The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (24 page)

These, however, were not to be won without a fierce struggle. For five years Odoacer fought back, in
490
coming near to destroying his enemy by besieging him in Pavia; only in the nick of time was Theodoric saved by the arrival of Visigothic reinforcements. A few months later he
turned the tables, blockading Odoacer in his turn within the walls of Ravenna and holding him there until February
493,
when the local bishop arranged an armistice. By this time, however, thanks in large measure to the assistance of the Church, which gave its full support to Theodoric -although he was, like Odoacer, an Arian - the conquest of Italy was virtually complete; and it must have come as a surprise to many when the conqueror agreed to what appeared to be remarkably generous terms: that Italy should be ruled by him and Odoacer jointly, with both of them sharing the palace of Ravenna.

The reason for this apparent generosity soon became clear: Theodoric had not the faintest intention of keeping his agreement, and had merely determined to lull his rival into a false sense of security. On
1
5
March, only ten days after his formal entry into Ravenna, he invited Odoacer, his brother, his son and his chief officers to a banquet in his wing of the palace. As the Scyrian took his place in the seat of honour, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove through the body of Odoacer from collar-bone to thigh. The force of the blow and its effect surprised even him: 'The wretch cannot have had a bone in his body,' he is said to have laughed.

The members of Odoacer's suite were quickly dealt with by the surrounding guards, while his brother was shot down by arrows as he tried to escape through the palace gardens. His wife, Sunigilda, was thrown into prison, where she later died of hunger; his son, Thelane, whom he had surrendered to Theodoric as a hostage, was first sent off to Gaul but was subsequently executed in his turn on the King's orders. The Scyrian line, in short, was wiped out; and Theodoric the Ostrogoth, his ambition at last achieved, laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself - as Odoacer had never done - in the imperial purple, and settled down to rule in Italy. Despite all the pomp and ceremonial of his court, however, he did not forget his agreement with Zeno. While reigning as King of the Ostrogoths he remained, as far as the Empire was concerned, a Patrician and
magister militum
but no more, a vassal who owed allegiance to the Emperor just as did the meanest of his subjects. The laws which he passed were known as
edicta,
rather than the
leges
which were the imperial prerogative; and though his coins carried his own monogram, the only portrait they bore was that of the Emperor. Theodoric himself, it need hardly be said, had no objection to this arrangement. The Roman citizens in Italy - who outnumbered the Goths many times over - were a good deal happier to be ruled by an imperial viceroy than by someone whom they would otherwise have
looked upon as a foreign oppressor. To antagonize them was the last thing he would have wished; he allowed them to live just as they always had with all their estates intact, excepting only that they were debarred from military service. The civil service, by contrast, was their exclusive preserve.

Theodoric's reign began with perfidy and bloodshed; its close was also clouded, by the imprisonment and brutal execution (by slow garrotting) in
524
of the philosopher Boethius,
1
which left an indelible stain on his memory - though it is only fair to add that he afterwards repented, and bitterly regretted his action till the day of his death. With these exceptions, the thirty-three years that he occupied the throne were prosperous and peaceful; and the extraordinary mausoleum which he built -and which still stands in the north-eastern suburbs of Ravenna - perfectly symbolizes, in its half-classical, half-barbaric architectural strength,
2
a colossus who himself bestrode two civilizations and lost no opportunity to promote and increase the harmony between his people and the citizens of Rome. No other Germanic ruler, setting up his throne on the ruins of the Western Empire, possessed a fraction of his statesmanship and political vision; and when he died, on
30
August
5 26,
Italy lost the greatest of her early medieval rulers, unequalled until the days of Charlemagne.

1
The only offence of Boethius was to have energetically defended his friend, the ex-Consul Albinus, who had been wrongly accused of treason. This led him and his father-in-law Symmachus to be similarly charged. While he was in prison he wrote
Tie Consolations
of
Philosophy,
a work which enjoyed immense popularity in succeeding centuries and was translated into Anglo-Saxon by Alfred the Great.

2
The erection of the gigantic
200
-ton monolith which forms its roof ranks among the most astonishing engineering feats of the Middle Ages.

9

The Rise of Justinian

[493-532]

Ruling as we do over our Empire, which God has entrusted to us, by His divine authority, we know both the triumphs of war and the adornments of peace; we bear up the framework of the State; and we so lift up our hearts in contemplation of the support given to us by the Lord Omnipotent that we put not our trust in our own arms, nor in those of our soldiers, nor in our leaders in war, nor in our own skill; rather do we rest our hopes in the providence of the Supreme Trinity, from whence proceeded the elements of the whole universe and their disposition throughout the world.

Justinian, in his Introduction to the
Digest

In the spring of
491,
while Theodoric the Ostrogoth was busy blockading Odoacer the Scyrian in Ravenna, the Emperor Zeno died in Constantinople. The last three years of his
r
eign had been the best, at least where the security of the state was concerned: the insurrection of Illus and his friends was over and its ringleaders eliminated; yet more important, the Empire - or, at least, that part of it still controlled from the capital - was, since the departure of Theodoric, finally free of the Goths. The only major problem that Zeno had failed to solve was the religious one: despite the decisions of Chalcedon, the monophysite heresy continued to gain ground - especially in the eastern provinces, which were becoming dangerously disaffected as a result. An attempt, made in
482
by the Emperor together with Patriarch Acacius, to heal the breach by means of a circular letter known as the
Henoticon,
had proved spectacularly unsuccessful. It had sought to paper over the differences by affirming that Christ was both God and man, while avoiding the delicate word 'nature' altogether; and, like all such compromises, it had aroused the implacable hostility of both sides. Most outraged of all were Pope Simplicius in Rome and his successor Felix III, whose anger was still further increased by the appointment to the Patriarchate of Alexandria, with the blessing of both Zeno and Acacius, of one Paul the Stammerer, a cleric whose utterances, when comprehensible at all, were violently monophysite in character. At a synod held in Rome in
484,
Pope Felix had gone so far as to excommunicate the Patriarch of Constantinople
1
- a sentence which, in default of any orthodox ecclesiastic courageous enough to pronounce it, had been transcribed on to a piece of parchment and pinned to the back of Acacius's cope during a service in St Sophia, when he was not looking, whereat the Patriarch, discovering it a few moments later, instantly excommunicated him back, thereby not only placing the see of Constantinople on the same hierarchical level as that of Rome but simultaneously confirming an open schism between the two churches that was to last for the next thirty-five years.

By the end of the decade the Emperor was obviously declining, both physically and mentally. His son, also called Zeno, had fallen into bad company at an early age and had died soon afterwards, worn out, it was said, by homosexual excesses and venereal disease. His expected successor was therefore his reprobate brother Longinus, whose star had steadily risen as that of his enemy Illus had declined and who by
490
— when he was appointed Consul for the second time - was in effective control of the State. Zeno, however, became obsessed by the prophecy of a well-known soothsayer, who had foretold that his place would be taken not by Longinus but by 'one who had served as silentiary'. Now the silentiaries were a corps of picked officials who made up the Emperor's personal entourage. Their name derived from their special duty of watching outside his private apartments and ensuring that his rest was not disturbed; in fact, however, they were considerably more distinguished than this particular function implies. Men of high culture and education, they ranked with senators and were employed on various important and confidential services, including the writing of court history. Their number was fixed at thirty, but to Zeno's senile mind the prophecy could refer to only one: a former member of the corps named Pelagius, now an eminent statesman and Patrician. The unfortunate man was given no opportunity to prepare his defence. His property was confiscated without ceremony; he himself was arrested and, shortly afterwards, strangled.

Pelagius had been popular and universally respected; Zeno was neither. In his youth he had been renowned as an athlete - the
Anonymus

1
Something of an irony, since Felix was - as far as we can tell - the first Pope to have formally announced his election to the Emperor.

Vale
sii
rather surprisingly attributes his fleetness of foot to the fact that he was born without kneecaps - but in all other fields he had been a failure. Even if he was not altogether to blame for the almost constant insurrections during his reign, these were inevitably seen as a reflection of his lack of ability; and the loss of the Western Empire put another indelible - if largely undeserved - stain on his reputation. By his senseless murder of Pelagius, Zeno sacrificed what little of his subjects' affection he had ever enjoyed; and there were few lamentations when, on
9
April
491
, he died of a fit of epilepsy. The crowds are said to have greeted the appearance of the widowed Ariadne with the cry, 'Give the Empire an
orthodox
Emperor! Give the Empire a
Roman
Emperor!' Their meaning was clear: no more heretics on the one hand and no more Isaurians on the other. Longinus was passed over, and the soothsayer's prediction was proved correct: the choice fell on another former silentiary, Flavius Anastasius - owing in large measure to the influence of Ariadne, who married him some six weeks later. A native of Dyrrachium
1
and now in his early sixties, he had one blue eye and one black one - a peculiarity which, we are told, in no way detracted from his outstandingly handsome appearance, nor from his reputation for uprightness and integrity. 'Reign, Anastasius!' the people shouted when, on
11
April, he first appeared before them in the imperial purple. 'Reign as you have lived!'

Anastasius did so; and if his subjects found life under their new Emperor during the first years of his reign more irksome than they had expected, they had only themselves to blame. He was intelligent and highly cultivated, given neither to those outbursts of cruelty nor to those sudden fits of ungovernable rage that had characterized so many of his predecessors. His chief defect was an almost pathological pars
imoni
ousness - a failing which, combined as it was with a strong puritanical streak, made Constantinople a duller place to live in than its inhabitants could ever remember. Contests with wild beasts were forbidden throughout the Empire; and such was the general tightening-up of public morals that the citizens were no longer permitted to hold nocturnal feasts, on the grounds that they led to unbridled licentiousness - which, it must be said, they very often did. Meanwhile the Emperor launched a simultaneous campaign against unnecessary public expenditure, with the result that at the end of his twenty-seven-year reign he left the imperial treasury richer by
320,000
pounds of gold than it had been on his

1
Later known as Durazzo and now the Albanian port of Dimes, Dyrrachium marked the western en
d of
the Via E
gnatia.

accession
1
- an achievement all the more remarkable in that he is also known to have abolished the so-called
cbrysargyron,
a tax on receipts which fell particularly heavily on the poor and was among the most unpopular of all the imperial levies.

In his religious policy, Anastasius was somewhat less successful. A man of devout Christian piety even by the standards of the time, he had been in the habit during the previous reign of holding regular theological seminars in St Sophia and preaching in churches throughout the capital, despite the fact that as a layman he was technically unlicensed to do so; he had even at one moment been put on a short list of three candidates for the vacant bishopric of Antioch. Later, however, he had gradually moved towards monophysitism, to the point where Patriarch Euphemius was obliged to bar him from the pulpits and, after his accession, to refuse him coronation until he had signed a written declaration of orthodoxy.

Anastasius signed without hesitation. He was the least cynical of men, and it seems certain that up to that time he believed, rightly or wrongly, that he stood firmly in the Chalcedonian camp. But there were others less convinced, who were quick to ascribe his action to an eye for the main chance and a readiness to sacrifice his principles on the altar of political expediency. Such men could be trusted, too, to exaggerate any signs he might have given of monophysite tendencies, seeing in them a perfect weapon to be used against him. They represented essentially the Isaurian faction, and were led by Zeno's disaffected brother Longinus, who had never forgiven Anastasius for occupying a throne which he believed to be rightfully his. Before long he had gathered around him an unsavoury mob of troublemakers and hooligans, largely but by no means exclusively Isaurian; and the outbreaks of street fighting that ensued led to fires in which several more of the city's finest buildings, including much of the Hippodrome, were destroyed or damaged.

The Emperor fought back. In
492
Longinus himself was arrested and exiled to Alexandria, where he was forced to enter the priesthood; but strife in the city continued and soon escalated into full-scale civil war. The following year saw still more serious disturbances, during which the imperial statues were toppled over and dragged through the streets; only with great difficulty was order restored, after which an edict was published banishing all Isaurians from the capital including Lalis, the old mother of Zeno, and the rest of his family, all of whose property - even

1
It is never really possible to calculate the precise modern equivalents of such sums; but this figure, given by Procopius
(Ante
dota,
xix,
7)
compares interestingly with the
1
30,000
pounds which he mentions as the cost of Leo I's ill-fated African expedition in
468.