THE GOLDEN HORN FROM EYÛB
THE GOLDEN HORN FROM EYÛB
Let Professor Bury's summary continue the tale:—"The twenty years which intervened between the banishment of Justinian in 695 and the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 717 witnessed a rapid succession of monarchs,all of whom were violently deposed. Isaurian Leontius was succeeded by Apsimar, who adopted the name Tiberius, and these two reigns occupied the first ten years. Then Justinian returned from exile, recovered the throne, and 'furiously raged' for six years (705-711). He was overthrown by Bardanes, who called himself Philippicus; then came Artemius, whose imperial name was Anastasius; and finally the years 716 and 717 saw the fall of Anastasius, the reign and fall of Theodosius, and the accession of Isaurian Leo, whose strong arm guided the Empire from ways of anarchy into a new path."[10]
In the tragedies of these years Constantinople bore its full share, and no more strange contrast to the scene of his barbarous mutilation could be imagined than that when Justinian II. sat again, ten years later (705) in the hippodrome, with his feet on the necks of the two monarchs who had filled his throne in the meantime. As the fickle people saw the "slit-nose," as they called him, triumphant over Leontius and Apsimar they called out in the words of the psalms, which came so readily to their lips, "Thou hast trodden upon thelionand theasp: the young lion and the dragon hast thou trodden under thy feet."
Six years later (711) there was a more terrible tragedy. Justinian was justly dethroned and slain, and his little boy Tiberius, the child of his exile, was torn from the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae and cruelly butchered outside the palace wall. The next years were stained by crimes and follies hardly less revolting than those that had gone before; there could be no more bitter irony than the single word which the humble tax-gatherer, who was elevated against his will to the imperial throne under the name of Theodosius II., inscribed upon his tomb—ὑγίεια—healthwas to be found nowhere for the empire in his day.
His successor, Leo the Isaurian, whom the Senate and the patriarch of Constantinople chose in 718 to be their lord, had seen an adventurous life, and was already the general and imperator of the great eastern army.
His first task was to defend the city against the Saracens. The great siege of 718, lasting twelve months, failed chiefly through his skill and patience. The invaders encamped before the city in August 717; the name of their Suleiman was one which was later to be very familiar to the Byzantines. When winter came it was one of those bitter seasons to which Constantinople is often subject. For many weeks snow lay on the ground, and the besiegers suffered far more than the garrison. Leo defended the city with extraordinary skill, and at length, at the right moment, by a well planned sortie he scattered the infidels, and of the great host of a hundred and eighty thousand men the Mohammedan historians say that only thirty thousand escaped back to the East. No greater feat was ever performed by the great empire, the bulwark of Christendom, than this heroic defence and splendid repulse.
It was not wholly the work of Leo, for the Bulgarians came from the north to his aid, and a pestilence, even before the storms of the Dardanelles destroyed their fleet, caused the withdrawal of the Saracen host. Then as an administrator he reformed the government, as a legist he reissued and revised the laws. The great earthquake of 739 caused the institution of a new tax, if not a new financial system.
"Some of the oldest monuments in the city were thrown down by the shock, the statue of Constantine the Great, at the gate of Attalus; the statue andsculptured column of Arcadius; the statue of Theodosius I., over the Golden Gate, and the church of Irene, close to S. Sophia. The land walls of the city were also subverted; and in order to repair the fortifications Leo increased the taxes by one-twelfth, or a miliarision in a nomisma."
Thus Professor Bury.[11]But to such acts, important though they were, Leo the Isaurian does not owe the fact that his name will never be forgotten in the history of the Empire which he ruled. It was he who began the attack upon the ancient custom of the Eastern churches which gave rise to the long and bitter iconoclastic controversy. It were idle for a Western accustomed to the severity and restraint of English worship to pretend to judge without partiality the conflict which arose in the eighth century among the Easterns. To Englishmen it comes with a shock of surprise to learn that they are regarded as Romanists, as has recently happened, because they do not use incense in every public service of the Church, according to the immemorial usage of the East. Similarly it is with diffidence that we learn to recognise the reverence paid to icons, pictures of sacred things, as a true and helpful part of Oriental devotion. It tends, we think, to superstition; as much perhaps as our grandfathers' pride in the black gown of the preacher, or the curious customs which led in England to the "plethoric Sunday afternoon." Leo the Isaurian, and after him his son, Constantine V. (nicknamed Copronymus by his people, probably "from his devotion to the stables"), of whom the latter certainly had no sense of the reality of religion, embarked on an ill-omened attempt to purge from the Church, and to destroy in the sacred buildings themselves, all the brilliant pictures and mosaics which commemorated the saints and receivedthe homage, bordering no doubt on superstition, of the faithful. They objected that it was a sin to represent Christ in art at all; and that the representation of His Mother tended to the exaltation of her name into that of a Divinity. "Apostles of rationalism" these Emperors have strangely been called, who fought against an ineradicable passion of their people. As dear to the hearts of the Greek Christians as their subtle questionings into the deep meanings of divine things, their determination to be satisfied with nothing less than a precise and logical definition of the faith once for all given to the saints, was their craving for outward and visible signs to represent the gifts of God at once in the Divine Life and in the lives of the saintly followers of the Lord, and their own reverence and consecration of all that was beautiful in the work of man. The force of Mohammedanism had lain in its austere rejection of any outward image of Divine things; heretics, Judaising or Monophysite, had from time to time taken up the cry against these innocent representations of the saints. If the "worship" of images tended to obscure the spiritual truth of religion, the destruction of all visible memorials of the saints, emblems of the divine attributes, or representations of the passion of Christ, was even more certain to tell against the real belief of a race at once ignorant and dramatic, to whom the eye was the constant teacher of the mind. However strange and unedifying the reverence paid to icons may seem to the modern Western mind, it is but the shallowest ignorance which would call it idolatry, and it is plain that any hasty attempt to interfere with the popular expression of religious ideas must tend, if hastily and unskilfully conducted, to impair the faith of the people itself. Led by men who were believed by the enthusiastic and conservative Byzantines to be influenced by Monophysites, Jewsand Mohammedans, it was certain to provoke a desperate resistance, and that the more widespread because the issue was not an intricate matter of scholastic teaching, but a plain issue of practice in which every day passions were deeply concerned.
In 726, almost, it would seem, without warning, the Emperor Leo issued an edict that all images in churches should be utterly abolished. The patriarch, rather than consent to the action, resigned his office. The story of what followed may be given in the words of Mr Tozer.[12]
"The work of destruction now commenced in earnest; the statues were everywhere removed, and the pictures on the walls were whitewashed over, and though numerous outbreaks occurred, and some executions took place before it was accomplished, yet on the whole the opposition was not formidable. The act which caused the greatest indignation was the removal of the magnificent image of Christ which surmounted the bronze gateway of the imperial palace, and was the object of great reverence. In order to take down this statue and burn it, a soldier of the guard had mounted a ladder, when a number of women assembled at the spot to beg that it might be spared; but, instead of listening to them, the soldier struck his axe into the face of the image. Infuriated by this, which appeared to them to be an insult offered to the Saviour Himself, they dragged the ladder from under his feet and killed him. The Emperor avenged his agent by executing some, and exiling others, of the offenders, and set up in the place of the statue a plain cross, with an inscription explaining the significance of the change.
"In the defence of images there stood forth two champions, the one in the West, the other in the East; and the points of view from which theyrespectively regarded them illustrate the different feelings of the two churches on the subject. The former of these was Pope Gregory II., who at first strongly remonstrated with the Emperor on his edict, and afterwards, when he endeavoured to enforce its observance in Italy, encouraged his people to disregard the order, and defied his nominal sovereign in violent and even insulting language. At last he excommunicated his nominee, the patriarch Anastasius. But he advocated the retention of images on the practical ground of their utility in instructing the young and ignorant, and as being an incentive to devotion. Far more exalted and more subtly defined was the position attributed to them by the other advocate, who spoke from the distant East. This was John of Damascus, otherwise known as S. John Damascene, the last of the Fathers of the Greek Church. This learned and acute theologian, who in many ways was superior to the age in which he lived, at one time filled a civil post of some importance under the Caliphs, who now ruled in Syria, but afterwards retired to the monastery of S. Saba, in the wilderness of Engedi, the strange position of which, overhanging a deep gorge that leads down to the Dead Sea, is still the wonder of the traveller. As he lived in the dominion of the Saracens he was beyond the reach of the Emperor's arm, and now undertook the cause of his suffering co-religionists. In three powerful addresses he set forth his arguments for image worship. Some of them follow the familiar lines of defence, that these objects were memorials of the mysteries of the faith; and that in the adoration of them the spiritual was reached through the medium of the material. But beyond this he made it plain that, to his mind, and the minds of those who thought with him, the worship of images was closely connected with the doctrine of the Incarnation,the earthly material having been once for all sanctified when the Son of God took human flesh, and being thenceforth worthy of all honour. From this we may learn both how it came to pass that the most religious men of the age became enthusiasts for what was in itself superstitious, and also what was the cardinal point of difference between them and their opponents. For, while the one side regarded figures of Christ as a degradation of a heavenly being, to the other they were a practical confession of His true humanity, and any disregard of them appeared in the light of a denial of the Incarnation. At last, when it was found that the Emperor persevered in his attack, the iconoclasts were anathematised by the orthodox congregations in all the Mahometan countries outside the Empire. Both John and Gregory protested throughout against the interference of the State with the Church in this matter as being beyond its province; and, owing to the close connection which existed between the clergy and the people, they were generally regarded as the assertors of liberty and of the right of private judgment in opposition to despotism."
The indirect effects of Leo's action were even more important than the obvious ones. The division which ensued between Italy, resisting iconoclasm under the Pope's authority, and the imperial power made the Emperor decide to transfer to the patriarch of Constantinople the jurisdiction over Sicily and Calabria, leaving to the Pope that over the exarchate of Ravenna which still nominally obeyed the Cæsar. The meaning of this is thus expressed by Professor Bury.
"The effect of this act of Leo, which went far to decide the mediæval history of Southern Italy, was to bring the boundary between the ecclesiasticaldominions of New Rome and Old Rome into coincidence with the boundary between the Greek and the Latin nationalities. In other words, it laid the basis of the distinction between the Greek and the Latin Churches. The only part of the Empire in which the Pope now possessed authority was the exarchate, including Rome, Ravenna and Venice. The geographical position of Naples, intermediate between Rome and the extremities of Italy, determined that its sympathies should be drawn in two directions; in religious matters it inclined towards Old Rome, in political matters it was tenacious of its loyalty to New Rome."[13]
But this was not all. An immense immigration of persecuted monks and priests as well as lay folk practically recolonised much of Southern Italy.
Constantine Copronymus was far more eager than his father to push the iconoclastic campaign. In 761 he began a deliberate and bitter persecution of those who opposed him. Already, under Leo the Isaurian, the virgin Theodosia had been martyred. Her festival is still kept on May 29, and the church raised to her memory still stands transformed into a mosque just within the Aya Kapou, on the Golden Horn. Many whom the Greek Church still commemorates were now slain and others tortured. Constantine was equally hostile to monks, and he was as bitter against his creatures whom he suspected as against those who openly disputed his will. The patriarch whom he had set up fell into disgrace in spite of his support of iconoclasm. He was degraded in S. Sophia, carried round the Hippodrome sitting backwards on an ass, and at last beheaded as a traitor.
The successor of Constantine, Leo IV., was significant only in that he followed his policy of persecution.He left the crown in 780 to his son Constantine and his widow Irene. Conspiracies, real or alleged, of his brothers were bitterly punished. The Empress Irene was satisfied so long as her son was still a boy to allow him a nominal share in the government; but when he grew up and showed an independent spirit, she used the growing unpopularity which came upon him after his repudiation of his wife to raise a party against him, and hired troops to take his life. He escaped death only to lose his eyes, and his wicked mother, surrounded by degraded favourites, reigned alone. It was she whom the great Teutonic King Charles was ready to wed, and the failure of the negotiations led, with other more notable causes, to the creation of the new empire of the West, so long held by German Cæsars, but professing still to be—as that of Constantinople historically was—the heir of the ancient empire of the Roman world.
Wicked as Irene was, it was given to her to restore peace to the Church, and to reunite though only for a time the Catholic Church throughout the world. So completely was the popular feeling against the iconoclasts that it needed little of the intrigue or violence which Irene was so ready to use to secure the result she desired. In 786, when her worst passions had not been revealed and she still lived in union with her son, the seventh General Council met at Nicaea. It was attended by representatives from Italy as well as from the East, and as its decisions represent the use and teaching of the Eastern Church to-day, they may here be summarised in Professor Bury's words.
"At the seventh sitting (5th or 6th October), the definition (ὅρος) of doctrine was drawn up; after a summary repetition of the chief points of theology established by previous Universal Councils, it is laid down that the figure of the holy cross and holy images,whether coloured or plain, whether consisting of stone or of any other material, may be represented on vessels, garment, walls or tables, in houses or on public roads; especially figures of Christ, the Virgin, angels, or holy men: such representations, it is observed, stimulate spectators to think of the originals, and, while they must not be adored with that worship which is only for God (λατρεία) deserve adoration (προσκύνησις)."[14]
But Irene's services to the Church were not allowed then, any more than we should allow them now, to preserve her in power. The stars in their courses seemed to the superstitious to fight against her, and, though she held the crown she had so ill-won for five years, the end came at last by the treachery of those she had raised to highest place. "For five years," says Gibbon, "the Roman world bowed to the government of a female; and, as she moved through the streets of Constantinople, the reins of four milk-white steeds were held by as many patricians, who marched on foot before the golden chariot of their queen." But among the patricians whom she had chosen was the treasurer Nicephorus, who on October 31, 802, having captured his benefactress, and with some spark of generosity, undestroyed by his ambition and his avarice, sent her to banishment rather than to death, ascended the throne of the Cæsars.
With him began a new dynasty, a new century, and in some ways a new era for the imperial city.
During the eighth century Constantinople, as a city, underwent a great change. This was not merely due to the incessant ebb and flow of population, the coming and going of different detachments of the imperial army, the founding of new monasteries by men from all parts of the Christian world, the opening of new commercial establishments, the coming of new trading embassies,but to one great and irremediable disaster. From 745 to 747 the city was devastated by the plague, that bubonic distemper, so familiar already but now more terribly destructive than ever before. The words of Theophanes, who lived when the remembrance of it was still fresh, though they have been often quoted, may be quoted again. They stand side by side with the modern records of the still powerful pestilence.
"And in the spring of the first indiction (747) the pestilence spread to a greater extent, and in summer its flame culminated to such a height that whole houses were entirely shut up, and those on whom the office devolved could not bury their dead. In the embarrassment of the circumstances, the plan was conceived of carrying out the dead on saddled animals, on whose backs were placed frameworks of planks. In the same way they placed the corpses above one another in waggons. And when all the burying-grounds in the city and suburbs had been filled, and also the dry cisterns and tanks, and very many vineyards had been dug up, the gardens too within the old walls were used for the purpose of burying human bodies, and even thus the need was hardly met."
THE AQUEDUCT OF VALENS
THE AQUEDUCT OF VALENS
The effect of the great loss of life which ensued was felt at once. At the very time when multitudes were seeking refuge in Italy from the iconoclastic persecution, came this new depopulation, and Constantine found himself obliged to encourage, and even enforce, immigration from every part of his dominions. Chiefly he brought Greeks from the mainland, and their places were filled by Slaves from the North. Greece and the Balkan States as they appear to-day, and even to some degree Constantinople itself took a new and marked departure in the middle of the eighth century. Constantinople received a new Greek population and, while its official classes still preserved the pomp anddignity of Roman traditions, began to feel itself more than ever Greek. None the less it was still actively and obviously cosmopolitan. Scholars from all parts of the world came to the university where ancient classics were still read and where Greek was still a living tongue. Constantine actually made Nicetas, a man of Slavonic race, patriarch, and it is said that his clergy mocked at his pronunciation of the Greek of the Gospel. Armenians had already become almost as prominent in the city as they are to-day; at the beginning of the ninth century one of them actually became Emperor. As early as the reign of Justin II. a large colony of traders from Central Asia was established in the city. When communication became easier and the power of the Roman State, reviving under Heraclius, more wide spread, the riches of the city increased. It is noted that the influence of the Church was steadily directed against luxury, and that nothing at all like the scenes described by Juvenal or Petronius marked the Byzantium of the days of the iconoclasts. Constantine himself was a man who lived freely, and the monks whom he attacked commented severely on his life. But the rich men of Constantinople, as a rule, though they delighted in the outward adorning of gold and precious stones, and loved entertainments, the circus and excursions on the Bosphorus, lived on the whole simply. Though the churches, as well as the houses, glittered with mosaics and gems, the asceticism which the many monasteries kept always visibly before the eyes of the people, had its influence among the rich as well as the poor. Rich though the imperial city was it was rich most of all in its churches and its relics. And indeed the constant danger from without, and the pressing needs of a large population, both gave employment to great numbers and gave to the government always some practical work which kept up the taxes.The laws, it has been observed, recognised the duty of the State to provide work for the people, and to see that they did it. Idleness was regarded as a crime as well as a sin: the State declared that for this reason it must actively discourage it, and no less because "it is unfair that strong men should live by the consumption of the superfluity of the labour of others, because that superfluity is owed to the weak." It is noted also that "besides the inevitable staff of public workmen, who, in a city like Byzantium, where fires were frequent and earthquakes not uncommon, had much to do beyond the repairs necessitated by the wear and tear of time, the State also supported multitudes of bakers"—for the State still followed the Roman rule and provided the poor with bread as well as public games—"and we are taught that the gardens, to which we sometimes meet casual references in the historians, were not the property of private citizens, but were parks for the people, kept up at the State's expense." Already we see that some of the features most prominent in the city to-day belonged to it in the early Middle Age. The great Dome of S. Sophia glittered upon the wayfarer as he sailed up towards the mouth of the Golden Horn, and the city as the soldier looked at it from the tower of Heraclius was a city set in bowersof perpetual green. Another feature as prominent, which the foreigner sees from the heights of Pera, owes its preservation to Constantine Copronymus. The aqueduct of Valens had been destroyed by the Avars in the reign of Heraclius, Constantine brought thousands of workmen together and repaired it, and the water flowed as of old into the capacious cisterns which were the work of the greatest of eastern architects.
The ninth century began with the new and short-lived dynasty of Nicephorus. "His character," says Gibbon, "was stained with the three odious vices of hypocrisy, ingratitude and avarice; his want of virtue was not redeemed by any superior talents nor his want of talents by any pleasing qualifications." The historians, being ecclesiastics, resented his attempt to assert the most extreme claims of the iconoclastic emperors to rule the Church, and the people despised him for his treachery and his failures in war. He fell in 811 in battle against the Bulgarians. In six months his son, Stauricius, followed him to the tomb. Michael Rhangabe, who had married Procopia, the daughter of Nicephorus, then reigned for two years, but his weakness caused his deposition, and the people of Constantinople found a new sovereign, Leo the Armenian, forced upon them by the army. During his reign the imperial city was again besieged. Hadrianople was lost, and but for the death of the Bulgarian king it seems unlikely that Leo would have been able to drive back the forces which overran the peninsula. Yet Leo, conqueror though he was, was able to hold the crown but little longer than his predecessors. In 820 a conspiracy of his generals, which his own generosity had made possible, attacked him as he sang matins on Christmas Day, and slew him at the foot of the altar in the chapel. He did not reign without leaving a memorial of his rule which lasts to this day. The wall ofHeraclius was not thought fully to defend the quarter of Blachernae. Leo determined to build another wall and dig a broad moat in front of the Heraclian wall. "The wall of Leo," says Professor Van Millingen, "stands 77 feet to the west of the wall of Heraclius, running parallel to it for some 260 feet, after which it turns to join the walls along the Golden Horn." It is a strong fortification, and the number of attacks afterwards delivered on that quarter show how necessary it was that it should be strong. "Its parapet-walk was supported upon arches, which served at the same time to buttress the wall itself, a comparatively slight structure about 8 feet thick. With a view of increasing the wall's capacity for defence, it was flanked by four small towers, while its lower portion was pierced by numerous loopholes. Two of the towers were on the side facing the Golden Horn, and the other two guarded the extremities of the side looking towards the country on the west. The latter towers projected inwards from the rear of the wall, and between them was a gateway corresponding to the Heraclian gate of Blachernae."[15]
Michael II., called the Stammerer, who was then brought from the dungeon to the throne, and on whose legs,—such was the haste of the revolution,—the fetters actually remained for some hours after he was Emperor, was twice besieged in Constantinople by a rival general, but was relieved by the Bulgarians, and showed to the captured leader, Thomas the Slavonian, none of the mercy that had been shown to himself. He died in 829, and his son Theophilus reigned in his stead. Of his character and reign the most contradictory reports are given; but it is interesting to recall the scene of his choice of a wife, as Theophanes tells it. He determined to choose a bride from among the beauties ofConstantinople, and when they were assembled he walked between two lines of lovely damsels. When he came to the poetess Kasia, he addressed her in verse:
διὰ γυναικὸς εἰσερρύη τὰ φαῦλα.
διὰ γυναικὸς εἰσερρύη τὰ φαῦλα.
διὰ γυναικὸς εἰσερρύη τὰ φαῦλα.
She replied, more happily,
ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ γυναικὸς τὰ κρείττονα πηγάζει.
ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ γυναικὸς τὰ κρείττονα πηγάζει.
ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ γυναικὸς τὰ κρείττονα πηγάζει.
It was in the style of the old Greek poets: the leaders of each semichorus championing the cause of their sex in the immortal question: "Through woman evil things entered"; "but also through woman better things well forth." The lady was too witty to be empress, and Theodora, who was chosen instead, became not only a happy wife but a wise regent after the death of Theophilus. He died in 842, and Theodora was regent for her son Michael till 856. Her husband had been Iconoclast, and he scourged those who would not receive his edict. His widow declared that he had repented on his death-bed, and procured his absolution after death. Before the year of his death was out Theodora had replaced the images and a synod had reiterated the right and benefit of image-"worship." But the independence of the Eastern Church was none the less fully secured; and the indignant protests of Popes showed that they were becoming, as their own pretensions grew, more and more estranged from Constantinople.
The wisdom of the mother was not rewarded in the life of her son. Michael III. was perhaps the most contemptible sovereign who ever sat on the imperial throne of the East. He gave himself up to pleasure and in particular to the Circus. He was a drunkard and buffoon, and he delighted to mock in public processions the most sacred ordinances of theChristian religion. In 867 he was murdered by one whom he had raised almost to the purple. The years of his reign were diversified by sieges—notably the first attack of some hitherto unknown barbarians from the North-East.
Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries Constantinople was attacked four times by the Russians. The traders told of the riches of the city, and the barbarians were eager to carry them away. In June 860 they actually anchored in the Bosphorus and attacked the walls, but the return of Michael III. drove them off, and they were afterwards completely defeated. A second attempt is said to have taken place in 907, when the rough barks of the pirates were drawn over the isthmus; a third in 941 was as completely defeated; and again in 1048 the Greek fire proved effective.
But these later sieges were still in the far future when Michael, with the aid, men said, of the Blessed Virgin of the Blachernae, scattered the invaders, and passed again into the seclusion of his corrupt court, from whose recesses no news but that of murders and debaucheries seems ever to have penetrated without. "The state of society at the Court of Constantinople," says Finlay, "was not amenable to public opinion, for few knew much of what passed within the walls of the great palace; but yet the immense machinery of the imperial administration gave the Emperor's power a solid basis, always opposed to the temporary vices of the courtiers. The order which rendered property secure, and enabled the industrious classes to prosper, through the equitable administration of the Roman law, nourished the vitality of the Empire, when the madness of a Nero and the drunkenness of a Michael appeared to threaten political order with ruin. The people, carefully secluded from public business, and almostwithout any knowledge of the proceedings of their government, were in all probability little better acquainted with the intrigues and crimes of their day than we are at present. They acted, therefore, only when some real suffering or imaginary grievance brought oppression directly home to their interests or their feelings. Court murders were to them no more than a tragedy or a scene in the amphitheatre, at which they were not present."[16]
Thus, when Cæsar followed Cæsar, with no change for the city over which they were supposed to rule, the intrigues and scandals which disgraced the reign of Michael III. raised scarce a stir among the people; and when he died by the hands of one who had taken—it was said—a base part in some of the most degraded of his acts, men hardly wondered and certainly did not condemn.
Basil the Macedonian, had had a romantic life. As a boy he had wandered penniless to Constantinople, and slept on the steps of the church of S. Diomed. The kindness shown to the wayfarer by the abbat of the monastery attached to the church was rewarded, when Basil became Emperor, by the erection of a new church and monastery, some pillars of which still lie neglected upon the beach of the Sea of Marmora, not far from Yedi Koulé station. His immense strength, personal beauty, and acute intelligence, soon made their way, and he completed his ascent to power it is said by marrying a mistress of Michael III.
As sovereign and the founder of a dynasty, Basil the Macedonian was amongst the greatest of the Emperors. He was a successful warrior, an able administrator of finance, a great builder of churches, and a repairer of the walls. But his greatest glory is that of restorer of the ancient Roman law. He returned, as has been shownby Professor Bury,[17]to the principles of Justinian, in the Basilica, which were the most important reconstruction of Roman law in the Middle Ages, and the last it received.
We must hurry over these years, in which Constantinople itself underwent but few changes. Leo VI., the "philosopher," who has been more happily called a pedant, left no trace on the history of the city, save his name as a repairer on one of the towers of the sea-walls by Koum Kapou. His son, Constantine VII., called Porphyrogenitus, because he was "born in the purple," (i.e.not when his father was Emperor, but because of the porphyry lined chamber reserved for his mother at his birth), was at first under the charge of his uncle Alexander and then of his mother Zoe, and lastly of a successful general Romanus, who surrounded himself with a galaxy of imperial sons, allowing Constantine VII. also still to retain the title of Emperor.
"The studious temper and retirement of Constantine," says Gibbon, "disarmed the jealousy of power; his books and music, his pen and his pencil, were a constant source of amusement; and, if he could improve a scanty allowance by the sale of his pictures, if their price was not enhanced by the name of the artist, he was endowed with a personal talent which few princes could employ in the hour of adversity." Constantine was much more than a student. A plot against Romanus and the other Cæsars enabled him to resume power, which he held with credit for seventeen years. As a writer he is one of the most important of all the Byzantine historians.
The chief feature indeed of this age is its literary interest. Two Emperors ruled whose pride it was to be men of letters. Leo the wise, and Constantine born in the purple, were both men who wrote of war andgovernment as they knew them, and left to their successors remarkable pictures of their times. Leo describes the military forces which had still a magnificent organisation and a record of victory and valour but little tarnished. The nobles of Constantinople could fight as well as intrigue. Rich, brave and popular, the ancient families which lingered so long after the Mohammedan conquest in the ancient houses of the Phanar could always be relied upon to furnish gallant officers for the troops. Constantine wrote of the Themes, of the Imperial administration, and of the court ceremonial—the last an extraordinary work describing the dignity and state of the emperors, and regulating the minutest detail of the pomp with which their daily life was surrounded.
The Court of the Eastern Empire indeed was by far the most brilliant of the Middle Ages, and the Empire itself, weak and corrupt though it may seem, was much the strongest government of the time, and the one under which life and property were most secure. The commerce of Constantinople was still greater probably than that of any other city of the world. East and West poured their treasures into the city.
The reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was diversified, like those of so many of his predecessors, as has already been said, by revolutions, which placed many Cæsars on at least the steps of the throne. Romanus and his sons Constantine (called the Eighth) and Stephen, came to an end in 945, and from that time till his death in 958 Constantine VII. reigned alone. His son, Romanus II., succeeded him, and to him came a time of war, in which his arms were victorious over the Mohammedans through the genius of his general, Nicephorus Phocas. In 963 Romanus died, and Nicephorus, marrying his widow Theophano, became joint Emperor with the young Basil.
Nicephorus was above all things a warrior. He recovered for the Empire the lands of Cilicia, North Syria, and Cyprus. His triumph in 966, celebrated in the Hippodrome and in the great street of the city, was the prelude to many another great military display; yet not being sole Emperor, he never entered in triumph through the Golden gate, though it was at that gate that he was received in 963 when he began his joint reign.[18]But his life as Emperor was an unhappy one. So unpopular was he in the city, owing to his opposition to the lavish generosity of his predecessors and to his debasement of the coinage, that he was often stoned in the streets and had to fortify the great Palace; and his portrait has been limned for posterity by his enemies. Chief among the pictures of mediæval Constantinople is that drawn by Liudprand, bishop of Cremona, who came on behalf of the Emperor Otto I. to treat of a marriage between Theophano, the daughter of the Emperor Romanus, and the future Otto II.
Liudprand had visited Constantinople in 948. Then he spoke of the great palace to which he was admitted to audience with Constantine Porphyrogenitus, of its golden tree in which golden birds of divers kinds sang sweetly, of the golden lions that guarded the throne, shaking the earth with the beat of their tails, and roaring at the approach of the envoys—marvellous features of the Eastern Court which the Emperor had not forgotten to record in his account of the ceremonial. Then he saw, too, the Emperor recline at dinner after the ancient fashion, he saw the games of the Hippodrome, and he marvelled at the size of the fruit and at the extraordinary acrobatic strength of the boys of the circus. Then he was treated with great distinction. Now, in 968, his reception was very different. In hisletter to the two Ottos he declared that he even lodged in a roofless house, exposed to heat and cold, and constantly under guard, and that he suffered agonies from the resinous Greek wine. First he saw Basil, the Emperor's brother, and then he was admitted to the presence of Nicephorus himself, whom he describes as more a monster than a man, black as an Ethiop, and small as a pigmy. A pretty argument took place between envoy and Emperor; the Greek refusing the imperial title to the German Cæsars of the West, while the Western bishop would not allow any rights of the East to the Italian lands of old Rome. Their converse was interrupted by the hour of prayer, and Liudprand joined the procession to S. Sophia. Tradesmen and low-born folk, says the contemptuous bishop, lined the streets, many of them barefoot, because of the holiness of the procession. Nicephorus alone wore gold and jewels.
When they entered the great church the choir sang "Lo there cometh the morning star. The dawn riseth. He reflects the rays of the sun. Nicephorus our ruler, the pale death of the Saracens."[19]The famous phrase, "pallida mors Saracenorum," which Liudprand uses, was to be terribly avenged; but then it was a triumphant expression of the safety which the city owed to the wise Emperor. As he went, says Liudprand, "his lords the Emperors" (Basil and Constantine, the sons of Romanus) bowed before him. After the Eucharist the bishop dined with the Emperor, and was again, he says, subject to his taunts. "You are not Romans but Lombards," was the Eastern mockery of the German imperialism; andthe reply was that to the Westerns there was no name more contemptible than that of Roman. Such abrupt witticisms naturally consigned Liudprand again to his "hated dwelling, or more truly, prison." He wrote to Basil the curopalates (a post of honour second only to that of Cæsar) and John Tzimisces the Logothete, beseeching that if his mission was not favourably received, he might return at once; and then in an interview with Nicephorus, in the presence of Basil the chamberlain (parakinomenos) he pressed the proposal of Otto for a marriage. The Emperor replied that it was unheard of that a princess born in the purple, the child of an Emperor born in the purple, should be given in marriage to a "gentile" or "barbarian." So day by day the meetings were renewed and the proud Italian thought that he was treated each time with new indignity, being even set below a Bulgarian envoy—to whose master the Greeks would even allow the title of "Vasileus" (βασιλεύς) which they would not give to Otto, and towards whose people alone it seemed that the Eastern Empire at this time had any kindly feeling. Theology as well as politics were often in question, and the Italian bishop was mocked at for the modernism of his doctrines, as the Greeks mock the Latins to-day. He was kept, he says, in company with five lions; and the women, as he passed through the streets, called out in pity at his woe-worn appearance. Sometimes he visited the Emperor in the camp at Balukli (εἰς πήγας, he says, in one of his snatches of Greek) and quoted Plato to him; sometimes he had to listen to homilies of S. John Chrysostom read aloud; more often he had to hear what seemed to him the grossest insults of the Germans and the Latins, insults which he gladly returned in his report to the Ottos upon "the wild ass Nicephorus," and which he even ventured, he says, to write on thewall of his prison in verses none too easily to be understood. At length he was allowed to leave the city, "once most opulent and flourishing, now half-starved, perjured, lying, cunning, greedy, rapacious, avaricious, boastful." His report, as we have it, breaks off in a torrent of denunciations of the Greeks and their ways. His mission was a failure, but Theophano, refused by Nicephorus, was afterwards given by John Tzimisces, to be bride to Otto II.
This curious survival of tenth century opinion illustrates the almost total severance which had now come about between the East and the West, and shows how natural was the destruction which was soon to come upon the city of the Cæsars. The West had ceased to feel for the Eastern survival of empire anything of brotherhood or Christian fellowship. First it would seek to conquer the bulwark of Christendom for itself; then it would let it fall before the conquering infidels.
Nicephorus did not long retain the throne he had so well defended. John Tzimisces (or Tchemchkik), an Armenian, who won the favour of the Empress Theophano, joined in a plot to overthrow his benefactor, and Nicephorus was murdered in the palace. John Tzimisces reigned in his stead. He made treaty with the patriarch Polyeuctus, by which he gave up the claim that Nicephorus had asserted, that all episcopal nominations should only be valid by the Emperor's consent. He gave high promotion to the dignified and imposing Basil, the chamberlain whom Psellus the historian describes as so impressive a person. He banished the wicked Empress Theophano to the Princes' islands. Then he reigned as joint Emperor with the young Emperors Basil and Constantine, whose rights he was scrupulous to preserve.
John Tzimisces was famous as a gallant defender of the empire. The people of Constantinople knew himchiefly for the imposing ceremonies of his accession, of his second marriage with Theodora, daughter of Constantine VII., and of his departure for war against the barbarian invaders, when the clergy led him in pomp to his embarkation on the Golden Horn, and blessed his ships, and the citizens watched a naval sham fight from the walls. Domestic rebellions—those of Bardas, Sclerus, and of the family of Phocas—as well as the dangerous Russian invasions—distracted his reign: but Tzimisces was a successful general, and by his conquest over the Russians under Swiatoslaf he preserved the Empire, and began that association of teaching and Christian influence which is returned to-day by the orthodox Russians to the Church of Constantinople, which is their mother, and which now, in her time-honoured conservatism, weak though she is, she is inclined rather to resent than to welcome. From his conquest John Tzimisces returned in triumph to Constantinople through the Golden gate, followed by his soldiers and his captives, greeted by the Church and by the officers of his court, and watched by the vast population of the imperial city. It was one of the greatest of the triumphs, as it was one of the last. The ancient usages were retained in all their pomp. The senate met the Emperor at the gate with the conqueror's chaplet and with the golden chariot drawn by four white horses, in which they besought him to drive through the streets. Dramatically he showed his sympathy with the religious feeling of his people; the chariot should carry the Ikon of the Blessed Virgin which he had taken in Bulgaria and to which he attributed his victories: he would ride behind, clothed as an emperor and a general, and would offer in S. Sophia the crown of the conquered Bulgarian kings. Then in the palace the young Bulgarian chieftain Boris, who had followed histriumph on foot, was despoiled of the insignia of sovereignty, yet ranked among the officers of the imperial court.
It was not the last of the victories of John Tzimisces. He returned more than once a conqueror from Armenia and Mesopotamia. He died in 976, in the midst of his victories; and since the young Emperors whom he had guarded were now grown to man's estate, men spoke of his death as mysterious and as probably due to poison.
In Basil II. the Empire again had a warrior Emperor, but one who added to the delights of war the devotion of an almost monastic religion. While his brother, Constantine IX., confined himself to the court and its pleasures, Basil in many hard-won fights achieved the title of Bulgaroktonos, the slayer of the Bulgarians. For thirty-four years he fought the great King Samuel, who had built up a power in the Balkans, till at last he utterly broke up the Slavs, captured all their fortresses, and extended the frontier of the Empire to Belgrade, and so down the Danube to the Black Sea. It was, as Gibbon says, "since the time of Belisarius, the most important triumph of the Roman arms." Victories also he won in the East, but they served only to break down the kingdom of Armenia, and thus to destroy what might have been a bulwark against the infidel. Basil, who reigned from 963 to 1025, when he died at the age of sixty-eight, and who for more than fifty years was practically the sole ruler of the Empire, was a stern, vigorous man, sharp in speech, often cruel in victory, serious and restrained in life, but fond of mirth in his moments of ease. He was a complete contrast to his idle brother, who lived it seemed only for the Hippodrome and the society of the ladies of his court. Basil was never married. Constantine, who survived him three years,left three daughters.[20]During his long reign Basil had swept away all rivals from his path: the great chamberlain Basil had early been banished, and there was no dynasty to compete with the Macedonians in the last days of their power.
Basil taught the people that the Emperor could rule without the intervention of courtiers, and thus when he died the imperial city looked for a man to be at its head. If they had feared rather than loved the great conqueror of the Bulgarians, they respected him because he had kept up the power of the Church and had patronised the learning which still had its home in the East. He left to his successors the alliance of the patriarchal See and a school of literature founded on classic models, which, with all its affectations, gave to the eleventh century an important group of historical writers. In no age, too, was Byzantine art, the art of working in ivory, of miniature, of mosaic, more vigorous. With the death of Basil, however long it might be disguised, the decay began.
When Constantine died his three daughters survived him, Eudocia who preferred a convent to a throne, and Zoe and Theodora, ladies of more ambitious temper. Zoe before her father died was wedded—she was forty-eight—to Romanus Argyrus, an elderly noble already married, whose wife was banished to a convent. Romanus III. was for six years (1028-1034) the nominal ruler of the Empire. He thought himself a philosopher and a warrior; but, says Psellus, "he thought he knew far more than he did." Some of his acts were useful—as his repair of the walls after the earthquakes of 1032 and 1033, commemorated by an inscription onthe fourth tower from the Sea of Marmora, shows. But the historian mocks at his long drawn-out building of the monastery of S. Mary Peribleptos and says that a "whole mountain was excavated" to supply the stones. It was his most enduring memorial, and, several times rebuilt, it still survives in the possession of the Armenians as the monastery of S. George, not far from the Psamatia station.
But the Emperor's dreams of war, philosophy and building, were rudely disturbed by the intrigue of his wife with a young Paphlagonian soldier, Michael. He professed to disbelieve it, though it was notorious to the court. His complaisance perhaps allowed him to die in peace, though some said he was killed by a slow poison. On the very day of his death Zoe elevated Michael to the throne, and before the burial of Romanus the senate kissed the right hand of his successor.
Michael appears before us in the pages of the rhetorical Psellus as almost a hero and a saint. He reclaimed sinners after the manner of Justinian, he reformed the administration, he daily worshipped God in the services of the Church, and nightly walked the streets to watch and to prevent crime. One of the strangest pictures of mediæval Constantinople is that which Psellus gives us of the unwearied Emperor, disguised in monkish dress, passing swiftly "like lightning" through the streets at night, watching that his people might be preserved from crime. Yet with all his virtues he was a drunkard, and the epileptic fits to which he became more and more subject were probably due to his vices. So terribly did his affliction increase upon him that when he gave audience it was necessary to surround him with curtains which could in a moment be drawn to hide his paroxysms, and when he rode his guards formed a circle about him. His greedy relations surrounded him and urged him to provide for them, andwhen he had signalised his reign by a heroic defence of the Empire against a rising of the Bulgarians he returned in triumph only to retire to a monastery and to die.
Zoe emerged from the seclusion in which she had passed the last years of her young husband's life, and was induced by her family to make his nephew, Michael Kalaphates Emperor. Raised to the throne by his family he set himself at once to reduce it to the lowest depths. "The names of kinship, the common tie of kindred blood, appeared to him mere childishness, and it would have been nothing to him if one wave had engulfed all his kin." The same measure he meted to the nobles and the officials; but he courted popularity with the traders and the populace more than any of his predecessors had done, and when he showed himself in the streets silk carpets were strewn before him and he was greeted as the noblest of the Cæsars. Yet he relied too much upon the fickle mob. When the senate consented to his banishment of Zoe, shorn as a nun, to Prince's Island, he proclaimed his act in the forum of Constantine for the acceptance of the people.
But Constantinople again showed that, favoured as it had been like a petted child, it could show its power. The people assembled in knots at street corners and protested against the banishment of the heiress of the Macedonian warrior. The conclaves became a riot and the riot a revolution. Women ran through the streets tearing their hair and beating their breasts. Officers of State joined the mob, and they rushed to destroy the houses of the Emperor's family. Zoe was hastily recalled from Prinkipo, and shown in purple robes to the people in the Hippodrome. But it was too late. The mob broke open the monastery of the Petrion (by the Phanar) where her sister Theodora had long lived in retirement, and forced herto go with them to S. Sophia and there the patriarch Alexius and the vast crowd hailed her as Empress. The Emperor and his uncle took refuge in the church of the Studium. They were dragged from the altar and their eyes were put out; and Zoe and Theodora, who hated each other, became joint Empresses.
Their rule was extravagant and reckless; and while the State was advancing rapidly towards bankruptcy, the aged Zoe took a third husband, after two attempts at choice, wedding Constantine Monomachus, who reigned from 1042 to 1054 as Constantine X. The old Empress and her young husband gave themselves entirely to pleasure, to luxury and buffoonery. The Emperor, generous in giving and knowing how to confer benefits after the manner of an Emperor, beautified the city by the building of the magnificent monastery of S. George at the Mangana (near Deirmen Kapou on the Mamora), and amused the citizens by showing them an elephant and a camelopard. The court which Constantine and Zoe gathered round them was a strange assembly; its chief personage was the Emperor's mistress Skleraina, whom the Empress treated as a friend. The people resented the conjunction and cried "we will not have Skleraina to reign over us, nor on her account shall our purple-born mothers, Zoe and Theodora, die." The aged Zoe herself appeased them. It was an extraordinary state of society, reminding us of the eighteenth century in France: the intrigues that Psellus tells are indeed hardly credible. But the social corruption coexisted with a real revival of learning. Constantinople became the centre of a new study of literature, which had decayed since the iconoclastic emperors set themselves to destroy culture and Leo III. abolished the University. Constantine refounded the University, endowing two chairs—philosophy and law—which were held byPsellus and his friend, John Xiphilinos. A revival of the study of the classics followed this institution: Psellus considered himself a Platonist, and he thought himself worthy to represent as well as to revive the best traditions of Greek literature. In the hands of Anna Comnena and her contemporaries, the purism which the writers affected became little more than an Attic euphuism.
While the Emperor and his friends were thus busy with trifles, and the government was in the hands sometimes of wise ministers such as Leichudes, sometimes of mere thieves, the throne was constantly threatened by revolts (of which the most famous was that of George Maniakes) and by direct attacks on the city, such as that of the Russians, and in 1047 of Leo Tornikos. This latter was nearly successful. Many of the citizens were ready to join him, and but for the military skill shown by Constantine (if we rightly read the rhetorical description of Psellus) Leo would probably have entered and found himself welcomed as Emperor.
In 1054 Constantine X. died, and the aged Theodora, the last survivor of the Macedonian house, came forth again from her convent and reigned with the aid of ministers who were at least capable and honest. On her death, after two years as sole ruler, the throne passed, by her wish, to an able but aged soldier, Michael Stratioticus.
Psellus shows that the accession of this sovereign marked a crisis in the history of the Empire. Constantine X. had reformed the Senate, opening it to all men of merit apart from their birth. Michael VI. thought he could rely entirely on the civil functionaries, but the army was still strong enough to dictate to the Emperor, and his unwise acts led to an alliance between the generals and the energetic patriarch Michael Cerularius.Michael attempted to negotiate with Isaac Comnenus, whom the army had chosen as their leader, and who was encamped at Nicæa (Isnik); but before the envoys, among whom was Psellus, had completed their mission, a rising in the city, led by some discontented senators, had dethroned and slain Michael, and the whole city was waiting to welcome Isaac as Emperor.
Constantinople in this revolution decisively chose her own Emperor. The Senate and the chiefs of certain "clubs" (the successors of the factions of the Circus so prominent four centuries before) guided, as seems probable, by the patriarch, carried the city with them. Isaac they summoned from Skutari: Michael departed to a monastery with the patriarch's kiss of peace.
The scene when Isaac was about to cross the Bosphorus to receive his crown was a dramatic one. He called Psellus, the envoy of his deposed rival, to him, and said, when the philosopher spoke of the enthusiasm of the people, "I liked thy tongue better when it reviled me than now when it speaks smooth words." But he began his reign by an amnesty, for he made Psellus president of the Senate, and Michael the patriarch—however much he may have distrusted him—he treated with the fullest confidence and honour.
While these political and dynastic changes had supplied the Empire with a new ruler almost every year, the growing alienation between East and West had been marked decisively by the separation of the Churches. Two great names embody in the East the final protest against Roman assumption. The Church of Constantinople had never abandoned its claim to equality with that of Rome, though it allowed to the ancient city the primacy of honour. Photius, who became patriarch in 858, and died in891, owed his throne to an election which was not canonical, and though a council in 861 at Constantinople, at which papal legates were present, confirmed him in his office, Pope Nicholas I. declared that its decisions were illegal, and that Photius was deposed and excommunicated, while the Emperor himself was attacked in language of peculiar vehemence. The papal claim to decide between two claimants to the patriarchate was fiercely resented. Photius declared the equality of his see with that of Rome. To the Roman claim of jurisdiction, complicated also by assertions of supremacy over the Bulgarian Church, were added points of theological contention which the churches debated with as much eagerness, and it would seem, as little desire, to arrive at a reasonable solution. The addition of the wordsFilioqueto the Nicene Creed, asserting the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, was, and is, resented by the Greeks as an addition to "the faith once for all delivered to the Saints." The use of unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist was regarded in the East as an heretical innovation. There were, and are, other points of dispute; but none, it is probable, but for the strong national feeling of Italy and of Greece, would have caused a final breach.
The position which Photius defended with skill and vigour in the ninth century was reasserted by Michael Cerularius in the eleventh. He regarded the teaching of the West on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, says Psellus, as an intolerable heresy; and he was prompt to reassert jurisdiction over the churches of Apulia, now conquered by the Normans and made subject to Rome. The final breach came from Rome itself. On July 16, 1054, two legates of the Pope laid on the altar of S. Sophia the act of excommunication which severed the patriarch from the communion of the West, and condemnedwhat were asserted to be seven deadly heresies of the Eastern Church.
But to return to the imperial revolution.
Isaac Comnenus, who was called to the throne in 1057, had been brought up in the palace, but he was none the less a warrior and a man of determination, who had served the Empire well. He reigned only for two years, and then retired to end his days in religion, in the famous and beautiful monastery of the Studium, which looks from a slight elevation over the Sea of Marmora, some half mile away, and whose half ruined walls are to-day among the most striking of the memorials of the past that Constantinople can show.
With the beginning of the dynasty of the Comneni the causes which brought about the fall of the Empire can clearly be traced. The imperial power, concentrated more and more in the imperial household, and finally in the Emperor himself, had come to be devoted chiefly, in the hands of feeble or self-indulgent emperors, to the maintenance of imperial dignity and pride in the city itself. The magnificent administration which had presented a coherent and effective government while the rest of Europe was in "the dark ages," was beginning to sink into a mere machine for the support of a luxurious Court. The Empire was neglected. The aristocracy of Byzantium was treated with severity or contempt. The officials of the State were the mere nominees of the Emperor. For their interest and for the pursuit of popularity among the people it was that government seemed to exist. Every year, as the defences of the Empire grew weaker, the shows of the Hippodrome, the festivals of the Church, the entertainments of the palace, grew more splendid. When the other States of Europe were yet in their cradle, when England as a Power had hardly begun toexist, the long history of the Empire was verging irresistibly towards decay.
"The domestics of the Basilian dynasty carried on the work of political change," says Finlay,[21]"by filling the public offices with their own creatures, and thereby destroying the power of that body of State officials, whose admirable organisation had repeatedly saved the Empire from falling into anarchy under tyrants or from being ruined by peculation under aristocratic influence. In this manner the scientific fabric of the imperial power, founded by Augustus, was at last ruined in the East as it had been destroyed in the West. The Emperors broke the government to pieces before strangers destroyed the Empire.
"The revolution which undermined the systematic administration was already consummated before the rebellion of the aristocracy placed the imperial crown on the head of Isaac Comnenus. No organised body of trained officials any longer existed to resist the egoistical pretensions of the new intruders into ministerial authority. The Emperor could now make his household steward prime minister, and the governor of a province could appoint his butler prefect of the police. The Church and the law alone preserved some degree of systematic organisation and independent character. It was not in the power of an emperor to make a man a lawyer or a priest with the same ease with which he could appoint him a chamberlain or a minister of State."
The decay of which the general causes are thus sketched can clearly be traced in the series of historians who give us the records of the years from the accession of John Comnenus to the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, from the year 1057, that is, to the year 1204. Psellus, monk, secretary ofState, philosopher, statesman, gives, as we have already seen, a close account of the intrigues of the court. Michael Altaleiates records the years 1034-1079. Nicephorus Bryennius and his wife, Anna Comnena, wrote from within the story of the politics of Alexius Comnenus, the former to some extent, the latter very greatly, influenced by the classic revival, and endeavouring to form their work on classic models. John Cinnamus, Nicetas Acominatos, John Scylitzes, John Zonaras, are all chroniclers who have special sources of information; and the result is that for the century of decay which culminated in the collapse of the Empire before the Latins, we have information almost complete.
The Emperor Isaac was assisted at the first by the able patriarch Michael Cerularius, who put into exercise all the claims of his predecessors to power and independence, to equality with Rome, and to superiority over the churches related to the patriarchate. Strife soon broke out between Emperor and patriarch. Michael appeared in the red boots which marked the imperial dignity, declaring that he was the equal of the Emperor; and of the Emperor himself he said, in what seems to have been a popular proverb, "Oven, I built you, and I can knock you down." He was seized and banished to Proconnesus.
After the retirement of Isaac, Constantine Ducas, like the Comneni a Cappadocian, and a friend of their own, reigned for eight years, 1059-1067, and left the reputation of a man anxious only to save money, and thus unable to protect the frontiers of the Empire. Under him we learn the importance of the Emperor's personal guard of Varangians—a body of barbarian warriors founded early in the eleventh century, and consisting at first of Russians, whom the wars of Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimiscesand Basil Bulgaroktonos had taught the Empire to respect; and of Scandinavians, and later of Danes, and after the Norman Conquest of fugitive Englishmen, who, rather than serve the foreign conquerors of their own land, gladly came to win fame and wealth as the guardians of the Cæsar's throne. Constantine XI. paid the Varangians while he neglected the rest of his army. The Empire paid the penalty in the ravaging of Armenia by the Seljuk Turks, and of Bulgaria by the Tartars. When he died in 1067, already the name of Alp-Arslan, the Sultan of the Seljuks, struck terror into the Asiatic provinces of the Empire, and the sceptre of the Cæsars fell to Michael VII., a child who could not protect what his father had not cared to defend. The mother of the young Emperor, Eudocia, married a gallant general, Romanus Diogenes, who, with the title of joint Emperor, won but little power in the palace, but was readily allowed to lead the armies in the field. Of his campaigns it is only needful to say that, while for a time he held back the Seljuks, in 1071, at Manzikert, on the Armenian frontier, his troops were scattered by the overwhelming hordes of the barbarians, and when night fell Alp-Arslan placed his foot upon the neck of the prostrate Cæsar, his captive.
In Constantinople a new revolution followed the news of the Emperor's defeat. John Ducas, brother of Constantine XI., for a time held the post of Regent for his nephew. When Romanus was released from captivity he was seized and his eyes were put out, a crime which resulted in his death. The scenes of blood and treachery which marked these years, when the Court still kept up its splendours in the presence of pestilence, famine, and decay, are almost incredible; but the vengeance that was surely coming shows theweakness that resulted from the reign of corruption and crime. Michael VII. was called Parapinakes, "the peck-stealer," a name "given him because in a year of famine he sold the measure of wheat to his subjects a fourth short of its proper contents." He was overthrown by an adventurer named Nicephorus Botoniates, whose reign of three years was a period of vice and waste which brought the Empire rapidly nearer to its fall. Michael VII. retired, like Romanus, to the Monastery of the Studium, where as titular bishop of Ephesus, he passed the last years of his life in peace. Three years exhausted the patience of the nobles with the aged and debauched Nicephorus. Maria, once wife of Michael VII. and now wife of his successor, formed a plot against him, and from a number of conspirators, Alexius Comnenus, son of the Emperor Isaac, was chosen to lead the troops who determined to give a new Cæsar to the exhausted Empire. In 1081 the friends of the conspirators escaped through the gate of Blachernae with horses they had stolen from the Imperial stables. They returned with an army: the German guards who held the gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapou) were bribed, and the adherents of Comnenus poured into the heart of the city. A battle at first seemed certain, for the Varangians stood boldly across the forum of Constantine to defend the approaches to the great palace. But when George Palaeologus, a gallant officer connected by marriage with the Comneni, secured the fleet, the heart of the aged Nicephorus failed him, and he fled to S. Sophia, whence he was removed like so many of his predecessors to a monastery.
Alexius Comnenus was not strong enough to restrain the motley rabble who had entered in his train. The city was given over to pillage. The very palaces and monasteries were spoiled by the barbarians from theBalkans. It was from this date that the ruin of the city began. If the churches still maintained their relics and their jewels, the commercial prosperity, which all through these years of imperial corruption and weakness it had struggled to maintain, now began to slip from its grasp. It was clear that property was no more safe than life; and as the Italian cities began to secure the commerce of the Levant, the merchants of Constantinople fell behind in the race for wealth, and saw the trade that had been theirs taken by the Venetians, the Pisans and the Genoese, who now settled at their very gates.
Alexius Comnenus was at first not sole Emperor. Constantine Ducas, the son of Michael VII., was also called Emperor, but he soon died. Alexius then reigned alone, but not without many plots against him. Within, the city managed to suppress the conspirators; without, he suffered defeat from the Normans at Durazzo, and preserved with difficulty the Thessalian province. He won fame among his people as a persecutor of Paulicians and Bogomils; and Basil, a monk, was entrapped by Alexius into a confession of his heretical opinions and then burnt as a heretic in the Hippodrome, to the delight of the people of Constantinople. He kept off the Turks, though they were now (1092) settled so near as to have Smyrna for their capital. But his chief danger came from the Crusades.
In spite of the breach between the Churches it was impossible for the Eastern Emperor openly to do otherwise than welcome the hosts who in response to the preaching of Peter the Hermit and the call of Urban II. marched through Hungary and Bulgaria and arrived outside the land walls in a ragged and disordered condition. Hugh of Vermandois had landed near Durazzo, but had been treated almost as a foreigner, and having been made to do homage to Alexius, awaited inthe imperial city the arrival of the rest of the hosts. His treatment was resented by Godfrey of Bouillon; but the skill and tact of Alexius triumphed. In the palace of the Blachernae, while the hosts were encamped outside the walls, the Emperor received the leaders, among them Godfrey, Bohemond, and Peter the Hermit himself, and by cajoling some, bribing others, threatening those who seemed weakest, he procured that they all should do him homage and promise to convey to him all of his Empire that they should recover from the Turks.
To the people of Constantinople the warriors of the West seemed like ignorant and half-brutal children, ever gabbling, boasting, and changeable. The warlike garb of the Latin priests and bishops disgusted the Greeks and widened the breach between the Churches. The climax seemed to come on the day when the chiefs did homage to the Emperor. Thus the story is told by Anna Comnena, who was herself then fourteen years old, and may not improbably have witnessed the scene.
"As soon as they approached the great city, they occupied the place appointed for them by the Emperor, near to the monastery of the Cosmidion.[22]But this multitude was not, like the Hellenic one of old, to be restrained and governed by the loud voices of nine heralds. They required the constant superintendence of chosen and valiant soldiers to keep them from violating the commands of the Emperor. He, meantime, laboured to obtain from the other leaders that acknowledgment of his supreme authority which had already been drawn from Godfrey himself. But notwithstanding the willingness of some to accede to this proposal, and their assistancein working on the minds of their associates, the Emperor's endeavours had little success, as the majority were looking for the arrival of Bohemond, in whom they placed their chief confidence, and resorted to every art with the view of gaining time. The Emperor, whom it was not easy to deceive, penetrated their motives; and by granting to one powerful person demands which had been supposed out of all bounds of expectation, and by resorting to a variety of other devices, he at length prevailed, and won general assent to the following of the example of Godfrey, who also was sent for in person to assist in this business.