The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  Constantine arrived with a numerous retinue in the early spring of 711. Having travelled the last leg of the journey by land, he was met at the seventh milestone by an impressive delegation headed by the Patriarch and the co-Emperor Tiberius, Justinian's son, now aged six. Richly caparisoned horses with harnesses, of gold were put at their disposal, and the combined party made its formal entry into the city by the Golden Gate, before proceeding down the Mese to the Palace of Placidia, which had once again been made ready for a papal visitor. The Emperor, oddly enough, was not in the capital to greet his guest, being away in Nicaea; but he sent a cordial letter of welcome, suggesting that the two might meet at the half-way point of Nicomedia. Whether or not this was an attempt to gain a tactical advantage by forcing Constantine to come out to meet him must be a matter of conjecture; at all events the Pontiff willingly agreed - and was rewarded, when the meeting took place a day or two later, by the sight of Justinian, in full regalia including the imperial diadem, prostrating himself to kiss his foot. On the following Sunday the Basileus received the sacrament at the papal hands and sought general absolution for his sins; the two then returned together to Constantinople, where their discussions began.

  Of the agreement that resulted, our knowledge is sadly sketchy: our two Greek sources obviously take no interest in the Western Church, while the author of the Liber Pontificalis dwells delightedly on the details of the Pope's reception and the ceremonies arranged in his honour, to the virtual exclusion of the theological and liturgical issues involved. All that can be said with any certainty is that concessions were made on both sides; that the Pope finally approved about half the Canons, on the understanding that the Emperor would drop the rest; that the two parted amicably, with Justinian 'renewing all the privileges of the Church' -whatever that might mean; and that the papal mission returned safely to Rome in October, just a year after it had set out.

  It might have been expected - and, by the majority of his subjects, must devoutly have been hoped - that the Emperor, seeing the fury of the insurrection that had followed his punitive expedition to Ravenna, would have decided against any further adventures of the same kind. But Justinian was ever unpredictable, and early in 711 - it must have been just about the time he was conferring with the Pope - he struck again, this time against his former place of exile, Cherson in the Crimea. As with Ravenna, his reasons are hard to analyse. According to both Nicephorus and Theophanes, he was impelled solely by the desire to take vengeance on a city which had sought to surrender him to the usurping Emperor Tiberius; but if so, why did he wait six years after his reinstatement? There is, fortunately, another, more plausible, possibility. Some time after his departure from the Crimea, his brother-in-law the Khagan of the Khazars seems to have advanced to Cherson and - if he did not actually conquer the city - to have established a presence there in the person of a Khazar Tudun, or Governor. It may therefore have been this technical infringement of the imperial frontier - or at least of the Byzantine sphere of influence - that caused the Emperor to act as he did; in this event, his wrath would have been directed primarily at the Khazars rather than against the native inhabitants of the city.

  Whatever his motives, his expeditionary force - which is reported to have numbered 100,000 men, though this is almost certainly an exaggeration - achieved its object well enough. Seven of the leading citizens were roasted alive, countless others were drowned in the approved manner (with weights attached) and some thirty - including the Tudun and the Greek mayor, Zoilos - were sent, with their families, in chains to Constantinople. An imperial Governor named Elias was appointed in the place of the Tudun and settled in the city with a much-enlarged garrison. But when the Emperor came to summon his army home, disaster struck: one of those storms for which the Black Sea has always been famous arose without warning and engulfed the entire fleet. Precise figures must, as always, be treated with suspicion, but the casualties were estimated at 73,000.

  At this point both our sources report that Justinian, on being brought news of the catastrophe, burst into peals of laughter. If so, the most charitable interpretation is that he had suffered an attack of acute hysteria; otherwise it is hard to escape the conclusion that he had in turn fallen victim to the family madness. Almost immediately, he announced his intention of sending out a second expedition; before he could do so, however, he was pre-empted by messengers bringing further disquieting news: a Khazar army had arrived in Cherson to defend the city from Byzantine attack. Worse still, the imperial Governor Elias and the entire garrison, finding themselves hopelessly outnumbered and in imminent danger of their lives, had deserted en masse to the enemy.

  Insane or not, Justinian now took the only possible course - that of diplomacy. He released both the Tudun and the mayor and sent them back, with an escort of 300 soldiers, to resume their former positions. With them went his own Grand Logothete, George of Syria, with instructions to present the Emperor's sincere apologies to the Khagan for all that had occurred. He was then to ask for the surrender of Elias, together with that of a leading Byzantine exile, a general of Armenian extraction named Vardan - Hellenized to Bardanes - whom, probably rightly, he blamed for the Governor's treachery.

  But the citizens of Cherson were in no mood for conciliation. The Logothete and his entourage were put to death on their arrival; the Tudun, with his 300-strong escort, was dispatched to the Khagan. Unfortunately he died on the way; and the Khazars, taking the view that he would probably need his escort just as much on his journey to the next world as he had in this one, killed the lot of them. Cherson and the other cities of the Crimea now formally announced that they no longer recognized Justinian as their Emperor. Instead, they gave their allegiance to Bardanes the Armenian exile — who, adopting the fine old Roman name of Philippicus, forthwith proclaimed himself Basileus. Henceforth it was open war.

  Justinian's anger when these developments were tremblingly reported to him was fearful to behold. At once he prepared a new armament under the command of the Patrician Maurus, with orders to raze Cherson to the ground, leaving no living thing within its walls. Thanks to the huge siege engines that he had brought with him, Maurus actually succeeded in destroying two of the city's defensive towers; but now a further body of Khazar troops arrived and he had no option but to make terms. Having done so, however, he knew that he could never return and report his failure to Justinian; he asked to be brought before Philippicus, and fell on his knees before him. The die was cast; there was no point in waiting any longer. The Byzantine fleet and what remained of the army sailed back to Constantinople with the new Emperor at its head.

  Justinian, meanwhile, had made the cardinal mistake of leaving his capital - not in flight (for he had as yet no idea of these last developments) but in order to put down some minor rising in Armenia. He never got there: the moment the news was brought to him that a third would-be usurper of his throne was on his way across the Black Sea, he turned and, 'roaring like a lion', made all possible speed back to his capital. But he was too late. Philippicus arrived first, and the people of Constantinople received him with open arms. Justinian was arrested at the twelfth milestone by a body of troops under the command of Elias -the same officer, in all probability, whom he had appointed Governor of Cherson only months before - who claimed the privilege of performing the execution himself, striking off his head with a single blow and sending it to the new Emperor as a trophy. Subsequently, we are told, it was exhibited in Rome and Ravenna. Meanwhile the headless corpse, denied the dignity of a Christian burial, was flung unceremoniously into the Marmara.

  When the news of Justinian's death was carried back to Constantinople his mother, the Empress Anastasia, seized her little grandson Tiberius and hurried him off to sanctuary in the Church of the Virgin at Blachernae. No sooner had they arrived there, however, than two agents of Philippicus presented themselves and demanded that the Prince be given into their custody. The old Empress tried to plead with them, and one of them seemed disposed to listen; but while he did so his
companion -whose name was John Strouthos, 'the Sparrow' - advanced upon the terrified child, who stood clinging to the altar with one hand and clutching a fragment of the True Cross in the other. No Byzantine could possibly ignore so holy an object, but Strouthos was not to be deflected from his mission. Wrenching the fragment from Tiberius's grasp, he reverently laid it upon the altar. Next he untied a box of other saintly relics from the Prince's neck and transferred it to his own. Only then did he drag his small prisoner to the porch of a neighbouring church, where he stripped him of his clothing and, in the chronicler's graphic words, 'slaughtered him like a sheep'. Thus, with the cold-blooded murder of a little boy of six, was the Heraclian line extinguished for ever.

  Running in direct succession through five Emperors, that line constitutes the first true dynasty in Byzantine history. It had begun magnificently; it ended, 101 years later, in butchery and shame. Justinian II was not, it must be emphasized, the unmitigated disaster that has often been suggested. In his first reign especially, he worked as hard as any of his predecessors to strengthen the defences of the Empire, still further developing the Theme system and, where necessary, moving whole populations in order to establish military colonies in strategic areas. Similarly, his Farmers' Law - if it was indeed his - did much to free the agricultural peasantry from their former bondage to the landed aristocracy, giving them independence, self-respect and, in future generations, the readiness to defend their territory against all comers. He strove, also, to improve relations with his two most dangerous neighbours, the Arabs on one side and the Bulgars on the other; and if in this field he was ultimately less successful, the attempts were nevertheless surely worth making. Finally, he left the Empire on excellent terms with the Church of Rome, living to receive the Pope as an honoured guest in his capital -the last elected Pontiff to set foot in the city for twelve and a half centuries.1

  Such a record is far from contemptible, even if we leave aside the extraordinary courage and determination displayed by Justinian when, after nearly a decade of exile and horribly disfigured, he made his way back from the Crimea to reclaim his throne. Yet no amount of pleading can excuse the atrocities for which he was responsible nor diminish the incalculable number of his subjects, the majority of them completely innocent, who were put to death at his command. It has been plausibly suggested that the uncontrolled violence of his nature can be explained, at least in part, by the mutilation that he himself had suffered and the hideous - and humiliating - face which he was ever afterward obliged to present to the world: a face which can have been but little improved by the artificial nose of solid gold which he is said to have worn in his later years. That may be an explanation, but it is in no sense an excuse; it would certainly have been of small comfort to his victims and their

  1 The next occasion was to be the visit by Pope Paul VI to Istanbul on 25 July 1967.

  families, and it could not in any sense mitigate his conduct during his first reign which, though less unbridled than the second, was still intolerable enough to provoke a revolution.

  His subjects, in short, were well rid of him. We may feel sympathy for his mother, Anastasia, who is said to have once been whipped by Stephen the Sacellarius without her son's lifting a finger in her defence or taking any punitive action afterwards; for his wife Theodora, of whose fate we know nothing but who was probably with her husband - since she was clearly not with her son - when the end came; and above all for his son: poor, frightened Tiberius, murdered for no good reason shortly before his seventh birthday. Justinian, on the other hand, was forty-two when he died; and of him it can only be said that his death, on 4 November 711, came not a moment too soon.

  17

  The First Iconoclasts

  [711-75]

  In the long night of superstition the Christians had wandered far away from the simplicity of the Gospel: nor was it easy for them to discern the clue, and tread back the mazes of the labyrinth. The worship of images was inseparably blended, at least to a pious fancy, with the Cross, the Virgin, the saints and their relics; the holy ground was involved in a cloud of miracles and visions; and the nerves of the mind, curiosity and scepticism, were benumbed by the habits of obedience and belief.

  Gibbon,

  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. XLIX

  It was fortunate that Justinian II, during the days when he was still an effective ruler, had done so much to strengthen, both economically and militarily, the heartland of the Empire; because in Constantinople itself morale was now dangerously low. Less fortunate was the fact that his successor Philippicus Bardanes quickly proved himself a hopeless hedonist, who spent vast sums on his own amusement and, in his serious moments, seemed interested only in reviving the old theological disputes for which, over the years, the Byzantines had already paid so heavy a price. His innermost convictions probably tended towards monophysitism -that most inflammatory of heresies which, wisely, he did not attempt to revive. He did, however, make a determined effort to reimpose the monothelite compromise, even going so far as to issue an imperial edict on his own authority rejecting the decisions of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which had condemned the doctrine only thirty years before. At the same time he ordered the removal of a picture in the imperial palace representing the Council in session, together with an inscribed plaque commemorating the event on the Milion Gate.

  When the news of all this reached Rome, Pope Constantine - already horrified by the fate of his friend Justinian and implacably hostile to his successor - flew into a fury. The formal letter that Philippicus had addressed to him, notifying him of his accession in terms which struck the Pope as profoundly heretical, he rejected out of hand - replying with a decree of his own in which he made it an offence to stamp the new Emperor's portrait on coins, to refer to his reign in the dating of documents, or even to include his name in Church prayers. Finally, in obvious retaliation for the removal of the offending picture, he gave orders that a whole series of similar paintings - not just of the Sixth Council but of all the other five as well - should be specially painted for the walls of St Peter's.

  In a more peaceful age, an Emperor might have been allowed to indulge himself in the quintessentially Byzantine combination of sensual pleasure and Christological speculation to his heart's content, leaving his subjects to get on with their own lives. Not, however, in 712; for the murder of Justinian had given the Bulgar King Tervel just the opportunity he needed. On the pretext that he was honour-bound to avenge his former friend, he now invaded the Empire for the second time and advanced once again to the walls of Constantinople, leaving a trail of devastation behind him. Perhaps because he trusted his Bulgar ally, Justinian had paid little heed to his Thracian defences, and his successor had cared for them even less. If the invaders were to be driven back, the Emperor had no choice but to summon additional troops from the Opsikian Theme across the Marmara.

  Inescapable as it may have been, the decision proved his undoing. The Opsikians were notoriously self-willed, and felt no instinctive loyalty to an Armenian upstart who, having reached the throne by methods to say the least questionable, now seemed disposed to treat it like a plaything. They laid their plans with care; then, on Whit Saturday, 3 June 713, soon after the Emperor had settled down to a noon-day siesta after an agreeable morning spent banqueting with friends, a group of soldiers burst into his bed-chamber, seized him and hurried him away to the Hippodrome. There, in the changing room of the Green charioteers, his eyes were put out. He had reigned just nineteen months.

  After the success of their coup, the Opsikians might have been expected to proclaim one of their own number the new Basileus. In some way, however, they were prevented from doing so; and the choice of the Senate and people fell on a certain Artemius, who had been Chief Secretary to the former Emperor. It may have been this background that persuaded him to choose for his imperial title the name of another former civil servant who had risen to the supreme power: on the following day, Whit Sunday, he was crowned by the Patriarch in St
Sophia as the Emperor Anastasius II.

  Anastasius was a far abler ruler than his predecessor, and deserved to last a good deal longer than he did. He began, very sensibly, by rescinding Philippicus's monothelitist edict and restoring the memorials of the Sixth Ecumenical Council to their rightful places; then he settled down to the problem of imperial defence. Thanks to the Opsikian troops, the Bulgars had retreated back into their homeland; it was now the Arabs who were, once again, on the march - and who, as the Emperor's spies ominously reported, were preparing another full-scale attack on Constantinople. Anastasius at once began major operations on the Land Walls, repairing and reinforcing them where necessary. The state granaries were filled to bursting point, and every citizen was ordered to lay in enough food to last him and his family for three years; meanwhile the Byzantine shipyards were working harder than ever before. If the attack came, the Empire would not be caught unprepared.

  But could the attack not be prevented altogether? Anastasius believed that it could, and early in 715 he decided to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Saracens, using Rhodes as a base for the operation. His chances of success looked excellent and, had he been allowed to proceed as he had planned, his subjects might have been spared much suffering. Alas, the Opsikian troops had developed a taste for rebellion. No sooner had they arrived in Rhodes than - barely two years after they had dethroned Philippicus - they turned on John, the General Logothete to whom Anastasius had given command of the expedition, and clubbed him to death. They then made their way to Constantinople, picking up en route an innocuous and inoffensive tax-gatherer named Theodosius whom, for reasons not entirely clear, they decided to proclaim Emperor. When Theodosius was informed of their intention he very sensibly fled into the mountains; but he was tracked down and forced at sword-point to accept - though still very reluctantly - an honour that was, to him, as undesirable as it was unexpected. Meanwhile the rebels had reached the capital where, after a few months of bitter strife, Anastasius was deposed in his turn and withdrew to a monastery in Thessalonica.