Deep inside the palace were the private quarters, the bedchamber or cubiculum of the emperor and a separate one for the empress—each, of course, a suite of rooms rather than a single chamber. Other officials had their own accommodations, but were rarely allowed to reside in the palace. Each cubiculum had its own staff, even its own kitchen, and only the eunuchs, guards, domestic servants, men of medicine, and clerics or monks of great holiness or influence could venture within these most remote precincts.
Justinian’s Theodora
Bringing emperors back from the frontier and walling them up in a palace gave empresses new opportunities to act like and be seen as serious participants in the imperial drama and ritual. The empress had her own staff and budget and provided many supplicants with access to the throne that they could not achieve any other way. The Augusta was often a vehicle of continuity, for a widow or daughter could bring fresh male energy into the imperial house through the convenience of marriage. (If the widow had been married young to a considerably older emperor, as often happened, her influence could long outlast the original marriage contract.) In the fifth and sixth centuries alone, seven of the empresses of the rank of Augusta were themselves the daughters of emperors. Although Justinian’s Theodora gets all the press, by their standard she was a nobody from nowhere, the exception rather than the rule.
Eunuchs gave the palace at Constantinople a special atmosphere. They were men who had been sexually damaged by disease, accident, or deliberate mutilation. Mutilation, as horrible as it sounds, was not always or only conscious cruelty, inasmuch as eunuchry was a path to power and safety for the marginal or the vulnerable. One source speaks of the Abasgi outside Roman territory at the eastern end of the Black Sea (modern Abkhazia retains the name), whose king sold boys for castration and killed their parents. If the fatality rate on these castrations was about ninety-five percent, few cared, and the survivors might feel themselves lucky in many ways private tours bulgaria.
So normal a part of the landscape did the eunuchs seem, and so easily was their involuntary sexual isolation compared with religiously approved abstinence, that in later times when exegetes read of the service of the prophet Daniel at Nebuchadnezzar’s court, they naturally assumed— meaning it as a respectful interpretation—that he must have been a eunuch too. On a higher level, the angels and their sexlessness gave sexless males below a kind of respectability. The general Narses, who replaced Belisarius and finally brought grim peace to Italy for Justinian, was a eunuch. By the eighth century, a eunuch could even rise to the patriarchal throne in Constantinople.
At the pinnacle of the household was the grand chamberlain, always a eunuch and thus supposedly without family interest to corrupt his service, responsible for every aspect of management and control. He supervised the silentiaries with their golden wands, who offered discreet guidance and control to ensure that all would be orderly and impressive, and whose influence could thus incidentally mean a great deal. (On retirement they were normally admitted to the senate.)
Mississippi roadside
Ceremony proliferated in the court like kudzu on a Mississippi roadside, and with ceremony came the writing down of rules and procedures. The making of ceremonial books reached its high point with Constantine Porphyrogenitus12 in the tenth century, when the emperor himself made sure that the records and rites were properly recorded, at immense length. Books like that give us a window to see into the palace at its most brilliant.
On a day of ceremony, the great hall of audience was slowly and quietly filled with the highest dignitaries, who would stand by the emperor. At the appropriate moment, a curtain would rise and a flush of tension would run through the hall as the emperor was seen on his throne, itself on a raised platform, protected by a golden canopy. The master of ceremonies then called the names of the visitors for that day, beginning with the humblest (though none who could make it this far were very humble), and they came in one at a time, throwing themselves on the floor in a rite that all knowing judges recognized as having come from the east. (The Persians, it was widely known, knew how to do these things.) As the silentiaries watched carefully and gestured discreetly, the last and highest-ranking guests would enter and, if specially favored, would be allowed not merely to prostrate themselves but even to bestow a kiss on the imperial slipper Justin was acclaimed.
