These upheavals, it should be noted, were the consequence not of any imperial decree but of a single action by the Emperor: the destruction
1 In the communities along the shore of the Venetian lagoon, their choice fell on a certain Ursus, or Orso, from Heraclea, who was placed at the head of the former provincial administration and given the title of Dux. At that moment the Republic of Venice was born; and that title, transformed by the rough Venetian dialect into Doge, was to be passed down through 117 successors and over more than a thousand years until the Republic's end in 1797-
of the icon over the doors of the Chalke. Once aware of the fury that he had aroused, Leo might have been expected to call a halt for fear of sparking off a full-scale civil war; but his resolution never wavered. For three years he tried unsuccessfully to negotiate with the Church leaders, both in the East and in the West, who opposed him; then, in 730 -having first taken the precaution of dismissing the iconodule Patriarch Germanus and replacing him with a weakly acquiescent cleric named Anastasius - he finally issued his one and only edict against the images.
The die was cast. All holy pictures were to be destroyed forthwith. Those who failed to obey would be subject to arrest and punishment; those who continued to cherish their images could expect relentless persecution. In the East, the blow fell most heavily on the monasteries, many of which possessed superb collections of ancient icons - to say nothing of vast quantities of holy relics, now similarly condemned. Hundreds of monks fled secretly to Greece and Italy, taking with them such of the smaller and more precious treasures as could safely be concealed beneath their robes. Others sought refuge in the deserts of Cappadocia, whose contorted outcrops of soft and friable volcanic tufa had, already for the best part of a hundred years, offered troglodytic sanctuary for other Christian communities threatened by the advancing Saracen. Meanwhile in the West Pope Gregory, seeing that an open breach could no longer be postponed, issued a public condemnation of iconoclasm and followed it up with two letters to Leo, setting out the orthodox view on images and suggesting that the Emperor leave the task of defining Christian dogma to those best qualified to perform it.
Leo's first reaction was to deal with Gregory in much the same way as Constans II had dealt with Pope Martin; but the ships sent to arrest the Pontiff foundered in the Adriatic, and before anything further could be done Gregory himself was dead. His successor and namesake took an equally determined line. Still further incensed by the Emperor's confiscation, early in 731, of the annual incomes from the Churches of Sicily and Calabria he summoned a synod in November which decreed excommunication for all who laid impious hands on sacred objects of any kind. Leo retaliated by transferring the Sicilian and Calabrian bishoprics, together with a considerable number of others throughout the Balkan peninsula, from the see of Rome to that of Constantinople. Henceforth the already strained relations between the Eastern and Western Churches were marked by a still more unconcealed hostility, which was to continue with only brief intermissions for more than three centuries until the final schism.
Of the last decade of Leo's reign we know little. The 730s were a relatively quiet time for Byzantium: apart from the regular Saracen raids in Anatolia which had become an accepted fact of life, they were probably to a large extent taken up with the consequences of the iconoclast decree, its further implementation and the pursuit and chastisement of those who elected to defy it. Quiet as they may have been, however, those years were certainly not happy. Leo III, like Heraclius before him, had saved the Western world; but whereas Heraclius had striven to put an end to religious strife, Leo seems almost deliberately to have encouraged it. When he died, on 18 June 741, he left behind him an Empire which, though finally secure against its Arab enemies, was more deeply and desperately divided than ever in its history.
Constantine V, his son and successor, was the last man to reunite it. Known during his own lifetime and to posterity by the unattractive nickname of Copronymus - a sobriquet acquired, Theophanes assures us, as a result of an unfortunate and embarrassing accident at his baptism -he had been crowned co-Emperor by his father in 720 at the age of two; and from an early age he had been closely associated with Leo in his iconoclast policy. It was almost certainly for this reason that his much older brother-in-law Artabasdus - Leo's principal ally in his bid for power, whom he had rewarded with the hand of his daughter Anna - in 742 launched a surprise attack on the young Emperor while he was marching eastwards on a campaign against the Saracens, soundly defeated him and, hurrying to the capital, proclaimed himself Basileus in his stead. He then immediately ordered the restoration of the icons - people were astonished at the quantity of holy images said to have been destroyed that suddenly reappeared safe and sound, just as they were at the number of former iconoclasts who now revealed that they had been secret iconodules all along - and for sixteen months Constantinople looked itself again, its churches and public buildings once more aglitter with gold.
But Constantine was not beaten. He had sought refuge at Amorium, the scene of his father's early successes, where the garrison - composed as it was entirely of local Anatolians - was iconoclast to a man, and where he was given an enthusiastic welcome. From there it was a simple matter to raise further troops of similar persuasion, with whose help in 743 he defeated Artabasdus at the ancient Sardis (Sardes), in Lydia, and marched on to Constantinople, which surrendered to him on 2 November. Artabasdus and his two sons were publicly blinded in the Hippodrome, their chief supporters executed or subjected to various mutilations; meanwhile the trembling Patriarch Anastasius, who had predictably turned his coat and crowned the usurping Emperor, was first flogged, then stripped naked and, sitting backwards on a donkey, ignominiously paraded round the arena. After this humiliation - which had been accurately predicted by his predecessor Germanus fifteen years before - he was, to everyone's surprise, reinstated in his former office. Here was one of Constantine's subtler moves. He was always anxious to reduce the influence of the hierarchy, in order to concentrate as much power as possible in his own hands; and a thoroughly discredited Patriarch was just what he wanted.
The rebellion of Artabasdus had two significant results. The first was to inflame the Emperor's hatred of icon-worshippers to an almost pathological degree. Once restored to the throne, he intensified his persecution of all who displayed the slightest sign of religious superstition; the citizens of Constantinople, in particular, felt themselves to be in the grip of a new reign of terror. And yet, surprisingly perhaps, about Constantine himself there was nothing remotely austere, any more than there had been about his father. Except where the images were concerned, the iconoclasts were far from puritanical - less so, indeed, than many an image-loving Western churchman. In one of his letters to Leo, Pope Gregory had accused him of trying to console those who missed their old icons with 'harps, cymbals, flutes and other such trivialities'; and even in the visual arts secular subjects continued to be actively encouraged. A near-contemporary1 tells us, for example, that the mosaics portraying the life of Christ on the walls of the Church of St Mary in Blachernae were almost immediately replaced with others, just as fine, depicting landscapes with so many trees and birds and fruits as to make it look half-way between a provisions market and an aviary. More improbable still was the Patriarchal Palace, which was, we learn, richly embellished with representations of horse-races and scenes of the chase.
Constantine's own tastes, if our meagre (and, alas, exclusively iconodule) sources can be believed, bordered on the libertine. Shamelessly bisexual, he filled his court with exquisite young favourites; and although various accounts of unbridled orgies can probably be ascribed to the malicious tongues of his enemies, there was certainly plenty of music and dancing; the Emperor himself is said to have been an accomplished performer on the harp. None of this, however, should be taken to imply that he was not a fundamentally religious man. On the contrary, he had
i The anonymous author of the Life of St Stephen the Younger, written in 808 on the basis of earlier
information provided by Stephen, deacon of St Sophia.
pondered long and deeply over the doctrinal issues raised by his policies - during his life he wrote no less than thirteen theological treatises -and had drawn his own conclusions, which he made no attempt to conceal. What evidence we have makes it clear that he was at heart a monophysite: he abhorred the cult of the Virgin Mary and refused outright to allow her the title of Tbeotokos, Mother of God, since he held that she had given birth only to the physical body of Jesus Christ, in which his Spirit had been temporarily contained. For the worship of the saints - and worse still, their relics - he showed a still greater contempt, as he did for any form of intercessory prayer. Even the use of the prefix 'Saint' before a name would incur his wrath: St Peter could be referred to only as 'Peter the Apostle', St Mary's church as 'Mary's'. If a member of his court forgot himself so far as to invoke the name of a saint in some exasperated expletive, the Emperor would immediately reprimand him - not for the implied lack of respect for the saint in question, but because the title was undeserved.
The second consequence of Artabasdus's coup was to impress upon Constantine the full strength of the opposition to iconoclasm, especially in the capital. It convinced him that Leo's decree of 730 was by itself inadequate: what was required was a full Council of the Church. At the same time he knew, like his father before him, that to press on too fast might be fatal, since it could well provoke a revolution; and it was another twelve years before he felt strong enough to summon what he described as an Ecumenical Council to give its official approval to iconoclast doctrines. Meanwhile he prepared the way with care. Bishops whose views he considered unsound were quietly eased out of their sees, and imperial nominees appointed in their place; new dioceses were established and given to trustworthy supporters.
Outside the Patriarchal see of Constantinople, however, the Emperor had comparatively little influence - a fact made the more unfortunate in that the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem had all declared themselves in favour of images. Rather than risk any overheated discussions, with the attendant possibility of the Council's findings turning out otherwise than he had intended, Constantine had therefore decided that no representatives from these sees - or, of course, from that of Rome — should receive invitations; and the relatively small assembly that gathered in the Palace of Hiera, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, on 10 February 754 had thus no conceivable right to the title of ‘Ecumenical' that it so presumptuously claimed. It consisted altogether of 338 prelates, meeting under the presidency of Bishop Theodosius of Ephesus, a son of the former Emperor Tiberius II - Patriarch Anastasius having succumbed to a particularly revolting disease the previous autumn1 and no suitable replacement for him having yet been found. For seven months they debated; but the results of their deliberations, as promulgated on 29 August in Constantinople, came as no surprise. Christ's nature, they unanimously declared, was aperigraptos - not circumscribable, and consequently not to be represented as circumscribed by the limits of a figure within a finite space. As to the images of the Virgin and saints, they smacked of heathen idolatry and were thus equally to be condemned.
These conclusions were, predictably, enshrined within countless pages of meticulous reasoning, backed up by much biblical and patristic quotation and any amount of pulverizing scholarship; but they were all that the Emperor needed. The order for the destruction of every holy image was reconfirmed, the leaders of the pro-icon party - who included the deposed Patriarch Germanus, together with the party's chief polemicist John of Damascus - excommunicated. And the persecutions continued with renewed vigour. Henceforth, however, there becomes apparent a gradual change of emphasis. The monasteries, as we have seen, had long been a target of the iconoclasts - but principally, in the early days of the movement, because of the quantity of icons and relics that they possessed. After the Council, the Emperor began persecuting them for their own sake, and with a fury that raises serious doubts as to his sanity. Referring to them as 'the unmentionables', he would fulminate with maniacal passion against their cupidity, corruption and general debauchery: there were, it seemed, no crimes of which they were not guilty, no depths of degradation to which they had not sunk. The most famous of his victims (since he is the subject of a still-extant biography) was Stephen, abbot of the monastery of St Auxentius in Bithynia, who became the chief focus of monkish resistance. Arrested on charges of every kind of vice - and, most serious of all, of persuading, under false pretences, numbers of innocent people to embrace the monastic life - he was first exiled, then imprisoned and finally, like his namesake the Protomartyr, stoned to death in the street.
But Stephen was only one of many hundreds - perhaps several thousands - of monks and nuns who in the last fifteen years of the reign of Constantine suffered ridicule, mutilation or death (and sometimes all three) in defence of their chosen way of life. In the Theme of Thracesion
l A stoppage of the bowels, described by Theophanes as a cbordapsus, which caused him to vomit up their contents. His flock reflected on his undistinguished record as Patriarch and, as usual, drew their own conclusions.
— which was nowhere near Thrace, but comprised the central section of the Ionian coast and its hinterland - the local Governor assembled every monk and nun and commanded them all to marry at once or face transportation to Cyprus. This same official, Michael Lachanodrakon, is also said to have impregnated the beards of those monks who opposed him with a highly inflammable mixture of oil and wax, and then set fire to them; in their abandoned monasteries he committed whole libraries to the flames, sold the consecrated vessels of gold and silver and sent the proceeds to the Emperor - who replied with an effusive letter of thanks, describing him as a man after his own heart. Of what happened in the other Themes we have rather less information; but the story is unlikely to have been very different.
For atrocities of this kind there can obviously be no excuse; but it is only fair to observe that in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries the monasteries in the Empire had multiplied in both size and number to the point where they were beginning to cause the administration serious concern. Despite all the ambitious resettlement programmes of Justinian II and others, there remained huge areas of Asia Minor which were still desperately underpopulated; and the situation became graver still between 745 and 747, when an epidemic of bubonic plague removed perhaps a third of the inhabitants. For reasons both economic and military, more manpower was urgently needed - to till the soil, to defend the frontiers and, above all, to reproduce. Instead, more and more of the population, male and female, rich and poor, young and old, were opting for a life which was both sterile and unproductive and which, however beneficial it might be to their immortal souls, was utterly useless to the State. It was this dangerous tendency, every bit as much as religious superstition in the narrower sense, that Constantine was fighting during his later years; we are told that few thing* angered him more than when members of his court or, worse still, officers of the army announced their intention of retiring to some distant cloister when their work was done. Ultimately, however, he lost the battle. His draconian measures could not fail to be effective in the short term; but within a few years of his death the monasteries were as full and flourishing as before. Indeed, the problem that they presented was never completely solved. For all their undoubted contribution to the civilization of Byzantium, they were to continue to drain its life blood for another seven centuries, until the end came.
The reign of Constantine Copronymus is so overshadowed by the spectre of iconoclasm that his military achievements are all too often overlooked. He was by no means the natural soldier that his father had been; nervous and highly strung, he had a chronically weak constitution and suffered from periodic bouts of depression and ill health. Few Emperors, in short, seemed worse equipped, physically or temperamentally, for the rigours of military life. And yet, against all expectations, he proved a courageous fighter, a brilliant tactician and a superb leader of men; and, of all his subjects
, it was probably his soldiers who loved him the most.
In the first decade of his reign, once Artabasdus had been dealt with, his principal adversaries were the Arabs, weakened as they were by a long and bitter civil war which enabled Byzantium at long last to take the initiative. In 746, Constantine invaded northern Syria and captured Germanicia, the home of his ancestors; the larger part of the population he resettled in Thrace, where a colony of Syrian monophysites survived well into the ninth century. The next year brought a major victory at sea, when an Arab fleet from Alexandria fell victim, as so many others had done before it, to the ravages of Greek fire. Other triumphs followed in Armenia and Mesopotamia; but then, in 750, the situation underwent a radical change. At the battle of the Greater Zab River, the army of the Caliph Marwan II was smashed by that of Abu al-Abbas al-Suffah, and the Omayyad dynasty of Damascus came to an end. The Caliphate passed to the Abbasids of Baghdad, who were more interested in the East - in Persia, Afghanistan and Transoxiana - than in Europe, Africa or Asia Minor; and the Emperor in Constantinople was able to turn his attention to other, more immediate dangers nearer home.
Notably the Bulgars. For some years their attitude towards the Empire had been growing increasingly threatening, and in 756 matters came to a head. The immediate cause of the trouble seems to have been the sudden influx of Syrians into Thrace after Constantine-'s expedition, and the still more unwelcome arrival of a colony of Armenians a year or two later. This had necessitated the building of several fortresses, which may well have been a technical violation of a treaty concluded between Theodosius III and Tervel in 716; in any event it provided the Bulgars with an excuse for a new invasion of imperial territory. Riding out at once at the head of his army, the Emperor had little difficulty in putting the invaders to flight; but he could not prevent their returning again and again in the years that followed, and henceforth successive Bulgar campaigns became a regular feature of Byzantine military life. Constantine himself was to lead no less than nine of them; and one, in 763, brought him the most glorious - though also the most hard-won victory of his career, when on 30 June, in a battle which raged from dawn to dusk on one of the longest days of the year, he utterly destroyed the invading army of King Teletz, subsequently celebrating his success with a triumphal entry into his capital and special games in the Hippodrome.
The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 46