And Justinian knew it. In the years prior to his accession, he had exploited the gangsterdom associated with the Hippodrome for his own ends. The most brutal racing faction of all, whose members deliberately aped the Hephthalites’ aura of menace by shaving the fronts of their scalps and “allowing the hair behind to hang down in a disorderly mess,”36 had been sponsored by the heir-apparent, and deployed on the streets of the capital as paramilitaries. Once on the throne, however, Justinian had come to regard the continued employment of hooligans with mullets as incompatible with the imperial dignity. Gang warfare in the Hippodrome was henceforward to be suppressed without fear or favour. Yet, even as Justinian himself affected a stern neutrality between the rival factions, other, less scrupulous members of the elite remained eager to sponsor their thuggery. Senators, in particular, while far too cautious to challenge the emperor’s reform programme openly, had no compunction about stirring up trouble behind his back. The Hippodrome, despite all Justinian’s efforts to dampen it, remained a tinderbox.
Then finally, on 14 January 532, even as the emperor’s law commissioners were scribbling away furiously in the palace next door, it exploded. Three days earlier, two rival gang-members had been temporarily spared execution when the gallows had snapped. Now, in the face of Justinian’s refusal to confirm their reprieve, the two factions forged an unexpected alliance, combined their forces and sprung their comrades from the city jail. Intoxicated by their own daring, and perhaps encouraged by whispering senators, the gangs then went on a collective rampage. Looters fanned out across the most exclusive quarter in the world. Anything that could not be stolen was trashed or burned. The damage was something prodigious. Over the course of the succeeding days, many of the city’s most beautiful and venerable monuments were burned to the ground. From the Augustaion to Constantine’s forum, the whole of the Mese was reduced to smoking rubble. Justinian, holed up in his palace, attempted to stave off total disaster by means of increasingly frantic expedients. First, he dismissed some of his more notoriously venal ministers; next, he tried to bribe the faction leaders; then, he contemplated flight. Finally, screwing his courage to the sticking place, he resolved to dowse the flames of anarchy with blood—gallons of it. Squadrons of crack troops were marched through the smouldering ruins of the city, and stationed at opposite ends of the Hippodrome, where a raging but largely unarmed mob was amusing itself by calling for Justinian to be deposed. The order to attack was given; the troops advanced; the crowd was systematically hacked and trampled underfoot. Less a battle than a calculated atrocity, the massacre left the arena piled high with corpses. The death toll, so it was claimed, approached fifty thousand people.37 If true, then one-tenth of the city’s population had been wiped out in a single day.
Justinian was now secure. The crisis turned out to have buttressed his mastery for good. Less than a couple of years later, in December 533, the commissioners whose work had so nearly been aborted by the riots delivered the second of their great law revisions: what they termed the Digest. No one, of course, thought to oppose it. The decimation of the Byzantines in the Hippodrome had made sure of that. In truth, however, the lesson taught the Roman people by the unleashing in their capital of such carnage was a primordial one. The first to demonstrate it, after all, had been Romulus himself, that fratricidal founder of the original Rome, whose twin brother, jealous and embittered, had presumed to challenge his authority by jumping over the unfinished wall of his infant city: an unforgivable and capital offence. Again and again, throughout the long and bloody course of their history, the Romans had served to prove the truth of the moral. Power without the sanction of violence barely ranked as power at all.
Yet Justinian himself, for all the savagery he had unleashed, did not care to dwell too closely upon the brute reality of what had taken place beyond his palace. Just as Virgil, back in the balmiest days of Roman power, had piously attributed the forging of the empire to the favour of the gods as well as to the swords of the legions, so similarly was it important for Justinian, in the midst of all his labours for the improvement of the world, to demonstrate that he had right as well as might on his side. Fortunately for his purposes, there lay, in the wake of the riots, the perfect stage to hand. The centre of Constantinople had been left gutted. “The city was a series of blackened, blasted hills, like the reaches of a volcano, uninhabitable because of dust, smoke, and the foul stench of building materials reduced to ashes.”38 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 bath-house. 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 Augustaion for his tastes: its replacement, so he decreed, was to be built on a much smaller scale. Similarly, great works of art although the statues might have been, they had represented—to Justinian’s mind—not gods, but demons. Much that had once been taken for granted by the Roman people was now dismissed by them as dangerous superstition. The entire notion of the supernatural order of things celebrated by Virgil had long since been junked as a diabolical fantasy. Even the Palladium, secure and unharmed though it still lay beneath Constantine’s column, had been largely forgotten—with those who did preserve a memory of the statue likelier to regard it as an object of necromancy than a talisman.
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. A god from whom everything to which Justinian laid claim, whether the governance of the world or “the power to make laws,”39 directly flowed. A god who reigned eternal in the heavens—and yet who had been born a man back in the reign of Augustus, and put to death upon a Roman cross.
Justinian, rebuilding Constantinople, would stamp the city definitively, once and for all, as a Christian capital.
Joined at the Hip
Huge buildings spelled greatness. The Caesars had always appreciated this. Like the issuing of laws, the humbling of barbarians and the wearing of purple, the construction of towering monuments was very much part of what the Roman people expected of an emperor. Nor was Justinian minded to let them down. Even before the destruction of large swaths of Constantinople provided him with the perfect opportunity to rebuild the city to his own exalted tastes, he had displayed his relish for the empire’s grand tradition of architectural swagger. The initial focus of his energies, however, had lain not in the capital but far away, on the eastern frontier.
Here, in 530, the Persians had responded to the latest breakdown of peace talks in time-honoured fashion—by making a land grab. The object of their campaign had been that particular bugbear of their high command, Dara. Directly in front of the walls of the fortress, a Roman army, led by a brilliant young general named Belisarius, had met the Persians and put them to flight. “Such an event was one which had not happened for a very long while.”40 Nevertheless, it had been a close-run thing: Dara’s fortifications, jerry-built at immense speed, would not have withstood a concentrated siege. “And because the emperor Justinian perceived that the Persians, so far as it lay in their power, would never permit this outpost of the Romans, which was such a menace to them, to continue standing there, but were bound to persist in attacking it with all their might,”41 he had ordered a massive rebuilding programme.42 Dara was made to bristle. It was designed to be—and to appear—impregnable. Any passing barbarians were to look on it and despair. The emperor, aiming to ram the point home, even graced Dara with a new name: “Justiniana New Town.” Here, in the hulking silhouette of its ramparts, was the manifestation of a ruler with the world in his hands.