With a single exception, popular uprisings succeeded in forcing emperors to make concessions or else be deposed. The one exception in the empire’s thousand years was the Nika revolt of 532, when Justinian the Great, at the urging of Empress Theodora, sent soldiers to slaughter the murderous mob assembled in the Hippodrome to acclaim another emperor. (There were earlier instances of such brutality, but they fell under the Dominate of the third and fourth centuries.)
Harder for modern Westerners to appreciate is the relationship between the emperor’s authority and the empire’s laws.
Romans of every age prided themselves on their respect for law, which was closely related to their belief in the common good and one of the features of Romanity that they believed set them above other nations.
Their emperors were also expected to respect the law, yet there was no law they could not change. In Western eyes, this made the emperor not just an autocrat whose word was law but an unlimited autocrat—an absolute monarch. thisarticleappears
Yet this common Western view is based less on Byzantium than on the “New Absolutism” of the early modern West, which grew out of early efforts by Western princes to theorize their claims of “sovereignty” against papal claims of the same. With the Reformation, these peculiarly Western claims on sovereignty became more urgent and expansive, producing both Catholic and Protestant justifications for the “Divine Right of Kings,” according to which the king, as sovereign, is accountable to no one but God.
For the French Catholic Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, the king personified the state: “Tout l’État est en la personne du prince,” he wrote, or as the Sun King would say, “L’État c’est moi.”
