The Book of Ancient Bastards (22 page)

The Emperor as Paranoid Plodder

( A.D. 317–361)

If any persons should be proved to devote their attention to sacrifices or to worship images, We command that they shall be subjected to capital punishment.
—Constantius II, The Edict of Milan

The Roman emperor Constantius II was hard-working, austere, and methodical, something of a plodder who, according to one ancient historian, “was too dull-witted to make a speaker, and when he turned to versifying produced nothing worthwhile.” Yet, when it came to religious toleration or perceived threats to his own life, this otherwise mediocre emperor proved to be every bit the bastard his father, Constantine the Great, had been.

Like his father, Constantius took great interest in religious matters. But where his father had bent Christian doctrine to will and subordinated it to his political purposes, Constantius II found himself buffeted by competing claims of various church fathers.

Constantius was not his father. He wasn’t all that bright, and had a short attention span, deferring much of the policymaking during his reign to a number of self-serving imperial eunuchs who enriched themselves at the state’s expense. In fact, Constantius himself wasn’t even an orthodox Christian. He followed the so-called Arian heresy that emphasized the humanity of Christ.

But that didn’t stop him from persecuting non-Christians!

Late in his reign, with no children of his own, Constantius, who had helped wipe out all but one of his cousins while still new to the throne, adopted as his heir the one cousin who hadn’t died in his earlier purge: a philosopher named Julian. But when Julian proved very adept at both commanding troops in the field and running a government, Constantius turned on him, disinherited him, and was about to meet him in battle to decide the question when he suddenly took sick and died at the relatively youthful age of forty-three.

Paranoid Bastard

As a young man, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcelinus served as an officer in the army of the emperor Constantius II and knew him personally. The portrait he paints of Constantius’s attitudes towards his own position as emperor is telling: “Although in most respects he was comparable to other emperors of average merit, yet if he discovered any ground, however false or slight, for suspecting an attempt upon the throne he showed in endless investigations regardless of right or wrong a cruelty which easily surpassed that of Gaius [Caligula] and Domitian and Commodus. Indeed, at the very beginning of his reign he rivaled their barbarity by destroying root and branch all who were connected with him by blood and birth. The sufferings of the wretched men accused of infringing or violating his prerogative were increased by the bitter and angry suspicions nourished by the emperor in all such cases. Once he got wind of anything of this kind he threw himself into its investigation with unbecoming eagerness, and appointed merciless judges to preside over such trials. In the infliction of punishment he sometimes tried to prolong the agonies of death, if the victim’s constitution could stand it.”

When Nike Is More Than Just the Name of a Shoe

( A.D. 483–565)

If you, my Lord, wish to save your skin, you will have no difficulty in doing so. We are rich, there is the sea, there too are our ships. But consider first whether, when you reach safety, you will not regret that you did not choose death in preference. As for me, I stand by the ancient saying: the purple is the noblest death shroud.
—The Byzantine Empress Theodora to her husband, Justinian I

The son of illiterate peasants, Justinian was the ultimate country boy come to the big city to make good. His uncle Justin worked his way up through the army to become commander of the emperor’s bodyguard and then emperor himself. And when he was made emperor in A.D. 518, he made his very smart nephew his right-hand man.

While he waited for his own term as emperor, Justinian plotted and intrigued, getting rid of potential rivals for the throne. Not a man of either action or physical courage, he preferred to assassinate or buy enemies off rather than fight them.

Still, as emperor he did many great things: revising the Roman law code, instituting a massive building program, and sending out great generals such as the legendary Belisaurius and Narses to reconquer Italy, Spain, North Africa, and southern France for the empire.

All of this cost money, and Justinian passed those expenses on to the citizenry. The reasonably foreseeable result was that the people would get pissed off and riot.

And when it happened, it happened right in Justinian’s backyard, at the Hippodrome, Constantinople’s open-air coliseum. Determined to flee, Justinian was shamed into action by his iron-willed wife, the empress Theodora.

He ordered his generals to take their troops to the Hippodrome and put down this riot that had attracted tens of thousands and threatened to spill over into open revolt. This they did with grim efficiency. Narses’s troops sealed off the coliseum so that no one within could escape. Then Belisaurius’s soldiers were ordered inside, where they killed every single living thing within.

The final death toll? Thirty thousand dead in one day.

Justinian’s subjects never forgot the example he made of those who rioted during that bloody week. He went on to rule for another thirty-three years. He never taxed his subjects as heavily as he had before the Nike riots (as they were called). And they never again rose up in such open revolt.

The Steel in the Bastard’s Spine

Born into the lowest of circumstances in Constantinople, Theodora was the daughter of a bear-keeper in the Hippodrome who worked by turns as an actress, acrobat, and prostitute before becoming the kept woman of a series of government officials, culminating in her liaison with Justinian, who insisted on marrying her. When he took the imperial throne in A.D. 529, she was very much his partner in ruling. As demonstrated by her speech quoted above, Theodora was a formidable woman, often stiffening her cowardly husband’s spine in moments when he wavered. Without her, he might well have fled the city during the Nike riots and lost both his throne and his life. Instead he ensured that thousands of citizens lost theirs in the Hippodrome.

Literal Bastard, Figurative Bastard

( A.D. 742–814)

Charles did not cease, after declaring war, until he had exhausted King Desiderius by a long siege, and forced him to surrender at discretion; driven his son Adalgis, the last hope of the Lombards, not only from his kingdom, but from all Italy; restored to the Romans all that they had lost; subdued Hruodgaus, Duke of Friuli, who was plotting revolution; reduced all Italy to his power, and set his son Pepin as king over it.
—Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne

There can be little doubt that Charlemagne was a great man. Uniting the Franks and expanding the Frankish kingdom to its greatest extent, he helped rekindle the flame of education, even though he himself could barely read. A great warrior, he stood off the Muslims in Spain and converted heathens in central Europe to Christianity.

Like all great men, Charlemagne had a bit of the bastard in him.

The passage quoted above shows some of that bastardry and determination. Charlemagne went into northern Italy and conquered the Lombards because their king was harboring a party of Frankish nobles that included a rival for the Frankish throne. This rival was named Pippin, and he was the eldest son of Charlemagne’s dead brother, Carloman.

Because of Frankish succession traditions, Charlemagne didn’t inherit King Pepin the Short’s kingdom outright upon his father’s death in A.D. 768. Instead, he split it with his younger brother Carloman.

The two brothers despised each other. They began preparing for war over the kingdom, which was only narrowly avoided by Carloman’s sudden death as a result of a nosebleed.

When a deputation of Carloman’s own nobles appealed to Charlemagne to annex Carloman’s territory rather than allow his underage son to succeed him, Charlemagne did so, effectively cutting Carloman’s sons out of the succession. Carloman’s widow Gerberga responded by taking her two sons and fleeing to Lombardy (in northern Italy), seeking protection from Desiderius, the king of the Lombards. In A.D. 773 , Charlemagne, no doubt realizing what a potential threat they represented to his hold on the Frankish throne, went after them.

What resulted from all of this was the end of the Lombard kingdom in Italy (Charlemagne gave it to the pope after he finished conquering it). The king of the Lombards and his entire family were forced to become monks or nuns (at least they weren’t put to death). And Gerberga and her sons? No further mention is made of them in the Frankish chronicles. Modern scholars assume they too were forced to take the tonsure and the veil.

Bastard Succession

The early Frankish kings did not hand over their realms in one piece to their eldest sons. Instead, according to custom, they split their kingdoms among their living sons. Charlemagne himself only had one son survive to adulthood, but that son, Louis, split the Frankish kingdom among his own three sons, leading to the foundation of the separate kingdoms of France and Germany.