Not one of the Emperors in my time - and I say this with experience of many in my life, for most of them lasted only a year - not one of them, to my knowledge, bore the burden of Empire entirely free from blame to the end.
Michael Psellus, Chronograpbia, IV, 11
Constantine VIII, the sixty-five-year-old widower who now found himself sole Emperor of Byzantium, was as different from his brother as it is possible to be. Physically, he was magnificent: tall and well-proportioned where Basil had been short and stocky, and with a natural grace of movement and manner. A superb horseman, he had a passion for the chase and the circus, and habitually trained his own horses; in his youth he had also been an active competitor in athletic events - running, wrestling, javelin-throwing and the like - which had long been out of fashion but which he once again made popular. By the time of his succession, it need hardly be said, his athletic days were over; years of excess had ravaged his constitution and had led to chronic gout, so severe that in his last years he could hardly put a foot to the ground; but he remained to the end an impressive figure. Like his brother, he had received little formal schooling; a lively intellectual curiosity had however given him a modicum of culture - 'enough for a child', sniffs Psellus - which enabled him to hold his own with foreign ambassadors. Those whom he received in audience for the first time would frequently comment on his remarkable eloquence, the effect of which was further increased by a beautiful speaking voice. So easily, indeed, did words come to him that his secretaries were obliged to develop a shorthand of their own to keep pace with his dictation.
With all these advantages, he should — and could — have made a perfectly adequate Emperor. Why then was his reign of less than three years an unmitigated disaster? Above all, because he was devoid of any semblance of moral fibre. He was terrified of his own power, and since he knew himself incapable of handling it he reacted to every challenge with mindless cruelty. He believed every rumour and, lacking the courage for trials or confrontadons, ordered the execution or mutilation of hundreds of innocent men. Blinding was his favourite punishment. 'He had a true predilection for this form of torture,' writes Zonaras, 'since it paralyses the sufferer and renders him powerless without depriving him of life . . .' The sentence was known in Constantinople, with tragic irony, as 'the divine clemency of the Emperor'. His tendency to indulge later in an orgy of remorse, tearfully flinging his arms around his sightless victims and imploring their forgiveness, did little to increase his popularity.
A man so dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure - 'when he held the dice in his hand,' Psellus tells us, 'the affairs of the world, however important they might be, were suspended' - could have been expected to give careful consideration to the choice of his closest ministers and counsellors, to whom the tedious business of government might safely be entrusted. If Constantine did anything of the kind, it says litde for him as a judge of men. The all-important posts of parakoimomenos and Domestic of the Schools - or commander-in-chief - in the East were given to his chief valet, the eunuch Nicholas; another eunuch, Symeon -heretofore a very minor Palace functionary - was. appointed chief of police in Constantinople; yet a third, Eustathius, was raised from equally humble duties to that of Grand Heteriarch, responsible for all the foreign or barbarian mercenaries of the Imperial Guard; while a fourth, a well-known ruffian named Spondylus, became Duke of Antioch, castellan of the greatest and most strategic fortress in the Empire and chief protector of the newly conquered southern frontier against the Saracen hordes.
Only one class of Byzantines welcomed the weakness of the new regime: the Anatolian aristocracy. Their first reaction was to stage a coup d'etat, sweep Constantine away and replace him with an Emperor of their own; but they foolishly tried to act independently rather than in unison, and since the greater part of Basil's army remained loyal to his brother their attempts came to nothing. In the event it hardly mattered: the Emperor was quite unable to resist their demands, and within months the detested land laws were buried. Once again 'the powerful' descended on their erstwhile estates, snapping up every available acre while the poor peasant small-holders were left to survive as best they might - their distress still further increased by a decade of droughts and visitations of locusts that reduced many to literal starvation. Once more, as in the sixth century, Asia Minor became a country of latifundia — vast estates owned more often than not by absentee landlords and worked by serfs.
Meanwhile Constantine VIII carried on as he always had: hunting, feasting, gaming, carousing with his cronies, cavorting with his concubines, watching obscene performances in his private theatre, experimenting with more and more elaborate sauces — for he was a passionate gourmet with the digestion of an ostrich - and avoiding whenever possible the affairs of state. But such a life could not endure for ever, and on 9 November 1028 he fell mortally ill. Then, and only then, did he give a thought to the question which must long have been troubling every other citizen of Constantinople: who was to succeed him? He had, as we saw in the last chapter, no sons. Of his three daughters, the eldest had long been vowed to the religious life. The second, Zoe, had experienced one near-encounter with matrimony when she had set off to marry Otto III, only to find on her arrival in Italy that he was already dead; but that was twenty-six years in the past, and ever since then she had dragged out a mournful existence in the imperial gynaeceum, in the company of her younger sister Theodora — a good deal more intelligent, but less attractive in appearance - whom she cordially detested.
Theodora, while still only in her middle forties, had become distinctly spinsterish; but Zoe, though now approaching fifty and well past the age of child-bearing, still dreamed voluptuously of the marriage that she had never had and longed passionately for liberation from her Palace prison.1 She consoled herself with the knowledge that that liberation must come sooner or later; for she was her father's heir, and it was through her that the imperial diadem would be passed on to her husband. There was only one question: who was it to be? Feverish discussions by the bedside of the dying Emperor first raised the possibility of the Patrician Constantine Dalassenus, a member of one of the few families of 'the powerful' who had never wavered in their loyalty to the Macedonian house, and a
1 Her spirits may have risen when, early that same year, an embassy arrived from the Empire of the West with another proposal for an imperial marriage; but they almost certainly sank again when it was discovered that the intended bridegroom - Henry, son of the Emperor Conrad II - was only ten years old. The idea, it need hardly be said, came to nothing.
messenger was dispatched to summon him urgently to Constantinople; but when word of what had happened reached the civil bureaucracy of the capital there was an immediate storm of protest and the Emperor, timorous even on his deathbed, immediately gave in. Another messenger followed the first with instructions to intercept Dalassenus and tell him to come no further. Meanwhile the bureaucracy proposed its own candidate: a sexagenarian senator named Romanus Argyrus.
Romanus came from an old aristocratic family of Constantinople. A distant relative of the Emperor1 (and a brother of the ill-starred Maria who had married young Giovanni Orseolo twenty-four years before), he was a Patrician, a Supreme Judge of one of the principal tribunals, Administrator(economos) of St Sophia and, finally, Imperial Prefect of the city - an office roughly equivalent to that of mayor. For all these reasons he seemed admirably suited for the throne. As it happened, he was already happily married; but Constantine had made up his mind, and anyway there was no time to be lost. The senator and his wife were both put under arrest; they were then brought to the Emperor and given a simple choice. Either there was an immediate divorce and Romanus married Zoe, in which case he would receive the rank of Caesar and, in due course, basileus; or his eyes would be put out.
Psellus suggests that all this was nothing more than a charade and that, if Romanus had had the courage to call the bluff, he and his wife could have lived out the rest of their lives together unharmed. It seems unlikely. In the past three years Constantine had shown himself perfectly capable of greater brutalities than this; meanwhile the question of Zoe's marriage - and, with it, the succession — was of desperate urgency and could be no longer postponed. In any case, the old couple can surely be forgiven for not taking the risk. He, loving his wife as dearly as he did, was agonized; but she did not hesitate. Tearfully she cut off all her hair and declared herself ready, for his sake, to enter a convent - which she immediately did. On the very next day - it was 10 November - Romanus, with some reluctance, married Zoe2 in the imperial chapel of the Palace; on the nth, he stood at his father-in-law's bedside as he
1. They were in fact third cousins, their great-grandfathers having both married daughters of Romanus Lecapenus.
2. Zonaras claims that Constantine had originally intended to marry Argyrus to his youngest daughter, Theodora, on the grounds that she was more intelligent and that, being a few years younger, she might just possibly still manage to produce a son; but, he continues, Theodora refused categorically on the grounds of their blood relationship. Zoe, on the other hand, seems to have been almost embarrassingly enthusiastic
breathed his last; and on the 12th he found himself Romanus III, seated beside his beaming wife on the imperial throne.
Before we continue the story, it may be a good idea to pause for a moment to make a proper introduction to the greatest scholar of his day, author of the most valuable - and by far the most entertaining -Byzantine memoir since that of Procopius, 500 years before. The name of Michael Psellus has appeared already more than once in these pages, but only as a reporter of what he has heard, never of what he has seen: henceforth his Cbronographia - still covering almost half a century - can be considered an eye-witness account. As he himself puts it at the beginning of his chapter on Romanus III:
was before, for the Emperor Basil died when I was a child, while Constantine ended his reign just after I had begun my elementary studies. Consequently I was never admitted to their presence, nor did I hear them speak. Whether I even saw them I cannot say, for I was too young to remember at the time. On the other hand, I saw Romanus with my own eyes and, on one occasion, actually talked with him.
Psellus was born in 1018, of a respectable middle-class family in Constantinople. His social advancement was probably due in large measure to John Mauropous, the future Archbishop of Euchaita, who was then working as a private tutor in the capital and under whose roof he was able to meet, as fellow-students, several rich and influential young men - including his close friend John Xiphilinus (who would one day become Patriarch) and Constantine Ducas, better known as the Emperor Constantine X. He soon entered the imperial service, where his quick intelligence and profound scholarship - always highly prized in Byzantium — won him rapid promotion. He thus writes of events which he not only experienced but frequently himself helped to shape and control. Though his last chapters are unashamedly tendentious - they were commissioned by his friend Ducas, then reigning in Constantinople — few medieval writers can boast his eye for detail; fewer still have the gift of bringing a character to life in a few lines; and none has produced a more brilliant and evocative picture of the world in which he lived. Of Romanus Argyrus he writes:
This man, nurtured on Greek literature, also had some acquaintance with the literary works of the Italians. He had a graceful turn of speech and a majestic utterance. A man of heroic stature, he looked every inch an Emperor. His idea of his own range of knowledge was vastly exaggerated, but wishing to model his reign on those of the great Antonines of the past... he paid particular attention to two things: the study of letters and the science of war. Of the latter he was completely ignorant, and as for literature, his knowledge was far from profound... This belief in his own knowledge, this straining beyond his own intellectual limits, led him to make mistakes on a grand scale.
In short, the besetting sin of Romanus - in striking contrast to his predecessor - was over-confidence. He was far from stupid, and had been an admirable magistrate; but imperial power went straight to his head and seems to have convinced him that, now that he was an Emperor himself, he could equal any of the great Emperors of the past in their own fields. If Marcus Aurelius was a philosopher, then so was he: whole days would pass while he discussed abstruse problems of theology and metaphysics, but since he had had no proper grounding in syllogisms or dialectical argument no purpose was served, no conclusion reached. If Augustus or Constantine could found a dynasty, then — despite his wife's advanced age - he must do likewise. To increase his chances, he made himself easy game for all the charlatans in Constantinople, swallowing their nostrums and aphrodisiacs, rubbing himself with their ointments and performing extraordinary exercises that would, he was promised, restore to him the vigour of his youth. Meanwhile Zoe did much the same, draping herself with chains and charms, stuffing herself with amulets and falling for the most transparently ridiculous mumbo-jumbo in her determination, somehow, to conceive - though no one, with the possible exceptions of herself and her husband, was surprised when she failed to do so.
When the Emperor chose to play the philosopher or the dynast, no great harm was done; it was a very different matter when he tried to prove himself a strategist, as was seen in 1030 when he decided to teach the obstreperous Emir of Aleppo a lesson. His generals warned him against it; on his arrival at Antioch, however, he found ambassadors from the Emir reminding him of the existing treaty of peace and offering reparations for any damage that might have been done. But Romanus — who had already ordered the crown that he intended to wear for his triumphal procession - refused to listen. Instead, he set out for Aleppo at the head of his army. He and his men were already in Syria, and were just about to enter a narrow pass, when they heard the Saracen war-cry; and there, suddenly, were the Emir's men galloping down on them from both sides, their scimitars flashing in the sun. Nicephorus Phocas or John Tzimisces, had they allowed themselves to be ambushed in such a manner, would have fought it out where they stood; Romanus Argyrus fled, his troops with him. Indeed, if one of his aides had not quickly helped him on to his horse, he would almost certainly have been taken prisoner. It was worse than a disaster; it was a disgrace. The enemy, Psellus tells us, watched the flight in utter astonishment - as well they might. When Basil died, the imperial army had been the finest fighting machine in the civilized world; now, after just five years of mismanagement and neglect, it was well on the way to becoming the laughing-stock of the East.
All, however, was not lost. A litde way to the north of Antioch lay a small and relatively unimportant Theme known by the name of its chief city, Teluch, and governed by a young strategos of colossal size and exceptional ability called George Maniakes. Some days later a body of some 800 Saracen cavalry, loaded with plunder from the imperial camp, rode up insolently to Teluch with the town's first news of the debacle — a somewhat exaggerated account as it happened, according to which the Emperor had been killed and the entire Byzantine army annihilated. As night was already falling, they gave the garrison until the following morning to surrender, adding threats of dire retribution if it failed to do so. Maniakes, showing every sign of fear, agreed at once, sending out copious quantities of food and wine to the infidel camp as an earnest of his good intentions and promising that he and his men would give themselves up at first light with all the gold and treasure the town possessed.
His plan worked perfectly. The Saracens, suspecting nothing and as delighted to receive the wine as they were unaccustomed to its effects, polished off the lot. Maniakes waited until they were in a logged sleep, fell on them and then, when every one of the 800 lay dead on the ground, gave orders that each corpse should have its nose and ears cut off. The next morning he set out in search of his defeated sovereign. Finding him in Cappadocia, he produced a blood-stained sack from which he proudly poured the grisly trophies at Romanus's feet, whereupon the delighted Emperor immediately appointed him catapan of Lower Media - effectively Governor of all the cities of the upper Euphrates Valley, with his residence at Samosata. From here he was to launch a whole series of victorious campaigns, culminating two years later in a heroic recovery of Edessa for the first time since the days of Heraclius, four centuries before.
On his return to Constantinople, the Emperor wisely forsook military matters and devoted himself instead to the cares of government. In the first months of his reign his acts of generosity - probably sincerely meant - had won him a good deal of support: that of the Church, when he increased by eighty pounds of gold the annual government subsidy to St Sophia; that of the monasteries and the greater landowners, when he repealed Basil's law known as the allelengyon, according to which they had been responsible for any shortfall in the tax payable by their local communities; that of government debtors, for whom he declared an amnesty — resulting in the release of several hundred from prison; and that of the victims of Constantine VIII's agrarian policy, to whom princely compensation was paid. It was a promising start; but the promise was not fulfilled. As time went on Romanus showed himself to be hardly more successful as a legislator than he had been in other fields. The appalling results of Constantine VIII's legislation should by now have been obvious to all; but the new Emperor continued the work of his predecessor, even going so far as to revive the farming of taxes -that most pernicious of all abuses, whereby some speculator would purchase from the treasury for an agreed sum the right to collect revenue on its behalf, then would himself demand double or treble that sum from the unfortunate taxpayers. 'The powerful' - by now more powerful than ever — were of course well able to resist this sort of skulduggery; once again the burden fell on the defenceless small-holder, who had no means of fighting back.
It was perhaps inevitable, sooner or later, that Romanus should have turned his attention to church-building. He had already spent a small fortune on gilding the capitals in St Sophia and the Church of the Theotokos in Blachernae, but this was not enough: like his great predecessor Justinian, he too must leave a lasting memorial behind him. The result of this decision was an enormous edifice dedicated to the Virgin Peribleptos, or All-Seeing,1 on the Seventh Hill as it slopes down to the Marmara shore. It was unquestionably magnificent; but, as Psellus makes all too clear, it scarcely added to the Emperor's reputation:
What was intended as an act of piety turned out to be the cause of evil and the occasion for many injustices. The expenditure incurred over the church was constantly increased. Every day he collected more contributions than were necessary for the work, and woe betide the man who tried to limit the building.
1 Not, surely, 'the Virgin who must be seen by all and from all sides', as Schlumberger suggests.
On the other hand, anyone who invented fresh extravagances and new variations of style was sure of winning the Emperor's friendship at once ...
Nothing in the whole world was thought good enough for this church. All the royal treasure was made available, every golden stream poured into it. Even when funds were exhausted the construction went on, for new parts were added one on top of another while other parts were pulled down again.
The church, however, was not enough by itself; it must have a dependent monastery. Soon this second building was as grandiose as the first, so huge indeed that it became almost impossible to find monks enough to fill it. Together, these two monuments to imperial megalomania are said to have brought the people of Constantinople to the verge of rebellion, such was their fury over the Emperor's continual demands for more and more money. But did they, one wonders, admire them none the less? It seems unlikely. ThePeribleptos, if Psellus is to be believed, must have been an appalling hotchpotch. It can certainly have borne little trace of any overall architectural conception, of the kind that gives the Church of the Holy Wisdom its simplicity and strength. But we shall never know for sure: for on its site there now rises the wonderfully uninteresting mass of the Armenian church of Surp Kevork (St George), known locally as Sulu Monastir. Of the vast edifice that Romanus Argyrus intended to stand for ever to the glory of God and His Mother - and of course himself - not a trace remains.1
What, meanwhile, of the Empress Zoe, without whom her husband would never have attained the supreme power, or had the money to squander as he did? She was, as she had been for most of her life, frustrated and dissatisfied; and - like the people of Constantinople, though for a rather different reason — she was furious with her husband. Her anger was due principally to the fact that, from the moment he had given up hope of posterity, he had refused to share her bed and had taken a mistress; indeed, he had conceived so intense a dislike of her that he could hardly bear to be in the same room. It was further increased by
1The Peribleptos was one of the few churches in Constantinople that continued as a Christian sanctuary after the Turkish conquest. According to the Blue Guide to Istanbul, 'the generally accepted tradition is that the church remained in the hands of the Greeks until 164), when it was given to the Armenians by Sultan Ibrahim under the influence of a favourite Armenian concubine. (This lady's name was seker Parca, or Piece of Sugar; she is said to have weighed more than 300 pounds.)' The Guide adds, however, that more recent evidence suggests that it was already in the Armenian Patriarchate in 1608.
his having refused her access to the imperial treasury, giving her instead a meagre annual pension which she was formally forbidden to exceed. Unfortunately for him, Zoe was intensely proud; she had also, for the first fifty years of her life, been thoroughly spoilt by a father who had denied her nothing. At first she had vented her feelings on her sister Theodora - now a morbidly religious old maid of fifty who had hardly ever left the gynaeceum - whom in 103 \ she ordered into a convent 'to put an end to her constant intrigues and the scandals of her life'; soon, however, she took more direct action, and it is at this moment that there enters upon the scene the strange and sinister figure of John the Orphanotrophus.
This man - destined to play a leading role in our story over the coming decade — was a eunuch who had risen, through his own intelligence and industry, from obscure and humble origins in Paphlagonia to be a highly influential member of the civil bureaucracy. For many years already he had been a friend and confidant of the Emperor, who had recently appointed him director of the city's principal orphanage, whence he took his name. He possessed four younger brothers, of whom the two eldest were eunuchs like himself; the other two called themselves money-changers buc were more probably strikers of false coin. The youngest, Michael, an outstandingly handsome youth still in his teens, was one day in 1033 brought by his brother to the Palace and presented to Romanus and Zoe in formal audience. Romanus scarcely noticed him; Zoe, on the other hand, fell - precisely as John had intended her to fall — instantly and besottedly in love.
From that moment she thought of nothing but the young Paphlagonian, whom she invited regularly to her private apartments and, after having overcome first his shyness and later his understandable reluctance, successfully seduced. Michael remained far from enthusiastic where sex was concerned, though he was naturally flattered to be the lover of the Empress; but he received careful instruction from his brother, and - particularly after Zoe began to flaunt her new amour in public and speak openly about her intention to make him Emperor — his own slowly awakening ambition did the rest. As for Romanus, for a long time he seems to have had no inkling of what was going on; far from treating Michael with suspicion, he actually appointed him his own personal servant, regularly sending for him to massage his legs and feet (for his health was becoming rapidly worse and he was beginning to have difficulty in walking) and - or so it appeared to those around him — deliberately shutting his eyes to his wife's increasingly blatant infidelity. Finally his sister Pulcheria could bear the gossip no longer and told him in so many words what was going on, warning him in addition that there might be a plot against his life. Only then did he send for Michael and make him swear on some holy relics that there was no truth in what he had heard; when the lad unhesitatingly did so, he showed every sign of being completely reassured.
There were those at court who believed that he was only feigning ignorance: that he was perfectly well aware of his wife's insatiable sexual appetite and was only too pleased that her infatuation with Michael was keeping her out of worse trouble. Others suggested that as the young man was known to be an epileptic, Romanus had dismissed the rumours as impossible. As the months went by, however, the question became less and less important; for by now it was plain to all that the Emperor was himself very seriously ill. Though he still appeared in ceremonial processions, he looked (writes Psellus) like a walking corpse: his face was grotesquely swollen, his breathing short and rapid, and every few paces he had to stop to rest. His appetite left him and he could not sleep. His character, too, had changed. In the past he had been a friendly, accessible sort of man, easily moved to laughter; now he was irritable and peevish, hating to be disturbed and losing his temper on the slightest provocation.
All too often already in this history, we have seen how circumstances such as these at the court of Byzantium would immediately give rise to rumours of poison. Such rumours had been rife after the death Romanus II, and again after that of John Tzimisces; but on both those occasions they were almost certainly unfounded. With Romanus III, we cannot be so sure. We know for a fact that his wife hated him and had every reason to want him out of the way, enabling her to instal Michael in his place. We know too that she had plenty of opportunity, while it is clear from her subsequent behaviour that she would have been fully capable of the crime. As far as local opinion was concerned, we have it on the authority of Psellus that no one at the Palace doubted her guilt for an instant. Already the case against Zoe — and with her, almost certainly, John the Orphanotrophus and Michael himself — looks black; what makes it blacker still is the highly suspicious manner in which, on the Thursday before Good Friday 1034, her husband met his death. Once again we must quote Psellus, since his account is the fullest and, if we are to make up our minds, his carefully-worded testimony is vital:
He was making himself ready for the public services on the morrow. Before dawn he set out to bathe in one of the huge and beautifully decorated baths near the imperial apartments. There was no one to assist him, and he was certainly not then at the point of death... He washed his head and body; then, as he was breathing strongly, he proceeded to the swimming bath, which had been deepened in the middle. At first he amused himself by swimming and floating on the surface, blowing out and refreshing himself with every sign of pleasure. Soon, as he had ordered, some of his retinue arrived to help him rest and to dress him.
I cannot swear that it was these men who killed him, but I know that all those who tell the story maintain that, at the moment that the Emperor dived as was his custom, they held his head for a long time beneath the water, attempting at the same time to strangle him. Then they departed. Later the unhappy Emperor was found floating on the surface like a cork. He was still breathing feebly, and reached out his arm in an imploring gesture for help. Someone, seized with pity, picked him up in his arms, carried him from the bath and laid him on a couch.
By this time the shouts of those who had first discovered him brought many people running to the spot, among them the Empress herself, unattended and making an immense show of grief. She gazed long at her husband; then, satisfied that he was past help, went away. Romanus moaned, looking round this way and that. He could not speak, and tried to express himself with signs and gestures; then, seeing that these were not understood, he closed his eyes and his breathing became faster again. Suddenly his mouth gaped open and there flowed from it some dark-coloured, coagulated matter. He gasped two or three times more, then gave up the ghost.
It is a curious story, and not altogether conclusive. The murder — if murder it was — is unsubstantiated, with no eye-witnesses; Psellus's only evidence is based on hearsay, and the victim was unable to testify one way or the other before he died. For all we know, the Emperor might have suffered a sudden stroke or heart attack while bathing. On the other hand it is worth mentioning that Scylitzes states as a point of fact - though again without substantiation - that Romanus was strangled by Michael's men, in the main pool orkolymbithra in the Baths of the Great Palace, while Matthew of Edessa maintains that he died of poison administered by his wife. We are consequently left with two suspected murders of the same victim, and four separate theories. The first is that that there was no foul play at all: the Emperor was simply a very sick man, suffering in all probability from some cardiac or arterial complaint, which finally struck him down while bathing. The second also accepts that his sickness sprang from natural causes, but holds that theEmpress and her friends administered - or caused to be administered -the coup de grace. According to the third, Romanus was dying of slow poison - Psellus suggests hellebore - which weakened him to the point where the swim was too much for him, so that he died, quite naturally, of his exertions.
And so we come to the fourth theory: that Zoe, John and Michael at first planned to kill Romanus by poison but then, when he took much longer to die than they had expected, lost patience and decided to force the issue. This seems on the face of it the most probable of all, but there - once again we shall never know, and perhaps it hardly matters. The essential point is that unless we accept the first hypothesis - which surely strains our credulity too far - we must conclude that in some way or another Zoe killed her husband.
Once he was dead, she made no pretence of grieving for him. At dawn on that Good Friday morning - it was 12 April 1034 — Alexis of the Studium, Patriarch of Constantinople, was summoned urgently from St Sophia to the Palace, where the first sight that met his eyes was the near-naked body of the dead Emperor. Scarcely had he recovered from the shock when a pair of enormous doors opened - and there, in the great Coronation Hall or Chrysotriclinium, sat the Empress enthroned in state. On her head was the imperial diadem, in her hand the sceptre, over her shoulders the gold brocade robe of the Emperors, heavy with jewels. And there at her side, to the unconcealed horror of the Patriarch, sat young Michael, similarly robed and crowned. She spoke firmly and steadily; Alexis could not fail to understand her commands, nor could he refuse them. There and then he joined the hand of the fifty-six-year-old Empress - widowed only a few hours before - with that of her fellow-murderer and paramour, an epileptic young Paphlagonian forger nearly forty years her junior;1 consecrated him as basileus, Equal of the Apostles; and called the blessing of God down upon them both.
That same evening, after all the high functionaries of Church and State - bishops and abbots, senators and generals, ministers and bureaucrats - had filed past the sovereign pair, touching their foreheads to the ground and kissing Michael's hand (though not Zoe's) in homage, the body of Romanus Argyrus was carried in an open coffin through the streets of Constantinople to his own Church of the
1 Scylitzes claims that for some time the Patriarch was too shocked to speak, and found his voice only after the Empress had thrust into his hand fifty pounds of gold for himself and fifty more for his clergy.
Peribleptos, the new Emperor and his brother leading the procession. The eighteen-year-old Psellus, recendy arrived in the capital, watched it pass. Had it not been for the imperial insignia, he tells us, he would never have recognized the old man. The face was not wasted away but curiously swollen, drained of colour 'like those who have been poisoned', while the sparseness of the hair and beard reminded him of 'an empty cornfield after the harvest'. No tears were shed: the people of the city had cordially disliked Romanus while he was alive, and they were not sorry to see him go.
If the Empress had hoped for a second husband who would in effect be little more than a crowned slave, ready to indulge her every whim and obey her every command, she was soon to be disappointed. For a few months she was indeed able to enjoy such a desirable state of affairs; but long before that fateful year of 1034 was at its end, Michael was beginning to show signs of impatience. He had never loved Zoe or even much respected her; and it soon became clear to him that he was capable of governing the Empire very much better than she. If, on the other hand, he were to take over the reins — which he was determined to do -might he not risk a similar fate to that which had befallen his predecessor? His brother the Orphanotrophus certainly believed so, and it was probably at his insistence that Zoe once again found herself confined to the gynaeceum under constant surveillance, forbidden even to receive visits from her friends without permission, her liberty - and her spending - even more curtailed than in the days of Romanus.
There were other reasons too - apart from fear and personal dislike -why Michael should wish to distance himself from his wife. One was his health, which was fast deteriorating. His epileptic fits were becoming ever more frequent, to the point where he had red curtains hung about his throne, which could be drawn immediately his eyes began to glaze or his head suddenly to shake from side to side; but there was clearly no way in which he could conceal his humiliation from his family and close associates, and since on these occasions he minded the presence of Zoe more than that of anyone else, he preferred to avoid her altogether. He was also, despite his youth, becoming dropsical - a disability which apparently made him incapable of normal sexual relations. Finally there was his conscience. He owed everything to the Empress: his position, his wealth, his power. That debt, he knew, had been ill repaid, and he could not bear to meet her eye.
But he also knew that this betrayal of his wife was as nothing compared to his faithlessness towards Romanus. The memory of it tortured him, and the rest of his short life was one desperate attempt to save his soul. He spent hours a day in church; he established monasteries and convents by the dozen; he set up a vast refuge for the pious poor together with another, even larger, for reformed prostitutes; he sought out holy men and ascetics from every corner of the Empire, washing their feet, personally tending their sores, even putting them to rest in his own bed, while he himself stretched out by its side on a humble pallet; and he transformed Justinian's old Church of St Cosmas and St Damian - the two doctor saints in whom he naturally took a special interest — into what, according to Psellus, must have been one of the loveliest buildings in the city:
So far as the building of sacred churches was concerned, Michael surpassed all his predecessors, both in workmanship and in magnificence. The depths and heights of this edifice were given a new symmetry, and the new chapels harmonized with the church to give it an infinite beauty. The most wondrous stones were used in the floors and walls, and the whole church was made resplendent with gold mosaics and the painter's art. Images that seemed almost to live, set in every comer of the building, filled it with glory. Besides all this, near the church and practically incorporated in it, were luxurious baths, countless fountains, beautiful lawns and whatever else could attract or delight the eye.1
At those times when he was not preoccupied with spiritual matters (and once his wife was out of the way) the Emperor devoted himself to the business of government — at which, it must be said, he proved a good deal more adept than might have been expected. Suddenly he seemed to grow up: the Empire was no longer a plaything, but a responsibility. Psellus notes with approval that he made no dramatic changes in the administration after the manner of so many new Emperors: there were no abolitions of established customs, no reversals of policy, no removals of old or experienced advisers. Such changes as were made came about only gradually, while those men to whom he was under some obligation and who had hoped for high office under the new regime were started off in junior positions to gain experience until he felt them to be ready for promotion. Questions of finance and taxation
1 In Michael's day the church was usually known as the Anargyroi — 'the unpaid ones' - owing to the tradition that the two saintly physicians never accepted tees for their services. Nothing, alas, remains of it today.
he left to his brother the Orphanotrophus; everything else he kept firmly in his own hands, paying particular attention to local administration, to foreign affairs and to the army, whose shattered morale he managed in large measure to restore.
Although he had had little formal education, Michael learned fast. Within months of his assumption of effective power he was ruling the Empire with a sure and steady hand. His advisers marvelled at his industry, his quickness of perception, his sure political instinct and, despite his epilepsy, his emotional balance: he never lost his temper or raised his voice - which was, we are told, unusually resonant — but spoke evenly and rapidly, with a ready wit and a natural ease of expression. In his presence, the baseness of his origins and his shameful path to the throne were alike forgotten. Men were conscious only of his intelligence, his gentleness of manner and his obviously genuine desire to serve his Empire to the best of his ability; and those who knew him well had nothing but admiration for the courage with which he struggled against his two cruellest handicaps - his health and his family.
Of his four elder brothers, three were little better than parasites, living off the court and interested only in what they could get. The eldest, John the Orphanotrophus, was a far more formidable figure. He also lacked Michael's new-found selflessness and high moral principle; where intelligence and industry were concerned, however, he was cast in a similar mould. While the Emperor, progressively weakened by disease, was on occasion almost prostrate with exhaustion, John's energy was boundless. So, too, was his vigilance. He would work indefatigably late into the night, and then spend hours wandering through the streets of Constantinople, watching and listening, unrecognized in the monastic habit which he always wore. There was, it appeared, nothing that he did not know. Like his brother he was without malice, and would never do anyone a gratuitous injury; but he deliberately cultivated a fierce, intimidating manner, and if this did not make him hated it did at least ensure that he was almost universally feared. He drank heavily, and occasionally abandoned himself to unspeakable debaucheries; yet his shrewdness and watchfulness never left him, and his drinking companions soon discovered that every careless word spoken in their cups was remembered when, early the following morning, they were summoned into his presence to explain themselves. Psellus - who knew him well - was not the only man to conclude that the Orphanotrophus was still more dangerous drunk than sober.
He differed from his brother the Emperor in one other important respect. While the latter strove for fairness and impartiality in all that he did, John thought only of the advancement of his family. To be sure, this failing had its advantages: without it, Michael would never have come to the throne in the first place, and once he had attained the supreme power he found in the Orphanotrophus a source of constant strength. It was not that the conduct of the other three brothers was a whit less embarrassing to John than to everyone else; it was simply that he felt bound to protect them. He would go to any length to keep the Emperor in ignorance of their misdeeds or, if this proved impossible, to minimize them or shift the blame elsewhere. This and this alone explains why Michael did not take firm action against them, as he would have been well capable of doing; but John had no similar excuse. Had he treated them as firmly as he treated everyone and everything else, all might have been well. By refusing to do so he did a serious disservice both to his brother's reputation and to his own.
More serious still, he extended this family feeling to a certain Stephen, husband of his sister Maria. In his early days, before suddenly waking up to find himself the Emperor's brother-in-law, Stephen had exercised the humble profession of ships' caulker in the harbour of Constantinople. A man of no intelligence, education or aptitude, it would have been better had he remained there. Psellus gives us an unforgettable description:
I saw him after the metamorphosis. .. His horse, his clothes, everything else that alters a man's appearance - all were out of place. It was as if a pygmy wanted to play Hercules... The more such a person tries, the more his appearance belies him — clothed in a lion's skin, but weighed down by the club.
Had the Orphanotrophus been content to weigh his brother-in-law down with honours and titles and leave it at that, no great harm would have been done. Unfortunately, he went further. In 1038 he arranged for Stephen to be given command of the transport fleet for the most ambitious - and what, but for him, might have been the most triumphant - military undertaking of Michael's reign: the long-delayed Sicilian expedition.
Originally planned by Basil II for 1026 but indefinitely postponed as a result of bis death in the previous year, this expedition now seemed to Michael and his advisers more necessary than ever. The continual raids on Byzantine territory in south Italy by the Sicilian-based Saracens were no longer an annoyance; they were rapidly becoming a threat to imperial security. Nor was it only the coastal towns that were suffering from their depredations: the city merchants complained that the Middle Sea was alive with pirates, prices of imports were rising accordingly and the level of foreign trade was beginning to decline. To every Byzantine, Sicily remained part of the imperial birthright; it continued to boast a considerable Greek population. That it should still be occupied by the heathen after more than two centuries was an affront hot only to national security but also to national pride.
But if the necessity of the expedition had increased in the twelve years since Basil's death, so too had its chances of success. Among the Arab Emirs of the island, civil war had broken out. The ruler of Palermo, al-Akhal, had suddenly found himself confronted with an insurgent army led by his brother Abu Hafs, stiffened by 6,000 warriors from Africa under the command of Abdullah, son of the Zirid Emir of Kairouan; in 103 j, growing desperate, he had actually appealed to Constantinople for help. Michael had agreed: such an opportunity, he knew, was unlikely to be repeated. The Emir's assassination almost immediately afterwards unfortunately removed this useful pretext for an unopposed landing; but revolt was now spreading throughout Sicily and the Saracens, more and more hopelessly divided, seemed unlikely to be able to offer much resistance to a concerted Byzantine attack.
The expedition sailed in the early summer of 1038. It had been put under the overall command of George Maniakes, still glorious from his Syrian triumphs and by now the foremost general of the Empire. Psellus has left us a fearsome description:
I myself saw the man, and marvelled at him; for nature had combined in his person all the qualities necessary for a military commander. He stood to the height of ten feet, so that to look at him men would tilt back their heads as if towards the top of a hill or a high mountain. His countenance was neither gentle nor pleasing, but put one in mind of a tempest; his voice was like thunder and his hands seemed made for tearing down walls or for smashing doors of bronze. He could spring like a lion and his frown was terrible. And everything else about him was in proportion. Those who saw him for the first time discovered that every description that they had heard of him was an understatement.
The army which this magnificent ogre was to command was as usual heterogeneous. Its strongest element was an impressive Varangian contingent, which had been joined by the almost legendary Norse hero Harald Hardrada, returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; its weakest a body of grumbling Lombards from Apulia who made no secret of their disgust at having been forced into Byzantine service. Landing in the late summer, at first it carried all before it. Courageously as the divided Saracens fought, they could do little to stem the tide. Messina fell almost at once and was followed, after heavy fighting, by Rometta, the key fortress commanding the pass linking Messina with the northern coastal road to Palermo. Of the next stage of the campaign we know little;1 there seems however to have been a slow but steady advance on Syracuse, which fell to Maniakes in 1040.2
The demoralization of the Byzantine forces and their collapse after the victory of Syracuse were so sudden and so complete that one can readily understand the Saracens' contention that Allah had intervened on their behalf. Everything seemed to go wrong at once. So far as we can judge, the fault lay partly with Maniakes and partly with the Emperor's brother-in-law Stephen, for whom the general had never bothered to hide his contempt and upon whom, after some particularly crass piece of ineptitude on Stephen's part, he forgot himself so far as to launch a violent attack, casting doubts on his masculinity and accusing him of being nothing but a purveyor of pleasures for his brother-in-law. Stephen - for whom, in view of his assailant's size alone, the experience must have been alarming in the extreme - determined to have his revenge, and sent an urgent message to Constantinople accusing Maniakes of treason. The general was immediately summoned to the capital where, without being given any opportunity to answer the charges against him, he was flung unceremoniously into prison. He was succeeded in his command by Stephen - with results that could have been foreseen - and then, on Stephen's death soon afterwards, by a eunuch named Basil, who proved very little better. The army had by this time lost its momentum and its morale; and the retreat began.
And still more trouble was to come. For some years dissatisfaction
1 One of the few clues remaining is the abbey church of S. Maria di Maniace near Maletto, built on the site of one of Maniakes's victories by the local Greek population soon after the battle, then restored and enlarged by Count Roger I towards the end of the century. This was the church around which, in 1173, Queen Margaret of Navarre was to found the large and richly-endowed Benedictine abbey of Maniace, last of the great Norman foundations in Sicily. Later it was to form part of the Bronte estate, bestowed by Ferdinand IV on Lord Nelson in 1799.
2 The so-called Castello Maniace which still stands in Syracuse today is in fact nothing of the sort, having been erected by Frederick II almost exactly zoo years after the Byzantine capture of the city.
had been growing in Apulia, where the Lombard separatists had had little difficulty - particularly after the imperial press-gangs had begun their forcible recruiting - in working up the local populations against their Byzantine masters. Already in 1038 several leading officials had been murdered; in 1039 the situation was near flash-point; and in 1040 the signal was given for revolt. The catapan was assassinated, and all the local militias along the coast rose up in a mutiny which the depleted garrisons were totally unable to contain. The army was urgently summoned from Sicily to deal with the situation; and within a few months the entire island — with the single exception of Messina — was once again in Saracen hands. It was as if the great expedition had never been.
By the time the news of the disaster reached Constantinople, it was clear that the Emperor was dying. No longer capable of dealing with affairs of state, he spent his days in ever more desperate attempts to appease the divine anger which had reduced him, while still in his twenties, to a hideously bloated travesty of what he had been only a few years before when his beauty had won him the heart of an Empress. Messengers were sent to every corner of the Empire with orders to pay two pieces of gold to every parish priest and one to every monk in return for their prayers for his recovery; meanwhile he himself passed more and more time in Thessalonica, spreadeagled over the tomb of his beloved St Demetrius as he implored his intercession.
Government of the Empire was now in the capable hands of John the Orphanotrophus. The pages of certain chroniclers - Scylitzes and Zonaras among them - are full of stories of his iniquities. For Psellus, better placed to know the truth, John was neither unjust nor corrupt in matters that did not affect his family; he was, however, obsessed by the idea of founding a Paphlagonian dynasty, and in this one respect would stoop to anything that might further his ends. His brother Michael would die within a year or so, leaving no issue; how was he to ensure the succession of another member of his family? Already in 1037 he had made a determined bid for the Patriarchal throne, claiming that the present incumbent, Alexis of the Studium, had been uncanonically elected; but old Alexis had been too clever for him. If his election had indeed been uncanonical, he pointed out, every single one of the ecclesiastical appointments he had made in the past eleven years was null and void - as, incidentally, would be the coronations of the last three Emperors. John's support, such as it had been, fell away at once and no more was heard of the matter.
The question remained: who was to be Michael's successor? Of his and John's three brothers one, Nicetas, was already dead; the other two - eunuchs like John himself - were disqualified. His brother-in-law Stephen, to everyone's relief, was dead. One possibility only remained: Stephen's son Michael, generally known by the nickname of Calaphates, 'the caulker', after his father's early profession. It was not a particularly pleasing prospect: although the boy - the exact date of his birth is unknown, but he was not yet out of his teens - was agreeable enough to meet, those who knew him well had already found him to be a snake in the grass: a compulsive liar and inveterate schemer, whose apparent friendliness all too often concealed his true intentions. The mind of the Orphanotrophus, however, was made up. He had little difficulty in persuading the Emperor, while Zoe was in no position to refuse; and soon afterwards, at a high Mass in the Church of St Mary at Blachernae, his nephew's succession was assured. The old Empress, enthroned at the side of her pathetic young husband, declared her formal adoption of Michael the Caulker as her son, sitting him down - symbolically if somewhat ridiculously - upon her lap. The Emperor then feebly proclaimed him Caesar, and the youth - of whom the majority of the vast assembly had never even heard and whom they were now seeing for the first time - proceeded to the age-old ceremony of his consecration.
The new Caesar might have been unknown; but everyone recognized John the Orphanotrophus standing beside the thrones, and none could mistake his expression of satisfaction and triumph. Nor could they guess how soon he would regret the disaster he had unconsciously brought upon the Empire, his family and himself.
There is no need for us to investigate in any close detail the reasons for the revolt which broke out in Bulgaria in the summer of 1040. The severity of Byzantine taxation seems to have been largely to blame. Basil II had wisely allowed his Bulgar subjects to pay, as they always had, in kind; John the Orphanotrophus insisted on cash, thereby imposing a far heavier burden. The Bulgars had been angered, too, when on the death of the Slav Bishop of Ochrid in 1037 a Greek named Leo, the chartophylax of St Sophia, was appointed in his place. Three years later they took up arms, under the leadership of one Peter Deljan, who seems to have been the bastard grandson of Tsar Samuel and who was joined a few weeks later by his cousin Alusian, rescued from semi-captivity in Constantinople. The two quickly drove the Byzantines from western
Bulgaria and then, like Symeon and Samuel before them, invaded northern Greece. By the end of the year they had stormed Dyrrachium -thus giving them an outlet on the Adriatic - and penetrated as far south as the Gulf of Lepanto, whence they now pressed eastwards to lay siege to Thebes.
At this point an astonishing thing happened. The Emperor Michael, speaking from his Palace in Thessalonica, suddenly announced his intention of leading his army in person against the enemy. He was by now semi-paralysed, his monstrously swollen legs having been attacked by gangrene; the slightest movement was an agony. In vain did those around him - including his surviving brothers - implore him to renounce the idea; he refused to listen. It was bad enough, he pointed out, that his reign had seen no increase of the imperial dominions; he was at least determined that it should not witness any diminution. As Psellus puts it:
His first battle — in which he was victorious - was against members of his own intimate circle, before he ever came to grips with the barbarians; and the first trophy of the war was set up to commemorate his triumph over his own kinsmen and his associates - and himself. Bodily weakness was more than compensated for by strength of purpose, and in this strength he committed his cause to God.
But this, Psellus makes clear, was not an empty gesture. There were no vain heroics, nor any question of a mortally sick man riding out in search of a glorious death on the battlefield. The campaign was meticulously planned, and its specific targets carefully chosen, before the dying basileus led his army across the frontier to war.
Camp was pitched in a suitable spot when the expedition arrived in enemy territory. A council was held, and after it the Emperor decided to engage the Bulgars - an extraordinary plan, about which even his commanders who were there with him had contrary opinions. Nor is this surprising, for during the night his doctors had to be sent for and he nearly died. Yet at daybreak he immediately rose - some power apparently giving him new strength - mounted his horse, sat firm in the saddle, and managed the animal with skilful use of the bridle. Then, an object of wonder to all who saw him, he rode to the rear and formed up the various divisions of his army into one coherent force.
It would be pleasant indeed to be able to attribute the defeat of the Bulgar insurgents to the courage of the Emperor. In fact Alusian's men brought it on themselves by their lack of discipline, laying siege to Thessalonica and then falling into such disorder as virtually to invite the defenders to emerge from the city and destroy them. By this time too a serious quarrel had broken out between the two leaders, Deljan being quick to accuse Alusian of incompetence and even treachery. Alusian responded by setting a trap for his cousin and then removing his eyes and nose with a carving knife; soon afterwards, realizing that the insurrection no longer had any hope of success, he sent a secret message to the Emperor offering surrender in return for safe conduct back to Constantinople.
And so, early in 1041, Michael returned to his capital in triumph, followed by his army and a host of captives including the eyeless and noseless Deljan. Psellus, who was there, records the scene:
The entire population poured out of their houses to greet their Emperor. I myself saw him on this occasion, looking as if he were attending a funeral and swaying on his horse. The fingers that gripped his bridle were like those of a giant, for each of them was as thick as a man's arm - such were the effects of the disease from which he suffered. His face, too, preserved not a trace of its former beauty.
It was his last public appearance. As the year went on his condition grew steadily worse, until on 10 December, feeling the end to be near, he had himself carried to his own monastery of St Cosmas and St Damian. There he took off his imperial robes and diadem, donning in their place the robes of a simple monk. His brothers, John in particular, could not restrain their tears; only he remained happy and serene, confident that he had at last obtained the forgiveness for which he had so long striven. To the astonishment of all, the old Empress Zoe appeared at the monastery gate, having heard of her husband's condition and anxious to see him before he died; but Michael refused to receive her. (Before we condemn him for so unnecessary a snub to the old woman to whom he owed everything, we should remember that he had only a few hours to live, that he was in the last stages of exhaustion and that he knew Zoe a lot better than we do.) When the time came for Vespers, he called for a pair of sandals; hearing that those which were being made for him were not yet ready, he refused to wear the imperial purple buskins and hobbled barefoot into the chapel, supported by two of his fellow-monks. But the effort was too much for him. Gasping now for breath, he was carried back to his cell, where an hour or two later he died.
Of all those who occupied the Byzantine throne, few had risen from more lowly origins; few had attained power by more questionable methods; none, certainly, suffered a more agonizing end. And yet, had he lived, Michael might have proved a great Emperor. He might even have reversed the slow process of disintegration which had begun with the death of Basil II in 1025. He possessed wisdom, vision and - as he showed in that last astonishing Bulgarian expedition - almost superhuman courage. He was a truly tragic figure; and, in the reigns that followed, there would be many who desperately regretted his loss.