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

by Lars Brownworth

  In May 797, Constantine's infant son died, and while the emperor was distracted in mourning, Irene struck. As he was riding home from the Hippodrome, some of her palace guard burst out of the underbrush and tried to seize him. He managed to escape to the docks but was soon caught and dragged to the Great Palace. There, in the very room where he had been born twenty-six years before, Irene had him blinded so brutally that he died.

  She had never really been a mother to him, busy as she was with the affairs of state, and like all imperial heirs he had been raised by a swarm of nursemaids and tutors with little time to grow close to either of his parents. Even so, the vile murder deeply shocked the empire. Irene had violated the maternal bonds that every member of society, from the highest patrician to the lowest stable hand, held sacred. She had lost a part of her humanity, and though her subjects tolerated her continued rule, they could never respect her. She was the first woman to rule the Roman Empire, not as a regent or an empress but as an emperor, but she wasn't to enjoy it for long. Guilt robbed her of her energy, and when the Arabs sensed weakness and invaded, she immediately offered an immense tribute the empire couldn't afford. Trying to bolster her flagging popularity, she took to riding around on a golden chariot pulled by the finest white horses and sprinkling gold coins to the crowd. The assembled populace took the money, but their love couldn't be so easily bought. They were well aware that thanks to her promises of tribute to the Saracens, the treasury was quite empty, and flinging what was left into the crowds brought her only increased scorn. The only surprise was that the revolt, when it came, was sparked not by a disaffected Byzantine but by a barbarian in the far west.

  The trouble started in Rome, where Pope Leo III was growing more unpopular with each passing day. He had risen from peasant stock and as such was hated by the powerful Roman senatorial families who believed that the papacy should be reserved for members of the nobility. Their hatred was so intense that in 799 they sent a gang to ambush the pope as he was walking in the streets, ordering their henchmen to gouge out his eyes and rip out his tongue. Thankfully for the pontiff, in the excitement of the attack, the mob merely left him unconscious with his vision and speech intact. Smuggled out of the city before his assailants could correct their mistake, Leo fled to the court of the Frankish king and waited for tempers to cool. The moment he was gone, his enemies tried to depose him, charging him with everything from public drunkenness to adultery. Leo angrily denied the charges from the safety of his shelter, but it was clear that the two sides had reached an impasse. Some sort of trial would have to be held, but that involved damaging complications. Who was qualified to sit in judgment of the Vicar of Christ?

  The answer, of course, was the emperor of Constantinople, the temporal head of Christendom, but not only had she disgraced herself by killing her own son, she was also a woman and therefore in western eyes disbarred from ruling. Leo needed a champion, and he turned not to the East but to the far more immediate power of the Franks.

  Though it was not yet a century old, the Frankish kingdom already had an illustrious history. Its founder, Charles "the Hammer" Martel, had stopped the Muslims at the battle of Tours, permanently turning the tide of the formerly irresistible Islamic advance into western Europe. His son Pepin the Short had come to the rescue of the pope while the Byzantines had been busy fighting over iconoclasm and was personally crowned and rewarded with the rank of patrician by the grateful pontiff. It was with Pepin's illustrious son, however, that the kingdom of the Franks really came into its own.

  For someone who was known to history by the nickname "the Short," Pepin had a remarkably tall son. Named Charles like his grandfather, he stood nearly six-foot-four, and he had a personality as large and dominating as his frame. By the year 800, he had transformed the relatively minor kingdom he inherited into the most powerful state of western Europe, an empire unparalleled in the West since the days of ancient Rome. After crossing the Alps at the pope's request, Charles the Great--or Charlemagne, as he was soon to be known--descended on Italy in December of the year 800 and testified on Leo's behalf. The pope swore on the Gospels that he was innocent, and with the looming figure of the Frankish king behind him, the assembled clergy accepted his word. Two days later, while Charlemagne was kneeling at the Christmas Mass, Leo lifted a jeweled crown from the altar and placed it on his head, declaring to the startled assembly that Charlemagne was now a "Holy Roman Emperor"--adding for good measure that he was descended from the biblical kings of Israel. Shock waves rippled through the electrified crowd. After four hundred years in abeyance, an emperor had returned to the West.

  Life in Dark Ages Europe was all too often brutish and short, but the inheritors of the wreckage of the Western Roman Empire were fully conscious that it hadn't always been so. The white marble ruins of ancient Rome were sprinkled from Britain to Sicily, constant reminders of a time before the light of learning had given way to darkness. They longed for the day that the empire would rise again, phoenixlike, from its own ashes and restore the proper order to the world. Now, on Christmas day at the dawn of the ninth century, Pope Leo had declared that that day had come.

  The coronation was breathtaking in its presumption. By placing the crown on Charlemagne's head, Leo was implying that the true crown of the Roman Empire was his alone to give--and what he could make, he could unmake as well.* The church, Pope Leo was firmly declaring, was a higher authority than the state. Such statements struck at the very heart of Byzantine authority, for if Charlemagne was the true Roman emperor, than obviously Irene--or anyone else on the Byzantine throne--was not. At a stroke, Leo had created a rival empire that not only dared to claim equality with the ancient line of the Caesars, but also declared Constantinople's throne to be full of impostors, mere pretenders to the throne of Augustus.

  Leo, of course, didn't have the slightest authority to create a new emperor, but to bolster his position he trotted out what was surely the most shameful forgery of the Middle Ages--the "Donation of Constantine."+ According to this document, Pope Sylvester had miraculously cured the emperor Constantine of leprosy, and the grateful emperor had "retired" to Byzantium and given the pope authority over the Western Empire and the ability to bestow the crown on whomever he chose. The Latin it was composed in was anachronistic and referred to events that had taken place after it was supposedly written, but education in the West had sunk so low that it was used to bolster papal claims for the next six hundred years.

  The news of the coronation was greeted with horror in Constantinople. Just as there was one God in heaven, there was only one Roman Empire and only one emperor here on earth. Irene may not have been a satisfactory ruler, but that didn't mean an illiterate barbarian could claim equality with her throne. The blasphemous coronation was an affront to the correct world order, and that the pope had performed the ceremony made the betrayal that much worse.

  Tempers were not improved when early the next year the ambassadors of this boorish Frank arrived in Constantinople with a startling marriage proposal, offering their monarch's hand to Irene. The empire would again be united under a single hand, they said, and Irene could rule like a new Theodora over both the East and the West. To the shocked Byzantine courtiers, the only thing more insulting than the arrogance of the barbarian envoys was the fact that Irene actually appeared to be seriously considering their proposal. Now almost universally hated in her own domains, she felt the walls closing in, and this seemed like the perfect escape.

  Her subjects, however, had no intention of letting Irene turn over their empire to this barbarian pretender, and they moved quickly to get rid of their discredited monarch. Irene hardly bothered to resist. After a lifetime spent tenaciously gripping power, she was a spent force and was overthrown by a group of patricians with barely an effort. Imprisoned tamely in the palace that she had so recently commanded, she waited quietly while the assembled populace in the Hippodrome acclaimed one of her ministers of finance as emperor, and then obligingly headed into exile on the Aegean island of
Lesbos.

  Irene's fall brought an end to more than just a tired regime. Her reign marked the last time Christendom had a single, undisputed temporal head and saw the final collapse of the old Roman world. Her empire bore little resemblance to the proud state of Augustus, and the differences were more profound than the empty treasury and ruined economy that her shortsighted attempts to buy popularity had brought. The old order had lingered in the East long after its light had gone out in the West, but raids and plagues had taken a heavy toll even as the unrelenting attacks of Islamic armies had robbed the empire of Spain, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa.

  What had begun with the shattering advance of Islam had been completed with the coronation of Charlemagne. Byzantium had been subjected to tremendous pressures, both spiritual and physical, and every level of society had been transformed. No longer was it the confident master of the Mediterranean, straddling the warm shores that had given it birth. The last traces of that classical empire of Constantine and Justinian had disappeared in the wreckage of Irene's rule, and the enemies pressing in on every side threatened its very existence. It was too late to try to undo the damage. Byzantium would either adapt or be extinguished.

  *The old Senate house was gradually absorbed by the Great Palace and used as an audience chamber. The Senate itself, however, did continue to exist and was occasionally used to sit in judgment of high-ranking individuals. Though its prestige and responsibilities were reduced to insignificance by the ninth century, there were still senators present on May 29, 1453, to defend the empire on its last day of existence.

  *Just before the iconoclastic controversy broke out, imperial tradition had been to put images of Christ on the coins. Since Irene had just restored icons to favor, she was expected to celebrate it with her coins, but ambition appears to have trumped piety.

  *This lesson wasn't lost on the shrewd Charlemagne, but the deed was done and there was nothing for the irate monarch to do. A thousand years later, when it came time for his own coronation, Napoleon made sure he crowned himself.

  +It was probably written a few decades before Leo used it, and it remained a standard weapon in the papal arsenal until the humanist Lorenzo Valla conclusively proved it a fake in 1440.

  15

  THE TURNING TIDE

  As if to underscore the empire's peril, a new and deadly threat arrived at the dawn of the ninth century. A great warlord crossed the Carpathians and hammered together the Bulgars from Transylvania to the Danube, forging the first great Bulgarian empire. Known only as Krum, the terrible khan swatted aside the Byzantine armies sent against him, killing one emperor and managing to cause the overthrow of another.* Meeting scarcely any resistance, his soldiers fell on the rich cities of the Black Sea, carrying off entire populations into captivity and threatening to completely overrun the Balkans. Even Constantinople seemed poised to fall to the all-conquering khan, but its walls proved to be too stout, and the disappointed Bulgarian had to satisfy himself with leveling the suburbs and killing every living thing that wasn't quick enough to get out of the way.

  Fortunately for the empire, the menace of Krum, like that of Attila before and Genghis Khan after, was based more on personal charisma than underlying strength, and after the khan's death it evaporated as quickly as it had appeared. The humiliations suffered from such an unexpected direction, however, impressed themselves deeply on the frightened citizens of the empire and led to a second flirtation with iconoclasm. Whatever else could be said about the iconoclastic emperors, they had been remarkably effective militarily, and that prowess now seemed sorely needed. Less than a decade after Irene's death, a mob interrupted a service in the Church of the Holy Apostles by breaking into the ornate marble tomb of Constantine V and begging the great iconoclast to rise from the dead and lead the Byzantine armies to victory again.

  Unfortunately for the empire, however, consigning its works of art to the flames did little to strengthen its military. After several decades of relative quiet, the caliphate resumed the offensive, and the imperial army proved just as incapable of stopping them. In 826, a Muslim force landed on Crete, imposing Islam on the reluctant population and turning the capital of Candia into the busiest slave market in the world. By 838, the Muslims had burst into Asia Minor, sacking the city of Amorium and burning most of its citizens alive in the city's church, where they were trapped.* The next year, most of western Sicily fell and the Arabs crossed into Italy, conquering Taranto and using the heel of the Italian boot as a base from which to launch attacks against what is now the Croatian coast. The imperial government was so alarmed that it sent envoys begging the western emperor Louis the Pious for help, but the crusading spirit was still more than two hundred years in the future, and the talks came to nothing.

  Ignoring the mounting evidence to the contrary, emperors continued to stubbornly insist that iconoclasm was the only way to restore divine favor to the imperial armies. One emperor even personally administered beatings to two Palestinian monks who refused to destroy their icons, and when a week of such treatment failed to induce them to change their minds, he had insulting verses tattooed on their faces and exiled them to Anatolia. Such ham-fisted measures have never been particularly successful where religion is concerned, and without the argument of victory to bolster it, iconoclasm was a spent force. Most Byzantines realized that they had destroyed their icons and starved their artistic senses in vain. In 843, after less than three decades, iconoclasm disappeared again with barely a whimper. On the first Sunday of Lent that year, the beautiful and brilliant empress Theodora officially ended Byzantium's last major religious controversy by holding a general church council and a service of thanksgiving in the Hagia Sophia.* Artists once again picked up their brushes, hammers, and chisels and resumed their attempt to portray the divine in paint, wood, and stone. Several years passed before the first icon appeared in the great church of the Hagia Sophia, but its unveiling clearly demonstrated that the years in exile had done nothing to diminish the power of Byzantine art.+

  Military reverses aside, there were encouraging signs in the ninth century that the empire was slowly regaining its strength. Shrunken by the losses of war, it had been reduced to a core in Asia Minor, Thrace, and Greece, but these territories were strong and united. Religious dissent had largely disappeared with the turbulent territories of Syria and Egypt, and the smaller imperial government was reasonably efficient regardless of who sat on the throne. New gold mines were uncovered, overflowing the impoverished treasury, and a rich merchant class sprang up in the wake of such unexpected wealth.

  Even more encouraging was a great revival of learning sparked, ironically enough, by the dying embers of iconoclasm. Attempts to justify one side of the argument or the other by quoting obscure references to earlier church fathers led to further study to rebut them. Private schools began to appear throughout the empire as interest in education spread, and literacy began to pick up a momentum of its own. Under the emperor Theophilus in the mid-ninth century, teachers were endowed at the public expense, scriptoria were opened, and the University of Constantinople was endowed with new faculties of law and philosophy.*

  This was in marked contrast with the West, where the church was slowly spreading the fragments of learning that it had preserved. Western medieval thought, though quite vital, had been cut off from its rich classical heritage and would have to wait for the Renaissance to build on the learning of antiquity. Eastern schools, however, could draw on their undiminished philosophical and literary traditions. Within a few years, Byzantium's renewed intellectual fame was so great that a caliph even asked for a specialist to be sent to Baghdad. Perhaps wisely, the emperor refused to let him go, choosing instead to set the scholar up in the capital to continue the ferment. Encouraged by the new air of curiosity, court historians once again took up their pens, young nobles returned to their study of the classics, and Byzantine scholarship, which had been nearly dormant since the reign of Irene, sprang once again into bloom. His armies may have been
scattered in Asia Minor, but Theophilus presided over a cultural renaissance, winning the hearts of his subjects with his concern for justice.+

  In an age in which the emperor was seen as an unapproachable figure--the human representation of God on earth--Theophilus was remarkably visible to his subjects. A devoted fan of chariot races, he once entered the competition under the banner of the Blues and delighted the crowd with his skill.++ Most astonishing of all to the citizens of Constantinople, however, was the emperor's habit of wandering in disguise through the streets of the capital, questioning those he met about their concerns and ensuring that merchants were charging fair prices for their wares. Once a week, accompanied by the blare of trumpets, he would ride from one end of the city to the other, encouraging any who had complaints to seek him out. Those who stopped him could be certain of a sympathetic ear no matter how powerful their opponent. One story tells of a widow who approached the emperor and made the startling claim that the very horse he was riding had been stolen from her by a senior magistrate of the city. Theophilus dutifully looked into the matter, and when he discovered that the widow was correct, he had the magistrate flogged and told his watching subjects that justice was the greatest virtue of a ruler.*

  To be accessible, however, didn't mean that the emperor intended to be an inch less regal, and he poured gold into a building program unlike anything seen since the days of Justinian.+ All emperors have expensive tastes, but Theophilus put most of his predecessors to shame. With a flurry of activity, the walls along the Golden Horn were strengthened, a magnificent new summer palace was built, and the Great Palace was completely renovated for the first time in nearly three hundred years.++ This last accomplishment caught the imagination of contemporary historians, who left breathless accounts of the work. Before their watching eyes, Theophilus transformed the sprawling, somewhat stuffy collection of buildings that made up the Great Palace into a residence fit for a ninth-century emperor* Such a renovation was long overdue. Originally built by Septimus Severus in the second century, the palace had been haphazardly added to by successive emperors, who had built reception halls, living quarters, churches, baths, and administrative buildings, until the rambling structures threatened to cover the entire southeastern tip of the city.