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

by Chris Wickham

  This attraction to a past literature recalls the culture of the Carolingian élite in the ninth century, as we shall see, in the density of its allusiveness and the joy in words felt by its authors. (Cf. also Chapter 14, for the ninth-century Arabs.) But there is a difference. The Carolingian kings developed an educated theological culture around them as part of a programme of moral reform; it was possible for people to become politically important solely because of their intellectual ability; Carolingian political crises were all mediated, and moralized about, by intellectuals. In Byzantium, the sense of religious mission was less constant, and, of the figures just mentioned, only Photios could easily be said to have had a political programme based on a worked-out theological or philosophical position. The others were members of an official élite, who saw their education as part of their standing in that élite; they used literary culture as an entry into and justification of political power, not as a guide to how to conduct that power. This is even true for Constantine VII; ‘order and dignity’ were his touchstones, not Carolingian-style moral reform and salvation. Nor were there, for a long time, any important theological disagreements inside the Byzantine political world after the end of Iconoclasm. Indeed, after Nicholas mystikos, even patriarchs were relatively marginal politically for a century or more.

  The aim of the tenth-century Byzantine educated élite was different: it was to restore the Roman past, which belonged to them, the true Romans. In the fourth century, membership of the political élite was closely associated with a literary education, as with Libanios, Synesios and Basil of Caesarea (or, in the West, Ausonius and, later, Sidonius Apollinaris). So should it be again, and indeed was. The tenth-century literary language moved away from spoken Greek, sticking closely as it did to late Roman forms. We begin again, as in the late Roman empire, to find snobbish remarks about the lack of literary culture of the military emperors (Constantine VII sneered at Romanos I Lekapenos, 920-44, who had admittedly usurped his own throne, as a ‘common, illiterate fellow’). And the search for a Roman renewal led early to the revival of Roman law; begun by Basil I and Photios, and completed by Leo VI, the Basilika was the translation and rationalization of Justinian’s Digest, Code and Novels. This was henceforth to be (and, as far as we can tell, actually was) the basis of all the legal practice of the empire, as it had not been since the crises of the seventh century. Literary, ceremonial, and legal re-creation went together; with the renewed confidence of the period, the 350-year gap separating Leo and Constantine from Justinian could be conceptually abolished.

  Middle Byzantine court culture has often been seen as static and arid; even modern commentators can be found arguing along these lines. Tenth-century writers would be delighted; this was their aim, indeed. But it is not a true account, all the same. For a start, beside all this classical vocabulary there was a dense theological culture in all these writers, as there was not in any of their secular fourth- to sixth-century forebears. Biblical allusions are in fact much commoner in their works than are Plato and Homer, in a way that would have appalled Prokopios, for example. But things were also constantly changing. Ceremonies were always being renewed and developed, even while claiming to be immemorial. They could also be sabotaged, with sometimes sharp political effects. After Leo VI’s fourth marriage in 906, which was flatly illegal in canon law, Patriarch Nicholas banned him from Hagia Sophia. This was almost more momentous than excommunication, for it meant that all the court ceremonial we began with in this chapter was thrown into confusion; Leo had to force Nicholas to resign a year later, and he did not regain his office until Leo’s death. The patriarch did not win on that occasion, but a weaker emperor would have to have conceded rather more. After the murder of Nikephoros Phokas in 969, which was instigated by his nephew and successor John I Tzimiskes (969-76), with the cooperation of Nikephoros’ own wife (and John’s lover) Theophano, John too was banned from Hagia Sophia by Patriarch Polyeuktos (d. 970); Polyeuktos demanded that John must give up Theophano and expel her from the city, and repent his crime, before he could even get into the church to be crowned, and this time the emperor gave in. The denser a ceremonial system, the more easily it can be used to make points, major ones as here, more subtle ones elsewhere. Byzantine politicians played with their system, and it changed, steadily, under their hands, as a direct result.

  The Byzantine court, with all its processions, had in fact become a hugely elaborate stage, on which an equally complex politics could be fought out between rival players. The network of offices and titles were ever more crucial parts of a hierarchy which was focused directly on the emperor, and which underpinned the system of imperial power. This could itself be subverted, in the sense that emperors could be removed or marginalized, but the power of the system was nonetheless maintained. It was more solid than any other political system in Europe after the sixth century, and indeed more solid even than the parallel structures of the caliphate, except in the first century of ‘Abbasid power, as we shall see in the next chapter. This was not, however, a ‘theatre state’, a political system only consisting of ceremonial, as on Bali in the nineteenth century, as described by Clifford Geertz. Ceremonial cost money (so did it on Bali, of course), and so did official status. The other aspects of imperial self-presentation, like the bronze tree full of mechanical singing birds which so impressed Liutprand of Cremona on his earlier, happier, embassy to Constantine VII in 949 (as they were intended to - impressing envoys was a major aim of Byzantine ceremonial), cost money too. The Byzantines could be very direct about this, as with the salary-paying ceremony in the week before Palm Sunday also witnessed by Liutprand in 949: the emperor distributed bags of gold coins which were put on the shoulders of each senior court and military official in turn, across a three-day period - for there were so many officials to pay - with lesser officials paid the following week by the chamberlain. (Liutprand told Constantine that he would like it better if he could take part, and got a pound of gold coins for his spirit.) This procedure unveils the underlying motivation of the whole official class: they needed paid office, not only to wield power (which few of them would ever really manage to do), but to sustain their prosperity and lifestyle. As in the time of Theodosius or Justinian, the solidity of the state depended on an effective tax system. Since the early ninth century, this had become more and more organized again, and only this could permit the ceremonial world of Constantine VII to exist at all. Liutprand in 949 certainly did not miss the point, and even in 968, however grudgingly, he had not forgotten it. Byzantine rulers, by now, were simply richer than anyone else in Christian Europe; by 949, indeed, most Muslim rulers did not match them either. It was this that their extreme formality was designed above all else to emphasize, and indeed did so.

  The stage we have been looking at was set, in this format at least, by Theodora and her advisers in 843, with the end of Iconoclasm and the proclamation of Orthodoxy (on 11 March, a day commemorated thereafter on the first Sunday of Lent by another formal procession, all across the city, as the Book of Ceremonies tells us). Theodora’s son Michael III (842-67) was dominated by others, herself, then her brother Bardas, then, after Bardas’ murder in 866, by the former groom, now chamberlain, Basil. Basil capped his rapid rise - unusual even in Byzantium, where ancestry was less crucial than in the West, as we shall see shortly - by murdering Michael in 867 as well, and becoming emperor as Basil I. Michael had to be subjected after his death to a campaign of vilification as an inept drunkard to justify this, but Basil established a stable regime, and a family succession for his ‘Macedonian’ dynasty that lasted nearly two centuries, up to 1056, longer than any family had managed before in the history of the empire.

  The politico-military situation facing Basil was in most respects a favourable one. Above all, the ‘Abbasid caliphate had dissolved into political crisis after 861, thus neutralizing the strongest power in Eurasia and Byzantium’s most immediate threat; it never recovered, except for a generation roughly coinciding with Leo VI’s reign. This freed
up the Byzantines, as Arab civil war had under Constantine V, to be real military protagonists if they could manage it. Already in 863 the emir of Melitene (modern Malatya), one of the main border warlords, was defeated and killed on a raid to the Ankara region; in the 870s Basil went onto the offensive, leading raids over the Tauros mountains into Cilicia and the Euphrates valley. This protagonism remained. Even in the generation of ‘Abbasid revival, the Byzantines at least managed to hold the frontier, and they gained an increasingly concrete hegemony over the lawless borderlands; Basil destroyed the autonomous (apparently heretical) Christian Paulicians of the Tauros in the 870s, and he and his successors had steadily more influence over the newly unified Armenians and their Bagratuni kings as well. Basil in the 880s then looked westwards. He was no more successful than his predecessors in holding back the long-drawn-out Arab conquest of Sicily (its capital Syracuse fell in 878), but he took advantage of the confusion produced by Arab raids in mainland southern Italy, and conquered most of it himself (not in person, this time) in 880-88, turning the Lombard principalities, much of whose territory he had taken, into client states. This meant that, even though Sicily had gone, Byzantium maintained a strong western presence for another two centuries.

  The most obvious target for Byzantine aggression was the Bulgar khaganate, which had dominated the central and northern Balkans for fifty years, since the time of Krum; we need to focus on the latter, and its relations with Constantinople, for a moment as a result. Exactly how the Bulgar political system worked is not at all clear. Archaeological excavation in its successive capitals, Pliska and (from the 890s) Preslav, show considerable wealth and, in the latter, architectural ambition; so does the Great Fence which bounded Bulgar rule to the south. But what sort of fiscal infrastructure the khagans had is hard to see; they took tribute from their subjects, but it is not certain how systematically they did so. They could be very effective militarily, but they relied on perhaps semi-autonomous aristocrats (boilades or bolyary) to supply their armies. If they were to withstand the Byzantines, freed from eastern defensive needs by the 860s, they needed to borrow techniques of government from them fairly fast. The first of these was Christianity and the Christian church. The Byzantines attacked Bulgaria in 864, and Khagan Boris I (852-89) immediately agreed to be baptized in 865, and to allow missionaries in. It was such a prompt concession that it must have been on the cards for some time, although it was far from popular - Boris faced rebellion almost at once. The Bulgar mission nonetheless continued, and became a political football between the rival missionary projects of Constantinople and Rome, both of whom Boris invited in. Relations between the two churches were already bad, for the Moravian ruler Rastislav, who ruled a powerful Sclavenian polity in the Frankish borderlands (see below, Chapter 20), had in 863 invited Byzantine missionaries, Constantine-Cyril and Methodios, to proselytize, rather than the Latin missions which Pope Nicholas I (858-67) considered proper. Nicholas protested about this missionary rivalry, but without effect. More successfully, he pressed the usurping and still politically insecure Basil I to remove Photios as patriarch in 867, on the grounds that his election was uncanonical, although Photios soon made peace with Basil: he was Leo VI’s tutor by the early 870s, and became patriarch again in 877. Competition between Rome and Constantinople for the conversion of two Christianizing polities, the restored Photios’ understandable resentment at papal interference, and growing differences over Christological details, sent relations between the two churches into the worst crisis since Iconoclasm.

  The Moravians and Bulgars eventually accepted geopolitical logic, and the former went Latin, the latter Greek; once this finally happened in the 880s the tension between the churches quietened down again. But Boris, in particular, had got substantial concessions in return for his Greek choice: in 870, the Bulgar church was recognized as autonomous outside of Constantinople, with its own archbishop. After 885, Boris welcomed Methodios’ missionaries, now expelled from Moravia, into his kingdom, and adopted the Slavonic liturgy that Constantine-Cyril had created for the Moravians as his own - it still exists as the core of Slav Orthodoxy. The Cyrillic alphabet was developed in Preslav in the late ninth century, too, and a Slavic religious literature followed quickly. Slavic also slowly became the dominant language in the Bulgar khaganate, largely as a result of these developments. The Bulgars were creating an increasingly Byzantinizing style of rule, but were giving it an identity separate from Constantinopolitan influence. This stood it in good stead when Bulgar-Byzantine relations became cool again under Symeon, with wars in 894-7 and 913-24, in both of which the Bulgars were notably successful, raiding the suburbs of Constantinople itself in 913, and again in 920-24, in an echo of Krum. Symeon took the title basileus, emperor (tsar, from ‘Caesar’, in Slavic) in 913 or shortly after, and was feared to be aiming for the throne of Byzantium too - he called himself ‘emperor of the Bulgars and Romans’ by 924 (why don’t you call yourself caliph as well, Theodore Daphnopates retorted). But Constantinople’s walls held, and Symeon died; under his successor Peter (927-68) peace returned. This was the apex of Bulgar power and status; under Peter we begin to find more and more lead seals, signs of a literate Byzantinizing administration, particularly in Preslav; the Bulgar archbishop had been upgraded to a patriarch, too. The Bulgar state even developed its own popular heresy, Bogomilism, during Peter’s reign. The Bogomils were dualists, and believed that the world had been created by the devil; this enabled them to generate a social critique of the growing differentiations inside Bulgar society, as is made clear in an attack on them in Slavic by Cosmas the Priest in the 960s. The Bogomils directly influenced the Cathar heresy which was so influential in western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; their beliefs were second only to the Slavonic liturgy as the most lasting cultural exports of Symeon’s and Peter’s Bulgaria. The Bulgar state fell fairly rapidly in the end, as we shall see, but it left these legacies, at least.

  Leo VI, hemmed in by resurgent Bulgars on one side and more briefly reviving ‘Abbasids on the other, was less of a military figure than Basil had been, but he held his ground, and his Taktika revived the genre of military handbooks to considerable effect; a dozen similar handbooks, some as we have seen drafted by other emperors, follow in Byzantium in the next century. Leo focused on law and on administrative reform. He was also concerned with the centrality and survival of his and Basil’s dynasty, and the church crisis over his fourth marriage, to Zoe Karbonopsina, was caused by his iron determination to safeguard the legitimacy of his only son, Constantine VII, who was born to Zoe when she was still Leo’s mistress. Constantine was only eight when he succeeded as sole emperor in 913, however, and rivals fought over who was to be regent, or perhaps emperor, for the next seven years: the re-enthroned Patriarch Nicholas, the domestikos tn scholn (in prac- tice, the head of the eastern army) Constantine Doukas, who attempted a coup in 913, Tsar Symeon, whose second war began in the same year, Zoe Karbonopsina herself, who took over the regency council in 914 and ruled the empire until 919, and finally the head of the navy, Romanos Lekapenos, who staged a successful coup in 919, married his daughter Helena to Constantine, and became senior emperor in 920. The Macedonian dynasty had already achieved too much status to be easily overthrown, and Romanos (through Theodore Daphnopates) indignantly protested his loyalty to Constantine when writing to Symeon in 924. But Constantine, though still at court, was marginalized, and, when he finally overthrew the Lekapenoi in 945 and ruled directly, saw himself as in his second reign, with a quarter of a century’s break between the two.

  Romanos I had an exceptionally loyal and able domestikos tn scholn, John Kourkouas, who held the post from 922 to 944, when Romanos was overthrown by his sons, a month before Constantine’s own coup. After the Bulgar peace in 927, John raided systematically and boldly on the eastern frontier for fifteen years, achieving military dominance in the borderlands as the ‘Abbasids folded into crisis again. He turned this into conquest in 934 when he took Melitene; he had conside
rable influence in Armenia; and in 944 he forced the emir of Edessa not only to make peace but also to hand over one of the great Christian relics, the Mandylion with Christ’s miraculous image, to be held henceforth in the palace in Constantinople. Constantine VII as sole ruler in 945 appointed Bardas Phokas as domestikos tn scholn, returning as he did to a family which had held this position for most of the reigns of Leo VI and Zoe, as we shall see later. Bardas and then his son Nikephoros, who succeeded him as domestikos in 955, followed John Kourkouas in pushing eastwards; Nikephoros in particular sought to conquer. In 958 he took Samosata on the Euphrates, and by 962, under Constantine’s son Romanos II, he was in control of the whole upper Euphrates valley; in 962-5 he took Cilicia, in 965 Cyprus, in 969 Antioch, the old Roman capital of the East. As important was his conquest of Crete in 961, the strategic key to the southern Aegean, which the Byzantines had unsuccessfully tried to take back several times since 827.

  Nikephoros Phokas, the most successful general for centuries, was thus in a good position to repeat Romanos Lekapenos’ coup when Romanos II died with young heirs in 963. He moved swiftly to the capital, married Romanos’ widow Theophano, and, as in 920, reduced the children Basil II and Constantine VIII to the status of marginal co-emperors. He then returned to war, the first emperor to command his own troops since Basil I. So after 969 did his nephew and murderer John Tzimiskes, who was John Kourkouas’ great-nephew as well; John attacked on the eastern frontier as far south as Beirut, and by the end of his reign in 976 all the Arab rulers of the rest of Syria paid him tribute. John was also, for the first time in this period, successful in the Balkans. Svyatoslav, prince of the Rus of Kiev (see below, Chapter 20), attacked Bulgaria in 967, probably at Nikephoros’ instigation, and took Preslav; he returned in 969 and overran the Bulgar state, threatening Byzantine territory as well. John in 971 pushed the Rus out of Bulgaria in a quick campaign, the reverse of the long-drawn-out and inconclusive Bulgar wars of the last two centuries. He drew the logical conclusion to his military supremacy and deposed Tsar Boris II (968-71) as well, in a formal ceremony in the forum of Constantine in Constantinople. Bulgar power, fearsome for so long, thus suddenly collapsed, and John ruled from the Danube to the Euphrates, over a third as much again as Romanos I had ruled at his accession.