The Byzantine Empire Part 6

This loss brought the inhabitants of the East almost to despair; they thought that the luck of the empire had departed with the Holy Wood, which had served as its Palladium, and even imagined that the Last Day was at hand and that Chosroes of Persia was Antichrist. The mad language of pride and insult which the Persian in the day of his triumph used to Heraclius might also explain their belief. His blasphemous phrases seem like an echo of the letter of Sennacherib in the Second Book of Kings. The epistle ran:-

"Chosroes, greatest of G.o.ds, and master of the whole earth, to Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave. Have I not destroyed the Greeks? You say you trust in your G.o.d: why, then, has he not delivered out of my hand Caesarea, Jerusalem, and Alexandria? Shall I not also destroy Constantinople? But I will pardon all your sins if you will come to me with your wife and children; I will give you lands, vines, and olive groves, and will look upon you with a kindly aspect. Do not deceive yourself with the vain hope in that Christ, who was not even able to save himself from the Jews, who slew him by nailing him to a cross."

The horror and rage roused by the loss of the "True Cross" and the blasphemies of King Chosroes brought about the first real outburst of national feeling that we meet in the history of the Eastern Empire. It was felt that the fate of Christendom hung in the balance, and that all, from highest to lowest, were bound to make one great effort to beat back the fire-worshipping Persians from Palestine, and recover the Holy Places. The Emperor vowed that he would take the field at the head of the army-a thing most unprecedented, for since the death of Theodosius I., in 395, no Caesar had ever gone out in person to war. The Church came forward in the most n.o.ble way-at the instance of the Patriarch Sergius all the churches of Constantinople sent their treasures and ornaments to the mint to be coined down, and serve as a great loan to the state, which was to be repaid when the Persians should have been conquered. The free dole of corn which the inhabitants of the capital had been receiving ever since the days of Constantine was abolished, and the populace bore the privation without demur. It was indeed observed that this measure not only saved the treasury, but drove into the army-where they were useful-thousands of the able-bodied loiterers who were the strength of the circus factions and the pest of the city. If the dole had been continued Heraclius could not have found a penny for the war. Egypt, the granary of the empire, had been lost in 616, and the supply of government corn entirely cut off, so that the dole would have had to be provided by the treasury buying corn, a ruinously expensive task.

By the aid of the Church loan Heraclius equipped a new army and strengthened his fleet. He also provided for the garrisoning of Constantinople by an adequate force, a most necessary precaution, for in 617 the Persians had again forced their way to the Bosphorus, and this time captured Chalcedon. Heraclius would probably have taken the field next year but for troubles with the Avars. That wild race had long been working their wicked will on the almost undefended Thracian provinces, but now they promised peace. Heraclius went out, at the Chagan's pressing invitation, to meet him near Heraclea. But the conference was a snare, for the treacherous savage had planted ambushes on the way to secure the person of the Emperor, and Heraclius only escaped by the speed of his horse. He cast off his imperial mantle to ride the faster, and galloped into the capital just in time to close its gates as the vanguard of the Chagan's army came in sight. The Avars kept the Emperor engaged for some time, and it was not till 622 that he was able to take the field against the Persians.

This expedition of Heraclius was in spirit the first of the Crusades. It was the first war that the Roman Empire had ever undertaken in a spirit of religious enthusiasm, for it was to no mere political end that the Emperor and his people looked forward. The army marched out to save Christendom, to conquer the Holy Places, and to recover the "True Cross." The men were wrought up to a high pitch of enthusiasm by warlike sermons, and the Emperor carried with him, to stimulate his zeal, a holy picture-one of those _eikons_ in which the Greek Church has always delighted-which was believed to be the work of no mortal hands.

Heraclius made no less than six campaigns (A.D. 622-27) in his gallant and successful attempt to save the half-ruined empire. He won great and well-deserved fame, and his name would be reckoned among the foremost of the world's warrior-kings if it had not been for the misfortunes which afterwards fell on him in his old age.

His first campaign cleared Asia Minor of the Persian hosts, not by a direct attack, but by skilful strategy. Instead of attacking the army at Chalcedon, he took ship and landed in Cilicia, in the rear of the enemy, threatening in this position both Syria and Cappadocia. As he expected, the Persians broke up from their camp opposite Constantinople, and came back to fall upon him. But after much manuvring he completely beat the general Shahrbarz, and cleared Asia Minor of the enemy.

In his next campaigns Heraclius endeavoured to liberate the rest of the Roman Empire by a similar plan: he resolved to a.s.sail Chosroes at home, and force him to recall the armies he kept in Syria and Egypt to defend his own Persian provinces. In 623-4 the Emperor advanced across the Armenian mountains and threw himself into Media, where his army revenged the woes of Antioch and Jerusalem by burning the fire-temples of Ganzaca-the Median capital-and Thebarmes, the birthplace of the Persian prophet Zoroaster. Chosroes, as might have been expected, recalled his troops from the west, and fought two desperate battles to cover Ctesiphon.

His generals were defeated in both, but the Roman army suffered severely.

Winter was at hand, and Heraclius fell back on Armenia. In his next campaign he recovered Roman Mesopotamia, with its fortresses of Amida, Dara, and Martyropolis, and again defeated the general Shahrbarz.

But 626 was the decisive year of the war. The obstinate Chosroes determined on one final effort to crush Heraclius, by concerting a joint plan of operations with the Chagan of the Avars. While the main Persian army watched the emperor in Armenia, a great body under Shahrbarz slipped south of him into Asia Minor and marched on the Bosphorus. At the same moment the Chagan of the Avars, with the whole force of his tribe and of his Slavonic dependants, burst over the Balkans and beset Constantinople on the European side. The two barbarian hosts could see each other across the water, and even contrived to exchange messages, but the Roman fleet sailing incessantly up and down the strait kept them from joining forces.

In the June, July, and August of 626 the capital was thus beset: the danger appeared imminent, and the Emperor was far away on the Euphrates.

But the garrison was strong, the patrician Bonus, its commander, was an able officer, the fleet was efficient, and the same crusading fervour which had inspired the Constantinopolitans in 622 still buoyed up their spirits. In the end of July 80,000 Avars and Slavs, with all sorts of siege implements, delivered simultaneous a.s.saults along the land front of the city, but they were beaten back with great slaughter. Next the Chagan built himself rafts and tried to bring the Persians across, but the Roman galleys sunk the clumsy structures, and slew thousands of the Slavs who had come off in small boats to attack the fleet. Then the Chagan gave up the siege in disgust and retired across the Danube.

Heraclius had shown great confidence in the strength of Constantinople and the courage of its defenders. He sent a few veteran troops to aid the garrison, but did not slacken from his attack on Persia. While Shahrbarz and the Chagan were besieging his capital, he himself was wasting Media and Mesopotamia. He imitated King Chosroes in calling in Tartar allies from the north, and revenged the ravages of the Avars in Thrace by turning 40,000 Khazar hors.e.m.e.n loose on Northern Persia. The enemy gave way before him everywhere, and the Persians began to grow desperate.

Next year King Chosroes put into the field the last levy of Persia, under a general named Rhazates, whom he bid to go out and "conquer or die." At the same time he wrote to command Shahrbarz to evacuate Chalcedon and return home in haste. But Heraclius intercepted the despatch of recall, and Shahrbarz came not.

Near Nineveh Heraclius fell in with the Persian home army and inflicted on it a decisive defeat. He himself, charging at the head of his cavalry, rode down the general of the enemy and slew him with his lance. Chosroes could put no new army in the field, and by Christmas Heraclius had seized his palace of Dastagerd, and divided among his troops such a plunder as had never been seen since Alexander the Great captured Susa.

The Nemesis of Chosroes' insane vanity had now arrived. Ten years after he had written his vaunting letter to Heraclius he found himself in far worse plight than his adversary had ever been. After Dastagerd had fallen he retired to Ctesiphon, the capital of his empire, but even from thence he had to flee on the approach of the enemy. Then the end came: his own son Siroes and his chief n.o.bles seized him and threw him in chains, and a few days after he died-of rage and despair according to one story, of starvation if the darker tale is true.

The new king sent the humblest messages to the victorious Roman, hailing him as his "father," and apologizing for all the woes that the ambition of Chosroes had brought upon the world. Heraclius received his amba.s.sadors with kindness, and granted peace, on the condition that every inch of Roman territory should be evacuated, all Roman captives freed, a war indemnity paid, and the spoils of Jerusalem, including the "True Cross,"

faithfully restored. Siroes consented with alacrity, and in March, 628, a glorious peace ended the twenty-six years of the Persian war.

Heraclius returned to Constantinople in the summer of the same year with his spoils, his victorious army, and his great trophy, the "Holy Wood."

His entry was celebrated in the style of an old Roman triumph, and the Senate conferred on him the t.i.tle of the "New Scipio." The whole of the citizens, bearing myrtle boughs, came out to meet the army, and the ceremony concluded with the exhibition of the "True Cross" before the high altar of St. Sophia. Heraclius afterwards took it back in great pomp to Jerusalem.

This was, perhaps, the greatest triumph that any emperor ever won.

Heraclius had surpa.s.sed the eastern achievements of Trajan and Severus, and led his troops further east than any Roman general had ever penetrated. His task, too, had been the hardest ever imposed on an emperor; none of his predecessors had ever started to war with his very capital beleaguered and with three-fourths of his provinces in the hands of the enemy. Since Julius Caesar no one had fought so incessantly-for six years the emperor had not been out of the saddle-nor met with such uniform success.

Heraclius returned to Constantinople to spend, as he hoped, the rest of his years in peace. He had now reached the age of fifty-four, and was much worn by his incessant campaigning. But the quiet for which he yearned was to be denied him, and the end of his reign was to be almost as disastrous as the commencement.

The great Saracen invasion was at hand, and it was at the very moment of Heraclius' triumph that Mahomet sent out his famous circular letter to the kings of the earth, inviting them to embrace Islam. If the Emperor could but have known that his desolated realm, spoiled for ten long years by the Persian and the Avar, and drained of men and money, was to be invaded by a new enemy far more terrible than the old, he would have prayed that the day of his triumph might also be the day of his death.

XI. SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE. (A.D. 320-620.)

The reign of Heraclius forms the best dividing point in the history of the empire between what may roughly be called Ancient History and the Middle Ages. There is no break at all between Constantine and Heraclius, though the area, character, social life, and religion of the empire had been greatly modified in the three hundred years that separated them. The new order of things, which commenced when Constantine established his capital on the Bosphorus, had a peaceable and orderly development. The first prominent fact that strikes the eye in the history of the three centuries is that the sceptre pa.s.sed from sovereign to sovereign in quiet and undisturbed devolution. From the death of Valens onward there is no instance of a military usurper breaking the line of succession till the crowning of Phocas in 602. The emperors were either designated by their predecessors or-less frequently-chosen by the high officials and the senate. The regularity of their sequence is all the more astonishing when we realize that only in three cases in the whole period was father succeeded by son. Saving Constantine himself, Theodosius I., and Arcadius, not a single emperor left male issue; yet the hereditary instinct had grown so strong in the empire that nephews, sons-in-law, and brothers-in-law of sovereigns were gladly received as their legitimate heirs. Considering this tendency, it is extraordinary to note that the whole three hundred years did not produce a single unmitigated tyrant.

Constantius II. was gloomy and sometimes cruel, Valens was stupid and avaricious, Arcadius utterly weak and inept, Justinian hard and thankless; but the general average of the emperors were men of respectable ability, and in moral character they will compare favourably with any list of sovereigns of similar length that any country can produce.

The chief modifications which must be marked in the character of the empire between 320 and 620 depend on two processes of gradual change which were going on throughout the three centuries. The first was the gradual de-Romanization (if we may coin the uncouth word) alike of the governing cla.s.ses and the ma.s.ses of population. In the fourth century the Roman impress was still strong in the East; the Latin language was habitually spoken by every educated man, and nearly all the machinery of the administration was worked in Latin phraseology. All law terms are habitually Latin, all t.i.tles of officers, all names of taxes and inst.i.tutions. Writers born and bred in Greece or Asia still wrote in Latin as often as in the Greek which must have been more familiar to them.

Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus may serve as a fair example: born in Greece, he wrote in the tongue of the ruling race rather than in his own idiom. Moreover there was still in the lands east of the Adriatic a very large body of Latin-speaking population-comprising all the inhabitants of the inland of the Balkan peninsula, for, except Greece proper, Macedonia, and a scattered line of cities along the Thracian coast, the whole land had learnt to speak the tongue of its conquerors.

By the seventh century this Roman element was rapidly vanishing. It is true that the Emperor was still hailed as the "Pius, Felix, Perpetuus, Augustus": it was not till about A.D. 800 that he dropped the old style and called himself "?? ???st? p?st?? as??e?? t?? ??a???." Nor were the old Roman official t.i.tles yet disused: men were still tribunes and patricians, counts and praetors, but little more than the names survived.

Already in the sixth century a knowledge of Latin was growing unusual even among educated men. The author Johannes Lydus tells us that he owed his rise in the civil service mainly to this rare accomplishment. Procopius, the best writer of the day and a man of real merit and discernment, was absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Latin, and blunders when he tries to translate the simplest phrase. Justinian was the last emperor who spoke Latin as his mother tongue, all his successors were better skilled in Greek.

The gradual disuse of Latin has its origin in the practical-though not formal-solution of the continuity between Rome and the East, which began with the division of the empire between the sons of Constantine and became more complete after Odoacer made himself King of Italy in 476. In the course of a century and a half the Latin element in the East, cut off from the Latin-speaking West, was bound to yield before the predominant Greek.

But the process would have been slower if the Eastern provinces which spoke Latin had not been those which suffered most from the barbarians.

The Visigoths and Ostrogoths hara.s.sed and decimated the Thracians, Illyrians, and Moesians, but the Slavs a century later almost exterminated them. In A.D. 400 probably a quarter of the provincials east of the Adriatic spoke Latin; in A.D. 620 not a tenth. The Romanized lands of the Balkan peninsula had now become Slavonic princ.i.p.alities: only the Dalmatian seaports and a few scattered survivors in the Balkans still used the old tongue. The only districts where a considerable Latin-speaking population obeyed the Emperor were Africa and the Italian Exarchate, now reunited to Constantinople by the conquests of Justinian. But they seem to have been too remote from the centre of life and government to have exercised any influence or delayed the de-Romanizing of the East. The last notable author, who being a subject of the empire wrote in Latin as his native tongue, was the poet Flavius Corippus who addressed a long panegyric to Justinus II.: as might have been expected, he was an African.

While the empire was losing its Roman characteristics, it was at the same time growing more and more Christian at heart. Under Constantine and his immediate successors the machinery of government was only just beginning to be effected by the change of the emperor's religion. Though the sovereign personally was Christian, the system remained what it had been before. Many of the high officials were still pagans, and the form and spirit of all administrative and legal business was unaltered from what it had been in the third century. It is not till forty years after Constantine's death that we find the Christian spirit fully penetrating out of the spiritual into the material sphere of life. Attempts by the State to suppress moral sin no less than legal crime begin with Theodosius I., whose crusade against s.e.xual immorality would have been incomprehensible to even the best of the pagan emperors. The old gladiatorial shows, one of the most characteristic and repulsive features of Roman life, were abolished not long after. They survived for sixty years at Rome, though Christian Constantinople never knew them. But this was not the work of the State, but of a single individual. One day in A.D.

404 the games had begun, and the gladiators were about to engage, when the monk Telemachus leapt down into the arena and threw himself between the combatants, adjuring them not to slay their brethren. There was an angry scuffle, and the good monk was slain. But his death had the effect that his protests might have failed to bring about, and no gladiatorial show was ever given again.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

General View Of St. Sophia. (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

In other provinces of social life the work of Christianity was no less marked. It put an end to the detestable practice of infanticide which pervaded the ancient world, resting on the a.s.sumption that the father had the right to decide whether or not he would rear the child he had begotten. Constantine made the State a.s.sume the charge of feeding and rearing the children of the dest.i.tute, lest their parents should be tempted to cast them forth to perish in the old fashion, and Valentinian I. in 374 a.s.similated infanticide to other forms of murder, and made it a capital offence.

Slavery was also profoundly affected by the teaching of the Church. The ancient world, save a few philosophers, had regarded the slave with such contempt that he was hardly reckoned a moral being or conceived to have rights or virtues. Christianity taught that he was a man with an immortal soul, no less than his own master, and bade slaves and freemen meet on terms of perfect equality around the baptismal font and before the sacred table. It was from the first taught that the man who manumitted his slaves earned the approval of heaven, and all occasions of rejoicing, public and private, were fitly commemorated by the liberation of deserving individuals. Though slavery was not extinguished for centuries, its evils were immensely modified; Justinian's legislation shows that by his time public opinion had condemned the characteristic evils of ancient slavery: he permitted the intermarriage of slaves and free persons, stipulating only for the consent of the owner of the servile partner in the wedlock.

He declared the children of such mixed marriages free, and he made the prost.i.tution of a slave by a master a criminal offence. Hereditary slavery became almost unknown, and the inst.i.tution was only kept up by the introduction of barbarian captives, heathens and enemies, whose position did not appeal so keenly to the mind of their captors.

The improvement of the condition of all the unhappy cla.s.ses of which we have been speaking-women, infants, slaves, gladiators-can be directly traced back to a single fundamental Christian truth. It was the belief in the importance of the individual human soul in the eyes of G.o.d that led the converted Roman to realize his responsibility, and change his att.i.tude towards the helpless beings whom he had before despised and neglected. It is only fair to add that the realization of this central truth did not always operate for good in the Roman world of the fifth and sixth centuries. Some of the developments of the new idea were harmful and even dangerous to the State. They took the form of laying such exclusive stress on the relations between the individual soul and heaven, that the duties of man to the State were half forgotten. Chief among these developments was the ascetic monasticism which, starting from Egypt, spread rapidly all over the empire, more especially over its eastern provinces. When men retire from their duties as citizens, intent on nothing but on saving their own souls, take up a position outside the State, and cease to be of the slightest use to society, the result may be harmless so long as their numbers are small. But at this time the monastic impulse was working on such a large scale that its development was positively dangerous. It was by thousands and ten thousands that the men who ought to have been bearing the burdens of the State, stepped aside into the monastery or the hermit's cave. The ascetics of the fifth century had neither of the justifications which made monasticism precious in a later age, they were neither missionaries nor men of learning. The monastery did not devote itself either to sending out preachers and teachers, or to storing up and cherishing the literary treasures of the ancient world. The first abbot to whom it occurred to turn the vast leisure of his monks to good account by setting them systematically to work at copying ma.n.u.scripts was Ca.s.siodorus, the ex-secretary to King Theodoric the Goth [A.D. 530-40].

Before his time monks and books had no special connection with each other.

When a State contains ma.s.ses of men who devote their whole energies to a repulsively selfish attempt to save their own individual souls, while letting the world around them slide on as best it may, then the body politic is diseased. The Roman Empire in its fight with the barbarians was in no small degree hampered by this att.i.tude of so many of its subjects.

The ascetic took the barbarian invasions as judgments from heaven rightly inflicted upon a wicked world, and not as national calamities which called on every citizen to join in the attempt to repel them. Many men complacently interpreted the troubles of the fifth century as the tribulations predicted in the Apocalypse, and watched them develop with something like joy, since they must portend the close approach of the Second Advent of our Lord.

This apathetic att.i.tude of many Christians during the afflictions of the empire was maddening to the heathen minority which still survived among the educated cla.s.ses. They roundly accused Christianity of being the ruin of the State by its anti-social teaching which led men to neglect every duty of the citizen. The Christian author Orosius felt himself compelled to write a lengthy history to confute this view, aiming his work at the pagan Symmachus whose book had been devoted to tracing all the calamities of the world to the conversion of Constantine.

It was fortunate for the empire that its governing cla.s.ses continued to preserve the old traditions of Roman state-craft, and fought on doggedly against all the ills of their time-barbarian invasion, famine, and pestilence, instead of bowing to the yoke and recognizing in every calamity the righteous judgment of heaven and the indication of the approaching end of the world.

Paganism had practically disappeared by the end of the fifth century as an active force; none save a few philosophers made an open profession of it, and in 529 Justinian put a formal end to their teaching, by closing the schools of Athens, the last refuge of the professors of the expiring religion. But if open heathenism was dead, a large measure of indifferentism prevailed among the educated cla.s.ses: many men who in the fifth century would have been pagans were Christians in name in the sixth, but little affected by Christianity in their lives. This type was extremely common among the literary and official cla.s.ses. There are plenty of sixth-century authors-Procopius may serve as an example-whose works show no trace of Christian thought, though the writer was undoubtedly a professing member of the Church. Similar examples could be quoted by the dozen from among the administrators, lawyers, and statesmen of the day, but all were now nominally Christian. As time went on, such men grew rarer, and the old stern, non-religious Roman character pa.s.sed away into the emotional and superst.i.tious mediaeval type of mind. The survival of pre-Christian feeling, which appeared as indifferentism among the educated cla.s.ses, took a very different shape among the lower strata of society. It revealed itself in a crowd of gross superst.i.tions connected with magic, witchcraft, fortune-telling, charms, and trivial or obscene ceremonies practised in secret. The State highly disapproved of such practices, treated them as impious or heretical, and imposed punishment on those who employed them: but nevertheless these contemptible survivals of heathenism persisted down to the latest days of the empire.

It has been usual to include all the Eastern Romans of all the centuries between Constantine I. and Constantine XIV. in one sweeping condemnation, as cowardly, corrupt, and effete. The ordinary view of Byzantine life may be summed up in Mr. Lecky's irritating statement(18) that "the universal verdict of history is that it const.i.tutes the most base and despicable form that civilization ever a.s.sumed, and that there has been no other enduring civilization so absolutely dest.i.tute of all the forms and elements of greatness, none to which the epithet _mean_ may be so emphatically applied. It is a monstrous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women; of poisoning, conspiracies, uniform ingrat.i.tude, perpetual fratricide." How Mr. Lecky obtained his universal verdict of history, it is hard to see: certainly that verdict can not have been arrived at after a study of the evidence bearing on the life of the persons accused. It sounds like a cheap echo of the second-hand historians of fifty years ago, whose staple commodity was Gibbon-and-water.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Illuminated Initials. (_From Byzantine MSS._) (_From "L'Art Byzantin." Par C. Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)

If we must sum up the characteristics of the East Romans and their civilization, the conclusion at which we arrive will be very different. It is only fair to acknowledge that they had their faults: what else could be expected when we know that the foundations of the Eastern Empire were laid upon the Oriental provinces of the old Roman world, among races that had long been stigmatized by their masters as hopelessly effete and corrupt-Syrians, Egyptians, and h.e.l.lenized Asiatics, whom even the degenerate Romans of the third century had been wont to despise. The Byzantine Empire displayed from its very cradle a taint of weakness derived from this Oriental origin. It showed features particularly obnoxious to the modern mind of the nineteenth century-such as the practice of a degrading and grovelling court etiquette, full of prostrations and genuflexions, the introduction of eunuchs and slaves into high offices of State, the wholesale and deliberate use of treachery and lying in matters of diplomacy.

But remembering its origins we shall, on the whole, wonder at the good points in Byzantine civilization rather than at its faults. It may fairly be said that Christianity raised the Roman East to a better moral position than it had known for a thousand years. With all their faults the monks and hermits of the fifth century are a good subst.i.tute for the priests of Cybele and Mithras of the second. It was something that the Government and the public opinion of the day had concurred to sweep away the orgies of Daphne and Canopus. Church and State united in the reign of Justinian to punish with spiritual and bodily death the unnatural crimes which had been the open practice of emperors themselves in the first centuries of the empire.