© GEORGE FINLAY
HISTORY OF
First Edition February 1906
Section
III
CONSTANTINE
V., (COPRONYMUS,) A.D.
741-775
Their king was now compelled to make the cause of the predatory bands a national questions, and an embassy was sent to Constantinople to demand payment of an annual tribute, under the pretext that some of the fortifications erected to guard the passes were situated in the Bulgarian territory, but, in reality, to replace the loss of the plunder which had enabled many of the warlike Bulgarians to live in idleness and luxury. The demands of the king were rejected, and he immediately invaded the empire with a powerful army. The Bulgarians carried their ravages up to the long wall; but though they derived assistance from the numerous Sclavonian colonies settled in Thrace, they were defeated, and driven back into their own terrirory with great slaughter, A.D. 757.
Constantine carried on a series of campaigns, systematically planned, for the purpose of weakening the Bulgarian power. Instead of allowing his enemies to make any incursions into the empire, he was always ready to carry the war into their territory. The difficulties of his enterprises were great, and he suffered several defeats; but his military talents and persevering energy prevented the Bulgarians from profiting by any partial success they obtained, and he soon regained the superiority. In the campaigns of 760, 763, and 765, Constantine marched far into Bulgaria, and carried off immense booty. In the year 766 he intended to complete the conquest of the country, by opening the campaign at the commencement of spring.
His fleet, which consisted of two thousand six hundred vessels, in which he had embarked a considerable body of infantry in order to enter the Danube, was assailed by one of those furious storms that often sweep the Euxine. The shores of the Black Sea were covered with the wrecks of his ships and the bodies of his soldiers. Constantine immediately abandoned all thought of continuing the campaign, and employed his whole army in alleviating the calamity to the survivors, and in securing Christian burial and funeral honours to the dead. A truce was concluded with the enemy, and the Roman army beheld the emperor as eager to employ their services in the cause of humanity and religion, as he had ever been to lead them to the field of glory and conquest. His conduct on this occasion gained him as much popularity with the poeple of Constantinople as with the troops.
In the year 774 he again assembled an army of eighty thousand men, accompanied by a fleet of two thousand transports, and invaded Bulgaria. The Bulgarian monarch concluded a treaty of peace – which, however, was broken as soon as Constantine returned to his capital. But the emperor was not unprepared, and the moment he heard that the enemy had laid siege to Verzetia, one of the fortresses he had constructed to defend the frontier, he quitted Constantinople in the month of October, and, falling suddenly on the besiegers, routed their army with great slaughter. The following year his army was again ready to take the field; but as Constantine was on his way to join it he was attacked by a mortal illness, which compelled him to retrace his steps. Having embarked at Selymbria, in order to reach Constantinople with as little fatigue as possible, he died on board the vessel at the castle of Strongyle, just as he reached the walls of his capital, on the 23rd September, 775.
The long war with the Bulgarians was carried on rather with
the object of securing tranquillity to the northern provinces of the empire,
than from any desire of a barren conquest. The necessity of reducing the Sclavonian
colonies in Thrace and Macedonia to complete obedience to the central administration,
and of secluding them from all political communications with one another,
or with their countrymen in Bulgaria, Sevia, and Dalmatia, imposed on the
emperor the necessity of maintaining strong bodies of troops, and suggested
the policy of forming a line of Greek towns and Asiatic colonies along the
northern frontier of the empire. When this was done, Constantine began to
root out the brigandage, which had greatly extended itself during the anarchy
which preceded his father's election, and which Leo had never been able to
exterminate. Numerous bands lived by plunder, in a state of independence,
within the bounds of the empire. They were called Skamars, and, like the Bagauds
of Gaul, formed organised confederacies of outlaws, originally consisting
of men driven to despair by the fiscal legislation. When the incursions of
the Bulgarians had wasted the fields of the cultivator, the government still
called upon him to pay the full amount of taxation imposed on his estate in
prosperous times: his produce, his cattle, his slaves, and his seed-corn were
carried away by the imperial officers. He could then only live by plundering
his fellow-subjects, who had hitherto escaped the calamities by which he had
been ruined; and thus the oppression of the imperial government was avenged
on the society that submitted to it without striving to reform its evils.
Constantine rooted out these bands. A celebrated chief of the Skamars was
publicly executed at Constantinople with the greatest barbarity, his living
body being dissected by surgeons after the amputation of his hands and feet.
The habitual barbarity of legal punishments in the Byzantine empire can hardly
relieve the memory of Constantine from the reproach of cruelty, which this
punishment proves he was ready to employ against the enemies of his authority,
whether brigands or image-worshippers. His error, therefore, was not only
passing laws against liberty of conscience – which was a fault in accordance
with the spirit of the age – but in carrying these laws into execution with
a cruelty offensive to human feelings. Yet on many occasions Constantine gave
proofs of humanity, as well as of desire to protect his subjects. The Sclavonians
on the coast of Thrace, having fitted out some piratical vessels, carried
off many of the inhabitants of Tenedos, Imbros, and Samothrace, to sell them
as slaves. The emperor on this occasion ransomed two thousand five hundred
of his subjects, preferring to lower his own dignity, by paying a tribute
to the pirates, rather than allow those who looked to him for protection to
pine away their lives in hopeless misery. No act of his reign shows so much
real greatness of mind as this. He also concluded the convention with the
Saracens for an exchange of prisoners, which has been already mentioned –
one of the earliest examples of the exchanges between the Mohammedans and
the Christians, which afterwards became frequent on the Byzantine frontiers.
Man was exchanged for man, woman for woman, and child for child. These conventions
tended to save the lives of innumerable prisoners, and rendered the future
wars between the Saracens and Romans less barbarous.
Constantine was active in his internal administration, and his schemes for
improving the condition of the inhabitants of his empire were carried out
on a far more gigantic scale than modern governments have considered practicable.
One of his plans for reviving agriculture in uncultivated districts was by
repeopling them with colonies of emigrants, to whom he secured favourable
conditions and efficient protection. On the banks of the Artanas in Bithynia,
a colony of two hundred thousand Sclavonians was formed. The Christian population
of Germanicia, Doliche, Melitene, and Theodosiopolis was established in Thrace,
to watch and restrain the rude Sclavonians settled in that province; and these
Asiatic colonists long continued to flourish and multiply. They are even accused
of spreading the heretical opinions which they had brought from the East throughout
great part of western Europe, by the extent of their commercial relations
and the example of their prosperity and honesty. It is not to be supposed
that the measures of Constantine's administration, however great his political
abilities might be, were competent to remove many of the social evils of his
age. Agriculture was still carried on in the rudest manner; and as communications
were difficult and insecure, and transport expensive, capital could hardly
be laid out on land to any extent with much profit. As usual under such circumstances,
we find years of famine and plenty alternating in close succession. Yet the
bitterest enemy of Constantine, the abbot Theophanes, confesses that this
reign was one of general abundance. It is true, he reproaches him with loading
the husbandmen with taxes; but he also accuses him of being a new Midas, who
made gold so common in then hands of all that it became cheap. The abbot's
political economy, it must be confessed, is not so ortodox as his calumny.
If the Patriarch Nicephorus, another enemy of Constantine, is to be believed,
grain was so abundant, or gold so rare, that sixty measures of wheat, or seventy
measures of barley, were sold for a nomisma, or gold Byzant. To guard against
severe drought in the capital, and supply the gardens in its immediate vicinity
with water, Constantine repaired the great aqueduct of Valens. the flourishing
condition of the towns in Greece at the time is attested by the fact, that
the best workmen in cement were sought in the Hellenic cities and the islands
of the Archipelago.
TO BE
CONTINUED