Gibbon describes this second Council of Nicaea as 'a curious monument of superstition and ignorance, of falsehood and folly'. So in a way it was - particularly since, for all its outward unanimity, it heralded only a brief interruption in the iconoclast period: a quarter of a century later, its findings were to be repudiated in their turn and the holy images subjected once again to execration. The author of one of the most comprehensive works on iconoclasm, however, takes a radically different view.1 For him, the Council ranks as 'one of those events, trivial in themselves, which are great crises in the history of Christianity', because 'it completed the process of identifying Christianity with the Graeco-Latin civilization'. The iconoclasts, he argues, like the monophysites before them, reflected the oriental, mystical side of the Christian religion towards which, thanks to the influence of the Eastern
1 E. J. Martin, The History of the Iconodastic Controversy.
provinces - and, indeed, of Islam itself - the Byzantine Empire was constantly being drawn. But it never ceased to resist; and its resistance kept it rooted, theologically, in the Mediterranean world. If we accept this theory - and it seems difficult not to do so - the second Council of Nicaea can be seen as the sequel to that of Chalcedon, the Empire's Mast gesture of refusal to the claims of the Asiatic ideal'. Its tragedy was that, as the years went by, it increasingly lost political touch with the West, and consequently became 'a tragic monument of obstinate isolation' - a fact which will grow ever more apparent as our story continues.
The seventeen-year-old Emperor Constantine VI who signed the definitions reached by the second Council of Nicaea was still a figurehead; and despite his marriage to the beautiful Paphlagonian Mary of Amnia in the following year, a figurehead he was for the moment content to remain. How long he would have accepted this almost total exclusion from public affairs if his mother had been able to control her ambitions we cannot tell; but in 790 Irene overreached herself. Just when she should have been arranging to associate her son more closely with the imperial government, she resolved instead to inflict upon him a new and quite unnecessary humiliation - decreeing that henceforth she should take precedence over him as senior ruler, and that her name should always be mentioned before his. From that moment on Constantine found himself, whether he liked it or not, to be the rallying-point of all those who were opposed to his mother - and thus, inevitably, of many of the iconoclast old guard. Before long a group of them had formed a conspiracy with the object of seizing the Empress and banishing her to Sicily; but the ever-watchful Irene got wind of it in time, dealt firmly with those responsible, flung her son into prison and, to strengthen her position still further, demanded that the entire army swear an oath of allegiance to her personally.
Once again she had gone too far. In Constantinople and the European provinces, the soldiers swore their oath willingly enough; but in Asia Minor - where the iconoclast element remained strong - there was point-blank refusal. The mutiny, led by the troops of the Armeniakon Theme, spread rapidly: within a matter of days, Constantine was being acclaimed on all sides as the Empire's sole legitimate ruler. Hastily liberated from his prison, the young Emperor joined his adherents in Anatolia and returned with them in strength to the capital. Stauracius, Irene's Logothete and her chief lieutenant, was flogged, tonsured and banished to the Armeniakon; several lesser members of the Empress's court suffered similar fates. As for Irene herself, she was confined to her palace of Eleutherius, work on which had recently been completed. We should probably be mistaken in supposing that Constantine was personally responsible for such decisive measures; it is far likelier that the decisions were taken by his military supporters and that he remained his usual passive self. But his popularity was greater than it had ever been, his supremacy undisputed. The future was his.
And he threw it away. Weak, vacillating and easily led, he soon acquired the reputation of always believing the last thing he was told, and of following the most recent advice he was given. When in the autumn of 791 Harun al-Rashid's Saracens invaded his eastern provinces, he immediately concluded another shameful peace, involving the payment of a tribute which the Empire could ill afford; when at about the same time hostilities broke out along the Bulgarian frontier and he was obliged to go on campaign himself, he proved incapable of command and, at Marcellae in 792, ignominiously fled the field. That same year he actually allowed himself to be persuaded to recall his mother to the capital and restore her to her former power. For the secret iconoclasts in Constantinople, whose hopes he had thus betrayed, this was the last straw. A new plot was hatched, with the object of dethroning both mother and son in favour of the Caesar Nicephorus - one of the five brothers of Leo IV — despite the holy orders that had been forced on him a dozen years before; but it too was discovered, and for the first time in his life Constantine acted with decision. He had Nicephorus blinded; and, in the unlikely event that any of his other uncles should harbour similar ambitions, ordered that all four should have their tongues cut out.
The Emperor, it now appeared, was not only indecisive, disloyal and a coward; he was also capable of the most brutal cruelty. Few of his subjects could have retained any respect for so contemptible a ruler. Outside the iconoclast faction in the army of Asia Minor, one group only was prepared to accord him even a moderate degree of support: the representatives of the old monastic party, who had been gratified to find him apparently well disposed towards them - instead of openly favouring the iconoclasts as they had feared - and who had rejoiced still further when he had reinstated his mother on her former throne. But now they in their turn were to be alienated. In January 795 they learned to their horror that the Emperor had divorced his wife and was contemplating a second marriage. Mary of Amnia, for all her beauty, had not been a success. She had, admittedly, borne her husband a daughter, Euphrosyne, who thirty years later was to attain imperial rank as the wife of the
Emperor Michael II; but there had been no son to assure the succession, and Constantine was in any case bored with her, having long ago given his heart to Theodote, one of the court ladies. Mary was packed off to a nunnery; Patriarch Tarasius reluctantly condoned the divorce; and the following August, in the palace of St Mamas outside Constantinople, the Emperor and Theodote were married. Fourteen months later she presented him with a son.
The monks were scandalized. For an Emperor to remarry after his wife's death was one thing; but for him to put away his lawful Empress in favour of another woman - this was a sin against the Holy Ghost. Constantine's association with Theodote, they thundered, could in no circumstances be tolerated; nor could the bastard child be considered as a possible successor. The leaders of the protest, Abbot Plato of the monastery of Saccudion in Bithynia and his nephew Theodore - later to achieve celebrity as Abbot of the Studium in Constantinople - were exiled to Thessalonica, but their followers refused to be silenced. Nor was the adulterous Emperor the only object of these monkish fulminations; almost as much of their fury was directed against Tarasius, for having allowed the marriage to take place - even though he had been careful not to officiate himself.
Whether or not the worldly Patriarch ever revealed to his accusers that Constantine had threatened to ally himself openly with the iconoclasts if the necessary permission were refused, we do not know; it certainly did not prevent charges of heresy being prepared against him. As the months went by, moreover, the so-called Moechian controversy1 was seen to have a significance which went far beyond the narrow issue of the Emperor's second marriage. Its long-term effect was further to deepen the split, not between iconoclasts and iconodules but between the two branches of the latter: the more or less fanatical monks on the one hand and, on the other, the moderates who understood that the Empire was something more than an outsize monastery, and that if the elements of Church and State were to work effectively in tandem there must be a degree of give and take on both sides. This split had already become apparent at the recent Council in Nicaea, during the discussion on the status of the recanting bishops; it was to con
tinue for another century and more, dividing and weakening the Church on several occasions when unity was desperately needed and poisoning relations between churchmen who, working together, might have conferred lasting benefits on the Empire.
i From the Greek moicheia, adultery.
Meanwhile, Constantine had forfeited his last remaining potential supporters in Constantinople and was now defenceless against his most formidable enemy - his mother, Irene. She had never forgiven him for her deposition, temporary as it had been; and she knew just how easily it could happen again. She was fully aware that her son's real sympathies lay with the iconoclasts, and vice versa; and she had no delusions about their strength among the army in Asia. While Constantine lived, another coup was always a possibility - and one which might well not only destroy her but undo all her work and reimpose iconoclastic doctrines throughout the Empire. For that reason, since her return to power, she had lost no opportunity of undermining his position in every way she could. It is more than probable that she had deliberately encouraged him in his plans for divorce and remarriage, the better to discredit him in the eyes of her own most fervent supporters, the monks. Almost certainly, when in an endeavour to redeem his military reputation he marched in the spring of 797 against the Saracens, it was her own agents who fed him false intelligence to the effect that the enemy had withdrawn across the frontier; only when he returned to Constantinople did he discover that Harun al-Rashid had done nothing of the kind and was still in occupation of large tracts of Byzantine territory. The murmurs of cowardice, never altogether silenced, grew louder again - just as Irene had intended that they should.
In June, she was ready to strike. One day, when Constantine was riding in procession from the Hippodrome to the Church of St Mamas in Blachernae, a party of soldiers leaped out from a side street and fell upon him. His own guards fought back, and during the ensuing melee he managed to escape and have himself rowed across the Bosphorus, where he hoped to find support. But Irene moved more quickly than her son. He was captured almost at once and brought back to the imperial palace; and there, on Tuesday 15 August at three o'clock in the afternoon, in the Porphyry Pavilion where he had been born twenty-seven years earlier, his eyes were put out. The act, we are told, was performed in a particularly brutal manner in order to ensure that he would not survive; and although some doubt remains as to how long he actually did so, there can be none that Irene was guilty of his murder. Theophanes tells us that, as a sign of divine disapprobation, the very sky was darkened; and that it remained so for the next seventeen days.
Since Constantine's young son by Theodote had died - probably of natural causes, though with our knowledge of his grandmother we can never be entirely sure - only a few months after his birth, Irene now found herself not only the sole occupant of the throne of Byzantium but the first woman ever to preside, not as a regent but in her own right, over the Empire. It was a position for which she had long striven but one which, in the event, she had little opportunity to enjoy. Over the past years her two chief advisers, the eunuchs Stauracius and Aetius, had developed an almost pathological jealousy of each other, to the point where their incessant intrigues made effective government impossible. Irene's popularity among her subjects - never great at the best of times - declined sharply after the murder of her son, and she now attempted to redeem it by granting enormous remissions of taxes, which the Empire could not begin to afford. Among the most favoured beneficiaries were the monastic institutions that had always been her chief source of support; in addition, the immensely profitable customs and excise duties levied at Abydos and in the Straits were cut by half, while the hated tax on receipts was abolished altogether, as was the municipal levy payable by all the free citizens of Constantinople.
But measures of this kind could only delay the inevitable. The Empress's more thoughtful subjects were disgusted at the sheer irresponsibility of her actions, and despised her for her assumption that their affections could be so easily bought. The largely iconoclast army of Asia, who had always detested her and had come near to mutiny after Constantine's murder, were horrified and humiliated by the new and increased tribute that she had promised to Harun al-Rashid, and must also have been asking themselves where their future pay was coming from. The civil service watched powerless while the imperial treasury grew emptier every day, and began to despair of ever setting the economy to rights. Meanwhile the reactionaries of every age and station throughout the Empire, who had always shaken their heads at the thought of a female Basileus, now saw their direst suspicions confirmed. It was clearly only a matter of time before one or another of these groups rose up - in the interests not of themselves but of Byzantium itself - and overthrew her.
When the coup finally occurred, which, of all the reasons suggested above, was the one that actually decided the conspirators to act as and when they did? Very probably, none of them: because by now there was another, which called still more urgently for swift and decisive action. On Christmas Day 800 at St Peter's in Rome, Charles, son of Pepin the Frank, had been crowned by Pope Leo III with the imperial crown and the title of Emperor of the Romans; and some time in the summer of 802 he sent ambassadors to Irene with a proposal of marriage.
Well before his coronation, Charles the Great - or, as he soon came to be called, Charlemagne - was an Emperor in all but name. He had become sole ruler of the Franks in 771, on the sudden death of his brother Carloman; two years later he had captured Pavia and proclaimed himself King of the Lombards. Returning to Germany, he had next subdued the heathen Saxons and converted them en masse to Christianity before going on to annex the already-Christian Bavarians. An invasion of Spain was less successful - though it provided the inspiration for the first great epic ballad of Western Europe, the Chanson de Roland - but Charles's subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and Upper Austria had resulted in the destruction of their Kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation in turn within his own dominions. Thus, in little more than a generation, he had raised the Kingdom of the Franks from being just one of the many semi-tribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.
And he had done so, for most of the time at least, with the enthusiastic approval of the Papacy. It was nearly half a century since Pope Stephen had struggled across the Alps to seek help against the Lombards from Charles's father Pepin - an appeal which might more properly have been addressed to the Byzantine Emperor, and indeed would have been if Constantine Copronymus could only have spared a few moments from his iconoclast obsession to turn his attention to the problem of Italy. Pepin and Charles had succeeded where Byzantium had failed; and although the rift between Rome and Constantinople had been theoretically healed at Nicaea, Pope Hadrian had in fact been far from satisfied by the report he had received from his representatives on their return to Rome. They had pointed out, for example, that when the Pope's message to Irene and Constantine had been read aloud to the assembled Council, all the controversial passages - including those in which he had protested against the uncanonical consecration of Patriarch Tarasius and the latter's use of the 'Ecumenical' title - had been suppressed. Neither had any indication been forthcoming that the disputed South Italian, Sicilian and Illyrian bishoprics might be returned to papal jurisdiction. Small wonder, then, that Hadrian and his successor Leo had remained loyal to their infinitely more reliable western champion, even if this did entail certain concessions where the cult of images was concerned — Charles rather inconveniently maintaining his own opinions on the subject which, while less extreme than those upheld by the Council of 754, approximated a good deal more closely to iconoclast doctrines than the Curia liked to admit.
The King of the Franks had been to Rome once before: on a state visit in 774 when, as a young man of thirty-two, he had been welcomed by Hadrian and, deeply impressed by all he saw, had confirmed his father's donation of that central Italian territory which formed the nucleus of the Papal State. In 800 he came on more serio
us business. Pope Leo, ever since his accession four years before, had been the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of a body of young Roman noblemen who were determined to remove him; and on 25 April he was actually set upon in the street and beaten unconscious. Only by the greatest good fortune was he rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles's court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he returned to Rome a few months later, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges fabricated by his enemies, including simony, perjury and adultery.
By whom, however, could he be tried? Who, in other words, was qualified to pass judgement on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances the only conceivable answer to that question would have been the Emperor at Constantinople; but the imperial throne was at this moment occupied by Irene. That the Empress was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, almost immaterial: it was enough that she was a woman. The female sex was known to be incapable of governing, and by the old Salic tradition was debarred from doing so. As far as Western Europe was concerned, the Throne of the Emperors was vacant: Irene's claim to it was merely an additional proof, if any were needed, of the degradation into which the so-called Roman Empire had fallen.
Charles was fully aware, when he travelled to Rome towards the end of 800, that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgement at St Peter's; but he also knew that while the accusations remained unrefuted Christendom lacked not only an Emperor but a Pope as well, and he was determined to do all he could to clear Leo's name. As to the precise nature of his testimony, we can only guess; but on 23 December, at the high altar, the Pope swore a solemn oath on the Gospels that he was innocent of all the charges levelled against him - and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head, while the entire congregation cheered him to the echo. He had received, as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title: the crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any number of conquests; for it meant that, after more than 400 years, there was once again an Emperor in Western Europe.
The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Page 48