The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (49 page)

Running in direct succession through five Emperors, that line constitutes the first true dynasty in Byzantine history. It had begun magnificently; it ended,
101
years later, in butchery and shame. Justinian II was not, it must be emphasized, the unmitigated disaster that has often been suggested. In his first reign especially, he worked as hard as any of his predecessors to strengthen the defences of the Empire, still further developing the Theme system and, where necessary, moving whole populations in order to establish military colonies in strategic areas. Similarly, his Farmers' Law - if it was indeed his - did much to free the agricultural peasantry from their former bondage to the landed aristocracy, giving them independence, self-respect and, in future generations, the readiness to defend their territory against all comers. He strove, also, to improve relations with his two most dangerous neighbours, the Arabs on one side and the Bulgars on the other; and if in this field he was ultimately less successful, the attempts were nevertheless surely worth making. Finally, he left the Empire on excellent terms with the Church of Rome, living to receive the Pope as an honoured guest in his capital -the last elected Pontiff to set foot in the city for twelve and a half centuries.
1

Such a record is far from contemptible, even if we leave aside the extraordinary courage and determination displayed by Justinian when, after nearly a decade of exile and horribly disfigured, he made his way back from the Crimea to reclaim his throne. Yet no amount of pleading can excuse the atrocities for which he was responsible nor diminish the incalculable number of his subjects, the majority of them completely innocent, who were put to death at his command. It has been plausibly suggested that the uncontrolled violence of his nature can be explained, at least in part, by the mutilation that he himself had suffered and the hideous - and humiliating - face which he was ever afterward obliged to present to the world: a face which can have been but little improved by the artificial nose of solid gold which he is said to have worn in his later years. That may be an explanation, but it is in no sense an excuse; it would certainly have been of small comfort to his victims and their

1 The next occasion was to be the visit by Pope Paul VI to Istanbul on 25 July 1967.

families, and it could not in any sense mitigate his conduct during his first reign which, though less unbridled than the second, was still intolerable enough to provoke a revolution.

His subjects, in short, were well rid of him. We may feel sympathy for his mother, Anastasia, who is said to have once been whipped by Stephen the
Sacellarius
without her son's lifting a finger in her defence or taking any punitive action afterwards; for his wife Theodora, of whose fate we know nothing but who was probably with her husband - since she was clearly not with her son - when the end came; and above all for his son: poor, frightened Tiberius, murdered for no good reason shortly before his seventh birthday. Justinian, on the other hand, was forty-two when he died; and of him it can only be said that his death, on
4
November
711,
came not a moment too soon.

17

The First Iconoclasts

[711-75]

In the long night of superstition the Christians had wandered far away from the simplicity of the Gospel: nor was it easy for them to discern the clue, and tread back the mazes of the labyrinth. The worship of images was inseparably blended, at least to a pious fancy, with the Cross, the Virgin, the saints and their relics; the holy ground was involved in a cloud of miracles and visions; and the nerves of the mind, curiosity and scepticism, were benumbed by the habits of obedience and belief.

Gibbon,

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Chap. XLIX

It was fortunate that Justinian II, during the days when he was still an effective ruler, had done so much to strengthen, both economically and militarily, the heartland of the Empire; because in Constantinople itself morale was now dangerously low. Less fortunate was the fact that his successor Philippicus Bardanes quickly proved himself a hopeless hedonist, who spent vast sums on his own amusement and, in his serious moments, seemed interested only in reviving the old theological disputes for which, over the years, the Byzantines had already paid so heavy a price. His innermost convictions probably tended towards monophysitism -that most inflammatory of heresies which, wisely, he did not attempt to revive. He did, however, make a determined effort to reimpose the monothelite compromise, even going so far as to issue an imperial edict on his own authority rejecting the decisions of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which had condemned the doctrine only thirty years before. At the same time he ordered the removal of a picture in the imperial palace representing the Council in session, together with an inscribed plaque commemorating the event on the Milion Gate.

When the news of all this reached Rome, Pope Constantine - already horrified by the fate of his friend Justinian and implacably hostile to his
successor - flew into a fury. The formal letter that Philippicus had addressed to him, notifying him of his accession in terms which struck the Pope as profoundly heretical, he rejected out of hand - replying with a decree of his own in which he made it an offence to stamp the new Emperor's portrait on coins, to refer to his reign in the dating of documents, or even to include his name in Church prayers. Finally, in obvious retaliation for the removal of the offending picture, he gave orders that a whole series of similar paintings - not just of the Sixth Council but of all the other five as well - should be specially painted for the walls of St Peter's.

In a more peaceful age, an Emperor might have been allowed to indulge himself in the quintessentially Byzantine combination of sensual pleasure and Christological speculation to his heart's content, leaving his subjects to get on with their own lives. Not, however, in
712;
for the murder of Justinian had given the Bulgar King Tervel just the opportunity he needed. On the pretext that he was honour-bound to avenge his former friend, he now invaded the Empire for the second time and advanced once again to the walls of Constantinople, leaving a trail of devastation behind him. Perhaps because he trusted his Bulgar ally, Justinian had paid little heed to his Thracian defences, and his successor had cared for them even less. If the invaders were to be driven back, the Emperor had no choice but to summon additional troops from the Opsikian Theme across the Marmara.

Inescapable as it may have been, the decision proved his undoing. The Opsikians were notoriously self-willed, and felt no instinctive loyalty to an Armenian upstart who, having reached the throne by methods to say the least questionable, now seemed disposed to treat it like a plaything. They laid their plans with care; then, on Whit Saturday,
3
June
713,
soon after the Emperor had settled down to a noon-day siesta after an agreeable morning spent banqueting with friends, a group of soldiers burst into his bed-chamber, seized him and hurried him away to the Hippodrome. There, in the changing room of the Green charioteers, his eyes were put out. He had reigned just nineteen months.

After the success of their coup, the Opsikians might have been expected to proclaim one of their own number the new Basileus. In some way, however, they were prevented from doing so; and the choice of the Senate and people fell on a certain Artemius, who had been Chief Secretary to the former Emperor. It may have been this background that persuaded him to choose for his imperial title the name of another former civil servant who had risen to the supreme power: on the following day,
Whit Sunday, he was crowned by the Patriarch in St Sophia as the Emperor Anastasius II.

Anastasius was a far abler ruler than his predecessor, and deserved to last a good deal longer than he did. He began, very sensibly, by rescinding Philippicus's monothelitist edict and restoring the memorials of the Sixth Ecumenical Council to their rightful places; then he settled down to the problem of imperial defence. Thanks to the Opsikian troops, the Bulgars had retreated back into their homeland; it was now the Arabs who were, once again, on the march - and who, as the Emperor's spies ominously reported, were preparing another full-scale attack on Constantinople. Anastasius at once began major operations on the Land Walls, repairing and reinforcing them where necessary. The state granaries were filled to bursting point, and every citizen was ordered to lay in enough food to last him and his family for three years; meanwhile the Byzantine shipyards were working harder than ever before. If the attack came, the Empire would not be caught unprepared.

But could the attack not be prevented altogether? Anastasius believed that it could, and early in
715
he decided to launch a pre-emptive strike against the Saracens, using Rhodes as a base for the operation. His chances of success looked excellent and, had he been allowed to proceed as he had planned, his subjects might have been spared much suffering. Alas, the Opsikian troops had developed a taste for rebellion. No sooner had they arrived in Rhodes than - barely two years after they had dethroned Philippicus - they turned on John, the General Logothete to whom Anastasius had given command of the expedition, and clubbed him to death. They then made their way to Constantinople, picking up
en route
an innocuous and inoffensive tax-gatherer named Theodosius whom, for reasons not entirely clear, they decided to proclaim Emperor. When Theodosius was informed of their intention he very sensibly fled into the mountains; but he was tracked down and forced at sword-point to accept - though still very reluctantly - an honour that was, to him, as undesirable as it was unexpected. Meanwhile the rebels had reached the capital where, after a few months of bitter strife, Anastasius was deposed in his turn and withdrew to a monastery in Thessalonica.

With the accession of Theodosius III, the Byzantines could look back on no less than six Emperors in the previous twenty years; five of their reigns had ended violently and the sixth was shortly to do so. Never since the foundation of Constantinople had there been so prolonged a period of restless anarchy. But salvation, although the people were not yet aware of it, was on the way; and it is to the future author of this salvation that we must now direct our attention. His name was Leo, and he is often known as 'the Isaurian'; in fact, he was almost certainly nothing of the sort.
1
His simple peasant family had originated, so far as we can tell, in the old Roman town of Germanica, in the district of Commagene beyond the Taurus Mountains - the present
city of Maras
; later, as part of Justinian II's huge shifts of population, it had been resettled near Mesembria in Thrace.

From Leo's point of view, his new home could scarcely have been better chosen. Impelled, as he had been since early childhood, by a relentless determination to make his way in the world, he had ridden out to meet Justinian II when the Emperor was marching on Constantinople in
705
and, according to tradition, had offered him
500
sheep for the army; in return, he had been invited to join the imperial guard with the rank of
spath
arius.
Before long his outstanding abilities (or, as some have less charitably suggested, his insufficiently concealed ambitions) persuaded Justinian to send him to the East on a delicate diplomatic mission among the various barbarian peoples and buffer-states in Syria and the Caucasus - principally the Alans, Abasgians and Armenians - sometimes inciting one against the other, sometimes cementing alliances between them in opposition to the Arabs. It was a task for which Leo was admirably suited, and for several years he performed it brilliantly. It therefore came as no surprise when, in
715,
Anastasius appointed him Governor
(strategos)
of the Anatolikon, one of the largest and most important Themes in the Empire. He reached his new post just in time: early the following year two huge Saracen armies crossed the imperial border, one under the command of the Caliph's brother, Maslama, the other under a general named Suleiman; and the latter's first objective was the capital of the Anatolikon, the city of Amorium.
2

What happened next is obscure. Theophanes produces a whole saga of picaresque incident, told with an abundance of detail suggesting that it may well be based on some lost diary written by Leo himself; unfortunately his account is so involved as to be largely incomprehensible. All that emerges with any degree of certainty is that Leo immediately entered into negotiations with the Arab leaders and that in consequence,