by David Jacobs
At Chalcedon in A.D. 451, when the Fourth General Council of the Church convened, the leading clergy members of the empire met to struggle with the issue. The result of the Council was a definition stating that Christ was both God and man - perfect in his divine nature, perfect in his human one. He was above human frailty but still capable of human suffering. This sort of definition seemed to appeal to the people of Constantinople, who, like their Greek ancestors, retained a love for philosophic speculation and debate.
In Syria and Egypt, however, they could not accept the notion that Christ could have possessed a divine and human duality. More Oriental in their beliefs, and retaining a greater tradition of pre-Christian belief that there is only one God, the Syrians and Egyptians preferred a Monophysite theology, in which believers could not challenge or qualify the divinity of Christ. Moreover, these subjects of the empire felt that the imposition of the Chalcedon formula was a political intrusion on their traditional beliefs. Monophysite theology became a cause to the people of the Middle East and underlined the many grievances that they had against the government in Constantinople. Obviously, the problem existed before Justinian I, but the emperor still gave thoughtful consideration to the Monophysites’ positions because he was dedicated to the achievement of unity within his realm. (One reason for his concern must have been the sympathy that Theodora had for the Monophysite view, which she apparently had developed during her stay in Alexandria.)
At first, Justinian I tried to appease the Monophysite leaders. After allowing certain of the exiled leaders to return to the empire, he invited several of them to Constantinople to meet with some Orthodox priests to try to settle their differences. The conference was fruitless, and the emperor reversed his position. He ordered several of the Syrian Monophysites to be imprisoned, tortured, and executed. But when he learned that Theodora actually was hiding a number of Monophysites in the palace, he ended the persecutions and again tried negotiation. Although he received criticism for taking such an active role in theological matters, the emperor tried again and again to understand the problem and come up with a solution.
Justinian I’s involvement with the Monophysites began to concern the Christians of the West, who were afraid he would drift too far from the Roman position on theology. In A.D. 547, Pope Vigilius came to Constantinople from Rome to participate in the talks. In truth, Vigilius became a prisoner for seven years, and Justinian alternately pampered and threatened the pope to get him to yield various theological points. A strong, stubborn man, Vigilius responded by alternately yielding and standing firm.
At one point, Vigilius received word that they planned to forcefully remove him from his quarters and make him agree to all of Justinian I’s pronouncements. Confident that he would be safe in the sanctuary of a church, the pope and his aide, the Archbishop of Milan, fled to the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, not far from the imperial palace. When the emperor learned this, he sent soldiers to remove the men from the church. The pope and the archbishop clung to the altar, but the soldiers grabbed the pope by his feet and beard in an attempt to pry him loose. Vigilius would not budge. The soldiers pulled harder and eventually pulled down the altar, which fell on top of the pope. Vigilius was not hurt, but the frightened soldiers fled.
When Justinian I died, the Greek, Roman, and Monophysite Christians were still quarreling. In spite of all of his efforts, he considered his inability to establish religious unity as a major failure. His successors did not even attempt to understand the difficulties of religious dissenters. Constantinople and Rome drifted further and further apart, and the Egyptians and Syrians broke off from the empire altogether when the Arabs invaded their lands.
But if Rome and the Middle East drifted away, what was left was a more naturally unified, cohesive Byzantine Empire. Few subsequent leaders even approached the competence of Justinian I. It was a tribute to his skills that the empire and its glorious capital were strong enough to prosper and prevail under leaders of sharply varying ability.
After the death or departure of a particularly strong and active leader, citizens frequently look forward to a period of calmer, though still efficient rule. During such periods, the entire citizenry has a chance to catch its breath; more importantly, this can be a time to measure and solidify the gains and changes achieved by the former leader.
When Justinian I died in A.D. 565, the people of Constantinople had every reason to believe they were about to enjoy a time of quiet. The new emperor, Justinian’s nephew Justin II, was a soft-spoken, articulate man who assumed the throne with dignity and a proper respect for protocol. After he expressed his devotion to the Orthodox Church in Hagia Sophia, officials crowned him at the palace; then he addressed the populace at the Hippodrome. In his speech, he led the citizens to believe that he was going to be a conservative ruler by promising to settle all of the many debts contracted by his extravagant predecessor.
But Justin II proved to be anything but conservative. Ill-equipped to possess power, he collapsed under power’s weight. While barbarians attacked the empire in the western regions that Justinian I had regained, and while Avars and Turks took advantage of the distraction and demanded tribute, Justin II quickly went mad. He built a golden chamber in the palace to sit in, as though solitude would make the problems go away. He had servants draw him around the palace in a toy cart. He went into frequent rages; before long, he was seriously mentally ill and incapable of ruling. Once he erected a pillar on which he intended to place a statue of himself. When workers completed the pillar and inscribed on it a list of his virtues, someone placed a tablet on it that read:
Build, build aloft the pillar,
And raise it vast and high;
Then mount it and stand upon it;
Soar proudly in the sky;
East, south and north, and westward,
Wherever thou shalt gaze,
Nought shalt thou see but ruins
The work of thine own days.
In A.D. 574, after nine years of Justin II’s inept rule, officials begged Empress Sophia to help replace her husband and stop the disintegration of the empire. Sophia simply removed Justin II’s crown from his head and presented it to Tiberius II. Tiberius was not mad, but his ideas of how to deal with the empire’s problems were not much different from those of Justin II. Instead of facing the problems, he ignored them and tried to crush dissent.
They finally met the threats to the boundaries of the empire when Emperor Maurice assumed the throne in A.D. 582. Despite his competence as a military leader, however, Maurice was an overzealous tyrant, and the people hated him. In A.D. 602, the demes incited a revolution in Constantinople. Although Maurice attempted to flee, they captured him and escorted him to the circus, where the people demanded his execution.
Under his successor, Phocas, near-anarchy prevailed in Constantinople. Phocas’s leadership wavered between lethargy and despotism, and the factions in the Hippodrome began plotting against him and each other. During his eight-year reign, it was not unusual for the streets to be filled with corpses from one or another of the many insurrections and massacres or from famines. Moreover, an army of Persians arrived at Chalcedon and camped there, apparently lying in wait until Constantinople destroyed itself.
In A.D. 610, Heraclius, a popular general, led a fleet of Byzantine ships into the Golden Horn and stepped onto the shore of Constantinople to restore order. His appearance united the people. They drove Phocas from the palace and crowned Heraclius emperor in Hagia Sophia. Because they feared his reputation as a military leader, the Persians retreated from Chalcedon.
In spite of his popularity and military skills, Heraclius almost lost his throne within six years. In 615, Jerusalem fell to the Persians, and a year later, Heraclius tried to negotiate with a Persian army that returned to Chalcedon. When he realized that his negotiations were getting nowhere and were simply giving the enemy more time to plan the assault on Constantinople, he secretly decided to move his capital to Carthage. But when a ship loaded with
supplies en route to Carthage sank, the citizens of Constantinople learned about his plans to move. Only his popularity prevented a revolution. The people gave him a chance to change his mind, and he took it. For good measure, the citizens made the emperor swear to the patriarch in Hagia Sophia that he never would move the capital of the empire elsewhere.
With that promise made, Heraclius became the most competent emperor of Byzantium since Justinian I, primarily because he enjoyed the support of the people. After they broadcast news of his pledge in Hagia Sophia, nobles and churchmen sent money and treasure to the palace, and veterans and young men enlisted to drive away the Persians. Heraclius mobilized an army and led it through Chalcedon, all across southern Asia Minor, and into the heart of the Persian Empire, with Persians retreating before him.
But while the emperor led the battle in the East, some 30,000 Avars crossed the Balkans into Thrace and advanced to Constantinople. The barbarians camped under the city walls and demanded tribute from the Senate. When the senators refused, the Avars burned down a number of churches in suburban areas. The invaders must not have known that some troops had remained in the harbor because they panicked and fled when the Senate sent a small naval force to attack them. They periodically returned, but not before the men of Constantinople had rebuilt and strengthened the outer wall.
In A.D. 628, Emperor Heraclius returned from his victorious campaign, crossed the Bosporus with his enormous armies, entered the city through the Golden Gate, and restored joy and a sense of majestic power to Constantinople.
The reign of Heraclius, which lasted until A.D. 641, was a considerable failure in one respect and a great success in another. He failed because he could not resolve the theological controversy that had been dividing the empire since before Justinian I’s day. Heraclius probably was the last emperor strong enough, popular enough, and secure enough on his throne to accommodate the demands of his Eastern subjects for religious freedom. That might have stemmed the tide of Islam within the empire at least temporarily. But Heraclius preferred to leave theological matters to the religious leaders, who could not reach a compromise with Monophysitism. For all intents and purposes, the southeastern parts of the Byzantine Empire - Egypt and Syria in particular - thus were lost.
But Heraclius’s rule was a success in establishing an administrative organization that would help the empire survive and prosper even during periods of internal strife, religious controversy, and a succession of inept leaders. Heraclius decided to deal with the external threats all around the empire by combining military and civil leadership in the provinces. He had begun this process during his Persian campaign. Each time he had liberated a province, he had placed a general in charge of all of that province’s affairs. He instructed each general to form an army of provincial peasants and to pay the soldiers with grants of land within the province.
As a result of Heraclius’s arrangement, the Byzantine army became mainly a citizen army, rather than a force of undependable foreign mercenaries. Each province had its own army similar to a state militia whose members fought to protect their own land. Obviously, this resulted in more effective military units than the old mercenary army had provided. The system also benefited the empire as a whole. It strengthened the peasant class as they became a class of landowners with some economic and political power. In addition, ambitious officers who were attempting a coup could not gain the cooperation of the citizen-soldiers as easily as they had with the mercenaries.
After his death, Heraclius’s successors soon tested the worth of the system that he had established. They dealt inadequately with the Arabs in the East and with the barbarians who crossed Thrace once again and camped at Constantinople’s doors. But the citizen armies held their own, and the city was secure.
Constantinople did enjoy one moment of brilliance in the otherwise lackluster period of the late seventh century. In A.D. 678, the Arabs, who had been raiding and robbing successfully in Asia for years, sailed through the Sea of Marmara and began a siege of the city. Under Emperor Constantine IV, the army fought magnificently and turned the invaders back with heavy losses. Representatives from the West soon arrived to render thanks and praise. Constantinople had become the fortress of Europe against the unbelievers.
Constantine’s son, Justinian II, was an inconsistent leader. An active builder and a reformer of the tax structure, he also was a devout Christian and the first emperor to order the coin of the realm stamped with Christ’s image. His government was the first in many years to take on an anti-aristocratic emphasis, and he restored and protected the rights of many formerly unrepresented subjects, such as farmers.
But Justinian II was in some ways a negligent and incompetent ruler. He was an extortionist, who raised taxes for his building programs and kept the excess money for his own extravagant use at court. He allowed vice and corruption to run rampant at the palace. His two closest advisors were a sadistic eunuch and a vicious monk. An advocate of brutality, indifferent to public opinion, Justinian II tried the patience of his subjects for more than a decade until finally their patience ran out. When he attempted to banish a popular general, the people revolted and gained the support of the aristocrats whom Justinian II had opposed. The rebels fought the palace guard and captured the emperor, removing his crown and escorting him to the Hippodrome. This time the people did not insist that their dethroned ruler be executed. As punishment for his crimes, they cut off his nose and slit his tongue.
Yet ten years later, Justinian II returned from exile to mount the throne again. In a barbaric display of triumph in A.D. 705, he took his seat in the Hippodrome, surrounded by the men who had made possible his return. His feet rested on the necks of the two emperors, Leontius and Tiberius III, who had been monarchs in his absence; he later had them beheaded. Justinian II ranted and raved for six years until his subjects no longer could tolerate him. They removed him again from his throne and immediately executed him. Then, to make certain that his kind would reappear no more, the mob entered the Church of Theotokos, where attendants were hiding Justinian II’s little son Tiberius. They kidnapped the child, took him to the palace, and murdered him.
There were three emperors in the following six years (A.D. 711-717), but it would be closer to the truth to say that there were none. Sometimes anarchy prevailed; at other times, whichever faction momentarily controlled the emperor, or the treasury, or the armories ruled the city. But in A.D. 716, the Senate and clergy chose as their emperor Leo Isaurian, an adventurer who had proven his worth as a general many times in the East.
A year later, the Arabs again arrived at the gates to the city and began a furious siege that lasted twelve full months. Emperor Leo III defended the city with patience, skill, and luck. He refused to counterattack before winter; when winter came, it was particularly bitter. After a few weeks, he led a surprise raid on the freezing Arabs, who quickly scattered. Before they could regroup, an army of Bulgarians arrived to help Leo III and killed many of the enemy. Disease spread among the remaining Arabs as they made their way back to their ships; later, a series of storms destroyed many of the ships in the Arab fleet. Islamic historians have written that of the 180,000 men who besieged Constantinople in A.D. 717—718, only 30,000 returned to their homes.
With this encouraging beginning, Leo III remained on the throne for twenty-four years. He was an able ruler but is remembered more for his ideas than for his ability. Leo III was the first of several emperors known as iconoclasts, those who opposed the use of sacred images.
In A.D. 726, there was a volcanic eruption near the island of Santorin in the empire. For some reason, Leo III, a Syrian by birth, interpreted the phenomenon as a sign of God’s anger. He tried to determine what had made God angry and decided that it was because the people of his city worshiped idols. To him, the eruption was clearly a wrathful warning and that he was supposed to assume the role of God’s advocate. He would be both a latter-day Abraham, smasher of idols, and a Moses, bearer of God’s law.
The controvers
y regarding the appropriateness of depicting lifelike forms in religious art was a very old one, and it was natural that the issue should come to a head in the Byzantine Empire. After all, the subjects of the realm had descended from peoples with a wide range of beliefs and a number of contradictory traditions. The Greeks and Romans of Classical antiquity had been fond of religious statuary representing their many gods, but they placed more emphasis on depicting and striving to emulate the ideal human form than on actual worshiping of the statues. On the other hand, many of the pagans passionately worshiped their idols. They made manlike beast-figures and prayed to them, sacrificed to them, and employed them extensively in their rituals. It was this overemphasis on the magical powers of the man-made figure that the early Hebrews had reacted against so strongly. Like some of the monotheistic Egyptians and Babylonians, the Hebrews were more mystical than the pagans and tended to stress individual responsibility in their religious definitions. Thus they prohibited the fashioning of “graven images.” The Jews seldom depicted any human form because they believed that God had created man in His image; therefore, to depict a man was to portray God.
Christianity had many more troublesome and less philosophical problems to occupy it in its early years. The conversions in the third and fourth centuries often happened without elaborate definition of theology. People who always had made figures continued making figures. When the Church finally took a position around that time, the practice of depicting images already was widespread and people accepted it. For a long time, the voice in ecclesiastical circles opposing imagery was a minority voice.
Certain powerful bishops in Constantinople who were against the widespread use of icons probably influenced Leo III in his convictions. As a Syrian, Leo may have felt empathy for the beliefs of the Monophysites, who were inclined to be iconoclasts, and for the Arabs, whose Islamic faith prohibited depiction of divine beings. In any case, in A.D. 730, he declared the many mosaics, reliefs, and paintings in the churches to be idols and ordered his followers to destroy all of them. They removed images from mosaics, whitewashed walls, collected and melted down coins, and burned pictures. This outraged the people of Constantinople who occasionally attempted to protect their favorite images. There were executions and massacres, and the destruction continued.
