The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (35 page)

Then, in
551,
Theodis's second successor, King Agila, found himself faced with two simultaneous rebellions: one by the Romans of Cordova and one, larger and far more serious, by his own kinsman, Athanagild. He fought back with courage and determination, and it was not long before Athanagild appealed to the Emperor for help.
1
Here was precisely the opportunity Justinian had been waiting for. Despite the exigences of the Italian campaign and his chronic shortage of manpower, he ordered that a small force - perhaps one or two thousand at the most - should be detached from Narses's army and sent under Liberius to Spain for the support of Athanagild and the protection of the Roman insurgents. Landing on the south-east coast, they met with little resistance: the Visigothic army was already hopelessly divided between those who were loyal to Agila and those who had thrown in their lot with the rebellion. Before long Liberius effectively controlled the whole area south of a line drawn from Valencia to Cadiz, including Cordova. In
555
Agila was murdered by his own troops and Athanagild assumed the throne without opposition.

Had the new King agreed to rule as an imperial vassal, all would have been well; such, however, had never been his intention and he soon made it clear to Liberius that he expected him and his army to withdraw as soon as they conveniently could. The old man - who was clearly every bit as good a diplomat as he was a general - agreed in principle, but gradually persuaded Athanagild to negotiate; and finally an agreement was reached between them according to which the Empire kept much of the territory it had conquered. But its soldiers were few, and its lines of communication dangerously long; and Justinian was obliged to acknowledge that a good seven-eighths of the peninsula lay beyond his power. On the other hand, he retained the Balearic Islands which, together with Corsica and Sardinia (reconquered respectively by Belisarius and Narses) gave him a firm base in the western Mediterranean, and he could boast that the Empire now once again extended from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. The expedition may not have been a complete success; but it was certainly not a failure.

1 The Visigoths, like almost all the barbarian tribes, were devout Arians; according to Bishop Isidore of Seville, however, Athanagild was secretly a Catholic - in other words, an orthodox Christian. If he is right, Justinian would doubtless have been even more eager to go to his assistance.

When the army of Narses drove the Goths out of Rome for the last time, Pope Vigilius was not present to preside over the services of thanksgiving. He was still in Constantinople, ever more inextricably enmeshed in the dispute over the Three Chapters. The hostility aroused by his
Judicature
had compelled him to revoke the offending document in
5
50;
and though in August of that year he had secretly sworn to Justinian a written oath that he would continue to use all his influence on his behalf, his efforts to regain the control - and, more difficult still, the respect - of the Western Churches had inevitably led him further and further away from the Emperor's own position. Relations between the two became still more strained the following year, when Justinian published a second edict, in the form of a long treatise in which he set forth - as if he himself were a one-man Ecumenical Council - his own interpretation of the basic tenets of Christianity, ending up with yet another violent condemnation of the Chapters. Prompted, no doubt, by many of the Western churchmen in the city, Vigilius protested that the edict went against the principles of Chalcedon and called upon the Emperor to withdraw it. Justinian, predictably, refused; whereupon the Pope summoned a meeting in his palace of all the bishops from both East and West who were present in the city. This assembly pronounced unanimously against the edict, solemnly forbidding any cleric to say mass in any church in which it was exhibited. When, a few days later, two prelates ignored this decree they were immediately excommunicated - as was (for the third time) the Patriarch himself.

On hearing the news, Justinian flew into a towering fury; and the Pope, suspecting that he was no longer safe from arrest, sought refuge in the Church of St Peter and St Paul, which the Emperor had recently built next to the Palace of Hormisdas.
1
Scarcely had he reached it, however, when there arrived the Praetor of the People, who commanded the city police, with a company of the imperial guard. According to a party of Italian churchmen, who were eye-witnesses of what took place and who subsequently described it in detail to the Frankish ambassadors,
2
they burst into the church with swords drawn and bows ready-strung and made straight for the Pope. He, seeing them, made a dash for the high altar; meanwhile the various priests and deacons surrounding him

remonstrated with the Praetor, and a scuffle ensued during which several of them were injured, though not seriously. The soldiers then seized hold of the Pope himself, who was by this time clinging tightly to the columns supporting the altar, and tried to drag him - some by the legs, some by the hair and others by the beard - forcibly away. But the more they pulled, the tighter he clung - until at last the columns themselves came loose and the altar crashed to the ground, narrowly missing his head.

By this time a considerable crowd, attracted by the commotion, had begun to protest vehemently against such treatment being accorded to the Vicar of Christ; the soldiers, too, were manifestly unhappy, and the Praetor wisely decided to withdraw, leaving a triumphant though badly shaken Vigilius to survey the damage. The next day there arrived a high-powered delegation, led by Belisarius, to express the Emperor's regrets for what had occurred and to give the Pope a formal assurance that he could return to his residence in the capital without fear of violence or apprehension.

The Pope returned at once, but soon found that he was being kept under so close a surveillance as to amount to something approaching house arrest. He realized, too, that if he were to break the present deadlock and maintain the prestige that he had striven so hard to recover among the Western Churches, he must once again take decisive action. Two nights before Christmas, in the late evening of
23
December
551,
he squeezed his considerable bulk through a small window of the palace and took a boat across the Bosphorus to Chalcedon, where he made straight for the Church of St Euphemia. It was a clever move, and also a symbolic one in that he was deliberately associating himself with the scene of the Great Council of
451,
distancing himself from the Emperor who was questioning its authority and taking refuge from him in the very building in which its sessions had been held exactly a century before. Once again a delegation under Belisarius came to plead with him, but this time he stood firm; and when a detachment of soldiers called a few days later they were content to arrest some of his priests, but made no attempt to lay hands on the Pope himself. Vigilius meanwhile composed a long letter to Justinian known as his
Encycl
ica,
in which he answered accusations made by the Emperor by giving his own account of the controversy as he saw it and once again proposing negotiations. In a less conciliatory mood, he also published his sentences of excommunication on the Patriarch and the two bishops who had incurred his wrath the previous August.

Negotiations were resumed in the spring, and in June Justinian decided on a major tactical concession: the Patriarch and other excommunicated bishops were dispatched to St Euphemia to apologize and humble themselves before Vigilius, after which the Pope returned to his palace. It was also agreed to annul all recent statements on both sides covering the Three Chapters, including the Emperor's edict. To the papal supporters it must have seemed like victory: if recent statements were annulled it was hardly likely that any more would be made, and with any luck the whole issue might now be allowed to fade back into the obscurity it deserved. But Justinian was not yet beaten. He now decreed a new Ecumenical Council to pronounce upon the matter once and for all, and invited Vigilius to preside.

In theory an Ecumenical Council of the Church was a convocation of bishops from every corner of Christendom. When all were gathered together it was believed that the Holy Spirit would descend on them, giving a sort of infallibility to their pronouncements. Their judgement was supreme, their decisions final. In practice, however, attendance was inevitably selective. If therefore the Church was split on any given issue, the outcome of the Council's deliberations would depend less on divine intervention than on the number of bishops from each side able to attend; and both Emperor and Pope knew full well that bishops were considerably thicker on the ground in the East than they were in the West, and that - particularly if the meetings were held in Constantinople - the Easterners would thus command a substantial majority. Vigilius accordingly suggested that the question should be put to a small committee composed of an equal number of representatives from both East and West, but Justinian refused; and after various other possibilities had been put forward and similarly rejected the Pope decided that his only chance lay in boycotting the assembly altogether. In consequence, when the Fifth Ecumenical Council eventually met in St Sophia on
5
May
553,
under the presidency of Eutychius, Mennas's successor as Patriarch - of the
168
bishops present only eleven were from the West, and nine of these were African. Justinian too had elected to stay away since, he explained, he did not wish to influence the assembly; but his letter to the delegates, read aloud at the opening session, reminded them that they had already anathematized the Three Chapters. No one present could have had any doubt as to what was expected of him.

For over a week the deliberations continued; then, on
14
May, after repeated invitations to attend, the Pope produced what he described as a
Constitutum,
signed by himself and nineteen other Western churchmen. It was to some degree a compromise, in that it allowed that there were indeed certain grave errors in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia; but, it pointed out, the other two writers accused had been pronounced 'orthodox fathers' at Chalcedon. In any case, it was not proper to anathematize the dead. The present agitation over the Three Chapters was therefore unfounded and unnecessary, and itself to be condemned. Vigilius concluded by forbidding - 'by the authority of the Apostolic See, over which by the Grace of God we preside' - any ecclesiastic to venture any further opinion on the matter.

It was not till
25
May that the Pope formally sent a copy of his paper to the Palace. He cannot have expected it to be well received; neither, however, had he reckoned with the changed situation in Italy. Totila was dead; the Goths were defeated; no longer was it necessary to woo the Roman citizens in Italy for their support. Justinian had had more than enough of Vigilius, and now at last he could afford to treat him as he deserved. He made no reply to the
Constitutum;
instead, he sent one of his secretaries to the Council with a packet containing three documents. The first was the text of the Pope's secret declaration of June
547,
anathematizing the Three Chapters; the second was his written oath of August
5 50,
swearing to do everything in his power to bring about their condemnation; and the third was a decree that his name should be forthwith struck from the diptychs. This was tantamount to a sentence of excommunication on the Pope himself - though Justinian stressed that in repudiating Vigilius personally he was not severing communion with Rome.
1
At its seventh session on
26
May the Council formally endorsed the Emperor's decree and condemned the Pope in its turn, 'until he should repent his errors'; and at its eighth and last, on
2
June, echoing the Emperor's second edict almost verbatim, it anathematized a whole series of heretics including Theodore and Theodoret. (Ibas escaped, on the grounds that the offending letter attributed to him had in fact been written by someone else.)

For Vigilius, it was the end of the road. Banished to an island in the Marmara, he was told that until he accepted the findings of the Council he would never be permitted to return to Rome. Not for another six months - by which time he was suffering agonies from kidney-stones -did he capitulate; but when at last he did so his surrender was absolute. In a letter to the Patriarch of
8
December he admitted all his previous errors, and two months later - almost certainly at Justinian's insistence -

1
Non sedem sed se
dentem,
'not the scat but the sitter'.

he addressed to the Western Churches a second
Constitutum
in which he formally condemned the Three Chapters and all who dared uphold them; as for himself, 'whatever is brought forward or anywhere discovered in my name in their defence is hereby nullified'. He could not say more. By now too ill to travel, he remained another year in Constantinople and only then, during a brief respite from the pain, started for home. But the effort was too great. On the way, his condition suddenly grew worse. He was obliged to interrupt his journey at Syracuse; and there, broken alike in body and spirit, he died.

It is an almost universal characteristic among autocrats that they cling compulsively to power, to the detriment alike of their subjects and their reputation. If death had come to Justinian at the same time as it came to Pope Vigilius, he would have been genuinely mourned. By the re-conquest of Italy he had restored to his Empire its former frontiers and had made the Mediterranean once again a Roman lake; by the Council of Constantinople he had brought at least a semblance of unity to the Christian Church. His work was done, all his dominions at peace. He was seventy-three years old, his beloved Theodora was dead and it was time for him to follow her to the grave. But death did not come; indeed, it delayed its coming for another ten years. And the Empire suffered.

All through that last, unhappy decade of his life Justinian persistently refused to delegate his authority, while it became clearer and clearer to those around him that he no longer possessed either the ability or the appetite to wield it properly himself. 'The old man no longer cared for anything,' wrote a contemporary, 'his spirit was already in heaven.' Money - always a problem - was shorter than ever; but whereas in the old days the Emperor would have taken steps himself to find at least part of what he needed, now he left it to his ministers to do the best they could. The defence of the frontier had always been one of his primary concerns: he had raised literally hundreds of walls and ramparts, of castles and strongholds, from the Euphrates to the Guadalquivir. But by
5 5 5
he had allowed the imperial army, which had once numbered
645,000
men, to shrink to a mere
150,000,
while the great frontier fortresses stood desolate and abandoned. War, money, defence, even conquest - all these things had begun to bore him. Nowadays he cared only for religion, for the state of the Church -
his
Church - and for the endless theological disputations in which, true Byzantine that he was, he found both stimulus and relaxation.

Hostile neighbours were to be bought rather than fought, even though the exchequer had no funds with which to buy them. Thus the payment in
5 56
to the Great King of
30,000
gold
solidi
obtained a fifty-year peace treaty with Persia - well worth it, from Justinian's point of view, for the renunciation of all Persian claims on Lazica and for the opportunity for him to stand down his army along the seemingly endless eastern frontier. Unfortunately, protection money has always been a poor guarantee for the future; he who starts to pay it usually finds it very hard to stop. Sometimes, too, such methods proved impracticable. Only three years afterwards, in
559,
meeting little resistance from the Danubian defences or from the long inner chain of forts that Justinian had erected behind them, a Hunnish tribe known as the Kotrigurs swarmed deep into imperial territory, striking southward into Thessaly and advancing eastward through Thrace to within twenty miles of the capital.

This was not the first invasion that the Empire had suffered in recent years - in
548
and again in j
50
the Slavs had overrun the Balkan peninsula as far as the Gulf of Corinth, the Adriatic and the shores of the Aegean - but for the people of Constantinople it was by far the most terrifying, many of them in their panic taking flight with their families and all their movable possessions across the Bosphorus. Justinian himself was not unduly alarmed; the invaders had been able to approach so close only because the Anastasian Walls, which ran some thirty miles west of the city from Selymbria on the Marmara to the Black Sea, had recently been severely damaged in an earthquake. On the other hand the Walls of Theodosius, which formed the inner line of defence, had survived intact and were still fully manned. In such circumstances he knew that they could be trusted to keep out any army in existence, let alone so primitive and ill-equipped a horde as the Kotrigurs.

What he did feel was humiliation: that he, who had des
troyed the Ostro
gothic and Vandal Kingdoms in Italy and Africa and had re-established the imperial presence in Spain, should have allowed a rough barbarian tribe of which few people had ever heard to approach to his very doorstep, plundering and laying waste everything in their path. This time there was no alternative but to fight. As so often in the past at moments of crisis, he sent for Belisarius.

The general was still only in his middle fifties. Although it was now ten years since he had seen action in the field, he had lost none of his energy, nor any of his astonishing tactical imagination. With only a few hundred men at his disposal he organized a brilliant guerrilla campaign, in the course of which he drew the Kotrigurs into a carefully planned ambush and left
400
dead where they had fallen before driving the remainder back to their base camp near Arcadiopolis (Liileburgaz). Doubtless he could have driven them further if Justinian had allowed him; with a few more men he could probably have destroyed them utterly. But that was not the Emperor's way. He preferred diplomacy, backed up where necessary with bribes. And so he bought the Kotrigurs just as he had bought the Persians, promising them a generous annual subsidy on condition that they returned to their homeland and made no further incursions into imperial territory.

After so encouraging a start, this was not a very creditable outcome to the affair; it certainly did not merit Justinian's triumphal procession into his capital when he returned that August from Selymbria, whither he had made one of his rare excursions from Constantinople to superintend the reconstruction of the Anastasian Walls. This extraordinary ceremony, in which Belisarius took no part, was apparently intended to convince his subjects that the Kotrigurs had been annihilated after a great and glorious victory for which the Emperor himself had been alone responsible; that old jealousy for his brilliant commander that had always smouldered in his heart had suddenly flared up again, for the first time since Theodora's day.

Belisarius doubtless took note, and retreated once more into the background. Even then, no one was probably more surprised than he when, in the autumn of
562,
several distinguished citizens were accused of plotting against the Emperor's life and one of them named him as being among those implicated. Nothing, of course, was ever proved; but he was shorn of all his dignities and privileges, and lived for eight months in a state of disgrace until Justinian, finally persuaded of his innocence, reinstated him. It was presumably this unfortunate incident that gave rise to the legend according to which the Emperor had his old general blinded and thrown out into the streets with a begging-bowl; but the earliest authority for this story dates from more than five centuries later and can safely be rejected.
1
After his return to favour Belisarius lived out his life in tranquillity and comfort, dying in March
565
at the age of about sixty. Antonina, now probably well into her eighties, survived him.

That same month saw Justinian's last item of legislation, the end of a long series of enactments on ecclesiastical affairs - they included a law

1
Strangely enough, the work in question - a late-eleventh-century account of Constantinople tentatively attributed to Michael Psellus - refers on the very same page to the continued existence of the gilded statue of Belisarius that Justinian had erected in
549.
This would surely have been taken down had the general suffered the fate described.

fixing the official dates of Christmas and the Epiphany - to which, as he grew older, he devoted more and more of his time. He continued through the summer and early autumn, working at his desk, granting audiences and holding theological discussions; then, on the night of
14
November, quite without warning, he died - of a heart attack presumably, or a stroke. The only official with him at the time was the Patrician Callinicus, Praepositus of the Sacred Bedchamber, who subsequently reported that the Emperor had, with his last breath, designated his successor: his nephew Justin, son of his sister Vigilantia.

There may have been some who doubted this story, but no one was in a position to contradict it. The account of what happened next is also somewhat suspect, relying as it does on the testimony of a third-rate African poet named Corippus who was obviously anxious to ingratiate himself with the new Emperor; but since it was intended to be read by several eye-witnesses to the events it describes, it is probably true in its essentials at least. Corippus sings of how the Patrician quickly summoned a number of senators and how together they hurried to Justin's mansion. There they found the prince, accompanied by his wife Sophia - who was Theodora's niece - in a beautiful room overlooking the sea, and hailed him as their new Emperor. The whole party then repaired to the Palace, where Justinian had been laid out on a golden bier and where Sophia, producing a golden cloth on which she had embroidered scenes from her uncle's life, draped it reverently over the body.

The following morning the imperial pair rode in state to St Sophia where Justin, having been ceremonially raised on a shield in the old Roman manner and crowned with the imperial diadem, made an inaugural speech in which he swore to his orthodox beliefs, undertook to rule with piety and justice and - somewhat ungraciously, it may be thought - expressed his regret that his predecessor in his old age had neglected or mismanaged so many important departments of state. He and Sophia then continued to the Hippodrome, where they received the acclamation of their new subjects and paid off, then and there, all Justinian's debts left unsettled at his death. Only when all these formalities had been completed could they proceed to the funeral itself. The body, now raised on a high catafalque glittering with gold and jewels, was carried slowly from the Palace and through the densely packed but silent streets, followed on foot by Justin and Sophia, the Senate and senior officers of State, the Patriarch, bishops and clergy, the soldiers and the Palace Guard. On arrival at the Church of the Holy Apostles it was borne up the nave to the tomb of Theodora, next to which stood a vast
porphyry sarcophagus, empty and waiting. Into this it was gently lowered, while a mass was said for the repose of the old Emperor's soul.

An age had ended. The Empire had passed from an uncle to a nephew, in as smooth and undisputed a succession as had ever been known; but there is no mistaking the fact that, far from inaugurating the glorious new era of which he had dreamt, Justinian was the last Roman Emperor to occupy the throne of Byzantium. It was not simply that he had been born a Latin, and that - if Procopius is to be believed - he spoke barbarous Greek all his life; it was that his mind was cast in a Latin mould, and that throughout his reign he devoted the greater part of his prodigious energies to the restoration of the old Roman Empire. What he never understood was that that Empire was by now an anachronism; the days when one man could stand in undisputed universal authority were gone, and would not return. He had dealt the Vandals and the Ostrogoths their respective death-blows; but the barbarian tribes that pressed along his northern frontiers were as numerous as ever, and ever more eager to enjoy for themselves the warmth and fertility of the Mediterranean lands. No longer moreover were they prepared, as their predecessors had been, to accept the role of barbarians. Already the Slavs had begun their slow but relentless infiltration into the Balkans. As for Italy, in the reconquest of which Justinian had spent almost half his lifetime and which he had regained only at the cost of many thousand lives and untold human misery, it was to remain in imperial hands, after his death, for just three years.

Of all the Emperors of Byzantium, he is the one whom we find the easiest to imagine - thanks to the great contemporary mosaic in the choir of the Church of S. Vitale in Ravenna, dating from
546
when the building was completed. Justinian looks younger than his sixty-four years, but his face - in striking contrast to the imperial diadem that he is wearing and the golden nimbus that frames his head - is plain and unidealized: a portrait clearly taken from the life, as is that of Maximianus, Archbishop of Ravenna, who stands next to him. It is not a fine face - the Macedonian peasant is there for all to see - nor indeed a particularly strong one. Certainly it bears no comparison with that of Theodora on the opposite wall, frowning menacingly from between pendant ropes of pearls as she extends a great jewelled chalice - in a gesture that echoes those of the Three Kings, embroidered along the bottom of her purple robe. No wonder, one feels, that her husband was easily led - if it was she who was doing the leading.

And yet, weak-willed and vacillating as he could often be, Justinian was - with anyone except his wife - an autocrat through and through. He possessed in full measure the faults which are all too frequently associated with absolute power: the vanity, the quickness of temper, the occasional bursts of almost paranoid suspicion, the childish jealousy of anyone - though it was usually Belisarius - who he feared might threaten his prestige. On the other hand his energy astonished all who knew him, while his capacity for hard work was apparently without limit. Known within his court as
akoimetos
- 'the sleepless' - he would spend whole days and nights together pondering on affairs of state, attending personally to the minutest details, wearing out whole successions of secretaries and scribes as the sky darkened, then lightened, then darkened again outside the palace windows. Such, he believed, were the duties imposed by God upon an Emperor; and he performed those duties with conscientious dedication and - at least until the very last years of his life - with unfailing efficiency.