The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Read online

  The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01

  Book Jacket

  Series: Byzantium [1]

  Tags: Z, Non Fiction, History

  SUMMARY:

  'This thrilling book is the first occasion on which early Byzantine history has been rendered both readable and credible' - Independent. 'He is brilliant . . . He writes like the most cultivated modern diplomat attached by a freak of time to the Byzantine court, with intimate knowledge, tactful judgement and a consciousness of the surviving monuments' - Independent. 'Lord Norwich's skill is to communicate . . . the humanity of his subject - the human faces of emperor and priest - and to transmit his own imaginative interest to ourselves . . . Lord Norwich has appeared as a silver-tongued Virgil to guide us through Tartarian regions with the amenity and amusement of a luxury tour' - Sunday Times. 'The reader is conveyed in comfort, as it were in a very superior hovercraft, which glides smoothly over all the unevenness of the ground, to the regular, melodious sound of the author's prose' - Sunday Telegraph.

  JOHN JULIUS NORWICH

  BYZANTIUM

  The Early Centuries

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Viking 1988 Published in Penguin Books 1990 5 7 9 10 8 6

  Copyright © John Julius Norwich, 1988 All rights reserved

  'Sailing to Byzantium' by W. B. Yeats is taken from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats and is reproduced by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd, on behalf of Michael B. Yeats and Macmillan London Ltd. The translations of Procopius by B. H. Dewing, published in the Loeb Classical Library, arc reproduced by kind permission of Wm Heinemann Ltd and Harvard University Press The translations by G. A. Williamson of Eusebius's The History of the Church, © G. A. Williamson, 196S

  Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic Filmset in Garamond

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  For Moll

  Contents

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Constantine the Great [to 323]

  The Adoption of the Faith [323-6]

  Constantinople [326-37]

  Julian the Apostate [337-63]

  The Empire at Bay [363-95]

  The Fall of Rome [395-410]

  Of Heresies and Huns [410-53]

  The Fall of the West [455-93]

  The Rise of Justinian [493-532]

  Belisarius [532-40]

  Totila the Goth [540—49]

  The Last Years of Justinian [549-65]

  The Downward Drift [565-610]

  The First Crusader [610-641]

  The Heraclian Line [641-85]

  The Emperor who Lost his Nose [685-71

  The First Iconoclasts [711-75]

  Irene [775-802]

  Byzantine Monuments Surviving in Istanbul

  List of Emperors

  Bibliography

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt thanks are due to Mollie Philipps, for all her hard work on the illustrations; and to Kim Erkan for her invaluable help in Istanbul.

  As so often in the past, I have once again to express my gratitude and admiration to the London Library, in which virtually every word of this book has been written; and to its Librarian Douglas Matthews, for having produced yet another superb index.

  Introduction

  Of that Byzantine Empire the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed . . . There has been no other enduring civilisation so absolutely destitute of all the forms and elements of greatness ... Its vices were the vices of men who had ceased to be brave without learning to be virtuous . . . Slaves, and willing slaves, in both their actions and their thoughts, immersed in sensuality and in the most frivolous pleasures, the people only emerged from their listlessness when some theological subtlety, or some chivalry in the chariot races, stimulated them to frantic riots . . . The history of the Empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides.

  This somewhat startling diatribe is taken from W. E. H. Lecky's History of European Morals, published in 1869; and although to modern ears it is perhaps not quite so effective as the author meant it to be - his last sentence makes Byzantine history sound not so much monotonous as distinctly entertaining - the fact remains that, for the past 200 years and more, what used to be known as the Later Roman Empire has had an atrocious press. The long campaign of denigration seems to have been given its initial impetus in the eighteenth century by Edward Gibbon who, like all classically educated Englishmen and Englishwomen of his day, saw Byzantium as the betrayal of all that was best in ancient Greece and Rome; and it continued until well into the present century. After the First World War, under the influence of Robert Byron, David Talbot-Rice, Steven Runciman and their friends and followers, the pendulum began to swing; but it was only after the Second - when the ease, speed and relative comfort of travel in the Levant made Byzantine monuments at last generally accessible - that the Empire came into its own again and was at last recognized, in its own very different way, as a worthy successor to the two mighty civilizations which had gone before.

  The trouble was, for most of us, that we knew so little about it. The old attitudes died hard. During my five years at one of England's oldest and finest public schools, Byzantium seems to have been the victim of a conspiracy of silence. I cannot honestly remember its being mentioned, far less studied; and so complete was my ignorance that I should have been hard put to define it in even general terms until I went to Oxford. Many people, I suspect, feel similarly vague today; and it is for them, above all, that this book has been written.

  It does not tell the whole story. The Byzantine Empire, from its foundation by Constantine the Great on Monday n May 330 to its conquest by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II on Tuesday 29 May 1453, lasted for a total of 1,123 years and 18 days; and, as I soon discovered when writing a history of Venice a few years ago, that sort of span simply cannot be dealt with in one volume of manageable size. One or two historians have tried it, but the results never seem to me entirely satisfactory: either the reader is presented with so sketchy and disconnected an account that he loses his way, or else he is greeted by a remorseless fusillade of facts that sends him running for cover. I have preferred a more leisurely approach, and have consequently limited this first volume to what amounts, very roughly, to the first 500 years. The two opening chapters form a prologue, being concerned essentially with the early years of Constantine and his rise to power - a story that seems to me not just fascinating in itself, but also indispensable if we are to understand what follows; only in Chapter 3 do we come to the inauguration of Constantinople as the New Rome, the point at which the Roman Empire - though it never cast off its old title - can properly be called the By
zantine. The volume ends 470 years later with the coronation of Charlemagne as Roman Emperor of the West on Christmas Day, 800 -one of the most convenient dates in all history - and the appearance, for the first time, of a rival to the old imperial throne on the Bosphorus. A sequel will carry the saga on to the Crusades; and a third volume will bring it to its heroic - and almost unbearably tragic - end.

  What, you may ask, ever induced me to take on so formidable an assignment? In fact the idea originated not with me at all but with my friend Bob Gottlieb, some time before he left my American publishers to edit the New Yorker, and though I remember feeling a little daunted by the magnitude of the task he suggested, I do not think there was any real hesitation. For over a quarter of a century already I had been captivated by the Byzantine world - ever since my first visit to Greece in 1954 and, in the following year, my posting to the British Embassy,

  Belgrade; and three years subsequently spent in Beirut - when that enchanting city was still one of the happiest places in the world to live in - had only deepened my affection for the Eastern Mediterranean and all that it stood for. It was no coincidence, when I finally left the Foreign Service in 1964 to try to earn my living by my pen, that I turned for my first book - written jointly with Reresby Sitwell - to the one place which, more than any other, still breathes the very spirit of Byzantium: Mount Athos.

  My most recent preoccupation has been with Venice, first a province and later an offshoot of the Empire, where St Mark's - designed, incidentally, on the model of Constantine's Church of the Holy Apostles -and the Cathedral of Torcello both contain Byzantine mosaics worthy, to rank with those of Constantinople itself. And yet how astonishingly different the two cities are to write about! Throughout her history Venice, protected from terra firma by the still, shallow waters of the lagoon, radiated security; until her very end she was inviolate, and she knew it. Constantinople, on the other hand, lived under almost perpetual threat of attack. Siege followed siege; again and again the city was saved only by the heroism of the Emperor and his subjects. The inhabitants, too, could scarcely have been more dissimilar. The Venetians were cynics: hard-faced, commercially-minded men of the world. The Byzantines were mystics, for whom Christ, his Mother and the Saints were as real as members of their own families. Finally and most important of all, Venice was governed by faceless committees - elected groups of black-robed men, working in secret, their composition constantly changing, taking their decisions collectively, avoiding all individual prominence. Byzantium was an autocracy, ruled by an Emperor half-way to heaven, Equal to the Apostles, God's Vice-Gerent on Earth, who held the life of every one of his subjects in the hollow of his hand. Some of these Emperors were heroes, others were monsters; but they were never, never dull.

  For that reason alone, this book has been a constant pleasure to write; but it is also, in its modest way, a tribute. Our civilization has never adequately acknowledged the debt it owes to the Empire of the East. Were it not for that great oriental bastion of Christendom, what chance would Europe have had against the armies of the King of Persia in the seventh century, or those of the Caliph of Baghdad in the eighth? What language would we be speaking today, and what god would we worship? In the cultural field, too, our indebtedness is great. After the barbarian invasions and the fall of the Emperor in Rome, the light of learning was almost extinguished in western Europe, apart from a few fitful monastic flickers; it was on the banks of the Bosphorus that it continued to blaze, and that the old classical heritage was preserved. Much of what we know of antiquity - especially of Greek and Latin literature and of Roman law - would have been lost for ever but for the scholars and scribes and copyists of Constantinople.

  These tremendous services, however, have long since been taken for granted and forgotten. In our own day there remains to us only one continual reminder of the genius of the Byzantines: the splendour of their art. Never in the history of Christianity - or, one is tempted to add, of any other of the world's religions - has any school of artists contrived to infuse so deep a degree of spirituality into its work. Byzantine theologians used to insist that religious painters and mosaicists should seek to reflect the image of God. It was no small demand; but in the churches and monasteries of the Empire we see it, again and again, triumphantly accomplished.

  Finally let me emphasize that this book makes no claim to academic scholarship. No professional Byzantinist perusing its pages will find anything that he does not know already - except, very likely, the occasional statement and opinion with which he will disagree. So be it. For periods as remote as that with which we are dealing the surviving records are often pitifully thin, and on those occasions when we have two chroniclers covering the same ground we are as likely as not to find them contradicting one another. The luckless historian can only weigh the probabilities and tell his story as best he can.

  Nevertheless, though the backwaters of the river are sometimes murky, the main stream flows clear enough; and along that stream I have tried to steer as straight - and as accurate - a course as I can. There is still a long way to go before we reach the sea; but the journey will be, I trust, its own reward.

  John Julius Norwich London, December 1987

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  W. B. Yeats

  'Sailing to Byzantium'

  Constantine the Great

  [to 323]

  With such impiety pervading the human race, and the State threatened with destruction, what relief did God devise? ... I myself was the instrument he chose . . . Thus, beginning at the remote Ocean of Britain, where the sun sinks beneath the horizon in obedience to the law of Nature, with God's help I banished and eliminated every form of evil then prevailing, in the hope that the human race, enlightened through me, might be recalled to a proper observance of God's holy laws.

  Constantine the Great, quoted by Eusebius, De Vita Constantini, II, 28

  In the beginning was the word - surely one of the most magically resonant place-names in all history. Even had its Empire never existed, even had there been no W. B. Yeats to celebrate it, even had it remained what it was at the outset - a modest Greek settlement at the furthest extremity of the European continent, without pretensions or ambitions - Byzantium would surely have impressed itself upon our minds and memories by the music of its name alone, conjuring up those same visions that it evokes today: visions of gold and malachite and porphyry, of stately and solemn ceremonial, of brocades heavy with rubies and emeralds, of sumptuous mosaics dimly glowing through halls cloudy with incense. Historians used to maintain that the town was founded in 658 BC by a certain Byzas, leader of a group of colonists from the Greek city of Megara. They now inform us that Byzas may never have existed, and we can only pray that they are right. Magic is always best left unexplained.

  Next, the site; and this too was supreme. Standing on the very threshold of Asia and occupying the easternmost tip of a broad, triangular promontory, its south side washed by the Propontis - which we nowadays call the Sea of Marmara - and its north-east by that broad, deep and navigable inlet, some five miles long, known since remotest antiquity as the Golden Horn, it had been moulded by nature at once into a magnificent harbour and a well-nigh impregnable stronghold, needing as it did major fortification only on its landward side. Even an attack from the sea was difficult enough, the Marmara itself being protected by two long and narrow straits - the Bosphorus to the east and the Hellespont (or Dardanelles) to the west. So perfectly suited, in fact, was the place for colonization that the inhabitants of Chalcedon, who had founded their own town seventeen years earlier on the opposite shore of the Bosphorus, became proverbial for their blindness:
how otherwise, it was said, could they possibly have missed so infinitely preferable a site only a mile or two away?

  Finally, the man: Constantine I, Emperor of Rome. No ruler in all history - not Alexander nor Alfred, not Charles nor Catherine, not Frederick nor even Gregory - has ever more fully merited his title of 'the Great'; for within the short space of some fifteen years he took two decisions, either of which alone would have changed the future of the civilized world. The first was to adopt Christianity - the subject, only a generation before, of official persecutions more brutal than any that it has suffered before or since - as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The second was to transfer the capital of that Empire from Rome to the new city which he was building on the site of old Byzantium and which was to be known, for the next sixteen centuries, by his name: the city of Constantine, Constantinople. Together, these two decisions and their consequences have given him a serious claim to be considered

  excepting only Jesus Christ, the Buddha and the Prophet Mohammed