The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (54 page)

Meanwhile, Constantine had forfeited his last remaining potential supporters in Constantinople and was now defenceless against his most formidable enemy - his mother, Irene. She had never forgiven him for her deposition, temporary as it had been; and she knew just how easily it could happen again. She was fully aware that her son's real sympathies lay with the iconoclasts, and vice versa; and she had no delusions about their strength among the army in Asia. While Constantine lived, another coup was always a possibility - and one which might well not only destroy her but undo all her work and reimpose iconoclastic doctrines throughout the Empire. For that reason, since her return to power, she had lost no opportunity of undermining his position in every way she could. It is more than probable that she had deliberately encouraged him in his plans for divorce and remarriage, the better to discredit him in the eyes of her own most fervent supporters, the monks. Almost certainly, when in an endeavour to redeem his military reputation he marched in the spring of 797 against the Saracens, it was her own agents who fed him false intelligence to the effect that the enemy had withdrawn across the frontier; only when he returned to Constantinople did he discover that Harun al-Rashid had done nothing of the kind and was still in occupation of large tracts of Byzantine territory. The murmurs of cowardice, never altogether silenced, grew louder again - just as Irene had intended that they should.

In June, she was ready to strike. One day, when Constantine was riding in procession from the Hippodrome to the Church of St Mamas in Blachernae, a party of soldiers leaped out from a side street and fell upon him. His own guards fought back, and during the ensuing melee he managed to escape and have himself rowed across the Bosphorus, where he hoped to find support. But Irene moved more quickly than her son. He was captured almost at once and brought back to the imperial palace; and there, on Tuesday
1
5
August at three o'clock in the afternoon, in the Porphyry Pavilion where he had been born twenty-seven years earlier, his eyes were put out. The act, we are told, was performed in a particularly brutal manner in order to ensure that he would not survive; and although some doubt remains as to how long he actually did so, there can be none that Irene was guilty of his murder. Theophanes tells us that, as a sign of divine disapprobation, the very sky was darkened; and that it remained so for the next seventeen days.

Since Constantine's young son by Theodote had died - probably of natural causes, though with our knowledge of his grandmother we can never be entirely sure - only a few months after his birth, Irene now found herself not only the sole occupant of the throne of Byzantium but the first woman ever to preside, not as a regent but in her own right, over the Empire. It was a position for which she had long striven but one which, in the event, she had little opportunity to enjoy. Over the past years her two chief advisers, the eunuchs Stauracius and Aetius, had developed an almost pathological jealousy of each other, to the point where their incessant intrigues made effective government impossible. Irene's popularity among her subjects - never great at the best of times - declined sharply after the murder of her son, and she now attempted to redeem it by granting enormous remissions of taxes, which the Empire could not begin to afford. Among the most favoured beneficiaries were the monastic institutions that had always been her chief source of support; in addition, the immensely profitable customs and excise duties levied at Abydos and in the Straits were cut by half, while the hated tax on receipts was abolished altogether, as was the municipal levy payable by all the free citizens of Constantinople.

But measures of this kind could only delay the inevitable. The Empress's more thoughtful subjects were disgusted at the sheer irresponsibility of her actions, and despised her for her assumption that their affections could be so easily bought. The largely iconoclast army of Asia, who had always detested her and had come near to mutiny after Constantine's murder, were horrified and humiliated by the new and increased tribute that she had promised to Harun al-Rashid, and must also have been asking themselves where their future pay was coming from. The civil service watched powerless while the imperial treasury grew emptier every day, and began to despair of ever setting the economy to rights. Meanwhile the reactionaries of every age and station throughout the Empire, who had always shaken their heads at the thought of a female Basileus, now saw their direst suspicions confirmed. It was clearly only a matter of time before one or another of these groups rose up - in the interests not of themselves but of Byzantium itself - and overthrew her.

When the coup finally occurred, which, of all the reasons suggested above, was the one that actually decided the conspirators to act as and when they did? Very probably, none of them: because by now there was another, which called still more urgently for swift and decisive action. On Christmas Day
800
at St Peter's in Rome, Charles, son of Pepin the Frank, had been crowned by Pope Leo III with the imperial crown and the title of Emperor of the Romans; and some time in the summer of
802
he sent ambassadors to Irene with a proposal of marriage.

Well before his coronation, Charles the Great - or, as he soon came to be called, Charlemagne - was an Emperor in all but name. He had become sole ruler of the Franks in
771,
on the sudden death of his brother Carloman; two years later he had captured Pavia and proclaimed himself King of the Lombards. Returning to Germany, he had next subdued the heathen Saxons and converted them
en masse
to Christianity before going on to annex the already-Christian Bavarians. An invasion of Spain was less successful - though it provided the inspiration for the first great epic ballad of Western Europe, the
Chanson de Roland -
but Charles's subsequent campaign against the Avars in Hungary and Upper Austria had resulted in the destruction of their Kingdom as an independent state and its incorporation in turn within his own dominions. Thus, in little more than a generation, he had raised the Kingdom of the Franks from being just one of the many semi-tribal European states to a single political unit of vast extent, unparalleled since the days of imperial Rome.

And he had done so, for most of the time at least, with the enthusiastic approval of the Papacy. It was nearly half a century since Pope Stephen had struggled across the Alps to seek help against the Lombards from Charles's father Pepin - an appeal which might more properly have been addressed to the Byzantine Emperor, and indeed would have been if Constantine Copronymus could only have spared a few moments from his iconoclast obsession to turn his attention to the problem of Italy. Pepin and Charles had succeeded where Byzantium had failed; and although the rift between Rome and Constantinople had been theoretically healed at Nicaea, Pope Hadrian had in fact been far from satisfied by the report he had received from his representatives on their return to Rome. They had pointed out, for example, that when the Pope's message to Irene and Constantine had been read aloud to the assembled Council, all the controversial passages - including those in which he had protested against the uncanonical consecration of Patriarch Tarasius and the latter's use of the 'Ecumenical' title - had been suppressed. Neither had any indication been forthcoming that the disputed South Italian, Sicilian and Illyrian bishoprics might be returned to papal jurisdiction. Small wonder, then, that Hadrian and his successor Leo had remained loyal to their infinitely more reliable western champion, even if this did entail certain concessions where the cult of images was concerned — Charles rather inconveniently maintaining his own opinions on the subject which, while less extreme than those upheld by the Council of
754,
approximated a good deal more closely to iconoclast doctrines than the Curia liked to admit.

The King of the Franks had been to Rome once before: on a state visit in
774
when, as a young man of thirty-two, he had been welcomed by Hadrian and, deeply impressed by all he saw, had confirmed his father's donation of that central Italian territory which formed the nucleus of the Papal State. In
800
he came on more serious business. Pope Leo, ever since his accession four years before, had been the victim of incessant intrigue on the part of a body of young Roman noblemen who were determined to remove him; and on
25
April he was actually set upon in the street and beaten unconscious. Only by the greatest good fortune was he rescued by friends and removed for safety to Charles's court at Paderborn. Under the protection of Frankish agents he returned to Rome a few months later, only to find himself facing a number of serious charges fabricated by his enemies, including simony, perjury and adultery.

By whom, however, could he be tried? Who, in other words, was qualified to pass judgement on the Vicar of Christ? In normal circumstances the only conceivable answer to that question would have been the Emperor at Constantinople; but the imperial throne was at this moment occupied by Irene. That the Empress was notorious for having blinded and murdered her own son was, in the minds of both Leo and Charles, almost immaterial: it was enough that she was a woman. The female sex was known to be incapable of governing, and by the old Salic tradition was debarred from doing so. As far as Western Europe was concerned, the Throne of the Emperors was vacant: Irene's claim to it was merely an additional proof, if any were needed, of the degradation into which the so-called Roman Empire had fallen.

Charles was fully aware, when he travelled to Rome towards the end of
800,
that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgement at St Peter's; but he also knew that wh
ile the accusations remained un
refuted Christendom lacked not only an Emperor but a Pope as well, and he was determined to do all he could to clear Leo's name. As to the precise nature of his testimony, we can only guess; but on
23
December, at the high altar, the Pope swore a solemn oath on the Gospels that he was innocent of all the charges levelled against him - and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head, while the entire congregation cheered him to the echo. He had received, as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title: the crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any
number of conquests; for it meant that, after more than
400
years, there was once again an Emperor in Western Europe.

There remains the question of why the Pope acted as he did. Not, certainly, to engineer a deliberate split in the Roman Empire, still less to bring about two rival Empires where one had been before. There was, so far as he was concerned, no living Emperor at that time. Very well, he would create one; and because the Byzantines had proved so unsatisfactory from every point of view - political, military and doctrinal -he would select a westerner: the one man who by his wisdom and statesmanship and the vastness of his dominions, as well as by his prodigious physical stature, stood out head and shoulders above his contemporaries. But if Leo conferred a great honour on Charles that Christmas morning, he bestowed a still greater one on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and sceptre, the Emperor of the Romans. Here was something new, perhaps even revolutionary. No Pontiff had ever before claimed for himself such a privilege - not only establishing the imperial crown as his own personal gift but simultaneously granting himself implicit superiority over the Emperor whom he had created.

If, however, there was no precedent for this extraordinary step, by what authority was it taken? And so we come to what was arguably the most momentous - and the most successful - fraud of the Middle Ages: that known as the Donation of Constantine, according to which Constantine the Great, recognizing the primacy of his contemporary Pope Sylvester, had diplomatically retired to the 'province' of Byzantium, leaving his imperial crown for the Pope to bestow on whomsoever he might select as temporal Emperor of the Romans. This totally spurious document, fabricated around the turn of the century within the Curia, was to prove of inestimable value to papal claims for well over
600
years, its authenticity remaining unquestioned - even by the enemies of Rome - until it was finally exposed, in the middle of the fifteenth century, by the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla.
1

1 Dante, that staunch upholder of imperial claims, deplores it in a famous passage:

Abi,
Costantin, di quanto mal fu mat
re,

Non la tna conversion, ma qui
lla dote

Che
da te prese il prima ricco pat
re!

[
A
h
Constantine, how great an evil sprang

Not from thine own conversion,

but that gift

That first rich Father did receive from thee!)

Inferno, xix,
115-17

Historians have long debated whether the imperial coronation had been jointly planned by Leo and Charles or whether, as appeared at the time, the King of the Franks was taken completely by surprise. Of the two possibilities, the latter seems a good deal more likely. Charles had never shown the faintest interest in claiming imperial status, and for the rest of his life continued to style himself
Rex Francorum et Langobardorum.
Nor, above all, did he wish to owe any obligation to the Pope; there is reason to believe that he was in fact extremely angry when he found such an obligation thrust upon him, and at any other time in his career he would almost certainly have refused with indignation. But now, at this one critical moment of history, he recognized an opportunity that might never be repeated. Irene, for all her faults, remained a marriageable widow - and, by all accounts, a remarkably beautiful one. If he could but persuade her to become his wife, all the imperial territories of East and West would be reunited under a single crown: his own.

The reaction in Constantinople to the news of Charles's coronation can easily be imagined. To any right-thinking Greek, it was an act not only of quite breath-taking arrogance, but also of sacrilege. The Byzantine Empire was built on a dual foundation: on the one hand, the Roman power; on the other, the Christian faith. The two had first come together in the person of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome and Equal of the Apostles, and this mystical union had continued through all his legitimate successors. It followed inevitably that, just as there was only one God in heaven, so there could be but one supreme ruler here on earth; all other claimants to such a title were impostors, and blasphemers as well.

Moreover, unlike the princes of the West, the Byzantines had no Salic Law. However much they might detest their Empress and even attempt to depose her, they never questioned her fundamental right to occupy the imperial throne. So much the greater, therefore, was their anxiety when they realized that Irene, far from being repelled by the very idea of marriage with an illiterate barbarian - for Charles, though he could read a little, made no secret of his inability to write - and insulted that he should even have presumed to advance such a proposal, appeared on the contrary to be intrigued, gratified and, in principle, disposed to accept.

In view of what we know of her character, her reasons are not hard to understand. Irene was a deeply selfish woman; she was also a pragmatist. By
802,
when Charles's ambassadors arrived in Constantinople, she had reduced the Empire to degradation and penury. Her subjects loathed and despised her, her advisers were at each others' throats, her exchequer was exhausted. Sooner or later - more probably sooner - a coup was virtually inevitable, in which event her very life would be in danger. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, there came a chance of salvation. It mattered little to her that her suitor was a rival Emperor, nor that he was in her eyes an adventurer and a heretic; if he were as uneducated as the reports suggested, she would probably be able to manipulate him as easily as she had manipulated her late husband and her son. Meanwhile by marrying him she would preserve the unity of the Empire and - far more important - save her own skin.

There were other attractions too. The proposal offered an opportunity to escape, at least for a while, from the stifling atmosphere of the imperial court. Irene, though twenty-two years a widow - during which time she had lived largely surrounded by women and eunuchs - was still, probably, only in her early fifties, and perhaps even younger: what could be more natural than that she should look favourably on the prospect of a new husband at last - particularly one rumoured to be tall and outstandingly handsome, a superb hunter with a fine singing voice and flashing blue eyes?

But it was not to be. Her subjects had no intention of allowing the throne to be taken over by this boorish Frank, in his outlandish linen tunic and his ridiculously cross-gartered scarlet leggings, speaking an incomprehensible language and unable even to sign his name except by stencilling it through a gold plate - as Theodoric the Ostrogoth had done three centuries before. On the last day of October
802,
while Irene was recovering from some minor indisposition at Eleutherius, a group of high-ranking officials took over the Great Palace, summoned an assembly in the Hippodrome and declared her deposed. Arrested and brought to the capital, she made no protest, accepting the situation with quiet dignity and, we may suspect, something very like relief. She was sent into exile, first to the Princes' Islands in the Marmara and afterwards to Lesbos; and a year later she was dead.

With the overthrow of the Empress Irene, the first phase of Byzantine history is complete. Four hundred and seventy-two years had elapsed since that spring morning when Constantine the Great had inaugurated his New Rome at the mouth of the Bosphorus - a period of time approximately equal to that which separates us from the Reformation - during which both the Roman Empire and the city which lay at its heart had changed beyond recognition. The Empire itself was much diminished: Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa and Spain had ail been engulfed by the Muslim tide, while Central Italy had fallen first to the Lombards and then to the Franks, who had passed it on in their turn to the Pope. Constantinople itself, on the other hand, had grown dramatically, and was by now incontestably the largest city, as well as the richest and most sumptuous, in the world. Periodic visitations of the plague had taken their toll, but by the dawn of the ninth century the population can have numbered not less than a quarter of a million souls - and in all likelihood considerably more.