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

by Lars Brownworth

  Heraclius's reign had ended on a sour note, and his subjects certainly didn't mourn his passing. Under his watch, the empire had lost huge swaths of its territory to a bewildering new enemy, and the dying emperor had hardly bothered to resist them. The shocked Byzantines had looked to Constantinople for help, terrified by the catastrophe, but had found only an agonized defeatism from their broken emperor.

  But as poor as the empire's fortunes were at Heraclius's death, without him they would have been immeasurably worse. If he hadn't arrived to overthrow Phocas, the empire would have fallen easy prey to the Persians; and when the Islamic tide came rushing out of Arabia, there would have been nothing to shield Europe from the flood. Instead, by combining a touch of Justinian's vision with more than a hint of Belisarius's generalship, Heraclius had made Constantinople a bulwark against Islamic aggression, diverting the Muslim advance into the long wastes of North Africa and delaying its entrance into Europe. His early years had seen one glorious victory after another, and had he died after the overthrow of Chosroes II, with the Persian Empire defeated and the True Cross restored to Jerusalem, his subjects would have remembered him as one of the greatest emperors to sit on the Byzantine throne.

  His reign saw the great turning point for much of the Middle East. For a thousand years, these lands had been Hellenized, ruled by a Roman Empire at first pagan and then Christian. They had contributed much to classical civilization, providing some of the finest emperors, theologians, saints, and poets of the classical world. After the Arab invasions, however, all that changed. Arabic replaced Greek as the lingua franca, and Islam replaced Christianity. Wrenched out of the Mediterranean orbit, these lands began to look to Damascus, then Baghdad, instead of Rome or Constantinople. A way of life that had more than a millennium came to a violent and abrupt end. Life in the Middle East would never be the same again.

  Of the next five emperors who succeeded Heraclius, only one was older than sixteen when he gained the throne, and all were crippled by the struggles of powerful factions to assert control. Each defeat further diminished their authority and crippled their ability to fight back. Had a stronger ruler than the dying Heraclius been on the throne to confront the Muslims in 633, the subsequent history of the entire Middle East would have been radically different, but he was a sick man, and the imperial teenagers who succeeded him couldn't grab hold of power firmly enough to effectively oppose the Islamic advance. By the middle of the century, the opportunity to contain the threat had passed, and the Arab conquest picked up an irresistible momentum. Frightened Byzantine citizens paraded their holy icons around the walls, invoking divine aid, but still the Muslim tide rolled on, destroying centuries of Roman rule and leaving the empire profoundly shocked in its wake. To many, it must have seemed a terrible divine judgment, and the emotional trauma seemed to paralyze Byzantium.

  The unwieldy imperial army was marshaled to defend the long frontier, but the Arabs seemed impossible to contain. The impenetrable desert had always offered a feeling of safety for the Byzantines, but now it was a terrifying weakness. Using the stars to navigate across the featureless landscape, the Arabs slaughtered the camels they rode to consume their water, and emerged unexpectedly behind imperial lines. Whenever the Byzantine army did manage to confront them, the Arabs simply melted back into the desert, only to erupt somewhere else. Only once did an imperial army try to follow them. In 636, it pursued a Muslim army to a tributary of the Jordan River and suffered an appalling defeat. Those who survived the initial fighting tried to surrender but were massacred on the spot. The watching Mediterranean world was put on terrible notice: For those who resisted the Islamic sword, there would be no mercy.

  Unnerved by the speed and ferocity of the attack, the East virtually threw away its defenses. Eight years after conquering Jerusalem, the Arabs entered Egypt, and at the sight of the Muslim forces, Alexandria, seat of one of the five great patriarchates of the church, voluntarily surrendered. The dissident Christians who had invited the invaders in soon found their new masters to be considerably less tolerant than the orthodox regime they had swept away, but by then it was too late. A popular uprising ejected the Muslim garrison, but it returned with an army at its back. Battering their way inside, the forces of Islam razed the walls, burned what remained of the library, and moved the capital to Al-Fustat--a small village in the shadow of the pyramids that would later become Cairo.* Only the waters of the Mediterranean seemed to form a barrier capable of checking the desert-dwelling Arabs, but they learned quickly. Navigating at sea was not so different from navigating in the desert, and within a decade, they had constructed a navy and inflicted a crushing defeat of the formerly invincible Byzantine navy.

  Faced with the unrelenting attack, the government at Constantinople panicked and moved to Sicily, abandoning the East to its fate. This less-than-inspiring action left most Byzantines feeling bewildered and bitter, but, thankfully, the Arab assault was halted by a civil war.+ The Islamic world was further distracted by the conquest of Afghanistan, but by the time a Byzantine emperor cautiously took up his residence in Constantinople again, the Muslim victor of the civil war had announced a pledge to annihilate the Roman Empire, and the conquest resumed. The Sicilian city of Syracuse--so recently the capital of the Roman world--was brutally sacked in 668, and the next year an Arab army virtually annihilated the Byzantine forces in North Africa, leaving the entire province open to invasion.

  The Arabs, however, were by now more interested in dealing a knockout blow to the empire than in further conquests of the desolate African coast, and the thrust of their attack was soon directed against Constantinople itself. Moving its capital to Damascus, the Arab caliphate launched yearly strikes at New Rome, probing its defenses. The land walls were virtually impregnable, but the city was vulnerable from the sea, and only the demoralized imperial navy guarded its harbor. The Arab fleet had repeatedly demonstrated its superiority, even managing to seize an island opposite Constantinople while the Byzantines glumly watched, and in 674 they took Rhodes--the proud possessor of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.* That same year, Tarsus--birthplace of Saint Paul--fell to the Muslims, and it seemed an awful confirmation that God had deserted the Byzantines.

  Three Arab fleets converged on the capital, but great moments of crisis have a way of producing heroes from unlikely sources, and a Syrian refugee named Callinicus of Heliopolis saved Constantinople. He invented a devastatingly flammable liquid called "Greek fire," which could be sprayed at enemy ships with terrifying results.+ Water was useless against the horrible conflagration, serving only to spread the flames, and balls of cloth soaked in it could be hurled great distances, immolating anything they touched. The Arab fleet broke against the terrible new weapon, and the waters of the Golden Horn were choked with burning ships.*

  Constantinople had been saved, but the rest of the empire was disintegrating fast. The Arab sword now turned against Africa, annihilating Carthage in 697 and using it as a springboard to attack Italy and Sardinia. By 711, Muslim forces had completed the six-hundred-mile trek across Africa, and an invasion force led by a one-eyed warrior named Tariq had crossed to Spain, landing in the shade of the huge rock that still bears his name.+

  The Arab empire now had more land, resources, and wealth than the Byzantines, and awaited only the order to begin the final annihilation. In 717, the same year that a Muslim raiding party crossed into France, that order was given, and an immense army set sail in nearly two thousand ships to take Constantinople.

  The capital again found an unlikely hero, this time in a Syrian shepherd named Konon. Slipping into the city a month before the Muslim invasion fleet, he adroitly used the political crisis to seize the throne and was crowned as Leo III. Equally fluent in Arabic and Greek, the new emperor had a keen mind and a lifetime of experience fighting the Arabs. Aided by the most ferocious winter in recent memory, Leo easily outmaneuvered the Muslim army while his fire-ships destroyed the Arab navy and the terrible cold froze livestock and humans
alike. Starving and now unable to bury their dead in the frozen ground, the Muslims were reduced to consuming the flesh of their fallen comrades to stay alive. A thaw arrived with the spring, but that merely added the misery of disease to the unsanitary camp, and when Leo persuaded a tribe of Bulgars to attack the hapless Muslims, their commander gave up in despair. The entire campaign had been an unmitigated disaster for the forces of Islam. Less than half of the invading army managed to drag itself back to Damascus, and of the grand fleet, only five ships survived to see their home ports again.*

  *The great library of Alexandria had been heavily damaged at least twice before--first when Julius Caesar had entered the city, and centuries later when a Christian mob tried to burn the section on necromancy and witchcraft. An impressive repository of the learning of the ancient world, it was probably only a shell of its former self by the time the Arabs arrived. The conquering caliph Omar gave it the coup de grace, according to an apocryphal story, with the words "if the books of the library don't contain the teachings of the Qur'an, they are useless and should be destroyed; if the books do contain the teachings of the Qur'an, they are superfluous and should be destroyed."

  +That war still splits the Islamic world today. An assassin loyal to the fearsome general Muawiyah assassinated the caliph Ali while he was praying in a mosque in central Iraq. Those who rejected Muawiyah and held that only a descendant of Ali could become caliph are known as Shiites, while those who accepted Muawiyah as caliph are called Sunni. Iraq remains largely a Shiite country to this day.

  *The great Colossus, a magnificent statue of the sun god, lay where it had fallen during an earthquake nine centuries before, and the victorious Arab commander had it broken up and sold for scrap. There was so much bronze that it required nine hundred camels to haul away the pieces.

  +The composition of Greek fire was considered a state secret and was guarded so effectively that even today we don't know exactly how it was made. If, as suspected, it was a form of a low-density liquid hydrocarbon, like naphtha, it anticipated modern chemists by a good twelve centuries.

  *The Golden Horn is an inlet of the Bosporus forming the great harbor on Constantinople's northern shore.

  +Jabal al'Tariq (the mountain of Tariq), better known as Gibraltar.

  *The rest fell victim to Greek fire and winter storms, and a few met the horrendous fate of being burned by a volcano as they passed the island of Thira.

  13

  THE IMAGE BREAKERS

  Leo III was hailed as a giant from the age of Justinian, a heavensent savior of the empire, but his reign would show just how psychologically scarring the Arab invasions had been for the empire. Byzantium's losses had been horrendous. Less than a century before, it had been the dominant power of the Mediterranean, stretching from Spain to the Black Sea, the proud and confident repository of Christian culture and civilization. The divine order of heaven had been mirrored here on earth, with an all-powerful emperor enforcing the Lord's justice. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything had changed. A bewildering enemy had erupted from the desert sands and carried all before them. Two-thirds of the empire's territories had vanished in the flood, and half its population had disappeared. Arab raiders plundered the remaining countryside, and the cities were mere shells of what they had been in happier times. Whole populations fled the uncertainty of urban life and retreated to the more defensible safety of mountaintops, islands, or otherwise inaccessible places. Refugees impoverished and ruined by Muslim attacks roamed Constantinople's streets, and prosperity dried up. The once-powerful empire had shrunk to Asia Minor, and was now poorer, less populated, and far weaker than the neighboring caliphate.

  The Byzantine world was left deeply traumatized. The armies of a false prophet had clashed with the Christian empire whose ruler was the sword arm of God, and yet it was the banner of Christ that had fallen back. In only eight years, the Muslims had conquered three of the five great patriarchates of the Christian Church--Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem--and neither prayers, nor icons, nor steel had been able to stop them. An arrogant caliph had seized Christendom's holiest city and built the Dome of the Rock, boasting that Islam had superseded Christianity. Using Byzantine craftsmen to decorate the structure, he added an inscription declaring that Jesus was only a prophet, concluding with an ominous warning for Christians to "refrain" from saying otherwise. The Byzantines responded by putting an image of Christ on their coins--in part to regain God's favor and in part to annoy the Arabs, who widely used them--but still the imperial armies suffered defeat after defeat. To an empire which had itself been Christianized by the convincing argument of victory at the Milvian Bridge, such calamities shook the very foundations of their belief. Why, the bewildered citizens asked themselves, had God allowed such a disaster to happen?

  The answer seemed plain enough to Leo III. Christ had withdrawn his hand of protection, and the culprit seemed to be the sacred icons held in such high regard by so many citizens of the empire. Designed as worship aids for the faithful, the veneration of icons had grown to the point where the line between honor and outright worship was blurred. Icons stood in for godparents at baptisms and were offered prayers to intercede for the faithful. People in the streets gave thanks to an icon of the Virgin Mary for their recent deliverance from the Muslims, and most icons were treated with a reverence uncomfortably close to the old pagan worship of idols. What had started as a tool to peel back the veil between the mortal and divine now seemed to have crossed into a clear violation of the second commandment. The biblical Israelites had angered God by bowing down to a golden calf, and now, like the chosen people wandering in the desert for forty years, the empire was being punished for the sin of idolatry.

  The emperor's sacred duty was to end the abuses that were obviously angering God, so in 725 Leo III ascended the pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and gave a rousing sermon to the packed church, thundering against the worst offenders. The Muslims, he said, with their strict prohibition of all images, had marched from victory to victory, while the Byzantines had been torn by heresy, angering God by praying to paint and wood for deliverance. Few in the congregation could disagree with the emperor's words, and fewer still could argue with the assertion that something was dreadfully wrong with the empire. Leo, however, was just getting started. The time had come to take his reforms beyond mere words.

  The main gate to the Great Palace was a magnificent bronze structure, originally built by Justinian after the Nika riots. A series of mosaics celebrating the triumphs of the great emperor and his general Belisarius decorated the interior of its central dome, and rising up directly above the doors was a magnificent golden icon of Christ that dwarfed everything around it. Facing the Hagia Sophia, and visible throughout the great central square, it was the most prominent icon in the city, and with its hand raised in a ubiquitous blessing, it served as a reminder of the duties of a righteous sovereign. To Leo, however, it was the very symbol of all the ills besetting the empire, and he ordered its immediate destruction.

  The emperor may have had plenty of support for his sermons, but the sight of Christian soldiers deliberately vandalizing an image of Christ was taking it too far. A group of nearby women were so outraged that they lynched the officer in charge, and a full-scale riot was only prevented by a heavy show of steel from the palace. Riots swept through the countryside, and a pretender rose in Greece who proclaimed that he would hurl the impious emperor from his throne and restore icons to their proper place of veneration.

  Fortunately for Leo, his victories had earned him enough respect in the army that he was able to crush the rebels easily; but in the West, he wasn't so fortunate. Shielded from the blows of Arab invasions by the empire, western Europe viewed the whole icon controversy with bewildered horror. Proud of their artistic heritage, they saw no reason to suddenly conclude that painting and sculpture were impediments to faith. The pope in particular was annoyed that the emperor had interfered in matters of doctrine and threw his support behind the outraged population
of Italy. The imperial governor of Ravenna was killed as cities throughout the peninsula threw off the Byzantine yoke, and they would have elected another emperor if the pope hadn't balked at the thought of imperial retribution.*

  With such a firestorm erupting around him from the destruction of a single icon, Leo could have been expected to pull back from his inflammatory position, but he was firmly convinced that he was right and refused to back down. Issuing a decree condemning images, he ordered all holy icons and relics to be immediately destroyed. Setting the example himself, he seized reliquaries, vestments, and church plate throughout the city and destroyed them publicly. When the pope wrote to him, acidly commenting that he should leave church doctrine to those actually qualified to compose it, Leo sent two warships to arrest him. They foundered at sea, sparing the church from the spectacle of the arrest of its most auspicious bishop, but tensions continued to escalate when the pope retaliated by excommunicating anyone who destroyed an icon.

  The pope's words had little effect in the East, where thousands of images were smashed or torn apart; but for every one destroyed, there seemed to be a dozen more that escaped. Nearly every household had its share of icons, from simple wooden carvings to more elaborate ones of enamel or etched metal, and these wouldn't be given up easily. Leo, however, was nothing if not thorough, and his soldiers moved through the city, confiscating icons and painting over the mosaics that adorned church walls. The monasteries tried to resist, especially the powerful Saint John of Studius within the city walls, but there was little they could do. Hundreds of monks fled with their precious icons to the wilds of Cappadocia, where they carved secret churches into the soft rock and waited for popular opinion to sweep their cruel emperor from power.