Timeline Friday 18 January 532

Events on Friday 18 January 532 2

• 532 Nika Riots -- Constantinople in flames On 13 January 532, partisans of the chariot-racing Blues and Greens factions in Constantinople unite against Justinian, chanting 'Nika!' (Victory!). The riots last five days, burning the Hagia Sophia, the Senate house, the baths of Zeuxippus and large parts of the city. Justinian prepares to flee; Theodora refuses and delivers her famous speech about preferring a royal death to ignoble flight. Belisarius and Mundus trap approximately 30,000 rioters in the hippodrome and slaughter them. The riots kill more people than some wars -- and clear the ground for Justinian's building programme.
• 532 Nika Riots destroy the Theodosian church The second Hagia Sophia is burned during the Nika Riots of January 532. For Justinian, the destruction is an opportunity: he commissions a completely new building of unprecedented ambition within days of suppressing the riots. The architects he chooses -- Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus -- are not traditional architects but a mathematician and a physicist. Their approach is analytical rather than empirical: they calculate the geometry of the dome and pendentives mathematically, producing a structure that no craftsman-architect of the period could have conceived.