The Apogee - Byzantium 02 (41 page)
The Patrician Constantine Maleinus and his son the
magister
Eustathius have enjoyed for a hundred years, perhaps 120, the uncontested possession of property unlawfully acquired by them. The same is true of the Phocas who, from father to son over more than a century, have also succeeded in retaining estates
to which they have no legal titl
e
...
Basil abolished the forty-year period altogether, requiring that any territorial claim, to be valid, must go back at least to the decree of his great-grandfather Romanus, sixty-one years before. All property acquired since that time was to be restored immediately to its previous owner or his family, without compensation or payment for any improvements made. Even imperial
cbrysobuls
— including those signed with the name of Basil himself— were to be inadmissible as a defence, while any deed of grant issued between 976 and 985 in the name of Basil the eunuch was automatically null and void unless specially revalidated in the Emperor's own hand.
The results were dramatic - and, to the Anatolian aristocracy, calamitous. Maleinus was not only expropriated but imprisoned for life. The Phocas lost all but a minute fraction of their vast estates. Some noble families were reduced literally to beggary, others to the level of the peasants around them. But for those peasants, and for the local small-holders — the traditional backbone of imperial armies for hundreds of years - the way was open to return to the lands of their forefathers. Meanwhile vast tracts of formerly imperial land reverted again to the Empire, while the Emperor himself gained immeasurably in strength. For thirteen years he had been obliged to defend his lawful throne against 'the powerful'. Now their power was gone; and his revenge, we may be sure, was sweet.
Even after the publication of his fateful edict, the Emperor did not at once return to Bulgaria. There was, inevitably, serious disaffection in Anatolia, and it was important that he should be at hand in the capital, ready to deal with any trouble. Besides, he had now been absent for nearly five years from the imperial chancery, where a vast backlog of work had accumulated. The Patriarchate — to take but one example -
had been vacant since 991; on 12 April 996 Basil appointed a learned physician named Sisinnius to the post. In one respect it was an unfortunate choice - not so much because Sisinnius was a layman, but because he shared all his master's dislike and distrust of the Western Empire; and scarcely had he assumed his new office when there arrived in Constantinople an embassy from the court of young Otto III. Otto, it appeared, wanted a Byzantine wife, just as his father had done; and he was now making a formal request for the hand in marriage of one of Basil's three nieces Eudocia, Zo
e or Theodora - he did not greatl
y mind which - the daughters of his brother Constantine.
On the face of it, Otto's embassy was a surprising one. Admittedly his father Otto II had married the Greek princess Theophano,
1
who had made him an excellent wife and had done much for the spread of Byzantine culture in the West; but he had unfortunately seen the marriage as grounds for claiming the 'restitution', as part of her dowry, of all Byzantine lands in Italy, and war had been the inevitable result. This had continued intermittently until 981, when Otto II had marched into Apulia, his wrath on this occasion directed principally against the occupying Saracens; and Basil - or more probably his great-uncle the
parakoimomenos
— had seen his chance. A temporary alliance had quickly been arranged with the Saracens, who soon afterwards cut Otto's army to pieces near Stilo in Calabria. Luckily for the Western Emperor, he was a strong swimmer: he swam to a passing ship, managed somehow to conceal his identity and later, as the vessel passed Rossano, jumped overboard again and struck out for the shore. But he never recovered from the humiliation and died in Rome the following year, aged twenty-eight.
2
His son by Theophano, Otto III, was an extraordinary child. Succeeding to the imperial throne at the age of three, he grew up combining the traditional ambitions of his line with a romantic mysticism clearly inherited from his mother, forever dreaming of a great Byzantinesque theocracy that would embrace Germans and Greeks, Italians and Slavs alike, with God at its head and himself and the Pope - in that order -His twin Viceroys. Who could be more suited than he - born as he was of a Greek mother — to make this dream a reality? And what better foundation for that reality than another marriage alliance between the two Empires? Otto chose his ambassadors carefully. They were Bishop
1
See p. 22
o.
2
He it the only Holy Roman Emperor to be buried in St Peter's.
Bemward of Wiirzburg
1
and John Philagathus, Archbishop of Piacenza, a Greek from Calabria who, having begun life as a slave, had become the close friend, protege and finally chaplain of Theophano, and had retained the favour of her son after her death.
Alas, we have no Bishop of Cremona to give us an account of this embassy; but it is safe to assume that it was received in Constantinople a good deal more cordially than Liudprand had been. Basil would have asked nothing better than a marriage which would, with any luck, preserve the peace in south Italy and give him a free hand to pursue his struggle with the Bulgars, and it is recorded that when Philagathus returned to Rome
2
he took with him Byzantine ambassadors to negotiate the details with Otto in person. If those ambassadors had found the Emperor in the city, there is little doubt that all would have been swiftly arranged: the marriage would have taken place and the future would have been very different - not only for those directly concerned. Unfortunately Otto had left some weeks before, with consequences that would be unhappy for him, deeply unpleasant for them and, for John Philagathus, nothing short of catastrophic.
Early that same year,
996,
the fifteen-year-old Emperor had crossed the snow-covered Brenner Pass and entered Italy in full imperial state, with the Holy Lance that had pierced Christ's side
3
carried before him and a sizeable army marching behind. In Pavia he had heard of the death of Pope John XV; and in Ravenna, at the request of delegates from the Roman nobility who had come to greet him, he had personally designated as John's successor his own cousin Bruno of Carinthia, then aged twenty-four, who took the name of Gregory V. On Ascension Day - 21 May -Otto was crowned by Gregory in St Peter's. When he left for Germany a few weeks later, it seemed to everyone that the imperial power had once again been firmly established in the Eternal City, and that Western Christendom was in safer hands than for many years past.
Pope Gregory, however, now made a disastrous mistake. He revoked
1
Not Bishop - later St - Bernward of Hildesheim, as Schlumberger rather surprisingly assumes.
- Minus, unfortunately, the Bishop of Wurzburg, who expired
en route.
Such is the paucity of our information on this period that we do not even know whether his death occurred on the outward or the return journey; only that he was buried in the monastery of Politika, on the island of Euboea. - Another Holy Lance, with equal claims to authenticity, had been cherished in Constantinople since the seventh century and was to remain there till
1492,
when Sultan Beyazit II presented it to Pope Innocent VIII. Yet another was to be discovered at Antioch during the First Crusade; this is' almost certainly the one which is still preserved in the Armenian cathedral at Etchmiadzin. We may take our choice.
the sentence of banishment that had been passed on the Patrician Crescentius, head of the most influential family in Rome, who had been responsible for the election of John XV and had, until shortly before Otto's arrival, held the city in his grip; and Crescentius, heedless of the oath of fidelity that he had been obliged to swear, at once reverted to his old ways. One of his first actions on returning to power was to seize Basil's ambassadors (who were apparently still in Rome, recovering from their long sea voyage) and throw them into prison - more, it seems, to spite Otto by spoiling his marriage plans than for any other reason. Gregory, panic-stricken, sent urgently to his cousin, begging him to return and restore imperial-papal authority; but Otto refused -on the somewhat surprising grounds that he could not stand the climate
-and the poor Pope had no alternative but to flee, early in
997,
to Pavia, whereupon Crescentius appointed in his place none other than the Archbishop of Piacenza, John Philagathus.
Why one of the Emperor's most trusted servants should have lent himself to such villainy is hard to understand. Having successfully concluded the preliminary negotiations for the imperial marriage, Philagathus could confidently have expected high preferment in the near future; to have betrayed his master by throwing in his lot with an unscrupulous adventurer seems little short of lunacy. But he was eaten up by ambition, and the immediate prospect of the papal throne, even if he were to occupy it only as Anti-Pope, seems to have been more than he could resist. In May
997
he installed himself in the Lateran Palace under the name of John XVI.
He soon had cause to regret his decision. Already excommunicated by his rival, he spent a miserable summer under a hail of abuse from every bishop in Italy, scarcely able to show himself in the streets of the city, dealing with the remonstrations of both Gregory and Otto by the simple expedient of throwing their ambassadors too into prison. Then, towards the end of the year, came retribution. The Emperor of the West
—trusting, presumably, that the Roman winter would prove less of a trial to his constitution than the Roman summer — marched into the peninsula for the second time, joined the Pope at Pavia (where they celebrated Christmas together) and then, with a mixed force of Germans and Italians, advanced on Rome. Two years before, he had come peaceably, as a friend. This time he was angry - and pitiless. As confusion spread through the city Crescentius shut himself up with a dozen faithful henchmen in the Castel Sant'Angelo. John Philagathus meanwhile fled the city and took refuge in a tower that was said to be impregnable; but a few days later he was tracked down by a party of Germans who quickly proved that it was nothing of the kind. On Pope Gregory's orders - but, we are assured, without the knowledge of the Emperor — he was taken prisoner and hideously mutilated. His captors cut off his ears, nose and hands, put out his eyes and tore out his tongue; then they dragged him back to Rome and flung him into a monastic cell to await trial.
Some time during Lent in 998, what was left of John Philagathus was brought before Pope and Emperor, sitting side by side. John's fellow-countryman St Nilus, abbot of Rossano in Calabria, pleaded earnestly that he had already suffered enough; but Pope Gregory thought otherwise. The unfortunate man was now seated backwards on a mule and paraded through the streets of Rome to jeers and catcalls; only then was he permitted to retire to a distant retreat - probably the German monastery of Fulda, near Frankfurt-am-Main - where he lived on, after a fashion, till 101
3.
As for Crescentius, he held out in the Castel Sant'Angelo until 29 April, when he was finally obliged to surrender. His punishment was comparatively merciful: at the highest point of the castle, where he could be seen by all Rome, he was publicly beheaded. His body was flung into the surrounding ditch, whence it was later retrieved and, together with those of his twelve followers who had suffered a similar fate, hung by the heels from a gallows on Monte Mario.
For Basil II, who seems - though we cannot be sure - to have remained throughout this period in Constantinople, news of the fate of John Philagathus and the events leading up to it could hardly have been more unwelcome. Not that he would have been moved by any description of the archbishop's sufferings; he was not that sort of man. But it would have suited him to have a Greek on the throne of St Peter almost as much as to have a niece as Empress of the West;
1
now the first was out of the question, and even the second had run into difficulties. His ambassadors, who had left Constantinople nearly two years before, had finally been released from prison; but they had not yet made contact with Otto — whose pro-Greek sympathies might well have been, after the Philagathus affair, not quite what they were.
1
It has even been suggested - by St Peter Damian (most uncharitable of chroniclers) and by many others after him - that John's elevation might have been due less to Crescentius's powers of persuasion than to the sacks of Byzantine gold that he had brought with him from Constantinople.
But Basil had other more immediate preoccupations: and the most important of these was the fact that the past three years had seen an alarming increase in the power of Tsar Samuel. In 996, taking full advantage of the Emperor's absence in the East, Samuel had ambushed and killed the Governor of Thessalonica and had taken prisoner both his son and his successor, John of Chaldia. He had then invaded the defenceless Theme of Hellas, which he had sacked and plundered as far south as Corinth. The following year, admittedly, had seen a decisive defeat of the Bulgar army - on the banks of the river Spercheus, near Thermopylae - by the best of the new generation of imperial generals, Nicephorus Uranus; Samuel himself had been lucky to escape with his life. Soon afterwards, however, the Tsar had seized the important Adriatic harbour of Dyrrachium (Durazzo, now Diirres in Albania) and begun a long, triumphant advance through the Dalmatian hinterland and into Bosnia. If he were not. stopped quickly it might soon be too late to stop him at all.
The Byzantine lands along the shores of the Adriatic had always presented something of an administrative problem. In terms of distance they were no further from Constantinople than was Syria; but the roads were steep and rocky and the populations, even in peaceful times, tended to be a good deal less friendly than those of Asia Minor. In present circumstances, Basil would have had to fight every inch of the way. There was, as he saw it, only one solution: the Republic of Venice, with which he was already on excellent terms. Already in 992 he had concluded a treaty with Pietro Orseolo II - one of the most brilliant Doges in Venetian history - by the terms of which Venice was granted generous commercial privileges in Constantinople in return for her agreement to transport imperial troops in time of war; why should the republic not now take over responsibility for the entire Dalmatian coast, ruling it as a protectorate under Byzantine suzerainty?
Pietro Orseolo asked nothing better. Here was an offer of a practically inexhaustible new source of corn for Venice's rapidly growing population, and of timber for ship-building. Furthermore, for some time Venetian merchantmen had been suffering severely at the hands of Croatian pirates; such an arrangement as was now proposed would allow him to move against them far more effectively than before. His son Giovanni hastened to Constantinople, and the matter was soon settled. On Ascension Day,
ad
1000, Orseolo — newly dubbed
Dux
Dalmatiae
—
attended Mass in the cathedral of S. Pietro di Castello and received from the Bishop of Olivolo a consecrated standard.
1
He then boarded his flagship and set sail at the head of a huge fleet to receive the homage of his new subjects. Tsar Samuel might control the hinterland and the fastnesses of Bosnia; but the Greek-speaking cities of the coast were henceforth in safe hands.
The Emperor meanwhile turned his attention back to Bulgaria itself, employing precisely the same tactics as before: first, the establishment of an impregnable base camp - now Philippopolis (Plovdiv); then a slow, methodical spreading-out to north, west and south, consolidating every conquest and garrisoning every captured town before advancing to the next. In
999
another Fatimid victory in Syria caused a repetition of the crisis of five years before and called him back to the East — fortunately as it happened, since he chanced to be in Tarsus when, on Easter Sunday 1000, Prince David of Upper Tao was assassinated; he was thus able to move in immediately with the army to claim his new inheritance. The governorship of this vast region to the north of Lake Van he entrusted to the dead man's cousin Bagrat, King of Abasgia, to whom he also transferred David's title of
cu
ropalates
but it was already late autumn before he was back on the Bosphorus. A few months later he was able to conclude a ten-year truce with the Fatimid Caliphate. Now at last, with both his eastern and western frontiers properly protected, he was free to concentrate on Bulgaria; and in the summer of 1001 he succeeded both in recapturing Berrhoea and in expelling the Bulgar garrisons from Thessaly before returning to the capital — where important business awaited him.
The Emperor Otto, far from giving up his idea of a Byzantine marriage, had sent a second embassy to Constantinople with instructions not only to conclude any outstanding arrangements but to bring him back his bride. It was consequently a far larger and more impressive mission than its predecessor. At its head was Archbishop Arnulf of Milan, the richest and most magnificent ecclesiastic in the West, who appeared at the Palace on a superbly caparisoned steed whose very horseshoes were of gold, secured with silver nails. Although he made no attempt to match his guest either in sartorial splendour or in the social graces - for Arnulf was renowned for his cultivation, intelligence and charm - Basil received him with every honour, bade him sit by his side and, calling for an interpreter, engaged h
im in long and earnest conversa
tion
1
There is reason to believe that on it the Venetian emblem of the winged lion of St Mark, holding in its paw an open
book, appeared for the first tim
e.