Aided by unscrupulous subordinates, with names like ‘Alexander the Scissors’ or ‘John the Leaden-Jawed’ attesting their unpopularity, John of Cappadocia pressed on apace with his drive to fill the Treasury. Tax defaulters were treated with callous disregard for individual circumstances: one Petronius — a respected citizen of Philadelphia — was chained in a stable and beaten, until he had agreed to hand over the family jewels in lieu of payment of a supposed new tax on inherited wealth; in the same town, an old soldier hanged himself after being tortured to force him to pay up, despite being destitute. Far from being exceptional, such examples were typical of the lengths to which the prefect and his enforcers were prepared to go, in order to keep the revenue from taxes flowing in.
A regimen of swingeing cuts was visited upon the civil service. To squeals of anguished but ineffectual protest, mass sackings with savage pruning of departments became the order of the day. When the administration had been purged of all excessive fat, the prefect directed his economizing zeal towards the cursus publicus. The state postal service was not so much trimmed as virtually destroyed, leaving the infrastructure of but one route intact — that of the strategically important highway from Constantinople to the Persian frontier. On all other roads throughout the Empire, the following were totally abandoned: maintenance, relays of horses, postal stations, the hire of vehicles for travel or transport. The effect of this particular cost-cutting measure was immediate and disastrous. Farmers in the inland provinces were suddenly deprived of the means (on which they had relied for centuries) of conveying their goods to the ports, whence they were shipped to Constantinople and other centres. With the cost of private transport beyond the reach of the majority, many were reduced to trying to carry their goods to the ports themselves. .
Staring at the roadside corpse, a half-spilled sack of corn beside it (the sixth such he had encountered that morning), Basil — a small farmer from the province of Lydia, en route to Ephesus — lowered the heavy bale from his shoulders to the ground. He turned towards his wife, several paces behind and tottering beneath the weight of an enormous sack of grain. ‘Enough,’ he declared bitterly. ‘We will turn back now — unless we wish to end up like one of these.’ And he indicated the body on the road.
‘But how will we live unless we sell our produce?’ cried the woman, and began to weep. ‘If we can’t get it to market, our corn will just rot in the fields.’
‘Hush, my dear,’ soothed Basil, putting his arms around her. ‘Let it rot. We can harvest enough for ourselves to see us through the winter. Next year perhaps, the emperor will come to his senses and appoint another prefect. We can but hope.’
Basil’s plight was shared by countless other coloni. Everywhere, farmers went bankrupt and flocked to the cities in search of employment, adding more hungry mouths to a near-starving urban population. For, with food production stalling, a state of famine threatened to develop in many areas. The farmers were not alone in their resentment. At the beginning of a bitterly cold January in Justinian’s sixth regnal year — the two hundred and third from the Founding of New Rome* — there converged upon the capital a host of angry citizens: members of the upper classes (senators and councillors making common cause with the great landowners); small farmers, representative of the great mass of the population; supporters of the Blues; Church leaders; intellectuals; those ruined by the tax-collectors, or denied justice because they lacked the cash to bribe Tribonian, Justinian’s brilliant but corrupt top jurist. Disparate they might be, but all groups were united by a single purpose — to make the emperor listen to their grievances (above all those to do with John of Cappadocia), when he opened the races in the Hippodrome on the Ides of January.**
Meanwhile, delighted with the spate of revenue pouring into the Treasury (surely a sign of God’s approval), and blissfully unaware of the impending storm, Justinian was preoccupied with plans to replace his native village with a splendid new city — to be named Justiniana Prima. In doing this, he would be honouring his promise to fulfil his mother’s wish, to ‘make us proud of you’.
* Senatus Populusque Romanus — the Senate and People of Rome.
* In 529.
* It was in fact completed in just under fourteen months: begun on 13 February 528, and published on 8 April 529 — a staggering achievement!
** Confucius.
* 532. (See Notes.)
** Tuesday the 13th.
ELEVEN
Nika!*
The ninth day of January of that year, the two hundred and third from the Founding of New Rome, dawned cold and grey. A bitter wind from the Bosphorus gusted through Constantinople’s streets, causing beggars and the destitute huddled in doorways to wrap rags and blankets more tightly round their shivering frames. As the city stirred into life, angry restless crowds everywhere materialized, swirling about the squares and thoroughfares in sullen knots and eddies. Above the throngs placards bobbed: ‘Give us work’. . ‘Give us food’. . ‘Down with Tribonian’. . ‘Hang the Cappadocian’. As the morning wore on, the mood of the crowds grew steadily more tense and menacing. They began to search for a target on which they could vent their wrath. That target would soon, obligingly, present itself. .
Eudaemon, the city prefect, was a worried man. A report had just reached him in his headquarters — the Praetorium — by messenger from the curator of Region V, informing him that the crowds, now grown noisy and unruly, were massing in the Forum of Constantine.
‘Too close to the Palace for comfort, Phocas,’ Eudaemon muttered to his second-in-command. ‘Time perhaps to show the flag.’
‘No “perhaps” about it, sir,’ the optio retorted. ‘We should have cracked down hard hours ago. Arrested the ringleaders. Dispersed the rest by force. Now, we’ll be lucky not to have a riot on our hands.’
‘You’re forgetting, Phocas,’ responded the prefect with asperity, ‘these people have good reason to be angry.’ He regarded his Number Two — a burly six-footer with a nose broken in suppressing some street brawl — disapprovingly. ‘They’re not your average troublemakers, like the Circus factions, say. Most are ordinary decent citizens — frightened and desperate, thanks largely to the policy of John of Cappadocia. What they need are reassurances, not threats.’
‘My heart bleeds, sir. Meanwhile, as we sit here discussing the rights and wrongs of the situation, things out there are getting out of hand. Permission to call the men to action stations?’
Minutes later, Eudaemon and Phocas, at the head of several hundred vigiles, set out from the Praetorium near the Palace towards ‘the Forum’, as the Forum of Constantine was colloquially known. Each policeman, helmeted and carrying a riot shield, in addition to his nightstick, had been issued a baldric from which was suspended a military spatha. As the force entered the vast circular enclosure dominated by a tall column surmounted by a statue of the City’s Founder, via the easternmost of its two great gates, Eudaemon’s heart sank. The crowds had now morphed into that most dangerous of entities — a mob. Such an assembly was animated by a seemingly collective will, which could, in an instant, turn mindlessly ferocious, however rational its constituent parts might be.
Orchestrated by prominent members of the Greens and Blues, the huge concourse, on spotting the vigiles, broke into a baying chorus of boos and jeers, chilling in its menacing hostility. Mounting the tribunal beneath the gate’s central arch, Eudaemon tried to reason with the mob, assuring them that if they went home quietly, their grievances would be addressed. His (largely inaudible) words seemed merely to inflame his audience, who responded with a barrage of catcalls and abuse.