The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  1052:

  d. of Earl Godwin, statesman

  1054:

  Schism of Greek from Roman Church

  1055–6:

  Theodora Eastern empress

  1056–1106:

  Henry IV of Germany

  1057–9:

  Isaac Comnenus Eastern emp.

  1057–72:

  Peter Damian Bishop of Ostia

  1058:

  Malcolm III of Scotland deposes Macbeth

  1059–61:

  Pope Nicholas II; College of Cardinals established

  1060:

  Robert Guiscard Duke of Apulia

  1061–91:

  Norman Conquest of Sicily

  1063:

  Prince Harold conquers Wales

  1063f:

  Cathedral of Pisa

  1066:

  Harold King of England; Battle of Hastings; Norman Conquest of England

  1073–85:

  Pope Gregory VII Hildebrand

  1075:

  Decree against lay investiture; excommunication of Henry IV

  1077:

  Henry IV at Canossa

  1081–1118:

  Alexius I Eastern emp.

  1085:

  Sack of Rome by Robert Guiscard

  CHAPTER XVIII

  The Byzantine World

  565–1095

  I. HERACLIUS

  IF now we turn from the Oriental side of the endless duel between East and West, we are soon moved with sympathy for a great empire harassed at once with internal discord and, on every side, external attack. Avars and Slavs were crossing the Danube and taking possession of imperial lands and towns; Persians were preparing to overrun Western Asia; Spain was lost to the Visigoths; and the Lombards, three years after Justinian’s death, conquered half of Italy (568). Plague swept the Empire in 542 and again in 566; famine in 569; poverty, barbarism, and war broke down communications, discouraged commerce, stifled literature and art.

  Justinian’s successors were men of ability, but only a century of Napoleons could have coped with their problems. Justin II (565—78) fought vigorously against an expanding Persia. Tiberius II (578—82), favored by the gods with almost every virtue, was taken by them after a brief and just reign. Maurice (582-602) attacked the invading Avars with courage and skill, but received little support from the nation; thousands entered monasteries to escape military service; and when Maurice forbade the monasteries to receive new members until the danger was over, the monks clamored for his fall.1 The centurion Phocas led a revolution of the army and the populace against the aristocracy and the government (602); the five sons of Maurice were butchered before his eyes; the old Emperor refused to let the nurse of his youngest child save it by substituting for it her own; he himself was beheaded; the six heads were hung up as a spectacle for the people, and the bodies were cast into the sea. The Empress Constantina and her three daughters, and many of the aristocracy, were slain, usually with torture, with or without trial; eyes were pierced, tongues were torn out, limbs were amputated;2 once more the scenes of the French Revolution were rehearsed.

  Khosru II took advantage of the disorder, and renewed the old war of Persia against Greece. Phocas made peace with the Arabs, and transported the entire Byzantine army into Asia; he was everywhere defeated by the Persians, while the Avars, unresisted, seized nearly all the agricultural hinterland of Constantinople. The aristocracy of the capital appealed to Heraclius, the Greek governor of Africa, to come to the rescue of the Empire and their property. He excused himself on the ground of age, but sent them his son. The younger Heraclius fitted out a fleet, sailed into the Bosporus, overthrew Phocas, exhibited the mutilated corpse of the usurper to the populace, and was hailed as emperor (610).

  Heraclius deserved his title and his name. With almost the energy of Heracles he set himself to reorganize the shattered state. He spent ten years in rebuilding the morale of the people, the strength of the army, and the resources of the treasury. He gave land to peasants on condition that the eldest son in each family should render military service. Meanwhile the Persians captured Jerusalem (614), and advanced to Chalcedon (615); only the Byzantine navy, still controlling the waters, saved the capital and Europe. Soon afterward the Avar hordes marched up to the Golden Horn, raided the suburbs, and took thousands of Greeks into slavery. The loss of the hinterland and of Egypt cut off the city’s supply of grain, and compelled abolition of the dole (618). Heraclius, desperate, thought of transporting his army to Carthage and thence attempting to retake Egypt; the people and the clergy refused to let him go, and the Patriarch Sergius agreed to lend him the wealth of the Greek Church, at interest, to finance a holy war for the recapture of Jerusalem.3 Heraclius made peace with the Avars, and at last (622) set out against the Persians.

  The campaigns that followed were masterpieces of conception and execution. For six years Heraclius carried the war to the enemy, and repeatedly defeated Khosru. In his absence a Persian army and a host of Avars, Bulgars, and Slavs laid siege to Constantinople (626); an army despatched by Heraclius defeated the Persians at Chalcedon, and the garrison and populace of the capital, roused by the Patriarch, scattered the barbarian horde. Heraclius marched to the gates of Ctesiphon; Khosru II fell; Persia pled for peace, and surrendered all that Khosru had taken from the Greek Empire. After seven years’ absence, Heraclius returned in triumph to Constantinople.

  He hardly deserved the fate that shamed his old age. Weakened by disease, he was devoting his last energies to strengthening the civil administration when suddenly wild Arab tribes poured into Syria (634), defeated an exhausted Greek army, and captured Jerusalem (638); and even as the Emperor lay on his deathbed Egypt fell (641). Persia and Byzantium had fought each other to a common ruin. Under Constans II (642—68) the Arab victories continued; thinking the Empire beyond saving, Constans spent his last years in the West, and was killed in Syracuse. His son Constantine IV Pogonatus was abler or luckier. When through five crucial years (673—8) the Moslems made another effort to take Constantinople, “Greek fire,” now mentioned for the first time, saved Europe. The new weapon, allegedly invented by Callinicus of Syria, was akin to our flame throwers, an incendiary mixture of naphtha, quicklime, sulphur, and pitch; it was thrown against enemy ships or troops on flaming arrows, or blown against them through tubes, or shot on iron balls bearing flax and tow soaked in oil; or it was loaded and fired on small boats which were set adrift against the foe. The composition of the mixture was a secret successfully guarded for two centuries by the Byzantine government; to reveal any knowledge of it was treason and sacrilege. The Saracens finally discovered the formula, and used “Saracen fire” against the Crusaders. Until the invention of gunpowder it was the most talked-of weapon in the medieval world.

  The Moslems made another assault upon the Greek capital in 717. An army of 80,000 Arabs and Persians under Moslema crossed the Hellespont at Abydos, and besieged Constantinople from the rear. At the same time the Arabs fitted out a fleet of 1800 vessels, presumably small; this armada entered the Bosporus, overshadowing the straits, said a chronicler, like a moving forest. It was the good fortune of the Greeks that in this crisis an able general, Leo “the Isaurian,” replaced the incompetent Theodosius III on the throne, and assumed the organization of defense. He disposed the small Byzantine navy with tactical skill, and saw to it that every ship was well supplied with Greek fire. In a little while the Arab vessels were aflame, and nearly every ship in the great fleet was destroyed. The Greek army made a sortie upon the besiegers, and won so decisive a victory that Moslema withdrew to Syria.

  II. THE ICONOCLASTS: 717—802

  Leo III derived his cognomen from the district of Isauria in Cilicia; according to Theophanes he was born there of Armenian parentage. His father moved thence to Thrace, raised sheep, and sent 500 of them, with his son Leo in the bargain, as a present to the Emperor Justinian II. Leo became a guardsman of the palace, then commander of the Anatolian legions, finally, by the convi
ncing suffrage of the army, emperor. He was a man of ambition, strong will, and patient perseverance; a general who repeatedly defeated Moslem forces greatly superior to his own; a statesman who gave the Empire the stability of just laws justly enforced, reformed taxation, reduced serfdom, extended peasant proprietorship, distributed lands, repopulated deserted regions, and constructively revised the laws. His only fault was autocracy.

  Perhaps in his Asiatic youth he had imbibed from Moslems, Jews, Manicheans, Monophysites, and Paulicians a Stoic-Puritan conception of religion that condemned the addiction of popular Christianity to image worship, ceremonialism, and superstition. The Old Testament (Deut. iv, 15) had explicitly forbidden any “graven image of any figure, male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth.” The early Church had frowned upon images as relics of paganism, and had looked with horror upon pagan sculptures purporting to represent the gods. But the triumph of Christianity under Constantine, and the influence of Greek surroundings, traditions, and statuary in Constantinople and the Hellenistic East, had softened this opposition. As the number of worshiped saints multiplied, a need arose for identifying and remembering them; pictures of them and of Mary were produced in great number; and in the case of Christ not only His imagined form but His cross became objects of reverence—even, for simple minds, magic talismans. A natural freedom of fancy among the people turned the holy relics, pictures, and statues into objects of adoration; people prostrated themselves before them, kissed them, burned candles and incense before them, crowned them with flowers, and sought miracles from their occult influence. In Greek Christianity especially, sacred images were every where—in churches, monasteries, houses and shops, even on furniture, trinkets, and clothes. Cities in danger from epidemic, famine, or war tended to rely upon the power of the relics they harbored, or on their patron saint, rather than on human enterprise. Fathers and councils of the Church repeatedly explained that the images were not deities, but only reminders thereof;4 the people did not care to make such distinctions.

  Leo III was offended by these excesses of popular faith; it seemed to him that paganism was in this manner reconquering Christianity; and he felt keenly the satire directed by Moslems, Jews, and Christian sects against the superstitions of the orthodox multitude. To weaken the power of the monks over the people and the government, and win the support of Nestorians and Monophysites, he assembled a great council of bishops and senators, and with their consent he promulgated in 726 an edict requiring the complete removal of icons from the churches; representations of Christ and the Virgin were forbidden; and church murals were to be covered with plaster. Some of the higher clergy supported the edict; the lower clergy and the monks protested, the people revolted. Soldiers trying to enforce the law were attacked by worshipers horrified and infuriated by this desecration of the dearest symbols of their faith. In Greece and the Cyclades rebel forces proclaimed a rival emperor, and sent a fleet to capture the capital. Leo destroyed the fleet, and imprisoned the leaders of the opposition. In Italy, where pagan forms of worship had never died, the people were almost unanimous against the edict; Venice, Ravenna, and Rome drove out the Imperial officers; and a council of Western bishops summoned by Pope Gregory II anathematized the Iconoclasts—image breakers—without naming the Emperor. The patriarch of Constantinople joined the revolt, and sought by it to restore the independence of the Eastern Church from the state. Leo deposed him (730), but did him no violence; and the edict was so mildly enforced that when Leo died (741), most of the churches retained their frescoes and mosaics unharmed.

  His son Constantine V (741-75) continued his policy, and received from hostile historians the genial epithet of Copronymus—“named from dung.” A council of Eastern bishops, called by him at Constantinople (754), condemned image worship as “abominable,” charged that through such worship “Satan had re-introduced idolatry,” denounced “the ignorant artist who with his unclean hands gives form to that which should be believed only by the heart,”5 and decreed that all images in the churches should be erased or destroyed. Constantine executed the decree without moderation or tact; imprisoned and tortured resisting monks; again eyes or tongues were torn out, noses were cut off; the patriarch was tortured and beheaded (767). Like Henry VIII, Constantine V closed monasteries and convents, confiscated their property, turned the buildings to secular uses, and bestowed monastic lands upon his favorites. At Ephesus the imperial governor, with the approval of the Emperor, assembled the monks and nuns of the province, and forced them to marry one another as an alternative to death.6 The persecution continued for five years (765-71).

  Constantine exacted from his son Leo IV (775-80) an oath to continue the Iconoclastic policy; Leo did what he could despite his weak constitution. Dying, he named his ten-year-old son Constantine VI as emperor (780-97), and nominated his widow, the Empress Irene, as regent during the youth’s minority. She ruled with ability and without scruple. Sympathizing with the religious feelings of the people and her sex, she quietly ended the enforcement of the Iconoclast edicts; permitted the monks to return to their monasteries and their pulpits, and convened the prelates of Christendom in the Second Council of Nicaea (787), where 350 bishops, under the lead of papal legates, restored the veneration—not the worship—of sacred images as a legitimate expression of Christian piety and faith.

  In 790 Constantine VI came of age. Finding his mother reluctant to surrender her power, he deposed and exiled her. Soon the amiable youth relented; he brought her back to court, and associated her with him in the imperial power (792). In 797 she had him imprisoned and blinded, and thereafter reigned under the title of emperor—not basilissa but basileus. For five years she administered the Empire with wisdom and finesse: lowered taxes, scattered largess among the poor, founded charitable institutions, and beautified the capital. The people applauded and loved her, but the army fretted at being ruled by a woman more capable than most men. In 802 the Iconoclasts revolted, deposed her, and made her treasurer Nicephorus emperor. She yielded quietly, and asked of him only a decent and safe retreat; he promised it, but banished her to Lesbos, and left her to earn a scanty living as a seamstress. Nine months later she died, with hardly a penny or a friend. The theologians forgave her crimes because of her piety, and the Church canonized her as a saint.

  III. IMPERIAL KALEIDOSCOPE: 802—1057

  A full perspective of Byzantine civilization would require at this point a record of many emperors and some empresses—not of their intrigues, palace revolutions, and assassinations, but of their policy and legislation, and their age-long effort to protect the diminishing Empire from Moslems on the south and Slavs and Bulgars on the north. In some respects it is an heroic picture: through all the fluent shifts of appearing and disappearing figures the Greek heritage was in good measure preserved; economic order and continuity were maintained; civilization continued, as if by some enduring impetus from the ancient labors of Pericles and Augustus, Diocletian and Constantine. In other aspects it is a sorry spectacle of generals climbing over slain rivals to imperial power, to be slain in their turn; of pomp and luxury, eye-gouging and nose-cutting, incense and piety and treachery; of emperor and patriarch unscrupulously struggling to determine whether the empire should be ruled by might or myth, by sword or word. So we pass by Nicephorus I (802-11) and his wars with Harun al-Rashid; Michael I (811-13), dethroned and tonsured into monkhood because of his defeat by the Bulgars; Leo V the Armenian (813-20), who again forbade the worship of images, and was assassinated while singing an anthem in church; Michael II (820-9) the illiterate “Stammerer,” who fell in love with a nun, and persuaded the Senate to entreat him to marry her;7 Theophilus (829—42), a legislative reformer, royal builder, and conscientious administrator, who revived the Iconoclastic persecution, and died of dysentery; his widow Theodora, who as an able regent (842-56) ended the persecution; Michael III “the Drunkard” (842-67), whose amiable incompetence left the government first to his mother and, after her death, to his cultured and capable
uncle Caesar Bardas. Then suddenly a unique and unexpected figure appeared on the scene, overthrew every precedent except violence, and founded the powerful Macedonian dynasty.

  Basil the Macedonian was born (812?) near Hadrianople of an Armenian peasant family. As a child he was captured by Bulgars, and lived his youth among them beyond the Danube, in what was then called Macedonia. Escaping in his twenty-fifth year, he made his way to Constantinople, and was hired as groom by a diplomat who admired his physical strength and massive head. He accompanied his master on a mission to Greece, and there attracted the attention, and some of the wealth, of the widow Danielis. Back in the capital, he tamed a spirited horse for Michael III, was taken into the Emperor’s service, and, though quite illiterate, rose to the position of lord chamberlain. Basil was ever convenient and competent; when Michael sought a husband for his mistress, Basil divorced his peasant wife, sent her to Thrace with a comforting dowry, and married Eudocia, who continued her services to the Emperor.8 Michael supplied Basil with a mistress, but the Macedonian thought he deserved the throne as reward. He persuaded Michael that Bardas was plotting to depose him, and then killed Bardas with his own enormous hands (866). Long accustomed to reign without ruling, Michael made Basil coemperor and left him all the tasks of government. When Michael threatened to dismiss him, Basil arranged and supervised his assassination, and became sole emperor (867): so, even under hereditary monarchy, career was open to talent. With such servility and crime the letterless son of a peasant established the longest of all Byzantine dynasties, and began a nineteen-year reign of excellent administration, legislating wisely, judging justly, replenishing the treasury, and building new churches and palaces for the city that he had captured. No one dared oppose him; and when he died by a hunting accident the throne passed with unwonted quiet to his son.