Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (33 page)

Once more, a dream broke the stalemate. A bishop from the East (his name is now lost) came to Justinian claiming that God had visited him in a dream and ordered him to see the emperor and reproach him for his hesitation: “I will Myself join with him in waging war and make him Lord of Libya.” These words, attributed to God, proved crucial.
¹⁶

The military chiefs’ concerns were understandable. It had been decades since the empire of Constantinople last engaged an enemy in a major naval war, and all of a sudden five hundred ships were needed, plus sixteen thousand soldiers and twenty thousand others to man the oars and the sails and provide other services. A whole city’s worth of men was being sent out to sea, with all the attendant problems of logistics, supplies, hygiene, and discipline.

What’s more, Belisarius was now commander-in-chief (because of his personal ties to Justinian and his successes in Persia and in the Nika rebellion); he was a brilliant young general of armies on land, but he was not an admiral. There was no predicting the outcome of a direct naval engagement. Sailing with him was an advisor who understood
the predicament: the advisor was Procopius of Caesarea, whose writings would become the most influential and controversial historical source about Theodora and her times.

Justinian saw clearly the risks that the operation entailed. He did not forget that it took months for news coming overland from Carthage to reach Constantinople, and vice versa. Several seasons often passed before a person could get a reply to his letter. Sending a letter by sea took a little over a month, provided of course that the ship reached its destination instead of sinking (for the benefit of some future archaeology museum). Perhaps this was why the sailing of the fleet was accompanied by especially fervent prayers, votive offerings, and wild swinging of the smoky censers.

The North African expedition proved to be blessed, or just plain lucky; Belisarius turned out to be a wise and victorious commander even on the sea.

The Roman troops from Constantinople entered Carthage, capital of the Vandal kingdom, on September 15, 533. As early as mid-December there was a decisive battle, at Tricamarum, thirty miles west of Carthage. The Vandal army was routed and its soldiers scattered among the Berber tribes in the hinterland; some were even absorbed into the Roman cities. And so the Vandals were gone from the stage. They had made their grand entrance on the Mediterranean scene at the time of the death of Saint Augustine in Hippo, in 430; now their departure was marked by Belisarius’s capture of Hippo.

While the treasures that the Vandals had stolen from the first Rome in 455 were recovered by the second Rome, the Vandal king Gelimer sought refuge high in the mountains of the Numidian interior. Tracked down and surrounded, he made a request to the imperial army. He asked for a lyre so he could accompany himself as he sang his poems; he asked for a sponge to wash his eyes; and he asked for bread, since the Berbers who gave him shelter—like the ancient Homeric Cyclops—did not eat wheat, the first mark of civilization.

In March 534, Gelimer surrendered. The Vandal kingdom was wiped out, and it no longer dominated the seas and the Balearic
Islands, the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, and the strongholds on the North African coast of the Mediterranean.

Alas, Belisarius’s military and strategic foresight was counterbalanced by myopia in his private life. At the start of the war his wife, Antonina, had thoughtfully furnished his boat with wineskins full of pure water, and she accompanied him on his voyage. With them was her godson Theodosius, a “youth from Thrace.”
¹⁷
She “fell extraordinarily in love with Theodosius [and] had intercourse with him, at first in secret, but finally even in the presence of servants of both sexes.”
¹⁸
Belisarius, his eyes focused on a tidy vision of his victory, failed to see the disorder in his private life. (Just as Justinian, blinded by his grandiose vision of restoration, had not anticipated the public uprising of the Nika.)

Long before the Vandals succumbed, Justinian was taking the victory for granted. In 533, before the decisive battle, the dedication on the
Institutions
had described Justinian as follows:
Emperor Caesar Flavius Justinianus, conqueror of the Alamanni, the Goths, the Franks, the Germans, the Antes, the Alans, the Vandals, and the Africans, pious, happy, glorious conqueror and vanquisher, always August
.
¹⁹
The prologue to that work was far from modest: it referred to an Africa that had been “recovered to the Roman empire and added to our power, thanks to the victories that Heaven has granted us.”
²⁰
And the
Digest
noted that the Vandalic race had been “destroyed” and “all of Africa had been restored to the empire”
²¹
—this
during
the battle at Tricamarum in December, long before news of it could reach Constantinople. Such statements were typical of Justinian’s sense of personal and institutional greatness.

Though “the least military of men,” Justinian proclaimed himself “Africanus” just like Scipio in ancient Rome. At the same time, he devised a detailed administrative system for the conquered territories, creating a new structure, the African prefecture of the praetorium, alongside the Eastern prefecture (for Asia) and the Illyric prefecture (for Europe). The power structure was carefully mapped out, and there was also a celebratory element: the wealthy city of Hadrumetum (now Sousse, Tunisia) was renamed Justiniana. In Carthage, elegant baths
were built and named Theodorianae. Ancient urban centers were rebaptized Theodorias (just as they had been in Asian lands already belonging to the empire), among them Vaga, an important mercantile town and crossroads in the Numidian interior (now Bajah, Tunisia), which was fortified with new city walls.

Even so, claims that “all of Africa” had been totally “restored to the empire” were pure propaganda. Pockets of resistance and intense guerrilla activity remained; then troublemakers were not Vandals but Berber tribes. Besides, Belisarius was not permitted to complete the conquest. He was recalled in the summer of 534: preparations had been made for him in Constantinople.

Belisarius was bringing a lot back with him: Gelimer the Vandal king and his retinue, other captive prisoners, and the Vandal treasure, including the spoils of the sack of Rome of 455. The second Rome had defeated Carthage just as the first Rome once had done. For Justinian, with his antiquarian spirit, this was an occasion to clear his name in the city’s mind. Two years after the Nika rebellion, he would show them the true meaning of “victory.”

The emperor decided to organize a triumph, apparently to honor his general. There hadn’t been one since the time of Trajan’s wars against the Dacii, early in the second century after Christ. And no Roman military chief had scored such a victory since Lucius Cornelius Balbus, under Octavian Augustus, had defeated the Garamantes of Africa in 19
B.C.
The 553-year gap was enormous. For precisely this reason, a triumphal procession and a theatrical celebration of victory would give body and vitality to the idea of the restoration.

Belisarius marched through the city with his army. King Gelimer, dressed in a purple mantle that was even more “scandalous” for being neither imperial nor Roman, paraded along surrounded by his noble-men. He was followed by carts loaded with the treasure of Carthage, a profusion of silver and appealing trinkets from the elegant world of the North African elite, which could hardly be called “barbarian.”

The only possible endpoint for the triumphal procession was the center of the imperial world, the Hippodrome. Justinian and the
imperial grandees were watching the show from the Kathisma. We do not know whether Theodora was with them, but she certainly was watching from some vantage point. She knew every detail of the triumph; indeed, she may have had a hand in designing the event, since a triumph is nothing but a spectacle of supreme power, celebrating and exalting majesty with theatrical exaggeration.

Gelimer was stripped of the purple that he had usurped. He was ordered to prostrate himself before the imperial loge. The defeated king whispered the Biblical refrain “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”
²²
as he cast himself face down before Justinian, Lord of the World. Belisarius, the victorious general, made the same gesture of submission. All other would-be authorities had to bow down before the sovereign Augustus; so it only appeared that Belisarius was being honored. In reality, he was kneeling like a “slave” before his “master” in accordance with the new court ceremonial.

Some saw Belisarius’s prostration as an arrogant abuse of power on the part of the emperor or—more probably—on the part of the empress, who had suggested it from behind the scenes. There was sympathy for the general: the humiliated conqueror, who had been seen as a butcher in the Hippodrome only two years before, was now a hero.

Gelimer’s treasure included the great Menorah, the seven-branched candelabra from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. The Roman emperor Titus had seized it from the Hebrews in
A.D.
71; Genseric, the Vandal king, had plundered it during the sack of Rome of 455. Now the Vandals lost it to Justinian. Because the object had not brought luck to anyone who seized it, Justinian sent it and other objects from the Hebrew temple back to Jerusalem, their natural home, in the custody of the Christian community. But this gesture was not the only event with Biblical implications in the triumph.

The immense arena was crowded with cheering people, like extras on a movie set; Gelimer stood in sharp focus in the foreground. He had an inner vision, a revelation of the “evil plight [in which] he was.”
²³
As if in a trance, he repeated, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” from
Ecclesiastes
, which at the time was ascribed to King Solomon, the
Justinian model of an ideal ruler. And the admonition did not apply only to himself in this moment of humiliation and uncertainty about the future; with the typical ancient sensitivity to allusions, he was reciting the refrain for Justinian, too, for the conqueror, the emulator of Solomon.

For
Ecclesiastes
reminds us that “there is a time for winning and a time for losing,”
²⁴
and Justinian, high in the gallery, truly evoked Solomon, “great and powerful, more than those who’d come before him,”
²⁵
just as he had once dreamed. And yet, even for King Solomon “everything is vanity and useless anxiety.”
²⁶

The heretic Vandal king warned that this day of imperial triumph was Gelimer’s time for failure; some other day would prove to be Justinian’s time for failure. When the
Wars
were published seventeen years later, Procopius’s audience read the warning as a prophecy.
²⁷

Theodora was thinking along very different lines, and as usual her thinking was quite concrete. She was pleased about the events on the African continent. Justinian had achieved a real objective. The great parade through the city and the final scene in the Hippodrome affirmed his strength, his will, and the majesty of the crown on that most difficult and bloody of stages. She and the Augustus were avenging the sack of the first Rome in 455, setting themselves up as benefactors.

As always, she was taking the appropriate precautions. She was especially wary of Belisarius’s growing popularity, and so she considered the general’s kneeling before the emperor as a duty, rather than an arbitrary imposition. It was the ideal occasion to reiterate that the emperor was the one who truly deserved homage. She did allow that Belisarius and his men had been fundamental in crushing the Nika rebellion and that he had led thousands of his personal soldiers, at his own expense, to success in Africa. Still, as Theodora recalled, the general had also won enormous riches in the expedition. She had unmistakable proof of that from her private sources. So she had to be watchful. She could not allow Belisarius to use his wealth to buy favors and prepare himself a path to the throne.

His wife, Antonina, also had to be kept under watch, for the woman knew how to hide precious spoils of war even from Belisarius,
in order to conceal them from the emperor. Besides, her naked “erotic rage”
²⁸
for her godson Theodosius did not suit the feminine ideal that the Augusta championed. Theodora was willing to grant freedom, but would not tolerate open license.

The ruling couple agreed that Antonina and Belisarius (who was to be appointed consul in 535) would spend only a short time in the city. They planned to send him quickly to Italy, to recover the lands that had once belonged to the first Rome; the situation was just becoming ripe.

HEODORA’S
“nature always led her to assist unfortunate women.”
¹
These approving words are not propaganda from Justinian’s law texts; they are not inscriptions carved in the Eastern churches commissioned by the Augusti. They are from Procopius, the same author who had criticized Theodora so harshly in the
Secret History.
Their source is worth noting, but the words themselves are even more significant, for they give a new dimension to Theodora, describing something other than her expressions of pure power.