Theodora: Empress of Byzantium (Mark Magowan Books) (4 page)

Judgment Day could be forecast with great accuracy, using the different chronologies: the event would occur in
A.D.
1506, if 5494
B.C.
was accepted as the year of the creation of the world; in 1500, if 5500 was the beginning of the calculation; and in 1499, supposing the world had begun in 5501. In the end, it was agreed that the world had begun in 5508, and in an attempt at consistency the year 1492 was projected as the last year of the seventh eon. After that, the eighth and last eon would begin, an eon that would have no end, a period that would raise the just to a state of perfect joy and keep sinners in an everlasting punishment.

Those who, like Theodora, were born about six thousand years after the creation of the world—around the year
A.D.
500—were therefore born at the beginning of the seventh eon. Of course, mankind would have to wait another long thousand years for the fulfillment of the promise of joy and justice ushered in by the incarnation of “the Son of God, Our Savior Jesus Christ,”
⁴
but this final lap in the great race of time allowed some hope. Just as Sunday was the well-deserved day of rest after a week’s toil, so the seventh eon glorified the new man, moving him closer to the Divinity who had found him worthy of His sacrifice. And while it was always a good thing to trust in Providence, it was especially good to do so in the seventh eon. There was a whole
millennium to be filled with charity and good deeds. Never had the world hosted so many devout resolutions.

Those high hopes and good intentions had spread throughout the inhabitants of the lands around the Mediterranean, that sea once called a “frog pond”
⁵
by the ancient philosophers who were deemed to lack the enlightenment of divine grace but were still celebrated for their eloquence. According to modern demographers, approximately 50 million people lived around the Mediterranean basin. Of them, about 1 percent—half a million, or perhaps 600,000 people—believed themselves to be God’s chosen. These were the inhabitants of Constantinople and included Acacius’s widow—whose name isn’t known—and her three daughters: Comito, the eldest, Theodora, and Anastasia, the youngest.

Constantinople had been founded in
A.D.
324 and inaugurated six years later on the site of the ancient Byzantion, where Europe and Asia face each other, by Constantine the Great (emperor from
A.D.
306 to 337), who had granted freedom of worship to Christians and had chosen to be baptized himself. The true cross had come to him in a dream, and when fighting under the sign of the cross he had won great battles. Buried in the church of the Holy Apostles as the “thirteenth apostle,” his presence was still felt in the city that guarded the remains of his earthly body, a city filled with columns and great statues dedicated to him, where the people told and retold an endless number of stories and folk tales.

The city of Constantine was called the “new Jerusalem” because of its religious, Christian importance, and also the “second Rome” because it had inherited Rome’s political primacy as well as its urban and administrative structure.
⁶
It was said that no tribe could ever vanquish it: had any opponent dared to attack the capital, they would have “smashed their heads” against the fortified walls in the attempt.
⁷
Only God could raise his hand against the city, but He would do so only on Judgment Day. The end of the city would signify the end of the Roman and Christian empire, and with that, the close of the seventh and last eon, and thus the end of time.

(In 1453 the Ottoman Turks stormed the city of Constantinople. Assuming that the Creation occurred in 5508
B.C.
, the year 1453 fell within the proper chronological period. But the world did not end in 1492, the last year of the seventh eon; on the contrary, with the discovery of the Americas, that year marked an upheaval and expansion of the world. One world, however—that particular Roman and Christian world—did indeed come to an end.)

In the evenings and nights, in the dim light of oil lamps, Acacius’s widow would recount to her daughters the tales of the capital’s fabled past; at other times, she would comfort them with predictions about their future in the city during the seventh eon. By day, she faced the hardships of daily life.
⁸
As a widow she was protected by the highest church authority in the capital, the Patriarchate, which was in charge of guiding the “widows’ battalion.”
⁹
So she probably turned to the Church’s charity network, which operated as a sort of public welfare center distributing necessities such as dried or preserved food staples, fabrics, thread, and used clothing, and dispensing some form of medical care, all supplemented with spiritual exhortations to patience, forbearance, and trust in divine mercy.

Two popular solutions of the time were available to Acacius’s widow: she could entrust her daughters to strangers who would adopt them, or consign them to a convent or a hospital in the hope that some high-placed benefactor might come along for them. As for her, she could retire from active life in the city and enter an almshouse for poor widows. Given her present hardships and the prospects for the future—she had no sons—these appeared to be reasonable solutions to her predicament.

These solutions seem particularly likely insofar as Acacius’s family was thoroughly Christianized, judging from their names. Names such as Acacius, Comito, Theodora, and Anastasia, while unambiguously Hellenic (Greek was the language spoken at home), also signal a strong Christian element. And they offer us important circumstantial evidence.

The name
Acacius
is derived from the Greek privative
alpha
and
from
kakos
, bad: it means “he who does no harm to others,” or “he who knows no evil,” similar to the Latin Innocentius (a name chosen by twelve popes). Saint Acacius, a Christian soldier who died a martyr in 303 or 305, was worshipped in the city. Also, from 472 to 489 an Acacius had been patriarch of Constantinople.

Because at the time people married extremely young and sought to have children as soon as possible, and because we suppose that Theodora was born around the year 500 and Comito was perhaps three years older (born around 497), it is reasonable to assume that Acacius was born during the tenure of Patriarch Acacius and had thus been baptized with the name of the patriarch. This would place his birth in or near Constantinople in the year 475 or shortly before. Acacius’s family was probably linked to the patriarch by patron-client bonds or some other dependent relationship. When Acacius the bear keeper died in 503, he may have been thirty years old; life expectancy for a man at the time was barely forty years.

The Greek names of the three orphan girls are further evidence that the family held the Christian religion in high esteem. Theodora (
theou dôron
in Greek) means “gift of God”: quite a different meaning from her modern myth as a toxic femme fatale. The name of Anastasia, the younger sister, evokes not only
Anastasis
, the resurrection of Christ—a fundamental tenet of Christian faith—but also Anastasius, the emperor at the time of her birth, who ruled from 491 to 518. No information has survived about Anastasia, but Comito, the eldest, has left historical traces. She married into an illustrious family and bore a daughter, Sophia (“wisdom”), who became the first woman after her aunt Theodora to ascend the “Roman” throne of Constantinople.

The name
Comito
echoes the Greek verb
komaô
and the noun
comet
: the name means “she of the bountiful locks,” or the “long-haired one” (comets can be seen to have long “tresses”). Possibly Comito was born with an unusual shock of hair, and that was reflected in the name her parents gave her. Or perhaps they were thinking of a comet in the sky, and chose the name to invoke a happy destiny for their firstborn “star.” Since there is no evidence that any real comets were racing
through the skies at the time, it is most likely that her parents referred to the star that marked the birth of Jesus, the one the Eastern Magi followed to reach Bethlehem.

These, then, were the three daughters of Acacius the bear keeper and of a mother whose name and background we don’t know, although a later (unreliable) legend claimed that she was the sister of a great general of the empire.
¹⁰
At most, we can guess her age: she might have been twenty-five years old when Anastasia was born, the last of these daughters to be baptized with such clearly Christian names. Possibly these female births did not satisfy the parents. They would have wanted sons who could soon contribute to the family income. Sons who could work at trades suitable to their social class: in the footsteps of Acacius, working with wild beasts or spurring chariot horses; or maybe going into military service, perhaps even at the emperor’s palace, where they would wear splendid plumed helmets.

There must have been several failed pregnancies in an effort to bear a son, especially because spontaneous abortions, premature births, and stillbirths were common at the time, the infant mortality rate standing at about 50 percent. If that was the case, we might detect—in Theodora’s name especially, meaning as it does “gift from God”—a hint of thanksgiving: if not for a male child, at least for a successful pregnancy.

It was a Christian family, but it was not the kind to withdraw from the world. As a matter of fact, Acacius’s widow seemed especially unsuited for such a prospect. She had strong ties and alternative relationships that complemented the church-based network, and she made good use of them. As a result, when her husband died she was able to maintain her lifestyle as a mother of three young children and as a woman—not just as the heartbroken widow of Acacius or as a “bride of Christ,” as her religion would have wanted. Soon, the little orphan girls had a new father, a stepfather “who … would later assist her in both the care of the household and in her first husband’s occupation.”
¹¹
There is a slightly disparaging tone in the Greek words of the only primary source we have on this topic, Procopius’s
Secret History
, and it is not clear
whether the union was a common-law arrangement or an actual second marriage.

These changes happened thanks to Asterius, the highest public figure to attend Acacius’s Christian funeral. He wielded power in a city that, while not exactly opposed to religion, stood at some distance from it, according to Saint John Chrysostom (“Golden Mouth”), who had been patriarch of Constantinople about a century earlier and had compared it to a Satanic temple.
¹²
This is harsh criticism, but it is true that around
A.D.
500—at the onset of the seventh eon—Constantinople was poised not only between Europe and Asia, but also between antiquity and the Middle Ages. There was a thriving worship of holy relics such as fragments of the Golgotha Cross, the Nails of the Passion, the Crown of Thorns, the Virgin’s Cloak, and other signs and mementos of Jesus and Mary, of saints, martyrs, and the elect. At the same time, ancient classical life lingered on.

For example, in spacious aristocratic mansions—of which there were hundreds—servants drew baths for their masters and mistresses and prepared and served meals for their comfort and pleasure; domestics and secretaries delivered polished epistles; and litter bearers carried the rich to their destinations in elegant sedans. The masters drew the curtains across the sedans’ windows to block out the sight of beggars (heirs to a very Mediterranean patron-client tradition) who loitered about the famed porticos flanking the city’s wide streets and majestic squares.

These lords, the potentates, would be carried to the imperial palace for a court function, or to the thermal baths that were as heavily patronized as the city churches. Or they might visit those “Satanic” theaters for lighthearted shows such as mime sketches, farces, and tableaux vivants, or sophisticated mute pantomimes that retraced the exploits of divinities that had been evicted from their “pagan” temples but were still dear to the public. Or the masters might visit other places, such as the Kynêgion (the amphitheater) or the Hippodrome (the racetrack): the show-business world of Acacius the bear keeper and of the powerful Asterius.

+ + +

The broken columns that now stand as sad mementos in the center of At Meydani Square in Istanbul were intact at the time, and majestic. Like other monumental works, they decorated the central track (
spina
in Latin) of Constantinople’s Hippodrome. The chariots raced round and round, and the charioteer’s skill was measured by his success in overtaking the other chariots around the curve at the end of the
spina
after racing down straight tracks about twelve hundred feet long. These shows were so popular that the public was known to watch as many as twenty-four races in one day.

5. Constantinople’s Hippodrome in a late-15th-century engraving. From Onofrio Panvino’s
De ludis circensibus,
Venice, 1600.

According to ancient travelers’ accounts (confirmed by modern archeological finds), the vast size of the Hippodrome was a spectacle in itself, a wonder of the civilized world. About fifteen hundred feet in length and more than six hundred feet wide, it could seat at least one hundred thousand spectators, or about one-fifth of the entire urban population [
fig. 5
]. In ancient imperial Rome, it was equaled only by the grand Circus Maximus beneath the Palatine Hill. The Hippodrome was an important hub of city life. It was central to the city’s emotional life as well as its economy, traffic, and supply network. It attracted loafers, greedy bettors, and fans who rooted for the two rival teams or
“factions.” These factions—the Blues (also called the “Venetians”) and the Greens (known as the “Prasini”)—had inherited and simplified a tradition of the first Rome, which had four different teams (Whites and Reds as well as Blues and Greens).