1 A barbarian tribe by then extinct. The reference is presumably to their successors, the Slavs.
having offered formal congratulations to the new Emperor, requested payment of the money due to them under the former agreement it was Justin's turn to refuse. In the course of the following year he showed that he intended to take a similar line with the several other recipients of Justinian's bounty, including the Great King Chosroes himself. Such a display of firmness much increased his popularity, particularly as it seemed to offer prospects of reduced taxes; it soon revealed, however, that Justinian had not been paying out his subsidies for nothing.
Ironically enough, the race that dealt the Empire the severest blow of the many it sustained during Justin's reign was one which had previously caused no trouble and which had never received a penny of Byzantine protection money. The Lombards were a Germanic people who, in the fourth and fifth centuries, had slowly drifted southwards from their homes around the lower Elbe to the region that we should now call Austria. In 567, allied with the Avars, they inflicted an annihilating defeat on their neighbours the Gepids, and in the spring of the following year they crossed the Julian Alps into Italy. It says much for the effects of the wars of Belisarius and Narses that after fifteen years the greater part of the country was still in ruins, its people stunned and demoralized. The Lombards encountered no real resistance anywhere except Pavia, which they captured only after a three-year siege; but they made no move against Ravenna - where the imperial commander Lon-ginus also refrained from opposition, contenting himself with securing the city and its immediate surroundings. Meanwhile the conquerors continued their southward advance. Their King, Alboin, went no further than Tuscany, but many of his nobles pressed on further to set up independent duchies in Spoleto and Benevento which were to survive for another five centuries.1
Thus, from the start, the Lombards came to Italy not as raiders but as permanent settlers. They intermarried with the Italians, adopted their language, absorbed their culture and doubtless intended to make the whole peninsula their own. The fact that they made no attempt at this time on Byzantine Ravenna, nor on the cities of the Venetian lagoon associated with it is probably explained by their lack of numbers;
1 There is a venerable legend according to which the Lombards had been invited into Italy by Narses, in revenge for an insult that he had received from the Empress Sophia who, so the story goes, had sent him a distaff in a pointed reference to his emasculation. 'I will weave her such a skein,' the old eunuch is said to have muttered, 'that she will not unravel in her lifetime.' It is a good story - but, alas, nothing more.
doubtless for the same reason Naples, Calabria and Sicily also remained in imperial hands. It would be a mistake therefore to see the Lombards as destroyers of everything that Justinian, Belisarius and Narses had achieved; what they did was to impose severe limits on Byzantine authority in Italy and to introduce a powerful new element into the political scene. For over two centuries they were to flourish as an independent kingdom - until at last they were swallowed up in the new-founded Empire of the West and Charlemagne himself assumed their crown.
It might have been expected that so staunch an upholder of the Roman tradition as was the Emperor Justin would have lost no time in sending an army to expel the Lombards from his dominions; but he was fully occupied with the Avars. They too had profited vastly from the victory that the Lombards, with their help, had won over the Gepids. The former having moved into Italy and the latter having been virtually wiped out, the old Lombard territories now lay open to settlement; and once installed in their new homeland the Avars were at last in a position to take their revenge on Justin for his refusal to continue their subsidy. In 568, only a few months after the Lombard invasion, they burst into Dalmatia in a frenzy of wholesale destruction. This time the Emperor reacted quickly, sending as large a force as he could muster under the command of his Count of the Excubitors, Tiberius; but after three years of warfare the exhausted general could continue no longer and was obliged to seek a truce. The ensuing treaty cost Justin 80,000 pieces of silver, a sum far greater than the original subsidy; the blow to his pride must have been greater still.
That same year, 571, saw a dangerous development in the East. Justin was not the only ruler who had difficulties with his neighbours. For King Chosroes, the perennial problem was that of Armenia. It was not so much the fact that the Armenians, having lost not only their independence but also their political unity, were now split between the Byzantine and the Persian Empires; rather was it the fierce pride that they took in their Christianity, which constantly impelled those of them who were under the sway of the Great King to escape from the Persian yoke and, if they could no longer have a Kingdom of their own, to join their compatriots as subjects of the Christian Emperor. Now, suddenly, this chronic disaffection exploded into open revolt and the insurgents appealed to Justin for support - a request which as a Christian monarch he could not possibly ignore. Neither, however, could he hope that Chosroes, already furious at his refusal to continue the tribute promised by his uncle, would any longer restrain himself. Early in 5 72 the Persian War was resumed. It was to continue, with brief interruptions, for twenty years.
From the outset, things went badly for Byzantium. In November 573 the Persians seized Dara on the Tigris, one of the most important Christian bishoprics in the East; and at much the same time they invaded and ravaged Syria - whence, the chroniclers assure us, they returned with no less than 292,000 captives. Of these, 2,000 of the most beautiful Christian virgins were personally selected by Chosroes for presentation to the Khan of the Turks, whom he hoped to enlist as an ally; but the maidens, when they reached a great river within fifty leagues of the Khan's camp, sought permission from their heavy military escort to bathe, separated themselves a little from the soldiers on grounds of modesty and then, rather than face the simultaneous loss of their religion and their virtue, deliberately drowned themselves.1
By this time the Emperor had abandoned his earlier policy of guarded toleration of monophysitism in favour of open persecution - a decision made more reprehensible by the fact that he and Sophia had both been monophysites themselves in their youth, having later adopted the orthodox faith for purely political reasons. There were, so far as we know, no executions or tortures, but monks and nuns were driven from their monasteries and convents and the monophysite clergy were no longer recognized. This abrupt change of attitude occurred in 571, and some historians have attributed it to the beginnings of the mental disturbance which, over the next three years, reduced Justin to a state of hopeless insanity. In his calmer moments, John of Ephesus tells us, his chief amusement was to sit in a little cart and be dragged round his apartments by his keepers; but he was often subject to fits of extreme violence, during which he would attack anyone who approached him2 and try to hurl himself out of the windows, which had to be fitted with bars for his protection. In these moods there was only one way to pacify him: to
John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, VI, i. This period marks the first appearance of the Turks in the history of the West. In 568 or 569 they had sent an embassy to Constantinople, and a treaty of allegiance in the event of renewed hostilities with Persia had been signed the following year; but Chosrocs was evidently not unhopeful of winning them over.
'They selected strong young men to act as his chamberlains and guard him; and when these youths were obliged to run after him and hold him he, being a powerful man, would turn upon them and seize them with his teeth, and tear them; and two of them he bit so severely about the head as to do them serious injury; and they took to their sick beds, and the report spread about the city that the Emperor had eaten two of his chamberlains' (John of Ephesus, 111, iii).
speak the name of Harith, the leader of a minor Arab tribe known as the Ghassanids. For reasons that were never altogether understood, this relatively unimportant chieftain inspired him with such terror that he instantly became quiet.
Sophia had meanwhile taken over the
government of the Empire, and in 574 she persuaded Chosroes to grant a year's truce in return for a payment of 45,000 nomismata; but at the end of that same year, finding the burdens of state too heavy to bear alone, she took advantage of one of her husband's brief spells of lucidity to persuade him to raise Tiberius
whose defeat by the Avars had not, apparently, affected his reputation
to the rank of Caesar. From that moment the two of them acted as joint regents; and when Justin died on 4 October 578 his former Count of the Excubitors was his uncontested successor.
For Tiberius, it had not been an easy regency. The Turks, furious at the peace with Persia about which they had not been consulted and which they considered a betrayal, had repudiated the alliance and seized a Byzantine stronghold in the Crimea; and in 577 a vast horde of Slavs -their numbers were conservatively estimated at a hundred thousand - had poured into Thrace and Illyricum and settled there, the few and insignificant imperial garrisons being powerless to stop them. A more immediate problem than either, however, was that presented by Sophia herself. Not for nothing was she Theodora's niece. Having secured her colleague's promotion, she immediately began to show a marked reluctance to share her authority with him - especially in financial matters, in which he was, she claimed, unnecessarily extravagant. For as long as her husband lived, she insisted on keeping the keys of the imperial treasury herself, granting the unfortunate Caesar only the most meagre of allowances on which to keep himself and his family; she also jealously refused to permit his wife Ino or his two daughters to set foot in the Palace. Only after Justin's death did Tiberius finally dare to assert himself: Sophia, despite several unsuccessful plots to dethrone him, suddenly found herself deprived of her court and placed under close surveillance, in which unhappy condition she was to remain for the rest of her natural life while Ino, now rechristened Anastasia, was at last able to enjoy the privileges so long denied her.
The new Emperor, who assumed on his accession the additional name of Constantine, was - in marked contrast to his two predecessors -outstandingly popular with his people. He was also a pragmatist who, throughout his short reign, did his utmost to stem the steady decline in Byzantine fortunes. Persecution of the monophysites was stopped at once; being himself a Thracian, he instinctively understood that with Greek influence everywhere on the increase it was above all the Greek-speaking provinces of Asia that must be kept loyal and contented, and if that meant antagonizing the West it could not be helped.1 At the same time, in a deliberate reaction to the haughty aristocratic style favoured by Justinian and Justin, he tried to broaden the base of government by increasing the powers both of the previously moribund Senate and of the demes - the Greens and the Blues - which had been suppressed by Justinian after the Nika riots. The principal focus of his attention, however, was the army. The moment he had control of the Exchequer he set out to strengthen it by every means within his power, and in 581 he established a new elite corps of 15,000 barbarian foederati2 which, centuries later, was to evolve into the famous Varangian Guard.
With all his excellent intentions and his unremitting effort, Tiberius Constantine might have proved a great Emperor. The fact that he failed to do so can be attributed in a large degree to the fatal weakness against which Sophia had so forcibly reacted - his uncontrolled liberality. Not content with remitting, soon after his accession, one quarter of all taxes levied throughout the Empire, at various times in his reign he dispensed huge amounts of largesse in every direction. In his first year alone he gave away no less than 7,200 pounds of gold - 800 of them to the army in Asia - to say nothing of silver, silk and other luxuries in almost insane abundance. The next three years saw further distributions on a similar scale; and it was perhaps just as well for the imperial treasury that by the end of the fourth he was dead - of poison, it was rumoured, taken in a dish of early but particularly succulent mulberries.
Tiberius Constantine died on 13 August 582, in his palace of the Hebdomon.3 A week before, he had appointed as his successor a young Cappadocian named Maurice, to whom he had simultaneously given his second daughter Constantina in marriage. Maurice could already boast a distinguished military record; he had just returned from four years at the Persian front, during which time he had largely reorganized the army, breathing new life and hope into its dispirited ranks. 'Make your reign my finest epitaph,' were the last words of the dying Emperor; and for
1 It must, however, in justice be recorded that he was a good deal less sympathetic to Arianism -presumably because, being a heresy favoured almost exclusively by barbarians, it did not in his view deserve similar respect,
2 See p. 108.
3 A suburb of the city which lay at the seventh milestone.
the next twenty years Maurice was to rule the Empire with a firm and competent hand.1 Coming to the throne during one of those brief lulls which occasionally interrupted the long drawn-out war with Persia, he was able to give serious thought to the situation in the West and to what was left of Justinian's conquests in Italy and Africa. The result was the two great Exarchates which he created - Ravenna and Carthage; organized on strict military lines under an Exarch who wielded absolute power over both the military and the civilian administration, they were long to remain the principal western outposts of imperial authority.
All too soon, however, hostilities with Persia flared up again. Old Chosroes had died in 579, a few months after Justin, and had been succeeded by his son Hormisdas, who had inherited to the full his father's love of battle. He had sustained a grave defeat at the hands of Maurice in 581, after which he had needed time to rebuild his shattered army; but by the end of the following year he had returned to the attack. A detailed account of the subsequent course of the war would be tedious for writer and reader alike, and is in any case unnecessary; suffice it to say that, despite a serious mutiny of their army in 588, the Romans somehow managed to hold their ground for two more years, until a coup d'etat in Persia led to a civil war. Hormisdas was killed; his son Chosroes II fled into Byzantine territory and appealed to Maurice for help. Despite the almost unanimous advice of his ministers, the Emperor saw a chance and seized it: he told the prince that he would be happy to provide the assistance he needed - but only in return for a treaty of peace between the two Empires, by the terms of which both Persian Armenia and eastern Mesopotamia, including the two great cities of Dara and Martyropolis on the Tigris, would be restored to Byzantium. In 591, with his support, young Chosroes overthrew the opposition - and kept his promises to the letter. The Persian War was over, sooner and on more favourable terms than anyone had dared to expect.
Now at last Maurice could fling the whole weight of his army against a foe which, during the past two years, had become every bit as dangerous as the Persians had ever been. In 571, the Avars had won their first major victory over Tiberius - by then Caesar and effective co-regent of the Empire. Next, in 581, they had captured by trickery the key city of Sirmium on the river Sava, which they were soon able to use as a base for the mopping up of several poorly-defended Byzantine
1 Our main primary source for the reign of Maurice is the History of Theophylact Simocatta, an Egyptian whose name literally means a flat-nosed cat and in whose style - 1 quote Professor Bury -'bombast, in all its frigidity, is carried to an unprecedented extreme'.
fortresses along the Danube. Meanwhile they continually increased their demands for tribute, until by 5 84 Maurice - whose propitiatory presents of an elephant and a golden bed had been contemptuously rejected by the Avar Khagan - was obliged to agree to a revised figure of 100,000 pieces. By this time the Emperor had appointed as general of his army in the West a former commander of his bodyguard named Comentiolus; but the army itself amounted to a mere 10,000 men, of whom only slightly more than half were capable soldiers; and apart from one significant victory at Adrianople he had little success in stemming the barbarian tide.
The peace with Persia meant that Maurice suddenly found himself with a far greater force at his disposal for deplo
yment in the West;1 and such was his exhilaration that he announced his intention of taking the field in person. The Patriarch and Senate, to say nothing of his own family, implored him not to risk his life in such a manner; he refused to listen. As it happened, they need not have worried. The Emperor had got no further than Anchialus - on the Gulf of Burgas, in modern Bulgaria - when the unexpected arrival of a Persian embassy in Constantinople recalled him hurriedly to the capital; and by the time the ambassadors had departed he had lost interest in joining his army. Perhaps it was just as well. Despite his new-found strength the war was to continue, against both the predatory Avars and the immigrant Slavs, for the rest of his reign; and was to prove, indirectly, the cause of his death.
Maurice's difficulties in the West were further complicated by the fact that his relations with the Papacy were deteriorating fast. There had been several minor points of contention over the years, but the serious trouble began only in 588, when the Patriarch of Constantinople, John the Faster, adopted the title of 'Ecumenical' - thereby implying universal supremacy over all other prelates, including the Pope himself. John was not the first Patriarch to make this claim; the title had been used at various times for the best part of a century and until now had passed apparently unnoticed. This time, however, there were angry expostulations from Pope Pelagius; and still more vigorous protests followed two years later, when Pelagius was succeeded by one of the most formidable
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