The Rest Is History - 220. Justinian & Theodora: The Secret History

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Wars, disease, and legacy. In the final episode of the trilogy, Tom and Dominic discuss the Byzantine reconquest of Italy, the arrival of the Justinianic plague, and the legacy of Justinian and Theodora. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. The centre of Constantinople had been left gutted. Among the many treasures destroyed in the inferno had been the Senate House

and all the antique statues with which Constantine had long previously adorned the bathhouse. Their loss had obliterated precious links with what was by now a very distant past. Yet in truth, Justinian was pleased to see them gone. The Senate House had always loomed too large over the Augustaeon for his tastes. Its replacement, so he decreed, was to be built on a much smaller scale. The monuments that Justinian aimed to found upon the rubble of the old would be raised to the glory not of the traditional gods of the roman people but of something very different a single omnipotent god tom who who wrote that

deathless prose uh it was a top historian as yourself it was yes it was um so that's in the shadow of the sword um and that is just a summary of where we were at the end of last episode. Yeah, we're back with Justin and Theodore, aren't we? The third episode of what was going to be one episode. So for those people who haven't listened to the previous two, obviously you do need to listen. Well, you don't need to, but you could and you should listen to the previous two. We're in the 6th century.

We're in Constantinople, the new rome the capital of the well you call it the roman empire the eastern roman empire the byzantine empire um this incredibly glamorous couple are emperor and empress justinian and theodora they have just seen off the blues and the greens the circus factions who are rioting at the beginning of 532 they justinian has is rebuilding Hagia Sophia, the great church of the holy wisdom, the great cathedral that still is one of the world's great sort of tourist sites in the center of Istanbul. And Tom, Justinian, I mean, the paradox of Justinian, as you say, is that he seems to us to mark a break with ancient Rome, because conventionally,

I suppose, in kind of popular history books, in textbooks and encyclopedias and things, the 6th century is roughly the point at which people stop talking of this as the Roman Empire, and they start talking of it as the Byzantine Empire. But Justinian has this project, doesn't he, to rebuild not just the city, but to rebuild the Roman world by reuniting Constantinople with Italy and with North Africa and perhaps ultimately with Spain, who knows, with Gaul, with Britain even, with the provinces that have been lost. that we ended our last episode on this note, that Justinian is an incredibly paradoxical figure, because on the one hand, he seems almost a bit of an anachronism. He is a kind of Caesar of the order of Trajan. He's a great conqueror. He's the embodiment of these kind of ancient roman martial imperial traditions but at the same time his attempts to kind of restore this roman empire actually precipitates its decline yeah well that's the big that's the big argument isn't it about whether that's the case but actually when it

starts so he starts with north Africa, doesn't he? That's his first target. And it's a relatively, it's been run by these, I mean, it's been taken over by these people called the Vandals for about 100 years. And actually that campaign goes pretty well. The Vandals, interestingly, we haven't talked as much as some people might expect about Christological disputes. But the Vandals are yet another brand of heretics because they are Aryans, aren't they?

So they believe. Now, Tom, I know you'll think this is a grotesque simplification, but am I right in thinking the Vandals believe that Jesus is subordinate to God? Basically, yes. He's not co-eternal with God. He's not quite as good. And so in the first episode we talked about these kind of rows about the nature of christ and at the arian heresy that the vandals hold to um is a product of the fourth century the age of constantine so in that sense

the vandals are you know they're throwbacks they're theological throwbacks cranky they're dinosaurs they are done yeah so they've clearly Clearly, they've got to be cleared up. The Vandals are doubly a threat because they're occupying the breadbasket that had previously fed Rome. They're occupying the great Roman city of Carthage. But also,

they hold to this kind of antiquated heresy and it's unacceptable. So Justinian raises an immense fleet, a great armada. It sails out from the harbour of Constantinople to much cheering. And it's a triumph of success and it's under the command of Belisarius, who people who listened to the previous episode may remember is very much in Justinian's good books

because he's slaughtered thousands of people in the hippodrome the equivalents of loads of unarmed football hooligans exactly yes but so so actually when you look at the timeline i mean the fleet leaves in the midsummer 533 so that's just over a year we're a year and a bit since the the end of the rioting um but actually they pretty much wiped the floor with the vandals within less than a year so that the the king of the vandals is a man called gelima do you know what happened to gelima tom he gets taken back doesn't he and led to triumph so he was beaten at a battle gelima went and hid and uh belisarius said you know will you surrender and he said yes and you know what he asked for in return i'm so delighted i found these details of the same remind me he said, yes. And do you know what he asked for in return? I'm so delighted I found these details.

No, remind me. He said, I require just two things to get me to surrender. They were a sponge and a liar. The sponge was to wipe his eye because he suffered an eye infection while in hiding. And the liar was, Gelimer had written a song. He'd written a dirge because he felt very downbeat after losing his kingdom and he said i'd like a liar so that i could i could try it out so belisarius gave him that so he gave him the sponge and the liar he was taken to constantinople in and he was led in a

triumph so that's very roman tom unbelievably roman yeah so this great triumph that kind of culminates in the uh in the hippod And he retired. Golema retired. He was allowed to retire to Galatia. Galatia is now in Turkey, I think, is it? Yeah. So it's kind of middle of Cappadocia. So is he in danger of getting a letter from St. Paul? Did St. Paul write to the Galatians?

Yes, he did. So am I right in thinking, therefore, the Vandal rule in Africa must have been relatively kind of shallow? Yeah, pretty much. They were disliked by the people that they ruled. Is that because they're basically a bunch of Germans kind of sweating in the African sun? The dark reputation that they have is reflected in the fact that we still use the word Vandal to mean what it means. And the story is that they took the looted treasures from Jerusalem that Titus had brought in the first century, paraded in his triumph through the streets of Rome, that the vandals then took it to Carthage

and Belisarius then takes them to Constantinople is one of the story. We're not absolutely sure about that, but if that's true, it's kind of a nice sense of the way, which is very good story. You know, these are the trophies of victory and Justinian could legitimately say, well,

you know, Rome is back. We're celebrating triumphs. And of course the next target is the big one, which is Italy and Rome, but that's a different matter, isn't it? So Italy is,

um, has been run by the Goths, the Ostrogoths. Theoderic, who had been the great Gothic leader, had sort of been subordinate to Constantinople. Am I right? He'd sort of acknowledged the kind of suzerainty of the emperor in Constantinople? Yeah. So there's a kind of spacious legalism whereby the emperor could pretend that he still ruled Italy and the Ostrogoths could pretend that he still ruled italy and the ostrogoths could feel that they had a you know that they'd been legitimized that they weren't just kind of barbarians yeah and italy italy under theodoric is a pretty stable prosperous place

so they are you know the senate is still sitting in rome chariots are still being raised in circus maximus um water is flowing happily along the aqueducts so you know there are lots of people Senate is still sitting in Rome. Chariots are still being raised in Circus Maximus. Water is flowing happily along the aqueducts. So, you know, there are lots of people, I think we mentioned this in the episode we did on when the Roman Empire falls, that I think there are lots of people in Italy who don't particularly feel that the Roman Empire has fallen. And to that extent, the arrival of a large flotilla

from Constantinople isn't necessarily greeted with fractious enthusiasm, because it means that Italy will now become a theatre of war. Well, I was going to ask about this, because we could, I mean, we could spend, I mean, do a sort of Dan Carlin hardcore history style narrative of the Italian wars. I actually, I mean, I studied these when I was a student. And when I used to read Procopius' account of the wars in Italy, I found it absolutely impossible to keep awake, let alone to work out what was going on. But basically, it's cut a really, really long story,

very, very simplistically short. The campaign just lasts forever. And I mean, within a year of landing, so Belisarius is in charge yet again. He captures Naples. But within a year of landing, so Belisarius is in charge yet again. He captures Naples. But within a year of landing, he's basically holed up in Rome, isn't he? He's got into Rome. Yeah, so Belisarius famously is the first person to capture Rome from the south before the Allies in the Second World War.

So your brother has written a book about the war in Italy in the Second World War. And I was struck because everyone always says, you know, the war in Italy is sort of the forgotten part of the Second World War because it was so vicious and so difficult for the Allies fighting their way up the peninsula against the Germans. And there's a bit of an element of that about this, isn't there? A bit, yeah. They've had a sort of a soft start in North Africa, and now they land in Italy, and it's just so much more difficult.

And yeah, Belisarius does capture Rome, but then he ends up- He loses it, gets it back. And this is essentially what finishes Rome off as a great capital. Because during the course of all these kind of sieges and so on, the aqueducts get cut. And without the aqueducts, it becomes impossible to sustain the size of population that rome had had and at one point during these wars rome effectively becomes

depopulated so the city that at the heyday of the empire had had a million you know it's it's this absolute wilderness it's this emptied wilderness i mean that's true of much of italy isn't it that the farmlands are destroyed by these armies crisscrossing back and forth you get accounts of people starving. It must have been a kind of apocalyptic landscape. Completely. And, you know, thanks first to Belisarius and then to Narses, who by this point is about 310.

Yeah. So he takes over the command. They effectively get control of Italy, but it's, you know, it's a charnel house. And if you want to say, well, when does the Roman Empire end in Italyaly i'd say it's with this i mean i know it's impossible to say but is it your sense that most people in italy would have much preferred the in inverted commas roman army never to have pitched up and to just lived quite happily under

gothic rule yeah of course i mean you know if you're if you're're a senator in Rome, and you end up a penniless refugee, it's no consolation that you are now ruled by an emperor from a Caesar in Constantinople. Yeah, of course. And the worst thing is that, you know, from the point of view of the penniless senator, is that it's all for nothing. Because very soon after the conquests have seemingly been completed, and the Gothss defeated a whole new people in the form of the lombards turn up yeah and grab you know huge chunks of italy so that um constantinople ends up ruling rome still so it still has rome and it has ravenna because ravenna

is a port that is is open to shipping coming up the adriatic and ravenna had been a previous imperial capital as well hadn't it it had yes And so there are lots of palaces there. There are lots of churches there. It had been pretty much the capital for Austro-Gothic rule. And it will become the place where the most famous visual representations of Justinian Theodora. Well, this is what I was about to say, Tom, that the wars from a tourist's perspective, from a modern tourist's perspective, the wars were tremendously worthwhile because these extraordinary visual depictions of Justinian and Theodora survive in the church of, I think it's San Vitale, isn't it, in Ravenna. I mean, they are the most incredible Byzantine mosaics. But, you know, that brings us slightly back to the personalities of Justinian and Theodora which i guess sometimes get lost in this story because we have images of them that we don't have really of most other post-sixth century

um emperors and certainly empresses i guess do you think that's one reason why another reason why theodora is i mean nobody really remembers any barely any maybe zoe later on really irene yeah but apart from that nobody remembers other empresses do you think that the existence I mean, nobody really remembers any, barely any, maybe Zoe later on. Irene, perhaps. Irene, yeah. But apart from that, nobody remembers other empresses. Do you think that the existence of the mosaics is one reason why? Yes, I'm sure. Because, you know, the literal iconography of it, it's so powerful. And they're such kind of stunning mosaics.

They're on the cover of every book about, not just Justinian Theodora, but about pretty much Byzantium. Well, I think because they're completely worth it and a tremendous idea because they gave us the mosaics that we can advertise this podcast with. However, just after they've embarked, really, I mean, within a year or a couple of years of embarking on this reconquest of Italy, there's trouble in the East. So we've talked in previous episodes about Persia being the big superpower threat to Constantinople and Khosrow as sort of, is he Khrushchev to Justinian's Kennedy or is he Kennedy to Justinian's Khrushchev? I don't know who quite fits that analogy. I mean, Justinian is a peasant stock, isn't he?

So maybe he's Khrushchev. And Khosrow is a very regal stock. So maybe he's Kennedy. Anyway, the Persians reappear, come across the frontier, and they basically capture Antioch. Which is the third city. So it's in Syria. It's the great capital of Syria.

Very ancient city, very rich city. So it's in Syria. It's the great capital of Syria, very ancient city, very rich city. So it's a disaster. So Procopius says, I become dizzy as I write of such a great calamity. And that must have been how many people in Constantinople felt when they contemplated the fact. I mean, it's a problem for them that Antioch is not that far from the border, I suppose. And as you said in previous episodes, there are no real natural frontiers between Rome and Persia, so that the Persians can just, you know, if they spot a weakness, they can just pile across. But this is a colossal setback for Justinian.

Surely a bigger setback than the capture of some of Italy is a triumph. Do you think? Yeah, definitely. It's a humiliation and it's a stunning blow to the economy of the empire. Yeah. To have your third city, to have all the skilled people, all the craftsmen and everybody, they all get taken off to Iraq and Persia.

The city is stripped bare. Yeah, it's complete humiliation and a disaster. And as if one disaster like that wasn't enough. We are a year away from the arrival in, I think it's first detected in Egypt. So we talked about this with Kyle last week. So it comes to the plague arrives, hits Pelusium, hits Alexandria, winnows out from Alexandria to Constantinople and then to Italy and then onwards, westwards and eastwards.

So it hits Persia as well. Absolute disaster. I mean, there is much debate about the scale of it, but I think we're with Petereter saris on this aren't we that yeah that it's so this is a disaster on the scale of the black death pretty much so so procopius says i mean obviously we did talk about this in our podcast with car harbour but just to kind of recapitulate um for for those people who missed it i mean procopius says 10 000 people a day died in constantinople and because Procopius clearly tends to exaggerate,

and because he also did think Justinian's head floated off its body and could reappear, so people sort of say, oh, 10,000, it couldn't have been 10,000. It probably means it was 500. But I think a lot of historians now would say, I mean, you mentioned Peter Sarris, who's written articles about this. A lot of historians now would say Procopius is probably right. It probably does kill thousands of people a day. It probably kills tens of millions of people

across the Mediterranean. Justinian himself gets it and is one of the few that survives. So many people are dying in the streets of Constantinople that they start chucking them in the harbour and then it just blocks up the harbour because it's just floating with corpses. So Justinian orders that they should dig pits on the other side of the Golden Horn, so across from the kind of promontory on which Constantinople was built. And they dig these pits and they chuck the bodies in.

And there are these hideous descriptions of how the corpses kind of melt and come to constitute a kind of corpse custard, I suppose. A corpse custard, Tom. A thick gravy. So that if somebody falls into it, they get kind of sucked down into the mulch of it and drown. I mean, it's so hideous.

If you're going to drown, don't drown in human gravy. No, I mean mean it's so hideous i mean and and so if you're gonna drown don't drown in human gravy no i mean it's really horrible and when um and when you when you get chroniclers kind of saying as one does that the whole of humanity came close to annihilation of course that's an exaggeration so people say that kind of language it's bread of the bible you know it's it's the well it's equivalent for kind of you know a daily mail headline yoy terrible for house prices all this kind of thing there's absolutely let me just be absolutely clear in case anybody's listening in uh rothermere towers there's absolutely nothing wrong with daily mail headlines they are very measured and sober and i want to go on absolutely on record as distancing myself from that shame shameful remark so if the daily

mail is around it would say it would say this is going to be terrible for house prices. But I think it is, you know, the apocalyptic quality of it is really very, very profound. And I think that it essentially, it's an absolute disaster for Justinian and his plans, because what it does is that it demolishes his tax base. Yes. And it means that the funds to pay his armies, to maintain the roads, to maintain the fortifications that of the empire because it means that,

you know, nomads are likelier to escape the impact of the plague. It's urban centres that are being hit by it. And that is in the very long run, you know, that's very bad news because it means that the Arabs will be able to move in. But in the short term, it means that bands of horsemen are able to cross the Danube you know rather as the lamb long paths do going into italy and they discover that there's no one to stop them just on um on on justinian in the play tom justinian is ill for weeks and he almost dies uh he is now he's not a young man he became emperor when he was in his 40s uh so now he is what he's in his um he must be nearly 60 yeah he's

getting on um so he's lucky to to pull through and there's obviously must have been talk when he's lying in you know who's going to be next who's going to succeed him and clearly he has one general who's a sort of dashing swashbbuckling general, very good at fighting hooligans in stadiums, but also very good at beating vandals and giving them sponges, and that is Belisarius. And it's about this point, isn't it, that you start to really notice that his favourite general, you know, they're no longer on such great terms, and that probably Justinian is worried that Belisarius wants to replace him,

that he's a focus for opposition, that let's get rid of the old man and get the young guy in. And do you think that Justinian's near-death experience is one of the things that explains their falling out that Robert Graves writes about in his novel? I doubt it. You don't think so? No, I think Justinian was a naturally suspicious person.

So down on Justinian, Tom. Very bad. Very bad. Well, I mean, he was a disaster. I mean, he was a disaster. And I think that that actually, I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we should end this account of his reign and that of Theodora by looking at the death of Theodora,

looking at the last years of Justinian's rule, and then looking at Procopius and saying, well, you know, where is his secret history coming from? Okay, very good. We will see you after the break. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews

splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club

if you want ad free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com that's therestisentertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com this man was both an evildoer and easily led into evil the sort of person whom they call a moral

pervert never of his own accord speaking the truth to those with whom he conversed but having a deceitful and crafty intent behind every word he was was insincere, crafty, hypocritical, dissembling his anger, double-dealing, clever, a perfect artist in acting out an opinion which he pretended to hold, and even then able to produce tears, not from joy or sorrow, but contriving them for the occasion, according to the needs of the moment, always playing false. So that's one of the members of our Rest Is History Club talking about my

co-presenter, Tom Holland. And if you too want to join the Rest Is History Club, join up at restishistorypod.com. So no other podcast, I think, in the world, Tom, uses the words of the historian Procopius to recruit supporters for their own podcast club. So I think that's something that distinguishes us from other history podcasts. Yes, and continuing that Procopian tradition of one minute being all smiles and nice and kind and generous and then suddenly stabbing me in the back. Well, you know what Procopius said?

Very, very Procopian behaviour. He was a fickle friend, a truiceless enemy, an ardent devotee of assassination and of robbery. There was no robbery in the Rest is History Club. Let's be absolutely clear about that. Right, Tom, the lessons of history. So we've done the plague. We have done the incredibly gruelling campaign in Italy, which has been grinding all this time. We've done the fact that Justinian has suffered this terrible, devastating humiliation of the sack of Antioch by the Persians. And Theodora in all this, I mean,

she's sort of like a lot of women in history. She's invisible to the chroniclers if they're not slagging her off, isn't she? But we kind of know one thing about her, which is that she, I mean, Procopius basically says he presents in a very bad light. She clearly tried to rehabilitate lots of prostitutes. So she housed them in a convent. Procopius basically says... Yes, called repentance. She incarcerated these ladies of the night against their will, this dreadful harridan. But clearly, there's a kind of Gladstonian way of looking at that.

Yeah, completely. Completely. And she kind of makes Justinian into a rather improbable feminist. So he introduces a lot of legislation to kind of improve women's lives. Clearly, clearly influenced by Theodora. Divorce reform, mothers getting custody, the end of the death penalty for women who've been accused of being unfaithful. The death penalty for rape he brings in. So lots of things that clearly, you know,

you have this image of this sort of Bill and Hillary Clinton kind of relationship. And she also has the latitude to support bishops and missionaries and things with her own kind of monophysite beliefs, doesn't she? So she clearly is a... Although the Orthodox tradition comes to be that that actually she was orthodox all along and that she was a kind of um trojan horse so is that how she was able to become a saint basically it is yes yeah but do you think tom that uh i mean do you think she was as it were a saintly figure i mean should you remember her as a i always think that about people who are

described as as being saintly by hagiographers um and the temptation is always to say it was all just a sham it was all just a fraud i i have no doubt that um theodora's you know her process of being born again if you want to put it like that in alexandria as a young woman when she turns her back on her previous career i'm'm sure that's absolutely authentic. And the obvious reason for thinking that is that Justinian, whatever else you may say about him, is he's not a hypocrite. He really does believe what he says he believes. And his Christian faith is crucially, crucially important to him. And so it's inconceivable that he would marry and love a woman who was a dissembler. Right. Because there's nothing in it for him in

marrying her. I mean, he actually has to, I mean, as we discussed in a previous podcast, his uncle has to change the law to allow him to marry beneath his station. So they are a great Christian couple. I mean, no question about that. What one might say, Tom, is if she does have this shady past, which we'll come to in a second, the allegations against her, if she does have this very shady past, then it's all the more impressive that she devotes her energies to rehabilitating girls who've been sex slaves,

girls who've been prostitutes. Yeah. Because, of course, that draws attention to her. I mean, she's not afraid to draw attention to her past, is she? Because she's not trying to distance herself. So Procopius says, and there's, I think, no reason to doubt it, because there is a Monophysite bishop who refers to Theodora without any kind of, you know, just absolutely naturally that Theodora, who was in the brothel, who was in a brothel. So it's not something that the monophysites who see her as her great champion are trying to hide they acknowledge it um and they see it as redounding to her credit so we mentioned mary magdalene that this is an example but if we if you

and it's so difficult because to to get into the minds of people from from such a distant culture such a distant time but that opening passage that we read in the very first, you know, the opening of part one. The geese. The geese. That passage has always been a subject of kind of, you know, titillation and salaciousness. But what her career there, she is a child.

So she's a child. She's being introduced, you know, she's performing these acts as a child and she's starting to be prostituted as as you know by our standards underage well there's descriptions of her i mean i mean procopius is completely upfront about that he says uh she was too immature to sleep with a man or to have intercourse like a woman, but she acted as might a male prostitute to satisfy those dregs of humanity, slaves though they were, who followed their master to the theatre and there took the opportunity to indulge in such bestial practices. He's telling that story

to say how degenerate she is. Of course, we read that story and we say, oh my God, she is a child sex slave. And so Procopius, with that kind of language, is doing what Roman moralists have always done, which is to blame the victims of prostitution and slavery for the crimes that are forced on them, the rapes that are forced on them. And to say, well, they love it. They enjoy it. They're absolutely rapacious. They're insatiable yeah that's an absolute you know so in that sense procopius as in so many other things is an absolute traditionalist and i think that it is not um it's not anachronistic to adopt a perspective that said that says well you know that is a crime because our perspective is the christ perspective, essentially, that every individual should have bodily integrity. And so I think there is a sense

in which Theodora is, you know, her Christianity is the way that she tries to reform prostitutes, that she tries to bring in laws that will better patrol the right of women not to be raped. It's a part of this process that Justinian is also very much the embodiment of, where traditions that have been inherited from Rome are starting to be swept away by an increasingly Christian worldview. Yeah. In the sense that she's not trying to distract attention from her sin. She knows she's been a sinner, as it were, but she's also been a victim and she's not afraid. As you've often said about Christianity, the great innovation of Christianity is that there is, as it were,

dignity and holiness in suffering, in being a victim, which the Romans had never believed, had they? And all of this brings us to the question of, I mean, she dies, poor Theodora. She dies of probably, I mean, I don't know where people get this from, where they guess how people died, but everything you ever read says she probably died of cancer in 548. So she died at the age of, in her late 40s, probably. And there was a church in which Constantine and other emperors had been buried.

And Justinian, in his grief, builds a new kind of mausoleum in which she's laid and whenever he rode past it he would stop and light candles before her her grave so it was his bereavement was clearly very real um theodora was clearly you know to the end of their days they loved each other i think i did again i don't think it's being sentimental or anachronistic to say that. And she was clearly, you know, the great partner that he'd missed terribly in the kind of rather grim final years of his life. But the sort of tragedy for her, Tom, is that everybody remembers. I mean, those people who do remember her, remember her for the geese and they remember the, and that's Procopius. Now he was, to explain to who he was, he was basically Belisarius' secretary. Is that right?

Yeah, pretty much. So he's from Palestine. He sees, you know, a lot of what he's describing. And as well as the secret history, he also writes a book about the monuments that Justinian raises. With a brilliant title, On Buildings. On Buildings. And he writes a history of the monuments that Justinian raises. With a brilliant title, On Buildings. On Buildings. And he writes a history of the war.

So he writes a history of the North African War, the Vandal War, and the conquest of Italy, in which he is very, very respectful of Justinian. There's none of the stuff about moral perversion or demons' heads and shapeless masses of flesh in that. Yeah. And so in these histories of the Italian wars, he gives Justinian a very good spin. So he says of Justinian that he took over the state when it was much harassed by disorder.

And his achievement was that not only did he make it greater in extent, but also much more illustrious. So in the history of the wars, Procopius is the spokesman for Justinianic propaganda. Yeah. And so the question has always been, what on earth is he doing? One of the great kind of literary assassinations of all time. So that, as you said, when everyone people think of Theodora, they don't think of the same. They think of the they think of literary assassinations of all time. So that, as you said, whenever people think of Theodora, they don't think of the saint. They think of the geese.

Yeah, and the gymnastics. But isn't this simply, I mean, very easily explained, that Justinian and Theodora have fallen out with Belisarius and his wife, Antonina. There's all kinds of weird stuff about Theodora and Antonina kind of plotting against each other and gossiping and all this sort of, um,

sort of very Rebecca Vardy and Colleen Rooney. And, um, and the Procopius is writing because he's, you know, he's Belisarius, he's partisan. But he's not,

he's equally rude about Belisarius. It's just bitter, isn't he? He's just generally bitter. I mean, he's, he's slagging them off as well. I think,

so I think, I think what is going on is that procopius is is a conservative and essentially you know that is what romans were you know i mean it's insane to talk about roman conservatives because everyone is conservative everyone had this kind of deep-seated assumption that the old ways were the best um justinian again is is christian to the extent that he's dreaming of a new and better world. It's a new and better world in which he is the autocrat, but he is a radical.

He is a revolutionary to that extent. He wants to reshape the world, even if he's saying, well, by, by reshaping the world and improving it, I'm also, you know, restoring and repairing also restoring and repairing what's gone wrong. And Procopius, in The Secret History, the thing he goes on and on and on about is that Justinian is constantly, he's deliberately setting out to mess everything up. This is what's giving him his great source of pleasure. He's going around ruining everything, changing everything, messing everything up. And I think for Procopius, genuinely, he thinks that Justinian is a demonic figure because he can't really understand ultimately, firstly, how he's mind, is that although we said that the history of the wars is much more overtly positive, there's a passage where the Goths send ambassadors to

Cusro, the king of Persia, to try and persuade him to launch an invasion of the Roman Empire while the Romans are busy invading Italy. And the Gothic ambassador says of Justinian that he is a man who by nature strives for change and loves was to not belong to him at all. He was not able to keep things as they are. He was therefore tried to seize the whole earth and has been captured by the desire to take for himself each and every rule. And you compared Justinian to Khrushchev. I mean, that is, you know, the Goths there are kind of casting Justinian as an agent of universal change and revolution and upheaval.

And I think that Procopius is putting in the Gothic ambassador's mouth what he feels about Justinian. Yeah, that sounds very plausible. I think he genuinely does see him as a demonic figure. Even though, of course, the irony is that Justinian. Yeah, that sounds very causal. I think he genuinely does see him as a demonic figure. Even though, of course, the irony is that Justinian thinks he is reviving the glory of Rome. So what to some people seems a radical project, and you could argue, I mean, we'll come to this in a second,

you could argue is a moment of tremendous disruption from which the Roman world never recovers. Justinian conceives of that as a restorative. That's why some historians talk about this as a reconquista. Even though actually it's a good analogy because, of course, the reconquista is not really a reconquest because those territories never belonged to Spain. So Justinian's so-called reconquista probably doesn't seem like a reconquest

to people in Italy who'd probably much rather be off living under the Goths without armies trudging over their farmland. Justinian is doing it for what he sees as the very noblest of motives. He's doing it as a Roman and he's doing it as Christian. And he sees these are the duties that have been laid on him by God. Where Procopius is, I think, scabrously unfair to Justinian is in saying that Justinian is doing it just for the fun of it. So Procopius says of Justinian that he wasn't satisfied just with ruining the Roman Empire. So in other words, the territories that he already owned, and that this is why he insisted on invading North Africa, why he insists on invading

Italy. It's for the sole purpose of ensuring that he can destroy the inhabitants of those lands, as well as the inhabitants of the Roman Empire. It's just a ludicrous thing to say. But I think probably Procopius genuinely believes that. The forces of evil have been unleashed on the earth. And again, I think that the scale of the plague and the war of the age is so monstrous

that I think, you know, this is an age where you're living in apocalyptic times. I mean, Justinian, so Theodora died in 548. Justinian, although he's a fair bit older than her, he lives for another 17 years,

which I think, you know, when historians talk about it he he feels like an aging exhausted everything's a bit grayer i mean obviously it's not surprising it feels like a sort of grayer time because it's in the aftermath of this horrendous plague um constant sort of fighting it's very clear isn't it tom that he's you know their tax base has shrunk their manpower has shrunk they're struggling to fight off incursions on the frontiers. So at one point, there's a group called the Kutrigers, who make it all the way down into Greece, sort of charging around Greece, you know, sort of sacking and pillaging. And you've also got the first rumors of a group of

people called the Avars, who are going to be a issue um for constantinople in the long run so it's quite a sort of grim gray story isn't it there it really is and i think that that it is a genuinely tragic story if by tragedy you mean you know someone is destroyed by his own qualities and virtues well let's get to it so justinian dies in november uh 565 He'd ruled for almost 40 years. He's succeeded by his nephew, Justin, who becomes Justin II. And then you have a couple more emperors before you really get to the kind of, as it were, the cataclysm. Yeah. Yeah.

So to sort of jump ahead and anticipate, to paint the picture for people who are not massively familiar with this. At the end of the 6th century, beginning of the 7th century, the Roman-Persian conflict becomes this kind of all-out superpower death match where the Persians appear to have the Romans completely on the ropes and a new emperor called Heraclius sort of summons up every last sinew of Roman energy and fights them off. And they're both absolutely exhausted. And it's at this point that the Arabs appear and just absolutely wipe the floor with it. And people who want to know what happens then, we have done an episode on Muhammad, which I commend to you.

So, Tom, if you want to follow this story up, that's the next stage in this story. So, Tom, there are two ways of looking at Justinianian and theodore and their their time in that light i would say one would be to say this is the last hurrah for a particular kind of rome before the deluge and the and to say you know what there's quite a big interval between justinian's death and the coming of islam it's ridiculously unfair to blame him for something that happens so long afterwards. He did his best to restore the Roman state. It's not massively unstable. I mean, I know it's fiscally fragile, but it's not massively unstable when he dies.

Actually, he is a pretty great emperor. He reasserts the dignity of the office. He reasserts the authority of the capital, reasserts the authority of the capital all of those things that's one interpretation the other interpretation would be to say he massively overextends the empire he wastes a lot of money on campaigns in north africa and italy that don't really achieve anything it takes 20 years to subdue italy um you know he because of the overextension in the long run he lands his successes with commitments that are unsustainable.

And it's basically his fault that it all goes wrong a generation later. I'm guessing that you're in the first camp. No, I'm not. I think his campaigns in Italy are disastrous, as I said, for anything that would rank as a kind of the continuity of Roman civilization in Italy. Yeah. I think it's that they are so destructive, but I think the real villain isn't Justinian.

I think it's Yersinia Pestis, which is why I wanted to do this in the wake of the, the discussion that we had with Karl Harper. So by that you mean the plague. I mean the plague. So I, the, I think that without the plague,

I think it is entirely possible to see the situation in Italy, stabilizing Roman military power in Italy becoming sufficient that the Lombards never invade, the Danube frontier holds, Antioch has been demolished by Khosrow, but this has happened before. Antioch is always being demolished either by Persians or by earthquakes. So that frontier could be stabilized and you would never have had, you know, because the whole reason, the whole thing of why the plague is so devastating relative to nomads is that it's urban centers that get destroyed and people out in the desert, you know, are able to maintain their forces. It's that that ultimately in the long run kind

of dooms the Roman control of Syria, of Palestine, of Egypt. So I think without the plague, well, I mean, maybe the Roman Empire would still be a going concern. Who knows? But I think the reputation of Justinian would be very different. And I think that he could have spent his last decades rather than frantically struggling to repair the damage inflicted by the plague, in restoring prosperity to Italy, restabilizing the frontier along with Mesopotamia. I think the story would have been very different. And I think the Balkan frontier wouldn't have collapsed as it does. You wouldn't have had barbarians kind of penetrating all the way to Greece, all the way to the walls of Constantinople. I think the story would have been very different.

And with Italy stabilized, of course, the Romans would then be in a position to start thinking about recapturing maybe Southern Gaul, the Provincia, you know, very kind of Romanized area and expanding the toeholds that they do get in Southern Spain. So I think the story could have been very different. I think, you know, it's right to call the plague that hits the Mediterranean in the 6th century the Justinianic plague because he is the paradigmatic ruler of the age. But it's also kind of, you know, it's a cruel irony because it is the Justinianic plague that destroys Justinian's legacy. Although, as it stands, Tom, he leaves a not unimpressive legacy. I mean, he codifies the laws.

He doesn't see… Hagia Sophia, the architecture of… He leaves the most famous… I mean, his reign leaves these tremendous buildings, the mosaics, the art. He doesn't see… You know, there's not massive civil wars and rebellions during his reign. I mean, the riots… Apart from the Nica riot. There's not massive civil wars and rebellions during his reign. Apart from the Nica riot.

Right, the riot in the Hippodrome is very famous, but by the standards of Roman rebellions, it's all done and dusted in what, a week? And limited to the capital. So you could say of the Roman emperors in this period, he is by far the most... Visionary. The most visionary, the most adept at using the machinery government. The one who has...

Visionary is the right word. The one who has the clearest vision for a renovated and reformed, modernized empire. And it doesn't work through factors that he can't control. I think, though, the tragedy is that vision runs into the greatest natural calamity to hit the Mediterranean. And that's why I think it was right to do these series of episodes because they have been prefaced by that episode we did with Karl Harper on the way that plague impacted the Roman world.

We've talked ever since we started this whole podcast, The Rest is History, about the Byzantine Empire and Byzantium. Do you think this is the moment at which it no longer makes sense for us as historians looking back to talk about Rome? So in other words, is the word Roman still useful to describe the people who call themselves Romans in the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries? Or do you think Justinian's reign and the period that then immediately follows it marks such a break that they're no longer usefully Romans? I think a more useful point is the Arab invasions and conquests. Because I think what had been the Roman Empire basically gets reduced to a rump.

You know, that great legacy of cities that the emperors in Constantinople had inherited from the Greek and the Roman classical worlds, they get destroyed essentially. So all that really gets left is Constantinople. And the people of Constantinople did call themselves Byzantine. So they called themselves Roman, they were Romeo, but they did also call themselves Byzantines. The extent that what had been the Roman Empire, you know, at one point, basically, is Constantinople with a few kind of scattered territories that are constantly being invaded by Arabs and barbarians from the north. I think the Byzantine conveys the sense of a really radical break. I think that Justinian's rule is very decisive as a kind of fracture point, but it's a kind of evolution of norms in Rome that someone like Procopius can see as a kind of shocking assault. But Procopius is kind of talking about it as a political process. What happens with the Arab invasions is almost the entire collapse of the empire. And essentially, the effort of ensuring

that Constantinople doesn't fall, that something in Anatolia, in Greece, in the Balkans, and to a degree in Italy is preserved, is so shattering and exhausting that by the time the Byzantine empire starts to get back on a moderately stable footing, everything has changed. And you have people in Constantinople who look at what has remained of the Roman era, you know, the statues, the friezes, even the statue, great statue of Justinian that he's put up to himself. And they can't remember what, you know, who or what these things are. They think that they're kind of illustrations of necromancers or, and there are no histories. That's the other thing.

So Procopius is kind of the last of that living tradition that reaches all the way back to Thucydides and Herodotus. But it's the measure of the, you know, we took, again, we talked about this with Karl Harper. I think it's a measure of the trauma

that they suffer, that people aren't around to write histories. So there really is a break, I think. Well, and I think we should do future episodes on the Arab conquests and Byzantium's resilience and, of course, iconoclasm, which is a particularly mysterious and intriguing moment in Byzantine history. Quite topical. Very topical.

And on current form, Tom, we'll probably get around to doing those in about 2027. Yes. We'll see you in 2027. But there's one last question before we end, which I think is the question that will have been on a lot of listeners' minds since we started the first of these Justina and Theodora podcasts, what seems like an eternity ago. And that is this. Tom, do you think Theodora was a justified um victor of love island i really do i really do and i think that um uh so love island in britain finished last week um i could imagine love island finished about a month ago um so theodora is a kind of love island contestant

who then ends up the most powerful woman in Britain. Yeah. That gives you some measure, I think, of her quality. The most powerful woman in Britain. Yeah. I see you're saying that's the analogy. Imagine that. And you, I think, have some sense of the fact that clearly she combined charisma, sex appeal, intelligence, ruthlessness, and ultimately holiness in a

package that I think is entirely inimitable. Well, I'll end it with this thought, Tom, that if Theodora had been married to Stanley Baldwin, her co-champion on Love Island, rather than Justinian, Stanley Baldwin's mantra, of course, was safety first. And it may well be that the Roman Empire would still be going today had stanley baldwin been in charge in the sixth century and that is a thought you probably won't have heard in any rival history podcast but i imagine we'll live with our listeners till the end of their days if only if only it had been stanley and theodora yeah if only stanley baldwin had been roman emperor in 527 history would be very different. And on that bombshell, thank you,

Tom. That was an absolutely splendid. I really enjoyed that. I don't know if our listeners enjoyed it, but I certainly enjoyed it. And we will see you next time for all kinds of treats. What have we got coming, Tom?

We've got lady Jane gray. We've got, we've got the real outbreak of the first of the second world war. coming, Tom? We've got Lady Jane Grey. We've got... We've got the real outbreak of the Second World War, haven't we? We've got holidays. Yeah. Holidays.

Lots to come. Roman holidays, Victorian holidays, since it is the holiday season. And looking further forward, we've got Walt Disney and we've got French films and we've got the Norse myths.

History of France told through 10 french films yeah so lots to come all sorts of delights uh and we will see you then bye bye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.