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the passionately monophysite Empress Theodora, and he now made a secret agreement with her by which Belisarius, then in Italy, would depose Silverius and install him, Vigilius, in his stead. In return, he promised to denounce the principles laid down at Chalcedon 3 and proclaim his acceptance of the monophysite creed. Belisarius did as he was bidden; Vigilius then hurried back to Rome for his coronation, forcing Silverius into an Anatolian exile.
    By the autumn of 545 the army of Totila was at the gates of Rome. Belisarius, with the limited means at his disposal, was doing everything he could to avoid a siege but was receiving little or no support from his emperor. Justinian had other problems on his mind. The root of the trouble was that hoary old enigma, the identity of Christ. The orthodox view was that laid down almost a century before by the Council of Chalcedon: that the Savior possessed, in his one person, two natures divided but inseparable, the human and the divine. This view, however, had never been accepted by the monophysites, according to whom the divine nature alone existed and who consequently saw Christ as God rather than man; and these, heretics as they might be, were far too numerous and too widespread to be eliminated. Egypt, for example, was monophysite through and through; in Syria and Palestine too, the doctrine had taken a firm and potentially dangerous hold. In the West, on the other hand, such heresy as existed at all—which was to be found almost exclusively among the barbarians—championed the opposite, Arian, view that Christ was essentially human. The Roman Church, meanwhile, remained staunchly orthodox and was predictably quick to protest at any deviation from the Chalcedonian path. Justinian therefore had a difficult and delicate course to steer. If he dealt too harshly with the monophysites, he risked rebellion and possible loss to the empire of valuable provinces; Egypt was one of its chief sources of corn. If he treated them with too much consideration, he would incur the wrath of the orthodox and split his subjects more than ever. He was, of course, fully aware of his wife’s own monophysite sympathies and rather welcomed them: they enabled him on occasion to take an outwardly rigid line in the knowledge that she would secretly be able to temper its severity.
    Thanks to this highly disingenuous policy, the emperor had managed to curb most of the monophysite communities—apart from those of Egypt, which he left firmly alone—but then, suddenly, there emerged a dangerously charismatic new troublemaker. Jacob Baradaeus (“the Ragged”) was a monk from Mesopotamia who, having in 543 been consecrated Bishop of Edessa by the monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria, took it upon himself to revive monophysite sentiment throughout the East, traveling constantly and at prodigious speed the length and breadth of Syria and Palestine, uncanonically consecrating some thirty bishops as he went and ordaining several thousand priests.
    Unable to stamp out the flames of fanaticism that sprang up everywhere in the wake of Baradaeus, Justinian found himself in a quandary. The monophysites in their present mood needed more careful treatment than ever; at the same time, he was already being criticized in the West for weakness and inertia in the face of the new threat. Some kind of positive action was clearly required, and so, for want of any better solution, he decided on a public condemnation—not of the monophysites but of those who occupied the other end of the theological spectrum, professing the humanity rather than the divinity of Christ: the Nestorians. This by now half-forgotten sect had been condemned as early as 431 by the Council of Ephesus; afterward the majority had fled eastward, to Persia and beyond, and few if any now remained within the imperial frontiers. It thus mattered little to them whether they were attacked again or not, but they had the advantage of being detested by the monophysites