Chapter I: The History of the City in ancient and mediæval times (2)

Thus Theodora proved herself fit mate for a Cæsar, and worthy of her crown; and those who had counselled flight now found courage to resist. While Justinian's men planned an attack, the followers of Hypatius agreed upon delay, and he himself sent, it would seem, to make peace with the Emperor. As his messenger went, he was told that the Cæsar had fled, and then the unhappy pretender took upon him the dignity of Emperor. In a few hours Belisarius led his troops upon the multitude assembled in the Hippodrome, and before nightfall they forced their way in with fire and sword, and of all the citizens gathered in the Circus not one left it alive. Justinian was not told till too late that Hypatius had been willing to submit. The two brothers were dragged out with contumely, and the next morning before daylight they fell under the swords of the barbarian soldiers. The Emperor, it is said, would have spared them, but Theodora, "swearing by God and by him, urged him to have them killed." Zachariah of Mitylene says that more than 80,000 persons perished in the riot.

At midday on Monday, January 19, Constantinople was at peace; but it was in ruins. Three distinct conflagrations had reduced the grandest monuments of the city of Constantine to ashes. On the first two days of the riot all the buildings of the Augusteum were destroyed, and with them S. Sophia, the "Great Church," only its baptistery, it would seem, being saved. Two days later the buildings north-west of S. Sophia were in flames, and among them the Hospice for poor and sick folk, "founded in ancient times by a holy man whose name was Samson," and Constantine's Church of S. Irene. On the 17th the buildings round the Mesê, the street which connected the forum of Constantine with the Augusteum, and the "great porticoes leading up to the agora named from Constantine, and many houses of rich men, and large property, were burned." Thus, a great part of what had been the first Byzantium, which was adorned with the finest buildings of Constantine, was utterly destroyed. To one who saw the blackened ruins, they seemed like the masses of molten lava round the crater of a volcano. To Justinian, already a great law-giver, came the task of building anew the imperial city.

The Emperor began at once with the rebuilding of the Great Church of the Divine Wisdom. On the 23rd of February the work was begun: on December 26, 537, the new church was dedicated. "The procession," says Theophanes, who wrote from older materials in the eighth century, "started from the church of the Anastasia," where S. Gregory of Nazianzus had long preached to the men of Byzantium, "Menas, the patriarch, sitting in the royal chariot, and the King walking with the people." In 558 the eastern part of the dome with the apse was destroyed by an earthquake and was rebuilt. Agathias, a contemporary historian, thus describes the building and the restoration:

"Now the former church having been burnt by the angry mob, Justinian built it up again from the foundations, as great, and more beautiful and wonderful, and this most beautiful design was adorned with much precious metal. He built it in a round form, with burnt brick and lime. It was bound together here and there with iron; but they avoided the use of wood, so that it should no more be easily burnt. Now Anthemius was the man who devised and worked at every part. And when by the earthquake the middle part of the roof and the higher parts had been destroyed, the Emperor made it stronger, and raised it to a great height. Anthemius was then dead, but the young man Isidorus and the other craftsmen, turning over in their minds the earlier design, and comparing what had fallen with what remained, estimated where the error lay, and of what kind it was. They determined to leave the eastern and western arches as they were. But of the northern and southern they brought towards the inside that portion of the building which was upon the curve. And they made these arches wider, so as to be more in harmony with the others, thus making the equilateral symmetry more perfect. In this way they were able to cover the measurelessness of the empty space, and to take off some of its extent to form an oblong design. And again, they wrought that which rose up above it in the middle, whether cycle or hemisphere or whatever other name it may be called. And this also became more straightforward and of a better curve, in every part agreeing with the line; and at the same time not so wide but higher, so that it did not affright the spectators as before, but was set much more strong and safe."

A more minute account of the work must be reserved till we pass from history to description. Here we have only to summarise and characterise the work of the great architects whom Justinian employed to rebuild his city. The opportunity was a great one. Constantinople was now the centre of the civilised world. Thither came in the sixth century a crowd as motley as those gathered together on the day of Pentecost, or as may be seen now on the bridge of Galata. Men of Mesopotamia and Syria, Persians, Greeks from the islands and the Peloponnese, men of Sicily and Africa, Alexandrines and Palestinian Jews, met with the Roman and with the barbarian subjects of the now again undivided empire.

Of this vast gathering of the nations Byzantine art was the result and the reflexion. But adaptive as it was of every influence that came before the eyes of its great masters, it was, above all, like the city where it reached its highest glory, pre-eminently religious and Christian. The new style has been called "historical-dogmatic," and indeed it combined in a marvellous manner the traditions of different races under the uniting power of the Catholic faith.

The genius which gave to the Byzantine architecture its completed glory was that of Anthemius of Tralles, of whose skill contemporary writers write in enthusiastic applause. His works, says Agathias, "even if nothing were said about them, would suffice of themselves to win for him an everlasting glory in the memory of man as long as they stand and endure."

The characteristics of the art of Anthemius at its highest development may be seen to-day in Constantinople. There are few churches earlier than his time still standing. Among these may be the semi-basilican S. Thekla and S. Theodore of Tyrone, and certainly are S. John of the Studium and S. Irene. The last was rebuilt by Justinian immediately after the Nika insurrection in 532, but it belongs to the earlier style. Similar to it was the church of S. Peter and S. Paul, now destroyed, but of which some beautiful marble capitals lie in the sea close to the palace of Hormisdas. Later came the still standing church of S. Sergius and S. Bacchus, called by the people "little S. Sophia," built about 527 by Justinian himself. This prepares the way for almost every feature which appears developed and completed in the great S. Sophia itself. The two most striking characteristics of the new style are the impost capital and the merging of subsidiary spaces in one central building.

The impost capital is probably first seen in the great cistern, also of Justinian's day. I may here repeat what I have said elsewhere.[7]

"Strygowski[8] regards this impost-capital as the work of the builder of the great cistern, who he thinks may have been Anthemius, here proving his fitness for the great work of S. Sophia. It was, he shows, an architectural revolution. The capital, with undercut volutes, was suitable for a straight architrave, but not for the arch. Hence a piece was inserted to transfer the weight from the angles to the centre. The Theodosian age used an inserted impost. The constructive activity of the age of Justinian produced the impost-capital.

As to design, the capitals lying neglected about the city, together with those _in situ_ in the churches and cisterns, furnish a perfect museum of the types with which others, dispersed over the whole area of the empire, agree in the minutest particulars of design and workmanship. The acanthus leaves, so familiar through all the work of the centuries--from the Golden Gate (388) onward, and the portico to S. John of the Studium a century later--assume the beautiful "windblown" design in the ruins near the "Rose Mosque."[9]

The second feature is the arrangement which unites the longitudinal with the central building and makes the whole effect of the interior of one piece by relating every piece of work, pillar, arch, semi-dome, to the one vast central dome which crowns the whole. From without, but more clearly from within, the architecture of S. Sophia is seen to form one entire and perfect whole. It is impossible to conceive it deprived of a single feature without the sacrifice of the whole. To mutilate would be to destroy.

Seen then in its grandeur at S. Sophia the work of Justinian changed the appearance of the whole city. Procopius in his _Aedifices_ records what was when he wrote in 558, a complete list of what had been built in the reign. Everywhere there were arising, as though by an enchanter's wand, palaces, churches, baths, aqueducts, great cisterns supported on exquisitely carved columns, new markets, houses for the great nobles, barracks, hospitals, convents. The splendour and beauty of the new city, its richness of decoration, marbles, statuary, mosaics, struck all beholders with amaze. The chroniclers, who in other times would have been satisfied to tell of military successes and court intrigues, now tell of measurements and designs, and collect lists of gems and splendours of decoration. The reign of Justinian, in spite of many foreign dangers, and oppression at home, is the most magnificent period of early Byzantine history; and the magnificence seemed to be expressed in the buildings of Constantinople.

When Procopius in his _Ædifices_ has told of the glories of S. Sophia, he goes on to speak of the Augusteum and its statues. Chiefest among them, one of Justinian himself as Achilles. Then S. Irene, then the churches of the Blessed Virgin at the Blachernae and at Balukli beyond the triumphal way. Church after church follows in his tale, and chief among them those which the mariner sees as he sails up the Golden Horn. "As to the other buildings, it would be hard to name them all." The Hospice of Samson rose again from its ruins, probably close by where the gate of the old Seraglio now stands. The baths of Xeuxippus, which lasted down to the time of Mohammed the Conqueror, with the other buildings near the Augusteum and the forum of Constantine, were restored. "In addition to this he rebuilt and added great magnificence to the house named after Hormisdas, which stands close to the palace, to which he joined it,"--that pathetic ruin whose broken wall hangs over the Marmora to-day. When the eulogist comes to the palace itself, words fail him to repeat its glories, the pictures, mosaics, marbles, that combine to make the walls glitter as with life. After works of beauty come those of use, and the cisterns receive as much praise as works more brilliant yet hardly more beautiful.

It is buildings such as these that enable us to see what Justinian was to the capital of his Empire. Every year it seemed that new victories and new conversions were increasing the power of the Empire and the Church. While Belisarius reconquered Italy and made the name of the Cæsar again honoured at Rome and Ravenna, ended the cruel rule of the Vandals in Africa and Sicily, crushed the Goths of Spain, and kept the strong Persian prince at bay on the eastern frontier of the empire, Christian missions spread the faith of the orthodox Church to the Caucasus and the Sudan. Again and again did processions of returning warriors pass along the triumphal way, but the Emperor alone entered by the Golden Gate. It was in the Hippodrome that Belisarius celebrated his triumph over the Vandals. It was nigh six hundred years, Procopius thought, since any had had the same. But Belisarius walked with a proud humility from his own house to the Hippodrome, and thence from his own tent to the imperial throne. The rich spoils that were spread out were the treasures of all the years of Vandal conquest, and among them some of the vessels that Titus had brought from the temple at Jerusalem and Generic the Vandal conqueror had taken from Rome. These Justinian gave to churches in the Holy City. As the captives were led up to the imperial throne all eyes were fixed on the Vandal chief, Gelimer, wearing the purple, as in mockery, with his kindred about him, "himself the tallest and most beautiful of the Vandals." As he walked up to the throne he looked up, and uttering no lament for his fallen state, said with the poet's simple feeling, "Vanity of vanities." They stripped him of his robe and made him fall on his face before the Emperor. Beside him knelt his conqueror, and supplicated for his pardon, and the day was crowned by generosity such as the Emperor loved to show and the people to applaud.

Such scenes became familiar to the people as the years of victory rolled on. They saw, too, Belisarius, drawn through the streets in his chariot by the captives of his wars, when he received the dignity of Patrician. The empire of Justinian, based upon the old laws which he collected and enlarged, cherishing the traditions of old Rome, was eager to revive every glory of former days. "And then," says Procopius, who himself the bitterest of satirists of the present, looked not unkindly on the past, "men saw things long forgotten thus renewed by time." But the picture, brilliant though it was, was not unclouded. The city of the Cæsars was again and again threatened by barbarians and struck by the visitation of God. In 542 Constantinople was devastated by a terrible pestilence, the bubonic plague, that has lost none of its terrors in fifteen hundred years. For four months it raged, and at its height Procopius declares that as many as ten thousand perished in a day. It spared no constitution and no age, and God alone could be the cause of it. Justinian, who was one of the few who recovered, was assiduous in charitable aid; but the loss to the city could hardly be conceived--no trades, no shops, says the recorder of many horrors, remained, and "many for fear leaving their bad courses, consecrated themselves to God, and many when the danger was passed fell to their old despising of God again."

After plagues came famines and earthquakes, and in the last year of the reign, the dread army of the Huns, under Zabergan, drew nigh even to the walls of Constantinople, murdering and ravaging as they came. Hastily the treasures of the church northwards of the city were brought for safety within the walls, and Belisarius in old age again came forward to save the empire. It was his last victory, and seven years later he passed away, honoured and beloved. The Emperor himself died but a few weeks later in November 565. The glories of the reign had passed away before the aged ruler laid down his power; but he left a reconquered Empire and a capital that was the wonder of the world.

He left too a memory as a theologian, which the church for some centuries continued specially to honour in her most solemn service. Justinian, the legislator, the builder and the organizer of victory, seemed to the vision of Dante to dwell like the sun in perpetual light.

_Sì come'l sol, che si cela egli stessi
Per troppa luce, quando il caldo ha rose
Le temperanze de' vapori spessi;
Per più letizia sì mi si nascose
Dento al suo raggio la figura santa._

To this aspect of his life we can give here but little attention; but it is not to be doubted that it was as a theologian that the men of his Constantinople heard most of their ruler's doings. Far into the dark hours, says the chronicler of his reign, he sat writing the theological treatises which expressed the teaching of the Church; night after night he would study in his library the writings of the Fathers, and the Sacred Scriptures, with some learned prelates or monks at hand, that he might discuss with them the questions as they rose before his mind. From the time of his predecessor he had been engaged in corresponding with Popes on theological points, and when he became sole ruler he determined once for all to settle the side issues which depended on the great Monophysite contest. Edict after edict, letter after letter, treatises closely argued and tightly packed with patristic and scriptural learning, and even hymns, showed the restless activity of the imperial theologian. When in 535 Anthemius of Trebizond was made Patriarch of Constantinople, and when Pope Agapetus came on a mission from the Gothic King Theodahad, the discussion of articles of the faith brought the deposition of the patriarch as a monophysite, and the succession of Mennas, head of the hospice of Samson. Then came the conflict with the Origenists, which led indirectly to the controversy of "the Three Chapters" and the session of the Fifth General Council. Of this it were here a weariness to tell. Let it suffice to say that on May 5, 553, the Council met in the southern gallery of the great Church of the Divine Wisdom. The Pope himself was at Constantinople but he would not attend the sessions. He was lodged at first in the royal palace of Placidia at the eastern end of the promontory, beyond S. Irene, looking over the sea to Asia and the churches of Chalcedon. Then he fled by night to cross the Bosphorus and took refuge in the Church of S. Euphemia at Chalcedon where a hundred years before the council had sat. Embassies crossed and recrossed the sea; even the great general Belisarius was an envoy, but Vigilius, when the Council met, refused to join it, to speak, or to vote: and the Council made short work of the foolish, bombastic, hesitating pontiff. It condemned those who refused to receive its decisions and struck Vigilius out of the diptychs on which were inscribed the names of those prayed for at the Eucharist.

But if there was no Roman patriarch present, there was the new patriarch of Constantinople, Eutychius, and the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, while he of Jerusalem sent proxies. To the decisions of the council a hundred and sixty-four signatures were affixed. Theologians still contest as to whether it was a free and open council; but it was accepted beyond question, though after some years, by the whole Church. It did its work: it safeguarded the Catholic faith by stripping bare the meaning of statements which indirectly attacked the Divine and Human Natures of the Incarnate Son. It condemned these subtle suggestions, and it preserved to the Church the real Christ of Whom she had learned.

These theological questions stand out, it may seem to some to-day, too boldly in the history of the New Rome: but they know little of the capital of the East who do not know how close to its life lie these matters of dogma and definition. The very tradesmen at their work talked of them, as they talked in the time of Gregory; and there was nothing which the crowds who thronged the markets and the basilicas in the days of Justinian more readily or more constantly discussed. Constantinople in these first centuries of her life had the theological interest closest to her heart; as the years went on the needs of defence brought the military interest to the top.

The city in Justinian's days was rich and full of bread. All the glory of the world seemed there to be gathered together, and with it the vice, which stern laws and the charitable institutions, founded by the imperial sovereigns, endeavoured as best they could to conquer or to heal. The thronged markets sold every kind of goods, for commerce or luxury. The monks who brought the silkworm from China to the Emperor's court enabled him to found an industry which added greatly to resources of his empire and the prosperity of his people. The mosaics, which glittered on the walls of the churches, were made by skilled artists in the city itself--carved work, images (the icons which the Greek Church has never ceased to love), jewellery, beautifully wrought, were among the manufactures of the great trading centre of the East; and the military engines for which the Eastern army was renowned were made within the walls of the capital itself. The pages of Procopius and Agathias, of Lydus and John of Ephesus, show a busy hurrying life, elaborate administrative arrangements, official classes greedy and exclusive, popular agitations hasty and fickle, an accumulating luxury with all its accompaniments of oppression, avarice, and vulgar show. The millionaires of the sixth century, with their gout, their costly equipages, and their summer palaces on the Bosphorus or at Chalcedon, were a prominent feature in the life of the great city. Beside them were the dusky traders from the far East, the hordes of bearded monks ever ready to join in the logical squabbles or take part in popular riots, and the silent barbarian soldiers, opening wondering eyes on the disputes and the splendours of the imperial city, and prompt at the word of command to dethrone emperors or massacre their foes. In such a city it would have been strange if there were order or peace; and indeed the constant complaint of the chroniclers is of nobles, clerics and artizans, whom it was impossible to restrain. Yet amid this scene of confusion at any moment the imperial power might show itself with arbitrary and brutal abruptness. When a servant maid by mischance spat on the robe of the dead Empress Eudocia as it was carried to the tomb she was executed immediately and without protest.

3. FROM JUSTIN II. TO THE LATIN CONQUEST.

In 565 Justinian died, and the glory of his reign set in a dull glow that heralded storms. Justin II., his nephew, was a tyrant and a madman, but it was power which brought out his tyranny and his madness. When he came to the throne he spoke mildly and well. He made profession of orthodoxy in S. Sophia; he was raised on the imperial shield in the palace; he promised in the Hippodrome to pay the debts of the dead Emperor. They were strange scenes, such as the people of Byzantium often saw, and strangest of all to our minds is that which shows the citizens in the place of public games clamouring before the imperial throne for the payment of debts of Justinian.

Constantinople is still the same. Even when it looks cowed, it has still its impudence and its determination to criticise. Justin's doings were watched and mocked at, as if he had been the humblest tradesman, by the city jesters. He built a golden chamber in the palace by the sea: he set up a pillar to record his virtues, and then some one affixed a tablet on it:

Build, build aloft thy pillar,
And raise it vast and high;
Then mount and stand upon it,
Soar proudly in the sky;
East, south and north, and westward,
Wherever thou shalt gaze,
Nought shalt thou see but ruins,
The work of thine own days.

Meanwhile the barbarians were coming nearer to the Empire. The Avars demanded tribute, and the Turks, a name that was so soon to be a familiar terror, sent envoys to the Cæsar's court. The enemies, it might seem, were already closing in when Justin became a lunatic, bursting into mad fits of rage, and drawn about the palace in a toy cart, while the "whole senate and city" knew of the sad fate of their Emperor. Sophia, his wife, had all the masterful genius of her aunt Theodora. It was she who gave the rule to Tiberius II., under whom the empire steadily decayed. Maurice, his successor, was a severe ruler, whom the people learned to hate. When at last his reign ended in a revolution and a flight, it was the people of Constantinople, the demes and the factions of the Circus, who gave him to death, and placed the imperial crown on the head of Phocas, his successor.

While Constantinople thus dethroned and set up the civil rulers of the Empire, it was claiming for its patriarch the highest position in the Church. When at the beginning of the sixth century the patriarch John had signed the formula drawn up by Pope Hormisdas, he repudiated any claim to superiority on the part of the old Rome: the two cities and the two Sees he declared were one. As early as 518 the patriarch of Constantinople called himself "universal bishop": in 595 the great Pope Gregory, who had himself, as a papal envoy, seen the greatness of the Eastern See, vigorously protested, to the Emperor Maurice, against the assumption to the title. But while the patriarchs used the title in no exclusive sense, they were determined, as they are determined to-day, to assert the independence of their See and its equality with that of Rome.

Ecclesiastical independence did not preserve the Empire from political weakness. Phocas was soon seen to be worse than Maurice, and one conspiracy after another was begun in the Hippodrome and ended by a massacre in the streets. The Green faction in the Circus called the Emperor a drunkard and a madman to his face. Famine and pestilence ravaged the crowded city, and when Heraclius, already a renowned general, brought his fleet up the Hellespont and anchored at the Golden Horn the collapse of the power of Phocas was immediate, and a new Emperor was crowned in the great church of the "Capital of the World." The reign of Heraclius, gallant man though he was, began in almost unbroken disaster, and when in 615 Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Persians it seemed that the end was at hand. In the next year, as had already happened under Phocas, a Persian army encamped at Chalcedon. When negotiations were in vain, when Heraclius had even formed the idea of transferring the seat of Empire from Constantinople to Carthage, and had only abandoned it after his preparations were far advanced, when the terror and indignation of the people forced him to take oath before the patriarch in S. Sophia that he would never leave "the Queen of Cities," at length the courage of the empire awoke, the nobles sacrificed their wealth and the churches their treasures, the fleet utterly destroyed that of the Persians, and Heraclius delivered the city and the empire by a march as brilliant as it was daring. Leading five thousand veterans across Asia Minor and through the mountains he "penetrated into the heart of Persia and recalled the armies of the great king to the defence of their bleeding country." After three campaigns he returned in triumph and entered, as no Emperor since Theodosius the Great had done, by the Golden Gate.

In his absence thirty thousand Avars, who had swept over the Balkan provinces like a devouring flame, broke through the great wall and encamped under the very walls of the city itself. Churches in the suburbs were burnt to the ground and the famous Church of the Theotokos in Blachernae was on the point of being destroyed, when some panic caused the Avar horsemen to retire. The danger was too obvious for the warning to be neglected, and the Senate, which had refused with contumely the offers of the barbarian leaders, allies of the Persian King, drove back the enemy and immediately increased the fortifications by a new wall. This splendid barrier, magnificent to-day in its ruins, stretched from the enclosure outside the palace of Blachernae, at the foot of the sixth hill, to the Golden Horn. It is flanked by three hexagonal towers.

A year later, in 627, the Emperor, who dreaded even the sight of the sea, crossed the Bosphorus by a bridge of boats, decked with branches of trees to imitate a forest. Landing north of the city he marched inland and crossed the valley at the head of the Golden Horn--below the "Sweet Waters of Europe"--by a bridge made by Justinian nearly opposite the end of the walls. So along the triumphal way he went, past the new walls that have ever since borne his name, and entered by the Golden Gate, the Emperor who had vanquished the Persians, saved his empire, and brought back the greatest of all relics, the sacred wood of the true Cross, which S. Helena, the mother of Constantine, had found on Calvary.

But Heraclius was not to triumph unchecked. The fatal temptation of theological strife conquered even the conqueror of the Persians, and the beginning of the Monothelite controversy dates from the _Ekthesis_ of Sergius the patriarch, a document which, if it were intended to make peace, certainly provoked, war that was not ended, though its area was defined, by the decision of the Fourth General Council, which met at Constantinople in 680, and condemned those who denied that Christ had two wills, human and divine.

The dreary years of the latter half of the seventh century may be rapidly summarised. Constantinople saw the settlement of barbarians, Slaves and Balgars, almost at its gates. Emperor succeeded emperor without anyone appearing who was worthy to be the heir of Heraclius. At length in 672 the Saracens, who had long devastated Asia, brought a fleet up the Hellespont and besieged the city. Their total defeat by Constantine IV., whom his people nicknamed Pogonatus (the bearded), was the greatest triumph of the Christian powers against the infidel; it was won, it is said, by the newly-discovered "Greek fire," so long to be the terror of the foes of the Empire. Constantinople proved herself the bulwark of Europe against the infidel. The nations of the West sent their envoys to applaud. Six hundred years later another Constantine was to fall, when his city was at length captured by the followers of Mohammed.

Justinian II., the son of Constantine Pogonatus, was a great builder like his namesake, whom probably he sought to imitate; but in character he was far from resembling the builder of S. Sophia. In the inimitable phrases of Gibbon, "The name of a triumphant law-giver was dishonoured by the vices of a boy.... His passions were strong; his understanding was feeble; and he was intoxicated with a foolish pride that his birth had given him the command of millions, of whom the smallest community would not have chosen him for their local magistrate. His favourite ministers were two beings the least susceptible of human sympathy, an eunuch and a monk; to the one he abandoned a palace, to the other the finances; the former corrected the Emperor's mother with a scourge, the latter suspended the insolvent tributaries, with their heads downwards, over a slow and smoky fire. Since the days of Commodus and Caracalla, the cruelty of the Roman princes had most commonly been the effect of their fear; but Justinian, who possessed some vigour of character, enjoyed the sufferings and braved the revenge of his subjects about ten years, till the measure was full of his crimes and of their patience."

The attempt to banish a popular general whom he had long imprisoned was the occasion of a revolt which cast the Emperor from the throne; and the hippodrome saw again an act of tragic vengeance, when the tongue and nose of the fallen Cæsar were slit in the presence of the people who had borne with him too long.

Let Professor Bury's summary continue the tale:--"The twenty years which intervened between the banishment of Justinian in 695 and the accession of Leo the Isaurian in 717 witnessed a rapid succession of monarchs, all of whom were violently deposed. Isaurian Leontius was succeeded by Apsimar, who adopted the name Tiberius, and these two reigns occupied the first ten years. Then Justinian returned from exile, recovered the throne, and 'furiously raged' for six years (705-711). He was overthrown by Bardanes, who called himself Philippicus; then came Artemius, whose imperial name was Anastasius; and finally the years 716 and 717 saw the fall of Anastasius, the reign and fall of Theodosius, and the accession of Isaurian Leo, whose strong arm guided the Empire from ways of anarchy into a new path."[10]

In the tragedies of these years Constantinople bore its full share, and no more strange contrast to the scene of his barbarous mutilation could be imagined than that when Justinian II. sat again, ten years later (705) in the hippodrome, with his feet on the necks of the two monarchs who had filled his throne in the meantime. As the fickle people saw the "slit-nose," as they called him, triumphant over Leontius and Apsimar they called out in the words of the psalms, which came so readily to their lips, "Thou hast trodden upon the _lion_ and the _asp_: the young lion and the dragon hast thou trodden under thy feet."

Six years later (711) there was a more terrible tragedy. Justinian was justly dethroned and slain, and his little boy Tiberius, the child of his exile, was torn from the church of the Theotokos at Blachernae and cruelly butchered outside the palace wall. The next years were stained by crimes and follies hardly less revolting than those that had gone before; there could be no more bitter irony than the single word which the humble tax-gatherer, who was elevated against his will to the imperial throne under the name of Theodosius II., inscribed upon his tomb--ὑγίεια--health was to be found nowhere for the empire in his day.

His successor, Leo the Isaurian, whom the Senate and the patriarch of Constantinople chose in 718 to be their lord, had seen an adventurous life, and was already the general and imperator of the great eastern army.

His first task was to defend the city against the Saracens. The great siege of 718, lasting twelve months, failed chiefly through his skill and patience. The invaders encamped before the city in August 717; the name of their Suleiman was one which was later to be very familiar to the Byzantines. When winter came it was one of those bitter seasons to which Constantinople is often subject. For many weeks snow lay on the ground, and the besiegers suffered far more than the garrison. Leo defended the city with extraordinary skill, and at length, at the right moment, by a well planned sortie he scattered the infidels, and of the great host of a hundred and eighty thousand men the Mohammedan historians say that only thirty thousand escaped back to the East. No greater feat was ever performed by the great empire, the bulwark of Christendom, than this heroic defence and splendid repulse.

It was not wholly the work of Leo, for the Bulgarians came from the north to his aid, and a pestilence, even before the storms of the Dardanelles destroyed their fleet, caused the withdrawal of the Saracen host. Then as an administrator he reformed the government, as a legist he reissued and revised the laws. The great earthquake of 739 caused the institution of a new tax, if not a new financial system.

"Some of the oldest monuments in the city were thrown down by the shock, the statue of Constantine the Great, at the gate of Attalus; the statue and sculptured column of Arcadius; the statue of Theodosius I., over the Golden Gate, and the church of Irene, close to S. Sophia. The land walls of the city were also subverted; and in order to repair the fortifications Leo increased the taxes by one-twelfth, or a miliarision in a nomisma."

Thus Professor Bury.[11] But to such acts, important though they were, Leo the Isaurian does not owe the fact that his name will never be forgotten in the history of the Empire which he ruled. It was he who began the attack upon the ancient custom of the Eastern churches which gave rise to the long and bitter iconoclastic controversy. It were idle for a Western accustomed to the severity and restraint of English worship to pretend to judge without partiality the conflict which arose in the eighth century among the Easterns. To Englishmen it comes with a shock of surprise to learn that they are regarded as Romanists, as has recently happened, because they do not use incense in every public service of the Church, according to the immemorial usage of the East. Similarly it is with diffidence that we learn to recognise the reverence paid to icons, pictures of sacred things, as a true and helpful part of Oriental devotion. It tends, we think, to superstition; as much perhaps as our grandfathers' pride in the black gown of the preacher, or the curious customs which led in England to the "plethoric Sunday afternoon." Leo the Isaurian, and after him his son, Constantine V. (nicknamed Copronymus by his people, probably "from his devotion to the stables"), of whom the latter certainly had no sense of the reality of religion, embarked on an ill-omened attempt to purge from the Church, and to destroy in the sacred buildings themselves, all the brilliant pictures and mosaics which commemorated the saints and received the homage, bordering no doubt on superstition, of the faithful. They objected that it was a sin to represent Christ in art at all; and that the representation of His Mother tended to the exaltation of her name into that of a Divinity. "Apostles of rationalism" these Emperors have strangely been called, who fought against an ineradicable passion of their people. As dear to the hearts of the Greek Christians as their subtle questionings into the deep meanings of divine things, their determination to be satisfied with nothing less than a precise and logical definition of the faith once for all given to the saints, was their craving for outward and visible signs to represent the gifts of God at once in the Divine Life and in the lives of the saintly followers of the Lord, and their own reverence and consecration of all that was beautiful in the work of man. The force of Mohammedanism had lain in its austere rejection of any outward image of Divine things; heretics, Judaising or Monophysite, had from time to time taken up the cry against these innocent representations of the saints. If the "worship" of images tended to obscure the spiritual truth of religion, the destruction of all visible memorials of the saints, emblems of the divine attributes, or representations of the passion of Christ, was even more certain to tell against the real belief of a race at once ignorant and dramatic, to whom the eye was the constant teacher of the mind. However strange and unedifying the reverence paid to icons may seem to the modern Western mind, it is but the shallowest ignorance which would call it idolatry, and it is plain that any hasty attempt to interfere with the popular expression of religious ideas must tend, if hastily and unskilfully conducted, to impair the faith of the people itself. Led by men who were believed by the enthusiastic and conservative Byzantines to be influenced by Monophysites, Jews and Mohammedans, it was certain to provoke a desperate resistance, and that the more widespread because the issue was not an intricate matter of scholastic teaching, but a plain issue of practice in which every day passions were deeply concerned.

In 726, almost, it would seem, without warning, the Emperor Leo issued an edict that all images in churches should be utterly abolished. The patriarch, rather than consent to the action, resigned his office. The story of what followed may be given in the words of Mr Tozer.[12]

"The work of destruction now commenced in earnest; the statues were everywhere removed, and the pictures on the walls were whitewashed over, and though numerous outbreaks occurred, and some executions took place before it was accomplished, yet on the whole the opposition was not formidable. The act which caused the greatest indignation was the removal of the magnificent image of Christ which surmounted the bronze gateway of the imperial palace, and was the object of great reverence. In order to take down this statue and burn it, a soldier of the guard had mounted a ladder, when a number of women assembled at the spot to beg that it might be spared; but, instead of listening to them, the soldier struck his axe into the face of the image. Infuriated by this, which appeared to them to be an insult offered to the Saviour Himself, they dragged the ladder from under his feet and killed him. The Emperor avenged his agent by executing some, and exiling others, of the offenders, and set up in the place of the statue a plain cross, with an inscription explaining the significance of the change.

"In the defence of images there stood forth two champions, the one in the West, the other in the East; and the points of view from which they respectively regarded them illustrate the different feelings of the two churches on the subject. The former of these was Pope Gregory II., who at first strongly remonstrated with the Emperor on his edict, and afterwards, when he endeavoured to enforce its observance in Italy, encouraged his people to disregard the order, and defied his nominal sovereign in violent and even insulting language. At last he excommunicated his nominee, the patriarch Anastasius. But he advocated the retention of images on the practical ground of their utility in instructing the young and ignorant, and as being an incentive to devotion. Far more exalted and more subtly defined was the position attributed to them by the other advocate, who spoke from the distant East. This was John of Damascus, otherwise known as S. John Damascene, the last of the Fathers of the Greek Church. This learned and acute theologian, who in many ways was superior to the age in which he lived, at one time filled a civil post of some importance under the Caliphs, who now ruled in Syria, but afterwards retired to the monastery of S. Saba, in the wilderness of Engedi, the strange position of which, overhanging a deep gorge that leads down to the Dead Sea, is still the wonder of the traveller. As he lived in the dominion of the Saracens he was beyond the reach of the Emperor's arm, and now undertook the cause of his suffering co-religionists. In three powerful addresses he set forth his arguments for image worship. Some of them follow the familiar lines of defence, that these objects were memorials of the mysteries of the faith; and that in the adoration of them the spiritual was reached through the medium of the material. But beyond this he made it plain that, to his mind, and the minds of those who thought with him, the worship of images was closely connected with the doctrine of the Incarnation, the earthly material having been once for all sanctified when the Son of God took human flesh, and being thenceforth worthy of all honour. From this we may learn both how it came to pass that the most religious men of the age became enthusiasts for what was in itself superstitious, and also what was the cardinal point of difference between them and their opponents. For, while the one side regarded figures of Christ as a degradation of a heavenly being, to the other they were a practical confession of His true humanity, and any disregard of them appeared in the light of a denial of the Incarnation. At last, when it was found that the Emperor persevered in his attack, the iconoclasts were anathematised by the orthodox congregations in all the Mahometan countries outside the Empire. Both John and Gregory protested throughout against the interference of the State with the Church in this matter as being beyond its province; and, owing to the close connection which existed between the clergy and the people, they were generally regarded as the assertors of liberty and of the right of private judgment in opposition to despotism."

The indirect effects of Leo's action were even more important than the obvious ones. The division which ensued between Italy, resisting iconoclasm under the Pope's authority, and the imperial power made the Emperor decide to transfer to the patriarch of Constantinople the jurisdiction over Sicily and Calabria, leaving to the Pope that over the exarchate of Ravenna which still nominally obeyed the Cæsar. The meaning of this is thus expressed by Professor Bury.

"The effect of this act of Leo, which went far to decide the mediæval history of Southern Italy, was to bring the boundary between the ecclesiastical dominions of New Rome and Old Rome into coincidence with the boundary between the Greek and the Latin nationalities. In other words, it laid the basis of the distinction between the Greek and the Latin Churches. The only part of the Empire in which the Pope now possessed authority was the exarchate, including Rome, Ravenna and Venice. The geographical position of Naples, intermediate between Rome and the extremities of Italy, determined that its sympathies should be drawn in two directions; in religious matters it inclined towards Old Rome, in political matters it was tenacious of its loyalty to New Rome."[13]

But this was not all. An immense immigration of persecuted monks and priests as well as lay folk practically recolonised much of Southern Italy.

Constantine Copronymus was far more eager than his father to push the iconoclastic campaign. In 761 he began a deliberate and bitter persecution of those who opposed him. Already, under Leo the Isaurian, the virgin Theodosia had been martyred. Her festival is still kept on May 29, and the church raised to her memory still stands transformed into a mosque just within the Aya Kapou, on the Golden Horn. Many whom the Greek Church still commemorates were now slain and others tortured. Constantine was equally hostile to monks, and he was as bitter against his creatures whom he suspected as against those who openly disputed his will. The patriarch whom he had set up fell into disgrace in spite of his support of iconoclasm. He was degraded in S. Sophia, carried round the Hippodrome sitting backwards on an ass, and at last beheaded as a traitor.

The successor of Constantine, Leo IV., was significant only in that he followed his policy of persecution. He left the crown in 780 to his son Constantine and his widow Irene. Conspiracies, real or alleged, of his brothers were bitterly punished. The Empress Irene was satisfied so long as her son was still a boy to allow him a nominal share in the government; but when he grew up and showed an independent spirit, she used the growing unpopularity which came upon him after his repudiation of his wife to raise a party against him, and hired troops to take his life. He escaped death only to lose his eyes, and his wicked mother, surrounded by degraded favourites, reigned alone. It was she whom the great Teutonic King Charles was ready to wed, and the failure of the negotiations led, with other more notable causes, to the creation of the new empire of the West, so long held by German Cæsars, but professing still to be--as that of Constantinople historically was--the heir of the ancient empire of the Roman world.

Wicked as Irene was, it was given to her to restore peace to the Church, and to reunite though only for a time the Catholic Church throughout the world. So completely was the popular feeling against the iconoclasts that it needed little of the intrigue or violence which Irene was so ready to use to secure the result she desired. In 786, when her worst passions had not been revealed and she still lived in union with her son, the seventh General Council met at Nicaea. It was attended by representatives from Italy as well as from the East, and as its decisions represent the use and teaching of the Eastern Church to-day, they may here be summarised in Professor Bury's words.

"At the seventh sitting (5th or 6th October), the definition (ὅρος) of doctrine was drawn up; after a summary repetition of the chief points of theology established by previous Universal Councils, it is laid down that the figure of the holy cross and holy images, whether coloured or plain, whether consisting of stone or of any other material, may be represented on vessels, garment, walls or tables, in houses or on public roads; especially figures of Christ, the Virgin, angels, or holy men: such representations, it is observed, stimulate spectators to think of the originals, and, while they must not be adored with that worship which is only for God (λατρεία) deserve adoration (προσκύνησις)."[14]

But Irene's services to the Church were not allowed then, any more than we should allow them now, to preserve her in power. The stars in their courses seemed to the superstitious to fight against her, and, though she held the crown she had so ill-won for five years, the end came at last by the treachery of those she had raised to highest place. "For five years," says Gibbon, "the Roman world bowed to the government of a female; and, as she moved through the streets of Constantinople, the reins of four milk-white steeds were held by as many patricians, who marched on foot before the golden chariot of their queen." But among the patricians whom she had chosen was the treasurer Nicephorus, who on October 31, 802, having captured his benefactress, and with some spark of generosity, undestroyed by his ambition and his avarice, sent her to banishment rather than to death, ascended the throne of the Cæsars.

With him began a new dynasty, a new century, and in some ways a new era for the imperial city.

During the eighth century Constantinople, as a city, underwent a great change. This was not merely due to the incessant ebb and flow of population, the coming and going of different detachments of the imperial army, the founding of new monasteries by men from all parts of the Christian world, the opening of new commercial establishments, the coming of new trading embassies, but to one great and irremediable disaster. From 745 to 747 the city was devastated by the plague, that bubonic distemper, so familiar already but now more terribly destructive than ever before. The words of Theophanes, who lived when the remembrance of it was still fresh, though they have been often quoted, may be quoted again. They stand side by side with the modern records of the still powerful pestilence.

"And in the spring of the first indiction (747) the pestilence spread to a greater extent, and in summer its flame culminated to such a height that whole houses were entirely shut up, and those on whom the office devolved could not bury their dead. In the embarrassment of the circumstances, the plan was conceived of carrying out the dead on saddled animals, on whose backs were placed frameworks of planks. In the same way they placed the corpses above one another in waggons. And when all the burying-grounds in the city and suburbs had been filled, and also the dry cisterns and tanks, and very many vineyards had been dug up, the gardens too within the old walls were used for the purpose of burying human bodies, and even thus the need was hardly met."