The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  Julian was thirty-one at the time of his death, and had occupied the imperial throne for just nineteen and a half months. As an Emperor he was a failure. He was responsible for virtually no lasting legislation, he wasted his time and energy on a hopelessly quixotic attempt to revive an ill-defined and moribund religion, to the detriment of that which was to give the Empire its binding force for a thousand years to come; he made

  1 According to legend, Julian scooped up a handful of the blood that was flowing from his wound and murmured the words 'icisti Galilaee! - 'Thou has conquered, Galilean!' He is said to have been killed by St Mercurius, one of the Christian army officers whom he had had executed, but whom the Virgin had temporarily resurrected for the purpose — a fact subsequently proved by his contemporary St Basil who, commanded in a dream to visit the martyr's tomb, there found the bloodstained lance.

  himself thoroughly unpopular with his subjects, Christian and pagan alike, who hated his puritanism and his ceaseless sermonizing; and he came near to destroying the entire imperial army - as well as himself - in a campaign which, however brilliantly organized on the ground, ended in near catastrophe through want of clear-sighted forward planning and properly focused objectives.

  And yet, of all the eighty-eight Emperors of Byzantium, it is Julian who, more than any other - not excepting the great Constantine himself - has caught the imagination of posterity, from Gregory Nazianzen in the fourth century to Gore Vidal in the twentieth. He has been depicted by medieval writers as a devil, a serpent, even as Antichrist; by those of the Renaissance as a tragic hero; by those of the eighteenth century as the archetypal philosopher-prince, the apostle of reason and enlightenment; and by the Romantics in their favourite guise of outsider and rebel - noble, courageous, but ultimately defeated. It is arguable that this last interpretation - even when, as has several times occurred, Julian's life is embellished with the love interest which in history it had so conspicuously lacked - comes nearest the truth.

  The real tragedy of Julian lies not in his misguided policies or in his early death, but in the hairsbreadth by which he failed to achieve the greatness which he in so many ways deserved. Few monarchs have possessed his most outstanding qualities in such abundance: his intelligence, the depth of his education and culture; his energy and tireless industry; the courage and inspiring leadership that he invariably showed in battle; the utter integrity and incorruptibility of his public and private life; his apparent immunity to physical temptation of whatever kind; his astonishing ability to sublimate himself in the service of his Empire and, above all, of his gods. Sadly, however, he also possessed two faults, which together made any lasting achievement impossible. The first was his religious fanaticism, which warped his judgement and robbed him of that instinctive sense of priorities which is essential to any successful ruler; the second was a certain lack of sharpness and definition in his thinking. The latter trait, which is all too evident in his literary effusions and which was ultimately to sabotage the Persian expedition, may well derive from the former: Julian could on occasion be curiously indecisive. Again and again we find him asking the gods for guidance, when he should have been taking decisions for himself. On the other hand this very weakness gave him, once he had resolved upon his actions, a quite extraordinary self-confidence; and even when it was plain to all that a disastrous mistake had been made, his courage never deserted him.

  Perhaps, had he lived, Julian would have overcome both these faults and proved himself one of the greatest of all the Roman Emperors. But he did not live. He died, in the most characteristic way he could have died, bravely but unnecessarily, leaving the world with nothing but the ineffaceable memory of a marvellous, misguided young visionary who attempted to change the world and failed, his talents and high qualities betrayed, his promise unfulfilled.

  5

  The Empire at Bay

  [363-95]

  He who has tasted of the Fountain of living water, what else can he desire? What kingdoms? What powers? What riches? Perceiving how miserable even in this world is the condition of kings, how mutable the imperial state, how short the span of this life, what slavery sovereigns themselves endure, seeing that they live not according to their own will but by the will of others.

  St Ambrose, Epistles, xxix, 18

  Finding itself on Julian's death not only without an Emperor but also -still more important at so critical a moment - without a leader, the Roman army assembled en masse early the following morning to nominate his successor. Their first choice was Sallustius Secundus, the Praetorian Prefect of the East, but he declined absolutely, pleading age and infirmity. Then what seems to have been a relatively small group of soldiers started shouting the name of Jovian, the commander of the imperial guard. Jovian was thirty-two, a bluff, genial soldier, popular with his men; he was also, perhaps significantly, a Christian - a persuasion which in no way diminished his well-known penchant for wine and women. But he was in no sense distinguished, and certainly not of imperial calibre. Why therefore he should have been proposed remains a mystery; and more surprising still is the fact that the cry should then have been taken up by the entire Roman army - so surprising, indeed, that Ammianus Marcel-linus (who was, once again, almost certainly an eye-witness) maintains that the whole thing was a mistake and that most of those present understood the cry to be not 'Jovianus!' but 'Julianus!' and concluded that their former Emperor had unexpectedly recovered and resumed his rank and title. It was only when the tall, prematurely stooping figure of Jovian was paraded before them that 'they realized what had happened, and gave themselves up to tears and lamentations'.

  And so, under a new and deeply uninspiring leader, the sad and weary retreat continued along the east bank of the Tigris, still under constant harassment from the Persians, who had been informed by a deserter of Julian's death and hoped to take advantage of any consequent confusion. Within a few days, however, it was noted that they were avoiding pitched battles; and at the beginning of July, after the Roman army had succeeded in making a forced crossing of the river despite all that he could do to prevent it, Shapur decided to offer terms. These were humiliating in the extreme, but Jovian accepted them. The resulting treaty provided for thirty years of peace, together with the restitution to Persia of five frontier provinces conquered by Diocletian and of eighteen important fortresses - including the two key strongholds of Nisibis (Nusaybin) and Singara (Sinjar). Further, the Romans bound themselves not to assist King Arsaces of Armenia against Persian attack - a promise tantamount to renouncing all their claims over that country.

  Jovian had made a disastrous beginning to his reign. 'We should have fought ten battles,' explodes Ammianus, 'rather than give up a single one of those fortresses'; and there must have been many in the army who enthusiastically agreed with him. He goes on to suggest that, since the negotiations had taken place only a hundred miles from Roman territory, the army could easily have fought its way to safety without this wholesale capitulation, and that Jovian was interested only in getting home as soon as possible, in order to consolidate his hold upon the throne. Whether this charge is justified or not - and it is only fair to point, out in his defence that a hundred miles through desert terrain is a long way for an army under constant attack and already running dangerously short of food - one could argue that Jovian, in return for all that he had conceded, might at least have been entitled to ask the Persian King for provisions enough to see his men safely back into imperial territory; but his requests, if they were ever made, were refused. During the next section of the march, which led the army westward from the Tigris through Hatra to Nisibis, they had to pass through seventy miles of merciless desert, during which they were forced to kill all their camels and pack-mules; even then, they barely survived. When they finally reached Nisibis, the Emperor refused to enter a city which he had just surrendered, preferring to pitch his camp outside the walls; and the following day, on the arrival of a representative of Shapur to hoist the Persian standard, he ordered a mass evacuation of
the populace, so that not a single citizen should be left to receive the conquerors. In vain the inhabitants begged to be allowed to remain, and to defend their city on their own account; Jovian would not break his bond. Ammianus paints an affecting picture of the scene:

  The whole city was a place of mourning and lamentation, and in every quarter nothing was heard but one universal wail, matrons tearing their hair when about to be driven from the homes in which they had been born and brought up, the mother who had lost her children, or the wife the husband, about to be torn from the place rendered sacred by their shades, clinging to their doorposts, embracing their thresholds and pouring forth floods of tears.

  Every road was crowded, with everyone straggling away as best they could. Many, too, loaded themselves with as much of their property as they thought that they could carry, while leaving behind them abundant and costly furniture, which they could not remove for want of beasts of burden.

  At Nisibis Julian's embalmed body - which had been carried by the soldiers all the way from the place where he fell - was entrusted to his old friend and remote kinsman Procopius - whom some said that he had secretly appointed to succeed him - for burial at Tarsus, where he had intended to establish his court after his victorious return. As for Jovian, he led the army on to Antioch, the holy labarum being borne once again before it as in the days of Constantine and his sons. On his arrival there he immediately issued an edict of general religious toleration, restoring full rights and privileges to the Christians throughout the Empire. That his own sympathies lay with the orthodox Nicene faith, rather than with the Arians formerly favoured by Constantius, was made abundantly clear by the deep reverence which he showed to old Athanasius of Alexandria - now restored to the see from which Julian had removed him - who had travelled at once to Antioch to congratulate the new Emperor on his accession. Doubtless encouraged by the assurances of the splendid old patriarch that his re-establishment of the true faith would be rewarded by a long and peaceful reign, Jovian left Antioch in mid-October, moving with his army in easy stages through Anatolia. He was acclaimed with obvious enthusiasm in all the towns (largely Christian) through which he passed; only at Ancyra - the modern Ankara - where on 1 January 364 he assumed the Consulship with his infant son Var-ronianus, did the deafening howls of the latter during the ceremony of induction lead the more credulous of those present, despite Athanasius's predications, to fear an evil omen.

  As well they might have. A few days later, on 16 February 364 - by which time he had progressed as far as the little town of Dadastana, about half-way between Ancyra and Nicaea - he was found dead in his bedroom. 'By some,' writes Gibbon, his death 'was ascribed to the consequences of an indigestion, occasioned either by the quantity of the wine or the quality of the mushrooms which he had swallowed in the evening.

  According to others, he was suffocated in his sleep by the vapour of charcoal, which extracted from the walls of the apartment the unwholesome moisture of the fresh plaster.' Surprisingly enough, foul play was not suspected.

  The choice of Jovian as Emperor had marked the restitution of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it had also signalled something else: the end of a dynasty which had dominated it for more than half a century. The male line of Constantius Chlorus was now extinct; the diadem was once again a prize open to all. And there could be no clearer indication of this changed state of affairs than the virtual unanimity with which the army, some ten days after Jovian's death, acclaimed Valentinian as his successor. At first sight the new Emperor might have seemed still more unfitted to the purple. Uncouth of manner, almost illiterate and possessed of a furious and quite uncontrollable temper, he was the son of a Pannonian rope-maker who had himself risen from the ranks to positions of high authority in both Africa and Britain. Like his father before him, Valentinian made no attempt to conceal his peasant origins; but at forty-two he still boasted a magnificent physique and a commanding - some said forbidding - presence. He was a devout Christian and a superb soldier, though capable of unspeakable cruelty when the mood took him. When, after his acclamation, he was pressed to nominate a co-Augustus, he refused to be hurried: only after the army finally reached Constantinople on 28 March did he name - to the general dismay - his younger brother Valens.

  It was a curious choice. Valens was an Arian and, in appearance, little short of grotesque - bandy-legged and pot-bellied, with a ferocious squint into the bargain. Seven years younger than his brother, he possessed none of his courage or toughness and very little of his ability, equalling him only in his reputation for brutality. He was, however, precisely what Valentinian wanted: a faithful lieutenant who freely acknowledged his brother's superiority and could be trusted to provoke no difficulties or quarrels. Valens, the Emperor rather surprisingly announced, would be responsible for the East while he, Valentinian, would rule the West from his capital at Milan.

  Would he, one wonders, have reversed the two roles had he foreseen the crisis that his brother would have to face within a year of installing himself in Constantinople? Early in the spring of 365, a few days after he had left for Syria - where, in defiance of the treaty signed less than two years before, trouble was again brewing along the Persian frontier -

  Valens was recalled with the news that Procopius, that distant cousin of the Emperor Julian who had been responsible for his burial arrangements, had raised the standard of revolt. Playing on the old loyalties to the house of Constantine - to which he claimed, rather unconvincingly, to belong - Procopius had quickly gained the support of the army in the capital; Thrace and Bithynia soon followed. Valens, panic-stricken, fled to Ancyra, his despair growing still deeper when he heard that no help could be expected from his brother, already fully extended with the barbarian tribes in Gaul. 'Procopius,' Valentinian had characteristically remarked as he turned down the appeal for assistance, 'is enemy only to my brother and myself; the Alemanni are the foes of the whole Roman world.'

  Fortunately for the two emperors, however, the rebel soon overreached himself, antagonizing several influential men who, having previously declared themselves in his favour, now transferred their support to Valens. Their example led to further widespread defections, and by the end of May the revolt was at an end. Procopius himself was captured at Philippopolis in Thrace - now Plovdiv - and decapitated, his severed head being dispatched as a trophy to Valentinian in Gaul. Meanwhile Valens instituted a programme of appalling retribution on all those whose loyalties had even briefly wavered, ordering throughout the affected provinces tortures and executions, burnings and banishments on such a scale as to earn for himself a degree of fear and hatred among his subjects that not even a twenty-five per cent reduction of taxes in the following year was altogether able to remove.

  For the next decade we find the two Emperors almost constantly caught up in their respective struggles: Valens engaged first with the Gothic tribes along the Danubian frontier, building forts and establishing garrisons over its entire length, and then in 371 setting out on his long-delayed journey to the East, where Shapur had taken King Arsaces prisoner, driven him to suicide and reduced Armenia to the status of a Persian satellite; Valentinian dealing with the repeated incursions of the barbarians into Gaul and, after 367, faced with a serious upheaval in Britain, the result of invasions by the Picts and Scots. Being himself pinned down in Europe, he entrusted this latter crisis to a certain Theodosius, one of his finest generals, who moved in with spectacular success and left the island in 370 happier and more peaceful than it had been for a generation or more. Only three years later still could the Emperor leave Gaul in safety; almost immediately, however, new troubles broke out - this time with a normally quiet and law-abiding tribe, the Quadi, who lived just across the Danube from his own Pannonian homeland. Resenting the way in which imperial forts had been built on what they held to be their side of the river, and believing, moreover, that the Romans had been responsible for the recent murder of their King, they had invaded imperial territory in protest and la
id waste a certain amount of land along the frontier. They had then sent an embassy to Valentinian, explaining why they had thus taken the law into their own hands and claiming that the real aggressors were the Romans themselves.

  On the face of it, the Quadi seem to have had a case; but to Valentinian this was unpardonable presumption, an insult to Rome. The anger welled up within him as he listened, his normally rubicund face turning a deeper and deeper purple until he suddenly fell forward in a fit of apoplexy and died, at Bregetio in Valeria, on 17 November 375. In his eleven-year reign he had worked, as few Emperors had ever worked, for the good of the Empire and, above all, the integrity of its frontiers. As an orthodox Christian, he had shown tolerance for those who did not share his own strongly-held Nicene faith; he had, for example, refused to replace such Arian bishops as he found still in possession of their sees. As a ruler he had set up schools and medical services, and had dispensed justice with a fair, impartial hand; and if his punishments were often severe - even cruel - at least they were visited on the guilty and not the innocent. None the less, his harshness and austerity had won him little love from his subjects; and few of them were heartbroken to see him go.

  Already as early as 367, after a serious illness during which he had worried greatly about the succession, Valentinian had persuaded his troops to recognize his seven-year-old son Gratian as his co-Augustus. As he lay on his deathbed, however, knowing that Gratian was far away at Trier and Valens a good deal further still at Antioch, he sent for his son by his second marriage, also called Valentinian and still only four, and had him proclaimed co-Emperor with his stepbrother. On his death, therefore, the Empire theoretically had three rulers to carry on the government; a malformed, middle-aged sadist utterly devoid of wisdom or judgement, a delightful boy of sixteen and a child scarcely out of its cradle. On those three the future of the Empire now depended, and at one of the most critical moments of its history; for only a year after Valentinian's death it found itself confronting a new wave of invaders, infinitely more formidable than any it had so far encountered: the Huns.