A proclamation might follow, or the welcoming of an ambassador. At the end, the emperor would rise and leave, and then the dignitaries would leave, now led by the highest-ranking of them. For some, this was routine; for others, it was a thrilling opportunity; but for all it was a clear reaffirmation and declaration of the power of the throne and a definition of the positions of those who came within that space or were kept outside.
In Justinian’s time, the entire ceremony was conducted in Latin, but this most Roman of Roman habits was starting to change. Constantinople’s rise had gradually allowed Greek to claim equal rights as a legal language in the fourth and fifth centuries. The law codes Justinian created were all in Latin, but he began to issue later laws more and more often in Greek. His successor Tiberius II in the 570s would be spoken of as the first Greek emperor; and by the 580s the man about to become Pope Gregory I noticed that it was becoming harder to find anyone in Constantinople who could translate Greek into Latin.
Gaining the throne
Such was Justinian’s Constantinople, the city present in all its possibilities in 527 as he took the throne, but I have gotten a bit ahead of myself. Who was Justinian, and how did he get here?
Justinian to declareHe was Petrus Sabbatius by birth, taking the name Justinian to declare how closely he followed his uncle Justin’s coattails. Legend would have it that Justin and two companions, Zimarchus and Dityvistus, came down out of the Macedonian hills with nothing in their knapsacks but paximadia, the twice-baked bread that wouldn’t go stale, which within living memory was still the food of shepherds in Crete and beggars in Greece. These were ordinary men out for adventure. They found it in Constantinople rila lakes bulgaria tour.
Justin advanced in the elite corps of 300 palace guards called the excubitors, moving up to the senior rank of count in that service. It was a considerable office, purely military—if there is anything purely military about guarding a monarch. We think he was well on in middle age, around sixty-five, when the emperor Anastasius, after twenty-seven years on the throne, died at age eighty-eight in 518. Five hundred years later, another emperor, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, told the story of what followed in meticulous detail.13
When the chamberlains and courtiers allowed Anastasius’s death to be announced, the master of offices, Celer (also from the Balkans), and the count Justin were called in, each going back shortly afterward to consult with others—Celer with the civil bureaucracy, Justin with the excubitors. The next morning, the leading citizens (in principle, the senate, but in practice an ad hoc group of potentates) arrived variously dressed, some in gray for dignity, others in the many colors of court style. They heard cheering from the circus, where a throng awaited the news of a new emperor the way people now fill Saint Peter’s Square to wait for a new pope. The secular and religious dignitaries were seated in chairs placed for them in the portico outside the great banqueting hall near where the public and private sections of the palace met.
Celer
There a bitter argument began. The aptly named Celer (“Swifty”) argued that if the inner-circle courtiers were to retain the initiative, a quick decision must be made. Meanwhile, events marched ahead outside. In the circus, the excubitors acclaimed a tribune named John as their candidate and lifted him on their shields. But the Blues would not accept this and began throwing rocks to break up the crowd. Some of the excubitors responded with bows and arrows and killed a few of the Blues. Another body of guards, the scholares, seized a patrician who was serving in military office (we don’t know who this was) and hauled him off to the great triclinium to propose him for coronation. But the excubitors angrily rushed to the scene, dragging the candidate off in great peril of immediate death. Just then Justinian, still not a most senior figure, intervened to rescue the patrician and have him taken away in protective custody. A ripple of enthusiasm for acclaiming Justinian went through the excubitors, but he would have none of it.
All the while, a mob clamored at the ivory doors of the palace itself, demanding that the chamberlains release the imperial regalia to them so they could enthrone an emperor, but the courtiers within kept stony silence. Eventually Justin’s name came to the fore, for reasons that later gave rise to speculation. The historian John Malalas, writing later in the sixth century, reports that one of the senior chamberlains resisting the mob’s demands gave money to Justin for his troops in order to buy their support for a candidate named Theocritus. But Justin put the bribe to a more personal use, and the troops chose him instead the palace were the private quarters.
This matches a story from another sixth-century historian, the count Marcellinus, that Theocritus and his patron Amantius were put to death (Marcellinus gives no explanation) very early in Justin’s reign. Justin was a known quantity, of mature years, who could control the troops at this critical moment— letting them bluster enough to make people fear revolt, then showing them deftly pulled to heel.
