The immediate effect of the rupture of the marriage treaty was seen in an invasion of Italy by the Greeks, in which at last the long lingering Adelchis took part. The intention was to make an attack on Charles’s dominions in combination with the Prince of Benevento (on whom the dignity of patrician was conferred) perhaps also with Tassilo the Bavarian; but before the Imperial troops landed in Italy, Arichis of Benevento was no more. He died on the 26th of August 787, a man still in the flower of his age. It is striking to observe how much Charles’s upward course to empire was facilitated by the opportune deaths of his competitors. Carloman, Constantine V., Leo IV., and now Arichis of Benevento, all died at the most seasonable time for the success of Charles’s projects. At the time of the death of Arichis, his son and heir Grimwald III. was in Charles’s keeping as a hostage. Pope Hadrian earnestly besought the king never to permit one of the God-hated dynasty to ascend the Beneventan throne, but Charles, after some delay, allowed Grimwald to return and take his place in the palace of Benevento. He was, however, compelled to promise to pay a yearly tribute of 7000 solidi, to coin money with Charles’s effigy, to date his charters by the years of the Frankish king, and in all things to acknowledge him as his over-lord. For the present these conditions were kept, and at the crisis of the Byzantine invasion Grimwald III. comported himself as a loyal vassal of Charles. So it came to pass that when at last the Byzantine troops landed in Calabria they were met by the united forces of the Frankish king under his general Winighis, and the Lombard dukes of Spoleto and Benevento. The defeat of the Greeks was crushing (788). Four thousand of their warriors were slain, among them the sacellarius John, commander of the expedition; and one thousand were taken prisoners. Adelchis appears to have made his escape. He reappeared no more on the soil of Italy, but died many years after, an elderly, probably a wealthy, patrician at Constantinople. This last scion of the Lombard kings is not an interesting figure in history.
Charles’s reply to this direct attack on his dominions in the south of Italy was to lay hands on the Imperial province of Istria in the north, a conquest desirable in itself, for the cities of Istria were numerous and wealthy, and also one that facilitated the operations which he was planning against the Avars. The Court of Constantinople, probably dispirited by the defeat of the great armament under the sacellarius John seems to have accepted the rebuff. For several years after this we hear nothing more of Greek expeditions to Italy, though there may have been intrigues with the young Prince of Benevento, who married a Greek wife named Wantia, a relative of the Emperor, and in various ways showed that he fretted under his galling vassalage to the Frankish king.
But in Constantinople itself during these years of truce with the West, strange and terrible events were happening. The young Emperor Constantine VI. found as he grew up to manhood that he was an absolute cipher in his empire and in his palace. All power was kept by Irene in her own hands, all orders went through her confidential minister the eunuch Stauracius. To these two all suppliants dressed their petitions. Constantine himself was treated as of no account to any man. Brooding over the daily slights which he had to endure, and resenting also, it is said, the manœuvre which had deprived him of his fair young Frankish bride, and tied him to the unloved and childless Armenian, he began in 790 to look around for partizans who would enable him to effect a revolution and become a real instead of a puppet emperor. The plan of the conspirators (among whom were two patricians and the great minister called magister officiorum), was to arrest the empress, send her off to banishment in Sicily, and proclaim Constantine sole emperor. The ever watchful Stauracius, however, obtained intelligence of the plot, arrested the conspirators, ordered some of them to be flogged, tonsured, and sent into the Sicilian exile which they had planned for Irene; the magister officiorum received some degrading punishment and was imprisoned in his own house; and lastly this same punishment of seclusion was inflicted on Constantine, after his mother had herself struck him and attacked him with an angry woman’s invective. Then a new and strange oath was administered to all the soldiers in the capital and its neighborhood. “So long as thou livest, O Empress! we will not suffer thy son to reign.” These events took place in the spring or summer of 791. In September of that year there came a change. The soldiers who were stationed in Armenia, when they were required to take the new oath, refused. “We will not put the name of Irene before that of Constantine,” said they, “but will swear obedience as of old to Constantine and Irene.” The disaffection spread; the regiments which had sworn the new oath to Irene forgot their vows and joined the soldiers from Armenia. By the end of October the revolution was complete. Irene was compelled by the clamor of the soldiers to liberate her son from confinement; she was deprived of all power, and Constantine was hailed as sole emperor. Stauracius was beaten, tonsured and sent into exile in Armenia. Aetius, another eunuch and confidant of Irene, was also banished, and a clean sweep was made of all the menial eunuch train, through whom apparently for ten years the empire had been governed.
But, unfortunately, the character of the young emperor, weakened by the subjection in which his mother had kept him, was utterly inadequate to the duties of his new position. With extraordinary folly, after a few months he drew Irene forth from the seclusion of her palace, and allowed the people to shout once more, “Long life to Constantine and Irene.” He went forth to war with the Bulgarians and was badly beaten. This humiliation of the imperial arms caused the soldiers in the city to plot for the elevation of Nicephorus, a half-brother of Leo IV. and uncle of Constantine VI. The young emperor arrested Nicephorus and ordered him to be blinded; and at the same time the tongues of four other of his uncles were cut out (792). These barbarous punishments, blinding and mutilation, were characteristic of the Constantinople of that day, but the resort to them on so large a scale proved the alarm as well as the cruelty of the young emperor, and must have helped to lose him the hearts of his subjects. His mother and Stauracius (who was now back again in the palace) were thought to have counselled these cruel deeds; and they certainly succeeded in embroiling him with his old supporters, the Armenian soldiers, whose revolts plunged the empire in civil war.
The climax of the emperor’s unpopularity seems to have been reached when (in January 795) he put away his Armenian wife, compelling her to enter a convent, and in September of the same year publicly celebrated his union with a lady of her bedchamber named Theodote. He had now lost the favor of the multitude, while his mother was ever at work forming a party among the officers by promises and bribes, suggesting that they should depose her son and proclaim her sole empress. On the 14th of June 797 Constantine went, after witnessing an equestrian performance in the circus, to worship in the church of St. Mamas in the environs of Constantinople. The conspirators, whose movements were directed by Stauracius, endeavored to seize him there, but he seems to have been warned, and escaped in the imperial boat to the Bithynian shore. Unhappily his mother’s friends and his own bitterest foes accompanied his flight. There was hesitation and delay, and there seemed a possibility that the soldiers would rally round him and his cause might yet triumph. The ruthless Irene sent a secret message to his adherents, “Unless in some way or other you effect his capture I will inform the emperor of all the plot which you and I have formed against him.” Fear made the conspirators bold; they seized the emperor while at his prayers, forced him to re-embark, and hurried him back across the Sea of Marmora to Constantinople. There, after the lapse of some weeks, in the Purple Chamber of the palace, they put out his eyes, purposely performing the cruel operation with such brutality as to endanger his life. It was, in fact, supposed by many that he was dead, but he appears to have lingered on through many revolutions, an obscure and forgotten sufferer, for more than twenty years after his mutilation.
The deed was done on Saturday the 15th of August 797, at the ninth hour of the day. On the same day of the week and at the same hour, five years before, had his uncle suffered the same punishment. Men observed the coincidence and traced a divine retribution therein. But with greater horror did they learn that the emperor had suffered this brutal punishment in the Purple Chamber which was always reserved for the birth of an emperor’s children. Here, in the very same room of the palace where he first saw the light, did he with the connivance, if not by the express command, of his mother lose the light of day and all that makes life worth living. “For seventeen days,” says the historian, himself an image-worshipper and adherent of Irene, “the sun was darkened and did not give forth his rays, so that vessels lost their course and drifted helplessly, and all men said and confessed that because of the blinding of the emperor the sun did not show his beams. Thus did Irene his mother obtain supreme power.”
The character of the Empress Irene receives unbounded praise from the writers of the image-worshipping party. She is for them “the most pious Irene,” “that strong-minded and God-guided woman, if, indeed, it be right to call her a woman, who was armed against all foes and all calamities with truly masculine temper.” “Irene, that strong-minded and God-beloved woman, if we ought to call ‘woman’ one who surpassed even man in her pious disposition, one through whom God mercifully expelled the crooked heresy which had crept snakelike into the Church and brought back orthodoxy.”
But neither these flatteries of the monkish image-worshippers, nor her outward show of magnificence when, on Easter Monday (799), the proud Athenian rode forth from the Church of the Apostles in a golden car drawn by four white horses, which were driven by four patricians, and showered money among the multitude after the fashion of the ancient Consuls of Rome, represented the real place of the empress in the hearts of her subjects. The rule of Irene meant, as every one knew, the rule and the bickerings of the eunuchs who advised her. Moreover, there was really no precedent for a woman sitting alone in the seat of empire. When Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II., was hailed as Augusta, it was on condition of her giving her hand to the soldier Marcian. Theodora and Sophia were Augustæ, but ruled only during the lifetime of their husbands. When Martina, widow of Heraclius, tried to pose as joint-ruler with her son and stepson (641), the multitude shouted an indignant denial of her claims. “How can you sit upon the throne and answer foreign envoys when they come to the royal city. God forbid that the polity of the Romans should come into such a plight as that.” It was a hundred and fifty-six years since the Byzantine populace had hurled these words at Martina and compelled her to descend from the throne, but we may be sure that the spirit which prompted them still dwelt in the hearts of the mass of the people who yet called themselves Romans. To be ruled by a woman, and such a woman, the despoiler and all but murderer of her own son, was felt to be an unendurable humiliation. The insecurity of Irene’s position was shown by the shortness of her reign, but that short reign of five years (797–802) was long enough to include, in a certain sense to necessitate, the great event which will be the subject of the following chapter.