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

by Chris Wickham

  Constantinople and its immediate hinterland were a partial exception to this. The city remained large, at least by post-Roman standards, and a money economy certainly survived there. A miracle-book of the 660s, rewritten later in the century, recounts the miraculous cures (mostly of genital problems) performed by the body of St Artemios, buried in the church of St John Prodromos. It shows us a bustling urban society full of incomers and artisans (a silver-seller, a bronze-caster, a ship-builder, a bow-maker, and also general workmen who had suffered hernias owing to heavy lifting), sitting in the church hoping for healing; the supplicants had their own associations with a treasurer to hold the money, and played dice to while away the time - as well as stealing from each other on occasion, and, in one case, thoughtlessly urinating in the church itself (the perpetrator was given someone else’s hernia by St Artemios for this misjudgement). Constantinople was an active city in the seventh century, evidently. Its élites did own land, especially around the Sea of Marmara; a frequent theme in early ninth-century saints’ lives is of public officials retiring to their estates and founding monasteries there. So Platon (d. 814), a middle-ranking bureaucrat from an official family, retired south of the Marmara to found the Sakkoudion monastery on his estates in 783; he became a monastic rigorist, together with his more famous nephew Theodore (d. 826), who was made abbot of the Stoudios monastery in the imperial city around 798. Platon and Theodore’s uncompromising political interventions, for example in opposition to the supposedly adulterous second marriage in 796 of the emperor Constantine VI (780-97), were the first known political acts by non-office-holding landed aristocrats since the sixth century. This would only have been possible immediately around the capital.

  But Constantinople was very much a creation of the state, all the same. It was dominated, even at its low point around 700, by a highly complex bureaucratic hierarchy, which ran the central government in its six or seven main departments, of which the most important was the genikon, which controlled the land tax. The relatively unmilitary culture of the city is explained by the strength of this bureaucracy, just as the wealth of the city was directly derived from its role as the fiscal hub of the empire. The church hierarchy, itself large, was also closely associated with the state; patriarchs were always chosen directly by the emperor, and dismissed if they disagreed with him. And Constantinople was an immense public space, with a complex ceremonial geography, centred on the display of imperial power. The Hippodrome, just in front of the palace, was a major location for public acts, including the proclamation of new emperors, or the humiliation of opponents, including the mock marriage of Iconophile monks and nuns in 765 supposedly commanded by Constantine V (741-75); and also for formal dialogues between emperors and representatives of the city. There were regular processions along the main streets of the city, too, at important moments of the liturgical year and to commemorate major events, which were so carefully crafted that observers could read precise meanings into which gate the procession entered at or how many places it stopped at. This ceremonial aspect of the city looked straight back to late Rome; although Roman traditions had certainly changed, they changed less here than in most other respects discussed in this chapter. It helped maintain a Roman form to the cityscape: wide roads survived longer in Constantinople than in any other post-Roman city, east or west. It helped maintain the statue-laden public spaces discussed at the start of this chapter, too. And it represented the state, public political power, at every stage.

  The focus of Constantinopolitan politics and ceremonial, and also of the military hierarchies of the provinces, was the emperor. However unstable his personal position, the imperial office mattered enormously: indeed, the frequency of coups and attempted coups itself showed how much people wanted the imperial title. I have stressed the fiscal and military decentralization of the theme system, but in all other respects the Byzantine empire was more centralized after 650 or so, not less, for social status was so dependent on position in the office-holding hierarchy. The dominance of the imperial city was also far greater after other cities failed; in Byzantium, uniquely in the Christian world, it was commonplace for bishops of sees all over the empire to spend as much time as they could in the capital rather than in their own diocese. It may be added that the empire was by now more culturally homogeneous, too; in 500 only a minority of the population of the eastern empire spoke Greek, and the official language was still, at least nominally, actually Latin, but by 700, after the loss of Syriac- and Coptic-speaking provinces, nearly everyone was a Greek-speaker, and the occasional Sclavenian and not-so-occasional Armenian were exotic. There were no more regional divisions between Christians, as between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, for the Monophysite provinces were almost all lost: religious disagreements were henceforth fought out above all in the capital. The major exceptions to this, the Latin-speakers of the mainland Italian provinces, including the Romans of Rome, slipped away from Byzantine rule in part precisely for this reason. A concentration of religious controversy on the capital also meant its concentration on the choices and actions of emperors; these were watched with considerable attention. Leo III (717-41) was accused, in a polemical text of two generations later (it purported to be a letter written to him by the pope), of saying ‘I am emperor and priest’. The claim, however polemical, was not a ridiculous one to make of any emperor. Emperors had a religious importance which even Justinian had not claimed in an earlier century, although earlier emperors, up to Constantine, did do so.

  In this form, the pared-down state survived the Arab conquests. And all through, it could continue to defend itself despite a relative shortage of charismatic leaders: in the two centuries and a half after 602, only the Isaurian emperors of the 710s-770s were really on top of events. The Frankish kings could not have survived in this situation, but the infrastructures of the Byzantine empire remained solid enough for it to be possible. Let us look at how this turned out in more detail.

  Heraclius died in 641 leaving a succession dispute between his two sons, by different mothers, ruling under the aegis of his widow (and, controversially, his niece) Martina. Martina was overthrown a few months later by supporters of his young grandson Constans II (641-68), however; it was Constans who presided over the final loss of Egypt, and over the stabilization of the frontier and the theme system, none of which, probably, had much to do with him. What he is best known for is his religious and Italian policies. Constans was committed to Monotheletism, and devoted his attention throughout his reign to imposing it on all opponents. The popes in Rome resisted particularly publicly; Constans had Pope Martin I (649-53) arrested, tried in Constantinople, and deposed. Constans also faced secular rebellions in the West, by Gregory, exarch of Africa (d. 647) and Olympius, exarch of Ravenna (d. 652), two of the three main western provincial governors, the strategos of Sicily being the third. Constans was very interested in his western provinces, all the same; they were the part of the empire least affected by the Arab threat. (Gregory was actually killed in an Arab raid on Africa; but the Arabs did not return there until the 670s.) Constans tried to reconquer the Lombard parts of Italy in the 660s, and, most remarkably of all, tried to move the imperial capital to Syracuse. This reflected Sicily’s wealth and stability, but it was too extreme a move (it could potentially have led to the abandonment of Constantinople and the East), and Constans was killed in a coup in 668. His son Constantine IV (668-85) returned to Constantinople, and also abandoned Monotheletism, in the sixth ecumenical council, held in the capital in 680; Christological debate no longer seemed relevant in a rapidly changing political system, and the issues involved hardly resurfaced in the East after the end of the century.

  Constantine, like his father, lived on the defensive. The Arabs attacked by sea in his reign, attempting to blockade Constantinople in the mid- 670s. The conquest of Africa began in the same period, culminating in the fall of Carthage in 698. In the Balkans, the retreat of the Avars after 626 had left a host of small, effectively independent, Sclavenian grou
ps which could occasionally attack the Byzantine coastal cities (as with Thessaloniki between 675 and 677) though in some way recognizing Byzantine supremacy; but a new Turkic power appeared south of the Danube in 680, the Bulgars, under their khagan Asparuch (d. c. 700), who defeated an imperial army and were recognized as independent rulers of, roughly, the northern half of modern Bulgaria in 681. The Bulgars would henceforth rival the Byzantines for hegemony over the Sklaviniai for three centuries. In Constantine’s reign, nonetheless, a style of military politics which would have a long future began to crystallize. Constantine dealt with the army as a direct interlocutor. Already under Constans, both supporters and opponents of Monotheletism were accused of causing defeat by wrong belief. The army came to see this as an issue too; the sixth council in 680 was urged on the emperor by the army, as Constantine himself said. In 681, following on from this, the soldiers of the Anatolikon theme demanded (unsuccessfully) that the emperor take back his brothers as co-emperors, supposedly saying ‘we believe in the Trinity. Let us crown all three!’ - as clear a statement of an imperial office modelled on the divine power as one could imagine. Constantine’s son Justinian II (685-95), an intransigent and unpopular ruler, ratified the sixth council in 687, deferring again to the views of the army. Justinian was, however, overthrown in a military coup in 695, and was exiled, with his nose cut off, to the Crimea.

  Six emperors followed in the next two decades, each replacing the last by coup. One was Justinian II again (705-11), who had escaped from the Crimea with Bulgar help, and who revenged himself terribly on his enemies. His successor Philippikos re-established Monotheletism; Anastasios II (713-15) abolished it again. The context of all of this was a growing political protagonism of the different themes, in a period of renewed Arab danger. Anastasios was at least competent enough to prepare against the long-planned and widely anticipated Arab siege of Constantinople; he decreed that only people with three years’-worth of provisions could stay in the city. He was however deposed by the Opsikion theme, against whom the Anatolikon and Armeniakon then revolted, and by the time the Arab army and navy arrived, in 717, the strategos of the Armeniakon, Leo III, was emperor. Leo survived the great siege of 717-18, the last serious attempt to destroy the Byzantine empire for almost half a millennium. His success broke the cycle of coups, and he and his son Constantine V ruled for nearly sixty years.

  The empire could hardly have been in a worse strategic situation in 717, but the Isaurian emperors turned the corner, using the bureaucratic and military structure that had bedded down in the last generation. Leo faced off Arab raids throughout his reign, defeating some of them; partly reorganized the administration; and at the end of his life, in 741, issued the first systematic imperial legislation since Justinian, the Ekloga: not a long text, but compiled explicitly because Justinian’s laws had become ‘unintelligible’. Under Constantine V, for the first time, the Byzantines raided the Arab lands as often as the Arabs raided back. In general, periods of Byzantine military success were made possible by periods of Arab political instability, and Constantine’s reign, in particular, coincided with the civil wars that resulted in the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate in 750. This created an aura of success which on its own made Constantine a figure with a high reputation in military circles, lasting into the 830s at least. Constantine also for the first time moved seriously to re-establish Byzantine power in the Balkans, attacking the Bulgars frequently in the period 759-75 and reimposing imperial hegemony as much as possible on the Sklaviniai, particularly those of what is now Greece. Constantine, on the other hand, was less interested in the West. Leo had opposed the papacy, initially over tax-paying issues, and in the 730s he stripped the popes of rights in southern Italy and Sicily. Byzantine control in the south was reasserted here at the expense of the north, however, and Constantine did not resist the Lombard conquest of the exarchate of Ravenna, in 751. The popes began to see themselves as part of a Lombard and Frankish world, not a Byzantine one, from the mid-eighth century onwards. This is when the Latin lands were lost to Byzantium, a fact that Greek sources hardly record. Constantine also intervened, more than any predecessor for a century, in imperial infrastructure, rebuilding the main aqueduct into Constantinople in 767, reforming the tax system, and establishing a non-thematic corps of professional shock troops, the tagmata, which would become the élite force in the ninth-century army.

  This renewed military and political protagonism is not what Leo and Constantine are best known for, however: for these, famously, are the Iconoclast emperors, the opponents of the developing cult of holy images. In the late Roman empire, east and west, if there was anything that was surely holy it was the relics of saints (and of the Christian divinity, like the True Cross); portraits of Christ and the saints, and paintings of biblical narratives, were simply guides, ‘made for the instruction of the ignorant, so that they might understand [scriptural] stories’, as Gregory the Great said. This remained the assumption in the West, at least among theorists, but in the East images ‘not made by human hand’, that is, created miraculously, begin to be referred to in the late sixth century, and one, an image of Christ, was credited (along with the direct action of Mary) with saving Constantinople during the 626 siege. These images can still be seen as pictorial equivalents to relics; but in the last quarter of the seventh century the power of images as a whole was beginning to widen. By 700 it was increasingly common to regard all portraits of saints as windows into the divine; one might pray to a holy portrait (an ‘icon’ as we would now say, although eikn in Greek just means any image) and believe that, in so doing, one was talking directly to the saint. Anyone could thus have their own saint at hand, and one did not need to go to church to have access to the divine. Already the Quinisext council in 691/2 justified images of Christ as consequences of his human incarnation. Although the council did not go so far as to say that they should be prayed to, the importance of holy images in Byzantine culture was clearly growing. It was this which Iconoclasts reacted against in the eighth century: praying to icons detracted from the honour due only to God, and could be seen as idolatry. Indeed, as Constantine V argued in his Peuseis (c. 752), images of Christ only stress the human side of the divinity, and neglect the divine side; Christ is only properly represented in the eucharist, as well as, metaphorically, in the cross. But this is the only point at which the Iconoclast vs. Iconophile controversy referred to the Christological controversies of the past. Otherwise, it was essentially concerned with whether religious images of all kinds could be venerated, and whether praying to (or through) them was a correct, or an idolatrous, form of worship.

  Later Iconophile sources saw Iconoclasm as an imperial challenge to image-worship, beginning with Leo III, who supposedly saw the volcanic eruption on the island of Thera in 726 as a sign of God’s wrath and began to destroy religious images from then onwards. All the sources that tie Leo to Iconoclast policies are late, however, postdating the first repudiation of Iconoclasm at the second council of Nicaea in 787, some of them being interpolated into earlier texts. (Most descriptions of the spiritual power of images of saints before 700 are similar interpolations.) In Leo’s reign, Iconoclast views took root in the empire, all the same, apparently as a grass-roots phenomenon; there were already bishops like Thomas of Klaudioupolis and Constantine of Nakoleia (both sees were in western Anatolia) who opposed images in the 720s-730s, and Thomas was criticized by Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople for actually removing them from public places. In the years around 750, Constantine V took this up and turned Iconoclasm into imperial policy. As we have seen, he even wrote a treatise on the subject (his Peuseis survives because it is excerpted and attacked in the Antirrhseis of Patriarch Nikephoros, d. 828); and in 754 he called the council of Hiereia, a palace across the Bosporos from Constantinople, to ban the veneration of images altogether. ‘The unlawful art of the painters’ was henceforth to be regarded as a secular activity alone. Pictures of the cross were still legitimate, but those of holy humans were not.


  Constantine’s breaking of icons and persecution of Iconophiles (particularly monks) were much written up by later authors, but they do not seem to have been particularly thorough or consistent. Constantine obviously did not promote icons, and the mosaic cross still surviving in the apse of Hagia Eirene in Constantinople, rebuilt after 753, reflects imperial patronage. But there is little evidence of active destruction. Nor did Constantine systematically target monks, not all of whom were Iconophiles anyway; indeed, he patronized some monasteries. There were some high-profile executions, notably of the monk Stephen the Younger in 765, but they were isolated. It is worth repeating that Iconoclasm had grass-roots support, including in the episcopate as early as the 720s, and certainly in the army and imperial bureaucracy, and in the capital. It was not just an imperial cult, like Monotheletism, imposed by force on the hostile and indifferent. The Life of Stephen the Younger, which is one of the texts most responsible for the image of Iconoclasm as a generalized tyranny, says that Iconophiles had to flee to the Crimea, to Italy (the pope was fiercely anti-Iconoclast), and to the south coast of Anatolia, to escape persecution. This is a text of 809, much later than the events it describes, and heavily tendentious, but the impression one gets is that the core lands of the empire were fairly solidly Iconoclast. In any case, in the last twenty years of his reign, 755-75, Constantine behaved as if the Iconophile issue was mostly solved; his military campaigns were probably rather more to the front of his mind.