A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

This was virtually the end of Rome. It staggered on for another twenty years under various
emperors and pretenders, the last of whom was a mere boy, Romulus Augustulus. By this time the
Roman Empire was really in the hands of several barbarians who had enlisted as Roman soldiers;
when they asked the emperor’s father to share out the empire, he refused, and they murdered him.
The boy-Caesar resigned after only eleven months. After that, there were no more Roman
emperors, either in Rome or Ravenna. The Christian pope remained the real master of Rome, as he
has to this day.
The story of Constantinople must be continued for a few more years - the throne endured for
another thousand - because it is the necessary prelude to the next stage in the history of Europe.
The emperor Justinian, who came to the throne in 527 A.D., was possibly the worst ruler since
Caligula and killed more people than all the other Roman emperors put together. This was not out
of sadism, but because he fancied himself another Constantine and tried to force all the pagans in
his empire to accept Christianity; those who refused were killed, and vast numbers refused. He left
behind a legacy of bitterness that paved the way for the success of Mohammedanism a century
later. It is one of the tragedies of European history that this weak, vicious and disagreeable man
held the throne for so long - thirty-eight years. It is not, however, a mystery; he owed most of his
success to his empress, the ex-prostitute Theodora.
Justinian met Theodora four years before he became emperor. She was the daughter of a man who
looked after the circus animals, and she and her two sisters went on the stage as members of the
Roman equivalent of a song and dance act. They became high-class tarts; even as a child, Theodora
knew how to satisfy lovers - the historian Procopius said that she was so expert at fellatio that
people said she had a second vagina in her face.
Justinian quickly became her slave and, when he became emperor, had the law changed so he could
marry her. She proved to be an excellent choice; she had a stronger character than Justinian, and a
good head for business.
Trouble almost ended his reign before it had properly started. Constantinople was obsessed by
sport, and its two leading factions - equivalents of modern football hooligans - were called the
Greens and the Blues. These also took opposite sides in one of the sillier Christian controversies,
the question of whether the divine and human natures in Christ were joined together or separated;
in the true Christian tradition, they reinforced their arguments by murdering one another. In 532,
the prefect of police ordered them to stop the killing, and in the resulting riots, half Constantinople
was set on fire. Justinian was terrified and wanted to flee; Theodora called him a coward and
refused to budge. Justinian’s greatest general, Belisarius, settled the matter by taking his army into
the streets and killing thirty thousand people, which convinced the Blues and Greens that they had
better return to a less ambitious scale of homicide.
Unfortunately, Justinian was deeply impressed by this beautifully simple way of settling political
questions, and decided to apply it to the rest of his empire. He sent Belisarius off to North Africa to
convert the Vandals; these were, it is true, already Christians, but of the Arian persuasion. Since
Belisarius happened to be the greatest military genius of his age, he was able to carry out this order
with magnificent efficiency, exterminating all who declined to believe that Jesus had no beginning.
Next, Belisarius was sent off to convert the Goths, who were also Arians; this took him five years
and drastically reduced the Goth population. Justinian was by this time in the grip of a curious
dilemma. He was convinced that Belisarius wanted to usurp the throne - a suspicion that was