The year 536 was a turning point. In that year, the deposed Severus and Jacob Baraddaeus, the two leaders of the monophysite community, accepted that they would not prevail at court and so began consecrating a hierarchy of bishops of their own. Over the next forty years, traveling relentlessly through all the provinces between Asia Minor and Egypt, Jacob would ordain hundreds of bishops, including a patriarch for Antioch in the 550 s. On one occasion, at Tralles in 541, he carried out the consecration of his bishop in the gallery of the cathedral while the Chalcedonians conducted their service downstairs, ignorant of what he was doing. The Jacobite church that survives to this day in the Middle East and elsewhere takes its name from him. Justinian’s fellow Chalcedonians had to regret that he let the consecration happen, but in the moment he had few choices.
Agapetus I visited Constantinople
In 536 Pope Agapetus I visited Constantinople and refused to take communion with Justinian’s patriarch, Anthimus I, seeing him as too tolerant of eastern aberrance. Justinian was embarrassed and deposed Anthimus shortly afterward and replaced him with Menas, who turned out to be the hardheaded, outspoken Chalcedonian that monophysitism needed as a pretext for declaring independence. Severus, the hero of a generation of monophysites, died in exile only two years later, but by then the pattern was set. Constantinople remained faithful to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, and could count on support from Jerusalem (grateful that Chalcedon had raised the city’s ecclesiastical status), but in the main the sympathies of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were lost. The insistent formation of a fiercely Christian Roman empire made the unity Justinian most wanted impossible to attain istanbul city tour.
So the Christian empire of Justinian and his successors took a particular shape. On the one hand, official ideology prevailed, with an official clergy, heavily subsidized and performing ritual duties in the imperial churches of the capital city. On the other hand, stubborn hostility and resistance grew among those whose religious sentiments were not respected by such practice. Justinian as a religious monarch resembles Stalin, and as a political monarch he favors Milosevic: outwardly in control, using ideological purity as a weapon to ensure control, and in the process inadvertently fueling the sympathies and ambitions of all those who simply did not agree.25
Justinian’s establishment of a Christian empire succeeded in ensuring that its subjects would confess the name of Christ for 900 years, but it did not guarantee that they would do so with one voice. His success and his failure both cast long shadows forward.
Hamlet on throne
Hamlet would have made a terrible king. Justinian, intellectually arrogant, priggish, not as well educated as he thought he was, and alternating between indecisiveness and rashness, shows us how Hamlet would have turned out. Thinking about that comparison can help us avoid the most common failing of histories of this period—let me call it Procopianism Not only Theodora but also Belisarius.
The libraries of Caesarea, on the coast of Palestine, a little more than halfway up from Tel Aviv to Haifa, were among the wonders of late antiquity. They are now lost to us, with the city effaced and left for archaeologists to retrace.26 Since the third century (and the days of Origen, that most versatile and prolific of early Christian writers, destined to have his own long-posthumous quarrel with Justinian), Caesarea had plied two trades: one of the intellect and the other more mercantile. It had a less grand scale of commerce than Alexandria or Antioch, but it offered a convenient Mediterranean port for caravans from southern Arabia, and provided a no less distinctive advantage for the scholars who lived and wrote there. Procopius came from Caesarea in the early years of Justinian’s reign to make his way in Constantinople.
When Procopius came to write the history of Justinian, he knew exactly the story he wanted to tell. He had a good emperor, a good general, and wars that gave every promise of great success. But the good emperor was not Justinian—it was Khusro I, the Persian—and Justinian’s wars of great promise all turned out ill in the end. The good general was Justinian’s loyal Belisarius, on whose staff Procopius had served during African and Italian campaigns. Since Procopius was self-interested enough to tell his story as though it were in praise of Justinian, most ancient and modern readers have taken for granted that he was a serviceable court historian, doing the best he could with difficult material. If Justinian is Procopius’s central figure, however, he comes through these pages silent and sullen, and at one point is even accused of behaving like a barbarian.27 Whether Procopius revives the spirit of Thucydides or anticipates that of Leo Strauss (both notions have their supporters among scholars today), he is a slippery and ambiguous figure to be the source of so much precious and privileged information.
