The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (25 page)

off into exile or confined in monasteries; every key post was now in the hands of one of his own supporters. The navy was behind him to a man, together with the immense majority of the army. The Church, under a new and subservient Patriarch, gave no further trouble. Romanus himself was not only the crowned and anointed Emperor but head of a numerous imperial family, whose only possible rival was completely under his control and, incidentally, his son-in-law. At last he was secure.

Moreover, within a year or two of Symeon's death it became clear that Bulgaria was a spent force. She could never have become truly great until she had conquered Byzantium, and Byzantium had once again proved unconquerable. Symeon had had no choice but to turn back, time and time again, from those tremendous walls, and to exhaust himself instead against the tribes of the Balkans and the steppes; and this was a war that could never be won. Young Peter, in any case - quite apart from being the son-in-law of the Byzantine Emperor - possessed none of his father's natural aggression. Though infinitely superior in his moral life — many of his subjects looked upon him as a saint — he was to prove a weak and feckless ruler, who in a reign of forty-two years never learned to control his boyars, still less to hold his kingdom together. Thus, for half a century, Bulgaria was to give the Empire no further cause for concern; and when at last a new ruler, representing a new dynasty, was once again to challenge the authority of Constantinople, he was to find himself faced with an adversary worthy of his steel.

The Bulgarian peace finally allowed Romanus Lecapenus to concentrate his energies in the East - a region infinitely more vital to the health and security of Byzantium than the Balkans could ever be. Here were the richest and most fertile fields and farms, here the seemingly bottomless human reservoir that had for centuries provided the Empire with the steadiest and the sturdiest of its fighting men. Here - most important of all - was the front line of Christendom, on whose integrity and inviolability all Europe depended.

Some time around
900,
Leo VI had managed to annex the lands of a minor Armenian princeling, Manuel of Teces, which - with the addition of one or two neighbouring cities - he had incorporated into a new Theme which he called Mesopotamia.
1
With this not very

1
Not quite the area, however, to which the name - 'between the rivers' — is normally applied today. The two rivers here referred to are not the Euphrates and the Tigris but the two main branches of the Euphrates
.

important exception, the Empire's eastern frontier had remained, at the time of his death, substantially as it had been for the past two centuries. Raiding, on the part of both sides, had long been an institution; seldom did a summer pass without the launching of at least one naval or military expedition from one side against the territory of the other. But these expeditions, though often involving forces of considerable size, were prompted more by the desire for plunder and pillage than for territorial expansion, and for the most part had little long-term effect.

Then, in 923, there was appointed as commander-in-chief of the army one of the most brilliant generals that Byzantium was ever to produce. John Curcuas - sometimes known by his baptismal name of Gourgen -was, like the Emperor himself, an Armenian from the extreme north: the region we now know as Georgia. The two were, so far as we can gather, old friends; it was Curcuas who had been primarily responsible for the rounding-up of all potentially subversive elements in the capital at the time of Romanus's assumption of power, and for the next quarter-century no man in the Empire was to give his master more loyal or devoted service. In the first year of his command, the one outstanding victory was in fact naval rather than military: the final defeat of the renegade pirate Leo of Tripoli, the destroyer of Thessalonica nineteen years previously; and in 924, the better to deal with Symeon, Romanus concluded a two-year peace with the Caliph. But from 926, with the Bulgar threat behind him, he was ready to take on the Arabs; and over the next eighteen years the whole complexion of the age-long and hitherto indecisive struggle in the East was to be changed. Since the earliest days of Saracen conquest, the initiative had remained firmly with the forces of Islam. After their first onslaught they had made no further major advance; but though the Byzantines had scored several notable victories under Michael III in the previous century there had never been a question of a large-scale invasion of traditionally Saracen territory. The first six years of Curcuas's campaigns were aimed at the further consolidation of imperial authority in Armenia, and ended in 932 with the capture of Manzikert: a city later to acquire terrible significance in Byzantine history, but which at this time — together with Percri, Khelat (the modern Ahlat) and other towns on or around the northern shore of Lake Van - simply enabled him to control the roads into central Armenia and the more southerly district of Vaspurakan. Only two years later, on 19 May 934, there came an even greater triumph: the capture of
Melitene, the first important Arab Emirate to be incorporated into the Empire.

The years immediately following were less eventful, largely owing to a counter-offensive on the part of the powerful Hamdanid Emir of Mosul, Sai'f ed-Daula, 'Sword of the Empire'. By 940 Saif was causing Curcuas serious anxiety; and matters might have taken a dramatically different turn had not a new crisis in Baghdad — where the Abbasid Caliphate was by now fast disintegrating - recalled him in haste to the capital. For the Byzantines, their good fortune proved even greater than they knew: had the Emir kept up the pressure, they would have been hard put to it indeed to meet the utterly unexpected thunderbolt that descended on them, out of an apparently clear blue sky, during the following summer.

In the year 941 there may have been old men and women still alive in Constantinople who remembered their parents' stories of the terrible — though fortunately short-lived - Russian raid on the city eighty-one years before.
1
In those days the Russians had been a primitive and fairly heterogeneous collection of mainly Slav tribes, held together by a feudal, probably Scandinavian, aristocracy; in the intervening period, however, they had come - both literally and figuratively - a long way. In 882 or thereabouts the Viking Oleg had headed south from Novgorod and sailed down the Dnieper to Kiev, which he had captured and made the capital of a new Russian state; since then trade had steadily expanded and, where Byzantium was concerned, had been regulated by a commercial treaty signed with Leo VI in 911, according to which preferential treatment was to be accorded - though with certain safeguards - to all Russian merchants in Constantinople. The Slavonic chronicler known -wrongly, as it happens - by the name of Nestor maintains that this treaty had been intended to settle matters after Oleg had launched an immense land and sea expedition, with 2,000 ships and an unspecified number of men, against the city four years previously, in 907; it even relates how, at one stage during the fighting, he had carried his ships on rollers over the hill of Pera and down into the Golden Horn, just as Mehmet II was to do in 1453. This raid is not mentioned by any other source and is almost certainly apocryphal; Oleg had anyway died in the following year and had been succeeded by Igor, son of Rurik, as Grand Prince of Kiev.

1
See pp.
66-8.

But the armada that Igor dispatched at the beginning of June 941 was all too real.

This time the Greek chroniclers put the number of vessels in the Russian fleet at ten or, in one case, fifteen thousand; Liudprand of Cremona, on the other hand (whose stepfather, then the Italian ambassador at Constantinople, was able to give him a first-hand account of what had occurred) speaks, rather more moderately, of
mille
et eo amplius
- 'a thousand and more' - and is almost certainly a good deal nearer the mark. Nevertheless, when Romanus first heard from his Bulgar friends of the Russian approach, his heart sank within him: his army was away on the eastern frontier, his navy divided between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Urgent messages were sent to both, with orders to return at once; meanwhile, the shipwrights worked round the clock trying to put into some kind of shape the only craft that could be mobilized in the capital: a pathetic collection of fifteen ancient hulks, long destined for the scrapyard but fortunately not yet dismantled. These were loaded to the gunwales with Greek fire and dispatched, under the
protovestiarius
Theophanes, to block the Bosphorus at its northern end. Theophanes arrived only just in time: on the morning of 11 June the Russian fleet appeared on the horizon. He attacked at once.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Greek fire in Byzantine history. Time and time again, in naval engagements without number, it had wrenched victory from almost certain defeat. To Saracen fleets it was all too familiar - though they had never found an effective weapon against it. To the Russians, on the other hand, it came as a total surprise. As the first of their ships were engulfed in flames, the remainder turned abruptly away from the mouth of the Bosphorus and headed east along the Black Sea coast of Bithynia; there they landed in strength, venting on the maritime towns and villages all their pent-up anger and frustration at being blocked from the capital and perpetrating unspeakable horrors on the local populations - especially, we are told, on the clergy, some of whom were used for target practice while others, still less fortunate, had iron skewers driven through their skulls.

For many weeks the terror continued; but the military governor of the Armeniakon Theme, Bardas Phocas, hurried to the scene with his local levies and kept the marauders occupied as best he could pending the arrival of the main army under Curcuas. The fleet too was on its way, and as each new squadron arrived it went, just as Thebphanes had done, straight into the attack. Before many days had passed it was the Russians
who were on the defensive: they had failed in their primary purpose, autumn was approaching and they were increasingly anxious to sail for home. But it was too late. The Byzantine fleet was drawn up in strength between them and the open sea, and slowly closing in. Early in September they made a desperate attempt to slip through the blockade to the north-west, towards Thrace; again, Theophanes was too quick for them. Suddenly the whole sea was aflame with what Nestor's chronicle describes as 'winged fire'; the Russian ships went up like matchwood. The crews leaped overboard in their hundreds, but there was little hope for them: the lucky ones were dragged to the bottom by the weight of their armour, while the rest met their deaths in the oil-covered water, which blazed as fiercely as the vessels from which they had flung themselves. Few — very few - escaped the inferno and returned to break the news of the catastrophe to their master. In Constantinople, however, there was wild rejoicing: Theophanes was given a hero's welcome and promoted on the spot to the rank of
parakoimomenos.
Where the Russian prisoners were concerned, Romanus seems for once to have shown no mercy - not surprisingly, perhaps, in view of the outrages for which they had been responsible. If Liudprand is to be believed, they were all executed in the presence of his stepfather - though why a peaceable ambassador should have been called upon to witness so unpleasant a proceeding is nowhere explained.
1

This was not quite the end of Romanus's difficulties with the Russians. Only three years later Igor tried again - this time with an amphibious operation, for which he had mobilized members of virtually every tribe in his dominions, to say nothing of a large force of Pecheneg mercenaries. As before, the Emperor was given advance warning: the Bulgars reported the approach of the land army, while the people of Cherson in the Crimea sent him a blood-curdling description of a fleet so huge that the vessels covered the whole surface of the sea. Romanus, however, had no intention of fighting if he could avoid it. His recent victory, complete as it was, had been won only after much bloodshed and devastation; besides, his army was once again away in Mesopotamia, even further from the capital than on the last occasion. He was by no means certain that it could be recalled in time, and was in any case reluctant to withdraw it from a campaign that was proving outstandingly successful. Instead, he decided to send ambassadors to Igor, who was leading the

i Although Liudprand is probably right about the size of the Russian armament, he is not, it must be said, invariably to be relied upon.

land force, to negotiate a settlement. They met the Grand Prince on the Danube and, quite simply, bought him off; while a further
douceur
satisfied the Pechenegs, who were only too pleased to lay waste Bulgaria instead.

The following spring, a delegation arrived from Kiev to conclude a new political and commercial treaty. Drawn up in the names of Igor on the one side and those of Romanus and all his co-Emperors on the other - and transcribed verbatim in Nestor's chronicle - it laid down a detailed set of conditions regulating trade between the two states, the duties and responsibilities to be accepted and the privileges to be enjoyed by the merchants of each in the territories of the other. Article II, for example, stated that Russians wishing to enter Constantinople might do so only in unarmed groups of up to fifty at a time, accompanied by an imperial representative; any merchandise purchased for more than 50
zo
lotniki
would be delivered in bond and excise duty levied.
1
Other articles related to the treatment of escaped slaves, extradition arrangements, punishments for crimes committed by Russians in the Empire or Byzantines in Russia and, in the event of threats from any third power, the duty of each of the signatories to send immediate and unlimited assistance to the other. After the Emperor had affixed his seal the Russians returned to Kiev, together with imperial representatives empowered to sign the ratification documents once the Grand Prince had similarly given his approval. Both sides were well pleased with what they had achieved, and so they might be: relations between Russia and Byzantium were to remain unruffled for a quarter of a century.

Immediately after the destruction of the Russian fleet in 941, John Curcuas had led his army back to the East. To his relief, he had found all his old positions intact: his chief enemy Sai'f ed-Daula was still detained with the crumbling Caliphate in Baghdad, and everything seemed set fair for a continuation of the interrupted offensive. Early in 942 therefore, he swept down into the province of Aleppo where, although he failed to capture the city, he took prisoners in a quantity estimated by the Arabs' own sources at ten or fifteen thousand. By the high summer he was back in imperial territory, resting his troops, rearming and revictualling; and then, as autumn drew on - for the

1
The approximate value of a
zo
lotnik
may be judged from Article V, which prescribed the ransoms payable for Russian prisoners. An able-bodied young man or a pretty girl could be redeemed for
10
zo
lotniki;
a person of middle age for
8;
old people and children for
5.

Syrian climate, unlike the Armenian, allows campaigning throughout the year - he was off again, in a huge clockwise loop that led him past Lake Van and then westward to the great fortress city of Amida on the banks of the Tigris.
1
From here he swung south-east again to Nisibin, and thence west to Edessa.

Edessa, though it had fallen to Islam as early as 641 in the first wave of Muslim conquest, could boast a long and venerable history as a Christian city. In the fifth century it had been a refuge for the Nestorians expelled from the Empire after the Council of Ephesus,
2
and it was later to perform a similar service for persecuted monophysites. To the average Eastern Christian of the tenth century, however, Edessa was above all famous for its two priceless possessions: the letter which the ailing King Abgar I had received from Jesus Christ in reply to an invitation to come to Edessa and cure him, and the Saviour's own portrait, miraculously imprinted on a cloth.
3
Both these objects were known to be spurious -the portrait is nowhere heard of before the fifth century, while the letter had actually been declared a fake by Pope Gelasius in 494 - but their legends had refused to die; and by the tenth century there seem to have been no less than three rival portraits in the city, held respectively by the Jacobites, the Nestorians and the Melkites, each of them claiming their own to be authentic.
4

So far as John Curcuas was concerned, however, there was only one; and he was determined to have it. He therefore sent word to the inhabitants offering peace and the return of all his prisoners in return for the famous image. This put the Edessans in a quandary. The vast majority of them were devout Muslims; but in the eyes of Islam Jesus was one of those 'close to God', and his portrait in consequence a sacred trust. So important a decision, they replied, must be referred to the Caliph in person; would the general therefore be so good as to stay his hand until they received instructions? Curcuas agreed; there was, after

j Now known as Diyaibakir, the city has retained nearly all its tremendous medieval walls, more than four miles in circumference. The immense Islamic reliefs above the Harput Gate on the northern side almost certainly date from
910
- and had thus, by the time of which we are speaking, already been in place nearly forty years.

2
See
Byzantium: The Early Centuries,
p.
i48n.

3
This tradition appears to have been the origin of the Veronica legend, which does not properly surface again until the fourteenth century - and then in France, whither it was probably brought back by the Crusaders. Compare also the Turin Shroud.

4
The fullest account of the letter and the portrait - together with much else about one of the most fascinating of ancient cities - is given by J. B. Segal
(
Edessa, 'The Blessed City',
Oxford
1970).