The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (50 page)

some time towards the end of
71
6,
their armies retired once again behind the frontier. So bald a statement, on the other hand, raises more questions than it answers. How did Leo achieve such a remarkable result? What did he offer the Saracens in return for their withdrawal? Above all, perhaps, to what extent was there collusion between them? Our sources do not reveal; the most likely answer, however, is that Maslama and his colleague Suleiman tried to use Leo for their own ends, but were in fact outsmarted and used by him instead. They were already well aware that he was hostile to Theodosius and that he was generally expected, sooner or later, to seize the throne; and their intention was first to encourage his revolt and then, once he was safely established, to make him their puppet until such time as he could be obliged to surrender the whole Empire into the Caliph's hands. Theophanes records that Suleiman's forces, outside the walls of Amorium, were actually ordered to shout, 'Long Live the Emperor Leo!' and to encourage the city's defenders to take up the cry; and two separate Arab sources report that the
strategos
secretly promised to accept the generals as his paymasters and to do as they bade him.

So, very probably, he did — pointing out, however, that his path to the throne would be a good deal more difficult if he were seen to have Saracen support, and thereby persuading them to make their tactical retreat. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Leo ever had the slightest intention of betraying the Empire; his subsequent actions as Emperor are alone sufficient proof of that. But his profound understanding of Arab psychology and his easy fluency in Arabic - which, given his origins, may even have been his first language, with Greek only a later acquisition - enabled him to deceive and out-manoeuvre them at every turn.

Some months previously Leo had taken the precaution of obtaining the support of Artabasdus, Governor of the Armeniakon Theme, promising him in return the hand of his daughter in marriage and the rank of
curopalates —
one of the three highest in the Empire, usually reserved for members of the imperial family. Together, the two now marched on Constantinople. At Nicomedia they easily defeated a small army sent out against them under the command of Theodosius's son, taking him prisoner with his entire household. From there, knowing the defences of the capital to be virtually impregnable, Leo opened up negotiations with the Patriarch and Senate. They did not take much persuading. It was, they were well aware, only a matter of months before the Saracens renewed their offensive; if Constantinople were once again to be besieged, they were in little doubt as to whom they would rather have as their leader.

Early in 717 Theodosius, having received formal assurances that neither he nor his son would be harmed, abdicated the throne on to which he had been so unwillingly thrust and retired with relief to a monast
ery at Ephesus; meanwhile, on 25
March, the greatest Emperor since Heraclius entered the city in triumph by the Golden Gate and was crowned in St Sophia.

If we are right in our speculations, it may well have been in accordance with a carefully pre-arranged plan that, in the high summer of 717, Prince Maslama marched across Asia Minor. He captured Pergamum and pressed on to Abydos, whence he and his army crossed the He
llespont into Thrace; and on 15
August, with 80,000 men encamped around him, he stood before Constantinople. Just over a fortnight later, on 1 September, Suleiman entered the Marmara at the head of a fleet which the chroniclers estimate at 1,800 ships of war; and the blockade of the city began.

Leo III was ready - though not, perhaps, in quite the way that the Arab generals had expected. He had put to good account the five months that had elapsed since his coronation, pressing on with the various defence measures initiated by Anastasius and ensuring that his people had' all they needed to defend themselves against the worst that the Saracens could hurl against them. As the siege progressed, it came more and more to resemble its predecessors of the 670s, when for five years Constantine IV and his subjects had fought off the Saracen onslaught. In those days, however, the fighting had been limited to the summer months; now it continued throughout the winter - and that winter proved the cruellest that even the oldest citizens could remember, with the snow lying thick on the ground for over ten weeks. Inevitably it was the besiegers who suffered the most, unaccustomed as they were to the treacherous Constantinopolitan climate and having no protection against the elements but their flimsy tents - a more effective shield from the desert sun than against the icy winds of Thrace. Soon, too, the food ran out; in such conditions scavenging was impossible and, if Theophanes is to be believed, the desperate Arabs were reduced to eating their horses, donkeys and camels and, finally, cakes of dead men's flesh, mixed with their own excrement and baked in the camp ovens. Famine, as always, brought disease; with the hardness of the ground putting burial out of the question, hundreds of corpses were flung into the Marmara. Suleiman himself was among the victims. On the sea, meanwhile, Greek fire exacted a daily toll among the Saracen ships. There was a bad moment
in the early spring when the defenders were horrified to see on the horizon a second armada, almost as immense as the first, arriving from Egypt; fortunately the majority of them proved to be manned by Christian galley-slaves, who deserted
en masse
at the first opportunity.

It was, however, a Bulgarian army that delivered the
coup de grace.
The Bulgars had no love for the Byzantines, but they preferred them to the infidel and were in any case determined that, if Constantinople were to be taken, it should fall into Bulgar rather than Arab hands. As spring turned to summer they marched down from the north, fell on the sick and demoralized Saracens and killed, we are told,
22,000
of them. Now at last Maslama decided that he and his men had had enough: early in August he gave the signal to withdraw. The land army - or what was left of it - dragged itself back to Syria without further mishap; but the remainder of the fleet, by now so damaged as to be dangerously un-seaworthy, was almost annihilated in a series of summer storms. Only five vessels returned safely to their home ports.

This time the Byzantine victory was decisive. Over the years to come - indeed, throughout Leo's reign - the Arabs would make countless raids and incursions into Anatolia; but never again would they put the very survival of the Empire in jeopardy - and never again would they lay siege to its capital. As for the Emperor himself, he had amply justified his bid for power. He had, moreover, made a considerably larger contribution to his subjects' deliverance than most of them ever knew. As near-contemporary Arab accounts make clear, he had been in touch with Maslama and Suleiman from the start, making them endless promises that he had no intention of keeping and offering them copious advice that he knew would prove disastrous. Eventually, of course, the two leaders realized that they had been duped, and Leo cheerfully admitted as much; but by then it was too late. Meanwhile the Emperor had had plenty of time in which to indulge his penchant for intrigue: there are good reasons to suspect that both the mass desertion of the galley-slaves and the perfectly-timed arrival of the Bulgar army were due, at least in part, to his machinations.

In just a dozen years - he cannot even now have been much over thirty - Leo had risen from the status of a simple Syrian peasant to that of Emperor of Byzantium; and in doing so he had almost certainly saved his Empire from destruction. And yet, strangely enough, his chief claim to fame rests on neither of these achievements. The greatest and most fateful step of his career had yet to be taken.

*

Ever since the dawn of history, when man first became a religious animal and almost simultaneously - give or take a millennium or two - made his first clumsy attempts at adorning the walls of his cave, he has had to face one fundamental question; is art the ally of religion, or its most insidious enemy? Primitive societies often tended to take the easy way out by equating the two, first creating a fetish for themselves and then worshipping it; with the advent of theological speculation, however, and the idea of a universal deity unfettered to a piece of wood or stone, something better was required: and it thus became more and more essential to establish whether or not the visual depiction of the godhead was possible and, if so, whether it should be permitted.

Speaking in necessarily general terms of the world's great religions, it could be said that Judaism and - later - Islam set their faces resolutely against such practices, while the Hindus and the Buddhists saw no objection. As for Christianity, it has never quite made up its mind. For most of its history and among most of its adherents, pictorial or sculptural representations of Jesus Christ and even (though less frequently) God the Father have been enthusiastically encouraged, to the incalculable benefit of the artistic heritage of the world. In certain places and periods, however - England under the Commonwealth being an obvious example - opinion has swung sharply in the opposite direction; and never has such a reversal wrought more havoc, or caused more repercussions through the length and breadth of Christendom, than that which was instigated by Leo III - and was later to be carried on with even greater vigour by his son Constantine.

The sudden appearance of iconoclasm - the word means, literally, 'the smashing of icons' - on the Byzantine religious scene has often been explained by the proximity of the world of Islam, to which the very idea of a representation of the human form, whether religious or secular, was abhorrent; and it would be hard indeed to argue that Leo, with his Syrian background, was not to some extent at any rate influenced by Islamic beliefs and practices. On the other hand it should also be remembered that this new and revolutionary doctrine was in fact an obvious corollary to the monophysite belief: if we accept only the divine nature of Christ - which is by definition impossible to depict - and reject the human, we cannot logically approve of a two- or three-dimensional portrayal of him as a human being. It was therefore not surprising that most of the support for the new movement should come from the eastern provinces of the Empire, in which monophysitism had always been more prevalent and which had always been influenced by

oriental mystical philosophy, rather than from the more down-to-earth, materialistic West.

None the less, the iconoclasts had a strong case. Ever since the beginning of the century the cult of icons had been growing steadily more uncontrolled, to the point where holy images were openly worshipped in their own right and occasionally even served as godparents at baptisms. It was thus as a protest against what they considered flagrant idolatry that a number of bishops in Asia Minor had adopted an iconoclast manifesto and were now intent on spreading their ideas more widely through the Empire.

Leo himself, despite his Syrian background, had given no early indication of similar tendencies: indeed, on several occasions during the recent siege he had made full use of one of Constantinople's most popular wonder-working icons, the Virgin
Hodegetria
('She who shows the Way'), having it paraded up and down the city walls to give his men courage and to strike fear among the besiegers. On the other hand he had made no protest - as he had had every reason to do - when in
723
the Caliph Yazid, having been cured of a serious illness by a Jewish necromancer from Tiberias, was persuaded by the said necromancer to issue an edict ordering the immediate destruction of all Christian pictures in churches, markets or private ho
uses throughout his dominions;
and there is some evidence to suggest that the same
eminence grise
had subsequently appeared in Constantinople and put similar pressure on the Emperor. In
725
the iconoclast bishops certainly did so. It seems, therefore, that Leo's change of heart was far from spontaneous; rather was it the result of a combination of Muslim and Jewish influences, together with others — perhaps the strongest of all - exerted by a number of his own Christian subjects. In the same year he went so far as to preach a series of sermons in which he pointed out some of the more flagrant excesses of the iconodules - as the image-worshippers were called - which he held to be in open disobedience of the Law of Moses as laid down in the Second Commandment. Then, in
726,
he decided to set an example.

He could hardly have chosen a more striking one. Facing eastwards towards St Sophia across the broad open space of the Augusteum was the principal gateway to the imperial palace, known as the Chalke. Destroyed by the mob during the Nika riots, it had been rebuilt by Justinian and was now a magnificent edifice in its own right. Procopius tells us
2

that it was a tall, vaulted building with a central dome, the interior revetted with slabs of polychrome marble above which ran a cycle of dazzling mosaics representing the victories of Justinian and Belisarius and the capture of various cities of Italy and Libya. In the centre were full-length mosaic portraits of the Emperor and Theodora - presumably very much on the same lines as those in the still surviving Church of S. Vitale in Ravenna - with the Kings of the Goths and the Vandals standing bound before them and the Senate ranged solemnly to each side. The walls were lined with statues, some antique, some of former Emperors; outside, above the great bronze doors that gave the building its name, there rose a vast golden icon of Christ.

It was this tremendous icon - perhaps the largest and most prominent in the whole city - that Leo selected as the first to be destroyed. The popular reaction was immediate: the officer in charge of the demolition party was set upon by a group of outraged women and killed on the spot. As the news of the desecration spread, more demonstrations followed. Widespread mutinies were reported in the Aegean fleet, and others among the army in Thrace. Whatever the Eastern bishops might say, the Emperor's European subjects - inheritors as they were of the old Graeco-Roman tradition - had left their sovereign in no doubt of their own feelings. To them, iconoclasm meant nothing less than wilful sacrilege. They loved and revered their images, and they were prepared to fight for them.

Leo saw that he must advance with caution. Once he had dealt with the mutineers, he decided to give tempers time to cool. Unfortunately, they did nothing of the kind. In
727,
his Italian subjects in the Exarchate of Ravenna rose in revolt, backed to the hilt by Pope Gregory who, quite apart from his natural feelings of revulsion at the destruction of the holy images, deeply resented the Emperor's presumption in arrogating to himself the supreme authority in matters of doctrine. The Exarch was murdered, his provincial governors put ignominiously to flight. Meanwhile the rebellious garrisons, all recruited locally, chose their own commanders and asserted their independence.
1

These upheavals, it should be noted, were the consequence not of any imperial decree but of a single action by the Emperor: the destruction

1
In the communities along the shore of the Venetian lagoon, their choice fell on a
certain Ursus, or Orso, from He
raclea, who was placed at the head of the former provincial administration and given the title of
Dux.
At that moment the Republic of Venice was born; and that title, transformed by the rough Venetian dialect into
Doge,
was to be passed down through
117
successors and over more than a thousand years until the Republic's end in
1797-