Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Mahometan Victories

After the battle of Yermuk Syria fell and Palestine was invaded. In 637 Jerusalem became a Moslem town, with a mosque standing where once had been the famous temple of Solomon. Mahomet had declared Jerusalem a sanctuary only second in glory to Mecca; and his followers with a toleration strange in that age left under Christian guardianship the Tomb of the Holy Sepulchre and other sacred sites.

After Syria, Palestine; after Palestine, Egypt and the north African coast-line. The dying Heraclius heard nothing but the bitter news of disaster, and after his death the quarrels of his descendants increased the feebleness of Christian resistance. A spirit of unity might have carried the Moslem banners to the limits of the Eastern Empire, but in 656 the Caliph Othman was murdered, and the civil war that ensued enabled the Christian Emperor, Constans II, to negotiate peace. He had lost Tripoli, Syria, Egypt, and the greater part of Armenia to his foes, who had also succeeded in establishing a naval base in the Mediterranean that threatened the islands of Greece herself. In the north his borders were overrun by Bulgar and Slav tribes, while in Italy the Lombards maintained a perpetual struggle against his viceroy, the Exarch of Ravenna.

Constans himself spent six years in Italy, the greater part in campaigns against the Lombards. He even visited Rome, but earned hatred there as elsewhere by his ruthless pillage of the West for the benefit of the East. Thus the Pantheon was stripped of its golden tiles to enrich Constantinople, and the churches of South Italy robbed of their plate to pay for his wars. At last a conspiracy was formed against him, and while enjoying the baths at Syracuse one of his servants struck him on the head with a marble soap-box and fractured his skull. Constans had been a brave and resolute Emperor of considerable military ability. His son, Constantine ‘Pogonatus’, or ‘the bearded’, inherited his gifts and drove back the Mahometans from Constantinople with so great a loss of men and prestige that the Caliph promised to pay a large sum of money as tribute every year in return for peace.

Constantine ‘Pogonatus’ died when a comparatively young man and was succeeded by his son, Justinian II, a lad of seventeen, arrogant, cruel, and restless. Without any reason save ambition he picked a quarrel with the Moslem Caliph, marched a large army across his Eastern border, and, when he met with defeat, proceeded in his rage to execute his generals and soldiers, declaring that they had failed him. At home, in Constantinople, his ministers tortured the inhabitants in order to exact money for his treasury and filled the imperial dungeons with senators and men of rank suspected of disloyalty.

Such a state of affairs could not last; and the Emperor, who treated his friends as badly as his foes, was captured by one of his own generals, and, after having his nose cruelly slit, was exiled to the Crimea. Mutilation was supposed to be a final bar to the right of wearing the imperial crown; but Justinian II was the type of man to be ignored only when dead. After some years of brooding over his wrongs he fled from the Crimea and took refuge with the King of the Bulgars.

On his sea-journey a terrific storm arose that threatened to overwhelm both him and his crew. ‘My Lord,’ exclaimed one of his attendants, ‘I pray you make a vow to God that if He spare you, you also will spare your enemies.’ ‘May God sink this vessel here and now,’ retorted his master, ‘if I spare a single one of them that falls into my hands,’ and the words were an ill omen for his reign, that began once more in 705 when, with the aid of Bulgar troops and of treachery within the capital, Justinian II established himself once more in Constantinople.

During six years the Empire suffered his tyranny anew; and those who had previously helped to dethrone him were hunted down, tortured, and put to death. Like Nero of old he burned alive his political enemies, or he would order the nobles of his court who had offended him to be sewn up in sacks and thrown into the sea. At last another rebellion brought a final end to his reign, and that of the house of Heraclius, for both he and his young son were murdered, and the Eastern Empire given up to anarchy.

Leo the Isaurian

The man who did most to save Constantinople from the next Mahometan invasion was one of the military governors of the Empire called Leo the Isaurian. Conscious of his own ability he took advantage of his first successes to seize the imperial crown; and then, having heard that the Mahometan fleet was moored off the shores of Asia Minor, he secretly sent a squadron of his own vessels that set the enemy’s ships on fire. In the panic that ensued more than half the Arabian ships were sunk. About the same time a Mahometan land force was also defeated by the King of the Bulgars, who had allied himself with the Emperor on account of their mutual dread of an Eastern invasion. The result of these combined Christian victories was that the Caliph Moslemah, whose main forces were encamped beneath the walls of Constantinople, grew alarmed lest he should be cut off from support and provisions. He therefore raised the siege, embarked his army in what remained of his fleet, and retreated to his own kingdom, leaving the Christian capital free from acute danger from the East for another three hundred years.