Zeno enjoyed comparative peace after Leontius’ rebellion had been crushed, and was still more fortunate when, in 488, he induced Theodoric the Amal to move his Ostrogoths out of Moesia and go forth to conquer Italy. How Theodoric fared in Italy we have already related. His departure was of enormous benefit to the empire, and, for the first time since his accession, Zeno was now able to exercise a real authority over his European provinces. They were left to him in a most fearful state of desolation: ten years of war, ranging over the whole tract south of the Danube and north of Mount Olympus, had reduced the land to a wilderness. Whole districts were stripped bare of their inhabitants, and great gaps of waste territory were inviting new enemies to enter the Balkan peninsula, and occupy the deserted country-side. North of the Balkans the whole provincial population seems to have been well-nigh exterminated. |State of the Balkan peninsula.| When the Ostrogoths abandoned the country there was nothing left between the mountains and the Danube but a few military posts and their garrisons, nor was the country replenished with inhabitants till the Slavs spread over the land in the succeeding age. Illyria and Macedonia had not fared so badly, but the net result of the century of Gothic occupation in the Balkan peninsula had been to thin down to a fearful extent the Latin-speaking population of the Eastern Empire. All the inland of Thrace, Moesia, and Illyricum had hitherto employed the Latin tongue: with the thinning out of its inhabitants the empire became far more Asiatic and Greek than it had before been.
When the Ostrogoths migrated to Italy, the empire acquired a new set of neighbours on its northern frontier, the nomad Ugrian horde of the Bulgarians on the lower Danube, and the Teutonic tribes of the Gepidae, Heruli, and Lombards on the middle Danube and the Theiss and Save. Contrary to what might have been expected, none of these races pushed past the barrier of Roman forts along the river to occupy Moesia. They vexed the empire with nothing worse than occasional raids, and did not come to settle within its limits.
Zeno’s ecclesiastical policy demands a word of notice. He was himself orthodox, but not fanatical: the Church being at the moment grievously divided by the Monophysite schism, to which the Churches of Egypt and Palestine had attached themselves, he thought it would be possible and expedient to lure the heretics back within the fold by slightly modifying the Catholic statement of doctrine. In 482, though he was in the midst of his struggle with Theodoric the Amal, he found time to draft his ‘Henoticon,’ or Edict of Comprehension. The Monophysites held that there was but one nature in our Lord, as opposed to the orthodox view, that both the human and the divine element were fully present in His person. |Zeno’s Henoticon.| Zeno put into his ‘Henoticon’ a distinct statement that Christ was both God and man, but did not insert the words ‘two natures,’ which formed the orthodox shibboleth. But his well-meant scheme fell utterly flat. The heretics were not satisfied, and refused to conform, while the Catholics held that it was a weak concession to heterodoxy, and condemned Zeno for playing with schism. The patriarch, Acacius, who had assisted him to draft the ‘Henoticon,’ was excommunicated by the Bishop of Rome, and the churches of Italy and Constantinople were out of communion for more than thirty years, owing to an edict that had been intended to unite and not to divide.
The last years of Zeno’s reign were far more undisturbed by war and rebellion than its earlier part. He survived till 491, when he died of epilepsy, leaving no heir to inherit his throne. He had had two sons, named Leo and Zeno: the first had died, while still a child, in 474; the second killed himself by evil-living, when on the threshold of manhood, long ere his father’s death.
The right of choosing Zeno’s successor fell nominally into the hands of the Senate and people, really into those of the widowed Empress Ariadne and the Imperial Guard. The daughter of Leo made a wise choice in recommending to the suffrages of the army and people Anastasius of Dyrrhachium, an officer of the silentiarii,[[6]] who was universally esteemed for his piety and virtue.
[6]. A body-guard, whose duty it was to preserve silence around the emperor’s private apartments.
Anastasius was a man of fifty-two or fifty-three, who had spent most of his life in official work in the capital, and was specially well known as an able and economical financier. He was sincerely religious, and spent many of his leisure hours as a lay preacher in the church of St. Sophia, till he was inhibited from giving instruction by the Patriarch Euphemius, who detected Monophysitism in his sermons. He had once proposed to take orders, and had been spoken of as a candidate for the bishopric of Antioch. Yet, in spite of his religious fervour, he was never accused of being unworldly or unpractical. |Character of Anastasius.| Anastasius was a man of blameless life, learned and laborious, slow to anger, a kind and liberal master, and absolutely just in all his dealings. ‘Reign as you have lived,’ was the cry of the people when he first presented himself to them clad in the imperial purple. Only two objections were ever made to him—the first, that he leaned towards the Monophysite heresy; the second, that his court was too staid and puritanical for the taste of the multitude, who had loved the pomp and orgies of the dissolute Zeno. He earned unpopularity by suppressing gladiatorial combats with wild beasts, and licentious dances.
Six weeks after his accession the new emperor married the Empress-Dowager Ariadne, who had been the chief instrument in his election. She was a princess of blameless life, and had done much in the previous reign to redeem the ill-repute of her first husband. It was a great misfortune for the empire that she bore her second spouse no heir to inherit his throne.
The commencement of the reign of Anastasius was troubled by a rebellion of the Isaurians. Zeno had not only formed an Imperial Guard of his countrymen, but had filled the civil service with them, and encouraged them to settle as merchants and traders in Constantinople. They had been much vexed when the sceptre passed to the Illyrian Anastasius, and entered into a conspiracy to seize his person, and proclaim Zeno’s brother, Longinus, as emperor. A few months after his accession they rose in the capital and obtained possession of part of the city near the palace, but the majority of the people and army were against them, and they were put down after a sharp street fight, in which the great Hippodrome was burnt. Longinus was captured, and compelled to take orders. He died long after as a priest in Egypt. Anastasius, after this riot, dismissed all the Isaurian officers from the public service. They returned to their homes in Asia Minor, and organised a rebellion in their native hills. A second Longinus, who had been magister militum in Thrace, put himself at the head of the insurrection, which lingered on for five years (491-496), but was never a serious danger to the empire. |Rebellions in Isauria, 492-496.| The rebels were beaten whenever they ventured into the plains, and only maintained themselves so long by the aid of the mountain-castles with which their rugged land was studded. In 496 their last fastnesses were stormed, and their chief, the ex-magister, taken and executed. Anastasius punished the communities which had been most obstinate in the rebellion by transferring them to Thrace, and settling them on the wasted lands under the Balkans, where he trusted that these fearless mountaineers would prove an efficient guard to keep the passes against the barbarians from beyond the Danube.
The Asiatic provinces of the empire had no further troubles till 502, when a war broke out between Anastasius and Kobad king of Persia. The Mesopotamian frontier had been singularly quiet for the last century; there had been no serious war with the great Oriental monarchy to the East since Julian’s unfortunate expedition in 362. The same age which had seen the Teutonic migrations in Europe had been marked in inner Asia by a great stirring of the Huns and other Turanian tribes beyond the Caspian, and while the Roman emperors had been busy on the Danube, the Sassanian kings had been hard at work defending the frontier of the Oxus. In a respite from his Eastern troubles Kobad made some demands for money on Anastasius, which the emperor refused, and war soon followed. It began with several disasters for the Romans, and Amida, the chief fortress of Mesopotamia, was stormed in 503. |War with Persia, 503-505.| Nisibis fell later in the same year, and when Anastasius sent reinforcements to the East he appointed so many generals with independent authority that the whole Roman army could never be united, and the commanders allowed themselves to be taken in detail and defeated in succession. In 504, however, the fortune of war turned, when the supreme authority in the field was bestowed on Celer, the magister officiorum; he recovered Amida after a long siege, and began to press forward beyond the Persian frontier. Kobad was at the same time assailed by the Huns from beyond the Oxus, and gladly made peace, on terms which restored the frontier of both parties to the line it had occupied in 502. Anastasius provided against future wars by building two new fortresses of the first class on the Persian frontier, Daras in Mesopotamia, and Theodosiopolis farther north on the borders of Armenia. These places served to break the force of the Persian attack thirty years later, when the successors of Kobad and Anastasius again fell to blows. The Persian war, like the Isaurian, had only afflicted a very limited district,—the province beyond the Euphrates,—and no raids had penetrated so far as Syria. Indeed, during the whole reign of Anastasius, the only serious trouble to which the Asiatic half of the empire was exposed was a Hunnish raid from beyond the Caucasus, which in 515 caused grave damage in Pontus, Cappadocia, and Lycaonia. This invasion, however, was an isolated misfortune, followed by no further incursions of the nomads of the Northern Steppes.