Lost to the West (26 page)

Flushed with victory, Basil launched his great offensive. The fleet swept toward Cyprus, soon reconquering the island for the empire, and the imperial armies battered their way into northern Mesopotamia, annihilating the hapless Arab army that wandered into their path. The next year, Basil turned west, clearing the Muslims out of Dalmatia and capturing the Italian city of Bari. By 876, he had extended Byzantine influence into Lombardy, laying the groundwork for the recovery of all of southern Italy.

While his armies marched from one victory to the next, Basil turned his prodigious energies to the domestic front. In his mind, there was no greater testament to the decline of Byzantium than the lack of building in the capital. Old churches had fallen into shameful
disrepair, and public monuments were beginning to have a distinct atmosphere of decay. Sending his workmen throughout the capital, he began a massive program to refurbish the queen of cities. Timber roofs were replaced by stone, walls were patched, and glittering mosaics restored numerous churches to their former glory. The most effort of all, however, was saved for his personal residence in the imperial palace. Heavily carved columns of green marble with rich veins of yellow supported a ceiling covered in gold, and huge portraits of the emperor and his family were arrayed in sumptuous mosaics. Massive imperial eagles decorated the floor, and glass tesserae filled with gold sparkled above them. Just to the east of these apartments rose his magnificent new church, officially dedicated to four saints but more commonly known by the rather uninspired name of Nea Ekklesia—“new church.” Not since Justinian had finished construction on the Hagia Sophia had such a bold new church graced the imperial skyline. Countless angels and archangels looked down from its cascading domes, and priceless jewels studded its interior. This was to be Basil’s supreme architectural triumph, a perpetual reminder of the splendor of the house of Macedon. So intent was the emperor on finishing it that when he heard the Arabs were besieging Syracuse—the last major Byzantine stronghold in Sicily—he refused to dispatch the fleet to help, preferring to use the navy to transport marble for his church instead. Syracuse fell, but the Nea was completed.
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Byzantium had clearly found its footing again, and in addition to a resurgence of power and prestige, the empire now entered a startling cultural renaissance. It started with the brilliant patriarch Photius, who virtually single-handedly reawoke a love of classical Roman and Greek literature in the empire.
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A flurry of intellectual activity
followed, and Basil began an ambitious new project to translate Justinian’s law codes into Greek. It would have been a remarkable achievement for an emperor whose own education was lacking, but he never had the chance to complete the project. His beloved eldest son Constantine, who had been groomed for the throne, suddenly died, and Basil was thrown into a deep depression from which he never recovered.

Basil’s melancholy was made much worse by the fact that the death left his second son, Leo VI, as the heir apparent. Thanks to a rather complicated arrangement, Basil had married his predecessor’s mistress, and Leo was widely believed (especially by Basil, who presumably would have known) to be the child of Michael the Drunkard. The thought that this boy would soon inherit the throne that should have gone to Constantine nearly pushed Basil over the edge. When the emperor discovered that the fifteen-year-old Leo had taken a mistress named Zöe, he beat the boy severely with his own hands, restricting the prince to a wing of the palace and marrying off Zöe to someone else. This failed to stop the affair, however, and the moment Leo was released, he resumed relations with Zöe. The enraged emperor threw Leo into prison and, in a scene that shocked his courtiers, threatened to put out the boy’s eyes.

Zöe’s father finally managed to talk the emperor into releasing Leo by pointing out that since he was in his mid-seventies, keeping the heir to the throne disgraced was an invitation to all the horrors of a disputed succession. Reluctantly, Basil relented and the two were reconciled, but few believed it would last for long. The emperor was increasingly unpredictable, burdened down by the weight of his depression and frequently subject to bouts of insanity. He had never shown even the remotest scruple about murder, and Leo was perfectly aware that the odds were against his continued survival if the emperor lasted much longer. Basil, however, had always been renowned for his
physical prowess, and at seventy-four didn’t show many signs of slowing down. Perhaps nature needed to be nudged along.

A month after his reconciliation with Leo, the emperor was dead. The official story was that he had been killed during a hunting accident, a wildly improbable tale involving an enormous stag that dragged him sixteen miles through the woods. Even more suspicious was the fact that Zöe’s father—a man who certainly wasn’t enjoying the imperial favor—led the rescue party. The full extent of Leo’s involvement has, of course, been long buried by the intervening years, but whatever the truth, most citizens were willing to turn a blind eye toward the cloudy circumstances in favor of the bright promise of the nineteen-year-old heir. A few days later, Leo VI took possession of the empire, and his first action was to exhume Michael the Drunkard’s body from its shabby tomb and have it reburied in a magnificent sarcophagus in the Church of the Holy Apostles. At last the murdered emperor could sleep in peace—his death had been avenged. As for Basil, his reign had begun with the dark stain of a murder, and perhaps it’s fitting that it ended the same way. For all the violence, however, he left the empire immeasurably strengthened both militarily and culturally, and it had good cause to mourn him.

T
eenagers had been cast to the forefront of Byzantium before, but none had ever been as superbly prepared for the role as Leo VI. Easygoing and charming, the emperor could boast an education more extensive than any ruler since the days of Julian the Apostate, and an intellect to match it. His reign saw the return of classical architecture, a burst of literary activity, and a new spirit of humanism. Within weeks of his inauguration, he had talked the church into appointing his youngest brother, Stephen, as patriarch, a move that united the offices of the sacred and the secular under a single family and let the emperor exercise a control over church and state unrivaled in imperial history. Presiding over an astonishing period of domestic peace and prosperity, Leo was able to concentrate on Basil’s great unfinished work—the recodification of Roman law.

More than three and a half centuries had passed since Justinian had brought order to the chaotic Roman judicial system, and the law books were in desperate need of review. The passing years had piled on thousands of new legal decisions, adding volumes to a legal code that already had the disadvantage of being written in Latin—an impenetrably dead language now accessible only to a few antiquarians. In just two short years, the emperor managed the monumental task of translating the entire mess, systematically arranging it, and publishing the first of six condensed volumes. The unveiling of the finished work earned the emperor the nickname “Leo the Wise” and saw him hailed as the greatest lawgiver since Justinian (a fact that would have severely irked his predecessor). Those who expected him to lead the armies to equal glory, however, were soon to be disappointed. The young emperor was more of a lover than a fighter, and perhaps inevitably he proved a good deal less successful in his foreign policy than in his domestic pursuits.

Byzantium never wanted for hostile neighbors, but, at the start of Leo’s reign, it seemed as if at least the northwestern border was somewhat safe. There the Bulgar khan Boris had adopted Christianity, and many in Constantinople began to hope that the awful specter of Krum had been banished once and for all. This feeling was strengthened when Boris abdicated in favor of his youngest son, Vladimir, and retired meekly to a monastery, but no sooner had he gone than Vladimir tried to resurrect paganism, threatening to undo all of his father’s hard work. Displaying a certain lack of monastic tranquillity, the enraged Boris blinded Vladimir and put his younger sibling, Simeon, on the throne instead. The watching dignitaries of Byzantium were relieved to have a friendlier candidate in power. It was widely known that Simeon had grown up in Constantinople and was a firm Christian to boot. Here, surely, was a man who understood the civilized world and could recognize the advantages of remaining on good terms with the empire.

Perhaps that would have been the case if Leo had lived up to his nickname, but he foolishly decided to raise the import taxes on Bulgarian
goods, completely ignoring Simeon’s protests. The annoyed Bulgarians immediately invaded, catching the empire by surprise, and within a matter of weeks they had swept into Thrace and had started plundering. Unfortunately for Leo, all of his armies were busy fighting in the East, so he resorted to the tried-and-true method of calling in allies to do his fighting for him. Byzantine messengers sped to the Magyars, a hostile tribe to the east of Bulgaria, inviting them to fall on the Bulgar rear. Caught in the pincer, Simeon had no choice but to withdraw and ask for peace. Leo sent his ambassadors to hammer out the details of the treaty and withdrew to deal with some Arab raiders, convinced that the chastened Bulgars had learned their lesson.

Leo may have been satisfied with himself, but Simeon had no intention of letting the matter drop. He had been outmaneuvered by the emperor, but the Bulgarian khan was a fast learner who was fully capable of employing Byzantine tactics. The moment the last imperial troop had disappeared down the road to Constantinople, he called in his own proxies, the Pechenegs—a Turkish tribe that was the natural enemy of the Magyars. Attacked from all sides, the Magyars were forced to flee, leaving Simeon free to invade Thrace once again.
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A Byzantine army tried vainly to contain the damage, but it was easily crushed, and Leo was forced to conclude a humiliating and expensive peace.

The emperor had badly mishandled the situation, and when Taormina—the last Byzantine outpost in Sicily—fell to the Muslims in 902, it seemed as if the empire was once again going to slip back into weakness and enervation. Fortunately for Leo, his generals saved his military reputation in the East, where they were keeping up a steady pressure against the disintegrating caliphate. The next decade saw a surge of activity as Byzantine armies expelled the Muslims from western Armenia, destroyed the Arab navy, and raided as far as the Euphrates. There were, of course, the occasional setbacks. A major
naval expedition failed to reconquer Crete, and in 904 an earthquake leveled the seawalls of Thessalonica—the second most important city of the empire. Its citizens hurried to repair the walls, but before the work was completed, an Arab fleet appeared, and the Saracens managed to batter their way inside. For an entire week, the Muslims plundered the city, butchering the old and weak before carting the rest off to their busy slave markets. The insult of Thessalonica was avenged the next year as Byzantine armies left the Arab port of Tarsus a heap of smoking ruins, but not many people were paying attention. The entire capital was gripped in the very public spectacle of the emperor’s love life.

Leo had never really been happy with the woman Basil had forced him to marry as a teenager, and he had found comfort instead in the arms of his longtime mistress, Zöe. Not surprisingly, the imperial couple failed to produce an heir, and when the empress died in 898, Leo had happily summoned Zöe to the capital. There was the small obstacle of Zöe’s husband, but he rather conveniently died, and the two lovers were hastily married. Their idyll, however, proved to be short-lived. After presenting her husband with a daughter, Zöe died of a fever only two years into the marriage. Leo was devastated with grief. Not only was his love gone, but he still hadn’t managed to produce an heir, and the ramifications of that were terrible indeed. His brother Alexander was a hopeless reprobate by now, thoroughly incapable of progeny, and if Leo died it would be the end of the dynasty. The empire seemed destined to be subjected to all the horrors of a civil war.

Third marriages—at least in the East—were strictly forbidden by the church, but since the future of the empire was at stake, the patriarch reluctantly decided to allow Leo to choose another wife.
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A stunningly
beautiful woman by the name of Eudocia was selected, and within a year she was pregnant. The court astrologers assured the emperor that it was a boy, and he was overjoyed when they proved to be correct. Leo VI, however, seemed destined for tragedy, and his uneasy subjects could only shake their heads when Eudocia died in childbirth and the baby expired a few days later. Canon law, it seemed, could not be flouted so easily.

Leo was now in an awkward position. He was desperate to have a son, but he himself had written the law forbidding multiple marriages. Now deeply regretting the thundering sermons he had given against those who “wallowed in the filth” of a fourth union, he gingerly sounded out the new patriarch, Nicholas, but was sternly informed that a fourth marriage would be “worse than fornication.” Deciding that if this was the case he might as well enjoy some fornication, he found a devastatingly beautiful mistress named Zoë Carbonopsina.
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Leo was a resourceful man, and he knew that with a bit of arm-twisting he could probably arrange for another marriage, but since this would unquestionably be his last chance, there was no reason to try unless she produced a son. That fall Zoë became pregnant with a son, and the overjoyed emperor had her moved into a special room in the palace. Decorated with porphyry columns and hung with purple silks—a color specifically reserved for emperors—it was known as the
Porphyra
, or Purple Room. Only imperial children could be born there, and from that day on Leo’s son would bear the proud nickname “Por-phyrogenitus,” the Purple-born. Leo clearly intended to have the boy follow him on the throne, and just in case anyone missed the point, he named him Constantine VII to further strengthen his prestige.
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