Agent of Byzantium

by Harry Turtledove

  The day after peace—more a peace of exhaustion than anything else—returned to the city, word came of disorders in Antioch, the third city of the Empire.

  George Lakhanodrakon summoned Argyros that afternoon. The magistrianos was shocked to see how worn he looked; although Master of Offices was not a military post, Lakhanodrakon was a member of the Emperor’s Consistory and had had to attend privy council meetings day and night. He also oversaw the civil servants who prepared orders and recorded testimony, all of whom had been overworked in the emergency.

  “You should rest, sir,” Argyros said.

  “So I should,” Lakhanodrakon agreed. “I should also exercise until I lose this belly of mine, should learn better Latin to go with my Greek, and should do a great many other things I have no time for.”

  No doubt one of the things he had no time for was well-meaning but useless suggestions. The magistrianos flushed, expecting a dressing-down.

  But his superior surprised him, asking, out of the blue it seemed, “Basil, where do you stand on this fight over the images?”

  “For them, I suppose,” Argyros said after a moment’s hesitation. “I’m no Jew, to say an icon is a graven image. And since it was a breaker of images (is ‘iconoclast’ a word?) who started the troubles here, I can’t look kindly on their cause—all the more so because I had my head split in the brawl.”

  “I happen to agree with you,” Lakhanodrakon said. “I respect the tradition of the church, and icons have been a part of it for many, many years. Still, you’ll find honest men who think we’re wrong. In Consistory the other day, the Count of the excubitores called icons a pagan holdover and said that was reason enough to suppress them.”

  “It must have made quelling the riot interesting, if you couldn’t decide which faction to put down,” Argyros said dryly.

  The Master of Offices rolled his eyes. “Joke all you like, but it’s nothing to laugh at. Both sides can’t be right: either it’s proper to give reverence to icons, or it’s not. The Emperor and the patriarch have to lay down the proper doctrine for the people to follow. We can’t have icons destroyed here and hallowed there. One Empire, one faith.”

  “Of course,” Argyros nodded. “Since there can be only one true creed, everyone should follow it.” In theory, as Lakhanodrakon had said, the whole Empire worshiped as Constantinople decreed. In fact, heresy persisted in Egypt, in Syria, in the western provinces reconquered from their German kings—Italia, Ispania, Africa, Narbonese Gallia. Only fitting to root it out wherever it sprang up.

  “You have a good knowledge of the inner learning, Basil,” Lakhanodrakon said. “If you were going to justify the use of images in worship, how would you go about it?”

  The magistrianos considered. As George Lakhanodrakon had said, he knew his theology; only in the barbarous lands of northwest Europe was such wisdom reserved for priests. He said, “Of course the argument that an icon is a graven image falls to the ground as soon as it is made. The Pauline dispensation frees us from the rigor of the Jewish law. I would say the chief value of images is to remind us of the holy ones they represent—Christ, the Virgin, or a saint. When we look at an icon, we contemplate the figure behind the portrait. Also, icons teach the truths of the faith to those who cannot read Scripture.”

  The Master of Offices had been jotting down notes. “That last is a good point; I don’t recall it coming up in any of the council meetings I’ve attended. I’ll pass it on to the patriarch. Have no fear, I’ll mention whose suggestion it was.”

  “You’re very kind, your illustriousness,” Argyros said, and meant it. Most imperial officers would have appropriated both the idea and the credit that went with it. Then the import of what Lakhanodrakon had said hit him. “The patriarch is collecting arguments in favor of icons?”

  “Sharp as usual, aren’t you?” The Master of Offices was smiling. “Yes, so he is, to be ready in case of need. One of the options raised for putting an end to this quarrel over images is for the Emperor to convene an ecumenical council.”

  Argyros whistled, soft and low. “They’re taking it as seriously as that, then?” Ecumenical councils were watersheds in the history of the church; in the thousand years since Constantine the Great, only nine had been called. Groups that refused to accept their decrees passed into heresy: notably the Nestorians of Syria, with their undue emphasis on Christ’s humanity; and the Monophysites, strong in Egypt and all through the Roman east, when the council of Chalcedon would not accept the way they overstressed His divinity.

  “I think the Emperor was going to wait and see if things blew over,” Lakhanodrakon said, “until last night. That was when the grand logothete called the city prefect a filthy pagan-minded heretic and broke a crystal decanter over his head.”

  “Oh, my,” the magistrianos said, blinking.

  “Yes. Officially, of course, the prefect fell down a flight of stairs, and don’t forget it—the saints have mercy on you if you go around telling the other tale. But it was about then that Nikephoros decided a council might not be out of place.”

  “When will the order summoning the bishops go out?” Argyros asked.

  “Soon, I think. It’s late July now—or has August started yet? In any case, fall will be starting by the time prelates in places like Carthage and Rome and Ispania receive the call. By then it will be too late for them to travel—no ships will be sailing till spring. I imagine the synod will be held then.”

  “Good. We’ll have some time to prepare a solid theological case.”

  “Among other preparations,” the Master of Offices said with a grin. Ecumenical councils were as much exercises in practical politics as they were religious disputes. Most of the time, they ran as the Emperors who called them wanted them to. Nikephoros III was a thorough ruler; he would have no intention of letting this one go wrong.

  Lakhanodrakon went on, “Write me a statement giving your views on the icons; let me have it some time in the next couple of weeks. I’ll convey it to the patriarch, as I said. Don’t expect any immediate acknowledgment, though—it won’t be the only document he’s getting, I’m sure.”

  “I daresay.” Everyone in the city who fancied himself a theologian—which meant, for all practical purposes, everyone in the city who could write—would be sending impassioned missives to the patriarchal residence attached to Hagia Sophia. Most of them, as was the way of such things, would end up in braziers or have their ink scraped off so they could be reused.

  Lakhanodrakon made a gesture of dismissal, saying, “I’ll look forward to seeing that commentary of yours.” Argyros bowed his way out, then hotfooted it over to the library in Hagia Sophia: best to start taking notes before half the tomes he needed disappeared.

  The magistrianos submitted his long memorandum on the icons to George Lakhanodrakon. He was proud of the document, which he had thickly studded with quotations from such venerable authorities as St. John Chrysostom, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Sophronios of Jerusalem, St. Athanasios of Alexandria, and the church historian Eusebios, who had been at the very first ecumenical council, the one Constantine had convened at Nikaia.

  While he worked and afterward, reports of strife over the images kept coming into Constantinople. A riot convulsed Ephesos, with half the town burnt. Several monasteries were sacked outside of Tarsos when the monks refused to yield up their icons. The Jewish quarter of Neaplis in Italia was plundered because the Neaplitans blamed the Jews, who rejected images for their own reasons, for stirring up iconoclasm in the first place.

  It was almost a relief when the stormy season set in and news grew harder to acquire. One of the last grain ships from Alexandria brought word that Arsakios, the patriarch of that city, had convened a local synod there to try to settle the issue for his ecclesiastical province. No one on the big merchantman knew how the synod had come out; it had still been going on when they sailed.

  Argyros wondered how much the gathering could accomplish. The patriarchate of Alexandria leaned over backward to avoid
antagonizing the Monophysites, who were probably a majority in Egypt, and the Monophysites had always opposed images. As their name implied, they felt Christ had but one nature, the divine, after the Incarnation, with His humanity entirely subsumed. And since God by definition was uncircumscribable, the Monophysites rejected all attempts to portray Christ.

  Come to think of it, the magistrianos remembered, that was the line the Egyptian monk Sasopis had taken. Despite Argyros’s best efforts, the devil seemed to have vanished into thin air. Probably, the magistrianos thought gloomily, he was halfway across the Empire by now, spreading trouble as he wandered from town to town.

  As winter wore on, Argyros forgot about Sasopis. The Master of Offices shared responsibility with the patriarch for lodging the bishops during the upcoming council, for one of his duties was seeing to embassies that came to Constantinople. George Lakhanodrakon passed the job on to Argyros, who went through the city checking on available cells in monasteries and on grander quarters for the more important or more luxury-minded prelates.

  “After all this running about, the council itself will be a relief,” he told the Master of Offices one cold February day.

  “That’s as it should be,” Lakhanodrakon replied calmly. “Let the country bumpkins from Sicily or Rome see the proper way to do things. If everything is planned well in advance, it will go properly when the crucial moment comes and there’s no more time for planning.”

  “You’re not the one getting blisters,” Argyros muttered, too low for his boss to hear. But that was unfair, and he knew it. Lakhanodrakon was doing enough work for two men, each half his age.

  The first bishops began arriving in mid-April, a bit earlier than the Master of Offices had expected. Thanks to his elaborate preparations, though, they were housed without difficulty.

  There were representatives from all five patriachates: that of Constantinople, of course, and Antioch, Jerusalem, Rome, and Alexandria. The Alexandrian contingent, led by Arsakios himself, was the last sizable one to reach the imperial capital. The Egyptians virtually took over the monastery of Stoudios, in the southwestern part of the city. They behaved as if it were a citadel under siege, not a place of worship and contemplation. Muscular monks armed with very stout walkingsticks constantly patrolled the grounds, glowering at passersby.

  “Egyptians!” Lakhanodrakon snorted when that was reported to him. “They always act as though they think it would pollute them to have anything to do with anyone else.”

  “Yes, sir,” Argyros said, but inside he wondered. He had watched Arsakios disembarking from his ship. The patriarch of Alexandria had been friendly enough then, distributing blessings and coppers among the longshoremen and other dock laborers at the Theodosian harbor. The grin on his foxily handsome face, in fact, had been enough to rouse the magistrianos’s ever-ready suspicions.

  But diligent checking had turned up nothing more incriminating than the fact that Arsakios had brought a woman with him. If only the priests who held to their vows of celibacy were allowed to take part in the ecumenical council, Argyros thought, Nikephoros could hold it in St. Mouamet’s little church, not Hagia Sophia. Nevertheless, he filed the information away. No telling when a hint of scandal might come in handy.

  The Emperor and his courtiers gathered in the Augusteion to greet the assembled prelates before they went into the great church and called the council to order. Argyros stood in the first rank of the magistrianoi, behind George Lakhanodrakon, whose position of honor was at the left hand of Nikephoros III’s seat.

  Nikephoros III, Autocrat and Emperor of the Romans, rose from his portable throne and bowed to the hundreds of clerics in the square. They in their turn performed the proskynesis before him, going down to their knees and then their bellies as they prostrated themselves. Sunlight flashed from cloth-of-gold and pearls, shimmered off watered silks, was drunk by plain black wool.

  After the bishops, priests, and monks had acknowledged the Emperor’s sovereignty as vicegerent of God on earth, most of Nikephoros’s courtiers went back to their duties. Several magistrianoi, however, Argyros among them, accompanied Lakhanodrakon as they followed Nikephoros into Hagia Sophia. The churchmen came after them.

  The atrium of the great church was magnificent enough, with its forest of marble columns, their acanthus capitals bound with gilded brass. Then the clerics passed through the exonarthex into the nave, and Argyros heard gasps. He smiled to himself. Throughout the Empire, churches were modeled after Hagia Sophia. The models and their prototype, however, were not identical.

  For one thing, Hagia Sophia was huge. Counting the side aisles, the open space under the dome was about eighty yards square; that dome itself reached sixty yards above the floor. With forty-two windows all around the base admitting bright beams of light, the golden mosaic and cross in the dome seemed to float above the rest of the church, as if, as Prokopios had written, it were suspended on a chain from the sky.

  Justinian had lavished the wealth of the entire Empire on the church. Rare marble and other stone faced the columns and walls: white-veined black from the Bosporos, two shades of green from Hellas, porphyry out of Egypt, yellow marble from Libya, red and white marble from Isauria, multicolored stone from Phrygia. All the lamps were silver.

  Before the altar, itself of solid gold, stood the iconstasis with its images of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. Another portrait of Christ ornamented the crimson altar curtain; He was flanked by Paul and Mary. It hurt Argyros to think of destroying such beauty, but he heard some of the bishops hiss when they saw the icons and other divine images.

  The Emperor ascended the pulpit. His courtiers stayed inconspicuously in one of the side aisles, while the churchmen gathered in the central worship area.

  Nikephoros III waited for silence. He was the one man recognizable to everyone in the empire, for his features appeared on every coin, gold, silver, or copper. He was between Argyros and Lakhanodrakon in age and, like the Master of Offices, had the heavy features and strong nose associated with Armenian blood.

  “Dissension, friends, is the worst enemy our holy church knows,” Nikephoros declared. His words echoed in the church; he was a soldier-Emperor, used to pitching his voice to carry on the field. He went on, “When this controversy over images came to our notice, we ached in our soul; it is unbecoming for religious men to be in discord, as you are properly men of peace. Thus we have summoned you together for this council. Examine the reasons behind your turmoil, and with the help of the Holy Spirit seek an end to it, and to the evil designs of Satan, who through envy creates the disturbances among you. Hear now the words of Constantinople’s holy patriarch Eutropios, who shall convey to you the thoughts that have occurred to us concerning the propriety of icons.”

  Eutropios began his statement, which Nikephoros and his officials intended as the point of departure for the council. Argyros was pleased to hear two or three phrases from his own little treatise in the patriarch’s oration.

  The clerics gave Eutropios varying amounts of attention. Many of those from the lands close to Constantinople—from the Balkans or western Asia Minor—were already familiar with his arguments. The western bishops, those under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, could be expected to follow along. Ever since Constans II had installed his own candidate on the Roman patriarchal throne to replace the pope who fled over the Alps to the Franks, Rome remained subservient to Constantinople.

  The clerics about whom Argyros worried came from the three eastern patriarchates. Even aside from the heretical tendencies in their sees, the prelates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem still looked on Constantinople as an upstart town a thousand years after its founding.

  The magistrianos stiffened. “Look there,” he hissed to George Lakhanodrakon, pointing into the delegation of Arsakios of Alexandria. “That’s Sasopis! The skinny fellow there, next to the bishop in the green robe.”

  “Do the best you can to keep an eye on him,” the Master of Offices said. “It wouldn’t do to d
rag him out of the opening session of the council in chains.”

  “No,” Argyros admitted reluctantly. “But what’s he doing with Arsakios? Alexandria’s already had its synod on icons.” He stopped. “What did that synod decide?”

  “I don’t recall hearing,” Lakhanodrakon said. He ran his hands over his bald pate, adding in a worried tone, “We’re about to find out, I think.”

  Indeed, Eutropios was running down: “Just as Christ’s two natures are linked by a single will, may everyone be joined in concord at the close of our discussions here.”

  The amen resounded through the great church. Before its echoes had died away, Arsakios stepped forward, his hand upraised. “May I add a few words to your brilliant discussion of the issues, your holiness?”

  “Er, yes, go ahead,” Eutropios said nervously. Like everyone else, he knew the patriarch of Alexandria was a better theologian than he. Emperors tended to pick the prelates with whom they worked most closely for pliability rather than brains.

  “Thank you.” Arsakios bowed with exquisite politeness. Despite a vanishing trace of Egyptian accent in his Greek, his smooth tenor was an instrument he played masterfully. “Your address covered many of the points I wished to make, thus enabling me to achieve the virtue of brevity.” Stifled cheers rose here and there; Arsakios ignored them.

  He went on, “I am not quite certain, for example, your holiness, of your conception of the relationship between this present dispute over images and previous disagreements over how Christ’s humanity and divinity coexist.”

  “I do not see that there is a relationship,” Eutropios said cautiously. Argyros frowned; he did not see it either.

  But Arsakios raised an eyebrow in feigned disbelief. “But is not an icon of our Lord a statement of christology in and of itself?”

  “The man’s mad,” Lakhanodrakon whispered to Argyros at the same time as Eutropios demanded, “In what way?” of Arsakios.

  And the patriarch of Alexandria, smiling, sank the barb: “Let me state it in the form of questions: What does an image of Christ portray? If it depicts His human nature alone, is this not separating His humanity from His divinity, as the heretic Nestorians do? But if it portrays His divinity, does it not attempt both to circumscribe what may not be circumscribed and to subordinate His humanity altogether, in a Monophysite fashion? In either case, then, the validity of the use of images comes into question, does it not? So, at least, decided the synod held in my city this past fall.” With another elegant bow, he gave the floor back to his brother of Constantinople.