The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (4 page)

Such panic proved unfounded, at least for the time being. Krum, who saw no reason to fight for anything that he could get for nothing, proposed peace. In the circumstances, Michael should have leapt at the chance; but it so happened that the conditions offered by the Khan included the perfectly reasonable demand that all Bulgar prisoners and deserters in Byzantine hands should be returned to him. This was more than Abbot Theodore could stomach. Quoting - quite inappropriately - the words of Christ as recorded by St John, 'He that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out',
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he easily persuaded the Emperor to reject the terms; and the war was resumed.

Krum's next target was Mesembria (Nesebur), one of the richest ports in the whole Balkan peninsula. Itself almost an island, it was joined to the mainland only by a narrow and heavily fortified isthmus some quarter of a mile long. Since the Bulgars had no ships, this was their only possible point of attack; in the old days a few vessels of the imperial navy would have been enough to maintain supplies of food and ammunition for an indefinite period. But the navy, after years of neglect, was now in the last stages of disrepair and Michael made no attempt to revictual the city.

As the siege began, Patriarch Nicephorus held a service of intercession in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Half-way through the ceremony there was a sudden commotion: a section of the congregation, including a large group of recently demobilized army veterans, surrounded the great marble tomb of Constantine V and besought the dead Emperor to burst his cerements and to lead them again, as so often

1
John
6:1
7.

in the past, to victory and salvation. Their prayers, it need hardly be said, went unanswered; but the point had been made, and the conclusion was not hard to draw. The victorious Constantine had been an iconoclast; under his three icon-loving successors the Empire had, time and time again, been humiliated and brought low. The pendulum, in short, was once again ready to swing: one more defeat, and it would surely do so.

That defeat was not long in coming. On 5 November 812 Mesembria fell. With it there passed into Krum's hands vast stores of gold and silver and, more precious still, canisters of liquid Greek fire - the Empire's most effective and most secret weapon - together with thirty-six bronze siphons with which to discharge it. To the Emperor in Constantinople, it was now clear that if he wished to retain his throne he would have to march once more against his adversary; and this time he would have to win. All that winter he spent gathering troops, from every corner of the Empire; and in May 813 he marched from his capital, Procopia accompanying him as far as Heraclea on the Marmara and waving him goodbye from the aqueduct.

The Bulgar army was always notoriously difficult to engage in battle until it was ready to fight; and Michael, doubtless remembering his hair's-breadth escape in 811, appears to have been unwilling to enter enemy territory. For over a month he dithered in Thrace, while the Asiatic troops — who were in the overwhelming majority - grew steadily more restive. Only in early June did Krum himself cross the frontier; and at last, on the field of Versinicia some twenty miles north-east of Adrianople, the armies came face to face. The imperial forces easily outnumbered the Bulgars; but Michael still seemed reluctant to take the initiative and for another sweltering fortnight he and Krum stood watching each other. It was not till 21 June that John Aplakes, commander of the Macedonian regimen
t on the left wing, sought his
Emperor's permission to attack. On the next day he did so. The Bulgars fell back in confusion before his onslaught, and for a moment it looked as if the battle were over almost before it had begun. But then an astonishing thing happened: the Anatolian troops on the right, commanded by Leo the Armenian, suddenly turned tail and fled from the field.

At first, we are told, Krum stood speechless, refusing to believe the evidence of his own eyes; then, realizing their good fortune, he and his men fell on the luckless Macedonians — abandoned by their comrades and now, in their turn, hopelessly outnumbered — and slaughtered them wholesale. Their way was now clear: nothing more lay between them and Constantinople. On 17 July the Bulgar army pitched its camp beneath the walls of the city.

By this time, however, Michael Rhangabe was no longer Emperor. Escaping from the battle once again unscathed, he had returned at full speed to the capital and had immediately informed the Patriarch of his intention to abdicate. He could no longer struggle, he maintained, against the will of the Almighty, who had now conclusively demonstrated His hatred of the house of Nicephorus. The Patriarch may or may not have agreed with this last hypothesis, but he certainly approved of Michael's decision - in which, he very much feared, lay the only hope of the imperial family's survival. The Empress Procopia, on the other hand, took a very different view. She had no wish to give up the throne, the occupation of which she greatly enjoyed; and she clearly saw herself as another Theodora, encouraging her husband to hold firm. But her arguments were ignored. She, the ex-Emperor and their five children, all disguised in monastic habits, took refuge in the Church of the Virgin of Pharos, where they remained till they had received assurances of their safety. Their lives were spared, though their three sons were castrated to prevent their making any future bids for power;
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Procopia and her daughters were immured in convents. As for Michael himself, he adopted the monastic name of Athanasius and passed the thirty-two years that remained to him in a monastery on one of the Princes' Islands in the Marmara, where he was eventually to die on the anniversary of the death of his predecessor Stauracius, 11 January 845. And Leo the Armenian, commander of those perfidious Anatolians who had betrayed their Emperor and thrown away the decisive victory that lay within their grasp, entered Constantinople by the Golden Gate, to be acclaimed as
basileus
at the Church of St John the Baptist in the Studium before riding in triumph through the streets to the Imperial Palace.

What, we may ask, had really happened? Leo's Anatolian troops were brave and experienced fighters - the last men in the world to lose their heads on the field of battle, least of all when facing an inferior force on open ground. The only remotely reasonable explanation for their action can be treachery. It follows that their apparent cowardice must have

1 One of them, Nicetas, we shall meet later in this story as Ignatius, Patriarch under Michael III and Basil I.

been deliberately feigned, as a means of instilling a genuine panic among the rest of the army. As for their commander, he played his cards with his usual cunning: by standing firm himself until the last possible moment and leaving the field only after all his men had fled, he was later able to claim that his own conduct had been blameless. Inevitably there were grave suspicions, but nothing could be conclusively proved. By then, in any case, he had achieved his object: the crown of Byzantium. And it is worth noting that, after what seemed on the face of it to be among the most humiliating defeats in the history of the Roman Empire, none of those who took flight was ever punished.

Not for the first time - for he had been deeply implicated in the insurrection of Bardanes Turcus some years before - Leo had betrayed his Emperor; and his troops had abetted him. Were he and they, however, the only parties to the plot? It may be that they were; but it seems probable that there was yet another, who also contributed largely to the success of the whole operation: Krum himself. Ever since the Bulgars had first become a threat to the Empire they had invariably avoided pitched battles on an open plain, preferring in every instance to keep to the mountain passes and defiles which were infinitely better suited to their fighting methods; why then should their wily and experienced Khan suddenly abandon the practice of a lifetime and draw up his men as he did before a vastly superior army? And was it really astonishment that kept him and his troops rooted to the spot as the Anatolians hurried from the field, allowing them to get clean away before he himself settled down to the massacre of the valiant Macedonians? How much more likely that Leo should have further assured the success of his plan by making an accomplice of the Bulgar leader — who would have found the idea irresistible, particularly since he would have been under no further obligations once his fellow-conspirators had made their escape.

As Krum watched his soldiers digging themselves in beneath the walls to each side of the Golden Gate, he could have looked back on six years of unbroken success. He had been responsible for the deaths of two Roman Emperors, and the downfall of a third; and he had overwhelmingly defeated two imperial armies, one of which had been utterly destroyed while the other — for whatever reason it may have been - had fled ignominiously from the field. For the moment, however, he had been brought to a halt: those mighty ramparts towering above him could never, he knew, be taken by storm. According to a curious and unidentified fragment which has come down to us - its author is known only as Scriptor Incertus - he covered his own uncertainty as to how best to proceed by staging a whole series of weird ceremonies and demonstrations of strength. The defenders on the walls gazed down incredulously on the elaborate sacrifices, both animal and human, with which the pagan priests propitiated their gods; they even watched, fascinated, while Krum himself — 'the new Sennacherib', as Theophanes calls him -slowly advanced into the sea for the ritual washing of his feet, emerging to sprinkle the water over his soldiers in benediction. On other occasions he would parade in state through serried rows of his own ululating concubines, while his warriors bellowed their approbation.

What precisely the Khan hoped to achieve by such manifestations remains unclear. A few days later, however, in the absence of any reaction from within the walls, he sent a message to the Emperor with a demand that he be allowed, as a sign of his victory, to fix his lance on the Golden Gate; and when this overture met - as he must have known it would - with a curt refusal, he showed his displeasure by pillaging and plundering the countryside around for several days before taking his next initiative: a peace proposal in which he demanded, as the price of his withdrawal, huge quantities of gold, chests full of sumptuous vestments and, finally, a selection of the most beautiful maidens that the Empire could provide. Leo, it need hardly be said, had no more intention of humouring Krum over the maidens than he had over the lance; but the offer of terms, however unacceptable, suggested to his ever-devious mind a possible way out of the impasse. He now proposed a meeting between Krum and himself, to be held at the point where the northern end of the walls ran down to the Golden Horn. He would arrive by water, Krum by land; they would carry no weapons, and would be accompanied only by a few similarly unarmed followers.

The Khan accepted the suggestion, and the very next morning rode down with his treasurer, his Greek brother-in-law Constantine Patzikos and his young nephew - the latter's son - to the appointed spot. Here he was joined by the Emperor and a Byzantine court official named Hexabulios. After the usual civilities the conversation began, Constantine acting as interpreter. All seemed to be going smoothly enough when Hexabulios suddenly covered his face with his hands. Krum, possibly seeing the gesture as an insult - or, more probably (and correctly) recognizing it as a prearranged signal — leapt on to his horse, which his nephew was holding, saddled and bridled and ready for just such an
eventuality, immediately behind him. He was only just in time. At that moment three armed men burst out of a nearby hiding-place. The treasurer was killed outright, Patzikos and his son taken captive. As Krum galloped away to safety, he was slightly wounded by darts fired by the attackers; but they did him no serious harm - merely increasing his fury at so shameless a betrayal of trust and his determination to take his revenge.

That revenge began on the following day, and was dreadful to behold. The Bulgars could not penetrate the city walls; but the suburbs beyond the Golden Horn, with all their churches, their palaces and their rich monasteries and convents, were consumed in one mighty conflagration. Among the buildings destroyed was the Imperial Palace of St Mamas,
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one of the most opulent of the Emperor's several residences in the capital, from which all the elaborately carved marble columns and rows of sculptured animals were carted off to Krum's own palace at Pliska. Every living creature l
eft unburn
t was butchered. To the west of the city, the countryside suffered a similar fate. The Palace of the Hebdomon went the same way as St Mamas, and as the still-furious Khan began his journey homeward he left behind him a nightmare trail of slaughter and destruction. The city of Selymbria was reduced to a smouldering heap of ashes, as were innumerable other towns and villages; Heraclea was saved, thanks to the stoutness of its defences -only one degree less impregnable than those of Constantinople itself -but the avenging horde levelled the fortress of Rhaedestum (now Tekirdag) before moving up to the neighbouring hills, whither the country people had fled for refuge. Family by family they were tracked down; the men were put to the sword, the women and children sent off into slavery. Then, after a quick punitive excursion to the Hellespont, Krum turned north to Adrianople. For some weeks already the city had been under attack by his brother, against whom the garrison had put up a courageous resistance; but now food was running out, and the arrival of the terrible Khan himself with the main body of his army finally broke its morale. All 10,000 inhabitants were carried off beyond the Danube, where many - including the archbishop - found martyrdom.