What Was the Nika Riot?

The Nika riots were a week-long uprising in Constantinople in January 532, in the fourth year of the reign of the emperor Justinian, that nearly toppled the imperial government, destroyed much of the city center, and led to the building of the present Hagia Sophia. The riots were a coalition of the two great chariot-racing factions of the hippodrome, the Blues and the Greens, who set aside their traditional rivalry to demand the dismissal of unpopular officials and the relaxation of oppressive taxation. The name Nika — Greek for “conquer!” — was the traditional cry of the circus factions, and the rioters adopted it as their battle cry. The uprising ended in a massacre of perhaps thirty thousand people inside the hippodrome, the destruction of much of the old imperial center, and the consolidation of Justinian’s autocratic power.

The narrative below links to the related treatments of the Emperor Justinian and his reign and Empress Theodora.

The Setting

By the reign of Justinian, the hippodrome of Constantinople was the most important public space in the empire. It was a venue for chariot races, which were a hugely popular spectator sport, but it was also a forum for the expression of public opinion and a place where the emperor appeared before his subjects in the imperial box. The two great racing factions, the Blues and the Greens, were formally organizations of fans, but they had long since become quasi-political factions with wealthy patrons, organized memberships, and an effective monopoly on the public expression of grievances. Emperors listened to the factions because the factions spoke for the people of Constantinople.

The Blues were generally associated with the senatorial and aristocratic establishment, and the Greens with the merchants and craftsmen; but the affiliation was not strictly political, and either faction could be critical of imperial policy. The factions had a long history of urban unrest, including a serious riot against the emperor Anastasius in 512. The factions were also closely connected with the demes, the civic organizations of the capital, and their leaders wielded substantial economic and political power.

The Outbreak of the Riot

The immediate spark for the Nika riots was a series of minor judicial incidents that occurred in the days leading up to 13 January 532. Several members of the Blues and Greens had been sentenced to death for murder; when the emperor Justinian, then relatively new to the throne, refused a customary clemency, the two factions united in protest. The factions assembled in the hippodrome and demanded the dismissal of several unpopular officials, including the praetorian prefect of the East, Eudaemon, and the quaestor Tribonian, the jurist who was leading the compilation of the Corpus Juris Civilis. The emperor refused; the factions rioted.

The rioters surged out of the hippodrome and attacked the prefect’s office, setting it on fire. The great church of Hagia Sophia, the original church of Constantine, was also set ablaze and burned to the ground. The imperial palace was besieged, and the rioters proclaimed a new emperor, Hypatius, a nephew of the late emperor Anastasius. For five days, the imperial government lost effective control of the capital, and it seemed likely that Justinian would be forced to abdicate or flee.

Theodora’s Resolve

By the account of Procopius, the court historian and a contemporary witness, the imperial council considered flight. The imperial treasury, the family of the emperor, and the remnants of the court could be loaded onto ships and transported to safety. Justinian, by Procopius’s report, was on the verge of giving the order to flee. The empress Theodora, according to the famous anecdote, refused: “If now it were possible to escape by flight,” she is reported to have said, “death would be far better. But I think that for one who has reigned, an escape is impossible. … If you wish to save yourself, O emperor, that is easy. We have plenty of money, the sea is at hand, and the ships are ready. But consider whether, after you have been saved as a refugee, you will not sooner regret that you did not choose death.” (Procopius, Secret History, English translation by H. B. Dewing.) The words, if not exactly recorded, are at least representative of Theodora’s later reputation as a woman of iron will.

Whether or not the story is literally true, Justinian resolved to remain. The loyal general Belisarius, with the remnants of the palace guard and a force of Gothic mercenaries, took command. On the morning of 18 January 532, Belisarius and his men, the Bucellarii of the loyal general Mundus, and the imperial guard under the command of the eunuch Narses entered the hippodrome through a side entrance and began to slaughter the rioters trapped inside. The slaughter continued for hours. The proclaimer Hypatius was arrested and executed; the bodies of the dead were thrown into the sea, and the surviving rioters were pardoned only after several days of further violence.

The Destruction

The damage to the city was severe. The original Hagia Sophia, the church of Holy Wisdom that had served the city for two centuries, was destroyed. The Senate house, the baths of Zeuxippus, the hospitals and hostels that lined the Mese, and much of the central city was burned. The great library of Constantinople, which had contained irreplaceable manuscripts, was destroyed. The economic cost of the riots was enormous: thousands of buildings, hundreds of shops and workshops, and the homes of the wealthiest and poorest citizens of the capital lay in ruins.

The political cost was, however, less than might have been expected. Justinian, having survived the crisis through force, was now free of the last restraints on his autocratic power. The senate was no longer a body capable of effective opposition. The factions, which had shown themselves capable of overthrowing emperors, were broken as political forces. And the emperor, now committed to the city that had nearly killed him, immediately began to rebuild.

The Rebuilding and the New Hagia Sophia

Within weeks of the suppression of the riots, Justinian commissioned the construction of a new Hagia Sophia on the ruins of the old. The architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, the greatest mathematicians of the age, designed a building of unprecedented scale and innovation; the construction, completed in only five years (dedicated on 27 December 537), would be the largest cathedral in Christendom for nearly a thousand years. The new cathedral is treated in detail in who built the Hagia Sophia.

The rebuilding of the rest of the city was undertaken with similar speed. The great cisterns, the baths, the churches, and the houses of the central city were reconstructed under the supervision of imperial officials, and the city was made ready for the new age of Justinian’s reign. The legacy of the Nika riots is thus, in a sense, the entire Hagia Sophia — the new church, the new palace, and the new regime that emerged from the ashes of the old.

Historical Significance

The Nika riots were the most serious urban uprising in Byzantine history and one of the most serious in the medieval Mediterranean. The crisis revealed both the fragility of the imperial system and the ruthlessness with which the imperial government was prepared to defend itself. The massacre at the hippodrome set the pattern for the next several centuries of Byzantine urban government: the factions continued to operate, but they were no longer capable of independent political action. The memory of the Nika riots, and of Theodora’s reported defiance, became a kind of founding legend for the later Byzantine state.