this back to the day when it first appeared on the scene!
With this information—the questions had been carefully worked out by
the emperor Constantine Born-in-the-Purple in a book called _How To
Run the Empire_—the Byzantines could select the right method for the
nation they were interested in and then go to work on it.
If the ruler or his ambassador was easily dazzled, they could impress
him with court ceremony and with purple shoes and robes, and they
might even give out a title or two such as patrician or _archon_.
They might even take some northern duke or count and promote him to
be prince or king provided he swore allegiance to them.
If he was greedy and avaricious—and, said Constantine, “the tribes of
the north demand everything and hanker after everything”—they could
give him cash in hand or even pay an annual tribute.
As a last resort, the emperor could marry a foreign princess or
give a sister or a daughter in marriage to a foreign prince. The
Byzantines did not really approve of the latter, especially the
ladies who were shipped off to some outlandish country without
Byzantine comforts or conveniences! “I am being sacrificed to the
wild beast of the West!” wailed one of them. But it often worked
wonders. From distant Asbagia under the towering snow-crowned
Caucasus Mountains to distant Germany, where the “wild beast of
the West” lived, many and many a kingdom was made friendly to the
Byzantines because a Byzantine princess sat on its throne.
But of course when an emperor did this, he must never give the
barbarians all they asked for, and he must always think up a good
reason for not doing so. If they asked for an imperial crown or
an imperial robe, he must point out that these were sacred and
consecrated and tell of the horrendous death suffered by one emperor
who had given some to his Khazar relatives. If they asked for Greek
fire, he must tell them that it was given by an angel and that anyone
who gave it away would be struck down from heaven. If they sought to
marry a princess, he must tell them that the demand is monstrous,
even though the royal robe-makers were already embroidering the
wedding gown.
In that way he would not only save some of his valuable possessions,
but the barbarians would appreciate the ones he did give them all the
more.
[Illustration: Man talking]
ONE RELIGION, ONE CHURCH
Last of the things that made the Byzantine Empire strong and powerful
was the Byzantine church. In some ways, it was the most important of
all.
The Byzantine Empire was much more than just one half of the old
Roman Empire dragging out its days for another thousand years. It was
a new Roman Empire based on Christianity. Practically every Byzantine
was a Christian, and so it was Christianity that united all the
many races and languages into a single people. In spite of all the
arguments about this doctrine and that doctrine, practically every
Byzantine believed in the official Orthodox faith, and as the emperor
was head of this faith, that gave him additional power.
Even a weak emperor could point to the Bible. “Render therefore
unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things
that are God’s.” But the emperor was _caesar_, and he was God’s
representative too. He had to be obeyed on both counts.
The Byzantines were by nature an intensely religious people. They
were Middle Easterners as well as Greek, and more than half of
the world’s great religions were born in the Middle East—Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, to name just the most important three.
The Byzantines had been religious from the very beginning, and the
Greek side of their nature made them like to talk and argue about
their religion as well.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa visited Constantinople when it was only forty
years old, and even this holy man threw up his hands in astonishment.
The money changer who converted his Asiatic money into Byzantine
gold, the white-faced baker who sold him a loaf of bread, even the
slave boy who mixed hot and cold water for him at the public bath,
all wanted to discuss the fine points of Christian beliefs with him.
Saint Gregory shook his head. “Everybody in this city seems to be
a doctor of theology,” he said. “_Everybody!_ Even the slaves and
day laborers. There isn’t a man in the city who can’t preach a good
sermon, and they all do if you give them half a chance. If you don’t
believe me, just stand at any street corner! Just go into any shop!”
But it was not merely the servants and shopkeepers who were deeply
wrapped up in religion. High or low, virtually every Byzantine,
even including those who spent most of their time making money and
amassing worldly goods, had been taught from childhood and absolutely
believed that life in this world was a vain shadow and the important
thing was to win everlasting bliss in heaven. But this could only be
done through religion and the church.
That may have been why many rich Byzantines and even many a
Byzantine emperor or empress liked to endow monasteries, just as
in modern times many rich men set up foundations. In fact, so many
monasteries were set up in this way that it became necessary to pass
a law stating that if you wanted to found a monastery, you must sell
the land and only give the money. Many of the greatest estates were
being left to the church and since they then didn’t have to pay taxes
any more, it grew more and more difficult for the state to raise all
the money it needed.
Many Byzantines, including emperors, became monks before they died.
They felt more sure of their reward in the future if they actually
entered a monastery, had their heads shaven, and exchanged their
golden garments for a hair shirt or a cowl.
[Illustration: Boy pointing]
[Illustration Man speaking]
That may also have been why so many patriarchs—the title of the head
of the Byzantine church—did not fear the emperor, even though the
emperor had appointed them.
One patriarch boldly told an emperor that no one had to obey his laws
if they went against the church. The emperor exiled him but did not
dare to harm him.
Another went even further.
“I made you emperor, you ignorant fool!” he shouted at Isaac
Comnenus. “I can bring you down as easily.”
He even put on the imperial purple shoes, saying the patriarch had a
right to wear them. Of course, he didn’t get away with this, but at
least he had tried.
Sometimes, to be sure, Byzantine religion was very close to
superstition, particularly among women and children.
You could make yourself a saint by becoming a stylite like Saint
Simeon Stylites, who lived most of his life on top of a column sixty
feet high without ever coming down. Simeon was venerated and even
prayed to.
Many Byzantines were certain that cures could be effected by touching
the arms, legs, and even the congealed sweat of some holy man. On the
other hand, a doctor was howled down by the mob when he suggested
ending a plague by letting fresh air into the crowded tenements.
“Blasphemy!” cried the Byzantines. “God decides when a man shall die,
not fresh air!” When the doctor persisted, and died himself, they
said God had punished him.
Others believed that cities had been saved by the apparition of some
saint as much as by soldiers. For instance, when the Goths stormed
toward Thessalonica (modern Salonika), the second city of the empire,
Saint Demetrius appeared and led the East Roman army to victory. When
the Avars reached Constantinople, the khagan saw a majestic female
figure pacing the walls. It was the Theotokos, the Greek word for
“Mother of God,” which the Byzantines called the Virgin Mary. He
turned back in panic.
Almost all the Byzantines paid great attention to fortunetelling,
palm reading, and prophecies. Everybody believed in them. There
were even more than a few emperors of humble birth who would not
have even dared to try seizing the throne if it had not been for a
fortuneteller or a prophecy. But, although sometimes the monks and
abbots themselves told some of these fortunes, none of this had much
to do with the church.
The Byzantine, even the most superstitious Byzantine, was truly
Christian, but that did not mean he tolerated every kind of
Christianity in existence. The Byzantine did not believe, as most of
us do, that religion is a personal matter and that every man has a
right to worship God in his own way, according to his own conscience.
To the Byzantine, there was only one religion—the official religion.
And there was only one church—his own Orthodox Church. If you
believed anything else, you were a heretic and to be persecuted or
fought.
This had been so from the very beginning. Constantine himself had
called council after council to work out the details of the Christian
creed, and the emperors who followed carried on his work. In council
after council, they wrote down in black and white what every
Byzantine had to believe. When it was written down, that was _it_.
No further discussion about it, unless you enjoyed exile or having
insulting poetry branded on your forehead; and this last really
happened to one poor monk who refused to conform.
It was still true in the last days of the empire, but by then not
even the emperor could change what had been agreed on earlier. Some
of the later emperors tried to. They journeyed to France, Italy, and
even England seeking help against the Turks, and in order to get the
Western nations on their side they promised to make the Orthodox
Church join the Roman Catholic Church, with the Pope as head of both.
The Byzantine people rose in protest. Lucas Notaras, a relative of
the emperor and the last Megadux, or Great Admiral, shouted at his
cousin angrily. “Better a Turkish turban than a papal miter!” he
cried.
Although a huge Turkish cannon was already battering the walls, the
mob shouted its approval.
“The Latins are trying to destroy the Greek city, the Greek religion,
the Greek race, even the Greek language!” the people roared.
Even before there had been riots with the “democracy in rags,” the
poor people, joining the monks and abbots to make certain that the
old-time religion of the Byzantines was kept true and pure even if
this made the empire fall.
Nevertheless the old-time Orthodox Byzantine faith did not come
into being just as it was and all at once. Since religion was so
important, and since the Greeks loved to argue, the whole history
of the Byzantines is filled with violent discussions and bitter
differences of opinion about exactly what a man was supposed to
believe. Some of the arguments were so complicated that it does not
seem that the Byzantines themselves always understood them, even
though they were willing to rush into the streets and fight about
them. The arguments are even more hard to understand today.
One of the most bitter disputes was about the use of the single
letter _i_. There is a Greek word _homoios_ which means “similar,”
and another Greek word _homos_ which means “same.” Men and women were
sent to distant sunless provinces or shipped to lonely islands; they
were locked in damp, rat-infested cells; and volume after volume was
written and published over whether the Saviour was _homoi-ousion_
(similar to God) or _homo-ousion_ (the same as God). But this was
only one of many arguments and discussions. It would be impossible
to tell you even a small part of them. But that does not mean that
these differences were not important. Many people think that the
reason the Arabs conquered Egypt and Syria so easily and converted
the inhabitants to Islam was that most of the emperors were Orthodox
Christians who tried to make the Egyptians and Syrians Orthodox, too.
The most important controversy that troubled the Byzantines is
easier to understand. It is called the Iconoclast (image breaker)
controversy, and it agitated the empire for more than a hundred years.
Although the early Christians had opposed images and paintings,
calling them heathen idols, most Byzantines attached great importance
to them. In fact, some of their finest art went into the making
of statues, portraits, and even small portable mosaics of saints,
apostles, and other holy persons. They called these _eikons_, and
they certainly paid them great reverence. Their enemies said they
even worshiped them.
But not every Byzantine was an image worshiper. The hardy
mountaineers from Isauria and other parts of Asia Minor still held to
the Puritan-like thoughts of their ancestors. They hated images. Then
an Isaurian general seized the throne. In addition to hating images,
he realized that image worship greatly increased the power of the
monks and priests who were now just about as strong as the emperor.
Because they hated images, and also to break the power of the church
party, he and his son and the other emperors who followed ordered
every image to be torn down and many of them destroyed. Then they
abolished many monasteries. In some cases they made the monks and
nuns parade hand in hand before howling crowds in the Hippodrome,
forcing them to choose between marriage or torture and death.
These Iconoclast emperors were supported by the soldiers (most of
whom were also image breakers; and all wanted a chance to loot church
treasures) and by much of Asia Minor. But the monks would not give
in, many of them suffering martyrdom first, and _they_ were supported
by the people; by the superstitious sailors of the fleet; by all
the women; and by many of the empresses who were as stubborn as the
monks. Saint Theodora, for instance, although her husband was a
strong Iconoclast, never gave up image worship in private and she
taught her daughters and granddaughters to do the same. When she was
surprised by a dwarf who told the emperor, she said that the figures
they were praying to were really dolls and that she was playing
with her grandchildren. But later she had the dwarf beaten for good
measure.
With opposition like that, the Iconoclasts could not hope to win, and
in the end they compromised. The images were restored, but they were
to be placed high and out of reach. Worshipers could look at them or
reverence them, but they could not kiss them or touch them.
[Illustration: Men pulling down statue]
It was at this time, and probably because harmony now reigned, that
the Byzantine church at last felt powerful enough not only to take
care of its own peoples’ religion, but to set out to convert their
heathen neighbors. Particularly their Slavic neighbors! Many of these
still worshiped pagan gods 800 years after Christ.
It was Michael the Drunkard, a much better emperor than the name
seems to indicate, who ended the Iconoclast controversy. And it was
the same Michael who sent out Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius to do
their work. They were the most famous missionaries eastern Europe had
ever seen.
They prepared themselves like generals going into battle, and in a
way they were like generals. They carefully restudied the Slavic
languages, for since they were from a part of the empire where there
were many Slavs, they already knew some Slavic languages. They
learned all about Slavic culture and Slavic history. Finally they
invented what is known today as the Cyrillic alphabet, which is still
used in much of the Slavic world.
To be sure, their mission was not a complete success. They converted
Moravia, now a part of Czechoslovakia, without too much difficulty,
but when the Moravian king was defeated by a German king the country
became Roman Catholic. Cyril and Methodius or saints trained by them,
for they actually trained saints, went into Bulgaria, Macedonia,
and Serbia. The people there stayed converted and stayed Orthodox.
Indeed, Bulgaria soon boasted that it was the “eldest daughter of the
eastern church,” and had its own patriarch, and its own Santa Sophia,
too.
But the most important conversion made by the Byzantines took place
a hundred years later. It was the conversion of the Russians. The
Russians themselves say this was done more by Byzantine splendor
than by the talk of Byzantine missionaries, or even by the marriage
of the Russian Prince Vladimir to the emperor’s sister, Anna.
In 989, this huge ruler with his forest-shaking voice decided to
make his people abandon their Norse gods and goddesses. He sent
ambassadors to the four great religions that he knew about to find
out which one was the best to adopt.
First the ambassadors went to the Black Bulgars, who were Moslems.
But the mosques were smelly and dirty, and the Black Bulgars told the
Russians that they would have to give up wine.
“Drinking is the joy of the Russians!” roared Vladimir.
Next they visited the Jewish Khazars, but how, asked Vladimir, could
the Jews be God’s chosen people if he had scattered them all over the
earth?
Then they went to the German Roman Catholics.
“The Germans say that they worship the truth,” the ambassadors
reported, “but they have day after day of fasting, and there is no
magnificence.”
“I do not like to fast,” said Vladimir.
Finally, they visited the Greeks, that is, the Byzantines.
“The Greeks,” they said, “led us to the edifices where they worship
their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for
nowhere have we seen such splendor and beauty. We are at loss how to
describe it, but we do know that God must dwell there.”
Then they added, “If the Greek faith was not good, your grandmother
Olga would not have adopted it.”
For they knew that this straw-haired princess had never stopped
talking about the domes of polished copper, the pavements of rare
stone, the magnificent decorations, the pearl-encrusted psalm books
and Bibles, the incense and the music in Constantinople. They knew
too that she had never stopped talking about the God-chosen emperor
who had wanted to marry her, and how she had tricked him into giving
her rich gifts instead.
Vladimir agreed. He ordered his subjects to be baptized, and told his
boyars to give up worshiping Odin and Thor, and to burn their idols
or cast them into the Dnepr River.
This conversion of the Slavs was as important to the Byzantines as
a victory by their army or by their diplomats, and indeed it was a
victory. For although they still fought with the Serbs and with the
Russians and particularly with the Bulgarians, these people were
gradually drawn into the Byzantine way of life and became more and
more friendly. Thus the flanks of the empire were protected.
It was, of course, far more lasting than any military victory. The
Byzantine Empire came to an end more than 500 years ago, but if you
were to go into the Balkans or Greece today, you would find that the
work done by Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius still remains. Even
after forty years of communism, you might find that the seeds of
Christianity, and particularly Greek Orthodox Christianity, which had
been sown by Vladimir’s conversion, were still living in some Russian
communist hearts.
[Illustration: Coin]
GOLDEN BEZANTS
It took a lot of money to be able to do all these things—to pay the
expenses of the emperor and his court and government, and of the
army, the navy, and the church, to say nothing of bribing foreign
rulers and their ambassadors. And this money did not come from
conquering fabulously rich lands and then making them hand over their
treasures as tribute or as booty.
This method was the way the old Roman Empire had become wealthy. In
fact, the famous Roman statesman Cicero, who had a rich province to
govern, boasted to his friend Atticus that the natives loved him
because he did not make them give him a well-furnished palace in
every city where he spent the night. They thronged from every village
and hamlet to cheer him because he did not force them to borrow money
and then pay him back with forty-eight per cent interest!
But in Byzantine days there were very few fabulously rich countries
left to conquer, and the Byzantines had to find some other source
of wealth. They had to rely on hard work and on their own skill
and cleverness. They supported themselves on the little farms that
nestled in every Balkan valley and the huge estates that sprawled
over Thrace and Anatolia (the Asiatic part of modern Turkey). They
earned a living, sometimes even amassing treasure, in the many
industries that were found in every Byzantine city. They became
wealthy from their world-wide foreign trade.
Nobody can say today just how wealthy they were. One historian says
that the Byzantine state had an annual budget of one hundred and
twenty million dollars in gold, but another says that it was only
twenty million.
No matter which was right, and it was probably the first, you would
still have to multiply the figure many times to find out what it
is worth in modern money. Anyway, this was only the money spent by
the government; it did not include the vast sums and the enormous
property owned by private citizens. There may have been fifteen
million people in the Byzantine Empire, and while some of them were
poor as poor could be, a great many of them were very rich indeed.
Of all ways of making a living, farming probably came first. Rich
or poor, almost every Byzantine had an eye for the land, that is,
everyone except the city mobs who couldn’t bear to be too far away
from the excitement of the Circus.
In fact, many people say that the reason the Byzantine Empire finally
lost its wealth was because the average Byzantine preferred to invest
his money in an estate rather than in foreign trade. The Byzantines
let foreign trade fall into the hands of the Venetians, Genoese, and
Pisans. Then when the Turks came and the richest provinces fell into
the hands of the invaders, there was nothing to fall back on, and no
money to pay soldiers to hold the Turks off.
If that is so, it was for the same reason that the Byzantines did not
like the navy; foreign trade was too uncertain and there was no way
to figure out your risks. Just take pirates alone. The Aegean Sea
and in fact the whole eastern Mediterranean was strewn with islands
behind which lurked swift ships, manned by swarthy corsairs. They
were as dangerous as Captain Kidd or Henry Morgan, and they kept
Byzantine traders terrified.
“What am I going to do?” jeered one of them, a Genoese, as he boarded
a heavily laden Byzantine merchant vessel. “Seize you and your goods,
_and cut off your noses_!”
But besides pirates, there was wind and weather, land robbers (if you
shipped your goods by caravan), and the possibility that some prince
or emir would confiscate your property and say that it was indemnity
owed to him by the Byzantine Government.
And there was only the most primitive kind of insurance to take care
of you in time of trouble.
Of course, farming had its difficulties and dangers too. The farmer
was just as likely to have his crops ruined by drought or by heavy
rains as he is today. Also just as today, prices were only high
when there was little to sell. When the yield was plentiful and the
farmer’s storerooms were full, prices went down and so even if you
sold a lot, you didn’t get much in return. There were also wild
beasts to contend with. The Balkans and Asia Minor were far more
covered with waste and woodland than they are now, and you did not
have to go to the steppes of Russia to find ravening wolf packs. No
Byzantine herdsman dared go out without a sheepdog as savage as a
wolf itself. Sheepdogs were so important that a man who killed one
was given 100 lashes and had to pay double the dog’s value to its
owner. Life was often hard for the Byzantine farmer. We must never
think of the world in those days being like it is today. Boundary
lines were not rigidly fixed with customs officials at every point,
and even when the Byzantine Empire was strongest, savage bands and
even nations crossed the Danube and other rivers, roving to their
hearts’ content. They never captured Constantinople, and the big
cities of the empire—from Thessalonica and Athens to Antioch and
Berytus (modern Beirut)—were often safe. But a farmer who came back
from his fields was just as likely to find his farmhouse a smoking
ruin and his wife and children murdered or carried off, as a settler
in our own wilderness days was to find them scalped by Indians. The
conditions were about the same.