The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (27 page)
admittedly, was on his side — first in John Curcuas, in whom he found a general of quite exceptional merit, and secondly in the state of the Abbasid Caliphate, which was no longer capable of exercising any real authority; but it remains a fact that, for the first time since the rise of Islam, it was the Christian forces that were on the offensive.
At home, during a remarkably uneventful reign, Romanus displayed much the same qualities that he had shown in his dealings with the Bulgars. There can be no doubt of his unfeigned abhorrence of bloodshed, a rare virtue in those violent days: again and again, even in cases of conspiracy against his own person, we find him preferring sentences of exile to those of execution. He seems, too, to have been genuinely kind-hearted: in the dreadful winter of 928, the longest and coldest in Constantinople's history, it was he who personally directed the emergency food supply. And he was a devoted family man - rather too devoted, perhaps, where his sons were concerned.
Why, then, was he not better loved? Why, when his own sons rose against him, did none of his subjects utter a word of protest or lift a finger on his behalf? Was it simply that they disliked usurpers? Or was there also something in his character that failed to endear him? Here, perhaps, we can find at least a partial answer to the mystery; for Romanus's virtues and qualities were not such as ever to seize the popular imagination. He was not a great soldier, nor a great legislator: his ambitious attempts at land reform had little long-term effect, and were anyway of minimal interest to the people of Constantinople. He seems to have appeared rarely in public and never made much of a show at the Hippodrome. In short, although he did his utmost to see his subjects properly provided with bread, he was distinctly short on circuses. They consequently tended to ignore him and, when they thought of him at all, to remember the only deeply memorable thing in the life of this able, quiet and surprisingly colourless man: his path to the throne.
And he, as we know, remembered it too: remembered it so vividly, and with such consuming remorse, that his last few years were passed in unremitting mental torment. This, surely, was punishment enough; for if at the start he had laid predatory hands on the Empire, later he had served it well. And it is pleasant to reflect that he died at last with his spirit at peace, and his sins forgiven.
[945-63]
He was devoid of that energy of character which could emerge into a life of action and glory; and the studies which had amused and dignified his leisure were incompatible with the serious dudes of a sovereign. The emperor neglected the practice, to instruct his son Romanus in the theory, of government: while he indulged the habits of intemperance and sloth, he dropped the reins of the administration into the hands of Helena his wife; and, in the shifting scene of her favour and caprice, each minister was
regretted in the promot
ion of a more worthless successor. Yet the birth and misfortunes of Constantine had endeared him to the Greeks; they excused his failings; they respected his learning, his innocen
ce and charity, his love of justi
ce; and the ceremony of his funeral was mourned with the unfeigned tears of his subjects.
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
Chapter XLVIII
By the time Constantine Porphyrogenitus assumed sole power in the Byzantine State after the effective elimination of his brothers-in-law at the beginning of 945, he had long outgrown the sickliness of his youth. Tall and broad-shouldered, standing 'erect as a cypress tree',
1
his ruddy complexion half-hidden by a thick black beard above which shone eyes of a brilliant pale blue, he now looked as if he had never known a day's illness in his life. True, he was - by modern standards - distinctly overweight, the result of a largely sedentary life and an almost insatiable appetite; but a generous degree of
embonpoint
was considered no bad thing in the tenth century, when a man of thirty-nine was considered to be already well advanced in middle age.
For well over thirty-six of those thirty-nine years, Constantine had been a titular Emperor; and during practically the whole of that period,
1
The
ophanes Continuatus,
Cbronograph
ia,
Book VI.
for reasons which the last two chapters should have made clear, he had played no part in the imperial government, confining his public appearances to the minimum required of him by his office. He had not, however, wasted his time. From his father Leo the Wise he had inherited a passion for books and scholarship which, unlike Leo, he had had plenty of time to indulge. He failed, it is true, to fulfil his great ambition, declared in the opening chapter of his life of Basil I,
1
of writing a complete history of Byzantium until his own day, nor even his more modest aspiration to give an account of the Macedonian house; none the less, the body of work which he left behind him is impressive by any standards. Few other writers - and certainly no other Emperors - have contributed so much to our knowledge of their time.
Apart from the biography of his grandfather, Constantine is known above all for two major works. The first,
De Ceremoniis Aulae Byz
antinae,
is an encyclopedia of Byzantine ritual in which the Emperor sets out in detail the protocol to be followed on every feast of the Church and state occasions: coronations and birthdays, baptisms and funerals of Emperors and Augustae, promotions to the high offices of government and court, even games in the Hippodrome. Clothes and vestments to be worn, responses to be sung, acclamations required of the army and the people, the Blues and the Greens - nothing is omitted or ignored, nothing left to chance. To read even a few pages at random is to be almost suffocated by the sheer weight of the ceremonial described: how, one wonders, could any Emperor - whether he were active and energetic like Basil I or Romanus, or idle and pleasure-loving like Michael III or Alexander - have endured it for a moment? And yet, for all the oppression, here is a rare and precious glimpse of the court life of Byzantium: the mosaics and the marbles, the damasks and the brocades, the
basileus
in dalmatic and diadem, pavilioned in all the majesty of the New Rome.
But the Emperor was more than a great golden symbol: he was also the head of a vast administrative machine, the ruler of a state which still extended from the toe of Italy to the foothills of the Caucasus, an immense area which Constantine was well aware that his son Romanus would one day be called upon to govern. In 952, therefore -the year in which the young prince celebrated his fourteenth birthday — he set about the composition of what is, in essence, a practical textbook
1
Theophanes Continuatus,
Cbronograph
ia,
Book V, is believed to be entirely his work
on the art of government which he quite simply entitled
Constantine to h
is son Romanus
but which we now know as
De Administrando Imperio.
The nucleus of this work seems to have been another, earlier, essay by the Emperor on the various barbarian races which occupied the lands surrounding the imperial frontiers; to this he now added a detailed assessment of the world situation as he saw it, together with a quantity of excellent advice for the boy's future guidance. It is significant that the Bulgars, to whom thirty years before he would almost certainly have devoted more attention than to any other people, are scarcely mentioned. Pride of place is now given to the Pechenegs, whose apparently limitless numbers and bestial cruelty made them by far the most feared of all the Empire's potential foes. Like his father-in-law, Constantine was instinctively opposed to war if it were not absolutely necessary; there is no suggestion in
De Administrando Imperio
that any military action should be taken against the tribe. On the contrary:
In
my judgement it is always greatl
y to our advantage to keep the peace with the Pecheneg nation; to conclude conventions and treaties of friendship with them; to send to them every year an envoy with gifts of appropriate value and kind; and to welcome from their side sureties - that is, hostages - and a diplomatic representative who will confer, in this our God-protected city, with a competent minister and will enjoy all imperial attentions and honours which it is suitable for the Emperor to bestow.
1
It is, he continues, an expensive business:
These Pechenegs are insatiable, fiercely covetous of those commodities that are rare among them, and shameless in their demands for generous presents .
..
When the imperial envoy enters their country, their first reaction is to ask for the Emperor's gifts; and when the men have finally been satisfied they demand the same for their wives and their parents.
2
They should, however, be given whatever they ask for, unhesitatingly and with a good grace; it will always be cheaper in the end.
With less powerful peoples, on the other hand, Constantine favours a distinctly tougher line. Foreign ambassadors should, as a general rule, be granted as little as possible. On no account should they be allowed to carry away state robes or vestments — items which seem to have been much coveted abroad, and for which the Byzantine government received innumerable requests — nor of course could there ever be any question
2
De Administrando Imperii),
Chapter I. i
2
Ibid., Chapter VII.
of revealing the secret of Greek fire. Romanus should also refuse all suggestions for marriage alliances, on the grounds that Constantine the Great himself had decreed that the imperial family should never marry outside the Empire except on occasion to the Franks.
1
At this point all his pent-up resentment of his father-in-law suddenly comes boiling up to the surface:
If they point out that the Lord Emperor Romanus himself made such an alliance when he gave the hand of his own granddaughter to the Bulgarian Tsar Peter, you should reply that the Lord Romanus was a vulgar illiterate who had been neither educated in the Palace nor initiated in the Roman traditions. His family was not imperial or even noble, and tended accordingly to be arrogant and headstrong. In this instance he heeded neither the prohibition of the Church nor the commandment of the great Constantine, but went his own arrogant and headstrong way
...
It was for this reason that he was in his lifetime much abused, and was hated and vilified by the Senate, the people and the Church itself, as was shown by the end to which he came; and that hatred and vilification continued after his death, even to the present day.
2
All this - together with a historical and geographical description of the imperial provinces usually known as
De Th
ematibus -
was written, at least for the most part, by the Emperor's own hand, in the elegant and polished style of the scholar that he was. With the help of a regiment of scribes and copyists, however, he also compiled digests of all the available manuals and treatises on any number of other subjects: military strategy, history, diplomacy, jurisprudence, hagiography, medicine, agriculture, natural science, even veterinary surgery. The result was a veritable encyclopedia - a reference work which must have been of immense value to the imperial civil service and to all those private individuals fortunate enough to have access to it for many years to come, and which testifies both to the size and range of the Emperor's personal library and to the catholicity of his interests. He was, we are told, a passionate collector — not only of books and manuscripts but of works of art of every kind; more remarkable still for a man of his class
1
It is doubtful whether the Emperor would have inserted this proviso had he not been on fairly shaky ground himself. His half-sister Anna - Leo VTs daughter by his second wife Zoe - had married Lewis III (the Blind) of Provence, while his own son Romanus (to whom he was addressing these words) had at the age of five been married off to Bertha, the illegitimate daughter of Hugh of Aries, King of Italy, and was at the time the book was written betrothed to Hedwig of Bavaria, niece of Otto the Great.
2
De Adminis
trando Imperio,
Chapter XIII. The translation has been slightly abridged in the interests of concision, but accurately reflects the spirit of the original.
and background, he seems to have been a painter in his own right - and, if we are to believe Liudprand of Cremona, a very good one too. Finally, he was the most generous of pa
trons: to mosaicists and enamel
lers, to writers and scholars, to goldsmiths, silversmiths and jewellers.
Thus it is less as an Emperor than as a writer, scholar, compiler, collector, bibliophile, painter and patron that Constantine Porphyrogenitus deserves his place as the central figure of the tenth-century literary and artistic revival known as the 'Macedonian Renaissance'. But - the question can no longer be postponed - how effective was he as an Emperor? If we are to believe Gibbon, we shall have to rank him as a near-disaster; but Gibbon is obviously basing himself on two not entirely trustworthy sources, Cedrenus and Zonaras - both of whom derive from the same earlier authority, John Scylitzes - and seems to ignore the anonymous author of the second part of Theophanes Continuatus, Book VI, who paints a very different picture. Here Constantine emerges as a competent, conscientious and- hard-working administrator and an excellent picker of men, who made appointments to military, naval, ecclesiastical, civil and academic posts that were both imaginative and successful. He also did much to develop the imperial system of higher education and took a special interest in the administration of justice, immediately investigating all reports of social abuses -particularly against the poor — and himself reviewing the sentences of long-term prisoners. That he ate and drank more than was good for him all our authorities seem to agree - though he was certainly not a drunkard in any sense of the word; and there is unanimity, too, on his constant good humour: he was unfailingly courteous to all classes of society and was never known to lose his temper.