Heraclius and Chosroës, bidding them embrace Islam. The Persian replied
with the threat that he would put the Prophet in chains when he had
leisure. The Roman made no direct reply, but sent Mahomet some small
presents, neglecting the theological bent of his message, and only
thinking of enlisting a possible political ally. Both answers were
regarded as equally unsatisfactory by the Prophet, and he doomed the two
empires to a similar destruction. Next year [629] the first collision
between the East-Romans and the Arabs took place, a band of Moslems having
pushed a raid up to Muta, near the Dead Sea. But it was not till three
years later, when Mahomet himself was already dead, that the storm fell on
the Roman Empire. In obedience to the injunctions of his deceased master,
the Caliph Abu Bekr prepared two armies, and launched the one against
Palestine and the other against Persia.
Till the last seven or eight years English writers have been inclined to
underrate the force and fury of an army of Mahometan fanatics in the first
flush of their enthusiasm. Now that we have witnessed in our own day the
scenes of Tamaai and Abu Klea we do so no longer. The rush that can break
into a British square bristling with Martini-Henry rifles is not a thing
to be despised. For the future we shall not treat lightly the armies of
the early Caliphs, nor scoff with Gibbon at the feebleness of the troops
who were routed by them. If the soldiers of Queen Victoria, armed with
modern rifles and artillery, found the fanatical Arab a formidable foe,
let us not blame the soldiers of Heraclius who faced the same enemy with
pike and sword alone. In the early engagements between the East-Romans and
the Saracens the superior discipline and more regular arms of the one were
not a sufficient counterpoise to put against the mad recklessness of the
other. The Moslem wanted to get killed, that he might reap the fruits of
martyrdom in the other world, and cared not how he died, if he had first
slain an enemy. The Roman fought well enough; but he did not, like his
adversary, yearn to become a martyr, and the odds were on the man who held
his life the cheapest.
The moment of the Saracen invasion was chosen most unhappily for
Heraclius. He had just paid off the enormous debt that he had contracted
to the Church, and to do so had not only drained the treasury but imposed
some new and unwise taxes on the harassed provincials, and disbanded many
of his veterans for the sake of economy. Syria and Egypt, after spending
twelve and ten years respectively under the Persian yoke, had not yet got
back into their old organization. Both countries were much distracted with
religious troubles; the heretical sects of the Monophysites and Jacobites
who swarmed within their boundaries had lifted up their heads under the
Persian rule, being relieved from the governmental repression that had
hitherto been their lot. They seem to have constituted an actual majority
of the population, and bitterly resented the endeavours of Heraclius to
enforce orthodoxy in the reconquered provinces. Their discontent was so
bitter that during the Saracen invasion they stood aside and refused to
help the imperial armies, or even on occasion aided the alien enemy.
The details of the Arab conquest of Syria have not been preserved by the
East-Roman historians, who seem to have hated the idea of recording the
disasters of Christendom. The Moslems, on the other hand, had not yet
commenced to write, and ere historians arose among them, the tale of the
invasion had been intertwined with a whole cycle of romantic legends,
fitter for the “Arabian Nights” than the sober pages of a chronicle.
But the main lines of the war can be reconstructed with accuracy. The
Saracen horde under Abu Obeida emerged from the desert in the spring of
634 and captured Bostra, the frontier city of Syria to the east, by the
aid of treachery from within. The Romans collected an army to drive them
off, but in July it was defeated at Aijnadin [Gabatha] in Ituraea.
Thoroughly roused by this disaster Heraclius set all the legions of the
East marching, and sixty thousand men crossed the Jordan and advanced to
recover Bostra. The Arabs met them at the fords of the Hieromax, an
Eastern tributary of the Jordan, and a fierce battle raged all day. The
Romans drove the enemy back to the very gates of their camp, but a last
charge, headed by the fierce warrior Khaled, broke their firm array when a
victory seemed almost assured. All the mailed horsemen of Heraclius, his
Armenian and Isaurian archers, his solid phalanx of infantry, were
insufficient to resist the wild rush of the Arabs. Urged on by the cry of
their general, “Paradise is before you, the devil and hell-fire behind,”
the fanatical Orientals threw themselves on regiment after regiment and
drove it off the field.
All Syria east of Jordan was lost in this fatal battle. Damascus, its
great stronghold, resisted desperately but fell early in 635. Most of its
population were massacred. This disaster drew Heraclius into the field,
though he was now over sixty, and was beginning to fail in health. He
could do nothing; Emesa and Heliopolis were sacked before his eyes, and
after an inglorious campaign he hurried to Jerusalem, took the “True
Cross” from its sanctuary, where he had replaced it in triumph five years
before, and retired to Constantinople. Hardly had he reached it when the
news arrived that his discontented and demoralized troops had proclaimed a
rebel emperor, though the enemy was before them. The rebel—his name was
Baanes—was put down, but meanwhile Antioch, Chalcis, and all Northern
Syria fell into the hands of the Arabs.
Worse yet was to follow. In the next year, 637, Jerusalem fell, after a
desperate resistance, protracted for more than twelve months. The
inhabitants refused to surrender except to the Caliph in person, and the
aged Omar came over the desert, proud to take possession of the city which
Mahomet had reckoned the holiest site on earth save Mecca alone. The
Patriarch Sophronius was commanded to guide the conqueror around the city,
and when he saw the rude Arab standing by the altar of the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, cried aloud, “Now is the Abomination of Desolation, which
was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, truly in the Holy Place.” The Caliph
did not confiscate any of the great Christian sanctuaries, but he took the
site of Solomon’s Temple, and erected on it a magnificent Mosque, known
ever since as the Mosque of Omar.
The tale of the last years of Heraclius is most melancholy. The Emperor
lay at Constantinople slowly dying of dropsy, and his eldest son
Constantine had to take the field in his stead. But the young prince
received a crushing defeat in 638, when he attempted to recover North
Syria, and next year the Arabs, under Amrou, pressed eastward across the
Isthmus of Suez, and threw themselves upon Egypt. Two years more of
fighting sufficed to conquer the granary of the Roman Empire; and in
February, 641, when Heraclius died, the single port of Alexandria was the
sole remaining possession of the Romans in Egypt.
The ten years’ war which had torn Syria and Egypt from the hands of the
unfortunate Heraclius had been even more fatal to his Eastern neighbour.
The Arabs had attacked the Persian kingdom at the same moment that they
fell on Syria: two great battles at Kadesia [636] and Yalulah [637]
sufficed to place all Western Persia in the hands of the Moslems. King
Isdigerd, the last of the Sassanian line, raised his last army in 641, and
saw it cut to pieces at the decisive field of Nehauend. He fled away to
dwell as an exile among the Turks, and all his kingdom as far as the
borders of India became the prey of the conquerors.
Heraclius had married twice; by his first wife, Eudocia, he left a single
son, Constantine, who should have been his sole heir. But he had taken a
second wife, and this wife was his own niece Martina. The incestuous
choice had provoked much scandal, and was the one grave offence which
could be brought against Heraclius, whose life was in other respects
blameless. Martina, an ambitious and intriguing woman, prevailed on her
aged husband to make her eldest son, Heracleonas, joint-heir with his half
brother Constantine.
This arrangement, as might have been expected, worked very badly. The
court and army was at once split up between the adherents of the two young
Emperors, and while the defence of the empire against the Saracens should
have been the sole care of the East-Romans, they found themselves
distracted by fierce Court intrigues. Armed strife between the Emperors
seemed destined to break out, but after reigning only a few months
Constantine III. died. It was rumoured far and wide that his step-mother
had poisoned him, to make the way clear for her own son Heracleonas, who
immediately proclaimed himself sole emperor. The senate and the Byzantine
populace were both highly indignant at this usurpation, for the deceased
Constantine left a young son named Constans, who was thus excluded from
the throne to which he was the natural heir. Heracleonas had reigned alone
no more than a few weeks when the army of the East and the mob of
Constantinople were heard demanding in angry tones that Constans should be
crowned as his uncle’s colleague. Heracleonas was frightened into
compliance, but his submission only saved him for a year. In the summer of
642 the senate decreed his deposition, and he was seized by the adherents
of Constans and sent into exile, along with his mother Martina. The
victorious faction very cruelly ordered the tongue of the mother and the
nose of the son to be slit—the first instance of that hateful Oriental
practice being applied to members of the royal house, but not the last.
Constans II. was sole emperor from 642 to 668, and his son and successor,
Constantine IV., reigned from 668 to 685. They were both strong,
hard-headed warrior princes, fit descendants of the gallant Heraclius.
Their main credit lies in the fact that they fought unceasingly against
the Saracen, and preserved as a permanent possession of the empire nearly
every province that they had still remained Roman at the death of
Heraclius. During the minority indeed of Constans II., Alexandria(20) and
Aradus, the two last ports preserved by the Romans in Egypt and Syria were
lost. But the Saracens advanced no further by land; the sands of the
African desert and the passes of Taurus were destined to hold them back
for many years. The times, however, were still dangerous till the murder
of the Caliph Othman in 656, after which the outbreak of the first civil
war among the Moslems—the contest of Ali and Moawiah for the
Caliphate—gave the empire a respite. Moawiah, who held the lands on the
Roman frontier—his rival’s power lying further to the east—secured a free
hand against Ali, by making peace with Constans. He even consented to pay
him a small annual subsidy so long as the truce should last. This
agreement was invaluable to the empire. After twenty-seven years of
incessant war the mangled realm at last obtained an interval of repose. It
was something, too, that the Saracens were induced to pause, and saw that
the extension of their conquests was not destined to spread at once over
the whole world. When they realized that their victories were not to go on
for ever, they lost the first keenness of the fanatical courage which had
made them so terrible.
Freed from the Saracen war, which had threatened not merely to curtail,
but to extinguish the empire, Constans was at liberty to turn his
attention to other matters. It seems probable that it was at this moment
that the reorganization of the provinces of the empire took place, which
we find in existence in the second half of the seventh century. The old
Roman names and boundaries, which had endured since Diocletian’s time, now
disappear, and the empire is found divided into new provinces with strange
denominations. They were military in their origin, and each consisted of
the district covered by a large unit of soldiery—what we should call an
army corps. “Theme” meant both the corps and the district which it
defended, and the corps-commander was also the provincial governor. There
were six corps in Asia, called the Armeniac, Anatolic, Thracesian,
Bucellarian, Cibyrrhæot, and Obsequian themes. Of these the first two
explain themselves, they were the “army of Armenia” and the “army of the
East”; the Obsequian theme, quartered along the Propontis, was so called
because it was a kind of personal guard for the Emperor and the home
districts. The Thracesians were the “Army of Thrace,” who in the stress of
the war had been drafted across to Asia to reinforce the Eastern troops.
The Bucellarii seem to have been corps composed of natives and barbarian
auxiliaries mixed; they are heard of long before Constans, and he probably
did no more than unite them and localize them in a single district. The
Cibyrrhæot theme alone gets its name from a town, the port of Cibyra in
Pamphylia, which must have been the original headquarters of the
South-Western Army Corps. Its commander had a fleet always in his charge,
and his troops were often employed as marines.(21)
The western half of the empire seems to have had six “Themes” also; they
bear however old and familiar names—Thrace, Hellas, Thessalonica, Ravenna,
Sicily, and Africa, and their names explain their boundaries. In both
halves of the empire there were, beside the great themes, smaller
districts under the command of military governors, who had charge of
outlying posts, such as the passes of Taurus, or the islands of Cyprus and
Sardinia. Some of these afterwards grew into independent themes.
Thus came to an end the old imperial system of dividing military authority
and civil jurisdiction, which Augustus had invented and Diocletian
perpetuated. Under stress of the fearful Saracenic invasion the civil
governors disappear, and for the future a commander chosen for his
military capacity has also to discharge civil functions.
Constans II., when once he had made peace with Moawiah, would have done
well to turn to the Balkan Peninsula, and evict the Slavs from the
districts south of Haemus into which they had penetrated during the reign
of Heraclius. But he chose instead to do no more than compel the Slavs to
pay homage to him and give tribute, and set out to turn westward, and
endeavour to drive the Lombards out of Italy. Falling on the Duchy of
Benevento, he took many towns, and even laid siege to the capital. But he
failed to take it, and passed on to Rome, which had not seen the face of
an emperor for two hundred years. When an emperor did appear he brought no
luck, for Constans signalized his visit by taking down the bronze tiles of
the Pantheon and sending them off to Constantinople [664].
The Emperor lingered no less than five years in the West, busied with the
affairs of Italy and Africa, till the Constantinopolitans began to fear
that he would make Rome or Syracuse his capital. But in 668 he was
assassinated in a most strange manner. “As he bathed in the baths called
Daphne, Andreas his bathing attendant smote him on the head with his
soap-box, and fled away.” The blow was fatal, Constans died, and
Constantine his son reigned in his stead.
Constantine IV., known as Pogonatus, “the Bearded,” reigned for seventeen
years, of which more than half were spent in one long struggle with the
Saracens. Moawiah, the first of the Ommeyades, had now made himself sole
Caliph; the civil wars of the Arabs were now over, and once more they fell
on the empire. Constantine’s reign opened disastrously, with simultaneous
attacks by the armies and fleets of Moawiah on Africa, Sicily, and Asia
Minor. But this was only the prelude; in 673 the Caliph made ready an
expedition, the like of which had never yet been undertaken by the
Saracens. A great fleet and land army started from Syria to undertake the
siege of Constantinople itself, an enterprise which the Moslems had not
yet attempted. It was headed by the general Abderrahman, and accompanied
by Yezid, the Caliph’s son and heir. The fleet beat the imperial navy off
the sea, forced the passage of the Dardanelles, and took Cyzicus. Using
that city as its base, it proceeded to blockade the Bosphorus.
The great glory of Constantine IV. is that he withstood, defeated, and
drove away the mighty armament of Moawiah. For four years the investment
of Constantinople lingered on, and the stubborn resistance of the garrison
seemed unable to do more than stave off the evil day. But the happy
invention of fire-tubes for squirting inflammable liquids (probably the
famous “Greek-fire” of which we first hear at this time), gave the
Emperor’s fleet the superiority in a decisive naval battle. At the same
time a great victory was won on land and thirty thousand Arabs slain.
Abderrahman had fallen during the siege, and his successors had to lead
back the mere wrecks of a fleet and army to the disheartened Caliph.
It is a thousand pities that the details of this, the second great siege
of Constantinople, are not better known. But there is no good contemporary
historian to give us the desired information. If he had but met with his
“sacred bard,” Constantine IV. might have gone down to posterity in
company with Heraclius and Leo the Isaurian, as the third great hero of
the East-Roman Empire.
The year after the raising of the great siege, Moawiah sued for peace,
restored all his conquests, and offered a huge war indemnity, promising to
pay 3000 lbs. of gold per annum for thirty years. The report of the
triumph of Constantine went all over the world, and ambassadors came even
from the distant Franks and Khazars to congratulate him on the victory
which had saved Eastern Christendom from the Arab.
While Constantine was defending his capital from the Eastern enemy, the
wild tribes of his northern border took the opportunity of swooping down
on the European provinces, whose troops had been drawn off to resist the
Arabs. The Slavs came down from the inland, and laid siege for two years
to Thessalonica, which was only relieved from their attacks when
Constantine had finished his war with Moawiah. But a far more dangerous
attack was made by another enemy in the eastern part of the Balkan
Peninsula. The Bulgarians, a nomad tribe of Finnish blood, who dwelt in
the region of the Pruth and Dniester, came over the Danube, subdued the
Slavs of Moesia, and settled between the Danube and the Eastern Balkans,
where they have left their name till this day. They united the scattered
Slavonic tribes of the region into a single strong state, and the new
Bulgarian kingdom was long destined to be a troublesome neighbour to the
empire. The date 679 counts as the first year of the reign of Isperich
first king of Bulgaria. Constantine IV. was too exhausted by his long war
with Moawiah to make any serious attempt to drive the Bulgarians back over
the Danube, and acquiesced in the new settlement.
The last six years of Constantine’s reign were spent in peace. The only
notable event that took place in them was the meeting at Constantinople of
the Sixth Oecumenical Council in 680-1. At this Synod, the doctrine of the
Monothelites, who attributed but one will to Our Lord, was solemnly
condemned by the united Churches of the East and West. The holders of
Monothelite doctrines, dead and alive, were solemnly anathematised, among
them Pope Honorius of Rome, who in a previous generation had consented to
the heresy.
Constantine IV. died in 685, before he had reached his thirty-sixth year,
leaving his throne to his eldest son Justinian, a lad of sixteen.
XIII. THE FIRST ANARCHY.
Justinian II., the last of the house of Heraclius, was a sovereign of a
different type from any emperor that we have yet encountered in the annals
of the Eastern Empire. He was a bold, reckless, callous, and selfish young
man, with a firm determination to assert his own individuality and have
his own way,—he was, in short, of the stuff of which tyrants are made.
Justinian was but seventeen when he came to the throne, but he soon showed
that he intended to rule the empire after his own good pleasure long
before he had begun to learn the lessons of state-craft.
Ere he had reached his twenty-first year Justinian had plunged into war
with the Bulgarians. He attacked them suddenly, inflicted several defeats
on their king, and took no less than thirty thousand prisoners, whom he
sent over to Asia, and forced to enlist in the army of Armenia. He next
picked a quarrel with the Saracen Caliph on the most frivolous grounds.
The annual tribute due by the treaty of 679 had hitherto been paid in
Roman _solidi_, but in 692 Abdalmalik tendered it in new gold coins of his
own mintage, bearing verses of the Koran. Justinian refused to receive
them, and declared war.
His second venture in the field was disastrous: his unwilling recruits
from Bulgaria deserted to the enemy, when he met the Saracens at
Sebastopolis in Cilicia, and the Roman army was routed with great
slaughter. The two subsequent campaigns were equally unsuccessful, and the
troops of the Caliph harried Cappadocia far and wide.
Justinian’s wars depleted his treasury; yet he persisted in plunging into
expensive schemes of building at the same time, and was driven to collect
money by the most reckless extortion. He employed two unscrupulous
ministers, Theodotus, the accountant general—an ex-abbot who had deserted
his monastery—and the eunuch Stephanus, the keeper of the privy purse.
These men were to Justinian what Ralph Flambard was to William Rufus, or
Empson and Dudley to Henry VII: they raised him funds by flagrant
extortion and illegal stretching of the law. Both were violent and cruel:
Theodotus is said to have hung recalcitrant tax-payers up by ropes above
smoky fires till they were nearly stifled. Stephanus thrashed and stoned
every one who fell into his hands; he is reported to have actually
administered a whipping to the empress-dowager during the absence of her
son, and Justinian did not punish him when he returned.
While the emperor’s financial expedients were making him hated by the
moneyed classes, he was rendering himself no less unpopular in the army.
After his ill-success in the Saracen war, he began to execute or imprison
his officers, and to decimate his beaten troops: to be employed by him in
high command was almost as dangerous as it was to be appointed a
general-in-chief during the dictatorship of Robespierre.
In 695 the cup of Justinian’s iniquities was full. An officer named
Leontius being appointed, to his great dismay, general of the “theme” of
Hellas, was about to set out to assume his command. As he parted from his
friends he exclaimed that his days were numbered, and that he should be
expecting the order for his execution to arrive at any moment. Then a
certain monk named Paul stood forth, and bade him save himself by a bold
stroke; if he would aim a blow at Justinian he would find the people and
the army ready to follow him.
Leontius took the monk’s counsel, and rushing to the state prison, at the
head of a few friends, broke it open and liberated some hundreds of
political prisoners. A mob joined him, he seized the Cathedral of St.
Sophia, and then marched on the palace. No one would fight for Justinian,
who was caught and brought before the rebel leader in company with his two
odious ministers. Leontius bade his nose be slit, and banished him to
Cherson. Theodotus and Stephanus he handed over to the mob, who dragged
them round the city and burnt them alive.