The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (13 page)

Jovian had made a disastrous beginning to his reign. 'We should have fought ten battles,' explodes Ammianus, 'rather than give up a single one of those fortresses'; and there must have been many in the army who enthusiastically agreed with him. He goes on to suggest that, since the negotiations had taken place only a hundred miles from Roman territory, the army could easily have fought its way to safety without this wholesale capitulation, and that Jovian was interested only in getting home as soon as possible, in order to consolidate his hold upon the throne. Whether this charge is justified or not - and it is only fair to point, out in his defence that a hundred miles through desert terrain is a long way for an army under constant attack and already running dangerously short of food - one could argue that Jovian, in return for all that he had conceded, might at least have been entitled to ask the Persian King for provisions enough to see his men safely back into imperial territory; but his requests, if they were ever made, were refused. During the next section of the march, which led the army westward from the Tigris through Hatra to Nisibis, they had to pass through seventy miles of merciless desert, during which they were forced to kill all their camels and pack-mules; even then, they barely survived. When they finally reached Nisibis, the Emperor refused to enter a city which he had just surrendered, preferring to pitch his camp outside the walls; and the following day, on the arrival of a representative of Shapur to hoist the Persian standard, he ordered a mass evacuation of the populace, so that not a single citizen should be left to receive the conquerors. In vain the inhabitants begged to be allowed to remain, and to defend their city on their own account; Jovian would not break his bond. Ammianus paints an affecting picture of the scene:

The whole city was a place of mourning and lamentation, and in every quarter nothing was heard but one universal wail, matrons tearing their hair when about to be driven from the homes in which they had been born and brought up, the mother who had lost her children, or the wife the husband, about to be torn from the place rendered sacred by their shades, clinging to their doorposts, embracing their thresholds and pouring forth floods of tears.

Every road was crowded, with everyone straggling away as best they could. Many, too, loaded themselves with as much of their property as they thought that they could carry, while leaving behind them abundant and costly furniture, which they could not remove for want of beasts of burden.

At Nisibis Julian's embalmed body - which had been carried by the soldiers all the way from the place where he fell - was entrusted to his old friend and remote kinsman Procopius - whom some said that he had secretly appointed to succeed him - for burial at Tarsus, where he had intended to establish his court after his victorious return. As for Jovian, he led the army on to Antioch, the holy
labarum
being borne once again before it as in the days of Constantine and his sons. On his arrival there he immediately issued an edict of general religious toleration, restoring full rights and privileges to the Christians throughout the Empire. That his own sympathies lay with the orthodox Nicene faith, rather than with the Arians formerly favoured by Constantius, was made abundantly clear by the deep reverence which he showed to old Athanasius of Alexandria - now restored to the see from which Julian had removed him - who had travelled at once to Antioch to congratulate the new Emperor on his accession. Doubtless encouraged by the assurances of the splendid old patriarch that his re-establishment of the true faith would be rewarded by a long and peaceful reign, Jovian left Antioch in mid-October, moving with his army in easy stages through Anatolia. He was acclaimed with obvious enthusiasm in all the towns (largely Christian) through which he passed; only at Ancyra - the modern Ankara - where on
1
January
364
he assumed the Consulship with his infant son Var-ronianus, did the deafening howls of the latter during the ceremony of induction lead the more credulous of those present, despite Athanasius's predications, to fear an evil omen.

As well they might have. A few days later, on
16
February
364
- by which time he had progressed as far as the little town of Dadastana, about half-way between Ancyra and Nicaea - he was found dead in his bedroom. 'By some,' writes Gibbon, his death 'was ascribed to the consequences of an indigestion, occasioned either by the quantity of the wine or the quality of the mushrooms which he had swallowed in the evening.

According to others, he was suffocated in his sleep by the vapour of charcoal, which extracted from the walls of the apartment the unwholesome moisture of the fresh plaster.' Surprisingly enough, foul play was not suspected.

The choice of Jovian as Emperor had marked the restitution of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, but it had also signalled something else: the end of a dynasty which had dominated it for more than half a century. The male line of Constantius Chlorus was now extinct; the diadem was once again a prize open to all. And there could be no clearer indication of this changed state of affairs than the virtual unanimity with which the army, some ten days after Jovian's death, acclaimed Valentinian as his successor. At first sight the new Emperor might have seemed still more unfitted to the purple. Uncouth of manner, almost illiterate and possessed of a furious and quite uncontrollable temper, he was the son of a Pannonian rope-maker who had himself risen from the ranks to positions of high authority in both Africa and Britain. Like his father before him, Valentinian made no attempt to conceal his peasant origins; but at forty-two he still boasted a magnificent physique and a commanding - some said forbidding - presence. He was a devout Christian and a superb soldier, though capable of unspeakable cruelty when the mood took him. When, after his acclamation, he was pressed to nominate a co-Augustus, he refused to be hurried: only after the army finally reached Constantinople on 28 March did he name - to the general dismay - his younger brother Valens.

It was a curious choice. Valens was an Arian and, in appearance, little short of grotesque - bandy-legged and pot-bellied, with a ferocious squint into the bargain. Seven years younger than his brother, he possessed none of his courage or toughness and very little of his ability, equalling him only in his reputation for brutality. He was, however, precisely what Valentinian wanted: a faithful lieutenant who freely acknowledged his brother's superiority and could be trusted to provoke no difficulties or quarrels. Valens, the Emperor rather surprisingly announced, would be responsible for the East while he, Valentinian, would rule the West from his capital at Milan.

Would he, one wonders, have reversed the two roles had he foreseen the crisis that his brother would have to face within a year of installing himself in Constantinople? Early in the spring of
365,
a few days after he had left for Syria - where, in defiance of the treaty signed less than two years before, trouble was again brewing along the Persian frontier -

Valens was recalled with the news that Procopius, that distant cousin of the Emperor Julian who had been responsible for his burial arrangements, had raised the standard of revolt. Playing on the old loyalties to the house of Constantine - to which he claimed, rather unconvincingly, to belong - Procopius had quickly gained the support of the army in the capital; Thrace and Bithynia soon followed. Valens, panic-stricken, fled to Ancyra, his despair growing still deeper when he heard that no help could be expected from his brother, already fully extended with the barbarian tribes in Gaul. 'Procopius,' Valentinian had characteristically remarked as he turned down the appeal for assistance, 'is enemy only to my brother and myself; the Alemanni are the foes of the whole Roman world.'

Fortunately for the two emperors, however, the rebel soon overreached himself, antagonizing several influential men who, having previously declared themselves in his favour, now transferred their support to Valens. Their example led to further widespread defections, and by the end of May the revolt was at an end. Procopius himself was captured at Philippopolis in Thrace - now Plovdiv - and decapitated, his severed head being dispatched as a trophy to Valentinian in Gaul. Meanwhile Valens instituted a programme of appalling retribution on all those whose loyalties had even briefly wavered, ordering throughout the affected provinces tortures and executions, burnings and banishments on such a scale as to earn for himself a degree of fear and hatred among his subjects that not even a twenty-five per cent reduction of taxes in the following year was altogether able to remove.

For the next decade we find the two Emperors almost constantly caught up in their respective struggles: Valens engaged first with the Gothic tribes along the Danubian frontier, building forts and establishing garrisons over its entire length, and then in
371
setting out on his long-delayed journey to the East, where Shapur had taken King Arsaces prisoner, driven him to suicide and reduced Armenia to the status of a Persian satellite; Valentinian dealing with the repeated incursions of the barbarians into Gaul and, after
367,
faced with a serious upheaval in Britain, the result of invasions by the Picts and Scots. Being himself pinned down in Europe, he entrusted this latter crisis to a certain Theodosius, one of his finest generals, who moved in with spectacular success and left the island in
370
happier and more peaceful than it had been for a generation or more. Only three years later still could the Emperor leave Gaul in safety; almost immediately, however, new troubles broke out - this time with a normally quiet and law-abiding tribe, the Quadi, who lived just across the Danube from his own
Pan
nonian homeland. Resenting the way in which imperial forts had been built on what they held to be their side of the river, and believing, moreover, that the Romans had been responsible for the recent murder of their King, they had invaded imperial territory in protest and laid waste a certain amount of land along the frontier. They had then sent an embassy to Valentinian, explaining why they had thus taken the law into their own hands and claiming that the real aggressors were the Romans themselves.

On the face of it, the Quadi seem to have had a case; but to Valentinian this was unpardonable presumption, an insult to Rome. The anger welled up within him as he listened, his normally rubicund face turning a deeper and deeper purple until he suddenly fell forward in a fit of apoplexy and died, at Bregetio in Valeria, on 17 November 375. In his eleven-year reign he had worked, as few Emperors had ever worked, for the good of the Empire and, above all, the integrity of its frontiers. As an orthodox Christian, he had shown tolerance for those who did not share his own strongly-held Nicene faith; he had, for example, refused to replace such Arian bishops as he found still in possession of their sees. As a ruler he had set up schools and medical services, and had dispensed justice with a fair, impartial hand; and if his punishments were often severe - even cruel - at least they were visited on the guilty and not the innocent. None the less, his harshness and austerity had won him little love from his subjects; and few of them were heartbroken to see him go.

Already as early as 367, after a serious illness during which he had worried greatly about the succession, Valentinian had persuaded his troops to recognize his seven-year-old son Gratian as his co-Augustus. As he lay on his deathbed, however, knowing that Gratian was far away at Trier and Valens a good deal further still at Antioch, he sent for his son by his second marriage, also called Valentinian and still only four, and had him proclaimed co-Emperor with his stepbrother. On his death, therefore, the Empire theoretically had three rulers to carry on the government; a malformed, middle-aged sadist utterly devoid of wisdom or judgement, a delightful boy of sixteen and a child scarcely out of its cradle. On those three the future of the Empire now depended, and at one of the most critical moments of its history; for only a year after Valentinian's death it found itself confronting a new wave of invaders, infinitely more formidable than any it had so far encountered: the Huns.

Nowadays we tend to think of all these barbarian tribes that swarmed southward and westward into Europe during the fourth and fifth centuries as being very much the same, but we are wrong: by the time of which we are speaking the Goths were a relatively civilized people, the majority of them Arian Christians. Although the western branch, the Visigoths, was still ruled by local chieftains, the Ostrogoths of the east had already evolved into a united and prosperous kingdom. The Huns, on the other hand, were savages - a vast, undisciplined, heathen horde, Mongolian in origin, who had swept down from the Central Asian steppe, destroying and laying waste everything in their path. In
376
they flung themselves on the Goths with unprecedented fury. King
Erma
naric, after several courageous stands against them, finally took his own life; his successor was killed a short time later in yet another hopeless battle. The Ostrogoths' resistance was now at an
end; and although one venerable old Visigothic chieftain, Athanaric, did his best to rally his people and withdrew, undefeated, to the mountains of Transylvania, the greater number sought permission from Valens to settle within the Empire, on the plains of Thrace.

Their request was granted, the Emperor giving express orders to his local representatives to provide the refugees with food and shelter while they established themselves in their new homes. Alas, his instructions were ignored: the local authorities, led by Lupicinus, Count of Thrace, saw in the new arrivals only opportunities for exploitation and extortion, robbing them of virtually everything that they possessed and reducing them to the brink of starvation. By the summer of
377
the settlers, now desperate, were driven to active resistance. Advancing
en masse
to
Mar
cianople - the capital of the imperial province of Lower Moesia, some twenty miles inland from the modern port of Varna, in Bulgaria - they demanded to see Lupicinus, who refused to receive them. A day or two later he emerged with an army, intending to teach them a lesson; in fact he was soundly defeated, narrowly escaping with his life. Within days, all the Goths of Thrace were up in arms, to be joined by the Visigoths and even the Huns in a full-scale barbarian attack on the Roman Empire.

The war raged throughout the winter, despite the arrival of heavy reinforcements from both the eastern and the western Emperors. At last, in the spring of
378,
Valens headed in person for the Balkans, encouraged by a promise from Gratian to come quickly to his aid. Having defeated a sizeable Gothic force on the Maritsa river to the north-west of Adria-nople, he was advancing towards Philippopolis on his way to meet his nephew when news of an attempt to cut him off from his capital forced him to retire. Back again in Adrianople, he received word from Gratian asking him to delay any major confrontation until reinforcements could be sent; but these were still many miles away and the Gothic army, according to the most reliable information, was a small one - only some
10,000
men in all. His general, Sebastian, favoured an immediate attack, and Valens allowed himself to be persuaded. It was the greatest mistake of his life - and also the last. The battle that followed, fought on
9
August
378,
was a
debacle.
The Emperor was killed by an arrow, Sebastian and his second-in-command Trajan fell at his side, and two-thirds of the Roman army perished with them.

Everything now depended on Gratian, still only nineteen. Despite a magnificent victory that he had gained the previous February over yet another barbarian tribe, the Lentienses, at Argentaria in Alsace, he himself could not yet leave the West; instead, he turned to Theodosius, the son of that other Theodosius who had scored such signal successes in Britain ten years before. Sadly, in
376,
the father had been disgraced and executed by Valens as the result of some court intrigue, since when his son had retired to the family estates in Spanish Galicia; now, however, he willingly responded to the Emperor's call, and within a few months had proved himself a leader of such distinction that, in January
379,
Gratian raised him to be his co-Augustus. Establishing his headquarters at Thessalonica, he devoted the next two years to restoring order in Thrace and confidence among the Goths, vast numbers of whom were recruited into the legions.

None of this, to be sure, was achieved without sacrifice: the Goths were granted complete autonomy, exemption from taxation and an exceptionally high rate of pay for their military services, either as treaty-bound allies
(foederati)
or directly subordinate to the Emperor. This in turn meant increased financial burdens, and proportionately higher taxes for those ordinary citizens who were not exempt. It also led to continued resentment against the barbarians as a whole, and fears that the Germanic element in the army was now becoming dangerously strong. If, on the other hand, this was the price of retaining the Eastern Empire, Theodosius was happy enough to pay it. By the summer of
380,
thanks to his quiet, patient diplomacy, the Goths were happily settled in their new homes and Thrace was once again at peace; on
24
November he made his formal entry into Constantinople, and on
11
January
381
welcomed old Athanaric to the capital, receiving him outside the walls and personally escorting him to his place of residence. The excitements of the
splendid city and the lavishness of the entertainment he received obviously proved too much for the old man, who died a fortnight later; but he was given a sumptuous funeral, the Emperor himself accompanying his body to the grave. Such consideration for their former leader deeply gratified the Goths, disposing them still further towards a lasting reconciliation; the Romans, too, welcomed the new accord. 'Now that the wounds of strife are healed,' declared the court orator Themistius, 'Rome's most courageous enemies will become her truest and most loyal friends.'

Gratian's elevation of Theodosius to the supreme power was perhaps the most lasting benefit that he conferred on the Empire. And yet, ironically, that very year -
383
- that saw the conclusion of the final peace treaty with the Goths also witnessed the Emperor's downfall. Few had ever shown greater promise. In the course of his short life, his piety and purity of heart had never left him. As a fervent Nicene Christian, he had been the first Emperor to refuse the title and insignia of
Pontifex Maximus;
in Rome, he had swept away the altar and statue of Victory that Julian had restored to the Senate House, and had expropriated the immense wealth of the Temple of Vesta and its chosen virgins for the benefit of the imperial treasury. But he had other interests besides religion. His tutor, Ausonius, proudly described him as possessing a
mens aurea,
a golden mind: he was remarkably well read and, if reports are true, a very passable poet. He was also a superb athlete and a magnificent horseman, while his skill as a hunter was - according once again to Ausonius - almost supernatural: he could kill a lion with a single arrow. Finally, he remained all his life an inspired leader in the field. But, at the age of twenty-four, he was already growing lazy. The pleasures of the chase and the excitements of the amphitheatre were taking up more and more of his time. More dangerous still, he no longer attempted to conceal the predilection he felt for the barbarian element in the army (and particularly for his own personal guard of tall, blond Alani) whom he openly favoured at the expense - and to the increasing resentment - of their Roman colleagues. Matters came to a head when one of the imperial generals serving in Britain, Magnus Clemens Maximus, was suddenly acclaimed Augustus by his men; a few days later he landed in Gaul, where his army met Gratian's just outside Paris. After some inconclusive skirmishing the Emperor would probably have won the day had not his Moorish cavalry suddenly and unexpectedly defected to Maximus. He fled, but was taken prisoner soon afterwards at Lyons and there, on
25
August, was murdered while attending a banquet - under a promise of safe conduct - with his captors.

In Constantinople, Theodosius received the news with horror. For the moment, however, he was powerless. The Persian King Ardashir II -who had succeeded his brother Shapur four years before - had just been deposed in favour of his nephew Shapur III, an unknown quantity who needed watching; meanwhile the Huns were still causing trouble along the northern frontier. This was no time to embark on a long punitive expedition against Maximus. Reluctantly, Emperor acknowledged usurper - as did most of the provinces of the West.

Except Italy. Thither Gratian's co-Emperor Valentinian II, now twelve years old, hastily moved his court from Sirmium, and there in Milan he maintained, somewhat precariously, his authority - ruling largely through his Sicilian mother,1 the redoubtable Justina, and under the guidance of the still more formidable Bishop Ambrose, who actually travelled to Trier in the winter of
383-4
in an attempt to reach an understanding with Maximus. The young Emperor's life cannot have been made happier by the machinations of his fanatically Arian mother, who feared the bishop's growing influence over her son and was forever intriguing against him; but Ambrose - who does not hesitate to compare her in his writings with Jezebel and Herodias — gave as good as he got, and out-manoeuvred her every time. His only failure was in his attempts to wean the boy from his mother's heretical persuasion; only after Justina's death was he eventually to persuade Valentinian to accept the Nicene faith, and by then it was too late: Maximus had been given the excuse he needed.

In
387
the pretender crossed the Alps into Italy, ostensibly to deliver the Empire from the taint of heresy. Justina and Valentinian fled, first to Aquileia and thence to Thessalonica, where Theodosius was able to join them. The past year had not been easy for the Emperor of the East. In January he had had to contend with serious disturbances at Antioch, where the populace had rioted in protest against a special tax laid upon the city in connection with his forthcoming
decennalia,
wrecked the public baths and smashed the statues of himself and his family. The local authorities had over-reacted, and the resulting massacre - graphically described, with its consequences, by St John Chrysostom, who was there - had

1 Zosimus (iv, 19, 43) claims that Justina had been the wife of the usurper Magnentius before her marriage to Valentinian: possible, but hardly likely.

included many women and children among its victims. It was Easter before order was restored by the Emperor's emissaries, and one of the proudest cities of Asia received the imperial pardon by which it regained its former rights and privileges. Then there had been the usual difficulties with the Persians. The new King had formally notified him of his accession by means of an embassy laden with magnificent presents -including, incidentally, elephants - but in subsequent diplomatic negotiations had showed that he could strike just as hard a bargain as his father. From the partition of Armenia that finally resulted in
387,
the Empire emerged with only one-fifth of the country under its control, four-fifths having been appropriated by Shapur.

But peace, at least, had been assured. The long-planned expedition against Maximus was finally a possibility. Theodosius spent the winter at Thessalonica with Valentinian and Justina - now his mother-in-law, since his recent marriage
en secondes noces
to her daughter Galla
1
- actively preparing for war. Only in June
388
was he ready, with Valentinian, to march; but once started he moved fast, pressing up through the mountain passes of Macedonia and Bosnia (successfully foiling a plot to assassinate him on the way) and eventually meeting Maximus at Siscia - the modern Sisak - on the Sava. Despite the fatigue of their long march, his troops plunged, fully armed, into the river, swam to the opposite bank and put the rebels to flight. One or two more battles followed, but thenceforth the campaign was largely a matter of pursuit until Maximus was finally driven to surrender at Aquileia. Brought before Theodosius, he confessed to him that he had claimed to have his approval when he usurped the throne; and for a moment it looked as if the Emperor was about to spare the life of his old colleague. But the soldiers dragged their prisoner away before he could do so. They knew Theodosius's reputation for clemency, and preferred to take no chances.

Appointing the Frankish general Arbogast as
Comes -
and thus effective Governor - of Gaul, Theodosius and Valentinian spent the winter in Milan and in the following year moved on with the former's four-year-old son Honorius to Rome where, on
13
June
389,
they made their solemn entry into the city. The senior Emperor's energetic efforts to weaken the hold of paganism cannot have endeared him to the local members of the old regime; but his easy approachability and charm of

1
Zosimus believes (iv,
44)
that Thcodosius was at first reluctant to take arms against Maximus, and agreed to do so only after Justina, knowing of his recent widowhood and his extreme susceptibility to attractive women, sent Galla to plead with him. The Emperor, he suggests, was not only persuaded but besotted: and Galla's efforts resulted not only in war but in marriage.