Justinian

by Ross Laidlaw

  The true cause of malaria was unsuspected at that period, and remained so until the beginning of the twentieth century, when (based on work by Laveran, Sir Ronald Ross, Bignami et al.) breakthrough research showed that the disease resulted not from ‘bad air’, but from the bite of the anopheles mosquito.

  a huge bull-like creature

  Originating in the East Indies, water-buffalo were domesticated in India thence introduced into the Middle East, Egypt, eastern Europe, and, by the sixth century, Italy. Adapted for marshy situations, buffalo are used as beasts of burden mainly in areas where water is a major feature of the terrain — such as paddy-fields, or the homeland of the marsh Arabs. The most notable difference between the Asiatic and the African buffalo is in the horns. In the Asiatic buffalo, the massive horns are long, curved, and lie back towards the shoulders. In the African buffalo, the horns — equally massive — nearly meet on the forehead in a huge boss, and are markedly recurved with upward-turning points. Though less aggressive than its African cousin, in a wild state (or if returned to the wild from domestication) the Asiatic buffalo is savage and dangerous, capable of unprovoked attack. Even in a domesticated state it is apt to resent injury — an attitude extremely characteristic of the African buffalo (which has never been domesticated).

  Chapter 23

  a pretty, heart-shaped face

  This does indeed describe the countenance of the figure immediately to Theodora’s left in the famous San Vitale mosaic panel. But she almost certainly does not represent Macedonia, of whose fate we remain ignorant. So, a piece of, hopefully permissible, artistic licence on my part. (There has been considerable speculation that the figure, in fact, represents Antonina, wife of Belisarius.) Like the other mosaic portraits in the panel, that of Theodora is thought to be a good likeness, its ‘fragility and air of physical delicacy [suggesting] that perhaps the disease that was eventually to kill her may have been already at work in her’. (Antony Bridge, Theodora.) For the purposes of the story, I have commissioned the mosaics a few years earlier than was actually the case.

  Chapter 24

  impatient of discipline

  A fatal weakness. Despite their great size and strength, plus ferocious courage, Germans were invariably defeated by Roman troops (provided these were properly led), thanks to Roman discipline and superior equipment. The only exceptions to this were when Germans attacked in overwhelming numbers — as on the last day of 406 when a vast confederation of barbarian tribes crossed the frozen Rhine, or when a leader of exceptional quality, capable of imposing discipline and teamwork, took charge. Examples of such Germans are extremely rare: Hermann/Arminius who led a confederation which wiped out three legions in the Teutoburger Forest in AD 9; Fritigern, under whom the Goths destroyed a huge Roman army at Adrianople in 378; perhaps Alaric; and of course Totila. Otherwise. .? (Although he was undoubtedly a great military leader, Theoderic can’t be included, as his victories were against barbarians, not Romans.)

  a band of brothers

  Besides Totila, some other charismatic leaders capable of inspiring huge personal loyalty are: Alexander, Caesar, Alfred the Great, Robert the Bruce, Henry V, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and (unfortunately) Hitler.

  staffing it [the administration]. . with humble Romans

  Theoderic’s system in Italy whereby the Goths manned the army, and the Romans the administration, had worked well. Native Romans had by this time lost their taste for fighting, whereas every Gothic male was a warrior. Romans, on the other hand, alone possessed the know-how to manage the complexities of the civil service. The only change here that Totila made was to staff the administration with Romans from a lower social stratum than heretofore.

  this second Petronius Arbiter

  Petronius, ‘Arbiter Elegentiae’ (memorably played by Leo Genn in the film Quo Vadis?), was a sort of intellectual and cultural guru at the court of Nero. His brilliant satire, Trimalchio’s Feast (the centrepiece of a fragmentary work, The Satyricon), gleefully trashes the pretensions of Roman nouveaux riches. You wonder how he might have responded to today’s celebrity culture — perhaps with a satire entitled, Party at Beckingham Palace?

  Chapter 25

  the causes of the pestilence

  Ignorance as to what caused the bubonic plague of the 540s (the same disease as the Black Death of 1348-49 and the Great Plague of 1665) prevailed, as with malaria, until the early twentieth century. It was then established that the disease is caused in humans by the bacterium pasteurella pestis entering the bloodstream via the bite of a flea — Xenopsylla Cheopsis — whose favourite mode of transport was the warm fur of black rats. It is thought that the rats — moving down the Nile valley from plague-ridden Ethiopia — reached the Egyptian port of Pelusium, whence, spread by ships, the plague became a pandemic, spreading west as far as Wales and east perhaps as far as China. The crowded conditions of most East Roman towns and cities — especially Constantinople — together with rotting piles of refuse outside city walls, provided ideal breeding grounds for rats, which helps to account for the terrifying speed with which the plague spread. (Infection was caused not by contagion but by transfer of fleas, which in crowded conditions virtually amounted to the same thing.) Procopius’ description of the plague’s symptoms and effects is both detailed and commendably accurate.

  Competition with brown rats eventually caused a severe decline in the population of the black rat, and thus of the plague itself.

  some association with rats

  I plead guilty to selective omission here, as John of Ephesus, commenting on the plague, mentions other animals besides rats. However, the fact that he mentions rats at all gives food for intriguing speculation. If physicians of the time had come to associate the plague with rats specifically, then a connection of the disease with rat-borne fleas might eventually have been made, enabling measures of control and avoidance to be taken.

  headless figures sitting in bronze boats

  John of Ephesus reports people experiencing such visions in areas affected by the plague. Could he have been implying that these were hallucinations?

  one of a new breed of appointees

  Rather as political and professional advancement in Soviet Russia depended on your being a card-carrying Communist, professing adherence to Marxist-Leninist dogma, so in Justinian’s Empire, subscription to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy was a prerequisite to obtaining a teaching post. A sign (of which the closing of the Schools of Athens was another) that the classical world, with its traditions of intellectual freedom and rational enquiry, was coming to an end.

  Chapter 26

  this firebrand priest

  Despite Theodora’s passionate championing of their cause, by 540 ferocious persecution (directed principally by Menas, Patriarch of Constantinople, backed by Justinian) had reduced the Monophysites outside Egypt to a state of cowed powerlessness. Then, in 543, everything changed. In that year, one Jacob ‘Baradaeus’ (meaning ‘ragged’ from his favourite disguise as a beggar) was permitted to be consecrated Monophysite bishop of Edessa. (Delicate political considerations involving the Monophysite king of an Arab buffer-state dictated that the concession go ahead.) For the Chalcedonian establishment, this proved to be a fatal mistake; they soon found they had unleashed a whirlwind. Imagine a personality imbued with all the toughness, resilience, charisma and sheer power of leadership of a combined Robin Hood-Zorro-Che Guevara-Mahatma Ghandi figure, and you have Jacob Baradaeus. Travelling incognito throughout the eastern provinces, ordaining priests and bishops and running rings around the imperial agents assigned to catch him, he succeeded, almost single-handedly, in re-kindling the dying fires of the persecuted creed. By the time Justinian issued his famous Edict of late 543 or early 544, the Monophysites were once again ascendant in the east.

  Both Palace and Gate still extant

  Re the Lateran Palace, mediaeval fabric has mostly replaced Roman; the Baptistery however is entirely fifth-century work. The Asinarian Gate — perhaps the finest in the whole circuit of th
e Aurelian Walls — survives in all its original glory.

  a condemnation of certain century-old writings

  In the text, I have done my best to outline (as simply as possible, in order to spare the reader) the basic issues involved in the apocalyptic row known as the Three Chapters controversy. The Three Chapters: it sounds innocuous enough. But once I started to scratch beneath the surface and are confronted with: ‘. . while the Divinity of the Logos is to be distinguished from the temple of the flesh, yet there remained but one person in the God-man. .’, or, ‘. . while granting the true Divinity and humanity of Christ, he [Nestorius] denied their union in a single hypostasis. .’, I began to suspect that I had tangled with something in which I could soon find myself out of my depth. Hoping for illumination, I turned from primary sources to more modern ones. As a true son of the Enlightenment, Gibbon treats the subject with magnificent disdain, dismissing it in three contemptuous lines: ‘. . the East was distracted by the Nestorian. . controversy, which attempted to explain the mystery of the incarnation, and hastened the ruin of Christianity in her native land. .’ So, not much help there, then. Antony Bridge (in his Theodora), Robert Browning (in his Justinian and Theodora), and Claire Sotinel (in her article ‘Emperors and Popes in the Sixth Century’ — Chapter 11 of The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian), all struggle valiantly to explain the theological metaphysics of Nestorius, Theodore, Theoderet and Ibas. To them I owe a debt of gratitude for whatever (limited) understanding I’ve been able to glean concerning the Three Chapters.

  For the sake of clarity and pace, I’ve somewhat telescoped the main events of the controversy, and emphasized the roles played by the apocrisiarius Stephen (whose denunciation of Justinian’s Edict I have, for dramatic reasons, relocated from Constantinople to Rome), and Facundus, bishop of Hermiane. (Vigilius’ self-serving vacillation needed no underscoring on my part!) This approach is justified, I think, for the following reason. Without some selective highlighting and streamlining in its presentation, the whole Three Chapters topic (which is important for our understanding both of Justinian and of his times) could appear to the average reader as an impenetrable thicket of Christological subtleties.

  Chapter 27

  Theoctistus — formerly the army’s most brilliant surgeon

  Procopius (in his The Wars of Justinian) describes in graphic detail an incident that took place during the siege of Rome, in which Theoctistus successfully treated a soldier horrendously wounded by an arrow between the nose and the right eye, ‘the point of the arrow penetrating as far as the neck behind’, whom other physicians were reluctant to operate on, in case they caused the patient’s death. Roman medical practice, especially in the army, was highly sophisticated and efficient — of a standard unrivalled until modern times. The tool-kit of a Roman medicus, with its array of needles, probes, catheters, lancets, forceps, scissors, etc., would be instantly recognizable to a surgeon of today. Though often brilliant in their ability to cope with ‘accident and emergency’ type injuries, the Romans’ competence in the field of invasive surgery was limited, being primarily confined to lithotomy, the removal of fistulae and the excision of some cancers, provided they were not too deep. Though of course knowing nothing of infection caused by germs, Roman doctors were aware from experience that cleanliness could aid recovery. Roman hospitals, especially army ones, were probably a good deal more hygienic than any operating at, say, the time of Waterloo.

  Chapter 28

  become in turn the Western emperor

  Thus reviving Diocletian’s neat but somewhat arid constitutional device known as the Tetrarchy: two ‘Augusti’ (one for the East, one for the West), with two ‘Caesars’ — emperors-in-waiting, who would replace the Augusti in due course. That was the theory; in practice it could break down, when power-hungry usurpers ignored the formula.

  leaving his son to become the Western emperor

  Germanus’ son (by Matasuntha) was in fact born posthumously.

  I’ll be blunt, Serenity

  In an age of subservience and protocol, Narses was noted for speaking his mind to Justinian — and being listened to (probably because his advice was invariably sound, and Justinian, unlike many Roman emperors, was, at bottom, a reasonable and fair-minded man).

  pushing up the Via Flaminia from Rome

  Losing count of the number of times Rome changed hands during the long Gothic War, I often found myself referring to a useful list compiled by Gibbon giving the various dates on which it was captured: ‘In. . 536 by Belisarius, in 546 by Totila, in 547 by Belisarius, in 549 by Totila, in 552 by Narses’. Determined to break the cycle of siege and capture, Totila was about to demolish the walls when he was dissuaded by Belisarius, who pointed out that such an act would make the Gothic king ‘abhorred by all civilized men’. Such generous restraint on Totila’s part (for which the modern tourist, who today is able to walk around the circuit of the walls in all their splendour, can be grateful) shows that civilized attitudes between enemies could still prevail — before the long campaign descended into ‘total war’, that is.

  the nation of the Ostrogoths had ceased forever to exist

  There is a terrible Wagnerian grandeur about the fate of the Ostrogoths — a heroic people who first emerge into the light of history, fighting (on the ‘wrong’ side) for Attila in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in 451, and vanish from it following the disaster of Busta Gallorum/Tadinae in 552. The ‘Ostrogothic century’ encompasses: first, Volkerwanderung on an epic scale — a search for a homeland throughout the Eastern Empire, followed by mass migration to Italy under their hero-king Theoderic (vice-gerent of the Eastern emperor); then a long and bloody war against Odovacar, king of another Germanic people, the Sciri, to secure their Italian homeland; finally — following a long period of harmonious ‘apartheid’ with the Romans, under Theoderic’s enlightened reign — their extinction as a people, resulting from Justinian’s obsession with reconstructing the Western Empire. (See my Theoderic.)

  Theoderic and Totila surely represent all that is best in the Teutonic character — courage and determination in the face of adversity, magnanimity, honour. Confronted by the overwhelming might of Narses’ Roman army at Busta Gallorum, Totila must have known this was the end. Hence, I believe, his amazing war-dance before the battle; at least he and his warriors would go out in a blaze of glory. Surely this scene (which reflects a Teutonic strain of heroic resignation and defiance in the face of certain death) has echoes down the centuries: in Beowulf, in the great Anglo-Saxon war-poem The Battle of Maldon (‘Heart shall be bolder, harder be purpose, more proud the spirit as our power lessens!’), in the last stand of King Harold’s huscarls at Hastings, in the defence of the Alamo.

  Chapter 29

  the year that witnessed the destruction of the Ostrogoths

  Some sources date the introduction of sericulture into the Roman Empire as 552, others as 554. A convenient discrepancy, as it enabled me to have the monks complete the round trip in two years (the usual time), after obtaining the commission from Justinian.

  a description. . of our Church of the Holy Wisdom

  Paul the Silentiary’s long and detailed work, which elaborates on the coloured marbles, precious stones and gold and silver objects in the building, was indeed recited to the emperor — not in fact in 552 as I’ve suggested, but in 562 at the second dedication of the church.

  I would not have that on my conscience

  Thus echoing (fictitiously) a sentiment of Vespasian. When it was suggested to that emperor that a special new machine (pulley-system? crane?) be used to convey heavy loads in the construction of the Colosseum, Vespasian declined, saying that its adoption would deprive many poor labourers of their living (which seems to confound the popular notion that the Flavian Amphitheatre was constructed mainly by slave labour).

  Gibbon laments a lost opportunity in the failure of the monks to introduce printing to the West, nearly a millennium before Gutenberg: ‘I reflect with some pain that if t
he importers of silk had introduced the art of printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth century’.

  the imposing gateway at the end of China’s Great Wall

  Jiayuguan today (a rebuilding of the Ming dynasty) is an imposing spectacle, carefully restored to something like its original splendour. In Justinian’s time, it marked China’s western limit. Since then, a vast new province, Xinjiang, has extended China’s border many hundreds of miles further to the west, taking in the lands of the Uighurs and the Kazaks. These are Turkic people — very different from the Han Chinese in ethnicity, culture, and religion (many being Muslim). Chinese occupation has resulted in considerable friction with the indigenous population, leading to political protest, which the Chinese authorities (displaying their usual horror and intolerance of dissent) invariably put down with harsh severity.

  Some sources have the monks smuggling out the silkworm eggs from China itself, others from ‘Chinese-controlled Sogdiana’. Surely the first theory is the more likely. For such an important and jealously guarded state secret as sericulture, would the Chinese have permitted it to be carried on elsewhere than within the Celestial Kingdom itself? Somehow, I doubt it. Moreover, I remain to be convinced that Sogdiana/Bactria was actually ‘controlled’ by China in any meaningful sense; that it came within the Chinese sphere of influence is perhaps the most that can be argued.

  a. . species of enormous bear

  This is Ursus Torquatus, larger even than the fearsome Kodiak. The sheep mentioned is the species now known as the Marco Polo Sheep.

  Chapter 30

  this latest theological dogma

  ‘His [Justinian’s] edict on the incorruptibility of Christ’s body. . is difficult to understand’. (Lucas Van Rompay, Chapter 10, The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian.) The above quotation has to be the understatement to beat all understatements! Aphthartodocetism, in the words of Van Rompay, argued that ‘Christ’s body transcended human corruptibility and was aphthartos [incorruptible], even though Christ of his free will — not out of necessity — submitted himself to corruption and suffering’. Just how Justinian imagined that this impenetrable doctrine (which seems if anything to lean towards Monophysitism) was going to resolve the split between the Chalcedonians and the Monophysites, is hard to see. Robert Browning in his Justinian and Theodora affirms that Justinian ‘had again and again said exactly the opposite in the past’, and goes on to admit that ‘The matter is a mystery and will probably always remain one’. The decree containing the Aphthartodocetist dogma has not survived, but was probably promulgated in 565, a few months before the emperor’s death. It seemed appropriate to introduce the doctrine into the story somewhat earlier than this, as Justinian must have thought about the matter long and hard, before issuing his decree.