The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (43 page)
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The little prince was returned three years later, and only just in time. A day or two after he had been safely delivered into the hands of his parents, Constantine VIII - who had just become sole ruler - made a determined effort to have him brought back to Constantinople. Fortunately the attempt failed; less than two years later, on George's death at the age of thirty, he su
cc
eeded to the throne under the name of Bagrat IV, and ruled over almost all Georgia for nearly half a century.
Henry II in person, and forced it back over the Alps. Now, surely, was the moment to strike again while the iron was still hot, consolidating past gains, re-establishing traditional frontiers and clearing Byzantine territory once and for all of foreign upstarts.
In south Italy, thanks to Boioannes, the job was already half done; there remained, however, the problem of Sicily which, reconquered for the Empire by Belisarius in 535, had been invaded by the Arabs three centuries later
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and had long been effectively part of the Muslim world. Now at long last this unsatisfactory state of affairs could be rectified. A great new army was prepared, and Boioannes was ordered to draw up a comprehensive plan for the invasion of the island in 1026. It was to be another twelve years, however, before that invasion took place; and when it did, neither the Emperor or his splendid
catapan
were there to lead it. Ten days before Christmas 1025, at the ninth hour of the day, Basil II died in the Great Palace of Constantinople, aged sixty-seven.
He had been a phenomenon: the most astonishing, perhaps, in all Byzantine history. For reasons which should be clear from the previous chapter, he had come late to maturity; but once he had found his touch it never deserted him. Despising as he did the outward trappings of power — by which almost all Emperors before and after him set so much store - he none the less effortlessly dominated and directed, by the impact of his personality alone, every branch of the administration of Church and State. He made and unmade Patriarchs, framed laws which revolutionized the whole social structure of Anatolia, summoned foreign princes again and again to do his bidding and - by virtue of the way in which he uniquely combined the strategic vision of a commander-in-chief with the meticulous attention to detail of a drill-sergeant - showed himself one of the most brilliant generals that the Empire had ever seen.
This last quality is the more surprising in that, apart from what must inevitably surround the figure of an Emperor, he was utterly devoid of glamour. Throughout history, nearly every outstanding leader in the field has had something charismatic about him, some indefinable spark that fires the imagination of his men, persuading them to follow him into battle not only willingly but with energy and enthusiasm. Of this, so far as we can judge, Basil possessed scarcely a trace. His campaigns generated no thunder or lightning. Under him the imperial army was more like a flood of volcanic lava, advancing slowly but inexorably, as
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See pp.
3
7-8.
impervious to direct frontal resistance as it was to attack from the sides or the rear. After his youthful humiliation at Trajan's Gate — which he never forgot, and for which the entire Bulgarian war was, in a sense, an act of revenge - he took few risks, and suffered few casualties. But although he was trusted by his troops, they never loved him.
No one - with the possible exception of his mother - ever did. Love as an emotion seems never to have touched him, either as lover or beloved. Indeed, there is no evidence that anyone even liked him much. The chroniclers mention no close associates. No lonelier man ever occupied the Byzantine throne - or any other, for that matter. And it is hardly surprising: Basil was ugly, dirty, coarse, boorish, totally philistine and almost pathologically mean. He was, in short, profoundly un-Byzantine. And all these things, one suspects, he would have readily admitted. He was not concerned with the social graces, not interested even in personal happiness, in laughter and the love of friends. He cared only for the greatness and prosperity of his Empire. No wonder that in his hands it reached its apogee.
In one respect only did he fail; but it was a failure so calamitous as to outweigh much of his success and to bring to naught much of his achievement. He left no children, and no one to continue his work after he was gone. He knew - better than anyone - the hopeless inadequacy of his brother Constantine, still as frivolous and pleasure-loving in his middle sixties as he had been half a century before. His own attitude to women - whether he hated them, or despised them, or (as is most likely) feared them - remains a mystery; and yet, one wonders, with all that steel discipline of his, could he not somehow have forced himself to take a wife, and engender a son or two, for the Empire's sake? Had he done so, it might have continued to prosper, might have spread still further across Europe and Asia, might have risen to yet greater heights of influence and power. Dying as he did without issue, he virtually ensured its decline.
He died on 15 December. By the 16th, that decline had already begun.
[1025-41]
Not one of the Emperors in my time - and I say this with experience of many in my life, for most of them lasted only a year - not one of them, to my knowledge, bore the burden of Empire entirely free from blame to the end.
Michael Psellus,
Ch
ronograpbia,
IV,
11
Constantine VIII, the sixty-five-year-old widower who now found himself sole Emperor of Byzantium, was as different from his brother as it is possible to be. Physically, he was magnificent: tall and well-proportioned where Basil had been short and stocky, and with a natural grace of movement and manner. A superb horseman, he had a passion for the chase and the circus, and habitually trained his own horses; in his youth he had also been an active competitor in athletic events - running, wrestling, javelin-throwing and the like - which had long been out of fashion but which he once again made popular. By the time of his succession, it need hardly be said, his athletic days were over; years of excess had ravaged his constitution and had led to chronic gout, so severe that in his last years he could hardly put a foot to the ground; but he remained to the end an impressive figure. Like his brother, he had received little formal schooling; a lively intellectual curiosity had however given him a modicum of culture - 'enough for a child', sniffs Psellus - which enabled him to hold his own with foreign ambassadors. Those whom he received in audience for the first time would frequently comment on his remarkable eloquence, the effect of which was further increased by a beautiful speaking voice. So easily, indeed, did words come to him that his secretaries were obliged to develop a shorthand of their own to keep pace with his dictation.
With all these advantages, he should — and could — have made a perfectly adequate Emperor. Why then was his reign of less than three years an unmitigated disaster? Above all, because he was devoid of any semblance of moral fibre. He was terrified of his own power, and since he knew himself incapable of handling it he reacted to every challenge with mindless cruelty. He believed every rumour and, lacking the courage for trials or confrontadons, ordered the execution or mutilation of hundreds of innocent men. Blinding was his favourite punishment. 'He had a true predilection for this form of torture,' writes Zonaras, 'since it paralyses the sufferer and renders him powerless without depriving him of life . .
.'
The sentence was known in Constantinople, with tragic irony, as 'the divine clemency of the Emperor'. His tendency to indulge later in an orgy of remorse, tearfully flinging his arms around his sightless victims and imploring their forgiveness, did little to increase his popularity.
A man so dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure - 'when he held the dice in his hand,' Psellus tells us, 'the affairs of the world, however important they might be, were suspended' - could have been expected to give careful consideration to the choice of his closest ministers and counsellors, to whom the tedious business of government might safely be entrusted. If Constantine did anything of the kind, it says litde for him as a judge of men. The all-important posts of
parakoimomenos
and Domestic of the Schools - or commander-in-chief - in the East were given to his chief valet, the eunuch Nicholas; another eunuch, Symeon -heretofore a very minor Palace functionary - was. appointed chief of police in Constantinople; yet a third, Eustathius, was raised from equally humble duties to that of Grand Heteriarch, responsible for all the foreign or barbarian mercenaries of the Imperial Guard; while a fourth, a well-known ruffian named Spondylus, became Duke of Antioch, castellan of the greatest and most strategic fortress in the Empire and chief protector of the newly conquered southern frontier against the Saracen hordes.
Only one class of Byzantines welcomed the weakness of the new regime: the Anatolian aristocracy. Their first reaction was to stage a
coup d'etat,
sweep Constantine away and replace him with an Emperor of their own; but they foolishly tried to act independently rather than in unison, and since the greater part of Basil's army remained loyal to his brother their attempts came to nothing. In the event it hardly mattered: the Emperor was quite unable to resist their demands, and within months the detested land laws were buried. Once again 'the powerful' descended on their erstwhile estates, snapping up every available acre while the poor peasant small-holders were left to survive as best they might - their distress still further increased by a decade of droughts and visitations of locusts that reduced many to literal starvation. Once more, as in the sixth century, Asia Minor became a country of
latifundia
— vast estates owned more often than not by absentee landlords and worked by serfs.
Meanwhile Constantine VIII carried on as he always had: hunting, feasting, gaming, carousing with his cronies, cavorting with his concubines, watching obscene performances in his private theatre, experimenting with more and more elaborate sauces — for he was a passionate gourmet with the digestion of an ostrich - and avoiding whenever possible the affairs of state. But such a life could not endure for ever, and on 9 November 1028 he fell mortally ill. Then, and only then, did he give a thought to the question which must long have been troubling every other citizen of Constantinople: who was to succeed him? He had, as we saw in the last chapter, no sons. Of his three daughters, the eldest had long been vowed to the religious life. The second, Zoe, had experienced one near-encounter with matrimony when she had set off to marry Otto III, only to find on her arrival in Italy that he was already dead; but that was twenty-six years in the past, and ever since then she had dragged out a mournful existence in the imperial
gynaeceum,
in the company of her younger sister Theodora — a good deal more intelligent, but less attractive in appearance - whom she cordially detested.
Theodora, while still only in her middle forties, had become distinctly spinsterish; but Zoe, though now approaching fifty and well past the age of child-bearing, still dreamed voluptuously of the marriage that she had never had and longed passionately for liberation from her Palace prison.
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She consoled herself with the knowledge that that liberation must come sooner or later; for she was her father's heir, and it was through her that the imperial diadem would be passed on to her husband. There was only one question: who was it to be? Feverish discussions by the bedside of the dying Emperor first raised the possibility of the Patrician Constantine Dalassenus, a member of one of the few families of 'the powerful' who had never wavered in their loyalty to the Macedonian house, and a
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Her spirits may have risen when, early that same year, an embassy arrived from the Empire of the West with another proposal for an imperial marriage; but they almost certainly sank again when it was discovered that the intended bridegroom - Henry, son of the Emperor Conrad II - was only ten years old. The idea, it need hardly be said, came to nothing.
messenger was dispatched to summon him urgently to Constantinople; but when word of what had happened reached the civil bureaucracy of the capital there was an immediate storm of protest and the Emperor, timorous even on his deathbed, immediately gave in. Another messenger followed the first with instructions to intercept Dalassenus and tell him to come no further. Meanwhile the bureaucracy proposed its own candidate: a sexagenarian senator named Romanus Argyrus.
Romanus came from an old aristocratic family of Constantinople. A distant relative of the Emperor
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(and a brother of the ill-starred Maria who had married young Giovanni Orseolo twenty-four years before), he was a Patrician, a Supreme Judge of one of the principal tribunals, Administrator
(economos)
of St Sophia and, finally, Imperial Prefect of the city - an office roughly equivalent to that of mayor. For all these reasons he seemed admirably suited for the throne. As it happened, he was already happily married; but Constantine had made up his mind, and anyway there was no time to be lost. The senator and his wife were both put under arrest; they were then brought to the Emperor and given a simple choice. Either there was an immediate divorce and Romanus married Zoe, in which case he would receive the rank of Caesar and, in due course,
basil
eus;
or his eyes would be put out.