The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (7 page)

The reader of these last two pages may perhaps have been struck by a note of theatricality, even sensationalism, making a sharp contrast with the austerity and restraint which has heretofore characterized our narrative. This is a reflection, not of any change of approach on the author's part, but of a new source who took over the chronicle of the monk Theophanes shortly before the latter's death in 814 on the island of Samothrace, whither he had been exiled for his religious opinions. This Continuator - as he is generally known, though in fact the later chapters of the work attributed to him are obviously by several different successors - has a penchant for drama" and an eye for the telling detail which sets him apart from the vast majority of his fellows. We may suspect him of occasionally elaborating his account with more than a touch of artistic licence, and are probably right to do so - particularly since the later compilation dates from the middle of the tenth century, well over a hundred years after the events here described; but he certainly knows how to tell a story, and natural storytellers are all too rare in medieval history. In all essentials, we have no reason to doubt his reliability; and even for the rest, so long as we hold an occasional pinch of salt at the ready, there is no reason not to enjoy him.

To say that Michael II ascended the Byzantine throne with blood on his hands is an understatement. Many other Emperors, to be sure, had done the same; none, however, with the arguable exception of Phocas in 602,
1
had dispatched his predecessor quite so cold-bloodedly - or with less excuse. Leo had had his faults, cruelty and duplicity prominent among them; but he had been a wise and effective ruler who had done much to restore the imperial fortunes and who, given the opportunity, would doubtless have continued to guide the Empire with firmness and confidence. Michael could not attempt to justify his murder on the grounds of his incapacity any more than he could on those of religion, since he fully shared Leo's views on iconoclasm. His sole motivation, in short, was a compound of jealousy and naked ambition - together, perhaps, with just a touch of superstition: for he had never forgotten the words uttered by the hermit of Philomelion, seventeen years before.

The people of Constantinople were perfectly well aware of all this. They laughed at Michael for his boorishness and lack of education - in the time it took him to write the six Greek letters of his name, they used

1 Sec
Byzantium: The
Early Centuries,
p. 277.

to say, another man could read a whole book - and from the moment of his accession they made him a popular target for political lampoons; but they feared him too. He had, after all, shown that in order to get what he wanted there was no conduct of which he was not capable. And yet, surprisingly, he was to prove a better ruler than anyone had expected -and one whose reign, troubled as it was, was to be characterized less by stupidity or cruelty than by moderation and sound common sense.

It was perhaps a manifestation of this latter virtue that led Michael, on Whit Sunday 821, to have his seventeen-year-old son Theophilus crowned co-Emperor. He was deeply conscious of the fact that he was the seventh occupant of the Byzantine throne in a quarter of a century, and that of his immediate predecessors two had been deposed, two killed in battle and two assassinated. Furthermore, the last three had all been unrelated to each other, and to himself. More than anything, it seemed, the Empire needed stability; and the coronation of Theophilus was the first step towards it. But Theophilus too must produce a son and heir: and the second step, which was taken very shortly afterwards - probably on the very same day - was to marry him to a Paphlagonian lady of high birth and startling beauty by the name of Theodora
1
, of whom we shall be hearing a good deal more in the years to come.

But already by this time Michael had problems on his mind more immediate than that of the imperial succession; for the Empire was once again under threat - not, as so often in the past, from the Saracens or the Bulgars, but from a military adventurer known as Thomas of Gaziura or, more usually, as Thomas the Slav. He was the third of the three officers who had accompanied Bardanes Turcus to the hermit of Philomelion in 803; since his two comrades Leo and Michael had already ascended the throne, it must have been clear to him that, by the terms of the prophecy, his own attempt must be doomed to failure; he seems, however, to have been determined to prove the prophet wrong. Throughout the reigns of Nicephorus and Michael I he had remained in exile in Muslim lands; but he had returned on the accession of Leo who, rather surprisingly - since the Armenians were known to dislike the Slavs even more than the Greeks did - had entrusted him with a high military command. Until about the time of Leo's murder he had caused no trouble; but as soon as the throne passed to Michael
–
with

1 Like Theophano, the wife of Stauracius (see p. 911.), she was almost certainly selected by means of a 'bride show' - a sort of beauty contest of eligible maidens, from whom the prospective bridegroom would make his choice.

whom he had maintained a long-standing rivalry - he began to stir up rebellion.

His success was remarkable, and for several reasons. In the eastern provinces he claimed to be the Emperor Constantine VI - who had somehow miraculously escaped the blinding ordered by his mother Irene twenty-three years before - and actually went through a ceremony of coronation in Muslim-held Antioch. In the West he took a violently anti-iconoclastic stand which was sure, he knew, to win him a large measure of support. Everywhere he set himself up as a champion of the poor, and of all those who were oppressed by high taxation and the widespread corruption of provincial government officials. Though relatively advanced in age - he was certainly well into his fifties, and may have been older — and afflicted with a pronounced limp, there seems to have been something almost irresistibly attractive about him: those who knew them both would always contrast his courtesy and charm with the incoherent coarseness of the Emperor. And he possessed another advantage too: the revulsion felt by all right-thinking men and women for the cold-blooded brutality of the crime by which the Amorian had seized the throne.. We may wonder, none the less, whether his innumerable supporters would have felt quite the same had they known that Thomas was enjoying considerable financial support from Caliph Mamun - to whom he may well have promised, if successful, to hold the Empire as a fief of the Caliphate.

The army with which this twisted, resentful yet somehow charismatic figure invaded the Empire in the spring of 821 was immense: some 80,000, including Arabs and Persians, Georgians and Armenians, Alans and Goths, Huns and Slavs. So heterogeneous a collection was hardly likely, one would have thought, to rally much support inside the Greek-speaking Anatolian heartland; yet within a matter of months only two Themes in all Asia Minor - the Opsikion and the Armeniakon - remained loyal to Michael. And so, in the knowledge that he had virtually the entire Empire behind him from Ararat to the Aegean, Thomas crossed to Thrace in December 821 and laid siege to Constantinople.

It was not, as we know, the first time that the capital had faced a besieging army. True, on the most recent occasion - only eight years previously - Krum had made no serious attempt to breach the 400-year-old walls of Theodosius II, contenting himself with ravaging the outer suburbs and the district of Galata beyond the Golden Horn. But there had been full-blooded sieges too - by the Persians in 626, and by the

Saracens in 674 and again in 717-18 - when the people had had to contend with simultaneous onslaughts from both land and sea, and all the men and women of Constantinople had felt themselves - rightly — to be in the front line of the attack.
Thanks in part to their courage
and determination, but in still greater part to those magnificent defences which no other city could match, they had always prevailed; and so they did against Thomas the Slav, for the same reasons. Thomas directed his main offensive against the Blachernae quarter, where the northern end of the land walls ran down to the Golden Horn and the fortifications were believed to be somewhat weaker; he seems to have been unaware that this particular area had been greatly strengthened by Leo V in expectation of Krum's last expedition that had never happened. In the event, his siege-engines proved hopelessly ineffective, certainly no match for the huge catapults and mangonels that Michael had ranged along the ramparts. At sea, too, though Thomas had had no difficulty in winning over the provincial fleet in its bases around the Anatolian coast, together with all its armaments and even its stocks of Greek fire, the raging winter winds prevented his ships from advancing far enough inshore to do any appreciable damage.

In the spring of 822 he tried again, with no better success. This time the Emperor managed to address the besieging army from the top of one of the towers, ostensibly appealing to their loyalty but in fact subtly contriving to suggest that the defenders of the city were at their last gasp. His hearers, assuming that they would therefore meet with little serious resistance, advanced to the attack carelessly and in loose order; they were taken totally by surprise when several gates were suddenly thrown open to release an avalanche of imperial troops, who fell on them before they had time to recover themselves and slaughtered them by the score. After that, the assault on Blachernae was abandoned. A naval battle, apparently fought on the same day, ended in another reverse for the rebels; while their second fleet, arriving from Hellas and the Peloponnese in the early summer, had scarcely engaged the Emperor's navy before being totally destroyed by Greek fire.

By the second winter of the rebellion - which, in view of the numbers involved, might perhaps be more properly described as a civil war — Thomas had still not achieved a single major victory; both to him and to his close associates it must have been clear that his bid for the crown had failed. But he did not give up the struggle; and there is no telling how long the stalemate might have continued had it not been for the Bulgar

Khan Omortag, Krum's son, who soon after his accession had concluded a thirty-year treaty with the Empire and who now offered Michael armed assistance. The Emperor is said to have politely declined the offer, being reluctant to permit Christian blood - even that of traitors -to be shed by pagan swords; but he could not prevent the Khan, for whom the prospects of plunder were well-nigh irresistible, from acting on his own account and may even, for all we know, have given him covert encouragement. However that may be, in March 823 the Bulgar horde swept down from Mount Haemus in Thrace and a few weeks later, on the plain of Keduktos
1
near Heraclea, smashed the rebel army to pieces. The plunder proved fully up to expectations. Well satisfied with his work, Omortag returned home.

Thomas, now desperate, gathered up what was left of his shattered forces and led them some twenty miles west of Constantinople to another expanse of flat, open country known as the plain of Diabasis. Shortly afterwards - it must have been about the beginning of May -the Emperor rode out of the capital, at the head of his own army, to meet him; and there, where the two little rivers Melas (now the Karasu) and Athyras flowed down from the hill of Kushkaya near the Anastasian walls,
2
the issue was finally decided. Thomas adopted the time-honoured tactic of a pretended flight; but when the moment came to spin round and charge the enemy his remaining troops, dispirited and demoralized, could not bring themselves to do so and laid down their arms instead. Their erstwhile commander, escaping with a handful of followers, fled to Arcadiopolis - the modern Liileburgaz - and barricaded himself in.

Now the roles were reversed: Michael was the besieger, Thomas the besieged. The latter, acutely conscious of the shortage of provisions, expelled from the city all the women, the children and the men who were too old or incapacitated to bear arms and so managed to hold out through the summer; but in October, by which time he and his men were reduced to eating the putrescent corpses of their own horses, it became clear that they could resist no longer. Many deserted, lowering themselves by ropes from the walls, and made straight for the imperial camp; the Emperor thereupon sent a message to the soldiers left in the city, promising them all a free pardon if they would deliver their leader

1 A corruption of
Aquaeductus
.
Heraclea (now Eregli) was famous for the great Roman aqueduct just outside the city.

1
The great outer defence of Constantinople, built in the early sixth century by Anastasius I across the thirty-odd miles from Selymbria (Stlivri) on the Marmara to the Black Sea.

into his hands. They in turn, realizing that the alternative might well be a general massacre, agreed.

Thomas and Michael had been enemies for many years; only for the last two had their enmity flared up into open warfare, but during those two years the damage done to the Empire, morally as well as materially, had been beyond computation. Vast tracts of rich farming land had been laid waste; the resident small-holders, faced with savagely increased taxation and possessing no capital to fall back on, were ruined. Once again they flocked to Constantinople in search of sustenance. The old problem - the same that had plagued both Nicephorus arid Leo V - was back again, in a more acute form than ever. As the sole cause of all the misery and devastation, the Slav knew that he could expect no mercy. Brought in chains into the Emperor^s presence, he was pushed roughly to the ground before him; and Michael made no attempt to conceal his satisfaction. Resting one purple-booted foot on the neck of his victim, he pronounced his fate: the hands and feet to be cut off, the body then to be impaled on a stake. The sentence was carried out on the spot, before the walls of Arcadiopolis.

Mopping-up operations continued for a few more months. Thomas's adopted son, a somewhat feckless former monk named Anastasius, suffered the same punishment as his father; other rebel leaders in the Asiatic provinces were hanged. The overwhelming majority of their followers, however, having given themselves up to the Emperor's representatives, were pardoned and allowed to return to their homes. By the beginning of 824 the rebellion - perhaps the greatest and most widespread in all Byzantine history - was at an end.

The same could not be said, however, for the tribulations of Michael II. His Empire had scarcely begun to recover from the havoc wrought by Thomas the Slav when two further disasters befell: disasters curiously similar in both cause and effect, which were to deprive him of two of his most important strategic bases in the Mediterranean. There has long been a tendency among historians of the period to hold Thomas responsible for these losses also, on the grounds that his rebellion had weakened the Empire to the point where it no longer had the power to resist; in fact, it was itself largely to blame. In former days the Emperors had maintained a strong navy, as a necessary defence against the formidable sea power of the Omayyad Caliphs of Damascus; after 750, however, with the transfer of the Caliphate to the Abbasids of Baghdad,
that power had rapidly declined and the Byzantine fleet had been in its turn increasingly neglected. When, therefore, in 825 some 10,000 Arabs from Spain sailed with a fleet of forty ships into imperial waters, Michael could do little to prevent them.

These Arabs had been expelled from Andalusia in 816 after an unsuccessful insurrection of their own against their local Emir, and had set off eastward across the Middle Sea in a determined attempt to restore their shattered forces. Their first target had been Egypt, where in 818 they had captured Alexandria; seven years later, forcibly expelled by the Caliph Mamun, they headed for Crete. According to a venerable tradition
-
supported by both Byzantine and Arabic sources - their leader Abu Hafs gave them twelve days to plunder the island, after which they were to return to the harbour; on doing so, they found to their horror that he had ordered the destruction of all their ships. In vain did they remind him of the wives and children that they had left behind in Egypt; he told them brusquely that they must content themselves with the women of Crete. This, with what we must assume to be varying degrees of reluctance, they did - simultaneously founding the city of Candia (now Heraklion) which has ever since been the island's capital. From it they marched out to take twenty-nine other towns, forcibly imposing the Islamic faith and reducing the inhabitants to slavery. One community only was spared - unfortunately we are not given its name - in which Christianity might still be openly professed.

Crete henceforth became a nest of pirates, from whom no island in the Eastern Mediterranean or the Aegean, no harbour on the coast of Greece or Asia Minor, could consider itself safe. Over the next century Aegina, Paros and the Cyclades were devastated again and again; the monks of Mount Athos were driven from their monasteries; and similar stories could doubtless be told, had more written records survived, of innumerable other islands, towns and monastic communities pillaged and plundered by the Arab corsairs. Soon, too, Candia became the busiest slave market of its time. The Empire sought repeatedly to bring its inhabitants to heel; Michael II alone launched three separate expeditions between 827 and 829, and there were to be several more attempts by his successors before control was finally reimposed by the Byzantine general
-
and future Emperor - Nicephorus Phocas in 961.

Within only two years of the capture of Crete another, unrelated, company of Arabs invaded the island of Sicily. This time, however, they came by invitation - to support the cause of a former Byzantine admiral,

Euphemius by name, who had been dismissed from his post after an unseemly elopement with a local nun. Realizing that surrender would almost certainly mean death - or, at the very least, hideous mutilation -he had risen in revolt, killing the Imperial Governor and proclaiming himself Emperor. Even then, however, it was clear that he would never be able to maintain the position unaided. He therefore crossed to North Africa to seek the armed assistance of the Emir of Kairouan, undertaking to pay him an annual tribute once he was firmly established in power.

To the Emir, such an invitation was irresistible; and on 14 June 827 a fleet of between seventy and a hundred ships sailed northward to Sicily, carrying 700 cavalry and 10,000 foot-soldiers under the command, somewhat surprisingly, of one of the leading judges in the religious court of Kairouan, Asad Ibn al-Furat. Although his force was imposing enough at first sight, Asad soon found that he was not to have things entirely his own way. He himself was to die during an outbreak of plague the following year, and Euphemius was shortly afterwards killed by members of the imperial garrison at Enna; but the contest between Christian and Saracen - still fought, amid much clattering of toy swords on biscuit-tin breastplates and lopping of turbanned heads, in the traditional puppet-shows of Palermo - was to continue for another half-century until the fall of Syracuse in 878 marked the effective triumph of Muslim power in the island.
1
Long before then, however, Sicily had proved itself, for a people bent on piracy and conquest, an even better springboard than Crete: the armies of the Prophet had crossed the Straits of Messina, overrun Calabria and much of Apulia, and had even passed thence over the Adriatic to the southern Dalmatian coast. Michael and his successors did all they could to hold them in check, but the Byzantine navy in the middle of the ninth century was simply not large enough to tackle the problems of Crete and Sicily at the same time. It tended to concentrate more on the former, as being a closer and more immediate danger - with the result that the Saracens of Sicily found that they could do very much as they liked. As the centuries passed, the island was to suffer further invasions — by Normans and Germans, Angevins and Aragonese; inevitably, perhaps, the Arabic element became smaller and was gradually Christianized. But it was never entirely driven out, and the descendants of those first Islamic invaders are still there, to this day.