The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (45 page)

During the Emperor's long absence from Constantinople, the remaining eastern provinces had been administered by the eldest of his three sons, who now succeeded him as Constantine IV. Owing to our continued -and deeply frustrating - lack of contemporary historians, we know little about his appearance or character; an incident occurring soon after his accession, however, hardly predisposes us in his favour. In 669 certain regiments from Asia Minor marched on the capital, demanding that Constantine should crown his two younger brothers co-rulers with himself, on the curious grounds that since Heaven was ruled by a Trinity, so should the Earth be also. The firmness and promptness of the Emperor's reaction showed, as clearly as anything could, how he intended to govern: he invited the leaders to a conference in his palace, and immediately on their arrival had them seized and summarily executed - after which, as Gibbon tells the story, 'the prospect of their bodies hanging on the gibbet in the suburb of Galata reconciled their companions to the unity of the reign of Constantine'. Opinions differ as to whether or not the two young princes had instigated the uprising; but their brother was not in the mood to give them the benefit of the doubt. In conformity with the practice now growing distressingly frequent in Byzantine political life, their noses were slit - not just a punishment and a warning for the future, but a silent proclamation, to army and people alike, of their unfitness to rule.

Such a charge, despite his periodic outbursts of brutality, could never be levelled against Constantine. On the contrary, he was to prove a wise statesman and, like his great-grandfather, a born leader of men. Admittedly he had inherited from Heraclius a superbly organized state -
at least where its Anatolian heartland was concerned; one might argue, too, that he enjoyed more than his fair share of good luck. But what cannot be questioned is the fact that the first decade of his reign marked a watershed in the history, not only of the Byzantine Empire, but of all Christendom: the moment when, for the first time, the armies of the Crescent were checked, turned and put to flight by those of the Cross.

The brief respite was over. In
661
the Caliph Ali had been assassinated outside the mosque at his headquarters in Kufa; since then, Muawiya had reigned supreme. One of his first decisions had been to establish his capital at Damascus, where he founded the dynasty of Omayyad Caliphs that was to endure for the next eighty years. An old and venerable city, it was moreover incomparably better placed than the remote townships of the Arabian Hejaz for the achievement of his prime objective: the annihilation of the Roman Empire. With the vastly increased resources now at his command, he had resumed those tactics that had served him so well in the previous decade, every year dispatching a new army into Anatolia and a new fleet up the Ionian coast, plucking off the imperial cities and islands one by one. After Cos came Chios; after Chios, Smyrna; finally, in
672,
the Saracens sailed up the Hellespont and into the Marmara, where they captured the peninsula of Cyzicus on the Bithynian shore - only some fifty miles across the water from Constantinople itself-and began to fortify it as their principal bridgehead. Two years later the siege began.

Most of the previous attacks against the city of Constantine had been launched from the landward side: this one came from the sea. The Saracen ships carried heavy siege engines and huge catapults with which to bombard the walls and their defenders alike. But the fortifications, both along the Marmara and the Golden Horn, were proof against all their assaults - while the Byzantines for their part were able to create havoc among the attackers by means of a secret weapon invented a few years before by a certain Callinicus, an architect and chemist from the Syrian city of Heliopolis (more familiar to us nowadays as Baalbek). It was a secret so well guarded that to this day we are uncertain of the precise composition of what was known throughout the middle ages as 'Greek fire'.
1
Sometimes it was sprayed, by means of a pump or syphon, over an enemy vessel; sometimes it was poured into long, narrow

1
Marcus Graecus, a writer of the tenth century, gives a rough recipe: 'Take pure sulphur, tartar, sarcocolla [Persian gum], pitch, dissolved nitre, petroleum [obtainable from surface deposits in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus] and pine resin; boil these together, then saturate tow with the result and set fire to it. The conflagration will spread, and can be extinguished only by urine, vinegar or sand' - a property which, if true, would give a completely new dimension to the technique of fire-fighting.

cartridges and catapulted against its objective. The results were almost invariably catastrophic - particularly since the flaming liquid, being oil-based, would float upon the surface of the sea, frequently igniting the wooden hulls of the ships and causing an additional hazard to those who tried to save themselves by jumping overboard.

But the Muslims, unaccustomed to such opposition, refused to admit defeat. Retiring with the approach of winter to Cyzicus, they called up further reinforcements from Syria and spent the next few months repairing and refitting their ships. With the coming of spring they returned to the attack; but the second year of the siege did not prove any more successful than the first. Nor did the third, nor the fourth; it was only after the fifth year of frustration, in 678, that the siege was finally raised and the battered remnants of the Saracen fleet turned about and headed for home. Even then their tribulations were not over; returning along the coast of Pamphylia, they ran into a freak autumn storm which accounted for yet further losses.

While Muawiya's navy was hammering in vain against the walls of Constantinople, his army had sustained similar reverses nearer home. Here his enemies were not the Byzantines but the so-called Mardaites -bands of Christian freebooters who, from their original redoubts high in the Taurus Mountains, had spread south into Syria and Mount Lebanon, where they were waging a ceaseless guerrilla war against the Arabs as far south as Jerusalem and even the Dead Sea. To the Caliph, already seriously worried by his inability to control these brigands, the news of the humiliation of his fleet came as a shattering blow. The Empire, it seemed, was invincible after all, under the divine protection of its Christian God. In 679, discouraged and demoralized, he accepted Constantine's offer of peace - under terms which, a few years before, he would have considered ignoble: the evacuation of the Aegean islands that he had so recently conquered, plus an annual tribute to the Emperor of fifty slaves, fifty horses and 5
,000
pounds of gold. A year later he was dead.

Constantine, on the other hand, was at the height of his popularity and prestige. He had inspired his subjects with the courage and the morale to withstand five years of siege by a power hitherto considered irresistible, and in doing so he had saved Western civilization. Blocked from Europe by the impregnable walls of Constantinople and the unyielding spirit of the Emperor and his people, the armies of the Prophet were obliged to travel the entire length of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Gibraltar before they could invade the continent - thus extending their lines of communication and supply almost to breaking point and rendering impossible any permanent conquests beyond the Pyrenees. Had they captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe - and America - might be Muslim today.

And Western civilization recognized its saviour. It was not only the Khagan of the Avars and the Slav tribal leaders in the Balkans who sent Constantine embassies of congratulation, with requests for assurances of peace and friendship: it was also the Lombard and Frankish princes of the West. He was, after all, the sole Emperor of the Christian world: a ruler with whom they might disagree or even on occasion wage war, but whose precedence they would never have questioned; and he had shown himself worthy of his title.

With the Saracens finally in retreat, Constantine could turn his attention to another, lesser, enemy - the Bulgars. These warlike pagan tribesmen were not in fact Slavs - as their descendants, largely for linguistic reasons, are generally considered today - but of Turkic origin; they had, however, left their ancient home in the lands between the lower reaches of the Volga and the Don and had migrated westward to the north bank of the Danube, whence more and more of them were trickling across the river into imperial territory. In
680
a large squadron of Byzantine ships, with the Emperor himself in command, sailed up the Bosphorus into the Black Sea and landed an army just north of the Danube delta. Unfortunately, the region had not been reconnoitred in advance: the swampy terrain made any organized advance impossible, while Constantine himself suffered an agonizing attack of gout which obliged him to retire for a few days to Mesembria nearby. Such a minor incapacity should not have affected the campaign unduly; for some reason, however, the rumour spread through the army that the Emperor had taken flight. In the ensuing panic his men turned and fled - while the Bulgars, seeing their chance, pursued them across the Danube into the former province of Moesia, killing all those whom they captured.

The net result of the expedition was thus precisely the opposite of what had been intended: instead of forcing back the Bulgars, it facilitated and encouraged their further penetration of the Empire. The invaders quickly realized that the new region in which they found themselves, an unusually fertile land protected by the Danube to the north, the Balkan Mountains to the south and the Black Sea to the east, was far preferable to that which they had just left. Easily subduing the seven Slavonic tribes who had already settled there, they rapidly established a strong

Bulgar state - which, in a somewhat different form, survives to this day - and even obliged the Emperor to agree to the annual payment of protection money to their King.

It was, in fact, more of a humiliation than a real disaster. Given the strength of the Bulgars along the frontier, some such arrangement would sooner or later have been inevitable. It had, moreover, the advantage of cementing a general peace which wa
s to endure to the end of Const
antine's reign and which allowed him to tackle the most stubborn of all his internal problems. The doctrine of the Single Will of Christ had sustained several severe blows during his father's time, but had obstinately refused to die. Already in
678
the Emperor had written to the Pope, proposing an ecumenical council of the Church to settle the matter once and for all; and the Pope, after summoning a preliminary synod in Rome to ensure that the Western representatives at least should speak with one voice, enthusiastically agreed. All through the early autumn of
680
the delegates poured in -
174
of them, from every corner of the Christian world. The Italian party, which consisted of the Bishops of Palermo, Reggio and Porto and their suites, together with a priest named Theodore representing the Greek Church of Ravenna, were received with particular honours and accommodated in the Palace of Placidia at the Emperor's expense. By the beginning of November most of them had arrived, and a week later the Sixth Ecumenical Council of the Church held its first session in the
Trullos,
or Domed Hall, of the imperial palace.

The Council was to hold eighteen plenary sessions, spread out over the next ten months. Constantine himself presided over the first eleven of them - though he was careful to remain impartial throughout and to express no opinions of his own - and again over the last, when on
16
September
681
he formally endorsed the almost unanimous findings. The doctrine of the Single Will, the Council decided, was incompatible with that of the humanity of the Saviour - who possessed, on the contrary, 'two natural Wills and two natural Energies, without division, alteration, separation or confusion'. Those who had maintained otherwise were condemned and cursed - including the now defunct Pope Honorius, who had given his somewhat lukewarm approval half a century before.

The problem of a canonically elected Pope being anathematized by his own successors has been a perennial source of embarrassment to Roman Catholic theologians - particularly those who have had to defend the later doctrine of papal infallibility; but it caused no anxiety to those gathered in the Domed Hall who, after the Emperor's closing speech,
cheered him to the echo - hailing him as the Light of the World, the new Constantine the Great, the new Marcian,
1
the new Justinian, and the Destroyer of all Heretics. None of these accolades were altogether justified, least of all the last; but when, four years later, Constantine died of a sudden dysentery at the age of just thirty-three, he could congratulate himself not only that he was leaving his Empire stronger, more peaceful and more united than at any time in the century, but that he had dealt the monothelite heresy a blow from which it would never recover.

1
It was Marcian who summoned the Council of Chalccdon in
451,
when the monophysites were first condemned (see Chapter 7).

16

The Emperor who Lost his Nose

[685
-711]

Nort cuicunque datum est habere nasum.

It is not given to just anyone to have a nose.

Martial