So, Theodora had ordered Belisarius to carry out the purge. He had refused.
Flatly refused. Partly, he told her, because it was excessive. Those men were not guilty of treason, after all, simply dereliction of duty. What was more important, he explained—calmly, coldly—was that such an indiscriminate purge of the entire officer corps in Constantinople would undermine the army itself.
He needed that army. Rome needed that army. The first battle with the Malwa Empire had been fought and won. There were many more to come.
In the end, Theodora had yielded. She had been satisfied—it might be better to say, had accepted—the dismissal of those officers. Belisarius, along with Sittas and Hermogenes, had spent three days enforcing that dismissal.
None of the officers had objected, with the sole exception of Gontharis, the commander of the Army of Rhodope. A scion of one of the empire's noblest families, he apparently felt his aristocratic lineage exempted him from such unceremonious and uncouth treatment.
Belisarius, not wishing to feed further the nobility's resentment against Thracians, had allowed Sittas to handle the problem.
The Greek nobleman's solution had been quick and direct. Sittas felled Gontharis with a blow of his gauntleted fist, dragged him out of his headquarters into the Army of Rhodope's training field, and decapitated him in front of the assembled troops. Another head joined the growing collection on the walls of the Hippodrome.
Immediately thereafter, Sittas and his cataphracts marched to Gontharis' villa on the outskirts of Constantinople. After expelling all the occupants, Sittas seized the immense treasure contained therein and burned the villa to the ground. The confiscated fortune, he turned over to the imperial treasury.
The treasury's coffers were bulging, now. Theodora had executed only nineteen noblemen. But she had confiscated the fortunes of every noble family whose members had even the slightest connection with the plot. The confiscations, true, had been restricted to that portion of such families' fortunes which were located in the capital. Their provincial estates—to which most of them had fled—were untouched. But, since most aristocrats resided in the capital, the plunder was enormous.
The same treatment had been dealt to officials, bureaucrats, churchmen.
None of them objected. Not publicly, at least. They were glad enough to escape with their lives.
A Populace and Its Glee
The great populace of the city had been untouched.
Indeed, after a day, the populace came out of hiding and began applauding the purge. Throngs of commoners could be found, from dawn to dusk, admiring the new decorations on the Hippodrome. The heads of bucellarii meant little to them, and the Malwa heads even less. But the heads of high officials, nobles, churchmen—oh, now, that was a different matter altogether. Often enough, over the years—over the decades and centuries, in the memory of their families—had such men extorted and bullied them.
John of Cappadocia's head, of course, was the most popular attraction. He had often been called the most hated man in the Roman Empire. Few had doubted that claim, in the past. None doubted it now.
But the populace also spent much time admiring the heads of the Hippodrome factions. For the first time in their lives, the common folk could walk the streets of Constantinople without fearing an encounter with faction thugs. The leaders of those thugs—with the exception of a few who had escaped Irene's eye—were all perched on the wall. And, within days, those who had escaped the slaughter joined them—along with two hundred and sixty-three other faction bravos. Such men might have escaped Irene's eye, and the eyes of the agentes in rebus. They could not escape the eyes of the populace, who ferreted them out of their hiding places and turned them over to Hermogenes' infantrymen. Or, often enough, simply lynched them on the spot and brought their heads to the Hippodrome.
The more prosperous residents of Constantinople—and there were many of them, in that teeming city: merchants, shopkeepers, craftsmen, artisans—did not share the unadulterated glee of their poorer neighbors. They were not immune to that glee, of course. They, too, had suffered from the exactions of the high and mighty. But—as is usually the case with those who have something to lose—they feared that the purge might widen, and deepen, and grow into a cataclysm of mass terror.
Their fears were exaggerated, perhaps, but by no means groundless. On any number of occasions, Hermogenes' infantrymen had prevented mobs from beating or murdering a man—or an entire family—whose only real crime was unpopularity. On two occasions, the turmoil had become savage enough to require the intervention of Sittas and Belisarius' cataphracts.