The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (53 page)

The attempted insurrection provided her with an excuse to carry out a purge of the army; but the price she paid was a high one. In face of the dismissal of many of the best and most popular officers, those who had escaped the purge grew discontented and demoralized to the point where they could no longer feel any loyalty to the imperial throne. In Sicily, the Byzantine Governor declared himself independent and shortly afterwards threw in his lot with the Saracens of North Africa. In the East, when the Caliph's son Harun al-Rashid crossed the border in
782
at the head of an army estimated at
100,000,
the Armenian general Tatzates immediately defected in similar fashion, his men following him without hesitation: Harun was eventually bought off by a humiliating and expensive truce, by the terms of which Irene agreed to pay him an annual tribute of
70,000
gold dinars for the next three years. Significantly, the Empress's only military success throughout the years of her regency was won in her native Greece, where the army was composed largely of westerners and iconoclasts were few. Thither in
783
she dispatched her chief minister and favourite, the eunuch Stauracius who, having first put down the rebellious Slavs in Macedonia and Thessaly, advanced deep into the still unsubdued Peloponnese, whence he returned loaded with plunder.

After this small triumph Irene felt strong enough to press on with her ecclesiastical policy. In
784
the iconoclast Patriarch resigned - the reason given was ill health, but some degree of persuasion does not seem unlikely - his place being taken by the Empress's former secretary Tarasius. In the circumstances, she could have made no better choice. The new Patriarch had never been a churchman; though he was well versed in theology - as were all educated Byzantines - his training had been that of a civil servant and diplomat. His approach to the iconoclast issue was consequently that of a practical statesman rather than a cleric. Even he, as we shall see, was to make mistakes; it remains true that much of the short-term success of the iconodule reaction was due to his wisdom and sound judgement.

The first priority, he decided, must be the restoration of relations with Rome. On
29
August
785
Irene and her son therefore addressed a letter to Pope Hadrian I, inviting him to send delegates to a new Council at Constantinople which would repudiate the findings of its heretical predecessor. The Pope replied with guarded enthusiasm. It was, he suggested, a pity that the Emperor and Empress had seen fit to appoint a layman to the Patriarchate, and had once again described him as 'Ecumenical'; on the other hand he greatly looked forward to therestoration of the South Italian, Sicilian and Illyrian bishoprics to his authority, and expressed his confidence that, if they dutifully followed his guidance as their spiritual father, young Constantine would grow up to be another Constantine the Great while Irene herself would prove a second Helena.

Thus, when the Council convened for its opening session on
17
August
786
in the Church of the Holy Apostles - the qualifying adjective, forbidden in the days of Constantine V, now happily reinstated - complete with delegates from Rome and all three Eastern Patriarchates, the cause of the icons seemed assured. But Tarasius, carefully as he had laid his plans, had underestimated the determination of the iconoclast diehards; they were not yet beaten, and they demonstrated the fact in the most forceful manner possible. Soon after the delegates had taken their seats, a detachment of soldiers from the imperial guard and the city garrison suddenly burst into the church and threatened dire penalties on all who did not leave at once. The meeting broke up in disorder verging on panic, and the papal legates, deeply shaken, at once took ship back to Rome.

Irene and Tarasius acted with decision. A few weeks later they announced a new expedition against the Saracens. The mutinous troops were mobilized for action and carried across into Asia; once there they were quietly but firmly disbanded, their place in the capital being taken by trustworthy units from Bithynia. Meanwhile the departed delegates were laboriously reassembled, and in September
787
the reconvened Seventh Ecumenical Council began its work at last, amid the strictest security precautions, in the Church of the Holy Wisdom at Nicaea -where the First Council had been held by Constantine the Great more than four and a half centuries before. As an earnest of its good intentions towards Rome, the two papal delegates - who had got as far as Sicily before their reluctant return - were given precedence over all the rest, including Patriarch Tarasius, in the attendance lists; the Patriarch served, however, as acting chairman - the true presidency being vested in Christ himself, represented (as was usual in Church assemblies) by the Book of the Gospels, laid open upon the presidential throne.

This time there were no interruptions. The business of the Council, it appeared, was not to discuss the pros and cons of iconoclasm; it was simply to ratify the return to the veneration of images. In the year that had passed since the abortive meeting in Constantinople, the entire opposition seems to have withered away. This is not, however, to say that matters proceeded entirely smoothly. Indeed, the very first issue to be discussed - the treatment of those formerly iconoclast bishops who were now prepared to admit their past errors - generated considerable heat, certain of the delegates almost coming to blows. The Council wisely decided that these bishops, once they had made full and public recantation, should be taken back into the bosom of the Church; but the motion was carried only in the teeth of violent opposition on the part of the representatives of diehard monasticism, who insisted that the offending prelates should be cast for ever into the outer darkness. There was much angry muttering as the former iconoclasts stood up one after the other, to acknowledge, as one of them put it, that they had been 'born, bred and trained in heresy', stigmatizing the Council of 754 as 'a synod gathered together out of stubbornness and madness . .. contrary to all truth and piety, audaciously and temerariously subversive of the traditional law of the Church by the insults that it hurled and the contempt that it showed towards the holy and venerable images'.

With relief, the Council now turned to a less divisive topic. Though all those present were agreed on the general desirability of the images, it was deemed essential to assemble a body of supporting evidence from the Scriptures and the early Fathers of the Church, thereby establishing the truth once and for all - and, it was hoped, ensuring that the same doctrinal mistake could not be repeated by generations to come. Some of the testimony adduced was of such footling triviality that it might have been better suppressed: the recanting Bishop Basil of Ancyra, for example, assured the assembly that he had frequendy read the story of the sacrifice of Isaac and had remained unmoved, but that the moment he saw it illustrated he burst into tears. Another former iconoclast, Theodore of Myra, capped this neatly with a story of one of his archdeacons, who had had a vision of St Nicholas and was fortunately able to recognize him at once from his icon. But at last the task was completed to the general satisfaction, and by the seventh session the Council was ready to approve a new definition of doctrine. This condemned hostility to holy images as heresy; decreed that all iconoclast literature must be immediately surrendered to the Patriarchal office in Constantinople under pain of degradation from holy orders or, in the case of laymen, of excommunication; and formally approved the veneration of icons. It concluded thus:

Wherefore we define with all strictness and care that the venerable and holy icons be set up, just as is the image of the venerable and life-giving Cross,

inasmuch as matter consisting of paints and pebbles and other materials is suitable to the holy Church of God, on sacred vessels and vestments, on walls and panels, in houses and streets: both the images of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ, and of our undefiled Lady the Holy Mother of God, and of the honourable angels, and of all the Saints.

For the more continuously these are seen by means of pictorial representation, the more their beholders are led to remember and to love the originals, and to give them respect and honourable obeisance: not that we should worship them with the true worship which is appropriate only to the Divine; yet still with offering of candles and incense, in the same way as we do to the form of the life-giving and venerable Cross and to the holy Gospel-Book, and to other sacred objects, even as was the pious custom in ancient days also.

That last sentence sounded a gentle note of warning: icons were to be objects of veneration
(proskynesis)
rather than adoration
(latreia).
The point may seem self-evident: anything else would be flagrant idolatry. But the delegates were well aware that it was the blurring of the distinction between the two that had been at least partially responsible for the rise of the iconoclast movement in the first place. It was as well to keep the faithful on their guard.

For its eighth and last session the entire Council moved to Constantinople where, on
23
October, it met in the palace of Magnaura under the joint presidency of Irene and her son. The definition of doctrine was read again, and was unanimously approved. It was then solemnly signed by the Empress and the Emperor, after which the delegates dispersed to their homes. Irene and Tarasius, having finally achieved their objective, had good cause to congratulate themselves.

Gibbon describes this second Council of Nicaea as 'a curious monument of superstition and ignorance, of falsehood and folly'. So in a way it was - particularly since, for all its outward unanimity, it heralded only a brief interruption in the iconoclast period: a quarter of a century later, its findings were to be repudiated in their turn and the holy images subjected once again to execration. The author of one of the most comprehensive works on iconoclasm, however, takes a radically different view.
1
For him, the Council ranks as 'one of those events, trivial in themselves, which are great crises in the history of Christianity', because 'it completed the process of identifying Christianity with the Graeco-Latin civilization'. The iconoclasts, he argues, like the monophysites before them, reflected the oriental, mystical side of the Christian religion towards which, thanks to the influence of the Eastern

1
E. J. Martin,
The History
of
the Iconodastic
Controversy.

provinces - and, indeed, of Islam itself - the Byzantine Empire was constantly being drawn. But it never ceased to resist; and its resistance kept it rooted, theologically, in the Mediterranean world. If we accept this theory - and it seems difficult not to do so - the second Council of Nicaea can be seen as the sequel to that of Chalcedon, the Empire's Mast gesture of refusal to the claims of the Asiatic ideal'. Its tragedy was that, as the years went by, it increasingly lost political touch with the West, and consequently became 'a tragic monument of obstinate isolation' - a fact which will grow ever more apparent as our story continues.

The seventeen-year-old Emperor Constantine VI who signed the definitions reached by the second Council of Nicaea was still a figurehead; and despite his marriage to the beautiful Paphlagonian Mary of Amnia in the following year, a figurehead he was for the moment content to remain. How long he would have accepted this almost total exclusion from public affairs if his mother had been able to control her ambitions we cannot tell; but in
790
Irene overreached herself. Just when she should have been arranging to associate her son more closely with the imperial government, she resolved instead to inflict upon him a new and quite unnecessary humiliation - decreeing that henceforth she should take precedence over him as senior ruler, and that her name should always be mentioned before his. From that moment on Constantine found himself, whether he liked it or not, to be the rallying-point of all those who were opposed to his mother - and thus, inevitably, of many of the iconoclast old guard. Before long a group of them had formed a conspiracy with the object of seizing the Empress and banishing her to Sicily; but the ever-watchful Irene got wind of it in time, dealt firmly with those responsible, flung her son into prison and, to strengthen her position still further, demanded that the entire army swear an oath of allegiance to her personally.

Once again she had gone too far. In Constantinople and the European provinces, the soldiers swore their oath willingly enough; but in Asia Minor - where the iconoclast element remained strong - there was point-blank refusal. The mutiny, led by the troops of the Armeniakon Theme, spread rapidly: within a matter of days, Constantine was being acclaimed on all sides as the Empire's sole legitimate ruler. Hastily liberated from his prison, the young Emperor joined his adherents in Anatolia and returned with them in strength to the capital. Stauracius, Irene's Logothete and her chief lieutenant, was flogged, tonsured and banished to the Armeniakon; several lesser members of the Empress's court
suffered similar fates. As for Irene herself, she was confined to her palace of Eleutherius, work on which had recently been completed. We should probably be mistaken in supposing that Constantine was personally responsible for such decisive measures; it is far likelier that the decisions were taken by his military supporters and that he remained his usual passive self. But his popularity was greater than it had ever been, his supremacy undisputed. The future was his.

And he threw it away. Weak, vacillating and easily led, he soon acquired the reputation of always believing the last thing he was told, and of following the most recent advice he was given. When in the autumn of
791
Harun al-Rashid's Saracens invaded his eastern provinces, he immediately concluded another shameful peace, involving the payment of a tribute which the Empire could ill afford; when at about the same time hostilities broke out along the Bulgarian frontier and he was obliged to go on campaign himself, he proved incapable of command and, at Marcellae in
792,
ignominiously fled the field. That same year he actually allowed himself to be persuaded to recall his mother to the capital and restore her to her former power. For the secret iconoclasts in Constantinople, whose hopes he had thus betrayed, this was the last straw. A new plot was hatched, with the object of dethroning both mother and son in favour of the Caesar Nicephorus - one of the five brothers of Leo IV — despite the holy orders that had been forced on him a dozen years before; but it too was discovered, and for the first time in his life Constantine acted with decision. He had Nicephorus blinded; and, in the unlikely event that any of his other uncles should harbour similar ambitions, ordered that all four should have their tongues cut out.

The Emperor, it now appeared, was not only indecisive, disloyal and a coward; he was also capable of the most brutal cruelty. Few of his subjects could have retained any respect for so contemptible a ruler. Outside the iconoclast faction in the army of Asia Minor, one group only was prepared to accord him even a moderate degree of support: the representatives of the old monastic party, who had been gratified to find him apparently well disposed towards them - instead of openly favouring the iconoclasts as they had feared - and who had rejoiced still further when he had reinstated his mother on her former throne. But now they in their turn were to be alienated. In January
795
they learned to their horror that the Emperor had divorced his wife and was contemplating a second marriage. Mary of Amnia, for all her beauty, had not been a success. She had, admittedly, borne her husband a daughter, Euphrosyne, who thirty years later was to attain imperial rank as the wife of the

Emperor Michael II; but there had been no son to assure the succession, and Constantine was in any case bored with her, having long ago given his heart to Theodote, one of the court ladies. Mary was packed off to a nunnery; Patriarch Tarasius reluctantly condoned the divorce; and the following August, in the palace of St Mamas outside Constantinople, the Emperor and Theodote were married. Fourteen months later she presented him with a son.

The monks were scandalized. For an Emperor to remarry after his wife's death was one thing; but for him to put away his lawful Empress in favour of another woman - this was a sin against the Holy Ghost. Constantine's association with Theodote, they thundered, could in no circumstances be tolerated; nor could the bastard child be considered as a possible successor. The leaders of the protest, Abbot Plato of the monastery of Saccudion in Bithynia and his nephew Theodore - later to achieve celebrity as Abbot of the Studium in Constantinople - were exiled to Thessalonica, but their followers refused to be silenced. Nor was the adulterous Emperor the only
object of these monkish fulmina
tions; almost as much of their fury was directed against Tarasius, for having allowed the marriage to take place - even though he had been careful not to officiate himself.

Whether or not the worldly Patriarch ever revealed to his accusers that Constantine had threatened to ally himself openly with the iconoclasts if the necessary permission were refused, we do not know; it certainly did not prevent charges of heresy being prepared against him. As the months went by, moreover, the so-called Moechian controversy
1
was seen to have a significance which went far beyond the narrow issue of the Emperor's second marriage. Its long-term effect was further to deepen the split, not between iconoclasts and iconodules but between the two branches of the latter: the more or less fanatical monks on the one hand and, on the other, the moderates who understood that the Empire was something more than an outsize monastery, and that if the elements of Church and State were to work effectively in tandem there must be a degree of give and take on both sides. This split had already become apparent at the recent Council in Nicaea, during the discussion on the status of the recanting bishops; it was to continue for another century and more, dividing and weakening the Church on several occasions when unity was desperately needed and poisoning relations between churchmen who, working together, might have conferred lasting benefits on the Empire.

i From the Greek
moiche
ia,
adultery.