The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (52 page)

— which was nowhere near Thrace, but comprised the central section of the Ionian coast and its hinterland - the local Governor assembled every monk and nun and commanded them all to marry at once or face transportation to Cyprus. This same official, Michael Lachanodrakon, is also said to have impregnated the beards of those monks who opposed him with a highly inflammable mixture of oil and wax, and then set fire to them; in their abandoned monasteries he committed whole libraries to the flames, sold the consecrated vessels of gold and silver and sent the proceeds to the Emperor - who replied with an effusive letter of thanks, describing him as a man after his own heart. Of what happened in the other Themes we have rather less information; but the story is unlikely to have been very different.

For atrocities of this kind there can obviously be no excuse; but it is only fair to observe that in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries the monasteries in the Empire had multiplied in both size and number to the point where they were beginning to cause the administration serious concern. Despite all the ambitious resettlement programmes of Justinian II and others, there remained huge areas of Asia Minor which were still desperately underpopulated; and the situation became graver still between 745 and 747, when an epidemic of bubonic plague removed perhaps a third of the inhabitants. For reasons both economic and military, more manpower was urgently needed - to till the soil, to defend the frontiers and, above all, to reproduce. Instead, more and more of the population, male and female, rich and poor, young and old, were opting for a life which was both sterile and unproductive and which, however beneficial it might be to their immortal souls, was utterly useless to the State. It was this dangerous tendency, every bit as much as religious superstition in the narrower sense, that Constantine was fighting during his later years; we are told that few thing* angered him more than when members of his court or, worse still, officers of the army announced their intention of retiring to some distant cloister when their work was done. Ultimately, however, he lost the battle. His draconian measures could not fail to be effective in the short term; but within a few years of his death the monasteries were as full and flourishing as before. Indeed, the problem that they presented was never completely solved. For all their undoubted contribution to the civilization of Byzantium, they were to continue to drain its life blood for another seven centuries, until the end came.

The reign of Constantine Copronymus is so overshadowed by the spectre
of iconoclasm that his military achievements are all too often overlooked. He was by no means the natural soldier that his father had been; nervous and highly strung, he had a chronically weak constitution and suffered from periodic bouts of depression and ill health. Few Emperors, in short, seemed worse equipped, physically or temperamentally, for the rigours of military life. And yet, against all expectations, he proved a courageous fighter, a brilliant tactician and a superb leader of men; and, of all his subjects, it was probably his soldiers who loved him the most.

In the first decade of his reign, once Artabasdus had been dealt with, his principal adversaries were the Arabs, weakened as they were by a long and bitter civil war which enabled Byzantium at long last to take the initiative. In
746,
Constantine invaded northern Syria and captured Germanicia, the home of his ancestors; the larger part of the population he resettled in Thrace, where a colony of Syrian monophysites survived well into the ninth century. The next year brought a major victory at sea, when an Arab fleet from Alexandria fell victim, as so many others had done before it, to the ravages of Greek fire. Other triumphs followed in Armenia and Mesopotamia; but then, in
750,
the situation underwent a radical change. At the battle of the Greater Zab River, the army of the Caliph Marwan II was smashed by that of Abu al-Abbas al-Suffah, and the Omayyad dynasty of Damascus came to an end. The Caliphate passed to the Abbasids of Baghdad, who were more interested in the East - in Persia, Afghanistan and Transoxiana - than in Europe, Africa or Asia Minor; and the Emperor in Constantinople was able to turn his attention to other, more immediate dangers nearer home.

Notably the Bulgars. For some years their attitude towards the Empire had been growing increasingly threatening, and in
756
matters came to a head. The immediate cause of the trouble seems to have been the sudden influx of Syrians into Thrace after Constantine-'s expedition, and the still more unwelcome arrival of a colony of Armenians a year or two later. This had necessitated the building of several fortresses, which may well have been a technical violation of a treaty concluded between Theodosius III and Tervel in
716;
in any event it provided the Bulgars with an excuse for a new invasion of imperial territory. Riding out at once at the head of his army, the Emperor had little difficulty in putting the invaders to flight; but he could not prevent their returning again and again in the years that followed, and henceforth successive Bulgar campaigns became a regular feature of Byzantine military life. Constantine himself was to lead no less than nine of them; and one, in
763,
brought him the most glorious - though also the most hard-won victory of his career, when on
30
June, in a battle which raged from dawn to dusk on one of the longest days of the year, he utterly destroyed the invading army of King Teletz, subsequently celebrating his success with a triumphal entry into his capital and special games in the Hippodrome.

And even that was not the end. There was another important campaign in
773,
and yet another in
775.
But this, for Constantine, was the last. As he was marching northward to the frontier in the fierce heat of August, his legs grew so swollen and inflamed that they could no longer support him. He was carried on a litter back to Arcadiopolis and thence to the port of Selymbria where, shortly afterwards, a ship arrived to take him home to Constantinople. It was not a long journey, but he did not live to complete it. His condition suddenly worsened, and he died on
14
September. He was fifty-seven.

It was unfortunate - perhaps, for Byzantium, disastrous - that Constantine should never have spared for his Western dominions even a fraction of the care and attention he lavished on those of the East. Within a few years of his accession, Italy had found itself under heavy pressure from the advancing Lombards, who were already whittling away at Byzantine territory. At that time a well-directed expedition - which the Empire was quite capable of launching - might have saved the situation; but instead of showing the solidarity that was so desperately needed, Constantine deliberately antagonized the Pope, and with him the vast majority of his Italian flock, by his clumsy attempts to enforce icono-clasm. Somehow the Exarchate survived - though only just - the events of
727;
but in
751
Ravenna was finally captured by the Lombard King Aistulf, and the last imperial foothold in North Italy was lost, never to be regained. Rome, abandoned by the Emperor, was left naked to her enemies.

But not for long. Beyond the Alps to the west, a new and more benevolent power was rapidly rising to greatness. In the very year that Ravenna fell, the Frankish leader Pepin the Short had received papal approval for the deposition of the Merovingian King Childeric III -who had long been his puppet — and his own coronation. Pope Stephen II - to whom the Franks must have seemed considerably more desirable allies than the heretical and domineering Byzantines - thus felt himself in a strong position to seek assistance and personally set off for France where, at Ponthion, in
754,
on the Feast of the Epiphany, he conferred upon Pepin the title of Patrician and anointed him, together with his
two sons, Charles and Carloman, as King of the Franks. In return Pepin promised to transfer all those territories which the Lombards had captured from the Empire, not to their rightful sovereign but to the Pope.

He proved as good as his word. In response to a letter said to have been miraculously penned by St Peter himself, Frankish troops swept into Italy, bringing Aistulf to his knees; and in
756
Pepin forthwith proclaimed the Pope sole ruler of those lands formerly comprised by the imperial Exarchate, snaking across central Italy to embrace Ravenna, Perugia and Rome itself. His authority to do any such thing is, to say the least, doubtful. It was at one time suggested that he might have justified his action by the so-called Donation of Constantine, of which there will be more to say later; but recent evidence suggests that this shameless forgery was not concocted for another half-century. It remains true that the Papal States which he thus brought into being, however shaky their legal foundation, were to endure for over eleven centuries, providing a standing invitation to foreign adventurers up to and including Napoleon III, and constituting one of the principal obstacles to the realization of Italy's long-cherished dream of unity; while the Frankish alliance with the Pope was to lead, less than half a century later, to the establishment of the only Christian polity - apart from the Papacy itself - ever to put forward claims equal to those of Byzantium itself: the Holy Roman Empire.

18

I
rene

[775
-802]

An image, when the original is not present, sheds a glory like the original; but when the reality is there the image itself is outshone, the likeness remaining acceptable because it reveals the truth.

Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Nicephorus

Despite his unorthodox sexual proclivities, Constantine Copronymus was three times married and succeeded in fathering, on two of his wives, six sons and a daughter; and it was the eldest of those sons, born of another Khazar princess, who on his death assumed the throne as Leo IV. Although far more balanced a character than his father, Leo proved to be nowhere near so capable a ruler; allowance, however, must be made for two cruel handicaps with which he had to contend throughout his short reign. One was the disease - probably tuberculosis - which was to kill him while he was still some months short of his thirty-second birthday. The other was his wife, Irene.

The second Athenian to become Empress of Byzantium, Irene could hardly have been more different in character
from the brilliant young Athen
ais who had married Theodosius II three and a half centuries before. Scheming and duplicitous, consumed by a devouring ambition and an insatiable lust for power, she was to bring dissension and disaster to the Empire for nearly a quarter of a century, and to leave a still darker stain on her reputation by one of the foulest murders that even Byzantine history has to record. During her husband's lifetime she could operate only through him; but as he was both morally and physically weak while she was preternaturally strong, her influence is discernible from the moment that he assumed the supreme authority.

Why Leo - or, more probably, his father - chose her is a mystery. She was, it is true, startlingly beautiful; but the Empire was full of beautiful women and she possessed no other obvious advantage. Her family and antecedents were obscure; although she seems to have adopted the name of Irene only on her marriage, we know of no other. Her native city, too, had long since lost its old distinction. The former intellectual capital of the world was now a pious little provincial town: even the Parthenon had been converted into a church. Worse still from the imperial point of view, the people of Athens were known to be fervent supporters of images; and Irene was no exception. Her husband, left to himself, would have been an iconoclast like his father - in one of his rare moments of self-assertion he was to have a group of senior officials publicly scourged and imprisoned for icon-worship - but his wife made no secret of her own sympathy for such practices and constantly strove to bring about, once and for all, the defeat of iconoclasm and everything that it stood for.

Now there is no reason to think that Irene was not perfectly sincere in her beliefs, and for as long as her activities were limited to the exercise of a moderating influence on her husband they were plainly beneficial: thanks in large measure to her, the exiled monks were allowed back into their monasteries, the Virgin Mary was once again accepted as an object of veneration rather than the butt of ribald jokes, and the Emperor was actually hailed as 'Friend to the Mother of God' - a title that would have thrown his father into paroxysms. But during the high summer of
780
Leo's health took a sudden turn for the worse. Boils broke out all over his head and face, he was stricken with a violent fever and on
8
September he died, leaving a son just ten years old. This was Irene's opportunity. She immediately declared herself Regent on behalf of the boy, and for the next eleven years was the effective ruler of the Roman Empire.

Her position was not, however, undisputed. The army in Anatolia, still overwhelmingly iconoclast, mutinied within a matter of weeks, ostensibly in favour of one or the other of the late Emperor's five brothers, all hopelessly incompetent but providing a useful focus for discontents. The insurrection was quickly put down, and its ringleaders appropriately punished, the five brothers — who were quite probably innocent - being tonsured, forcibly ordained and then, lest anyone should have any further doubts about their religious status, obliged jointly to administer the sacrament at St Sophia on the Christmas Day following. For Irene, the lesson was not lost. Now more than ever she understood the strength of the opposition: every high office of Church and State and most of the army was in iconoclast hands. If she were to succeed in her purpose, she would have to pick her way with care.