Constantinople: A Sketch of its History from its Foundation to its Conquest by the Turks in 1453/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
THE MACEDONIANS.
F Justinian has suffered at the hands of a spiteful writer, Basil has gained by the partiality of his biographers. The groom, stable boy, peasant, who rose to be the companion of an emperor, who married the emperor's mistress, and corrupted the emperor's sister, who murdered his benefactor, who was a bad general, who finally destroyed the ancient Roman constitution and established an arbitrary despotism, appears as the illustrious scion of a royal though fallen race, as able in war as in administration, and as eminent for religious as for political qualities.
We have already sketched his youth and the manner of his rise to power. The incidents of his reign have but little to do with the city, and may be briefly touched upon.
At his coronation he made haste to display his piety by kneeling before the altar and proclaiming that he dedicated his crown and himself to the service of God, who had raised him to the empire. He called a general council of the Church, at which small concessions were made to the Latins. These, however, led to no permanent reconciliation. The emperor resumed some of the lavish gifts made by the drunken Michael to his favourites, and in this way collected 30,000 pounds weight of gold without taxation. He never, indeed, increased the taxes—a policy which largely contributed to the popularity which clung to his race for more than a hundred years. He published first a new Manual of Law, and subsequently a complete new code called the Revision of the Old Law; and he maintained the army in efficiency. The wars of his reign were those which were waged with the Saracens, and a military expedition against the Paulicians. Basil extended the power of the empire in Italy, lost Syracuse, and regained Cyprus, which he held only for seven years.
He received a visit while emperor from Danielis, a Peloponnesian matron, to whom he owed his first rise from the lowest rank of society. She brought him splendid gifts, including hundreds of young men, eunuchs, and girls, for the service of the imperial household, immense stores of rich drapery and woven stuffs, and a service of cups, plates, and dishes in gold and silver. After Basil's death she made Leo VI. heir to her prodigious wealth. One wonders if there were many ladies of the Peloponnese so richly endowed. Her slaves were so numerous that the emperor sent 3,000 of them into Apulia to cultivate the land; and her estates were so vast, that after paying all the numerous legacies, her heir remained the possessor of eight villages.
Basil was carried off by a fever, the result of an accident in the hunting field. The suspicion and ferocity of his character are shown by the fact that he caused the servant who saved his life by cutting him free from the boar, whose antlers had caught in the bridle, to be beheaded. Thus he ended his reign as he began it, a murderer.
He was succeeded by his son, Leo VI., the Philosopher. Leo reigned in comparative tranquillity for twenty-five years. The Saracen fleets ravaged fearfully the seaboard of the empire, and even succeeded in taking the important city of Thessalonica, and carrying off 22,000 of the inhabitants as prisoners. The frontier wars in Asia were still waged with success on neither side; and after seventy years of peace between the Bulgarians and the Greeks, war again broke out with that prosperous nation. It was disastrous to the Byzantine arms. The Bulgarians defeated the troops sent against them, and cut off the noses of all the prisoners. Twice again Leo's armies were defeated before peace was concluded.
Stringent rules were passed during Leo's reign on the observance of the Sunday. The suspension of all civil business on that day had been ordered long ago by Constantine: one by one, exemptions were permitted. During the iconoclastic quarrels both sides were eager to show their piety by scrupulously regarding Sunday. Leo ordered that these exemptions should all be revoked: not even necessary agricultural work was allowed.
The long reign of Constantine VII., who succeeded his father at the age of eight, offers few events of interest connected with the city. His uncle Alexander assumed the regency, but died within a year. The Empress Zoe became regent. Then began the customary revolts and intrigues of generals ambitious to become colleagues on the imperial throne. Constantine Ducas took the lead. He repaired secretly to Constantinople, where the revolt had been already prepared: he was immediately proclaimed emperor, and with such troops as his friends could raise, he hastened to the palace of Chalke, intending to seize on the young emperor. But the faithful English guards were true to their duty, and the rebels were repulsed after a sanguinary fight, in which 3,000 were slain, including Constantine Ducas himself. Then the Bulgarians gave trouble, their king marching up even to the very gates of Constantinople[1] without opposition. Zoe sent one of the finest armies which ever left Constantinople to carry the struggle into the Bulgarian territory. It was cut all to pieces. Then followed a sort of race between Leo Phocas, the general who lost this battle, and Romanus, the admiral who helped to lose it, for the dignity of co-emperor. It was won by Romanus, whose daughter the young emperor married. Romanus, thus arrived at the object of his ambition, proceeded to name his three sons as joint emperors with himself, putting Constantine in the fifth place. Unfortunately for Romanus, his strength was not equal to his ambition. One of the sons died; the other two, dreading that their father would restore Constantine to the first place, deposed him and sent him to a monastery. They were themselves immediately afterwards deposed and sent to join their father. A pleasing picture is sketched by Gibbon of the old emperor greeting his sons with unbounded satisfaction, congratulating them on their exchange of a temporal for a heavenly kingdom, and cheerfully inviting them to share in his bread of repentance and water of affliction.
Then Constantine VII., who would much rather have remained quietly at work among his books, his music, and his paintings, had to reign alone. He was the most popular of Byzantine sovereigns. It is from his writings that most of our knowledge of his time is derived. He died at the age of fifty-eight.
His son, Romanus II., who succeeded him, inherited the strength and beauty which distinguished the Macedonian line, but possessed a more active and determined character than his father. He might have done great things for the empire, but unfortunately he reigned for eight years only, and died at the age of twenty-four. The one event of his reign was the recovery of Crete from the Saracens.
He left two boys, Basil and Constantine, both infants. The same ambitions were aroused which disturbed the early years of Constantine VII., fortunately without the same loss of life and with a happier result. Nicephorus Phocas, who was crowned emperor very shortly after the death of Romanus II., was a soldier of cold disposition and military discipline. Already of a mature age, he seems to have been of irreproachable morals. Personally he was unpopular. He granted money for festivals and shows with a niggardly hand: he was accused of heaping up treasure for himself. A great scarcity of wheat increased his unpopularity; he issued debased coin, which excited the utmost odium; and, worse than all, he had a constant succession of quarrels with the clergy. For, to stimulate the military ardour of the soldiers, he asked the patriarch to declare that all Christians who perished in fighting Saracens were holy martyrs. The unpatriotic Churchman replied that all war was unholy, and that he who slew an enemy in battle ought to be deprived of the sacraments for at least three years. Nicephorus also restrained the growing passion for founding monasteries: he prohibited the foundation of any more, and declared void all testamentary donations to the Church.
The campaigns of this soldier prince were fought far from his capital. They were successful and honourable. He was murdered after a reign of six years by his nephew, John Zimiskes, instigated by the Empress Theophano, the widow of Romanus II., who had been suspected of poisoning her father-in-law and her husband. The new emperor, who began his reign, like Basil, by a murder, was as able as Nicephorus and far more popular. The great event of his reign was the Russian war.
We have already mentioned the first appearance of the Russians before Constantinople in 865. After the defeat of their invasion the Russians opened up a correspondence with Constantinople, began a trade which grew yearly more extensive, and invited Christian missionaries into their country. Numerous Russian traders took up their residence in Cherson and Constantinople. Russian sailors shipped themselves in the Byzantine fleets. These friendly relations were interrupted, as friendly relations between countries always are interrupted, by the desire of a prince to distinguish himself. It was in the year 907, when Oleg was regent during the minority of Igor, the son of Rurik. He collected 2,000 vessels and made a plundering incursion, called a siege by some writers, in the neighbourhood of Constantinople. Leo bought them off. The next attack was in 941, when Igor made an incursion with "innumerable" vessels. The Russians landed here and there, pillaging, murdering, torturing. Their skill in torture was admirable: priests, especially, were distinguished by having nails driven into their heads. It is satisfactory to learn that an insignificant force of fifteen vessels, armed with the Greek fire, was sufficient to destroy this immense fleet. Igor escaped with a few boats only. Another Russian invasion was projected which came to nothing. Igor being subsequently murdered, his widow Olga became regent for their son Swiatoslaff. She became a Christian. Then the Byzantines began to consider how they could play off Russia against Bulgaria. Nicephorus persuaded Swiatoslaff to invade Bulgaria, which was done with a result exceeding the Greek emperor's design, for the Bulgarians were entirely defeated, and their country occupied by the Russians. Then Nicephorus took the side of the conquered: it was not at all a part of his programme that Russia should be a powerful neighbour separated only by the Balkans. Bulgaria was recovered. Nicephorus was murdered. Swiatoslaff returned to Bulgaria with 60,000 men: he concluded an alliance with Hungarians and Patzinaks, crossed the Balkans, and dreamed of the conquest of Constantinople. That was, however, a dream destined to be left for the Russian imagination for many centuries to come. The Russians advanced as far as Arcadiopolis, where they were defeated by the general Bardas Skleros, and retired behind the mountains. Early in the following spring John Zimiskes, sending a great fleet to hold the Danube and cut off communications, crossed the Balkans, long before the enemy expected him, and falling upon the Russians unexpectedly, defeated them in a series of hard fought battles. Swiatoslaff escaped with the remains of his army, but fell into the hands of the Patzinaks, whose prince made a drinking cup of his skull, writing upon it a moral reflection, "He who covets the property of others, often loses his own." Few subsequent Russians appear to have laid this moral to heart.
There is little or nothing else of metropolitan interest in the reign of John Zimiskes. He died—he is said to have been poisoned—in his fifty-first year, and was succeeded by the two young princes, Basil II. and Constantine VIII.
Basil seems to have inherited part of the character of the founder of his dynasty. But he possessed a greater share of military genius. Like the first Basil, he was severe, rapacious, and cruel: unlike him, he was a man of pure and high morality. His reign—for his brother counted as nothing in the empire—began with the revolt of a general. We will not describe the suppression of this revolt. Enough that it was suppressed, and that, in great measure, by the prudence and skill of the young emperor.
Basil passed the whole of a long and vigorous reign in arms. He extended the boundaries of the empire on every side; under him it arrived at the culminating point of its greatness. He was the greatest of the Macedonian dynasty, and perhaps the greatest of all the emperors. But he has left nothing behind him, but a chronicle of wars and the title, "Slayer of the Bulgarians." He died at the age of sixty-eight.
Constantine VIII., his brother, three years younger, reigned three years alone. He was an Oriental caliph; his brother was a soldier. He spent his time among musicians and dancing-girls; Basil in the camp. Constantine succeeded to the throne after a tolerably long life spent entirely in amusements. He could not expect to live long. Who was to succeed him, and who would govern for him while he lived?
He had three daughters; one was already in a convent, two were unmarried. Of these two Theodora refused absolutely to marry; Zoe, already forty-eight years of age, consented to espouse Romanus Argyrus, whose own wife kindly retreated to a convent, and her husband was crowned emperor as Romanus III. two days before her father died.
The twenty-nine years which follow this marriage, and finish off the Macedonian dynasty, are the shameful history of an old woman's successive husbands, and the incapacity of two old women.
Romanus III. was sixty; his wife Zoe was forty-eight. There were no children. The emperor was indefatigable in all religious observances. He endowed monasteries, decorated churches, and obtained permission to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Caliph Hakem in 1010. But there was no heir to the throne. Then there were jealousies about Theodora; there were conspiracies in the capital; there were defeats in the field; there were earthquakes, famines, and pestilences; and after six years of uneasy and anxious splendour, Romanus III. died.
Zoe, now fifty-four years of age, but still anxious for an heir, lost no time in placing a new emperor on the throne. Michael IV. was married to Zoe, and proclaimed emperor on the day of Romanus's death. Still there were no children, and the unhappy emperor, who had been a money-changer and a menial, suffered from epileptic fits. There were more seditions in this reign, though the military powder of the empire was maintained. Michael IV., who possessed many noble qualities, died after a reign of seven years.
Zoe was now in her sixty-second year. It was absurd to look any longer for the miraculous intervention of Heaven. She resolved to have no more husbands, and named as emperor the nephew of Michael IV. He repaid his benefactress by sending her to a monastery. And then the people rose in fury. Michael was dethroned; his eyes were put out, and he was sent to pass the remainder of his life in a monastery, perhaps the same in which the sons of Romanus I. were still dragging on repentant days.
Zoe and Theodora reigned together. But Zoe was jealous of the superior abilities of her sister. She chose another husband in order to destroy her influence. Constantine Monomachus, of whom very little is known, except that he was openly and shamelessly profligate, had a beautiful mistress whom he brought with him to Constantinople, and with whom he appeared in public—a Christian emperor with two empresses.
The emperor, however, had some glimmerings of conscience. He built hospitals and houses of refuge for the good of his own soul: for the same reason he advanced literary men to posts of distinction—a salutary device which has not commended itself to modern princes who are also sinners—and he completed the rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Let us pass over the history of the various revolts which mark this period. Among them was one which led to a siege—which does not appear to have been serious—of the capital.
In the year 1043 began a three years' war with the Russians, which ended in the defeat of the latter. As usual, the Greek fire turned the scale. In the eastern provinces, as well as the western, the empire suffered grievous disasters.
Zoe died in 1050, at the age of seventy. Constantine survived till 1054. Theodora then ruled alone for two years. She was the last of the Macedonian dynasty. At seventy-six years of age she named an emperor. It was Michael Stratiotikos, an old decrepit general. He succeeded, under the title of Michael VI. He was speedily deposed, and was allowed to retire to his own private house, where he died a year or two later.
- ↑ This demonstration has been called a siege. Simeon, the King of the Bulgarians, appeared before the city twice again, in 921 and 923.