It was not only by heaping taxes on his subjects that Justinian made himself unpopular. He had a mania for seizing and imprisoning on suspicion senators and other important personages, and he was so merciless in dealing with military officers who met with any defeat, that to accept a command under him was considered the shortest way to the dungeon or the block. Meanwhile his ill-luck in the Saracen war made him as much detested by the soldiery as he was dreaded by their officers. In 695 a distinguished general named Leontius, the conqueror of Iberia and Albania,[[40]] was ordered by Justinian to take command of the theme of Hellas. Regarding this charge as a mere preliminary to disgrace and execution, Leontius in sheer desperation planned a coup d’état. |Fall of Justinian, 695.| At the head of a few dozen followers he burst open the prisons, and made a dash at the palace. Justinian was taken completely by surprise; he fell into the hands of Leontius, who slit his nose, and banished him to the distant fortress of Cherson, in the Crimea. His two detested ministers, Theodotus and Stephanus, were torn to pieces and burnt by the populace.
With the fall of Justinian II. began twenty-two years of anarchy and disaster for the empire. Hitherto Constantinople had been singularly fortunate in escaping the consequences of military revolts and changes of dynasty. With the single exception of the usurpation of the tyrant Phocas, and his deposition by Heraclius, there had been no cases of the transfer of the imperial crown by violence for more than three hundred years. All the earlier emperors of the East had been either designated by their predecessors or peaceably elected by the senate and army. It was now to be seen how fatal was the breaking up of the rule of orderly succession: in the next twenty-two years there were no less than five revolutions at home, and abroad many grave disasters cut the empire short.
|Carthage lost, 698.| The three-years’ rule of Leontius was mainly distinguished by the final loss of Carthage and Africa. Already in Justinian’s time the province had been invaded and partially overrun by the generals of the Caliph. In 697 Carthage fell: it was recovered for a moment by an expedition sent out by Leontius, but in 698 it fell permanently into the hands of the Saracens. The Roman generals, however, escaped by sea with the main body of their army. Fearing to face the wrath of Leontius with such a tale of disaster, the returning officers conspired against him. They sailed to the Bosphorus, where their arrival was quite unexpected, caught the emperor, slit his nose, and threw him into a monastery. In his stead they proclaimed the admiral Tiberius Apsimarus as sovereign (698).
Tiberius II., a very capable man, clung to the throne for seven years. He was fortunate in his war with the Saracens: his armies defeated those of the Caliph, recovered Cilicia, and even occupied Antioch. But this success abroad did not save Tiberius from the wonted end of usurpers. He was overthrown by the banished and mutilated Justinian II., who now reappears upon the stage in a most startling fashion.
Justinian had been consigned by Leontius to the remote fortress of Cherson—the modern Sebastopol—on the north shore of the Black Sea. But being carelessly guarded, he succeeded in escaping, and reaching the court of the Chagan of the Khazars, the Tartar tribe who dwelt on the lower Volga and the shores of the sea of Azoff. |Adventures of Justinian.| In spite of his mutilated nose he succeeded in gaining the good graces of the Chagan, and received the hand of his sister in marriage. Hearing of this Tiberius II. sent a huge bribe to the Tartar, to persuade him to surrender his guest. The treacherous barbarian consented, and despatched an officer to arrest Justinian. But the exile got wind of the plot through a message from his wife, and instead of allowing himself to be seized, slew the Chagan’s emissary, and escaped to sea in an open boat, with half-a-dozen attendants. A storm arose, and the little vessel seemed likely to founder. ‘Make a vow to God that if you escape you will forgive your enemies,’ said one of Justinian’s companions to him, as the boat began to fill. ‘No,’ replied the reckless and inflexible exile, ‘if I spare a single one of them when my time comes, may God sink me here and now.’ The storm abated, the boat came safe to land, and Justinian fell into the hands of Terbel, the king of the Bulgarians. Terbel lent him an army with which to try his fortune, and with its aid he advanced to the gates of Constantinople. |Justinian restored, 705-11.| The city was betrayed to him by partisans within the walls, and he succeeded in getting possession of the palace, and of the person of Tiberius II. Justinian then dragged out of his cloister the deposed usurper Leontius, bound him and Tiberius hand and foot, and laid them before his throne in the Hippodrome. There he sat in triumph with his feet on the necks of the vanquished Caesars, while his partisans chanted ‘Thou shalt trample on the Lion and the Asp,’ an allusion to the names of the two fallen rulers (Leontius and Apsimarus). The two prisoners were then beheaded (705).
During his first reign Justinian had chastised his subjects with whips, it was with scorpions that he now afflicted them. He had returned from exile in a mood of reckless cruelty: the vow he had made was kept with rigid accuracy. Every one who had been concerned in his deposition ten years before was sought out, tortured, and put to death. Some of his doings rose to a monstrous pitch of inhumanity: the chief men of Cherson, who had offended him during his exile, were bound on spits and roasted: many patricians were sewed up into sacks and cast into the Bosphorus.
It is astonishing to find that the second reign of Justinian lasted for more than five years. His tyranny was such that an instant explosion of popular wrath might have been expected. But if reckless, he was also active, suspicious, and strong-handed, and crushed many plots before they could come to a head. |Justinian slain, 711.| At last he fell before a military revolt: the army, headed by a general named Philippicus, disavowed its allegiance, seized the tyrant, and beheaded him. His little six-year-old son, Tiberius, whom the Chagan’s sister had borne him, was torn from sanctuary, and murdered. Thus perished the house of Heraclius, after it had given five rulers to the empire during a century of rule (610-711). It had done much to save the state from the Saracens: all its members, even Justinian, had been men of ability, and Heraclius himself, Constantinus-Constans, and Constantine V. had each borne his part in the long struggle with credit, if not with complete success.
|Anarchy, 711-17.| There now followed six years of complete anarchy (711-17), during which the imperial annals are filled by the obscure names of Philippicus (711-13), Artemius Anastasius (713-715) and Theodosius III. (715-17). Each was the creature of a conspiracy, and each fell by the same means by which he had been uplifted. They were all feeble and incompetent sovereigns, far below the rank of the two earlier usurpers, Leontius and Tiberius Apsimarus. The importance of their reigns lies not in their struggle with each other, but in the general collapse of the system of defence of the empire against the Saracen, the natural result of the employment of the whole army in civil war. The generals of the caliphs Welid and Soliman, the sons of Abd-al-Melik (705-17) burst through the boundaries of the empire on every point. In 711 Sardinia, the westernmost province of the empire since the loss of Africa, was subdued by the Arabs. In the same year they crossed the Taurus, and sacked Tyana in Cappadocia. In 712 they overran Pontus and captured Amasia, in 713 Antioch in Pisidia fell, and with it much of southern Asia Minor. It appeared as if with the downfall of the house of Heraclius the power of self-defence had been taken away from the East-Romans. Nor was the lowest depth yet reached.
Emboldened by the easy successes of his armies over those of the ephemeral sovereigns who followed Justinian II., the caliph Soliman at last resolved to fit out an expedition on the largest scale against Constantinople. |Saracen invasion, 716.| A hundred thousand men advanced by land from Tarsus, while a fleet of more than 1000 sail gathered in the ports of Syria, and sailed round Asia Minor into the Ægean. The Caliph’s brother Moslemah was to head the whole expedition. Cappadocia was already in Saracen hands, and the Caliph’s vanguard was occupied with the siege of Amorium, the chief stronghold of Phrygia. That town, indeed, was saved from destruction by Leo the Isaurian, the governor of the Anatolic theme. But soon after, while the Arabs were still advancing, this same Leo, after concluding a private truce with the invaders, proclaimed himself emperor, and advanced against Constantinople, instead of reserving his strength to resist the armies of Soliman (716).