His paramour was Theodora, a blonde actress twenty years younger, daughter of a bear trainer in the hippodrome, who had performed in live sex shows on stage with penetration of all orifices by multiple partners and geese eating grain off her private parts – according to the embittered courtier Procopius, whose satire was only funny because it was partly true.* Eschewing bear pits and sex shows, she embraced religion with humourless solemnity, but it was the meeting with Justinian that truly changed her life.
QUSAY AND JUSTINIAN: FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO MECCA
Justinian was determined to marry Theodora, but the law banned noble-actress marriages and Empress Euphemia disapproved. Finally, in 521, Justin legalized the
Both empires were fighting proxy wars using Arab allies from Syria to Yemen. The Sasanian shah backed the Lakhm Arabs of Iraq and Justin, advised by his nephew, recognized the sheikh of the Ghassan tribes, headquartered on the Golan Heights, as king, patrician and phylarch. The Arab potentates fought so viciously that their imperial masters struggled to restrain them. In southern Arabia, the Romans vied with the Persians. Himyari (Yemen) had been conquered by the Christian kings of Axum (Ethiopia). But then a Himyari king, Abu-Kariba, expelled the Africans, defied Axum, Constantinople and Persia: he converted to Judaism and conquered Arabia as far north as Yatrib (Medina). When the Jewish king Yusuf persecuted his Christians, King Kaleb of Axum got Justin’s backing to retake Yemen. The African army crossed to Asia and overthrew Yusuf, who rode his steed into the sea. The Christians won – for now.
Between the three Arabian kingdoms were the small towns of Arabia that contained Christians, Jews and pagans, stops on the caravan routes that ran from the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf to Egypt and Syria. One of them was Mecca, which was both trading centre and numinous shrine, governed by the family of a sheikh named Qusay, who had come up from Himyari and become the guardian of its Kaaba, a black meteorite surrounded by a pantheon of statues.* After Qusay’s death around 480, his sons and grandsons ruled Mecca, the founders of the most powerful family in world history.
Back in Constantinople, Justinian succeeded his uncle and proceeded to demonstrate his high-mind Christian legitimacy, persecuting Jews and Manichaeans, building new churches with a new design feature, the dome, codifying the laws and fighting Persia. Yet rolling the iron dice of war is always a gamble. The shah unleashed his Arab ally, King al-Mundhir, who raided Roman Palestina, Egypt and even the outskirts of Antioch, where he captured two Roman generals (whom he ransomed) and 400 nuns (whom he burned alive as sacrifices to al-Uzza).
Justinian promoted a Thracian general who had started in Justin’s bodyguard. Belisarius, whose strapping figure and good looks were in stark contrast to the meagre, gingery Justinian, was married to Antonina, daughter of a chariot racer and best friends with Theodora from their racy youth. Belisarius, whose staff included Procopius the pornographic historian, was an innovator who, starting with his own regiment, devised a new army of multipurpose heavy cavalry and light mounted archers. Justinian and Belisarius formed a winning partnership, though the emperor, arch-manipulator, never forgot that a triumphing general was a threat. Now Belisarius won victories against the Persians but was let down by his unruly Arabs, and the shah was soon advancing into Syria. Just when it seemed things could not get any worse, they did.
JUSTINIAN: SOLOMON, I HAVE SURPASSED YOU
In January 532, Justinian ordered the hanging of some chariot-racing hooligans of the Greens and Blues, but the ropes broke and the thugs escaped. At the hippodrome, the crowd shouted at Justinian to pardon the escapees. When he refused, the factions, united and shouting the war cry ‘Nika!’ – Victory! – stormed the prison, and then went berserk as fire raged. Besieged in the Mega Palation as a new emperor was acclaimed in the hippodrome, Justinian wavered, ready to escape by boat. But Theodora declared that she preferred to die as an empress. ‘Purple,’ she said, ‘makes the best burial shroud.’
The couple had a surprise up their sleeve: Belisarius – leading his vanguard of
