The other alternative was Romanus Lecapenus. He differed from Leo in two important respects. First, he was a man of neither birth nor breeding, an Armenian peasant's son who had risen to his present rank entirely on his own merit. Second, although he too had signally failed to distinguish himself during the recent hostilities, he had not been defeated. His great flagship was even now riding proudly at anchor in the Golden Horn, surrounded by the rest of the imperial fleet: a proclamation of naval might that was not lost on the Byzantines, particularly when they remembered the condition of their army - for which, as they well knew, Leo Phocas was principally to blame.
Of the two, the Empress not surprisingly preferred the handsome, aristocratic general to the jumped-up foreign parvenu. She therefore summoned Leo to the Palace where, within a few weeks, he became one of her closest associates and most trusted advisers. She had, however, seriously underestimated the strength of public opinion. The people of Constantinople - a political element which, especially in times of crisis, sovereigns ignored at their peril - had always mistrusted these feudal lords from Anatolia; their traditional loyalties were to the established imperial dynasty, and their opinions were shared by most of the old urban aristocracy and many members of the court itself. Little Constantine was now thirteen years old; although his health remained poor, he was clearly a child of quite unusual intelligence who appeared to have the makings of a first-class Emperor. But what chance would he stand against the ambitions of a Phocas, when not even his own mother seemed aware of the danger?
It was at this moment that a member of the imperial household took matters into his own hands. Theodore, Constantine's personal tutor, now wrote a letter in his pupil's name to Romanus Lecapenus appealing for his protection. Why Romanus was considered any more trustworthy than Leo is not altogether clear: perhaps his modest beginnings told in his favour. But he was certainly no less ambitious, and unhesitatingly proclaimed his readiness to serve the young Emperor as his protector and champion. In doing so, he can have had no delusions as to the effect that such a pronouncement would have on the Empress. Doubtless encouraged by Phocas, she instructed her old friend and counsellor, the parakoimomenos Constantine, to order Romanus in her name to pay off his sailors and disband the fleet forthwith. The admiral replied with the utmost courtesy, inviting Constantine to come on board the flagship to see for himself how conscientiously the imperial commands were being obeyed. All unsuspecting, the Chamberlain did so - only to be immediately seized and put under arrest.
To lay hands on her chief representative was a deliberate affront to the Empress herself; but when Zoe sent envoys to the admiral to demand an explanation they were greeted by a hail of stones. Now seriously alarmed, she called a meeting of her ministers at the Bucoleon1 — only to find that they too had turned against her. She was obliged to listen in silence while the young Constantine Porphyrogenitus read from a prepared script, informing his mother that her Regency was at an end:
1 The area between the southern end of the Hippodrome and the Marmara, which included the private harbour and maritime entrance to the Great Palace.
henceforth the government would be entrusted jointly to Patriarch Nicholas and another member of the former Council, the magister Stephen. The next morning a body of soldiers arrived to escort her back to the convent of St Euphemia; only in response to long and tearful entreaties on the part of her son was she at length permitted to remain, powerless but at least uncloistered, in the gynaeceum of the Palace.
Nicholas had triumphed; but he soon discovered that the condition of the Empire was very different from what it had been five years before. Zoe had been dealt with satisfactorily enough; but Leo Phocas and Romanus Lecapenus were now locked in an open struggle for supremacy. Floundering hopelessly between them, the unhappy Patriarch did his utmost to play one off against the other, but succeeded only in making his own position more and more untenable. Finally, on 25 March 919, Romanus appeared with his fleet at the Bucoleon, entered the Palace by the Marine Gate and announced that he had taken over the government of the Empire; and only a month later, in St Sophia, he gave away his exquisite young daughter Helena to Constantine in marriage, taking for himself that same title of basileopator that Leo the Wise had invented for his own father-in-law, Stylian Zautses.
For the second time in just over half a century, an Armenian upstart stood but one short step from the throne of Byzantium.
Of the obstacles remaining in the path of Romanus Lecapenus, the greatest was Leo Phocas, who had returned to his army across the Bosphorus and there, from his camp at Chrysopolis, had raised the standard of revolt. To ensure the loyalty of his troops, he gave it out that he was acting to free the Emperor from the clutches of the usurping basileopator, Romanus countered this by using two undercover agents, one a priest and the other a prostitute, to disseminate copies of a letter ostensibly signed by the boy Emperor himself, making it clear that his father-in-law enjoyed his complete confidence and trust, while Leo Phocas was nothing more than a contemptible rebel with the temerity to rise up against his legitimate sovereign. The priest was soon arrested, but the prostitute did her work admirably and hundreds of Leo's men laid down their arms. Leo himself saw that he had failed, and that his only chance of survival lay in flight; but he was caught in a Bithynian village, where his eyes were put out before he was brought back in chains to Constantinople.
When he heard of the blinding of his rival, Romanus is said to have flown into a fury - though his anger did not prevent him, on the discovery of another conspiracy a few weeks later, from parading the wretched Leo round the Forum on a mule to the jeers and taunts of the populace. But Leo Phocas was now a spent force; a far more important consideration in the mind of Romanus was to smooth his own path to the throne - an objective which, since he clearly had no right to it, could be achieved only by undermining the claims of Constantine. Thus, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the Patriarch, a formal synod was summoned to Constantinople in the summer of 920, with the express purpose of putting an end to the turmoil in the Church; and on 9 July-this synod published the famous Tomus Unionis in which was set out, finally and authoritatively, the revised canon law on the subject of remarriage. According to its meticulously drafted provisions, for a man to marry a second time was perfectly legitimate, while even a third wife might be permitted to a childless widower under the age of forty, provided that their nuptials were followed by an appropriate act of penance; but fourth marriages were out of the question in any circumstances at all, and would be punished by excommunication until such time as the fourth partner were permanently repudiated. Fortunately, the decree was not retrospective. Leo VI’s last two marriages were however condemned in the strongest possible terms, and the legitimacy of his son accepted only reluctantly and on sufferance.
The feelings of the fourteen-year-old Constantine, obliged to put his signature to such a document, may well be imagined; but the Tomus, hateful to him as it must have been, did not mark the end of his tribulations. Barely a month later, his mother Zoe was accused by Romanus of attempting to poison him. Whether there was any truth in the charge we shall never know, although in the circumstances there seems nothing inherently improbable about it. But it was enough to settle the Empress's fate once and for all. Again her hair was shorn; again she was obliged to don the coarse nun's habit that she detested; and again the great doors of St Euphemia slammed shut behind the reluctant Sister Anna.
There remained one last adversary. Constantine's tutor Theodore had played a crucial part in Romanus's rise to power. He had first invited him to act as the young Emperor's protector; and there is reason to believe that it was he, when the admiral had appeared off the Bucoleon the previous March, who had actually unlocked the gate and admitted him into the Palace. In all this, however, Theodore had been acting in what he innocently believed to be the best interests of his pupil; he now saw that his intrigues had placed Constantine in precisely the position that he had most wished to avoid. Imperial champion or no
t, Romanus had shown himself every bit as self-seeking as Leo Phocas. The moment that he realized this, Theodore's attitude to him abruptly changed, and it did not take Romanus long to understand that the man who had started as his accomplice had become his enemy. It was probably some time in early September that Theodore and his brother Symeon were invited to a banquet given by the Patrician Theophylact, Count of the Stable. Halfway through the meal they were both arrested on a charge of conspiracy, and exiled to their country estate in north-west Anatolia.
With the departure of Theodore, Constantine lost his last true friend. He was now nothing but,a pawn in the hands of his father-in-law, whom on 24 September 920 - just a few days after his fifteenth birthday - he dutifully appointed Caesar. Less than three months later, on 17 December, he marked the culmination of the astonishing career of Romanus Lecapenus by laying on his head the imperial diadem1. Theoretically, of course, he - Constantine - still remained the senior Emperor; but within a year it was Romanus whose portrait - slightly larger and in more resplendent robes - began to appear in the place of honour on the coinage, and to the vast majority of his subjects it must have seemed only a matter of time before that of the young Porphyrogenitus disappeared altogether.
1 Earlier historians, including Sir Steven Runciman (The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus, p. 62) place these last two events in the previous year, 919. But - as has been pointed out by both Grumel and Ostrogorsky (p. 264) - Romanus appeared at the Synod of 920 as basileopator, a title which he would not conceivably have used if he were already Caesar, let alone Emperor.
The Gentle Usurper
[920-48]
You are a mortal; you await death, resurrection and judgement. Today you live and tomorrow you are dust; one fever will quench all your pride. What will you say, when you come before God, of your unrighteous slaughter? How will you face the terrible, just Judge? If it is for love of riches that you do this, I will grant all your desires and more: only hold out your hand. Welcome peace, love concord, that you yourself may live a peaceful, bloodless and untroubled life, and that Christians may see an end to their woes and may cease destroying their fellow-Christians.
Romanus Lecapenus to Symeon of Bulgaria, 9 September 924
Of the early history of Romanus Lecapenus - or, as we must now call him, the Emperor Romanus I - all too little has come down to us. His father, known universally to contemporaries as Theophylact the Unbearable, was an Armenian peasant whose good fortune it was to have rescued Basil I from the Saracens at the battle of Tephrike in 872. This earned him a place in the imperial guard, but probably little more: there is no indication that he was in any way ambitious either for himself or his son, and he certainly took no trouble over Romanus's education, as Constantine VII was scornfully to point out when circumstances allowed him to do so. It was left for the boy to make his own way in the world. Born around 870 - even the exact date is unknown - he had entered the imperial service in the navy, and whether or not we choose to accept the suggestion by Liudprand of Cremona that his early promotion was the direct result of a heroic encounter with a lion, he was probably still in his thirties when he was appointed strategos of the Samian Theme, which included most of the western coast of Asia Minor and the neighbouring islands - a position of considerable authority since it gave him, although a serving officer, full responsibility for the civil as well as the military administration. He seems to have performed his duties with distinction, and after the disgrace of Himerius in 912 was the obvious choice for drungarius, or High Admiral.
At the time of Romanus's seizure of power his wife Theodora -whom he was to proclaim Augusta at Epiphany, 921 - had borne him at least six children, and before her death in 923 was to present him with two more. Of their four sons, no less than three were to be crowned co-Emperor by the end of 924; the youngest, Theophylact, was a eunuch intended for the Patriarchate. It is clear that, like his fellow-Armenian Basil I, the new Emperor intended to found a dynasty. Where he differed from his predecessor was in the comparative gentleness of his character. Basil's road to power had been marked by at least two proved assassinations; Romanus Lecapenus had employed trickery and deceit in plenty, but he was not by nature either violent or brutal. When his archrival Leo Phocas was blinded by his captors - a common enough fate in tenth-century Byzantium - he had been quick to express his horror and disgust; for the vast majority of his enemies, he would always consider exile to be punishment enough. The persistency with which his young son-in-law clung to life must have infuriated him - while the Porphyrogenitus lived, there could be little long-term future for the house of Lecapenus - and given the boy's permanently fragile state of health it would have been an easy matter to poison him without arousing suspicions: Basil, in similar circumstances, would not have hesitated for an instant. But Romanus was cast in a different mould. He might - indeed he did - do everything in his power to displace the young Emperor, promoting both himself and his son to superior positions; but never did he lay a finger upon his son-in-law - who, as it turned out, was comfortably to outlive the two of them.
For Constantine it must, nevertheless, have been a miserably unhappy childhood, shot through with uncertainty and fear: a father dead, a mother branded as a concubine and twice exiled, he himself facing constant accusations of bastardy and forced to accept in silence the gradual removal of everyone in whom he could put his trust. All this would have been bad enough for a sickly, sensitive boy, without finding himself alone, unwanted and unloved amid a huge and fundamentally hostile family; and a marriage of convenience at the age of thirteen to a member of that family (a girl whom he hardly knew) can hardly have improved matters. Later, it is only fair to point out, that marriage was to prove a surprisingly happy one, with two of the couple's children eventually succeeding their father on the throne; be that as it may, there can be little doubt that the young Emperor passed his adolescence in desperate loneliness and very largely ignored. Fortunately for him, his physical weakness was offset by an unusually lively mind, and a wide range of artistic and intellectual interests: he seems to have been a talented painter, he was fascinated by everything he could discover about the great world that lay beyond the immediate confines of the capital and even the Empire, and he would spend hours and days at a time studying the intricacies of Byzantine court ceremonial, the one subject which his position, intolerable as it was, gave him limitless opportunity to observe and on which his exhaustive survey, De Ceremoniis Aulae Byzantinae, remains our most valuable authority.
He was fortunate too in possessing* at least in those early years, neither political ambition nor - so far as can be seen - very much in the way of moral courage. Wisely, he made no attempt to assert himself. When his father-in-law elbowed him aside as senior Emperor; when in May 921 Romanus elevated his eldest son Christopher to be yet another occupant of the throne; when, on the death of the Augusta Theodora in February 923, he crowned Christopher's wife Sophia in her place; when, two years later still, he elevated two more sons, thus producing a somewhat ridiculous total of five simultaneous Emperors; even when in 927 he proclaimed Christopher second only to himself, relegating the Porphyrogenitus to third position in the State — on none of these occasions did Constantine utter a word of protest. Silence, however, did not mean' indifference: as his later writings show, each successive insult wounded him to the quick - though none, one suspects, more than the Tomus Unionis, whose insinuations were made still harder to bear by the stipulation that it was to be read every year, on the second Sunday in July, from the ambo of every church in the Empire, and was to be annually commemorated in the capital by a procession between the churches of St Irene and St Sophia in which all the co-Emperors, together with the Patriarch, were obliged to participate. Yet on these occasions too, obediently and uncomplainingly, Constantine did what was required of him. He knew that he had one duty that took precedence over all the others: to survive.
'We have glad tidings for you, O my son, which will delight your heart as much as it delights our own to impart
them: the Church of God is once again united.' So wrote Patriarch Nicholas to Symeon of Bulgaria, informing him of the Tonus Unionis and the end of the quarrel between his own party and that of the Euthymians. Symeon was not delighted in the least. The Byzantine Church was of no interest to him: he cared only for the throne - that throne which seven years before had been almost within his grasp but which, since its appropriation by Romanus Lecapenus, now seemed as far away as ever. The Emperor, from the moment of his accession, had done everything in his power to restore good relations with his turbulent neighbour, whom he was perfecdy prepared to buy off with an annual tribute or even, if necessary, with a cession of imperial territory; but Symeon would accept no terms that did not begin with Romanus's abdication, and so hostilities continued. The Byzantines reverted once again to their old trick of stirring up trouble elsewhere around the enemy's border — this time in Serbia, where the local princes, struggling to shake off the Bulgar yoke, were only too happy to accept imperial subsidies; but the pressure was never relaxed for long. In 919 Symeon pushed south as far as the Hellespont; in 921 he was back at Casasyrtae, within sight of the land walls; in 922 he advanced to the European shore of the Bosphorus, inflicted a humiliating defeat on a Byzantine army, sacked the whole area around Stenum (the modern Istinye) and burnt one of Romanus's favourite palaces at Pegae;1 while 923 saw his recapture of Adrianople - whose Governor, Moroleon, he punished for his heroic resistance by torturing him to death.
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