It was not long before Theodora showed her mettle. Two years after she married Alexis there was a violent uprising in the City, in which the priests most hostile to the Emperor joined with barbarian mercenaries from the Tigris and Euphrates. The rebels invoked a new and unpopular tax on the orange trade to gain the support of a large section of the population of the City: hence the rising became known to history as the Orange Rebellion. In only a few hours the situation became grave. At the end of two days, things looked desperate for the Emperor and his party. The priests and great landowners who had not forgiven Alexis for the execution of Jester and did not accept the New Alliance had joined in an unnatural coalition with a large body of barbarians who demurred at Balamir’s submission to and friendship with the Emperor. It is clear that this coalition, if it had been successful, was bound to disintegrate after a few weeks, but meanwhile it would have drawn down countless catastrophes on the Empire. The City, weary perhaps of prosperity and peace, was seized with a kind of madness, and it seemed that the inhabitants—backed by the riffraff often found hanging around seaports, come from none knows where, unconcerned with the people’s real interests but eager for looting and arson—were gaining the upper hand. There was a wave of panic. Bruince and Logophilus themselves seemed on the point of giving in. The Emperor hesitated. It looked as though a last effort on the part of those known as the “Oranges” might throw down the whole patiently constructed edifice of the Empire. Then Theodora calmly announced that the Emperor and his ministers might leave, but rather than yield she would die on the spot amongst a faithful few. “If you choose to run away, Alexis, very well. You have money, your ships are ready, the sea is open. But I shall stay. I like the old proverb that says the sky makes a good shroud.” This calm and unshakable determination changed the situation at a blow, and the revolt was crushed. “A dozen words,” writes Sir Allan, “had changed the destiny of the world.” It was a lesson the great recalcitrants of history were not to forget.
After her resistance to the Orange Rebellion, Theodora exercised a great influence on the policy of the Empire. Although Alexis was not really ambitious, the Empress was. Alexis has been described as a metaphysician in power, eager to persuade and to spread his teaching—if necessary by fire and sword, for how else could princes and captains act upon the world?—guided by a deep faith, and perhaps a terrific love of humanity, rather than by ambition. But Theodora was ambitious. She wanted the lands over which the Emperor ruled to grow; she wanted Alexis’s glory to fly from one city to another; she desired with all her strength—and that was saying a good deal—that the Emperor should leave behind a dazzling name, and that the historians of the future should make him come to life again after he was dead. In almost diametrically opposed forms, Alexis and Theodora were each a prey to the most consuming of passions, the passion a contemporary philosopher has eloquently named the desire for eternity. They understood this desire very differently. For the Emperor, it was a desire for the eternity of revelation taught to him by the sages and seers of Asia, of which he had spoken to Jester long ago.[4] Theodora’s concern was with the eternity of history. For Alexis, time everlasting in the blaze of a moment. For Theodora, the indelible trace left in passing time. It is not hard to see the brilliance that might result from the coming together of these two contrasting minds, these two equally strong wills.
No serious attempt to understand the foreign policy of the Empire can afford to neglect one final element—the financial aspect of things. Reforms, administration, the upkeep of the army, temples, and palaces, the Emperor’s love of beauty and fine buildings—all these were expensive. The Empire was rich again, but its resources were not inexhaustible. Cyprus and Pomposa, on the other hand, were overflowing with gold, ships, and objets d’art siphoned all year round toward the capital by countless merchants scattered in colonies and factories all over the world. The temptation to seize such treasures, within arm’s reach, was irresistible; and the Emperor, pressed by Theodora, bound by his engagements to Balamir, forced to war by the provocations offered by the princes of Cyprus, yielded, though his thoughts were still full of dreams of humanity and universal brotherhood.
Cyprus was the first stage on the long road of the wars of conquest. Its rulers’ rashness had passed all bounds. Terrified by the New Alliance and the threat of the barbarians, against whom they had long hoped to persuade Alexis to fight, disappointed by the failure of Jester and the priests in their pay, and perhaps disappointed that the Orange revolt, in which some historians see once again the influence of Pomposan and Cypriot gold, had been crushed, they launched themselves into a sort of escalation of violence. While still active within the Empire through their agents and spies, they attacked the barbarians on the maritime frontiers of their power, in Syria, at Byblos, and all along the coast between Tyre and Sidon. For several years in succession they launched spring and autumn campaigns that were at first quite successful—for a while Cypriot troops were on the Euphrates. Emboldened by success, the princes of Cyprus then attacked the Empire directly. History never repeats itself, but geographical conditions and natural imperatives, the capes and bays, the passes and fords essential to military strategy constantly impose themselves on the plans of armies and their captains. One spring morning, at dawn, the Cyprian army suddenly appeared in an area we know well. They disembarked at Cape Gildor.
It was quite a well-planned operation. Most of the barbarian troops that might have been called in to help were engaged in a large-scale campaign on the frontiers of Persia and India. At the time of the debarkation, the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs was in fact just crossing the Khyber Pass and descending on the rich plains around Peshawar. As for the army corps permanently stationed in the Empire, it had been detailed to cover the Euphrates, and had just arrived there. But the Cyprian generals could not hope to hold out for long against the forces of the Empire even when these were obliged to depend entirely on themselves. They did, however, succeed in laying waste to the whole area around Gildor, in taking a large number of prisoners, and in loading their ships with an impressive amount of booty. The princes of Cyprus had only resolved on such an attack because they thought themselves safe, on their island, from reprisal by Alexis. The Emperor saw at once that negotiations, fortification of the coasts, and keeping the army on permanent alert was of no use so long as Cyprus’s attitude remained unchanged. No precaution could stop them from repeating the operation, making a surprise landing, laying waste to the crops, and sacking the villages. But Cyprus showed no sign of changing either its policy or its tactics. So no other solution remained but confrontation on an altogether different scale.
There were two factors that Cyprus overlooked, two ways in which its princes underestimated what Alexis and, above all, Bruince had achieved: the construction, or rather reconstruction, of a mighty imperial fleet,[5] and the continuation of Thaumas’s policy of maintaining good terms with the pirates.[6] The latter had become scarcer and less of a threat since Basil’s day, but they had never entirely disappeared and could still be an appreciable factor. Bruince had just won their alliance, and they were delighted at the idea of joining with the troops of the Empire to throw themselves on Cyprus. The Empire’s navy alone was becoming a formidable force, and, backed by the pirates, it need fear nothing but the warships of Pomposa. When the Kha-Khan of the Oïghurs returned from Peshawar and Samarkand, a council of war was held in the palace of the City, attended by the Emperor, Theodora, Bruince, Balamir, and Logophilus, together with some generals and other officers. They decided to launch a naval attack against Cyprus.
There were many advantages to this operation, not least the fact that it offered a sop to the impatience of the barbarians. For years now Balamir had been promising them possession of the world, and for years he had been using them for routine operations against Persia and China. Cyprus with its palaces and temples and treasure would shine for them like a golden gate to the West of which they had dreamed as they raided the dusty steppes. But the choice of Cyprus a
s the first objective gave Balamir and the barbarians another and even greater reason for satisfaction. The barbarians possessed irresistible power, but they had no ships, and in deciding to attack an island the Emperor put within their reach a prey that they could never have grasped alone and unaided. Belatedly, but indisputably, Alexis was proving his sincerity; those supporters of Balamir who had struggled so long against the impatience of his opponents within the barbarian army itself were at last rewarded; and the New Alliance emerged stronger than ever from a decision that was momentous not only for the future of Cyprus, but for the future of the whole Mediterranean, that ancient basin that the history of the world had chosen as its center.
Famagusta, where Basil the Great had met the king of Sicily and the khan of the Oïghurs, Balamir’s distant ancestor, was impregnable by land. So instead of trying to disembark troops at some point that might have been comparatively lightly defended, the combined imperial and pirate fleet, under the command of the famous Carradine of the flaming red beard, made straight for the port itself, the approaches to which were defended by the great citadel. The sentries looking out over the sea from the watchtowers were so delighted to see the coming of the enemy ships so evidently doomed to destruction that “the sound of their laughter,” according to Justus Dion, “could be heard by the officers and men massed on the decks of the galleys.” But their amusement was to be short-lived. Among the detachments of barbarian soldiers on the ships, some of whom were seeing the Mediterranean for the first time and were, incidentally, suffering acutely from seasickness, Alexis and Bruince had seen to it that there were also those same carpenters from the northeastern forests who had worked at the construction of the fleet. Under the astonished eyes of the defenders of Famagusta the ships of the Empire anchored under the very walls of the citadel and, protected by huge shields, the carpenters set to work raising wooden siege-engines, towers, and great battering-rams resting partly on the decks of the ships and partly on the ramparts of the citadel. The Cypriot troops tried to hinder them with showers of arrows, pitch, and boiling oil, but the men from the forests of the north, sheltered by the leather tents and wooden awnings they had rigged up before they started, got on with their work without turning a hair.
After some days, perhaps weeks, a wind arose from the northwest, a variant of the famous melteme still familiar to sailors and tourists in this part of the Mediterranean, especially in the Aegean, round about the Cyclades and Northern Sporades. The leaders of the besieged city gathered on the ramparts to look at the attacking ships, on the point of foundering. That evening there was a thunderstorm, and soon lightning flashes were illuminating the battered vessels hurled against one another by the waves. The men of Cyprus rejoiced at the baleful sounds that rose up out of the darkness. The storm lasted three days. The oarsmen, sailors, barbarians, pirates, and carpenters had all lashed themselves to seats, masts, and stanchions. Two ships sank. But the fleet was not scattered. On the fourth day the sun reappeared over a calm sea. The noise of hammering arose once more; it sounded like a knell to those within the besieged city.
The princes of Cyprus still had one hope left. One galley had managed to break through the blockade that the imperial navy maintained all around the island. It was manned by a reliable crew who were to carry the alarm to the merchant princes of Pomposa and invoke the help of their fleet. It was a race against time. As they watched the forest of scaffolding rising all around them out of the sea, the princes of Cyprus anxiously calculated how long it would take their messengers to reach Pomposa, and then how long it would take the Pomposan fleet to row and sail to the help of the besieged island. As the days and nights went by, hope began to revive in the city. Two attempted attacks had already been repulsed. It was almost four moons now since the siege had begun. Every morning the lookouts scanned the horizon for the great black and white sails of the merchant warriors. The princes were always sending some officer or page to ask the sentries:
“Well, Semias?”
“Nothing yet.”
“We must just wait. They can’t be long now.”
The sun would set.
“Well, Comazon?”
“Still nothing.”
“They’ll be here tomorrow then. Courage!”
Cyprus did not lack courage. But the black and white sails still did not come, and meanwhile the towers grew ever taller and more numerous by the ramparts and the posterns. One morning before daybreak, Alexis and Balamir launched the attack. It was a staggering sight: “All the devils of hell,” says Justus Dion, “seemed to be rising out of the sea and materializing out of the air.” Clusters of barbarians and pirates dropped on the defenders from the wooden frames and engines now overhanging the ramparts. In this first assault nearly all the attackers were killed, but enough survived to open breaches through which the rest of the army could pour in. The barbarians swept through the town. Alexis had been violently opposed to massacring women and children, but he was only partly obeyed, and the siege of Famagusta survives in history as a stain on his memory. Justus Dion declares that fire broke out by accident, but at all events, when the victors at last turned from killing off the survivors to fighting the flames, it was already too late, and Famagusta was destroyed.
Five days later the Pomposan fleet appeared before the ruins of one of the strongest cities in the Mediterranean. The lookouts were astonished, as they approached, at not being able to make out the towers, walls, and lofty mansions of Famagusta overhanging the sea. The reason they could not see them was that they no longer existed. Carradine’s fleet lay in ambush on the other side of the island. With great difficulty Alexis restrained the barbarians from throwing themselves on the Pomposan ships just as they had done on Famagusta: but the time was not yet ripe. He sent out a large carrack to the black- and white-sailed fleet; the admirals and men of Pomposa were amazed to see it issue forth alone from the port, which gave no other sign of life. When it was within earshot of the most stately of the Pomposan ships, on which sumptuously clad nobles sat at table before rare dishes and Greek wines, wondering at the strange welcome Famagusta was giving the reinforcements come to save her, the men on the carrack leaped up and threw the bloody heads of the princes of Cyprus onto the flagship’s deck. According to chronicle and legend, it was on this occasion that Alexis murmured one of those phrases constantly held against him by historians, especially Christian historians: “Now they will all know the meaning of death.”
It is not impossible such words were actually uttered. What is surprising is that succeeding historians have seen them as nothing but savagery. No doubt, as we have seen, Alexis was by now very different from the ascetic visionary nursing his remorse along the roads of Asia. Not only had he returned to the instinctive violence that was bound up with his childhood and formed the basis of his character, but the inexorable march of history and events had swept him still further into a headlong course in which to rule was to use violence whether one liked it or not. All this is evident and indisputable. But in Alexis violence and blood always coexisted not only with what Sir Allan Carter-Bennett has called his “cosmic sense of history,” but also with a real metaphysical nostalgia and an inextinguishable love of meditation on the destiny of man. How can one fail to hear in the famous phrase an echo of despair at the human condition? Perhaps it is going too far to follow Heidegger, and see the Emperor’s terrible deed as “a metaphysical experiment in action, a lesson on the anguish of death, a tragic unveiling of the totality of the void at the heart of which is that which exists.”[7] Let us merely say that Alexis gives a helpless and disillusioned acknowledgment of the equivocal relation between thought and action, a ferocious reminder of the mystery of which man is both object and prey. Alexis was no longer just a repository of truth: now he wished to transmit it to the world. He took on the supremely dangerous role of “instructor in the universal.”[8] It was an office that could scarcely be exercised but in blood. The Emperor resigned himself. He had unleashed the barbarian horde on Cyprus, and the mac
hinery was now in motion that would lead him, with his Twelve Thousand, the army of the Empire, and all the squadrons of the nomads, to that Western ocean on which Balamir had fed his barbarians’ dreams.
The Glory of the Empire Page 36