The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (19 page)

The Council met on
22
June
431
in the Church of the Theotokos — a significant dedication - at Ephesus; and Cyril, who had beggared his own diocese to find sufficient funds for the bribing of civil servants and ecclesiastics as necessary, carried all before him. With no apparent difficulty he assumed the presidency of the Council, and then summoned Nestorius to appear before it to answer the charges of heresy levelled against him. Not surprisingly, Nestorius demurred. He had travelled to Ephesus, he pointed out, as a delegate, not as a defendant; he would present himself at the church only when all the bishops who had signified that they would attend the Council had in fact arrived. But Cyril was not disposed to wait. He read out the correspondence that had passed between them - suitably edited, one suspects - after which the entire assembly cried anathema on the unfortunate Nestorius, who was thereupon dismissed from his episcopate and from all priestly communion. The number of delegates present by that time was
198;
but when Nestorius later commented that 'the Council was Cyril', he was surely not so very far wrong. He retired into private life; his troubles, however, were not yet over. In
435
the Emperor - who had by this time totally renounced Nestorianism - banished him, first to Petra in Arabia and later to a distant oasis in Libya or Upper Egypt, where he died.
1

Many years before - perhaps even while Galla Placidia and her children were still at Constantinople - Athenais had vowed that, if her daughter did in fact marry Valentinian and become Empress of the West, she herself would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in thanksgiving. The marriage duly took place in the summer of
437;
and in the following year she set out for the Holy Land. Her journey, however, first took her to Antioch, where her pagan upbringing stood her in better stead than her more recently adopted faith. Though the population of Antioch was by now predominantly Christian the city remained, more than any other in Asia Minor, infused with the old Hellenistic spirit; and the Empress's familiarity with the literary and cultural traditions of antiquity, combined with the purity and perfection of her Greek, made a far deeper impression than ever it had in Constantinople. The climax came with a magnificent ceremony in the local Senate House, in the course of which she delivered a brilliant extempore speech in praise of the city and its history, ending with a quotation from the
Odyssey:

1
Despite his disgrace, Ne
storius was to have a more lasting influence than he knew. Some of his followers wandered eastward to Persia and Mesopotamia, where they later founded a separate Nestorian Church. After periods of considerable prosperity, they eventually fled from Mongol oppression under Tamburlaine and sought refuge in the mountains of Kurdistan, where a small number of them survived into modern times.

I claim proud kinship with your race and blood.
1

Jerusalem, Roman but never Greek, was very different. There may well have been a few old men and women still alive whose fathers had remembered the visit of the Empress Helena,
111
years before; and Athenais clearly modelled herself on her predecessor. She remained in the city a whole year, visiting all the Holy Places as a humble pilgrim, attending the consecrations of churches, instituting new charities, opening convents and hospices. When at last she returned to Constantinople she brought with her the usual profusion of relics - in which, we are told, the Bishop of Jerusalem plied a profitable trade - including the bones of St Stephen and the chains with which St Peter had been fettered when imprisoned by King Herod.
2
Her husband welcomed her warmly, and for a time all went on as before. But not, alas, for long.

What precisely it was that caused Athenais's downfall we shall never know for sure; but the sixth-century historian John Malalas tells a story which, improbable as it sounds, is curious enough to be worth repeating here. One day, he relates, as the Emperor was on his way to church, a poor man handed him a Phrygian apple of prodigious size. So huge was this apple, and so impressed was Theodosius at the sight of it, that he ordered the man to be given
150
nomismata
and immediately sent it to Athenais. She, however, did not eat it herself but had it taken instead to Paulinus, Master of the Offices, who was confined by an injured foot to his house; and Paulinus, not knowing how the Empress had obtained it, dispatched it to the Palace as a gift from himself to Theodosius. The Emperor received it with some surprise. At last, thoroughly mystified and not a little suspicious, he summoned his wife and, concealing the apple, asked her what she had done with it.

Poor Athenais - had she only given a truthful answer, all might yet have been well; but at this critical moment she lost her head. 'I ate it,' she replied. White with rage, her husband produced the fatal fruit. By lying, he told her, she had revealed the truth of her relations with Paulinus, who would be executed at once. But now Athenais struck

1
Such a claim seldom fails to touch the hearts of its audience. We may compare General Eisenhower, addressing the crowd after receiving the Freedom of the City of London in
1945:
'I
've got just as much right to be down there hollering as you have -
I
'm a Londoner too'; or President Kennedy's
'Ich bin te
n Berliner
in
1963.

2
One of these she sent on to her daughter Eudoxia, who immediately built the Roman church now known as S. Pietro in Vincoli to receive them. There they were subsequently joined by similar chains said to have tethered the saint during his later captivity in Rome.

back. To execute him, she claimed, would be tantamount to an open accusation of adultery, which she absolutely denied. After such an insult she could in any case no longer remain under her husband's roof; she accordingly sought his permission to return to Jerusalem, where she proposed to end her days.

It has been suggested, by Professor Bury among others,
1
that the apple was in ancient times a symbol of chastity, and that this strange story may consequently be allegorical, signifying that Athenais had indeed surrendered her virtue to Paulinus. It may be so, and perhaps she had; but such an interpretation certainly does not accord with her character as we know it. The Master of the Offices was by all accounts a highly honourable man, the closest friend of her husband since the two had played together as children. Athenais, too, he had known since before her marriage, which he had actively encouraged and at which he acted as
paranymphos
or best man. On her deathbed, some twenty years later, the Empress swore once again that she was innocent; and if there is still any doubt, she must surely be given the benefit of it. A final point in her favour is that Paulinus was executed in
440,
whereas she does not seem to have left for Jerusalem till some three years later - a long time to remain in a city in which she believed herself dishonoured.

It looks, therefore, as if we shall have to consign the story of the Phrygian apple to legend and conclude that, in all probability, the fate of Paulinus - who was in fact first exiled to Caesarea in Cappadocia, being assassinated on the Emperor's orders a short while later - had no connection with the Empress's resolve to leave the capital for ever. A far likelier explanation is to be found in the relentless machinations of Pulcheria, who must have been infuriated by the vastly increased reputation for holiness acquired by her sister-in-law as a result of her visit to Jerusalem and who doubtless intrigued against her with still greater determination than before. But, whatever the reason, it seems clear that Athenais did somehow fall from her husband's favour - she could never otherwise have left him as she did - and that even her departure did not altogether save her from his vindictiveness; for within a few months of her arrival in Jerusalem a certain Saturninus, Count of the Imperial Bodyguard, followed her there and killed the two leading members of her entourage, one a priest and the other a deacon, whom she had brought with her from Constantinople. She took her revenge by having Saturninus murdered in his turn and (perhaps subconsciously) by her enthusiastic adoption of the monophysite heresy
2
- until, in her last

years, Pope Leo the Great himself finally succeeded in persuading her back into the orthodox fold. She lived on till
460,
sad, lonely and embittered, a pathetic shadow of the brilliant, talented girl who had swept the young Emperor off his feet and, fifteen years later, had so dazzled the citizens of Antioch. When at last she died, she was buried in the Church of St Stephen which she had founded - in Constantinople long forgotten and even in Jerusalem, one suspects, feared rather than loved.

We have now followed - sketchily but, in a book primarily concerned with the Byzantine Empire, sufficiently - the career of the young Western Emperor Valentinian III from his childhood in Ravenna and Constantinople to his coronation in Rome and, twelve years later, his marriage to the Princess Eudoxia. He had proved a weak and ineffectual figure, utterly dominated by his formidable mother Placidia, who had continued to govern in his name long after he had reached manhood - indeed, until her own death in
450;'
and he need no longer detain us here. As for his sister Honoria, she would not have gained so much as a mention in this book were it not for a single circumstance; but that circumstance must ensure for her at least a footnote in any account of her time. In the whole of history there can, after all, have been few princesses of any age or condition who would, of their own free will, have offered themselves in marriage to Attila the Hun.

Any self-respecting historian must try as best he can to tell his story in his own words. He may permit himself the occasional direct quotation from primary sources, if they add colour or flavour to his narrative; but he should, on the whole, steer clear of secondary ones, unless there are compelling reasons to the contrary. Such a moment now arises: for the Princess Honoria has provided Edward Gibbon with the inspiration for one of his most brilliant and characteristic paragraphs, which it would be unfair to the reader not to quote in full:

The sister of Valentinian was educated in the palace of Ravenna, and as her marriage might be productive of some danger to the state, she was raised, by the title of
Augusta,
above the hopes of the most presumptuous subject. But the

1
Her Mausoleum at Ravenna is the outstanding monument of the age. Of the three marble sarcophagi that stand beneath the glorious mosaics, that on the left contains all that remains of Constantius, her se
cond husband, and their son Vale
ntinian III; that on the right holds what there is of Honorius; while the central sarcophagus - the largest of all - is that of the Empress herself. In it her body is said to have sat, enthroned in robes of state, for eleven centuries, visible through a small peep-hole at the back; but in
1577,
so the story goes, some children thrust a lighted taper through the hole. There was a sudden flash, and within seconds everything - throne, robes and Empress - was a heap of ashes.

fair Honoria had no sooner attained the sixteenth year of her age than she detested the importunate greatness which must for ever exclude her from the comforts of honourable love; in the midst of vain and unsatisfactory pomp Honoria sighed, yielded to the impulse of nature, and threw herself into the arms of her chamberlain Eugenius. Her guilt and shame (such is the absurd language of imperious man) were soon betrayed by the appearances of pregnancy: but the disgrace of the royal family was published to the world by the imprudence of the Empress Placidia, who dismissed her daughter, after a strict and shameful confinement, to a remote exile at Constantinople. The unhappy princess passed twelve or fourteen years in the irksome society of the sisters of Theodosius and their chosen virgins, to whose
crown
Honoria could no longer aspire, and whose monastic assiduity of prayer, fasting and vigils she reluctantly imitated. Her impatience of long and hopeless celibacy urged her to embrace a strange and desperate resolution. The name of Attila was familiar and formidable at Constantinople, and his frequent embassies entertained a perpetual intercourse between his camp and the imperial palace. In the pursuit of love, or rather of revenge, the daughter of Placidia sacrificed every duty and every prejudice, and offered to deliver her person into the arms of a barbarian of whose language she was ignorant, whose figure was scarcely human, and whose religion and manners she abhorred. By the ministry of a faithful eunuch she transmitted to Attila a ring, the pledge of her affection, and earnestly conjured him to claim her as a lawful spouse to whom he had been secretly betrothed. These indecent advances were received, however, with coldness and disdain; and the king of the Huns continued to multiply the number of his wives till his love was awakened by the more forcible passions of ambition and avarice.

Attila, jointly with his brother Bleda, had succeeded to the throne of the Huns in
434.
Since
376,
when it had first smashed its way into Europe from the steppes of Central Asia, this most savage of all the barbarian tribes had caused the Empire surprisingly little trouble. Neither an invasion - possibly prompted
by Rufinus - of Armenia and Cap
padocia in
395
nor a brief incursion into Bulgaria by King Uldin thirteen years later had produced any lasting results, and to increase his sense of security still further Theodosius had started, in about
430,
to pay an annual subsidy - some might have called it a tribute - of
350
pounds of gold, the further to encourage his neighbours to keep the peace.

With the appearance of Attila, however - 'the scourge of God' as he was called - this relatively uneventful coexistence was to change. After over half a century's contact with the Romans, his people had become perhaps one degree less bestial than at their first arrival; but the vast majority still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked foods - though they would often soften raw meat by putting
it between their thighs and their horses' flanks as they rode. For clothing they favoured tunics made, rather surprisingly, from the skins of field-mice, crudely stitched together; these they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until they dropped off of their own accord. And, as they had always done, they still practically lived on their horses, eating, trading, holding their councils, even sleeping in the saddle. Attila himself was typical of his race: short, swarthy and snub-nosed, with tiny beady eyes set in a head too big for his body and a thin, straggling beard. He was not a great ruler, nor even a particularly able general; but so overmastering were the ambition and avarice with which Gibbon credits him - to say nothing of his pride, in both his person and his race, and his lust for power - that within the space of a few years he made himself feared throughout the length and breadth of Europe: more feared, perhaps, than any other single man - with the possible exception of Napoleon - before or since.

The details of his early campaigns are largely unrecorded; but within seven years of his succession he had built up a vast barbaric dominion of his own, stretching from the Balkans to the Caucasus and beyond. His first attacks on the Eastern Empire began in
441,
and for the next six years there was sporadic fighting in Pannonia and along the Danube; but it was not until
447
that he gave Theodosius and his ministers serious cause for alarm. By this time his brother Bleda had died - no contemporary evidence exists to support later allegations that Attila had had him murdered - and he was in sole command of a people estimated at several thousand. His army now advanced in two directions at once: southward into Thessaly as far as Thermopylae, and eastward to Constantinople. The Theodosian Walls had, it seemed, been built just in time: the Huns had not the patience, the skill nor the discipline required for protracted siege warfare and soon turned away in search of more accessible plunder. But they inflicted a crushing defeat on the Byzantine army at Gallipoli, withdrawing only after the Emperor had agreed to treble the annual amount of Hun-money payable - as well as to hand over vast sums of past arrears which Attila claimed (probably rightly) that he had never received.

From this time forward, embassies passed almost constantly between Attila's camp and the court of Theodosius. If the majority came from the Hunnish side this was because Attila, seeing one after another of his ambassadors return from Constantinople weighed down with rich presents, had discovered a most effective means of benefiting those whom he wished to help at no cost to himself. He believed that the Emperor was now terrified of him, and he was right: what little spirit Theodosius had once possessed had long since evaporated. His only policy now was one of craven appeasement, for which he was perfectly ready not only to exhaust his own treasury but to bleed his subjects white into the bargain. Had Athenais, or even Pulcheria, remained at his side, one is tempted to believe that they might have persuaded him to take a firmer line; but the former was far away in Jerusalem, and the latter had long since lost her brother's ear. The most powerful influence at the court was now that of a eunuch named Chrysaphus; and it was he who in
448
managed to suborn one of Attila's envoys, Edeco, and to involve him, in return for a rich reward, in a plot to assassinate the King of the Huns.

In pursuance of this conspiracy, a more than usually distinguished Byzantine embassy set out later in the same year. It was led by a senior officer of noble lineage (a point to which Attila always attached great significance) named Maximin and his friend Priscus - to neither of whom it was revealed that certain members of their retinue had secret orders from Chrysaphus to murder Attila in the course of their mission. In the event, this hardly mattered. The plot was at once confessed to Attila by Edeco - whose role from the outset may have been that of an
agent provocateur
-
and was dealt with by its intended victim with remarkable adroitness. Meanwhile the embassy, after a few initial embarrassments, was finally received with every show of cordiality by Attila himself.

Its significance to posterity, however, lies not in its more sinister aspect nor yet in its achievements - which were in any case minimal -but in the long and almost unbelievably detailed account of it left by Priscus. Thanks to him we have an unforgettable picture of the Hunnish court, as well as of its King - feasting, carousing, dispensing justice, entertaining the Roman emissaries with his tribesmen, moving alternately between towering, terrifying rages and quieter moods in which he shows his guests courtesy and even glimmerings of charm. They were surprised, too, by the simplicity of his tastes during the banquet that he gave in their honour:

While for the other barbarians and for us there were lavishly prepared dishes served on silver platters, for Attila there was only meat on a wooden plate .. . Gold and silver goblets were handed to the men at the feast, whereas his cup was of wood. His clothing was plain, and differed not at all from that of the rest, except that it was clean. Neither the sword that hung at his side nor the fastenings of his barbarian boots nor his horse's bridle was adorned, like those of the other Scythians, with gold or precious stones or anything else of value.
1

1
Trans. R. C. Blockle
y.

Priscus leaves us with the unmistakable impression that Attila, for all his brutishness, was in fact a remarkably astute diplomatist; and there is no telling how much longer he would have continued to drain away the wealth of the Eastern Empire had not Theodosius been killed, on
28
July
450,
by a fall from his horse while hunting. He and Athenais had produced no male heir, but the problem of the succession was solved by Pulcheria. Despite her vow of virginity, she was able to contract a nominal marriage to Marcian, a Thracian senator and ex-soldier, whom she promptly named Augustus and placed, with herself, on the throne - giving out (whether truthfully or not it is hard to say) that he had been nominated by Theodosius on his deathbed.

One of the first acts of the new Emperor was to refuse the King of the Huns his annual tribute. It was a courageous step to take, though possibly not quite so courageous as it seemed: Marcian was almost certainly aware that Attila was at that moment preparing a vast operation against the Western Empire, and doubtless gambled on his unwillingness to delay this by a punitive expedition to the East. Nevertheless, a gamble it was; and there must have been rejoicing in Constantinople when the news arrived that the Hunnish army had started upon its march into Italy and Gaul.

But rejoicing, by its very essence, does not last long. All too soon the exhilaration dies, the problems of daily life reassert themselves. So, as the danger from the Huns began to fade, Marcian found himself obliged to turn his attention to a new threat, internal rather than external, spiritual rather than material, but none the less insistent for that: the ever-deepening split in Byzantine society occasioned by the monophysite heresy.

It was rooted in the same old enigma: the precise relation of the Father and the Son within the Trinity. The story of the Nestorians has already been told, with its grim moral concerning the fate awaiting those who upheld the principle of the two distinct persons in Christ, the human and the divine. That error had been dealt with forcibly enough at Ephesus in
431;
since then, however, the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme, and in
448
an elderly archimandrite named Eutyches was accused of disseminating the equally subversive doctrine that the Incarnate Christ possessed but a single nature, and that that nature was divine. Found guilty, condemned and degraded, Eutyches at once appealed to Pope Leo I (the Great), to the Emperor Theodosius and to the monks of Constantinople; and in doing so he unleashed a storm of scarcely imaginable ferocity. For three years the Church was in uproar, with councils summoned and discredited, bishops unseated and restored; with intrigues and conspiracies, violence and vituperation, curses and anathemas thundering between Rome and Constantinople, Ephesus and Alexandria. At last, in October
451,
the fourth Ecumenical Council
1
was held in the Church of St Euphemia at Chalcedon to put an end to the chaos. Numbering as it did some five to six hundred bishops, whose views ranged across t
he whole breadth of the Christo
logical spectrum, it is astonishing that this Council should have reached any decisions at all; in fact, it achieved everything it set out to do and more.
2
Eutyches, who had been rehabilitated and reinstated in
449,
was once again condemned; and a new statement of faith was drawn up, known as the Chalcedonian Definition, according to which the doctrines of Nestorius and Eutyches were alike repudiated. Christ was established as the possessor of one person with two natures, united 'unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly and inseparably': perfect God and perfect man.