The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (32 page)

1
True or false? If not simply an out-and-out lie to appease Athanasius, was this decision the result of Nicephorus's oath or of Theophano's repugnance? We shall never know.

it free from all but direct imperial control, he implored him to return and finish the task he had begun.

Loaded down with all the treasures, precious relics, endowments and privileges with which Nicephorus strove to appease his agonized conscience - including the great jewelled Bible and the golden reliquary containing a section of the True Cross which are still among the chief glories of the Holy Mountain — Athanasius did as he was bidden. Within a few months his monastery was complete - though it was never, alas, destined to shelter the two old men, one an Emperor and the other a saint, in the evening of their lives. The dreadful fate of Nicephorus is shortly to be told, but Athanasius was spared this further shock: soon after his resumption of building operations, the half-completed dome of his church collapsed on his head and killed him.

The Emperor Nicephorus II was - it hardly seems necessary to repeat -a soldier through and through, and one moreover for whom the war against the Saracens was nothing less than a crusade. It was, he devoutly believed, the will of God that the infidels should be driven back to the desert wastes from which they had come - and that he, Nicephorus, had been ordained to perform the task. Thus even his love for Theophano, great as it may have been, could not keep him from his duty; and in
964
he returned to the attack, which rapidly regained all its old momentum. The summer of
965
saw the first major conquest of this new campaign: the city of Tarsus, the Arabs' chief springboard for their annual incursions into Cilicia and for over 200 years one of the sharpest and most painful thorns in Byzantine flesh.

From Tarsus, too, it was but a short sail across to Cyprus. As early as
668
the island had been the subject of a treaty between Constantine IV and the Caliph Abdul-Malik, by the terms of which it had been demilitarized and ruled as a sort of neutral condominium by Emperor and Caliph together. To the bigoted mind of Nicephorus, however, this eminently civilized arrangement was anathema. That same summer of
965
his troops occupied the island in strength, such Muslims as were there at the time making not even a gesture of resistance or even protest; and Cyprus became a Byzantine Theme.

This lack of Saracen reaction to what was little better than an act of highway robbery was by now almost to be expected; for as the Abbasid Caliphate crumbled, so did its subjects grow ever more demoralized. As for Sai'f ed-Daula of Aleppo, he had never really recovered from the destruction of his palace and the effective conquest of his capital in 962; five years later, a broken man and partially paralysed after what seems to have been a stroke, he died aged only fifty-one.
1
With his chief adversary gone, Nicephorus encountered no more serious obstacles to his progress. The position of Aleppo itself, whose garrison had never formally capitulated, was now regularized: the city became an imperial vassal and protectorate. And in 969, after 332 years, the ancient patriarchal city of Antioch returned once more to Christian hands.

Thus, so far as the war in the East is concerned, an account of the reign of Nicephorus II is one of virtually uninterrupted success; nor need this surprise us, since all that was required there was the military skill that the Emperor, his brother Leo and his companion-in-arms John Tzimisces - to say nothing of the young hero of Antioch, Michael Bourtzes - possessed in plenty. In the West, on the other hand, there is a less happy story to tell; for in dealing with Europe diplomacy was required; and in all the history of Byzantium there were few worse diplomats than Nicephorus Phocas. He seems to have allowed supreme power to go to his head: at the best of times singularly devoid of charm, we see him becoming ever more arrogant and overbearing as his reign goes on. He provided an excellent example of this blundering boorishness as early as 965, when an embassy arrived from Bulgaria to collect the annual subsidy agreed by Romanus Lecapenus and Tsar Peter at the time of the latter's marriage in 927. The Bulgars were, it is true, pressing their luck: the Tsaritsa Maria-Irene had died a month or two before, and Nicephorus might legitimately have objected that the arrangement had lapsed with her death.
2
On the other hand Bulgaria was an invaluable buffer state, protecting the Empire from both the Magyars and the Russians, and the modest subsidy - which had been annually handed over without question for thirty-eight years - might have been considered a small enough price to pay for friendly relations. Be that as it may, the Emperor had no possible justification for acting as he did. He turned on the ambassadors with a stream of invective, abusing them and their countrymen as a race of hideous and filthy beggars, triple slaves and sons of dogs, ruled by a prince dressed only in the skins of

1
The immediate cause of his death, according to
The
Encyclopaedia of Islam,
was 'retention of the urine'. His body, it continues, 'was brought to Mayyafariqin and buried in the
turbe
of his mother outside the town. He had given orders for a brick made of soil that he had won in his campaigns to be placed under his head in his coffin.'

2
Still according to the theory
of Sir Steven Runciman. See p. 1
47n.

animals. Then he had them scourged before sending them back empty-handed to Preslav.

Whatever the provocation, such conduct was obviously inexcusable -paralleled only by that of the Emperor Alexander in similar circumstances over half a century before. But while Alexander had been a drunken boor, Nicephorus was in deadly earnest. He advanced at once to the Bulgar fronder and captured several border strongholds to show that he meant what he had said, and in other circumstances he would doubtless have penetrated further; but the bulk of his army was fully - and profitably - engaged in the East and he had no wish to weaken it at such a time. He therefore concluded an agreement with Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev - the son of Igor and the recently baptized Olga - whereby Svyatoslav, in return for a handsome fee, undertook to subdue the Bulgars on his behalf. Svyatoslav was more than happy to accept Byzantine gold, but he was also greedy for conquest. Only a few years before, he had utterly destroyed the Kingdom of the Khazars; here was a heaven-sent opportunity to do the same to his Bulgar neighbours, pushing forward his already extensive frontiers as far as the banks of the Danube. The Bulgar Kingdom, now hopelessly divided, could put up no effective resistance: too late, the Emperor saw that he had succeeded only in replacing a weak and peace-loving neighbour with an ambitious and aggressive enemy.

In his dealings with Western Europe, Nicephorus's diplomacy - if it can so be described - was equally calamitous, and his chief adversary still more formidable. Otto the Saxon had come a long way since the time of his first appearance in this story, some fifteen years before. Although titular King of Italy since
952,
he had at first been largely occupied in Germany, while the peninsula had been effectively ruled by the Marquis Berengar of Ivrea. In
961,
however, in response to an appeal by the unspeakable John XII,
1
he had swept down into Italy, reasserted his control, taken Berengar prisoner and ridden on to Rome, where in February
962
the Pope had crowned him Emperor.

Attentive readers may remember that Otto in earlier years had welcomed the offers of an alliance made to him by Constantine

1
Most infamous of the tenth-century papal 'pornocracy', John had been made Pope in
95 5
at the age of sixteen. As Gibbon puts it, 'we read, with some surprise, that the worthy grandson of Marozia lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome; that the Lateran Palace was turned into a school foi prostitution; and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the shrine of St Peter, lest, in the.devout act, they should be violated by his successor*.

Porphyrogenitus: an alliance which Constantine had hoped to seal by the marriage of his son Romanus (after the early death of the latter's first wife) to Otto's niece Hedwig. Romanus's rejection of this lady in favour of the lovely Theophano had greatly displeased the Saxon King, and when in 959 this arrogant and - in Otto's eyes - extremely ill-mannered young man succeeded his father on the throne relations between them became chillier still; but Otto condnued to dream of a dynastic union, and in the last weeks of 967 - with Romanus in his turn now safely out of the way - he sent an embassy to Nicephorus to discuss the possibility. Thanks to misunderstandings on both sides, this proved unsuccessful -so unsuccessful indeed that, in an effort to bring the
basileus
to his senses, Otto launched a totally unprovoked attack on Byzantine-held Apulia, occupying much of the province; but when his army failed absolutely to capture Bari he resorted once again to diplomacy, and in the early summer of 968 dispatched a second embassy, more high-powered than the first and under a considerably more experienced ambassador: our old friend Liudprand of Cremona.

Liudprand's report to Otto of his second journey to the Bosphorus, the so-called
Relatio
de
le
atione
constantinopolitana,
is incontestably the most enjoyable - as well as the most malicious - account ever written of a diplomatic mission to the court of Byzantium; and if he has little good to say of it, this is hardly surprising when we consider the difficulties with which he had to contend. First of all there was the abrasive personality of the Emperor himself. On Liudprand's earlier mission he had got on well enough with Constantine Porphyrogenitus, for whose sophisticated and scholarly mind any Western intellectual probably had considerable appeal. To the rough and uncultivated Nicephorus, on the other hand, he was everything that was most abhorrent: a smoothtongued trickster made still more dangerous by his fluent Greek, a man in whom no trust could possibly be reposed and a heretic to boot. On top of this he represented a German adventurer who called himself Emperor, whereas every right-thinking person knew that the Roman Empire was one and indivisible, with its seat at Constantinople: a pretender to his throne and a usurper of his title who had, moreover, recently broken faith with an entirely unjustified attack on imperial Byzantine territory.

Liudprand's lukewarm reception on his return to Constantinople was thus only to be expected; he was, none the less, deeply wounded in his
amour
propre.
Nineteen years before, as emissary of a mere Italian marquis, he had been welcomed with at least a modicum of politeness; now, a plenipotentiary of the Emperor of the West, he described to his master the barely disguised hostility with which he had been received:

The palace in which we were confined, though large and open, neither kept out the cold nor afforded protection from the heat; furthermore we were placed under armed guards, who prevented my people from going out and anyone else from coming in. It was thus accessible only to us who were shut up inside it, and was so far from the residence of the Emperor that when we walked there -for we were not permitted to ride — we arrived exhausted. To make matters worse, the Greek wine was quite undrinkable, having been mixed with pitch, resin and plaster
1
...

On the fourth of June
...
we arrived at Constantinople and waited in heavy rain with our horses outside the Carian Gate until the eleventh hour
[5
p.m.]. Only then did Nicephorus order us to be admitted on foot, for he did not deem us worthy to ride the horse with which Your Grace had provided us, and we were escorted to the aforesaid loathsome, waterless and draughty stone house. On the sixth of June, the Saturday before Pentecost, I was brought before the Emperor's brother Leo, marshal of the court and Logothete; and we wore ourselves out in a fierce argument over your tide. He called you not 'Emperor', which is
basileus
in his tongue, but - most insultingly -
rex,
which is 'King' in ours. When I told him that the two words, different as they were, signified the same he accused me of having come not to make peace but to foment strife. Finally he rose fr
om his seat in a fury and, greatl
y offended, received your letter not with his own hands but through an intermediary. Though he may appear humble he is in fact a man of considerable stature: if anyone were to lean upon him for support, he would pierce his hand.

On the following day Liudprand had his first audience of the Emperor - who came, he tells us, straight to the point. He regretted not having been able to give his guest a more courteous reception, but in view of Otto's conduct - invading Rome, and depriving Berengar and Adalbert of their lawful Kingdom, to say nothing of his attempted seizure of Apulia - he had had no choice. Liudprand - if his account is to be believed - gave as good as he got. His master, he pointed out, had not invaded Rome, but had liberated the city from a tyranny of libertines and harlots; if Nicephorus and his predecessors were truly the Roman Emperors they claimed to be, why had they allowed this state of affairs? Berengar and Adalbert had been Otto's vassals. They had rebelled

1
This must, I believe, be the first recorded reaction of a Western European to the taste of
rets
ina.