1 Cedrenus, 1, p. i 1.
15
The Heraclian Line
[641-85]
Mais le Vile siecle n'en marque pas moins pour l'Orient grec la fin du monde antique; et, a ce titre, peut-etre vaut-il la peine de montrer par quelques exemples ce que furent les ames, desequilibrees et troubles, des hommes qui virent s'accomplir cette grande evolution.
Charles Diehl, Choses et Gens de Byzance
The death of Heraclius, long expected as it was, threw Byzantium into chaos; and the cause of all the trouble was Martina. Not content with persuading her husband to crown their son Heraclonas co-Emperor, she had also forced him to draw up a will entrusting the Empire jointly to his eldest son and true heir Constantine III, to Heraclonas and to herself. One of the first acts of her widowhood was to hold a public rally in the Hippodrome, at which she announced the terms of the will, making it clear to all present that it was she who proposed to exercise the effective power.
But the Byzantines would have none of it. They had long mistrusted Martina for her scheming ambition; many, too, held her responsible for her husband's decline and death. Their worst suspicions now seemed confirmed. How, they demanded, could a woman receive or reply to foreign ambassadors, let alone administer an Empire? The very idea was preposterous. They would be happy to accord her the respect due to an Empress Mother, but their obedience would be given only to her son and stepson. Martina, baffled and furious, had no alternative but to retreat into the palace; but she was not beaten yet. Soon afterwards Constantine, the senior Emperor, fell sick. Possibly for a change of air, but more likely to distance himself from his stepmother, he crossed the Bosphorus to the palace at Chalcedon, but the move was of no avail: he died on 25 May 641, after a reign of just three and a half months.
Was he killed by Martina? We cannot say for certain. In the absence of any contemporary records we are obliged to rely, for what little information we have, principally on Nicephorus and Theophanes, both writing in the early ninth century; and of these Nicephorus (whose account is the more detailed of the two) makes no such suggestion. Constantine had long been in ill health, and could well have died of natural causes. On the other hand the circumstances and above all the timing of his death are, at the very least, suspicious. Moreover, as we shall very shortly see, his son and successor did not hesitate to accuse the Empress, in the strongest possible terms, of his murder.
It also seems undeniable that Constantine himself had felt threatened. Why, otherwise, having first moved to the Asiatic shore, should he have appealed to the army from his deathbed to protect his infant heir, Heraclius, and his other children, and to uphold their rights of succession? As it happened, he need not have worried. The people of Constantinople, already overwhelmingly in favour of the senior branch of the family, were outraged by the way in which Martina, scarcely before her stepson's body was cold, openly sent all his ministers into exile and, ignoring her own son, assumed full imperial authority; and they were still more incensed by her enthusiastic support of monothelitism, a by now plainly unsuccessful doctrine which had never found popular favour and which Constantine had been doing his best to sweep away. In the summer of 641, in response to increasingly insistent demonstrations, little Heraclius had been crowned Emperor, and his name - presumably to avoid confusion with his grandfather - changed to Constans; and in September of the same year, by command of the Senate, Martina and Heraclonas were suddenly arrested. Her tongue was cut out; his nose was slit;1 and the two were exiled to the island of Rhodes, never to return to the capital. If the Empress's only crime was her overweening ambition, she had paid a heavy price for it; if she and her son were regicides, they were lucky to have escaped so lightly.
My father Constantine reigned with Heraclius, his father and my grandfather, for a considerable time; but after the latter's death for only a very short period. For the envy of his stepmother Martina brought his high hopes to nothing and deprived him of his life - and all for the sake of Heraclonas, the son of her incestuous union with Heraclius. Your vote above all contributed to the just
1 The slitting - effectively the amputation - of the nose was an ancient oriental practice, introduced for the first time in Byzantium when Heraclius had thus punished Theodore and Athalaric for their suspected conspiracy a few years before (sec p. 308). Its purpose was to invalidate the victim's claim to the throne since an Emperor, in the Byzantine view, must be free of all obvious physical imperfections.
deposition of her and her son from the imperial dignity, in order that the Roman Empire should not be obliged to countenance so grave an insult to the Law. Of this your noble eminences are fully aware; and I therefore invite you to assist me by your advice and judgement, in providing for the general safety of my subjects.1
With these words the eleven-year-old Constans II, now sole ruler of Byzantium, addressed the assembled Senate early in 642, entrusting it with the care of the Empire during his minority. During the years following the death of Justinian the Senate had grown rapidly in power and prestige. It was now as influential as ever it had been, serving both as adviser to the sovereign and as the supreme court of justice; and it was, in the absence of any senior member of the imperial family, the obvious body to assume the regency. But Constans was to mature into a determined and self-willed autocrat; he was not to accept its tutelage for long.
His twenty-seven-year reign was overshadowed from beginning to end by his constant struggle with the seemingly invincible Saracens. Already at the time of his accession they were advancing relentlessly through Egypt, which his stepmother during her brief period of power had virtually surrendered to them; and in 642 the Byzantine garrison sailed obediently out of Alexandria, leaving the country in the hands of the great Arab general Amr. When, two years later after the death of the Caliph Omar, his successor Othman recalled Amr to Medina, the Byzantines saw an opportunity for a counter-offensive and sent out a fleet, which managed briefly to recapture Alexandria; but as soon as the news reached Amr he hurried back to Egypt, and by the summer of 646 was once again in control. Razing the walls of Alexandria to the ground, he established a new capital, at the southern end of the delta and consequently less vulnerable to attack, in a village known as Fostat, later to be renamed Cairo. The popular tradition that the Muslim armies put the torch to the famous Library of Alexandria - the greatest in the world of late antiquity - is unfounded; that had already been destroyed by the Christians, in the anti-Arian riots of 391. Nor did they take any vengeance on the local populations - most of whom, like their Syrian and Palestinian neighbours, seem to have found their conquerors a welcome change from the Byzantines. Having thus successfully deprived the Empire of its richest and most valuable province, they then drove westward along the North African coast -in 647 inflicting a disastrous defeat on Gregory, Exarch of Carthage, who had advanced against them with an army (we are told) of 120,000 men.
The new Caliph Othman was a weaker, less effectual leader than the
1 Theophancs, 6134.
austerely magnificent Omar; in one respect, however, he proved considerably more far-sighted. Omar, with the desert-dweller's deep-rooted mistrust of the sea, had steadfastly refused to allow the building of a fleet; Othman, at the continued insistence of Muawiya, the Arab governor of Syria, gave his consent. Inevitably, the ship-building programme which was immediately initiated took several years to complete: Muawiya filled in the time leading major offensives into Armenia and - in 647 - as far west as Cappadocia, where he captured Caesarea (now Kaiseri). Only two years later, however, his fleet was ready, his seamen trained; and he at once flung the full force of it against Cyprus, with himself in command. The target was well chosen: Cyprus was one of the Empire's chief naval bases, and though Muawiya had not sufficient manpower to occupy it permanently he was able to take its capital Constantia1 by storm, sack the city, destroy the port and harbour installations and ravage vast tracts of the surrounding country.
In 650 it was the turn of Aradus (now Ruad), a prosperous
merchant city on an island off the Syrian coast, which was burnt to ashes and left uninhabitable, its people driven away to seek refuge where they might. After that, Constans was able to negotiate a two-year truce; but this only freed Muawiya to concentrate on more ship-building, so that in 654 he was able to launch a still more formidable expedition against the island of Rhodes. The extent of the damage wrought on this occasion is not recorded, though it must have been considerable; our best source, Theophanes, is understandably more interested to tell us of the fate of the celebrated Colossus. This hundred-foot-high bronze statue of Helios the sun god - one of the Seven Wonders of the World - had been commissioned from a local sculptor, Chares of Lindos, in 304 BC, and proudly set up beside the entrance to the harbour;2 but alas, only a century later an earthquake brought it crashing to the ground. The heartbroken Rhodians never tried to re-erect it, but left it for nearly nine more centuries lying where it had fallen. It was only now, during the temporary Arab occupation of the island, that Muawiya had it broken up and sold for scrap. The metal was ultimately sold to a Jewish merchant from Edessa; he needed 900 camels to carry it away.
Better known nowadays by its original Greek name of Salamis, Constantia lies about 5 km north of Famagusta. Although later rebuilt and refortified, it was to suffer several further raids and a serious earthquake, as a result of which the harbour silted up and became unusable. It was then abandoned, its ruined buildings making it a convenient quarry for Famagusta in its fourteenth-century heyday.
Contrary to the popular legend, never straddling it.
The capture of Rhodes - and of its neighbour Cos soon afterwards -persuaded Constans that he must take the initiative: left to himself, Muawiya would obviously continue to add island after island to his chain of conquests until it extended to Constantinople itself. In 655, therefore, an imperial fleet sailed out of the Marmara and southward down the coast. It met the Saracens off Phoenicus - the modern Finike -in Lycia, and immediately battle was joined. This was the first of a whole millennium of sea fights between Christian and Muslim, and it was a catastrophe. The Byzantine navy was shattered, and Constans himself escaped only by changing clothes with one of his men - who was subsequently killed in the fighting.
The situation now looked grave indeed; but the next year saw a momentous event which prevented Muawiya from following up his advantage. On 17 June 656 the Caliph Othman was assassinated in his house at Medina, while reading the Koran. Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, was elected his successor on the spot, and was supported by the tribesmen of Mesopotamia; Muawiya, on the other hand, who had been simultaneously proclaimed in Syria, accused Ali of complicity in the murder and, hanging Othman's bloodstained shirt on the mimber1 of the Great Mosque of Damascus, swore vengeance. The ensuing strife continued until 661, when Ali's own assassination left Muawiya supreme. For the next five years the Muslim world would be in ferment - and Byzantium could breathe again.
The Emperor — whose heavily hirsute appearance had by now earned him the nickname of Pogonatus, 'the Bearded'2 - doubtless welcomed the respite, and in 659 was more than happy to accept Muawiya's offer of 1,000 nomismata in return for a cessation of hostilities, with the additional bonus of a horse and a slave for every day that the peace between them should last. The question arises, all the same, why he had waited fourteen years after his accession, until the year 655, before taking any action at all against his enemy. Much the same question, it will be remembered, had been asked of his grandfather Heraclius, and to some extent the same
The hooded pulpit, reached by a long flight of steps, from which the Friday sermon is delivered.
This nickname was long mistakenly attributed to Constans's son, Constantinc IV. The confusion was finally cleared up by E. W. Brooks in his monograph 'Who was Constantine Pogonatus?' in Byzantiniscbe Zeitscbrift, Vol. xvii O908), pp. 460-62. All the Emperors at this period wore beards; a glance at their coins, on the other hand, makes it clear that the luxuriant growth on the face of Constans was, even by seventh-century standards, something rather special.
answer can be given: he needed time to prepare his forces. But for Constans there was another requirement too. The ill feeling engendered by the monothelite controversy and the intrigues of Martina had left Constantinople dangerously split. It was of the first importance that he should somehow re-establish - at least so far as he could - religious and political unity.
He himself had never had any time for theological speculation: of the doctrine of the Single Will he probably understood little and cared less. Originally intended as a constructive compromise, it had only added to the prevailing bitterness and confusion. The sensible thing, clearly, would be to forget all about it and pretend that it had never been put forward. Unfortunately, however, it still had influential adherents in the capital, led by the Patriarch Paul in person, while a vociferous opposition had been organized in Africa by an alarmingly articulate monk known as Maximus the Confessor. Early in 646 Maximus arranged for a manifesto condemning the heresy to be endorsed by a synod of African bishops and forwarded to Pope Theodore; and the Pope, understandably irritated that his predecessor's action of only six years before should have had so little effect, wrote to the Patriarch demanding a full statement of his beliefs. Paul replied, defending the offending doctrine in the strongest possible terms, whereupon Theodore promptly excommunicated him.
Constans was still only seventeen, but his reaction was so characteristic of him that it must clearly have been his own initiative. Whereas his grandfather would have defended his Patriarch in a long and closely reasoned document - as Paul doubtless urged him to do - he remained determinedly impartial, while contriving at the same time to be both firm and decisive. Early in 648 he published an edict known as the Typos, or Type. It did not seek to weigh the pros and cons of monothelitism, still less to pronounce on its validity; it simply decreed that the whole dispute should be consigned to oblivion, and that the state of affairs that had prevailed before it began should continue 'as if the issue had never arisen'. If a bishop or a clerk should dare even to raise the subject, he would be immediately deposed; if a monk, he would be excommunicated; if a member of the army or civil service, he would be deprived of his rank or office; if a senator or the equivalent, he would lose his property; if a private person, he would be flogged and banished.
It is hard not to sympathize with Constans; at the same time he should have known, even at his age, that it is impossible to put back the clock. The problem would not go away, and the Typos satisfied nobody. In
October 649 Pope Theodore's successor, Martin I, summoned a Council of 105 bishops in the Lateran Palace which duly condemned it; he then sent the Emperor a full report of the Council's findings, considerately translated into Greek for his benefit, under cover of a letter of studied politeness in which he required him formally to express his abhorrence of the monothelite dogma.
Constans, it need hardly be said, had no intention of doing any such thing. Little did Pope Martin know that before his letter was even written the newly appointed Byzantine Exarch of Ravenna, Olympius, was on his way to Italy with a small armed force, bearing orders to arrest the Pontiff - on the somewhat shaky grounds that his recent election had not been submitted to Constantinople for approval. Anastasius, Pope Martin's biographer, claims that Olympius had decided to kill the Pope rather than take him prisoner but, being continually thwarted in his attempts to do so, concluded that his intended victim was under divine protection and made a complete confession to him; what is beyond doubt is the fact that he then tried to take advantage of the widespread anti-Byzantine feeling in Italy to detach the whole province from the Empire and seize the secular power for himself. He did not succeed, but retired with his army to Sicily where he died three years later.
One year after his death, however, in June 653, his successor as Exarch, a certain Theodore Calliopas, landed in Italy. Theodore had similar instructions, and was determined to carry them out. Within days of his arrival, Pope Martin - already a sick man -
had been duly arrested and put on board the ship that was to carry him to face trial in Constantinople. For some unexplained reason he was not taken there directly, but was held for a year on the island of Naxos; only in September 654 did he reach the Bosphorus - to find that his tribulations had hardly begun. Arriving early in the morning, he was obliged to remain on board till sunset, being subjected throughout the day to the jeers and mockery of the populace. At nightfall he was taken off to the prison of Prandearia, where he was held for the next ninety-three days. Finally, half-starving, freezing cold (for it was now mid-winter) and unable to walk, he was brought before the tribunal.
To the original charge of having assumed the Papacy without imperial consent, a new and graver one had now been added: the Pope was accused of having conspired with Olympius against the Emperor. He naturally denied all the allegations, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion: he was found guilty, sentenced to death and led out into a large open courtyard where, in the presence of a dense crowd, his papal robes were torn from his shoulders. Even his undershirt was ripped from top to bottom, 'so that he was naked in several places'. An iron chain was then flung around his neck and he was marched through the streets to the Praetorium - the imperial prison - with the executioner's sword carried before him. On arrival there he was obliged to share a cell with murderers and common criminals, and was treated with such brutality that his legs were badly cut and the floor of the cell was stained with his blood.
The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 40