Within hours, the riots were put down.
But even when the empress did not do things like this, she was very important. For this reason a widower emperor remarried as soon as possible. Leo the Philosopher married four times and got into almost as much trouble as Henry VIII. If an emperor didn’t remarry, he made his daughter the Augusta.
“When there is not an Augusta,” wrote a Byzantine, “it is not possible to celebrate holidays or give banquets or entertainments in the manner prescribed by law.”
That may not seem important to us, but it was very important to the Byzantines. Since the emperor was God’s representative on earth, every official act of his life had to be like a church service, and in almost every one of the more than eighty occasions described in detail in an instruction book for emperors called The Book of Ceremonies, the empress took part.
It was something to see the royal pair on any great Byzantine holiday, for example, May 11, when they celebrated the founding of the city.
On this day the statue of Constantine the Great was paraded through the city in a golden chariot drawn by white mules, and the emperor sat in the Hippodrome waiting to pay honor to it. He was clad in robes that literally glittered. His principal garment was a tunic which reached almost to his ankles. This was called the scaramangion and was so stiff with brocade that it could have stood by itself. Over this was a shorter garment called the saigon. It was purple, gold-embroidered, and seeded with pearls. On his head he wore the stemmata, or imperial crown. It twinkled with rubies and sapphires of the purest ray serene. On his feet were the campagia, or special boots that only the emperor could wear. These too were of imperial purple, although some people say this imperial purple was really a deep crimsony red.
The empress sat at his side, just as splendid as he. Her garments were much like his, but on her crown was a plume made of precious stones. She wore earrings that dangled far below her shoulders, and sometimes a neckpiece made of oval or pear-shaped pearls. If he was a solid gold emperor, she was a solid gold empress too.
Yet in spite of all the splendor and glory (and this is only a little bit of it), the Byzantine emperor did not have to be royally born. In the Byzantine Empire it was just as easy to rise from a hovel to the throne as it is to be born in humble circumstances and become President of the United States.
Many of the emperors did.
An early emperor had been a butcher. Another had been a swineherd from Macedonia, and the great Justinian was this swineherd’s nephew. The savage Phocas was originally a centurion (a top sergeant). Still another had once been a donkey trader who moved from one country fair to another. Basil I was raised as a Balkan farm boy. He was very tall and strong and attracted the attention of the reigning emperor because he could tame horses. A later emperor had been a petty officer in the navy. Still another was originally a dockyard worker.