Urbicius (Chamberlain)

Urbicius ( Latinized form; Greek Οὐρβίκιος Ourbíkios ; born before 434; died after 504) was the Imperial Chamberlain under several Eastern Roman emperors in the 5th century , an office held exclusively by eunuchs . For many decades he was one of the most influential politicians at the Byzantine court.

Urbicius is first recorded for the year 434 as praepositus sacri cubiculi , chief chamberlain, under Theodosius II . In this function he was responsible for the entire court administration at the Byzantine court and the supervision of the cubicularii , the subordinate servants. The emperors Leo I and Zenon installed him in the same position . After Leo I died in 474, Urbicius first supported the attempt of the usurper Basiliskos in 475 to take power instead of the legitimate new emperor Zenon. But the following year he participated in his overthrow, so that Zenon was able to ascend the throne again in 476.

Urbicius was close to Verina , Leo I's widow and sister of Basiliscus . She was arrested in the turmoil of her brother's usurpation, which she supported, after a complaint from General Illus . Urbicius may have been involved in the following assassination attempt on Illus in 481 and previously in other murders in the vicinity of the court - for example against the army master Aspar . In 491 Urbicius supported the election of Anastasios I as emperor, with whom he had had a relationship of trust for a long time, as he also had with Ariadne , the widow of Zenon, who died in 491. It was she who, on the proposal of Urbicius, was to choose her husband's successor and named Anastasios. Urbicius last appeared in 504/505 in Edessa in northern Mesopotamia and in the Holy Land , where he promoted Christian institutions.

In a written in the first half of the 6th century and Theodosius attributed magazine De situ terrae sanctae is reported Urbicius have tried the boulder on which Mary , the mother of Jesus, three miles outside Jerusalem had rested, according to Konstantin Opel create let - a failed project so that the boulder stayed in Jerusalem. Due to the many decades of power held by Urbicius, it is not known when this undertaking was supposed to have taken place.

literature

• John Robert Martindale: Urbicius 1. In: The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire (PLRE). Volume 2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980, ISBN 0-521-20159-4 , pp. 1188-1190.
• Manfred Clauss : Urbicius "praepositus imperii". In: Vincenzo Giuffrè (ed.): Sodalitas. Scritti in onore di Antonio Guarino. Volume 3. Naples 1984, pp. 1245-1257.
• Franz Tinnefeld : Urbicius. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 12, Metzler, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-476-01470-3 , Sp. 1030 f.

Remarks

1. ↑ Helga Scholten : The highest court eunuch. The political efficiency of a socially discriminated person. In: Aloys Winterling (Ed.): Comitatus. Contributions to research into the late antique imperial court. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1998, pp. 51–74, here: pp. 61 f .; Alexander Demandt : Magister 5a. In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Supplementary volume XII, Stuttgart 1970, Col. 553-790 (here: Col. 730).
2. ^ Rene Pfeilschifter : The Emperor and Constantinople. Communication and conflict resolution in a late antique metropolis (= Millennium Studies. Studies on Culture and History of the First Millennium AD. Volume 44). De Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2013, pp. 157–159.
3. ^ Theodosius, De situ terrae sanctae 28 ( digitized version ).
4. ↑ Richard von Rieß : Kathisma palaion and the so-called fountain of the wise at Mar Eljas. In: Journal of the German Palestine Association. Volume 11, 1888, pp. 19-23, here: pp. 20 f. ( Digitized version ); Vered Shalev-Hurvitz: Holy Sites Encircled: The Early Byzantine Concentric Churches of Jerusalem. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2015, pp. 135 f.