by David Jacobs
The first five years of Justinian I’s rule produced an unusual alliance between the demes and several senators and government officials who were alarmed at the emperor’s casual spending. Byzantine armies were always off fighting; to pay for the expeditions, the taxation of Byzantine subjects was extraordinarily heavy. At home, Justinian I had established a policy of harsh punishment to members of the demes caught robbing or plundering. The demes were dissatisfied with him, and the older senators who remembered more moderate leaders were afraid that he would bankrupt the empire. The result was an alliance that developed into the bloody Nika Rebellion.
Late in A.D. 531 and early the next year, the demes in the Hippodrome frequently argued about who was responsible for the financial troubles of the empire. Some blamed military adventures; others blamed the poor management of Justinian I’s finance minister, John the Cappadocian. One day in the great arena, a fight broke out between several Blues and Greens. In accordance with his policy of firmness with the demes, Justinian I sent troops to arrest the rioters and gave stiff punishments to all those who were involved.
The emperor’s handling of the riot backfired. Instead of teaching the demes a lesson, he united them. Blues and Greens presented a combined force by marching together; aristocrats and working people joined them in demanding his overthrow. They contrived to replace him with Hypatius, who was a descendant of an earlier emperor.
During the several days following the Hippodrome riot, the insurrection gathered force. Arsonists set a number of fires, and no member of Justinian’s court was safe out of doors. Finally, the rebel leaders decided that the time had come to crown the new emperor, and spread the word through the rebels’ ranks for all to converge on the Hippodrome.
Justinian I heard the news and hurried to the arena. Carrying in his hand a gospel to swear upon, the emperor addressed the crowd and acknowledged its victory. He promised that there would be an amnesty for all involved and a substantial tax reduction. But the mob was too excited and refused to listen. Nearby, in the Forum of Constantine, some of the rebels were preparing to crown Hypatius, escort him to the Hippodrome, and place him in the emperor’s box. Ignored, Justinian I hurried out of the arena and back to the imperial palace. As far as he was concerned, the rebellion had been successful, and he was ready to leave Constantinople.
But Theodora had other plans. Meeting with her husband and his loyal generals at the palace, she addressed the men calmly and as an equal. A courtier named Procopius was present and recorded her words: “In my opinion, this is no time to admit the maxim that a woman must not act as a man among men; nor, if she fires the courage of the halting, are we to consider whether she does right or no. When matters come to a crisis, we must agree as to the best course to take. My opinion is that, although we may save ourselves by flight, it is not to our interest. Every man that sees the light must die, but the man who has once been raised to the height of empire cannot suffer himself to go into exile and survive his dignity. God forbid that I should ever be stripped of this purple [the royal robe], or live a single day on which I am not to be saluted as Mistress. If thou desirest to go, Emperor, nothing prevents thee. There is the sea; there are the steps to the boats. But have a care that when thou leavest here, thou dost not exchange this sweet light for an ignoble death. For my part I like the old saying: the empire is a fine winding sheet.”
Inspired and determined, Procopius writes, the imperial party resolved to retake power from the rebels. As they planned their strategy, they realized the rebels were making a very serious error in assembling within the walled Hippodrome. Because there probably were close to 80,000 of them in a place meant for 60,000, the rebels were vulnerable to an attack from without.
While one general mobilized the few available soldiers, the palace guard, and any other arms-bearing men he could locate, another went to the Hippodrome. There he secretly informed several of the more opportunistic deme rulers that the emperor’s “army” was en route to the arena and soon would have it encircled. A number of the Blues’ leaders correctly evaluated their own vulnerable situation and either removed their men or decided to fight on the emperor’s side.
What followed was a massacre. After the improvised army of invaders entered the Hippodrome and many of the reconverted Blues inside began attacking their fellow rebels, the assembly became chaotic. Contemporary sources usually place the number of deaths at 30,000, and few modern historians dispute that figure.
With Justinian I’s merciless crushing of the Nika Rebellion, the only democratic element in the Byzantine autocracy disappeared. The emperor had been reluctant to destroy the demes, but Theodora did not want them to destroy her. She prevailed.
His opposition silenced, Justinian I resumed his many programs to glorify his empire. At Theodora’s suggestion, he instituted a new policy of tolerance toward some of the non-Orthodox peoples of the realm, such as the Syrians and Egyptians. Because Theodora felt that Persia represented a greater potential threat to the empire than the barbarians of the West, their best protection in the East was satisfied people who would resist invaders. When they had established good relations in the East, the emperor turned his military attentions to the West. The emperor’s armies restored the heart of the old Roman Empire by dominating the Vandals in North Africa, the Ostrogoths in Italy, and the Visigoths in southern Spain.
Even though military expenditures were enormous, Justinian I still undertook the rebuilding of Constantinople. Some of the reconstruction was essential because the fires of the Nika Rebellion had destroyed the entire center of the city. But even if there had not been a rebellion, the emperor would likely have rebuilt the city anyway. He was the sort of ruler who enjoyed all the trappings of power. In his view, the successor to the ancient Roman Empire would need a worthy capital.
Constantine XI had made Byzantium the capital of the world’s greatest empire, but it was Justinian I who gave Constantinople its character of a great international city. For 700 years, the city on the Golden Horn would influence the evolution of the arts, religion, government, and law in Western civilization. Constantinople served to bridge the cultures of East and West in a way that no later world capital ever duplicated.
Justinian I undoubtedly regarded the restoration of the heart of the old Roman Empire as his most significant achievement. But that was not the case. The emperor had regained some of the frontiers of the ancient realm, but the ancient world no longer existed. The new Roman Empire that he so proudly built did not survive for long after his death in A.D. 565.
What did survive was the culture. No one “founds” a culture, but Justinian I’s restructuring of his empire’s society created an atmosphere and the institutions through which a culture might flourish. In contrast, the West was undergoing a period of constant change and of enormous political and religious upheaval. To the east and south of the Mediterranean, the religious dissatisfaction of Justinian’s subjects would pave the way, within a century after the emperor’s death, for the success of Mohammed and his new religion of Islam. Within this world of turbulent change, Justinian I’s empire and its capital would provide an imperfect but stable link between the cultures of East and West, past and future.
Throughout history, many have referred to the Eastern Christian empire as the Byzantine Empire. Although its borders stretched and receded during the 700 years of its existence, Constantinople was always its heart and capital. It changed a great deal over the years but essentially remained the city that Justinian I bequeathed to his empire.
During his rule, the city consisted of about 600,000 people who called themselves Romans and spoke Greek. As had been characteristic of the population from Constantine XI’s time, their ancestry was quite varied. Some were descendants of Greeks and Romans, of Illyrians, Thracians, Goths, Celts, Cappadocians, or Phrygians. Other arrivals included Egyptian Copts, Syrians, and Armenians. Huns and Germans who served as mercenaries in Justinian’s army sometimes settled there permanently. Although the people of Constantinople
tended to regard those who did not believe in Orthodox Christianity or did not speak Greek as barbarians, they were not racially prejudiced. If both persons were Orthodox and spoke Greek, citizens accepted intermarriage between persons of different nationalities or races. Justinian I was born in Illyricum, and many of his closest advisors and generals were not of Roman origin.
Life in Constantinople revolved around the government. The emperor and empress were at the very center of the city’s society, and the members of the imperial court surrounded them. The court included the emperor’s council, military leaders, heads of the bureaucracy, senators, and clergy. The court’s official ceremonies were very luxurious. Even such routine matters as the reception of foreign dignitaries and audiences granted by the emperor might become festive pageants that featured colorful processions and lavish banquets. Religious holidays also gave the court an excuse to fill its calendar with celebrations.
During these festivals, the royal family and their courtiers wore richly decorated tunics and cloaks embroidered with gold thread and decorated with jewels. They wore expensive crowns and carried crosses and scepters in processions. Aristocratic ladies wore precious stones mounted on delicate and elaborate gold pendants and lockets; they carried their cosmetics in beautiful ivory containers and drank from ornate copper and bronze and silver cups. The products on display at the festivals left no doubt that Constantinople was an international city: Each celebration was a procession of goods and raw materials from all over the civilized world.
But the grandest display of all was the city itself.
Even though the people of Constantinople were temporarily disappointed with Justinian I after the Nika Rebellion, they were enthusiastic about the program he developed for rebuilding the city. Like the emperor, they appreciated the monuments and the extravagant way of life that testified to their position of supremacy in the world.
Money was no object. Contributions of cash and goods poured into the building fund. If people continued to complain about the high taxes, they confined their complaints to comments about military expenditures. The truth was that they would have resented the emperor more if he had not rebuilt his capital.
With his characteristic thoroughness and sense of organization, Justinian I devised a general plan for the renewal of Constantinople. The suburbs as well as the central city were all part of his plan. He rebuilt all the stone churches that predated his reign and enlarged those in depressed areas. He also rebuilt an old hospital for paupers located between the churches of Hagia Sophia and Saint Eirene near the center of the city. Even though he enlarged it considerably, he did not make it large enough to accommodate the demands of all the poor. Instead, he rebuilt at least three others situated elsewhere in or near the city. On the shores of the Bosporus, he constructed a public guest house, where poor people who had traveled to the capital to do business with the government could stay, free of charge, in relatively picturesque surroundings.
Justinian I scattered public buildings, forums, and recreation centers throughout the city. He located the law library in the Imperial Basilica near Hagia Sophia. In the vicinity of the Augustaeum, the unofficial “main” forum of the city, he had the Zeuxippus Baths restored and opened to the public. Thus the city’s poor visited the neighborhood of the major government buildings and church to take baths. In the suburb of Hebdomon, overlooking the Marmara, he had another public bath built and with it a handsome colonnade and market place. He ordered the construction of a sheltered port to stimulate the neighborhood’s commercial development and then enacted a similar program for the suburb of Arcadianae. There Justinian I created a large seaside park with a marble- and stone-paved court projecting into the Sea of Marmara. He gave orders for workers to transport bronze and marble statues there from the center of the city and from other parts of the empire. Once underpopulated and dull, that suburb became one of the busiest and most beautiful areas in the city.
Justinian I concentrated his major efforts on the building and rebuilding of the many churches of Constantinople. He consecrated at least twenty-five buildings during his reign. All of them - even those that had not been in particularly bad shape before enactment of his building program - bore the architectural characteristics that revealed they were his work. None was grander than Hagia Sophia, for centuries the symbol of Eastern Orthodoxy and a strong Byzantine Empire.
Built according to the cruciform “central plan” favored in Near Eastern architecture, Hagia Sophia was a huge, domed church, vaulted in the manner of some Roman basilicas. No building in Constantinople better demonstrates that Byzantine art and architecture were essentially a marriage of the styles of East and West. Its interior contained thick pillars and spaciousness that resemble the greatest buildings of Rome. The intricately arranged arches, the rich ornamentation, and the repetitive series of patterned mosaics and inlay clearly were products of Eastern influence.
Hagia Sophia long remained the most glorious edifice in Christendom. Even though the many Gothic cathedrals of Western Europe were magnificent, none truly surpassed Hagia Sophia in size, grandeur, or awesomeness. The only Western shrine that might have outshone it - Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome - did not reach its most splendid state until after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Hagia Sophia then became Sultan Mehmet II’s mosque. But for as long as it was a Christian church, Hagia Sophia was supreme. (Today the edifice is neither church nor mosque, but a museum.)
Next to his rebuilding of the city, Justinian I’s most important contribution to his empire and capital was his decree of A.D. 528 that established a commission to prepare a new code of laws. He issued this decree just six and one-half months after he had become emperor.
In A.D. 438, during the reign of Emperor Theodosius II, he had centuries of Roman legislation and legal precedents compiled in a written code. It was, however, a rather nonselective compilation and contained many obsolete and contradictory laws. Furthermore, there were now many new rulings and statutes that needed to be added to the code and clarified. In Justinian I’s time, the Senate was only a figurehead body with the emperor serving as the sole interpreter and executor of the law. Justinian took this responsibility very seriously. He had to match his power to make laws by personal pronouncement to his sense of justice, and justice required a degree of consistency. By appointing ten distinguished jurists to compile the new codification, Justinian announced his intention to execute law on an equal basis to all his subjects.
Essentially, the laws of the empire were Roman. The development of legal codes and restrictions and guarantees probably was Rome’s major gift to the evolution of Western civilization. Roman law produced not only a universal definition of human rights but also ensured a respect for law and the acknowledgment that civilized mankind could survive and prosper only under the law. Without the Justinian Code, the heritage of Roman law might have been lost.
Basically, Justinian’s Code defined the relationship between the individual and the state according to Roman concepts, with certain Christian precepts incorporated. It prescribed the training of lawyers and instructed jurists to consider the spirit as well as the letter of the law in making judgments. It reminded the emperor to regard philanthropia - the love of mankind - as the most important consideration when making new laws. Human rights were more sacred than property rights; the weak needed to be protected from the strong. Of course, anyone was permitted to become rich if he could but not at the expense of someone else. In many cases, courts favored the slave over the master, the wife over the husband, the debtor over the creditor, the ward over the guardian.
In practice, however, Justinian’s Code did not guarantee equal treatment under the law for all citizens of the empire. Then as now, courts often treated upper-class citizens more leniently than they treated lower-class people for commission of the same crime. Nevertheless, the existence of the Code was a powerful tool for Justinian I. It strengthened his hold on the office; it gave an aura of justice to the legal procedures of an autocratic stat
e; its humanistic qualities restored the people’s confidence in the emperor.
In a way, the Code personified imperial power. Whenever it was employed to treat people fairly, even in a court of law away from Constantinople, the populace regarded its use as a personal enactment of justice by the emperor. They wrote the new additions - the “new constitutions,” or novellae - regulating many points of civil law in Greek, rather than traditional Latin. This helped to bridge the gap between the common people and the often hard-to-understand legal system.
Justinian’s Code long outlived Justinian I and became the basis for the formation of European law. But in his own time, the emperor saw his law provide internal social strength. The empire would need it to withstand the next seven of the most eventful and brutal centuries in history.
The Orthodox Church supplied the spiritual strength of Constantinople. It was impossible to separate religion and citizenship in the capital, and special sacraments accompanied even the simplest events. Specific services celebrated the completion of a new house; travelers beginning a journey needed to hear certain prayers; and there were sacraments for a mother giving birth and others for the women who assisted at the birth. Religious commemorative rites filled the calendar almost daily. They used the Greek language to conduct these lengthy services with great splendor, especially at Hagia Sophia.
Although Constantinople was uniformly Orthodox, the entire empire was not, and this provided Justinian I with one of his biggest problems. They could not satisfactorily resolve a particular theological issue during his reign or thereafter. To some extent, this divisive issue had been troubling Christians since the inception of their religion: How could they reconcile the human and divine elements of Christ’s life? Was Christ man or God?
