The Dark Ages, 476-918

by Charles Oman

For the last five years of Constantinus’ long absence in the West there had been grievous trouble with the Saracens in Asia Minor, against which the caliph Muavia had launched his hosts for five successive summers. The raids of his generals reached as far as Amorium in Phrygia, which was stormed by the Arabs, and promptly retaken by the Romans in 668. The nominal control of affairs in Asia had been left to the emperor’s eldest son Constantine, when his father sailed to the West. |Constantine Pogonatus, 668-85.| On the news of the murder at Syracuse and the usurpation of Mezecius, Constantine, now aged eighteen, sailed in person to Sicily, put down and executed the usurper, and then promptly returned to Constantinople. He had been beardless when he set out, but returned next year with his face covered with hair, wherefore the people of the capital gave him the nickname of ‘Pogonatus,’ the bearded, by which he is generally known. Curiously enough the name would have been far better applied to his father whose beard was enormous, while that of Constantine V. did not exceed a very moderate limit.

Constantine Pogonatus was his father’s true son, a hard-working, hard-fighting, and somewhat high-handed Caesar, who kept the empire well together, and spent all his energy in holding the Saracens in check, a task in which he won great success. He reigned for seventeen years (668-85), of which the first ten were a time of unbroken war with the Caliphate. The first beginning of this struggle was not very favourable for the empire; in 669-70 the generals of Muavia pushed their way as far as the sea of Marmora, and in 672 the Caliph thought success so nearly in his grasp that he prepared for a formal siege of Constantinople, the second that it had undergone in the century. Using the harbour of Cyzicus as their base, the Saracens, under a general named Abderrha-man, and the Caliph’s son Yezid, beleaguered the city for six months (April-September, 673). They were finally forced to retire after a naval engagement in which the Imperial galleys had the better, largely owing, it is said, to the newly invented ‘Greek fire,’ by which they burnt many of the Moslem ships. |Constantine V. saves Constantinople.| When forced away from the Bosphorus, the Saracens fell back on Cyzicus, which they succeeded in holding for no less than four years, making occasional sallies from it towards Constantinople, of which every single one was repelled with loss by the emperor. At last the Arabs, after losing their general, and seeing Abu Eyub, one of the last surviving companions of Mohammed, perish before the walls, raised the siege. Their fleet was destroyed by a storm off the Lycian Coast: their land-army was attacked on its retreat by the East-Romans, and defeated with a loss of 30,000 men.

So great was the blow inflicted on the Caliph by the entire failure of his army before Constantinople, that he was glad to conclude an ignominious peace with the emperor, by which he engaged to pay 3000 pounds of gold to Constantine, and to send him fifty Arab horses for every year that the treaty lasted (678).

The fidelity of the East-Romans to the house of Heraclius was thus justified by the victory of Constantine; it is a pity that only a very meagre account of his campaign has come down to us, owing to the dearth of chroniclers in the seventh century. We know, however, that the fame of his triumph went all over Europe, and that ambassadors came from the Avars, the Lombards, and even the distant Franks to congratulate him on beating off an attack which had threatened serious consequences to the whole of Christendom.

|The Bulgarians.| For the remainder of his reign Constantine enjoyed a well-earned peace, disturbed only by some slight bickering with a new enemy, the Bulgarians. This Ugrian tribe, who had dwelt for the last two centuries beyond the Danube, crossed the river in the end of Constantine’s reign, and threw themselves upon the Slavonic tribes who held Moesia. They subdued the Slavs without much difficulty, and defeated a Roman army which Constantine led by sea to the mouth of the Danube. Recognising that it was impossible to reconquer the long-lost Moesia, the emperor made peace with Isperich, the Bulgarian king, and allowed him to settle without further opposition in the land between the Danube and the Balkans, where the Slavs had hitherto held possession (679). A new Bulgarian nation was gradually formed by the intermixture of the conquering tribe and their subjects: when formed, it displayed a Slavonic rather than a Ugrian type, and spoke a Slavonic not a Ugrian tongue.

The later years of Constantine V. were better known to contemporaries as the time of the holding of the council of Constantinople, than as the time of the foundation of the new Bulgarian kingdom. To settle the dispute on the divine and human wills of Christ, the emperor summoned an œcumenical synod, at which the Western churches were well represented. It finally condemned the Monothelite heresy, which for the future ceased to be the great question debated between the churches (680-1). But a new controversy, that on Iconoclasm, was ere long to break out.

|Character of Constantine V.| To the misfortune of the empire the able and hard-working Constantine died in 685, at the comparatively early age of thirty-six. We hear little that is unfavourable to him from any chronicler: his sole crime seems to have been the cruel act of slitting the noses of his two brothers Heraclius and Tiberius in 680, to disqualify them from holding imperial power. They had hitherto been nominally the colleagues of Constantine, and were honoured with the title of Caesars, but in the interests of his own son Justinian, now a growing boy, the emperor determined to make it impossible for them to aspire to the supreme power. It appears to have been a cruel and unjustifiable act, and unless the Caesars had given provocation, a fact of which we have no hint in any chronicler, it was a grievous blot on the otherwise excellent character of Constantine V.

The young Justinian, second of that name, mounted his father’s throne in 685, when only in his seventeenth year. The accession of this prince was a fearful misfortune for the empire. He possessed the qualities of his grandfather Constantinus in an exaggerated form, being arbitrary, cruel, reckless, and high-handed, yet so brave and capable that his throne was not easy to shake. |Justinian II., 685-95.| He started on his career too young, and might have come to better things if his father had lived for another ten years; but, abandoned to his own devices ere he was well out of his boyhood, he developed into a bloodthirsty tyrant. The first few years of his reign, ere he had felt his feet and fully realised his own desires, were comparatively uneventful. The Saracens were occupied in civil wars since the death of Muavia, and gave no trouble: the caliph Abd-el-Melik was only too glad to renew with Justinian the treaty that his predecessor had made with Constantine V. Unmolested by the Saracens, Justinian sent armies into Iberia and Albania, the Christian kingdoms under the Caucasus, and compelled them to pay him tribute. Soon after he undertook in person a great expedition against the Bulgarians, designing to push the Roman boundary once more to the Danube. He was very successful, beating the enemy in the field, and bringing back more than 30,000 captives, from whom he organised an auxiliary force for service in Asia.

Justinian’s triumph over the Bulgarians emboldened him to undertake the greater scheme of winning back Syria from the Saracens. In 693 he picked a quarrel with the Caliph on the most frivolous grounds: when the annual payment due under the treaty of 686 was tendered to him, he refused to receive the money, because the coins were not the old Roman solidi, which had hitherto circulated in Syria and Egypt, and still formed the bulk of the Saracen currency, but new Arab ‘dirhems’ with Abd-el-Melik’s name upon them, which the caliph had lately begun to strike. |Justinian’s Saracen war, 693.| But any pretext was good enough for Justinian: he declared war with a light heart, and led his armies in person across the Taurus into Cilicia. At Sebastopolis near Tarsus he suffered a fearful defeat, mainly caused by the desertion to the Saracens of the unwilling recruits whom he had enlisted from among the captives of the Bulgarian War. When he had rallied his army Justinian was cruel and illogical enough to order those of the corps who had not deserted to be put to death—lest they might follow their comrades’ example in the next battle (693). In the next year the emperor lost Roman Armenia by the revolt of its Governor, a native Armenian named Sumpad, who deserted to the Saracens. Other disasters followed, and the Arabs harried the ‘Anatolic’ and ‘Armeniac’ themes.

Meanwhile the young emperor had been making himself most unpopular at home by the exactions necessary for the support of his unlucky war, and still more by persisting in building expensive and unnecessary palaces in the capital, while the war still raged. His two finance ministers, Theodotus, a lapsed abbot who had quitted his monastery, and the eunuch Stephanus, are reported to have gone to the extremes of cruelty in dealing with the citizens. It is said that Theodotus was wont to torture defaulting tax-payers by hanging them over smoky fires and half stifling them. Stephanus preferred the rod: it is said that he even presumed on one occasion—during Justinian’s absence—to seize and beat the empress-dowager Anastasia. The emperor only punished him by ordering him to complete, at his own expense, a building on which he was then engaged.