Strategos: Rise of the Golden Heart

by Gordon Doherty

  John Doukas’ scowl faded at this, and then his face bent into a determined grimace. ‘Aye,’ he nodded, ‘and the sooner his blood is spilled, the sooner the throne will belong to its rightful owners once more . . . ’

  Psellos smiled, satisfied that he had his puppet under control once more.

  ‘We will speak again tomorrow,’ John nodded, then turned and strode from the balcony and back into the palace.

  Psellos allowed himself a moment of reflection. So many wretches had died – and died horribly – on this initiative, yet he had not even a bruise on his skin nor a dent on his grip on power to complain about. God’s city, where the emperor reigns as God’s chosen one, he thought with a sense of satisfaction. ‘Then he who chooses the emperor must be . . . ’ he started, grinning like a shark.

  ‘ . . . a dark soul indeed,’ a voice spoke, inches from his ear.

  Psellos stumbled back, startled. Where John had stood moments ago, a cloaked and hooded figure loomed. The storm picked up with a ferocious howl. He panicked, backing up against the balcony edge. An assassin? No, this figure was knotted and withered. The numeros spearman posted on the adjacent balcony looked out to the Bosphorus, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the stranger. His lungs filled to call the spearman, yet his tongue was tied and his voice was but a whisper.

  ‘Yes, you have something to say?’ the figure asked.

  Psellos clutched at his throat. ‘Don’t kill me,’ he hissed.

  ‘I may or I may not.’ The figure laughed gently and reached up with knotted, aged hands to lower the hood. The puckered, sightless features of a silver-haired hag stared through him. The gale dropped at that moment, the snow falling silently around them. ‘It depends on your answers to my questions.’

  Psellos looked around. ‘Then ask me,’ he said in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘You have grand plans, visions of greatness.’

  ‘Don’t all men?’ Psellos shrugged, his face expressionless.

  ‘Your machinations have already brought about the deaths of many, many souls.’

  Psellos’ gaze darted nervously across the crone’s face.

  She continued; ‘And fate shows me what will come to pass if your scheming continues. On a battlefield far to the east, by an azure lake flanked by two mighty pillars, blood will be let like a tide,’ she extended a bony finger and pointed it at him, ‘and it will be your doing. Does this please you?’

  ‘My doing?’ Psellos squared his shoulders and tilted his pointed features haughtily at the crone. He was surprised to find that his voice had returned and thought of shouting to the nearby spearman. Then he touched his fingers to the hilt of the dagger tucked up his sleeve. ‘Bloodshed cannot always be avoided,’ he said, then wrapped his fingers around the dagger hilt, tensing his arm, ‘sometimes it simply begs to be spilled.’ He swung the blade out and round for the sightless crone’s throat. But her gnarled hand shot up to grapple his, shaking the blade from his grip. Then she clasped her other hand around his throat like a viper’s jaws and lifted him up and towards the edge of the balcony. He gasped and spat soundlessly, his legs kicking, his free hand thrashing.

  The crone threw her head back, unleashing a shrill cackle into the night sky. ‘So you do not know the meaning of remorse. You are Fate’s pawn indeed!’ At that moment the storm picked up into a ferocious roar once more, hurling the stinging snow horizontally across the balcony, sweeping her hair back from her withered features. Her eyes bulged and her yellowed teeth were revealed in a baleful grin. ‘I have found out all I need to know about you, Psellos of Byzantium. And now . . . ’ she started, edging him ever closer to the lip of the balcony.

  Panic shook every part of Psellos’ being as he saw the three storey drop onto the flagstones below. For the first time in his life, he was utterly powerless. Then the storm quelled once more, and she set him down carefully. Psellos panted, cupping his throat, trembling in disbelief.

  ‘Now I will leave you with one musing; as you sow . . . ’ she lifted one fingertip to his chest ‘ . . . you shall reap!’ She jabbed the fingertip into his breastbone as if thrusting a dagger. It burned like fire and he cried out once more, falling to the balcony floor.

  As he threw up his hands to shield himself, cold hands pulled at his wrists and he struggled to beat them away, crying out for mercy.

  ‘Sir?’ a voice pierced the shrieking gale. ‘Sir!’

  Trembling, Psellos blinked open his eyes. The numeros had him by the wrists and wore an anxious frown. The crone was gone.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ the spearman asked as the thick snow whipped around them.

  Psellos scrambled up to standing. ‘Get your hands off me,’ he spat, pushing the soldier away. He staggered back towards the doorway, snatching glances up and around at the barbarous storm.

  Over the howling, he could hear the faint shrieking of an eagle. As his panic subsided, he frowned, feeling a dull stinging on his chest where she had touched him. He pulled at his robe to see that there was nothing but a coin-sized, blood-red blemish on his breastbone. It itched, but that was all. His terror waned; if this was the worst the crone could do then he had little to fear of her.

  His eyes darted across the storm as her words rang in his ears; On a battlefield far to the east, by an azure lake flanked by two mighty pillars, blood will be let like a tide . . . and it will be your doing.

  ‘So be it,’ he said, a winter-cold grin spreading across his features.

  Author’s Note

  Dear Reader,

  I’d like to thank you warmly for trying my work and I truly hope that the tale of ‘Rise of the Golden Heart’ has allowed you to escape to Byzantium for a precious few hours.

  After I left Apion at the end of ‘Strategos: Born in the Borderlands’ I often found my thoughts returning to him. In these moments I did not ask myself where I would take him next, but wondered instead where I would find him. So it has been a cathartic experience to enter his world once more, and I know that world has already moved on again without me since I wrote the final words of this volume.

  Now, as always, a work of historical fiction weaves a tale around events of the past. The core aspects are based on solid historical fact, others are skewed slightly to aid a dramatic narrative and some are entirely fictional. I’ll try to summarise the main elements of the plot which I feel are noteworthy in these areas.

  In 1067, Alp Arslan was at war with the Fatimids to the south of his dominion, offering a brief period of respite to the Byzantine borderlands. But only until Bey Afsin slew a member of the sultan’s court, then fled west with an army. His subsequent raids into Anatolia ripped through the heart of the poorly defended Byzantine Themata. The rogue bey led his men in the sacking of Caesarea, which saw the tomb of St Basil pillaged and the sarcophagus broken. My portrayal of Alp Arslan halting Bey Afsin at this juncture is fictional, but when Alp Arslan finally did bring Afsin’s raids to an end in 1068, he magnanimously pardoned his bey and welcomed him back into his ranks.

  My depiction of Emperor Romanus Diogenes comes chiefly from the chronicler, Michael Attaleiates. Attaleiates’ History is considered slightly anti-Diogenes, but with a grudging respect for his bullish determination to right the wrongs of the previous imperial dynasties and to stop the decay of the armies. Attaleiates’ writings also provide priceless eyewitness accounts of Diogenes’ imperial campaigns. He tells how the emperor’s Syrian campaign in 1068 took them through Anatolia where he tried to muster the themata, but found them in a grievous condition:

  For the most part they had been neglected, because no emperor had marched east for many years and they had not received their due pay having been subdued and turned to flight little by little by their opponents due to their wretchedness and ill preparedness for attack, and thus fallen into cowardice and impotency, of no good use. To put it plainly, their standards were dirty as if from smoke with easily countable, wretched attendants beneath them. They were greatly discouraged when reckoning how they would return to the old
days of their former martial honor and get it back after so much time, since the men who remained in the legions were few and lacking in arms and mounts, a band of inexperienced youths with the most warlike and war-experienced opponents arraigned against them.

  The campaign continued to the south east and culminated in the siege and taking of Hierapolis. Attaleiates records that the lower city was taken swiftly, but that the citadel was tall, well-defended and hardy, and that it took a ‘snowstorm of artillery’ to breach its walls. He goes on to describe how, while the citadel was being taken, the Emir of Aleppo marched from the west and fell upon the unprepared Byzantine units posted outside of the walls, routing the Scholae Tagma and capturing their standards. Romanus Diogenes only learned of the emir’s arrival whilst still battling to take the citadel. The emperor took to rallying his fearful army and then led a brave sally, eventually turning the emir’s forces to flight.

  One place I have knowingly strayed from Attaleiates’ text is in my depiction of Romanus Diogenes residing on the Istrian frontier prior to his accession to the imperial throne. Attaleiates states that he was in fact exiled in his native Cappadocia at the time.

  As for Michael Psellos; he has been hailed by some as a great thinker, by others as an imperial sycophant, and by some as a power-hungry and shrewd individual. Among modern commentators, Psellos' penchant for long autobiographical digressions in his works has earned him accusations of vanity and ambition. He rose to prominence in the eleventh century, spearheading the initiative to establish the University of Constantinople and serving at various times as a provincial judge and in the imperial court. It was in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachus (1042-1055) that he became an influential political adviser. He then played a decisive role in the transition of power from Michael VI to Isaac I Komnenos in 1057; then from Isaac Komnenos to Constantine X Doukas in 1059. Then, in 1067, the strident Eudokia Makrembolitissa decided to renege on the oath she had made to her husband and manoeuvred to raise Romanus Diogenes rose to the imperial throne. Psellos and the Doukids were bitterly opposed to his accession and then to his reign, and actively sought to confound him at every turn.

  So, while much of my portrayal of Psellos’ behaviour and deeds is entirely speculative, he was clearly a shrewd operator. You have to question how one man can remain at the side of the imperial throne for so long while emperors (God’s chosen ones) come and go. It was Psellos’ role as kingmaker and his hand in the events that followed the Syrian campaign (which I will cover in the next volume of the series) that proved fuel enough for me to draw the darkest possible conclusions.

  Regarding the themata; Apion’s home – the Byzantine Thema of Chaldia – was a bastion of the imperial borderlands for many centuries. However, by the mid-eleventh century, many themata were in the process of becoming, and some had already become, ‘ducates’. In other words, they would have been ruled primarily by a doux rather than a strategos, and the border tagma commanded by the doux would have diminished the importance of the strategos’ thematic armies. I have portrayed Doux Fulco as Apion’s ostensible superior in this respect. However, I do confess to exaggerating Apion’s position and the doggedness of his thematic ranks.

  One question that has been raised about ‘Strategos: Born in the Borderlands’, that is likely to be raised again from this volume, is my depiction of Byzantine soldiers using Latin war cries. After all, in the eleventh century, Latin had been a dead language for several hundreds of years and the people of the Byzantine Empire undoubtedly spoke Greek.

  The cry of ‘Nobiscum Deus’ was attested to in Maurice's 'Strategikon' (written in the 6th century AD) and then referred to in John Haldon's 'Warfare, state and society in the Byzantine world, 565-1204' where it is grouped as one of many practices that 'remained constant throughout the existence of the empire.' The paucity of compelling evidence of any one particular Byzantine cry – possibly Greek – usurping this, and the likelihood that the original, simple, Latin phrase would have gathered an air of mystique after centuries of use, led me to stick with the Latin. Certain phrases can and do transcend the death of their parent language while maintaining their semantic origins. Indeed, a friend pointed out to me that the Irish Rangers' (a British Army regiment) cry is in Gaelic, which most of their men can't speak. Added to this, many other Latin phrases persisted right up to the end of the Byzantine Empire, albeit partially graecofied (e.g. skutum = scutum, kontoubernion = contubernium). I don't think we'll ever have concrete proof either way, but I think there is a certain romance in the notion of a war cry from antiquity echoing through the centuries.

  Regarding heraldry, historians believe that, by 1068 AD, both the Seljuks and Byzantines had come to use the double-headed eagle as their symbol of power. This image is thought to have represented their declaration of power over the east and west. Interestingly, on the Byzantine side, Emperor Isaac I Komnenos (1057-1059 AD) adopted the symbol, having been inspired by legends of the Haga (the actual Hittite myth – not the fictional Apion!). However, I have deliberately neglected to depict this symbol on Byzantine and Seljuk banners, as I felt it would cause some confusion in the narrative, being identical to Apion’s Haga stigma.

  There are hours of discussion to be had on many more aspects of the history. As ever, I’d be delighted to hear from you on these or any other aspects, and I can be contacted at my website (below).

  In the meantime, rest assured that Apion’s journey is not over yet. The Haga will return, and I hope you will too.

  Yours faithfully,

  Gordon Doherty

  www.gordondoherty.co.uk

  Glossary

  Akhi: Seljuk infantry armed with long anti-cavalry spears, scimitars, shields and sometimes armoured in lamellar.

  Armamenta: State funded imperial warehouses tasked with producing arms, clothing and armour for the armies. They were usually situated in major cities and strongholds.

  Bey: Seljuk military commander, subordinate to an emir.

  Ballista: Primarily anti-personnel missile artillery capable of throwing bolts vast distances. Utilised from fortified positions and on the battlefield.

  Bandophorus: The standard-bearer for a Byzantine bandon.

  Bandon: The basic battlefield unit of infantry in the Byzantine army. Literally meaning ‘banner’, a bandon typically consisted of between two hundred and four hundred men, usually skutatoi, who would line up in a square formation, presenting spears to their enemy from their front ranks and hurling rhiptaria from the ranks behind. Banda would form together on the battlefield to present something akin to the ancient phalanx.

  Basileus: The Byzantine emperor (feminine: Basileia).

  Bey: The leader of a Seljuk warband.

  Buccina: The ancestor of the trumpet and the trombone, this instrument was used for the announcement of night watches and various other purposes in the Byzantine forts and marching camps as well as to communicate battlefield manoeuvres.

  Buccinator: A soldier who uses the buccina to perform acoustical signalling on the battlefield and in forts, camps and settlements.

  Chi-Rho: The Chi-Rho is one of the earliest forms of Christogram, and was used in the early Christian Roman Empire through to the Byzantine high period as a symbol of piety and empire. It is formed by superimposing the first two letters in the Greek spelling of the word Christ, chi = ch and rho = r, in such a way to produce the following monogram:

  Daylamid warriors: Fierce and rugged warriors from the mountains of northern Iran. It is thought that they may have fought with twin-pronged spears (though many argue that this is a mistranslation and that they actually fought with double-edged blades).

  Dekarchos: A minor officer in charge of a kontoubernion of ten skutatoi who would be expected to fight in the front rank of his bandon. He would wear a red* sash to denote his rank.

  Doux: One of the titles for the leader of a Byzantine tagma.

  Dromon: Byzantine war galley with twin triangular sails. Capable of holding up to three hundred men.

&
nbsp; Droungarios: A Byzantine officer in charge of two banda, who would wear a silver* sash to denote his rank.

  Emir: Seljuk military leader, roughly equivalent to the Byzantine strategos.

  Er-ati: A Seljuk warrior name.

  Fatimid Caliphate: Arab Islamic caliphate that dominated the area comprising modern-day Tunisia and Egypt in the Middle Ages.

  Follis: A large bronze coin of small value.

  Foulkon: The Byzantine heir to the famous Roman testudo or ‘tortoise’ formation.

  Ghulam: The Seljuk heavy cavalry, equivalent to the Byzantine kataphractos. Armoured well in scale vest or lamellar, with a distinctive pointed helmet with nose guard, carrying a bow, scimitar and spear.

  Ghazi: The Seljuk light cavalry, a blend of steppe horse archers and light skirmishers whose primary purpose was to raid enemy lands and disrupt defensive systems and supply chains.

  Haga: A ferocious two-headed eagle from ancient Hittite mythology. Also the basis for what would become the emblem of both the Byzantine Empire and the Seljuk Sultanate.

  Kampidoktores: The drill master in charge of training Byzantine soldiers.

  Kataphractos: Byzantine heavy cavalry and the main offensive force in the thema and tagma armies. The riders and horses would wear iron lamellar and mail armour, leaving little vulnerability to attack. The riders would use their kontarion for lancing, spathion for skirmishing or their bow for harrying.

  Kathisma: The imperial box at the Hippodrome in Constantinople. This was connected directly to the Imperial Palace via the Cochlia Gate and a spiral staircase.