PART III
11
The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, ‘Brief Historical Notes’, is an anonymous mid-eighth-century text from Constantinople. It consists of comments on the monuments of the city, above all its statues. Some of the text purports to collect notes and letters written by a group of friends, state officials in the 710s, who had a sort of research project exploring who the statues were of and where they had come from. This may well be a literary fiction, for references in the text to other authors are themselves mostly clear inventions, and the text sometimes has an in-jokiness about it which makes the reader mistrustful. But someone did do the work, going around from statue to statue, reading the inscription on the base or asking other people what they thought the figure represented. This was not always easy; the woman seated on a bronze chair in the Hippodrome might be the empress Verina (d. c. 484), as the skilled statue-interpreter Herodian thought, but it might also be the goddess Athena, ‘as I have myself heard from many people . . . and this I believed’. It was also dangerous work; Himerios the chartoularios (a medium-level financial official) and his friend Theodore went to look at the statues in the Kynegion, north of Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of Constantinople; as they were studying one, it fell on Himerios and killed him, and Theodore, who fled, had trouble getting out of a criminal accusation. In the end, the statue was buried on the spot by order of the emperor Philippikos (711-13). ‘Take care when you look at old statues, especially pagan ones,’ the chapter finishes: pagan statues were maleficent, and one had to be prepared.
Conversely, if an expert knew his statues, and was a skilled enough interpreter, his knowledge was highly useful. Not only could he avoid maleficent ones, but he could tell the future. Herodian knew that one of the Hippodrome statues of women giving birth to wild beasts (Scylla and Charybdis, probably) prefigured the reign of terror of Justinian II in 705-11; the other (the one with the boat) ‘has not been fulfilled, but remains’. Asklepiodoros looked at the inscription on the statue of Herakles in the Hippodrome and could at once tell what bad things (unnamed) were going to happen, to his distress (‘I would have been better off if I had not read the inscription’). And he could also, of course, reconstruct the past. The authors of the Parastaseis did not have access to many books about the past, but they were very interested in it, and sought systematically to locate statue-knowledge in a historical framework. Valentinian III’s statue, for example, had not fallen over in an earthquake; this showed that his assassination in 455 was unjust, and not, as people had previously thought, a fair retribution for his murder of Aetius. Constantinople was still a very large city, and, obviously, was full of statues; this text could not conceivably have been written about any other Mediterranean city except Rome - and in Rome, churches and Christian cult-sites were by now the inescapable points of reference, unlike in the eastern capital, as it seems. In the eastern capital, the imperial past still mattered, and the whole history of Constantinople was laid out through its statues. Conversely, this history was above all of the fourth and fifth centuries (often misunderstood), much less of the sixth (there is surprisingly little about Justinian) and less still of the seventh and eighth. This is a key to the text: it represented a genuine antiquarian interest, with statues operating as a memory-theatre in a literal sense, but its author or authors looked at the great days of the Christian Roman empire across a huge divide, and did not by any means know much about what that empire meant. Such is the divide which this chapter explores, for the eighth-century Byzantine empire, lineal heir of the east Roman empire, was a very different society, with most of its points of reference changed.
The reason for this divide was a simple one: it was the catastrophic events which broke Roman control over most of the east Mediterranean between 609 and 642. The drastic downsizing and reorganization of the empire that resulted was the main break in the imperial history of the East in our whole period, and, together with most historians, I call the surviving empire ‘Byzantine’ from now on. (The Byzantines always called themselves ‘Romans’, Romaioi in Greek; so did their eastern neighbours; westerners called them ‘Greeks’. ‘Byzantines’ in our period only meant the inhabitants of Constantinople, which had once been called Byzan tion. But it is a convenient misnomer, all the same.) We left the late sixth-century east Roman empire in reasonable shape in Chapter 4. The emperor Maurice (582-602) was a war leader; he had ended twenty years of Persian frontier war in 591 by intervening in a succession dispute in Persia and helping to set up Khusrau II (590-628) as shah. He also faced out threats to the Balkans. Here, the sixth-century successors to the Germanic invaders of the late fourth and fifth were Sclavenian groups, small-scale tribal communities whose raids are attested from the 540s onwards. (Many or most of these groups spoke Slavic languages, but this is not stressed by our early sources as an identifier for the Sklavnoi, so I shall avoid the word ‘Slav’ here; see further Chapter 20.) The Avars, a Turkic-speaking nomadic people, came westwards in 558, and by 567-8 had established themselves in Pannonia as the Huns had done over a century earlier; they established a loose hegemony over many of the Sclavenian tribes north of the Danube, and presented a greater military threat, particularly after their capture of the Roman frontier town of Sirmium in 582. After 591, however, Maurice could attend systematically to Balkan defence, and he held these incursions back in the 590s, reinforcing the Danube frontier as he did so. It was Maurice’s very success which undid him, for in 602 the Balkan army revolted against his orders to over-winter north of the Danube, and he was killed with his family by one of his generals, Phocas, who succeeded him (602-10).
Phocas’ accession was the first successful overthrow of an emperor in the eastern empire since 324; between 602 and 820, however, only five out of twenty-one emperors died naturally in office. There had always been a culture of coups in the East, but from now on they were frequently effective. The army’s role in politics changed as a result, as we shall see. There were constant and successful attempts to establish dynasties, which lasted five generations under the Heraclids (610-711), four under the Isaurians (717-802), three under the Amorians (820-67), six under the Macedonians (867-1056: see Chapter 13); the notion of hereditary succession was by no means lost, that is to say. But even this succession was punctuated by coups. Legitimacy was as much linked to military success and to popularity in the capital (coups were hard if the city of Constantinople was opposed) as to family background; the image of the choice of God, which lay behind the decisions of ‘the people, the senate and the army’, was used even when sons succeeded fathers. The ceremony of imperial accession was much more elaborate as a result, to establish this legitimacy as publicly as possible. The openness of the succession, and its apparent availability to almost anyone who was of sound body (blinding and other mutilation were standard Byzantine methods of neutralizing rivals), marked out the Byzantine world from now on; so did the importance of the image of divine favour for the emperor, which had further consequences, as we shall see.
Phocas is often seen as the turning point in this development, but his reign matches that of Maurice in important particulars. The Balkan frontier remained sound, and, although Khusrau restarted the Persian war in 603, at least nominally to avenge Maurice, it remained a standard frontier war for some years. Phocas was unpopular, however, and could not withstand a north African-based uprising in 608-10 aimed at putting Heraclius, the son of the exarch of Africa, on the throne. It was that civil war which threw the empire sideways, for it was then that the Persian breakthrough began. Heraclius (610-41) already found the Persians raiding in Anatolia in 611; more drastically still, Syria was conquered in 613, Palestine in 614, Egypt in 619; in 616-17 Persian raids reached the Bosporos. Heraclius pulled out all the troops in the Balkans to defend Anatolia, and Sclavenian groups began to settle there permanently; the Avars consolidated a hegemony over them, and by 617 they were raiding up to the Aegean too. In less than a decade, the richest provinces of the empire were all lost, and no part of it was safe from raiding except the Aegean islands and the western provinces of Sicily and Africa. It got worse: in 626, an Avar-Sclavenian army to the west and a Persian army to the east, roughly coordinated, besieged the capital, when Heraclius was 800 kilometres away campaigning in Armenia. Constantinople’s huge fortifications stood firm, however, and the Avar siege failed (the Persians, on the other side of the Bosporos, could not get across). The Avar-Sclavenian alliance broke up acrimoniously, and Avar hegemony in the Balkans began to fail from now on. In two years of daring campaigning Heraclius got behind the Persian armies and attacked Khusrau’s heartland (what is now Iraq), with the considerable help of an army of Gök Turk nomads from the Caucasus; Khusrau was killed in a coup, and the Persians made peace in 628, surrendering all their conquests. The Sassanian polity went into crisis; seven rulers followed Khusrau in quick succession before Yazdagird III (632-51) established himself in 633-4.
Heraclius in 628 was a hero. He was received in triumph in Constantinople in 629, and in Jerusalem in 630, where he restored the True Cross, taken by the Persians in 614. Heraclius was closely attached to the Cross, Christianity’s most resonant relic, which Constantine’s mother Helena was said to have found outside Jerusalem in the 320s; as his court poet George of Pisidia put it, ‘[the Persians] were venerating fire, while you, O sovereign, [venerate] wood’. This was a time for religious renewal, so Jews were massacred and otherwise persecuted, and Heraclius also made the last attempt to reunify the rival Chalcedonian and Monophysite churches (cf. Chapter 3) in 638, when he proclaimed a compromise doctrine, called Monotheletism, which was henceforth to be the only legitimate version of Christianity throughout the empire. But the empire was, of course, devastated, its economy in crisis owing to destruction and political division, and its armies in need of years to recover. It was thus impossible for Heraclius successfully to resist attack from a new quarter, Arabia. Arab armies defeated the Byzantines on the River Yarmuk near the Sea of Galilee in 636, and the disaster of the 610s repeated itself: the Arabs took Syria in 636, Palestine in 638, and Egypt in 639-42. This time the Byzantines did not get them back. Notwithstanding Heraclius’ successes in 627-8, the reunification of the empire only lasted for a decade or less. Only after Heraclius’ death in 641 would the Byzantines slowly come to see that they would have in future to do without the south-east Mediterranean provinces; but in reality the empire had lost them in the 610s.
How the Arabs were so successful, and what happened in the lands they conquered, we shall see in the next chapter, but the seriousness of these conquests for the Byzantine world cannot be overemphasized. Heraclius has a curiously good press even now, thanks to the events of 627-8, but his reign was, taken as a whole, the most disastrous in a thousand years of Roman history. The empire lost two-thirds of its land and three-quarters of its wealth in the 610s, in Michael Hendy’s words, and this loss became permanent in the 630s. The loss of the agrarian and productive wealth of Egypt was particularly serious. Byzantium was reduced to the Anatolian plateau of modern Turkey, the Aegean sea and the lands around it, and, moving westwards, pockets of the Adriatic coast, parts of Italy (including Rome) and Sicily, and North Africa. In the next two centuries, the southern Balkans would be reconquered, but northern and central Italy and Africa would be lost, and then, after the 820s, so would Sicily, although much of mainland southern Italy stayed Byzantine until after 1050.
The Roman empire had always relied on sea traffic to integrate its economy. The Byzantine empire remained a maritime state, too, for only the sea roads connected its far-flung provinces by now, linking the richest but also the furthest province, Sicily, to the capital. The Byzantine navy was far less politically prominent than the army, and we know less about it, but it was a crucial element in the survival of the empire, both strategically and tactically. The fact that the Byzantines held the Bosporos strait was essential to the survival of Constantinople in the great sieges of 626 and 717-18. All the same, the Byzantines had not only lost Egypt, the traditional grain reserve for the capital, but also, at least after the Arab conquests, the Egyptian fleet based at Alexandria. The Arabs held the southern Mediterranean sea roads, restricting the Byzantines to its northern edge, and they used the Alexandrian fleet particularly effectively in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, raiding into the Aegean and, in 717-18, even into the Sea of Marmara. That raiding stopped temporarily in the eighth century, but the Byzantines could never take their sea mastery for granted, particularly beyond their Aegean heartland. Constantinople lost its right to free grain in 618, when Heraclius rapidly drew the correct conclusions from the Persian conquest of Egypt, and the population dropped substantially in size, from some 500,000 to between 40,000 and 70,000: still the largest city in Europe, but a tenth the size of what it had been. This smaller urban community could be supplied from Aegean and Black Sea sources, and would be henceforth, particularly after Sicily was lost.
People knew at once that the Persian-Arab conquests were a catastrophe, of course. The seventh-century crisis in the East was unlike the fifth-century crisis in the West, in that it was so fast. People could not get comfortably used to the new status quo as they did in the West, in the increasingly regionalized politics of the crystallizing Germanic kingdoms; in the East, they knew that they had to adapt quickly, or else be conquered. The atmosphere of crisis is reflected in nearly every seventh-century text. This was a period in which apocalyptic writing was common, both Christian and Jewish. The Christians, of course, could see the conquest of half of their world by Zoroastrians and then by as yet hardly understood Muslims as an immediate presage that the world itself would end. The Jews, although less persecuted in the Persian and Arab empires than in the seventh-century Roman/Byzantine empire, saw the rise of Islam, a rival monotheistic and Abrahamic religion, as a direct cultural threat; but the Persian wars already seemed to them, too, to presage final days. More widely, political disagreements of all kinds gained a religious edge, as we shall see, for divine disfavour seemed so evident.
At a less spiritual level, the first priority had to be the army. The Byzantines needed an army large enough to defend against the Arabs, but had to fund it from an empire with its richest provinces lost. Army supply had to be very streamlined for this to work. Under Heraclius, who spent most of his reign campaigning, there is little sign of army reorganization, but things stabilized a little in the 650s, when a more permanent frontier region, roughly along the Tauros mountains in east-central Anatolia, was established; the late 650s was also a period of Arab civil war. In the period 669-87, we first have references to the four great military districts, or ‘themes’, of Anatolia, the Opsikion, Thrakesion, Anatolikon and Armeniakon, each of which had its own army, and each of which was supplied locally - each theme had at least one relatively prosperous region at its heart whose produce the army could live off. These themes probably began to take shape in the 640s- 650s. They were superimposed on long-standing smaller provinces, which handled civil administration and justice, and also local tax-raising; most of these functions were gradually taken over by the military, but this long process was not complete until the ninth century. Slowly, too, other parts of the empire were organized into themes: Thrace and the Aegean islands later in the century, Greece in the eighth and early ninth century as it was reoccupied, southern Italy in the late ninth with renewed conquests there. Tax was therefore mostly spent locally; the fiscal integration of the empire largely ceased, except that the supply of Constantinople involved longer-distance links, and the capital continued to control the mechanisms of tax-raising and, for a time, provincial administrations. But armies were still paid, with their salaries funded by the land tax, except for relatively untrained militias. Soldiers were locally recruited, and remained local; they were frequently, or became, local landowners too. But they did not, as in the West, come to depend entirely on their landowning to resource them. What did happen was that taxation, and army pay, ceased for the most part to be in money; produce became the major element of the fiscal system until the ninth century. This meant that fewer coins needed to be minted (coin-finds virtually cease for the period between the 650s and the 820s, except in Constantinople and Sicily); it also meant that equipment supply became much more cumbersome, and an entire government department, the eidikon, developed to ensure it, with local branches in every theme.
This thematic army system was largely defensive; each army defended its own area. It needed to do so: the hundred years after 650, even though the frontier was by now relatively stable, was one of constant Arab raiding, which meant that no part of Anatolia was secure. Local society became largely militarized as a result; the thematic army, together with a slowly militarizing provincial bureaucracy, became the main political and social hierarchy in each area. When a landowning aristocracy is next documented, in the ninth and (especially) tenth centuries, it was as heavily military as in the West, as we shall see in Chapter 13. It is notable, however, that we can say almost nothing about landowning élites in the Byzantine empire between 650 and 800/850, even given the relatively poor documentation of the period. Landowners probably became poorer in the crisis years, particularly in those parts of Anatolia most exposed to long-term raiding. Cities also became much weaker in the period, and urban society vanished altogether in some parts of the empire (see below, Chapter 15), thus making a traditional Roman local politics, focused on the city as it had been, impossible. But what is above all the case is that social status from now on, in an empire concentrating on military survival, depended on office in the army or administration. We know the names of hundreds of military or civil administrators in this period, for they survive on lead seals, once used to authenticate documents, which have been found on archaeological sites all over the empire. It is just that we cannot say whether they had landed properties as well as offices in the imperial hierarchy, except in a few cases close to the capital, as we shall see in a moment. They probably did; and many of them may well have been both the descendants of sixth-century senatorial and urban élites and the ancestors of tenth-century surnamed aristocrats. But we do not know whether they did or not, and this is important. The period 650-800/850 was one in which office in the state overwhelmed landed wealth or local reputation as something to aspire to. Even ancestry became temporarily unimportant, or at any rate it is rarely stressed in our sources. To survive, Byzantine society and politics folded itself around the state.
Constantinople and its immediate hinterland were a partial exception to this. The city remained large, at least by post-Roman standards, and a money economy certainly survived there. A miracle-book of the 660s, rewritten later in the century, recounts the miraculous cures (mostly of genital problems) performed by the body of St Artemios, buried in the church of St John Prodromos. It shows us a bustling urban society full of incomers and artisans (a silver-seller, a bronze-caster, a ship-builder, a bow-maker, and also general workmen who had suffered hernias owing to heavy lifting), sitting in the church hoping for healing; the supplicants had their own associations with a treasurer to hold the money, and played dice to while away the time - as well as stealing from each other on occasion, and, in one case, thoughtlessly urinating in the church itself (the perpetrator was given someone else’s hernia by St Artemios for this misjudgement). Constantinople was an active city in the seventh century, evidently. Its élites did own land, especially around the Sea of Marmara; a frequent theme in early ninth-century saints’ lives is of public officials retiring to their estates and founding monasteries there. So Platon (d. 814), a middle-ranking bureaucrat from an official family, retired south of the Marmara to found the Sakkoudion monastery on his estates in 783; he became a monastic rigorist, together with his more famous nephew Theodore (d. 826), who was made abbot of the Stoudios monastery in the imperial city around 798. Platon and Theodore’s uncompromising political interventions, for example in opposition to the supposedly adulterous second marriage in 796 of the emperor Constantine VI (780-97), were the first known political acts by non-office-holding landed aristocrats since the sixth century. This would only have been possible immediately around the capital.
But Constantinople was very much a creation of the state, all the same. It was dominated, even at its low point around 700, by a highly complex bureaucratic hierarchy, which ran the central government in its six or seven main departments, of which the most important was the genikon, which controlled the land tax. The relatively unmilitary culture of the city is explained by the strength of this bureaucracy, just as the wealth of the city was directly derived from its role as the fiscal hub of the empire. The church hierarchy, itself large, was also closely associated with the state; patriarchs were always chosen directly by the emperor, and dismissed if they disagreed with him. And Constantinople was an immense public space, with a complex ceremonial geography, centred on the display of imperial power. The Hippodrome, just in front of the palace, was a major location for public acts, including the proclamation of new emperors, or the humiliation of opponents, including the mock marriage of Iconophile monks and nuns in 765 supposedly commanded by Constantine V (741-75); and also for formal dialogues between emperors and representatives of the city. There were regular processions along the main streets of the city, too, at important moments of the liturgical year and to commemorate major events, which were so carefully crafted that observers could read precise meanings into which gate the procession entered at or how many places it stopped at. This ceremonial aspect of the city looked straight back to late Rome; although Roman traditions had certainly changed, they changed less here than in most other respects discussed in this chapter. It helped maintain a Roman form to the cityscape: wide roads survived longer in Constantinople than in any other post-Roman city, east or west. It helped maintain the statue-laden public spaces discussed at the start of this chapter, too. And it represented the state, public political power, at every stage.
The focus of Constantinopolitan politics and ceremonial, and also of the military hierarchies of the provinces, was the emperor. However unstable his personal position, the imperial office mattered enormously: indeed, the frequency of coups and attempted coups itself showed how much people wanted the imperial title. I have stressed the fiscal and military decentralization of the theme system, but in all other respects the Byzantine empire was more centralized after 650 or so, not less, for social status was so dependent on position in the office-holding hierarchy. The dominance of the imperial city was also far greater after other cities failed; in Byzantium, uniquely in the Christian world, it was commonplace for bishops of sees all over the empire to spend as much time as they could in the capital rather than in their own diocese. It may be added that the empire was by now more culturally homogeneous, too; in 500 only a minority of the population of the eastern empire spoke Greek, and the official language was still, at least nominally, actually Latin, but by 700, after the loss of Syriac- and Coptic-speaking provinces, nearly everyone was a Greek-speaker, and the occasional Sclavenian and not-so-occasional Armenian were exotic. There were no more regional divisions between Christians, as between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, for the Monophysite provinces were almost all lost: religious disagreements were henceforth fought out above all in the capital. The major exceptions to this, the Latin-speakers of the mainland Italian provinces, including the Romans of Rome, slipped away from Byzantine rule in part precisely for this reason. A concentration of religious controversy on the capital also meant its concentration on the choices and actions of emperors; these were watched with considerable attention. Leo III (717-41) was accused, in a polemical text of two generations later (it purported to be a letter written to him by the pope), of saying ‘I am emperor and priest’. The claim, however polemical, was not a ridiculous one to make of any emperor. Emperors had a religious importance which even Justinian had not claimed in an earlier century, although earlier emperors, up to Constantine, did do so.
In this form, the pared-down state survived the Arab conquests. And all through, it could continue to defend itself despite a relative shortage of charismatic leaders: in the two centuries and a half after 602, only the Isaurian emperors of the 710s-770s were really on top of events. The Frankish kings could not have survived in this situation, but the infrastructures of the Byzantine empire remained solid enough for it to be possible. Let us look at how this turned out in more detail.
Heraclius died in 641 leaving a succession dispute between his two sons, by different mothers, ruling under the aegis of his widow (and, controversially, his niece) Martina. Martina was overthrown a few months later by supporters of his young grandson Constans II (641-68), however; it was Constans who presided over the final loss of Egypt, and over the stabilization of the frontier and the theme system, none of which, probably, had much to do with him. What he is best known for is his religious and Italian policies. Constans was committed to Monotheletism, and devoted his attention throughout his reign to imposing it on all opponents. The popes in Rome resisted particularly publicly; Constans had Pope Martin I (649-53) arrested, tried in Constantinople, and deposed. Constans also faced secular rebellions in the West, by Gregory, exarch of Africa (d. 647) and Olympius, exarch of Ravenna (d. 652), two of the three main western provincial governors, the strategos of Sicily being the third. Constans was very interested in his western provinces, all the same; they were the part of the empire least affected by the Arab threat. (Gregory was actually killed in an Arab raid on Africa; but the Arabs did not return there until the 670s.) Constans tried to reconquer the Lombard parts of Italy in the 660s, and, most remarkably of all, tried to move the imperial capital to Syracuse. This reflected Sicily’s wealth and stability, but it was too extreme a move (it could potentially have led to the abandonment of Constantinople and the East), and Constans was killed in a coup in 668. His son Constantine IV (668-85) returned to Constantinople, and also abandoned Monotheletism, in the sixth ecumenical council, held in the capital in 680; Christological debate no longer seemed relevant in a rapidly changing political system, and the issues involved hardly resurfaced in the East after the end of the century.
Constantine, like his father, lived on the defensive. The Arabs attacked by sea in his reign, attempting to blockade Constantinople in the mid- 670s. The conquest of Africa began in the same period, culminating in the fall of Carthage in 698. In the Balkans, the retreat of the Avars after 626 had left a host of small, effectively independent, Sclavenian groups which could occasionally attack the Byzantine coastal cities (as with Thessaloniki between 675 and 677) though in some way recognizing Byzantine supremacy; but a new Turkic power appeared south of the Danube in 680, the Bulgars, under their khagan Asparuch (d. c. 700), who defeated an imperial army and were recognized as independent rulers of, roughly, the northern half of modern Bulgaria in 681. The Bulgars would henceforth rival the Byzantines for hegemony over the Sklaviniai for three centuries. In Constantine’s reign, nonetheless, a style of military politics which would have a long future began to crystallize. Constantine dealt with the army as a direct interlocutor. Already under Constans, both supporters and opponents of Monotheletism were accused of causing defeat by wrong belief. The army came to see this as an issue too; the sixth council in 680 was urged on the emperor by the army, as Constantine himself said. In 681, following on from this, the soldiers of the Anatolikon theme demanded (unsuccessfully) that the emperor take back his brothers as co-emperors, supposedly saying ‘we believe in the Trinity. Let us crown all three!’ - as clear a statement of an imperial office modelled on the divine power as one could imagine. Constantine’s son Justinian II (685-95), an intransigent and unpopular ruler, ratified the sixth council in 687, deferring again to the views of the army. Justinian was, however, overthrown in a military coup in 695, and was exiled, with his nose cut off, to the Crimea.
Six emperors followed in the next two decades, each replacing the last by coup. One was Justinian II again (705-11), who had escaped from the Crimea with Bulgar help, and who revenged himself terribly on his enemies. His successor Philippikos re-established Monotheletism; Anastasios II (713-15) abolished it again. The context of all of this was a growing political protagonism of the different themes, in a period of renewed Arab danger. Anastasios was at least competent enough to prepare against the long-planned and widely anticipated Arab siege of Constantinople; he decreed that only people with three years’-worth of provisions could stay in the city. He was however deposed by the Opsikion theme, against whom the Anatolikon and Armeniakon then revolted, and by the time the Arab army and navy arrived, in 717, the strategos of the Armeniakon, Leo III, was emperor. Leo survived the great siege of 717-18, the last serious attempt to destroy the Byzantine empire for almost half a millennium. His success broke the cycle of coups, and he and his son Constantine V ruled for nearly sixty years.
The empire could hardly have been in a worse strategic situation in 717, but the Isaurian emperors turned the corner, using the bureaucratic and military structure that had bedded down in the last generation. Leo faced off Arab raids throughout his reign, defeating some of them; partly reorganized the administration; and at the end of his life, in 741, issued the first systematic imperial legislation since Justinian, the Ekloga: not a long text, but compiled explicitly because Justinian’s laws had become ‘unintelligible’. Under Constantine V, for the first time, the Byzantines raided the Arab lands as often as the Arabs raided back. In general, periods of Byzantine military success were made possible by periods of Arab political instability, and Constantine’s reign, in particular, coincided with the civil wars that resulted in the overthrow of the Umayyad caliphate in 750. This created an aura of success which on its own made Constantine a figure with a high reputation in military circles, lasting into the 830s at least. Constantine also for the first time moved seriously to re-establish Byzantine power in the Balkans, attacking the Bulgars frequently in the period 759-75 and reimposing imperial hegemony as much as possible on the Sklaviniai, particularly those of what is now Greece. Constantine, on the other hand, was less interested in the West. Leo had opposed the papacy, initially over tax-paying issues, and in the 730s he stripped the popes of rights in southern Italy and Sicily. Byzantine control in the south was reasserted here at the expense of the north, however, and Constantine did not resist the Lombard conquest of the exarchate of Ravenna, in 751. The popes began to see themselves as part of a Lombard and Frankish world, not a Byzantine one, from the mid-eighth century onwards. This is when the Latin lands were lost to Byzantium, a fact that Greek sources hardly record. Constantine also intervened, more than any predecessor for a century, in imperial infrastructure, rebuilding the main aqueduct into Constantinople in 767, reforming the tax system, and establishing a non-thematic corps of professional shock troops, the tagmata, which would become the élite force in the ninth-century army.
This renewed military and political protagonism is not what Leo and Constantine are best known for, however: for these, famously, are the Iconoclast emperors, the opponents of the developing cult of holy images. In the late Roman empire, east and west, if there was anything that was surely holy it was the relics of saints (and of the Christian divinity, like the True Cross); portraits of Christ and the saints, and paintings of biblical narratives, were simply guides, ‘made for the instruction of the ignorant, so that they might understand [scriptural] stories’, as Gregory the Great said. This remained the assumption in the West, at least among theorists, but in the East images ‘not made by human hand’, that is, created miraculously, begin to be referred to in the late sixth century, and one, an image of Christ, was credited (along with the direct action of Mary) with saving Constantinople during the 626 siege. These images can still be seen as pictorial equivalents to relics; but in the last quarter of the seventh century the power of images as a whole was beginning to widen. By 700 it was increasingly common to regard all portraits of saints as windows into the divine; one might pray to a holy portrait (an ‘icon’ as we would now say, although eikn in Greek just means any image) and believe that, in so doing, one was talking directly to the saint. Anyone could thus have their own saint at hand, and one did not need to go to church to have access to the divine. Already the Quinisext council in 691/2 justified images of Christ as consequences of his human incarnation. Although the council did not go so far as to say that they should be prayed to, the importance of holy images in Byzantine culture was clearly growing. It was this which Iconoclasts reacted against in the eighth century: praying to icons detracted from the honour due only to God, and could be seen as idolatry. Indeed, as Constantine V argued in his Peuseis (c. 752), images of Christ only stress the human side of the divinity, and neglect the divine side; Christ is only properly represented in the eucharist, as well as, metaphorically, in the cross. But this is the only point at which the Iconoclast vs. Iconophile controversy referred to the Christological controversies of the past. Otherwise, it was essentially concerned with whether religious images of all kinds could be venerated, and whether praying to (or through) them was a correct, or an idolatrous, form of worship.
Later Iconophile sources saw Iconoclasm as an imperial challenge to image-worship, beginning with Leo III, who supposedly saw the volcanic eruption on the island of Thera in 726 as a sign of God’s wrath and began to destroy religious images from then onwards. All the sources that tie Leo to Iconoclast policies are late, however, postdating the first repudiation of Iconoclasm at the second council of Nicaea in 787, some of them being interpolated into earlier texts. (Most descriptions of the spiritual power of images of saints before 700 are similar interpolations.) In Leo’s reign, Iconoclast views took root in the empire, all the same, apparently as a grass-roots phenomenon; there were already bishops like Thomas of Klaudioupolis and Constantine of Nakoleia (both sees were in western Anatolia) who opposed images in the 720s-730s, and Thomas was criticized by Patriarch Germanos of Constantinople for actually removing them from public places. In the years around 750, Constantine V took this up and turned Iconoclasm into imperial policy. As we have seen, he even wrote a treatise on the subject (his Peuseis survives because it is excerpted and attacked in the Antirrhseis of Patriarch Nikephoros, d. 828); and in 754 he called the council of Hiereia, a palace across the Bosporos from Constantinople, to ban the veneration of images altogether. ‘The unlawful art of the painters’ was henceforth to be regarded as a secular activity alone. Pictures of the cross were still legitimate, but those of holy humans were not.
Constantine’s breaking of icons and persecution of Iconophiles (particularly monks) were much written up by later authors, but they do not seem to have been particularly thorough or consistent. Constantine obviously did not promote icons, and the mosaic cross still surviving in the apse of Hagia Eirene in Constantinople, rebuilt after 753, reflects imperial patronage. But there is little evidence of active destruction. Nor did Constantine systematically target monks, not all of whom were Iconophiles anyway; indeed, he patronized some monasteries. There were some high-profile executions, notably of the monk Stephen the Younger in 765, but they were isolated. It is worth repeating that Iconoclasm had grass-roots support, including in the episcopate as early as the 720s, and certainly in the army and imperial bureaucracy, and in the capital. It was not just an imperial cult, like Monotheletism, imposed by force on the hostile and indifferent. The Life of Stephen the Younger, which is one of the texts most responsible for the image of Iconoclasm as a generalized tyranny, says that Iconophiles had to flee to the Crimea, to Italy (the pope was fiercely anti-Iconoclast), and to the south coast of Anatolia, to escape persecution. This is a text of 809, much later than the events it describes, and heavily tendentious, but the impression one gets is that the core lands of the empire were fairly solidly Iconoclast. In any case, in the last twenty years of his reign, 755-75, Constantine behaved as if the Iconophile issue was mostly solved; his military campaigns were probably rather more to the front of his mind.
Constantine’s son Leo IV (775-80) did not live long, and the latter’s widow Eirene ruled for her son Constantine VI (780-97) for the next decade. In 785, Eirene, with her newly appointed patriarch Tarasios (d. 806), made her opposition to Iconoclasm clear, and called a council in 786 in Constantinople to deal with it. The army and some bishops broke it up on the first day, and it had to be rescheduled for Nicaea, further from the capital, the year after. The second council of Nicaea condemned Iconoclasm uncompromisingly, refuting (and thus preserving) its theology point by point. It was, in effect, Second Nicaea which invented the theology of images which has remained a structural part of the eastern church. Many of the basic liturgical practices of Orthodox Christianity look back to 787. Images from now on - as never before - not only could be venerated, but had to be. And Nicaea not only invented Orthodoxy, but to a large extent invented Iconoclasm too, turning Constantine V’s policies into a totalizing system, which they probably never had been at the time.
It is not fully clear why Eirene did this. She was certainly bothered by the religious break with the pope, who was by now close to the Frankish kings, and she wished to reunify Rome and Constantinople; her first formal announcement of her intentions was in a letter to Pope Hadrian I. (She succeeded, at least on a religious level; the Franks themselves, however, rather favoured Iconoclasm, and formally condemned Nicaea at the synod of Frankfurt in 794; see Chapter 17. But the whole controversy never had the same importance in the West, where religious images were never given the same spiritual attention.) It is also highly likely that Eirene needed an excuse to break with Constantine V’s supporters in both church and state, and to put in her own. It may even be that she had been a closet Iconophile all along, just waiting her chance (though if so she had been very quiet about it in the twenty years since her marriage to Leo, carefully orchestrated in imperial ceremonial in 769). But this was not necessarily the case. Eirene was an effective and sometimes ruthless dealer. If 787 was not proof of that, 797 would be, for this was when, after several years of partial retirement, Eirene organized a coup against her son, deposed and blinded him, and made herself empress in his stead. If Eirene could make herself empress by force, the only woman in Roman history to do so (or in European history before Elizabeth of Russia in 1741), then she could also orchestrate the invention of Orthodox Christianity to bolster her power. Either way, however, the religious basis of imperial power took a new path from now on.
Eirene was not a very active figure as sole ruler (797-802), however, and she was deposed in her stead by one of her senior financial administrators, Nikephoros I (802-11), with both official and military backing. All the same, she had managed to get together a substantial coalition in 797, inside the imperial bureaucracy and parts of the tagmata, and also had the support of the most rigorist clerics and monks around Platon of Sakkoudion and his nephew Theodore, to whom she gave the Stoudios monastery. These people were happy with a female ruler, as not all religious extremists are, and it is worth pausing for a moment to look at why. We saw in Chapter 4 that empresses like Pulcheria, Verina, Theodora, Sophia were influential in the eastern empire from the fifth century; they were part of the imperial hierarchy in their own right, even if subordinate to emperors (usually their husbands). Unlike in the Frankish political system, they not only gained power as regents for their young children, and indeed Pulcheria and Theodora were childless by their husbands (although Theodora was said to have had earlier children); they could have considerable influence over emperors even if the latter were major protagonists, as with Theodora’s husband Justinian, and could rule in all but name if they were not, as with Pulcheria’s brother Theodosius II. This clearly did not change with the transformations of the seventh century. Martina failed to ride the politics of the capital in 641, but there was still an institutional role and a moral space for a determined empress, and Eirene, who was both regent for her son and already empress in the lifetime of her husband, could make use of that. She had her own household, separate from that of the emperor; she was formally a co-ruler with her son for seventeen years, appearing on coins in the position of senior ruler at times. An element of female power was, if not typical, at least not abnormal in late Rome and Byzantium; and Eirene had a ready-made clientele, who owed their careers to her since 787 and before, when she took sole power in the end. Even after her fall, it was only in the West that people attributed her failure to the fact that she was a woman. And Iconophile religious rigorists were above all won over by Second Nicaea; the chronicler Theophanes (d. 818), who admittedly loathed Nikephoros I, wrote about 802: ‘men who lived a pious and reasonable life wondered at God’s judgement, namely at how he had permitted a woman who had suffered like a martyr on behalf of the true faith to be ousted by a swineherd.’ The image of the pious female being given a chance at power in order to right wrong belief went back to Pulcheria, and was a resonant one.
If Constantine V marks a turning point for military protagonism, Nikephoros I does the same for the administration. He continued Constantine’s and also Eirene’s campaigns in the Balkans, but for the first time moved to stabilize conquests by creating new themes and thus an administrative infrastructure, including the Peloponnesos in southern Greece, and Thessaloniki in the north. He also revised the census in around 809, a necessary element in any tax-raising state, the first time this is known to have happened since Leo III’s reign; Theophanes complains bitterly about this as part of a narrative onslaught on Nikephoros’ ‘vexations’, so its novelty may well be the author’s invention, but it is likely that the emperor saw the reorganization of the tax system as a priority. Most of Theophanes’ other ‘vexations’ indeed concerned taxation: remissions were cancelled, some previously exempt church estates were taxed, so was treasure trove, and so on. From now on, references in our sources to fiscal activity increase, and Theophanes’ references to taxes in money may also imply that Nikephoros expanded money exactions rather than taxes in kind. The imperial economy could sustain this again by now, and coin finds on archaeological sites increase again from now on too (see Chapter 15).
The Balkans was by now occupied by semi-autonomous Sklaviniai, as we have seen, who could be defeated over and over again, but who remained. Exactly how Balkan society worked in the two centuries after Heraclius is exceptionally obscure, however. The Sclavenians can only have been a small minority of the population originally, and were furthermore always organized in very small-scale tribal groups. It is a measure of the radical disruption of the Byzantine politico-military system in the seventh century that they settled so easily. The Balkans in this respect resembles Anglo-Saxon England more than any other part of the former Roman empire; there, too, quite small-scale groups managed to take over a province more or less completely in the century after 450, and in the end even change its language, even though the descendants of British speakers outnumbered the descendants of settlers by perhaps ten to one. This latter change happened in the northern and central Balkans too. Slavic had become the common tongue for communication there by the mid-tenth century, as Constantine VII Porphyrogennitos records in his On the Administration of the Empire; both Greek and Latin were still spoken too (Latin still is in some areas, in forms resembling modern Romanian), and so were more local languages such as the ancestor of modern Albanian, but Slavic would eventually win out, north of present-day Greece and Albania at least. Slavic would indeed take over even in the multi-ethnic khaganate of the Bulgars (below, Chapter 13), whose rulers were Turkic-speaking for a long time. The Bulgars were also, however, always better organized than their Sclavenian neighbours. Constantine V pushed them back to their core areas, around Pliska in northern Bulgaria, their capital, but he did not destroy them, and under Eirene they regrouped - they benefited from Charlemagne’s final destruction of the Avars in 796 (below, Chapter 16), and picked up territory and resources north of the Danube. By the time Nikephoros I was extending the themes of Greece northwards, the Bulgar khagan Krum (c. 800-814) had established an effective army, and counterattacked. Nikephoros sacked Pliska in 809 and 811, but Krum cut him off and destroyed him and his army in the latter year. Nikephoros was the first emperor to die in battle since Valens at Adrianople in 378.
The year 811 was a shock to the empire, and Krum’s wars of 813-14, in which he defeated Michael I (811-13), captured Adrianople and assaulted Constantinople, made it that much more serious. Constantine V’s memory, including his religious policies, suddenly became much more attractive. Conspirators tried to raise Constantine’s blinded sons to the throne in 812; a group of soldiers opened the imperial mausoleum in 813 and prayed before Constantine’s tomb calling on him: ‘Arise and help the state that is perishing!’, as Theophanes claims in appalled tones. The new emperor Leo V (813-20) held off Krum, but drew the same conclusions: that it was under Iconoclasm that the state had been victorious. In 815 he re-established it formally, and deposed Patriarch Nikephoros for refusing to assent. Nikephoros wrote sourly in around 819 that if one was going to adopt religious policies just because of military success, one might as well go back to Alexander, Caesar, Herod and Sennacherib; the argument in itself shows how much Second Iconoclasm owed to Constantine V’s reputation.
Leo fell in another coup, the fifth since 797; Michael II (820-29) hesitated over maintaining Iconoclasm, but found Theodore of Stoudios, whom Leo had exiled, so uncompromising a spokesman for the Iconophiles that it seemed safer to maintain an Iconoclast position. It is indeed clear from Theodore’s own voluminous letters how few people stood out against Iconoclasm in this period, and how much Theodore’s attempts to rally the faith fell on stony ground; bishops were almost entirely Iconoclast; and, over all, whatever people’s private views, they were happy to accept Iconoclasm as the theology of the regime. Michael’s son Theophilos (829-42) was a more convinced religious partisan, and persecuted public Iconophiles with some verve from 833 onwards; most innovatively, by having a condemnatory text tattooed on the faces of two Palestinian monks, Theodore and his brother Theophanes, in 839 (the two, the graptoi, ‘inscribed’ brothers, became Iconophile heroes, and eventually saints). But Iconoclasm had much weaker social roots second time round, and its military justification could not stand up to events. The Bulgars had made peace in 816, but held much wider areas, and did not go away; they marked out their boundary with the Byzantines with the huge earthwork known as the Great Fence of Thrace in this period. The ‘Abbasid caliphate was at its height, and Theophilos’ attempts to impose himself on the eastern frontier resulted in a massive Arab invasion in 838, led by Caliph al-Mu‘tasim himself, which sacked the important city of Amorion. Worse, north African Arabs invaded Sicily in 827 and began a conquest which would remove the whole island from Byzantine control by the early tenth century; and Crete fell to Spanish Arab pirates in 828, thus opening the Aegean to sea raiding again. It was now Iconoclasm, not Orthodoxy, which seemed to bring defeat. At Theophilos’ death, his widow Theodora, regent for her infant son Michael III (842-67), and her allies overturned Iconoclasm in a year. In 843 Orthodoxy was restored (Theodora claimed that her husband had repented on his deathbed); Theodora, a second Eirene, had Constantine V’s body exhumed and destroyed, and put Eirene’s body into the imperial mausoleum instead. Iconoclasm vanished remarkably fast this time; there were no more major military defeats; and Byzantium could from now on continue firmly on its medieval track.
Second Iconoclasm can easily be painted as a superficial deviation, this time - unlike in the eighth century - little more than an imperial cult, tragedy reappearing as farce. It was more interesting than that, however, for two reasons. One was that Second Nicaea, and, later, Theodore of Stoudios and Patriarch Nikephoros, had created an organized Iconoclasm as a negative image, which could simply be re-established by their opponents. That is to say, precisely because of Iconoclasm’s enemies, it could be an entire religious system that Leo V and his advisers invoked, not just the memory of Constantine V, even though the latter lay at the core of their choices. The other was that there were more intellectuals in Constantinople by now to debate about it; we know much more about Second than about First Iconoclasm as a result. The relative prosperity of the eighth century allowed for the development of education in theology, classical literature and philosophy in the capital after 750 or so which is hardly attested in the previous hundred and fifty years. Constantinople had never gone short of the great works of ancient secular and ecclesiastical literature, but from now on they were increasingly accessible to the political élite. Nikephoros used Aristotle to refute Iconoclast ideas in hisAntirrhseis; Theodore was steeped in Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom. Ignatios the Deacon (d. c. 848), whose career we shall come to in a moment, cited many classical authors, above all Homer, but also Hesiod, Euripides and Aristotle, in his writings and invoked the ‘Pythagorean doctrine of friendship’ in letters. The writings of the major Iconoclast theorist John the Grammarian, who compiled the texts Leo V used in 815 and was patriarch in 837-43, do not survive, but his name speaks for itself. His relative Leo the Mathematician (d. after 869) taught the next generation of the élite, in the schools he ran from the 820s onwards, both before and after 843. These men were capable of serious intellectual debate. The emperor Theophilos, in particular, sought it; remarkably, he freed in 838 the Sicilian Iconophile Methodios (d. 847), who had been in prison most of the time since 821, and kept him in the palace to discuss theology. Methodios was himself to become patriarch at the proclamation of Orthodoxy in 843.
Ignatios the Deacon represents the twists and turns of political culture in this period as well as anyone. Born in the 770s, he was a protégé of Tarasios and a friend of Patriarch Nikephoros in the 800s, which also, even if he does not say so very explicitly, will have made him an opponent of Theodore of Stoudios; even among Iconophiles, Theodore seemed an extremist, until Second Iconoclasm in 815 made them close ranks. Ignatios trimmed much closer to the wind than any of these, however. He may or may not have been the Ignatios who composed Iconoclast poems for the walls of the imperial palace under Leo V, but he was certainly archbishop of Nicaea for a while under either Leo or Michael II, and he wrote public poetry for Michael. Ignatios’ collected letters of the 820s-840s show him to be a cultured intellectual, but essentially a regime figure, devoted to patronage relations with bishops and civil officials alike. The collection, made after 843, is expurgated of pro-Iconoclast sentiment, but it contains very little Iconophile sentiment either. In perhaps the 820s he writes to his close friend the archivist Nikephoros, praising him for his stance, which was slightly more critical of Iconoclasm than Ignatios’ own, but the letter shows quite clearly that both men were on friendly terms with a leading Iconoclast; relationships of power cut across personal belief in a very obvious way. The year 843 marked a break here; Ignatios was regarded by Methodios as too close to Second Iconoclasm to remain unscathed, and for a while he was exiled (sort of: to a monastery in sight of the capital, not exactly very far away). The letters he writes now are regretful: I am poor now; I ‘furiously strayed to the opposite side’. But Ignatios redeemed himself remarkably fast, with heavily Iconophile biographies of his old associates patriarchs Tarasios and Nikephoros, and by his death he was back in the patriarchal entourage - he had successfully trimmed back again to his starting point. In the early ninth century Ignatios was probably the norm, committed Iconophiles or Iconoclasts the exceptions. Byzantium in 843 comes to seem like England in 1660 or East Germany in 1990, full of people trying to show how little they had compromised with a losing political system which in reality they had been largely happy with. Each was the triumph of a better-rooted but also rather more conservative and complacent political regime, which imposed its own orthodoxy, a set of soon-unquestioned assumptions inside which people henceforth would have to operate.
I have spent some time on Iconoclasm, because it is perplexing. One could easily write a history of the period 750-850 stressing quite other things: Constantine V’s military protagonism; Nikephoros I’s administrative reforms, which were taken further under Michael II and Theophilos (by the mid-ninth century, the army was better paid and equipped, and was reinforced by a strong set of tagmata around the capital); or the visible commitment to prestige building in the capital under Theophilos: new palaces with mechanical devices which do not survive, renewed city walls which do. All of these betray a greater confidence, as well as a desire to impress. The empire was in reasonably good shape by 850; it had weathered the worst storms by now. Does it matter, then, that so much imperial and theological rhetoric was taken up with the issue of whether one should venerate pictures? Iconoclasm, the first medieval theological dispute, has seemed to many to be about less ‘serious’ theoretical issues than the great Christological debates of the past. It is not surprising, then, that much analysis of Iconoclasm has supposed, whether explicitly or implicitly, that it was ‘really’ about something else. So Peter Brown, in an influential argument, fully recognizes that the Iconoclast debate was about the location of the holy in society, not a small matter, but he goes on to emphasize that the aim of the Iconoclast emperors, in the face of the Arab threat, was to streamline the whole of Byzantine society and culture, and focus it on a few central symbols, the cross, the eucharist, the capital, the emperor himself, rather than face ‘a haemorrhage of the holy . . . into a hundred little paintings’.
In a sense, this is quite true; but it is also the case that the Byzantines had become interested in representation and its rules for their own sake. It is already visible in the Parastaseis, in an almost entirely secular context: whom statues really represented mattered to people. It was, famously, also an issue important to the Muslim Arabs, who avoided all representations of people in their public art, seeing them as idolatrous (although the Qur’an conveys no such instruction, as we shall see in the next chapter). Caliph al-Walid I (705-15), who probably employed Byzantine mosaicists to erect the complicated foliage patterns on the walls of the Great Mosque of Damascus (see above, Chapter 10), would presumably have been entirely happy that they should take back to Constantinople accounts of his religious aesthetic. This aesthetic may indeed have impacted on Palestinian Christians, living under Arab rule, who after about 720 began to efface all representations of living beings, even animals and birds, from the floor mosaics of their churches; this obsession has no parallel in Byzantium, and may well show Muslim influence - though it goes beyond Muslim concerns, too. It must be stressed that there is absolutely no sign that the Byzantine Iconoclasts were influenced by the Arabs. But Arabs, Byzantines, Palestinian Christians, were all separately concerned with the issue of representation: which elements were holy, which were idolatrous, how and whom images represented and should represent. This was a break with a late Roman Christian tradition, in which images, even of saints, had relatively little special charge; in the East from now on they had, at least potentially, a numinous power, and people had to get them right, in one way or another. And the political system this mattered most in was Byzantium, for emperors were becoming more important foci of religious concern than were either Roman emperors or even, by now, caliphs. Iconoclasm did not begin with the emperors, but once it reached Constantine V and he took a decision on it, it immediately became an imperial initiative, and was tied to him, in a way ‘Arianism’ never was for Valens, nor Monophysitism for Anastasius I. Representation, and the importance of the visual, thus became tied in with imperial legitimacy. After 843 this became Orthodoxy; the religious centrality of images has been a feature of Orthodox Christianity ever since.