Jerusalem. The Biography

Dyophysites, but Eudocia, like most Eastern Christians, was a Monophysite. Pulcheria duly expelled her from the Church. When Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem, backed Pulcheria, the Monophysite Jerusalemites mobilized their monkish shock-trooperswho drove him out of the city, a predicament he exploited. Christianity had long been ruled by the four great metropolitan bishoprics – Rome and the eastern patriarchates. But Jerusalem’s bishops had always campaigned for promotion to patriarch. Now Juvenal won this promotion as the prize for the loyalty that almost cost him his life. Finally in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, Pulcheria enforced a compromise: in the Union of Two Natures, Jesus was ‘perfect in divinity, and perfect in humanity’. Eudocia agreed and became reconciled with Pulcheria. This compromise has lasted to this day in the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Churches, but it was flawed: the Monophysites and Nestorians, for precisely opposite reasons, rejected it and split off from Orthodoxy for ever. *
    At a time when the Western Roman empire was being terrorized by Attila the Hun and hurtling toward its fatal collapse, the ageing Eudocia was writing Greek poetry and building her St Stephen’s basilica, now vanished, but just north of the Damascus Gate, where in 460 she was buried alongside the relics of the first martyr. 5

518–630
     
    JUSTINIAN AND THE SHOWGIRL EMPRESS: BYZANTINE JERUSALEM
     
    In 518, aged thirty-five, Justinian found himself the real ruler of the eastern empire when his uncle Justin was raised to the throne. The elderly new emperor was an illiterate Thracian peasant and depended on his clever nephew Peter, who adopted the name Justinian. * He did not come to power alone: his mistress Theodora was the daughter of the Blue chariot-racing team’s bear-trainer, raised among the sweaty charioteers, louche bathhouses and bloody bearpits of the Constantinople hippodrome. Starting as a pre-pubescent burlesque showgirl, she was said to be a gymnastically gifted orgiast whose speciality was to offer all three orifices to her clients simultaneously. Her nymphomaniacal party piece was to spread-eagle herself on stage while geese pecked grains of barley from ‘the calyx of this passion flower’. The sexual details were no doubt exaggerated by their court historian, who must secretly have resented the sycophancy of his day job. Whatever the truth, Justinian found her life-force irresistible and changed the law so that he could marry her. Though her intrigues complicated Justinian’s life, Theodora often provided the will he lacked. When he had almost lost Constantinople during the Nika riots and was ready to flee, she said she would prefer to die in imperial purple than live without it and despatched his generals to massacre the rebels.
    Thanks to their realistic portraits in the San Vitale Church at Ravenna, we know that Justinian was thin-faced and unprepossessing with a reddish complexion, while Theodora, delicate, pale and glacial, with dazzling eyes and pursed lips, stares at us witheringly as ropes of pearls bedeck her head and breast. They were a supreme political double-act. Whatever their origins, both were humourlessly, mercilessly serious about empire and religion.
    Justinian, the last Latin-speaking emperor of the east, believed that his life’s mission was to restore the Roman empire and reunite Christendom: shortly before he was born, the last emperor of Rome had been driven from the city by a Germanic chieftain. Ironically, this enhanced the prestige of the bishops of Rome, soon to be known as popes, and the differences between east and west. Justinian achieved astounding success in promoting his universal Christian empire by war, faith and art. He reconquered Italy, north Africa and southern Spain, though he faced repeated invasions by the Persians who at times almost overran the East. The imperial couple promoted their Christian empire as ‘the first and greatest blessing of all mankind’, suppressing homosexuals, pagans, heretics, Samaritans and Jews. Justinian demoted Judaism from a permitted religion and banned Passover if it fell before Easter, converted synagogues into churches, forcibly baptized Jews, and commandeered Jewish history: in 537, when Justinian dedicated his breathtaking domed Church of Hagia Sofia (‘Holy Wisdom’) in Constantinople, he is said to have reflected, ‘Solomon, I have surpassed thee.’ Then he turned to Jerusalem to trump