Category Archives: Early Middle Ages

897: Pope Stephen VII, Cadaver Synod convener

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“The papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”

-Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

In August 897 or so, the deposed Pope Stephen VII (or VI*) was executed (or just murdered) in prison by strangulation.

Details, you see, are thin on the ground here in the so-called Dark Ages. Rome has come down a bit in the world.

“The ruins of Rome,” quoth Gibbon,

presented the sad image of depopulation and decay: her slavery was a habit, her liberty an accident; the effect of superstition, and the object of her own amazement and terror. The last vestige of the substance, or even the forms, of the constitution, was obliterated from the practice and memory of the Romans; and they were devoid of knowledge, or virtue, again to build the fabric of a commonwealth. Their scanty remnant, the offspring of slaves and strangers, was despicable in the eyes of the victorious Barbarians. As often as the Franks or Lombards expressed their most bitter contempt of a foe, they called him a Roman;

“and in this name,” says the bishop Liutprand, “we include whatever is base, whatever is cowardly, whatever is perfidious, the extremes of avarice and luxury, and every vice that can prostitute the dignity of human nature.”

While the popes of the 10th century would really set that prostituted standard with the period known as the “pornocracy”, Stephen VI(I) makes everybody’s bad popes lists with one of the papacy’s all-time embarrassing events: the Cadaver Synod.

The pontiff at this point is no global media celebrity but an ensemble character captive to the the disreputable politics of a shrunken, malarial borough. Stephen’s predecessor Formosus had been one of the city’s “Carolingian” faction backing the withering remains of Charlemagne’s once-great line.

At loggerheads with the Italian Spoleto family claiming the Holy Roman Emperor title for the anti-Carolingians, Formosus had invited an illegitimate Frankish scion to roll down the Italian peninsula and take it from them — which is exactly what happened.

Two months after Formosus crowned this Carolingian, Arnulf by name, as “Augustus” in Rome, Formosus died while Arnulf was on his way back to Bavaria … putting the Spoletos back in charge. After a brief interregnum papacy, the Spoleto-backed anti-Carolingian prelate Stephen ascended St. Peter‘s throne.

The factional conflict was approaching civil war. Stephen’s Cadaver Synod (or in the equally evocative Latin, Synod horrenda) was a singular show of power against the Carolingians.

About January of 897, the pope had Formosus’s corpse exhumed and creepily propped up in its vestments on a throne at the Basilica of St. John Lateran. There, before a reluctant clerical conclave, the rotting remains of Formosus** were subjected to a kangaroo prosecution personally conducted by Pope Stephen. As Robert Browning described it in a digressive passage of The Ring and the Book,

And at the word the great door of the church
Flew wide, and in they brought Formosus’ self,
The body of him, dead, even as embalmed
And buried duly in the Vatican
Eight months before, exhumed thus for the nonce.
They set it, that dead body of a Pope,
Clothed in pontific vesture now again,
Upright on Peter’s chair as if alive.

…

For frightful was the corpse-face to behold,—
How nowise lacked there precedent for this.


Pope Formosus and Stephen VII (aka Stephen VI), by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870

After the possibly-nuts Stephen had his fill of ranting at the mortal remains, he declared his foe “convicted” and condemned the body to the dissevering of its three right-hand blessing-fingers — symbolic of the damnatio memoriae the synod would pass upon the ex-pope, revoking the decrees and undoing the ordinations that hand had wrought in life. Formosus in his various parts was tossed into the Tiber.

While this macabre spectacle lives forever in the papal annals, Stephen didn’t live out the year: his enemies overthrew him that summer and had him summarily put to death, declaring the Synod horrenda‘s judgment reversed in the process.

In the event, the matter would be settled the old-fashioned Roman way: in the streets.

Despite the loss of their leader, [Stephen’s] party remained active and elected a certain Cardinal Sergius as pope, simultaneously with the election of a candidate by the opposite faction.

But, in a sudden burst of violence, Sergius and most of his followers were chased out of the city … Over the next twelve months, four more popes scrambled onto the bloodstained throne, maintained themselves precariously for a few weeks — or even days — before being hurled themselves into their graves.

* Between VI and VII, it depends on whether you count a short-lived 8th century Stephen in the list of Stephens; the popes at this time weren’t using regnal numbering themselves. Since the Catholic Encyclopedia’s roster of popes goes with VII, we will as well.

** Ironically, “Formosus” is Latin for “handsome”. It’s too bad he wasn’t “Pope Mephitis“.

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869 or 870: St. Edmund the Martyr

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This is the feast date and martyrdom date of middle ages English king Edmund the Martyr.

Stained glass of Edmund the Martyr from Our Lady and the English Martyrs church in Cambridge. (cc) image from Laurence OP

This acute ruler of the East Angles, the last native East Anglian king, was stomped in battle by the marauding norsemen under Ivar the Boneless and his less interestingly-named brother Ubbe Ragnarsson.

These two were sore about their father Ragnar Lodbrok, who had shipwrecked in England — maybe East Anglia, maybe elsewhere — and allegedly been thrown into a snakepit.

According to the hagiographic account, these Danish heathens attempted to force Edmund to renounce Christianity. Edmund demurred.

Then those wicked men bound Edmund, and shamefully insulted him, and beat him with clubs, and afterwards they led the faithful king to an earth-fast tree, and tied him thereto with hard bonds, and afterwards scourged him a long while with whips, and ever he called, between the blows, with true faith, on Jesus Christ; and then the heathen because of his faith were madly angry, because he called upon Christ to help him. They shot at him with javelins as if for their amusement until he was all beset with their shots, as with a porcupine’s bristles, even as Sebastian was.

The martyr-king’s body was ultimately interred at the aptly-namd Bury St. Edmunds. This locale thereafter became a major, and lucrative, pilgrimage spot in Britain.

Edmund himself became the patron saint of England until he was supplanted just before the Norman invasion by omnibus patron saint George. As George had nothing to do with England, there’s been some latter-day push to revert the honor to the native king.

So far, no dice.

Update: Jamie that killjoy at the British History Podcast puts it in 869 and rebuts the notion that there was any execution at all, here.

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c. 865: Ragnar Lodbrok, Viking raider

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On an unknown date in (perhaps) the 860s, Norse raider Ragnar Lodbrok (or Ragnar Lothbrok) was allegedly put to death in the Indiana Jones-esque manner of being cast into a pit of snakes.

Ragnar is a half-legendary character who plundered France and Britain in the mid-ninth century, the heyday of Viking marauders; he’s also the lead character of the cable TV series Vikings.

He’s known from Scandinavian sagas, like the Ragnarssona Þattr, which describes Ragnar’s final battle after shipwrecking in Northumbria.

At that time, there was a king called Ælla ruling over Northumbria in England. And when he learns that raiders have come to his kingdom, he musters a mighty force and marches against Ragnar with an overwhelming host, and hard and terrible battle ensues. King Ragnar was clad in the silken jacket Aslaug had given him at their parting. But as the defending army was so big that nothing could withstand them, so almost all his men were killed, but he himself charged four times through the ranks of King Aella, and iron just glanced off his silk shirt. Finally he was taken captive and put in a snake-pit, but the snakes wouldn’t come near him. King Aella had seen during the day, as they fought, that iron didn’t bite him, and now the snakes won’t harm him. So he had him stripped of the clothes that he’d been wearing on the day, and at once snakes were hanging off him on all sides, and he left his life there with much courage.

Here’s Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar in the 1958 film The Vikings, dying in a pit full of wild dogs, not snakes. Well, it’s the same animal kingdom.

“How the little pigs would grunt if they knew how the old boar suffers!” he’s supposed to have exclaimed, keeping to the nature theme.

Although Vikings didn’t really seem to need a casus belli to pillage England, the little pigs would in fact do some serious grunting when they found out about the boar: Ragnar’s sons punitive sorties against England martyred the Christian king St. Edmund.

Update: When this post was first written in 2011, information about this distant Viking captain was not all that plentiful. Ragnar’s starring turn in a TV serial since that time has somewhat broadened his cultural footprint.

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555: Rusticus and John

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On an uncertain date in the autumn of 555, a Byzantine commander and his brother were put to death for the treacherous murder of the vassal king of Lazica.

Rusticus, the commander, probably had good cause to be annoyed with Gubazes II, who ruled a borderlands realm on the eastern edge of the Black Sea, in modern-day Georgia.

Gubazes had gone from calling in Persian aid in 541 against Lazica’s Byzantine masters, to summoning Byzantine help against the Persians a few years later. Now, he was kvetching to Byzantine Emperor Justinian about the Byzantine generals he’d called for.

We’ll let J.B. Bury take it from here:

King Gubazes, who had been engaged in frequent quarrels with the Roman commanders, sent a complaint to Justinian accusing them of negligence in conducting the war. Bessas, Martin, and Rusticus were specially named. The Emperor deposed Bessas from his post, but assigned the chief command to martin and did not recall Rusticus. This Rusticus was the Emperor’s pursebearer who had been sent to bestow rewards on soldiers for special merit. He and Martin determined to remove Gubazes. To secure themselves from blame, they despatched John, brother of Rusticus, to Justinian with the false message that Gubazes was secretly favouring the Persians. Justinian was surprised, and determined to summon the king to Constantinople. “What,” asked John, “is to be done, if he refuses?” “Compel him,” said the Emperor; “he is our subject.” “But if he resist?” urged the conspirator. “Then treat him as a tyrant.” And will he who should slay him have naught to fear?” “Naught, if he act disobediently and be slain as an enemy.” Justinian signed a letter to this effect, and armed with it John returned to Colchis. The conspirators hastened to execute their treacherous design. Gubazes was invited to assist in an attack on the fortress of Onoguris, and with a few attendants he met the Roman army on the banks of the Chobus. An altercation arose between the king and Rusticus, and on the pretext that the gainsayer of a Roman general must necessarily be a friend of the enemy, John drew his dagger and plunged it in the royal breast. The wound was not mortal but it unhorsed the king, and when he attempted to rise from the ground, a blow from the squire of Rusticus killed him outright.

The Lazi silently buried their king according to their customs, and turned away in mute reproach from their Roman protectors. They no longer took part in the military operations, but hid themselves away as men who had lost their hereditary glory. The other commanders, Buzes and Justin the son of Germanus, concealed the indignation which they felt, supposing that the outrage had the Emperor’s authority. Some months later, when winter had begun, the Lazi met in secret council in some remote Caucasian ravine, and debated whether they should throw themselves on the protection of Chosroes. But their attachment to the Christian religion as well as their memory of Persian oppression forbade them to take this step, and they decided to appeal for justice and satisfaction to the Emperor, and at the same time to supplicate him to nominate Tzath, the younger brother of Gubazes, as their new king. Justinian promptly complied with both demands. Athanasius, a senator of high repute, was sent to investigate the circumstances of the assassination, and on his arrival he incarcerated Rusticus and John, pending a trial. In the spring (A.D. 555) Tzath arrived in royal state, and when the Lazi beheld the Roman army saluting him as he rode in royal apparel, a tunic embroidered with gold reaching to his feet, a white mantle with a gold stripe, red shoes, a turban adorned with gold and gems, and a crown, they forgot their sorrow and escorted him in a gay and brilliant procession. It was not till the ensuing autumn that the authors of the death of the late king were brought to justice, and the natives witnessed the solemn procedure of a Roman trial. Rusticus and John were executed. Martin’s complicity was not so clear, and the Emperor, to whom his case was referred, deposed him from his command in favour of his own cousin Justin, the son of Germanus. Martin perhaps would not have been acquitted if he had not been popular with the army and a highly competent general. (link)

“The historical importance of the Lazic War,” Bury says, “lay in the fact that if the Romans had not succeeded in holding the country and thwarting the design of Chosroes, the great Asiatic power would have had access to the Euxine and the Empire would have had a rival on the waters of that sea. The serious menace involved in this possibility was fully realised by the Imperial government and explains the comparative magnitude of the forces which were sent to the defence of the Lazic kingdom.”

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738: Copan king 18-Rabbit (Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil)

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Mayan history has thus far been difficult to examine due to a major communication gap. Much of the Western world’s understanding of its own history comes from the written word, such that the deciphering of ancient scripts is not only a linguistic triumph, but it also pushes aside centuries of debris to expose a new corner of human culture.

It is this evolving ability to crack codes from classic Mesoamerica that has yielded a close approximation of the true name of the man formerly known only as 18-Rabbit: Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil.*

(Alternately, Waxaklajuun Ub’aah K’awiil. The name means “Eighteen Images of K’awiil”; K’awiil was a Mayan divinity.)


Image (c) Matt Stokes of guatemalaholla.blogspot.com and used with permission.

By any name, he was one of the greatest rulers of the Mayan Classical Era, reigning from the Rio Copan Valley in today’s Honduras, near the present border with Guatemala. His life is preserved in several sets of stelae on temples around Copan and describes a man intent on advancing the culture of Copan.

In the city itself, Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil greatly contributed to the design of the Great Plaza, which housed one of the great ball courts in the region. More obviously, though, his reign was marked by a drastic sculptural shift away from the angular designs of the Early Classical period and straight into the more complete and rounded designs that persisted through the remainder of the Mayan era.

Reliefs from: the preceding 12th Ruler period (left); and, from 18 Rabbit’s period (right).

In spite of these major cultural moves, little about Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil is known directly. However, for the 20th anniversary of his ascension to the throne — on March 27, 715 AD** — Temple 22 was dedicated to the ruler, with a rare inscription ascribed to the ruler himself etched thereon.

It would be another 23 years before Ruler 13 was, as his conquering neighbor put it, “axed”. In 738, the Quirigua region — now in southeastern Guatemala — was considered part of the Copan empire. The Quirigua are now mostly known only for the size of their sculptures, which eclipse others in the region. But in 738, the Quiriga were mostly known for their fearsome king, Kawak Sky, or K’ak’ Tiliw Chan Yopaat, occupied the city just 50 km away and executed (or sacrificed) its former ruler.

That move ended a span of Copan dominance in the area and briefly put the Quirigua on top. Strangely, Yopaat was not apparently responsible for overseeing a particularly fruitful Quiriga culture. Almost nothing was built in his honor until after Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil’s death, after which several monuments to Yopaat’s glory were erected. It has been suggested that Yopaat was a brother or cousin of Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil, as Kawak Sky’s biography indicates that he both took the throne under Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil’s authority and executed his predecessor; this suggests that the move was not a full-on coup.

Regardless of their relationship, in the aftermath of the execution, Copan declined rapidly, presumably as their new Quirigua ruler exploited its labor and material resources to build up his own name. As one Copan scribe later lamented, “[There are] no altars, no pyramids, no places.” But the Copan would rise again: Ruler 15, or Smoke Shell, polished off the unfinished Temple 26 and built up its heiroglyphic staircase to highlight the dynastic history of Copan and its connection to its northerly neighbor, Teotihuacan. His son, Yax Pak Chan Yat, would be the last of the 16 rulers of Copan in the Yax K’uk’ Mo’ line.

* Because of his place in the dynastic sequence of Copan, Uaxaclajuun Ub’aah K’awiil is sometimes referred to simply as Ruler 13.

** Mayan dates are surprisingly easy to nail down once the system is understood. While Europeans moved from Roman to Julian to Gregorian calendars — with the Eastern Orthodox Church and several traditionally Orthodox nations hanging onto the Julian one into the 20th Century — the Mayans had a consistent system that advanced day-to-day and was tied to verifiable events. Hence the ability to date Dec 21, 2012 as the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, which began on Aug 11, 3114 BCE.

In a way, the MLC is the precursor to the astronomical system of Julian Dates (which are not the same as the Julian calendar).

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859: St. Eulogius of Cordoba

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On this date 1,150 years ago, Eulogius of Cordoba was beheaded for blasphemy in Muslim Spain.

Islamic rule in Spain was a century and a half old at this time; a period of relative comity among the Abrahamic faiths, it was nevertheless far from painless for Christians.

Islamic law exerted some (usually) non-lethal pressure on subject Christians by tolerating them as second-class citizens, subject to restricted civic privileges and additional taxes. With apostasy from Islam to Christianity punishable by death, it engineered a steadily increasing Muslim proportion of the populace.

Around 850, and continuing for the ensuing century, some Christians’ resistance to this arrangement would provoke periodoc repressions and a regular supply of martyrs.

Eulogius, a priest renowned for his eloquence and education, became a prominent exponent of the emerging trend of missionary martyrdom — Christians intentionally blaspheming Mohammad to a Muslim judge for purposes of drawing an exemplary death sentence.

We can readily infer that Eulogius’s support for such behavior was controversial; surely missionary martyrdom escalated tensions between the comingling communities in ways potentially troublesome for the go-along, get-along crowd. And Christians had good reasons to go along and get along: they could enjoy positions of wealth, influence and comfort, along with unencumbered worship.

Bishop Reccafred of Cordoba attempted to squelch any appearance of official support for these fire eaters, and threw Eulogius and other priests in prison after promulgating a decree against the martyrdoms in 852. Naturally, this made him a sellout in the eyes of the militants; Eulogius took a firm line against any attempt to derogate the martyrs of a fellow monotheism as unequal to the ancient martyrs of pagan Rome.

Those who assert that these [martyrs] of our own day were killed by men who worship God and have a law, are distinguished by no prudence … because if such a cult or law is said to be valid, indeed the strength of the Christian religion must necessarily be impaired. (Cited here)

The Cordoban martyrs’ movement claimed a few dozen lives over the 850’s — a hagiography records 48 — some taking inspiration from Eulogius’ Exhortation to Martyrdom. The author of that tract eventually followed his own advice.

Caught sheltering an apostate Muslim (she was executed a few days after Eulogius), the priest got into it with the Islamic judge, denounced the Prophet, and earned himself a death sentence. The story says he even literally “turned the other cheek” when struck by a guard en route to his decapitation.

In all the time since, Eulogius’s words have had a resonance for at least some segment of Christendom: when martyrdom has waxed popular, or confrontation with Islam loomed large. As his entry in Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia puts it,

Eulogius’s apologetic treatises are important, then, not only as evidence of the wide spectrum of Christian responses to life under Muslim rule — from outright rejection to almost complete assimilation — but also as one of the earliest extant sources for Western views on Islam.

St. Eulogius’s life gets a somewhat more detailed treatment (from an apologetic perspective) in The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints, a Google books freebie.

Part of the Themed Set: The Church confronts its competition.

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1009: St. Bruno of Querfurt

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We have the rare privilege this date* to salute 1,000 years since the martyrdom of St. Bruno of Querfurt.

St. Bruno — also Brun or Boniface — had his head chopped off, and 18 companions were allegedly simultaneously hung or hacked to pieces, by a chieftain who did not appreciate the bishop’s efforts to Christianize the Baltics. The wherefores, and even the wheres (different sources locate it in Prussia, Rus’, or Lithuania) of this missionary’s end are permanently obscure to us.

But this relatively forgotten saint has something to tell us about the fluid area of contact between the Latin and Greek Christian spheres in the decades before their schism.

Lithuanian Institute of History scholar Darius Baronas argues** that although Bruno’s missions were conducted independently under papal authorization, he received support from the courts of both the Polish king Boleslaw the Brave and the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus’ Vladimir the Great.†

Both rulers hoped to extend their influence among the still-pagan lands of Europe, a secular incarnation of the rivalry between eastern and western rites.

So why is he so little-known to posterity? Baronas observes that St. Bruno

is a supreme example of a missionary saint and his activities ranged almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Yet despite his activities, let alone his glorious death, he did not receive much praise from his contemporaries and still less from later generations. His subsequent cult was rather circumscribed and was largely forgotten.

Precisely because of his ambiguous place between these two competing powers, and because his mission did not conform precisely with either’s policies of statecraft, neither Boleslaw nor Vladimir promoted a cult of Bruno: each realm was uncertain which side Bruno was on, and which side would profit most from his inroads among the pagans.

* February 14, 1009 is also cited as a date for St. Bruno’s martyrdom — for instance, by the Catholic Encyclopedia; the source of this may be the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg. In the absence of a determinative reason to prefer that earlier date, and allowing that 1,000-year-old executions are prone to shaky dating, I’m placing it on March 9 based on the Annals of Quedlinburg.


This text, reading “St. Bruno, an archbishop and monk, who was called Boniface, was beheaded by Pagans during the 11th year of this conversion at the Rus and Lithuanian border, and along with 18 of his followers, entered heaven on March 9th,” also happens to be the earliest surviving written reference to Lithuania.

** Darius Baronas, ‘The year 1009: St. Bruno of Querfurt between Poland and Rus”, Journal of Medieval History (2008), 34:1:1-22

† Vladimir the Great is himself a saint, too — in the Catholic tradition as well as the Orthodox.

Part of the Themed Set: The Church confronts its competition.

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922: Mansur al-Hallaj, Sufi mystic

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On this date in 922, Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj was put to a torturous end in Baghdad — either crucifixion, dismembering, or both — for “theological error threatening the security of the state.”

Born in Persia, al-Hallaj traveled widely from India to Mecca, eventually settling in Baghdad, the capital of the Abassid Empire.

Ana al-Haqq

Al-Hallaj espoused the mystical Islamic school of Sufism and produced gorgeous poetry.

But he ran afoul of the authorities for his unusual willingness to speak publicly about Sufi concepts which were held to require mystic initiation in order to grasp.

Most particularly, saying “ana al-Haqq” — “I am God” — and poems directly identifying himself with divinity were thought by the state theologians to have mystical wisdom for initiates, but to be exceedingly dangerous sentiments to set loose among the hoi polloi, especially given popular devotion to the Abassid government that was less than ironclad.

In truth, al-Hallaj’s condemnation seems to have been rooted in contemporary imperial politics, his demise representing the (momentary) upper hand of the more autocratic elements against potentially more sympathetic parties.

He spent eleven years in a Baghdad jail, reportedly enduring torture with placidity. Accounts of his execution speak of him greeting a horrific death with joy.

Mansur al-Hallaj remains revered today among mystically inclined followers of many faiths and admired by many westerners, factors which do not quite resolve the dispute over his place within Islam. Ultimately, the rightness of his choices remains very much in the eye of the beholder.

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532: Hypatius and Pompeius, for Byzantine sports riots

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On this date in 532, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I had two nephews of a former emperor executed for participating, however unwillingly, in the Nika riots.

Early in Justinian‘s reign, chariot-racing factions comprised mobs unruly enough to put any modern football hooligan into traction. Riots were a periodic feature of the sport.

The historian Procopius, who is our guide to this day’s events, describes a type the modern reader will recognize:

The Empress Theodora‘s cool head famously saved the day — and the empire — when her husband was ready to bolt. “May I never be separated from this purple, and may I not live that day on which those who meet me shall not address me as mistress. If, now, it is your wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty … as for myself, I approve a certain ancient saying that royalty is a good burial-shroud.”

They care neither for things divine nor human in comparison with conquering in these struggles; and it matters not whether a sacrilege is committed by anyone at all against God, or whether the laws and the constitution are violated by friend or by foe; nay even when they are perhaps ill supplied with the necessities of life, and when their fatherland is in the most pressing need and suffering unjustly, they pay no heed if only it is likely to go well with their “faction” …

When the clubs were pitted against each other, the civic disturbance rated a mere annoyance. But early in 532, they came into an unexpected alliance — around, it should be said in this venue, hangings meted out to their respective partisans — and outright revolt erupted at a race on January 13. Instead of chanting their respective factional slogans, a common cry of Nika! — “Victory!” — heralded a week of mayhem that nearly ended the great Byzantine prince’s era when it had hardly begun.

This day’s victims were nephews of a former Byzantine emperor, and their lot in the affair was an unlucky one. The suspicious Justinian cast them out of the palace quite against their will, for they feared exactly what in fact came to pass: the mob proclaimed Hypatius emperor and thrust him involuntarily — he had to be physically pried from the desperate resistance of his wife — into treason.

It was an old vintage in the Roman tradition, as Edward Gibbon reflected in reviewing the perverse structural logic of civil war during an earlier era of the western empire:

[I]f we examine with candour the conduct of these usurpers, it will appear that they were much oftener driven into rebellion by their fears than urged to it by their ambition … If the dangerous favour of the army had imprudently declared them deserving of the purple, they were marked for sure destruction; and even prudence would counsel them to secure a short enjoyment of the empire, and rather to try the fortune of war than to expect the hand of an executioner.

For a few hours, the throne stood in danger. Justinian mulled flight; his remarkable wife held him steady — and on January 18, their generals trapped the rioters in the Hippodrome and slaughtered some 30,000 of them.

Back to Procopius:

[T]he populace, who were standing in a mass and not in order, at the sight of armoured soldiers who had a great reputation for bravery and experience in war, and seeing that they struck out with their swords unsparingly, beat a hasty retreat … the partisans of Hypatius were assailed with might and main and destroyed.

Hypatius and his brother were taken alive but disposed of on this day, by which time their deaths were but a drop in a bloodbath.

[T]he emperor commanded the two prisoners to be kept in severe confinement. Then, while Pompeius was weeping and uttering pitiable words (for the man was wholly inexperienced in such misfortunes), Hypatius reproached him at length and said that those who were about to die unjustly should not lament. For in the beginning they had been forced by the people against their will, and afterwards they had come to the hippodrome with no thought of harming the emperor. And the soldiers killed both of them on the following day and threw their bodies into the sea. The emperor confiscated all their property for the public treasury, and also that of all the other members of the senate who had sided with them. Later, however, he restored to the children of Hypatius and Pompeius and to all others the titles which they had formerly held, and as much of their property as he had not happened to bestow upon his friends. This was the end of the insurrection in Byzantium.

Bad luck for Hypatius and Pompeius proved a blessing for posterity (and Turkey’s contemporary tourist trade): riot-devastated space near the Hippodrome was appropriated by Justinian to build the magnificent Hagia Sophia basilica.

This gripping affair is narrated in greater depth in an installment of Lars Brownworth’s 12 Byzantine Rulers podcast series:

[audio:http://www.12byzantinerulers.com/audio/07-Justinian-Part_1.mp3]

… and in gripping detail by the History of Byzantium podcast.

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838: Babak Khorramdin

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On this date in 838, Babak Khorramdin was chopped to pieces for his 20-year rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate.

A Zoroastrian son of northwest Iran’s Azerbaijan region, Babak rose to head a movement at once political and religious rooted in cultural preservation against the Arab-dominated caliphate.

Captured at last — he had spurned a guarantee of safety with that timeless insurrectionary sentiment, “Better to live for just a single day as a ruler than to live for forty years as an abject slave” — he had his hands and legs struck off in the presence of the caliph. It is said that Babak washed his face in the blood of these wounds to deprive his royal observer the pleasure of seeing his face fall pallid.

Babak remains an iconic figure in his homeland for his resistance to Arab domination, as evidenced by this Farsi-language vignette …

… and this performance of the Persian Ballet.

But he is not an unproblematic character for contemporary Iran, and not so much because of the anti-Islamic character of his revolt. Babak, whose personal ethnic composition seems to be a bone of historical contention, is also hailed an Azeri nationalist hero vis-a-vis Iran. His fortress is mountainous northern Iran still stands … and has latterly become a meeting-ground for advocates of “greater Azerbaijan” on the occasion of Babak’s birthday in July, much to the displeasure of Iranian authorities.

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