administration was less popular than in the camp. The stern old soldier
was not a friend of either priests or courtiers. He had several quarrels
with the patriarch Polyeuctus, which made him detested by the clergy, and
in his public life he displayed a dislike for pomp and ceremony which led
the Byzantine populace to style him a niggard and an extortioner. He
suppressed shows and sports, and turned all the public revenues into the
war budget, which lay nearest his heart. When he left the city in 968 for
a new campaign against the Saracens, he was a much less popular ruler than
when he had entered it in triumph in 966 after the conquest of Cilicia.
In the camp, however, Nicephorus was as well loved and as successful as
ever. His last Syrian expedition was no less glorious than his earlier
campaign in the same quarter six years before. All the North Syrian cities
fell into his hands—Emesa, Hierapolis, Laodicea, and with them Aleppo, the
residence of the Emir: Damascus bought off the invader by a great tribute.
Only Antioch, the ancient capital of the land, held out, and Antioch also
was taken in the winter by escalade, through the daring of an officer
named Burtzes. The story of its fall is curious. The Emperor had left a
blockading army before it under a general named Peter, with orders not to
risk an assault. Burtzes, the second in command, disobeyed orders and
stormed a corner tower on a snowy night at the head of a small band of 300
men. Peter, in fear of the Emperor’s orders, refused to send him aid, and
for more than two days Burtzes maintained himself unaided in the tower he
had won. At last, however, the main body entered, and the Saracens fled
from the town. Nicephorus dismissed both his generals from the
service—Burtzes for having acted against orders, Peter for having obeyed
them too slavishly, and allowing an important advantage to be imperilled.
Nicephorus returned to Constantinople in the following year, to meet his
death at the hands of those who should have been his nearest and dearest.
His wife, Theophano had learnt to hate her grim and stern husband, who,
though he possessed all the virtues, displayed none of the graces. She had
cast her eyes in love on the Emperor’s favourite nephew, John Zimisces, a
young cavalry officer, who had greatly distinguished himself in the Syrian
war. Zimisces listened to her tempting, but he was not swayed by lust, but
by ambition: he had hoped that his uncle would make him heir to the
throne, to the detriment of the young emperor Basil. The loyal old soldier
had no idea of wronging his wards, and his nephew resolved to gain by
murder what he could not gain by favour.
[Illustration]
Return Of A Victorious Emperor. (_From an Embroidered Robe._) (_From
"L’art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
So John and Theophano conspired against their best friend, and basely
murdered him in the palace one December night in 969. The Emperor was
awakened from sleep to find a dozen of the assassins forcing his door.
John threw him to the ground, and the others stabbed him, while he cried
in his death-agony, “Oh, God! grant me Thy mercy!”
Thus ended the brave and virtuous Nicephorus Phocas. His murderers
succeeded in their end, for John Zimisces was able to seduce the guards,
overawe the ministers, and force the patriarch to crown him emperor. He
showed some contrition for the base slaughter of his uncle, giving away
half his private fortune to found hospitals for lepers, and the other half
to be distributed among the poor of the city. He did not wed the partner
of his guilt, the empress Theophano, but refused to see her face, and
ultimately sent her to a monastery.
If the manner of his accession could but be forgiven John might pass for a
favourable specimen of an emperor. He respected the rights of the young
emperors Basil and Constantine as scrupulously as his uncle had done, and
proved that as an administrator and a soldier he was not unworthy to sit
in the seat of Phocas. But the Nemesis of the murder of his uncle rested
upon him in the shape of a long civil war. His cousin Bardas Phocas took
arms to revenge the death of the old Nicephorus, and stirred up troubles
among his Cappadocian countrymen for several years, till at last he was
captured and immured in a monastery.
The chief feat for which John Zimisces is remembered is his splendid
victory over the Russians, whose great invasion of the Balkan Peninsula
falls within the limits of his reign. We have not yet had much occasion to
mention the Russian tribes, who for many centuries had been dwelling in
obscurity and barbarism, by the waters of the Dnieper and the Duna, in a
land of forest and marsh, far remote from the boundaries of the empire.
Nor should we hear of them now, but for the fact that their scattered
tribes had been of late unified into a single horde by a power from
without, and urged forward into a career of conquest by a race of
ambitious princes. Into the land of the Russians there had come some
hundred years before the reign of John Zimisces [862 A.D.], a Viking band
from Sweden, headed by Rurik, the ancestor of all the princes and Tzars of
Russia. The descendants of these adventurers from the north had gradually
conquered and subdued all the Slavonic tribes of the great forest-land,
and formed them into a single powerful kingdom. Its capital lay at Kief on
the Dnieper, and it had proved a formidable neighbour to all the barbarous
tribes around. The Viking blood of the new Russian princes drove them
seaward, and ere many generations had passed they had forced their way
down the Dnieper into the Euxine, and begun to vex the northern borders of
the Byzantine Empire with raids and ravages like those which the Danes
inflicted on Western Europe. Twice already, within the tenth century, had
large fleets of light Russia row-boats—they were copies on a smaller scale
of the Viking ships of the North—stolen down from the Dnieper mouth to the
shores of Thrace, and landed their plundering crews within a few miles of
the Bosphorus, for a hurried raid on the rich suburban provinces. On the
first occasion in 907, the Russians had returned home laden with plunder,
but on the second, which fell in 941, the Byzantine fleet had caught them
at sea, and revenged the harrying of Thrace by sinking scores of their
light boats, which could not resist for a moment the impact of the heavy
war-galley urged by its hundred oars.
[Illustration]
Arabesque Design From A Byzantine MS. (_From "L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles
Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
But the attack which John Zimisces had to meet in 970 was far more
formidable than either of those which had preceded it. Swiatoslaf, king of
the Russians, had come down the Dnieper with no less than 60,000 men, and
had thrown himself on to the kingdom of Bulgaria, which was at the moment
distracted by civil war. He conquered the whole country, and soon his
marauders were crossing the Balkans and showing themselves in the plain of
Thrace. They even sacked the considerable town of Philippopolis before the
imperial troops came to its aid. This roused Zimisces, who had been absent
in Asia Minor, and in the early spring of 971 an imperial army of 30,000
men set out to cross the Balkans and drive the Russians into the Danube.
The struggle which ensued was one of the most desperate which East-Roman
history records. The Russians all fought on foot, in great square columns,
armed with spear and axe: they wore mail shirts and peaked helmets, just
like the Normans of Western Europe, to whom their princes were akin. The
shock of their columns was terrible, and their constancy in standing firm
almost incredible. Against these warriors of the North Zimisces led the
mailed horsemen of the Asiatic themes, and the bowmen and slingers who
were the flower of the Byzantine infantry. The tale of John’s two great
battles with the Russians at Presthlava and Silistria reads much like the
tale of the battle of Hastings. In Bulgaria, as in Sussex, the sturdy
axeman long beat off the desperate cavalry charges of their opponents. But
they could not resist the hail of arrows to which they had no missile
weapons to oppose, and when once the archers had thinned their ranks, the
Byzantine cavalry burst in, and made a fearful slaughter in the broken
phalanx. More fortunate than Harold Godwineson at the field of Senlac,
King Swiatoslaf escaped with his life and the relics of his army. But he
was beleaguered within the walls of Silistria, and forced to yield
himself, on the terms that he and his men might take their way homeward,
on swearing never to molest the empire again. The Russian swore the oath
and took a solemn farewell of Zimisces. The contrast between the two
monarchs struck Leo the Deacon, a chronicler who seems to have been
present at the scene, and caused him to describe the meeting with some
vigour. We learn how the Emperor, a small alert fair-haired man, sat on
his great war-horse by the river bank, in his golden armour with his
guards about him, while the burly Viking rowed to meet him in a boat, clad
in nothing but a white shirt, and with his long moustache floating in the
wind. They bade each other adieu, and the Russian departed, only to fall
in battle ere the year was out, at the hands of the Patzinak Tartars of
the Southern Steppes. Soon after Swiatoslaf’s death the majority of the
Russians became Christians, and ere long ceased to trouble the empire by
their raids. They became faithful adherents of the Eastern Church, and
drew their learning, their civilization, even their names and titles from
Constantinople. The Tzars are but Caesars misspelt, and the list of their
names—Michael, Alexander, Nicholas, John, Peter, Alexis—sufficiently
witnesses to their Byzantine godparents. Russian mercenaries were ere long
enlisted in the imperial army, and formed the nucleus of the “Varangian
guard,” in which at a later day, Danes, English, and Norsemen of all sorts
were incorporated.
[Illustration]
Russian Architecture From Byzantine Model. (_Church at Vladimir._) (_From
"L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
John Zimisces survived his great victory at Silistria for five years, and
won, ere he died, more territory in Northern Syria from the Saracens. The
border which his uncle Nicephorus had pushed forward to Antioch and Aleppo
was advanced by him as far as Amida and Edessa in Mesopotamia. But in the
midst of his conquests Zimisces was cut off by death, while still in the
flower of his age. Report whispered that he had been poisoned by one of
his ministers, whom he had threatened to displace. But the tale cannot be
verified, and all that is certain is that John died after a short illness,
leaving the throne to his young ward Basil II., who had now attained the
age of twenty years [976 A.D.].
XIX. THE END OF THE MACEDONIAN DYNASTY.
Basil II., who now sat in his own right on the throne which his warlike
guardians Nicephorus and John had so long protected, was by no means
unworthy to succeed them. Unlike his ancestors of the Macedonian house, he
showed from the first a love for war and adventure. Probably the deeds of
John and Nicephorus excited him to emulation: at any rate his long reign
from 976 till 1025, is one continuous record of wars, and almost entirely
of wars brought to a successful termination. Basil seemed to have modelled
himself on the elder of his two guardians, the stern Nicephorus Phocas.
His earliest years on the throne, indeed, were spent in the pursuit of
pleasure, but ere he reached the age of thirty a sudden transformation was
visible in him. He gave himself up entirely to war and religion: he took a
vow of chastity, and always wore the garb of a monk under his armour and
his imperial robes. His piety was exaggerated into bigotry and fanaticism,
but it was undoubtedly real, though it did not keep him from the
commission of many deeds of shocking cruelty in the course of his wars.
His justice was equally renowned, but it often degenerated into mere
harshness and indifference to suffering. No one could have been more
unlike his gay pleasure-loving father, or his mild literary grandfather,
than the grim emperor who won from posterity the title of Bulgaroktonos,
“the Slayer of the Bulgarians.”
Basil’s life-work was the moving back of the East-Roman border in the
Balkan Peninsula as far as the Danube, a line which it had not touched
since the Slavonic immigration in the days of Heraclius, three hundred and
fifty years before. In the first years of his reign, indeed, he
accomplished little, being much harassed by two rebellions of great
Asiatic nobles—Bardas Phocas, the nephew of Nicephorus II., and Bardas
Skleros, the general of the Armeniac theme. But after Phocas had died and
Skleros had surrendered, Basil reserved all his energies for war in
Europe, paying comparatively little attention to the Eastern conquests
which had engrossed Nicephorus Phocas and John Zimisces.
The whole interior of the Balkan Peninsula formed at this period part of
the dominions of Samuel King of the Bulgarians, who reigned over Bulgaria,
Servia, inland Macedonia, and other districts around them. It was a strong
and compact kingdom, administered by an able man, who had won his way to
the throne by sheer strength and ability, for the old royal house had
ceased out of the land during Swiatoslaf’s invasion of Bulgaria ten years
before. The main power of Samuel lay not in the land between Balkan and
Danube, which gave his kingdom its name, but in the Slavonic districts
further West and South. The centre of his realm was the fortress of
Ochrida, which he had chosen as his capital—a strong town situated on a
lake among the Macedonian hills. There Samuel mustered his armies, and
from thence he started forth to attach either Thessalonica or Adrianople,
as the opportunity might come to him.
The duel between Basil and Samuel lasted no less than thirty-four years,
till the Bulgarian king died a beaten man in 1014. This long and
unremitting struggle taxed all the energies of the empire, for Samuel was
not a foe to be despised; he was no mere barbarian, but had learnt the art
of war from his Byzantine neighbours, and had specially studied
fortification. It was the desperate defences of his numerous hill-castles
that made Basil’s task such a long one. The details of the struggle are
too long to follow out: suffice it to say that after some defeats in his
earlier years, Basil accomplished the conquest of Bulgaria proper, as far
as the Danube, in 1002, the year in which Widdin, the last of Samuel’s
strongholds in the North surrendered to him. For twelve years more the
enemy held out in the Central Balkans, in his Macedonian strongholds,
about Ochrida and Uskup. But at last, Basil’s constant victories in the
field, and his relentless slaughter of captives after the day was won,
broke the force of the Bulgarian king. In 1014 the Emperor gained a
crowning victory, after which he took 15,000 prisoners: he put out the
eyes of all save one man in each hundred, and sent the poor wretches with
their guides to seek King Samuel in his capital. The old Bulgarian was so
overcome at the horrible sight that he was seized with a fit, and died on
the spot, of rage and grief. His successors Gabriel and Ladislas could
make no head against the stern and relentless emperor, and in 1018 the
last fortress of the kingdom of Ochrida surrendered at discretion.
Contrary to his habit, Basil treated the vanquished foe with mildness,
indulged in no massacres, and contented himself with repairing the old
Roman roads and fortresses of the Central Balkans, without attempting to
exterminate the Slavonic tribes that had so often defied him. His
conquests rounded off the empire on its northern frontier, and made it
touch the Magyar kingdom of Hungary, for Servia no less than Bulgaria and
Macedonia formed part of his conquests. The Byzantine border now ran from
Belgrade to the Danube mouth, a line which it was destined to preserve for
nearly two hundred years, till the great rebellion of Bulgaria against
Isaac Angelus in the year 1086.
Having justly earned his grim title of “the Slayer of the Bulgarians” by
his long series of victories in Europe, Basil turned in his old age to
continue the work of John Zimisces on the Eastern frontier. There the
Moslem states were still weak and divided; though a new power, the
Fatimite dynasty in Egypt, had come to the front, and acquired an
ascendency over its neighbours. Basil’s last campaigns, in 1021-2, were
directed against the princes of Armenia, and the Iberians and Abasgians
who dwelt beyond them to the north. His arms were entirely successful, and
he added many Armenian districts to his Eastern provinces; but it may be
questioned whether these conquests were beneficial to the empire. A strong
Armenian kingdom was a useful neighbour to the Byzantine realm; being a
Christian state it was usually friendly to the empire, and acted as a
barrier against Moslem attacks from Persia. Basil broke up the Armenian
power, but did not annex the whole country, or establish in it any
adequate provision against the ultimate danger of attacks from the East by
the Mahometan powers.
Basil died in 1025 at the age of sixty-eight, just as he was preparing to
send forth an expedition to rescue Sicily from the hands of the Saracens.
He had won more provinces for the empire than any general since the days
of the great Belisarius, and at his death the Byzantine borders had
reached the furthest extension which they ever knew. His successors were
to be unworthy of his throne, and were destined to lose provinces with as
constant regularity as he himself had shown in gaining them. There was to
be no one after him who could boast that he had fought thirty campaigns in
the open field with harness on his back, and had never turned aside from
any enterprise that he had ever taken in hand.
Basil’s brother Constantine had been his colleague in name all through the
half century of his reign. No one could have been more unlike the ascetic
and indefatigable “Slayer of the Bulgarians.” Constantine was a mere
worldling, a man of pleasure, a votary of the table and the wine cup,
whose only redeeming tastes were a devotion to music and literature. He
had dwelt in his corner of the palace surrounded by a little court of
eunuchs and flatterers, and excluded by the stern Basil from all share and
lot in the administration of the empire. Now Constantine found himself the
heir of his childless brother, and was forced at the age of sixty to take
up the responsibilities of empire. He proved an idle and incompetent, but
not an actively mischievous sovereign. His worst act was to hand over the
administration of the chief offices of state to six of his old
courtiers—all eunuchs—whose elevation was a cause of wild anger to the
great noble families, and whose inexperience led to much weak and futile
government during his short reign.
Constantine died in 1028, after a very brief taste of empire. He was the
last male of the Macedonian house, and left no heirs save his elderly
unmarried daughters—whose education and moral training he had grossly
neglected. Zoe, the eldest, was more than forty years of age, but her
father had never found her a husband. On his death-bed, however, he sent
for a middle-aged noble named Romanus Argyrus, and forced him, at an
hour’s notice, to wed the princess. Only two days later Romanus found
himself left, by his father-in-law’s death, titular head of the empire.
But Zoe, a clever, obstinate, and unscrupulous woman, kept the reins of
authority in her own hands, and gave her unwilling spouse many an evil
hour. She was inordinately vain, and pretended, like Queen Elizabeth of
England, to be the mistress of all hearts long after she was well advanced
in middle age. Her husband let her go her own way, and devoted himself to
such affairs of state as he was allowed to manage. His interference with
warlike matters was most unhappy. Venturing a campaign in Syria, he led
his army to defeat, and saw several towns on the border fall into the
hands of the Emir of Aleppo. After a reign of six years Romanus died of a
lingering disease, and Zoe was left a widow. Almost before the breath was
out of her husband’s body, the volatile empress—she was now over fifty—had
chosen and wedded another partner. The new emperor was Michael the
Paphlagonian, a young courtier who had been Gentleman of the Bedchamber to
Romanus: he was twenty-eight years of age and noted as the most handsome
man in Constantinople. His good looks had won Zoe’s fancy, and to his own
surprise he found himself seated on the throne by his elderly admirer
[1034].
The object of Zoe’s anile affection was a capable man, and justified his
rather humiliating elevation by good service to the empire. He beat back
the Saracens from Syria and put down a Bulgarian rebellion with success.
But in his last years he saw Servia, one of the conquests of Basil II.,
burst out into revolt, and could not quell it. He also failed in a project
to reconquer Sicily from the Moors, though he sent against the island
George Maniakes, the best general of the day, who won many towns and
defeated the Moslems in two pitched battles. The attempt to subdue the
whole island failed, and the conquests of Maniakes were lost one after the
other. Michael IV., though still a young man, was fearfully afflicted with
epileptic fits, which sapped his health, and so enfeebled him that he died
a hopeless invalid ere he reached the age of thirty-six. The irrepressible
Zoe, now again a widow, took a few days to decide whether she would adopt
a son, or marry a third husband. She first tried the former alternative,
and crowned as her colleague her late spouse’s nephew and namesake Michael
V. But the young man proved ungrateful, and strove to deprive the aged
empress of the control of affairs. When he announced his intention of
removing her from the capital, the city mob, who loved the Macedonian
house, and laughed at rather than reprobated the foibles of Zoe, took arms
to defend their mistress. In a fierce fight between the rioters and the
guards of Michael V., 3,000 lives were lost: but the insurgents had the
upper hand, routed the soldiery, and caught and blinded Michael.
Zoe, once more at the head of the state, now made her third marriage, at
the age of sixty-two. She chose as her partner Constantine Monomachus, an
old debauchee who had been her lover thirty years ago. Their joint reign
was unhappy both at home and abroad. Frequent rebellions broke out both in
Asia Minor and in the Balkan Peninsula. The Patzinaks sent forays across
the Danube, while a new enemy, the Normans of South Italy, conquered the
“theme of Langobardia,” the last Byzantine possession to the West of the
Adriatic, and established in its stead the duchy of Apulia [1055]. A still
more dangerous foe began also to be heard of along the Eastern frontier.
The Seljouk Turks were now commencing a career of conquest in Persia and
the lands on the Oxus. In 1048 the advance guard of their hordes began to
ravage the Armenian frontier of the empire. But this danger was not yet a
pressing one.
When Zoe and Constantine IX. were dead, the sole remaining scion of the
Macedonian house was saluted as ruler of the empire. This was Theodora,
the younger sister of Zoe, an old woman of seventy, who had spent the best
part of her days in a nunnery. She was as sour and ascetic as her sister
had been vain and amorous; but she does not seem to have been the worst of
the rulers of Byzantium, and her two years of power were not troubled by
rebellions or vexed by foreign war. Her austere virtues won her some
respect from the people, and the fact that she was the last of her house,
and that with its extinction the troubles of a disputed succession were
doomed to come upon the empire, seems to have sobered her subjects, and
led them to let the last days of the Basilian dynasty pass away in peace.
Theodora died on the 30th of August, 1057, having on her death-bed
declared that she adopted Michael Stratioticus as her successor. Then
commenced the reign of trouble, the “third anarchy” in the history of the
Byzantine Empire.
XX. MANZIKERT. (1057-1081.)