The Oxford History of Byzantium

by Cyril Mango

  After the death of Leo IV, his widow Irene, who took power for their young son Constantine VI, moved to end the empire’s growing isolation from the rest of the Christian world. She renewed the negotiations for a marriage alliance with the Carolingians which had been cut short by the death of Pepin in 768, and preparations were made for Constantine to marry Charlemagne’s daughter Rotrud. More cautiously, she worked to end the official policy of Iconoclasm in the Byzantine Church, and after the death of the patriarch Paul in 784 secured the election of a successor, Tarasios, who would co-operate with her to call an ecumenical council for the restoration of icons and Church unity. After an abortive meeting at Constantinople in 786, the council concluded its business at Nicaea the following year. By this time, however, Charlemagne had called off his daughter’s betrothal and come into conflict with Byzantine interests in southern Italy and the Adriatic. In 788 the Franks defeated a Byzantine expeditionary force sent to restore the Lombard king Adelchis. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that Charlemagne refused to recognize the Council of Nicaea, on which he had not been consulted and which omitted all mention of him from its proceedings.

  If the Byzantine government was hoping to divide Charlemagne from the papacy it was disappointed; their relationship remained close, and it culminated in the famous occasion on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. The question as to who took the initiative and who was doing the favour to whom has been open ever since, but there can be no question that Byzantium was seriously offended, or that even without the formality of the title Charles was imperial in ways that matched and surpassed the achievement of any contemporary Byzantine emperor. He chaired his own reforming Church council in 794. To the huge conglomeration of Germanic kingdoms which was his dynastic inheritance he added by consistent success in war. He all but terminated the political existence of two peoples who had caused the empire much grief: the Lombards, whose Italian kingdom he had annexed in 774, and the Avars, whose kingdom on the middle Danube he invaded in 791 and finished off in 795–6, thus winning for the Franks the fabulous treasures which the Avars had amassed from plunder and tribute, mainly at the expense of Byzantium. He exchanged embassies with the Abbasid caliph Haru-n al-Rashid, who recognized him as the protector of the church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem: Charlemagne made conspicuous benefactions to the church of Jerusalem at a time when the Byzantine government was conspicuously unable to help.

  The Carolingian empire was hardly the equal of the Abbasid caliphate in resources and sophistication, or in terms of the threat it posed to Byzantium. The Abbasid realm stretched from Tunisia to Central Asia, comprising all the ancient centres of civilization in the Near East, and dominating all the major trade routes between the Mediterranean and the Far East. It was one of the most bureaucratized and urbanized states in the world. It shared a long frontier with Byzantium from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and Islam confronted Orthodox Christianity with the challenge of an alternative monotheism which saw the conquest and conversion of the Christian world as one of its basic objectives, and preached the jihd, the struggle against non-Muslims, as a means to spiritual salvation. The Abbasids, with their capital at Baghdad and with a strong political orientation towards Iran, did not prioritize the conquest of Constantinople in the way their Umayyad predecessors had done, but they promoted the jihd all the more energetically, either leading campaigns in person or delegating them to the emirs of Syria and North Africa. This meant a constant pressure of annual raids into Asia Minor, the greater part of which remained a war zone, while on the maritime front the islands of the Mediterranean, all still Christian at the beginning of the ninth century, came under increasing attack. Thus in 827, the Aghlabids of al-Ifriqqiya (Tunisia) began the long conquest of Sicily, while a group of political exiles from Muslim Spain launched a successful invasion of Crete. Byzantium thus lost its two main island possessions in the central and western Mediterranean, with devastating consequences for the security of Italy, Greece, and the whole Aegean and Adriatic littoral.

  The threat from the Carolingian empire was hardly of the same order. There are nevertheless parallels in the ways that both Abbasids and Carolingians challenged Byzantium over the legacy of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Both appropriated core areas of the Graeco-Roman world, but dominated them from power bases that were far from the Mediterranean and from cultural traditions that did not wholly identify with Rome. Both also appropriated enough of ancient culture for their propagandists to assert that the wisdom of the ancients, along with world domination, had deserted the Greeks and found a new home. The mutual recognition of Hariūn al-Rashid and Charlemagne was thus significant for Byzantium. It signified that the continuation of the Roman empire in Constantinople was no longer the sole focus of the other great powers of the post-Roman world, but was fast becoming the smallest and weakest of the three. An observer of the world scene in 800 could well have concluded that if the end of the world was not imminent, the future of the western part of it lay with Latin Europe and Islam. It is no accident that both Harūn and Charlemagne were to become immortalized in literature and legend, whereas no contemporary Byzantine ruler left any reputation for greatness, apart from the partisan recognition that the empress Irene received for the restoration of icons. The empire in the decades around 800 was afflicted by humiliating military defeats, usurpations, and short reigns of emperors who all, apart from Irene, had bad relations with the Church. So bad had the situation become by 813 that a strong pressure group in Constantinople and in the army convinced the emperor Leo V that the solution lay in a return to the Iconoclasm that had seemingly guaranteed Leo III and Constantine V long reigns, a secure dynastic succession, and military success, above all against the Bulgars.

  One of several boundary stones set up in the reign of King Symeon (AD 904) between Byzantium and Bulgaria. This one was found about 20 km north of Thessalonica.

  The empire’s straitened circumstances derived not only from the constraints imposed by the superpowers to the east and west of it, but also, and more urgently, from the pressure of the medium-sized power to the north, with which it had to share domination of the Balkan peninsula. The greatest obstacle to the empire’s revival was the presence to the south of the Danube of the Bulgar khaganate with its capital at Pliska and a southern frontier in the Hebros/Maritza valley only three days march from Constantinople. In 780 the Bulgar state had survived in close proximity to Byzantium for almost a century, taking advantage of the empire’s internal problems and wars against the Arabs, and this survival had hardened it into an extremely tough political entity. Its Turkic ruling elite combined the military ferocity of the steppe people they had been with the agricultural resource base of the Slav peasantry they dominated, and with the skills of civilization acquired from Greek traders, captives, and defectors. The emperors Constantine V, Irene, and Nikephoros I all tried with some success to extend the area of imperial control in the frontier region of Thrace by fortification and resettlement, but their work was undone when Nikephoros I and his army were trapped by the Bulgar khan Krum in a valley near Sar-dica (modern Sofia) in 811. Nikephoros became the first emperor since Valens (378) to die in battle against a foreign enemy; Krum followed up his victory by terrorizing Thrace and threatening Constantinople. His sudden death from a stroke (814) gave Byzantium a reprieve, but the thirty-year peace concluded in 816 left the frontier where it had been in the mid-eighth century, and Krum’s successors used the peace to expand northwestwards up the Danube and south-westwards towards the Adriatic.

  The conversion of Bulgaria to Christianity was clearly inevitable; that Khan Boris (852–89, 893), baptized Michael in c.865, adopted the Christian religion in its Byzantine form, is seen as a triumph of Byzantine diplomacy. But it is questionable whether Byzantium would have undertaken the conversion if it had not been on the agenda of the Frankish Church and the papacy, or whether it was as advantageous to Byzantium as it was to Bulgaria. For all his deference to the emperor and patria
rch of Constantinople, the convert-king used Christianity to define the separate identity of his kingdom, both culturally through the development of a Slavonic religious literature, and territorially through the establishment of new bishoprics under the jurisdiction of a semi-autonomous archbishop of Bulgaria. The new bishoprics were heavily concentrated in frontier areas, and thus served to define the partition of the Balkan peninsula to Bulgaria’s advantage, as can be seen from the way the name Bulgaria came to apply to a vast swathe of territory stretching from what is now central Albania to the hinterland of Constantinople. Things did not improve for Byzantium when the convert-king was succeeded by a son who had been destined for the monastic life and educated in Constantinople. Perhaps because of this background, Symeon seems to have gone out of his way to demonstrate to those of his subjects with a nostalgia for paganism that he was no cloistered Byzantine puppet. The effect of seeing Byzantium from the inside was certainly to make him want the empire, or something very much like it, for himself. Though committed in principle to peaceful coexistence with Byzantium, he spent more than half of his thirty-three-year reign at war with its rulers in retaliation for being cheated out of what he considered to be his legitimate expectations. From 913, when the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos tried to appease him by performing some sort of coronation ritual on him outside the walls of Constantinople, he expected recognition as emperor (basileus in Greek, tsar in Slavonic) and a marriage between his daughter and the young Constantine VII. His ultimate ambition eluded him, but in pursuing it he matched Byzantium in diplomacy and constantly outperformed it in battle. And he did not ruin his country in the process: it is apparent that his son Peter inherited a kingdom which was as coherent and viable a military power as any in tenth-century Europe. As the price of peace with Peter after Symeon’s death in 927 the emperor Romanos I was prepared to give Peter his granddaughter in marriage, to recognize Peter as basileus, to pay an annual tribute, and to accord patriarchal status to the Bulgarian Church.

  At the end of the ninth century Symeon of Bulgaria moved his seat to Preslav, which he adorned with many buildings, including churches. The Round Church, situated in the outer city, has no exact counterpart in contemporary Byzantine architecture.

  John Tzimiskes celebrates his triumphal return to Constantinople. In front of him an icon of the Virgin Mary is carried on a chariot. Miniature of the Chronicle of John Skylitzes, illustrated in southern Italy in the late twelfth century.

  The emperor John Tzimiskes conquers Preslav in 972 (upper register). In the lower register Basil II captures Pliska in 1000. Miniatures illustrating the Bulgarian translation of the Byzantine chronicle of Constantine Manasses (fourteenth century).

  The peace established in 927 lasted forty years, by which time, a century after the baptism of Boris-Michael, Bulgaria was well on the way to becoming a permanent fixture among the states of Europe, at least as fixed as any of the Frankish kingdoms which remained from Charlemagne’s empire. Yet Byzantium was fundamentally opposed to coexistence. After the overthrow of Romanos I in 944, Constantine VII denounced the marriage of Peter to Maria Lekapene as an anomaly. The view of Bulgaria in Constantine’s treatise on foreign relations, the so-called De administrando imperio, is entirely consistent with that expressed some fifty years earlier by his father Leo VI in a survey of the military tactics of the empire’s enemies: the Bulgar kingdom is pointedly left off the map, as a black hole at the centre of the empire’s web of relationships in eastern Europe, neither Christian ally nor barbarian foe, but implicitly classed with the barbarian nations to the north of it, and identified as a target for their attacks. Indeed, tenth-century Byzantine rulers had no scruples about inciting pagan peoples to attack Christian Bulgaria. The Magyars and the Pechenegs were used against Symeon; in 967, the emperor Nikephoros II, deciding not to renew the treaty with Peter, engaged the Rus under Sviatoslav of Kiev. Sviatoslav greatly exceeded his brief by occupying Bulgaria and reducing it, under Peter’s son Boris, to a protectorate of the vast East European empire that he now proposed to rule from the Danube. However, this Rus occupation made it possible for Nikephoros’ successor, John I Tzimiskes, to subsume the liquidation of the Bulgarian kingdom in his victorious campaign against Sviatoslav in 971: the ceremony which stripped Boris of his royal insignia was a part of the triumph which Tzimiskes celebrated on his return to Constantinople. The Bulgarian capital, Preslav, was made the headquarters of a Byzantine military governor. However, the decapitation of the Bulgarian state left much of the organism intact, especially in the west. During the civil wars which followed Tzimiskes’ death in 976, the Bulgarian elite rallied under the leadership of the sons of an Armenian official, one of whom, Samuel, made himself the ruler of a revived Bulgarian kingdom centred first on Prespa and then on Ochrid. It took Basil II (976–1025) the greater part of his reign to destroy Samuel’s dynastic regime.

  The conquest of Bulgaria brought much additional territory, removed a major threat to the hinterland of Constantinople, and restored overland communications between the Aegean and the Adriatic. The Balkan wars of John I and Basil II made the empire a superpower on two continents. Yet those wars were hard fought, and could not have been won if the empire had not, in the meantime, improved its position on other fronts, especially in the east, where the frontier with Islam had advanced significantly between 931 and 968. This was partly the result of a great increase in military efficiency, but it was also due to the political decline of the empire’s great imperial neighbours. Whereas Byzantium in the year 1000 was clearly recognizable as the state it had been in 800, only bigger and stronger, the empires of Harūn al-Rashid and Charlemagne were looking somewhat altered and greatly the worse for wear. Both the Abbasid caliphate and the Carolingian empire had fractured into smaller units and the dynasties which had created them had lost effective power. Islam was being pulled apart by religious divisions, all expressed in dynastic terms, between the Sunnites and various groups of Shiites, by regionalism in Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran, and by strong non-Arabic cultural traditions, notably in Iran and among the Turks whose role in the caliph’s armies made them an increasing presence at the heart of the caliphate. Thus instead of a jihd financed and recruited from the whole Islamic world, Byzantium was now confronted on its eastern border by independent regional emirates, which however bellicose—like the Hamdanid emirate of Aleppo led by Sayf al-Dawla—could not prevail against the co-ordinated might of the empire’s resources. In the West, Charlemagne’s empire had crumbled under pressure from the inheritance demands of multiple heirs, from the raids of Vikings, Magyars, and Saracens, and from the violent self-help of the warrior aristocracy. Only in East Francia, under a new dynasty, did the Frankish monarchy, by successful war against the pagan Slavs and Magyars, reverse the trend sufficiently to present Byzantium with a new imperial challenge in Italy, following the imperial coronation of Otto I in 962. However, the challenge was aimed at a marriage alliance, and it was resolved in 972 by the marriage which united Otto II to Theophano, a female relative of John I. The half-Greek son of this marriage, Otto III, stood on his western imperial dignity, but in a style that clearly reflected the court of his eastern colleague, Basil II, whose niece he was preparing to marry at the time of his premature death in 1002. The crushing defeat of Otto II by Saracen forces in Calabria in 982 only confirmed what had been clear since 870: Byzantium was the only local power with the resources to organize resistance to Muslim aggression in central and southern Italy. The recapture of Crete in 961 made the reconquest of Sicily a possibility. The papacy, the city-republics of Amalfi, Naples, Gaeta, and Venice, the Lombard princes of Benevento and Capua, and the Ottonian emperors, all had to concede that an enhanced Byzantine presence in Italy, and good relations with the empire, were an unavoidable necessity.

  Byzantium in the tenth century was realizing the benefits of the unglamorous strengths which it had built up in the struggle for survival in the seventh and eighth centuries, and which made it a model of cohesion and stability compar
ed with the giants which had overshadowed it in 800. It was territorially more compact than either the Carolingian or the Abbasid state, and unlike them it was not a dynastic state; that is, it was not the creation of a dynasty and did not depend on dynastic continuity—or dynastic substitution—for its identity or its survival. Unlike most medieval empires, it was not held together by aggressive warfare to satisfy a military aristocracy’s need for land and booty. It had the religious unity which was lacking in the caliphate: the iconoclast controversy, ended by the final restoration of icons in 843, had forged a strong bond between orthodoxy and political identity. At the same time, Byzantium had the apparatus of government—a bureaucracy, a standing army, a comprehensive taxation system—which was largely missing in the Carolingian realm. Its imperial capital and its holy city were the same, which was not the case in either Latin Christendom or Islam. The Abbasid capital, Baghdad, may have matched or surpassed Constantinople as a showcase of wealth, learning, and palace power. But Constantinople was older by four hundred years; its buildings and rituals were visible proof that this was still the Roman empire of Constantine, however reduced, which had existed when the Franks and Arabs were barely known to history, and Baghdad had been a vacant site up-river from the capital of the now extinct Persian empire.