The Nika Riots: the bloodiest riots in Roman history

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2:32Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. The sun rises over the city of Constantinople in the year 527 A.D. The sun dances off the waters of the Golden Horn, the inlet which divides the city's eastern and western halves. You can hear the bustle of shop owners as they begin to set up their stalls for the day. The smell of freshly baked bread wafts through the air, and the fishermen of the city are beginning to set

3:07up their lines. This bustling city is home to some half a million inhabitants. It is the eastern capital of the Roman Empire. The western capital, the city of Rome itself, has long since fallen and is now under the control of Germanic kings. Constantinople is now the only imperial capital ruling over the provinces of the eastern Roman Empire, and it has all the things that you'd expect from a Roman capital. It has a senate, a law court, public bathhouses, a forum,

3:38and an emperor who wears the imperial purple. As you walk through the streets, you would hear a mix of Greek, Latin, and Syriac, along with other languages being spoken by the many different people who make up this incredible empire. The city's streets are also full of churches, which is testimony to the fact that at this point in its history, in the 500s, the Roman Empire is firmly Christian. Christianity is the official religion, and it has a very Christian emperor, a man named Justinian.

4:10Justinian's name is associated with one of the most thoroughgoing legal reforms in Roman history. He was an incredibly ambitious ruler who even made it his project to reconquer the lost city of Rome itself. But all of that nearly didn't happen. Because during his reign, the city of Constantinople suffered one of the bloodiest riots in all of recorded history. This is the story of how that happened. You are listening to Villains and Virgins Podcast, and this is the second episode in a series on Emperor Justinian

4:43and Empress Theodora. But before we get into the details of all of that, I have some very special news for you. Justinian and Theodora, the subjects of today's story, are the power couple of the 500s. But there's another power couple that I've looked at on this podcast, and you now have a unique opportunity to do a deep dive into their history. So in September, I am teaching an online course through Simon Fraser University, and it's open to anyone who's interested in enrolling. You don't have to be a university student, and you don't

5:19even need to have a university background. It's through the Continuing Studies program, and what that means is it's a shorter course. It's going to run for only six weeks. It'll be one session a week online, and you can join live. There will be extra readings and things you can dig into if you want, but there's no mandatory homework, and you won't have to write any essays. So this course is about Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and their role

5:50in the Reconquista and the Inquisition. If any of that sounds interesting to you, email me at the podcast. The email for the podcast is in the description today, but it's villainsandvirginspodcast at gmail.com. Send me an email. Let me know if you'd like to be added to the list so that you have access to register as soon as it opens. And if your appetite for history is not satisfied yet with the twice-a-month episodes that I'm doing here on the podcast, there's a way that you can get even more.

6:24Because as a member of the incredible community of people who support Villains and Virgins podcast on Patreon, you get access to a monthly bonus episode every month that is only available on Patreon. You also get to have monthly live history Q&As with me about whatever historical topics have come up for you, and you also get ad-free access to regular episodes just like this one. So if any of those benefits sound of interest to you, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and

6:56become a supporter of Villains and Virgins podcast. And of course, I have to say a huge thank you to the amazing people who are already steadfast supporters of this podcast there. Episodes like this one would not be possible without you. Thank you. The story of Justinian and Theodora is to me one of the most incredible accounts I've ever come across in many thousands of pages of historical reading. And that's because each of these people are remarkable as individuals,

7:27but the relationship that they had with each other is also outstanding. And we introduced both of these two in our last episode, but to briefly remind you, Theodora begins her life as a circus performer. Her family works in entertainment in the Hippodrome. At a very young age, she's training to be an actress and a performer. And while this means that she's highly visible, it also means that she's part of one of the lowest stratas of society in Constantinople at the time. And this is because actresses and performers were also very frequently sex workers.

8:03It was expected. It was assumed. And so for Theodora, who spends her teenage years in this profession, she's going to carry around this reputation of being an actress, which was synonymous with being a prostitute, for the rest of her life. Despite the fact that she finds an escape from that life, although it's very difficult to do, and she has a conversion experience in Egypt as a woman in her 20s, which radically alters her life. And so by the time she comes back to Constantinople, she's no longer an actress.

8:38She's had a number of very significant life-changing experiences, and she's looking for a job, a different kind of job. And that's when she's introduced to Justinian. He is also a remarkable figure, because at this point in time when he meets Theodora, his uncle is the emperor. But they're a very unlikely family. Justinian and his uncle were peasants from the province of Thrace. They were people who were physically strong, but they weren't at all part of the aristocracy.

9:08And so his uncle manages to become emperor through building a career in the imperial guards and then cheating a scheming eunuch who made the mistake of giving this captain of the palace guards some money to distribute as bribes to get somebody else selected as emperor. But the captain of the guard distributes these bribes and persuades people to support him. And so that's the story of how Justinian's uncle, Justin, manages to become emperor. Because he succeeds, Justinian is now connected to the most powerful man in the empire, and he himself is being

9:46lined up to inherit the throne. So both of these people, Justinian and Theodora, are outsiders. They're people that aren't regarded as part of the existing power hierarchy. This doesn't make them particularly popular with people in the powerful patrician class, but their experience as outsiders shapes the vision that they bring to how the empire will be ruled. Today's story is essentially about pressure. It's about the pressure that Justinian and Theodora, as emperor and empress, try to

10:19exert from the top down on their society, reshaping Roman law, reshaping ways of living, reshaping what is allowed and what is not allowed, who has access to power and who doesn't. But it's also about pressure being exerted in the opposite direction, from the ground up. Because there is resistance and resentment that is going to well up against Justinian and Theodora, which will culminate in this absolutely horrific riot that nearly topples them from power before they've even properly gotten started.

10:54If you look up Justinian on Wikipedia right now, you're going to get an account of his rule that makes him sound very competent, very skillful, an excellent emperor. But what this glosses over is the fact that he was highly controversial and not necessarily well-liked in his lifetime. So let's dig a little bit deeper into why that is exactly. It starts with the fact that not only is Justinian from this peasant family, he's already rewritten some very

11:28important laws just to marry Theodora. Roman society at the time had laws that prohibited actresses, because they were also prostitutes, from marrying men of the upper classes, or aristocrats. And so when Justinian meets Theodora and falls in love with her and makes her his mistress, he's not content with just keeping her in that position. He wants to make her his wife. But in order to do that, he needs to get his uncle, the emperor, to rewrite the laws.

12:03His uncle obliges. So this means that Justinian gets to marry Theodora. But of course, that's not all it means. It means he just opened a door that allows countless other men and women to marry people that they normally wouldn't have been allowed to wed. And there are many people who take advantage of this. So you can imagine some of the landed aristocracy, some of the senators and patricians looking around going, what kind

12:35of chaos is this? Justinian's family has made it possible for the lowest of the low to marry into our families, to have access to our money, to attend our dinner parties, these disreputable dregs of society. What kind of a disaster is this? So even before Justinian has managed to become emperor, he's already stirred up a scandal just by getting the laws changed so he can marry his wife. Soon after, Justinian and Theodora are crowned emperor and empress, and things only get worse from there.

13:12One of the main voices of this feeling of discontent and anxiety that Justinian and Theodora create is a guy called Procopius. Now, if you ever did any kind of Byzantine history back in school or university, you would certainly have come across Procopius's name. He's famous for writing this absolutely insane little document called The Secret History, and it's perhaps one of the most scurrilous, venomous, and vindictive pieces of smear that's ever been written in history.

13:44But Procopius was an insider. He was somebody who worked in the imperial court. He knew Justinian and Theodora. He was a member of the educated classes himself, and he worked for a guy called General Belisarius. So Belisarius is good friends with Emperor Justinian. Belisarius's wife Antonina is good friends with Empress Theodora. And here is Procopius working for General Belisarius and very much in the inner circle of palace politics. His official job is to accompany General Belisarius on military campaigns and write

14:19the official history of what was done there. And in these official histories that Procopius writes, General Belisarius comes across as a military genius, brave, brilliant, somebody who overcomes incredible odds and pulls off victories that seemed impossible to regular mortals. But behind the scenes, when nobody was looking, Procopius amused himself by collecting together the very worst rumors that anybody ever said about Emperor Justinian, Theodora, his boss Belisarius, and Belisarius's wife Antonina. And to these, he added exaggeration, interpretation, and fabrications of his own.

14:54Now, the secret history of all of these slanders that Procopius is preparing was not published during his lifetime. And this was intentional. He would have gotten into a lot of trouble if it had come out while he was alive, and he knew that. But he kept it like a bomb that was timed to go off when he was safely out of the picture. And it was designed to permanently blacken the names and legacies of these

15:26four people in the imperial court. And you get the idea that Procopius wasn't just trying to blacken their names or smear dirt on them. He was trying to make you believe they were made of nothing else. So just to give you a sense of the kind of exaggeration Procopius indulges in, he would have you believe that Justinian, the emperor, is nothing less than the prince of demons whose sole goal is the destruction of humanity.

15:57And that in this he's aided by his demon consort, the empress Theodora. And in Justinian himself, the worst vices of all of humanity are somehow miraculously combined in one place. It's just way over the top. The secret history, therefore, is not really a good account of the facts about Justinian and Theodora. But what it is a good account of is the kind of gossip and slander that people liked to whisper about them. And there are all kinds of interesting reasons for that.

16:32In Theodora's early days as an empress, she's working really hard to try and grow into the role. It's certainly not the sort of job that she trained for or ever expected to have. The fact that she found herself wearing the crown of an empress was something that defied belief for herself and for a good number of the people around her who couldn't believe it had happened either. And so she had a lot of work to do.

17:04And in her first years in that role, we find her working really hard to study the different languages in their most formal forms that she's going to need to interact with palace administrators, with foreign diplomats, with members of the court. And she also has to build her own networks. She has to find alliances of people inside the palace that she can work with, but she also needs her own circle of friends that she can trust. And one of the things that Theodora does that begins to get

17:41people's tongues wagging is that she brings some of her friends back from the days when she was a nobody, an actress in the theater, and she installs them in the palace, including her older sister, who was a very well-known actress. So many of these women had left the acting profession and Theodora was making sure that they were comfortable and also that they had access to marriages with rich and powerful men. But the gossip was that Theodora had just brought in a bunch of prostitutes from the Hippodrome and installed them

18:15in the Imperial Palace where they were carrying on the same sex trade as before. And here she was, turning the Imperial Palace into a brothel. Now, of course, that's a ridiculous exaggeration, but it's the sort of thing that people loved to repeat. People who were patricians and were really angry that these low and common people like Theodora and her friends could be in the halls of power. And when you look at it from Theodora's perspective, you can hardly blame her.

18:46Once you're an empress, everybody wants to flatter you. Everybody wants to be your friend. But if you had any brains at all, and Theodora had quite a good supply of those, we have every reason to believe, you would know that most of these people are just flattering you to your face, but that's because they want to get things from you. The only people that you can be certain of who are really your friends are the people who were your friends when you were a nobody, when you were the sort of

19:20woman that respectable people didn't want to be seen with. And so if these were your friends from that time, then you can be sure that these are people who still really like you for who you are. So it's hardly surprising that Theodora wanted to surround herself with women like that. There was a marked difference between Theodora and her friends. When Theodora married Justinian, and then a few years later stepped into the role of empress, she dedicated herself to these roles completely and wholeheartedly. So there's every reason to believe that she had an entirely monogamous relationship with Justinian.

19:57She carried on no affairs. Not even her worst enemies could find even a shred of evidence to suggest that Theodora herself was engaged in any kind of sexual impropriety. But she was a pragmatist, and that meant that she didn't necessarily expect the same rigorous standards of behavior from all of her friends. She does make efforts, though, to ensure that her friends are looked after. Some of her acquaintances from her past life in the circus are able to make their own marriages into wealthy

20:28families. But now that Theodora is empress, she has the power to arrange some marriages for some of her friends and their daughters as well. And she doesn't hesitate to use that power. Now, if the empress tells a wealthy family in Constantinople that she's found a bride for their son, it would be really inadvisable to refuse that suggestion, even if the young woman in question might have a disreputable past or connections to an actress as her mother, for example. In other words, even if wealthy patrician families left to their

21:02own devices would never allow such a marriage, despite what the law might permit, if the empress applied a bit of pressure, suddenly these doors would need to open. And so Theodora does arrange marriages for some of the daughters of her friends in this way. And there's a hilarious story about the outcome of one of these marriages that I cannot resist sharing with you. The story goes that Theodora arranged a marriage for the wealthy son of an aristocrat family with the daughter of one of her actress friends.

21:35And the morning after the wedding, the young aristocrat complained that his new wife was not a virgin. And when Theodora heard about this, she ordered that he be brought to the palace, wrapped in a blanket, and spanked with a cane. Basically, she was treating him like you would treat a mischievous schoolboy, someone who was going to be caned on the backside for misbehaving. And the reason for this was that Theodora knew men like this. Aristocrats who were happy to buy the bodies of poor women on the streets or in the hippodrome to gratify

22:12their own sexual appetites whenever they felt like it. But when they got married, they expected that their wives be completely virginal. And so this double standard around sexual activity was something that Theodora herself had many bitter experiences with in her past life, and she had no patience for this double standard from someone from this class. And so this public humiliation of this young man was very much a commentary on what the Empress thought of

22:44this double standard. Another thing that Theodora and Justinian did that attracted a lot of resentment was they took court protocols to a whole new level. And again, this particularly rankled people in the upper classes given who they thought Justinian and Theodora were. In other words, these people are commoners and here they are humiliating us, the upper classes, in these rituals. So the imperial court rituals before had involved a bowing and a kneeling to sort of kiss

23:17the hem of the garment of the emperor. Under Justinian and Theodora, these rituals were significantly expanded. Now, people entering the imperial presence had to completely flatten themselves on the ground and they had to kiss the foot of the emperor or the empress, whomever they happened to be having an audience with. So the more complete flattening on the floor, the kissing of the foot, these were new additions which were considered

23:47further abasement or humbling of the person in the presence of the emperor. But the real shocker was that these prostrations and these forms of extreme humility were required not just in the presence of the emperor but now in the presence of the empress. So this is an amazing statement on Justinian's part which is that his wife Theodora is worthy of all the same state ceremony as the emperor himself. but you can see why it would cause a lot of bitterness for

24:23people in the patrician class. Theodora probably knew many of these people herself so when they were bitter while they looked at the ground and kissed her foot she may have seen many of these people at parties where she worked as a teenager. Some of them might even have been former clients of hers during her years as a sex worker and so they resented the fact that the balance of power had been so resoundingly overturned that they

24:55were now abasing themselves in the presence of someone that they once regarded as the lowest of the low and for Theodora perhaps it was a small bit of revenge. But you can also easily imagine the amount of bitterness that this would engender and why the insane slanders of someone like Procopius would find an eager audience. We know that Theodora didn't condemn her actress friends or their daughters nor did she insist that they adhere to the same level of sexual propriety that she herself now practiced but

25:33she did have very strong opinions about the system that had entrapped them. Within two years of Justinian and Theodora becoming emperor and empress Justinian embarks on a whole-scale reform of the Roman legal system and the first version of these reforms comes out in 529 but many of these laws have Theodora's fingerprints all over them in particular the ones that have to do with prostitutes. Theodora herself knew all too well the life of actresses in the Hippodrome which was a life that she and

26:08her sisters had been born into and which was extremely difficult to escape. So that was one form of prostitution but there were others. There were in Constantinople women who walked the streets and sold sexual services and these were among the most desperate and destitute. Many street prostitutes lived on the edge of starvation. There was one account I read of a churchman who in Constantinople encountered a woman like this and said that she hadn't eaten in three days and he bought her some food but this was the sort of edge of

26:43starvation existence. Similarly there were women who worked in brothels and if you've ever been to Pompeii and you've seen the brothels that still survive there they resemble nothing more than jail cells. They're extremely grim and the women who worked in these places were very much slaves. Throughout the empire in the 6th century there were men who would roam to small villages and they would offer parents money for their young daughters. There were many girls who were sold into the sex trade as young as

27:1610 years old. The pimps didn't always tell the parents that the money that they were paying for their young daughters was the price of sending them into life as a prostitute but in many cases that's exactly what happened. These children were brought back to the capital and soon installed in brothels where they were forced to work for long hours and where all of their earnings were pocketed by the men who owned them. There were some fathers who prostituted their daughters directly and there were also slave owners who prostituted their slaves despite

27:52the fact that there were laws against doing this. So it was a very widespread and a very grim trade and crucially it was a trade that the girls and women themselves had basically no choice about. Theodora decided that this was something that she was going to use her new power as empress to change. So she and her husband Justinian built a place that they called the Convent of Repentance. It was essentially a nunnery and Theodora had street prostitutes rounded up from Constantinople and sent to this place.

28:26And her idea was that here they would be safe, they would be given clothing, they would be given food, and they could live out the rest of their lives in peace and comfort. Procopius predictably snickers at this initiative and repeats rumors that some of these women unhappily threw themselves to their deaths out of the walls of this convent because they found it so difficult to live without sex. But that's more or less what you'd expect someone like Procopius to say.

28:57Throughout his writings he demonstrates a lively and prurient interest in the sex trade and the women plying it he repeats the worst rumors and apparently has absolutely no conception of what it was like to be one of the women trapped in it. So Procopius is the only one who repeats the idea that some women were throwing themselves to their deaths out of desperation from being removed from the sex trade. Theodora is trying to create essentially a women's shelter in the 6th century but she doesn't stop there.

29:31She then attempted to end the brothel sex trade in the city. So she summoned the pimps or the owners to the imperial palace. She required them to disclose under oath the amount of money they had paid for each of the women or children that they had working. She then paid each of these pimps the purchase price of the girls. She gave these girls and women a new set of clothes a small amount of money and set them free.

30:02So these are remarkable interventions. Theodora, even though she now lives in luxury and as an empress, hasn't forgotten the bitterness, the suffering, and the desperation of the women that she saw on the city's streets when she was one of them. And now that she has power and wealth, she's using these things not to amuse herself, but to try to free other people from situations that they had no way of escaping. Unfortunately, these efforts didn't end the sex trade. And that's because there were certain economic realities that kept applying pressure

30:38on families in this direction. What I'm talking about here is the idea of a dowry. So a dowry was an amount of money that a father was expected to supply with his daughter at the time of her marriage. In some parts of the world, dowries work the other way, but in this part of the world, the dowry was an amount of money that the girl's family was supposed to come up with. Now, if you were a very poor family, you had no chance of being able to supply a sum of

31:14money to the family of the potential husband for your daughter. And what that meant was that your daughter was unmarriageable. And therefore, she was now going to be a dependent that you had to support. So if someone came along and offered you money to take your daughter away, you can begin to see how families who themselves were living in desperate economic conditions would find that a hard offer to refuse. So what happened was that new girls were bought and the sex trade resumed in other places.

31:49And of course, Theodora and Justinian also made laws about actresses. So we've addressed the three different levels of prostitution. There were street prostitutes who went to the convent of repentance. There were brothel prostitutes who got this buyout and were set free, and then there were actresses who were doing sex work in the hippodrome itself. And what Theodora and Justinian decreed was that nobody could force a woman into the life of an actress or keep her there against her will.

32:21And once again, this is very clearly a rule that comes directly from Theodora's own experience. While she didn't end up successfully ending the sex trade, she certainly made a concerted attempt. It's very clear that Justinian championed and supported Theodora's initiatives around trying to end prostitution. But for him, prostitution was just one of a very long list of issues that he thought needed to be addressed. His project was the whole-scale reform of the Roman legal code, which was an accretion of decisions and precedents

32:55that had accumulated over centuries. And some of these things were contradictory and some of them were out of date, and Justinian decided that the whole thing needed an overhaul. So he puts a guy named Trebonian in charge of this. Trebonian is a Roman Empire jurist, and he's going to oversee combing over all of the Roman legal precedents and decisions, eliminating discrepancies, filling in places that are confusing, removing laws that are now obsolete, and adding new laws.

33:26And Justinian's program here is to systematize Roman law and also to bring it into line with his vision of the Roman Empire as a Christian state. In particular, he wants to deal with a category that he would have called religious deviance, which is quite a large category, as we shall see. But this Roman legal reform project is one of the most important parts of Justinian's legacy, because the version of Roman law that's come down to us today is very much Justinian's version.

34:00He was responsible for preserving, systematizing, and recording all of this. And the Justinian Code becomes the foundation for civil law, which is still very much the foundation of legal systems throughout many parts of Europe, as well as Latin America. There are two essential systems of law. There's the common law tradition, which emerges from England and is exported to Commonwealth countries, and then there's the civil law tradition, which is very much rooted in Justinian's reforms and is found

34:31in the countries I've already mentioned. Many centuries later, none other than Napoleon Bonaparte is going to firmly position himself in the Roman legal tradition. He will call himself at first consul and then emperor of France, and Napoleon undertakes a massive rewriting of the French legal system, but he very much looks to Justinian and Justinian's legal code as the foundation of what he's going to do. So while in Justinian's lifetime this was a massive project, he couldn't

35:01have had any idea of how long lasting this particular legacy would be. Justinian isn't just interested in organizing the law and resolving contradictions, of course. He wants to bring the laws into line with his vision of a Christian empire. So what did that mean exactly? Well, it meant that Justinian is also introducing laws to eliminate practices that he thinks are undesirable or unchristian, and these include an attempt to regulate or even eliminate gambling in the empire.

35:32Of course, that didn't go over well because gambling was incredibly popular in the 6th century as it is today, and particularly around chariot races in the Hippodrome at Constantinople. Gambling on chariot drivers and horses was big business, and a lot of people enjoyed doing that even if they also went to church. So trying to crack down on gambling wasn't a particularly popular initiative. Justinian also tried to get rid of the teaching of Hellenic thought, or what he would have called pagan philosophy.

36:04So we're talking about Stoicism, a school of philosophical thought that was associated with several Roman emperors, including Marcus Aurelius. We're also talking about people like the Cynics. Yes, this was actually a philosophical way of thinking, not just a term for a jaded person that we use today. The Stoics, the Cynics, and the Epicureans. But one of the most interesting and far-reaching reforms, one of the ones that would have affected almost everybody, was Justinian's reformed laws on marriage. Lots of people got married, so if you're going to change the rules on that,

36:41you were going to have a direct impact on the daily life of most of the people in the empire. So what was it like before? Well, Roman law around marriage was pretty relaxed. It essentially resembled what in some places we call common law relationships today, which is if two people were cohabiting for a certain period of time and they expressed a desire to be married, then they could be married because they both wanted to be. And if they decided that it wasn't working out and they weren't very compatible and

37:17they didn't want to be married anymore, that was the end of it. It was fairly easy to get into and fairly easy to get out of. Yes, there were property and inheritance implications that had to be dealt with, but you weren't in a situation where you had to stay married to somebody that you really didn't want to be with. Justinian formalizes the procedures around getting into marriage and he also makes it harder to get out of marriage if

37:48your reason is just simple incompatibility. It wasn't harder for everyone to get a divorce, though. One of the interesting reforms that Justinian makes is to make it possible for women to get a divorce if their husbands are living with another woman under the family roof, or maintaining mistresses elsewhere in the city. This particular law has the fingerprints of Theodora all over it, and we have the very strong indication that this was something that she had direct personal knowledge of, maybe friends of hers who were wives in these situations.

38:24Justinian also makes it easier for women to recover their dowries, that payment that their family made after the death of a husband. Many of his legal reforms were intended to stress monogamy and an equal bond in marriage, which you can imagine was not particularly popular with some people who might have been used to having everything all their own way. Justinian also makes it easier for men to marry their concubines, and so this is bringing an informal

38:55sexual relationship into the category of marriage, which provides more stability and legal protection for the woman involved, but it also legitimizes children of that union and provides an inheritance for them as well. This reform is interesting because it makes it possible to marry women that some people would have considered beneath their status before, so these women can now be legitimate marriage partners in the eyes of the law, so in this sense it's a major advantage for lower class women. And the law was now interested in protecting the inheritance of

39:33children even if their parents separated or got remarried to other people. And one final story about this legal reform, which I think sheds a lot of light on conditions in the empire at this time, was that Justinian was concerned with protecting children who were abandoned by their parents and forced to become beggars. So this is something that you come across as a side note in a summary of Justinian's legal reforms, but if it's important enough to write into the law, what it tells you is that the economic

40:09circumstances of many families in the empire had to be so desperate that parents would consider just abandoning their children altogether, leaving them to survive as best they might on the street. So we can see that this is a situation that Justinian is very concerned about and he wants to improve. The legal code also deals with slaves and agricultural workers. It basically provided a lot more freedom for people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

40:40Remarkably, women who were freed from slavery were now legally free to marry whomever they chose, and that meant that they were no longer going to be regarded as permanently stained in the eyes of the law by their years of slavery. One of the common threads that we see running through all of the different social reforms that Justinian and Theodora make is that they're interested in judging people for what they do, not who they've been in the

41:12past. And so we saw that with Theodora's reforms around prostitutes, and we can now see that in the protection the law offers for women who'd been trapped as slaves. Women who were slaves and who were kept as concubines by their masters were now automatically freed if their master died. This hadn't been automatic before. In many cases, that family expected to be able to keep women and their children who were already slaves as slaves in perpetuity. But Justinian's law ends that and says, no, if the master

41:48dies, the freedom of the slave concubine and her children is now automatic. And so that represents an economic loss to the family that had purchased this woman and now benefits from her labor and the labor of her children. You can see why not everybody would be happy about this. So Justinian is something of a social engineer, a person who had very high ambitions. And one scholar I was reading described his reign as, quote, His attempts to reshape the law would have a

42:23very deep footprint that would continue for more than a thousand years. But Justinian and his reforms had to survive first. And in the early years of his reign, that was by no means a guarantee. He was shaking things up legally, but things were being shaken up in general by earthquakes. So in 526, the year before Justinian becomes emperor, there's a major earthquake. And in 528, the year after he becomes emperor, there's another major earthquake in two big cities, including Antioch.

42:56So obviously these earthquakes are incredibly destructive, buildings are flattened, cities require massive rebuilding, there are huge casualty numbers. But why is this a threat to Justinian personally? Well, it's because in the ancient world, as we've seen sometimes in more recent days, people are inclined to regard natural disasters as signs of the wrath of God. And if God is angry about something in the empire, then the emperor himself surely has to have some share

43:27of responsibility for whatever it is that's displeasing God. So some people looked at these earthquakes and said, something is wrong in the empire, and perhaps it might even be the person who's wearing the crown. Justinian, on the other hand, blamed the earthquakes on homosexual behavior. Now, one scholar I was reading pointed out that this was ridiculous even in the 500s. Yes, this is the ancient world, but there were people even then who understood the idea that it was probably

44:00a little bit more related to geology than it was to sexual practices. Nevertheless, Justinian picks homosexual behavior as the reason that God is displeased, and he uses this to initiate a crackdown on homosexual men. Again, this is radically different from the attitude of the ancient Romans to homosexual sex. So prior to the rise of Christianity throughout the empire and to its status as the official empire of the religion in the late 300s, attitudes had been very, very different.

44:33The Romans didn't really regard people as straight or gay. They didn't think that who you had sex with was this major marker of your identity. What they cared about was where in the social hierarchy you were positioned. And so they had rules about seducing freeborn young men. So if you're a free Roman male, you shouldn't be seducing the son of your friend who's also a freeborn Roman male. That's bad. Also, you shouldn't be having sex with your friend who's a free Roman male, because one

45:09of you is going to have to play the subordinate role, and that's sort of shameful. But if as a Roman man you choose to have sex with your male slaves, nobody cares about that at all. It didn't mean that you had an identity that was gay. It just meant that slaves were beneath you, whether they were male or female, and you could do with their bodies exactly as you pleased. So there wasn't any kind of attitude in Roman law that condemned homosexuality as a

45:44blanket practice. But by the time we get to Justinian's legal reforms, and the first version of this comes out in 529, the year after the earthquake, Christianity has been very influential in the empire for some two centuries. And so there is a shift around social attitudes toward homosexual sex, and Justinian is now going to reflect these very publicly and very violently. So he decides to round up two bishops. These are church officials, and they're known to have been engaging in homosexual behavior, and he makes a public example

46:21of them. One of them gets tortured and sent into exile, and the other one is castrated, and then paraded publicly as a form of humiliation. Justinian labeled their crime as religious deviance. In other words, the teachings of Christianity as he understood them were one thing. These were people who were violating those Christian teachings, and so they were deviating from the correct practice of the faith. And Justinian uses this event as the beginning of a crackdown on homosexual men throughout the empire, and the

46:56penalties that he establishes are things like flogging, exile, or full castration, the entire loss of all male genitalia, which was often a death sentence for the men who suffered it. So when we pull back from all of these individual stories and details, what we see is a whirlwind of activity in the first five years of Justinian's reign, and changes being exerted at every level of society, suddenly you are really in trouble if you're having sex with other men.

47:31Gambling is a problem. Prostitution is illegal. It's difficult to get out of marriage for some people. Slaves are being freed. Former prostitutes and actresses are marrying into upper-class families. There were so many different inputs that affected people at so many different levels that it must have seemed somewhat overwhelming, and that's really important for understanding what happens next. There's a lot of top-down pressure being exerted by the emperor on his people, but every action tends to stimulate

48:04a reaction. And by 532, when Justinian has been on the throne for five years, there's an enormous and very violent reaction, which is pressure coming from the bottom back up towards the emperor. The Nica riots, often called the bloodiest riots in history, begin in January of 532, and they begin and end in the Hippodrome. We talked a lot about the Hippodrome in our previous episode, but think of it as this

48:35enormous oval racetrack located in the center of Constantinople, where people are coming every week to watch chariot races. The rich, the poor, the free, the enslaved, everybody goes there. They're watching chariot races, they're watching the halftime shows by circus performers and actresses and gymnasts who we've already talked about, and they're socializing with their friends and their neighbors. They're also organized into factions, and this is a really important part of the story, absolutely necessary for understanding how

49:09the riots unfold as they do. So there were several of these factions. Some sources call them the Deems, and there were four colors. There were the blues, the greens, the reds, and the whites. The reds and the whites are more minor players, and they're essentially absorbed by the blues and the greens. So you have these two major factions. The people involved in these factions begin as sports fans. So the blues have their own blue chariot drivers that people are supporting and cheering for and gambling on, but

49:47they also have their own upper-class supporters, people who are patrons, and they have their own circus performers. So there's the blue circus performers who do the halftime show. Then the greens are exactly the same. They have their separate chariot drivers, their wealthy patrons, their sports fans, and their dedicated circus performers or halftime show staff. So you can think of everyone gathering in the Hippodrome. They're sitting with their faction. They're rooting for their own chariot drivers in the races.

50:21But the factions are an amazing social phenomenon because they weren't just sports fans. They also functioned a little bit like political parties as well. Because the rich and the poor were both part of the same faction, you could have pressure being exerted by the poor through the faction to make demands on the emperor, as we're about to see. But you could also see wealthy patrons using the factions for their own purposes, using bribes to perhaps pay members

50:55of that faction to undertake certain types of street violence or intimidation. So think of these factions as these incredibly volatile social organizations. They have a sports team aspect. They have a political aspect. And we're going to see all of that on display in the Nika riots. So it's January 532. Everyone's in the Hippodrome for these chariot races. And the Greens faction begins a chant. And this is a chant that they're doing in the presence of the emperor, who's also in the Hippodrome, in the imperial box.

51:28He's watching the games. And Emperor Justinian and Theodora were known to be supporters of the blues faction, the rival faction. So here we have the Greens. Think of them as filling the stands. And now they're united in chanting something that they want the emperor to hear. And so they're making a number of demands. They're essentially saying that members of the Greens are being treated unjustly by some palace officials. There had been an ongoing problem of street brawling. Outside the Hippodrome on off hours, you'd have blues faction members and greens faction members, typically young men, finding each

52:06other in the streets and fighting. And so the Greens were complaining that in these episodes, they were being unjustly punished. And members of the blues were just being let off. They're saying this is unjust and they're appealing to the emperor for justice. Justinian doesn't respond sympathetically. He doesn't use his own voice, of course, but he has a herald or someone who's going to be his voice officially. He brings the herald over. He tells the herald what he wants to say. And then the herald trumpets the emperor's words loudly so that

52:40they can be heard by people in the Hippodrome. And the emperor's not sympathetic. He essentially says to the Greens, you're wrong, you're incorrect, your demands are not factual. And then it devolves into him through the herald, actually calling them names. Apparently he calls them a bunch of Jews, Samaritans, and Manichaeans. And what that means is, you're not good Orthodox Christian imperial subjects. You guys are religious deviants, which is kind of a threatening term. And it's a way of undermining their claims and saying, you know, you guys are essentially a bunch of rabble

53:16rousers. I'm not taking you seriously. Obviously, the Greens are very unhappy with this response. And after people leave the Hippodrome and the races are over that day, there are a number of even more violent street brawls between members of the Blues and members of the Greens. And Justinian needs to crack down on this. So there are members of both factions who are arrested and something like seven of them are condemned to execution. So four of them are beheaded and three of them are sentenced

53:49to hanging. As was customary, people are gathering to watch these public executions. And this is where things get really messy. So the executioner botches the hangings. He's got three men he's supposed to kill. He manages to hang the first one. But when the next two are strung up, they end up falling down alive. And so the executioner gathers them up and he tries again. And this time the scaffold breaks. And once again, these two men are on the ground with nooses around their

54:21necks and they're still alive. And you can imagine the horror of the crowd watching this. It's not particularly comfortable to watch another human being get killed in front of you anyway. But when that human being has now gone through this process a couple of times and you've seen the horror on their face and the dread and they have to go through the whole experience again, people said enough is enough. So two of these men had fallen on the ground, still alive.

54:52The crowd seizes them. A couple of monks run forward to offer them shelter in a church and they get whisked away. It just so happened that one of the two survivors was from the Greens faction and the other survivor was from the Blues faction. The city prefect, who's in charge of law and order and supervising executions, sees that these two men have been sheltered in a church, which is supposed to be a place of sanctuary. So you can't just run in and drag them out.

55:24So instead he stations soldiers around that church so that these two guys aren't going to be able to escape at night and vanish into the city. And this makes the crowd even more unhappy. They sort of think that these men have paid their due. They've gone through an execution twice and they've managed to survive. It's time to leave them alone. And the idea that the city prefect is going to station soldiers, which is an indication that he still intends to arrest them and try to kill them again, makes them really angry.

55:59What this remarkable, horrifying circus of an execution does is it suddenly unifies the Blues and the Greens. The same factions that have been literally at each other's throats in the streets for months are now suddenly united by one shared goal, which is they want these two guys to live. And one of them is a Blue and one of them is a Green. So now both factions have the same goal, which means that the following week when they're back in the Hippodrome

56:30watching chariot races, the two factions are now bringing one request to the Emperor. So during the races, you can hear people in the Blues and the Greens chanting their demands, let these men live, show mercy. And the Emperor is unmoved by them. The chanting continues and each faction finishes the chant with long live the merciful Blues and Greens. So now even the chanting unites the factions in a common cause. Now, this would have been a good moment to show clemency.

57:00As an Emperor, to appease the crowd by granting them the lives of these two men, who had really suffered quite extraordinarily, would have been a good political decision. Yes, look, you can have their lives. I promise you they'll be let free. Everyone can be happy. They can rejoice in the mercy of the Emperor and that could be the end of it. This would have been a good thing to do. But Justinian is a very inflexible character. He's a man of principle and he's a lawgiver. And in his book, these guys had broken the law and

57:36therefore they had to suffer the penalty and that was that. So he turns a deaf ear to the demands of the crowd. When the Emperor refuses them, things take a much more heated turn. The crowd, which is filling the Hippodrome, all the people, the blues and the greens, are now chanting Nika, Nika, which translates as victory. And that's, of course, where these riots get their name from. And they flood out of the Hippodrome into the streets, heading for the prison.

58:07Now at this point, things are beginning to get out of control. Having an angry crowd leave the Hippodrome, yelling, threatening violence, things look like they're starting to slip and Justinian is beginning to be worried for his physical safety. So he leaves the Hippodrome and goes directly to the palace where he can be fortified by the Imperial Guard and behind defensible walls. Meanwhile, the crowd is surging out of the Hippodrome and toward the city prison, which is run by the city

58:37prefect, the guy in charge of imprisonment and execution. And the crowd is outside the prison yelling and screaming and demanding some guarantee about the freedom of these two survivors. And because they don't get any kind of a promise from the city prefect, the crowd turns to violence. So they begin to actually set fire to buildings and they break into the prison and set free some prisoners that they find there. We've now crossed the line from social discontent into open rebellion.

59:07And in the days that follow, the destructiveness only increases. So the angry rioters begin to set fires in other parts of the city. And of course, once you set a fire, you can't really control where else it goes. So several really important buildings are very badly damaged, including the Church of Hagia Sophia, which, yes, did exist in 532, but not in the form that we know it today. It was a smaller church at that point and it was badly damaged by these fires.

59:39There were even some parts of the Hippodrome itself that were damaged in these flames. Justinian tries to resume some normalcy by ordering races in the Hippodrome the very next day. He's hoping that if he can get everybody back into their regular routine, bread and circuses, people are going to simmer down. But it doesn't work. So he ends up sending a representative to ask the crowd what their demands are. What do they want to make them stop? And by this point, the demands of the rioters have grown.

1:00:12It's no longer just about the two men who'd been nearly executed, the blue and the green, that they want to be freed. The list of demands has expanded and the crowd has now named three hated Imperial officials, including a guy called John the Cappadocian, who's a champion tax collector and has a reputation for raising lots of money for the emperor and inflating the tax rates so that he pockets a good chunk of that cash for himself. And as you can imagine, that creates a very heavy economic burden on many people.

1:00:47So they absolutely loathe this guy. So they're demanding that Justinian dismiss these three officials, which he does. But the riots and the fires continue. The thing about a crowd is that there are lots of people in it and they don't necessarily all have the same ideas. So many of the people of the city are chafing against other issues as well. The long list of things that are now crimes as a result of Justinian's recent legal reforms, the very heavy

1:01:18enforcements or punishments that he uses to force people to follow these laws. It's all a lot of change very quickly and many people are extremely unhappy about it. The rioters are still setting fires around the city and one of them gets out of control and lights a hospice. And this hospice burns to the ground, killing all of the patients who are trapped inside in their beds. A group of these rioters gathers outside the imperial palace and of course, Justinian is once again quite worried for

1:01:50his physical safety. So he decides that it would be a good idea to send General Belisarius and some goth soldiers out there, essentially like riot police to disperse the crowd. But this only inflames them even more. So people were angry, they got angrier, and now that essentially the riot police have been deployed on them, that anger is going to reach a fever pitch. Mob demands now escalate to a new emperor for the city. So we've gone from something as simple as stop treating the Greens unfairly to an escalation that now says we

1:02:26need a new emperor. We are done with this Justinian guy. And so the rioters run towards the house of a nephew of a previous emperor. So you remember, Justinian was preceded by his uncle Justin, who was also from a peasant family. But the emperor before those guys was called Anastasius. And he was an emperor from the patrician classes. So the mob is now going to find one of the nephews of this old emperor, Anastasius. And they go to his house and they try to seize him to make him the new emperor.

1:03:01This nephew, though, has wisely skipped town. He kind of figured that he saw how things were going and decided it would be a good time to take a little bit of an unscheduled vacation. So the mob is angry that they can't find this guy at his house. And what do they do? They burn his house. Now this seems kind of bizarre, doesn't it? This is a man you wanted to make emperor, but he's not home. So you decide you're going to burn his house. There's an old saying that says the intelligence of the mob

1:03:37is the intelligence of an average person in that mob divided by the number of people in that mob. In other words, it's not very high. It's very unpredictable. And the things that people do in these mob formations don't always make a lot of sense. So we go from wanting to make this guy the new emperor to burning his house to the ground in a very short space of time. But there are two other imperial nephews that are still around in the city.

1:04:10And these two guys had actually been sheltering in the palace with Justinian and Theodora so far. Many senators and these imperial nephews were offered shelter in the palace by Justinian when things started to get out of control. But as the violence is spiraling and becoming increasingly destabilizing, Justinian decides to send the senators and these other two imperial nephews out of the palace and back to their own homes. And that's because he's beginning to worry that there might actually be a revolution underfoot.

1:04:42And in that case, he doesn't want potential future emperors under the same roof of the palace with the imperial guard where they could potentially connive together and coordinate their efforts to overthrow Justinian if the imperial guard should decide to get involved. So he wants to separate these people from the imperial guard. He sends them home. When one of these two imperial nephews, a guy called Hypatius, gets home, the mob arrives soon after and they drag him out because he's going to be their chosen candidate for new emperor.

1:05:17And Hypatius' wife is horrified by this. She tries to rip her husband out of the hands of these men in the riot mob and keep him with her because she knows full well how dangerous this is. But Hypatius is seized by force. He's carried out. They take him to the Forum of Constantine and legend has it that they were looking for a crown of some kind to put on his head to indicate that he's the new emperor. and somebody took off a golden torque, essentially a metal collar that's open at the back, took

1:05:54it off their neck and placed it on Hypatius' head, declaring him to be the new emperor. And then they proceed to carry him into the Hippodrome itself. Hypatius expressed no desire to be emperor and he also must have understood how dangerous his situation now was. But it seems that when he saw the massive number of people who were assembled in the Hippodrome yelling his name that he began to think that there was a possibility he might just succeed in becoming emperor and began

1:06:27to play along. The senators, who are the upper classes in Rome, who have also been kicked out of the imperial palace and are witness to all of these events, begin to think that backing Hypatius might be a good idea. After all, Hypatius is old money. He's the nephew of the real emperor, Anastasius, that guy who ruled before these upstarts from Thrace arrived, before Justinian and his unspeakably low wife, Theodora, took over Constantinople. Hypatius's old money, like them. And the senators also have some other gripes with Justinian.

1:07:02They're complaining that since he took over, he allows the Senate, meaning them, to meet, but really just for formality's sake, because it's a tradition. He doesn't allow them to make any substantial decisions and has centralized all power in his own grasp. And so these senators are saying, essentially, not only is Justinian not one of us, but he's actually marginalizing us and reshaping how power functions in the empire. And we don't like it. So perhaps this mob uprising provides a perfect opportunity to get rid of this Justinian

1:07:36guy and reinstall someone like Hypatius, someone like us, and rebalance things to how they were. Justinian and Theodora at this point are trapped inside their palace with the imperial guard, and they must have been listening with some trepidation to the chants and cries coming from the Hippodrome and all this talk that there was a new emperor who was going to be put in place to get rid of them. And at this point, for Justinian, there have been days of rioting, uncontrolled violence, fires.

1:08:09He's been unable to settle things down or reassert his own control in the city. And at this point, he's beginning to panic. He's tried everything. He's sent somebody to appease the mob. He's fired the guys that they wanted him to fire. He's tried to use the riot police. He's tried to use races in the Hippodrome. Nothing has worked. And in a tradition that many emperors in Constantinople would observe, when things begin to get difficult, it's a good time to get into a boat and sail away.

1:08:42So this is exactly what Justinian is beginning to think about doing. And at this critical moment, Theodora steps in and changes everything. The speech that Theodora makes at this moment is incredible. And Procopius is our source for this, which is kind of a little bit dubious because Procopius was no fan of Theodora's. But this speech isn't part of Procopius' secret history. It was part of his official history. And that meant that it would have been read by people who were

1:09:14in the room. People like General Belisarius. And therefore, if Procopius had written some version of Theodora's words that was wildly inconsistent with the facts, he would have been called on that. So while we can't imagine that Procopius is giving us her exact words, we can have some reasonable degree of certainty that in the broad strokes, it was accurate. And essentially, what Theodora says is that flight, running away, is not the right action to take. For someone who's once been an emperor, to run away and become an exile,

1:09:48is a shameful thing. And she says, I hope never to have the imperial purple or the robes of her office stripped from me. Nor do I want to live to see the day when people I meet fail to address me as empress. And she says to Justinian, if you want to save your life, you can do that. But if you do, don't you think there will come a day when you would happily trade all your safety and comfort for what you're about to leave behind. And then she concludes by saying, as for me, I think

1:10:26that the imperial purple makes a fine burial shroud. In other words, I would rather die an empress than live in exile. This is a grim moment. If they stay in the palace doing nothing, they're going to die. If they flee and go into exile, they may still very well be murdered. They could attempt to raise an army somewhere and try to come back. Or they could live out their days in exile. But it's a very uncertain future.

1:10:56Theodora is saying, we stay, but we stay and fight. And she, of all people, must have known that there would be many in the city who would love to see her naked body dragged through the streets in disgrace. And she's absolutely not willing to permit that to happen. not without dying first. Theodora's speech puts resolve into the heart of Justinian and his men. And inspired by her words, Justinian decides to take a new course of action. He sends General Belisarius and a force of Germanic soldiers and mercenaries toward the Hippodrome.

1:11:31Now, inside the Hippodrome, the scene is that the crowd has put Hypatius into the emperor's box, into the spot in the Hippodrome where Justinian normally sits to watch the games. And he's got this gold torque on his head and they're acclaiming him emperor and a well-armed group of greens is currently offering to go and break into the imperial palace on Hypatius' behalf. In other words, we're ready to go attack the imperial palace, drag Justinian and Theodora out and put you in.

1:12:04And it's right at this moment that General Belisarius and his men begin to enter the Hippodrome and they do so in a concerted attack from three different points. So suddenly, there are soldiers coming into the Hippodrome and they're just cutting down everybody that they can find. And so, you can hear the chanting and the excitement of the crowd begin to shift as suddenly there's screaming and then panicking and then people running because the people in the

1:12:36Hippodrome are civilians. They may have had some sticks and some weapons but they weren't trained soldiers in armour and suddenly there are people being hacked to death by swords everywhere they're bleeding on the Hippodrome and you have the stampeding effect. So people begin to run for their lives and many more people would have died by trampling than would have died by the sword. The estimates of the number of people who died in the Hippodrome that day

1:13:08range from 30,000 to as high as 50,000. Now, even if we go with 30,000 to 35,000 which is the more frequently repeated number that's an incredible number of corpses. And if we go as high as 50,000 that's something like a tenth of the population of the entire city. One in ten people dead. So if you think about your own city and its population and you think about the impact of killing one in ten people it becomes a massive number.

1:13:40These tens of thousands of bodies littered all over the sands of the Hippodrome would be the price of kingship. And it's an appalling scene to modernize. This was the end of what had been a sort of revolution in the making. The people in Constantinople the ones in the Hippodrome that day wanted to get rid of Justinian and put a new man on the imperial throne. The form of government that they were trying to enact wouldn't have

1:14:12been a democracy of course. But it would have been an act of agency. A decision by the people of the city about who was going to rule over them. A terrible silence descended over the city of Constantinople for several days in the wake of this massacre. People stayed quiet in their homes afraid to go out in the streets afraid of who else might need to die before the emperor was done with them. And one legend says that the bodies of the slain were buried

1:14:47underneath the sands of the Hippodrome itself. Now I don't know if that's true but it's a ghastly mental image to contemplate. If you think of some thirty thousand bodies buried under the sands of the Hippodrome where bread and circuses would continue to be offered to the people to sustain the emperor it's a horrible image of the cost of that reign continuing. It's pretty hard for Justinian to look like the good guy here.

1:15:17You want to maintain your grip on power and you don't care how many people have to die for you to do that? Incidents like this from history are a reminder of why we developed democratic government in the first place. The whole point of democratic government is that you are allowed to exercise power if and only if you have the consent of the people that you govern. And once you lose that consent you lose your legitimacy to

1:15:48govern that country and you lose your grip on power. That's the whole point because what happened in the Nika riots is an example of a system of government where one person has power and also has control of the military and is willing to do whatever is necessary to maintain that control no matter how many of their own people they need to kill to do it. In the chilling aftermath of this massacre there were some loose ends that needed to be tied up.

1:16:22Those two nephews of the former emperor Hypatius who had been crowned in the Hippodrome and the other nephew Pompeius well they needed to be rounded up and they were going to be executed. Justinian and Theodora could not permit rival candidates for the throne to continue to exist because there was always the possibility that they would be used as figureheads for another attempt. These two nephews had to be eliminated by which I mean executed and that Theodora was the one who said

1:16:56absolutely not these two have to be killed but it's equally possible that Justinian could have reached that conclusion entirely on his own. Whatever the conversations in the imperial palace actually were we know that these two men were executed and their bodies were thrown into the water they're thrown into the sea. But Justinian relented after the execution and he pardoned them posthumously and you might think what's the point of that they're already dead but there was actually a very good reason to do this.

1:17:30If you had people who were executed for treason then that meant that all of their property would be immediately seized by the state by which we mean here the emperor. By pardoning these men posthumously Justinian allowed some of their family property to pass to their children and in this way he refrained from punishing future generations of that family for the political entanglements of their fathers. Now he turned his attention to the city center. The Hippodrome the Church of Hagia Sophia the Church of St.

1:18:05Irene and the Senate were smoking ruins. There would be a lot of rebuilding required to bring the city back to its former glory. But Justinian wasn't necessarily interested in rebuilding trust with his subjects. This part baffles me because within a year of the end of the Nica riots he'd reinstated the very imperial officials that the people had risen up to demand that he dismiss including that hated tax collector John the Cappadocian who we will hear more of in the next episode.

1:18:38But perhaps Justinian was expressing his desire to rebuild his reputation in other ways specifically with building projects. The Church of Hagia Sophia as we know it today with its impossibly high dome is the direct result of Justinian's rebuilding of it after the Nica riots in 532. In its new expanded form it could accommodate something like 16,000 people at once and it had a staff of 500. Its new far more elevated dome was the highest dome it was possible to build while concealing the support

1:19:13pillars of that dome inside the walls. The new dome rose to dizzying heights and the church became an example of the largest interior space that it was possible to build with the constraints of that time. During his reign and especially in the period after the riots Justinian acquired a reputation as the emperor who didn't sleep and he had good reason to be anxious. The Nica riots had come terrifyingly close to toppling his reign

1:19:43and ending all of his imperial projects. And Justinian who'd managed at great cost paid by other people to continue being emperor was now determined to prove himself worthy of the imperial purple. So we have this image of an emperor who's working all day and most of the night. He eats little and he sleeps even less because he's involving himself in absolutely every detail of imperial administration. He's working on his legal reform project, his massive city rebuilding project, but he's also focused on small details like

1:20:18the cost of food as well as organizing military campaigns. The picture that emerges of Justinian is a man who's something of a micromanager. He has to be involved in every little detail, but he's also something of an inflexible ruler, someone who would impose heavy taxes to fund his visions, but wasn't particularly good at building the political consensus that he would need to maintain a stable rule. In his own words, we have this account of his activities, quote, We lose sleep

1:20:51every night, pondering what boon, pleasing to God, we might bestow upon our subjects. At all times we are sleepless and fasting and undergoing all hardships to benefit our subjects, unquote. Now this is obviously how Justinian wanted other people to see him, and so it's tempting to write this off as a bit of an exaggeration. Was he really staying up at all hours and eating so little? We might be inclined to doubt this, but we have independent accounts from people who were not fans of Justinian

1:21:26that he was indeed up at late hours, so this part is true. But not everyone was convinced that he was up late at night working for the benefit of his subjects. Procopius, for example, in his Secret History claims that these sleepless nights were evidence of Justinian's status as the demon king, and there was even a ludicrous account of Justinian walking around the palace at night, at all hours, without his head. His head floated of its own accord about the imperial halls.

1:21:59So, as you can see, everyone agreed the emperor worked very late hours, but not everyone was convinced that this was evidence that he was working for the benefit of his subjects. In the aftermath of the disaster of the Nica riots, Justinian is committed to proving himself worthy of his imperial station. And to do this, he's going to commence two of the most ambitious projects of his reign, or perhaps any imperial reign. And the first will be to resolve the religious controversy that is tearing apart the Christian world.

1:22:35The second has to do with the immense amount of territory that the Roman Empire has lost to barbarian tribes like the Vandals and the Goths. And Justinian wants to commit to recapturing that territory, including the original capital of the empire, the fabled city of Rome itself. And to this goal, he will commit vast amounts of effort and imperial treasure. But to see how all that turns out, and to hear about some of the court intrigues and the spicier bits of Justinian and Theodora's reign, you'll have to come back for the third and final episode.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at the Nica riots and this pivotal moment in the reign of Justinian and Theodora. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure your notifications are on so you don't miss the next one when it comes out. And if you'd like to discuss the details of this episode with me in person during our monthly live history chat on Patreon, head on over to patreon.com slash Eva Schubert and become a supporter of Villains and Virgins podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me today, and hopefully I'll see you in the next episode. Bye. Bye. Bye.