The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (37 page)
What obliged him to take the long and tedious road westward to his capital — conscious as he was that he would have to retrace his steps a month or two later - was, almost certainly, a religious crisis: a crisis precipitated not in Constantinople but in Rome. Otto the Great had died in
973;
his son Otto was away in Germany; and in the early summer of
97
4
the Cardinal Deacon Franco — a noble Roman who hated the Saxon Emperor for having, as he saw it, made a plaything of the Papacy — had
1 See p. 130
.
seized the opportunity to stage a
coup
against Otto's puppet Pope Benedict VI, to imprisoning him in the Castel Sant'Angelo, where he was shortly afterwards strangled. Franco had then mounted the throne himself, under the name of Boniface VII; but a counter-revolution in the Emperor's favour had obliged him almost immediately to flee for his life to Constantinople. Meanwhile the young Emperor had appointed in his stead the Bishop of Sutri, one of whose first actions as Pope Benedict VII was to excommunicate his predecessor.
The arrival of Boniface on the Bosphorus put the Byzantines in something of a quandary. His long opposition to the Western Empire had led him to forge strong links with Constantinople, and he had steadfastly supported Nicephorus Phocas in all the latter's differences with Otto I. How much he chose to tell them of his treatment of Benedict VI we do not know; the Palace, at all events, seems to have decided that he deserved their support and that relations with Rome must be at once broken off; they also probably sent an urgent appeal to the Emperor in Mesopotamia to return as soon as he could and settle the matter once and for all. Patriarch Basil, on the other hand, took the opposite view. He had, it was true, been personally selected by John for the Patriarchate; but he was not prepared to be dictated to. He had never questioned the essential unity of the Church or the supremacy of the legitimate Pontiff, whose edict of excommunication he was determined to uphold.
As may already have been noticed, it was nearly always the urbane and ambitious Patriarchs of Constantinople who tended to challenge the status of the Pope in Rome; the unworldly ascetics had no such doubts. Basil the Scamandrian fell squarely into the second category; in the eyes of his flock, indeed, he was almost too holy, living on a near-starvation diet of berries and water, wearing the same filthy robe until it fell to pieces, sleeping always on the bare earth. 'His only fault,' writes Leo the Deacon, 'was a tendency to scrutinize too closely the behaviour of others, and to involve himself more than was proper in their affairs.' In consequence he had made himself thoroughly unpopular; and when the decision was taken to get rid of him in favour of someone more amenable there was no shortage of bishops and clergy to give evidence against him. He had been guilty, they testified, of maladministration, of contravention of the canon law, even of intrigue regarding the succession. Basil himself made no defence against the charges, insisting however that he could be deposed only by an Ecumenical
Council - one, that is to say, on which the Pope was properly represented. An imperial tribunal, meeting soon after the Emperor had returned to the capital, was only too happy to prove him wrong.
So Basil was exiled, Benedict was refused recognition and Boniface remained in Constantinople until April 984 when, with Byzantine help, he managed to depose his rival's successor John XIV (who also came to an unpleasant end in Sant'Angelo) and regain the pontifical throne. This time he held it for fifteen months - until his death, almost certainly by poison, in the following year. His corpse, we are told, was dragged naked through the city and eventually left 'beneath the horse of Constantine' on the Capitol,
1
where it lay ignored until a passing group of priests recovered it and arranged for its burial.
In the early spring of 975, with the religious crisis behind him and a new Patriarch, Antony III of the Studium, safely installed at St Sophia, John Tzimisces returned to the East and set off on the last, and the most spectacularly successful, of all his campaigns. From Antioch he first marched against Emesa (Horns), which surrendered without a struggle, passing on to Baalbek, which fell after little more than a token resistance. Damascus followed, after which the way was clear into Palestine. Tiberias, Nazareth, Caesarea - it seemed as though the triumphal progress would continue for ever; but the African garrisons from all these cities were now entrenching themselves in a line of fortresses along the coast, and rather than continue to Jerusalem John turned back to deal with them before they became a serious danger to his rear. Sidon fell, then - despite a heroic resistance - Beirut, then Byblos. Of all the coastal cities, only Tripoli resisted capture. By the end of the summer most of Palestine, Syria and the Lebanon - regions where no Emperor had set foot since the days of Heraclius — were under Byzantine control.
It was an astonishing achievement; but when John returned to Constantinople towards the end of the year he was a dying man. The nature of his illness is uncertain. Our three most authoritative sources -Scylitzes, Zonaras and Leo the Deacon - all point an accusing finger at Basil the
parakoimomenos.
They tell us that the Emperor, inquiring on his return journey through Anatolia about the ownership of all the most prosperous estates through which he passed, was informed that every
1
Liber Pontificalis.
The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was believed throughout the Middle Ages to be a representation of Constantine - a fortunate misconception which alone preserved it from destruction as a pagan monument.
one of them belonged to Basil. The discovery - which could only mean peculation on a scale of which he had never dreamed - threw him into a fury, and he made no secret of his intention of confronting his Chamberlain immediately on his return and demanding an explanation. He would have done better to keep silent. One of the daily couriers that shuttled between the army and the Palace reported his words to Basil; and Basil, sensing danger, made his dispositions accordingly. A week or two later, when John was dining with one of his rich vassals in Bithynia, a slow-acting poison was slipped into his cup; he awoke the' next morning scarcely able to move his limbs, his eyes streaming with blood and his neck and shoulders covered with suppurating sores. Henceforth he had one idea only: to get home before he died. Messengers sped to Constantinople with orders to prepare for his imminent arrival and to speed up work on his tomb.
By the time he reached the Bosphorus he was breathing only with great difficulty. Somehow he seems to have risen from his litter for long enough to attend the service at which the two principal prizes he had brought back from the East - a pair of sandals worn by Christ and the hair of John the Baptist - were rededicated and installed in St Sophia; then he took to his bed, never to leave it again. All his own personal wealth he left to the poor and the sick; then he made a long and tearful confession to Bishop Nicholas of Adrianople, calling repeatedly on the Holy Virgin Theotokos to intercede on his behalf. He was still invoking her aid when he died on 10 January 976, after a reign of just six years and a month. He was fifty-one.
What are we to make of this poisoning story? At least seven chroniclers repeat it in one form or another, though not all of them accuse Basil; but as previous chapters have already made clear, foul play was invariably suspected on such occasions. Besides, if Basil had really done the deed, would he have remained in power as he did, acting as effective Regent for the two young Emperors? And what was this mysterious poison, so slow-acting and yet so grimly effective? (The secret of it must have been lost — or, at any rate, they don't seem to make it any more.) In short, is it not far likelier that John died - as many thousands of humbler soldiers must have died during those eastern wars - of typhoid, or malaria, or dysentery, or any of those other deadly infections which, even now, can only with difficulty be held at bay?
Yes — but we can never be sure. John Tzimisces is a mystery in his death, just as he was in his life. In his short reign he proved himself one
of the very greatest of Byzantine Emperors. He had conquered the Russians, the Bulgars and the Caliphs of both Baghdad and Cairo; he had regained the greater part of Syria and the Lebanon, of Mesopotamia and Palestine. He had been admired by allies and enemies alike for his courage, his chivalry, his compassion. In peace he had been a ruler both wise and just, a friend to the poor and, above all, to the sick, with whom he always seems to have felt a particular affinity — although he himself never knew a day's illness until the end. His radiant personality, like his golden armour, leaves us dazzled. Yet it can never quite blind us to another, darker vision: that of a pitiful, misshapen heap lying huddled on a palace floor, while another figure - spare, sinewy and immensely strong - gazes contemptuously down, and kicks.
[976-89]
Cut down the governors who become overproud. Let no generals on campaign have too many resources. Exhaust them with unjust exactions, to keep them busy with their own affairs. Admit no women to the imperial councils. Be accessible to no one. Share with few your most intimate plans.
Bardas Scleras, to Basil II, Bithynia,
989
With the death of John Tzimisces, the way seemed clear at last for the assumption of power by the two young sons of Romanus II, the eighteen-year-old Basil and his brother Constantine, two years his junior. The two could scarcely have been more dissimilar. Whereas Constantine was never to display, either then or in later life, the slightest interest in politics or statecraft, nor to ask anything more than to be left to his own mildly unsavoury devices, Basil impressed everyone by his alertness, his quickness of mind and his apparently inexhaustible energy. Still less did he resemble his forebears. For all his intelligence, he was in no sense an intellectual as Leo the Wise and Constantine Porphyrogenitus had been; he showed no inclination towards scholarship or literature, while the crude simplicity of his Greek grated on the ears of the ever-fastidious Byzantines. Whereas Leo and Constantine had taken care always to emphasize their power and majesty by dazzling panoply and sumptuous costume, surrounding themselves with priceless treasures and
objets
d'art,
Basil spent practically nothing on himself, cut state ceremonial to a minimum and went about the Palace and the city in drab, workaday clothes quite unbefitting an Emperor and, it was noted, none too clean. Physically, too, he bore little resemblance to his father and grandfather. They had been tall and dark; Basil was short and stocky, with a round, heavily-bearded face and light blue eyes that shone with unusual brilliance from beneath high, arched eyebrows. The chronicler Michael
Psellus (who makes the first of his many appearances at this point in the story) tells us that when not in the saddle his appearance was undistinguished; it was only when mounted - for he was a superb horseman - that he came fully into his own.
1
In one other respect, too, did Basil differ from his father. Romanus had been, throughout the adult years of his short life, a pleasure-loving voluptuary. Basil had shown similar tendencies in his early youth, but with his accession to power he put self-indulgence behind him and thenceforth led a life of quite exceptional austerity, eating and drinking sparingly and avoiding women altogether. Almost alone among Byzantine Emperors - and indeed among contemporary princes of Europe — he never married: an omission that appears still more extraordinary in view of the importance of providing for a legitimate succession, particularly since his brother's wife, Helena Alypina, was to produce only daughters. Could it be, one cannot help wondering, that there was indeed a marriage, of which all records have somehow been lost' Several Empresses, after all - the wife of John Tzimisces is a case in point - are mentioned only once in the chronicles and then never again; and our sources for the reign of Basil II are lamentably thin. But such a hypothesis, attractive as it may be, cannot really be sustained. For the half-century that Basil and his brother were to reign in tandem, several descriptions of state functions have come down to us; and in every one of them Helena is mentioned as the only Empress, performing all the duties appropriate to her rank. There can thus be no serious doubt that Basil lived and died a bachelor. Why he did so, on the other hand, remains a mystery.
From the moment that he found himself senior Emperor, he seems to have been determined to rule as well as reign; and with a brother grateful to be relieved of the burdens of responsibility he should have experienced no difficulty in doing so. Two obstacles, however, stood in his path. The first was his great-uncle and namesake, Basil the
parakoimomenos.
It was now some thirty years since this natural son of Romanus Lecapenus had been raised - while still in his twenties - by
i Psellus was admittedly only seven years old when Basil died, but he himself assures us that he had many friends and acquaintances who had known the Emperor well. Such was the contrast between Basil and his predecessors that at least one historian has suggested that he may not in fact have been the son of Romanus II at all, but the result of some momentary collision between his mother Theophano and a Norman member of her husband's Varangian guard. But there is too little evidence for the theory to be convincing.
