The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (17 page)

1 So called because of the nineteen couches on which guests reclined in the antique manner during certain ceremonial banquets, particularly between Christmas and Epiphany.

At the time of his consecration, the new Emperor was just twenty years old. His life up to that time had not been a happy one. He had been only thirteen when the death of his brother Constantine had changed his father's feelings towards him from mild dislike to bitter loathing; less than three years later, there had been the enforced marriage, the banishment of his beloved mistress and his own incarceration - made a good deal more irksome by the presence of his wife Theophano, who had insisted on sharing it together with their infant daughter. So much adversity during his formative years might well have had a catastrophic effect on Leo's character. It is greatly to his credit that it did nothing of the kind. There is, admittedly, the possibility that he may have been privy to the plot - if such existed - to murder Basil; but this can never be proved. For the rest, he seems to have been kind, generous, highly intelligent and possessed of considerable charm. He was also - unlike Basil - a scholar.

The one point upon which all the chroniclers agree is Leo's intellectual calibre. The first Emperor to have been able to benefit from the cultural renaissance inaugurated by Theoctistus and Bardas and exem
plified by Photius, Constantine,
Cyril and Leo the Philosopher, he had shown himself from his earliest years to possess a first-rate academic mind, with the strong inclinations typical of his time towards philosophy and theology. He was never, it need hardly be said, the astrologer-soothsayer of his later reputation, nor could he conceivably have been the author of the immensely popular but utterly spurious collection of prophecies about the Empire and its destiny with which he was to be universally credited in later centuries. He was, on the other hand, a man of very considerable learning - more, almost certainly, than could have been claimed by any of his predecessors on the Byzantine throne: one who had read widely on many subjects and who spent his leisure hours composing not only liturgical poems and hymns but also a vast collection of sermons and homilies which he was wont to deliver personally, on the great feasts of the Church, from the pulpit of St Sophia. These effusions occasionally reveal a somewhat disconcerting lack of self-consciousness: diatribes against those who 'instead of bathing in the pure waters of matrimony prefer to wallow in the mud of fornication' come strangely from the lips of a man who kept a regular and recognized mistress from the age of fifteen; while the words at the head of this chapter must surely have caused him considerable embarrassment towards the end of his life. The general tenor of his writings, however, leaves us in no doubt of the breadth of his scholarship, which was enough to earn him, while still in his twenties, the sobriquet of
sophotatos,
'the most wise'; and although outside the Greek world we tend to drop the superlative form of the adjective, it is as Leo the Wise that - rightly or wrongly - he is still known today.

In the circumstances it was only to be expected that when Leo succeeded to the throne - in theory he shared it with his brother Alexander, but Alexander was a pleasure-loving nonentity who took no interest in government and asked nothing better than to be relieved of all responsibilities - he should have made radical changes in the administration; nor does it come as a surprise to learn that the chief beneficiary of these changes was Stylian Zautses — he who had played so questionable a part in the mystery surrounding Basil's death - who now became Master of the Offices and Logothete of the Course, effectively the director of imperial policy at home and abroad. The chief casualty, equally predictably, was Photius. After all that he had suffered, directly and indirectly, at the Patriarch's hands, Leo would have had sufficient cause to dismiss him for personal reasons alone; but there was more to it than that. The long years of the quarrel with Ignatius had revealed all too clearly the danger of allowing the Church too much independence or freedom of action; and Photius's views on the relationship between the political and spiritual thrones as set out in the
Epanagoge
seemed to the new Emperor to savour more than a little of treason. For the second time the Patriarch found himself obliged to sign an act of abdication; on this occasion, however, he did not escape so easily. Early in
887
he and Theodore Santabarenus were brought before a specially-convened tribunal and accused of having been involved, four years previously, in a conspiracy against the State. Santabarenus, found guilty, was blinded and exiled; Photius, devious to the last, was permitted to retire to a remote monastery in the Armeniakon Theme, where he was able to continue his theological and literary work undisturbed, and where he died in obscurity a few years later.

The choice of his successor showed clearly enough the way Leo's mind was working: on Christmas Day
886
he audaciously raised to the patriarchal throne his own youngest brother Stephen, not yet sixteen years old. Never in the history of the Eastern Church had the supreme ecclesiastical authority been entrusted to one so young; surprisingly,
however, Stephen's appointment seems to have aroused little opposition.
1
It may be that the bishops and abbots had simply had enough of the endless squabbling of the past forty years and genuinely welcomed the prospect of a period of peace and understanding between Church and State, even at some cost to their effective independence. There was after all no other obvious candidate for the post, and Stephen - who was a weak and sickly youth, unlikely to last very long - may well have struck them as a harmless stopgap who would ensure his brother a few years' respite while he settled on to his throne. If so, they were right: the new Patriarch was to prove every bit as cooperative as expected. Alas, only six and a half years later he was dead; his successors, as we shall see, were to prove distinctly less amenable.

With Stylian Zautses as his political adviser and Stephen as his willing instrument in Church affairs, Leo was now admirably equipped to govern bis Empire. On the domestic front there were no major upheavals for the rest of the century, which was to end on a particularly happy note when an important synod — it may even have been a General Council - was summoned in
899
and did much to restore relations between the Eastern and Western Churches. (At the time it seemed also to have settled the still-smouldering dispute that divided the Photian and Ignatian factions; but this, as we shall shortly see, was soon to be rekindled by the affair of the Emperor's fourth marriage.) Leo was con-sequendy able to give his full attention to the tremendous work initiated by his father - the revision and recodification of the Roman law.

His reputation as a lawgiver - and indeed as the most, important in Byzantine history since Justinian himself - was, it must be said, partly due to Basil and his commission of distinguished legists, under the chairmanship of the
protospath
arius
2
Symbatius, to whom he had entrusted the task of 'purification' mentioned in the preceding chapter. Not a little of the credit must also go to Stylian, who inspired him and drove him forward, and after whose death the whole project seems to have lost a certain impetus. But Leo too applied himself to the work, at least in those early years, with energy and enthusiasm; and there can be no doubt that it gained much from both his erudition and his literary skills.

1 Forty-seven years later, Romanus
i
was to elevate his own youngest son Theophylact, who was only a month or two older.

a One of the eighteen honorary ranks of the Byzantine imperial service. The three highest -
Caesar, no
bilissimus
and
c
uropalates —
were normally reserved for members of the Emperor's family; they were followed by
magister, an
tihypatus, patricius, protospath
arius
and eleven others.

The results were published in series over the years: known as the
Basilica
and consisting of six mighty volumes, each containing ten books, they were largely based on Justinian's
Codex
and
Digest;
they did, however, incorporate a good deal of later work - including parts of the
Proch
eiron
- and in addition possessed two inestimable advantages. First, the laws were systematically arranged: a given subject was treated
in extenso
in a given book, and nowhere else. Second, they were written in Greek rather than Latin, which for well over two centuries had been a dead language in Constantinople, comprehensible only to scholars. Thus, from the reign of Leo VI onwards, the work of Justinian was effectively superseded; it is henceforth the
Basilica,
rather than the
Codex, Digest
or
Institutes,
on which the medieval legal structure of Byzantium is founded.

For all their importance, however, the
Basilica
deal mainly with first principles of right and wrong; they tell us disappointingly little about their time. A good deal more illuminating in this respect are Leo's so-called
Novels,
the
113
separate decrees by which he revises or revokes older laws according to developments in political or religious ideas. Once again we must be chary of ascribing too much responsibility for them to the Emperor personally: the seventeen which deal with exclusively ecclesiastical matters may well be from his own hand; the remainder, however, though ostensibly addressed to Stylian, are more probably the work of the Logothete himself. Of the latter, the most significant are those revoking the ancient rights of the Curia and the Senate. For a hundred years and more these two institutions - whose functions had formerly been to provide checks on imperial power - had been declining in importance; at last, in
Novels
46, 47
and
78,
they received their quietus. This is not to say that they were dissolved. The Senate in particular remained active and was not afraid to express its opinions; and it is worth noting that when Leo was at the point of death he specifically committed his son to its care. But it no longer existed as a political force in the State, nor did it enjoy any constitutional power.

Only in ecclesiastical matters was the Emperor still something less than omnipotent. God's Vice-Gerent on Earth he may have been; yet he remained after all a layman, while the Church had its own leader in the Patriarch of Constantinople. Admittedly it was he who appointed the Patriarch; but the appointment, like that to all high ecclesiastical offices, required the consent of the clergy. He was also bound by the decisions of the Councils, his duty where matters of dogma were concerned being merely to safeguard the Orthodox creed as defined by those authorized
to do so. In all other fields, however, his power was absolute: chosen by God, Equal of the Apostles, he was master of the government of the Empire, commander-in-chief of its forces, sole lawgiver and supreme judge, whose decisions were subject to no appeal and irrevocable by all but himself.

That blessed period of domestic quiet which accounts in large measure for the remarkable speed with which the new legislation was published , in the last decade of the ninth century was not, unfortunately for Leo, reflected by a similar degree of tranquillity abroad. In the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean, the Arabs kept up the pressure: some years were worse than others, but there had been few indeed since the fall of Sicily and Crete to Saracen arms when an imperial city had not been raided or imperial shipping attacked. A more immediate threat, however - and a very much more unexpected one - came in
894
from Bulgaria. After the conversion of King Boris twenty-nine years before, the Byzantines had hoped that the two Christian peoples might henceforth live together in peace; but Boris had abdicated in
889
and had retired to the monastery of St Panteleimon near Preslav, leaving the throne to his elder son, Vladimir; and Vladimir had proved a disaster. In a violent reaction against his father and all that he had stood for, he had identified himself with the once-powerful boyar aristocracy which Boris had done his utmost to crush. The boyars were old-fashioned reactionaries who detested Christianity and asked nothing better than to return to the bad old days of privilege and paganism; Vladimir agreed with them entirely, and with their support was rapidly undoing all his father's work and encouraging a return to the ancient tribal gods.

Had he waited another few years, he might even have succeeded. The Bulgarian Church had got off to a fairly shaky start and had had little time to take root; many of its members may well have felt a similar nostalgia. But he had reckoned without Boris, whose espousal of the contemplative life had not prevented him from closely following developments in the outside world. In an explosion of rage which can almost be heard down the centuries the old king burst out of his monastery, took over the government without a struggle, deposed and blinded Vladimir and, summoning a great conference from every corner of his kingdom, bade the assembled delegates acclaim his younger son, Symeon, as their ruler. Unhesitatingly, they did so; whereupon he returned to his cloister, never to leave it again.