Empire of God, page 18
There was once again a male Roman emperor in Constantinople. Yet Charlemagne did not, of course, lay down his crown.
It is one of the tantalizing turning points of history. It might even have been a missed opportunity, although there is no way to tell whether it would have resulted in good or ill. There was certainly the potential for great good to have resulted. A dynastic marriage between Charlemagne and Irene would have made the empire larger than it had been since the time of Constantine and then some. It might have transformed the development of Western Europe, which was growing progressively more estranged from the empire and the Greek intellectual tradition. A revived Roman Empire in the West might have ended that estrangement and brought about the intellectual flowering of the West several centuries earlier than it actually began. A united empire might also have stood strong against the challenge and threat of Islam even more effectively and comprehensively than the Romans of the East did on their own.
It’s also possible that if such a marriage had taken place, none of that would have happened. History is full of surprises, unexpected developments, and dramatic twists. What actually did happen was that Charlemagne’s Frankish Roman Empire and the old Roman Empire in Constantinople developed an uneasy relationship of mistrust that ultimately culminated in the schism between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople, and the resulting hesitancy on the part of the West to aid Constantinople against Islam without some sort of ecclesiastical union. The estrangement between the Christian East and the Christian West is still with us today and has borne all manner of bitter fruit. It is intriguing to speculate on how it all might have been different had Charlemagne, standing tall and regal among the Romans in Hagia Sophia, taken Empress Irene as his lawful wedded wife.
Iconoclasm Resurgent
To those who believed that God’s hand could readily be discerned in human affairs, the record was clear: the empire was suffering numerous military setbacks, but when Emperor Leo the Isaurian declared that the icons were the source of all the Romans’ troubles, the empire began to win military victories, particularly during the reign of Emperor Constantine V—who acted with particular firmness against the icons and those who venerated them. After the icons were definitively declared to be in accord with the Orthodox Christian Faith at the Second Council of Nicaea, the imperial armies began once again to lose.
The Syriac Orthodox patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian—who as a Monophysite had no great love for the Roman Empire—recounted one telling incident that took place in 811. According to Michael, Nikephoros “went with a large force against the Bulgars. He reached the capital city of their kingdom and caused great destruction, to the point that he threw their little children on the ground and mercilessly drove over them with his threshing wagons. It happened that a certain Frank became enraged by this wild and bestial behavior, struck and killed him when he was alone and away from his bodyguards.”315
Michael may have been exaggerating Nikephoros’s brutality, but whether he was or not, this was a story of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Nikephoros had advanced to the Bulgars’ capital city of Pliska and was on the verge of eliminating what had become a nagging threat to the empire—a pagan and aggressive people on its northern border—when he was ambushed and killed. An anonymous ninth-century Roman chronicler writes bitterly of Nikephoros’s death: “Thus, Emperor Nicephorus, after reigning eight years and seven months, because of his recklessness and presumptuousness ruined himself and the whole Roman might.”316 The incident seemed emblematic of the empire’s military difficulties, and matters became even worse when the Bulgars advanced against the empire, threatening Constantinople himself.
In 813, according to Theophanes, as the Bulgars approached the imperial border, some Romans determined to reapply an old remedy that had appeared to work before. The citizens of the city had gone to the Church of the Holy Apostles to pray for the city’s safety. While they were thus distracted, says Theophanes, “some impious followers of the heresy of Constantine [V] (who was abominable to God) pried open the door to the imperial tombs. While no one was paying any attention to them because of the crowd’s anguish, they suddenly opened the door with a crash, as if by a divine miracle. Rushing inside, they fell at the feet of the heretic’s remains”—that is, the tomb of Constantine V—“and called on him, not on God, saying, ‘Arise and help the state, which is being destroyed.’” Theophanes adds that these people even circulated the story that the dead emperor, “who dwells in Tartaros with the demons, rose up on horseback and went off to attack the Bulgars.”317
Emperor Leo V, who was known as the Armenian, followed up on this by restoring the iconoclasm of the eighth century, hoping to end the period of the reversals the empire had recently suffered at the hands of the Bulgars and Arabs, and recapture the glory days of Leo III. He deposed Ecumenical Patriarch Nikephoros, who supported the icons, and replaced him with Theodotos, whom he had preside over a council in Constantinople that repudiated the Second Council of Nicaea and reaffirmed iconoclasm.
Initially, it seemed to work. Leo defeated and drove back the Bulgars. The eleventh century historian John Skylitzes states that then, “puffed up” by defeating the Bulgars, Leo also “achieved some success against the Arabs.”318 Success also filled him with arrogance, to the extent that “he was now unbearable in his attitude, inclined to be harsh and very cruel.”319 He began to imitate the Muslims not just in their rejection of images but in the harshness of their laws: “For small offences he awarded heavy punishments. For some, he cut off a hand, for others a foot, or, in other cases, some other vital member. The pieces which he had ordered to be amputated he now caused to be hung up along the main thoroughfare, no doubt to strike consternation and fear into those who beheld them. Thus he earned the hatred of all his subjects.”320
Ultimately this hatred gave rise to a conspiracy against Leo in 820. When the conspirators struck Leo, he rushed into a church and grabbed a large cross, one religious symbol the iconoclasts allowed; the iconoclastic emperor used it to fend off the sword thrusts of his attackers. They proved to be too much for him in the end, and John Skylitzes speaks of him in death as “the most cruel man who ever lived, more sacrilegious than all his predecessors.”321
One of those conspirators became Leo’s successor, Michael II the Amorian, also known as “The Stammerer.” Michael was also an iconoclast—but contrary to iconoclastic assumptions—he was powerless to stop the Arabs from taking Crete and invading Sicily at the invitation of an angry and disgruntled Roman, whose rage led to untold misery for his countrymen on the island. Gibbon recounts that in 826, “an amorous youth, who had stolen a nun from her cloister, was sentenced by the emperor to the amputation of his tongue.”322 Rather than submit to this, the young man, Euphemius, appealed to one of the empire’s greatest enemies, who were only too glad to help: the Muslim Arabs in North Africa. Soon afterward, Euphemius returned to Sicily with “the Imperial purple, a fleet of one hundred ships, and an army of seven hundred horse and ten thousand foot” soldiers.323 While this expedition was unsuccessful, the Arabs then sent reinforcements from Andalucia. The battles went on for years, but ultimately the Muslims prevailed, and Sicily was lost to the Romans. “In Sicily,” says Gibbon, “the religion and language of the Greeks were eradicated; and such was the docility of the rising generation, that fifteen thousand boys were circumcised and clothed on the same day with the son of the Fatimite caliph.”324
Theophilos Tests Iconoclasm
Michael II died in 829; it fell to his son, Theophilos, who succeeded him as emperor at the age of sixteen, to preside over the loss of Sicily in 833, although the island continued to be contested for a considerable period thereafter. In response, Theophilos sought to turn away the divine wrath by beginning a new and particularly virulent persecution of the iconodules, that is, those who believed in and practiced the veneration of the sacred icons. Meanwhile, as the Arabs remained a persistent threat, Theophilos sent out peace feelers to the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun. Al-Ma’mun’s response was less than conciliatory: “Pay taxes to me and acknowledge me as king over you, and I will establish friendship with you.”325 Theophilos—disinclined to hand over the empire to al-Ma’mun—ended their correspondence there. Al-Ma’mun subsequently invaded the empire and advanced confidently until he died unexpectedly, and his successor, al-Mu‘tasim, ordered a withdrawal.
Theophilos was pleased, believing that God had confirmed the wisdom of his iconoclastic policy by once again delivering the Romans from the hands of their enemies after he had moved decisively against the holy pictures. His assurance that he had found the secret to divine favor and earthly success was not shaken in 835, when he sent an unsuccessful expedition against the Muslims in Sicily, and when Muslims defeated a Roman army on the border between the two empires in Asia Minor. However, he had more success against the Bulgars and felt confident enough to carry out a successful raid inside the Abbasid caliphate in 837.
However, al-Ma’mun’s successor, al-Mu‘tasim, retaliated the following year, launching a full-scale invasion of the empire, taking Ancyra (today’s Ankara) in the Roman heartland, as well as Amorium, the birthplace of Michael II. Theophilos once again tried to conclude a peace treaty but was only able to obtain an uneasy peace after agreeing to a prisoner exchange that was heavily weighted in favor of the Arabs.
Al-Mu‘tasim’s success came as a grave shock to Theophilos, who had up to that point been absolutely certain that iconoclasm would carry him from victory to victory. When the evidence began pouring in that this was not true, he was overwhelmed even to the point of physical illness. He was unable to act against the threats the empire faced and yet refused to reconsider his iconoclasm, even branding the hands of an iconographer and tattooing the faces of two iconodule monks—Theophanes and Theodore—with claims that they were heretics. Yet the Muslims continued to carry out raids against imperial holdings.
When Theophilos died in 842 at the age of thirty, the Romans could hardly look back on his reign as a period in which the empire advanced from glory to glory. The Bulgars and Arabs both remained major threats, and the Arabs had made significant advances into the empire’s key territory, from which it drew the bulk of its fighting force.
The one-to-one equation of the divine disfavor with the sacred images, and the assumption that God would bless the empire with worldly success once the images were removed, appeared to have been definitively disproven. It should never have gained any foothold at all among a people whose scriptures contained the divine admonition: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9).
Yet such thinking remains a persistent temptation for the human race all over the globe. People today would laugh derisively at the iconoclasts’ notion that they would receive divine favor as a result of destroying icons and see it as primitive magical thinking. Then we have seen some of our most respected political figures get a vaccine that was supposed to prevent their contraction of a disease, get the disease anyway, and say, “I sure am glad I got the vaccine, otherwise my illness would be so much worse.”
Just as Emperors Leo, Michael, and Theophilos had no actual way of knowing that they were losing battles because of God’s anger, so nowadays those who offer this strange expression of faith in what is manifestly a failed remedy have no way of knowing that they would have been more seriously ill if they hadn’t gotten that remedy. Magical thinking is still very much with us.
Theophilos and Justice
Most of the writings that survive from the iconoclastic period were written by iconodules. Accordingly, Leo III the Isaurian, Constantine V Copronymus, Leo V the Armenian, and the other iconoclastic emperors are generally excoriated and portrayed in blisteringly negative terms, with their accomplishments downplayed, explained away, or attributed to sinister dealings. Theophilos, however, is a notable exception. John Skylitzes, writing about three hundred years after Theophilos’s time, provides a great deal of information about the emperor’s iconoclasm—which Skylitzes opposed—but also about his manifest good deeds. In doing so, Skylitzes manifests an understanding of the vagaries of the human heart and the complexity of each individual soul that escapes most people in our far wiser and technologically advanced age in which people are condemned as evil and deprived of a living for a single indiscreet or misinterpreted quip they made ten years ago, and there is no recourse, no appeal. The Romans knew better.
Accordingly, John Skylitzes recounts that it was Theophilos’s habit to ride out each week on horseback to the Church of the Mother of God at Blachernae in northwest Constantinople. At one point, a Roman commander, knowing that Theophilos was looking for a good horse, confiscated the animal of a poor soldier, expelled him from his regiment, and grandly presented the horse to the emperor as if it were his to give. Even worse, war broke out shortly thereafter, and the man from whom the horse had been stolen reentered the army and ended up being killed in battle. “Hearing of the emperor’s love for justice,” Skylitzes writes, “the wife, inflamed by devotion to her husband and no longer able to provide for the needs of her children, went up to the capital.”326 When Theophilos rode out on her late husband’s stolen horse to go to the church at Blachernae, she “seized the beast by the bridle, saying it was hers and that it was none other but the emperor himself who was responsible for her husband’s death.”327
Theophilos was flabbergasted. Rather than dismissing her with contempt, however, as any number of other rulers throughout history may have done, he took her complaint seriously and asked her to come to the palace to plead her case. He also summoned the commander who gave him the horse to appear at the same time. It quickly became clear to him that the horse had indeed belonged to the woman’s husband and had been stolen, whereupon he “declared that the woman and her children were to be brothers and sister to the commander, of equal rank with him and co-heirs of his fortune. He relieved the culprit of his command and sent him into perpetual exile.”328
Theophilos also took care to protect the imperial city, tearing down its old walls and building new, higher ones, “making them,” according to John Skylitzes, “insurmountable to the enemy.”329 With judgment that was somewhat less sound, Theophilos also sent an envoy to Syria who showered the Arab ruler with gifts, intending to impress him with the empire’s munificence and generosity. This is a bit of statecraft that has been much imitated in our own day and with the same mixed results at best; the Arabs were duly impressed by the display of Roman magnificence, but that didn’t stop them from continuing to raid imperial cities. Neither iconoclasm nor Roman gold ever deterred them from doing so.
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301 Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne, Samuel Epes Turner, trans. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880), 22.
302 Ibid.
303 Ibid., 6.
304 Ibid., 27.
305 Ibid., 28.
306 Ibid.
307 Ibid.
308 Theophanes, The Chronicle, op. cit., 155.
309 Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne, op. cit., 28.
310 Theophanes, The Chronicle, op. cit., 157.
311 Ibid.
312 Ibid., 158.
313 Ibid.
314 Ibid., 159.
315 Michael the Syrian, The Chronicle of Michael the Great, Patriarch of the Syrians, from Sources of the Armenian Tradition, Robert Bedrosian, trans. (Long Branch, N.J., 2013), 148.
316 Scriptor Incertus (unknown writer), “About the Emperor Nicephorus and How He Left His Bones in Bulgaria,” Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Scriptor_Incertus.
317 Theophanes, The Chronicles, op. cit., 179.
318 John Skylitzes, Byzantine History 811-1057, op. cit.
319 Ibid.
320 Ibid.
321 Ibid., 25-6.
322 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, op. cit., V.52.4.
323 Ibid.
324 Ibid.
325 Michael the Syrian, Michael the Great, op. cit., 151.
326 Ibid., 57.
327 Ibid.
328 Ibid.
329 Ibid.
Chapter Fourteen
Seeds of Schism
The End of Iconoclasm, Again
History is often said to repeat itself, and sometimes it actually does. When Theophilos died, the new emperor was his son Michael III, who was only two years old. Theophilos’s widow, Theodora, became the regent, just as Irene had served as regent for Constantine VI upon the untimely death of Leo IV. Like Irene, Theodora was an iconodule and even secretly taught her daughters, Theophilos’s own children, to venerate the icons as well.
The firmly iconoclastic Theophilos came to marry an iconodule due to the machinations of Euphrosyne, the daughter of the ill-fated Emperor Constantine VI, who—as we have seen—died as the result of a blinding at the hands of supporters of his mother Irene. In 795, when Euphrosyne was five years old, Constantine divorced Euphrosyne’s mother and sent her, along with their two daughters, to live in a convent. Euphrosyne had no reason to expect that she wouldn’t spend her entire life there. In 823, however, when Euphrosyne was twenty-eight, Emperor Michael II the Amorian’s wife, Thekla—the mother of Theophilos—died. Michael then plucked Euphrosyne out of the convent and married her in order to increase the strength of his claim to the throne. Michael was an iconoclast, and Euphrosyne was deeply devout in her veneration of the sacred icons, but that mattered little, if at all, to an emperor who was worried that he could be overthrown for having a shaky (at best) claim to sit on the imperial throne in the first place.
