The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (53 page)
Others may speak of his many splendid successes, but for me there is one overriding consideration: the fact that this man, as admirable in reality as he was in appearance, should place more confidence in my judgement than in the scheming of my rivals. Whether he had discerned more evidence of wisdom in my opinions than in those of the others, or whether it was because he admired my character, I cannot tell; but so greatly was he attached to me, so much did he love me more than t
he rest, that he listened intentl
y to every word that I uttered, depended on me absolutely for spiritual advice and entrusted his most precious possessions to my personal care.
Psellus cannot possibly have had the same power over Isaac Comnenus as he did over Constantine Ducas; but he possessed extraordinary powers of persuasion and it was he - we can be virtually sure — who somehow convinced the dying (or, if we prefer, simply depressed) Emperor that Constantine must be his successor. If this hypothesis is correct, it can only be said that his burden of guilt must be heavy indeed; for there is no Emperor in the whole history of the later Roman Empire whose accession had more disastrous consequences. Had Isaac Comnenus kept his health and energy, had he reigned for twenty years instead of two, he would have built up the strength of the army to the level it had known under Basil II. It would then, almost certainly, have been more than a match for the enemy that was already gathering its forces along the eastern frontier; Isaac would have been able to bequeath his Empire, undefeated and undiminished, direcdy to his nephew Alexius; and the third volume of this history would have had a very different - and far happier — story to tell. But it was not to be. Isaac's tragically premature death, and his inexplicable choice of successor, rendered inevitable the first of the two great catastrophes that were ultimately to bring about the downfall of Byzantium.
[1059-71]
Here one could see a dreadful sight: those celebrated Roman regiments who had brought both East and West under their sway, consisting now of only a handful of men - and men, moreover, bowed down with poverty and ill-health, no longer even fully armed. Instead of swords and other weapons they held, as the Bible has it, only pikes and scy
thes. And this was not even in ti
me of peace. Yet because it was so long since any Emperor had fought here they lacked war horses and equipment of every kind. And since they were considered weak and cowardly and of no serious use they had received no subsistence money, nor their customary allowance to buy grain. Their very standards rang dully when struck, and looked dirty and as if blackened by smoke; and there were few to care for them. All this caused great sadness in the hearts of those who saw them, when they thought upon the condition from which the Roman armies had come, and that to which they had fallen.
John Scylitzes
Within weeks of Isaac's death it had become clear to all with eyes to see that his brief reign had constituted only a momentary pause in the imperial decline. This had begun immediately on the death of Basil II in 1025, with the accession of his hopeless, hedonist brother; it had continued all through the long, unedifying reigns of Zoe, her husbands, her sister and her adoptive son; and now, under Constantine X Ducas -arguably the most disastrous ruler ever to don the purple buskins - it reached its nadir. Not that there was anything evil or malevolent about Constantine. He was, as we have seen, the close friend, former pupil and to a certain extent the creature of Michael Psellus, on whose advice Isaac had named him his successor; he was a scholar and an intellectual, and -by Byzantine standards, which would certainly not be ours - a superb orator. Finally, he was a scion of one of the oldest and richest families of the military aristocracy. Had he but remained true to his background, had he continued Isaac's work for the eight years that he was to reign
,
building up the army in preparation for the challenge that so obviously lay ahead, the situation might even at this late stage have been saved. But Constantine X was not one of nature's soldiers. He preferred the ease and comforts of Constantinople, spending his time in learned d
iscussions and the drafting of in
tertninable dissertations on the finer points of law. And the price that the Empire paid for him was heavy indeed.
Once again the bureaucracy was all-powerful, operating on a scale unmatched anywhere else (with the possible exception of China) for several centuries; for it has to be remembered that the Byzantine Empire, absolute monarchy though it might be, ran its economy on distinctly socialist lines. Capitalism was allowed, but rigidly controlled at every stage; production, labour, consumption, foreign trade, public welfare and even the movement of population were all firmly in the hands of the State. The consequence was a vast army of civil servants, taking its orders theoretically from the Emperor - though effectively, more often than not, from Psellus and his friends - and inspired, so far as one can see, by one overriding principle: to curb - if not actually to destroy - the power of the army. In the past seventeen years, they might have argued, the Empire had experienced three military insurrections: two had been quelled more by luck than anything else, the third had succeeded. It followed that the army must be humbled, and reduced to a proper state of subordination. It must be starved of funds, the authority of the generals must be limited, the former peasant-soldiers - many of whom had followed government advice and bought their exemption from military service - must be progressively replaced by foreign mercenaries.
What Constantine X and his government of intellectuals could never apparently understand was, first, that these were the very measures most likely to provoke further
coups;
second, that mercenaries were by their very nature unreliable, being loyal to their paymasters only for as long as they received their pay, or until someone else offered them more; third, and most important of all, that the enemy — the most formidable enemy that Byzantium had seen since the appearance of the Saracens 400 years before - was at the gates.
That enemy was a people who, being relatively new arrivals on the scene, have so far received only a passing mention in this book. The Seljuk Turks first appear as a distinctive tribe in the latter half of the tenth century in Transoxania, that region of Central Asia which lies between the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes south-east of the Aral Sea, where they quickly adopted the prevailing faith of Islam. At this time they were still entirely nomadic and leading a life of brigandage: fighting with neighbouring tribes, pillaging and plundering wherever the opportunity arose, finding amid the constant warfare of the local princes plenty of
employment for their tough littl
e war ponies, their swords and above all their bows, which they could string in the saddle; shooting as easily to the rear as to the front, they seldom wasted an arrow. By 104 j, under their leader Tughrul Bey, they had spread across Persia; ten years later they were to make themselves masters of Baghdad, establishing a protectorate over the moribund Abbasid Caliphate and proclaiming Tughrul 'Sultan and King of East and West'.
The Caliphate, however, had never been their ultimate objective. Still less had the Byzantine Empire, whose existence had always been accepted by the rulers of Islam. This history has already recorded raids and incursions aplenty, in both directions across the frontier; but the idea of annihilating Byzantium would have struck the Seljuk Sultans as completely unrealistic, even ridiculous. The final goal on which their attention was fixed was Fatimid Egypt, whose Empire now extended across Palestine and Syria as far as Aleppo. As orthodox Sunni Muslims, blazing with all the fervour of recent converts, they detested these Shi'ite upstarts, who represented in their eyes not only unspeakable heresy but - since they had actually dared to set up a rival Caliphate in Cairo - a rupture in the fundamental unity of Islam. They knew that the Fatimids would not rest until they had taken Baghdad; and they were determined to destroy them before they had a chance to do so. First, however, there
were certain matters to be settl
ed nearer home; and the most important of these was Armenia.
From 1045 onwards, according to the agreement that John Smbat, King of Ani, had made with Basil II nearly twenty years before,
1
the larger part of Armenia was in Byzantine hands. Its annexation after John's death had been virtually the only diplomatic success of Constantine Monomachus; at the time he had made much of it, but it would have been better if he had left it alone - particularly since his subsequent policy, and that of Constantine Ducas, towards Armenia could hardly have been more short-sighted. The Empire's reason for
1
See p.
264.
acquiring this great mile-high mountain barrier on its north-eastern frontier can only have been strategic; yet one of Constantine's first acts after its acquisition had been to institute a fierce religious persecution of the staunchly monophysite Armenians, the surest possible way of turning them against him. His second successor Constantine X, while maintaining the persecution, was to go still further in idiocy. Armenia maintained a local militia of some 50,000 men, for the maintenance of which certain imperial taxes were remitted; in his constant search for new sources of money the Emperor ordered the taxes reimposed and the militia disbanded.
Thus it was that Byzantium lost an invaluable buffer state and gained instead, not an Armenian bulwark as it had hoped, but what might a century ago have been called an Armenian Question — a disaffected and discordant minority within the Empire which created more problems than it solved. The Armenian princes, left to themselves, would have put up as stiff a resistance to the Muslim invaders as they always had; now, demoralized and resentful, they found themselves wondering whether even conquest by the Turks would prove appreciably worse than their present subjection to the Greeks.
Tughrul Bey was not slow to turn this vastly improved situation to his advantage. His first attack on Vaspurakan as early as 1046 was a failure: the Byzantine Governor deliberately left a bait in the form of an undefended camp and ambushed the Turks as they were plundering it.-Two years later, however, his unruly half-brother Ibrahim Inal took advantage of the temporary removal of Byzantine troops at the time of Leo Tornices's revolt and overran the city of Ardzen. The Armenian historian Matthew of Edessa speaks of 150,000 massacred, and goes on to describe 'the sons taken into slavery, the infants smashed without mercy against the rocks, the venerable old men ab
ased in public squares, the gentl
e-born virgins dishonoured
and carried off'; Matthew doubtl
ess exaggerates, but the Seljuk sack of a wealthy city cannot have been a pleasant sight.
1
Thenceforth the raids continued almost annually. At one point Constantine Monomachus, obliged to withdraw troops from the East in order to deal with a more immediate threat from the Balkan Pechenegs, concluded a truce with Tughrul, but it did not last long: in 1054 the Seljuk Sultan personally led an expedition which ravaged
1
The survivors are said to have escaped to the neighbouring city of Theodosiopolis, which they renamed after their old home, Ardzen er-Rum (Ardzen of the Romans) - a name which over the years was corrupted into the modern Erzurum.
northern and central Armenia and the plain of Erzurum, pressing on to within some fifty miles of Trebizond itself. Although his entry into Baghdad in 1055 provided a brief interval of relief, the old pattern was resumed all too soon; now, too, the sufferings of the local populations were increased by the activities of the Turkomans - Turks who, though outwardly Islamicized, had never abandoned their nomadic habits, refused to accept the authority of the Sultan and cheerfully continued the brigand life of their ancestors.
Tughrul died in 1063, and was succeeded - after a good deal of family strife - by his nephew Alp Arslan, the son of his brother and co-ruler Chagri. Alp Arslan's moustaches were said to have been so long that they had to be tied behind his back when he went hunting; apart from that, the chroniclers tell us little about his personal appearance. As to his character, their accounts differ. Matthew of Edessa predictably calls him a drinker of blood, and Aristakes considers him one of the forces of Antichrist; in the opinion of Michael the Syrian, on the other hand, he ruled justly and well. The Arab historian Ibn al-Adim tells a story which suggests that he did not invariably observe the Prophet's strictures against the drinking of wine, but this failing was not unusual among Muslim princes of his day; all that we know of him for certain is that he was a superb commander in the field. At the time of his accession he was about thirty-three. Early the following year, 1064, he led a huge expedition against Armenia and besieged its capital, Ani.
No traveller visiting what remains of Ani today can fail to catch his breath in sheer astonishment at the splendour of the site: the towering walls, still partially standing, the rolling plain beyond it from which rise the ruins of some of the most magnificent churches of their time (Matthew of Edessa claims that there were a thousand and one of them) and - invisible until one is at the very brink - the sudden chasm formed by the river nowadays known as the Arpa Cay and one of its tributaries, thanks to which the city enjoyed one of the strongest defensive positions of any in the re
gion. This was, however, of littl
e use against the Seljuks. Unlike many of its neighbours Ani put up a show of resistance, holding out for twenty-five days before it surrendered. At the last moment its inhabitants are said to have sent out all their loveliest maidens and most handsome young men in an attempt to avoid a sack; but Alp Arslan was, as usual, merciless. The Arab historian Sibt ibn al-Gawzi quotes a purported eye-witness of what took place:
