The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  PART III

  The Empires of the East, 550-1000

  11

  Byzantine Survival, 550-850

  The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, ‘Brief Historical Notes’, is an anonymous mid-eighth-century text from Constantinople. It consists of comments on the monuments of the city, above all its statues. Some of the text purports to collect notes and letters written by a group of friends, state officials in the 710s, who had a sort of research project exploring who the statues were of and where they had come from. This may well be a literary fiction, for references in the text to other authors are themselves mostly clear inventions, and the text sometimes has an in-jokiness about it which makes the reader mistrustful. But someone did do the work, going around from statue to statue, reading the inscription on the base or asking other people what they thought the figure represented. This was not always easy; the woman seated on a bronze chair in the Hippodrome might be the empress Verina (d. c. 484), as the skilled statue-interpreter Herodian thought, but it might also be the goddess Athena, ‘as I have myself heard from many people . . . and this I believed’. It was also dangerous work; Himerios the chartoularios (a medium-level financial official) and his friend Theodore went to look at the statues in the Kynegion, north of Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of Constantinople; as they were studying one, it fell on Himerios and killed him, and Theodore, who fled, had trouble getting out of a criminal accusation. In the end, the statue was buried on the spot by order of the emperor Philippikos (711-13). ‘Take care when you look at old statues, especially pagan ones,’ the chapter finishes: pagan statues were maleficent, and one had to be prepared.

  Conversely, if an expert knew his statues, and was a skilled enough interpreter, his knowledge was highly useful. Not only could he avoid maleficent ones, but he could tell the future. Herodian knew that one of the Hippodrome statues of women giving birth to wild beasts (Scylla and Charybdis, probably) prefigured the reign of terror of Justinian II in 705-11; the other (the one with the boat) ‘has not been fulfilled, but remains’. Asklepiodoros looked at the inscription on the statue of Herakles in the Hippodrome and could at once tell what bad things (unnamed) were going to happen, to his distress (‘I would have been better off if I had not read the inscription’). And he could also, of course, reconstruct the past. The authors of the Parastaseis did not have access to many books about the past, but they were very interested in it, and sought systematically to locate statue-knowledge in a historical framework. Valentinian III’s statue, for example, had not fallen over in an earthquake; this showed that his assassination in 455 was unjust, and not, as people had previously thought, a fair retribution for his murder of Aetius. Constantinople was still a very large city, and, obviously, was full of statues; this text could not conceivably have been written about any other Mediterranean city except Rome - and in Rome, churches and Christian cult-sites were by now the inescapable points of reference, unlike in the eastern capital, as it seems. In the eastern capital, the imperial past still mattered, and the whole history of Constantinople was laid out through its statues. Conversely, this history was above all of the fourth and fifth centuries (often misunderstood), much less of the sixth (there is surprisingly little about Justinian) and less still of the seventh and eighth. This is a key to the text: it represented a genuine antiquarian interest, with statues operating as a memory-theatre in a literal sense, but its author or authors looked at the great days of the Christian Roman empire across a huge divide, and did not by any means know much about what that empire meant. Such is the divide which this chapter explores, for the eighth-century Byzantine empire, lineal heir of the east Roman empire, was a very different society, with most of its points of reference changed.

  The reason for this divide was a simple one: it was the catastrophic events which broke Roman control over most of the east Mediterranean between 609 and 642. The drastic downsizing and reorganization of the empire that resulted was the main break in the imperial history of the East in our whole period, and, together with most historians, I call the surviving empire ‘Byzantine’ from now on. (The Byzantines always called themselves ‘Romans’, Romaioi in Greek; so did their eastern neighbours; westerners called them ‘Greeks’. ‘Byzantines’ in our period only meant the inhabitants of Constantinople, which had once been called Byzan tion. But it is a convenient misnomer, all the same.) We left the late sixth-century east Roman empire in reasonable shape in Chapter 4. The emperor Maurice (582-602) was a war leader; he had ended twenty years of Persian frontier war in 591 by intervening in a succession dispute in Persia and helping to set up Khusrau II (590-628) as shah. He also faced out threats to the Balkans. Here, the sixth-century successors to the Germanic invaders of the late fourth and fifth were Sclavenian groups, small-scale tribal communities whose raids are attested from the 540s onwards. (Many or most of these groups spoke Slavic languages, but this is not stressed by our early sources as an identifier for the Sklavnoi, so I shall avoid the word ‘Slav’ here; see further Chapter 20.) The Avars, a Turkic-speaking nomadic people, came westwards in 558, and by 567-8 had established themselves in Pannonia as the Huns had done over a century earlier; they established a loose hegemony over many of the Sclavenian tribes north of the Danube, and presented a greater military threat, particularly after their capture of the Roman frontier town of Sirmium in 582. After 591, however, Maurice could attend systematically to Balkan defence, and he held these incursions back in the 590s, reinforcing the Danube frontier as he did so. It was Maurice’s very success which undid him, for in 602 the Balkan army revolted against his orders to over-winter north of the Danube, and he was killed with his family by one of his generals, Phocas, who succeeded him (602-10).

  Phocas’ accession was the first successful overthrow of an emperor in the eastern empire since 324; between 602 and 820, however, only five out of twenty-one emperors died naturally in office. There had always been a culture of coups in the East, but from now on they were frequently effective. The army’s role in politics changed as a result, as we shall see. There were constant and successful attempts to establish dynasties, which lasted five generations under the Heraclids (610-711), four under the Isaurians (717-802), three under the Amorians (820-67), six under the Macedonians (867-1056: see Chapter 13); the notion of hereditary succession was by no means lost, that is to say. But even this succession was punctuated by coups. Legitimacy was as much linked to military success and to popularity in the capital (coups were hard if the city of Constantinople was opposed) as to family background; the image of the choice of God, which lay behind the decisions of ‘the people, the senate and the army’, was used even when sons succeeded fathers. The ceremony of imperial accession was much more elaborate as a result, to establish this legitimacy as publicly as possible. The openness of the succession, and its apparent availability to almost anyone who was of sound body (blinding and other mutilation were standard Byzantine methods of neutralizing rivals), marked out the Byzantine world from now on; so did the importance of the image of divine favour for the emperor, which had further consequences, as we shall see.

  Phocas is often seen as the turning point in this development, but his reign matches that of Maurice in important particulars. The Balkan frontier remained sound, and, although Khusrau restarted the Persian war in 603, at least nominally to avenge Maurice, it remained a standard frontier war for some years. Phocas was unpopular, however, and could not withstand a north African-based uprising in 608-10 aimed at putting Heraclius, the son of the exarch of Africa, on the throne. It was that civil war which threw the empire sideways, for it was then that the Persian breakthrough began. Heraclius (610-41) already found the Persians raiding in Anatolia in 611; more drastically still, Syria was conquered in 613, Palestine in 614, Egypt in 619; in 616-17 Persian raids reached the Bosporos. Heraclius pulled out all the troops in the Balkans to defend Anatolia, and Sclavenian groups began to settle there permanently; the Avars consolidated a hegemony over them, and by 617 they were raiding up to the Aege
an too. In less than a decade, the richest provinces of the empire were all lost, and no part of it was safe from raiding except the Aegean islands and the western provinces of Sicily and Africa. It got worse: in 626, an Avar-Sclavenian army to the west and a Persian army to the east, roughly coordinated, besieged the capital, when Heraclius was 800 kilometres away campaigning in Armenia. Constantinople’s huge fortifications stood firm, however, and the Avar siege failed (the Persians, on the other side of the Bosporos, could not get across). The Avar-Sclavenian alliance broke up acrimoniously, and Avar hegemony in the Balkans began to fail from now on. In two years of daring campaigning Heraclius got behind the Persian armies and attacked Khusrau’s heartland (what is now Iraq), with the considerable help of an army of Gök Turk nomads from the Caucasus; Khusrau was killed in a coup, and the Persians made peace in 628, surrendering all their conquests. The Sassanian polity went into crisis; seven rulers followed Khusrau in quick succession before Yazdagird III (632-51) established himself in 633-4.

  Heraclius in 628 was a hero. He was received in triumph in Constantinople in 629, and in Jerusalem in 630, where he restored the True Cross, taken by the Persians in 614. Heraclius was closely attached to the Cross, Christianity’s most resonant relic, which Constantine’s mother Helena was said to have found outside Jerusalem in the 320s; as his court poet George of Pisidia put it, ‘[the Persians] were venerating fire, while you, O sovereign, [venerate] wood’. This was a time for religious renewal, so Jews were massacred and otherwise persecuted, and Heraclius also made the last attempt to reunify the rival Chalcedonian and Monophysite churches (cf. Chapter 3) in 638, when he proclaimed a compromise doctrine, called Monotheletism, which was henceforth to be the only legitimate version of Christianity throughout the empire. But the empire was, of course, devastated, its economy in crisis owing to destruction and political division, and its armies in need of years to recover. It was thus impossible for Heraclius successfully to resist attack from a new quarter, Arabia. Arab armies defeated the Byzantines on the River Yarmuk near the Sea of Galilee in 636, and the disaster of the 610s repeated itself: the Arabs took Syria in 636, Palestine in 638, and Egypt in 639-42. This time the Byzantines did not get them back. Notwithstanding Heraclius’ successes in 627-8, the reunification of the empire only lasted for a decade or less. Only after Heraclius’ death in 641 would the Byzantines slowly come to see that they would have in future to do without the south-east Mediterranean provinces; but in reality the empire had lost them in the 610s.

  How the Arabs were so successful, and what happened in the lands they conquered, we shall see in the next chapter, but the seriousness of these conquests for the Byzantine world cannot be overemphasized. Heraclius has a curiously good press even now, thanks to the events of 627-8, but his reign was, taken as a whole, the most disastrous in a thousand years of Roman history. The empire lost two-thirds of its land and three-quarters of its wealth in the 610s, in Michael Hendy’s words, and this loss became permanent in the 630s. The loss of the agrarian and productive wealth of Egypt was particularly serious. Byzantium was reduced to the Anatolian plateau of modern Turkey, the Aegean sea and the lands around it, and, moving westwards, pockets of the Adriatic coast, parts of Italy (including Rome) and Sicily, and North Africa. In the next two centuries, the southern Balkans would be reconquered, but northern and central Italy and Africa would be lost, and then, after the 820s, so would Sicily, although much of mainland southern Italy stayed Byzantine until after 1050.

  The Roman empire had always relied on sea traffic to integrate its economy. The Byzantine empire remained a maritime state, too, for only the sea roads connected its far-flung provinces by now, linking the richest but also the furthest province, Sicily, to the capital. The Byzantine navy was far less politically prominent than the army, and we know less about it, but it was a crucial element in the survival of the empire, both strategically and tactically. The fact that the Byzantines held the Bosporos strait was essential to the survival of Constantinople in the great sieges of 626 and 717-18. All the same, the Byzantines had not only lost Egypt, the traditional grain reserve for the capital, but also, at least after the Arab conquests, the Egyptian fleet based at Alexandria. The Arabs held the southern Mediterranean sea roads, restricting the Byzantines to its northern edge, and they used the Alexandrian fleet particularly effectively in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, raiding into the Aegean and, in 717-18, even into the Sea of Marmara. That raiding stopped temporarily in the eighth century, but the Byzantines could never take their sea mastery for granted, particularly beyond their Aegean heartland. Constantinople lost its right to free grain in 618, when Heraclius rapidly drew the correct conclusions from the Persian conquest of Egypt, and the population dropped substantially in size, from some 500,000 to between 40,000 and 70,000: still the largest city in Europe, but a tenth the size of what it had been. This smaller urban community could be supplied from Aegean and Black Sea sources, and would be henceforth, particularly after Sicily was lost.

  People knew at once that the Persian-Arab conquests were a catastrophe, of course. The seventh-century crisis in the East was unlike the fifth-century crisis in the West, in that it was so fast. People could not get comfortably used to the new status quo as they did in the West, in the increasingly regionalized politics of the crystallizing Germanic kingdoms; in the East, they knew that they had to adapt quickly, or else be conquered. The atmosphere of crisis is reflected in nearly every seventh-century text. This was a period in which apocalyptic writing was common, both Christian and Jewish. The Christians, of course, could see the conquest of half of their world by Zoroastrians and then by as yet hardly understood Muslims as an immediate presage that the world itself would end. The Jews, although less persecuted in the Persian and Arab empires than in the seventh-century Roman/Byzantine empire, saw the rise of Islam, a rival monotheistic and Abrahamic religion, as a direct cultural threat; but the Persian wars already seemed to them, too, to presage final days. More widely, political disagreements of all kinds gained a religious edge, as we shall see, for divine disfavour seemed so evident.

  At a less spiritual level, the first priority had to be the army. The Byzantines needed an army large enough to defend against the Arabs, but had to fund it from an empire with its richest provinces lost. Army supply had to be very streamlined for this to work. Under Heraclius, who spent most of his reign campaigning, there is little sign of army reorganization, but things stabilized a little in the 650s, when a more permanent frontier region, roughly along the Tauros mountains in east-central Anatolia, was established; the late 650s was also a period of Arab civil war. In the period 669-87, we first have references to the four great military districts, or ‘themes’, of Anatolia, the Opsikion, Thrakesion, Anatolikon and Armeniakon, each of which had its own army, and each of which was supplied locally - each theme had at least one relatively prosperous region at its heart whose produce the army could live off. These themes probably began to take shape in the 640s- 650s. They were superimposed on long-standing smaller provinces, which handled civil administration and justice, and also local tax-raising; most of these functions were gradually taken over by the military, but this long process was not complete until the ninth century. Slowly, too, other parts of the empire were organized into themes: Thrace and the Aegean islands later in the century, Greece in the eighth and early ninth century as it was reoccupied, southern Italy in the late ninth with renewed conquests there. Tax was therefore mostly spent locally; the fiscal integration of the empire largely ceased, except that the supply of Constantinople involved longer-distance links, and the capital continued to control the mechanisms of tax-raising and, for a time, provincial administrations. But armies were still paid, with their salaries funded by the land tax, except for relatively untrained militias. Soldiers were locally recruited, and remained local; they were frequently, or became, local landowners too. But they did not, as in the West, come to depend entirely on their landowning to resource them. What did happen was that t
axation, and army pay, ceased for the most part to be in money; produce became the major element of the fiscal system until the ninth century. This meant that fewer coins needed to be minted (coin-finds virtually cease for the period between the 650s and the 820s, except in Constantinople and Sicily); it also meant that equipment supply became much more cumbersome, and an entire government department, the eidikon, developed to ensure it, with local branches in every theme.

  This thematic army system was largely defensive; each army defended its own area. It needed to do so: the hundred years after 650, even though the frontier was by now relatively stable, was one of constant Arab raiding, which meant that no part of Anatolia was secure. Local society became largely militarized as a result; the thematic army, together with a slowly militarizing provincial bureaucracy, became the main political and social hierarchy in each area. When a landowning aristocracy is next documented, in the ninth and (especially) tenth centuries, it was as heavily military as in the West, as we shall see in Chapter 13. It is notable, however, that we can say almost nothing about landowning élites in the Byzantine empire between 650 and 800/850, even given the relatively poor documentation of the period. Landowners probably became poorer in the crisis years, particularly in those parts of Anatolia most exposed to long-term raiding. Cities also became much weaker in the period, and urban society vanished altogether in some parts of the empire (see below, Chapter 15), thus making a traditional Roman local politics, focused on the city as it had been, impossible. But what is above all the case is that social status from now on, in an empire concentrating on military survival, depended on office in the army or administration. We know the names of hundreds of military or civil administrators in this period, for they survive on lead seals, once used to authenticate documents, which have been found on archaeological sites all over the empire. It is just that we cannot say whether they had landed properties as well as offices in the imperial hierarchy, except in a few cases close to the capital, as we shall see in a moment. They probably did; and many of them may well have been both the descendants of sixth-century senatorial and urban élites and the ancestors of tenth-century surnamed aristocrats. But we do not know whether they did or not, and this is important. The period 650-800/850 was one in which office in the state overwhelmed landed wealth or local reputation as something to aspire to. Even ancestry became temporarily unimportant, or at any rate it is rarely stressed in our sources. To survive, Byzantine society and politics folded itself around the state.