Group Portrait with Empress

Whether we want to or not, we have to look up to Theodora. For her portrait is in a mosaic high over the heads of beholders. It is in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. From the opposite wall her husband, Justinian, emperor of the East Roman Empire, looks out across us. Theodora too bears the insignia of power, clearly visible: the bejewelled triple diadem with the long chains of pearls, over a jewel-encrusted cap, and over her shoulders a cloak of imperial purple. The empress is not aligned with her retinue; hers is the only figure over which no other overlaps. She is going ahead of those who accompany her, leading a procession and bearing a communion chalice to the church. An official is pulling back the drape from a portal, and the dark opening contrasts with the golden brightness of the outdoor scene. The procession is moving across an area of greenery; a fountain is splashing; and over the ladies is a colourful awning. The empress is standing exactly underneath a baldachin borne on stone columns. Although accounts describe her as short and petite, Theodora dominates her court, thanks to her foreground position and her high head-dress. Protocol dictated as much to the artists who worked on this mosaic in the mid-6th century.

The images of the imperial couple in Ravenna served a political purpose. They underlined the presence of the rulers in a city they had only recently reconquered for their empire. They were in a church because the emperor of the East Roman Empire was a religious leader and Christ’s vicar upon earth. Hence the golden nimbus behind Theodora’s head, a reflection of the light divine. This places her on a par with saints and apostles, quite a career for the daughter of a bear-tamer at the Constantinople hippodrome. Meteoric careers were by no means unusual in mobile Byzantine society. The empress’s closest confidant, Narses, probably shown here at her side, was born into slavery in Armenia in 480. Uneducated, and “a slight, to all appearances weakly man”, he made his way by his appetite for hard work and his expertise, both of which he exhibited in political and military positions. Rulers could rely on him. Narses is seen in the modest attitude prescribed by etiquette, both arms concealed beneath his cloak; for it was forbidden to approach the divine rulers with “impure hands”.

Both of the men portrayed in the mosaic are dressed as Byzantine officials, in the uniform of the civil administration, which was organized along military lines. The officials’ belt over the white tunic is almost concealed by the long cloak fastened at the right shoulder. The rank of the wearer was proclaimed by the colour of the cloak and the large rectangular piece of material sewn onto it. This was called a tablion; the emperor’s was gold, that of Narses is the precious purple reserved to the most senior of the seven ranks of official.

Even the black and white footwear was part of the uniform. It was part of an official’s salary and was presented to him by the emperor, together with his certificate of appointment. Many officials studied law and passed difficult examinations; others, such as Narses, had a background in hands-on work. Parents who wanted their sons to rise more easily to high office had them castrated at an early age. Narses too was a eunuch. Only eunuchs and priests could not become emperor in Byzantium - and so posed no threat to the ruler.

The East Roman emperors lived dangerously, in spite or maybe because of their seemingly infinite power. They went in fear of potential rivals in high office, for they were constantly beset with court intrigues, military conspiracies and popular uprisings. In theory the ruler was elected directly by the “people”; in practice, however, it was a small military clique that voted him in.

Thus in the late 5th century Justinian was a rural lad living in a village in Thrace, till his uncle, a dependable professional soldier, was unexpectedly proclaimed emperor by the soldiery. Shortly afterwards, Justinian moved to the capital, Constantinople, where he received an excellent education and presently became the right-hand man of the ruler. This provided him with the means to assure himself of the throne. In 527, on the death of his uncle, Justinian became the official successor of Caesar and Augustus, the absolute over-lord of an empire still known as “Roman” although for the past two centuries it had no longer been ruled from the banks of the Tiber but from the Bosporus. Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine, had moved his capital there in dangerous times when tribes were on the move. Before the city was named after him, it was called Byzantium.

Justinian inherited a vast empire centred on the eastern Mediterranean, united only by the Christian religion and the person of the emperor. The western territories of the old Roman empire had fallen to barbarians. When Justinian came to the throne, the Ostrogoths ruled in Rome and Ravenna. The new emperor took as his great task in life the restoration of the old borders of the Roman empire, and he succeeded; but the areas of North Africa and Italy that were conquered by his generals were lost once more after his death. The East Roman or Byzantine Empire, however, survived until 1453. The only certain likeness that we have of the empress Theodora is this one in Ravenna: large dark eyes, gazing from a narrow face. At this point she was no longer young, about fifty (we do not know when she was born). She died in 548, at about the same time as the church containing her image was consecrated. The portrait was copied from an original done in Constantinople, for in fact Theodora never set foot in Ravenna.

Theodora’s features bear signs of illness (historians suspect cancer) or of the arduous toil of government affairs in an especially difficult time. About 540, plague spread through the East Roman Empire, taking a heavy toll on the population and ruining the economy. When Justinian too was stricken with the plague, the responsibility of government fell squarely upon Theodora. She proved well able to manage, pre-empting potential conspiracies and dealing with the administrative affairs of the empire as well as with military ventures - albeit not to the delight of the generals. This marked the peak of her power. For months, the empress was the absolute ruler in a patriarchal state that normally preferred her sex to be confined to the ladies’ apartments. She was experienced in matters of government, since Justinian had involved her in them from the outset. This was envisaged neither by tradition nor by the constitution; but Justinian wished to share everything with the wife he worshipped his whole life long. He called her his “sweetest delight” or, from the literal meaning of her name in Greek, “the gift of God”.

When he fell head over heels in love with Theodora, then a mere girl and twenty years younger than he, Justinian was already a counsellor to the emperor and in line for the throne. Theodora, by contrast, was from the lower classes. Since her early youth she had been performing on revue stages. “Fair of countenance, and graceful of form”, she could neither dance nor sing, but nonetheless scored immense success with her comic striptease number. In a Leda burlesque she performed with a goose that was trained to pick out grains of corn from between her thighs whilst she writhed in transports of delight. In his "Secret History", from which we know these things, Procopius (the contemporary who also wrote the official histories) described Theodora as “the sort of girl who if somebody walloped her or boxed her ears would make a jest of it and roar with laughter”. The bishop of Ephesus was even blunter: “Theodora was from a brothel.”

No one, not even the church, raised any objection when the emperor’s confidant fell so madly in love with this girl that he resolved to make her his lawful wife. Theodora was crowned empress at Justinian’s side, and from that moment on even her arch-enemies (among them Procopius) could find not the slightest misdemeanour to accuse her of. She acquitted herself with dignity in her new role. She did not forget her earlier experiences, as is shown by an edict she promulgated against prostitution. Doubtless she owed her realism and tough will to the hard youth she spent in the hippodrome, the sleazy pleasure district of the capital: in 532, when whole quarters of the city were burnt to the ground in a popular uprising, and a mob besieged the palace, the emperor and his advisers were already debating flight, going into exile overseas, but Theodora, the one woman in a counsel of men, urged a fight and refused to flee. “I shall never take off the purple”, she declared, “nor shall I ever see the day when those around me do not address me as the empress. The purple will make a good shroud.” At her urging, Justinian’s generals put down the insurrection. Some forty thousand were left dead. Sixteen years later, Theodora went to the grave in the imperial purple. The two ladies immediately beside Theodora cannot be identified with certainty, but while the five companions in the background are all to a similar schematic design, these two have individualized features: the elder, with the high cheekbones, may be Antonina, the chatelaine of the palace and wife of the famous general Belisarius; the younger, who bears a resemblance to her, would then be Johannina, her daughter.

Like the empress, Antonina had had quite a career on the stage; both were strong-willed women who exerted a powerful influence on their partners, an influence that their contemporaries were at a loss to explain except by supposing them to use magic potions. Belisarius did indeed seem very much under his wife’s thumb. Even on campaign he was inseparable from her; and time and again he turned a blind eye to her many blatant affairs.

If Theodora took her friend under her wing despite her scandalous life-style, it was not only out of loyal friendship. Through Antonina she had the popular general Belisarius, who might have been a dangerous rival for Justinian, where she wanted him. And in dealing with countless intrigues, the dependable Antonina proved her worth. In the “silken apartments of the holy palace”, ably informed by a secret service organized by Narses, the two women deliberated strategies to put the empress’s policies into effect and wipe out anyone who got in her way. For one powerful minister of finance, for instance, who had dared to bear tales about Theodora to Justinian, Antonina set a cunning trap: she led the unwary unfortunate to admit, with reliable witnesses listening in concealment, that he had his eyes on the throne. His fate was sealed.

It was also Antonina who carried out Theodora’s plans in Italy in 537. She accompanied her husband there, persuading the reluctant Belisarius to depose the newly and lawfully elected Pope Silverius in Rome, on the orders of the empress. The Pope was replaced by force with a favourite of the empress’s. Indeed, Silverius is said to have been first banished and then murdered, by a servant of Antonina’s, at the empress’s command.

But charges such as these were made by Procopius, the secretary of Belisarius, who hated Theodora, or by authors who disliked her policy on religion. Her whole life long, the empress supported the Christian sect of the Monophysites, even hiding a persecuted bishop in her own apartments for years. The Monophysites were found chiefly in Egypt and Syria, and held that Christ had but one divine nature, and not an additional second, human nature, as the Orthodox Church taught. The Monophysites were persecuted as heretics, and that included the man concealed by the empress. Theodora’s aim, which Justinian tolerated, was to place a Pope at the head of the Church who sympathized with her proteges. That end justified any means; and when the pontiff whom Belisarius had placed on St. Peter’s chair failed to satisfy her expectations too, she had him abducted from Rome and brought to Constantinople, where she could put pressure on him. Shortly before her death she seemed to be within sight of her goal: the Pope was yielding, and the Monophysites were rehabilitated. They praised the empress as “sent by God, to protect his persecuted people in the dangers of the tempest”. But in fact the Orthodox Church was victorious in the long term. It was the church that wrote the history books; and Theodora was not portrayed favourably in them. The hem of Theodora’s long cloak, worn over the bejewelled white robe, is adorned with figures embroidered in gold: the Three Kings bearing their gifts. The detail is minutely done, in coloured-glass mosaic stones of various shapes. The number of pieces used for the two imperial mosaics in San Vitale is put at 322,560, many of them gold. A thousand years on, they still shine. Bedded upon an uneven ground of mortar, they still reflect the light in manifold ways.

We know neither who designed nor who made these works, for the masters who made mosaics did not sign their achievements. They may have been from Italy, where the Roman tradition was still alive, or equally from Constantinople. There were many outstanding Byzantine craftsmen, and throughout the Middle Ages Constantinople supplied Europe with luxury items: implements crafted of ivory, jewellery, and above all costly fabrics. Textiles were the most important sector of the Byzantine economy, assuming almost industrial proportions. But that splendorous workshop that was Byzantium produced not only for the export market (carefully monitored by customs), above all, their wares were produced for the imperial court. The exhibition of wealth was a deliberate act of policy.

“Through the beauty of its ceremonies”, one Byzantine official noted, “imperial power appears a yet more splendid and magnificent thing. It makes as profound an impression on foreigners as it does on subjects of the empire.” The emperor was good at the kind of show one might expect of God’s vicar on earth. One contemporary poet described barbarians admitted to an audience supposing themselves already in heaven when they had barely crossed the threshold of the palace, so great was the splendour.

The protocol that set the emperor apart from mere mortals (and afforded him protection from them) extended to his clothing. Certain colour shades were reserved for the imperial family, and the death penalty could be inflicted on anyone who dared wear those shades. Tyrian purple in particular, the prized genuine purple from Tyre made from snails, was the colour of imperial garb. The shades it came in ranged from scarlet to the costliest brownish-purple amethyst hue, which has been used to dye the silk we see Theodora wearing. The fact that her neighbour is wearing a similar shade indicates her privileged status. Antonina and the other ladies of the court are furthermore wearing white patterned stoles of the latest oriental fashion. All of them, on certain feast days, received their rich clothing from the hands of the empress; for silk fabrics were a state monopoly.

Silk came from remote China, on the caravan route that crossed Persia, where the trade might be interrupted at any time. Not until years after Theodora’s death did wily Byzantine monks contrive to smuggle silkworms out of China in hollowed-out walking staffs. Byzantium likewise guarded the secret of silk well, and the material remained a status symbol.

The motif of the Three Kings embroidered onto the silk is found again in the mosaics of Ravenna, in Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo. There we can see clearly what we can only guess at here: the biblical magi are not entitled to the imperial purple, nor are they assigned the aura of a halo - unlike the Empress Theodora.