XII. The Coming Of The Saracens.
After the peace of 628 the Roman and the Persian Empires, drained of men and money, and ravaged from end to end by each other's marauding armies, sank down in exhaustion to heal them of their deadly wounds. Never before had either power dealt its neighbour such fearful blows as in this last struggle: in previous wars the contest had been waged around border fortresses, and the prize had been the conquest of some small slice of marchland. But Chosroës and Heraclius had struck deadly blows at the heart of each other's empire, and harried the inmost provinces up to the gates of each other's capitals. The Persian had turned the wild hordes of the Avars loose on Thrace, and the Roman had guided the yet wilder Chazars up to the walls of Ctesiphon. Hence it came to pass that at the end of the war the two powers were each weaker than they had ever been before. They were bleeding at every pore, utterly wearied and exhausted, and desirous of nothing but a long interval of peace to recover their lost strength.
Precisely at this moment a new and terrible enemy [pg 159] fell upon the two war-worn combatants, and delivered an attack so vehement that it was destined to destroy the ancient kingdom of Persia and to shear away half the provinces of the Roman Empire.
The politics of Arabia had up to this time been of little moment either to Roman or Persian. Each of them had allies among the Arab tribes, and had sometimes sent an expedition or an embassy southward, into the land beyond the Syrian desert. But neither of them dreamed that the scattered and disunited tribes of Arabia would ever combine or become a serious danger.
But while Heraclius and Chosroës were harrying each other's realms events of world-wide importance had been taking place in the Arabian peninsula. For the first and last time in history there had arisen among the Arabs one of those world-compelling minds that are destined to turn aside the current of events into new channels, and change the face of whole continents.
Mahomet, that strangest of moral enigmas, prophet and seer, fanatic and impostor, was developing his career all through the years of the Persian war. By an extraordinary mixture of genuine enthusiasm and vulgar cunning, of self-deception and deliberate imposture, of benevolence and cruelty, of austerity and licence, he had worked himself and his creed to the front. The turbulent polytheists of Arabia had by him been converted into a compact band of fanatics, burning to carry all over the world by the force of their swords their new war-cry, that “God was God, and Mahomet His prophet.”
[pg 160]In 628, the last year of the great war, the Arab sent his summons to Heraclius and Chosroës, bidding them embrace Islam. The Persian replied with the threat that he would put the Prophet in chains when he had leisure. The Roman made no direct reply, but sent Mahomet some small presents, neglecting the theological bent of his message, and only thinking of enlisting a possible political ally. Both answers were regarded as equally unsatisfactory by the Prophet, and he doomed the two empires to a similar destruction. Next year [629] the first collision between the East-Romans and the Arabs took place, a band of Moslems having pushed a raid up to Muta, near the Dead Sea. But it was not till three years later, when Mahomet himself was already dead, that the storm fell on the Roman Empire. In obedience to the injunctions of his deceased master, the Caliph Abu Bekr prepared two armies, and launched the one against Palestine and the other against Persia.
Till the last seven or eight years English writers have been inclined to underrate the force and fury of an army of Mahometan fanatics in the first flush of their enthusiasm. Now that we have witnessed in our own day the scenes of Tamaai and Abu Klea we do so no longer. The rush that can break into a British square bristling with Martini-Henry rifles is not a thing to be despised. For the future we shall not treat lightly the armies of the early Caliphs, nor scoff with Gibbon at the feebleness of the troops who were routed by them. If the soldiers of Queen Victoria, armed with modern rifles and artillery, found the fanatical Arab a formidable foe, let us not blame [pg 161] the soldiers of Heraclius who faced the same enemy with pike and sword alone. In the early engagements between the East-Romans and the Saracens the superior discipline and more regular arms of the one were not a sufficient counterpoise to put against the mad recklessness of the other. The Moslem wanted to get killed, that he might reap the fruits of martyrdom in the other world, and cared not how he died, if he had first slain an enemy. The Roman fought well enough; but he did not, like his adversary, yearn to become a martyr, and the odds were on the man who held his life the cheapest.
The moment of the Saracen invasion was chosen most unhappily for Heraclius. He had just paid off the enormous debt that he had contracted to the Church, and to do so had not only drained the treasury but imposed some new and unwise taxes on the harassed provincials, and disbanded many of his veterans for the sake of economy. Syria and Egypt, after spending twelve and ten years respectively under the Persian yoke, had not yet got back into their old organization. Both countries were much distracted with religious troubles; the heretical sects of the Monophysites and Jacobites who swarmed within their boundaries had lifted up their heads under the Persian rule, being relieved from the governmental repression that had hitherto been their lot. They seem to have constituted an actual majority of the population, and bitterly resented the endeavours of Heraclius to enforce orthodoxy in the reconquered provinces. Their discontent was so bitter that during the Saracen invasion they stood aside and refused to [pg 162] help the imperial armies, or even on occasion aided the alien enemy.
The details of the Arab conquest of Syria have not been preserved by the East-Roman historians, who seem to have hated the idea of recording the disasters of Christendom. The Moslems, on the other hand, had not yet commenced to write, and ere historians arose among them, the tale of the invasion had been intertwined with a whole cycle of romantic legends, fitter for the “Arabian Nights” than the sober pages of a chronicle.
But the main lines of the war can be reconstructed with accuracy. The Saracen horde under Abu Obeida emerged from the desert in the spring of 634 and captured Bostra, the frontier city of Syria to the east, by the aid of treachery from within. The Romans collected an army to drive them off, but in July it was defeated at Aijnadin [Gabatha] in Ituraea. Thoroughly roused by this disaster Heraclius set all the legions of the East marching, and sixty thousand men crossed the Jordan and advanced to recover Bostra. The Arabs met them at the fords of the Hieromax, an Eastern tributary of the Jordan, and a fierce battle raged all day. The Romans drove the enemy back to the very gates of their camp, but a last charge, headed by the fierce warrior Khaled, broke their firm array when a victory seemed almost assured. All the mailed horsemen of Heraclius, his Armenian and Isaurian archers, his solid phalanx of infantry, were insufficient to resist the wild rush of the Arabs. Urged on by the cry of their general, “Paradise is before you, the devil and hell-fire behind,” the fanatical [pg 163] Orientals threw themselves on regiment after regiment and drove it off the field.
All Syria east of Jordan was lost in this fatal battle. Damascus, its great stronghold, resisted desperately but fell early in 635. Most of its population were massacred. This disaster drew Heraclius into the field, though he was now over sixty, and was beginning to fail in health. He could do nothing; Emesa and Heliopolis were sacked before his eyes, and after an inglorious campaign he hurried to Jerusalem, took the “True Cross” from its sanctuary, where he had replaced it in triumph five years before, and retired to Constantinople. Hardly had he reached it when the news arrived that his discontented and demoralized troops had proclaimed a rebel emperor, though the enemy was before them. The rebel—his name was Baanes—was put down, but meanwhile Antioch, Chalcis, and all Northern Syria fell into the hands of the Arabs.
Worse yet was to follow. In the next year, 637, Jerusalem fell, after a desperate resistance, protracted for more than twelve months. The inhabitants refused to surrender except to the Caliph in person, and the aged Omar came over the desert, proud to take possession of the city which Mahomet had reckoned the holiest site on earth save Mecca alone. The Patriarch Sophronius was commanded to guide the conqueror around the city, and when he saw the rude Arab standing by the altar of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, cried aloud, “Now is the Abomination of Desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, truly in the Holy Place.” The Caliph did [pg 164] not confiscate any of the great Christian sanctuaries, but he took the site of Solomon's Temple, and erected on it a magnificent Mosque, known ever since as the Mosque of Omar.
The tale of the last years of Heraclius is most melancholy. The Emperor lay at Constantinople slowly dying of dropsy, and his eldest son Constantine had to take the field in his stead. But the young prince received a crushing defeat in 638, when he attempted to recover North Syria, and next year the Arabs, under Amrou, pressed eastward across the Isthmus of Suez, and threw themselves upon Egypt. Two years more of fighting sufficed to conquer the granary of the Roman Empire; and in February, 641, when Heraclius died, the single port of Alexandria was the sole remaining possession of the Romans in Egypt.
The ten years' war which had torn Syria and Egypt from the hands of the unfortunate Heraclius had been even more fatal to his Eastern neighbour. The Arabs had attacked the Persian kingdom at the same moment that they fell on Syria: two great battles at Kadesia [636] and Yalulah [637] sufficed to place all Western Persia in the hands of the Moslems. King Isdigerd, the last of the Sassanian line, raised his last army in 641, and saw it cut to pieces at the decisive field of Nehauend. He fled away to dwell as an exile among the Turks, and all his kingdom as far as the borders of India became the prey of the conquerors.
Heraclius had married twice; by his first wife, Eudocia, he left a single son, Constantine, who should [pg 165] have been his sole heir. But he had taken a second wife, and this wife was his own niece Martina. The incestuous choice had provoked much scandal, and was the one grave offence which could be brought against Heraclius, whose life was in other respects blameless. Martina, an ambitious and intriguing woman, prevailed on her aged husband to make her eldest son, Heracleonas, joint-heir with his half brother Constantine.
This arrangement, as might have been expected, worked very badly. The court and army was at once split up between the adherents of the two young Emperors, and while the defence of the empire against the Saracens should have been the sole care of the East-Romans, they found themselves distracted by fierce Court intrigues. Armed strife between the Emperors seemed destined to break out, but after reigning only a few months Constantine III. died. It was rumoured far and wide that his step-mother had poisoned him, to make the way clear for her own son Heracleonas, who immediately proclaimed himself sole emperor. The senate and the Byzantine populace were both highly indignant at this usurpation, for the deceased Constantine left a young son named Constans, who was thus excluded from the throne to which he was the natural heir. Heracleonas had reigned alone no more than a few weeks when the army of the East and the mob of Constantinople were heard demanding in angry tones that Constans should be crowned as his uncle's colleague. Heracleonas was frightened into compliance, but his submission only saved him for a year. In the summer [pg 166] of 642 the senate decreed his deposition, and he was seized by the adherents of Constans and sent into exile, along with his mother Martina. The victorious faction very cruelly ordered the tongue of the mother and the nose of the son to be slit—the first instance of that hateful Oriental practice being applied to members of the royal house, but not the last.
Constans II. was sole emperor from 642 to 668, and his son and successor, Constantine IV., reigned from 668 to 685. They were both strong, hard-headed warrior princes, fit descendants of the gallant Heraclius. Their main credit lies in the fact that they fought unceasingly against the Saracen, and preserved as a permanent possession of the empire nearly every province that they had still remained Roman at the death of Heraclius. During the minority indeed of Constans II., Alexandria20 and Aradus, the two last ports preserved by the Romans in Egypt and Syria were lost. But the Saracens advanced no further by land; the sands of the African desert and the passes of Taurus were destined to hold them back for many years. The times, however, were still dangerous till the murder of the Caliph Othman in 656, after which the outbreak of the first civil war among the Moslems—the contest of Ali and Moawiah for the Caliphate—gave the empire a respite. Moawiah, who held the lands on the Roman frontier—his rival's power lying further to the east—secured a free hand against Ali, by making [pg 167] peace with Constans. He even consented to pay him a small annual subsidy so long as the truce should last. This agreement was invaluable to the empire. After twenty-seven years of incessant war the mangled realm at last obtained an interval of repose. It was something, too, that the Saracens were induced to pause, and saw that the extension of their conquests was not destined to spread at once over the whole world. When they realized that their victories were not to go on for ever, they lost the first keenness of the fanatical courage which had made them so terrible.
Freed from the Saracen war, which had threatened not merely to curtail, but to extinguish the empire, Constans was at liberty to turn his attention to other matters. It seems probable that it was at this moment that the reorganization of the provinces of the empire took place, which we find in existence in the second half of the seventh century. The old Roman names and boundaries, which had endured since Diocletian's time, now disappear, and the empire is found divided into new provinces with strange denominations. They were military in their origin, and each consisted of the district covered by a large unit of soldiery—what we should call an army corps. “Theme” meant both the corps and the district which it defended, and the corps-commander was also the provincial governor. There were six corps in Asia, called the Armeniac, Anatolic, Thracesian, Bucellarian, Cibyrrhæot, and Obsequian themes. Of these the first two explain themselves, they were the “army of Armenia” and the “army of the East”; [pg 168] the Obsequian theme, quartered along the Propontis, was so called because it was a kind of personal guard for the Emperor and the home districts. The Thracesians were the “Army of Thrace,” who in the stress of the war had been drafted across to Asia to reinforce the Eastern troops. The Bucellarii seem to have been corps composed of natives and barbarian auxiliaries mixed; they are heard of long before Constans, and he probably did no more than unite them and localize them in a single district. The Cibyrrhæot theme alone gets its name from a town, the port of Cibyra in Pamphylia, which must have been the original headquarters of the South-Western Army Corps. Its commander had a fleet always in his charge, and his troops were often employed as marines.21
The western half of the empire seems to have had six “Themes” also; they bear however old and familiar names—Thrace, Hellas, Thessalonica, Ravenna, Sicily, and Africa, and their names explain their boundaries. In both halves of the empire there were, beside the great themes, smaller districts under the command of military governors, who had charge of outlying posts, such as the passes of Taurus, or the islands of Cyprus and Sardinia. Some of these afterwards grew into independent themes.
Thus came to an end the old imperial system of dividing military authority and civil jurisdiction, which Augustus had invented and Diocletian perpetuated. [pg 169] Under stress of the fearful Saracenic invasion the civil governors disappear, and for the future a commander chosen for his military capacity has also to discharge civil functions.
Constans II., when once he had made peace with Moawiah, would have done well to turn to the Balkan Peninsula, and evict the Slavs from the districts south of Haemus into which they had penetrated during the reign of Heraclius. But he chose instead to do no more than compel the Slavs to pay homage to him and give tribute, and set out to turn westward, and endeavour to drive the Lombards out of Italy. Falling on the Duchy of Benevento, he took many towns, and even laid siege to the capital. But he failed to take it, and passed on to Rome, which had not seen the face of an emperor for two hundred years. When an emperor did appear he brought no luck, for Constans signalized his visit by taking down the bronze tiles of the Pantheon and sending them off to Constantinople [664].
The Emperor lingered no less than five years in the West, busied with the affairs of Italy and Africa, till the Constantinopolitans began to fear that he would make Rome or Syracuse his capital. But in 668 he was assassinated in a most strange manner. “As he bathed in the baths called Daphne, Andreas his bathing attendant smote him on the head with his soap-box, and fled away.” The blow was fatal, Constans died, and Constantine his son reigned in his stead.
Constantine IV., known as Pogonatus, “the Bearded,” reigned for seventeen years, of which more than half were spent in one long struggle with the [pg 170] Saracens. Moawiah, the first of the Ommeyades, had now made himself sole Caliph; the civil wars of the Arabs were now over, and once more they fell on the empire. Constantine's reign opened disastrously, with simultaneous attacks by the armies and fleets of Moawiah on Africa, Sicily, and Asia Minor. But this was only the prelude; in 673 the Caliph made ready an expedition, the like of which had never yet been undertaken by the Saracens. A great fleet and land army started from Syria to undertake the siege of Constantinople itself, an enterprise which the Moslems had not yet attempted. It was headed by the general Abderrahman, and accompanied by Yezid, the Caliph's son and heir. The fleet beat the imperial navy off the sea, forced the passage of the Dardanelles, and took Cyzicus. Using that city as its base, it proceeded to blockade the Bosphorus.
The great glory of Constantine IV. is that he withstood, defeated, and drove away the mighty armament of Moawiah. For four years the investment of Constantinople lingered on, and the stubborn resistance of the garrison seemed unable to do more than stave off the evil day. But the happy invention of fire-tubes for squirting inflammable liquids (probably the famous “Greek-fire” of which we first hear at this time), gave the Emperor's fleet the superiority in a decisive naval battle. At the same time a great victory was won on land and thirty thousand Arabs slain. Abderrahman had fallen during the siege, and his successors had to lead back the mere wrecks of a fleet and army to the disheartened Caliph.
It is a thousand pities that the details of this, the [pg 171] second great siege of Constantinople, are not better known. But there is no good contemporary historian to give us the desired information. If he had but met with his “sacred bard,” Constantine IV. might have gone down to posterity in company with Heraclius and Leo the Isaurian, as the third great hero of the East-Roman Empire.
The year after the raising of the great siege, Moawiah sued for peace, restored all his conquests, and offered a huge war indemnity, promising to pay 3000 lbs. of gold per annum for thirty years. The report of the triumph of Constantine went all over the world, and ambassadors came even from the distant Franks and Khazars to congratulate him on the victory which had saved Eastern Christendom from the Arab.
While Constantine was defending his capital from the Eastern enemy, the wild tribes of his northern border took the opportunity of swooping down on the European provinces, whose troops had been drawn off to resist the Arabs. The Slavs came down from the inland, and laid siege for two years to Thessalonica, which was only relieved from their attacks when Constantine had finished his war with Moawiah. But a far more dangerous attack was made by another enemy in the eastern part of the Balkan Peninsula. The Bulgarians, a nomad tribe of Finnish blood, who dwelt in the region of the Pruth and Dniester, came over the Danube, subdued the Slavs of Moesia, and settled between the Danube and the Eastern Balkans, where they have left their name till this day. They united the scattered Slavonic tribes [pg 172] of the region into a single strong state, and the new Bulgarian kingdom was long destined to be a troublesome neighbour to the empire. The date 679 counts as the first year of the reign of Isperich first king of Bulgaria. Constantine IV. was too exhausted by his long war with Moawiah to make any serious attempt to drive the Bulgarians back over the Danube, and acquiesced in the new settlement.
The last six years of Constantine's reign were spent in peace. The only notable event that took place in them was the meeting at Constantinople of the Sixth Oecumenical Council in 680-1. At this Synod, the doctrine of the Monothelites, who attributed but one will to Our Lord, was solemnly condemned by the united Churches of the East and West. The holders of Monothelite doctrines, dead and alive, were solemnly anathematised, among them Pope Honorius of Rome, who in a previous generation had consented to the heresy.
Constantine IV. died in 685, before he had reached his thirty-sixth year, leaving his throne to his eldest son Justinian, a lad of sixteen.
XIII. The First Anarchy.
Justinian II., the last of the house of Heraclius, was a sovereign of a different type from any emperor that we have yet encountered in the annals of the Eastern Empire. He was a bold, reckless, callous, and selfish young man, with a firm determination to assert his own individuality and have his own way,—he was, in short, of the stuff of which tyrants are made. Justinian was but seventeen when he came to the throne, but he soon showed that he intended to rule the empire after his own good pleasure long before he had begun to learn the lessons of state-craft.
Ere he had reached his twenty-first year Justinian had plunged into war with the Bulgarians. He attacked them suddenly, inflicted several defeats on their king, and took no less than thirty thousand prisoners, whom he sent over to Asia, and forced to enlist in the army of Armenia. He next picked a quarrel with the Saracen Caliph on the most frivolous grounds. The annual tribute due by the treaty of 679 had hitherto been paid in Roman solidi, but in 692 [pg 174] Abdalmalik tendered it in new gold coins of his own mintage, bearing verses of the Koran. Justinian refused to receive them, and declared war.
His second venture in the field was disastrous: his unwilling recruits from Bulgaria deserted to the enemy, when he met the Saracens at Sebastopolis in Cilicia, and the Roman army was routed with great slaughter. The two subsequent campaigns were equally unsuccessful, and the troops of the Caliph harried Cappadocia far and wide.
Justinian's wars depleted his treasury; yet he persisted in plunging into expensive schemes of building at the same time, and was driven to collect money by the most reckless extortion. He employed two unscrupulous ministers, Theodotus, the accountant general—an ex-abbot who had deserted his monastery—and the eunuch Stephanus, the keeper of the privy purse. These men were to Justinian what Ralph Flambard was to William Rufus, or Empson and Dudley to Henry VII: they raised him funds by flagrant extortion and illegal stretching of the law. Both were violent and cruel: Theodotus is said to have hung recalcitrant tax-payers up by ropes above smoky fires till they were nearly stifled. Stephanus thrashed and stoned every one who fell into his hands; he is reported to have actually administered a whipping to the empress-dowager during the absence of her son, and Justinian did not punish him when he returned.
While the emperor's financial expedients were making him hated by the moneyed classes, he was rendering himself no less unpopular in the army.
[pg 175]After his ill-success in the Saracen war, he began to execute or imprison his officers, and to decimate his beaten troops: to be employed by him in high command was almost as dangerous as it was to be appointed a general-in-chief during the dictatorship of Robespierre.
In 695 the cup of Justinian's iniquities was full. An officer named Leontius being appointed, to his great dismay, general of the “theme” of Hellas, was about to set out to assume his command. As he parted from his friends he exclaimed that his days were numbered, and that he should be expecting the order for his execution to arrive at any moment. Then a certain monk named Paul stood forth, and bade him save himself by a bold stroke; if he would aim a blow at Justinian he would find the people and the army ready to follow him.
Leontius took the monk's counsel, and rushing to the state prison, at the head of a few friends, broke it open and liberated some hundreds of political prisoners. A mob joined him, he seized the Cathedral of St. Sophia, and then marched on the palace. No one would fight for Justinian, who was caught and brought before the rebel leader in company with his two odious ministers. Leontius bade his nose be slit, and banished him to Cherson. Theodotus and Stephanus he handed over to the mob, who dragged them round the city and burnt them alive.
Twenty years of anarchy followed the usurpation of Leontius. The new emperor was not a man of capacity, and had been driven into rebellion by his fears rather than his ambition. He held the throne [pg 176] barely three years, amid constant revolts at home and defeats abroad. The Asiatic frontier was ravaged by the armies of Abdalmalik, and at the same time a great disaster befel the western half of the empire. A Saracen army from Egypt forced its way into Africa, where the Romans had still maintained themselves by hard fighting while the emperors of the house of Heraclius reigned. They reduced all its fortresses one after the other, and finally took Carthage in 697—a hundred and sixty-five years after it had been restored to the empire by Belisarius.
The larger part of the army of Africa escaped by sea from Carthage when the city fell. The officers in command sailed for Constantinople, and during their voyage plotted to dethrone Leontius. They enlisted in their scheme Tiberius Apsimarus, who commanded the imperial fleet in the Aegean, and proclaimed him emperor when he joined them with his galleys. The troops of Leontius betrayed the gates of the capital to the followers of the rebel admiral, and Apsimarus seized Constantinople. He proclaimed himself emperor by the title of Tiberius, third of that name, and condemned his captive rival to the same fate that he himself had inflicted on Justinian II. Accordingly the nose of Leontius was slit, and he was placed in confinement in a monastery.
Tiberius III. was more fortunate in his reign than his predecessor: his troops gained several victories over the Saracens, recovered the frontier districts which Justinian II. and Leontius had lost, and even invaded Northern Syria. But these successes did not save Tiberius from suffering the same doom which had fallen on Justinian and Leontius. The people and army were out of hand, the ephemeral emperor could count on no loyalty, and any shock was sufficient to upset his precarious throne.
We must now turn to the banished Justinian, who had been sent into exile with his nose mutilated. He had been transported to Cherson, the Greek town in the Crimea, close to the modern Sebastopol, which formed the northernmost outpost of civilization, and enjoyed municipal liberty under the suzerainty of the empire. Justinian displayed in his day of adversity [pg 178] a degree of capacity which astonished his contemporaries. He fled from Cherson and took refuge with the Khan of the Khazars, the Tartar tribe who dwelt east of the Sea of Azof. With this prince the exile so ingratiated himself that he received in marriage his sister, who was baptized and christened Theodora. But Tiberius III. sent great sums of money to the Khazar to induce him to surrender Justinian, and the treacherous barbarian determined to accept the bribe, and sent secret orders to two of his officers to seize his brother-in-law. The emperor learnt of the plot through his wife, and saved himself by the bold expedient of going at once to one of the two Khazar chiefs and asking for a secret interview. When they were alone he fell on him and strangled him, and then calling on the second Khazar served him in the same fashion, before the Khan's orders had been divulged to any one.
This gave him time to escape, and he fled in a fishing boat out into the Euxine with a few friends and servants who had followed him into exile. While they were out at sea a storm arose, and the boat began to fill. One of his companions cried to Justinian to make his peace with God, and pardon his enemies ere he died. But the Emperor's stern soul was not bent by the tempest. “May God drown me here,” he answered, “if I spare a single one of my enemies if ever I get to land!” The boat weathered the storm, and Justinian survived to carry out his cruel oath. He came ashore in the land of the Bulgarians, and soon won favour with their king Terbel, who wanted a good excuse for invading the [pg 179] empire, and found it in the pretence of supporting the exiled monarch. With a Bulgarian army at his back Justinian appeared before Constantinople, and obtained an entrance at night near the gate of Blachernæ. There was no fighting, for the adherents of Tiberius were as unready to strike a blow for their master as the followers of Leontius had been [705 a.d.]
So Justinian recovered his throne without fighting, for the people had by this time half forgotten his tyranny, and regretted the rule of the house of Heraclius. But they were soon to find out that they had erred in submitting to the exile, and should have resisted him at all hazards. Justinian came back in a relentless mood, bent on nothing but revenging his mutilated nose and his ten years of exile. His first act was to send for the two usurpers who had sat on his throne: Leontius was brought out from his monastery, and Tiberius caught as he tried to flee into Asia. Justinian had them led round the city in chains, and then bound them side by side before his throne in the Cathisma, the imperial box at the Hippodrome. There he sat in state, using their prostrate bodies as a footstool, while his adherents chanted the verse from the ninety-first Psalm, “Thou shalt tread on the lion and asp: the young lion and dragon shalt thou trample under thy feet.” The allusion was to the names of the usurpers, the Lion and Asp being Leontius and Apsimarus!
After this strange exhibition the two ex-emperors were beheaded. Their execution began a reign of terror, for Justinian had his oath to keep, and was set [pg 180] on wreaking vengeance on every one who had been concerned in his deposition. He hanged all the chief officers and courtiers of Leontius, and put out the eyes of the patriarch who had crowned him. Then he set to work to hunt out meaner victims: many prominent citizens of Constantinople were sown up in sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus. Soldiers were picked out by the dozen and beheaded. A special expedition was sent by sea to sack Cherson, the city of the Emperor's exile, because he had a grudge against its citizens. The chief men were caught and sent to the capital, where Justinian had them bound to spits and roasted.
These atrocities were mere samples of the general conduct of Justinian. In a few years he had made himself so much detested that it might be said that he had been comparatively popular in the days of his first reign.
The end came into 711, when a general named Philippicus took arms, and seized Constantinople while Justinian was absent at Sinope. The army of the tyrant laid down their arms when Philippicus approached, and he was led forth and beheaded without further delay—an end too good for such a monster. The conqueror also sought out and slew his little son Tiberius, whom the sister of the Khan of the Khazars had borne to him during his exile. So ended the house of Heraclius, after it had sat for five generations and one hundred and one years on the throne of Constantinople.
The six years which followed were purely anarchical. Justinian's wild and wicked freaks had completed the [pg 181] demoralization which had already set in before his restoration. Everything in the army and the state was completely disorganized and out of gear. It required a hero to restore the machinery of government and evolve order out of chaos. But the hero was not at once forthcoming, and the confusion went on increasing.
To replace Justinian by Philippicus was only to substitute King Log for King Stork. The new emperor was a mere man of pleasure, and spent his time in personal enjoyment, letting affairs of state slide on as best they might. In less than two years he was upset by a conspiracy which placed on the throne Artemius Anastasius, his own chief secretary. Philippicus was blinded, and compelled to exchange the pleasures of the palace for the rigours of a monastery. But the Court intrigue which dethroned Philippicus did not please the army, and within two years Anastasius was overthrown by the soldiers of the Obsequian theme, who gave the imperial crown to Theodosius of Adrammytium, a respectable but obscure commissioner of taxes. More merciful than any of his ephemeral predecessors, Theodosius III. dismissed Anastasius unharmed, after compelling him to take holy orders.
Meanwhile the organization of the empire was visibly breaking up. “The affairs both of the realm and the city were neglected and decaying, civil education was disappearing, and military discipline dissolved.” The Bulgarian and Saracen commenced once more to ravage the frontier provinces, and every year their ravages penetrated further inland. The [pg 182] Caliph Welid was so impressed with the opportunity offered to him, that he commenced to equip a great armament in the ports of Syria with the express purpose of laying siege to Constantinople. No one hindered him, for the army raised to serve against him turned aside to engage in the civil war between Anastasius and Theodosius. The landmarks of the Saracens' conquests by land are found in the falls of the great cities of Tyana [710], Amasia [712], and Antioch-in-Pisidia [713]. They had penetrated into Phrygia by 716, and were besieging the fortress of Amorium with every expectation of success, when at last there appeared the man who was destined to save the East-Roman Empire from a premature dismemberment.
This was Leo the Isaurian, one of the few military officers who had made a great reputation amid the fearful disasters of the last ten years. He was now general of the “Anatolic” theme, the province which included the old Cappadocia and Lycaonia. After inducing the Saracens, more by craft than force, to raise the siege of Amorium, Leo disowned his allegiance to the incapable Theodosius and marched toward the Bosphorus.
The unfortunate emperor, who had not coveted the throne he occupied, nor much desired to retain it, allowed his army to risk one engagement with the troops of Leo. When it was beaten he summoned the Patriarch, the Senate, and the chief officers of the court, pointed out to them that a great Saracen invasion was impending, that civil war had begun, and that he himself did not wish to remain responsible [pg 183] for the conduct of affairs. With his consent the assembly resolved to offer the crown to Leo, who formally accepted it early in the spring of 717.
Theodosius retired unharmed to Ephesus, where he lived for many years. When he died the single word ΥΓΙΕΙΑ, “Health,” was inscribed on his tomb according to his last directions.
XIV. The Saracens Turned Back.
By dethroning Theodosius III. on the very eve of the great Saracen invasion, Leo the Isaurian took upon himself the gravest of responsibilities. With a demoralized army, which of late had been more accustomed to revolt than to fight, a depleted treasury, and a disorganized civil service, he had to face an attack even more dangerous than that which Constantine IV. had beaten off thirty years before. Constantine too, the fourth of a race of hereditary rulers, had a secure throne and a loyal army, while Leo was a mere adventurer who had seized the crown only a few months before he was put to the test of the sword.
The reigning Caliph was now Suleiman, the seventh of the house of the Ommeyades. He had strained all the resources of his wide empire to provide a fleet and army adequate to the great enterprise which he had taken in hand. The chief command of the expedition was given to his brother Moslemah, who led an army of eighty thousand men from Tarsus across the centre of Asia Minor, and marched on [pg 185] the Hellespont, taking the strong city of Pergamus on his way. Meanwhile a fleet of eighteen hundred sail under the vizier Suleiman, namesake of his master the Caliph, sailed from Syria for the Aegean, carrying a force no less than that which marched by land. Fleet and army met at Abydos on the Hellespont without mishap, for Leo had drawn back all his resources, naval and military, to guard his capital.
In August, 717, only five months after his coronation, the Isaurian saw the vessels of the Saracens sailing up the Propontis, while their army had crossed into Thrace and was approaching the city from the western side. Moslemah caused his troops to build a line of circumvallation from the sea to the Golden Horn, cutting Constantinople off from all communication with Thrace, while Suleiman blocked the southern exit of the Bosphorus, and tried to close it on the northern side also, so as to prevent any supplies coming by water from the Euxine. Leo, however, sallied forth from the Golden Horn with his galleys and fire-vessels bearing the dreaded Greek fire, and did so much harm to the detachment of Saracen ships which had gone northward up the strait, that the blockade was never properly established on that side.
The Saracens relied more on starving out the city than on taking it by storm: they had come provided with everything necessary for a blockade of many months, and sat down as if intending to remain before the walls for an indefinite time. But Constantinople had been provisioned on an even more lavish scale; each family had been bidden to lay in a stock of corn [pg 186] for no less a period than two years, and famine appeared in the camp of the besiegers long ere it was felt in the houses of the besieged. Nor had Moslemah and Suleiman reckoned with the climate. Hard winters occasionally occur by the Black Sea, as our own army learnt to its cost in the Crimean War. But the Saracens were served even worse by the winter of 717-18, when the frost never ceased for twelve weeks. Leo might have boasted, like Czar Nicholas, that December, January, and February were his best generals—for these months wrought fearful havoc in the Saracen host. The lightly clad Orientals could not stand the weather, and died off like flies of dysentery and cold. The vizier Suleiman was among those who perished. Meanwhile the Byzantines suffered little, being covered by roofs all the winter.
When next spring came round Moslemah would have had to raise the siege if he had not been heavily reinforced both by sea and land. A fleet of reserve arrived from Egypt, and a large army came up from Tarsus and occupied the Asiatic shores of the Bosphorus.
But Leo did not despair, and took the offensive in the summer. His fire-ships stole out and burnt the Egyptian squadron as it lay at anchor. A body of troops landing on the Bithynian coast, surprised and cut to pieces the Saracen army which watched the other side of the strait. Soon, too, famine began to assail the enemy; their stores of provisions were now giving out, and they had harried the neighbourhood so fiercely that no more food could be got from near at [pg 187] hand, while if they sent foraging parties too far from their lines they were cut off by the peasantry. At last Moslemah suffered a disaster which compelled him to abandon his task. The Bulgarians came down over the Balkans, and routed the covering army which observed Adrianople and protected the siege on the western side. No less than twenty thousand Saracens fell, by the testimony of the Arab historians themselves, and the survivors were so cowed that Moslemah gave the order to retire. The fleet ferried the land army back into Asia, and both forces started homeward. Moslemah got back to Tarsus with only thirty thousand men at his back, out of more than a hundred thousand who had started with him or come to him as reinforcements. The fleet fared even worse: it was caught by a tempest in the Aegean, and so fearfully shattered that it is said that only five vessels out of the whole Armada got back to Syria unharmed.
Thus ended the last great endeavour of the Saracen to destroy Constantinople. The task was never essayed again, though for three hundred and fifty years more wars were constantly breaking out between the Emperor and the Caliph. In the future they were always to be border struggles, not desperate attempts to strike at the heart of the empire, and conquer Europe for Islam. To Leo, far more than to his contemporary the Frank Charles Martel, is the delivery of Christendom from the Moslem danger to be attributed. Charles turned back a plundering horde sent out from an outlying province of the Caliphate. Leo repulsed the grand-army of [pg 188] the Saracens, raised from the whole of their eastern realms, and commanded by the brother of their monarch. Such a defeat was well calculated to impress on their fatalistic minds the idea that Constantinople was not destined by providence to fall into their hands. They were by this time far removed from the frantic fanaticism which had inspired their grandfathers, and the crushing disaster they had now sustained deterred them from any repetition of the attempt. Life and power had grown so pleasant to them that martyrdom was no longer an “end in itself”; they preferred, if checked, to live and fight another day.
Leo was, however, by no means entirely freed from the Saracens by his victory of 718. At several epochs in the latter part of his reign he was troubled by invasions of his border provinces. None of them, however, were really dangerous, and after a victory won over the main army of the raiders in 739 at Acroinon in Phrygia, Asia Minor was finally freed from their presence.