The Byzantine Empire
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Title: The Byzantine Empire
Author: Charles Oman
Release date: October 14, 2011 [eBook #37756]
Most recently updated: June 17, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE ***
The Byzantine Empire
By
Charles William Chadwick Oman, M.A., F.S.A.
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Author of
“Warwick the Kingmaker,” “The Art of War in the Middle Ages,” Etc.
Third Edition
T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd.
Adelphi Terrace, London
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons
1902
CONTENTS
Preface.
I. Byzantium.
II. The Foundation Of Constantinople. (A.D. 328-330.)
III. The Fight With The Goths.
IV. The Departure Of The Germans.
V. The Reorganization Of The Eastern Empire. (A.D. 408-518.)
VI. Justinian.
VII. Justinian’s Foreign Conquests.
VIII. The End Of Justinian’s Reign.
IX. The Coming Of The Slavs.
X. The Darkest Hour.
XI. Social And Religious Life. (A.D. 320-620.)
XII. The Coming Of The Saracens.
XIII. The First Anarchy.
XIV. The Saracens Turned Back.
XV. The Iconoclasts. (A.D. 720-802.)
XVI. The End Of The Iconoclasts. (A.D. 802-886.)
XVII. The Literary Emperors And Their Time. (A.D. 886-963.)
XVIII. Military Glory.
XIX. The End Of The Macedonian Dynasty.
XX. Manzikert. (1057-1081.)
XXI. The Comneni And The Crusades.
XXII. The Latin Conquest Of Constantinople.
XXIII. The Latin Empire And The Empire Of Nicaea. (1204-1261.)
XXIV. Decline And Decay. (1261-1328.)
XXV. The Turks In Europe.
XXVI. The End Of A Long Tale. (1370-1453.)
Table Of Emperors.
Index.
Footnotes
[Illustration]
Interior of St. Sophia
PREFACE.
Fifty years ago the word “Byzantine” was used as a synonym for all that
was corrupt and decadent, and the tale of the East-Roman Empire was
dismissed by modern historians as depressing and monotonous. The great
Gibbon had branded the successors of Justinian and Heraclius as a series
of vicious weaklings, and for several generations no one dared to
contradict him.
Two books have served to undeceive the English reader, the monumental work
of Finlay, published in 1856, and the more modern volumes of Mr. Bury,
which appeared in 1889. Since they have written, the Byzantines no longer
need an apologist, and the great work of the East-Roman Empire in holding
back the Saracen, and in keeping alive throughout the Dark Ages the lamp
of learning, is beginning to be realized.
The writer of this book has endeavoured to tell the story of Byzantium in
the spirit of Finlay and Bury, not in that of Gibbon. He wishes to
acknowledge his debts both to the veteran of the war of Greek
Independence, and to the young Dublin professor. Without their aid his
task would have been very heavy—with it the difficulty was removed.
The author does not claim to have grappled with all the chroniclers of the
Eastern realm, but thinks that some acquaintance with Ammianus, Procopius,
Maurice’s “Strategikon,” Leo the Deacon, Leo the Wise, Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, Anna Comnena and Nicetas, may justify his having
undertaken the task he has essayed.
OXFORD,
_February_, 1892.
[Illustration]
I. BYZANTIUM.
Two thousand five hundred and fifty-eight years ago a little fleet of
galleys toiled painfully against the current up the long strait of the
Hellespont, rowed across the broad Propontis, and came to anchor in the
smooth waters of the first inlet which cuts into the European shore of the
Bosphorus. There a long crescent-shaped creek, which after-ages were to
know as the Golden Horn, strikes inland for seven miles, forming a quiet
backwater from the rapid stream which runs outside. On the headland,
enclosed between this inlet and the open sea, a few hundred colonists
disembarked, and hastily secured themselves from the wild tribes of the
inland, by running some rough sort of a stockade across the ground from
beach to beach. Thus was founded the city of Byzantium.
The settlers were Greeks of the Dorian race, natives of the thriving
seaport-state of Megara, one of the most enterprising of all the cities of
Hellas in the time of colonial and commercial expansion which was then at
its height. Wherever a Greek prow had cut its way into unknown waters,
there Megarian seamen were soon found following in its wake. One band of
these venturesome traders pushed far to the West to plant colonies in
Sicily, but the larger share of the attention of Megara was turned towards
the sunrising, towards the mist-enshrouded entrance of the Black Sea and
the fabulous lands that lay beyond. There, as legends told, was to be
found the realm of the Golden Fleece, the Eldorado of the ancient world,
where kings of untold wealth reigned over the tribes of Colchis: there
dwelt, by the banks of the river Thermodon, the Amazons, the warlike women
who had once vexed far-off Greece by their inroads: there, too, was to be
found, if one could but struggle far enough up its northern shore, the
land of the Hyperboreans, the blessed folk who dwell behind the North Wind
and know nothing of storm and winter. To seek these fabled wonders the
Greeks sailed ever North and East till they had come to the extreme limits
of the sea. The riches of the Golden Fleece they did not find, nor the
country of the Hyperboreans, nor the tribes of the Amazons; but they did
discover many lands well worth the knowing, and grew rich on the profits
which they drew from the metals of Colchis and the forests of Paphlagonia,
from the rich corn lands by the banks of the Dnieper and Bug, and the
fisheries of the Bosphorus and the Maeotic Lake. Presently the whole
coastland of the sea, which the Greeks, on their first coming, called
Axeinos—“the Inhospitable”—became fringed with trading settlements, and
its name was changed to Euxeinos—“the Hospitable”—in recognition of its
friendly ports. It was in a similar spirit that, two thousand years later,
the seamen who led the next great impulse of exploration that rose in
Europe, turned the name of the “Cape of Storms” into that of the “Cape of
Good Hope.”
The Megarians, almost more than any other Greeks, devoted their attention
to the Euxine, and the foundation of Byzantium was but one of their many
achievements. Already, seventeen years before Byzantium came into being,
another band of Megarian colonists had established themselves at
Chalcedon, on the opposite Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. The settlers
who were destined to found the greater city applied to the oracle of
Delphi to give them advice as to the site of their new home, and Apollo,
we are told, bade them “build their town over against the city of the
blind.” They therefore pitched upon the headland by the Golden Horn,
reasoning that the Chalcedonians were truly blind to have neglected the
more eligible site on the Thracian shore, in order to found a colony on
the far less inviting Bithynian side of the strait.
[Illustration]
Early Coin Of Byzantium.
[Illustration]
Late Coin Of Byzantium Showing Crescent And Star.
From the first its situation marked out Byzantium as destined for a great
future. Alike from the military and from the commercial point of view no
city could have been better placed. Looking out from the easternmost
headland of Thrace, with all Europe behind it and all Asia before, it was
equally well suited to be the frontier fortress to defend the border of
the one, or the basis of operations for an invasion from the other. As
fortresses went in those early days it was almost impregnable—two sides
protected by the water, the third by a strong wall not commanded by any
neighbouring heights. In all its early history Byzantium never fell by
storm: famine or treachery accounted for the few occasions on which it
fell into the hands of an enemy. In its commercial aspect the place was
even more favourably situated. It completely commanded the whole Black Sea
trade: every vessel that went forth from Greece or Ionia to traffic with
Scythia or Colchis, the lands by the Danube mouth or the shores of the
Maeotic Lake, had to pass close under its walls, so that the prosperity of
a hundred Hellenic towns on the Euxine was always at the mercy of the
masters of Byzantium. The Greek loved short stages and frequent stoppages,
and as a half-way house alone Byzantium would have been prosperous: but it
had also a flourishing local trade of its own with the tribes of the
neighbouring Thracian inland, and drew much profit from its fisheries: so
much so that the city badge—its coat of arms as we should call
it—comprised a tunny-fish as well as the famous ox whose form alluded to
the legend of the naming of the Bosphorus.(1)
As an independent state Byzantium had a long and eventful history. For
thirty years it was in the hands of the kings of Persia, but with that
short exception it maintained its freedom during the first three hundred
years that followed its foundation. Many stirring scenes took place
beneath its walls: it was close to them that the great Darius threw across
the Bosphorus his bridge of boats, which served as a model for the more
famous structure on which his son Xerxes crossed the Hellespont. Fifteen
years later, when Byzantium in common with all its neighbours made an
ineffectual attempt to throw off the Persian yoke, in the rising called
the “Ionic Revolt,” it was held for a time by the arch-rebel Histiaeus,
who—as much to enrich himself as to pay his seamen—invented strait dues.
He forced every ship passing up or down the Bosphorus to pay a heavy toll,
and won no small unpopularity thereby for the cause of freedom which he
professed to champion. Ere long Byzantium fell back again into the hands
of Persia, but she was finally freed from the Oriental yoke seventeen
years later, when the victorious Greeks, fresh from the triumph of Salamis
and Mycale, sailed up to her walls and after a long leaguer starved out
the obstinate garrison [B.C. 479]. The fleet wintered there, and it was at
Byzantium that the first foundations of the naval empire of Athens were
laid, when all the Greek states of Asia placed their ships at the disposal
of the Athenian admirals Cimon and Aristeides.
During the fifth century Byzantium twice declared war on Athens, now the
mistress of the seas, and on each occasion fell into the hands of the
enemy—once by voluntary surrender in 439 B.C., once by treachery from
within, in 408 B.C. But the Athenians, except in one or two disgraceful
cases, did not deal hardly with their conquered enemies, and the
Byzantines escaped anything harder than the payment of a heavy war
indemnity. In a few years their commercial gains repaired all the losses
of war, and the state was itself again.
We know comparatively little about the internal history of these early
centuries of the life of Byzantium. Some odd fragments of information
survive here and there: we know, for example, that they used iron instead
of copper for small money, a peculiarity shared by no other ancient state
save Sparta. Their alphabet rejoiced in an abnormally shaped Β, which
puzzled all other Greeks, for it resembled a Π with an extra limb.(2) The
chief gods of the city were those that we might have expected—Poseidon the
ruler of the sea, whose blessing gave Byzantium its chief wealth; and
Demeter, the goddess who presided over the Thracian and Scythian corn
lands which formed its second source of prosperity.
The Byzantines were, if ancient chroniclers tell us the truth, a luxurious
as well as a busy race: they spent too much time in their numerous inns,
where the excellent wines of Maronea and other neighbouring places offered
great temptations. They were gluttons too as well as tipplers: on one
occasion, we are assured, the whole civic militia struck work in the
height of a siege, till their commander consented to allow restaurants to
be erected at convenient distances round the ramparts. One comic writer
informs us that the Byzantines were eating young tunny-fish—their
favourite dish—so constantly, that their whole bodies had become well-nigh
gelatinous, and it was thought they might melt if exposed to too great
heat! Probably these tales are the scandals of neighbours who envied
Byzantine prosperity, for it is at any rate certain that the city showed
all through its history great energy and love of independence, and never
shrank from war as we should have expected a nation of epicures to do.
It was not till the rise of Philip of Macedon and his greater son
Alexander that Byzantium fell for the fifth time into the hands of an
enemy. The elder king was repulsed from the city’s walls after a long
siege, culminating in an attempt at an escalade by night, which was
frustrated owing to the sudden appearance of a light in heaven, which
revealed the advancing enemy and was taken by the Byzantines as a token of
special divine aid [B.C. 339]. In commemoration of it they assumed as one
of their civic badges the blazing crescent and star, which has descended
to our own days and is still used as an emblem by the present owners of
the city—the Ottoman Sultans. But after repulsing Philip the Byzantines
had to submit some years later to Alexander. They formed under him part of
the enormous Macedonian empire, and passed on his decease through the
hands of his successors—Demetrius Poliorcetes, and Lysimachus. After the
death of the latter in battle, however, they recovered a precarious
freedom, and were again an independent community for a hundred years, till
the power of Rome invaded the regions of Thrace and the Hellespont.
Byzantium was one of the cities which took the wise course of making an
early alliance with the Romans, and obtained good and easy terms in
consequence. During the wars of Rome with Macedon and Antiochus the Great
it proved such a faithful assistant that the Senate gave it the status of
a _civitas libera et foederata_, “a free and confederate city,” and it was
not taken under direct Roman government, but allowed complete liberty in
everything save the control of its foreign relations and the payment of a
tribute to Rome. It was not till the Roman Republic had long passed away,
that the Emperor Vespasian stripped it of these privileges, and threw it
into the province of Thrace, to exist for the future as an ordinary
provincial town [A.D. 73].
Though deprived of a liberty which had for long years been almost nominal,
Byzantium could not be deprived of its unrivalled position for commerce.
It continued to flourish under the _Pax Romana_, the long-continued peace
which all the inner countries of the empire enjoyed during the first two
centuries of the imperial _régime_, and is mentioned again and again as
one of the most important cities of the middle regions of the Roman world.
But an evil time for Byzantium, as for all the other parts of the
civilized world, began when the golden age of the Antonines ceased, and
the epoch of the military emperors followed. In 192 A.D., Commodus, the
unworthy son of the great and good Marcus Aurelius, was murdered, and ere
long three military usurpers were wrangling for his blood-stained diadem.
Most unhappily for itself Byzantium lay on the line of division between
the eastern provinces, where Pescennius Niger had been proclaimed, and the
Illyrian provinces, where Severus had assumed the imperial style. The city
was seized by the army of Syria, and strengthened in haste. Presently
Severus appeared from the west, after he had made himself master of Rome
and Italy, and fell upon the forces of his rival Pescennius. Victory
followed the arms of the Illyrian legions, the east was subdued, and the
Syrian emperor put to death. But when all his other adherents had yielded,
the garrison of Byzantium refused to submit. For more than two years they
maintained the impregnable city against the lieutenants of Severus, and it
was not till A.D. 196 that they were forced to yield. The emperor appeared
in person to punish the long-protracted resistance of the town; not only
the garrison, but the civil magistrates of Byzantium were slain before his
eyes. The massive walls “so firmly built with great square stones clamped
together with bolts of iron, that the whole seemed but one block,” were
laboriously cast down. The property of the citizens was confiscated, and
the town itself deprived of all municipal privileges and handed over to be
governed like a dependent village by its neighbours of Perinthus.
Caracalla, the son of Severus, gave back to the Byzantines the right to
govern themselves, but the town had received a hard blow, and would have
required a long spell of peace to recover its prosperity. Peace however it
was not destined to see. All through the middle years of the third century
it was vexed by the incursions of the Goths, who harried mercilessly the
countries on the Black Sea whose commerce sustained its trade. Under
Gallienus in A.D. 263 it was again seized by an usurping emperor, and
shared the fate of his adherents. The soldiers of Gallienus sacked
Byzantium from cellar to garret, and made such a slaughter of its
inhabitants that it is said that the old Megarian race who had so long
possessed it were absolutely exterminated. But the irresistible attraction
of the site was too great to allow its ruins to remain desolate. Within
ten years after its sack by the army of Gallienus, we find Byzantium again
a populous town, and its inhabitants are specially praised by the
historian Trebellius Pollio for the courage with which they repelled a
Gothic raid in the reign of Claudius II.
The strong Illyrian emperors, who staved off from the Roman Empire the
ruin which appeared about to overwhelm it in the third quarter of the
third century, gave Byzantium time and peace to recover its ancient
prosperity. It profited especially from the constant neighbourhood of the
imperial court, after Diocletian fixed his residence at Nicomedia, only
sixty miles away, on the Bithynian side of the Propontis. But the military
importance of Byzantium was always interfering with its commercial
greatness. After the abdication of Diocletian the empire was for twenty
years vexed by constant partitions of territory between the colleagues
whom he left behind him. Byzantium after a while found itself the border
fortress of Licinius, the emperor who ruled in the Balkan Peninsula, while
Maximinus Daza was governing the Asiatic provinces. While Licinius was
absent in Italy, Maximinus treacherously attacked his rival’s dominions
without declaration of war, and took Byzantium by surprise. But the
Illyrian emperor returned in haste, defeated his grasping neighbour not
far from the walls of the city, and recovered his great frontier fortress
after it had been only a few months out of his hands [A.D. 314]. The town
must have suffered severely by changing masters twice in the same year; it
does not, however, seem to have been sacked or burnt, as was so often the
case with a captured city in those dismal days. But Licinius when he had
recovered the place set to work to render it impregnable. Though it was
not his capital he made it the chief fortress of his realm, which, since
the defeat of Maximinus, embraced the whole eastern half of the Roman
world.
It was accordingly at Byzantium that Licinius made his last desperate
stand, when in A.D. 323 he found himself engaged in an unsuccessful war
with his brother-in-law Constantine, the Emperor of the West. For many
months the war stood still beneath the walls of the city; but Constantine
persevered in the siege, raising great mounds which overlooked the walls,
and sweeping away the defenders by a constant stream of missiles, launched
from dozens of military engines which he had erected on these artificial
heights. At last the city surrendered, and the cause of Licinius was lost.
Constantine, the last of his rivals subdued, became the sole emperor of
the Roman world, and stood a victor on the ramparts which were ever
afterwards to bear his name.
II. THE FOUNDATION OF CONSTANTINOPLE. (A.D. 328-330.)
When the fall of Byzantium had wrecked the fortunes of Licinius, the Roman
world was again united beneath the sceptre of a single master. For
thirty-seven years, ever since Diocletian parcelled out the provinces with
his colleagues, unity had been unknown, and emperors, whose number had
sometimes risen to six and sometimes sunk to two, had administered their
realms on different principles and with varying success.
Constantine, whose victory over his rivals had been secured by his talents
as an administrator and a diplomatist no less than by his military skill,
was one of those men whose hard practical ability has stamped upon the
history of the world a much deeper impress than has been left by many
conquerors and legislators of infinitely greater genius. He was a man of
that self-contained, self-reliant, unsympathetic type of mind which we
recognize in his great predecessor Augustus, or in Frederic the Great of
Prussia.
[Illustration]
Constantine the Great
Though the strain of old Roman blood in his veins must have been but
small, Constantine was in many ways a typical Roman; the hard, cold,
steady, unwearying energy, which in earlier centuries had won the empire
of the world, was once more incarnate in him. But if Roman in character,
he was anything but Roman in his sympathies. Born by the Danube, reared in
the courts and camps of Asia and Gaul, he was absolutely free from any of
that superstitious reverence for the ancient glories of the city on the
Tiber which had inspired so many of his predecessors. Italy was to him but
a secondary province amongst his wide realms. When he distributed his
dominions among his heirs, it was Gaul that he gave as the noblest share
to his eldest and best-loved son: Italy was to him a younger child’s
portion. There had been emperors before him who had neglected Rome: the
barbarian Maximinus I. had dwelt by the Rhine and the Danube; the politic
Diocletian had chosen Nicomedia as his favourite residence. But no one had
yet dreamed of raising up a rival to the mistress of the world, and of
turning Rome into a provincial town. If preceding emperors had dwelt far
afield, it was to meet the exigencies of war on the frontiers or the
government of distant provinces. It was reserved for Constantine to erect
over against Rome a rival metropolis for the civilized world, an imperial
city which was to be neither a mere camp nor a mere court, but the
administrative and commercial centre of the Roman world.
For more than a hundred years Rome had been a most inconvenient residence
for the emperors. The main problem which had been before them was the
repelling of incessant barbarian inroads on the Balkan Peninsula; the
troubles on the Rhine and the Euphrates, though real enough, had been but
minor evils. Rome, placed half way down the long projection of Italy,
handicapped by its bad harbours and separated from the rest of the empire
by the passes of the Alps, was too far away from the points where the
emperor was most wanted—the banks of the Danube and the walls of Sirmium
and Singidunum. For the ever-recurring wars with Persia it was even more
inconvenient; but these were less pressing dangers; no Persian army had
yet penetrated beyond Antioch—only 200 miles from the frontier—while in
the Balkan Peninsula the Goths had broken so far into the heart of the
empire as to sack Athens and Thessalonica.
Constantine, with all the Roman world at his feet, and all its
responsibilities weighing on his mind, was far too able a man to overlook
the great need of the day—a more conveniently placed administrative and
military centre for his empire. He required a place that should be easily
accessible by land and sea—which Rome had never been in spite of its
wonderful roads—that should overlook the Danube lands, without being too
far away from the East; that should be so strongly situated that it might
prove an impregnable arsenal and citadel against barbarian attacks from
the north; that should at the same time be far enough away from the
turmoil of the actual frontier to afford a safe and splendid residence for
the imperial court. The names of several towns are given by historians as
having suggested themselves to Constantine. First was his own
birth-place—Naissus (Nisch) on the Morava, in the heart of the Balkan
Peninsula; but Naissus had little to recommend it: it was too close to the
frontier and too far from the sea. Sardica—the modern Sofia in
Bulgaria—was liable to the same objections, and had not the sole advantage
of Naissus, that of being connected in sentiment with the emperor’s early
days. Nicomedia on its long gulf at the east end of the Propontis was a
more eligible situation in every way, and had already served as an
imperial residence. But all that could be urged in favour of Nicomedia
applied with double force to Byzantium, and, in addition, Constantine had
no wish to choose a city in which his own memory would be eclipsed by that
of his predecessor Diocletian, and whose name was associated by the
Christians, the class of his subjects whom he had most favoured of late,
with the persecutions of Diocletian and Galerius. For Ilium, the last
place on which Constantine had cast his mind, nothing could be alleged
except its ancient legendary glories, and the fact that the mythologists
of Rome had always fabled that their city drew its origin from the exiled
Trojans of Æneas. Though close to the sea it had no good harbour, and it
was just too far from the mouth of the Hellespont to command effectually
the exit of the Euxine.
Byzantium, on the other hand, was thoroughly well known to Constantine.
For months his camp had been pitched beneath its walls; he must have known
accurately every inch of its environs, and none of its military advantages
can have missed his eye. Nothing, then, could have been more natural than
his selection of the old Megarian city for his new capital. Yet the Roman
world was startled at the first news of his choice; Byzantium had been so
long known merely as a great port of call for the Euxine trade, and as a
first-class provincial fortress, that it was hard to conceive of it as a
destined seat of empire.
When once Constantine had determined to make Byzantium his capital, in
preference to any other place in the Balkan lands, his measures were taken
with his usual energy and thoroughness. The limits of the new city were at
once marked out by solemn processions in the old Roman style. In later
ages a picturesque legend was told to account for the magnificent scale on
which it was planned. The emperor, we read, marched out on foot, followed
by all his court, and traced with his spear the line where the new
fortifications were to be drawn. As he paced on further and further
westward along the shore of the Golden Horn, till he was more than two
miles away from his starting-point, the gate of old Byzantium, his
attendants grew more and more surprised at the vastness of his scheme. At
last they ventured to observe that he had already exceeded the most ample
limits that an imperial city could require. But Constantine turned to
rebuke them: “I shall go on,” he said, “until He, the invisible guide who
marches before me, thinks fit to stop.” Guided by his mysterious
presentiment of greatness, the emperor advanced till he was three miles
from the eastern angle of Byzantium, and only turned his steps when he had
included in his boundary line all the seven hills which are embraced in
the peninsula between the Propontis and the Golden Horn.
The rising ground just outside the walls of the old city, where
Constantine’s tent had been pitched during the siege of A.D. 323, was
selected out as the market-place of the new foundation. There he erected
the _Milion_, or “golden milestone,” from which all the distances of the
eastern world were in future to be measured. This “central point of the
world” was not a mere single stone, but a small building like a temple,
its roof supported by seven pillars; within was placed the statue of the
emperor, together with that of his venerated mother, the Christian Empress
Helena.
The south-eastern part of the old town of Byzantium was chosen by
Constantine for the site of his imperial palace. The spot was cleared of
all private dwellings for a space of 150 acres, to give space not only for
a magnificent residence for his whole court, but for spacious gardens and
pleasure-grounds. A wall, commencing at the Lighthouse, where the
Bosphorus joins the Propontis, turned inland and swept along parallel to
the shore for about a mile, in order to shut off the imperial precinct
from the city.
[Illustration]
The Heart of Constantinople
North-west of the palace lay the central open space in which the life of
Constantinople was to find its centre. This was the “Augustaeum,” a
splendid oblong forum, about a thousand feet long by three hundred broad.
It was paved with marble and surrounded on all sides by stately public
buildings. To its east, as we have already said, lay the imperial palace,
but between the palace and the open space were three detached edifices
connected by a colonnade. Of these, the most easterly was the Great Baths,
known, from their builder, as the “Baths of Zeuxippus.” They were built on
the same magnificent scale which the earlier emperors had used in Old
Rome, though they could not, perhaps, vie in size with the enormous Baths
of Caracalla. Constantine utilized and enlarged the old public bath of
Byzantium, which had been rebuilt after the taking of the city by Severus.
He adorned the frontage and courts of the edifice with statues taken from
every prominent town of Greece and Asia, the old Hellenic masterpieces
which had escaped the rapacious hands of twelve generations of plundering
proconsuls and Cæsars. There were to be seen the Athene of Lyndus, the
Amphithrite of Rhodes, the Pan which had been consecrated by the Greeks
after the defeat of Xerxes, and the Zeus of Dodona.
Adjoining the Baths, to the north, lay the second great building, on the
east side of the Augustaeum—the Senate House. Constantine had determined
to endow his new city with a senate modelled on that of Old Rome, and had
indeed persuaded many old senatorial families to migrate eastward by
judicious gifts of pensions and houses. We know that the assembly was
worthily housed, but no details survive about Constantine’s building, on
account of its having been twice destroyed within the century. But, like
the Baths of Zeuxippus, it was adorned with ancient statuary, among which
the Nine Muses of Helicon are specially cited by the historian who
describes the burning of the place in A.D. 404.
Linked to the Senate House by a colonnade, lay on the north the Palace of
the Patriarch, as the Bishop of Byzantium was ere long to be called, when
raised to the same status as his brethren of Antioch and Alexandria. A
fine building in itself, with a spacious hall of audience and a garden,
the patriarchal dwelling was yet completely overshadowed by the imperial
palace which rose behind it. And so it was with the patriarch himself: he
lived too near his royal master to be able to gain any independent
authority. Physically and morally alike he was too much overlooked by his
august neighbour, and never found the least opportunity of setting up an
independent spiritual authority over against the civil government, or of
founding an _imperium in imperio_ like the Bishop of Rome.
[Illustration]
The Atmeidan Hippodrome And St. Sophia.
All along the western side of the Augustaeum, facing the three buildings
which we have already described, lay an edifice which played a very
prominent part in the public life of Constantinople. This was the great
Hippodrome, a splendid circus 640 cubits long and 160 broad, in which were
renewed the games that Old Rome had known so well. The whole system the
chariot-races between the teams that represented the “factions” of the
Circus was reproduced at Byzantium with an energy that even surpassed the
devotion of the Romans to horse racing. From the first foundation of the
city the rivalry of the “Blues” and the “Greens” was one of the most
striking features of the life of the place. It was carried far beyond the
circus, and spread into all branches of life. We often hear of the “Green”
faction identifying itself with Arianism, or of the “Blue” supporting a
pretender to the throne. Not merely men of sporting interests, but persons
of all ranks and professions, chose their colour and backed their faction.
The system was a positive danger to the public peace, and constantly led
to riots, culminating in the great sedition of A.D. 523, which we shall
presently have to describe at length. In the Hippodrome the “Greens”
always entered by the north-eastern gate, and sat on the east side; the
“Blues” approached by the north-western gate and stretched along the
western side. The emperor’s box, called the Kathisma, occupied the whole
of the short northern side, and contained many hundreds of seats for the
imperial retinue. The great central throne of the Kathisma was the place
in which the monarch showed himself most frequently to his subjects, and
around it many strange scenes were enacted. It was on this throne that the
rebel Hypatius was crowned emperor by the mob, with his own wife’s
necklace for an impromptu diadem. Here also, two centuries later, the
Emperor Justinian II. sat in state after his reconquest of Constantinople,
with his rivals, Leontius and Apsimarus, bound beneath his footstool,
while the populace chanted, in allusion to the names of the vanquished
princes, the verse, “Thou shalt trample on the Lion and the Asp.”
Down the centre of the Hippodrome ran the “spina,” or division wall, which
every circus showed; it was ornamented with three most curious monuments,
whose strange juxtaposition seemed almost to typify the heterogeneous
materials from which the new city was built up. The first and oldest was
an obelisk brought from Egypt, and covered with the usual hieroglyphic
inscriptions; the second was the most notable, though one of the least
beautiful, of the antiquities of Constantinople: it was the three-headed
brazen serpent which Pausanias and the victorious Greeks had dedicated at
Delphi in 479 B.C., after they had destroyed the Persian army at Platæa.
The golden tripod, which was supported by the heads of the serpents, had
long been wanting: the sacrilegious Phocians had stolen it six centuries
before; but the dedicatory inscriptions engraved on the coils of the
pedestal survived then and survive now to delight the archæologist. The
third monument on the “spina” was a square bronze column of more modern
work, contrasting strangely with the venerable antiquity of its
neighbours. By some freak of chance all three monuments have remained till
our own day: the vast walls of the Hippodrome have crumbled away, but its
central decorations still stand erect in the midst of an open space which
the Turks call the Atmeidan, or place of horses, in dim memory of its
ancient use.
Along the outer eastern wall of the Hippodrome on the western edge of the
Augustaeum, stood a range of small chapels and statues, the most important
landmark among them being the _Milion_ or central milestone of the empire,
which we have already described. The statues, few at first, were increased
by later emperors, till they extended along the whole length of the forum.
Constantine’s own contribution to the collection was a tall porphyry
column surmounted by a bronze image which had once been the tutelary
Apollo of the city of Hierapolis, but was turned into a representation of
the emperor by the easy method of knocking off its head and substituting
the imperial features. It was exactly the reverse of a change which can be
seen at Rome, where the popes have removed the head of the Emperor
Aurelius, and turned him into St. Peter, on the column in the Corso.
[Illustration]
Building A Palace (from a Byzantine MS.)
North of the Hippodrome stood the great church which Constantine erected
for his Christian subjects, and dedicated to the Divine Wisdom (_Hagia
Sophia_). It was not the famous domed edifice which now bears that name,
but an earlier and humbler building, probably of the Basilica-shape then
usual. Burnt down once in the fifth and once in the sixth centuries, it
has left no trace of its original character. From the west door of St.
Sophia a wooden gallery, supported on arches, crossed the square, and
finally ended at the “Royal Gate” of the palace. By this the emperor would
betake himself to divine service without having to cross the street of the
Chalcoprateia (brass market), which lay opposite to St. Sophia. The
general effect of the gallery must have been somewhat like that of the
curious passage perched aloft on arches which connects the Pitti and
Uffizi palaces at Florence.
The edifices which we have described formed the heart of Constantinople.
Between the Palace, the Hippodrome, and the Cathedral most of the
important events in the history of the city took place. But to north and
west the city extended for miles, and everywhere there were buildings of
note, though no other cluster could vie with that round the Augustaeum.
The Church of the Holy Apostles, which Constantine destined as the
burying-place of his family, was the second among the ecclesiastical
edifices of the town. Of the outlying civil buildings, the public
granaries along the quays, the Golden Gate, by which the great road from
the west entered the walls, and the palace of the praetorian praefect, who
acted as governor of the city, must all have been well worthy of notice. A
statue of Constantine on horseback, which stood by the last-named edifice,
was one of the chief shows of Constantinople down to the end of the Middle
Ages, and some curious legends gathered around it.
[Illustration]
Fifteenth-Century Drawing Of The Equestrian Statue Of Constantine.
It was in A.D. 328 or 329—the exact date is not easily to be fixed—that
Constantine had definitely chosen Byzantium for his capital, and drawn out
the plan for its development. As early as May 11, 330, the buildings were
so far advanced that he was able to hold the festival which celebrated its
consecration. Christian bishops blessed the partially completed palace,
and held the first service in St. Sophia; for Constantine, though still
unbaptized himself, had determined that the new city should be Christian
from the first. Of paganism there was no trace in it, save a few of the
old temples of the Byzantines, spared when the older streets were levelled
to clear the ground for the palace and adjoining buildings. The statues of
the gods which adorned the Baths and Senate House stood there as works of
art, not as objects of worship.
To fill the vast limits of his city, Constantine invited many senators of
Old Rome and many rich provincial proprietors of Greece and Asia to take
up their abode in it, granting them places in his new senate and sites for
the dwellings they would require. The countless officers and functionaries
of the imperial court, with their subordinates and slaves, must have
composed a very considerable element in the new population. The artizans
and handicraftsmen were enticed in thousands by the offer of special
privileges. Merchants and seamen had always abounded at Byzantium, and now
flocked in numbers which made the old commercial prosperity of the city
seem insignificant. Most effective—though most demoralizing—of the gifts
which Constantine bestowed on the new capital to attract immigrants was
the old Roman privilege of free distribution of corn to the populace. The
wheat-tribute of Egypt, which had previously formed part of the public
provision of Rome, was transferred to the use of Constantinople, only the
African corn from Carthage being for the future assigned for the
subsistence of the older city.
On the completion of the dedication festival in 330 A.D. an imperial edict
gave the city the title of New Rome, and the record was placed on a marble
tablet near the equestrian statue of the emperor, opposite the Strategion.
But “New Rome” was a phrase destined to subsist in poetry and rhetoric
alone: the world from the first very rightly gave the city the founder’s
name only, and persisted in calling it Constantinople.
III. THE FIGHT WITH THE GOTHS.
Constantine lived seven years after he had completed the dedication of his
new city, and died in peace and prosperity on the 22nd of May, A.D. 337,
received on his death-bed into that Christian Church on whose verge he had
lingered during the last half of his life. By his will he left his realm
to be divided among his sons and nephews; but a rapid succession of
murders and civil wars thinned out the imperial house, and ended in the
concentration of the whole empire from the Forth to the Tigris under the
sceptre of Constantius II., the second son of the great emperor. The Roman
world was not yet quite ripe for a permanent division; it was still
possible to manage it from a single centre, for by some strange chance the
barbarian invasions which had troubled the third century had ceased for a
time, and the Romans were untroubled, save by some minor bickerings on the
Rhine and the Euphrates. Constantius II., an administrator of some
ability, but gloomy, suspicious, and unsympathetic, was able to devote his
leisure to ecclesiastical controversies, and to dishonour himself by
starting the first persecution of Christian by Christian that the world
had seen. The crisis in the history of the empire was not destined to fall
in his day, nor in the short reign of his cousin and successor, Julian,
the amiable and cultured, but entirely wrongheaded, pagan zealot, who
strove to put back the clock of time and restore the worship of the
ancient gods of Greece. Both Constantius and Julian, if asked whence
danger to the empire might be expected, would have pointed eastward, to
the Mesopotamian frontier, where their great enemy, Sapor King of Persia,
strove, with no very great success, to break through the line of Roman
fortresses that protected Syria and Asia Minor.
But it was not in the east that the impending storm was really brewing. It
was from the north that mischief was to come.
[Illustration]
Gothic Idols. (_From the Column of Arcadius._)
For a hundred and fifty years the Romans had been well acquainted with the
tribes of the Goths, the most easterly of the Teutonic nations who lay
along the imperial border. All through the third century they had been
molesting the provinces of the Balkan Peninsula by their incessant raids,
as we have already had occasion to relate. Only after a hard struggle had
they been rolled back across the Danube, and compelled to limit their
settlements to its northern bank, in what had once been the land of the
Dacians. The last struggle with them had been in the time of Constantine,
who, in a war that lasted from A.D. 328 to A.D. 332, had beaten them in
the open field, compelled their king to give his sons as hostages, and
dictated his own terms of peace. Since then the appetite of the Goths for
war and adventure seemed permanently checked: for forty years they had
kept comparatively quiet and seldom indulged in raids across the Danube.
They were rapidly settling down into steady farmers in the fertile lands
on the Theiss and the Pruth; they traded freely with the Roman towns of
Moesia; many of their young warriors enlisted among the Roman auxiliary
troops, and one considerable body of Gothic emigrants had been permitted
to settle as subjects of the empire on the northern slope of the Balkans.
By this time many of the Goths were becoming Christians: priests of their
own blood already ministered to them, and the Bible, translated into their
own language, was already in their hands. One of the earliest Gothic
converts, the good Bishop Ulfilas—the first bishop of German blood that
was ever consecrated—had rendered into their idiom the New Testament and
most of the Old. A great portion of his work still survives, incomparably
the most precious relic of the old Teutonic tongues that we now possess.
The Goths were rapidly losing their ancient ferocity. Compared to the
barbarians who dwelt beyond them, they might almost be called a civilized
race. The Romans were beginning to look upon them as a guard set on the
frontier to ward off the wilder peoples that lay to their north and east.
The nation was now divided into two tribes: the Visigoths, whose tribal
name was the Thervings, lay more to the south, in what are now the
countries of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Southern Hungary; the Ostrogoths, or
tribe of the Gruthungs, lay more to the north and east, in Bessarabia,
Transylvania, and the Dniester valley.
But a totally unexpected series of events were now to show how prescient
Constantine had been, in rearing his great fortress-capital to serve as
the central place of arms of the Balkan Peninsula.
About the year A.D. 372 the Huns, an enormous Tartar horde from beyond the
Don and Volga, burst into the lands north of the Euxine, and began to work
their way westward. The first tribe that lay in their way, the nomadic
race of the Alans, they almost exterminated. Then they fell upon the
Goths. The Ostrogoths made a desperate attempt to defend the line of the
Dniester against the oncoming savages—“men with faces that can hardly be
called faces—rather shapeless black collops of flesh with little points
instead of eyes; little in stature, but lithe and active, skilful in
riding, broad shouldered, good at the bow, stiff-necked and proud, hiding
under a barely human form the ferocity of the wild beast.” But the enemy
whom the Gothic historian describes in these uninviting terms was too
strong for the Teutons of the East. The Ostrogoths were crushed and
compelled to become vassals of the Huns, save a remnant who fought their
way southward to the Wallachian shore, near the marshes of the Delta of
the Danube. Then the Huns fell on the Visigoths. The wave of invasion
pressed on; the Bug and the Pruth proved no barrier to the swarms of nomad
bowmen, and the Visigoths, under their Duke Fritigern, fell back in dismay
with their wives and children, their waggons and flocks and herds, till
they found themselves with their backs to the Danube. Surrender to the
enemy was more dreadful to the Visigoths than to their eastern brethren;
they were more civilized, most of them were Christians, and the prospect
of slavery to savages seems to have appeared intolerable to them.
Pressed against the Danube and the Roman border, the Visigoths sent in
despair to ask permission to cross from the Emperor. A contemporary writer
describes how they stood. “All the multitude that had escaped from the
murderous savagery of the Huns—no less than 200,000 fighting men, besides
women and old men and children—-were there on the river bank, stretching
out their hands with loud lamentations, and earnestly supplicating leave
to cross, bewailing their calamity, and promising that they would ever
faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance if only the boon was granted
them.”
At this moment (A.D. 376) the Roman Empire was again divided. The house of
Constantine was gone, and the East was ruled by Valens, a stupid,
cowardly, and avaricious prince, who had obtained the diadem and half the
Roman world only because he was the brother of Valentinian, the greatest
general of the day. Valentinian had taken the West for his portion, and
dwelt in his camp on the Rhine and Upper Danube, while Valens, slothful
and timid, shut himself up with a court of slaves and flatterers in the
imperial palace at Constantinople.
The proposal of the Goths filled Valens with dismay. It was difficult to
say which was more dangerous—to refuse a passage to 200,000 desperate men
with arms in their hands and a savage foe at their backs, or to admit them
within the line of river and fortress that protected the border, with an
implied obligation to find land for them. After much doubting he chose the
latter alternative: if the Goths would give hostages and surrender their
arms, they should be ferried across the Danube and permitted to settle as
subject-allies within the empire.
The Goths accepted the terms, gave up the sons of their chiefs as
hostages, and streamed across the river as fast as the Roman
Danube-flotilla could transport them. But no sooner had they reached
Moesia than troubles broke out. The Roman officials at first tried to
disarm the immigrants, but the Goths were unwilling to surrender their
weapons, and offered large bribes to be allowed to retain them: in strict
disobedience to the Emperor’s orders, the bribes were accepted and the
Goths retained their arms. Further disputes soon broke out. The provisions
of Moesia did not suffice for so many hundred thousand mouths as had just
entered its border, and Valens had ordered stores of corn from Asia to be
collected for the use of the Goths, till they should have received and
commenced to cultivate land of their own. But the governor, Lupicinus, to
fill his own pockets, held back the food, and doled out what he chose to
give at exorbitant prices. In sheer hunger the Goths were driven to barter
a slave for a single loaf of bread and ten pounds of silver for a sheep.
This shameless extortion continued as long as the stores and the patience
of the Goths lasted. At last the poorer immigrants were actually beginning
to sell their own children for slaves rather than let them starve. This
drove the Goths to desperation, and a chance affray set the whole nation
in a blaze. Fritigern, with many of his nobles, was dining with Count
Lupicinus at the town of Marcianopolis, when some starving Goths tried to
pillage the market by force. A party of Roman soldiers strove to drive
them off, and were at once mishandled or slain. On hearing the tumult and
learning its cause, Lupicinus recklessly bade his retinue seize and slay
Fritigern and the other guests at his banquet. The Goths drew their swords
and cut their way out of the palace. Then riding to the nearest camp of
his followers, Fritigern told his tale, and bade them take up arms against
Rome.
There followed a year of desperate fighting all along the Danube, and the
northern slope of the Balkans. The Goths half-starved for many months, and
smarting under the extortion and chicanery to which they had been
subjected, soon showed that the old barbarian spirit was but thinly
covered by the veneer of Christianity and civilization which they had
acquired in the last half-century. The struggle resolved itself into a
repetition of the great raids of the third century: towns were sacked and
the open country harried in the old style, nor was the war rendered less
fierce by the fact that many runaway slaves and other outcasts among the
provincial population joined the invaders. But the Roman armies still
retained their old reputation; the ravages of the Goths were checked at
the Balkans, and though joined by the remnants of the Ostrogoths from the
Danube mouth, as well as by other tribes flying from the Huns, the
Visigoths were at first held at bay by the imperial armies. A desperate
pitched battle at Ad Salices, near the modern Kustendje thinned the ranks
of both sides, but led to no decisive result.
Next year, however, the unwarlike Emperor, driven into the field by the
clamours of his subjects, took the field in person, with great
reinforcements brought from Asia Minor. At the same time his nephew
Gratian, a gallant young prince who had succeeded to the Empire of the
West, set forth through Pannonia to bring aid to the lands of the Lower
Danube.
The personal intervention of Valens in the struggle was followed by a
fearful disaster. In 378 A.D., the main body of the Goths succeeded in
forcing the line of the Balkans; they were not far from Adrianople when
the Emperor started to attack them, with a splendid army of 60,000 men.
Every one expected to hear of a victory, for the reputation of
invincibility still clung to the legions, and after six hundred years of
war the disciplined infantry of Rome, _robur peditum_, whose day had
lasted since the Punic wars, were still reckoned superior, when fairly
handled, to any amount of wild barbarians.
But a new chapter of the history of the art of war was just commencing;
during their sojourn in the plains of South Russia and Roumania the Goths
had taken, first of all German races, to fighting on horseback. Dwelling
in the Ukraine they had felt the influence of that land, ever the nurse of
cavalry from the day of the Scythian to that of the Tartar and Cossack.
They had come to “consider it more honourable to fight on horse than on
foot,” and every chief was followed by his war-band of mounted men. Driven
against their will into conflict with the empire, they found themselves
face to face into the army that had so long held the world in fear, and
had turned back their own ancestors in rout three generations before.
Valens found the main body of the Goths encamped in a great “laager,” on
the plain north of Adrianople. After some abortive negotiations he
developed an attack on their front, when suddenly a great body of horsemen
charged in on the Roman flank. It was the main strength of the Gothic
cavalry, which had been foraging at a distance; receiving news of the
fight it had ridden straight for the battle field. Some Roman squadrons
which covered the left flank of the Emperor’s army were ridden down and
trampled under foot. Then the Goths swept down on the infantry of the left
wing, rolled it up, and drove it in upon the centre. So tremendous was
their impact that legions and cohorts were pushed together in hopeless
confusion. Every attempt to stand firm failed, and in a few minutes left,
centre, and reserve, were one undistinguishable mass. Imperial guards,
light troops, lancers, auxiliaries, and infantry of the line were wedged
together in a press that grew closer every moment. The Roman cavalry saw
that the day was lost, and rode off without another effort. Then the
abandoned infantry realized the horror of their position: equally unable
to deploy or to fly, they had to stand to be cut down. Men could not raise
their arms to strike a blow, so closely were they packed; spears snapped
right and left, their bearers being unable to lift them to a vertical
position; many soldiers were stifled in the press. Into this quivering
mass the Goths rode, plying lance and sword against the helpless enemy. It
was not till forty thousand men had fallen that the thinning of the ranks
enabled the survivors to break out and follow their cavalry in a headlong
flight. They left behind them, dead on the field, the Emperor, the Grand
Masters of the Infantry and Cavalry, the Count of the Palace, and
thirty-five commanders of different corps.
The battle of Adrianople was the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman
army since Cannæ, a slaughter to which it is aptly compared by the
contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The army of the East was
almost annihilated, and was never reorganized again on the old Roman
lines.
This awful catastrophe brought down on Constantinople the first attack
which it experienced since it had changed its name from Byzantium. After a
vain assault on Adrianople, the victorious Goths pressed rapidly on
towards the imperial city. Harrying the whole country side as they passed
by, they presented themselves before the “Golden Gate,” its south-western
exit. But the attack was destined to come to nothing: “their courage
failed them when they looked on the vast circuit of walls and the enormous
extent of streets; all that mass of riches within appeared inaccessible to
them. They cast away the siege machines which they had prepared, and
rolled backward on to Thrace.”(3) Beyond skirmishing under the walls with
a body of Saracen cavalry which had been brought up to strengthen the
garrison, they made no hostile attempt on the city. So forty years after
his death, Constantine’s prescience was for the first time justified. He
was right in believing that an impregnable city on the Bosphorus would
prove the salvation of the Balkan Peninsula even if all its open country
were overrun by the invader.
The unlucky Valens was succeeded on the throne by Theodosius, a wise and
virtuous prince, who set himself to repair, by caution and courage
combined, the disaster that had shaken the Roman power in the Danube
lands. With the remnants of the army of the East he made head against the
barbarians; without venturing to attack their main body, he destroyed many
marauders and scattered bands, and made the continuance of the war
profitless to them. If they dispersed to plunder they were cut off; if
they held together in masses they starved. Presently Fritigern died, and
Theodosius made peace with his successor Athanarich, a king who had lately
come over the Danube at the head of a new swarm of Goths from the
Carpathian country. Theodosius frankly promised and faithfully observed
the terms that Fritigern had asked of Valens ten years before. He granted
the Goths land for their settlement in the Thracian province which they
had wasted, and enlisted in his armies all the chiefs and their war-bands.
Within ten years after the fight of Adrianople he had forty thousand
Teutonic horsemen in his service; they formed the best and most formidable
part of his host, and were granted a higher pay than the native Roman
soldiery. The immediate military results of the policy of Theodosius were
not unsatisfactory; it was his Gothic auxiliaries who won for him his two
great victories over the legions of the West, when in A.D. 388 he
conquered the rebel Magnus Maximus, and in A.D. 394 the rebel Eugenius.
[Illustration]
Gothic Captives. (_From the Column of Arcadius._)
But from the political side the experiment of Theodosius was fraught with
the greatest danger that the Roman Empire had yet known. When barbarian
auxiliaries had been enlisted before, they had been placed under Roman
leaders and mixed with equal numbers of Roman troops. To leave them under
their own chiefs, and deliberately favour them at the expense of the
native soldiery, was a most unhappy experiment. It practically put the
command of the empire in their hands; for there was no hold over them save
their personal loyalty to Theodosius, and the spell which the grandeur of
the Roman name and Roman culture still exercised over their minds. That
spell was still strong, as is shown in the story which the Gothic
historian Jornandes tells about the visit of the old King Athanarich to
Constantinople. “When he entered the royal city, ‘Now,’ said he, ‘do I at
last behold what I had often heard and deemed incredible.’ He passed his
eyes hither and thither admiring first the site of the city, then the
fleets of corn-ships, then the lofty walls, then the crowds of people of
all nations, mingled as the waters from divers springs mix in a single
pool, then the ranks of disciplined soldiery. And at last he cried aloud,
‘Doubtless the Emperor is as a god on earth, and he who raises a hand
against him is guilty of his own blood.’ ” But this impression was not to
continue for long. In A.D. 395, the good Emperor Theodosius, “the lover of
peace and of the Goths,” as he was called, died, and left the throne to
his two weakly sons Arcadius and Honorius.
IV. THE DEPARTURE OF THE GERMANS.
The Roman Empire, at the end of the fourth century, was in a condition
which made the experiment of Theodosius particularly dangerous. The
government was highly centralized and bureaucratic; hosts of officials,
appointed directly from Constantinople, administered every provincial post
from the greatest to the least. There was little local self-government and
no local patriotism. The civil population was looked on by the
bureaucratic caste as a multitude without rights or capacities, existing
solely for the purpose of paying taxes. So strongly was this view held,
that to prevent the revenue from suffering, the land-holding classes, from
the _curialis_, or local magnate, down to the poorest peasant, were
actually forbidden to move from one district to another without special
permission. A landowner was even prohibited from enlisting in the army,
unless he could show that he left an heir behind him capable of paying his
share in the local rates. An almost entire separation existed between the
civil population and the military caste; it was hard for a civilian of any
position to enlist; only the lower classes—who were of no account in
tax-paying—were suffered to join the army. On the other hand, every
pressure was used to make the sons of soldiers continue in the service.
Thus had arisen a purely professional army, which had no sympathy or
connection with the unarmed provincials whom it protected.
The army had been a source of unending trouble in the third century; for a
hundred years it had made and unmade Cæsars at its pleasure. That was
while it was still mainly composed of men born within the empire, and
officered by Romans.
But Theodosius had now swamped the native element in the army by his
wholesale enlistment of Gothic war-bands. And he had, moreover, handed
many of the chief military posts to Teutons. Some of them indeed had
married Roman wives and taken kindly to Roman modes of life, while nearly
all had professed Christianity. But at the best they were military
adventurers of alien blood while at the worst they were liable to relapse
into barbarism, cast all their loyalty and civilization to the winds, and
take to harrying the empire again in the old fearless fashion of the third
century. Clearly nothing could be more dangerous than to hand over the
protection of the timid and unarmed civil population to such guardians.
The contempt they must have felt for the unwarlike provincials was so
great, and the temptation to plunder the wealthy cities of the empire so
constant and pressing, that it is no wonder if the Teutons yielded.
Cæsar-making seemed as easy to the leaders as the sack of provincial
churches and treasuries did to the rank and file.
When the personal ascendency of Theodosius was removed, the empire fell at
once into the troubles which were inevitable. Both at the court of
Arcadius, who reigned at Constantinople, and at that of Honorius, who had
received the West as his share, a war of factions commenced between the
German and the Roman party. Theodosius had distributed so many high
military posts to Goths and other Teutons, that this influence was almost
unbounded. Stilicho _Magister militum_ (commander-in-chief) of the armies
of Italy was predominant at the council board of Honorius; though he was a
pure barbarian by blood, Theodosius had married him to his own niece
Serena, and left him practically supreme in the West, for the young
emperor was aged only eleven. In the East Arcadius, the elder brother, had
attained his eighteenth year, and might have ruled his own realm had he
possessed the energy. But he was a witless young man, “short, thin, and
sallow, so inactive that he seldom spoke, and always looked as if he was
about to fall asleep.” His prime minister was a Western Roman named
Rufinus, but before the first year of his reign was over, a Gothic captain
named Gainas slew Rufinus at a review, before the Emperor’s very eyes. The
weak Arcadius was then compelled to make the eunuch Eutropius his
minister, and to appoint Gainas _Magister militum_ for the East.
Gainas and Stilicho contented themselves with wire-pulling at Court; but
another Teutonic leader thought that the time had come for bolder work.
Alaric was a chief sprung from the family of the Balts, whom the Goths
reckoned next to the god-descended Amals among their princely houses. He
was young, daring, and untameable; several years spent at Constantinople
had failed to civilize him, but had succeeded in filling him with contempt
for Roman effeminacy. Soon after the death of Theodosius, he raised the
Visigoths in revolt, making it his pretext that the advisers of Arcadius
were refusing the _foederati_, or auxiliaries, certain arrears of pay. The
Teutonic sojourners in Moesia and Thrace joined him almost to a man, and
the Constantinopolitan government found itself with only a shadow of an
army to oppose the rebels. Alaric wandered far and wide, from the Danube
to the gates of Constantinople, and from Constantinople to Greece,
ransoming or sacking every town in his way till the Goths were gorged with
plunder. No one withstood him save Stilicho, who was summoned from the
West to aid his master’s brother. By skilful manœuvres Stilicho blockaded
Alaric in a mountain position in Arcadia; but when he had him at his
mercy, it was found that “dog does not eat dog.” The Teutonic prime
minister let the Teutonic rebel escape him, and the Visigoths rolled north
again into Illyricum. Sated with plunder, Alaric then consented to grant
Arcadius peace, on condition that he was made a _Magister militum_ like
Stilicho and Gainas, and granted as much land for his tribesmen as he
chose to ask. [A.D. 396.]
For the next five years Alaric, now proclaimed King of the Goths by his
victorious soldiery, reigned with undisputed sway over the eastern parts
of the Balkan Peninsula, paying only a shadow of homage to the royal
phantom at Constantinople. There appeared every reason to believe that a
German kingdom was about to be permanently established in the lands south
and west of the Danube. The fate which actually befell Gaul, Spain, and
Britain, a few years later seemed destined for Moesia and Macedonia. How
different the history of Europe would have been if the Germans had settled
down in Servia and Bulgaria we need hardly point out.
But another series of events was impending. In A.D. 401, Alaric, instead
of resuming his attacks on Constantinople, suddenly declared war on the
Western Emperor Honorius. He marched round the head of the Adriatic and
invaded Northern Italy. The half-Romanized Stilicho, who wished to keep
the rule of the West to himself, fought hard to turn the Goths out of
Italy, and beat back Alaric’s first invasion. But then the young emperor,
who was as weak and more worthless than his brother Arcadius, slew the
great minister on a charge of treason. When Stilicho was gone, Alaric had
everything his own way; he moved with the whole Visigothic race into
Italy, where he ranged about at his will, ransoming and plundering every
town from Rome downwards. The Visigoths are heard of no more in the Balkan
Peninsula; they now pass into the history of Italy and then into that of
Spain.
While Alaric’s eyes were turned on Italy, but before he had actually come
into conflict with Stilicho, the Court of Constantinople had been the seat
of grave troubles. Gainas the Gothic _Magister militum_ of the East, and
his creature, the eunuch Eutropius, had fallen out, and the man of war had
no difficulty in disposing of the wretched harem-bred Grand Chamberlain.
Instigated by Gainas, the German mercenaries in the army of Asia started
an insurrection under a certain Tribigild. Gainas was told to march
against them, and collected troops ostensibly for that purpose. But when
he was at the head of a considerable army, he did not attack the rebels,
but sent a message to Constantinople bidding Arcadius give up to him the
obnoxious Grand Chamberlain. Eutropius, hearing of his danger, threw
himself on the protection of the Church: he fled into the Cathedral of St.
Sophia and clung to the altar. John Chrysostom, the intrepid Patriarch of
Constantinople, forbade the soldiers to enter the church, and protected
the fugitive for some days. One of the most striking incidents in the
history of St. Sophia followed: while the cowering Chamberlain lay before
the altar, John preached to a crowded congregation a sermon on the text,
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” emphasizing every period of his
harangue by pointing to the fallen Eutropius—prime minister of the empire
yesterday, and a hunted criminal to-day. The patriarch extorted a promise
that the eunuch’s life should be spared, and Eutropius gave himself up.
Arcadius banished him to Cyprus, but the inexorable Gainas was not
contented with his rival’s removal; he had Eutropius brought back to
Constantinople and beheaded.
The _Magister militum_ now brought his army over to Constantinople, and
quartered it there to overawe the emperor. It appeared quite likely that
ere long the Germans would sack the city; but the fate that befell Rome
ten years later was not destined for Constantinople. A mere chance brawl
put the domination of Gainas to a sudden end. He himself and many of his
troops were outside the city, when a sudden quarrel at one of the gates
between a band of Goths and some riotous citizens brought about a general
outbreak against the Germans. The Constantinopolitan mob showed itself
more courageous and not less unruly than the Roman mob of elder days. The
whole population turned out with extemporized arms and attacked the German
soldiery. The gates were closed to prevent Gainas and his troops from
outside returning, and a desperate street-fight ranged over the entire
city. Isolated bodies of the Germans were cut off one by one, and at last
their barracks were surrounded and set on fire. The rioters had the upper
hand; seven thousand soldiers fell, and the remnant thought themselves
lucky to escape. Gainas at once declared open war on the empire, but he
had not the genius of Alaric, nor the numerical strength that had followed
the younger chief. He was beaten in the field and forced to fly across the
Danube, where he was caught and beheaded by Uldes, King of the Huns.
Curiously enough the officer who defeated Gainas was himself not only a
Goth but a heathen: he was named Fravitta and had been the sworn
guest-friend of Theodosius, whose son he faithfully defended even against
the assault of his own countrymen, [A.D. 401.]
The departure of Alaric and the death of Gainas freed the Eastern Romans
from the double danger that has impended over them. They were neither to
see an independent German kingdom on the Danube and Morava, nor to remain
under the rule of a semi-civilized German _Magister militum_, making and
unmaking ministers, and perhaps Cæsars, at his good pleasure. The weak
Arcadius was enabled to spend the remaining seven years of his life in
comparative peace and quiet. His court was only troubled by an open war
between his spouse, the Empress Ælia Eudoxia, and John Chrysostom, the
Patriarch of Constantinople. John was a man of saintly life and apostolic
fervour, but rash and inconsiderate alike in speech and action. His
charity and eloquence made him the idol of the populace of the imperial
city, but his austere manners and autocratic methods of dealing with his
subordinates had made him many foes among the clergy. The patriarch’s
enemies were secretly supported by the empress, who had taken offence at
the outspoken way in which John habitually denounced the luxury and
insolence of her court. She favoured the intrigues of Theophilus,
Patriarch of Alexandria, against his brother prelate, backed the Asiatic
clergy in their complaints about John’s oppression of them, and at last
induced the Emperor to allow the saintly patriarch to be deposed by a
hastily-summoned council, the “Synod of the Oak” held outside the city.
The populace rose at once to defend their pastor; riots broke out,
Theodosius was chased back to Egypt, and the Emperor, terrified by an
earthquake which seemed to manifest the wrath of heaven, restored John to
his place.
Next year, however, the war between the empress and the patriarch broke
out again. John took the occasion of the erection of a statue of Eudoxia
in the Augustaeum to recommence his polemics. Some obsolete semi-pagan
ceremonies at its dedication roused his wrath, and he delivered a scathing
sermon in which—if his enemies are to be believed—he compared the empress
to Herodias, and himself to John the Baptist. The Emperor, at his wife’s
demand, summoned another council, which condemned Chrysostom, and on
Easter Day, A.D. 404, seized the patriarch in his cathedral by armed
force, and banished him to Asia. That night a fire, probably kindled by
the angry adherents of Chrysostom, broke out in St. Sophia, which was
burnt to the ground. From thence it spread to the neighbouring buildings,
and finally to the Senate-house, which was consumed with all the treasures
of ancient Greek art of which Constantine had made it the repository.
Meanwhile the exiled John was banished to a dreary mountain fastness in
Cappadocia, and afterwards condemned to a still more remote prison at
Pityus on the Euxine. He died on his way thither, leaving a wonderful
reputation for patience and cheerfulness under affliction. This
fifth-century Becket was well-nigh the only patriarch of Constantinople
who ever fell out with the imperial Court on a question of morals as
distinguished from dogma. Chrysostom’s quarrel was with the luxury,
insolence, and frivolity of the Empress and her Court; no real
ecclesiastical question was involved in his deposition, for the charges
against him were mere pretexts to cover the hatred of his disloyal clergy
and the revenge of the insulted Aelia Eudoxia. [A.D. 407.]
V. THE REORGANIZATION OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE. (A.D. 408-518.)
The feeble and inert Arcadius died in A.D. 408, at the early age of
thirty-one; his imperious consort had preceded him to the grave, and the
empire of the East was left to Theodosius II., a child of seven years,
their only son. There was hardly an instance in Roman history of a minor
succeeding quietly to his father’s throne. An ambitious relative or a
disloyal general had habitually supplanted the helpless heir. But the
ministers of Arcadius were exceptionally virtuous or exceptionally
destitute of ambition. The little emperor was duly crowned, and the
administration of the East undertaken in his name by the able Anthemius,
who held the office of Praetorian Praefect. History relates nothing but
good of this minister; he made a wise commercial treaty with the king of
Persia; he repelled with ease a Hunnish invasion of Moesia; he built a
flotilla on the Danube, where Roman warships had not been seen since the
death of Valens, forty years before; he reorganized the corn supply of
Constantinople; and did much to get back into order and cultivation the
desolated north-western lands of the Balkan Peninsula, from which Alaric
and his Visigothic hordes had now taken their final departure. The empire
was still more indebted to him for bringing up the young Theodosius as an
honest and god-fearing man. The palace under Anthemius’ rule was the
school of the virtues: the lives of the emperor and his three sisters,
Pulcheria, Arcadia, and Marina, were the model and the marvel of their
subjects. Theodosius inherited the piety and honesty of his grandfather
and namesake, but was a youth of slender capacity, though he took some
interest in literature, and was renowned for his beautiful penmanship. His
eldest sister, Pulcheria, was the ruling spirit of the family, and
possessed unlimited influence over him, though she was but two years his
senior. When Anthemius died in A.D. 414, she took the title of Augusta,
and assumed the regency of the East. Pulcheria was an extraordinary woman:
on gathering up the reins of power she took a vow of chastity, and lived
as a crowned nun for thirty-six years; her fear had been that, if she
married, her husband might cherish ambitious schemes against her brother’s
crown; she therefore kept single herself and persuaded her sisters to make
a similar vow. Austere, indefatigable, and unselfish, she proved equal to
ruling the realms of the East with success, though no woman had ever made
the attempt before.
When Theodosius came of age he refused to remove his sister from power,
and treated her as his colleague and equal. By her advice he married in
A.D. 421, the year that he came of age, the beautiful and accomplished
Athenaïs, daughter of the philosopher Leontius. The emperor’s chosen
spouse had been brought up as a pagan, but was converted before her
marriage, and baptized by the name of Eudocia. She displayed her literary
tastes in writing religious poetry, which had some merit, according to the
critics of the succeeding age. The austere Pulcheria—always immersed in
state business or occupied in religious observances—found herself ere long
ill at ease in the company of the lively, beautiful, and volatile literary
lady whom she had chosen as sister-in-law. If Theodosius had been less
easy-going and good-hearted he must have sent away either his sister or
his wife, but he long contrived to dwell affectionately with both, though
their bickerings were unending. After many years of married life, however,
a final quarrel came, and the empress retired to spend the last years of
her life in seclusion at Jerusalem. The cause of her exile is not really
known: we have only a wild story concerning it, which finds an exact
parallel in one of the tales of the “Arabian Nights.”
“The emperor,” so runs the tale, “was one day met by a peasant who
presented him with a Phrygian apple of enormous size, so that the
whole Court marvelled at it. And he gave the man a hundred and
fifty gold pieces in reward, and sent the apple to the Empress
Eudocia. But she sent it as a present to Paulinus, the ‘Master of
the Offices,’ because he was a friend of the emperor. But
Paulinus, not knowing the history of the apple, took it and gave
it to the emperor as he reëntered the Palace. And Theodosius
having received it, recognized it and concealed it, and called his
wife and questioned her, saying, ‘Where is the apple that I sent
you?’ She answered, ‘I have eaten it.’ Then he bade her swear by
his salvation the truth, whether she had eaten it or sent it to
some one. And Eudocia swore that she had sent it to no man, but
had herself eaten it. Then the emperor showed her the apple, and
was exceedingly wrath, suspecting that she was enamoured of
Paulinus, and had sent it to him as a love-gift; for he was a very
handsome man. And on this account he put Paulinus to death, but he
permitted Eudocia to go to the Holy Places to pray. And she went
down from Constantinople to Jerusalem, and dwelt there all her
days.”
That Paulinus was executed, and that Eudocia spent her last years of
retirement in Palestine, we know for certain. All the rest of the story is
in reality hidden from us. The chief improbability of the tale is that
Eudocia had reached the age of forty when the breach between her and her
husband took place, and that Paulinus was also an official of mature
years.
Theodosius’ long reign passed by in comparative quiet. Its only serious
troubles were a short war with the Persians, and a longer one with Attila,
the great king of the Huns, whose empire now stretched over all the lands
north of the Black Sea and Danube, where the Goths had once dwelt. In this
struggle the Roman armies were almost invariably unfortunate. The Huns
ravaged the country as far as Adrianople and Philippopolis, and had to be
bought off by the annual payment of 700 lbs. of gold [£31,000]. It is true
that they fell on Theodosius while his main force was engaged on the
Persian frontier, but the constant ill-success of the imperial generals
seems to show that the armies of the East had never been properly
reorganized since the military system of Theodosius I. had been broken up
by the revolt of Gainas forty years before. His grandson had neither a
trustworthy body of German auxiliaries nor a sufficiently large native
levy of born subjects of the empire to protect his borders.
[Illustration]
Angel Of Victory. (_From a Fifth-century Diptych._) _Reproduced from
"L’Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._
The reconstruction of the Roman military forces was reserved for the
successors of Theodosius II. He himself was killed by a fall from his
horse in 450 A.D., leaving an only daughter, who was married to her cousin
Valentinian III., Emperor of the West. Theodosius, with great wisdom, had
designated as his successor, not his young-son-in-law, a cruel and
profligate prince, but his sister Pulcheria, who at the same time ended
her vow of celibacy and married Marcianus, a veteran soldier and a
prominent member of the Senate. The marriage was but formal, for both were
now well advanced in years: as a political expedient it was all that could
be desired. The empire had peace and prosperity under their rule, and
freed itself from the ignominious tribute to the Huns. Before Attila died
in 452, he had met and been checked by the succours which Marcianus sent
to the distressed Romans of the West.
When Marcianus and Pulcheria passed away, the empire came into the hands
of a series of three men of ability. They were all bred as high civil
officials, not as generals; all ascended the throne at a ripe age; not one
of them won his crown by arms, all were peaceably designated either by
their predecessors, or by the Senate and army. These princes were Leo I.
(457-474), Zeno (474-491), Anastasius (491-518). Their chief merit was
that they guided the Roman Empire in the East safely through the stormy
times which saw its extinction in the West. While, beyond the Adriatic,
province after province was being lopped off and formed into a new
Germanic kingdom, the emperors who reigned at Constantinople kept a tight
grip on the Balkan Peninsula and on Asia, and succeeded in maintaining
their realm absolutely intact. Both East and West were equally exposed to
the barbarian in the fifth century, and the difference of their fate came
from the character of their rulers, not from the diversity of their
political conditions. In the West, after the extinction of the house of
Theodosius (455 A.D.), the emperors were ephemeral puppets, made and
unmade by the generals of their armies, who were invariably Germans. The
two _Magistri militum_, Ricimer and Gundovald—one Suabian, the other
Burgundian by birth—deposed or slew no less than five of their nominal
masters in seventeen years. In the East, on the other hand, it was the
emperors who destroyed one after another the ambitious generals, who, by
arms or intrigue, threatened their throne.
While this comparison bears witness to the personal ability of the three
emperors who ruled at Constantinople between A.D. 457 and A.D. 518, it is
only fair to remember they were greatly helped by the fact that the German
element in their armies had never reached the pitch of power to which it
had attained in the West; the suppression of Gainas forty years before had
saved them from that danger. But unruly and aspiring generals were not
wanting in the East; the greatest danger of Leo I. was the conspiracy of
the great _Magister militum_ Aspar, whom he detected and slew when he was
on the eve of rebelling. Zeno was once chased out of his capital by
rebels, and twice vexed by dangerous risings in Asia Minor, but on each
occasion he triumphed over his adversaries, and celebrated his victory by
the execution of the leaders of the revolt. Anastasius was vexed for
several years by the raids of a certain Count Vitalian, who ranged over
the Thracian provinces with armies recruited from the barbarians beyond
the Danube. But, in spite of all these rebellions, the empire was never in
serious danger of sinking into disorder or breaking up, as the Western
realm had done, into new un-Roman kingdoms. So far was it from this fate,
that Anastasius left his successor, when he died in A.D. 518, a loyal army
of 150,000 men, a treasure of 320,000 lbs. of gold, and an unbroken
frontier to East and West.
The main secret of the success of the emperors of the fifth century in
holding their own came from the fact that they had reorganized their
armies, and filled them up with native troops in great numbers. Leo I. was
the first ruler who utilized the military virtues of the Isaurians, or
mountain populations of Southern Asia Minor. He added several regiments of
them to the army of the East, but it was his son-in-law and successor,
Zeno, himself an Isaurian born, who developed the scheme. He raised an
imperial guard from his countrymen, and enlisted as many corps of them as
could be raised; moreover, he formed regiments of Armenians and other
inhabitants of the Roman frontier of the East, and handed over to his
successor, Anastasius, an army in which the barbarian auxiliaries—now
composed of Teutons and Huns in about equal numbers—were decidedly
dominated by the native elements.
The last danger which the Eastern Empire was to experience from the hands
of the Germans fell into the reign of Zeno. The Ostrogoths had submitted
to the Huns ninety years before, when their brethren the Visigoths fled
into Roman territory, in the reign of Valens. But when the Hunnish Empire
broke up at the death of Attila [A.D. 452], the Ostrogoths freed
themselves, and replaced their late masters as the main danger on the
Danube. The bulk of them streamed south-westward, and settled in Pannonia,
the border-province of the Western Empire, on the frontier of the
East-Roman districts of Dacia and Moesia. They soon fell out with Zeno,
and two Ostrogothic chiefs, Theodoric, the son of Theodemir, and
Theodoric, the son of Triarius, were the scourges of the Balkan Peninsula
for more than twenty years. While the bulk of their tribesmen settled down
on the banks of the Save and Mid-Danube, the two Theodorics harried the
whole of Macedonia and Moesia by never-ending raids. Zeno tried to turn
them against each other, offering first to the one, then to the other, the
title of _Magister militum_, and a large pension. But now—as in the time
of Alaric and Stilicho—it was seen that “dog will not eat dog”; the two
Theodorics, after quarrelling for a while, banded themselves together
against Zeno. The story of their reconciliation is curious.
Theodoric, the son of Theodemir, the ally of Rome for the moment, had
surrounded his rival on a rocky hill in a defile of the Balkans. While
they lay opposite each other, Theodoric, the son of Triarius [he is
usually known as Theodoric the One-Eyed], rode down to his enemy’s lines
and called to him, “Madman, betrayer of your race, do you not see that the
Roman plan is always to destroy Goths by Goths? Whichever of us fails,
they, not we, will be the stronger. They never give you real help, but
send you out against me to perish here in the Desert.” Then all the Goths
cried out, “The One-Eyed is right. These men are Goths like ourselves.” So
the two Theodorics made peace, and Zeno had to cope with them both at once
[A.D. 479]. Two years later Theodoric the One-Eyed was slain by
accident—his horse flung him, as he mounted, against a spear fixed by the
door of his tent—but his namesake continued a thorn in the side of the
empire till 488 A.D.
In that year Zeno bethought him of a device for ridding himself of the
Ostrogoth, who, though he made no permanent settlement in Moesia or
Macedonia, was gradually depopulating the realm by his incursions. The
line of ephemeral emperors who reigned in Italy over the shrunken Western
realm had ended in 476, when the German general Odoacer deposed Romulus
Augustulus, and did not trouble himself to nominate another puppet-Cæsar
to succeed him. By his order a deputation from the Roman Senate visited
Zeno at Constantinople, to inform him that they did not require an emperor
of their own to govern Italy, but would acknowledge him as ruler alike of
East and West; at the same time they besought Zeno to nominate, as his
representative in the Italian lands, their defender, the great Odoacer.
Zeno replied by advising the Romans to persuade Odoacer to recognize as
his lord Julius Nepos, one of the dethroned nominees of Ricimer, who had
survived his loss of the imperial diadem. Odoacer refused, and proclaimed
himself king in Italy, while still affecting—against Zeno’s own will—to
recognize the Constantinopolitan emperor as his suzerain.
In 488 A.D. it occurred to Zeno to offer Theodoric the government of
Italy, if he would conquer it from Odoacer. The Ostrogoth, who had harried
the inland of the Balkan Peninsula bare, and had met several reverses of
late from the Roman arms, took the offer. He was made “patrician” and
consul, and started off with all the Ostrogothic nation at his back to win
the realm of Italy. After hard fighting with Odoacer and the mixed
multitude of mercenaries that followed him, the Goths conquered Italy, and
Theodoric—German king and Roman patrician—began to reign at Ravenna. He
always professed to be the vassal and deputy of the emperor at
Constantinople, and theoretically his conquest of Italy meant the reunion
of the East and the West. But the Western realm had shrunk down to Italy
and Illyricum, and the power of Zeno therein was purely nominal.
With the departure of the Ostrogoths we have seen our last of the Germans
in the Balkan Peninsula; after 488 the Slavs take their place as the
molesters of the Roman frontier on the Danube.
VI. JUSTINIAN.
The Emperor Anastasius died in A.D. 518 at the ripe age of eighty-eight,
and his sceptre passed to Justinus, the commander of his body-guard, whom
Senate and army alike hailed as most worthy to succeed the good old man.
The late emperor had nephews, but he had never designated them as his
heirs, and they retired into private life at his death. Justinus was well
advanced in years, as all his three predecessors had been when they
mounted the throne. But unlike Leo, Zeno, and Anastasius, he had won his
way to the front in the army, not in the civil service. He had risen from
the ranks, was a rough uncultured soldier, and is said to have been hardly
able to sign his own name. His reign of nine years would have been of
little note in history—for he made no wars and spent no treasure—if he had
not been the means of placing on the throne of the East the greatest ruler
since the death of Constantine.
Justinus had no children himself, but had adopted as his heir his nephew
Justinian, son of his deceased brother Sabatius. This young man, born
after his father and uncle had won their way to high places in the army,
was no uncultured peasant as they had been, but had been reared, as the
heir of a wealthy house, in all the learning of the day. He showed from
the first a keen intelligence, and applied himself with zeal to almost
every department of civil life. Law, finance, administrative economy,
theology, music, architecture, fortification, all were dear to him. The
only thing in which he seems to have taken little personal interest was
military matters. His uncle trusted everything to him, and finally made
him his colleague on the throne.
Justinian was heir designate to the empire, and had passed the age of
thirty-five, giving his contemporaries the impression that he was a staid,
business-like, and eminently practical personage. “No one ever remembered
him young,” it was said, and most certainly no one ever expected him to
scandalize the empire by a sensational marriage. But in A.D. 526 the world
learnt, to the horror of the respectable and the joy of all
scandal-mongers, that he had declared his intention of taking to wife the
dancer Theodora, the star of the Byzantine comic stage.
So many stories have gathered around Theodora’s name that it is hard to
say how far her early life had been discreditable. A libellous work called
the “Secret History,” written by an enemy of herself and her husband,(4)
gives us many scandalous details of her career; but the very virulence of
the book makes its tales incredible. It is indisputable, however, that
Theodora was an actress, and that Roman actresses enjoyed an unenviable
reputation for light morals. There was actually a law which forbade a
member of the senate to marry an actress, and Justinian had to repeal it
in order to legalize his own marriage. There had been scores of bad and
reckless men on the throne before, but none of them had ever dared to
commit an action which startled the world half so much as this freak of
the staid Justinian. His own mother used every effort to turn him from his
purpose, and his uncle the Emperor threatened to disinherit him: but he
was quietly persistent, and ere the aged Justinus died he had been induced
to acknowledge the marriage of his nephew, and to confer on Theodora the
title of “Patrician.”
[Illustration]
The Empress Theodora And Her Court. _Reproduced from "L’Art Byzantin." Par
Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._
Theodora, as even her enemies allow, was the most beautiful woman of her
age. Procopius, the best historian of the day, says “that it was
impossible for mere man to describe her comeliness in words, or imitate it
in art.” All that her detractors could say was that she was below the
middle height, and that her complexion was rather pale, though not
unhealthy. It is unfortunate that we have no representation of her
surviving, save the famous mosaic in San Vitale at Ravenna, and mosaic is
of all forms of art that least suited to reproduce beauty.
Whatever her early life may have been, Theodora was in spirit and
intelligence well suited to be the mate of the Emperor of the East. After
her marriage no word of scandal was breathed against her life. She rose to
the height of her situation: once her courage saved her husband’s throne,
and always she was the ablest and the most trusted of his councillors. The
grave, studious, and hard-working Emperor never regretted his choice of a
consort.
It cannot be said, however, that either Justinian or Theodora are
sympathetic characters. The Emperor was a hard and suspicious master, and
not over grateful to subjects who served him well; he was intolerant in
religious, and unscrupulous in political matters. When his heart was set
on a project he was utterly unmindful of the slaughter and ruin which it
might bring upon his people. In the extent of his conquests and the
magnificence of his public works, he was incomparably the greatest of the
emperors who reigned at Constantinople. But the greatness was purely
personal: he left the empire weaker in resources, if broader in provinces,
than he found it. Of all the great sovereigns of history he may be most
fairly compared with Louis XIV. of France; but it may be remembered to his
credit in the comparison that Louis has nothing to set against Justinian’s
great legal work—the compilation of the _Pandects_ and _Institutes_, and
that Justinian’s private life, unlike that of the Frenchman, was strict
even to austerity. All night long, we read, he sat alone over his State
papers in his cabinet, or paced the dark halls in deep thought. His
sleepless vigilance so struck his subjects that the strangest legends
became current even in his life-time: his enemies whispered that he was no
mere man, but an evil spirit that required no rest. One grotesque tale
even said that the Emperor had been seen long after midnight traversing
the corridors of his palace—without his head.
If Justinian seemed hardly human to those who feared him, Theodora is
represented as entirely given up to pride and ambition, never forgiving an
offence, but hunting to death or exile all who had crossed her in the
smallest thing. She is reproached—but who that has risen from a low estate
is not?—of an inordinate love for the pomps and vanities of imperial
state. High officials complained that she had as great a voice in settling
political matters as her husband. Yet, on the whole, her influence would
appear not to have been an evil one—historians acknowledge that she was
liberal in almsgiving, religious after her own fashion, and that she often
interfered to aid the oppressed. It is particularly recorded that,
remembering the dangers of her own youth, she was zealous in establishing
institutions for the reclaiming of women who had fallen into sin.
The aged Justinus died in 527 A.D., and Justinian became the sole occupant
of the throne, which he was destined to occupy for thirty-eight years. It
was less than half the century, yet his personality seems to pervade the
whole period, and history hardly remembers the insignificant predecessors
and successors whose reigns eke out the remainder of the years between 500
and 600.
The empire when Justinian took it over from the hands of his uncle was in
a more prosperous condition than it had known since the death of
Constantine. Since the Ostrogoths had moved out of the Balkan Peninsula in
A.D. 487, it had not suffered from any very long or destructive invasion
from without. The Slavonic tribes, now heard of for the first time, and
the Bulgarians had made raids across the Danube, but they had not yet
shown any signs of settling down—as the Goths had done—within the limits
of the empire. Their incursions, though vexatious, were not dangerous.
Still the European provinces of the empire were in worse condition than
the Asiatic, and were far from having recovered the effects of the ravages
of Fritigern and Alaric, Attila, and Theodoric. But the more fortunate
Asiatic lands had hardly seen a foreign enemy for centuries.(5) Except in
the immediate neighbourhood of the Persian frontier there was no danger,
and Persian wars had been infrequent of late. Southern Asia Minor had once
or twice suffered from internal risings—rebellions of the warlike
Isaurians—but civil war left no such permanent mark on the land as did
barbarian invasions. On the whole, the resources of the provinces beyond
the Bosphorus were intact.
Justinus in his quiet reign had spent little or none of the great hoard of
treasure which Anastasius had bequeathed to him. There were more than
300,000 lbs. of gold [£13,400,000] in store when Justinian came to the
throne. The army, as we have had occasion to relate in the last chapter,
was in good order, and composed in a larger proportion of born subjects of
the empire than it had been at any time since the battle of Adrianople.
There would appear to have been from 150,000 to 200,000 men under arms,
but the extent of the frontiers of the empire were so great that Justinian
never sent out a single army of more than 30,000 strong, and forces of
only a third of that number are often found entrusted with such mighty
enterprises as the invasion of Africa or the defence of the Armenian
border. The flower of the Roman army was no longer its infantry, but its
mailed horsemen (_Cataphracti_), armed with lance and bow, as the Parthian
cavalry had once been of old. The infantry comprised more archers and
javelin-men than heavy troops: the Isaurians and other provincials of the
mountainous parts of Asia Minor were reckoned the best of them. Among both
horse and foot large bodies of foreign auxiliaries were still found: the
Huns and Arabs supplied light cavalry, the German Herules and Gepidæ from
beyond the Danube heavier troops.
The weakest point in the empire when Justinian took it over was its
financial system. The cardinal maxim of political economy, that “taxes
should be raised in the manner least oppressive to those who pay them” was
as yet undreamt of. The exaction of arbitrary customs dues, and the
frequent grant of monopolies was noxious to trade. The deplorable system
of tax-farming through middlemen was employed in many branches of the
revenue. Landed proprietors, small and great, were still mercilessly
overtaxed, in consideration of their exemption from military service. The
budget was always handicapped by the necessity for providing free corn for
the populace of Constantinople. Yet in spite of all these drawbacks
Justinian enjoyed an enormous and steady revenue. His finance minister,
John of Cappadocia, was such an ingenious extortioner that the treasury
was never empty in the hardest stress of war and famine: but it was kept
full at the expense of the future. The grinding taxation of Justinian’s
reign bore fruit in the permanent impoverishment of the provinces: his
successors were never able to raise such a revenue again. Here again
Justinian may well be compared to Louis XIV.
Justinian’s policy divides into the departments of internal and foreign
affairs. Of his doings as legislator, administrator, theologian, and
builder, we shall speak in their proper place. But the history of his
foreign policy forms the main interest of his reign. He had determined to
take up a task which none of his predecessors since the division of the
Empire under Arcadius and Honorius had dared to contemplate. It was his
dream to re-unite under his sceptre the German kingdoms in the Western
Mediterranean which had been formed out of the broken fragments of the
realm of Honorius; and to end the solemn pretence by which he was
nominally acknowledged as Emperor West of the Adriatic, while really all
power was in the hands of the German rulers who posed as his vicegerents.
He aimed at reconquering Italy, Africa, and Spain—if not the further
provinces of the old empire. We shall see that he went far towards
accomplishing his intention.
But during the first five years of his reign his attention was distracted
by other matters. The first of them was an obstinate war of four years’
duration, with Kobad, King of Persia. The causes of quarrel were
ultimately the rival pretensions of the Roman and Persian Empires to the
suzerainty of the small states on their northern frontiers near the Black
Sea, the kingdoms of Lazica and Iberia, and more proximately the
strengthening of the fortresses on the Mesopotamian border by Justinian.
His fortification of Dara, close to the Persian frontier town of Nisibis,
was the _casus belli_ chosen by Kobad, who declared war in 528, a year
after Justinian’s accession.
The Persian war was bloody, but absolutely indecisive. All the attacks of
the enemy were repelled, and one great pitched battle won over him at Dara
in 530. But neither party succeeded in taking a single fortress of
importance from the other; and when, on the death of Kobad, his son
Chosroës made peace with the empire, the terms amounted to the restoration
of the old frontier. The only importance of the war was that it enabled
Justinian to test his army, and showed him that he possessed an officer of
first-rate merit in Belisarius, the victor of the battle of Dara.
This famous general was a native of the Thracian inland; he entered the
army very young, and rose rapidly, till at the age of twenty-three he was
already Governor of Dara, and at twenty-five _Magister militum_ of the
East.(6) His influence at Court was very great, as he had married
Antonina, the favourite and confidante of the Empress Theodora. His
position, indeed, was not unlike that which Marlborough, owing to his
wife’s ascendency, enjoyed at the Court of Queen Anne. Like Marlborough,
too, Belisarius was ruled and bullied by his clever and unscrupulous wife.
Unlike the great Duchess Sarah, Antonina never set herself to thwart her
mistress; but after Theodora’s death she and her husband lost favour, and
in declining years knew much the same misfortune as did the Marlboroughs.
The year which saw the Persian War end [A.D. 532], saw also the rise and
fall of another danger, which while it lasted was much more threatening to
the Emperor’s life and power. We have already noticed the “Blues” and
“Greens,” the great factions of the Byzantine Circus.(7) All through the
fifth century they had been growing stronger, and interfered more and more
in politics, and even in religious controversies. To be a “Green” in 530
meant to be a partisan of the house of the late Emperor Anastasius, and a
Monophysite.(8) The “Blues” posed as partisans of the house of Justinus,
and as strictly orthodox in matters ecclesiastical. From mere Circus
factions they had almost grown into political parties; but they still
retained at the bottom many traces of their low sporting origin. The
rougher elements pre-dominated in them; they were prone to riot and
mischief, and, as the events of 532 were to show, they were a serious
danger to the State.
In January of that year there was serious rioting in the streets.
Justinian, though ordinarily he favoured the Blue faction, impartially
ordered the leaders of the rioters on both sides to be put to death. Seven
were selected for execution, and four of them were duly beheaded in the
presence of a great and angry mob, in front of the monastery of St. Conon.
The last three rioters were to be hung, but the hangman so bungled his
task that two of the criminals, one a Blue the other a Green, fell to the
ground alive. The guards seized them and they were again suspended; but
once more—owing no doubt to the terror of the executioners at the menaces
of the mob—the rope slipped. Then the multitude broke loose, the guards
were swept away, and the half-hung criminals were thrust into sanctuary at
the adjacent monastery.
This exciting incident proved the commencement of six days of desperate
rioting. The Blues and Greens united, and taking as their watchword,
_Nika_, “conquer,” swept through the city, crying for the deposition of
John of Cappadocia, the unpopular finance minister, and of Eudemius,
Praefect of the city, who was immediately responsible for the executions.
The ordinary police of the capital were quite unable to master them, and
Justinian was weak enough to promise to dismiss the officials. But the mob
was now quite out of hand, and refused to disperse: the trouble was
fomented by the partisans of the house of the late emperor, who began to
shout for the deposition of Justinian, and wished to make Hypatius, nephew
of Anastasius, Cæsar in his stead. The city was almost empty of troops,
owing to the garrison having been sent to the Persian War. The Emperor
could only count on 4,000 men of the Imperial Guard, a few German
auxiliaries, and a regiment of 500 “Cataphracti,” mailed horsemen, under
Belisarius, who had just returned from the seat of war.
Belisarius was placed in command of the whole, and sallied out to clear
the streets, but the rioters, showing the same pluck that the Byzantine
mob displayed against the soldiers of Gainas a hundred and twenty-five
years before, offered a stout resistance. The main fighting took place
around the great square of the Augustaeum, between the Imperial palace and
the Hippodrome. In the heat of the fight the rebels set fire to the Brazen
Porch by the Senate House. The Senate House caught fire, and then the
conflagration spread east and north, till it was wafted across the square
to St. Sophia. On the third day of the riot the great cathedral was burnt
to the ground, and from thence the flames issued out to burn the hospital
of Sampson and the church of St. Irene.(9) The fire checked the fighting,
and the insurgents were now in possession of most of the city. But they
could not find their chosen leader, for the unfortunate Hypatius, who had
no desire to risk his neck, had taken refuge with the Emperor in the
palace. It was not till he was actually driven out by Justinian, who
feared to have him about his person, that this rebel in spite of himself,
fell into the hands of his own adherents. But on the sixth day of the
riots they led him to the Hippodrome, installed him in the royal seat of
the Kathisma, and crowned him there with a gold chain of his wife’s, for
want of a proper diadem.
[Illustration]
Theodora Imperatrix. _From the Painting by Val. Prinsep. The copyright is
in the Artist’s hands._
Meanwhile there was dismay and diversity of councils in the Palace. John
of Cappadocia and many other ministers strove to persuade the Emperor to
fly by sea, and gather additional troops at Heraclea. There was nothing
left in his power save the palace, and they insisted that if he remained
there longer he would be surrounded by the rebels and cut off from escape.
It was then that the Empress Theodora rose to the level of the occasion,
refused to fly, and urged her husband to make one final assault on the
enemy. Her words are preserved by Procopius.
“This is no occasion to keep to the old rule that a woman must not speak
in the council. Those who are most concerned have most right to dictate
the course of action. Now every man must die once, and for a king death is
better than dethronement and exile. May I never see the day when my purple
robe is stripped from me, and when I am no more called Lady and Mistress!
If you wish, O Emperor, to save your life, nothing is easier: there are
your ships and the sea. But _I_ agree with the old saying that ‘Empire is
the best winding-sheet.’ ”
Spurred on by his wife’s bold words, Justinian ordered a last assault on
the rebels, and Belisarius led out his full force. The factions were now
in the Hippodrome, saluting their newly-crowned leader with shouts of
“_Hypatie Auguste, tu vincas,_” preparatory to a final attack on the
palace. Belisarius attacked at once all three gates of the Hippodrome:
that directed against the door of the Kathisma failed, but the soldiery
forced both the side entrances, and after a hard struggle the rebels were
entirely routed. Crowded into the enormous building with only five exits,
they fell in thousands by the swords of the victorious Imperialists. It is
said that 35,000 men were slain in the six days of this great “Sedition of
Nika.”
It is curious to learn that not even this awful slaughter succeeded in
crushing the factions. We hear of the Blues and Greens still rioting on
various occasions during the next fifty years. But they never came again
so near to changing the course of history as in the famous rising of A.D.
532.
VII. JUSTINIAN’S FOREIGN CONQUESTS.
After the Persians had drawn back, foiled in their attempt to conquer
Mesopotamia, and after the suppression of the “Nika” sedition had cowed
the unruly populace of Constantinople, Justinian found himself at last
free, and was able to take in hand his great scheme for the reconquest of
the lost provinces of the empire.
The enforced delay of six years between his accession and his first
attempt to execute his great plan, was, as it happened, extremely
favourable to the Emperor. In each of the two German kingdoms with which
he had first to deal, the power had passed within those six years into the
hands of a weak and incapable sovereign. In Africa, Hilderic, the king of
the Vandals, had been dethroned by his cousin Gelimer, a warlike and
ambitious, but very incapable, ruler. In Italy, Theodoric, the great king
of the Ostrogoths, had died in A.D. 526, and his grandson and successor,
Athalaric, in A.D. 533. After the death of the young Athalaric, the
kingdom fell to his mother, Amalasuntha, and she, compelled by Gothic
public opinion to take a husband to rule in her behalf, had unwisely
wedded Theodahat, her nearest kinsman. He was cruel, scheming, and
suspicious, and murdered his wife, within a year of her having brought him
the kingdom of Italy as a dowry.(10) Cowardly and avaricious as well as
ungrateful, Theodahat possessed exactly those vices which were most suited
to make him the scorn of his warlike subjects; he could count neither on
their loyalty nor their respect in the event of a war.
Both the Vandals in Africa and the Goths in Italy were at this time so
weak as to invite an attack by an enterprising neighbour. They had, in
fact, conquered larger realms than their limited numbers were really able
to control. The original tribal hordes which had subdued Africa and Italy
were composed of fifty or sixty thousand warriors, with their wives and
children. Now such a body concentrated on one spot was powerful enough to
bear down everything before it. But when the conquerors spread themselves
abroad, they were but a sprinkling among the millions of provincials whom
they had to govern. In all Italy there were probably but three
cities—Ravenna, Verona, and Pavia—in which the Ostrogoths formed a large
proportion of the population. A great army makes but a small nation, and
the Goths and Vandals were too few to occupy such wide tracts as Italy and
Africa. They formed merely a small aristocracy, governing by dint of the
ascendency which their fathers had won over the minds of the unwarlike
populations which they had subdued. The only chance for the survival of
the Ostrogothic and Vandal monarchies lay in the possibility of their
amalgamating with the Roman provincial population, as the Franks, under
more favourable circumstances, did with the conquered inhabitants of Gaul.
This was seen by Theodoric, the great conqueror of Italy; and he did his
best to reconcile Goth and Roman, held the balance with strict justice
between the two, and employed Romans as well as Goths in the government of
the country. But one generation does little to assuage old hatreds such as
that between the conquerors and the conquered in Italy. Theodoric was
succeeded by a child, and then by a ruffian, and his work ended with him.
Even he was unable to strike at the most fatal difference of all between
his countrymen and the Italians. The Goths were Arians, having been
converted to Christianity in the fourth century by missionaries who held
the Arian heresy. Their subjects, on the other hand, were Orthodox
Catholics, almost without exception. When religious hatred was added to
race hatred, there was hardly any hope of welding together the two
nationalities.
Another source of weakness in the kingdoms of Africa and Italy must be
noted. The Vandals of the third generation and the Goths of the second,
after their settlement in the south, seem to have degenerated in courage
and stamina. It may be that the climate was unfavourable to races reared
in the Danube lands; it may be that the temptations of unlimited luxury
offered by Roman civilization sufficed to demoralize them. A Gothic sage
observed at the time that “the Goth, when rich, tends to become Roman in
his habits; the Roman, when poor, Gothic in his.” There was truth in this
saying, and the result of the change was ominous for the permanence of the
kingdom of Italy. If the masters softened and the subjects hardened, they
would not preserve for ever their respective positions.
The case of the kingdom of Africa was infinitely worse than that of the
kingdom of Italy. The Vandals were less numerous than the Goths, in
proportion to their subjects; they were not merely heretics, but fanatical
and persecuting heretics, which the Goths were not. Moreover, they had
never had at their head a great organizer and administrator like
Theodoric, but only a succession of turbulent princes of the Viking type,
fit for war and nothing else.
Justinian declared war on King Gelimer the moment that he had made peace
with Persia, using as his _casus belli_, not a definite re-assertion of
the claim of the empire over Africa—for such language would have provoked
the rulers of Italy and Spain to join the Vandals, but the fact that
Gelimer had wrongfully deposed Hilderic, the Emperor’s ally. In July, 533,
Belisarius, who was now at the height of his favour for his successful
suppression of the “Nika” rioters, sailed from the Bosphorus with an army
of 10,000 foot and 5,000 horse. He was accompanied, luckily for history,
by his secretary, Procopius, a very capable writer, who has left a full
account of his master’s campaigns. Belisarius landed at Tripoli, at the
extreme eastern limit of the Vandal power. The town was at once betrayed
to him by its Roman inhabitants. From thence he advanced cautiously along
the coast, meeting with no opposition; for the incapable Gelimer had been
caught unprepared, and was still engaged in calling in his scattered
warriors. It was not till he had approached within ten miles of Carthage
that Belisarius was attacked by the Vandals. After a hard struggle he
defeated them, and the city fell into his hands next clay. The provincials
were delighted at the rout of their masters, and welcomed the imperial
army with joy; there was neither riot nor pillage, and Carthage had not
the aspect of a conquered town.
Calling up his last reserves, Gelimer made one more attempt to try the
fortunes of war. He advanced on Carthage, and was met by Belisarius at
Tricameron, on the road to Bulla. Again the day went against him; his army
broke up, his last fortresses threw open their gates, and there was an end
of the Vandal kingdom. It had existed just 104 years, since Genseric
entered Africa in A.D. 429.
Gelimer took refuge for a time with the Moorish tribes who dwelt in the
fastnesses of Mount Atlas. But ere long he resolved to surrender himself
to Belisarius, whose humanity was as well known as his courage. He sent to
Carthage to say that he was about to give himself up, and—so the story
goes—asked but for three things: a harp, to which to chant a dirge he had
written on the fate of himself and the Vandal race; a sponge, to wipe away
his tears; and a loaf, a delicacy he had not tasted ever since he had been
forced to partake of the unsavoury food of the Moors! Belisarius received
Gelimer with kindness, and took him to Constantinople, along with the
treasures of the palace of Carthage, which included many of the spoils of
Rome captured by the Vandals eighty-six years before, when they sacked the
imperial city, in 453. It is said that among these spoils were some of the
golden vessels of the Temple at Jerusalem, which Titus had brought in
triumph to Rome, and which Gaiseric had carried from Rome to Carthage.
[Illustration]
Cavalry Scouts. (_From a Byzantine MS._) _Reproduced from "L’Art
Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._
The triumphal entry of Belisarius into Constantinople with his captives
and his spoils, encouraged Justinian to order instant preparations for an
attack on the second German kingdom, on his western frontier. He declared
war on the wretched King Theodahat in the summer of A.D. 435, using as his
pretext the murder of Queen Amalasuntha, whom, as we have already said,
her ungrateful spouse had first imprisoned and then strangled within a
year of their marriage.
The king of the Goths, whether he was conscience-stricken or merely
cowardly, showed the greatest terror at the declaration of war. He even
wrote to Constantinople offering to resign his crown, if the Emperor would
guarantee his life and his private property. Meanwhile he consulted
soothsayers and magicians about his prospects, for he was as superstitious
as he was incompetent. Procopius tells us a strange tale of the doings of
a Jewish magician of note, to whom Theodahat applied. He took thirty
pigs—to represent unclean Gentiles, we must suppose—and penned them in
three styes, ten in each. The one part he called “Goths,” the second
“Italians,” and the third “Imperialists.” He left the beasts without food
or water for ten days, and bade the king visit them at the end of that
time, and take augury from their condition. When Theodahat looked in he
found all but two of the “Goth” pigs dead, and half of the “Italians,” but
the “Imperialists,” though gaunt and wasted, were all, or almost all,
alive. This portent the Jew expounded as meaning that at the end of the
approaching war the Gothic race would be exterminated and their Italian
subjects terribly thinned, while the Imperial troops would conquer, though
with toil and difficult.
While Theodahat was busying himself with portents, actual war had broken
out on the Illyrian frontier between the Goths and the governor of
Dalmatia. There was no use in making further offers to Justinian, and the
king of Italy had to face the situation as best he could.
In the summer of 535, Belisarius landed in Sicily, with an even smaller
army than had been given him to conquer Africa—only 3,000 Roman troops,
all Isaurians, and 4,500 barbarian auxiliaries of different sorts.
Belisarius’ first campaign was as fortunate as had been that which he had
waged against Gelimer. All the Sicilian towns threw open their gates
except Palermo, where there was a considerable Gothic garrison, and
Palermo fell after a short siege. In six months the whole island was in
the hands of Belisarius.
Theodahat seemed incapable of defending himself; he fell into a condition
of abject helplessness, which so provoked his warlike subjects, that when
the news came that Belisarius had crossed over into Italy and taken
Rhegium, they rose and slew him. In his stead the army of the Goths
elected as their king Witiges, a middle-aged warrior, well known for
personal courage and integrity, but quite incompetent to face the
impending storm.
After the fall of Rhegium, Belisarius marched rapidly on Naples, meeting
no opposition; for the Goths were very thinly scattered through Southern
Italy, and had not even enough men to garrison the Lucanian and Calabrian
fortresses. Naples was taken by surprise, the Imperialists finding their
way within the walls by crawling up a disused aqueduct. After this
important conquest, Belisarius made for Rome, though his forces were
reduced to a mere handful by the necessity of leaving garrisons in his
late conquests. King Witiges made no effort to obstruct his approach. He
had received news that the Franks were threatening an evasion of Northern
Italy, and went north to oppose an imaginary danger in the Alps, when he
should have been defending the line of the Tiber. Having staved off the
danger of a Frankish war by ceding Provence to King Theuderic, Witiges
turned back, only to learn that Rome was now in the hands of the enemy.
The troops of Leudaris, the Gothic general, who had been left with 4,000
men to defend the city, had been struck with panic at the approach of
Belisarius, and were cowardly and idiotic enough to evacuate it without
striking a blow. Five thousand men had sufficed to seize the ancient
capital of the world! [December, 536.]
Next spring King Witiges came down with the main army of the Goths—more
than 100,000 strong—and laid siege to Rome. The defence of the town by
Belisarius and his very inadequate garrison forms the most interesting
episode in the Italian war. For more than a year the Ostrogoths lay before
its walls, essaying every device to force an entry. They tried open storm;
they endeavoured to bribe traitors within the city; they strove to creep
along the bed of a disused aqueduct, as Belisarius had done a year before
at Naples. All was in vain, though the besiegers outnumbered the garrison
twenty-fold, and exposed their lives with the same recklessness that their
ancestors had shown in the invasion of the empire a hundred years back.
The scene best remembered in the siege was the simultaneous assault on
five points in the wall, on the 21st of March, 537. Three of the attacks
were beaten back with ease; but near the Prænestine Gate, at the
south-east of the city, one storming party actually forced its way within
the walls, and had to be beaten out by sheer hard fighting; and at the
mausoleum of Hadrian, on the north-west, another spirited combat took
place. Hadrian’s tomb—a great quadrangular structure of white marble, 300
feet square and 85 feet high—was surmounted by one of the most magnificent
collections of statuary in ancient Rome, including four great equestrian
statues of emperors at its corners. The Goths, with their ladders, swarmed
at the foot of the tomb in such numbers, that the arrows and darts of the
defenders were insufficient to beat them back. Then, as a last resource,
the Imperialists tore down the scores of statues which adorned the
mausoleum, and crushed the mass of assailants beneath a rain of marble
fragments. Two famous antiques, that form the pride of modern
galleries—the “Dancing Faun” at Florence, and the “Barberini Faun” at
Munich—were found, a thousand years later, buried in the ditch of the tomb
of Hadrian, and must have been among the missiles employed against the
Goths. The rough usage which they then received proved the means of
preserving them for the admiration of the modern world.
A year and nine days after he had formed the siege of Rome, the unlucky
Witiges had to abandon it. His army, reduced by sword and famine, had
given up all hope of success, and news had just arrived that the
Imperialists had launched a new army against Ravenna, the Gothic capital.
Belisarius, indeed, had just received a reinforcement of 6,000 or 7,000
men, and had wisely sent a considerable force, under an officer named
John, to fall on the Adriatic coast.
The scene of the war was now transported further to the north; but its
character still remained the same. The Romans gained territory, the Goths
lost it. Firmly fixed at Ancona and Rimini and Osimo, Belisarius gradually
forced his way nearer to Ravenna, and, in A.D. 540 laid siege to it.
Witiges, blockaded by Belisarius in his capital, made no such skilful
defence as did his rival at Rome three years before. To add to his
troubles, the Franks came down into Northern Italy, and threatened to
conquer the valley of the Po, the last Gothic stronghold. Witiges then
made proposals for submission; but Belisarius refused to grant any terms
other than unconditional surrender, though his master Justinian was ready
to acknowledge Witiges as vassal-king in Trans-Padane Italy. Famine drove
Ravenna to open its gates, and the Goths, enraged at their imbecile king,
and struck with admiration for the courage and generosity of Belisarius,
offered to make their conqueror Emperor of the West. The loyal general
refused; but bade the Goths disperse each to his home, and dwell peaceably
for the future as subjects of the empire. [May, 540 A.D.] He himself,
taking the great Gothic treasure-hoard from the palace of Theodoric, and
the captive Witiges, sailed for Constantinople, and laid his trophies at
his master’s feet.
Italy now seemed even as Africa; only Pavia and Verona were still held by
Gothic garrisons, and when he sailed home, Belisarius deemed his work so
nearly done, that his lieutenants would suffice to crush out the last
embers of the strife. He himself was required in the East, for a new
Persian war with Chosroësroës, son of Kobad, was on the eve of breaking
out. But things were not destined to end so. At the last moment the Goths
found a king and a hero to rescue them, and the conquest of Italy was
destined to be deferred for twelve years more. Two ephemeral rulers
reigned for a few months at Pavia, and came to bloody ends; but their
successor was Baduila,(11) the noblest character of the sixth century—“the
first knight of the Middle Ages,” as he has been called. When the generals
of Justinian marched against him, to finish the war by the capture of
Verona and Pavia, he won over them the first victory that the Goths had
obtained since their enemies landed in Italy. This was followed by two
more successes; the scattered armies of Witiges rallied round the banner
of the new king, and at once the cities of Central and Southern Italy
began to fall back into Gothic hands, with the same rapidity with which
they had yielded to Belisarius. The fact was, that the war had been a
cruel strain on the Italians, and that the imperial governors, and still
more their fiscal agents, or “logothetes,” had become unbearably
oppressive. Italy had lived through the fit of enthusiasm with which it
had received the armies of Justinian, and was now regretting the days of
Theodoric as a long-lost golden age. Most of its cities were soon in
Baduila’s hands; the Imperialists retained only the districts round Rome,
Naples, Otranto, and Ravenna. Of Naples they were soon deprived. [B.C.
543.] Baduila invested it, and ere long constrained it to surrender. He
treated the inhabitants with a kindness and consideration which no Roman
general, except Belisarius, had ever displayed. A speech which he
delivered to his generals soon after this success deserves a record, as
showing the character of the man. A Gothic warrior had been convicted of
violating the daughter of a Roman. Baduila condemned him to death. His
officers came round him to plead for the soldier’s life. He answered them
that they must choose that day whether they preferred to save one man’s
life or the life of the Gothic race. At the beginning of the war, as they
knew well, the Goths had brave soldiers, famous generals, countless
treasure, horses, weapons, and all the forts of Italy. And yet under
Theodahat—a man who loved gold better than justice—they had so angered God
by their unrighteous lives, that all the troubles of the last ten years
had come upon them. Now God seemed to have avenged Himself on them enough.
He had begun a new course with them, and they must begin a new course with
Him, and justice was the only path. As for the present criminal being a
valiant hero, let them know that the unjust man and the ravisher was never
brave in fight; but that, according to a man’s life, such was his luck in
battle.
Such was the justice of Baduila; and it seemed as if his dream was about
to come true, and that the regenerate Goths would win back all that they
had lost. Ere long he was at the gates of Rome, prepared to essay, with
15,000 men, what Witiges had failed to do with 100,000. Lest all his
Italian conquests should be lost, Justinian was obliged to send back
Belisarius, for no one else could hold back the Goths. But Belisarius was
ill-supplied with men; he had fallen into disfavour at Court, and the
imperial ministers stinted him of troops and money. Unable to relieve
Rome, he had to wait at Portus, by the mouth of the Tiber, watching for a
chance to enter the city. That chance he never got. The famine-stricken
Romans, angry with the cruel and avaricious Bessas, who commanded the
garrison, began to long for the victory of their enemy; and one night some
traitors opened the Asinarian Gate, and let in Baduila and his Goths. The
King thought that his troubles were over; he assembled his chiefs, and
bade them observe how, in the time of Witiges, 7,000 Greeks had conquered,
and robbed of kingdom and liberty, 100,000 well-armed Goths. But now that
they were few, poor, and wretched, the Goths had conquered more than
20,000 of the enemy. And why? Because of old they looked to anything
rather than justice: they had sinned against each other and the Romans.
Therefore they must choose henceforth, and be just men and have God with
them, or unjust and have God against them.
Baduila had determined to do that which no general since Hannibal had
contemplated: he would destroy Rome, and with it all the traditions of the
world-empire of the ancient city—to him they seemed but snares, tending to
corrupt the mind of the Goths. The people he sent away unharmed—they were
but a few thousand left after the horrors of the famine during the siege.
But he broke down the walls, and dismantled the palaces and arsenals. For
a few weeks Rome was a deserted city, given up to the wolf and the owl
[A.D. 550].
For eleven unquiet years, Baduila, the brave and just, ruled Italy,
holding his own against Belisarius, till the great general was called home
by some wretched court intrigue. But presently Justinian gathered another
army, more numerous than any that Belisarius had led, and sent it to
Italy, under the command of the eunuch Narses. It was a strange choice
that made the chamberlain into a general; but it succeeded. Narses marched
round the head of the Adriatic, and invaded Italy from the north. Baduila
went forth to meet him at Tagina, in the Apennines. For a long day the
Ostrogothic knights rode again and again into the Imperialist ranks; but
all their furious charges failed. At evening they reeled back broken, and
their king received a mortal wound in the flight [A.D. 553].
With the death of Baduila, it was all up with the Goths; their hero’s
knightly courage and kingly righteousness had not sufficed to save them
from the same doom which had overtaken the Vandals. The broken army made
one last stand in Campania, under a chief named Teia; but he was slain in
battle at Nuceria, and then the Goths surrendered. They told Narses that
the hand of God was against them; they would quit Italy, and go back to
dwell in the north, in the land of their fathers. So the poor remnant of
the conquering Ostrogoths marched off, crossed the Po and the Alps, and
passed away into oblivion in the northern darkness. The scheme of
Justinian was complete. Italy was his; but an Italy so wasted and
depopulated, that the traces of the ancient Roman rule had almost
vanished. “The land,” says a contemporary chronicler, “was reduced to
primeval solitude”—war and famine had swept it bare.
[Illustration]
Details Of St. Sophia.
It is strange to find that the Emperor was not tired out by waging this
desperate war with the Goths; the moment it ended he began to essay
another western conquest. There was civil war in Spain, and, taking
advantage of it, Liberius, governor of Africa, landed in Andalusia, and
rapidly took the great towns of the south of the peninsula—Cordova,
Cartagena, Malaga, and Cadiz. The factious Visigoths then dropped their
strife, united in arms under King Athangild, and checked the further
progress of the imperial arms. But a long slip of the lost territory was
not recovered by them. Justinian and his successors, down to A.D. 623,
reigned over the greater part of the sea-coast of Southern Spain.
VIII. THE END OF JUSTINIAN’S REIGN.
The slackness with which the generals of Justinian prosecuted the Gothic
war in the period between the triumph of Belisarius at Ravenna in A.D.
540, and the final conquest of Italy in A.D. 553, is mainly to be
explained by the fact that, just at the moment of the fall of Ravenna, the
empire became involved in a new struggle with its great Eastern neighbour.
Chosroës of Persia was seriously alarmed at the African and Italian
conquests of Justinian, and remembered that he too, as well as the Vandals
and Goths, was in possession of provinces that had formerly been Roman,
and might one day be reclaimed by the Emperor. He determined to strike
before Justinian had got free from his Italian war, and while the flower
of the Roman army was still in the West. Using as his pretext for war some
petty quarrels between two tribes of Arabs, subject respectively to Persia
and the empire, he declared war in the spring of A.D. 540. Justinian, as
the king had hoped, was caught unprepared: the army of the Euphrates was
so weak that it never dared face the Persians in the field, and the
opening of the war was fraught with such a disaster to the empire as had
not been known since the battle of Adrianople, more than a hundred and
sixty years before. Avoiding the fortresses of Mesopotamia, Chosroës, who
led his army in person, burst into Northern Syria. His main object was to
strike a blow at Antioch, the metropolis of the East, a rich city that had
not seen an enemy for nearly three centuries, and was reckoned safe from
all attacks owing to its distance from the frontier. Antioch had a strong
garrison of 6,000 men and the “Blues” and “Greens” of its circus factions
had taken arms to support the regular troops. But the commander was
incompetent, and the fortifications had been somewhat neglected of late.
After a sharp struggle, Chosroës took the town by assault; the garrison
cut its way out, and many of the inhabitants escaped with it, but the city
was sacked from cellar to garret and thousands of captives were dragged
away by the Persians. Chosroës planted them by the Euphrates—as
Nebuchadnezzar had done of old with the Jews—and built for them a city
which he called Chosroantiocheia, blending his own name with that of their
ancient abode.
This horrible disaster to the second city of the Roman East roused all
Justinian’s energy; neglecting the Italian war, he sent all his disposable
troops to the Euphrates frontier, and named Belisarius himself as the
chief commander. After this, Chosroës won no such successes as had
distinguished his first campaign. Having commenced an attack on the Roman
border fortresses in Colchis, far to the north, he was drawn home by the
news that Belisarius had invaded Assyria and was besieging Nisibis. On the
approach of the king the imperial general retired, but his manœuvre had
cost the Persian the fruits of a whole summer’s preparation, and the year
A.D. 541 ended without serious fighting. In the next spring very similar
operations followed: Belisarius defended the line of the Euphrates with
success, and the invaders retired after having reduced one single
Mesopotamian fortress. The war lingered for two years more, till Chosroës,
disgusted at the ill-success of all his efforts since his first success at
Antioch, and more especially humiliated by a bloody repulse from the walls
of Edessa, consented to treat for peace [A.D. 545]. He gave up his
conquests—which were of small importance—but regarded the honours of the
war as being his own, because Justinian consented to pay him 2,000 lbs. of
gold [£108,000] on the ratification of the treaty. One curious clause was
inserted in the document—though hostilities ceased everywhere else, the
rights of the two monarchs to the suzerainty of the kingdom of Lazica, on
the Colchian frontier, hard by the Black Sea, were left undefined. For no
less than seven years a sort of by-war was maintained in this small
district, while peace prevailed on all other points of the Perso-Roman
frontier. It was not till A.D. 556, after both parties had wasted much
treasure and many men on the unprofitable contest, that Chosroës resigned
the attempt to hold the small and rugged mountain kingdom of the Lazi, and
resigned it to Justinian on the promise of an annual grant of £18,000 as
compensation money.
But although Justinian had brought his second Persian war to a not
unsuccessful end, the empire had come badly out of the struggle, and was
by 556 falling into a condition of incipient disorder and decay. This was
partly caused by the reckless financial expedients of the Emperor, who
taxed the provinces with unexampled rigour while forced to maintain at
once a Persian and an Italian war.
The main part of the damage, however, was wrought by other than human
means. In A.D. 542 there broke out in the empire a plague such as had not
been known for three hundred years—the last similar visitation had fallen
in the reign of Trebonianus Gallus, far back in the third century. This
pestilence was one of the epoch-making events in the history of the
empire, as great a landmark as the Black Death in the history of England.
The details which Procopius gives us concerning its progress and results
leave no doubt that it operated more powerfully than any other factor in
that weakening of the empire which is noticeable in the second half of the
sixth century. When it reached Constantinople, 5,000 persons a day are
said to have fallen victims to it. All customary occupations ceased in the
city, and the market-place was empty save for corpse-bearers. In many
houses not a single soul remained alive, and the government had to take
special measures for the burial of neglected corpses. “The disease,” says
the chronicler, “did not attack any particular race or class of men, nor
prevail in any particular region, nor confine itself to any period of the
year. Summer or winter, North or South, Greek or Arabian, washed or
unwashed—of such distinctions the plague took no account. A man might
climb to the hill-top, and it was there; he might retire to the depths of
a cavern, and it was there also.” The only marked characteristic of its
ravages that the chronicler could find was that, “whether by chance or
providential design, it strictly spared the most wicked.”(12)
Justinian himself fell ill of the plague: he recovered, but was never his
old self again. Though he persevered inflexibly to his last day in his
scheme for the reconquest of the empire, yet he seems to have declined in
energy, and more especially to have lost that power of organization, which
had been his most marked characteristic. The chroniclers complain that he
had grown less hopeful and less masterful. “After achieving so much in the
days of his vigour, when he entered into the last stage of his life he
seemed to weary of his labours, and preferred to create discord among his
foes or to mollify them with gifts, instead of trusting to his arms and
facing the dangers of war. So he allowed his troops to decline in numbers,
because he did not expect to require their services. And his ministers,
who collected his taxes and maintained his armies were affected with the
same indifference.”(13)
One feature of the Emperor’s later years was that he took more and more
interest in theological disputes, even to the neglect of State business.
The Church question of the day was the dispute on Monophysitism, the
heresy which denied the existence both of a human and a divine nature in
Our Lord. Justinian was not a monophysite himself, but wished to unify the
sect with the main body of the Church by edicts of comprehension, which
forbade the discussion of the subject, and spent much trouble in coercing
prelates orthodox and heretical into a reconciliation which had no chance
of permanent success. His chief difficulty was with the bishops of Rome.
He forced Pope Vigilius to come to Constantinople, and kept him under
constraint for many months, till he signed all that was required of him
[A.D. 554]. The only result was to win Vigilius the reputation of a
heretic, and to cause a growing estrangement between East and West.
The gloom of Justinian’s later years was even more marked after the death
of his wife; Theodora died in A.D. 548, six years after the great plague,
and it may be that her loss was no less a cause of the diminished energy
of his later years than was his enfeebled health. Her bold and adventurous
spirit must have buoyed him up in many of the more difficult enterprises
of the first half of his reign. After her death, Justinian seems to have
trusted no one: his destined successor, Justinus, son of his sister, was
kept in the background, and no great minister seems to have possessed his
confidence. Even Belisarius, the first and most loyal soldier of the
empire, does not appear to have been trusted: in the second Gothic war the
Emperor stinted him of troops and hampered him with colleagues. At last he
was recalled [A.D. 549] and sent into private life, from which he was only
recalled on the occurrence of a sudden military crisis in A.D. 558.
This crisis was a striking example of the mismanagement of Justinian’s
later years. A nomad horde from the South Russian steppes, the Cotrigur
Huns, had crossed the frozen Danube at mid-winter, when hostilities were
least expected, and thrown themselves on the Thracian provinces. The
empire had 150,000 men under arms at the moment, but they were all
dispersed abroad, many in Italy, others in Africa, others in Spain, others
in Colchis, some in the Thebaid, and a few on the Mesopotamian frontier.
There was such a dearth of men to defend the home provinces that the
barbarians rode unhindered over the whole country side from the Danube to
the Propontis plundering and burning. One body, only 7,000 strong, came up
to within a few miles of the city gates, and inspired such fear that the
Constantinopolitans began to send their money and church-plate over to
Asia. Justinian then summoned Belisarius from his retirement, and placed
him in command of what troops there were available—a single regiment of
300 veterans from Italy, and the “Scholarian guards,” a body of local
troops 3,500 strong, raised in the city and entrusted with the charge of
its gates, which inspired little confidence as its members were allowed to
practice their trades and avocations and only called out in rotation for
occasional service. With this undisciplined force, which had never seen
war, at his back, Belisarius contrived to beat off the Huns. He led them
to pursue him back to a carefully prepared position, where the only point
that could be attacked was covered with woods and hedges on either side.
The untrustworthy “Scholarians” were placed on the flanks, where they
could not be seriously molested, while the 300 Italian veterans covered
the one vulnerable point. The Huns attacked, were shot down from the woods
and beaten off in front, and fled leaving 400 men on the field, while the
Romans only lost a few wounded and not a single soldier slain. Thus the
last military exploit of Belisarius preserved the suburbs of the imperial
city itself from molestation; after defending Old Rome in his prime, he
saved New Rome in his old age.
Even this last service did not prevent Justinian from viewing his great
servant with suspicion. Four years later an obscure conspiracy against his
life was discovered, and one of the conspirators named Belisarius as being
privy to the plot. The old emperor affected to believe the accusation,
sequestrated the general’s property, and kept him under surveillance for
eight months. Belisarius was then acquitted and restored to favour: he
lived two years longer, and died in March, 565.(14) The ungrateful master
whom he had served so well followed him to the grave nine months later.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
Of Justinian as conqueror and governor we have said much. But there remain
two more aspects of his life which deserve notice—his work as a builder
and his codification of the laws. From the days of Diocletian the style of
architecture which we call Byzantine, for want of a better name, had been
slowly developing from the old classic forms, and many of the emperors of
the fourth and fifth centuries had been given to building. But no previous
monarch had combined in such a degree as did Justinian the will and the
power to launch out into architectural experiments. He had at his disposal
the hoarded treasures of Anastasius, and his tastes were as magnificent as
those of the great builders of the early empire, Augustus and Nero and
Hadrian. All over the empire the monuments of his wealth and taste were
seen in dozens of churches, halls of justice, monasteries, forts,
hospitals, and colonnades. The historian Procopius was able to compose a
considerable volume entirely on the subject of Justinian’s buildings, and
numbers of them survive, some perfect and more in ruins, to witness to the
accuracy of the work. Even in the more secluded or outlying portions of
the empire, any fine building that is found is, in two cases out of three,
one of the works of Justinian. Not merely great centres like
Constantinople or Jerusalem, but out-of-the-way tracts in Cappadocia and
Isauria, are full of his buildings. Even in the newly-conquered Ravenna
his great churches of San Vitale, containing the celebrated mosaic
portraits of himself and his wife, and of St. Apollinare in the suburb of
Classis, outshine the older works of the fifth-century emperors and of the
Goth Theodoric.
[Illustration]
Columns In St. Sophia.
[Illustration]
Galleries Of St. Sophia.
Justinian’s churches, indeed, are the best known of his buildings. In
Oriental church-architecture his reign forms a landmark: up to his time
Christian architects had still been using two patterns copied straight
from Old Roman models. The first was the round domed church, whose origin
can be traced back to such Roman originals as the celebrated Temple of
Vesta—of such the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Rome may serve as a
type. The second was the rectangular church with apses, which was nothing
more than an adaptation for ecclesiastical purposes of the Old Roman
law-courts, and which had borrowed from them its name of _Basilica_. St.
Paul’s Outside the Walls, at Rome is a fair specimen. Justinian brought
into use for the first time on a large scale the combination of a
cruciform ground-plan and a very large dome. The famous Church of St.
Sophia may serve as the type of this style. The great cathedral of
Constantinople had already been burnt down twice, as we have had occasion
to relate: the first time on the eve of the banishment of John Chrysostom,
the second in the great “Nika” riot of 532. Within forty days of its
destruction Justinian had commenced preparations for rebuilding it as a
monument of his triumph in the civil strife. He chose as his architect
Anthemius of Tralles, the greatest of Byzantine builders, and one of the
few whose names have survived. The third church was different in plan from
either of its predecessors, showing the new combination which we have
already specified. It is a Greek cross, 241 feet long and 224 broad,
having in its midst a vast dome, pierced by no less than forty windows,
light and airy and soaring 180 feet above the floor. In the nave the
aisles and side apses are parted from the main central spaces by
magnificent colonnades of marble pillars, the majority of _verde antique_.
These are not for the most part the work of Justinian’s day, but were
plundered from the chief pagan temples of Asia, which served as an
inexhaustible quarry for the Christian builder. The whole of the interior,
both roof and dome, was covered with gilding or mosaics, which the
Vandalism of the Turks has covered with a coat of whitewash, to hide the
representations of human forms which are offensive to the Moslems’ creed.
Procopius describes the church with enthusiasm, and his praises are well
justified—
“It presents a most glorious spectacle, extraordinary to those who
behold it, and altogether incredible to those who know it by
report only. In height it rises to the very heavens, and overtops
the neighbouring buildings like a ship anchored among them. It
towers above the city which it adorns, and from it the whole of
Constantinople can be beheld, as from a watch-tower. Its breadth
and length are so judiciously chosen, that it appears both broad
and long without disproportion. For it excels both in size and
harmony, being more magnificent than ordinary buildings, and much
more elegant than the few which approach it in size. Within it is
singularly full of light and sunshine; you would declare that the
place is not lighted from without, but that the rays are produced
within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into it. The
gilded ceiling adds glory to its interior, though the light
reflected upon the gold from the marble surpasses it in beauty.
Who can tell of the splendour of the columns and marbles with
which the church is adorned? One would think that one had come
upon a meadow full of flowers in bloom—one wonders at the purple
tints of some, the green of others, the glowing red and glittering
white, and those, too, which nature, like a painter, has marked
with the strongest contrasts of colour. Moreover, it is impossible
accurately to describe the treasures of gold and silver plate and
gems which the Emperor has presented to the church: the Sanctuary
alone contains forty thousand pounds weight of silver.”
Justinian was almost as great a builder of forts as of churches, but his
military works have for the most part disappeared. It may give some idea
of his energy in fortifying the frontiers when we state that the Illyrian
provinces alone were protected by 294 forts, of which Procopius gives a
list, disposed in four successive lines from the Danube back to the
Thessalian hills. Some were single towers, but many were elaborate
fortresses with outworks, and all had to be protected by garrisons.
Thus much of Justinian as builder: space fails to enumerate a tithe of his
works. Of his great legal achievement we must speak at even shorter
length. The Roman law, as he received it from his predecessors was an
enormous mass of precedents and decisions, in which the original basis was
overlaid with the various and sometimes contradictory rescripts of five
centuries of emperors. Several of his predecessors, and most especially
Theodosius II., had endeavoured to codify the chaotic mass and reduce it
to order. But no one of them had produced a code which sufficed to bring
the law of the day into full accord with the spirit of the times. It was
no mean work to bring the ancient legislation of Rome, from the days of
the Twelve Tables down to the days of Justinian, into strict and logical
connection with the new Christian ideas which had worked their way into
predominance since the days of Constantine. Much of the old law was
hopelessly obsolete, owing to the change in moral ideas which Christianity
had introduced, but it is still astonishing to see how much of the old
forms of the times of the early empire survived into the sixth century.
Justinian employed a commission, headed by the clever but unpopular lawyer
Tribonian, to draw up his new code. The work was done for ever and a day,
and his “Institutes” and “Pandects” were the last revision of the Old
Roman laws, and the starting-point of all systematic legal study in
Europe, when, six hundred years later, the need for something more than
customary folk-right began to make itself felt, as mediæval civilization
evolved itself out of the chaos of the dark ages. If the Roman Empire had
flourished in the century after Justinian as in that which preceded him,
other revisers of the laws might have produced compilations that would
have made the “Institutes” seem out of date. But, as a matter of fact,
decay and chaos followed after Justinian, and succeeding emperors had
neither the need nor the inclination to do his work over again. Hence it
came to pass that his name is for ever associated with the last great
revision of Roman law, and that he himself went down to posterity as the
greatest of legislators, destined to be enthroned by Dante in one of the
starry thrones of his “Paradise,” and to be worshipped as the father of
law by all the legists of the Renaissance.
IX. THE COMING OF THE SLAVS.
The thirty years which followed the death of Justinian are covered by
three reigns, those of Justinus II. [565-578], Tiberius Constantinus
[578-582], and Maurice [582-602]. These three emperors were men of much
the same character as the predecessors of Justinian; each of them was an
experienced official of mature age, who was selected by the reigning
emperor as his most worthy successor. Justinus was the favourite nephew of
Justinian, and had served him for many years as Curopalates, or Master of
the Palace. Tiberius Constantinus was “Count of the Excubiti,” a high
Court officer in the suite of Justinus: Maurice again served Tiberius as
“Count of the Fœderati,” or chief of the Barbarian auxiliaries. They were
all men of capacity, and strove to do their best for the empire:
historians concur in praising the justice of Justinus, the liberality and
humanity of Tiberius, the piety of Maurice. Yet under them the empire was
steadily going down hill: the exhausting effects of the reign of Justinian
were making themselves felt more and more, and at the end of the reign of
Maurice a time of chaos and disaster was impending, which came to a head
under his successor.
The internal causes of the disaster of this time were the weakening of the
empire by the great plague of 544 and still more by the grinding exactions
of Justinian’s financial system. Its external phenomena were invasions by
new hordes from the north, combined with long and exhausting wars with
Persia. The virtues of the emperors seem to have helped them little:
Justin’s justice made him feared rather than loved; Tiberius’s liberality
rendered him popular, but drained the treasury; Maurice, on the other
hand, who was economical and endeavoured to fill the coffers which his
predecessors had emptied, was therefore universally condemned as
avaricious.
The troubles on the frontier which vexed the last thirty years of the
sixth century were due to three separate sets of enemies—the Lombards in
Italy, the Slavs and Avars in the Balkan Peninsula, and the Persians in
the East.
The empire held undisputed possession of Italy for no more than fifteen
years after the expulsion of the Ostrogoths in A.D. 553. Then a new enemy
came in from the north, following the same path that had already served
for the Visigoths of Alaric and the Ostrogoths of Theodoric. The
new-comers were the race of the Lombards, who had hitherto dwelt in
Hungary, on the Middle Danube, and had more frequently been found as
friends than as foes of the Romans. But their warlike and ambitious King
Alboin, having subdued all his nearer neighbours, began to covet the
fertile plains of Italy, where he saw the emperors keeping a very
inadequate garrison, now that the Ostrogoths were finally driven away. In
A.D. 568 Alboin and his hordes crossed the Alps, bringing with them wife
and child, and flocks and herds, while their old land on the Danube was
abandoned to the Avars. The Lombards took possession of the flat country
in the north of Italy, as far as the line of the Po, with very little
difficulty. The region, we are told, was almost uninhabited owing to the
combined effects of the great plague and the Ostrogothic war. In this once
fertile and populous, but now deserted, lowland, the Lombards settled down
in great numbers. There they have left their name as the permanent
denomination of the plain of Lombardy. Only one city, the strong fortress
of Pavia, held out against them for long; when it fell in 571, after a
gallant defence of three years, Alboin made it his capital, instead of
choosing one of the larger and more famous towns of Milan and Verona, the
older centres of life in the land he had conquered. After subduing
Lombardy the king pushed forward into Etruria, and overran the valley of
the Arno. But in the midst of his wars he was cut off, if the legend tells
us the truth, by the vengeance of his wife Queen Rosamund. She was the
daughter of Cunimund, King of the Gepidæ, whom Alboin had slain in battle.
The fallen monarch’s skull was, by the victor’s orders, mounted in gold
and fashioned into a cup. Long years after, amid the revelry of a drinking
bout, Alboin had the ghastly cup filled with wine, and bade his wife bear
it around to his chosen warriors. The queen obeyed, but vowed to revenge
herself by her husband’s death. By the sacrifice of her honour she bribed
Alboin’s armour-bearer to slay his master in his bed, and then fled with
him to Constantinople [A.D. 573].
But the death of Alboin did not put an end to the Lombard conquests in
Italy. The kingdom, indeed, broke up for a time into several independent
duchies, but the Lombard chiefs continued to win territory from the
empire. Two of them founded the considerable duchies of Spoleto and
Benevento, the one in Central, and the other in Southern Italy. These
states survived as independent powers, but the rest of the Lombard
territories were reunited by King Autharis, in 584, and he and his
immediate successors completed the conquest of Northern Italy.
Thus, during the reigns of Justin, Tiberius II., and Maurice, the greater
part of Justinian’s Italian conquests were lost, and formed once more into
Teutonic states. The emperor retained only two large stretches of
territory, the one in Central Italy, where he held a broad belt of land,
extending right across the peninsula, from Ravenna and Ancona on the
Adriatic, to Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea; the other comprehending the
extreme south of the land—the “toe” and “heel” of the Italian boot—and
comprising the territory of Bruttium and the Calabrian(15) towns of
Taranto, Brindisi, and Otranto. Sardinia and Sicily were also left
untouched by the Lombards, who never succeeded in building a fleet. The
Roman territory which stretched across Central Italy cut the Lombards in
two, the king ruling the main body of them in Tuscany and the valley of
the Po; while the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento maintained an isolated
existence in the south.
[Illustration]
Cross Of Justinus II. (_From the Vatican._) (_From "L’Art Byzantin," Par
C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
This partition of Italy between the Lombards and the empire is worth
remembering, from the fact that never again, till our own day, was the
whole peninsula gathered into a single state. Not till 1870, when the
kingdom of United Italy was completed by the conquest of Rome, did a time
come when all the lands between the Alps and the Straits of Messina were
governed by one ruler. Justinian had no successor till Victor Emmanuel.
After the Lombard conquest the imperial dominions in Italy were
administered by a governor, called the Exarch, who dwelt at Ravenna, the
northernmost and strongest of the imperial fortresses. All the Italian
provinces were nominally beneath his control, but, as a matter of fact, he
was only treated with implicit obedience by those of his subordinates who
dwelt in his own neighbourhood. He found it harder to enforce his orders
at Naples and Reggio, or in the distant islands of Sicily and Sardinia.
But it was the bishops of Rome who profited most by his absence: although
a “duke,” a military officer of some importance, dwelt at Rome, he was
from the first overshadowed by his spiritual neighbour. Even during the
days of the Ostrogoths the Roman bishops had acquired considerable
importance, as being the chief official representatives of the Italians in
dealings with their Teutonic masters. But they spoke with much more
freedom and weight when they had to do, not with a King of Italy dwelling
quite near them, but with a mere governor fettered by orders from distant
Constantinople. Gregory the Great [590-604] was the first of the popes who
began to assume an independent attitude and to treat the Exarch at Ravenna
with scant ceremony. He was an able and energetic man, who could not bear
to see Rome suffering for want of a ruler on the spot, and readily took
upon himself civil functions, in spite of the protests of his nominal
superior the Exarch. In 592, for example, he made a private truce for Rome
with the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, though the latter was at war with the
empire. The Emperor Maurice stormed at him as foolish and disobedient, but
did not venture to depose him, being too much troubled with Persian and
Avaric wars to send troops against Rome. On another occasion Gregory
nominated a governor for Naples, instead of leaving the appointment to the
Exarch. In 599 he acted as mediator between the Lombard king and the
government at Ravenna, as if he had been a neutral and independent
sovereign. Although he showed no wish to sever his connection with the
Roman Empire, Gregory behaved as if he considered the emperor his suzerain
rather than his immediate ruler. He would never give in on disputed
points, issued orders which contradicted imperial rescripts, and
maintained a bitter quarrel with successive patriarchs of Constantinople,
who possessed the favour of Maurice. When the patriarch John the Faster
took the title of “œcumenical bishop,” Gregory wrote to Maurice to tell
him that the presumption of John was a sure sign that the days of
Antichrist were at hand, and to urge him to repress such pretensions by
the force of the civil arm. This is one of the first signs of the approach
of that mediæval view of the papacy which imagined that it was the
pontiff’s duty to censure and advise kings and emperors on all possible
topics and occasions. Gregory’s immediate successors were not men of mark,
or a breach with the empire might have been precipitated. The final
disavowal of the supremacy of the Constantinopolitan monarch was to be
still delayed for nearly two hundred years.
The wars between the Exarchs of Ravenna and the Lombard kings were little
influenced by interference from the East. The emperors during the last
thirty years of the sixth century were far more engrossed with their
Persian and Slavonic wars. Contests with the Great king of the East
occupied no less than twenty years in the reigns of Justin II., Tiberius,
and Maurice. War was declared in 572, and did not cease till 592. Like the
struggle between Justinian and Chosroës I., thirty years before, it was
wholly indecisive. There were more plundering raids than battles, and the
frontier provinces of each empire were reduced to a dreadful state of
desolation and depopulation: if the Persians pushed their ravages as far
as the gates of Antioch, Roman generals penetrated deep into Media and
Corduene, where the imperial banner had not been seen for two hundred
years. The net result of the whole twenty years of strife was that each
combatant had seriously weakened and distressed his rival, without
obtaining any definite superiority over him. Forced to make peace by the
pressure of a civil war, Chosroës II. gave back to Maurice the two
frontier cities of Dara and Martyropolis, the sole trophies of twenty
campaigns, and ceded him a slice of Armenian territory. But these trivial
gains were far from compensating the empire for the fearful losses caused
by dozens of Persian invasions.
The Persian war was exhausting, but successful: on the northern frontier,
however, the Roman army had been faring far worse, and serious losses of
territory were beginning to take place. The enemies in this quarter were
two new tribes, who appeared on the Danube after the Lombards had departed
from it to commence their invasion of Italy. There were now no Teutons
left on the northern frontier of the empire: of the incoming tribes, one
was Tartar and the other Slavonic. The Avars were a nomadic race from
Asia, wild horsemen of the Steppes, much like their predecessors the Huns.
They had fled west to escape the Turks, who were at this time building up
an empire in Central Asia, and betook themselves to the South Russian
plains, not far from the mouth of the Danube. To cross the river and
ravage Moesia was too tempting a prospect to be neglected, and ere long
the Avaric cavalry were seen only too frequently along the Balkans and on
the coast of the Black Sea. Their first raid into Roman territory fell
into the year 562, just before the death of Justinian, and from that time
forward they were always causing trouble. They were ready enough to make
peace when money was paid them, but as they invariably broke the agreement
when the money was spent, it was never long before they reappeared south
of the Danube.
But the Slavs were a far more serious danger to the empire than the Avars.
The latter came only to plunder, the former—like the Germans two centuries
before—came pressing into the provinces to win themselves a new home. The
Romans knew at first of only two tribes of them, the Slovenes and Antae,
but behind these there were others who were gradually to push their way to
the south and make their presence known—Croats, Servians, and many more.
The Slavs were the easternmost of the Aryan peoples of Europe, and by far
the most backward. They had always lain behind the Germans, and it was
only when the German barrier was removed by the migration of the Goths and
Lombards that they came into touch with the empire. They were rude races,
far behind the Teutons in civilization; they had hardly learnt as yet the
simplest arts, knew nothing of defensive armour, and could only use for
boats tree-trunks hollowed out by fire—like the Australian savages of
to-day. They had not learnt to live under kings or chiefs, but dwelt in
village communities, governed by the patriarchs of the several families.
Their abodes were mud huts, and they cultivated no grain but millet. When
they went to war they could send out thousands of spearmen and bowmen, but
their wild bands were not very formidable in the open field. They could
resist neither cavalry nor disciplined infantry, and were only formidable
in woods and defiles, where they formed ambuscades and endeavoured to take
their enemy by surprise, and overwhelm him by a sudden rush. We are
assured that one of their favourite devices was to conceal themselves in
ponds or rivers by lying down in the water for hours together, breathing
through reeds, whose points were the only things visible above the
surface. Thus a thousand men might be concealed, and nothing appear except
a bed of rushes. This strange stratagem would seem incredible, if we had
not on record one or two occasions on which it was actually practised.
The Slavs had begun to make themselves felt early in the sixth century,
but it was not till the death of Justinian that we hear of them as a
pressing danger. But when the Lombards had passed away westward, they came
down to the Danube and began to cross it in great numbers, in the
endeavour to make permanent settlements on the Roman bank. The raids of
the Slavs and the Avars were curiously complicated, for the king, or
Chagan, of the Tartar tribe had made vassals of many of his Slavonic
neighbours. They, on the other hand, sometimes acted in obedience to him,
but more frequently tried to escape from his power by pushing forward into
Roman territory. Hence it comes that we often find Slav and Avar leagued
together, but at other times find them acting separately, or even in
opposition to each other. A more chaotic series of campaigns it is hard to
conceive.
Down to this time the inland of the Balkan peninsula had been inhabited by
Thracian and Illyrian provincials, of whom the majority spoke the Latin
tongue, though a few still preserved their ancient barbaric idiom.(16)
They formed the only large body of subjects of the empire outside Italy,
who still spoke the old ruling language, and as they were about a quarter
of its population, they did much to preserve its Roman character, and to
prevent it from becoming Greek or Asiatic. Their pride in their Latin
tongue was very marked: Justinian, born in the heart of the district, was
fond of laying special stress on the fact that Latin was his native
language.
On this Latinized Thraco-Illyrian population the invasion of the Slavs and
Avars fell with unexampled severity. The Goths had afflicted them before,
but they, at least, had been Christian and semi-civilized, while the
new-comers were in the lowest grade of savagery. It is not too much to say
that between 570 and 600 the old population was almost exterminated over
the greater part of the country north of the Balkans—the modern Servia and
Bulgaria—and very sadly cut down even in the more sheltered Macedonian and
Thracian provinces. The Latin-speaking provincials almost disappeared: the
only remnants of them were the Dalmatian islanders and the “Vlachs” or
Wallachians who are found in later times scattered in small bodies among
the Slavs who had swept over the whole country-side. The effect of the
invasion is well described by the contemporary chronicler, John of
Ephesus—
“The year 581 was famous for the invasion of the accursed people called
Slavonians, who overran Greece and the country by Thessalonica, and all
Thrace, and captured the cities and took many forts, and devastated and
burnt, and reduced the people to slavery, and made themselves masters of
the whole country, and settled in it, by main force, and dwelt in it as
though it had been their own. Four years have now elapsed, and still they
live at their ease in the land, and spread themselves far and wide, as far
as God permits them, and ravage and burn and take captive, and still they
encamp and dwell there.”
The open country was swept bare by the Slavs: the towns resisted better,
for neither Slav nor Avar was skilled in siege operations. Relying upon
the fortified towns as his base the great general Priscus, whom Maurice
placed in command, was able to keep his ground along the Danube, and to
perform many gallant exploits. He even crossed the river and attacked the
Slavs and Avars in their own homes beyond it; but it was to no effect that
he burnt their villages and slew off their warriors. He could not protect
the unarmed population in the open country within the Roman boundary, and
the girdle of fortresses along the Danube soon covered nothing but a
wasted region, sparsely inhabited by Slavs. The limit of Roman population
had fallen back to the line of the Balkans, and even to the south of it,
and the Slavs were ever slipping across the Danube in larger and larger
numbers, despite the garrisons along the river which were still kept up
from Singidunum [Belgrade] to Dorostolum [Silistria].
The misfortunes of the Avaric and Slavonic war were the cause of the fall
of the Emperor Maurice. He had won some unpopularity by his manifest
inability to stem the tide of the barbarian invasion, and more by an act
of callousness, of which he was guilty in 599. The Chagan of the Avars had
captured 15,000 prisoners, and offered to release them for a large ransom.
Maurice—whose treasury was empty—refused to comply, and the Chagan
massacred the wretched captives. But the immediate cause of the emperor’s
fall was his way of dealing with the army. He was unpopular with the
soldiery, though an old soldier himself, and did not possess their respect
or confidence. Yet he was an officer of some merit and had written a long
military treatise called the “Strategicon,” which was the official
handbook of the imperial armies for three hundred years.
Maurice sealed his fate when, in 602, he issued orders for the
discontented army of the Danube to winter north of the river, in the waste
marshes of the Slavs. The troops refused to obey the order, and chased
away their generals. Then electing as their captain an obscure centurion,
named Phocas, they marched on Constantinople.
Maurice armed the city factions, the “Blues” and “Greens,” and strove to
defend himself. But when he saw that no one would fight for him, he fled
across the Bosphorus with his wife and children, to seek refuge in the
Asiatic provinces, where he was less unpopular than in Europe. Soon he was
pursued by orders of Phocas, whom the army had now saluted as emperor, and
caught at Chalcedon. The cruel usurper had him executed along with all his
five sons, the youngest a child of only three years of age. Maurice died
with a courage and piety that moved even his enemies, exclaiming with his
last breath, “Thou art just, O Lord, and just are thy judgments!”
X. THE DARKEST HOUR.
For the first time since Constantinople had become the seat of empire the
throne had been won by armed rebellion and the murder of the legitimate
ruler. The break in the peaceful and orderly succession which had hitherto
prevailed was not only an evil precedent, but an immediate disaster. The
new emperor proved a far worse governor than the unfortunate Maurice, who,
in spite of his faults and his ill luck, had always been hard-working,
moderate, pious, and economical. Phocas was a mere brutal soldier—cruel,
ignorant, suspicious, and reckless, and in his incapable hands the empire
began to fall to pieces with alarming rapidity. He opened his reign with a
series of cruel executions of his predecessor’s friends, and from that
moment his deeds of bloodshed never ceased: probably the worst of them was
the execution of Constantina, widow of Maurice and daughter of Tiberius
II., whom he slew together with her three young daughters, lest their
names might be used as the excuse for a conspiracy against him. But even
greater horror seems to have been caused when he burnt alive the able
general Narses,(17) who had won many laurels in the last Persian war.
Narses had come up to the capital under safe conduct to clear himself from
accusations of treason: so the Emperor not only devised a punishment which
had never yet been heard of since the empire became Christian, but broke
his own plighted oath.
The moment that Phocas had mounted the throne, Chosroës of Persia declared
war on him, using the hypocritical pretext that he wished to revenge
Maurice, for whom he professed a warm personal friendship. This war was
far different from the indecisive contests in the reigns of Justinian and
Justin II. In two successive years the Persians burst into North Syria and
ravaged it as far as the sea; but in the third they turned north and swept
over the hitherto untouched provinces of Asia Minor. In 608 their main
army penetrated across Cappadocia and Galatia right up to the gates of
Chalcedon. The inhabitants of Constantinople could see the blazing
villages across the water on the Asiatic shore—a sight as new as it was
terrifying; for although Thrace had several times been harried to within
sight of the city, no enemy had ever been seen in Bithynia.
Plot after plot was formed in the capital against Phocas, but he succeeded
in putting them all down, and slew the conspirators with fearful tortures.
For eight years his reign continued: Constantinople was full of
executions; Asia was ravaged from sea to sea; the Thracian and Illyrian
provinces were overrun more and more by the Slavs, now that the army of
Europe had been transferred across the Bosphorus to make head against the
Persians. Yet Phocas still held on to Constantinople: the creature of a
military revolt himself, it was by a military revolt alone that he was
destined to be overthrown.
Africa was the only portion of the Roman Empire which in the reign of
Phocas was suffering neither from civil strife nor foreign invasion. It
was well governed by the aged exarch Heraclius, who was so well liked in
the province that the emperor had not dared to depose him. Urged by
desperate entreaties from all parties in Constantinople to strike a blow
against the tyrant, and deliver the empire from the yoke of a monster,
Heraclius at last consented. He quietly got ready a fleet, which he placed
under the orders of his son, who bore the same name as himself. This he
despatched against Constantinople, while at the same time his nephew
Nicetas led a large body of horse along the African shore to invade Egypt.
When Heraclius the younger arrived with his fleet at the Dardanelles, all
the prominent citizens of Constantinople fled secretly to take refuge with
him. As he neared the capital the troops of Phocas burst into mutiny: the
tyrant’s fleet was scattered after a slight engagement, and the city threw
open its gates. Phocas was seized in the palace by an official whom he had
cruelly wronged, and brought aboard the galley of the conqueror. “Is it
thus,” said Heraclius, “that you have governed the empire?” “Will you
govern it any better?” sneered the desperate usurper. Heraclius spurned
him away with his foot, and the sailors hewed him to pieces on the deck.
Next day the patriarch and the senate hailed Heraclius as emperor, and he
was duly crowned in St. Sophia on October 5, A.D. 610.
Heraclius took over the empire in such a state of disorder and confusion
that he must soon have felt that there was some truth in the dying sneer
of Phocas. It seemed almost impossible to get things into better order,
for resources were wanting. Save Africa and Egypt and the district
immediately around the capital, all the provinces were overrun by the
Persian, the Avar, and the Slav. The treasury was empty, and the army had
almost disappeared owing to repeated and bloody defeats in Asia Minor.
Heraclius seems at first to have almost despaired of the possibility of
evolving order out of this chaos, though he was in the prime of life and
strength—“a man of middle stature, strongly built, and broad-chested, with
grey eyes and yellow hair, and of a very fair complexion; he wore a bushy
beard when he came to the throne, but afterwards cut it short.” For the
first twelve years of his reign he remained at Constantinople,
endeavouring to reorganize the empire, and to defend at any rate the
frontiers of Thrace and Asia Minor. The more distant provinces he hardly
seems to have hoped to save, and the chronicle of his early years is
filled with the catalogue of the losses of the empire. Mesopotamia and
North Syria had already been lost by Phocas, but in 613, while the
imperial armies were endeavouring to defend Cappadocia, the Persian
general Shahrbarz turned southwards and attacked Central Syria. The great
town of Damascus fell into his hands; but worse was to come. In 614 the
Persian army appeared before the holy city of Jerusalem, took it after a
short resistance, and occupied it with a garrison. But the populace rose
and slaughtered the Persian troops when Shahrbarz had departed with his
main army. This brought him back in wrath: he stormed the city and put
90,000 Christians to the sword, only sparing the Jewish inhabitants.
Zacharias, Patriarch of Jerusalem, was carried into captivity, and with
him went what all Christians then regarded as the most precious thing in
the world—the wood of the “True Cross.” Helena, the mother of Constantine,
had dug the relic up, according to the well-known legend, on Mount Moriah,
and built for it a splendid shrine. Now Shahrbarz desecrated the church
and took off the “True Cross” to Persia.
This loss brought the inhabitants of the East almost to despair; they
thought that the luck of the empire had departed with the Holy Wood, which
had served as its Palladium, and even imagined that the Last Day was at
hand and that Chosroës of Persia was Antichrist. The mad language of pride
and insult which the Persian in the day of his triumph used to Heraclius
might also explain their belief. His blasphemous phrases seem like an echo
of the letter of Sennacherib in the Second Book of Kings. The epistle
ran:—
“Chosroës, greatest of gods, and master of the whole earth, to Heraclius,
his vile and insensate slave. Have I not destroyed the Greeks? You say you
trust in your God: why, then, has he not delivered out of my hand
Caesarea, Jerusalem, and Alexandria? Shall I not also destroy
Constantinople? But I will pardon all your sins if you will come to me
with your wife and children; I will give you lands, vines, and olive
groves, and will look upon you with a kindly aspect. Do not deceive
yourself with the vain hope in that Christ, who was not even able to save
himself from the Jews, who slew him by nailing him to a cross.”
The horror and rage roused by the loss of the “True Cross” and the
blasphemies of King Chosroës brought about the first real outburst of
national feeling that we meet in the history of the Eastern Empire. It was
felt that the fate of Christendom hung in the balance, and that all, from
highest to lowest, were bound to make one great effort to beat back the
fire-worshipping Persians from Palestine, and recover the Holy Places. The
Emperor vowed that he would take the field at the head of the army—a thing
most unprecedented, for since the death of Theodosius I., in 395, no
Caesar had ever gone out in person to war. The Church came forward in the
most noble way—at the instance of the Patriarch Sergius all the churches
of Constantinople sent their treasures and ornaments to the mint to be
coined down, and serve as a great loan to the state, which was to be
repaid when the Persians should have been conquered. The free dole of corn
which the inhabitants of the capital had been receiving ever since the
days of Constantine was abolished, and the populace bore the privation
without demur. It was indeed observed that this measure not only saved the
treasury, but drove into the army—where they were useful—thousands of the
able-bodied loiterers who were the strength of the circus factions and the
pest of the city. If the dole had been continued Heraclius could not have
found a penny for the war. Egypt, the granary of the empire, had been lost
in 616, and the supply of government corn entirely cut off, so that the
dole would have had to be provided by the treasury buying corn, a
ruinously expensive task.
By the aid of the Church loan Heraclius equipped a new army and
strengthened his fleet. He also provided for the garrisoning of
Constantinople by an adequate force, a most necessary precaution, for in
617 the Persians had again forced their way to the Bosphorus, and this
time captured Chalcedon. Heraclius would probably have taken the field
next year but for troubles with the Avars. That wild race had long been
working their wicked will on the almost undefended Thracian provinces, but
now they promised peace. Heraclius went out, at the Chagan’s pressing
invitation, to meet him near Heraclea. But the conference was a snare, for
the treacherous savage had planted ambushes on the way to secure the
person of the Emperor, and Heraclius only escaped by the speed of his
horse. He cast off his imperial mantle to ride the faster, and galloped
into the capital just in time to close its gates as the vanguard of the
Chagan’s army came in sight. The Avars kept the Emperor engaged for some
time, and it was not till 622 that he was able to take the field against
the Persians.
This expedition of Heraclius was in spirit the first of the Crusades. It
was the first war that the Roman Empire had ever undertaken in a spirit of
religious enthusiasm, for it was to no mere political end that the Emperor
and his people looked forward. The army marched out to save Christendom,
to conquer the Holy Places, and to recover the “True Cross.” The men were
wrought up to a high pitch of enthusiasm by warlike sermons, and the
Emperor carried with him, to stimulate his zeal, a holy picture—one of
those _eikons_ in which the Greek Church has always delighted—which was
believed to be the work of no mortal hands.
Heraclius made no less than six campaigns (A.D. 622-27) in his gallant and
successful attempt to save the half-ruined empire. He won great and
well-deserved fame, and his name would be reckoned among the foremost of
the world’s warrior-kings if it had not been for the misfortunes which
afterwards fell on him in his old age.
His first campaign cleared Asia Minor of the Persian hosts, not by a
direct attack, but by skilful strategy. Instead of attacking the army at
Chalcedon, he took ship and landed in Cilicia, in the rear of the enemy,
threatening in this position both Syria and Cappadocia. As he expected,
the Persians broke up from their camp opposite Constantinople, and came
back to fall upon him. But after much manœuvring he completely beat the
general Shahrbarz, and cleared Asia Minor of the enemy.
In his next campaigns Heraclius endeavoured to liberate the rest of the
Roman Empire by a similar plan: he resolved to assail Chosroës at home,
and force him to recall the armies he kept in Syria and Egypt to defend
his own Persian provinces. In 623-4 the Emperor advanced across the
Armenian mountains and threw himself into Media, where his army revenged
the woes of Antioch and Jerusalem by burning the fire-temples of
Ganzaca—the Median capital—and Thebarmes, the birthplace of the Persian
prophet Zoroaster. Chosroës, as might have been expected, recalled his
troops from the west, and fought two desperate battles to cover Ctesiphon.
His generals were defeated in both, but the Roman army suffered severely.
Winter was at hand, and Heraclius fell back on Armenia. In his next
campaign he recovered Roman Mesopotamia, with its fortresses of Amida,
Dara, and Martyropolis, and again defeated the general Shahrbarz.
But 626 was the decisive year of the war. The obstinate Chosroës
determined on one final effort to crush Heraclius, by concerting a joint
plan of operations with the Chagan of the Avars. While the main Persian
army watched the emperor in Armenia, a great body under Shahrbarz slipped
south of him into Asia Minor and marched on the Bosphorus. At the same
moment the Chagan of the Avars, with the whole force of his tribe and of
his Slavonic dependants, burst over the Balkans and beset Constantinople
on the European side. The two barbarian hosts could see each other across
the water, and even contrived to exchange messages, but the Roman fleet
sailing incessantly up and down the strait kept them from joining forces.
In the June, July, and August of 626 the capital was thus beset: the
danger appeared imminent, and the Emperor was far away on the Euphrates.
But the garrison was strong, the patrician Bonus, its commander, was an
able officer, the fleet was efficient, and the same crusading fervour
which had inspired the Constantinopolitans in 622 still buoyed up their
spirits. In the end of July 80,000 Avars and Slavs, with all sorts of
siege implements, delivered simultaneous assaults along the land front of
the city, but they were beaten back with great slaughter. Next the Chagan
built himself rafts and tried to bring the Persians across, but the Roman
galleys sunk the clumsy structures, and slew thousands of the Slavs who
had come off in small boats to attack the fleet. Then the Chagan gave up
the siege in disgust and retired across the Danube.
Heraclius had shown great confidence in the strength of Constantinople and
the courage of its defenders. He sent a few veteran troops to aid the
garrison, but did not slacken from his attack on Persia. While Shahrbarz
and the Chagan were besieging his capital, he himself was wasting Media
and Mesopotamia. He imitated King Chosroës in calling in Tartar allies
from the north, and revenged the ravages of the Avars in Thrace by turning
40,000 Khazar horsemen loose on Northern Persia. The enemy gave way before
him everywhere, and the Persians began to grow desperate.
Next year King Chosroës put into the field the last levy of Persia, under
a general named Rhazates, whom he bid to go out and “conquer or die.” At
the same time he wrote to command Shahrbarz to evacuate Chalcedon and
return home in haste. But Heraclius intercepted the despatch of recall,
and Shahrbarz came not.
Near Nineveh Heraclius fell in with the Persian home army and inflicted on
it a decisive defeat. He himself, charging at the head of his cavalry,
rode down the general of the enemy and slew him with his lance. Chosroës
could put no new army in the field, and by Christmas Heraclius had seized
his palace of Dastagerd, and divided among his troops such a plunder as
had never been seen since Alexander the Great captured Susa.
The Nemesis of Chosroës’ insane vanity had now arrived. Ten years after he
had written his vaunting letter to Heraclius he found himself in far worse
plight than his adversary had ever been. After Dastagerd had fallen he
retired to Ctesiphon, the capital of his empire, but even from thence he
had to flee on the approach of the enemy. Then the end came: his own son
Siroes and his chief nobles seized him and threw him in chains, and a few
days after he died—of rage and despair according to one story, of
starvation if the darker tale is true.
The new king sent the humblest messages to the victorious Roman, hailing
him as his “father,” and apologizing for all the woes that the ambition of
Chosroës had brought upon the world. Heraclius received his ambassadors
with kindness, and granted peace, on the condition that every inch of
Roman territory should be evacuated, all Roman captives freed, a war
indemnity paid, and the spoils of Jerusalem, including the “True Cross,”
faithfully restored. Siroes consented with alacrity, and in March, 628, a
glorious peace ended the twenty-six years of the Persian war.
Heraclius returned to Constantinople in the summer of the same year with
his spoils, his victorious army, and his great trophy, the “Holy Wood.”
His entry was celebrated in the style of an old Roman triumph, and the
Senate conferred on him the title of the “New Scipio.” The whole of the
citizens, bearing myrtle boughs, came out to meet the army, and the
ceremony concluded with the exhibition of the “True Cross” before the high
altar of St. Sophia. Heraclius afterwards took it back in great pomp to
Jerusalem.
This was, perhaps, the greatest triumph that any emperor ever won.
Heraclius had surpassed the eastern achievements of Trajan and Severus,
and led his troops further east than any Roman general had ever
penetrated. His task, too, had been the hardest ever imposed on an
emperor; none of his predecessors had ever started to war with his very
capital beleaguered and with three-fourths of his provinces in the hands
of the enemy. Since Julius Caesar no one had fought so incessantly—for six
years the emperor had not been out of the saddle—nor met with such uniform
success.
Heraclius returned to Constantinople to spend, as he hoped, the rest of
his years in peace. He had now reached the age of fifty-four, and was much
worn by his incessant campaigning. But the quiet for which he yearned was
to be denied him, and the end of his reign was to be almost as disastrous
as the commencement.
The great Saracen invasion was at hand, and it was at the very moment of
Heraclius’ triumph that Mahomet sent out his famous circular letter to the
kings of the earth, inviting them to embrace Islam. If the Emperor could
but have known that his desolated realm, spoiled for ten long years by the
Persian and the Avar, and drained of men and money, was to be invaded by a
new enemy far more terrible than the old, he would have prayed that the
day of his triumph might also be the day of his death.
XI. SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE. (A.D. 320-620.)
The reign of Heraclius forms the best dividing point in the history of the
empire between what may roughly be called Ancient History and the Middle
Ages. There is no break at all between Constantine and Heraclius, though
the area, character, social life, and religion of the empire had been
greatly modified in the three hundred years that separated them. The new
order of things, which commenced when Constantine established his capital
on the Bosphorus, had a peaceable and orderly development. The first
prominent fact that strikes the eye in the history of the three centuries
is that the sceptre passed from sovereign to sovereign in quiet and
undisturbed devolution. From the death of Valens onward there is no
instance of a military usurper breaking the line of succession till the
crowning of Phocas in 602. The emperors were either designated by their
predecessors or—less frequently—chosen by the high officials and the
senate. The regularity of their sequence is all the more astonishing when
we realize that only in three cases in the whole period was father
succeeded by son. Saving Constantine himself, Theodosius I., and Arcadius,
not a single emperor left male issue; yet the hereditary instinct had
grown so strong in the empire that nephews, sons-in-law, and
brothers-in-law of sovereigns were gladly received as their legitimate
heirs. Considering this tendency, it is extraordinary to note that the
whole three hundred years did not produce a single unmitigated tyrant.
Constantius II. was gloomy and sometimes cruel, Valens was stupid and
avaricious, Arcadius utterly weak and inept, Justinian hard and thankless;
but the general average of the emperors were men of respectable ability,
and in moral character they will compare favourably with any list of
sovereigns of similar length that any country can produce.
The chief modifications which must be marked in the character of the
empire between 320 and 620 depend on two processes of gradual change which
were going on throughout the three centuries. The first was the gradual
de-Romanization (if we may coin the uncouth word) alike of the governing
classes and the masses of population. In the fourth century the Roman
impress was still strong in the East; the Latin language was habitually
spoken by every educated man, and nearly all the machinery of the
administration was worked in Latin phraseology. All law terms are
habitually Latin, all titles of officers, all names of taxes and
institutions. Writers born and bred in Greece or Asia still wrote in Latin
as often as in the Greek which must have been more familiar to them.
Ammianus Marcellinus may serve as a fair example: born in Greece, he wrote
in the tongue of the ruling race rather than in his own idiom. Moreover
there was still in the lands east of the Adriatic a very large body of
Latin-speaking population—comprising all the inhabitants of the inland of
the Balkan peninsula, for, except Greece proper, Macedonia, and a
scattered line of cities along the Thracian coast, the whole land had
learnt to speak the tongue of its conquerors.
By the seventh century this Roman element was rapidly vanishing. It is
true that the Emperor was still hailed as the “Pius, Felix, Perpetuus,
Augustus”: it was not till about A.D. 800 that he dropped the old style
and called himself “Ἐν Χριστῷ πιστὸς βασιλεὺς τῶν Ῥωμαίων.” Nor were the
old Roman official titles yet disused: men were still tribunes and
patricians, counts and praetors, but little more than the names survived.
Already in the sixth century a knowledge of Latin was growing unusual even
among educated men. The author Johannes Lydus tells us that he owed his
rise in the civil service mainly to this rare accomplishment. Procopius,
the best writer of the day and a man of real merit and discernment, was
absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Latin, and blunders when he tries
to translate the simplest phrase. Justinian was the last emperor who spoke
Latin as his mother tongue, all his successors were better skilled in
Greek.
The gradual disuse of Latin has its origin in the practical—though not
formal—solution of the continuity between Rome and the East, which began
with the division of the empire between the sons of Constantine and became
more complete after Odoacer made himself King of Italy in 476. In the
course of a century and a half the Latin element in the East, cut off from
the Latin-speaking West, was bound to yield before the predominant Greek.
But the process would have been slower if the Eastern provinces which
spoke Latin had not been those which suffered most from the barbarians.
The Visigoths and Ostrogoths harassed and decimated the Thracians,
Illyrians, and Moesians, but the Slavs a century later almost exterminated
them. In A.D. 400 probably a quarter of the provincials east of the
Adriatic spoke Latin; in A.D. 620 not a tenth. The Romanized lands of the
Balkan peninsula had now become Slavonic principalities: only the
Dalmatian seaports and a few scattered survivors in the Balkans still used
the old tongue. The only districts where a considerable Latin-speaking
population obeyed the Emperor were Africa and the Italian Exarchate, now
reunited to Constantinople by the conquests of Justinian. But they seem to
have been too remote from the centre of life and government to have
exercised any influence or delayed the de-Romanizing of the East. The last
notable author, who being a subject of the empire wrote in Latin as his
native tongue, was the poet Flavius Corippus who addressed a long
panegyric to Justinus II.: as might have been expected, he was an African.
While the empire was losing its Rom
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