and the Greens after the colors they would don to show their support, the factions were mostly made up of youths and members of the lower classes who had few other ways to vent their energy. Showing up at the Hippodrome to watch the chariot races, they would sit in their own sections and try to drown out the opposing side with mildly insulting chants. Most emperors and their families maintained a careful neutrality when it came to the rowdy circus factions, spouting bland assertions of support depending on the company they were in, but Justinian, with his typical disregard for tradition, made no attempt to hide his passionate support for the Blues.

A day at the chariot races was more than just entertainment. The vast network of Blue supporters allowed Justinian to keep a finger on the pulse of the city and alerted him to possible threats from public disturbances. There was never a shortage of people willing to ingratiate themselves with the heir apparent by sharing information, and one of them, a star ballet dancer named Macedonia, introduced Justinian to a beautiful ex-actress named Theodora. The daughter of a bear keeper and an actress, Theodora was nearly twenty years his junior and had grown up on the stage—a profession synonymous with prostitution in the sixth century *The gulf between them was so large, and the occupation of actress so frowned upon, that there was even a law forbidding someone of senatorial rank from marrying a lady of the stage. It would have been hard to pick a less appropriate mate for a future emperor, but the moment he set eyes on her, Justinian fell madly in love.

Despite their different social status, it proved to be an inspired match. Theodora’s prodigious energy and intelligence matched Justinian’s, and the two of them were soon inseparable. Easily overcoming the legal barriers to marriage by pressuring his uncle to amend the offending law, Justinian soon married his new love and turned his formidable mind back to foreign policy.

The emperor Justin was as always content to be led by his brilliant nephew, and Byzantium looked outward with an expansive new confidence. Dissidents crushed by the tyrannies of foreign oppression suddenly found they had a powerful ally in Constantinople, and emissaries flocked to the capital. The glittering new power and prestige drew neighboring powers into the Byzantine orbit, and one diplomatic triumph seemed to follow the next. Client kings tired of the oppressive Persian rule began to break away, transferring their allegiance to Constantinople, despite the furious protests of the Persian king. The long arm of Justinian’s ambition even reached the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, where the Jewish king of Yemen had recently massacred his Christian subjects by throwing them into a ditch and setting them on fire. Offering to provide transport ships to aid in crossing the Red Sea, Justinian induced the Christian king of Ethiopia to retaliate and avenge the disaster. Within two years, a Christian king was installed on the Yemenite throne, and the empire was given access to trade routes from the Red Sea to India.

Most of these accomplishments came at the expense of Persia, and the annoyed king sent an army into modern Georgia to prevent any more vassals from defecting. This ham-fisted measure provoked the annoyed Justinian into more direct action, and he persuaded his uncle to send a Byzantine army to raid Persian Armenia. It wasn’t a large force, and it was remarkable only for a single man that Justinian contributed from his personal bodyguard. At the moment, he was simply an unknown soldier, but he would soon show himself to be the most brilliant general in imperial history. Like Justinian, his origins were humble, but kingdoms and kings would one day tremble at the name of Belisarius.

By the end of 526, as the two ancient enemies slowly rumbled to war, Justin’s health started to seriously decline, and the Senate asked him to crown Justinian as coemperor. He did so on April 1, 527, in a magnificent ceremony that seemed more a coming-out party than a simple coronation. By the end of the summer, Justin was dead of an old war wound, and Justinian and Theodora stood as the sole rulers of the Roman Empire.

*Called Monophysitism (single nature), this heresy stemmed from several bishops who vigorously defended the church from the teachings of Arius. So intent were they on denying the claim of an inferior, human Christ that they went as far in the other direction.†Pope Felix III actually excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople, but since no one was brave enough to deliver the sentence in person, the questionable decision was made to pin the letter of anathema to the back of his robes when he wasn’t paying attention. *Theodora herself seems to have specialized in a particularly obscene form of pantomime involving geese. Such details of her life, however, come from the lurid pen of Procopius, who had reason enough to hate her, and should probably be taken with a large grain of salt.

8

N IKA!

The new imperial couple could hardly have been more different from the old regime. They were both young—he in his forties and she in her twenties—and if they were never exactly popular, they at least seemed like a breath of fresh air to the populace. The coronation had been an extravagant affair, unlike anything seen during the stingy days of Anastasius, and there were those who hoped it was a sign that a glorious new age was dawning.

Justinian certainly wasn’t like other men who had held the imperial throne. Alone of the Byzantine emperors, he dreamed on a truly imperial scale, unable to abide the abomination of a Roman Empire that didn’t include Rome. He had been steeped since youth in the classical view that just as there was one God in heaven, there was only one empire here on earth. His authority as the sole Christian emperor was absolute, and his duty was to mirror the heavenly order. This was a sacred trust, and the fact that half of the empire lay in heretical barbarian hands was an insult he couldn’t let pass. It must be made whole again, and be filled with monumental public works that would endure through all the ages as a testament to the splendor of his reign.

Of course, ambitions as grand as these needed to be paid for somehow, and though his two penny-pinching predecessors had left the treasury bursting at the seams, Justinian had already proven how quickly he could burn through state funds. Six years earlier, he had managed to disperse more than thirty-seven hundred pounds of gold to pay for the decorations of the lavish games in honor of his consulship, and by the second year of his reign, he had already begun a monumental building program that had started construction on no fewer than eight churches. He had many virtues, but clearly restraint and frugality were not among them.