Sailing from Byzantium (20 page)

n an early summer afternoon in the year 860— June 18, to be precise—the inhabitants of Constantinople began the most terrifying ordeal that most of them would ever live through. The city had been quiet enough that morning. The emperor, Michael III, was off with the army campaigning against the Arabs in Asia Minor, making the most of the decline that had weakened the Abbasids after the death of al-Mamun nearly three decades earlier. The fleet was also off fighting the Arabs somewhere in the Mediterranean. The empire had begun its long, slow recovery from the disasters of the seventh and eighth centuries, and was again taking the initiative against its enemies. The capital itself hadn't suffered a direct attack in a quarter century, and since then the empire had gone from strength to strength. An air of general confidence prevailed.

The Byzantines’ complacency was harshly shattered that afternoon, when without warning some two hundred ships materialized offshore and attacked the capital. In a
sermon to the fearful citizens gathered under the huge dome of Hagia Sophia, the learned Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, described the unforeseen and mysterious assault. “Nay, nor did it resemble other raids of barbarians, but the unexpectedness of the attack, its strange swiftness, the inhumanity of the barbarous tribe, the harshness of its manners and the savagery of its character proclaim the blow to have been discharged like a thunderbolt from God.”

Photius, whose sermons are the only contemporary source for these events, went on to recall Byzantines’ initial horrified reactions:

Do you recollect that unbearable and bitter hour when the barbarians’ boats came sailing down at you, wafting a breath of cruelty, savagery and murder? When the sea spread out its serene and unruffled surface, granting them gentle and agreeable sailing, while, waxing wild, it stirred up against us the waves of war? When the boats went past the city showing their crews with swords raised, as if threatening the city with death by sword? When all human hope ebbed away from men, and the city was moored only with recourse to the divine?

Adding to the shock of the onslaught was the unexpectedness of the direction from which it came: the attacking ships had slipped undetected into the Bosporus from the north, from somewhere in the Black Sea. For centuries, Byzantium's vigilance had been focused to the east and the south, toward its most threatening enemies, the Arabs. Any leftover attention went to the west and northwest, by land, toward the Slavs who had occupied Greece and the Balkans over the past several hundred years. The Bulgars in particular had besieged the city several times by land earlier in the
ninth century, but their thrusts had been easily blunted by the great walls. Never before had Constantinople been attacked by a naval fleet from the north.

“Why has this dreadful bolt fallen on us out of the farthest north?” Photius asked, then suggested that it was in punishment for its inhabitants’ sins that God had visited this hardship on the capital.

Though several earlier embassies from these northerners are recorded, little was known about their origins. An “obscure nation,” Photius calls them, “a nation of no account, a nation ranked among slaves … a nation dwelling somewhere far from our country, barbarous, nomadic, armed with arrogance, unwatched, unchallenged, leaderless,” which nonetheless “so suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye … as a wild boar has devoured the inhabitants of the land.” Alert no doubt to the emperor's possible return, the marauders broke off their well-timed attack after a couple of weeks’ worth of plunder. By the time the emperor could march back with the army the attackers had long since evaporated, withdrawing to the northern wastes from which they had emerged.

No one among the capital's traumatized populace that June could ever have guessed what the future held, that one day these “arrogant savages” would become the empire's best and most faithful allies against yet undreamt-of enemies. Nor could anyone have envisioned that, centuries after that, this “nation of no account” would inherit from a vanquished Byzantium the leadership of Orthodox Christian civilization, becoming its great new hope as the Greeks passed into their long Turkish captivity.

They had gone away for the moment, perhaps, but the Russians would be back.

The Russian attack on Constantinople in 860 was the Byzantines’ first real exposure to this rising northern power, and it would be followed by a decade of remarkable Byzantine achievements aimed largely at coping with the new threat. But the Byzantines already had centuries to get acquainted with the populous groups of South Slavs who had long ago settled in the Balkans, as their immediate neighbors.

That story starts in the fifth century, when the populous and primitive Slavic tribes began a great migration that would transform the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe. The Slavs’ original homeland lies to the north of the Black Sea, in the area of today's western Ukraine, roughly between the Bug, the Pripet, and the Dnieper rivers. From this center they moved outward in all directions. Some pushed west, among them the ancestors of the Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks. Some pushed north and east, to become the Russians. And some pushed south, where they would eventually settle in Greece and the Balkans. Small-scale farmers and pastoralists, unlettered pagans who worshiped nature's forces, they moved on foot and slowly in small tribal groups. Within a few centuries they had occupied a wide swath of territory extending from the Elbe River in the west to the Volga in the east.

That much the archeological record has filled in. The Slavs first appear in the historical record in the early sixth century, when the southward-moving group breached the Byzantine frontier at the Danube. For the next half century they conducted constant raids into the Byzantine Balkans, terrorizing the Romanized inhabitants and carrying off crops and booty. Toward the middle of the century these
incursions began to get longer, and soon instead of raiders the Slavs became settlers. Preoccupied with his ambitious re-conquest of Europe and North Africa, and with war against Persia, Justinian didn't pay enough attention to his own backyard until it was too late. He was certainly aware of the problem, and built hundreds of fortresses across the Balkans, but he never committed the manpower or money to make them permanent and strong. In the decades after his death, these meager defenses collapsed.

By the end of the sixth century, the Slavs were pouring into the Balkans, penetrating all the way down to the southern Peloponnesus, the bottom of the Greek mainland. Writing in 585, the Syriac historian John of Ephesus reports that “an accursed people, called Slavonians,” had made themselves masters of the whole Balkan peninsula, including Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace, right up to the walls of Constantinople itself: “And even to this day … they still encamp and dwell there … and they have grown rich in gold and silver, and herds of horses, and arms, and have learnt to fight better than the Romans, though at first they were but rude savages, who did not venture to show themselves outside the woods.”

As they flooded into the Balkans, the Slavs there also picked up a trick that would be repeated in various forms throughout their early history. This was to apprentice themselves to a smaller but more advanced group of non-Slavs, forming an alliance in which the non-Slavic group acted as a warrior aristocracy and the Slavs were the raw manpower— with the result that, more often than not, the numerous Slavs absorbed their masters, whose know-how had gone toward forming a state that the Slavs now dominated.

The first Slavic apprenticeship was to the Avars, a Turkic people who taught the Slavs the fighting skills that so
impressed John of Ephesus. Slavs assisted the Avars in the siege of Constantinople in 626, when the Avar-Slav force coordinated its attack with the Persians. The Slavs, who had the crucial assignment of ferrying the Persians across the Bosporus in their small boats, were overwhelmed by the Byzantines’ superior fleet, and it was this failure that allowed the siege to be broken. The Avars, formerly fierce but now chastened, backed off to the Hungarian plain, while their Slav subjects remained in the Balkans, ending this apprenticeship before the masters could be absorbed.

The Slavs’ next apprenticeship arose from the ashes of the first, as another group of Turkic warriors, the Bulgars, moved into the northern Balkans and essentially replaced the Avars as the Slavs’ overlords there. Crossing the Danube in the late seventh century, the Bulgars occupied the zone known as the Dobrudja, along the Black Sea coast south of the Danube delta. A halfhearted Byzantine attempt to eject them ended in defeat, and in 681 the Byzantines were forced to sign a treaty ceding the Bulgars these former imperial lands.

Byzantium and Bulgaria were now neighbors, and from this point forward their fates would be intimately intertwined. In much the same way as the Italians did in the West and the Syrians did in the Islamic world, the Bulgarians would eventually act as a pipeline for the Byzantine legacy, a conduit through which Byzantine cultural influences flowed to the rest of the Slavic world.

But for the moment, the relationship was characterized mostly by vicious warfare, which constantly erupted between the sometimes desperate Byzantines and their vigorous new
neighbor. It raged back and forth throughout the Dark Age. The fearsome Bulgar khan Krum gained further Byzantine territory and dealt the Byzantines several sharp defeats, culminating in the annihilation of a Byzantine army in a mountain ambush in 811. The emperor Nicephorus I himself perished, the first time in nearly five centuries that a Byzantine ruler had died in battle. Krum reportedly took off the top of the emperor's skull, lined it with silver, and turned it into a drinking cup. The Bulgar khan was readying his forces for a major siege of Constantinople when he died suddenly a few years later.

The Slavs in the northern part of the Balkans kept their Slavic identity, and by the end of the ninth century they had completed the process of absorbing their aristocratic overlords. Modern Bulgarian, a Slavic tongue, has fewer than a dozen words of Turkic origin. The Slavs who moved into Greece encountered a very different fate, and in some ways an opposite one.

Even as Krum was toasting his success, Byzantium had begun to revive. Then Byzantium was weaker and smaller than either the Frankish or the Abbasid states, and in danger of being expelled from the Balkans by Bulgaria. By the mid-eleventh century, the Frankish and Abassid empires had both been shattered into smaller principalities, and Byzantium had conquered and absorbed Bulgaria. During this remarkable period of military expansion, Byzantium almost doubled in size.

This revival also allowed the Byzantines to recolonize the Greek mainland. The success of that effort would prove crucial to the survival of Greek culture in future centuries, after the other lands had fallen away. Having overrun nearly all of the Greek mainland, the cities, and the islands, by the tenth century the Slavs in Greece had been converted to
Orthodox Christianity and thoroughly Hellenized. Today, the only evidence of the Slavs’ arrival is the presence of Slavic place names, some five hundred or so of them, scattered charmingly throughout the Greek countryside.

The renewed confidence of the ninth century spilled over into Byzantine culture to spark the First Byzantine Renaissance, as the Orthodox church embarked on vigorous expansion and Byzantine literary scholars rediscovered the ancient texts. In both arenas the dominant figure was Photius, the patriarch of Constantinople during the Russian attack of 860. On the religious side, as the empire's highest church authority during much of this period, Photius initiated Byzantium's greatest cultural triumph, the conversion of the Slavs to Orthodox Christianity. Yet, long before becoming patriarch, he was also his century's most accomplished lay scholar of ancient Greek literature, and as such he played the pivotal role in the intellectual revival.

This was the age when the pagan classics again began to be copied, a process that was stimulated by the importation of paper from the Arabs. The translation movement was now in full swing in Baghdad, and it has recently been suggested that the Arab interest helped to jump-start the resurgence of interest in Byzantium.
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Another impetus came from the development of cursive or minuscule script. Easier both to write and to read (not least because words were now separated for
the first time), minuscule rapidly replaced the capital letters or uncial script employed by earlier copyists. Virtually all of the ancient Greek literature surviving today was copied during this period of intense activity, plus much that has since been lost. And Photius towers over it all.

Photius’ early life is largely unknown to us. Born around 810, he was a nephew of the famous patriarch Tarasius, who had helped the empress Irene restore the icons in 787, ending the first period of Iconoclasm. But because the sources for this period are so sparse, we can only speculate about how he attained his phenomenal mastery of ancient Greek language and literature.