Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (12 page)

i
The Alexiad,
XII, iii.

his bedside and ordering prayers said throughout the Empire for his recovery; but she could bring him no relief, and saw, with everyone else, that he was sinking fast.

Some time in the afternoon of
15
August the news was brought to John Comnenus that his father had only a few hours to live and urgently wished to see him. He hastened to the Mangana, where the dying Alexius gave him his imperial ring and ordered him to lose no time in having himself proclaimed
basileus.
John did so, then ran across to St Sophia where, in the briefest of ceremonies, the Patriarch crowned him. Returning to the palace, he was at first - presumably on Irene's orders -denied admittance by the Varangian Guard; only when he showed them the ring and told them of his father's imminent death did they stand back and let him through.

What, meanwhile, of Irene herself? Still determined to secure the succession of Bryennius, she would not willingly have absented herself from her husband's last conversation with his son; and yet, although she seldom left his bedside, he had somehow contrived to remove her at this crucial moment for her plans. By the time she returned it was too late. Even now she made one last attempt to force him to recognize the rights of his son-in-law; but he only smiled and - by now too feeble to speak - raised his hands as if in thanksgiving. That evening he died, and was buried the next day with the minimum of ceremony in the monastery of Christ Philanthropos, founded by Irene some fifteen years before.

He deserved a more elaborate farewell; for his subjects owed Alexius Comnenus far more than they knew. First of all, he had achieved his principal object: to halt the political and moral decline that had begun after the death of Basil II in
1025
and to give the Empire a new stability. After fifty-six years during which it had been misgoverned by thirteen different monarchs, he alone had reigned for thirty-seven; his son was to continue for another twenty-five before his accidental death, his grandson for another thirty-seven. Next there was his military record: no Emperor had defended his people more courageously, or with greater determination, or against a greater number of enemies; nor had any done more to build up the imperial forces by land and sea. Thirdly, there was his brilliant handling of the Crusade, organizing the passage of perhaps a hundred thousand men, women and children of all ranks and classes of society, feeding them and so far as possible protecting them from one end of his Empire to the other. Had those Crusading armies marched a quarter of a century earlier than they in fact did, the consequences for them - and for Byzantium - might have been grave indeed.

Thus, in three different ways and in three different capacities - as statesman, general and diplomatist - Alexius Comnenus may be said to have saved the Empire. Inevitably, he had had his failures: the restoration of the economy, the healing of the rift with Rome, the recovery of South Italy. But of these only the first was serious; the other two were little more than dreams, never to be realized by Alexius or any of his successors. He had his failings, too - among them his shameless nepotism and his susceptibility to women: Mary of Alania, Anna Dalassena and his wife Irene all exerted far more power over him than he should have allowed. Even over the supremely important question of the succession he had not trusted himself to impose his will upon Irene, preferring to achieve his ends by trickery rather than by firm imperial command.

Did he regret that - except among his soldiers, by whom he was idolized - personal popularity should always have remained beyond his grasp? Not, probably, very much. He never courted it, and certainly never compromised his principles to win the plaudits of the crowd. From the outset of his reign he had ruled conscientiously, energetically and to the very best of his ability; and he left his son an Empire incomparably stronger and better organized than it had been for a century. He died content - as well he might.

5

John the Beautiful

[111
8-43]

Should I not be considered mad if, having acquired the crown in a manner that was scarcely legitimate, and indeed scarcely Christian, I were to place it upon the head of a stranger, rather than upon that of my own son?

Alexius Comnenus to his wife, quoted by Nicet
as Choniates, 'John Comnenus',

The account of the death of Alexius Comnenus as given in the previous chapter, which is principally based on the testimony of John Zonaras and Nicetas Choniates,
1
bears little resemblance to that with which Anna Comnena ends
The Alexiad.
Anna paints an affecting picture of the distinguished doctors bickering round the bedside; of the increasing horror of the Emperor's sufferings; of the selflessness of his wife Irene, weeping 'tears more copious than the waters of the Nile' as she tended him through the long, agonizing days and nights; of the devoted ministrations of their daughters — Maria, Eudocia and of course Anna herself; of the candles that were lit and the hymns that were chanted; and, at the moment of death, of the widowed Empress kicking off her imperial purple slippers, tearing aside her veil, seizing a knife and slashing away at her beautiful hair. Anna gives, however, no hint of her father's last, not entirely creditable
coup,
when he prevented the succession of herself and her husband in favour of John, the rightful heir — whom, in her entire chapter, she mentions only once, and then does not even deign to call by his name.

Anna's hatred for John, which lasted all her life, was a simple matter of jealousy. As Alexius's eldest child, she had been betrothed in her infancy to the young Prince Constantine - son of Michael VII - and thus,

1
Nicetas began his career as an imperial secretary at the court, and ended as Grand Logothctc under the Angeli. His
History,
which begins with the death of Alexius and continues until
1206,
is the most descriptive and colourful that has come down to us since the days of Psellus and will, I hope, do much to enliven the following chapters.

for the first five years of her life, had been heiress-presumptive to the throne of Byzantium. Then, on
13
September
1087,
the Empress Irene had given birth to a son, John; and Anna's dreams of the imperial diadem were shattered. But not for long. On the premature death of Constantine she had married in
1097
Nicephorus Bryennius, son
1
of that general of the same name who, having made a bid for the throne in
1077,
had been captured and blinded by Botaneiates. Nicephorus too had proved himself a fine soldier and leader of men, to the point where, in
1111
or thereabouts - the precise date is uncertain - Alexius had conferred upon him the title of Caesar; and immediately all his wife's ambitions were resurrected. The story of her recruitment of her mother Irene and her brother Andronicus to her cause has already been told, as has that of their ultimate failure; but even now Anna did not give up. She was almost certainly behind a plot to murder John at their father's funeral - from which her brother, having received advance warning, wisely stayed away; and a few months after John's accession she organized a conspiracy - to be led by her husband Bryennius - to murder him in the Philopation, a country palace just outside the Golden Gate. Unfortunately, Bryennius's courage failed him at the last moment and he never turned up at the rendezvous. Meanwhile his fellow-conspirators, whom he had failed to inform of his defection, were caught wandering about in the palace and immediately arrested.

The new Emperor showed himself surprisingly merciful. There were no blindings, no mutilations. The guilty were sentenced to nothing worse than the confiscation of their possessions - which most of them were later able to recover. Nicephorus Bryennius escaped scot-free and served the Emperor loyally in the field for another twenty years until his death, occupying his idle hours in the composition of a remarkably boring history. His wife was not so lucky. On hearing of what had happened at the Philopation, she had flown into a hysterical rage and had cursed Providence in the crudest possible terms for having endowed her husband with certain attributes of virility which, she claimed, had far better been given to her. She too suffered the temporary confiscation of her property; worse, she was barred in perpetuity from the imperial court. Abandoned and humiliated, she settled in the convent of the Theotokos Kecharitomene,
2
where she lived for the next thirty-five

1
Not, I think, the grandson as is often claimed; see
The Alexiad,
VII, ii.

2
i.e., the Virgin Full of Grace. This convent adjoined the mon
astery of Christ Philanthropos
and was also founded by the Empress Irene; the two buildings were separated by a wall,
but shared a single water system. The forty nuns of the Kecharitomene lived a strictly coenobitic life, sleeping in a common dormitory; Irene had, however, considerately added one or two rather more comfortable apartments for the benefit of female members of the imperial family.

years, writing the life of her father and endlessly lamenting her injuries, nearly all of which - had she had the honesty to admit it - were self-inflicted.

At the time of his accession, John Comnenus was a month short of his thirtieth birthday. Thanks to his sister's reticence on the subject, we know disappointingly little of his early years, although she does give us a brief description of his appearance at birth:

The child was of a swarthy complexion, with a broad forehead, rather thin cheeks, a nose that was neither flat nor aquiline but something between the two, and darkish eyes which, as far as one can divine from the look of a newborn baby, gave evidence of a lively spirit.

For once, Anna was letting her brother off lightly: even so great an admirer of John Comnenus as William of Tyre
1
admits that he was small and unusually ugly, with eyes, hair and complexion so dark that he was known as 'the Moor'. He had, however, another nickname too:
Kaloian
nis,
'John the Beautiful'. It has been suggested that this was intended ironically, but even a cursory reading of the chroniclers shows that it was nothing of the kind. The description referred not to his body, but to his soul. Both his parents - whatever their failings in other respects -had been unusually devout, even by the standards of the time; John carried their example further still. Levity and ribaldry he hated: members of the court were expected to restrict their conversation to serious subjects, or otherwise to hold their peace. Luxury, too, was frowned upon. The food served at the imperial table was frugal in the extreme; wealthy noblemen and their ladies, seeking to impress the Emperor by the opulence of their palaces or the sumptuousness of their robes, would receive instead a stern lecture on the vanity of such adornments - which, in his eyes, could lead only to decadence and depravity.

Today, more likely than not, most of us would find the Emperor John Comnenus an insufferable companion; in twelfth-century Byzantium he was loved. He was, first of all, no hypocrite. His principles may have been strict, but they were sincerely held; his piety was

1
William of Tyre
(c.
11
30-86),
Chancellor of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Archbishop of Tyre, whose
History
(see Bibliography) is the most important source we possess for Byzantine relations wit
h the Crusader states of Outreme
r.

genuine, his integrity complete. Second, there was a gentle, merciful side to his nature that was in his day rare indeed. Nicetas Choniates's testimony that he never condemned anyone to death or mutilation may seem to us faint praise; but John's treatment of his sister Anna and her fellow-conspirators certainly seems in retrospect to have been almost dangerously lenient. He was generous, too: despite the austerity of his own life, no Emperor ever dispensed charity with a more lavish hand. Never was he accused, as his father had been, of favouring his family at the expense of his subjects; on the contrary, he deliberately kept his brothers and sisters, as well as his more distant relations, at arm's length, often choosing his ministers and closest advisers from men of relatively humble origins. Most trusted of all was a certain John Axuch, a Turk who had been captured in infancy by the Crusaders at Nicaea, given as a present to Alexius Comnenus and brought up in the imperial household, where he soon became the young prince's boon companion. On his accession John at once took Axuch into his service, after which his promotion was swift. Before long he had been appointed Grand Domestic, or commander-in-chief of the armies.

It was a sensible appointment for a man whom the Emperor wished to keep at his side; for John Comnenus was, like his father, a soldier through and through. He believed, as Alexius had believed before him, that the Empire had been bestowed on him by the Almighty as a sacred trust, together with the responsibility for its protection; but whereas Alexius had been largely content to defend it against its manifold enemies, John saw his duty in more positive terms - to liberate all those imperial territories now occupied by the infidel, and to restore to Byzantium the glory and power that it had known in the days of Basil the Great, or even Justinian. Here was an enterprise indeed; but he embarked on it with determination and energy, continuing his father's programme of military reorganization, improving still further his methods of training, constantly setting his soldiers an example of courage and endurance that few of them could hope to follow. To his subjects it seemed as though his life were one long campaign; and though he seems to have loved his Empress - the Hungarian princess Piriska, who had adopted the more euphonious but distressingly unoriginal Byzantine name of Irene - and remained faithful to her all his life, he certainly spent far more of his time in the field than in his palace at Constantinople, as did his four sons as soon as they were old enough to accompany him.

In one important respect John Comne
nus was more fortunate than his
father: the situation in the West was, in Alexius's day, seldom settled enough to enable him to concentrate on the Muslim threat in Asia. At the time of John's accession, however, and for several years afterwards, Europe presented comparatively few immediate problems. Across the Danube, the Cumans and the Pechenegs were quiet; in the Balkan peninsula, the Serbs acknowledged Byzantine suzerainty and were anyway too divided to make trouble, while the Hungarians were fully occupied in consolidating their position on the Dalmatian coast - a region which, though remaining technically an imperial province, had in fact long been abandoned to the Venetians. Further west again, Pope and Holy Roman Emperor were still locked in their long struggle for supremacy. As for the Normans of Apulia - who had caused poor Alexius more anxiety than all his other European enemies combined -Robert Guiscard's pathetic son Roger Borsa and, after Roger's death in
1111
, his equally feckless son William had failed utterly to assert their authority over the local barons, and their Dukedom was little by little subsiding into chaos. True, their cousin Count Roger of Sicily was rapidly making a name for himself and by
1130,
as King Roger II, would have gathered all the Norman lands of the south under his sceptre; but that was twelve years away in the future and John, as we shall see, was far too good a diplomatist to allow the King of Sicily to become an immediate threat to Byzantium.

He could thus focus his attention on Asia Minor - where, nearly half a century after Manzikert, the situation was still hopelessly confused. Roughly, it could be said that the Empire controlled the northern, western and southern coasts and all the land to the north-west of a rather wavy line drawn from the mouth of the Meander a few miles south of Ephesus to the south-eastern corner of the Black Sea a little beyond Trebizond - which was an imperial fief under its own Duke, Constantine Gabras. To the south-east of that line were the Turks, most of them subject to the Seljuk Sultan of Iconium, Mas'ud; but recent years had seen a diminution of the Sultan's effective power due to the rise of another Turkish tribe, the Danishmends, whose Emir Ghazi II now ruled from the Halys river
1
to the Euphrates and was steadily pressing westward into Paphlagonia. There were also large numbers of armed Turcoman tribesmen who may have paid lip-service to one or the other of these potentates, but who effectively did as they wished. Throughout the second half of the reign of Alexius, these nomads had

1
Now known as the Kizil Irmak.

been infiltrating the fertile valleys of Phrygia and Pisidia, where the climate was more gentle and the pasture for their flocks incomparably richer than that of the scrubby plateau of central Anatolia. They had thus succeeded in virtually cutting off the Byzantine port of Attaleia (Antalya), which was now accessible only by sea. It was they, as much as the Seljuks themselves, who were the target of John's first campaign.

He set out in the spring of
1119,
and made straight for the old Phrygian capital, Laodicea on the Lycus, some four miles to the north of the modern city of Denizli.
1
Captured by the Seljuks in
1071,
Laodicea had been briefly recovered by Alexius Comnenus twenty-five years later; but like so many other towns and villages along that all too flexible frontier, it had since fallen away again. John had sent Axuch and a party of men out in advance to prepare the siege, and his Grand Domestic had done his work well. Resistance collapsed at the first assault; the local Emir Abu-Shara fled; and John surrounded it with a line of new walls to ensure that he did not return.

At this point the Emperor, for reasons unknown, returned hurriedly to Constantinople. It has been suggested
2
that the intrigues of his sister may have had something to do with his decision. Obviously her unsuccessful plot was not to blame, since that must have been timed for when John was already in the capital; but there were very likely other intriguers besides Anna, and during the first possibly insecure years of his reign he seems to have been reluctant to leave it for too long. At all events he was back again a few weeks later for the fall of Sozopolis — some thirty miles north of Attaleia - and for the capture of a whole string of castles and strong points commanding the road leading from the Meander up to the central plateau. By late autumn the vital land links with Attaleia had been re-established; John and Axuch returned to the Bosphorus well satisfied with what they had done.

It is unclear whether they were back in Asia Minor in
1120;
our principal chroniclers,
3
admirable as they are in many respects, show maddeningly little interest in precise chronology. In the following year, however, the Emperor's attention was brought back forcibly to Europe, where there was a dangerous irruption of Pechenegs across the Danube.

1
There is not much to see of Laodicea today. Formerly an important Hellenistic city, famous for its wool and cloth production and one of the Seven Churches of Asia, its ruins arc nowadays deserted and rather sad. Few tourists stop there at all, and even those that do pass on hurriedly to the petrified waterfalls of Pamukkale, a dozen miles further on.

2
F. Chalandon,
Les Comnene,
Vol. II, p.
47.

3
Nicetas Choniates, John Cinnamus and Michael the Syrian.

Since its defeat by Alexius at Levunium in
1091,
thi
s restless people had given littl
e trouble; but thirty years had now passed, a new generation had grown up, and in the summer of
1121
tens of thousands of barbarian tribesmen overran Thrace, causing the usual havoc. As an invasion, it was nowhere near on the scale of its predecessor; on the other hand, John's ambitious programme in Asia depended absolutely on peace in Europe, and it was essential that he should deal with the invaders firmly and expeditiously. While preparing his army and bringing it into position he attempted to buy time by sowing discord among the various Pecheneg tribes - fortunately they had no supreme leader - and by offering them rich presents, as re
commended by Constantine Porphy
rogenitus nearly three centuries before;
1
but the Pechenegs had learnt a lot since Constantine's day and remained unimpressed.

It hardly mattered. Once the army was ready, the Emperor saw no reason to delay the action any longer. The first phase of the battle proved ind
ecisive. John himself was slightl
y wounded, and though a fair number of the enemy were captured, the large majority managed to regain their camp, where they drew up their chariots to form a great circular rampart and dug themselves in. Several times the Byzantine cavalry attacked, but the chariots stood firm. At last the Emperor -who, whenever not actually engaged in battle, had been on his knees before an icon of the Virgin — gave the general order to dismount and, flanked by his Varangian Guard with their long shields and huge battle-axes, led the way forward on foot. The battle-axes made short work of the chariots, and the Pechenegs' morale disintegrated. Some of them managed to escape; the rest were taken prisoner. Many of the captives were however later released and given lands within the Empire on which to settle, in return for joining the imperial army on the spot or giving an undertaking of future military service. The Emperor doubtless remembered how invaluable the Pecheneg regiments had been to his father in policing the Crusader route across the Balkans; he must devoutly have hoped that they would not be necessary again in such a capacity, but they would certainly have their uses during the years to come. Meanwhile, to celebrate his victory, he instituted an annual 'Pecheneg holiday', which was still being celebrated when the century ended.

With the Pechenegs effectively subdued - so effectively, indeed, that

1
See
Byzantium: The Apogee, p.
164
.

they never troubled Byzantium again - John Comnenus would have liked to return as soon as possible to Asia Minor; but his work in Europe was not yet over. The Venetians were on the war-path; and both the Hungarians and the Serbs, so quiet and well-behaved during the first years of his reign, were now in similar mood.

In Alexius's day, Venice had been the Empire's closest ally; she had had to be, because her fleet was of vital importance against the Normans of South Italy - first Robert Guiscard and later Bohemund. To keep the Venetians well-disposed, the Emperor had not hesitated in
1082
to grant them trading privileges enjoyed by no other foreign merchants, including the complete remission of all customs dues. Thus their colony on the Golden Horn had grown both in size and in wealth to the point where it had aroused the intense resentment of the Byzantines, many of whom had appalling stories to tell of Venetian arrogance and
hauteur.
By the time of John's accession, however, the Norman menace had faded; and when Doge Domenico Michiel, elected in the same year, sent ambassadors asking for the renewal of the current arrangements and the confirmation of all the old privileges, the new Emperor refused point-blank. From now on, he told them, they would enjoy only the same treatment as was accorded to their competitors. The Venetians were furious, and on
8
August
1122
the Doge's flagship sailed out of the lagoon with seventy-one men-of-war in its wake.