THE ICONOCLAST EMPERORS—STATE OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE IN THE EIGHTH
CENTURY
717-802
Leo and the defence of Constantinople, 718—Importance of his
triumph—Social and economical condition of the Empire—Decay of Art
and Letters—Superstition and Iconoduly—The Iconoclast movement—Leo’s
Crusade against Images—Constantine Copronymus and his
persecutions—Successful wars of Constantine V.—Minority of
Constantine VI.—Intrigues and triumph of Irene—Restoration of
Image-worship—End of the Isaurian dynasty, 802.
In March 717 Leo the Isaurian became master of Constantinople, his
predecessor, Theodosius III., having abdicated and refused to continue
the civil war which had begun in the previous year. It is probable that
his resignation was due as much to fear of the oncoming of the Saracens
as to the dread of Leo, for the armies of the caliph Soliman were
already ravaging Phrygia and Cappadocia, and slowly making their way
towards the Bosphorus. Nothing save the consciousness of his own
capacity to stem the rising flood of Moslem invasion could have
justified Leo in taking arms against Theodosius in such a time of
danger; but fortunately for the empire he had not overvalued his own
power, and was destined to show that he was fully competent to face the
situation. [Sidenote: Leo the Isaurian, 717-40.] He was still a young
man, but his life had already been full of incident and adventure; he
was the son of parents of some wealth, who had migrated from the
Isaurian regions in the Taurus to Thrace. He had entered the army during
the second reign of Justinian Rhinotmetus, and after serving him well
had incurred the tyrant’s suspicion, and been sent on a dangerous
expedition into the Caucasus, from which he was not intended to return.
But he extricated himself from many perils among the Alans and Abasgi of
those distant regions, and came back in safety, to be made by Anastasius
II. governor of the Anatolic theme. He was an active, enterprising,
persevering man, with a talent for organisation, a great power of making
himself loved by his soldiery, and an iron hand. His later career shows
that he was more than a good soldier, being also one who looked deep
into the causes of things, and had formed his own views on politics and
religion.
Leo was only granted five months in which to prepare for the
long-dreaded advent of the Saracens. He spent this time in accumulating
vast stores of provisions, recruiting the garrision of Constantinople,
and strengthening its fortifications. On the 15th of August Moslemah
with an army of 80,000 Saracens appeared on the Bithynian coast; a few
days later a Syrian fleet of over 1000 sail appeared in the Propontis,
took the army of Moslemah on board, and transported it into Thrace. The
Saracen’s land-troops at once commenced the blockade of the capital by
land, while part of the fleet moved into the Bosphorus, to post itself
so as to block the mouth of the Golden Horn, in which the Imperial navy
had taken refuge. Leo delivered his first blow while the Saracen vessels
were passing up the Bosphorus; issuing out of the Golden Horn with many
galleys and fireships he attacked the enemy as they were trying to pass
up the straits, and burnt twenty ships of war. [Sidenote: Moslemah
besieges Constantinople.] The Saracen admiral then dropped down to the
southern exit of the Bosphorus, and left the northern exit free to the
Romans, so that Leo was able to continue to draw supplies from the Black
Sea.
The blockade of Constantinople was, therefore, imperfect, and we learn
without surprise, that while the Saracens in their camp on the Thracian
side of the straits suffered severely from the cold of an unusually
severe autumn and winter, the garrison within the walls was well fed and
also well housed, and continued to grow in self-confidence. Moslemah
sent in haste for reinforcements, and the Caliph supported him with
zeal; a second land-army marched up from Tarsus to Chalcedon in the
spring of 718, and occupied the Bithynian shore of the Bosphorus, while
a great fleet from Africa and Egypt joined the blockading squadron, and
moored at Kalosagros on the eastern side of the Bosphorus, in order to
watch the mouth of the Golden Horn, and stop the communication of the
city with the Black Sea.
The preservation of the free waterway to the north was all-important to
the defence. Accordingly, Leo determined to make a great effort to
destroy the Egyptian fleet. His galleys, many of them fitted with
apparatus for discharging the famous Greek fire, sailed out suddenly,
and fell on the Saracen ships as they lay moored against the Asiatic
shore. Many of the crews of the Egyptian ships were Christians, forced
on board against their will; these men either deserted to the
Imperialists or fled ashore and dispersed. The Moslem sailors on board
made some resistance, but being caught at anchor, and unable to manœuvre
or escape, they were soon overcome. The whole blockading squadron was
burnt or towed back in triumph to Constantinople. The rest of Moslemah’s
fleet made no further attempt to bar the Bosphorus, and allowed the
Roman galleys to dominate its waters. Leo then threw a force on to the
Bithynian shore, and dispersed the Saracen troops who were encamped
there. Thus the army of Moslemah was cut off from Asia, and could draw
no further supplies from thence. It had already exhausted those of the
nearer districts of Thrace, and by the summer of 718 was reduced to the
verge of starvation, living from hand to mouth on what its foragers
could procure. Many had already perished of privation, when Moslemah
heard that a great Bulgarian army had crossed the Balkans, and was
advancing against him. Leo had apparently convinced king Terbel that a
Saracen invasion of Europe was as dangerous to him as to the empire.
Moslemah detached a portion of his army to hold back the Bulgarians, but
near Hadrianople it was completely cut to pieces by the barbarians. The
Arab historians confess that 22,000 men fell in the rout.
This decided Moslemah to raise the siege. His fleet took the remains of
the land-army on board, and put it ashore near Cyzicus. [Sidenote: Siege
of Constantinople raised, 718.] From thence he forced his way back to
Tarsus, but of more than 100,000 men comprised in his original army and
its reinforcements, Moslemah brought back only 30,000. The fleet fared
yet worse; it was caught in a storm off the Lycian coast, and almost
entirely destroyed. The Romans captured many of the surviving ships, and
it is said that only five vessels out of a thousand got back to Syria.
Thus perished the last Saracen armament which ever seriously threatened
the existence of the East-Roman Empire. It was perhaps the most
formidable expedition that the Caliphs ever sent forth, far larger and
better equipped than the predatory bands which had overrun Africa and
Spain with such ease a few years before, or the army which Charles
Martel faced at Poictiers a few years later. It was no mean achievement
of Leo the Isaurian, that, ere yet firmly seated on his throne, and with
all his Asiatic provinces already overrun by the enemy, he should beat
off with ease such a mighty armament. His success must be ascribed
primarily to his own courage, energy, and skill, next to the impregnable
strength of the walls of Constantinople, and lastly, to the inexperience
of the Arabs on the sea, which compelled them to use unwilling Christian
seamen for their galleys, and prevented them from making any adequate
use of their momentary naval predominance. The fleet of Moslemah seems
to have been as useless and unwieldy as the fleet of Xerxes. But,
however much he may have been helped by the faults of his enemy, Leo the
Isaurian deserves the thanks of all future ages for staying the progress
of the Saracen invader at a moment when there was no other power in
eastern Europe which could have for a moment held back the advancing
Moslem. If Constantinople had fallen, it is absolutely certain that the
barbarous pagan tribes who occupied all eastern and central Europe would
have become the subjects of the Caliph, and the votaries of Islam. There
was no capacity for prolonged resistance in the Bulgarian, Avar, or
Slav; and if the East-Roman Empire had fallen, the wave of Saracen
invasion would have swept all before it up to the borders of Austrasia.
Whether the Franks could have stood firm if attacked on the east as well
as on the south is very doubtful. It is, therefore, fair to ascribe to
Leo the Isaurian an even greater share in the salvation of Europe from
the Moslem peril than is given to Charles Martel.
After the failure of Moslemah the victorious Leo had a breathing time
granted him, in which to reorganise the shattered realm that had been
left him by his predecessor. Although the Saracen war still went on, and
border raids never ceased till the very end of his reign, yet there was
no very serious danger in these latter bickerings, and Leo was able to
turn his attention to the internal affairs of the empire, without the
fear of having at any moment a dangerous invasion launched against him
from beyond the Taurus.
Leo was a reformer and an innovator in every branch of administration.
His dealings with the Church are those which caused most stir and are
best remembered, but his activity was as great in secular as in
ecclesiastical matters. It is unfortunate that most of the records of
his reforms have perished, nothing having been preserved except his
_Ecloga_ or new handbook of law. But enough survives to show the
character of his administration, and its effects in the succeeding
century are very marked.
We have already pointed out in an earlier chapter that the East-Roman
Empire had been in a state of rapid decay since the middle of the sixth
century. The downward movement that had begun with the wars and taxes of
Justinian had been accelerated under his successors, and had threatened
the actual destruction of the empire during the reign of Heraclius. That
the State struggled through all its troubles, and emerged bleeding at
every pore, shorn of many of its members, but still alive, was due to
the personal abilities of Heraclius and his descendants
Constantinus-Constans and Constantine V. [Sidenote: Decadence of the
empire.] But though the life still lingered in the body of the State, it
was yet in the most deplorable condition. Its purely Oriental
provinces—Egypt, Syria, and Africa—were gone for ever. Asia Minor was
dreadfully wasted by the repeated invasions of the Saracens. The Balkan
peninsula was, as regards more than half its extent, in the hands of the
Bulgarians and Slavs. In the seventh century Slavonic tribes had made
their way even into Hellas and Peloponnesus, there to occupy all the
more remote and mountainous corners of the land.
The disasters of the seventh century were accompanied by wholesale
displacements of population. In Europe the old Latin-speaking population
of Illyricum, Moesia, and Thrace had almost disappeared. Only a few
scattered fragments, the ancestors of the modern Roumanians and
Dalmatians, still survived, scattered among the Slavs of the Balkans. In
Asia the old provincial population had been grievously thinned by
Saracen wars, but, on the other hand, it had been recruited by great
bands of refugees from all the lands that the Saracen had overrun.
[Sidenote: Changes in population.] Many thousands of Armenians and
Persians had chosen to become subjects of the Emperor rather than the
Caliph, and in particular the Mardaïtes or Christians of the Syrian
mountains had emigrated wholesale into Asia Minor, after maintaining for
many years a struggle in the Lebanon against the power of the Saracens.
The European themes were now Greco-Slav, not Greco-Roman, in their
population: the Asiatic ones were far more Oriental and far less Greek
than in the sixth century. By the time of Leo this change was complete:
the empire was now Roman in nothing but name and administrative
organisation. On the other hand, it had not yet become Greek, as it was
to do in a later age. Its most important element in this and the next
two centuries was the Asiatic. Isauria and Armenia and the other
mountain lands of Asia Minor supplied most of the rulers of the empire.
They were not Orientals of the more effeminate and feeble type—like the
Syrians or Egyptians, whose only show of energy for many years had been
in the hatching of new heresies and the practice of irrational
asceticism—but were a bold vigorous race, hardened by many generations
of Persian and Saracen wars, the men who, ever since the fifth century,
had been supplying the core of the East-Roman armies.
The change in the population of the empire had been accompanied by
equally great changes in its social condition. Of these the most
important was the disappearance of the old Roman system of predial
serfdom, of great estates tilled by _coloni_ or peasants bound to the
soil and unable to leave their farms. This tenure, which lasted on in
the West till it became the basis of the feudal system, had in the East
entirely disappeared between Justinian and Leo the Isaurian. [Sidenote:
Decrease of serfdom.] In the time of Leo we find the soil cultivated
either by free tenants, who worked the estates of great land-owners at a
fixed rent, or by villages of free peasants occupying their own communal
lands. The very healthy outcome of this change was a great growth in the
proportion of freemen to slaves all over the empire: of this the most
important and beneficial result was that the government could reckon on
a much larger and better recruiting ground for the army than in those
earlier times, when the peasant was fixed to the soil and absolutely
prohibited from serving as a soldier. The cause of the vanishing of the
old tenure was, without doubt, the fact that the ravages of Slav,
Persian, and Saracen between 600 and 700 had broken up the old
landmarks, and either swept away or displaced the former servile
population. When many provinces had been, for many years at a time, in
the hands of foreign enemies, as happened to the whole of Asia Minor
during the first years of Heraclius and to great part of it in the
anarchy between 710 and 718, it was not wonderful that old social
arrangements which bore hardly on the bulk of the population tended to
vanish.
The disappearance of predial serfdom was a change for the better within
the empire. But in most other things the changes had been for the worse.
The civilisation of the whole realm had sunk to a very low level
compared with that which prevailed in the fifth century. [Sidenote:
Decay of arts and letters.] Arts and letters had reached the lowest
depth which they ever knew in the East. All literature save the
compiling of polemical religious tracts had disappeared: between 620 and
720 we have not a single contemporary historian: the story of the times
has to be learned entirely from later sources. Poetical, scientific, and
philosophical composition had also died off; except the _Heracliad_—the
wars of Heraclius told as an epic—of George of Pisidia, the seventh
century produced no single poem. The study of Latin had so far died out
that the great legal works of Justinian had become useless to the
inhabitants of the empire. They were a sealed book to all save the
exceptionally learned, so that systematic law had almost disappeared. In
the various themes we find justice being administered according to local
customs and usages, instead of by old Roman precept. Leo had to abridge
and translate Justinian’s Code, in order to render it either useful or
intelligible. When doing this he omitted great sections of it, in order
to bring the book into accordance with the needs and customs of the day,
for both manners and social conditions had been transformed since the
reign of Justinian. The decay of art had been as rapid as that of
letters: very few remains of the unhappy seventh century have come down
to us, but in those which are most numerous, the coins of the emperors,
we find the most barbarous incapacity to express the simplest forms. The
faces of Heraclius or Constantine V. are barely human: the legends
surrounding them are so ill spelt as to be almost unintelligible: the
letters are ill formed and ill cut.
But the most painful feature of the time was that the decay of arts and
letters had been accompanied by the growth of a dense superstition and
ignorance which would have seemed incredible to the ancient Roman of the
fourth, or even the fifth century. Although Constantinople still
preserved all the great literary works of antiquity, the minds of its
rulers were no more influenced by them than were the eyes and hands of
its craftsmen inspired by the great works of Greek sculpture that still
adorned the streets. It was a time of the growth of countless silly
superstitions, of witchcraft and necromancy, of the framing of wild
legends of apocryphal saints, and of strange misconceptions of natural
phenomena.
Among the most prominent tokens of this growth of irrational
superstitions was the great tendency of the seventh century towards
image-worship,—Iconoduly as its opponents called the practice. In direct
opposition to early Christian custom, it became common to ascribe the
most strange and magical powers to representations, whether sculptured
or painted, of Our Lord and the Saints. [Sidenote: Image-worship.] They
were not merely regarded as useful memorials to guide the piety of
believers, but were thought to have a holiness inherent in themselves,
and to be capable of performing the most astonishing miracles. Heraclius
possessed, and carried about with him as a fetich, a picture which he
believed to have been painted in heaven by angelic hands, and thought it
brought him all manner of luck. The crucifix over the door of the
imperial palace was believed to have used human speech. Even patriarchs
and bishops affirmed that the hand of a celebrated picture of the Virgin
in the capital distilled fragrant balsam. Every church and monastery had
its wonder-working image, and drew no small revenue from pious offerings
to it. The freaks to which image-worship led were often most grotesque:
it was, for example, a well-known practice to make a favourite picture
the god-father of a child in baptism, by scraping off a little of its
paint and mixing it with the baptismal water.
The act for which the name of Leo the Isaurian is best remembered is the
issue of his edict against these puerile superstitions, and his attempt
to put down image-worship all through his realm. Leo was not only a man
of strong common sense, but he was sprung from those lands on the
Mohammedan border where Christians had the best opportunity of comparing
the gross and material adoration of their co-religionists for stones and
paint, with the severe spiritual worship of the followers of Islam. The
Moslem was always taunting the Christian with serving idols, and the
taunt found too much justification in many practices of the vulgar.
Thinking men like Leo were moved by the Moslem’s sneer into a horror of
the superstitious follies of their contemporaries. [Sidenote:
Iconoclasm.] They fortified themselves by the view that to make graven
or painted representations of Our Lord savoured of heresy, because it
laid too much stress on His humanity as opposed to His divinity. Such an
idea was no new thing: it had often been mooted among the Eastern
Christians, though more often by schismatics than by Catholics. Of Leo’s
own orthodoxy, however, there was no doubt: even his enemies could not
convict him of swerving in the least from the faith: it was only on this
matter of image-worship that he differed from them. Wherever he plucked
down the crucifix he set up the plain cross—on the standards of his
army, on the gates of his palace, on his money, on his imperial robes.
It was purely to the anthropomorphic representation of Our Lord and to
the over-reverence for images of saints that he objected.
Leo was no mere rough soldier: his parents were people of some wealth,
and he had entered the army as an imperial _aide-de-camp_
(_spathiarius_), not as one of the rank and file.[45] It is probable
therefore that he was sufficiently educated to object to image-worship
on rational and philosophic grounds, not from the mere unthinking
prejudice picked up from Saracens or heretics. This much is certain,
that from the moment that he declared his policy he found the greatest
support among the higher officers of the civil service and the army.
Educated laymen were as a rule favourable to his views: the mass of the
soldiery followed him, and the eastern provinces as a whole acquiesced
in his reformation. On the other hand, he found his chief opponents
among the monks, whose interests were largely bound up with
image-worship, and among the lower classes, who were blindly addicted to
it. The European themes were as a whole opposed to him: the further west
the province the more Iconodulic were its tendencies. Of the whole
empire Italy was the part where Leo’s views found the least footing.
Footnote 45:
The story that he began life as a poor huckster travelling about with
a mule is one of the many inventions of his enemies the monks.
Leo began his crusade against image-worship in 726, eight years after
his great victory over the Saracens. The empire was by this time quieted
down and reorganised; two rebellions had also been crushed, one under a
certain Basil in Italy, the other under the ex-emperor Artemius
Anastasius, who had tried to resume the crown by the aid of the
Bulgarians. The heads of Basil and Artemius had fallen, and no more
trouble from rebellion was expected. Leo’s edict forbade all
image-worship as irreverent and superstitious, and ordered the removal
of all holy statues and the white-washing of all holy pictures on church
walls. [Sidenote: Leo’s Iconoclastic Edict.] From the very first the
emperor’s commands met with a lively resistance. When his officials
began to remove the great crucifix over the palace gate, a mob fell upon
them and beat them to death with clubs. Leo sent out troops to clear the
streets, and many of the rioters were slain. This evil beginning was
followed by an equally disastrous sequel. All over the empire the bulk
of the clergy declared against the emperor: in many provinces they began
to preach open sedition. The Pope, as we have already seen when telling
the fate of Italy, put himself at the head of the movement, and sent
most insulting letters to Constantinople. In 727 Rome refused obedience
to the edict, and what was of more immediate danger, the theme of Hellas
rose in open rebellion. The garrison-troops and the populace, incited by
the preaching of fanatical monks, joined to proclaim a certain Cosmas
emperor. They fitted out a fleet to attack Constantinople, but it was
defeated, and the rebel emperor was taken prisoner and beheaded. It is
acknowledged, however, even by Leo’s enemies, that he treated the bulk
of the prisoners and the rebel theme with great mildness. Indeed, he
seldom punished disobedience to his edict with death: stripes and
imprisonment were the more frequent rewards of those whom the Iconodules
styled heroes and confessors of the true faith. Leo was determined that
his edict should be carried out, but he was not by nature a persecutor:
it was as rioters or rebels, not as image-worshippers, that his enemies
were punished, just as in the reign of Elizabeth of England the Jesuit
suffered, not as a Papist, but as a traitor. Leo deposed the aged
patriarch Germanus for refusing to work with him, but did him no further
harm.[46] In general it was by promoting Iconoclasts, not by maltreating
Iconodules, that he worked.
Footnote 46:
The stories of the sufferings of Germanus are late inventions of
Iconodule writers.
The last thirteen years of Leo’s reign (727-40) were on the whole a time
of success for the emperor. He succeeded in getting his edict enforced
over the greater part of the empire, in spite of some open and more
secret resistance; only Italy defied him. From the reconquest of Rome he
was kept back by the necessity of providing for the defence of the East,
for in 726 the caliph Hisham—hearing no doubt of Leo’s domestic
troubles—commenced once more to invade the Asiatic themes. [Sidenote:
Wars with the Saracen.] In 727 a Saracen host pushed forward as far as
Nicaea, where it was repelled and forced to retire. There were less
formidable invasions in 730, 732, and 737-8, but none led to any serious
loss, and the imperial boundary stood firmly fixed in the passes of the
Taurus. The Saracen war practically ended with a great victory won by
Leo in person at Acroinon, in the Anatolic theme, where an army of
20,000 Arab raiders was cut to pieces with the loss of all its chiefs.
The house of the Ommeyad Caliphs was already verging towards its
decline: it never again prepared any expedition approaching the strength
of the great armament of Moslemah, which Leo had so effectually turned
back in 718, and its later sovereigns were not of the type of those
fanatical conquerors who had cut the boundaries of the empire short in
the preceding century. Leo had effectually staved off any imminent
danger to eastern Christendom from Moslem conquest for three full
centuries.
Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine, fifth of that name according
to the usual reckoning, sixth if the grandson of Heraclius be given his
true name, and not the erroneous title of Constans II. The second of the
Isaurian emperors, however, is less known by the numeral affixed to his
name than by the insulting epithet of Copronymus, which his Iconodulic
enemies bestowed on him—showing thereby their own bad taste rather than
any unworthiness on the part of their sovereign.
Constantine was a young man of twenty-two at the moment of his
accession. He had long acted as his father’s colleague, and was
thoroughly trained in Leo’s methods of administration, and indoctrinated
with his Iconoclastic views. [Sidenote: Constantine Copronymus, 740-75.]
He seems, while possessing a great measure of his father’s energy and
ability, to have been inferior to him in two respects. Leo had combined
caution with courage, and knew how to exercise moderation. Constantine
was bold to excess, did not understand half-measures or toleration, and
carried through every scheme with a high hand. Moreover, while Leo’s
private life had been blameless and even severe, Constantine was a
votary of pleasure, fond of pomp and shows, devoted to musical and
theatrical entertainments, and sometimes lapsing into debauchery. Hence
it is easy to see why he has been dealt with by the chroniclers of the
next century in an even harsher spirit than his father, and is
represented as a monster of cruelty and vice.
Constantine was no sooner seated on the throne than he showed that he
was determined to continue his father’s policy. He was at once assailed
by the rebellion of the Iconodulic faction: they induced his
brother-in-law Artavasdus, general of the Obsequian theme, to seize the
capital, and proclaim himself emperor, while Constantine was absent on
an expedition against the Saracens. All the European themes, where the
image-breakers were hated, did homage to Artavasdus. But the Anatolic
and Thracesian themes, the heart of Asia Minor, remained true to the son
of Leo. He showed his energy and ability by beating the sons of
Artavasdus in two battles, and besieging the rebel in Constantinople.
When the city was well-nigh reduced by famine, Artavasdus fled, but he
was caught and brought before Constantine. The emperor ordered him and
his sons to be blinded, and confined them in a monastery. Their chief
adherents were beheaded (742).
This sanguinary lesson to the Iconodulic party seems to have cowed them
to such an extent that they did not raise another open rebellion in the
long reign of Constantine (740-775). But they adhered as fully as ever
to their faith: nothing is so difficult to eradicate as a well-rooted
superstition, and Constantine’s strong hand was better fitted to cow
than to persuade. As the years of his reign passed by, and he found
image-worship practised in secret by thousands of conscientious
votaries, the emperor grew more and more determined to uproot it. After
a time he resolved to call in the spiritual sanction to aid the secular
arm: in 753 he summoned a general council to meet at Constantinople, but
it was œcumenical only in name. The Pope replied by anathemas of
contumely to the summons to appear; the patriarchs of Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Alexandria, safe under the protection of the caliph,
denied their presence. [Sidenote: Council of Constantinople, 753.] But
there assembled an imposing body of three hundred and thirty-eight
bishops, presided over by the Constantinopolitan patriarch, Constantine
of Sylaeum, and by Theodosius, metropolitan of Ephesus, son of the
emperor Tiberius II. This council committed itself fully to Iconoclastic
doctrine; it proscribed all representations of Our Lord as blasphemous
snares, for endeavouring to express both His human and His divine nature
in the mere likeness of a man, and thereby obscuring His divinity in His
humanity. At the same time it condemned the worship of images of saints,
because all adoration except that paid to the Godhead savoured of
heathenism and anthropolatry. The emperor had other scruples of his own,
on which he did not press the council to deliver a decision; he denied
the intercessory powers of the Virgin, and scrupled to prefix the
epithet ἅγιος, ‘holy,’ to the names of even the greatest saints. He
spoke, for example, of ‘Peter the Apostle,’ not of ‘the holy Peter.’ On
these awful depths of free thought the Iconodules of his own and the
succeeding generation wasted expressions of horror, worthy to be
employed on a Herod or a Judas.
Armed with the decree of the council of Constantinople, the emperor
proceeded, during the remainder of his reign, to indulge in what was a
true religious persecution, for he pursued the image-worshippers as
heretics, not as rebels or rioters. He inflicted the death-penalty in a
few cases, but the majority of his victims were flogged, mutilated,
pilloried, or banished. The most obstinate supporters of Iconoduly were
found among the monks, who not only resisted themselves, but never
ceased to use their vast influence over the mob in order to turn it
against the emperor. After a time Constantine resolved to make an end of
the monastic system, as being the strongest bulwark of superstition.
[Sidenote: Persecution of monks.] To uproot a habit of life founded on
the practice of centuries, and highly revered by the multitude was of
course an impossibility. Monasteries can only be suppressed, as they
were at the Reformation, if the nation sides with the sovereign.
Nevertheless, Constantine drove out and harried a vast number of monks.
He held that they were over-numerous, that they were men who shirked the
ordinary duties of the citizen, and that their profession was a cloak
for selfishness and sloth. He aimed not only at breaking up the
cloisters, but at secularising their inmates. On one occasion he had all
the monks and nuns of the Thracesian theme assembled, and offered them
their choice between marriage or banishment to Cyprus. The majority
chose the latter alternative, and became in the eyes of their
contemporaries confessors of the true faith. On another occasion he
exhibited in the Hippodrome a procession of unfrocked monks, each
holding by the hand an unfrocked nun whom he was to marry—the Iconodule
writers, as might be expected, call the backsliding nuns ‘harlots.’ The
deserted monasteries were either pulled down for building materials or
turned into barracks.
But it must not be supposed that Constantine’s activity was entirely
engrossed in persecuting the worshippers of images. The thirty-five
years of his reign were a period of considerable military glory, and the
emperor, who always headed his own armies, took the field for more than
a dozen campaigns. In Asia the fall of the Ommeyad Caliphs, accompanied
by savage civil wars among the Saracens (750), offered an unrivalled
opportunity for extending the bounds of the empire. [Sidenote: Wars of
Constantine.] Constantine pushed beyond the Anti-Taurus as far as the
Euphrates; in 745 he occupied the district of Commagene, and transported
all its Christian inhabitants to Thrace: in 751 he took Melitene on the
Euphrates, and the great Armenian fortress of Theodosiopolis. Part of
these conquests were afterwards recovered by the first Abbaside Caliph,
Abdallah Al-Saffah, but the rest remained to the empire as a trophy of
Constantine’s wars. Several Saracen attempts to invade Cappadocia and
Cyprus were driven back with great slaughter, and in general it may be
stated that Constantine effectually protected Asia Minor from the
Mohammedan sword, and that the country began to grow again both in
wealth and in population.
Nor was his work less useful in Europe. He completely reduced to order
the Slavonic tribes south of the Balkan, both in Thrace and Macedonia:
they had got out of hand during the troubles of the years 605-718, and
required to be subdued anew. Constantine carefully fortified the defiles
of the Balkans, which communicate with the valley of the Danube,
garrisoning once more the ruined castles which Justinian had built
there. This advance northward brought him into hostile contact with the
Bulgarians, who had long been accustomed to harry both the Slavonic and
the Roman districts of Thrace and Macedon, and could not brook to be
walled in by the new line of forts. Constantine waged three successful
wars with the Bulgarians; the first, lasting from 755 to 762, ended with
a great victory at Anchialus, after which king Baian sued for peace, and
obtained it on promising to keep his subjects from raiding across the
Balkans. The second war occupied the years 764-773. Constantine crossed
the Balkans, wasted Bulgaria, slew the new king Toktu near the Danube,
and was preparing in the next year to complete the conquest of the
country, when his whole fleet and army were destroyed by a storm in the
Black Sea (765). Long and indecisive bickering on the line of the
Balkans followed, and peace was made in 773 on the old terms. The last
Bulgarian war, provoked by an attempt of king Telerig to invade
Macedonia in 774-5, was notable for a great victory at Lithosoria, but
Constantine died while leading his army northward, and his successes had
no permanent result. The Bulgarians were not subdued by him, but they
were kept at bay, and so tamed that they were compelled to leave Thrace
alone, and content themselves with defending their own Danubian plains
from the attacks of the East-Romans.
The Saracen and Bulgarian being driven away from the frontier, we are
not surprised to hear that the empire flourished under Constantine.
[Sidenote: Constantine’s home government.] He planted many colonies on
the waste lands of the borders, settling the emigrant Christians of
Armenia in Thrace, and many Slavonic and Bulgarian refugees in Bithynia.
We are told that agriculture prospered in his time, so much that sixty
measures of wheat sold for a gold solidus. He exterminated brigandage,
and made the roads safe for merchants. He furnished Constantinople with
a new water-supply by restoring the aqueduct of Valens, broken more than
a hundred and fifty years before. When the capital had been devastated
by a great plague in 746-7, he more than replaced the lost thousands of
its population by new settlers from Hellas and the islands, for whom
employment was found by the increasing commerce which followed the
growth of internal prosperity. When he died in 775, aged fifty-seven, he
left a full treasury, a loyal and devoted army, and a well-organised
realm.
Constantine was succeeded by his eldest son Leo IV., often called Leo
the Chazar, because his mother Irene had been a Chazar princess. Leo had
acted as his father’s colleague for many years, and carried on
Constantine’s policy, though with a less harsh hand. [Sidenote: Reign of
Leo IV., 775-80.] In the beginning of his reign he showed toleration to
the Iconodules, but when they commenced to raise their heads again he
resumed his father’s persecuting manner, flogging and banishing many
prominent image-worshippers. He did not, however, object to monks, as
Constantine had done, but allowed them to rebuild their convents, and
even promoted some of them to bishoprics. It is probable that his
resumption of persecution in 777 was connected with the discovery of a
conspiracy against him in which his own brothers Nicephorus and
Christophorus had leagued themselves with the discontented party. The
treacherous Caesars were pardoned by their brother, and their associates
suffered banishment and not death.
Leo continued his father’s war with the Saracens. In 778 his armies
invaded Commagene, defeated a great Saracen host in the open field, and
brought back under their protection a great body of Syrian Christians,
who were settled as colonists in Thrace. The caliph Mehdy replied in the
next year by an invasion of the Anatolic theme: his army forced its way
as far as Dorylaeum, but retired in disorder, and much harassed by the
Romans, after failing to take that place.
Leo was of a sickly habit of body, and died after a short reign of five
years, in 780, before he had attained the age of thirty-two. He left the
throne to his son Constantine VI.,[47] for whom the empress Irene was to
act as regent, as the boy was only nine years of age. Leo’s early death
was a fatal misfortune alike for the Iconoclastic cause and the Isaurian
dynasty. The empress Irene, though she had succeeded in concealing the
fact during her husband’s life, was a fervent worshipper of images, and
the moment that the reins of power fell into her hands, set herself to
reverse the imperial policy of the last sixty years. [Sidenote:
Constantine VI. and Irene.] She began by putting an end to the
repression of the Iconodules, and then gradually displaced the old
ministers of state and governors of the themes by creatures of her own.
This led to a plot against her; the conspirators proposed to crown
Nicephorus, the eldest of her brothers-in-law, but they were discovered
and banished, while all the five brothers of the deceased emperor were
forcibly made priests, to disqualify them from seizing the throne.
Footnote 47:
Or seventh, if Constantinus-Constans is counted.
When the patriarch Paul died in 784, Irene replaced him by Tarasius, a
fervent image-worshipper, and then ventured to call a general council at
Nicaea, to which she invited pope Hadrian at Rome, and the Patriarchs of
the East, to send delegates. Under the influence of the empress the
council, by a large majority, declared the lawfulness of making
representations of Our Lord and the Saints, and bade men pay not divine
worship (λατρεία), but adoration and reverence (προσκύνησις) to them.
The recalcitrant Iconoclastic bishops were excommunicated. [Sidenote:
Restoration of image-worship, 785.] The doings of the council caused a
mutiny of the Imperial guard in Constantinople, for the greater part of
the army still adhered to the views of the Isaurian emperors. But Irene
succeeded in steering through the troubled waters, put down the mutiny,
and retained her power.
Meanwhile the reign of a child and a woman proved disastrous to the
empire. The Slavs of the Balkans burst into revolt, and the Saracens
invaded Asia Minor. The want of an emperor to head the army was
grievously felt, and Haroun-al-Raschid, the son of the caliph Mehdy,
ravaged the whole Anatolic and Obsequian themes as far as the Bosphorus.
Irene felt herself unable to cope with the situation, and bought a peace
by an annual payment of 70,000 solidi (784). Soon after the Bulgarian
king declared war, and ravaged Thrace after slaying the general of the
Thracian theme in battle.
Among these disasters Constantine VI. grew up to manhood, but his
mother, who had acquired a great taste for power, and feared to see her
son reverse her religious policy, long refused to give him any share in
the government. [Sidenote: Constantine seizes power.] She even made the
army swear never to receive her son as sole emperor as long as she
should live. The young emperor, after chafing for some time in his state
of tutelage, took matters into his own hands. In his twenty-first year
he repaired to the camp of the Anatolic troops, and there proclaimed
himself of age, and sole ruler of the State. He banished his mother’s
favourites, and confined her for some months to her own apartments in
the palace.
When he had firmly seized the helm of power, Constantine was weak enough
to take his mother again as his colleague on the throne, and to
associate her name with his in all imperial decrees. The ambitious and
unnatural Irene repaid his confidence by scheming against him. She had
grown so fond of power that she had resolved to win it back at all
costs. Constantine was, like his ancestors, a warlike and energetic
prince. He won several successes over the Saracens, and then engaged in
a Bulgarian war. His popularity was first shaken by a fearful defeat at
the hands of the Bulgarian king Cardam, by which he lost much of his
influence with the army. Shortly afterwards he entered into a fierce
struggle with the Patriarch and the clergy, having divorced, in spite of
their opposition, a wife whom his mother had forced upon him in early
youth, and espoused Theodota, on whom his own affections were set.
[Sidenote: Irene dethrones her son, 797.] Knowing that the Church was
wroth with Constantine for this outbreak of self-will, and that the army
no longer loved him as before, the wicked Irene determined to strike a
blow against her son. She suborned some of the young emperor’s
attendants to seize their master, and, when he fell into her hands, had
his eyes put out. He was then immured in a monastery, where he survived
for more than twenty years.
It was by a mere palace-conspiracy, not by an open rising, that the
unnatural mother had dethroned and blinded her son. It is, therefore,
all the more extraordinary to find that she was able to cling to power
for more than five years, in spite of the horror which her act had
caused. The gratitude of the image-worshippers to her, for having
restored to them the power of practising their superstition, partly
explains, but does not at all excuse the impunity which she enjoyed
after her cruel deed.
Irene’s five years of power (797-802) were disastrous at home and
abroad. Her court was swayed by two greedy eunuchs, Aetius and
Stauracius, on whom she lavished all the highest offices. Their
miserable quarrels with each other are the chief things recorded in the
annals of her internal government. Meanwhile the frontiers were overrun
by the armies of Haroun-al-Raschid. The Saracens harried the Anatolic
and Thracesian themes, and forced their way as far as Ephesus. Peace was
only granted when Irene consented to pay a large annual tribute to the
Caliph.
[Sidenote: Deposition of Irene, 802.] In 802 the cup of Irene’s
iniquities was full. To put an end to anarchy abroad and within, a
number of the chief officers of State, headed by the treasurer
Nicephorus, seized her by night, and shut her up in a nunnery. No one
struck a blow in her defence, for she was loved by no one, not even by
the Iconodules, for whom she had done so much. Nicephorus was proclaimed
as her successor, and ascended the throne without any disturbance.
Thus ended the house of the Isaurians, after eighty-five years of rule.
They had effected much for the empire; for the disasters of Irene’s
short reign had not sufficed to undo the solid work of Leo III. and
Constantine V. The boundaries were safer, the population greater, the
wealth largely increased, the armies more efficient than at the
commencement of the century. Even the Iconoclastic persecutions, though
they had failed to crush superstition, had done some good in rooting out
the grosser vagaries of image-worship. The Iconoclastic party still
subsisted, and was strong in the army and civil service; we shall see it
once more in power during the ninth century.
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