The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (36 page)

But there were other sides, too, to an Emperor's life. He could not always remain closeted in the imperial chancery. He must also move out among his people, dazzling them with a majesty and magnificence that reflected the glory of the Empire itself. Hence the sumptuous processions, the high ceremonial pomp with which he was surrounded on all public occasions. Hence also his passion for building. The Empire's splendour, he believed, must be made manifest in its capital. Justinian transformed Constantinople; and though many of his most extraordinary monuments - such as the Great Palace, which he entirely rebuilt for himself and his successors, with its famous 'Bronze Gate', the
Chalke,
ablaze with polychrome marble and mosaic, or his own immense equestrian statue on a column in the Augusteum - have long since crumbled away to dust, the great churches of St Sophia and St Irene and the little miracle of St Sergius and St Bacchus have somehow survived and still have the power to catch the breath. So, even more surprisingly, have certain of his public works - above all the vast Columned cisterns now known as the Yerebatansaray and the Binbir-direk, constructions as remarkable in their way as any that can be seen in the city. But - despite the fact that he so seldom left it himself -Justinian did not confine his tremendous building projects to his capital. Roads were laid, sewers were sunk, bridges and aqueducts sprang up in every corner of the Empire; not one but several new cities were founded and given the name of Justiniana in his honour. Antioch, after its sack by Chosroes in
540,
was rebuilt on a far more lavish scale than formerly, as were the Syrian towns destroyed in the succession
of earthquakes that, in
551
and again in
554,
shook the province to its foundations.

One reason for Justinian's compulsive building operations may be that here at least he could be reasonably certain of the outcome of each new enterprise. Not all his other endeavours were equally successful - often through his chronic inability to come to terms with the world as it was, rather than as he would have liked it to be. In his desire for religious unity, as we have seen, he succeeded only in deepening the rift between East and West, orthodox and monophysite, since having once taken a decision it never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Similarly his immense efforts to reform the administration and to purge it of corruption were repeatedly sabotaged by his own extravagance: so great was his need of money that he simply could not afford to be too particular about how it was obtained. Even his conquests had disappointing results. He had hoped, by restoring the conquered lands to the Empire, to bring them peace, prosperity and good government; in fact, the depredations of the imperial soldiery, followed by those of the swarms of tax-collectors and logothetes, left the local populations in misery and destitution. And although vast expenditure in Africa - including a magnificent rebuilding of the city of Carthage - ultimately replaced that economy on a sound footing, in Italy such similar attempts as were made ended in failure, leaving its desperate people all too ready to welcome the Lombard invaders.

But there were successes too, particularly in the field of industry and commerce. By Justinian's day, Constantinople was already the principal centre of the entrepot trade between Europe and Asia, and carrying on a brisk business with both the Mediterranean world and the Orient. The West, however, was by now sadly impoverished; it was to Cathay and the Indies that the Byzantines looked for their commercial prosperity -and for the silks, spices and precious stones by which they set so much store. But there was one perennial problem which beset all merchants trading in such commodities: the presence of Persia. Caravans taking the land route from the East passed without hindrance as far as the oases of Samarkand and Bokhara and the Oxus River; thereafter, however, they were in Persian territory, where the Great King exercised a strict control over all their transactions - often, in time of war, suspending them completely. The sea route presented the same difficulty, since all cargoes had to be landed in the Persian Gulf. Huge tolls were levied, especially on silk - the most sought-after item of all - and direct trading was forbidden. Sales could only be effected by Persian middlemen, and they too took exorbitant commissions.

This was the stranglehold that Justinian had determined to break-First, he opened up new routes designed to bypass Persia altogether: a northern one via the Crimea, Lazica and the Caucasus - where his subjects were already carrying on a flourishing trade in textiles, jewellery and wine, which they exchanged for leather, furs and slaves - and a southern one which used the Red Sea rather than the Gulf and which involved him, already in the early
530s,
in negotiations with the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum. The first of these attempts was partially successful; the latter failed, owing to the firmness of the Persian grip on the Indian and Ceylonese ports. The real breakthrough came only in
552,
when a party of orthodox monks sought an audience with the Emperor and offered to obtain through certain contacts in Soghdiana - that distant land beyond the Oxus - a quantity of silkworm eggs, together with enough technical knowledge to establish an industry. Justinian leapt at the chance; before long there were factories not only in Constantinople but in Antioch, Tyre and Beirut (and later at Thebes in Boeotia) and the imperial silk industry - always a state monopoly - became one of the most profitable in the Empire.

After thirty-eight years on the throne, a personality as powerful as that of Justinian could not fail to be missed by his subjects; but he was not deeply mourned. Even in his early days he had never won their love. By the time he had grown old, the tyranny of his tax-gatherers had created dangerous discontent; of the last ten years of his reign, no less than six saw serious rioting in the capital. Economically, despite all his efforts, he left the Empire prostrate: for that reason alone, he cannot be considered a truly great ruler. On the other hand, he also left it infinitely richer in amenities, services and public works, and incomparably more beautiful. He extended its frontiers, he simplified and streamlined its laws. He worked ceaselessly, indefatigably, as few rulers in history have ever worked, for what he believed to be the good of his subjects. When he failed, it was almost invariably because he attempted too much and set his sights too high; never the reverse. More than any other monarch in the history of Byzantium, he stamped the Empire with the force of his own character; centuries were to pass before it emerged from his shadow.

13

The Downward Drift

[565-610]

En A vares Francique truces Gipidesque Getaeque Totque aliae gentes commotis undlque signis Bella movent. Qua vi tantos superabimus hostes Cum, virtus Romana,
jaces?

Lo, the Avars and the wild Franks, the Gepids and the Getae,
1
and so many other nations, their standards waving, make war on us from every side. What strength shall we find to overcome such fearsome enemies when you, O Roman virtue, lie forgotten?

Justin II, quoted by Corippus,
In Laudem Justin:',
I,
254-7

Byzantium was indeed beset by its enemies; and whether or not the Emperor Justin II, standing beside the bier of his predecessor, actually lamented the passing of the old Roman virtues as Corippus would have us believe, he certainly did his best to resurrect them. Proud, arrogant, unshakeable in his self-confidence, he believed implicitly that with wisdom and determination, with prudence and fortitude and above all with courage, those enemies could and would be scattered - and that he was the man to do it. He was soon to be painfully, even pitifully, disillusioned.

Justin gave proof of his new philosophy within a week of his accession, when he received an embassy from the Avars, a race of unknown but probably Tartar origin that had made its first appearance in the West only a few years before. His uncle, as might have been expected, had agreed to pay them an annual subsidy in return for their undertaking to keep various other hostile tribes away from the imperial frontiers; but in
562
they themselves had invaded Thrace and had categorically declined to accept the alternative homeland that he offered them in Pannonia. Clearly they were not to be trusted; and when their representatives,

1
A barbarian tribe by then extinct. The reference is presumably to their successors, the Slavs.

having offered formal congratulations to the new Emperor, requested payment of the money due to them under the former agreement it was Justin's turn to refuse. In the course of the following year he showed that he intended to take a similar line with the several other recipients of Justinian's bounty, including the Great King Chosroes himself. Such a display of firmness much increased his popularity, particularly as it seemed to offer prospects of reduced taxes; it soon revealed, however, that Justinian had not been paying out his subsidies for nothing.

Ironically enough, the race that dealt the Empire the severest blow of the many it sustained during Justin's reign was one which had previously caused no trouble and which had never received a penny of Byzantine protection money. The Lombards were a Germanic people who, in the fourth and fifth centuries, had slowly drifted southwards from their homes around the lower Elbe to the region that we should now call Austria. In
567,
allied with the Avars, they inflicted an annihilating defeat on their neighbours the Gepids, and in the spring of the following year they crossed the Julian Alps into Italy. It says much for the effects of the wars of Belisarius and Narses that after fifteen years the greater part of the country was still in ruins, its people stunned and demoralized. The Lombards encountered no real resistance anywhere except Pavia, which they captured only after a three-year siege; but they made no move against Ravenna - where the imperial commander Lon-ginus also refrained from opposition, contenting himself with securing the city and its immediate surroundings. Meanwhile the conquerors continued their southward advance. Their King, Alboin, went no further than Tuscany, but many of his nobles pressed on further to set up independent duchies in Spoleto and Benevento which were to survive for another five centuries.
1

Thus, from the start, the Lombards came to Italy not as raiders but as permanent settlers. They intermarried with the Italians, adopted their language, absorbed their culture and doubtless intended to make the whole peninsula their own. The fact that they made no attempt at this time on Byzantine Ravenna, nor on the cities of the Venetian lagoon associated with it is probably explained by their lack of numbers;

1
There is a venerable legend according to which the Lombards had been invited into Italy by Narses, in revenge for an insult that he had received from the Empress Sophia who, so the story goes, had sent him a distaff in a pointed reference to his emasculation. 'I will weave her such a skein,' the old eunuch is said to have muttered, 'that she will not unravel in her lifetime.' It is a good story - but, alas, nothing more.

doubtless for the same reason Naples, Calabria and Sicily also remained in imperial hands. It would be a mistake therefore to see the Lombards as destroyers of everything that Justinian, Belisarius and Narses had achieved; what they did was to impose severe limits on Byzantine authority in Italy and to introduce a powerful new element into the political scene. For over two centuries they were to flourish as an independent kingdom - until at last they were swallowed up in the new-founded Empire of the West and Charlemagne himself assumed their crown.

It might have been expected that so staunch an upholder of the Roman tradition as was the Emperor Justin would have lost no time in sending an army to expel the Lombards from his dominions; but he was fully occupied with the Avars. They too had profited vastly from the victory that the Lombards, with their help, had won over the Gepids. The former having moved into Italy and the latter having been virtually wiped out, the old Lombard territories now lay open to settlement; and once installed in their new homeland the Avars were at last in a position to take their revenge on Justin for his refusal to continue their subsidy. In
568,
only a few months after the Lombard invasion, they burst into Dalmatia in a frenzy of wholesale destruction. This time the Emperor reacted quickly, sending as large a force as he could muster under the command of his Count of the Excubitors, Tiberius; but after three years of warfare the exhausted general could continue no longer and was obliged to seek a truce. The ensuing treaty cost Justin
80,000
pieces of silver, a sum far greater than the original subsidy; the blow to his pride must have been greater still.

That same year,
571,
saw a dangerous development in the East. Justin was not the only ruler who had difficulties with his neighbours. For King Chosroes, the perennial problem was that of Armenia. It was not so much the fact that the Armenians, having lost not only their independence but also their political unity, were now split between the Byzantine and the Persian Empires; rather was it the fierce pride that they took in their Christianity, which constantly impelled those of them who were under the sway of the Great King to escape from the Persian yoke and, if they could no longer have a Kingdom of their own, to join their compatriots as subjects of the Christian Emperor. Now, suddenly, this chronic disaffection exploded into open revolt and the insurgents appealed to Justin for support - a request which as a Christian monarch he could not possibly ignore. Neither, however, could he hope that Chosroes, already furious at his refusal to continue the tribute promised by his uncle, would any longer restrain himself. Early in
5 72
the Persian War was resumed. It was to continue, with brief interruptions, for twenty years.