The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  In the circumstances, the generosity of these terms was astonishing; besides, the Emperor can hardly have been unaware of the consequences of another rejection. And yet, once again, he set his face against any compact with the Goths. Alaric's patience was finally exhausted. For the second time in twelve months, he marched on Rome and immediately set up a blockade; on this occasion, however, he changed his tactics. His purpose, he told the Romans, was not to put their city to fire and the sword but simply to overthrow Honorius, now the single obstacle to peace in Italy. If they agreed, they must declare their Emperor deposed and elect a more reasonable successor; he, for his part, would lift the siege forthwith.

  The Roman Senate, meeting in emergency session, did not take long to decide. No one could contemplate the prospect of another siege, with all the horrors that it brought in its train. Besides, it was pointed out, Honorius had shown no concern for his people, either now or in the previous year; so long as he personally was safe behind the dikes and ditches of Ravenna, he seemed oblivious to the fate of anyone else. He had, in short, forfeited their allegiance. They wanted no more of him. So the gates were opened, and Alaric entered Rome in peace; Honorius was declared deposed, and it was agreed that he should be succeeded as Augustus by the Prefect of the City, an Ionian Greek named Priscus Attalus.

  It was not, on the face of it, a bad choice. Attalus was an intelligent man of pronounced artistic tastes, himself a Christian but acceptable to the pagans on account of his tolerant views and his love of antique literature and culture. Fortunately, too, he had been baptised by an Arian Gothic bishop and thus enjoyed the support of all the Christian Goths, Arians to a man. Appointing Alaric his magister militum, he at once prepared to march on Ravenna; but, before he could leave, there was one major problem to be settled. Africa, the small but vital province (roughly corresponding to what is now Northern Tunisia) on which Rome was entirely dependent for its corn, was then governed by Her-aclian, the officer who had been responsible for the execution of Stilicho and who was expected to remain loyal to Honorius. For Alaric, there was only one solution: the immediate dispatch to Carthage, the capital, of an army which would depose Heraclian and ensure continued supplies. Attalus, on the other hand, preferring a more diplomatic approach, sent over a young man named Constans with instructions to take over the province peaceably in his name. This done, he set off with his magister militum for Ravenna.

  With the news of events in Rome and the imminent approach of his enemies, Honorius had finally abandoned his sang-froid and had entered a state bordering on panic. He sent messages to Attalus, agreeing to his rule in Rome on condition that he himself might continue as Augustus in Ravenna; meanwhile he ordered ships to be made ready at the neighbouring port of Classis, to take him and his entourage to safety in Constantinople. Just as they were about to sail, however, there arrived at the same port six Byzantine legions - some 40,000 men, if Zosimus is to be believed - sent in the name of young Theodosius II, who had received his uncle's appeal and had responded at once. The appearance of reinforcements on such a scale restored the Emperor's courage. He would, he declared, hold out in Ravenna, at least until he heard the news from Africa: if Heraclian had stood firm, all might not yet be lost.

  Nor was it; a few days later there came a report that was all Honorius could have wished: Heraclian had dealt with the unfortunate Constans just as effectively, and in much the same manner, as he had dealt with Stilicho less than two years before. To Alaric, this was a serious blow. It meant, first of all, that he could no longer hope to oust the Emperor from Ravenna; more worrying still, perhaps, it pointed to a serious lack of political acumen on the part of Attalus. Again he pressed for the forcible removal of the African governor, but Attalus was stubborn: as Augustus, he maintained, he could not send an army of Goths against a Roman province. And the Senate agreed with him. Something, on the other hand, would have to be done, and quickly: Heraclian had already cut off the grain supply and famine was again beginning to threaten. One day, it was said, when Attalus was attending the Circus, the cry was heard from the topmost tiers: 'Pretium pone carni humanae - 'Put a price on human flesh!'

  Alaric had had enough. In the early summer of 410 he summoned Attalus to Rimini and, in a broad open space just outside the walls, publicly stripped him of the diadem and the purple. Then, after one more unsuccessful attempt to reach an agreement with Honorius, he marched back to Rome and besieged it for the third time. Maddeningly, we know little of the details: Zosimus, that most irritating of chroniclers, gives up at this critical moment, and such other sources as have been preserved are pitifully sketchy. But, with food already short, the city did not hold out for long. Some time towards the end of August, the Goths burst in by the Salarian Gate in the northern wall, just at the foot of the Pincian Hill.

  After the capture, there were the traditional three days of pillage; but this early sack of Rome seems to have been a good deal less savage than the school history-books would have us believe - quite restrained, in fact, when compared with the havoc wrought by the Normans in 1084 or the armies of Charles V in 15 27. Alaric himself, devout Christian that he was, had given orders that no churches or religious buildings were to be touched, and that the right of asylum was everywhere to be respected. Yet a sack, however decorously conducted, remains a sack; the Goths were far from being saints and, despite occasional exaggerations, there is probably all too much truth in the pages that Gibbon devotes to the atrocities committed: the splendid edifices consumed by the flames, the multitudes of innocents slain, of matrons ravished and of virgins deflowered.1

  When the three days were over, Alaric moved on to the south, intending to sail his army over to Africa, deal once and for all with Heraclian and deliver Italy from famine. But he had got no further than Cosenza when he was attacked by a sudden violent fever, and within a few days he was dead. He was still only forty. His followers carried his body to the river Busento, which they dammed and temporarily deflected from its usual channel. There, in the stream's dry bed, they buried their leader; then they broke the dam, and the waters came surging back and covered him.

  i The Decline and Pall of the Roman Empire, Chap. XXXI.

  7

  Of Heresies and Huns

  [410-453]

  If you ask a man for change, he will give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies: 'The Father is greater and the Son inferior'; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.

  St Gregory of Nyssa

  It is one of the cliches of Constantinople that it should, ideally, be approached from the sea. Only then, we are told, can the uniqueness of its geographical position be properly appreciated, to say nothing of that famous skyline of dome and minaret which has symbolized, for as long as any of us can remember, the Mysterious East. With this opinion we cannot easily disagree; but, for those of us on whom Byzantium will always cast a more powerful spell than Islam, there is another approach every bit as satisfying and very nearly as spectacular. No one, surely, whose first arrival has been by road from Edirne, can ever forget that first astonishing sight of the Land Walls, looming up from the surrounding plain, their huge russet-striped towers splintered and occasionally shattered, magnificent witnesses to the bludgeonings - by attacking armies and, more recently, by Turkish traffic - that they have endured for nearly sixteen centuries. Running just over four miles from the Marmara to the upper reaches of the Golden Horn - and thus enclosing a far greater area than those earlier fortifications traced by Constantine -they totally close off the city by land; only once, after more than a thousand years, were they ever breached - a breach that was to spell the end of the Byzantine Empire.

  But that was over 500 years ago; they are still standing today, and still known as the Theodosian Walls after Theodosius II, in whose reign they were first built. And yet, although this tremendous construction remains the only achievement of his forty-two-ye
ar reign for which the name of Theodosius is generally remembered, the sad truth is that he can take little of the credit. Those walls - a single line of them, rather than the triple fortification that we see today - were begun in 413, when the Emperor was still a boy of twelve; they were conceived and carried to their completion not by him but by his Praetorian Prefect Anthemius, who for the first six years of his reign was his guardian and the effective Regent of the East.

  Anthemius was the first highly-placed layman at Constantinople since the days of Theodosius the Great to combine ability with high principle. Apart from the Walls, he was also responsible for a new peace treaty with Persia; for a much strengthened Danube fleet after a damaging but ultimately unsuccessful invasion by the Hun King Uldin; for improvements in the corn supply from Alexandria; and for the restoration of good relations with the Western Empire after the death of Arcadius. But he did not last long. After 414 he disappears from view, to be succeeded as the power behind the throne by the Emperor's own sister, the princess Pulcheria; and with this faintly awesome figure there is inaugurated a period of thirty-six years - the remainder of her brother's reign - during which virtually all the effective influence in the state was concentrated in female hands.

  Pulcheria had been born only two years before Theodosius; she was thus still barely fifteen when she was proclaimed Augusta and took over the reins of government. By now it must have been generally apparent that her brother would be no improvement on Arcadius: he was weak, vacillating and easily led. She herself, by contrast, was strong and determined, with a love of power for its own sake; but she was also excessively, extravagantly pious, taking a particular pleasure in the rebuilding of the ruined St Sophia. Under her influence, her two younger sisters Arcadia and Marina developed similar inclinations: the prevailing mood in the imperial palace, it was said, was more that of a cloister than a court, thronged from morning till night with priests and monks while the princesses, all three of whom had vowed themselves to perpetual virginity, stitched away at their altar-cloths and chasubles to the sound of hymns, psalmodies and muttered prayers. It was all a far cry, people somewhat wistfully observed, from what it had been in Eudoxia's day.

  How far Theodosius allowed himself to be drawn into his sister's devotions is a matter for conjecture. Born in the purple1 and proclaimed co-Augustus at his birth, he had in fact granted his first petition

  1 Porphyroginitus, or born in the purple, was a title used exclusively of a prince who was bom after his father had become Emperor - theoretically at least, in the Purple Chamber of the Great Palace.

  (addressed to him by Porphyrius, Bishop of Gaza, and requesting the destruction of all pagan temples in his diocese) immediately after his baptism, when he was still only a few days old;1 and from his earliest childhood he had been obliged to live in that stultifying seclusion from his fellows that was considered appropriate for God's Vice-Gerent on Earth. Despite his upbringing, however, and his hereditary defects of character, he seems to have possessed considerable charm: 'he was much loved,' writes Socrates the Church historian, 'by Senate and people alike.' And he was certainly far from stupid. Religion in the fifth century was too much a part of everyday life not to have interested him in some degree, but his tastes lay more in the direction of secular learning and culture: in the classical authors both Latin and Greek, in mathematics and the natural sciences, and above all in the art of illustrating and illuminating manuscripts, where his skill soon earned him the sobriquet of kalligraphos, the calligrapher. His interests, however, were not exclusively intellectual and artistic. He had a passion for hunting, and there is evidence - though not, it must be admitted, contemporary - to suggest that it was he who introduced to Constantinople the Persian game of tsukan, which we know today as polo. Immersed as he was in these pursuits, he had no objection to leaving affairs of state to his sister, long after he had reached the age when he should have taken them over himself. Only in 420, when he was nineteen and his thoughts began to turn to other channels, did he send for Pulcheria on a matter of state importance. It was time, he told her, that she found him a wife.

  Now it happened - these are admittedly the facts as given by later historians, but who are we to contradict them? - that at about this time there presented herself at the Palace a young Greek girl of startling beauty named Athenais. She was the daughter of a certain Leontius, a professor at the university of Athens, and she had come to enlist the Emperor's support against her two brothers, who had refused to share her father's estate with her after his death and had thus condemned her to penury. According to one version of the story, Leontius had deliberately cut her off with a hundred gold pieces since, as he wrote in his will, 'she will

  1 The Bishop's deacon, Marcus, tells how he and his master stood outside the church and, when the baptismal procession emerged, shouted the words, 'We petition Your Piety', and held out the document. 'And he who carried the child .. . halted, and commanded silence, and having unrolled a part he read it .. . and placed his hand under the head of the child and cried out: "His Majesty has ordered the requests contained in the petition to be ratified."' Later, at the Palace, 'the Emperor ordered the paper to be read, and said: "The request is hard, but to refuse is harder, since it is the first mandate of our son"' (quoted by Bury (op. cit.), from the Abhandlungen of the Berlin Academy, 1879).

  have her good luck, which is better than that of any other woman'. If so, he was right. Pulcheria, who saw her first, was immensely impressed -not only by her beauty but by the exquisite Greek in which she framed her appeal. She took her straight to Theodosius, who at once fell passionately in love. The potential difficulty of the girl's paganism was quickly overcome: after a few weeks' instruction by Bishop Atticus she was baptized into the Christian faith, marking the occasion by a change of name from Athenais to Eudocia. Her new sister-in-law, it need hardly be said, stood as her godmother. On 7 June 421, she and Theodosius were married.

  Into the well-nigh insufferable atmosphere of the imperial palace, Athenais1 arrived like a fresh spring breeze. She too was genuinely religious - in the circumstances she could hardly have been anything else - but her Christianity was somehow lightened by her pagan background. Her father had steeped her from childhood in the Hellenistic tradition, and she knew the Greek poets and philosophers even better than the Bible and the patristic writings; in short, there was a whole extra dimension to her mind compared to those of the three dismal princesses, and she cheered up the court wonderfully. Her star rose still higher when, the year after her marriage, she presented her husband with a baby daughter — to whom, in a gesture towards his mother's memory as inappropriate as it was confusing, he gave the name Eudoxia. It was perhaps in gratitude for his first-born child that, in 423, he raised his wife to the rank of Augusta.

  Nothing, one would have thought, could be more natural; but her sister-in-law did not take it well. Pulcheria had always seen Athenais as her creation. She had found her, introduced her to Theodosius, organized her conversion, sponsored her at her baptism and educated her in the ways of the court. The girl was her protegee, beholden to her for all she possessed and all she had become. Now, suddenly, she was of equal rank. She was more beautiful, more sought-after, better educated and infinitely better liked. She was also far closer to her husband, and exerted a far greater influence over him than his sister could ever hope to do. As Pulcheria's jealousy grew, she began to find the Empress frivolous, irreverent and - which was probably true - increasingly disrespectful of herself. And so she determined, sooner or later and in any way she could, to cut her down to size.

  1 From this point on she should properly be known as Eudocia; but since both her mother-in-law and daughter were called Eudoxia - the two names seem often to have been interchangeable - the possibilities of confusion will be appreciably lessened if we allow her, for the purpose of this narrative, to keep her pagan name. It is a much prettier name anyway.

  That same summer the imperial couple received at the Palace the Empire's third Augusta: G
alla Placidia, daughter of Theodosius the Great - and granddaughter, through her mother, of the elder Valentinian

  - who arrived in Constantinople with her two small children. Though still only in her early thirties, Placidia could already look back on an extraordinary life. Finding her half-brother Honorius's court in Ravenna intolerable, she had taken up residence in Rome, where she had survived all three of Alaric's sieges; after the third, however, she had been taken by the Goths as a hostage and kept by them in captivity for four years until, in 414, Honorius was finally induced to consent to her marriage with Ataulfus, Alaric's brother-in-law and successor. There had been a sumptuous wedding at Narbonne, and the two had finally established their court at Barcelona; but Ataulfus had died after little more than a year and Placidia had returned to Ravenna - where, in 417, reluctantly but at her brother's insistence, she took his closest adviser, a dark, swarthy Illyrian named Constantius, as her second husband.

  Despite his unprepossessing appearance - his expression, we are told, was permanently sulky, his eyes darting suspiciously to right and left -and his execrable horsemanship, Constantius had enjoyed a distinguished military career, culminating in the defeat of the usurper Constantinus at Aries in 4111 and he seems to have genuinely loved Placidia, whose hand he had sought even before her first marriage. Two children, Honoria and Valentinian, were born to them in swift succession, and in 421 Constantius was raised to be co-Emperor with Honorius, Placidia herself being named Augusta. The news was received with dismay at the court of Theodosius, who refused to recognize the new elevations or to erect the traditional statues when they arrived from Ravenna; but fortunately this dissension did not last long, since Constantius - who detested his new position and had almost immediately gone into a decline - died in his turn, after a reign of barely six months.