Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03, page 9
part #3 of Byzantium Series
Such plans that he might have had would anyway have been in vain, for in the summer of 1112 Alexius fell gravely ill and seems to have been incapacitated for several weeks. Correspondence with Rome continued intermittently; but the Pope insisted as firmly as ever on his supremacy, Byzantium refused to compromise its independence and nothing was settled. In any case, the Emperor soon found his attention taken up with other, more immediate problems.
The peace that had begun at the end of 1108 with the Treaty of Devol continued for three years; then, in 1111, the wars began again and continued for the rest of the reign. That autumn, indeed, Alexius narrowly avoided having to fight simultaneously on two fronts, when a new outbreak of hostilities against the Turks coincided with the arrival of a fleet of Genoese and Pisan ships which threatened to ravage the Ionian coast. Fortunately he was able to buy them off by concluding a treaty with the Pisans, by which he undertook not to impede them in their Crusading activities, to make an annual present of gold and silk to their cathedral and - most important of all - to allow them to maintain a permanent trading colony in Constantinople, the most prominent members of which would enjoy reserved seats both for services in St Sophia and for games in the Hippodrome.1
The Turks were less easily dealt with. Fortunately for Alexius, they were not yet out for conquest; they still had more than enough territory to absorb and consolidate in Asia Minor. Their invasions across the imperial border were more in the nature of carefully planned raids than anything else: they avoided pitched battles wherever possible, attacking
1 This was not the first treaty between the Empire and the Italian trading republics: Basil II had concluded one with Venice as early as 992. (See Byzantium: The Apogee, p. 257.) Strangely, perhaps, the Genoese did not insist on similar privileges - which they were not to receive until 115 5, from Manuel I.
on a wide front at several points simultaneously - thus obliging the Byzantines to spread their forces - and then making a quick getaway with as much plunder and as many prisoners as they could. In 1111 they had crossed the Hellespont into Thrace, where Anna reports that her father was campaigning against them early the following year. In 1113 another Turkish army, estimated this time at fifty-four thousand, laid siege to Nicaea; but it failed in its attempt, was surprised by Alexius near Dorylaeum and soundly defeated. The next year saw the basileus back in Thrace to defend the northern frontier against a new invasion by the Cumans; and scarcely had they been successfully repulsed than, in 1115, the Turks were once again on the march, this time beneath the banners of Malik-Shah, Seljuk Sultan of Iconium.
But the Emperor was slowing down. By now nearly sixty - sixty-eight if we are to believe Zonaras1 - and already prey to the disease that was to destroy him, he delayed his reaction until the following year: only in the autumn of 1116 did he set off with his army to attack the Sultan in his own Anatolian heartland. He advanced as far as the city of Philomelion, meeting with little of the resistance that he had expected; his progress was, however, appreciably delayed by the appearance at every halt of vast numbers of homeless Greeks - families who had fled the Turkish invaders and who now emerged from their various places of refuge, attaching themselves to the army for protection. At this point, for reasons unclear, he decided to retire; and it was only after he had started on his homeward road that Malik-Shah decided to attack. This, according to Anna,2 proved a serious mistake. The Sultan's army was, she reports, so destroyed by the Byzantines that he was forced to sue for peace, abandoning his recent conquests and recognizing the imperial frontiers that had existed immediately before Manzikert, in the reign of Romanus Diogenes.
Here, she continues, was a historic victory indeed. Alas, she seems to have been indulging in more of her favourite wishful thinking. Romanus's old frontiers stretched eastward to Armenia - which, quite apart from other considerations, were not the Sultan's to restore. Subsequent events, in any case, strongly suggest that no such surrender of territory was made. Malik-Shah may well have closed down his advance outposts in western Anatolia; but he remained in Iconium and it is unlikely that the Emperor returned with any major territorial concessions.
1 Seep4, note 3.
2 The Alexiad.XV.vi.
Thanks to the hopeless confusion of Anna's account - as well as her obvious bias - and to the paucity of our other sources,1 we shall never know the truth about Philomelion; all that can be said is that, whether the Emperor's victory was decisive or negligible, it was his last. He returned to the capital a sick man, to find himself in the centre of bitter domestic strife.
Admittedly this was no new experience for him. Ever since his accession, his family had been divided. In the early days the fault had been very largely his own; we have seen how much power he gave to his mother, Anna Dalassena, and how he had rejected his fifteen-year-old wife Irene Ducas - even trying to prevent her coronation - in his infatuation with Mary of Alania. Mary, it is true, had soon faded out of the picture and Irene had returned to her husband's side; but Anna had continued for several years as the principal power behind the throne - more formidable even than her second son, the sebastocrator Isaac, with whom she theoretically shared the regency while Alexius was away on his numerous campaigns. She thus became more and more unpopular in Constantinople, to the point where the Emperor began to see her as a serious liability. Some time around 1090, therefore, she had retired — ostensibly of her own accord — to the monastery of the Pantepoptes where she had died, not altogether in disgrace, a few years later.
With the disappearance of Anna Dalassena, the Empress Irene finally comes into her own. Her daughter Anna - in whom the virtue of filial respect almost becomes a vice — describes her thus:
Her natural inclination would have been to shun public life altogether. Most of her time was devoted to household duties and her own pursuits - reading the books of the saints, or turning her mind to good works and acts of charity . .. Whenever she was obliged to appear as Empress at some important ceremony, she was overcome with shyness and blushes. The story is told of how when the woman philosopher Theano2 once inadvertently bared her elbow, someone lightly remarked 'What a beautiful elbow!' 'But not,' Theano replied, 'for public show.' Thus it was with the Empress my mother ... So far from being pleased to reveal to the common gaze an elbow or her eyes, she was unwilling that even her voice should be heard by strangers .. . But since not even the gods, as the poet says, fight against necessity, she was forced to accompany the
1Our only other valuable authority is Zonaras, who attaches no particular importance to the campaign.
2The pupil, and possibly the wife, of Pythagoras.
Emperor on his frequent expeditions. Her innate modesty would have kept her inside the palace; on the other hand, her devotion to him and burning love for him compelled her, however unwillingly, to leave her home .. . The disease which attacked his feet required the most careful attention; he suffered excruciating pain from gout, and my mother's touch was what he most valued, for she understood him perfectly and by gentle massage could relieve him to some extent of his agony.1
Now all this may be perfectly true so far as it goes; but it seems likely that there was another consideration, apart from his gout, which caused Alexius to insist so firmly on Irene's accompanying him on campaign. He did not trust her an inch. It was not for his own safety that he feared; but he knew that she and her daughter had conceived a bitter hatred for her eldest son John Comnenus, heir apparent to the throne, and were for ever intriguing to disgrace or eliminate him so that Anna's husband, the Caesar Nicephorus Bryennius, might succeed instead. Gradually these two scheming women had become the focus for a number of other malcontents, among them the Emperor's second son Andronicus.
Irene never let slip an opportunity to blacken John in his father's eyes, representing him as a drunkard and debauchee hopelessly unfit to govern. Alexius, however, always refused to listen. He loved and trusted John, and - rightly, as it turned out - retained complete confidence in his abilities. Besides, he was determined to found a dynasty. One of the chief causes of Byzantine decline in the previous century had, he believed, been the fundamental instability of the throne itself, either passing to one or another of the Empress Zoe's feckless husbands or being looked upon as little more than a toy, to be shuttled backwards and forwards between the richest and most powerful families of the Empire. He himself had acquired it in just this way; but he would be the last to do so. If his own considerable achievements were to endure, the crown must be handed down in orderly succession to his first-born son and, God willing, to his son after him.
After his return to Constantinople his health steadily declined, until by the summer of 1118 it was clear that death could not be far away. By this time he was in constant pain and suffering serious respiratory difficulties; soon he was obliged to sit upright in order to breathe at all. Then his stomach and feet began to swell, while his mouth, tongue and throat became so inflamed that he could no longer swallow. Irene had him carried to her own palace of the Mangana, spending hours a day by
i The Alexiad, XII, iii.
his bedside and ordering prayers said throughout the Empire for his recovery; but she could bring him no relief, and saw, with everyone else, that he was sinking fast.
Some time in the afternoon of 15 August the news was brought to John Comnenus that his father had only a few hours to live and urgently wished to see him. He hastened to the Mangana, where the dying Alexius gave him his imperial ring and ordered him to lose no time in having himself proclaimed basileus. John did so, then ran across to St Sophia where, in the briefest of ceremonies, the Patriarch crowned him. Returning to the palace, he was at first - presumably on Irene's orders -denied admittance by the Varangian Guard; only when he showed them the ring and told them of his father's imminent death did they stand back and let him through.
What, meanwhile, of Irene herself? Still determined to secure the succession of Bryennius, she would not willingly have absented herself from her husband's last conversation with his son; and yet, although she seldom left his bedside, he had somehow contrived to remove her at this crucial moment for her plans. By the time she returned it was too late. Even now she made one last attempt to force him to recognize the rights of his son-in-law; but he only smiled and - by now too feeble to speak - raised his hands as if in thanksgiving. That evening he died, and was buried the next day with the minimum of ceremony in the monastery of Christ Philanthropos, founded by Irene some fifteen years before.
He deserved a more elaborate farewell; for his subjects owed Alexius Comnenus far more than they knew. First of all, he had achieved his principal object: to halt the political and moral decline that had begun after the death of Basil II in 1025 and to give the Empire a new stability. After fifty-six years during which it had been misgoverned by thirteen different monarchs, he alone had reigned for thirty-seven; his son was to continue for another twenty-five before his accidental death, his grandson for another thirty-seven. Next there was his military record: no Emperor had defended his people more courageously, or with greater determination, or against a greater number of enemies; nor had any done more to build up the imperial forces by land and sea. Thirdly, there was his brilliant handling of the Crusade, organizing the passage of perhaps a hundred thousand men, women and children of all ranks and classes of society, feeding them and so far as possible protecting them from one end of his Empire to the other. Had those Crusading armies marched a quarter of a century earlier than they in fact did, the consequences for them - and for Byzantium - might have been grave indeed.
Thus, in three different ways and in three different capacities - as statesman, general and diplomatist - Alexius Comnenus may be said to have saved the Empire. Inevitably, he had had his failures: the restoration of the economy, the healing of the rift with Rome, the recovery of South Italy. But of these only the first was serious; the other two were little more than dreams, never to be realized by Alexius or any of his successors. He had his failings, too - among them his shameless nepotism and his susceptibility to women: Mary of Alania, Anna Dalassena and his wife Irene all exerted far more power over him than he should have allowed. Even over the supremely important question of the succession he had not trusted himself to impose his will upon Irene, preferring to achieve his ends by trickery rather than by firm imperial command.
Did he regret that - except among his soldiers, by whom he was idolized - personal popularity should always have remained beyond his grasp? Not, probably, very much. He never courted it, and certainly never compromised his principles to win the plaudits of the crowd. From the outset of his reign he had ruled conscientiously, energetically and to the very best of his ability; and he left his son an Empire incomparably stronger and better organized than it had been for a century. He died content - as well he might.
5
John the Beautiful
[1118-43]
Should I not be considered mad if, having acquired the crown in a manner that was scarcely legitimate, and indeed scarcely Christian, I were to place it upon the head of a stranger, rather than upon that of my own son?
Alexius Comnenus to his wife, quoted by Nicetas Choniates, 'John Comnenus',
The account of the death of Alexius Comnenus as given in the previous chapter, which is principally based on the testimony of John Zonaras and Nicetas Choniates,1 bears little resemblance to that with which Anna Comnena ends The Alexiad. Anna paints an affecting picture of the distinguished doctors bickering round the bedside; of the increasing horror of the Emperor's sufferings; of the selflessness of his wife Irene, weeping 'tears more copious than the waters of the Nile' as she tended him through the long, agonizing days and nights; of the devoted ministrations of their daughters — Maria, Eudocia and of course Anna herself; of the candles that were lit and the hymns that were chanted; and, at the moment of death, of the widowed Empress kicking off her imperial purple slippers, tearing aside her veil, seizing a knife and slashing away at her beautiful hair. Anna gives, however, no hint of her father's last, not entirely creditable coup, when he prevented the succession of herself and her husband in favour of John, the rightful heir — whom, in her entire chapter, she mentions only once, and then does not even deign to call by his name.
Anna's hatred for John, which lasted all her life, was a simple matter of jealousy. As Alexius's eldest child, she had been betrothed in her infancy to the young Prince Constantine - son of Michael VII - and thus,
1 Nicetas began his career as an imperial secretary at the court, and ended as Grand Logothctc under the Angeli. His History, which begins with the death of Alexius and continues until 1206, is the most descriptive and colourful that has come down to us since the days of Psellus and will, I hope, do much to enliven the following chapters.
for the first five years of her life, had been heiress-presumptive to the throne of Byzantium. Then, on 13 September 1087, the Empress Irene had given birth to a son, John; and Anna's dreams of the imperial diadem were shattered. But not for long. On the premature death of Constantine she had married in 1097 Nicephorus Bryennius, son1 of that general of the same name who, having made a bid for the throne in 1077, had been captured and blinded by Botaneiates. Nicephorus too had proved himself a fine soldier and leader of men, to the point where, in 1111 or thereabouts - the precise date is uncertain - Alexius had conferred upon him the title of Caesar; and immediately all his wife's ambitions were resurrected. The story of her recruitment of her mother Irene and her brother Andronicus to her cause has already been told, as has that of their ultimate failure; but even now Anna did not give up. She was almost certainly behind a plot to murder John at their father's funeral - from which her brother, having received advance warning, wisely stayed away; and a few months after John's accession she organized a conspiracy - to be led by her husband Bryennius - to murder him in the Philopation, a country palace just outside the Golden Gate. Unfortunately, Bryennius's courage failed him at the last moment and he never turned up at the rendezvous. Meanwhile his fellow-conspirators, whom he had failed to inform of his defection, were caught wandering about in the palace and immediately arrested.
The new Emperor showed himself surprisingly merciful. There were no blindings, no mutilations. The guilty were sentenced to nothing worse than the confiscation of their possessions - which most of them were later able to recover. Nicephorus Bryennius escaped scot-free and served the Emperor loyally in the field for another twenty years until his death, occupying his idle hours in the composition of a remarkably boring history. His wife was not so lucky. On hearing of what had happened at the Philopation, she had flown into a hysterical rage and had cursed Providence in the crudest possible terms for having endowed her husband with certain attributes of virility which, she claimed, had far better been given to her. She too suffered the temporary confiscation of her property; worse, she was barred in perpetuity from the imperial court. Abandoned and humiliated, she settled in the convent of the Theotokos Kecharitomene,2 where she lived for the next thirty-five
1Not, I think, the grandson as is often claimed; see The Alexiad, VII, ii.
2i.e., the Virgin Full of Grace. This convent adjoined the monastery of Christ Philanthropos and was also founded by the Empress Irene; the two buildings were separated by a wall, but shared a single water system. The forty nuns of the Kecharitomene lived a strictly coenobitic life, sleeping in a common dormitory; Irene had, however, considerately added one or two rather more comfortable apartments for the benefit of female members of the imperial family.
years, writing the life of her father and endlessly lamenting her injuries, nearly all of which - had she had the honesty to admit it - were self-inflicted.
At the time of his accession, John Comnenus was a month short of his thirtieth birthday. Thanks to his sister's reticence on the subject, we know disappointingly little of his early years, although she does give us a brief description of his appearance at birth:
