The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (22 page)

they had proved a good deal more objectionable than the Germans had ever been. The preferential treatment that they had received from Leo had gone to their heads: they were arrogant and noisy, with a regrettable propensity for violence. Inevitably, much of the hostility that they aroused now became focused on their most distinguished representative, the Emperor himself - who also had to face the implacable hatred of two powerful enemies within his own household: Verina the Empress Mother, and her brother
Basileus
.

The objectives of these two were not identical:
Basileus
, who had been understandably maintaining a low profile since the Carthaginian expedition eight years before, had emerged from his retirement on Leo's death still determined to secure the diadem for himself; the Empress, on the other hand, wanted it for her recently acquired lover Patricius, Master of the Offices at the palace.
1
Both, however, were united in their primary object - to get rid of Zeno; and with the aid of an Isaurian general, Illus - who had suddenly turned, for reasons unexplained, against his imperial benefactor - they managed to recruit a number of powerful adherents to their cause. In November
475,
as the Emperor was presiding over the games in the Hippodrome, he received an urgent message from his mother-in-law: army, Senate and people were united against him, he must flee the city at once. The thought of resistance, or that Verina's words might have been largely bluff, never seems to have occurred to him. That very night he slipped away from Constantinople with his wife and mother, to seek refuge among the mountains of his native Isauria.

With Zeno out of the way, and the cause of Patricius espoused only by Verina,
Basileus
was proclaimed Emperor - remarkable testimony to the power of human ambition. He began by ordering - or at any rate permitting - a widespread slaughter of Isaurians in the capital; but if the purpose of thus eliminating the enemy faction was to strengthen his own hold on the throne, it failed.
Basileus
did not last long. He lost the sympathy of his sister by having her lover assassinated; he antagonized his subjects by vicious taxation; and he incurred the lasting enmity of the Church, first by his openly-expressed monophysite opinions and then by his ham-fisted attempts to impose them throughout the Empire. In these he was encouraged by the former monophysite Bishop of Alexandria, the aptly named Timothy the Weasel, who had been expelled from his see after the Council of Chalcedon and whom
Basileus
now saw fit to restore. At the insistence of this poisonous cleric, he not only abrogated the decrees of Chalcedon but even tried to abolish the

1
And no relation, it need hardly be said, to the son of Aspar.

Patriarchate of Constantinople, causing Patriarch Acacius to drape the high altar of St Sophia in black and to put all his priests into mourning; meanwhile Daniel, the famous stylite of the city,
1
actually descended from his pillar for the first time in fifteen years, haranguing the people and terrifying
Basileus
into the withdrawal of his edict. The heavens, too, showed themselves against the usurper: there could be no other explanation for the appalling fire of
476
which, beginning in the bazaar of the bronze-smiths, spread to the
Basilike,
the public library founded by Julian which was said to contain
120,000
books - including the intestine of a serpent,
120
feet long, on which were inscribed the entire
Iliad
and
Odyssey
in golden characters. Another tragic loss was the Palace of Lausus with its celebrated collection of antique sculpture, including the Hera of Samos, the Athena of Lindos and the Aphrodite of Cnidus. After all this it came as no great surprise when lllus, disgusted with the ruler whom he had helped to put on the throne, turned his coat again, joined Zeno in his mountain retreat and began to plan his restoration.

The person most directly responsible for the downfall of
Basileus
was, however, neither Zeno nor Illus but his own nephew Harmatius. This ridiculous young man, well-known throughout Constantinople as a dandy and a fop, was promoted by his uncle - despite the flagrant affair that he was carrying on with
Basileus's own wife, his aunt Zeno
nis - to the rank of
magister militum,
an appointment which so delighted him that he took to parading around the Hippodrome dressed as Achilles. Sent with an army against Zeno and Illus, he was invited by them to negotiate and was easily persuaded - by the promise of the Praetorian Prefecture for himself and the rank of Caesar for his son - to declare himself in their favour. Thus, in July
477,
Zeno returned to his capital unopposed. The would-be Augustus - who had, for the second time, sought sanctuary in St Sophia - was prevailed upon to surrender, on the undertaking that his blood would not be shed; and the real Emperor, true to his word, exiled him with his family to the wilds of Cappadocia where, the following winter, cold and hunger did for the lot of them.

After twenty months of exile, Zeno could at last turn his mind again to affairs of state. There had been sev
eral developments during his ab
sence

1
Daniel the Stylite had visited St Simeon on his column near Antioch, and on Simeon's death had determined to follow his example. After some time on a fairly modest pillar he moved to a magnificent double column erected for him by the Emperor Leo himself, crossing straight from one to the other on a makeshift bridge of planks. He died on
11
December
493,
having remained aloft for a total of thirty-three years and three months. The author of his life claims that on this, his only venture down to ground level, he managed to persuade
Basileus
of the error of his ways and obtained from him a formal recantation in St Sophia; but this sounds suspiciously like wishful thinking.

that demanded his attention - among them, the final collapse of the Roman Empire of the West.

For seventeen years after the deaths of Aetius and Valentinian, the West had been dominated by the Suevian Count Ricimer,
1
yet another of those barbarian kingmakers so characteristic of the time. He had brought on to the scene a succession of no less than five puppet Emperors. One of these, Avitus, he had forced to abdicate (but allowed to become Bishop of Piacenza) and two, Marjorian and Anthemius, he had had murdered. Two only had kept their thrones: Libius Severus and Olybrius, the latter having died of dropsy in October
472,
two months after Ricimer himself. After a four-month interregnum Ricimer's son and would-be successor Gundobad had raised up yet another nonentity, Glycerius; but in Constantinople Leo I had refused to approve him, appointing instead the husband of his wife's niece, one Julius Nepos. Landing in Italy early in
474,
Nepos overthrew his rival with scarcely a struggle and was shortly afterwards proclaimed at Rome. Perhaps, men thought, the age of chaos was over. Ricimer was dead, Gundobad and Glycerius discredited; Julius Nepos had the blessing of the Emperor in Constantinople - by this time Zeno had succeeded Leo, but his policy towards the West was unchanged
-
and might well, with help from the East, re-establish Roman supremacy over the barbarian adventurers.

But such hopes were all too quickly dashed. In August
475
Orestes, commander-in-chief of the army, rose in revolt against the new Emperor. He had had a curious career. Born in Pannonia, he had found his way while still a young man to the court of Attila, where he had been employed by the King of the Huns as his personal secretary and had played an important part in frustrating the murder plot connected with the embassy of Priscus. After Attila's death he had entered the imperial service, and had headed the household troops under the short-lived Emperor Anthemius; next, on Nepos's accession and his own promotion to the supreme command, he had been ordered to Gaul, there to arrange for the transfer of Auvergne, which had been ceded by the Senate to the Visigothic King Euric. Instead of obeying, however, Orestes took up arms against his sovereign and, with his army behind him, marched on Rome.

In these circumstances, Julius Nepos had no alternative but flight,

1
The Sue
vians were one of the several Germanic tribes that had been forced to flee their homeland

-
for them, the valley of the Elbe - before the advancing Huns. The majority had by this time settled in Spain and Portugal.

first to Ravenna and then, as Orestes continued in his pursuit, across the Adriatic to Salona - where, presumably, he must have had a somewhat embarrassing encounter with his predecessor Glycerius and where, before that fateful year was over, he was to receive the news that Zeno, his co-Emperor, had almost simultaneously been obliged to seek refuge from his enemies. No help, clearly, was to be expected from the East. Nepos resigned himself to the inevitable and settled down to wait.

Orestes, meanwhile, had returned to Rome, where on
31
October he had proclaimed as Emperor his son Romulus, nicknamed - though perhaps only later - with the contemptuous diminutive Augustulus. The date of his birth is unknown, but he was still little more than a child and his father clearly intended to keep the reins of power firmly in his own hands. So, for the best part of a year, he did; but then the army turned against him, just as he had turned it against Julius Nepos. For a century or more it had been composed largely of barbarian mercenaries; and since the death of Attila the fellow-tribesmen of those mercenaries had been pouring across the imperial frontiers, unchecked and uncontrolled, in ever-increasing numbers. They now sought in their turn what barbarians within the Empire had always sought, and what many of them had found - a country of their own to dwell in; and they demanded of Orestes one-third of the land of Italy, with every Roman land-owner making over that proportion of his estate to a Germanic immigrant.

The proposal was perhaps less outrageous than it sounds; in
418
Constantius III had willingly transferred two-thirds of south-western Gaul to the Visigoths. That donation, however, had been the voluntary grant of a remote corner of the Empire to protect the rest of the continent; this, by contrast, was a demand at sword-point for its very heartland. Orestes must have believed that it would be open to negotiation; indignantly, he refused. But he had misjudged the temper of his men. Their answer was immediate mutiny, under the leadership of Orestes's own standard-bearer, a Scyrian named Odoacer.
1
On
23
August
476
he was raised upon the soldiers' shields, and the fight was on. Orestes fled first to Ticinum (the modern Pavia) where he took refuge with its saintly bishop Epiphanius. A few days later, after Odoacer had stormed and sacked the city, he slipped away to Placentia (Piacenza). This time there was no escape. The mutineers caught up with him and killed him.

Few observers at that moment would have given much for the life

1
Or Odovacar. He was the son of Edeco, who may or may not have been the same as that envoy of Attila who makes a brief appearance in Chapter
7.
The Scyrians were another Germanic tribe, of minimal importance in this story.

of poor Romulus Augustulus, lonely and frightened in the palace of Ravenna. But when Odoacer reached the city and summoned the miserable boy into his presence, his heart was softened. Romulus was very young, very pathetic and, by all accounts, quite outstandingly good-looking. Instead of putting him to the sword, the barbarian simply ordered him to abdicate, provided him with a generous pension and sent him off to live in peaceful obscurity with relatives in Campania. Then, as soon as he heard that Zeno had been reinstated - for he had never recognized
Basileus
- he sent ambassadors to Constantinople, to inform him of the new dispensation and to hand over the imperial insignia of the West as a sign that he, Odoacer, made no claim to sovereignty for himself. All he asked was the title of Patrician, in which rank he proposed to take over the administration of Italy in the Emperor's name.

The abdication of Romulus Augustulus on
4
September
476
is generally accepted as marking the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Historians, however, have gone to considerable lengths to persuade us that this is not so. The Empire, they point out, was one and indivisible; whether it was ruled at any given moment by a single Augustus, or two, or even three or four, was purely a matter of administrative convenience. Besides, they continue, Odoacer was always at pains to emphasize the Emperor's continued sovereignty over Italy. Here was simply a return to the days when the Empire had been governed by a sole ruler, just as it had been by Constantius II, and later by Julian.

All this is perfectly true; and it is also undeniable that most people in Italy at the time, watching the young ex-Emperor settle himself into his comfortable Campanian villa, would have been astounded to learn that they were living through one of the great watersheds of European history. For nearly a century now they had grown used to seeing barbarian generals at the seat of power. There had been Arbogast the Frank, then Stilicho the Vandal, then Aetius - who, though a Roman, was almost certainly of Germanic origin on his father's side - then Ricimer the Suevian. Was the Scyrian Odoacer, they might have asked, so very different from these?