The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

by John Julius Norwich

  This was not the first invasion that the Empire had suffered in recent years - in 548 and again in j 50 the Slavs had overrun the Balkan peninsula as far as the Gulf of Corinth, the Adriatic and the shores of the Aegean - but for the people of Constantinople it was by far the most terrifying, many of them in their panic taking flight with their families and all their movable possessions across the Bosphorus. Justinian himself was not unduly alarmed; the invaders had been able to approach so close only because the Anastasian Walls, which ran some thirty miles west of the city from Selymbria on the Marmara to the Black Sea, had recently been severely damaged in an earthquake. On the other hand the Walls of Theodosius, which formed the inner line of defence, had survived intact and were still fully manned. In such circumstances he knew that they could be trusted to keep out any army in existence, let alone so primitive and ill-equipped a horde as the Kotrigurs.

  What he did feel was humiliation: that he, who had destroyed the Ostrogothic and Vandal Kingdoms in Italy and Africa and had re-established the imperial presence in Spain, should have allowed a rough barbarian tribe of which few people had ever heard to approach to his very doorstep, plundering and laying waste everything in their path. This time there was no alternative but to fight. As so often in the past at moments of crisis, he sent for Belisarius.

  The general was still only in his middle fifties. Although it was now ten years since he had seen action in the field, he had lost none of his energy, nor any of his astonishing tactical imagination. With only a few hundred men at his disposal he organized a brilliant guerrilla campaign, in the course of which he drew the Kotrigurs into a carefully planned ambush and left 400 dead where they had fallen before driving the remainder back to their base camp near Arcadiopolis (Liileburgaz). Doubtless he could have driven them further if Justinian had allowed him; with a few more men he could probably have destroyed them utterly. But that was not the Emperor's way. He preferred diplomacy, backed up where necessary with bribes. And so he bought the Kotrigurs just as he had bought the Persians, promising them a generous annual subsidy on condition that they returned to their homeland and made no further incursions into imperial territory.

  After so encouraging a start, this was not a very creditable outcome to the affair; it certainly did not merit Justinian's triumphal procession into his capital when he returned that August from Selymbria, whither he had made one of his rare excursions from Constantinople to superintend the reconstruction of the Anastasian Walls. This extraordinary ceremony, in which Belisarius took no part, was apparently intended to convince his subjects that the Kotrigurs had been annihilated after a great and glorious victory for which the Emperor himself had been alone responsible; that old jealousy for his brilliant commander that had always smouldered in his heart had suddenly flared up again, for the first time since Theodora's day.

  Belisarius doubtless took note, and retreated once more into the background. Even then, no one was probably more surprised than he when, in the autumn of 562, several distinguished citizens were accused of plotting against the Emperor's life and one of them named him as being among those implicated. Nothing, of course, was ever proved; but he was shorn of all his dignities and privileges, and lived for eight months in a state of disgrace until Justinian, finally persuaded of his innocence, reinstated him. It was presumably this unfortunate incident that gave rise to the legend according to which the Emperor had his old general blinded and thrown out into the streets with a begging-bowl; but the earliest authority for this story dates from more than five centuries later and can safely be rejected.1 After his return to favour Belisarius lived out his life in tranquillity and comfort, dying in March 565 at the age of about sixty. Antonina, now probably well into her eighties, survived him.

  That same month saw Justinian's last item of legislation, the end of a long series of enactments on ecclesiastical affairs - they included a law

  1 Strangely enough, the work in question - a late-eleventh-century account of Constantinople tentatively attributed to Michael Psellus - refers on the very same page to the continued existence of the gilded statue of Belisarius that Justinian had erected in 549. This would surely have been taken down had the general suffered the fate described.

  fixing the official dates of Christmas and the Epiphany - to which, as he grew older, he devoted more and more of his time. He continued through the summer and early autumn, working at his desk, granting audiences and holding theological discussions; then, on the night of 14 November, quite without warning, he died - of a heart attack presumably, or a stroke. The only official with him at the time was the Patrician Callinicus, Praepositus of the Sacred Bedchamber, who subsequently reported that the Emperor had, with his last breath, designated his successor: his nephew Justin, son of his sister Vigilantia.

  There may have been some who doubted this story, but no one was in a position to contradict it. The account of what happened next is also somewhat suspect, relying as it does on the testimony of a third-rate African poet named Corippus who was obviously anxious to ingratiate himself with the new Emperor; but since it was intended to be read by several eye-witnesses to the events it describes, it is probably true in its essentials at least. Corippus sings of how the Patrician quickly summoned a number of senators and how together they hurried to Justin's mansion. There they found the prince, accompanied by his wife Sophia - who was Theodora's niece - in a beautiful room overlooking the sea, and hailed him as their new Emperor. The whole party then repaired to the Palace, where Justinian had been laid out on a golden bier and where Sophia, producing a golden cloth on which she had embroidered scenes from her uncle's life, draped it reverently over the body.

  The following morning the imperial pair rode in state to St Sophia where Justin, having been ceremonially raised on a shield in the old Roman manner and crowned with the imperial diadem, made an inaugural speech in which he swore to his orthodox beliefs, undertook to rule with piety and justice and - somewhat ungraciously, it may be thought - expressed his regret that his predecessor in his old age had neglected or mismanaged so many important departments of state. He and Sophia then continued to the Hippodrome, where they received the acclamation of their new subjects and paid off, then and there, all Justinian's debts left unsettled at his death. Only when all these formalities had been completed could they proceed to the funeral itself. The body, now raised on a high catafalque glittering with gold and jewels, was carried slowly from the Palace and through the densely packed but silent streets, followed on foot by Justin and Sophia, the Senate and senior officers of State, the Patriarch, bishops and clergy, the soldiers and the Palace Guard. On arrival at the Church of the Holy Apostles it was borne up the nave to the tomb of Theodora, next to which stood a vast porphyry sarcophagus, empty and waiting. Into this it was gently lowered, while a mass was said for the repose of the old Emperor's soul.

  An age had ended. The Empire had passed from an uncle to a nephew, in as smooth and undisputed a succession as had ever been known; but there is no mistaking the fact that, far from inaugurating the glorious new era of which he had dreamt, Justinian was the last Roman Emperor to occupy the throne of Byzantium. It was not simply that he had been born a Latin, and that - if Procopius is to be believed - he spoke barbarous Greek all his life; it was that his mind was cast in a Latin mould, and that throughout his reign he devoted the greater part of his prodigious energies to the restoration of the old Roman Empire. What he never understood was that that Empire was by now an anachronism; the days when one man could stand in undisputed universal authority were gone, and would not return. He had dealt the Vandals and the Ostrogoths their respective death-blows; but the barbarian tribes that pressed along his northern frontiers were as numerous as ever, and ever more eager to enjoy for themselves the warmth and fertility of the Mediterranean lands. No longer moreover were they prepared, as their predecessors had been, to accept the role of barbarians. Already the Slavs had begun their slow but relentless infiltration into the Balkans. As for Italy, in the reconques
t of which Justinian had spent almost half his lifetime and which he had regained only at the cost of many thousand lives and untold human misery, it was to remain in imperial hands, after his death, for just three years.

  Of all the Emperors of Byzantium, he is the one whom we find the easiest to imagine - thanks to the great contemporary mosaic in the choir of the Church of S. Vitale in Ravenna, dating from 546 when the building was completed. Justinian looks younger than his sixty-four years, but his face - in striking contrast to the imperial diadem that he is wearing and the golden nimbus that frames his head - is plain and unidealized: a portrait clearly taken from the life, as is that of Maximianus, Archbishop of Ravenna, who stands next to him. It is not a fine face - the Macedonian peasant is there for all to see - nor indeed a particularly strong one. Certainly it bears no comparison with that of Theodora on the opposite wall, frowning menacingly from between pendant ropes of pearls as she extends a great jewelled chalice - in a gesture that echoes those of the Three Kings, embroidered along the bottom of her purple robe. No wonder, one feels, that her husband was easily led - if it was she who was doing the leading.

  And yet, weak-willed and vacillating as he could often be, Justinian was - with anyone except his wife - an autocrat through and through. He possessed in full measure the faults which are all too frequently associated with absolute power: the vanity, the quickness of temper, the occasional bursts of almost paranoid suspicion, the childish jealousy of anyone - though it was usually Belisarius - who he feared might threaten his prestige. On the other hand his energy astonished all who knew him, while his capacity for hard work was apparently without limit. Known within his court as akoimetos - 'the sleepless' - he would spend whole days and nights together pondering on affairs of state, attending personally to the minutest details, wearing out whole successions of secretaries and scribes as the sky darkened, then lightened, then darkened again outside the palace windows. Such, he believed, were the duties imposed by God upon an Emperor; and he performed those duties with conscientious dedication and - at least until the very last years of his life - with unfailing efficiency.

  But there were other sides, too, to an Emperor's life. He could not always remain closeted in the imperial chancery. He must also move out among his people, dazzling them with a majesty and magnificence that reflected the glory of the Empire itself. Hence the sumptuous processions, the high ceremonial pomp with which he was surrounded on all public occasions. Hence also his passion for building. The Empire's splendour, he believed, must be made manifest in its capital. Justinian transformed Constantinople; and though many of his most extraordinary monuments - such as the Great Palace, which he entirely rebuilt for himself and his successors, with its famous 'Bronze Gate', the Chalke, ablaze with polychrome marble and mosaic, or his own immense equestrian statue on a column in the Augusteum - have long since crumbled away to dust, the great churches of St Sophia and St Irene and the little miracle of St Sergius and St Bacchus have somehow survived and still have the power to catch the breath. So, even more surprisingly, have certain of his public works - above all the vast Columned cisterns now known as the Yerebatansaray and the Binbir-direk, constructions as remarkable in their way as any that can be seen in the city. But - despite the fact that he so seldom left it himself -Justinian did not confine his tremendous building projects to his capital. Roads were laid, sewers were sunk, bridges and aqueducts sprang up in every corner of the Empire; not one but several new cities were founded and given the name of Justiniana in his honour. Antioch, after its sack by Chosroes in 540, was rebuilt on a far more lavish scale than formerly, as were the Syrian towns destroyed in the succession of earthquakes that, in 551 and again in 554, shook the province to its foundations.

  One reason for Justinian's compulsive building operations may be that here at least he could be reasonably certain of the outcome of each new enterprise. Not all his other endeavours were equally successful - often through his chronic inability to come to terms with the world as it was, rather than as he would have liked it to be. In his desire for religious unity, as we have seen, he succeeded only in deepening the rift between East and West, orthodox and monophysite, since having once taken a decision it never occurred to him that he might be wrong. Similarly his immense efforts to reform the administration and to purge it of corruption were repeatedly sabotaged by his own extravagance: so great was his need of money that he simply could not afford to be too particular about how it was obtained. Even his conquests had disappointing results. He had hoped, by restoring the conquered lands to the Empire, to bring them peace, prosperity and good government; in fact, the depredations of the imperial soldiery, followed by those of the swarms of tax-collectors and logothetes, left the local populations in misery and destitution. And although vast expenditure in Africa - including a magnificent rebuilding of the city of Carthage - ultimately replaced that economy on a sound footing, in Italy such similar attempts as were made ended in failure, leaving its desperate people all too ready to welcome the Lombard invaders.

  But there were successes too, particularly in the field of industry and commerce. By Justinian's day, Constantinople was already the principal centre of the entrepot trade between Europe and Asia, and carrying on a brisk business with both the Mediterranean world and the Orient. The West, however, was by now sadly impoverished; it was to Cathay and the Indies that the Byzantines looked for their commercial prosperity -and for the silks, spices and precious stones by which they set so much store. But there was one perennial problem which beset all merchants trading in such commodities: the presence of Persia. Caravans taking the land route from the East passed without hindrance as far as the oases of Samarkand and Bokhara and the Oxus River; thereafter, however, they were in Persian territory, where the Great King exercised a strict control over all their transactions - often, in time of war, suspending them completely. The sea route presented the same difficulty, since all cargoes had to be landed in the Persian Gulf. Huge tolls were levied, especially on silk - the most sought-after item of all - and direct trading was forbidden. Sales could only be effected by Persian middlemen, and they too took exorbitant commissions.

  This was the stranglehold that Justinian had determined to break-First, he opened up new routes designed to bypass Persia altogether: a northern one via the Crimea, Lazica and the Caucasus - where his subjects were already carrying on a flourishing trade in textiles, jewellery and wine, which they exchanged for leather, furs and slaves - and a southern one which used the Red Sea rather than the Gulf and which involved him, already in the early 530s, in negotiations with the Ethiopian kingdom of Axum. The first of these attempts was partially successful; the latter failed, owing to the firmness of the Persian grip on the Indian and Ceylonese ports. The real breakthrough came only in 552, when a party of orthodox monks sought an audience with the Emperor and offered to obtain through certain contacts in Soghdiana - that distant land beyond the Oxus - a quantity of silkworm eggs, together with enough technical knowledge to establish an industry. Justinian leapt at the chance; before long there were factories not only in Constantinople but in Antioch, Tyre and Beirut (and later at Thebes in Boeotia) and the imperial silk industry - always a state monopoly - became one of the most profitable in the Empire.

  After thirty-eight years on the throne, a personality as powerful as that of Justinian could not fail to be missed by his subjects; but he was not deeply mourned. Even in his early days he had never won their love. By the time he had grown old, the tyranny of his tax-gatherers had created dangerous discontent; of the last ten years of his reign, no less than six saw serious rioting in the capital. Economically, despite all his efforts, he left the Empire prostrate: for that reason alone, he cannot be considered a truly great ruler. On the other hand, he also left it infinitely richer in amenities, services and public works, and incomparably more beautiful. He extended its frontiers, he simplified and streamlined its laws. He worked ceaselessly, indefatigably, as few rulers in history have ever worked, for what he believed
to be the good of his subjects. When he failed, it was almost invariably because he attempted too much and set his sights too high; never the reverse. More than any other monarch in the history of Byzantium, he stamped the Empire with the force of his own character; centuries were to pass before it emerged from his shadow.

  13

  The Downward Drift

  [565-610]

  En A vares Francique truces Gipidesque Getaeque Totque aliae gentes commotis undlque signis Bella movent. Qua vi tantos superabimus hostes Cum, virtus Romana, jaces?

  Lo, the Avars and the wild Franks, the Gepids and the Getae,1 and so many other nations, their standards waving, make war on us from every side. What strength shall we find to overcome such fearsome enemies when you, O Roman virtue, lie forgotten?

  Justin II, quoted by Corippus, In Laudem Justin:', I, 254-7

  Byzantium was indeed beset by its enemies; and whether or not the Emperor Justin II, standing beside the bier of his predecessor, actually lamented the passing of the old Roman virtues as Corippus would have us believe, he certainly did his best to resurrect them. Proud, arrogant, unshakeable in his self-confidence, he believed implicitly that with wisdom and determination, with prudence and fortitude and above all with courage, those enemies could and would be scattered - and that he was the man to do it. He was soon to be painfully, even pitifully, disillusioned.

  Justin gave proof of his new philosophy within a week of his accession, when he received an embassy from the Avars, a race of unknown but probably Tartar origin that had made its first appearance in the West only a few years before. His uncle, as might have been expected, had agreed to pay them an annual subsidy in return for their undertaking to keep various other hostile tribes away from the imperial frontiers; but in 562 they themselves had invaded Thrace and had categorically declined to accept the alternative homeland that he offered them in Pannonia. Clearly they were not to be trusted; and when their representatives,