The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (9 page)

the Prime Miracle. Seated on his throne, Theophilus next acknowledged the plaudits of the Greens and the Blues and received a further present from the citizenry in the shape of a pair of golden armlets; he then rode on past the Baths of Zeuxippus to the Hippodrome, whence he finally entered the Palace and was lost to view. On the day following he held an investiture — at which honours were, conferred on all those who had distinguished themselves in battle - before taking his seat in the imperial box and giving the signal for the start of the games.

Alas, the festivities were premature. In the autumn of the same year the imperial army sustained a crushing defeat, and Theophilus was obliged to write Mamun two letters - the first having been rejected on the grounds that he had begun it with his own name rather than with that of its addressee — offering 100,000 gold dinars and 7,000 prisoners in return for the restitution of a number of captured fortresses and an agreement to a five-year peace. Even after the required redrafting, however, the offer was rejected; and a third overture early the next year, following the fall to the Saracens of the key stronghold of Lulon -which commanded the northern approach to the Cilician Gates - met with no greater success, the Caliph making clear that he would never agree to peace until Emperor and Empire alike forswore Christianity for Islam. Mamun's death on campaign in August 833 afforded a few years' respite, while his brother and successor Mutasim overcame the usual difficulties in confirming and consolidating his authority; but in 837 hostilities flared up again. Once more Theophilus, who had done much in the interim to strengthen his army, started off" well; expeditions into Mesopotamia and western Armenia were successful enough - at least in his eyes - to justify another triumph, and in the games that followed he even went so far as to enter the lists himself, driving a white chariot in the uniform of the Blues and winning - to nobody's surprise -by a comfortable margin, while the crowd hailed his victory with cries of
'Welcome, Champion Incomparable!'

Once again he had celebrated too soon. In April 838 Mutasim rode out of his palace at Samarra at the head of an army estimated by one of our most reliable sources, Michael the Syrian, at 50,000, with an equal number of camels and 20,000 mules. On his banner was inscribed the single word
amorium
- home of the Emperor's family and by now the second city of the Empire — which he made no secret of his intention of reducing to rubble. A week or two later, probably as soon as he had heard the news of the Caliph's departure, Theophilus set out from

Constantinople determined to block his path; his army met one wing of the Saracen host at Dazimon, the modern Tokat. At first all went well; then, suddenly, the sky darkened and the rain began to fall in torrents. At this point the Emperor saw that his opposite wing was in difficulties and led 2,000 men round behind his centre to reinforce it; unfortunately he omitted to tell his junior commanders what he was doing, and his unexpected disappearance immediately gave rise to a rumour that he had been killed. Panic broke out, followed — as always - by flight; and when the rain stopped and the light returned Theophilus realized that he and his men were surrounded. Somehow — largely because the bowstrings of the enemy archers had been rendered useless by the rain — they fought their way out, though with frightful casualties; but the battle was lost, the surviving soldiers were dispersed in all directions and the Caliph was already marching on Ancyra (Ankara), which surrendered a few days later without a struggle.

From the moment that Mutasim drew up his triumphant army before Amorium, however, it seemed that the capture of that huge and mightily-walled city was going to be a very differen
t matter; and so, doubtl
ess, it would have been had there not been a weak section of the bastion which, despite the Emperor's express orders that it should be properly strengthened, had been only roughly filled in with rubble and the surface hurriedly made good. This vulnerable spot was revealed to the besiegers by a converted Muslim resident; the Caliph directed all his available siege-engines against it and within a few days a breach was made. Even then the garrison fought on courageously; but at last its commander sent out three of his officers with the local bishop, offering to deliver up the city in return for the promise of safe conduct to all who wished to leave. Mutasim refused, insisting on unconditional surrender; but then one of the officers, Boiditzes by name, took an Arab general aside and promised his cooperation. What he actually did is uncertain: perhaps he stood down his soldiers at that particular point, or ordered them to hold their fire until he gave the order. At all events the Saracens were able to pour unchecked into the breach. Amorium was theirs.

Many of the inhabitants took refuge in a large church, in which they were promptly burnt alive by the conquerors; others, taken captive and led off into slavery, were slaughtered when the army's water supplies threatened to run low, or were left to die of thirst in the desert. Only forty-two survived the journey back to Samarra; these, after seven years'
captivity during which they had steadfastly refused to renounce their religion, were finally offered the choice: conversion or death. All of them chose without hesitation to die, and on 6 March 845 were decapitated on the banks of the Tigris - to go down in the history of the Greek Orthodox Church as the Forty-Two Martyrs of Amorium.
1

The news of the destruction of the city - for Caliph Mutasim was as good as his word — was received with horror in Constantinople, where the disaster was seen not only as a damaging blow to the very heart of the Empire but also as a personal affront to the Emperor and his line. Theophilus himself, now seriously alarmed by the growing power of Islam, immediately sent an impassioned appeal for aid to the Emperor Lewis, proposing a joint offensive. His original idea was, so far as we can gather, for the Eastern Empire to launch a major attack on Crete while the Western moved simultaneously against Sicily and south Italy; but there may well have been a still more ambitious plan - a combined attack on Saracen North Africa and even Egypt. It was also agreed that the alliance between the two Empires should be sealed by the marriage of one of the daughters of Theophilus to Lewis's grandson, the future Lewis II.

The Byzantine envoys were warmly received at the imperial court at Ingelheim in June 839, and the talks which were then initiated continued spasmodically for another four years, despite the deaths of both Emperors during that time. Had those talks proved fruitful, the age of the Crusades might have been brought forward by some two and a half centuries; but they came to nothing, and a similar appeal to Venice — one of the first occasions on which we find the young republic being addressed respectfully as an independent state - proved equally abortive. In the event, the Caliph made no immediate attempt to follow up his victory until 842, when a huge fleet sailed against Constantinople from the Syrian ports. Victim of a sudden storm, all but seven of the 400
dromonds
1
were smashed to pieces. But Mutasim never heard of this
-1
catastrophe. Already on 5 January he had died in Samarra; and just fifteen days later Theophilus followed him to the grave.

1 There is an old tradition that their headless bodies, when flung into the river, all obstinately refused to sink. Only the corpse of the traitor Boidirzes - who, despite having become a Muslim, had shared their fate - went plummeting to the bottom.

2
The
dromond
was the smallest type of Byzantine warship, designed for lightness and speed. It carried a crew of some twenty rowers at a single bank of oars, and was roofed over to protect them from enemy missiles.

With his known admiration for Arabic art and learning, it is hardly-surprising that Theophilus should have shared the iconoclast convictions of his immediate predecessors; some writers, indeed, have accused him of fanaticism. In fact, his reputation in this regard rests on only a few known instances of ill-treatment, all of them in one way or another special cases. Thus Lazarus, the leading icon-painter of the day, was eventually - after repeated warnings - scourged and branded on the palms of his hands with red-hot nails; but after his release (at the intercession of the Empress) he is known to have completed at least two more important commissions, including a new gigantic figure of Christ to replace the one removed by Leo V from the Chalke, so his injuries cannot have been too severe.

Lazarus was probably singled out for such punishment because of his prominence in the icon-loving community and his open defiance of the imperial decree; in the circumstances, the Emperor had little choice but to make an example of him. Similar considerations explain his actions in another case, still more fully documented: that of two brothers from Palestine, the writer Theodore and the hymnographer Theophanes, who had together assumed the mantle of Theodore of the Studium, after the latter's death in 826, as principal champions of the iconodules. According to their own account, they were summoned to Constantinople, kept for a week in prison and then brought before the Emperor. When he asked them why they had entered the Empire in the first place, they refused to answer, whereupon they were beaten severely about the head. On the next day they were flogged, but still refused to renounce their views. Four days later still, Theophilus offered them their last chance: if they would consent to take communion just once with the iconoclasts, they would hear no more of the matter. But they only shook their heads. And so, by the imperial command, they were laid across a bench while an abusive lampoon was tattooed across their faces. It was not, Theophilus admitted, a very good lampoon; but it was good enough for them. A free translation, thoughtfully provided by Professor Bury
1
— complete with its majestic mixed metaphor in the second line — confirms the Emperor's opinion:

In that fair town whose sacred streets were trod Once by the pure feet of the Word of God —

1 'Some admiration,' observes the Professor, 'is due to the dexterity and delicacy of touch of the tormentor who succeeded in branding twelve iambic lines on a human face.'

The city all men's hearts desire to see -These evil vessels of perversity Were driven forth to this our Qty where, Persisting in their wicked, lawless ways, They are condemned and, branded in the face, As scoundrels, hunted to their native place.

The tenor of the Emperor's questions - as well as that of this deplorable doggerel - suggests that not the least of the two brothers' offences was the fact that they were foreign immigrants who had, in Theophilus's eyes, entered the Empire deliberately to stir up trouble. They were not, however, returned to Palestine as the last line claims, but were imprisoned in the small Bithynian town of Apamea. Here Theodore died; his brother survived to become, in happier times, Bishop of Nicaea.

This unedifying story demonstrates clearly enough the cruelty and brutality of which Theophilus was capable when his authority was openly defied; there can be little doubt, on the other hand, that his motives on such occasions were more political than religious. Where he drew the line was at the public profession of the cult of icons in Constantinople. Elsewhere in the Empire, or within the privacy of their own homes in the capital, his subjects might do as they pleased. Even in the Imperial Palace, although he must have been perfectly well aware -for all their transparent subterfuges - that both his pious Paphlagonian wife Theodora and her mother Theoktiste were enthusiastic iconodules, he made no serious attempt to stop them.

Perhaps he himself subconsciously understood that the forces of iconoclasm were almost spent. The second period of its enforcement had after all been but a pale reflection of the first. Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus had changed the face of the Empire, subordinating all other issues to the single, simple belief that dictated and dominated their lives; Leo the Armenian, Michael and Theophilus shared their views, but possessed little of their inward fire. The times, too, were changing. The mystical, metaphysical attitude to religion that had originally given birth to iconoclasm was becoming less fashionable every day. Of the eastern lands in which it had first taken root, some had already been lost to the Saracens; and the populations of those that remained, beleaguered and nervous, had developed an instinctive mistrust of a doctrine that bore such obvious affinities with those of Islam. There was a new humanism in the air, a revived awareness of the
old classical spirit that stood for reason and clarity, and had no truck with the tortuous, introspective spiritualizings of the Oriental mind. At the same time a naturally artistic people, so long starved of visual beauty, were beginning to crave the old, familiar images that spoke to them of safer and more confident days. And when, on 20 January 842, the Emperor Theophilus died of dysentery at thirty-eight, the age of iconoclasm died with him.

4

The Images Restored

[842-56]

All worship whatsoever must proceed by symbols, by idols: we may say, all idolatry is comparative, and the worst idolatry is only more idolatrous.

Thomas Carlyle,
Heroes and Hero-Worship,
IV

The story is told of how, one day during Theophilus's reign, his wife Theodora was suddenly surprised by Denderis, the court jester, in the act of kissing certain sacred images that she had concealed in her bedchamber. Hiding her confusion as best she could, she told him that she had merely been playing with a few dolls that she had preserved from her childhood. It seems unlikely that Denderis believed her; at all events he reported the conversation to the Emperor, who flew into a towering rage and furiously accused her of idolatry. This time Theodora had another explanation: there were no dolls - Denderis had been deceived by the reflections in a mirror of herself and some of her ladies. Theophilus seems to have accepted the story - mirrors were rarities in the ninth century, and it might then have sounded a litde less far-fetched than it does today - but doubts clearly lingered in his mind, for some time later he asked the jester whether he had noticed any repetition of his wife's strange behaviour. 'Hush,' replied Denderis, putting one hand to his lips and using the other to give himself a resounding slap on the behind, 'hush, Emperor - not a word about the dolls!'