The Apogee - Byzantium 02

by John Julius Norwich

  Now it was the turn of the Byzantines to sue for peace. But Krum could not forget Leo's treachery, nor was his anger assuaged when reports reached him in the autumn of a surprise attack on a Bulgar army

  1 The building stood on the shore of the Bosphorus in the quarter now known as Besiktas, a little beyond the Dolmabahce Palace.

  near Mesembria. It had been planned and carried out by the Emperor in person — who, by one of those devious stratagems for which he was famous, had taken his victims completely by surprise as they slept and massacred the lot of them. He had followed up this success by advancing deep into enemy territory where, while sparing the adult populations, he had seized all the children he could find and dashed their heads against the rocks. The Khan's mind was now made up: however formidable the walls of Constantinople might appear, he would smash them - and, with them, the Byzantine Empire.

  By the early spring of 814 the capital was abuzz with rumours of his preparations: of towering siege-engines under construction; of gigantic catapults capable of hurling huge boulders against the walls or flaming firebrands over them; of scaling ladders and battering rams, of 1,000 oxen and 5,000 iron-bound wagons standing ready to haul these massive engines into position. The Emperor for his part worked furiously to strengthen the defences - especially around the quarter of Blachernae, where Krum had been so dishonourably set upon and where he was expected to launch the weight of his attack - simultaneously sending ambassadors to the court of Lewis the Pious, who had succeeded his father Charlemagne on the latter's death a few months before. That mission failed, Lewis understandably pointing out that he had enemies enough of his own; but by the time the envoys returned to the capital the danger was past. On Holy Thursday, 13 April 814, just as his new expeditionary force was ready to march, Krum suffered a sudden seizure. Blood streamed from his nose, mouth and ears, and within a few minutes he was dead.

  There now occurred something rare indeed in Byzantine history: peace descended on the Empire. Krum's son Omortag was young and inexperienced, and the first year of his reign was further troubled by a revolt of the Bulgar aristocracy which kept him fully occupied at home. Similar upheavals in Baghdad pre-empted any aggression on the part of Harun al-Rashid's successor, the Caliph Mamun. In the West, the Pax Nicephori still held. Leo was free at last to turn his attention to home affairs - and to take the decisive step for which, more than any other, he is remembered.

  The Return of Iconoclasm

  [814-29]

  Leave the Church to its pastors and masters; attend to your own province, the State and the army. If you refuse to do this, and are bent on destroying our faith, know that though an angel came from heaven itself to pervert us we would not obey him. Far less would we obey you.

  Abbot Theodore of the Studium to the Emperor Leo V,

  Of the personal appearance of the Emperor Leo V we know little; the sole description that has come down to us reports only that he was short and bearded, with thick curly hair and an unusually loud voice. Of his character, on the other hand, we can deduce a good deal more. First of all there was his consuming ambition: unlike his predecessor Michael, who came of noble stock and had the additional advantage of being an Emperor's son-in-law, Leo had made his way from humble beginnings, rising to the supreme power entirely through his own efforts, assisted by boundless physical energy. If we accept the explanation of his conduct at Versinicia given in the previous chapter, we have no cause to question his powers of leadership, still less his courage; all accounts of his punitive expedition into Bulgar territory in the autumn of 813, however, point to a streak of bestial cruelty which was quick to burst forth when his anger was aroused. Nor must it ever be forgotten that he was an Armenian; as such, he possessed in full measure - indeed it was perhaps the salient feature of his unusually complex personality - that quality for which his countrymen have always been noted: a keen and subtle intelligence, shot through with resourcefulness and guile.

  It was this intelligence that had probably first endeared him to his rebellious compatriot Bardanes Turcus. He had shown it a few years later at Versinicia, and again when he had carried out his nocturnal surprise attack on the Bulgar force in 813; and it was once more in evidence when, in the year following, he set about the reimposition of iconoclasm on the Empire. His reasons for taking so tremendous a step were very different from those which had impelled his namesake to do the same eighty-eight years before. Leo III had been a devout theologian, who had thought long and earnestly about the issues involved and had genuinely believed that he was obeying the will of God. As for Leo V, this was not a question to which he gave much thought: his approach to the question was a purely practical one. Already in the days of Irene the imperial government had had to contend with the problem posed by vast numbers of destitute peasant small-holders, dispossessed and driven from their homes by Saracen incursions into the eastern provinces. Enrolled by Nicephorus as regular soldiers, they had proved useful enough during the Bulgarian war as an emergency militia for the capital; with the coming of peace, however, they had been disbanded and were once again reduced to penury, begging at street corners for their daily bread. Being easterners, these men were nearly all iconoclasts by tradition and upbringing; moreover, since their misery had had its origins during the reign of Irene, they not unnaturally tended to associate it with her, and through her with the reaction against iconoclasm which she had brought about.

  Thus, by the summer of 814, there was in Constantinople an ominous ground-swell of iconoclast opinion which, while not yet presenting any serious threat to the security of the State, might well have turned dangerous if ignored for too long. Nor was this opinion confined to the dissatisfied ex-soldiers; it was also widespread - as it had always been -among the upper classes of the capital, as well as in the senior ranks of the army. We have seen how a demonstration at the tomb of Constantine V two years before had recalled the military triumphs of the iconoclast Emperors, in marked contrast to the failures of their iconodule successors: there must have been many men and women in the Empire not normally given to theological speculation who felt nevertheless that the Almighty had made His own point of view on the matter clear enough, and that the time had come for a change.

  It was thus as a means of preserving domestic peace rather than as an expression of any deep religious conviction that Leo went ahead with his plan. His first step was to appoint, in June 814, a special commission with orders to examine the scriptures and all the writings of the early Fathers of the Church for evidence in favour of the iconoclastic persuasion. As its chairman he nominated another of his countrymen: the brilliant young Armenian abbot of the monastery of SS. Sergius and Bacchus — he was still in his early thirties - whose real name was John Morocharzamius but who is more conveniently known to posterity as John the Grammarian. As his deputy the Emperor rather surprisingly selected Antony, Bishop of Syllaeum in Pamphylia, an agreeable old reprobate who - according to the violently anti-iconoclast Scriptor Incertus - spent most of his time telling dubious stories to the two monks and two laymen who made up the rest of the commission. Throughout their six-month labour they were bound to the strictest secrecy, being lodged and fed — superbly, it appears — inside the Great Palace and encouraged to remain as far as possible within its walls.

  The results of their endeavours were completed in early December and submitted to the Emperor, who immediately summoned Patriarch Nicephorus to the Palace. Still treading warily, he first proposed - as a compromise 'to please the soldiers' - the removal only of those holy pictures which were hanging low on the walls; the Patriarch, however, who knew the thin end of a wedge when he saw one, would have none of it. 'But why,' pursued Leo, 'do you venerate images, when there is no scriptural injunction to do so?' Nicephorus replied that the Church endorsed many beliefs and practices for which there was no written authority; further than that he refused to go. In such circumstances the Emperor had no option but to set the example himself - acting, however, with typical disingenuousness. The icon
on which he had set his sights was the huge representation of Christ which stood above the main gate of the Palace known as the Chalke - the very same that had been pulled down by Leo III in 726, only to be subsequently replaced by Irene; but whereas the Isaurian had simply ordered the military to get on with the job, the Armenian laid his plans with care. He too sent for a detachment of soldiers, but his orders' to them were somewhat different. Their task would be to create a disturbance, apparently spontaneous, in the course of which they would hurl imprecations and abuse at the holy image, pelting it with mud and stones; this would be the cue for the arrival of the Emperor himself, who would order its removal to save it from any further desecration.

  The operation went according to plan, whereupon the Patriarch on his own initiative summoned a meeting of all the local bishops and abbots, warning them of the approaching storm and calling upon them to stand firm on the principles laid down by the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787.1 Then, early on Christmas morning, he had another

  1 This was the Council called by Irene to condemn tconoclasm. See Byzantium: The Early Centuriess, pp. 69-72.

  audience with Leo. He implored the Emperor to dismiss him if he so wished, but to make no radical change in Church doctrine; Leo smoothly assured him that he had no intention of doing either — in confirmation of which, at the Christmas Mass in St Sophia, he ostentatiously bowed down as usual before a representation of the Nativity. Less than two weeks later, on the other hand, during the service of Epiphany on 6 January 815, it was noted by all present that he made no such obeisance. Nicephorus could only stand by and await developments.

  They were not long in coming. The Emperor now summoned a number of iconoclast churchmen to the capital - carefully giving them no opportunity to pay their customary respects to the Patriarch on their arrival - and handed them the collection of scriptural and patristic citations that the commission had prepared. Then, once again, he called Nicephorus to the Palace. The Patriarch obeyed the summons - but he did not come alone. With him there appeared a large body of the faithful, including Abbot Theodore of the Studium, formerly one of his bitterest enemies but now steadfast at his side. The ensuing meeting was a stormy one, in the course of which Theodore openly defied the Emperor in the words quoted at the head of this chapter; the assembled ecclesiastics were shortly afterwards dismissed. A few days later there was promulgated an edict forbidding the Patriarch and all members of the iconodule faction to hold meetings in public places or even private residences. Nicephorus himself was put under something closely resembling house arrest and thus effectively prevented from performing his official duties.

  That Easter, what was called a General Synod - to which, however, a considerable number of iconodule bishops failed to receive their invitations - was held in St Sophia. By this time the Patriarch had fallen seriously ill: summoned to attend the assembly, he was not well enough to do so, and was accordingly deposed in absentia. When sufficiently recovered he was exiled to the monastery of St Theodore the Martyr, some distance up the Bosphorus on the Asiatic side. There he lived on for some years, but never returned to Constantinople. In his place the Emperor appointed - significantly - a relative of Constantine V named Theodotus Cassiteras. Iconoclast the new Patriarch undoubtedly was; like Constantine, however, he seems to have been far from puritanical in other respects. One of his first acts on his succession was to give a sumptuous luncheon party in the Patriarchal Palace, at which distinguished ecclesiastics and austere monks, many of whom had not touched meat for years, were obliged by their host to make free of the succulent dishes and superb wines that were set before them and, in the words of Professor Bury, 'the dull solemnity of an archiepiscopal table was now enlivened by frivolous conversation, amusing stories, and ribald wit'.

  But the Patriarch's life was not all pleasure. It was also his duty to preside at the Synod - an unenviable task and one which, as soon became clear, lay well beyond his capabilities. Nicephorus, one feels - or Tarasius before him - would somehow have managed to impose his authority; but when certain Orthodox bishops were called in for examination and tempers became heated, Theodotus lost control. The unfortunate prelates were physically attacked, thrown to the ground, punched, kicked and spat upon. The prestige of the Synod - already weakened by the obvious one-sidedness of its composition - was still further diminished by this unedifying display; at last, however, the delegates dusted themselves down, resumed their places - and did what they were told. Their findings were consequently a foregone conclusion; and their final decree, in an only slightly abridged form, ran as follows:

  The Emperors Constantine [V] and Leo [III], considering the safety of the Empire to depend on Orthodoxy, formerly gathered a numerous synod of spiritual fathers and bishops and condemned the unprofitable practice, unwarranted by tradition, of making and adoring icons, preferring worship in spirit and in truth.

  On this account, the Church of God remained tranquil for a number of years, and the people enjoyed peace, until the government passed from men to a woman, and the Church became the victim of feminine simplicity. This woman followed the counsel of ignorant bishops; she convoked an injudicious assembly; she laid down the doctrine of painting in a material medium the Son and Word of God, and of representing the Mother of God and the Saints by dead images; and she enacted that these representations should be adored, thus heedlessly defying the proper doctrine of the Church. In such a way did she sully our adoration which is due to God alone, declaring that what should be given only to Him should be offered to lifeless icons. Furthermore she foolishly maintained that they were full of divine grace, encouraging the lighting of candles and the burning of incense before them. Thus did she cause the simple to err.

  We do therefore now forbid throughout the Orthodox Church the unauthorized manufacture of pseudonymous icons; we reject the adoration denned by Tarasius;1 we annul the decrees of his synod, on the ground that they granted to images undue honour; and we condemn the lighting of candles and the offering of incense.

  1 Patriarch at the time of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787.

  Gladly recognizing, however, the Holy Synod which met at Blachernae in the temple of the unspotted Virgin in the reigns of Constantine and Leo as firmly based on the doctrine of the Fathers, we decree that the manufacture of icons -we abstain from calling them idols, for there are degrees of evil - is neither worshipful nor of service.

  With iconoclasm once again introduced throughout the Empire, the dangers of civil disruption removed - at least for the immediate future -and continued peace established on all his frontiers, Leo V could congratulate himself on an excellent start to his reign. Lacking any deep religious convictions of his own, he took no stringent measures against the general run of icon-worshippers who refused to submit to the new edict. A few of its most vociferous opponents - those who continued publicly to demonstrate against it and openly to defy the ban on images - were punished for form's sake: Abbot Theodore, for example, now the acknowledged leader of the iconodule camp, was thrown into three different prisons. His biographer recalls with relish his repeated floggings and the hideous extremes of heat and cold - to say nothing of the enthusiastic visitations of rats, fleas and lice - that he was called upon to endure. But then, as the Emperor would have been quick to point out, Theodore had asked for it: he had never minced words during his imperial audiences, and on the Palm Sunday before the Synod he had staged a procession in which the monks of the Studium had flagrantly paraded round the monastery, carrying all their most precious icons shoulder-high before them. More serious still, in 817, he was found to be in regular correspondence with the newly elected Pope Paschal I, not only informing him of the plight of the Orthodox faithful but on one occasion actually proposing an appeal for help to the Western Emperor. Such a proposal was obviously treasonable, and in the circumstances it was hardly surprising that Leo should have taken firm action against him. Most of those churchmen who shared his opinions found, on the other hand, that provided they kept a suitably low
profile they were permitted to carry on as they always had, without molestation or interference. Leo's primary interests were State security and public order. So far as he was concerned, the doctrinal considerations so dear to Theodore and his followers were at most of secondary importance.