Psellus then put forward his master's proposal in a speech which, according to his own description of it, would have done credit to Demosthenes himself. At first, he tells us, there were the inevitable protests from the assembled soldiery; but as he continued they gradually became quiet, and by the time he reached his peroration it was clear that his arguments had prevailed. Isaac then took him aside and told him that he would be perfectly content with the title of Caesar, on the understanding that the Emperor would appoint no other successor, would recognize the honours that he, Isaac, had bestowed on his principal associates and would grant him the power to make certain civil and military appointments and promotions. 'Tonight,' he concluded, 'you will dine with me. Tomorrow you will carry my message to your master.'
The relief of the Emperor Michael when he heard this news can well be imagined. He sent Psellus straight back to the camp to say that he gladly accepted all his rival's conditions; he would receive him in Constantinople like a son and load him with all the honours and privileges he wanted. Isaac, equally delighted, immediately began to prepare his departure. That same evening, however, there arrived a messenger from the capital: a coup d'etat by certain members of the Senate, aided and abetted by the Patriarch, had forcibly deposed Michael and obliged him to take refuge in St Sophia. At first both Isaac and Psellus were inclined to discount this as a rumour; but finally, when other messengers appeared with the same tidings supported now with an increasing amount of circumstantial detail, they allowed themselves to be convinced. Psellus frankly confesses that he got no sleep that night: as a spokesman for a deposed Emperor who had done his utmost to keep Isaac from the throne, he felt he could expect no mercy. But the general greeted him the next morning with his usual cordiality and even asked his advice on the art of government. On i September 1057, accompanied by thousands of Constantinopolitans who had sailed across the Marmara to greet him, Isaac I Comnenus entered his capital in triumph.
Michael the Aged had enjoyed one year of power. To his successor's eternal credit, he suffered no blinding, no exile. Abdication was enough. He died soon afterwards, a private citizen.
It is hardly surpring that Isaac Comnenus should have elected to be represented on his coins holding in his right hand a drawn sword. He assumed the throne of Byzantium with one object only in mind: to recover for the Empire, in the shortest possible time, the greatness it had known half a century before. Pscllus tells us that he settled down to work on the very same evening that he entered the Palace, before he had taken a bath or even changed his clothes. His object was a complete military reform, and he pursued it with military efficiency and ruthlessness. This is not to say that he imposed martial law, or appointed his fellow-generals to all key positions in the State; on the contrary, no one understood better than he the dangers of leaving too many victorious soldiers idle in a rich and populous city, and one of his first preoccupations was to pay off his men and send them back to their homes to await his further summons. Nor did he instantly dismiss all the civil bureaucrats and senators from their posts. He did however ensure that the army should once again receive the financial support that Zoe and her family had so long withheld, and rapidly restored the firm military rule in which, as Basil II had conclusively proved, lay the only lasting hope of imperial security.
But all this needed money; and to make good the immense damage that the Empire had suffered in recent years Isaac had no hesitation in resorting to radical measures. Horrified to see how the immense reserves that Basil had accumulated had been frittered away by his successors (largely on gifts and sweeteners for their supporters and luxuries for themselves) he immediately embarked on a programme of large-scale territorial confiscation. The old legally-held estates were untouched - he had no wish to reduce the power of his own aristocratic class - but vast tracts of land which had been recently conferred on favourites and time-servers were seized without compensation. The victims, provided that they were individuals and laymen, might protest as vociferously as they liked; they had no redress, and they knew it.
When, on the other hand, Isaac turned his attention towards Church property, he must have known that he was inviting trouble. Michael Cerularius, who had been working steadily ever since his accession to build up his own position, was by now almost as powerful as the basiUus himself, and probably a good deal more popular. The Patriarch believed - with good reason - that he had been substantially responsible for Michael's overthrow; Isaac, he maintained, owed him his throne, and he expected some recognition of the fact. The Emperor for his part was perfectly prepared to be accommodating in areas in which imperial interests were not, as he saw it, directly threatened. He willingly handed over the adrninistration of St Sophia — formerly an imperial responsibility - to the Church, and agreed not to trespass on the Patriarch's ecclesiastical preserves, while Cerularius gave a similar undertaking with regard to secular affairs of state. The difficulty was to know exactly where the line was to be drawn between them; and on this subject in particular the
Patriarch had his own very definite ideas, in the forcible expression of which he did not scruple to cite the Donation of Constantine,1 to threaten Isaac with deposition and - if John Scylitzes is to be believed -even at one point to don the Emperor's purple boots.
This, for Isaac, was going too far. While Cerularius remained in Constantinople his popularity was so great that he could not be touched; but when on 8 November 1058 he left the capital to visit a monastery some distance beyond the walls he was seized by the imperial guards and carried off into exile. Even then, however, he refused absolutely to resign the patriarchal throne; the Emperor had no choice but to arrange for a formal sentence of deposition. The necessary synod was held, prudently, in a provincial city; as might have been expected, its proceedings turned into something suspiciously resembling a show trial. The case for the prosecution - drawn up, to nobody's surprise, by Psellus — accused the Patriarch of every kind of heresy, blasphemy and vice. The inflexible Patriarch would, we can be sure, have put up a spirited defence; but he was by now an old man and the strain was too much for him. He died, of rage and a broken heart, before sentence was passed.
Isaac Comnenus seemed at first to have emerged victorious; but it soon became apparent that the battle was far from over. The local populace, who had barely contained their fury at the arrest of their beloved Patriarch, now chose to see him as a martyr: rioting followed, and although order was restored, the Emperor never regained his earlier popularity. Thus, little more than a year after his accession, he found the Church, the bureaucratic aristocracy and the people of Constantinople ranged implacably against him. Only the soldiers remained behind him to a man; thanks to them he successfully defended the eastern frontiers, beat off a determined attack by the Magyars and even held the dreaded Pechenegs firmly at bay. Psellus gives us an unforgettable description of this formidable tribe:
They are more difficult to fight and harder to subdue than any other people .. . They wear no breastplates, greaves or helmets, and carry no shields or swords. Their only weapon and sole means of defence is the spear. . . They build no protective palisades or ditches around their camps. In one dense mass, encouraged by sheer desperation, they shout their thunderous war-cries and hurl themselves pell-mell upon their adversaries and push them back, pressing
1 The theory according to which Constantine the Great had deliberately left his imperial crown to the Church for it to bestow on whomsoever it might select as temporal Emperor of the Romans. See Byzantium: The Early Centuries, p. 379.
against them in solid blocks, like towers, then pursuing them and slaying them without mercy. If on the other hand the opposing force withstands their assault, they turn about and seek safety in flight. But there is no order in their retreat... They all disperse at the same moment; then later in some strange manner they reunite, one descending from a mountain, another emerging from a ravine, another from a river, all from different places of refuge. When they are thirsty and find water, either from springs or in r
unning streams, they fling themselves down into it and gulp it up; if there is no water, each man dismounts from his horse, opens its veins with a knife, and drinks the blood ... After that they cut up the fattest of the horses, set fire to whatever wood they find ready to hand and, having slighdy warmed the chopped limbs of the horse there on the spot, they gorge themselves on the meat, blood and all. The repast over, they hurry back to their primitive huts, where they lurk like snakes in the deep gullies and precipitous cliffs which constitute their home.
This time, he tells us, the sight of Isaac's army, with its unbroken line of shields, filled the Pechenegs with such terror that they abandoned their usual practice of trying to crush the enemy by sheer weight of numbers. Instead, they attacked in isolated groups and when these made no impression dispersed, announcing simply that they would give battle in three days' time. On the third day Isaac accepted the challenge and marched out to find them; but there were none to be seen. He contented himself by plundering and destroying their camp and then returned to the capital laden with booty and trophies.
Isaac Comnenus astonished all with whom he came in contact by his seemingly superhuman energy. Whether working in the Palace or on campaign, he seemed to need scarcely any sleep or even rest. His only recreation was the chase, into which he flung himself with the same tireless determination that he showed in every other field of activity; and it was while he was out hunting towards the end of 1059 that he contracted the fever that was to bring about his early death. At first he dismissed it as being of no importance, but his condition worsened and after a few days he took ship to Blachernae. Soon it was clear that he had not long to live; he was determined, however, to return to the Great Palace before he died. 'Here,' writes Psellus,
he demonstrated that he had lost none of his former courage. He left his chamber refusing the offer of any arm on which to lean. It was typical of the man's independent spirit. Like some towering cypress violently shaken by gusts of wind, he tottered as he advanced, and his hands trembled; but he walked unaided. In this condition he mounted his horse, but how he fared on the ride I do not know for I hurried on by the other road in order to arrive before him. When he reached the Palace I could see that he was extremely agitated and in a state of utter collapse. All his family sat around him, lamenting. They would willingly have died with him, had they been able.
It was at this point that the dying Emperor expressed a wish to enter the Church. His wife Catherine - daughter of the Bulgarian John Vladislav - made vigorous objection, but he refused to change his mind and insisted there and then on nominating his successor. His only son having died in his early youth, there remained his daughter Maria, His brother John and five nephews; his choice however, fell on none of these. Instead he sent for Constantine Ducas, the most aristocratic of that group of intellectuals who had been responsible for reviving the university a few years before, and solemnly entrusted him with the Empire. Then he had himself carried to the monastery of the Studium, where he adopted the monk's habit and where, a few days later, he died.
Such, at least, is Psellus's version of events. Other chroniclers tell somewhat different stories, according to which Isaac abdicated not on his deathbed but voluntarily - though perhaps during a fit of depression - simply because the political problems became too much for him. The exact truth is, as so often, impossible to establish; it can only be said that the theory of a voluntary abdication hardly accords with the character of Isaac as we know it; and that Psellus's account, supported as it is by a wealth of circumstantial detail, seems to have the ring of authenticity. In any case, there is a more important question to be asked: why did Isaac- not choose a soldier like himself to succeed him on the throne, a man whom he could trust to continue those policies which (at least so far as the army was concerned) had already proved their effectiveness, instead of a hopelessly impractical and woolly-minded bureaucrat who -as he must have known - would undo all that he had done and simply bring back the bad old days of Constantine IX?
Once again, it is not difficult to see behind the whole story the hand of Psellus. A return of the bureaucratic party to power had been unthinkable two years before; now, thanks to the unpopularity of Isaac Comnenus and the death of Michael Cerularius, it was once again a possibility. Constantine Ducas was one of his oldest and closest friends -he describes him in his history as a paragon among men - who, he disingenuously informs us, possessed an additional advantage:
Others may speak of his many splendid successes, but for me there is one overriding consideration: the fact that this man, as admirable in reality as he was in appearance, should place more confidence in my judgement than in the scheming of my rivals. Whether he had discerned more evidence of wisdom in my opinions than in those of the others, or whether it was because he admired my character, I cannot tell; but so greatly was he attached to me, so much did he love me more than the rest, that he listened intently to every word that I uttered, depended on me absolutely for spiritual advice and entrusted his most precious possessions to my personal care.
Psellus cannot possibly have had the same power over Isaac Comnenus as he did over Constantine Ducas; but he possessed extraordinary powers of persuasion and it was he - we can be virtually sure — who somehow convinced the dying (or, if we prefer, simply depressed) Emperor that Constantine must be his successor. If this hypothesis is correct, it can only be said that his burden of guilt must be heavy indeed; for there is no Emperor in the whole history of the later Roman Empire whose accession had more disastrous consequences. Had Isaac Comnenus kept his health and energy, had he reigned for twenty years instead of two, he would have built up the strength of the army to the level it had known under Basil II. It would then, almost certainly, have been more than a match for the enemy that was already gathering its forces along the eastern frontier; Isaac would have been able to bequeath his Empire, undefeated and undiminished, direcdy to his nephew Alexius; and the third volume of this history would have had a very different - and far happier — story to tell. But it was not to be. Isaac's tragically premature death, and his inexplicable choice of successor, rendered inevitable the first of the two great catastrophes that were ultimately to bring about the downfall of Byzantium.
Manzikert
[1059-71]
Here one could see a dreadful sight: those celebrated Roman regiments who had brought both East and West under their sway, consisting now of only a handful of men - and men, moreover, bowed down with poverty and ill-health, no longer even fully armed. Instead of swords and other weapons they held, as the Bible has it, only pikes and scythes. And this was not even in time of peace. Yet because it was so long since any Emperor had fought here they lacked war horses and equipment of every kind. And since they were considered weak and cowardly and of no serious use they had received no subsistence money, nor their customary allowance to buy grain. Their very standards rang dully when struck, and looked dirty and as if blackened by smoke; and there were few to care for them. All this caused great sadness in the hearts of those who saw them, when they thought upon the condition from which the Roman armies had come, and that to which they had fallen.
John Scylitzes
Within weeks of Isaac's death it had become clear to all with eyes to see that his brief reign had constituted only a momentary pause in the imperial decline. This had begun immediately on the death of Basil II in 1025, with the accession of his hopeless, hedonist brother; it had continued all through the long, unedifying reigns of Zoe, her husbands, her sister and her adoptive son; and now, under Constantine X Ducas -arguably the most disastrous ruler ever to don the purple buskins - it reached its nadir. Not that there was anything evil or malevolent about Constantine. He was, as we have seen, the close friend, former pupil and to a certain extent the creature of Michael Psellus, on whose advice Isaac had named him his successor; he was a scholar and an intellectual, and -by Byzantine standards, which would certainly not be ours - a superb orator. Finally, he was a scion of one of the oldest and richest familie
s of the military aristocracy. Had he but remained true to his background, had he continued Isaac's work for the eight years that he was to reign, building up the army in preparation for the challenge that so obviously lay ahead, the situation might even at this late stage have been saved. But Constantine X was not one of nature's soldiers. He preferred the ease and comforts of Constantinople, spending his time in learned discussions and the drafting of intertninable dissertations on the finer points of law. And the price that the Empire paid for him was heavy indeed.
Once again the bureaucracy was all-powerful, operating on a scale unmatched anywhere else (with the possible exception of China) for several centuries; for it has to be remembered that the Byzantine Empire, absolute monarchy though it might be, ran its economy on distinctly socialist lines. Capitalism was allowed, but rigidly controlled at every stage; production, labour, consumption, foreign trade, public welfare and even the movement of population were all firmly in the hands of the State. The consequence was a vast army of civil servants, taking its orders theoretically from the Emperor - though effectively, more often than not, from Psellus and his friends - and inspired, so far as one can see, by one overriding principle: to curb - if not actually to destroy - the power of the army. In the past seventeen years, they might have argued, the Empire had experienced three military insurrections: two had been quelled more by luck than anything else, the third had succeeded. It followed that the army must be humbled, and reduced to a proper state of subordination. It must be starved of funds, the authority of the generals must be limited, the former peasant-soldiers - many of whom had followed government advice and bought their exemption from military service - must be progressively replaced by foreign mercenaries.
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