The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  Meanwhile many of the Turks known as Bulgars, whom their fellow Turks the Khazars had attacked from the east, crossed the Danube and migrated into Thrace. Though they were occupying land inhabited by Slavs and outside Byzantine control, Constantine realized that the Bulgars would make troublesome neighbours, and marched against them. At first he forced them back to the Danube delta. But when he withdrew from the campaign because of an attack of gout, his troops panicked and fled, and the Bulgars defeated them.

  Greatly eroded relief of a mounted figure followed by a dog on a vertical cliff face at Madara, near the Protobulgarian capital of Pliska. Next to the horseman are inscriptions in Greek in honour of the khans Tervel, Kormisos, and Omurtag. Early eighth to early ninth century.

  The Bulgars quickly established themselves in northern Thrace, taking a few coastal towns that had been Byzantine. Constantine agreed to a peace that recognized their new borders, and as a defence against them created a new Theme of Thrace from the territory of the Opsician Theme. He must have felt that one war of attrition was all the empire could handle at the time; he could hardly have foreseen that the Bulgars would outlast the Arabs as a danger.

  Constantine soon made further gains against the Arabs, who were fighting amongst themselves in new civil wars. At the Armenians’ request, he restored the Byzantine protectorate over much of Armenia, and retook Cilicia and the border regions that he had lost at the beginning of his reign. In 685, he concluded another truce with the Arabs, just before he died. A scarcely less shadowy figure than his father, he had had similar success, against similarly formidable opposition. While avoiding warfare when he could, he had handled the Arabs, the Bulgars, and his own subjects creditably. He died fairly young, but he died in bed, which was itself something of an accomplishment at the time.

  Constantine’s 16-year-old son Justinian II became the fourth emperor in a row to take power in his teens. Like his father and grandfather, he was capable, but with the Arab onslaught in abeyance he was more confident about the empire’s future. He saw that it would survive as a great power, but he seems not to have seen that it was still far weaker than the caliphate. Awareness of the vast achievements of his namesake Justinian I also appears to have made Justinian overly ambitious in his plans. Yet he is hard to judge, because our sources, though slightly more informative than before, are clearly unfair to him.

  Without formally breaking his father’s treaty with the squabbling Arabs, Justinian kept jockeying for advantage. He strengthened his control over Armenia. By agreement with the caliph, he received from Syria some Christian mountaineers known as Mardaïtes, who had long raided within the caliphate. Justinian now made them oarsmen for the Carabisian Theme, and probably also for a new Theme of Hellas that he created in Greece. He campaigned against the Slavs of Thrace, capturing a large number of them to enrol as soldiers in the Opsician Theme.

  The emperor seems to have liked to resettle people, because he also deported much of the population of Cyprus to the devastated region around Cyzicus, which he refounded under the name of Justinianopolis. Then he provoked a war with the Arabs. In 691 he minted new coins marked with a bust of Christ, demanding that the Arabs use them to pay their tribute. With the Arab civil war dying down, the caliph refused to use the coins, invaded Anatolia, and defeated the Byzantine army when its unwilling Slavic recruits deserted to him. The Armenians submitted to the Arabs not long afterwards.

  Justinian then decided to seek glory by other means than warfare. He held a church council, known as the Quinisext (Fifth–Sixth) because it was supposed to complete the preceding fifth and sixth ecumenical councils. Yet it included no western bishops, and offended his western subjects by mandating various eastern church customs that the West did not share. The emperor also began to add buildings to the imperial palace in Constantinople. Justinian’s military campaigns had already led him to resort to rigorous taxation and even confiscation from his wealthier subjects, and his building programme caused further exactions.

  In 695 some disgruntled aristocrats organized a conspiracy that overthrew Justinian, slit his nose, and replaced him with a general whom he had earlier disgraced, Leontius. The revolution was an inauspicious one. Although Justinian had sometimes been reckless, on the whole he had been competent, and his hereditary right to rule was clear. Leontius, while intelligent and vigorous, was only the second deposer of a legitimate emperor in Byzantine history, and the disastrous precedent was Phokas in 602. Without a strong hereditary ruler, the danger that the themes would rebel became much greater, at a time when the Arabs were resurgent.

  The caliph soon struck at Byzantine Africa, where his troops seized Carthage in 697. Leontius promptly sent a naval expedition to recover the city, and it did so, but the next year the Arabs drove it out again. The defeated Byzantine force sailed back to Crete, where, rather than face responsibility for its defeat, it proclaimed an officer of the Carabisian Theme as emperor. Then the rebels sailed to Constantinople, besieged the city, and forced their way in. They slit Leontius’ nose and installed their candidate as Tiberius III.

  With scarcely anything to justify his usurpation, Tiberius tried to win an easy victory by raiding Arab Syria. The caliph, who had finished taking Byzantine Africa, retaliated by attacking the empire’s eastern frontier. In 702 the Armenians rebelled against the caliphate, but despite Tiberius’ best efforts the Arabs soon conquered both Armenia and some adjacent Byzantine territory. Meanwhile the deposed Justinian II escaped from Byzantine Crimea, where he had been exiled, and made his way first to the Khazars and then to the Bulgars, where the Bulgar khan gave him an army to lead against Constantinople. Contriving to enter, Justinian captured Tiberius and reclaimed his throne.

  Mutilation and exile had obviously not improved Justinian’s temper, but he acted more prudently after his restoration than might have been expected. Though he executed both Tiberius and Leontius, his own example had shown that mutilation was not enough to keep an emperor deposed. He soon became embroiled in wars with the Arabs and his recent allies the Bulgars, but he held his own until his former place of exile in the Crimea revolted against him with help from the Khazars. A naval expedition that he sent against the Crimea, presumably involving the Carabisian Theme, joined the rebels in proclaiming a new emperor, Philippicus. In 711 Philippicus sailed to Constantinople and overthrew and beheaded Justinian.

  The least impressive usurper to date, Philippicus tried to repudiate the anti-Monothelete Sixth Ecumenical Council, which was unpopular in his native Armenia. He fared poorly in wars with the Arabs and Bulgars, and after two years was blinded by the Count of the Opsician Theme. But the head of the imperial chancery outmanoeuvred the count, whom he blinded in his turn, taking the crown for himself. The new emperor, Anastasius II, was a man of marked ability, who could say that he was not a rebel and in fact had punished one. Nonetheless, after five rebellions, overthrowing emperors had almost become a custom.

  By this time the caliph, seeing the Byzantines in such disarray, was planning an attempt to take Constantinople outright. The Arabs advanced along the coast and through the interior of Anatolia. Anastasius strengthened the fortifications of the capital, and sent an army to Rhodes to attack the Arabs in 715. Once arrived there, however, some soldiers from the Opsician Theme led a revolt against Anastasius, perhaps in revenge for his having blinded their count two years before.

  The rebels returned, besieged Constantinople, and installed yet another emperor, the reluctant Theodosius III. Though Anastasius agreed to abdicate and become a monk, with the Arabs swarming over Anatolia the Anatolic and Armeniac themes refused to accept Theodosius. They proclaimed the Anatolic strategos emperor as Leo III. Amid mounting chaos, Theodosius too abdicated and became a cleric in 717, and Leo entered Constantinople, not very far ahead of the Arabs.

  Leo III took over an empire shaken by seven violent revolutions in twentytwo years and a recent civil war, and facing the most formidable assault on its capital it had ever seen. He had only a few months to pr
epare before an immense Arab army and navy, reportedly of 120,000 men and 1,800 ships, arrived to put the city under siege. The Arabs built a fortified camp that extended the full distance of the land walls, and had the ships to blockade the city by sea as well. If the capital fell, the rest of Anatolia was likely to follow, and the rest of the empire not much later.

  No sooner had the Arab fleet arrived, however, than the Byzantines attacked it with Greek Fire. The losses the Arabs suffered frightened them into keeping the rest of their ships in port, so that the Byzantines could resupply the city by sea. Leo had made an alliance with the Bulgar khan, who sent raiders to harry the foraging parties of the Arabs. It proved extremely difficult to supply the huge Arab army with food. The winter was unusually bitter, tormenting the Arabs in their camp with unaccustomed snow and cold. Many of the besiegers died.

  In spring 718 the caliph sent a new army and fleet as reinforcements. But when the fleet arrived, many of its crewmen, who were Egyptian or African Christians, deserted to the emperor. Leo ambushed the reinforcing army as it approached Constantinople, and its survivors fled without ever crossing the Bosphorus. The remaining besiegers, suffering from hunger, disease, and Bulgar raids, raised their siege after thirteen months. Though their army evacuated Anatolia without opposition, most of their fleet succumbed to storms, Byzantine attacks, and a volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea as the ships passed by. Duly impressed by their devastating failure, the Arabs never made a serious effort to take Constantinople again.

  Even if Byzantium had survived the worst the Arabs could do, its troubles were far from over. The caliphate was still much stronger than the empire. Though Leo III plainly owed his victory not only to luck but to his talents and resolve, the very next year the deposed emperor Anastasius II tried to overthrow him with the support of the Opsician Theme and the Bulgars, and nearly succeeded. Byzantine Italy had rebelled during the siege, and some of it, including Sardinia, was lost for good. Byzantine attempts to regain some eastern border territory came to nothing, and the Arabs soon resumed raiding Anatolia as before.

  Inscription in the walls of Nicaea in the names of Leo III, Constantine V, and the curopalate Artabasdos commemmorating the deliverance of that city from the Arabs ‘with divine help’ in 727.

  Like many Byzantines, Leo seems to have attributed Byzantine failures since the rise of the Arabs to divine anger. But he was not quite sure in what respect the empire was displeasing God. First Leo tried forcing the empire’s Jews to convert to Christianity. Probably in the spring of 726, he issued a short new law code, the Ecloga, full of such biblically inspired prescriptions as the death penalty for homosexual acts (Romans 1: 24–32) and bodily mutilation for many other crimes (Matthew 5: 29–30, Mark 9: 43–8). Leo also began to think that the Byzantines’ habit of venerating religious pictures might break the biblical commandment against idolatry. When the volcano in the Aegean erupted again in the summer of 726, Leo ordered his soldiers to take down the icon of Christ over the palace gate (see Chapter 6).

  Though apparently surprised that this act provoked a riot, the emperor seems to have issued an edict against icons the same year. In 727 the Carabisian Theme and the Theme of Hellas rebelled against him, possibly because of the edict; but he defeated them. In 730 he banned all icons. The patriarch Germanus abdicated in protest, and Pope Gregory III declared Iconoclasm a heresy, opening a schism with Byzantium and virtually declaring his independence. Leo sent a naval expedition against Rome that failed, but he deprived the papacy of jurisdiction over southern Italy and Greece, assigning them to the patriarchate of Constantinople. In political terms, Iconoclasm seemed a dead loss, though Leo chose to give it credit for a victory he won over Arab raiders in 740.

  In 741 Leo managed to die of natural causes while still reigning, as his six predecessors had failed to do. He had certainly improved upon their record. He had kept his nerve during the terrible Arab siege of Constantinople, and afterwards had slowly restored the empire’s defences. A good ruler, if not a great one, he had shown enough moderation in his Iconoclasm to limit its ill effects. His reign had been the longest since that of Constans II, who had himself been assassinated, and he left a son, Constantine V, old enough to rule at age 22.

  Leo had at least broken the cycle of revolutions that had encouraged the Arabs to think they could destroy the empire. Yet he had found no lasting solution to the problem of rebellious themes. Within a month of his death, his son and heir Constantine V was attacked by Artavasdos, Leo’s son-in-law and Count of the Opsician Theme. Artavasdos defeated Constantine, seized Constantinople, and held it for two years before Constantine managed to starve him out, retake the city, and blind him in 743.

  Not long after putting down the revolt, the emperor broke up Artavasdos’ Opsician Theme, the empire’s largest, which had rebelled so many times. He apparently reassigned more than half its men to six new units called tagmata (‘regiments’). These were stationed in and around the capital, some on the territory of the Opsician Theme and Theme of Thrace. The three principal tagmata were the Scholae, the Excubitors, and the Watch, previously companies of guards that had long declined into unimportance. Their commanders, most of them styled domestics, were directly responsible to the emperor.

  Even if Constantine V founded the tagmata primarily to weaken the Opsician Theme, as Constans II had founded the themes to save money, they turned out, like the themes, to have incidental military advantages. While tagmatic soldiers appear to have held military lands like those of thematic soldiers, they were more mobile troops, intended more for offensive campaigns than for garrison duty. Constantine seems to have used them for the first time to conquer land on the Thracian frontier from the Slavs, and then to capture Christian settlers in the Arab borderlands for resettlement in this new land in Thrace.

  The creation of the tagmata and the successes he gained with them won Constantine the loyalty of most of his troops, but the policy of Iconoclasm he had inherited from his father made him unpopular with many people in the empire and almost everyone abroad. In 751 the Lombards took Ravenna and the tiny Exarchate around it. Byzantine rule in Italy lapsed outside the far south, which was already a separate Theme of Sicily, and a few practically independent enclaves, like Naples and Venetia. Iconoclasm had put Byzantium in schism not only with the whole western Church but with the orthodox patriarchates of the East. Nothing daunted, Constantine held a council in 754 that proclaimed venerating icons to be heretical.

  Constantine’s expansion in Thrace, though it came only at the expense of the Slavs, alarmed the nearby and much stronger Bulgars. They began to raid across the frontier. In 759 the emperor retaliated with a full-scale campaign, defeating the Bulgars in a bloody battle and forcing them to make a truce. When they repudiated this truce four years later, Constantine attacked again, and again won a hard-fought victory. He prepared a land and sea expedition against them once more in 766, only to have his fleet wrecked by a storm. Though undefeated in the war, he had lost a good many men for no particular advantage.

  Returning to Constantinople, Constantine discovered a formidable iconophile conspiracy against him. Its ringleaders were some of his most powerful civil officials and military commanders, including the strategoi of the Opsician Theme and the Theme of Thrace and the Domestic of the Excubitors. He executed or blinded the lot of them, and executed the patriarch of Constantinople the next year for complicity in the plot. Appointing new and more loyal officers, Constantine intensified his persecution of iconophiles, and his favour to iconoclasts.

  Though the Arabs were raiding Anatolia again, Constantine concentrated his efforts on the Bulgars. He defeated them once, in 774, but the next spring another storm damaged the fleet he was sending against them. Then the Bulgar khan tricked him into revealing the names of the Byzantine spies in Bulgaria, whom the Bulgars killed. Constantine led another expedition against them in the autumn, but before reaching Bulgar territory he suddenly fell ill and died.

  An effective general but no diploma
t, Constantine had won a generally good reputation among his soldiers and bitter hatred among iconophiles, who still appear to have been in the majority in the Church and the bureaucracy. Although his harsh enforcement of Iconoclasm and neglect of the West contributed to the empire’s definitive loss of central Italy, his creation of the tagmata and military efforts had won some modest gains in Thrace from the Bulgars and allowed some easy raids on the territory of the squabbling Arabs. Of his two main legacies, the strength of the tagmata proved to be more lasting than the divisiveness of Iconoclasm.

  For only the second time since 641, the succession was uneventful, as the crown passed to Constantine’s oldest son Leo IV. Though his enemies gossiped that Constantine had homosexual tendencies, he had married three times and left five sons besides Leo. The year after his accession, Leo had to suppress a plot by his bodyguards to replace him with one of his brothers. The emperor tried to calm the passions aroused by his father’s iconoclast measures by appointing monks and even some secret iconophiles as bishops. But in 780 Leo was enraged to discover that members of his household had supplied icons to his own wife Irene. Soon after punishing them and banishing her from his bed, he died under suspicious circumstances, leaving her to rule for their young son.

  By 780 Byzantium had emerged from a horrendous period of military defeat and internal unrest to regain a measure of stability and security. Its losses to the Arabs had been catastrophic, and the Bulgars and especially the Arabs remained fearsome enemies. After so many examples of successful revolts, Byzantine emperors were in much greater danger of deposition than they had been before 602. Yet in the themes and the tagmata the emperors had found a means of defending most of their territory. Once divided into smaller units, the themes were less likely to rebel, or to prevail if they did. Although Byzantium could expect many trials to come, for the present it no longer had to struggle for bare survival. The immediate danger of collapse, anarchy, or complete conquest by enemies had passed. After so many perils, reaching this point of safety was no mean accomplishment.