The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (2 page)

Though Irene's husband, the weak and feckless Leo IV, was temperamentally an iconoclast like his father, he was completely dominated by his wife; in any case he died at thirty-one, leaving her as Regent for their ten-year-old son Constantine VI. And when that son, having grown to manhood, attempted to take over the authority that was rightfully his, his mother unhesitatingly had him blinded, in a particularly barbarous manner which caused his death soon afterwards -as she had known perfectly well that it would. She thus became the first woman to reign, not just as a regent but in her own right, over the Byzantine Empire. Always a passionate iconodule, she had no difficulty in restoring the cult of images and even succeeded in getting it formally defined and approved at the second Council of Nicaea in 787; but in all other respects she proved a disaster. By the end of the century she had reduced the Empire to penury and brought it to the brink of revolution.

It was at this moment of universal dissatisfaction and plunging morale that a new threat presented itself: a threat that was neither economic nor even military and was indeed unlike any that Byzantium had ever faced before, directed as it was against the very cornerstone on which the Empire had been founded - the union of the Roman Empire with the Christian faith. This union was, in Byzantine eyes, symbolized and personified by the Emperor himself, at once the successor of Augustus and God's Vice-Gerent, the Ele
ct of Christ, Equal of the Apostl
es. It followed that, just as there was but a single Ruler in heaven, so -although he might choose to share his throne for purely administrative reasons - there could be but a single Emperor on earth, any challenge to whose divinely ordained authority was not only treason but blasphemy. The fact that there had been many such challenges over the centuries is immaterial: consciousness of sin seldom serves to prevent it. The important point to remember is that this concept - of an Emperor occupying a higher spiritual plane than his subjects and standing, as it were, half-way to heaven - was no abstruse doctrine; on the contrary, it was a firm conviction, consciously held by virtually every Byzantine from the
B
asileus
himself to the meanest peasant: an article of faith at least as universal as, let us say, Christianity in Victorian England. No wonder that the reaction to the news of the coronation in Rome, when it reached Constantinople at the beginning of 801, was one of incredulity and horror.

How much of the Byzantine theory of Empire was understood by Charlemagne, as he rose from his knees before the high altar of St Peter's that Christmas morning, we shall never know. To him, however, the question would have been largely academic; for in his eyes the imperial throne of Byzantium was not tottering but vacant. According to the old Salic tradition in which he had been raised, no woman might wear a crown except as consort of her husband; and Pope Leo, we may assume, fully shared his views. Thus - despite the fateful ceremony just completed - the Roman Empire remained, so far as either of them was concerned, one and indivisible, with Charles as its Emperor. All that had happened was that the Pope had arrogated to himself the right to appoint and invest the Emperor of the Romans - a right which for nearly five centuries had been exercised by Byzantium.

At the same time there was no denying that Irene claimed for herself every inch of imperial territory, and little doubt that the coronation, with all that it implied, would be furiously contested in Constantinople; and it was with this thought uppermost in his mind that in 802 Charlemagne sent ambassadors to the Empress to seek her hand in marriage. For him, the advantages were self-evident: with all the imperial domains of East and West united under a single crown the Empire would once again be a single entity, just as Constantine had conceived it. Nor, even, would there be any members of Irene's family to contest the succession after her death; she herself had most efficiently seen to that.

The Empress too - unlike any of her subjects - was inclined to look favourably on the idea. Marriage to Charles would mean an opportunity to refill her empty treasury and, more important still, might even avert the insurrection that she was aware could not long be delayed. It would also offer a chance of escape from the suffocating and intrigue-ridden atmosphere of Constantinople. Her advisers, on the other hand, when they had recovered from their astonishment - for, as an imaginative German historian once pointed out, the effect on them of such a proposal must have been roughly equivalent to the effect on an eighteenth-century Viennese of a suggested match between the Empress Maria Theresa and the Negus of Abyssinia - would have none of it: how could they possibly sanction the surrender of the Roman Empire to an uncouth and illiterate barbarian? Before the year was out a group of senior officials, led by Irene's long-suffering Logothete of the Treasury (effectively her Minister of Finance) declared her deposed and sent her off - to her own scarcely disguised relief - into exile on the not entirely appropriate island of Lesbos, where she died soon afterwards.

The story of Charlemagne's coronation and of his marriage
manque
has been told in rather more detail, and its significance more thoroughly discussed, in the first volume of this history; it has seemed worthwhile to summarize it here merely to remind the reader of the point at which that volume ended and to set the scene for the events to follow. And the first of those events is the accession to the throne of Byzantium of the leader of the palace revolt which deposed Irene: the former Logothete of the Treasury, who now assumed the name and tide of Nicephorus I.

The new Emperor is said to have been of Arab extraction, a descendant of King Jaballah of Ghassan.
1
A man of vigour and determination, he was firmly resolved to set the Empire to rights after the damage done by his predecessor, and not perhaps unduly concerned about the methods by which this object was to be achieved. No one, certainly, better understood the gravity of the imperial condition. Irene's determination to purge the army of all traces of iconoclasm had resulted in a disastrous weakening of its strength, of which the enemies of the Empire were swift to take advantage. Unable to restrain them by force of arms, she had been obliged to offer vast annual tributes to both the Bulgar Khan and the Caliph Harun al-Rashid; and, to make matters worse, the constant irruptions of the Caliph's armies into Asia Minor had wrought havoc among the immense numbers of peasant small-holders with military obligations on whom, since the days of Justinian II in the late seventh century, the defence of the Empire had been based. Many of these, driven from their homes, had drifted to the capital; thus, instead of swelling the exchequer with their regular taxes, they were now a further drain on it with their unceasing demands for food and maintenance. Their farms meanwhile fell prey to the rapacity of the big landowners - and, in particular, to the monasteries, which Irene had most irresponsibly exempted from all taxation. Having also seen fit to remit the residence tax payable by all free citizens of Constantinople, the tax

1
A Christian-Arab enclave in Syria.

on receipts
1
and half the customs duties levied on imports at Abydos and in the straits, she had succeeded in the space of a very few years in bringing the Empire perilously close to financial and fiscal suicide. The
coup
which led to her downfall had been launched not a moment too soon.

It was Nicephorus's misfortune to have aroused the fury and intense hatred of the monkish chronicler Theophanes, our only full - and generally reliable — contemporary source for the period, for whom the Emperor ranks only a little above Antichrist. For many centuries, in consequence, he suffered an extremely bad press. There were in fact few men more experienced, or better qualified, to set Byzantium back on its financial feet. Irene's tax exemptions were countermanded; other levies were massively increased. Destitute small-holders were drafted into the regular army, the cost of their equipment - valued at 18J gold pieces -being compulsorily met by their more prosperous neighbours. Private loans to merchants were forbidden; shipowners were permitted to raise money only from the State, which charged exorbitant interest at the rate of almost 17 per cent. Nor did the Emperor hesitate, as had so many of his predecessors, to move against the Church; he instructed his provincial officials to treat bishops and clergy 'like slaves', giving them full authority to sequestrate gold and silver plate as necessary. The monasteries he treated with even more contempt (a fact which does much to explain the wrath of Theophanes), quartering troops upon
them, authorizing the imperial lan
d commission to confiscate certain of their properties without according them corresponding fiscal relief and levying poll-tax on the families of their tenants and employees. None of this, obviously, was a recipe for popularity; but under his direction the economy was soon on a sounder footing than it had been for years.

It needed to be; for one of Nicephorus's first actions on his accession had been to write to the Caliph, informing him that he intended to pay no further tribute and even demanding the restitution of the immense sums disbursed by his predecessor. Harun's only reply was to launch an immediate attack, which proved the more damaging when in 803 the Byzantine commander, an Armenian named Bardanes Turcus, suddenly

1 It must be said in Irene's favour that the tax on receipts was, by its very nature, particularly liable to abuse. Theodore of the Studium - one of the Empress's few admirers - describes
(Epist
olae
,
i,
6)
the sufferings of tradesmen of every kind, and the positive infestation of fiscal officers on every road and along every coast. 'When a traveller came to some narrow defile, he would be startled by the sudden appearance of a tax-gatherer, sitting aloft like a thing uncanny'
(A
History of the Later Roman Empire
,
Bury, p. )).

rebelled and proclaimed himself Emperor.
1
The revolt was almost immediately crushed, but not before the Saracens had made considerable territorial gains - which they were to increase substantially in the years that followed. In 806 a Muslim army of 135,000, led by the Caliph in person, drove deep into Cappadocia, capturing Tyana - now an insignificant village called Kalesihisar but then an important city and a bishopric - and withdr
awing only after a payment of 1
0,000 gold pieces as a ransom.

Fortunately for the Empire, Harun died three years later; but by that time Nicephorus was occupied on two other fronts. The first was the area which we now know as Greece, in particular the Theme of Hellas -roughly comprising Attica, Boeotia and Phocis - and the Peloponnese. In the six
th century, Slav settlers had ov
errun this whole region, thus seriously weakening Byzantine influence: in the Peloponnese there had not been a single imperial garrison since 747, and the Emperor's writ had long ceased to run. Fortunately the immigrants had shown themselves a mild and peace-loving people, who asked nothing more than to be left to cultivate their land unmolested; but after the rise of the Bulgars and their large-scale incursions into Macedonia there had been a grave danger that the situation might change, swiftly and for the worse. One huge Slavonic bloc, united and belligerent, extending from the Danube to Cape Matapan, was not a possibility that the Byzantines cared to contemplate.

The Emperor's fears were confirmed when in 805 a considerable force of Slavs attacked the city of Patras on the Gulf of Corinth. They were repulsed, but not without some difficulty; and the incident encouraged Nicephorus to embark on a wholesale resettlement of the Peloponnese, to which he brought vast numbers of his Greek-speaking subjects from all over the Empire - including substantial colonies from Calabria and Sicily. With them of course came the Christian religion, to which the Slavs had not yet been converted and which since their arrival had been very largely forgotten. As with most resettlement programmes, the majority of those who were obliged to abandon their homelands for a

1 The story goes that soon after his revolt Bardanes, accompanied by three of his closest associates, decided to consult a hermit
of Phil
omelion, near Antioch, who was widely believed to possess the gift of prophecy. The hermit fixed the general with a piercing eye and shook his head: there was no hope for him. Then, turning his gaze towards the others, he foretold that two of them would wear the imperial crown and that the third would come near to doing so. The first two proved to be the future Leo V and Michael II; the third
was Thomas the Slav. (Sec p. 32
.)

terra incognita
peopled, so far as they knew, by hostile barbarians did so only through fear of the consequences of refusal; but without Nicephorus's wise and far-sighted policy the later history of the Balkan peninsula might have been different indeed.

This argument acquires additional force when we remember that the first decade of the ninth century saw the rise of the most formidable leader that the Bulgar nation had ever produced. His name was Krum. Of his origins we know nothing. All that can be said for certain is that in the first years of the century he utterly annihilated the Avars, who now disappear from history
never to return; and that in 807
he somehow rose to supremacy, uniting the Bulgars of the Danube basin with those who lived across the Carpathians in Pannonia and Transylvania and welding them together to form a military force unprecedented in Bulgar history. In that same year the Emperor, taking advantage of the dearly-bought truce on his eastern frontier, decided to lead an expedition against them; but he had got no further than Adrianople when he uncovered a conspiracy among his officers and abruptly abandoned the campaign. Now it was Krum's turn to take the initiative. In the late autumn of 808 he surprised a large Byzantine army encamped near the mouth of the river Strymon and totally destroyed it, and in the spring of 809 he tricked his way into Serdica - the modern Sofia - razing the fortress and slaughtering the entire garrison, 6,000 strong.