Empress Theodora was a truly remarkable, accomplished, influential and impressive woman. She is a Byzantine-age feminist icon, a progressive reformer, and a real life Cinderella story!
Theodora’s extraordinary life story began in present day Turkey as an exotic dancer in a circus. She became a teen mom at 14, left performing arts at 18 to move with her lover to Libya, survived an abusive relationship by 24, travelled around the Mediterranean as a struggling single mom, became passionately religious, lived in a Christian commune in Alexandria for a while, and then made her way to Constantinople to work as a wool spinner and a spy, where she met Emperor Justinian and became his mistress, beloved wife and an effective co-ruler!
As an Empress, Theodora was a gifted politician, a prolific policy maker and a passionate women’s rights advocate. She promoted and passed laws that gave women rights to own individual property outside of marriage, rights to bodily autonomy and self-governance, rights to divorce and retain legal guardianship of their own children. She improved social and criminal justice for women by installing harsher punishments and death sentences for rape, outlawed pimping, closed brothels and established some of the first women’s shelters!
Theodora was deeply devout and worked hard to promote her faith throughout the Byzantine Empire. Her husband Emperor Justinian supported her feminist and religious work and policies, and together they were quite the power couple. The beautiful Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople is one of Theodora and Justinian’s lasting legacies.
Theodora died of breast cancer at 50, and Justinian never recovered or remarried. Theodora was canonized as a Saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
From a circus dancer, to Empress, to Saint - what an extraordinary life, of an extraordinary woman!
