Chapter II: Part 2

I leave this unpleasantly frank statement in the original Old French, merely remarking that it means that Jeanne never menstruated. D’Aulon must have had plenty of opportunities for knowing this, in his position as steward of her household in the field. He guards himself from innuendo by saying that several women had told him. Jeanne’s failing to become mature must have been the topic of amazed conversation among all the women of her neighbourhood, and no doubt she herself took it as a sign from God that she was to remain virgin. It is especially significant that she first heard her Voices when she was about thirteen years of age, at the very time that she should have begun to menstruate; and that at first they did not come regularly, but came at intervals, just as menstruation itself often begins. Some months later she was informed by the Voices that she was to remain virgin, and thereby would she save France, in accordance with a prophecy that a woman should ruin France, and a virgin should save it. Is it not probable that the idea of virginity must have been growing in her mind from the time when she first realized that she was not to be as other women? Probably the delusion as to the Voices first began as a sort of vicarious menstruation; probably it recurred when menstruation should have reappeared; we can put the idea of virginity into the jargon of psycho-analysis by saying that Jeanne had well-marked “repression of the sex-complex.” The mighty forces which should have manifested themselves in normal menstruation manifested themselves in her furious religious zeal and her Voices. Repression of the sex-complex is like locking up a giant in a cellar; sooner or later he may destroy the whole house. He ended by driving Jeanne d’Arc to the stake. That was a nobler fate than befalls some girls, whom the same giant drives to the streets; nobler, because Jeanne the peasant was of essentially noble stock. Her mother was Isabel Romée--the “Romed woman”--the woman who had had sufficient religious fervour to make the long and dangerous pilgrimage to Rome that she might acquire the merit of seeing the Holy Father; Jeanne herself made a still more dangerous pilgrimage, which has won for her the love of mankind at the cost of her bodily anguish. Madame her mother saved her own soul by her pilgrimage, and bore an heroic daughter; Jeanne saved France by her courage and devotion to her idea of God. And this would have been impossible had she not suffered from repression of the sex-complex and seen visions therefore.

Another remarkable piece of evidence has been omitted from the English translation. It was given by the Demoiselle Marguerite la Thoroulde, who had taken Jeanne to the baths and seen her unclothed. Madame la Thoroulde said, in the Latin translation of the Rehabilitation Trial which has survived: “Quod cum pluries vidit in balneo et stuphis [sweating-bath] et, ut percipere potuit, credit ipse fore virginem.”

That is to say, she saw her naked in the baths and could see that she was a virgin! What on earth did the good lady think that a virgin would look like? Did she think that because Jeanne did not look like a stout French matron she must therefore be a virgin? Or did she see a strong and boyish form, with little development of hips and bust, which she thought must be nothing else but that of a virgin? That is the explanation that occurs to me; and probably it also explains Jeanne’s idea that by wearing men’s clothes she would render herself less attractive to the mediæval soldiery among whom her lot was to be cast. An ordinary buxom young woman would certainly not be less attractive because she displayed her figure in doublet and hose; Rosalind is none the less winsome when she acts the boy; and I should have thought that Jeanne, by wearing men’s clothes, would simply have proclaimed to her male companions that she was a very woman. But if the idea be correct that she was shaped like a boy, with little feminine development, the whole mystery is at once solved. It is to be remembered that we know absolutely nothing about Jeanne’s appearance[4]; the only credible hint we have is that she had a gentle voice.

In the Rehabilitation Trial several of her companions in arms swore that she had had no sexual attraction for them. It is quaint to read the evidence of these respectable middle-aged gentlemen that in their hot and lusty youth they had once upon a time met at least one young girl after whom they had not lusted; they seem to consider that the fact proved that she must have come from God. Anatole France makes great play with them, but it would appear that his ingenuity is in this direction misplaced. Is it not possible that Jeanne was unattractive to men because she was immature--that she never became more than a child in mind and body? Even mediæval soldiery would not lust after a child, especially a child whom they firmly believed to have come straight from God! It must be remembered that to half of her world Jeanne was unspeakably sacred; to the other half she was undeniably a most frightful witch. Even the executioner would not imperil his immortal soul by touching her. It was the custom to spare a woman the anguish of the fire, by smothering her, or rendering her unconscious by suddenly compressing her carotids with a rope before the flames leaped around her. But Jeanne was far too wicked for anybody to touch in this merciful office; they had to let her die unaided; and afterwards, so wicked was her heart, they had to rescue it from the ashes and throw it into the Seine. Is it conceivable that men who thought thus would have ventured hell-fire by making love to her? Yet more--it is quite possible that she had no bodily charms whatever; we know nothing of her appearance. The story that she was charming and beautiful is simply sentimental legend. Indeed, it is difficult not to become sentimental over Jeanne d’Arc.

A noteworthy feature in her character was her Puritanism. She prohibited her soldiers from consorting with the prostitutes that followed the army; sometimes she even forced them to marry these women. Naturally the soldiers objected most strongly, and in the end this was one of the causes that led to her downfall. Jeanne used to run after the prohibited girls and strike them with the flat of her sword; in one case the girl was killed. In another the sword broke, and King Charles asked, very sensibly, “Would not a stick have done quite as well?” This is believed by some people to have been the very sword of Charles Martel which the priests had found for her at St. Catherine’s command, and naturally the soldiers, deprived of their female companions, wondered what sort of a holy sword could it have been which could not even stand the smiting of a prostitute? When people suffer from repression of the sex-complex the trouble may show itself either by constant indirect attempts to find favour in the eyes of individuals of the opposite sex, or sometimes by actually forbidding all sexual matters; Puritanism in sexual affairs is often an indication that all is not quite well with a woman’s subconscious mind; nor can one confine this generalization to one sex. It is not for one moment to be thought that Jeanne ever had the slightest idea of what was the matter with her; the whole of her delusions and Puritanism were to her quite conscious and real; the only thing that she did not know was that her delusions were entirely subjective--that her Voices had no existence outside her own mind. Her frantic belief in them led her to an heroic career and to the stake. She did not consciously repress her sex; Nature did that for her.

Women who never menstruate are not uncommon; most gynæcologists see a few. Though they are sometimes normal in their sexual feelings--sometimes indeed they are even nymphomaniacs or very nearly so--yet they seldom marry, for they know themselves to be sterile, and, after all, most women seem to know at the bottom of their hearts that the purpose of women is to produce children.

But there is still more of psychological interest to be gained from a careful reading of the first trial. It is possible to see how Jeanne’s unstable nervous system reacted to the long agony. We had better, in order to be fair, make quite certain why she was burned. These are the words uttered by the good Bishop of Beauvais as he sentenced her for the last time:--

“Thou hast been on the subject of thy pretended divine revelations and apparitions lying, seducing, pernicious, presumptuous, lightly believing, rash, superstitious, a divineress and blasphemer towards God and the Saints, a despiser of God Himself in His sacraments; a prevaricator of the Divine Law, of sacred doctrine and of ecclesiastical sanctions; seditious, cruel, apostate, schismatic, erring on many points of our Faith, and by these means rashly guilty towards God and Holy Church.”

This appalling fulmination, summed up, appears to mean--if it means anything--that she believed that she was under the direct command of God to wear man’s clothes. To this she could only answer that what she had done she had done by His direct orders.

Theologians have said that her answers at the trial were so clever that they must have been directly inspired; but it is difficult to see any sign of such cleverness. To me her character stands out absolutely clearly defined from the very beginning of the six weeks’ agony; she is a very simple, direct, and superstitious child struggling vainly in the meshes of a net spread for her by ecclesiastical politicians who were determined to sacrifice her to serve the ends of brutal masters. She had all a child’s simple cunning; when the Bishop asked her to repeat her Paternoster she answered that she would gladly do so if he himself would confess her. She thought that if he confessed her he might have pity on her, or, at least, that he would be bound to send her to Heaven, because she knew how great was the influence wielded by a Bishop; she thought that she might tempt him to hear her in the secrets of the confessional if she promised to repeat her Paternoster to him! Poor child--she little knew what was at the bottom of the trial.

She sometimes childishly boasted. When she was asked if she could sew, she answered that she feared no woman in Rouen at the sewing; just so might answer any immature girl of her years to-day. She sometimes childishly threatened; she told the Bishop that he was running a great risk in charging her. She had delusions of sight, smell, touch, and hearing. She said that the faces of Saints Catherine and Margaret were adorned with beautiful crowns, very rich and precious, that the saints smelled with a sweet savour, that she had kissed them, that they spoke to her.

There was a touch of epigram about the girl, too. In speaking of her banner at Rheims, she said: “It had been through the hardships--it were well that it should share the glory.” And again, when the judges asked her to what she attributed her success, she answered, “I said to my followers: ‘Go ye in boldly against the English,’ _and I went myself_.” The girl who said that could hardly have been a mere military _mascotte_. Yet, in admitting so much, one does not admit that she may have been a sort of Amazon. As the desperation of her position grew upon her she began to suffer more and more from her delusions; while she lay in her dungeon waiting for the fatal cart she told a young friar, Brother Martin Ladvenu, that her spirits came to her in great numbers and of the smallest size. When despair finally seized upon her she told “the venerable and discreet Maître Pierre Maurice, Professor of Theology,” that the angels really had appeared to her--good or bad, they really had appeared--in the form of very minute things[5]; that she now knew that they had deceived her. Her brain wearied by her long trial of strength with the Bishop, common sense re-asserted its sway, and she realized--the truth! Too late! When she was listening to her sermon on the scaffold in front of the fuel destined to consume her, she broke down and knelt at the preacher’s knees, weeping and praying until the English soldiers called out to ask if she meant to keep them there for their dinner; it is pleasing to know that one of them broke his lance into two pieces, which he tied into the form of a cross and held it up to her in the smoke that was already beginning to arise about her.

Her last thoughts we can never know; her last word was the blessed name of Jesus, which she repeated several times. In public--though she had told Pierre Maurice in private that she had “learned to know that her spirits had deceived her”--she always maintained that she had both seen and believed them because they came from God; her courage was amazing, both physical and moral. She was twice wounded, but she said that she always carried her standard so that she would never have to kill anybody--and that in truth she had never killed anybody.

Her extraordinary accomplishment was due to the unbounded superstition of the French common people, who at first believed in her implicitly; it was Napoleon, a French general, who said that in war the moral is to the spiritual as three is to one; our Lord said, “By faith ye shall move mountains”; and it must not be forgotten that she went to Orleans with powerful reinforcements which she herself estimated at about ten to twelve thousand men. This superstition of the French was more than equalled by the superstition of the English, who looked upon her as a most terrifying witch: one witness at the Rehabilitation Trial said that the English were a very superstitious nation, so they must have been pretty bad. Indeed, most of the witnesses at that trial seem to have been very superstitious; one must examine their evidence with care lest one suddenly finds that one is assisting at a miracle.

She seems to have been hot-tempered and emphatic in her speech, with a certain tang of rough humour such as would be natural in a peasant girl. A notary once questioned the truth of something she said at her trial; on inquiry it was found that she had been perfectly accurate; Jeanne “rejoiced, saying to Boisguillaume that if he made mistakes again she would pull his ears.” Once during the trial she was taken ill with vomiting, apparently caused by fish-poisoning, that followed after she had eaten of some carp sent her by the Bishop. Maître d’Estivet, the promoter of the trial, said to her, ‘Thou _paillarde_!’ (an abusive term), ‘thou hast been eating sprats and other unwholesomeness!’ She answered that she had not; and then she and d’Estivet exchanged many abusive words. The two doctors of medicine who treated her for this illness gave evidence, and it is pleasing to see that they seem to have been able to rationalize a trifle more about her than most of her contemporaries. But, taken all through, her evidence gives the impression of being exceedingly simple and straightforward--just the sort of thing to be expected from a child.

It is noteworthy that a great many witnesses at the Rehabilitation Trial swore that she was “simple.” Did they mean that she was half-witted? Probably not. More probably it was true that she always wanted to spare her enemies, when, in accordance with the custom of the Hundred Years’ War, she should rather have held them for ransom if they had been noble or slain them if they had been poor men. To the ordinary brutal mediæval soldiery such conduct would appear insane. Possibly, of course, the term “simple” might have been used in opposition to the term “gentle.”

May I be allowed to give a vignette of Jeanne going to the burning, compiled from the evidence of many onlookers given at the Rehabilitation Trial? She assumed no martyresque imperturbability; she did not hold her head high in the haughty belief that she was right and the rest of the world wrong, as a martyr should properly do. She wept bitterly as she walked to the fatal cart from the prison-doors; her head was shaven; she wore woman’s dress; her face was swollen and distorted, her eyes ran tears, her sobs shook her body, her wails moved the hearts of the onlookers. The French wept for sympathy, the English laughed for joy. It was a very human child who went to her death on May 30th, 1431. She was nineteen years of age--according to some accounts, twenty-one--and, unknown to herself, she had changed the face of history.

The Empress Theodora

This famous woman has been the subject of one of the bitterest controversies in history; and, while it is impossible to speak fully about her, it is certain that she was a woman of remarkable beauty, character, and historical position. For nearly a thousand years after her death she was looked upon as an ordinary--if unusually able--Byzantine princess, wife of Justinian the lawgiver, who was one of the ablest of the later Roman Emperors; but in 1623 the manuscript was discovered in the Vatican of a secret history, purporting to have been written by Procopius, which threw a new and amazing light on her career.

Procopius--or whoever wrote this most scurrilous history--states that the great Empress in early youth was an actress, daughter of a bear-keeper, and that she had sold tickets in the theatre; her youth had been disgustingly profligate: he narrates a series of stories concerning her which cannot be printed in modern English. The worst of these go to show that she was an ordinary type of Oriental prostitute, to whom the word “unnatural,” as applied to vice, had no meaning. The least discreditable is that the girl who was to be Empress had danced nearly naked on the stage--she is not the only girl who has done this, and not on the stage either. She had not even the distinction of being a good dancer, but acquired fame through the wild abandon and indecency with which she performed. At about the age of twenty she married--when she had already had a son--the grave and stately Justinian: “the man who had never been young,” who was so great and learned that it was well known that he could be seen of nights walking about the streets carrying his head in a tray like John the Baptist. When he fell a victim to Theodora’s wiles he was about forty years of age. The marriage was bitterly opposed by his mother and aunts, but they are said to have relented when they met her, and even had a special law passed to legalize the marriage of the heir to the throne with a woman of ignoble birth; and, after the death of Justin, Theodora duly succeeded to the leadership of the proudest court in Europe. This may be true; but it does not sound like the actions of a mother and old aunts. One would have thought that a convenient bowstring or sack in the Bosphorus would have been the more usual course.

So far we have nothing to go by but the statements of one man; the greatest historian of his time, to be sure--if we can be certain that he wrote the book. Von Ranke, himself a very great critical historian, says flatly that Procopius never wrote it; that it is simply a collection of dirty stories current about other women long afterwards. The Roman Empire seems to have been a great hotbed for filthy tales about the Imperial despots: one has only to remember Suetonius, from whose lively pages most of our doubtless erroneous views concerning the Palatine “goings on” are derived; and to recall the foul stories told about Julius Cæsar himself, who was probably no worse than the average young officer of his time; and of the last years of Tiberius, who was probably a great deal better than the average. Those of us who can cast their memories back for a few years can doubtless recall an instance of scurrilous libel upon a great personage of the British Empire, which cast discredit not on the gentleman libelled but upon the rascal who spread the libel abroad. It is one of the penalties of Empire that the wearer of the Imperial crown must always be the subject of libels against which he has no protection but in the loyal friendship of his subjects. Even Queen Victoria was once called “Mrs. Melbourne,” though probably even the fanatic who howled it did not believe that there was any truth in his insinuation. And Procopius did not have the courage to publish his libels, but preferred to leave to posterity the task of finding out how dirty was Procopius’ mind. Probably he would not have lived very long had Theodora discovered what he really thought of her. He was wise in his generation, and had ever the example of blind Belisarius before him to teach him to walk cautiously.

Démidour in 1887, Mallet in 1889, and Bury also in 1889, have once more reviewed the evidence. The two first-mentioned go very fully into it, and sum up gallantly in Theodora’s favour; but Bury is not so sure. Gibbon, having duly warned us of Procopius’ malignity, proceeds slyly to tell some of the most printable of the indecent stories. Gibbon is seldom very far wrong in his judgments, and evidently had very little doubt in his own mind about Theodora’s guilt. Joseph Maccabe goes over it all again, and “regretfully” believes everything bad about her. Edward Foord says, in effect, that supposing the stories were all true, which he does not appear to believe, and that she had thrown her cap over the windmills when she was a girl--well, she more than made up for it all when she became Empress. After all, it depends upon how far we can believe Procopius; and that again depends upon how far we can bring ourselves to believe that an exceedingly pretty little Empress can once upon a time have been a _fille de joie_. That in its turn depends upon how far each individual man is susceptible to female beauty. If she had been a prostitute it makes her career as Empress almost miraculous; it is the most extraordinary instance on record of “living a thing down,” and speaks volumes for her charm and strength of personality.

She lived in the midst of most furious theological strife. Christianity was still a comparatively new religion, even if we accept the traditional chronology of the early world; and in her time the experts had not yet settled what were its tenets. The only thing that was perfectly clear to each theological expert was that if you did not agree with his own particular belief you were eternally damned, and that it was his duty to put you out of your sin immediately by cutting your throat lest you should inveigle some other foolish fellows into the broad path that leadeth to destruction. Theodora was a Monophysite--that is to say, she believed that Christ had only one soul, whereas it was well known to the experts that He had two. Nothing could be too dreadful for the miscreants who believed otherwise. It was gleefully narrated how Nestorius, who had started the abominable doctrine of Monophysm, had his tongue eaten by worms--that is, died of cancer of the tongue; and it is not incredible that Procopius, who was a Synodist or Orthodox believer, may have invented the libels and secretly written them down in order to show the world of after days what sort of monster his heretical Empress really was, wear she never so many gorgeous ropes of pearls in her Imperial panoply. It is difficult to place any bounds to theological hatred--or to human credulity for that matter. The whole question of the nature of Christ was settled by the Sixth Œcumenical Council about a hundred and fifty years later, when it was finally decided that Christ had two natures, or souls, or wills--however we interpret the Greek word Φύσις--each separate and indivisible in one body. This, and the Holy Trinity, are still, I understand, part of Christian theology, and appear to be equally comprehensible to the ordinary scientific man.

But it is difficult to get over a tradition of the eleventh century--that is to say, six hundred years before Procopius’ _Annals_ saw the light--that Justinian married “Theodora of the Brothel.” Although Mallet showed that Procopius had strong personal reasons for libelling his Empress, one cannot help feeling that there must be something in the stories after all.

Once she had assumed the marvellous crown, with its ropes of pearls, in which she and many of the other Empresses are depicted, her whole character is said to have changed. Though her enemies accused her of cruelty, greed, treachery, and dishonesty--and no accounts from her friends have survived--yet they were forced to admit that she acted with propriety and amazing courage; and no word was spoken against her virtue. In the Nika riots, which at one time threatened to depose Justinian, she saved the Empire. Justinian, his ministers, and even the hero Belisarius, were for flight, the mob howling in the square outside the Palace, when Theodora spoke up in gallant words which I paraphrase. She began by saying how indecorous it was for a woman to interfere in matters of State, and then went on to say: “We must all die some time, but it is a terrible thing to have been an Emperor and to give up Empire before one dies. The purple is a noble winding-sheet! Flight is easy, my Emperor--there are the steps of the quay--there are the ships waiting for you; you have money to live on. But in very shame you will taste the bitterness of death in life if you flee! I, your wife, will not flee, but will stay behind without you, and will die an Empress rather than live a coward!” Proud little woman--could that woman have been a prostitute selling her body in degradation? It seems impossible.

The Council, regaining courage, decided for fighting; armed bands were sent forth into the square; the riot was suppressed with Oriental ferocity; and the Roman Empire lasted nearly a thousand years more. “Toujours l’audace,” as Danton said nearly thirteen hundred years later, when, however, he was not in imminent peril himself.

THE EMPRESS THEODORA.
From a Mosaic (Ravenna, San Vitale).]

In person Theodora was small, slender, graceful, and exquisitely beautiful; her complexion was pale, her eyes singularly expressive: the mosaic at Ravenna, in stiff and formal art, gives some evidence of character and beauty. She was accused, as I have said, of barbarous cruelties, of herself applying the torture in her underground private prisons; the stories are contradictory and inconsistent, but one story appears to be historical: “If you do not obey me I swear by the living God that I will have you flayed alive,” she said with gentle grace to her attendants. It is said that her illegitimate son, whom she had disposed of by putting him with his terrified father in Arabia, gained possession of the secret of his birth, and boldly repaired to Constantinople in the belief that her maternal affection would lead her to pardon him for the offence of having been born, and that thereby he would attain to riches and greatness; but the story goes that he was never seen again after he entered the Palace. Possibly the story is of the nature of romance. She dearly longed for a legitimate son, and the faithful united in prayer to that end; but the sole fruit of her marriage was a daughter, and even this girl was said to have been conceived before the wedding.

When she was still adolescent she went for a tour in the Levant with a wealthy Tyrian named Ecebolus, who, disgusted by her violent temper or her universal _charity_, to use Gibbon’s sly phrase, deserted her and left her penniless at Alexandria. The men of Egypt appear to have been less erotic than the Greeks, for she remained in dire poverty, working her way back home by way of the shores of the Euxine. In Egypt she had become a Monophysite; and when she reached Constantinople it is said that she sat in a pleasant home outside the Palace and plied her spinning-wheel so virtuously that Justinian fell in love with her and ultimately married her, having first tried her charms. Passing over the obvious difficulty that a girl of the charm and immorality of Procopius’ Theodora need never have gone in poverty while men were men, the wonder naturally arises whether the girl who went away with Ecebolus was the same as she who returned poor and alone and sat so virtuously at her spinning-wheel as to bewitch Justinian. Mistaken identity, or rather loss of identity, must have been commoner in those days than these when the printing-press and rapid postal and telegraphic communication make it harder to lose one’s self. However, granting that there was no confusion of identity, one may believe--if one tries hard enough--that she was befriended by the Monophysites in Egypt, and may have “found religion” at their hands, and, by suffering poverty and oppression with them, had learned to sympathize with the under-world. Though the story may seem to be more suitable for an American picture-show than for sober history, still one must admit that it is not absolutely impossible. When she became great and famous she did not forget those who had rescued her in the days of her affliction; and her influence on Justinian is to be seen in the “feminism” which is so marked in his code. What makes it not impossible is the well-known fact that violent sexuality is in some way related to powerful religious instincts; and the theory that the passions which had led Theodora to the brothel may, when her mind was turned to religion, have led her to be a Puritan, is rather attractive. But nothing is said about Theodora which has not in some way been twisted to her infamy. The only certain fact about her is that she had enormous influence over her husband, and it is difficult to believe that a great and able man like Justinian could have entirely yielded his will to the will of a cruel and treacherous harlot. The idea certainly opens an unexpectedly wide vista of masculine weakness.

She used this influence in helping to frame the great Code of Justinian, which has remained the standard of law in many countries ever since. A remarkable feature about this code is that, while it is severe on the keepers of brothels, it is mild to leniency on the unhappy women who prostituted themselves for these keepers’ benefit. The idea that a prostitute is a woman, with rights and feelings like any other woman, appears to have been unknown until Theodora had it introduced into the code of laws which perpetuates her husband’s memory. One night she collected all the prostitutes in Constantinople, five hundred in all--were there only five hundred in that vast Oriental city?--shut them up in a palace on the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus, and expected them to reform as she had reformed, but with less success; as our modern experience would lead us to expect. The girls grew morbidly unhappy, and many threw themselves into the sea. Even in a lock hospital we know how difficult it is to reclaim girls to whom sexual intercourse has become a matter of daily habit, and if Theodora’s well-meant attempt failed we must at least give her credit for an attempt at an idealistic impossibility. These girls did not have the prospect of marrying an Emperor; no pearl-stringed crown was dangled before their fingers for the grasping. Poor human nature is not so easily kept on the strait and narrow path as Theodora thought. Throughout her life she seems to have had great sympathy for the poor and the oppressed, and one feels with Edward Foord that one can forgive her a great deal. We must not forget that her husband called her his “honoured wife,” his “gift from God,” and his “sweet delight”; and spoke most gratefully of her interest and assistance in framing his great code of laws. Was her humanitarianism, her sympathy with down-trodden women, the result of her own sad past experience? To think so would be to turn her pity towards vice into an argument against her own virtue, and I shrink from doing so. Let us rather believe that she really did perceive how terribly the Fates have loaded the dice against women, and that she did what she could to make their paths easier through this earth on which we have no continuing city.

Her health gave her a great deal of trouble, and she spent many months of every year in her beautiful villas on the shores of the Sea of Marmora and the Bosphorus. She remained in bed most of every day, rising late, and retiring early. To Procopius and the Synodists these habits were naturally signs of Oriental weakness and luxury; but may not the poor lady have been really ill? She visited several famous baths in search of health, and we have a vivid account of her journey through Bithynia on her way to the hot springs of the Pythian Apollo near Brusa.

We have no evidence as to the nature of her illness. Her early life, of course, suggests some venereal trouble, and it is interesting to inquire into the position of the various venereal diseases at that time. Syphilis I think we may rule out of court; for it is now generally believed that that disease was not known in Europe until after the return of Columbus’ men from the West Indian islands. Some of the bones of Egypt were thought to show signs of syphilitic invasion until it was shown by Elliott Smith that similar markings are caused by insects; and no indubitable syphilitic lesion has ever been found in any of the mummies. If syphilis did really occur in European antiquity, it must have been exceedingly rare and have differed widely in its pathological effects from the disease which is so common and destructive to-day; that is to say, in spite of certain German enthusiasts, it could not have been syphilis.

But gonorrhœa is a very old story, and was undoubtedly prevalent in the ancient world. Luys indeed says that gonorrhœa is as old as mankind, and was named by Galen himself, though regular physicians and surgeons scorned to treat it. It is strange that there is so little reference to this disease in the vast amount of pornographic literature which has come down to us. Martial, for instance, or Ovid; nothing would seem too obscene to have passed by their salacious minds; yet neither of them so much as hint that such a thing as gonorrhœa existed. But it is possible that such a disease might have been among the things unlucky or “tabu.” All nations and all ages have been more or less under the influence of tabu, which ranges from influence on the most trivial matters to settlement of the gravest. Thus, many men would almost rather die than walk abroad in a frock coat and tan boots, or, still more dreadful, in a frock coat and Homburg hat, though that freakish costume appears to be common enough in America. In this matter we are under the influence of tabu--the thing which prevents us, or should prevent us, from eating peas with our knife, or making unseemly noises when we eat soup, or playing a funeral march at a cheerful social gathering. In all these things the idea of _nefas_--unlucky--seems more or less to enter; similarly we do not like to walk under a ladder lest a paint-pot should fall upon us. Many people hate to mention the dread word “death,” lest that should untimely be their portion. Just so possibly a licentious man like Ovid may have been swayed by some such fear, and he may have refrained from writing about the horrid disease which he must have known was ever waiting for him.

But though it may seem to have been impossible that any prostitute should have escaped gonorrhœa in Byzantium, just as it is impossible in modern London or Sydney, yet there is no evidence that Theodora so suffered; what hints we have, if they weigh on either side at all, seem to make it unlikely. She had a child after her marriage with Justinian, though women who have had untreated gonorrhœa are very frequently or generally sterile. Nor is there any evidence that Justinian ever had any serious illness except the bubonic plague, from which he suffered, and recovered, during the great epidemic of 546. I assume that the buboes from which he doubtless suffered at that time were not venereal but were the ordinary buboes of plague. He had been Theodora’s husband for many years before that terrible year in which the plague swept away about a third of the population of the Roman Empire, where it had been simmering ever since the time of Marcus Aurelius. If Theodora really had gonorrhœa, Justinian must have caught it, and it is unlikely that he would have called her his “honoured wife.”

A more probable explanation of her continued ill-health might be that she became septic at her confinement, when the unwanted girl was born. When the Byzantines spoke of a child as being “born in the purple,” they spoke literally, for the Roman Empress was always sent to a “porphyry palace” on the Bosphorus for her confinement; and once there she had access to less good treatment than is available for any sempstress to-day. It is impossible to suppose that the porphyry palace--the “purple house”--ever became infected with puerperal sepsis because there was never more than one confinement going on at a time within its walls, and that only at long intervals. Still, there must have been a great many septic confinements and unrecorded female misery from their results among the women of that early world; and that must be remembered when we consider the extraordinarily small birth-rate of the Imperial families during so many centuries. Had the Roman Emperors been able to point to strong sons to inherit their glories, possibly the history of the Empire would have been less turbulent. A Greek or Roman Lister might have altered the history of the world by giving security of succession to the Imperial despot.

After all, it is idle to speculate on Theodora’s illness, and it does not much matter. She has long gone to her account, poor fascinating creature; all her beauty and wit and eager vivacity are as though they had never been save for their influence upon her husband’s laws. Theodora is the standing example of woman’s fate to achieve results through the agency of some man.

She died of cancer, and died young. There is no record of the original site of the cancer; the ecclesiastic who records the glad tidings merely relates joyfully that it was diffused throughout her body, as was only right and proper in one who differed from him in religious opinions. It is generally thought that it started in the breast. No doubt this is a modern guess, though of course cancer of the breast is notorious for the way in which its secondary growths spread through liver, lungs, bones, neck, spine, and so forth; and there is little reason to suppose that the guess is incorrect. After trying all the usual remedies for “lumps,” her physicians determined to send her to the baths of Brusa, famous in miraculous cure. There were two large iron and two large sulphur springs, besides smaller ones; and people generally went there in spring and early summer when the earth was gaily carpeted with the myriad flowers that spring up and fade before the heat of the Mediterranean July. May we infer from the choice of a sulphur bath that the cancer had already invaded the skin? Possibly. Such a horror may have been the determining factor which induced the Empress and her physicians to travel afield. But if so, surely the recording priest missed a chance of rejoicing; for he does not tell us the glad news. All over Bithynia and the Troad there were, and are, hot mineral springs; Homer relates how one hot spring and a cold gushed from beneath the walls of Troy itself. The girls of Troy used to wash their clothes in the hot spring whenever Agamemnon would let them.

When Theodora went to Brusa she was accompanied by a retinue of four thousand, and Heaven resounded with the prayers of the Monophysites; but the Orthodox refused to pray for the recovery of so infamous a heretic, just as they had refused to join in her prayers for a son. Theodora met with little loving-kindness on this earth after she had left Egypt; possibly the world repaid her with what it received from her.

The sanctuaries of Asklepios were the great centres of Greek and Roman healing, and the treatment there was both mental and physical. The temples were generally built in charming localities, where everything was peace and loveliness; the patients lay in beds in beautiful colonnades, and to them, last thing at night, priests delivered restful and touching services; when sleep came upon them they dreamt, and the dreams were looked upon as the voice of God; they followed His instructions and were cured. They were not cured, however, if they had cancer. One Ælius Aristides has left us a vivid--and unconsciously amusing--account of his adventures in search of health; he seems to have been a neurotic man who ultimately developed into a first-class neurasthenic. To him his beloved god was indeed a trial, as no doubt Aristides himself was to his more earthly physicians. He would sit surrounded by his friends, to whom he would pour out his woes in true neurasthenic style. Aristides seems never to have been truly happy unless he was talking about his ailments, and he loyally followed any suggestion for treatment if only he could persuade himself that it came from the beloved Asklepios. The god would send him a vision, that ordered him to bathe three times in icy water when fevered, and afterwards to run a mile in the teeth of a north-east wind--and the north-easters in the Troad can be bitter indeed; very different from the urbane and gentle breath that spreads so delicious a languor over the summer of Sydney! This behest the much-tried man of faith would dutifully perform, accompanied by a running bodyguard of doctors and nurses marvelling at his endurance and the inscrutable wisdom of the god, though they expected, and no doubt in their inmost hearts hoped, that their long-suffering patient would drop dead from exhaustion. There were real doctors at these shrines besides priests. The doctors seem to have been much the same kind of inquisitive and benevolent persons as we are to-day; some of them were paid to attend the poor without fee. The nurses were both male and female, and appear to have been most immoral people. Aristides was the wonder of his age; his fame spread from land to land, and it is marvellous that he neither succumbed to his heroic treatment nor lost his faith in the divine being that subjected him to such torment. Both facts are perhaps characteristic of mankind. The manner of his end I do not know.

In Theodora’s time Asklepios and the other Olympian divinities had long been gathered to their fathers before the advancing tides of Christianity and Earth-Mother worship; but though the old gods were gone the human body and human spirit remained the same, and there is no doubt that she was expected to dream and bathe and drink mineral waters just as Aristides had done centuries before; and no doubt a crowd of sympathizing friends sat round her on the marble seats which are still there and tried to console her--a difficult task when the sufferer has cancer of the breast. She sat there, her beauty faded, her once-rounded cheeks ashy with cachexia and lined with misery, brooding over the real nature of the Christ she was so soon to meet, wondering whether she or her implacable enemies were in the right as to His soul--whether He had in truth two souls or one. She had made her choice, and it was too late now to alter; in any case she was too gallant a little Empress to quail in the face of death, come he never so horribly. Let us hope that she had discovered before she died that Christ the All-merciful would forgive even so atrocious a sin as attributing to Him a single soul! All her piety, all the prayers of her friends, and all the medical skill of Brusa proved in vain, and she died in A.D. 548, being then forty years of age. So we take leave of this woman, whom many consider the most remarkable in history. Let us envisage her to ourselves--this graceful, exquisite, little cameo-faced lady, passionate in her loves and her hates, with some of the languor of the East in her blood, much of the tigress; brave in danger and resourceful in time of trouble; loyal and faithful to her learned husband as he was loyal to her; yet perhaps a little despising him. Except Medea, as seen by Euripides, Theodora was probably the first feminist, and as such has made her mark upon the world. On the whole her influence upon the Roman Empire seems to have been for good, and the merciful and juster trend of the laws she inspired must be noted in her favour.

Theodora dead, the glory of Justinian departed. He seemed to be stunned by the calamity, and for many critical months took no part in the world’s affairs; even after he recovered he seemed but the shadow of his old self. Faithful to her in life, he remained faithful after her death, and sought no other woman; that is another reason for thinking that Procopius lied. He lived, a lonely and friendless old man, for eighteen more years, hated by his subjects for his extortionate taxation--which they attributed to the extravagance of the crowned prostitute, though more likely it was due to the enormous campaigns of Belisarius and Narses the eunuch, as a result of which Italy and Africa once more came under the sway of the East. Justinian was lonely on his death-bed, and the world breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone. He had long outlived his glory.

The Emperor Charles V

That extraordinary phenomenon which, being neither Holy, nor Roman, nor yet strictly speaking an Empire, was yet called the Holy Roman Empire, began when Charlemagne crossed the Alps to rescue the reigning Pope from the Lombards in A.D. 800. The Pope crowned him Roman Emperor of the West, a title which had been extinct since the time of Odoacer more than three hundred years before. The revival of the resplendent title caused the unhappy people of the Dark Ages to think for a moment in their misery that the mighty days of Augustus and Marcus Aurelius had returned; it seemed to add the power of God to the romance of ages and the brute power of kings. During the next two centuries the peoples of France and Germany gradually evolved into two separate nations, but it was impossible for men to forget the great brooding power which had given the _Pax Romana_ to the world, and its hallowed memory survived more beneficent than possibly it really was; it appeared to their imaginations that if it were possible to unite the sanctity of the Pope with the organizing power of Rome the blessed times might again return when a man might reap in peace what he had sown in peace, and the long agony of the Dark Ages might be lifted from mankind. When Henry the Fowler had welded the Germans into a people with a powerful king the time appeared to have arisen, and his son Otto was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He was not Emperor of Germany, nor German Emperor; he was _Holy Roman Emperor_ of the German people, wielding power, partly derived from the religious power of the Pope, and partly from the military resources of whatever fiefs he might hold; and this enormous and loosely knit organization persisted until 1806--nearly seven hundred years from the time of Otto, and more than 1,000 years after the time of Charlemagne.

This mediæval Roman Empire was founded on sentiment; it took its power from blessed--and probably distorted--memories of a golden age, when one mighty Imperator really did rule the civilized world with a strong and autocratic hand. It was a pathetic attempt to put back the hands of the clock. It bespoke the misery through which mankind was passing in the attempt to combine feudalism with justice. When the mediæval Emperor was not fighting with the Pope he was generally fighting with his presumed subjects; occasionally he tried to defend Europe from the Turks. He might have justified his existence by defending Constantinople in 1453, by which he would have averted the greatest disaster that has ever befallen Europe. He missed that opportunity, and the mediæval Empire, though it survived that extraordinary calamity, yet continued ramshackle, feeble, and mediævally glorious until long past the Protestant Reformation. Being Roman, of course it was anti-Lutheran, and devoted its lumbering energies to the destruction of the Protestants. No Holy Roman Emperor ever rivalled the greatness of Charles V, in whose frame shone all the romance and glamour of centuries. How vast was his power is shown when we consider that he ruled over the Netherlands, Burgundy, Spain, Austria, much of what is now Germany, and Italy; and he was not a man to be contented with a nominal rule.

He was born in Ghent in 1500 to Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and Juana, who is commonly known as “Crazy Jane”; it is now generally believed that she was insane, though the Spaniards shrank from imputing insanity to a queen. From his father he inherited the principalities of the Netherlands and Burgundy; from his mother he inherited the kingships of Spain, Naples, and the Spanish colonies. When his grandfather, the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian, died, Charles was elected Emperor in 1519; the other candidate was Francis I of France. The electors were the seven _Kurfursten_ of Germany, and Charles bribed the harder of the two. What power on earth could summon before a magistrate the kings of France and Spain on a charge of improperly influencing the vote of a German princelet? Once having attained to the title of Roman Emperor, added to the enormous military power of King of Spain, Charles immediately became the greatest man in the world. He was strong, cautious, athletic, brave, and immeasurably sagacious; his reputation for wisdom long survived him.

Francis did not forgive him his victory, and for the next quarter of a century--until 1544--Europe resounded with the rival cries of the two monarchs, unhappy Italy being usually the actual scene of battle. At Pavia in 1525 Francis had to say “All is lost save honour”--the precise definition of “honour” in Francis’s mind being something very different from what it is to-day. Francis was captured and haled to Madrid to meet his grim conqueror, who kept him in prison until he consented to marry Charles’s favourite sister Eleanor of Austria, and to join with him in an alliance against the heretics. This Eleanor was a gentle and beautiful lady whom Charles treated with true brotherly contempt; yet she loved him. As soon as Francis was out of prison he forgot that he was married, and made love to every pretty girl that came his way.