Download PDF | Byzantium_ The Imperial Centuries AD 610-1071-Barnes & Noble, Inc (1966).
408 Pages
PREFACE
This book has been written, not for the scholar and specialist in Byzantinism, but for the student and general reader. It is designed to give the latter, by way of an introduction to the subject, a connected account of what actually went on in the East Roman, or ‘Byzantine’, Empire during the four and a half centuries between the accession of Heraclius and the Battle of Manzikert. Several good books exist in English which deal with this Empire on an analytical’ plan: that is to say, by sections devoted to separate aspects of its culture (political theory, administration, art, literature and so on), regardless of, or not primarily regarding, chronological sequence. I have here no wish to challenge comparison with these, or to add to their number.
The title chosen calls for a word of explanation. In the eyes of the Byzantines themselves the seventh to the eleventh centuries were no more or less ‘imperial’ than any other of the fourteen that elapsed between Augustus Caesar and Constantine x1. But, as we shall see, the modern historian divides the eleven centuries from the foundation of Constantinople in AD 324 to its fall in AD 1453 into three distinct epochs: the fourth to the seventh, the seventh to the eleventh, and the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. The first period was indeed ‘imperial’, but is better denominated ‘Late Roman’ than ‘Byzantine’. The third period as a whole can scarcely be called ‘imperial’, except by courtesy. To the second period alone can both terms be properly applied: and indeed an alternative title might well be “The Rise and Fall of the MiddleByzantine Empire’.
In a work of this nature, documentation poses some problems. The beginner does not wish to be choked by a mass of primary and secondary sources. On the other hand, if he wishes to pursue the subject, he must be given the opportunity of doing so. On the whole, it has seemed best to limit the primary sources to half a a dozen chief historical texts that cover the period; and the secondary to half a dozen of the best modern histories. These secondary sources have been chosen, not merely because they are good in a a but also because they are themselves fully ented.
Texts and editions are given in the accompanying Bibliographical Note; but a word on the modern works there cited will not be amiss. First and foremost stands the classic Geschichte des byzantinischen Staates of Georg Ostrogorsky, now in its third German edition. There are two English-language editions of it, but these are less up to date. This work, one of the greatest achievements of all time in this field, is distinguished by sound judgement, minute accuracy, masterly arrangement and compression, and a wealth of reference to every important source, both primary and secondary.
The Vie et mort de Byzance of Louis Bréhier gives a detailed and well-written narrative of very great value, and, here too, the judgement is admirable; but it is not quite so well articulated, and more difficult to use owing to a complicated and perverse system of references. A.A. Vasiliev’s History of the Byzantine Empire has been deservedly popular, and cites in translation many opinions of Russian historians whose works the general reader has no occasion to study. The two works of J.B. Bury, though both of them more than fifty years old, are still indispensable sources for the period AD 610-867, and are a monument to the industry and skill of the greatest of English Byzantinists. Finally, the forthcoming re-edition of Cambridge Medieval History, volume 1, is certain to be of immense value, and cannot be omitted from even so short a list as this.
Admirable as these works, and very many others, are, they are not books for beginners: and that is my excuse for trying to supply one.
I wish to acknowledge my gratitude to the Cambridge University Press for allowing me to reproduce Chapter 23 substantially as it appears in Cambridge Medieval History volume Iv (new edition, 1966); and also to Mrs Fanny Bonajuto for most valuable help in preparing this book for the press.
THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Let me begin with a quotation: Of the Byzantine Empire the universal verdict of history is that it constitutes, with scarcely an exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilisation has yet assumed. . . . There has been no other enduring civilisation so absolutely destitute of all the forms and elements of greatness, and none to which the epithet mean may so emphatically be applied. The Byzantine Empire was pre-eminently the age of eachery.
Its vices were the vices of men who had ceased to be brave without learning to be virtuous. Without patriotism, without the fruition or desire of liberty, after the first paroxysms of religious agitation, without genius or intellectual activity; slaves, and willing slaves, in both their actions and their thoughts, immersed in sensuality and in the most frivolous pleasures, the people only emerged from their listlessness when some theological subtilty, or some rivalry in the chariot races, stimulated them into frantic riots. They exhibited all the externals of advanced civilisation.
They possessed knowledge; they had continually before them the noble literature of ancient Greece, instinct with the loftiest heroism; but that literature, which afterwards did so much to revivify Europe, could fire the degenerate Greeks with no spark or semblance of nobility. The history of the Empire is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisoning, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual atricides. ... At last the Mohammedan invasion terminated the long decrepitude of the Eastern Empire. Constantinople sank beneath the Crescent, its inhabitants wrangling about theological differences to the very moment of their fall.
This passage from Lecky’s History of European Morals, written in 1869, is interesting from several points of view, but principally from two. It is dictated, first by ignorance, and second by prejudice. As for the matter, it is, “with scarcely an exception’, a tissue of mis-statements, half-truths and downright absurdities which an historian — let alone a great and learned historian — should have been ashamed to write. This is the fruit of ignorance, and it may serve as a warning to even the most gifted of us not to write about what we do not understand. But the prejudice is equally illuminating and important.
The language is such as a western Crusader of the twelfth century might have held, and often in fact did hold, about Byzantium. It is the outcome of that deplorable strife between Eastern and Western Christendom which begat in the West a long-enduring hatred of Byzantium, still plainly discernible in the pages of the historians Gibbon and Voltaire, and of the novelists Walter Scott and George Eliot. There was, assuredly, much in the East which the West could look upon with justifiable abhorrence. But Byzantium, monopolist as she was, had no monopoly in vice; and the vices of the medieval West, though different, seem on an impartial survey no less odious and contemptible.
One misapprehension common in the West during the eighteenth ad nineteenth centuries (we find it in Lecky's diatribe) was the notion that, because the official language of the Byzantine Empire was a form of Greek, this implied that those who spoke it were in some way lineally connected with Classical Hellas, and must therefore be regarded as degenerate offspring from a noble ancestry. This notion the true Byzantine would have rejected with scorn, and very rightly. The Roman Empire, which he claimed to perpetuate, was multiracial, as all empires must necessarily be.
The only elements which it had in common with Classical Hellas (whose people were long defunct) were a bastard and artificial version of the classical Attic dialect as the tongue of administration and literature, and the writings of Greek antiquity, on parts of which its secular education was based. It was not until the collapse of the ‘universal’ empire of East Rome was seen to be imminent, in and after the time of the Emperor Michael vim (died 1282), that the Byzantines, or rather a few of their antiquaries, put out the utterly erroneous theory that they were descended from the Hellenes, and exchanged the imperial heritage of Rome for the cultural heritage of Ancient Greece.
Let us try to get rid of this notion of ‘decline’ and review some centuries of Byzantine history, during which the state, far from being in decline, was in a process of rapid improvement and a career of striking magnificence and glory. Let us review the aims and the achievements of the Christian Romans of the Bosphorus, without any but theoretical reference to Augustus or Trajan, and without any reference at all to Pericles or Leonidas. Let us try to put these into the focus of historical perspective ; and draw our own conclusions.
Our theme is the internal and external history of what is nowadays called the ‘Middle’ Byzantine Empire during four centuries and a half: from the accession of the Emperor Heraclius in 610 to the defeat of the Emperor Romanus rv at Manzikert in 1071. In justifying our choice of this temporal period, we might well be content to rest on the now classic definition of Georg Ostrogorsky. He writes :
The years of anarchy under Phocas [Heraclius’ predecessor, 602-10] mark the last phase in the history of the late Roman Empire. The late Roman, or early Byzantine, period came to an end. Byzantium was to emerge from the crisis in an essentially different form, freed from the heritage of decadent political life, and fortified by new and vigorous sources of strength. Here [in AD 610] Byzantine history properly speaking begins, the history of the medieval Greek empire.
id might leave it at that. Yet, as ts know, history is pear se rather fragmentary ; and what a at first sight to be its most decisive beaks wil on more snaeaie connideesaen be found to exemplify the dictum of “plus ¢a change’. As in the development of species, so in the development of ideas or moulds of thought, sudden and radical change is unknown. We are not without a specimen of this truth in our own day. At first sight, oe could, and did, appear more revolutionary than the triumph of a form of Marxism over Tsarism, and the transmogrification of Holy Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The bad old world, it was passionately asserted, had been swept away ; mankind was setting out on a wholly new track. However, forty years’ experience of the USSR suggest that, both in theory and practice, the changes are far less ork than the continuity, and that the sudden and violent imposition of a newcreed is powerless to modify, in any material respect, national instincts and policies whose growth has been the work of centuries.
The modern Russian state, in its rejection of personal freedom, in its spiritual pride, in its monopoly of orthodoxy (that is, ‘right belief”), in the restless and encroaching spirit of its imperialism and expansion, in its unalterable conviction of a pre-ordained world-domination, merely carries on the tradition of Tsarist days, and is utterly unlike any polity dreamt of in the gloomy philosophy of Marx or Engels. Orthodox Christianity has become ‘Socialism’: and the Will of Almighty God is now denominated “Historical Net But behind this re-titled fagade the age-old structure is essentially the same, save for some restorations which make it stronger and more durable than ever. Its new, universal religion has abolished the strife between orthodox and catholic. It will not surprise the thoughtful observer that this structure is, very recognizably, the Byzantine Palace of the Third Rome.
With respect to the new or renovated structure of the Emperor Heraclius, we have to be even more careful to subject each of its phenomena to a comparative scrutiny, and to estimate the freshness of its leaven: in as much as, in the eyes of the medieval Byzantine, the continuity of the empire was far more important than its innovations, which he regarded as superficial and incidental. The strongest and most universally held tenet in the Byzantine thought-world was a conviction of Rome’s divinely sanctioned claim to universal empire, and the divinely ordained decree that in God’s good time this empire must be achieved. The change of creed from paganism to Christianity, initiated by Constantine I (died 337) and consummated by Theodosius 1 (died 395), had served merely to corroborate the fundamental postulate. The command to rule and the gift of supremacy came long before, from Jupiter. In the mystical accents of the poet, the imperium sine fine ~ empire without limit in space or time — was accorded to the Eternal City : and the fiat was enunciated in lines which none of us can afford to forget or ignore :
Others may softlier mould the breathing brass,
Or from the marble coax the living face;
Others more eloquently plead than thou,
Or trace the heavenly hie name the stars. Thine, Roman, be the empire over man!
Be these thy arts! Impose the law of peace,
Sparing the meek, and trampling down the proud!
These words of Virgil, in their thunderous expression of the might, the duty and, above all, the divine sanction of Rome to rule over the less fortunate races of mankind, breathe the very spirit of the great conquerors and governors, of Sulla and Pompey, of Pilate and Gallo. Did it greatly matter whether the sanction was that of Jove or Jesus ?
However, the reign of Constantine the Great (324-37) was marked by two reforms, each of which was of lasting importance. First, the religion of Christ was grafted, with startling ingenuity but not everywhere with absolute harmony, on to the existing imperial idea. Second, the centre of imperial government was transferred from Rome to the Bosphorus. The modifications entailed by the first of these reforms were, politically speaking, more spectacular than fundamental. The old dogma of the unity of the world beneath the elect of Jupiter, a dogma universally accepted by the Mediterranean world and its peripheries, was, for practical purposes, modified by the simple substitution of Jesus for Jove. The younger, more mystical eben’ | replaced the older and more effete, with an increase in imperial authority and prestige. Almighty God, it was now stated, at the very time when Augustus was unifying the temporal empire and giving it the inestimable benefit of universal peace, had sent on earth his Divine Counterpart, Jesus Christ, who was also the Prince of Peace.
The Pax Romana was reinforced by the Pax Dei. The unity of the Roman Empire was the reflection of the celestial unity, over which the One True God governed in perfect law and order, backed by a heavenly hier and a standing army of invincible strength. It was God’s Will, as His Son had explicitly stated, that the world should be similarly governed. Anyone who disagreed with this was God’s enemy as well as Rome’s. Anyone who refused to submit to the Roman sceptre was automatically a rebel, a disturber of God’s Peace, in short, a warmonger, to be dealt with righteously as God has dealt with Lucifer-Satan. God’s minister for the unification and pacification of this world was the Roman emperor, whom He himself elected and crowned, with the concurrence of the old Roman estates of senate, army and people, and the newer, though not indispensable, sanction of the Christian Church.
Hitherto the emperors, following Hellenistic tradition, had themselves been deified, and in this single particular their newer status as Christian rulers was Sinanished: But, in practice, their position as the elect and representative of the One True God was more authoritative than their automatic membership of a rather disreputable Hellenistic pantheon. Such, then, was the conception of the Roman’s destiny and place in the universe which endured until 1453, and, in its essence, long afterwards. The harnessing to imperial destinies, both in Ancient Rome and in Modern Russia, of the two religions of humility, created in each case an entity which the founders of those religions would have contemplated with — a ent and consternation. So oe
An € we may note in passing that this dogma of divinely prescribed unity is one which differentiates the mind of Classical Greece in its heyday from the mind of late antiquity and the middle ages. Plurality was acceptable, and indeed fundamental, to the thought-world of the Ancient Greeks. Their divinities and their communities were legion. Much of their intellectual activity was devoted to differentiation and definition. It was the opinion of the philosopher Heracleitus that life itself consisted in the tension of opposite forces. This tendency is certainly reflected in the political configuration of Hellas, with its multifarious states at war, or at all events at rivalry, with one another.
However, as one of the most brilliant of the early Greek philosophers very justly observed, tendencies towards plurality and towards unity run in temporal cycles. And even by the time of Plato and Isocrates (fourth century Bc), the opposite motion was setting in. According to the former thinker, who detested democracy and idolised absolute power in a carefully organised and graduated society, the plurality of the world of sense is illusory : it serves merely to elevate a properly adjusted mind to a hierarchy of supersensible forms, themselves subordinate to a single monarchical principle, the ‘Good’, which dominates the world of being as the sun dominates the sensible firmament. This doctrine, as developed by the Neo-Platonists, reached its logical conclusion in the belief that unity is morally good and plurality intrinsically evil: which is merely another way of saying that orthodoxy is good and heresy bad. It can easily be seen that this dogma, or, better, this way of thinking, became the strongest prop of universal empire in the minds of late Roman and medieval man.
The very notion that one single empire of all the world with one single pruiodeny is the best and ultimate constitution because it imitates the supersensible constitution of Heaven is more Platonic than Christian ; although of course the Lord’s Prayer could very easily be made to square with it. And the Empire of Rome was the only possible candidate for the position in the world of sense. But now, as regards the second reform of Constantine the Great, the transfer of the administrative centre from the Tiber to the Bosphorus : this was an eminently judicious step, alike from litical economic and — as it proved — ecclesiastical as . If it Pod not been taken in time, it seems very doubtful whether the empire could have survived the Dark Ages; and it would certainly not have known the centuries of increasing stability, riches and glory which it experienced in the Middle-Byzantine era. But the transfer had one other important consequence. It brought the centre of imperial administration and society into the area of Greek speech. Greek, in its various forms, as the medium of education, religion, commerce and everyday communication, had won so firm a grasp over the coasts and cities of the Near East during the long rule of the successors of Alexander, that its predominance in those parts, though twice challenged, was never seriously threatened by the Latin ; and in the seventh century, the Latin, as the language of administration, was officially abandoned. Asia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, though never by any means monolingual, remained in the sphere of Greek speech.
This meant that the education and cultural tradition of the empire of New Rome were exclusively Hellenistic: and the enormous pride which was felt by the Byzantine in his possession of this splendid, if very fepereaty understood, cultural inheritance increased his sense of his divinely ordained superiority over the rest of the world. The linguistic division was at last fatal to the unity of the old Roman Empire: perhaps more fatal than any differences of belief or character. After the seventh century Catholic West and Orthodox East literally could not understand one another : and ignorance bred, on both sides, arrogance and contempt. The doctrinal differences which divided, and still divide, Catholic from Orthodox Christians appear, to an impartial observer, trivial and even infinitesimal by comparison with the great body of Christian belief which has never been questioned by either. It is certainly arguable that if all Mediterranean countries had been latinised in speech by Rome, as Italy, Gaul and Spain were latinised, a common tongue would have preserved a com-mon faith, and even a unified empire. This could not be.
The decisive factors in the disintegration of the Mediterranean, or ‘universal’, empire of Rome, which led to the formation of the truly Byzantine state, a compact and solid rump of the old dominion, in the seventh century, were the invasions of Germans, Slavs, Huns and Arabs or Saracens, the scope and direction of which we must consider in some detail. Not only the losses of territory, but also the fundamental administrative reforms of the century, are directly attributable to this cause. It is certainly true that, by the time of Justinian 1 ($27-65), the process of barbarisa~ tion had during some centuries continuous. Spain and North Africa were already occupied by Visigoths and Vandals. The Salian Franks were masters of North Gaul.
Much of Italy was governed by the Ostrogoths. The eastern part of the empire itself had absorbed a large Gothic element, which had intruded into the fabric of society and the machinery of government. But this earlier, Germanic, inundation differed in principle from the later inundations of Lombards, Slavs, Bulgars and Saracens.
The Gothic rulers of Italy, and the Frankish rulers of Gaul, were content, at least in name, to form parts of the old empire, and to derive their titles, if not their policies, from Constantinople. The empire itself in the sixth century was still strong enough to envisage the reconquest of Spain and north-west Africa. But the Lombards, Slavs and Saracens never integrated themselves into the old imperial scheme. The Saracens had their own religion and fotmed their own empire. The Lombards were conquered, not by the Roman, but by the Frankish empire. The Balkan Slavs, except those of Hellas, remained generally speaking outside imperial control. Nothing of this, of course, disturbed the faith in Roman unity and universalism ; but faith and fact now began markedly to diverge, and were to remain divergent.
The last forcible attempt of the empire at a reassertion of its control over the dominions of Augustus was made by Justinian 1 who has consequently been called, by Francis Bacon among others, ‘the last of the Romans’. This title does violence to the Byzantine concept of the continuity of the Roman imperial tradition dicouphiout the middle ages, though it is true that Justinian, in contrast with his successors, spoke Latin and shaved his chin. During a very brief period of bis long reign he was master of Rome and Italy, of all North Africa, and a corner of Spain ; but this brief restoration of Roman authority, which sur-vived him by three years only, was a meagre return for the fearful ruin and loss brought about by his profuse expenditure of money and men. It was in 533 that he indestook to recover the western half of his empire from a century-old German occupation. In each theatre of operation — Africa, Italy, Dalmatia — initial success was followed by years, or decades, of tough warfare, which even the genius of his generals Belisarius and Narses could not curtail. After twenty years the end seemed to be in sight. Gelimer, Vitiges and Totila were taken or slain. Africa and the Danubian frontier were held down by costly and (as it proved) useless fortifications. But by this time both men and money were exhausted.
The large treasure amassed by the Emperor Anastasius (died 518) had long been dissipated ; and plans for fresh taxation of trade and agriculture were stultified by malversation or sheer inability to pay. Some at least of the discontent sown in the once prosperous provinces of the east, which showed itself in the increasing intransigence of the so-called ‘monophysite’ heresy, is attributable to economic rather than to doctring| causes ; though we should certainly err in regarding the latter as mere symptoms of dissatisfaction. More serious still was the catastrophic decline in manpower. The numbers of men sacrificed in Justinian’s wars must be told in millions. To make matters worse, in 542 the bubonic plague broke out with unexampled severity. The historian tells us that at its height the mortality in Constantinople alone reached ten thousand a day. The bearing of such wars, and of such a pestilence, as these on the fate of the empire during the next century must be appreciated. Repopulation was the condition of survival.
The last years of Justinian’s reign were indeed not troubled by military wars. But internal religious dissensions were never at rest. Justinian’s designs in the west had at first compelied him to champion the orthodoxy of Chalcedon against that large section of his eastern subjects who claimed that the Saviour had had but one Single Nature, that is, the ‘monophysites’. Later, circumstances forced him to shift his ground; and he at length found himself committed to a position which scarcely differed from that of the outermost and most mystical fringe se monophysitism itself. Nothing would serve. He had piped unto them and they would not dance. Justinian had restored the empire of the Mediterranean. He had brought order to the civil code. He had built St Sophia’s cathedral, the ‘eye of the universe’. But he was powerless to impose on men the views which they should adopt as touching the nature of the Divine Incarnation. This absolutely irreconcilable conflict, in an empire of which religious unity was a fundamental postulate, was ominous of political disruption. Three whole centuries were to pass before the problem, in one form or another, could be settled, and the religious unity essential for stability be achieved.
Justinian achieved much. Yet the structure at his death resembled a vacuum. He had recreated a system which there were no longer the men or the money or the general and popular will to sustain. It was subjected to multifarious external pressures, any one of which was powerful enough to pierce the shell, and shatter the globe into fragments. This dangerous situation was abundantly clear to his contemporaries, and their gloomy pessimism over the future was a sad return for so much effort ne pepe that had seemingly been achieved. The historian John of Ephesus thought that the end of the world was nigh : and so, in one sense, it was.?
Italy was the first, though not the most important, part of Justinian’s empire to disappear. It was, when the emperor died in $65, already both disaffected and indefensible. The tyranny and extortion of the Byzantine Governor-General Narses were already arousing the loud-voiced protests of those who felt the Byzantine finger thicker than the loins of the alien and herétical Ostrogoths. The Germanic occupation soon returned. In 567 the Lombards, a gifted but primitive tribe then settled in Pannonia, reached an agreement with the Hunnic people of the Avars, who had pushed westwards across Thrace and into the lands of the upper Danube, in search of habitation. The Lombard Alboin ana the Avar Khan Baian agreed jointly to extirpate the tribe of the Germanic Gepids who lived in Dacia, on the left bank of the Danube. The Avars were to settle on the Danube. The Lombards, taking one half of the spoils, were to invade Italy. Both plans were carried out, with lasting effects. The Avar kingdom was for a century the source of widespread devastation south of the Danube. And the Lombard invasion of Italy, which began in 568, changed the mee and to a considerable extent the population of that peninsula.
It is significant of the exhaustion and unpopularity of the restored Roman régime in Italy that the Lombard advance met with little or no opposition. The invasion was gradual rather than sudden ; and was in fact not properly consummated until the eighth century. But it was inexorable. The Roman power was contracted into the peripheral regions of Venice, Ravenna and Calabria-cum-Sicily. The Lombards took Milan and Pavia, and, further south, set up the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. The invasion was in the long run decisive for the fate of Old Rome also, where the papacy, no longer under the direct and continuous political control of Constantinople, developed its independence and at last its distinctively western orientation. The Spanish Visigoths soon recovered the small but important territories seized by Justinian, and remained masters of the country until the Saracen conquest of the eighth century.3
It was during the same sixth century and in the beginning of the next that an even more momentous immigration of foreign races engulfed the ancient homeland of the Hellenes. The factual truth of this very simple event was long obscured, partly by the paucity of direct evidence (which, however, scanty as it may be, is unanimous), but even more owing to a very absurd and frustrating controversy aroused during the nineteenth century by the publication of the facts. During the War of Greek Independence (1821-7) the cause of the insurgents had prevailed owing to the support given them by the Great Powers of Europe ; and this tae had been accorded in decisive measure because of the delusion then prevalent in the West, that the contemporary inhabitants of old Hellas were the racial descendants of Homer and Sophocles and Plato. When, shortly after the war ended, it was pointed out that this could not be so, the popular revulsion, both in Greece and Europe, against this unpleasant truth completely befogged the issue; and even scholarship itself, which should be exempt from passion and prejudice, was drawn into the maelstrom of recrimination and error.
Gradually the mud began to settle, though resentment at any suggestion that new Hellenes were not old Hellenes writ large was still fierce in Greece at the end of the nineteenth century, when the learned Gelzer could write: “For this reason, all attempts to convert the honest NeoHellenes to a recognition of historical truth is literally labour in vain. However, this need not stop us from expounding it’. We live in an age when, as at Byzantium, religious and political controversies have once more taken the place of seal: and this at least has the advantage that racial origins need no longer be discussed amid a babel of abuse and objurgation.
The invaders of Italy were Lombards. The invaders of the Balkan Peninsula were Hunnic Avars, whose strength lay in the uncountable hordes of Slavs which now make their impact on Mediterranean history. The Slavs were an eminently hardy, but peace-loving, unambitious and industrious people. Their tribes were reluctant to combine, and they seldom acted in unison except under foreign leadership such as that of the Avar and the Bulgarian. They were not town-dwellers; yet it would be very erroneous to class them as nomads, like the Turkic tribes of the Steppe. They had developed agriculture to a high degree of efficiency. They were bee-keepers on a large scale.
They were skilful huntsmen and fishermen. They were, as the Byzantine emperors soon found, well qualified to be immigrants into waste or underdeveloped territories ; and it is to their industry and agricultural skill that much of the recovery in the Byzantine rural economy in and after the seventh century must in fairness be attributed. The contention of a recent historian has much to be said for it: namely, that if the Slavs had been permitted to infiltrate peaceably into the waste lands of the Balkans, they would have been welcomed there by the Byzantine government as they were welcomed into Asia Minor. But the savagery of the Avars under whose leadership the Slav tribes pressed southwards made this impossible ; and it is to the Avar element in the Avaro-Slav invasion that we must probably attribute that merciless extermination of the remnants of rural life recorded by contemporary historians.
During the 570s to 90s the Roman forces of the Emperors Tiberius and Maurice, with the slenderest resources but with indomitable perseverance and courage, were fighting desperately to contain the Avars beyond the frontier and to defend the key fortresses of Sirmium on the Save and Singidunum on the Danube. But this could not last. Both fortresses succumbed, and the way was open for the barbarian invasion of Dalmatia, which Byzantine records state to have been either Avaric or Slavonic: in fact it was both. The eastern half of the peninsula was scarcely ee except from behind the walls of a few impregnable Fortresses.
A particularly vicious raid on Mainland Greece in about 587 destroyed most of what was left of Athens and Corinth outside their acropoleis. The invaders poured into Peloponnesus and b 623 were raiding from it as far south as Crete. The natives, s as they were, sought refuge under the walls of Monemvasia, but up to those walls the inundation rolled. During a period variously estimated at between 50 and 200 years Byzantine control of Greece was non-existent. In Peloponnesus there was not even a framework of Roman administration. In Mainland Greece only the garrison forts held out. The rest was ‘sclavinica terra’.4
Italy, Dalmatia and Old Hellas were divided from the empire by the year 615, which Isidore of Seville marks as the final step in the Slavonic conquest of Greece. This in itself was a revolutionary break with the past, and the inauguration of a new epoch. But it was a mere beginning to the changes which the Eastern Empire was shortly to undergo. I do not here wish to describe the Arab conquests at length, since they began only in the latter years of Heraclius’ reign and were consummated during the next half century. Suffice it to say that in a few decades, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus, Egypt and North Africa fell to the Saracens. Armenia was overrun ; and shortly afterwards first Crete and then Sicily were occupied. The Aegean islands were devastated afresh, and the very coasts of Asia Minor fearfully harassed. The youthful and growing might of the Bulgars was fixed permanently to north and south 3 the Balkan mountains. And de nightmare of John of Ephesus, that the end of the world was nigh, was realised in an age most justly denominated ‘dark’. It seemed that the great heritage and tradition of the Graeco-Roman world, and even the Christian culture of the later Empire, might be extinguished. The miracle lay not in the collapse of the Roman Empire but in its survival and ultimate recovery as the dominant power of the Near East. With the loss of Syria and Egypt, trade and economy were disrupted, for the one had been the great manufactory, the other for centuries the granary, of the Eastern Empire.
What was left The kernel of the empire, Asia Minor, with its capital across the Bosphorus, was what remained as the raw material of recovery. So long as these survived, there was a hope, if only a slender one. But at least two emperors of the seventh century thought of abandoning the city of Constantine and establishing an imperial capital in Carthage or Sicily. Nor should we blame their faintheartedness, but rather applaud their apparent good sense.
What measures, military, economic, demographic and administrative ultimately stemmed and turned back the tides we must try to summarise below. But, to answer the question posed at the beginning, the empire of the House of Heraclius, though unchanged in theory, was radically different from that of Justinian in the practical respects of territory, population and administration. And the survival, though in a very different form, of the culture of the successors of Alexander and of the Rome of Augustus must be attributed primarily to the new settlers in the Eastern Empire: to the genius and valour of Hellenised Armenians aut the industry and adaptability of Hellenised Slavs.
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