Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire
by William Holden Hutton · English · Gutenberg #41391 · 580,782 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Constantinople: The Story of the Old Capital of the Empire
Author: William Holden Hutton
Illustrator: Sydney Cooper
Release date: November 17, 2012 [eBook #41391]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation, spelling and use of diacritics in the
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On page 38, "Theodore of Tyrone" should possibly be "Theodore of
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_The Story of Constantinople_
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration: Interior of S. Sophia.
Showing the Sultan's pew and the stairs to the pulpit.]
Constantinople
_The Story of the old Capital
of the Empire by William
Holden Hutton, Fellow of
S. John Baptist College, Oxford.
Illustrated by Sydney Cooper_
_London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden, W.C. 1900_
This superb successor
Of the earth's mistress, as thou vainly speakest,
Stands 'midst these ages as, on the wide ocean,
The last spared fragment of a spacious land,
That in some grand and awful ministration
Of mighty nature has engulfed been,
Doth lift aloft its dark and rocky cliffs
O'er the wild waste around, and sadly frowns
In lonely majesty.
* * * * *
I was the daughter of Imperial Rome,
Crowned by her Empress of the mystic east:
Most Holy Wisdom chose me for her home
Sealed me Truth's regent, and High Beauty's priest.
Lo! when fate struck with hideous flame and sword,
Far o'er the new world's life my grace was poured.
PREFACE
A word of introduction is necessary to explain the nature of this
sketch of the history of Constantinople. It is the holiday-task, very
pleasant to him, of a College don, to whom there is no city in the
world so impressive and so fascinating as the ancient home of the
Cæsars of the East.
It is not intended to supersede the indispensable Murray. For a city
so great, in which there is so much to see, a guide-book full of
practical details is absolutely necessary. For this I can refer the
reader, with entire confidence, to Murray's _Hand-book_--and to
nothing else. But I think everyone who visits Constantinople feels the
need of some sketch of its long and wonderful history. I have myself
often felt the need as I wandered about the city, or spent a long
evening, during the cold spring, in the hotel. I have endeavoured, as
best I could, to supply what I have myself wanted. I do not pretend to
have written a history of the city "from the earliest times to the
present day" from the mass of original authorities of which I know
something. I have used the works of the best modern writers freely,
and I should like here, once for all, to express my obligations. I may
venture to say that the list of books I here insert will be found
useful by anyone who wishes to go further into the history than my
little book is able to take him. The ordinary standard books are
Professor Bury's edition of Gibbon; Mr Tozer's edition of Finlay's
_History of Greece_; Professor Bury's _History of the Later Empire_;
Von Hammer's _History of the Turks_; and the Vicomte de la Jonquière's
sketch of the same subject.
The authorities, in detail, for the history and topography of the city
are admirably summed up in Herr Eugen Oberhummer's contribution to the
Pauly-Wissowas _Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft_,
band iv., which can be purchased separately as a "Sonder-Abdruck."
Among the books which I have found especially useful I must mention
first Professor van Millingen's _Byzantine Constantinople, The
Walls, etc._; the _Broken Bits of Byzantium_, by Mrs Walker and the
late Rev. C. G. Curtis, to whose kindness I owe very much, a book
which is now very rarely to be met with, and ought certainly to be
republished; Bayet, _L'Art Byzantin_; Kraus, _Geschichte der
Christlichen Kunst_; Lethaby and Swainson, _S. Sophia_; Grosvenor,
_Constantinople_; Paspates, _The Great Palace of Constantinople_.
Among histories of particular periods there are none more useful than
Pears' _Conquest of Constantinople_, and Mijatovich, _Constantine the
last Emperor of the Greeks_. Among a mass of interesting and important
articles I should like to note that on _Les Débuts du Monachisme à
Constantinople_, by M. Pargoire in the _Revue des questions
historiques_, Jan. 1899.
The texts of the original authorities may be read in the Bonn edition,
and some of them, happily, in Professor Bury's admirable collection of
Byzantine texts, of which I have found the three volumes already
published most useful. I have referred in Chapter VII. to the work of
Gyllius, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of the mediæval city.
I have referred to a great number of books of travel, as may be seen;
it is impossible here to particularise them all.
The limits of the series have compelled me to confine myself chiefly
to the story of Constantinople as a mediæval town. Thus I have been
reluctantly compelled to leave out much that I should have liked to
say about Skutari, the Bosphorus and its palaces, and the present
social life and religious observances, the Dervishes, the "Sweet
Waters," and many familiar names.
For the same reason, I have dwelt very briefly on much that is of
great interest. I would gladly, for instance, have said more about
Iconoclasm, and something about that great theologian, S. Theodore of
the Studium.
Practically, I may add that the advice of Murray's Guide is always to
be taken; personally I have always found the Hotel Bristol most
comfortable in every way, and I have no occasion to commend any other
hotel, because I have never felt tempted to leave it. It has had
varied fortunes, but it is at its best, I think, as managed by Herr H.
Güllering. I have myself found a dragoman, except for the first day,
unnecessary; but I can strongly recommend Eustathios Livathinos as a
most pleasant companion. Jacob Moses has also much experience.
I should add that in my spelling of names I have usually adopted, for
simplicity, the common use; but I fear I have not even been uniform.
I owe very much to the kind offices of Lord Currie and of Sir Nicholas
O'Connor, Her Majesty's Ambassadors in 1896 and 1899, and to several
members of the Embassy, with a very special debt of gratitude to Mr
Fitzmaurice, C.M.G. I can never forget the kindness of the late Canon
C. G. Curtis, whose death in 1896 was so great a loss to the British
community in Constantinople, to archæology, and to religion.
In several instances photographs taken by my friend, Mr J. W.
Milligan, who was in Constantinople in 1896, have been of not a little
use to my friend, the Rev. Sydney Cooper, to whose illustrations this
book will owe very much more than half its interest.
W. H. HUTTON.
THE GREAT HOUSE, BURFORD, OXON,
_S. Mark's Day, 1900_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
_The History of the City in ancient and mediæval
times_ 1
CHAPTER II
_Constantinople under the Turks_ 154
CHAPTER III
_The Churches_ 231
CHAPTER IV
_The Walls_ 270
CHAPTER V
_The Mosques, Türbehs and Fountains_ 290
CHAPTER VI
_The Palaces_ 310
CHAPTER VII
_Antiquities_ 320
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_Interior of S. Sophia_ _Frontispiece_
_Seraglio Point after Sunset_ 2
_Therapia_ 4
_The Hippodrome and Mosque of Ahmed_ 9
_Yeri Batan Serai (Cistern)_ 28
_The Imperial Quarter (Plan)_ 31
_The Burnt Column_ 35
_S. Sophia and the Ministry of Justice from the Sea_ 37
_The Golden Gate_ 42
_The Golden Horn from Eyûb_ 53
_The Aqueduct of Valens_ 67
_Roumeli Hissar_ 139
_In the Cemetery at Scutari_ 154
_The Golden Horn from Pera, after Sunset_ 173
_Fountain in the Court of Mosque of Valideh_ 186
_Interior of Mosque of Ahmed I._ 191
_Houses in the Phanar_ 207
_Street in Galata_ 223
_Capitals from S. Sophia_ 232
_Courtyard of the Church of the Studium_ 234
_Plan of SS. Sergius and Bacchus_ 237
_Plan of S. Sophia_ 245
_In the Gallery of S. Sophia_ 253
_Ornament on the Brazen Lintel above the Principal
Door of S. Sophia_ 257
_Bronze Door of Southern Entrance to the Narthex,
S. Sophia_ 258
_Ancient Urn in S. Sophia_ 260
_Church of the Pantokrator_ 267
_Part of the Walls of Theodosius: the Seven Towers
in the Background_ 270
_Kadikeui (Chalcedon) from Seraglio Point_ 272
_The Marble Tower at S.W. Corner of the Walls_ 277
_Walls near the Golden Gate: Roman Road in
Foreground_ 281
_Mohammed, the Apostle of God. Embroidery from
Curtain over the Door of S. Sophia_ 290
_Mosque of Mohammed II. from English Embassy_ 291
_Mosque of Suleiman from the Golden Horn_ 293
_Court of the Mosque of Ahmed I._ 299
_An Entrance to the Mosque of Ahmed_ 301
_Mural Tiles from the Mosque of Valideh_ 305
_In a Türbeh_ 306
_Entrance to the Türbeh of Selim II. at S. Sophia_ 307
_Embroidery from Curtain over Entrance to S. Sophia_ 309
_Tower of Galata from Bridge_ 311
_Approach to the Old Seraglio_ 313
_A Corner of the Old Seraglio_ 315
_Scutari Point and Leander's Isle_ 319
_S. Sophia from the Hippodrome. Obelisk in the
Foreground_ 321
_Bas-Relief from Base of the Obelisk in the
Hippodrome, showing the Imperial Box during
the Performance of a Ballet_ 324
_The Palace of the Porphyrogenitus_ 331
_Sarcophagus from the Royal Mausoleum at Sidon.
The Carving is copied from the Frieze of the
Parthenon_ 336
_Sketch Plan of the City_ _facing last page_
TABLE OF EMPERORS
Constantine I., the Great 306-337
Constantius II. 337-361
Julian 361-363
Jovian 363-364
Valens 364-378
Theodosius I., the Great 378-395
Arcadius 395-408
Theodosius II. 408-450
Marcian 450-457
Leo I. 457-474
Zeno 474-491
Anastasius I. 491-518
Justin I. 518-527
Justinian I., the Great 527-565
Justin II. 565-578
Tiberius II. 578-582
Maurice 582-602
Phocas 602-610
Heraclius 610-641
Heraclius Constantinus and Heracleonas 641-642
Constans II. 642-668
Constantine IV. 668-685
Justinian II. 685-695
Leontius 695-697
Tiberius III. Apsimarus 697-705
Justinian II. (restored) 705-711
Philippicus 711-713
Anastasius II. 713-715
Theodosius III. 715-717
Leo III., the Isaurian 717-740
Constantine V. Copronymus 740-775
Leo IV. 775-779
Constantine VI. 779-797
Irene 797-802
Nicephorus I. 802-811
Stauricius 811
Michael I. Rhangabe 811-813
Leo V., the Armenian 813-820
Michael II., the Amorian 820-829
Theophilus 829-842
Michael III. 842-867
Basil I., the Macedonian 867-886
Leo VI., the Wise 886-912
Constantine VII. Porphyrogenitus 912-958
Co-Emperors--
Alexander 912-913
Romanus I. Lecapenus 919-945
Constantine VIII. and Stephanus, sons of
Romanus I., reigned five weeks 944
Romanus II. 958-963
Basil II. Bulgaroktonos 963-1025
Co-Emperors--
Nicephorus II. Phocas 963-969
John I. Tzimisces 969-976
Constantine IX. 976-1025
Constantine IX. 1025-1028
Romanus III. Argyrus 1028-1034
Michael IV., the Paphlagonian 1034-1042
Michael V. 1042
Zoe and Theodora 1042
Constantine X. Monomachus 1042-1054
Theodora (restored) 1054-1056
Michael VI. Stratioticus 1056-1057
Isaac I. Comnenus 1057-1059
Constantine XI. Ducas 1059-1067
Michael VII. Ducas 1067-1078
Co-Emperor--
Romanus IV. Diogenes 1067-1078
Nicephorus III. Botoniates 1078-1081
Alexius I. Comnenus 1081-1118
John II. Comnenus 1118-1143
Manuel I. Comnenus 1143-1180
Alexius II. Comnenus 1180-1183
Andronicus I. Comnenus 1183-1185
Isaac II. Angelus 1185-1195
Alexius III. Angelus 1195-1203
Isaac II. (restored) }
Alexius IV. Angelus } 1203-1204
Alexius V. Ducas, Murtzuphlus 1204
_Latin Emperors_
Baldwin I. 1204-1205
Henry 1205-1216
Peter 1217-1219
Robert 1219-1228
John of Brienne 1228-1237
Baldwin II. 1237-1261
_Nicæan Emperors_
Theodore I. Lascaris 1204-1222
John III. Ducas 1222-1254
Theodore II. Ducas 1254-1259
John IV. Ducas 1259-1260
_Empire Restored_
Michael VIII. Palæologus 1260-1282
Andronicus II. Palæologus 1282-1328
Co-Emperor--
Michael IX. 1295-1320
Andronicus III. Palæologus 1328-1341
John VI. Palæologus 1341-1391
Co-Emperors--
John V. Cantacuzene 1342-1355
Andronicus IV. Palæologus (usurped
throne) 1376-1379
Manuel II. Palæologus 1391-1425
John VII. Palæologus 1425-1448
Constantine XII. Palæologus 1448-1453
_Turkish Sultans_
Mohammed II., "The Conqueror" 1451-1481
Bayezid II., "The Mystic" 1481-1512
Selim I., "The Great" 1512-1520
Suleiman I., "The Magnificent" 1520-1566
Selim II., "The Sot" 1566-1574
Murad III. 1574-1595
Mohammed III. 1595-1603
Ahmed I. 1603-1617
Mustafa I. } 1617-(1618)
Osman II. } 1623
Murad IV. 1623-1640
Ibrahim 1640-1649
Mohammed IV. 1649-1687
Suleiman II. 1687-1691
Ahmed II. 1691-1695
Mustafa II. 1695-1703
Ahmed III. 1703-1730
Mahmûd I. 1730-1754
Osman III. 1754-1757
Mustafa III. 1757-1774
Abdul Hamid I. 1774-1789
Selim III. 1789-1807
Mustafa IV. 1807-1808
Mahmûd II., "The Reformer" 1808-1839
Abdul Mejid 1839-1861
Abdul Aziz 1861-1876
Murad V. 1876
Abdul Hamid II. 1876
Constantinople
CHAPTER I
_The History of the City in ancient and mediæval times_
1. BYZANTIUM BEFORE CONSTANTINE.
It is impossible to approach Constantinople without seeing the beauty
and the wonder of its site. Whether you pass rapidly down the
Bosphorus, between banks crowned with towers and houses and mosques,
that stretch away hither and thither to distant hills, now bleak, now
crowned with dark cypress groves; or up from the Sea of Marmora,
watching the dome of S. Sophia that glitters above the closely packed
houses, till you turn the point which brings you to the Golden Horn,
crowded with shipping and bright with the flags of many nations; or
even if you come overland by the sandy wastes along the shore, looking
across the deep blue of the sea to the islands and the snow-crowned
mountains of Asia, till you break through the crumbling wall within
sight of the Golden Gate, and find yourself at a step deep in the
relics of the middle ages; you cannot fail to wonder at the splendour
of the view which meets your eyes. Sea, sunlight, the quaint houses
that stand close upon the water's edge, the white palaces, the crowded
quays, and the crowning glory of the Eastern domes and the mediæval
walls--these are the elements that combine to impress, and the
impression is never lost. Often as you may see again the approach to
the imperial city, its splendour and dignity and the exquisite beauty
of colour and light will exert their old charm, and as you put foot in
the New Rome you will feel all the glamour of the days that are gone
by.
[Illustration: SERAGLIO POINT AFTER SUNSET]
So of old the Greeks who founded the city dwelt lovingly on the
contrast of sea and land here meeting, and hymned the nymphs of wave
and spring, the garden by the shore.
"Where ocean bathes earth's footstool these sea-bowers
Bedeck its solid wavelets: wise was he
Who blended shore with deep, with seaweed flowers,
And Naiads' rivulets with Nereids' sea."
Strictly speaking the peninsula on which the city stands is of the
form of a trapezium. It juts out into the sea, beating back as it
were the fierce waves of the Bosphorus, and forcing them to turn aside
from their straight course and widen into the Sea of Marmora, which
the ancients called the Propontis, narrowing again as it forces its
way between the near banks of the Hellespont, which rise abrupt and
arid from the European side, and slope gently away in Asia to the foot
of Mount Ida. Northwards there is the little bay of the Golden Horn,
an arm as it were of the Bosphorus, into which run the streams which
the Turks call the Sweet Waters of Europe. The mouth of the harbour is
no more than five hundred yards across. The Greeks of the Empire
spanned it by a chain, supported here and there on wooden piles,
fragments of which still remain in the Armoury that was once the
church of S. Irene. Within is safe anchorage in one of the finest
harbours of the world.
South of the Golden Horn, on the narrow tongue of land--narrow it
seems as seen from the hills of the northern shore--is the city of
Constantine and his successors in empire, seated, like the old Rome,
on seven hills, and surrounded on three sides by sea, on the fourth by
the still splendid, though shattered, mediæval walls. Northwards are
the two towns, now linked together, of Pera and Galata, that look back
only to the trading settlements of the Middle Ages.
The single spot united, as Gibbon puts it, the prospects of beauty, of
safety, and of wealth: and in a masterly description that great
historian has collected the features which made the position, "formed
by Nature for the centre and capital of a great monarchy," attractive
to the first colonists, and evident to Constantine as the centre where
he could best combine and command the power of the Eastern half of his
mighty Empire.
[Illustration: THERAPIA]
"Situated in the forty-first degree of latitude, the imperial city
commanded, from her seven hills, the opposite shores of Europe and
Asia; the climate was healthy and temperate, the soil fertile, the
harbour secure and capacious, and the approach on the side of the
continent was of small extent and easy defence. The Bosphorus and
Hellespont may be considered as the two gates of Constantinople, and
the prince who possessed those important passages could always shut
them against a naval enemy and open them to the fleets of commerce.
The preservation of the eastern provinces may, in some degree, be
ascribed to the policy of Constantine, as the barbarians of the
Euxine, who in the preceding age had poured their armaments into the
heart of the Mediterranean, soon desisted from the exercise of piracy,
and despaired of forcing this insurmountable barrier. When the gates
of the Hellespont and Bosphorus were shut, the capital still enjoyed,
within their spacious enclosure, every production which would supply
the wants, or gratify the luxury, of its numerous inhabitants. The
sea-coast of Thrace and Bithynia, which languish under the weight of
the Turkish oppression, still exhibits a rich prospect of vineyards,
of gardens, and of plentiful harvests; and the Propontis has ever been
renowned for an inexhaustible store of the most exquisite fish, that
are taken in their stated seasons without skill, and almost without
labour. But when the passages of the straits were thrown open for
trade, they alternately admitted the natural and artificial riches of
the north and south, of the Euxine, and of the Mediterranean. Whatever
rude commodities were collected in the forests of Germany and Scythia,
as far as the sources of the Tanais and the Borysthenes; whatsoever
was manufactured by the skill of Europe or Asia; the corn of Egypt,
and the gems and spices of the farthest India; were brought by the
varying winds into the port of Constantinople, which for many ages
attracted the commerce of the ancient world."
There is no wonder that legend should surround the beginnings of the
imperial city of the East. Men from Argos and Megara under the
navigator Byzas founded it about 657 B.C. But mythology made the
founder the son of Neptune the sea god, and said that Io, changed into
a heifer, swam across the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia,
and so gave it the name of Bosphorus, which means literally Oxford.
The Delphic oracle told men to settle "opposite the land of the
blind," for blind were those men of Megara who some years before had
chosen Chalcedon on the Asiatic shore instead of the matchless site on
which rose the city of Byzantium.
The early history can be briefly told. Byzantium was the first of the
cities of Europe to fall into the hands of Darius. It was burned to
the ground by the Persians, rescued and rebuilt by Pausanias, was
threatened by the Ten Thousand on their retreat, and saved by the
eloquence of Xenophon. Two years it was besieged by Philip of Macedon,
and was saved by the Athenians. When Rome first showed her power in
those lands Byzantium was her ally; but her chequered fortunes ended
their first epoch with destruction at the hands of Septimius Severus
in 196 A.D. She waited then for a century till her real founder came.
Byzantine coins go back as far as the fifth century B.C., and there
were in the early Middle Ages many surviving memorials of
pre-Christian times; of these there are now left only the striking
Corinthian column standing on a high granite base in the garden of the
old Seraglio, which almost certainly commemorates a victory of the
Emperor Claudius Gothicus, some parts of the foundations of the
Hippodrome, an inscription in the Doric dialect which formerly stood
in the Stadium, and that wonderful serpent column, which only came, it
is true, to the city after Constantine rebuilt it, but which was
centuries before in the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
2. FROM CONSTANTINE TO JUSTINIAN.
The true history of the city begins with Constantine the Great. It is
said that he hesitated at first, like the men of Megara, between
Byzantium and Chalcedon, when he came to choose a spot from which to
rule the East. But when he chose aright he founded a city which has
endured to this day, and which it is inconceivable should ever be
deserted again. The site on which he built is about four miles long,
broadening from less than a mile where it fronts the Bosphorus to four
miles from where the Marble Tower now stands to the Golden Horn. Seven
hills and six valleys diversify the ground. The seven hills as we see
them now stretch thus from east to west. First is that irregular
elevation ending at Seraglio Point, on which stand the buildings of
the old Seraglio, S. Irene, S. Sophia, the great mosque of Sultan
Ahmed, and the Hippodrome. Second, and north-west of it, is the hill
on which stands the column of Constantine himself, now burned and
broken. On the third stands the great tower by the War Office
(Seraskierat), the mosques of Bayezid and Suleiman. A valley descends
northwards to the Golden Horn; and across it runs the Aqueduct of
Valens, and on the other side is the hill marked by the mosque of
Mohammed the Conqueror. The fifth hill stretches from the fourth
almost to the Golden Horn, and on it stands the mosque of Selim. The
sixth hill, divided from the fifth by a valley ascending from the
Golden Horn, has now the ruins of the palace called by the people "the
House of Belisarius," and the seventh extends from the south of the
Adrianople Gate to the Sea of Marmora. As the old foundation, so the
new planning of Constantine has its legend. It is said that he traced
the boundary of his city himself, walking spear in hand and marking
the line of the walls; and when his courtiers asked him how far he
could go he answered, as though he saw a sacred vision, "Until He
tarries Who now goes before." He ascribed in his laws the founding to
the command of God.
He did not cover the whole ground of the Seven Hills. It is difficult
to trace with certainty the line of the walls, but it would seem
probable that they extended from what is now the inner bridge across
the Golden Horn to a point on the Sea of Marmora about midway between
the gate of Daoud Pasha and the Psamatia Gate. This would exclude part
of the fifth, sixth, and seventh hills; but it is improbable that they
were left entirely unprotected or completely excluded from the city of
Constantine. By the sixth at any rate already stood the Blachernae,
later to be the famous palace of the Byzantine emperors. Sycae,
across the Golden Horn, was the name of what is now Galata. It was at
one time the quarter where the Galatian mercenaries dwelt, and quite
early in history it had another division named Pera, or "across the
water." The seaward walls remained as they had been in old Byzantium,
and they were repaired, and brought forward to the point whence the
new land walls started. Of the remains of Constantine's time there are
none that are not half destroyed or wholly altered, but the Church of
S. Irene still recalls the days of its first founder, and the serpent
column from Delphi still stands in the Hippodrome where he placed it.
The divisions of Constantine's city are not easy to recover. For
municipal government it had, like Rome, fourteen regions, two of which
were outside the walls, those (xiii.) of Sycae and (xiv.) of
Blachernae. From the Golden gate, which was not far from the Marmora
end of the land walls (the name Isa Kapou Mesjidi still recalls the
Holy Name of Jesus which it bore), a road led to the Augusteum. The
Forum of Constantine stood outside where the old Byzantine walls had
been, and west of the Hippodrome. The Hippodrome extended south-west
from the Forum of the Augusteum. North-east at some distance stood the
Church of S. Irene. The Augusteum which, as Mr Bury says, we may
translate _place impériale_, had the Church of S. Sophia, begun
probably by Constantius, on the north; on the east the Senate house,
and some buildings of the Palace; on the south the great Palace
itself, built eastwards of the Hippodrome and commanding the
magnificent view over the Marmora islands to the shores of Asia and
the snows of Olympus.
[Illustration: THE HIPPODROME AND MOSQUE OF AHMED]
Of the splendour of the city of Constantine many hints of
description remain. Constantinople was enriched, says one writer, by
the spoils of all other cities: Rome and Athens, Sicily and Antioch,
were robbed of treasures. Of all these treasures the most wonderful,
almost if not quite alone, survives. For eight hundred years it had
already stood in the Sanctuary of Delphi, the serpent column with its
triple head, inscribed with the names of the Greek city states which
had triumphed on the field of Platæa. Through all the changes of the
sixteen centuries since Constantine lived the column has still
remained where he set it. Its heads are now broken off, and one may be
seen in the museum; but parts of the inscription on the coils might
still be traced fifteen years ago when rubbings were taken. The name
of the Tenians, whose trireme brought the news to the Greeks of the
Persian approach, may still be seen. "For this service," says
Herodotus, "the Tenians were inscribed in Delphi, on the tripod, among
those who had overthrown the barbarian." Thus for nearly two thousand
four hundred years this memorial has endured. Of all the wonders of
the city of Constantine there is none like it.
From Constantine to Justinian the history of the city may be rapidly
traversed, for no great builder came between them to rival their work.
It was on May 11, 330 A.D., that the city of Constantine was dedicated
and received the name of New or Second Rome. Throned in the
Hippodrome, ever after to be the centre of Byzantine life, Constantine
gave thanks to God for the birth of this fair city, the daughter (so
wrote S. Augustine), as it were, of Rome herself. Grandeur, riches,
dignity, he could give to his new city: but before he died it was
plain that he could not bequeath to her a legacy of peace.
The early history of Constantinople is largely concerned with the
defence of the true Christian faith, handed down from the Apostles,
against the errors of Arius. The Council of Nicæa (Isnik) in 325,
summoned by Constantine at a place not more than a day's journey from
Constantinople, defined the being of the Second Person of the Blessed
Trinity as Ὁμοούσιον, of one essence (substance), with that
of the Father, but centuries passed before the false teaching was
overcome. It was natural that at Constantinople, the seat of imperial
government, the strife should be concentrated. Thither the Arian
leaders went to denounce the great S. Athanasius of Alexandria to the
Emperor. It was there that Constantine gave his order to the aged
bishop Alexander that Arius should be admitted to communion. There the
bishop lay in prayer before the altar in the apse of S. Irene,
beseeching God to spare him the profanation. There that very day Arius
met his awfully sudden death.
Under the sons of Constantine the imperial city witnessed scenes of
disturbance and persecution. As soon as Constantius freed himself from
the danger of civil war, he threw himself warmly into the support of
Arianism, and "devoted the leisure of his winter quarters," says
Gibbon, "to the amusement or toils of controversy; the sword of the
magistrate, and even of the tyrant, was unsheathed to enforce the
reasons of the theologian"; and he refers to the happy passages in
which Ammianus Marcellinus records the results of his disastrous
activity, in language which loses nothing in Gibbon's English.
"The Christian religion, which in itself is plain and simple, he
confounded by the dotage of superstition. Instead of reconciling the
parties by the weight of his authority, he cherished and propagated by
verbal disputes the differences which his vain curiosity had excited.
The highways were covered with troops of bishops, galloping from
every side to the assemblies which they call synods; and, while they
laboured to reduce the whole body to their own particular opinions,
the public establishment of the posts was almost ruined by their hasty
and repeated journeys." The "opinions" indeed were far from original
to Constantius, but his support of Arianism rendered the position of
the Church in the imperial city dangerous and uncertain. Five times
was the bishop Paul banished from the city. The Catholics rose in
tumult, and the streets of Constantinople saw for the first time what
they have often since witnessed, a massacre in which not even the
churches preserved those who fled to them for refuge. Another fatal
precedent had already been set when Constantine died, by the murder of
many princes of his house. One of the few survivors ascended the
throne in 361, on the death of the last of Constantine's sons. This
new Emperor was Julian, whom later ages have named the Apostate.
Julian had been baptized and had "followed the way of the Christians"
till he was twenty. He had even, it seems, taken minor orders as a
reader. But he was greatly attracted by the old Greek ideals, and had
not patience to study the Christian religion perfectly. As Emperor he
set himself seriously to revive Paganism, which had received its
death-blow from Constantine.
The pagan Emperor was above all things a pedant and a doctrinaire. It
is impossible to study his life or his writings without a sense of his
extraordinary self-conceit. He was moral in life, sound and excellent
even to weariness in his platitudinarian sentiments; but he was
obstinate, and blind, and abnormally self-conscious, as men of his
mould always are. He was so convinced that he was right that he was
utterly blind to the good deeds of Christians and deaf to their
arguments, even from the clearest thinkers. We see in him not a trace
of intellectual progress, even on his own lines; we find him
throughout intensely superstitious and fond of dabbling in occult
arts. As a student, he somewhat hastily accepted certain conclusions,
and found himself a marked man in consequence. From that moment he
clung to his philosophy with the tenacity of a limited mind; and we
may be quite sure the story is legendary that such a man admitted on
his deathbed the triumph of a religious system which he had combated
all his life.
Julian was brought up probably in Constantinople. As Emperor he did
not a little to increase the pride and beauty of the city. Especially
interesting to him were the constitutional rules which Constantine had
set up in imitation of the old Rome, and he paid notable respect to
the office of the Consul, and enlarged the powers of the Senate. Art
and science he endeavoured to foster by endowments for teaching in the
schools of the city, and in this he was followed by his successors.
Julian died a disappointed man in 363, and his successors inclined to
the Catholic party; but still Arianism was strong, and its strength
was felt not least in Constantinople. Jovian proclaimed toleration,
Valentinian followed him, Valens professed Arianism. While religions
contended, the material prosperity of the city continued to grow. In
378, when the Goths drew near to besiege the imperial city, they
turned back, it is said, at the sight of its increased size. Already
people of every kindred and tongue poured into the great mart for
commerce and pleasure. At length, says Sozomen, it far surpassed Rome
both in population and riches, and Eunapius thus describes its
importance in his day:--"Constantinople, formerly called Byzantium,
allowed the ancient Athenians a liberty of importing corn in great
quantities; but now not all the ships of burden from Egypt, Asia,
Syria, Phœnicia, and many other nations can import a quantity
sufficient for the support of those people whom Constantine, by
unpeopling other cities, has transported thither." Already there began
the custom, which has lasted so many centuries, of building houses on
wooden piles thrust out into the sea. As the incursion of the
barbarians became more dangerous many took refuge in the capital; and
yearly the churches grew in importance, and the monasteries attracted
more religious.
"There were many structures which Constantine had only commenced; and
the completion of the fortifications of the city had been left to
Constantius; Julian found it necessary to construct a second harbour
on the side of the sea of Marmora;[1] Valens was obliged to improve
the waterworks of the city by the erection of the fine aqueduct which
spans the valley between the fourth and fifth hills. And how large a
number of hands such work required appears from the fact that when the
aqueduct was repaired, in the ninth century, 6000 labourers were
brought from the provinces to Constantinople for the purpose."[2]
But while the magnificent aqueduct of Valens (364-378) still towers
over the city, as one views it from the heights of Pera, no other
great building was added till the reign of Theodosius the Great
(378-395), which marks the triumph of Catholic Christianity and the
great increase in the splendour of the patriarchal and imperial abode.
A contemporary, Gregory of Nyssa, quaintly describes the results of
the theological interests which now surrounded the throne. Not only
did great preachers fill the churches with attentive crowds, but the
poor took up the tale. "The city is full of mechanics and slaves who
are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in
the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of money for you he
informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the
price of a loaf you are told by way of reply that the Son is inferior
to the Father; and if you enquire whether the bath is ready, the
answer is that the Son was made out of nothing." This was in the time
of the Arian triumph. It was the work of great preachers, as well as
of the orthodox Emperor, to recover the Church from the blows she had
received in the house of her friends.
The three great saints of the Eastern Church in the fourth century
were in different ways associated with Constantinople. S. Basil of
Cæsarea in Cappadocia, (brother of S. Gregory of Nyssa) was a
fellow-student of the Emperor Julian, and died in 379. He knew very
little directly of the seat of empire; he probably only twice passed
through it; but his writings, full in every page of lucid order and
perspicuous exposition, did much to vindicate the position which the
orthodox in Constantinople were struggling to retain. Probably it was
before his death that the great preacher, S. Gregory of Nazianzus, was
pleading in the imperial city, and vindicated by his great oration the
worship of the Holy Trinity. The site of his first preaching was
commemorated by the building of the Church of Anastasia, a name given
to denote the rising again of the Catholic faith of Nicæa. The
sixteenth century mosque of Mehmed Pacha, south-west of the
Hippodrome, preserves the position of the church, which was destroyed
in 1458. At first the mission of S. Gregory was conducted amid scenes
of the greatest disturbance and at great danger to his own life. His
church was profaned, he himself was stoned. But when Theodosius
entered the city in triumph he gave to S. Gregory the great church of
the Twelve Apostles, and himself sought to seat him upon the episcopal
throne. Humble, and weakened by suffering, it was with reluctance that
the saint entered upon the heritage of the church; but he records that
when he entered the sanctuary the light that burst forth on the chill
November day cheered him to give thanks before all the people for the
benefits which the Blessed Trinity had bestowed. After a month of
reluctance he was at length installed as bishop. In May 381 the second
General Council of the Church was assembled by the order of the
Emperor Theodosius at Constantinople. It reasserted the creed of
Nicæa, emphasised the Catholic teaching of the Divinity of the Holy
Ghost, and condemned the heresy of Apollinaris. Its claim to be
ecumenical rests on its unanimous acceptance of "all the nations and
all the churches of the Christian world."
By this council the precedence of the bishop of Constantinople in the
Church was assigned as next after that of the Roman bishop, "because
it is the new Rome."
S. Gregory, attacked by critics for his acceptance of the see, which
he had so reluctantly received, withdrew to Nazianzus. "The title of a
saint had been added to his name, but the tendencies of his heart, and
the elegance of his genius, reflect a more pleasing lustre on the
memory of Gregory of Nazianzen," says Gibbon in his inimitable way.
The consecration of his successor, a senator named Nectarius, who when
elected had not yet been baptised, is described by the same classic as
"whimsical," but it served to bring peace to the Church of
Constantinople. The conquests of Theodosius confirmed the security of
the imperial throne, and under the rule of the orthodox Emperor the
Church in the East regained her peace. By his order all churches were
given up to the orthodox, and his edict condemned all those who
taught heretical doctrines, and "who, though possessing a sound faith,
form congregations separate from the canonical bishops." Under
Theodosius the security of life and property in the imperial city
tended to a great increase of wealth and population; and with that to
a considerable extension of the area occupied.
"Should the zeal of the Emperor to adorn the city continue," said the
orator Themistius, "a wider circuit will be required, and the question
will arise whether the city added to Constantinople by Theodosius is
not more splendid than the city which Constantine added to Byzantium."
"No longer is the vacant ground in the city more extensive than that
occupied by buildings; nor are we cultivating more territory within
our walls than we inhabit; the beauty of the city is not as heretofore
scattered over it in patches, but covers the whole area like a robe
woven to the very fringe. The city gleams with gold and porphyry. It
has a [new] Forum, named after the Emperor; it owns baths, porticos,
gymnasia; and its former extremity is now its centre. Were Constantine
to see the capital he founded, he would behold a glorious and splendid
scene, not a bare and empty void; he would find it fair, not with
apparent but with real beauty."[3]
The beginning of the fifth century witnessed the great extension of
the city which the orator so grandiloquently describes in
anticipation. Anthemius, who ruled during the earlier part of the
minority of Theodosius II., built the great wall, a mile or in parts a
mile and a half to the west of Constantine's wall, which still extends
from the Sea of Marmora to the so-called "palace of Belisarius." It
was within the city now rapidly growing, that the greatest preacher of
the early Church, began at the end of the fourth century to exercise
his marvellous influence over the crowds that thronged the great
church of the capital. Arcadius, the son and successor of Theodosius
I., having heard of the splendid eloquence of John, a preacher of
Antioch, whom men came to call Chrysostom (the golden-mouthed),
nominated him to the throne of Constantinople on the death of
Nectarius in 397.
He set an example, which the clergy sadly needed, of simplicity and
asceticism; he was not only a reformer but an organiser of missions,
and above all a preacher of righteousness. The Emperor and Empress,
Arcadius and Eudocia, were among his most ardent admirers. He owed his
nomination to the imperial minister Eutropius; yet he denounced his
vices at the height of his power, and when he fell preserved him in
sanctuary from the rage of the people. But the Empress and the
courtiers soon grew restless under his searching exposure of vice and
worldliness. He was a severe disciplinarian: bishops were ready to
turn against him, and the ladies of the court were determined to
avenge themselves on their censor. When he denounced the Empress
almost openly as Jezebel, it was clear that peace could not long be
maintained even in appearance. Charges of heresy, complicated by his
charitable succour of some Eastern monks whom the bishop of Alexandria
had ill-treated and banished, led to his condemnation by a council of
his enemies at Chalcedon, across the Bosphorus. When the citizens
heard this they surrounded the palace of their beloved bishop and kept
watch all night lest he should be seized, but he gave himself up and
was banished to Hieron (now Anadoli Kavak) at the mouth of the Black
Sea on the Asiatic side. The people assembled round the imperial
palace with threats; an earthquake shook the resolution of the
Empress, and Chrysostom was brought back in triumph to his throne.
His position seemed stronger than ever. Always ready to believe the
best, he accepted the Empress's assurance of friendship and repaid it
with courtierlike expressions of respect. But it was soon apparent
that the friendship could not be continued without a sacrifice of
principle. Eudocia envied, it would seem, the divine honours of the
pagan emperors; and the dedication of her statue in September 403 was
made the occasion of blasphemous and licentious revelry. From the ambo
of the great church S. John Chrysostom denounced the wickedness of the
festival, while the sound of the disturbance could be heard as he
spoke. Men declared that he compared the Empress to Herodias--"Again
Herodias dances: again she demands the head of John on a charger."
The Empress demanded the punishment of the bold preacher. Intrigues
won over the Emperor, time-serving bishops brought up ingenious
distortions of Church rules through which Chrysostom could be
punished. It was pretended that he was not legally bishop, and at last
the timid Emperor gave the order to arrest him, an act which was
accomplished, in a scene of brutal disorder and violence, in the great
church itself on Easter Eve 404, when the sacrament of baptism was
being ministered to three thousand catechumens.
Two months later he was sent into banishment, and his adherents
underwent a bitter persecution. They appealed to the churches of the
West for aid: Chrysostom himself wrote to Rome, Milan, and Aquileia.
But the Emperor was not to be moved. In his banishment at Cucusus, on
the borders of Cilicia and Armenia, the Saint exercised as wide an
influence as on his throne. Constant letters to Constantinople cheered
the loyal clergy, comforted penitents, aroused faint hearts to devoted
service of God. But his sufferings in exile were at length made fatal
by the brutality with which he was hurried from place to place, and he
gave up his soul on September 14, 407, a martyr to his zeal for
righteousness. Thirty years afterwards in 438 his body was translated
to the city where his memory was still cherished. It came in triumphal
procession down the Bosphorus followed by crowds of boats, and was
laid in a tomb by the altar in the Church of the Holy Apostles; the
Emperor, Theodosius II., praying for the pardon of God on the sins of
his parents.
Thus briefly the tale of Chrysostom may be told. It is characteristic
of the struggles through which the Church of Constantinople had to
pass during the years of unchecked imperial power, when it was
dependent on the arbitrary authority of a sovereign who might be weak
and led by evil counsellors, or wicked and resentful of any criticism
of his deeds, but who had always at his command a body of brutal
soldiery, often pagan and retaining of the old Roman tradition only
the implicit obedience to the commands of their ruler. The name of S.
John Chrysostom, loved and honoured by the people in his life, has
remained the chief glory of the Church of Constantinople. It is said
that his tomb was rifled by the Crusaders in 1204, and his head is
shown among the relics of the Cathedral of Pisa; but in countless ways
his memory is still preserved by the Church which he ruled. At the
Cathedral Church of the Patriarchate in the Phanar they point to-day
to a pulpit and a throne (of much later date) as his; and the ancient
liturgy of the East, used from time immemorial in the Church of
Constantinople, has been given his name, as that of the most famous of
the holy prelates who used it.
The troubles of the Church, which centred round the persecution and
martyrdom of S. Chrysostom, were followed by at least outward peace
in religious matters. The chief clergy of Constantinople became the
mere officers of the Court. But the dangers of the times, when again
and again the barbarian was at the gates, turned men's minds to the
repair of the fortifications and the completion of their circuit
around the now greatly extended city.
The work of Anthemius, regent during part of the minority of
Theodosius II., was eulogised by Chrysostom himself. The office of
Prætorian Præfect of the East which he held, was honoured, said the
great preacher, by his holding it. He restored the defences of the
Empire after the weakness of Arcadius, "and to crown the system of
defence he made Constantinople a mighty citadel. The enlargement and
refortification of the city was thus part of a comprehensive and far
seeing plan to equip the Roman State in the East for the impending
desperate struggle with barbarism; and of all the services which
Anthemius rendered, the most valuable and enduring was the addition he
made to the military importance of the capital. The bounds he assigned
to the city fixed, substantially, her permanent dimensions, and behind
the bulwarks he raised--improved and often repaired indeed by his
successors--Constantinople acted her great part in the history of the
world."[4]
The two greatest interests of Constantinople have always been the
military and the ecclesiastical. The Eastern churches have always
looked, and look to-day, on the New Rome as the centre of true
religion and sound learning. The theology of the Councils is the
theology of the great Church of Constantinople and its patriarchs; and
in the days of its bitterest persecution, in the times when the
infidel has ruled, the strongest sentiment of the Greek people, who
feel that the city is still truly their own, is that of loyalty to
the unalterable faith and the immemorial liturgies of the holy
Orthodox Church preserved by the successors of S. Chrysostom. But
while the intense intellectual keenness of the East and the chivalrous
conservatism of the ancient Greek families preserves undisputed the
dominion of religion, and the thronged churches witness to a devotion
which is perhaps more conspicuous than in any city which lives on to
our day from the centuries of the Middle Ages, the great city of
Constantine can never cease to be the home of a military power, where
military science is cultivated and the soldier's life is the most
prominent before the eyes of the people. Even at the lowest point of
the Empire, the great city of the Cæsars was always a military
stronghold of the first class. The streets have never ceased to be
thronged with soldiers, and the military pageants of to-day look back
for their origin and their necessity to the days of Constantine and
Theodosius and Anthemius the wall-builder. It is said that to-day the
city is more completely defended than any other in Europe. More than
sixteen centuries ago it was the strength of the walls of Anthemius
and the size of the army and the fleet that he gathered that turned
back the army of Attila. Just as the whole city was concerned in the
doings of the Church, its buildings, its festivals, its councils, so
were all the citizens bound to take part in its military defence. The
walls, like the churches, belonged to all. Strict laws, from which no
one was exempt, and the power of levying special taxes besides the due
proportion of the city land-tax, made every man liable to contribute.
Characteristically the Hippodrome had its share in directing the work.
The two factions of the Circus, the blues and the greens, were charged
with the direction; and it is said that in 447 they furnished no less
than sixteen thousand labourers for the work.
The reign of Theodosius II. was the great age of the construction of
defences. The walls of Anthemius were built in 413; in 439 the sea
walls were extended to include the part of the city now enclosed. In
447, an earthquake, always the greatest enemy of the fortifications
and responsible even now for more destruction than any other force,
overthrew much of what had been so lately built, with fifty-seven
towers. Attila was almost at the gates, and was dictating an
ignominious treaty of peace. But, as an inscription which may be read
to-day on the gate now called Yeni-Mevlevi Haneh Kapoussi tells--
"In sixty days, by order of the sceptre loving Emperor,
Konstantinos the Eparch added wall to wall."
A Latin inscription makes the same record almost in the words of the
contemporary chronicler Marcellinus Comes--
"Theodosii jussis gemino nec mense peracto
Constantinus ovans haec moenia firma locavit
Tam cito quam stabilem Pallas vix conderet arcem."
This addition was a new wall, in front of that of Anthemius, with 192
towers, and a moat without, forming tiers of defence. It was this
magnificent series of bulwarks which, in the words of the historian of
the walls, "so long as ordinary courage survived and the modes of
ancient warfare were not superseded, made Constantinople impregnable,
and behind which civilisation defied the assaults of barbarism for a
thousand years."[5]
Theodosius II. reigned till 450. The later part of his reign was
disturbed by the Nestorian controversy, in which the bishop of
Constantinople himself involved the Church. The denial by this prelate
of the title Theotokos (Mother of God) to the Blessed Virgin Mary was
no obscure attack upon the reality of the Incarnation as the Church
had always received it; and the people of the city as well as the
clergy received the new teaching with disgust. Eastern and Western
bishops united against the heresy, and in 431 the third General
Council of the Church at Ephesus condemned it and its author, and
again defined the Catholic faith. The party of Nestorius was not
suppressed, though he was himself deposed, and in the sixth century it
became the great agent of Christian missions in the East.
Hardly was this false teaching rejected before a new heresy arose.
Eutyches, a monk of Constantinople, denied the existence of two
natures in Christ, and after a dispute which shook the Church for
twenty years his teaching was at last condemned by the fourth General
Council, which met at Chalcedon, just across the Bosphorus. The
Council also emphasised the importance of the position now held by the
New Rome by enacting that it should be "magnified in ecclesiastical
matters even like the elder imperial Rome, as being next to it." This
rule was accepted by the Emperor Marcian, and the power it gave to
consecrate the metropolitans of Thrace, Asia, and Pontus was supported
by the State as a badge of supremacy. The emperors who followed
Marcian were all more or less concerned in the theological strife
which the opinions of Eutyches had raised. The Monophysites, as the
party which rejected the decisions of Chalcedon came to be called, was
constantly rising into power in the Court. The imperial crown was worn
in turn by four adventurers, who deposed prelates and attempted to
reconcile parties at their will. In 482 the Emperor Zeno, with the
advice of the patriarch Acacius, put forth the _Henoticon_ (form of
union), which was intended to reconcile the Monophysites to the
Catholic Church. The controversy was far from stilled by this inept
document; and when in 484, Felix, the pope of Rome, with other Western
bishops, wrote to the patriarch Acacius, declaring him deposed from
his office, and separated from the communion of the faithful, a schism
was caused in Constantinople itself. While the majority of the clergy
and people treated the Roman decree with contempt, some of the monks,
and especially the Akoimetai (an order which kept up perpetual worship
by succession of worshippers, and thus received the name of
"sleepless"), refused communion with their own patriarch. The
Henoticon had divided the Church. The patriarchates of Antioch and
Alexandria were Monophysite; Jerusalem and Constantinople were
orthodox.
The reign of Anastasius, the son-in-law of Leo, whose wife was the
widow of his predecessor Zeno, was regarded by the orthodox as an era
of persecution. Himself a man of piety and virtue, he was greeted by
the people in the Circus on his accession with the cry, "Reign as you
have lived!" He added to the defences of the city a great wall
stretching from the Marmora to the Euxine, some thirty-five miles from
Constantinople; but he unhappily turned to theology, and widened the
gulf which the Henoticon had made between the Emperors and the Church.
In November 512, the streets again ran with blood shed by the people
for the cause of religious truth. Amid these years stained by crime
and folly, the imperial city was again and again in danger from
external as well as internal foes. At the beginning of the reign of
Anastasius the Isaurians who had been driven from the city rebelled,
and for five years there was war, ended only when, in 498, Isaurian
captives were led in triumph through the streets. Eleven years before,
Theodoric the Goth had stood before the gates, but turned back from
the massive strength which he could not overthrow. He was now ruler of
Italy. And even in the East, Huns, Romans and Goths again and again
threatened the capital. Anastasius dabbled in theology to the end,
made overtures to Pope Hormisdas which came to nothing, and died at
the age of eighty-eight, regretted by none.
He was succeeded by an illiterate but honest Thracian soldier, Justin.
Orthodox and straightforward, he was welcomed by the people as a
saviour and a second Constantine. Under his rule peace was made with
the orthodox West, and the Church again had rest.
With the death of Justin, 527, we reach the second great epoch of the
history of the imperial city. Constantinople before the days of
Justinian, when Theodoric, about 461, was sent as a hostage to the
Imperial Court, _et quia puerulus elegans erat meruit gratiam
imperialem habere_, was the most glorious city of Europe. Jordanes,
the historian of the Goths, tells how he marvelled at the wondrous
sight. "Lo! now I behold," said he, "what I have often heard, but have
never believed, the glory of so great a city!" Then turning his eyes
this way and that, beholding the situation of the city and the
concourse of ships, how he marvels at the long perspective of lofty
walls. Then he sees the multitude of various nations like the stream
flowing forth from one fountain which has been fed by many springs;
then he beholds the soldiers in ordered ranks. "A god," said he,
"without doubt a god upon earth is the Emperor of this realm, and
whoso lifts his hand against him, that man's blood be on his own
head." Thus the barbarian may well have spoken when he had his first
sight of the majesty of the Empire and its civilization in its Eastern
home.
[Illustration: YERI BATAN SERAI (CISTERN)]
Within a few years there was a great change. Earthquakes, rebellions,
fires, compelled the rebuilding of a great part of Constantinople, and
Justinian the Great, lawyer, theologian and organiser of victory, left
monuments as enduring in architecture as in the other spheres of his
activity. With the exception of the churches of S. John of the Studium
and S. Irene, and the walls of Theodosius, there are to-day no great
works of the Christian period, save a very few of the later Emperors,
remaining in Constantinople except those which Justinian built. His
architects created the Byzantine style which reached its magnificent
completion in S. Sophia. The finest of the cisterns which astonish the
traveller to-day are the work of his age; and as we walk by the
splendid walls that extend from the Marmora to the Golden Horn, it is
along his triumphal way that we tread. The first book of the
"Aedifices" of Procopius, written to commemorate his achievements in
building, is even now a handbook in little to the glories of
Constantinople.
Leaving to our description of the city the still standing work of the
great Emperor, we must here shortly sketch the reign which was for
nine centuries the most glorious memory of the Eastern Empire. Born in
482 or 483, Justinian was the son of a Dardanian peasant, and was born
at Scupi (Üsküp), "at the crossing-point of great natural routes
across the western part of the Illyrian peninsula." When his uncle
Justin raised himself to the throne in 518 he was sent for and trained
to succeed to, if not already to exercise, supreme power. So long as
Justin lived Justinian was his chief adviser. When Vitalian, the
orthodox Goth, whose troops in the neighbourhood of the city seemed to
threaten the new dynasty, was murdered in the palace, it was
Justinian, for whose concern in the crime no valid evidence has been
produced, who rose to the highest place in military as well as civil
affairs. In 523 he married the beautiful Theodora, whose earlier life
has been covered with shame by historians whose veracity is open at
least to suspicion. She is described by the bitter Procopius as
everything that is vile; it is probably true that her youth was
disreputable; but it is certain that she made the noblest atonement
for the past by the charity and piety of her later life and by the
courage and wisdom which were of profit even to the Empire.[6] Of her
beauty there is no doubt. Small, pale as marble, but with brilliant
eyes, the bitterest of her enemies describes her; and when he uses
the language of compliment he declares of the statue erected in her
honour by the baths of Arcadius that "the face is beautiful but falls
short of the beauty of the Empress, since it is utterly impossible for
any mere human workmen to express her loveliness." Four years after
the marriage, which was one of unbroken affection till the Empress
died in 548, Justinian was associated with his uncle on the imperial
throne. On April 1, 527, he became sole Emperor, and he reigned till
565.
Constantinople under Justinian became again the centre of Christian
Europe. But before his power was fully established it was threatened
by the gravest of the great insurrections with which the populace
showed its independence and its fickle levity. The sedition arose in
the Circus, and it was long the fashion to believe that Constantinople
was ruled entirely under the sway of the factions of the Hippodrome. A
more critical investigation has shown that the demes (δῆμοι)
or parties were organised bodies intimately connected with the court
and the municipality. The demes had two parts, military under
democrats, and civil, or political, under demarchs. The heads of each
faction were officers of the court and the army, and the demes were
fully organised for military purposes. Not only were they, as we have
seen, intrusted with the building of the wall, but they provided,
under the Emperor Maurice, troops for the guarding of the long walls;
and Justinian himself, at the end of his reign, used them in a similar
way. It was to the demes, one writer seems to show, that Justin owed
his throne. But while their military and political importance is now
fully recognised, we are still without an explanation of how they
became connected with the parties and colours of the Circus.
However that may be, we find in the reign of Justinian two large
Circus parties, the Blues and the Greens, with whom were merged as
sub-divisions the Reds and the Whites, who organised the races and had
so much liberty allowed them by the laws, that they were able to defy
emperors and set public order at defiance. But the madness of their
riot was not without a method. To the demes or factions were allowed
privileges which seemed the last relics of the ancient freedom of the
Greek cities. "In the sixth century," says Professor Bury, "the
outbreaks of the demes represent a last struggle for municipal
independence, on which it is the policy of imperial absolutism to
encroach. The power of the demarchs had to give way to the control of
the præfects of the city."
[Illustration: THE IMPERIAL QUARTER]
On January 13, 532, there began an insurrection called ever after the
"Nika" (conquer), from the watchwords of the insurgents, which
threatened the imperial throne, and went nigh to destroy the whole
city. The præfect of the city led to execution some criminals
belonging to both parties, three days before. The Greens, during the
celebration of public games in the Hippodrome on Sunday, January 11,
appealed to the Emperor against Calapodius, the imperial minister, and
the most extraordinary dialogue occurred. "Be silent, Jews, Samaritans
and Manichæans," cried Justinian's _mandator_, uttering imperial
commands, but they renewed their complaints, and finally passed into
insults, calling the Emperor tyrant and murderer. Justinian determined
to show his indifference to the mob by the execution that night of
criminals of both factions. Two were rescued, and the two factions
determined to procure their pardon, and on the 13th, when the great
games took place, they appealed to Justinian, but in vain. The two
demes then declared themselves united, and having no answer from the
præfect whose house they surrounded, they set fire to the prætorium,
and then in the night spread the fire over the imperial quarter. The
portico of the Palace, the Baths of Xeuxippus, the Senate-house, and
the wooden church of S. Sophia were set on fire. Next morning they
marched to the Palace and demanded the dismissal of the unpopular
ministers. Justinian was about to yield, and indeed had given the
order, when the insurgents determined to depose him. Anastasius had
left three nephews, Probus, Hypatius and Pompeius. Failing to find the
first the mob burned his house. The two other brothers remained in
safety in the palace. Next day the greatest general of the age,
Belisarius, who had but recently returned from a victorious campaign
against the Persians, sallied forth from the palace with a body of
barbarian troops, Goths and Heruls--for the garrison of the city could
not be trusted--and fierce fighting occurred for two days in the
streets. The clergy did their utmost to restore peace, but were
utterly unheeded, and in the evening of the 16th the Church of S.
Irene, built by Constantine, was burnt, though not to the ground, and
the Hospice of Samson, which stood between it and S. Sophia, were also
destroyed. On the 17th, Saturday, the fire spread still further, and
almost all the centre of the city was reduced to ashes. At night
Justinian determined to give up Hypatius and Pompeius to the mob,
hoping no doubt that if they were conspiring against him they would be
less dangerous outside than within the palace. In spite of their
reluctance he drove them forth to their own houses. Next day, early on
the Sunday morning, the Emperor himself went down to the Hippodrome
and made what was little better than an abject submission. He swore on
the gospels to forgive all that had been done, if order were now
restored. "The blame is not yours but all mine. For the punishment of
my sins I did not grant your requests when first you spoke to me in
this place." Some cried out that he swore falsely, and no heed was
taken of his words. A few hours later Hypatius was proclaimed Emperor,
and as the mob surrounded the palace it seemed that there was nothing
for the Emperor but flight. It was then, when Justinian was ready to
yield and cross the Bosphorus to the safety of Chalcedon, that
Theodora showed herself worthy of the purple. "No time is this," she
cried, "to ask whether a woman should be bold before men or valiant
when men are afraid. They who are in extremest peril must think of
nothing but how best to meet what lies before them. To fly, if ever it
be expedient, would now not be so, I declare, even if it preserved us.
For a man born into this light not to die is impossible; but for one
who has been Emperor to become an exile is not to be endured. Let me
never come to be without this purple robe nor live that day when men
shall cease to call me their sovereign Lady. If you, Emperor, wish to
escape, it is no hard matter. Here is the sea, and there lie the
ships. But consider whether you may not one day wish that you had
exchanged your mean safety for a glorious death. For me I love the
ancient saying, 'How brave a sepulchre a kingdom is!'"
Thus Theodora proved herself fit mate for a Cæsar, and worthy of her
crown; and those who had counselled flight now found courage to
resist. While Justinian's men planned an attack, the followers of
Hypatius agreed upon delay, and he himself sent, it would seem, to
make peace with the Emperor. As his messenger went, he was told that
the Cæsar had fled, and then the unhappy pretender took upon him the
dignity of Emperor. In a few hours Belisarius led his troops upon the
multitude assembled in the Hippodrome, and before nightfall they
forced their way in with fire and sword, and of all the citizens
gathered in the Circus not one left it alive. Justinian was not told
till too late that Hypatius had been willing to submit. The two
brothers were dragged out with contumely, and the next morning before
daylight they fell under the swords of the barbarian soldiers. The
Emperor, it is said, would have spared them, but Theodora, "swearing
by God and by him, urged him to have them killed." Zachariah of
Mitylene says that more than 80,000 persons perished in the riot.
At midday on Monday, January 19, Constantinople was at peace; but it
was in ruins. Three distinct conflagrations had reduced the grandest
monuments of the city of Constantine to ashes. On the first two days
of the riot all the buildings of the Augusteum were destroyed, and
with them S. Sophia, the "Great Church," only its baptistery, it
would seem, being saved. Two days later the buildings north-west of S.
Sophia were in flames, and among them the Hospice for poor and sick
folk, "founded in ancient times by a holy man whose name was Samson,"
and Constantine's Church of S. Irene. On the 17th the buildings round
the Mesê, the street which connected the forum of Constantine with the
Augusteum, and the "great porticoes leading up to the agora named from
Constantine, and many houses of rich men, and large property, were
burned." Thus, a great part of what had been the first Byzantium,
which was adorned with the finest buildings of Constantine, was
utterly destroyed. To one who saw the blackened ruins, they seemed
like the masses of molten lava round the crater of a volcano. To
Justinian, already a great law-giver, came the task of building anew
the imperial city.
[Illustration: THE BURNT COLUMN]
The Emperor began at once with the rebuilding of the Great Church of
the Divine Wisdom. On the 23rd of February the work was begun: on
December 26, 537, the new church was dedicated. "The procession," says
Theophanes, who wrote from older materials in the eighth century,
"started from the church of the Anastasia," where S. Gregory of
Nazianzus had long preached to the men of Byzantium, "Menas, the
patriarch, sitting in the royal chariot, and the King walking with the
people." In 558 the eastern part of the dome with the apse was
destroyed by an earthquake and was rebuilt. Agathias, a contemporary
historian, thus describes the building and the restoration:
"Now the former church having been burnt by the angry mob, Justinian
built it up again from the foundations, as great, and more beautiful
and wonderful, and this most beautiful design was adorned with much
precious metal. He built it in a round form, with burnt brick and
lime. It was bound together here and there with iron; but they avoided
the use of wood, so that it should no more be easily burnt. Now
Anthemius was the man who devised and worked at every part. And when
by the earthquake the middle part of the roof and the higher parts had
been destroyed, the Emperor made it stronger, and raised it to a great
height. Anthemius was then dead, but the young man Isidorus and the
other craftsmen, turning over in their minds the earlier design, and
comparing what had fallen with what remained, estimated where the
error lay, and of what kind it was. They determined to leave the
eastern and western arches as they were. But of the northern and
southern they brought towards the inside that portion of the building
which was upon the curve. And they made these arches wider, so as to
be more in harmony with the others, thus making the equilateral
symmetry more perfect. In this way they were able to cover the
measurelessness of the empty space, and to take off some of its extent
to form an oblong design. And again, they wrought that which rose up
above it in the middle, whether cycle or hemisphere or whatever other
name it may be called. And this also became more straightforward and
of a better curve, in every part agreeing with the line; and at the
same time not so wide but higher, so that it did not affright the
spectators as before, but was set much more strong and safe."
[Illustration: S. SOPHIA AND THE MINISTRY OF JUSTICE FROM THE SEA]
A more minute account of the work must be reserved till we pass from
history to description. Here we have only to summarise and
characterise the work of the great architects whom Justinian employed
to rebuild his city. The opportunity was a great one. Constantinople
was now the centre of the civilised world. Thither came in the sixth
century a crowd as motley as those gathered together on the day of
Pentecost, or as may be seen now on the bridge of Galata. Men of
Mesopotamia and Syria, Persians, Greeks from the islands and the
Peloponnese, men of Sicily and Africa, Alexandrines and Palestinian
Jews, met with the Roman and with the barbarian subjects of the now
again undivided empire.
Of this vast gathering of the nations Byzantine art was the result and
the reflexion. But adaptive as it was of every influence that came
before the eyes of its great masters, it was, above all, like the city
where it reached its highest glory, pre-eminently religious and
Christian. The new style has been called "historical-dogmatic," and
indeed it combined in a marvellous manner the traditions of different
races under the uniting power of the Catholic faith.
The genius which gave to the Byzantine architecture its completed
glory was that of Anthemius of Tralles, of whose skill contemporary
writers write in enthusiastic applause. His works, says Agathias,
"even if nothing were said about them, would suffice of themselves to
win for him an everlasting glory in the memory of man as long as they
stand and endure."
The characteristics of the art of Anthemius at its highest development
may be seen to-day in Constantinople. There are few churches earlier
than his time still standing. Among these may be the semi-basilican S.
Thekla and S. Theodore of Tyrone, and certainly are S. John of the
Studium and S. Irene. The last was rebuilt by Justinian immediately
after the Nika insurrection in 532, but it belongs to the earlier
style. Similar to it was the church of S. Peter and S. Paul, now
destroyed, but of which some beautiful marble capitals lie in the sea
close to the palace of Hormisdas. Later came the still standing church
of S. Sergius and S. Bacchus, called by the people "little S. Sophia,"
built about 527 by Justinian himself. This prepares the way for
almost every feature which appears developed and completed in the
great S. Sophia itself. The two most striking characteristics of the
new style are the impost capital and the merging of subsidiary spaces
in one central building.
The impost capital is probably first seen in the great cistern, also
of Justinian's day. I may here repeat what I have said elsewhere.[7]
"Strygowski[8] regards this impost-capital as the work of the builder
of the great cistern, who he thinks may have been Anthemius, here
proving his fitness for the great work of S. Sophia. It was, he shows,
an architectural revolution. The capital, with undercut volutes, was
suitable for a straight architrave, but not for the arch. Hence a
piece was inserted to transfer the weight from the angles to the
centre. The Theodosian age used an inserted impost. The constructive
activity of the age of Justinian produced the impost-capital.
As to design, the capitals lying neglected about the city, together
with those _in situ_ in the churches and cisterns, furnish a perfect
museum of the types with which others, dispersed over the whole area
of the empire, agree in the minutest particulars of design and
workmanship. The acanthus leaves, so familiar through all the work of
the centuries--from the Golden Gate (388) onward, and the portico to
S. John of the Studium a century later--assume the beautiful
"windblown" design in the ruins near the "Rose Mosque."[9]
The second feature is the arrangement which unites the longitudinal
with the central building and makes the whole effect of the interior
of one piece by relating every piece of work, pillar, arch, semi-dome,
to the one vast central dome which crowns the whole. From without, but
more clearly from within, the architecture of S. Sophia is seen to
form one entire and perfect whole. It is impossible to conceive it
deprived of a single feature without the sacrifice of the whole. To
mutilate would be to destroy.
Seen then in its grandeur at S. Sophia the work of Justinian changed
the appearance of the whole city. Procopius in his _Aedifices_ records
what was when he wrote in 558, a complete list of what had been built
in the reign. Everywhere there were arising, as though by an
enchanter's wand, palaces, churches, baths, aqueducts, great cisterns
supported on exquisitely carved columns, new markets, houses for the
great nobles, barracks, hospitals, convents. The splendour and beauty
of the new city, its richness of decoration, marbles, statuary,
mosaics, struck all beholders with amaze. The chroniclers, who in
other times would have been satisfied to tell of military successes
and court intrigues, now tell of measurements and designs, and collect
lists of gems and splendours of decoration. The reign of Justinian, in
spite of many foreign dangers, and oppression at home, is the most
magnificent period of early Byzantine history; and the magnificence
seemed to be expressed in the buildings of Constantinople.
When Procopius in his _Ædifices_ has told of the glories of S. Sophia,
he goes on to speak of the Augusteum and its statues. Chiefest among
them, one of Justinian himself as Achilles. Then S. Irene, then the
churches of the Blessed Virgin at the Blachernae and at Balukli beyond
the triumphal way. Church after church follows in his tale, and chief
among them those which the mariner sees as he sails up the Golden
Horn. "As to the other buildings, it would be hard to name them all."
The Hospice of Samson rose again from its ruins, probably close by
where the gate of the old Seraglio now stands. The baths of Xeuxippus,
which lasted down to the time of Mohammed the Conqueror, with the
other buildings near the Augusteum and the forum of Constantine, were
restored. "In addition to this he rebuilt and added great magnificence
to the house named after Hormisdas, which stands close to the palace,
to which he joined it,"--that pathetic ruin whose broken wall hangs
over the Marmora to-day. When the eulogist comes to the palace itself,
words fail him to repeat its glories, the pictures, mosaics, marbles,
that combine to make the walls glitter as with life. After works of
beauty come those of use, and the cisterns receive as much praise as
works more brilliant yet hardly more beautiful.
It is buildings such as these that enable us to see what Justinian was
to the capital of his Empire. Every year it seemed that new victories
and new conversions were increasing the power of the Empire and the
Church. While Belisarius reconquered Italy and made the name of the
Cæsar again honoured at Rome and Ravenna, ended the cruel rule of the
Vandals in Africa and Sicily, crushed the Goths of Spain, and kept the
strong Persian prince at bay on the eastern frontier of the empire,
Christian missions spread the faith of the orthodox Church to the
Caucasus and the Sudan. Again and again did processions of returning
warriors pass along the triumphal way, but the Emperor alone entered
by the Golden Gate. It was in the Hippodrome that Belisarius
celebrated his triumph over the Vandals. It was nigh six hundred
years, Procopius thought, since any had had the same. But Belisarius
walked with a proud humility from his own house to the Hippodrome,
and thence from his own tent to the imperial throne. The rich spoils
that were spread out were the treasures of all the years of Vandal
conquest, and among them some of the vessels that Titus had brought
from the temple at Jerusalem and Generic the Vandal conqueror had
taken from Rome. These Justinian gave to churches in the Holy City. As
the captives were led up to the imperial throne all eyes were fixed on
the Vandal chief, Gelimer, wearing the purple, as in mockery, with his
kindred about him, "himself the tallest and most beautiful of the
Vandals." As he walked up to the throne he looked up, and uttering no
lament for his fallen state, said with the poet's simple feeling,
"Vanity of vanities." They stripped him of his robe and made him fall
on his face before the Emperor. Beside him knelt his conqueror, and
supplicated for his pardon, and the day was crowned by generosity such
as the Emperor loved to show and the people to applaud.
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN GATE]
Such scenes became familiar to the people as the years of victory
rolled on. They saw, too, Belisarius, drawn through the streets in his
chariot by the captives of his wars, when he received the dignity of
Patrician. The empire of Justinian, based upon the old laws which he
collected and enlarged, cherishing the traditions of old Rome, was
eager to revive every glory of former days. "And then," says
Procopius, who himself the bitterest of satirists of the present,
looked not unkindly on the past, "men saw things long forgotten thus
renewed by time." But the picture, brilliant though it was, was not
unclouded. The city of the Cæsars was again and again threatened by
barbarians and struck by the visitation of God. In 542 Constantinople
was devastated by a terrible pestilence, the bubonic plague, that has
lost none of its terrors in fifteen hundred years. For four months it
raged, and at its height Procopius declares that as many as ten
thousand perished in a day. It spared no constitution and no age, and
God alone could be the cause of it. Justinian, who was one of the few
who recovered, was assiduous in charitable aid; but the loss to the
city could hardly be conceived--no trades, no shops, says the recorder
of many horrors, remained, and "many for fear leaving their bad
courses, consecrated themselves to God, and many when the danger was
passed fell to their old despising of God again."
After plagues came famines and earthquakes, and in the last year of
the reign, the dread army of the Huns, under Zabergan, drew nigh even
to the walls of Constantinople, murdering and ravaging as they came.
Hastily the treasures of the church northwards of the city were
brought for safety within the walls, and Belisarius in old age again
came forward to save the empire. It was his last victory, and seven
years later he passed away, honoured and beloved. The Emperor himself
died but a few weeks later in November 565. The glories of the reign
had passed away before the aged ruler laid down his power; but he left
a reconquered Empire and a capital that was the wonder of the world.
He left too a memory as a theologian, which the church for some
centuries continued specially to honour in her most solemn service.
Justinian, the legislator, the builder and the organizer of victory,
seemed to the vision of Dante to dwell like the sun in perpetual
light.
_Sì come'l sol, che si cela egli stessi
Per troppa luce, quando il caldo ha rose
Le temperanze de' vapori spessi;
Per più letizia sì mi si nascose
Dento al suo raggio la figura santa._
To this aspect of his life we can give here but little attention; but
it is not to be doubted that it was as a theologian that the men of
his Constantinople heard most of their ruler's doings. Far into the
dark hours, says the chronicler of his reign, he sat writing the
theological treatises which expressed the teaching of the Church;
night after night he would study in his library the writings of the
Fathers, and the Sacred Scriptures, with some learned prelates or
monks at hand, that he might discuss with them the questions as they
rose before his mind. From the time of his predecessor he had been
engaged in corresponding with Popes on theological points, and when he
became sole ruler he determined once for all to settle the side issues
which depended on the great Monophysite contest. Edict after edict,
letter after letter, treatises closely argued and tightly packed with
patristic and scriptural learning, and even hymns, showed the restless
activity of the imperial theologian. When in 535 Anthemius of
Trebizond was made Patriarch of Constantinople, and when Pope Agapetus
came on a mission from the Gothic King Theodahad, the discussion of
articles of the faith brought the deposition of the patriarch as a
monophysite, and the succession of Mennas, head of the hospice of
Samson. Then came the conflict with the Origenists, which led
indirectly to the controversy of "the Three Chapters" and the session
of the Fifth General Council. Of this it were here a weariness to
tell. Let it suffice to say that on May 5, 553, the Council met in the
southern gallery of the great Church of the Divine Wisdom. The Pope
himself was at Constantinople but he would not attend the sessions. He
was lodged at first in the royal palace of Placidia at the eastern end
of the promontory, beyond S. Irene, looking over the sea to Asia and
the churches of Chalcedon. Then he fled by night to cross the
Bosphorus and took refuge in the Church of S. Euphemia at Chalcedon
where a hundred years before the council had sat. Embassies crossed
and recrossed the sea; even the great general Belisarius was an envoy,
but Vigilius, when the Council met, refused to join it, to speak, or
to vote: and the Council made short work of the foolish, bombastic,
hesitating pontiff. It condemned those who refused to receive its
decisions and struck Vigilius out of the diptychs on which were
inscribed the names of those prayed for at the Eucharist.
But if there was no Roman patriarch present, there was the new
patriarch of Constantinople, Eutychius, and the patriarchs of
Alexandria and Antioch, while he of Jerusalem sent proxies. To the
decisions of the council a hundred and sixty-four signatures were
affixed. Theologians still contest as to whether it was a free and
open council; but it was accepted beyond question, though after some
years, by the whole Church. It did its work: it safeguarded the
Catholic faith by stripping bare the meaning of statements which
indirectly attacked the Divine and Human Natures of the Incarnate
Son. It condemned these subtle suggestions, and it preserved to the
Church the real Christ of Whom she had learned.
These theological questions stand out, it may seem to some to-day, too
boldly in the history of the New Rome: but they know little of the
capital of the East who do not know how close to its life lie these
matters of dogma and definition. The very tradesmen at their work
talked of them, as they talked in the time of Gregory; and there was
nothing which the crowds who thronged the markets and the basilicas in
the days of Justinian more readily or more constantly discussed.
Constantinople in these first centuries of her life had the
theological interest closest to her heart; as the years went on the
needs of defence brought the military interest to the top.
The city in Justinian's days was rich and full of bread. All the glory
of the world seemed there to be gathered together, and with it the
vice, which stern laws and the charitable institutions, founded by the
imperial sovereigns, endeavoured as best they could to conquer or to
heal. The thronged markets sold every kind of goods, for commerce or
luxury. The monks who brought the silkworm from China to the Emperor's
court enabled him to found an industry which added greatly to
resources of his empire and the prosperity of his people. The mosaics,
which glittered on the walls of the churches, were made by skilled
artists in the city itself--carved work, images (the icons which the
Greek Church has never ceased to love), jewellery, beautifully
wrought, were among the manufactures of the great trading centre of
the East; and the military engines for which the Eastern army was
renowned were made within the walls of the capital itself. The pages
of Procopius and Agathias, of Lydus and John of Ephesus, show a busy
hurrying life, elaborate administrative arrangements, official
classes greedy and exclusive, popular agitations hasty and fickle, an
accumulating luxury with all its accompaniments of oppression,
avarice, and vulgar show. The millionaires of the sixth century, with
their gout, their costly equipages, and their summer palaces on the
Bosphorus or at Chalcedon, were a prominent feature in the life of the
great city. Beside them were the dusky traders from the far East, the
hordes of bearded monks ever ready to join in the logical squabbles or
take part in popular riots, and the silent barbarian soldiers, opening
wondering eyes on the disputes and the splendours of the imperial
city, and prompt at the word of command to dethrone emperors or
massacre their foes. In such a city it would have been strange if
there were order or peace; and indeed the constant complaint of the
chroniclers is of nobles, clerics and artizans, whom it was impossible
to restrain. Yet amid this scene of confusion at any moment the
imperial power might show itself with arbitrary and brutal abruptness.
When a servant maid by mischance spat on the robe of the dead Empress
Eudocia as it was carried to the tomb she was executed immediately and
without protest.
3. FROM JUSTIN II. TO THE LATIN CONQUEST.
In 565 Justinian died, and the glory of his reign set in a dull glow
that heralded storms. Justin II., his nephew, was a tyrant and a
madman, but it was power which brought out his tyranny and his
madness. When he came to the throne he spoke mildly and well. He made
profession of orthodoxy in S. Sophia; he was raised on the imperial
shield in the palace; he promised in the Hippodrome to pay the debts
of the dead Emperor. They were strange scenes, such as the people of
Byzantium often saw, and strangest of all to our minds is that which
shows the citizens in the place of public games clamouring before the
imperial throne for the payment of debts of Justinian.
Constantinople is still the same. Even when it looks cowed, it has
still its impudence and its determination to criticise. Justin's
doings were watched and mocked at, as if he had been the humblest
tradesman, by the city jesters. He built a golden chamber in the
palace by the sea: he set up a pillar to record his virtues, and then
some one affixed a tablet on it:
Build, build aloft thy pillar,
And raise it vast and high;
Then mount and stand upon it,
Soar proudly in the sky;
East, south and north, and westward,
Wherever thou shalt gaze,
Nought shalt thou see but ruins,
The work of thine own days.
Meanwhile the barbarians were coming nearer to the Empire. The Avars
demanded tribute, and the Turks, a name that was so soon to be a
familiar terror, sent envoys to the Cæsar's court. The enemies, it
might seem, were already closing in when Justin became a lunatic,
bursting into mad fits of rage, and drawn about the palace in a toy
cart, while the "whole senate and city" knew of the sad fate of their
Emperor. Sophia, his wife, had all the masterful genius of her aunt
Theodora. It was she who gave the rule to Tiberius II., under whom the
empire steadily decayed. Maurice, his successor, was a severe ruler,
whom the people learned to hate. When at last his reign ended in a
revolution and a flight, it was the people of Constantinople, the
demes and the factions of the Circus, who gave him to death, and
placed the imperial crown on the head of Phocas, his successor.
While Constantinople thus dethroned and set up the civil rulers of the
Empire, it was claiming for its patriarch the highest position in the
Church. When at the beginning of the sixth century the patriarch John
had signed the formula drawn up by Pope Hormisdas, he repudiated any
claim to superiority on the part of the old Rome: the two cities and
the two Sees he declared were one. As early as 518 the patriarch of
Constantinople called himself "universal bishop": in 595 the great
Pope Gregory, who had himself, as a papal envoy, seen the greatness of
the Eastern See, vigorously protested, to the Emperor Maurice, against
the assumption to the title. But while the patriarchs used the title
in no exclusive sense, they were determined, as they are determined
to-day, to assert the independence of their See and its equality with
that of Rome.
Ecclesiastical independence did not preserve the Empire from political
weakness. Phocas was soon seen to be worse than Maurice, and one
conspiracy after another was begun in the Hippodrome and ended by a
massacre in the streets. The Green faction in the Circus called the
Emperor a drunkard and a madman to his face. Famine and pestilence
ravaged the crowded city, and when Heraclius, already a renowned
general, brought his fleet up the Hellespont and anchored at the
Golden Horn the collapse of the power of Phocas was immediate, and a
new Emperor was crowned in the great church of the "Capital of the
World." The reign of Heraclius, gallant man though he was, began in
almost unbroken disaster, and when in 615 Jerusalem fell into the
hands of the Persians it seemed that the end was at hand. In the next
year, as had already happened under Phocas, a Persian army encamped at
Chalcedon. When negotiations were in vain, when Heraclius had even
formed the idea of transferring the seat of Empire from Constantinople
to Carthage, and had only abandoned it after his preparations were
far advanced, when the terror and indignation of the people forced him
to take oath before the patriarch in S. Sophia that he would never
leave "the Queen of Cities," at length the courage of the empire
awoke, the nobles sacrificed their wealth and the churches their
treasures, the fleet utterly destroyed that of the Persians, and
Heraclius delivered the city and the empire by a march as brilliant as
it was daring. Leading five thousand veterans across Asia Minor and
through the mountains he "penetrated into the heart of Persia and
recalled the armies of the great king to the defence of their bleeding
country." After three campaigns he returned in triumph and entered, as
no Emperor since Theodosius the Great had done, by the Golden Gate.
In his absence thirty thousand Avars, who had swept over the Balkan
provinces like a devouring flame, broke through the great wall and
encamped under the very walls of the city itself. Churches in the
suburbs were burnt to the ground and the famous Church of the
Theotokos in Blachernae was on the point of being destroyed, when some
panic caused the Avar horsemen to retire. The danger was too obvious
for the warning to be neglected, and the Senate, which had refused
with contumely the offers of the barbarian leaders, allies of the
Persian King, drove back the enemy and immediately increased the
fortifications by a new wall. This splendid barrier, magnificent
to-day in its ruins, stretched from the enclosure outside the palace
of Blachernae, at the foot of the sixth hill, to the Golden Horn. It
is flanked by three hexagonal towers.
A year later, in 627, the Emperor, who dreaded even the sight of the
sea, crossed the Bosphorus by a bridge of boats, decked with branches
of trees to imitate a forest. Landing north of the city he marched
inland and crossed the valley at the head of the Golden Horn--below
the "Sweet Waters of Europe"--by a bridge made by Justinian nearly
opposite the end of the walls. So along the triumphal way he went,
past the new walls that have ever since borne his name, and entered by
the Golden Gate, the Emperor who had vanquished the Persians, saved
his empire, and brought back the greatest of all relics, the sacred
wood of the true Cross, which S. Helena, the mother of Constantine,
had found on Calvary.
But Heraclius was not to triumph unchecked. The fatal temptation of
theological strife conquered even the conqueror of the Persians, and
the beginning of the Monothelite controversy dates from the _Ekthesis_
of Sergius the patriarch, a document which, if it were intended to
make peace, certainly provoked, war that was not ended, though its
area was defined, by the decision of the Fourth General Council, which
met at Constantinople in 680, and condemned those who denied that
Christ had two wills, human and divine.
The dreary years of the latter half of the seventh century may be
rapidly summarised. Constantinople saw the settlement of barbarians,
Slaves and Balgars, almost at its gates. Emperor succeeded emperor
without anyone appearing who was worthy to be the heir of Heraclius.
At length in 672 the Saracens, who had long devastated Asia, brought a
fleet up the Hellespont and besieged the city. Their total defeat by
Constantine IV., whom his people nicknamed Pogonatus (the bearded),
was the greatest triumph of the Christian powers against the infidel;
it was won, it is said, by the newly-discovered "Greek fire," so long
to be the terror of the foes of the Empire. Constantinople proved
herself the bulwark of Europe against the infidel. The nations of the
West sent their envoys to applaud. Six hundred years later another
Constantine was to fall, when his city was at length captured by the
followers of Mohammed.
Justinian II., the son of Constantine Pogonatus, was a great builder
like his namesake, whom probably he sought to imitate; but in
character he was far from resembling the builder of S. Sophia. In the
inimitable phrases of Gibbon, "The name of a triumphant law-giver was
dishonoured by the vices of a boy.... His passions were strong; his
understanding was feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride
that his birth had given him the command of millions, of whom the
smallest community would not have chosen him for their local
magistrate. His favourite ministers were two beings the least
susceptible of human sympathy, an eunuch and a monk; to the one he
abandoned a palace, to the other the finances; the former corrected
the Emperor's mother with a scourge, the latter suspended the
insolvent tributaries, with their heads downwards, over a slow and
smoky fire. Since the days of Commodus and Caracalla, the cruelty of
the Roman princes had most commonly been the effect of their fear; but
Justinian, who possessed some vigour of character, enjoyed the
sufferings and braved the revenge of his subjects about ten years,
till the measure was full of his crimes and of their patience."
The attempt to banish a popular general whom he had long imprisoned
was the occasion of a revolt which cast the Emperor from the throne;
and the hippodrome saw again an act of tragic vengeance, when the
tongue and nose of the fallen Cæsar were slit in the presence of the
people who had borne with him too long.
[Illustration: THE GOLDEN HORN FROM EYÛB]
Let Professor Bury's summary continue the tale:--"The twenty years
which intervened between the banishment of Justinian in 695 and the
accession of Leo the Isaurian in 717 witnessed a rapid succession of
monarchs, all of whom were violently deposed. Isaurian Leontius was
succeeded by Apsimar, who adopted the name Tiberius, and these two
reigns occupied the first ten years. Then Justinian returned from
exile, recovered the throne, and 'furiously raged' for six years
(705-711). He was overthrown by Bardanes, who called himself
Philippicus; then came Artemius, whose imperial name was Anastasius;
and finally the years 716 and 717 saw the fall of Anastasius, the
reign and fall of Theodosius, and the accession of Isaurian Leo, whose
strong arm guided the Empire from ways of anarchy into a new
path."[10]
In the tragedies of these years Constantinople bore its full share,
and no more strange contrast to the scene of his barbarous mutilation
could be imagined than that when Justinian II. sat again, ten years
later (705) in the hippodrome, with his feet on the necks of the two
monarchs who had filled his throne in the meantime. As the fickle
people saw the "slit-nose," as they called him, triumphant over
Leontius and Apsimar they called out in the words of the psalms, which
came so readily to their lips, "Thou hast trodden upon the _lion_ and
the _asp_: the young lion and the dragon hast thou trodden under thy
feet."
Six years later (711) there was a more terrible tragedy. Justinian was
justly dethroned and slain, and his little boy Tiberius, the child of
his exile, was torn from the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae and
cruelly butchered outside the palace wall. The next years were stained
by crimes and follies hardly less revolting than those that had gone
before; there could be no more bitter irony than the single word which
the humble tax-gatherer, who was elevated against his will to the
imperial throne under the name of Theodosius II., inscribed upon his
tomb--ὑγίεια--health was to be found nowhere for the empire in his
day.
His successor, Leo the Isaurian, whom the Senate and the patriarch of
Constantinople chose in 718 to be their lord, had seen an adventurous
life, and was already the general and imperator of the great eastern
army.
His first task was to defend the city against the Saracens. The great
siege of 718, lasting twelve months, failed chiefly through his skill
and patience. The invaders encamped before the city in August 717; the
name of their Suleiman was one which was later to be very familiar to
the Byzantines. When winter came it was one of those bitter seasons to
which Constantinople is often subject. For many weeks snow lay on the
ground, and the besiegers suffered far more than the garrison. Leo
defended the city with extraordinary skill, and at length, at the
right moment, by a well planned sortie he scattered the infidels, and
of the great host of a hundred and eighty thousand men the Mohammedan
historians say that only thirty thousand escaped back to the East. No
greater feat was ever performed by the great empire, the bulwark of
Christendom, than this heroic defence and splendid repulse.
It was not wholly the work of Leo, for the Bulgarians came from the
north to his aid, and a pestilence, even before the storms of the
Dardanelles destroyed their fleet, caused the withdrawal of the
Saracen host. Then as an administrator he reformed the government, as
a legist he reissued and revised the laws. The great earthquake of 739
caused the institution of a new tax, if not a new financial system.
"Some of the oldest monuments in the city were thrown down by the
shock, the statue of Constantine the Great, at the gate of Attalus;
the statue and sculptured column of Arcadius; the statue of
Theodosius I., over the Golden Gate, and the church of Irene, close to
S. Sophia. The land walls of the city were also subverted; and in
order to repair the fortifications Leo increased the taxes by
one-twelfth, or a miliarision in a nomisma."
Thus Professor Bury.[11] But to such acts, important though they were,
Leo the Isaurian does not owe the fact that his name will never be
forgotten in the history of the Empire which he ruled. It was he who
began the attack upon the ancient custom of the Eastern churches which
gave rise to the long and bitter iconoclastic controversy. It were
idle for a Western accustomed to the severity and restraint of English
worship to pretend to judge without partiality the conflict which
arose in the eighth century among the Easterns. To Englishmen it comes
with a shock of surprise to learn that they are regarded as Romanists,
as has recently happened, because they do not use incense in every
public service of the Church, according to the immemorial usage of the
East. Similarly it is with diffidence that we learn to recognise the
reverence paid to icons, pictures of sacred things, as a true and
helpful part of Oriental devotion. It tends, we think, to
superstition; as much perhaps as our grandfathers' pride in the black
gown of the preacher, or the curious customs which led in England to
the "plethoric Sunday afternoon." Leo the Isaurian, and after him his
son, Constantine V. (nicknamed Copronymus by his people, probably
"from his devotion to the stables"), of whom the latter certainly had
no sense of the reality of religion, embarked on an ill-omened attempt
to purge from the Church, and to destroy in the sacred buildings
themselves, all the brilliant pictures and mosaics which commemorated
the saints and received the homage, bordering no doubt on
superstition, of the faithful. They objected that it was a sin to
represent Christ in art at all; and that the representation of His
Mother tended to the exaltation of her name into that of a Divinity.
"Apostles of rationalism" these Emperors have strangely been called,
who fought against an ineradicable passion of their people. As dear to
the hearts of the Greek Christians as their subtle questionings into
the deep meanings of divine things, their determination to be
satisfied with nothing less than a precise and logical definition of
the faith once for all given to the saints, was their craving for
outward and visible signs to represent the gifts of God at once in the
Divine Life and in the lives of the saintly followers of the Lord, and
their own reverence and consecration of all that was beautiful in the
work of man. The force of Mohammedanism had lain in its austere
rejection of any outward image of Divine things; heretics, Judaising
or Monophysite, had from time to time taken up the cry against these
innocent representations of the saints. If the "worship" of images
tended to obscure the spiritual truth of religion, the destruction of
all visible memorials of the saints, emblems of the divine attributes,
or representations of the passion of Christ, was even more certain to
tell against the real belief of a race at once ignorant and dramatic,
to whom the eye was the constant teacher of the mind. However strange
and unedifying the reverence paid to icons may seem to the modern
Western mind, it is but the shallowest ignorance which would call it
idolatry, and it is plain that any hasty attempt to interfere with the
popular expression of religious ideas must tend, if hastily and
unskilfully conducted, to impair the faith of the people itself. Led
by men who were believed by the enthusiastic and conservative
Byzantines to be influenced by Monophysites, Jews and Mohammedans, it
was certain to provoke a desperate resistance, and that the more
widespread because the issue was not an intricate matter of scholastic
teaching, but a plain issue of practice in which every day passions
were deeply concerned.
In 726, almost, it would seem, without warning, the Emperor Leo issued
an edict that all images in churches should be utterly abolished. The
patriarch, rather than consent to the action, resigned his office. The
story of what followed may be given in the words of Mr Tozer.[12]
"The work of destruction now commenced in earnest; the statues were
everywhere removed, and the pictures on the walls were whitewashed
over, and though numerous outbreaks occurred, and some executions took
place before it was accomplished, yet on the whole the opposition was
not formidable. The act which caused the greatest indignation was the
removal of the magnificent image of Christ which surmounted the bronze
gateway of the imperial palace, and was the object of great reverence.
In order to take down this statue and burn it, a soldier of the guard
had mounted a ladder, when a number of women assembled at the spot to
beg that it might be spared; but, instead of listening to them, the
soldier struck his axe into the face of the image. Infuriated by this,
which appeared to them to be an insult offered to the Saviour Himself,
they dragged the ladder from under his feet and killed him. The
Emperor avenged his agent by executing some, and exiling others, of
the offenders, and set up in the place of the statue a plain cross,
with an inscription explaining the significance of the change.
"In the defence of images there stood forth two champions, the one in
the West, the other in the East; and the points of view from which
they respectively regarded them illustrate the different feelings of
the two churches on the subject. The former of these was Pope Gregory
II., who at first strongly remonstrated with the Emperor on his edict,
and afterwards, when he endeavoured to enforce its observance in
Italy, encouraged his people to disregard the order, and defied his
nominal sovereign in violent and even insulting language. At last he
excommunicated his nominee, the patriarch Anastasius. But he advocated
the retention of images on the practical ground of their utility in
instructing the young and ignorant, and as being an incentive to
devotion. Far more exalted and more subtly defined was the position
attributed to them by the other advocate, who spoke from the distant
East. This was John of Damascus, otherwise known as S. John Damascene,
the last of the Fathers of the Greek Church. This learned and acute
theologian, who in many ways was superior to the age in which he
lived, at one time filled a civil post of some importance under the
Caliphs, who now ruled in Syria, but afterwards retired to the
monastery of S. Saba, in the wilderness of Engedi, the strange
position of which, overhanging a deep gorge that leads down to the
Dead Sea, is still the wonder of the traveller. As he lived in the
dominion of the Saracens he was beyond the reach of the Emperor's arm,
and now undertook the cause of his suffering co-religionists. In three
powerful addresses he set forth his arguments for image worship. Some
of them follow the familiar lines of defence, that these objects were
memorials of the mysteries of the faith; and that in the adoration of
them the spiritual was reached through the medium of the material. But
beyond this he made it plain that, to his mind, and the minds of those
who thought with him, the worship of images was closely connected with
the doctrine of the Incarnation, the earthly material having been
once for all sanctified when the Son of God took human flesh, and
being thenceforth worthy of all honour. From this we may learn both
how it came to pass that the most religious men of the age became
enthusiasts for what was in itself superstitious, and also what was
the cardinal point of difference between them and their opponents.
For, while the one side regarded figures of Christ as a degradation of
a heavenly being, to the other they were a practical confession of His
true humanity, and any disregard of them appeared in the light of a
denial of the Incarnation. At last, when it was found that the Emperor
persevered in his attack, the iconoclasts were anathematised by the
orthodox congregations in all the Mahometan countries outside the
Empire. Both John and Gregory protested throughout against the
interference of the State with the Church in this matter as being
beyond its province; and, owing to the close connection which existed
between the clergy and the people, they were generally regarded as the
assertors of liberty and of the right of private judgment in
opposition to despotism."
The indirect effects of Leo's action were even more important than the
obvious ones. The division which ensued between Italy, resisting
iconoclasm under the Pope's authority, and the imperial power made the
Emperor decide to transfer to the patriarch of Constantinople the
jurisdiction over Sicily and Calabria, leaving to the Pope that over
the exarchate of Ravenna which still nominally obeyed the Cæsar. The
meaning of this is thus expressed by Professor Bury.
"The effect of this act of Leo, which went far to decide the mediæval
history of Southern Italy, was to bring the boundary between the
ecclesiastical dominions of New Rome and Old Rome into coincidence
with the boundary between the Greek and the Latin nationalities. In
other words, it laid the basis of the distinction between the Greek
and the Latin Churches. The only part of the Empire in which the Pope
now possessed authority was the exarchate, including Rome, Ravenna and
Venice. The geographical position of Naples, intermediate between Rome
and the extremities of Italy, determined that its sympathies should be
drawn in two directions; in religious matters it inclined towards Old
Rome, in political matters it was tenacious of its loyalty to New
Rome."[13]
But this was not all. An immense immigration of persecuted monks and
priests as well as lay folk practically recolonised much of Southern
Italy.
Constantine Copronymus was far more eager than his father to push the
iconoclastic campaign. In 761 he began a deliberate and bitter
persecution of those who opposed him. Already, under Leo the Isaurian,
the virgin Theodosia had been martyred. Her festival is still kept on
May 29, and the church raised to her memory still stands transformed
into a mosque just within the Aya Kapou, on the Golden Horn. Many whom
the Greek Church still commemorates were now slain and others
tortured. Constantine was equally hostile to monks, and he was as
bitter against his creatures whom he suspected as against those who
openly disputed his will. The patriarch whom he had set up fell into
disgrace in spite of his support of iconoclasm. He was degraded in S.
Sophia, carried round the Hippodrome sitting backwards on an ass, and
at last beheaded as a traitor.
The successor of Constantine, Leo IV., was significant only in that he
followed his policy of persecution. He left the crown in 780 to his
son Constantine and his widow Irene. Conspiracies, real or alleged, of
his brothers were bitterly punished. The Empress Irene was satisfied
so long as her son was still a boy to allow him a nominal share in the
government; but when he grew up and showed an independent spirit, she
used the growing unpopularity which came upon him after his
repudiation of his wife to raise a party against him, and hired troops
to take his life. He escaped death only to lose his eyes, and his
wicked mother, surrounded by degraded favourites, reigned alone. It
was she whom the great Teutonic King Charles was ready to wed, and the
failure of the negotiations led, with other more notable causes, to
the creation of the new empire of the West, so long held by German
Cæsars, but professing still to be--as that of Constantinople
historically was--the heir of the ancient empire of the Roman world.
Wicked as Irene was, it was given to her to restore peace to the
Church, and to reunite though only for a time the Catholic Church
throughout the world. So completely was the popular feeling against
the iconoclasts that it needed little of the intrigue or violence
which Irene was so ready to use to secure the result she desired. In
786, when her worst passions had not been revealed and she still lived
in union with her son, the seventh General Council met at Nicaea. It
was attended by representatives from Italy as well as from the East,
and as its decisions represent the use and teaching of the Eastern
Church to-day, they may here be summarised in Professor Bury's words.
"At the seventh sitting (5th or 6th October), the definition (ὅρος)
of doctrine was drawn up; after a summary repetition of the chief
points of theology established by previous Universal Councils, it
is laid down that the figure of the holy cross and holy images,
whether coloured or plain, whether consisting of stone or of any other
material, may be represented on vessels, garment, walls or tables, in
houses or on public roads; especially figures of Christ, the Virgin,
angels, or holy men: such representations, it is observed, stimulate
spectators to think of the originals, and, while they must not be
adored with that worship which is only for God (λατρεία) deserve
adoration (προσκύνησις)."[14]
But Irene's services to the Church were not allowed then, any more
than we should allow them now, to preserve her in power. The stars in
their courses seemed to the superstitious to fight against her, and,
though she held the crown she had so ill-won for five years, the end
came at last by the treachery of those she had raised to highest
place. "For five years," says Gibbon, "the Roman world bowed to the
government of a female; and, as she moved through the streets of
Constantinople, the reins of four milk-white steeds were held by as
many patricians, who marched on foot before the golden chariot of
their queen." But among the patricians whom she had chosen was the
treasurer Nicephorus, who on October 31, 802, having captured his
benefactress, and with some spark of generosity, undestroyed by his
ambition and his avarice, sent her to banishment rather than to death,
ascended the throne of the Cæsars.
With him began a new dynasty, a new century, and in some ways a new
era for the imperial city.
During the eighth century Constantinople, as a city, underwent a great
change. This was not merely due to the incessant ebb and flow of
population, the coming and going of different detachments of the
imperial army, the founding of new monasteries by men from all parts
of the Christian world, the opening of new commercial establishments,
the coming of new trading embassies, but to one great and
irremediable disaster. From 745 to 747 the city was devastated by the
plague, that bubonic distemper, so familiar already but now more
terribly destructive than ever before. The words of Theophanes, who
lived when the remembrance of it was still fresh, though they have
been often quoted, may be quoted again. They stand side by side with
the modern records of the still powerful pestilence.
"And in the spring of the first indiction (747) the pestilence spread
to a greater extent, and in summer its flame culminated to such a
height that whole houses were entirely shut up, and those on whom the
office devolved could not bury their dead. In the embarrassment of the
circumstances, the plan was conceived of carrying out the dead on
saddled animals, on whose backs were placed frameworks of planks. In
the same way they placed the corpses above one another in waggons. And
when all the burying-grounds in the city and suburbs had been filled,
and also the dry cisterns and tanks, and very many vineyards had been
dug up, the gardens too within the old walls were used for the purpose
of burying human bodies, and even thus the need was hardly met."
[Illustration: THE AQUEDUCT OF VALENS]
The effect of the great loss of life which ensued was felt at once. At
the very time when multitudes were seeking refuge in Italy from the
iconoclastic persecution, came this new depopulation, and Constantine
found himself obliged to encourage, and even enforce, immigration from
every part of his dominions. Chiefly he brought Greeks from the
mainland, and their places were filled by Slaves from the North.
Greece and the Balkan States as they appear to-day, and even to some
degree Constantinople itself took a new and marked departure in the
middle of the eighth century. Constantinople received a new Greek
population and, while its official classes still preserved the pomp
and dignity of Roman traditions, began to feel itself more than ever
Greek. None the less it was still actively and obviously cosmopolitan.
Scholars from all parts of the world came to the university where
ancient classics were still read and where Greek was still a living
tongue. Constantine actually made Nicetas, a man of Slavonic race,
patriarch, and it is said that his clergy mocked at his pronunciation
of the Greek of the Gospel. Armenians had already become almost as
prominent in the city as they are to-day; at the beginning of the
ninth century one of them actually became Emperor. As early as the
reign of Justin II. a large colony of traders from Central Asia was
established in the city. When communication became easier and the
power of the Roman State, reviving under Heraclius, more wide spread,
the riches of the city increased. It is noted that the influence of
the Church was steadily directed against luxury, and that nothing at
all like the scenes described by Juvenal or Petronius marked the
Byzantium of the days of the iconoclasts. Constantine himself was a
man who lived freely, and the monks whom he attacked commented
severely on his life. But the rich men of Constantinople, as a rule,
though they delighted in the outward adorning of gold and precious
stones, and loved entertainments, the circus and excursions on the
Bosphorus, lived on the whole simply. Though the churches, as well as
the houses, glittered with mosaics and gems, the asceticism which the
many monasteries kept always visibly before the eyes of the people,
had its influence among the rich as well as the poor. Rich though the
imperial city was it was rich most of all in its churches and its
relics. And indeed the constant danger from without, and the pressing
needs of a large population, both gave employment to great numbers and
gave to the government always some practical work which kept up the
taxes. The laws, it has been observed, recognised the duty of the
State to provide work for the people, and to see that they did it.
Idleness was regarded as a crime as well as a sin: the State declared
that for this reason it must actively discourage it, and no less
because "it is unfair that strong men should live by the consumption
of the superfluity of the labour of others, because that superfluity
is owed to the weak." It is noted also that "besides the inevitable
staff of public workmen, who, in a city like Byzantium, where fires
were frequent and earthquakes not uncommon, had much to do beyond the
repairs necessitated by the wear and tear of time, the State also
supported multitudes of bakers"--for the State still followed the
Roman rule and provided the poor with bread as well as public
games--"and we are taught that the gardens, to which we sometimes meet
casual references in the historians, were not the property of private
citizens, but were parks for the people, kept up at the State's
expense." Already we see that some of the features most prominent in
the city to-day belonged to it in the early Middle Age. The great Dome
of S. Sophia glittered upon the wayfarer as he sailed up towards the
mouth of the Golden Horn, and the city as the soldier looked at it
from the tower of Heraclius was a city set in bowers of perpetual
green. Another feature as prominent, which the foreigner sees from the
heights of Pera, owes its preservation to Constantine Copronymus. The
aqueduct of Valens had been destroyed by the Avars in the reign of
Heraclius, Constantine brought thousands of workmen together and
repaired it, and the water flowed as of old into the capacious
cisterns which were the work of the greatest of eastern architects.
The ninth century began with the new and short-lived dynasty of
Nicephorus. "His character," says Gibbon, "was stained with the three
odious vices of hypocrisy, ingratitude and avarice; his want of virtue
was not redeemed by any superior talents nor his want of talents by
any pleasing qualifications." The historians, being ecclesiastics,
resented his attempt to assert the most extreme claims of the
iconoclastic emperors to rule the Church, and the people despised him
for his treachery and his failures in war. He fell in 811 in battle
against the Bulgarians. In six months his son, Stauricius, followed
him to the tomb. Michael Rhangabe, who had married Procopia, the
daughter of Nicephorus, then reigned for two years, but his weakness
caused his deposition, and the people of Constantinople found a new
sovereign, Leo the Armenian, forced upon them by the army. During his
reign the imperial city was again besieged. Hadrianople was lost, and
but for the death of the Bulgarian king it seems unlikely that Leo
would have been able to drive back the forces which overran the
peninsula. Yet Leo, conqueror though he was, was able to hold the
crown but little longer than his predecessors. In 820 a conspiracy of
his generals, which his own generosity had made possible, attacked him
as he sang matins on Christmas Day, and slew him at the foot of the
altar in the chapel. He did not reign without leaving a memorial of
his rule which lasts to this day. The wall of Heraclius was not
thought fully to defend the quarter of Blachernae. Leo determined to
build another wall and dig a broad moat in front of the Heraclian
wall. "The wall of Leo," says Professor Van Millingen, "stands 77 feet
to the west of the wall of Heraclius, running parallel to it for some
260 feet, after which it turns to join the walls along the Golden
Horn." It is a strong fortification, and the number of attacks
afterwards delivered on that quarter show how necessary it was that it
should be strong. "Its parapet-walk was supported upon arches, which
served at the same time to buttress the wall itself, a comparatively
slight structure about 8 feet thick. With a view of increasing the
wall's capacity for defence, it was flanked by four small towers,
while its lower portion was pierced by numerous loopholes. Two of the
towers were on the side facing the Golden Horn, and the other two
guarded the extremities of the side looking towards the country on the
west. The latter towers projected inwards from the rear of the wall,
and between them was a gateway corresponding to the Heraclian gate of
Blachernae."[15]
Michael II., called the Stammerer, who was then brought from the
dungeon to the throne, and on whose legs,--such was the haste of the
revolution,--the fetters actually remained for some hours after he was
Emperor, was twice besieged in Constantinople by a rival general, but
was relieved by the Bulgarians, and showed to the captured leader,
Thomas the Slavonian, none of the mercy that had been shown to
himself. He died in 829, and his son Theophilus reigned in his stead.
Of his character and reign the most contradictory reports are given;
but it is interesting to recall the scene of his choice of a wife, as
Theophanes tells it. He determined to choose a bride from among the
beauties of Constantinople, and when they were assembled he walked
between two lines of lovely damsels. When he came to the poetess
Kasia, he addressed her in verse:
διὰ γυναικὸς εἰσερρύη τὰ φαῦλα.
She replied, more happily,
ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ γυναικὸς τὰ κρείττονα πηγάζει.
It was in the style of the old Greek poets: the leaders of each
semichorus championing the cause of their sex in the immortal
question: "Through woman evil things entered"; "but also through woman
better things well forth." The lady was too witty to be empress, and
Theodora, who was chosen instead, became not only a happy wife but a
wise regent after the death of Theophilus. He died in 842, and
Theodora was regent for her son Michael till 856. Her husband had been
Iconoclast, and he scourged those who would not receive his edict. His
widow declared that he had repented on his death-bed, and procured his
absolution after death. Before the year of his death was out Theodora
had replaced the images and a synod had reiterated the right and
benefit of image-"worship." But the independence of the Eastern Church
was none the less fully secured; and the indignant protests of Popes
showed that they were becoming, as their own pretensions grew, more
and more estranged from Constantinople.
The wisdom of the mother was not rewarded in the life of her son.
Michael III. was perhaps the most contemptible sovereign who ever sat
on the imperial throne of the East. He gave himself up to pleasure and
in particular to the Circus. He was a drunkard and buffoon, and he
delighted to mock in public processions the most sacred ordinances of
the Christian religion. In 867 he was murdered by one whom he had
raised almost to the purple. The years of his reign were diversified
by sieges--notably the first attack of some hitherto unknown
barbarians from the North-East.
Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries Constantinople was
attacked four times by the Russians. The traders told of the riches of
the city, and the barbarians were eager to carry them away. In June
860 they actually anchored in the Bosphorus and attacked the walls,
but the return of Michael III. drove them off, and they were
afterwards completely defeated. A second attempt is said to have taken
place in 907, when the rough barks of the pirates were drawn over the
isthmus; a third in 941 was as completely defeated; and again in 1048
the Greek fire proved effective.
But these later sieges were still in the far future when Michael, with
the aid, men said, of the Blessed Virgin of the Blachernae, scattered
the invaders, and passed again into the seclusion of his corrupt
court, from whose recesses no news but that of murders and
debaucheries seems ever to have penetrated without. "The state of
society at the Court of Constantinople," says Finlay, "was not
amenable to public opinion, for few knew much of what passed within
the walls of the great palace; but yet the immense machinery of the
imperial administration gave the Emperor's power a solid basis, always
opposed to the temporary vices of the courtiers. The order which
rendered property secure, and enabled the industrious classes to
prosper, through the equitable administration of the Roman law,
nourished the vitality of the Empire, when the madness of a Nero and
the drunkenness of a Michael appeared to threaten political order with
ruin. The people, carefully secluded from public business, and almost
without any knowledge of the proceedings of their government, were in
all probability little better acquainted with the intrigues and crimes
of their day than we are at present. They acted, therefore, only when
some real suffering or imaginary grievance brought oppression directly
home to their interests or their feelings. Court murders were to them
no more than a tragedy or a scene in the amphitheatre, at which they
were not present."[16]
Thus, when Cæsar followed Cæsar, with no change for the city over
which they were supposed to rule, the intrigues and scandals which
disgraced the reign of Michael III. raised scarce a stir among the
people; and when he died by the hands of one who had taken--it was
said--a base part in some of the most degraded of his acts, men hardly
wondered and certainly did not condemn.
Basil the Macedonian, had had a romantic life. As a boy he had
wandered penniless to Constantinople, and slept on the steps of the
church of S. Diomed. The kindness shown to the wayfarer by the abbat
of the monastery attached to the church was rewarded, when Basil
became Emperor, by the erection of a new church and monastery, some
pillars of which still lie neglected upon the beach of the Sea of
Marmora, not far from Yedi Koulé station. His immense strength,
personal beauty, and acute intelligence, soon made their way, and he
completed his ascent to power it is said by marrying a mistress of
Michael III.
As sovereign and the founder of a dynasty, Basil the Macedonian was
amongst the greatest of the Emperors. He was a successful warrior, an
able administrator of finance, a great builder of churches, and a
repairer of the walls. But his greatest glory is that of restorer of
the ancient Roman law. He returned, as has been shown by Professor
Bury,[17] to the principles of Justinian, in the Basilica, which were
the most important reconstruction of Roman law in the Middle Ages, and
the last it received.
We must hurry over these years, in which Constantinople itself
underwent but few changes. Leo VI., the "philosopher," who has been
more happily called a pedant, left no trace on the history of the
city, save his name as a repairer on one of the towers of the
sea-walls by Koum Kapou. His son, Constantine VII., called
Porphyrogenitus, because he was "born in the purple," (_i.e._ not when
his father was Emperor, but because of the porphyry lined chamber
reserved for his mother at his birth), was at first under the charge
of his uncle Alexander and then of his mother Zoe, and lastly of a
successful general Romanus, who surrounded himself with a galaxy of
imperial sons, allowing Constantine VII. also still to retain the
title of Emperor.
"The studious temper and retirement of Constantine," says Gibbon,
"disarmed the jealousy of power; his books and music, his pen and his
pencil, were a constant source of amusement; and, if he could improve
a scanty allowance by the sale of his pictures, if their price was not
enhanced by the name of the artist, he was endowed with a personal
talent which few princes could employ in the hour of adversity."
Constantine was much more than a student. A plot against Romanus and
the other Cæsars enabled him to resume power, which he held with
credit for seventeen years. As a writer he is one of the most
important of all the Byzantine historians.
The chief feature indeed of this age is its literary interest. Two
Emperors ruled whose pride it was to be men of letters. Leo the wise,
and Constantine born in the purple, were both men who wrote of war
and government as they knew them, and left to their successors
remarkable pictures of their times. Leo describes the military forces
which had still a magnificent organisation and a record of victory and
valour but little tarnished. The nobles of Constantinople could fight
as well as intrigue. Rich, brave and popular, the ancient families
which lingered so long after the Mohammedan conquest in the ancient
houses of the Phanar could always be relied upon to furnish gallant
officers for the troops. Constantine wrote of the Themes, of the
Imperial administration, and of the court ceremonial--the last an
extraordinary work describing the dignity and state of the emperors,
and regulating the minutest detail of the pomp with which their daily
life was surrounded.
The Court of the Eastern Empire indeed was by far the most brilliant
of the Middle Ages, and the Empire itself, weak and corrupt though it
may seem, was much the strongest government of the time, and the one
under which life and property were most secure. The commerce of
Constantinople was still greater probably than that of any other city
of the world. East and West poured their treasures into the city.
The reign of Constantine Porphyrogenitus was diversified, like those
of so many of his predecessors, as has already been said, by
revolutions, which placed many Cæsars on at least the steps of the
throne. Romanus and his sons Constantine (called the Eighth) and
Stephen, came to an end in 945, and from that time till his death in
958 Constantine VII. reigned alone. His son, Romanus II., succeeded
him, and to him came a time of war, in which his arms were victorious
over the Mohammedans through the genius of his general, Nicephorus
Phocas. In 963 Romanus died, and Nicephorus, marrying his widow
Theophano, became joint Emperor with the young Basil.
Nicephorus was above all things a warrior. He recovered for the Empire
the lands of Cilicia, North Syria, and Cyprus. His triumph in 966,
celebrated in the Hippodrome and in the great street of the city, was
the prelude to many another great military display; yet not being sole
Emperor, he never entered in triumph through the Golden gate, though
it was at that gate that he was received in 963 when he began his
joint reign.[18] But his life as Emperor was an unhappy one. So
unpopular was he in the city, owing to his opposition to the lavish
generosity of his predecessors and to his debasement of the coinage,
that he was often stoned in the streets and had to fortify the great
Palace; and his portrait has been limned for posterity by his enemies.
Chief among the pictures of mediæval Constantinople is that drawn by
Liudprand, bishop of Cremona, who came on behalf of the Emperor Otto
I. to treat of a marriage between Theophano, the daughter of the
Emperor Romanus, and the future Otto II.
Liudprand had visited Constantinople in 948. Then he spoke of the
great palace to which he was admitted to audience with Constantine
Porphyrogenitus, of its golden tree in which golden birds of divers
kinds sang sweetly, of the golden lions that guarded the throne,
shaking the earth with the beat of their tails, and roaring at the
approach of the envoys--marvellous features of the Eastern Court which
the Emperor had not forgotten to record in his account of the
ceremonial. Then he saw, too, the Emperor recline at dinner after the
ancient fashion, he saw the games of the Hippodrome, and he marvelled
at the size of the fruit and at the extraordinary acrobatic strength
of the boys of the circus. Then he was treated with great distinction.
Now, in 968, his reception was very different. In his letter to the
two Ottos he declared that he even lodged in a roofless house, exposed
to heat and cold, and constantly under guard, and that he suffered
agonies from the resinous Greek wine. First he saw Basil, the
Emperor's brother, and then he was admitted to the presence of
Nicephorus himself, whom he describes as more a monster than a man,
black as an Ethiop, and small as a pigmy. A pretty argument took place
between envoy and Emperor; the Greek refusing the imperial title to
the German Cæsars of the West, while the Western bishop would not
allow any rights of the East to the Italian lands of old Rome. Their
converse was interrupted by the hour of prayer, and Liudprand joined
the procession to S. Sophia. Tradesmen and low-born folk, says the
contemptuous bishop, lined the streets, many of them barefoot, because
of the holiness of the procession. Nicephorus alone wore gold and
jewels.
When they entered the great church the choir sang "Lo there cometh the
morning star. The dawn riseth. He reflects the rays of the sun.
Nicephorus our ruler, the pale death of the Saracens."[19] The famous
phrase, "pallida mors Saracenorum," which Liudprand uses, was to be
terribly avenged; but then it was a triumphant expression of the
safety which the city owed to the wise Emperor. As he went, says
Liudprand, "his lords the Emperors" (Basil and Constantine, the sons
of Romanus) bowed before him. After the Eucharist the bishop dined
with the Emperor, and was again, he says, subject to his taunts. "You
are not Romans but Lombards," was the Eastern mockery of the German
imperialism; and the reply was that to the Westerns there was no name
more contemptible than that of Roman. Such abrupt witticisms naturally
consigned Liudprand again to his "hated dwelling, or more truly,
prison." He wrote to Basil the curopalates (a post of honour second
only to that of Cæsar) and John Tzimisces the Logothete, beseeching
that if his mission was not favourably received, he might return at
once; and then in an interview with Nicephorus, in the presence of
Basil the chamberlain (_parakinomenos_) he pressed the proposal of
Otto for a marriage. The Emperor replied that it was unheard of that a
princess born in the purple, the child of an Emperor born in the
purple, should be given in marriage to a "gentile" or "barbarian." So
day by day the meetings were renewed and the proud Italian thought
that he was treated each time with new indignity, being even set below
a Bulgarian envoy--to whose master the Greeks would even allow the
title of "Vasileus" (βασιλεύς) which they would not give to Otto,
and towards whose people alone it seemed that the Eastern Empire
at this time had any kindly feeling. Theology as well as politics were
often in question, and the Italian bishop was mocked at for the
modernism of his doctrines, as the Greeks mock the Latins to-day. He
was kept, he says, in company with five lions; and the women, as he
passed through the streets, called out in pity at his woe-worn
appearance. Sometimes he visited the Emperor in the camp at Balukli
(εἰς πήγας, he says, in one of his snatches of Greek) and quoted
Plato to him; sometimes he had to listen to homilies of S. John
Chrysostom read aloud; more often he had to hear what seemed to him
the grossest insults of the Germans and the Latins, insults which he
gladly returned in his report to the Ottos upon "the wild ass
Nicephorus," and which he even ventured, he says, to write on the
wall of his prison in verses none too easily to be understood. At
length he was allowed to leave the city, "once most opulent and
flourishing, now half-starved, perjured, lying, cunning, greedy,
rapacious, avaricious, boastful." His report, as we have it, breaks
off in a torrent of denunciations of the Greeks and their ways. His
mission was a failure, but Theophano, refused by Nicephorus, was
afterwards given by John Tzimisces, to be bride to Otto II.
This curious survival of tenth century opinion illustrates the almost
total severance which had now come about between the East and the
West, and shows how natural was the destruction which was soon to come
upon the city of the Cæsars. The West had ceased to feel for the
Eastern survival of empire anything of brotherhood or Christian
fellowship. First it would seek to conquer the bulwark of Christendom
for itself; then it would let it fall before the conquering infidels.
Nicephorus did not long retain the throne he had so well defended.
John Tzimisces (or Tchemchkik), an Armenian, who won the favour of the
Empress Theophano, joined in a plot to overthrow his benefactor, and
Nicephorus was murdered in the palace. John Tzimisces reigned in his
stead. He made treaty with the patriarch Polyeuctus, by which he gave
up the claim that Nicephorus had asserted, that all episcopal
nominations should only be valid by the Emperor's consent. He gave
high promotion to the dignified and imposing Basil, the chamberlain
whom Psellus the historian describes as so impressive a person. He
banished the wicked Empress Theophano to the Princes' islands. Then he
reigned as joint Emperor with the young Emperors Basil and
Constantine, whose rights he was scrupulous to preserve.
John Tzimisces was famous as a gallant defender of the empire. The
people of Constantinople knew him chiefly for the imposing ceremonies
of his accession, of his second marriage with Theodora, daughter of
Constantine VII., and of his departure for war against the barbarian
invaders, when the clergy led him in pomp to his embarkation on the
Golden Horn, and blessed his ships, and the citizens watched a naval
sham fight from the walls. Domestic rebellions--those of Bardas,
Sclerus, and of the family of Phocas--as well as the dangerous Russian
invasions--distracted his reign: but Tzimisces was a successful
general, and by his conquest over the Russians under Swiatoslaf he
preserved the Empire, and began that association of teaching and
Christian influence which is returned to-day by the orthodox Russians
to the Church of Constantinople, which is their mother, and which now,
in her time-honoured conservatism, weak though she is, she is inclined
rather to resent than to welcome. From his conquest John Tzimisces
returned in triumph to Constantinople through the Golden gate,
followed by his soldiers and his captives, greeted by the Church and
by the officers of his court, and watched by the vast population of
the imperial city. It was one of the greatest of the triumphs, as it
was one of the last. The ancient usages were retained in all their
pomp. The senate met the Emperor at the gate with the conqueror's
chaplet and with the golden chariot drawn by four white horses, in
which they besought him to drive through the streets. Dramatically he
showed his sympathy with the religious feeling of his people; the
chariot should carry the Ikon of the Blessed Virgin which he had taken
in Bulgaria and to which he attributed his victories: he would ride
behind, clothed as an emperor and a general, and would offer in S.
Sophia the crown of the conquered Bulgarian kings. Then in the palace
the young Bulgarian chieftain Boris, who had followed his triumph on
foot, was despoiled of the insignia of sovereignty, yet ranked among
the officers of the imperial court.
It was not the last of the victories of John Tzimisces. He returned
more than once a conqueror from Armenia and Mesopotamia. He died in
976, in the midst of his victories; and since the young Emperors whom
he had guarded were now grown to man's estate, men spoke of his death
as mysterious and as probably due to poison.
In Basil II. the Empire again had a warrior Emperor, but one who added
to the delights of war the devotion of an almost monastic religion.
While his brother, Constantine IX., confined himself to the court and
its pleasures, Basil in many hard-won fights achieved the title of
Bulgaroktonos, the slayer of the Bulgarians. For thirty-four years he
fought the great King Samuel, who had built up a power in the Balkans,
till at last he utterly broke up the Slavs, captured all their
fortresses, and extended the frontier of the Empire to Belgrade, and
so down the Danube to the Black Sea. It was, as Gibbon says, "since
the time of Belisarius, the most important triumph of the Roman arms."
Victories also he won in the East, but they served only to break down
the kingdom of Armenia, and thus to destroy what might have been a
bulwark against the infidel. Basil, who reigned from 963 to 1025, when
he died at the age of sixty-eight, and who for more than fifty years
was practically the sole ruler of the Empire, was a stern, vigorous
man, sharp in speech, often cruel in victory, serious and restrained
in life, but fond of mirth in his moments of ease. He was a complete
contrast to his idle brother, who lived it seemed only for the
Hippodrome and the society of the ladies of his court. Basil was never
married. Constantine, who survived him three years, left three
daughters.[20] During his long reign Basil had swept away all rivals
from his path: the great chamberlain Basil had early been banished,
and there was no dynasty to compete with the Macedonians in the last
days of their power.
Basil taught the people that the Emperor could rule without the
intervention of courtiers, and thus when he died the imperial city
looked for a man to be at its head. If they had feared rather than
loved the great conqueror of the Bulgarians, they respected him
because he had kept up the power of the Church and had patronised the
learning which still had its home in the East. He left to his
successors the alliance of the patriarchal See and a school of
literature founded on classic models, which, with all its
affectations, gave to the eleventh century an important group of
historical writers. In no age, too, was Byzantine art, the art of
working in ivory, of miniature, of mosaic, more vigorous. With the
death of Basil, however long it might be disguised, the decay began.
When Constantine died his three daughters survived him, Eudocia who
preferred a convent to a throne, and Zoe and Theodora, ladies of more
ambitious temper. Zoe before her father died was wedded--she was
forty-eight--to Romanus Argyrus, an elderly noble already married,
whose wife was banished to a convent. Romanus III. was for six years
(1028-1034) the nominal ruler of the Empire. He thought himself a
philosopher and a warrior; but, says Psellus, "he thought he knew far
more than he did." Some of his acts were useful--as his repair of the
walls after the earthquakes of 1032 and 1033, commemorated by an
inscription on the fourth tower from the Sea of Marmora, shows. But
the historian mocks at his long drawn-out building of the monastery of
S. Mary Peribleptos and says that a "whole mountain was excavated" to
supply the stones. It was his most enduring memorial, and, several
times rebuilt, it still survives in the possession of the Armenians as
the monastery of S. George, not far from the Psamatia station.
But the Emperor's dreams of war, philosophy and building, were rudely
disturbed by the intrigue of his wife with a young Paphlagonian
soldier, Michael. He professed to disbelieve it, though it was
notorious to the court. His complaisance perhaps allowed him to die in
peace, though some said he was killed by a slow poison. On the very
day of his death Zoe elevated Michael to the throne, and before the
burial of Romanus the senate kissed the right hand of his successor.
Michael appears before us in the pages of the rhetorical Psellus as
almost a hero and a saint. He reclaimed sinners after the manner of
Justinian, he reformed the administration, he daily worshipped God in
the services of the Church, and nightly walked the streets to watch
and to prevent crime. One of the strangest pictures of mediæval
Constantinople is that which Psellus gives us of the unwearied
Emperor, disguised in monkish dress, passing swiftly "like lightning"
through the streets at night, watching that his people might be
preserved from crime. Yet with all his virtues he was a drunkard, and
the epileptic fits to which he became more and more subject were
probably due to his vices. So terribly did his affliction increase
upon him that when he gave audience it was necessary to surround him
with curtains which could in a moment be drawn to hide his paroxysms,
and when he rode his guards formed a circle about him. His greedy
relations surrounded him and urged him to provide for them, and when
he had signalised his reign by a heroic defence of the Empire against
a rising of the Bulgarians he returned in triumph only to retire to a
monastery and to die.
Zoe emerged from the seclusion in which she had passed the last years
of her young husband's life, and was induced by her family to make his
nephew, Michael Kalaphates Emperor. Raised to the throne by his family
he set himself at once to reduce it to the lowest depths. "The names
of kinship, the common tie of kindred blood, appeared to him mere
childishness, and it would have been nothing to him if one wave had
engulfed all his kin." The same measure he meted to the nobles and the
officials; but he courted popularity with the traders and the populace
more than any of his predecessors had done, and when he showed himself
in the streets silk carpets were strewn before him and he was greeted
as the noblest of the Cæsars. Yet he relied too much upon the fickle
mob. When the senate consented to his banishment of Zoe, shorn as a
nun, to Prince's Island, he proclaimed his act in the forum of
Constantine for the acceptance of the people.
But Constantinople again showed that, favoured as it had been like a
petted child, it could show its power. The people assembled in knots
at street corners and protested against the banishment of the heiress
of the Macedonian warrior. The conclaves became a riot and the riot a
revolution. Women ran through the streets tearing their hair and
beating their breasts. Officers of State joined the mob, and they
rushed to destroy the houses of the Emperor's family. Zoe was hastily
recalled from Prinkipo, and shown in purple robes to the people in the
Hippodrome. But it was too late. The mob broke open the monastery of
the Petrion (by the Phanar) where her sister Theodora had long lived
in retirement, and forced her to go with them to S. Sophia and there
the patriarch Alexius and the vast crowd hailed her as Empress. The
Emperor and his uncle took refuge in the church of the Studium. They
were dragged from the altar and their eyes were put out; and Zoe and
Theodora, who hated each other, became joint Empresses.
Their rule was extravagant and reckless; and while the State was
advancing rapidly towards bankruptcy, the aged Zoe took a third
husband, after two attempts at choice, wedding Constantine Monomachus,
who reigned from 1042 to 1054 as Constantine X. The old Empress and
her young husband gave themselves entirely to pleasure, to luxury and
buffoonery. The Emperor, generous in giving and knowing how to confer
benefits after the manner of an Emperor, beautified the city by the
building of the magnificent monastery of S. George at the Mangana
(near Deirmen Kapou on the Mamora), and amused the citizens by showing
them an elephant and a camelopard. The court which Constantine and Zoe
gathered round them was a strange assembly; its chief personage was
the Emperor's mistress Skleraina, whom the Empress treated as a
friend. The people resented the conjunction and cried "we will not
have Skleraina to reign over us, nor on her account shall our
purple-born mothers, Zoe and Theodora, die." The aged Zoe herself
appeased them. It was an extraordinary state of society, reminding us
of the eighteenth century in France: the intrigues that Psellus tells
are indeed hardly credible. But the social corruption coexisted with a
real revival of learning. Constantinople became the centre of a new
study of literature, which had decayed since the iconoclastic emperors
set themselves to destroy culture and Leo III. abolished the
University. Constantine refounded the University, endowing two
chairs--philosophy and law--which were held by Psellus and his
friend, John Xiphilinos. A revival of the study of the classics
followed this institution: Psellus considered himself a Platonist, and
he thought himself worthy to represent as well as to revive the best
traditions of Greek literature. In the hands of Anna Comnena and her
contemporaries, the purism which the writers affected became little
more than an Attic euphuism.
While the Emperor and his friends were thus busy with trifles, and the
government was in the hands sometimes of wise ministers such as
Leichudes, sometimes of mere thieves, the throne was constantly
threatened by revolts (of which the most famous was that of George
Maniakes) and by direct attacks on the city, such as that of the
Russians, and in 1047 of Leo Tornikos. This latter was nearly
successful. Many of the citizens were ready to join him, and but for
the military skill shown by Constantine (if we rightly read the
rhetorical description of Psellus) Leo would probably have entered and
found himself welcomed as Emperor.
In 1054 Constantine X. died, and the aged Theodora, the last survivor
of the Macedonian house, came forth again from her convent and reigned
with the aid of ministers who were at least capable and honest. On her
death, after two years as sole ruler, the throne passed, by her wish,
to an able but aged soldier, Michael Stratioticus.
Psellus shows that the accession of this sovereign marked a crisis in
the history of the Empire. Constantine X. had reformed the Senate,
opening it to all men of merit apart from their birth. Michael VI.
thought he could rely entirely on the civil functionaries, but the
army was still strong enough to dictate to the Emperor, and his unwise
acts led to an alliance between the generals and the energetic
patriarch Michael Cerularius. Michael attempted to negotiate with
Isaac Comnenus, whom the army had chosen as their leader, and who was
encamped at Nicæa (Isnik); but before the envoys, among whom was
Psellus, had completed their mission, a rising in the city, led by
some discontented senators, had dethroned and slain Michael, and the
whole city was waiting to welcome Isaac as Emperor.
Constantinople in this revolution decisively chose her own Emperor.
The Senate and the chiefs of certain "clubs" (the successors of the
factions of the Circus so prominent four centuries before) guided, as
seems probable, by the patriarch, carried the city with them. Isaac
they summoned from Skutari: Michael departed to a monastery with the
patriarch's kiss of peace.
The scene when Isaac was about to cross the Bosphorus to receive his
crown was a dramatic one. He called Psellus, the envoy of his deposed
rival, to him, and said, when the philosopher spoke of the enthusiasm
of the people, "I liked thy tongue better when it reviled me than now
when it speaks smooth words." But he began his reign by an amnesty,
for he made Psellus president of the Senate, and Michael the
patriarch--however much he may have distrusted him--he treated with
the fullest confidence and honour.
While these political and dynastic changes had supplied the Empire
with a new ruler almost every year, the growing alienation between
East and West had been marked decisively by the separation of the
Churches. Two great names embody in the East the final protest against
Roman assumption. The Church of Constantinople had never abandoned its
claim to equality with that of Rome, though it allowed to the ancient
city the primacy of honour. Photius, who became patriarch in 858, and
died in 891, owed his throne to an election which was not canonical,
and though a council in 861 at Constantinople, at which papal legates
were present, confirmed him in his office, Pope Nicholas I. declared
that its decisions were illegal, and that Photius was deposed and
excommunicated, while the Emperor himself was attacked in language of
peculiar vehemence. The papal claim to decide between two claimants to
the patriarchate was fiercely resented. Photius declared the equality
of his see with that of Rome. To the Roman claim of jurisdiction,
complicated also by assertions of supremacy over the Bulgarian Church,
were added points of theological contention which the churches debated
with as much eagerness, and it would seem, as little desire, to arrive
at a reasonable solution. The addition of the words _Filioque_ to the
Nicene Creed, asserting the Procession of the Holy Ghost from the
Father and the Son, was, and is, resented by the Greeks as an addition
to "the faith once for all delivered to the Saints." The use of
unleavened bread in the Holy Eucharist was regarded in the East as an
heretical innovation. There were, and are, other points of dispute;
but none, it is probable, but for the strong national feeling of Italy
and of Greece, would have caused a final breach.
The position which Photius defended with skill and vigour in the ninth
century was reasserted by Michael Cerularius in the eleventh. He
regarded the teaching of the West on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity,
says Psellus, as an intolerable heresy; and he was prompt to reassert
jurisdiction over the churches of Apulia, now conquered by the Normans
and made subject to Rome. The final breach came from Rome itself. On
July 16, 1054, two legates of the Pope laid on the altar of S. Sophia
the act of excommunication which severed the patriarch from the
communion of the West, and condemned what were asserted to be seven
deadly heresies of the Eastern Church.
But to return to the imperial revolution.
Isaac Comnenus, who was called to the throne in 1057, had been brought
up in the palace, but he was none the less a warrior and a man of
determination, who had served the Empire well. He reigned only for two
years, and then retired to end his days in religion, in the famous and
beautiful monastery of the Studium, which looks from a slight
elevation over the Sea of Marmora, some half mile away, and whose half
ruined walls are to-day among the most striking of the memorials of
the past that Constantinople can show.
With the beginning of the dynasty of the Comneni the causes which
brought about the fall of the Empire can clearly be traced. The
imperial power, concentrated more and more in the imperial household,
and finally in the Emperor himself, had come to be devoted chiefly, in
the hands of feeble or self-indulgent emperors, to the maintenance of
imperial dignity and pride in the city itself. The magnificent
administration which had presented a coherent and effective government
while the rest of Europe was in "the dark ages," was beginning to sink
into a mere machine for the support of a luxurious Court. The Empire
was neglected. The aristocracy of Byzantium was treated with severity
or contempt. The officials of the State were the mere nominees of the
Emperor. For their interest and for the pursuit of popularity among
the people it was that government seemed to exist. Every year, as the
defences of the Empire grew weaker, the shows of the Hippodrome, the
festivals of the Church, the entertainments of the palace, grew more
splendid. When the other States of Europe were yet in their cradle,
when England as a Power had hardly begun to exist, the long history
of the Empire was verging irresistibly towards decay.
"The domestics of the Basilian dynasty carried on the work of
political change," says Finlay,[21] "by filling the public offices
with their own creatures, and thereby destroying the power of that
body of State officials, whose admirable organisation had repeatedly
saved the Empire from falling into anarchy under tyrants or from being
ruined by peculation under aristocratic influence. In this manner the
scientific fabric of the imperial power, founded by Augustus, was at
last ruined in the East as it had been destroyed in the West. The
Emperors broke the government to pieces before strangers destroyed the
Empire.
"The revolution which undermined the systematic administration was
already consummated before the rebellion of the aristocracy placed the
imperial crown on the head of Isaac Comnenus. No organised body of
trained officials any longer existed to resist the egoistical
pretensions of the new intruders into ministerial authority. The
Emperor could now make his household steward prime minister, and the
governor of a province could appoint his butler prefect of the police.
The Church and the law alone preserved some degree of systematic
organisation and independent character. It was not in the power of an
emperor to make a man a lawyer or a priest with the same ease with
which he could appoint him a chamberlain or a minister of State."
The decay of which the general causes are thus sketched can clearly be
traced in the series of historians who give us the records of the
years from the accession of John Comnenus to the conquest of
Constantinople by the Crusaders, from the year 1057, that is, to the
year 1204. Psellus, monk, secretary of State, philosopher, statesman,
gives, as we have already seen, a close account of the intrigues of
the court. Michael Altaleiates records the years 1034-1079. Nicephorus
Bryennius and his wife, Anna Comnena, wrote from within the story of
the politics of Alexius Comnenus, the former to some extent, the
latter very greatly, influenced by the classic revival, and
endeavouring to form their work on classic models. John Cinnamus,
Nicetas Acominatos, John Scylitzes, John Zonaras, are all chroniclers
who have special sources of information; and the result is that for
the century of decay which culminated in the collapse of the Empire
before the Latins, we have information almost complete.
The Emperor Isaac was assisted at the first by the able patriarch
Michael Cerularius, who put into exercise all the claims of his
predecessors to power and independence, to equality with Rome, and to
superiority over the churches related to the patriarchate. Strife soon
broke out between Emperor and patriarch. Michael appeared in the red
boots which marked the imperial dignity, declaring that he was the
equal of the Emperor; and of the Emperor himself he said, in what
seems to have been a popular proverb, "Oven, I built you, and I can
knock you down." He was seized and banished to Proconnesus.
After the retirement of Isaac, Constantine Ducas, like the Comneni a
Cappadocian, and a friend of their own, reigned for eight years,
1059-1067, and left the reputation of a man anxious only to save
money, and thus unable to protect the frontiers of the Empire. Under
him we learn the importance of the Emperor's personal guard of
Varangians--a body of barbarian warriors founded early in the eleventh
century, and consisting at first of Russians, whom the wars of
Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimisces and Basil Bulgaroktonos had taught
the Empire to respect; and of Scandinavians, and later of Danes, and
after the Norman Conquest of fugitive Englishmen, who, rather than
serve the foreign conquerors of their own land, gladly came to win
fame and wealth as the guardians of the Cæsar's throne. Constantine
XI. paid the Varangians while he neglected the rest of his army. The
Empire paid the penalty in the ravaging of Armenia by the Seljuk
Turks, and of Bulgaria by the Tartars. When he died in 1067, already
the name of Alp-Arslan, the Sultan of the Seljuks, struck terror into
the Asiatic provinces of the Empire, and the sceptre of the Cæsars
fell to Michael VII., a child who could not protect what his father
had not cared to defend. The mother of the young Emperor, Eudocia,
married a gallant general, Romanus Diogenes, who, with the title of
joint Emperor, won but little power in the palace, but was readily
allowed to lead the armies in the field. Of his campaigns it is only
needful to say that, while for a time he held back the Seljuks, in
1071, at Manzikert, on the Armenian frontier, his troops were
scattered by the overwhelming hordes of the barbarians, and when night
fell Alp-Arslan placed his foot upon the neck of the prostrate Cæsar,
his captive.
In Constantinople a new revolution followed the news of the Emperor's
defeat. John Ducas, brother of Constantine XI., for a time held the
post of Regent for his nephew. When Romanus was released from
captivity he was seized and his eyes were put out, a crime which
resulted in his death. The scenes of blood and treachery which marked
these years, when the Court still kept up its splendours in the
presence of pestilence, famine, and decay, are almost incredible; but
the vengeance that was surely coming shows the weakness that resulted
from the reign of corruption and crime. Michael VII. was called
Parapinakes, "the peck-stealer," a name "given him because in a year
of famine he sold the measure of wheat to his subjects a fourth short
of its proper contents." He was overthrown by an adventurer named
Nicephorus Botoniates, whose reign of three years was a period of vice
and waste which brought the Empire rapidly nearer to its fall. Michael
VII. retired, like Romanus, to the Monastery of the Studium, where as
titular bishop of Ephesus, he passed the last years of his life in
peace. Three years exhausted the patience of the nobles with the aged
and debauched Nicephorus. Maria, once wife of Michael VII. and now
wife of his successor, formed a plot against him, and from a number of
conspirators, Alexius Comnenus, son of the Emperor Isaac, was chosen
to lead the troops who determined to give a new Cæsar to the exhausted
Empire. In 1081 the friends of the conspirators escaped through the
gate of Blachernae with horses they had stolen from the Imperial
stables. They returned with an army: the German guards who held the
gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapou) were bribed, and the adherents of
Comnenus poured into the heart of the city. A battle at first seemed
certain, for the Varangians stood boldly across the forum of
Constantine to defend the approaches to the great palace. But when
George Palaeologus, a gallant officer connected by marriage with the
Comneni, secured the fleet, the heart of the aged Nicephorus failed
him, and he fled to S. Sophia, whence he was removed like so many of
his predecessors to a monastery.
Alexius Comnenus was not strong enough to restrain the motley rabble
who had entered in his train. The city was given over to pillage. The
very palaces and monasteries were spoiled by the barbarians from the
Balkans. It was from this date that the ruin of the city began. If the
churches still maintained their relics and their jewels, the
commercial prosperity, which all through these years of imperial
corruption and weakness it had struggled to maintain, now began to
slip from its grasp. It was clear that property was no more safe than
life; and as the Italian cities began to secure the commerce of the
Levant, the merchants of Constantinople fell behind in the race for
wealth, and saw the trade that had been theirs taken by the Venetians,
the Pisans and the Genoese, who now settled at their very gates.
Alexius Comnenus was at first not sole Emperor. Constantine Ducas, the
son of Michael VII., was also called Emperor, but he soon died.
Alexius then reigned alone, but not without many plots against him.
Within, the city managed to suppress the conspirators; without, he
suffered defeat from the Normans at Durazzo, and preserved with
difficulty the Thessalian province. He won fame among his people as a
persecutor of Paulicians and Bogomils; and Basil, a monk, was
entrapped by Alexius into a confession of his heretical opinions and
then burnt as a heretic in the Hippodrome, to the delight of the
people of Constantinople. He kept off the Turks, though they were now
(1092) settled so near as to have Smyrna for their capital. But his
chief danger came from the Crusades.
In spite of the breach between the Churches it was impossible for the
Eastern Emperor openly to do otherwise than welcome the hosts who in
response to the preaching of Peter the Hermit and the call of Urban
II. marched through Hungary and Bulgaria and arrived outside the land
walls in a ragged and disordered condition. Hugh of Vermandois had
landed near Durazzo, but had been treated almost as a foreigner, and
having been made to do homage to Alexius, awaited in the imperial
city the arrival of the rest of the hosts. His treatment was resented
by Godfrey of Bouillon; but the skill and tact of Alexius triumphed.
In the palace of the Blachernae, while the hosts were encamped outside
the walls, the Emperor received the leaders, among them Godfrey,
Bohemond, and Peter the Hermit himself, and by cajoling some, bribing
others, threatening those who seemed weakest, he procured that they
all should do him homage and promise to convey to him all of his
Empire that they should recover from the Turks.
To the people of Constantinople the warriors of the West seemed like
ignorant and half-brutal children, ever gabbling, boasting, and
changeable. The warlike garb of the Latin priests and bishops
disgusted the Greeks and widened the breach between the Churches. The
climax seemed to come on the day when the chiefs did homage to the
Emperor. Thus the story is told by Anna Comnena, who was herself then
fourteen years old, and may not improbably have witnessed the scene.
"As soon as they approached the great city, they occupied the place
appointed for them by the Emperor, near to the monastery of the
Cosmidion.[22] But this multitude was not, like the Hellenic one of
old, to be restrained and governed by the loud voices of nine heralds.
They required the constant superintendence of chosen and valiant
soldiers to keep them from violating the commands of the Emperor. He,
meantime, laboured to obtain from the other leaders that
acknowledgment of his supreme authority which had already been drawn
from Godfrey himself. But notwithstanding the willingness of some to
accede to this proposal, and their assistance in working on the minds
of their associates, the Emperor's endeavours had little success, as
the majority were looking for the arrival of Bohemond, in whom they
placed their chief confidence, and resorted to every art with the view
of gaining time. The Emperor, whom it was not easy to deceive,
penetrated their motives; and by granting to one powerful person
demands which had been supposed out of all bounds of expectation, and
by resorting to a variety of other devices, he at length prevailed,
and won general assent to the following of the example of Godfrey, who
also was sent for in person to assist in this business.
"All, therefore, being assembled, and Godfrey among them, the oath was
taken; but when all was finished, a certain noble among these counts
had the audacity to seat himself on the throne of the Emperor. The
Emperor restrained himself and said nothing, for he was well
acquainted of old with the nature of the Latins.
"But the Count Baldwin stepping forth, and seizing him by the hand,
dragged him thence, and with many reproaches said, 'It becomes thee
not to do such things here, especially after having taken the oath of
fealty. It is not the custom of the Roman Emperors to permit any of
their inferiors to sit beside them, not even of such as are born
subjects of their empire; and it is necessary to respect the customs
of the country.' But he, answering nothing to Baldwin, stared yet more
fixedly upon the Emperor, and muttered to himself something in his own
dialect, which, being interpreted, was to this effect--'Behold, what
rustic fellow is this, to be seated alone while such leaders stand
around him!' The movement of his lips did not escape the Emperor, who
called to him one that understood the Latin dialect, and inquired what
words the man had spoken. When he heard them the Emperor said nothing
to the other Latins, but kept the thing to himself. When, however, the
business was all over, he called near to him by himself that swelling
and shameless Latin, and asked of him, who he was, of what lineage,
and from what region he had come. 'I am a Frank,' said he, 'of pure
blood, of the nobles. One thing I know, that where three roads meet in
the place from which I came, there is an ancient church, in which
whosoever has the desire to measure himself against another in single
combat, prays God to help him therein, and afterwards abides the
coming of one willing to encounter him. At that spot a long time did I
remain, but the man bold enough to stand against me I found not.'
Hearing these words the Emperor said, 'If hitherto thou hast sought
battles in vain the time is at hand which will furnish thee with
abundance of them. And I advise thee to place thyself neither before
the phalanx, nor in its rear, but to stand fast in the midst of thy
fellow-soldiers; for of old time I am well acquainted with the warfare
of the Turks.' With such advice he dismissed not only this man, but
the rest of those who were about to depart on that expedition."
A scene such as this made the Greeks regard the Westerns simply as
barbarians, and they rejoiced when the host at last passed over the
Bosphorus to fight the Turks. For the first year Alexius remained with
the army; but as they became divided among themselves, and refused to
give up to him the territory they conquered in the East, he returned
to Constantinople, satisfied with the conquest which had driven back
the Turks in Asia for more than 200 miles.
While the Empire gained by its most dangerous enemy being thus driven
back, it lost seriously in other ways. "Between 1098 and 1099 a
continual stream of armed pilgrims traversed the Byzantine Empire,"
everywhere bringing ruin and devastation with them. One detachment of
Lombards actually attempted to storm the Blachernae quarter and were
only with great difficulty taken over to Asia, where they slaughtered
Christians as readily as Turks. Open war broke out between Bohemond
and Alexius, and it was the last success of Alexius that he was able
to beat off the attacks of the Christians of the West. He died in
1118, his last hours disturbed by a plot in which his wife Irene and
his daughter Anna were engaged to compel his son John to yield the
Empire to Anna's husband, Nicephorus Bryennius.
Alexius may have seemed to leave the Empire stronger than he found it;
but in truth, though its military power was greater, its commercial
greatness was passing away. The development of trade in the Levant
through the establishment of Christian kingdoms in the East by the
Crusaders reduced the trade of Constantinople, it has been estimated,
by "a third or even a half in the fifty years that followed the first
crusade." A system of financial extortion and a debased coinage
brought the merchants of the city still nearer to ruin, and that ruin
seemed consummated when they found the Genoese and Pisans settled with
special privileges in their midst. But the new Emperor at least kept
up appearances. He was a conqueror, and he was popular among his
subjects, called at first Maurojoannes (Black John), from his dark
complexion, he soon became called Kalojoannes, for his goodness rather
than his beauty. At the first he was met by conspiracy. His sister
Anna was ready to have him murdered that she and her husband might
ascend the throne. He discovered the plot, and after a few weeks
restored her to all her possessions. His brother Isaac fled from
Constantinople to the Turks, and though he returned, his son
afterwards became a Mohammedan. For chief minister the Emperor had a
Turkish slave who had been captured by his father at Nicaea and
brought up with him. These instances show how closely the Empire, in
spite of its Christianity, was drawing nigh to the Turks, a state of
affairs paralleled by the relations between Christians and Moors in
Spain in the days of El Cid Campeador, and which made the conquest,
when it came, less abrupt and terrible than it seems to-day.
The reign of John Comnenus (1118-1143) was perhaps the brightest in
the later years of the Empire. "Feared by his nobles, beloved by his
people," says Gibbon, "he was never reduced to the painful necessity
of punishing, or even of pardoning, his enemies. During his government
of twenty-five years[23] the penalty of death was abolished in the
Roman Empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the human theorist,
but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom
consistent with the public safety. Severe to himself, indulgent to
others, the philosophic Marcus would not have disdained the artless
virtues of his successor, derived from his heart and not borrowed from
the schools. He despised and moderated the stately magnificence of the
Byzantine Court, so oppressive to the people, so contemptible to the
eye of reason. Under such a prince innocence had nothing to fear and
merit had everything to hope; and without assuming the tyrannic office
of a censor he introduced a gradual though visible reformation in the
public and private manners of Constantinople."
Manuel I., his youngest son, whom he chose for his military daring in
preference to his brother Isaac, was "a mere knight errant, who loved
fighting for fighting's sake, and allowed his passion for excitement
and adventure to be his only guide." It is said that he made a special
payment to secure the good will of the clergy on his accession; but he
was vicious as well as passionate, and the crimes of his court
received a licence from his own acts. Buffoonery as well as vice seems
to have marked the life of Constantinople, for the popular minister,
John Kameratos, was renowned as the greatest drinker of his time, as
being able to swallow a vast quantity of raw beans and drink "the
water contained in an immense porphyry vase at two draughts," and he
was favoured by the Emperor chiefly for his powers as a singer and
dancer. Manuel himself was skilled in surgery and was a theologian as
well as a warrior, but his abilities were of no service to the Empire.
The citizens saw the Italians encroaching upon them at every point.
Heavy taxation was continued, but the army and navy alike decayed in
his time. Only the public games were kept up, and outwardly
Constantinople was as gay and wealthy as ever. Benjamin of Tudela, a
Jew who visited the city in 1161, wrote of the magnificence that he
saw everywhere, and the riches of the traders and nobles, and in the
Hippodrome he said that "lions, bears and leopards were shown, and all
nations of the world were represented, together with surprising feats
of jugglery." With all this, and especially after the war with Venice,
which was ended in 1174, the city was really becoming poor, and it
might almost seem defenceless. Manuel did much for the defences; a
large part of the land walls, defending the palace of Blachernae, was
added by him; an inscription on the tower close to Narli Kapoussi
records his repair of part of the sea wall; and he built many other
gates and additional fortifications. It was indeed time.
The eleventh century saw the position of the Empire and the safety of
the imperial city continually threatened not only by active attacks
but by internal dissensions; dissensions which, it has been well said,
would have settled themselves a century before, but which now both
weakened the city and made its weakness apparent to the world.
How weak the city was, was seen in 1146, when a Norman fleet sailed up
the Hellespont, and the admiral robbed the imperial gardens of fruit.
Bulgars, Serbians, Turks, had all at different times threatened the
city, and without success, but its internal weakness was made the more
evident as the century went on by the division which was arising
between the Emperor and his people. Manuel I. was believed to be at
heart a Latin; his campaigns of the West, his marriages to Western
wives, his neglect of the fleet, his encouragement of foreign settlers
in the capital, all increased his unpopularity. Matters were not
improved under the boy, Alexius II., when the struggle between his
mother and the minister she favoured, and his sister, took place in
the streets of the city, and in S. Sophia itself. The dynastic dispute
was complicated, like all the disputes in Constantinople, by
ecclesiastical interests, and the return of a patriarch who had been
driven out was one of those picturesque scenes in which the people
delighted, which showed their independence of the government, but
revealed also, only too plainly, that there was now no union in Church
or State.
A few words may suffice to explain and date the events of the latter
part of the twelfth century.
Manuel up to his death in 1180 retained all the appearance of a
victorious Emperor, though he suffered a severe defeat in 1176, at
Myriokephalon in Phrygia, from the Seljukian Turks. Crusading princes,
the Turkish Sultan Kilidji Arslan, and the Christian King, Amaury of
Jerusalem, visited him at Constantinople, and were received with
ostentatious splendour. Alexius II., his son and successor, was a boy
of thirteen, and in two years the streets of the imperial city
witnessed a desperate encounter between his supporters and those of
his sister Maria, which swept up to the walls of S. Sophia. Then
Andronicus, the cousin of the Emperor Manuel, was recalled from
banishment, and he signalised his acquisition of power by a massacre
of the Latins in the city. From this he proceeded to slay every one
who stood in his way, till, in 1183, having murdered the young
Alexius, he seated himself on the throne. For two years he continued a
course of crimes greater than those that any sovereign ever committed,
till a popular insurrection crowned a descendant of the great Alexius.
Andronicus, though the vilest of men, had made a serious effort to
reform the administration and reduce the influence of the nobles. His
fall left the Empire to its fate.
The miserable end of the wickedest of the Emperors, as it is told by a
recent writer from the pages of Nicetas, may well serve to illustrate
the horrors with which the Empire in its fall was only too familiar.
He was confined in the prison called after the Cretan Anemas, who was
first imprisoned there by Alexius Comnenus. "He quitted it only to die
at the hands of his infuriated subjects. On the eve of his execution
he was bound with chains about the neck and feet, like some wild
animal, and dragged into the presence of his successor, Isaac Angelus,
to be subjected to every indignity. He was reviled, beaten, struck on
the mouth; he had his hair and beard plucked, his teeth knocked out,
his right hand struck off with an axe, and then was sent back to his
cell, and left there without food or water or attention of any kind
for several days. When brought forth for execution, he was dressed
like a slave, blinded of one eye, mounted upon a mangy camel, and led
in mock triumph through the streets of the city to the Hippodrome,
amidst a storm of hatred and insult, seldom, if ever, witnessed under
similar circumstances in a civilised community. At the Hippodrome he
was hung by the feet on the architrave of two short columns which
stood beside the figures of a wolf and a hyena, his natural
associates. But neither his pitiable condition, nor his quiet
endurance of pain, nor his pathetic cry, "Kyrie eleison, why dost Thou
break the bruised reed?" excited the slightest commiseration.
Additional and indescribable insults were heaped upon the fallen
tyrant, until his agony was brought to an end by three men who plunged
their swords into his body, to exhibit their dexterity in the use of
arms."[24]
Isaac Angelus was little more worthy of his position than the man whom
he displaced. He gave himself to enjoyment, to building, to luxury of
every kind. He lost Bulgaria and Cyprus, and when his own general,
Alexis Branas, turned against him and led his troops to besiege
Constantinople, it was saved only by Conrad of Montferrat, the husband
of the Emperor's sister Theodora, who was then in the city on his way
to the East.
The troops of Branas assembled outside the walls and attacked, but
were driven back from the gate of Charisius (Edirnè Kapoussi): the
famous icon of the Blessed Virgin, believed to have been painted by S.
Luke, was carried round the walls: then a sortie led by Conrad
scattered the rebels and brought the revolt to an end. But Isaac was
incapable of ruling. He retained his throne with difficulty for ten
years. At length in 1195, when he was on the way to the Bulgarian
war, he was betrayed by his brother Alexius. He was not, as would have
happened two centuries before, made a monk: he was imprisoned in a
monastery, blinded, and left to die in peace. No one foresaw his
restoration.
Alexius III., called also Angelus Comnenus, was no wit better than his
brother, but he had a clever wife, Euphrosyne, in whom the worst
characteristics of the Eastern Empresses were reproduced. Her
profligacy and extravagance completed the ruin of the Empire, and when
the fourth crusade turned its arms against the city it fell an easy
prey.
It has been well said of the rule of the early Byzantines--during the
period, that is, that extended from the foundation of the city by
Constantine down to the death of Michael VI. and the end of the
Macedonian dynasty--that no other government has ever existed in
Europe which has secured for so long a time the same advantages to the
people. There was a general security for life and property; there was
a magnificent system of law; there was a genuine and commanding
influence of religion; and municipal government was, for the age, well
developed. But this can only be accepted with considerable
qualifications. If the government itself did not change, the dynasties
often did; if there was a good code of laws, there were terrible and
barbarous punishments, and there were often periods of mob-rule; if
there was a sound system of municipal government, it was far from a
complete check on the excesses of imperial power.
But the most striking characteristic of these centuries, when all
deductions have been made, is the stability of the government. As the
city and the Empire were ruled under Isaac Comnenus, so, save for
changes more superficial than real, had it been ruled under
Justinian. The new families of merchant princes that had grown up and
lined the Bosphorus with their houses, were as much in touch with the
old system as the old families had been. Trading interests had become
stronger and stronger with each century, and trading interests are in
the main conservative. But the century and a half that followed the
accession of the Comneni told inevitably in favour of further changes.
First there was the slow and terrible advance of the Turks, cutting
away strip by strip the outskirts of the Empire. Then there was the
exhaustion proceeding from the constant passage through the Empire of
crusaders, often pillaging, always contending, a continual drain upon
the material resources of the land. More important still was the great
and rapid increase of dynastic contentions. As ever, internal
dissension was the real cause of the self-betrayal which gave up
Constantinople in 1204 to the robbers of the West.
The condition of Constantinople at the beginning of the thirteenth
century has been the subject of more than one exhaustive examination.
We must briefly summarise what is known of the capital at this period
of its greatest riches, and perhaps its greatest weakness. First and
most prominently, it was a great commercial centre. Subordinate to its
commerce were its art, rich and wonderful though that was, its
military power, even its popular and all-embracing religious spirit.
Commerce influenced all these. It gathered together all the nations of
the earth, and it inspired them with greed for its treasures.
Constantinople was, as it still is to some extent, in spite of the
revolutions wrought by railways and by steamships, the most important
outlet of commerce in the world. All the traffic of Asia naturally
came that way; the great caravans of Central Asia, the trade of
Palestine, Asia Minor, Persia, even Egypt, journeyed naturally to the
New Rome. So naturally was Constantinople the centre of trade that she
acted as a sort of universal banker. Her coins were in use in India
and in distant England.
And the merchants who made their living in Constantinople had, like
those of the Hansa in London, their own permanent settlements. You may
see to-day the great khans or caravanserais where the merchants and
pilgrims congregate, the walls strong to resist attacks, the gates
closed at nightfall, the arrangements for common meals and common
ablutions; and as you pass by you see the dark figures clustering in
the doorways, or sitting on the marble steps, in their picturesque
colours, and with that strange far-away look on their faces that you
learn to know so well in the land where there is never any more
pressing need than repose, or any delight more sweet. The custom of
these great common lodgings, and very often the buildings themselves,
go back far into the Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century they held
great colonies of merchants strong for mutual combination and defence.
Many of them were near to the wharves, as close within the walls as
might be, and some without. No visitor to-day can fail to be struck by
the great khan hard by the Mosque of Validè Sultan, which he passes
when he has crossed the Galata Bridge on his way to S. Sophia.
The traders of the thirteenth century were by no means all Christians.
Jews and even Mohammedans were allowed to settle in the imperial city,
and Geoffrey of Vinsauf bitterly says "it would have been right even
to have rased the city to the ground, for, if we believe report, it
was polluted by new mosques, which its perfidious Emperor allowed to
be built that he might strengthen the league with the Turks." It
seemed strange to the Western that such toleration should be allowed.
The Jews and the Albigenses were the only "dissenters" he had met; but
in the East there were not only the Romanists, but the Monophysite
Armenians and the Nestorian Chaldeans; Jews and Mohammedans made no
such very great addition to the parliament of religions. And they all,
infidels and heretics alike, brought their riches to the great mart.
As the Turks advanced over Asia, scattering ruin and blight before
their path, the riches of the devastated cities fled to shelter behind
the Byzantine walls. No city it seemed to a Jewish observer of the
time was so rich or so full of business save Baghdad. Gold was nothing
accounted of; it covered the walls and pillars of the palace, it made
the throne of the Emperor, the lamps of S. Sophia, the vessels of many
an almost forgotten church. "The whole Empire had been put under
contribution for the adornment of the capital. The temples and public
buildings of Greece, of Asia Minor, and of the islands of the
Archipelago, had been ransacked to embellish what its inhabitants
spoke of as the Queen City, and even Egypt had contributed an obelisk
and many other monuments." All who saw the city were amazed at its
riches, at the magnificence of its buildings, of its churches,
palaces, houses of nobles and merchants. Marble and stone houses
filled the chief streets; the splendid marble from the quarries of the
Proconnesus, the stone which still stands firm in the massive
dwellings of the Phanar. There were of course then as now many houses
of wood, and fires were constant, but those who noted the fine houses
destroyed as more than in the three largest cities of France, noted
also that of those that remained as of the treasures of the churches
there was "neither end nor measure." And with all this there was a
profound sense of security, so often and so unwarrantably
contemporaneous with a marked development of luxurious life.
Constantinople had never been captured, men easily believed that it
never would be. Its walls, so magnificent in their decay, had proved
and were thought still to be impregnable. The subtle influence of
Oriental habits had eaten, it seemed, into the life that had been so
strong and fierce under Justinian or Heraclius. Men, as they had
ceased to contend earnestly for faith or morals, had sunk down into a
luxurious pleasure-loving life, almost like that of old Rome or modern
London. Some of the worst features of Asiatic life had already been
introduced; the _entourage_ of the Sultan that is now so conspicuous
at the Selamlik had its counterpart in the court of the Comneni. The
Emperor's favourites were coming to be the administrators of the
Empire: so bitterly complains the chronicler Nicetas--"these creatures
who guard the mountains and the forests for the Emperors' hunting with
as great care as the old pagans guarded the groves sacred to the gods,
or with a fidelity like that with which the destroying angel guards
the gates of Paradise, threatened to kill any one who attempted to cut
timber for the fleet": it was at the crisis of the Empire. And while
the Empire was ruled by eunuchs and the court by mistresses the
Emperors of the twelfth century lived in luxury, effeminacy, and
indolence. It had come to be thought--what a contrast from the days of
the sleepless Justinian!--that work was impossible for a Cæsar of the
East. And the example spread, as such examples always do, downwards.
It was easy for there to be a general who could not lead, soldiers who
could not fight, sailors who could not navigate beyond the Bosphorus.
And there was no hope of regeneration from a strong Church preaching
righteousness. The Emperors in the time of their power had reduced
the patriarchs to impotence: and now there was no one in the Church to
resist, as there was no one in the State to lead. Yet
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