Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

by Lars Brownworth

  The city that would become an empire was officially dedicated on May 11, 330, and though Constantine had named it Nova Roma, it was always known as Constantinople in his honor.* The celebrations were lavish on a scale only the master of the known world could bestow and they culminated with a strange mix of pagan and Christian services. Accompanied by priests and astrologers, the man who had set himself up as the defender of Christianity processed to the center of his forum, stopping before the great column that he had erected in his own honor. The tall structure was surmounted fittingly enough with a golden statue taken from the temple of Apollo and recarved to look like Constantine. Crowned with a halo of seven rays (which, according to rumor, contained the nails used in the Crucifixion), the impressive figure gazed confidently toward the rising sun, dreaming of the glorious future that awaited. At the base of the column, the emperor presided over a solemn ceremony, dedicating the city to God while the most sacred items he could find from both the pagan and Christian past were buried below it. At a moment chosen by his astrologers, the relics were interred in great porphyry drums brought from the Egyptian desert and sunk below the column. There the sacred cloak of Athena, the ax that Noah had used to make the ark, and the baskets from the feeding of the five thousand would lie incongruously together through the centuries.+ As far as his soul was concerned, Constantine clearly preferred to hedge his bets.

  For the rest of his reign, the emperor tried hard to maintain a political and religious harmony. Under his firm hand, a measure of prosperity returned, but at times his ruthlessness bordered on petulance. Annoyed that his oldest son, Crispus, was wildly popular, Constantine accused him of trying to seduce his stepmother, Fausta. Not bothering to give his son a chance to protest his innocence, the emperor had him executed, then decided to kill Fausta by scalding her to death in her bath. He had spilled too much blood to unify the empire under his rule to brook any rivals--especially within his own family.

  When it came to his dealings with the church, however, this decisiveness was nowhere to be found. Bored by theological speculation, he cared only that Christians were united behind him, and this led to an irritating habit of backing whichever side he thought was in the ascendancy.

  The main problem was that a council--even one as prestigious as Nicaea--could establish doctrine, but it couldn't change the minds of the common men and women who made up the body of the church. Arius may have been branded a heretic by a group of bishops, but that did nothing to diminish his effectiveness as a speaker, and he found warm support throughout the East, where people continued to convert to his cause. His Egyptian congregation had been given a new bishop--Athanasius, the fiery champion of the mainstream position--but they continued to prefer Arius's sermons. If Constantine had stood firmly by the decisions of his own Council of Nicaea, all would have been well. With strong leadership from the top, the Arian heresy would have withered away soon enough, but Constantine decided that public opinion had swung behind Arius, so he reversed his position and condemned Athanasius. When the accused man came to Constantinople to plead his case, the emperor was so impressed by his oratory that he reversed the ruling again and condemned Arius. By this time the citizens of Alexandria must have been suffering whiplash from wondering which of the two men was their bishop.

  Things only got worse. Arius, doing his level best to ignore the fact that he had been deposed, started his own church, and an embarrassingly large number of Alexandrians soon supported him. Constantine responded by trying to tax them into obedience, announcing that any professed Arian would have much higher rates. This didn't seem to have much effect, and before long the Arian faction at court talked the vacillating emperor into reversing himself once again. Athanasius, in what by now must have been a familiar drill, was deposed and sent into exile. Thanks to Constantine's wavering, the situation was now hopelessly confused and continued to deteriorate even after Arius's rather lurid death.*

  Constantine had no patience for the confusing religious problems, and before long his mind started to wander to thoughts of military glory. In his younger days, Christians had flocked to his banner when threatened by Licinius, and perhaps another military campaign would bring the church back into line. Casting about for a suitable opponent, his eye caught Persia, the favorite enemy of Rome. The Persian king Shapur II had just invaded Armenia, and a campaign to conquer and Christianize the fire-worshipping Persians would serve perfectly.

  There was no love lost between the two empires, and Shapur II had much to answer for. The dyed skin of a Roman emperor still hung in a Persian temple and captured Roman standards still decorated its walls. The time had come to avenge these insults. Gathering his army, Constantine set out just after Easter in 337, but only made it as far as Helenopolis (modern-day Hersek), the city named after his mother, before he felt too sick to continue. The waters of a nearby thermal spa failed to improve his condition, and by the time he reached the suburbs of Nicomedia, he knew he was dying.

  The emperor had always played it safe with religion, postponing his baptism in the belief that a last-minute consecration, with its cleansing of sin, would give him a better chance of entering paradise with a clean slate. Now, feeling his last breath approaching, he threw off the imperial regalia and donned the white robes of a new Christian. Vacillating between the sides of Nicaea to the end, he chose the city's Arian bishop, Eusebius, to perform the baptism. A few days later, on May 22, the first Christian emperor expired.

  Even in death, he managed to trumpet his self-importance. He had taken to calling himself the "equal of the apostles"--though he certainly considered himself superior to them--and his burial left no doubt about how he saw himself. In a departure from the usual Roman tradition of cremation, he was laid in a magnificent sarcophagus in the sumptuous Church of the Holy Apostles that he had built in Constantinople. Arrayed around him were twelve empty caskets--one for each disciple--with himself as the Christ figure at the center. It was one last bit of propaganda worthy of the man who had couched his brutal and opportunistic maneuvering as a divinely inspired mission. Despite having murdered his wife and eldest son, he was venerated as a saint--quite an impressive feat for a man who was both deified as a pagan god and baptized by a heretic.

  Aside from the unpleasantness of his character, few rulers in history have had such an impact on history. He had found an empire and a religion fractured and hopelessly divided, and bestowed on both an order that would serve them well. His limited understanding of Christianity made the divisions within it much worse, but his adoption of the faith set off a cultural earthquake that began a sweeping and permanent social transformation. In the West, he laid the feudal foundations of medieval Europe by making peasant jobs hereditary, and in the East, the faith he professed would become the binding force of his empire for the next thousand years. In time, the city that he founded would grow to become the great bulwark of Christendom, protecting an underdeveloped Europe from countless Asiatic invasions.

  By the time of Constantine's death, the transformation that had started with Diocletian had come to its final fruition, and the old Roman Empire began to pass away. The capital on the Bosporus was founded on a Latin model, its bureaucracy and planning echoing that of Rome, but transplanted on an eastern shore, this New Rome had already begun to change. The Greek, Christian culture around it was beginning to take hold.

  *It's still there, although today it's known as Constantine's basilica. After he entered Rome, the victorious Constantine replaced Maxentius's statue with one of himself put some finishing touches on the building, and claimed it for his own.

  *Constantine's association with the city actually went back to 292, when he had been kept there with his mother, Helena, as a hostage of the eastern emperor, Galerius.

  *This was the origin of the famous Blue and Green Circus Factions that would soon dominate the Hippodrome and play such a large role in Justinian's reign.

  *From 323 until the empire was destroyed more than a thousand years later, the citizens of Cons
tantinople would meet in the Hippodrome every May 11 to commemorate the city's birth.

  +Where presumably they still are. In time, the column itself came to be seen as a sort of relic, and each New Year's Day (September 1) the citizens would gather at the base of it and sing hymns.

  *While walking in the Forum of Constantinople, Arius was suddenly seized with a desire to relieve himself. Squatting down in the dust behind a column, his intestines spilled out, along with his liver and kidneys, killing him almost instantly.

  3

  THE PAGAN COUNTERSTROKE

  Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead. Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover. In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.

  --WILMER C. WRIGHT, Julian: Volume III

  The empire might have been profoundly transforming itself, but its citizens were oblivious to the change. They had called themselves Roman at the start of Constantine's reign, and they would still be calling themselves Roman 1,123 years later when Constantinople finally fell. On the evening of May 22, 337, they were only aware that Constantine's thirty-one-year reign was over. It had been the longest one since Augustus, and had ushered in sweeping changes. Christianity had struck its first blow against paganism for the soul of the empire, but that war was by no means over.

  Despite his formidable reputation as a defender of the faith, the world Constantine left behind wasn't by any means a Christian one. Strictly speaking, the Roman Empire was still officially pagan, and the government continued to pay for the upkeep of temples and priests of the old state religion. Constantine had done nothing more than legalize Christianity, but from the beginning it was clear that the new faith was the wave of the future. There were many in the empire who watched the growing influence of this strange new faith with fear, and writers and historians alike bemoaned the decay of traditional values. The old gods had nourished Rome for a thousand years, and moralists ominously warned that only disaster could come of abandoning them now. The temples were still full, despite the crowded churches, and there were many who prayed for a champion of the old gods who would save the empire from the enervation of the Christians. Only twenty-four years after Constantine's death, that leader arose.

  It's one of those quirks of history that the last pagan emperor was a member of the empire's first Christian dynasty. Perhaps not surprisingly, Constantine had put very little thought into who would follow him on the throne. Showing his usual preoccupation with himself, he left detailed instructions about his funeral but didn't bother to address the succession. Each of his three surviving sons (with a distressing lack of originality, all had been given different variations of the name Constantine) assumed that he would become emperor, and the result was an awkward three-way division of the empire. Constantius II, the most able of the boys, took the precaution of killing off anyone with a drop of his father's blood, sparing his cousin Julian only because at five years old the child didn't seem much of a threat.

  The massacre may have prevented any further diminution of the brothers' power, but though the empire was large, it wasn't large enough to contain the three monumental egos, and they started fighting almost immediately. Born into the luxury of the palace, they had been raised by an army of attendants, surrounded since birth by the cloying ceremonies of royalty. Educated by swarms of tutors, flattered by the attentions of courtesans, they had little time or opportunity to develop brotherly bonds, and this led to a troubled family dynamic, to say the least. Within three years, the oldest brother had invaded the territory of the youngest, and the empire convulsed once again into a civil war.

  While Constantine's sons were busy killing each other, their cousin Flavius Claudius Julianus, better known to posterity as Julian the Apostate, was spending his childhood under virtual house arrest reading the Greek and Roman classics. By temperament a quiet, serious scholar, he was perfectly content to remain in his comfortable exile and showed no aspirations to join his family on the dangerous imperial stage. When he turned nineteen, Julian successfully obtained permission to travel abroad to pursue his studies, and he spent the next four years journeying from Pergamum to Ephesus, sitting at the feet of philosophers and falling under the spell of the vanishing classical world. By the time he reached the famous School of Athens, he had secretly rejected Christianity and converted to a form of paganism called Neoplatonism. Keeping his apostasy carefully hidden under an appearance of piety, he reassured his worried teachers that his faith was as strong as ever, even as he inducted himself into numerous pagan cults.

  Julian's youthful travels came to an all-too-abrupt end. Constantius II had outlasted his brothers and united the Roman world under his sole rule, but he found that the empire had too many enemies for one person to face alone. When he had been consolidating power, his family had seemed a threat, to be eliminated or neutralized as quickly as possible. But now that he was established on the throne and the heavy responsibilities of office were weighing him down, blood seemed to be the best chance at loyalty after all. Barbarians were overrunning Gaul and someone had to be sent to stop them, but Constantius II was pinned down dealing with the ever-present threat of Persia. Searching for someone within his own family to send was somewhat embarrassing since he had been instrumental in killing virtually everyone related to him, but there was still one available candidate. Hoping that Julian had learned the virtue of forgiveness during his extensive education, Constantius II summoned his young cousin to Milan.

  Julian would have liked to live out his time in quiet study, but an emperor's summons could hardly be ignored. Pausing only long enough to visit the ancient site of Troy, he nervously presented himself before his cousin. The last family member to appear in front of Constantius II had been executed, and after hearing his fate Julian wasn't sure that he had fared any better. Raised to the rank of Caesar, the former scholar was sent to Gaul to restore order on the Rhine frontier. To accomplish this arduous task, he was given only 360 men who (as he dryly put it) "knew only how to pray" and not to fight.*

  Julian was hardly an impressive commander himself. Ungainly and somewhat awkward, he had never led anyone in his life and was openly ridiculed by the court. The West was in chaos that daunted even an experienced campaigner like Constantius II, and it would most likely take years to straighten out. No one put much faith in the serious and introverted new Caesar.

  Decked out in an uncomfortable military uniform, the former student gathered up his books, and on December 1, 355, he set out on his unlikely mission. Against all expectations, he turned out to be a brilliant general. In five years of campaigning, he pacified the province, liberated twenty thousand Gothic prisoners, expelled the barbarians, and even crossed the Rhine four times to destroy the Alamanni in their own territory. Sending the conquered Germanic king to Constantinople in chains, the victorious junior emperor retired to Paris for the winter.

  Such daring exploits were the last thing Constantius II wanted to hear about. Julian had left him as an awkward student, a quiet, non-threatening youth widely mocked by the court, and had somehow transformed himself into a skilled general and administrator, adored by his army and citizens. He had shown no signs of disloyalty, but Constantius II had seen too many pretenders in his time to just sit back and wait until he was betrayed. The sooner this emerging threat was dealt with the better. Claiming to need Julian's money and troops for a campaign against Persia, Constantius II wrote to his cousin demanding that the Caesar levy taxes on Gaul and immediately donate half of his army to the Persian campaign.

  Word of the emperor's demands reached Julian in the winter of 359 and was greeted with horror and disbelief. Many of Julian's soldiers had joined explicitly on the condition that they would never be sent east, and the thought of marching thousands of miles to fight under another banner while their families were exposed to barbarian raids sparked a strange mutiny. Surrounding Julian's palace during the night, his soldiers hailed him as Augustus, and pleaded with him to
defy Constantius II.* After claiming to have received a sign from Zeus, Julian at last agreed. Hoisting him up on a shield in the ancient Germanic fashion, the soldiers shouted themselves hoarse, splitting the Roman world once again between two masters.

  The world was not to be split for long. Julian's actions obviously meant war, so he dropped the pretense of his Christian faith and sent manifestos to every major city in Greece and Italy declaring his intention to restore paganism. Word of the shocking apostasy sped through out the West, but it failed to reach Tarsus, where Constantius had fallen seriously ill. Julian had timed his revolt perfectly. Unaware of his cousin's new faith, Constantius magnanimously named Julian as his successor and dismissed his doctors. A few days later, the forty-year-old emperor was dead, and a pagan once more took up the reins of the Roman Empire.

  Julian was on the Adriatic coast when he heard of his cousin's death, and he traveled to the capital so fast that a rumor started that his chariot had grown wings. The first emperor to have been born in Constantinople arrived in his native city on December 11 and was greeted with a thunderous welcome. Nearly every inhabitant poured out into the streets and acclaimed Julian, in the words of one eyewitness, "as if he had dropped from heaven."+ Senators hurried to congratulate him as jubilant crowds thronged the alleys cheering and clapping. Most of them had only heard rumors of their young emperor, whispered stories of military greatness that had trickled down from the frontiers. Their first glimpse of him striding confidently through the city seemed a vision of Julius Caesar himself, returned to lead the empire to a new golden age.