The Apogee - Byzantium 02

by John Julius Norwich

  In the spring of 822 he tried again, with no better success. This time the Emperor managed to address the besieging army from the top of one of the towers, ostensibly appealing to their loyalty but in fact subtly contriving to suggest that the defenders of the city were at their last gasp. His hearers, assuming that they would therefore meet with little serious resistance, advanced to the attack carelessly and in loose order; they were taken totally by surprise when several gates were suddenly thrown open to release an avalanche of imperial troops, who fell on them before they had time to recover themselves and slaughtered them by the score. After that, the assault on Blachernae was abandoned. A naval battle, apparently fought on the same day, ended in another reverse for the rebels; while their second fleet, arriving from Hellas and the Peloponnese in the early summer, had scarcely engaged the Emperor's navy before being totally destroyed by Greek fire.

  By the second winter of the rebellion - which, in view of the numbers involved, might perhaps be more properly described as a civil war — Thomas had still not achieved a single major victory; both to him and to his close associates it must have been clear that his bid for the crown had failed. But he did not give up the struggle; and there is no telling how long the stalemate might have continued had it not been for the Bulgar

  Khan Omortag, Krum's son, who soon after his accession had concluded a thirty-year treaty with the Empire and who now offered Michael armed assistance. The Emperor is said to have politely declined the offer, being reluctant to permit Christian blood - even that of traitors -to be shed by pagan swords; but he could not prevent the Khan, for whom the prospects of plunder were well-nigh irresistible, from acting on his own account and may even, for all we know, have given him covert encouragement. However that may be, in March 823 the Bulgar horde swept down from Mount Haemus in Thrace and a few weeks later, on the plain of Keduktos1 near Heraclea, smashed the rebel army to pieces. The plunder proved fully up to expectations. Well satisfied with his work, Omortag returned home.

  Thomas, now desperate, gathered up what was left of his shattered forces and led them some twenty miles west of Constantinople to another expanse of flat, open country known as the plain of Diabasis. Shortly afterwards - it must have been about the beginning of May -the Emperor rode out of the capital, at the head of his own army, to meet him; and there, where the two little rivers Melas (now the Karasu) and Athyras flowed down from the hill of Kushkaya near the Anastasian walls,2 the issue was finally decided. Thomas adopted the time-honoured tactic of a pretended flight; but when the moment came to spin round and charge the enemy his remaining troops, dispirited and demoralized, could not bring themselves to do so and laid down their arms instead. Their erstwhile commander, escaping with a handful of followers, fled to Arcadiopolis - the modern Liileburgaz - and barricaded himself in.

  Now the roles were reversed: Michael was the besieger, Thomas the besieged. The latter, acutely conscious of the shortage of provisions, expelled from the city all the women, the children and the men who were too old or incapacitated to bear arms and so managed to hold out through the summer; but in October, by which time he and his men were reduced to eating the putrescent corpses of their own horses, it became clear that they could resist no longer. Many deserted, lowering themselves by ropes from the walls, and made straight for the imperial camp; the Emperor thereupon sent a message to the soldiers left in the city, promising them all a free pardon if they would deliver their leader

  1 A corruption of Aquaeductus. Heraclea (now Eregli) was famous for the great Roman aqueduct just outside the city.

  1 The great outer defence of Constantinople, built in the early sixth century by Anastasius I across the thirty-odd miles from Selymbria (Stlivri) on the Marmara to the Black Sea.

  into his hands. They in turn, realizing that the alternative might well be a general massacre, agreed.

  Thomas and Michael had been enemies for many years; only for the last two had their enmity flared up into open warfare, but during those two years the damage done to the Empire, morally as well as materially, had been beyond computation. Vast tracts of rich farming land had been laid waste; the resident small-holders, faced with savagely increased taxation and possessing no capital to fall back on, were ruined. Once again they flocked to Constantinople in search of sustenance. The old problem - the same that had plagued both Nicephorus arid Leo V - was back again, in a more acute form than ever. As the sole cause of all the misery and devastation, the Slav knew that he could expect no mercy. Brought in chains into the Emperor^s presence, he was pushed roughly to the ground before him; and Michael made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction. Resting one purple-booted foot on the neck of his victim, he pronounced his fate: the hands and feet to be cut off, the body then to be impaled on a stake. The sentence was carried out on the spot, before the walls of Arcadiopolis.

  Mopping-up operations continued for a few more months. Thomas's adopted son, a somewhat feckless former monk named Anastasius, suffered the same punishment as his father; other rebel leaders in the Asiatic provinces were hanged. The overwhelming majority of their followers, however, having given themselves up to the Emperor's representatives, were pardoned and allowed to return to their homes. By the beginning of 824 the rebellion - perhaps the greatest and most widespread in all Byzantine history - was at an end.

  The same could not be said, however, for the tribulations of Michael II. His Empire had scarcely begun to recover from the havoc wrought by Thomas the Slav when two further disasters befell: disasters curiously similar in both cause and effect, which were to deprive him of two of his most important strategic bases in the Mediterranean. There has long been a tendency among historians of the period to hold Thomas responsible for these losses also, on the grounds that his rebellion had weakened the Empire to the point where it no longer had the power to resist; in fact, it was itself largely to blame. In former days the Emperors had maintained a strong navy, as a necessary defence against the formidable sea power of the Omayyad Caliphs of Damascus; after 750, however, with the transfer of the Caliphate to the Abbasids of Baghdad, that power had rapidly declined and the Byzantine fleet had been in its turn increasingly neglected. When, therefore, in 825 some 10,000 Arabs from Spain sailed with a fleet of forty ships into imperial waters, Michael could do little to prevent them.

  These Arabs had been expelled from Andalusia in 816 after an unsuccessful insurrection of their own against their local Emir, and had set off eastward across the Middle Sea in a determined attempt to restore their shattered forces. Their first target had been Egypt, where in 818 they had captured Alexandria; seven years later, forcibly expelled by the Caliph Mamun, they headed for Crete. According to a venerable tradition - supported by both Byzantine and Arabic sources - their leader Abu Hafs gave them twelve days to plunder the island, after which they were to return to the harbour; on doing so, they found to their horror that he had ordered the destruction of all their ships. In vain did they remind him of the wives and children that they had left behind in Egypt; he told them brusquely that they must content themselves with the women of Crete. This, with what we must assume to be varying degrees of reluctance, they did - simultaneously founding the city of Candia (now Heraklion) which has ever since been the island's capital. From it they marched out to take twenty-nine other towns, forcibly imposing the Islamic faith and reducing the inhabitants to slavery. One community only was spared - unfortunately we are not given its name - in which Christianity might still be openly professed.

  Crete henceforth became a nest of pirates, from whom no island in the Eastern Mediterranean or the Aegean, no harbour on the coast of Greece or Asia Minor, could consider itself safe. Over the next century Aegina, Paros and the Cyclades were devastated again and again; the monks of Mount Athos were driven from their monasteries; and similar stories could doubtless be told, had more written records survived, of innumerable other islands, towns and monastic communities pillaged and plundered by the Arab corsairs. Soon, too, Candia became the busiest slave ma
rket of its time. The Empire sought repeatedly to bring its inhabitants to heel; Michael II alone launched three separate expeditions between 827 and 829, and there were to be several more attempts by his successors before control was finally reimposed by the Byzantine general - and future Emperor - Nicephorus Phocas in 961.

  Within only two years of the capture of Crete another, unrelated, company of Arabs invaded the island of Sicily. This time, however, they came by invitation - to support the cause of a former Byzantine admiral,

  Euphemius by name, who had been dismissed from his post after an unseemly elopement with a local nun. Realizing that surrender would almost certainly mean death - or, at the very least, hideous mutilation -he had risen in revolt, killing the Imperial Governor and proclaiming himself Emperor. Even then, however, it was clear that he would never be able to maintain the position unaided. He therefore crossed to North Africa to seek the armed assistance of the Emir of Kairouan, undertaking to pay him an annual tribute once he was firmly established in power.

  To the Emir, such an invitation was irresistible; and on 14 June 827 a fleet of between seventy and a hundred ships sailed northward to Sicily, carrying 700 cavalry and 10,000 foot-soldiers under the command, somewhat surprisingly, of one of the leading judges in the religious court of Kairouan, Asad Ibn al-Furat. Although his force was imposing enough at first sight, Asad soon found that he was not to have things entirely his own way. He himself was to die during an outbreak of plague the following year, and Euphemius was shortly afterwards killed by members of the imperial garrison at Enna; but the contest between Christian and Saracen - still fought, amid much clattering of toy swords on biscuit-tin breastplates and lopping of turbanned heads, in the traditional puppet-shows of Palermo - was to continue for another half-century until the fall of Syracuse in 878 marked the effective triumph of Muslim power in the island.1 Long before then, however, Sicily had proved itself, for a people bent on piracy and conquest, an even better springboard than Crete: the armies of the Prophet had crossed the Straits of Messina, overrun Calabria and much of Apulia, and had even passed thence over the Adriatic to the southern Dalmatian coast. Michael and his successors did all they could to hold them in check, but the Byzantine navy in the middle of the ninth century was simply not large enough to tackle the problems of Crete and Sicily at the same time. It tended to concentrate more on the former, as being a closer and more immediate danger - with the result that the Saracens of Sicily found that they could do very much as they liked. As the centuries passed, the island was to suffer further invasions — by Normans and Germans, Angevins and Aragonese; inevitably, perhaps, the Arabic element became smaller and was gradually Christianized. But it was never entirely driven out, and the descendants of those first Islamic invaders are still there, to this day.

  1 Even then, a few heroic communities continued to resist. Taormina, thanks to its superbly defensible position, managed to hold out till 901.

  Nothing that we know of Michael the Amorian leads us to suppose that he would have bothered his head unduly with theological speculation. Insofar as he gave any thought to the question at all, he was an iconoclast; as he himself pointed out, he had never in his life worshipped a holy image, and he was furthermore resolved to leave the Church as he found it. But he possessed none of the fanaticism of his iconoclast predecessors, or even of his own son Theophilus. Already at the time of his accession he had freed or recalled all those whom his predecessor had condemned to imprisonment or exile - including of course Theodore of the Studium, who had immediately renewed his campaign for the general restitution of the images; and though Michael was to remain firm on basic principles, he was perfectly prepared - even more than Leo V had been - to allow his subjects to practise whatever form of worship they liked, so long as they did so in private and refrained from preaching or proselytizing one way or the other. Nor did he ever make any sustained effort to enforce iconoclast doctrines outside the capital. Even in Leo's reign, professional icon-painters or fervent image-worshippers had been able to retire to Greece, or to the coast and islands of Asia Minor, with a reasonable chance of being left to pursue their chosen activities undisturbed; under Michael their prospects were better still. What he mistrusted above all about the iconodules was not so much their religious habits as their insistence on the ultimate supremacy of the Pope in matters of dogma; and when one of his own subjects, an Orthodox monk named Methodius, returned from Rome with a letter from Paschal I calling upon him to restore the True Faith, he became almost apoplectic with anger: Methodius was first scourged and then imprisoned in a tomb on the tiny island of St Andreas in the Gulf of Nicomedia, where he was to remain for nearly nine years.

  Michael's reaction to Paschal's letter did not however prevent his considering the dispatch of a reply, describing the excesses to which the cult of images had led its more enthusiastic adherents and urging the Pope to withdraw his active support; but before doing so he decided to seek the advice of the Western Emperor Lewis the Pious, to whom he rehearsed the principal arguments:

  Lights were set in front of the images and incense burnt, and they were held in the same honour as the life-giving Cross. Prayers were addressed to them, and their intercession was sought. There were even those who would cover them with cloths and appoint them godparents at the baptisms of their children. Some priests would scrape the paint from the pictures and mix it in the bread

  and wine which they dispensed at Holy Communion; others would place the body of the Lord in the hands of the images, from whom the communicants would receive it.

  His letter was carried to Lewis by a mixed delegation of priests and laymen, who were received with elaborate courtesy at the imperial court in Rouen. Then they passed on to Rome, only to find that Paschal was dead, and that he had been succeeded by Eugenius II in the chair of St Peter. How they fared with the new Pope is not recorded; all we know is that Eugenius gave his permission for Lewis to summon a synod of Frankish bishops, which met in Paris in 825. This body ruled, with admirable common sense, that images should be displayed in churches as ornaments or memorials, but that they should not be worshipped; unfortunately it could claim no ecumenical status, and the Byzantines simply ignored it.

  All in all, if we except the hostility of a few extremists, Michael's moderation in matters of doctrine won him general popularity in ecclesiastical circles. His only serious differences with the Church concerned not the worship of icons but his own remarriage, probably in 824, after the death of his beloved first wife Thecla. Among theologians of the strictest Orthodoxy second marriages, especially by Emperors, were to be deplored; what made things still more difficult on this occasion was the fact that the lady concerned - Euphrosyne, daughter of Constantine VI and granddaughter of the unspeakable Irene - had been for many years a nun in an island convent in the Marmara. By precisely what means Michael managed to obtain her release from her vows we shall never know; but he did so at last, and this second marriage proved, so far as we know, as happy as the first had been - Euphrosyne keeping vigil at her husband's bedside throughout his last illness (a disease of the kidneys) and, in October 829, finally closing his eyes in death. He was the first Emperor for half a century to expire, while still a reigning monarch, in his bed; the first, too, to leave a strong and healthy son, still in the prime of life, to succeed him.

  3

  Theophilus

  [829-42]

  Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,

  More miracle than bird or handiwork,

  Planted on the star-lit golden bough,

  Can like the cocks of Hades crow

  Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

  In glory of changeless metal

  Common bird or petal

  And all complexities of mire or blood.

  W. B. Yeats, Byzantium

  At the time of his father's death, Theophilus had already been co-Emperor for eight years,' during which time the chroniclers barely mention him. There is one brief and tantalizing moment in 821, at the ve
ry beginning of the joint reign, when we are given a glimpse of the seventeen-year-old prince, bearing the Empire's most precious relics -the fragments1 of the True Cross and the robe of the Virgin Mary - in solemn procession along the land walls while the army of Thomas the Slav was encamped below; but in general he seems to have been content to remain in his father's shadow, performing various ceremonial functions as necessary but otherwise avoiding the limelight. Now, with his assumption of the effective power at the age of twenty-five, he comes into his own - and at last reveals himself as being magnificently qualified to take on the responsibilities of Empire.

  In marked contrast to the barely literate Michael, Theophilus was an intellectual, with all the characteristically Byzantine passion for theology; but he had also acquired a thorough military training, so that even if he

  1 Fragments only: the main body of the Cross, after two periods in Constantinople and fourteen years in Persian hands, having been personally returned to Jerusalem by the Emperor Heraclius in 619. The Virgin's robe had been discovered in 629 in a coffin at Blacbernae.