The Byzantine Empire Part 11

The struggle which ensued was one of the most desperate which East-Roman history records. The Russians all fought on foot, in great square columns, armed with spear and axe: they wore mail shirts and peaked helmets, just like the Normans of Western Europe, to whom their princes were akin. The shock of their columns was terrible, and their constancy in standing firm almost incredible. Against these warriors of the North Zimisces led the mailed hors.e.m.e.n of the Asiatic themes, and the bowmen and slingers who were the flower of the Byzantine infantry. The tale of John's two great battles with the Russians at Presthlava and Silistria reads much like the tale of the battle of Hastings. In Bulgaria, as in Suss.e.x, the st.u.r.dy axeman long beat off the desperate cavalry charges of their opponents. But they could not resist the hail of arrows to which they had no missile weapons to oppose, and when once the archers had thinned their ranks, the Byzantine cavalry burst in, and made a fearful slaughter in the broken phalanx. More fortunate than Harold G.o.dwineson at the field of Senlac, King Swiatoslaf escaped with his life and the relics of his army. But he was beleaguered within the walls of Silistria, and forced to yield himself, on the terms that he and his men might take their way homeward, on swearing never to molest the empire again. The Russian swore the oath and took a solemn farewell of Zimisces. The contrast between the two monarchs struck Leo the Deacon, a chronicler who seems to have been present at the scene, and caused him to describe the meeting with some vigour. We learn how the Emperor, a small alert fair-haired man, sat on his great war-horse by the river bank, in his golden armour with his guards about him, while the burly Viking rowed to meet him in a boat, clad in nothing but a white shirt, and with his long moustache floating in the wind. They bade each other adieu, and the Russian departed, only to fall in battle ere the year was out, at the hands of the Patzinak Tartars of the Southern Steppes. Soon after Swiatoslaf's death the majority of the Russians became Christians, and ere long ceased to trouble the empire by their raids. They became faithful adherents of the Eastern Church, and drew their learning, their civilization, even their names and t.i.tles from Constantinople. The Tzars are but Caesars misspelt, and the list of their names-Michael, Alexander, Nicholas, John, Peter, Alexis-sufficiently witnesses to their Byzantine G.o.dparents. Russian mercenaries were ere long enlisted in the imperial army, and formed the nucleus of the "Varangian guard," in which at a later day, Danes, English, and Nors.e.m.e.n of all sorts were incorporated.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Russian Architecture From Byzantine Model. (_Church at Vladimir._) (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

John Zimisces survived his great victory at Silistria for five years, and won, ere he died, more territory in Northern Syria from the Saracens. The border which his uncle Nicephorus had pushed forward to Antioch and Aleppo was advanced by him as far as Amida and Edessa in Mesopotamia. But in the midst of his conquests Zimisces was cut off by death, while still in the flower of his age. Report whispered that he had been poisoned by one of his ministers, whom he had threatened to displace. But the tale cannot be verified, and all that is certain is that John died after a short illness, leaving the throne to his young ward Basil II., who had now attained the age of twenty years [976 A.D.].

XIX. THE END OF THE MACEDONIAN DYNASTY.

Basil II., who now sat in his own right on the throne which his warlike guardians Nicephorus and John had so long protected, was by no means unworthy to succeed them. Unlike his ancestors of the Macedonian house, he showed from the first a love for war and adventure. Probably the deeds of John and Nicephorus excited him to emulation: at any rate his long reign from 976 till 1025, is one continuous record of wars, and almost entirely of wars brought to a successful termination. Basil seemed to have modelled himself on the elder of his two guardians, the stern Nicephorus Phocas.

His earliest years on the throne, indeed, were spent in the pursuit of pleasure, but ere he reached the age of thirty a sudden transformation was visible in him. He gave himself up entirely to war and religion: he took a vow of chast.i.ty, and always wore the garb of a monk under his armour and his imperial robes. His piety was exaggerated into bigotry and fanaticism, but it was undoubtedly real, though it did not keep him from the commission of many deeds of shocking cruelty in the course of his wars.

His justice was equally renowned, but it often degenerated into mere harshness and indifference to suffering. No one could have been more unlike his gay pleasure-loving father, or his mild literary grandfather, than the grim emperor who won from posterity the t.i.tle of Bulgaroktonos, "the Slayer of the Bulgarians."

Basil's life-work was the moving back of the East-Roman border in the Balkan Peninsula as far as the Danube, a line which it had not touched since the Slavonic immigration in the days of Heraclius, three hundred and fifty years before. In the first years of his reign, indeed, he accomplished little, being much hara.s.sed by two rebellions of great Asiatic n.o.bles-Bardas Phocas, the nephew of Nicephorus II., and Bardas Skleros, the general of the Armeniac theme. But after Phocas had died and Skleros had surrendered, Basil reserved all his energies for war in Europe, paying comparatively little attention to the Eastern conquests which had engrossed Nicephorus Phocas and John Zimisces.

The whole interior of the Balkan Peninsula formed at this period part of the dominions of Samuel King of the Bulgarians, who reigned over Bulgaria, Servia, inland Macedonia, and other districts around them. It was a strong and compact kingdom, administered by an able man, who had won his way to the throne by sheer strength and ability, for the old royal house had ceased out of the land during Swiatoslaf's invasion of Bulgaria ten years before. The main power of Samuel lay not in the land between Balkan and Danube, which gave his kingdom its name, but in the Slavonic districts further West and South. The centre of his realm was the fortress of Ochrida, which he had chosen as his capital-a strong town situated on a lake among the Macedonian hills. There Samuel mustered his armies, and from thence he started forth to attach either Thessalonica or Adrianople, as the opportunity might come to him.

The duel between Basil and Samuel lasted no less than thirty-four years, till the Bulgarian king died a beaten man in 1014. This long and unremitting struggle taxed all the energies of the empire, for Samuel was not a foe to be despised; he was no mere barbarian, but had learnt the art of war from his Byzantine neighbours, and had specially studied fortification. It was the desperate defences of his numerous hill-castles that made Basil's task such a long one. The details of the struggle are too long to follow out: suffice it to say that after some defeats in his earlier years, Basil accomplished the conquest of Bulgaria proper, as far as the Danube, in 1002, the year in which Widdin, the last of Samuel's strongholds in the North surrendered to him. For twelve years more the enemy held out in the Central Balkans, in his Macedonian strongholds, about Ochrida and Uskup. But at last, Basil's constant victories in the field, and his relentless slaughter of captives after the day was won, broke the force of the Bulgarian king. In 1014 the Emperor gained a crowning victory, after which he took 15,000 prisoners: he put out the eyes of all save one man in each hundred, and sent the poor wretches with their guides to seek King Samuel in his capital. The old Bulgarian was so overcome at the horrible sight that he was seized with a fit, and died on the spot, of rage and grief. His successors Gabriel and Ladislas could make no head against the stern and relentless emperor, and in 1018 the last fortress of the kingdom of Ochrida surrendered at discretion.

Contrary to his habit, Basil treated the vanquished foe with mildness, indulged in no ma.s.sacres, and contented himself with repairing the old Roman roads and fortresses of the Central Balkans, without attempting to exterminate the Slavonic tribes that had so often defied him. His conquests rounded off the empire on its northern frontier, and made it touch the Magyar kingdom of Hungary, for Servia no less than Bulgaria and Macedonia formed part of his conquests. The Byzantine border now ran from Belgrade to the Danube mouth, a line which it was destined to preserve for nearly two hundred years, till the great rebellion of Bulgaria against Isaac Angelus in the year 1086.

Having justly earned his grim t.i.tle of "the Slayer of the Bulgarians" by his long series of victories in Europe, Basil turned in his old age to continue the work of John Zimisces on the Eastern frontier. There the Moslem states were still weak and divided; though a new power, the Fatimite dynasty in Egypt, had come to the front, and acquired an ascendency over its neighbours. Basil's last campaigns, in 1021-2, were directed against the princes of Armenia, and the Iberians and Abasgians who dwelt beyond them to the north. His arms were entirely successful, and he added many Armenian districts to his Eastern provinces; but it may be questioned whether these conquests were beneficial to the empire. A strong Armenian kingdom was a useful neighbour to the Byzantine realm; being a Christian state it was usually friendly to the empire, and acted as a barrier against Moslem attacks from Persia. Basil broke up the Armenian power, but did not annex the whole country, or establish in it any adequate provision against the ultimate danger of attacks from the East by the Mahometan powers.

Basil died in 1025 at the age of sixty-eight, just as he was preparing to send forth an expedition to rescue Sicily from the hands of the Saracens.

He had won more provinces for the empire than any general since the days of the great Belisarius, and at his death the Byzantine borders had reached the furthest extension which they ever knew. His successors were to be unworthy of his throne, and were destined to lose provinces with as constant regularity as he himself had shown in gaining them. There was to be no one after him who could boast that he had fought thirty campaigns in the open field with harness on his back, and had never turned aside from any enterprise that he had ever taken in hand.

Basil's brother Constantine had been his colleague in name all through the half century of his reign. No one could have been more unlike the ascetic and indefatigable "Slayer of the Bulgarians." Constantine was a mere worldling, a man of pleasure, a votary of the table and the wine cup, whose only redeeming tastes were a devotion to music and literature. He had dwelt in his corner of the palace surrounded by a little court of eunuchs and flatterers, and excluded by the stern Basil from all share and lot in the administration of the empire. Now Constantine found himself the heir of his childless brother, and was forced at the age of sixty to take up the responsibilities of empire. He proved an idle and incompetent, but not an actively mischievous sovereign. His worst act was to hand over the administration of the chief offices of state to six of his old courtiers-all eunuchs-whose elevation was a cause of wild anger to the great n.o.ble families, and whose inexperience led to much weak and futile government during his short reign.

Constantine died in 1028, after a very brief taste of empire. He was the last male of the Macedonian house, and left no heirs save his elderly unmarried daughters-whose education and moral training he had grossly neglected. Zoe, the eldest, was more than forty years of age, but her father had never found her a husband. On his death-bed, however, he sent for a middle-aged n.o.ble named Roma.n.u.s Argyrus, and forced him, at an hour's notice, to wed the princess. Only two days later Roma.n.u.s found himself left, by his father-in-law's death, t.i.tular head of the empire.

But Zoe, a clever, obstinate, and unscrupulous woman, kept the reins of authority in her own hands, and gave her unwilling spouse many an evil hour. She was inordinately vain, and pretended, like Queen Elizabeth of England, to be the mistress of all hearts long after she was well advanced in middle age. Her husband let her go her own way, and devoted himself to such affairs of state as he was allowed to manage. His interference with warlike matters was most unhappy. Venturing a campaign in Syria, he led his army to defeat, and saw several towns on the border fall into the hands of the Emir of Aleppo. After a reign of six years Roma.n.u.s died of a lingering disease, and Zoe was left a widow. Almost before the breath was out of her husband's body, the volatile empress-she was now over fifty-had chosen and wedded another partner. The new emperor was Michael the Paphlagonian, a young courtier who had been Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Roma.n.u.s: he was twenty-eight years of age and noted as the most handsome man in Constantinople. His good looks had won Zoe's fancy, and to his own surprise he found himself seated on the throne by his elderly admirer [1034].

The object of Zoe's anile affection was a capable man, and justified his rather humiliating elevation by good service to the empire. He beat back the Saracens from Syria and put down a Bulgarian rebellion with success.

But in his last years he saw Servia, one of the conquests of Basil II., burst out into revolt, and could not quell it. He also failed in a project to reconquer Sicily from the Moors, though he sent against the island George Maniakes, the best general of the day, who won many towns and defeated the Moslems in two pitched battles. The attempt to subdue the whole island failed, and the conquests of Maniakes were lost one after the other. Michael IV., though still a young man, was fearfully afflicted with epileptic fits, which sapped his health, and so enfeebled him that he died a hopeless invalid ere he reached the age of thirty-six. The irrepressible Zoe, now again a widow, took a few days to decide whether she would adopt a son, or marry a third husband. She first tried the former alternative, and crowned as her colleague her late spouse's nephew and namesake Michael V. But the young man proved ungrateful, and strove to deprive the aged empress of the control of affairs. When he announced his intention of removing her from the capital, the city mob, who loved the Macedonian house, and laughed at rather than reprobated the foibles of Zoe, took arms to defend their mistress. In a fierce fight between the rioters and the guards of Michael V., 3,000 lives were lost: but the insurgents had the upper hand, routed the soldiery, and caught and blinded Michael.

Zoe, once more at the head of the state, now made her third marriage, at the age of sixty-two. She chose as her partner Constantine Monomachus, an old debauchee who had been her lover thirty years ago. Their joint reign was unhappy both at home and abroad. Frequent rebellions broke out both in Asia Minor and in the Balkan Peninsula. The Patzinaks sent forays across the Danube, while a new enemy, the Normans of South Italy, conquered the "theme of Langobardia," the last Byzantine possession to the West of the Adriatic, and established in its stead the duchy of Apulia [1055]. A still more dangerous foe began also to be heard of along the Eastern frontier.

The Seljouk Turks were now commencing a career of conquest in Persia and the lands on the Oxus. In 1048 the advance guard of their hordes began to ravage the Armenian frontier of the empire. But this danger was not yet a pressing one.

When Zoe and Constantine IX. were dead, the sole remaining scion of the Macedonian house was saluted as ruler of the empire. This was Theodora, the younger sister of Zoe, an old woman of seventy, who had spent the best part of her days in a nunnery. She was as sour and ascetic as her sister had been vain and amorous; but she does not seem to have been the worst of the rulers of Byzantium, and her two years of power were not troubled by rebellions or vexed by foreign war. Her austere virtues won her some respect from the people, and the fact that she was the last of her house, and that with its extinction the troubles of a disputed succession were doomed to come upon the empire, seems to have sobered her subjects, and led them to let the last days of the Basilian dynasty pa.s.s away in peace.

Theodora died on the 30th of August, 1057, having on her death-bed declared that she adopted Michael Stratioticus as her successor. Then commenced the reign of trouble, the "third anarchy" in the history of the Byzantine Empire.

XX. MANZIKERT. (1057-1081.)

The moment that the last of the Macedonian dynasty was gone, the elements of discord seemed unchained, and the double scourge of civil war and foreign invasion began to afflict the empire. In the twenty-four years between 1057 and 1081 were pressed more disasters than had been seen in any other period of East-Roman history, save perhaps the reign of Heraclius. For now came the second cutting-short of the empire, the blow that was destined to shear away half its strength, and leave it maimed beyond any possibility of ultimate recovery.

Domestic troubles were the first inevitable consequence of the extinction of the Macedonian dynasty. The aged Theodora had named as her successor on the throne Michael Stratioticus, a contemporary of her own who had been an able soldier twenty-five years back. But Michael VI. was grown aged and incompetent, and the empire was full of ambitious generals, who would not tolerate a dotard on the throne. Before a year had pa.s.sed a band of great Asiatic n.o.bles entered into a conspiracy to overturn Michael, and replace him by Isaac Comnenus, the chief of one of the ancient Cappadocian houses, and the most popular general of the East.

Isaac Comnenus and his friends took arms, and dispossessed the aged Michael of his throne with little difficulty. But a curse seemed to rest upon the usurpation; Isaac was stricken down by disease when he had been little more than a year on the throne, and retired to a monastery to die.

His crown was transferred to Constantine Ducas, another Cappadocian n.o.ble, who was supposed to be second only to Isaac in competence and popularity.

Constantine reigned for seven troubled years, and disappointed all his supporters, for he proved but a sorry administrator. His mind was set on nothing but finance, and in the endeavour to build up again the imperial treasure, which had been sorely wasted since the death of Basil II., he neglected all the other departments of state. To save money he disbanded no inconsiderable portion of the army, and cut down the pay of the rest.

This was sheer madness, when there was impending over the empire the most terrible military danger that had been seen for four centuries. The safety of the realm was entirely in the hands of its well-paid and well-disciplined national army, and anything that impaired the efficiency of the army was fraught with the deadliest peril.

The Seljouk Turks were now drawing near. Pressing on from the Oxus lands, their hordes had overrun Persia and extinguished the dynasty of the Buhawides. In 1050, they had penetrated to Bagdad, and their great chief, Togrul Beg, had declared himself "defender of the faith and protector of the Caliph." Armenia had next been overrun, and those portions of it which had not been annexed to the empire, and still obeyed independent princes, had been conquered by 1064. In that year fell Ani, the ancient Armenian capital, and the bulwark which protected the Byzantine Empire from Eastern invasions.

The reign of Constantine Ducas was troubled by countless Seljouk invasions of the Armeniac, Anatolic, and Cappadocian themes. Sometimes the invaders were driven back, sometimes they eluded the imperial troops and escaped with their booty. But whether successful or unsuccessful, they displayed a reckless cruelty, far surpa.s.sing anything that the Saracens had ever shown. Wherever they pa.s.sed they not merely plundered to right and left, but slew off the whole population. Meanwhile, Constantine X., with his reduced army, proved incompetent to hold them back; all the more so that his operations were distracted by an invasion of the Uzes, a Tartar tribe from the Euxine sh.o.r.e, who had burst into Bulgaria.

Ducas died in 1067, leaving the throne to his son, Michael, a boy of fourteen years. The usual result followed. To secure her son's life and throne, the Empress-dowager Eudocia took a new husband, and made him guardian of the young Michael. The new Emperor-regent was Roma.n.u.s Diogenes, an Asiatic n.o.ble, whose brilliant courage displayed in the Seljouk wars had dazzled the world, and caused it to forget that caution and ability are far more regal virtues than headlong valour. Roma.n.u.s took in hand with the greatest vigour the task of repelling the Turks, which his predecessor had so grievously neglected. He led into the field every man that could be collected from the European or Asiatic themes, and for three successive years was incessantly marching and counter-marching in Armenia, Cappadocia, and Syria, in the endeavour to hunt down the marauding bands of the Seljouks.

The operations of Roma.n.u.s were not entirely unsuccessful. Alp Arslan, the Sultan of the Seljouks, contented himself at first with dispersing his hordes in scattered bands, and attacking many points of the frontier at once. Hence the Emperor was not unfrequently able to catch and slay off one of the minor divisions of the Turkish army. But some of them always contrived to elude him; his heavy cavalry could not come up with the light Seljouk horse bowmen, who generally escaped and rode back home by a long detour, burning and murdering as they went. Cappadocia was already desolated from end to end, and the Turkish raids had reached as far as Amorium, in Phrygia.

In 1071 came the final disaster. In pursuing the Seljouk plunderers, Roma.n.u.s was drawn far eastward, to Manzikert, on the Armenian frontier.

There he found himself confronted, not by a flying foe, but by the whole force of the Seljouk sultanate, with Alp Arslan himself at its head.

Though his army was hara.s.sed by long marches, and though two large divisions were absent, the Emperor was eager to fight. The Turks had never before offered him a fair field, and he relied implicitly on the power of his cuira.s.siers to ride down any number, however great, of the light Turkish horse.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Our Lord Blessing Roma.n.u.s Diogenes And Eudocia. (_From an Ivory at Paris._) (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

The decisive battle of Manzikert, which it is not too much to call the turning-point of the whole course of Byzantine history, was fought in the early summer of 1071. For a long day the Byzantine hors.e.m.e.n continued to roll back and break through the lines of Turkish horse bowmen. But fresh hordes kept coming on, and in the evening the fight was still undecided.

As the night was approaching, Roma.n.u.s prepared to draw his troops back to the camp, but an unhappy misconception of orders broke up the line, and the Seljouks edged in between the two halves of the army. Either from treachery or cowardice Andronicus Ducas, the officer who commanded the reserve, led his men off without fighting. The Emperor's division was beset on all sides by the enemy, and broke up in the dusk. Roma.n.u.s himself was wounded, thrown from his horse, and made prisoner. The greater part of his men were cut to pieces.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Nicephorus Botaniates Sitting In State. (_From a contemporary MS._) (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

Alp Arslan showed himself more forbearing to his prisoner than might have been expected. It is true that Roma.n.u.s was led after his capture to the tent of the Sultan, and laid prostrate before him, that, after the Turkish custom, the conqueror might place his foot on the neck of his vanquished foe. But after this humiliating ceremony the Emperor was treated with kindness, and allowed after some months to ransom himself and return home.

He would have fared better, however, if he had remained the prisoner of the Turk. During his captivity the conduct of affairs had fallen into the hands of John Ducas, uncle of the young emperor Michael. The unscrupulous regent was determined that Roma.n.u.s should not supersede him and mount the throne again. When the released captive reappeared, John had him seized and blinded. The cruel work was so roughly done that the unfortunate Roma.n.u.s died a few days later.

After this fearful disaster Asia Minor was lost; there was no chief to take the place of Roma.n.u.s, and the Seljouk hordes spread westward almost unopposed. The next ten years were a time of chaos and disaster. While the Seljouks were carving their way deeper and deeper into the vitals of the empire, the wrecks of the Byzantine army were employed not in resisting them, but in carrying on a desperate series of civil wars. After the death of Roma.n.u.s, every general in the empire seemed to think that the time had come for him to a.s.sume the purple buskins and proclaim himself emperor.

History records the names of no less than six pretenders to the throne during the next nine years, besides several rebels who took up arms without a.s.suming the imperial t.i.tle. The young emperor, Michael Ducas, proved, when he came of age, to be a vicious nonent.i.ty; he is remembered in Byzantine history only by his nickname of Para-pinakes, the "peck-filcher," given him because in a year of famine he sold the measure of wheat to his subjects a fourth short of its proper contents. His name and that of Nicephorus Botaniates, the rebel who overthrew him, cover in the list of emperors a s.p.a.ce of ten years that would better be represented by a blank; for the authority of the nominal ruler scarcely extended beyond the walls of the capital, and the themes that were not overrun by the Turks were in the hands of governors who each did what was right in his own eyes. At last a man of ability worked himself up to the surface.

This was Alexius Comnenus, nephew of the emperor Isaac Comnenus, whose short reign we related in the opening paragraph of this chapter.

Alexius was a man of courage and ability, but he displayed one of the worst types of Byzantine character. Indeed, he was the first emperor to whom the epithet "Byzantine," in its common and opprobrious sense could be applied. He was the most accomplished liar of his age, and, while winning and defending the imperial throne, committed enough acts of mean treachery, and swore enough false oaths to startle even the courtiers of Constantinople. He could fight when necessary, but he preferred to win by treason and perjury. Yet as a ruler he had many virtues, and it will always be remembered to his credit that he dragged the empire out of the deepest slough of degradation and ruin that it had ever sunk into. Though false, he was not cruel, and seven ex-emperors and usurpers, living unharmed in Constantinople under his sceptre, bore witness to the mildness of his rule. The tale of his reign sufficiently bears witness to the strange mixture of moral obliquity and practical ability in his character.