The upheavals of the seventh century had transformed Byzantium. The old
urban fabric of the Roman empire largely gave way. Though the precise
causes and chronology remain controversial, archaeological evidence shows
that, in the long run, the cities of AsiaMinor and the Balkan peninsula fared
little better than those ofwestern Europe.11 Despite streams of refugees, even
the capital of Constantinople shrank dramatically in population.12
To the north, the old Danube frontier and much of the Balkans were
overrun by Slavs, Avars and Bulgars, although the imperial government
still clung to coastal strongholds like Thessaloniki or Monemvasia. The
closing of the old military roads across the Balkans effectively sundered
Byzantine Italy from the imperial centre in the winter months, when sailing
was difficult.13 To the south, Rome and Ravenna hung by a thread as the
Lombards expanded their power from the Po basin down Italy’s mountainous
spine. The bold attempt of Emperor Constans II (641–68) to defend
the empire’s southern flank by transferring his imperial headquarters back
to Italy around 662 collapsed with his murder.14 At the same time, a cashstrapped
government intensified the fiscal yield of its western provinces.15
That pressure may have reinforced tensions which had started over religious
issues.
For a government whose professional bureaucracy and military forces
were sustained largely by a land tax levied on the provinces, the fiscal
implications of such territorial losses were devastating, amounting to as
much as three-quarters of revenues.16 Defeat and the fiscal crunch forced
radical administrative and military reconfigurations in the empire’s besieged
remnants. And conjugated disaster opened more than a political crisis in a
society which lived and breathed its religious sentiment: the challenge of
Islam was ideological no less than political and military. Was the sect in
whose sign the Roman empire had conquered since Constantine’s conversion
no longer stamped with God’s seal of success?
Lifestyle and mental attitudes underwent a sea change as the amenities
of late Roman daily life became a thing of the past outside the court’s
island of archaism.17 By the seventh century, Greek had supplanted Latin
as the characteristic language of the central administration. Outside the
Latin-speaking outposts of Dalmatia and Italy, only the Latin lettering of
coins and imperial documents, a fewfossilised acclamations and the massive
presence of Latin loan words in the technical jargon of the state offered a
faint linguistic echo of the old Roman past.
Byzantine culture no longer coincided with the Byzantine polity. For
a few generations, Constantinople ceded Hellenic cultural leadership to
the empire’s geographic edges. John Damascene, the greatest Byzantine
thinker of his time, wrote his Greek theological treatises under the Arab
caliphs; the best Byzantine art adorned the shrines and pleasure palaces of
the new Islamic empire, while remarkable Byzantine hagiography of the
eighth century was produced in Italy or Palestine.18
Small wonder that one of the few pieces of contemporary Byzantine literature
translated into Latin around 700 is an apocalyptic vision of the Arab
conquest, the last Byzantine emperor’s return to Jerusalem and the impending
end of the world!19 But events would follow an unforeseeable path.
Transformed and reorganised, Byzantium was about to begin a remarkable
resurgence. Bede, who had earlier succumbed to optimistic reports of the
Roman reconquest of Africa, accurately reported the successful defence of
Constantinople from the final Arab siege of 717–18.20 That victory inaugurated
an era whose scarce sources cannot obscure the renewal of Byzantine
civilisation which, by 900, stood on the threshold of its great medieval
expansion.
The changes that produced this revamped empire are much debated.
The Byzantines themselves located the defining moments of their history
in dynasties and doctrines, a vision which says as much about emperor and
faith in Byzantine mentality as about historical trends. By these lights, confusion
and usurpation followed the toppling and execution of Heraclius’
last descendant, Justinian II (685–95/705–11), until the usurper general Leo
III (717–41) defended the capital from the Arabs and launched the ‘Isaurian’
or Syrian dynasty. The victorious Leo promoted a new cult practice whose
affinity with Islam many observers feel is undeniable: he proscribed most
religious images and their veneration as a form of idolatry. His dynasty
championed iconoclasm almost to the end, uncovering powerful stresses
within the Byzantine ruling class which succeeding generations memorialised
as religious persecution (see above, pp. 279–84).
Three generations later, the regent empress Irene recruited the support
of Pope Hadrian I (772–95) to overturn the imperial doctrine at the second
ecumenical council of Nicaea in 787 (see above, pp. 287–8). Charlemagne’s
ambassadors witnessed the palace coup that ended Irene’s independent rule
and the Isaurian dynasty in 802. This spell of short reigns, involving a toneddown
reversion to iconoclasm, led to a coup by Michael II (820–9) who
established the Amorian dynasty, named after his home town in AsiaMinor,
where excavation has uncovered the material face of the age.21 Another
regent, Empress Theodora (842–56), finally abolished iconoclasm in 843.
Her son Michael III (842–67) and the Amorian house were overturned by
a palace parvenu, Basil I (867–86). Down to Michael III’s time, soldier
emperors predominated: Leo III and his son Constantine V (741–75) were
particularly successful commanders.
Reorganisation and re-establishment of control characterise this era. Survival
required first and foremost the military stabilisation of the eastern
front, where Arab incursions into the empire’s new agrarian heartland of
western Asia Minor were increasingly checked thanks to new provincial
defence systems, known as themes. These themata spread sporadically as
events dictated. The word’s derivation is contested but it refers simultaneously
to autonomous military units and to the large territorial districts
in which they were permanently stationed and of which the empire was
composed. They may have been inspired at least in part by the western exarchates,
earlier administrative and military structures elaborated in reconquered
Italy and Africa. By the time of Charlemagne and his son, themes
and the generals or military governors (strat¯egoi) who headed them had
everywhere ended the late Roman tradition that strictly separated civil and
military administration, and government had shifted to a permanent war
footing.22
The mighty themes of Asia Minor helped slow the Arab advance. The
European themes straddled the capital’s western approaches and defended
Constantinople from the rising power of the Bulgars. But the very concentration
of power that facilitated the generals’ defensive tasks complicated the
political structure of the empire, since strat¯egoi like the future Leo III often
challenged the emperor resident in Constantinople (see above, p. 380). The
last great revolt of the themes in particular had serious consequences. The
civil war between Michael II in Constantinople and Thomas the Slav in
821–3 and the ensuing disarray contributed to the empire’s greatest territorial
losses in our period: the Arab conquest of Crete (c. 824–8) and the
beginning in 826 of the fall of Sicily, both of which had implications for
imperial communications with western Europe.
To counter their own provincial armies, the Isaurian emperors created a
new, imperial army of cavalry and infantry, known simply as ‘the regiments’
(tagmata) and headquartered in the capital. The tagmata spearheaded offensive
operations and played a key role in the Isaurians’ notable successes in
the Balkans and AsiaMinor. At sea, the seventh-century Karabisianoi fleet,
essentially conceived to defend the central coastal areas and sea approaches
to Constantinople, was superseded by provincial fleets organised as maritime
themes in the course of the eighth and ninth centuries. An imperial
fleet equipped with Greek fire was stationed at Constantinople and chiefly
destined for long-range intervention, flanked by elements of the thematic
fleets.23 On the empire’s western flank, a naval squadron based in Sicily
brought enhanced security to Italian waters in the 750s.24 Despite occasional
setbacks, the newmilitary apparatus proved effective in preserving the
empire. As surviving inscriptions attest, the emperors began refurbishing
critical infrastructures across territories that had slipped out of their control
in the seventh century. Whatever local discomfort the return of imperial
tax-collectors may have brought to any provincial landowners who might
have survived the century of storms, the centripetal dynamic was probably
powerful: imperial armies brought coinage, administrators and bishops,
who sent back to Constantinople the newly restored tax revenues; these,
in turn, reinforced the imperial treasury which financed the bureaucracy
and military apparatus and enabled the empire to extend its reach even
further.25
In the capital, the few great late Roman ministers like the praetorian prefects
or the masters of the offices, into whose offices various vertical chains
of administrative institutions formerly converged, had disappeared. They
were replaced by the omnipresent ‘accountants’ or logothetes ever vigilant
for income and expenditure of a state straining against the abyss. These new
sub-ministers reported directly to the emperor and so brought more direct
lines of authority into his hands (see above, pp. 238–9, 273). Administrative
structures were far more institutionalised than in the west, as professional
bureaucracies looked after imperial finances and justice. Whatever survived
or now emerged as a ruling class owed much to government service as the
source and sign of its wealth and power. The stresses of a ruling class in
the making mark the top echelon of society: frequent coups d’´etat, political
shake-ups and church schisms start to stabilise only in the tenth century.
From c. 800, Byzantine and Frankish sources yield the earliest glimpses of
family names and clans like the Phokai or the Argyroi who would dominate
the social scene at Byzantium’s apogee and who seem to ride a rising
tide of economic and demographic recovery.26 A state hierarchy structured
this emerging power elite, as imperial promotion granted life-long, nonhereditary
state dignities like patrician or pr¯otospatharios and salaries to
leading officials who trumpeted their titles on numerous surviving lead
seals. Each official’s place in the hierarchy was communicated by his position
in imperial ceremonies and delineated in official lists of precedence,
the earliest surviving example of which (the Taktikon Uspensky) dates from
842–3.27 For all its factions, the power of this senatorial order was such that
a prudent pope might demand that it confirm by oath guarantees issued to
his legates by a shaky regency, and it is this social group that supplied most
of the challenges to imperial authority, whether they came in the form of
conspiracies, usurpations or doctrinal dissidence.28
Iconoclasm, the most lasting and disruptive doctrinal quarrel of the era,
had many consequences. Resistance to the imperial heresy challenged the
emperor’s power in matters of doctrine and, implicitly, in other matters
as well. The considerable efforts subsequently devoted to restoring the
emperor’s prestige and redefining relations with the ruling class are most
visible in the refurbishing of imperial ceremonial. Iconoclasm affected the
institutional history of the church even more deeply. The patriarchs resided
only a stone’s throw from the imperial palace and were often under the
emperor’s thumb. The secular church’s relative tractability with respect to
imperial doctrinal shifts fostered internal conflict. Churchmen who sought
to resolve conflict without throwing the ecclesiastical hierarchy into chaos
clashed with zealots. A monastic party centering on the great cenobitic
reformer Theodore the Stoudite (759–826) burned to root out any who
had temporised with what had been the empire’s official doctrine over
nine of the last twelve decades, factionalising the church in ways which
paralleled and were perhaps connected with fissures in the lay aristocracy
(see also above, pp. 288–9). In any case conflict spilled over into other issues
and spawned a series of bitter schisms from the Moechian controversy –
a dispute centering on Emperor Constantine VI’s decision to divorce and
remarry in 795 – to the ‘Tetragamy’ in which the Italian-born patriarch
and former imperial adviser, Nicholas I Mystikos (901–7, 912–25) bitterly
opposed Emperor Leo VI’s (886–912) fourth marriage (see below, p. 503).
Since partisans of each faction challenged their opponents’ ecclesiastical
appointments, Byzantine bishops’ careers seemed noticeably unsettled in
this era.
Factionalism in the upper echelons of church and state provoked sudden
political shifts which affected relations with the west. Since the days of Pope
Leo I (440–61), whose memory the iconophile hero Theodore Graptos still
celebrated, the Roman see and its doctrinal rectitude had enjoyed great
prestige in the Constantinopolitan church. This prestige was only enhanced
by Rome’s role in the earlier monothelite controversies and Pope Martin
I’s (649–55) resistance, arrest and death in imperial custody which led the
Byzantine church to venerate him as a martyr (see above, pp. 231–2). A
Greek account of his suffering was composed in eighth-century Jerusalem
or Rome, an alternative which is itself revealing. Rome had become the
authority to which Byzantine religious thinkers under pressure appealed
for support. That the duchy of Rome was slipping out from under the
emperor’s effective administrative reach only increased its attractiveness,
hence efforts to persuade western authorities to curtail the activities of
eastern ´emigr´es at Rome.29
Culturally, four generations of theological debate for and against icons
spurred renewed examination of the Hellenic theological and cultural heritage.
The hunting out and recopying of old books – to uncover or rebut
authorities on icons – marks the earliest stages in the birth of Byzantine
humanism, the encyclopaedic movement. The political and economic
recovery of a society based in large part on written administration equally
invigorated literary culture. Imperial bureaucrats like the future patriarch
Nikephoros I (806–15) figure prominently in the early phases of the revival.30
They were reinforced by intellectuals and others like Michael Synkellos or
Patriarch Methodios (843–7) who migrated back to a recovering imperial
centre from Arab-controlled Palestine or the Italian borderlands. As in the
west so in Byzantium a new minuscule book script was the tool and hallmark
of the new culture.31 So too the new Greek writing required and
conditioned the phenomenon of transliteration. Ancient exemplars in the
old script were sought out, compared and copied in the new script. That
new writing has preserved in such Byzantine ‘editions’ most of what has
survived of classical Greek and patristic literature.
In the capital, the receding danger of Arab siege was replaced by the
imminent menace of Bulgar attack. Repairs were made to the city walls.32
Behind their protective bulk, renewal stirred in a city where nature had
reconquered much of the urban fabric. Though on a much smaller scale and
with a more religious focus than the colossal monuments of the old Roman
state, construction and redecorating were nonetheless significant by recent
standards and invite comparison with contemporarywestern efforts. In 768,
ConstantineVrestored the aqueduct ofValens, which had been interrupted
since 626 and was essential to the water-starved site of Constantinople.
Numerous churches were remodelled in the ninth century. Theophilos
(829–42) built a new suburban palace, ‘Bryas’, modelled, significantly, on
the Arab caliphs’, the new standard-bearers of luxury. Basil I constructed a
splendid new chapel, the Nea, for the Great Palace, and the ebb and flow
of icon veneration required redecoration of religious shrines according to
the dictates of the moment.33
It was, then, a changing Byzantium which bordered onwestern Christendom.
As the threat of political extinction receded, the reorganised empire
reasserted control. The progress of imperial administration allied with an
improving general situation and sporadic disarray amongst the empire’s
most lethal enemies to allow renewed, if staccato, campaigns of intervention
at the empire’s extremities, which despite all setbacks and reversals
steadily extended outwards from Constantinople.
World History
