Theodora

Rising from the stage of Constantinople's Hippodrome to the imperial throne, Theodora was the wife and closest partner of the emperor Justinian I, sharing power in the eastern Roman world from 527 until her death in 548. She shaped church politics, court appointments and the response to the most dangerous uprising of the reign, and she remains a saint of the Orthodox churches.

Almost everything known about her youth comes from the historian Procopius, and above all from his Secret History, a hostile pamphlet written after her death and only published in 1623. Most modern scholars think she was born around 495, probably in Constantinople, although later writers placed her birth in Syria, Cyprus, Paphlagonia or Alexandria. Her father, Acacius, kept bears for the Green chariot-racing faction; her mother was a dancer and actress. After her father died, the Blue faction gave the family a livelihood.

She went on stage with her elder sister Comito. Procopius describes a career of prostitution in lurid detail, and John of Ephesus also says she came "from the brothel", though historians such as David Potter treat Procopius's account as exaggerated invective containing a core of fact. She later lived in North Africa as the companion of Hecebolus, governor of the Libyan Pentapolis, then passed through Alexandria and Antioch before returning to the capital, where she met Justinian.

Roman law barred men of senatorial rank from marrying actresses, and Justin I's empress, Euphemia, opposed the match. After Euphemia died in 524, Justin issued a law permitting such marriages. When Justinian became emperor in 527, Theodora was crowned augusta. Justinian publicly called her his partner in deliberation, and officials swore an oath of loyalty to both of them.

In January 532 the Blue and Green factions joined forces against the government, burned much of the city and proclaimed Hypatius, a nephew of the former emperor Anastasius, as emperor. According to Procopius, as Justinian's council weighed flight, Theodora declared that she would rather die than live as a fugitive, adding that royal purple made the finest burial shroud. Some scholars think Procopius shaped the speech to make Justinian look more cowardly than his wife. Troops then attacked the crowd in the Hippodrome, killing, by the sources' figures, more than 30,000 people, and Hypatius was executed.

With Justinian she sponsored lavish building, including the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, whose inscription still praises her, and the new Hagia Sophia. She founded a convent named Metanoia, "Repentance", for former prostitutes; sources disagree over whether the women went willingly. She arranged marriages to bind leading families to the dynasty and in 541, with Belisarius's wife Antonina, engineered the fall of the powerful prefect John the Cappadocian. Letters show her corresponding with the Ostrogothic royal women of Italy.

Theodora favoured the Miaphysites, who rejected the Council of Chalcedon, while Justinian upheld it. She sheltered Miaphysite leaders in the palace, hiding the deposed patriarch Anthimus for years, and backed Miaphysite missionaries to Nobatia, south of Egypt, around 540. She was also blamed for the removal of Pope Silverius, who died in exile, and the appointment of Vigilius. Procopius and Evagrius suggested that the couple's religious differences were partly staged.

She died on 28 June 548. Victor of Tunnuna gave the cause in a term usually rendered as "cancer", though it may mean any malignant ulcer, and she was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles. Historians remain divided: James Allan Evans reads the Secret History as aristocratic resentment and Averil Cameron as a contemporary way of rationalising the inexplicable, while Anthony Kaldellis and Clive Foss note that independent sources confirm much of it.

Our 500 and 600 maps bracket her lifetime, showing the Byzantine Empire before and after Justinian's reconquests in the west.