I. Byzantium.
Two thousand five hundred and fifty-eight years ago a little fleet of galleys toiled painfully against the current up the long strait of the Hellespont, rowed across the broad Propontis, and came to anchor in the smooth waters of the first inlet which cuts into the European shore of the Bosphorus. There a long crescent-shaped creek, which after-ages were to know as the Golden Horn, strikes inland for seven miles, forming a quiet backwater from the rapid stream which runs outside. On the headland, enclosed between this inlet and the open sea, a few hundred colonists disembarked, and hastily secured themselves from the wild tribes of the inland, by running some rough sort of a stockade across the ground from beach to beach. Thus was founded the city of Byzantium.
The settlers were Greeks of the Dorian race, natives of the thriving seaport-state of Megara, one of [pg 002] the most enterprising of all the cities of Hellas in the time of colonial and commercial expansion which was then at its height. Wherever a Greek prow had cut its way into unknown waters, there Megarian seamen were soon found following in its wake. One band of these venturesome traders pushed far to the West to plant colonies in Sicily, but the larger share of the attention of Megara was turned towards the sunrising, towards the mist-enshrouded entrance of the Black Sea and the fabulous lands that lay beyond. There, as legends told, was to be found the realm of the Golden Fleece, the Eldorado of the ancient world, where kings of untold wealth reigned over the tribes of Colchis: there dwelt, by the banks of the river Thermodon, the Amazons, the warlike women who had once vexed far-off Greece by their inroads: there, too, was to be found, if one could but struggle far enough up its northern shore, the land of the Hyperboreans, the blessed folk who dwell behind the North Wind and know nothing of storm and winter. To seek these fabled wonders the Greeks sailed ever North and East till they had come to the extreme limits of the sea. The riches of the Golden Fleece they did not find, nor the country of the Hyperboreans, nor the tribes of the Amazons; but they did discover many lands well worth the knowing, and grew rich on the profits which they drew from the metals of Colchis and the forests of Paphlagonia, from the rich corn lands by the banks of the Dnieper and Bug, and the fisheries of the Bosphorus and the Maeotic Lake. Presently the whole coastland of the sea, which the Greeks, on their first coming, called [pg 003] Axeinos—“the Inhospitable”—became fringed with trading settlements, and its name was changed to Euxeinos—“the Hospitable”—in recognition of its friendly ports. It was in a similar spirit that, two thousand years later, the seamen who led the next great impulse of exploration that rose in Europe, turned the name of the “Cape of Storms” into that of the “Cape of Good Hope.”
The Megarians, almost more than any other Greeks, devoted their attention to the Euxine, and the foundation of Byzantium was but one of their many achievements. Already, seventeen years before Byzantium came into being, another band of Megarian colonists had established themselves at Chalcedon, on the opposite Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus. The settlers who were destined to found the greater city applied to the oracle of Delphi to give them advice as to the site of their new home, and Apollo, we are told, bade them “build their town over against the city of the blind.” They therefore pitched upon the headland by the Golden Horn, reasoning that the Chalcedonians were truly blind to have neglected the more eligible site on the Thracian shore, in order to found a colony on the far less inviting Bithynian side of the strait.
Early Coin Of Byzantium.
Late Coin Of Byzantium Showing Crescent And Star.
From the first its situation marked out Byzantium as destined for a great future. Alike from the military and from the commercial point of view no city could have been better placed. Looking out from the easternmost headland of Thrace, with all Europe behind it and all Asia before, it was equally well suited to be the frontier fortress to defend the border [pg 004] of the one, or the basis of operations for an invasion from the other. As fortresses went in those early days it was almost impregnable—two sides protected by the water, the third by a strong wall not commanded by any neighbouring heights. In all its early history Byzantium never fell by storm: famine or treachery accounted for the few occasions on which it fell into the hands of an enemy. In its commercial aspect the place was even more favourably situated. It completely commanded the whole Black Sea trade: every vessel that went forth from Greece or Ionia to traffic with Scythia or Colchis, the lands by the Danube mouth or the shores of the Maeotic Lake, had to pass close under its walls, so that the prosperity of a hundred Hellenic towns on the Euxine was always at the mercy of the masters of Byzantium. The Greek loved short stages and frequent stoppages, and as a half-way house alone Byzantium would have been prosperous: but it had also a flourishing local trade of its own with the tribes of the neighbouring Thracian inland, [pg 005] and drew much profit from its fisheries: so much so that the city badge—its coat of arms as we should call it—comprised a tunny-fish as well as the famous ox whose form alluded to the legend of the naming of the Bosphorus.[1]
As an independent state Byzantium had a long and eventful history. For thirty years it was in the hands of the kings of Persia, but with that short exception it maintained its freedom during the first three hundred years that followed its foundation. Many stirring scenes took place beneath its walls: it was close to them that the great Darius threw across the Bosphorus his bridge of boats, which served as a model for the more famous structure on which his son Xerxes crossed the Hellespont. Fifteen years later, when Byzantium in common with all its neighbours made an ineffectual attempt to throw off the Persian yoke, in the rising called the “Ionic Revolt,” it was held for a time by the arch-rebel Histiaeus, who—as much to enrich himself as to pay his seamen—invented strait dues. He forced every ship passing up or down the Bosphorus to pay a heavy toll, and won no small unpopularity thereby for the cause of freedom which he professed to champion. Ere long Byzantium fell back again into the hands of Persia, but she was finally freed from the Oriental yoke seventeen years later, when the victorious Greeks, fresh from the triumph of Salamis and Mycale, sailed up to her walls and after a long leaguer starved out [pg 006] the obstinate garrison [b.c. 479]. The fleet wintered there, and it was at Byzantium that the first foundations of the naval empire of Athens were laid, when all the Greek states of Asia placed their ships at the disposal of the Athenian admirals Cimon and Aristeides.
During the fifth century Byzantium twice declared war on Athens, now the mistress of the seas, and on each occasion fell into the hands of the enemy—once by voluntary surrender in 439 b.c., once by treachery from within, in 408 b.c. But the Athenians, except in one or two disgraceful cases, did not deal hardly with their conquered enemies, and the Byzantines escaped anything harder than the payment of a heavy war indemnity. In a few years their commercial gains repaired all the losses of war, and the state was itself again.
We know comparatively little about the internal history of these early centuries of the life of Byzantium. Some odd fragments of information survive here and there: we know, for example, that they used iron instead of copper for small money, a peculiarity shared by no other ancient state save Sparta. Their alphabet rejoiced in an abnormally shaped Β, which puzzled all other Greeks, for it resembled a Π with an extra limb.[2] The chief gods of the city were those that we might have expected—Poseidon the ruler of the sea, whose blessing gave Byzantium its chief wealth; and Demeter, the goddess who presided over the Thracian and Scythian corn lands which formed its second source of prosperity.
The Byzantines were, if ancient chroniclers tell us the truth, a luxurious as well as a busy race: they spent too much time in their numerous inns, where the excellent wines of Maronea and other neighbouring places offered great temptations. They were gluttons too as well as tipplers: on one occasion, we are assured, the whole civic militia struck work in the height of a siege, till their commander consented to allow restaurants to be erected at convenient distances round the ramparts. One comic writer informs us that the Byzantines were eating young tunny-fish—their favourite dish—so constantly, that their whole bodies had become well-nigh gelatinous, and it was thought they might melt if exposed to too great heat! Probably these tales are the scandals of neighbours who envied Byzantine prosperity, for it is at any rate certain that the city showed all through its history great energy and love of independence, and never shrank from war as we should have expected a nation of epicures to do.
It was not till the rise of Philip of Macedon and his greater son Alexander that Byzantium fell for the fifth time into the hands of an enemy. The elder king was repulsed from the city's walls after a long siege, culminating in an attempt at an escalade by night, which was frustrated owing to the sudden appearance of a light in heaven, which revealed the advancing enemy and was taken by the Byzantines as a token of special divine aid [b.c. 339]. In commemoration of it they assumed as one of their civic badges the blazing crescent and star, which has descended to our own days and is still used as an emblem by the present [pg 008] owners of the city—the Ottoman Sultans. But after repulsing Philip the Byzantines had to submit some years later to Alexander. They formed under him part of the enormous Macedonian empire, and passed on his decease through the hands of his successors—Demetrius Poliorcetes, and Lysimachus. After the death of the latter in battle, however, they recovered a precarious freedom, and were again an independent community for a hundred years, till the power of Rome invaded the regions of Thrace and the Hellespont.
Byzantium was one of the cities which took the wise course of making an early alliance with the Romans, and obtained good and easy terms in consequence. During the wars of Rome with Macedon and Antiochus the Great it proved such a faithful assistant that the Senate gave it the status of a civitas libera et foederata, “a free and confederate city,” and it was not taken under direct Roman government, but allowed complete liberty in everything save the control of its foreign relations and the payment of a tribute to Rome. It was not till the Roman Republic had long passed away, that the Emperor Vespasian stripped it of these privileges, and threw it into the province of Thrace, to exist for the future as an ordinary provincial town [a.d. 73].
Though deprived of a liberty which had for long years been almost nominal, Byzantium could not be deprived of its unrivalled position for commerce. It continued to flourish under the Pax Romana, the long-continued peace which all the inner countries of the empire enjoyed during the first two centuries of [pg 009] the imperial régime, and is mentioned again and again as one of the most important cities of the middle regions of the Roman world.
But an evil time for Byzantium, as for all the other parts of the civilized world, began when the golden age of the Antonines ceased, and the epoch of the military emperors followed. In 192 a.d., Commodus, the unworthy son of the great and good Marcus Aurelius, was murdered, and ere long three military usurpers were wrangling for his blood-stained diadem. Most unhappily for itself Byzantium lay on the line of division between the eastern provinces, where Pescennius Niger had been proclaimed, and the Illyrian provinces, where Severus had assumed the imperial style. The city was seized by the army of Syria, and strengthened in haste. Presently Severus appeared from the west, after he had made himself master of Rome and Italy, and fell upon the forces of his rival Pescennius. Victory followed the arms of the Illyrian legions, the east was subdued, and the Syrian emperor put to death. But when all his other adherents had yielded, the garrison of Byzantium refused to submit. For more than two years they maintained the impregnable city against the lieutenants of Severus, and it was not till a.d. 196 that they were forced to yield. The emperor appeared in person to punish the long-protracted resistance of the town; not only the garrison, but the civil magistrates of Byzantium were slain before his eyes. The massive walls “so firmly built with great square stones clamped together with bolts of iron, that the whole seemed but one block,” were laboriously cast down. The property [pg 010] of the citizens was confiscated, and the town itself deprived of all municipal privileges and handed over to be governed like a dependent village by its neighbours of Perinthus.
Caracalla, the son of Severus, gave back to the Byzantines the right to govern themselves, but the town had received a hard blow, and would have required a long spell of peace to recover its prosperity. Peace however it was not destined to see. All through the middle years of the third century it was vexed by the incursions of the Goths, who harried mercilessly the countries on the Black Sea whose commerce sustained its trade. Under Gallienus in a.d. 263 it was again seized by an usurping emperor, and shared the fate of his adherents. The soldiers of Gallienus sacked Byzantium from cellar to garret, and made such a slaughter of its inhabitants that it is said that the old Megarian race who had so long possessed it were absolutely exterminated. But the irresistible attraction of the site was too great to allow its ruins to remain desolate. Within ten years after its sack by the army of Gallienus, we find Byzantium again a populous town, and its inhabitants are specially praised by the historian Trebellius Pollio for the courage with which they repelled a Gothic raid in the reign of Claudius II.
The strong Illyrian emperors, who staved off from the Roman Empire the ruin which appeared about to overwhelm it in the third quarter of the third century, gave Byzantium time and peace to recover its ancient prosperity. It profited especially from the constant neighbourhood of the imperial court, after Diocletian [pg 011] fixed his residence at Nicomedia, only sixty miles away, on the Bithynian side of the Propontis. But the military importance of Byzantium was always interfering with its commercial greatness. After the abdication of Diocletian the empire was for twenty years vexed by constant partitions of territory between the colleagues whom he left behind him. Byzantium after a while found itself the border fortress of Licinius, the emperor who ruled in the Balkan Peninsula, while Maximinus Daza was governing the Asiatic provinces. While Licinius was absent in Italy, Maximinus treacherously attacked his rival's dominions without declaration of war, and took Byzantium by surprise. But the Illyrian emperor returned in haste, defeated his grasping neighbour not far from the walls of the city, and recovered his great frontier fortress after it had been only a few months out of his hands [a.d. 314]. The town must have suffered severely by changing masters twice in the same year; it does not, however, seem to have been sacked or burnt, as was so often the case with a captured city in those dismal days. But Licinius when he had recovered the place set to work to render it impregnable. Though it was not his capital he made it the chief fortress of his realm, which, since the defeat of Maximinus, embraced the whole eastern half of the Roman world.
It was accordingly at Byzantium that Licinius made his last desperate stand, when in a.d. 323 he found himself engaged in an unsuccessful war with his brother-in-law Constantine, the Emperor of the West. For many months the war stood still beneath the walls of the city; but Constantine persevered in [pg 012] the siege, raising great mounds which overlooked the walls, and sweeping away the defenders by a constant stream of missiles, launched from dozens of military engines which he had erected on these artificial heights. At last the city surrendered, and the cause of Licinius was lost. Constantine, the last of his rivals subdued, became the sole emperor of the Roman world, and stood a victor on the ramparts which were ever afterwards to bear his name.
II. The Foundation Of Constantinople. (a.d. 328-330.)
When the fall of Byzantium had wrecked the fortunes of Licinius, the Roman world was again united beneath the sceptre of a single master. For thirty-seven years, ever since Diocletian parcelled out the provinces with his colleagues, unity had been unknown, and emperors, whose number had sometimes risen to six and sometimes sunk to two, had administered their realms on different principles and with varying success.
Constantine, whose victory over his rivals had been secured by his talents as an administrator and a diplomatist no less than by his military skill, was one of those men whose hard practical ability has stamped upon the history of the world a much deeper impress than has been left by many conquerors and legislators of infinitely greater genius. He was a man of that self-contained, self-reliant, unsympathetic type of mind [pg 014] which we recognize in his great predecessor Augustus, or in Frederic the Great of Prussia.
Constantine the Great
Though the strain of old Roman blood in his veins must have been but small, Constantine was in many ways a typical Roman; the hard, cold, steady, unwearying energy, which in earlier centuries had won the empire of the world, was once more incarnate in him. But if Roman in character, he was anything but Roman in his sympathies. Born by the Danube, [pg 015] reared in the courts and camps of Asia and Gaul, he was absolutely free from any of that superstitious reverence for the ancient glories of the city on the Tiber which had inspired so many of his predecessors. Italy was to him but a secondary province amongst his wide realms. When he distributed his dominions among his heirs, it was Gaul that he gave as the noblest share to his eldest and best-loved son: Italy was to him a younger child's portion. There had been emperors before him who had neglected Rome: the barbarian Maximinus I. had dwelt by the Rhine and the Danube; the politic Diocletian had chosen Nicomedia as his favourite residence. But no one had yet dreamed of raising up a rival to the mistress of the world, and of turning Rome into a provincial town. If preceding emperors had dwelt far afield, it was to meet the exigencies of war on the frontiers or the government of distant provinces. It was reserved for Constantine to erect over against Rome a rival metropolis for the civilized world, an imperial city which was to be neither a mere camp nor a mere court, but the administrative and commercial centre of the Roman world.
For more than a hundred years Rome had been a most inconvenient residence for the emperors. The main problem which had been before them was the repelling of incessant barbarian inroads on the Balkan Peninsula; the troubles on the Rhine and the Euphrates, though real enough, had been but minor evils. Rome, placed half way down the long projection of Italy, handicapped by its bad harbours and separated from the rest of the empire by the passes of the Alps, [pg 016] was too far away from the points where the emperor was most wanted—the banks of the Danube and the walls of Sirmium and Singidunum. For the ever-recurring wars with Persia it was even more inconvenient; but these were less pressing dangers; no Persian army had yet penetrated beyond Antioch—only 200 miles from the frontier—while in the Balkan Peninsula the Goths had broken so far into the heart of the empire as to sack Athens and Thessalonica.
Constantine, with all the Roman world at his feet, and all its responsibilities weighing on his mind, was far too able a man to overlook the great need of the day—a more conveniently placed administrative and military centre for his empire. He required a place that should be easily accessible by land and sea—which Rome had never been in spite of its wonderful roads—that should overlook the Danube lands, without being too far away from the East; that should be so strongly situated that it might prove an impregnable arsenal and citadel against barbarian attacks from the north; that should at the same time be far enough away from the turmoil of the actual frontier to afford a safe and splendid residence for the imperial court. The names of several towns are given by historians as having suggested themselves to Constantine. First was his own birth-place—Naissus (Nisch) on the Morava, in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula; but Naissus had little to recommend it: it was too close to the frontier and too far from the sea. Sardica—the modern Sofia in Bulgaria—was liable to the same objections, and had not the sole advantage of Naissus, that of being connected in [pg 017] sentiment with the emperor's early days. Nicomedia on its long gulf at the east end of the Propontis was a more eligible situation in every way, and had already served as an imperial residence. But all that could be urged in favour of Nicomedia applied with double force to Byzantium, and, in addition, Constantine had no wish to choose a city in which his own memory would be eclipsed by that of his predecessor Diocletian, and whose name was associated by the Christians, the class of his subjects whom he had most favoured of late, with the persecutions of Diocletian and Galerius. For Ilium, the last place on which Constantine had cast his mind, nothing could be alleged except its ancient legendary glories, and the fact that the mythologists of Rome had always fabled that their city drew its origin from the exiled Trojans of Æneas. Though close to the sea it had no good harbour, and it was just too far from the mouth of the Hellespont to command effectually the exit of the Euxine.
Byzantium, on the other hand, was thoroughly well known to Constantine. For months his camp had been pitched beneath its walls; he must have known accurately every inch of its environs, and none of its military advantages can have missed his eye. Nothing, then, could have been more natural than his selection of the old Megarian city for his new capital. Yet the Roman world was startled at the first news of his choice; Byzantium had been so long known merely as a great port of call for the Euxine trade, and as a first-class provincial fortress, that it was hard to conceive of it as a destined seat of empire.
When once Constantine had determined to make Byzantium his capital, in preference to any other place in the Balkan lands, his measures were taken with his usual energy and thoroughness. The limits of the new city were at once marked out by solemn processions in the old Roman style. In later ages a picturesque legend was told to account for the magnificent scale on which it was planned. The emperor, we read, marched out on foot, followed by all his court, and traced with his spear the line where the new fortifications were to be drawn. As he paced on further and further westward along the shore of the Golden Horn, till he was more than two miles away from his starting-point, the gate of old Byzantium, his attendants grew more and more surprised at the vastness of his scheme. At last they ventured to observe that he had already exceeded the most ample limits that an imperial city could require. But Constantine turned to rebuke them: “I shall go on,” he said, “until He, the invisible guide who marches before me, thinks fit to stop.” Guided by his mysterious presentiment of greatness, the emperor advanced till he was three miles from the eastern angle of Byzantium, and only turned his steps when he had included in his boundary line all the seven hills which are embraced in the peninsula between the Propontis and the Golden Horn.
The rising ground just outside the walls of the old city, where Constantine's tent had been pitched during the siege of a.d. 323, was selected out as the market-place of the new foundation. There he erected the Milion, or “golden milestone,” from which all the [pg 019] distances of the eastern world were in future to be measured. This “central point of the world” was not a mere single stone, but a small building like a temple, its roof supported by seven pillars; within was placed the statue of the emperor, together with that of his venerated mother, the Christian Empress Helena.
The south-eastern part of the old town of Byzantium was chosen by Constantine for the site of his imperial palace. The spot was cleared of all private dwellings for a space of 150 acres, to give space not only for a magnificent residence for his whole court, but for spacious gardens and pleasure-grounds. A wall, commencing at the Lighthouse, where the Bosphorus joins the Propontis, turned inland and swept along parallel to the shore for about a mile, in order to shut off the imperial precinct from the city.
The Heart of Constantinople
North-west of the palace lay the central open space in which the life of Constantinople was to find its centre. This was the “Augustaeum,” a splendid oblong forum, about a thousand feet long by three hundred broad. It was paved with marble and surrounded on all sides by stately public buildings. To its east, as we have already said, lay the imperial palace, but between the palace and the open space were three detached edifices connected by a colonnade. Of these, the most easterly was the Great Baths, known, from their builder, as the “Baths of Zeuxippus.” They were built on the same magnificent scale which the earlier emperors had used in Old Rome, though they could not, perhaps, vie in size with the enormous Baths [pg 021] of Caracalla. Constantine utilized and enlarged the old public bath of Byzantium, which had been rebuilt after the taking of the city by Severus. He adorned the frontage and courts of the edifice with statues taken from every prominent town of Greece and Asia, the old Hellenic masterpieces which had escaped the rapacious hands of twelve generations of plundering proconsuls and Cæsars. There were to be seen the Athene of Lyndus, the Amphithrite of Rhodes, the Pan which had been consecrated by the Greeks after the defeat of Xerxes, and the Zeus of Dodona.
Adjoining the Baths, to the north, lay the second great building, on the east side of the Augustaeum—the Senate House. Constantine had determined to endow his new city with a senate modelled on that of Old Rome, and had indeed persuaded many old senatorial families to migrate eastward by judicious gifts of pensions and houses. We know that the assembly was worthily housed, but no details survive about Constantine's building, on account of its having been twice destroyed within the century. But, like the Baths of Zeuxippus, it was adorned with ancient statuary, among which the Nine Muses of Helicon are specially cited by the historian who describes the burning of the place in a.d. 404.
Linked to the Senate House by a colonnade, lay on the north the Palace of the Patriarch, as the Bishop of Byzantium was ere long to be called, when raised to the same status as his brethren of Antioch and Alexandria. A fine building in itself, with a spacious hall of audience and a garden, the patriarchal dwelling [pg 022] was yet completely overshadowed by the imperial palace which rose behind it. And so it was with the patriarch himself: he lived too near his royal master to be able to gain any independent authority. Physically and morally alike he was too much overlooked by his august neighbour, and never found the least opportunity of setting up an independent spiritual authority over against the civil government, or of founding an imperium in imperio like the Bishop of Rome.
The Atmeidan Hippodrome And St. Sophia.
All along the western side of the Augustaeum, facing the three buildings which we have already described, lay an edifice which played a very prominent part in the public life of Constantinople. This was the great Hippodrome, a splendid circus 640 cubits long and 160 broad, in which were renewed the games that Old Rome had known so well. The whole system the chariot-races between the teams that represented the “factions” of the Circus was reproduced at Byzantium with an energy that even surpassed the devotion of the Romans to horse racing. From the first foundation of the city the rivalry of the “Blues” and the “Greens” was one of the most striking features of the life of the place. It was carried far beyond the circus, and spread into all branches of life. We often hear of the “Green” faction identifying itself with Arianism, or of the “Blue” supporting a pretender to the throne. Not merely men of sporting interests, but persons of all ranks and professions, chose their colour and backed their faction. The system was a positive danger to the public peace, and constantly led to riots, culminating [pg 024] in the great sedition of a.d. 523, which we shall presently have to describe at length. In the Hippodrome the “Greens” always entered by the north-eastern gate, and sat on the east side; the “Blues” approached by the north-western gate and stretched along the western side. The emperor's box, called the Kathisma, occupied the whole of the short northern side, and contained many hundreds of seats for the imperial retinue. The great central throne of the Kathisma was the place in which the monarch showed himself most frequently to his subjects, and around it many strange scenes were enacted. It was on this throne that the rebel Hypatius was crowned emperor by the mob, with his own wife's necklace for an impromptu diadem. Here also, two centuries later, the Emperor Justinian II. sat in state after his reconquest of Constantinople, with his rivals, Leontius and Apsimarus, bound beneath his footstool, while the populace chanted, in allusion to the names of the vanquished princes, the verse, “Thou shalt trample on the Lion and the Asp.”
Down the centre of the Hippodrome ran the “spina,” or division wall, which every circus showed; it was ornamented with three most curious monuments, whose strange juxtaposition seemed almost to typify the heterogeneous materials from which the new city was built up. The first and oldest was an obelisk brought from Egypt, and covered with the usual hieroglyphic inscriptions; the second was the most notable, though one of the least beautiful, of the antiquities of Constantinople: it was the three-headed brazen serpent which Pausanias and the [pg 025] victorious Greeks had dedicated at Delphi in 479 b.c., after they had destroyed the Persian army at Platæa. The golden tripod, which was supported by the heads of the serpents, had long been wanting: the sacrilegious Phocians had stolen it six centuries before; but the dedicatory inscriptions engraved on the coils of the pedestal survived then and survive now to delight the archæologist. The third monument on the “spina” was a square bronze column of more modern work, contrasting strangely with the venerable antiquity of its neighbours. By some freak of chance all three monuments have remained till our own day: the vast walls of the Hippodrome have crumbled away, but its central decorations still stand erect in the midst of an open space which the Turks call the Atmeidan, or place of horses, in dim memory of its ancient use.
Along the outer eastern wall of the Hippodrome on the western edge of the Augustaeum, stood a range of small chapels and statues, the most important landmark among them being the Milion or central milestone of the empire, which we have already described. The statues, few at first, were increased by later emperors, till they extended along the whole length of the forum. Constantine's own contribution to the collection was a tall porphyry column surmounted by a bronze image which had once been the tutelary Apollo of the city of Hierapolis, but was turned into a representation of the emperor by the easy method of knocking off its head and substituting the imperial features. It was exactly the reverse of a change which can be seen at [pg 027] Rome, where the popes have removed the head of the Emperor Aurelius, and turned him into St. Peter, on the column in the Corso.
Building A Palace (from a Byzantine MS.)
North of the Hippodrome stood the great church which Constantine erected for his Christian subjects, and dedicated to the Divine Wisdom (Hagia Sophia). It was not the famous domed edifice which now bears that name, but an earlier and humbler building, probably of the Basilica-shape then usual. Burnt down once in the fifth and once in the sixth centuries, it has left no trace of its original character. From the west door of St. Sophia a wooden gallery, supported on arches, crossed the square, and finally ended at the “Royal Gate” of the palace. By this the emperor would betake himself to divine service without having to cross the street of the Chalcoprateia (brass market), which lay opposite to St. Sophia. The general effect of the gallery must have been somewhat like that of the curious passage perched aloft on arches which connects the Pitti and Uffizi palaces at Florence.
The edifices which we have described formed the heart of Constantinople. Between the Palace, the Hippodrome, and the Cathedral most of the important events in the history of the city took place. But to north and west the city extended for miles, and everywhere there were buildings of note, though no other cluster could vie with that round the Augustaeum. The Church of the Holy Apostles, which Constantine destined as the burying-place of his family, was the second among the ecclesiastical edifices of the town. Of the outlying civil buildings, the public [pg 028] granaries along the quays, the Golden Gate, by which the great road from the west entered the walls, and the palace of the praetorian praefect, who acted as governor of the city, must all have been well worthy of notice. A statue of Constantine on horseback, which stood by the last-named edifice, was one of the chief shows of Constantinople down to the end of the Middle Ages, and some curious legends gathered around it.
Fifteenth-Century Drawing Of The Equestrian Statue Of Constantine.
It was in a.d. 328 or 329—the exact date is not easily to be fixed—that Constantine had definitely chosen Byzantium for his capital, and drawn out the plan for its development. As early as May 11, 330, the buildings were so far advanced that he was able to hold the festival which celebrated its consecration. [pg 029] Christian bishops blessed the partially completed palace, and held the first service in St. Sophia; for Constantine, though still unbaptized himself, had determined that the new city should be Christian from the first. Of paganism there was no trace in it, save a few of the old temples of the Byzantines, spared when the older streets were levelled to clear the ground for the palace and adjoining buildings. The statues of the gods which adorned the Baths and Senate House stood there as works of art, not as objects of worship.
To fill the vast limits of his city, Constantine invited many senators of Old Rome and many rich provincial proprietors of Greece and Asia to take up their abode in it, granting them places in his new senate and sites for the dwellings they would require. The countless officers and functionaries of the imperial court, with their subordinates and slaves, must have composed a very considerable element in the new population. The artizans and handicraftsmen were enticed in thousands by the offer of special privileges. Merchants and seamen had always abounded at Byzantium, and now flocked in numbers which made the old commercial prosperity of the city seem insignificant. Most effective—though most demoralizing—of the gifts which Constantine bestowed on the new capital to attract immigrants was the old Roman privilege of free distribution of corn to the populace. The wheat-tribute of Egypt, which had previously formed part of the public provision of Rome, was transferred to the use of Constantinople, only the African corn from Carthage [pg 030] being for the future assigned for the subsistence of the older city.
On the completion of the dedication festival in 330 a.d. an imperial edict gave the city the title of New Rome, and the record was placed on a marble tablet near the equestrian statue of the emperor, opposite the Strategion. But “New Rome” was a phrase destined to subsist in poetry and rhetoric alone: the world from the first very rightly gave the city the founder's name only, and persisted in calling it Constantinople.
III. The Fight With The Goths.
Constantine lived seven years after he had completed the dedication of his new city, and died in peace and prosperity on the 22nd of May, a.d. 337, received on his death-bed into that Christian Church on whose verge he had lingered during the last half of his life. By his will he left his realm to be divided among his sons and nephews; but a rapid succession of murders and civil wars thinned out the imperial house, and ended in the concentration of the whole empire from the Forth to the Tigris under the sceptre of Constantius II., the second son of the great emperor. The Roman world was not yet quite ripe for a permanent division; it was still possible to manage it from a single centre, for by some strange chance the barbarian invasions which had troubled the third century had ceased for a time, and the Romans were untroubled, save by some minor bickerings on the Rhine and the Euphrates. Constantius II., an administrator of some ability, but gloomy, suspicious, and unsympathetic, was able to devote his leisure to ecclesiastical controversies, and to dishonour himself by starting the first [pg 032] persecution of Christian by Christian that the world had seen. The crisis in the history of the empire was not destined to fall in his day, nor in the short reign of his cousin and successor, Julian, the amiable and cultured, but entirely wrongheaded, pagan zealot, who strove to put back the clock of time and restore the worship of the ancient gods of Greece. Both Constantius and Julian, if asked whence danger to the empire might be expected, would have pointed eastward, to the Mesopotamian frontier, where their great enemy, Sapor King of Persia, strove, with no very great success, to break through the line of Roman fortresses that protected Syria and Asia Minor.
But it was not in the east that the impending storm was really brewing. It was from the north that mischief was to come.
Gothic Idols. (From the Column of Arcadius.)
For a hundred and fifty years the Romans had been well acquainted with the tribes of the Goths, the most easterly of the Teutonic nations who lay along the imperial border. All through the third century they had been molesting the provinces of the Balkan Peninsula by their incessant raids, as we have already had occasion to relate. Only after a hard struggle had they been rolled back across the Danube, and compelled to limit their settlements to its northern bank, in what had once been the land of the Dacians. The last struggle with them had been in the time of Constantine, who, in a war that lasted from a.d. 328 to a.d. 332, had beaten them in the open field, compelled their king to give his sons as hostages, and dictated his own terms of peace. Since then the appetite of the Goths for war and adventure seemed [pg 034] permanently checked: for forty years they had kept comparatively quiet and seldom indulged in raids across the Danube. They were rapidly settling down into steady farmers in the fertile lands on the Theiss and the Pruth; they traded freely with the Roman towns of Moesia; many of their young warriors enlisted among the Roman auxiliary troops, and one considerable body of Gothic emigrants had been permitted to settle as subjects of the empire on the northern slope of the Balkans. By this time many of the Goths were becoming Christians: priests of their own blood already ministered to them, and the Bible, translated into their own language, was already in their hands. One of the earliest Gothic converts, the good Bishop Ulfilas—the first bishop of German blood that was ever consecrated—had rendered into their idiom the New Testament and most of the Old. A great portion of his work still survives, incomparably the most precious relic of the old Teutonic tongues that we now possess.
The Goths were rapidly losing their ancient ferocity. Compared to the barbarians who dwelt beyond them, they might almost be called a civilized race. The Romans were beginning to look upon them as a guard set on the frontier to ward off the wilder peoples that lay to their north and east. The nation was now divided into two tribes: the Visigoths, whose tribal name was the Thervings, lay more to the south, in what are now the countries of Moldavia, Wallachia, and Southern Hungary; the Ostrogoths, or tribe of the Gruthungs, lay more to the north and east, in Bessarabia, Transylvania, and the Dniester valley.
But a totally unexpected series of events were now to show how prescient Constantine had been, in rearing his great fortress-capital to serve as the central place of arms of the Balkan Peninsula.
About the year a.d. 372 the Huns, an enormous Tartar horde from beyond the Don and Volga, burst into the lands north of the Euxine, and began to work their way westward. The first tribe that lay in their way, the nomadic race of the Alans, they almost exterminated. Then they fell upon the Goths. The Ostrogoths made a desperate attempt to defend the line of the Dniester against the oncoming savages—“men with faces that can hardly be called faces—rather shapeless black collops of flesh with little points instead of eyes; little in stature, but lithe and active, skilful in riding, broad shouldered, good at the bow, stiff-necked and proud, hiding under a barely human form the ferocity of the wild beast.” But the enemy whom the Gothic historian describes in these uninviting terms was too strong for the Teutons of the East. The Ostrogoths were crushed and compelled to become vassals of the Huns, save a remnant who fought their way southward to the Wallachian shore, near the marshes of the Delta of the Danube. Then the Huns fell on the Visigoths. The wave of invasion pressed on; the Bug and the Pruth proved no barrier to the swarms of nomad bowmen, and the Visigoths, under their Duke Fritigern, fell back in dismay with their wives and children, their waggons and flocks and herds, till they found themselves with their backs to the Danube. Surrender to the enemy was more dreadful to the Visigoths than to their eastern [pg 036] brethren; they were more civilized, most of them were Christians, and the prospect of slavery to savages seems to have appeared intolerable to them.
Pressed against the Danube and the Roman border, the Visigoths sent in despair to ask permission to cross from the Emperor. A contemporary writer describes how they stood. “All the multitude that had escaped from the murderous savagery of the Huns—no less than 200,000 fighting men, besides women and old men and children—-were there on the river bank, stretching out their hands with loud lamentations, and earnestly supplicating leave to cross, bewailing their calamity, and promising that they would ever faithfully adhere to the imperial alliance if only the boon was granted them.”
At this moment (a.d. 376) the Roman Empire was again divided. The house of Constantine was gone, and the East was ruled by Valens, a stupid, cowardly, and avaricious prince, who had obtained the diadem and half the Roman world only because he was the brother of Valentinian, the greatest general of the day. Valentinian had taken the West for his portion, and dwelt in his camp on the Rhine and Upper Danube, while Valens, slothful and timid, shut himself up with a court of slaves and flatterers in the imperial palace at Constantinople.
The proposal of the Goths filled Valens with dismay. It was difficult to say which was more dangerous—to refuse a passage to 200,000 desperate men with arms in their hands and a savage foe at their backs, or to admit them within the line of river and fortress that protected the border, with an implied [pg 037] obligation to find land for them. After much doubting he chose the latter alternative: if the Goths would give hostages and surrender their arms, they should be ferried across the Danube and permitted to settle as subject-allies within the empire.
The Goths accepted the terms, gave up the sons of their chiefs as hostages, and streamed across the river as fast as the Roman Danube-flotilla could transport them. But no sooner had they reached Moesia than troubles broke out. The Roman officials at first tried to disarm the immigrants, but the Goths were unwilling to surrender their weapons, and offered large bribes to be allowed to retain them: in strict disobedience to the Emperor's orders, the bribes were accepted and the Goths retained their arms. Further disputes soon broke out. The provisions of Moesia did not suffice for so many hundred thousand mouths as had just entered its border, and Valens had ordered stores of corn from Asia to be collected for the use of the Goths, till they should have received and commenced to cultivate land of their own. But the governor, Lupicinus, to fill his own pockets, held back the food, and doled out what he chose to give at exorbitant prices. In sheer hunger the Goths were driven to barter a slave for a single loaf of bread and ten pounds of silver for a sheep. This shameless extortion continued as long as the stores and the patience of the Goths lasted. At last the poorer immigrants were actually beginning to sell their own children for slaves rather than let them starve. This drove the Goths to desperation, and a chance affray set the whole nation in a blaze. Fritigern, with many [pg 038] of his nobles, was dining with Count Lupicinus at the town of Marcianopolis, when some starving Goths tried to pillage the market by force. A party of Roman soldiers strove to drive them off, and were at once mishandled or slain. On hearing the tumult and learning its cause, Lupicinus recklessly bade his retinue seize and slay Fritigern and the other guests at his banquet. The Goths drew their swords and cut their way out of the palace. Then riding to the nearest camp of his followers, Fritigern told his tale, and bade them take up arms against Rome.
There followed a year of desperate fighting all along the Danube, and the northern slope of the Balkans. The Goths half-starved for many months, and smarting under the extortion and chicanery to which they had been subjected, soon showed that the old barbarian spirit was but thinly covered by the veneer of Christianity and civilization which they had acquired in the last half-century. The struggle resolved itself into a repetition of the great raids of the third century: towns were sacked and the open country harried in the old style, nor was the war rendered less fierce by the fact that many runaway slaves and other outcasts among the provincial population joined the invaders. But the Roman armies still retained their old reputation; the ravages of the Goths were checked at the Balkans, and though joined by the remnants of the Ostrogoths from the Danube mouth, as well as by other tribes flying from the Huns, the Visigoths were at first held at bay by the imperial armies. A desperate pitched battle at Ad Salices, near the modern Kustendje thinned the ranks of both sides, but led to no decisive result.
Next year, however, the unwarlike Emperor, driven into the field by the clamours of his subjects, took the field in person, with great reinforcements brought from Asia Minor. At the same time his nephew Gratian, a gallant young prince who had succeeded to the Empire of the West, set forth through Pannonia to bring aid to the lands of the Lower Danube.
The personal intervention of Valens in the struggle was followed by a fearful disaster. In 378 a.d., the main body of the Goths succeeded in forcing the line of the Balkans; they were not far from Adrianople when the Emperor started to attack them, with a splendid army of 60,000 men. Every one expected to hear of a victory, for the reputation of invincibility still clung to the legions, and after six hundred years of war the disciplined infantry of Rome, robur peditum, whose day had lasted since the Punic wars, were still reckoned superior, when fairly handled, to any amount of wild barbarians.
But a new chapter of the history of the art of war was just commencing; during their sojourn in the plains of South Russia and Roumania the Goths had taken, first of all German races, to fighting on horseback. Dwelling in the Ukraine they had felt the influence of that land, ever the nurse of cavalry from the day of the Scythian to that of the Tartar and Cossack. They had come to “consider it more honourable to fight on horse than on foot,” and every chief was followed by his war-band of mounted men. Driven against their will into conflict with the empire, they found themselves face to face into the army that [pg 040] had so long held the world in fear, and had turned back their own ancestors in rout three generations before.
Valens found the main body of the Goths encamped in a great “laager,” on the plain north of Adrianople. After some abortive negotiations he developed an attack on their front, when suddenly a great body of horsemen charged in on the Roman flank. It was the main strength of the Gothic cavalry, which had been foraging at a distance; receiving news of the fight it had ridden straight for the battle field. Some Roman squadrons which covered the left flank of the Emperor's army were ridden down and trampled under foot. Then the Goths swept down on the infantry of the left wing, rolled it up, and drove it in upon the centre. So tremendous was their impact that legions and cohorts were pushed together in hopeless confusion. Every attempt to stand firm failed, and in a few minutes left, centre, and reserve, were one undistinguishable mass. Imperial guards, light troops, lancers, auxiliaries, and infantry of the line were wedged together in a press that grew closer every moment. The Roman cavalry saw that the day was lost, and rode off without another effort. Then the abandoned infantry realized the horror of their position: equally unable to deploy or to fly, they had to stand to be cut down. Men could not raise their arms to strike a blow, so closely were they packed; spears snapped right and left, their bearers being unable to lift them to a vertical position; many soldiers were stifled in the press. Into this quivering mass the Goths rode, plying lance and sword against [pg 041] the helpless enemy. It was not till forty thousand men had fallen that the thinning of the ranks enabled the survivors to break out and follow their cavalry in a headlong flight. They left behind them, dead on the field, the Emperor, the Grand Masters of the Infantry and Cavalry, the Count of the Palace, and thirty-five commanders of different corps.
The battle of Adrianople was the most fearful defeat suffered by a Roman army since Cannæ, a slaughter to which it is aptly compared by the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The army of the East was almost annihilated, and was never reorganized again on the old Roman lines.
This awful catastrophe brought down on Constantinople the first attack which it experienced since it had changed its name from Byzantium. After a vain assault on Adrianople, the victorious Goths pressed rapidly on towards the imperial city. Harrying the whole country side as they passed by, they presented themselves before the “Golden Gate,” its south-western exit. But the attack was destined to come to nothing: “their courage failed them when they looked on the vast circuit of walls and the enormous extent of streets; all that mass of riches within appeared inaccessible to them. They cast away the siege machines which they had prepared, and rolled backward on to Thrace.”[3] Beyond skirmishing under the walls with a body of Saracen cavalry which had been brought up to strengthen the garrison, they made no hostile attempt on the city. So forty years after his death, Constantine's prescience was for the [pg 042] first time justified. He was right in believing that an impregnable city on the Bosphorus would prove the salvation of the Balkan Peninsula even if all its open country were overrun by the invader.
The unlucky Valens was succeeded on the throne by Theodosius, a wise and virtuous prince, who set himself to repair, by caution and courage combined, the disaster that had shaken the Roman power in the Danube lands. With the remnants of the army of the East he made head against the barbarians; without venturing to attack their main body, he destroyed many marauders and scattered bands, and made the continuance of the war profitless to them. If they dispersed to plunder they were cut off; if they held together in masses they starved. Presently Fritigern died, and Theodosius made peace with his successor Athanarich, a king who had lately come over the Danube at the head of a new swarm of Goths from the Carpathian country. Theodosius frankly promised and faithfully observed the terms that Fritigern had asked of Valens ten years before. He granted the Goths land for their settlement in the Thracian province which they had wasted, and enlisted in his armies all the chiefs and their war-bands. Within ten years after the fight of Adrianople he had forty thousand Teutonic horsemen in his service; they formed the best and most formidable part of his host, and were granted a higher pay than the native Roman soldiery. The immediate military results of the policy of Theodosius were not unsatisfactory; it was his Gothic auxiliaries who won for him his two great victories over the legions of the West, when in [pg 044] a.d. 388 he conquered the rebel Magnus Maximus, and in a.d. 394 the rebel Eugenius.
Gothic Captives. (From the Column of Arcadius.)
But from the political side the experiment of Theodosius was fraught with the greatest danger that the Roman Empire had yet known. When barbarian auxiliaries had been enlisted before, they had been placed under Roman leaders and mixed with equal numbers of Roman troops. To leave them under their own chiefs, and deliberately favour them at the expense of the native soldiery, was a most unhappy experiment. It practically put the command of the empire in their hands; for there was no hold over them save their personal loyalty to Theodosius, and the spell which the grandeur of the Roman name and Roman culture still exercised over their minds. That spell was still strong, as is shown in the story which the Gothic historian Jornandes tells about the visit of the old King Athanarich to Constantinople. “When he entered the royal city, ‘Now,’ said he, ‘do I at last behold what I had often heard and deemed incredible.’ He passed his eyes hither and thither admiring first the site of the city, then the fleets of corn-ships, then the lofty walls, then the crowds of people of all nations, mingled as the waters from divers springs mix in a single pool, then the ranks of disciplined soldiery. And at last he cried aloud, ‘Doubtless the Emperor is as a god on earth, and he who raises a hand against him is guilty of his own blood.’ ” But this impression was not to continue for long. In a.d. 395, the good Emperor Theodosius, “the lover of peace and of the Goths,” as he was called, died, and left the throne to his two weakly sons Arcadius and Honorius.
IV. The Departure Of The Germans.
The Roman Empire, at the end of the fourth century, was in a condition which made the experiment of Theodosius particularly dangerous. The government was highly centralized and bureaucratic; hosts of officials, appointed directly from Constantinople, administered every provincial post from the greatest to the least. There was little local self-government and no local patriotism. The civil population was looked on by the bureaucratic caste as a multitude without rights or capacities, existing solely for the purpose of paying taxes. So strongly was this view held, that to prevent the revenue from suffering, the land-holding classes, from the curialis, or local magnate, down to the poorest peasant, were actually forbidden to move from one district to another without special permission. A landowner was even prohibited from enlisting in the army, unless he could show that he left an heir behind him capable of paying his share in the local rates. An almost entire separation existed between the civil population and the military caste; it was hard for a civilian of any position to enlist; only the lower classes—who [pg 046] were of no account in tax-paying—were suffered to join the army. On the other hand, every pressure was used to make the sons of soldiers continue in the service. Thus had arisen a purely professional army, which had no sympathy or connection with the unarmed provincials whom it protected.
The army had been a source of unending trouble in the third century; for a hundred years it had made and unmade Cæsars at its pleasure. That was while it was still mainly composed of men born within the empire, and officered by Romans.
But Theodosius had now swamped the native element in the army by his wholesale enlistment of Gothic war-bands. And he had, moreover, handed many of the chief military posts to Teutons. Some of them indeed had married Roman wives and taken kindly to Roman modes of life, while nearly all had professed Christianity. But at the best they were military adventurers of alien blood while at the worst they were liable to relapse into barbarism, cast all their loyalty and civilization to the winds, and take to harrying the empire again in the old fearless fashion of the third century. Clearly nothing could be more dangerous than to hand over the protection of the timid and unarmed civil population to such guardians. The contempt they must have felt for the unwarlike provincials was so great, and the temptation to plunder the wealthy cities of the empire so constant and pressing, that it is no wonder if the Teutons yielded. Cæsar-making seemed as easy to the leaders as the sack of provincial churches and treasuries did to the rank and file.
When the personal ascendency of Theodosius was removed, the empire fell at once into the troubles which were inevitable. Both at the court of Arcadius, who reigned at Constantinople, and at that of Honorius, who had received the West as his share, a war of factions commenced between the German and the Roman party. Theodosius had distributed so many high military posts to Goths and other Teutons, that this influence was almost unbounded. Stilicho Magister militum (commander-in-chief) of the armies of Italy was predominant at the council board of Honorius; though he was a pure barbarian by blood, Theodosius had married him to his own niece Serena, and left him practically supreme in the West, for the young emperor was aged only eleven. In the East Arcadius, the elder brother, had attained his eighteenth year, and might have ruled his own realm had he possessed the energy. But he was a witless young man, “short, thin, and sallow, so inactive that he seldom spoke, and always looked as if he was about to fall asleep.” His prime minister was a Western Roman named Rufinus, but before the first year of his reign was over, a Gothic captain named Gainas slew Rufinus at a review, before the Emperor's very eyes. The weak Arcadius was then compelled to make the eunuch Eutropius his minister, and to appoint Gainas Magister militum for the East.
Gainas and Stilicho contented themselves with wire-pulling at Court; but another Teutonic leader thought that the time had come for bolder work. Alaric was a chief sprung from the family of the Balts, whom the Goths reckoned next to the god-descended [pg 048] Amals among their princely houses. He was young, daring, and untameable; several years spent at Constantinople had failed to civilize him, but had succeeded in filling him with contempt for Roman effeminacy. Soon after the death of Theodosius, he raised the Visigoths in revolt, making it his pretext that the advisers of Arcadius were refusing the foederati, or auxiliaries, certain arrears of pay. The Teutonic sojourners in Moesia and Thrace joined him almost to a man, and the Constantinopolitan government found itself with only a shadow of an army to oppose the rebels. Alaric wandered far and wide, from the Danube to the gates of Constantinople, and from Constantinople to Greece, ransoming or sacking every town in his way till the Goths were gorged with plunder. No one withstood him save Stilicho, who was summoned from the West to aid his master's brother. By skilful manœuvres Stilicho blockaded Alaric in a mountain position in Arcadia; but when he had him at his mercy, it was found that “dog does not eat dog.” The Teutonic prime minister let the Teutonic rebel escape him, and the Visigoths rolled north again into Illyricum. Sated with plunder, Alaric then consented to grant Arcadius peace, on condition that he was made a Magister militum like Stilicho and Gainas, and granted as much land for his tribesmen as he chose to ask. [a.d. 396.]
For the next five years Alaric, now proclaimed King of the Goths by his victorious soldiery, reigned with undisputed sway over the eastern parts of the Balkan Peninsula, paying only a shadow of homage to the royal phantom at Constantinople. There [pg 049] appeared every reason to believe that a German kingdom was about to be permanently established in the lands south and west of the Danube. The fate which actually befell Gaul, Spain, and Britain, a few years later seemed destined for Moesia and Macedonia. How different the history of Europe would have been if the Germans had settled down in Servia and Bulgaria we need hardly point out.
But another series of events was impending. In a.d. 401, Alaric, instead of resuming his attacks on Constantinople, suddenly declared war on the Western Emperor Honorius. He marched round the head of the Adriatic and invaded Northern Italy. The half-Romanized Stilicho, who wished to keep the rule of the West to himself, fought hard to turn the Goths out of Italy, and beat back Alaric's first invasion. But then the young emperor, who was as weak and more worthless than his brother Arcadius, slew the great minister on a charge of treason. When Stilicho was gone, Alaric had everything his own way; he moved with the whole Visigothic race into Italy, where he ranged about at his will, ransoming and plundering every town from Rome downwards. The Visigoths are heard of no more in the Balkan Peninsula; they now pass into the history of Italy and then into that of Spain.
While Alaric's eyes were turned on Italy, but before he had actually come into conflict with Stilicho, the Court of Constantinople had been the seat of grave troubles. Gainas the Gothic Magister militum of the East, and his creature, the eunuch Eutropius, had fallen out, and the man of war had no [pg 050] difficulty in disposing of the wretched harem-bred Grand Chamberlain. Instigated by Gainas, the German mercenaries in the army of Asia started an insurrection under a certain Tribigild. Gainas was told to march against them, and collected troops ostensibly for that purpose. But when he was at the head of a considerable army, he did not attack the rebels, but sent a message to Constantinople bidding Arcadius give up to him the obnoxious Grand Chamberlain. Eutropius, hearing of his danger, threw himself on the protection of the Church: he fled into the Cathedral of St. Sophia and clung to the altar. John Chrysostom, the intrepid Patriarch of Constantinople, forbade the soldiers to enter the church, and protected the fugitive for some days. One of the most striking incidents in the history of St. Sophia followed: while the cowering Chamberlain lay before the altar, John preached to a crowded congregation a sermon on the text, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” emphasizing every period of his harangue by pointing to the fallen Eutropius—prime minister of the empire yesterday, and a hunted criminal to-day. The patriarch extorted a promise that the eunuch's life should be spared, and Eutropius gave himself up. Arcadius banished him to Cyprus, but the inexorable Gainas was not contented with his rival's removal; he had Eutropius brought back to Constantinople and beheaded.
The Magister militum now brought his army over to Constantinople, and quartered it there to overawe the emperor. It appeared quite likely that ere long the Germans would sack the city; but the fate that [pg 051] befell Rome ten years later was not destined for Constantinople. A mere chance brawl put the domination of Gainas to a sudden end. He himself and many of his troops were outside the city, when a sudden quarrel at one of the gates between a band of Goths and some riotous citizens brought about a general outbreak against the Germans. The Constantinopolitan mob showed itself more courageous and not less unruly than the Roman mob of elder days. The whole population turned out with extemporized arms and attacked the German soldiery. The gates were closed to prevent Gainas and his troops from outside returning, and a desperate street-fight ranged over the entire city. Isolated bodies of the Germans were cut off one by one, and at last their barracks were surrounded and set on fire. The rioters had the upper hand; seven thousand soldiers fell, and the remnant thought themselves lucky to escape. Gainas at once declared open war on the empire, but he had not the genius of Alaric, nor the numerical strength that had followed the younger chief. He was beaten in the field and forced to fly across the Danube, where he was caught and beheaded by Uldes, King of the Huns. Curiously enough the officer who defeated Gainas was himself not only a Goth but a heathen: he was named Fravitta and had been the sworn guest-friend of Theodosius, whose son he faithfully defended even against the assault of his own countrymen, [a.d. 401.]
The departure of Alaric and the death of Gainas freed the Eastern Romans from the double danger that has impended over them. They were neither [pg 052] to see an independent German kingdom on the Danube and Morava, nor to remain under the rule of a semi-civilized German Magister militum, making and unmaking ministers, and perhaps Cæsars, at his good pleasure. The weak Arcadius was enabled to spend the remaining seven years of his life in comparative peace and quiet. His court was only troubled by an open war between his spouse, the Empress Ælia Eudoxia, and John Chrysostom, the Patriarch of Constantinople. John was a man of saintly life and apostolic fervour, but rash and inconsiderate alike in speech and action. His charity and eloquence made him the idol of the populace of the imperial city, but his austere manners and autocratic methods of dealing with his subordinates had made him many foes among the clergy. The patriarch's enemies were secretly supported by the empress, who had taken offence at the outspoken way in which John habitually denounced the luxury and insolence of her court. She favoured the intrigues of Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, against his brother prelate, backed the Asiatic clergy in their complaints about John's oppression of them, and at last induced the Emperor to allow the saintly patriarch to be deposed by a hastily-summoned council, the “Synod of the Oak” held outside the city. The populace rose at once to defend their pastor; riots broke out, Theodosius was chased back to Egypt, and the Emperor, terrified by an earthquake which seemed to manifest the wrath of heaven, restored John to his place.
Next year, however, the war between the empress and the patriarch broke out again. John took the [pg 053] occasion of the erection of a statue of Eudoxia in the Augustaeum to recommence his polemics. Some obsolete semi-pagan ceremonies at its dedication roused his wrath, and he delivered a scathing sermon in which—if his enemies are to be believed—he compared the empress to Herodias, and himself to John the Baptist. The Emperor, at his wife's demand, summoned another council, which condemned Chrysostom, and on Easter Day, a.d. 404, seized the patriarch in his cathedral by armed force, and banished him to Asia. That night a fire, probably kindled by the angry adherents of Chrysostom, broke out in St. Sophia, which was burnt to the ground. From thence it spread to the neighbouring buildings, and finally to the Senate-house, which was consumed with all the treasures of ancient Greek art of which Constantine had made it the repository.
Meanwhile the exiled John was banished to a dreary mountain fastness in Cappadocia, and afterwards condemned to a still more remote prison at Pityus on the Euxine. He died on his way thither, leaving a wonderful reputation for patience and cheerfulness under affliction. This fifth-century Becket was well-nigh the only patriarch of Constantinople who ever fell out with the imperial Court on a question of morals as distinguished from dogma. Chrysostom's quarrel was with the luxury, insolence, and frivolity of the Empress and her Court; no real ecclesiastical question was involved in his deposition, for the charges against him were mere pretexts to cover the hatred of his disloyal clergy and the revenge of the insulted Aelia Eudoxia. [a.d. 407.]
V. The Reorganization Of The Eastern Empire. (a.d. 408-518.)
The feeble and inert Arcadius died in a.d. 408, at the early age of thirty-one; his imperious consort had preceded him to the grave, and the empire of the East was left to Theodosius II., a child of seven years, their only son. There was hardly an instance in Roman history of a minor succeeding quietly to his father's throne. An ambitious relative or a disloyal general had habitually supplanted the helpless heir. But the ministers of Arcadius were exceptionally virtuous or exceptionally destitute of ambition. The little emperor was duly crowned, and the administration of the East undertaken in his name by the able Anthemius, who held the office of Praetorian Praefect. History relates nothing but good of this minister; he made a wise commercial treaty with the king of Persia; he repelled with ease a Hunnish invasion of Moesia; he built a flotilla on the Danube, where Roman warships had not been seen since the death of Valens, forty years before; he reorganized the corn supply [pg 055] of Constantinople; and did much to get back into order and cultivation the desolated north-western lands of the Balkan Peninsula, from which Alaric and his Visigothic hordes had now taken their final departure. The empire was still more indebted to him for bringing up the young Theodosius as an honest and god-fearing man. The palace under Anthemius' rule was the school of the virtues: the lives of the emperor and his three sisters, Pulcheria, Arcadia, and Marina, were the model and the marvel of their subjects. Theodosius inherited the piety and honesty of his grandfather and namesake, but was a youth of slender capacity, though he took some interest in literature, and was renowned for his beautiful penmanship. His eldest sister, Pulcheria, was the ruling spirit of the family, and possessed unlimited influence over him, though she was but two years his senior. When Anthemius died in a.d. 414, she took the title of Augusta, and assumed the regency of the East. Pulcheria was an extraordinary woman: on gathering up the reins of power she took a vow of chastity, and lived as a crowned nun for thirty-six years; her fear had been that, if she married, her husband might cherish ambitious schemes against her brother's crown; she therefore kept single herself and persuaded her sisters to make a similar vow. Austere, indefatigable, and unselfish, she proved equal to ruling the realms of the East with success, though no woman had ever made the attempt before.
When Theodosius came of age he refused to remove his sister from power, and treated her as his colleague and equal. By her advice he married in a.d. [pg 056] 421, the year that he came of age, the beautiful and accomplished Athenaïs, daughter of the philosopher Leontius. The emperor's chosen spouse had been brought up as a pagan, but was converted before her marriage, and baptized by the name of Eudocia. She displayed her literary tastes in writing religious poetry, which had some merit, according to the critics of the succeeding age. The austere Pulcheria—always immersed in state business or occupied in religious observances—found herself ere long ill at ease in the company of the lively, beautiful, and volatile literary lady whom she had chosen as sister-in-law. If Theodosius had been less easy-going and good-hearted he must have sent away either his sister or his wife, but he long contrived to dwell affectionately with both, though their bickerings were unending. After many years of married life, however, a final quarrel came, and the empress retired to spend the last years of her life in seclusion at Jerusalem. The cause of her exile is not really known: we have only a wild story concerning it, which finds an exact parallel in one of the tales of the “Arabian Nights.”
“The emperor,” so runs the tale, “was one day met by a peasant who presented him with a Phrygian apple of enormous size, so that the whole Court marvelled at it. And he gave the man a hundred and fifty gold pieces in reward, and sent the apple to the Empress Eudocia. But she sent it as a present to Paulinus, the ‘Master of the Offices,’because he was a friend of the emperor. But Paulinus, not knowing the history of the apple, took it and gave it to the emperor as he reëntered the Palace. And Theodosius having received it, recognized it and concealed it, and called his wife and questioned her, saying, ‘Where is the apple that I sent you?’ She answered, ‘I have eaten it.’ Then he bade her swear by his salvation the truth, whether she had eaten it or sent it to some one. And Eudocia swore that she had [pg 057]sent it to no man, but had herself eaten it. Then the emperor showed her the apple, and was exceedingly wrath, suspecting that she was enamoured of Paulinus, and had sent it to him as a love-gift; for he was a very handsome man. And on this account he put Paulinus to death, but he permitted Eudocia to go to the Holy Places to pray. And she went down from Constantinople to Jerusalem, and dwelt there all her days.”
That Paulinus was executed, and that Eudocia spent her last years of retirement in Palestine, we know for certain. All the rest of the story is in reality hidden from us. The chief improbability of the tale is that Eudocia had reached the age of forty when the breach between her and her husband took place, and that Paulinus was also an official of mature years.
Theodosius' long reign passed by in comparative quiet. Its only serious troubles were a short war with the Persians, and a longer one with Attila, the great king of the Huns, whose empire now stretched over all the lands north of the Black Sea and Danube, where the Goths had once dwelt. In this struggle the Roman armies were almost invariably unfortunate. The Huns ravaged the country as far as Adrianople and Philippopolis, and had to be bought off by the annual payment of 700 lbs. of gold [£31,000]. It is true that they fell on Theodosius while his main force was engaged on the Persian frontier, but the constant ill-success of the imperial generals seems to show that the armies of the East had never been properly reorganized since the military system of Theodosius I. had been broken up by the revolt of Gainas forty years before. His grandson had neither a trustworthy body of German auxiliaries nor a sufficiently large [pg 059] native levy of born subjects of the empire to protect his borders.
Angel Of Victory. (From a Fifth-century Diptych.) Reproduced from "L'Art Byzantin." Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883.
The reconstruction of the Roman military forces was reserved for the successors of Theodosius II. He himself was killed by a fall from his horse in 450 a.d., leaving an only daughter, who was married to her cousin Valentinian III., Emperor of the West. Theodosius, with great wisdom, had designated as his successor, not his young-son-in-law, a cruel and profligate prince, but his sister Pulcheria, who at the same time ended her vow of celibacy and married Marcianus, a veteran soldier and a prominent member of the Senate. The marriage was but formal, for both were now well advanced in years: as a political expedient it was all that could be desired. The empire had peace and prosperity under their rule, and freed itself from the ignominious tribute to the Huns. Before Attila died in 452, he had met and been checked by the succours which Marcianus sent to the distressed Romans of the West.
When Marcianus and Pulcheria passed away, the empire came into the hands of a series of three men of ability. They were all bred as high civil officials, not as generals; all ascended the throne at a ripe age; not one of them won his crown by arms, all were peaceably designated either by their predecessors, or by the Senate and army. These princes were Leo I. (457-474), Zeno (474-491), Anastasius (491-518). Their chief merit was that they guided the Roman Empire in the East safely through the stormy times which saw its extinction in the West. While, beyond the Adriatic, province after province was being lopped [pg 060] off and formed into a new Germanic kingdom, the emperors who reigned at Constantinople kept a tight grip on the Balkan Peninsula and on Asia, and succeeded in maintaining their realm absolutely intact. Both East and West were equally exposed to the barbarian in the fifth century, and the difference of their fate came from the character of their rulers, not from the diversity of their political conditions. In the West, after the extinction of the house of Theodosius (455 a.d.), the emperors were ephemeral puppets, made and unmade by the generals of their armies, who were invariably Germans. The two Magistri militum, Ricimer and Gundovald—one Suabian, the other Burgundian by birth—deposed or slew no less than five of their nominal masters in seventeen years. In the East, on the other hand, it was the emperors who destroyed one after another the ambitious generals, who, by arms or intrigue, threatened their throne.
While this comparison bears witness to the personal ability of the three emperors who ruled at Constantinople between a.d. 457 and a.d. 518, it is only fair to remember they were greatly helped by the fact that the German element in their armies had never reached the pitch of power to which it had attained in the West; the suppression of Gainas forty years before had saved them from that danger. But unruly and aspiring generals were not wanting in the East; the greatest danger of Leo I. was the conspiracy of the great Magister militum Aspar, whom he detected and slew when he was on the eve of rebelling. Zeno was once chased out of his capital by rebels, and twice [pg 061] vexed by dangerous risings in Asia Minor, but on each occasion he triumphed over his adversaries, and celebrated his victory by the execution of the leaders of the revolt. Anastasius was vexed for several years by the raids of a certain Count Vitalian, who ranged over the Thracian provinces with armies recruited from the barbarians beyond the Danube. But, in spite of all these rebellions, the empire was never in serious danger of sinking into disorder or breaking up, as the Western realm had done, into new un-Roman kingdoms. So far was it from this fate, that Anastasius left his successor, when he died in a.d. 518, a loyal army of 150,000 men, a treasure of 320,000 lbs. of gold, and an unbroken frontier to East and West.
The main secret of the success of the emperors of the fifth century in holding their own came from the fact that they had reorganized their armies, and filled them up with native troops in great numbers. Leo I. was the first ruler who utilized the military virtues of the Isaurians, or mountain populations of Southern Asia Minor. He added several regiments of them to the army of the East, but it was his son-in-law and successor, Zeno, himself an Isaurian born, who developed the scheme. He raised an imperial guard from his countrymen, and enlisted as many corps of them as could be raised; moreover, he formed regiments of Armenians and other inhabitants of the Roman frontier of the East, and handed over to his successor, Anastasius, an army in which the barbarian auxiliaries—now composed of Teutons and Huns in about equal numbers—were decidedly dominated by the native elements.
The last danger which the Eastern Empire was to experience from the hands of the Germans fell into the reign of Zeno. The Ostrogoths had submitted to the Huns ninety years before, when their brethren the Visigoths fled into Roman territory, in the reign of Valens. But when the Hunnish Empire broke up at the death of Attila [a.d. 452], the Ostrogoths freed themselves, and replaced their late masters as the main danger on the Danube. The bulk of them streamed south-westward, and settled in Pannonia, the border-province of the Western Empire, on the frontier of the East-Roman districts of Dacia and Moesia. They soon fell out with Zeno, and two Ostrogothic chiefs, Theodoric, the son of Theodemir, and Theodoric, the son of Triarius, were the scourges of the Balkan Peninsula for more than twenty years. While the bulk of their tribesmen settled down on the banks of the Save and Mid-Danube, the two Theodorics harried the whole of Macedonia and Moesia by never-ending raids. Zeno tried to turn them against each other, offering first to the one, then to the other, the title of Magister militum, and a large pension. But now—as in the time of Alaric and Stilicho—it was seen that “dog will not eat dog”; the two Theodorics, after quarrelling for a while, banded themselves together against Zeno. The story of their reconciliation is curious.
Theodoric, the son of Theodemir, the ally of Rome for the moment, had surrounded his rival on a rocky hill in a defile of the Balkans. While they lay opposite each other, Theodoric, the son of Triarius [he is usually known as Theodoric the One-Eyed], [pg 063] rode down to his enemy's lines and called to him, “Madman, betrayer of your race, do you not see that the Roman plan is always to destroy Goths by Goths? Whichever of us fails, they, not we, will be the stronger. They never give you real help, but send you out against me to perish here in the Desert.” Then all the Goths cried out, “The One-Eyed is right. These men are Goths like ourselves.” So the two Theodorics made peace, and Zeno had to cope with them both at once [a.d. 479]. Two years later Theodoric the One-Eyed was slain by accident—his horse flung him, as he mounted, against a spear fixed by the door of his tent—but his namesake continued a thorn in the side of the empire till 488 a.d.
In that year Zeno bethought him of a device for ridding himself of the Ostrogoth, who, though he made no permanent settlement in Moesia or Macedonia, was gradually depopulating the realm by his incursions. The line of ephemeral emperors who reigned in Italy over the shrunken Western realm had ended in 476, when the German general Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, and did not trouble himself to nominate another puppet-Cæsar to succeed him. By his order a deputation from the Roman Senate visited Zeno at Constantinople, to inform him that they did not require an emperor of their own to govern Italy, but would acknowledge him as ruler alike of East and West; at the same time they besought Zeno to nominate, as his representative in the Italian lands, their defender, the great Odoacer. Zeno replied by advising the Romans to persuade Odoacer to recognize as his lord Julius Nepos, one of the [pg 064] dethroned nominees of Ricimer, who had survived his loss of the imperial diadem. Odoacer refused, and proclaimed himself king in Italy, while still affecting—against Zeno's own will—to recognize the Constantinopolitan emperor as his suzerain.
In 488 a.d. it occurred to Zeno to offer Theodoric the government of Italy, if he would conquer it from Odoacer. The Ostrogoth, who had harried the inland of the Balkan Peninsula bare, and had met several reverses of late from the Roman arms, took the offer. He was made “patrician” and consul, and started off with all the Ostrogothic nation at his back to win the realm of Italy. After hard fighting with Odoacer and the mixed multitude of mercenaries that followed him, the Goths conquered Italy, and Theodoric—German king and Roman patrician—began to reign at Ravenna. He always professed to be the vassal and deputy of the emperor at Constantinople, and theoretically his conquest of Italy meant the reunion of the East and the West. But the Western realm had shrunk down to Italy and Illyricum, and the power of Zeno therein was purely nominal.
With the departure of the Ostrogoths we have seen our last of the Germans in the Balkan Peninsula; after 488 the Slavs take their place as the molesters of the Roman frontier on the Danube.