13 XI 2025: Stuart Airlie (University of Glasgow), Body Horror of the Empress and Dark Palaces of the Emperor: Rulers and Resentment c.400-c.1100

 In 404, the empress Eudoxia died in childbirth in Constantinople. Shortly after this, a follower of bishop John Chrysostom delivered a sermon gloating over her agonising death as a just punishment by a God angered at her persecution of John. We can see this sermon as an example of what Nietzsche was to claim was ‘resentment’ (ressentiment), the resentment of the weak (Christian apologists) towards the strong (rulers). Nietzsche’s ideas and his identification of this resentment as a trait of Judaeo-Christian ‘slave morality’ are deeply problematic, but I propose to use them as a heuristic device, a perspective that reveals a continuous undercurrent of Christian rulers who, while venerating the ancient martyrs, went on to create new ones. The narratives of these persecutions and martyrdoms focused on the apparatus of secular rule and reveal the imaginarium of a sinister state. The sermon condemning Eudoxia highlighted an empress’s key political function: producing heirs for the Imperial line. Accounts of rulers’ misdeeds and persecutions show how vividly contemporaries imagined the apparatus of ‘secular’ power (dynastic bodies, palaces, warriors, etc.). This is apparent in, e.g., ‘Donatist’ martyr texts and accounts of Vandal persecutions.

Such contemporary narratives of martyrdom and persecutions under Christian rulers express tensions inherent in the Christian empires and kingdoms of Late Antiquity and of early medieval Christian Europe. Figures such as Herod and Pilate, etc., can actually as types of bad rulers but their long shadow and the endless discourse of martyrs and persecutors and the delineation of oppressive palaces, unjust rulers and the bloody weaponry at their disposal suggest that rulership itself could be imagined as a problem. The increasing Christianising of rule, culminating in the ‘penitential state’ of the Carolingian era increased the burden of expectations on rulers (and bishops)

 The crises that engulfed Henry IV of Germany in the 11th century illustrate how creatively people could use the discourse of dark palaces and martyrdom to protest against a ‘failed’ ruler.