Emperor Justinian and Theodora: The Black Death and the Christian Roman Empire

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1:07Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked, and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company.

1:38This is a new way to run IT. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets, and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com slash tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash tickets. The year is 559, and a white-haired emperor kneels in the interior of a darkened church. He is old now, nearly 80, and many of the people that he's known in his life have already passed.

2:14His reign has been long and difficult. Even now, as a very old man, he's presided over the defeat of yet another army that has threatened his empire. Here, inside this church, he kneels in front of the mausoleum, lights candles, and begins to pray. It's been 11 long years since he buried his beautiful, brilliant wife here. When he closes his eyes, he can still see her looking back at him with those dark eyes.

2:45He can still almost hear the sound of her voice. Those monks of yours, Theodora, he murmurs, they still pray for you too. You are listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast, and this is the third episode in a series on Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora. But before we get into today's story, there are a few extra announcements. First, I'm teaching a course in September that is going to be live and online. It's run through Simon Fraser University, but you don't have to be a university student or have a degree or any prerequisite courses to enroll in this one.

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5:00We left off our story in the last episode with the Nica riots, which nearly toppled Emperor Justinian from the throne a mere five years into his reign. These riots had been out of control for days. There was violence. There were fires being lit across the city. And no matter what he did, Justinian was unable to get a handle on the situation. Soon, there were calls for a new emperor. Things got so bad that Justinian was considering fleeing the city of Constantinople by ship.

5:31And then his wife, Empress Theodora, stepped in. And she gave a speech that changed the course of events. She said that it was better to stay and fight than to live in shameful exile. And famously, she said that the imperial purple makes a fine burial shroud. In other words, better to die, emperor and empress, than to live as nobodies somewhere else. In response, Emperor Justinian commits to staying, whatever the cost.

6:02And he sends armed soldiers into the Hippodrome to confront the crowd who are busy proclaiming a new emperor. In the ensuing massacre, estimates are that over 30,000 people lost their lives. And in the wake of this slaughter, silence descends across the city. It's peace of a sort. The peace of the terrified and of the dead. Justinian has managed to hold on to his throne. But he knows that he's going to have to do something very differently if he's going to keep it.

6:34The riots had been a near thing. And Justinian would need to fortify his legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects to avoid other disasters just like this. Today's story is very much about how Justinian and Theodora go about doing that and building the legacy that has burned their names into the historical record for centuries thereafter. And religion is a large part of this story. But we're going to get to that a little bit later. Let's start with Justinian.

7:05Whatever else you could accuse Justinian of, he wasn't an idler. He wasn't the sort of guy who would just sit around and enjoy the perks of being emperor and spend his days in entertainments and feasting and pleasure. Quite the opposite. In fact, Justinian was much closer to an ascetic. He ate very little and slept even less. He didn't really observe a lot of the procedures and dignities of office, except for the ritual prostrations that were required of anyone who had to approach the imperial presence.

7:39And he was genuinely engaged in the micro details of running an empire. Even before Justinian became emperor, and before he met Theodora, there's no record of him running around to parties, getting drunk, consorting with prostitutes, and doing the sort of wild partying that other young men of the aristocratic classes might have engaged in. In part, this may be because Justinian was born into a peasant family, and he came to Constantinople as a young man at the invitation of his uncle, who was from the same sort of family, but had moved to the big city and was busy building a career in the imperial guard.

8:22And Justinian's uncle, Justin, does end up becoming emperor, which of course propels Justinian into a far more elevated number of positions, and eventually into being in line to inherit the throne. But the fact that Justinian and his family were outsiders, and came from these peasant origins, probably meant that he never took his money or his status for granted. He might have felt the need to work a bit harder just to fit in and belong.

8:52It's possible that even after he becomes emperor, this continues to drive him, although I'm speculating. After all, Justinian and Theodora were both well aware that aristocratic families still continued to gossip and giggle about their humble origins when their backs were turned. Justinian is very much a systems type of guy. He believes in building better structures, whether those are taxes, or laws, or even theologies. He's a man of principle, and he can be dangerously inflexible, as we saw during the Nika riots.

9:28His wife Theodora, by contrast, is a people person. She's someone who invests an enormous amount of effort into her relationships. She's fiercely loyal to her friends, and quite dangerous to people that she regards as her enemies. She's also a pragmatist, someone who's willing to work with very different people in order to achieve a desirable outcome. As we're going to see in today's episode, Justinian is really a bit of a moralist. He's someone who's very much concerned with correctness.

10:01Correctness of practice and correctness of belief, including religious beliefs. Which makes it all the more surprising that he would choose a former prostitute to be his wife. Because that's what Theodora was. She grew up in the circus, as we covered in the first episode in this series. And like many other actresses and performers, she probably began sex work as a prepubescent child. This was standard for women and girls who were born into that life.

10:32And it was one that she had very little choice about, and great difficulty escaping. But here's the thing. Justinian cared about his own judgment and opinion. And not really at all for the judgment and opinion of others. Justinian saw Theodora as a woman with a past that she never chose. And circumstances which he refused to believe defined her permanently. He saw her as intelligent, as beautiful, and as someone who had a lot to offer. However, Theodora is perhaps the only ungovernable passion in Justinian's life.

11:06And that makes him a very interesting character. At least to me. Justinian has a vision of the state that he's trying to build. It is orderly. It is Roman. And it's Christian. Now, of course, Christianity has been the official religion of the Roman Empire for a couple of centuries now. So that's not new. But the empire is a mix of very different people, with different languages and different backgrounds. And Justinian is interested in standardization. He's also the emperor, by the way, who changes the official language of the empire from Latin to Greek.

11:41So up to that point, the official language had been Latin because it began in Rome. And even though Rome has now fallen and is no longer under imperial control, Latin had continued to be the official language of the empire in its eastern capital of Constantinople. But under Justinian's reign, that changes to reflect the fact that Greek is the more commonly spoken language of the people in the empire. And he wants the laws to be immediately accessible to people, to be written in a language that they understand.

12:12So we have a Greek-speaking empire, which is Christian and Roman. And, of course, Christianity is the official religion. It's the dominant religion. But it's not the only religion. So Justinian's great standardization project begins with the pagans. Pagan is kind of a catch-all term, really. It's a term that's used to refer to people who aren't Christians and aren't monotheists. So the term pagan here refers to people in the empire who could have a range of different beliefs that are different from each other.

12:46It's not as though there's one unified system of pagan belief. It's a catch-all term. Justinian begins by demanding that pagans in the empire present themselves for baptism. So they need to be converted and they need to be baptized as an official ceremony recognizing their new Christian identity. And if they lapse back into their pagan beliefs or practices after this formal ceremony, they can be sentenced to death. It's really very severe. Now, as you can imagine, people are going to come forward and comply with these things.

13:19But that doesn't necessarily mean there's a wholesale shift in beliefs and practices. What it means is that people take their non-Christian practices underground. And so they carefully cover up the pagan art in their homes with crosses. And they're very careful to perform the outwardly correct Christian motions and to conceal their prohibited personal identities. And there's some evidence that even very high-ranking members of Justinian's imperial court were secretly pagans who outwardly professed Christianity

13:55because this was pretty important for their own survival and for their own survival and for their careers to flourish. So it's possible that even men as significant as Trebonian, the Roman jurist that Justinian puts in charge of his legal reforms, was actually a pagan in private and professed Christianity in public. Something called religious deviance became a major focus of Emperor Justinian's attention. And this was a very broadly defined category. As we saw in our last episode, it began with a crackdown on homosexual behavior amongst men,

14:30but also expanded to include a much wider range of practices. Basically anything that didn't conform to what the emperor defined as Christianity. But here's the problem. When you want to make Christianity the official religion of your state, and you want to have the government in charge of defending and enforcing that religion, which version of Christianity are you going to use? Because there's more than one. The proliferation of Christian communities and denominations today is clear evidence of the fact

15:02that Christians quite frequently disagree amongst themselves about matters of right belief and practice. And it wasn't any different in Justinian's day back in the 6th century. Then too, there were sharp divisions in Christian communities about right belief and practice. And this is going to create some political difficulties for the emperor. At this point, we need to take a deep dive into religious controversy. And this may begin to seem like splitting hairs to a modern audience.

15:34But we have to do this because it was anything but trivial to people in the 6th century. People lost their livelihoods. They were socially shunned. Or even suffered mob violence on account of these differences in belief. And so we have to get to grips with what were the issues that people were so animated about. And this may also surprise some of you because the version of Christianity that's been passed down to us, which we've sort of learned and perhaps not really questioned,

16:06is in fact the product of centuries of disagreement and contention. And this is one of those formative moments. There were in the empire two major schools of thought on one very important theological question. What was the nature of Jesus? Was he human? Was he divine? Was he both? And how did these two things mix exactly? This wasn't the first time that there had been sharply differing opinions on a question such as this. And so in the church at this period, when there were differences of belief or practice or doctrine,

16:44typically they were resolved when you had church leaders or bishops who would get together at church councils. And that's where they would hash out the different perspectives and points of view and decide which one was correct and which was going to be standardized and taught as the official version of Christianity and which versions were deviant or incorrect or going to be rejected. So questions like which books belonged in the Bible or how should we understand the nature of God

17:15or the nature of Jesus in particular were discussed in great detail in these church councils. These bishops would come from the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire. And even now, in the 6th century, now that the Roman half of the empire has collapsed and is no longer under imperial control, you still have western bishops from cities that were in that western part of the Roman Empire coming to these church councils to participate in discussing these important matters.

17:45The question of the nature of Jesus in particular had involved a church council before. It was actually in the city of Nicaea in 325. And no less a person than the emperor Constantine himself had attended. Because at that time, it had come to the attention of bishops in the empire that there were differing teachings and understandings of the nature of Jesus. The council of Nicaea was trying to solidify how people should understand Jesus. And they came up with the Nicene Creed as a standardized expression

18:19of what they believed was the correct version. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father, through him all things were made. Unquote. Now that includes some very specific language. Consubstantial, begotten, not made?

18:49That language is no accident. It was a language that had been hammered out after extended and sometimes heated discussions amongst the bishops at the council of Nicaea. This creed expresses the official formulation of the doctrine. And it was also a response to a doctrine that the council was busy rejecting. And that doctrine came from a man called Arius. His version became known as Arianism, or the Arian heresy, or, by people who accepted it, Arian Christianity.

19:22Arius essentially said that Jesus wasn't the same as God, but had been brought into being later. And his ideas are going to be pretty important because there were groups of newly converted Christians, specifically Germanic tribes like the Vandals and Goths, who are going to be part of our story later, who converted to this Arian version of Christianity. So the church council of Nicaea is busy formulating an official creed expressing what they believe to be the right version of Christianity.

19:53And it's designed to refute the Arian version of Christianity. Now, if you thought that would have resolved the matter, you would be wrong. Because in the 400s, almost a century later, there's another bishop, a guy called Bishop Nestorius, who's the Bishop of Constantinople. And he articulates a version which is a little bit different again. And he essentially says, Jesus has two natures, but he's really very, very human. And we shouldn't do things like refer to his mother Mary as Theotokos,

20:24or God-bearer, because what she bore was a human child who had perhaps a divine aspect somewhere. But he really stressed Jesus' humanity. So we now have two centuries that have gone by since the council of Nicaea, and one century that's gone by since Bishop Nestorius. And there are, once again, two very different views on Jesus himself. So here they are. By the time we get to the 6th century, during the reign of Emperor Justinian, we have these two major communities.

20:55There are probably other minor ones, but the ones at issue are the Monophysite community and the Chalcedonian community. So the Monophysites, as their name suggests, believe that Jesus has only one nature. Mono means one. And Jesus' nature is divine. The Monophysites are also the Christian community that Empress Theodora had encountered when she had her conversion experience in Egypt. And that was discussed in episode one. But at the time, Theodora was a single mother.

21:29She was destitute. She'd been rejected by the man who'd fathered her child. And she had very few options. And she was taken in and sheltered by a Monophysite Christian community in Alexandria. So she has this personal experience of this community and of the care and compassion that they showed her. And that's going to be very significant for how our story today unfolds. On the other side of the debate, we have the Chalcedonians. And they get their name from a church council in Chalcedon,

21:59which proclaimed their version. And the Chalcedonians say, Jesus has two natures. He is human and divine. To the Monophysites, this sounds a whole lot like Bishop Nestorius, who was condemned as a heretic a century ago. So they don't want to have anything to do with the Chalcedonians. And they reject that position entirely. At this point, you might be asking, why does it matter? Why are people so agitated about this question? And the best way I can explain it is as follows. If Jesus is completely divine,

22:29then his sufferings on the cross, his temptations, and all of that is not really relatable. If he's divine, then he's basically a superman. And he has power and strength over these things that you and I just will never have access to. So to what extent can we look at that as a realistic example that we could follow? If he's divine completely, he's in another category. But if you go with fully human, and you say Jesus is a man, then that makes him very relatable. But that causes a whole lot of problems

23:01for church doctrine around the Trinity and this three-person Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So that would require some pretty radical doctrinal revisions. And so you see people trying to balance uneasily between these two ends of the spectrum and say, well, there's a human aspect and there's a divine aspect, and we're going to argue a whole lot about how these two things intersect. So at this point in the 6th century, we have these two major communities of belief across the Roman Empire. They're all over the Eastern Empire,

23:32and they're also in what was formerly the Western Empire. The Monophysites are particularly concentrated in places like Egypt, which also happens to be a really wealthy province for the Empire. Emperor Justinian is now busy trying to standardize Roman law and also standardize Roman religion. So when he takes over as emperor, he inherits this messy, divided situation. His uncle, the previous emperor, Justin, had championed the Chalcedonian position

24:03and had been busy persecuting monophysite Christian communities. And this got really severe. Monophysite monks, for example, were thrown out of their monasteries, essentially making them homeless and destitute. The emperor gave orders that dead churchmen who were known to have had monophysite views should have their names stripped from the official records in local communities, which were usually preserved on wooden panels called diptychs. And so you can imagine how local communities would feel

24:34when you have this top-down order that says, scratch out the name of that bishop you had who died 10 years ago or 20 years ago. This was the man who married couples couples in your community, who baptized your children, who was at the bedside of dying members in that town. And now someone from Constantinople is telling you, you need to scratch his name out of the record because we've decided he was a heretic. He was a monophysite and that's not okay. That didn't go over very well.

25:04So there are local riots in different communities as these kinds of commands are coming out. There's a lot of unrest. But in Egypt, where Theodora had had her conversion experience, monophysite communities were spared a lot of these heavy restrictive measures because Egypt was so wealthy. And given the unrest that was being stirred up elsewhere, the emperor didn't want to destabilize such a wealthy tax-paying province. So Egypt hadn't experienced the brunt of this monophysite repression

25:35during Justin's rule. That's going to change under Justinian a little bit later. So while Justinian is grappling with theology and spending many of his late nights talking theology with aged Chalcedonian churchmen, Theodora, his wife, is a monophysite. Or at least she's got very strong monophysite sympathies. So what is she doing in the midst of all of this? Well, the answer is she's not sitting on her hands. Theodora throughout her life is a person who demonstrates intense loyalty

26:07to people who have been her friend back when she was a nobody. And she remembers the monophysite communities of Egypt. So she's very much a supporter of the monophysite cause. And she's going to continue to support them even as her husband takes increasingly restrictive measures against them. There's a wonderful story about this from a few years later in their reign when a Nubian community in Egypt wants to convert to Christianity. And Emperor Justinian is going to send a delegation

26:37of Chalcedonian Christians over there to teach them the correct way. But Theodora has her own team of monophysite Christians. And she actually writes to the local governor in the region and says, make sure that the emperor's Chalcedonian Christian committee gets a bit delayed so that these monophysites reach the Nubian community first. And the local governor makes the decision that it would be better to agree with the empress and do what she wants

27:08than to ignore her request and make sure that the emperor's committee gets there first. So he complies with Theodora's request. And as a result, the monophysites get to this Nubian community first. They convert to monophysite Christianity. And when the Chalcedonian Christians show up later, it's too late. The community is already monophysite. So we can see that Theodora takes really an active role in championing monophysites. And you might wonder, what did Justinian think of all this? I mean, isn't this his wife actively thwarting his policy?

27:41Wouldn't he be angry about this? We have no record that Justinian was angry about it. In fact, his wife's monophysite sympathies were not a surprise to him. And given some of his later actions, it's highly unlikely that he was angry with her. And this, again, I think is a really interesting statement about the relationship they had with each other. It's not one where Theodora is expected to just conform to all of her husband's ideas and objectives. In fact, Justinian is quite heavily influenced by Theodora.

28:13So in 531, a mere four years into their reign, Justinian halts the persecution of monophysites that his predecessor, Emperor Justin, had been carrying out. And he and Theodora invite a number of leading monophysite Christians to Constantinople. And the idea is that they're going to sponsor a dialogue between monophysite clergy and Chalcedonian clergy, and see if they can find some common ground between the two so that there's not this stark division of one community against the other.

28:47And so they're bringing in monophysites from places like Egypt and Syria into the capital itself. Now, in fact, Theodora already has her own monophysite invitation project because during the persecution that had been ongoing when she became empress, she was aware of a number of monks that had been thrown out of monasteries, clergymen who were on the run because of these persecutions in places like Armenia and Egypt and so on. And she invited a bunch of them to Constantinople personally

29:19and housed them in a palace that she and Justinian used to live in before they became emperor and empress. And apparently there were so many of these refugee monophysites in the palace that at one point they collapsed the floor. There are so many of them, several hundred. So Theodora has her own monophysite shelter going on, but in 531, she gets Justinian to formally invite others and sponsor this dialogue project. There's this period of quiet for several years as this is going on.

29:52So Justinian has halted government persecution of monophysites. There's a dialogue project going on in Constantinople. And all of this gets quashed in 536 when the Pope shows up from Rome. So again, Rome is no longer under imperial control. There's a Gothic king who runs Rome and large parts of Italy at this point, but he sent the Pope into Constantinople to negotiate for various reasons. And while the Pope is there, he talks to the Patriarch, the leading churchman of Constantinople,

30:24and finds him to be dangerously close to monophysite ideas. So the Pope is outraged because he's a firm Chalcedonian, and he basically says the Patriarch of Constantinople. He says, you're not a legitimate member of the church. You can't be teaching Christianity. Your job here is over. And he might even have leveled this excommunication charge against Empress Theodora herself. The sources are a bit unclear on this, but the Pope is very outraged at the monophysite sympathies he finds everywhere in Constantinople.

30:57So the Patriarch disappears, and it later turns out that Theodora had actually whisked him away and hidden him inside the women's quarters of the imperial palace. So he's going to live there, undercover, in secret, for the next decade. And that's going to protect him from any sort of repercussions or persecutions for his not sufficiently orthodox beliefs. So here again, we see Theodora directly sheltering people. And again, the Patriarch wasn't officially a monophysite,

31:29but the Pope thought he was too close to their position. So Theodora shelters this guy. But Justinian is now going to officially champion the Chalcedonian position. So the period of dialogue is over, and Justinian is going to resume the persecution of monophysites that his uncle had already begun. And he does this for a number of reasons. He has sound political reasons for doing this, but also the Chalcedonians outnumber the monophysites.

31:59And so it makes a lot of sense for him to want to be seen to be on that side of things. If you're going to make one version of Christianity the official version, it's better to go with the one that has more subscribers. And that's what Justinian does. In 536, this persecution of monophysites is resumed with a vengeance. Men found to be heretics or monophysites would be punished with things like exile, loss of positions, loss of rank, and exclusion from all skilled possessions.

32:29So essentially, this is going to render you destitute, an outsider, an exile. It's very severe. And for women too, these persecutions are extended. So by 541, we see Justinian adjusting the laws to strip women of protections that he gave them for things like their dowries. So we talked about this in episode two. Justinian is this great legal reformer. It's one of his projects, and in many ways, he adjusts the law to protect women in marriage.

33:02So the dowry was a sum of money that a woman brought into a marriage from her family. And in the event that her husband died or that there was a divorce, she needed to retrieve that money. So Justinian had made it easier for women to do that. But now in 541, he says, Ah, but wait, if the woman in question happens to be one of those heretic monophysites, then we're going to strip any legal protection for her around this dowry. So what this means is that women who had these views were risking economic destitution

33:34if they were looking at the end of a marriage, because they would have very few options for retrieving that dowry sum of money that they would so desperately need. Once the emperor had officially authorized this persecution of monophysite communities, locals were very happy to take things into their own hands, because you had Christians of these different persuasions living next to each other. And so in some cases, you'd get Chalcedonian Christian priests or bishops who would incite mob violence toward their monophysite Christian brethren.

34:07And there was one account that I read, which even suggested that a local Chalcedonian clergyman had actually hired lepers to go into the houses of monophysite Christians and try to contaminate the inside of their houses by smearing their infected leprosy sores onto bedding and even trying to drop pus into the wine vats. Now, that's a sickening level of hatred that we're looking at here when you're actually going to hire lepers to try and give this disease

34:40to people who are Christians of a different stripe than you. Even if you want to say they're heretics, not Christians, and they don't belong in your community, is this kind of behavior really justifiable? So this is the kind of stuff that's going on throughout the empire. People in different communities are freelancing their persecution of monophysites now that they know what the official government position is. Professor Anthony Kaldalis, who has written extensively on this period of history, points out the amazing irony of this moment.

35:12Because the earliest days of Christianity are formed around the memory of the Roman state persecuting early Christians for not sacrificing to the emperor. But now we have the Roman state persecuting people for not subscribing to the Chalcedonian version of Christianity. Ah yes, those ancient Romans persecuting Christians were so terrible. But we Romans, who are persecuting people for not following our version of Christianity, are right.

35:47While all this is going on, Empress Theodora's refuge for monophysites inside Constantinople is still operating, and Emperor Justinian looks the other way. So all of these things are happening at the same time, which is kind of remarkable to think of. And while all of this religious turmoil is going on at home, Justinian is hatching other plans. So in the immediate aftermath of the Nica riots in 532, he's desperate to bolster his legitimacy.

36:19And what better way to do that than with a military victory? So Justinian has his eyes set on North Africa, which used to be a Roman imperial province, until it was taken over by the Vandals in 429. Now, the word Vandal today is associated with Vandalism, or to Vandalize something, which basically means to smash something, or destroy it, or deface it. And that's a weird historical memory of the original Vandals, with a capital V,

36:49who are a Germanic tribe, and they had taken over and conquered North Africa. So it used to be a Roman province, now the Vandals have control of it, and Emperor Justinian, who's desperate to bolster his credibility, is thinking about taking it back. In 533, basically as quickly as possible, after the Nica riots, Emperor Justinian sends his friend, General Belisarius, with an army to North Africa. And the goal is to retake that territory for the emperor.

37:23Now, there's a whole campaign there, and I'm not going to tell that story today, because General Belisarius deserves his own episode. So we're going to hold off on those details, and save them for the podcast episode that's devoted entirely to General Belisarius. But suffice to say, that General Belisarius achieves an astonishing victory in North Africa, he retakes the territory, and he's rewarded with a classical Roman triumph to celebrate this victory in the streets of Constantinople.

37:54However, Justinian follows this victory by unwisely increasing the tax rate in North Africa, which is never a way to make a new government popular with people. You know? Hello, congratulations, you're now our new subjects, and guess what? Your taxes are going to be higher than they were under those other guys. It's not really a good move. And to make matters worse, Justinian also insists that as returning citizens of the Roman Empire, everyone follow the correct version of Christianity, the Chalcedonian version.

38:25The problem was that many of the churches and communities in North Africa were Arian Christians, because Vandals and Goths and many of these Germanic tribes had converted to Arian Christianity. But according to Emperor Justinian, that was heresy. And so it was now illegal to practice Arianism. And also, if you were an Arian church, you needed to hand over church property and get rid of your Arian priest so that that property could be taken over by correct Chalcedonian Christians,

38:57and you could have a correct Chalcedonian priest be in charge of teaching and worship in that community. Higher taxes, and now you can't practice the religion that you were born into, these were not measures designed to increase popularity. And as a result of his inflexibility, Justinian soon had a full-scale rebellion on his hands in North Africa. So you can see here how all this religious controversy just spills out into all of these other aspects of the story,

39:29from military victories and local rebellions. It's impossible to really understand what's going on here without recognizing the centrality of religion. Let's take a break, though, from religious orthodoxy, military campaigns, and Emperor Justinian, and turn our attention to Empress Theodora back at the palace. Now, we already know that Empress Theodora is fiercely loyal to her friends, and she has her own opinions about things like religion and politics. She doesn't simply fall into line with whatever Emperor Justinian has in mind.

40:02And this actually makes her more valuable, because she brings her own insights and her own perspective to the table. And Justinian doesn't just consult her about matters of state. He tells people that he consults her about matters of state, which means he's not just happy to profit from her advice in private, but he signals to other people publicly how valuable he thinks it is, and how they ought to regard her. Theodora has an excellent grasp of how the game of politics is played, and she demonstrates this on a number of occasions.

40:34I don't have time in this episode to detail them all, but I am going to tell you one story which illustrates her role extremely well. The story here is about the fall of a guy called John the Cappadocian. Now, if you listen to episode two on the Nika riots, you might recall that John the Cappadocian's name came up, in the mouths of the angry rioters. And that's because he was one of Justinian's officials. He was a prefect, and he was in charge of tax collection. He was really, really good at collecting taxes.

41:06That's why Justinian liked him, because he brought in a lot of money. But John the Cappadocian didn't just bring in money for the emperor. He brought in money for himself as well. He did this by extorting people. So, for everyday people, John the Cappadocian was a hated figure, because he was gouging them, not just for the taxes that were due to the emperor, but for additional money that John the Cappadocian would use to line his own pockets. So, during the Nika riots, the crowd is angrily demanding that this guy get fired.

41:40And Justinian complies with this in a desperate attempt to appease the crowd. But less than a year after the riots are over, John the Cappadocian is back in office, collecting taxes, just like before, for Emperor Justinian. Now, Empress Theodora also disliked John the Cappadocian. She knew that this guy was part of Justinian's inner circle of advisors. And she also found out that the Cappadocian had been saying things that weren't so nice about her to her husband.

42:12So, put yourself in her shoes for a second. If you found out that someone in your spouse's inner circle was bad-mouthing you to your husband or wife, you probably wouldn't be a fan of that person, either. So, we can see why Theodora had a personal reason to dislike him. But, she was also very canny politically. And she knew that John the Cappadocian was much hated in the city for his corruption. The Nika riots had nearly ended the reign of Emperor Justinian and her own time as Empress.

42:48And so, you can see that from a political point of view, she must have realized how dangerous it was to put such a hated official right back into office, where he could continue doing things that would make people angry. Theodora actually approached Emperor Justinian. And she told him about John the Cappadocian and how serious his corruption was and how intensely he was hated by the people. So, she actually tried to appeal to Justinian directly and say,

43:18listen, this guy is not good for us. He's a political liability. And apparently, Justinian just couldn't bring himself to get rid of the guy. There was something about him and the money that he brought in that was very attractive. Having accomplished nothing by direct appeal, in 540, the Empress tries a different strategy. And she's going to lay a trap for John the Cappadocian, using one of her friends, a former actress named Antonina.

43:48So, this is a woman who comes from a very similar background to Theodora herself. And she just happens to be married to General Belisarius. And it's not entirely clear who cooked up this plan first, whether it was Theodora's brainchild or Antonina's initiative. But the two of them were both in on it. So, this is what happened. Antonina goes out of her way to befriend the daughter of John the Cappadocian while he's out of town. And so, she's having these conversations with the young woman. And she's complaining that Emperor Justinian is so ungrateful.

44:22He doesn't really appreciate what my husband, General Belisarius, has done. He's a great war hero. He's retaken all of this land for the Empire. And Emperor Justinian just doesn't seem to appreciate how much he's done. The daughter, sensing an opportunity, asks Antonina if General Belisarius might be interested in a regime change. I mean, if the Emperor is not appreciative enough, perhaps a different Emperor would be the right way to go. And Antonina says, well, General Belisarius couldn't get a regime change without an insider to help set that up.

44:59So, of course, the daughter goes running straight back to her father, John the Cappadocian. And she excitedly tells him that the wife of General Belisarius is busy complaining. The great General Belisarius might be interested in toppling Justinian. And don't you want to have a conversation about this? John the Cappadocian reaches out to Antonina and sets up a conversation. So, they're going to meet in a villa that's owned by General Belisarius. And they're going to have this little quiet talk about what the future might hold.

45:30Antonina, of course, tips off Empress Theodora about what's going to happen. And she says, we're going to have this conversation. Everything is going perfectly. So, make sure you have some ears on site to record what's going on. And Empress Theodora is only too happy to oblige. So, she sends over a couple of high-ranking officers to hide themselves in the villa and wait for John the Cappadocian to show up. So, essentially, we have a sting operation being set up here in the 6th century.

46:00Antonina arrives. John the Cappadocian shows up. They have this conversation about potentially overthrowing Emperor Justinian. And as John the Cappadocian gets into the conversation excitedly, of course, he's incriminating himself. And then the officers emerge. And that's the end of John the Cappadocian's palace career. The funny thing about this is the penalty that's assigned to John the Cappadocian. Justinian sends him into a city far away to become a priest. Now, this has me scratching my head.

46:32Because if you sent someone away to be a monk, then they would be living under some fairly strict rules in an enclosed community without having contact with the outside world. They would be ruled by their abbot. That might seem to be a reasonable measure. But if you send someone somewhere else to be a priest, you're putting them in charge of the spiritual welfare of other people. Which seems like an odd mission to give somebody who's in trouble for corruption and potential treason. But in any case, John the Cappadocian's career as a priest doesn't last very long.

47:05Because pretty soon, he gets himself implicated in the murder of a bishop. So now, the local community is furious at him. And when he's convicted of this, he's flogged, he's stripped of all his property, and he's sent into permanent exile in Egypt. Now, all of this, I think, vindicates Empress Theodora's sense that John the Cappadocian was not a good guy. He was not good for Justinian. He wasn't good for the realm. He wasn't good for anybody.

47:35He was corrupt, and he was someone who was simply looking out for his own self-interest. He'd wormed himself into the emperor's good graces, but would have been as willing to stab him in the back if the opportunity arose and he saw a profit in doing that. Which he uses to defame Theodora and Justinian and Emperor Belisarius. Empress Theodora is scheming, and she's vindictive, and she's nasty. But the events that occur after John the Cappadocian's disgrace seem to suggest another interpretation entirely.

48:10They suggest that Theodora had a very accurate sense of what kind of a person John the Cappadocian was, and that because she'd failed to get the emperor to see this, she took matters into her own hands, and essentially allowed John the Cappadocian to prove who he was by having this conversation. And by getting him removed, she removes a threat to the safety of the imperial couple and to the empire. Procopius often complains that Theodora intervenes in these ways and thwarts the careers of other officials.

48:43But if you were in her shoes, and you'd watched the emperor nearly lose his crown only five years into his reign, you too might have a heightened sense of vigilance around potential threats, or other people becoming a little bit too successful and becoming rival candidates. So there are other ways of viewing why Theodora does the things that she does. Procopius' account of her is entirely one-sided, and he gives her credit for exactly nothing.

49:16So far, the reign of Emperor Justinian has been a pretty bumpy ride. We've seen severe earthquakes, we've seen the Nika riots, we've seen religious conflict and persecution, and now we're going to see something even more horrible. The Black Death. Now, the Black Death is something you've probably heard of in the context of its visit to Western Europe in the 1300s, when it's estimated to have killed somewhere between one-third to one-half of the population.

49:46The death toll varied by region, it wasn't uniform throughout. The Black Death is caused by a bacteria known as Yersinia pestis, which essentially lives in the digestive tract of fleas. And fleas will ride on the backs of rats. So in cities where you had rats running around, which were most of the cities of the ancient world, these rats could be carrying infected fleas, which would then jump from the rats onto people and bite them. And when they did so, they injected this bacteria from their digestive tract into the bloodstream of the victim.

50:20And that's how plague got passed around. The same plague that visited Western Europe in the 1300s was first written about in the 6th century, when it paid a visit to the Eastern Roman Empire during the reign of Emperor Justinian. This earlier episode of the plague is now called the Justinian Plague by historians, which is kind of funny because Justinian had a penchant for attaching his name to everything. But I'm not sure he would have wanted his name to be attached to this.

50:51And Procopius, in his Secret History, where he's busy slandering Emperor Justinian, says that Justinian was actually worse than the Black Death because the Black Death spared some of its victims. Not everyone who contracted it died. Whereas Justinian affected all of his subjects by impoverishing them. And nobody escaped Justinian. Now, this is typical Procopius hyper-exaggeration, of course. Procopius is almost certainly blaming Justinian for everything that was going wrong.

51:24And the plague would definitely have had a massive economic effect. The reports we have suggest that it first emerged in an Egyptian port in 541. And within months, it had spread all along the trade routes of the empire. Because, of course, port cities have ships coming and going, with rats jumping on and off from one ship to the next. And so, in the spring of 542, it had arrived in the port of Constantinople. There are reports from Constantinople in the 540s of the death toll as the plague took hold.

51:59And bodies were being carried out in massive numbers through the city gates for burial. Justinian had some people stationed at the gates to count. And they recorded numbers in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 corpses a day at some points, before they got tired of counting. So we're talking about four days of the bubonic plague being the equal to all the deaths during the Nika riots. But the plague in Constantinople didn't last for four days. It lasted for four months.

52:31And very soon, they were running out of room to dispose of all these bodies. So at first, Emperor Justinian orders the construction of deep pits outside the city, where these bodies can just be dumped en masse for burial. But they don't even have enough room with the pits. So they start sticking bodies into guard towers on the city walls, and covering them with quicklime to speed up their decomposition. And eventually, they end up loading bodies onto ships, old ships or barges,

53:02and sending them out into the Sea of Marmara and sinking them. That's how many corpses we are talking about. It was an overwhelming number. The plague wasn't limited to the city of Constantinople, of course, but it had a devastating effect on people living at such close quarters with each other. And the estimates are that it may have wiped out half the population of the city. It was present in other parts of the empire, where it exploded in different outbreaks on and off for a number of years.

53:33Decades, in fact. As you would expect, the impact of this on the city was incredible. There were food shortages, chaos, a complete breakdown of law and order. Try to imagine yourself living in some quarter of Constantinople during this period. What happens if you get robbed by somebody in the street? Oh, you want to report it to the city prefect. Unfortunately, he's dead. And the guy in charge of finding his replacement isn't feeling too good either. People who would normally be patrolling the city streets

54:05are now pressed into service just from moving bodies. So there's really no recourse for your safety and security from things like theft, murder, and rape because there just isn't the infrastructure to provide that kind of protection. And plague was quite indifferent to social status. The rich were as likely to get it as the poor. Not everyone who got it died, but the mortality rates were terrifying. Emperor Justinian himself contracted the disease at one point during this period,

54:37and this leaves everybody in the palace facing the grim possibility that they may need to find a new emperor in very short order. Fortunately, Emperor Justinian survives, although at this point he was about 60 years old. But only a few years later, in 548, Emperor Justinian would lose his wife. Theodora dies in 548 of an illness that may well have been cancer. And on her deathbed, she gets Justinian to promise to continue to support

55:11her monophysite Christian refuge inside the city of Constantinople. And he promises her that he will continue to shelter them. He will protect them, despite the official policy of the empire. And he keeps this promise. Theodora's marriage to Justinian had lasted over 20 years. She'd been his closest advisor, his loyal opposition, and his partner in all things. Justinian would outlive her by many years. As an old man, nearly 80 years old, 11 years after her death,

55:45we find him in that church in Constantinople, lighting candles for the repose of her soul and saying prayers beside her mausoleum. He never remarried. He never forgot this woman who had been such an incredible part of his life. Theodora would be remembered well, not just by her husband, the man who rewrote laws to make her his wife, but also by the many women that she herself had freed from sex trafficking and prostitution,

56:18as well as by the Christian communities that she had so persistently sheltered. In fact, she is still revered as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church, and her saint day is celebrated on November the 14th. Now, it's not surprising that the Oriental Orthodox Church would remember her well, because they are directly descended from the monophysite communities that she had so faithfully sheltered. But it's a little more surprising that the Eastern Orthodox Church

56:49would also celebrate her as a saint, because they were Chalcedonian Christians, and Theodora was sympathetic to the monophysite point of view. An inscription to her memory at the Church of St. Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople reads, quote, She was the God-crowned Theodora, whose mind is adorned with piety, and whose constant toil lies in unsparing efforts to nourish the destitute. Unquote. You might be tempted to think that this was just some official praise to an empress

57:24who had sponsored the building of that church, and that it was an exaggeration, except that the facts of her life bear out this pronouncement quite substantially. She had, in fact, continuously shown concern for the less fortunate, for the forgotten ones, for the people in the empire who had nobody else to look out for them. But Empress Theodora is remembered very differently in the Latin churches of the West, later to be known as Catholic churches, who followed the Pope and the Chalcedonian version of Christianity.

57:57And for them, she was seen as somebody who was sponsoring dissent, and sheltering people that they viewed as enemies of the correct practice of Christianity. Even centuries later, during the Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 1500s, a guy called Cardinal Baronius is still heaping aspersions on Theodora. And in a book of history that he writes, called Annals Ecclesiasticus, he says the following, Such as these were the evil schemes that were the work of this degenerate woman, meaning Theodora.

58:32Another Eve who heeded the serpent, who was the source of every ill her husband endured. She was a denizen of the abyss and a mistress of demons. It was she who, driven by a satanic spirit, roused by a diabolic rage, spitefully overthrew a consensus that was one with great toil, and a peace redeemed by the blood of martyrs, and seconded by the sweat of confessors. Unquote. Of course, Cardinal Baronius never knew Theodora.

59:04He's writing nearly a millennium after she died. But for him, it's enough to know that she had monophysite sympathies, and therefore, she was a heretic. And for men like him, it might even have been enough just to know that she was a woman to begin to level the criticism of being the daughter of Eve, a woman, the source of sin and evil, and all that is bad with the world. It's a very familiar refrain, and has nothing to do with the facts of who Theodora actually was,

59:35and what she actually did. When we look at the historical memory of Theodora, it's impossible to avoid mentioning Procopius, who, with his secret history, did more to blacken her name than anybody else. And Procopius did know Theodora, of course. He worked in the imperial court. He met her and Justinian. He worked for General Belisarius. And in his official histories, he writes very well of the empress and the emperor. But in this secret history,

1:00:06this document that he penned in the quiet and did not allow to be published during his lifetime, it was only discovered centuries after his death, he paints a very different picture. It's completely one-sided. For Procopius in The Secret History, Theodora is the source of all evil. She's wicked, she's shrewish, she's vindictive, she's hateful, and anything she does can only be attributed to a base and evil motive.

1:00:38Procopius gives Theodora credit for exactly nothing except being beautiful, and even that is something that he thinks she misuses. Procopius renders her as this one-dimensional character who's petty, vindictive, grasping, and merciless. But to the many people that Theodora went out of her way to help during her lifetime, she was a very different character. And Procopius gives her credit for exactly none of this.

1:01:08To people who had lost their homes and their livelihoods just for having the wrong version of Christianity, Theodora was very merciful indeed. Procopius is happy to report any action she did that he can use to condemn her, but he refuses to give her credit for anything except being beautiful. So Theodora's legacy is remembered very differently, depending on who you talk to. And her husband, Emperor Justinian's legacy, is also mixed. Some of the most spectacular architecture still to be found in the city of Istanbul,

1:01:43as Constantinople is called today, is his handiwork. The Church of Hagia Sophia and the incredible Basilica Cistern were building projects that he commissioned. His legal reforms would echo for centuries after his death. But his legacy, especially his military campaigns, is also mixed, for reasons that we're going to leave to discuss in our episode on General Belisarius. So we're going to defer those for another day. But the bond between Justinian and Theodora is something for the ages.

1:02:17Two people, both from very humble beginnings, who, against all odds, find themselves ruling an empire. Both of them chose to defy social expectations and attitudes. And in their long marriage, they didn't always agree with each other. But they were fiercely loyal to the very end. Theirs is one of the great love stories of history. I hope you've enjoyed this third episode in the series on Justinian and Theodora.

1:02:49And if you'd like to chat with me live with your questions about this episode or anything else to do with Justinian and Theodora, I'm holding a live history chat just for Patreon supporters later this month. So if you want to get in on that, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporter of Villains and Virgins podcast today. And for even more on this story, stay tuned, because coming next is an episode on General Belisarius, the man who retook the city of Rome itself

1:03:22and is ranked as one of the greatest generals in Roman imperial history. Stay tuned and subscribe if you haven't already so you don't miss that. Thank you so much for being here with me in this episode, and I'll see you in the next one. Hello. Nah, sorry, we're booked out at least three weeks. Yep, sorry. Another one you had to turn away? Yeah, third one today. And I'm not going to have the available cash or time to hire more help until after busy season. I don't think you can wait. Got any ideas? Get business financing through Capitus. Easy application, no hidden fees, and really fast funding.

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