The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (20 page)

But, successful as the Council of Chalcedon unquestionably was in the short term, it laid up a greater store of future trouble than it knew. Monophysitism, as soon became apparent, was by no means dead. In the years to come, both in Egypt and Syria - the latter once a stronghold of the Nestorians - bishop after bishop was openly to reject the findings of the Council; and when these provinces began their struggle for independence from Byzantine rule, the Single Nature of Christ was to be their rallying-cry.
3
With the West also, the seeds of discord were sown -notably in one of the thirty decrees which the delegates went on to promulgate when their main business was over. This decree, known as Canon Twenty-Eight, bestowed on the Bishop of Constantinople the title of Patriarch and reiterated the Theodosian ruling of
381
which had accorded him a pride of place in the Christian hierarchy second only to the Pope of Rome. So much the papal representatives present were

1
The three previous Councils had been those of Nicaea in
325,
Constantinople in
381
and Ephesus in
431.

1
According to an 'Anonymous Englishman' writing in
1190,
the two opposing
camps, orthodox and monophysite
, decided to resolve the dispute by placing their two respective formulas in the coffin of St Euphemia - a local virgin martyred in
303
- and leaving the decision to her. When they opened the coffin a week later they found
the orthodox formula on her head
and the monophysite under her feet. There was no further argument.

3
The monophysite doctrine still survives today among the Copts and Abyssinians, the Jacobites of Syria and the Armenians.

prepared to allow; what they could not accept was the clear implication that the Pope's supremacy would henceforth be purely titular, and that in every other respect there would be complete equality between the sees of Rome and Constantinople. The eastern provinces in particular - those of Thrace, Pontus and Asia - would be responsible to the Patriarch alone, by whom their metropolitans would in future be ordained. From this moment was born the ecclesiastical rivalry between the Old Rome and the New which was to grow increasingly bitter over the centuries until, just
600
years later, it was to erupt into schism.

John Malalas - a sixth-century Syrian-Byzantine chronicler whose anecdotes, however apocryphal, are the very essence of the
ben trovato -
records that the King of the Huns sent envoys, shortly before the death of Theodosius II, to both the Eastern and the Western Emperors, bearing the message: 'Attila, thy master and mine, bids thee prepare a palace for his reception.' Despite the lack of contemporary evidence, there is nothing inherently improbable about this story: Attila had designs on both halves of the Roman Empire, and loved nothing more than to strike terror into the hearts of his enemies. Until now, he had directed his energies principally against the East; but developments among the various barbarian tribes in the Western provinces had recently provided several excellent pretexts for his intervention there. Still more fortunate, from his point of view, was the opportunity unexpectedly afforded by the luckless Princess Honoria, to whose imperial brother he could now forward the ring she had sent him, together with a demand couched in his usual peremptory style: that Valentinian should restore to her forthwith that part of his Empire which was her due, and of which he had so unjustly deprived her.

The details of Attila's western campaigns need not concern us here; none the less, it should never be forgotten that, in the summer of
45
1
and again in
452,
the whole fate of western civilization hung in the balance. Had the Hunnish army not been halted in these two successive campaigns, had its leader toppled Valentinian from his throne and set up his own capital in Ravenna or Rome, there is little doubt that both Gaul and Italy would have been reduced to spiritual and cultural deserts, just as surely and just as completely as the Balkan peninsula was reduced by the Ottoman Turks a thousand years later. In
451
Attila crossed the Rhine, devastated the great frontier city of Metz with several other important garrison towns, and penetrated as far as the walls of Orleans. Before he could take the city, however, he was forced to turn back: an imperial army under the Roman general Aetius - the effective ruler of Gaul - was advancing from the east, strengthened by detachments of Visigoths and Burgundians, Bretons and Franks, all united for the first time against their common enemy; and though the ensuing battle, known sometimes by the name of the Catalaunian and sometimes by that of the Mauriac or Mauritian Plain,
1
was indecisive insofar as both sides sustained immense losses and neither was left master of the field, it had the effect of halting the Huns' advance. On the following morning Attila gave the signal for retreat and departed for his Hungarian heartland, there to rest and consolidate until spring should bring new ardour to his men.

Early in
452
he launched his army upon Italy. The opening of the new campaign was hardly encouraging: Aquileia held out for three months against the Hunnish onslaught, and Attila was on the point of giving up the siege when, Jordanes tells us, he saw a flight of storks heading away from the city with their young. Crediting them with a degree of foresight which in our own day is more usually accorded to rats, he pointed them out to his troops as a sure sign that the city was doomed. Thus encouraged, the Huns flung themselves with renewed vigour into the attack; and soon afterwards, the ninth greatest metropolis in the Roman Empire was an empty shell. Concordia, Altino and Padua followed in quick succession. Vicenza and Verona, Brescia and Bergamo would have suffered likewise had they not immediately opened their gates at the conqueror's approach - as would Pavia and Milan, where Attila triumphantly set up his court in the imperial palace. These last cities were not put to the torch like those of the Veneto; they were, however, mercilessly sacked, and many of their leading citizens taken into captivity.

This time the King of the Huns was carrying all before him. Aetius, who had assumed command in Italy, had no friendly barbarian tribes on whom to call, as he had had in Gaul the previous year. The imperial army alone stood no chance against the advancing multitude and there was, it seemed, nothing to prevent Attila from marching on Rome - the consequences of which would have been infinitely more terrible than anything ever contemplated by the relatively civilized, Christian, Alaric. And yet, at the very point of departure for his advance down the

1
The old chroniclers differ as to the site of the battle as well as its name. Hodgkin, after a careful analysis of all available
evidence, plumps for Mery-sur-Seine
, some twenty miles n
orth-west of Troy
es; if he is right - which he probably is - the actual fighting is most likely to have taken place in the broad, flat plain immediately to the south, between Mery and Estissac.

peninsula, he suddenly halted; and historians have been speculating ever since as to precisely why he did so.

Traditionally, the credit has always been given to Pope Leo the Great who, accompanied by two imperial dignitaries of the highest rank, travelled from Rome to meet Attila on the banks of the Mincio - probably near Peschiera, where the river issues from Lake Garda - and somehow persuaded him to advance no further; but the pagan Hun would not have obeyed the Pope out of mere respect for his office, and the question remains: what inducements was he offered in return? A substantial tribute is the likeliest answer - together, perhaps, with the hand of Honoria and an appropriate dowry. But there is another possibility: Attila, like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious, and the Pope may well have reminded him of how Alaric had died almost immediately after the sack of Rome, pointing out that a similar fate was known to befall every invader who raised his hand against the holy city. The Huns themselves may also have been partly responsible for persuading their leader to retire: we have evidence to suggest that, after their devastation of all the surrounding countryside, they were beginning to suffer from a serious shortage of food, and that disease had broken out within their ranks. A final consideration was that troops were beginning to arrive from Constantinople, sent by Marcian to swell the imperial forces. A march on Rome, it began to appear, might not prove quite so straightforward as had first been thought.

For some, or all, of these reasons - just which we shall never know, primary sources for the period being in lamentably short supply - Attila made the decision to turn back. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already countless wives, his exertions brought on a sudden haemorrhage; and, as his life-blood flowed away, all Europe breathed again. While the funeral feast was in progress, a specially selected group of captives prepared his body for the grave, encasing it in three coffins - one of gold, one of silver and one of iron. Then, when it had been lowered into the earth and covered over, first with rich spoils of war and then with earth until the ground was level above it, all those involved in the burial ceremonies were put to death, so that the great King's last resting-place might remain for ever secret and inviolate.

And so it has done, to this day.

8

The Fall of the West

[455-95]

Hesperium Romanae gentis impe
rium , . . cum hoc Augustulo periit. . . Gotborum dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus.

The western Empire of the Roman people . . . perished with that little Augustus . . . the Gothic Kings occupying Rome thereafter.

Count Marcellinus

Some time in the middle of March
455
- it must have been on or about the Ides - the Emperor Valentinian III, who had deserted Ravenna to take up residence in Rome, rode out of the city to the Campus Martius, there to do a little archery practice and to watch the athletes exercising in the spring sunshine. Suddenly, as he paused by some laurel bushes, two soldiers of barbarian origin stepped out from behind them and ran him through with their swords - none of his court or bodyguard lifting, so far as we can gather, a finger in his defence. To a considerable extent, Valentinian could be said to have brought it on himself. Only a few months before, he had personally killed in very much the same way his
magister militum
Aetius, who had effectively ruled the West for the past thirty years, for no better reason than that the latter had planned to marry off his son to one of the Emperor's daughters; and the murdered man's friends and supporters had there and then determined on revenge.

Valentinian left no son; and the choice of the army fell on an elderly senator, Petronius Maximus, generally believed to have been the grandson of the usurper Maximus who had been crushed by Theodosius the Great. As a young man he had had an outstanding career, having been Consul for the first time at the age of thirty-eight and Praetorian Prefect of Italy six years later; but he was now well past his prime, and if - as was popularly rumoured - he had bribed his way to power, he soon had cause to regret it: almost at once, he found the cares of Empire in the fast-disintegrating West too much for him. He showed, too, a deplorabl
e
lack of both political judgement and human sensitivity, first by refusing to punish the murderers of his predecessor and accepting them instead into the circle of his personal friends,
1
and secondly by insisting on immediately taking the widowed Empress Eudoxia as his wife. Eudoxia

-
now thirty-seven and, like her mother, one of the most beautiful women of her day - was still in deep mourning for her husband whom, despite his innumerable infidelities, she had genuinely loved; and she was horrified at the prospect of a marriage, against her will, to a tired old man nearly twice her age. Knowing that an appeal to Constantinople would have little chance of being answered, she therefore decided on a course of action similar to that chosen by her despairing sister-in-law Honoria a few years earlier: she invoked the assistance of a barbarian King.

So, at least, runs the traditional story. It does not, however, sound particularly convincing, and one of the only two chroniclers to report it

-
John of Antioch - describes it as hearsay. A less romantic but, alas, more probable version claims that Eudoxia proved well able to look after herself and indignantly rejected the new Emperor's advances. In such an event she would have had no reason to appeal to King Gaiseric; and indeed the latter's subsequent invasion of Italy requires no explanation of this kind. Neither Alaric nor Attila had bothered to find pretexts for aggression: the reputation of Rome provided motive enough for any barbarian chieftain out for plunder. But the point hardly matters. Whatever the reason, the city was once again under threat - and this time from the last of the three formidable peoples that, during the fifth century, devastated so much of Europe: the Vandals.

By comparison with the Goths and the Huns, the Vandals had little direct impact on the Byzantine Empire; they will not, in consequence, occupy much space in this book. Suffice it to say here that they were a Germanic tribe, in creed fanatically Arian, who had fled westward from the Huns at the end of the previous century and, after invading and laying waste a large area of Gaul, had settled in Spain in
409.
There they had remained until
428,
when the newly crowned King Gaiseric led his entire people - probably some
160,000
men, women and children — across the sea to the North African coast. (Already, it will be noted, the Vandals possessed a fleet - the only barbarians to do so.) A treaty concluded with Valentinian by which the Vandal state was acknowledged as part of

1
According to Procopius
{History
of
the
Wars,
111,
iv) it was Maximus himself w
ho had been responsible for Vale
ntinian's murder, the Emperor having violated his wife shortly before. But Procopius (who was born in about
500)
is, at least in the opinion of Gibbon, 'a fabulous writer for events which precede his own memory".

the Empire proved short-lived; in
439
Gaiseric tore it up and declared an independent autocracy - similarly, a step that no other barbarian ruler had ever taken. Some time later he added Sicily to his dominions. By now, having established his capital at Carthage, he was the undisputed master of the whole western Mediterranean.

Thus, whether or not he ever received an appeal from Eudoxia, he would have been able and willing to answer one; and Valentinian had been less than three months in his grave when the Vandal fleet put to sea. In Rome, the reaction to the news was one of panic. The Emperor, cowering in his palace, issued a proclamation - not, as might have been expected, calling upon all able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the Empire, but announcing that anyone who wished to leave was free to do so. He need not have bothered. Already the terrified Romans were sending their wives and daughters away to safety, and the roads to the north and east were choked with carts as the more well-to-do families -and indeed all those with objects of value that they wished to preserve from Vandal clutches - poured out of the city.