The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (42 page)

The struggle, such as it had been, was over. Emesa and Damascus were reoccupied, and have ever since remained under Muslim rule. Jerusalem, under the governorship of Patriarch Sophronius, resisted stoutly for as long as it could; but food supplies were running low, all the surrounding countryside was in Arab hands and, apart from a small garrison at Caesarea, there was no Christian army nearer than Egypt. By the autumn of
637,
the Patriarch agreed to capitulate - stipulating, however, one condition: that the Caliph Omar should be present to receive his surrender in person. Thus it was that, in February
638,
the Caliph himself rode into Jerusalem. He was mounted on a snow-white camel, but his robes were tattered and threadbare in keeping with the austerity enjoined by the Prophet. Sophronius received him on the Mount of Olives and showed him every courtesy, taking him personally on a tour of the principal Christian shrines;' only when he saw the ragged but majestic figure standing in silence on the site of the Temple of Solomon - whence, it was believed, his friend Mohammed had ascended into heaven - did the Patriarch's self-control momentarily desert him. 'Behold,' he murmured, 'the Abomination of Desolation, spoken of by the Prophet Daniel, that standeth in the Holy Place.'

And what, during this hideous chain of disasters, of Heraclius himself? True, he had ordered the mobilization of his ill-fated army; but neither before nor afterwards did he personally take any part in the fighting. How, one wonders, can it possibly be that this heroic soldier-Emperor, scourge of the Persians, the first to lead his subjects into battle for over
200
years, should have remained inactive while these new and terrible enemies carried all before them - that this stalwart defender of Christendom, recoverer of the True Cross, should have stood by while Jerusalem itself fell into the hands of the infidel, lifting not a finger to save it?

The answer to these questions becomes painfully clear as we follow the Emperor through the last tragic years of his life. Already stricken by the disease that was ultimately to kill him, he was also rapidly approaching a state of both mental and spiritual collapse. Even before the battle of the Yarmuk, as he watched while the soldiers of the Prophet

1
The Caliph is said to have been in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when the hour came for prayer, but to have refused to spread his prayer-rug within the church lest the building should be claimed by his followers for Islam. He therefore withdrew to the outer porch and prayed there. His fears proved justified: the porch - but only the porch - was immediately taken over, and remains in Muslim hands to this day.

overran the lands that he had fought so hard to regain, he had been tormented by fears that God had abandoned him - that the Almighty had perhaps even transferred His support to this new tribe of conquerors. After the battle, he had given up all hope. His life's work, his long struggle with Persia, his tireless efforts to settle the theological controversies - all had been in vain. Pausing only to slip into beleaguered Jerusalem, thence to remove once again the True Cross that he had so recently restored, he turned his back on Syria for ever and set off on the long, weary road to Constantinople.

By the time he reached the Bosphorus his mind was seriously affected. Somehow, on the journey, he had developed an unreasoning terror of the sea; and once arrived at the palace of Hiera, nothing would induce him to make the mile-long journey across the strait. He remained, trembling, in his apartment, refusing to receive the anxious delegations from the capital that begged him to delay his return no longer, occasionally sending his sons to represent him at the games or at important feasts of the Church. Meanwhile he began to behave with quite uncharacteristic brutality. Hearing rumours of a conspiracy within the city in which his nephew Theodore and his bastard son Athalaric were said to have been implicated, he had them both sent away into banishment - but not before their noses and hands had been cut off at his command. When Theodore arrived at his place of exile on the Maltese offshore island of Gozo, it was to discover that the governor had been ordered to remove one of his feet as well.

Only after a delay of several weeks did his wife and his entourage hit upon a way of getting the Emperor home. If we are to believe the history of Theophanes - who, it must be remembered, was writing nearly two centuries after the event - a bridge of boats was thrown across the Bosphorus and fenced with green branches so as to form a sort of artificial hedge along each side, preventing him from seeing the water; Heraclius then mounted his horse and rode across 'as if he were on land'. Given the width of the strait and the strength of the currents, the story seems hardly likely; perhaps, as certain more recent historians have suggested, he travelled on a boat similarly disguised. Whatever the truth may be, the last return of the Emperor to his capital could not have been other than a sad, pathetic contrast to his previous entry, less than nine years before.

By this time it was plain to all that he was a dying man; and his superstitious subjects were not slow to explain the cause of his decline. Clearly, they whispered, he had incurred the wrath of God by his incestuous marriage to his niece. Of the nine children that Martina had borne him, four had died in infancy, one had a twisted neck and another, Theodosius, was deaf and dumb: could there be any more unmistakable indication of divine displeasure? The Emperor's steadily deteriorating mental and physical condition was only additional corroboration. Martina, never popular in Constantinople, now found herself hated and publicly reviled.

It is uncertain, however, whether she greatly cared, for all her energies were now fixed on a single objective: to ensure the succession of her own first-born, Heraclonas,
1
as co-Emperor with Constantine, her husband's son by his first wife Eudocia. The task was scarcely daunting. Young Constantine, despite the heroism he had shown during the siege of the capital in
626,
had grown up a sad and sickly young man, almost certainly consumptive; although there is no cause to think that his reason was impaired, he is known to have needed constant attention. And Heraclius no longer possessed the strength to resist his wife, even had he wished to do so. Thus it was that on
4
June
638,
in the Palace of the Bosphorus, he tremulously lowered the imperial diadem on to the head of Heraclonas, while Martina and Constantine stood by. Both sons -now twenty-three and twenty-six respectively - were thenceforth co-rulers with their father, accompanying him (when he appeared at all) at occasional state ceremonies, but more and more often representing him in his absence.

The most important of these ceremonies, occurring within a few weeks of his son's coronation, was Heraclius's promulgation of what was known as his
Ekthesis,
in which he made one last attempt to heal the still-raging monophysite controversy. The doctrine of the single energy of Christ had, as we have seen, been exploded by Sophronius of Jerusalem four years previously; in Constantinople, however, Patriarch Sergius had refused to give up, and had now slightly amended his formula. The question of energies, it seemed, was no longer relevant: the important thing was that Christ, while possessing the two natures that had been confirmed at Chalcedon, had but a single
will.
If only this proposition could now be universally accepted, peace would at last return to the tormented Church.

And so the principles of monothelitism, the doctrine of the Single Will as set forth in the
Ekthesis,
were circulated to all the bishops of Christendom. A copy was posted up in the narthex of St Sophia; and

1
H
is real name was He
raclius, but he was generally known as Heraclonas to distinguish him from his father.

when Patriarch Sergius died in December
638
its prospects looked distinctly promising, with all four of the eastern Patriarchs signifying their assent. Only two years later did the blow fall, and then from a most unexpected quarter. Early in
641,
the newly elected Pope John IV condemned the whole thing out of hand. An issue which had been virtually confined to the Eastern Church, and to which the Pope in Rome had till now shown himself to be largely indifferent, had suddenly been inflated into a major schism between East and West.

It led, too, to the final humiliation of the Emperor Heraclius. His body by now distended and near-paralysed with dropsy and plagued by other symptoms almost as unattractive,
1
he spent the days groaning on his litter, brooding on the frustration of his efforts, the hopelessness of his life and the torments that he confidently expected after his death. In December
640
he had been informed of the arrival of the Saracen army at the gates of Alexandria; and now, just two months later, came the news of the Pope's condemnation of monothelitism. Had it been just a little longer delayed, the Emperor would have been beyond its reach; coming as it did, it added yet further to his despair. He was too tired, now, for courage: with his last breath he denied having had any part in the
Ekthesis.
It was all the fault of Sergius, he muttered; only at the Patriarch's request had he given it his unwilling approval. Thus, on
11
February
641,
with a transparent lie on his lips, one of the greatest of Byzantine Emperors expired in misery and shame.

He had lived too long. Could he only have died in
629,
with the Persian Empire on its knees and the Holy Cross restored to Jerusalem, his reign would have been the most glorious in the Empire's history; those last twelve years brought him only disappointment, disillusion and, ultimately, dishonour - with all the pain and indignity of a loathsome disease. Yet his record, despite its tragic end, remains a magnificent one. Without his energy, determination and inspired leadership, Constantinople might well have fallen to the Persians - in which case it would almost inevitably have been engulfed a few years later by the Muslim tide, with consequences for western Europe that can scarcely be imagined. As it was, he left Byzantium stronger than it had been for centuries, thanks to the military and administrative organization that he conceived and created and that was to become the backbone of the medieval Empire. The survival of that Empire for another
800
years, during which

1
'Every time that he voided water, he was obliged to lay a board across his stomach to prevent its spurting into his face' (Niccphorus, VII, xi). Thus, his subjects whispered, was the organ primarily responsible for his incestuous union singled out by the Almighty for special punishment.

it was to reach its highest and most brilliant apogee, was due in a very large measure to him.

Culturally, too, his reign marked the beginning of a new era. If Justinian had been the last of the truly Roman Emperors, it was Heraclius who dealt the old Roman tradition its death-blow. Until his day, Latin was still regularly used by the civil service and even by the army -despite the fact that it was incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of his subjects. At a moment when efficiency of communications was of paramount importance, such a state of affairs was clearly ridiculous; and it was Heraclius who decreed that Greek, for long the language of the people and the Church, should henceforth be the official language of the Empire. Within a generation, even among the educated classes, Latin became virtually extinct. Finally, by way of marking the end of the old Empire and setting the seal on the new, he abolished the ancient Roman titles of imperial dignity. Heretofore, like his predecessors, he had been formally hailed as
Imperator Caesar
and
Augustus;
all these were now replaced by the old Greek word for 'King',
Basileus —
which was to remain the official title for as long as the Empire lasted.

For three days after his death the body of the Emperor lay, grotesque and misshapen, on an open bier guarded by the Palace eunuchs, while those of his subjects who remembered him in the years of his greatness filed slowly past it in silent homage. It was then laid in a sarcophagus of white onyx and buried, near that of Constantine the Great, in the Church of the Holy Apostles. Heraclius's sufferings were over at last; one further indignity, however, was reserved for him. Barely three months after his entombment, on the order of his first-born son, the sarcophagus was reopened and the jewelled diadem with which he had been buried was wrenched from his head.
1
Spite, rather than cupidity, seems to have been the motive: Constantine had probably never forgiven his father for obliging him to share a crown that should have been his alone. None the less, as we read of those hideous last years of this most tragic of Emperors, it is hard not to feel that he - more perhaps than any other occupant of the Byzantine throne - should hav
e been allowed to rest in peace

1
Cedre
nus,
1,
p.
i
1
.

15

The Heraclian Line

[641-85]

Mais le Vile siecle n'en marque pas moins pour l'Orient grec la fin du monde antique; et, a ce titre, peut-etre vaut-il la peine de montrer par quelques exemples ce que furent les ames, desequilibrees et troubles, des hommes qui virent s'accomplir cette grande evolution.