Sunday, January 6, 2008




Some years ago, in a Balkan country, a young boy, left his remote village for the distant capital. His Uncle, Justin, had made the same journey, years earlier, with little more than a piece of bread in his pocket and the clothes on his back. Through ability and loyalty he had risen through the ranks and was now a senior general in the military backed regime that ruled. Being a poor country boy, he never got a decent education, and the city elite looked down on the unpolished soldier as a barely literate bufoon for his inability to hold an inteligent conversation on say the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle. Now that he had made it he sent for his nephew, Justinian, from the family village to give him the education he hadn't had and the opportunities that came with it. Justinian was a smart boy, but to the others he was just another country bumpkin son of that hated oaf of a general. That general, though, was a powerful man, they hated them, but they had to cow-tow to them, which made them hate them even more. Justinian grew up with a sense of both inferiority and superority which bounced off each other and multiplied. When the old ruler, Anastasius, died, Justin with his nephew working behind the scenes, manouvered into power.


Young Justinian hung around with guys like him, smart boys from new families. Together they were waiting for an opportunity to take over, and fanatical supporters of the blues football team. He was supposed to marry old money, but instead he married a stripper from the football club, Theodora. She was though no dumb blonde trophy bride, she had brains, and was Justinians intellectual equal, the first 'two for one deal'. She revelled in her new found status, loving nothing more than telling a senator's wife 'sorry you didn't bow low enough, try again". Old money hated them both.
In this time in the great city, there were a huge number of unemployed, living on government handouts, with a lot time on their hands. For many of these youths, life revolved around football, and they formed gangs, based on their team loyalty. Some of these gangs, became semi-official extensions of the clubs. They fought with the other teams' gangs for the club's honour, they protected their fellow supporters on match days, they gave the club leadership muscle, and could be used as private security for the clubs' influential patrons and none of these patrons were more influential than Justianian. As Justin's heir, he should have felt safe, but he saw enemies and rivals everywhere. Justinan gave the blue's gang unofficial protection, and wave of murder and violence commenced. Many of Justinians enemies met violent deaths in back alleys, and everyone else that mattered soon realised whose good side you had to be on to live safely. Best of all for Justinian he could claim total innocence.
Over the years Justin became older and more senile and Justinian slowly took over, taking charge on Justin's death. He put his mates into top positions, and they soon gained a reputation for the brutal efficiany with which they raked in the taxes, and their enthusiasm for filling their own pockets at the same time. Many small farmers gave up trying to make a living and sold up and moved to the city in search of opportunity where they joined the urban poor, with nothing to lose and an axe to grind with the regime.
Now safely in power, Justinian decided that he needed to do something about the out of control situation of law and order in his capital. He appointed a no-nonesense police chief with a brief to make streets safe. After a series of brutal murders, he caught the culprits, who were from both the blues gang and an their archrivals the greens, and ordered them hung. Somehow the executioners botched the job, some of them escaped and took refuge in a nearby church, and a tense standoff ensued.
The next day was a matchday, and Justinian took his place in his private box, but the crowds, blue and green united, hurled abuse and garbage at him. Shocked, he immediatly tried to curry favour by sacking his unpopular ministers, but the crowds saw it as weekness and wanted nothing less than his head. The match broke up in chaos, together the blue and green gangs, with the slogan "victory" rioted in the surrounding streets and Justinian retreated to his palace. His opponents in the elite appeared to openly denounce the regime and passed out weapons to the crowd. The mob tried to burn down the palace with Justinian inside, but the fire got out of control destroying large parts of the city centre instead. Justinian called on the military but they had no loyalty to him and well he was finished anyway. They waited in the baracks for events to give them a new leader to swear undying loyalty to.
Meanwhile the mob found one of the nephews of Justins predecessor Anastasius, and dragged him out of his house and took him to the stadium, there they stuck a crown on his head and put him in the royal box where he soon got the hang of playing the part to the delight of the gathered crowd.
In the palace, Justinian gave the order to pack for an inglorious flight out the back door. But it was Theodora who stood up and said better to die fighting than an inglorious exile. At this point, one of Justinian's friends an officer who he had promoted to command, Belisarius, returned to the city. He had been thumping the neighbours with an army of foreign mercenaries raised from some third world country with a reputation for being total thugs. They shut the gates of the stadium and marched in - and none of the reputed 30.000 people inside came out alive. In fact they didn't even come out dead, they were buried under the pitch to avoid 30.000 dangerous funerals.
So Justinian survived and died years later in his bed. He was detirimined though to fill the boots of an emperor, he fought foreign war after foreigner war and built grandiose buildings everywhere, preferably with a giant statue of himself out the front. On his death, the land was broke and exhausted, and in little more than a generation it would be almost anhilated by enemies from all directions. Some remembered him, from his glory and ambition, his spectacular bulidings and incredible victories. Others saw him as the demon who ruined their nation. And the old elite, who wrote the histories, hated him.