The woman left the imperial household the following day.
Eudoxia accepted everything with smiling sweetness and serenity. But in private, it was whispered, the emperor still called her Athenais.
They were married on the seventh day of June, in the Year of Grace 421, in the great rectangular basilica of the Church of Hagia Sophia, by Patriarch Epiphanius.
They travelled there in a lavishly carved and gilded coach, drawn by four white horses through the streets of Constantinople. Heralds and trumpeters acclaimed the procession, while the people surged through the streets, strewing herbs and flowers in their path, casting wreaths over every statue and garlanding every doorway they passed with myrtle, rosemary, ivy and box, in the ceremony of ‘crowning the town’.
Theodosius wore a robe of cloth of gold, purple shoes, and an emerald sash. Athenais wore a stiff dalmatic stitched with precious stones. Indian pearls shone in her dark hair. Descending from the imperial coach, they made their solemn and stately way up the aisle of the church, gleaming with candlelight, the air filled with the sonorous chants of ‘Kyrie eleison’.
Among the congregation were Athenais’ humble family: the kindly old aunt who had paid for her journey to Constantinople; and, to the astonishment of many, her two elder brothers, who had so hard-heartedly dealt with her in the matter of their father’s will. Now they sat near the back of the church, disbelieving, watching their sister marry the emperor himself. Shamefaced and bright-eyed in the gloom of that great church, filled with remorse and regret, and acknowledging in their hearts at last that, after all, their sister was a better person and a sweeter soul than they would ever be.
From that day forth, they were devoted to her. And not merely because she was the empress.
Amid the solemn priests and the deacons, the incense and chanting, and throughout the blessed sacrament and symbolic marital ritual of the blood in a silver spoon, the empress’s two brothers were as joyful in their hearts as any there. She had conquered them, as she would conquer so many in the years to come, by goodness rather than strength.
It is a sorrowfully rare stratagem.
The imperial couple stood before the altar and Patriarch Epiphanius with his bejewelled fingers and his long scented hair. The patriarch turned to the purple cloaks and diadems laid out ready on velvet cushions. He blessed the cloaks before they were taken up by the attendant vestitores and fastened about the imperial pair with golden brooches.
The Patriarch placed the diadems on their heads, saying, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.’
The congregation chanted, ‘Holy, holy, holy, glory to God in the highest, and peace to his people on earth!’
The emperor and empress turned and walked down the aisle, passing rows of all the noblest and wealthiest citizens of Constantinople. One among their number was a very holy and noble lady who wore a cloak of such elaborate embroidery, illustrating the lurid tortures and deaths of those two blessed brothers, Primus and Felician, saints and martyrs, that other women around her had tutted that she looked as if she was trying to outshine the bride herself. But in truth there was no great danger of that, for the holy and noble lady was by no means so attractive in her features as she liked to believe.
As the newly married couple passed by, the empress seemed to slow a little, and gaze very keenly into the face of the noble lady, and smile. Such was the lady’s rapture at being thus acknowledged by the empress herself, that she gave a little scream, and clasped a hanky to her mouth, and succumbed to a fit of the vapours, and had to be quickly carried out of a side door into the street and splashed with holy water.
After the ceremony they returned to the palace where, flanked by armed guards and eunuchs, they entered the secret passage and ascended the spiral staircase to emerge into the Kathisma, the grandiose imperial box on the north side of the Hippodrome. Theodosius made the sign of the cross over his loyal subjects, and a hundred thousand people roared, ‘Long live the emperor! God bless the empress!’
There followed a great wedding feast in the palace, with the imperial pair seated together on a high dais. Princess Pulcheria had been reduced to a lower seating order. She ate very little, drank nothing, and scowled throughout. When a slavegirl bumped her, she pinched the girl’s arm viciously.
And then came the hymeneal hymn. One of the most admired court poets of Rome had been specially shipped over for the occasion. His name was Claudian Claudianus, an Alexandrian by birth. He was getting on in years, but his inspiration was in no way faltering, and his poems remained as lengthy and ornate as ever. Several guests had to be excused during the recitation of the hymn, which lasted almost an hour, and surprisingly failed to return to the table.
I shall quote only the delicate closing lines of the hymn, after Claudian had delightfully pictured the new empress’s virginal modesty being overcome during the wedding night ahead.
Then when your lips and limbs have found their rest,
Untied soul to soul, ye both shall sleep,
And Morpheus’ train shall still your throbbing breath.
When rosy-fingered dawn shall find you lying
Entangled in the coverlets, arm in arm,
The couch shall still be warm with princely wooing,
New stains ennobling sheets of Tyrian dye.’
When he at last finished and mopped his perspiring brow, the applause was tremendous.
In the days immediately following the marriage of the emperor and his beautiful new empress, a beggarwoman in a side street near the north end of the Mese found that some crazy fool with more money than sense had hidden a bag of solid gold pieces in the brown woollen blanket on the pavement where she slept. She waited a few days in case anyone should come back to collect their money with menaces, but none did. She concluded that God had chosen to wait until her seventh decade before bestowing His blessings upon her, and that His Ways were mysterious and wonderful, and that the money was hers. It would enable her to rent a little apartment above the shop of her friend the baker, and live in comfort for the rest of her days.
Likewise, a blind and legless beggar who sat all day and shivered all night beside the Fountain of Saint Irenaeus, as he sat there one evening, pulling his thin cloak round his skinny shoulders as best he could and praying that the chill wind out of Asia would drop, felt his hand taken by another, a slim, soft hand.
He jerked in blind astonishment. The hand held him gently but firmly.
‘Who are you?’ he whispered hoarsely, his eyes searching the darkness before him as if he might yet see. ‘The Magdalene? The Mother of God?’
He was lifted up into a carriage and driven through the streets, and he knew that the girl or angel or even the Mother of God herself was sitting next to him, but she would say nothing. They passed through some gates into a courtyard, the sound of the carriage-wheels clattering on the cobbles and echoing off the surrounding walls. He was taken and washed, and his sores were bathed in oil and bandaged, and he was laid to sleep in a little narrow chamber, with warm woollen blankets to keep him from the cold.
The following day a fellow who gruffly said he was called Braccus and worked here at this paupers’ hospital carried the beggar out into a sunny garden sheltered by high walls from the wind off the nearby sea. The old man was set down in some sort of arbour, and he sat there all day and on into evening in happy wonder, until the night air was filled with the sweet fragrance of jasmine.
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