Pulcheria the Empress

Origins and early life

Aelia Pulcheria was born on 19 January 399, the second daughter of the emperor Arcadius and the empress Eudoxia, and granddaughter of Theodosius the Great. Of the imperial children — Pulcheria, her sisters Arcadia and Marina, and the one boy, Theodosius — she was the strongest character by every account. Orphaned young (Eudoxia died in 404, Arcadius in 408), the children grew up in a palace governed by ministers while the seven-year-old Theodosius II reigned in name.

Pulcheria received an unusually thorough education — Greek and Latin, Scripture, and the arts of government — and matured early. On 4 July 414, aged fifteen, she was proclaimed Augusta by the senate, and took into her own hands the guardianship of her thirteen-year-old brother, supervising both his education and, in large measure, the government of the East.

The vow of virginity

At about the same time Pulcheria took the step that shaped her whole life and her later veneration: with her sisters she publicly vowed perpetual virginity, dedicating herself to Christ. The historian Sozomen, her contemporary, records the vow and the altar she dedicated in token of it in the Great Church of Constantinople, inscribed with the dedication of her own virginity. Piety and prudence met in the act — it also closed the palace to ambitious suitors and would-be regents — but its effect on the court was profound: under Pulcheria the palace took on the character of a monastery, with fixed hours of prayer, psalmody, fasting, and works of charity, and the sisters occupied themselves with weaving and the care of churches and the poor. Contemporaries traced to her influence the piety of Theodosius II himself.

Empress and church-builder

For a decade Pulcheria was the effective centre of the Eastern government, and even after Theodosius came of age and married the Athenian Athenais — baptised Eudocia, a match Pulcheria herself had promoted — her influence remained great, though the rivalry of the two empresses would later divide the court. Under the eunuch Chrysaphius, who dominated Theodosius in the 440s and favoured her rival, Pulcheria was gradually edged from power and withdrew to the palace of Hebdomon outside the city, living quietly in prayer until events recalled her.

To Pulcheria the tradition ascribes the foundation of the great Marian churches of Constantinople: the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae, which came to house the precious Robe of the Mother of God; the church of the Chalkoprateia, which received her Girdle; and the church of the Hodegoi (the Hodegon), with which the icon of the Theotokos Hodegetria — sent from Jerusalem, tradition says, by the empress Eudocia — was associated. She built and endowed many other churches, monasteries and hospices. In 438 she shared with the Patriarch Proclus in the solemn return of the relics of John Chrysostom — the bishop who had clashed with her mother Eudoxia — to Constantinople, an act of public reconciliation; and around 446 the relics of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste were uncovered through her devotion, an event with which Sozomen closes his history in her praise.

Against Nestorius; Ephesus and Chalcedon

When Nestorius became archbishop of Constantinople in 428 and began to preach against calling the Virgin "Theotokos," Pulcheria became his most formidable opponent in the capital. The sources record open friction between them: Nestorius barred the Augusta from receiving communion within the sanctuary as she had been accustomed, removed her image and repudiated the honours the church of the capital paid her consecrated virginity — and disparaged that virginity itself. Pulcheria threw her weight behind Cyril of Alexandria; the Third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus (431) confessed the Mother of God to be Theotokos and deposed Nestorius. In the popular acclaim of the capital, the vindication of the Theotokos and the piety of the virgin empress were felt as one cause.

Theodosius II died of a riding injury on 28 July 450, leaving no heir. Pulcheria, recalled to power, first had the intriguer Chrysaphius removed, then — to secure the succession — consented to be married to the general and senator Marcian, on the publicly stated condition that her vow of virginity be honoured; they reigned as husband and wife in name, living, as the church historians put it, as brother and sister. Crowning Marcian, she became the instrument of the Fourth Ecumenical Council: she and Marcian convoked the bishops to Chalcedon in 451, where the tome of Leo of Rome was received and the two natures of Christ in one person confessed against Eutyches and Dioscorus. When the imperial pair attended the council's sixth session, the fathers acclaimed Pulcheria a "new Helen," guardian of the faith. The correspondence of Leo the Great includes letters to Pulcheria crediting her zeal for the orthodox faith.

Repose

Pulcheria died in peace in July 453, aged fifty-four, and was buried in the church of the Holy Apostles, the mausoleum of the Theodosian house. She had given away her wealth to the poor and to the Church; the distribution of her estate to the needy was, by her own direction, her last public act.