To the great loss of the empire, Theophilus died in 842, while still in the prime of his life, leaving a son and heir of only four years of age. We have already spoken, more than once, of the dangers of a long minority in that time, and the youth of Michael III. was not to be an exception to the rule. For fourteen years a council of regency governed in his behalf to the small profit of the empire. |Theodora restores Iconoduly.| The chief place in it was taken by the empress-dowager, whose interests were mainly religious. Almost before the breath was out of her husband’s body Theodora set to work to undo his policy. Calling to her aid the whole image-loving party in the palace, she deposed the patriarch, drove into exile the chief Iconoclastic bishops, and summoned a council at Constantinople, which anathematised the enemies of images, and re-affirmed all the doctrines which had been condemned in 830 by order of Theophilus. Only thirty days after the new reign had begun Iconoduly had once more become orthodox, and Iconoclasm was proscribed. Active persecution against heretics followed; the Paulicians and other dissidents of Asia Minor were so maltreated that they migrated en masse to the dominions of the caliph, and from thence revenged themselves by making incursions into the empire.
The two men who shared the chief power with Theodora were her worthless brother Bardas, and the count Theoctistus: they were bitterly jealous of each other, and Bardas ultimately procured his rival’s death. Each of these personages believed himself to be a great general, and their ambitious but ill-managed expeditions against the Saracens ended in uniform disaster. It was fortunate for the empire that the caliphate had now passed into the hands of two incapable bigots and debauchees, Wathek and Motawakkel, who were quite unable to profit by their neighbour’s weakness (842-861). Indeed the Byzantine arms won some success when neither Bardas nor Theoctistus were present, and one daring expedition even seized and held Alexandria for a year. The long, weary war dragged on, but neither empire nor caliphate got any advantage from it.
In 856 the young Michael attained his eighteenth year, and took the government into his own hands. He at once sent away his mother, whose long domination he had secretly resented, and confiscated most of her treasure and estates. Michael was an ill-disposed youth, but owed much of his evil character to his uncle Bardas, who had brought him up in the worst of fashions, and taught him to plunge, while yet a mere boy, into drinking, gambling, and debauchery. Michael and his uncle were sworn companions in all kinds of ribaldry and evil-living, and their court was a scene of perpetual scandals. Bardas was made Caesar in 862, and for the next four years had as much to do with the government of the empire as his nephew. But he was unwise enough to take too much upon him, to treat Michael as a drunken boy, and to assume a superiority over him which the young emperor could not brook. After they had reigned together four years Michael caused his uncle to be slain, and took another associate in the empire (866).
His new colleague was Basil the Macedonian, a young man of Slavonic descent, who had long been one of his boon-companions. When Michael was still a boy he had been impressed by the courage and strength of Basil, who had entered his service as a groom. The young emperor promoted him from one office to another, till he became Protostrator, or Count of the Stables—Marshal as he would have been called in a western monarchy. The new favourite was bold, ready-witted, and hard-headed; he could drink down the emperor himself at their feasts—a power which inspired Michael with the greatest respect. So trusting to the faith of the friend of his youth, Michael preferred him to the place of the murdered Bardas.
When not under the influence of the wine-cup, Michael the Drunkard—as his subjects named him—was a warlike and energetic sovereign. He often took the field against the Saracens and the Bulgarians, and sometimes met with success when courage could take the place of strategy. After a successful campaign beyond the Balkans he forced the Bulgarian king not only to do him homage, but to become a Christian, a change which did much in later years to make relations easier between the empire and its northern neighbours.
Michael sometimes busied himself about things ecclesiastical: his mother had brought him up as a fervent image-worshipper, and he distinguished himself when he came to years of discretion by the disgraceful outrage of exhuming and burning the bodies of Constantine Copronymus and the patriarch John, the chief representatives—lay and spiritual—of Iconoclasm. Another of his doings had a graver consequence: it was he who, offended by the austere morals of the patriarch Ignatius, deposed him and nominated Photius in his stead. The preferment of Photius was, as we have already stated when dealing with the Papacy, the original cause of that breach between East and West which has never yet been healed.[[68]]
|Basil I. murders Michael III., 867.| Michael had attained the age of thirty-one, and seemed destined to rule for many more years, when he was suddenly cut off. His friend and boon-companion, Basil, whom he had raised from a groom to be a Caesar, was the murderer. At the end of one of their debauches the Macedonian rose and bade some of his friends slay his benefactor. Michael was stabbed as he lay in a drunken sleep, and the crown passed away from the Amorian house (867). Basil had already, as colleague in the empire, got the reins of power in his hands, and the murder of Michael passed unrevenged. No one raised his voice in behalf of the dead man’s infant sons, and the new dynasty was inaugurated without a struggle or a civil war.
The Macedonian, though he had shown himself an ungrateful traitor, was a man of great ability. He held firmly to his ill-gotten crown, and founded the longest dynasty that ever sat upon the Byzantine throne. It was not till 1056 that his house was extinguished. As emperor he did all that he could to make his subjects forget that he had once been the deep-drinking favourite of Michael III. He proved himself a hard-working sovereign, economical, prudent, and judicious, and the empire flourished under his rule. Some of his work was destined to be permanent; his code, a new revision of the laws of Justinian, superseding Leo the Isaurian’s Ecloga, remained the text-book of the eastern empire down to its last days. His financial arrangements, which seem to have been excellent, were also destined to endure for nearly two centuries. In matters ecclesiastical he did his best to patch up the breach with the Roman church; he reinstated the deposed patriarch Ignatius, and sent Photius into private life; but though the cause of offence was removed the quarrel remained, and the exorbitant claims of the Popes prevented any reunion of the East and West. Finding this to be the case, Basil restored Photius when Ignatius died, and allowed things to take their inevitable course.
Except in Sicily the wars of Basil were generally successful. The empire of the caliphs was rapidly breaking up; the dynasty of the Saffarides had lopped off the eastern provinces of their realm, and Egypt had fallen into the hands of Ahmed-ibn-Tulun. Four caliphs had been murdered in nine years (861-9), and the incessant civil war which raged at Bagdad stripped the Saracen frontier of most of its defenders. The Christian arms, therefore, did not fare badly during the reign of Basil and his son Leo, and for the first time the East-Roman boundary began to move eastward, and new themes were carved out of the captured territory. The Byzantine armies ravaged northern Syria and Mesopotamia as far as Amida and Aleppo. Cyprus was recovered, though only for a time, and the rebellion of the Paulician heretics on the Armenian frontier was suppressed. |Wars of Basil I.| At the same time Basil’s fleets won victories in the Ægean and the Ionian sea over the corsairs of Crete and Africa. We have already mentioned, in another place, how the admiral Oriphas aided Lewis II. to reconquer Bari, and how Nicephorus Phocas drove out the Saracens from Lucania and Bruttium, and added the southern peninsula of Italy to his master’s realm. In Sicily alone was disaster met; the fall of Syracuse in 878 marks the practical extinction of the East-Roman power in that island. But success elsewhere atoned for this single loss.