© GEORGE FINLAY

HISTORY OF

THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE

FROM DCCXVI TO MLVII

First Edition February 1906

Section III
CONSTANTINE V., (COPRONYMUS,) A.D. 741-775

Part VIII

Orthodox zeal and party ambition combined to form a dangerous conspiracy against Constantine. Men of the highest rank engaged in the plot, and even Patriarch Constantinos, though himself an Iconoclast, appears to have joined the conspirators. He was removed from the patriarchate, and the dignity was conferred on a Sclavonian prelate, named Niketas. The deposed Patriarch was brought to trial and condemned to death. Constantinos, after his condemnation, and apparently with the hope of having his life spared, signed a declaration that he believed the worship of images to be idolatry, that the doctrines of the orthodox church, and that the faith of the emperor was pure. This last article was added because the patriarch was accused of having counterbalanced reports charging the emperor with heterodox opinions concerning the Virgin. If Constantinos expected mercy by his pliancy, he was mistaken. His sentence was carried into execution in the cruellest manner. The head of the Greek church was placed on an ass, with his face towards the tail, and conducted through the streets of the capital, while the mob treated him with every insult. On reaching the amphitheatre his head was struck off. It may easily be supposed that, when the highest ecclesiastic in the empire was treated in this manner in the capital, the severity of the imperial agents in the distant provinces was often fearfully tyrannical.
The spirit of ecclesiastical bigotry which has so often led popes, princes, and Protestants to burn those who differed from them in matters of opinion, gave the image-worshippers as much fortitude to resist as it gave their opponents cruelty to persecute. The religious and political reforms of the Isaurian emperors were equally a subject of aversion to the Pope and the Italians; and all the possessions of the emperors in central Italy had been rendered virtually independent, even before Constantine convoked the council of Constantinople. His struggle with the Saracens and Bulgarians had prevented his making any effort in Italy. At Rome, however, the Popes continued to acknowledge the civil and judicial supremacy of the emperor of the East, even after the Lombards had conquered the exarchate of Ravenna. But the impossibility of receiving any support from Constantine against the encroachment of the Lombards, induced Pope Stephen to apply to Pepin of France for assistance. Pope Paul afterwards carried his eagerness to create a quarrel between the emperor Pepin and Constantine so far, that he accused the emperor of hostile designs against Italy, which he was well aware Constantine had little time or power to execute. Pepin, who was anxious to gain the aid of papal authority in his projects of usurpation, made a donation of the exarchate of Ravenna to the papal see in the year 755, though he had not the smallest right to dispose of it. The donation, however, supplied the Pope with a pretext for laying claim to the sovereignty over the country; and there can be no doubt that the papal government was at this period very popular among the Italians, for it secured them the administration of justice according to the Roman law, guaranteed to them a considerable degree of municipal independence, and permitted them to maintain their commercial relations with the Byzantine empire. The political dependence of many of the cities in central Italy, which escaped the Lombard domination, was not absolutely withdrawn from the empire of the East until a new emperor of the West was created, on the assumption of the imperial crown by Charlemagne, to whom the allegiance of the Italians, who threw off Constantine’s authority, was at last transferred.
Some remarkable physical phenomena occurred during the reign of Constantine. An unnatural darkness obscured the sun from the 10th to the 15th of August in the year 746. It terrified the inhabitants of Constantinople at the same time it occurred; and when the great pestilence broke out in the following year, it was regarded as a prognostic of that calamity. In the year 750, violent earthquakes destroyed whole towns in Syria. In the month of October, 763, a winter of singular severity commenced long before severe cold generally sets in at Constantinople. The Bosphorus was frozen over, and men passed on foot between Europe and Asia in several places. The Black Sea was covered with ice from the Palus Maeotic to Mesembria. When the thaw began in the month of February, 764, immense mountains of ice were driven through the Bosphorus, and dashed with such violence against the walls of Constantinople as to threaten them with ruin. These icebergs were seventy feet in thickness; and Theophanes mentions that, when a boy, he mounted on one of them with thirty of his young companions.
One great calamity in the age of Constantine appears to have travelled over the whole habitable world; this was the great pestilence, which made its appearance in the Byzantine empire as early as 745. It had previously carried off a considerable portion of the population of Syria, and the Caliph Yezid III. Perished of the disease in 744. From Syria it visited Egypt and Africa, from whence it passed into Sicily and Calabria, it spread to Greece; and at last, in the year 749, it broke out with terrible violence in Constantinople, then probably the most populous city in the universe. It was supposed to have been introduced, and dispersed through Christian countries, by the Venetian and Greek ships employed in carrying on a contraband trade in slaves with the Mohammedan nations, and it spread wherever commerce extended. Monemvasia, one of the commercial cities at the time, received the contagion with the return of its trading vessels, and dissembled the disease over all Greece, and the islands of the Archipelago. On the continent, this plague threatened to exterminate the Hellenic race. Historians have left us a vivid picture of the horrors of this fearful visitation, which show us that the terror it inspired disturbed the fabric of society. Strange superstitions preoccupied men’s minds, and annihilated every sense of duty. Some appeared to be urged by a demoniacal impulse to commit heinous but useless crime, with the wildest recklessness. Small crosses of unctuous matter were supposed to appear suddenly, traced by an invisible hand on the clothes of persons as they were engaged in their ordinary pursuits; examples were narrated of their having appeared suddenly visible to the eyes of the assembled congregation on the vestments of the priest as he officiated at the altar. The individual thus marked out was invariably assailed by the disease on his return home, and soon died. Crosses were constantly found traced on the doors and outer walls of buildings; houses, palaces, huts, and monasteries were alike marked. This was considered as an intimation that some of the inmates were ordered to prepare for immediate death. In the delirium of fear and the first paroxysms of the plague, many declared that they beheld hideous spectres wandering about; these apparitions were seen flitting through the crowded streets of the city, at times questioning the passengers, at times walking into houses before the inmates, and then driving the proprietors from the door. At times it was said that these spectres had even attacked the citizens with naked swords. That these things were not reported solely on the delusion of the fancy of persons rendered insane by attacks of disease, is asserted by a historian [Theophanes] who was born about ten years later, and who certainly passed his youth at Constantinople. The testimony of Theophanes is confirmed by the records of similar diseases in other populous cities. The uncertainty of life offers additional chances of impunity to crime, and thus relaxes the power of the law, and weakens the bonds of moral restraint. Danger is generally what man fears little, when there are several chances of escape. The bold and wicked, deriding the general panic, frequently make periods of pestilence times of revelry and plunder; the very individuals charged as policemen to preserve order in society, finding themselves free from control, have been known to assume the disguise of demons, in order to plunder the terrified and superstitious with impunity. The predominant passions of all find full scope when the feeling of responsibility is removed; shame is thrown aside, the most unfeeling avarice and the wildest debauchery are displayed. But, at the same time, it is on such fearful occasions that we see examples of the noblest courage, the most devoted self-sacrifice and the purest charity. Boccaccio and Defoe, in describing the scenes which occurred at Florence in 1348, and at London in 1665, afford a correct picture of what happened at Constantinople in 747.
The number of dead was so great, that when the ordinary means of transporting the bodies were insufficient, boxes were slung over the pack-saddles of mules, into which the dead were cast without distinction of rank. When the mules became insufficient, low chariots were constructed to receive piles of human bodies, and these frightful hearses were drawn through the streets to receive their loads, by a crowd of men who received a fixed sum of money with each body. Long trenches were prepared without the walls to serve as graves for hundred of bodies, and into these the aged beggar and the youthful noble were precipitated side by side. When all the cemeteries around the capital were filled, and the panic kept the mass of the population shut up in their dwellings, bodies were interred in the fields and vineyards nearest to the city gates, or they were cast into vacant houses and empty cisterns. The disease prevailed for a year, and left whole houses tenantless, having exterminated many families. We possess no record of the member of deaths it caused, but if we suppose the population of Constantinople at the time to have exceeded a million, we may form an estimate of the probable loss it sustained, by observing that, during the great plague at Milan, in 1630, about eighty-six thousand persons perished in the course of a year, in a population hardly exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand souls.
After the plague had completely disappeared, the capital required an immense influx of new inhabitants. To fill up the void caused by the scourge, Constantine induced many Greek families from the continent and the islands to emigrate to Constantinople. These new citizens immediately occupied a well-defined social position; for whether artisans, tradesmen, merchants, or householders, they became members of established corporations, and knew how to act in their new relations of life without embarrassment. It was by the perfection of its corporate societies and police regulations, that the Byzantine empire effected the translocation of the inhabitants of whole cities and provinces, without misfortune or discontent. By modifying the fiscal severity of the Roman government, by relieving the members of the municipality from the ruinous obligation of mutual responsibility for the total amount of the land-tax, and by relaxing the laws that fettered children to the profession or handicraft of their parents, the Byzantine administration infused new energy into an enfeebled social system. It still preserved, as an inheritance from Rome, an intimate knowledge of the practical methods of regulating the relative supplies of labour, food, and population in the manner least likely to inconvenience the government, though undoubtedly with little reference to the measures best calculated to advance the happiness of the people.
This memorable pestilence produced as great changes in the provinces as in the capital. While the population of Constantinople lost much of its Roman character and traditions by the infusion of a large number of Greek emigrants, Greece itself lost also much of its Hellenic character and ancient traditions, by the departure of a considerable portion of its native middle class for Constantinople, and the destruction of a large part by the plague itself. The middle classes of the Hellenic cities flocked to Constantinople, while an inferior class from the villages crowded to supply their place, and thus a general translocation of the population was effected; and though this emigration may have been confined principally to the Greek race, it must have tended greatly to separate the future traditions of the people from those of an earlier period. The Athenian or the Lacedemonian who settled at Constantinople, lost all local characteristics; and the emigrants from the islands, who supplied their place at Athens and Lacedemon, mingled their traditions and dialect with the Attic and Doric prejudices of their new homes; ancient traditions were thus consigned to oblivion. The depopulation on the continent and in the Peloponnesus was also so great that Sclavonian population extended their settlements over the greater part of the open country; the Greeks crowded into the town, or into the districts immediately under the protection of their walls. The Sclavonian colonies, which had been gradually increasing ever since the reign of Heraclius, attained at this time their greatest extension; and the depopulation caused by this pestilence is said by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who wrote two centuries later, to have been so great, that the Sclavonians occupied the whole of the open country in Greece and the Peloponnesus, and reduced it to a state of barbarism. The emperor perhaps confounded in some degree the general translocation of the Greek population itself with the occupation of extensive districts, then abandoned to Sclavonian cultivators and herdsmen. It is certain, however, that from this time the oblivion of the ancient Hellenic names of villages, districts, rivers and mountains became general; and the final extinction of those dialects, which marked a direct affiliation of the inhabitants of particular spots with the ancient Hellenic population of the same districts, was consummated. The new names which came into use, whether Sclavonian or Greek, equally mark the loss of ancient traditions.
In closing the history of the reign of Constantine V., it is necessary to observe that he deserves praise for the care with which he educated his family. The most bigoted image-worshippers inform us that he was so mild in his domestic circle that he permitted his third wife to protect a nun named Anthusa, who was a most devoted worshipper of images; and one of the emperor’s daughters received from this nun both her name and education. The Princess Anthusa was distinguished for her benevolence and piety; she is said to have founded one of the first orphan asylums established in the Christian world; and her orthodox devotion to pictures obtained for her a place among the saints of the Greek church, an honour granted also to her godmother and teacher.

TO BE CONTINUED