[intro music]
We stand upon execution grounds in Constantinople.
Seven men are lined up to die.
One by one, they drop.
The first man falls, rope snapped taut, feet tremble.
The second man falls,
then the third, the fourth, and the fifth.
Then the final two drop.
There's a defeaning crack, a retort that rings throughout the courtyard.
Then, silence, and then frantic action.
Two men are on the ground, gasping, grabbing their necks.
The echoes of the sound, a sound not of bones breaking but of ropes snapping
still bounds from the stone.
The guards look about, confused.
The executioner has yet to even become aware of his error.
A group of monks, from the nearby monastery of Saint Conan,
who have been watching from the crowd,
surge forward to gather up the men.
They can't let such suffering continue.
The guards move to stop them, but the crowd bars their way.
The monks procure a small boat, and row the men across the winter waters of the Bosphorus
to the church of Saint Lawrence to ask sanctuary of the priests inside.
Soon, the guards arrive, but the men are already safely within the church.
They have sanctuary.
The guard commander posts men at all the exits. They'll starve them out.
It's not long before a crowd starts to gather.
The men who were hanged, and the men who escaped,
these were men of the Demes,
men of the chariot racing factions that played such a huge part in Byzantine life.
The Demes, the sports clubs that had a hand in everything
from running the city fire departments to making major political decisions,
had become more and more unruly, more and more lawless, over the preceding years.
During a riot that had broken out after a chariot race a few weeks earlier,
several people were murdered.
A little hooliganry could be tolerated, but that was too much.
Order had to be maintained in the capital.
So seven of the ringleaders were marked to die for their crimes.
But two of them didn't die, and they would serve as the tinder that would set Constantinople alight.
On January 13, 532, the emperor Justinian entered his box in the Hippodrome.
Like he would for any other race.
But these races, the races to celebrate the ides of January, were to be different.
The crowd began to shout for clemency, to beg the emperor to forgive the two men still holed up in the church.
Race after race went by, and they continued to loudly implore the emperor.
But the emperor was silent.
He'd had too much of the Demes' controlling his city.
Law would be restored.
But as the last few races were being set up, the crowd's chant changed.
They began to chant, Long Live the Merciful Blues and Greens
because as fortune dictated, of the men hiding in the church, the ones who'd escaped,
one was from each of the Demes.
Then, suddenly, someone shouted, Nika!
Then the crowd, perhaps tens of thousands strong, began to shout it at the emperor.
Nika was the cry for victory. It meant conquer.
And usually, the blues and greens would shout it at one another,
taunting each other as their racers won,
or encouraging their champions as they sped around the track.
But here, now, with one voice, the entire stadium screamed it at the emperor.
The Demes had always been kept in check by one another.
They were never united, and so the emperor could play them against each other when the need was nearest,
but here, they stood as one, chanting.
This must have been a terrifying moment.
The emperor's guard hastily led him out of his box,
and down the specially constructed tunnel that connected his seat in the Hippodrome to the palace.
The emperor was shaken, but he wasn't gonna be cowed by the mob.
They'd likely fall back into their rivalries before nightfall.
But the mob, now united, flooded out into the streets of Constantinople,
burning and looting as they went.
They made their way to the palace, and set the palace gate ablaze.
But the fire spread.
First, the church of Sancta Sophia, the great center of worship for the capital, caught alight.
It was consumed by the flames.
Then the baths, the great baths of Zeuxippus,
the baths built by Constantine himself when he founded the city,
adorned with treasures assembled from around the world, fell victim to the flame.
The ash and tinder of antiquity floating off into the night sky.
By dawn, much of the Augusteum, the palace quarter, was in cinders.
But when the city woke, it wasn't the stunned and subdued city Justinian had hoped for.
For five more days, the riot burned through the city.
The palace was under siege.
The prison was razed to the ground, and its prisoners loosed.
And through all this, fire.
Fire spread through every quarter, burnt its way through the wood and timber,
leaping from house to house as the riot raged around it.
And the riot itself was a servant of the fire,
keeping those who would try to stay it, those who were part of the bucket brigades or part of the civic corps, fighting in the streets while the city burned.
And then, on Sunday the 18th, as smoke covered Constantinople
and nearly a quarter of the largest city in the world lay in smoldering ruin
the crowd again gathered for the games.
Justinian, cowed for perhaps the only time in his career,
came out and told the crowd he would give their men pardon.
But now that wasn't enough.
The crowd shouted that they wanted evil officials removed.
They shouted for removal of the city prefect, the man who had been responsible for the arrest of their leaders int he first place.
This was to be expected. Justinian acquiesced.
Then, the crowd called out the names of Tribonian, Justinian's legal advisor who had rewritten the law code,
and John the Cappadocian, the empire's tax man.
Justinian was stunned.
These men were corrupt, but their corruption didn't particularly affect the poor citizens of Constantinople.
This wasn't the sort of request the mob would make.
No. This meant they were being backed by senators.
By powerful men, perhaps some of the very same men who took shelter with him in the palace, who stood next to him while the mob howled outside.
This spooked Justinian.
He accepted these terms.
He offered a full pardon to everyone involved.
But even this wasn't enough.
Clearly, the crowd had been primed.
In their fury, they called for a new emperor.
Justinian, again, retreated to his palace, and conferred with his advisors.
He'd began to make plans to take the treasury, and those men loyal to him, and board ships to flee across the Bosphorus.
Meanwhile, the mob raged through the city.
The nephews to Anastasius, the previous emperor, still lived.
Why were the people of Constantinople serving as slaves to this upstart emperor, born a peasant,
when they had men of royal blood that they could elevate to the purple?
As the riots had spread over the preceding days, most of Anastasius's remaining kin had fled the city.
But one aging relative of the old emperor remained: a man named Hypatius.
Hypatius never wanted to be emperor. In fact, he was hiding under his bed when the mob arrived.
But they found him, and carried him on their shoulders back to the Hippodrome to crown him and proclaim him their emperor.
But, as this was happening,
Theodora, empress of Rome, looked at the trembling men around her counseling her husband to flee.
and said, Whether or not a woman should give an example of courage to men is neither here nor there.
At a moment of desperate danger, one must do what one can.
I think that flight, even if it brings us to safety, is not in our interest.
Every man born to see the light of day must die,
but that one who has been emperor should become an exile I cannot bear.
May I never be without the purple I wear, nor live to see the day when men do not call me Your Majesty.
If you wish safety, my lord, that is an easy matter.
We are rich, and there is the sea, and yonder are ships.
But consider whether if you reach safety you may not desire to exchange to exchange that safety for death.
As for me, I like the old saying, that the purple is the noblest shroud.
There was a silence in the hall, and shame.
Then, Justinian said, Get me Belisarius, Mundus, and Narses.
While the palace guards had not been enough to quell the riots,
as luck would have it, Belisarius, Justinian's greatest general, happened to be in the city waiting to be reassigned,
and Mundus, the great Germanic general who had long defended the empire's northern frontier,
was also passing through the city on his way to take up Belisarius's old post.
Neither of them had their armies with them, but they did have their personal legions.
At Justinian's command, they gathered their men.
The last man Justinian gathered, Narses, was a deceptively frail man,
a thin Armenian eunuch serving in the palace.
Justinian trusted Narses. Narses was his master of the treasury,
and as a eunuch Narses could never become emperor,
so Justinian could ask Narses to do the very thing that had allowed his family to usurp the throne in the first place:
take a big bag of money, slip out of the palace, and bribe those opposing him.
Narses made his way to the Hippodrome, unnoticed,
quietly following the stair that took him to the box where the leaders of the Blues stood as the crowd shouted and cheered for Hypatius.
Narses reminded them that Justinian favored the Blues,
and y'know that Hypatius guy's a Green, right?
before putting a small stack of gold in each of their hands.
Soon after members of the Blues started to silently disperse.
But the Hippodrome was still filled with tens of thousands of Blues and Greens milling about the arena floor.
Belisarius planned a commando raid to snatch Hypatius and flee,
but he found the way blocked,
so the order was given.
Belisarius and his men entered from the east,
while Mundus entered from the west.
They marched in a line cutting down all before them.
People panicked and fled, clambered over each other, were trampled as they ran,
but impassive, the soldiers marched on.
By the end of the day, 30 000 people lay dead in the Hippodrome.
And Justinian's reign would never be challenged again.
Join us next week as we watch Justinian rebuild Constantinople.
And Belisarius sets out to recapture the west.
[outro music]