The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  Patriarch Paul, meanwhile, was on his deathbed. There he was visited by Constans, who gave him - presumably in an attempt to raise his spirits - a full account of Martin's trial and his subsequent sufferings. To the Emperor's surprise, the dying man was much distressed. 'Alas,' he murmured, 'this too must I answer for'; and he begged the Emperor as his last wish that the Pope should be subjected to no further ill treatment and that his life should be spared. His request was granted - though only after Martin had spent another eighty-five days in prison - and the sentence commuted from death to banishment. The old man was sent off to Cherson in the Crimea where, less than six months later, on 16 September 655, he died. Nor was he the only martyr to the doctrine of the Single Will: soon after his condemnation it was the turn of Maximus the Confessor. He too was brought from Italy to stand trial in Constantinople, where he was subjected to unspeakable brutalities - including the removal of his tongue and the cutting off of his right hand - in attempts to force him to recant. But like Martin he stood firm and -thanks largely to his immense reputation as a theologian1 - also escaped execution, finally dying a natural death in 662 in his place of exile, at the age of eighty.

  As the eastern provinces of his Empire fell one by one to the Arab invaders, Constans began to turn his thoughts increasingly towards those of the West. In the past half-century they had given his predecessors and himself little enough trouble; his grandfather Heraclius had hardly needed to spare them a thought. He knew, however, that this happy state of affairs could not last. In the Balkans, the Slav settlers were

  1 Maximus, even more than Pope Martin, had been the spiritual leader of the opposition both to the Ekthesis and the Typos. Indeed he had gone even further, maintaining that the Emperor as a layman had no right to pronounce on theological matters. The author of no less than ninety major works, he was in many respects the forerunner of those medieval fathers who were to uphold the claims of the Church against the State in centuries to come.

  growing restive and making difficulties over their annual tribute; in Italy, especially after the arrest and trial of Pope Martin, Byzantium was more unpopular than ever it had been; Sicily, meanwhile, was in very real danger from the Saracens, who had first attacked it as early as 652 and had since occupied still more of the North African coast, from which they would doubtless be launching further expeditions before long. If, in short, preventive measures were not taken, the western provinces might drop away from the Empire just as surely as those in the East had done.

  The respite afforded by Muawiya's preoccupations with the Caliphate gave the Emperor precisely the chance he needed. Already in 658 we find him leading a punitive expedition against the Balkan Slavs, large numbers of whom he transported and resettled in Asia Minor; but it was only in 662 that he took the decision which might have changed the whole future history of the Roman Empire: to leave Constantinople for ever and establish his court permanently in the West. His grandfather Heraclius had had the same idea nearly half a century before, and had been dissuaded only by the combined entreaties of Patriarch and people. Heraclius, however, had been an outstandingly popular ruler; his grandson was not. Constans had antagonized the monophysite and monothelitist communities by refusing to give them the support they had hoped for, and the orthodox by his treatment of Martin and Maximus; worse still, in 660 he had shamelessly ordered the murder of his brother Theodosius, having previously forced him into the priesthood - not, as he claimed, because Theodosius had been conspiring against him but, as everybody knew, because he was under pressure to crown him co-Emperor and could not bear to contemplate any sharing of his own authority.

  We can probably discount the suggestion by later historians that the Emperor fled his capital to escape from the hideous visions of his bloodstained brother which haunted his midnight hours; nor, surely, can his decision be attributed to his unpopularity in the city - even though this may go some way to explain why the inhabitants seem to have raised no objections.1 He had never made any effort to be popular and, so long as his position remained secure, the degree to which he was loved by his subjects was a matter of supreme indifference to him. In any case his primary purpose in leaving was a far more honourable one: to protect Italy, Sicily and what was left of his African province from Saracen

  1 Another reason for their apathy may have been that they did not know his true intentions and simply assumed that he was leaving on an extended tour of his western dominions rather than deserting them for ever.

  conquest. If in addition he could drive the Lombards from Italy - or at least from the southern half of the peninsula - then so much the better.

  Leaving his wife and three sons in Constantinople, the Emperor sailed in early 662 for Greece, where he seemed to have found more to do than he had expected. He remained there, first in Thessalonica and then in Athens, for a full year; and it was not until the spring of 663 that he finally crossed the Adriatic and landed with his army at Tarentum — now Taranto. The Lombards put up what opposition they could, but their local militias were small: Constans was able to advance without too much difficulty as far as Benevento, to which he laid siege. Unfortunately for him, the city had already sent an urgent appeal for aid to the Lombard King Grimuald in his capital at Pavia, and Grimuald had at once dispatched a relief force of considerable strength; if Benevento could hold out until its arrival, it would be the Byzantines who found themselves outnumbered.

  At this point, as the Lombard army was advancing rapidly southwards, a messenger who had been sent on ahead by Grimuald to inform the Beneventans of its approach was captured and brought before Constans. Cunningly, the Emperor offered to spare his life if he would deliver a contrary message, to the effect that no help was to be forthcoming. The messenger - his name was Sesuald - agreed; but when he was brought beneath the walls he shouted, before his captors could silence him, that the army was indeed on its way and had already reached the Sangro River. He barely had time to add a plea for the protection of his wife and children before his head was struck from his shoulders; shortly afterwards it was loaded into a catapult and hurled over the walls.

  But Sesuald had saved Benevento, and the imperial army had no course but to go on to Naples - which was a Greek city, and therefore friendly - and thence to Rome where Constans, despite his treatment of Martin, was accorded a formal welcome by Pope Vitalian and solemnly escorted into the city - the first Emperor to set foot in it since the fall of the Western Empire nearly two centuries before. The Liber Pontificalis describes approvingly how he spent the next twelve days visiting all the major churches; but the Romans were a good deal less gratified when he began stripping their city of what few valuables it still possessed -including even the copper from the roof of the Pantheon - and shipping them back to Constantinople. Great must have been their relief when, on 12 July, he returned to Naples.

  In the autumn, having marched slowly south through Calabria, Constans crossed the Straits of Messina to Sicily; and for the next five years he kept his court at Syracuse. For the Sicilians, those five years were one protracted nightmare. The honour, such as it was, of finding their island selected for the capital of the Roman Empire was as nothing in comparison with the extortions of the imperial tax-gatherers - for the satisfaction of whom, we are told, husbands were sold into slavery, wives forced into prostitution, children separated from their parents. Nor can we tell how long these depredations might have continued had not the Emperor unexpectedly come to a sudden, violent and somewhat humiliating end. There was, so far as we know, no preconceived plan to assassinate him, far less any deeply hatched conspiracy; but on 15 September 668, while he was innocently lathering himself in his bath, one of his Greek attendants - in what we can only assume to have been a fit of uncontrollable nostalgia - felled him with the soap-dish.

  During the Emperor's long absence from Constantinople, the remaining eastern provinces had been administered by the eldest of his three sons, who now succeeded him as Constantine IV. Owing to our continued -and deeply frustrating -
lack of contemporary historians, we know little about his appearance or character; an incident occurring soon after his accession, however, hardly predisposes us in his favour. In 669 certain regiments from Asia Minor marched on the capital, demanding that Constantine should crown his two younger brothers co-rulers with himself, on the curious grounds that since Heaven was ruled by a Trinity, so should the Earth be also. The firmness and promptness of the Emperor's reaction showed, as clearly as anything could, how he intended to govern: he invited the leaders to a conference in his palace, and immediately on their arrival had them seized and summarily executed - after which, as Gibbon tells the story, 'the prospect of their bodies hanging on the gibbet in the suburb of Galata reconciled their companions to the unity of the reign of Constantine'. Opinions differ as to whether or not the two young princes had instigated the uprising; but their brother was not in the mood to give them the benefit of the doubt. In conformity with the practice now growing distressingly frequent in Byzantine political life, their noses were slit - not just a punishment and a warning for the future, but a silent proclamation, to army and people alike, of their unfitness to rule.

  Such a charge, despite his periodic outbursts of brutality, could never be levelled against Constantine. On the contrary, he was to prove a wise statesman and, like his great-grandfather, a born leader of men. Admittedly he had inherited from Heraclius a superbly organized state - at least where its Anatolian heartland was concerned; one might argue, too, that he enjoyed more than his fair share of good luck. But what cannot be questioned is the fact that the first decade of his reign marked a watershed in the history, not only of the Byzantine Empire, but of all Christendom: the moment when, for the first time, the armies of the Crescent were checked, turned and put to flight by those of the Cross.

  The brief respite was over. In 661 the Caliph Ali had been assassinated outside the mosque at his headquarters in Kufa; since then, Muawiya had reigned supreme. One of his first decisions had been to establish his capital at Damascus, where he founded the dynasty of Omayyad Caliphs that was to endure for the next eighty years. An old and venerable city, it was moreover incomparably better placed than the remote townships of the Arabian Hejaz for the achievement of his prime objective: the annihilation of the Roman Empire. With the vastly increased resources now at his command, he had resumed those tactics that had served him so well in the previous decade, every year dispatching a new army into Anatolia and a new fleet up the Ionian coast, plucking off the imperial cities and islands one by one. After Cos came Chios; after Chios, Smyrna; finally, in 672, the Saracens sailed up the Hellespont and into the Marmara, where they captured the peninsula of Cyzicus on the Bithynian shore - only some fifty miles across the water from Constantinople itself-and began to fortify it as their principal bridgehead. Two years later the siege began.

  Most of the previous attacks against the city of Constantine had been launched from the landward side: this one came from the sea. The Saracen ships carried heavy siege engines and huge catapults with which to bombard the walls and their defenders alike. But the fortifications, both along the Marmara and the Golden Horn, were proof against all their assaults - while the Byzantines for their part were able to create havoc among the attackers by means of a secret weapon invented a few years before by a certain Callinicus, an architect and chemist from the Syrian city of Heliopolis (more familiar to us nowadays as Baalbek). It was a secret so well guarded that to this day we are uncertain of the precise composition of what was known throughout the middle ages as 'Greek fire'.1 Sometimes it was sprayed, by means of a pump or syphon, over an enemy vessel; sometimes it was poured into long, narrow

  1 Marcus Graecus, a writer of the tenth century, gives a rough recipe: 'Take pure sulphur, tartar, sarcocolla [Persian gum], pitch, dissolved nitre, petroleum [obtainable from surface deposits in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus] and pine resin; boil these together, then saturate tow with the result and set fire to it. The conflagration will spread, and can be extinguished only by urine, vinegar or sand' - a property which, if true, would give a completely new dimension to the technique of fire-fighting.

  cartridges and catapulted against its objective. The results were almost invariably catastrophic - particularly since the flaming liquid, being oil-based, would float upon the surface of the sea, frequently igniting the wooden hulls of the ships and causing an additional hazard to those who tried to save themselves by jumping overboard.

  But the Muslims, unaccustomed to such opposition, refused to admit defeat. Retiring with the approach of winter to Cyzicus, they called up further reinforcements from Syria and spent the next few months repairing and refitting their ships. With the coming of spring they returned to the attack; but the second year of the siege did not prove any more successful than the first. Nor did the third, nor the fourth; it was only after the fifth year of frustration, in 678, that the siege was finally raised and the battered remnants of the Saracen fleet turned about and headed for home. Even then their tribulations were not over; returning along the coast of Pamphylia, they ran into a freak autumn storm which accounted for yet further losses.

  While Muawiya's navy was hammering in vain against the walls of Constantinople, his army had sustained similar reverses nearer home. Here his enemies were not the Byzantines but the so-called Mardaites -bands of Christian freebooters who, from their original redoubts high in the Taurus Mountains, had spread south into Syria and Mount Lebanon, where they were waging a ceaseless guerrilla war against the Arabs as far south as Jerusalem and even the Dead Sea. To the Caliph, already seriously worried by his inability to control these brigands, the news of the humiliation of his fleet came as a shattering blow. The Empire, it seemed, was invincible after all, under the divine protection of its Christian God. In 679, discouraged and demoralized, he accepted Constantine's offer of peace - under terms which, a few years before, he would have considered ignoble: the evacuation of the Aegean islands that he had so recently conquered, plus an annual tribute to the Emperor of fifty slaves, fifty horses and 5,000 pounds of gold. A year later he was dead.

  Constantine, on the other hand, was at the height of his popularity and prestige. He had inspired his subjects with the courage and the morale to withstand five years of siege by a power hitherto considered irresistible, and in doing so he had saved Western civilization. Blocked from Europe by the impregnable walls of Constantinople and the unyielding spirit of the Emperor and his people, the armies of the Prophet were obliged to travel the entire length of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar before they could invade the continent - thus extending their lines of communication and supply almost to breaking point and rendering impossible any permanent conquests beyond the Pyrenees. Had they captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe - and America - might be Muslim today.

  And Western civilization recognized its saviour. It was not only the Khagan of the Avars and the Slav tribal leaders in the Balkans who sent Constantine embassies of congratulation, with requests for assurances of peace and friendship: it was also the Lombard and Frankish princes of the West. He was, after all, the sole Emperor of the Christian world: a ruler with whom they might disagree or even on occasion wage war, but whose precedence they would never have questioned; and he had shown himself worthy of his title.

  With the Saracens finally in retreat, Constantine could turn his attention to another, lesser, enemy - the Bulgars. These warlike pagan tribesmen were not in fact Slavs - as their descendants, largely for linguistic reasons, are generally considered today - but of Turkic origin; they had, however, left their ancient home in the lands between the lower reaches of the Volga and the Don and had migrated westward to the north bank of the Danube, whence more and more of them were trickling across the river into imperial territory. In 680 a large squadron of Byzantine ships, with the Emperor himself in command, sailed up the Bosphorus into the Black Sea and landed an army just north of the Danube delta. Unfortunately, the region had not been reconnoitred in adva
nce: the swampy terrain made any organized advance impossible, while Constantine himself suffered an agonizing attack of gout which obliged him to retire for a few days to Mesembria nearby. Such a minor incapacity should not have affected the campaign unduly; for some reason, however, the rumour spread through the army that the Emperor had taken flight. In the ensuing panic his men turned and fled - while the Bulgars, seeing their chance, pursued them across the Danube into the former province of Moesia, killing all those whom they captured.

  The net result of the expedition was thus precisely the opposite of what had been intended: instead of forcing back the Bulgars, it facilitated and encouraged their further penetration of the Empire. The invaders quickly realized that the new region in which they found themselves, an unusually fertile land protected by the Danube to the north, the Balkan Mountains to the south and the Black Sea to the east, was far preferable to that which they had just left. Easily subduing the seven Slavonic tribes who had already settled there, they rapidly established a strong

  Bulgar state - which, in a somewhat different form, survives to this day - and even obliged the Emperor to agree to the annual payment of protection money to their King.

  It was, in fact, more of a humiliation than a real disaster. Given the strength of the Bulgars along the frontier, some such arrangement would sooner or later have been inevitable. It had, moreover, the advantage of cementing a general peace which was to endure to the end of Constantine's reign and which allowed him to tackle the most stubborn of all his internal problems. The doctrine of the Single Will of Christ had sustained several severe blows during his father's time, but had obstinately refused to die. Already in 678 the Emperor had written to the Pope, proposing an ecumenical council of the Church to settle the matter once and for all; and the Pope, after summoning a preliminary synod in Rome to ensure that the Western representatives at least should speak with one voice, enthusiastically agreed. All through the early autumn of 680 the delegates poured in - 174 of them, from every corner of the Christian world. The Italian party, which consisted of the Bishops of Palermo, Reggio and Porto and their suites, together with a priest named Theodore representing the Greek Church of Ravenna, were received with particular honours and accommodated in the Palace of Placidia at the Emperor's expense. By the beginning of November most of them had arrived, and a week later the Sixth Ecumenical Council of the Church held its first session in the Trullos, or Domed Hall, of the imperial palace.