The deeply undistinguished reign of Leontius is notable for one thing only: the capture of Carthage by the Saracens and the consequent extinction in 698 of the Exarchate of Africa. The upstart Emperor had done his best to save the situation, sending the largest fleet he could muster to the relief of the beleaguered city; ironically enough, it was this very fleet that overthrew him. Rather than return and report their failure, its leaders decided instead to rebel, acclaiming as Basileus one of their own number, a drungarius - the rank roughly corresponded to vice-admiral - whose Germanic name of Apsimar was hastily changed to Tiberius. When the fleet reached Constantinople, the Greens - who had never liked Leontius - upheld the cause of the mutineers, and their support proved decisive. The unhappy man lost - all too predictably -his nose, together with as much of his hair as was necessary to provide him with a tonsure, and was sent off to the monastery of Dalmatus.
Tiberius, for his part, proved a good deal more effective. With the help of his brother Heraclius he strengthened both the land and the sea defences of Anatolia, and in 700 actually invaded Saracen-held Syria, going on to regain - though unfortunately only for a brief period -parts of Armenia. Later, in 703 and 704, he beat back successive Arab invasions of Cilicia, inflicting heavy losses as he did so; indeed, had he only retained the imperial diadem, he might well have achieved still greater things, earning for himself a distinguished place on the roll of Byzantine Emperors. But he did not retain it. In 705 he in his turn was
1 The slitting of the tongue seems on this occasion to have been more symbolic than anything else: Justinian remained, so far as we can judge, an unusually talkative man all his life. The damage to his nose, on the other hand, resulted in lasting disfigurement: he was ever afterwards known as Rbinotmetus - 'Cut-Nose'.
overthrown. Justinian, after a decade in exile and despite his hideous mutilations, had returned to the capital - with his ambitions as strong as ever and vengeance in his heart.
The city of Cherson - now known as Korsun - consists today of a few excavated streets with the remains of a central square, a theatre and some rather good mosaic floors of the sixth century. Thirteen hundred years ago, on the other hand, it was a considerable community: a semi-autonomous dependency of the Empire with its own independent Hellenistic traditions, its own governing magistrate and its own senate. The small imperial garrison stationed there existed more for its protection than for its control. It was, however, useful to Byzantium in two ways. First, it was a valuable observation post, from which a watchful eye could be kept on the barbarian tribes - Alans and Avars, Bulgars and Slavs, Khazars and Petchenegs - who still led their old wandering lives through South Russia and the Caucasus; second, its remoteness made it an admirable place of exile - for Pope Martin among many others, who had died there just thirty years before the arrival of Justinian.1
The Emperor - still, it must be remembered, only twenty-six at the time of his banishment - had made it known from the start that he considered his stay in Cherson to be strictly temporary. Gradually he gathered round him a circle of loyal adherents who, as time went on, grew steadily more outspoken in their hostility to Leontius. When the usurper was dethroned in 698 they made no secret of their delight; and by 702 or early 703 Justinian had become such a liability to the local authorities that they decided to return him to Constantinople. Learning of their intentions just in time, however, he slipped out of the city and appealed for protection to the Khazar Khagan Ibuzir, who welcomed him with enthusiasm and immediately gave him his sister for a bride. The lady's first impressions of her new husband are, perhaps fortunately, not recorded; he cannot have been a pretty sight. But it is significant that he immediately renamed her Theodora. The two then settled in Phanagoria, at the entrance to the Sea of Azov, to await developments.
Their married life was soon interrupted. Clearly it was only a matter of time before the exiled Emperor's whereabouts became known in Constantinople, and at some point in 704 one of Theodora's handmaidens brought her the news that an imperial envoy had arrived at her brother's court, offering rich rewards for Justinian, dead or alive. Ibuzir, it appeared, had stood firm at first, but as the envoy's tone became
1 The Pope had hated it, and had complained bitterly about the living conditions. He even wrote to his friends asking them to send him bread, 'which is talked of, but has never been seen".
threatening he had slowly weakened; his brother-in-law was now in imminent danger of his life.
This report was confirmed a few days later when a detachment of soldiers suddenly appeared at Phanagoria, purporting to be a newly formed bodyguard. Justinian did not believe them for a moment. He soon singled out two officers as his potential assassins. Before they could strike, he invited them separately to his house; and then, as they entered, he leapt upon them and strangled them with his own hands. The immediate danger was averted; but there was still no time to be lost. Theodora, now heavily pregnant, had no choice but to return to her brother; Justinian himself slipped down to the harbour, commandeered - or, more probably, stole - a fishing-boat and sailed off into the night, back round the Crimean coast to Cherson. In doing so he was aware that he was risking his life; he was well known throughout the city, disguise - for him of all people - was impossible, and the authorities would never allow him to escape a second time. Somehow, however, he managed to contact his supporters and to summon them to a secret rendezvous - whence they all set sail together under cover of night, westward across the Black Sea.
The story is told of how, on their journey, their frail vessel was caught in a fearful tempest; and of how one of their number suggested to the Emperor that the divine anger might be assuaged by a promise that, if he regained his throne, he would spare all those who had formerly opposed him. Justinian's reaction had been entirely characteristic: 'If I spare a single one of them,' he had replied, 'may I be drowned on this instant.' Nothing happened; the storm subsided; and the little boat was carried safely to the Bulgar-held lands around the Danube delta.
The Bulgar King Tervel received Justinian as warmly as had the Khagan of the Khazars a year or two before, and readily agreed to his proposal: that he should provide all the military assistance necessary for the Emperor to regain his throne, in return for the title of Caesar and the hand of his daughter1 in marriage. Thus it was that in the spring of 705 the exiled Emperor appeared, at the head of an army of Slavs and Bulgars, before the walls of Constantinople. For three days he waited, while his peremptory demands for the gates to be opened to him were answered with derisive insults; then he took action. During those three days, his scouts had discovered an old water conduit, long disused, running beneath the walls into the city. On the night of the third day, accompanied only by a few picked volunteers, he managed to squeeze
1 The child of his first wife Eudocia, who had died young.
himself along it, finally emerging just outside the Palace of Blachernae at the northern extremity of the walls. The sleeping guards were taken by surprise, and within a few minutes the building was his. When the word spread the next morning that the Emperor had returned and had taken possession of his palace, Tiberius fled to Bithynia; and the citizens of Constantinople, faced with the alternatives of surrender or the immediate sack of their city at the hands of the barbarian hordes, very wisely chose the former.
If the Emperor had indeed sworn that fearful oath during his crossing of the Black Sea, those who had accompanied him would have had good cause to remember it in the days that followed. Tiberius himself was soon captured, and his predecessor Leontius was dragged, protesting, from his monastery; then, on 15 February 706, the two were paraded in chains through the city to the Hippodrome - just as Justinian had been ten years before - while their erstwhile subjects hurled abuse and pelted them with ordure. The prescribed circuit complete, they were flung down before the Emperor, who symbolically planted one purple-booted foot on the neck of each while the crowd chanted the Ninety-First Psalm, verse thirteen of which had seemed particularly appropriate:
<
br /> Thou hast trodden on the asp and the basilisk:
The lion and the dragon hast thou trampled underfoot.1
Then they were taken away to the place of execution, where their heads were severed from their shoulders.
Meanwhile the Bulgar army was waiting at the gates. Not without difficulty had Tervel restrained his men from bursting into the city and giving themselves over to the rapine and looting to which they had been eagerly looking forward; and Justinian was well aware that his new ally would not lead them home before claiming his reward. Of the projected marriage of Tervel to his daughter nothing more is heard; since the chroniclers make no further mention of the girl herself, we can only conclude that she had followed her mother to an early grave. But the other half of the bargain was inescapable; and so it was that shortly after his return, in an impressive ceremony held before a vast concourse of spectators, he draped a purple robe across the shoulders of the Bulgar King, seated him at his side and formally proclaimed him Caesar. Many of those present were horrified: here was the highestetitle after that of the Emperor himself, one which had hitherto been invariably reserved
1 The point here is the play on words: 'the lion' is Lcontius, 'the asp’ Apsimar. (The English Authorized Version prefers 'adder' to 'asp', which rather spoils the joke - such as it is.)
for senior members of the imperial family; must they now be obliged to watch in silence while it was conferred not even on a citizen of the Empire, but on a barbarian brigand? Yes, was the short answer: they were. All too soon it was to be made plain to them that their Basileus was no respecter of tradition; and that whatever they felt about his decisions, they would do well to keep their opinions to themselves.
For now came the Terror: an orgy of blood-letting worse even than that initiated by Phocas a century before. As Paul the Deacon1 unpleasantly put it (in a snide reference to the Emperor's noselessness), 'as often as he wiped away the drops of rheum from his nostrils, almost as often did he order another one of those who had opposed him to be slain.' Tiberius's brother Heraclius - the best general in the Empire, a brilliant soldier whom Justinian could ill afford to lose - was hanged with all his staff officers on a row of gibbets erected along the Land Walls; others were tied up in weighted sacks and thrown into the sea. Patriarch Callinicus, who had crowned both the usurpers, was blinded and exiled to Rome - as a warning, it was murmured, to Pope John VII if he did not ratify the Quinisextum - and the countless other cases of torture and mutilation were by no means confined to those who had opposed Justinian in the past. To his contemporaries only one explanation was possible; the Emperor was mentally unhinged. By now he seemed totally oblivious of state affairs, or of the ever-worsening situation along the imperial borders. He wanted only two things. The first was blood - and if that blood were the life-blood of the Empire itself, he cared not a jot. The other was his wife.
It was two years now since he had seen her; he may not even have known whether she and her baby were dead or alive. Nor could he be certain that her brother would allow her to leave his court. In the event, however, he need not have worried. On hearing of the Emperor's reinstatement the Khagan Ibuzir had repented of his former faithlessness; he was now eager to resume their former friendship and to enjoy the perquisites of an imperial brother-in-law. Theodora arrived safely in Constantinople with her little boy - named, rather unfortunately, Tiberius - the first foreign-born Empress ever to ascend the throne of Byzantium. Justinian was at the quayside to greet them; and now the watching crowd gasped again as the truth slowly dawned: this ogre who was their Emperor, this monster of inhumanity who seemed to breathe only bitterness and hatred, was in love. Inevitably, there were those who shook their heads as they watched the Emperor lower the diadems on to
i Historia Langobardorum, VI, xxxii.
the heads of his wife and son in St Sophia. The woman was, after all, not just a foreigner - though that would have been bad enough. She was a barbarian to boot - and her son, whom Justinian had named co-Emperor at the same time, was half-barbarian too. Mesalliances of this kind, they whispered, would have been unthinkable in former times.
But then, so would an Emperor without a nose. Such old-fashioned prejudices were no longer acceptable in Justinian's Constantinople. It was significant that he had not cut the noses of either of the upstart pretenders; having proved by his own example that an Emperor could be an Emperor whether he possessed a nose or not, there was simply no point in doing so. The only way to make sure that they would cause no further trouble was to eliminate them completely - which was what he had done. In consequence of this, the abominable practice of rhinokopia, as it was called, is hardly ever heard of again. By the same token, Theodora the Khazar was only the first of many Empresses born beyond the furthest confines of the Empire.
The Byzantium of the eighth century would be, in short, a very different place from the Byzantium of the seventh; and for that difference Justinian II was, for all his violence and his brutality, to be very largely responsible.
Justinian's elevation of Tervel was not his only attempt to improve relations with his neighbours. Soon after his restoration he liberated 6,000 Arab prisoners of war taken by his two predecessors; and a year or two later he sent the Caliph Walid I a vast quantity of gold, a team of skilled workmen and a huge consignment of mosaic tesserae for the embellishment of the great Mosque of Medina, then a-building. In return, Walid is said to have bestowed on him a whole 'houseful' of pepper, valued at 20,000 dinars.
But alas, no amount of extravagant gestures could keep the peace for very long on the imperial borders. Justinian's neighbours to both east and west soon realized that by his wholesale purges he had eliminated all his best officers, and they were not slow to take advantage of the fact. In 708 the Byzantines suffered a serious defeat at the hands of certain Bulgar tribes (who were, however, almost certainly not subject to Tervel) at Anchialos near the mouth of the Danube; and in 709 they sustained an even graver blow: the loss of the key stronghold of Tyana in Cappadocia to the Arabs, whose victory was to encourage them to make further and still deeper incursions into imperial territory.
That same year, 709, saw another incident far more damaging to Justinian's reputation than the loss of any number of fortresses. This was his punitive expedition against Ravenna. His motives remain a mystery. True, the city had defied him when he had tried to lay hands on Pope Sergius; but that was seventeen years before, and even his own ten-year exile is not quite enough to explain the delay. Our most vivid authority for this episode, a ninth-century Ravennate named Agnellus, suggests that it was certain of his fellow-citizens who had been responsible for the Emperor's rhinokopia; but this sounds even more unlikely.
There remains, however, a third possibility: that Ravenna was showing disturbing signs of rebelliousness towards Rome. Relations between the two were never entirely easy: as capital of the Exarchate, Ravenna always claimed a degree of ecclesiastical autonomy; she tended to resent Roman supremacy and, in particular, the special oath of obedience that all her archbishops, on their appointment, were required to swear to the Pope. Normally this resentment was allowed to smoulder quietly, doing little real harm; in 708, however, the new archbishop, Felix by name, categorically refused to sign the necessary undertaking. There followed a furious altercation, and it is this which may have persuaded the Emperor - or at least provided him with an excuse - to take the action he did. In the spring of 709 he sent a fleet to Ravenna under a certain Patrician named Theodore, with instructions to invite all the local dignitaries to a banquet in his name. Unsuspectingly, they presented themselves on the appointed day; whereupon they found themselves seized, fettered, loaded on to a ship and carried off to Constantinople, while Theodore's troops sacked and looted their city. On their arrival they were led before Justinian - seated, Agnellus tells us, on a throne of gold and emeralds and wearing a pearl-encrusted diadem fashioned for him by the Empress with her own hands - who unhesitatingly sentenced them to death. Only one life would he spare: that of th
e archbishop, in consequence of an admonitory dream that he had had the night before. Felix's sentence was commuted to one of blinding,1 after which he was exiled to Pontus. Only after Justinian's death was he permitted to return to his see.
In Ravenna, Justinian's action proved predictably disastrous. The smouldering discontent flared up - as well it might - into open insurrection,
1 The method employed was an interesting one: a huge silver dish was heated till it was red hot, after which 'the strongest vinegar' was poured over it. The Patriarch was obliged to stare directly into it for a long time, thereby utterly destroying his sight (Agnellus, p. 169).
followed by a campaign of civil disobedience which was to prove a source of considerable anxiety to succeeding Exarchs in the years to come. In Rome, by contrast, it seems hardly to have been noticed. Any Pope worthy of his tiara could have been expected to protest - and protest vociferously - at such outrageous treatment of his flock, and in particular of a consecrated prelate, insubordinate or not; from Pope Constantine I, however, there came not a word of remonstration. Subsequent events were to reveal why: at long last, Emperor and Pope together were hoping to solve the vexed question of the Quinisextum.
All through Justinian's exile, the 102 Canons approved by his Synod had remained without papal endorsement; and one of his first acts on his return had been to send two metropolitan bishops to the Pope (then John VII) suggesting that he give his approval at least to those Canons to which he had no objection. It was a reasonable enough request -especially coming from an autocrat like Justinian - but not, apparently, reasonable enough for the Pontiff, who refused his assent to the lot. The consequent stalemate might have continued indefinitely, had not John died in 707. His second successor - the first, an elderly Syrian called Sisinnius, reigned only three weeks before expiring in his turn - fortunately proved better disposed. This was Constantine, another Syrian, who in 710 accepted Justinian's invitation to come himself to the capital and settle matters once and for all.
The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 43