To the court of Constantine V. fled the young Adelchis, son of Desiderius, on the downfall of the Lombard kingdom (774).[55] He was well received by the emperor, who bestowed upon him the high-sounding title of Patrician, thus making him, as far as rank in the empire went, at least the equal of his conqueror, Charles. We have seen how the combination of rebellious Italian dukes, independent princes, and Byzantine generals, which was formed to restore Adelchis to the Lombard throne, failed, owing to the death of Constantine V. (September 775), and how Hrodgaud of Friuli was left alone to bear and to sink under the vengeful might of the Frankish king.[56]
The Emperor Constantine V. was succeeded by his son Leo IV., surnamed the Khazar, his mother having been a princess of that barbarous Tartar tribe, who dwelt by the Sea of Azof and under the Caucasus. The strain of barbarian blood did not bring strength to the character of the young emperor. Leo IV., though an earnest image-breaker, was distinctly a weaker man than his father, and during his short reign the cause of Iconoclasm probably retrograded rather than advanced.
The five years during which Leo the Khazar was on the throne (775–780) were years during which Charles gave little attention to the affairs of Italy, having much to occupy him elsewhere, for these were the years of Roncesvalles and of the fresh outbreak of the Saxon revolt. His friend and clamorous dependant, however, Pope Hadrian, sent him frequent cries for help. “The Greeks hateful to God” (that is the generals and ministers of Leo the Khazar) were conspiring with the “most unutterable” Lombards of Benevento to seduce the towns in Campania from their allegiance to Charles and Hadrian. The island of Sicily, the one secure stronghold of the Byzantine power during all these centuries, was the focus of this strife, but in order to prosecute it more successfully the patrician of Sicily took up his headquarters at Gaeta, and from thence, in concert with the Duke of Naples, was pressing hard upon those Campanian and Latian cities which kept their loyalty to the pope. Moreover, when Hadrian wrote one of his most urgent letters, in 779, it was daily expected that “the son of the most unutterable and long ago absolutely unmentionable king Desiderius” would land in Italy with soldiers lent him by his Imperial ally and head the anti-Papal, anti-Frankish coalition.
Still, however, Adelchis lingered in Constantinople and once again a vacancy in the palace of the Cæsars saved Italy from a war. On the 8th of September 780, Leo the Khazar died and was succeeded by his son Constantine VI., a boy of nine years old, ruling not under the regency of, but jointly with, his mother Irene. This woman was a daughter of Athens and a secret worshipper of images, though in her father-in-law’s lifetime she had solemnly sworn always to adhere to the party of the Iconoclasts. Like Queen Athaliah of old, she was passionately fond of power, both for its own sake and as helping her to maintain the cause of idolatry against the religious reformers, and she was ready, in defence of her darling schemes of ambition, to violate not only the oath which she had given to her father-in-law—that was a light and pardonable offence—but the deepest and holiest instincts of a woman’s heart, the love of a mother for her only son.
For the first ten years of the joint reign (780–790) the lad, Constantine VI., quietly submitted to his mother’s ascendency, and only her will and her projects require the historian’s attention. The Iconoclastic spirit was strong among the soldiers of her late husband’s family, and she had to wait four years before she could openly take steps towards the restoration of the worship of images; but she seems at once to have ceased the attacks on Hadrian’s subject cities, and to have assumed a more friendly attitude towards Charles, who was not himself at this time interested in the Iconoclastic controversy, but whose friendship was important if the Patriarchate of Constantinople was to be reconciled with that of Rome. Thus it came to pass that in 781, during Charles’s second visit to Rome, there appeared in that city two high nobles of the Byzantine Court, the sacellarius Constans and the primicerius Mamalus, who brought proposals for a marriage between the young emperor and Charles’s daughter Hrotrud, whom the Greeks called Eruthro. It was only an alliance at some future day that was talked of, for the prospective bridegroom was but ten years old, and the Frankish princess was probably about eight. But the match was a splendid one, there having been no previous instance of a matrimonial alliance between the Roman Cæsars and the Frankish kings, and Charles gladly accepted the offer. A tutor named Elissæus was sent to the Frankish court to instruct the future empress in the Greek tongue, and there was peace in Italy between the Franks and the generals of the empire.
During these years of peace Irene was maturing her plans for the restoration of image-worship. In 784, Paul the Patriarch of Constantinople resigned his great office and became a monk, acknowledging to all the world that his conscience was troubled by the isolation of Constantinople from all the other Patriarchates on the ground of Iconoclasm. Nothing could have suited Irene’s plans better than this resignation. Her secretary Tarasius, though a layman, was made patriarch in the room of Paul, evidently on the understanding that images were to be restored. In August, 785, an imperial letter from Constantine and Irene was addressed to Pope Hadrian begging him to fix a time for the convocation of a general council at Constantinople to settle the question of Iconoclasm. The pope of course gladly consented, though he took advantage of the re-opened intercourse with Constantinople to demand the restoration of the “patrimonies” (probably in Sicily) which had been taken away from St. Peter’s see by the first Iconoclastic emperor: and though he also held up to the Byzantine rulers the admirable example of Charles, “King of the Franks and Lombards, and patrician of Rome, who had in all things obeyed the admonitions of the pope his spiritual father, had subdued to himself the barbarous nations of the west, and had given back to the church of St. Peter many estates, provinces, and towns, of which it had been despoiled by the faithless Lombards.”
The general council was opened at Constantinople in August, 786, but failed of its purpose. The Iconoclastic spirit was still too strong among the soldiers who were quartered in Constantinople, old comrades of Leo III. and his son. The church was invaded by them, and the image-worshipping bishops departed in fear. Next year, however, care having been taken to dispose of the Iconoclastic troops elsewhere, a general council was held at Nicæa (24th September to 23d October, 787), and there the cultus of images was re-established in full glory, only with one of those distinctions dear to theologians which defined “that it was right to salute and grovel in adoration before the holy images, but not to give them that peculiar worship which is due to God alone.”
Thus, then, the great cause of ecclesiastical contention was removed, and we might expect that the joyful event would be celebrated by the marriage of the young affianced pair, Constantine and Hrotrud, now aged sixteen and fourteen respectively. On the contrary, this was the very year in which, after mysterious embassies backwards and forwards between the two Courts, the marriage treaty was broken off and the relations became more openly hostile than ever; but curiously enough (as is not unfrequently the case in such affairs) there is a conflict of testimony as to which side had the credit or discredit of breaking off the match. The Frankish annalists say or hint that Charles refused his daughter to the young Emperor, who was much angered by the refusal. A Byzantine historian says that “Irene broke off the treaty with the Franks and sent the Captain of the Guard to fetch a damsel from Armenia named Mary whom she married to her son the Emperor Constantine, he being much grieved thereat, and not liking his bride because his inclination was towards the daughter of Charles, King of the Franks, to whom he had been precontracted.”
It is hopeless with our scanty materials to discover the reason of this mysterious rupture between the Courts. One of the most careful of the German writers who have treated of this period attributes it entirely to Charles’s invasion of Benevento and reduction of its prince Arichis to vassalage, which, as has been already related, occurred in the year 786. This, he considers, was a breach of the tacit agreement to maintain the Italian status quo ante entered into in 781, and was resented accordingly. Others have seen in it a stroke of policy on the part of Irene, who was already becoming jealous of her son’s share in the Imperial authority, and feared to see him provided with a too powerful father-in-law. If it be permitted to hazard yet another conjecture, where all is conjectural, I would point out that in the interval between 781 and 787, Hildegard, the mother of Hrotrud, had died, and Charles had married another wife, the haughty and unpopular Fastrada. Possibly that proud and jealous woman resented the idea of seeing her little step-daughter raised higher than herself by her exaltation to the throne of the Cæsars, and may have used her influence with her husband to entangle still further the already ravelled hank of the negotiations with Constantinople, and at last in disgust to break off the match altogether? The whole story is a remarkable illustration of the fact, so clearly shown in the negotiations for the Spanish marriage of Charles I. when Prince of Wales, that a marriage treaty, if not very carefully conducted, is quite as likely to embroil two sovereigns as to unite them.[57]
One curious, though not immediate, result of the rapidly increasing estrangement between Franks and Greeks was that in the great synod which Charles held at Frankfurt in 794 for the condemnation of the “Adoptian heresy,”[58] Charles induced his bishops to pass a severe condemnation of “the synod held a few years before under Irene and her son which called itself the Seventh Ecumenical Council, but which was neither the seventh nor ecumenical, but was rejected by all present at Frankfurt as absolutely superfluous.” At the same time it was declared by the assembled bishops that neither worship nor adoration was to be paid to the images of the saints. Thus was Charles, the great patron and defender of the papacy, actually brought into controversy with the pope on an important point of Christian practice.