Justinian and Theodora

Justinian

Justinian was born of Latin-speaking provincial stock about 482 at Tauresium in the Balkan province of Illyricum. He owed his rise to his uncle Justin, a peasant who had come to Constantinople as a soldier and mounted through the guard to the throne as the emperor Justin I; Justin, childless, brought his able nephew to the capital, educated him, and made him his right hand and, in 527, his colleague and successor. For thirty-eight years Justinian ruled with a tireless ambition to restore the Roman world in its unity, its law, and its faith.

His enduring monument is the codification of Roman law: the Codex, Digest, Institutes, and Novellae, gathered by a commission under the jurist Tribonian into what later ages called the Corpus Juris Civilis — the foundation of the legal tradition of both East and West. In 532 the great factional riot known as the Nika revolt nearly cost him his throne and left the city in ashes; from the ruin he raised the new Church of the Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, dedicated in 537, the supreme achievement of Christian architecture, at whose completion he is said to have cried, "Solomon, I have surpassed thee." His generals Belisarius and Narses recovered North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths, and for a time the Mediterranean was again a Roman sea.

In religion Justinian held himself the guardian of Orthodoxy. He laboured, not always with success, to reconcile the Miaphysites who rejected the Council of Chalcedon while himself upholding its definition; he closed the last pagan philosophical school, the Academy of Athens, in 529; and in 553 he convened the Fifth Ecumenical Council, the Second of Constantinople, which condemned the "Three Chapters" and confirmed the Church's Christology against both Nestorian and Monophysite readings. He wrote theological edicts and treatises of his own, and the tradition ascribes to him the troparion "Only-begotten Son and Word of God" (Ὁ μονογενὴς Υἱός), a compact confession of the Incarnation that entered the Divine Liturgy in his reign and is sung at every celebration to this day. He reposed on 14 November 565, and for his defence of the faith and his ordering of the Christian empire the Church numbers him among the righteous.

Theodora

Theodora was born about the year 500 of the humblest origins — the hostile historian Procopius, in his Secret History, makes her the daughter of a bear-keeper of the Hippodrome and an actress of ill repute before she met Justinian. Whatever the truth beneath that invective, she rose to become his wife (a law was altered to permit the marriage) and, crowned with him, Augusta and full partner in his government. Her courage is fixed in the memory of the Nika revolt: when the terrified court urged flight and ships were ready, Theodora rose and refused, declaring — in the words Procopius gives her — that she would not live to be seen without her purple, for "the purple makes a fine winding-sheet"; her resolve stiffened Justinian, the revolt was crushed, and the throne saved. She used her power for the protection of women and worked, against her husband's Chalcedonian policy, to shelter the persecuted Miaphysite clergy and monks, for whom she remained a patroness. She died, probably of cancer, in 548, some seventeen years before her husband.