It is noteworthy that a great many witnesses at the Rehabilitation Trial swore that she was “simple.” Did they mean that she was half-witted? Probably not. More probably it was true that she always wanted to spare her enemies, when, in accordance with the custom of the Hundred Years’ War, she should rather have held them for ransom if they had been noble or slain them if they had been poor men. To the ordinary brutal mediæval soldiery such conduct would appear insane. Possibly, of course, the term “simple” might have been used in opposition to the term “gentle.”
May I be allowed to give a vignette of Jeanne going to the burning, compiled from the evidence of many onlookers given at the Rehabilitation Trial? She assumed no martyresque imperturbability; she did not hold her head high in the haughty belief that she was right and the rest of the world wrong, as a martyr should properly do. She wept bitterly as she walked to the fatal cart from the prison-doors; her head was shaven; she wore woman’s dress; her face was swollen and distorted, her eyes ran tears, her sobs shook her body, her wails moved the hearts of the onlookers. The French wept for sympathy, the English laughed for joy. It was a very human child who went to her death on May 30th, 1431. She was nineteen years of age—according to some accounts, twenty-one—and, unknown to herself, she had changed the face of history.
The Empress Theodora
THIS famous woman has been the subject of one of the bitterest controversies in history; and, while it is impossible to speak fully about her, it is certain that she was a woman of remarkable beauty, character, and historical position. For nearly a thousand years after her death she was looked upon as an ordinary—if unusually able—Byzantine princess, wife of Justinian the lawgiver, who was one of the ablest of the later Roman Emperors; but in 1623 the manuscript was discovered in the Vatican of a secret history, purporting to have been written by Procopius, which threw a new and amazing light on her career.
Procopius—or whoever wrote this most scurrilous history—states that the great Empress in early youth was an actress, daughter of a bear-keeper, and that she had sold tickets in the theatre; her youth had been disgustingly profligate: he narrates a series of stories concerning her which cannot be printed in modern English. The worst of these go to show that she was an ordinary type of Oriental prostitute, to whom the word “unnatural,” as applied to vice, had no meaning. The least discreditable is that the girl who was to be Empress had danced nearly naked on the stage—she is not the only girl who has done this, and not on the stage either. She had not even the distinction of being a good dancer, but acquired fame through the wild abandon and indecency with which she performed. At about the age of twenty she married—when she had already had a son—the grave and stately Justinian: “the man who had never been young,” who was so great and learned that it was well known that he could be seen of nights walking about the streets carrying his head in a tray like John the Baptist. When he fell a victim to Theodora’s wiles he was about forty years of age. The marriage was bitterly opposed by his mother and aunts, but they are said to have relented when they met her, and even had a special law passed to legalize the marriage of the heir to the throne with a woman of ignoble birth; and, after the death of Justin, Theodora duly succeeded to the leadership of the proudest court in Europe. This may be true; but it does not sound like the actions of a mother and old aunts. One would have thought that a convenient bowstring or sack in the Bosphorus would have been the more usual course.
So far we have nothing to go by but the statements of one man; the greatest historian of his time, to be sure—if we can be certain that he wrote the book. Von Ranke, himself a very great critical historian, says flatly that Procopius never wrote it; that it is simply a collection of dirty stories current about other women long afterwards. The Roman Empire seems to have been a great hotbed for filthy tales about the Imperial despots: one has only to remember Suetonius, from whose lively pages most of our doubtless erroneous views concerning the Palatine “goings on” are derived; and to recall the foul stories told about Julius Cæsar himself, who was probably no worse than the average young officer of his time; and of the last years of Tiberius, who was probably a great deal better than the average. Those of us who can cast their memories back for a few years can doubtless recall an instance of scurrilous libel upon a great personage of the British Empire, which cast discredit not on the gentleman libelled but upon the rascal who spread the libel abroad. It is one of the penalties of Empire that the wearer of the Imperial crown must always be the subject of libels against which he has no protection but in the loyal friendship of his subjects. Even Queen Victoria was once called “Mrs. Melbourne,” though probably even the fanatic who howled it did not believe that there was any truth in his insinuation. And Procopius did not have the courage to publish his libels, but preferred to leave to posterity the task of finding out how dirty was Procopius’ mind. Probably he would not have lived very long had Theodora discovered what he really thought of her. He was wise in his generation, and had ever the example of blind Belisarius before him to teach him to walk cautiously.
Démidour in 1887, Mallet in 1889, and Bury also in 1889, have once more reviewed the evidence. The two first-mentioned go very fully into it, and sum up gallantly in Theodora’s favour; but Bury is not so sure. Gibbon, having duly warned us of Procopius’ malignity, proceeds slyly to tell some of the most printable of the indecent stories. Gibbon is seldom very far wrong in his judgments, and evidently had very little doubt in his own mind about Theodora’s guilt. Joseph Maccabe goes over it all again, and “regretfully” believes everything bad about her. Edward Foord says, in effect, that supposing the stories were all true, which he does not appear to believe, and that she had thrown her cap over the windmills when she was a girl—well, she more than made up for it all when she became Empress. After all, it depends upon how far we can believe Procopius; and that again depends upon how far we can bring ourselves to believe that an exceedingly pretty little Empress can once upon a time have been a fille de joie. That in its turn depends upon how far each individual man is susceptible to female beauty. If she had been a prostitute it makes her career as Empress almost miraculous; it is the most extraordinary instance on record of “living a thing down,” and speaks volumes for her charm and strength of personality.
She lived in the midst of most furious theological strife. Christianity was still a comparatively new religion, even if we accept the traditional chronology of the early world; and in her time the experts had not yet settled what were its tenets. The only thing that was perfectly clear to each theological expert was that if you did not agree with his own particular belief you were eternally damned, and that it was his duty to put you out of your sin immediately by cutting your throat lest you should inveigle some other foolish fellows into the broad path that leadeth to destruction. Theodora was a Monophysite—that is to say, she believed that Christ had only one soul, whereas it was well known to the experts that He had two. Nothing could be too dreadful for the miscreants who believed otherwise. It was gleefully narrated how Nestorius, who had started the abominable doctrine of Monophysm, had his tongue eaten by worms—that is, died of cancer of the tongue; and it is not incredible that Procopius, who was a Synodist or Orthodox believer, may have invented the libels and secretly written them down in order to show the world of after days what sort of monster his heretical Empress really was, wear she never so many gorgeous ropes of pearls in her Imperial panoply. It is difficult to place any bounds to theological hatred—or to human credulity for that matter. The whole question of the nature of Christ was settled by the Sixth Œcumenical Council about a hundred and fifty years later, when it was finally decided that Christ had two natures, or souls, or wills—however we interpret the Greek word Φύσις—each separate and indivisible in one body. This, and the Holy Trinity, are still, I understand, part of Christian theology, and appear to be equally comprehensible to the ordinary scientific man.
But it is difficult to get over a tradition of the eleventh century—that is to say, six hundred years before Procopius’ Annals saw the light—that Justinian married “Theodora of the Brothel.” Although Mallet showed that Procopius had strong personal reasons for libelling his Empress, one cannot help feeling that there must be something in the stories after all.
Once she had assumed the marvellous crown, with its ropes of pearls, in which she and many of the other Empresses are depicted, her whole character is said to have changed. Though her enemies accused her of cruelty, greed, treachery, and dishonesty—and no accounts from her friends have survived—yet they were forced to admit that she acted with propriety and amazing courage; and no word was spoken against her virtue. In the Nika riots, which at one time threatened to depose Justinian, she saved the Empire. Justinian, his ministers, and even the hero Belisarius, were for flight, the mob howling in the square outside the Palace, when Theodora spoke up in gallant words which I paraphrase. She began by saying how indecorous it was for a woman to interfere in matters of State, and then went on to say: “We must all die some time, but it is a terrible thing to have been an Emperor and to give up Empire before one dies. The purple is a noble winding-sheet! Flight is easy, my Emperor—there are the steps of the quay—there are the ships waiting for you; you have money to live on. But in very shame you will taste the bitterness of death in life if you flee! I, your wife, will not flee, but will stay behind without you, and will die an Empress rather than live a coward!” Proud little woman—could that woman have been a prostitute selling her body in degradation? It seems impossible.