people
that the prosperity of the empire was connected with the continuity of the
Macedonian dynasty.
Basil II never
married. But after his death in 1025, his relatives remained in possession of
the throne until 1056, less because of their efficiency than because of a
general feeling among the Byzantine people
that the prosperity of the empire was connected with the continuity of the
Macedonian dynasty.
When Basil’s brother Constantine VIII died in 1028, the line was continued in his two daughters, Zoe and Theodora. Zoe was married three times: to Romanus III Argyrus (1028-34), to Michael IV (1034-41) and finally to Constantine IX Monomachus (1042-55), who outlived her. When Constantine IX died in 1055, Zoe’s sister, Theodora, reigned alone as empress until her death a year later.
The successors of Basil II responded to situations but were rarely in control of them. Between 1025 and 1081, there were thirteen emperors. An attempt made by Constantine X Ducas to found a new dynasty was disastrously unsuccessful. Not until the rise of Alexius I Comnenus to power, in 1081, was stability restored by an ensured succession in the Comnenus family, who ruled for more than a hundred years (1081-1185).
After a long period of secure prosperity, new pressures from outside the imperial frontiers aggravated the latent tensions in society within the Byzantine Empire.
The brief reigns
of Basil II’s heirs reflected divisions in the Byzantine ruling class, a
conflict between the military aristocracy of the provinces and the civilian
aristocracy or bureaucracy of Constantinople.
Each faction put up rival
emperors.
The sophisticated urban aristocracy favoured rulers who would reverse the militaristic trend of the empire and who would expand the civil service and supply them and their families with lucrative offices and decorative titles.
The military families, whose wealth was not in the capital but in the provinces favoured emperors who were soldiers and not civil servants. In this they were more realistic, for in the latter part of the 11th century it became increasingly clear that the empire’s military strength was no longer sufficient to hold back its enemies.
The landowners in the provinces appreciated the dangers more readily than the government in Constantinople, and they made those dangers an excuse to enlarge their estates in defiance of all the laws passed in the 10th century. The theme system in Anatolia, which had been the basis of the empire’s defensive and offensive power, was rapidly breaking down at the very moment when new enemies were gathering their strength.
On the other hand, the urban aristocracy of Constantinople, reacting against the brutalisation of war, sought to make the city a centre of culture and sophistication. Constantine IX gave the university a new charter in 1045, partly to ensure a steady flow of educated civil servants for the bureaucracy. The law school was revived under the jurist John Xiphilinus. Michael Psellus, whose researches into every field of knowledge earned him a considerable reputation and a great following of brilliant pupils, chaired the school of philosophy[1].
The Schism of 1054[2]
hastened the final separation between the Eastern Christian churches (led by the
patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius) and the Western Church (led by
Pope Leo IX). The mutual exco
mmunications by the Pope and the Patriarch in that
year became a watershed in church history. There were two main
reasons for the schism.
Firstly, the Pope in
Rome maintained that he was the pre-eminent churchman for Christianity. The relation of the Byzantine Church
and the Roman Church grew increasingly difficult from the 5th to the
11th century. In the early church, three bishops were of particular
importance, the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. The transfer of the
seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople and the later eclipse of Alexandria
and Antioch as battlegrounds of Islam and Christianity promoted the importance
of Constantinople. At the same time, the theological calmness of the West, in
contrast to the often-violent theological disputes that troubled the Eastern
patriarchates strengthened the position of the Roman popes, who made increasing
claims to pre-eminence. But this pre-eminence was never acknowledged in the
East. To pres
s it upon the Eastern patriarchs was to prepare the way for
separation; to insist on it was to cause a schism.
Secondly, there were important theological difference between the western-Roman church and the eastern-orthodox church. Eastern theology had its roots in Greek philosophy, whereas a great deal of Western theology was based on Roman law. This gave rise to misunderstandings and at last led to two widely separate ways of regarding and defining one important doctrine (the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father or from the Father and the Son) with the Roman churches, without consulting the East, incorporating the Son into their creed. The Eastern churches also resented the Roman enforcement of clerical celibacy, the limitation of the right of confirmation to the bishop, and the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist. Political jealousies and interests intensified the disputes.
The final break came in 1054, when Pope Leo IX excommunicated Michael Cerularius and his followers while the Patriarch retaliated with a similar excommunication. There had been mutual excommunications before, but they had not resulted in permanent schisms.
The new enemies that emerged in the 11th century, unlike the Arabs or the Bulgars, had no cause to respect the military reputation of the empire. They appeared almost simultaneously on the northern, the eastern, and the western frontiers. It was nothing new for the Byzantines to have to fight on two fronts at once. But the task required a soldier on the throne.
The Pechenegs, a Turkic tribe, had long been known as the northern
neighbours of the Bulgars. Constantine VII had thought them to be valuable
allies against the Bulgars, Magyars, and Russians. But after the conquest of
Bulgaria, the Pechenegs began to raid across the Danube into what was then
Byza
ntine territory. Constantine IX allowed them to settle south of the river,
where their numbers and their ambitions increased. By the mid-11th
century they were a constant menace to the peace in Thrace and Macedonia. It
was left to Alexius I to avert a crisis by defeating the Pechenegs in battle in
1091.
The new arrivals on the eastern frontier were the Seljuk Turks, whose conquests were to change the whole shape of the Muslim and Byzantine worlds. In 1055, having conquered Persia, they entered Baghdad, and their prince assumed the title of sultan and protector of the Abbasid caliphate. Before long they extended their authority to the borders of Fatimid Egypt and Byzantine Anatolia. They made their first explorations across the Byzantine frontier into Armenia in 1065 and, in 1067, as far west as Caesarea in central Anatolia. The raiders were inspired by the Muslim idea of holy war, and there was at first nothing systematic about their invasion. They found it surprisingly easy to plunder the countryside and isolate the cities, owing to the long neglect of the eastern frontier defences by the emperors in Constantinople.
The emergency strengthened the position of the
military aristocracy in Anatolia who, in 1068, finally secured the election of
one of their o
wn number, Romanus IV Diogenes, as emperor. Romanus assembled an
army, mainly composed of foreign mercenaries to deal with what he saw as a
large-scale military operation. In August 1071, it was defeated at
Manzikert,
near Lake Van in Armenia. Romanus was taken prisoner by the Seljuk sultan, Alp-Arslan.
He was allowed to buy his freedom after signing a treaty. However, the opposition in Constantinople refused to have him back and installed its own candidate, Michael VII. Romanus was treacherously blinded. The Seljuqs were thus justified in continuing their raids and were even encouraged to do so. Michael VII invited Alp-Arslan to help him against his rivals, Nicephorus Bryennius and Nicephorus Botaneiates, who were respectively proclaimed emperor at Adrianople in 1077 and at Nicaea in 1078. In the four years of civil war that followed, there were no troops to defend the eastern frontier. By 1081, the Turks had reached Nicaea. The heart of the empire’s military and economic strength was now under Turkish rule.
The new enemies in the West were the Normans, who began their conquest of South Italy early in the 11th century. Basil II’s project of recovering Sicily from the Arabs had been almost realised in 1042 by the one great general of the post-Macedonian era, George Maniaces, who was recalled by Constantine IX and killed as a pretender to the throne. The Normans thereafter made steady progress in Italy and in April 1071, Bari, the last remaining Byzantine stronghold, fell after a three-year siege. Byzantine rule in Italy and the hope of a reconquest of Sicily were at an end.
The disasters at Manzikert and Bari in 1071, at opposite extremes of the empire, illustrated the decline of Byzantine power. The final loss of Italy underlined the fact of the permanent division between the Greek East and the Latin West, which was now not only geographical and political but also increasingly cultural and ecclesiastical. The schism of 1054 passed unnoticed by contemporary Byzantine historians; its significance as a turning point in East-West relations was fully realised only later.
But even the events of 1071 had not made the decline of Byzantium irretrievable[3]. The shrinking of its boundaries reduced the empire from its status as a dominating world power to that of a small Greek state fighting for survival. This depended on the new political, commercial, and ecclesiastical forces in the West, because it could no longer draw on its former military and economic resources in Anatolia. The civil aristocracy of Constantinople yielded with bad grace. After four years of civil war, the military aristocracy triumphed with the accession of Alexius I Comnenus, the greatest soldier and statesman to hold the throne since Basil II. His reign began with an empire threatened by enemies on all sides.
The Normans captured Dyrrhachium in 1082 and planned to advance overland to Thessalonica. Alexius called on the Venetians to help him, but Robert Guiscard’s death in 1085 temporarily eased the Norman problem.
The following year the Seljuq sultan died, and the sultanate was split by internal rivalries. Fortune thus played into Alexius’s hands by ridding him of two of his enemies.
By his own efforts, however, he defeated the Pechenegs in 1091.
The Venetians had been pleased to help drive
the Normans out of the Adriatic Sea but demanded a heavy price. In 1082, Alexius
granted them trading privileges in Constantinople and elsewhere on terms
calculated to outbid Byzantine merchants. This charter was the cornerstone of
the commercial empire of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean
. But it fed the
flames of Byzantine resentment against the Latins; and it provoked the rich, who
might have been encouraged to invest their capital in shipbuilding and trade, to
rely on the more familiar security of landed property.
The terms that Alexius made with his enemies
in the first ten years of his reign were not meant to be permanent. He fully
expected to win back Anatolia from the Seljuqs. His plans were not given
time to mature, for matters were precipitated by the arrival in the East of the
first crusaders from Western Europe in 1096. Alexius
had
undoubtedly sought the help of mercenary troops from the West but not for the liberation
of the Holy Land from the infidel. The urgent need was the protection of
Constantinople and the recovery of Anatolia. The Byzantines were more realistic
about their Muslim neighbours than the distant popes and princes of the West.
Jerusalem had finally been taken by the Seljuqs in 1071, but the most immediate
threat to Byzantium came from the Pechenegs and the Normans. Alexius was tactful
in his dealings with the pope and ready to discuss the differences between the
churches. But neither party foresaw the consequences of Pope Urban II’s appeal
in 1095 for recruits to fight a Holy War. The response in Western Europe was
overwhelming. The motives of those who took the cross as crusaders ranged from
religious enthusiasm to a mere spirit of adventure or a hope of gain; and it was
no comfort to Alexius to learn that four of the eight leaders of the First
Crusade were Normans, among them Bohemond, the son of Robert Guiscard. Since the
crusade had to pass through Constantinople, however, the Emperor had some control
over it. He required its leaders to swear to restore to the empire any towns or
territories they might conquer from the Turks on their way to the Holy Land. In
return, he gave them guides and a military escort. Still, the cost was enormous,
for the crusaders had to be supplied with food or live off the land as they
went.
Nicaea fell to them in 1097 and was duly
handed over to the Emperor in accord with the agreement. In 1098, they reached,
and captured
,
Antioch. There the trouble started. Bohemond refused to turn over t
he
city and instead set up his own principality of Antioch. His example was imitated in the
establishment of the Latin Kingdom of
Jerusalem in 1100 that
had fallen to the crusaders the year before, and of the counties of Edessa and
Tripoli. The crusaders settled down to colonise and defend the coast of
Palestine and Syria and to quarrel among themselves.
While they did so, Alexius was able to establish a new and more secure boundary
between Byzantium and Islam through the middle of Anatolia and a limit was set
to the westward expansion of the Turks.
The First Crusade thus brought some benefits to Byzantium. But nothing could reconcile the emperor to Bohemond of Antioch. In 1107, Bohemond mounted a new invasion of the empire from Italy. Alexius was ready and defeated him at Dyrrhachium in 1108. Byzantine prestige was higher than it had been for many years, but the empire could barely afford to sustain the part of a great power.
Alexius reformed the army and re-created the fleet, but only by stabilising the Byzantine gold coinage at one-third of its original value and by imposing a number of supplementary taxes.
It became normal
practice for taxes to be farmed out, which meant that the collectors recouped
their outlay on their own terms. People in the provinces had the added burden of
providing materials an
d labour for
defence, communications, and provisions for
the army, which now included very large numbers of foreigners.
The supply of native soldiers was limited with the disappearance or absorption of their military holdings. Alexius promoted an alternative source of native manpower by extending the system of granting estates in pronoia (by favour of the emperor) and tying the grant to the military obligation.
The recipient of a pronoia was entitled to all the revenues of his estate and to the taxes payable by his tenants (paroikoi), on condition of equipping himself as a mounted cavalryman with a varying number of troops. He was in absolute possession of his property until it reverted to the crown upon his death. The pronoia system had advantages both for the state and for the military aristocracy who were its main beneficiaries. But in the long term it hastened the fragmentation of the empire among the landed families and the breakdown of centralised government that the 10th century emperors had laboured to prevent.
Alexius also tried to promote more profitable development of the estates of the church by granting them to the management of laymen as charistikia or benefices.
[1] G. Ostrogorsky, History of the Byzantine State, Oxford University Press, 1968 and W. Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society, Stanford University Press, 1997 are the best general surveys. M. Angold The Byzantine Empire 1025-1204: a political history, Longman, 1984 and Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni, 1081-1261, Cambridge University Press, 1995, revised edition, 2003 are more detailed. J. D. Howard-Johnson (ed.), Byzantium and the West, c.800-c.1200, Amsterdam, 1988 is a useful study of east-west relations.
[2] S. Runciman, The Eastern Schism, Cambridge, 1955 remains the best starting-point. J. M. Hussey, The Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire, Oxford History of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, 1986, is a superb survey of Byzantine history and theology, touching on a host of valuable issues touching medieval history, including the iconoclastic controversy, the Great Schism, and the Crusades.
[3] Ferdinand Chalandon, Essai sur le règne d'Alexis Ier Comnène (1081–1118), Paris, 1900, reissued 1971 and Jean II Comnène, 1118–1143, et Manuel I Comnène, 1143–1180, Paris 1912, reissued in two volumes, 1971 remain the basic texts.