Jerusalem: The Biography

Theodosius sent Eudocia a Phrygian apple. She gave it to her protégé, Paulinus, Master of the Offices, who then sent it as a present to the emperor. Theodosius, hurt by this, confronted his wife who lied and insisted that she had not given his present away to anyone but had eaten it. At that, the emperor produced the apple. This white lie suggested to Theodosius that what his sister had been whispering was true: Eudocia was having an affair with Paulinus. The story is mythical – apples symbolize life and chastity – but in its very human details it chronicles just the sort of accidental chain of events that can end badly in the hothouse courts of fraught autocracies. Paulinus was executed in 440, but the imperial couple negotiated a way for Eudocia to retire from the capital with honour. Three years later, she arrived in Jerusalem to rule Palaestina in her own right.

Even then Pulcheria tried to destroy her, despatching Saturnius, Count of the Imperial Bodyguard, to execute two of her entourage. Eudocia quickly had Saturnius murdered. Once this imperial skulduggery had died down, she was left to her own devices: she built palaces for herself and the city’s bishop and a hospice next to the Sepulchre that survived for centuries. She built the first walls since Titus, enclosing Mount Zion and the City of David – her sections of wall can be seen today in both places. The pillars of her multi-levelled church around the Siloam Pool still stand in the waters there.^*

The empire was now disturbed by the reignited Christological dispute. If Jesus and the Father were ‘of one substance’, how could Christ combine both divine and human natures? In 428, Nestorius, the new Patriarch of Constantinople, tactlessly stressed Jesus’ human side and dual nature, claiming that the Virgin Mary should be considered not Theotokos, Bearer of God, but merely Christokos, Bearer of Christ. His enemies, the Monophysites, insisted that Christ had one nature which was simultaneously human and divine. Dyophysites fought their Monophysite protagonists in the imperial palaces and in the backstreets of Jerusalem and Constantinople with all the violence and hatred of Christological football hooligans. Everyone, noticed Gregory of Nyssa, had an opinion: ‘You ask a man for change, he’ll give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies “The Father is greater and the Son inferior”; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.’

When Theodosius died, his two empresses faced each other across the Christological divide. Pulcheria, who had seized power in Constantinople, backed the Dyophysites, but Eudocia, like most Eastern Christians, was a Monophysite. Pulcheria duly expelled her from the Church. When Juvenal, the Bishop of Jerusalem, backed Pulcheria, the Monophysite Jerusalemites mobilized their monkish shock-troopers who drove him out of the city, a predicament he exploited. Christianity had long been ruled by the four great metropolitan bishoprics – Rome and the eastern patriarchates. But Jerusalem’s bishops had always campaigned for promotion to patriarch. Now Juvenal won this promotion as the prize for the loyalty that almost cost him his life. Finally in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, Pulcheria enforced a compromise: in the Union of Two Natures, Jesus was ‘perfect in divinity, and perfect in humanity’. Eudocia agreed and became reconciled with Pulcheria. This compromise has lasted to this day in the Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Churches, but it was flawed: the Monophysites and Nestorians, for precisely opposite reasons, rejected it and split off from Orthodoxy for ever.^*

At a time when the Western Roman empire was being terrorized by Attila the Hun and hurtling toward its fatal collapse, the ageing Eudocia was writing Greek poetry and building her St Stephen’s basilica, now vanished, but just north of the Damascus Gate, where in 460 she was buried alongside the relics of the first martyr.⁵

SUNSET OF THE BYZANTINES: PERSIAN INVASION

518–630

JUSTINIAN AND THE SHOWGIRL EMPRESS: BYZANTINE JERUSALEM