Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  NOW THE THRONE PASSED to Constantine’s eldest son, Leo IV. The new Leo was of a milder temperament than his father, and quietly attempted to heal divisions in the capital while maintaining official opposition to icons. In 780, Leo was shocked to discover two icons hidden among the belongings of his wife, the Empress Irene, which had been smuggled into the palace by members of his own staff. Leo was furious that his wife and his servants had conspired to keep secrets from him, and had his chamberlain flogged. The imperial couple became estranged, and Leo refused to share the marriage bed with Irene.

  Then in September, Irene emerged from the palace with shocking news: Leo was dead. The emperor, she said, had been behaving strangely. He had demanded a jewelled crown be brought to him, but when he placed it on his head, the precious stones caused boils to break out all over his scalp. The infection was followed by a fever, then death.

  This unlikely story has led historians to assume Leo’s demise was engineered by Irene, acting in concert with senior palace officials with iconophile sympathies. But no one saw fit to question the story, and so Irene’s nine-year-old son, Constantine VI, became emperor, with his mother the empress-regent. But Irene never saw herself as a stopgap ruler. She was twenty-five years old, and just getting started.

  Basilissa and Basileus

  IRENE WAS BORN into a prominent family in Athens. It’s likely she was selected as a suitable wife for Leo in a bride-show, a ceremony where beautiful, refined young women were paraded for inspection before the imperial family. Her future father-in-law arranged for Irene to enter Constantinople in style on All Saints’ Day 769: she crossed the Bosphorus in a Roman galley, surrounded by imperial warships festooned with silk streamers. Cheering crowds greeted her procession through the city. She was crowned Irene Augusta and married to Leo in a church within the palace grounds.

  Irene lived in the shadow of power as empress-consort for twelve years before her husband’s death opened the way for her to become the most powerful empress in the long history of the Roman empire, more powerful even than Theodora, who shared her imperium with Justinian.

  SEEING THAT CONTROL of the empire had passed to a woman and a child, ambitious men thought they could sense weakness at the top. A conspiracy formed, almost immediately, to replace Irene and her son with one of Leo’s half-brothers, Nicephorus. Irene disposed of the plot cleverly and bloodlessly by forcing Nicephorus and his four brothers to be tonsured and ordained as monks, which immediately disqualified them from the throne. Irene ‘honoured’ their entry into the priesthood with a splendid ceremony in the Hagia Sophia, where the unhappy brothers were compelled to perform the rite of communion for her, letting everyone in the Great Church know who was the dominant figure in the room.

  Realising that male generals would be affronted to receive orders from a woman, Irene appointed eunuchs to key positions in the court and the army, men who would not blanch at feminine leadership. The foremost of these eunuchs was Stauracius, who became her chief minister.

  Irene dextrously exploited her iconophile sympathies to win over key figures in the aristocracy and the church who would otherwise abhor the presence of a woman on the throne. But iconoclasts still controlled the army and some sections of the bureaucracy, and seethed at her leadership.

  The empress took steps to bring the clergy to her side. She appointed a sympathetic new Patriarch and then convened an ecumenical council in 786 to rescind the policy of iconoclasm. The council met in the Church of the Holy Apostles while Irene looked on from the gallery with her young son Constantine. But soldiers from the tagmata, the imperial troops of the capital who were faithful to the ideals of the previous emperor, raucously interrupted their deliberations, and the council had to be dissolved.

  Irene would not be thwarted. She relocated the rebellious troops to Asia Minor on the pretext of preparing for an imminent battle against the Arabs, which failed to eventuate. Once they were there, she ordered the regiment to be split up and dispersed through the various provinces. She replaced the tagmata in the capital with loyal troops from Thrace and Bithynia. The following year she summoned a new council outside the capital in Nicaea, attended by around three hundred and fifty bishops and a hundred monks. Proceedings went smoothly and the prohibition of icons was officially lifted.

  MEANWHILE, IRENE’S SON Constantine VI was growing older, and would soon need a wife. A union was arranged between her son and a daughter of the Frankish king Charlemagne, but relations with the Franks soured and the engagement was broken off.

  Still, a suitable consort had to be found, and so in 780, the empress organised a bride-show for Constantine. Thirteen eligible young women came to the capital to be paraded in front of the young emperor, but it was Irene and Stauracius who selected the bride, Maria of Amnia, the granddaughter of a saint. The two were married, but Constantine, increasingly resentful of his domineering mother, neglected his wife after she gave birth to a daughter.

  AS CONSTANTINE ENTERED his late teens, he yearned to set his mother aside and assume sole occupancy of the throne. Irene and Stauracius had no intention of surrendering power, and relations between mother and son deteriorated. Constantine’s attempts to assume a greater role in the palace were repeatedly thwarted by Stauracius. In his naivety, Constantine simply couldn’t imagine the chief minister was acting on orders from his own mother, so he concluded that Irene had become the puppet of the wily eunuch.

  Constantine conspired with a group of friends to overthrow Stauracius, but the plot was easily exposed. When Irene was told, she summoned her son to the throne room, slapped him across the face, and confined him to quarters. His co-conspirators were arrested, flogged and exiled.

  A somewhat rattled Irene insisted the army swear to uphold her name above that of her son’s. For once, she badly miscalculated: half the army mutinied and demanded the captive Constantine be brought safely over to them, whereupon they installed him as sole ruler of the Roman empire. Irene was allowed to retain her title of empress, but was confined to her palace overlooking the Sea of Marmara.

  Constantine VI, a nineteen-year-old of no executive experience, soon found himself sorely in need of his mother’s advice, which Irene was only too happy to give. But after several military debacles, Constantine’s support within the army began to dwindle. He repudiated his wife Maria and married another woman, which was seen by church leaders as an adulterous relationship. Sentiment was now drifting back to Irene, who was remembered as a competent administrator.

  In October 796, Constantine was staying at the hot springs of Prusa in Asia Minor, accompanied by Irene, when he received news that his new wife Theodote had given birth to a son. Constantine rushed back to Constantinople to be at her side, leaving his mother to conspire with the tagmata commanders in his absence.

  In May the next year, Constantine was leaving the Hippodrome when a group of soldiers fell on his personal guard and tried to arrest him. He fled across the Bosphorus, but was captured and brought back to the Great Palace. On his mother’s orders, he was dragged by soldiers into the purple marble chamber where Irene had given birth to him, and a soldier gouged his eyes out. Constantine VI died several days later of his wounds. He was twenty-six years old. Theophanes records that after his death, an eerie darkness fell upon Constantinople for seventeen days, which was attributed to the horror of heaven.

  Gold solidus of Empress Irene with globe and sceptre.

  Classical Numistatic Group

  It’s unclear whether the cruel circumstances of Constantine’s death were widely known among the people of Constantinople, and with Irene firmly back in charge, it was probably unwise to ask too many questions anyway.

  Irene’s sole occupancy of the throne created a major legal problem: all of her edicts thus far had been issued in the name of her son. With Constantine dead, it wasn’t at all clear that a woman would have the legal authority to issue laws in her own name. Irene circumvented the problem by signing laws under the name of basileus – ‘Emperor’ – instead of b
asilissa, ‘Empress’. The army was a problem too; she didn’t dare issue orders to her restive generals in case they were not obeyed. Still, Irene was popular among the people and in the monasteries, and was able to shrewdly navigate the political currents of Constantinople as she always had.

  In Easter 799, Irene paraded through the streets of Constantinople in a golden chariot, drawn by four white horses, with her four chief commanders holding the bridles. It was a dizzying moment for the woman who had risen to the commanding heights of a thoroughly patriarchal empire.

  The following month she fell ill, and Stauracius’s rival, another eunuch named Aetius, came to her bedside to warn her of her chief minister’s disloyalty. Stauracius was made to apologise, but he too fell ill, and then died. Irene had just recovered from her illness when shocking news from Rome threw all her plans into disarray.

  Karolus Magnus

  ON CHRISTMAS DAY 800, Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, strode into the shrine of St Peter in Rome without his royal insignia to participate in mass as a humble Christian. But as he knelt at the altar for communion, Pope Leo III placed a golden crown upon his head, and proclaimed him Karolus Magnus, emperor of the Romans. The congregation cheered and hailed Charlemagne as their Augustus, as the pope prostrated himself at the new emperor’s feet.

  From Constantinople’s point of view, the coronation of a barbarian king in Rome as ‘Emperor’ was an outrageous intrusion on their imperial prerogatives – only Constantinople had the right to name an Augustus. But there was little they could do about it. The eastern Roman empire was no longer the empire of Justinian, having lost too much territory and manpower. Sooner or later someone in the west was going to call Constantinople’s bluff on its imperial pretensions. It was unfortunate for Irene, but no coincidence, that it happened during her reign. Pope Leo justified his audacious move by claiming that since everyone knew a woman was ineligible to be emperor, Charlemagne was merely filling a vacancy.

  The coronation had more to do with Pope Leo’s need for Frankish protection than Charlemagne’s vanity. Charlemagne was now the ruler of a sprawling empire that covered modern-day France, western Germany, Austria and northern Italy, the largest political unit to emerge in western Europe since the death of the western Roman empire. Although nowhere near as culturally sophisticated, Charlemagne’s kingdom was, embarrassingly, twice as large as Irene’s empire.

  Looking for allies, Charlemagne had put out feelers towards the court of Caliph Harun al-Rashid, who had responded warmly and sent Charlemagne an elephant as a gift. Then Charlemagne thought better of an Arab alliance, and in 802, sent envoys to Constantinople with a proposal of marriage for Irene, a union that would unite the eastern and western empires under one crown.

  Irene was intrigued and inclined to accept, but her counsellors were horrified by the idea of being ruled by a coarse barbarian. On 31 October, while Irene was recovering from a minor illness, a cabal of senior bureaucrats and military officers acted pre-emptively against the alliance by seizing control of the Great Palace and deposing Irene. She was replaced on the throne by a bureaucrat named Nicephorus. Irene accepted her overthrow gracefully and was sent into exile to the island of Principo in the Sea of Marmara. A year later she was dead. Irene had ruled alone or alongside her son for twenty-two years. There would be other influential empresses in the years to come, but none so powerful as Irene of Athens, the only woman to claim the title of ‘Emperor’.

  IRENE’S REIGN MARKED the beginning of a turnaround in the empire’s fortunes. After centuries of dispiriting defeats, plagues and natural disasters, the Romans were at last to get some breathing space that would allow them to slowly recover. An era of rebirth and expansion was about to begin. Constantinople’s economy steadily improved as more people were drawn to the city, and districts that had lain dormant since the plague were rebuilt and repopulated. The apocalyptic gloom lifted for a while, and Constantinople recovered its old confidence.

  The Arab expansion was checked and the frontiers expanded. The Thracian farmlands, the island of Cyprus and the city of Antioch were restored, for a while, to imperial control, and the empire settled into a shape that roughly resembled a double-headed eagle, a motif that would later be adopted as the empire’s emblem. There was a European wing, encompassing Thrace, Greece, Sicily and parts of the Balkans, and an Asian wing covering the Anatolian peninsula and Cyprus.

  The highwater mark would be reached under the reign of Basil II, ‘The Bulgar Slayer’. Basil earned his grim nickname by blinding fourteen thousand Bulgarian prisoners of war, leaving a single one-eyed man in each cohort to lead the rest of his mutilated men back to their ruler. It was said the Khagan was so distressed, he suffered a stroke and died two days later. The Bulgars were completely defeated and their lands brought back into the Roman orbit. Other border peoples were simply absorbed into the multi-ethnic, multilingual empire.

  The city’s newfound wealth ignited a revival of culture and education. Manuscripts of literature, mathematics and philosophy from ancient Greece were salvaged and taught in schools and academies. Encyclopaedic tomes were compiled on history, medicine and zoology.

  Such was the gravitational power exerted by Constantinople at this time that the Slavs and eastern Europeans were brought into the orbit of the Orthodox church. Visitors who were subject to the full force and majesty of the liturgy in the Hagia Sophia were left in no doubt as to the chosen religion of the One True God. The envoys of Prince Vladimir of Kievan Rus’ were lost for words to describe it: ‘only this we know: that God dwells there among humans, and that their service surpasses the worship of all other places. For we cannot forget that beauty’.

  Ison and Melody

  ON A SUNDAY MORNING, while in Rome, Joe and I went out looking for pastries and coffee. Church bells were clanging musically throughout the neighbourhood, summoning people to Mass. In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti we heard choral music emanating from two open doors. The plaque beside the door identified the church as the Chiesa dei Santi Sergio e Bacco, a Ukrainian Catholic house of worship that practises the Byzantine rite. I was hoping we could sneak into a back pew, but the church was already overcrowded, and we couldn’t even get through the door. The scent of sandalwood floated over our heads as we lingered in the doorway, absorbing the deep resonance of the male voices raised in holy song.

  A BYZANTINE CHANT has two parts, the ison and the melody. The ison is the underlying heavy drone, the sustained choral note that anchors the chant. The ison doesn’t move, and so exists outside of time. It represents nothing less than the uncreated light of God, eternal and sublime.

  The ison sustains the melody, which moves up and down through time. This represents the unified voice of the church. The chants travel through scales that are distinctly different from the familiar major and minor scales used in western music, shifting unexpectedly through semitones that sound beautifully strange. The ison and the melody combine to form harmonies that shimmer and ring in your head. It feels exciting and soothing at the same time. On some occasions listening to this music I’ve felt tears pricking at my eyes and wondered where on earth they had sprung from.

  Joe stood next to me, patiently waiting for me to get my fill. I can hardly expect a fourteen-year-old kid to enjoy Byzantine choral music as much as I do. I knew he was bored, but I loved that he didn’t whine about it, that he doesn’t mind daydreaming while his father loiters outside a church doorway. There’s a gentleness in Joe that is revealed in these moments, and a quiet underlying strength that is present even here, despite the absence of breakfast.

  Most places were closed for the Sabbath, but near the square we found a café run by godless hipsters and decorated with Italian kitsch from the 1960s. While we waited for our pastries, I thought about the previous evening, when we’d walked past a hole-in-the-wall whiskey joint and I’d suddenly wished I could borrow Joe’s older self for a night so we could sit at the bar, sample six different kinds of scotch and tell funny stories. And it occurred
to me that Joe, as that young man, will be far more plugged into contemporary culture than me, and able to introduce me to new things bubbling up into the culture. At some point we’ll switch roles, and Joe will become the cultural guide. I only hope he’ll let me tag along.

  I told him there’ll come a time when our relationship will change. ‘I will no longer be the dad who makes decisions for both of us. I’ll stop bossing you around and we’ll be more like equals. Like brothers.’

  Joe shrugged. That day seemed a long way off to him.

  Byzantine sheet music.

  public domain

  I try to envisage the moment when Khym and I are required to resign our parental authority over Joe. I imagine a dignified ceremony, something like the British handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese. There’ll be a solemn lowering of the parental ensign and the raising of a shiny new banner of self-determination, and he’ll look at his parents, now aged and shrunken, festooned with medals from campaigns that no one remembers, and try to remember how it was that we had once loomed so large in his eyes.

  Melusine

  A WAITER IN A PRISTINE white jacket brings us a plate of grilled kofte with long green pickled chillies, along with a dome of pilaf rice. On the side is a spicy chilli sauce. Joe and I have been eating here most nights. The room is too brightly lit, but the food is cheap and good. The aroma of the grilled meat, mixed with parsley, mint and lemon juice, awakens our caveman carnivore instincts, like a sausage sizzle at a hardware store. The sour, vinegary chillies complement the lamb kofte perfectly.

  Over dinner I offer to tell Joe a fairytale.

  ‘I’m a bit old for that now, Dad,’ he sighs.

  ‘You’re never too old for a real fairytale. I’m talking about old folktales that are much darker than that Disney stuff you got fed as a little kid.’