The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  1 As Theophylact puts it: 'And so, now that the day smiled upon affairs in the East, and made not her progress mythically, in Homeric fashion, from a barbaric couch, but refused to be called "rosy-fingered" inasmuch as the sword was not crimsoned with blood, the Emperor transferred his forces to Europe* - a fair enough example of the literary style admired at the time, through which the luckless historian is compelled to wade.

  characters ever to assume the throne of St Peter: Gregory the Great. Gregory at once fired off two letters. The first was to Maurice demanding, for the sake of the peace of the Empire, that he call his recalcitrant Patriarch to order; the second he addressed to the Empress Constantina, begging her to intervene with her husband; John's arrogant assumption of the ecumenical title was, he claimed, a clear indication that the age of Antichrist was at hand.

  Whether Constantina ever replied we do not know; but her husband did, and he fully supported his Patriarch. From that time forward, Gregory's irritation is plain to see; even so reasonable a measure as Maurice's law forbidding serving soldiers to desert on the grounds that they wished to enter monasteries was denounced by him as a further blow struck against the Church. But the Byzantines were irritated too, and it may well have been as a result of the Pope's protests that the fatal word soon became a regular part of the Patriarchal style. Gregory's successors wisely decided to ignore it; but what both sides must have known well enough was that the incident, trivial as it might seem in retrospect, marked another stage in the steadily growing rivalry between the Eastern and Western Churches - a rivalry which, four and a half centuries later, was to end in schism.

  From the moment that he assumed the throne of Byzantium, Maurice had had to face one overriding problem: lack of money. Thanks to his predecessor's extravagance he had inherited a virtually bankrupt state, and the almost incessant warfare in both East and West - to say nothing of the vast subsidies which he was obliged to pay to his potential enemies - made it impossible for him to replenish the imperial coffers as he would have wished. The result was a parsimoniousness which, in his later years, became an obsession - making him not only unpopular with his subjects but oddly insensitive to what they would or would not tolerate. Already in 588 his proclamation that all military rations were to be reduced by a quarter had led to a widespread mutiny among the army of the East; in 599 he is said to have refused - once more on grounds of economy - to ransom no less than 12,000 prisoners taken by the Avars, who consequently put them all to death; and three years later, in 602, he issued the most disastrous decree of all: that the army should not return to base for the coming winter, but should sit it out in the inhospitable and barbarous lands beyond the Danube.

  The reaction was immediate and dramatic. The army had been fighting hard for eight months, and was physically and mentally exhausted.

  During that time the men had acquired considerable amounts of booty, which was however useless to them until they could sell it in the markets of the capital. There was, in any case, a generally accepted tradition that soldiers returned for the winter to their wives and families. Instead, they were now being ordered to endure the intense cold and discomfort of a winter under canvas on the plains of Pannonia, living as best they could off the local populations and in constant danger from marauding barbarian clans, all because their miserly Emperor claimed that he could not afford to send them home. When they reached the fortress of Securisca (now the Bulgarian town of Nikopol) at which they were to cross the Danube, they flatly refused to go another step. Their general, Peter - whose position was scarcely improved by the fact that he was the Emperor's brother - argued and pleaded with them in vain. Turning their backs on him in scorn, they raised one of their own centurions, a certain Phocas, on their shields and proclaimed him their leader.

  Peter, doubtless considering himself lucky to have escaped with his life, hurried back to Constantinople with news of the revolt, bearing with him a message to the Emperor from the rebels, who were even then preparing to march on the capital. There was no question, they emphasized, of Phocas being made Emperor. Maurice himself they would no longer tolerate, but they had not withdrawn their allegiance from his family: they would be happy to acclaim either his seventeen-year-old son Theodosius (who would be the first Emperor since Theodosius II to have been born in the purple), or failing him his father-in-law Germanus, as successor to the throne.

  Both men chanced to be away together on a hunting expedition, but were immediately recalled by Maurice and accused of treason. Theodosius was flogged; Germanus, fearing (with good reason) that his life was in danger, fled for refuge to St Sophia where - with the help of numerous adherents - he successfully resisted several attempts by the imperial guard to drag him out by force. The Emperor meanwhile had turned for support to the demes - the two popular factions of the Hippodrome, brought out of their temporary obscurity by Tiberius and once again influential forces in the city. He had hoped to ensure the allegiance of both the Blues and the Greens, and had been relieved when both had agreed to man the Theodosian Walls against the mutineers' advance; but he soon discovered that while he could rely on the loyalty of the 900 active Blues, that of the 1,500 Greens was dangerously uncertain. By now riots had broken out all over the capital, and an angry crowd had gathered in the square outside the Palace, hurling imprecations at the Emperor and baying for his blood.

  That night - it was 22 November - Maurice, his wife Constantina and their eight children, together with Constantine Lardys, the Praetorian Prefect of the East whose house had been burnt down by the mob, crept out of the Palace in disguise and took a small boat across the Marmara to Asia. A violent storm carried them far off their course, but they landed at last on the shore of the Bay of Nicomedia, near the Church of St Autonomus the Martyr. Here the Emperor, incapacitated by a severe attack of gout, was obliged to remain with Constantina and the rest of his children; Theodosius and the Prefect, however, headed east to the court of the Persian King. Chosroes owed his throne to Maurice's support; now was his opportunity to repay the debt.

  In Constantinople, Germanus had meanwhile emerged from his refuge in St Sophia and, encouraged by the popular support he had received, now made his bid for the throne. Everything, he knew, depended on the attitude of the demes. He himself had always favoured the Blues, but it was clear that his cause would be hopeless without the backing of the far more numerous and influential Greens - in return for which he promised their leader, Sergius, rich rewards once the Empire were his. The offer was carefully considered, but refused. Convinced in their hearts that despite his protestations he would never really abandon their rivals, the Greens cast in their lot with Phocas, who had by now reached the outskirts of the capital.

  Phocas too had made up his mind. His early disclaimer of any imperial ambitions may have been sincere at the time, but now the situation had changed: of the two candidates for the throne, Theodosius had fled and Germanus, it appeared, was no longer acceptable. From his headquarters in the Hebdomon he sent an emissary into Constantinople with a message to be read from the high pulpit of St Sophia, requiring Patriarch, Senate and people to come out at once to the Church of St John the Baptist; and there, a few hours later, 'that impudent centaur' (as Theophylact1 describes him) was crowned Emperor of the Romans. The following morning, in a chariot drawn by four white horses, he rode in triumph into his capital, scattering showers of gold to the populace as he passed; the day after, he made the traditional donations to the soldiers and, with still greater pomp, invested his wife Leontia with the rank and title of Augusta.

  During this last ceremony a scuffle broke out between the Blues and

  1 The full story of Maurice's downfall is given by Thcophylact {History, Vlll, vi-xii).

  the Greens, in the course of which several Blues were heard to shout: 'Beware, beware! Remember that Maurice is not dead!' Phocas is unlikely to have forgotten; but it was a state of affairs that he was determined to remedy. A troop of soldiers was dispatched to Asia, where it quickly ran the fugitives t
o earth. The Emperor made no attempt to escape; there was no fight left in him. Indeed he appeared almost to welcome his captors, even sending a messenger to recall Theodosius and Constantine Lardys and dissuading the children's nurse from her attempt to substitute another child for one of the imperial princes. He is said to have watched impassively as his four younger sons were butchered before his eyes, only murmuring, 'Thou art just, O Lord, and just are thy judgements,' again and again. Then without another word he himself faced the executioner who dispatched him at a stroke. The bodies were cast into the sea, and Theophylact tells us that huge crowds came down to the shore to gaze on the corpses as they floated on the still waters of the bay. The troop commander, Lilius, meanwhile returned with the five heads to Constantinople, where they were later exposed at the Hebdomon.

  As a ruler, Maurice had his faults. He was too much given to nepotism, a tendency which led him to advance worthless men like his brother Peter to positions far beyond their capabilities and to bestow large estates on members of his family and other favourites. His subjects, too, were surprised - in view of the parsimoniousness for which he was famous -to see the vast sums that he spent on his birthplace, the insignificant little Cappadocian town of Arabissus, in his determination to transform it into a rich and splendid city.1 We have seen, finally, his curious in-sensitivity to the feelings of his subjects and his inability to judge how far an unpopular policy could safely be pursued. In other ways, however, he proved a wise and far-sighted statesman. Quite apart from his newly established Exarchates of Carthage and Ravenna, he redrew the administrative map of the Empire, incorporating the scattered imperial possessions in both East and West into a new provincial system far simpler and more logical than the old. He was careful, too, always to place the ultimate responsibility for any given province in the hands of the military rather than those of the civil authorities. It was the former magister militum who was now accorded the new title of Exarch, effectively the imperial viceroy and answerable to none but the Emperor himself. Had

  i Now the still more insignificant village of Yarpuz, a little to the north of Mara§. When an earthquake destroyed all that Maurice had built, he immediately began all over again.

  such firm organization existed in Justinian's day, Italy would surely have been conquered a good deal more expeditiously than it was, and might even have succeeded in turning the Lombard tide.

  Thus the tragedy of Maurice's overthrow, even though he brought it largely on himself, was one that he had done little to deserve. By a combination of determination, clear-sightedness and sheer hard work he left the Empire immeasurably stronger than he found it - which was more than could have been said of any of his three immediate predecessors. Had he allowed his soldiers only a little more bread, or his people just a few more circuses, he would easily have escaped the fate he was called upon to suffer. Even as things were, it was only a matter of weeks before his subjects were mourning his death, asking themselves how they could ever have sacrificed him for the depraved and sadistic monster who took his place.

  The chronicler George Cedrenus has left us a physical description of the Emperor Phocas. It hardly predisposes us in his favour. Under a tangle of red hair his thick, beetling eyebrows met across his nose; the rest of his face was deformed by a huge, angry scar that turned crimson when he was aroused, giving it a still more hideous aspect than that which it normally bore. He was not, however, as pleasant as he looked. Debauched, drunken and almost pathologically cruel, he loved, we are told, nothing so much as the sight of blood. Until his day, torture had been rare in the Byzantine Empire; it was Phocas who introduced the gallows and the rack, the blindings and the mutilations which were to cast so sinister a shadow over the centuries to come.

  His eight-year reign saw the Empire at the nadir of its fortunes: a depth of abasement, humiliation and despair unequalled at any previous moment in its history. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that a popular revolution had given place to a reign of terror. The deaths of Maurice and his sons proved to be only the beginning; thereafter, executions and judicial murders followed thick and fast - among them those of the Praetorian Prefect Constantine Lardys; of Comentiolus; of the Emperor's brother Peter; and, almost certainly, of his son Theodosius - though a persistent rumour that he had escaped to Persia seems to have been believed by Phocas himself, who soon afterwards had one of his principal henchmen put to death on a charge of having accepted bribes to assist the young prince's flight. Of those principally concerned in the drama the only survivors - apart from the new Emperor and his friends - were Germanus, who swore loyalty to Phocas and whose life was accordingly spared on condition that he became a priest, and the Empress Constantina, who was dispatched with her three daughters to a nunnery. All those suspected of continuing loyalty to Maurice, whatever their rank or station, met their deaths by the axe, the bowstring or, more frequently, slow torture.

  King Chosroes, meanwhile, had found in the fate of his friend and benefactor the pretext he had long been awaiting, and in 603 launched a huge army against Byzantium. Now the Empire had at that time only one first-rate general in the East, a certain Narses - he was, so far as is known, no relation of his more famous namesake - who had distinguished himself in the previous phase of the war and at whose name, we are told, every Persian child cringed in terror. For Maurice, Narses would have sprung to arms and, quite probably, driven back the invader; for Phocas he refused to budge. He had heard enough of the upstart Emperor to be determined to unseat him, even at the cost of a Persian victory. Rallying his men to his own standard, he rose in rebellion, seized Edessa (the modern Urfa) and appealed to Chosroes for help. That part of the army that had remained loyal to Phocas thus found itself obliged to fight two enemies simultaneously and soon took flight. Narses and Chosroes met in Edessa, together - if an Armenian chronicler is to be believed - with a young pretender who claimed to be Theodosius, and began planning their joint attack upon the usurper.

  It was now plain to Phocas that if he were to save his skin he would need every soldier he possessed on the eastern front. He quickly concluded a truce with the Avars - promising them a huge annual tribute in return - and flung the whole weight of his army against the advancing Persians. But it was of no avail. Narses was lured to Constantinople under a guarantee of safe conduct, ostensibly to discuss peace terms. If only the Emperor had acted in good faith, he could probably have come to some arrangement and even won back his general's allegiance. Instead, the moment Narses reached the capital he was seized and burnt alive. At a stroke, Phocas had deprived himself of his best commander. Only two others remained of comparable quality; and of those one died of wounds after a battle, while the other was recalled on suspicion of treason and cast into prison in Constantinople. Supreme command of the army passed to the Emperor's nephew, one Domentziolus, a callow and inexperienced young soldier who proved no match for his brilliant adversaries. Over the next four years the Persians overran much of western Mesopotamia and Syria, Armenia and Cappadocia, Paphlagonia and Galatia in a steady, relentless tide, until in 608 their advance guard was encamped at Chalcedon, within sight of the capital. Meanwhile the Slavs and the Avars -the latter oblivious of the protection money they had received - continued to flood into the Balkan peninsula.

  Desperate crises of the kind that the Empire was now facing tend to arouse strong feelings of national solidarity, the threatened people forgetting its political, social or even its confessional differences in its determination to present a united front against the common enemy. If Phocas had any chance left to him of averting disaster, it would have been to encourage such an attitude among his subjects. Instead, he chose this of all moments to initiate an all-out campaign for the persecution and forcible conversion of the Jews. Most of his intended victims lived in the eastern provinces - in the front line, as it were, in face of the Persian attack; to alienate them at such a time was an act of barely credible folly. The result was as might have been expected. The Jews of Antioch rose in revo
lt and began in their turn to massacre the local Christians, inflicting a particularly horrible and obscene death on the Patriarch, Anastasius. Thousands of terrified citizens, Christian and Jewish alike, fled the butchery and sought refuge in Persian-held territory. The whole Empire, it seemed, was rapidly sinking into anarchy.

  Meanwhile, plot succeeded plot in swift succession. In one of them, Phocas was to be murdered in the Hippodrome, his place taken by the Praetorian Prefect of the East, Theodorus; in another, the Prefect was to be supplanted by Germanus - still as ambitious as ever, despite the holy orders he had reluctantly assumed. Both of these conspiracies were betrayed and reported to the Emperor, who had all those involved immediately executed - including the ex-Empress Constantina and her three daughters. More executions followed as Phocas, seeing the Empire tottering about him, grew more and more paranoically unstable. In the capital, the Greens revolted and set fire to several public buildings; in the eastern provinces there was chaos. Christians and Jews were now everywhere at each others' throats, while the latter openly allied themselves with the Persians - who, not surprisingly, received them with open arms. Even as far away as Palestine, what had begun as faction fighting between the Blues and the Greens in Jerusalem was now assuming the dimensions of civil war.

  It was, of all places, from Africa that deliverance came at last. Ruling as Exarch in the city of Carthage was a certain Heraclius, who had been one of Maurice's principal generals in the war with Persia some twenty years before. With him as his second-in-command was his brother Gregorius. The two men were both by now in their late middle age too old, certainly, to take any decisive action themselves beyond breaking off communications with Constantinople and cutting off the grain supplies on which the capital depended; but in the course of the year 608 they raised a considerable army and prepared a fleet of warships, which they placed under the command of their respective sons: the army under Nicetas, son of Gregorius, and the fleet under the son of Heraclius, who bore the same name as his father. Towards the end of the year, Nicetas set out overland for Egypt, where he soon succeeded in capturing Alexandria before continuing his advance on Constantinople;1 and in 609 the young Heraclius sailed for Thessalonica, receiving a rapturous reception at all the ports at which he called on his way. Once arrived in the city, he spent the best part of a year rallying all the European malcontents to his banner and collecting further ships to swell his expedition; then, in the summer of 610, he set off on the last lap of his journey.