The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (24 page)

might be prepared to put his own magnificent navy at his disposal for a joint expedition, and he accordingly dispatched an embassy to the court at Mahdiya to discuss the idea. These initial overtures were distinctly encouraging, and it was agreed that the discussions should be continued with Symcon in person; but when the ambassadors sailed for home accompanied by an Arab delegation, they were intercepted on the high seas by a Byzantine squadron of Calabrian Greeks and escorted under heavy guard to Constantinople. There the Bulgars were interned; but Romanus, subtle diplomat that he was, loaded the Arabs with presents and sent them back to their Caliph with a promise of peace and an annual tribute far more certain than anything that could have been hoped for from Symeon.

We do not know when, or how, the news of this misfortune reached the Bulgar court. It may well be that when in the high summer of 924 Symeon led his army - for at least the tenth time - into Thrace he expected to find the Fatimid navy already mobilized in the Marmara. If so, he was disappointed. At any rate, he changed his tactics. According to well-established precedent, he could now have been expected to launch another campaign of devastation in the surrounding country; but he did not do so. Instead, he sent to the city with a request for a meeting with his old friend the Patriarch.

Once again the aged Nicholas — he was now seventy-two and beginning to fail - made his laborious way through the city to the walls, where one of the gates was cautiously unbarred to allow him to slip out to the Bulgar camp. This time, however, he did not do so by stealth, but in the company of a number of distinguished court officials; nor did he find the Bulgar King in as amenable a mood as he had eleven years before. Symeon had by now decided that he would no longer negotiate with inferiors. If the Patriarch was prepared to come hurrying out at his bidding, why should not the Emperor do likewise? Curtly, he informed Nicholas that since summoning him he had changed his mind. If the Empire wanted peace, he would discuss it only with Romanus himself.

The Emperor had no objection. He always preferred talking to fighting, and he was determined to put a stop to these constant Bulgar incursions. There remained, however, the question of security. He did not trust Symeon any more than Symeon trusted him, and neither had forgotten what had happened at the meeting between Khan Krum and Leo V a century before. And so a great pier was constructed at

Cosmidium at the northern end of the Golden Horn,
1
projecting into the water with a fence extending transversely across the middle. It was agreed that Symeon would approach from the landward side, while Romanus sailed up the Horn on his imperial barge; the barrier would remain between them throughout their conversation.

The meeting took place on Thursday, 9 September.
2
Symeon rode up with much swagger and in considerable state, with a numerous escort which he ostentatiously ordered to make a thorough examination of the security arrangements before he approached the fence. Romanus, who was accompanied by the Patriarch, appeared by contrast thoughtful and subdued; with him he carried the city's holiest relic, the mantle of the Blessed Virgin, which he had borrowed from her church at Blachernae as a token of the importance he attached to the occasion. And so, after another brief delay during which hostages were exchanged, the two monarchs finally found themselves face to face.

Our sources for the discussion that followed are all Greek, and inevitably biased; there seems little doubt, however, that it was dominated by Romanus who, in typical Byzantine fashion, treated his adversary to a sermon: instead of begging for peace as Symeon had expected, he appealed to his better nature as a Christian and pressed him earnestly to mend his ways while there was still time. True, he also suggested increasing his own annual tribute; but the proposal was so deftly incorporated into the homily that many of his hearers may well have missed it altogether. Even to those who noticed, it must have sounded less like a concession than a price that was being willingly offered by a benevolent patron for the salvation of a sinner's soul.

It was, by all accounts, a masterly performance; and it succeeded better than either Emperor or Patriarch could have hoped. Romanus spoke, as everyone knew, from a position of weakness: it was he, not the Bulgar, who was suing for peace. As the son, moreover, of an Armenian peasant, his origins were considerably humbler than those of Symeon, who could boast a proud ancestry of Khans going back at least four generations to the great Krum, and possibly a good deal fu
rther. But, when he spoke, he di
d so with the majesty and authority of the

1
The modern Eyup. The Byzantine village took its name from the great monastery of SS. Cos mas and Damian - of which, alas, not a brick now remains.

2
There has been a good deal of argument about the date, and even the year. I follow Sir Steven Runciman
(The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus,
pp. 146-8), who devotes a complete appendix to the question and makes what seems to me an unanswerable case.

thousand-year-old Roman Empire, compared with which Bulgaria was still nothing more than a parvenu principality of semi-civilized barbarians. And Symeon knew it.

At that moment two eagles were seen in the sky above, first wheeling together and then suddenly separating, one to continue its sweeping circles over the towers of Constantinople while the other headed off westward towards Thrace. None of those who saw it could doubt that it was a sign; and its meaning was unmistakable. Strive as he might, Symeon would never be lord of Byzantium: there were to be two rulers in the Balkan peninsula, not one.

After that, there was little more to be said. Details of the subsidy that Romanus himself had proposed were soon settled. It was to include an annual gift of 100
scaramangia
- those richly embroidered silken robes that counted among the greatest luxuries that even Constantinople had to offer - in return for which Symeon agreed to withdraw from imperial territory and from the fortresses that he had captured on the Black Sea coast. Then he turned in silence from the fence, remounted his horse and rode back to his homeland. He never invaded the Empire again.

This is not to say that he became a reformed character. He was now over sixty, and had occupied the throne for more than thirty years: the old leopard could not be expected altogether to change his spots. No longer, however, did he dream of reigning in Constantinople; and his almost pathetic assumption in 925 of the title of
basile
us
- adding the words 'of the Romans and the Bulgars' for good measure - was, in its way, an admission of defeat: the action not of a statesman but of a spoilt, petulant child. As Romanus very sensibly remarked, Symeon could call himself the Caliph of Baghdad if he wanted to. In the following year, showing the same spirit of impotent defiance, Symeon at last declared the independence of the Bulgarian Church, elevating its archbishop to the rank of Patriarch. Nicholas would have been horrified to see his old nightmare come true at last; but Nicholas had died in May 925, and nobody else seemed to care very much. From Constantinople there came, not a single word of protest — a fact which, we may imagine, caused Symeon no little irritation in itself.

But he was trying not to think about Constantinople. Instead, he had turned his attention towards his enemies in the West: to the Serbs and, beyond them, to the maritime, militarist Kingdom of Croatia. The former he easily crushed; but the latter fought back and in 926 destroyed the Bulgar army almost to a man. Symeon never recovered. Obliged to accept a humiliating peace, he stumbled on into the spring of the following year; but the spirit had gone out of him and on 27 May 927, disillusioned and disappointed, he died at sixty-nine.
1

Symeon left behind him clear orders as to the succession: the Bulgarian crown should go to the eldest of the three sons of his second marriage, a boy named Peter,
2
during whose minority his maternal uncle, one George Sursubul, was to act as Regent. Regencies, however, are dangerous things - particularly when they follow a ruler as strong as Symeon -and George soon realized that if he were to survive he must consolidate the recent understanding with Byzantium by means of a more formal treaty of peace, cemented if possible by a marriage alliance. He sent ambassadors to Romanus, who responded with alacrity; and at a conference held soon afterwards in the frontier city of Mesembria agreement was quickly reached. The Emperor and his suite then returned to Constantinople, whither the Bulgarian delegation followed them and where George was presented to - and enchanted by - the young Maria Lecapena, daughter of Romanus's eldest son Christopher. When his tentative inquiries met with encouraging replies he immediately sent for his nephew to join him.

The imperial wedding - the first time in over five hundred years that a Byzantine princess had married outside the Empire - was held in the Palace at Pegae on
8
October, only four and a half months after Symeon's death. The pair were duly blessed by Patriarch Stephen II -who had succeeded Nicholas in 925, the Emperor's son Theophylact being considered, at the age of eight, still a little too young for office -and the bride, now rechristened Irene in honour of the peace, returned briefly to Constantinople (for reasons probably gynaecological) while Peter waited at Pegae. Only three days later did she rejoin him for the sumptuous wedding feast. Then, tearfully - because she, like her husband, was still little more than a child, had never before left home and can have had no idea of the life that awaited her in the barbarian

land to which she was going — she kissed her family goodbye and set off with a vast baggage train on the long road to the north-west.

So dazzled are the chroniclers by the splendour of the wedding celebrations that they tell us next to nothing about the peace treaty that was signed at the same time. There seem to have been one or two minor territorial adjustments, together with provisions for the payment to Peter of an annual tribute - which may have been merely a confirmation of what had already been agreed upon by Symeon and Romanus on the Golden Horn but which now apparently carried an additional proviso that it should be payable only during Maria-Irene's lifetime, in which case it may have been nothing more than a subsidy to ensure that she would be able to maintain a degree of state appropriate to a Byzantine princess.
1
Finally - and here the contemporary sources leave no room for doubt - Romanus agreed formally to recognize the independence of the Bulgarian Patriarchate and Peter's imperial title of Tsar - or, in Greek,
basileus.
The first of these obligations did not worry him unduly: the independence of the Patriarchate was after all a
fait accompli
and, though mildly galling to Constantinople, effectively deprived the Bulgars of one of their favourite blackmailing threats, that of secession to Rome. The second must have been a little harder to stomach; in practice, however, it was simply ignored. Not until Constantine Porphyrogenitus assumed effective power in 94$ was Peter to be addressed as anything more elevated than
archon —
'ruler' - in missives from the Bosphorus.

For Romanus was above all a realist. The peace treaty to which he had set his seal left no question in anyone's mind that, although there had been no outright victor of the Bulgarian War, the Bulgars had had the better of it. Arguably, with patient and persistent diplomacy, he might have achieved more favourable terms, but the game was scarcely worth the candle: in the interests of a quick and uncontentious agreement, with a marriage alliance as a further guarantee of lasting Bulgar friendship, he was quite prepared to accept a few minor humiliations. In the first four years of his reign, with two open revolts to contend with (one in Apulia, the other in the Chaldian Theme in the far north-east) and new conspiracies being uncovered every few months, he could never have afforded such a luxury; but now he had consolidated his position. All those government and court officials who had opposed him had been sent

1
Such at least is the hypothesis of Sir Steven Runciman
(The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus
,
p.
99),
who suggests - perhaps a trifle unkindly - that the money would really have been used 'to pay for the tided ambassadress or spy that the Emperor kept at the Bulgarian court'.