by Will Durant
Leo VI (886-912) was the complement of his father: learned, bookish, sedentary, mild; gossip concluded that he was Michael’s, not Basil’s, son, and perhaps Eudocia was not sure. He earned his cognomen of “the Wise” not by his poetry, nor by his treatises on theology, administration, and war, but by his reorganization of provincial and ecclesiastical government, his new formulations of Byzantine law, and his meticulous regulation of industry. Though an admiring pupil of the scholarly patriarch Photius, and himself devoted to piety, he shocked the clergy, and amused the people, by four marriages. His first two wives died without bearing him a son; Leo insisted on a son as the only alternative to a war of succession; the moral theology of the Church forbade a third marriage; Leo persisted, and his fourth wife, Zoë, crowned his resolution with a boy.
Constantine VII (912—58) was called Porphyrogenitus—“born in the purple”—i.e., in the porphyry-lined apartment reserved for the use of expecting empresses. He inherited his father’s literary tastes, not his administrative capacity. He composed for his son two books on the art of government: one on the “themes” or provinces of the Empire, and a Book of Ceremonies describing the ritual and etiquette required of the emperor. He supervised the compilation of works on agriculture, medicine, veterinary medicine, and zoology, and formed an “historians’ history of the world” by selecting extracts from historians and chroniclers. Under his patronage Byzantine literature flourished in its polished and anemic way.
Perhaps Romanus II (958-63) was like other children, and did not read his father’s books. He married a Greek girl, Theophano; she was suspected of poisoning her father-in-law and hastening Romanus’ death; and before her twenty-four-year-old husband was dead she seduced into her arms the ascetic general Nicephorus II Phocas, who with her connivance seized the throne. Nicephorus had already driven the Moslems from Aleppo and Crete (961); in 965 he drove them from Cyprus, in 968 from Antioch; it was these victories that shattered the Abbasid caliphate. Nicephorus pled with the patriarch to promise all the rewards and honors of martyrdom to soldiers who should fall in battle against the Moslems; the patriarch refused on the ground that all soldiers were temporarily polluted by the blood that they shed; had he consented, the Crusades might have begun a century earlier. Nicephorus lost ambition, and retired into the palace to live like an anchorite. Bored with this monastic existence, Theophano became the mistress of the general John Tzimisces. With her connivance he killed Nicephorus (969) and seized the throne; remorseful, he repudiated and exiled her, and went off to atone for his crimes by transient victories against the Moslems and the Slavs.
His successor was one of the most powerful personalities in Byzantine history. Basil II, born to Romanus and Theophano (958), had served as co-emperor with Nicephorus Phocas and Tzimisces; now (976) he began at the age of eighteen an undivided rule that lasted half a century. Troubles encompassed him: his chief minister plotted to displace him; the feudal barons, whom he proposed to tax, financed conspiracies against him; Bardas Sclerus, general of the eastern army, rebelled, and was suppressed by Bardas Phocas, who then had himself proclaimed emperor by his troops; the Moslems were recovering nearly all that Tzimisces had won from them in Syria; the Bulgars were at their zenith, encroaching upon the Empire in east and west. Basil suppressed the revolt, reclaimed Armenia from the Saracens, and in a ruthless thirty years’ war destroyed the Bulgarian power. After his victory in 1014 he blinded 15,000 prisoners, leaving one eye in every hundredth man to lead the tragic host back to Samuel, the Bulgarian tsar; perhaps in terror rather than in admiration the Greeks called him Bulgaroctonus, Killer of Bulgars. Amid these campaigns he found time to war against “those who enriched themselves at the expense of the poor.” By his laws of 996 he sought to break up some of the large estates, and to encourage the spread of a free peasantry. He was about to lead an armada against the Saracens in Sicily when death surprised him in his sixty-eighth year. Not since Heraclius had the Empire been so extensive, nor since Justinian so strong.
The Byzantine decline was resumed under his aged brother Constantine VIII (1025—8). Having no offspring but three daughters, Constantine persuaded Romanus Argyrus to marry the eldest, Zoë, who was nearing fifty. As regent, and with the help of her sister Theodora, Zoë governed the state through the reigns of Romanus III (1028-34), Michael IV (1034-42), Michael V (1042), and Constantine IX (1042—55); and seldom had the Empire been better ruled. The imperial sisters attacked corruption in state and Church, and forced officials to disgorge their embezzled hoards; one who had been chief minister surrendered 5300 pounds of gold ($2,226,000) which he had secreted in a cistern; and when the Patriarch Alexis died, a cache of 100,000 pounds of silver ($27,000,000) was discovered in his rooms.9 For a brief interlude the sale of offices was stopped. Zoë and Theodora sat as judges on the highest tribunal, and dispensed stern justice. Nothing could rival Zoë’s impartiality. Having at sixty-two married Constantine IX, and knowing that her cosmetic skill had preserved barely the surface of her charms, she allowed her new husband to bring his mistress Sclerena to live in the royal palace; he chose quarters between their apartments, and Zoë never visited him without making sure that he was disengaged.10 When Zoë died (1050), Theodora retired to a convent, and Constantine IX ruled for five years with wisdom and taste; he chose men of competence and culture for his aides, rebeautified St. Sophia, built hospitals and refuges for the poor, and supported literature and art. At his death (1055) the supporters of the Macedonian dynasty led a popular revolt that brought the virgin Theodora out of her conventual retreat, and, much against her will, crowned her empress. Despite her seventy-four years she and her ministers governed efficiently; but in 1056 she died so suddenly that chaos ensued. The palace aristocracy named Michael VI emperor; the army preferred the general Isaac Comnenus. One battle decided the issue; Michael became a monk, and Comnenus entered the capital in 1057 as emperor. The Macedonian dynasty had come to an end after 190 years of violence, war, adultery, piety, and excellent administration.
Isaac Comnenus resigned after two years, named Constantine Ducas, the president of the Senate, as his successor, and entered a monastery. When Constantine died (1067) his widow Eudocia acted as regent for four years; but the demands of war required a sterner leader, and she married and crowned Romanus IV. Romanus was defeated by the Turks at Manzikert (1071), returned to Constantinople in disgrace, was deposed, imprisoned, and blinded, and was allowed to die of his untended wounds. When Alexius Comnenus I, nephew of Isaac Comnenus, came to the throne (1081), the Byzantine Empire seemed near its fall. The Turks had taken Jerusalem (1076), and were advancing through Asia Minor; the Patzinak and Cuman tribes were approaching Constantinople from the north; the Normans were attacking the Byzantine outposts in the Adriatic; the government and the army were crippled with treason, incompetence, corruption, and cowardice. Alexius met the situation with subtlety and courage. He sent agents to foment revolution in Norman Italy; gave Venice commercial privileges in return for the aid of its navy against the Normans; confiscated Church treasures to rebuild his army; took the field in person, and won victories by strategy rather than by blood. Amid these foreign cares he found time to reorganize the government and its defenses, and gave the tottering Empire another century of life. In 1095, in a far-reaching stroke of diplomacy, he appealed to the West to come to the aid of the Christian East; at the Council of Piacenza he offered a reunion of the Greek with the Latin Church in return for the unity of Europe against Islam. His appeal conspired with other factors to unleash the first of those dramatic Crusades that were to save, and then destroy, Byzantium.
IV. BYZANTINE LIFE: 566—1095
At the beginning of the eleventh century the Greek Empire, through the arms and statesmanship of the Isaurian and Macedonian dynasties, had reached again the power, wealth, and culture of its zenith under Justinian. Asia Minor, northern Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, the Cyclades, and Crete had been wrested from the Moslems; southern Italy was once more Magna Grecia, ruled by Constantinop
le; the Balkans had been recaptured from Bulgars and Slavs; Byzantine industry and commerce again dominated the Mediterranean; Greek Christianity had triumphed in the Balkans and Russia; and Greek art and literature were enjoying a Macedonian renaissance. The revenue of the state in the eleventh century reached the present equivalent of $2,400,000,000.11
Constantinople was at the crest of its curve, surpassing ancient Rome and Alexandria, contemporary Baghdad and Cordova, in trade, wealth, luxury, beauty, refinement, and art. Its population of nearly a million12 was now predominantly Asiatic or Slav—Armenians, Cappadocians, Syrians, Jews, Bulgars, and half-Slav Greeks, with a colorful infusion of merchants and soldiers from Scandinavia, Russia, Italy, and Islam; and at the top a thinning layer of Greek aristocrats. A thousand varieties of homes—gabled, terraced, or domed—with balconies, loggias, gardens, or pergolas; full markets reeking with the products of all the world; a thousand narrow muddy streets of tenements and shops; splendid thoroughfares bordered with stately mansions and shady porticoes, peopled with statuary, spanned with arches of triumph, and leading out to the countryside through guarded gates in the fortress walls; complex royal palaces—the Triconchus of Theophilus, the New Palace of Basil I, the Bucoleon of Nicephorus Phocas, descending by marble stairs to a sculptured colonnaded wharf on the Sea of Marmora; churches “as many as there are days in the year” (said a traveler), and several of them architectural jewels; altars enshrining the most revered and precious relics in Christendom; monasteries unashamedly magnificent without, and turbulent with proud saints within; St. Sophia ever newly adorned, glowing with candles and lamps, heavy with incense, solemn with pageantry, sonorous with convincing chants: this was the frame, half gold and half mud, of teeming life in the Byzantine capital.
Within the city palaces of the aristocracy and the great merchants, and in the villas of seaside and hinterland, every luxury available to that age could be found, and decoration uninhibited by Semitic tabus: marbles of every grain and hue, murals and mosaics, sculptures and fine pottery, curtains sliding on silver rods, tapestries and carpets and silks, doors inlaid with silver or ivory, furniture exquisitely carved, table services of silver or gold. Here moved the world of Byzantine society: men and women of fine face and figure, dressed in colored silks and lace and furs, and rivaling the graces, amours, and intrigues of Bourbon Paris and Versailles. Never were ladies better powdered and scented, jeweled and coiffured; in the imperial palaces fires were kept burning all the year long to brew the perfumes required to deodorize queens and princesses.13 Never before had life been so ornate and ceremonious, so colorful with processions, receptions, spectacles and games, so minutely ordained by protocol and etiquette. At the Hippodrome as well as in the court the firmly established aristocracy flaunted its finest raiment and ornament; on the highways its stately equipages passed, so reckless as to earn the hatred of the pedestrian poor, and so rich as to bring down the anathemas of prelates who served God in vessels, and on altars, of marble, alabaster, silver, and gold. Constantinople, said Robert of Clari,14 contained “two thirds of the world’s wealth”; even the common “Greek inhabitants,” reported Benjamin of Tudela, “seem all to be the children of kings.”15
“If Constantinople,” said a twelfth—century writer, “surpasses all other cities in wealth, it also surpasses them in vice.”16 All the sins of a great city found room here, impartially in rich and poor. Brutality and piety took turns in the same imperial souls; and among the people intensity of religious need could be adjusted to the corruption or violence of politics and war. The castration of children to serve as eunuchs in harems and administration, the assassination or blinding of present or potential rivals for the throne, continued through divers dynasties and the monotonous kaleidoscope of changeless change. The populace, disordered and manipulated by divisions of race, class, or creed, was fickle, bloodthirsty, periodically turbulent; bribed by the state with doles of bread, oil, and wine; diverted by horse races, beast baitings, rope dancing, indecent pantomimes in the theater, and by imperial or ecclesiastical pageantry in the streets. Gambling halls and saloons were everywhere; houses of prostitution could be found on almost every street, sometimes “at the very church doors.”17 The women of Byzantium were famous for their licentiousness and their religious devotion, the men for their quick intelligence and unscrupulous ambition. All classes believed in magic, astrology, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and miraculous amulets. The Roman virtues had disappeared even before the Latin tongue; Roman and Greek qualities had been overwhelmed by a flood of uprooted Orientals who had lost their own morality and had taken on no other except in words. Yet even in this highly theological and sensual society the great majority of men and women were decent citizens and parents, who settled down after youthful frolics to the joys and sorrows of family life, and grudgingly performed the work of the world. The same emperors who blinded their rivals poured out charity to hospitals, orphanages, homes for the aged, free hostels for travelers.18 And in that aristocracy where luxury and ease seemed the order of every day, there were hundreds of men who gave themselves, with a zeal tempered by venality, to the tasks of administration and statesmanship, and somehow managed, despite all overturns and intrigues, to save the realm from every disaster, and to maintain the most prosperous economy in the medieval Christian world.
The bureaucracy that Diocletian and Constantine had established had become in seven centuries an effective engine of administration, reaching every region of the realm. Heraclius had replaced the old division of the Empire into provinces by a division into “themes,” or military units ruled by a strategos or military governor; this was one of a hundred ways in which the Islamic threat modified Byzantine institutions. The themes retained considerable self-government, and prospered under this centralized rule; they received a continuity of order without bearing the direct force of the struggles and violence that disturbed the capital. Constantinople was ruled by the emperor, the patriach, and the mob; the themes were governed by Byzantine law. While Islam confused law with theology, and Western Europe floundered through the chaos of a dozen barbarian codes, the Byzantine world cherished and extended the legacy of Justinian. The “novels” or new laws of Justin II and Heraclius, the Ecloga, or selected laws, issued by Leo III, the Basilica, or royal edicts, promulgated by Leo VI, and the “novels” of the same Leo, adjusted the Pandects of Justinian to the changing needs of five centuries; codes of military, ecclesiastical, maritime, mercantile, and rural law gave order and dependability to legal judgments in army and clergy, in markets and ports, on the farm and the sea; and in the eleventh century the school of law at Constantinople was the intellectual center of secular Christendom. So the Byzantines preserved Rome’s greatest gift—Roman law-through a millennium of peril and change, until its revival at Bologna in the twelfth century revolutionized the civil law of Latin Europe and the canon law of the Roman Church. The Byzantine Maritime Code of Leo III, developed from the nautical regulations of ancient Rhodes, was the first body of commercial law in medieval Christendom; it became in the eleventh century the source of similar codes for the Italian republics of Trani and Amalfi; and by that lineage entered into the legal heritage of the modern world.
The Rural Code was a creditable attempt to check feudalism and establish a free peasantry. Small holdings were given to retired soldiers; larger tracts belonging to the state were cultivated by soldiers as a form of military service; and great areas were colonized by heretical sects transported from Asia into Thrace and Greece. Still vaster regions were settled, under governmental compulsion or protection, by barbarian groups who were judged less dangerous within the Empire than outside; so Goths were received into Thrace and Illyria, Lombards into Pannonia, Slavs into Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece; by the tenth century the Peloponnesus was predominantly Slav, and Slavs were numerous in Attica and Thessaly. State and Church co-operated to diminish slavery; imperial legislation forbade the sale of slaves, or the enslavement of a freeman, and automatically emancipated slaves
who entered the army or the clergy, or married a free person. In Constantinople slavery was in effect limited to domestic service, but it flourished there.
Nevertheless it is almost a Newtonian law of history that large agricultural holdings, in proportion to their mass and nearness, attract smaller holdings, and, by purchase or otherwise, periodically gather the land into great estates; in time the concentration becomes explosive, the soil is redivided by taxation or revolution, and concentration is resumed. By the tenth century most of the soil of the Byzantine East was owned in extensive domains by rich landlords (dynatoi, “powerful men”), or by churches, monasteries, or hospitals endowed with supporting terrain by pious legacy. Such tracts were worked by serfs, or by coloni legally free but economically chained. The owners, equipped with retinues of clients, guards, and domestic slaves, led lives of refined luxury in their villas or their city palaces. We see the good and bad of these great lords in the story of Basil I’s benefactress, the lady Danielis. When she visited him in Constantinople 300 slaves took turns supporting the litter, or covered couch, in which she traveled from Patras. She brought to her imperial protégé richer presents than any sovereign had ever sent to a Byzantine emperor; 400 youths, 100 eunuchs, and 100 maidens were but a part of her gift; there were also 400 pieces of art-woven textiles, 100 pieces of cambric (each so fine that it could be enclosed in the joint of a reed), and a dinner service in silver and gold. During her lifetime she gave away much of her wealth; at her death she willed the rest to Basil’s son. Leo VI found himself suddenly dowered with eighty villas and farms, masses of coin and jewelry and plate, costly furniture, rich stuffs, numberless cattle, thousands of slaves.19