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I have now deduced from Trajan to Constantine, from
Constantine to Heraclius, the regular series of the Roman
emperors; and faithfully exposed the prosperous and adverse
fortunes of their reigns. Five centuries of the decline and
fall of the empire have already elapsed; but a period of
more than eight hundred years still separates me from the
term of my labors, the taking of Constantinople by the
Turks. Should I persevere in the same course, should I
observe the same measure, a prolix and slender thread would
be spun through many a volume, nor would the patient reader
find an adequate reward of instruction or amusement. At
every step, as we sink deeper in the decline and fall of the
Eastern empire, the annals of each succeeding reign would
impose a more ungrateful and melancholy task. These annals
must continue to repeat a tedious and uniform tale of
weakness and misery; the natural connection of causes and
events would be broken by frequent and hasty transitions,
and a minute accumulation of circumstances must destroy the
light and effect of those general pictures which compose the
use and ornament of a remote history. From the time of
Heraclius, the Byzantine theatre is contracted and darkened:
the line of empire, which had been defined by the laws of
Justinian and the arms of Belisarius, recedes on all sides
from our view; the Roman name, the proper subject of our
inquiries, is reduced to a narrow corner of Europe, to the
lonely suburbs of Constantinople; and the fate of the Greek
empire has been compared to that of the Rhine, which loses
itself in the sands, before its waters can mingle with the
ocean. The scale of dominion is diminished to our view by
the distance of time and place; nor is the loss of external
splendor compensated by the nobler gifts of virtue and
genius. In the last moments of her decay, Constantinople
was doubtless more opulent and populous than Athens at her
most flourishing aera, when a scanty sum of six thousand
talents, or twelve hundred thousand pounds sterling was
possessed by twenty-one thousand male citizens of an adult
age. But each of these citizens was a freeman, who dared to
assert the liberty of his thoughts, words, and actions,
whose person and property were guarded by equal law; and who
exercised his independent vote in the government of the
republic. Their numbers seem to be multiplied by the strong
and various discriminations of character; under the shield
of freedom, on the wings of emulation and vanity, each
Athenian aspired to the level of the national dignity; from
this commanding eminence, some chosen spirits soared beyond
the reach of a vulgar eye; and the chances of superior merit
in a great and populous kingdom, as they are proved by
experience, would excuse the computation of imaginary
millions. The territories of Athens, Sparta, and their
allies, do not exceed a moderate province of France or
England; but after the trophies of Salamis and Platea, they
expand in our fancy to the gigantic size of Asia, which had
been trampled under the feet of the victorious Greeks. But
the subjects of the Byzantine empire, who assume and
dishonor the names both of Greeks and Romans, present a dead
uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by
the weakness of humanity, nor animated by the vigor of
memorable crimes. The freemen of antiquity might repeat with
generous enthusiasm the sentence of Homer, "that on the
first day of his servitude, the captive is deprived of one
half of his manly virtue." But the poet had only seen the
effects of civil or domestic slavery, nor could he foretell
that the second moiety of manhood must be annihilated by the
spiritual despotism which shackles not only the actions, but
even the thoughts, of the prostrate votary. By this double
yoke, the Greeks were oppressed under the successors of
Heraclius; the tyrant, a law of eternal justice, was
degraded by the vices of his subjects; and on the throne, in
the camp, in the schools, we search, perhaps with fruitless
diligence, the names and characters that may deserve to be
rescued from oblivion. Nor are the defects of the subject
compensated by the skill and variety of the painters. Of a
space of eight hundred years, the four first centuries are
overspread with a cloud interrupted by some faint and broken
rays of historic light: in the lives of the emperors, from
Maurice to Alexius, Basil the Macedonian has alone been the
theme of a separate work; and the absence, or loss, or
imperfection of contemporary evidence, must be poorly
supplied by the doubtful authority of more recent compilers.
The four last centuries are exempt from the reproach of
penury; and with the Comnenian family, the historic muse of
Constantinople again revives, but her apparel is gaudy, her
motions are without elegance or grace. A succession of
priests, or courtiers, treads in each other's footsteps in
the same path of servitude and superstition: their views are
narrow, their judgment is feeble or corrupt; and we close
the volume of copious barrenness, still ignorant of the
causes of events, the characters of the actors, and the
manners of the times which they celebrate or deplore. The
observation which has been applied to a man, may be extended
to a whole people, that the energy of the sword is
communicated to the pen; and it will be found by experience,
that the tone of history will rise or fall with the spirit
of the age.
From these considerations, I should have abandoned without
regret the Greek slaves and their servile historians, had I
not reflected that the fate of the Byzantine monarchy is
passively connected with the most splendid and important
revolutions which have changed the state of the world. The
space of the lost provinces was immediately replenished with
new colonies and rising kingdoms: the active virtues of
peace and war deserted from the vanquished to the victorious
nations; and it is in their origin and conquests, in their
religion and government, that we must explore the causes and
effects of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire. Nor
will this scope of narrative, the riches and variety of
these materials, be incompatible with the unity of design
and composition. As, in his daily prayers, the Mussulman of
Fez or Delhi still turns his face towards the temple of
Mecca, the historian's eye shall be always fixed on the city
of Constantinople. The excursive line may embrace the wilds
of Arabia and Tartary, but the circle will be ultimately
reduced to the decreasing limit of the Roman monarchy.
On this principle I shall now establish the plan of the last
two volumes of the present work. The first chapter will
contain, in a regular series, the emperors who reigned at
Constantinople during a period of six hundred years, from
the days of Heraclius to the Latin conquest; a rapid
abstract, which may be supported by a general appeal to the
order and text of the original historians. In this
introduction, I shall confine myself to the revolutions of
the throne, the succession of families, the personal
characters of the Greek princes, the mode of their life and
death, the maxims and influence of their domestic
government, and the tendency of their reign to accelerate or
suspend the downfall of the Eastern empire. Such a
chronological review will serve to illustrate the various
argument of the subsequent chapters; and each circumstance
of the eventful story of the Barbarians will adapt itself in
a proper place to the Byzantine annals. The internal state
of the empire, and the dangerous heresy of the Paulicians,
which shook the East and enlightened the West, will be the
subject of two separate chapters; but these inquiries must
be postponed till our further progress shall have opened the
view of the world in the ninth and tenth centuries of the
Christian area. After this foundation of Byzantine history,
the following nations will pass before our eyes, and each
will occupy the space to which it may be entitled by
greatness or merit, or the degree of connection with the
Roman world and the present age. I. The Franks; a general
appellation which includes all the Barbarians of France,
Italy, and Germany, who were united by the sword and sceptre
of Charlemagne. The persecution of images and their
votaries separated Rome and Italy from the Byzantine throne,
and prepared the restoration of the Roman empire in the
West. II. The Arabs or Saracens. Three ample chapters
will be devoted to this curious and interesting object. In
the first, after a picture of the country and its
inhabitants, I shall investigate the character of Mahomet;
the character, religion, and success of the prophet. In the
second, I shall lead the Arabs to the conquest of Syria,
Egypt, and Africa, the provinces of the Roman empire; nor
can I check their victorious career till they have
overthrown the monarchies of Persia and Spain. In the
third, I shall inquire how Constantinople and Europe were
saved by the luxury and arts, the division and decay, of the
empire of the caliphs. A single chapter will include, III.
The Bulgarians, IV. Hungarians, and, V. Russians, who
assaulted by sea or by land the provinces and the capital;
but the last of these, so important in their present
greatness, will excite some curiosity in their origin and
infancy. VI. The Normans; or rather the private
adventurers of that warlike people, who founded a powerful
kingdom in Apulia and Sicily, shook the throne of
Constantinople, displayed the trophies of chivalry, and
almost realized the wonders of romance. VII. The Latins;
the subjects of the pope, the nations of the West, who
enlisted under the banner of the cross for the recovery or
relief of the holy sepulchre. The Greek emperors were
terrified and preserved by the myriads of pilgrims who
marched to Jerusalem with Godfrey of Bouillon and the peers
of Christendom. The second and third crusades trod in the
footsteps of the first: Asia and Europe were mingled in a
sacred war of two hundred years; and the Christian powers
were bravely resisted, and finally expelled by Saladin and
the Mamelukes of Egypt. In these memorable crusades, a
fleet and army of French and Venetians were diverted from
Syria to the Thracian Bosphorus: they assaulted the capital,
they subverted the Greek monarchy: and a dynasty of Latin
princes was seated near threescore years on the throne of
Constantine. VII. The Greeks themselves, during this
period of captivity and exile, must be considered as a
foreign nation; the enemies, and again the sovereigns of
Constantinople. Misfortune had rekindled a spark of national
virtue; and the Imperial series may be continued with some
dignity from their restoration to the Turkish conquest. IX.
The Moguls and Tartars. By the arms of Zingis and his
descendants, the globe was shaken from China to Poland and
Greece: the sultans were overthrown: the caliphs fell, and
the Caesars trembled on their throne. The victories of
Timour suspended above fifty years the final ruin of the
Byzantine empire. X. I have already noticed the first
appearance of the Turks; and the names of the fathers, of
Seljuk and Othman, discriminate the two successive dynasties
of the nation, which emerged in the eleventh century from
the Scythian wilderness. The former established a splendid
and potent kingdom from the banks of the Oxus to Antioch and
Nice; and the first crusade was provoked by the violation of
Jerusalem and the danger of Constantinople. From an humble
origin, the Ottomans arose, the scourge and terror of
Christendom. Constantinople was besieged and taken by
Mahomet II., and his triumph annihilates the remnant, the
image, the title, of the Roman empire in the East. The
schism of the Greeks will be connected with their last
calamities, and the restoration of learning in the Western
world. I shall return from the captivity of the new, to the
ruins of ancient Rome; and the venerable name, the
interesting theme, will shed a ray of glory on the
conclusion of my labors.
The emperor Heraclius had punished a tyrant and ascended his
throne; and the memory of his reign is perpetuated by the
transient conquest, and irreparable loss, of the Eastern
provinces. After the death of Eudocia, his first wife, he
disobeyed the patriarch, and violated the laws, by his
second marriage with his niece Martina; and the superstition
of the Greeks beheld the judgment of Heaven in the diseases
of the father and the deformity of his offspring. But the
opinion of an illegitimate birth is sufficient to distract
the choice, and loosen the obedience, of the people: the
ambition of Martina was quickened by maternal love, and
perhaps by the envy of a step- mother; and the aged husband
was too feeble to withstand the arts of conjugal
allurements. Constantine, his eldest son, enjoyed in a
mature age the title of Augustus; but the weakness of his
constitution required a colleague and a guardian, and he
yielded with secret reluctance to the partition of the
empire. The senate was summoned to the palace to ratify or
attest the association of Heracleonas, the son of Martina:
the imposition of the diadem was consecrated by the prayer
and blessing of the patriarch; the senators and patricians
adored the majesty of the great emperor and the partners of
his reign; and as soon as the doors were thrown open, they
were hailed by the tumultuary but important voice of the
soldiers. After an interval of five months, the pompous
ceremonies which formed the essence of the Byzantine state
were celebrated in the cathedral and the hippodrome; the
concord of the royal brothers was affectedly displayed by
the younger leaning on the arm of the elder; and the name of
Martina was mingled in the reluctant or venal acclamations
of the people. Heraclius survived this association about
two years: his last testimony declared his two sons the
equal heirs of the Eastern empire, and commanded them to
honor his widow Martina as their mother and their sovereign.
When Martina first appeared on the throne with the name and
attributes of royalty, she was checked by a firm, though
respectful, opposition; and the dying embers of freedom were
kindled by the breath of superstitious prejudice. "We
reverence," exclaimed the voice of a citizen, "we reverence
the mother of our princes; but to those princes alone our
obedience is due; and Constantine, the elder emperor, is of
an age to sustain, in his own hands, the weight of the
sceptre. Your sex is excluded by nature from the toils of
government. How could you combat, how could you answer, the
Barbarians, who, with hostile or friendly intentions, may
approach the royal city? May Heaven avert from the Roman
republic this national disgrace, which would provoke the
patience of the slaves of Persia!" Martina descended from
the throne with indignation, and sought a refuge in the
female apartment of the palace. The reign of Constantine
the Third lasted only one hundred and three days: he expired
in the thirtieth year of his age, and, although his life had
been a long malady, a belief was entertained that poison had
been the means, and his cruel step-mother the author, of his
untimely fate. Martina reaped indeed the harvest of his
death, and assumed the government in the name of the
surviving emperor; but the incestuous widow of Heraclius was
universally abhorred; the jealousy of the people was
awakened, and the two orphans whom Constantine had left
became the objects of the public care. It was in vain that
the son of Martina, who was no more than fifteen years of
age, was taught to declare himself the guardian of his
nephews, one of whom he had presented at the baptismal font:
it was in vain that he swore on the wood of the true cross,
to defend them against all their enemies. On his death-bed,
the late emperor had despatched a trusty servant to arm the
troops and provinces of the East in the defence of his
helpless children: the eloquence and liberality of Valentin
had been successful, and from his camp of Chalcedon, he
boldly demanded the punishment of the assassins, and the
restoration of the lawful heir. The license of the
soldiers, who devoured the grapes and drank the wine of
their Asiatic vineyards, provoked the citizens of
Constantinople against the domestic authors of their
calamities, and the dome of St. Sophia reechoed, not with
prayers and hymns, but with the clamors and imprecations of
an enraged multitude. At their imperious command,
Heracleonas appeared in the pulpit with the eldest of the
royal orphans; Constans alone was saluted as emperor of the
Romans, and a crown of gold, which had been taken from the
tomb of Heraclius, was placed on his head, with the solemn
benediction of the patriarch. But in the tumult of joy and
indignation, the church was pillaged, the sanctuary was
polluted by a promiscuous crowd of Jews and Barbarians; and
the Monothelite Pyrrhus, a creature of the empress, after
dropping a protestation on the altar, escaped by a prudent
flight from the zeal of the Catholics. A more serious and
bloody task was reserved for the senate, who derived a
temporary strength from the consent of the soldiers and
people. The spirit of Roman freedom revived the ancient and
awful examples of the judgment of tyrants, and the Imperial
culprits were deposed and condemned as the authors of the
death of Constantine. But the severity of the conscript
fathers was stained by the indiscriminate punishment of the
innocent and the guilty: Martina and Heracleonas were
sentenced to the amputation, the former of her tongue, the
latter of his nose; and after this cruel execution, they
consumed the remainder of their days in exile and oblivion.
The Greeks who were capable of reflection might find some
consolation for their servitude, by observing the abuse of
power when it was lodged for a moment in the hands of an
aristocracy.
We shall imagine ourselves transported five hundred years
backwards to the age of the Antonines, if we listen to the
oration which Constans II. pronounced in the twelfth year of
his age before the Byzantine senate. After returning his
thanks for the just punishment of the assassins, who had
intercepted the fairest hopes of his father's reign, "By the
divine Providence," said the young emperor, "and by your
righteous decree, Martina and her incestuous progeny have
been cast headlong from the throne. Your majesty and wisdom
have prevented the Roman state from degenerating into
lawless tyranny. I therefore exhort and beseech you to
stand forth as the counsellors and judges of the common
safety." The senators were gratified by the respectful
address and liberal donative of their sovereign; but these
servile Greeks were unworthy and regardless of freedom; and
in his mind, the lesson of an hour was quickly erased by the
prejudices of the age and the habits of despotism. He
retained only a jealous fear lest the senate or people
should one day invade the right of primogeniture, and seat
his brother Theodosius on an equal throne. By the
imposition of holy orders, the grandson of Heraclius was
disqualified for the purple; but this ceremony, which seemed
to profane the sacraments of the church, was insufficient to
appease the suspicions of the tyrant, and the death of the
deacon Theodosius could alone expiate the crime of his royal
birth. (A) His murder was avenged by the imprecations of the
people, and the assassin, in the fullness of power, was
driven from his capital into voluntary and perpetual exile.
Constans embarked for Greece and, as if he meant to retort
the abhorrence which he deserved he is said, from the
Imperial galley, to have spit against the walls of his
native city. After passing the winter at Athens, he sailed
to Tarentum in Italy, visited Rome, (B) and concluded a long
pilgrimage of disgrace and sacrilegious rapine, by fixing
his residence at Syracuse. But if Constans could fly from
his people, he could not fly from himself. The remorse of
his conscience created a phantom who pursued him by land and
sea, by day and by night; and the visionary Theodosius,
presenting to his lips a cup of blood, said, or seemed to
say, "Drink, brother, drink;" a sure emblem of the
aggravation of his guilt, since he had received from the
hands of the deacon the mystic cup of the blood of Christ.
Odious to himself and to mankind, Constans perished by
domestic, perhaps by episcopal, treason, in the capital of
Sicily. A servant who waited in the bath, after pouring
warm water on his head, struck him violently with the vase.
He fell, stunned by the blow, and suffocated by the water;
and his attendants, who wondered at the tedious delay,
beheld with indifference the corpse of their lifeless
emperor. The troops of Sicily invested with the purple an
obscure youth, whose inimitable beauty eluded, and it might
easily elude, the declining art of the painters and
sculptors of the age.
Constans had left in the Byzantine palace three sons, the
eldest of whom had been clothed in his infancy with the
purple. When the father summoned them to attend his person
in Sicily, these precious hostages were detained by the
Greeks, and a firm refusal informed him that they were the
children of the state. The news of his murder was conveyed
with almost supernatural speed from Syracuse to
Constantinople; and Constantine, the eldest of his sons,
inherited his throne without being the heir of the public
hatred. His subjects contributed, with zeal and alacrity,
to chastise the guilt and presumption of a province which
had usurped the rights of the senate and people; the young
emperor sailed from the Hellespont with a powerful fleet;
and the legions of Rome and Carthage were assembled under
his standard in the harbor of Syracuse. The defeat of the
Sicilian tyrant was easy, his punishment just, and his
beauteous head was exposed in the hippodrome: but I cannot
applaud the clemency of a prince, who, among a crowd of
victims, condemned the son of a patrician, for deploring
with some bitterness the execution of a virtuous father.
The youth was castrated: he survived the operation, and the
memory of this indecent cruelty is preserved by the
elevation of Germanus to the rank of a patriarch and saint.
After pouring this bloody libation on his father's tomb,
Constantine returned to his capital; and the growth of his
young beard during the Sicilian voyage was announced, by the
familiar surname of Pogonatus, to the Grecian world. But
his reign, like that of his predecessor, was stained with
fraternal discord. On his two brothers, Heraclius and
Tiberius, he had bestowed the title of Augustus; an empty
title, for they continued to languish, without trust or
power, in the solitude of the palace. At their secret
instigation, the troops of the Anatolian theme or province
approached the city on the Asiatic side, demanded for the
royal brothers the partition or exercise of sovereignty, and
supported their seditious claim by a theological argument.
They were Christians, (they cried,) and orthodox Catholics;
the sincere votaries of the holy and undivided Trinity.
Since there are three equal persons in heaven, it is
reasonable there should be three equal persons upon earth.
The emperor invited these learned divines to a friendly
conference, in which they might propose their arguments to
the senate: they obeyed the summons, but the prospect of
their bodies hanging on the gibbet in the suburb of Galata
reconciled their companions to the unity of the reign of
Constantine. He pardoned his brothers, and their names were
still pronounced in the public acclamations: but on the
repetition or suspicion of a similar offence, the obnoxious
princes were deprived of their titles and noses, (C) in the
presence of the Catholic bishops who were assembled at
Constantinople in the sixth general synod. In the close of
his life, Pogonatus was anxious only to establish the right
of primogeniture: the heir of his two sons, Justinian and
Heraclius, was offered on the shrine of St. Peter, as a
symbol of their spiritual adoption by the pope; but the
elder was alone exalted to the rank of Augustus, and the
assurance of the empire.
After the decease of his father, the inheritance of the
Roman world devolved to Justinian II.; and the name of a
triumphant lawgiver was dishonored by the vices of a boy,
who imitated his namesake only in the expensive luxury of
building. 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 favorite ministers were two beings the
least susceptible of human sympathy, a eunuch and a monk: to
the one he abandoned the 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 vigor 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. In a dark dungeon, Leontius, a
general of reputation, had groaned above three years, with
some of the noblest and most deserving of the patricians: he
was suddenly drawn forth to assume the government of Greece;
and this promotion of an injured man was a mark of the
contempt rather than of the confidence of his prince. As he
was followed to the port by the kind offices of his friends,
Leontius observed, with a sigh, that he was a victim adorned
for sacrifice, and that inevitable death would pursue his
footsteps. They ventured to reply, that glory and empire
might be the recompense of a generous resolution; that every
order of men abhorred the reign of a monster; and that the
hands of two hundred thousand patriots expected only the
voice of a leader. The night was chosen for their
deliverance; and in the first effort of the conspirators,
the praefect was slain, and the prisons were forced open:
the emissaries of Leontius proclaimed in every street,
"Christians, to St. Sophia!" and the seasonable text of the
patriarch, "This is the day of the Lord!" was the prelude of
an inflammatory sermon. From the church the people
adjourned to the hippodrome: Justinian, in whose cause not a
sword had been drawn, was dragged before these tumultuary
judges, and their clamors demanded the instant death of the
tyrant. But Leontius, who was already clothed with the
purple, cast an eye of pity on the prostrate son of his own
benefactor and of so many emperors. The life of Justinian
was spared; the amputation of his nose, perhaps of his
tongue, was imperfectly performed: the happy flexibility of
the Greek language could impose the name of Rhinotmetus; and
the mutilated tyrant was banished to Chersonae in Crim-
Tartary, a lonely settlement, where corn, wine, and oil,
were imported as foreign luxuries.
On the edge of the Scythian wilderness, Justinian still
cherished the pride of his birth, and the hope of his
restoration. After three years' exile, he received the
pleasing intelligence that his injury was avenged by a
second revolution, and that Leontius in his turn had been
dethroned and mutilated by the rebel Apsimar, who assumed
the more respectable name of Tiberius. But the claim of
lineal succession was still formidable to a plebeian
usurper; and his jealousy was stimulated by the complaints
and charges of the Chersonites, who beheld the vices of the
tyrant in the spirit of the exile. With a band of
followers, attached to his person by common hope or common
despair, Justinian fled from the inhospitable shore to the
horde of the Chozars, who pitched their tents between the
Tanais and Borysthenes. The khan entertained with pity and
respect the royal suppliant: Phanagoria, once an opulent
city, on the Asiatic side of the lake Moeotis, was assigned
for his residence; and every Roman prejudice was stifled in
his marriage with the sister of the Barbarian, who seems,
however, from the name of Theodora, to have received the
sacrament of baptism. But the faithless Chozar was soon
tempted by the gold of Constantinople: and had not the
design been revealed by the conjugal love of Theodora, her
husband must have been assassinated or betrayed into the
power of his enemies. After strangling, with his own hands,
the two emissaries of the khan, Justinian sent back his wife
to her brother, and embarked on the Euxine in search of new
and more faithful allies. His vessel was assaulted by a
violent tempest; and one of his pious companions advised him
to deserve the mercy of God by a vow of general forgiveness,
if he should be restored to the throne. "Of forgiveness?"
replied the intrepid tyrant: "may I perish this instant -
may the Almighty whelm me in the waves - if I consent to
spare a single head of my enemies!" He survived this impious
menace, sailed into the mouth of the Danube, trusted his
person in the royal village of the Bulgarians, and purchased
the aid of Terbelis, a pagan conqueror, by the promise of
his daughter and a fair partition of the treasures of the
empire. The Bulgarian kingdom extended to the confines of
Thrace; and the two princes besieged Constantinople at the
head of fifteen thousand horse. Apsimar was dismayed by the
sudden and hostile apparition of his rival whose head had
been promised by the Chozar, and of whose evasion he was yet
ignorant. After an absence of ten years, the crimes of
Justinian were faintly remembered, and the birth and
misfortunes of their hereditary sovereign excited the pity
of the multitude, ever discontented with the ruling powers;
and by the active diligence of his adherents, he was
introduced into the city and palace of Constantine.
In rewarding his allies, and recalling his wife, Justinian
displayed some sense of honor and gratitude; (D) and Terbelis
retired, after sweeping away a heap of gold coin, which he
measured with his Scythian whip. But never was vow more
religiously performed than the sacred oath of revenge which
he had sworn amidst the storms of the Euxine. The two
usurpers (for I must reserve the name of tyrant for the
conqueror) were dragged into the hippodrome, the one from
his prison, the other from his palace. Before their
execution, Leontius and Apsimar were cast prostrate in
chains beneath the throne of the emperor; and Justinian,
planting a foot on each of their necks, contemplated above
an hour the chariot-race, while the inconstant people
shouted, in the words of the Psalmist, "Thou shalt trample
on the asp and basilisk, and on the lion and dragon shalt
thou set thy foot!" The universal defection which he had
once experienced might provoke him to repeat the wish of
Caligula, that the Roman people had but one head. Yet I
shall presume to observe, that such a wish is unworthy of an
ingenious tyrant, since his revenge and cruelty would have
been extinguished by a single blow, instead of the slow
variety of tortures which Justinian inflicted on the victims
of his anger. His pleasures were inexhaustible: neither
private virtue nor public service could expiate the guilt of
active, or even passive, obedience to an established
government; and, during the six years of his new reign, he
considered the axe, the cord, and the rack, as the only
instruments of royalty. But his most implacable hatred was
pointed against the Chersonites, who had insulted his exile
and violated the laws of hospitality. Their remote
situation afforded some means of defence, or at least of
escape; and a grievous tax was imposed on Constantinople, to
supply the preparations of a fleet and army. "All are
guilty, and all must perish," was the mandate of Justinian;
and the bloody execution was intrusted to his favorite
Stephen, who was recommended by the epithet of the savage.
Yet even the savage Stephen imperfectly accomplished the
intentions of his sovereign. The slowness of his attack
allowed the greater part of the inhabitants to withdraw into
the country; and the minister of vengeance contented himself
with reducing the youth of both sexes to a state of
servitude, with roasting alive seven of the principal
citizens, with drowning twenty in the sea, and with
reserving forty-two in chains to receive their doom from the
mouth of the emperor. In their return, the fleet was driven
on the rocky shores of Anatolia; and Justinian applauded the
obedience of the Euxine, which had involved so many
thousands of his subjects and enemies in a common shipwreck:
but the tyrant was still insatiate of blood; and a second
expedition was commanded to extirpate the remains of the
proscribed colony. In the short interval, the Chersonites
had returned to their city, and were prepared to die in
arms; the khan of the Chozars had renounced the cause of his
odious brother; the exiles of every province were assembled
in Tauris; and Bardanes, under the name of Philippicus, was
invested with the purple. The Imperial troops, unwilling
and unable to perpetrate the revenge of Justinian, escaped
his displeasure by abjuring his allegiance: the fleet, under
their new sovereign, steered back a more auspicious course
to the harbors of Sinope and Constantinople; and every
tongue was prompt to pronounce, every hand to execute, the
death of the tyrant. Destitute of friends, he was deserted
by his Barbarian guards; and the stroke of the assassin was
praised as an act of patriotism and Roman virtue. His son
Tiberius had taken refuge in a church; his aged grandmother
guarded the door; and the innocent youth, suspending round
his neck the most formidable relics, embraced with one hand
the altar, with the other the wood of the true cross. But
the popular fury that dares to trample on superstition, is
deaf to the cries of humanity; and the race of Heraclius was
extinguished after a reign of one hundred years
Between the fall of the Heraclian and the rise of the
Isaurian dynasty, a short interval of six years is divided
into three reigns. Bardanes, or Philippicus, was hailed at
Constantinople as a hero who had delivered his country from
a tyrant; and he might taste some moments of happiness in
the first transports of sincere and universal joy.
Justinian had left behind him an ample treasure, the fruit
of cruelty and rapine: but this useful fund was soon and
idly dissipated by his successor. On the festival of his
birthday, Philippicus entertained the multitude with the
games of the hippodrome; from thence he paraded through the
streets with a thousand banners and a thousand trumpets;
refreshed himself in the baths of Zeuxippus, and returning
to the palace, entertained his nobles with a sumptuous
banquet. At the meridian hour he withdrew to his chamber,
intoxicated with flattery and wine, and forgetful that his
example had made every subject ambitious, and that every
ambitious subject was his secret enemy. Some bold
conspirators introduced themselves in the disorder of the
feast; and the slumbering monarch was surprised, bound,
blinded, and deposed, before he was sensible of his danger.
Yet the traitors were deprived of their reward; and the free
voice of the senate and people promoted Artemius from the
office of secretary to that of emperor: he assumed the title
of Anastasius the Second, and displayed in a short and
troubled reign the virtues both of peace and war. But after
the extinction of the Imperial line, the rule of obedience
was violated, and every change diffused the seeds of new
revolutions. In a mutiny of the fleet, an obscure and
reluctant officer of the revenue was forcibly invested with
the purple: after some months of a naval war, Anastasius
resigned the sceptre; and the conqueror, Theodosius the
Third, submitted in his turn to the superior ascendant of
Leo, the general and emperor of the Oriental troops. His
two predecessors were permitted to embrace the
ecclesiastical profession: the restless impatience of
Anastasius tempted him to risk and to lose his life in a
treasonable enterprise; but the last days of Theodosius were
honorable and secure. The single sublime word, "Health,"
which he inscribed on his tomb, expresses the confidence of
philosophy or religion; and the fame of his miracles was
long preserved among the people of Ephesus. This convenient
shelter of the church might sometimes impose a lesson of
clemency; but it may be questioned whether it is for the
public interest to diminish the perils of unsuccessful
ambition.
I have dwelt on the fall of a tyrant; I shall briefly
represent the founder of a new dynasty, who is known to
posterity by the invectives of his enemies, and whose public
and private life is involved in the ecclesiastical story of
the Iconoclasts. Yet in spite of the clamors of
superstition, a favorable prejudice for the character of Leo
the Isaurian may be reasonably drawn from the obscurity of
his birth, and the duration of his reign. - I. In an age of
manly spirit, the prospect of an Imperial reward would have
kindled every energy of the mind, and produced a crowd of
competitors as deserving as they were desirous to reign.
Even in the corruption and debility of the modern Greeks,
the elevation of a plebeian from the last to the first rank
of society, supposes some qualifications above the level of
the multitude. He would probably be ignorant and disdainful
of speculative science; and, in the pursuit of fortune, he
might absolve himself from the obligations of benevolence
and justice; but to his character we may ascribe the useful
virtues of prudence and fortitude, the knowledge of mankind,
and the important art of gaining their confidence and
directing their passions. It is agreed that Leo was a native
of Isauria, and that Conon was his primitive name. The
writers, whose awkward satire is praise, describe him as an
itinerant pedler, who drove an ass with some paltry
merchandise to the country fairs; and foolishly relate that
he met on the road some Jewish fortune-tellers, who promised
him the Roman empire, on condition that he should abolish
the worship of idols. A more probable account relates the
migration of his father from Asia Minor to Thrace, where he
exercised the lucrative trade of a grazier; and he must have
acquired considerable wealth, since the first introduction
of his son was procured by a supply of five hundred sheep to
the Imperial camp. His first service was in the guards of
Justinian, where he soon attracted the notice, and by
degrees the jealousy, of the tyrant. His valor and
dexterity were conspicuous in the Colchian war: from
Anastasius he received the command of the Anatolian legions,
and by the suffrage of the soldiers he was raised to the
empire with the general applause of the Roman world. - II.
In this dangerous elevation, Leo the Third supported himself
against the envy of his equals, the discontent of a powerful
faction, and the assaults of his foreign and domestic
enemies. The Catholics, who accuse his religious
innovations, are obliged to confess that they were
undertaken with temper and conducted with firmness. Their
silence respects the wisdom of his administration and the
purity of his manners. After a reign of twenty-four years,
he peaceably expired in the palace of Constantinople; and
the purple which he had acquired was transmitted by the
right of inheritance to the third generation. (E)
In a long reign of thirty-four years, the son and successor
of Leo, Constantine the Fifth, surnamed Copronymus, attacked
with less temperate zeal the images or idols of the church.
Their votaries have exhausted the bitterness of religious
gall, in their portrait of this spotted panther, this
antichrist, this flying dragon of the serpent's seed, who
surpassed the vices of Elagabalus and Nero. His reign was a
long butchery of whatever was most noble, or holy, or
innocent, in his empire. In person, the emperor assisted at
the execution of his victims, surveyed their agonies,
listened to their groans, and indulged, without satiating,
his appetite for blood: a plate of noses was accepted as a
grateful offering, and his domestics were often scourged or
mutilated by the royal hand. His surname was derived from
his pollution of his baptismal font. The infant might be
excused; but the manly pleasures of Copronymus degraded him
below the level of a brute; his lust confounded the eternal
distinctions of sex and species, and he seemed to extract
some unnatural delight from the objects most offensive to
human sense. In his religion the Iconoclast was a Heretic, a
Jew, a Mahometan, a Pagan, and an Atheist; and his belief of
an invisible power could be discovered only in his magic
rites, human victims, and nocturnal sacrifices to Venus and
the daemons of antiquity. His life was stained with the
most opposite vices, and the ulcers which covered his body,
anticipated before his death the sentiment of hell-tortures.
Of these accusations, which I have so patiently copied, a
part is refuted by its own absurdity; and in the private
anecdotes of the life of the princes, the lie is more easy
as the detection is more difficult. Without adopting the
pernicious maxim, that where much is alleged, something must
be true, I can however discern, that Constantine the Fifth
was dissolute and cruel. Calumny is more prone to
exaggerate than to invent; and her licentious tongue is
checked in some measure by the experience of the age and
country to which she appeals. Of the bishops and monks, the
generals and magistrates, who are said to have suffered
under his reign, the numbers are recorded, the names were
conspicuous, the execution was public, the mutilation
visible and permanent. (F) The Catholics hated the person and
government of Copronymus; but even their hatred is a proof
of their oppression. They dissembled the provocations which
might excuse or justify his rigor, but even these
provocations must gradually inflame his resentment and
harden his temper in the use or the abuse of despotism. Yet
the character of the fifth Constantine was not devoid of
merit, nor did his government always deserve the curses or
the contempt of the Greeks. From the confession of his
enemies, I am informed of the restoration of an ancient
aqueduct, of the redemption of two thousand five hundred
captives, of the uncommon plenty of the times, and of the
new colonies with which he repeopled Constantinople and the
Thracian cities. They reluctantly praise his activity and
courage; he was on horseback in the field at the head of his
legions; and, although the fortune of his arms was various,
he triumphed by sea and land, on the Euphrates and the
Danube, in civil and Barbarian war. Heretical praise must be
cast into the scale to counterbalance the weight of orthodox
invective. The Iconoclasts revered the virtues of the
prince: forty years after his death they still prayed before
the tomb of the saint. A miraculous vision was propagated
by fanaticism or fraud: and the Christian hero appeared on a
milk-white steed, brandishing his lance against the Pagans
of Bulgaria: "An absurd fable," says the Catholic historian,
"since Copronymus is chained with the daemons in the abyss
of hell."
Leo the Fourth, the son of the fifth and the father of the
sixth Constantine, was of a feeble constitution both of mind
(G) and body, and the principal care of his reign was the
settlement of the succession. The association of the young
Constantine was urged by the officious zeal of his subjects;
and the emperor, conscious of his decay, complied, after a
prudent hesitation, with their unanimous wishes. The royal
infant, at the age of five years, was crowned with his
mother Irene; and the national consent was ratified by every
circumstance of pomp and solemnity, that could dazzle the
eyes or bind the conscience of the Greeks. An oath of
fidelity was administered in the palace, the church, and the
hippodrome, to the several orders of the state, who adjured
the holy names of the Son, and mother of God. "Be witness, O
Christ! that we will watch over the safety of Constantine
the son of Leo, expose our lives in his service, and bear
true allegiance to his person and posterity." They pledged
their faith on the wood of the true cross, and the act of
their engagement was deposited on the altar of St. Sophia.
The first to swear, and the first to violate their oath,
were the five sons of Copronymus by a second marriage; and
the story of these princes is singular and tragic. The
right of primogeniture excluded them from the throne; the
injustice of their elder brother defrauded them of a legacy
of about two millions sterling; some vain titles were not
deemed a sufficient compensation for wealth and power; and
they repeatedly conspired against their nephew, before and
after the death of his father. Their first attempt was
pardoned; for the second offence (H) they were condemned to
the ecclesiastical state; and for the third treason,
Nicephorus, the eldest and most guilty, was deprived of his
eyes, and his four brothers, Christopher, Nicetas,
Anthemeus, and Eudoxas, were punished, as a milder sentence,
by the amputation of their tongues. After five years'
confinement, they escaped to the church of St. Sophia, and
displayed a pathetic spectacle to the people. "Countrymen
and Christians," cried Nicephorus for himself and his mute
brethren, "behold the sons of your emperor, if you can still
recognize our features in this miserable state. A life, an
imperfect life, is all that the malice of our enemies has
spared. It is now threatened, and we now throw ourselves on
your compassion." The rising murmur might have produced a
revolution, had it not been checked by the presence of a
minister, who soothed the unhappy princes with flattery and
hope, and gently drew them from the sanctuary to the palace.
They were speedily embarked for Greece, and Athens was
allotted for the place of their exile. In this calm
retreat, and in their helpless condition, Nicephorus and his
brothers were tormented by the thirst of power, and tempted
by a Sclavonian chief, who offered to break their prison,
and to lead them in arms, and in the purple, to the gates of
Constantinople. But the Athenian people, ever zealous in
the cause of Irene, prevented her justice or cruelty; and
the five sons of Copronymus were plunged in eternal darkness
and oblivion. [Footnote *: Schlosser thinks more highly of
Leo's mind; but his only proof of his superiority is the
successes of his generals against the Saracens, Schlosser,
p. 256. - M.]
For himself, that emperor had chosen a Barbarian wife, the
daughter of the khan of the Chozars; but in the marriage of
his heir, he preferred an Athenian virgin, an orphan,
seventeen years old, whose sole fortune must have consisted
in her personal accomplishments. The nuptials of Leo and
Irene were celebrated with royal pomp; she soon acquired the
love and confidence of a feeble husband, and in his
testament he declared the empress guardian of the Roman
world, and of their son Constantine the Sixth, who was no
more than ten years of age. During his childhood, Irene
most ably and assiduously discharged, in her public
administration, the duties of a faithful mother; and her
zeal in the restoration of images has deserved the name and
honors of a saint, which she still occupies in the Greek
calendar. But the emperor attained the maturity of youth;
the maternal yoke became more grievous; and he listened to
the favorites of his own age, who shared his pleasures, and
were ambitious of sharing his power. Their reasons
convinced him of his right, their praises of his ability, to
reign; and he consented to reward the services of Irene by a
perpetual banishment to the Isle of Sicily. But her
vigilance and penetration easily disconcerted their rash
projects: a similar, or more severe, punishment was
retaliated on themselves and their advisers; and Irene
inflicted on the ungrateful prince the chastisement of a
boy. After this contest, the mother and the son were at the
head of two domestic factions; and instead of mild influence
and voluntary obedience, she held in chains a captive and an
enemy. The empress was overthrown by the abuse of victory;
the oath of fidelity, which she exacted to herself alone,
was pronounced with reluctant murmurs; and the bold refusal
of the Armenian guards encouraged a free and general
declaration, that Constantine the Sixth was the lawful
emperor of the Romans. In this character he ascended his
hereditary throne, and dismissed Irene to a life of solitude
and repose. But her haughty spirit condescended to the arts
of dissimulation: she flattered the bishops and eunuchs,
revived the filial tenderness of the prince, regained his
confidence, and betrayed his credulity. The character of
Constantine was not destitute of sense or spirit; but his
education had been studiously neglected; and the ambitious
mother exposed to the public censure the vices which she had
nourished, and the actions which she had secretly advised:
his divorce and second marriage offended the prejudices of
the clergy, and by his imprudent rigor he forfeited the
attachment of the Armenian guards. A powerful conspiracy
was formed for the restoration of Irene; and the secret,
though widely diffused, was faithfully kept above eight
months, till the emperor, suspicious of his danger, escaped
from Constantinople, with the design of appealing to the
provinces and armies. By this hasty flight, the empress was
left on the brink of the precipice; yet before she implored
the mercy of her son, Irene addressed a private epistle to
the friends whom she had placed about his person, with a
menace, that unless they accomplished, she would reveal,
their treason. Their fear rendered them intrepid; they
seized the emperor on the Asiatic shore, and he was
transported to the porphyry apartment of the palace, where
he had first seen the light. In the mind of Irene, ambition
had stifled every sentiment of humanity and nature; and it
was decreed in her bloody council, that Constantine should
be rendered incapable of the throne: her emissaries
assaulted the sleeping prince, and stabbed their daggers
with such violence and precipitation into his eyes as if
they meant to execute a mortal sentence. An ambiguous
passage of Theophanes persuaded the annalist of the church
that death was the immediate consequence of this barbarous
execution. The Catholics have been deceived or subdued by
the authority of Baronius; and Protestant zeal has reechoed
the words of a cardinal, desirous, as it should seem, to
favor the patroness of images. (I) Yet the blind son of Irene
survived many years, oppressed by the court and forgotten by
the world; the Isaurian dynasty was silently extinguished;
and the memory of Constantine was recalled only by the
nuptials of his daughter Euphrosyne with the emperor Michael
the Second.
The most bigoted orthodoxy has justly execrated the
unnatural mother, who may not easily be paralleled in the
history of crimes. To her bloody deed superstition has
attributed a subsequent darkness of seventeen days; during
which many vessels in midday were driven from their course,
as if the sun, a globe of fire so vast and so remote, could
sympathize with the atoms of a revolving planet. On earth,
the crime of Irene was left five years unpunished; her reign
was crowned with external splendor; and if she could silence
the voice of conscience, she neither heard nor regarded the
reproaches of mankind. 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 these patricians were
for the most part eunuchs; and their black ingratitude
justified, on this occasion, the popular hatred and
contempt. Raised, enriched, intrusted with the first
dignities of the empire, they basely conspired against their
benefactress; the great treasurer Nicephorus was secretly
invested with the purple; her successor was introduced into
the palace, and crowned at St. Sophia by the venal
patriarch. In their first interview, she recapitulated with
dignity the revolutions of her life, gently accused the
perfidy of Nicephorus, insinuated that he owed his life to
her unsuspicious clemency, and for the throne and treasures
which she resigned, solicited a decent and honorable
retreat. His avarice refused this modest compensation; and,
in her exile of the Isle of Lesbos, the empress earned a
scanty subsistence by the labors of her distaff.
Many tyrants have reigned undoubtedly more criminal than
Nicephorus, but none perhaps have more deeply incurred the
universal abhorrence of their people. His character was
stained with the three odious vices of hypocrisy,
ingratitude, and avarice: his want of virtue was not
redeemed by any superior talents, nor his want of talents by
any pleasing qualifications. Unskilful and unfortunate in
war, Nicephorus was vanquished by the Saracens, and slain by
the Bulgarians; and the advantage of his death overbalanced,
in the public opinion, the destruction of a Roman army. (J)
His son and heir Stauracius escaped from the field with a
mortal wound; yet six months of an expiring life were
sufficient to refute his indecent, though popular
declaration, that he would in all things avoid the example
of his father. On the near prospect of his decease,
Michael, the great master of the palace, and the husband of
his sister Procopia, was named by every person of the palace
and city, except by his envious brother. Tenacious of a
sceptre now falling from his hand, he conspired against the
life of his successor, and cherished the idea of changing to
a democracy the Roman empire. But these rash projects served
only to inflame the zeal of the people and to remove the
scruples of the candidate: Michael the First accepted the
purple, and before he sunk into the grave the son of
Nicephorus implored the clemency of his new sovereign. Had
Michael in an age of peace ascended an hereditary throne, he
might have reigned and died the father of his people: but
his mild virtues were adapted to the shade of private life,
nor was he capable of controlling the ambition of his
equals, or of resisting the arms of the victorious
Bulgarians. While his want of ability and success exposed
him to the contempt of the soldiers, the masculine spirit of
his wife Procopia awakened their indignation. Even the
Greeks of the ninth century were provoked by the insolence
of a female, who, in the front of the standards, presumed to
direct their discipline and animate their valor; and their
licentious clamors advised the new Semiramis to reverence
the majesty of a Roman camp. After an unsuccessful
campaign, the emperor left, in their winter-quarters of
Thrace, a disaffected army under the command of his enemies;
and their artful eloquence persuaded the soldiers to break
the dominion of the eunuchs, to degrade the husband of
Procopia, and to assert the right of a military election.
They marched towards the capital: yet the clergy, the
senate, and the people of Constantinople, adhered to the
cause of Michael; and the troops and treasures of Asia might
have protracted the mischiefs of civil war. But his
humanity (by the ambitious it will be termed his weakness)
protested that not a drop of Christian blood should be shed
in his quarrel, and his messengers presented the conquerors
with the keys of the city and the palace. They were
disarmed by his innocence and submission; his life and his
eyes were spared; and the Imperial monk enjoyed the comforts
of solitude and religion above thirty-two years after he had
been stripped of the purple and separated from his wife.
A rebel, in the time of Nicephorus, the famous and
unfortunate Bardanes, had once the curiosity to consult an
Asiatic prophet, who, after prognosticating his fall,
announced the fortunes of his three principal officers, Leo
the Armenian, Michael the Phrygian, and Thomas the
Cappadocian, the successive reigns of the two former, the
fruitless and fatal enterprise of the third. This
prediction was verified, or rather was produced, by the
event. Ten years afterwards, when the Thracian camp
rejected the husband of Procopia, the crown was presented to
the same Leo, the first in military rank and the secret
author of the mutiny. As he affected to hesitate, "With
this sword," said his companion Michael, "I will open the
gates of Constantinople to your Imperial sway; or instantly
plunge it into your bosom, if you obstinately resist the
just desires of your fellow-soldiers." The compliance of the
Armenian was rewarded with the empire, and he reigned seven
years and a half under the name of Leo the Fifth. Educated
in a camp, and ignorant both of laws and letters, he
introduced into his civil government the rigor and even
cruelty of military discipline; but if his severity was
sometimes dangerous to the innocent, it was always
formidable to the guilty. His religious inconstancy was
taxed by the epithet of Chameleon, but the Catholics have
acknowledged by the voice of a saint and confessors, that
the life of the Iconoclast was useful to the republic. The
zeal of his companion Michael was repaid with riches,
honors, and military command; and his subordinate talents
were beneficially employed in the public service. Yet the
Phrygian was dissatisfied at receiving as a favor a scanty
portion of the Imperial prize which he had bestowed on his
equal; and his discontent, which sometimes evaporated in
hasty discourse, at length assumed a more threatening and
hostile aspect against a prince whom he represented as a
cruel tyrant. That tyrant, however, repeatedly detected,
warned, and dismissed the old companion of his arms, till
fear and resentment prevailed over gratitude; and Michael,
after a scrutiny into his actions and designs, was convicted
of treason, and sentenced to be burnt alive in the furnace
of the private baths. The devout humanity of the empress
Theophano was fatal to her husband and family. A solemn
day, the twenty-fifth of December, had been fixed for the
execution: she urged, that the anniversary of the Savior's
birth would be profaned by this inhuman spectacle, and Leo
consented with reluctance to a decent respite. But on the
vigil of the feast his sleepless anxiety prompted him to
visit at the dead of night the chamber in which his enemy
was confined: he beheld him released from his chain, and
stretched on his jailer's bed in a profound slumber. Leo
was alarmed at these signs of security and intelligence; but
though he retired with silent steps, his entrance and
departure were noticed by a slave who lay concealed in a
corner of the prison. Under the pretence of requesting the
spiritual aid of a confessor, Michael informed the
conspirators, that their lives depended on his discretion,
and that a few hours were left to assure their own safety,
by the deliverance of their friend and country. On the
great festivals, a chosen band of priests and chanters was
admitted into the palace by a private gate to sing matins in
the chapel; and Leo, who regulated with the same strictness
the discipline of the choir and of the camp, was seldom
absent from these early devotions. In the ecclesiastical
habit, but with their swords under their robes, the
conspirators mingled with the procession, lurked in the
angles of the chapel, and expected, as the signal of murder,
the intonation of the first psalm by the emperor himself.
The imperfect light, and the uniformity of dress, might have
favored his escape, whilst their assault was pointed against
a harmless priest; but they soon discovered their mistake,
and encompassed on all sides the royal victim. Without a
weapon and without a friend, he grasped a weighty cross, and
stood at bay against the hunters of his life; but as he
asked for mercy, "This is the hour, not of mercy, but of
vengeance," was the inexorable reply. The stroke of a
well-aimed sword separated from his body the right arm and
the cross, and Leo the Armenian was slain at the foot of the
altar. A memorable reverse of fortune was displayed in
Michael the Second, who from a defect in his speech was
surnamed the Stammerer. He was snatched from the fiery
furnace to the sovereignty of an empire; and as in the
tumult a smith could not readily be found, the fetters
remained on his legs several hours after he was seated on
the throne of the Caesars. The royal blood which had been
the price of his elevation, was unprofitably spent: in the
purple he retained the ignoble vices of his origin; and
Michael lost his provinces with as supine indifference as if
they had been the inheritance of his fathers. His title was
disputed by Thomas, the last of the military triumvirate,
who transported into Europe fourscore thousand Barbarians
from the banks of the Tigris and the shores of the Caspian.
He formed the siege of Constantinople; but the capital was
defended with spiritual and carnal weapons; a Bulgarian king
assaulted the camp of the Orientals, and Thomas had the
misfortune, or the weakness, to fall alive into the power of
the conqueror. The hands and feet of the rebel were
amputated; he was placed on an ass, and, amidst the insults
of the people, was led through the streets, which he
sprinkled with his blood. The depravation of manners, as
savage as they were corrupt, is marked by the presence of
the emperor himself. Deaf to the lamentation of a
fellow-soldier, he incessantly pressed the discovery of more
accomplices, till his curiosity was checked by the question
of an honest or guilty minister: "Would you give credit to
an enemy against the most faithful of your friends?" After
the death of his first wife, the emperor, at the request of
the senate, drew from her monastery Euphrosyne, the daughter
of Constantine the Sixth. Her august birth might justify a
stipulation in the marriage-contract, that her children
should equally share the empire with their elder brother.
But the nuptials of Michael and Euphrosyne were barren; and
she was content with the title of mother of Theophilus, his
son and successor.
The character of Theophilus is a rare example in which
religious zeal has allowed, and perhaps magnified, the
virtues of a heretic and a persecutor. His valor was often
felt by the enemies, and his justice by the subjects, of the
monarchy; but the valor of Theophilus was rash and
fruitless, and his justice arbitrary and cruel. He
displayed the banner of the cross against the Saracens; but
his five expeditions were concluded by a signal overthrow:
Amorium, the native city of his ancestors, was levelled with
the ground and from his military toils he derived only the
surname of the Unfortunate. The wisdom of a sovereign is
comprised in the institution of laws and the choice of
magistrates, and while he seems without action, his civil
government revolves round his centre with the silence and
order of the planetary system. But the justice of Theophilus
was fashioned on the model of the Oriental despots, who, in
personal and irregular acts of authority, consult the reason
or passion of the moment, without measuring the sentence by
the law, or the penalty by the offense. A poor woman threw
herself at the emperor's feet to complain of a powerful
neighbor, the brother of the empress, who had raised his
palace-wall to such an inconvenient height, that her humble
dwelling was excluded from light and air! On the proof of
the fact, instead of granting, like an ordinary judge,
sufficient or ample damages to the plaintiff, the sovereign
adjudged to her use and benefit the palace and the ground.
Nor was Theophilus content with this extravagant
satisfaction: his zeal converted a civil trespass into a
criminal act; and the unfortunate patrician was stripped and
scourged in the public place of Constantinople. For some
venial offenses, some defect of equity or vigilance, the
principal ministers, a praefect, a quaestor, a captain of
the guards, were banished or mutilated, or scalded with
boiling pitch, or burnt alive in the hippodrome; and as
these dreadful examples might be the effects of error or
caprice, they must have alienated from his service the best
and wisest of the citizens. But the pride of the monarch was
flattered in the exercise of power, or, as he thought, of
virtue; and the people, safe in their obscurity, applauded
the danger and debasement of their superiors. This
extraordinary rigor was justified, in some measure, by its
salutary consequences; since, after a scrutiny of seventeen
days, not a complaint or abuse could be found in the court
or city; and it might be alleged that the Greeks could be
ruled only with a rod of iron, and that the public interest
is the motive and law of the supreme judge. Yet in the
crime, or the suspicion, of treason, that judge is of all
others the most credulous and partial. Theophilus might
inflict a tardy vengeance on the assassins of Leo and the
saviors of his father; but he enjoyed the fruits of their
crime; and his jealous tyranny sacrificed a brother and a
prince to the future safety of his life. A Persian of the
race of the Sassanides died in poverty and exile at
Constantinople, leaving an only son, the issue of a plebeian
marriage. At the age of twelve years, the royal birth of
Theophobus was revealed, and his merit was not unworthy of
his birth. He was educated in the Byzantine palace, a
Christian and a soldier; advanced with rapid steps in the
career of fortune and glory; received the hand of the
emperor's sister; and was promoted to the command of thirty
thousand Persians, who, like his father, had fled from the
Mahometan conquerors. These troops, doubly infected with
mercenary and fanatic vices, were desirous of revolting
against their benefactor, and erecting the standard of their
native king but the loyal Theophobus rejected their offers,
disconcerted their schemes, and escaped from their hands to
the camp or palace of his royal brother. A generous
confidence might have secured a faithful and able guardian
for his wife and his infant son, to whom Theophilus, in the
flower of his age, was compelled to leave the inheritance of
the empire. But his jealousy was exasperated by envy and
disease; he feared the dangerous virtues which might either
support or oppress their infancy and weakness; and the dying
emperor demanded the head of the Persian prince. With
savage delight he recognized the familiar features of his
brother: "Thou art no longer Theophobus," he said; and,
sinking on his couch, he added, with a faltering voice,
"Soon, too soon, I shall be no more Theophilus!"
The Russians, who have borrowed from the Greeks the greatest
part of their civil and ecclesiastical policy, preserved,
till the last century, a singular institution in the
marriage of the Czar. They collected, not the virgins of
every rank and of every province, a vain and romantic idea,
but the daughters of the principal nobles, who awaited in
the palace the choice of their sovereign. It is affirmed,
that a similar method was adopted in the nuptials of
Theophilus. With a golden apple in his hand, he slowly
walked between two lines of contending beauties: his eye was
detained by the charms of Icasia, and in the awkwardness of
a first declaration, the prince could only observe, that, in
this world, women had been the cause of much evil; "And
surely, sir," she pertly replied, "they have likewise been
the occasion of much good." This affectation of unseasonable
wit displeased the Imperial lover: he turned aside in
disgust; Icasia concealed her mortification in a convent;
and the modest silence of Theodora was rewarded with the
golden apple. She deserved the love, but did not escape the
severity, of her lord. From the palace garden he beheld a
vessel deeply laden, and steering into the port: on the
discovery that the precious cargo of Syrian luxury was the
property of his wife, he condemned the ship to the flames,
with a sharp reproach, that her avarice had degraded the
character of an empress into that of a merchant. Yet his
last choice intrusted her with the guardianship of the
empire and her son Michael, who was left an orphan in the
fifth year of his age. The restoration of images, and the
final extirpation of the Iconoclasts, has endeared her name
to the devotion of the Greeks; but in the fervor of
religious zeal, Theodora entertained a grateful regard for
the memory and salvation of her husband. After thirteen
years of a prudent and frugal administration, she perceived
the decline of her influence; but the second Irene imitated
only the virtues of her predecessor. Instead of conspiring
against the life or government of her son, she retired,
without a struggle, though not without a murmur, to the
solitude of private life, deploring the ingratitude, the
vices, and the inevitable ruin, of the worthless youth.
Among the successors of Nero and Elagabalus, we have not
hitherto found the imitation of their vices, the character
of a Roman prince who considered pleasure as the object of
life, and virtue as the enemy of pleasure. Whatever might
have been the maternal care of Theodora in the education of
Michael the Third, her unfortunate son was a king before he
was a man. If the ambitious mother labored to check the
progress of reason, she could not cool the ebullition of
passion; and her selfish policy was justly repaid by the
contempt and ingratitude of the headstrong youth. At the
age of eighteen, he rejected her authority, without feeling
his own incapacity to govern the empire and himself. With
Theodora, all gravity and wisdom retired from the court;
their place was supplied by the alternate dominion of vice
and folly; and it was impossible, without forfeiting the
public esteem, to acquire or preserve the favor of the
emperor. The millions of gold and silver which had been
accumulated for the service of the state, were lavished on
the vilest of men, who flattered his passions and shared his
pleasures; and in a reign of thirteen years, the richest of
sovereigns was compelled to strip the palace and the
churches of their precious furniture. Like Nero, he
delighted in the amusements of the theatre, and sighed to be
surpassed in the accomplishments in which he should have
blushed to excel. Yet the studies of Nero in music and
poetry betrayed some symptoms of a liberal taste; the more
ignoble arts of the son of Theophilus were confined to the
chariot-race of the hippodrome. The four factions which had
agitated the peace, still amused the idleness, of the
capital: for himself, the emperor assumed the blue livery;
the three rival colors were distributed to his favorites,
and in the vile though eager contention he forgot the
dignity of his person and the safety of his dominions. He
silenced the messenger of an invasion, who presumed to
divert his attention in the most critical moment of the
race; and by his command, the importunate beacons were
extinguished, that too frequently spread the alarm from
Tarsus to Constantinople. The most skilful charioteers
obtained the first place in his confidence and esteem; their
merit was profusely rewarded the emperor feasted in their
houses, and presented their children at the baptismal font;
and while he applauded his own popularity, he affected to
blame the cold and stately reserve of his predecessors. The
unnatural lusts which had degraded even the manhood of Nero,
were banished from the world; yet the strength of Michael
was consumed by the indulgence of love and intemperance. (K)
In his midnight revels, when his passions were inflamed by
wine, he was provoked to issue the most sanguinary commands;
and if any feelings of humanity were left, he was reduced,
with the return of sense, to approve the salutary
disobedience of his servants. But the most extraordinary
feature in the character of Michael, is the profane mockery
of the religion of his country. The superstition of the
Greeks might indeed excite the smile of a philosopher; but
his smile would have been rational and temperate, and he
must have condemned the ignorant folly of a youth who
insulted the objects of public veneration. A buffoon of the
court was invested in the robes of the patriarch: his twelve
metropolitans, among whom the emperor was ranked, assumed
their ecclesiastical garments: they used or abused the
sacred vessels of the altar; and in their bacchanalian
feasts, the holy communion was administered in a nauseous
compound of vinegar and mustard. Nor were these impious
spectacles concealed from the eyes of the city. On the day
of a solemn festival, the emperor, with his bishops or
buffoons, rode on asses through the streets, encountered the
true patriarch at the head of his clergy; and by their
licentious shouts and obscene gestures, disordered the
gravity of the Christian procession. The devotion of
Michael appeared only in some offence to reason or piety: he
received his theatrical crowns from the statue of the
Virgin; and an Imperial tomb was violated for the sake of
burning the bones of Constantine the Iconoclast. By this
extravagant conduct, the son of Theophilus became as
contemptible as he was odious: every citizen was impatient
for the deliverance of his country; and even the favorites
of the moment were apprehensive that a caprice might snatch
away what a caprice had bestowed. In the thirtieth year of
his age, and in the hour of intoxication and sleep, Michael
the Third was murdered in his chamber by the founder of a
new dynasty, whom the emperor had raised to an equality of
rank and power.
The genealogy of Basil the Macedonian (if it be not the
spurious offspring of pride and flattery) exhibits a genuine
picture of the revolution of the most illustrious families.
The Arsacides, the rivals of Rome, possessed the sceptre of
the East near four hundred years: a younger branch of these
Parthian kings continued to reign in Armenia; and their
royal descendants survived the partition and servitude of
that ancient monarchy. Two of these, Artabanus and Chlienes,
escaped or retired to the court of Leo the First: his bounty
seated them in a safe and hospitable exile, in the province
of Macedonia: Adrianople was their final settlement. During
several generations they maintained the dignity of their
birth; and their Roman patriotism rejected the tempting
offers of the Persian and Arabian powers, who recalled them
to their native country. But their splendor was insensibly
clouded by time and poverty; and the father of Basil was
reduced to a small farm, which he cultivated with his own
hands: yet he scorned to disgrace the blood of the Arsacides
by a plebeian alliance: his wife, a widow of Adrianople, was
pleased to count among her ancestors the great Constantine;
and their royal infant was connected by some dark affinity
of lineage or country with the Macedonian Alexander. No
sooner was he born, than the cradle of Basil, his family,
and his city, were swept away by an inundation of the
Bulgarians: he was educated a slave in a foreign land; and
in this severe discipline, he acquired the hardiness of body
and flexibility of mind which promoted his future elevation.
In the age of youth or manhood he shared the deliverance of
the Roman captives, who generously broke their fetters,
marched through Bulgaria to the shores of the Euxine,
defeated two armies of Barbarians, embarked in the ships
which had been stationed for their reception, and returned
to Constantinople, from whence they were distributed to
their respective homes. But the freedom of Basil was naked
and destitute: his farm was ruined by the calamities of war:
after his father's death, his manual labor, or service,
could no longer support a family of orphans and he resolved
to seek a more conspicuous theatre, in which every virtue
and every vice may lead to the paths of greatness. The
first night of his arrival at Constantinople, without
friends or money, the weary pilgrim slept on the steps of
the church of St. Diomede: he was fed by the casual
hospitality of a monk; and was introduced to the service of
a cousin and namesake of the emperor Theophilus; who, though
himself of a diminutive person, was always followed by a
train of tall and handsome domestics. Basil attended his
patron to the government of Peloponnesus; eclipsed, by his
personal merit the birth and dignity of Theophilus, and
formed a useful connection with a wealthy and charitable
matron of Patras. Her spiritual or carnal love embraced the
young adventurer, whom she adopted as her son. Danielis
presented him with thirty slaves; and the produce of her
bounty was expended in the support of his brothers, and the
purchase of some large estates in Macedonia. His gratitude
or ambition still attached him to the service of Theophilus;
and a lucky accident recommended him to the notice of the
court. A famous wrestler, in the train of the Bulgarian
ambassadors, had defied, at the royal banquet, the boldest
and most robust of the Greeks. The strength of Basil was
praised; he accepted the challenge; and the Barbarian
champion was overthrown at the first onset. A beautiful but
vicious horse was condemned to be hamstrung: it was subdued
by the dexterity and courage of the servant of Theophilus;
and his conqueror was promoted to an honorable rank in the
Imperial stables. But it was impossible to obtain the
confidence of Michael, without complying with his vices; and
his new favorite, the great chamberlain of the palace, was
raised and supported by a disgraceful marriage with a royal
concubine, and the dishonor of his sister, who succeeded to
her place. The public administration had been abandoned to
the Caesar Bardas, the brother and enemy of Theodora; but
the arts of female influence persuaded Michael to hate and
to fear his uncle: he was drawn from Constantinople, under
the pretence of a Cretan expedition, and stabbed in the tent
of audience, by the sword of the chamberlain, and in the
presence of the emperor. About a month after this
execution, Basil was invested with the title of Augustus and
the government of the empire. He supported this unequal
association till his influence was fortified by popular
esteem. His life was endangered by the caprice of the
emperor; and his dignity was profaned by a second colleague,
who had rowed in the galleys. Yet the murder of his
benefactor must be condemned as an act of ingratitude and
treason; and the churches which he dedicated to the name of
St. Michael were a poor and puerile expiation of his guilt.
The different ages of Basil the First may be compared with
those of Augustus. The situation of the Greek did not allow
him in his earliest youth to lead an army against his
country; or to proscribe the nobles of her sons; but his
aspiring genius stooped to the arts of a slave; he
dissembled his ambition and even his virtues, and grasped,
with the bloody hand of an assassin, the empire which he
ruled with the wisdom and tenderness of a parent. A private
citizen may feel his interest repugnant to his duty; but it
must be from a deficiency of sense or courage, that an
absolute monarch can separate his happiness from his glory,
or his glory from the public welfare. The life or panegyric
of Basil has indeed been composed and published under the
long reign of his descendants; but even their stability on
the throne may be justly ascribed to the superior merit of
their ancestor. In his character, his grandson Constantine
has attempted to delineate a perfect image of royalty: but
that feeble prince, unless he had copied a real model, could
not easily have soared so high above the level of his own
conduct or conceptions. But the most solid praise of Basil
is drawn from the comparison of a ruined and a flourishing
monarchy, that which he wrested from the dissolute Michael,
and that which he bequeathed to the Mecedonian dynasty. The
evils which had been sanctified by time and example, were
corrected by his master-hand; and he revived, if not the
national spirit, at least the order and majesty of the Roman
empire. His application was indefatigable, his temper cool,
his understanding vigorous and decisive; and in his practice
he observed that rare and salutary moderation, which pursues
each virtue, at an equal distance between the opposite
vices. His military service had been confined to the
palace: nor was the emperor endowed with the spirit or the
talents of a warrior. Yet under his reign the Roman arms
were again formidable to the Barbarians. As soon as he had
formed a new army by discipline and exercise, he appeared in
person on the banks of the Euphrates, curbed the pride of
the Saracens, and suppressed the dangerous though just
revolt of the Manichaeans. His indignation against a rebel
who had long eluded his pursuit, provoked him to wish and to
pray, that, by the grace of God, he might drive three arrows
into the head of Chrysochir. That odious head, which had
been obtained by treason rather than by valor, was suspended
from a tree, and thrice exposed to the dexterity of the
Imperial archer; a base revenge against the dead, more
worthy of the times than of the character of Basil. But his
principal merit was in the civil administration of the
finances and of the laws. To replenish and exhausted
treasury, it was proposed to resume the lavish and
ill-placed gifts of his predecessor: his prudence abated one
moiety of the restitution; and a sum of twelve hundred
thousand pounds was instantly procured to answer the most
pressing demands, and to allow some space for the mature
operations of economy. Among the various schemes for the
improvement of the revenue, a new mode was suggested of
capitation, or tribute, which would have too much depended
on the arbitrary discretion of the assessors. A sufficient
list of honest and able agents was instantly produced by the
minister; but on the more careful scrutiny of Basil himself,
only two could be found, who might be safely intrusted with
such dangerous powers; but they justified his esteem by
declining his confidence. But the serious and successful
diligence of the emperor established by degrees the
equitable balance of property and payment, of receipt and
expenditure; a peculiar fund was appropriated to each
service; and a public method secured the interest of the
prince and the property of the people. After reforming the
luxury, he assigned two patrimonial estates to supply the
decent plenty, of the Imperial table: the contributions of
the subject were reserved for his defence; and the residue
was employed in the embellishment of the capital and
provinces. A taste for building, however costly, may
deserve some praise and much excuse: from thence industry is
fed, art is encouraged, and some object is attained of
public emolument or pleasure: the use of a road, an
aqueduct, or a hospital, is obvious and solid; and the
hundred churches that arose by the command of Basil were
consecrated to the devotion of the age. In the character of
a judge he was assiduous and impartial; desirous to save,
but not afraid to strike: the oppressors of the people were
severely chastised; but his personal foes, whom it might be
unsafe to pardon, were condemned, after the loss of their
eyes, to a life of solitude and repentance. The change of
language and manners demanded a revision of the obsolete
jurisprudence of Justinian: the voluminous body of his
Institutes, Pandects, Code, and Novels, was digested under
forty titles, in the Greek idiom; and the Basilics, which
were improved and completed by his son and grandson, must be
referred to the original genius of the founder of their
race. This glorious reign was terminated by an accident in
the chase. A furious stag entangled his horns in the belt
of Basil, and raised him from his horse: he was rescued by
an attendant, who cut the belt and slew the animal; but the
fall, or the fever, exhausted the strength of the aged
monarch, and he expired in the palace amidst the tears of
his family and people. If he struck off the head of the
faithful servant for presuming to draw his sword against his
sovereign, the pride of despotism, which had lain dormant in
his life, revived in the last moments of despair, when he no
longer wanted or valued the opinion of mankind.
Of the four sons of the emperor, Constantine died before his
father, whose grief and credulity were amused by a
flattering impostor and a vain apparition. Stephen, the
youngest, was content with the honors of a patriarch and a
saint; both Leo and Alexander were alike invested with the
purple, but the powers of government were solely exercised
by the elder brother. The name of Leo the Sixth has been
dignified with the title of philosopher; and the union of
the prince and the sage, of the active and speculative
virtues, would indeed constitute the perfection of human
nature. But the claims of Leo are far short of this ideal
excellence. Did he reduce his passions and appetites under
the dominion of reason? His life was spent in the pomp of
the palace, in the society of his wives and concubines; and
even the clemency which he showed, and the peace which he
strove to preserve, must be imputed to the softness and
indolence of his character. Did he subdue his prejudices,
and those of his subjects? His mind was tinged with the most
puerile superstition; the influence of the clergy, and the
errors of the people, were consecrated by his laws; and the
oracles of Leo, which reveal, in prophetic style, the fates
of the empire, are founded on the arts of astrology and
divination. If we still inquire the reason of his sage
appellation, it can only be replied, that the son of Basil
was less ignorant than the greater part of his
contemporaries in church and state; that his education had
been directed by the learned Photius; and that several books
of profane and ecclesiastical science were composed by the
pen, or in the name, of the Imperial philosopher. But the
reputation of his philosophy and religion was overthrown by
a domestic vice, the repetition of his nuptials. The
primitive ideas of the merit and holiness of celibacy were
preached by the monks and entertained by the Greeks.
Marriage was allowed as a necessary means for the
propagation of mankind; after the death of either party, the
survivor might satisfy, by a second union, the weakness or
the strength of the flesh: but a third marriage was censured
as a state of legal fornication; and a fourth was a sin or
scandal as yet unknown to the Christians of the East. In
the beginning of his reign, Leo himself had abolished the
state of concubines, and condemned, without annulling, third
marriages: but his patriotism and love soon compelled him to
violate his own laws, and to incur the penance, which in a
similar case he had imposed on his subjects. In his three
first alliances, his nuptial bed was unfruitful; the emperor
required a female companion, and the empire a legitimate
heir. The beautiful Zoe was introduced into the palace as a
concubine; and after a trial of her fecundity, and the birth
of Constantine, her lover declared his intention of
legitimating the mother and the child, by the celebration of
his fourth nuptials. But the patriarch Nicholas refused his
blessing: the Imperial baptism of the young prince was
obtained by a promise of separation; and the contumacious
husband of Zoe was excluded from the communion of the
faithful. Neither the fear of exile, nor the desertion of
his brethren, nor the authority of the Latin church, nor the
danger of failure or doubt in the succession to the empire,
could bend the spirit of the inflexible monk. After the
death of Leo, he was recalled from exile to the civil and
ecclesiastical administration; and the edict of union which
was promulgated in the name of Constantine, condemned the
future scandal of fourth marriages, and left a tacit
imputation on his own birth. In the Greek language, purple
and porphyry are the same word: and as the colors of nature
are invariable, we may learn, that a dark deep red was the
Tyrian dye which stained the purple of the ancients. An
apartment of the Byzantine palace was lined with porphyry:
it was reserved for the use of the pregnant empresses; and
the royal birth of their children was expressed by the
appellation of porphyrogenite, or born in the purple.
Several of the Roman princes had been blessed with an heir;
but this peculiar surname was first applied to Constantine
the Seventh. His life and titular reign were of equal
duration; but of fifty-four years, six had elapsed before
his father's death; and the son of Leo was ever the
voluntary or reluctant subject of those who oppressed his
weakness or abused his confidence. His uncle Alexander, who
had long been invested with the title of Augustus, was the
first colleague and governor of the young prince: but in a
rapid career of vice and folly, the brother of Leo already
emulated the reputation of Michael; and when he was
extinguished by a timely death, he entertained a project of
castrating his nephew, and leaving the empire to a worthless
favorite. The succeeding years of the minority of
Constantine were occupied by his mother Zoe, and a
succession or council of seven regents, who pursued their
interest, gratified their passions, abandoned the republic,
supplanted each other, and finally vanished in the presence
of a soldier. From an obscure origin, Romanus Lecapenus had
raised himself to the command of the naval armies; and in
the anarchy of the times, had deserved, or at least had
obtained, the national esteem. With a victorious and
affectionate fleet, he sailed from the mouth of the Danube
into the harbor of Constantinople, and was hailed as the
deliverer of the people, and the guardian of the prince. His
supreme office was at first defined by the new appellation
of father of the emperor; but Romanus soon disdained the
subordinate powers of a minister, and assumed with the
titles of Caesar and Augustus, the full independence of
royalty, which he held near five-and-twenty years. His
three sons, Christopher, Stephen, and Constantine were
successively adorned with the same honors, and the lawful
emperor was degraded from the first to the fifth rank in
this college of princes. Yet, in the preservation of his
life and crown, he might still applaud his own fortune and
the clemency of the usurper. The examples of ancient and
modern history would have excused the ambition of Romanus:
the powers and the laws of the empire were in his hand; the
spurious birth of Constantine would have justified his
exclusion; and the grave or the monastery was open to
receive the son of the concubine. But Lecapenus does not
appear to have possessed either the virtues or the vices of
a tyrant. The spirit and activity of his private life
dissolved away in the sunshine of the throne; and in his
licentious pleasures, he forgot the safety both of the
republic and of his family. Of a mild and religious
character, he respected the sanctity of oaths, the innocence
of the youth, the memory of his parents, and the attachment
of the people. The studious temper and retirement of
Constantine disarmed the jealousy of power: his books and
music, his pen and his pencil, were a constant source of
amusement; and if he could improve a scanty allowance by the
sale of his pictures, if their price was not enhanced by the
name of the artist, he was endowed with a personal talent,
which few princes could employ in the hour of adversity.
The fall of Romanus was occasioned by his own vices and
those of his children. After the decease of Christopher,
his eldest son, the two surviving brothers quarrelled with
each other, and conspired against their father. At the hour
of noon, when all strangers were regularly excluded from the
palace, they entered his apartment with an armed force, and
conveyed him, in the habit of a monk, to a small island in
the Propontis, which was peopled by a religious community.
The rumor of this domestic revolution excited a tumult in
the city; but Porphyrogenitus alone, the true and lawful
emperor, was the object of the public care; and the sons of
Lecapenus were taught, by tardy experience, that they had
achieved a guilty and perilous enterprise for the benefit of
their rival. Their sister Helena, the wife of Constantine,
revealed, or supposed, their treacherous design of
assassinating her husband at the royal banquet. His loyal
adherents were alarmed, and the two usurpers were prevented,
seized, degraded from the purple, and embarked for the same
island and monastery where their father had been so lately
confined. Old Romanus met them on the beach with a
sarcastic smile, and, after a just reproach of their folly
and ingratitude, presented his Imperial colleagues with an
equal share of his water and vegetable diet. In the
fortieth year of his reign, Constantine the Seventh obtained
the possession of the Eastern world, which he ruled or
seemed to rule, near fifteen years. But he was devoid of
that energy of character which could emerge into a life of
action and glory; and the studies, which had amused and
dignified his leisure, were incompatible with the serious
duties of a sovereign. The emperor neglected the practice
to instruct his son Romanus in the theory of government;
while he indulged the habits of intemperance and sloth, he
dropped the reins of the administration into the hands of
Helena his wife; and, in the shifting scene of her favor and
caprice, each minister was regretted in the promotion of a
more worthless successor. Yet the birth and misfortunes of
Constantine had endeared him to the Greeks; they excused his
failings; they respected his learning, his innocence, and
charity, his love of justice; and the ceremony of his
funeral was mourned with the unfeigned tears of his
subjects. The body, according to ancient custom, lay in
state in the vestibule of the palace; and the civil and
military officers, the patricians, the senate, and the
clergy approached in due order to adore and kiss the
inanimate corpse of their sovereign. Before the procession
moved towards the Imperial sepulchre, a herald proclaimed
this awful admonition: "Arise, O king of the world, and obey
the summons of the King of kings!"
The death of Constantine was imputed to poison; and his son
Romanus, who derived that name from his maternal
grandfather, ascended the throne of Constantinople. A
prince who, at the age of twenty, could be suspected of
anticipating his inheritance, must have been already lost in
the public esteem; yet Romanus was rather weak than wicked;
and the largest share of the guilt was transferred to his
wife, Theophano, a woman of base origin masculine spirit,
and flagitious manners. The sense of personal glory and
public happiness, the true pleasures of royalty, were
unknown to the son of Constantine; and, while the two
brothers, Nicephorus and Leo, triumphed over the Saracens,
the hours which the emperor owed to his people were consumed
in strenuous idleness. In the morning he visited the
circus; at noon he feasted the senators; the greater part of
the afternoon he spent in the sphoeristerium, or
tennis-court, the only theatre of his victories; from thence
he passed over to the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus, hunted
and killed four wild boars of the largest size, and returned
to the palace, proudly content with the labors of the day.
In strength and beauty he was conspicuous above his equals:
tall and straight as a young cypress, his complexion was
fair and florid, his eyes sparkling, his shoulders broad,
his nose long and aquiline. Yet even these perfections were
insufficient to fix the love of Theophano; and, after a
reign of four (L) years, she mingled for her husband the same
deadly draught which she had composed for his father.
By his marriage with this impious woman, Romanus the younger
left two sons, Basil the Second and Constantine the Ninth,
and two daughters, Theophano and Anne. The eldest sister
was given to Otho the Second, emperor of the West; the
younger became the wife of Wolodomir, great duke and apostle
of russia, and by the marriage of her granddaughter with
Henry the First, king of France, the blood of the
Macedonians, and perhaps of the Arsacides, still flows in
the veins of the Bourbon line. After the death of her
husband, the empress aspired to reign in the name of her
sons, the elder of whom was five, and the younger only two,
years of age; but she soon felt the instability of a throne
which was supported by a female who could not be esteemed,
and two infants who could not be feared. Theophano looked
around for a protector, and threw herself into the arms of
the bravest soldier; her heart was capacious; but the
deformity of the new favorite rendered it more than probable
that interest was the motive and excuse of her love.
Nicephorus Phocus united, in the popular opinion, the double
merit of a hero and a saint. In the former character, his
qualifications were genuine and splendid: the descendant of
a race illustrious by their military exploits, he had
displayed in every station and in every province the courage
of a soldier and the conduct of a chief; and Nicephorus was
crowned with recent laurels, from the important conquest of
the Isle of Crete. His religion was of a more ambiguous
cast; and his hair-cloth, his fasts, his pious idiom, and
his wish to retire from the business of the world, were a
convenient mask for his dark and dangerous ambition. Yet he
imposed on a holy patriarch, by whose influence, and by a
decree of the senate, he was intrusted, during the minority
of the young princes, with the absolute and independent
command of the Oriental armies. As soon as he had secured
the leaders and the troops, he boldly marched to
Constantinople, trampled on his enemies, avowed his
correspondence with the empress, and without degrading her
sons, assumed, with the title of Augustus, the preeminence
of rank and the plenitude of power. But his marriage with
Theophano was refused by the same patriarch who had placed
the crown on his head: by his second nuptials he incurred a
year of canonical penance; (M) a bar of spiritual affinity
was opposed to their celebration; and some evasion and
perjury were required to silence the scruples of the clergy
and people. The popularity of the emperor was lost in the
purple: in a reign of six years he provoked the hatred of
strangers and subjects: and the hypocrisy and avarice of the
first Nicephorus were revived in his successor. Hypocrisy I
shall never justify or palliate; but I will dare to observe,
that the odious vice of avarice is of all others most
hastily arraigned, and most unmercifully condemned. In a
private citizen, our judgment seldom expects an accurate
scrutiny into his fortune and expense; and in a steward of
the public treasure, frugality is always a virtue, and the
increase of taxes too often an indispensable duty. In the
use of his patrimony, the generous temper of Nicephorus had
been proved; and the revenue was strictly applied to the
service of the state: each spring the emperor marched in
person against the Saracens; and every Roman might compute
the employment of his taxes in triumphs, conquests, and the
security of the Eastern barrier. (N)*
Among the warriors who promoted his elevation, and served
under his standard, a noble and valiant Armenian had
deserved and obtained the most eminent rewards. The stature
of John Zimisces was below the ordinary standard: but this
diminutive body was endowed with strength, beauty, and the
soul of a hero. By the jealousy of the emperor's brother,
he was degraded from the office of general of the East, to
that of director of the posts, and his murmurs were
chastised with disgrace and exile. But Zimisces was ranked
among the numerous lovers of the empress: on her
intercession, he was permitted to reside at Chalcedon, in
the neighborhood of the capital: her bounty was repaid in
his clandestine and amorous visits to the palace; and
Theophano consented, with alacrity, to the death of an ugly
and penurious husband. Some bold and trusty conspirators
were concealed in her most private chambers: in the darkness
of a winter night, Zimisces, with his principal companions,
embarked in a small boat, traversed the Bosphorus, landed at
the palace stairs, and silently ascended a ladder of ropes,
which was cast down by the female attendants. Neither his
own suspicions, nor the warnings of his friends, nor the
tardy aid of his brother Leo, nor the fortress which he had
erected in the palace, could protect Nicephorus from a
domestic foe, at whose voice every door was open to the
assassins. As he slept on a bear-skin on the ground, he was
roused by their noisy intrusion, and thirty daggers
glittered before his eyes. It is doubtful whether Zimisces
imbrued his hands in the blood of his sovereign; but he
enjoyed the inhuman spectacle of revenge. (O) The murder was
protracted by insult and cruelty: and as soon as the head of
Nicephorus was shown from the window, the tumult was hushed,
and the Armenian was emperor of the East. On the day of his
coronation, he was stopped on the threshold of St. Sophia,
by the intrepid patriarch; who charged his conscience with
the deed of treason and blood; and required, as a sign of
repentance, that he should separate himself from his more
criminal associate. This sally of apostolic zeal was not
offensive to the prince, since he could neither love nor
trust a woman who had repeatedly violated the most sacred
obligations; and Theophano, instead of sharing his imperial
fortune, was dismissed with ignominy from his bed and
palace. In their last interview, she displayed a frantic
and impotent rage; accused the ingratitude of her lover;
assaulted, with words and blows, her son Basil, as he stood
silent and submissive in the presence of a superior
colleague; and avowed her own prostitution in proclaiming
the illegitimacy of his birth. The public indignation was
appeased by her exile, and the punishment of the meaner
accomplices: the death of an unpopular prince was forgiven;
and the guilt of Zimisces was forgotten in the splendor of
his virtues. Perhaps his profusion was less useful to the
state than the avarice of Nicephorus; but his gentle and
generous behavior delighted all who approached his person;
and it was only in the paths of victory that he trod in the
footsteps of his predecessor. The greatest part of his
reign was employed in the camp and the field: his personal
valor and activity were signalized on the Danube and the
Tigris, the ancient boundaries of the Roman world; and by
his double triumph over the Russians and the Saracens, he
deserved the titles of savior of the empire, and conqueror
of the East. In his last return from Syria, he observed
that the most fruitful lands of his new provinces were
possessed by the eunuchs. "And is it for them," he
exclaimed, with honest indignation, "that we have fought and
conquered? Is it for them that we shed our blood, and
exhaust the treasures of our people?" The complaint was
reechoed to the palace, and the death of Zimisces is
strongly marked with the suspicion of poison.
Under this usurpation, or regency, of twelve years, the two
lawful emperors, Basil and Constantine, had silently grown
to the age of manhood. Their tender years had been incapable
of dominion: the respectful modesty of their attendance and
salutation was due to the age and merit of their guardians;
the childless ambition of those guardians had no temptation
to violate their right of succession: their patrimony was
ably and faithfully administered; and the premature death of
Zimisces was a loss, rather than a benefit, to the sons of
Romanus. Their want of experience detained them twelve
years longer the obscure and voluntary pupils of a minister,
who extended his reign by persuading them to indulge the
pleasures of youth, and to disdain the labors of government.
In this silken web, the weakness of Constantine was forever
entangled; but his elder brother felt the impulse of genius
and the desire of action; he frowned, and the minister was
no more. Basil was the acknowledged sovereign of
Constantinople and the provinces of Europe; but Asia was
oppressed by two veteran generals, Phocas and Sclerus, who,
alternately friends and enemies, subjects and rebels,
maintained their independence, and labored to emulate the
example of successful usurpation. Against these domestic
enemies the son of Romanus first drew his sword, and they
trembled in the presence of a lawful and high-spirited
prince. The first, in the front of battle, was thrown from
his horse, by the stroke of poison, or an arrow; the second,
who had been twice loaded with chains, (P) and twice invested
with the purple, was desirous of ending in peace the small
remainder of his days. As the aged suppliant approached the
throne, with dim eyes and faltering steps, leaning on his
two attendants, the emperor exclaimed, in the insolence of
youth and power, "And is this the man who has so long been
the object of our terror?" After he had confirmed his own
authority, and the peace of the empire, the trophies of
Nicephorus and Zimisces would not suffer their royal pupil
to sleep in the palace. His long and frequent expeditions
against the Saracens were rather glorious than useful to the
empire; but the final destruction of the kingdom of Bulgaria
appears, since the time of Belisarius, the most important
triumph of the Roman arms. Yet, instead of applauding their
victorious prince, his subjects detested the rapacious and
rigid avarice of Basil; and in the imperfect narrative of
his exploits, we can only discern the courage, patience, and
ferociousness of a soldier. A vicious education, which
could not subdue his spirit, had clouded his mind; he was
ignorant of every science; and the remembrance of his
learned and feeble grandsire might encourage his real or
affected contempt of laws and lawyers, of artists and arts.
Of such a character, in such an age, superstition took a
firm and lasting possession; after the first license of his
youth, Basil the Second devoted his life, in the palace and
the camp, to the penance of a hermit, wore the monastic
habit under his robes and armor, observed a vow of
continence, and imposed on his appetites a perpetual
abstinence from wine and flesh. In the sixty-eighth year of
his age, his martial spirit urged him to embark in person
for a holy war against the Saracens of Sicily; he was
prevented by death, and Basil, surnamed the Slayer of the
Bulgarians, was dismissed from the world with the blessings
of the clergy and the curse of the people. After his
decease, his brother Constantine enjoyed, about three years,
the power, or rather the pleasures, of royalty; and his only
care was the settlement of the succession. He had enjoyed
sixty-six years the title of Augustus; and the reign of the
two brothers is the longest, and most obscure, of the
Byzantine history.
A lineal succession of five emperors, in a period of one
hundred and sixty years, had attached the loyalty of the
Greeks to the Macedonian dynasty, which had been thrice
respected by the usurpers of their power. After the death of
Constantine the Ninth, the last male of the royal race, a
new and broken scene presents itself, and the accumulated
years of twelve emperors do not equal the space of his
single reign. His elder brother had preferred his private
chastity to the public interest, and Constantine himself had
only three daughters; Eudocia, who took the veil, and Zoe
and Theodora, who were preserved till a mature age in a
state of ignorance and virginity. When their marriage was
discussed in the council of their dying father, the cold or
pious Theodora refused to give an heir to the empire, but
her sister Zoe presented herself a willing victim at the
altar. Romanus Argyrus, a patrician of a graceful person and
fair reputation, was chosen for her husband, and, on his
declining that honor, was informed, that blindness or death
was the second alternative. The motive of his reluctance
was conjugal affection but his faithful wife sacrificed her
own happiness to his safety and greatness; and her entrance
into a monastery removed the only bar to the Imperial
nuptials. After the decease of Constantine, the sceptre
devolved to Romanus the Third; but his labors at home and
abroad were equally feeble and fruitless; and the mature
age, the forty-eight years of Zoe, were less favorable to
the hopes of pregnancy than to the indulgence of pleasure.
Her favorite chamberlain was a handsome Paphlagonian of the
name of Michael, whose first trade had been that of a
money-changer; and Romanus, either from gratitude or equity,
connived at their criminal intercourse, or accepted a slight
assurance of their innocence. But Zoe soon justified the
Roman maxim, that every adulteress is capable of poisoning
her husband; and the death of Romanus was instantly followed
by the scandalous marriage and elevation of Michael the
Fourth. The expectations of Zoe were, however,
disappointed: instead of a vigorous and grateful lover, she
had placed in her bed a miserable wretch, whose health and
reason were impaired by epileptic fits, and whose conscience
was tormented by despair and remorse. The most skilful
physicians of the mind and body were summoned to his aid;
and his hopes were amused by frequent pilgrimages to the
baths, and to the tombs of the most popular saints; the
monks applauded his penance, and, except restitution, (but
to whom should he have restored?) Michael sought every
method of expiating his guilt. While he groaned and prayed
in sackcloth and ashes, his brother, the eunuch John, smiled
at his remorse, and enjoyed the harvest of a crime of which
himself was the secret and most guilty author. His
administration was only the art of satiating his avarice,
and Zoe became a captive in the palace of her fathers, and
in the hands of her slaves. When he perceived the
irretrievable decline of his brother's health, he introduced
his nephew, another Michael, who derived his surname of
Calaphates from his father's occupation in the careening of
vessels: at the command of the eunuch, Zoe adopted for her
son the son of a mechanic; and this fictitious heir was
invested with the title and purple of the Caesars, in the
presence of the senate and clergy. So feeble was the
character of Zoe, that she was oppressed by the liberty and
power which she recovered by the death of the Paphlagonian;
and at the end of four days, she placed the crown on the
head of Michael the Fifth, who had protested, with tears and
oaths, that he should ever reign the first and most obedient
of her subjects. The only act of his short reign was his
base ingratitude to his benefactors, the eunuch and the
empress. The disgrace of the former was pleasing to the
public: but the murmurs, and at length the clamors, of
Constantinople deplored the exile of Zoe, the daughter of so
many emperors; her vices were forgotten, and Michael was
taught, that there is a period in which the patience of the
tamest slaves rises into fury and revenge. The citizens of
every degree assembled in a formidable tumult which lasted
three days; they besieged the palace, forced the gates,
recalled their mothers, Zoe from her prison, Theodora from
her monastery, and condemned the son of Calaphates to the
loss of his eyes or of his life. For the first time the
Greeks beheld with surprise the two royal sisters seated on
the same throne, presiding in the senate, and giving
audience to the ambassadors of the nations. But the singular
union subsisted no more than two months; the two sovereigns,
their tempers, interests, and adherents, were secretly
hostile to each other; and as Theodora was still averse to
marriage, the indefatigable Zoe, at the age of sixty,
consented, for the public good, to sustain the embraces of a
third husband, and the censures of the Greek church. His
name and number were Constantine the Tenth, and the epithet
of Monomachus, the single combatant, must have been
expressive of his valor and victory in some public or
private quarrel. But his health was broken by the tortures
of the gout, and his dissolute reign was spent in the
alternative of sickness and pleasure. A fair and noble
widow had accompanied Constantine in his exile to the Isle
of Lesbos, and Sclerena gloried in the appellation of his
mistress. After his marriage and elevation, she was invested
with the title and pomp of Augusta, and occupied a
contiguous apartment in the palace. The lawful consort
(such was the delicacy or corruption of Zoe) consented to
this strange and scandalous partition; and the emperor
appeared in public between his wife and his concubine. He
survived them both; but the last measures of Constantine to
change the order of succession were prevented by the more
vigilant friends of Theodora; and after his decease, she
resumed, with the general consent, the possession of her
inheritance. In her name, and by the influence of four
eunuchs, the Eastern world was peaceably governed about
nineteen months; and as they wished to prolong their
dominion, they persuaded the aged princess to nominate for
her successor Michael the Sixth. The surname of
Stratioticus declares his military profession; but the crazy
and decrepit veteran could only see with the eyes, and
execute with the hands, of his ministers. Whilst he ascended
the throne, Theodora sunk into the grave; the last of the
Macedonian or Basilian dynasty. I have hastily reviewed,
and gladly dismiss, this shameful and destructive period of
twenty-eight years, in which the Greeks, degraded below the
common level of servitude, were transferred like a herd of
cattle by the choice or caprice of two impotent females.
From this night of slavery, a ray of freedom, or at least of
spirit, begins to emerge: the Greeks either preserved or
revived the use of surnames, which perpetuate the fame of
hereditary virtue: and we now discern the rise, succession,
and alliances of the last dynasties of Constantinople and
Trebizond. The Comneni, who upheld for a while the fate of
the sinking empire, assumed the honor of a Roman origin: but
the family had been long since transported from Italy to
Asia. Their patrimonial estate was situate in the district
of Castamona, in the neighborhood of the Euxine; and one of
their chiefs, who had already entered the paths of ambition,
revisited with affection, perhaps with regret, the modest
though honorable dwelling of his fathers. The first of
their line was the illustrious Manuel, who in the reign of
the second Basil, contributed by war and treaty to appease
the troubles of the East: he left, in a tender age, two
sons, Isaac and John, whom, with the consciousness of
desert, he bequeathed to the gratitude and favor of his
sovereign. The noble youths were carefully trained in the
learning of the monastery, the arts of the palace, and the
exercises of the camp: and from the domestic service of the
guards, they were rapidly promoted to the command of
provinces and armies. Their fraternal union doubled the
force and reputation of the Comneni, and their ancient
nobility was illustrated by the marriage of the two
brothers, with a captive princess of Bulgaria, and the
daughter of a patrician, who had obtained the name of Charon
from the number of enemies whom he had sent to the infernal
shades. The soldiers had served with reluctant loyalty a
series of effeminate masters; the elevation of Michael the
Sixth was a personal insult to the more deserving generals;
and their discontent was inflamed by the parsimony of the
emperor and the insolence of the eunuchs. They secretly
assembled in the sanctuary of St. Sophia, and the votes of
the military synod would have been unanimous in favor of the
old and valiant Catacalon, if the patriotism or modesty of
the veteran had not suggested the importance of birth as
well as merit in the choice of a sovereign. Isaac Comnenus
was approved by general consent, and the associates
separated without delay to meet in the plains of Phrygia at
the head of their respective squadrons and detachments. The
cause of Michael was defended in a single battle by the
mercenaries of the Imperial guard, who were aliens to the
public interest, and animated only by a principle of honor
and gratitude. After their defeat, the fears of the emperor
solicited a treaty, which was almost accepted by the
moderation of the Comnenian. But the former was betrayed by
his ambassadors, and the latter was prevented by his
friends. The solitary Michael submitted to the voice of the
people; the patriarch annulled their oath of allegiance; and
as he shaved the head of the royal monk, congratulated his
beneficial exchange of temporal royalty for the kingdom of
heaven; an exchange, however, which the priest, on his own
account, would probably have declined. By the hands of the
same patriarch, Isaac Comnenus was solemnly crowned; the
sword which he inscribed on his coins might be an offensive
symbol, if it implied his title by conquest; but this sword
would have been drawn against the foreign and domestic
enemies of the state. The decline of his health and vigor
suspended the operation of active virtue; and the prospect
of approaching death determined him to interpose some
moments between life and eternity. But instead of leaving
the empire as the marriage portion of his daughter, his
reason and inclination concurred in the preference of his
brother John, a soldier, a patriot, and the father of five
sons, the future pillars of an hereditary succession. His
first modest reluctance might be the natural dictates of
discretion and tenderness, but his obstinate and successful
perseverance, however it may dazzle with the show of virtue,
must be censured as a criminal desertion of his duty, and a
rare offence against his family and country. The purple
which he had refused was accepted by Constantine Ducas, a
friend of the Comnenian house, and whose noble birth was
adorned with the experience and reputation of civil policy.
In the monastic habit, Isaac recovered his health, and
survived two years his voluntary abdication. At the command
of his abbot, he observed the rule of St. Basil, and
executed the most servile offices of the convent: but his
latent vanity was gratified by the frequent and respectful
visits of the reigning monarch, who revered in his person
the character of a benefactor and a saint. If Constantine
the Eleventh were indeed the subject most worthy of empire,
we must pity the debasement of the age and nation in which
he was chosen. In the labor of puerile declamations he
sought, without obtaining, the crown of eloquence, more
precious, in his opinion, than that of Rome; and in the
subordinate functions of a judge, he forgot the duties of a
sovereign and a warrior. Far from imitating the patriotic
indifference of the authors of his greatness, Ducas was
anxious only to secure, at the expense of the republic, the
power and prosperity of his children. His three sons,
Michael the Seventh, Andronicus the First, and Constantine
the Twelfth, were invested, in a tender age, with the equal
title of Augustus; and the succession was speedily opened by
their father's death. His widow, Eudocia, was intrusted
with the administration; but experience had taught the
jealousy of the dying monarch to protect his sons from the
danger of her second nuptials; and her solemn engagement,
attested by the principal senators, was deposited in the
hands of the patriarch. Before the end of seven months, the
wants of Eudocia, or those of the state, called aloud for
the male virtues of a soldier; and her heart had already
chosen Romanus Diogenes, whom she raised from the scaffold
to the throne. The discovery of a treasonable attempt had
exposed him to the severity of the laws: his beauty and
valor absolved him in the eyes of the empress; and Romanus,
from a mild exile, was recalled on the second day to the
command of the Oriental armies. Her royal choice was yet
unknown to the public; and the promise which would have
betrayed her falsehood and levity, was stolen by a dexterous
emissary from the ambition of the patriarch. Xiphilin at
first alleged the sanctity of oaths, and the sacred nature
of a trust; but a whisper, that his brother was the future
emperor, relaxed his scruples, and forced him to confess
that the public safety was the supreme law. He resigned the
important paper; and when his hopes were confounded by the
nomination of Romanus, he could no longer regain his
security, retract his declarations, nor oppose the second
nuptials of the empress. Yet a murmur was heard in the
palace; and the Barbarian guards had raised their
battle-axes in the cause of the house of Lucas, till the
young princes were soothed by the tears of their mother and
the solemn assurances of the fidelity of their guardian, who
filled the Imperial station with dignity and honor.
Hereafter I shall relate his valiant, but unsuccessful,
efforts to resist the progress of the Turks. His defeat and
captivity inflicted a deadly wound on the Byzantine monarchy
of the East; and after he was released from the chains of
the sultan, he vainly sought his wife and his subjects. His
wife had been thrust into a monastery, and the subjects of
Romanus had embraced the rigid maxim of the civil law, that
a prisoner in the hands of the enemy is deprived, as by the
stroke of death, of all the public and private rights of a
citizen. In the general consternation, the Caesar John
asserted the indefeasible right of his three nephews:
Constantinople listened to his voice: and the Turkish
captive was proclaimed in the capital, and received on the
frontier, as an enemy of the republic. Romanus was not more
fortunate in domestic than in foreign war: the loss of two
battles compelled him to yield, on the assurance of fair and
honorable treatment; but his enemies were devoid of faith or
humanity; and, after the cruel extinction of his sight, his
wounds were left to bleed and corrupt, till in a few days he
was relieved from a state of misery. Under the triple reign
of the house of Ducas, the two younger brothers were reduced
to the vain honors of the purple; but the eldest, the
pusillanimous Michael, was incapable of sustaining the Roman
sceptre; and his surname of Parapinaces denotes the reproach
which he shared with an avaricious favorite, who enhanced
the price, and diminished the measure, of wheat. In the
school of Psellus, and after the example of his mother, the
son of Eudocia made some proficiency in philosophy and
rhetoric; but his character was degraded, rather than
ennobled, by the virtues of a monk and the learning of a
sophist. Strong in the contempt of their sovereign and their
own esteem, two generals, at the head of the European and
Asiatic legions, assumed the purple at Adrianople and Nice.
Their revolt was in the same months; they bore the same name
of Nicephorus; but the two candidates were distinguished by
the surnames of Bryennius and Botaniates; the former in the
maturity of wisdom and courage, the latter conspicuous only
by the memory of his past exploits. While Botaniates
advanced with cautious and dilatory steps, his active
competitor stood in arms before the gates of Constantinople.
The name of Bryennius was illustrious; his cause was
popular; but his licentious troops could not be restrained
from burning and pillaging a suburb; and the people, who
would have hailed the rebel, rejected and repulsed the
incendiary of his country. This change of the public
opinion was favorable to Botaniates, who at length, with an
army of Turks, approached the shores of Chalcedon. A formal
invitation, in the name of the patriarch, the synod, and the
senate, was circulated through the streets of
Constantinople; and the general assembly, in the dome of St.
Sophia, debated, with order and calmness, on the choice of
their sovereign. The guards of Michael would have dispersed
this unarmed multitude; but the feeble emperor, applauding
his own moderation and clemency, resigned the ensigns of
royalty, and was rewarded with the monastic habit, and the
title of Archbishop of Ephesus. He left a son, a
Constantine, born and educated in the purple; and a daughter
of the house of Ducas illustrated the blood, and confirmed
the succession, of the Comnenian dynasty.
John Comnenus, the brother of the emperor Isaac, survived in
peace and dignity his generous refusal of the sceptre. By
his wife Anne, a woman of masculine spirit and a policy, he
left eight children: the three daughters multiplied the
Comnenian alliance with the noblest of the Greeks: of the
five sons, Manuel was stopped by a premature death; Isaac
and Alexius restored the Imperial greatness of their house,
which was enjoyed without toil or danger by the two younger
brethren, Adrian and Nicephorus. Alexius, the third and most
illustrious of the brothers was endowed by nature with the
choicest gifts both of mind and body: they were cultivated
by a liberal education, and exercised in the school of
obedience and adversity. The youth was dismissed from the
perils of the Turkish war, by the paternal care of the
emperor Romanus: but the mother of the Comneni, with her
aspiring face, was accused of treason, and banished, by the
sons of Ducas, to an island in the Propontis. The two
brothers soon emerged into favor and action, fought by each
other's side against the rebels and Barbarians, and adhered
to the emperor Michael, till he was deserted by the world
and by himself. In his first interview with Botaniates,
"Prince," said Alexius with a noble frankness, "my duty
rendered me your enemy; the decrees of God and of the people
have made me your subject. Judge of my future loyalty by my
past opposition." The successor of Michael entertained him
with esteem and confidence: his valor was employed against
three rebels, who disturbed the peace of the empire, or at
least of the emperors. Ursel, Bryennius, and Basilacius,
were formidable by their numerous forces and military fame:
they were successively vanquished in the field, and led in
chains to the foot of the throne; and whatever treatment
they might receive from a timid and cruel court, they
applauded the clemency, as well as the courage, of their
conqueror. But the loyalty of the Comneni was soon tainted
by fear and suspicion; nor is it easy to settle between a
subject and a despot, the debt of gratitude, which the
former is tempted to claim by a revolt, and the latter to
discharge by an executioner. The refusal of Alexius to
march against a fourth rebel, the husband of his sister,
destroyed the merit or memory of his past services: the
favorites of Botaniates provoked the ambition which they
apprehended and accused; and the retreat of the two brothers
might be justified by the defence of their life and liberty.
The women of the family were deposited in a sanctuary,
respected by tyrants: the men, mounted on horseback, sallied
from the city, and erected the standard of civil war. The
soldiers who had been gradually assembled in the capital and
the neighborhood, were devoted to the cause of a victorious
and injured leader: the ties of common interest and domestic
alliance secured the attachment of the house of Ducas; and
the generous dispute of the Comneni was terminated by the
decisive resolution of Isaac, who was the first to invest
his younger brother with the name and ensigns of royalty.
They returned to Constantinople, to threaten rather than
besiege that impregnable fortress; but the fidelity of the
guards was corrupted; a gate was surprised, and the fleet
was occupied by the active courage of George Palaeologus,
who fought against his father, without foreseeing that he
labored for his posterity. Alexius ascended the throne; and
his aged competitor disappeared in a monastery. An army of
various nations was gratified with the pillage of the city;
but the public disorders were expiated by the tears and
fasts of the Comneni, who submitted to every penance
compatible with the possession of the empire. The life of
the emperor Alexius has been delineated by a favorite
daughter, who was inspired by a tender regard for his person
and a laudable zeal to perpetuate his virtues. Conscious of
the just suspicions of her readers, the princess Anna
Comnena repeatedly protests, that, besides her personal
knowledge, she had searched the discourses and writings of
the most respectable veterans: and after an interval of
thirty years, forgotten by, and forgetful of, the world, her
mournful solitude was inaccessible to hope and fear; and
that truth, the naked perfect truth, was more dear and
sacred than the memory of her parent. Yet, instead of the
simplicity of style and narrative which wins our belief, an
elaborate affectation of rhetoric and science betrays in
every page the vanity of a female author. The genuine
character of Alexius is lost in a vague constellation of
virtues; and the perpetual strain of panegyric and apology
awakens our jealousy, to question the veracity of the
historian and the merit of the hero. We cannot, however,
refuse her judicious and important remark, that the
disorders of the times were the misfortune and the glory of
Alexius; and that every calamity which can afflict a
declining empire was accumulated on his reign by the justice
of Heaven and the vices of his predecessors. In the East,
the victorious Turks had spread, from Persia to the
Hellespont, the reign of the Koran and the Crescent: the
West was invaded by the adventurous valor of the Normans;
and, in the moments of peace, the Danube poured forth new
swarms, who had gained, in the science of war, what they had
lost in the ferociousness of manners. The sea was not less
hostile than the land; and while the frontiers were
assaulted by an open enemy, the palace was distracted with
secret treason and conspiracy. On a sudden, the banner of
the Cross was displayed by the Latins; Europe was
precipitated on Asia; and Constantinople had almost been
swept away by this impetuous deluge. In the tempest,
Alexius steered the Imperial vessel with dexterity and
courage. At the head of his armies, he was bold in action,
skilful in stratagem, patient of fatigue, ready to improve
his advantages, and rising from his defeats with
inexhaustible vigor. The discipline of the camp was revived,
and a new generation of men and soldiers was created by the
example and precepts of their leader. In his intercourse
with the Latins, Alexius was patient and artful: his
discerning eye pervaded the new system of an unknown world
and I shall hereafter describe the superior policy with
which he balanced the interests and passions of the
champions of the first crusade. In a long reign of thirty-
seven years, he subdued and pardoned the envy of his equals:
the laws of public and private order were restored: the arts
of wealth and science were cultivated: the limits of the
empire were enlarged in Europe and Asia; and the Comnenian
sceptre was transmitted to his children of the third and
fourth generation. Yet the difficulties of the times
betrayed some defects in his character; and have exposed his
memory to some just or ungenerous reproach. The reader may
possibly smile at the lavish praise which his daughter so
often bestows on a flying hero: the weakness or prudence of
his situation might be mistaken for a want of personal
courage; and his political arts are branded by the Latins
with the names of deceit and dissimulation. The increase of
the male and female branches of his family adorned the
throne, and secured the succession; but their princely
luxury and pride offended the patricians, exhausted the
revenue, and insulted the misery of the people. Anna is a
faithful witness that his happiness was destroyed, and his
health was broken, by the cares of a public life; the
patience of Constantinople was fatigued by the length and
severity of his reign; and before Alexius expired, he had
lost the love and reverence of his subjects. The clergy
could not forgive his application of the sacred riches to
the defence of the state; but they applauded his theological
learning and ardent zeal for the orthodox faith, which he
defended with his tongue, his pen, and his sword. His
character was degraded by the superstition of the Greeks;
and the same inconsistent principle of human nature enjoined
the emperor to found a hospital for the poor and infirm, and
to direct the execution of a heretic, who was burned alive
in the square of St. Sophia. Even the sincerity of his moral
and religious virtues was suspected by the persons who had
passed their lives in his familiar confidence. In his last
hours, when he was pressed by his wife Irene to alter the
succession, he raised his head, and breathed a pious
ejaculation on the vanity of this world. The indignant
reply of the empress may be inscribed as an epitaph on his
tomb, "You die, as you have lived - A Hypocrite!"
It was the wish of Irene to supplant the eldest of her
surviving sons, in favor of her daughter the princess Anne
whose philosophy would not have refused the weight of a
diadem. But the order of male succession was asserted by
the friends of their country; the lawful heir drew the royal
signet from the finger of his insensible or conscious father
and the empire obeyed the master of the palace. Anna
Comnena was stimulated by ambition and revenge to conspire
against the life of her brother, and when the design was
prevented by the fears or scruples of her husband, she
passionately exclaimed that nature had mistaken the two
sexes, and had endowed Bryennius with the soul of a woman.
The two sons of Alexius, John and Isaac, maintained the
fraternal concord, the hereditary virtue of their race, and
the younger brother was content with the title of
Sebastocrator, which approached the dignity, without sharing
the power, of the emperor. In the same person the claims of
primogeniture and merit were fortunately united; his swarthy
complexion, harsh features, and diminutive stature, had
suggested the ironical surname of Calo-Johannes, or John the
Handsome, which his grateful subjects more seriously applied
to the beauties of his mind. After the discovery of her
treason, the life and fortune of Anne were justly forfeited
to the laws. Her life was spared by the clemency of the
emperor; but he visited the pomp and treasures of her
palace, and bestowed the rich confiscation on the most
deserving of his friends. That respectable friend Axuch, a
slave of Turkish extraction, presumed to decline the gift,
and to intercede for the criminal: his generous master
applauded and imitated the virtue of his favorite, and the
reproach or complaint of an injured brother was the only
chastisement of the guilty princess. After this example of
clemency, the remainder of his reign was never disturbed by
conspiracy or rebellion: feared by his nobles, beloved by
his people, John was never reduced to the painful necessity
of punishing, or even of pardoning, his personal enemies.
During his government of twenty-five years, the penalty of
death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most
delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the
practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom
consistent with the public safety. Severe to himself,
indulgent to others, chaste, frugal, abstemious, the
philosophic Marcus would not have disdained the artless
virtues of his successor, derived from his heart, and not
borrowed from the schools. He despised and moderated the
stately magnificence of the Byzantine court, so oppressive
to the people, so contemptible to the eye of reason. Under
such a prince, innocence had nothing to fear, and merit had
every thing to hope; and, without assuming the tyrannic
office of a censor, he introduced a gradual though visible
reformation in the public and private manners of
Constantinople. The only defect of this accomplished
character was the frailty of noble minds, the love of arms
and military glory. Yet the frequent expeditions of John
the Handsome may be justified, at least in their principle,
by the necessity of repelling the Turks from the Hellespont
and the Bosphorus. The sultan of Iconium was confined to
his capital, the Barbarians were driven to the mountains,
and the maritime provinces of Asia enjoyed the transient
blessings of their deliverance. From Constantinople to
Antioch and Aleppo, he repeatedly marched at the head of a
victorious army, and in the sieges and battles of this holy
war, his Latin allies were astonished by the superior spirit
and prowess of a Greek. As he began to indulge the
ambitious hope of restoring the ancient limits of the
empire, as he revolved in his mind, the Euphrates and
Tigris, the dominion of Syria, and the conquest of
Jerusalem, the thread of his life and of the public felicity
was broken by a singular accident. He hunted the wild boar
in the valley of Anazarbus, and had fixed his javelin in the
body of the furious animal; but in the struggle a poisoned
arrow dropped from his quiver, and a slight wound in his
hand, which produced a mortification, was fatal to the best
and greatest of the Comnenian princes.
A premature death had swept away the two eldest sons of John
the Handsome; of the two survivors, Isaac and Manuel, his
judgment or affection preferred the younger; and the choice
of their dying prince was ratified by the soldiers, who had
applauded the valor of his favorite in the Turkish war The
faithful Axuch hastened to the capital, secured the person
of Isaac in honorable confinement, and purchased, with a
gift of two hundred pounds of silver, the leading
ecclesiastics of St. Sophia, who possessed a decisive voice
in the consecration of an emperor. With his veteran and
affectionate troops, Manuel soon visited Constantinople; his
brother acquiesced in the title of Sebastocrator; his
subjects admired the lofty stature and martial graces of
their new sovereign, and listened with credulity to the
flattering promise, that he blended the wisdom of age with
the activity and vigor of youth. By the experience of his
government, they were taught, that he emulated the spirit,
and shared the talents, of his father whose social virtues
were buried in the grave. A reign of thirty seven years is
filled by a perpetual though various warfare against the
Turks, the Christians, and the hordes of the wilderness
beyond the Danube. The arms of Manuel were exercised on
Mount Taurus, in the plains of Hungary, on the coast of
Italy and Egypt, and on the seas of Sicily and Greece: the
influence of his negotiations extended from Jerusalem to
Rome and Russia; and the Byzantine monarchy, for a while,
became an object of respect or terror to the powers of Asia
and Europe. Educated in the silk and purple of the East,
Manuel possessed the iron temper of a soldier, which cannot
easily be paralleled, except in the lives of Richard the
First of England, and of Charles the Twelfth of Sweden.
Such was his strength and exercise in arms, that Raymond,
surnamed the Hercules of Antioch, was incapable of wielding
the lance and buckler of the Greek emperor. In a famous
tournament, he entered the lists on a fiery courser, and
overturned in his first career two of the stoutest of the
Italian knights. The first in the charge, the last in the
retreat, his friends and his enemies alike trembled, the
former for his safety, and the latter for their own. After
posting an ambuscade in a wood, he rode forwards in search
of some perilous adventure, accompanied only by his brother
and the faithful Axuch, who refused to desert their
sovereign. Eighteen horsemen, after a short combat, fled
before them: but the numbers of the enemy increased; the
march of the reenforcement was tardy and fearful, and
Manuel, without receiving a wound, cut his way through a
squadron of five hundred Turks. In a battle against the
Hungarians, impatient of the slowness of his troops, he
snatched a standard from the head of the column, and was the
first, almost alone, who passed a bridge that separated him
from the enemy. In the same country, after transporting his
army beyond the Save, he sent back the boats, with an order
under pain of death, to their commander, that he should
leave him to conquer or die on that hostile land. In the
siege of Corfu, towing after him a captive galley, the
emperor stood aloft on the poop, opposing against the
volleys of darts and stones, a large buckler and a flowing
sail; nor could he have escaped inevitable death, had not
the Sicilian admiral enjoined his archers to respect the
person of a hero. In one day, he is said to have slain
above forty of the Barbarians with his own hand; he returned
to the camp, dragging along four Turkish prisoners, whom he
had tied to the rings of his saddle: he was ever the
foremost to provoke or to accept a single combat; and the
gigantic champions, who encountered his arm, were
transpierced by the lance, or cut asunder by the sword, of
the invincible Manuel. The story of his exploits, which
appear as a model or a copy of the romances of chivalry, may
induce a reasonable suspicion of the veracity of the Greeks:
I will not, to vindicate their credit, endanger my own: yet
I may observe, that, in the long series of their annals,
Manuel is the only prince who has been the subject of
similar exaggeration. With the valor of a soldier, he did
no unite the skill or prudence of a general; his victories
were not productive of any permanent or useful conquest; and
his Turkish laurels were blasted in his last unfortunate
campaign, in which he lost his army in the mountains of
Pisidia, and owed his deliverance to the generosity of the
sultan. But the most singular feature in the character of
Manuel, is the contrast and vicissitude of labor and sloth,
of hardiness and effeminacy. In war he seemed ignorant of
peace, in peace he appeared incapable of war. In the field
he slept in the sun or in the snow, tired in the longest
marches the strength of his men and horses, and shared with
a smile the abstinence or diet of the camp. No sooner did
he return to Constantinople, than he resigned himself to the
arts and pleasures of a life of luxury: the expense of his
dress, his table, and his palace, surpassed the measure of
his predecessors, and whole summer days were idly wasted in
the delicious isles of the Propontis, in the incestuous love
of his niece Theodora. The double cost of a warlike and
dissolute prince exhausted the revenue, and multiplied the
taxes; and Manuel, in the distress of his last Turkish
campaign, endured a bitter reproach from the mouth of a
desperate soldier. As he quenched his thirst, he complained
that the water of a fountain was mingled with Christian
blood. "It is not the first time," exclaimed a voice from
the crowd, "that you have drank, O emperor, the blood of
your Christian subjects." Manuel Comnenus was twice married,
to the virtuous Bertha or Irene of Germany, and to the
beauteous Maria, a French or Latin princess of Antioch. The
only daughter of his first wife was destined for Bela, a
Hungarian prince, who was educated at Constantinople under
the name of Alexius; and the consummation of their nuptials
might have transferred the Roman sceptre to a race of free
and warlike Barbarians. But as soon as Maria of Antioch had
given a son and heir to the empire, the presumptive rights
of Bela were abolished, and he was deprived of his promised
bride; but the Hungarian prince resumed his name and the
kingdom of his fathers, and displayed such virtues as might
excite the regret and envy of the Greeks. The son of Maria
was named Alexius; and at the age of ten years he ascended
the Byzantine throne, after his father's decease had closed
the glories of the Comnenian line.
The fraternal concord of the two sons of the great Alexius
had been sometimes clouded by an opposition of interest and
passion. By ambition, Isaac the Sebastocrator was excited
to flight and rebellion, from whence he was reclaimed by the
firmness and clemency of John the Handsome. The errors of
Isaac, the father of the emperors of Trebizond, were short
and venial; but John, the elder of his sons, renounced
forever his religion. Provoked by a real or imaginary insult
of his uncle, he escaped from the Roman to the Turkish camp:
his apostasy was rewarded with the sultan's daughter, the
title of Chelebi, or noble, and the inheritance of a
princely estate; and in the fifteenth century, Mahomet the
Second boasted of his Imperial descent from the Comnenian
family. Andronicus, the younger brother of John, son of
Isaac, and grandson of Alexius Comnenus, is one of the most
conspicuous characters of the age; and his genuine
adventures might form the subject of a very singular
romance. To justify the choice of three ladies of royal
birth, it is incumbent on me to observe, that their
fortunate lover was cast in the best proportions of strength
and beauty; and that the want of the softer graces was
supplied by a manly countenance, a lofty stature, athletic
muscles, and the air and deportment of a soldier. The
preservation, in his old age, of health and vigor, was the
reward of temperance and exercise. A piece of bread and a
draught of water was often his sole and evening repast; and
if he tasted of a wild boar or a stag, which he had roasted
with his own hands, it was the well-earned fruit of a
laborious chase. Dexterous in arms, he was ignorant of fear;
his persuasive eloquence could bend to every situation and
character of life, his style, though not his practice, was
fashioned by the example of St. Paul; and, in every deed of
mischief, he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and
a hand to execute. In his youth, after the death of the
emperor John, he followed the retreat of the Roman army;
but, in the march through Asia Minor, design or accident
tempted him to wander in the mountains: the hunter was
encompassed by the Turkish huntsmen, and he remained some
time a reluctant or willing captive in the power of the
sultan. His virtues and vices recommended him to the favor
of his cousin: he shared the perils and the pleasures of
Manuel; and while the emperor lived in public incest with
his niece Theodora, the affections of her sister Eudocia
were seduced and enjoyed by Andronicus. Above the decencies
of her sex and rank, she gloried in the name of his
concubine; and both the palace and the camp could witness
that she slept, or watched, in the arms of her lover. She
accompanied him to his military command of Cilicia, the
first scene of his valor and imprudence. He pressed, with
active ardor, the siege of Mopsuestia: the day was employed
in the boldest attacks; but the night was wasted in song and
dance; and a band of Greek comedians formed the choicest
part of his retinue. Andronicus was surprised by the sally
of a vigilant foe; but, while his troops fled in disorder,
his invincible lance transpierced the thickest ranks of the
Armenians. On his return to the Imperial camp in Macedonia,
he was received by Manuel with public smiles and a private
reproof; but the duchies of Naissus, Braniseba, and
Castoria, were the reward or consolation of the unsuccessful
general. Eudocia still attended his motions: at midnight,
their tent was suddenly attacked by her angry brothers,
impatient to expiate her infamy in his blood: his daring
spirit refused her advice, and the disguise of a female
habit; and, boldly starting from his couch, he drew his
sword, and cut his way through the numerous assassins. It
was here that he first betrayed his ingratitude and
treachery: he engaged in a treasonable correspondence with
the king of Hungary and the German emperor; approached the
royal tent at a suspicious hour with a drawn sword, and
under the mask of a Latin soldier, avowed an intention of
revenge against a mortal foe; and imprudently praised the
fleetness of his horse as an instrument of flight and
safety. The monarch dissembled his suspicions; but, after
the close of the campaign, Andronicus was arrested and
strictly confined in a tower of the palace of
Constantinople.
In this prison he was left about twelve years; a most
painful restraint, from which the thirst of action and
pleasure perpetually urged him to escape. Alone and pensive,
he perceived some broken bricks in a corner of the chamber,
and gradually widened the passage, till he had explored a
dark and forgotten recess. Into this hole he conveyed
himself, and the remains of his provisions, replacing the
bricks in their former position, and erasing with care the
footsteps of his retreat. At the hour of the customary
visit, his guards were amazed by the silence and solitude of
the prison, and reported, with shame and fear, his
incomprehensible flight. The gates of the palace and city
were instantly shut: the strictest orders were despatched
into the provinces, for the recovery of the fugitive; and
his wife, on the suspicion of a pious act, was basely
imprisoned in the same tower. At the dead of night she
beheld a spectre; she recognized her husband: they shared
their provisions; and a son was the fruit of these stolen
interviews, which alleviated the tediousness of their
confinement. In the custody of a woman, the vigilance of
the keepers was insensibly relaxed; and the captive had
accomplished his real escape, when he was discovered,
brought back to Constantinople, and loaded with a double
chain. At length he found the moment, and the means, of his
deliverance. A boy, his domestic servant, intoxicated the
guards, and obtained in wax the impression of the keys. By
the diligence of his friends, a similar key, with a bundle
of ropes, was introduced into the prison, in the bottom of a
hogshead. Andronicus employed, with industry and courage,
the instruments of his safety, unlocked the doors, descended
from the tower, concealed himself all day among the bushes,
and scaled in the night the garden-wall of the palace. A
boat was stationed for his reception: he visited his own
house, embraced his children, cast away his chain, mounted a
fleet horse, and directed his rapid course towards the banks
of the Danube. At Anchialus in Thrace, an intrepid friend
supplied him with horses and money: he passed the river,
traversed with speed the desert of Moldavia and the
Carpathian hills, and had almost reached the town of Halicz,
in the Polish Russia, when he was intercepted by a party of
Walachians, who resolved to convey their important captive
to Constantinople. His presence of mind again extricated him
from danger. Under the pretence of sickness, he dismounted
in the night, and was allowed to step aside from the troop:
he planted in the ground his long staff, clothed it with his
cap and upper garment; and, stealing into the wood, left a
phantom to amuse, for some time, the eyes of the Walachians.
From Halicz he was honorably conducted to Kiow, the
residence of the great duke: the subtle Greek soon obtained
the esteem and confidence of Ieroslaus; his character could
assume the manners of every climate; and the Barbarians
applauded his strength and courage in the chase of the elks
and bears of the forest. In this northern region he
deserved the forgiveness of Manuel, who solicited the
Russian prince to join his arms in the invasion of Hungary.
The influence of Andronicus achieved this important service:
his private treaty was signed with a promise of fidelity on
one side, and of oblivion on the other; and he marched, at
the head of the Russian cavalry, from the Borysthenes to the
Danube. In his resentment Manuel had ever sympathized with
the martial and dissolute character of his cousin; and his
free pardon was sealed in the assault of Zemlin, in which he
was second, and second only, to the valor of the emperor.
No sooner was the exile restored to freedom and his country,
than his ambition revived, at first to his own, and at
length to the public, misfortune. A daughter of Manuel was
a feeble bar to the succession of the more deserving males
of the Comnenian blood; her future marriage with the prince
of Hungary was repugnant to the hopes or prejudices of the
princes and nobles. But when an oath of allegiance was
required to the presumptive heir, Andronicus alone asserted
the honor of the Roman name, declined the unlawful
engagement, and boldly protested against the adoption of a
stranger. His patriotism was offensive to the emperor, but
he spoke the sentiments of the people, and was removed from
the royal presence by an honorable banishment, a second
command of the Cilician frontier, with the absolute disposal
of the revenues of Cyprus. In this station the Armenians
again exercised his courage and exposed his negligence; and
the same rebel, who baffled all his operations, was
unhorsed, and almost slain by the vigor of his lance. But
Andronicus soon discovered a more easy and pleasing
conquest, the beautiful Philippa, sister of the empress
Maria, and daughter of Raymond of Poitou, the Latin prince
of Antioch. For her sake he deserted his station, and
wasted the summer in balls and tournaments: to his love she
sacrificed her innocence, her reputation, and the offer of
an advantageous marriage. But the resentment of Manuel for
this domestic affront interrupted his pleasures: Andronicus
left the indiscreet princess to weep and to repent; and,
with a band of desperate adventurers, undertook the
pilgrimage of Jerusalem. His birth, his martial renown, and
professions of zeal, announced him as the champion of the
Cross: he soon captivated both the clergy and the king; and
the Greek prince was invested with the lordship of Berytus,
on the coast of Phoenicia. In his neighborhood resided a
young and handsome queen, of his own nation and family,
great-granddaughter of the emperor Alexis, and widow of
Baldwin the Third, king of Jerusalem. She visited and loved
her kinsman. Theodora was the third victim of his amorous
seduction; and her shame was more public and scandalous than
that of her predecessors. The emperor still thirsted for
revenge; and his subjects and allies of the Syrian frontier
were repeatedly pressed to seize the person, and put out the
eyes, of the fugitive. In Palestine he was no longer safe;
but the tender Theodora revealed his danger, and accompanied
his flight. The queen of Jerusalem was exposed to the East,
his obsequious concubine; and two illegitimate children were
the living monuments of her weakness. Damascus was his
first refuge; and, in the characters of the great Noureddin
and his servant Saladin, the superstitious Greek might learn
to revere the virtues of the Mussulmans. As the friend of
Noureddin he visited, most probably, Bagdad, and the courts
of Persia; and, after a long circuit round the Caspian Sea
and the mountains of Georgia, he finally settled among the
Turks of Asia Minor, the hereditary enemies of his country.
The sultan of Colonia afforded a hospitable retreat to
Andronicus, his mistress, and his band of outlaws: the debt
of gratitude was paid by frequent inroads in the Roman
province of Trebizond; and he seldom returned without an
ample harvest of spoil and of Christian captives. In the
story of his adventures, he was fond of comparing himself to
David, who escaped, by a long exile, the snares of the
wicked. But the royal prophet (he presumed to add) was
content to lurk on the borders of Judaea, to slay an
Amalekite, and to threaten, in his miserable state, the life
of the avaricious Nabal. The excursions of the Comnenian
prince had a wider range; and he had spread over the Eastern
world the glory of his name and religion. By a sentence of
the Greek church, the licentious rover had been separated
from the faithful; but even this excommunication may prove,
that he never abjured the profession of Chistianity.
His vigilance had eluded or repelled the open and secret
persecution of the emperor; but he was at length insnared by
the captivity of his female companion. The governor of
Trebizond succeeded in his attempt to surprise the person of
Theodora: the queen of Jerusalem and her two children were
sent to Constantinople, and their loss imbittered the
tedious solitude of banishment. The fugitive implored and
obtained a final pardon, with leave to throw himself at the
feet of his sovereign, who was satisfied with the submission
of this haughty spirit. Prostrate on the ground, he
deplored with tears and groans the guilt of his past
rebellion; nor would he presume to arise, unless some
faithful subject would drag him to the foot of the throne,
by an iron chain with which he had secretly encircled his
neck. This extraordinary penance excited the wonder and
pity of the assembly; his sins were forgiven by the church
and state; but the just suspicion of Manuel fixed his
residence at a distance from the court, at Oenoe, a town of
Pontus, surrounded with rich vineyards, and situate on the
coast of the Euxine. The death of Manuel, and the disorders
of the minority, soon opened the fairest field to his
ambition. The emperor was a boy of twelve or fourteen years
of age, without vigor, or wisdom, or experience: his mother,
the empress Mary, abandoned her person and government to a
favorite of the Comnenian name; and his sister, another
Mary, whose husband, an Italian, was decorated with the
title of Caesar, excited a conspiracy, and at length an
insurrection, against her odious step-mother. The provinces
were forgotten, the capital was in flames, and a century of
peace and order was overthrown in the vice and weakness of a
few months. A civil war was kindled in Constantinople; the
two factions fought a bloody battle in the square of the
palace, and the rebels sustained a regular siege in the
cathedral of St. Sophia. The patriarch labored with honest
zeal to heal the wounds of the republic, the most
respectable patriots called aloud for a guardian and
avenger, and every tongue repeated the praise of the talents
and even the virtues of Andronicus. In his retirement, he
affected to revolve the solemn duties of his oath: "If the
safety or honor of the Imperial family be threatened, I will
reveal and oppose the mischief to the utmost of my power."
His correspondence with the patriarch and patricians was
seasoned with apt quotations from the Psalms of David and
the epistles of St. Paul; and he patiently waited till he
was called to her deliverance by the voice of his country.
In his march from Oenoe to Constantinople, his slender train
insensibly swelled to a crowd and an army: his professions
of religion and loyalty were mistaken for the language of
his heart; and the simplicity of a foreign dress, which
showed to advantage his majestic stature, displayed a lively
image of his poverty and exile. All opposition sunk before
him; he reached the straits of the Thracian Bosphorus; the
Byzantine navy sailed from the harbor to receive and
transport the savior of the empire: the torrent was loud and
irresistible, and the insects who had basked in the sunshine
of royal favor disappeared at the blast of the storm. It
was the first care of Andronicus to occupy the palace, to
salute the emperor, to confine his mother, to punish her
minister, and to restore the public order and tranquillity.
He then visited the sepulchre of Manuel: the spectators were
ordered to stand aloof, but as he bowed in the attitude of
prayer, they heard, or thought they heard, a murmur of
triumph or revenge: "I no longer fear thee, my old enemy,
who hast driven me a vagabond to every climate of the earth.
Thou art safety deposited under a seven-fold dome, from
whence thou canst never arise till the signal of the last
trumpet. It is now my turn, and speedily will I trample on
thy ashes and thy posterity." From his subsequent tyranny we
may impute such feelings to the man and the moment; but it
is not extremely probable that he gave an articulate sound
to his secret thoughts. In the first months of his
administration, his designs were veiled by a fair semblance
of hypocrisy, which could delude only the eyes of the
multitude; the coronation of Alexius was performed with due
solemnity, and his perfidious guardian, holding in his hands
the body and blood of Christ, most fervently declared that
he lived, and was ready to die, for the service of his
beloved pupil. But his numerous adherents were instructed
to maintain, that the sinking empire must perish in the
hands of a child, that the Romans could only be saved by a
veteran prince, bold in arms, skilful in policy, and taught
to reign by the long experience of fortune and mankind; and
that it was the duty of every citizen to force the reluctant
modesty of Andronicus to undertake the burden of the public
care. The young emperor was himself constrained to join his
voice to the general acclamation, and to solicit the
association of a colleague, who instantly degraded him from
the supreme rank, secluded his person, and verified the rash
declaration of the patriarch, that Alexius might be
considered as dead, so soon as he was committed to the
custody of his guardian. But his death was preceded by the
imprisonment and execution of his mother. After blackening
her reputation, and inflaming against her the passions of
the multitude, the tyrant accused and tried the empress for
a treasonable correspondence with the king of Hungary. His
own son, a youth of honor and humanity, avowed his
abhorrence of this flagitious act, and three of the judges
had the merit of preferring their conscience to their
safety: but the obsequious tribunal, without requiring any
reproof, or hearing any defence, condemned the widow of
Manuel; and her unfortunate son subscribed the sentence of
her death. Maria was strangled, her corpse was buried in
the sea, and her memory was wounded by the insult most
offensive to female vanity, a false and ugly representation
of her beauteous form. The fate of her son was not long
deferred: he was strangled with a bowstring; and the tyrant,
insensible to pity or remorse, after surveying the body of
the innocent youth, struck it rudely with his foot: "Thy
father," he cried, "was a knave, thy mother a whore, and
thyself a fool!"
The Roman sceptre, the reward of his crimes, was held by
Andronicus about three years and a half as the guardian or
sovereign of the empire. His government exhibited a
singular contrast of vice and virtue. When he listened to
his passions, he was the scourge; when he consulted his
reason, the father, of his people. In the exercise of
private justice, he was equitable and rigorous: a shameful
and pernicious venality was abolished, and the offices were
filled with the most deserving candidates, by a prince who
had sense to choose, and severity to punish. He prohibited
the inhuman practice of pillaging the goods and persons of
shipwrecked mariners; the provinces, so long the objects of
oppression or neglect, revived in prosperity and plenty; and
millions applauded the distant blessings of his reign, while
he was cursed by the witnesses of his daily cruelties. The
ancient proverb, That bloodthirsty is the man who returns
from banishment to power, had been applied, with too much
truth, to 'Marius and Tiberius; and was now verified for the
third time in the life of Andronicus. His memory was stored
with a black list of the enemies and rivals, who had
traduced his merit, opposed his greatness, or insulted his
misfortunes; and the only comfort of his exile was the
sacred hope and promise of revenge. The necessary
extinction of the young emperor and his mother imposed the
fatal obligation of extirpating the friends, who hated, and
might punish, the assassin; and the repetition of murder
rendered him less willing, and less able, to forgive. (Q) A
horrid narrative of the victims whom he sacrificed by poison
or the sword, by the sea or the flames, would be less
expressive of his cruelty than the appellation of the
halcyon days, which was applied to a rare and bloodless week
of repose: the tyrant strove to transfer, on the laws and
the judges, some portion of his guilt; but the mask was
fallen, and his subjects could no longer mistake the true
author of their calamities. The noblest of the Greeks, more
especially those who, by descent or alliance, might dispute
the Comnenian inheritance, escaped from the monster's den:
Nice and Prusa, Sicily or Cyprus, were their places of
refuge; and as their flight was already criminal, they
aggravated their offence by an open revolt, and the Imperial
title. Yet Andronicus resisted the daggers and swords of
his most formidable enemies: Nice and Prusa were reduced and
chastised: the Sicilians were content with the sack of
Thessalonica; and the distance of Cyprus was not more
propitious to the rebel than to the tyrant. His throne was
subverted by a rival without merit, and a people without
arms. Isaac Angelus, a descendant in the female line from
the great Alexius, was marked as a victim by the prudence or
superstition of the emperor. In a moment of despair,
Angelus defended his life and liberty, slew the executioner,
and fled to the church of St. Sophia. The sanctuary was
insensibly filled with a curious and mournful crowd, who, in
his fate, prognosticated their own. But their lamentations
were soon turned to curses, and their curses to threats:
they dared to ask, "Why do we fear? why do we obey? We are
many, and he is one: our patience is the only bond of our
slavery." With the dawn of day the city burst into a general
sedition, the prisons were thrown open, the coldest and most
servile were roused to the defence of their country, and
Isaac, the second of the name, was raised from the sanctuary
to the throne. Unconscious of his danger, the tyrant was
absent; withdrawn from the toils of state, in the delicious
islands of the Propontis. He had contracted an indecent
marriage with Alice, or Agnes, daughter of Lewis the
Seventh, of France, and relict of the unfortunate Alexius;
and his society, more suitable to his temper than to his
age, was composed of a young wife and a favorite concubine.
On the first alarm, he rushed to Constantinople, impatient
for the blood of the guilty; but he was astonished by the
silence of the palace, the tumult of the city, and the
general desertion of mankind. Andronicus proclaimed a free
pardon to his subjects; they neither desired, nor would
grant, forgiveness; he offered to resign the crown to his
son Manuel; but the virtues of the son could not expiate his
father's crimes. The sea was still open for his retreat;
but the news of the revolution had flown along the coast;
when fear had ceased, obedience was no more: the Imperial
galley was pursued and taken by an armed brigantine; and the
tyrant was dragged to the presence of Isaac Angelus, loaded
with fetters, and a long chain round his neck. His
eloquence, and the tears of his female companions, pleaded
in vain for his life; but, instead of the decencies of a
legal execution, the new monarch abandoned the criminal to
the numerous sufferers, whom he had deprived of a father, a
husband, or a friend. His teeth and hair, an eye and a
hand, were torn from him, as a poor compensation for their
loss: and a short respite was allowed, that he might feel
the bitterness of death. Astride on a camel, without any
danger of a rescue, he was carried through the city, and the
basest of the populace rejoiced to trample on the fallen
majesty of their prince. After a thousand blows and
outrages, Andronicus was hung by the feet, between two
pillars, that supported the statues of a wolf and an a sow;
and every hand that could reach the public enemy, inflicted
on his body some mark of ingenious or brutal cruelty, till
two friendly or furious Italians, plunging their swords into
his body, released him from all human punishment. In this
long and painful agony, "Lord, have mercy upon me!" and "Why
will you bruise a broken reed?" were the only words that
escaped from his mouth. Our hatred for the tyrant is lost
in pity for the man; nor can we blame his pusillanimous
resignation, since a Greek Christian was no longer master of
his life.
I have been tempted to expatiate on the extraordinary
character and adventures of Andronicus; but I shall here
terminate the series of the Greek emperors since the time of
Heraclius. The branches that sprang from the Comnenian
trunk had insensibly withered; and the male line was
continued only in the posterity of Andronicus himself, who,
in the public confusion, usurped the sovereignty of
Trebizond, so obscure in history, and so famous in romance.
A private citizen of Philadelphia, Constantine Angelus, had
emerged to wealth and honors, by his marriage with a
daughter of the emperor Alexius. His son Andronicus is
conspicuous only by his cowardice. His grandson Isaac
punished and succeeded the tyrant; but he was dethroned by
his own vices, and the ambition of his brother; and their
discord introduced the Latins to the conquest of
Constantinople, the first great period in the fall of the
Eastern empire.
If we compute the number and duration of the reigns, it will
be found, that a period of six hundred years is filled by
sixty emperors, including in the Augustan list some female
sovereigns; and deducting some usurpers who were never
acknowledged in the capital, and some princes who did not
live to possess their inheritance. The average proportion
will allow ten years for each emperor, far below the
chronological rule of Sir Isaac Newton, who, from the
experience of more recent and regular monarchies, has
defined about eighteen or twenty years as the term of an
ordinary reign. The Byzantine empire was most tranquil and
prosperous when it could acquiesce in hereditary succession;
five dynasties, the Heraclian, Isaurian, Amorian, Basilian,
and Comnenian families, enjoyed and transmitted the royal
patrimony during their respective series of five, four,
three, six, and four generations; several princes number the
years of their reign with those of their infancy; and
Constantine the Seventh and his two grandsons occupy the
space of an entire century. But in the intervals of the
Byzantine dynasties, the succession is rapid and broken, and
the name of a successful candidate is speedily erased by a
more fortunate competitor. Many were the paths that led to
the summit of royalty: the fabric of rebellion was
overthrown by the stroke of conspiracy, or undermined by the
silent arts of intrigue: the favorites of the soldiers or
people, of the senate or clergy, of the women and eunuchs,
were alternately clothed with the purple: the means of their
elevation were base, and their end was often contemptible or
tragic. A being of the nature of man, endowed with the same
faculties, but with a longer measure of existence, would
cast down a smile of pity and contempt on the crimes and
follies of human ambition, so eager, in a narrow span, to
grasp at a precarious and shortlived enjoyment. It is thus
that the experience of history exalts and enlarges the
horizon of our intellectual view. In a composition of some
days, in a perusal of some hours, six hundred years have
rolled away, and the duration of a life or reign is
contracted to a fleeting moment: the grave is ever beside
the throne: the success of a criminal is almost instantly
followed by the loss of his prize and our immortal reason
survives and disdains the sixty phantoms of kings who have
passed before our eyes, and faintly dwell on our
remembrance. The observation that, in every age and
climate, ambition has prevailed with the same commanding
energy, may abate the surprise of a philosopher: but while
he condemns the vanity, he may search the motive, of this
universal desire to obtain and hold the sceptre of dominion.
To the greater part of the Byzantine series, we cannot
reasonably ascribe the love of fame and of mankind. The
virtue alone of John Comnenus was beneficent and pure: the
most illustrious of the princes, who procede or follow that
respectable name, have trod with some dexterity and vigor
the crooked and bloody paths of a selfish policy: in
scrutinizing the imperfect characters of Leo the Isaurian,
Basil the First, and Alexius Comnenus, of Theophilus, the
second Basil, and Manuel Comnenus, our esteem and censure
are almost equally balanced; and the remainder of the
Imperial crowd could only desire and expect to be forgotten
by posterity. Was personal happiness the aim and object of
their ambition? I shall not descant on the vulgar topics of
the misery of kings; but I may surely observe, that their
condition, of all others, is the most pregnant with fear,
and the least susceptible of hope. For these opposite
passions, a larger scope was allowed in the revolutions of
antiquity, than in the smooth and solid temper of the modern
world, which cannot easily repeat either the triumph of
Alexander or the fall of Darius. But the peculiar
infelicity of the Byzantine princes exposed them to domestic
perils, without affording any lively promise of foreign
conquest. From the pinnacle of greatness, Andronicus was
precipitated by a death more cruel and shameful than that of
the malefactor; but the most glorious of his predecessors
had much more to dread from their subjects than to hope from
their enemies. The army was licentious without spirit, the
nation turbulent without freedom: the Barbarians of the East
and West pressed on the monarchy, and the loss of the
provinces was terminated by the final servitude of the
capital.
The entire series of Roman emperors, from the first of the
Caesars to the last of the Constantines, extends above
fifteen hundred years: and the term of dominion, unbroken by
foreign conquest, surpasses the measure of the ancient
monarchies; the Assyrians or Medes, the successors of Cyrus,
or those of Alexander.