Marciana the Empress
The Holy Empress Marciana (Euphemia), Consort of the Emperor Justin I
Righteous · Queen · b. late 5th century — d. c. 523/524, Constantinople
Commemorated 27 January — Commemoration of the pious empress; the deposition of her relics in the Church of the Holy Apostles
Marciana (died about 523/524) was the wife of the emperor Justin I (reigned 518–527) and empress of the Romans, remembered by the Church for her piety, her almsgiving, and the austerity of her life amid the splendour of the court. Born of humble origin and first called Lupicina, she rose with her Illyrian soldier-husband from obscurity to the imperial purple, and on his accession took the respectable imperial name Euphemia; the calendars keep her under the further name Marciana, from the official style Aelia Marcia Euphemia. Though she and Justin were childless and left the throne to his nephew Justinian, she was a firm guardian of Christian propriety — famed for having opposed Justinian's marriage to the former actress Theodora — and she raised a church in the capital in honour of the Great-Martyr Euphemia. She reposed a few years before her husband and was buried in Constantinople; the Byzantine synaxaria commemorate her on January 27, associating the day with the deposition of her relics in the Church of the Holy Apostles.
The empress the calendars call Marciana was born in the later fifth century of poor and obscure parentage — the sources name her first Lupicina, and later Byzantine tradition took the name for a servile or captive origin, though her true beginnings are unknown. She became the companion, and then the wife, of Justin, an Illyrian peasant from the region of Naissus (modern Niš) who had come to Constantinople as a young man to make his living as a soldier and who rose through the ranks of the imperial guard, the excubitores, over a long career under the emperor Anastasius I. The two married when both were already of mature years.
When Anastasius died in July 518 without a clear heir, Justin — by then commander of the guard — was raised to the throne, and Lupicina became empress. At her elevation she laid aside her old name, which was thought unfitting for an Augusta, and took the honourable name Euphemia; the calendars afterward keep her chiefly as Marciana, a form drawn from the imperial title Aelia Marcia Euphemia by which she was styled. She and Justin had no children of their own, and the succession passed to Justin's nephew, whom he adopted and raised — the future Justinian the Great.
As empress, Euphemia is remembered for a devout and charitable life rather than for any part in affairs of state, which she left to her husband and his counsellors. The tradition praises her piety, her mercy to the poor, and a personal austerity kept in the midst of the imperial luxury; and it records one conspicuous stand of conscience — her steady opposition to the marriage of her husband's heir Justinian to Theodora, a woman of the theatre whose past she judged unworthy of the imperial house. Only after Euphemia's death was the law altered and the marriage permitted. Of her works of devotion the sources single out the building of a church in honour of the Great-Martyr Euphemia at Constantinople, where she took her baptismal patroness's name in earnest.
She reposed about the year 523 or 524, a few years before Justin himself (who died in 527), and was buried in the capital — the tradition connecting her memory with the Church of the Holy Apostles, the imperial mausoleum where the emperors of Constantinople were laid. The Church numbered her among the righteous rulers, and her name entered the synaxaria under January 27.
Feast and commemoration
January 27 (church date; New Calendar civil January 27; Old Calendar civil February 9). The Byzantine synaxaria commemorate the pious empress on this day — the same day as the great feast of the translation of the relics of John Chrysostom to the Church of the Holy Apostles — and the sources associate her commemoration with the deposition of her own relics in that same imperial church. She has no proper hymnography transmitted under her name; where her memory is kept liturgically she is sung from the common of a righteous woman.
Taxonomy note. This entry types the empress queen under the interim handling of the project's record of open questionsb, which — pending a decision on a dedicated emperor/empress office term — classifies Byzantine imperial saints with the existing royal-office set (king/queen), following the Pulcheria precedent; and righteous, for a lay saint glorified in the ordinary life of the world.
Not to be confused with the Great-Martyr Euphemia the All-Praised (commemorated September 16 and July 11), the third-century virgin-martyr of Chalcedon whose name the empress bore and whose church she built: they are two different saints, and the empress's alternate name "Euphemia" points to her royal patroness, not to the martyr herself.
Iconography
The empress is depicted, where she is imaged at all, in the manner of the Byzantine holy sovereigns: crowned, in the jewelled loros and imperial chlamys of an Augusta, often holding a cross or a scroll, her sanctity marked by the halo. No identified pre-modern icon of her has been located for storage; the entry is listed as wanting an icon, and the common imperial-saint type is described here in its place.