When the patriarch Paul died in 784, Irene replaced him by Tarasius, a fervent image-worshipper, and then ventured to call a general council at Nicaea, to which she invited pope Hadrian at Rome, and the Patriarchs of the East, to send delegates. Under the influence of the empress the council, by a large majority, declared the lawfulness of making representations of Our Lord and the Saints, and bade men pay not divine worship (λατρεία), but adoration and reverence (προσκύνησις) to them. The recalcitrant Iconoclastic bishops were excommunicated. |Restoration of image-worship, 785.| The doings of the council caused a mutiny of the Imperial guard in Constantinople, for the greater part of the army still adhered to the views of the Isaurian emperors. But Irene succeeded in steering through the troubled waters, put down the mutiny, and retained her power.
Meanwhile the reign of a child and a woman proved disastrous to the empire. The Slavs of the Balkans burst into revolt, and the Saracens invaded Asia Minor. The want of an emperor to head the army was grievously felt, and Haroun-al-Raschid, the son of the caliph Mehdy, ravaged the whole Anatolic and Obsequian themes as far as the Bosphorus. Irene felt herself unable to cope with the situation, and bought a peace by an annual payment of 70,000 solidi (784). Soon after the Bulgarian king declared war, and ravaged Thrace after slaying the general of the Thracian theme in battle.
Among these disasters Constantine VI. grew up to manhood, but his mother, who had acquired a great taste for power, and feared to see her son reverse her religious policy, long refused to give him any share in the government. |Constantine seizes power.| She even made the army swear never to receive her son as sole emperor as long as she should live. The young emperor, after chafing for some time in his state of tutelage, took matters into his own hands. In his twenty-first year he repaired to the camp of the Anatolic troops, and there proclaimed himself of age, and sole ruler of the State. He banished his mother’s favourites, and confined her for some months to her own apartments in the palace.
When he had firmly seized the helm of power, Constantine was weak enough to take his mother again as his colleague on the throne, and to associate her name with his in all imperial decrees. The ambitious and unnatural Irene repaid his confidence by scheming against him. She had grown so fond of power that she had resolved to win it back at all costs. Constantine was, like his ancestors, a warlike and energetic prince. He won several successes over the Saracens, and then engaged in a Bulgarian war. His popularity was first shaken by a fearful defeat at the hands of the Bulgarian king Cardam, by which he lost much of his influence with the army. Shortly afterwards he entered into a fierce struggle with the Patriarch and the clergy, having divorced, in spite of their opposition, a wife whom his mother had forced upon him in early youth, and espoused Theodota, on whom his own affections were set. |Irene dethrones her son, 797.| Knowing that the Church was wroth with Constantine for this outbreak of self-will, and that the army no longer loved him as before, the wicked Irene determined to strike a blow against her son. She suborned some of the young emperor’s attendants to seize their master, and, when he fell into her hands, had his eyes put out. He was then immured in a monastery, where he survived for more than twenty years.
It was by a mere palace-conspiracy, not by an open rising, that the unnatural mother had dethroned and blinded her son. It is, therefore, all the more extraordinary to find that she was able to cling to power for more than five years, in spite of the horror which her act had caused. The gratitude of the image-worshippers to her, for having restored to them the power of practising their superstition, partly explains, but does not at all excuse the impunity which she enjoyed after her cruel deed.
Irene’s five years of power (797-802) were disastrous at home and abroad. Her court was swayed by two greedy eunuchs, Aetius and Stauracius, on whom she lavished all the highest offices. Their miserable quarrels with each other are the chief things recorded in the annals of her internal government. Meanwhile the frontiers were overrun by the armies of Haroun-al-Raschid. The Saracens harried the Anatolic and Thracesian themes, and forced their way as far as Ephesus. Peace was only granted when Irene consented to pay a large annual tribute to the Caliph.
|Deposition of Irene, 802.| In 802 the cup of Irene’s iniquities was full. To put an end to anarchy abroad and within, a number of the chief officers of State, headed by the treasurer Nicephorus, seized her by night, and shut her up in a nunnery. No one struck a blow in her defence, for she was loved by no one, not even by the Iconodules, for whom she had done so much. Nicephorus was proclaimed as her successor, and ascended the throne without any disturbance.
Thus ended the house of the Isaurians, after eighty-five years of rule. They had effected much for the empire; for the disasters of Irene’s short reign had not sufficed to undo the solid work of Leo III. and Constantine V. The boundaries were safer, the population greater, the wealth largely increased, the armies more efficient than at the commencement of the century. Even the Iconoclastic persecutions, though they had failed to crush superstition, had done some good in rooting out the grosser vagaries of image-worship. The Iconoclastic party still subsisted, and was strong in the army and civil service; we shall see it once more in power during the ninth century.