*
The autumn of the year 905 was, for the Emperor Leo the Wise, a blessed season. September had seen the birth of his son, October the destruction of a Saracen fleet and the destruction of Tarsus. At last, it seemed, the wind was beginning to blow in his favour; and though the following year had brought a further deterioration in his relations with Nicholas, his triumph over the Patriarch during the first weeks of 907 must have provided further confirmation of his changing fortunes. The baby was crowned co-Emperor on 11 May 908, and two years later Himerius sailed against the Syrian port of Laodicea (now Lattakia), sacked the city, plundered and ravaged the hinterland and returned safely to Constantinople without the loss of a single ship.
It would have been better for Leo if he had died there and then. Instead, in the autumn of 911 he sent off his admiral on a final attempt to recapture Crete. For five years he had been working to improve the imperial navy, and the force at Himerius's disposal was stronger and infinitely better equipped than any that had been previously thrown against the island. Alas, the occupying Saracens had been working simultaneously on their defences, and the expedition proved no more successful than its predecessors. For six months - all through the winter and into the spring - Himerius kept up the siege; but the defenders held firm, and the Byzantines could make no appreciable impact on the massive fortifications. Then, in April 912, there arrived an urgent message from the capital: the Emperor's health, which had been giving cause for anxiety since the beginning of the year, had taken a sudden turn for the worse. He was now gravely ill, and unlikely to live. Reluctantly, the admiral gave orders for the raising of the siege and set sail for the. Bosphorus. His ships were just rounding the island of Chios when they found themselves surrounded by a huge Saracen fleet under the command of Leo of Tripoli - he who had practically annihilated Thessalonica eight years before. Now he subjected the Byzantine vessels to much the same fate. Nearly all were sent to the bottom, Himerius himself narrowly escaping to Mitylene whence, slowly and with a heavy heart, he made his way back to Constantinople.
By the time news of the disaster reached the Imperial Palace, Leo's life was ebbing fast. He lived just long enough to hear it, then turned his face to the wall. On the night of 11 May he died. In a reign of just over a quarter of a century he had proved himself, if not perhaps a great Emperor, at any rate an outstandingly good one. He had, it is true, split the Church more deeply than ever; but this was the inevitable result of his fourth marriage, without which there would have been no obvious heir to the throne after the death of the childless Alexander. By his determination to marry Zoe Carbonopsina and to legitimize their son, he ensured both a universally recognized succession and the continuation of the Macedonian house, which was to survive for another 150 years - the greatest dynasty in the history of Byzantium. Compared with those two inestimable benefits, the damage done to the Church was of little long-term account.
For the rest, although he lacked that combination of relentless ambition, superhuman energy and boundless self-confidence that had distinguished his father — and is probably as good a definition of greatness as any other - he had ruled wisely and conscientiously over his subjects; and although his armed forces suffered more than their fair share of defeats at the hands of their Arab and Bulgar enemies, there can be no question but that he left the Empire, at least internally, in far better shape than when he inherited it. As befitted an intellectual and a scholar, he was not an exhibitionist: no great churches or sumptuous additions to the imperial palaces stand to his memory, and his mosaic portrait over the Imperial Door of St Sophia - which shows him, incidentally, in an attitude of prostration before Christ - dates almost certainly from several years after his death.1 His most enduring achievements - the codification of the law, the reorganization of the provincial administration, the restructuring of the armed forces - were by definition unspectacular; but they were no less valuable for that. In his lifetime Leo was genuinely loved and respected by his people; and after his death posterity had good cause to be grateful to him.
1 This mosaic, in the lunette above the central doorway of the nine leading from the narthex into the main body of the church, carries — most exceptionally - no identifying inscription, and has consequently been the subject of much learned argument. By far the most convincing interpretation is that given by N. Oikonomides, who believes it to represent Leo's repentance after his fourth marriage and his salvation after the intercession of the Virgin - pictured in a medallion above him, with the Recording Angel opposite her. According to this theory the mosaic would be connected with the Council of 920, intended to illustrate the subjection of the earthly ruler to the King of Heaven and placed over the very door before which Leo was twice denied entrance to the church. See 'Leo VI and the Narthex Mosaic at St Sophia' in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. jo (1976).
The Rise of Romanus
[912—20]
Thirteen months - and an evil time. Leo the Wise, on his deathbed1
The only good thing that can be said of the reign of the Emperor Alexander is that it was mercifully short. Already at the age of forty-one worn out by dissipation and debauchery, he was to occupy the throne of Byzantium for a little under thirteen months. Even in that short time, however, he managed to do a remarkable amount of damage. His normal behaviour could be compared only to that of Michael the Drunkard at his worst: the people of Constantinople were forced to witness the same senseless cruelties, the same drunken roisterings in public places, the same acts of wanton sacrilege. Sometimes it looked as though he intended to follow the example of Vladimir in Bulgaria and attempt the reintroduction of the ancient gods throughout the Empire; on one occasion at least, his pagan superstition brought him close to insanity - when he somehow persuaded himself that the bronze boar in the Hippodrome was his other self,2 and had it provided with new teeth and genitals in an attempt to remedy the extraordinary wear and tear that he had inflicted on his own.
He had long hated his brother, and in 903 had almost certainly been involved in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate him during a service in
1 Scholars are undecided about these last words of Leo. His use of the preposition meta suggests that he meant that the evil time would come in thirteen months; on the other hand, if we. could interpret his utterance to mean 'for thirteen months' it would be a remarkable prophecy about the reign of Alexander. The above admittedly free translation keeps the ambiguity of the original, if nothing else.
2 In fairness to Alexander it should be pointed out that this curious belief that every human being possessed an inanimate stoicbeion, a second repository of his physical and spiritual essence, was widely held in tenth-century Byzantium. It may well have been shared by Romanus Lecapenus himself: see p. 46n.
the Church of St Mocius. (It was probably as a result of this that in the following year he was deprived of his rank as co-Emperor - although his strong position as sole heir to the throne ensured that the demotion was only temporary.) Once he had achieved the power that he had so long awaited, he lost no time in giving that hatred open expression, reversing all Leo's policies, countermanding all his orders - striving, in short, to undo all that his brother had ever done, regardless of the consequences. The Empress Zoe was unceremoniously turned out of the Palace, together with all her friends and advisers; her uncle Himerius, who had given such sterling service to the Empire, was disgraced and thrown into prison, where he died six months later.
Meanwhile a Bulgarian embassy had arrived in Constantinople, sent by Symeon to congratulate him on his accession and to suggest a renewal of the peace treaty of 901. To Alexander, who had been with difficulty torn away from one of his orgiastic carousals to receive them, the treaty had been the work of his brother, and for that reason alone must be abrogated. In a sudden access of drunken braggadocio he shouted at the ambassador that he wanted no more treaties and, moreover, that Byzantium would be paying no further tribute. Then he dismissed them. They in their turn, probably more distressed by what they ha
d seen than by what they had heard, returned with much sad shaking of heads to their master. To Symeon, we may be sure, their report was not entirely unwelcome. Confident in the strength of his army and concluding that he had nothing to fear from any Empire ruled by so pathetic a figure, he began preparations for war.
By this time, too, Alexander had taken another step which was to prove, in its own way, almost as disastrous as his reception of the Bulgars. Once again for no other apparent reason than to go against his brother, he had declared the abdication of Patriarch Nicholas invalid, recalled him from banishment and restored him to his former throne. (Nicholas himself was to claim that his restitution had been ordered by Leo, in a moving scene of deathbed repentance.) Adversity had not improved the Patriarch's character. He had spent his five-year exile brooding over the injustice he had suffered and, in particular, over his betrayal by Euthymius and the Ignatians - who, having originally stood firm with him against Leo's fourth marriage, had then joined with the Emperor to plot his overthrow, seized power for themselves and finally, in giving the required dispensation, had done the one thing that they had always forbidden to him. He now returned with but a single thought in his mind: revenge.
Admittedly, he had a case. His mistake was to allow his resentment to blind him to all other considerations. Had he been content with his victory, directing his still considerable energies towards reconciliation with the Ignatians and permitting Euthymius to return quietly to the monastery that he should never have left, he might with time and patience have healed the controversy and reunited the Church. Instead he brought it, in a way that no Patriarch had ever brought it before, to the point of open mutiny. Euthymius was arraigned before a tribunal in the Palace of The Magnaura, whose proceedings are reported in detail by his contemporary biographer, who was quite possibly an eye-witness. Nicholas opened the cross-examination:
'Tell me, thou most witless of men, interpreter of the libidinous dreams of the deceased sovereign Leo, why, while yet I was among the living, didst thou take to wife the Church that was wedded to me, defiling her while driving me out?'
Replied Euthymius: 'Thou it was who broughtest her into defilement, and drovest thyself out, not once but thrice tendering thy resignation. And if thou askest me, I will tell thee the nature of thy defilement, and the cause of thine expulsion. For I am able, if God gives me the strength, to convict thee arid set thine injustices before thy face.'
Struck dumb by these words and boiling with anger at the liberty with which the other spoke, the Patriarch ordered him to be publicly and shamefully stripped of his robes, and declared him fallen from his holy office.
Then was there a sight to be seen more pitiful than any before. Dragging off his bishop's scarf, they trampled upon it, not sparing even the figure of the Cross; similarly, they tore off all his sacred vestments and trampled upon them too, even his monk's cowl. And when the servants saw their master rejoicing and delighting in these things, they laid hands on his beard and pulled it, and pushed him with such violence that he fell on his back to the ground, and there they kicked him where he lay, spitting upon him, beating him with their fists and striking him in the face. Then the Patriarch ordered him to be set on his feet again, that the interrogation might be continued. But one of his henchmen, a giant of huge physical strength, stood looking on until, at a nod from his master, he struck him two blows, knocking out two of his teeth, and continued to pummel him at the back of the neck until he had no breath left, nor speech, and was on the point of falling down the staircase. Had not a nobleman named Petronas caught hold of him with three others, he would quickly have died a martyr's death.1
1 The above is an edited and slightly shortened version of the translation by P. Karlin-Hayter, Byzantium, Vols, xxv-xxvii (19)5-7). According to the Continuator of Theophanes, the man who pulled Euthymius's beard returned home to find his house burnt down and his daughter struck dumb and paralysed, in which state she lived on until the reign of Nicephorus.
Having banished Euthymius to the monastery of Agathon, and having persuaded the Emperor to remove his name and that of the Pope from the diptychs1 (thereby breaking off all communion with Rome) the Patriarch now initiated a major purge of the entire hierarchy, aimed at nothing less than the elimination of all bishops and clergy with Ignatian — or, more properly, Euthymian - sympathies. How he expected the Church to function after such drastic surgery - where the episcopal bench alone was concerned, the Euthymians represented some two-thirds of the total - was never explained, but the problem was ultimately solved in another way: those dismissed flatly refused to go. The opposition, predictably, was led by Nicholas's arch-enemy Arethas of Caesarea, who made a public statement to the effect that he would leave his see only when the Emperor sent armed troops to remove him by force. Till then, he proposed to remain where he was and to carry out his duties as usual. Many others followed his example; meanwhile several Photian bishops who had tried to get rid of their Euthymian clergy found themselves besieged in their palaces by their mutinous flocks, and in one or two cities the disturbances led to serious rioting. Too late, the Patriarch realized that he had stirred up a hornets' nest. Back-pedalling desperately, he countermanded all his former orders; his voluminous correspondence from this time forth advocates a degree of tolerance and understanding far removed indeed from the spirit of his earlier fulminations. When the dust eventually settled, although several bishops had been transferred to other, equivalent, sees, only four had been dismissed absolutely. Arethas, we may not be surprised to learn, was not among them.
By this time, however, the Emperor Alexander was dead. The Continuator claims that he died as a result of a stroke, brought on by an ill-advised game of polo played in the heat of the day after a heavy lunch. More reliable sources, however, claim that his collapse followed immediately after various pagan sacrifices that he was making to the statues in the Hippodrome - including, presumably, the boar - in the hope of curing his impotence. It hardly matters: the important thing was his death, which occurred two days later, on Sunday, 6 June 913. His mosaic portrait in the north gallery of St Sophia must unquestionably
1 The tablets on which were inscribed the names of those, living and dead, who were to be specifically remembered during the service of the Eucharist date from his reign. After his death, his subjects wished only to forget him.
The moment that she heard that the Emperor was dying, his sister-in-law Zoe had forced her way back into the Palace, desperately worried for the future of her son. Some months before, she knew, Alexander had proposed to castrate him, thus rendering him permanently ineligible for the throne; he had been persuaded to reconsider only by the argument that such a step would provoke a potentially dangerous outcry, and that the boy was so weak and sickly that he could not be expected to live very long in any case. Now that it appeared that the Patriarch was to be the most powerful figure in the State, her anxieties were multiplied. Nicholas had never accepted the dispensation given by his enemy Euthymius that had recognized her marriage and her son's legitimacy; she had no doubt that he would do everything in his power to keep young Constantine from the throne, and she was determined to frustrate his efforts.
Her suspicions were well founded: the Patriarch did indeed have an alternative candidate. It was Constantine Ducas, Domestic of the Schools,1 son of that Andronicus with whom Nicholas had been accused of maintaining treasonable contacts six years before: a man who felt no greater loyalty to the Macedonian house than his father had before him. He could probably rely on the support of much of the army, and had connections of one kind or another with most of the leading aristocratic families of the Empire; if he were to attempt a coup his chances of success would be high, and once on the throne his natural gratitude to Nicholas would ensure the final victory of the Patriarchate over its enemies. For some time already he and the Patriarch had been in secret correspondence; when the moment came, their plans would be already laid.
Zoe was still battling to regain her old position when the dying
Emperor recovered sufficient consciousness to nominate his successor — which, to her relief, was indeed her son Constantine. She must, however, have been a good deal less pleased when he went on to appoint the necessary Council of Regency. Its president was to be Patriarch Nicholas; she herself was not included. She protested vigorously: never in the history of Byzantium had the mother of an Emperor and a crowned
1 I.e. Commander-in-chief of the land forces of the Empire.
Augusta1 been denied a place on such a council. But Nicholas knew that he could take no chances. Zoe was the virtual embodiment of the Euthymian party — more so even than the old abbot himself — beholden to it for both her own crown and that of her son, and thus the Patriarch's most implacable enemy. One of his first actions as Regent was to have her arrested, shorn of her hair and dispatched to the distant convent of St Euphemia in Petrium. Even her name was no longer her own: henceforth she would be known as Sister Anna, and nothing more.
For the moment at least, her seven-year-old son was sole Emperor; but, with a Regent who denied him any legal right to the throne, how long could he be expected to survive? The first threat to his position -and probably to his life - came within days of his accession, with the attempted coup of Constantine Ducas. Marching eastward from his Thracian camp, Ducas entered the city by night with only a handful of men - few enough to suggest that he expected the Palace gates to be opened to him from within. If so, it was he who was taken by surprise. The magister John Eladas, one of the Regency Council, had been forewarned and was waiting for him with a hastily assembled company of militia. Several of Ducas's men, including his son Gregory, were killed in the fighting; and just as he was trying to escape his own horse slipped on the wet pavement. He fell heavily to the ground, where one of the defenders severed his head from his body with a single stroke.
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