(intro)
As the great empires battled in the scorched plains of the Middle East,
a new threat began to creep its way onto the scene.
It was, at first, a small thing, a local thing.
A man in Pelusium dies.
But this death served merely as the starting bell,
the catalyst for a time of chaos and dread.
A darkness reached out from the borders of Egypt
and unleashed a horror never before seen on the world.
That man in Pelusium had, at first, felt only a fever.
But then, a strange fog descended on his mind.
accompanied by a swelling of great black pustules on his thigh.
Then, he began to vomit blood
and his skin began to decay while he still lived.
He had the plague.
This outbreak in Pelusium is the first recorded instance in world history of the plague.
But still, Pelusium was a somewhat isolated place.
Sure, rumors began to spread across the empire of a town transformed into a living hell,
but, at first, they were only rumors,
horror stories to share at night.
But then the plague moved up to Alexandria, the jewel of Egypt,
and that horror became very real.
The great port city of Alexandria fell into chaos.
No medicine or prayer could stop the ravages of the disease.
People spoke of the ends times, of the wrath of God, and people died.
Unfortunately, Alexandria was one of the great ports of the ancient world.
It was a center of trade.
It provided grain to the greatest cities of eastern Rome.
And so, from there, from port to port, the great plague made its way across the Roman world.
In 542, it reached Constantinople.
The horrors it inflicted cannot be overstated.
One in four people in the great city died.
Like, imagine that. Imagine if one out of every four people you knew just vanished.
Imagine what it does to an economy. To the functions of trade and of state.
How does a world run when, suddenly, for no rhyme or reason,
a fourth of its people are snatched up by the jaws of death?
And those left alive had other, grimmer duties?
Those struck with the plague didn't die in ways that were uniform.
They fell victim to different symptoms.
Sometimes suffering delirium, sometimes falling into a catatonic state.
Some men felt such great thirst,
that they would run outside, wild,
and drink from the fountains until they died,
their bodies half-in and half-out of the water.
Those who slipped into a coma-like state wouldn't die immediately.
Not if they had somebody to tend to them.
They would eat and drink if nourishment was put to their lips,
which meant many of their loved ones lived with the spectre of death,
caring for those they loved as the buboes grew and burst.
And those who fell into a coma without somebody to care for them:
They starved to death without even knowing.
Bodies sealed in houses with no one to discover them until the stench became too great.
It was said that no man was seen on the streets unless he was carrying a corpse.
Justinian had set up an office to handle the burials when the plague first struck,
but no functionary, no office of state could keep up with the tide of death.
First, they filled the cemeteries,
then, they dug up all the open land in Constantinople to bury the dead.
Then, in the state's final days of dwindling functionality,
they had dug mass graves outside the walls.
But soon, these, too, were filled.
Gravediggers tried to press the bodies down and pack them in.
As everything unraveled, people just began to dump the bodies into the sea,
which only lead to bloated corpses washing up along the shore.
They also tried filling boats with corpses and pushing those out into the waves.
All along the Mediterranean world, ghostly ships, manned only by the dead,
would find their way to the coastline, bringing a cargo of bodies riddled by the plague.
Finally, the people of Constantinople took to
simply packing the corpses into
the guard towers that lined its great wall.
When the wind blew, the stench of decay covered the city.
The queen of cities was a ghost town.
Those the plague didn't kill, it often drove mad with horror or grief.
Suicides increased dramatically
and all over the world, reports spread of grim apparitions,
plying the water in brazen boats
or spreading the plague by a touch of their ghostly hand.
Whether they were phantoms of men's plague-addled minds or merely the specters of fear is unknown,
but these demonic visions gave men even more reason to keep hiding behind locked doors.
And with all of this happening,
harvest couldn't be collected.
Crops rotted in the fields and famine loomed.
And the plague spared neither the old nor the young,
holy men or scoundrels, rich or poor.
Everyone got the plague.
Everyone, including Justinian.
The emperor fell into a deep coma.
Soon, the buboes appeared on his thigh.
Every day, the city prayed, but everyone knew the plague's course.
It was here that Theodora stepped in.
Make no mistake, through Justinian's reign, she was working behind the scenes.
During the course of his rule, she had worked to find space for both
Orthodox and Monophysite Christians in the empire.
She had fought for the rights of women and she had always helped with imperial policy.
On top of that, Theodora had also served as a sort of informal spy master for Justinian's regime,
uncovering plots and fending off any internal threats to Justinian's power.
In fact, she had just recently forced Justinian's ruthless tax man, John the Cappadocian,
into exile as a priest as punishment for his willingness to entertain a plot against the emperor.
And here, now in this critical juncture,
as Justinian lay comatose,
Theodora took up the fallen reins of power.
And this is a remarkable thing:
To think that she could do this,
that she could hold all of the jackals and potential usurpers at bay.
All around, there were generals with armies at their call.
The empire itself was in a state of disarray.
Any one of these generals could easily claim that the current regime had been forsaken by God,
that the emperor had no clear heir, and, by all accounts, he was weeks from death at most.
At no point since "Nika!" was control of the empire more tenuous.
When you consider the fact that Rome, even eastern Rome,
had so often suffered civil wars and rebellions,
it's incredible that in the midst of this plague and conflict,
armies of Romans didn't array themselves against each other,
spilling Roman blood to elevate some other ambitious man to the purple.
But Theodora served as a unifying thread,
as a continuation of imperium.
She made all the decisions that would normally come to Justinian.
She held the court together
and acted as a symbol of perseverance for a city and a nation going through unimaginable suffering.
But most of all, she acted quickly and ruthlessly,
bringing to heel anyone she suspected might attempt to supplant Justinian.
She had men of power arrested,
she had generals recalled from their armies,
and she had her courtiers listen for any sign of sedition.
And through doing so, she prevented the civil war that should've come.
But, one of the men she'd had to recall was Belisarius.
The world knew of his promise to never seek the purple while Justinian lived,
but Justinian was on his death bed.
Many naturally assumed that
Belisarius would simply take on the mantle of emperor once Justinian passed.
And though he had tried to quiet those rumors,
numerous Roman factions had started to campaign
for pushing out the existing imperial family and installing Belisarius instead.
And thus, Theodora recalled him,
tried him, and confiscated the vast wealth he had accumulated during his campaigns.
She would later use her friendship with Belisarius' wife as an excuse to restore him to favor,
but for now, he was stuck cooling his heels in Constantinople,
and safely removed from the power struggle, but also from the battlefield.
Luckily for the Byzantines, this plague had struck the Persians as well.
The war was by no means over,
but there was a lull as each of the great empires struggled with their own internal problems
and tried to keep their expensively trained troops away from the plague rather than fighting in the field.
And so, for weeks, Constantinople existed in torpor,
stunned and reeling from the catastrophe that had befallen it.
But then, the impossible happened:
Justinian woke up.
[ending screen with music]