The Book of Ancient Bastards (23 page)

Sometimes a Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother. This Isn’t One of Those Times

(CA. A.D. 752–803)

Scheming and duplicitous, consumed by a devouring ambition and an insatiable lust for power, [Irene] was to bring dissension and disaster to the Empire for nearly a quarter of a century, and to leave a still darker stain on her reputation by one of the foulest murders that even Byzantine history has to record.
—Modern historian John Julius Norwich in Byzantium:
The Apogee

By all accounts beautiful, strong-willed, narrow-minded, ambitious, and ruthless, the Byzantine Empress Irene was so obsessed with power that she kept her hands on the reins long after they should by right have passed to her son. When he asserted himself and insisted on getting his birthright, she had him ambushed, seized, kidnapped, and blinded in order to retain her throne.

Married young to the weak-willed and tubercular emperor Leo IV, Irene survived him by many years, taking over as regent for their ten-year-old son Constantine when he succeeded his father in A.D. 780. For the next decade, Irene ran the empire right into a ditch.

It wasn’t entirely her fault. The empire at the time was riven by a religious controversy centuries in the making over the question of whether or not the sacred icons used in worship services were in fact idols that turned all prayer into a blasphemy. Irene, an orthodox ruler, favored the use of icons. The problem was that the majority of her best soldiers and most able military commanders were iconoclasts (“idol smashers”) and disagreed. This, added to her profligate spending, led to a whole lot of conflict.

Included among the iconoclasts was Irene’s own son, the emperor Constantine VI. Growing up to be nearly as much of a weak-willed nonentity as his father, Constantine did at one point briefly muster up enough gumption to stand up to Mommy, depose her, and send her off to exile. It didn’t last long. Within a year, she returned to the capital city of Constantinople and to her previous position as co-emperor with her son.

Things came to a head the second time it looked to Irene as if her son was about to stand up for himself. She had her son kidnapped, and on Tuesday, August 15, A.D. 797, she ordered his eyes put out. It was done in the purple-lined birthing room where he had been born! He soon died from the brutality.

Remarkably, Irene managed to hold on to power for six years after her son’s death (she claimed he was actually alive and in prison for treason). Eventually, she was deposed in a palace coup and sent into exile on the island of Lesbos. She died of natural causes a year later.

What’s in a Bastard’s Name?

The Greek name Irene comes from the word
eirine
, which means “peace.” The irony of this violent and ruthless woman’s choice of regnal name (her given name is lost to us) is palpable. Perhaps it was to be expected, though, from a tough customer of a queen mother who insisted on using the title of basileus (“emperor”) rather than basilissa (“empress”).

Even Death Can’t Stop Justice

( A.D. ?–897)

Read, — how there was a ghastly Trial once/Of a dead man by a live man, and both, Popes
—Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book

No less than twenty-five men served as pope between the years A.D. 872 and 972. During this time, Rome’s wealthy families vied with each other to see one of their number don the shoes of the fisherman and in turn dispense ridiculous amounts of patronage among his kinsmen.

Feuds developed; blood was spilled. In the midst of all of this chaos, enter Pope Stephen VI, who went beyond the pale.

He ordered a predecessor’s corpse dug up and put on trial.

A succession of popes—including Stephen VI—made outside alliances with powerful Italian families for military support. They cemented these alliances by legitimizing the rule of the ally in question through a formal papal coronation. One pope who had done this was a predecessor of Stephen’s named Formosus, whose reign lasted five years ( A.D. 891–896). During that time, Formosus (whose name in Latin means, “good looking”) had crowned the young duke of Spoleto as Holy Roman Emperor, then turned around and offered the same crown to Arnulf, king of Germany.

Arnulf had answered Formosus’s invitation by invading Italy and taking Rome. Formosus promptly crowned him Holy Roman Emperor as well. Needless to say, this caused an uproar in Spoleto. Formosus responded by dying shortly afterward. He was succeeded by a couple of popes with ridiculously short reigns (one of them only lasted two weeks), and eventually by Stephen VI, in hock up to his eyeballs to his political patrons: Spoleto’s ruling family.

About six months into his reign, Stephen had Formosus dug up and propped up in a chair in the Vatican. Formosus was then placed on trial with Pope Stephen himself sitting as judge. Formosus (or rather his corpse) was accused of (among other things) being ambitious enough to actually want to be pope (the nerve!). No one is sure of Stephen’s reasons for putting on this, the ultimate show trial, but he did suffer from some well-documented psychosis and was almost certainly feeling pressure from his Spoleto sponsors.

The Cadaver Synod

Called the “Synod Horrenda” in Church Latin, this “Cadaver Synod” resulted in riots throughout Rome, which eventually cost Stephen first his papal throne and eventually his life. He was strangled in prison less than six months after condemning the dead Formosus.

The trial lasted for weeks, during which time Stephen would frequently interrupt his own papal prosecutor in order to rant at Formosus’s moldering corpse, calling it all manner of names, accusing it of murder, blasphemy, and several other crimes with which it was not actually charged. How the corpse responded is not recorded.

The trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The corpse was stripped of its expensive papal vestments, the first three fingers of its right hand (the three with which a pope blesses his subjects) were cut off, and the body was briefly reburied, this time in an unmarked grave in a cemetery reserved for foreigners. Within a couple of days it had been dug up yet again and tossed in the Tiber River, only to be pulled out by a monk loyal to the dead pope’s memory.

Once again, Formosus’s reaction, if any, to this news is not recorded.

Why Trusting Your Life to an Assassin Probably Isn’t a Good Idea

(CA. A.D. 830–886)

I have got rid of the fox; but in his place I have put a lion who will end by devouring us all.
—Bardas, caesar of the Byzantine Empire

Bardas, quoted above, as regent to Michael III, was the Byzantine emperor in everything but name and had gotten rid of one threat to his power. An unintended consequence was Basil’s elevation as Michael’s successor. Within a couple of years, Bardas’s pronouncement would prove eerily prophetic, because Basil, completely illiterate (when a signature was required, he signed by tracing it through a stencil, just Charlemagne), but strong as an ox and cunning as a sphinx, went on to assassinate Bardas, take his place, then turn on his mentor Michael, murder him as well, take his throne, establish the so-called Macedonian Dynasty of Byzantine emperors, and rule for nineteen years as Basil I.

As high chamberlain, Basil was expected to sleep in the emperor’s bedroom (usually this was a post filled only by eunuchs, incapable of sex), which set tongues wagging about whether or not the two men, seemingly inseparable, might be having a sexual relationship (unlikely, but this is gossip we’re talking about). Regardless, he was able to poison Michael’s tiny mind against his uncle Bardas, convincing him that the older man was out to assassinate him and take the throne for himself.

So Michael agreed to allow Basil to handle the situation. While the three of them were on a military campaign to retake the island of Crete from the Arabs, Basil made his move. As the three sat down to listen to morning reports, Basil suddenly gave Bardas a sucker punch that knocked him to the ground. Within a minute, he was dead as Basil’s guards hurried in with swords to finish him off.

When the army returned to Constantinople, Michael proclaimed Basil as his co-emperor.

And how did Basil repay this show of faith?

About a year after he became co-emperor, Basil and a group of his fellow palace officials snuck into the emperor’s bedchamber and stabbed him to death (first cutting his hands off). The people didn’t seem to mind; Basil had demonstrated himself a capable (if illiterate) leader, and Michael, a hopeless incompetent and blackout drunk, was not the type of emperor over the loss of whom most taxpayers would lose much sleep.

Basil ruled wisely and well once he actually became emperor, presiding over a period of peace and prosperity unparalleled in the long history of the Byzantine Empire. Considered one of the greatest of the empire’s rulers, he definitely showed his bastard side in clearing the way for his own ascent to ultimate power!

Bastard Geography Lesson

In spite of the nickname, Basil wasn’t Macedonian. He was Armenian. Like many subjects of the empire, his parents had been forcibly resettled from their native Armenia to a part of Thrace where mostly Macedonians lived. Once he got to Constantinople and in good with the emperor, the nickname stuck. In fact, the royal dynasty he founded bears the name “The Macedonian Dynasty” as a result.