The Nika Riots: the bloodiest riots in Roman history

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2:10The sun dances off the waters of the Golden Horn, the inlet which divides the city's eastern and western halves. You can hear the bustle of shop owners as they begin to set up their stalls for the day. The smell of freshly baked bread wafts through the air, and the fishermen of the city are beginning to set up their lines. This bustling city is home to some half a million inhabitants. It is the eastern capital of the Roman Empire.

2:41The western capital, the city of Rome itself, has long since fallen and is now under the control of Germanic kings. Constantinople is now the only imperial capital ruling over the provinces of the eastern Roman Empire, and it has all the things that you'd expect from a Roman capital. It has a senate, a law court, public bathhouses, a forum, and an emperor who wears the imperial purple. As you walk through the streets, you would hear a mix of Greek, Latin, and Syriac,

3:16along with other languages being spoken by the many different people who make up this incredible empire. The city's streets are also full of churches, which is testimony to the fact that at this point in its history, in the 500s, the Roman Empire is firmly Christian. Christianity is the official religion, and it has a very Christian emperor, a man named Justinian. Justinian's name is associated with one of the most thoroughgoing legal reforms in Roman history.

3:50He was an incredibly ambitious ruler who even made it his project to reconquer the lost city of Rome itself. But all of that nearly didn't happen. Because during his reign, the city of Constantinople suffered one of the bloodiest riots in all of recorded history. This is the story of how that happened. You are listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast, and this is the second episode in a series on Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora.

4:26But before we get into the details of all of that, I have some very special news for you. Justinian and Theodora, the subjects of today's story, are the power couple of the 500s. But there's another power couple that I've looked at on this podcast, and you now have a unique opportunity to do a deep dive into their history. So in September, I am teaching an online course through Simon Fraser University, and it's open to anyone who's interested in enrolling.

4:56You don't have to be a university student, and you don't even need to have a university background. It's through the Continuing Studies program, and what that means is it's a shorter course. It's going to run for only six weeks. It'll be one session a week online, and you can join live. There will be extra readings and things you can dig into if you want, but there's no mandatory homework, and you won't have to write any essays. So this course is about Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and their role in the Reconquista and the Inquisition.

5:29If any of that sounds interesting to you, email me at the podcast. The email for the podcast is in the description today, but it's villainsandvirginspodcast at gmail.com. Send me an email. Let me know if you'd like to be added to the list so that you have access to register as soon as it opens. And if your appetite for history is not satisfied yet with the twice-a-month episodes that I'm doing here on the podcast, there's a way that you can get even more. Because as a member of the incredible community of people who support Villains and Virgins podcast on Patreon,

6:04you get access to a monthly bonus episode every month that is only available on Patreon. You also get to have monthly live history Q&As with me about whatever historical topics have come up for you, and you also get ad-free access to regular episodes just like this one. So if any of those benefits sound of interest to you, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporter of Villains and Virgins podcast. And of course, I have to say a huge thank you to the amazing people who are already steadfast supporters of this podcast there.

6:43Episodes like this one would not be possible without you. Thank you. The story of Justinian and Theodora is to me one of the most incredible accounts I've ever come across in many thousands of pages of historical reading. And that's because each of these people are remarkable as individuals, but the relationship that they had with each other is also outstanding. And we introduced both of these two in our last episode, but to briefly remind you, Theodora begins her life as a circus performer.

7:16Her family works in entertainment in the Hippodrome. At a very young age, she's training to be an actress and a performer. And while this means that she's highly visible, it also means that she's part of one of the lowest stratas of society in Constantinople at the time. And this is because actresses and performers were also very frequently sex workers. It was expected. It was assumed. And so for Theodora, who spends her teenage years in this profession,

7:49she's going to carry around this reputation of being an actress, which was synonymous with being a prostitute, for the rest of her life. Despite the fact that she finds an escape from that life, although it's very difficult to do, and she has a conversion experience in Egypt as a woman in her 20s, which radically alters her life. And so by the time she comes back to Constantinople, she's no longer an actress. She's had a number of very significant life-changing experiences,

8:21and she's looking for a job, a different kind of job. And that's when she's introduced to Justinian. He is also a remarkable figure, because at this point in time when he meets Theodora, his uncle is the emperor. But they're a very unlikely family. Justinian and his uncle were peasants from the province of Thrace. They were people who were physically strong, but they weren't at all part of the aristocracy. And so his uncle manages to become emperor

8:51through building a career in the imperial guards and then cheating a scheming eunuch who made the mistake of giving this captain of the palace guards some money to distribute as bribes to get somebody else selected as emperor. But the captain of the guard distributes these bribes and persuades people to support him. And so that's the story of how Justinian's uncle, Justin, manages to become emperor. Because he succeeds, Justinian is now connected to the most powerful man in the empire,

9:23and he himself is being lined up to inherit the throne. So both of these people, Justinian and Theodora, are outsiders. They're people that aren't regarded as part of the existing power hierarchy. This doesn't make them particularly popular with people in the powerful patrician class, but their experience as outsiders shapes the vision that they bring to how the empire will be ruled. Today's story is essentially about pressure.

9:54It's about the pressure that Justinian and Theodora, as emperor and empress, try to exert from the top down on their society, reshaping Roman law, reshaping ways of living, reshaping what is allowed and what is not allowed, who has access to power and who doesn't. But it's also about pressure being exerted in the opposite direction, from the ground up. Because there is resistance and resentment

10:24that is going to well up against Justinian and Theodora, which will culminate in this absolutely horrific riot that nearly topples them from power before they've even properly gotten started. If you look up Justinian on Wikipedia right now, you're going to get an account of his rule that makes him sound very competent, very skillful, an excellent emperor. But what this glosses over is the fact that he was highly controversial

10:56and not necessarily well-liked in his lifetime. So let's dig a little bit deeper into why that is exactly. It starts with the fact that not only is Justinian from this peasant family, he's already rewritten some very important laws just to marry Theodora. Roman society at the time had laws that prohibited actresses, because they were also prostitutes, from marrying men of the upper classes, or aristocrats. And so when Justinian meets Theodora

11:26and falls in love with her and makes her his mistress, he's not content with just keeping her in that position. He wants to make her his wife. But in order to do that, he needs to get his uncle, the emperor, to rewrite the laws. His uncle obliges. So this means that Justinian gets to marry Theodora. But of course, that's not all it means. It means he just opened a door that allows countless other men and women to marry people that they normally wouldn't have been allowed to wed.

11:58And there are many people who take advantage of this. So you can imagine some of the landed aristocracy, some of the senators and patricians looking around going, what kind of chaos is this? Justinian's family has made it possible for the lowest of the low to marry into our families, to have access to our money, to attend our dinner parties, these disreputable dregs of society. What kind of a disaster is this?

12:29So even before Justinian has managed to become emperor, he's already stirred up a scandal just by getting the laws changed so he can marry his wife. Soon after, Justinian and Theodora are crowned emperor and empress, and things only get worse from there. One of the main voices of this feeling of discontent and anxiety that Justinian and Theodora create is a guy called Procopius. Now, if you ever did

12:59any kind of Byzantine history back in school or university, you would certainly have come across Procopius's name. He's famous for writing this absolutely insane little document called The Secret History, and it's perhaps one of the most scurrilous, venomous, and vindictive pieces of smear that's ever been written in history. But Procopius was an insider. He was somebody who worked in the imperial court.

13:31He knew Justinian and Theodora. He was a member of the educated classes himself, and he worked for a guy called General Belisarius. So Belisarius is good friends with Emperor Justinian. Belisarius's wife Antonina is good friends with Empress Theodora. And here is Procopius working for General Belisarius and very much in the inner circle of palace politics. His official job is to accompany General Belisarius

14:01on military campaigns and write the official history of what was done there. And in these official histories that Procopius writes, General Belisarius comes across as a military genius, brave, brilliant, somebody who overcomes incredible odds and pulls off victories that seemed impossible to regular mortals. But behind the scenes, when nobody was looking, Procopius amused himself by collecting together the very worst rumors

14:33that anybody ever said about Emperor Justinian, Theodora, his boss Belisarius, and Belisarius's wife Antonina. And to these, he added exaggeration, interpretation, and fabrications of his own. Now, the secret history of all of these slanders that Procopius is preparing was not published during his lifetime. And this was intentional. He would have gotten into a lot of trouble if it had come out while he was alive, and he knew that. But he kept it

15:04like a bomb that was timed to go off when he was safely out of the picture. And it was designed to permanently blacken the names and legacies of these four people in the imperial court. And you get the idea that Procopius wasn't just trying to blacken their names or smear dirt on them. He was trying to make you believe they were made of nothing else. So just to give you a sense of the kind of exaggeration Procopius indulges in,

15:35he would have you believe that Justinian, the emperor, is nothing less than the prince of demons whose sole goal is the destruction of humanity. And that in this he's aided by his demon consort, the empress Theodora. And in Justinian himself, the worst vices of all of humanity are somehow miraculously combined in one place. It's just way over the top. The secret history,

16:06therefore, is not really a good account of the facts about Justinian and Theodora. But what it is a good account of is the kind of gossip and slander that people liked to whisper about them. And there are all kinds of interesting reasons for that. In Theodora's early days as an empress, she's working really hard to try and grow into the role. It's certainly not the sort of job that she trained for or ever expected to have.

16:37The fact that she found herself wearing the crown of an empress was something that defied belief for herself and for a good number of the people around her who couldn't believe it had happened either. And so she had a lot of work to do. And in her first years in that role, we find her working really hard to study the different languages in their most formal forms that she's going to need to interact with palace administrators, with foreign diplomats, with members of the court. And she also has to build

17:07her own networks. She has to find alliances of people inside the palace that she can work with, but she also needs her own circle of friends that she can trust. And one of the things that Theodora does that begins to get people's tongues wagging is that she brings some of her friends back from the days when she was a nobody, an actress in the theater, and she installs them in the palace, including her older sister, who was a very well-known actress. So many of these women

17:37had left the acting profession and Theodora was making sure that they were comfortable and also that they had access to marriages with rich and powerful men. But the gossip was that Theodora had just brought in a bunch of prostitutes from the Hippodrome and installed them in the Imperial Palace where they were carrying on the same sex trade as before. And here she was, turning the Imperial Palace into a brothel. Now, of course, that's a ridiculous exaggeration, but it's the sort of thing that people loved to repeat.

18:08People who were patricians and were really angry that these low and common people like Theodora and her friends could be in the halls of power. And when you look at it from Theodora's perspective, you can hardly blame her. Once you're an empress, everybody wants to flatter you. Everybody wants to be your friend. But if you had any brains at all, and Theodora had quite a good supply of those, we have every reason to believe, you would know that most of these people

18:39are just flattering you to your face, but that's because they want to get things from you. The only people that you can be certain of who are really your friends are the people who were your friends when you were a nobody, when you were the sort of woman that respectable people didn't want to be seen with. And so if these were your friends from that time, then you can be sure that these are people who still really like you for who you are. So it's hardly surprising that Theodora wanted to surround herself with women like that.

19:09There was a marked difference between Theodora and her friends. When Theodora married Justinian, and then a few years later stepped into the role of empress, she dedicated herself to these roles completely and wholeheartedly. So there's every reason to believe that she had an entirely monogamous relationship with Justinian. She carried on no affairs. Not even her worst enemies could find even a shred of evidence to suggest that Theodora herself was engaged in any kind

19:40of sexual impropriety. But she was a pragmatist, and that meant that she didn't necessarily expect the same rigorous standards of behavior from all of her friends. She does make efforts, though, to ensure that her friends are looked after. Some of her acquaintances from her past life in the circus are able to make their own marriages into wealthy families. But now that Theodora is empress, she has the power to arrange some marriages for some of her friends and their daughters as well.

20:11And she doesn't hesitate to use that power. Now, if the empress tells a wealthy family in Constantinople that she's found a bride for their son, it would be really inadvisable to refuse that suggestion, even if the young woman in question might have a disreputable past or connections to an actress as her mother, for example. In other words, even if wealthy patrician families left to their own devices would never allow such a marriage,

20:42despite what the law might permit, if the empress applied a bit of pressure, suddenly these doors would need to open. And so Theodora does arrange marriages for some of the daughters of her friends in this way. And there's a hilarious story about the outcome of one of these marriages that I cannot resist sharing with you. The story goes that Theodora arranged a marriage for the wealthy son of an aristocrat family with the daughter of one of her actress friends. And the morning after the wedding,

21:12the young aristocrat complained that his new wife was not a virgin. And when Theodora heard about this, she ordered that he be brought to the palace, wrapped in a blanket, and spanked with a cane. Basically, she was treating him like you would treat a mischievous schoolboy, someone who was going to be caned on the backside for misbehaving. And the reason for this was that Theodora knew men like this.

21:44Aristocrats who were happy to buy the bodies of poor women on the streets or in the hippodrome to gratify their own sexual appetites whenever they felt like it. But when they got married, they expected that their wives be completely virginal. And so this double standard around sexual activity was something that Theodora herself had many bitter experiences with in her past life, and she had no patience for this double standard from someone from this class.

22:15And so this public humiliation of this young man was very much a commentary on what the Empress thought of this double standard. Another thing that Theodora and Justinian did that attracted a lot of resentment was they took court protocols to a whole new level. And again, this particularly rankled people in the upper classes given who they thought Justinian and Theodora were. In other words, these people are commoners and here they are humiliating us,

22:46the upper classes, in these rituals. So the imperial court rituals before had involved a bowing and a kneeling to sort of kiss the hem of the garment of the emperor. Under Justinian and Theodora, these rituals were significantly expanded. Now, people entering the imperial presence had to completely flatten themselves on the ground and they had to kiss the foot of the emperor or the empress,

23:19whomever they happened to be having an audience with. So the more complete flattening on the floor, the kissing of the foot, these were new additions which were considered further abasement or humbling of the person in the presence of the emperor. But the real shocker was that these prostrations and these forms of extreme humility were required not just in the presence of the emperor but now in the presence of the empress. So this is an amazing

23:49statement on Justinian's part which is that his wife Theodora is worthy of all the same state ceremony as the emperor himself. but you can see why it would cause a lot of bitterness for people in the patrician class. Theodora probably knew many of these people herself so when they were bitter while they looked at the ground and kissed her foot she may have seen many of these people at parties where she worked as a teenager.

24:19Some of them might even have been former clients of hers during her years as a sex worker and so they resented the fact that the balance of power had been so resoundingly overturned that they were now abasing themselves in the presence of someone that they once regarded as the lowest of the low and for Theodora perhaps it was a small bit of revenge. But you can also easily imagine the amount of bitterness that this would engender and why the insane slanders

24:51of someone like Procopius would find an eager audience. We know that Theodora didn't condemn her actress friends or their daughters nor did she insist that they adhere to the same level of sexual propriety that she herself now practiced but she did have very strong opinions about the system that had entrapped them. Within two years of Justinian and Theodora becoming emperor and empress Justinian embarks

25:21on a whole-scale reform of the Roman legal system and the first version of these reforms comes out in 529 but many of these laws have Theodora's fingerprints all over them in particular the ones that have to do with prostitutes. Theodora herself knew all too well the life of actresses in the Hippodrome which was a life that she and her sisters had been born into and which was extremely difficult to escape. So that was

25:51one form of prostitution but there were others. There were in Constantinople women who walked the streets and sold sexual services and these were among the most desperate and destitute. Many street prostitutes lived on the edge of starvation. There was one account I read of a churchman who in Constantinople encountered a woman like this and said that she hadn't eaten in three days and he bought her some food but this was the sort of edge of

26:21starvation existence. Similarly there were women who worked in brothels and if you've ever been to Pompeii and you've seen the brothels that still survive there they resemble nothing more than jail cells. They're extremely grim and the women who worked in these places were very much slaves. Throughout the empire in the 6th century there were men who would roam to small villages and they would offer

26:52parents money for their young daughters. There were many girls who were sold into the sex trade as young as 10 years old. The pimps didn't always tell the parents that the money that they were paying for their young daughters was the price of sending them into life as a prostitute but in many cases that's exactly what happened. These children were brought back to the capital and soon installed in brothels where they were forced to work for long hours and where all of their earnings

27:22were pocketed by the men who owned them. There were some fathers who prostituted their daughters directly and there were also slave owners who prostituted their slaves despite the fact that there were laws against doing this. So it was a very widespread and a very grim trade and crucially it was a trade that the girls and women themselves had basically no choice about. Theodora decided that this was something that she was going to use her new power as empress to change.

27:53So she and her husband Justinian built a place that they called the Convent of Repentance. It was essentially a nunnery and Theodora had street prostitutes rounded up from Constantinople and sent to this place. And her idea was that here they would be safe, they would be given clothing, they would be given food, and they could live out the rest of their lives in peace and comfort. Procopius predictably snickers at this initiative and repeats rumors that some of

28:24these women unhappily threw themselves to their deaths out of the walls of this convent because they found it so difficult to live without sex. But that's more or less what you'd expect someone like Procopius to say. Throughout his writings he demonstrates a lively and prurient interest in the sex trade and the women plying it he repeats the worst rumors and apparently has absolutely no conception of what it was like to be one of the women trapped in it. So Procopius is the only

28:55one who repeats the idea that some women were throwing themselves to their deaths out of desperation from being removed from the sex trade. Theodora is trying to create essentially a women's shelter in the 6th century but she doesn't stop there. She then attempted to end the brothel sex trade in the city. So she summoned the pimps or the owners to the imperial palace. She required them to disclose under oath the amount of money they had paid for each of the women or children that they

29:26had working. She then paid each of these pimps the purchase price of the girls. She gave these girls and women a new set of clothes a small amount of money and set them free. So these are remarkable interventions. Theodora, even though she now lives in luxury and as an empress, hasn't forgotten the bitterness, the suffering, and the desperation of the women that she saw on the city's streets when she was one of them.

29:56And now that she has power and wealth, she's using these things not to amuse herself, but to try to free other people from situations that they had no way of escaping. Unfortunately, these efforts didn't end the sex trade. And that's because there were certain economic realities that kept applying pressure on families in this direction. What I'm talking about here is the idea of a dowry. So a dowry was an amount of money that a father was expected to supply with

30:28his daughter at the time of her marriage. In some parts of the world, dowries work the other way, but in this part of the world, the dowry was an amount of money that the girl's family was supposed to come up with. Now, if you were a very poor family, you had no chance of being able to supply a sum of money to the family of the potential husband for your daughter. And what that meant was that your daughter was unmarriageable. And therefore, she was now going to be a dependent that you had to support.

30:58So if someone came along and offered you money to take your daughter away, you can begin to see how families who themselves were living in desperate economic conditions would find that a hard offer to refuse. So what happened was that new girls were bought and the sex trade resumed in other places. And of course, Theodora and Justinian also made laws about actresses. So we've addressed the three different levels of prostitution. There were street prostitutes who went to the convent of

31:30repentance.