The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  Diocletian’s first act was to disavow any complicity in the death of his predecessor. His second was to draw his sword there on the platform where he had just been acclaimed moments before, turn, and kill his rival (and co-conspirator) on the spot, claiming that Aper was the guilty one!

  While the depth of Diocletian’s involvement in this double plot on the imperial house of Carus is unknown, it’s pretty clear that he was involved at some point, and in the end, profited the most from it.

  Profiting bastard.

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  CONSTANTINE

  THE GREAT

  The Next Best Thing to Being God

  ( A.D. 272–337)

  With such impiety pervading the human race, and the State threatened with destruction, what relief did God devise? . . . I myself was the instrument he chose. . . . [W]ith God’s help I banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope that the human race, enlightened through me, might be recalled to a proper observance of God’s holy laws.

  —Constantine the Great, quoted by Eusebius in De Vita Constantini

  The first Christian emperor of Rome, the man who reunited the empire following the chaotic unraveling of Diocletian’s tetrarchy into a decade of civil war, Flavius Julius Constantinus, son of one of the tetrarchs, comes across in the quote above as a ruler with one outsized ego.

  No surprise then that he was a paranoid who trusted no one and killed off most of those close to him.

  In A.D. 312, Constantine supposedly experienced a revelation leading him to convert to Christianity the night before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (in northern Rome), a decisive victory over rival imperial claimant Maxentius that left Constantine the most powerful man in the Roman world. After he consolidated his power by first defeating and then killing all of the other claimants to the imperial throne, Constantine set about making Christianity the most powerful religion in the Roman Empire, reversing the policies of previous emperors, who had persecuted Christians. Constantine instead persecuted pagans.

  By the mid-320’s, Constantine had an heir-apparent ready to step into his shoes; his eldest son Crispus was already an experienced general, popular with the army, and also the focus of growing jealousy and suspicion on the part of his father. It was a tense situation when the imperial entourage headed for Rome in A.D. 326 with the empress Fausta (daughter and sister respectively of Constantine’s rivals Maximian and Maxentius, one killed on her husband’s order and the other killed fighting him in battle), Crispus, Constantia (Constantine’s half-sister and the widow of his rival Licinius), and Licinius’s son Licinianus in tow.

  At some point during the visit, Constantine’s simmering envy and paranoia exploded in a bloodbath. Crispus and Licinianus were arrested on charges of conspiring to depose Constantine and usurp the throne. A few days later, they were executed. A week later, the empress was also put to death on Constantine’s order. The evidence against all of these conspirators is scanty. Whether they were guilty of anything is open for debate. But with a ruthless, paranoid nut like Constantine running things, and them likely in constant fear for their own lives, who’d really blame them if they did plot against the emperor?

  When Constantine finally died after a long illness in A.D. 337, having reigned for thirty-one years, his court carried on as if he were still alive for three months. Maybe they wanted to be sure that the crazy bastard was actually dead before they worked out the problem of who would succeed him?

  Actual Bastard Bastard

  Constantine was the product of his father Constantius Chlorus’s union with a tavern-keeper’s daughter named Helena. Whether or not he actually bothered to marry her is open to some conjecture. Regardless, Chlorus swiftly set Helena aside in order to enter into a political marriage with the daughter of one of the other tetrarchs as part of an attempted shoring up of Diocletian’s succession plan.

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  CONSTANTIUS II

  The Emperor as Paranoid Plodder

  ( A.D. 317–361)

  If any persons should be proved to devote their attention to sacrifices or to worship images, We command that they shall be subjected to capital punishment.

  —Constantius II, The Edict of Milan

  The Roman emperor Constantius II was hard-working, austere, and methodical, something of a plodder who, according to one ancient historian, “was too dull-witted to make a speaker, and when he turned to versifying produced nothing worthwhile.” Yet, when it came to religious toleration or perceived threats to his own life, this otherwise mediocre emperor proved to be every bit the bastard his father, Constantine the Great, had been.

  Like his father, Constantius took great interest in religious matters. But where his father had bent Christian doctrine to will and subordinated it to his political purposes, Constantius II found himself buffeted by competing claims of various church fathers.

  Constantius was not his father. He wasn’t all that bright, and had a short attention span, deferring much of the policymaking during his reign to a number of self-serving imperial eunuchs who enriched themselves at the state’s expense. In fact, Constantius himself wasn’t even an orthodox Christian. He followed the so-called Arian heresy that emphasized the humanity of Christ.

  But that didn’t stop him from persecuting non-Christians!

  Late in his reign, with no children of his own, Constantius, who had helped wipe out all but one of his cousins while still new to the throne, adopted as his heir the one cousin who hadn’t died in his earlier purge: a philosopher named Julian. But when Julian proved very adept at both commanding troops in the field and running a government, Constantius turned on him, disinherited him, and was about to meet him in battle to decide the question when he suddenly took sick and died at the relatively youthful age of forty-three.

  Paranoid Bastard

  As a young man, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcelinus served as an officer in the army of the emperor Constantius II and knew him personally. The portrait he paints of Constantius’s attitudes towards his own position as emperor is telling: “Although in most respects he was comparable to other emperors of average merit, yet if he discovered any ground, however false or slight, for suspecting an attempt upon the throne he showed in endless investigations regardless of right or wrong a cruelty which easily surpassed that of Gaius [Caligula] and Domitian and Commodus. Indeed, at the very beginning of his reign he rivaled their barbarity by destroying root and branch all who were connected with him by blood and birth. The sufferings of the wretched men accused of infringing or violating his prerogative were increased by the bitter and angry suspicions nourished by the emperor in all such cases. Once he got wind of anything of this kind he threw himself into its investigation with unbecoming eagerness, and appointed merciless judges to preside over such trials. In the infliction of punishment he sometimes tried to prolong the agonies of death, if the victim’s constitution could stand it.”

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  JUSTINIAN I

  When Nike Is More Than Just the Name of a Shoe

  ( A.D. 483–565)

  If you, my Lord, wish to save your skin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, there too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will not regret that you did not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: the purple is the noblest death shroud.

  —The Byzantine Empress Theodora to her husband, Justinian I

  The son of illiterate peasants, Justinian was the ultimate country boy come to the big city to make good. His uncle Justin worked his way up through the army to become commander of the emperor’s bodyguard and then emperor himself. And when he was made emperor in A.D. 518, he made his very smart nephew his right-hand man.

  While he waited for his own term as emperor, Justinian plotted and intrigued, getting rid of potential rivals for the throne. Not a man of either action or physical courage, he preferred to assassinate or buy enemies off rather than fight them.

  Still, as
emperor he did many great things: revising the Roman law code, instituting a massive building program, and sending out great generals such as the legendary Belisaurius and Narses to reconquer Italy, Spain, North Africa, and southern France for the empire.

  All of this cost money, and Justinian passed those expenses on to the citizenry. The reasonably foreseeable result was that the people would get pissed off and riot.

  And when it happened, it happened right in Justinian’s backyard, at the Hippodrome, Constantinople’s open-air coliseum. Determined to flee, Justinian was shamed into action by his iron-willed wife, the empress Theodora.

  He ordered his generals to take their troops to the Hippodrome and put down this riot that had attracted tens of thousands and threatened to spill over into open revolt. This they did with grim efficiency. Narses’s troops sealed off the coliseum so that no one within could escape. Then Belisaurius’s soldiers were ordered inside, where they killed every single living thing within.

  The final death toll? Thirty thousand dead in one day.

  Justinian’s subjects never forgot the example he made of those who rioted during that bloody week. He went on to rule for another thirty-three years. He never taxed his subjects as heavily as he had before the Nike riots (as they were called). And they never again rose up in such open revolt.

  The Steel in the Bastard’s Spine

  Born into the lowest of circumstances in Constantinople, Theodora was the daughter of a bear-keeper in the Hippodrome who worked by turns as an actress, acrobat, and prostitute before becoming the kept woman of a series of government officials, culminating in her liaison with Justinian, who insisted on marrying her. When he took the imperial throne in A.D. 529, she was very much his partner in ruling. As demonstrated by her speech quoted above, Theodora was a formidable woman, often stiffening her cowardly husband’s spine in moments when he wavered. Without her, he might well have fled the city during the Nike riots and lost both his throne and his life. Instead he ensured that thousands of citizens lost theirs in the Hippodrome.

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  CHARLEMAGNE

  Literal Bastard, Figurative Bastard

  ( A.D. 742–814)

  Charles did not cease, after declaring war, until he had exhausted King Desiderius by a long siege, and forced him to surrender at discretion; driven his son Adalgis, the last hope of the Lombards, not only from his kingdom, but from all Italy; restored to the Romans all that they had lost; subdued Hruodgaus, Duke of Friuli, who was plotting revolution; reduced all Italy to his power, and set his son Pepin as king over it.

  —Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne

  There can be little doubt that Charlemagne was a great man. Uniting the Franks and expanding the Frankish kingdom to its greatest extent, he helped rekindle the flame of education, even though he himself could barely read. A great warrior, he stood off the Muslims in Spain and converted heathens in central Europe to Christianity.

  Like all great men, Charlemagne had a bit of the bastard in him.

  The passage quoted above shows some of that bastardry and determination. Charlemagne went into northern Italy and conquered the Lombards because their king was harboring a party of Frankish nobles that included a rival for the Frankish throne. This rival was named Pippin, and he was the eldest son of Charlemagne’s dead brother, Carloman.

  Because of Frankish succession traditions, Charlemagne didn’t inherit King Pepin the Short’s kingdom outright upon his father’s death in A.D. 768. Instead, he split it with his younger brother Carloman.

  The two brothers despised each other. They began preparing for war over the kingdom, which was only narrowly avoided by Carloman’s sudden death as a result of a nosebleed.

  When a deputation of Carloman’s own nobles appealed to Charlemagne to annex Carloman’s territory rather than allow his underage son to succeed him, Charlemagne did so, effectively cutting Carloman’s sons out of the succession. Carloman’s widow Gerberga responded by taking her two sons and fleeing to Lombardy (in northern Italy), seeking protection from Desiderius, the king of the Lombards. In A.D. 773 , Charlemagne, no doubt realizing what a potential threat they represented to his hold on the Frankish throne, went after them.

  What resulted from all of this was the end of the Lombard kingdom in Italy (Charlemagne gave it to the pope after he finished conquering it). The king of the Lombards and his entire family were forced to become monks or nuns (at least they weren’t put to death). And Gerberga and her sons? No further mention is made of them in the Frankish chronicles. Modern scholars assume they too were forced to take the tonsure and the veil.

  Bastard Succession

  The early Frankish kings did not hand over their realms in one piece to their eldest sons. Instead, according to custom, they split their kingdoms among their living sons. Charlemagne himself only had one son survive to adulthood, but that son, Louis, split the Frankish kingdom among his own three sons, leading to the foundation of the separate kingdoms of France and Germany.

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  EMPRESS IRENE OF BYZANTIUM

  Sometimes a Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother. This Isn’t One of Those Times

  (CA. A.D. 752–803)

  Scheming and duplicitous, consumed by a devouring ambition and an insatiable lust for power, [Irene] was to bring dissension and disaster to the Empire for nearly a quarter of a century, and to leave a still darker stain on her reputation by one of the foulest murders that even Byzantine history has to record.

  —Modern historian John Julius Norwich in Byzantium:

  The Apogee

  By all accounts beautiful, strong-willed, narrow-minded, ambitious, and ruthless, the Byzantine Empress Irene was so obsessed with power that she kept her hands on the reins long after they should by right have passed to her son. When he asserted himself and insisted on getting his birthright, she had him ambushed, seized, kidnapped, and blinded in order to retain her throne.

  Married young to the weak-willed and tubercular emperor Leo IV, Irene survived him by many years, taking over as regent for their ten-year-old son Constantine when he succeeded his father in A.D. 780. For the next decade, Irene ran the empire right into a ditch.

  It wasn’t entirely her fault. The empire at the time was riven by a religious controversy centuries in the making over the question of whether or not the sacred icons used in worship services were in fact idols that turned all prayer into a blasphemy. Irene, an orthodox ruler, favored the use of icons. The problem was that the majority of her best soldiers and most able military commanders were iconoclasts (“idol smashers”) and disagreed. This, added to her profligate spending, led to a whole lot of conflict.

  Included among the iconoclasts was Irene’s own son, the emperor Constantine VI. Growing up to be nearly as much of a weak-willed nonentity as his father, Constantine did at one point briefly muster up enough gumption to stand up to Mommy, depose her, and send her off to exile. It didn’t last long. Within a year, she returned to the capital city of Constantinople and to her previous position as co-emperor with her son.

  Things came to a head the second time it looked to Irene as if her son was about to stand up for himself. She had her son kidnapped, and on Tuesday, August 15, A.D. 797, she ordered his eyes put out. It was done in the purple-lined birthing room where he had been born! He soon died from the brutality.

  Remarkably, Irene managed to hold on to power for six years after her son’s death (she claimed he was actually alive and in prison for treason). Eventually, she was deposed in a palace coup and sent into exile on the island of Lesbos. She died of natural causes a year later.

  What’s in a Bastard’s Name?

  The Greek name Irene comes from the word eirine, which means “peace.” The irony of this violent and ruthless woman’s choice of regnal name (her given name is lost to us) is palpable. Perhaps it was to be expected, though, from a tough customer of a queen mother who insisted on using the title of basileus (“emperor”) rather than basilissa (“empress”).

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  POPE STEPHEN VI

  Even Death Can’t Stop Justice

  ( A.D. ?–897)

  Read, — how there was a ghastly Trial once/Of a dead man by a live man, and both, Popes

  —Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

  No less than twenty-five men served as pope between the years A.D. 872 and 972. During this time, Rome’s wealthy families vied with each other to see one of their number don the shoes of the fisherman and in turn dispense ridiculous amounts of patronage among his kinsmen.

  Feuds developed; blood was spilled. In the midst of all of this chaos, enter Pope Stephen VI, who went beyond the pale.

  He ordered a predecessor’s corpse dug up and put on trial.

  A succession of popes—including Stephen VI—made outside alliances with powerful Italian families for military support. They cemented these alliances by legitimizing the rule of the ally in question through a formal papal coronation. One pope who had done this was a predecessor of Stephen’s named Formosus, whose reign lasted five years ( A.D. 891–896). During that time, Formosus (whose name in Latin means, “good looking”) had crowned the young duke of Spoleto as Holy Roman Emperor, then turned around and offered the same crown to Arnulf, king of Germany.

  Arnulf had answered Formosus’s invitation by invading Italy and taking Rome. Formosus promptly crowned him Holy Roman Emperor as well. Needless to say, this caused an uproar in Spoleto. Formosus responded by dying shortly afterward. He was succeeded by a couple of popes with ridiculously short reigns (one of them only lasted two weeks), and eventually by Stephen VI, in hock up to his eyeballs to his political patrons: Spoleto’s ruling family.