Empress Theodora of Byzantium started life as a performer in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. The precise nature of her performances is contested by historians and exaggerated by her enemies, but the facts that survive scrutiny are these: she was the daughter of a bear keeper, she grew up backstage at the ancient world's equivalent of a sports arena, and she ended up ruling half the Roman Empire. The distance between those two points is the most improbable political ascent in Western history.

Procopius Hated Her and That Tells Us Something

Nearly everything we know about Theodora's early life comes from the Secret History written by Procopius of Caesarea, the court historian who publicly praised Justinian and Theodora in his official works and then wrote a private manuscript attacking them with the most venomous prose in Byzantine literature. Byzantine scholars at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library have spent decades trying to separate fact from slander in the Secret History. Procopius describes Theodora's pre-imperial life in terms so lurid that they read more as political pornography than biography. The descriptions were designed to delegitimize her by associating her with sexual scandal, a tactic that has been used against powerful women in every century since. What can be verified is this: Theodora was not born into the aristocracy. She came from the entertainment class, which in sixth-century Constantinople occupied a social position roughly equivalent to sex workers in some accounts, circus performers in others. She somehow caught the attention of Justinian, the heir to the imperial throne. He fell in love with her. He changed the law that prohibited senators from marrying actresses. They married in 525 and became co-rulers in 527.

The Nika Riots Should Have Ended Everything

In 532, five years into their reign, Constantinople erupted. The Nika Riots, named after the rallying cry of the mob, began as a sporting dispute between chariot racing factions and escalated into a full-scale revolution. The rioters set fire to large portions of the city. They proclaimed a new emperor. Justinian prepared to flee by ship. Theodora refused. According to Procopius's Wars, a text considered more reliable than the Secret History, she stood before the imperial council and said that she would rather die in the purple than flee. The phrase the purple refers to the imperial robes. She was saying she would rather die an empress than survive as a refugee. Research from the Department of Byzantine Studies at the University of Vienna has analyzed this speech as one of the decisive moments in Byzantine history. Justinian stayed. General Belisarius rallied the troops. The revolt was crushed. The city was rebuilt, including the Hagia Sophia, which Justinian ordered constructed on the ruins of the church the rioters had burned. Without Theodora's intervention, Justinian would have fled. The dynasty would have ended. The Hagia Sophia would never have been built. The Justinian Code, the foundation of European legal systems, might never have been completed.

She Changed the Laws to Protect Women Nobody Else Would Protect

Once the empire was stabilized, Theodora used her power to reform laws affecting women. She closed brothels and established a convent for former sex workers. She changed divorce laws to give women more property rights. She created protections for women sold into prostitution. She passed laws against sexual trafficking. Research from the Center for the Study of Women in Antiquity at King's College London has documented that Theodora's legal reforms were among the most progressive protections for women anywhere in the world for the next thousand years. She legislated from experience. She knew what it meant to be powerless, to be used, to have no legal recourse, and she used the most powerful position available to any woman in the ancient world to ensure that fewer women would experience what she had. She died of cancer in 548, seventeen years before Justinian. He never recovered. He never remarried. He spent the remaining years of his reign completing the projects they had begun together and reportedly speaking to her image in the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna, where she stares out across thirteen centuries with the face of a woman who knows exactly how far she has come.