Hardly anyone thinks of Byzantine women, power politics, and lifelong chastity in the same breath, although at least one chose this route to reign in a big way during the last centuries of the bifurcated Roman Empire.
Pulcheria was the precocious powerhouse example. At fifteen, she stepped up as regent empress for her weak young brother Theo, thereby running the eastern half of the Roman Empire from Constantinople. Her era, the centuries when Christianity really took hold, opened a new avenue of independence for women: career chastity. Not just as nuns or mother superiors, either. Pulcheria was astute enough to see that the best way to keep her autonomy was to give herself, body and soul, only to the church. Her “virgin for life” ceremony, being Byzantine, was gloriously pompous and dazzling. She was much applauded. As a mark of approval, the Roman senate also gave her more political power by declaring her Augusta in 414. That title got her treated equally among other rulers and men of power. Her face appeared on a variety of classy gold coins, too, showing her being crowned by the right hand of God, no less.
As regent empress, Pulcheria immediately fired the eunuch tutor in charge of her little brother’s education. Now her first order of business was to make him into a figurehead emperor; she personally tutored him on his studies, his duties, and even his choice of a mate. When she wasn’t reciting passages from Scripture or fasting twice a week, big sister put young Theo through his paces. A sampling of her lesson plans: how to speak with dignity; how to walk; how to restrain loud laughter; and how to ride a horse in an imperial fashion.
Being a Byzantine empress was swell. Even better was Pulcherias approach to it: career virgin.
A kind boy, Theo was careless and easily swayed. This being Byzantium, palace intrigue and outsider coup attempts were omnipresent. As Theo went through puberty, aristocrats fielded their own marital candidate from Antioch, a sleek Greek named Eudocia. Although she was still Theo’s puppet master, Pulcheria could do little to thwart him when her opponents managed to dangle their bride material in front of the teen, who snapped at Eudocia like a hungry trout.
Pulcheria still had supreme control; her brother was a trusting soul, too trusting. To show him the error of his ways, she placed a document on the table before him. He duly signed without reading it, as he’d always done. With a sigh, his big sister then made a point of reading aloud what he had just signed. It was a contract giving Pulcheria a new slave: Theo’s new wife! They all had a hearty fake laugh, as she finally tore it up.
Her credentials as the true CEO of Byzantium fully established, Pulcheria forged ahead with her organizational plans while not neglecting her piety projects, including a massive amount of church building.
Truth be told, Theo enjoyed having his older sister micro-manage; in fact, when a small war with Persia bubbled up in 420, he told everyone that her extreme piety—and her strict chastity—was directly responsible for the success of the Byzantine armies in the field.
As the years rolled on, a rift developed between Theo and his wife Eudocia; at length she slunk off to the Holy Land, ostensibly to make a pilgrimage. Pulcheria couldn’t help but gloat a bit; she gloated even more whenever Pope Leo wrote or came calling, asking for her help in the latest theological quarrels.
In the summer of A.D. 450, her beloved brother Theo—evidently forgetting momentarily how to ride a horse in true imperial fashion—fell from his mount and injured his spine. Two days later, he died. Before he did so, he had a heart-to-heart with his sister and an obscure military officer named Marcian about a premonition he’d had. In it, he saw Marcian ruling Byzantium. Dream premonitions being one of those omens you didn’t ignore in old Byzantium, he urged Pulcheria to wed Marcian.
Pulcheria was already worried, pondering her future, since legally the Roman senate would not make her (being female) sole ruler, even though they respected and feared her. After Theo died, she was shattered, spending the next month arranging for her brother’s huge public funeral. At the same time, she entered into negotiations with the mild-mannered Marcian. And they came to terms—her terms, naturally. The first being, absolutely no sex. She was a career virgin, by God, and intended to stay that way.
Pulcheria had three glorious years to run things her way before she left the material world in A.D. 453. Because she loved Constantinople and its people, she left all her worldly goods to local charities and to the poor—a staggering amount of real estate and other property. As befits a martinet to the last, she bossily instructed her husband Marcian to do the same. Or else!
Possibly garnering the most Obscure Roman Emperor award, Marcian peacefully ruled for three years before dying of gangrene. We still don’t know if he followed Pulcheria’s postmortem orders.