The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 Read online

  The Nika revolt (as it came to be called) taught Justinian a salutary lesson. Within a few weeks he felt sufficiently confident to reinstate Tribonian and John of Cappadocia in their former positions; but thereafter he was more circumspect, and though taxation remained heavy it no longer went beyond the bounds of reason. His subjects, too, were chastened. Thirty thousand of them indeed were dead, and there must have been countless others who attributed to divine providence alone their absence from the Hippodrome on that fateful afternoon. Emperors, it now appeared, could not be made and unmade as easily as they had thought. With Anastasius they had been able to do more or less as they liked; Justinian had shown that he was not to be trifled with.

  Meanwhile, for Emperor and people alike, there was work to be done.

  Their capital lay in ruins around them; whatever the cost, it must be rebuilt - where possible, on a yet grander and more impressive scale than before. Primarily, this was the responsibility of the City Prefect and his staff; but the central buildings of the capital were obviously too important to be left to subordinates, and first among them was St Sophia itself. This, Justinian resolved, was to be his own creation, and he lost no time. On 23 February 532, just thirty-nine days after the destruction of its predecessor, work began on the third and final Church of the Holy Wisdom.

  Although the earliest of the three churches to be built on the site had been conceived by Constantine himself, it was not actually erected until the reign of his son Constantius, around the year 360, and lasted for less than half a century before being burnt down during the riots following the banishment of St John Chrysostom in 404.1 The second church, re-dedicated eleven years later by Theodosius II, was almost certainly a near-replica of the first, designed once again on the traditional basilican plan. Justinian's building, however, was to bear no resemblance to these. It was to be infinitely larger, for one thing - far and away the largest religious building in the entire Christian world.2 It would also be square rather than rectangular, reaching its climax not with its apsed sanctuary at the eastern end but with its high central dome. So revolutionary was the concept, indeed, that it seems likely that Justinian was already planning it with his two chosen architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, long before the Nika rising made it necessary; for all their undoubted genius, they could hardly have prepared their working drawings in under six weeks.

  Of these two architects we know little. Anthemius, a Greek from Asia Minor - Tralles, now Aydin, was a small town in the valley of the Meander - was primarily a mathematician and engineer, who is thought to have studied in Alexandria before finding his way to Constantinople. Once there, he worked for Justinian on St Sergius and St Bacchus, so impressing his master that he was later given technical authority over all the new building work in the capital. His colleague Isidore came from the same region, and may also have travelled to Egypt for his education: he is known to have written a brilliant commentary on a famous treatise on vaulting by the first-century mathematician Heron of Alexandria. By the time he received the imperial summons, he was already celebrated as the foremost teacher of his day.

  See p. 130.

  It would remain so until the building of Seville Cathedral some 700 years later.

  From the outset Justinian seems to have given the two men carte blanche, regarding both the design and the cost of the building. His only stipulations were that it should be of unparalleled magnificence, and that it should be erected in the shortest possible time: he was already fifty years old and was determined to see it complete before he died. Procopius tells us1 that he gathered artisans and craftsmen 'from the whole world'; according to another authority, he appointed a hundred foremen, each with a hundred men under him, setting 5,000 to the north side and 5,000 to the south, so that each of the two teams should strive to work faster than the other. Meanwhile an imperial rescript was circulated to all the provinces of the Empire, requiring their governors to examine all the ancient sites and to send at once to the capital any surviving classical remains that might be suitable for incorporation in the new structure. In response, we are told, eight porphyry columns, once part of a temple of the Sun, were received from Rome and eight of green marble from Ephesus. More marble, of every colour and kind, was especially quarried, for use on the walls and pavements:

  . . . the fresh green from Carystus, and many-coloured marble from the Phrygian range, in which a rosy blush mingles with white or shines bright with flowers of deep red and silver. There is a wealth of porphyry too, powdered with brilliant stars, that once weighed down the boats of the broad Nile. You may see an emerald green from Sparta, and the glittering marble with the undulating veins which the tool has worked from the deep bosom of the Iassian hills, showing slanting streaks of blood-red and livid white . . . Stone too there is that the Libyan sun, warming with his golden light, has nurtured from the dark clefts of the Moorish hills, of crocus colour sparkling like gold; and that product of the Celtic crags, a wealth of crystals, like milk splashed over a surface of shining black. There is the precious onyx, looking as if gold were glowing through it, and the marble that the land of Atrax yields ... in parts a fresh green like the sea or emerald stone, or again like blue cornflowers in grass, with here and there a drift of fallen snow . . .

  So wrote a certain Paul the Silentiary, whose long poem in praise of the new church - one might almost call it a rhapsody - was composed for an encaenia held there on Christmas Eve, 563, when the building was reconsecrated after being damaged in two successive earthquakes. Despite his flowery Homeric language, he is immensely detailed and astonishingly accurate - so accurate indeed that one feels that he must have written the poem in the building itself. 'The vaulting,' he continues, 'is

  1 Buildings, i, i.

  formed of countless little squares of gold cemented together. And the golden stream of glittering rays pours down and strikes the eyes of men, so that they can scarcely bear to look. It is as if one were to gaze upon the mid-day sun in spring, when it gilds every mountain height.'

  Interestingly, neither the Silentiary nor any of his contemporaries mention the existence of figurative mosaics. One would not in fact expect any such work of Justinian's time to have survived, since it would certainly have been destroyed by the iconoclasts in the eighth century; had there ever been any, it is inconceivable that neither Paul nor Procopius - to say nothing of other writers - would have said a word about it. The latter, on the other hand, echoes the former when he remarks that the interior of the great church was so full of light and sunshine as to suggest some inner radiance of its own, and there can be no doubt but that virtually the whole surface of the interior above the marble revetments - an area estimated at some four acres - was completely covered with mosaic, either in uniform gold or in decorative patterns in which red, blue and green tesserae were added. The vast majority of this original work is still in place, though we have regrettably lost the huge jewelled cross on a background of stars that once spread itself across the dome.1

  But the splendour of the church was not confined to its surface decoration: architecturally, too, it seemed to its earliest visitors little less than a miracle. To Evagrius the historian, it was 'a great and incomparable work' whose beauty 'surpassed all powers of description'; to Procopius it seemed to soar up to heaven, rising above the surrounding buildings 'like a huge ship anchored among them'. But to most observers the most magical feature of all was that extraordinary dome, 107 feet across and 160 above the pavement, several times broader and higher than any other dome ever previously attempted, a shallow saucer pierced around its rim with forty windows so that it appeared to be 'suspended from heaven by a golden chain'.

  And then there was the furniture: the fifty-foot iconostasis in solid silver, hung with sacred images of angels and apostles, the Holy Virgin occupying the place of honour in the centre; the high altar, encrusted with gold and precious stones, covered by a silver ciborium resting on four richly decorated columns; the immense circular ambo for the

>   1 The first dome collapsed on 7 May 558, after being severely weakened by earthquakes in 553 and 557. It was rebuilt bv the nephew and namesake of Isidore who gave it a slightly steeper pitch, raising its crown some twenty feet higher than that of its predecessor; but this second dome collapsed with the western arch in 989, as did the third when the eastern arch fell in 1546. The present dome is the fourth, now reinforced with the iron chains inserted by the Italian architect Ciaspare Fossari in the course of his major restoration during the 1860s.

  preacher, ablaze with polychrome marble and mosaic; the gold lamps innumerable. The relics, too, were such as no other church could match, dominated as they were by the True Cross itself, brought back from Jerusalem by the Empress Helena with the other instruments of the Passion, among them were Christ's swaddling clothes and the table at which he and his Apostles sat for the Last Supper. Also to be revered were the chains of St Peter, the carpet of St Nicholas, the head of St Pantaleimon and the arm of St Germanus, which was laid upon each succeeding Patriarch at his induction. No wonder that Justinian, entering the completed building for the first time on 27 December 537 - just five years, ten months and four days after the laying of the first stone - stood for a long time in silence before being heard to murmur: 'Solomon, I have surpassed thee.'

  IO

  Belisarius

  532 -40

  His lofty stature and majestic countenance fulfilled their expectations of a hero ... By the union of liberality and justice he acquired the love of the soldiers, without alienating the affections of the people. The sick and wounded were relieved with medicines and money, and still more efficaciously by the healing visits and smiles of their commander ... In the licence of a military life, none could boast that they had seen him intoxicated with wine; the most beautiful captives of Gothic or Vandal race were offered to his embraces, but he turned aside from their charms, and the husband of Antonina was never suspected of violating the laws of conjugal fidelity. The spectator and historian of his exploits has observed that amidst the perils of war he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment; that in the deepest distress he was animated bv real or apparent hope, but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune.

  Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. XLI

  In the period of relative domestic tranquillity that followed the Nika revolt and the peace concluded with Persia eight months later, Justinian was at last able to turn his mind to what he had always determined was to be the primary objective of his reign: to recover the Empire of the West. Like the vast majority of his subjects, he believed the Roman Empire to be one and indivisible, the political manifestation of Christendom; that half of it should have fallen into alien and heretic hands was an offence against the Will of God, and it was therefore his Christian duty to regain his lost heritage. During the previous century such a reconquest had been impossible: the Empire had been hard put to protect itself from the Germanic and Slavic tribes forever pressing on its frontiers, while the barbarian infiltration of the army itself made its very loyalty uncertain. But by Justinian's time these problems were largely solved; moreover, as it happened, he had found in Belisarius one of the most brilliant generals in all Byzantine history - the one man, he believed, to whom this sacred task could confidently be entrusted.

  To this end he had recalled him from Mesopotamia in the autumn of 531. Already two years before, the young commander had been promoted to be magister militum per orientem, in which capacity he had inflicted an overwhelming defeat on a far superior Persian army at Dara, some twenty miles north-west of Nisibis. His military gifts were unquestioned: his personal courage had been proved again and again, and he was a natural leader of men. He had but one liability: his wife, whom he married soon after his return from the East. Antonina's background was not unlike that of her Empress. She too had been brought up in the theatre and the circus and her past, if not as lurid as Theodora's, was certainly far from stainless. At least twelve years older than her husband - Procopius says twenty-two - she had already had several children, in or out of wedlock. Unlike Theodora, she made no attempt to reform her character after her prestigious marriage, and in the years to come was to cause her husband much embarrassment and not a little anguish; but Belisarius, it seems, continued to love her and -perhaps to keep his eye on her as much as for any other reason - was accustomed to take her with him on all his campaigns.

  The first territory to be singled out for reconquest was the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa. Much had happened in the sixty-five years since that humiliating fiasco when the expedition under Basileus had been annihilated by King Gaiseric. The latter had died in 477, having given his Kingdom a constitution in which the succession was decreed by the laws of primogeniture - putting it, in this respect, well in advance of any other Germanic state and even of the Roman Empire itself - and the throne of Carthage had accordingly passed to Gaiseric's grandson, an elderly and mildly homosexual bachelor named Hilderic. The offspring of Princess Eudocia, that daughter of Valentinian III who had been brought back to Africa with her mother and sister after the Vandal sack of Rome and subsequently married off to Gaiseric's son,1 he was a Roman on his mother's side who had so far adopted Roman ways as to renounce the Arian heresy of his forefathers and embrace the orthodox faith; and his hatred of war was such that, if Procopius is to be believed, he would never allow the subject to be mentioned in his presence. All this was of course welcome news to Justinian, who understandably believed that with a little quiet diplomacy he could bring the Vandal Kingdom back into the imperial fold without the loss of a single Roman

  1 Sec p. 16).

  soldier. Unfortunately, he had less time than he thought. In 5 31 Hilderic's distant cousin Gelimer finally lost patience, and with the enthusiastic support of most of the Vandal nobility seized the throne for himself -replying to the Emperor's immediate protest with a letter pointing out that 'nothing was more desirable than that a monarch should mind his own business'.

  Gelimer had, it must be admitted, a point; but to Justinian these were fighting words. His advisers, remembering the earlier debacle, advised strongly against war, John of Cappadocia most insistently of all:

  You propose, O Emperor, to launch an expedition against Carthage, to which the land journey is one of a hundred and forty days. If you entrust your army to ships, you must cross a wide waste of waters to the utmost limits of the sea. Should misfortune overtake your forces, it will be a full year before the news is brought back to us. Even if you are victorious, you will never hold Africa while Italy and Sicily are in the hands of others, while if you are defeated your breach of the treaty will put the whole Empire in jeopardy. Success, in short, will bring you no lasting gain, while failure will risk the ruin of your flourishing and well-established state.1

  For Justinian, however, Gelimer's insult continued to rankle; and after an Eastern bishop had informed him of a dream in which the Almighty had promised his assistance in a holy war against the Arian Vandals he needed no further prompting. Belisarius was given his orders; and on or about Midsummer Day 533 the Emperor stood at the window of the Palace to watch the departure of the expedition. It consisted of 5,000 cavalry and twice as many infantry - at least half of them barbarian mercenaries, mostly Huns but with a strong admixture of Heruli from Scandinavia. They travelled in a fleet of 500 transports, escorted by ninety-two dromons.2 On the flagship, together with the commander himself, were his military secretary Procopius and, as usual, his wife Antonina.

  The journey began inauspiciously, when two drunken Huns - and the Huns, notes Procopius, were the most intemperate drinkers in the world - murdered one of their comrades and were summarily hanged by Belisarius on the hill above Abydos. After that the fleet made good time to

  1 Procopius, Hillary oj the Wars, III, x, 14-16.

  2 The dromon was the smallest type of Byzantine warship, designed for lightness and speed. It carried a crew of some twentv rowe
rs at a single bank of oars, and was roofed over to protect them from enemy missiles.

  Methoni, at the south-west corner of the Peloponnese; but disaster struck when the sacks of ship's biscuit provided by John of Cappadocia were found to be mouldy - not, unfortunately, before 500 men had been severely poisoned. (Procopius claims that John, wishing as always to economize, had sent the dough not to a proper bakery but to the furnace which heated the baths of Achilles in Constantinople, with the result that it had been only half-baked.) Many days elapsed before the ships could be revictualled with local produce and were able to continue, via Zacynthus (Zante), to Catania.

  After a brief period of Vandal rule, Sicily had been bought back by Odoacer in return for an annual subsidy. Since the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy was still, as in the days of Theodoric, friendly to Byzantium, Catania provided a useful vantage-point from which Belisarius could prepare his fleet for the final attack, while simultaneously gathering what intelligence he could about the enemy dispositions. To this end Procopius was sent south to Syracuse - where, as luck would have it, he soon ran into an old friend from his boyhood, one of whose slaves had returned only three days previously from Carthage. The information that this man was able to give him could hardly have been more welcome: the Vandals had heard nothing of the approaching fleet, and had indeed recently dispatched a major expedition of their own to put down a rising - inspired, though they did not know it, by Justinian himself -in Sardinia.