emperor was not a man of capacity, and had been driven into rebellion by
his fears rather than his ambition. He held the throne barely three years,
amid constant revolts at home and defeats abroad. The Asiatic frontier was
ravaged by the armies of Abdalmalik, and at the same time a great disaster
befel the western half of the empire. A Saracen army from Egypt forced its
way into Africa, where the Romans had still maintained themselves by hard
fighting while the emperors of the house of Heraclius reigned. They
reduced all its fortresses one after the other, and finally took Carthage
in 697—a hundred and sixty-five years after it had been restored to the
empire by Belisarius.
[Illustration]
Church Of The Twelve Apostles At Thessalonica. (_From "L’Art Byzantin."
Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
The larger part of the army of Africa escaped by sea from Carthage when
the city fell. The officers in command sailed for Constantinople, and
during their voyage plotted to dethrone Leontius. They enlisted in their
scheme Tiberius Apsimarus, who commanded the imperial fleet in the Aegean,
and proclaimed him emperor when he joined them with his galleys. The
troops of Leontius betrayed the gates of the capital to the followers of
the rebel admiral, and Apsimarus seized Constantinople. He proclaimed
himself emperor by the title of Tiberius, third of that name, and
condemned his captive rival to the same fate that he himself had inflicted
on Justinian II. Accordingly the nose of Leontius was slit, and he was
placed in confinement in a monastery.
Tiberius III. was more fortunate in his reign than his predecessor: his
troops gained several victories over the Saracens, recovered the frontier
districts which Justinian II. and Leontius had lost, and even invaded
Northern Syria. But these successes did not save Tiberius from suffering
the same doom which had fallen on Justinian and Leontius. The people and
army were out of hand, the ephemeral emperor could count on no loyalty,
and any shock was sufficient to upset his precarious throne.
We must now turn to the banished Justinian, who had been sent into exile
with his nose mutilated. He had been transported to Cherson, the Greek
town in the Crimea, close to the modern Sebastopol, which formed the
northernmost outpost of civilization, and enjoyed municipal liberty under
the suzerainty of the empire. Justinian displayed in his day of adversity
a degree of capacity which astonished his contemporaries. He fled from
Cherson and took refuge with the Khan of the Khazars, the Tartar tribe who
dwelt east of the Sea of Azof. With this prince the exile so ingratiated
himself that he received in marriage his sister, who was baptized and
christened Theodora. But Tiberius III. sent great sums of money to the
Khazar to induce him to surrender Justinian, and the treacherous barbarian
determined to accept the bribe, and sent secret orders to two of his
officers to seize his brother-in-law. The emperor learnt of the plot
through his wife, and saved himself by the bold expedient of going at once
to one of the two Khazar chiefs and asking for a secret interview. When
they were alone he fell on him and strangled him, and then calling on the
second Khazar served him in the same fashion, before the Khan’s orders had
been divulged to any one.
This gave him time to escape, and he fled in a fishing boat out into the
Euxine with a few friends and servants who had followed him into exile.
While they were out at sea a storm arose, and the boat began to fill. One
of his companions cried to Justinian to make his peace with God, and
pardon his enemies ere he died. But the Emperor’s stern soul was not bent
by the tempest. “May God drown me here,” he answered, “if I spare a single
one of my enemies if ever I get to land!” The boat weathered the storm,
and Justinian survived to carry out his cruel oath. He came ashore in the
land of the Bulgarians, and soon won favour with their king Terbel, who
wanted a good excuse for invading the empire, and found it in the pretence
of supporting the exiled monarch. With a Bulgarian army at his back
Justinian appeared before Constantinople, and obtained an entrance at
night near the gate of Blachernæ. There was no fighting, for the adherents
of Tiberius were as unready to strike a blow for their master as the
followers of Leontius had been [705 A.D.]
So Justinian recovered his throne without fighting, for the people had by
this time half forgotten his tyranny, and regretted the rule of the house
of Heraclius. But they were soon to find out that they had erred in
submitting to the exile, and should have resisted him at all hazards.
Justinian came back in a relentless mood, bent on nothing but revenging
his mutilated nose and his ten years of exile. His first act was to send
for the two usurpers who had sat on his throne: Leontius was brought out
from his monastery, and Tiberius caught as he tried to flee into Asia.
Justinian had them led round the city in chains, and then bound them side
by side before his throne in the Cathisma, the imperial box at the
Hippodrome. There he sat in state, using their prostrate bodies as a
footstool, while his adherents chanted the verse from the ninety-first
Psalm, “Thou shalt tread on the lion and asp: the young lion and dragon
shalt thou trample under thy feet.” The allusion was to the names of the
usurpers, the Lion and Asp being Leontius and Apsimarus!
After this strange exhibition the two ex-emperors were beheaded. Their
execution began a reign of terror, for Justinian had his oath to keep, and
was set on wreaking vengeance on every one who had been concerned in his
deposition. He hanged all the chief officers and courtiers of Leontius,
and put out the eyes of the patriarch who had crowned him. Then he set to
work to hunt out meaner victims: many prominent citizens of Constantinople
were sown up in sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus. Soldiers were picked
out by the dozen and beheaded. A special expedition was sent by sea to
sack Cherson, the city of the Emperor’s exile, because he had a grudge
against its citizens. The chief men were caught and sent to the capital,
where Justinian had them bound to spits and roasted.
These atrocities were mere samples of the general conduct of Justinian. In
a few years he had made himself so much detested that it might be said
that he had been comparatively popular in the days of his first reign.
The end came into 711, when a general named Philippicus took arms, and
seized Constantinople while Justinian was absent at Sinope. The army of
the tyrant laid down their arms when Philippicus approached, and he was
led forth and beheaded without further delay—an end too good for such a
monster. The conqueror also sought out and slew his little son Tiberius,
whom the sister of the Khan of the Khazars had borne to him during his
exile. So ended the house of Heraclius, after it had sat for five
generations and one hundred and one years on the throne of Constantinople.
The six years which followed were purely anarchical. Justinian’s wild and
wicked freaks had completed the demoralization which had already set in
before his restoration. Everything in the army and the state was
completely disorganized and out of gear. It required a hero to restore the
machinery of government and evolve order out of chaos. But the hero was
not at once forthcoming, and the confusion went on increasing.
To replace Justinian by Philippicus was only to substitute King Log for
King Stork. The new emperor was a mere man of pleasure, and spent his time
in personal enjoyment, letting affairs of state slide on as best they
might. In less than two years he was upset by a conspiracy which placed on
the throne Artemius Anastasius, his own chief secretary. Philippicus was
blinded, and compelled to exchange the pleasures of the palace for the
rigours of a monastery. But the Court intrigue which dethroned Philippicus
did not please the army, and within two years Anastasius was overthrown by
the soldiers of the Obsequian theme, who gave the imperial crown to
Theodosius of Adrammytium, a respectable but obscure commissioner of
taxes. More merciful than any of his ephemeral predecessors, Theodosius
III. dismissed Anastasius unharmed, after compelling him to take holy
orders.
Meanwhile the organization of the empire was visibly breaking up. “The
affairs both of the realm and the city were neglected and decaying, civil
education was disappearing, and military discipline dissolved.” The
Bulgarian and Saracen commenced once more to ravage the frontier
provinces, and every year their ravages penetrated further inland. The
Caliph Welid was so impressed with the opportunity offered to him, that he
commenced to equip a great armament in the ports of Syria with the express
purpose of laying siege to Constantinople. No one hindered him, for the
army raised to serve against him turned aside to engage in the civil war
between Anastasius and Theodosius. The landmarks of the Saracens’
conquests by land are found in the falls of the great cities of Tyana
[710], Amasia [712], and Antioch-in-Pisidia [713]. They had penetrated
into Phrygia by 716, and were besieging the fortress of Amorium with every
expectation of success, when at last there appeared the man who was
destined to save the East-Roman Empire from a premature dismemberment.
This was Leo the Isaurian, one of the few military officers who had made a
great reputation amid the fearful disasters of the last ten years. He was
now general of the “Anatolic” theme, the province which included the old
Cappadocia and Lycaonia. After inducing the Saracens, more by craft than
force, to raise the siege of Amorium, Leo disowned his allegiance to the
incapable Theodosius and marched toward the Bosphorus.
The unfortunate emperor, who had not coveted the throne he occupied, nor
much desired to retain it, allowed his army to risk one engagement with
the troops of Leo. When it was beaten he summoned the Patriarch, the
Senate, and the chief officers of the court, pointed out to them that a
great Saracen invasion was impending, that civil war had begun, and that
he himself did not wish to remain responsible for the conduct of affairs.
With his consent the assembly resolved to offer the crown to Leo, who
formally accepted it early in the spring of 717.
Theodosius retired unharmed to Ephesus, where he lived for many years.
When he died the single word ΥΓΙΕΙΑ, “Health,” was inscribed on his tomb
according to his last directions.
XIV. THE SARACENS TURNED BACK.
By dethroning Theodosius III. on the very eve of the great Saracen
invasion, Leo the Isaurian took upon himself the gravest of
responsibilities. With a demoralized army, which of late had been more
accustomed to revolt than to fight, a depleted treasury, and a
disorganized civil service, he had to face an attack even more dangerous
than that which Constantine IV. had beaten off thirty years before.
Constantine too, the fourth of a race of hereditary rulers, had a secure
throne and a loyal army, while Leo was a mere adventurer who had seized
the crown only a few months before he was put to the test of the sword.
The reigning Caliph was now Suleiman, the seventh of the house of the
Ommeyades. He had strained all the resources of his wide empire to provide
a fleet and army adequate to the great enterprise which he had taken in
hand. The chief command of the expedition was given to his brother
Moslemah, who led an army of eighty thousand men from Tarsus across the
centre of Asia Minor, and marched on the Hellespont, taking the strong
city of Pergamus on his way. Meanwhile a fleet of eighteen hundred sail
under the vizier Suleiman, namesake of his master the Caliph, sailed from
Syria for the Aegean, carrying a force no less than that which marched by
land. Fleet and army met at Abydos on the Hellespont without mishap, for
Leo had drawn back all his resources, naval and military, to guard his
capital.
In August, 717, only five months after his coronation, the Isaurian saw
the vessels of the Saracens sailing up the Propontis, while their army had
crossed into Thrace and was approaching the city from the western side.
Moslemah caused his troops to build a line of circumvallation from the sea
to the Golden Horn, cutting Constantinople off from all communication with
Thrace, while Suleiman blocked the southern exit of the Bosphorus, and
tried to close it on the northern side also, so as to prevent any supplies
coming by water from the Euxine. Leo, however, sallied forth from the
Golden Horn with his galleys and fire-vessels bearing the dreaded Greek
fire, and did so much harm to the detachment of Saracen ships which had
gone northward up the strait, that the blockade was never properly
established on that side.
The Saracens relied more on starving out the city than on taking it by
storm: they had come provided with everything necessary for a blockade of
many months, and sat down as if intending to remain before the walls for
an indefinite time. But Constantinople had been provisioned on an even
more lavish scale; each family had been bidden to lay in a stock of corn
for no less a period than two years, and famine appeared in the camp of
the besiegers long ere it was felt in the houses of the besieged. Nor had
Moslemah and Suleiman reckoned with the climate. Hard winters occasionally
occur by the Black Sea, as our own army learnt to its cost in the Crimean
War. But the Saracens were served even worse by the winter of 717-18, when
the frost never ceased for twelve weeks. Leo might have boasted, like Czar
Nicholas, that December, January, and February were his best generals—for
these months wrought fearful havoc in the Saracen host. The lightly clad
Orientals could not stand the weather, and died off like flies of
dysentery and cold. The vizier Suleiman was among those who perished.
Meanwhile the Byzantines suffered little, being covered by roofs all the
winter.
When next spring came round Moslemah would have had to raise the siege if
he had not been heavily reinforced both by sea and land. A fleet of
reserve arrived from Egypt, and a large army came up from Tarsus and
occupied the Asiatic shores of the Bosphorus.
But Leo did not despair, and took the offensive in the summer. His
fire-ships stole out and burnt the Egyptian squadron as it lay at anchor.
A body of troops landing on the Bithynian coast, surprised and cut to
pieces the Saracen army which watched the other side of the strait. Soon,
too, famine began to assail the enemy; their stores of provisions were now
giving out, and they had harried the neighbourhood so fiercely that no
more food could be got from near at hand, while if they sent foraging
parties too far from their lines they were cut off by the peasantry. At
last Moslemah suffered a disaster which compelled him to abandon his task.
The Bulgarians came down over the Balkans, and routed the covering army
which observed Adrianople and protected the siege on the western side. No
less than twenty thousand Saracens fell, by the testimony of the Arab
historians themselves, and the survivors were so cowed that Moslemah gave
the order to retire. The fleet ferried the land army back into Asia, and
both forces started homeward. Moslemah got back to Tarsus with only thirty
thousand men at his back, out of more than a hundred thousand who had
started with him or come to him as reinforcements. The fleet fared even
worse: it was caught by a tempest in the Aegean, and so fearfully
shattered that it is said that only five vessels out of the whole Armada
got back to Syria unharmed.
Thus ended the last great endeavour of the Saracen to destroy
Constantinople. The task was never essayed again, though for three hundred
and fifty years more wars were constantly breaking out between the Emperor
and the Caliph. In the future they were always to be border struggles, not
desperate attempts to strike at the heart of the empire, and conquer
Europe for Islam. To Leo, far more than to his contemporary the Frank
Charles Martel, is the delivery of Christendom from the Moslem danger to
be attributed. Charles turned back a plundering horde sent out from an
outlying province of the Caliphate. Leo repulsed the grand-army of the
Saracens, raised from the whole of their eastern realms, and commanded by
the brother of their monarch. Such a defeat was well calculated to impress
on their fatalistic minds the idea that Constantinople was not destined by
providence to fall into their hands. They were by this time far removed
from the frantic fanaticism which had inspired their grandfathers, and the
crushing disaster they had now sustained deterred them from any repetition
of the attempt. Life and power had grown so pleasant to them that
martyrdom was no longer an “end in itself”; they preferred, if checked, to
live and fight another day.
Leo was, however, by no means entirely freed from the Saracens by his
victory of 718. At several epochs in the latter part of his reign he was
troubled by invasions of his border provinces. None of them, however, were
really dangerous, and after a victory won over the main army of the
raiders in 739 at Acroinon in Phrygia, Asia Minor was finally freed from
their presence.
XV. THE ICONOCLASTS. (A.D. 720-802.)
If Leo the Isaurian had died on the day on which the army of the Caliph
raised the siege of Constantinople it would have been well for his
reputation in history. Unhappily for himself, though happily enough for
the East-Roman realm, he survived yet twenty years to carry through a
series of measures which were in his eyes not less important than the
repulse of the Moslems from his capital. Historians have given to the
scheme of reform which he took in hand the name of the Iconoclastic
movement, because of the opposition to the worship of images which formed
one of the most prominent features of his action.
For the last hundred years the empire had been declining in culture and
civilization; literature and art seemed likely to perish in the
never-ending clash of arms: the old-Roman jurisprudence was being
forgotten, the race of educated civil servants was showing signs of
extinction, the governors of provinces were now without exception rough
soldiers, not members of that old bureaucracy whose Roman traditions had
so long kept the empire together. Not least among the signs of a decaying
civilization were the gross superstitions which had grown up of late in
the religious world. Christianity had begun to be permeated by those
strange mediæval fancies which would have been as inexplicable to the
old-Roman mind of four centuries before as they are to the mind of the
nineteenth century. A rich crop of puerile legends, rites, and observances
had grown up of late around the central truths of religion, unnoticed and
unguarded against by theologians, who devoted all their energies to the
barren Monothelite and Monophysite controversies. Image-worship and
relic-worship in particular had developed with strange rapidity, and
assumed the shape of mere Fetishism. Every ancient picture or statue was
now announced as both miraculously produced and endued with miraculous
powers. These wonder-working pictures and statues were now adored as
things in themselves divine: the possession of one of them made the
fortune of a church or monastery, and the tangible object of worship seems
to have been regarded with quite as much respect as the saint whose memory
it recalled. The freaks to which image-worship led were in some cases
purely grotesque; it was, for example, not unusual to select a picture as
the godfather of a child in baptism, and to scrape off a little of its
paint and produce it at the ceremony to represent the saint. Even
patriarchs and bishops ventured to assert that the hand of a celebrated
representation of the Virgin distilled fragrant balsam. The success of the
Emperor Heraclius in his Persian campaign was ascribed by the vulgar not
so much to his military talent as to the fact that he carried with him a
small picture of the Virgin, which had fallen from heaven!
[Illustration]
Bishops, Monks, Kings, Laymen, And Women, Adoring The Madonna. (_From a
Byzantine MS._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris,
Quantin, 1883._)
All these vain beliefs, inculcated by the clergy and eagerly believed by
the mob, were repulsive to the educated laymen of the higher classes.
Their dislike for vain superstitions was emphasized by the influence of
Mahometanism on their minds. For a hundred years the inhabitants of the
Asiatic provinces of the empire had been in touch with a religion of which
the noblest feature was its emphatic denunciation of idolatry under every
shape and form. An East-Roman, when taunted by his Moslem neighbour for
clinging to a faith which had grown corrupt and idolatrous, could not but
confess that there was too much ground for the accusation, when he looked
round on the daily practice of his countrymen.
Hence there had grown up among the stronger minds of the day a vigorous
reaction against the prevailing superstitions. It was more visible among
the laity than among the clergy, and far more widespread in Asia than in
Europe. In Leo the Isaurian this tendency stood incarnate in its most
militant form, and he left the legacy of his enthusiasm to his
descendants. Seven years after the relief of Constantinople he commenced
his crusade against superstition. The chief practices which he attacked
were the worship of images and the ascription of divine honours to
saints—more especially in the form of Mariolatry. His son Constantine,
more bold and drastic than his father, endeavoured to suppress monasticism
also, because he found the monks the most ardent defenders of images; but
Leo’s own measures went no further than a determined attempt to put down
image-worship.
The struggle which he inaugurated began in A.D. 725, when he ordered the
removal of all the images in the capital. Rioting broke out at once, and
the officials who were taking down the great figure of Christ Crucified,
over the palace-gate, were torn to pieces by a mob. The Emperor replied by
a series of executions, and carried out his policy all over the empire by
the aid of armed force.
The populace, headed by the monks, opposed a bitter resistance to the
Emperor’s doings, more especially in the European provinces. They set the
wildest rumours afloat concerning his intentions; it was currently
reported that the Jews had bought his consent to image-breaking, and that
the Caliph Yezid had secretly converted him to Mahometanism. Though Leo’s
orthodoxy in matters doctrinal was unquestioned, and though he had no
objection to the representation of the cross, as distinguished from the
crucifix, he was accused of a design to undermine the foundations of
Christianity. Arianism was the least offensive fault laid to his account.
The Emperor’s enemies did not confine themselves to passive resistance to
his crusade against images. Dangerous revolts broke out in Greece and
Italy, and were not put down without much fighting. In Italy, indeed, the
imperial authority was shaken to its foundations, and never thoroughly
re-established. The Popes consistently opposed the Iconoclastic movement,
and by their denunciation of it placed themselves at the head of the
anti-imperial party, nor did they shrink from allying themselves with the
Lombards, who were now, as always, endeavouring to drive the East-Roman
garrisons from Ravenna and Naples.