Empire of God, page 16
Nonetheless, the Arab forces were so considerable that they were able to keep up the siege for seven years. In the winters they retreated to Cyzicus, right across the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople, and would renew their siege every spring, according to Theophanes, who adds that “with the aid of God and His Mother they were disgraced, expending a host of warlike men. They retreated in great distress, with severe wounds inflicted on themselves.”259 Then, “as their expedition was going away after God had ruined it, it was overtaken by a tempestuous winter storm near Syllaion. It was shivered to atoms and completely destroyed.”260
The Teenager
There were a few years of peace, but in 685, a new emperor, Justinian II, the son of Constantine IV, was determined to emulate his illustrious namesake and once again restore the glory of the Roman Empire. Theophanes observes, however, that “as he was but sixteen, Justinian was not one to follow traditional practice,” and “ran things without advice.”261 At a time when the empire had made peace with the Arabs and had them on the defensive to the extent that the caliph Abdel Malik had agreed to pay a daily tribute of “1,000 nomismata, a horse, and a slave,” Justinian II broke the peace and attacked.262 While Justinian was correct that the jihad had not been ended with a temporary truce and would resume as soon as its warriors were able to do so, he could have chosen rather than attacking to take advantage of the respite and build up the Roman forces. Instead, Justinian relied on a force of thirty thousand Slavs that he had just resettled from the Balkans, and not surprisingly, the loyalty of these new arrivals was doubtful. At Sebastopolis in central Asia Minor in 692, Abdel Malik bribed twenty thousand of them to switch sides and decisively defeated the Romans. Enraged, Justinian “massacred the remaining Slavs (and their wives and children).”263
Also like his illustrious namesake, Justinian embarked on an ambitious building program, although the teenager’s focus was in large part upon adding to the grandeur of his own palace: he augmented his palace’s outer walls and constructed a grand new reception hall. The emperor placed his advisor Stephen the Persian in charge of all this, heedless of the fact that Stephen was “bloodthirsty and cruel,” and was “not content with mercilessly harassing the workmen, but even stoned them and their leaders.”264 While Justinian was out of Constantinople, Stephen is said to have even subjected his mother, the Augusta Anastasia, to a whipping. Justinian is not recorded to have done anything in response. All this and more in the same vein, according to Theophanes, “made the Emperor hated.”265
Making matters even worse was the abbot Theodotos, whom Justinian put in charge of the treasury. Theodotos “rashly, vainly, and unjustifiably put into effect schemes, confiscations and tax assessments against a great many leaders of the state and important men, not only from the governing class, but also from among the property-owners of the city.”266 Theodotos had those whom he accused of not paying their taxes hanged or burned to death; others he imprisoned. “All this,” notes Theophanes laconically, “exacerbated the people’s hatred of the Emperor.”267
Justinian felt the same hatred for the people. Impulsive and out of control with rage, he ordered a general “to kill the populace of Constantinople, and to begin with the patriarch.”268 Instead, he himself was overthrown, his nose slit and tongue cut, and he was sent into exile to Chersonesus, a Roman colony on the remote Crimean peninsula. The general Leontios, who overthrew him, couldn’t stop the Arab advance; Carthage fell to the Umayyad caliphate in 697, ending forever the Roman presence in North Africa. The following year, it was Leontios’s turn to be overthrown and have his nose slit, at the hands of a military commander named Apsimaros, who reigned as Emperor Tiberius III. The new emperor couldn’t reverse the decline: the Umayyads took Armenia and held it even after the Armenians revolted against Umayyad rule, and the Romans made valiant efforts to win it back.
Surveying the seemingly endless failures of his successors, Justinian II, now thirty-six and presumably wiser but no less ruthless, decided that it was time to reclaim his throne. He had himself fitted with a golden nose to hide the evidence of his earlier mutilation and set sail from Chersonesus. The seas were stormy, and many on board thought the ship would sink. One of Justinian’s aides said to him: “You are going to die, my lord! Make a deal with God for being saved, so that if He restores your rule to you, you will not take vengeance on your enemies.”269
Justinian, however, had anything but mercy on his mind. “If I spare any of them,” he shot back angrily, “then may God drown me!”270 He made a deal with Terval, the ruler of Bulgaria, to give him his daughter in marriage in exchange for military support. With a force of Bulgars and Slavs, Justinian approached Constantinople.
The angry emperor took the city and regained power. True to his vow on the storm-tossed ship, he exacted bloody revenge on his enemies, hanging them en masse, although he had Leontios and Tiberius III beheaded. He had Ecumenical Patriarch Kallinikos blinded and exiled to Rome. The people of Constantinople were terrorized into submission, but the empire’s enemies were not impressed. The Umayyad caliph Walid, clearly unafraid of any possible reprisal from the impulsive and hot-headed Roman emperor, despoiled the church in Damascus and, according to Theophanes, “stopped the use of Greek in the public record books of the departments, ordering them to be written in Arabic instead; that is, except for numbers, since it is impossible to write the number ‘one,’ the number ‘two,’ the number ‘three,’ ‘eight and a half,’ or ‘three in the feminine gender’ in their language. Because of this their scribes are Christians even to the present day.”271 In our own age, when we are inundated with wildly exaggerated or outright fabricated stories of Muslim and Arab achievement and innovation, including “Arabic numerals” that actually originated in India, this is a striking detail.
Dispelling any good will he had built up with Terval, Justinian II attacked Bulgaria and was defeated. The Arabs defeated the Romans in Asia Minor and advanced into Cappadocia in the southeastern region of what is now Turkey. Soon after, Justinian was overthrown a second time, and this time the decisive step was taken to ensure that he would not return to the throne a third time: he was beheaded.
* * *
231 Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, Alfred Guillaume, trans. (Oxford University Press, 1955), 792.
232 Imam Muslim, Sahih Muslim, rev. ed., Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, trans., (Kitab Bhavan, 2000), Book 1, No. 27b.
233 Ibid.
234 Ibid.
235 Ibid.
236 Muslim, Sahih Muslim, Book 10, No. 31; cf. Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, Muhammad M. Khan, trans. (Darussalam, 1997), Vol. 1, Book 2, No. 25.
237 Sophronios, Christmas Sermon, 506 (quoted in Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It; A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian on Early Islam (Princeton, N. J.: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1997) 70).
238 Theophanes, The Chronicle, op. cit., 36.
239 Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Vol. 11, The Challenge to the Empires, translated by Khalid Yahya Blankinship (State University of New York Press, 1993), 94.
240 Ibid., 103.
241 Akbar Shah Najeebabadi, The History of Islam, (Darussalam, 2000), Vol. 1, 327.
242 Muhammed Ibn Ismaiel Al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari: The Translation of the Meanings, translated by Muhammad M. Khan, trans., Vol. 4, Book 56, No. 2941 (Darussalam, 1997).
243 Bukhari, The Translation, Vol. 1, Book 1, No. 7.
244 Ibid.
245 Ibn Sa’d, Kitab Al-Tabaqat Al-Kabir, translated by S. Moinul Haq and H. K. Ghazanfar, vol. 2 (Kitab Bhavan, n.d.), Vol. I, p. 306.
246 Bukhari, The Translation, op. cit.10
247 Ibid., Vol. 5, Book 64, No. 4424.
248 Ibid., Vol. 4, Book 61, No. 3618.
249 Sophronios, Ep. Synodica, Patrologia Greca 87, 3197D–3200A, in Hoyland, 69.
250 Theophanes, The Chronicle, op. cit., 39.
251 Sophronios, Holy Baptism, 162, Hoyland, op. cit., 72–73.
252 Muhammad ibn Jarir Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. XII, “The Battle of al-Qadisiyyah and the Conquest of Syria and Palestine,” trans. Yohanan Friedmann (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 191–192.
253 Ibid.
254 Theophanes, The Chronicle, op. cit., 45.
255 Ibid., 47.
256 Ibid., 53.
257 Ibid., 52.
258 Ibid.
259 Ibid., 53.
260 Ibid.
261 Ibid., 62.
262 Ibid., 61.
263 Ibid., 64.
264 Ibid., 65.
265 Ibid.
266 Ibid.
267 Ibid.
268 Ibid., 66.
269 Ibid., 71.
270 Ibid.
271 Ibid.
Chapter Twelve
The Iconoclasts
The First Iconoclast
The Christian empire had fallen on hard times and had been steadily losing territory. Its sovereigns, meanwhile, had often been bloodthirsty, incompetent, or both. Some Romans began to wonder if the empire was so beset by constant threats because it had offended God or wasn’t devoted enough to pleasing him.
In March 717, a general named Konon, who hailed from the rural region of Isauria in modern-day southern Turkey, deposed the hesitant Emperor Theodosius III and took power as Emperor Leo III. He was determined to stop the decline of the empire and searched earnestly for the cause of that decline. Theophanes asserts that around that time, a “Jewish wizard who made his headquarters at Phoenician Laodikeia came to Yezid,” the Umayyad caliph, and “told him that he would rule the Arab world for forty years if he would condemn the honored and revered icons in the Christians’ churches throughout his entire empire,” of which there was a considerable number.272 Yezid “believed him and promulgated an all-embracing edict against the holy icons,” but the prophecy proved false, as Yezid died that same year.273
Leo saw no connection between the death of Yezid and his iconoclastic edict. Instead, he was impressed by the resolute stand against images of the divine among the Arabs and in their developing the new religion of Islam. He ultimately concluded that God had allowed the Romans to suffer the humiliating defeats of recent decades because the people of the empire had strayed from the divine laws. While this was a classic case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy—“B came after A, therefore A caused B”—no one could argue with the success the Arabs had experienced over the last three-quarters of a century.
Leo decided that the icons, the sacred images of Christ and the saints that proliferated everywhere and were firmly rejected in Islamic law, were a violation of the Second Commandment prohibition against graven images and had aroused the divine wrath. God had raised up the iconoclastic Arabs to punish this idolatry, and now the empire had to become iconoclastic itself in order to recover its former strength and glory. To many, Leo’s reasoning seemed compelling. Theophanes, however, who was thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing, notes in his chronicle—written a century after Leo became emperor—that Leo “found a partisan for his stupidity” in a man named Beser, who during a stint as a prisoner of the Arabs in Syria “had apostatized from his faith in Christ and converted to the Arabs’ doctrine.”274
Around 726, Leo “began to frame an order condemning the august, holy icons.”275 Pope Gregory II immediately penned a doctrinal letter to the theologically minded sovereign, reminding him that “it was not proper for the Emperor to issue a command concerning the faith or to make innovations in the ancient doctrine of the Church.”276
Leo paid no heed. And despite the fact that he was basing his entire iconoclastic initiative on the assumption that God’s will could be readily discerned in the events of the day, he was not moved when a mysterious thick smoke arose from the sea (apparently from a submerged volcanic island) and engulfed all of Asia Minor. Leo concluded, says Theophanes, that “God was angry at him,” but dismissed the possibility that it could have been because of his campaign against the sacred images.
The people of Constantinople generally detested Leo’s iconoclasm, and when he had the icon of Christ on Constantinople’s Bronze Gate destroyed, they had had enough and rose up to overthrow him. Leo, however, was not cut from the same cloth as his immediate predecessors or inclined to endure exile with a slit nose; he had the uprising put down with ruthless efficiency. Theophanes says that he “caused many of them (especially those distinguished by noble birth or rhetorical skill) to be punished for their piety by mutilation, lashes, exile, and fines. This brought an end to the schools and pious education which had prevailed since the time of Constantine the Great.”277
Leo crushed another rebellion from Greece by turning Greek fire on the rebel ships. He pressured Ecumenical Patriarch Germanos to accept iconoclasm, and when the prelate refused, removed him from his position. “If I am Jonah,” said Germanos, “cast me into the sea,” as the biblical Jonah had been cast into the sea by panicked shipmen who saw his disobedience to God as the cause of the rocky waves they were experiencing.278 “For, Emperor, I cannot make innovations in the faith without an ecumenical conference.”279 Pope Gregory II, however, refused to accept the successor Leo had chosen for the patriarchal throne of Constantinople. In a move that would much later have far-reaching consequences for the empire and the world at large, the pope “condemned Leo for his impiety; he also split off Rome and all Italy from his rule.”280 Leo mounted an expedition to recapture it, but it came to nothing.
Relentless in his opposition to the icons, Leo ordered the churches to cover them; many were painted over, and the white walls decorated instead with bare crosses. He ordered sacred objects that had images on them to be destroyed. According to Theophanes, “Many clerics, monks, and pious laymen were endangered because of their true concept of the faith and were crowned with the crown of martyrdom.”281
Meanwhile, the Romans successfully beat back another Arab siege of Constantinople in 717. As the Arab vessels approached the city, Leo “sent fireships against them,” which “turned them into blazing wrecks.”282 As a result, the “spirits of the city’s inhabitants were lifted, but their foes shivered in terror, recognizing how strong the liquid fire was.”283 During Leo’s reign, the empire also withstood two later Umayyad invasions. Leo’s reasoning seemed to have been borne out. Maybe the icons were the source of the empire’s troubles, and now that the threat had been removed, the Christians would go from strength to strength. Maybe. The contemporary historian Warren Treadgold observes of Leo: “If his exploits had not convinced most people that Iconoclasm was right, he had not done badly enough to prove to them that Iconoclasm was wrong.”284
New and Old Laws
Leo also set out to put the empire on a more secure Christian footing by codifying the mass of post-Justinian laws and giving Roman law a more profoundly Christian character than it had had before. As enduring as it had been, Justinian’s work of codification did not suffice in itself to provide a legal superstructure for an empire that was facing new and unprecedented challenges. The Body of Civil Law was in Latin, in an empire that increasingly spoke Greek only; consequently, Greek-language summaries of the code circulated widely. In 726, Leo and his son and co-emperor Constantine V, who succeeded him as sole emperor in 741, issued the Ecloga, “Selections” from Justinian’s code. The Ecloga introduced some changes into Justinian’s body of laws, Leo explained, “in the interest of greater humanity.”285
In line with Leo’s determination to Christianize the law, abortion, adultery, and homosexual activity were outlawed, and divorce was made more difficult than it had been. For many crimes, mutilation rather than the death penalty was prescribed. While this is jarring to modern sensibilities—adulterers, for example, were to have their noses slit—it was considered to be a more humane alternative to putting someone to death. And as the twentieth-century historian Robert Byron notes, “Imprisonment, for a nation of philosophers, was considered no hardship.”286
Whatever one may think of it today, Leo’s Ecloga was not a reflection of some societal fad but of the faith that had prevailed in the empire for four hundred years by that point. It remained standard in the empire until 892.
Copronym
For the Orthodox Christian Romans, none of Leo’s achievements could outweigh his iconoclasm, and their detestation of this heresy overshadowed Leo’s heir from his earliest days. Theophanes recounts that when Constantine V was baptized, he “gave a terrible, foul-smelling harbinger: he defecated in the holy font, as say those who were accurate eyewitnesses.”287 Germanos, who was present, is said to have remarked: “This is a sign that in the future great evil shall befall the Christians and the Church because of him.”288 Because of the infant’s transgression, he came to be known as Copronym, the “dung-named,” although this epithet likely referred more to his staunch iconoclasm than to what may have happened when he was a mere babe in arms.
