A history of the Byzantine state and society 9780804724210, 9780804726306, 9780804779371

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A History of the Byzantine State and Society

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invasions by the Germans, Persians, and Avars. By 750 another major loss occurred, as the Arabs conquered a large part of Byzantine territory. But this second decline was made good by 1050, when after many reconquests the empire was scarcely smaller than it had been in 300 or 620, and slightly larger than it had been in 450. ‘Then came another severe decline, caused by losses to the Seljuk Turks. Interrupted by a partial recovery, this decline lasted until 1204, when Constantinople fell to the Fourth Crusade, and the provinces that remained under Greek rule were divided among several successor states. Finally the main empire and the smaller Greek states recovered for a time, before shrinking to nothing by 1461, conquered by the Ottoman Turks. No doubt differences in population and resources can make land area a misleading guide to a state’s power; but for Byzantium the graph gives for

the most part an accurate picture. Each major territorial gain reflected underlying strength, and each major loss showed underlying weakness. Such strengths and weaknesses often escaped the notice of Byzantine ob-

Introduction 9 servers, who considered the losses temporary and took the reconquests more or less for granted. But in comparison with these gains and losses of territory, most of the battles, intrigues, and ceremonies that preoccupy Byzantine sources and many modern histories were insignificant. Territorial losses and gains signaled the main turning points of Byzantine his-

tory, when the Byzantine state and the society it ruled shrank or expanded, and were forced to adapt to new circumstances. The Byzantine state and Byzantine society did not always match each other, since the state could have weak influence over some of its subjects, but strong influence over others who lived outside Byzantine rule. Yet up to the third century, the Roman state had hardly corresponded to any single society in the East. Rome’s rulers, consisting of the emperor and a select group of his officials, had little contact with most of the people they ruled. No doubt the government wished its subjects to be contented and prosperous, if only because it hoped that they would then rebel less often and pay more in taxes. But the rulers, to the extent that they thought about their subjects at all, gave most of their attention to the soldiers and to the citizens of the main cities, because those, small minorities though they were, could cause the government the most trouble. Nor did the third-century Roman government have any great effect on the lives of most of its subjects. Outside the Latin-speaking West, the

people of the Roman Empire had never had much in common with each other. Most Egyptians, Syrians, and Greeks shared no language, and shared a religion only in the sense that most of them did not repudiate the others’ gods. The bulk of them were subsistence farmers living in small villages, illiterate and seldom aware of political events. ‘They feared foreign invasions only because invaders usually ravaged and stole more than the Roman army did. Most provincials thought of the central government as an alien force, and found it rapacious and unreliable. Not

even the army was happy enough with the emperors it proclaimed to keep them for more than a few years before overthrowing them. Such were the unpromising elements from which the Byzantine Empire was to be formed. Yet even in the later third century the eastern Roman Empire retained much of its former prosperity. The invasions and state requisitions had caused only local and temporary impoverishment. The recurrences of disease seem to have brought only moderate depopulation, and may even have relieved overpopulation in some places. By ancient standards, the commerce, manufacturing, and culture of east-

ern Roman cities were still impressive. The worst effects of the third-

10 Introduction

century crisis had been felt in the western part of the empire, which possessed less defensible frontiers and less productive cities, and had suf-

fered more from enemy raids and military revolts. The future of the Roman Empire lay in the East, where in 284 the army proclaimed yet another new emperor.

The Enlarged State and the Burdened Society

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CHAPTER ONE

.: The Refoundation of the Empire, 284-337 fl sop hes,

SR SEO ey

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ayes

“—teccucausagi”™ In 283, during a war against the Persians in Meso-

potamia, the emperor Carus was killed, allegedly by a thunderbolt but more probably by assassination. The Roman army proclaimed Carus’s son Numerian emperor. Soon it abandoned the Persian war and slowly with-

drew into Anatolia. When the army reached Nicomedia in 284, Diocles, the commander of the imperial bodyguard, announced that Numerian himself had been murdered. After executing the supposed assassin, Diocles had himself proclaimed emperor. His claims were rejected by Carus’s surviving son, Carinus, who had been ruling at Rome and now led an army against Diocles. A civil war began, and early the next year the forces of the two emperors clashed at the Margus River in the muddle of the Balkans. The battle went well for Carinus until he too was assassinated, leaving Diocles the temporarily undisputed ruler of the Roman Empire.

_5

DIOCLETIAN S NEW SYSTEM Like most of his predecessors over the past fifty years, Diocles was a capable career officer from an obscure family in Illyricum. In comparison with similar emperors, he was a middling general but an excellent manager, with an education slightly better than average. He appears to have been around forty years old at his accession. According to plausible reports, he had been born at Salona on the Illyrian coast, to a father who was a freedman and a scribe. Appropriately for a scribe’s son, he showed a liking for records and numbers, and wrote without literary pretensions. Salona was in Latin-speaking territory, but his Greek name of Diocles

|

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I4 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

3. Marble bust, probably of Diocletian ee

Ss | as suggests Greek origins, and he was equally at ease speaking Latin or Greek. Although in 285 he Latinized his Greek name to Diocletianus, he was the nearest thing that the empire had yet had to an emperor of Greek stock.

Diocletian had no son, but decided he needed another emperor to share his powers and the dangers he faced. A preference for the Greek East may lie behind his decision to retain control over it and to entrust the

Latin West to someone else. At Milan, in July 285, Diocletian adopted as his son one of his Illyrian comrades in arms, Maximian, giving him the rank of Caesar, or junior emperor. Henceforth the defense of the provinces west of Illyricum became the primary responsibility of Maximian, while the defense of Ilyricum and the East remained that of Diocletian. The next year, when Maximian faced a usurping emperor in Britain, Diocletian strengthened his colleague’s hand by promoting him to Augustus, the highest imperial rank. Diocletian still kept a formal precedence over Maximian. As an expression of their relationship, Diocletian styled himself Jovius, claiming the patronage of Jupiter, king of the gods, and titled Maximian Herculius, assigning him the patronage of Jupiter’s son Hercules. In practice Maximian continued to defer to his senior colleague’s judgment. But each emperor maintained his own court and ran his own army and admunistration, with a separate praetorian prefect (in Latin, praefectus praetorio) as his chief lieutenant. Although the empire remained Jjuridically one, and on occasion was ruled by a single emperor again, after 285 its eastern and western parts always had different prefects and separate admunistrations. From this time forward, we can follow the history of the East with only occasional attention to the West.

Refoundation of Empire, 284-337 15

Before Diocletian, jurisdiction over the eastern and western parts of the empire had sometimes been separated for a time, either by a rebellion in the East, like Diocletian’s own, or as an emergency measure, like Carus’s entrusting the West to his son Carinus before departing for Persia. But Diocletian’s arrangement was more systematic than those temporary divisions. Although for an emperor without a son to adopt an heir and title him Caesar had long been standard practice, Diocletian meant Maximian, who was only a few years his junior, to be a colleague rather than an heir. Diocletian plainly realized that, at a time when internal rebellions and external invasions had become endemic, the empire was too big for one emperor to rule and defend. What remains striking is that Diocletian took as his own portion not the Latin West but the Greek East, to which he attached Latin-speaking Illyricum, his own homeland. Although his motives cannot be reliably reconstructed, he evidently believed that the East, with Hlyricum, was at least as important a part of the empire as the West, and an appropriate domain for the senior ruler. Given the threat that the empire faced from foreign invasions and military rebellions, part of his reason was surely that the larger part of the army was stationed in the East—twenty-three of thirty-four legions as of the early third century—where it faced the empire’s single strongest adversary, Persia. The East as Diocletian defined it also included the empire’s best recruiting ground, in Illyricum, and its richest farmland, in Egypt. Leaving Maximian to defend the West, Diocletian concentrated first

on strengthening the frontiers in the East. He began recruiting more troops. In two campaigns he drove some Sarmatian raiders back across the Danube frontier, and built new fortifications to keep them out. In 287 he negotiated a peace with Persia, establishing a Roman protectorate

over Armenia and securing the Mesopotamian border, which he defended with more fortifications. He established his principal residence at Nicomedia, where he had first taken power. On the coast of Asia Minor but facing Europe, Nicomedia was in the middle of Diocletian’s eastern

domains and midway on the road between the Balkan and Mesopotamian frontiers. Diocletian hardly supposed that naming a permanent colleague would be enough to solve the problem of the empire’s security. He felt that the empire, including its western part, needed a bigger army and more fortifications, and more revenue to pay for them. Probably in 287, he intro-

duced a new system for taxation and the requisition of supplies, which also applied to the western provinces ruled by Maximian. For centuries

16 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

the Romans had levied taxes of different kinds all over the empire, at widely different rates. The inflation of the previous century had slowly rendered monetary taxes almost worthless, so that the government increasingly met its expenses by requisitions of labor or goods, such as uniforms for the soldiers and grain for city dwellers. Originally such requisitions had been paid for in money at fixed rates, but as inflation made the

value of the payments nugatory they had gradually ceased to be made. Under this makeshift system assessment was inefficient and burdensome, and raising taxes was difficult.

Diocletian realized that the best way of maximizing receipts while minimizing economic dislocation was to standardize the taxes and requisitions according to his subjects’ ability to pay. Collecting taxes or requisitions that fell equally on each man, household, or measure of land had the obvious disadvantage that some men and households could afford to

pay much more than others, and some land was far more productive than other land. Uniform rates that the rich could pay easily would ruin the poor, and rates that the poor could pay would be absurdly low for the rich and yield little revenue. Yet any assessment of land and other property according to their monetary value would rapidly become obsolete as the coinage continued to inflate. To make a reliable assessment possible, Diocletian defined two standard units to measure tax liability. One was the caput—literally meaning “head,” but better translated as “heading” because it was a theoretical unit for varying numbers of taxpayers. It was supposed to stand for a set amount of wealth, which happened to be well above that of the average taxpayer; it could represent the resources of many poor households, the property of several middling ones, or a fraction of the fortune of a rich man. Seemingly the wealth taken into account was limited to real estate. The second unit was the jugum (“yoke”), representing a set acreage of first-class plowland; apparently it could also be a larger portion of worse land or a smaller portion of better land, so that each jugum would be of approximately the same value. The juga seem to have been designed to assess requisitions of grain, and the capita to assess other taxes, in coin or in kind. Evidently regions that produced a large surplus of grain, notably Egypt, were assigned more juga and fewer capita than others. The quantity of grain levied per jugum, and tax per caput, could vary from year to year according to the government’s needs. Yet the intent appears to have been that in a given year an equal quantity of grain should be levied per jugum and an equal amount of tax per caput, at least within the jurisdiction of each emperor.’

Refoundation of Empire, 284-337 17

This system must have taken some time to put into effect. Each city was assigned a quota of capita and juga for its territory, and the city councils, which had always been responsible for collecting taxes and requisitions, now had to collect the taxes and requisitions that corresponded to their cities’ quotas. When the system began, the quotas must have been

assigned somewhat arbitrarily, on the basis of current records. But the system at least allowed an accurate census to be made, and Diocletian seems to have planned for a regular revision of assessments in five-year cycles beginning in 287, with the beginning of a thoroughgoing reassessment perhaps scheduled for 292. His plans for a reform of the coinage and of provincial administration may also have begun this early.

Although Diocletian was now primarily ruler of the East, he continued to be aware of the problems of the West. He twice conferred with Maximian at the boundary between Illyricum and Italy, where their jurisdictions met. Once the two rulers campaigned together against the Germans there. Maximian, who had taken Milan as his headquarters, maintained or restored order in most of the West, though he was unable to suppress the rebellion in Britain, which had spread to northwestern Gaul. The record of the two Augusti was by no means a bad one, particularly by the standards of the past century of disasters, but it failed to satisfy Diocletian. He therefore made another major change. In 293 he arranged with Maximian to proclaim two junior emperors, so that each Augustus received a Caesar, sharing his epithet of Jovius or Herculius, to help rule his part of the empire. Maximian’s Caesar was Constantius, his son-in-law and former praetorian prefect, while Diocletian’s Caesar was his own son-in-law Galerius, who may also have been his former praetorian prefect. Like both Augusti, the new Caesars were experienced officers from Ilyricum. Constantius was given the task of putting down the rebellion in Britain and Gaul, where he took Trier as his headquarters. At this time, Galerius’s main headquarters seems to have been Antioch, and his main assignment to guard Syria and Egypt against the Persians, while Diocletian finished strengthening the Danube frontier. These Caesars, despite having praetorian prefects of their own, were subject to their Augusti even within their assigned regions, which in any case were not permanently fixed. Furthermore, though Constantius and

Galerius were not much younger than Diocletian and Maximian, the Caesars were designated heirs to the Augusti, perpetuating the artificial dynasties of the Jovii in the East and the Hercult1 in the West. This system of four emperors has since been called the tetrarchy. In fact, it sim-

18 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

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ply applied the familiar practice of appointing junior emperors to the existing dyarchy. It therefore tended to confirm rather than to confuse the twofold division of the empire. Around the time of the appointment of the new Caesars, Diocletian and his colleagues transformed the provincial administration, which had stayed much the same since the time of Augustus.* The former provinces,

which had been fewer than fifty and of very different sizes, were replaced by about a hundred new provinces of more nearly uniform extent, population, and resources. Some fifty-five of these provinces were in the eastern empire, which was smaller in area but richer and more densely populated. The former provincial governors, who had commanded whatever troops garrisoned their provinces, were replaced by purely civil governors, while the army became subject to separate military officials. The new provinces were further grouped into twelve large jurisdictions called dioceses, six of which were in the East. Each diocese was administered by a vicar (vicarius), an official who was the superior of the diocese’s civil governors. Each vicar’s superior was the praetorian pre-

fect of one of the four emperors. Thus the emperors roughly tripled the number of their major officials, adding new prefectures, dioceses, and provinces and appointing military and civil officials to replace the old provincial governors. The number of lower-ranking bureaucrats also increased.

The introduction of four emperors required approximately quadru-

Refoundation of Empire, 284-337 19

pling the imperial court, which consisted of councilors, household servants, and several administrative bureaus. Besides the praetorian prefect, whose department was in charge of the army and the requisitions levied for it, each emperor probably received a public treasurer, whose department handled his monetary revenues and mints, and a private treasurer, whose department managed his imperial estates. Each emperor also had bodyguards, messengers, and several departments to keep government records, all soon put under a master of offices (magister officiorum), an of-

ficial probably created by Diocletian. By a rough estimate, the civil service doubled from about fifteen thousand men to about thirty thousand, of whom something more than half held posts 1n the East.°

Diocletian and his colleagues also greatly enlarged the army. Although the difficulty of recruiting and supplying soldiers probably forced them to increase it more gradually than the much smaller bureaucracy, most of the army’s growth appears to have been rapid. The surviving figures that reflect it are open to some doubt, but the overall picture is clear.

Starting with an army totaling some 390,000 soldiers in 285, the four emperors seem to have increased it by about half as much again, to some $81,000. Within the East, the increase seems to have been a good deal less, from about 253,000 men to 311,000, with most of the additions being made on the Persian frontier. The navy also increased, from about 46,000 seamen to about 64,000, with perhaps half of each number be-

longing to the East.* |

Although earlier each provincial governor had commanded the soldiers in his province, Diocletian created military commands under dukes (duces). The dukes’ commands, sometimes covering two or three of the small provinces created by Diocletian, formed a continuous series along the empire’s land frontiers. All these ducates had forces ranging from two thousand to over twenty thousand men, usually both cavalry and infantry, and those on the lower Danube had fleets. Many of these frontier troops were quartered in new and elaborate fortifications. While the emperors could summon the dukes’ troops whenever necessary, only relatively small mobile reserves accompanied the emperors at other times. In the process of making his reforms, Diocletian reduced Italy and the city of Rome virtually to provincial status and subjected both the West and the East to the same administrative system. The Roman senate’s remaining authority nearly disappeared, and senators became ineligible for all but a few governorships and other offices. Although the senators retained their wealth and personal privileges, most of the real power in the

20 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY vast new machinery of government belonged to newcomers, many of them soldiers installed by the soldier-emperors. Now the empire's real capitals were simply wherever the emperors happened to be at the time, and many of their officials followed them on their travels. Diocletian took some pains to assure that his subjects treated him and his colleagues with reverence. Ceremonial for approaching the emperors

was made more elaborate, and they were guarded more closely. They were depicted in statuary as of superhuman size and strength (Fig. $; cf. Fig. 7), and official rhetoric in their honor was especially effusive, stressing the particular favor that the gods had shown them. They described themselves as chosen by the gods, abandoning the threadbare pretense that they were leaders of a republic but diverting attention from the brutal truth that their power came from the army. Except insofar as the inapproachability of the emperor made him harder to assassinate, all this made little practical difference. The emperor had long been an absolute monarch, who after he was proclaimed by the army could rule practically as he wished until he was removed. Nonetheless, by laying public

claim to the power that emperors had long had, but pretended not to have in deference to the wishes of senators and other conservatives, D1ocletian strengthened the basis of his authority. A new census of the empire’s people and wealth was begun soon after 293 and apparently completed by 296. The census inspectors reassessed

the persons and property of each landowner, evaluated these in capita and juga, and added the landowners’ totals together to produce revised totals of capita and juga for the area administered by each city. Tax collectors then instructed each city council to provide animals, money, and even recruits for the army in proportion to its jurisdiction's capita, and grain according to its juga. Most taxes fell due annually on 1 September, the beginning of the year of the indiction (indictio, meaning “assessment’’); but the census was also used for extraordinary requisitions. ‘The actual collection from individual landowners was the responsibility of the decurions (decuriones), the city councilors. Because decurions had to sup-

ply from their own property whatever they failed to exact from others, service as a decurion often became a burden, and in some cases could mean financial ruin. Despite the instability of the coinage, many of the taxes were either levied in money or convertible into money, with the rates adjusted to keep pace with inflation. Diocletian nonetheless intended to bring inflation to an end. Soon after his accession he had begun minting gold coins

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such attacks when he could. No doubt the original Tervingian revolt and Arbogast’s proclamation of Eugenius showed the dangers of allowing Germans too much power inside the empire. But despite his strenuous efforts to recruit more Romans, Theodosius needed German troops as well, and he managed his Germans skillfully enough that they fought for him repeatedly without rebelling. Admittedly Theodosius introduced no sweeping reforms of the many ’]

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State Under Strain, 337-305 77 defects in the administration and army. But those defects, however easy to identify, were maddeningly difficult to correct. Theodosius’s constant and successful efforts to avoid impending catastrophe left him scant leisure

to plan for the long run. He nonetheless rescued the empire from the gravest peril, and restored a stability that capable and unified leadership should have been able to maintain. Although at his death his sons were too young to provide that leadership, he had supplied each of them with a capable adviser, Arcadius with Rufinus and Honorius with Stilicho. No ruler could have done much more.

CHAPTER THREE

The Danger of Barbarization,

oy Or a a A

“Cesaagasi What Theodosius failed to foresee was that Stili-

cho and Rufinus would quarrel. The late emperor had specified that his elder son Arcadius should rule the prefectures of the East and Ilyricum, while Honorius, the younger son, should have the prefectures of Italy and Gaul. That much was not in dispute. But according to Stilicho, in a private conversation on the day of his death the emperor had entrusted both his sons to Stilicho’s care. Stilicho therefore claimed authority over the whole empire. Rufinus refused to accept this claim, which rested on Stilicho’s word alone.’

For the moment Rufinus controlled the administration of the East and Ilyricum. But Stilicho retained almost all of the mobile armies of both eastern prefectures, which Theodosius had led against Eugenius’s rebels. Just as Stilicho ruled for Honorius, who was a boy of eleven, Rufinus had effective control over Arcadius. At age eighteen, Arcadius should have been old enough to take some part in ruling; but even as an

adult he was too weak of wit and will to assert himself. So at a time when strong government was urgently needed to manage the Germans, Huns, and other barbarians, both inside and outside the empire, squabbling surrogates ruled for figurehead emperors.

HOSTILITY BETWEEN EAST AND WEST At the news of Theodosius’s death, the East’s lack of mobile forces became conspicuous. To exploit it, some eastern Huns crossed the Cauca-

sus and Armenia and invaded the East, penetrating to northern Syria.

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84 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

fellow Goths. With their support, he began dictating terms to the Romans. First he demanded that the emperor placate the rebels by surrendering Eutropius. Eutropius’s enemies in Constantinople, who had come

to include the empress Eudoxia and the prefect of the East Aurelian, persuaded Arcadius to agree. By taking refuge with Chrysostom in Saint Sophia the eunuch escaped immediate death, but he was executed not long thereafter. Aurelian took charge of Arcadius and the government.? Yet by now Gainas wanted control of the government for himself. To secure it, he openly joined the Ostrogothic rebels and marched on Con-

stantinople. Probably in the spring of 400, he demanded to meet the complaisant emperor at the city’s Asian suburb of Chalcedon. During this audience, Arcadius accepted more demands: to make Gainas one of the masters of soldiers in the Emperor’s Presence, to allow Gainas’s troops to occupy Constantinople, and to name officials of Gainas’s choice to the highest posts in the administration, removing Aurelian from the prefecture. Gainas therefore entered Constantinople as the master of the eastern empire, and was promised the consulship for the next year. Germans already dominated the eastern mobile forces, including the Army of Illyricum under Alaric and the Army of the East under another Visigoth, Fravitta. Although Arcadius remained emperor, he had never ruled as one and never would. Apparently Germans had taken over the whole enormous apparatus of the eastern Roman state. During the late spring and early summer of 400 Gainas held Constantinople and directed the empire as he wished, but with increasing diffi-

culty. The people of the city became more and more resentful of his power. Gainas found it prudent to exile rather than execute Aurelian and the other officials who had been dismissed. When the Goth asked for a single church within the walls in which he and his fellow Germans could practice their Arian faith, John Chrysostom insisted that Arcadius refuse. The emperor’s refusal emboldened the Romans in the city. Ru-

mors of Gothic reprisals against Romans provoked rumors of Roman plots against the Goths. Hoping to reduce tension, Gainas began to transfer his troops out of the capital. But after he and most of his army had withdrawn, the citizens rose against him, closed the gates, and massacred the Goths who were trapped inside. Arcadius, heeding the mob, recalled his former prefect Aurelian and the other exiles. The emperor promoted Fravitta from master of soldiers of the East to master of soldiers in the Emperor’s Presence, then called

Danger of Barbarization, 395-457 85

upon him to suppress Gainas as a traitor. Luckily for the Romans, Fravitta, who unlike most Goths was not an Arian but a pagan, chose to follow his own interests and obey. When Gainas’s men tried to cross into Anatolia, Fravitta’s army inflicted heavy losses upon them and forced them back. The remaining rebels turned north and crossed the Danube, only to be slaughtered by the Huns, who considerately sent Gainas’s head to Arcadius. Power in Constantinople appears to have passed to the empress Eudoxia and a group of officials led by the count of the sacred largesses John. John was reputedly Eudoxia’s lover and the real father of her son Theodosius, born at just this time. Such as they were, Romans were back in command of the empire. Gainas’s bid for power seems to have left the eastern authorities with an understandable distrust and dislike of German officers. Their feelings extended to Alaric and to Gatnas’s former patron Stilicho. Perhaps with John’s encouragement, toward the end of 4o1 Alaric gave up his post as master of soldiers for [Ilyricum and led his Visigoths out of eastern territory. They marched straight for the western imperial capital of Milan. When Fravitta protested John’s hostility toward the West, John had him cashiered and executed.? Now that many barbarian troops had been massacred in the East, and the chief barbarian military commanders had been removed, the eastern government had mostly freed itself from barbarian influence. Of course, Alaric’s departure for Italy helped the East only by gravely imperiling the West. Speedily concluding a campaign against some Germans who had crossed the upper Danube, Stilicho relieved Milan in early 402. After fighting an indecisive battle with Alaric, he negotiated the Visigoths’ withdrawal from Italy. But Alaric remained not far to the east, probably in the territory that had become the Diocese of Illyricum in the western empire. The western government was sufficiently traumatized to move its capital from Mulan to a more defensible place, the island city of Ravenna by the Adriatic coast.* A deadly threat hung over the West. During this time no single personality was firmly in charge in the East,

and the results were unfortunate not only for Stilicho and Fravitta but for John Chrysostom. In his efforts to reform the morals of the clergy, the patriarch of Constantinople had been exerting his ecclesiastical authority throughout Thrace and Anatolia, well beyond the traditional limits of his see’s jurisdiction. The enemies he made in the process found a leader in Theophilus, the domineering archbishop of Alexandria. As

86 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY head of a see that was also styled a patriarchate and had long been the most powerful in the eastern empire, Theophilus was disturbed by the rise of Constantinople to rival Alexandrian preeminence. In 402 some Egyptian monks whom Theophilus had excommunicated appealed to Chrysostom. Although Chrysostom claimed no jurisdiction in the case, Eudoxia and the civil authorities summoned Theophilus to the capital. When Theophilus arrived in 403, he assembled Chrysostom’s enemies, won over Eudoxia, and had a synod condemn the patriarch on various implausible charges. As riots broke out in Constantinople, Arcadius’s vacillating advisers had Chrysostom first exiled, then recalled almost immediately, and finally exiled again in 404. Chrysostom’s second exile provoked a schism, with his many defenders including Pope Innocent and the western bishops. Naturally this schism further damaged relations between East and West.

The empress Eudoxia died later the same year. Soon after the docile Arcadius had been freed from her influence, he returned to following a single competent adviser. This was Anthemius, who had been an important official for some time before he became prefect of the East in 40s. If he had had full responsibility earlier, he might well have avoided provoking the enmity of Stilicho and the schism over Chrysostom. As it was, however, Anthemius had to deal with the consequences of both of those follies of his predecessors.

Thoroughly out of patience with the East, Stilicho persuaded Alaric and his Visigoths to help seize the Prefecture of Illyricum for the West. By the beginning of 407, Alaric had occupied Epirus and was waiting to be joined by Roman troops from Stilicho. But before those troops could march, several German tribes simultaneously broke through the Rhine frontier, and rebellions broke out in Britain and Gaul. Stilicho had to abandon his attempt to take over [lyricum, and Alaric withdrew to the West, forcing Stilicho to pay him compensation for his trouble. Thus the western threat to Illyricum evaporated. Not long thereafter, Anthemius’s government had the exiled Chrysostom so badly mistreated that he died. Though the schism lingered on, no one could demand any longer that John be restored to office, and the issue became the less urgent one of whether his memory should be honored. Atticus, the patriarch who had been consecrated as John’s second successor in 406, quickly began conciliating John’s partisans, although it took him ten years to rehabilitate Chrysostom completely. Anthemius

Danger of Barbarization, 395-457 87

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and Atticus also started a grand new Church of Saint Sophia to replace the one built by Constantius II, which rioters in favor of Chrysostom had burned two years before. When Arcadius died in 408, he was succeeded by the seven-year-old Theodosius II, who at least for constitutional purposes was recognized as

Arcadius’s son. The change of sovereign from a weakling to a child merely meant that Anthemius’s virtual regency became official, while he remained without effective rivals for power. Although the western emperor Honorius wanted to go east to assert his authority there, Stilicho advised him not to leave the West while Germans were spreading over part of the Gallic Prefecture and rebels had seized the rest of it. Soon afterward a military uprising resulted in Stilicho’s execution, and in the massacre or desertion of most of the Germans in the Army of Italy. Honorius’s new anti-German advisers quickly repaired their relations with Anthemius. But thirteen years of estrangement from the East had inflicted terrible damage on the West. The western government was in an uproar, and Alaric and his Visigoths, joined by many German desert-

ers from Stilicho’s army, had Italy almost at their mercy. In the East, however, relative calm had returned. By failing to rule, Arcadius had allowed a good deal of maladministration. But by continuing to reign— so harmlessly that nobody had taken the trouble to depose him—he had maintained legal continuity during a troubled time. He had thereby secured the succession for Theodosius II, who during his own reign was to follow his predecessor’s example of feeble rulership.

88 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

THE THREAT OF THE HUNS For over thirty years the Huns had held the region to the north of the

Danube, and for several years at least they had been united under a single king, Uldin. Yet they had not disturbed the Romans much, and had actually helped the eastern government by killing Gainas in 400. In 408, however, while the East was distracted by reports of an imminent Persian invasion, Uldin led his Huns across the Danube in force, near the border between the eastern and western empires. Advancing through Dacia into Thrace, Uldin refused the Thracian commander’s offer of an alliance and demanded a substantial tribute from the eastern government. Fortunately for the empire, the bait of Roman gold led some of Uldin’s heutenants to desert. The king beat a hasty retreat across the Danube, abandoning many of his men. Anthemius’s government rounded them up, sold them into slavery, and carefully dispersed them in Asia. Uldin’s authority was shaken badly enough to keep him north of the Danube for the time being. Then the East concluded a peace with Persla, supposedly to last for a hundred years. Under it the Romans seem to have paid the Persians a subsidy for guarding the passes in the Caucasus against the Huns, and the Persians became more tolerant of their Christian subjects. While the East was still dealing with the Huns and Persians, the plight of the West became desperate. Gaul, Britain, and Spain remained in revolt. Alaric and his Visigoths twice besieged Rome, where they arranged

the proclamation of a puppet emperor in 409. Although the western capital of Ravenna was secure from direct assault, Honorius feared betrayal by his disaffected subjects and considered taking refuge at Constantinople. Anthemius’s regency managed to send four thousand soldiers to Ravenna, and they may well have saved Honorius’s throne. But no one saved Rome itself, which Alaric’s men captured and sacked in 410.

The fall of Rome shocked educated opinion in both West and East, and brutally revealed the weakness of the western government. Such a humiliation could scarcely have happened if the recent quarrel between East and West had not prevented Roman cooperation against the Visigoths. From this time on, the West was much inferior in wealth and power to the East, and generally known to be so. Nevertheless, over the next few years Honorius’s western empire made a partial recovery. Alaric died; the Visigoths left Italy and settled in southern Gaul; and the Roman

Danger of Barbarization, 395-457 89

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rebels were subdued, while the capable general Constantius took over the leadership of the army and administration. In the East the Huns remained a danger that Anthemius did not underestimate. He had the walls of the Thracian towns repaired, and built up the Roman fleet on the Danube. Not satisfied with this, in 413 he began new fortifications of great strength for Constantinople. Although the city proper can hardly have outgrown the capacious walls built by Constantine, the new walls commanded higher ground than the old ones and enclosed space for cisterns, farms, supply depots, and many refugees.

The walls included both inner and outer circuits, and were plainly designed to withstand a long siege. Although Anthemius must mainly have worried about the Huns, the Anthemian Walls—more commonly but less deservedly called Theodosian—formed an almost impregnable defense against any attack from the land side, whether of foreigners or of Roman rebels. Barring some major innovation in siege warfare, these fortifications could hardly be taken without the help of a navy or betrayal from within. They not only assured that Constantinople would never fall to the Huns, but remained the empire’s greatest man-made asset for centuries to come.

gO THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

Not long after starting work on the walls, and probably before the new Church of Saint Sophia was consecrated in 415, Anthemius seems to have died. Much of his power passed, remarkably, to the emperor's sixteen-year-old sister, Pulcheria. Although taking a vow of virginity excused her from marrying a husband who would have impinged upon her influence, Pulcheria, like her mother Eudoxia, shared her authority with male associates. Por years Pulcheria’s chief collaborator was apparently the master of offices Helio. She and he increasingly relied on German and other barbarian army officers, disregarding the dangers of excessive German power that had been revealed by the revolt of Gainas

not so long ago. In 418 Pulcheria and Helio sent the Gothic general Plinta to put down a revolt in Palestine. Afterward Plinta became one of the masters of soldiers in the Emperor’s Presence for twenty years.

As a devout Christian, Pulcheria had her brother the emperor officially bar pagans from public service in 416, although she seems not to have objected so much to Arian barbarians as to pagans. Eventually

, Theodosius II himself began to take an interest in religious affairs, and after he married in 421 his wife Eudocia, though a former pagan, did the

same. That year, when the new Persian king Bahram began to persecute Christians in his territory, Theodosius declared war on Persia, ending more than forty years of relative peace with the empire’s great eastern neighbor. To guard against an attack by the Huns while some Thracian troops were off fighting the Persians, Ostrogoths were brought

from Pannonia and settled in Thrace. |

Operations against the Persians were largely entrusted to Ardabur, a relative by marriage of Plinta’s from the Iranian tribe of the Alans. The war went somewhat better for the Romans than for their adversaries. Ardabur put Nisibis under siege, and another Roman army helped Christian rebels in Persian Armenia. But as the Romans were fighting on the eastern frontier, King Rua of the Huns took his chance to raid the dioceses of Dacia and Thrace again, passing by the recently settled Ostrogoths and forcing the government to man the new walls of Constantinople. Faced by a war on two fronts, in 422 Helio made peace with the Persians on roughly the same terms as before. This treaty, like the earlier one, was supposed to last for a century. The Huns were bought off with a small but ignominious annual tribute of 25,200 nomismata.®

Meanwhile relations between the eastern and western parts of the empire had worsened once again. The eastern government, in the hope

Danger of Barbarization, 395-457 91

of reuniting the empire under Theodosius II when Honorius died, had refused to recognize Honorius’s proclamation of his general Constantius as his coemperor and heir in 421. Theodosius’s government also tried to transfer ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the Prefecture of Illyricum from the pope to the patriarch of Constantinople. Although Constantius prepared the western army for war, he died before he could march. Constantius’s death brought a temporary reconciliation between West and East. Yet his widow Galla Placidia, Honorius’s sister, soon quarreled

with her brother and took refuge at Constantinople with her infant son Valentinian. In 423 Honorius himself died without an heir, and Theodosius II wanted to exercise his dynastic right to rule the whole empire. But the western courtiers proclaimed a new emperor, John, who was not related to the house of Theodosius. To defeat John, the eastern government decided to appeal to partisans of Galla Placidia by supporting her son’s claim to the western throne. In 424 the eastern general Ardabur and his son Aspar led an expedition to the West. At first Ardabur was shipwrecked near Ravenna and fell into John’s hands. But he turned his captivity in the city to such good account that he managed to betray it to Aspar. After capturing John, Ardabur reached a settlement with John’s partisans, by which one of them, Aétius, became the leading general in the West and Placidia’s son became emperor as Valentinian III. In 425 Helio traveled to Ravenna and

installed Valentinian there. During Valentinian’s reign the eastern and western empires maintained their alliance, which was sealed by Valentinian'’s betrothal and eventual marriage to Theodosius II’s daughter Eudoxia. Thus far into the reign of Theodosius, the eastern government had performed rather well, at least 1n comparison with what had been done under Arcadius and was being done in the West. The East had avoided internal dissension and dealt with external dangers, winning little glory but avoiding serious losses. It had even provided some protection to the Christians ruled by Persia, though the Persian king Bahram meddled somewhat more in church affairs after he abolished the Armenian monarchy in 428. Theodosius’s advisers also maintained sound finances and worked to improve the administration. In 425 state chairs were founded at Constantinople for thirty-one professors of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy,

and law, whose main task was to train civil servants. In 429 the government appointed a commission to produce the Roman Empire's first off1-

Q2 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY cial collection of laws, which was published nine years later as the Theodosian Code. But at about the time the commission started its work, Helio appears to have died, and the state began to function less smoothly. The first sign of trouble was a new theological controversy. The patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius expressed the seemingly logical opin10n that the Virgin Mary, since she had given birth to Christ only as a man, not as God, was the mother of Christ but not truly the Mother of God, as she was often called. Theodosius II supported Nestorius; Pulcheria opposed him. Many bishops, led by Cyril of Alexandria, accused Nestorius of heretically dividing Christ into separate human and divine persons. Nestorius insisted that he believed Christ to be a single person, though endowed with divine and human natures that acted separately. A council held at Rome by Pope Celestine condemned Nestorius in 430. Nestorius protested that his doctrines had been misrepresented. He

and the emperor obtained the pope’s consent to hold an ecumenical council at Ephesus on the matter in 431. This council, which Cyril of Alexandria convened before a number of the bishops had arrived, deposed Nestorius for his alleged belief that Christ had two persons. Again

Nestorius protested, and he won the support of a council of bishops who arrived later and voted to depose Cyril. Confusion reigned for two years. Finally the emperor and bishops accepted the decisions of Cyril’s Council of Ephesus that Mary was the Mother of God, that Christ was one person, and that Nestorius was a heretic. A few bishops started a Nestorian church based in Persia that followed Nestorius’s real doctrines. Many more, while thinking that Nestorius had gone too far, disapproved of Cyril’s high-handedness and thought him overly eager to submerge Christ’s humanity in his divinity. Theodosius II particularly resented this humiliation of the patriarch he had chosen for his capital.

In the meantime the German tribe of the Vandals had invaded the richest part of the West, its African provinces, and Galla Placidia appealed urgently for help from her nephew the eastern emperor. Respon-

sive to her request, Theodosius sent an expedition in 431, led by his leading general Aspar. During his stay of three years in Africa Aspar was defeated once by the Vandals and did no more than slow their advance.

But in the West’s desperate need this was enough for him to be rewarded with the western consulship for 434. Then Aspar was recalled, probably because of the growing danger posed to both West and East by the Huns. The Huns had gradually overrun most of the West’s Danube frontier

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except for its eastern anchor at Sirmium, which the eastern government took over to keep it in Roman hands. At about this time, the Hun king Rua demanded the return of some refugees who had fled from his territory to the eastern empire. But before the Roman ambassadors arrived

to negotiate, Rua suddenly died and was succeeded by his ferocious nephews Bleda and Attila. These two kings frightened the Romans into agreeing to return the refugees, to double the previous tribute to 50,400 nomismata, and to promise not to make any alliance against the Huns.

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sent no troops back to the West after Aspar’s departure. The Vandals advanced steadily through Africa, and in 439 took Carthage, where they soon built a fleet that landed in Sicily and even threatened the coastlands of the East.

Meanwhile the balance of power at Constantinople began to shift.

94 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY The emperor’s sister Pulcheria retired from government after a quarrel with the emperor’s wife Eudocia. Eudocia briefly became the chief influence on Theodosius II, with the help of the prefect of the East Cyrus of Panopolis. Cyrus’s main action was to strengthen the sea defenses of Constantinople to guard against a Vandal attack. But early in 440 the emperor came to suspect Eudocia of adultery, and soon afterward she retired to Jerusalem.’ The next year her ally Cyrus was deposed as prefect of the East and forced to become a bishop. The beneficiary of these upheavals was Chrysaphius, an ambitious palace eunuch, who seems to have plotted the departures of Pulcheria, Eudocia, and Cyrus so that he could seize power. Though by his intrigues Chrysaphius had made some enemies at court, probably including the barbarian generals, his nerve and skill at maneuvering were necessary qualities for a head of government at this dangerous time. In 441 the eastern government dispatched another expedition against the Vandals in Africa under the Gothic general Ariobindus. Aspar apparently remained in the Balkans to guard against a Hun invasion. While the expedition to Africa was away and the Huns still threatened, the Persians invaded Roman Mesopotamia, until they were bought off. Then, before

the Romans had properly dealt with the Vandals or Persians, the Huns did strike, and took and destroyed the border town of Viminacium in Dacia. Although Aspar marched against them, he found it safest to buy a truce for one year. During that time the expedition against the Vandals was recalled, without ever sailing farther than Sicily. The Huns invaded Dacia in earnest as soon as their truce expired. This time they overran the larger part of the Dacian Diocese, capturing and wrecking all its major cities, including Sirmium. They then moved into Thrace. After the master of soldiers for Thrace was assassinated because of a plot that seems not to have involved the Huns, they sharply defeated Ariobindus and Aspar. To obtain peace, the anxious eastern government had to raise the Huns’ tribute to 151,200 nomismata a year, plus a lump payment of 432,000 nomismata. These had become large

enough sums that the state began to curtail tax exemptions and demanded a new tax from senators to meet the expense. Attila made use of the peace to murder his brother Bleda and to unite the Huns under his formidable self. Providentially for the empire, the Persians had barbarian enemies of

their own, the so-called White Huns, who now became so menacing that Persia needed peace with Rome as much as Rome needed peace

Danger of Barbarization, 395-457 95 with Persia. In 442 the two empires made a treaty ending all mutual hostilities, and prohibiting new fortifications along their common frontier. This peace held for many years, cemented by the necessity for both powers to concentrate their forces against invaders who threatened their very existence. Although during the five years after 442 Attila did not invade with his main army, contingents of Huns kept raiding imperial territory, provoking the Romans to withhold their tribute in protest. In 447, when an earthquake damaged the walls of Constantinople, Attila demanded that the Romans pay the tribute that they had withheld and return new fugitives from Hun territory. As the Romans tried to negotiate instead of submitting at once, Attila struck across the Danube with devastating force.

The Gothic master of soldiers of Thrace Arnegisclus met Attila in battle in the Province of Moesia II, but lost decisively and died in the fighting. Fanning out over the Thracian Diocese as far as the coasts of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, the Huns sacked every important town but Adrianople and Constantinople itself. In the capital the walls were repaired in time, and a troop of Isaurians, native if uncivilized Ro-

mans, arrived as reinforcements.? But the Huns defeated a praesental army under Aspar near the Hellespont, and took many captives and enormous booty. Desperate for peace, the eastern government accepted unusually harsh terms. The greater part of the Diocese of Dacia, up to five days’ march from the Danube, was to remain desolate and open to the Huns, who could therefore cross the frontier whenever they liked. The

Romans naturally continued to pay their annual tribute, and made the back payments Attila had demanded. With this, Attila was content to leave the eastern empire alone for the present. The Huns had inflicted even worse damage on Thrace and northern Illyricum than that caused by the Goths after the battle of Adrianople. On the other hand, the Huns appear to have killed fewer Roman troops than the Goths had done, and they made no efforts to settle in Roman territory. Despite their surprising talent for sacking walled towns, the Huns could scarcely hope to storm the magnificent fortifications of Constantinople or to penetrate into Anatolia. Since Attila’s power, however

ereat, depended on precarious authority over many subject tribes, the Romans’ best course was probably to appease him and wait for the peril to pass. Although Chrysaphius seems to have understood this much, it

meant enduring prolonged humiliation by the Huns, which invited carping by his opponents. Repeated defeats in battle had discredited the

96 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY barbarian generals Aspar and Ariobindus. A commander who had not suffered such setbacks, Zeno, the leader of the Isaurians and master of soldiers of the East, became a major rival of Chrysaphius. The eunuch made still more enemies by becoming embroiled in a new theological controversy. After the Council of Ephesus, the more extreme adversaries of Nestorius had begun to contend that besides being one person Christ had only one nature. The Constantinopolitan abbot Eutyches took this view to the point of affirming that Christ’s nature, since it was fully divine, was unlike that of ordinary men. Chrysaphius, long an admirer of Eutyches, won him the favor of the impressionable emperor, who had recently supported Nestorius’s quite opposite opinion. The issue was a confusing one, but many Christians felt that Eutyches had gone too far in minimizing Christ’s humanity. The emperor’s view notwithstanding, a council held by Patriarch Flavian of Constantinople condemned Eutyches, and Pope Leo upheld the condemnation. In the hope of reversing this result, ‘Theodosius summoned another ecumenical council at Ephesus in 449. A supporter of Eutyches, the patriarch of Alexandria Dioscorus, presided over the council and used a band of armed Egyptian monks to intimidate his adversaries. Dioscorus thus secured a decision that Christ had only one, divine, nature. The synod vindicated Eutyches and deposed Flavian, who died on his way into exile. Though Pope Leo protested, ‘Theodosius II set about replacing the eastern bishops who were opposed to Dioscorus and Eutyches.

Meanwhile Chrysaphius was trying to lessen the danger from the Huns by arranging Attila’s assassination. Although the idea was in itself a

rational one, Attila discovered the plot, and demanded Chrysaphius be surrendered to him. This would have pleased the Isaurian leader Zeno well enough, but most of those with influence in government could not stomach such a humiliating concession. Through envoys Chrysaphius managed to flatter and buy his way to a reconciliation with the Hun king, who given his own past methods was not much upset by the idea of murdering opponents. The eunuch even gained Attila’s permission for the Romans to reoccupy the territory that they had evacuated in Dacia, which by this time was so devastated that the Huns had begun to lose interest in it. Chrysaphius had actually guided the empire through the worst of the Hun crisis with some dexterity. But in preserving the empire and his authority up to this time, he had acquired an impressive array of enemies.

Danger of Barbarization, 395-457 97

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22. Theodosius II (r. 408— 50), with personifications of Rome and Constantinople on the reverse. Gold double nomisma, shown one and one-half times actual size. (Photo: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., copyright 1996)

One was the Isaurian commander Zeno, whom the emperor had come to suspect of sedition but could not easily strip of his command. Another enemy of Chrysaphius’s was the empress Pulcheria, the first victim of his ingenuity, who had become reconciled with her brother Theodosius and had always been an ally of the still powerful general Aspar. Although the emperor seems to have supported his favorite nonetheless, in the middle of 450 Theodosius fell from his horse, injured his back, and died.

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God and man. Basil’s brother Gregory of Nyssa completed the development of these ideas by distinguishing the characteristics of the persons of the Trinity and the natures of Christ. Thus the three Cappadocians defined an anti-Arian position that permitted no doubts about the individual existence and humanity of Christ. They consequently resolved the main objections to Athanasian orthodoxy, leaving Arianism to be judged on its merits and condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381. Although the two Gregories’ views about Christ would by themselves have excluded Nestorianism and Monophysitism, the Council of Constantinople left room for some other interpretations, and for a good deal of confusion. The principal theologian of the subsequent period was Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, yet his works did not entirely resolve the is-

sues. He strongly attacked any tendency to see Christ as two persons, which he called Nestorianism; but his opponent Nestorius actually believed something more subtle than the doctrines condemned by Cyril and the Council of Ephesus in 431. Furthermore, Cyril went so far in emphasizing that Christ was one person that his works encouraged others to say that Christ had one nature, even if Cyril himself had not said so. Thus after his death Cyril was claimed both for Monophysitism and for the orthodox belief in two natures of Christ that was adopted by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Unfortunately for the unity of the Church, in the years after that council no theologian of the stature of Cyril, Athanasius, or the Cappadocian Fathers emerged to bring the Monophysite controversy to an early resolution. Though Athanasius and Cyril were no great stylists, the three Cappadocians had received splendid classical educations and could deliver orations reminiscent of the Second Sophistic. Gregory of Nazianzus was

the most eloquent, and his elaborate funeral oration for Basil of Caesarea later became the model not only for similar eulogies but for formal

Christian oratory of all kinds. The patriarch of Constantinople John Chrysostom was a less formal orator but gave sermons that became classics of their genre, combining stylistic facility with spontaneity and earnestness of purpose. Similar qualities made the letters that Basil wrote as bishop of Caesarea particularly admired and used as models. Although these works were thoroughly Christian in content, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, and Chrysostom were all reportedly pupils of Libanius of An-

tioch, the most famous pagan rhetor of the fourth century and an adviser of the emperor Julian. Despite Julian’s brief attempt to prohibit

132 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY Christians from teaching the Greek classics, the style of these Christian authors was as classical as that of eminent pagans.’ Christians with fewer stylistic pretensions than these developed their own sorts of history and biography. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a reluctant defender of Arius and an associate of the emperor Constantine, wrote the first real history of the Church at a time when pagan histori-

ography was dormant. Beginning with Christ and ending with Constantine’s final defeat of Licinius, Eusebius differed from classical historians by including authentic documents, avoiding invented speeches, and generally paying more attention to accuracy than to elegance. His work later inspired several fifth-century authors to write similar ecclesiastical histories that began where it concluded. Eusebius also inaugurated Christian biography by composing a Life of Constantine, though it suffered somewhat from his conflicting desires to praise Constantine and to tell the truth. The most successful work of this kind was the first real saint’s life, Athanasius’s biography of the Egyptian

hermit Anthony. This is a concise masterpiece, which created a new type of hero. Its concern is not with conventional biographical details but with Anthony’s struggle to approach the ideal of a perfect Christian life as nearly as possible. The Life of Anthony was widely read and imi-

tated almost from the time of its composition. Many of its imitators sought and found a wider and less educated audience by using simpler and more colloquial language than that of their prototype. Although this literature was produced in Greek, some of 1t was soon translated, not only into Latin but into the native languages of Egypt and Syria. Both Coptic and Syriac already had their own liturgies and versions of the Scriptures. From the reign of Diocletian, each of them developed its own Christian literature. Thus Anthony composed his letters and Pachomius his monastic rules in Coptic, while Ephraem of Nisibis, known as Ephraem Syrus, wrote lengthy hymns and theological poetry in Syriac. Some of the works of the latter two were translated into Greek. Christian Armenian literature began rather later, after the empire’s an-

nexation of western Armenia under Theodosius I. Writings in these eastern languages, which show considerable Greek influence, may even reflect an expansion of education among easterners who spoke no Greek, since little or nothing seems to have been written in Syriac, Coptic, or Armenian before. While Christians produced the works on which most of their later the-

Formation of Byzantine Society, 284-457 133

ology, sermons, letters, history, and hagiography were to be modeled,

pagans continued to write, though the opposition they presented to Christianity was fairly weak. The emperor Julian was probably the new religion’s most determined adversary in literature as he was 1n politics, composing a number of hasty but intelligent orations, letters, and trea-

tises. Eunapius of Sardis, who wrote an anti-Christian history that is mostly lost today and a collection of biographies of pagan philosophers that survives, complained bitterly about Christianity without much hope that it could be rolled back. Most Neoplatonist philosophers of the period were exploring mysticism and magic and showed little interest in anti-Christian polemic. The greatest of them, Proclus, was more aggressively pagan, but he found attacking Christianity imprudent by the time he summarized Neoplatonism in the mid-fifth century. The large band of rhetoricians were mostly pagan, but their works had little to do with religion. The finest pagan writers of the period, the rhetorician Libanius and the historian Ammuanus, were generally tolerant of Christians. The spread of Christianity and the expansion of the state affected art and architecture no less than literature. From Diocletian’s reign the state

had much more money to spend on public buildings, and from Constantine’s reign Christians had greatly increased resources with which to

build and decorate churches. At first, since little monumental art had been produced during the disruptions of the third century, artists and architects were too few to meet the burgeoning requirements of Church and state, as Constantine himself complained.'*’ In comparison with the Roman Empire of the first or second century, much of the work of the early fourth century was rough and crude (Figs. 5, 6), not only because of a shortage of experienced craftsmen but because of the inexperience and lack of cultivation of the rulers and bishops who commissioned the

monuments. They usually wanted something big and impressive that would redound to the glory of God, the emperor, or both. At best, as in the huge palace Diocletian built for his retirement near Salona (Fig. 2), the result was majestic. At worst, it could be positively unsafe, like Constantine’s chapel of the Holy Apostles in the capital, which had to be rebuilt a few years after its completion. Within fifty years or so, workmen had acquired the necessary skills, and patrons enough taste, to produce the desired quantity and quality of building and decoration. In the third century Christians had usually built their churches on the simple plan of a basilica, a long hall with aisles and

134. THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

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been constructed some began to show elegance, like that built around 450 in Constantinople by Studius, a high government official (Fig. 30). By then church decoration could be technically accomplished, as in the sculpture that survives from the reconstruction of Constantinople’s Saint Sophia after 404 (Fig. 19). All the cities of the empire had churches, and usually great monasteries, episcopal palaces, and charitable foundations as well. The new art became more refined, but it still tended to be bolder and heavier than the more naturalistic art of classical Greece and Rome.

The same striving for grandeur appeared in official art of a secular kind. This was only to be expected of the ceremonial structures in the capital, like the triumphal arches and columns set up by the emperors of the Theodosian dynasty (Figs. 15, 23, 24). Yet in this period many lesser cities all over the East also received grandiose gateways, squares, and colonnaded streets. Although these embellishments had some practical use as sites for commercial shops and stands, the state seems to have built them primarily to give an impression of power and prosperity. What the emperors did in the capital, the governors did in the provinces, adding

Formation of Byzantine Society, 284-457 135

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inscriptions and statues of themselves to take the credit. Officials often built private residences of a sumptuousness that rivaled imperial palaces. Not everyone was impressed; the people of Antioch pulled down their statues of Theodosius I and his family during a riot over taxes in 387. Despite the efforts of the emperors to look like absolute rulers, they were in practice nothing of the sort, and the ideology of a Christian empire would not allow them to be. While orators often praised the emperor with grandiloquent rhetoric that no one took seriously, Synesius of Cyrene could circulate an oration addressed to Arcadius comparing the inert emperor to a jellyfish.!* By taking Christ as their patron instead of Zeus, the emperors accepted Christian morality and the authority of

the Church, and those could be manipulated only up to a point. A Christian empire could tolerate some musrule, but not the unbridled tyranny of a Nero or a Commodus. In exchange, if the emperor was a reasonably decent man, Christian public opinion helped restrain those

136 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

who might want to overthrow him. Christians also had a reason that others lacked for feeling loyalty to the empire, because they saw its value for defending and spreading their religion. If Roman rule had ended in the East before Diocletian, it would have had remarkably few effects on eastern society. But if it had ended in the

mid-fifth century, the new state religion and administrative apparatus would still have left their marks on the East. By that time most easterners had come to think of themselves as Christians, and more than ever before had some idea that they were Romans. Although they may not have liked their government any better than before, the Greeks among them could no longer consider it foreign, run by Latins from Italy. The word “Greek”’ itself (Hellen) was already coming to mean a pagan rather

than a person of Greek race or culture. Instead, the usual word for an eastern Greek had begun to be “Roman” (Rhomaios), which we moderns may render as “Byzantine.”

IMPOVERISHMENT AND PROSPERITY The period from Diocletian to Marcian is difficult to characterize simply as one of expansion or degeneration, or even of stagnation. Though on the whole both the eastern Roman state and its subjects were better off than they had been during the third century, that century had been

the nadir of the empire’s fortunes to date. The army and bureaucracy had grown a great deal, but much of their growth was of dubious value even for the power and security of the government, and 1t imposed heavy costs on the empire’s taxpayers. The empire could not remain powerful for long if its economy was in severe decline. But was its economy actually deteriorating very much—or at all? Since the empire seems to have had more than enough cultivable land, the most important economic factor was the size of the population, and

in particular whether it was rising or falling. Different grounds can be cited for supposing either a rise or a fall. Scattered signs seem to indicate that the empire’s population had been declining somewhat even before the period 165—80, when an epidemic caused quite high mortality and was followed by another, similarly deadly epidemic in 251-66, Although the identity of these diseases is uncertain, they struck the Mediterranean with the force of new infections. They were therefore not bubonic plague, which first arrived later on, and some evidence suggests that they

Formation of Byzantine Society, 284-457 137

were smallpox and measles, which were unknown in the classical world and are not known to have arrived at any other time." These illnesses would then have become endemic, and for the Mediterranean population to build up resistance to them would have taken some time. Excess mortality from the new diseases would have decreased slowly, and could not entirely have ceased until modern times. Yet if the population had been declining before the epidemics because of a scarcity of cultivable land, afterward the land should have been more than sufficient for the reduced population, making growth possible. The earlier decline seems to have come about largely through widespread infanticide, especially of girls, which pagans found perfectly acceptable. With the spread of Christianity, infanticide seems to have become less common because the Church condemned it. While Christianity considered celibacy the ideal way of life for the most disciplined, it also encouraged the majority who could not endure celibacy to marry and raise children. This attitude should have raised birth rates as it changed the long-standing indifference of many pagans to family life. On the other hand, by taxing heads the fiscal system inadvertently discouraged childbearing, and in some cases overtaxation must have contributed to malnutrition and famine, and so increased the death rate. Because taxation was heavier in the countryside, peasants also had an economic incentive to flee to large cities, where the death rate was always higher because of poorer nutrition and wider exposure to disease. Some recent estimates would put the absolute size of the population of the eastern empire within the boundaries of Marcian’s day at about 19 million in the second century, 18 million under Diocletian, and 16 million under Marcian.'® Although such estimates incorporate a great deal

of guesswork, the probability remains that between 284 and 457 the population remained within the range of 15 to 20 million. Yet the conclusion that the population declined during that time depends not on recorded statistics, which scarcely exist, but on the comments of contemporaries and the implications of legislation, both of them subjective and treacherous guides. Particularly suspect 1s the estimators’ assumption

that the population declined steadily from the second century to the fifth, because the main effects of the epidemics of the second and third centuries should have been felt within those centuries. If the population of the East did fall from 19 to 16 million people between 150 and 450, at the midpoint around 300 it should have been no more than 17 million.

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A recent survey of the archeological material for the countryside of the western empire suggests a moderate expansion of cultivation and rural population in the fourth century in southern Gaul and Spain, and a moderate decline in northern Gaul and Italy.'!’ Though the Balkan parts of the eastern empire probably showed a decline like that of northern Gaul, which suffered similarly from barbarian raids, the more populous provinces of Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt were as peaceful as southern Gaul, Spain, and Italy. In other respects Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt are

more difficult to compare with the West. Like Italy, where the population apparently declined, they had an agricultural economy so well established that it had limited potential for further development; yet they had always been more fertile and prosperous than Italy. The best guess that can be made from present evidence is that the eastern empire’s population and agriculture declined a little, but not much. If anything, the few figures preserved imply that the largest eastern cities grew somewhat between the third and fifth centuries, though such growth seems to reflect migration from the countryside rather than any general increase. Constantinople certainly expanded greatly from its start as the modest city of Byzantium. The large system of waterworks known as the Aqueduct of Valens, completed under that emperor in 373, removed the main check on Constantinople’s explosive growth. By Marclan's reign the capital should have reached more than half the 375,000 that according to a prudent estimate its walls could comfortably hold; 200,000 might be a reasonable guess.!® For Alexandria, a survey of houses

taken around s00 has been used to estimate the population at 122,000, which may be somewhat low. Libanius, who should have been well informed, says that Antioch had about 150,000 people in the middle of the fourth century.!” By all accounts Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch were by far the largest cities in the East, and only they had a fully developed and correspondingly costly panoply of monuments, waterworks, baths, schools, and places of public entertainment. Their masses afforded an anonymity

that attracted peasants who fled the countryside to avoid taxation. The three great cities also seem to have been the only ones in the East to benefit from government grain subsidies, and their churches ran the East’s best-endowed charitable establishments. Consequently all three had siz-

able populations of unemployed or underemployed poor, whose numbers John Chrysostom guessed at around fifty thousand in Constantinople.*° Although each of the three cities had some industry, and Con-

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140 THE ENLARGED STATE AND BURDENED SOCIETY

stantinople and Alexandria were important ports, their manufacturing a » 45 ca and trade mostly served the cities’ ownoa inhabitants. As centers for bureaucracy and luxury building, all three great cities must have consumed a much larger share of the empire’s state budget and domestic product than they contributed. The East had perhaps thirty more cities of considerable size, ranging from not much more than ten thousand to about seventy-five thousand ca

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Eastern Recovery, 457-518 161

In 482, when the Chalcedonian patriarch of Alexandria died, the Alexandrian clergy replaced him with a Monophysite, Peter the Hoarse.

Before deciding whether to accept Peter’s election, on the advice of Acacius the emperor issued an edict, styled the Henoticon or Act of Union,

that took a deliberately ambiguous position. Condemning the extreme Monophysite Eutyches without endorsing the Council of Chalcedon that had condemned him, the edict promulgated a creed that did not specify whether Christ had two natures or one. It therefore excluded the minority of Eutychian Monophysites, who believed Christ was wholly divine, but tried to placate the Hesitant Monophysites, who believed Christ’s single nature was compatible with his humanity. Zeno asked the other patriarchs to join Acacius in subscribing to the Henoticon, which allowed them to hold discordant views but implied mutual toleration. Despite the objections of many of his Monophysite followers, Peter the Hoarse signed and was recognized as patriarch of Alexandria. Few Chalcedonians cared for the edict; it recerved the signature of an opportunistic patriarch of Jerusalem, but not of the patriarch of Antioch Calendion. Zeno was in no hurry to submit his formula to the pope in the solidly Chalcedonian West. Like previous emperors’ efforts to produce ecclesiastical harmony without doctrinal unity, the Henoticon satisfied neither side, and had the unfortunate effect of allowing actual beliefs to diverge even further. Given, however, his uncertain grip on power, this may have been the most Zeno could have done to resolve the prevailing religious confusion. Whatever he did could be used against him. He had already been expelled from mostly Chalcedonian Constantinople by the Monophysite Basiliscus. Now, at largely Monophysite Antioch, the Chalcedonian master of soldiers [lus used discontent with the Henoticon to start another plot against Zeno. The emperor learned of the plot, but he could not deal with Illus at once, because Theoderic the Amal now joined his forces with those of the recently deceased Strabo and ravaged Greece and Macedonia again. In 483 Zeno came to terms with Theoderic once more, naming him not only master of soldiers in the Emperor’s Presence but consul for 484, and settling the united Ostrogoths in Dacia Ripensis and Moesia II. Pleased by the signal honor of a consulship, Theoderic came to reside in Constan-

tinople without his men, whom he agreed to let Zeno use against Illus. First the emperor demanded that Illus release the empress dowager Verina. After further maneuvers, Illus found a way to turn this demand to his advantage. He had the temperamental Verina proclaim Zeno’s leg-

162 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE ate, the Isaurian general Leontius, a rival emperor in 484. As Chalcedonians, Leontius and Illus won over the orthodox patriarch of Antioch Calendion, though they inspired little enthusiasm among other easterners. Zeno speedily mustered a combined force of Byzantines and Ostrogoths under a barbarian general whom he trusted, John the Scythian. John made short work of the rebels. The rebel leaders escaped to a fort in Isauria, where Verina soon died and Illus and Leontius were trapped. The siege dragged on, but because of the roughness of the terrain rather than the strength of the besieged.

Among the rebels’ former supporters, Zeno punished some of the satraps of Byzantine Armenia by annexing their satrapies as a province, and dethroned the patriarch of Antioch Calendion, the main eastern opponent of the Henoticon. As Calendion’s successor the emperor recognized Peter the Fuller, who had been deposed from the see three times before for his Monophysitism. By signing the Henoticon, Peter formally united the eastern church behind Zeno. The emperor showed increased favor to Monophysites after the Chalcedonian rebellion of Leontius and Illus, especially because in the same year Pope Felix IIT condemned the Henoticon. By declaring the patriarch Acacius deposed and excommunicated, the pope began a schism between the eastern and western churches that corresponded with the political division between the empire and the barbarian kingdoms. The unintended effect of this Acacian Schism was to make it easier for Zeno to ignore the papacy. Despite the Ostrogoths’ help in suppressing Leontius’s usurpation, Zeno’s latest agreement with Theoderic broke down like the others. By 486 Theoderic was once again rampaging through Thrace at the head of his men, and the next year he pillaged the suburbs of Constantinople and cut the aqueducts. But even his united force of Ostrogoths had scant

hope of capturing the city. With little to gain from further plundering of the exhausted Balkans, Theoderic made an uneasy truce with the emperor. Zeno had never recognized Odoacer’s kingship in Italy. Although he had no army available to dislodge the king, in 487 the emperor incited the Rugians, the German tribe to Odoacer’s north, to invade Odoacer’s domain. When the king defeated the Rugians in 488, Zeno devised a truly inspired proposal. He offered Theoderic the mission of conquering Italy and ruling it in the emperor’s name. For Zeno, the arrangement offered the double advantage of punishing Odoacer and removing the Ostrogoths from the Balkans. For Theoderic it gave the emperor’s sanction

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make it comparably strong, though his new name for it, Anastastopolis, never gained much currency. Dara long served its intended function of anchoring the Persian frontier. Having made his borders relatively secure, Anastasius began to enjo a peace troubled only by some internal tensions. In 507 the Blues and Greens began riots at both Constantinople and Antioch that needed to be put down by the army, even though the factions seem not to have been expressing any particular displeasure with Anastasius. The emperor actually appears to have been rather popular from the time of his financial reforms, until he came under the influence of Severus, a Monophysite monk born in Pisidia but trained in Syria. In 511 Severus persuaded the emperor to hold a council to depose Macedonius II, the moderately Chalcedonian patriarch of Constantinople, on a charge of Nestorianism. The next year another council deposed the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, and Severus himself succeeded him. Though Severus accepted 4

Eastern Recovery, 457-518 171

the Henoticon, which remained in force, his Monophysitism was unconcealed, and the emperor ceased to disguise his agreement with it. Anastasius’s favor for Monophysites caused religious riots at both An-

tioch and Constantinople. In 512 Chalcedonian demonstrators in the capital joined the Blues and Greens 1n an attempt to proclaim a new emperor. Their candidate was Areobindus, a former general married to a ereat-great-granddaughter of Theodosius II. But Areobindus refused to be acclaimed. The rioters were already wavering when Anastasius appeared in the Hippodrome and completed their confusion by eloquently offering to abdicate. They could not bring themselves to accept, and the emperor weathered the crisis. Yet Anastasius’s Monophysitism remained unpopular. The next year brought an organized revolt led by Vitalian, a Chalcedonian general who commanded the barbarian federates in Thrace. Vitalian forced the dismissal of one master of soldiers for Thrace, had the next one killed, and

defeated a large force led against him by the emperor’s nephew Hypatius, whom he captured. In 514 Vitalian marched on Constantinople. Anastasius bought him off only by appointing him master of soldiers for Thrace, paying a ransom for Hypatius, and agreeing to hold an ecumenical council the next year, presided over by the firmly Chalcedonian pope. Thrown on the defensive, the emperor negotiated seriously with Pope Hormisdas to end the Acacian Schism, offering to accept Chalcedon. But

negotiations broke down when the pope insisted on condemning the memory of the patriarch Acacius, the deviser of the Henoticon. When no council convened and the schism continued into 515, Vitalian marched on Constantinople again. Anastasius gave the command against the rebels to Marinus, formerly his financial adviser and praetorian prefect of the East. Despite inexperience in warfare, Marinus defeated the rebel forces, first by sea and then by land. Vitalian himself escaped to the north, but he lost most of his following, and relative peace returned to the empire. The emperor seems to have assured his popularity with the army in 516 by converting the quinquennial donative into a generous annual supplement to the soldiers’ allowances.'° Abandoning his efforts to heal the schism with the pope, Anastasius kept the Henoticon in force, as he had always done. Patriarch Severus of

Antioch was still powerful, and in 516 won the deposition of the last openly Chalcedonian patriarch, Elias of Jerusalem. Nonetheless, most Christians in the patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem remained

172 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE orthodox, and Anastasius was by this time so aged that everyone anticipated his death. The current patriarchs of Constantinople and Jerusalem made little secret of their Chalcedonian sympathies. The Bulgars conducted a major raid into Macedonia and Thessaly in $17, while Vitalian remained at large in northern Thrace. On the whole, however, the empire was at peace and well under its emperor's control. Anastasius had achieved very substantial success when he finally died, at the age of eighty-eight, in 518. Despite the poverty of the treasury at his accession, at his death he left a colossal gold reserve of some 23 million nomismata, more than three times the amount left by Marcian 1n 457.'” Anastasius was the first emperor since Diocletian to leave no serious political, financial, or military problems behind him.

This success is the more remarkable because during the reigns of Leo I, Zeno, and Anastasius the empire had endured as many invasions and rebellions as at any time since Diocletian’s reforms. The Ostrogoths and Bulgars had ravaged Thrace and Illyricum again and again. Lacking strong dynastic claims to rule, the emperors had repeatedly confronted powerful barbarians and other rebels who tried to rule for them. During most of the period, a Persian invasion of the East, an Ostrogothic invasion of Anatolia, or simply prolonged unrest in the capital might well have allowed Aspar, one of the Theoderics, or another barbarian to make himself king at Constantinople. Then the eastern empire might well have sone the way of the western. Nevertheless, those quite conceivable disasters did not happen at a critical juncture, and the East overcame barbarian influence, restored its finances, and rebuilt its army. By the time the Persians did invade the empire in 502, the Byzantines were ready and soon defeated them. How-

ever near Leo I, Zeno, and Anastasius had come to deposition—and Zeno could hardly have come nearer—they survived to die natural deaths while still reigning. Despite many tribulations, at the end of these years

the eastern empire held everything it had held at the beginning except the city of Sirmium, occupied by the Gepids in 474 and eventually annexed by the Ostrogoths to their new Italian kingdom. While the empire certainly had some good luck, its weathering all these storms is also evidence of underlying strength. Any fair comparison of Byzantium as it was in 457 and 518 will show a great improvement. The vastly increased resources of the state must reflect not only better management but a continuing rise in economic prosperity, presumably encouraged by Anastasius’s monetary reform.

Fastern Recovery, 457-518 173

Even the many riots of the time seem to show prosperous exuberance rather than impoverished desperation. By 518 not only was the emperor back in command of his government, but the administration and the army, which had long been in difficulties, were functioning demonstrably well. Although religious dissension remained a problem, Monophysitism seemed to be on the wane. Further proof that the recovery was real came in the next generation, when the empire scored triumphs unprecedented for four hundred years.

CHAPTER SIX

The Reconquests and the Plague, 518-565

ee SON

te

2 4 Anastasius left an enviable legacy, but he had named

no heir before dying suddenly one night in his bed. Though he might well have wanted one of his three nephews to succeed him, his family’s prominence was too recent to secure their claim without his explicit dec-

laration. Since he had kept power in his own hands and his wife was dead, no one had clear authority to choose a new emperor. The succession was therefore entirely open for the first time since the unexpected deaths of Julian and Jovian in 363 and 364. As had happened both of those times, and in the similar circumstances of 284, the imperial bodyguard had the decisive voice, and proclaimed one of its own officers. The successful candidate, the count of the Excubitors Justin, was approved by the assembled officials and crowd after a few hours of confusion. Justin was a Thracian from a peasant family in the Latin-speaking province of Dardania, though he spoke Greek well enough. Poorly educated, passive by nature, and inexperienced in government, he was about sixty-eight, with no son to succeed him. But he had already adopted his nephew Peter, another guardsman, who had taken the name Justinian in his uncle’s honor and became Justin’s heir apparent. Aged about thirtysix, Justinian possessed adequate learning, extraordinary energy, and a keen sense of what the empire’s new wealth and strength made possible.

THE RISE OF JUSTINIAN Under Justin, the first native speaker of Latin to rule since Theodosius I, the imperial government took much more interest in the West.

Reconquests and Plague, 518-565 175

When Justin took power, the western Roman Empire was fading from memory, the eastern church was in schism with the papacy, and the propapal Vitalian was still in rebellion against the imperial government. But as Chalcedonians from the Illyrian territory that was subject to the pope, Justin and Justinian were eager to end both the schism and the rebellion. Justinian also wanted the empire to exert more authority over the barbarian kings, and he may already have been hoping to recover some of the West for the empire. The capital’s Chalcedonian majority celebrated Justin’s accession with demonstrations approved by the government. These compelled the patriarch John II to hold a quickly assembled synod that endorsed the Council of Chalcedon. Justin recalled the Chalcedonians exiled by Anastasius, including the former rebel Vitalian. The emperor, preferring to have V1talian depend on imperial favor 1n the capital to having him conspire in

Thrace, made him one of the two masters of soldiers in the Emperor's Presence. Further synods in Palestine and Syria hastened to accept Chalcedon and depose refractory bishops, among them the Monophysite patriarch of Antioch Severus. Severus took refuge in Alexandria, where the patriarch Timothy III remained at the head of a firmly Monophysite patriarchate. While avoiding a direct confrontation with Timothy and Severus and their many followers, Justin sent an embassy to the pope to negotiate an end to the Acacian Schism. The ambassador brought conciliatory letters from the emperor, the patriarch John, and, significantly, Justinian. With

Rome under Theoderic and his Ostrogoths, these negotiations were somewhat delicate. Theoderic was in his sixties; on his death the empire could reassert its claim to rule Italy, and that claim would be stronger if the schism was healed. To reassure the Ostrogothic king, Justin offered a form of adoption to Theoderic’s chosen successor, his son-in-law Eutharic, and shared the consulship with Eutharic in §19. That year the Acacian Schism was healed, as specified by Pope Hormisdas, by repudiating the doctrinally ambiguous Henoticon and condemning the late patriarch Acacius for promoting it. After the reunion, Justin began a gradual but

sustained effort to substitute Chalcedonians for the remaining Monophysite bishops outside Egypt. Having shown himself as good a Chalcedonian as Vitalian, Justin gave the former revolutionary a reliable colleague, naming Justinian the other

master of soldiers in the Emperor’s Presence. At about this time the emperor appointed another of his nephews, Germanus, to Vitalian’s for-

176 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE

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mer command as master of soldiers for Thrace. Besides securing the Army of Thrace for Justin, Germanus soon won a decisive victory over

Slavic raiders that established his milit tation.’ Although | s military reputation.’ Although Vitali Vitahan was honored with the consulship for 520, by the middle of that year his

power had so diminished that Justinian contrived to have him killed with impunity.

Justinian himself became consul for 521, and bid for popularity by staging unusually splendid consular games. Himself fond of public entertainments, Justinian favored the faction of the Blues, whose partisans became his allies. His patronage emboldened them to harry their rivals the Greens more than ever, disturbing the peace in Constantinople and An-

tioch for several years. Presumably it was through his association with the Blues that Justinian met his mistress Theodora, a former actress in

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the salacious mimes they staged. As Justinian became more influential, the empire’s foreign policy became more aggressive. In 522, the Christian king of Lazica, which had been a Persian protectorate for over fifty years, offered to transfer his al-

Reconquests and Plague, 518-565 177

legiance to the empire. Justin ignored Persian protests and accepted; in return, he suffered only some raids on Byzantine Mesopotamia and Syria by the Persians’ Arab allies. In 523, when the Jewish king of Yemen massacred Christians, Justin’s government persuaded the Christian king of Ethiopia to launch a retaliatory invasion. Within two years the Ethiopians had put Yemen under a Christian king subject to them, securing Byzantine access to the trade route through the Red Sea to India. The Ostrogothic and Vandal kingdoms also began to feel the power of the Byzantine government. In 523 Theoderic, whose heir Eutharic had just died, discovered letters from some Roman senators to the emperor that apparently discussed restoring imperial rule to Italy. Among those Theoderic arrested for treason was his master of offices Boéthius, an aristocratic philosopher, whom the king executed the next year. The affair soured what had seemed to be good relations between Theoderic and the Italian nobility. To Theoderic’s added discomfort, the new Vandal king in Africa, Hilderic, was corresponding with Justinian on terms so amicable as to compromise Vandal independence. Hilderic stopped Vandal efforts to convert his Roman subjects to Arianism, probably minted coins marked with Justin’s portrait, and imprisoned his predecessor's queen, who happened to be Theoderic’s sister. Theoderic also protested a ban imposed by Justin on Arian worship within the empire, where most Arians were Germans and many were Goths. In 525 the king sent Pope John to Constantinople as his ambassador. Justin and Justinian received the pope with the utmost respect, had him crown the emperor again, and made a few concessions to the Arians. When John returned to Italy the next year, however, Theoderic expressed grave displeasure with the pope’s friendly but not very fruitful negotiations with Justin. After imprisoning John, who died a few days later, Theoderic imposed his candidate as the next pope, Felix IV. The king himself died not long thereafter, leaving his daughter Amalasuntha to rule a discontented Italy on behalf of her eight-year-old son Athalaric. In the meantime war broke out between the empire and Persia. Encouraged by Lazica’s escape from Persian vassalage, the Christian king of Iberia tried to follow his neighbor’s example. He appealed for help to Justin, who dispatched a small force; but the Persian king Kavad sent a sizable army, which expelled both the Byzantine troops and the Iberian king, and annexed Iberia to the Persian Empire. Justin responded by sending Byzantine armies to raid Persian Armenia and Mesopotamia. Although these raids were only partly successful, they demonstrated the

178 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE talents of two young officers formerly in Justinian’s bodyguard, Belisarius and Sittas. Justinian gradually became virtual ruler of the empire. At first his plan to marry his mistress Theodora was frustrated by a law against marriages between senators and former actresses; but eventually he persuaded Jus-

tin to exempt repentant actresses, and the wedding took place. Despite Theodora’s disreputable past, her marriage to Justinian proved stable, fortified by shared political ambition and the religiosity of the newly respectable. Public opinion knew better than to reproach the powerful pair, and as Justin’s health failed visibly in 527, the senate petitioned for his nephew to be named coemperor. Justinian was duly crowned, taking sole possession of the throne when Justin died later in the year.

JUSTINIAN’S PROJECTS Naturally Justinian became even more active after he gained full authority. Well versed in the workings of the government, army, and church,

he had ideas for improvements in each of them. Although his plans were sometimes impractical, he saw many real opportunities that others missed. Occasionally vacillating, more often Justinian varied his means to pursue consistent ends. As an upstart himself, he chose his generals and officials for their merits rather than their connections. Egotistical and humorless, he was an expert employer of talented subordinates, and his best men repaid his trust with loyalty. Always he labored for what he believed, rightly or wrongly, to be the good of his subjects. Since at his accession the empire was still at war with Persia, Justinian’s first major reform concerned the troops defending the eastern frontier. After peace negotiations failed and the Persians defeated the Byzantines in 528, the emperor reorganized the Persian front, creating new commands for the border troops and a new mobile Army of Armenia. Although most of the Armenian army’s fifteen thousand troops came from other mobile armies, including that of the East, new recruitment kept those forces at their original strength. Combined with the Army of the East, the Army of Armenia increased the field troops facing the Persians from twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand men.* By 529 Justinian entrusted the war to his two former guardsmen, making Sittas master of soldiers for Armenia and Belisarius master of soldiers for the East. Meanwhile Justinian had appointed a commission of jurists to begin legal reforms of unprecedented scope. In §29, after scarcely more than a

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Reconquests and Plague, 518-565 213 pire and eventually spread to the western. The outbreak lasted six months

in Constantinople. Though less acute than the earlier epidemic, it was more than enough to roll back any recovery of the population or state revenues. Peter Barsymes, reappointed praetorian prefect by $55, had to rely on his old talents for economy and extortion, including forced loans from the rich. Military pay fell behind once more. Justinian never found the money and men to complete the conquest of Spain from the Visigoths, with whom he finally made peace. A collapse of the dome of Saint Sophia in 558 took almost five years to repair, though in better times the entire church had been built in six.

Concluding that the empire was vulnerable, early the next year the Kotrigur Huns joined the Bulgars and Slavs in raiding the Balkans. Helped by the return of the Army of Ilyricum from Italy, the Byzantine forces halted one band of the raiders in central Greece and drove another from southern Thrace. A third band, however, consisting of seven thousand men under the Kotrigur chief Zabergan, defeated a Byzantine army led by the same Sergius who had almost lost Africa to the Moors fifteen years before. The incapable general was himself among the captives. Zabergan headed for Constantinople, where only the emperor’s body-

guard remained to mount a defense. Justinian gave the command to Belisarius, who had been retired for ten years. Improvising an army of guardsmen, veterans, and volunteers, the great commander ambushed some of the raiders. Justinian then assumed the official command himself, though he simply paid Zabergan to release his prisoners and retreat. After the Kotrigurs withdrew, the emperor reentered Constantinople in a triumphal procession. He had won no military victory in person, but

he could justly celebrate both the containment of the raiders and the empire’s recovery from many other afflictions. To avoid further Kotrigur raids, Justinian again paid the Utigurs to attack them, starting a war that proved to be the ruin of both tribes. In 561 he bought off still another coalition of Huns, the Avars, who had asked him for lands in northern Thrace. The same year Narses finished pacifying Italy by defeating some Franks and a few rebellious Ostrogoths at Verona.** Finally Justinian and Khusrau of Persia concluded a treaty for a peace of fifty years. Under its terms the Byzantines agreed to pay the Persians a modest annual subsidy of thirty thousand nomismata and the Persians accepted a Byzantine protectorate over all of Lazica. The next few years were comparatively peaceful. In the spring of 562

214. THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE the Bulgars made a brief raid on Thrace. The next autumn Justinian discovered and suppressed a plot against him, probably a consequence of Peter Barsymes’ compulsory loans from the aristocracy. In 563 some Moors revolted in Africa, but they were quickly subdued by Justinian’s nephew Marcian. Periodically the Blues and Greens rioted and fought

each other. Once they made a disturbance serious enough to require police action by the emperor’s nephew Justin. The aged emperor’s greatest frustration was his failure to bring Chalcedonians and Monophysites together. For a time many western bishops resisted accepting the Second Council of Constantinople as ecumenical, despite the grudging endorsement of Pope Vigilius and his successors Pelagius and John IH. Eventually all but a few northern Italians gave up. By having a general council condemn a theologian and writings everyone admitted were pro-Nestorian, Justinian had attacked a minor issue with so much force that his final victory was certain. By the same token, however, the concession he had gained was too small to persuade Monophysites to abandon their schismatic church.

Seeing that his council was not enough, Justinian looked for some concession that would be compatible with the Council of Chalcedon but might still satisfy the Monophysites. In desperation he considered the formulation of the extreme Monophysite Julian of Halicarnassus that Christ’s body was by nature incapable of suffering and sin, a doctrine known as Aphthartodocetism. Somehow the emperor convinced himself that this was compatible with Christ’s having a fully human nature, and that the incongruous combination of both beliefs would have broad

appeal. At the beginning of 565 he endorsed both Aphthartodocetism and Chalcedon in an edict so lacking in his usual acumen as to suggest a touch of senility. Since even most Monophysites regarded Aphthartodocetism as an excessive limitation of Christ’s humanity, Chalcedonians naturally opposed the edict. The patriarch of Constantinople Eutychius refused to accept it

and was deposed. His replacement John III Scholasticus cleverly declared that he would not accept the edict until the other patriarchs approved it. Although none of them did so, they and John managed to avoid deposition for several months, until Justinian died, at the age of eighty-three, in November of 565. Justinian’s long and eventful reign can only be judged fairly by distineulshing the effects of his rule from those of the bubonic plague. At the time the plague appeared, Justinian had added more land to the empire

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Divided Society, 457-610 263

Arianism had received similar opportunities from Constantine, Constantius II, and Valens. Doctrines like Monophysitism that emphasized the divinity of Christ had always had a special appeal to the pious; yet the Church had early rid itself of the most extreme heresy of that sort, Sabellianism, which held that Christ was identical with the Father. While

Egyptian Christians were notoriously stubborn, many had eventually abandoned Arianism and Melitianism, and some did abandon Monophysitism. In earlier times church leaders had eventually been able to restore unity except with the most marginal groups of heretics; but in the case of Monophysitism they tried and failed. This failure of leadership is hard to deny. No Athanasius, Cappadocian Fathers, or Cyril of Alexandria appeared at the right moment to win over the majority. Yet leading Monophysites like Severus of Antioch and Jacob Baradaeus were men of theological insight, blameless life, and even goodwill. So were Chalcedonians like the patriarch of Constantinople Menas and the patriarch of Antioch Ephraem of Amida, both of whom collaborated with Justinian. Such men had the respect of their followers, and they and others wrote extensively on the Monophysite controversy. Yet none enjoyed nearly the prestige of the great Fathers of the fourth and early fifth centuries.

In fact, from the late fifth to the late sixth century the Church had notably fewer great leaders than in the previous period, especially in the eastern patriarchates. After Saint Symeon the Stylite died in 459 his im-

itators made a certain impression, but the prestige of living holy men was not what it had been. A principal theme of the rather defensive biography of Saint Daniel the Stylite, who lived on a pillar near Constantinople from 460 to 493, was how God humiliated the many people the

| saint failed to impress. Although saints were venerated more than ever, the martyrs and ascetics of an earlier era, like Menas or Cosmas and Damian, were the ones held in highest esteem. These were the most popular subjects for hagiography.'! While in and around Constantinople half-legendary martyrs like Christopher, Demetrius, Euphemia, George, and Theodore each had several churches dedicated to him, Daniel the Stylite had just one. The growth of the cult of the saints actually served to reduce respect for living holy men. They could hardly hope to equal the reputed exploits of the martyrs under pagan emperors, the confessors persecuted for opposing Arianism, or the first hermits of the desert. While stylitism was a valiant attempt to score new ascetic triumphs, its novelty soon

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264 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE

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wore off. Even Monophysite leaders suffered too little persecution to , gain much credit as confessors. Christians in need sought the intercession of established saints at shrines all over the empire, but relatively few can have resorted to living ascetics of unproven sanctity, especially because the most admirable tended to be the least accessible.'* In the same way, the wealthy and comfortable contemporary church naturally commanded less respect than the humble and oppressed church of the age of the persecutions.

Much of this decline in prestige was temporary, the result of adjustment to the Church’s recently acquired majority status. Late in the sixth century Gregory the Great and John the Faster became religious leaders of real stature, and were subsequently venerated as saints. They did not, however, give much attention to the Monophysite question, and they clashed with each other over John’s title of ecumenical patriarch. No church leaders could wholly avoid the consequences of the drifting apart of the eastern, western, and central parts of the empire, although, like the state, the Church did better than might have been expected at holding those diverse regions together.

HIGHER AND LOWER CULTURE In the late ancient world, any good secondary school taught the Greek classics. The basic curriculum included Homer, Euripides, Aristopha-

nes, and Demosthenes; more advanced students also read Herodotus

Divided Society, 457-610 2.65

and Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. In the fourth century the leading schools for higher education had been those of Athens and Alexandria, which continued to be famous into the sixth century. All these authors and institutions, of course, were thoroughly, though not self-consciously, pagan. For some time Christians who wanted to become well educated studied that curriculum and went to those schools along with pagans, even if reluctantly. In the fifth century, however, predominantly Christian schools developed, at Gaza for a time and above all at Constantinople. The influence of paganism on education elsewhere became of major concern to Christians. By the reign of Justinian, while Christians probably formed the majority of the empire’s teachers and intellectuals, the minority of pagan scholars were still numerous, prominent, and out of all proportion to the small pagan remnant of the whole population. Justinian attempted a typically decistve solution by forbidding pagans to teach in 529. His edict appears not to have ended all pagan teaching at once; but the Platonic Academy at Athens closed, and its teachers went into exile or retirement.'? Although some pagans continued to write as pagans, they could not circulate their works safely throughout the empire. By 600, pagan literature had become practically extinct. Oratory and formal epistolography, traditionally dominated by pagan rhetoricians, almost came to an end as Christians lost interest in them. Even the Christian sermons of the era were few, and undistinguished as rhetoric. The last notable pagan philosophers, Simplicius at Athens and Ammonius the son of Hermias of Alexandria, died in the middle of the sixth century. The leading philosopher of the next generation at Alexandria was a Christian, John Philoponus, who wrote works attacking the Aristotelian doctrines that he could not reconcile with Christianity, and defending his own brand of Tritheistic Monophysitism.'* Thus theology began to absorb philosophy, and the professional secular scholar became rare. Despite the decline of pure philosophy and rhetoric, learned men and accomplished writers continued to exist through the end of the sixth | century. Some, like Paul the Silentiary and Agathias of Myrina, wrote classical poetry of some virtuosity on primarily secular and even erotic subjects. Contemporary histories modeled on Thucydides and Herodotus appeared regularly. Though the last of the long line of definitely pagan historians was the embittered Zosimus, who around soo blamed Christianity for the western empire’s fall, his Christian successors improved upon him in both style and analysis.

266 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE The most brilliant of the classicizing historians was without doubt Procopius of Caesarea, Belisarius’s secretary. His graceful, intelligent, and detailed narrative of his superior’s campaigns not only imitates but rivals Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius. His books on the Persian war form an animated prelude; those on the Vandal war are vivid and sripping, showing his strong sense of the role of chance in history; and those on the Ostrogothic war gradually create a powerful picture of tragedy and loss. To vent indignation against Justinian that went too far to be publishable, Procopius also wrote for the drawer his intemperate but engrossing Secret History, which luckily has survived. Procopius has a good claim to be Byzantium’s greatest writer, and one of the great historians of the world. The poet Agathias later wrote a classicizing history to continue that of

Procopius, though it is much more pedestrian. As late as the reign of Maurice, Menander Protector and John of Epiphania produced proficlient classicizing histories, now mostly lost. These and a few other secular poets and historians were nearly all government officials by profession, trained as lawyers. Although they had a good knowledge of literature and rhetoric, they were not professional scholars or teachers versed in philosophy. Procopius was not a professional either, but he evidently knew such men and strove to meet their standards. Soon afterward, as the amateur writer and scholar became the rule, the literary community lost much of its depth and diversity. Even so, officials were obtaining fine educations in classical Greek up to the beginning of the seventh century, and a few used their erudition in their writing. After Justinian, however, even the leading authors seem

somewhat less sure of their knowledge. The decline of the senatorial class affected literary circles at Constantinople by reducing patronage for and interest in literature. Knowledge of Latin was becoming rare in the East, though one last Latin poet of some talent, Corippus, migrated from

reconquered Africa to the court of Justin IT. When an earthquake destroyed the law school at Berytus in §51, no one rebuilt it. Once the pagan scholars and teachers disappeared, fewer Christians took their place in an academic profession that seems to have sunk in prestige. On the other hand, from the sixth century on, literature in something close to spoken Greek became more common. The reason was hardly a spread of literacy among marginally educated groups, where it seems rather to have declined, but a decreasing ability among the educated to read and write the classical form of the language. As less educated writ-

Divided Society, 457-610 267

ers predominated, they became less ashamed of their more popular lansuage and interests, particularly as Christians became more distrustful of pagan literature and prouder of the not very elegant Greek of the New Testament.

Half-educated authors thus began to write with less fear of the scorn of better-educated critics. The chronicler John Malalas, relying on Eusebius of Caesarea and other compilers, confidently strung together myths, biblical stories, and real history. The pseudogeographer Cosmas Indicopleustes, explaining that the experts had their geography all wrong, corrected them from his own eccentric reading of the Bible. Though

admittedly ancient Greek literature could draw upon a long and rich tradition of misinformation, these sixth-century attempts to substitute Christian improvisation for traditional learning were mostly new. Something like them also appears in the popular hagiography of the time, especially in accounts of posthumous miracles ascribed to saints. Meanwhile Christian scholarship and literature took on a different shape. The middle of the fifth century turned out to be the end of the great age of the Greek Fathers, who had used their wide knowledge of secular rhetoric and philosophy to produce original and persuasive theological arguments. One peculiar exception appeared a generation or two later, significantly under the name of a much earlier figure, Saint Paul’s disciple Dionysius the Areopagite. This Pseudo-Dionysius wrote quite innovative mystical theology, describing in Neoplatonic terms how the sacraments, clergy, and angels could offer Christians oneness with God. His fictive date allowed him to avoid the issue of the Council of Chalcedon, though he was more or less a Monophysite, and to gain an authority otherwise accorded only to earlier writers. While the Council of Chalcedon coincided with the disappearance of

Church Fathers, it can hardly be the only cause of the change in the writing of theology. The council did complete the official definition of the nature of Christ and thus of fundamental Christian doctrine, which might seem to have restricted the scope of theological discourse. But, like the three previous ecumenical councils, it also set off heated theological arguments that cried out for resolution by new Church Fathers. Instead the disputants argued their cases through citations from the older Fathers,

who had either skirted the points in dispute or, like Cyril of Alexandria, addressed them ambiguously. As succeeding generations of theologians came to prize citations and to distrust innovation, theology became less rhetorical and more technical. Its technicality, lack of philosophical

268 THE INTERRUPTED ADVANCE subtlety, and indifference to ancient rhetoric may well have weakened its power to convert opponents. Accordingly clerics and monks came to know much less of the classics, but probably more of the Bible, and certainly more of the Fathers. They carefully read the new Christian classics of the fourth and early fifth cen-

turies, including the supposedly apostolic Pseudo-Dionysius, and imbibed their doctrine if not much of their style. These later writers respected the Christian classics too much to believe that they or their contemporaries could equal the wisdom or eloquence of such giants. This was partly true, since they lacked the philosophical and rhetorical training to imitate the style or argumentation of the Cappadocian Fathers. Instead they imitated the language and discourse of the less erudite Fathers and the Bible.

Nonetheless, some learned Christian literature persisted, and apart from doctrinal matters could even innovate. The polemics of various theologians for and against Monophysitism were abundant and serious. While most popular hagiography used conventional formulas to praise obscure saints, under Justinian Cyril of Scythopolis wrote several careful

and circumstantial lives of Palestinian monks, including their distinsuished leader Saint Sabas, which found a certain readership. Also under Justinian, Romanus the Melode developed a metrically intricate sort of hymn, the kontakion, and composed wonderful examples that were admired and sung from his own time onward. Toward the end of the sixth century John Climacus wrote a practical manual for ascetics, The Ladder

of Paradise, which became immensely popular in monasteries. In the reign of Maurice, Evagrius Scholasticus continued the fifth-century ecclesiastical histories up to his own time. This Christian Hellenic culture exerted influence well outside the resions where most people spoke Greek. Although few westerners knew

the language and most resisted attempts to conciliate Monophysites, in the end Justinian won acquiescence in his theological program from the pope and the other bishops of Italy and Africa, many of whom were chosen by the emperor and his officials and some of whom were Greeks. Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian were by now established as written languages in places with largely Monophysite churches. Yet if anything Monophysitism, which had first been formulated by speakers of Greek, strengthened Greek influence on Egyptian, Syrian, and Armenian culture. Since Monophysites regarded their faith as the orthodoxy all Chris-

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CHAPTER NINE

Two Fights for Survival,

610-668

ey ‘ea PS ee WO

“Sen” Heraclius is said to have accepted the crown with

reluctance, and only after Phocas’s son-in-law Priscus had refused it. Cer-

tainly ruling the Byzantine Empire had never been harder than it was after Phocas’s execution. Even if the Byzantines still held most of the territory they had had under Maurice, nearly every frontier was 1n imminent peril. The Persians of Khusrau IJ held Byzantine Mesopotamia and threatened Byzantine Armenia, Syria, and Anatolia. The main eastern army that faced them was still in the hands of Phocas’s brother Comentiolus. The Slavs already in [llyricum were looting it, and more of them had just invaded from the north. Heraclius became emperor at the age of about thirty-six, with little experience of commanding or fighting except during the final and easiest phase of the civil war. His close associates in the capital were few; his father soon died in Africa, and his cousin Nicetas remained in the East.

The new emperor had spent most of his adult life in Africa, though his family were Armenians from Cappadocia, and he had been betrothed to a young woman in Constantinople whom he married on the day of his coronation. He was prone to understandable fits of melancholy, but he had great gifts as a strategist and leader.

THE PERSIAN CONQUESTS Heraclius had gained much credit within the empire for overthrowing

the unpopular Phocas. When the late emperor’s brother Comentiolus planned to march on Constantinople from his winter quarters at Ancyra, some of his own men assassinated him.' Heraclius named Priscus to suc-

288 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

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Already Constantine had discovered a plot by the Slav chieftain Perbundus to seize Thessalonica. When he executed Perbundus, the Slavs attacked the city 1n retaliation. Since the emperor could spare only a small fleet and few supplies, the Slavs soon reduced the Thessalonians to real distress.* By this time the Lombards had also taken their chance to conuer most of Byzantine Calabria, including Brundisium and Tarentum. Many Calabrians fled from Italy’s heel to its toe, displacing the name of Calabria from their old homeland to their adopted one.

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5

The Arabs, by spending their third successive winter at Cyzicus, were forcing Constantine to choose between letting them sap Byzantine strength indefinitely or risking his army and fleet in a desperate attempt

to expel them. In the summer of 677 they again raided around Constantinople, while the Slavs briefly besieged Thessalonica. Finally the emperor decided to fight. That fall his navy put its Greek Fire into action, terrifying and routing the Arabs, many of whom were burned or drowned. At this their fleet and army both started for home. The already battered fleet sailed along the coast of Anatolia until it hit a severe storm

War of Attrition, 668-717 327

off the coast near Syllaeum, which sent almost all of it to the bottom. Before reaching Syria the Arab army was badly mauled in a battle with the forces of three Byzantine generals, probably the strategi of the Opsician, Anatolic, and Armeniac themes.* These Arab reverses led to still another. Since the conquest of Syria, some Christian freebooters known as Mardaites had been practically in-

dependent on Mount Amanus between Syria and Cilicia, though they had made a nominal submission to the Arabs and robbed Byzantine Cilicla more than Arab Syria. But the Arab conquests in Cilicia in 673 had

surrounded the Mardaites and left them with only Arab territory to loot, and the Byzantine victories against the Arabs emboldened the Mardaites to rebel openly. While some of them remained on Mount Amanus, others migrated south to Mount Lebanon, an even more rugged retreat. There, joined by native mountaineers and slaves and escaped Byzantine prisoners from neighboring parts of Syria, they began plundering northern Palestine. Thus relieved from Arab attacks, Constantine prepared an expedition against the Slavs, who had diverted their attacks from Thessalonica to

the northern Aegean and the Hellespont. The Byzantine army invaded | the valley of the Strymon and soundly defeated the Slavs settled there. As the Slavs fled north, the Thessalonians reoccupied the Byzantine enclave around their city, restoring the balance of power as it had been before the Arabs came to Cyzicus. Frustrated by the losses of the Arab army and navy and the rebellion of the Mardaites, Mu'awiyah opened negotiations for a truce. The treaty was probably concluded in 679, specifying an Arab tribute of 216,000 nomiusmata, fifty slaves, and fifty horses a year.® At first the treaty apparently allowed the Arabs to keep Rhodes. But the next year Mu‘awiyah died, a son of “Ali contested the claim of Mu‘awiyah’s son and successor Yazid, and Yazid evacuated Rhodes to avoid further trouble with the Byzantines. Various Slavic rulers and the Avar khan also made treaties with the empire, which suddenly seemed far stronger than four years before. Constantine used his respite to settle the unresolved question of Mo-

notheletism. Constans II had avoided condemning the doctrine in his Type because he hoped to retake the eastern provinces where Monotheletism had found some favor, and because he relied on Armenian generals and soldiers. Less dependent on Armenians, and with no real hope of retaking Egypt or Syria, Constantine had little reason to defend the ambiguities of the Type, which his western subjects resented. After friendly

328 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE consultation with the pope, the emperor called a council of the eastern church for the autumn of 680. Before the council met, Constantine announced the deposition of his brothers Heraclius and Tiberius, whom his father had crowned. Constantine wanted to establish his young son Justinian as the undisputed heir, which according to usual practice he was. But deposing unoffending junior emperors was unusual, and a body of soldiers from the Anatolic Theme arrived at Chrysopolis, opposite the capital, to demand the brothers’ reinstatement. Even though Constantine had the Anatolic ringleaders hanged, he prudently restored his brothers before the council convened.’ When it met in the imperial palace, the council declared itself ecumenical, the Third Council of Constantinople. It could fairly do so, since it included representatives of the pope, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and the leaderless Chalcedonians of the patriarchate of Alexandria, plus the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch in exile, Macarius. The council prolonged its deliberations for months as the papal legates produced patristic texts to demonstrate that Christ had two wills, and Macarius produced his own texts to the contrary. Meanwhile the Bulgars, who had long inhabited the lands between the lower Danube and the Sea of Azov, had begun to move west as the Khazars attacked them in the east.® By the beginning of 681 one group of Bulgars crossed the Danube into Thrace, led by their khan Asparukh, one of the sons of the late khan Kuvrat.? There they threatened not only to take the coastal towns still in Byzantine hands but to become enemies much stronger than the local Slavs, whom Constantine had just defeated. Determined to forestall this danger if possible, the emperor ordered troops from all five themes to cross into Thrace. Constantine led the thematic armies and fleet against the Bulgars, chased them to their fortifications in the marshes north of the Danube delta, and besieged them there. As a standoff developed, Constantine found that camping in a marsh

was bad for his gout. Entrusting the campaign to the strategi of the themes, he sailed south to take baths at the port of Mesembria. But his soldiers, thinking he had abandoned them, fled from the delta in panic. As the Bulgars pursued, and killed or wounded many of them, Asparukh advanced as far as Varna, which he captured along with the towns around it. He easily subdued the disunited Slavs and extended his khanate to the

Black Sea in the east, the Balkan Mountains in the south, and the Avar

War of Attrition, 668-717 329

Khanate in the west. Though only a short coastal strip of this land had recently been Byzantine, the emergence of such a mighty western neighbor was precisely what Constantine had tried to prevent. Once the Bulgars had settled south of the Danube, only a full-scale campaign outside imperial territory could dislodge them. Constantine chose to make peace, and found Asparukh willing. Before the invasion, Byzantines and Bulgars had observed a treaty that Heraclius had made with Asparukh’s father Kuvrat; even now, Byzantine and Bulgar lands barely touched, and their interests were not directly in conflict. Under the new treaty the emperor accepted the Bulgars’ occupation of the coast north of Mesembria and paid a presumably modest tribute, while Asparukh refrained from further conquests to the south. The Third Council of Constantinople continued its deliberations during the Bulgar war and dispersed only in September 681. The council declared that Christ had two wills, human and divine, corresponding to his two natures, though it acknowledged that those wills could not oppose each other. Among the clerics condemned for espousing or tolerating Monotheletism were Heraclius’s patriarchs Sergius and Pyrrhus, their contemporary Pope Honorius, and Macarius, whom the council deposed as patriarch-in-exile of Antioch.'® Although these surprisingly harsh anathemas provoked lengthy discussion, the majority was eager to end the ambiguities of Heraclius’s Ecthesis and Constans’ Type. After more than two centuries of controversy, this council clearly affirmed the Chalcedonian doctrine that Christ was at once fully human and fully divine. Its decisions won prompt acceptance within the empire and in the western church. Since the council had completed the definition of fundamental Christian doctrine, Constantine [V gained more than the usual credit given to emperors who held ecumenical councils. He was able to depose his brothers again and, with cautious cruelty, to make them ineligible for the throne by slitting their noses. A stroke of luck even allowed the emperor partly to offset his defeat by the Bulgars. Shortly after his council, a revolt broke out in the Avar Khanate among thousands of descendants of the Byzantines captured by the Avars during Heraclius’s reign. Led by Kuver, a Bulgar whom the khan had made their chief, the fugitives left their settlements near Sirmium and migrated south to Thessalonica. Constantine welcomed them and resettled them in Thrace.'! Around this time he also created a new

Theme of Thrace from most of the European part of the Opsician Theme, though the troops defending Constantinople remained Opsi-

330 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

an Ancyra. |

cian.'* From the first the new theme’s headquarters were probably at Arcadiopolis, near the border, where the strategus of Thrace was better placed to stop a Bulgar invasion than the count of the Opsician could be

Then dissensions among the Arabs brought Constantine more good fortune. About 682, while the caliph Yazid struggled to put down yet another Alid rebellion in Medina, the Christian princes of Armenia and Iberia defected from the Arabs and sought Byzantine protection for their states. The next year Arab renegades in Africa defeated and killed its Arab governor, and set up a rebel principality at Qayrawan in alliance with the Byzantines. Although Yazid’s forces suppressed the rebellion at Medina, as soon as they did so Yazid died. The succession of his sickly son Mu ‘awiyah II sparked another Alid revolt that took over most of the caliphate outside Syria. When Mu‘awiyah died in 684, his successor Marwan inherited the civil war. Even for an emperor who liked peace, the opportunity in the caliphate was irresistible. Constantine dispatched a fleet that raided the coast of Syria, sacking Acre, Caesarea, and Ascalon while the Mardaites made their own raids inland from Mount Lebanon. Apparently the next fall, Constantine led an army that retook much of Cilicia and the Armenian Hexapolis, including Mopsuestia.'? But Marwan defeated the rebels and recovered Egypt. In 685, when his successor “Abd al-Malik offered to pay the empire an increased tribute of 365,000 nomismata, 365 slaves, and 365 horses per year, Constantine accepted the terms. By then the emperor was dying of dysentery. Although he presumably wanted to leave a peaceful empire to his young heir, the prudent Constantine would probably have made the truce in any case. During the twenty-three years since his father had put him in power at Constantinople, he had met dangerous Arab, Slav, Bulgar, and rebel attacks with calm determination. While he had achieved no great successes, and lost some border territory to the Arabs and Bulgars, he had freed the Church from theological disputes and preserved the empire’s essential se-

curity. If Constantine might perhaps have done more, he had at least avoided trying to do too much.

JUSTINIAN II’S RISKS Constantine’s son Justinian became emperor at the age of sixteen, in an empire that had scarcely ever been smaller. He surely knew, however,

that his father and grandfather had been younger than he when they

War of Attrition, 068-717 331

took power, both of them in circumstances less favorable than his, and had acquitted themselves creditably. Justinian wanted more than that. Whatever may have moved the cautious Constantine IV to name his son Justinian, Justinian H himself felt called upon to emulate his great namesake Justinian J. From the beginning of his reign, he strove both to reconquer lost provinces and to restore imperial prestige. Justinian had some reason to think that the time was right for a counteroftensive against the Arabs. Over the past forty years their new conquests had been few and precarious, and their civil wars frequent and serious. In 685 the caliph “Abd al-Malik held only Syria and Palestine, both raided by the Christian Mardaites, plus Egypt; the Alid rebels in Persia, Mesopotamia, and Arabia controlled more than half the caliphate. When ‘Abd al-Malik tried and failed to take Mesopotamia, the Alids invaded Palestine. By comparison with the caliphate, the empire appeared strong,

solvent, and stable. Justinian showed only moderate audacity when he sought to continue his father’s reconquests, circumventing the treaty Constantine had made on his deathbed. Justinian began sensibly enough in 686 by reasserting the Byzantine protectorate over Armenia and Iberia, whose status was once more in doubt. Their two independent princes, after rebelling against the Arabs well before the treaty was signed, had been killed two years before by Khazar raiders, and the Arabs had invaded once again. Justinian sent an army under the strategus of the Anatolics Leontius that put most of Armenia and Iberia under princes subject to the empire, though the Arabs

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Sree le Pee 77. Gold nomisma of Justinian II, with a cross on steps on the reverse, shown twice actual size. (Photo: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., copyright 1996)

332 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE continued to hold parts of the two principalities. Leontius pressed on to raid and plunder Albania and Azerbaijan, which were within the territory of the caliphate but outside the control of the caliph who had made the treaty. This campaign not only gained loot and extended Byzantine influence in the Caucasus, but persuaded the embattled “Abd al-Malik to renew his treaty, with revisions in the empire’s favor. He agreed to pay the same tribute as before, and to share the revenues of Armenia, Iberia, and Cyprus equally with the empire. In return, Justinian agreed to withdraw the Mardaites from the caliphate and resettle them on Byzantine territory. Some of them came from Mount Amanus that year, and others from Mount Lebanon the following spring, when Justinian went to Armenia to take up partial possession of it. Though still other Mardaites stayed

where they were, at least twelve thousand men came to the empire, apparently with their families. These Justinian settled in the Carabisian Theme, enrolling them as permanent oarsmen for the theme’s fleet. Justinian seems then to have divided the Carabisian Theme into two parts, each with two thousand soldiers. The part in central Greece became anew Theme of Hellas with its capital at Corinth. The Carabisian Theme kept the Aegean islands, where its strategus continued to reside, along with the southern coast of Anatolia under a subordinate drungary of the Cibyrrhaeots, whose headquarters, to judge from their name, were at the port of Cibyra. The twelve thousand resettled Mardaites had their own commander and could man all the ships needed to carry the Carabisians’ two thousand marines. Substituting Mardaite oarsmen for temporary levies of locals must have improved the readiness and eftectiveness of the reduced Carabisian Theme." Justinian also had plans for the Balkans. Probably during his march to Armenia and back, the emperor ordered the cavalry from the themes of Anatolia to assemble the following year in the Theme of Thrace for a campaien. The Bulgars had evidently been extending their influence over the Slavs of southern Thrace, in territory uncomfortably close to Constantinople and Thessalonica. Justinian meant to stop the Bulgars, and in preparation he seems to have withheld the tribute due them under their treaty.

Though ending this tribute cannot have saved much more than the Byzantines’ pride, Justinian did want money, for this campaign and others. Like Justinian I, the emperor appointed energetic officials who began

squeezing revenue out of the aristocracy. The emperor’s chief instru-

War of Attrition, 668-717 333 ments were his sacellarius (treasurer) Stephen the Persian and especially

his general logothete (finance minister) the former abbot Theodotus. Theodotus collected taxes with unaccustomed rigor. He is said to have resorted frequently to confiscation, which he enforced by torture and imprisonment of the wealthy.'° In 688 Justinian led the assembled cavalry of the eastern themes from the capital overland to Thessalonica. On his way along the northern coast of the Aegean, he drove out the Bulgars, whose hold on the land must

have been tenuous, and defeated the Slavs, who formed most of the population. Without trying to annex the region, the emperor rounded up many Slavs to resettle elsewhere. He sent at least a hundred thousand

of them to the Opsician Theme. Of these Slavs, thirty thousand men were enrolled in the army and given military land grants, probably in land around Cyzicus devastated under Constantine IV by the Arabs. Justinian apparently settled other Slavs between Thessalonica and the Strymon River, in order to expand the enclave under imperial rule. To the east of the river, southern Thrace became a no-man’s-land separating Byzantine territory from the Bulgars. During this resettlement Justinian marched into Thessalonica, remained a short time in the city, and marched back, apparently by a more northerly route. As he returned, a band of Bulgars ambushed him in a mountain pass and inflicted considerable losses on his army. Yet his campaign could be counted a success if the thirty thousand captured Slavs could be incorporated into the Byzantine army, increasing it by about a third. Leaving his Slavic recruits on their new military lands, in 689 the tireless emperor attacked the Arabs again. Although his treaty with the caliphate should still have been valid, in spite of it many Mardaites remained at large on Mount Lebanon, joined by Arab renegades and runaway slaves, and the caliph may have withheld his tribute in protest. Since the Arab civil war continued to rage, Justinian felt safe in sending an army that reached Mount Amanus and approached Mount Lebanon it~ self. “Abd al-Malik, who was preparing another campaign to wrest Mesopotamia from the Alids, chose to make another truce. The annual tribute he paid was reduced from a thousand nomismata per day to a thousand

nomismata per week, but he apparently left the emperor a free hand in Armenia, Iberia, and Cyprus. For his part, Justinian appears to have withdrawn about sixty-five hundred more Mardaites with their families, though some still remained on Mount Lebanon. He enrolled those who came to him as oarsmen in his new Theme of Hellas."

334. THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE In his first four years as emperor, Justinian had ordered military operations every year. He had broken three treaties, made two treaties, created a theme, enrolled around 18,500 oarsmen and 30,000 soldiers, and gained control over Cyprus, Iberia, and Armenia. This frenetic activity

had brought evident progress, but paying for the campaigns and new troops kept the emperor’s financial officials busy at their unpopular work. And Justinian’s success owed a great deal to the troubles in the caliphate. Over the next two years “Abd al-Malik’s forces expelled the Alids from most of Mesopotamia, captured Medina, and seemed to be winning the

civil war. Justinian kept the peace, but in 691 he removed many of the people of Cyprus from their insecurely held island and settled them in

the still underpopulated region around Cyzicus. No doubt recalling that Justinian I had founded a city and archbishopric named Justiniana Prima, the emperor founded a city of Justinianopolis for the Cypriots and gave their archbishop the combined privileges of the metropolitans of Cyprus and Cyzicus. The emperor soon found an excuse to escape his treaty with the Arabs. He issued a new type of nomisma showing both his own portrait, as was

customary, and for the first time a bust of Christ. Hitherto the caliphs had minted gold dinars that copied Byzantine nomismata down to the emperor's portrait; but “Abd al-Malik understandably omitted the head of Christ from his dinars, which he began to mint in a different style and with a somewhat lighter weight. Justinian refused the caliph’s tribute on

the ground that the coins in it failed to match his own. Although the

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War of Attrition, 668-717 335

caliph added extra coins to make up the full value, Justinian insisted on the bust of Christ. Declaring the treaty broken, he prepared for a campaign against the Arabs.

By the summer of 692, Justinian’s thirty thousand Slavs had been trained, armed, and organized into a special company under their own commander Nebulus. The emperor added them to the regular thematic cavalry and led them east. But during the emperor’s prolonged preparations, “Abd al-Malik had put the Alids under siege in Mecca, mustered an Arab army, and invaded the empire before Justinian could invade the caliphate. The two armies clashed near Sebastopolis in the middle of the Armeniac Theme, with the Arabs brandishing a copy of the treaty on a spear in front of them to emphasize the justice of their cause. The Arabs had the worst of it until Nebulus and most of his Slavic company deserted to them, allegedly because of a bribe. At this the rest of the Byzantines fled. Though the Arabs also withdrew, Justinian was irate. He disbanded the Slavic company, of whom some ten thousand men remained, and is said to have killed many of them, apparently including wives and children of the deserters. Others he sold into slavery.” He also imprisoned the strategus of the Anatolics Leontius, whom he seems to have held partly responsible for the defeat. Although Justinian had to postpone his military ambitions, that very fall he sought another sort of glory. Emulating both his father and Jus-

tinian I, he announced an ecumenical council at Constantinople. No theological matters remained to be discussed; Justinian’s efforts to find some in the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council had already failed. He nonetheless declared that a council was needed to consider questions of canon law, which the fifth and sixth councils had neglected. Because the council was meant to complete those councils’ work, it has been termed the Quinisext (“Fifth-Sixth”) Council. During the two and a half centuries since the Council of Chalcedon had issued the last ecumenical canons, the practices of the eastern church had increasingly diverged from the western. The Quinisext Council came too late to harmonize such differences, but Justinian and the council’s almost exclusively eastern bishops knew little of western usage. Thus the council required married men who were ordained deacon or priest to continue conjugal life, which the western church required them to renounce. The council forbade fasting on Saturdays in Lent, which the western church prescribed. Among other rulings contrary to western views, the council reduced the pope’s primacy of authority to a mere precedence of honor.

336 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE Although papal legates signed the Quinisext Council’s acts early in 693, Pope Sergius promptly repudiated both his legates and the council. Justinian at first tried to intimidate Sergius by having an imperial officer

seize two papal officials; then the emperor sent another officer to arrest | the pope himself. But the army of the exarchate supported Sergius, and would have lynched the emperor’s representative if the pope had not helped him to escape. Only an army from the East could possibly have imposed Justinian’s will. After his defeat at Sebastopolis, Justinian had no soldiers to spare. His

client prince of Armenia submitted without a fight to “Abd al-Malik, who had taken Mecca and was extending his authority over Persia. Justinian himself sent columns for use in rebuilding the mosque at Mecca, since otherwise the caliph would have despoiled a church at Jerusalem.'® But “Abd al-Malik no longer needed the peace treaty that Justinian had

broken three times. In summer 694 the caliph sent his raiders, along with the Slav deserters from the empire, to attack Cilicia, where they defeated local Byzantine troops. Unable for the moment to win military victories, Justinian turned to

building, which had been of little interest to the emperors since his model Justinian I. The emperor began with the Great Palace at Constantinople, adding a dining hall and putting walls around the palace enclosure. Since he wanted to build a courtyard for imperial ceremonies

on the site of a nearby church, he demolished the church and built another elsewhere. These projects appear to have been expensive, and coming on top of military expenses they spurred Justinian’s officials Stephen and Theodotus to make still more exactions from the exasperated aristocracy. In summer 695 Justinian’s reputation sank further when another Arab

raid, this time on the Armenian Hexapolis, took many captives and showed that the balance of power had shifted back to the Arabs. The emperor tried to mollify the former strategus of the Anatolics Leontius, and presumably Leontius’s friends, by releasing him after three years’ imprisonment and naming him strategus of Hellas. Before he left Constantinople, however, the general organized a conspiracy against the emperor. By night the conspirators seized the city’s main prison, the Praetorium, and released and armed its prisoners, who included many aristocrats and military men. With their help Leontius and his followers summoned the people of the capital to Saint Sophia the next morning. They gained the support both of the patriarch Callinicus and of a large mob that

War of Attrition, 668-717 337

shouted slogans against Justinian. Crowding into the Hippodrome, the mob pulled Justinian from the palace and proclaimed Leontius emperor. The circumstances of Justinian’s deposition suggest that the empire lacked the resources for aggressive expansion, let alone for a return to the glories of the first Justinian. At the least, making sustained conquests at this time would have required great caution. Justinian II, despite his initial successes, had made too many enemies, spent too much money, taken

too many chances, and failed to see how much the seventh-century invasions had weakened the empire. In the end his projects weakened it further.

SEVEN REVOLUTIONS The overthrow of Justinian in 695 shook the empire more severely than the three earlier revolutions of the seventh century. The murder of Maurice in 602 could not utterly shatter the East’s tradition of orderly successions going back to Constantine I. The execution of Phocas in 610 seemed condign punishment for his usurpation; the rebellion in favor of Constans II in 641 served to confirm the tradition of succession from father to eldest son. But the deposition of Justinian I ended a well-established dynasty for no better reason than the emperor’s unpopularity among aristocrats. Leontius’s rule rested only on military support, which a number of other ambitious men could also claim since the creation of the themes. An Isaurian, Leontius was the first man of mature age and experience to become emperor since Heraclius. Adopting the name Leo that had already belonged to two emperors, Leontius tried to act like a legitimate and moderate ruler. Though the mob wanted Justinian killed, Leontius merely slit his nose and tongue to make him ineligible to rule, exiling him to Cherson in the Crimea with some of his ministers and support-

ers. Leontius had even wanted to save Justinian’s detested ministers Stephen and Theodotus, whom the mob burned alive. Shunning the arrogance that had made Justinian unpopular, Leontius

tolerated Arab border raids. But in 696 “Abd al-Malik sent an unignorable expedition against Byzantine Africa. The caliph’s commander Hassan ibn al-Nu‘man quickly took Qayrawan from the Arab renegades who held it, and by early 697 he seized Carthage, leaving what remained of the exarch’s forces scattered among a few fortified towns. Though the prince of Lazica had just repudiated Byzantine suzerainty and joined the

338 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

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Arabs, Leontius wisely gave priority to Africa, which if completely lost would be gone for the foreseeable future. That autumn the emperor loaded the Carabisian fleet with an expedi-

tionary force and sent it to Africa. Its commander John the Patrician boldly sailed into Carthage, taking the city by surprise while Hassan was

fighting the Moors. John also cleared the Arabs from the neighboring towns. But Hassan appealed to the caliph for more troops, and when they arrived early in 698 he forced John and his men out of Carthage. The Byzantine commander sailed back to seek reinforcements; but when

he reached Crete, some of his naval officers, afraid of being blamed for the campaign’s failure, revolted. They proclaimed as emperor one of themselves, the drungary of the Cibyrrhaeots Apsimar, and sailed on Constantinople. Leontius seems to have sent his remaining ships to Cyprus, to return the Cypriots from Justinianopolis under an agreement with the caliph.'” The plague was again raging in the capital. Yet the citizens stood by Leontius when Apsimar’s fleet arrived at Sycae, across the Golden Horn, and put the city under siege. That summer, however, some officers, who were said to be of foreign origin, opened a gate. The rebels stormed in, looting as they went. Apsimar, whose name was certainly foreign and probably German, became emperor under the name of Tiberius III, perhaps recalling the last emperor who had suffered no calamities. Apsimar slit Leontius’s nose and relegated him to a monastery 1n Constantinople. Though Apsimar had more or less adequate abilities, he had even less right to rule than Leontius, whose only real failure, the loss of Africa,

War of Attrition, 668—717 339

was more Apsimar’s fault than his own. In order to justify his usurpation, Apsimar planned a raid on the Arabs, who were then distracted by a re-

bellion in Persia. The emperor appointed as commander of all four Ana- . tolian land themes the man he trusted most, his brother Heraclius, and sent him south with a large force. Traversing the passes of Cappadocia

before winter set in, Heraclius invaded northern Syria. He inflicted heavy losses on an Arab army that came out from Antioch; then he raided as far as Samosata, and returned to the empire with much booty and numerous prisoners in the spring of 699. While scoring this easy but insubstantial victory, which invited Arab retaliation, Apsimar made no effort to prevent the Arabs from taking the empire’s last outposts in Africa. His only apparent contribution to the defense of the West was to form new themes of Sardinia and Sicily from existing troops. The feeble Theme of Sardinia comprised the remnants of the Exarchate of Africa, including Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Islands. The Theme of Sicily comprised Sicily and Calabria, which were the parts of the Exarchate of Italy most exposed to sea raids from Arabheld Africa.*°

The caliph soon retaliated for Heraclius’s raid with a full-scale invasion of Byzantine Armenia, which he sought to add to his holdings in Armenia proper. In 700 the caliph’s son “Abdullah captured the border stronghold of Theocdosiopolis and raided as far as the Hexapolis. The next year the caliph’s brother Muhammad invaded the Byzantine territory east of the Euphrates in such force that its Armenian commander Baanes surrendered and its Armenian inhabitants accepted an Arab governor. Neither the emperor nor his brother Heraclius oftered effective resistance.

But the Armenians themselves disliked the Arabs, and in 702 they massacred their Arab governor and his garrison, setting off a rebellion that extended far into Armenia proper and to Lazica as well. The Armenians appealed for aid to the emperor, and received some Byzantine troops. Unprepared to fight the Armenians at once, the caliph first sent ‘Abdullah to Cilicia, where in 703 he fortified Mopsuestia as the Arabs’

first stronghold in the region. By the next year “Abdullah led a large army into Armenia, while another Arab army besieged Sisium near Mopsuestia. Although Heraclius attacked the Arabs at Sisium and killed or captured many of them, “Abdullah continued subjugating Armenia.?! That year the deposed emperor Justinian, undeterred by the mutilation of his nose and tongue and unimpressed by Apsimar, escaped with

340 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

a few of his former courtiers from exile in Cherson to the Khazar Khanate. The khan took Justinian seriously enough to marry him to a Khazar princess, who was baptized under the significant name of Theodora. When Apsimar protested, the khan was ready to hand Justinian over, but the intrepid exile and his followers escaped again, leaving his pregnant wife behind. In the autumn they sailed to the Bulgar Khanate, , where Justinian was so persuasive that the Bulgar khan Tervel provided him with an army to regain his throne. Faced with this threat, Apsimar recalled his brother Heraclius from the

East to Thrace. By summer 705 Heraclius led an army near to the Bulgar frontier, but Justinian and Tervel passed right by him and marched on Constantinople. After waiting three days before the city walls without being invited in, the deposed ruler, whose courage never failed him, entered the pipe of the broken Aqueduct of Valens with some of his men. While they occupied the capital, Apsimar fled to Sozopolis in Thrace, where his army gradually deserted him. Justinian soon captured Apsimar, and executed Heraclius and his principal officers. The restored emperor sent to the Khazars for his wife Theodora and his newborn son Tiberius, and rewarded Tervel with lavish gifts and the rank of Caesar. Justinian could claim with reason that his deposition had harmed the empire. During the usurpations of Leontius and Apsimar Byzantium had lost Africa, Lazica, part of Cilicia, and Byzantine Armenia, though it

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War of Attrition, 668-717 341

had regained Lazica. The Arabs had resumed their annual raids, led by Maslamah, a son of the caliph and a brilliant warrior. Three revolutions in ten years was an alarming number, especially when the Arab war was intensifying. As both the legitimate emperor and a ruler of experience and talent, Justinian had the best chance of reestablishing stability if he exercised unaccustomed restraint. Though earlier emperors had seldom resorted to execution, Justin1an’s killing opponents in arms like Apsimar’s officers was defensible. Early in 706, after watching games in the Hippodrome seated with one foot on Leontius and the other on Apsimar, Justinian had both of them executed as well. This too was justifiable, since Justinian’s own case showed that mutilation was not enough to end an imperial career, and Phocas’s execution for usurpation was a generally accepted precedent. Justinian even showed some mercy by forcing Apsimar’s son to enter the Church rather than killing him. But Justinian did himself no good by executing a number of officers and officials for supporting the usurpers, and by blinding and not just deposing the patriarch Callinicus for crowning them. Shortly after Justinian’s restoration “Abd al-Malik died, and his son al-Walid became caliph. Walid’s uncle Muhammad finished subduing Armenia by massacring the Armenian nobles, while his half-brother Maslamah invaded Cappadocia, besieging Tyana through the winter of 707. To raise this siege, the emperor sent two strategi with a force increased by peasant irregulars; but Maslamah crushed it and sacked Tyana, deporting its inhabitants. The next year, while Justinian led a minor and unsuccessful campaign against his erstwhile Bulgar allies, Maslamah took

more forts and defeated a Byzantine army near Amorium. The next year he raided Isauria. Maslamah’s enthusiasm for fighting the empire appeared insatiable.

In 710 the Byzantine outpost of Cherson rebelled against Justinian with the help of the Khazars. Though the place was scarcely worth attention at a time when Anatolia was under serious attack, Justinian harbored a grudge against the notables of his place of exile, and sent a sizable fleet under Stephen the Patrician to reclaim it. Stephen easily took Cherson and executed some Chersonites, but his fleet was wrecked by an autumn storm on its way back to the capital. The people of Cherson were able to call in the Khazars once more. This time Justinian reacted more cautiously. He was trying to put down unrest in Ravenna and Rome, and had summoned Pope Constan-

342 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

tine to Constantinople to settle their differences over the Quinisext Council.” In the spring of 711 the emperor received the pope with respect and agreed that the papacy need not accept any decisions of the council that it found objectionable. Justinian was also distracted by the defection of Lazica and Abasgia to the caliph, and sent a modest expedition under Leo the Syrian, who recovered Abasgia. The emperor seems to have tried to compromise on Cherson, dispatching an embassy led by the general logothete George to negotiate a settlement with the Khazars. But the Chersonites and Khazars killed George and his party. They proclaimed as their emperor Bardanes, an exiled official of Armenian blood, giving him the Greek name Philippicus. Since Justinian could hardly ignore usurpation, that summer he sent a third naval expedition to Cherson under Maurus the Patrician. Yet at the same time the Arabs were advancing all along the eastern frontier. Having made peace with Tervel and obtained three thousand Bulgar reinforcements, Justinian led most of the Opsician and Thracesian themes to Sinope, from which he could have attacked the Arabs in either Lazica, Armenia, or Cilicia. But there he learned that Maurus, after failing to expel the Khazars from Cherson, had joined the Chersonites in proclaiming Philippicus.

The emperor and his army started to race the usurper and his fleet back to the capital. Despite the handicap of traveling by land, Justinian nearly arrived first; but he was just short of Chalcedon when the rebels sailed into Constantinople. Philippicus had Justinian’s little son Tiberius butchered, and executed Justinian’s chief officials. Advancing to Justin1an’s camp near Chalcedon, the rebel forces persuaded Justinian’s men to desert him in return for a promise of immunity. Justinian was beheaded, and Philippicus sent his head as far as Rome and Ravenna as proof of his death. Justinian’s second fall was due not so much to his excesses, which during his second reign were not great, as to the uncertainties caused by the

three revolutions before it. The fourth revolution made matters even worse, destroying whatever remained of dynastic legitimacy. Philippicus

evidently tried to justify himself by circulating an account of the expeditions to Cherson that exaggerated Justinian’s cruelty and folly. But Philippicus had outdone Justinian in savagery by killing not only his predecessor’s advisers but his son besides.

Like many other Armenians, Philippicus favored Monotheletism. When he entered the capital, he expressed his wish to repudiate the

War of Attrition, 668-717 343

anti-Monothelete Sixth Ecumenical Council. Barely two months later, at the beginning of 712, he deposed the patriarch Cyrus for defending the council and issued an edict rejecting it. Most of the rest of the clergy accepted the edict, reluctant to brand the emperor a heretic. Along with the usual motive of cowardice, some may have felt that the empire could not afford a theological controversy at such a time. By 712 Maslamah and the other Arab commanders had finished conquering Cilicia and the Byzantine lands east of the Euphrates. Philippicus tried to save the region of Melitene by sending Armenians to settle it, but Maslamah easily drove them from their exposed position. The Arabs pushed the empire’s frontier back from the Taurus to the Antitaurus and raided far into Anatolia. In the Armeniac Theme they sacked Amasia and reached Gangra; in the Anatolic Theme they sacked Misthia and apparently stayed the winter. Meanwhile the Bulgars raided Thrace as far as Constantinople. In the spring of 713 the Arabs captured Antioch in the Anatolic Theme, the Bulgars raided again, and the Italians, enraged at Philippicus’s edict against the Sixth Ecumenical Council, expelled his officers from Rome.

After all these Byzantine reverses, the count of the Opsician Theme George Buraphus, who had gone to Thrace to ward off the Bulgars,

concluded that Philippicus was ripe for deposition. The day before Pentecost the count sent officers to the’ capital who entered the palace, seized Philippicus during his siesta, and blinded him, inflicting a mutilation harder to ignore than slitting of the nose or tongue. The conspirators doubtless meant for the crowd that gathered next day at Saint Sophia to acclaim George; but they lost control of events. The protoasecretis Artemius, head of the imperial chancery, recetved the crowd’s acclamation and the throne under the imperial name of Anastasius IT. Anastasius seems to have chosen his new name in honor of the capable bureaucrat Anastasius I, whose prudence he emulated. He punished conspiracy and strengthened his own hand by blinding both George and the officer who had blinded Philippicus. Anastasius sent Philippicus himself to a monastery in Constantinople and exiled the plotters to Thessalonica. Without delay the emperor revoked Phillipicus’s edict and recognized the Sixth Ecumenical Council. He replaced most of the strategi who had served Philippicus, choosing as strategus of the Anatolics Leo the Syrian, who had regained Abasgia for Justinian II. The emperor gave his full attention to the Arabs who were pushing ever farther into Anatolia. In 714, when Maslamah invaded the region

344. THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

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of Ancyra in the Opsician Theme, Anastasius sent an embassy to the caliph Walid to negotiate a truce, or at least to discover the Arabs’ intentions. When the ambassadors returned to report that the caliph planned a land and sea assault on Constantinople, Anastasius began repairing the city’s fortifications and putting in supplies. He appears to have given the city its first full defenses by completing the sea walls. Although Walid died early in 715, his brother and successor Sulayman eagerly pursued his plans against the Byzantines. That spring the emperor learned that an Arab fleet had sailed to Phoenix in the Carabisian Theme to cut wood for more warships. Anastasius promptly ordered an expedition to assemble at Rhodes under his general logothete John the

Deacon, and from there to attack the Arabs across the strait. Once on Rhodes, however, the troops from the Opsician Theme rebelled against Anastasius, perhaps out of resentment for his blinding of their count George two years before. They killed John, scattered his expedition, and sailed to Adramyttium in the Thracesian Theme. There they found and proclaimed emperor the local tax collector Theodosius, despite his attempts to escape that dangerous honor. While the caliph Sulayman assembled a vast army under Maslamah to conquer the empire outright, the Byzantines fought still another civil

war. Anastasius left the capital in the hands of friendly officers and marched to Nicaea to confront the Opsician rebels on their home sround. But Theodosius’s supporters rallied most of the Opsician troops, marched and sailed to Chrysopolis, and began naval attacks on Constan-

War of Attrition, 668-717 345

tinople. Toward the end of the summer the rebels crossed to Thrace, gained admission to the capital by treachery, captured Anastasius’s officers, and plundered the city. Anastasius remained at Nicaea into the fall, when he agreed to abdicate, become a monk, and go into exile at Thessalonica in return for a promise of immunity.

Theodosius II], an incapable and unwilling emperor, found himself facing a full-scale Arab invasion and continuing resistance to his rule in the Anatolic and Armeniac themes. Nominally loyal to Anastasius II, the Anatolic strategus Leo the Syrian was allied with the Armeniac strategus Artavasdus against Theodosius. So matters stood in 716, when two Arab armies invaded Anatolia while an Arab fleet advanced along the coast from Cilicia. Leo, a native of Germanicea in the borderland that had recently become Arab territory, knew both Arabic and the Arabs. During long and duplicitous negotiations, Leo outmaneuvered the Arab commander Maslamah and kept him out of Amorium. That summer Leo had himself acclaimed emperor with Artavasdus’s support. The frustrated Maslamah left Leo’s territory for the Thracesian Theme, where the Arab army captured Sardis and Pergamum and spent the winter. Impatient to bring the civil war to a close, Leo marched on

Constantinople himself. At Nicomedia he met and captured a group of Theodosius’s officials, including the emperor’s young son. Without harming them, he advanced to Chrysopolis and opened negotiations with Theodosius. The latter agreed to abdicate in favor of Leo and to enter the Church with his son, once given assurances that they would not

be harmed. At the beginning of spring 717, Leo entered the capital as Leo IIL.

Although this seventh revolution was the most merciful and best justified of the lot, the government remained disrupted as Maslamah’s forces threatened Constantinople. Political anarchy had unquestionably harmed the empire’s defense against the Arabs, whose advance had seemed to stall before Justinian II’s first deposition. But the Arab attacks would in any case have intensified after the end of their own civil war, and those attacks had in their turn harmed the emperors’ reputations and the Byz-

antine army and treasury. With far more men, land, and wealth than Byzantium, the Arabs had begun to concentrate all their strength against it. Now they threatened to extinguish the empire entirely by capturing its capital.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Passing of the Crisis,

717-780

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LE Svs a The Arabs’ plan in 717 was not to raid in force, as in 674, but to take Constantinople outright. The caliph Sulayman had said as much. The army and navy on their way to the city were led by the Arabs’ best general, Maslamah, and are said to have reached the stag-

gering totals of 120,000 men and 1,800 ships.’ These forces outnumbered the entire army and navy of the empire, and were more than enough to blockade Constantinople completely. If the Arabs could take the center of Byzantine resistance at the capital, their way would be clear to complete the conquest of Anatolia that they had already begun. After a long civil war, to say nothing of seven violent revolutions over the past twenty-two years, Byzantium was ill prepared to meet them.

CHANGE UNDER LEO III The Byzantines’ main advantage was their latest emperor. Leo II, experienced but still vigorous at the age of about forty, had repeatedly extracted himself from almost hopeless situations as the Byzantine commander in Abasgia and then as strategus of the Anatolic Theme. In the latter post he had already bested Maslamah by his diplomatic and military skills and knowledge of the Arabs. As a Syrian who had probably been raised a Monophysite, Leo may have been suspect to some Byzantines; but he professed orthodoxy and was much too sensible to attempt religious innovations at such a time.* Leo inspired considerable loyalty in the army, and counted among his allies the Armeniac strategus Artavasdus, who married Leo’s daughter Anna.

Passing of Crisis, 717-780 347 Three years earlier, Leo’s former patron Anastasius IT had finished the

capital’s sea walls and begun stockpiling supplies. Leo seems to have bought time to complete his own preparations by further negotiations with Maslamah. In the meantime the emperor secured an alliance with the Bulgars, who evidently feared that the caliphate would make a more ageressive neighbor than Byzantium. They undertook to harass the Arabs whenever possible. At the beginning of summer, when Maslamah crossed the Hellespont at Abydus and marched across Thrace sacking cities, he was dogged by the Bulgars along his way. In July 717 Maslamah put Constantinople under a thorough siege on the land side.° Parallel to the Theodosian Walls the Arabs built two com-

plete siege walls, the inner one to confine the Byzantines and the outer to keep the Bulgars out of the Arab encampment in between. At the start of September, the Arab fleet arrived to begin a blockade by sea. As most of this fleet sailed past the city and up the Bosporus, Leo sent ships to attack its rear with Greek Fire. The Arabs were horrified to see their rear guard of twenty ships with two thousand men burned or sunk. Afterward the Arab fleet stayed clear of the Byzantine fire ships, remaining in a

harbor halfway up the European side of the Bosporus until winter came. , Since the Arabs had no plans for a frontal assault, as soon as they aban-

doned their plans for a sea blockade their numbers and the passage of time began to work against them and for the Byzantines. The Byzantines could bring in food for themselves by boat, but their land and sea raiders and their Bulgar allies prevented the Arab army in its camp and the Arab fleet in its harbor from venturing out to do much foraging. Moreover, the winter of 717-18 was freakishly harsh. As snow lay on the ground for over three months, many of the Arabs and their horses, camels, and livestock died of cold. The Arabs also rapidly consumed their supplies. In the spring the caliph “Umar I, who had succeeded Sulayman, sent new fleets from both Egypt and Africa to resupply the besiegers, and another army through Anatolia to reinforce them. At this news, the strate-

sus of Sicily Sergius assumed the capital was as good as lost and proclaamed emperor one of his officers, Basil Onomagulus, who was renamed Tiberius. With months of campaigning weather ahead, 400 Arab

: ships from Egypt and 260 from Africa, carrying both food and arms, entered the Sea of Marmara. To avoid the Byzantines’ Greek Fire, they put

in on the Asian shore, just south of Chalcedon. , : The crews of these ships were native Egyptians and Africans, over-

348 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

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,Jon S o re ax ee me ONE a te whelmingly Christian and ill disposed toward their Muslim rulers. Once they found themselves near Constantinople, many of them took to their

landing boats and escaped to the city, where they declared their allegiance to the emperor. Leo gladly recetved them and sent them back with his own fleet, which captured the Arabs’ supplies and sank their ships. Encouraged by this partial success, Leo was able to dispatch a small

expedition to Sicily, where the army surrendered its rebel officers and order was restored. Though the Byzantines recovered some Italian forts that the Lombards had taken in the confusion, this does seem to be the time when the empire effectively lost Sardinia and the islands dependent on it.* Meanwhile the army of Arab reinforcements had crossed Asia Minor and reached Nicaea. But Leo stationed Byzantine soldiers in the hills

around Nicomedia, who ambushed the advancing Arabs, killed many of , them, and sent the rest fleeing back to the frontier. By this time the Byzantines were bringing ample supplies into Constantinople, while :

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Passing of Crisis, 717-780 349 camp, and thousands of them were killed by Bulgar attacks. The caliph ‘Umar ordered a retreat, and after thirteen months the Arabs raised the siege on 15 August, the Feast of the Dormition of the Virgin, whom the Byzantines gave credit for saving the city. Though Maslamah’s exhausted troops returned across Anatolia unopposed, on the return voyage many

Arab ships sank during a storm in the Sea of Marmara. Still more of them burned when a volcano near the Aegean island of Thera showered them with ash. A few more fell into the hands of the Byzantines. Thus the great Arab offensive ended in fiasco, partly through their bad luck, partly through Leo III’s nerve, but largely because of the defensive strength of Constantinople and its distance from the caliphate. So complete was the Arabs’ failure that it allowed Leo to go on the offensive. He sent a fleet that sacked Laodicea in Syria, and an army that forced the Arabs to evacuate much of the border region. The Byzantines reoccupied part of western Armenia, and the caliph had to refortify Mopsuestia and Melitene against them. Despite Leo’s victories, however, in 719 the former emperor Anastasius II tried to overthrow him. Anastasius seized power at Thessalonica, where he had retired as a monk, and gained a promise of help from the Bulgars, who may have felt poorly rewarded for their services to Leo. Anastasius also expected support from several officials who had served him; but they were betrayed to Leo. When Anastasius came to Heraclea in Thrace with a Bulgar army and fleet, Leo persuaded the Bulgars to abandon the expedition. The emperor captured and executed Anastasius and punished his partisans, one of whom had been the count of the Opsician. That powerful command went to Leo’s son-in-law Artavasdus. The triumphant Leo crowned his son Constantine Junior emperor in 720, and celebrated by introducing a new silver coin, the miliaresion. It replaced the hexagram introduced by Heraclius, which had passed out of use. Evidently modeled on the Arab dirham and valued at twelve to the gold nomisma, the miliaresion filled a need for a coin worth more than the copper follis but less than the nomisma, which since the seventh century seems to have been tariffed at 288 folles. The muliaresion became a stable element of the coinage. The Arabs resumed their raids as before, in spite of all their recent losses. Beginning with 720, the next caliph, Yazid II, sent raiders every year into the Anatolic and Armeniac themes. First the Arabs defeated the Byzantines in the part of Armenia recently reclaimed for the empire, though the next year the Byzantines defeated the Arabs in Isauria. In

350 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE 722, possibly with the emperor’s encouragement, the Khazars began a war with the Arabs in Armenia; but not even this interrupted Arab raids on Asia Minor.° When Leo tried to raise taxes 1n Italy to pay for the Arab war, he found himself defied by Pope Gregory II and unable to control Rome. The emperor seems to have taken the common Byzantine attitude that such setbacks were evidence of divine wrath that needed appeasing. In 722 he tried forcing the empire’s Jews to accept baptism. Even that precaution, however, failed to stop the Arabs from sacking Iconium the next year and finishing their reconquest of Byzantine Armenia by taking Camachum. Not long afterward, Leo began to consider another possible reason for God’s anger: that the use of icons of Christ and the saints might violate the biblical commandment against idolatry. This idea had its partisans at the time. The news that Yazid II had banned Christian icons in the caliphate in 721 may have shamed some Christians with the thought that an infidel was forcing them to do something they should have done by themselves.° Within the empire, the leading opponents of icons were two bishops in the Opsician Theme, Constantine of Nacolea and Thomas of Claudiopolis. The patriarch Germanus rebuked them for their opinion, and though it was shared by an adviser of Leo’s named Beser, a Syrian refugee from the caliphate, thus far the emperor showed no clear signs of agreement. Yet the prestige that he and the empire had gained by foiling the Arab siege seemed to be dissipating. An expedition led by his exarch from Ravenna failed to regain control of Rome, and the Arabs had the better of their battles with the Khazars, raided Cyprus in 725, and sacked Caesarea in the spring

of 726. Even though God had spared the Byzantines outright destruction, he still seemed to be displeased with them. Apparently that same spring, Leo concentrated his efforts to placate God on a revised law code, the Ecloga or Selection—selected, naturally, from the Justinian Code.’ Besides being much shorter and in Greek, the Ecloga modified a number of Justinian’s provisions “in the interest of sreater humanity,” as Leo observed in its preface. Thus the FEcloga outlawed abortion and restricted the use of execution. But it prescribed the death penalty for homosexual acts, and greatly expanded the use of mutilation as a punishment. The inspiration for these measures, and for the Ecloga’s limiting the grounds for divorce, seems to have been a relentlessly literal reading of the Bible.® Of course, the main argument against icons was of the same sort.

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Passing of Crisis, 717-780 365 other military commanders. This was probably the time when Constantine divided the Opsician yet again, making it one of the smaller themes after more than half of it became the new Bucellarian Theme. In autumn 767 the emperor had the deposed patriarch Constantine humiliated and abused in the Hippodrome, and finally beheaded. Besides making a determined effort to destroy the remaining icons and some relics, the emperor launched an indiscriminate persecution of monks and nuns, maiming or killing a number of them and razing or confiscating their monasteries. While attacking iconophile officials and monks, the emperor curried favor with the tagmata and the people of the capital, many of whom he had recruited or settled there himself. He lodged soldiers in confiscated

monasteries and entertained them riotously at court. He greatly expanded the city’s water supply by restoring the Aqueduct of Valens, damaged by the Avars in 626. Food became abundant and cheap in city

markets, reportedly because the treasury hoarded so much gold that farmers became desperate for cash to pay their taxes. At Easter 769 Con-

stantine relieved the shortage of money somewhat by scattering gold through the streets of Constantinople at the coronation of his third wife Eudocia as Augusta. Later that year, he sumptuously celebrated the betrothal and marriage of his son Leo, making Leo’s bride Irene another Augusta.

After a decade of relative quiescence, the Arabs resumed serious raiding in 770, when they sacked Laodicea Combusta in the Anatolic Theme and deported its population. The next year they raided again and took more captives, while the Byzantines retaliated by raiding Armenia. In 772, when the Arabs advanced by land to besiege Sycae in the Cibyr-

rhaeot Theme, Constantine ordered forces from the Anatolics, Bucellarians, and Armeniacs to bar their retreat. But the Arabs routed the Byzantines and returned with their booty. The emperor asked for a truce from the caliph Mansur, without result. Though these Arab victories could have been taken as signs of divine

displeasure with Iconoclasm, Constantine had silenced all iconophile opposition. His loyal strategi spread his persecution of monks through all but the border areas of the empire. In the Thracesians, the strategus Michael Lachanodracon confiscated all monastic property and forced every monk and nun to marry on pain of blinding and exile. By 772 he had eradicated monasticism within his theme. Constantine did not so so far in the rest of the empire, but he approved what Lachanodracon had done.

366 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE To gain more military glory, the emperor planned to attack not the Arabs but the more vulnerable Bulgars. In spring 774 he sailed for the Danube delta with a large fleet that apparently carried the tagamata, while

the cavalry from the themes advanced on land. The Bulgars promptly sued for peace. Constantine agreed, perhaps because the sailing weather looked perilous. But he kept the cavalry from the themes in the forts of Thrace, and seems to have looked for a pretext to attack again. In the fall he found one. His spies informed him that the Bulgar khan Telerig was sending troops to deport from the border region some Slavs who were apparently friendly to the empire. The emperor quickly assembled his army, ambushed the Bulgars near the frontier, and crushed them.” In spring 775 Constantine began still another land and sea expedition

against the Bulgars, this time avoiding the dangers of the weather by leading his army on land. A storm nonetheless destroyed much of his fleet off Mesembria, and the emperor retreated. Though the khan Telerig made friendly overtures, these turned out to be a ruse to discover the identities of the imperial spies in the khanate, whom he killed. In late summer, Constantine started a retaliatory expedition, but when he reached Arcadiopolis he was stricken with a fever and boils on his legs. The emperor died on his way back to the capital. Constantine’s had been an extraordinary reign, but his success had been decidedly mixed. Although he had exploited the Abbasids’ overthrow of the Umayyads to win some easy victories from the Arabs, he had gained nothing of importance but Camachum and some Christian settlers for Thrace. In Thrace he had expanded and strengthened Byzan-

tine holdings somewhat and given the Bulgars better than he got, but even against them he gained no decisive advantage. In forcing outward acceptance of Iconoclasm on his officials by a reign of terror, he had be-

gun a bitter and avoidable theological controversy. Iconophiles, who later dubbed him “Name of Dung” (Kopronymos), rejoiced at his death, rumoring that he himself had seen it as divine punishment. Yet Constantine also had his partisans, particularly in the army, and his memory lingered long after him.

LEO IV’ S MODERATION Constantine’s twenty-five-year-old son became the emperor Leo IV,

sometimes known as the Khazar because his mother was the Khazar princess Irene. Early in his reign, Leo naturally lacked the experience

Passing of Crisis, 717-780 367 TABLE 8

The Dynasty of Leo II Emperors are in capital letters and italics, with the years of their reigns marked “r.”” Other years are of births and deaths unless indicated otherwise.

LEO UI = Maria (ca. 675-741; tr. 717~41)

ARTAVASDUS = Anna Irene = CONSTANTINE V = Eudocia

(r. 741-43) the Khazar (718-75;

(d. 750) r. 741-75)

Nicephorus —_ Nicetas

IRENE = LEO IV Christopher § Nicephorus 3M F (ca. 755-803; | (750-80; (b. ca. 755) (Db. ca. 758)

Philaretus r. 797-802) t. 775-80) of Amnia |

F

Maria of Amnia = CONSTANTINE VI = Theodote

(divorced 79 5) (771-97; r. 780-97)

MICHAEL If = Euphrosyne F Leo

(See Table 11) (796-97)

and authority with which his father had overawed opponents. Constantine had made matters worse by granting Leo’s slightly younger brothers

Christopher and Nicephorus the rank of Caesar, which could make them rallying points for strict iconoclasts if Leo was too conciliatory to iconophiles. Yet the iconophiles, who included many officials and Leo’s own wife Irene, needed placating. A careful and resourceful man, Leo tried to moderate the divisions left behind by his father. At his accession Leo discovered and confiscated a vast fund of gold intended for the use of his younger brothers, and used it to give generous donatives to the army and the people of the capital. At the next army payday, in the spring of 776, Leo encouraged troops from the tagmata and themes to demand the coronation of his little son Constantine as his heir. He crowned his son only after extracting an oath that they would defend the boy’s right to the throne, excluding Leo’s brothers. Just a month later, Leo’s brother Nicephorus was discovered in a plot backed

by some imperial bodyguards and grooms. With the consent of his

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Shrinking of Society, 610-780 377

been the richest and most populous parts of Anatolia, containing valleys

with the peninsula’s most fertile land and its largest concentrations of cities, and no doubt the larger part of its population. Yet the archeological evidence 1s clear that most of these relatively numerous cities grew a

good deal smaller during this period, and the population of their surrounding countryside presumably declined as well.

Western and northwestern Asia Minor, however, were the parts of the empire that enemy attacks damaged least. Much of the Thracesian and Opsician themes remained untouched by raiders throughout the seventh and eighth centuries. Although the Arabs ravaged some coastal

areas of the Thracesians and the Opsician between 670 and 677 and some interior cities of the Optimates and Bucellarians between 716 and 718, otherwise their raids were infrequent and brief. In western Anatolia many cities never fell to the Persians or Arabs at all, most others fell only once, and the rural areas were barely affected. The southern coast of Asia Minor, which became the Cibyrrhaeot Theme, suffered from Arab sea raids more often than the western coast, but even it was usually at peace. Thus the richest part of the empire was seldom raided, and military insecurity seems not to have been the main reason for the shrinkage of most Byzantine cities.! The Anatolian plateau, which included the eastern part of the Bucellarians but lay mostly within the Anatolic and Armeniac themes, had always been poorer and more rural than the lowlands to its west. Most of its less fertile land was better suited to raising animals than to growing crops. The plateau probably became poorer still in this period, because it was the object of the great majority of Persian and Arab raids. Nonetheless, the Arab raiders usually advanced only a short distance through the passes of the Taurus and Antitaurus, and returned as soon as they had rustled as much livestock as they could comfortably drive home. Just inside the Cilician Gates through the Taurus, Arab raids could be an annual occurrence, and led the hapless inhabitants of that part of the Anatolic Theme to dig themselves underground shelters 1n the soft rock. The raiders afflicted the southern part of the Armeniac Theme only a little less often. The more determined raiders penetrated far into both themes, and sacked almost all the towns at one time or another, often repeatedly. Many cities shrank to mere forts, and as such became mulitary bases and places of refuge. Yet over most of the plateau the raids were not so frequent as permanently to deplete the herds of sheep and cattle, and the pastures were practically indestructible for longer than a single season.

378 THE CONTAINED CATASTROPHE

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Internal Reforms,

780-842

Wey S——— In 780 Leo IV’s widow Irene and her nine-year-old son Constantine VI seemed unlikely to provide strong leadership. The unpromising precedent was Martina’s brief regency for Heraclonas in 641, and like Martina Irene had powerful enemies. Irene was also an iconophile, whereas the army, government, and clergy had been officially iconoclast for fifty years. As a woman, she felt unable to lead the army, which had become the most important part of the state, nor would

the army have accepted her if she had tried. The two eldest sons of Constantine V were in their early twenties and prime candidates for the throne; the second of them, Nicephorus, had already conspired against Leo IV. Even if they did not seize power, someone else might try to rule for young Constantine instead of the empress, and in any case she was supposed to step down as soon as her son was ready to rule. Many knowledgeable people must have doubted Irene would last that long.

THE NEW REGIME OF IRENE Yet Irene, an orphan in her mid-twenties from the shrunken provincial town of Athens, had keen political instincts, a strong will, and some devoted allies in the bureaucracy. The precariousness of her position seems to have given her a sense of urgency. A month and a half after her husband’s death, she foiled a plot, led by the postal logothete and the domestic of the Excubitors, to put Constantine V’s second son Nicepho-

rus on the throne. The empress exiled the conspirators and had Nicephorus and his four brothers ordained priests to make them ineligible

ee Sade.

418 THE LONG REVIVAL

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97. Irene (r. 797-802), with her son Constantine VI (r. 780-97) on the reverse. Gold nomisma, shown twice actual size. (Photo: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., copyright 1996)

to rule. She gave the vacated office of postal logothete to a loyal and ca-

pable eunuch, Stauracius, and secured her support within the bureaucracy. Without yet trying to abolish Iconoclasm, Irene began to select iconophile bishops, and was soon able to count on the backing of the Church. In 781 the strategus of Sicily rebelled, and the Arabs attacked Cappadocia. Rather than depend on the generals appointed by her husband, Irene assigned the operations to palace eunuchs whom she knew and trusted. These soon put down the Sicilian revolt and saw to the defense of Cappadocia, though the veteran Thracesian strategus Michael Lachanodracon was the one who actually defeated the Arabs near Caesarea. The next year, the exasperated caliph Mahdi sent his son Hartn alRashid to invade Anatolia with an army that reached the stupendous total of 95,793 men. To oppose him, Irene seems to have appointed her most trusted eunuch, the postal logothete Stauracius. After Hartn had raided almost to Constantinople, Stauracius managed to trap him in the valley of the Sangarius. When Stauracius agreed to negotiate, however, a disloyal Byzantine general betrayed him to the Arabs. Irene accepted a truce that cost her tribute of 160,000 nomismata a year in order to ransom her adviser. At least this humiliating treaty let the empress replace military commanders of dubious loyalty with commanders who proved to be faithful to her.

Irene promptly turned her attention to the Balkans, where she had Stauracius redeem his reputation 1n 783 by leading an expedition against the Slavs. He marched from Constantinople through Thessalonica to the Peloponnesus, cowing the Slavs and collecting booty and tribute. The

next year Irene herself and young Constantine toured Thrace with an

Internal Reforms, 780-842 419

army, refounding Thracian Beroea under the name of Irenopolis, and reaching Philippopolis, well west of the old frontier. Without running much risk or quite leading her troops, the empress gained in a year as much Thracian territory as Constantine V had won in his whole reign. The Byzantine campaigning continued in 784. Irene had an opportunity to move against Iconoclasm that same year, when the patriarch Paul fell ill, and on his deathbed called for an ecumenical council to condemn Iconoclasm. He also proposed, presumably with Irene’s approval, that his successor be the protoasecretis ‘Tarasius. After Paul’s death, Irene summoned a group of clergy, officials, and oth-

ers who endorsed the choice of Tarasius. To the dismay of some of them, Tarasius accepted the patriarchate only on condition that an ecumenical council be held. The change from Iconoclasm was a wrenching

one for a ruler so new and insecure as Irene to impose, but she proceeded in the attempt with determination. Before the council, the empress threw off the humiliation of paying tribute to the caliph, and in retaliation the Arabs kept the eastern patriarchs from sending delegates to Constantinople, and resumed raiding from their base at Adata. But in the winter of 786 the Armeniac strategus Nicephorus learned that floods had damaged Adata’s walls, and took

his chance to destroy the city. In the spring Irene and Constantine accompanied another army to Thrace, where they continued pushing back the Slavs.

Leaving this army to its work, the victorious empress and her son returned to the capital in time to convene their ecumenical council in the Church of the Holy Apostles. By now the army’s commanders were loyal to Irene; but many of the troops of the tagmata still honored the memory of the iconoclast Constantine V, under whom they had served for years. A mob of them gathered outside the church when the council had barely begun, and rowdily demanded its immediate end. After gauging her strength and finding it wanting, Irene dissolved the council and dismissed its delegates.

Despite her apparent failure, the empress briskly announced a campaign against the Arabs, ordering the tagmata to set out for the East. When they obeyed, the empress had Stauracius lead loyal troops from Thrace into Constantinople. Then she sent to the tagmata in Anatolia and discharged some fifteen hundred of them for their recent rioting against her council. She conducted this operation so skillfully that the soldiers obeyed without resistance. She then replaced the chief icono-

420 THE LONG REVIVAL

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98. The Second Council of Nicaea (787), with the patriarch Tarasius (left of cross), Constantine VI (right of cross), seated bishops, and a condemned iconoclast below. Miniature from the Menologium of Basil H. (Photo: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana)

clast bishops and reconvoked her council at Nicaea, the site of the First Ecumenical Council. This Second Council of Nicaea went as Irene intended. She remained in the capital, leaving the patriarch Tarasius to preside. The bishops present, who except for legates from abroad had almost all tolerated Iconoclasm, allowed even well-known iconoclasts to recant. Citing passages from the Fathers that approved the veneration of icons, the council condemned Iconoclasm and the iconoclast Council of Hieria. The bishops held their last session in Constantinople, where they hailed Constan4

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tine VI and Irene as the new Constantine and the new Helena. Irene overruled Tarasius and others who wanted harsher punishment for former iconoclasts, and her clemency was matched by a remarkable absence of open iconoclast resistance. After almost sixty years of official Icono-

clasm, not a single prominent person is known to have defended the doctrine once it ceased to be official.

Internal Reforms, 780-842 421

Having restored the icons and secured the frontiers, Irene had only to marry off her son and let him take power to complete a successful regency. Constantine VI was already betrothed to the Frankish princess Rotrud, the daughter of Charlemagne. In 787, when Constantine was sixteen and Rotrud about thirteen, Irene asked for her to be sent east: but Charlemagne was too fond of Rotrud to let her go. A year later, giving up on the match, Irene held a competition among suitable Byzantine candidates, at which she and Stauracius selected a wife for her son, the granddaughter of a saintly provincial magnate. This bride show seems to have made a favorable impression, and set a precedent.! Yet Irene showed no sign of conceding her son the power to which he was entitled, and he began to resent both his subordination and the

wife who had been forced upon him. As sympathy for him spread at court, his mother suffered several reverses in 788. Arab raiders defeated

the Anatolic army near the Cilician Gates, and the Bulgars ambushed another Byzantine army on the Strymon River, where it had advanced. When Irene sent one of her eunuchs to expel the Franks from the Principality of Benevento, the Beneventans and Franks defeated and killed him. Although she then made an alliance with Benevento and created a new Theme of Macedonia to keep the Bulgars out of western Thrace, her military reputation was tarnished. By 790 Constantine thought he saw his chance. He directed a plot against the logothete Stauracius, naively supposing that his mother was being manipulated by the eunuch. But Stauracius discovered the conspiracy and informed Irene. She confined her son to his quarters, and demanded the army swear to keep Constantine from power as long as she lived. The generals stood by Irene, and most of the soldiers reluctantly took the oath, until the Armeniacs objected. Irene sent the drungary of the Watch Alexius Musele to persuade the Armeniacs, but they deposed their strategus Nicephorus, forced Alexius to take his place, and proclaimed Constantine sole emperor. At this news the four other Anatolian land themes also deposed their strategi and rallied to Constantine. [rene bowed to necessity and released her son. Constantine VI took power at age nineteen, with the support of most of the soldiers, but with little capacity to rule. He found his responsibil-

ities daunting, and remained deeply attached to his mother. Although he confined her to her palace and exiled Stauracius, he never deposed her or most of her supporters. After starting and then interrupting expeditions against both the Bulgars and the Arabs within a single campaign-

422 THE LONG REVIVAL ing season, at the beginning of 792 he released Irene, recalled Stauracius, and ordered his troops to acclaim his mother along with himself. When

the Armeniacs refused to acknowledge Irene, as they had before, Constantine angered them further by imprisoning their former strategus Alexius Musele. The young emperor led another expedition against the Bulgars, but met with a disastrous defeat near Marcellae. In disgust at Constantine’s incompetence, some of the tagmata proclaimed his uncle Nicephorus emperor, priest though he was. Apparently on the advice of Irene and Stauracius, the young emperor blinded Nicephorus, slit the tongues of Nicephorus’s brothers, and blinded Alexius Musele. This subdued the tagmata, but the Armeniacs remained in revolt until the next year, when Constantine won his first victory by defeating them for defending his interests better than he had done himself. He discharged a thousand of them, whom he branded on the face with the words “Armeniac Conspirator.” In the confusion, however, the Arabs seized the Armeniac border fort of Camachum and raided the Anatolic Theme. Irene and Constantine shared power uneasily despite their reconciliation. In 795 the emperor repudiated his wife Maria, whom he had never liked, and married again in defiance of canon law. Though the patriarch Tarasius kept his disapproval quiet, Constantine’s supposed adultery was denounced by two respected monks, Plato of Saccudium and his nephew Theodore, who were relatives of Constantine’s new wife and friends of Irene. The pair of them fomented opposition to the marriage for two years, beginning the so-called Moechian (“Adulterous’’) controversy, until Constantine finally imprisoned Plato and exiled Theodore. Since the emperor’s remarriage remained unpopular and his government indecisive, most of his officials and generals came to prefer the still powerful Irene. In 797, as the Arabs raided Anatolia again, she and her

allies plotted against Constantine. At first he escaped their attempt to seize him; Irene was about to ask her son for terms, when her fellow conspirators managed to capture the young emperor and blind him. Al-

though they claimed that he survived the blinding and lived on in confinement, he almost certainly died of his wounds. This sordid revolution left Irene the only ruler, the first woman ever to reign over the Roman Empire by herself. Yet from this time Irene appears to have lost much of her old spirit, perhaps from a lasting sense of guilt. The Byzantines by and large accepted her position, but it was unprecedented and vulnerable. To make

Internal Reforms, 780-842 423 clear that she alone was the sovereign, she awkwardly called herself emperor rather than empress in official documents, and struck coins with her portrait on both sides. She had to leave the succession open, since

any man she adopted or married would immediately become a rival. The empress found only churchmen and eunuchs fairly safe. She recalled the monks Plato and Theodore with her apologies, and divided her trust between two eunuch patricians, the former logothete Stauracius and the newly prominent Aétius. Irene’s assumption of power soon provoked a plot in favor of the ordained and mutilated sons of Constantine V, though they found so little support that Aétius readily arranged their exile to Athens. But the Arabs too sensed Irene’s weakness, and in 798 made their boldest raids in six-

teen years, reaching Ephesus in the Thracesian Theme and sacking Malagina in the Opsician. The empress asked the caliph Hartin al-Rashid

for peace, and appears to have renewed the immense tribute she had temporarily agreed to pay in 782. The following year plotters in Athens tried to free the unlucky sons of Constantine V, but only caused the rest of them to be blinded. Irene tried to shore up her support by distributing donatives to the people of Constantinople, and seems to have exempted the Church from paying the taxes due on its secular tenants and their farms. She also in-

vited Plato of Saccudium and his nephew Theodore to take over the venerable but almost deserted Monastery of Studius in Constantinople. Theodore used his position as abbot to become a forceful religious leader,

and turned Studius into the head of a family of monasteries distinguished by strict discipline and Christian scholarship. The empress fell seriously ill in 799, and her eunuch advisers Aétius

and Stauracius began to plot to determine the succession. Even when she recovered, the plotting continued. By the next year, Stauracius was planning to seize the throne for himself, apparently on the theory that a eunuch was no less fit to reign than a woman. But his conspiracy ended when he died of disease, leaving Irene without a counterweight to the formidable power of Aétius, now strategus of the Anatolic Theme. Meanwhile Pope Leo HI crowned Charlemagne emperor at Rome on Christmas Day 800. Although the Frankish ruler had recognized Irene as

sovereign of the Roman Empire in a treaty just two years before, the pope argued that a woman was ineligible to be emperor, so that Charlemagne was simply filling a vacancy. Charlemagne had no intention of deposing Irene, but reports of his coronation further weakened her au-

424 THE LONG REVIVAL thority at Constantinople, which she tried to restore by distributing more

donatives and abolishing trade duties in the capital. She sent Charlemagne an embassy, and in 802 elicited a remarkable proposal. The Frankish

emperor, then a widower, offered to marry Irene. The marriage would settle their conflicting claims to be emperor and would legally unite the Byzantine and Prankish empires. What this could have meant in practice was and is quite unclear, but the empress was willing to consider it. Her courtiers were not. By this time Aétius was strategus of both the Anatolic and Opsician themes, and his brother Leo was strategus of both Thrace and Macedonia. Since Leo was not a eunuch, Aétius hoped to make him emperor. But other officials, among them the domestic of the Scholae Nicetas Triphyllius, opposed Aétius and made their own bid for power. While Charlemagne’s ambassadors were still in the city, Nicetas and his allies seized the Great Palace, captured Irene, and proclaimed the general logothete Nicephorus emperor. Irene accepted her deposition with dignity and was exiled to a convent she had founded.

The twenty-two years of Irene’s rule, with and without her son, brought important changes. Unlike her predecessors since Leo III, who had found most of their support in the army, Irene had relied heavily on her civil officials and clergy. On the whole the results served the empire rather well. Arab raids were no worse than before, and most of Slavicheld Thrace was retaken. Religious peace returned with the condemnation of Iconoclasm, and the reserve in the treasury remained adequate despite Irene’s largesses. Auspiciously for the future, the clergy and bureaucracy recovered their confidence and began restoring the empire’s system of education and administration.

NICEPHORUS S$ EXPANSION The plotters who overthrew Irene had chosen a man of great ability. The new emperor Nicephorus had not only managed state finance for several years as general logothete, but seems also to have been the stratesus of the Armeniacs who had sacked the Arab stronghold of Adata in 786. Allegedly descended from the Arab princely line of the Ghassanids, at the age of something over fifty he remained active and inventive. Familiar with the government and known for his piety, he was well regarded by most officials and clergy. Although he was a usurper, Nicephorus and his partisans could reasonably plead that they had acted to avert the usurpation of Aétius’s brother, and within a month of his coronation

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Internal Reforms, 780-842 425

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The only military units that seem to have been entirely lost during this period were a few of Tzimisces’ small themes that scarcely had time to establish themselves before they were overrun.'' The Theme of Sicily was only driven from the island after a dogged defense lasting for almost a century, and even then held its part of the Italian mainland. Several military reforms helped the army adapt to its changing functions. Nicephorus I probably recruited the first new army units since the sixth century, the new Tagma of the Hicanati and three themes in Greece. Theophilus increased the soldiers’ numbers further and almost doubled their pay, making the whole army a much more professional force. He also made the themes more flexible by dividing their thousandman drungi into two-hundred-man banda, and by turning the main sectors of the eastern frontier into independent cleisurae. Basil I strengthened the Imperial Fleet by giving it its own permanent marines, causing a great and almost immediate improvement in the empire’s naval forces. Leo V1 increased the proportion of the cavalry, thus making the themes more suitable for offenstve warfare. The same emperor began to create smaller themes on the eastern frontier that allowed the empire to annex

land by gradual increments. Nicephorus II contributed a new sort of heavily armed cavalry, and conquered a host of little themes on the frontier. John Tzimisces created the new Tagma of the Immortals and tightened control over Nicephorus’s many small themes and his own by erouping them under dukes. Basil I] began using foreign mercenaries on a significant scale by enlisting the Varangian Guard, and soon made the ethnarch, or commander of foreigners, an important officer. All these changes tended to enhance the army’s offensive capabilities. Although the army grew enormously, most of the increase occurred toward the end of this period, probably because by then the empire had the money and manpower to spare. The process began with the 10,000 new soldiers enrolled by Nicephorus I in 809 for his Greek themes and his new Tagma of the Hicanati, though the 4,000 of them in the Peloponnesus and Cephalonia evidently came from the Mardaite oarsmen of Hellas. Theophilus’s 30,000 new recruits were all Khurramite refugees from the caliphate. During the rest of the ninth century, the only additions to the rolls were Basil I’s 4,000 marines for the Imperial Fleet. When Basil founded the Theme of Dalmatia he sent it no new troops. During the first half of the tenth century, apart from the 12,000 Arab refugees of the Banti Habib, the army gained only about 14,000 men, 6,000 of them

$48 THE LONG REVIVAL probably Armenian natives of the new themes they garrisoned. Only from 963 to 1025 did the army expand rapidly by some 90,000 men, most of them Armenians with a scattering of other foreigners. While the army certainly grew much stronger between 780 and 1025, the final figure of 250,000 or so on the rolls is misleading. Field armies in the great campaigns of the later tenth century seldom had more than 40,000 soldiers, about a third of them cavalry. That was usually enough;

more men were hard to supply for long. The empire could field two such forces at a time, and still leave enough troops behind to defend its territory. After Tzimisces created the Immortals, the tagmata alone probably had 36,000 men, 24,000 of them cavalry. The Varangians made another 6,000. Among the themes, the troops with most fighting experi-

ence and nearest to hand for campaigns were the over 100,000 men added to the frontiers between goo and 1025. Most of the 96,000 men of the themes dating from before 900 were hardly needed, apart from the

naval themes and those in Italy and the Crimea, which were still exposed to attack. As the interior themes became almost immune from invasions or raids, they seldom needed to fight at home. Even after Leo VI increased the proportion of cavalry in the themes to a quarter, the interior themes were top-heavy with infantry, who had done good service as garrison troops

when their regions were frequently raided but were not much needed

for campaigns. When Romanus I settled the Banu Habib on the border | and Nicephorus II garrisoned Tarsus, the emperors apparently gave their new themes no infantry whatever. In all likelihood some other frontier themes were also composed mostly or entirely of cavalry. The interior themes could of course have been kept in training by calling them up by

turns for service on campaigns. But with plenty of seasoned soldiers available in the tagmata and frontier themes, the effort scarcely seemed worthwhile. Already in the campaigns against Crete of 911 and 949 many

soldiers of the nearby Thracesian Theme were passed over in favor of troops from the tagmata and eastern frontier themes. The obvious explanation is that the Thracesians had become worse troops than the others.

While most soldiers who served on expeditions received campaign pay, all soldiers seem to have received the same regular pay whether they

fought or not. The annual rate was frve nomismata for an ordinary soldier until 840, when Theophilus changed it to one nomisma for each year of service up to twelve. By Leo VI’s day, soldiers seem to have been

Expansion of Society, 780-1025 $49

paid a flat rate of nine nomismata a year. This rate, though only about half what was needed to support a family adequately, produced a large payroll when multiplied by 120,000 to 250,000 men. By the late tenth century the government was receiving very little service in return for these payments to the interior themes, as the emperors must have realized. One possible solution would have been to transfer to the borders men whose families had lived in the interior for centuries. Yet by doing this

Nicephorus I had raised loud complaints, and his successors, with less need for manpower, seem not to have repeated the experiment. Another possibility was simply to strike some soldiers from the rolls. But this would have meant either taking away their military lands, leaving them destitute and rebellious, or granting them at least some of their land without military obligations. The emperors were unwilling to give up something for nothing, especially because they might need the soldiers in some future crisis or campaign. The tenth-century legislation against selling mulitary lands must have been largely directed at these soldiers of the interior themes, because the requirements of active service should have forced most of the others to maintain their lands. In an effort to get some value for all this regular pay, the government sometimes demanded money from soldiers who were on the rolls but did no service. The principle had long been established that holders of military land could provide and equip someone else to serve in their place, and the next step was to ask for cash instead of the soldier. As early as 921 Romanus Lecapenus asked the soldiers of the Theme of Peloponnesus to pay five nomismata apiece, or half that if they were very poor, rather than go on a campaign in Italy. In 949 Constantine VII asked for four nomismata apiece from some cavalry of the Thracesians who were not joining his expedition against Crete. When Nicephorus I declared that heavy cavalrymen were to be supported by military lands worth twelve pounds of gold rather than the usual four pounds, in most cases two cavalrymen who stayed at home probably bought heavy arms and armor for a third cavalryman who campaigned. Thus the government traded unneeded manpower for better equipment or more revenue, an eminently practical solution. Though such practices could weaken the army if carried too far, in 1025 the army was still strong. During this period the civil service had less influence than the military establishment, and grew only modestly as its responsibilities expanded along with the empire. The bureaucracy continued to include a

$50 THE LONG REVIVAL postal logothete for diplomacy and domestic security, a general logothete for taxation, a military logothete for the army payroll, a great curator for imperial property, and a city prefect for Constantinople. Yet these ministers’ authority gradually diminished, and from the end of the ninth century the postal logothete ceased to be the most important civilian official. In the tenth century that distinction usually belonged to the grand chamberlain, who was a palatine official rather than a civil servant. His influence depended on his presence in the Great Palace, particularly when the emperor was underage or away on campaign, and reflected the

fact that power had become more concentrated in the imperial office. One official who kept his importance was the quaestor with his legal responsibilities, since after the codifying work of Basil I and Leo VI the emperors continued to exercise their legislative authority. The Basilica again gave the empire a comprehensive law code, which Leo’s novels brought more or less up to date. These laws’ promulgation ended a long period in which the empire’s legislation had been so hard to consult that few new laws had been made and many existing laws had become dead letters. The main concern of the novels of Leo’s successors in the tenth century was with land tenure, though they also regulated various judicial matters. To provide for stricter enforcement of the laws, the emperors named more judges in both the capital and the themes. As state property began to grow again after almost disappearing in the seventh century, it came to be entrusted not to the great curator or general logothete but to new officials. The first major acquisition, the estates of the Mangana confiscated from Michael I after his deposition, received

their own curator.'* The treasury began to keep much of the property it confiscated, and the state kept much of the land in the themes it annexed from the tenth century onward. In 996 Basil II repossessed the imperial estates acquired or given away by Basil Lecapenus. Crown land was administered by a new domestic logothete, whom Basil IT made in-

dependent of the general logothete.!° The revenues from imperial estates must have been largely responsible for the vast surplus piled up in the treasury by 1025. That surplus, like the ability to support such a large army, is a sign that the civil service was working efficiently through almost all of this period. After some disarray and demoralization in the chaotic seventh and eighth centuries, the bureaucracy’s training and morale began to recover during the reigns of Irene and Nicephorus I. Both Nicephorus and Theophilus

Expansion of Society, 780-1025 $51

made particular efforts to stem corruption. The reduction of enemy raids

would have reduced the number of temporary tax exemptions, while the land legislation of the tenth century would have made taxes easier to collect. After Basil II apparently decreed that richer members of tax assessment districts would have to pay when poorer members defaulted, the tax collectors must have been able to find someone to make up almost all the taxes that were due. No doubt many ctvil servants used their power and influence to em-

bezzle state funds, to finagle grants of state land, or to buy out smallholders or soldiers in violation of the land laws. The legislation of Romanus I and Basil II makes prominent mention of civilian dignitaries when listing those who tried to buy land illegally. John Tzimisces was indignant that Basil Lecapenus had granted himself huge tracts of state land in Cilicia, and Basil allegedly poisoned Tzimisces to keep him from reclaiming them. On the other hand, the emperors seem to have cared much less about limiting the holdings of civil servants in the Balkans,

where land was more plentiful and large landholders might even help bring in settlers. Most estates of civil officials grew up in the Balkan part of the empire.'* Though after the ninth century the officer corps became difficult for outsiders to break into, the leadership of the bureaucracy and especially of the palace staff were more open to new talent. The emperors became

familiar with many of the men serving them in Constantinople, even some of low rank, and took more interest in promotions there. By contrast, Theophilus’s pay increase appears to have made the army more conservative, so that an immigrant like Leo V or a prosperous peasant like Michael IT was less likely to reach the highest ranks. The Lecapeni rose in two generations, but they got their start when Romanus I’s father entered Basil I’s bodyguard, which was practically a palatine post. Within the palace, Basil I himself had advanced quickly from obscurity to be head of the imperial stables and then grand chamberlain. Because laws

against castration made eunuchs rare but they were still preferred for palatine offices, they had particularly good opportunities, and they could help their relatives rise in government. Bureaucrats from newly prominent families were often more ambitious than generals from established ones and, lacking inherited wealth, were eager to secure their position by investing their savings in land. The number of state employees had burgeoned since the eighth cen-

$52 THE LONG REVIVAL tury. By 1025 the empire’s officials, officers, soldiers, and oarsmen must with their families have exceeded a million souls. Those outside the system, who received no money from the state and had no superior officer or official to protect them, were easily exploited by bureaucrats and especially by tax collectors. Although the civil service and palace staff were relatively small, and mostly composed of humble clerks or custodians with little chance of making an illegal fortune, the richest bureaucrats and dignitaries bore watching, especially at a time when the government was acquiring so much money and land. Through most of these years, in fact, the emperors seem to have watched their bureaucracy vigilantly,

sensing that it could endanger their power and that of the army. The emperors and military officers were strong enough to keep the civil service in check, as long as they had the will to do so.

THE PARTNERSHIP OF EMPEROR AND CHURCH From the fourth to the early ninth century the empire had endured one theological controversy after another, and over a dozen emperors defended positions that were later branded heretical. After worsening during the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, the tension between Church

and state began to ease, and by 1025 the Byzantine church was more

united than ever before, and more obedient to the emperor. It also possessed great wealth, most of it in land, which the emperors beginning with Nicephorus II tried to limit but not to confiscate. At the same time, the conversion of the Bulgars, Serbs, and Russians made the Byzantine church much larger, spreading the empire’s influence far beyond its borders.

After much tension between the earlier iconoclast emperors and the clergy and monks, in restoring the icons the empress Irene allied herself with the Church and monasticism. Under her, particularly through the efforts of Theodore of Studius, monasteries became stronger and more independent. Yet in the Moechian controversy Theodore also started a new type of dispute over imperial control of the Church. He not only rejected the remarriage of Constantine VI but refused communion with clergy who accepted it, until Michael I finally settled the dispute on his terms. Theodore showed the power that spiritual authority could have,

but even many clerics doubted that the principles at stake in the Moechian controversy were worth the trouble they caused.

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130. Saint Theodore of Studius. Eleventh-century mosaic from the Monastery of Nea Mone, Chios. (Photo: Benaki Museum Photographic Archive, Athens)

The restored Iconoclasm of the early ninth century was more sympa-

thetic to the clergy than eighth-century Iconoclasm had been. Leo V and his iconoclast successors won over most bishops and monks and found a church leader of some stature 1n the learned John the Grammarian. By the time Theophilus began his sporadic persecution, Theodore of Studius and most iconophile bishops were dead, and even iconophile

monks seemed to be a dwindling group. Yet Iconoclasm never had a strong base in the Church, and Theodora found it easy to abolish. Even though the bishops of iconoclast times were deposed wholesale in 843, scarcely any of them defended Iconoclasm after its condemnation on the

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Sunday of Orthodoxy. It was to be the last great heresy to disturb the Byzantine church. At first Iconoclasm left most ordinary priests discredited for accepting it, while the new hierarchy, largely composed of monks, was inexpertenced and unsure of its authority. Quarrels over ordinations arose under

the patriarch Methodius, continued under his successor Ignatius, and became worse when Michael III replaced Ignatius with Photius. After

$54. THE LONG REVIVAL

the pope rejected Photius, Photius excommunicated the pope for the supposed heresy of following the customs of the western church. This Photian Schism was short, because Basil I soon returned Ignatius to the patriarchate, but the pope then insisted on deposing the clergy Photius had ordained. Although Photius restored his deposed clerics when he resumed his patriarchate on Ignatius’s death, all his ordinations were disputed after Leo VI deposed him again. Even after they were finally accepted and official unity was achieved by the end of the century, resentment lingered between former partisans of Ignatius and Photius.

Such acrimony exacerbated the controversy over the Tetragamy, Leo VI’s fourth marriage in 906. The dispute was as much over the validity of the ordinations of the patriarch Euthymius, Leo’s replacement for Nicholas Mysticus, as over Leo’s marriage and the legitimacy of Leo’s

heir, both of which the pope and Euthymius conditionally accepted. When Leo died, his brother Alexander reinstated Nicholas and deposed Euthymius’s clergy. The controversy dragged on until 920, when Romanus I prodded Nicholas into recognizing Euthymius’s ordinations and dispensation of the marriage. By that time the original political implications of the controversy had long ceased to matter.

After these disputes, the Church and emperor seem to have taken some care to prevent further controversy. The Church left the emperors relatively free to handle the succession and relations with the western church, while the emperors avoided uncanonical marriages and depositions of churchmen. After Nicholas Mysticus’s death the emperors also chose less assertive patriarchs. The strongest of them, Polyeuctus, made little effort to stop essentially political measures that affected the Church, like Nicephorus II’s law on church lands. Polyeuctus only insisted on spiritual principles, as when he rejected Nicephorus’s idea that to die fighting Muslims amounted to martyrdom. Polyeuctus required John

Tzimisces to do penance for his murder of Nicephorus, but crowned John emperor afterwards. Such a division of authority, with Church and state minding their own business, became widely accepted. Through most of this period the church hierarchy was dominated by monks. As former laymen, the patriarchs Nicephorus and Photius were exceptions, but they enjoyed less prestige than their rivals Theodore of Studius and Ignatius, and eventually had to defer to them. Monks were not necessarily less tolerant than others. Photius was harsher with iconoclasts than Ignatius, and in the Tetragamist controversy Photians like

Expansion of Society, 780-1025 $55

Nicholas Mysticus condemned Leo VI’s marriage while Ignatians like Euthymius condoned it. The key to positions in these controversies was usually the partisans’ loyalty to their leaders, rather than to a set of principles. Since monks tended to enjoy the greatest spiritual authority, first for their opposition to Iconoclasm and later for their personal sanctity, parties led by monks had an advantage. The monks’ influence became stronger as they formed larger communities. After Theodore’s Monastery of Studius in Constantinople was temporarily taken over by the iconoclast emperors, opposition to Iconoclasm became centered in the monasteries of Mount Olympus in Bithynia, not far from the capital. After the restoration of orthodoxy, Studius recovered some of its former prestige, and Mount Olympus kept the importance it had gained. Monasteries also multiplied on Mount Latrus near Ephesus, and from the end of the tenth century on Mount Athos

near Thessalonica. Monks on mountains were far enough from the world to escape many of its distractions, but close enough to influence it. The influence they sought was in the first instance spiritual rather _ than political.

During the early ninth century, the Church was inevitably preoccupied with Iconoclasm to some extent. Since the main theological arguments had already been made on each side, theologians like the exiled patriarch Nicephorus devoted themselves mostly to polemics. The struggles

of iconophile saints, most of whom were monks, provided subjects for hagiography for many years to come; but naturally the earliest lives were more vivid and stirring than the later ones, which became formulaic and conventional. The Photian Schism and the Tetragamy produced more polemics, and deeply felt lives of the embattled monastic patriarchs Ignatius and Euthymius. Monks took a leading role not only in determining theology but in shaping a whole view of Christian life that had lasting effects on the Byzantine church. Theodore of Studius’s writings, prescribing reading and manual labor for his monks, continued to guide the activities of many monasteries besides Studius. In the tenth century, however, Athanasius of Mount Athos began to place more value on contemplation. By the year 1000 the abbot Symeon the New Theologian was advocating a search for personal salvation and closeness to God that was to become a widely shared ideal in monasteries, and touched the secular clergy and laity.’

§$$6 THE LONG REVIVAL The period’s outstanding religious achievement was the conversion of the Slavs, for which both Church and state could claim credit. Byzantine missionary activity had more or less lapsed after the sixth century, when the empire’s last pagans had been converted. Although Nicephorus I’s reoccupation of much of Greece led incidentally to converting its pagan Slavs, the mission of Constantine-Cyril and Methodius to Mora-

via in 863 represented a new departure. Even though the Moravian church became subject to the papacy and was largely destroyed by the Magyars at the end of the century, this mission set the pattern for the conversion of Bulgaria and other Slavic countries. Constantine-Cyril evidently invented the Glagolitic alphabet, later simplified into the Cyrillic, and translated the liturgy into a dialect comprehensible to most Slavs, Old Church Slavonic, thus creating an important missionary tool. The mission of Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, originally the idea

of the prince of Moravia, awoke the Byzantines to the possibilities of missionary work. The Byzantine mission to Moravia also helped convince the Bulgar khan Boris that as a pagan he was missing something important, without which his state would be more backward than its neighbors. Although the Bulgarians worried about absorption by Byzantium, the example of more distant Moravia showed that accepting Byz-

antine missionaries could be compatible with political independence. Nonetheless, the mission that arrived in Bulgaria in 864 did bring a measure of ecclesiastical and cultural subordination. Attempts by the Bulgarlans to assert their independence included two pagan uprisings, Boris’s experiments with western missionaries, and the khan Symeon’s declaring himself an emperor and his archbishop a patriarch. The end result was

annexation to the empire, but only because the Bulgarian emperor Samuel and his successors had refused to accept a protectorate. The Serbs, who asked for Byzantine missionaries and converted not

long after the Bulgarians, had less to fear from the empire and more from Bulgaria. Their efforts to ally with the Byzantines against the Bulgarians had indifferent success, but they managed to avoid any lasting Bulgarian conquest, and survived the fall of Bulgaria to become clients of the Byzantines. To their northwest the Croats, despite brief submission to the patriarchate of Constantinople in the late ninth century, be-

came a part of the western church; but they, like the Serbs, accepted Byzantine political suzerainty after the fall of Bulgaria. The only independent people in the region who were not Slavs, the Hungarians, ac-

Expansion of Society, 780-1025 $57

cepted Byzantine missionaries in the mid-tenth century, and though their final conversion came from the West they remained friendly to the empire. Russia was much too large and too distant from Byzantium to fear annexation, but it also had little need of an alliance with the emperor. By the early tenth century the Russians’ raiding and trading had given them a familiarity with the empire and its religion, and by 911 some of them were serving as Byzantine mercenaries. Some progress was made toward Christianizing Russia after the visit and conversion of Princess Olga in the mid-tenth century. Nicephorus II considered the Russians friendly enough to hire them to attack Bulgaria in 966; but he misjudged them. John Tzimisces had to teach them a healthy respect for Byzantine power. Alone among the Slavs, however, they were finally converted to Christianity not at their own request but at that of the emperor, when Basil II offered a marriage alliance. A Byzantine princess was a great favor, which Basil would probably not have accorded a ruler nearer the empire for fear of conceding a claim to the Byzantine throne. With the marriage as an inducement, Vladimir became an enthusiastic Christian and loyal ally, establishing a Russian hierarchy subject to Constantinople. The conversion of the Slavs, despite its far-reaching significance, was no more the result of conscious planning than the empire’s territorial expansion was. Unlike the contemporary western church, Byzantium

sent out no missionaries on its Own initiative into pagan and hostile lands. Its success was consequently the more remarkable, evidence of the strong impression that the Byzantines made on their neighbors and that the missionaries made on their converts. While converting fewer people than western missionaries—-who were then spreading their faith to Croatia, Hungary, the northern Slavic lands, and Scandinavia—the Byzantine church spread more than Christianity. It brought its converts to accept a degree of cultural and political leadership from the empire.'®

The closeness of the Byzantine church to the imperial government probably explains the failure of the Byzantines in the East to convert any large number of Muslims. Because the state refused to accept more than a few non-Christian subjects, most of the Muslim populations of Syria or Egypt would have needed to convert before being conquered, an obvious impossibility. To repopulate the areas that the empire did annex, the emperors extended tolerance to Jacobite and Armenian Christians, leaving the Church in the East divided and ill prepared to win converts

§§8 THE LONG REVIVAL from Islam. Nor did either Muslims or Christians easily forget that for centuries the tide of conversion in the East had run against Christianity. Even worse than Islam, to Byzantine thinking, was the dualism of the Paulicians, whose belief that the whole material world was the evil creation of an evil God differed radically from orthodox Christianity. After Theodora drove the Paulicians from the empire, Basil I mostly eliminated them from the eastern frontier by forced conversion and deportation when he conquered their statelet. But some Paulicians had traveled or were deported to the Balkans, where they won converts of their own. In the first half of the tenth century, the Bulgarian priest Bogomil developed a Bulgarian strain of dualism, which rejected the sacraments and the Bulgarian church along with the rest of the world. Despite being persecuted and condemning marriage and procreation, Bogomilism spread on the strength of its cynical spirituality. By the time of the Byzantine conquest, Bogomils were a sizable though clandestine group in Bulgaria. Except for the period of Iconoclasm and the brief Photian Schism,

the Byzantine church remained in communion with western Christians throughout these centuries. Constantine-Cyril sided with the pope against Photius, and Greek monks from southern Italy founded monasteries in and near Rome that were obedient to the papacy. Yet the eastern and western churches were developing and making their converts separately, and often as rivals. The Photian Schism highlighted some of the differences between the two, in particular the addition of the filioque to the Creed, which could be misconstrued as an important theological disagreement over the Holy Spirit. The Byzantine controversy over the Tetragamy showed not only the discrepancy between East and West in rules about marriage, but a claim by the popes to jurisdiction over Byzantine affairs that many Byzantines resented. The close identification of the Byzantine church with the state carried the danger that Christendom might split between those who acknowledged imperial authority and those who did not.

CULTURAL REVIVAL Even before these military and missionary successes, while the iconoclast controversy still simmered, Byzantine education and scholarship had begun to recover. Notwithstanding the military crises of the seventh and eighth centuries the empire had maintained a functioning civil ser-

Expansion of Society, 780-1025 559

vice, along with the schools that trained it and the books needed for teaching; yet the civil service, the schools, and the books had all been deteriorating. Without an improvement, most books would eventually have been lost as the old papyri on which they were written decayed, and the schools and bureaucracy would slowly have broken down. By the mid-eighth century the bureaucracy seems already to have been keeping its tax records badly, while interest in history had become so rare as to endanger its transmission. Since the time of Justinian I, both Church and state had come to think of learning as a luxury at best, and at worst as impious or pagan.

Iconoclasm seems to have helped change that attitude. The iconoclasts, insisting that their doctrine was fully compatible with orthodox Christian tradition, cited some isolated passages from the Church Fathers that looked unfavorable to religious images. After Irene took power in 780, the iconophiles adduced their own patristic quotations, which fa-

vored images. This set up an argument about the numbers of the citations, their precise meanings, and the contexts in which they were found. The research required was not easy, because the Fathers have little to say about images, and some of the most relevant passages were 1n obscure places. By the time of the Second Council of Nicaea of 787, iconophiles had discovered that learning could be useful, at least for defending icons.

Also around 780, inspired by the restoration of icons, a number of people from civil-service families entered monasteries, where Theodore of Studius, among others, had them read Christian literature. The growth

in the number of readers required more copying of manuscripts. For this purpose, the monks of Studius and its allied monasteries apparently adapted the cursive script long in use in the bureaucracy, creating the minuscule hand.'’ Unlike the uncial script previously used for copying books, minuscule used lowercase letters, linked them, and left spaces between words. Minuscule was therefore quicker to write and, with the words divided, easier to read. It also made books cheaper, because it fitted more words onto less parchment in less time. Parchment had become the usual material for books since Byzantium had lost its source of papyrus with the fall of Egypt, and though this made books more expensive it also made them much more durable. As copying and reading revived, so did literature. Besides polemics

against Iconoclasm and lives of the saints who had defended icons, iconophiles produced the first historical works written for many years.

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of friendship.

The emperor now had few friends outside the empire, and a number of enemies within it. Around this time he had to suppress another plot against him, led by four brothers named Anemas.'” Again Alexius demanded that Bohemund surrender Antioch and the coast of Cilicia, and in autumn 1103 sent another expedition to enforce his demand. The Byzantines retook the Cilician coast, but most of the Armenians in the mountains joined the Crusaders, and Bohemund captured Germanicea from Alexius’s few Armenian allies early in 1104. The emperor's frien Raymond of Toulouse died while besieging Tripoli, and the duke of Trebizond rebelled against Alexius with the support of Danishmend. Then the emperor’s luck improved. In May the Turks defeated Bohebl

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626 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY mund and his allies from Edessa near Harran (the ancient Carrhae). A Byzantine fleet took its chance to seize Laodicea. Alexius lost an enemy and Bohemund an ally when the emir Danishmend died. After these reverses, Bohemund made Tancred regent of Antioch again and left for

France and Italy to seek help, not against the Turks but against the Byzantines. Alexius learned that Bohemund planned a direct invasion of

| the empire from Italy, like the one made by his father, Robert Guiscard. Both sides began prolonged preparations and a strenuous search for allies. Bohemund won over Pope Paschal II, married the daughter of Philip I of France, and enlisted a body of Italian and French adventurers. The emperor withdrew his troops from Cilicia and Laodicea, which Tancred soon captured. Alexius asked for ships from Venice and married his son and heir John to a cousin of the king of Hungary, Piroshka, who received the Greek name of Irene.?? The emperor also hired mercenaries from Kilij Arslan, and protected his rear somewhat by recovering Trebizond in 1106. In the autumn of 1107 Bohemund and his men landed again in Byzantine Epirus and besieged Dyrrhachium, reportedly with thirty-four thousand men. Profiting from his previous experience with the Normans, Alexius avoided a pitched battle. Instead he used Byzantine and Venetian ships to supply Dyrrhachium and deny supplies to Bohemund. The next spring Alexius barricaded the passes around Dyrrhachium and practically besieged the Normans. A year after his landing, with his army suffering from hunger and disease, Bohemund sued for peace. He agreed to surrender the Cilician coast and Laodicea to the empire, to become the emperor’s vassal for all his other possessions, and to restore the Greek patriarch of Antioch.

The prince of Antioch returned to Italy in failure, but the treaty became a dead letter. Since Bohemund stayed in Italy, Tancred remained the real ruler of Antioch and ignored the treaty. Yet Alexius had disposed of a serious invasion, humbled Bohemund, and discouraged future western attacks on Byzantium. Tancred’s interests were confined to

northern Syria, and even there he was feuding with King Baldwin of Jerusalem, Count Baldwin of Edessa, and the son of the late Raymond of Toulouse who became count of Tripoli. Tancred was in no position to attack the empire. After defeating Bohemund, Alexius finished restoring order to his system of taxation, a task he had begun with his reform of the coinage. Since the late eleventh century, the influence of rich taxpayers, the powerless-

Improvised Reconstruction, 1081-1143 627

ness of poor ones, and the prevailing monetary confusion had led tax collectors to convert the taxes into debased nomismata at rates ranging from a quarter of the intended tax to four times as much. By 1109 Alexius managed to enforce a standard rate for computing the taxes, and seems to have gained much more revenue by raising taxes for the rich than he lost by lowering them for the poor.”! The Sultanate of Iconium grew weaker after the death of Kily Arslan in 1107, but this was not entirely to the Byzantines’ advantage. Nomadic Turks reoccupied the no-man’s-land Alexius had created along the border and began raiding Byzantine territory. Around 1rto a local Byzantine force drove them out of the border fort of Lampe, which they had taken; but this provoked a major Turkish raid, which the outnumbered Byzantines only halted by an ambush outside Philadelphia. Asia Minor

needed more attention than Alexius was giving it. His commander at Acroénus, Michael of Amastris, began a revolt, though it seems to have consisted mostly of fighting the Turks without the emperor’s permission. After sending an expedition that forced Michael to surrender, Alexius pardoned him at once. The emperor was now in declining health, and more worried about Crusaders than about Turks. In 1111 he tried to stop piracy from Pisa by making a treaty with the city, reducing trade duties for its merchants and giving them a trading colony in Constantinople like the Venetians’. After Bohemund died that spring, the emperor sent to Tancred to demand the surrender of Antioch. When Tancred of course refused, the emperor sent an ambassador to Tripoli and Jerusalem to buy help against Antioch, but had no success. In 1112 Tancred died of disease and left his principality to his nephew. That year the sultan of Iconium Shahanshah, son of Kily Arslan, sent a major raid into the Byzantine corner of Anatolia.** Some of his raiders

penetrated almost to Ephesus before being turned back by the Byzantines. The next year the Turks raided again in force, this time to the north. They thoroughly plundered the region of Nicaea and Prusa, and sacked Cyzicus and Adramyttium. The duke of Nicaea attacked them but was captured. Only when the raiders were returning did the emperor meet them near Cotyaeum, defeat them, and rescue the duke.” Obviously Byzantine Anatolia was not yet safe. In the following years both the sultan and the emperor mustered their forces for a real war. In spring 1116 Turkish raiders again looted northwestern Asia Minor, until the emperor mustered an army and defeated

628 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY them near Poemanenum. He stayed 1n the region all summer, but even so he had to fight off more raiders near Nicomedia. As even more Turks appeared around Nicaea, Alexius decided to draw them off by a campaign into Turkish territory. From Dorylaeum south, the emperor razed settlements and deported the remaining Greek population to Byzantine territory. After the Turks failed to stop his advance, the sultan himself met him in a fierce battle near Philomelium. Alexius won, and Shahan-

shah made a treaty agreeing to halt the raids. Though the sultan was soon deposed and murdered by his brother Mas‘ad, the Turks were cowed

for the moment, and Alexius returned in triumph, with ample booty and thousands of Greek refugees.

After this campaign the emperor, who had suffered from gout and asthma for some time, became gravely ill. He had always been a merciful

man, but as he faced death in 1117 he became reluctant to restrain the stricter members of his clergy. He allowed them to try for heresy and depose Bishop Eustratius of Nicaea, a student of John Italus whom the emperor had long protected. Alexius also permitted the burning alive of the Bogomil leader Basil, which his clemency had long delayed.** As his death approached, the emperor was slow to reject his wife’s irresponsible

proposal to disinherit his son John in favor of the Caesar Nicephorus Bryennius, husband of his eldest daughter Anna. According to John himself, whose word was accepted, Alexius decided for his son just before dying in August.

That Alexius left the empire stronger than he found it is beyond doubt. He displayed great skill in repelling invasions, foiling conspira-

cies, and restoring order when general disintegration was a constant threat. Yet his early perils seem to have made him too wary of helping the Crusaders, or of strengthening his army by more recruitment. While some Crusaders and military officers certainly did want to overthrow him, cautious cooperation with them would probably have reduced that danger, and might even have let him retake most of Asia Minor before the Turks made it fully their own. By the end of his reign, he had allowed the Turks to become firmly entrenched on the Anatolian plateau. Alexius, however, had been born too late to remember when all of Asia Minor was secure and the army was a mass force of native Byzantines. The coastal regions that he recovered were much the richest and most populous parts of Anatolia; armies moving into the interior encountered poorer land, rougher terrain, fewer Greeks, and more Turks. A completely restored empire would have had larger revenues, but not a much larger surplus; and keeping it would have meant sharing power

°°‘

Improvised Reconstruction, 1081-1143 629

4 7 2 ' ml . * '

with more generals and officials, some of whom were hostile to the Com-

neni. The results would have been better for many Byzantines, espe3

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cially for those abandoned in Turkish territory, but not necessarily better for Alexi d an his1s relati Alex: his ow ror AALexX1us relatives.Know! Knowing ll ali this, tnis, exius put his own an d his family’s interests ahead of the empire's.

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John I] Comnenus was thirty when he became senior emperor. Although he had every right to the throne as Alexius’s eldest son and junior emperor, he had won it in spite of his mother Irene, his elder sister

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150. John I] Comnenus (r. 1118—43) and his wife Piroshka-Irene, presenting offerings to the Virgin, with their son Alexius (d. 1142) barely visible at far right, around corner. Contemporary mosaic in the gallery of Saint Sophia, Constantinople. (Photo: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., copyright 1996)

344

630 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY fused to renew the trading privileges of the Venetians, alleging that they had defied Byzantine officials in their colony in Constantinople. He also tried to expand Byzantine control in Anatolia beyond the periphery that had satisfied Alexius. John saw that frequent oftenstves were the best way

to reduce Turkish raids, and he sought further conquests to shield the Byzantine coastlands and to join them with each other by land routes. While at Alexius’s death northwestern Anatolia formed a solid block of territory, it was still separated from Byzantine-held Attalia by the Turks who occupied Caria. The Danishmendid emir Ghazi also seems to have cut off Trebizond at this time, capturing its dynast and duke Constantine Gabras. John ransomed Constantine, but as long as Trebizond was isolated 1t could not be under secure Byzantine control.*° The emperor therefore began an offensive against the Turks. In 1119,

provoked by a Turkish raid on the southern part of the Thracesian Theme, he set out to clear the whole Meander valley. He campaigned with his friend John Axuch, a Turk taken prisoner in childhood and brought up as a Christian, who held the title of grand domestic. The two of them took Laodicea, which had become a Turkish base after the Byzantines failed to garrison it under Alexius. Later, probably in 1120, the emperor seized the stronghold of Sozopolis which commanded roads to both Laodicea and Attalia. Before returning to Constantinople John opened the way to Attalia, separating the Turks of Caria from the Sultanate of Iconium. Yet John could not give all his attention to Asia Minor. Apparently

in 1121, a large raiding party of Cumans and Pechenegs crossed the Danube, and the emperor spent the next winter at Thracian Beroea negotiating with them. They agreed to make peace, but in the spring John rather treacherously attacked and crushed them, selling some into slavery and enrolling others in his army. Then, in autumn 1122, the Venetian doge paused on his way to the crusader states to avenge his loss of

privileges by besieging Corcyra. He failed to take the island, and by spring gave up and sailed for the East. But after a year and a half he sailed back to raid Rhodes and winter on Chios, and in 1125 he looted several more Aegean islands before returning to Venice. The empire’s navy, clearly inferior to its army, never ventured to attack the Venetians. The next year, the duke of Trebizond Constantine Gabras, who had long enjoyed unusual autonomy, openly rebelled. The governor to Gabras’s west, Cassianus, also rebelled at about the same time in Paphlagonia, so that most of the Black Sea coast was in revolt. When the Vene-

Improvised Reconstruction, 1081-1143 631

tians raided Cephalonia, the emperor decided he had too many enemies and made peace with them in August. He restored the privileges Alexius had granted Venice, and officially it became a Byzantine ally once more.

Not long afterward, the emperor cut his spending on the ineffective Byzantine fleet, preferring to use his resources on land in Asia Minor. Probably in summer 1127, before John could deal with the rebels along the Black Sea, the Hungarian king Stephen II invaded the empire, angry that the Byzantines were harboring his fugitive uncle.*° The king sacked Belgrade and Nish, and continued ravaging as far as Serdica and Philippopolis until the emperor drove him off. A year later John crossed

the Danube and defeated the Hungarians on their home ground near Sirmium; but after he left, the Hungarians counterattacked, and the Serbs of Ras repudiated Byzantine suzerainty. The emperor marched back and defeated and subjected the Serbs. Although he made only a feint against Hungary before winter set in, he managed to win a peace from Stephen, whose uncle had died in the meantime. By 1130 the emperor was ready to return to Anatolia. His preparations seem to have frightened the Paphlagonian rebel Cassianus into ceding his lands to Ghazi, who was also allied with Constantine Gabras of Trebizond. John apparently began his operations by strongly fortifying the town of Lopadium in the northwest, where the Turks were raiding again.?” Lopadium became the imperial headquarters for military recruitment and training. Next John marched against Ghazt; but on his way he discovered a plot by his younger brother, the sebastocrator Isaac, who fled to the Turks. Probably doubting the loyalty of his men, John returned to Constantinople to punish the conspirators. In exile Isaac Comnenus solicited the help of the emperor’s various rivals in Anatolia. He visited in turn the Danishmendid emir Ghazi, the rebel duke Constantine Gabras, Sultan Mas td of Iconium, and the Armenian king Leo of Cilicia, the heir of Ruben. But none of these potentates made up his mind to back the pretender. Once John had secured his position at home and mustered a stronger army than before, he made

a land and sea expedition to Paphlagonia in autumn 1132. There he massacred Turkish settlers, captured Castamon, where the Comneni had once had their estates, and apparently recovered the seacoast. Then he crossed the Halys, raided Turkish territory, and collected submissions from some of Ghazi’s governors. John celebrated a triumph 1n his capital the next year. Ghazi’s response seems to have been to help the Turks of Iconium at-

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1§1. The Monastery of Christ Pantocrator (“Ruler of All’), Constantinople, with its three connected churches. (Photo: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., copyright 1996)

k lis, the fort th ded John’ in th h. Al

tack Sozopolis, the fort that guarded John’s conquests 1n the south. Although that campaign failed, Ghazi soon besieged and retook Castamon. The emperor began another campaign in the summer of 1134, but interrupted it when he heard of the death of his wife Piroshka-Irene. Yet Ghazi died at almost the same time, leaving the Danishmendid realm in disarray. The emperor returned to attack Gangra, south of Castamon, before going into winter quarters. He took both Castamon and Gangra by surrender in 1135. The next year the victorious emperor dedicated an imposing monastery and hospital to Christ Pantocrator, on a prominent hillside in the ital.*% | ded offering his victort IT capital.** Intended as ahank thank offering for hisfor victories over conspirators

and the Turks, the Pantocrator became the family monastery of the Comneni, following the tradition of dynastic monasteries established in the two preceding centuries. Its construction showed that the treasury had recovered nicely from the crisis of the late eleventh century, which seems not to have allowed comparable outlays by John’s father Alexius. The emperor had yet to retake Trebizond and Cilicia, which Alexius had held insecurely, or Antioch, which Alexius had claimed. Antioch

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seemed about to fall into John’s lap in late 1136, when its widowed princess offered it and her daughter’s hand to John’s youngest son Manuel.

Improvised Reconstruction, 1081-1143 633

The Crusaders thwarted her plans by marrying the heiress to a Prenchman, Raymond of Poitiers, but this at least gave the emperor a pretext to intervene. John also wanted to punish the Armenian king Leo, who had taken the Cilician plain from the Principality of Antioch and was besieging Byzantine Seleucia to his west. Mustering a force of Byzantines, Pechenegs, and Turks, John brought it by land and sea to Attalia. The emperor and his sons marched against Leo’s little Armenian Kingdom in spring 1137. John speedily retook the Cilician plain and besieged

Leo in Anazarbus, where the mountains began. The town surrendered after a Byzantine bombardment of just over a month, though the king escaped into the Taurus. John pushed on to Antioch, and set his siege machines to batter it as well. The new prince Raymond readily agreed to take John as his overlord instead of the king of Jerusalem, and even to exchange Antioch for a principality stretching from Aleppo to Homs if John would help him conquer it. The emperor accepted this somewhat equivocal surrender, hoping to gain not only Antioch but a powerful crusader protectorate behind it. Before trying to conquer Raymond’s new fief, however, the emperor marched back to Cilicia, where he captured King Leo and his sons and

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152, The citadel of Anazarbus from the south, showing the ancient city walls in the foreground. (Photo: Irina Andreescu-Treadgold)

634 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY sent them back to Constantinople. John annexed the Cilician plain, and the Armenian princes in the mountains became Byzantine vassals. Early the next year the emperor returned to Antioch, where he marshaled the first joint force of Byzantines and Crusaders since the First Crusade. In the spring he led this army against Aleppo, but arrived a little too late to surprise its Turkish garrison. He therefore turned south and besieged Sizara, in the midst of the lands he intended for Raymond. The Byzantine siege engines broke through the town walls, but the citadel held out against the listless Crusaders, who preferred keeping Antioch to making conquests instead of it. The emperor accepted a nominal submission from Sizara and retreated. Then he entered Antioch, but withdrew when Raymond’s men began a riot and news came that the Turks were raiding Cilicia. John expelled the raiders and marched back to his capital, having won much glory but not so much real advantage. The emperor’s successes did impress his renegade brother Isaac, whose eight years of plotting had come to nothing, enough that he requested and received a pardon early in 1139. The Danishmendid Turks, less impressed by the emperor, raided the lower Sangarius valley. After chasing them away, John massed his forces at Lopadium again for a major campaign. Never properly defeated, the Danishmendids had evidently retaken Paphlagonia and were still backing Constantine Gabras of Trebi-

zond. The emperor could make no better use of his victorious army than to fight them. In late spring the emperor began his march along the Black Sea coast. He spent the rest of the year on his way, presumably because he had to drive out Turks and establish garrisons as he went. At the beginning of 1140 he reached the Danishmendid stronghold of Neocaesarea and be-

sieged it. But the place was strong, and the winter turned harsh; the Byzantines ran short of supplies, and a son of John’s brother Isaac deserted to the Turks. After six months John raised the siege, but he sent a contingent against Gabras that finally regained Trebizond for the empire.*’ By the time the emperor returned to his capital early in 1141, he had recovered the entire Pontic seaboard. That year John rested his army at his camp at Lopadium and recruited more troops for another expedition. He pursued negotiations with the German emperor Conrad II, whom he wanted as an ally against the Normans of Sicily, and engaged his fourth son Manuel to marry Conrad’s sister-in-law. Meanwhile the Danishmendid emir died, and his domains broke up into separate emirates. John took this as a chance not to destroy

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636 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY the Danishmendids, whose remaining lands were fairly barren, but to turn his back on them and campaign against the rich city of Antioch. The emperor and his sons marched south in the spring of 1142. Evidently meaning to secure a land corridor between the rest of Byzantine territory and the southern coast, they chased Turkish raiders from Sozopolis and paused to conquer the islands of Lake Caralis. The islanders,

who had come to terms with the Turks of nearby Iconium, at first resisted, and seem to have submitted to the Turks again soon after John left. When the emperor came to the southern port of Attalia, his eldest son and heir Alexius suddenly died, and the grieving father had his second and third sons take the body back to Constantinople. During the voyage John’s second son died as well.

The emperor determinedly pushed on toward Syria. The count of Edessa offered to become a Byzantine vassal and was accepted; but this time John demanded that Prince Raymond surrender Antioch before receiving other lands in exchange. While Raymond made excuses, John wintered in Cilicia and recaptured some mountain forts from the Turks. With only two sons left, he considered giving his younger son Manuel the title of junior emperor with responsibility for Cyprus and the coast from Attalia to Antioch. Apparently John had begun to see that his land corridor joining the southern Anatolian coast to the rest of the empire would never be truly safe, and thought of this means of protecting his southern possessions.

In early spring, before he could deal with Antioch, the emperor supposedly pricked himself with a poisoned arrow while hunting near Mopsuestia, and became deathly ill. Although most Byzantines in the camp wanted him to confirm his elder son Isaac as his heir, most of the western mercenaries supported the younger son Manuel, who was betrothed to a German and known to favor westerners. On his deathbed John was said to have chosen Manuel, who unlike his brother was present in the camp. In fact, the whole episode is suspicious. Manuel’s supporters may well have manipulated the succession, or even caused John’s death. Some complicity by Raymond of Antioch is also possible.*° Like his father, John II left the empire stronger than he found it, but not quite as strong as it looked. He improved the army and gave it a base at Lopadium from which it could guard much of Byzantine Anatolia. But the army remained a relatively small force to defend so large an empire, and the navy had become dangerously weak. John amassed a gold reserve that might better have been spent on expanding the army and

Improvised Reconstruction, 1081-1143 637

navy. He took great interest in Syria, and attempted to cooperate with Crusaders, as long as they served as his vassals. Yet this cooperation achieved nothing of importance, and his intervention weakened Antioch and Edessa, both of which needed all their strength to resist Zangyi, the vigorous Turkish governor of Aleppo. Involvement with the Crusaders distracted John from trying to take more of Turkish Asia Minor, which unlike Antioch would have made the empire more defensible. To most contemporaries, however, John’s choices seemed reasonable ones. By this time few Byzantines survived who longed for the lands lost to the Turks. The Sultanate of Iconium and the Danishmendid domains seemed to be in terminal decline even without Byzantine intervention; much of what they held was wasteland, and their Greek population was by now accustomed to Turkish rule. So John gave priority to subduing rebels, including the Crusaders who kept Antioch in defiance of their treaties and promises. When he died, Byzantium could defend itself, and was as big and prosperous as anyone could recall. That was good enough for John and most of his courtiers. Like his father Alexius, John was a man of limited ambitions, a brilliant manager rather than a great ruler.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Diminishing Security, 1143-1204

ee

Sa At the accession of Manuel Comnenus Byzantium

could still be considered the leading power in the Mediterranean, but only by a narrow margin. While militarily stronger than each of its neigh-

boring states, 1t was weaker than several combinations of them. More

ominously, most of them belonged to either a western or a Muslim sroup, each of which had more in common with fellow westerners or Muslims than with Byzantines. The empire needed some firm allies to avoid the danger of an overwhelming enemy coalition. Since for religious reasons alliances with the Turks could hardly be solid and lasting, the only real possibilities were westerners. With a Hungarian mother and a German fiancée, Manuel was well aware of opportunities both to ally with westerners and to make conquests from them. When he became emperor at age twenty-four, his intelligence and charisma were already evident. They may also have tempted him to jockey for temporary advantage instead of planning for the empire's long-term security. Manuel shared the military and political adroitness of his father and grandfather, but not their patience with the more mundane tasks of internal administration. He was at ease with westerners, rather too ready to believe in Byzantine superiority over them, and not quite wary enough of their power.

MANUEL S NORMAN WARS Manuel’s somewhat irregular succession was managed with little trouble. He speedily sent his father’s old friend, the grand domestic John

Diminishing Security, 1143-1204 639

Axuch, to secure Constantinople. Axuch proclaimed Manuel and detained the two most likely aspirants to the throne, Manuel’s disinherited brother and ambitious uncle, both named Isaac. Manuel’s older sister Maria helped foil a plot by her husband the Caesar John Roger, a halfNorman. Only some three months after his father’s death did Manuel reach the capital, where he was crowned. There he met his fiancée Bertha, recently arrived from Germany, neither beautiful nor lively, and not much to his Mediterranean taste. He delayed the marriage but continued the engagement, since he favored his father’s plan to use the Germans against the Normans of Sicily and the French of Antioch. Roger II

of Sicily asked him for a marriage alliance, but after thinking it over Manuel refused it. Probably in 1144, after a brief campaign to drive the Turks from Bithynia, the emperor sent a land and sea expedition to Antioch to punish its insubordination. The Byzantines defeated Prince Raymond and ravaged his principality. They also kept him from lending vital help to Edessa, which fell to Zangi’s Turks. The fall of Edessa left Raymond so exposed to Turkish attacks that he traveled to Constantinople and recognized the emperor as his overlord, and Manuel considered this a success. Yet the advance of the Turks in northern Syria threatened Byzantine Cilicia, and excited western plans for a new Crusade that the Byzantines did not want. When the German emperor Conrad protested Manuel’s delay in mar-

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640 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY rying Bertha, Manuel had to choose between taking an unattractive wife

and giving up an enticing alliance with Germany. He chose to marry Bertha in early 1146, renaming her Irene. He found he could bear her somber temperament cheerfully enough if he consoled himself with various mistresses, especially his niece Theodora Comnena. But he showed his wife outward respect, and his alliance with Conrad became his main

means of dealing with the West. The alliance of Byzantines and Germans was an obvious threat and provocation to Roger of Sicily, whose kingdom lay between them and whose peaceful overtures Manuel had rebuffed. Manuel’s immediate plans were to campaign against the Turks. While

the Syrian Turks were in disarray after Zangi had been murdered in 1146, Sultan Mas‘id of Iconium was probing Byzantine territory all along his frontier. Repulsed from Malagina to their north, Mas ad’s Turks took Pracana to their south and raided the Thracesian Theme to their west. After mustering his army at Lopadium, the emperor marched far into Mas‘td’s sultanate. He defeated the Turks at Acroénus, seized their base of Philomelium, and ravaged up to the walls of Iconium itself. But when the Danishmendids reinforced the sultanate, Manuel retreated by the shore of Lake Caralis, beating off Turkish counterattacks with some difficulty. As the emperor returned to Constantinople, Mas‘id opened negotiations that led to the return of Pracana. By this time, to Mas‘iid’s alarm and Manuel’s discomfiture, preparations for the Second Crusade had begun in the West. German Crusaders crossed the Danube frontier in the summer of 1147, led by their emperor Conrad III. Although Conrad was now Manuel’s relation by marriage, his men inevitably plundered on their way. The empress BerthaIrene had to intercede to stop fighting between Byzantines and Germans outside Constantinople. Then French Crusaders under Louis VII of France crossed the Danube and caused the usual trouble supplying themselves. Worst of all, while Manuel was occupied with the Crusaders, Roger of Sicily sent a fleet that seized Corcyra and raided Greece, sacking Thebes and Corinth. The German Crusaders were eager to advance, and Manuel was glad to see them off. Without waiting for the French, and ignoring Manuel’s

advice to march across the Thracesian Theme, Conrad led most of his men into the Sultanate of Iconium. Near Dorylaeum the Turks put him to a rout from which he barely escaped. He and many of his surviving men then joined Louis VII in marching through the Thracesians, but at Ephesus Conrad fell ill and returned to Constantinople. Louis and the

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Diminishing Security, 1143-1204 641

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others went on by way of the insecure corridor of Byzantine territory from Laodicea to Attalia, suffering from ‘Turkish attacks, hunger, and winter weather. By spring 1148 both Louis and Conrad arrived in Syria annoyed with each other and with Manuel. Manuel’s main concern was the Sicilian Normans’ invasion. To stop them, he built a large fleet and asked for help from the Venetians. He confirmed their previous trading privileges and allowed them to expand their trading quarter at Constantinople. In return, a Venetian fleet was to join the Byzantines in besieging the Normans on Corcyra. As the emperor was setting out, however, the Cumans made a raid across the Danube, and he turned to chase them off. Then he delayed his expedition to spend Christmas at Thessalonica with Conrad III, who had left the failed Second Crusade. The two emperors agreed on a joint effort to expel the Normans from southern Italy. In spring 1149 Manuel arrived at Corcyra, which the Byzantines and Venetians had still not recaptured. When the allies quarreled and began to fight each other, Manuel subdued the Venetians and forced the Nor-

mans to surrender the island. He wanted to invade the Norman Kingdom that very summer; but King Roger persuaded the Serbs of Ras to repudiate Byzantine suzerainty and attack the Serbs of Dioclea, who ap-

642 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY pealed to the empire for help. The emperor marched against the rebels, defeated them, and took Ras before returning to Constantinople for the winter. Manuel prepared his fleet to attack the Normans the next year. But then the Hungarians came to the aid of the Serbs of Ras, Mas‘td’s Turks raided the Thracesians, and the Armenian king Theodore II advanced in Cilicia.! Manuel also took his chance to buy the remnant of the County of Edessa, after Nureddin, Zangi’s son and successor as ruler of Aleppo, had blinded its count and killed the prince of Antioch.* Yet Manuel’s eastern purchases, which extended from Cilicia to Samosata, began falling to Nureddin and Mas‘iid almost as soon as he bought them, and the emperor was too busy in the West to defend them. He defeated the Serbs, returning them to vassalage, then invaded Hungary and sacked Semlin and Sirmium, forcing Géza II of Hungary to make peace in ITS51I.

Meanwhile Manuel had ordered the grand domestic John Axuch to sail to Ancona, a city just north of the Norman Kingdom that was subject to Conrad IT and friendly to Byzantium. But John never made the crossing. The weather was bad, and the Venetians opposed Manuel’s de-

signs on Sicily, fearing they would give Byzantium control over both shores of the Adriatic and so over Venetian trade. Manuel and Conrad nonetheless agreed on a joint German and Byzantine campaign against Sicily in 1152. Yet early that year Conrad died, and the expedition had to be abandoned. Since Nureddin had now conquered all Manuel’s purchases in Syria and Theodore II had taken most of Cilicia, Manuel had to turn his attention to the East. The emperor sent the now widowed Caesar John Roger to propose marriage to the widowed princess of Antioch; but he was a maladroit lover, and she refused him. Manuel sent an army to Cilicia under his cousin Andronicus Comnenus; but Andronicus, though an accomplished lover, was no warrior, and lost the rest of Cilicia to Theodore. The frustrated emperor paid Mas‘tid to attack Theodore; but Theodore defeated the sultan in 1154.

Roger II died the same year, and his son William I became king of Sicily. William made peace with the Venetians and tried to make peace with Manuel, but was rebuffed as his father had been. Manuel had bought the favor of some disloyal Norman nobles, and approached the new German emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Hadrian IV, both of whom were hostile to the Normans. William too had his diplomats, and persuaded Géza of Hungary to invade the empire, in concert with a

Diminishing Security, 1143-1204 643

plot by Manuel’s cousin Andronicus. Géza withdrew, however, when Manuel arrested Andronicus, and the king made peace after the emperor marched to the Danube in the spring of 1155. That year a Byzantine fleet finally landed at Ancona, and Manuel launched the invasion of the Norman Kingdom that he had planned for so long. Backed by a rebellion among the Norman nobles, the Byzantines overran the coast down to Bari by the end of the year. To gain additional help, Manuel made an alliance with the Genoese, granting them reduced trade duties and a commercial quarter at Constantinople. Byzantium seemed to be punishing the Italian Normans for the rebellion they had started more than a century before. The next spring, however, King William routed the outnumbered and overextended Byzantines as they besieged the citadel of Brindisi. Most of the expeditionary force was captured. The Norman rebels, the pope, and the Genoese came to terms with William; and Frederick Barbarossa spurned Manuel’s offer of an alliance. This costly campaign gained

the emperor nothing but a reputation for overreaching himself. William sent a fleet that raided Euboea in 1157; Manuel responded by sending John Axuch’s son Alexius to Ancona to hire more mercenaries and allies against William. Yet by now neither Byzantines nor Normans expected to gain much by continuing the war. Manuel’s main interest had already shifted to Syria. The young king Baldwin III of Jerusalem wanted to marry a Byzantine princess, and offered an alliance that might help the emperor recover both Cilicia and Antioch. So in spring 1158 Manuel agreed to a peace with William of Sicily. By this time the emperor had spent some two million hyperpyra

on his Norman projects.° In the unlikely event of their success, they would merely have added Apulia to the empire’s collection of endangered outposts. The Italian war had made Manuel enemies in Europe and distracted him from defending his holdings in Asia. It was quite un-

necessary, since both Roger II and William had been ready to make peace from the start. In the end, the war’s futility became clear even to Manuel.

MANUEL’S SHIFTING ALLIANCES In the summer of 1158, the emperor sent his brother Isaac’s daughter Theodora to Palestine, where she married King Baldwin of Jerusalem. This was probably the ttrme when Manuel, who was preparing an expe-

644. THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY dition to Syria but running short of money, changed procedures for pay-

ing the army. In place of regular pay, he granted various soldiers and officers the right to collect taxes in certain places, sometimes including rents from crown lands. Such a grant, resembling those given by the emperor Alexius to his relatives, was called a pronoia (“provision”), and its recipient may be termed a pronoiar. Manuel recruited many soldiers by this means, and the army he mustered does seem to have been the most formidable Byzantine force in memory.4 That fall Manuel himself led his army south, defeating some Turks on the way. He managed to surprise Theodore II of Cilicia, who fled before him while the Byzantines occupied the Cilician plain. Prince Reginald of Antioch, who had recently joined Theodore in raiding Cyprus, now hurried to submit to the emperor. Soon Manuel accepted both Reginald and Theodore as his vassals, though he reduced Theodore’s kingdom to the Cilician highlands. Manuel made a triumphal entrance into Antioch at Easter 1159, and prepared to march with the Crusaders against Nureddin in Aleppo. But the Turkish leader too sued for peace, and Manuel, having gained his main aims in Cilicia and Antioch, granted generous

terms. To the Crusaders’ disappointment, Nureddin kept the former lands of Edessa he had taken from Manuel, and simply surrendered his many Christian prisoners. The emperor led his army back through the Sultanate of Iconium; but he suffered more than he had expected from harrying by the Turks of Mas‘iid’s son and successor Kilij Arslan II.

This seemingly glorious expedition simply recovered ground that Manuel had lost earlier, and it showed the persistent strength of the Sultanate of Iconium, the enemy nearest the Byzantine heartland. The following winter the emperor ordered several attacks on the Turks and led forays from the Opsician and Thracesian themes, without much result. The Turks of Caria, over whom the sultan had some influence, pillaged Laodicea and took Phileta near Attalia. In 1160, to prepare for fighting Kili Arslan, Manuel began to hire new western mercenaries. He also sent for more troops from his vassals in Serbia, Armenian Cilicia, and Antioch, and from his ally King Baldwin of Jerusalem. Since Manuel’s empress Bertha-Irene had just died, his ambassador also sought a new empress in the Crusader states, and he married Princess Maria of Antioch, who unlike the late Bertha was renowned for her beauty.

By the next year, under attack from both the Danishmendids and Nureddin, Kily Arslan began to negotiate with the emperor. Before any settlement was concluded, however, Manuel’s reinforcements arrived

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704 THE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY quality.°* Constantinople continued to make products of all kinds, including the empire’s finest luxury goods. As always, however, trade was bigger business in Constantinople than manufacturing. In the eleventh century enough men made money from trade in the capital to buy the senatorial ranks that scandalized the landholding aristocracy. Although plainly Italians were doing a brisk business trading with the empire, especially after Alexius I exempted Venetians from trade duties in 1082, our western sources’ few references to Byzantine merchants are no proof that such merchants were few.*? If they had been, the measures taken against Italians by John HW, Manuel, and Andronicus I would have

severely disrupted the Byzantine economy; yet no source suggests that anything of the sort occurred. The trade duties of a tenth of the value of merchandise that natives had to pay were not so crushing a burden as to outweigh local connections and familiarity with local conditions. Byzantine businessmen must have dominated the empire’s internal trade, particularly away from the coasts, where Italians seldom ventured but most Byzantines lived. Byzantine merchants still had a large share of trade with the Muslims in the eleventh century, and are unlikely to have lost all of it in the twelfth.°* Nonetheless, the Byzantine government’s perverse policy of reverse protectionism, charging most Italian traders lower duties than natives, obviously hurt native traders. What the trade concessions to Italians did not do was decrease state revenue appreciably.

Arriving at an absolute estimate of the budget in this period is difficult, even though scattered statistics are more common than before. The military payroll, always the largest single item, can no longer be estimated

by multiplying the number of soldiers by the average rate of pay, not only because neither number is known, but because the number of soldiers and their pay varied widely, especially after many men received pronoia grants. Those grants, and others given to members of the imperial family, diminished the revenues that passed through the capital but should be included in the total, because they met state expenditures and the state kept track of them. Yet the budget cannot be said to have included outright tax exemptions, which seem to have become more common at this time. The fluctuating value of the coinage is also a problem in the later eleventh century, though less so after 1092, when the hyperpyron was stabilized at about seven-eighths of the value of the old nomisma.

All this having been said, if the empire had a population of about 12 million and revenues of about 5.9 million nomismata in 1025, there is no obvious reason why the empire of 1150, with a population perhaps

Restless Society, 1025-1204 705

five-sixths that of 1025, should have had revenues much less than fivesixths of the earlier figure. If so, the later total would have been some 4.9 million old nomismata, or some 5.6 million new hyperpyra. Although a good deal of this would never have reached Constantinople, most of it must have, to judge from the sums that the government could pay out right up to the Fourth Crusade. Manuel reportedly spent 2.16 million hyperpyra on his schemes against the Normans of Sicily. He also spent 1§0,000 hyperpyra in 1158 on the marriage of his niece Theodora to Baldwin II of Jerusalem, including her dowry. Under Isaac II the campaign pay of the army that fought the Normans in 1185 was 288,000 hyperpyra.°? Even with the empire at its poorest in 1203, Alexius [V managed to pay 440,000 hyperpyra to the Crusaders and Venetians, since the next year they demanded only 360,000 as the balance due on the 800,000 hyperpyra they had been promised. The great bulk of the revenue continued to come from the land. In 1168 Benjamin of Tudela was apparently told that the trade duties of

Constantinople, with the rents of state markets and shops, came to a mere 20,000 hyperpyra a year.°° The loss to the treasury caused by the exemptions from trade duties granted to the Italians, which were in effect at the time of Benjamin’s visit, has been calculated at under $0,000 hyperpyra a year.°’ In 1219 the tiny port of Lampsacus yielded 1,671” hyperpyra, all but 51% from agriculture.** In the twelfth century the total revenue of Corcyra 1s said to have been 108,000 hyperpyra, while a figure for the revenue of Cyprus of about 50,000 hyperpyra seems to

represent only the surplus forwarded to the capital’ The revenue of Corcyra, doubtless drawn overwhelmingly from land taxes, would have been around a fiftieth of the revenue of 5.6 million hyperpyra estimated for the whole empire. For all its military and political troubles, Byzantium remained rich until 1204, when its wealth still dazzled and tempted the Crusaders. Yet even if the empire had not fallen victim to the Fourth Crusade, by 1200 its problems of regional separatism, central maladministration, military weakness, and diplomatic ineptitude were acute. Alexius I, John II,

and Manuel had managed to control their refractory magnates, merchants, and bureaucrats and to keep their foreign enemies at bay by dint of family solidarity and strong leadership. Toward the end of the twelfth century, as during most of the eleventh, the emperors were unequal to their tasks. Their incapacity was not entirely fortuitous, because some of their officials wanted inadequate emperors on the throne. Nonetheless,

706 THERE WEAK STATE AND THE WEALTHY SOCIETY

without the Fourth Crusade, the realization that continuing chaos was bad for almost everyone would probably have given a capable ruler the chance to replace the Angeli, and to restore something like the equilibrium of the days of the Comneni. Until 1204 Byzantium always had the makings of a great economic and military power, however badly it was employing them. When Constantinople fell, matters became at once vastly worse. Much wealth was destroyed or stolen in the city, and Byzantine impotence became patent. The Crusaders and Venetians grew more powerful, and Bulgarians, Serbs, Turks, and separatist rebels seized their shares of the spoils. Worst of all, Byzantium lost its central government, which had organized a successful resistance to its enemies so many times before. Most of the provinces were as yet unconquered, and they had supplied much the largest part of the Byzantines’ wealth; but they were already falling into the hands of regional potentates, and even a generally recognized leader would have found them hard to marshal against the invaders. As it was, with Alexius II discredited, no one had a strong claim to the succession, and none of the separatists had more than local authority. How much of what had been the empire would remain under Byzantine rule, or even if any would, was very much in doubt.

PART SIX

The Failed Restoration

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tine Architecture { 1976 ,7 re [New York f

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Successor States, 1204-1261

Gea ————_ The Fourth Crusade left the Byzantine world in utter confusion. Since the empire had never been a Greek national state and violent successions were nothing new, at first many provincials failed to see that what had happened was a foreign conquest, and not a somewhat irregular revolution. The Crusaders promptly chose an emperor who was to assume control over the Byzantine church, bureaucracy, and provinces as the successor of Alexius IV. Although the better-informed Byzantines and Venetians realized that the old empire was gone, not even they knew quite what was going to take its place.

In March 1204, before the Crusaders and Venetians made their final assault, they had agreed to let a college of six Crusaders and six Venetians choose a new emperor. The emperor elected was to receive a quarter of both Constantinople and the empire as his domain. The forces of the Crusaders and the Venetians would each receive half of the remainder to hold 25 fiefs in vassalage to the emperor. If a Crusader was elected emperor, as everyone assumed would happen, a Venetian was to be pa-

triarch of Constantinople. After taking the city, but apparently before electing an emperor, the Crusaders and Venetians divided the land among

themselves. In broad outline, the partition put the imperial domain in Asia Minor and some of Thrace, the crusader fiefs in Greece, and the Venetian fiefs in the islands, some ports, and Epirus. ! In May the electors did choose a Crusader emperor, but not Marquis

Boniface of Montferrat, who had led the Crusade and expected to be elected. Boniface had already moved into the Great Palace, attracted some Byzantine supporters, and arranged to marry Isaac I’s widow Margaret-Maria. He had earlier family connections with both the An-

710 THE FAILED RESTORATION

geli and the Comneni, and was a man of energy and ability. But the Venetians wanted an emperor who would be easier to control, and joined with some French and German Crusaders to outvote Boniface’s Italian followers. They selected the thirty-one-year-old Count Baldwin of Flanders, who was duly crowned.

THE EMERGENCE OF SUCCESSORS At first Baldwin, whom Byzantines called the Latin emperor, held only

Constantinople and its immediate hinterland. The rest of the empire was subject partly to its bewildered Byzantine governors, and partly to a bewildering crew of rebels and deposed emperors. Alexius V reigned at Tzurulum in eastern Thrace. The previously deposed Alexius III was at Mosynopolis, from which he controlled western Thrace and the region of Thessalonica. Kaloyan of Bulgaria ruled to the north of the two Alex-

iuses. The rebel magnate Leo Sgurus held the parts of Greece around Nauplia, Corinth, and Thebes. Crete was apparently held by the men of Boniface of Montferrat, whom Alexius IV seems to have granted it in pronoia during his brief reign. Rhodes was under another Byzantine magnate, Leo Gabalas. Attalia had been seized by the Italian condottiere Aldobrandini. Three more magnates held the Meander valley: Sabas Asidenus around Priene, the old rebel Theodore Mangaphas around Philadelphia, and in the east Manuel Maurozomes, who had given refuge to the fugitive sultan Kaykhusraw. Northwestern Anatolia was held by Theodore Lascaris, a son-in-law and

nominal partisan of Alexius I. The Pontus had just fallen to David and Alexius Comnenus, grandsons of the emperor Andronicus who had been lynched nineteen years before. Alexius Comnenus now proclaimed himself Byzantine emperor at Trebizond. The Byzantine resistance therefore included three men who claimed to be emperor, Alexius III, Alexius V, and Alexius of Trebizond. Of these

Alexius III seemed the most plausible. He certainly hoped to retake Constantinople, and with his son-in-law Theodore Lascaris he could claim footholds in both the Balkans and Asia Minor. But he had been a disappointing ruler and had fled from the Crusaders early on. Alexius V had fled later, but after accomplishing even less. Alexius of Trebizond, descended from a widely detested usurper, was far away in a peripheral province. Although Kaloyan of Bulgaria also called himself emperor and was thinking of bigger things, few Byzantines thought of him as one of

Successor States, 1204-1261 711

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177. Gold hyperpyron, shown twice actual size, with a seated Christ on the obverse and John III Ducas Vatatzes of Nicaea (r. 1221—$4) and the Virgin on the reverse. (Photos: Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C., copyright 1996)

724 THE FAILED RESTORATION balas of Rhodes. The next year, after reducing Rhodes to vassalage, Va-

tatzes abandoned his negotiations with the papacy and made an antiLatin alliance with Asen.

This pact was sealed early in 1235 when Asen married his daughter Helena to Vatatzes’ son Theodore, though both bride and groom were underage. The recently restored Bulgarian patriarch at Tirnovo and the patriarch at Nicaea recognized each other. Asen and Vatatzes agreed to partition the Thracian part of the Latin Empire, assigning Vatatzes the southern sector with Constantinople. After Vatatzes had taken the territory from Callipolis to Tzurulum and Asen everything to the north, Constantinople was the only part of Thrace left in Latin hands, and the two emperors advanced to besiege it. But the Latin emperor John defeated the besiegers. The next year they returned, only to fail again. In 1237 John of Brienne died at an advanced age, while his successor Baldwin II was in Italy begging for help. Though the time was plainly ripe for another allied assault on Constantinople, the Bulgarian emperor, perhaps hoping to take the city for himself, broke his agreement with

| Vatatzes. After inviting his daughter back from Nicaea for a visit, Asen kept her in Bulgaria, made a treaty with the Latins, and joined them in besieging the Nicene outpost of Tzurulum. Asen made more trouble for Vatatzes by releasing the blinded emperor of Thessalonica Theodore Ducas, and himself marrying Theodore’s daughter. Theodore slipped into Thessalonica and raised a revolution against his brother Manuel, who was exiled to Turkish territory. To disarm those who objected that an emperor could not be blind, Theodore called his young son John emperor of Thessalonica, and ruled in his name from the nearby town of Edessa.

Late that year, however, an epidemic broke out in the Bulgarian capital of Tirnovo, killing the Bulgarian patriarch and Asen’s wife and eldest son. Taking this as a sign of divine wrath at his treachery, Asen renewed his agreement with Vatatzes, ended his siege of Tzurulum, and returned his daughter to Nicaea. Vatatzes had a second stroke of luck when Theodore Ducas’s brother Manuel escaped to Nicaea. Vatatzes agreed to help Manuel regain Thessalonica from Theodore, and in early 1239 landed him in Thessaly. But Theodore bought Manuel off by allowing him to sovern Thessaly under the suzerainty of Thessalonica. Later that year young Baldwin II of Courtenay finally marched back from the West. He had raised an army by levies from his ancestral lands

in France and by the virtual sale of Christ’s Crown of Thorns, taken

Successor States, 1204-12601 725

from Constantinople.'’ Distracted by the first appearance of the Mongols on the Danube, Asen disregarded his alliance with Vatatzes and let Baldwin pass through Bulgaria unmolested. The Latin emperor enlisted the help of Cumans who had fled the Mongols, and in 1240 captured Tzurulum from Vatatzes’ forces. Vatatzes responded with a naval campaign that seems to have taken Nicomedia from the Latins. Asen died the next year, leaving the Bulgarian throne to regents for his young son Koloman. Asen’s death freed Vatatzes from a strong and unpredictable neighbor; but it also gave more freedom to Theodore Ducas and his nephew Michael I] Ducas of Epirus, who had taken Thessaly when its ruler Manuel died. Vatatzes invited Theodore to Nicaea, apparently to discuss an alliance of the two leading Byzantine powers against the Latins and Bulgarians. But at Nicaea Vatatzes put Theodore

under arrest. He kept the peace with Bulgaria, and made a two-year truce with the Latins. He also won over the Cumans in Thrace, who joined the Nicene army in return for lands along the empire’s Anatolian borders." In spring 1242 Vatatzes led his Cumans on a major expedition against Thessalonica, taking the captive Theodore along with him. Avoiding Bulgarian territory, Vatatzes advanced through the coastal strip of the Thessalonian Empire and put its capital under siege. The siege of Thessalonica had barely begun, however, when news came from Nicaea that the Mongols had invaded the Sultanate of Iconium. Though Vatatzes kept the report to himself, he was worried enough to cut his campaign short. He annexed only the Thracian coast between the mouths of the Strymon and the Hebrus, and had Theodore persuade his son John to give up the title of emperor for the title of despot, under Nicene suzerainty. Having extracted these concessions, Vatatzes released Theodore and returned to Nicaea. As it happened, the Mongol invasion turned out well for Vatatzes. Without harming his empire, the Mongols wrecked the Sultanate of Iconium and reduced it to vassalage, also gaining the submission of the Empire of Trebizond. Yet for the present Vatatzes had lost interest in fighting Thessalonica, where the despot John was succeeded by his brother Demetrius in 1244, or the Latins, whose emperor Baldwin had returned to the West to beg for more money. In 1244 Vatatzes, having renewed bis truce with the Latins until 1245, married Constance-Anna, daughter of the German emperor Frederick Il. The emperor of Nicaea seemed content to be the greatest of the petty rulers of the Byzantine world.

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End of Independence, 1391-1461 789

did not disappoint his public. In June he met Charles VI, who came out from Paris to greet him. Manuel sent embassies to the Spanish kings and to Pope Boniface [IX at Rome, and before the end of the year, Henry IV of England welcomed the emperor in London. Everyone was gracious and respectful, and many made promises; but all had problems of their

own, and no one was in a hurry to help. In r4or Manuel returned to Paris. Aware that he would be forgotten if he went home, he stayed in the French capital into the following year.

Back in Constantinople, John VI held out with a few French auxiliaries left by Boucicault. John seems to have lost Selymbria and everything else in Thrace but the capital itself. By some accounts, he was ready to capitulate in the late spring of 1402. Just then, however, Bayezid had

to march east to face a new enemy, Timur the Lame. A Turk who had taken over Central Asia, Persia, and Mesopotamia with a mostly Mongol army, Timur was now invading Ottoman-held Asia Minor. In July he met the sultan in a great battle near Ancyra, won a crushing victory over the Ottoman forces, and captured Bayezid himself. Bayezid’s eldest son Sulayman escaped to Thrace, but he was far too busy salvaging the Ottoman Sultanate to resume the siege of Constantinople. Timur went on to devastate Asia Minor, restoring the independent eastern and southern emirates annexed by Bayezid. Bayezid’s younger sons took over what was left of Ottoman Anatolia. As long as Sulayman needed all his remaining strength to oppose his brothers and Timur, he was vulnerable to a concerted Byzantine and western attack on Ottoman Europe. Surely aware of this, on learning of the Ottoman defeat Manuel went first to Genoa and then to Venice for negotiations. No less aware of his danger, early in 1403 Sulayman offered astonishingly generous terms to avert an anti-Turkish coalition. Besides freeing Byzantium from Ottoman suzerainty, the sultan ceded it most of the Thracian seaboard, from Mesembria in the north to Panidus in the west. To this he added, apparently as an appanage for John VII

after Manuel’s return, Thessalonica, the surrounding coast east to the Strymon and south to Thessaly, and the offshore islands. Sulayman also sranted various concessions and privileges to the Venetians, Genoese, and Hospitalers. John VII and the westerners were delighted to receive so much for nothing. Yet the treaty served Sulayman’s purpose: it kept the

Christian powers from uniting against him when he was least able to fight them.

By late spring, when Manuel and his family sailed into Constanti-

790 THE FAILED RESTORATION nople, the treaty was already signed. Bayezid had died in captivity, and Timur had left Anatolia. Although the emperor was canny enough to see that an opportunity had passed along with the danger, he ratified the treaty. He liked John no better than before, perhaps resenting that the treaty provided his nephew with a large detached appanage around Thessalonica when Callipolis would have been more useful. Nonetheless, by the end of the year Manuel let John take up his fief. After the despot Theodore bought Corinth back from the Hospitalers in spring 1404, he held the greater part of the Peloponnesus, and Byzantium was bigger than it had been for years. The Ottoman Sultanate was not only smaller but split between Sulayman in the Balkans and his brothers in Anatolia. Yet the empire was itself divided into Manuel’s coastal strips around Constantinople, John’s coastlands around Thessalonica, and Theodore’s Peloponnesus, each of which was essentially independent of the others. Sulayman held the territory between them and most of their hinterlands in Bulgaria, Thrace, and Thessaly. He also kept contact with Anatolia through Callipolis. As the sultan had doubtless expected, Manuel’s empire was a facade, with barely the resources to maintain itself. For several years, however, the sultan had to keep fighting his broth-

ers, while Manuel’s brother Theodore died in 1407 and his nephew John VII died the next year. Manuel was therefore able to assign the Peloponnesus to his second son Theodore, and Thessalonica to his third son

Andronicus. Since both sons were still children, Manuel’s officials became the real administrators, and the emperor the real ruler, of both territories. More unified than before, Byzantium began to look a little less decrepit, though it was still much weaker than even a divided sultanate. The Ottoman civil war flared up in 1409, when Sulayman’s Balkan domains were invaded by his brother Musa. Manuel remained true to his treaty with Sulayman, but tried to take what advantage he could. In 1410 he almost captured Callipolis from Musa. Yet the emperor was weaker than either Ottoman claimant, and could not stop Musa from defeating and executing Sulayman the next year. In revenge the new sultan besieged Constantinople and Thessalonica. ‘To defend himself, the

emperor lent support to a third brother, Mehmed, ferrying his troops across the straits from Anatolia. After two more years of fighting, in 1413 Mehmed defeated Musa and had him strangled. Since this time, by luck,

the emperor had taken the winning side, Mehmed confirmed Sulayman’s favorable treaty of ten years before. Once again, however, Byzan-

End of Independence, 1391-1461 791 tium was trapped between a single sultan’s domains in Asia Minor and the Balkans. Unable to join his holdings together, Manuel tried at least to strengthen

their defenses. In 1414 he left his eldest son John to govern Constantinople and set sail for his western territories. Repulsing a Genoese attack

on the island of Thasos, he spent the winter at Thessalonica. The following year he visited the Peloponnesus, now the most prosperous part of his impoverished realm, and ordered the Isthmus of Corinth to be fortified. Exacting special levies for the work, and putting down a revolt

caused by them, he spanned the isthmus with a fortification he called the Hexamilium, or Six-Mile Wall. This he hoped would give the whole Peloponnesus protection comparable to the city walls of Thessalonica and Constantinople. The emperor returned to his capital in 1416 to find the sultan’s brother Mustafa raising a revolt in the Balkans. Manuel gave Mustafa some gin-

gerly backing, and the Venetians took their chance to destroy the Ottoman navy. But that fall Mehmed’s forces defeated Mustafa near Thessalonica and sent him fleeing into the city. Manuel’s son John interned

the unsuccessful rebel on Lemnos, and the sultan was willing to pay around twenty thousand hyperpyra a year to keep him there.’ Young John

eradually assumed more responsibilities, and was crowned coemperor early in 1421.

Then the sultan Mehmed died. John wanted to try setting up Mustafa as sultan in place of Mehmed’s son Murad II. Although the risks were obvious, success might give Byzantium a chance at real independence. The old emperor opposed such adventurism, but gave in after a dispute at court that lasted several months. So John had Mustafa released from Lemnos and brought to Callipolis, which was one of many places the pretender promised to surrender to the empire. Mustafa gained a good deal of support among the Turks, took Callipolis and Adrianople, and marched on Prusa. He met Murad in battle in early 1422, but was routed by his nephew. Murad had him pursued into the Balkans and hanged.* The sultan was understandably incensed with the Byzantines. Brushing aside Manuel’s attempts to make peace, he besieged Thessalonica

and Constantinople through the summer. Since Murad could hardly be angrier than he was, Manuel summoned the last available Ottoman pretender, another Mustafa, who was Murad’s younger brother. This | Mustata’s proclamation forced the sultan to raise the siege of Constantinople. Shortly afterward, however, the old and troubled emperor suffered

792 THE FAILED RESTORATION a stroke that partly paralyzed him, and valuable time was lost. With some Byzantine help, young Mustafa seized Nicaea. But early in 1423 Murad had this last pretender captured and strangled as well. Freed from rebellions, the sultan turned again to vengeance on Byzantium.

Having found Constantinople much too hard to take, Murad attacked the other fragments of the empire. He intensified the siege of Thessalonica, and sent an army that easily demolished the Hexamilium and raided the Peloponnesus. The Turks pressed Thessalonica so hard that its governor Andronicus gave the city to Venice in the hope of sav-

ing it.. The junior emperor John sailed to Venice to seek further aid. During his absence, in winter 1424 the sultan granted peace to the crippled Manuel, who was assisted by his fourth son Constantine. The Byzantines surrendered their remaining fortresses around Thessalonica and on the Black Sea, except for Mesembria and Anchialus, and pledged to

pay an annual tribute of about twenty thousand hyperpyra.° Though these terms were far from liberal, the isolated places the Byzantines gave up would hardly have been tenable against Turkish attacks, and the tribute was probably less than the cost of further warfare. In any case, the

empire had little choice. The junior emperor John, who had traveled from Italy to Hungary in his search for aid, returned with empty hands.

So when the aged and bedridden Manuel died in the summer of 1425, he left Byzantium only a bit less miserable than at his accession. Yet even after the battle of Ancyra, he had scarcely anything to work with. Perhaps he should have taken greater risks; but his son John had gambled on Murad’s uncle Mustafa and lost. Manuel tried as well as he could to persuade the western powers to contribute money and men to Byzantium’s defense; but even his tour of Italy, Prance, and England, at a time when Constantinople was in imminent danger, had brought no results. The Bulgarians and most of the Serbs were already subjects or vassals of the Turks. Under such circumstances, Manuel deserves some credit for the empire’s even surviving through his long reign.

A LAST APPEAL By the time John VIII Palaeologus became senior emperor at age thirty-two, he had already played a role in government for several years. Although his father had thought him somewhat too bold, by 1425 bold-

ness was almost impossible anyway. The empire possessed just three scraps of land. John directly ruled the vicinity of Constantinople, with

End of Independence, 1391-1461 793

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Selymbria and the northern Aegean islands; his brother Constantine held Mesembria and Anchialus to the north; and his brother Theodore retained the Byzantine Peloponnesus. Of these, the Peloponnesian segment was much the largest, and the only one that could be enlarged without a suicidal attack on the Turks.

| Since Theodore had expressed a wish to retire to a monastery, the emperor decided to replace him with Constantine, leaving Mesembria for his younger brother Demetrius. Yet by autumn 1426, when John went to the Peloponnesus with Constantine, Theodore had changed his mind about retiring. The emperor and Constantine stayed to campaign against the Latins in the northwestern corner of the peninsula. ‘The Byzantines first attacked Clarentza, which belonged to Carlo Tocco, ruler of Cephalonia and Epirus. After they bested him in a naval battle in early 1427, Tocco gave Constantine his part of the Peloponnesus and the hand of his daughter.

This dowry became a separate appanage for Constantine, to which the emperor added the western part of Theodore’s domain. John granted

his youngest brother Thomas another appanage in the northern Peloponnesus, next to the remnant of the Latin Principality of Achaea. Having apportioned the Peloponnesus among his brothers, the emperor re-

794 THE FAILED RESTORATION

turned to Constantinople. The ambitious Constantine soon attacked Patras, then held by a papal legate, and in spring 1429 added the city to his holdings. The same year Thomas Palaeologus defeated the forces of the aged and feeble prince of Achaea, married the prince’s daughter, and became his heir. Like his two brothers who also ruled in the Peloponnesus, Thomas received the title of despot. While the Byzantines made these small but gratifying gains, the Ottoman advance rolled on. The Turks stormed, sacked, and conquered Thessalonica in 1430, ending seven years of embattled Venetian rule. The same year the Turks captured Joannina from Carlo Tocco’s nephew and successor, who became their vassal for his remaining lands around Arta. By this time the Ottoman Sultanate had practically recovered its borders as they had been before the battle of Ancyra. Whenever Murad chose to make war on the Byzantines, their position would immediately become desperate. At least the Turks’ progress reawakened concern in western Europe,

reviving negotiations for church union and another crusade. In 1430 John made a tentative agreement with Pope Martin V to hold an ecumenical council. The papacy offered passage to Italy and back for an eastern delegation of up to seven hundred members, including the emperor and the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. But Pope Martin died the next year, and his successor Eugenius [TV began a power struggle with the Council of Basel that stymied negotiations with the Byzantines. The despot Thomas inherited the last of the Principality of Achaea in 1432, so that the Byzantines finally held the whole Peloponnesus except for the Venetian ports of Nauplia, Methone, and Corone. To exploit this turn of events, the despot Constantine exchanged his appanage in the western Peloponnesus for Thomas’s appanage in the north. From his new base Constantine hoped to acquire the neighboring Duchy of Athens, which had been ruled for some years by an Italian dynasty. He seemed near success in 1435, when the duke of Athens died and his Greek widow was ready to cede her duchy to Constantine. But her Latin nobles resisted, and she married a new Latin duke. Pope Eugenius, having gained the upper hand over the troublesome Council of Basel, invited the Byzantines to a council at Ferrara in 1437.

The emperor hastened to depart. Leaving his brother Constantine as regent at Constantinople, John embarked with his allotted delegation of seven hundred. Among them were the patriarch of Constantinople Joseph I, the archbishop of Nicaea Bessarion, representatives of the pa-

End of Independence, 1391-1461 795

triarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and bishops from Trebizond, Georgia, Bulgaria, Wallachia, anda second Vlach principality, Moldavia. Archbishop Isidore of Kiev, a Greek from Byzantium, came by land from Russia. Traveling by way of Venice, they all arrived in Ferrara the following spring. The council’s deliberations continued into 1439, when it moved from Ferrara to Florence. After exhaustive discussion, every question was resolved, usually by an agreement to tolerate existing differences. Thus the

Latin Creed continued to mention the Holy Spirit’s procession from both Father and Son (the filiogue), while the Greek Creed continued to speak of the Spirit’s procession simply from the Father. Formulations of varying degrees of ambiguity permitted the eastern practice of Hesychasm, the western beliefin Purgatory, and the use of either leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist. The most important point the eastern delegates conceded was papal authority to call ecumenical councils and to hear appeals on disciplinary matters. Although the patriarch Joseph died shortly before the proclamation of union, he left a written statement endorsing it. The emperor and all but two eastern delegates subscribed to it. The pope promised to organize a crusade the next year, and made Bessarion of Nicaea and Isidore of Kiev cardinals. The emperor and his delegates returned to Constantinople early in 1440, after achieving as much as anyone could fairly have expected.’ Even if the Byzantines’ antiwestern feelings seem to have faded somewhat since the Union of Lyons, from the beginning the Union of Florence encountered hostility in the East. The council’s opponents found

a leader in one of the two delegates who had rejected it, Archbishop Mark of Ephesus. Some other delegates who had subscribed at Florence disowned the union after they returned. The emperor delayed proclaiming it in the empire, and had trouble finding a unionist who would accept the patriarchate. The patriarch chosen, Archbishop Metrophanes of Cyzicus, faced open rebellion among many of his priests and bishops. Cardinal Bessarion of Nicaea returned to Italy in dismay. Cardinal Isidore of Kiev had to flee Russia for Italy the next year. The patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem all repudiated their delegates’ consent to

the union. The emperor’s brother Demetrius opposed it from his appanage at Mesembria, and in 1442 attacked and besieged Constantinople

with troops from the sultan. But no one betrayed the city; Demetrius gave up, and John put him under arrest. A Turkish attack on Trebizond also failed.

A civil war in Hungary delayed the promised crusade until Pope Eu-

796 THE FAILED RESTORATION

genius arranged a truce in 1442. The following year the pope began preparations for the expedition, which was to include an army from Hungary and a fleet to stop any Ottoman reinforcements from crossing the straits to the Balkans. The governor of the Hungarian province of Transylvania, John Hunyadi, led a preliminary campaign, which sacked Nish and Serdica before returning home at the onset of winter. ‘The emperor prepared for the crusade by assigning most of the Peloponnesus to his energetic brother Constantine, who meant to advance into ‘Turkish territory if the chance came. Since the Latin Duchy of Athens lay in his way, Constantine forced it to accept his suzerainty and to repudiate that of the sultan in spring 1444. Meanwhile the Albanians and Vlachs of Thessaly rebelled against the Turks, and the Albanian leader George Castriotes, better known as Scanderbeg, raised a rebellion in Albania itself. As a crusader fleet was readied at Venice, a crusader army gathered in Buda under King Ladislas of Hungary and Poland. The sultan Murad sued for peace. Strangely, the crusader army agreed to a ten-year truce, though only the Serbs kept its terms, which restored their independence, and the others seem only to have meant to take the sultan unawares. The crusader fleet sailed into the Hellespont according to plan. King Ladislas, assisted by Hunyadi, gathered some sixteen thousand mostly Hungarian troops, and enlisted four thousand Wallachians. In late summer these marched down the Danube valley to Nicopolis. From there they advanced to the port of Varna, which surrendered to them. The Venetians kept the sultan from crossing the Hellespont, but he managed to ferry his army across the Bosporus. In November Murad arrived at Varna with a considerably larger force than the Crusaders’. In a hard-fought battle, Ladislas was killed charging the Turks, and word of his death put the Crusaders to flight. Most of them were killed, though Hunyadi escaped. This Crusade of Varna had come close to destroying Murad’s army and setting off a general revolt in Turkish Europe. Even after its failure, Hunyadi became regent of Hungary and was eager to continue resistance. Albania remained in rebellion under Scanderbeg, and the crusader fleet was intact. The despot Constantine, who had been waiting to occupy northern Greece if the Crusaders won, decided to press on nonetheless. In spring 1445 he led an army into Thessaly and took it from the

Ottomans, while Hunyadi attacked the Turks along the Danube. But Hunyadi made no progress; the crusader fleet sailed home, and the Venetians made a truce with the sultan in 1446. By autumn Murad was

End of Independence, 1391-1461 797

free to campaign against Constantine. The sultan recovered Thessaly, reclaimed his suzerainty over Athens, and broke through the Hexamilium.

A Turkish raid on the Peloponnesus was enough to force Constantine and his brother Thomas back into vassalage. The tireless Hunyadi gathered another crusade of sorts by 1448, enlisting the Wallachians and Scanderbeg, who was supposed to join him later. The Hungarian regent reached Kosovo with his Wallachian allies, but the sultan arrived there before Scanderbeg did. When the Wallachi-

ans deserted, Hunyadi found himself outnumbered. Opting for prudence rather than glory, he fled. After this last reverse, Hunyadi lacked the means or reputation for another crusade, and no one else seemed to have the spirit for one. Not long afterward, in these nearly hopeless circumstances, John VIII died. Since John never had children, and his brothers Theodore and Andronicus had predeceased him, his heir was his oldest surviving brother, Constantine. John had tried the only plan with any likelihood of suc-

, cess, reunion with the western church in return for a crusade. He had concluded as convincing a reunion as was possible, which had brought as formidable a crusade as was feasible. If it had beaten the Turks, as it almost succeeded in doing, Constantine might well have retaken the rest of Greece, and Serbian, Albanian, and Bulgarian rebellions might have driven the Turks from Europe. Even if such an outcome was never probable, the melancholy alternative was to do nothing, and wait for the Turkish conquest.

THE FINAL FALL Constantine XI Palaeologus, aged forty-three, recerved word that he had inherited the empire when he was ruling as despot at Mistra.* The elderly empress Helena, his mother and John VIII's, thwarted a plot by his antiunionist brother Demetrius, and served as regent at Constantinople until Constantine could arrive. The new emperor was proclaimed at Mistra early in 1449. A man of undoubted ability, Constantine had

| already distinguished himself by his intrepid conquests in Greece. By now, however, he had scant room to maneuver. Although he wanted to continue the Union of Florence in the forlorn hope of further help from the West, he needed to avoid offending the Byzantine antiunionists, and most of all the sultan. When Constantine arrived at Constantinople he postponed his coro-

798 THE FAILED RESTORATION

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nation, probably to avoid being crowned by the unpopular unionist patriarch Gregory. The emperor made a new truce with Murad, who accepted him as a vassal. Constantine provided for his two brothers by slightly enlarging Thomas’s appanage in the western Peloponnesus and giving Demetrius the rest of the peninsula. Yet without Constantine’s presence to restrain them, the two despots quarreled within a year, and the emperor had to intervene to reconcile them. In 1451, after an inconclustve campaign against Scanderbeg’s Albanians, Murad II died. His successor was his nineteen-year-old son Mehmed II. At first the young sultan confirmed his father’s treaty with the emperor, perhaps only because he wanted to establish himself before making an attempt on Constantinople. Be that as it may, late in the year the impoverished Constantine asked the sultan to double an annual subsidy of some twenty thousand hyperpyra that the Byzantines received for detaining an Ottoman pretender.” Mehmed made this a pretext for abrogating the treaty. The next spring the sultan began building a fort he called Rumeli ?

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812 THE FAILED RESTORATION half of the century by making the Turkish emirs his vassals. On the whole Trebizond held off the ‘Turks better than Byzantium did, retaining more of its original land and lasting eight years longer.’

Such were the parts of the Byzantine world that remained under Greek rule, or returned to it. Most of the time the restored empire exercised diplomatic and ecclesiastical influence over other eastern Christian states as well. As before, these included the Slavs of Bulgaria, Serbia,

and Russia. They were joined in the fourteenth century by the new Vlach principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, which by this time may be called Romanian.’ While Georgia and Cilician Armenia maintained good relations with Byzantium, both were now distant from Byzantine

territory. The kings of Georgia were closer to the emperors of Trebizond, with whom they intermarried, while the Armenian kings of Cilicia allied themselves with Latin Cyprus.

Byzantium also had a measure of authority over the Greeks under Latin rule. Even where Latin dominance was continuous, as in Cyprus or Cephalonia, the westerners were too few to change the Greek character of the country. Their subjects came to various accommodations with the Latin government, grudgingly endured nominal union with the western church, and sometimes learned some French or Italian. But their main language remained Greek, adulterated with a few Prench and Italian loanwords that also became current in the emperor’s domains. Most regarded themselves as under foreign occupation, thought of themselves as Byzantines, and were glad to receive any of the emperor’s forces that might arrive. The Greeks of Crete repeatedly rebelled with the emperors’ help. The only place Greeks were in much danger of Latinization was southern Italy, where they had always been restricted to the coasts and mingled with the Italian-speaking population. Yet even most Italian Greeks continued to speak their own language, and Greek monks like Barlaam of Calabria kept close connections with Constantinople. As the number of Greeks ruled by Latins gradually diminished, the number ruled by Turks steadily rose. The Turks had greater powers of assimilation than the Latins. There were many more Turks, and they promoted conversion to Islam, which virtually insured that a Greek’s descendants would consider themselves Turkish. As the Turks raided and conquered, they enslaved many Christians, selling some in other Muslim regions and hindering the rest from practicing their faith. Besides levying the Muslims’ usual head tax on Christians, the Turks adopted the practice of taking Christian boys from their families and raising them as

Separation of Society from State, 1204-1461 813

Muslims, usually for military service in special corps known as the Janissaries. Conversions, Turkish migration, and Greek outmigration increasingly endangered the Greek minority 1n central Asia Minor. When the ‘Turks overran western Anatolia, they occupied the countryside first, driving the Greeks into the cities, or away to Europe or the islands. By

the time the Anatolian cities fell, the land around them was already largely Turkish.

During the first half of the thirteenth century the boundary between Muslims and Christians seemed to be stabilizing at the straits, giving Anatolian Greeks little hope of a Byzantine reconquest and some reason to emigrate to Europe. After the Turks captured Callipolis, their occupation of the Balkans proceeded in a rapid but haphazard fashion, and by the time most Greeks realized that the Turks had come to stay no secure refuge remained. Besides, after three centuries of Turkifying Asia Minor, not many Turks were left to repeat the process in the Balkans, and few followed their previous course of settling the countryside and then taking cities. Most Turks who did settle in the Balkans went to the cities first, where they were eventually outnumbered by migrants from the overwhelmingly Christian countryside.* Thus the pattern was set of

| a Christian Greek and Slav majority in Europe and a Muslim Turkish majority in Asia.°

For a century and a half the Ottomans lived in a surprising degree of harmony with the Byzantine emperors, first as allies and then as suzerains.

As long as an emperor remained at Constantinople, the Greeks under Turkish rule regarded him as their protector, who could at least negotiate on their behalf with the sultan.° When Constantinople fell and the empire vanished, all eastern Christians found themselves bereft of their accustomed leader. The Greeks, who still called themselves Romans, had become merely an ethnic group with a glorious past, no higher in legal or ecclesiastical status than other eastern Christians of the Ottoman Empire. As Latins and Turks also realized, the final Turkish conquest had a significance for people who lived far beyond the last pathetic remnants of Byzantine territory.

THE FRAGMENTED EMPIRE The Fourth Crusade shattered a tradition of unified government in the Aegean basin that dated back to the Roman Republic, and wrecked institutions that were as old as Diocletian and Constantine I. Since the

8I4 THE FAILED RESTORATION Crusaders failed to conquer the whole Byzantine Empire, they never replaced its institutions with a single system of their own. Because the Byzantines failed to reconquer everything they had lost, or even to suppress all the Latin states and the Empire of Trebizond, they were unable to restore the old system. Both Crusaders and Byzantines had to make compromises even within the lands they conquered or reconquered. Western feudalism worked poorly under eastern conditions, and the fortunes of the Byzantine successor states were mixed. The Latin Empire, Trebizond, and Epirus never came to be of much consequence. Nicaea did make itself into a passable imitation of Byzantium, but after holding its own for about a generation it began a gradual descent into insignificance. Curiously, however, each successor state enjoyed a dynastic stability that by earlier Byzantine standards was rocklike. The Grand Comneni

ruled Trebizond as long as its empire lasted, though they sometimes fought among themselves with encouragement from Constantinople. The Ducas dynasty ruled Epirus and Thessaly until its male line died out, and even then its female line was connected with the later rulers from the Orsini and Tocco families. ‘The Ducas family too had its internal quarrels, partly fomented by the Nicene and restored Byzantine empires. But while the family survived, local loyalty to 1t was too strong to allow Byzantium to annex Epirus and Thessaly for good.

The Lascarids remained emperors of Nicaea until the reconquest of Constantinople. In spite of John IV’s minority and Michael VIII’s triumph in regaining the capital, the change of dynasty in 1261 caused lingering bitterness. After that, the Palaeologi ruled the restored empire to the end, for more years than any other Byzantine dynasty. They enjoyed a loyalty from their subjects that outweighed popular resentments over the unions of Lyons and Florence, and the glaring failures of Andronicus II and John V. Dynastic loyalty was the main reason the young and mediocre John V Palaeologus was able to push aside the mature and brilliant John VI Cantacuzenus, even as a colleague. Although the practice of ruling through relatives presumably strengthened the dynasties, similar practices had been tried before 1204 with much less success. The main difference after the Fourth Crusade was probably the Byzantines’ readiness to rally around the ruling family against the powerful Latins and Turks. Such a feeling also helps explain the easing of the emperors’ troubles with local separatism and unruly merchants and magnates. While princes ruling appanages occasionally revolted, they did so rather less than might have been expected, given their power and the weakness of the central

Separation of Society from State, 1204-1461 815

government. No ruler of an appanage secured lasting independence in this period, and none seized the imperial throne more than momentarily. Byzantium still had many wealthy landholders, some of whom acted as virtual rulers of the towns where they lived and the surrounding regions where they owned their lands. Such men, however, seldom led local revolts. Although John VI Cantacuzenus was a magnate, he claimed the crown as the grand domestic of the army and a friend of the late emperor; he never aspired to rule as a separatist, and his support extended well beyond Thrace, the region of his estates. Magnates and merchants certainly played their parts in the civil wars between 1341 and 1354. Yet each side always struggled to take over the monarchy, not to limit it, and the legitimate dynasty emerged victorious in the end. At first glance, the great civil war, with its loyalist urban mobs sacking the palaces of Cantacuzenist aristocrats, may look like an uprising of the

oppressed against their oppressors. But if the Cantacuzenist magnates oppressed anyone, it was the peasantry on their rural estates, none of whom lived in the cities where the mobs ran riot. And if anyone oppressed the urban poor, it was the merchants, tradesmen, and bureaucrats, scarcely any of whom were magnates. What seems rather to have happened was that the bureaucrats, merchants, and tradesmen led the riots against the aristocrats. To the limited extent that the lower classes took part in the civil war at all, the urban poor seem to have sided with the businessmen and officials, making the cities loyal to the regency, while the peasants seem to have sided with their aristocratic landlords, leaving the countryside generally Cantacuzenist. While envy of rich aristocrats was doubtless a factor, the civil war was nothing so simple as a struggle between rich and poor. It was, however, partly a struggle between landholders and merchants, of a type already perceptible in Byzantine history during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In the fourteenth century the fight was for control not only over the central government but also over the cities, where the landholders usually resided. Because cooperation with Italian merchants was necessary to do business, the regency with its mercantile supporters tended to be more sympathetic to Italians.’ Since most monks and Palamites were suspicious of the western church, they tended to oppose the regency and favor the Cantacuzenists, who moreover included many aristocratic donors to monasteries. Despite all these tendencies, other public and private concerns were also involved, so that some aristocrats, monks, and Palamites backed the regency, and some merchants, bureau-

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ius ! of Trebizond, who brought along fugitive officials of his own from Constantinople, created a similar government of courtiers in his new capital. Michael Ducas of Epirus did much the same thing at Arta, without the title of emperor or much help from Byzantine refugees. These rulers claimed imperial prerogatives that had briefly lapsed but had long

been familiar to their subjects. Even if the successors’ rights to such authority were questionable, without possession of Constantinople no other Byzantine had a clearly superior claim. As under the Comneni, the most important officials of the Lascarids and Palaeologi were relatives of the ruling house, with such titles as despot, sebastocrator, Caesar, or panhypersebastus. Usually a grand domestic commanded the army; a grand duke, the navy. The bureaucracy was normally headed by a mesazon, holding the title that had been given to a general controller in the preceding period and now denoted the nearest thing to a prime minister. There was also a grand logothete, formerly

known as the logothete of the secreta, though his departments had changed. The treasury was now an extension of the emperor’ private treasury, while the old public treasuries had lapsed. The new chancery was an expanded bureau of the emperor’s private secretaries. Other palatine officials had duties that had formerly been performed by civil or military officials. Some titles once denoting high officials, like general logothete, confusingly became mere honorifics. Although imperial relatives and honorary officials were more numerous than before, the real central government was somewhat simplified, and even more dependent on the emperor. Later the despots with appanages had courts, administrations, and revenues of their own, on the pattern of the emperor.” At the local level, Theodore I Lascaris, who at first professed loyalty to his father-in-law Alexius HI Angelus, took over the provincial governments of western Anatolia soon after Alexius lost control of them. Alexius I Comnenus of Trebizond and Michael Ducas also set up their orig-

| inal states in lands that had recently been under Byzantine rule. The provincial administration that the successors inherited included the system of tax collection, various pronoia grants, and the themes, which had now become chiefly administrative divisions but were headed by dukes with some military responsibilities. The local magnates and towns, which had already shown tendencies toward independence before 1204, often profited by the ensuing confusion to assert their autonomy further. The successors did what they could to restore order. The emperors

of Trebizond, ruling little more than the old Theme of Chaldia, kept

818 THE FAILED RESTORATION

the old thematic subdivisions called turmae and banda. The rulers of Epirus and emperors of Thessalonica, holding middle-sized territories with shifting boundaries, seem to have paid little attention to the themes and created smaller divisions as they went. The emperors of Nicaea re-

tained the Asian themes with their dukes, but in their European conquests seldom tried to revive the themes as anything more than geographical expressions. By the time of the recovery of Constantinople, Michael VII adopted a more uniform system of smaller provinces, each usually consisting of a town and its region, under a governor with both civil and military powers.'° The emperors often appointed a leading magnate as governor of his town and region, though gubernatorial terms were kept short. There was certainly a danger that the towns and magnates might go their own way. They had the chance to choose sides 1n times of civil war or foreign invasion; but they chose the legitimate emperor surprisingly often. Since they were too weak to look after themselves, they needed the emperor’s protection. The emperor also kept control over taxation and pronoia grants through a domestic of the themes, or through separate domestics of the eastern and western themes when the empire had both Asian and European provinces. In the fourteenth century, as Byzantlum came to consist of discontinuous segments of territory, the small provinces in outlying areas were grouped into appanages under the despots, which met the need for an intermediate tier of administration. The resemblance that the Byzantine appanages bore to feudal counties and duchies was mostly superficial. The term “appanage” 1s a mod-

ern borrowing from medieval France, and not an entirely appropriate one. Except for the despotates of Epirus and Thessaly, which were independent states compelled to accept Byzantine suzerainty, the appanages never became hereditary, and functioned within a system of centralized imperial government and taxation. Although western practice probably

did contribute to the idea that junior members of Byzantine dynasties should receive lands of their own to govern, the practice owed at least as much to Byzantine family loyalties and a tradition of dynastic government going back to the Comneni in the late eleventh century. The system of appanages worked tolerably well, not only in easing family rivalries but in keeping what was left of the empire together. At a time when all armies were small by earlier Byzantine standards, the army of the Nicene emperors and Michael VIII was relatively large and strong. In 1211 Theodore I could put two thousand men 1n the field

Separation of Society from State, 1204-1461 819

to defeat the Seljuks. By 1259 well over six thousand men are said to have won the battle of Pelagonia for Michael VII. Michael recruited still more soldiers after he retook Constantinople. At times when he managed to repel his enemies on as many as six different fronts, he can scarcely have had fewer than ten thousand field troops, not counting the irregulars used to garrison towns. Yet Michael always had trouble paying his men. After the early part of his reign, his only major conquests were made by the self-financing admiral Licario. Andronicus If let both his army and his navy shrink. By 1304, with most of Asia Minor lost, the seventy-eight hundred Catalans were ap-

parently more than all the emperor’s field forces combined. By 1321, Andronicus was trying to raise his standing army to the modest figure of three thousand mercenaries. Even after mustering pronoiars and other soldiers resident in the provinces, the fourteenth-century empire could probably put no more than five thousand men in the field. Without a strong navy, this was barely enough to defend the Byzantine lands in the Balkans, and too few to restrain unruly Turkish auxiliaries. In the later fourteenth century, the Byzantines could no longer muster a field army worthy of the name, and Byzantium ceased to be a significant mulitary power.'? Besides continuing the system of pronoia grants and hiring mercenar-

ies, the emperors before Andronicus II provided support for some of their soldiers by settling them together in groups. Among the best Byzantine troops were the Cumans settled by John HI along the frontiers in Asia Minor, who numbered two thousand at Pelagonia. The Nicene

| emperors also settled native Byzantine irregulars in the Anatolian borderlands, some of whom Michael VIII later enrolled in his regular forces.

Michael also gave lands near newly reconquered Constantinople to his soldiers of the Thelematarii, his marines of the Tzacones, and his oarsmen of the Proselontes. The same emperor created two standing units of mercenaries, the marines of the Gasmuli and the thousand soldiers of the Turcopuli. Yet throughout this period most of the empire’s field soldiers seem to have been mercenaries hired for a term. Pronoiars contributed most of the heavy cavalry, though they formed a small proportion even of the emperor's regular soldiers. Military pronoia grants seem to have been better regulated under the Lascarids and Palae-

ologi than under the Comneni and Angeli. Because the grants eventually came to be worth more or less than their original value, the Palaeologi had them inspected, reassessed, and adjusted from time to time.

$520 THE FAILED RESTORATION Michael VIII made some pronoia grants hereditary, and the sons of other pronoiars must often have followed their fathers into the army and kept the grant in the family. But by and large pronoiars seem to have continued to do their service without greatly overstepping their rights. They formed a small class of petty nobles, humble enough for the government to master if it chose. If Andronicus II often chose to tax them instead of mustering them, the reason seems to have been financial shortsighted-

ness on his part rather than military incapacity on theirs. The government appears to have had less trouble in handling military pronoiars than in managing the pronoia grants and tax exemptions that it gave bureaucrats, imperial relatives, and owners of large estates. As the state declined, the great landholders, including the Church and particularly the monasteries, remained proportionally at least as powerful as they had been before. Although the unsettled conditions of the time ruined some of them, others bargained for privileges from rival rulers who needed their support, or acquired land that poorer and weaker owners were unable to keep. Magnates continued to increase their holdings, until peasants who farmed their own land and paid taxes directly to the

emperor seem to have become not only a minority but a rarity. Some peasants turned into tenants through the practice of pronoja, as the taxes

owed to a pronoiar became indistinguishable from the rent owed to a landlord. Tenants were still freemen, since they could leave the lands they

rented whenever they wished; but before the Black Death, when good land was scarce, peasants had few advantages in bargaining with their landlords. After the plague, vacant land became more plentiful, but most of it soon passed into the hands of the Serbs and Turks. The magnates suffered, but so did all Byzantines. Despite the Italians’ dominance of long-distance trade, Byzantine merchants and tradesmen benefited from the general growth of commerce.

The empire tended to lose its farmland before it lost its cities, giving merchants an additional advantage over landholders. In 1348 John VI, probably hoping not just to gain revenue but to placate the merchants who had opposed him in the civil war, finally lowered the trade duties paid by Byzantines to the level paid by Italians. He appears to have succeeded in stimulating Byzantine trade. Yet even after this measure, and the loss of many landed estates to the Turks, most Byzantine magnates

must have been richer than most Byzantine merchants. As trade expanded, the magnates used what remained of their fortunes to go into business, and quickly took a leading role. With magnates and merchants

Separation of Society from State, 1204-1461 821

beginning to form a unified upper class, the social tensions of the earlier fourteenth century waned.'* Even if the empire was already past saving, some of the new commercial class may have survived among the Phanariots, the Greek merchants of the Phanar in Ottoman Constantinople.

THE INTERNATIONAL CHURCH In the end, the Fourth Crusade did far less harm to the Byzantine church than to the Byzantine Empire. The Latin patriarchate of Constantinople and the Latin hierarchy imposed by the Crusaders never gained genuine acceptance from more than a handful of eastern Christians. Instead the Fourth Crusade increased hostility to the western church and loyalty to the eastern. The patriarchate of Constantinople reestablished by Theodore I Lascaris at Nicaea soon became the leader of the whole

eastern church, which included many more souls than the Empire of Nicaea or the restored Byzantine Empire ever did. Except in Asia Minor,

the Church’s membership scarcely diminished from what it had been in 1204. The emperors tried twice to impose a union with the western church, at Lyons and Florence, and both times the eastern church resisted with ultimate success. The Church not only outlasted the empire, but in some ways took its place. Nevertheless, the Church had to fight hard to maintain itself through-

out these two and a half centuries. Distinguished patriarchs alternated with nonentities, and on average patriarchates were brief. For a short time after the exiled John X died in 1206, the very survival of a Byzantine patriarchate was in doubt, as the Latin patriarch of Constantinople put himself at the head of the bishops and clergy of the Latin Empire. In the absence of a Byzantine patriarch, the Epirotes, Bulgarians, and Serbs officially submitted to the western church. The new patriarch that Theodore I had elected at Nicaea in 1208 was of dubious legitimacy. His coronation of Theodore identified the patriarchate with what was then a small and struggling successor state, with several eastern Christian rivals. The patriarchate at Nicaea, however, made steady gains, since it had no real competitors but the unpopular Latin patriarchate. Gradually Trapezuntines, Epirotes, Greeks under Latin rule, Russians, Bulgarians, and

Serbs accepted the Nicene patriarch’s authority. Without being much held back by its association with the Empire of Nicaea, the patriarchate did much to secure the empire’s claim to be the heir of Byzantium. By 1232 John Il of Nicaea and his patriarch Germanus II could approach

|

822 THE PAILED RESTORATION

199. John VI Cantacuzenus as a. .

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the pope as the leaders of the majority of eastern Christians. Relations between the Lascarid emperors and their patriarchs were good, even when

the emperors negotiated for union with the western church. The patriarchs would surely have found an actual reunion more problematic, but none occurred under John IIL.

For all the credit he gained by recovering Constantinople, Mi1chael VHI came into conflict with his church almost from the start. Much of the reason was that the patriarchate owed its position to the Lascarid dynasty, the last of whom Michael had deposed and blinded. Although several earlier Byzantine rulers had been able to blind or even kill their

predecessors and make peace with the Church afterwards, the excommunication imposed on Michael by the patriarch Arsenius had a powerful effect. The emperor’s deposition of Arsenius set off the Arsenite Schism of forty-five years. After one unfortunate patriarchal appointment, the emperor found a worthy candidate in Joseph I, who received him back into the Church in 1267. But the emperor’s crime and the Arsenite Schism weakened his standing to advocate union with the western church. The patriarch Joseph was a staunch antiunionist who refused to attend the Council of Lyons and retired when the union was proclaimed in

Separation of Society from State, 1204-1461 823

1275. Michael found another respectable candidate for patriarch, John XI Beccus, only to split the Church yet again. While Josephites and Arsen-

ites vied to represent the antiunionist majority at Byzantium, the emperors rivals in Epirus, Trebizond, Thessaly, Bulgaria, and Serbia denounced and repudiated the union. When the pope also excommunicated Michael in 1281, the Union of Lyons became a dead letter. For all Michael’s tenacity in supporting the union, and his agility in avoiding diplomatic disaster, he had made too many enemies to achieve something as delicate as reuniting the churches.

Andronicus II might have had a better chance, had he not lacked Michael’s conviction and nerve. Although the devout Andronicus wanted to avoid trouble with his church, even in that he failed. He had to change

patriarchs nine times, more than any previous emperor. He restored Joseph I, but then allowed harsh and divisive reprisals against unionists. The next patriarch, the former unionist Gregory of Cyprus, held a council to condemn the unionist view of the procession of the Holy Spirit; but his attempt to define this evanescent difference aroused so much controversy that he had to abdicate.'? Gregory’s successor Athanasius, a godly but unbending monk, in two stormy patriarchates denounced

everyone who fell short of his ideals, including the emperor and the Anatolian bishops who fled the Turks.'* After Athanasius’s second abdication, the emperor managed to heal the Arsenite Schism in 1310 only by means of a bizarre ceremony presided over by Arsenius’s skeleton. Finally, the patriarch Isaiah refused Andronicus’s demand to excommunicate the rebellious Andronicus II], and helped persuade the old emperor to abdicate.

Under Andronicus HI, the Church regained a measure of internal tranquility, even seeming ready to reconsider church union, until the outbreak of the Hesychast dispute and the great civil war split the hierarchy again. The patriarch John XIV Calecas was in the thick of both the dispute and the war as a regent for John V, opposing John Cantacuzenus and consequently Hesychasm and Gregory Palamas. The temporary victory of Cantacuzenus, and the permanent victory of Palamas, brought a succession of Palamite monks to the patriarchate. One of them, Callistus I, actually helped John V regain his throne, and none of them seems to have been strongly hostile to the western church. The patriarchs were quite tolerant of John V’s personal conversion at Rome, which did not affect them directly. Vociferous opposition to church union only resumed in 1439 with the Union of Florence. Even that union officially

$24 THE FAILED RESTORATION lasted till the empire fell, and would presumably have lasted longer if western Crusaders had managed to rescue Byzantium.

The Fourth Crusade gave the Byzantines some obvious reasons for hating westerners. Even after the Byzantines recovered Constantinople, Charles of Anjou and Charles of Valois threatened crusades against the restored empire, and the Union of Lyons failed even to win over the papacy for long. By the mid-fourteenth century, however, the Turks had plainly become a greater threat than the Latins, and had shown themselves the harsher rulers of Greeks. The grand duke Luke Notaras, who was quoted as preferring the Turkish turban to the Latin miter, presumably changed his mind after Constantinople fell, when the sultan condemned him to death with his sons.'? No important new differences stood in the way of union, and the Council of Ferrara and Florence seemed to have arrived at reasonable compromises, including western acceptance of Byzantine Hesychasm. However, antiunionists still demanded that westerners abandon usages dating from before the eleventhcentury schism, like the filiogue in the Creed and especially unleavened bread in the Eucharist, which neither union tried to impose on easterners. Such intransigence amounted to separatism for its own sake. Given that many eastern Christians would resist church union on any

terms whatever, concluding such a union threatened the authority not only of the emperor but of the patriarch of Constantinople. With the disappearance of the emperors of Bulgaria and Serbia, the Bulgarian and Serbian patriarchates lapsed, and the patriarch of Constantinople again gained jurisdiction over the whole former Byzantine world—if he could keep it. Most of the Slavs and Greeks outside the empire, many already

ruled by the sultan, were ready to break with Constantinople rather than accept any union with the western church. The emperor could do nothing to compel them, whatever influence he had within his shrunken domains. The Turks naturally opposed a church union that was meant to promote a crusade against them. After the fall of Constantinople, church union obviously became unsustainable. Although Latin rulers usually forced their Greek subjects into union with the western church, these unions were as grudging and superficial as the unions of Lyons and Florence. In most cases, the Latin bishops claimed nominal authority over Greek clergy and laity that paid them as little attention as possible. Sometimes a few Greek bishops were allowed to function alongside the Latin ones, though with restricted privileges and little church property. The allegiance of the bulk of the Greek popu-

Separation of Society from State, 1204-1461 825

lation to the Byzantine church was always clear. Whenever Latin rule ended in some Greek territory, all but a tiny minority returned to communion with Constantinople. Greek resentment of the Latin hierarchies in Latin Greece and Cyprus was a persistent irritant to relations between Byzantium and the papacy. The Turks, while they generally allowed their Greek subjects to remain in communion with the patriarch, of course favored conversion to Islam, and limited the number of churches and bishops. Most Seljuk rulers were fairly tolerant of Christians, but the Ottomans became less so as their power grew and they saw a chance of extinguishing Christianity altogether in Asia Minor. In the Balkans, where this seemed impossible, the sultans found bishops useful as a means of controlling the Christian population. Mehmed II continued the patriarchate of Constantinople for the same reason. The Turks let church courts keep their jurisdiction over Christians, to whom Islamic law obviously could not apply in relicious matters. Like the emperors before them, but even more arbitrarily, the sultans chose patriarchs and bishops, and removed them from office if they proved disobedient or otherwise unsatisfactory. While the independence of the episcopate suffered from Turkish and Latin interference, and from the divisive issue of church union, Byzantine monasticism became more independent. The reform movement that had begun in the eleventh century maintained itself afterward, and kept monasteries largely free from lay control. Although the Latins took over some monasteries in Greece and the islands, and the Turks destroyed others in Asia Minor, the great foundations on Mount Athos and Patmos survived. The emperors of Trebizond adopted and lavishly endowed the Monastery of Sumela in the mountains south of their capital (Fig. 161). Michael VII rebuilt and reendowed several monasteries in Constantinople. There the Monastery of the Chora was similarly restored by Andronicus IV’s mesazon, Theodore Metochites. In the fourteenth century a new monastic center developed in Thessaly, where refugee monks from Athos built houses atop the rock formations of the Meteora (“Miudair’’).'°

In this period the monasteries of Mount Athos gained a clear preeminence in eastern monasticism, overcoming Latin confiscations, the persecution of antiunionists by Michael VIII, and Catalan and Turkish raids. Athos attracted monks and donations from all of embattled eastern Christianity. Although subjects of the Byzantine emperor usually predominated on the Holy Mountain, as it came to be called, Greeks also

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