The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  Jovian led the dispirited Roman forces home through Antioch to Constantinople in the near vicinity of which, on 17 Februrary 364, he died. The crown now passed to the general Valentinian, who divided the empire with his brother Valens, the latter taking the East, Valentinian heading for the West, where the absence of Julian’s army had led to a resurgence of barbarian raids across the Rhine and Danube. Valentinian spent much of the subsequent eleven years of his reign engaged in successful military campaigns. In the East, Valens was obliged to contend both with a revived Persian threat and a revolt on the part of Procopius, a relative and supporter of the deceased Julian. In addition to defeating Procopius, Valens took battle to the usurper’s barbarian allies across the Danube, defeating them in 369.

  In 375, whilst himself campaigning on the Danube, Valentinian died. He had intended his elder son, the 16-year-old Gratian, to succeed him as emperor, and had left the boy at Trier in northern Gaul. Indeed, in an unusual step, Gratian had been accorded the title of Augustus in 367. Rather than complying with these wishes, however, Valentinian’s Danubian army acclaimed as emperor his 4-year-old son, Valentinian II, whose court was established in northern Italy, although the entourage around Gratian continued to exercise effective control in Gaul.

  Silver missorium depicting Theodosius I handing a codicil of appointment to an official. The senior emperor is flanked by the young Augusti Arcadius and Valentinian II. Below a personification of the bountiful Earth. AD 388.

  In 383, however, Gratian’s regime was directly challenged by a revolt in Britain in favour of a general of Spanish origin by the name of Magnus Maximus, to whose colours Gratian’s troops rapidly defected. This left Britain, Gaul, and Spain in the effective control of an usurper, and the court of Valentinian II isolated in Italy. Maximus appealed for recognition to the new eastern emperor, Theodosius I, who had succeeded Valens in 379. This recognition was withheld. In 387, Maximus crossed the Alps to take control of Italy and Africa, an act which, in 388, led Theodosius to invade the West in support of Valentinian. Maximus was defeated, captured, and executed. Valentinian II was sent off to Gaul to establish his court at Vienne. There he remained a puppet of his eastern colleague, to whom he owed his throne.

  Imperial group seated in their box (kathisma) in the hippodrome, receiving the tribute of kneeling barbarians. Pedestal of Egyptian obelisk in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. AD 390.

  In 392, evidently dispirited by his powerlessness, Valentinian II took his own life. This in turn led to another civil war, as Arbogast, commander of the western army, sought to place on the throne an ally of his by the name of Eugenius. Theodosius responded in 394 by leading yet another campaign westwards. The emperor was successful in defeating the usurper, but himself died in 395, dividing the empire between his two sons—Honorius in the West and Arcadius in the East.

  The period between the death of Valentinian I and that of Theodosius I was in many ways a pivotal one for the evolving relationship between the eastern and western provinces of the Roman empire. Valentinian I’s succession in the West by the ineffectual Gratian and Valentinian II, had meant that the governing classes of the western provinces, particularly in Britain and Gaul, had been left without a figure of sufficient personal authority or prestige to take effective charge of military affairs. The support given first to Maximus, and subsequently to Eugenius, demonstrated an increasing readiness on the part of the leaders of western society to follow usurpers, if those usurpers could offer them the leadership they required. This weakening of imperial government in the west was to become still more pronounced in the years that followed the division of the empire in 395, exacerbated as it was by two phenomena.

  The column of Arcadius at Constantinople drawn in 1574. A close imitation of the ‘historiated’ columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius in Rome, this column celebrated the defeat of the rebellious Gothic general Gainas in 400. The shaft of the column was dismantled in the early eighteenth century. Only the pedestal remains today, bereft of its reliefs.

  Marble head of the emperor Arcadius as a young man found near the Forum of Theodosius I at Constantinople, c. AD 395.

  As has been seen, the military security of the Roman world was highly sensitive to developments amongst the various barbarian peoples to the north of the Rhine and Danube. These tribal groupings were themselves highly vulnerable to any threat from the world of the Eurasian steppe—the plains and grasslands that stretched from the east of the Pannonian plain, across the region to the north of the Black Sea, to the distant marchlands of China. Instability on the Eurasian steppe could lead to the westward migration of highly mobile nomadic groups, which might in turn either come to exercise mastery over the trans-Danubian world, or force the barbarians already resident there to seek to cross into Roman territory. In the course of the fourth century, groups of nomadic barbarians known to us as the Huns began just such a westward migration, one that was to cast into turmoil the world to the north of the Roman empire.

  Some time before the mid-370s, the Huns appear to have established a power-base for themselves to the north of the Black Sea coast and to the east of the Carpathian mountains, first subduing the Alans, and subsequently coming into conflict with the Germanic Gothic tribes which had hitherto dominated the region. In 376 large numbers of Gothic refugees arrived on the northern bank of the river Danube. From there they sent requests to the emperor Valens, asking that they be permitted to settle within the Roman empire, offering their military service in return for land. Valens acceded to these petitions. The Gothic settlers were, however, mistreated by the Roman commanders in the region, leading in 378 to a large-scale uprising of the Visigoths under the leadership of a certain Fritigern. On 9 August, in a major engagement to the north of Adrianople, the Gothic host defeated a 40,000-strong Roman army. Two-thirds of the army was slaughtered, along with the emperor Valens himself. Although Theodosius was subsequently able to restore peace, settling the Visigoths in the western Balkans, the standoff was an uneasy one.

  Between 395 and 410 this situation again deteriorated. The death of Theodosius I vitiated relations in two key respects. First, Theodosius’ appointed heir in the west, Honorius, was only 10 years old at the time of his accession. His court came to be dominated by the commander of the western army—a general of barbarian origin by the name of Stilicho, a man with a reputation for hostility towards the Visigoths. Second, the demise of Theodosius presented the Visigoths, under their new leader Alaric, with the opportunity to attempt to secure ever better terms from the Romans. To this end they made periodic attacks on Roman positions in the Balkans and, increasingly, Italy. In Constantinople, the result was an anti-Gothic backlash, culminating in the year 400 with the massacre of the Gothic garrison in the city.

  Ivory diptych depicting Stilicho, general-in-chief and virtual ruler of the western empire, his wife Serena, and son Eucherius. The last, who was to be murdered in 408, is holding the codicils of his appointment to the honorific office of ‘tribune and notary’.

  In the West, Stilicho responded to these attacks with a series of ultimately inconclusive campaigns. Eventually, in 407, he felt obliged to come to terms with the Visigoths, offering them subsidies, payments, and honours. Here too, however, an anti-barbarian reaction appears to have taken place. In 408, Stilicho and his supporters were executed, bringing the continued existence of the western court’s pact with the Visigoths into question. In order to apply pressure on the western regime, Alaric led his army into Italy. As negotiations floundered, in 410 he and his troops sacked the city of Rome. By virtue of Theodosius I’s settlement of the Visigoths in the western Balkans, what had begun as a crisis for the empire in the East, was increasingly becoming a fullblown crisis in the West.

  The Goths were not the only barbarian people to enter Roman territory at this time. By the early years of the fifth century, the Huns appear to have established themselves to the west of the Carpathian mountains, intensifying barbarian pressure, not least on the Rhine frontier. In 405 Rada
gaisus, the chief of yet another Gothic army, led his troops into Italy. On 31 December 406 the frozen river Rhine was traversed by a host of barbarian peoples including Vandals, Sueves, and Alans. Radagaisus was defeated and executed outside Florence in 406. But the raiders from across the Rhine extended their incursions until, by 409, they were able to strike into Spain. In 412, the Visigoths, under the leadership of Alaric’s successor, Ataulf, crossed the Alps and established themselves in southern Gaul. By the second decade of the fifth century, much of the western empire was in the grip of a severe military paralysis. Barbarian armies were operative in Gaul and Spain and were heading towards Africa, which the Vandals were to conquer in 439. In 407 the mobile field army had been withdrawn from Britain, never to return.

  What is perhaps most striking about this crisis is the inability of the Roman field armies successfully to meet the barbarian challenge. The presence of the Gothic host in Italy in the first decade of the fifth century necessarily meant that the imperial authorities were too preoccupied with events within the peninsula to concentrate effectively on the situation in Gaul. Since 395, the court had moved first to Milan, and subsequently, in 402, to Ravenna, so as better to address the Visigothic challenge. Accordingly, military commanders and imperial officials in the remaining western provinces were obliged to fall back upon their own resources. But the feebleness of the imperial response to military events in the west after 406 was a result of more than a mere distancing of imperial power. Rather, it is clear that the imperial army in the West did not possess the resources required to mount a sustained defence.

  This was due to social and economic processes resultant from the emergence of the new aristocracy of service of the fourth century. As members of this new elite entrenched their social and political authority, so too did they expand their landed estates at the expense of lesser, more humble members of provincial society. This process is reflected in the fourth-century ‘villa boom’ which archaeologists have identified in the western provinces, as well as in what one scholar has described as the ‘snowballing’ of aristocratic fortunes attested in the sources. The same pattern is recorded in the East, where a series of surviving imperial laws dating from the fourth and fifth centuries attempted to limit the phenomenon. These laws are highly suggestive, for the imperial authorities claimed that wealthy landowners were using their influence and prestige to engage in large-scale tax evasion.

  Diminishing tax revenues necessarily undermined the fiscal basis of the Roman state and, in particular, hamstrung the military, which was the main recipient of imperial expenditure. Due to this, the western imperial authorities in the early fifth century were increasingly incapable of raising the revenues required to support the standing army.

  The colossus of Barletta, bronze statue probably of the emperor Leo I (45774), taken from Constantinople after 1204 and shipwrecked on the coast of Barletta, where it has remained ever since. The arms and legs were added during the Renaissance.

  Paralysed both by the proximity of the barbarian threat and its inability to meet it, the western court became more and more of an irrelevance as the fifth century progressed. Imperial officials found themselves obliged to cut deals with the barbarians so as to have access to at least some sort of military force. Thus, for example, in 418 the Visigoths were settled in Aquitaine, establishing a kingdom at Toulouse. In return for this settlement they agreed to protect the region from the depredations of other barbarian groups. Accordingly, the courts of the barbarian leaders came to serve as the main focus for the political ambitions of the leading members of western provincial society. The imperial court at Ravenna receded from sight. By the mid-fifth century only Italy was under effective imperial control.

  Yet even in Italy, the military situation was precarious. In 452 the leader of the Huns, the infamous Attila, led an army into the peninsula that was, to all intents and purposes, unopposed. In 455 Rome was sacked once more, this time by the Vandals. As the western court became increasingly emasculated, so too did the very concept of the western imperium come to seem expendable. In 467–8, when the western crown passed to an eastern placeman by the name of Anthemius, the imperial prefect in Gaul advised the Visigothic king Euric to reject the new emperor and divide Gaul between himself and the king of the Burgundians. Likewise, in a palace coup in the year 476, Romulus, the last of the Roman emperors in the West, was deposed by his barbarian general Odoacer. Odoacer set himself up as king in Italy and informed Constantinople that there was now no longer any need for a separate emperor in Ravenna. Titular authority in the region could pass to the eastern Augustus, a legal fiction that masked the emergence in the West of autonomous barbarian kingdoms which were now the successors to Rome.

  If the fifth century proved to be a fatal one for the structures of imperial government in the western provinces of the Roman empire, the situation in the East was rather less cataclysmic. This fact was primarily due to the greater military security of the eastern empire at this time. The migration of the Visigoths, combined with the increasingly westward-looking nature of Hunnic military activity, meant that the barbarian question was of less urgency in fifth-century Constantinople than in Ravenna. Even so, there was little the imperial authorities could do to prevent Hun incursions into the Balkans. After the death of Attila in 453, and the subsequent collapse of Hunnic power, they were obliged to permit the settlement in the northern Balkans of a large and potentially dangerous Ostrogothic confederation made up of former subjects of the Huns. Eventually, in the year 489, the bulk of the Ostrogoths, under the leadership of Theoderic, were persuaded to march west to depose Odoacer from control in Italy. There, Theoderic set up a new regime, one which paid lip-service to imperial suzerainty, but little more.

  Crucially, the fifth century saw a period of détente in Roman–Persian relations. Both settled empires were fully aware of the great threat posed to them by the disturbed nature of conditions on the Eurasian steppe. In such circumstances, co-operation was felt to be imperative. Nevertheless, it is important not to exaggerate the strength of the eastern empire in the fifth century and as it entered the sixth. The imperial authorities in the East were unable to make any substantial contribution to the defence of the West. The legal sources for the eastern empire, along with the surviving documentary evidence from Egypt, suggest that, as in the West, emperors in Constantinople were fighting a losing battle against the expansion of aristocratic estates and tax evasion on the part of their owners. Political conditions within Constantinople were periodically unstable, and the reign of the emperor Zeno (474–91) in particular was punctuated by a series of conspiracies and revolts.

  This undermining of imperial authority was intensified by two further developments. First, ever since the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Church in the East had found itself racked by disputes as to the nature of the relationship between the divine and the human within the person of Christ. The definition of this relationship established at the council met sustained resistance from the leaders of the Church in Egypt and Syria. The refusal of large sections of the Church in the East to accept the theological formula laid down at Chalcedon constituted a direct challenge to imperial power, a challenge to which emperors responded by means of limited persecution, cajoling, and attempted compromise, none of which had any lasting effect. The emperor Anastasius (491–518), who sympathized with anti-Chalcedonian sentiment, excited the hostility of the pro-Chalcedonian faction. The dispute appeared to be as intractable as it was debilitating.

  Second, the early sixth century saw the return of the Persian menace. In 484 the Sasanian shah Peroz found himself humiliated at the hands of a group of Huns known as the ‘Hephthalite’ or ‘White Huns’, who defeated him in battle and made the Persian empire their tributary. In 502/3, the shah Kavad sought to restore the fortunes of his dynasty by once more waging war on Rome, seizing the frontier post of Amida. Whilst Anastasius was ultimately able to force back the Persian advance, the re-emergence of a bellicose enemy to the empire’s
east can only have revived insecurity.

  Facing. Aerial view of St Sophia from the south-east.

  Each and every one of these challenges to imperial authority elicited an energetic response during the early years of the reign of the emperor Justinian. His accession heralded the most determined period of rulership the Roman world had witnessed since the days of Diocletian. Between the years 527 and 541, he undertook no less a project than the complete reconstruction of the Roman state. Justinian came to the throne as sole emperor in August of 527, succeeding his elderly uncle Justin. Like his uncle, Justinian was a military man, who appears to have gained the throne primarily on the basis of military support and may thus have been viewed with some suspicion by aristocratic circles in Constantinople. It was therefore vital that the new emperor assert his authority as rapidly as possible.

  The reforms initiated by Justinian in the period 527–41 should be viewed as a whole. Like the dome of his great monument in Constantinople, the Church of Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia, the overarching concept of the reassertion of imperial dignity was dependent upon the supporting substructures of a disorientatingly diverse range of policies that encompassed religion, the law, provincial administration, fiscal policy, and imperial ideology.

  Justinian’s first priority was to reassert imperial control over the religious lives of his subjects. Amongst the first acts of the new emperor in the year 528–9 were measures instituting the concerted persecution of surviving pagans amongst the upper classes, as well as heretics and homosexuals. Likewise, the year 532 saw the first of Justinian’s repeated efforts to reconcile the pro- and anti-Chalcedonian elements within the Church. This attempt combined an apparently genuine effort to establish a theological position with which all could concur and a ruthless determination to punish and exclude those individual bishops who had led resistance to the imperial authorities. At the same time, the emperor sought to provide an ideological justification for the active part he was determined to play in the religious life of his subjects. More explicitly than any emperor before him, Justinian asserted that the authority of the emperor and the authority of the priesthood derived from a common divine source, and that it was the responsibility of the emperor alone to regulate priesthood and Church alike. Imperial ceremonial adopted an increasingly religious tone, emphasizing the unique place of the emperor at the intersection of the divine and earthly hierarchies of power.