The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  Finally, the sixth and early seventh centuries were visited by recurrent bouts of bubonic plague, commencing in 542, by which ‘nearly the whole world was eliminated’, and by a series of clashes between the Byzantines and Persians, which culminated in the latter’s annexation of many of the former’s provinces. ‘Nations have been wiped out,’ wrote one Byzantine historian in 580, ‘cities enslaved, populations uprooted and displaced, so that all mankind has been involved in the upheaval.’ These events served to diminish the great coastal cities and to favour the smaller towns of the interior regions, where lesser population density mitigated the effects of the plague and distance from major thoroughfares spared them from pillage. The northwest Arabians participated in this efflorescence of the interior, trading especially with settlements in the Negev, Balqa’, and Hawran.

  In short, the century before Muhammad saw Arabia become increasingly integrated into the political, religious, and economic world of the superpowers of Byzantium and Iran. And yet the Arabs retained a distinctive culture and sense of identity. This was partly because of the very different ecology of their homeland which ill supported state structures. But it was also because increased resources, especially imperial subsidies, allowed them now to give expression to this difference. Chiefs of client kingdoms began to designate themselves as ‘king of all the Arabs’ and had Arabic poetry composed in their honour and for their entertainment. It is they who gave impetus to the creation of an Arabic script to record their deeds, requests, and genealogies. And it was, therefore, natural that God chose to send down to Muhammad a ‘recitation in Arabic’ (qur’an ‘arabiyy) in ‘clear Arabic speech’ (lisn ‘arabiyy mubn).

  This sense of being different from the civilized peoples of the Near East was to stand the Arabs in good stead when they were their masters. Tribal peoples, because they were highly mobile and because their menfolk were all militarily active, were often successful at overrunning settled states, but being culturally inferior they would very quickly become assimilated to the culture of their subjects. The Arabs were able to resist this process, for they had brought their own religion and their own cultural heritage, each of which validated the other. Moreover, they initially kept apart in military camps rather than dispersing amongst the native population as landlords and farmers. Lands taken by force were appropriated by the state and the revenues therefrom were paid to the Muslim soldiers by the government as stipends in return for military service. There were, of course, disputes. The third caliph, ‘Uthman (644–56), was murdered by veteran warriors angry at being shortchanged in favour of newcomers and at the nepotistic style of rule, and there ensued a civil war during which various factions struggled to assert their own view of government. But in the end the Arabs stuck together, many feeling that even an unjust ruler was preferable to loss of their unity (jam‘a).

  The winners of this first Arab civil war were a dynasty called the Umayyads (661–750), who immediately set about laying the foundations of a new empire. They built administrative complexes, palaces, and mosques; they reclaimed marshlands and undertook irrigation projects, carried out land surveys and censuses. For such tasks competent managers were required and, since the Muslim rulers paid no heed to the birth or creed or rank of non-Arabs, there were great opportunities for advancement open to the able. Bashshar ibn Burd’s grandfather, a native of Tukharistan, was captured and taken to Basra where he worked as a bricklayer; Bashshar himself became a famous court poet in a position to boast to his masters ‘that I am a man of ancestry superior to any other man of ancestry’. Conversion was not essential—thus Athanasius bar Gumaye, a native of Edessa, made his fortune as right-hand man to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, brother of the caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705) and governor of Egypt, while remaining a devout Christian. But among prisoners-of-war or émigrés to Muslim cities, who would be spending all their time among Muslims, conversion was the norm, as was noted with much grief by their erstwhile co-religionaries: ‘many people who were members of the Church will deny the true faith … without being subjected to any compulsion, lashings or blows.’ The entry into the Islamic fold of such a diffuse mixture of people, from so many different races and of so many different religious and philosophical persuasions, lent a tremendous variety and vitality to the nascent Muslim world and meant that Byzantium came face to face with a new and virulent civilization taking shape within its own former provinces.

  The small town of Anjar, near Baalbek (Lebanon) has been attributed to the caliph al-Wald I (705–15). It is built on an orthogonal plan in the Roman style, framing a square 175 m to the side.

  The earliest Umayyad coins imitate the Byzantine issues of Heraclius with three standing emperors, even including the mint mark CONOB. Only the cross on steps is made into a staff. The imperial figures are then replaced by the caliph drawing his sword. Finally, a purely epigraphic design was introduced.

  The confrontation of these two powers dominated their politics for centuries. Initially each strove totally to vanquish the other. However, ‘Abd al-Malik’s construction of the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, his minting of aniconic coins bearing the Muslim profession of faith, and his moves to institute Arabic as the official language of the new empire made it clear to all that the Muslim realm was to be no mere temporary phenomenon. Equally, the failure of the Muslims’ great thrust to take Constantinople in the early eighth century demonstrated to them that the Byzantines were not so easily to be ousted. War in the field became often no more than a ritual display, and the battle turned rather to one of words. Amidst the vituperative polemic exchanged by both sides there were also, however, occasional fruitful exchanges and rare enlightened overtures, such as that made by the patriarch Nicholas to the caliph Muqtadir (908–32): ‘The two powers of the whole universe, the power of the Saracens and that of the Romans, stand out and radiate as the two great luminaries in the firmament; for this reason alone we must live in common as brothers although we differ in customs, manners and religion.’

  5

  The Struggle for Survival (641–780)

  WARREN TREADGOLD

  These years can rightly be called the Dark Age of Byzantine history: a time of military reverses, political instability, economic regression, and declining education, which has left but a scanty record for modern historians. The evidence is so poor that we often have trouble not only reconstructing the course of events and evaluating the personalities of leading figures, but even discerning the broadest outlines of development. One of the harder questions to answer is how Byzantium managed to survive the Arabs’ attacks at all.

  To judge by the precedents for old empires attacked by vigorous peoples making their first bids for world power, Byzantium should have been doomed before the Arabs. It found itself in the role of the western Roman empire attacked by the Germans, Carthage attacked by the Romans, or the original Persian empire attacked by Alexander’s Greeks. None of those ancient states had lasted as long as a hundred years after its first decisive defeat. By 641 the Sasanid Persian empire had already lost its heartland and its capital to the Arabs, and was to last only ten more years as an organized monarchy.

  When Heraclius died, Byzantium also looked highly vulnerable. The Arabs had already despoiled it of Syria, Palestine, its part of Mesopotamia, and most of Egypt. Still exhausted by the ravages of the Persian war, which it had won only with agonizing difficulty, the empire was disorganized, impoverished, and almost bankrupt. It was also chaotically led, since Heraclius had divided the succession between his elder son Constantine III, who was dying from tuberculosis, and his younger son Heraklonas, who was dominated by his unpopular mother Martina. For three years the empire suffered from internal strife.

  Constantine III died after reigning a mere three months, and Martina and the 15-year-old Heraklonas succeeded. But many of the people of Constantinople had always considered Martina’s marriage to her uncle Heraclius incestuous and invalid, and Heraklonas a bastard. In any case the usual Roman and Byzantine practice had b
een for the succession to pass not from brother to half-brother but from father to son; and Constantine had left a son, Constans II, who was not much younger than Heraklonas. Heraklonas and his mother clung to power for just six months before the chief army commander, the Armenian general Valentine, overthrew them with the help of a Constantinopolitan mob.

  Rather than execute a woman and child, Valentine slit Martina’s tongue and Heraklonas’ nose to seal their deposition, using punishments previously imposed upon ordinary criminals. Then he proclaimed Constans II, married his daughter to the 11-year-old emperor, and became the power behind the throne. Meanwhile the Arabs finished conquering Egypt and raided Armenia and Anatolia. When Valentine tried to assume the title of emperor along with Constans, the mob, loyal to the legitimate heir, lynched the usurping general.

  When Constans II finally became his own master at the tender age of 13, every part of the empire that remained was endangered. Anatolia and Armenia were under Arab attack, and Byzantine Africa and Italy were plagued by revolts and at best half-independent. All that slowed the Arabs a little was their need to round off and pacify their conquests, especially in Persia. No one could have had great confidence in young Constans, who seems actually to have begun to rule, no doubt relying heavily on his advisers and generals.

  Having secured Armenia in 654, the Arabs started to invade Anatolia in earnest, sacking its main cities while looting Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete with a powerful new fleet. Though the next year an Arab civil war gave Byzantium a respite, which led to a formal truce and even a payment of tribute by the Arabs, nothing suggested that the Byzantines could stop the Arab onslaught when the truce ended. The empire must have been desperately short of money after losing so much land and so many taxpayers, and especially its main granary in Egypt. Yet its defensive needs were greater than ever, and seemed to demand spending money that the empire could not raise.

  At this point, our meagre sources begin to use Hellenized names for the empire’s five main armies and the districts where they were stationed. Both the armies and their districts are called ‘themes’ (themata, apparently meaning ‘emplacements’), and their commanders strategoi (‘generals’, except for the Count of the Opsician Theme). The origin of these themes is not in much doubt: they were evidently the field armies of the previous period. The large Opsician Theme combined what had been the two Praesental armies, while the Anatolic, Armeniac, and Thracesian themes were the former armies of the East, Armenia, and Thrace, which had retreated from their original positions to new stations in Anatolia. Only the origin of the Carabisian Theme is doubtful; the best guess is probably that its men, who were marines, came from the former army of Illyricum.

  Above: Inscription in honour of an emperor called Constantine—probably Constans II—following a victorious defence of Sardinia against the Lombards undertaken by the local duke, also called Constantine, c.AD 645 (?). Porto Torres, Sardinia.

  Below: Acclamation in honour of Constans II or Constantine IV on the land walls of Constantinople. The erased fourth line probably associated the emperor with the Green or Blue circus faction.

  What modern scholars chiefly dispute is how the new themes functioned. Our first clear evidence dates from the ninth and tenth centuries, when all our sources markedly improve. Then the soldiers of the themes were mainly supported and equipped not by their cash pay, as in the sixth century and before, but by land grants of specified minimum values located within their theme. The question is, did the themes have more or less their later form when they first appeared in the mid-seventh century, or did they only reach that state by some process of evolution?

  No source mentions the distribution of military land grants at any date, and their minimum values are only noted in legal texts of the tenth century. On the other hand, the obvious reason for using land grants to support soldiers is to save money. The empire had no special need to economize in the ninth or tenth centuries, but its need was acute in the mid-seventh century. At that time the vast imperial estates known from the earlier period should still have been available for distribution. Strikingly, by the ninth century these estates had become insignificant, while the military lands had become extensive. Such considerations point to the conclusion that the imperial estates were distributed as military lands in the middle of the seventh century, most likely during the truce with the Arabs between 659 and 662.

  Besides saving the government desperately needed cash, giving the soldiers land grants had other consequences, one advantageous and one not. The advantage was that, with themes now covering almost the whole empire, every important region had resident soldiers to defend it, who were strongly motivated to defend their own land. The disadvantage for the government was that, once the soldiers became mostly self-supporting, they had less reason to obey the emperor, and were easier to raise in rebellion against him. Though Constans II is unlikely to have anticipated either of these effects, he soon saw how both of them worked.

  In 662 Constans embarked for the West with a large army. He left his adolescent son Constantine to govern at Constantinople, doubtless assuring the boy that his own duties at the same age had been even heavier. After visiting Pope Vitalian in Rome, Constans made Sicily his headquarters. He managed to stop the slide of Byzantine Africa and Italy towards independence, and may well have distributed land grants to the soldiers there. During his absence the Arabs, whose civil war had ended, returned to the attack. They met with stiffer Byzantine resistance than before, presumably from the themes. But in 668 the strategos of the Armeniac Theme proclaimed himself emperor, and the Count of the Opsician Theme, who was in Sicily with Constans, assassinated him and also claimed the throne.

  Above: The last gold issues of Constantine IV (668–85) show a reversion to types of the sixth century and exceptionally high quality of execution, although the emperor’s name is misspelt as Constanus.

  Few historical figures of comparable importance are as poorly documented as Constans II, who lived thirty-seven years and reigned for twenty-seven of them. His reputation among orthodox Byzantines suffered because he refused to condemn Monotheletism and persecuted its opponents Pope Martin I and Maximus Confessor—though in fact he punished them for abetting rebellions in Italy and Africa. At the least, however, Constans successfully defended an empire that had seemed doomed when he took it over. If he was indeed the founder not merely of the themes but of the system of military land grants, he provided Byzantium with a flexible, affordable, and effective tool for the long struggle with the Arabs that stretched ahead.

  Below: Justinian II introduced for the first time the bust of Christ with the legend rex regnantium on the obverse of his gold coinage, relegating his own effigy to the reverse.

  The themes’ penchant to rebel, while real enough, proved not to be disastrous in this case. The Armeniac Theme ended its revolt after its strategos died in a riding accident, and the expeditionary force in the West promptly arrested Constans’ assassin. Constans’ son Constantine IV, though barely 20, had taken to ruling as precociously as his father had, and had already been in power in the East for six years. He sailed to Sicily, established his control of the West, and executed his father’s assassin. Constantine returned to the East the next spring, bringing with him the eastern contingents of Constans’ expedition.

  The emperor was needed there, because the Arab threat had become more pressing. The Arabs had already taken advantage of the Armeniac Theme’s revolt to seize some border territory, and they now began concerted land and sea attacks on Byzantine Africa, Sicily, and Anatolia. Worst of all, they began to make large-scale raids on the region around Constantinople itself. The raiders took as their base the nearby port of Cyzicus, where they first wintered in 670–1, and then returned in 674 for an indefinite stay. Though they had little chance of taking the strongly walled capital outright, their raids kept much of the Byzantine army pinned down. While the raiders from Cyzicus looted wherever they wished, other Arabs captured Cilicia and Rhodes, the Lombards conquered more of B
yzantine Italy, and the Slavs besieged Thessalonica, by now the empire’s second-largest city.

  After three miserable years of this, Constantine decided to risk a battle with the raiders, especially because he had a new weapon. A Christian refugee from Syria had discovered a formula that we call Greek Fire, which burned on the surface of seawater and destroyed any ship in its path. In 677 the Byzantine fleet attacked the Arabs’ ships, burned many of them with Greek Fire, and sent the raiders fleeing back towards the caliphate. A storm then wrecked most of what remained of the Arab fleet, as the Opsician, Anatolic, and Armeniac themes decimated the Arab army. The Byzantines had never won such signal victories against the Arabs before.

  Having made a truce with the Arabs, recovered Rhodes, and defeated the Slavs near Thessalonica, Constantine tackled the question of Monotheletism, which his father had determinedly left open. That doctrine had long been detested in Africa and Italy, and since the loss of Armenia it had few remaining adherents even in the eastern parts of the empire. In 681 the emperor called an ecumenical council, the Third Council of Constantinople, which after a year of deliberations condemned Monothelitism, declaring that Christ, as fully human and fully divine, had two wills corresponding to his two natures. This definition resolved the last ambiguities in official church doctrine about Christ. In the future the Byzantine Church would quarrel about matters less central to the Christian faith.