The Apogee - Byzantium 02

by John Julius Norwich

  With the return of the iconoclasts the Paulicians had had reason to hope that their troubles might be over, but they had been disappointed: both Leo the Armenian and Theophilus had actively pursued the policies of their predecessors. And now that the iconodules were back in power the persecutions continued with redoubled zeal. A new decree was promulgated, calling on all members of the sect to renounce their errors on pain of death; and a vast military expedition set out for the East to put the order into effect. The result - since the victims almost all remained true to their faith — was a massacre: 100,000 are reported to have perished - by hanging, drowning, the sword, even by crucifixion. All their property and lands were confiscated by the State. Fortunately a considerable number managed to escape, and sought refuge in the only place available — across the imperial frontier with Omar ibn Abdullah, the Emir of Melitene (now Malatya) and his fellow Saracens.

  Never before had the Byzantine Empire deliberately set out to destroy an entire religious community in such a manner; never would it attempt to do so again. But the treatment of the Paulicians was not only brutal and barbaric, leaving an indelible stain on the memory of the Empress in whose name it was carried out; it was also almost unbelievably shortsighted. Left to themselves, these sober, devout, disciplined men and women would have constituted a formidable bulwark against Saracen attacks, earning the respect and gratitude of every right-thinking Byzantine; instead, they were driven despite themselves into the territory of the Caliphate, of which they soon proved themselves loyal and courageous allies against the Empire. Meanwhile, as always under persecution, their religion spread. We find it - or something very like it - professed by the Bogomils in Bulgaria and Bosnia in the tenth century and by the Cathars of the Languedoc in the eleventh and twelfth. It was not an attractive creed, and untold suffering would have been avoided if it could have been contained among the Armenian fastnesses from which it sprang. That it was not so contained was the fault, above all, of successive rulers of Byzantium.

  *

  1 For the belief in the single (and divine) nature of Christ, see Byzantium: The Early Centuries, pp. 155-6.

  The Emperor Michael III, meanwhile, was growing up. We hear little of him during his long minority; his mother was a strong-willed, decisive woman who kept him firmly in the background, and he himself always remained, throughout his short life, almost childishly weak and easily led. In other respects, however, he seems to have been rather more mature: in 855 at the age of just fifteen he took as a mistress a certain Eudocia Ingerina, and might well have married her had not his mother — horrified at the prospect of a half-Swedish daughter-in-law who showed her, she considered, insufficient respect - forced him to cast her aside in favour of another Eudocia, surnamed Decapolitana, in whom he took no interest whatever. It was characteristic of Michael that he obeyed unquestioningly; perhaps he was already resolved to maintain the relationship with his first love which, we have reason to believe, was to continue until his death. It may well be, none the less, that his suppressed resentment at Theodora's high-handedness induced him to lend a sympathetic ear to the conspiracy which, only a few months later, was to bring about her downfall.

  The leading spirit in this conspiracy was the Empress's own brother, Bardas. He had never forgiven Theoctistus for out-manoeuvring him in 843; and for twelve years he had waited patiently for his chance. That chance had now come. With the assistance of the High Chamberlain Damianus - hero of the Damietta raid two years before, who may well have felt that his services on that occasion had been insufficiently recognized - he easily persuaded Michael that he would never be allowed to exert his rightful authority for as long as his mother and Theoctistus remained supreme, and that if he were even to attempt to assert himself they would have no compunction in deposing him.

  Once assured of the young Emperor's support, Bardas acted quickly. A day or two later, on 20 November 855, the Logothete was walking through the Palace on his way to Theodora's apartments when he suddenly found his path blocked by Michael himself and Damianus. The Emperor angrily pointed out that he was no longer a child, and that if there were any state business to be transacted it should be referred to himself rather than to his mother. An argument ensued, after which Theoctistus turned on his heel and went back the way he had come; but he had not gone far before Bardas, together with a group of disaffected army officers, suddenly leapt forward and struck him to the ground. Somehow he managed to draw his sword, but he was quickly overpowered and hustled, still struggling, to the Skyla - a small semicircular antechamber which gave direct entrance into the Hippodrome. Bardas's original idea, so far as we can tell, was to send him to some distant place of banishment; it was the Emperor himself who gave his guards the order to kill him. At this point Theodora, informed by her ladies of what had happened, appeared at the doors of the Skyla and tried to remonstrate; but she was rudely turned away. The guards dragged Theoctistus out from the chair under which he had crawled, and held him fast while their captain ran him through.

  With the death of the great Logothete, Theodora's power was ended - though for the moment she continued to live, bitter and unforgiving, in the Imperial Palace. Meanwhile in March 856, at a special session of the Senate, her son was proclaimed sole Emperor, in which capacity he was to reign for the next eleven years. To reign, however, is not necessarily to rule; and in view of Michael's weak character and general irresponsibility it was a good thing indeed for the Empire that the effective power should have passed into the hands of his uncle. Despite the unprincipled manner in which he had seized that power — and his reported intention of dealing with Theoctistus by exile rather than execution does little to mitigate his guilt, since he could almost certainly have persuaded the Emperor had he wished to do so — Bardas quickly proved more capable even than his predecessor. A brilliant administrator possessed both of farsighted statesmanship and boundless physical energy, he stamped his imprint indelibly on what was soon to become, in the opinion of many, the golden age of Byzantium; while as principal magistrate of the Empire and commander-in-chief of its armed forces he presided over a period of almost uninterrupted success. In the military sphere, for example, we learn - from Arab sources, rather than falsified Byzantine ones - that in 856 an army under the command of his brother Petronas crossed the Euphrates and penetrated deep into Muslim territory as far as Amida (the modern Diyarbakir), taking many prisoners. Another expedition three years later, led on this occasion by the Emperor himself, crossed the same river at a time when it was in flood and later passed into legend, becoming the theme of one of the most popular traditional Greek folk epics. Then in the summer of 859 there was another raid on Damietta, every bit as successful as the first; while in 863 imperial armies scored two crushing defeats over the Saracens within the space of some ten weeks.

  The first of these battles was fought against Omar ibn Abdullah, Emir of Melitene. Always a dangerous enemy, he had now further strengthened his forces with detachments of embittered Paulician refugees. In the early summer he led his army, Christians and Muslims together, through the Armeniakon Theme on the southern shore of the Black Sea, sacking the important commercial centre of Amisus (Samsun). The Byzantine army of some 50,000 sent against him was commanded once again by Petronas, who divided his forces into three and, advancing simultaneously from north, south and west, contrived to surround the Emir at Poson, a spot no longer precisely identifiable between the River Halys and its tributary, the Lalakaon. In the desperate fighting that followed Omar himself was killed, as were almost all his men, Saracens and Paulicians alike. The Emperor - who, according to the Arab chroniclers, was present throughout - and Petronas then returned in triumph to Constantinople, bringing with them as their prisoner the Emir's own son, one of the few Arabs to have survived. They had not been long in the capital before news reached them of yet another decisive victory - at Mayyafariqin over the Saracen Governor of Armenia, Ali ibn Yahya, who had also fallen in the fray.

  The disgrace of Amorium had been avenged.
The tide was beginning to turn. Until this time, from the earliest days of the Arab invasions, the Byzantines had been obliged to fight a defensive war against them; more than once, indeed, they had had to struggle for their very survival. Henceforth, we find them increasingly on the attack. Not only are they stronger and better equipped; there is a new spirit, a new confidence, in the air.

  5

  Of Patriarchs and Plots

  [857-66]

  Not merely were they deluded into illegalities but, if there be any summit of error, to this they have raised themselves ... Who has ever heard such claims, bursting from the mouths of even the most abandoned, up to now? What tortuous serpent has belched his poison into their hearts?

  Patriarch Photius, in a letter to the Eastern Patriarchs, summer 867

  The combination of wise government at home and military successes abroad should - or so one might have thought - have been a recipe for a happy and harmonious state. But happiness and harmony were rare visitors to Byzantium, and among all the various creators of discord pride of place must go to the Christian Church. Diligent readers of this history will have no difficulty in citing occasions without number on which it was at least arguable that the Empire would have been better off had it remained pagan - had Julian the Apostate been right after all; and it is especially ironical that this time of spectacular upsurge in Byzantine fortunes should have coincided with the gravest crisis yet to arise in the unedifying story of relations between the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope of Rome.

  The root of the trouble can be traced back to the death of the wise old Patriarch Methodius in 847 and his succession by Ignatius the eunuch, son of the deposed Emperor Michael I.1 Ignatius had other assets besides his imperial blood: in the darkest days of iconoclasm he had never wavered in his support for the holy images, and had made the monastery that he had founded on the island of Terebinthos - now Tavsan — in the Marmara a popular refuge for all who shared his views and who no longer felt safe in the capital. But where Methodius had been moderate and conciliatory in all his dealings with the former

  1 See p. i6n.

  iconoclasts, Ignatius was a blinkered bigot who understood neither forgiveness nor compromise. He owed his promotion to the Empress alone, and did not even wait for the end of his own consecration in St Sophia before giving his colleagues a foretaste of what was in store. His victim on this occasion was Gregory Asbestas, Archbishop of Syracuse, leader of the moderate party and thus by definition the object of his vindictiveness. On some fabricated pretext he suddenly turned on Gregory in the middle of the service and ordered him out of the church. Nor was that the end of the affair: he continued his persecution of the unfortunate archbishop for the next six years, until finally in 853 Gregory was arraigned before a synod that had been overwhelmingly packed in the Patriarch's favour, deposed and excommunicated.

  Gregory appealed to two successive Popes for reinstatement; but Ignatius, like all extreme iconodules, had always been a staunch upholder of papal supremacy and the Vatican had no wish to antagonize him. Meanwhile the former moderates had become most distinctly less so. United in their detestation of the Patriarch, they were determined somehow to get rid of him; and they were fortunate indeed to find, at the very moment that he was most needed, a stronger and more effective leader than Gregory could ever have been. His name was Photius. Though he could not, like his adversary, boast imperial descent, he too was an aristocrat and was connected to the Emperor — if somewhat tenuously - by marriage, his father's brother-in-law having married Theodora's sister. He could also claim to be the most learned scholar of his day, capable of running rings round Ignatius, whose mind was too narrow to encompass any but the simplest theological doctrines. In one particularly successful exercise in Patriarch-baiting he even went so far as to propound a new and deeply heretical theory that he had just thought up, according to which man possessed two separate souls, one liable to error, the other infallible. His own dazzling reputation as a scholar and intellectual ensured that he was taken seriously by many -including of course Ignatius - who should have known better, and after his doctrine had had its desired effect and made the Patriarch look thoroughly silly he cheerfully withdrew it. His friend Constantine — whose mission to the Slavs is soon to be described - is said to have reproached his old master for so deliberately corrupting the minds of the faithful; but Photius always maintained that he had done no serious harm. Nor had he: it is no bad thing for the pigeons to have the cat set among them from time to time. Photius was responsible for perhaps the only really satisfactory practical joke in the whole history of theology, and for that alone he deserves our gratitude.

  For all his immense learning, however, he was not a churchman. He had chosen instead a political career in the imperial chancery, where his promotion had been predictably swift; and it was inevitable that when Bardas came to power Photius should soon become his closest friend and counsellor. To Patriarch Ignatius, few developments could have been more unwelcome. Any sensible man, however, wishing in such circumstances to protect his own position, would have kept a low profile and played his hand as discreetly as he could; it was entirely characteristic of Ignatius that he should have come out, fists flailing, to the attack. On the particular issue he chose he was, it must be admitted, on firm ground. Bardas had had the misfortune to fall in love with his own daughter-in-law, for whom he had abandoned his wife; and the ensuing scandal was, not surprisingly, the talk of Constantinople. Ignatius first administered a public rebuke; then, when Bardas took no notice, he excommunicated him and, on the Feast of the Epiphany 8j8, refused him the Sacrament.

  It was a brave thing to do; but it was also disastrous. From that moment on, Bardas was watching for his opportunity to rid himself of the turbulent Patriarch once and for all. That opportunity came some months later when the Emperor - who had for some time been growing increasingly suspicious of his mother - finally decided to pack her off, together with his unmarried sisters, to the monastery of Karianos near Blachernae. To make doubly sure that they would remain there, he also resolved to have their heads shaved; but when he called upon Ignatius to perform the operation, he met with a point-blank refusal. Bardas had no difficulty in persuading Michael that this could mean only one thing: that Patriarch and Empress were in unholy alliance against him. Fortunately, too, an epileptic pretender named Gebeon made his appearance at about the same time, implausibly claiming to be the son of Theodora by a former marriage; it was the work of a moment to manufacture evidence that he also was receiving patriarchal support. On 23 November Ignatius was put under arrest and banished, without trial, to his monastery on Terebinthos.

  There was no question in Bardas's mind as to who his successor should be: Photius was the obvious candidate. Two obstacles, however, remained to be overcome. The first was that he was a layman; but that problem was easily solved. On 20 December he was tonsured; on the 21 st he was ordained lector; on the 22nd, subdeacon; on the 23 rd, deacon; on the 24th, priest; and on Christmas Day he was consecrated bishop by his friend Gregory Asbestas. His enthronement as Patriarch followed at once. The process may have been a trifle undignified, but there were plenty of precedents: Patriarch Tarasius - who had been Photius's uncle - and his successor Nicephorus had both acquired their ecclesiastical eminence in the same way. The second obstacle was more serious. No amount of pressure — and it was, we may be sure, considerable - would induce Ignatius to resign. Since the only other way of legally getting rid of him - canonical deposition by a Council of the Church - was manifestly impossible, the law would have to be set aside. Photius would occupy the patriarchal throne de facto; he could not hope to do so dejure, unless or until Ignatius changed his mind.

  With his rival at least temporarily out of the way, he settled down to consolidate his position. His first step was to write to the Pope in Rome, giving official notice of his elevation. Such letters were usually little more than a formality, and received a formal reply; Pope Nicholas I, however, unlike the vast majority of h
is predecessors, took an active interest in the Eastern Church, over which he was determined to assert his authority. As a long-time member of the papal Curia he may well have been involved in the earlier correspondence with the Archbishop of Syracuse, and he had almost certainly heard of the events leading up to Photius's enthronement. Moreover, although the new Patriarch's letter was a model of tactful diplomacy, containing not one word against his predecessor, it was accompanied by another, ostensibly from the Emperor himself, in which Ignatius was said to have neglected his flock and to have been properly and canonically deposed — both of which claims the Pope rightly suspected of being untrue. He received the Byzantine legates with all due ceremony in S. Maria Maggiore and graciously accepted the presents they had brought with them;1 but he made it clear that he was not prepared to recognize Photius as Patriarch without further investigation. In his reply, therefore, he proposed a Council of inquiry, to be held the following year in Constantinople, to which he would send two commissioners who would report back personally to him. He also took the opportunity of reminding the Patriarch — and through him the Emperor himself - about the Sicilian