In August 452, only ten months after the fateful Council of Chalcedon, Peter the Iberian, a former Georgian prince, was elected bishop of Maiouma, the harbor city of Gaza on the southern coast of Palestine. He was faced by a fervent congregation, which threatened to burn down the basilica, with himself inside, if he did not celebrate for them at once the Great Liturgy as their bishop. When he reached the solemn prayer of consecration and broke the sanctified bread of the Eucharist, blood gushed from the loaf and covered the entire altar. He turned, to see Christ at his side:
Break the bread, bishop … I have done this for my glory, that everyone may know where the truth is and who are they who hold the orthodox faith.1
Peter, in fact, was an uncompromising opponent of the Council of Chalcedon. Not everyone (certainly not pope Leo!) would have considered him “orthodox.” But both Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians agreed that it was the duty of a bishop to act as the high priest of his city. The bishop’s solemn celebration of the Eucharist at the Great Liturgy was a public rite which ensured God’s favor for the entire community. The bishop’s relations with his city were expressed by formal ceremonies. The text of the ceremony of a bishop’s entry into his city has survived from the sixth century. On entering, the bishop blessed the chapel at the city gate by surrounding it with clouds of incense. Then he led his clergy, chanting supplications, through the city, where he would offer incense at the Tetrapylon – the four-columned monument which marked the center of the city. After celebrating the Great Liturgy in his cathedral church, he retired to his palace. There he received the town council and the representatives of the imperial government.2
THE EASTERN EMPIRE ca. 500–ca. 650
| Symeon Stylites 390–459 Severus of Antioch 465–538 Barsanuphius of Gaza 470–547 | |
| Justinian 527–565 issues Codex Justinianus 529 Nika Riot 532 building of Hagia Sophia 533 issues Digest and Institutes 533 reconquers Africa 535 Rome 535 Ravenna 540 | |
| Plague 543–570 | Khusro I Anoshirwan 530–579 sacks Antioch 540 |
| Fifth Ecumenical Council: Condemnation of the Three Chapters 554 | |
| Jacob Baradaeus sets up “Jacobite” church 543–578 | |
| Lombard invasion of Italy 568 | |
| Slav and Avar penetration of the Balkans 550+ | |
| John of Ephesus 507–588 John Moschus 560–634 Leontius of Neapolis 570–650 |
The public rituals performed by the bishop and his clergy made the city holy. His presence as honorary chairman of the town council, assisted by the local notables, made it orderly. Quite as much as in the Gaul of Gregory of Tours, bishops of the eastern empire were public figures in their cities. As in Gaul, some were spectacularly rich. In A.D. 610, the patriarch of Alexandria had 8,000 pounds of gold in his church’s treasure. He supported 7,500 indigent persons on his poor-roll (when Gallic bishops barely supported more than a hundred). The trading fleets of the patriarch sailed from Alexandria to as far as Morocco and Cornwall.3
But the great patriarchs were an exception. Unlike in Gaul and Spain, there were few landed aristocrats among the clergy. The average bishop in the East Roman empire was a careworn and humdrum person. He was a glorified town councillor. He owed his position to the manner in which he stood between his city and an imposing imperial administration. In the eastern empire, the imperial system created by Diocletian and Constantine had remained in place. Reaching from the Adriatic to Mesopotamia, the eastern empire covered an area almost as vast as the later Ottoman empire. Bishops in the eastern empire were cogs in the machine of a fiercely intrusive and centralized governmental system.
By A.D. 500 the Christian bishop and his clergy had been encouraged by the emperors to take over many of the duties which had once been performed, in classical times, by the town councils.4 To be a clergyman gave one prestige in the city. One bishop complained that local notables wanted to buy their way into the clergy for no other reason than to be seen in public “in the robes of a clergyman.”5 The church had become the new avenue to local status and prestige.
The building of churches provided new opportunities for display. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the clergy were responsible for a wave of new building which changed the urban fabric of the cities of the Middle East. Archaeologists continue to be surprised by the number of large, new churches, paved with mosaic, that have been discovered all over the modern Balkans, Turkey, Syria, Israel, and Jordan. Many of these churches were placed in the center of the cities. Their floors were covered with exuberant mosaics containing inscriptions which praised the generosity, piety, and intelligence of the bishops and clergy who were their founders.6 Even in relatively small villages in Syria and elsewhere, the clergy dedicated to the altars large pieces of silverware, each of which bore their own names and those of their families.7 Church building on this scale signalled the definitive triumph of Christianity in the East Roman empire. Christianity no longer presented itself as a militant creed, locked in struggle with the religion and culture of a pagan world. In a Christian empire, Christianity was now thought to hold the high ground of an entire civilization. It was an age of synthesis, marked by great confidence that the ancient skills of classical Greece – rhetoric, poetry, history-writing, philosophy, and art – could be used to express the Christian message.8
On a more practical level, the imperial government used the clergy as its local watchdogs. Bishops were commanded to use “sacerdotal freedom” to report to the emperor governors guilty of graft or incompetence. Bishops validated the weights and measures used in the marketplace, and ensured that the city’s walls were maintained.9 It was they who represented the emperor to their cities. Imperial mandates were now read aloud to the local notables in the bishop’s audience hall. They were then posted for the entire city to read in the porch outside the local church.10 The bishop of Bostra “performed a service to his city” by building his own jail to house and feed criminals awaiting trial.11 At times of crisis, bishops even blessed and discharged the catapults which lined the city’s battlements – as did the bishop of Theodosiopolis (Erzerum, eastern Turkey), killing a Hunnish chieftain with a stone thrown from the catapult “of the church,” named the “Saint Thomas.”12 Altogether, the bishops of the East were deeply identified with the defence and stability of their cities, and so with the fate of the empire:
It is the duty of bishops [wrote the patriarch of Antioch to a subordinate] to cut short and restrain the unregulated movements of the mob … and to set themselves to maintain good order in the cities and to keep watch over the peaceful manners of those who are fed by their hand.13
Thus, the urban life of the largest political unit in the Mediterranean was firmly based on the conscientious mediocrity of its bishops. Contemporaries identified the coalescence of bishop and city as the keel which gave stability to the empire on the local level. But local politics were not everything. The Christian Church claimed to be universal and in possession of universal truths. The issue remained whether bishops, who were quite prepared to maintain law and order on the local level in their cities, could ever be persuaded to adopt a formula of belief which would make the Church as much a unity, from the doctrinal point of view, as the empire which protected it.
As we have seen in chapters 3 and 4, ever since the reign of Constantine, the achievement of doctrinal unity was held to be the raison d’être – indeed, the crowning achievement – of a Christian empire. But the passions aroused before and after the Council of Chalcedon had shown that this unity would be extremely difficult to achieve. It was not for lack of trying. Throughout the late fifth and sixth centuries, the imperial government was convinced that, given the right mixture of command and persuasion, a strong imperial line on Christian dogma would create a united, “orthodox” Church. This course of action failed. And it failed most blatantly during the reign of one of the most self-confident rulers ever produced in the Roman empire, the emperor Justinian (527–565). Justinian’s defeat showed that the Christian empire was not, perhaps, as harmoniously united as the ideology of the time had led many public-spirited bishops to expect. East Roman society proved to be more complex, and to contain more poles of loyalty in matters of religion, than the emperors and their servants, the bishops, had reckoned with. In the long run, neither the East Roman state nor the cities through which it ruled proved to have sufficient coercive force or moral authority to impose religious unity.14 It is important to see why this was so.
In the first place, the bishops had less moral authority than their official position in the cities might suggest, for the cities themselves were only partly Christian. In heading the cities, the bishops found themselves implicated in all that was most impenitently profane in East Roman society. The triumphal narratives of “instant” Christianization through victory over the gods left much of the past intact in the East Roman cities. All over the empire, the monumental decor of the cities remained standing. Statues of gods and of former pagan emperors could be seen on every street. In Oxyrhynchus, a minor city in Middle Egypt, for instance, a statue of the last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, was still standing. It had the reputation of descending from its pedestal at night, to stalk unwary passersby.15
Though now dominated by impressive Christian monuments, every East Roman city included much that spoke of forms of celebration and of attitudes to power and prosperity which owed nothing to Christianity. Theaters were still standing. One might now enter a theater through a gate on which the Cross had been placed over the traditional invocation of the Tyché, the numinous good fortune, of the city. But in the theater itself, little had changed. Clouds of incense still gave an air of mystical solemnity to the spectacular ballets of the pantomime dancers, whose miraculous leaps and sinuous gestures often took place against a backdrop of mythological friezes carved in stone. Such backdrops (like the theaters themselves) dated from classical times. They were already centuries old. Altogether, the theater stood out as a solid fragment of a very ancient past in the middle of the new Christian city.16
Those who attended the theater paid little attention to the warnings of their clergy: “I do not go that I may believe, but I go that I may laugh. It is a game; it is not paganism.”17 Even in the long-Christian city of Edessa, the arrival of a troupe of Greek dancers was a major event:
there came round again the time of that festival at which the heathen tales were sung; and the citizens took even more pains about it than usual. Lamps were lighted [before the dancers], and they were burning incense and holding vigils the whole night, walking about the city and praising the dancer until morning, with singing and shouting and lewd behavior … they neglected also to go to prayer [and] … they mocked at the modesty of their fathers, who, quoth they, “did not know how to do things as we do.”18
The bishop often found himself responsible for the maintenance of such shows. At the end of the sixth century, the patriarch of Antioch returned from Constantinople with a troop of pantomime dancers and with government funds to rebuild the Hippodrome. His enemies accused him of rebuilding “the Church of Satan.”19 But, although he was a bishop, he had acted as a conscientious public figure. He reintroduced the pantomime so as to keep the population of his city happy in times of distress.
For each city still needed its “Church of Satan.” The Hippodrome (the place of chariot races) was crucial to the youth culture of the East Roman cities. And in the fifth century, this youth culture changed, with dramatic consequences. Young men – and especially the privileged sons of the civic elites – had always supported competitive activities in their cities. Now this competition became both more clear-cut and more uniform throughout the empire. Each city came to be officially divided between two principal “factions” – the “Blues” and the “Greens.” These groups were encouraged to vie with each other in supporting rival performers of all kinds in the theater and in the Hippodrome. The competition was particularly fierce between the rival teams of “Blue” and “Green” charioteers. The frequent bloody clashes between rival gangs of supporters of each faction were tolerated because the shows themselves had taken on an imperial tone. They took place to celebrate the city’s loyalty to the emperor. Even the rivalries of the factions contributed to this atmosphere of strident loyalism. For the competition of the factions ensured that, in all cities, all heads remained turned toward the emperor and his representatives. Gathered in their separate benches in the hippodromes and theaters of all great cities, assembled at the center of the city or at the city’s gates on state occasions, the young men of the “Blues” and the “Greens” actively competed to show their enthusiasm for the distant emperor. They would strive to outdo each other in chanting loyal acclamations for the emperor and in denouncing his enemies.20
These factions were utterly profane and unusually inclusive. As young men of the “Blue” or “Green” factions, religious outsiders, such as Jews, had exactly the same rights as did “orthodox” Christians. All had a place on the benches of their local hippodrome. And what was celebrated, in the chariot races, was, quite frankly, Tyché, Lady Luck. The Hippodrome was both a public Wheel of Fortune and a public Victory Parade. It celebrated the heroic skills of the charioteers, who turned blind fortune into victory, as they whirled at headlong speed around the racecourse. The popular imagination linked these triumphs on the racecourse to the eventual triumphs of the empire itself. Everyone was involved, from the emperor downwards. It was from the imperial box at the head of the gigantic Hippodrome of Constantinople that the emperor met “his” people. And he did so by sharing the same passions as themselves. He also was the supporter of a faction. Hence, although the Hippodrome was denounced by Christian writers as the “Church of Satan,” it stood for a mystique of empire which reached back deep into the Roman past. In the hard-driving East Roman state of the sixth century, good fortune and victory had remained the stuff of life in a “Roman” empire.21
Hence a paradox of East Roman society. In the West, the bishops felt increasingly secure in their control of the surviving towns. They tended to look out from these oases of carefully maintained Christian propriety to confront a spreading countryside where Christianity seemed less securely rooted, and certainly less easy to control. In Syria and Egypt, by contrast, it could appear as if the cities, the centers of imperial government and the place of residence of most bishops, were enclaves of profane living in the midst of a population made up of God-fearing farmers. Along the Nile, villages that had once cohered around their pagan temples now found a new cohesion in their Christian clergy and a new identity in their fervent loyalty to the Monophysite patriarchs of Alexandria. It was through the activities of clergymen that Syriac and Coptic became major literary languages. Though both languages had deep roots in the pre-Christian past, they were identified with a triumphant Christian present. Coptic and Syriac still remained the liturgical languages of major local Churches in the Middle East.22
The agrarian society of northern Syria, around Antioch and Aleppo, was, indeed, new and thriving. Since the fourth century, expanding population had taken over marginal lands. By A.D. 500 northwestern Syria was a populous landscape, dotted with villages. The remarkable churches which were built by the villagers have survived to this day. Spectacular hoards of silverware have recently emerged from the area. They give an impression of the wealth which local landowners were prepared to lavish on local churches. An entire new Christian world had come into existence to one side of the cities.23
Prosperous and ostentatiously pious, the world of the countryside, in northern Syria and elsewhere, expressed its cohesion through great pilgrimages to spectacular holy men and to the monasteries associated with them. Thousands would stream out from the new villages, to gather every year at the shrine of Saint Symeon Stylites. Symeon was the first “column saint.” (He derived his name from stylos, Greek for “column.”) He had stood in prayer for some 30 years, until his death in 459, on top of a 60-foot column, on the edge of the limestone massif which still bears his name, the Jebel Sem’an. This massif lay within view of the main road which led from Antioch to the Euphrates. A new, dramatic form of Christianity had emerged, in a new Christian landscape, in the vital defensive zone between Antioch and the eastern frontier.24
It is important to explain the influence of persons such as Symeon Stylites in East Roman society. They drew their power from the fact that the most significant divide of all in the Christian imagination of the East Roman empire was not that between town and countryside. It was between the “desert” and the “world.” This was a notional chasm. It separated two closely juxtaposed spaces: the “desert” was associated with the “angel-like” life of the ascetic, the “world” with the more hesitant Christian behavior of the kosmikos, of persons “in the world.” Unlike the ascetics of “the desert,” persons “in the world” were caught in obligations to society. For that reason, they were not free to give all of themselves to Christ. “Worldly” persons could be lay men and lay women. They could also be busy bishops and members of the clergy. Compared with this basic notional division between those of the “the desert” and those of “the world,” all other divisions of the East Roman world – between town and country, between the urban bishop and his rural diocese, even between clergy and laity – seemed insignificant. The “world” as a whole was overshadowed by the presence of “angel-like” holy men associated with the “desert.”
In this respect Eastern Christianity differed significantly from the West. In the West, a strong current of opinion, which went back to Augustine, expected that the triumphant grace of God would show itself within society, in the form of holy persons who were, more often than not, called to be leaders of the Catholic Church. Grace enabled such persons to “overcome the world.” And they usually did this in the service of the Catholic Church, as bishops and clergymen. Holiness and ecclesiastical office tended to converge, to produce the sort of bishops whom we met in the world of Gregory of Tours – rulers of cities and the embodiment of law and order in Gaul and in other western regions.
This was not so in the East. In Syria and Egypt, and elsewhere in the territories of the Eastern empire, the Holy Spirit was thought to have raised up holy men and women in great numbers outside society, in the desert. Their authority came from the fact that they remained in the desert, to one side of the institutional structures of the Church. In Egypt and Syria, this “desert” was no impenetrable wilderness. It often lay within easy walking distance of towns and populous villages. By the sixth century, the countryside of Syria, Egypt, and Palestine – especially the Judaean desert outside Jerusalem – was flanked by impressive monasteries. These monasteries were characterized by solid buildings. They were miniature villages, often lying at the center of a ring of carefully constructed hermits’ cells. Most were perched within sight of the settled world. There was nothing wild or makeshift about them, but they stood for “the desert” in sharp contrast to the “world.”25
For only in the “desert” – that is, in a place to one side of settled life – could a few great ascetics bring back, through long penance and hard labor on their own bodies, a touch of the angelic glory which Adam had enjoyed in the Garden of Eden.26
Hence a significant difference between East and West. A western bishop, such as Gregory of Tours, tended to look for traces of Paradise among the holy dead. In the eastern Mediterranean, by contrast, living persons were thought capable of regaining Paradise on earth. In Egypt, farmers would run up to scoop the sand from the footprints of Apa Apollos, as he walked near his cell, on the edge of the desert. They would take this sand back to sprinkle on their fields in the valley below. The holiness of Apollos had turned the dead sand, the antithesis of the green valley of the Nile, into the richest earth of all – the earth of Eden.27 It was the same in Syria. Clouds of heavenly incense regularly surrounded the column of Symeon the Younger (521–592), the precocious imitator of Symeon Stylites. At the age of seven, Symeon the Younger wandered off from Antioch to settle in the mountains near the city (the modern Samandaǧ – Symeon’s Mountain, to the west of Antioch/Antakya). Symeon was believed to have played with mountain lions, calling them “kitty.” Settled on a high mountain-top, yet still accessible to pilgrims from Antioch and elsewhere, Symeon was believed to have brought back to earth, in his own lifetime, the sweet smell of Paradise, and a hint of Adam’s innocent mastery of the animal kingdom.28
“Angelic” holy men did not abandon the world, in the sense of severing all relations with it. Rather, in the imagination of contemporaries, they transformed its wild edges. They ringed a careworn society with the shimmering hope of Paradise regained. They effected a symbolic exchange on a deep imaginative level. Having drained from themselves all hint of the dark passions that ruled the world, they validated the world by constantly praying for it:
assistance flows from their bones to all creation.
Civilization, where lawlessness prevails,
is sustained by their prayers.
And the world, burdened by sin,
is preserved by their intercession.
The earth, heaving with controversy,
is upheld by them.
Troubled with speculation,
their vigil fills it with calm.29
This mystical symbiosis of “desert” and settled world was central to the spiritual lives of Eastern Christians. For the spectacular lives of a few great saints formed the model for the activities of innumerable, less famous ascetics whose reputation for holiness led them to be sought out by persons “in the world.” Holy persons – men, in the desert, and women, more usually in the safer seclusion of the towns and villages – were constantly available to offer spiritual counsel and the support of their prayers. Not all of them were members of the clergy.
Holy men and women were the true democrats of Eastern Christendom. Paradoxically, it was their awesome austerity which enabled them to fulfill this role. For, seen with the eyes of an “angelic” person formed in the “desert,” all persons of all ranks and status, of all vocations and levels of culture, were equal, because equally sinners, caught in “the world.” Clergy and laity were alike. Equally caught in the “world,” each, in their different manner, limped slowly toward the kingdom of Christ. Emperor or peasant, bishop or lay person, monk or prostitute, each needed the advice of holy persons and the constant support of their prayers. Ascetic representatives of the “desert” met the deep longing for solidarity and for spiritual guidance which the official leaders of the Church – bishops and clergy now deeply implicated in a largely urban world of power and status – could not provide.
We possess a precious record of the spiritual guidance offered by two major holy men in this period: the ostraka – the inscribed shards of pottery – which record the requests sent to Apa Epiphanius in his cell among the empty temples of Thebes, in the late sixth century, and the remarkable collection of Questions and Answers associated with the great old man, Barsanuphius (470–547), an Egyptian recluse settled outside Gaza. Both holy men moved with ease from providing exacting spiritual direction to a small group of disciples to offering firm and humane advice to married persons “in the world.”
An elderly priest asked Epiphanius how he should spend the last years of his life:
broken, lying abed, carried in and out … A great grief is in my heart, night and day … be so good as to appoint to me prayers and a regime of fasting convenient to my sickness and old age, and even if it be lying down, I will fulfill them.30
As for Barsanuphius of Gaza, he supplied the notables of the region with moral counsels which upheld, from the awesome darkness of his permanently closed cell, ancient standards of grace and courtesy. Should a landowner allow a Jewish neighbor to use his wine press?
If, when it rains, God causes the rain to fall on your fields and not those of the Jew, then you can refuse to press his wine. But He is full of love for all mankind … why should you, then, wish to be inhumane rather than merciful?31
What is abundantly plain in these vivid interchanges is the power of prayer ascribed to holy persons. Those who consulted Barsanuphius placed their souls in his hands, and expected to be protected and guided through his prayers.32 As a result, the religious life of eastern Christians of all classes and in all regions was crisscrossed by subtle and unbreakable threads of spiritual dependence on individual guides, who were often identified with specific local traditions. It was a form of religious “networking” that was unusually tenacious and potentially fissiparous. It counted for more in the lives of many pious persons than did the notional unity to which the emperor and the bishops were so strenuously committed.
On one thing, however, Barsanuphius was firm. Kosmikoi and monks alike should avoid contact with heretics. They should never be drawn into debate with them. “Heretics,” for Barsanuphius, included Monophysites who bitterly opposed the Council of Chalcedon. This was the problem. A remarkably unified empire did not possess a unified Church. The forceful reign of Justinian witnessed the failure of the most energetic attempt yet made to reassert, from Constantinople, a single imperial faith.
It is easy for the historian, with the benefit of hindsight, to foresee Justinian’s failure. Contemporaries, however, face their world generation by generation. The generation which came into its prime in Constantinople in the 520s was characterized by a quite exceptional combination of anxiety and high purpose. They knew that they lived in a changed world. The Roman empire of the West had fallen. In Constantinople, this was an ominous event. Pagans ascribed it to the suppression of sacrifice to the gods, Monophysites, predictably, to the Council of Chalcedon.33 No longer simply a “new” Rome, a replica of Rome offered to the East, Constantinople now stood alone as the capital of the “true” Roman empire. To call this empire “Byzantium,” and its subjects “Byzantines” (from Byzantium, the former site of Constantinople), is a modern practice that denies the continuity with the Roman empire to which the people of the sixth century were fiercely attached. They thought of themselves as members of “the fortunate race of the Romans.”34 Learned folklore, treasured in government departments, and recorded by the scholar-bureaucrat, John Lydus, insisted that the Praetorian Prefect’s court used the plural form, “we,” because it had been used by Romulus and Remus, when they sat in judgment. It was also believed that the uniforms of the guards of the imperial bedchamber had been designed by Romulus, who had received the pattern from Aeneas!35 Latin remained the language of the law. Though mediated by serviceable Greek and Syriac translations, Latin, “the Roman tongue,” continued to be used as the sacred language of a “Roman” state – as opaque but as redolent of uncanny continuity with the distant past as the Latin of the pre-Vatican II Catholic Mass used to be.
In Constantinople, the opinion was that if the West fell, it had been because the western emperors had not been “Roman” enough. They had failed to flex the muscles of empire which were still available to those who governed in New Rome. The yearly budget of the East Roman empire was 8,500,000 gold pieces.36 Eighty thousand tons of grain arrived each year at Constantinople as part of the tax levy of Egypt alone. The emperor Anastasius (491–518) had left 320,000 pounds of gold (23,000,000 gold pieces) as an unspent surplus in the imperial treasures. No state west of China could mobilize such sums on a regular basis.
Petrus Sabbatius Justinianus – the future emperor Justinian – came from the upper Vardar valley, near Skopje (in the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia), from a Latin-speaking periphery of the empire, halfway, as the crow flies, between Constantinople and Rome. In 527, Justinian succeeded his unprepossessing uncle, Justin, who had reigned from 518. Like that other outsider, the Corsican Buonaparte, who raised France to glory in the name of the Revolution, Justinian threw himself headlong into the new myth of Constantinople as the true Rome, the heir of Rome’s manifest destiny. He was convinced that he knew more clearly than did any of his predecessors what a Christian Roman empire should be like.37
Justinian had an outsider’s intolerance for the compromises and anomalies that had made possible the smooth running of a splendid, but slow-moving, system. Theodosius II, for instance, had been content to declare that pagans no longer existed in his empire. This meant, in fact, that many men of skill and high culture who were loyal to the old religion were allowed to play a public role as long as they kept their beliefs to themselves. Not so Justinian. In 528, all pagans were given three months in which to be baptized. In 529, the pagan professors of philosophy at the Academy in Athens were forbidden to teach in public. All knowledge was Christian knowledge: it could not be taught by “persons diseased with the insanity of the unholy Hellenes.”38
Justinian also knew what it was to have an up-to-date code of Roman law. The Codex of Theodosius II appeared to him to have been a half-hearted effort. Justinian set the lawyer, Tribonian, to work with a team of experts, to compile a Digest of the entire corpus of Roman law: 1,528 law-books were read through and condensed into 800,000 words. The Institutes, prepared at the same time, provided a streamlined new textbook for the law schools at Beirut. The Codex Justinianus, the Justinianic Code, brought the Theodosian Code up to date. The Codex appeared in 529, the Digest and the Institutes in 533.39 The Roman law which was later revived in medieval Europe, and which became the basis of all subsequent codes of “civil” law in western Europe and the Americas, as well as the basis of the imperial law of Russia up to 1917, was not a direct legacy of ancient Rome. It all came from Justinian. It drew upon the works produced by a team of lawyers in Constantinople, driven, for five hectic years, by a man determined to test to its limits the possibilities of the empire he had come to rule. Justinian had done.
what no-one else had dared to hope to achieve and to decide on … But we stretched out our hands to Him, Who can, by His mighty power, grant ultimate success to quite impossible enterprises.40
The reform of Roman law set the brisk tempo for a further decade. For a time, it seemed as if Justinian could do anything. Then, on January 13, 532, Constantinople exploded. For the first time ever, the Blue and the Green factions united, under the common rallying-cry of Nika, “Conquer.” They wished to replace Justinian’s advisers, and eventually to overthrow Justinian himself. Thirty thousand citizens died in a massacre inflicted by Justinian’s troops on a panic-stricken crowd trapped in the Hippodrome. Four days later, the huge roar of the firestorm that consumed the entire center of Constantinople still drowned every other noise.41 Yet recovery came quickly. Characteristically, Justinian used the destruction to go beyond his predecessors. The city’s main basilica was replaced by the stupendous new church of the Hagia Sophia, now known as the Aya Sofya of Istanbul, the Church of the Holy Wisdom.
Hagia Sophia was dedicated only five years after the Nika riot. For all future ages, it became the enduring symbol of Justinian’s piety and of Constantinople’s position as the center of the orthodox Christian world. The Hagia Sophia was also a symbol of empire. It was, indeed, so powerful a symbol that the great Ottoman architect of the sixteenth century, Mimar Sinan, strove to rival it in a series of stupendous domed mosques. As a result, Justinian’s great church lives on, as the standard mosque of the Ottoman empire, in areas as far apart as Mostar in Bosnia and Damascus in Syria.42
At the time, however, the new church was a prodigious gamble. A structural engineer’s nightmare, the piers which supported one main arch began to sway outward under the weight of masonry piled ever higher upon it, and the columns beneath others began to flake from the strain. Justinian was said to have urged the builders to continue. Sure enough, the completed arches settled under their own unimaginable weight. As he first entered the completed building, Justinian was believed to have exclaimed: “Solomon, I have outdone you!”43
In the years in which the Hagia Sophia was being built at Constantinople, Justinian set out to reconquer Italy and Africa. Between the summer of 533 and 540, Carthage, Sicily, Rome, and eventually Ravenna, fell to Justinian’s armies. It was a seemingly effortless demonstration of imperial power. A large navy landed small, highly professional contingents, supplemented by deadly Hunnish horse-archers. Divided among themselves, the armies of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths crumbled. Once again, it seemed as if Justinian had brought off the impossible.
We have good hope … that God will grant us to rule over the rest of what, subject to the ancient Romans to the limits of both seas, they later lost through their easy-going ways.44
A large part of the coastline of the western Mediterranean, from Carthage to Volubilis and from Sicily to Istria (including, for a time, a line of ports along the southern coast of Spain, centered on Cartagena) fell back into the imperial order after no more than a century of barbarian rule. And this was not a passing moment in the history of the western Mediterranean. In Italy and North Africa, it brought the empire back for centuries. Carthage remained an imperial city until 698, Ravenna until 751. The present-day name of the hinterland of Ravenna, the Romagna, marks it as former “Roman” land – a little Romania, overlooking the Adriatic Sea, down which ships sailed frequently to Constantinople. Throughout the early Middle Ages, the popes were subjects of the East Roman emperors. Up to A.D. 800, every papal document sent to western bishops and to western rulers was dated by the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople, the pope’s true lord and master.45
Our knowledge of the reign of Justinian has been overshadowed by the account of his wars. This was in part because of the writings of a gifted contemporary. Procopius of Caesarea had served as secretary to Justinian’s victorious general, Belisarius. He set to work as a historian in the classical Greek tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides. In the classical tradition, war was expected to furnish the principal theme for any writer of history. It is this aspect of the reign of Justinian, along with the intrigues of the emperor’s court, which have become best known to most modern readers.
Procopius’ image of Justinian was seriously lopsided, yet it still dominates our overall picture of East Roman society at the time.46 In one respect, however, Procopius understood very well one aspect of the mentality of a Roman emperor. Justinian shared with his predecessors a healthy zest for conquest. It was how he wished to be remembered. Procopius describes the mosaic which Justinian set up in the entrance hall of the imperial palace. It showed the sort of triumph which any ruler of “the fortunate race of the Romans” would have dreamed of.
On either side are war and battle, and numerous cities are being captured, some in Italy, others in Libya [the classical term for North Africa as a whole]. The Emperor is victorious through his lieutenant, the general Belisarius, who returns to the Emperor with his whole army intact, and offers him booty, namely kings and kingdoms and all things that are prized by men. In the center stand the Emperor and the Empress Theodora … They are surrounded by the Roman Senate, one and all in a festive mood … They smile proudly as they offer the Emperor divine honors because of his achievements.47
The bubonic plague, however, was nature’s rare, but deadly, comment on an expanded empire and on the creation of an Asia-wide economy which went with this expansion. East Rome was a revived empire, anxious for goods. It lay at the northwestern end of the trade routes of the Indian Ocean. Justinian’s gold pieces, the imperial solidi, were admired in distant Ceylon as those of the greatest empire in the world.48 Justinian’s navies reunited the western to the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Ceramics of unusual uniformity circulated throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Compared with the fragmented patterns of distribution which prevailed in large areas of the hinterland of western Europe, the continued movement of North African pottery along the coastline of the southern and eastern Mediterranean points to a consumer economy, linked to the prosperity provided by a unified state.49
We do not know for certain from where the bubonic plague came, when it escaped its deadly pocket – perhaps from the Middle Ganges but, more likely, from the Great Lakes of Central Africa. But once released, it moved swiftly. By the summer of 542, it was in Pelusium, the port at which the Indian Ocean trade of the Red Sea entered the Mediterranean. It emptied the coastal cities. Along the principal highroads of Syria and Asia Minor it left a swathe of deserted villages, of roadside inns filled with corpses, and an uncanny silence over the land, as the harvest lay ungathered on either side of the road.50
The plague soon reached Constantinople, rapidly killing a third of its population. It almost killed Justinian himself, leaving him with appreciably less energy. His old age lacked the driving vigor of the early years of his reign. His laws shrank to a trickle. Theological negotiations occupied an increasing amount of his time. By the year 563, Justinian was 81. That year, he left the capital for the first time in over 50 years. He crossed the highlands of Anatolia as winter approached, in a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Germia (Yürme, near Ankara). It was a most unusual journey for him to take. But the shrine was noted for its immemorial fishpond, a source of miraculous healing. Justinian may have sought healing. He had been chronically ill for years. He needed yet more life to complete his ambitious plans. But he died only two years later, in November 565. The empire which he had taken over with such high hopes was no longer the same.
Relatively small-scale societies can regain momentum after the first dislocating impact of the plague, as happened in Europe after the Black Death of 1348. But a vast empire, already stretched to its limits, had less chance of recovery. Plague remained endemic in the Middle East until the middle of the eighth century. Periodic outbursts of plague eroded the human resources of the great empires which struggled to control the region. Plague, in particular, burned out the heart of the maritime world on which the military exploits of Justinian had depended and crippled the provisioning of the cities of his empire. Away from the sea, the countryside was less exposed to massive infection. It recovered more quickly. Both within the empire and outside its borders, a world less identified with cities, and especially with the cities of the coastline, became that much stronger.51
The sheer size of the empire had placed vast fiscal resources at Justinian’s disposal. After 542, this size became Justinian’s most unrelenting enemy. Each distant frontier had to compete with every other for the allocation of diminished resources. Italy and the Danube lost out to the most formidable emergency of all. The fear of Persia had always been central to the strategic thinking of the emperors of Constantinople. Now this fear was realized. Under Khusro I Anoshirwan (530–579) the Persian bid to join Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean coast was on again. The head of a vast empire which stretched from Mesopotamia across the Iranian plateau into Central Asia, the Persian King of Kings enjoyed a perpetual military advantage. From 540 to 628, the “running ulcer” of war with Persia dominated the politics of the East Roman empire. The clash of superpowers throughout the Middle East, in a series of military and diplomatic encounters which ranged from the Caucasus to Yemen, made the other frontiers of the eastern empire seem of secondary importance.52
Italy was instantly neglected. Reduced to a military sideshow, imperial rule could not be securely established throughout the peninsula. An entire, old-world provincial society died in Italy, as the Po valley and the Apennines became an uncertain frontier region defended by a handful of imperial troops, first against the remaining armies of the Ostrogoths and, a decade later, against the war-bands of the Lombards, who arrived in northern Italy in 568.
The Lombard invasion proved decisive for Italian society. It coincided with nothing less than a social revolution. The final frontier established after 568, between the “Roman” enclaves along the coast of Italy and the territories controlled by Lombard dukes and kings, was not only a military frontier. It exposed a deeper social and geographical fissure in Italian society itself. The line of the frontier between the territories controlled by the East Roman empire and those controlled by the Lombards coincided with the division between coastline and hinterland, which had developed as a result of the recession of Mediterranean trade after the impact of the plague of 542. Lombard rule represented a victory of a more rural world over a weakened, imperial Mediterranean.53
Along the Danube, also, and as far south as the Aegean, great gashes began to appear in the imperial structure. After 550, Slavic tribes penetrated the mountainous hinterland of the Balkans. They reached as far as Greece and the Dalmatian coast. Small groups of farmers and pastoralists, stolidly indifferent to imperial pretensions, the Slavs welcomed Roman runaways and captives. They incorporated them with ease into their own tribal system. For that reason, they grew at a rapid rate. The Sklaviniai – the areas of Greece and the Balkans controlled by the Slavs – were an ominous sign. As with the Lombards in Italy, so with the Slavs; their settlements were not the result only of military conquest. They showed that an entire landscape had come to reject the imperial order. Established in the hinterland, away from the coast, the Sklaviniai, in effect, were stateless zones. Their inhabitants, Slav and “Roman” alike, were happy no longer to pay taxes or to provide soldiers for the emperor. If they identified with an imperial system at all, it was with the new nomad confederacy of the Avars, an avatar of the empire of Attila, which formed along the Danube in the 580s.54
Despite so many violent dislocations, following the plague of 542 and the revival of war with Persia, Justinian maintained the momentum of his quest for religious unity. Authoritarian as only a Roman emperor could be, he was not a violent man. He simply expected those around him to be swept into sharing his own, terrifying certainty on matters of belief. As emperor, he had considered it to be his duty to reform the inherited body of Roman law. In theory at least, the entire legal system of the empire came from his head alone. He approached Christian doctrine in the same way. He was confident that he could reinterpret the entire tradition of the Greek Fathers of the Church (a tradition which both sides held in common) so as to make the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon acceptable to Monophysite dissidents.55
Justinian was not unrealistic in these negotiations. He went for the “swing vote.” His main concern was to convince theologians in Syria and Asia Minor. He did not concentrate on Egypt, which he knew to be a monolithically Monophysite province. Syria, however, was more equally divided between Monophysites and Chalcedonians. In any case, Syria and the highlands to its north were the frontier provinces which now had to face continuous attack from the revived Persian empire. Justinian’s theological politics were directed toward that crucial area.
When Justinian thought it necessary, he could be a good listener.
He sits unguarded in some lobby of the Palace to a late hour of the night, and enjoys unrolling the Christian Scriptures in the company of aged priests.56
He knew when to compromise. He shared with the Monophysite opposition a deep reverence for the theology of Cyril of Alexandria. One of the principal reasons for Monophysite opposition to the Council of Chalcedon was that it seemed that Cyril (though dead by that time) had not been sufficiently respected by the council. He was denied a total posthumous victory. The bishops at Chalcedon had praised the theology of Cyril, but they made a fatal mistake in Monophysite eyes. They had accepted as “orthodox” a group of Syrian bishops – most notably Theodore of Mopsuestia, near Antioch, and Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, also near Antioch (modern Nabi Khoury on the Syrian–Turkish frontier). These bishops were known to have attacked Cyril vehemently. It seemed to Justinian that the part of the proceedings of Chalcedon which accepted these bishops as orthodox could be disowned in order to appease the Monophysite supporters of Cyril. Cyril’s critics would be declared, retrospectively, to have been “heretics.” The Council of Chalcedon had been wrong to accept them back into the Church.
It took a decade of tortuous negotiations before a fifth “worldwide” council (in fact, a mere 156 bishops, drawn from the core of Justinian’s empire) decided, in 553, to disown the three long-dead theologians, who were the bêtes noires of the Monophysites. This meant the formal condemnation of what became known as the Three Chapters – a tripartite dossier of the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa.
Justinian’s enterprise in condemning the Three Chapters had lasting and disastrous effects upon his relation with the Churches of western Europe. Because of the decisive role played in it by the Tome of pope Leo, Chalcedon had been regarded by Latin clergymen as “their” council. Every part of it was held to be above criticism. Justinian paid little attention to western opinion. The pope, Vigilius, was browbeaten into accepting Justinian’s drastic reinterpretation of the meaning of Chalcedon. He was bundled on to an imperial ship which had sailed up the Tiber to fetch him to court. On one occasion he was dragged from sanctuary in the church of the papal delegation in Constantinople with such violence that the heavy marble altar, whose column he had grasped, almost collapsed upon him.
This was not the way that bishops were accustomed to being treated in the West. Altogether, it was an ugly incident. It made the “universal” empire of Justinian appear small and shabby in Latin eyes. Latin opponents of Justinian’s decision on the Three Chapters treated East Rome as an alien world, truly “Greek” in its devious and tyrannical ways. A further, doctrinal fissure opened up in Italy. The newly established kingdom of the Lombards sheltered a vocal group of conservative Latin clergymen in northern Italy. They asserted that they would not accept directives on dogma handed down by the emperor to cities in the “Roman,” imperial parts of Italy – to Rome and Ravenna.57
Justinian, however, was quite prepared to sacrifice the good opinion of the Latins to make sure of Syria. What is remarkable is that the Monophysites, who stood so close to Justinian in their basic assumptions, remained unimpressed even by his attempt to make the Council of Chalcedon inoffensive to them. Driven too fast for too long, the complex mechanisms of imperial persuasion no longer worked.
An emperor who wished to command clergymen also had to know how to cajole. In the first decades of his reign, Justinian had done this with considerable success through his remarkable consort, Theodora. Theodora was known even to her Monophysite admirers, quite candidly, as “Theodora, formerly of the brothel.”58 The empress had been a circus performer and, later, the kept woman of a provincial governor. We are told of her sexual escapades in great detail by Procopius who, as a disillusioned politician, wrote a memorable Secret History. In the Secret History Procopius savagely caricatured the emperor whom he had once praised. He portrayed the misspent youth of Theodora with memorable obscenity.59
But Procopius gave only half the story. Theodora was a good example of how East Romans expected sudden conversions, even of the most unlikely persons. She settled down, her professional life behind her, as a devout Monophysite. She became close to the great theologian, Severus of Antioch (465–538), whose works she read in editions specially prepared for her in large, formal script.60 One suspects that Justinian was more fascinated by Theodora’s intense converted state than by the intricate sexual savoir faire ascribed to her by Procopius: she was yet further proof that, in Justinian’s empire, reform was always possible.
Theodora’s patronage had kept the Monophysite leaders in play. Bishops and abbots dispossessed by Justinian were settled by Theodora in respectable retirement in Constantinople, temptingly close to the court. By this means they were also kept at a safe distance from their restive flocks. In the early part of his reign, Theodora represented a principle of unofficial tolerance which the forceful Justinian could not allow himself to show in his public pronouncements. When Theodora died, in 548, Justinian was disconsolate. His subsequent handling of religious opposition did not show the same certainty of touch.61
By the 550s, the provinces themselves had changed. Less could be done through the cities. Though backed by force and substantial bribes, Chalcedonian bishops nominated by the emperor lacked authority. They were frequently discomfited by reminders of the desert, in the form of intransigent Monophysite holy men who came in from the country. In the middle of one imperial campaign to impose a Chalcedonian bishop on the city of Amida (Diyarbekir, eastern Turkey), Symeon the hermit, who usually lived in the neighboring mountains, suddenly appeared in the main basilica: “a strange and outlandish sight … clad in a patchwork of rags made of sackcloth and carrying the Cross on his shoulder.”62 Symeon urged the congregation not to submit to the “impious” Council of Chalcedon. He was a reminder that the precious essence of sanctity was not to be found upon a bishop’s throne, but out in the hills.
In Syria, the plague had accelerated a long-term development by which town and country came to level up with each other. For Monophysite clergy, to lose control of the cities was no longer to be rendered marginal. It was to “relocate,” much as a modern business might relocate from a deteriorating downtown. Bishops took up residence in great monasteries connected with large villages. In these villages, the local aristocracy had built substantial houses and had endowed churches as impressive as any that could be found in a city. In Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere, informal networks based on great villages had become as important as were the urban structures of the imperial administration and the imperial Church.63
The Monophysites were quick to take advantage of this weakening of imperial control. Between 542 and 578 Jacob Baradaeus (Burdona, the “rag man”), the Monophysite bishop of Edessa, took the fateful step of ordaining an entire Monophysite counter-hierarchy. The Monophysites would no longer compete, as one theological party among others, to control the single Church of the empire. They would have a Church of their own. Jacob always wore the wild rags of a Syrian holy man. He travelled incessantly all over the eastern provinces, “causing the priesthood to flow like great rivers.” He set up 27 metropolitans and was said to have ordained 100,000 clergymen. Not surprisingly, the Monophysites came to be known as “Jacobites,” from the numerous ecclesiastical progeny of Jacob Baradaeus.64
The Monophysite Church which Jacob created was not like the old Church of the empire. It was not a vertical structure, where separate urban communities were piled one on top of the other, in a pyramid which culminated at Constantinople. It consisted, rather, of a set of region-wide networks. Town and country were equal, because equally covered by the long tentacles of a shared religious identity. Monophysite clergymen travelled along these tentacular systems of loyalty – visiting a monastery here, a holy man there, ministering to a village community on the edge of the Syrian desert or encouraging a confraternity of pious lay persons established in Constantinople. This is the world revealed to us by the Ecclesiastical History and Lives of the Eastern Saints written by the remarkable Monophysite, John, the titular bishop of Ephesus (507–588). John’s heroes and heroines were all part of a fluid but tenacious group of “orthodox” (that is, Monophysite) believers. Religious ideas flowed rapidly along such Monophysite networks, bypassing the accustomed structures of the city-based state Church.65
Even the frontiers of the empire were ignored by the Monophysite community of believers. In the course of the sixth century, Monophysite missionaries created what has aptly been called a “Commonwealth” of Christian kingdoms along the periphery of the empire. The Armenian aristocracy rejected Chalcedon in 551. Far to the south, Axum and Nubia became independent kingdoms, loyal to the Monophysite beliefs of Egypt rather than to the faith of the emperors of Constantinople. Arab sheiks on the borders of Syria emerged as major patrons of Monophysite monasteries. Monophysite clergymen travelled with ease among their co-religionists from Constantinople to Persian Mesopotamia. The heavy collective sense of a single urban community joined around the celebration of the Eucharist, with which we began this chapter, gave way to a world of juxtaposed, extended networks which stretched through town and village alike. Chalcedonians and Monophysites lived side by side, without mingling, throughout the Middle East. Each felt that they had more in common with distant co-religionists than with their “heretical” neighbors in the same city.66
The generations after Justinian were marked by disastrous wars with Persia, by increased violence between “Blues” and “Greens,” and by the strengthening of the dissident, Monophysite Churches. But they also coincided with a flowering of hagiography. The stories of the saints written in the eastern empire are the equivalent of the writings of their contemporary, Gregory of Tours. Their authors shared with Gregory an urge to map out all aspects of the sacred as it impinged on day-to-day life. But the form these stories took was subtly different from the form taken by the hagiography of Gregory of Tours. Gregory wrote to record the moments and the places where Paradise had come close to earth. In the eastern empire, by contrast, Monophysites and Chalcedonians wrote so as to uphold the solidarity of their respective Christian communities. Each did so by exploring the manner in which God’s grace penetrated, through miracles and holy persons, into every nook and cranny of society.
The works of East Roman hagiography of this time represent the autumn fullness of a distinctive Christian culture. They followed a century of experiment in rendering Christianity universal throughout the empire. The great basilica churches of the eastern world had become places of newly elaborated liturgical drama. They offered a form of “sacred theater” which strove to rival the ever-present “Church of Satan” – the ancient theater and the Hippodrome. The hymns of Romanos Melodes, a Syrian immigrant to Constantinople who wrote in the days of Justinian, filled the churches with a new, high form of religious poetry. Borrowed from Syria, the chanted hymn, the kontakion, was a religious form as novel and as stunning, in its own way, as the Baroque oratorio.67 Monophysites and Chalcedonians would not have disagreed with each other so passionately, if they had not shared a spiritual world in which the great themes of Christ’s Incarnation and suffering on the Cross had reached new peaks of drama in the liturgy, preaching, and hymn-writing of the age.68
As we saw at the end of chapter 4, the issue of the joining of divine and human in Christ raised, in its most intense form, the issue of the solidarity between God and human beings, and so, also, of the solidarity between fellow-Christians. It was a concern which the staunchly Monophysite writer John of Ephesus shared with two convinced Chalcedonian writers of the early seventh century, John Moschus (ca.560–634) and Leontius of Neapolis in Cyprus (ca.570–650). While the bishop of Tours had looked mainly to the ancient dead and to the world of nature to find there all-redeeming traces of God’s Paradise, writers such as John of Ephesus looked, rather, into the great cities and villages, to scan the heaving, faceless mass of the poor. If Christ could be found there, then he could be found everywhere. He had not abandoned a fragmented and disillusioned Christian world.69
John’s Monophysite theology may have made him particularly prone to look to the poor in this way. For if Christ had taken on human flesh with such absorptive power as to render it divine, the humblest human body, because it bore the same flesh as Christ, was as charged with sanctity as was the Eucharist itself. To flout a beggar was to trample on flesh mysteriously linked to Christ and so to trample on God himself. John wrote of how two ladies, Susanna and Euphemia, emerged as the leaders of the Monophysite opposition in Amida at the time of Justinian’s persecutions in the 540s. In a region of cruel winters, they put relentless pressure on the rich to support the poor who lay shivering in the streets of the city. Townsmen quaked when they saw Euphemia bearing down upon them, with “her quick and rapid walk … with her toes bruised and her nails torn.” She would rebuke them for neglecting their fellow-believers. “While God is knocked down in the streets and swarms with lice and faints from hunger, do you not fear Him?”70
It was in this manner, with an emphasis on the Christ-like nature of the common man, that sanctity was thought to have flowed back from the desert into the settled land. A sense of the intrinsic holiness of one’s fellow-Christians provided a new way with which to express the solidarity of the Christian community, in a world where solidarity was all too easily lost in a cruel and abrasive age, in which the fellow-feeling which had once supported the citizens of classical cities had evaporated. The following anecdote circulated among the Sayings of the Fathers that formed part of the great reservoir of spiritual guidance that was available to average Christians in the eastern empire:
An important person took great pleasure in watching wild-beast shows, and hoped for one thing only, to see the fighters wounded by the animals. One day he fell into danger and cried to God: “Lord, come to my help in this misfortune.” Then the Lord came to him, His body covered with wounds, and said: “This is how you wish to see me; how then have I the strength to help you?”71
Poignant anecdotes such as this mark the end of an age. Large Christian groups, Chalcedonians quite as much as Monophysites, were prepared to forget ancient loyalties to their cities. Religion provided them with a more certain, more deeply felt basis of communal identity. Even when they lived in villages and cities where their own Church predominated, they had come to see themselves, first and foremost, as members of a religious community. They were fellow-believers. They were no longer fellow-citizens. Although, at the time, the thought remained unthinkable even for extreme Monophysites, within a century after the death of Justinian, the populations of Syria and Egypt, having fallen under Muslim rule, would even forget that they had once lived under a Christian empire.