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During this period two dynasties occupied the throne, each
lasting for several generations. Both were of Eastern
origin, the one from Northern Syria, the other from Phrygia.
Leo V (813-20) also was of Oriental extraction. On the other
hand, Nicephorus I (802-11) and his son-in-law Michael I,
Rhangabe (811-13), were Greeks. In other words, the
government of the empire became orientalized. This racial
antagonism must be borne in mind in order to grasp the
bitterness of the religious contentions of the period. The
same period shows a second dynastic anomaly: for the first
and last time there is an empress on the throne not as
regent, but with the full title Basileus. This is
Irene, perhaps the most disagreeable character of all the
great Byzantine women. Like Athenais, she was an Athenian,
but in the charm of the Muses she was totally lacking. Two
passions possessed her soul: ambition and religious
fanaticism, but her piety was of a strange kind. She
persisted in her devotion to her party with the unswerving
conviction that her opinion was right, and she did not
hesitate to commit the most atrocious crimes of which a
woman could be guilty in order to ruin her son morally and
physically. Not without reason has Irene been compared to
Catherine de' Medici. On the death of her husband, Leo IV
(775-80), in her desire for power she strove to keep her son
as a minor as long as possible, and finally to set him aside
altogether. Of her own authority she cancelled the betrothal
of Constantine VI (780-97) to Rotrud, the daughter of
Charlemagne, and forced him to marry Maria, an Armenian, a
woman wholly distasteful to him. When the seventeen-year-old
emperor showed a disposition to escape her power, she had
him scourged with rods. She finally lent her sanction to his
marriage with a woman of the court, Theodota, a union
regarded by the Church as bigamous. In this way she thought
to make his accession to power impossible. The worst,
however, was still to come. Irene took advantage of an
uprising to rid herself of her son permanently. Constantine
VI, blinded at the command of his mother, ended his life in
an obscure apartment of the imperial palace, where Theodota
bore him a son. His mother now ruled alone (797-802) until
the elevation of the grand treasurer, Nicephorus put an end
to her power, and she spent her remaining years on the
island of Lesbos in sickness and poverty.
Irene is honoured as a saint in the Greek Church because
at the Seventh General Synod of Nicaea (787), she obtained
important concessions in the matter of the veneration of
images. Though the adoration of images, as well as other
abusive practices of veneration, which had already been
condemned as idolatrous, were again wholly forbidden,
prostrate veneration, incense, and candles were permitted.
Theodora achieved a similar prominence. After the fall of
Irene, the Iconoclasts again gained the upper hand, and the
brief reign of Michael I, who supplanted his brother-in-law
Stauracius (811), was powerless to change this. The Emperor
Theophilus (829-42) in the vigour of his religious
persecution approached the energetic Constantine V (741-75),
known to the opposite party, and later to historians, by the
insulting epithet of Copronymus. When Theodora became
regent, through the early death of her husband, she
introduced milder measures. A compromise was effected
between the parties. At the synod of 843 permission was
given for the veneration of images, and at the same time the
anathema was removed from the name of the Emperor Theophilus.
In order to remove it, Theodora, it is said, was guilty of a
pious fraud and the false declaration that the emperor,
before his death, had been converted to the veneration of
images. Of more importance, however, is the feet that the
members of the ecclesiastical party by removing the anathema
against the emperor yielded to state authority, and while
victorious in the dogmatic controversy acknowledged that
they were vanquished in the ecclesiastico-political.
The questions of this time seem to have concerned matters
of far-reaching importance, problems which, despite their
strange dress, appear fundamentally quite modern and
familiar. The dogmatical side of these contests was not
connected with the old controversy about the two natures of
Christ, but with the heretical views of different Oriental
sects, influenced by Judaism and Mohammedanism. The eastern
frontier of the empire in Asia Minor was the home of these
multifarious sects, which guaranteed the separate existence
of the tribes which belonged to them and regarded themselves
as the "faithful" in opposition to the state Church. Leo
III, the Syrian (717-41), who saved Byzantium from the
Arabian peril, repulsed the last serious attack of the Arabs
on the capital (September, 717, to August, 718), by his
reforms made the empire superior to its foes, and brought
the views of these sectaries into the policy of the
Byzantine empire. In the celebrated edict of 726 he
condemned the veneration of images, a decree which he
considered part of his reforming activity. Probably he hoped
by this means to bring the people of the empire closer to
Islam, to lessen the differences between the two religions.
This may be regarded as another attempt to orientalize the
empire, such as the dynasty of Heraclius and others before
had previously made. The Greek nation answered by promptly
repudiating the attempt, all the more emphatically because
here again dogmatic and national antagonisms were connected
with the struggle between Church and State.
It is unjust to attribute unworthy motives to the party
who called themselves image-worshipers and rallied around
such men as Plato, abbot of the monastery of Saccudion, and
his nephew Theodore, afterwards Abbot of Studium. The fact
is that the whole movement was based on a deeply religious
spirit which led to detachment from the world and indeed to
complete insensibility towards all earthly ties, even the
most legitimate. The ideal of these men is not the Christian
ideal of today; their rigorous stand might not always meet
with our approval. But it was a party that exerted a
powerful influence on the people, which could only be
intensified by persecution. In this movement it seems
possible to discern the forerunner of the great reform
movement of the West during the tenth and eleventh centuries
— a movement which tended to intensify religious life and
which stood for the liberation of the Church from the
control of the State.
The Iconoclasts, on the other hand, represented a
principle which we know to have been forced into the
Greek-Byzantine world as something foreign. It encountered
sentiments and views, however, with which it could combine.
In spite of the Christianization of Byzantium, there
remained there a residue of ancient pagan Roman ideas. The
Byzantines of this school often appear so modern to us
precisely because they were permeated with rationalistic
anti-ecclesiastical sentiments. Such men were found most
frequently among the cultured classes, the high dignitaries
of Church and State. This is why Iconoclasm which was
sympathetic to this rationalistic tendency, could develop
into a general movement and why it reminds us in so many
ways of the rationalistic movement of the eighteenth
century; it also explains why the Iconoclastic emperors
always found supporters in the higher ranks of the clergy.
Thus it was that Leo III conducted his attack against the
protesting popes through the Patriarch Anastasius. When Pope
Gregory II refused to recognize the edict of 726, the
emperor withdrew from his jurisdiction Sicily, Lower Italy,
and Illyria, and placed them under the Patriarch of
Constantinople. Constantine Copronymus had similar support.
Upheld by prelates in favour of a national Church, he once
more, through the council of 754, prohibited the veneration
of images. We know of the numerous martyrdoms caused by the
execution of the decree, and how the Empress Irene, herself
a friend of the "image-worshipers", finally yielded. There
soon followed the reaction of the Icon under Leo V the
Armenian, and the Phrygian dynasty, and at last the legal
restoration of image-worship by Theodora. We have already
seen that this victory of the orthodox party, viewed from an
ecclesiastico-political standpoint, was not complete. The
reason of this partial defeat lay not in the existence of a
party among the higher clergy favouring a national Church,
but in the fact that the orthodox party gradually lost their
hold on the people. We know how the antagonism of the Greeks
to the Latins had gradually grown more intense. It was
regarded as unpatriotic when Theodore of Studium and his
friends so openly declared for Rome. The strength of this
National Church movement came into most perfect evidence
with the advent of the great Photius. His rise and the fall
of the Patriarch Ignatius were connected with a shabby court
intrigue, the Patriarch Ignatius having ventured to oppose
the all-powerful Bardas during the reign of Michael III
(842-67). At first the proceedings of Photius differed in no
respect from those of a common office-seeker. But by
opposing the claims of Old Rome to Bulgarian obedience he
suddenly gained immense popularity, and thus paved the way
for the ultimate separation of the Greek and Latin Churches.
It was Boris (852-88), the Bulgarian Tsar, who stirred up
the entire question. With the help of St. Clement, a
disciple of Methodius, the Apostle of the Slavs, he had
introduced Christianity among his people, on the occasion of
his own baptism, the Emperor Michael III was sponsor. Soon
afterwards Boris tried to withdraw from the influence of
East Rome, and enter into closer relations with Old Rome. At
the same time the Holy See renewed its claims to the
Illyrian obedience. Photius's answer was the egkuklios
epistole (circular letter) of 867, by which he sought to
establish the separation from Old Rome both in ritual and in
dogma. In spite of the many vacillations of Byzantine
polities between the partisans of Ignatius and those of
Photius during the next decades, this was the first decisive
step towards the schism of 1054.
During this whole period the Bulgarians had given great
trouble to the Byzantine Empire. The Emperor Nicephorus I
fell in battle against them, and his successors warded them
off only with the greatest difficulty. Equally violent were
the wars against the Saracens and the Slavs. There was no
second investment of the capital by the Syrian Arabs, it is
true, though on the other hand, in 860 the city was hard
pressed by the Varangian Ros, but all the more danger was to
be apprehended from the Arabs who had been expelled from
Spain and had settled in Egypt in 815. In 826 they conquered
Crete, and about the same time the Arabs of Northern Africa
began to settle in Sicily, a migratory movement which
finally resulted in the complete loss of the island to the
Byzantines. As once they had come from Syria and Asia Minor
so now many Greek families migrated to Lower Italy and the
Peloponnesus. The Christianization and hellenization of the
Slavs was now begun, and soon produced rich fruits. It is
difficult, as we have already said, to determine how great
an admixture of Slavic blood flows in the veins of the
Greeks of today, on the other hand, it is certain that the
Slavs have left many traces of their laws and customs. The
agrarian law dating, possibly, from the time of the Emperor
Leo III, shows the strength of the Slavic influence on the
development of the Byzantine agrarian system.
It remains to touch on the relations between the
Byzantine Empire and the West during this period. In the
West, the Frankish nation had gradually taken the lead of
all other Germanic peoples. As we know, the relations of
Byzantium with these nations were always somewhat unstable.
One thing only had remained unchanged: the Byzantine rulers,
as legitimate successors of the Roman emperors, had always
maintained their claim to sovereignty over the Germanic
peoples. For the most part this had been unconditionally
admitted, as is evident from the coinage. At the time of the
Empress Irene, however, a great change set in. The
restoration of the Roman Empire of the West by Charlemagne
(800) was the signal for a complete break with all previous
traditions. The West stood now on the same footing as the
East. As we know, this important step had been taken in full
accord with the papacy. Historically, it is thus a part of
the controversies which began with the withdrawal of
Illyrian obedience, and culminated in the egkuklios
epistole of Photius. The idea of a national imperial
Church seemed to prevail in both East and West; to be sure
this was only seemingly so, for the popes did not give up
their universal supremacy, but soon began again to utilize
politically their advantageous location midway between East
and West. |
