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

by Chris Wickham

  Constantine’s son Leo IV (775-80) did not live long, and the latter’s widow Eirene ruled for her son Constantine VI (780-97) for the next decade. In 785, Eirene, with her newly appointed patriarch Tarasios (d. 806), made her opposition to Iconoclasm clear, and called a council in 786 in Constantinople to deal with it. The army and some bishops broke it up on the first day, and it had to be rescheduled for Nicaea, further from the capital, the year after. The second council of Nicaea condemned Iconoclasm uncompromisingly, refuting (and thus preserving) its theology point by point. It was, in effect, Second Nicaea which invented the theology of images which has remained a structural part of the eastern church. Many of the basic liturgical practices of Orthodox Christianity look back to 787. Images from now on - as never before - not only could be venerated, but had to be. And Nicaea not only invented Orthodoxy, but to a large extent invented Iconoclasm too, turning Constantine V’s policies into a totalizing system, which they probably never had been at the time.

  It is not fully clear why Eirene did this. She was certainly bothered by the religious break with the pope, who was by now close to the Frankish kings, and she wished to reunify Rome and Constantinople; her first formal announcement of her intentions was in a letter to Pope Hadrian I. (She succeeded, at least on a religious level; the Franks themselves, however, rather favoured Iconoclasm, and formally condemned Nicaea at the synod of Frankfurt in 794; see Chapter 17. But the whole controversy never had the same importance in the West, where religious images were never given the same spiritual attention.) It is also highly likely that Eirene needed an excuse to break with Constantine V’s supporters in both church and state, and to put in her own. It may even be that she had been a closet Iconophile all along, just waiting her chance (though if so she had been very quiet about it in the twenty years since her marriage to Leo, carefully orchestrated in imperial ceremonial in 769). But this was not necessarily the case. Eirene was an effective and sometimes ruthless dealer. If 787 was not proof of that, 797 would be, for this was when, after several years of partial retirement, Eirene organized a coup against her son, deposed and blinded him, and made herself empress in his stead. If Eirene could make herself empress by force, the only woman in Roman history to do so (or in European history before Elizabeth of Russia in 1741), then she could also orchestrate the invention of Orthodox Christianity to bolster her power. Either way, however, the religious basis of imperial power took a new path from now on.

  Eirene was not a very active figure as sole ruler (797-802), however, and she was deposed in her stead by one of her senior financial administrators, Nikephoros I (802-11), with both official and military backing. All the same, she had managed to get together a substantial coalition in 797, inside the imperial bureaucracy and parts of the tagmata, and also had the support of the most rigorist clerics and monks around Platon of Sakkoudion and his nephew Theodore, to whom she gave the Stoudios monastery. These people were happy with a female ruler, as not all religious extremists are, and it is worth pausing for a moment to look at why. We saw in Chapter 4 that empresses like Pulcheria, Verina, Theodora, Sophia were influential in the eastern empire from the fifth century; they were part of the imperial hierarchy in their own right, even if subordinate to emperors (usually their husbands). Unlike in the Frankish political system, they not only gained power as regents for their young children, and indeed Pulcheria and Theodora were childless by their husbands (although Theodora was said to have had earlier children); they could have considerable influence over emperors even if the latter were major protagonists, as with Theodora’s husband Justinian, and could rule in all but name if they were not, as with Pulcheria’s brother Theodosius II. This clearly did not change with the transformations of the seventh century. Martina failed to ride the politics of the capital in 641, but there was still an institutional role and a moral space for a determined empress, and Eirene, who was both regent for her son and already empress in the lifetime of her husband, could make use of that. She had her own household, separate from that of the emperor; she was formally a co-ruler with her son for seventeen years, appearing on coins in the position of senior ruler at times. An element of female power was, if not typical, at least not abnormal in late Rome and Byzantium; and Eirene had a ready-made clientele, who owed their careers to her since 787 and before, when she took sole power in the end. Even after her fall, it was only in the West that people attributed her failure to the fact that she was a woman. And Iconophile religious rigorists were above all won over by Second Nicaea; the chronicler Theophanes (d. 818), who admittedly loathed Nikephoros I, wrote about 802: ‘men who lived a pious and reasonable life wondered at God’s judgement, namely at how he had permitted a woman who had suffered like a martyr on behalf of the true faith to be ousted by a swineherd.’ The image of the pious female being given a chance at power in order to right wrong belief went back to Pulcheria, and was a resonant one.

  If Constantine V marks a turning point for military protagonism, Nikephoros I does the same for the administration. He continued Constantine’s and also Eirene’s campaigns in the Balkans, but for the first time moved to stabilize conquests by creating new themes and thus an administrative infrastructure, including the Peloponnesos in southern Greece, and Thessaloniki in the north. He also revised the census in around 809, a necessary element in any tax-raising state, the first time this is known to have happened since Leo III’s reign; Theophanes complains bitterly about this as part of a narrative onslaught on Nikephoros’ ‘vexations’, so its novelty may well be the author’s invention, but it is likely that the emperor saw the reorganization of the tax system as a priority. Most of Theophanes’ other ‘vexations’ indeed concerned taxation: remissions were cancelled, some previously exempt church estates were taxed, so was treasure trove, and so on. From now on, references in our sources to fiscal activity increase, and Theophanes’ references to taxes in money may also imply that Nikephoros expanded money exactions rather than taxes in kind. The imperial economy could sustain this again by now, and coin finds on archaeological sites increase again from now on too (see Chapter 15).

  The Balkans was by now occupied by semi-autonomous Sklaviniai, as we have seen, who could be defeated over and over again, but who remained. Exactly how Balkan society worked in the two centuries after Heraclius is exceptionally obscure, however. The Sclavenians can only have been a small minority of the population originally, and were furthermore always organized in very small-scale tribal groups. It is a measure of the radical disruption of the Byzantine politico-military system in the seventh century that they settled so easily. The Balkans in this respect resembles Anglo-Saxon England more than any other part of the former Roman empire; there, too, quite small-scale groups managed to take over a province more or less completely in the century after 450, and in the end even change its language, even though the descendants of British speakers outnumbered the descendants of settlers by perhaps ten to one. This latter change happened in the northern and central Balkans too. Slavic had become the common tongue for communication there by the mid-tenth century, as Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos records in his On the Administration of the Empire; both Greek and Latin were still spoken too (Latin still is in some areas, in forms resembling modern Romanian), and so were more local languages such as the ancestor of modern Albanian, but Slavic would eventually win out, north of present-day Greece and Albania at least. Slavic would indeed take over even in the multi-ethnic khaganate of the Bulgars (below, Chapter 13), whose rulers were Turkic-speaking for a long time. The Bulgars were also, however, always better organized than their Sclavenian neighbours. Constantine V pushed them back to their core areas, around Pliska in northern Bulgaria, their capital, but he did not destroy them, and under Eirene they regrouped - they benefited from Charlemagne’s final destruction of the Avars in 796 (below, Chapter 16), and picked up territory and resources north of the Danube. By the time Nikephoros I was extending the themes of Greece northwards, the Bulgar khagan Krum (c. 800-814) had established an effe
ctive army, and counterattacked. Nikephoros sacked Pliska in 809 and 811, but Krum cut him off and destroyed him and his army in the latter year. Nikephoros was the first emperor to die in battle since Valens at Adrianople in 378.

  The year 811 was a shock to the empire, and Krum’s wars of 813-14, in which he defeated Michael I (811-13), captured Adrianople and assaulted Constantinople, made it that much more serious. Constantine V’s memory, including his religious policies, suddenly became much more attractive. Conspirators tried to raise Constantine’s blinded sons to the throne in 812; a group of soldiers opened the imperial mausoleum in 813 and prayed before Constantine’s tomb calling on him: ‘Arise and help the state that is perishing!’, as Theophanes claims in appalled tones. The new emperor Leo V (813-20) held off Krum, but drew the same conclusions: that it was under Iconoclasm that the state had been victorious. In 815 he re-established it formally, and deposed Patriarch Nikephoros for refusing to assent. Nikephoros wrote sourly in around 819 that if one was going to adopt religious policies just because of military success, one might as well go back to Alexander, Caesar, Herod and Sennacherib; the argument in itself shows how much Second Iconoclasm owed to Constantine V’s reputation.

  Leo fell in another coup, the fifth since 797; Michael II (820-29) hesitated over maintaining Iconoclasm, but found Theodore of Stoudios, whom Leo had exiled, so uncompromising a spokesman for the Iconophiles that it seemed safer to maintain an Iconoclast position. It is indeed clear from Theodore’s own voluminous letters how few people stood out against Iconoclasm in this period, and how much Theodore’s attempts to rally the faith fell on stony ground; bishops were almost entirely Iconoclast; and, over all, whatever people’s private views, they were happy to accept Iconoclasm as the theology of the regime. Michael’s son Theophilos (829-42) was a more convinced religious partisan, and persecuted public Iconophiles with some verve from 833 onwards; most innovatively, by having a condemnatory text tattooed on the faces of two Palestinian monks, Theodore and his brother Theophanes, in 839 (the two, the graptoi, ‘inscribed’ brothers, became Iconophile heroes, and eventually saints). But Iconoclasm had much weaker social roots second time round, and its military justification could not stand up to events. The Bulgars had made peace in 816, but held much wider areas, and did not go away; they marked out their boundary with the Byzantines with the huge earthwork known as the Great Fence of Thrace in this period. The ‘Abbasid caliphate was at its height, and Theophilos’ attempts to impose himself on the eastern frontier resulted in a massive Arab invasion in 838, led by Caliph al-Mu‘tasim himself, which sacked the important city of Amorion. Worse, north African Arabs invaded Sicily in 827 and began a conquest which would remove the whole island from Byzantine control by the early tenth century; and Crete fell to Spanish Arab pirates in 828, thus opening the Aegean to sea raiding again. It was now Iconoclasm, not Orthodoxy, which seemed to bring defeat. At Theophilos’ death, his widow Theodora, regent for her infant son Michael III (842-67), and her allies overturned Iconoclasm in a year. In 843 Orthodoxy was restored (Theodora claimed that her husband had repented on his deathbed); Theodora, a second Eirene, had Constantine V’s body exhumed and destroyed, and put Eirene’s body into the imperial mausoleum instead. Iconoclasm vanished remarkably fast this time; there were no more major military defeats; and Byzantium could from now on continue firmly on its medieval track.

  Second Iconoclasm can easily be painted as a superficial deviation, this time - unlike in the eighth century - little more than an imperial cult, tragedy reappearing as farce. It was more interesting than that, however, for two reasons. One was that Second Nicaea, and, later, Theodore of Stoudios and Patriarch Nikephoros, had created an organized Iconoclasm as a negative image, which could simply be re-established by their opponents. That is to say, precisely because of Iconoclasm’s enemies, it could be an entire religious system that Leo V and his advisers invoked, not just the memory of Constantine V, even though the latter lay at the core of their choices. The other was that there were more intellectuals in Constantinople by now to debate about it; we know much more about Second than about First Iconoclasm as a result. The relative prosperity of the eighth century allowed for the development of education in theology, classical literature and philosophy in the capital after 750 or so which is hardly attested in the previous hundred and fifty years. Constantinople had never gone short of the great works of ancient secular and ecclesiastical literature, but from now on they were increasingly accessible to the political élite. Nikephoros used Aristotle to refute Iconoclast ideas in his Antirrhseis; Theodore was steeped in Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom. Ignatios the Deacon (d. c. 848), whose career we shall come to in a moment, cited many classical authors, above all Homer, but also Hesiod, Euripides and Aristotle, in his writings and invoked the ‘Pythagorean doctrine of friendship’ in letters. The writings of the major Iconoclast theorist John the Grammarian, who compiled the texts Leo V used in 815 and was patriarch in 837-43, do not survive, but his name speaks for itself. His relative Leo the Mathematician (d. after 869) taught the next generation of the élite, in the schools he ran from the 820s onwards, both before and after 843. These men were capable of serious intellectual debate. The emperor Theophilos, in particular, sought it; remarkably, he freed in 838 the Sicilian Iconophile Methodios (d. 847), who had been in prison most of the time since 821, and kept him in the palace to discuss theology. Methodios was himself to become patriarch at the proclamation of Orthodoxy in 843.

  Ignatios the Deacon represents the twists and turns of political culture in this period as well as anyone. Born in the 770s, he was a protégé of Tarasios and a friend of Patriarch Nikephoros in the 800s, which also, even if he does not say so very explicitly, will have made him an opponent of Theodore of Stoudios; even among Iconophiles, Theodore seemed an extremist, until Second Iconoclasm in 815 made them close ranks. Ignatios trimmed much closer to the wind than any of these, however. He may or may not have been the Ignatios who composed Iconoclast poems for the walls of the imperial palace under Leo V, but he was certainly archbishop of Nicaea for a while under either Leo or Michael II, and he wrote public poetry for Michael. Ignatios’ collected letters of the 820s-840s show him to be a cultured intellectual, but essentially a regime figure, devoted to patronage relations with bishops and civil officials alike. The collection, made after 843, is expurgated of pro-Iconoclast sentiment, but it contains very little Iconophile sentiment either. In perhaps the 820s he writes to his close friend the archivist Nikephoros, praising him for his stance, which was slightly more critical of Iconoclasm than Ignatios’ own, but the letter shows quite clearly that both men were on friendly terms with a leading Iconoclast; relationships of power cut across personal belief in a very obvious way. The year 843 marked a break here; Ignatios was regarded by Methodios as too close to Second Iconoclasm to remain unscathed, and for a while he was exiled (sort of: to a monastery in sight of the capital, not exactly very far away). The letters he writes now are regretful: I am poor now; I ‘furiously strayed to the opposite side’. But Ignatios redeemed himself remarkably fast, with heavily Iconophile biographies of his old associates patriarchs Tarasios and Nikephoros, and by his death he was back in the patriarchal entourage - he had successfully trimmed back again to his starting point. In the early ninth century Ignatios was probably the norm, committed Iconophiles or Iconoclasts the exceptions. Byzantium in 843 comes to seem like England in 1660 or East Germany in 1990, full of people trying to show how little they had compromised with a losing political system which in reality they had been largely happy with. Each was the triumph of a better-rooted but also rather more conservative and complacent political regime, which imposed its own orthodoxy, a set of soon-unquestioned assumptions inside which people henceforth would have to operate.

  I have spent some time on Iconoclasm, because it is perplexing. One could easily write a history of the period 750-850 stressing quite other things: Constantine V’s military protagonism; Nikephoros I’s administrative reforms,
which were taken further under Michael II and Theophilos (by the mid-ninth century, the army was better paid and equipped, and was reinforced by a strong set of tagmata around the capital); or the visible commitment to prestige building in the capital under Theophilos: new palaces with mechanical devices which do not survive, renewed city walls which do. All of these betray a greater confidence, as well as a desire to impress. The empire was in reasonably good shape by 850; it had weathered the worst storms by now. Does it matter, then, that so much imperial and theological rhetoric was taken up with the issue of whether one should venerate pictures? Iconoclasm, the first medieval theological dispute, has seemed to many to be about less ‘serious’ theoretical issues than the great Christological debates of the past. It is not surprising, then, that much analysis of Iconoclasm has supposed, whether explicitly or implicitly, that it was ‘really’ about something else. So Peter Brown, in an influential argument, fully recognizes that the Iconoclast debate was about the location of the holy in society, not a small matter, but he goes on to emphasize that the aim of the Iconoclast emperors, in the face of the Arab threat, was to streamline the whole of Byzantine society and culture, and focus it on a few central symbols, the cross, the eucharist, the capital, the emperor himself, rather than face ‘a haemorrhage of the holy . . . into a hundred little paintings’.