Lost to the West

by Lars Brownworth

  FOR ANDERS,

  the great storyteller of our youth

  CONTENTS

  Note to Reader

  Guide to Maps

  Introduction

  Prologue: Roman Roots

  1. Diocletian’s Revolution

  2. Constantine and the Church Ascendant

  3. The Pagan Counterstroke

  4. Barbarians and Christians

  5. A Dreadful Rumor from the West …

  6. The Fall of Rome

  7. The Rise of Peter Sabbatius

  8. Nika!

  9. Of Buildings and Generals

  10. Yersinia Pestis

  11. A Persian Fire

  12. The House of War

  13. The Image Breakers

  14. The Crumbling Empire

  15. The Turning Tide

  16. The Glorious House of Macedon

  17. The Brilliant Pretender

  18. Death and His Nephew

  19. Basil the Bulgar Slayer

  20. The March of Folly

  21. The Comneni Recovery

  22. Swords That Drip with Christian Blood

  23. The Empire in Exile

  24. The Brilliant Sunset

  25. The Eternal Emperor

  Epilogue: Byzantine Embers

  Selected Bibliography

  Appendix: Emperors of Constantinople

  Acknowledgments

  The interested reader can find a complete list of dynasties and emperors at the back of the book.

  GUIDE TO MAPS

  The Empire of Diocletian: Division Between East and West

  Byzantium and the Barbarian West

  Justinian’s Reconquest

  The Empire in 1025: Macedonian Dynasty

  The Empire in 1180: Manuel Comnenus

  The Splinter Empires

  INTRODUCTION

  I first met Byzantium in a pleasant little salt marsh on the north shore of Long Island. I had paused there to read a book about what was innocently called the “later Roman Empire,” prepared to trace the familiar descent of civilization into the chaos and savagery of the Dark Ages. Instead, nestled under my favorite tree, I found myself confronted with a rich tapestry of lively emperors and seething barbarian hordes, of men and women who claimed to be emperors of Rome long after the Roman Empire was supposed to be dead and buried. It was at once both familiar and exotic; a Roman Empire that had somehow survived the Dark Ages, and kept the light of the classical world alive. At times, its history seemed to be ripped from the headlines. This Judeo-Christian society with Greco-Roman roots struggled with immigration, the role of church and state, and the dangers of a militant Islam. Its poor wanted the rich taxed more, its rich could afford to find the loopholes, and a swollen bureaucracy tried hard to find a balance that brought in enough money without crushing everyone.

  And yet Byzantium was at the same time a place of startling strangeness, alluring but quite alien to the modern world. Holy men perched atop pillars, emperors ascended pulpits to deliver lashing sermons, and hairsplitting points of theology could touch off riots in the streets. The concepts of democracy that infuse the modern world would have horrified the Byzantines. Their society had been founded in the instability and chaos of the third century, a time of endemic revolts with emperors who were desperately trying to elevate the dignity of the throne. Democracy, with its implications that all were equal, would have struck at the very underpinnings of their hierarchical, ordered world, raising nightmares of the unceasing civil wars that they had labored so hard to escape. The Byzantines, however, were no prisoners of an oppressive autocratic society. Lowly peasants and orphaned women found their way onto the throne, and it was a humble farmer from what is now Macedonia who rose to become Byzantium’s greatest ruler, extending its vast domains until they embraced nearly the entire Mediterranean. His successors oversaw a deeply religious society with a secular educational system that saw itself as the guardian of light and civilization in a swiftly darkening world. They were, as Robert Byron so famously put it, a “triple fusion”: a Roman body, a Greek mind, and a mystic soul.

  It’s a better definition than most, in part because the term “Byzantine” is a thoroughly modern invention, making the empire attached to it notoriously difficult to define. What we call the Byzantine Empire was in fact the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its citizens referred to themselves as Roman from the founding of Constantinople in 323 to the fall of the city eleven centuries later. For most of that time, their neighbors, allies, and enemies alike saw them in this light; when Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, he took the title Caesar of Rome, ruling, as he saw it, as the successor of a line that went back to Augustus. Only the scholars of the Enlightenment, preferring to find their roots in ancient Greece and classical Rome, denied the Eastern Empire the name “Roman,” branding it instead after Byzantium—the ancient name of Constantinople. The “real” empire for them had ended in 476 with the abdication of the last western emperor, and the history of the “impostors” in Constantinople was nothing more than a thousand-year slide into barbarism, corruption, and decay.

  Western civilization, however, owes an incalculable debt to the scorned city on the Bosporus. For more than a millennium, its capital stood, the great bastion of the East protecting a nascent, chaotic Europe, as one after another would-be world conqueror foundered against its walls. Without Byzantium, the surging armies of Islam would surely have swept into Europe in the seventh century, and, as Gibbon mused, the call to prayer would have echoed over Oxford’s dreaming spires. There was more than just force of arms to the Byzantine gift, however. While civilization flickered dimly in the remote Irish monasteries of the West, it blazed in Constantinople, sometimes waxing, sometimes waning, but always alive. Byzantium’s greatest emperor, Justinian, gave us Roman law—the basis of most European legal systems even today—its artisans gave us the brilliant mosaics of Ravenna and the supreme triumph of the Hagia Sophia, and its scholars gave us the dazzling Greek and Latin classics that the Dark Ages nearly extinguished in the West.

  If we owe such a debt to Byzantium, it begs the question of why exactly the empire has been so ignored. The Roman Empire fractured—first culturally and then religiously—between East and West, and as the two halves drifted apart, estrangement set in. Christianity was a thin veneer holding them together, but by 1054, when the church ruptured into Catholic and Orthodox halves, the East and West found that they had little to unite them and much to keep them apart. The Crusades drove the final wedge between them, engendering lasting bitterness in the East, and derision in the West. While what was left of Byzantium succumbed to Islamic invasion, Europe washed its hands and turned away, confident in its own growing power and burgeoning destiny. This mutual contempt has left Byzantium consigned to a little-deserved obscurity, forgotten for centuries by those who once took refuge behind its walls.

  Most history curricula fail to mention the civilization that produced the illumination of Cyril and Methodius, the brilliance of John I Tzimisces, or the conquests of Nicephorus II Phocas. The curtain of the Roman Empire falls for most with the last western emperor, and tales of heroism in Greece end with the Spartan king Leonidas. But no less heroic was Constantine Dragases, standing on his ancient battlements in 1453, or Belisarius before the walls of Rome. Surely we owe them as deep a debt of gratitude.

  This book is my small attempt to redress that situation, to give voice to a people who have remained voiceless far too long. It’s intended to whet the appetite, to expose the reader to the vast sweep of Byzantine history, and to put flesh and sinew on their understanding of the East and the West. Regrettably, it can make no claims to being definitive or exhaustive. Asking a single volume to contain over a thousand years of history is taxing enoug
h, and much must be sacrificed to brevity. In defense of what’s been left on the cutting-room floor, I can only argue that part of the pleasure of Byzantium is in the discovery.

  Throughout the book I’ve used Latinized rather than Greek names—Constantine instead of Konstandinos—on the grounds that they’ll be more familiar and accessible to the general reader. I’ve also used a personality-driven approach to telling the story since the emperor was so central to Byzantine life; few societies have been as autocratic as the Eastern Roman Empire. The person on the imperial throne stood halfway to heaven, the divinely appointed sovereign whose every decision deeply affected even the meanest citizen.

  Hopefully, this volume will awaken an interest in a subject that has long been absent from the Western canon. We share a common cultural history with the Byzantine Empire, and can find important lessons echoing down the centuries. Byzantium, no less than the West, created the world in which we live, and—if further motivation is needed to study it—the story also happens to be captivating.

  PROLOGUE: ROMAN ROOTS

  History isn’t supposed to hinge on the actions of a single man. Vast impersonal forces are supposed to sweep humanity along on an irresistible tide without regard to individual lives. But on a crisp fall day in AD 324, history hung on the shoulders of a man named Constantine as he climbed up a hill overlooking the Bosporus. Striding confidently forward, spear firmly in hand, he led a solemn procession of astonished courtiers. He had come following a divine voice—although whether it was that of an angel or of God himself he didn’t say. The turmoil of the recent civil wars was at last over. Once again the world lay at rest beneath the wings of the Roman eagle, but Rome itself, with its malarial streets and pagan past, was no longer worthy to be the capital of the world. So the young emperor had gone to Troy, that fabled cradle of the Roman people, and started work on a new capital. It was there, in the shadow of the ruined Trojan gates, that the voice first came to him. Priam’s ancient city, it said, was a city of the past, and so it should remain. His destiny—and that of his empire—lay elsewhere. Over the Hellespont it beckoned him, and he followed to the thousand-year-old city of Byzantium. That night he dreamed of an old woman who suddenly became young again, and when he awoke, he knew that on this spot he would make his capital. Rome, old and decrepit, would, like the woman in his dreams, be refreshed here on the shores of the Propontis.

  So at least runs the legend, and the empire centered on Constantine’s New Rome would indeed grow vibrant once again. Refounded on a new, eastern, Christian axis, it would last for over a millennium, a shining beacon of light in a dark and turbulent world. Looking back, historians would claim that so much had changed in the moment of the city’s founding that the Roman Empire itself had been transformed into something else, and Byzantine history had begun.

  But the roots of this new world didn’t begin with Constantine. The empire that he seized control of in the first decades of the fourth century had been profoundly changing for a generation, both politically and religiously, and Constantine merely put the finishing touches on its transformation. His vision and energy may have built the impressive edifice of Constantinople, but the reforms of his predecessor, Diocletian, provided the brick and mortar. And it is with Diocletian that the story of Byzantium properly begins.

  1

  DIOCLETIAN’S REVOLUTION

  The long-suffering people of the third-century Roman Empire had the distinct misfortune to live in interesting times. For three centuries before Constantine’s birth, Roman architects, engineers, and soldiers had crisscrossed the known world, bringing order and stability to the barbaric, diverse lands beyond the frontiers of Italy. In the wake of the mighty Pax Romana came more than fifty thousand miles of arrow-straight, graded roads and towering aqueducts, impervious alike to the mountains and valleys that they spanned. These highways were the great secret of empire, providing access to markets, ease of travel, and an imperial mail system that could cover more than five hundred miles in a single day. Graceful cities sprang up along the major routes, complete with amphitheaters, public baths, and even indoor plumbing—a visible testament to the triumph of civilization. But by the third century, time had ravaged the empire’s glory, and revolts had stained its streets with blood. Those impressive Roman roads that had so effectively exported the empire now became its greatest weakness as rebel armies and barbarian hordes came rushing in. No one—not even the ephemeral emperors—was safe in those uncertain times. In the first eight decades of the century, twenty-nine men sat on the imperial throne, but only one escaped murder or capture to die a natural death.

  Apathy and enervation seemed to be everywhere, sapping the strength of once solid Roman foundations. The military, too busy playing kingmaker to maintain itself, fell victim like everything else to the sickness of the age. In 259, the proud Emperor Valerian led his soldiers against the Persians, and suffered one of the greatest humiliations in Roman history. Captured by the enemy, he was forced to endure the indignity of being used as a footstool by the gleeful Persian king. When the broken emperor at last expired, the Persians had him flayed, dyeing the skin a deep red color and stuffing it with hay. Hanging the gruesome trophy on a wall, they displayed it to visiting Roman ambassadors as a constant reminder of just how hollow the myth of the invincible legions had become.

  Such public humiliation was galling, but Roman writers had been lamenting the decay of the national character for years. As early as the second century BC, Polybius blamed the politicians whose pandering had reduced the republic to mob rule, Sallust railed against the viciousness of political parties, and Livy—the most celebrated writer of Rome’s golden age—had written that “these days … we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies.”*

  Now, however, a more ominous note crept in. The predictions of disaster gave way to glowing panegyrics celebrating the greatness and permanence of emperors who were plainly nothing of the sort. The men on the throne seemed like shadows flitting across the imperial stage, an awful confirmation that the gods had turned their backs on humanity. Barbarian enemies were gathering like wolves on the frontiers, but the generals sent against them more often than not used their swords to clear a path to the throne. The army, once a servant of the emperor, now became his master, and dynasties rose and fell with bewildering frequency.

  The chaos of nearly continuous civil war made it hard to tell who the emperor actually was, but the tax collectors came anyway, with their unceasing demands for more money. The desperate shadow emperors tried to save money by reducing the silver content of their coins, but the resulting inflation crippled the economy, and most of the empire reverted to the barter system. Terrified by the mounting uncertainty men took refuge in “mystery religions” that taught that the physical world was fleeting or evil, and put their hopes in magic, astrology, and alchemy. Life was full of pain, and the more extreme refused marriage or committed suicide to escape it. The very fabric of society was coming apart, and rich and poor alike prayed for deliverance.

  Salvation came, unexpectedly enough, from Dalmatia. A tough soldier named Diocletian from that backward, rugged land of craggy peaks and lush forests rose up to claim the throne. Assuming power in the usual way by assassinating his predecessor and climbing over the bodies of rival armies, Diocletian was pragmatic enough to admit what others had only dimly suspected. The empire was simply too large to be successfully governed by one man in these troubled days. Its vast territory embraced the entire Mediterranean, stretching from the damp forests of Britain in the north to the blazing deserts of Egypt in the south, from the Rock of Gibraltar in the west to the borders of Persia in the east. Even if he spent his entire life in the saddle, Diocletian couldn’t possibly react quickly enough to stamp out every crisis, nor could he dispatch surrogates to fight on his behalf; recent imperial history provided too many examples of such generals using their armies to gain the throne. If the wobbling empire were to be preserved at all, Diocletian needed to somehow shrink its enormous size
—a task that had overwhelmed all of his immediate predecessors. Few leaders in history can have started a reign with such a daunting job, but the pragmatic Diocletian found an unorthodox solution: He raised an old drinking buddy named Maximian to the rank of senior emperor, or Augustus, and split the world in half.

  It wasn’t quite as revolutionary a decision as it sounded, especially because the empire was already divided linguistically. Long before Rome had dreamed of world conquest, Alexander the Great had swept east to India, crushing all who stood against him and forging the unwieldy territories into an empire. In his footsteps had come Hellenization, and though Alexander’s empire had crumbled with his death, Greek culture seeped in and took root. Rome had spread from the west like a veneer over this Hellenized world, superior in arms but awed by the older culture’s sophistication. Latin was spoken in the eastern halls of power, but not in its markets or homes. In thought and character, the East remained firmly Greek.

  Handing over the western areas of the empire, where Latin was the dominant language, to Maximian, Diocletian kept the richer, more-cultured Greek east for himself. In theory, the empire was still one and indivisible, but each half would have a drastically different fate, and the rough line that was drawn between them still marks the divide between eastern and western Europe today. The full ramifications wouldn’t become clear for another two centuries, but Diocletian had effectively divided the world into Roman and Byzantine halves.

  Sharing power with another man was a dangerous game for Diocletian to play since it ran the obvious risk of creating a rival, but Maximian proved to be an extremely loyal colleague. Pleased by the success, and aware that two men were still not enough to stem the tide of invaders streaming over the frontiers, Diocletian divided power again by appointing two junior emperors (Caesars). These men were given full authority to lead armies and even issue laws, and greatly eased the burdens of administration by the senior rulers. Four men could now claim an imperial rank, and though for the moment they were remarkably efficient, only time would tell if this “tetrarchy” (rule of four) would be a team of rivals or colleagues.