The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (33 page)

against him; he had removed them. It was as simple as that. As to the Apulian problem, that could easily be solved: if Nicephorus would give the hand in marriage of one of Romanus's daughters to his master's son, the younger Otto - who since the previous Christmas had been reigning with his father as co-Emperor - among the several important concessions that he might expect in return was the total evacuation of all occupying forces in the region. To this proposal he received no immediate answer; the Emperor signified that the audience was at an end, and Liudprand withdrew. Six days later, however, he was summoned by Basil the
parakoimomenos
and informed that a princess born in the purple might indeed be available - but only if the Western Empire were prepared to cede in return Ravenna, Rome and all eastern Italy, together with Istria and the northern part of the Dalmatian coast.

Neither Nicephorus nor Basil can have imagined for a moment that Otto would consider such terms, which were virtually tantamount to the surrender of all Italy and a good deal more besides; nor would Liudprand have had the authority to accept them even if he had wished to do so. There was consequently no good reason for him to remain in Constantinople, and his alarm was all the greater when, instead of being sent on his way, he found himself confined even more closely to his detested lodgings, from which he was allowed to emerge only when the Emperor from time to time invited him to dinner. Even these occasions were less agreeable than they might have been, owing first to the perfectly disgusting food, 'washed down with oil after the manner of drunkards and moistened also with an exceedingly bad fish liquor', and second to the fact that Nicephorus saw them only as opportunities to bully him. How, he would be asked again and again, did his master have the temerity to occupy lands in south Italy which had been recognized for centuries as the property of Byzantium? How, come to that, did he dare to call himself an Emperor at all?

At the end of July, to the ambassador's intense relief, his host left for Syria to resume his campaign; now at last there seemed some chance that he might be permitted to return home. But obstacles continued to be put in his way, and on 15 August a further disaster struck: an embassy arrived from Pope John XIII with a letter which was intended to help the negotiations along but which unfortunately referred to Otto as 'the august Emperor of the Romans' while Nicephorus was simply addressed as 'Emperor of the Greeks'. Liudprand describes the reaction of the Byzantine court with morbid relish: had the new envoys been of higher rank, he quotes them as saying - had there been, for example, a bishop or a marquis among them - they would have been scourged and had their hair and beards plucked out before being sewn into sacks and hurled into the sea. Being a bishop himself, he confesses to having felt some concern for his own safety: he was of course the emissary of the Western Emperor and not that of the Pope, but it was common knowledge that John was Otto's nominee, and he was far from sure that in their present anti-Western mood the Byzantines would bother with such nice distinctions.

Subsequent events were to prove him right; for on 17 September he was once again summoned, this time by the Patrician Christopher, a eunuch, who began the conversation with one or two personal remarks:

The pallor of your face, the emaciation of your whole body, the unusual length of your hair and beard, all reveal the immense pain that is in your heart because the date of your return to your master has been delayed.
..
The reason is this. The Pope of Rome - if indeed he may be called Pope when he has held communion and ministry with Alberic's son, the apostate, the adulterer, the sacrilegious - has sent a letter to our most sacred Emperor, worthy of himself and unworthy of Nicephorus, calling him 'Emperor of the Greeks' and not 'of the Romans'. Certainly this has been done at your master's insdgation
...
That fatuous blockhead of a Pope does not know that the sacred Constantine transferred to this city the imperial sceptre, the senate and all the Roman knighthood, leaving in Rome nothing but vile slaves, fishermen, confectioners, poulterers, bastards, plebeians and underlings. Never would he have written this letter if your king had not suggested it.

Clearly this was no time for heroics. Liudprand tried to argue that since the days of Constantine the Byzantines had changed their language, customs and dress, and that the Pope had probably thought that by now the very name of Romans, like their sartorial style, might be distasteful to them; but he did not press the point. Finally he promised that all future letters would be addressed to 'Nicephorus, Constantine and Basil, the great and august Emperors of the Romans'.

Now at last he was allowed to leave - but there was still one further insult in store for him. During his stay in Constantinople he had managed to buy five lengths of sumptuous purple cloth for the adornment of his cathedral in Cremona. These he was now peremptorily ordered to surrender. In vain he argued that Nicephorus himself had given him authority to take with him as much as he liked, calling as his witnesses the interpreter and the Emperor's brother Leo, both of whom had been present during the conversation; Nicephorus, he was told, had never intended his permission to cover luxuries such as these. In vain he pleaded that when, as a mere deacon representing the Marquis Berengar, he had visited the city nearly twenty years before, he had returned with a far greater number of vestments even more sumptuous than those at present in question, and had suffered none of the prevarications and insults that now, as a bishop representing an Emperor, he was called upon to endure. Times, it was firmly pointed out to him, had changed. Constantine had been a mild man, who achieved his ends by peaceful methods, working from his Palace; Nicephorus was a man of more warlike temper, who preferred crushing his enemies to bribing them. And so at last on 2 October, after four months of misery, sickness and almost constant vilification,

...
I boarded my vessel and left the city that was once so rich and prosperous and is now such a starveling, a city full of lies, tricks, perjury and greed, a city rapacious, avaricious and vainglorious. My guide was with me, and after forty-nine days of ass-riding, walking, horse-riding, fasting, thirsting, sighing, weeping and groaning, I arrived at Naupactus .
..

Even that was not the end of Liudprand's tribulations. He was delayed by contrary winds at Naupactus, deserted by his ship's crew at Patras, unkindly received by a eunuch bishop and half-starved on Leucas and subjected to three consecutive earthquakes on Corfu, where he subsequently fell among thieves. He was conscious, too, that it had all been in vain. The imperial marriage seemed no nearer, and relations between East and West were if anything even more strained than they had been before he set out: indeed, before he was back in Cremona war had erupted once again between the two Empires in south Italy. Poor Liudprand - he could not have known that his account of his journey would still be read a thousand years after his death, and found to be as fresh, funny and revealing as on the day it was written. A pity: it would have cheered him up.

It was only to be expected, in view of the character, manners and appearance of Nicephorus Phocas, that he should have been incapable of maintaining the affections of his subjects. At the beginning of his reign he had enjoyed the popularity due to a hero who had fought long and valiantly for the Empire, and whose exertions had been rewarded by the reconquest of Crete and the virtual annihilation of the Saracen threat in
the East. It was on the wave of this popularity that he had risen to the throne - not, certainly, as his birthright but at least by invitation of the reigning Empress, who had almost immediately become his wife; and his worst enemies would have had to agree that, in the political vacuum prevailing after the death of Romanus, he - and she - were fully justified in acting as they did. But Nicephorus was, as we have seen, supremely ungifted in the arts of peace; and in the six years of his reign he rapidly antagonized almost all those with whom he came into contact, together with that all-important element in the Byzantine State, the people of Constantinople.

Political power - which he had never before enjoyed - went to his head, and as his arrogance increased so did his irritability and shortness of temper. His unforgivable treatment of the Bishop of Cremona - who was, after all, an imperial ambassador - and his reception of the Bulgarian envoys were, alas, all too characteristic of his diplomatic methods, and he seems to have dealt with the officials of his own court and government in a similarly high-handed manner. Their dislike - and, as time went on, their growing distrust - of their master was based, however, on more than personal grounds. There was also his lack of judgement in foreign affairs, illustrated by his invitation to Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev to destroy Bulgaria and his gratuitous insults to Otto the Great at a time when his army, already fully stretched on both the eastern and western frontiers, could not possibly undertake a third simultaneous campaign in south Italy. And there was the shameless favouritism which he showed to the only two sections of society that represented his own background: the army first, and then the Anatolian military aristocracy. The imperial garrison in the capital could, in his eyes, do no wrong, and took full advantage of the fact: at night the streets were loud with the carousings of drunken soldiery, to the point where honest citizens feared to leave their homes. Protests and petitions in plenty were addressed to the Emperor, only to be brushed roughly aside.

The fortunes of 'the powerful' underwent an even more dramatic change. Romanus Lecapenus and Constantine Porphyrogenitus had both done their utmost to limit their growing influence; Nicephorus Phocas deliberately legislated in their favour. Formerly, if a holding came up for sale, first refusal was given to the owners of the immediately adjoining land; henceforth it was to be available to the highest bidder - almost inevitably a landed nobleman bent on increasing his estates. Formerly again, the minimum value of property to be owned by a small-holder for him to qualify as an armed cavalryman was four pounds of gold; this figure Nicephorus now in
creased to twelve pounds, effecti
vely disqualifying thousands of those landed peasant families who for centuries had constituted the backbone of the local militia and giving further power to the proprietorial class. Thus the rich threatened to become richer and the poor poorer; and the people of Constantinople, who took no interest in agrarian questions and very little in military ones - which they tended to leave so far as possible to their Asian compatriots - but who knew injustice when they saw it, did not attempt to conceal their displeasure.

Another, rather more surprising, source of opposition was the Church. The Emperor's extreme piety had initially predisposed the ecclesiastical authorities strongly in his favour; but they were soon made to understand that Nicephorus's views on their proper role in society differed radically from their own. His ascetic and puritanical sensibilities were profoundly shocked by the enormous wealth that the Church — and in particular the monasteries - had accumulated over the centuries. This problem was not new, but it had not been seriously tackled since the days of Constantine Copronymus 200 years before; and with vast tracts of superb agricultural land lying fallow under monastic mismanagement the time had clearly come for remedial action. Nicephorus's approach was characteristically uncompromising: all further such transfers were forbidden, whatever the circumstances. Would-be benefactors might if they wished restore churches or monasteries that were ruined or derelict, but that was all. Predictably, the edict called forth a storm of protest from monks and clergy alike, but worse was to follow: there now came a decree that no new bishop might be appointed without the Emperor's personal approval. This, in the opinion of the outraged priesthood, could mean but one thing: that he was determined on complete control of the Church, its hierarchy and its administration.

Finally, affecting rich and poor, cleric and layman, soldier and civilian alike, was the crippling taxation that Nicephorus had increased to unprecedented levels to finance his endless warfare, now raging simultaneously on three fronts: against the Saracens in the East, the Russians in Bulgaria and Otto in south Italy. Of these three wars, the first was already virtually won while the other two were unnecessary and should never have been allowed to begin; and the average taxpayer saw no reason why he should finance a grossly inflated army, which he in any case cordially detested and which - while its demands for further
financial support grew ever more insistent - made no attempt to share its considerable spoils. To make matters worse, a series of disastrous harvests had sent the price of bread rocketing. On similar occasions in the past, previous Emperors had ordered a government subsidy; but Nicephorus showed no such concern, and was widely suspected of using the misfortunes of his subjects for the additional benefit of his beloved soldiers.

And so dissatisfaction grew; and, as it grew, so it was more and more openly expressed. The first signs of serious trouble came on Easter Sunday
967,
when a quarrel between the Emperor's Armenian guard and some Thracian sailors developed into a full-scale riot; there were scores of casualties, several of them fatal. That afternoon, as the usual Easter games were about to start in the Hippodrome, a rumour spread to the effect that the Emperor intended to mark his displeasure by ordering random killings among the assembled crowd. Now Nicephorus, we can be perfectly sure, had no such intention; in an interval between the races, however, he gave the signal for certain companies of armed guards to descend into the arena. His reasons are uncertain. Leo the Deacon suggests that he may have decided on this show of military strength as a salutary warning, an indication that no repetition of the morning's disturbances would be tolerated; but mock battles were common enough in games of this kind, and he may have ordered one on this occasion simply as an amusement for the spectators. The immediate reaction, in any event, was panic: the thousands that thronged the stands had but a single thought in mind — escape. Only after many had been crushed to death in the sudden dash for the exits, and many more trampled underfoot, was it noticed that the soldiers in the arena had made no move against anyone and that the Emperor was still sitting, calm and utterly impassive, in his box. Gradually peace was restored; but the people persisted in blaming Nicephorus for the whole affair and he became more unpopular than ever.