Jerusalem. The Biography

Palaestina of them. He and his monks killed Jewsand burned synagogues. The emperor banned the violence for reasons of order, but Barsoma ignored him. Now, in Jerusalem, Barsoma’s coenobite shock-troopers, armed with swords and clubs under monks’ robes, ambushed the Jews on the Temple Mount, stoning and killing many of them, tossing their bodies into water cisterns and courtyards. The Jews fought back, arrested eighteen attackers and handed them over to the Byzantine governor who charged them with murder. ‘These brigands in the respectable habits of monks’ were brought to Eudocia, the pilgrim empress. They were guilty of murder but when they implicated Barsoma, he spread rumours that noble Christians were to be burned alive. The mob turned in Barsoma’s favour, especially when he cited a timely earthquake as a sign of divine approval.
    If the empress planned to execute Christians, Barsoma’s followers cried, then ‘we will burn the empress and all those with her’. Barsoma terrorized officials into testifying that the Jewish victims had no wounds: they had died of natural causes. Another earthquake added to the widespread fear. The city was slipping out of control. Eudocia had little choice but to acquiesce. ‘Five hundred groups’ of paramilitary monks patrolled the streets and Barsoma announced that ‘The Cross has triumphed’, a cry repeated across the city ‘like the roar of a wave’ as his followers anointed him with expensive perfumes, and the murderers were freed.
    Despite this violence, Eudocia cherished Jerusalem, commissioning an array of newchurches, and she returned to Constantinople laden with newrelics. But her sister-in-law Pulcheria was plotting to destroy her.
    EUDOCIA: EMPRESS OF JERUSALEM
     
    Theodosius sent Eudocia a Phrygian apple. She gave it to her protégé, Paulinus, Master of the Offices, who then sent it as a present to the emperor. Theodosius, hurt by this, confronted his wife who lied and insisted that she had not given his present away to anyone but had eaten it. At that, the emperor produced the apple. This white lie suggested to Theodosius that what his sister had been whispering was true: Eudocia was having an affair with Paulinus. The story is mythical – apples symbolize life and chastity – but in its very human details it chronicles just the sort of accidental chain of events that can end badly in the hothouse courts of fraught autocracies. Paulinus was executed in 440, but the imperial couple negotiated a way for Eudocia to retire from thecapital with honour. Three years later, she arrived in Jerusalem to rule Palaestina in her own right.
    Even then Pulcheria tried to destroy her, despatching Saturnius, Count of the Imperial Bodyguard, to execute two of her entourage. Eudocia quickly had Saturnius murdered. Once this imperial skulduggery had died down, she was left to her own devices: she built palaces for herself and the city’s bishop and a hospice next to the Sepulchre that survived for centuries. She built the first walls since Titus, enclosing Mount Zion and the City of David – her sections of wall can be seen today in both places. The pillars of her multi-levelled church around the Siloam Pool still stand in the waters there. *
    The empire was now disturbed by the reignited Christological dispute. If Jesus and the Father were ‘of one substance’, how could Christ combine both divine and human natures? In 428, Nestorius, the new Patriarch of Constantinople, tactlessly stressed Jesus’ human side and dual nature, claiming that the Virgin Mary should be considered not Theotokos, Bearer of God, but merely Christokos, Bearer of Christ. His enemies, the Monophysites, insisted that Christ had one nature which was simultaneously human and divine. Dyophysites fought their Monophysite protagonists in the imperial palaces and in the backstreets of Jerusalem and Constantinople with all the violence and hatred of Christological football hooligans. Everyone, noticed Gregory of Nyssa, had an opinion: ‘You ask a man for change, he’ll give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies “The Father is greater and the Son inferior”; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.’
    When Theodosius died, his two empresses faced each other across the Christological divide. Pulcheria, who had seized power in Constantinople, backed the