Gone Medieval - Theodora, the rags to riches Empress

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Dr. Eleanor Janega and author Stella Duffy dive into the extraordinary life and legacy of Empress Theodora.A woman who rose from the lowest ranks of society as a prostitute at the Hippodrome to capture the heard of an emperor to become the most powerful woman in the Byzantine Empire.A strident feminist, she fought for women's rights bringing in laws to stop sex trafficking and punish rape, Theodora was a game changer of the highest order who was venerated a as a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church.MOREThe Rise of Constantinoplehttps://open.spotify.com/episode/0xDnUgTBWpztIx2NCDrFPtJustinian: the Greatest Byzantine Emperor?https://open.spotify.com/episode/5rCisdx9LPzINtcXPa1pRgGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. It was edited by Tim Arstall, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-onSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here.

Before we begin, a word of warning. This episode discusses sex work, sex trafficking, and brothels in general ways. So you may wish to have a listen without little ears around in order to make a decision if it's appropriate for them first. The year is 532. and Constantinople, one of the greatest and most populous cities on earth, is in flame. Rival factions of the city's two biggest chariot teams, the greens and the blues, are in the streets baying for blood. Thousands have been killed, and the monumental buildings of the capital of eastern Rome are burning one after the other. The Emperor Justinian wishes to flee, but he's stopped by his Empress Theodora.

This is a woman who will not leave her city and her people, even if they threaten her life. She is a woman with the force of will to put a stop to any talk of the imperial household put to flight, and the sort of woman who can turn the tide of a riot. This was the sort of fortitude that allowed a woman like Theodora to gain the throne in the first place. Her rise to power was exceedingly unlikely. She was born the daughter of a bear trainer for the Green Chariot faction, and upon his death, she and her family joined the blues where she performed, well, we aren't exactly sure what she performed.

Certainly, she danced. She may have acted. And she may have performed sex acts, as the line between actress and sex worker was so blurry as to be more of a smudge in the early medieval period. But if she was born to the Greens, she died in imperial purple. And today to discuss one of the most incredible lives ever lived, I'm joined by Stella Duffy, the author of two works of historical fiction about the Empress Theodora. Theodora actress, empress, whore, and The Purple Shroud. Stella, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you so much.

Delighted to be with you. I am delighted to have dragged you here because you've written some books that I very much love. And this is a bit of a dream come true for me. So thank you for agreeing to this. I brought you on today to talk about one of my favorite people in history, the Empress Theodora. Yeah. And for those of our listeners, who may not like you and I be slightly obsessed.

Can you tell us a little bit about her and, you know, also her husband, just sitting in the emperor, I guess. Just a bit of a bit. You know, I'm fine, a bit. It's a boo, boring. Well, it's hard to know where to start, but I can tell you that I had never heard of her when I happened to be in Ravenna in Italy,

and I saw the mosaics there. These novels were my 11th and 12th or 10th and 11th. I can't remember. Oh, who's counting? Well, 17. That's how many I've got. I'm pumping. They kept banging on about going to visit their mosaica. And I didn't even know that they were saying the word mosaic because I don't speak Italian. And I was there for a book festival for other books. And I'd had a lovely time. And then there was a day free. And I went, oh, yeah, sure. Take me to see the mosaics. Why not? And seriously, I was so blasé about it. And it was like, yeah, all right, would be a nice enough thing. And I walked into this chapel. And I cannot tell you how. shocked I was, a girl brought up, you know, trad, fairly Irish Catholic, to see that a mosaic from the 6th century had the empress the same size as the emperor. The same size. Jesus was between them, as is appropriate.

He, Justinian, was on the right side with an entire retinue, but she, Theodora, in exactly the same size, with as large a retinue. was on the left-hand side. And I was like, oh, there's something really interesting about this woman. She must be amazing. How can I not ever have heard of her? So then, you know, I thought, well, these are beautiful. It's amazing. You know, they're very old and they've been preserved.

And it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And I felt like an idiot for never having heard of them. And then I went to the desk on the way out and I picked up this pamphlet. And seriously, it was, I don't know, three pages, five pages. And all it says is she was born in Constantinople, probably around 500 AD. We're not quite sure what happened to her, although some people called her a child prostitute. We don't know. And then eventually they changed the law and she got to become the Empress.

And she may have been a poisoner and she may have been a spy. She may have been these things. But we don't know. And by the way, she's a saint in the Orthodox Church. That's right. And I was like, well, that's just way too juicy. You know, I like a good, juicy woman in charge. And how can I never have heard of her?

So I came back to London and I thought, well, there's bound to be novels about her. And I looked them up. This is the early days of the internet. And there was almost nothing. The only thing I could find was a bit in Robert Graves, mostly in his Belisarius book. And like, you know, which is all battles anyway. And she's barely there.

And where she is, she's not very well drawn because Robert Graves wasn't very keen on women. And if he was, they were Livia and killing men. And then I found Procopius. And I was like, oh, mate. Oh, come on. So Procopius is the secret history, is purported to be the true story of what was going on in Constantinople, in the palace, as the fall of Western Rome happened and the rise of Byzantium begins. and it's all about how evil Theodora is.

And I was looking at this and just thinking, oh, you don't like her very much. What's she got that you don't like? And when a man, a historian, tells us that a woman is evil and wicked and bad and dangerous, and you know she's a saint in the Orthodox Church, you have to start thinking, oh, come, and I'm not a historian,

but I have always been interested in the early church and how women were written out of it. And the way that women were written out of the early stages of Christianity to suit the men in power. And also how Christianity became a tool of the Roman Empire. You know, that's really juicy. And so I thought, well, there's stuff here. The other thing that led me to believe that Procopius wasn't entirely telling us the truth,

is that he writes that Justinian the emperor walked through the palace at night with his head underneath his arm. And so I was like, yeah, no, you're lying, but what are you hiding? And then I started to do some research. There wasn't a lot. There's a great book by the Italian Paolo Cesaretti. I'm probably pronouncing his name wrong. But it's a really good, not particularly academic, and until recently I wasn't an academic,

a count of her life. But even so, it's half the size of these books. And it's still quite thin. So that just led me to think, okay, here's this amazing woman. She becomes empress at a time that being an actress meant that you would have had to be a prostitute to be an actress. You know, one of the reasons that I used to be an actor myself, one of the reasons we have for decades not use the word actress about ourselves, is because it did originally also mean whore. That's what it meant.

It didn't mean woman actor. Women weren't allowed on the stage. So if women were allowed on the stage in Theodora's time, in Greek times beforehand, they were only allowed on as scurrilous dancers, their version of a pole dance or a strip club. And they also worked backstage as prostitutes. Always for men pimps, almost always. I've changed that in my book to make it more juicy, to have a woman in control. And so the idea that this woman could rise from what is effectively child prostitution. to becoming the most important woman in the empire

felt to me just like a really beautiful story that needed telling. And so as a non-historian who had loved history at school and done a little bit in my first year at university, but only that, I just read as much as I could and realized there wasn't that much, and that meant that there was loads to make up. And that's such a great key, right? Because you're absolutely right. one of the things that we really struggle with in terms of Theodora is that our sources are pretty scant on the ground and they're largely procopious.

And, you know, the secret history is a wonderful thing to read. I enjoy reading it very much. Do I believe that, you know, Justinine walked around with his head under his arm? I do not. Do I believe that one of Theodora's acts was getting shagged by a couple of swans in order? to do Zeus and Leda. No, I mean... No, but I use that, given my own theatrical background,

as a really interesting scene that you can... Her life is so full of set scenes. There's what you can write with them performing in the Hippodrome. There's what you can write about what it's like to be poor and young at that time. When Constantinople, you're in central London, I'm in South London, Constantinople was the epitome of a melting pot. It probably had more different people from different nations than modern-day London. And it had so many different languages that the empire had been speaking Latin,

but they were speaking Greek because they were over on that side. But there were also people speaking Syriac, Aramaic, all sorts of versions and dialects of what we now know to be Arabic, but they weren't necessarily calling it that at the time. There were people speaking classic Hebrew. And there's a big crossover between Arabic and Old Hebrew. So it's really interesting and juicy and there's so many different people to consider this city that is, as the empire is moving from, of course, it's even imperialist to call it the west to the east. You know, the east is only the east because we're looking at it from Europe.

The east wouldn't, we wouldn't say, oh, that's the Orient if we were centered there. So as we're moving from Europe to what we now call the Middle East, and we only call it that, because Europe used to be the centre for history writers, not for people. I mean, China was always the centre for the people in China. And they'd be going back thousands of years before. And Silk, which is one of the things that Theodora brought to Constantinople, it just felt to me like there was all these amazing points that are pinpointed by history. Justinian did become the emperor.

and he wasn't necessarily, he was the nephew of the previous emperor Justin. He wasn't necessarily going to become the embryo. And he was a bit stayed and boring compared to the people it could have been. He'd been a soldier, but he wasn't, you know, one of the great fighters. But I have a friend who's a high court judge, and I have a couple of friends who are lawyers, who I went to university with, and they got the proper jobs. I ended up definitely not getting proper jobs. And they know about Justinian's Codex.

You know, Justinian was the first person to take what we, He now understand to be largely European law, on which British law, on much American law, on which Canadian law, Australian law. French law is different, but a large amount of the English-speaking world's law is based. Justinian brought that all together in the Codex. He did astonishing things and kind of kick-started the empire but from a different city, not from Rome, from Constantinople. And that's where I thought they were really juicy. And then there's the building of the Aes Sophia, which is the most phenomenal building in Istanbul. And any of your listeners who've been to Turkey to Istanbul will have gone to the Aya Sophia.

And in the first book of these two, it's the old church that she goes to because that one burned down in the riots. But the building of that church, the dome of the Aiosophia, the original one, not the one that's now. the dome of the original one was higher than the one that's now. It later fell in an earthquake. I can't even remember which emperor it was in Russia at the time, but sent envoys to come and see it because it was considered this most amazing wonder of the world. And it is said that that's why they took Christianity back to Russia because they were so amazed that a dome could exist.

We take them for granted. But this is the first proper, enormous. dome in a man-made building that wasn't, I guess, a version of an igloo or a version of a woven tent roof. That period of time is phenomenal, and there was a woman at the center of it. I could not agree more, and I think that Constantinople is one of these really unsung places in the public imagination. You know, here it was one of the largest cities in the world. You know, it's up there with Baghdad and, you know, Peking. It's as large as anywhere on the planet. And yeah, I think that it's so great that it's still grabbing imaginations and that you were able to kind of bring it to life.

I love writing about place. And I've been to Istanbul and I went for research for this book. And of course, very little of the original is there, except that the sun still rises in the same place. The golden horn is still following the same part of the shore on the water. The Bosphorus is still in the same place. So even when I'm writing about something 1,500 years later, the land is still there. The water and the land are still the same. And so that really helped feed what I was writing.

Let's just talk a little bit about Theodora and where she came from, because you've mentioned that she grows up in poverty and on the stage. Do we know exactly how Theodora and Justinian met? We don't officially, as far as I know, you may know things that I don't. There are suggestions, and I followed this up in my books, that they were put together because they were from different factions. So by this time, instead of the four factions that Rome had had, the white, green, blue and red, there was largely just two. So the blue and the greens. They also had different views on Christianity, and I'm still not totally clear on this because it's very complicated. But the best understanding I've ever come across is that as Jesus hadn't yet been,

worked out how divine he was, was he entirely God? Was he entirely God and human? Or was he God and human mingled? And they aren't the same. And I know that they might sound the same to anyone who wasn't raised Christian, but I'd promise you at the time, they weren't. There was a divide in Christianity as well. And it's the early church and, you know, what has been the Roman Empire, what is going to become the Byzantine, is trying to unite. Because it's a great way to keep people in suppression. We'll all have the same faith. We'll all speak the same language. You know, that's how you keep people together.

They don't get to go off and have rebellions by fermenting rebellions by speaking in their own language. So Justinian Theodore officially come from two different factions, the blues and the greens, they officially, as far as we know now, believed in two different sides of this Christianity debate. And so there is some suggestion that they were put together because it would look good. It would help the people ally. It would stop this possibility of Rome. You know, it was already bad enough that the Roman Empire was fighting off the Huns and the Visigoths and the Goths over in Italy. What we now know is Italy.

And they were trying to reestablish it from what was the new centre of the earth, Constantinople. And so if you could bring these two people together, if the public could believe in them as allies, then perhaps the idea that we could have the factions come together, the two sides of faith come together. And one of the sources I read said, you know, compared to what we would do now, two football teams are playing a match and we are watching them in a pub and my football team has just scored a goal over your football team. That was the kind of roaring, anger, fighting discussion that people were having about, was Jesus wholly divine, partly divine, part man, part God.

Seriously, they took it that seriously. And so as far as I know, you may know more than me, all we know is that they were officially two very different people. And bringing them together was perceived to be useful for the empire. I then decided to make it a true love match because we also know that he never remarried after her death. And he was alive for another 20 years. And I think that says something. Now, I agree. I think we tend to read them as a love match because of that.

And also because, you know, it may have been politically useful to bring them together, but it does require changing the law, right? You know, it was 100% not okay if someone from the senatorial class to be marrying an actress until they changed the law in order to allow it to happen. It was a really big deal. Here in Britain, there was the whole can Charles Mary Camilla? All of that rubbish. Imagine 1,500 years ago what it was like to say, this person who is from,

From the lowest of low classes, you know, we have some suggestion her father was a bearkeeper, which meant that he was probably pretty good at working in the hippodrome. And she was probably pretty good if even Procopius has this story about Leader and the Swans. But even so, she's definitely not patrician. She's not important enough to be allowed to marry him. They actually changed the law to allow, and this is great because Justinian was a lawyer, right? He knew how to do this work. They changed the law to allow an ex-actress to marry him.

They then changed the law. She wrote a paper, we think. We don't know for sure. Maybe he wrote it. But there's a paper on pimps and prostitutes, which is why the whole story about her being a prostitute comes true, because why else would she have cared? I mean, we can all care about sex work.

And in particular, sex trafficking, you know, people might choose sex work, but they don't choose sex trafficking. We can all care about that without having to have suffered it ourselves. But she both found a institution metanoia on the other side of the boss for us for ex-prostitutes to go and live. Yes, they have to live in repentance, but at least they're not begging on the street. And she writes a paper, or Justinian writes it for her, on pimps and prostitutes that is about we have to stop the pimps being the ones who make the money. And these were the things that made me think, oh, she's amazing, right? And also she brought in the first anti-rape laws.

She brought in the first laws to give women back their dowry. Because this was before Christianity had decided divorce wasn't okay. So men could summarily divorce their wives. I don't want to be married to you. I'm divorced from you now. But they got to keep the dowry. She brought in the law or Justinine did for her that said they get their money back. Now, all of these things suggest a very early prototype feminist.

And that for me really indefinitely. Kate's what's juicy about her, the most interesting stuff, that she wasn't just about power. Of course she was about power. She wouldn't have stayed in power that long with him. There was, you know, there were rebellions. There were all sorts of ghastly things happening. But she definitely cared about her people. And I think that made a huge difference. It's impossible not to think that her early life must have had some impact on her. You know, yeah, her father's this great bearkeeper for the group. and here she is, you know, her family is essentially destitute once her father dies.

The blues take her in, and probably, you know, which is very funny, you know. And but it also just even these details I always find so interesting because it tells us so much about Constantinople, that chariot teams, you know, and the grains and the blues mean this much. And it's not just the chariot scene, is it? It's also your bear handler and your dancers and, you know, all the plays you put on. As well as the leading patricians from the consuls. They all cared about their factions as well.

It mattered to all of them. Absolutely. And when she does get this power, it's very clear. You know, I would argue, and many historians have, that, yeah, she's certainly behind these particular laws on trafficking and pimping. And, you know, sex work is this huge part of the Roman Empire, both sides. Doesn't matter where you are. But she's just saying, look, I just think we should clean it up a little bit. And but I also think it's quite funny because you have on the one hand these big efforts to stop trafficking, to stop pimping, to stop essentially enslaving young boys and women and putting them into brothels.

And then, you know, also, yes, she starts this institution for women who can leave sex work if they want to. And, you know, this is classic throughout the medieval period. You have tons of these. And what does Bacopius do when she starts this really great institution? in this wonderful charitable thing. He's like, yeah, and all the women actually hated being in there. And they were like trying to jump out the windows and kill themselves. And it's like, Procopius, can you calm down for five minutes about this woman?

I had to put him in the book and have her just despise him because he so despises her. And what is so disappointing about this is that his account, because it's the only contemporaneous account, has been treated as if it were truth. It is even though he says Justinian is walking. around the palace with his own head under his arm, it is talked about as if it's truth. And it has been throughout the following centuries. And then it's really problematic because what we get then, you know, Robert Graves does it too. What we get then is we get the men who have the power of writing and sharing stories with us telling us these scurrilous

have to be lies about this woman because she's a woman, because she's a woman, because she cannot write for herself because her story isn't told and the story of all of these women haven't been told. The stories of the women who were forced into prostitution, who were sex trafficked across the empire, as well as the young men, absolutely, the unit boys as well, have not been told because the powerless never get to tell their story. Absolutely. And so now we see someone, this woman who was powerless and she's been raised up to the position of power. So what do you have to do? You've got to talk trash about her behind. your back. And you're absolutely right. I mean, obviously, we're coming a long way now in terms of

redressing this image of Theodora, but it did hold for a long time. And you're exactly right. It's amazing how people will pick and choose within the secret history. Oh, well, obviously, Justinian wasn't walking around with his head under his arm. You know, that's ridiculous thing to say. But she was a poison or a torturer. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, just to be clear for our listeners, You know, the head under his arm thing. Essentially, what is there is that it is an implication that Theodora is a sorceress. And she's magic to him and he's kind of like a sort of zombie person. It's a Mrs. Macbeth syndrome, right?

A woman with power has to be bad. A woman with power, a woman who enjoys power has to be extra bad. And not a proper woman. We only have a male paradigm for power. If we only have a male paradigm for power, what happens when a woman has power is she is talked about as if she's too masculine. And Theodora for Procopius is both too feminine in that she apparently likes sex. God forbid. Oh, no.

And the other one, the other side is, and not female enough in that she likes power too much. Again, God forbid someone in power should like power. But she really comes to her own when the Nika writes, which you've alluded to, break out. Can you tell us a little bit about them? I mean, that was one of the hardest things to write. I sort of seeded it in the early book where basically, in order to address the sorceress thing, I allow her to have visionary dreams that she makes sense of in retrospect. She doesn't believe these things are necessarily going to happen, but they make sense for her in retrospect. And she has a dream in the first book early on as a young woman who's working in the hippodrome

all the time. You can go to Istanbul now and see the size. eyes of the hippodrome. And 30,000 people, I've performed at the globe, and that, when it's packed, has got 3,000 in it. And it feels amazing when the audience respond, and they're that close. But the idea of 30,000 people watching you perform live. I mean, she's the Taylor Swift of her age, right? As a young before, at least. Oh, actually, I'm now going, hmm, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, maybe that's the new Justine and Theodora. Oh, I love that. That's the money of the empire needs, right? That's what we need right now.

Definitely. Anyway, she has a vision in my books anyway that there's all this blood in the hippodrome, all this blood and death. In the second book, which is around the time of the Nica writes, once they're in power, there's a lot of problems. We do know that Justinians spent a lot of money on rebuilding, not just in Constantinople, all across the empire.

He's rebuilding bits of Antioch after an earthquake. He's rebuilding bits here, bits there. He really wants to establish his new Rome. They're not calling it by Zadub yet as far as I know. You may know differently. No, you're bang on. Okay. He wants to establish this Rome as the new Rome,

and he needs big building projects to go, look at me, right? It's the Tennessee Valley Authority and the New Deal. You know, he's going, we've done this. We're amazing. Let's build another big dam. And it's partly to show the sassanids in Persia. It's partly to show the Huns, the Visi Goss, look, we're still amazing. Don't you go mistaking the Roman Empire?

But of course, what happens back in Constantinople is the taxes are getting raised. John McHapadoche, who the people don't like, is raising taxes. He's the treasurer. Theodora doesn't like him in my books either, because she's of the people. And Justinian doesn't get it. He doesn't get, you have to keep the people on your side. I write him like that, but it's clearly partly at least some of what happened, because he's looking to the expanse of the empire. But back home in Constantinople, things are being really difficult. There are more refugees coming in. It's getting poorer.

The people are really struggling. And out of all of this, higher taxes, what's going on? Why do you care so much about the father's reaches of the empire when we're struggling here at home? There's been some problems with, you know, the breadbasket of Rome with Egyptian crops. And there's a big riot. There's a massive riot. And I loved writing that bit because I wrote in some things where I don't think people go, let's have a riot.

Let's do something awful. I think it sort of takes hold like fire. Someone gets angry. Someone does something. Someone does something else. And it kicks off rather than we're all terrible people and we want to burn the place down to the ground. It's much more. We are frustrated and at our wits end.

And we're going to do this because we don't. don't know what else to do. And then, oh God, look what's happened. It's really taken off. And this entire rebellion happens. Belisarius comes in, saving the day. I'm a great soldier. I've been off saving things before. I mean, and I did pretty much stick to Robert Graves' version. You might as well. He writes very well. And he's a great soldier. And he's very good. And he's very warlike. and 30,000 people are killed in the hippodrome. You know, the hippodrome's ground was sand. It's still there.

The blood of those people is still on that land. This, of course, causes, it's not just that the people are subdued. The people are subdued, but and they're furious. There's the possibility of two other people, Pompeius and Hippacious, right? coming in as emperor or emperor support or we'll do it instead, we'll come in, get rid of Justinian, he's the bad guy, he's agreed with Belisarius. And as far as we know from Procopius, but it's also other people, they're getting ready to leave. Justinian is prepared to leave, just take off because it's too dangerous. and Theodora in, at least in the research I did, but changes his mind.

She changes his mind and the phrase that is repeated in lots of the accounts is, I'd rather die in purple, meaning as empress, then leave and leave the purple behind. Purple makes a great burial shroud. And so I got to write her a brilliant speech. so happy. Where she changes his mind, they're scared. They're understandably scared. The people have uprisen, being put down, and then it's still coming, right?

They didn't stop. The fighting hasn't stopped. They're prepared to go and just leave it, leave the empire to somebody else. And she's like, fuck no, we've done this. We're amazing. We just have to stand up and say, we're still. with you. We're still the Justinian and Theodora that you cared about. We're staying and we're going to fix this. And it all turns, as far as we know from the history that we've been taught

about Justinian, it all turns on her saying, purple makes a beautiful burial shroud. And I was like, yeah, I'm totally using that, because that's a great line. And that's why the second book's called the Purple Shround. And she is buried in purple. And it's, it's, it's, it's, It's an amazing idea that a woman's voice, yes, he loves her, yes, she's important, but that a woman's voice might change what all of these men think is the sensible thing to do. Do you think that it was her own history with the blues and greens, which are, again, you know, the Negro riots come down to, you know, they start off by being associated with the chariot factions? do you think that that gave her a sensitivity to sort of understand how these things could be overcome?

Or is it just the fact that she really understands how power can be wielded and doesn't want to give it up? I think she's a performer. Even if you believe Procopius, she's an amazing performer. Even if he's telling the truth about everything, she's the kind of performer that everyone knows her name. Everyone knows about her. Her own history means she understands poverty. She probably understands hunger. She understands slavery and difficulty

and what it's like to not be able to feed your children properly because she's been one of those children. And because of that, I think it's really important to her that she gets to say, they're pissed off and they're allowed to be. Yes, it's factional fighting. It's always been factional fighting. this is the way we express our anger.

They are allowed to be upset. Let's give them a show. And they give them a show. You know, Justinian, by all accounts, and not just Procopius' accounts, is pretty staid. He's a bit boring. He's Dalmatian, for God's sake.

You know, he's not even really Roman. He's not even from Rome, at least if he was from Rome. And he's not one of them, but she is. And there is something about her being their girl, I think, that does make a difference.

Which is not to say the rebellion was not put down brutally. It was. But even so, he goes on to keep being in leadership for decades. So clearly it worked and clearly something worked.

And for my money, why would you not use your theatrical training? Why would you not use your ability to hold an audience spellbound at a point when either you and your husband leave and flee for your lives or you get the people to come back on site.

You've alluded to her purple death shroud and she does eventually die and in 548 and it's relatively young. She dies of breast cancer. How do you think her death impacted Justinian? Because I like you would argue that he was left a bit bereft. You know, for an emperor ordinarily, if you don't have children

and your wife has died, you remarry almost immediately because this is a question of succession. So to me, that indicates we're in mourning. But I assume that you're coming with me on this particular characterization. I think they had to have been a love match. He didn't, you know, he didn't have to stay married to her. When she didn't have children, he didn't have to stay married to her, but he did. And then, you know, anecdotally, Procopoe says it, other people say it.

It's, we don't know for sure. How could we? He visits her mausoleum at least once a week for years and years and years. You know, she remains in his life all of that time. And of course, you're quite right. He should, if he cared about succession in that way, he should have remarried. He should have had sons. Then he could have kept it. going. And it really seems that Justinian cared about the empire. It really seems that Justinian cared about keeping his place. You know, he didn't leave in the Nika Rebellion. So it seems that he cares about it. Well, if he did care about it, then if that mattered most to him, he would have married again, had more kids. She had a child, we think, probably from rape.

We don't know. I put that in as who becomes the Empress Sophia later, because I was going to write a third book, but then I did some other things. And he doesn't do any of the things that you would normally do. I mean, if you think of Queen Victoria, there's a not dissimilar thing there, not that Victoria, you'd have any more children, that's for sure. But, you know, she, it would have been useful for Victoria, in the same way it would have been useful for Queen Elizabeth I,

to marry somebody European. They didn't do it. They're not making those pacts, those alliances, because that was what marriage was. It was an alliance. This man really cared about the empire and he didn't make an alliance.

I mean, there would have been some Persian princess he could marry. And that would have been really sensible too. But he didn't. So I think we really have to assume that it was a proper love match, that they really did love each other. because it doesn't make any sense of his other actions,

all of which were about the empire. Now, we've been talking about the way that Procopius writes her up as, you know, this, a sexual force for evil and, you know, a poisoner and a sorceress and all of these things. But you've also mentioned that, you know, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, she is remembered as a saint. How is it that she gets to that? Is this just, you know, the classic, oh, she's not. Empress, so now she's a saint, but she's doing actual cool, good work, right?

It's the cool, good work that makes her exciting. There's also the story that she had a religious conversion, which I love that. I love that stuff. I like anything that is a little bit mysterious, a little bit, is this magic, is this real? So I gave her a genuine religious conversion off in the desert where loads of people were having religious conversions. It wasn't unusual. People were going off and starving themselves and living in caves.

and it's so important, I think, whether we were raised Christian or not, here now in the 21st century, there is such an assumption around the Christianity that we understand. In the same way that there's an assumption around the Islam, we understand, or the Judaism. These faiths have been going for a long time now. At this point, Christianity was still super new. People were having amazing conversions. And we might these days go, that person is so. suffering from schizophrenia. No, seriously, they're hearing voices. They are seeing visions. But we did used to believe when people heard voices and saw visions, and we got that from

the Greeks, that it was mystic and the gods speaking to them. And so Theodora has, as far as we know, a religious conversion before she comes back to Constantinople. So she comes to the throne as a convert. and that's really important for the early church. In the same way that St. Paul, having previously been Saul of Tarsus, Paul, you know, the tax collector who becomes this great Christian writer, and not so great if you happen as I do to be gay and female,

Paul becomes really important. And it's partly because of his conversion. The Damascene conversion is one of the really important tenets of early Christianity. So her conversion becomes really important. important. She then goes on to do great things for women. One of them is that if we believe Pocopius and she was a willing prostitute, Percopius doesn't make sense except that this woman did have the kind of life that was absolutely forbidden and that even early Christianity was saying, no, she can't do, no she can't be. And laws are changed for these women,

fallen in verticom as women, to be allowed to come back into the church. So even if you're only looking at her from that perspective. What you get is you get a woman who matters to other women. And while the early church is subduing the voices of other women, it really still wants women to come and believe. So it is stopping the women from preaching. It is stopping women from holding positions of power within the early church. But it still wants women to believe because if her mother believes, then so will her children. So I think there's both, yes, she did good things. Let's make her a saint. But there's also, oh, she's a repentant sinner. Let's make her a saint. And she's a woman. And she helped other women. And if we make her a saint, then we've got the women on our side. A lot of the stuff around the early church, particularly in this very early period, is what's going on is how do we pragmatically get people to agree with us? It gives Rome more power. gives the state more power and what they're looking for is pragmatic versions of making someone part of the system rather than outside the system.

Always better to have them pissing inside the tent than pissing outside because it'll not know where they're pissing. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Just to sort of sum up, no, we've got this great description one historian wrote of Theodora, which is that no empress left so profound a mark on the imagination of her people, as did Theodora. Would you agree with that? Oh, absolutely. And I had that quote. I put a notice board just here. And for years, I had on this notice board both the close-up postcard of her face from the mosaic and that quote.

They felt to me like, oh, as well as Purple makes a great burial shroud, because they felt to me like the absolute core. And then, because it is all mystic, it's not there anymore, but around the cornerfront, from where I live, between Brixton and Camberwell and South London, there was a man who had an amazing garden. The front garden was phenomenal. It was built. These are little South London gardens. It was built on levels, and I'd walk past it loads of times, and I thought,

God, that's amazing. One day I stopped, and he was standing in his front garden. I said, that's phenomenal. It's like a hanging garden of Babylon, in his own front garden, built out of bits of wood. And I said, that's amazing. And he went, do you want to come and see what's in the back? And I went, sure. from thinking, okay, let's trust you. There was another lady there. She'd just come from church,

so I thought, okay, fine. I went in and he'd built the same thing, but in a 40, 50 foot back garden, three different levels, just this most phenomenal hanging garden. And let's remember that Theodora had all of these amazing things built in her lifetime. And I was in the throes of doing the research for this book, and I came back through the house, and I saw what I hadn't seen on his mantelpiece in the front room to come through. I hadn't seen it on the way to the back garden, but I saw it on the way back. A life size, like life mosaic size,

and for the purposes of the recording, I am doing a big, and vogueing, very big. It's true. It's true. A massive poster-sized picture of Theodora's head from the mosaic, exactly the same as I'd had on my notice board for the two years. I was doing the research for this. And I said, that's Theodora.

And he went, and at the time, no one knew who I was talking about, right? Everyone I said, I'm writing these books and they go, who? What about her? Never heard of her? Oh, did Robert Graves mention her? That was it. Yeah. And I said, that's Theodora.

She's amazing. And he said, ask her questions. She will give you answers. I know. And it felt like such a affirmation that I was on the right track, that it was worth. doing this work. Because at the time, I hadn't written any historical fiction.

My publishers were like, yeah, all right. We'll see when you finish. And I so knew that I wanted to tell these stories because she's amazing. And I just couldn't bear that the only, and Procopoeia is fiction. But the only fiction about her was so horrid. Or that she featured just as the poisoner, just as the switzerland. just as a sorceress in the background. She's a hero and I wanted her to be one.

Stella, this has been such an incredible delight. Thank you so much for coming on and chatting with me today. It's just been splendid. It's been a complete joy for me. And the coolest thing is to go back and look at these books after all this time and be relieved that I was glad of what I wrote. I've looked at other things and gone, oh dear, I'd change that now. But there's very little I change now.

really pleased with that. Look, this is going to sound weird, but I felt supported by her spirit, her energy, her as I was writing them. And I'm really grateful for that. She gave you the answers when you asked. Yeah, she did. Isn't that cool? Ask her questions. She will give you answers. I love it. Stella, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Eleanor. It's really lovely to talk to you. Thanks so much to Stella once again for joining me, and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you want to learn more about Constantinople and who doesn't, why not check out our past episodes on its rise and its fall? Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Medieval Apocalypse, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've Gone Medieval.

Until next time.