From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 165-181.
CHAPTER X
Relations with the East
Now that we are approaching the most important event in the life of Charlemagne, his assumption of the imperial title, it will be necessary to glance at his relations with the line of sovereigns who alone up to the year 800 wore the title of Emperor, the Cæsars of Constantinople.
It will be hardly needful here to repeat the warning given by many recent historians against considering the State which was governed from Constantinople, between 476 and 800, as anything else than the Roman empire. As its centre of gravity was now on the Bosphorus instead of being on the Tiber, and as its chief possessions were situated on the east of the Gulf of Venice, or even on the east of the Archipelago, it is difficult to avoid speaking of it as the eastern empire; but for all the centuries between the fifth and the ninth we must remember that this is not a strictly accurate expression. It was during all that period “the empire,” “the dominion of the world,” nay, it was still the “Roman republic,” though the man who sat in Julius Cæsar’s seat was practically the uncontrolled despot of the Roman world.
165And during all these intermediate centuries, though the empire might be cut very short, by Frank and Goth and Saxon in the west, or by the Saracen in the east, it would be safe to say that it never acquiesced in its limitations. Pre-eminently the wonderful reconquests of Italy, of Africa, of part of Spain, which were wrought in the sixth century by the generals of Justinian, might well keep alive the hope that, after the “little systems” of barbarian and infidel had “had their day,” the true Divinely-appointed world-ruler would emerge from his temporary eclipse and be again supreme all round the shores of the Mediterranean.
Doubtless, though the name “Roman” was still kept and still gloried in, the empire was, with each succeeding century, becoming more thoroughly Greek, or rather Graeco-Asiatic, in its character. From this point of view it has been observed by a modern historian that the great pestilence which raged in 747 (five years after the birth of Charles) was an important factor in the transformation of the empire. “A vast portion of the inhabitants of Byzantium, who maintained Roman character and many Roman traditions amid all their half-Hellenic, half-Oriental ways, had been carried off by the plague, and were replaced by pure Greeks who had not inherited the effect of Roman influence. This was an important step in the direction of becoming a Greek nationality, to which goal the Roman empire was steadily tending” (Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire, ii. 456).
But, notwithstanding this, the emperor at Byzantium never forgot that he was Roman, but always looked upon Italy as his lawful, his almost inalienable, possession. 167 Gaul, Spain, Britain — it might be necessary to abandon these to the barbarians — but Italy, but Rome, were rightfully his, and all the shades of all the buried Cæsars would pass in angry procession before the eyes of the degenerate successor who should be so base as formally to abandon his right to hold them. This, or something like this, we may believe to have been the secret underlying thought of the Leos and the Constantines when they heard what the Frank was doing in Italy.
Through the greater part of the eighth century the Iconoclastic controversy was the dominating element in the politics of the empire. We have already seen something of the career of the first great image-breaker, Leo III. On his death, which happened in 740 (two years before the birth of Charlemagne) he was succeeded by his son Constantine V., as able a general, as strong a statesmen, and as determined an image-breaker as his father. He was a great enemy also of the monks, and both they and the image-worshippers suffered at his hands a persecution which (at any rate according to their account of it) might seem to recall the days of Decius and Diocletian.
To the court of Constantine V. fled the young Adelchis, son of Desiderius, on the downfall of the Lombard kingdom (774). He was well received by the emperor, who bestowed upon him the high-sounding title of Patrician, thus making him, as far as rank in the empire went, at least the equal of his conqueror, Charles. We have seen how the combination of rebellious Italian dukes, independent princes, and Byzantine generals, which was formed to restore Adelchis to the Lombard throne, failed, 168 owing to the death of Constantine V. (September 775), and how Hrodgaud of Friuli was left alone to bear and to sink under the vengeful might of the Frankish king.
The Emperor Constantine V. was succeeded by his son Leo IV., surnamed the Khazar, his mother having been a princess of that barbarous Tartar tribe, who dwelt by the Sea of Azof and under the Caucasus. The strain of barbarian blood did not bring strength to the character of the young emperor. Leo IV., though an earnest image-breaker, was distinctly a weaker man than his father, and during his short reign the cause of Iconoclasm probably retrograded rather than advanced.
The five years during which Leo the Khazar was on the throne (775-780) were years during which Charles gave little attention to the affairs of Italy, having much to occupy him elsewhere, for these were the years of Roncesvalles and of the fresh outbreak of the Saxon revolt. His friend and clamorous dependant, however, Pope Hadrian, sent him frequent cries for help. “The Greeks hateful to God” (that is the generals and ministers of Leo the Khazar) were conspiring with the “most unutterable” Lombards of Benevento to seduce the towns of Campania from their allegiance to Charles and Hadrian. The island of Sicily, the one secure stronghold of the Byzantine power during all these centuries, was the focus of the strife, but in order to prosecute it more successfully the patrician of Sicily took up his headquarters at Gaeta, and from thence, in concert with the Duke of Naples, was pressing hard upon those Campanian and Latian cities which kept their loyalty to the pope. Moreover, when Hadrian wrote one of his most urgent letters, in 779, it was daily expected that 169 “the son of the most unutterable and long ago absolutely unmentionable king Desiderius” would land in Italy with soldiers lent him by his Imperial ally and head the anti-Papal, anti-Frankish coalition.
Still, however, Adelchis lingered in Constantinople and once again a vacancy in the palace of the Cæsars saved Italy from a war. On the 8th of September 780, Leo the Khazar died and was succeeded by his son Constantine VI., a boy of nine years old, ruling not under the regency of, but jointly with, his mother Irene. This woman was a daughter of Athens and a secret worshipper of images, though in her father-in-law’s lifetime she had solemnly sworn always to adhere to the party of the Iconoclasts. Like Queen Athaliah of old, she was passionately fond of power, both for its own sake and as helping her to maintain the cause of idolatry against the religious reformers, and she was ready, in defence of her darling schemes of ambition, to violate not only the oath which she had given to her father-in-law — that was a light and pardonable offence — but the deepest and holiest instincts of a woman’s heart, the love of a mother for her only son.
For the first ten years of the joint reign (780-790) the lad, Constantine VI., quietly submitted to his mother’s ascendency, and only her will and her projects require the historian’s attention. The Iconoclastic spirit was strong among the soldiers of her late husband’s family, and she had to wait four years before she could openly take steps towards the restoration of the worship of images; but she seems at once to have ceased the attacks on Hadrian’s subject cities, and to have assumed a more friendly attitude towards Charles, who was not 170 himself at this time interested in the Iconoclastic controversy, but whose friendship was important if the Patriarchate of Constantinople was to be reconciled with that of Rome. Thus it came to pass that in 781, during Charles’s second visit to Rome, there appeared in that city two high nobles of the Byzantine Court, the sacellarius Constans and the primicerius Mamalus, who brought proposals for a marriage between the young emperor and Charles’s daughter Hrotrud, whom the Greeks called Eruthro. It was only an alliance at some future day that was talked of, for the prospective bridegroom was but ten years old, and the Frankish princess was probably about eight. But the match was a splendid one, there having been no previous instance of a matrimonial alliance between the Roman Cæsars and the Frankish kings, and Charles gladly accepted the offer. A tutor named Elissæus was sent to the Frankish court to instruct the future empress in the Greek tongue, and there was peace in Italy between the Franks and the generals of the empire.
During these years of peace Irene was maturing her plans for the restoration of image-worship. In 784, Paul the Patriarch of Constantinople resigned his great office and became a monk, acknowledging to all the world that his conscience was troubled by the isolation of Constantinople from all the other Patriarchates on the ground of Iconoclasm. Nothing could have suited Irene’s plans better than this resignation. Her secretary Tarasius, though a layman, was made patriarch in the room of Paul, evidently on the understanding that images were to be restored. In August 785 an imperial letter from Constantine and Irene was addressed to 171 Pope Hadrian begging him to fix a time for the convocation of a general council at Constantinople to settle the question of Iconoclasm. The pope of course gladly consented, though he took advantage of the reopened intercourse with Constantinople to demand the restoration of the “patrimonies” (probably in Sicily) which had been taken away from St. Peter’s see by the first Iconoclastic emperor: and though he also held up to the Byzantine rulers the admirable example of Charles, “King of the Franks and Lombards, and Patrician of Rome, who had in all things obeyed the admonitions of the pope his spiritual father, had subdued to himself the barbarous nations of the west, and had given back to the church of St. Peter many estates, provinces, and towns, of which it had been despoiled by the faithless Lombards.”
The general council was opened at Constantinople in August 786, but failed of its purpose. The Iconoclastic spirit was still too strong among the soldiers who were quartered in Constantinople, old comrades of Leo III. and his son. The church was invaded by them, and the image-worshipping bishops departed in fear. Next year, however, care having been taken to dispose of the Iconoclastic troops elsewhere, a general council was held at Nicæa (24th September to 23rd October 787), and there the cultus of images was re-established in full glory, only with one of those distinctions dear to theologians which defined “that it was right to salute and grovel in adoration before the holy images, but not to give them the peculiar worship which is due to God alone.”
Thus, then, the great cause of ecclesiastical contention was removed, and we might expect that the joyful event 172 would be celebrated by the marriage of the young affianced pair, Constantine and Hrotrud, now aged sixteen and fourteen respectively. On the contrary, this was the very year in which, after mysterious embassies backwards and forwards between the two Courts, the marriage treaty was broken off and the relations became more openly hostile than ever; but curiously enough (as is not infrequently the case in such affairs) there is a conflict of testimony as to which side had the credit or discredit of breaking off the match. The Frankish annalists say or hint that Charles refused his daughter to the young Emperor, who was much angered by the refusal. A Byzantine historian says that “Irene broke off the treaty with the Franks and sent the Captain of the Guard to fetch the damsel from Armenia named Mary whom she married to her son the Emperor Constantine, he being much grieved thereat, and not liking his bride because his inclination was towards the daughter of Charles, King of the Franks, to whom he had been pre-contracted.”
It is hopeless with our scanty materials to discover the reason of this mysterious rupture between the Courts. One of the most careful of the German writers who here treated of this period attributes it entirely to Charles’s invasion of Benevento and reduction of its prince Arichis to vassalage, which, as has been already related, occurred in the year 786. This, he considers, was a breach of the tacit agreement to maintain the Italian status quo ante entered into in 781, and was resented accordingly. Others have seen in it a stroke of policy on the part of Irene, who was already becoming jealous of her son's share in the Imperial authority, and feared to see him 173 provided with a too powerful father-in-law. If it be permitted to hazard yet another conjecture, where all is conjectural, I would point out that in the interval between 781 and 787, Hildegard, the mother of Hrotrud, had died, and Charles had married another wife, the haughty and unpopular Fastrada. Possibly that proud and jealous woman resented the idea of seeing her little step-daughter raised higher than herself by her exaltation to the throne of the Cæsars, and may have used her influence with her husband to entangle still further the already ravelled hank of the negotiations with Constantinople, and at last in disgust to break off the match altogether? The whole story is a remarkable illustration of the fact, so clearly shown in the negotiations for the Spanish marriage of Charles I. when Prince of Wales, that a marriage treaty, if not very carefully conducted, is quite as likely to embroil two sovereigns as to unite them.
One curious, though not immediate, result of the rapidly increasing estrangement between Franks and Greeks was that in the great synod which Charles held at Frankfort in 794 for the condemnation of the “Adoptian heresy,” Charles induced his bishops to pass a severe condemnation of “the synod held a few years before under Irene and her son which called itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council, but which was neither the seventh nor ecumenical, but was rejected by all present at [Frankfurt] as absolutely superfluous.” At the same time it was declared by the assembled bishops that neither worship nor adoration was to be paid to the images of the saints. Thus was Charles, the great patron and defender of the papacy, actually brought into controversy 174 with the pope on an important point of Christian practice.
The immediate effect of the rupture of the marriage treaty was seen in an invasion of Italy by the Greeks, in which at last the long lingering Adelchis took part. The intention was to make an attack on Charles’s dominions in combination with the Prince of Benevento (on whom the dignity of patrician was conferred) perhaps also with Tassilo the Bavarian; but before the Imperial troops landed in Italy, Arichis of Benevento was no more. He died on the 26th of August 787, a man still in the flower of his age. It is striking to observe how much Charles’s upward course to empire was facilitated by the opportune deaths of his competitors. Carloman, Constantine V., Leo IV., and now Arichis of Benevento, all died at the most seasonable time for the success of Charles’s projects. At the time of the death of Arichis, his son and heir Grimwald III. was in Charles’s keeping as a hostage. Pope Hadrian earnestly besought the king never to permit one of the God-hated dynasty to ascend the Beneventan throne, but Charles, after some delay, allowed Grimwald to return and take his place in the palace of Benevento. He was, however, compelled to promise to pay a yearly tribute of 7000 solidi, to coin money with Charles’s effigy, to date his charters by the years of the Frankish king, and in all things to acknowledge him as his over-lord. For the present these conditions were kept, and at the crisis of the Byzantine invasion Grimwald III. comported himself as a loyal vassal of Charles. So it came to pass that when at last the Byzantine troops landed in Calabria they were met by the united forces of the Frankish 175 king under his general Winighis, and the Lombard dukes of Spoleto and Benevento. The defeat of the Greeks was crushing (788). Four thousand of their warriors were slain, among them the sacellarius John, commander of the expedition; and one thousand were taken prisoners. Adelchis appears to have made his escape. He reappeared no more on the soil of Italy, but died many years after, an elderly, probably a wealthy, patrician at Constantinople. This last scion of the Lombard kings is not an interesting figure in history.
Charles’s reply to this direct attack on his dominions in the south of Italy was to lay hands on the Imperial province of Istria in the north, a conquest desirable in itself, for the cities of Istria were numerous and wealthy, and also one that facilitated the operations which he was planning against the Avars. The Court of Constantinople, probably dispirited by the defeat of the great armament under the sacellarius John seems to have accepted the rebuff. For several years after this we hear nothing more of Greek expeditions to Italy, though there may have been intrigues with the young Prince of Benevento, who married a Greek wife named Wantia, a relative of the Emperor, and in various ways showed that he fretted under his galling vassalage to the Frankish king.
But in Constantinople itself during these years of truce with the West, strange and terrible events were happening. The young Emperor Constantine VI. found as he grew up to manhood that he was an absolute cipher in his empire and in his palace. All power was kept by Irene in her own hands, all orders went through her confidential minister the eunuch Stauracius. To 176 these two all suppliants addressed their petitions. Constantine himself was treated as of no account to any man. Brooding over the daily slights which he had to endure, and resenting also, it is said, the manœuvre which had deprived him of his fair young Frankish bride, and tied him to the unloved and childless Armenian, he began in 790 to look around for partisans who would enable him to effect a revolution and become a real instead of a puppet emperor. The plan of the conspirators (among whom were two patricians and the great minister called magister officiorum), was to arrest the empress, send her off to banishment in Sicily, and proclaim Constantine sole emperor. The ever watchful Stauracius, however, obtained intelligence of the plot, arrested the conspirators, ordered some of them to be flogged, tonsured, and sent into the Sicilian exile which they had planned for Irene; the magister officiorum received some degrading punishment and was imprisoned in his own house; and lastly this same punishment of seclusion was inflicted on Constantine, after his mother had herself struck him and attacked him with an angry woman’s invective. Then a new and strange oath was administered to all the soldiers in the capital and its neighbourhood. “So long as though livest, O Empress! we will not suffer thy son to reign.” These events took place in the spring or summer of 791. In September of that year there came a change. The soldiers who were stationed in Armenia, when they were required to take the new oath, refused. “We will not put the name of Irene before that of Constantine,” said they, “but will swear obedience as of old to Constantine and Irene.” The disaffection spread; the regiments which 177 had sworn the new oath to Irene forgot their vows and joined the soldiers from Armenia. By the end of October the revolution was complete. Irene was compelled by the clamour of the soldiers to liberate her son from confinement; she was deprived of all power, and Constantine was hailed as sole emperor. Stauracius was beaten, tonsured, and sent into exile in Armenia. Aetius, another eunuch and confidant of Irene, was also banished, and a clean sweep was made of all the menial eunuch train, through whom apparently for ten years the empire had been governed.
But, unfortunately, the character of the young emperor, weakened by the subjection in which his mother had kept him, was utterly inadequate to the duties of his new position. With extraordinary folly, after a few months he drew Irene forth from the seclusion of her palace, and allowed the people to shout once more, “Long life to Constantine and Irene.” He went forth to war with the Bulgarians and was badly beaten. This humiliation of the imperial arms caused the soldiers in the city to plot for the elevation of Nicephorus, a half-brother of Leo IV. and uncle of Constantine VI. The young emperor arrested Nicephorus and ordered him to be blinded; and at the same time the tongues of four other of his uncles were cut out (792). These barbarous punishments, blinding and mutilation, were characteristic of the Constantinople of that day, but the resort to them on so large a scale proved the alarm as well as the cruelty of the young emperor, and must have helped to lose him the hearts of his subjects. His mother and Stauracius (who was now back again in the palace) were thought to have counselled these cruel 178 deeds; and they certainly succeeded in embroiling him with his old supporters, the Armenian soldiers, whose revolts plunged the empire in civil war.
The climax of the emperor’s unpopularity seems to have been reached when (in January 795) he put away his Armenian wife, compelling her to enter a convent, and in September of the same year publicly celebrated his union with a lady of her bedchamber named Theodote. He had now lost the favour of the multitude, while his mother was ever at work forming a party among the officers by promises and bribes, suggesting that they should depose her son and proclaim her sole empress. On the 14th of June 797 Constantine went, after witnessing an equestrian performance at the circus, to worship in the church of St. Mamas in the environs of Constantinople. The conspirators, whose movements were directed by Stauracius, endeavoured to seize him there, but he seems to have been warned, and escaped in the imperial boat to the Bithynian shore. Unhappily his mother’s friends and his own bitterest foes accompanied his flight. There was hesitation and delay, and there seemed a possibility that the soldiers would rally round him and his cause might yet triumph. The ruthless Irene sent a message to his adherents, “Unless in some way or other you effect his capture I will inform the emperor of all the plot which you and I have formed against him.” Fear made the conspirators bold; they seized the emperor while at his prayers, forced him to re-embark, and hurried him back across the Sea of Marmora to Constantinople. There, after the lapse of some weeks, in the Purple Chamber of the palace, 179 they put out his eyes, purposely performing the cruel operation with such brutality as to endanger his life. It was, in fact, supposed by many that he was dead, but he appears to have lingered on through many revolutions, an obscure and forgotten sufferer, for more than twenty years after his mutilation.
The deed was done on Saturday the 15th of August 797, at the ninth hour of the day. On the same day of the week and at the same hour, five years before, had his uncle suffered the same punishment. Men observed the coincidence and traced a divine retribution therein. But with greater horror did they learn that the emperor had suffered this brutal punishment in the Purple Chamber which was always reserved for the birth of an emperor’s children. Here, in the very same room of the palace where he first saw the light, did he with the connivance, if not by the express command, of his mother lose the light of life and all that makes life worth living. “For seventeen days,” says the historian, himself an image-worshipper and adherent of Irene, “the sun was darkened and did not give forth his rays, so that vessels lost their course and drifted helplessly, and all men said and confessed that because of the blinding of the emperor the sun did not show his beams. Thus did Irene his mother obtain supreme power.”
The character of the Empress Irene receives unbounded praise from the writers of the image-worshipping party. She is for them “the pious Irene,” “that strong-minded and God-guided woman, if, indeed, it be right to call her a woman, who was armed against all foes and all calamities with truly masculine temper.” 180 “Irene, that strong-minded and God-beloved woman, if we ought to call ‘woman’ one who surpassed even man in her pious disposition, one through whom God mercifully expelled the crooked heresy which had crept snakelike into the Church and brought back orthodoxy.”
But neither these flatteries of the monkish image-worshippers, nor her outward show of magnificence when, on Easter Monday (799), the proud Athenian rode forth from the Church of the Apostles in a golden car drawn by four white horses, which were driven by four patricians, and showered money among the multitude after the fashion of the ancient Consuls of Rome, represented the real place of the empress in the hearts of her subjects. The rule of Irene meant, as every one knew, the rule and the bickerings of the eunuchs who advised her. Moreover, there was really no precedent for a woman sitting alone in the seat of empire. When Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II., was hailed as Augusta, it was on condition of her giving her hand to the soldier Marcian. Theodora and Sophia were Augustæ, but ruled only during the lifetime of their husbands. When Martina, widow of Heraclius, tried to pose as joint-ruler with her son and stepson (641), the multitude shouted an indignant denial of her claims. “How can you sit upon the throne and answer foreign envoys when they come to the royal city. God forbid that the polity of the Romans should come into such a plight as that.” It was a hundred and fifty-six years since the Byzantine populace had hurled these words at Martina and compelled her to descend from the throne, but we may be sure that the spirit which prompted them still dwelt in the hearts of the 181 mass of the people who yet called themselves Romans. To be ruled by a woman, and such a woman, the despoiler and all but murderer of her son, was felt to be an unendurable humiliation. The insecurity of Irene’s position was shown by the shortness of her reign, but that short reign of five years (797-802) was long enough to include, in a certain sense to necessitate, the great event which will be the subject of the following chapter.