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Chapter One

The Foundation of Constantine

(324-641)

The history of the Mediterranean world forms a natural whole. Separate histories can be written of each of the lands and peoples that surround it, but so far as they are separate they will be incomplete. Greek history begins in the Levant as well as the Balkans; it spreads westwards to the Pillars of Hercules and grows into the history of republican Rome. Roman history floods over into North Africa, where it rejoins the history of the Levant at Carthage, and moves eastwards across the Balkans into Anatolia. As it turns into the history of imperial Rome, it merges again with the history of Greece. This is not to deny that there are deep incompatibilities and antagonisms between the tides of Greek and Roman history. They do not merely converge but clash and split furiously; but they are part of one and the same story. The ebb and flow and confluences of these tides are often imperceptible, but sometimes there is a distinct moment of change that can be identified without hesitation. Such a moment came with the accession to power of Constantine the Great early in the 4th century A.D.

Constantine left three indelible marks on the history of the Mediterranean world, two of which can be precisely dated. He inaugurated the toleration of the Christian religion by inspiring the Edict of Milan (313). He founded the new capital of the Roman Empire at Byzantium, to which he gave his own name, the City of Constantine--Constantinople, the foundations of which were laid in 324. And he took the first steps, by his personal example and by his legislation, towards that fusion of three separate cultures--the pagan hellenistic, the Roman, and the orthodox Christian--which created what we know as the Byzantine Empire. He was neither a religious man by nature, nor a Greek nor even a Roman by patriotic instinct. He was a soldier of ferocious and ruthless ability, and a cunning politician of immense ambition. But whatever his motives, he is rightly looked upon by the Greeks as the founder of the greatest era in their post-classical history and their Church. Constantinople is to this day known to them simply as `the City', though it has been a foreign capital for half a millennium.

What led Constantine to his fateful decisions? Both in founding the new capital and in adopting the new religion, his motives were practical and political. The Roman Empire was undergoing a process of diffusion which brought it near to disintegration. Rome had long ceased to be the effective capital of the Empire. The capital was in the Emperor's military camp, wherever it might be. Constant threats to the security of the Empire from the north and east meant that there had to be many alternative centres of command--at Milan, at Trèves (Trier) in Germany, at York, at Salonae (Split) in Dalmatia, at Nicomedia (Izmit) in Bithynia, but seldom at Rome itself. The Emperors, too, had long ceased to be Romans or even Italians by birth, and they had no sentimental attachment to the eternal city. Since Caracalla had conferred Roman citizenship on every free inhabitant of the Empire (212), the name of `Roman' had ceased to have any national connotation. The Greeks call themselves Romans ( Romioí ) to this day; and Rûm (Rome) became in due course the name of Anatolia, where the majority of Greeks lived.

Of Constantine's immediate predecessors, few had any personal connexion with Rome. Maximinus (235-8) was the son of a Goth and an Alan, born in Thrace; Philip the Arab (244-9) was a Syrian; Diocletian (284-305) was the son of a Dalmatian slave; several were born, like Constantine himself, in the region known as Illyria, which came to include the whole territory bounded by the Adriatic and the Black Sea. When Diocletian divided the administration of the Empire between four Emperors--two senior, with the title of Augustus, and two junior, with the title of Caesar--all four colleagues were natives of the Balkan lands. Rome was no more than a name to them. The Senate still sat there, and commanded respect. But senators could hold no military commands, and the few posts to which they could elect each other were empty honours without real functions. They even sought to intervene in the election of new Emperors when the imperium was vacant, but never with any success that was not soon undone by civil war. The centre of gravity of the Empire had shifted away from the ancient capital.

It had shifted away, but it had yet to settle elsewhere. The shift was part of the Empire's endless quest for security. Neither as a centre of power within the Empire nor as a command-post for the protection of the frontiers was Rome a natural site. Power passed increasingly into the hands of the army, which no longer consisted chiefly even of Italians, let alone Romans. Celts, Sarmatians, German tribesmen, Dalmatians, Thracians and other non-Italians manned the armies. Control of the Empire depended on control of its armed forces. When the Emperor Decius was killed in battle with the Goths (251) and again when Valerian was captured by the Persians (260), claimants to the Empire emerged from all quarters, backed by their local armies. On each occasion, too, the Senate tried in vain to assert its right of election. It was usually troops who had been proved in battle on the frontiers that carried the successful claimant to power, and his camp was always far from Rome.

The power of the frontier armies lay in the vital need for security from enemies without. The history of Rome is the history of a perennial quest for external security. To the west and south all was well since the conquests of the republican era. Behind the North African littoral lay barely inhabited desert, beyond Spain and Gaul lay the sea. The British Isles were never completely conquered: hence the importance of the headquarters of York, where Constantine's father had held command. But much more dangerous was the undemarcated frontier in Central Europe, beyond which the Goths were growing in power and militancy. Even more dangerous was the fluctuating frontier to the east, because there the enemy consisted not simply of barbarian tribes but of another highly developed and sophisticated power, the Sassanid Persians. From the Rhine and the Danube to the Taurus mountains, there was no sector where the imperial arms could rest unalert, even in the intervals between open conflicts. War was a perennial state.

Such distant frontiers could not be defended from an imperial headquarters at Rome, nor from any single capital. That Rome was inadequately situated had been recognized long before Constantine. If Mark Antony had not lost the Empire to Augustus Caesar, he would probably have transferred his capital to Alexandria, and that for more serious reasons than merely the company of Cleopatra. Later Emperors were guided by the dictates of current compaigning. By the end of the third century, there was a good case for Salonae or Nicomedia as alternative capitals. Certain things were clear that had to be taken into consideration. One was that any movement of the centre of power from Rome would have to be eastwards, since that was the direction in which the line of communications with Rome was longest and most uncertain. Another was that there would have to be at least two capitals: the Roman Empire was too large to be administered from a single centre. The division of the Empire was a fact long before it was recognized.

Diocletian had divided the Empire between four colleagues. He had further tried to establish a limited monarchy which would be held only for a fixed period of twenty years by each Emperor. One of his junior colleagues, Constantius I, was the father of Constantine, who himself became Caesar in 306 and Augustus in 308; but he had no intention of preserving Diocletian's System. Constantine destroyed each of his rival co-rulers in a bloody civil war; he re-established the hereditary principle; and he re-united the Empire under his own dominion. But no sooner had he done so than he found it necessary to divide it again for administrative convenience. For administrative purposes he established four great provinces divided approximately as the commands of the four Emperors had been divided under Diocletian: Gallia (which included also Spain and Britain), Italia (which included North Africa), Illyricum (which included all the Greek mainland and most of the Balkan lands), and Oriens (which included all the crescent of territory from Thrace to Egypt). Under his successors the two western and the two eastern provinces were sometimes united and sometimes grouped under separate Emperors, until the western Empire was overrun by the Goths in the 5th century.

Over each of the four provinces a civil governor was appointed, who held no military command. The armed forces were placed under the command of two senior generals, one for the cavalry ( magister equitum ) and one for the infantry ( magister peditum ). All these office-holders, civil and military, were directly responsible to the Emperor and had no jurisdiction over each other. The separation of powers was clearly intended to make another usurpation impossible. That was also why Constantine dissolved the Praetorian Guard. He had learned the hard lesson of the civil wars by which he had himself reached power. He had also learned from the same experience where the centre of gravity of the Empire now lay. It was in the so-called `Illyrian triangle', bounded by the Black Sea and the Aegean and Adriatic. This area happened to include territorial Greece, though the Greeks of Hellas were now a minority in the Greek-speaking world. Illyricum was predominant rather because it was the nursery of tough soldiers and forceful leaders. It was an accident that the primacy of the Illyrian triangle meant that Constantinople was sited among the Greeks.

Constantine required a capital and a populace wholly dependent on himself, thus making a clean break with the past. He had climbed to power by bloodshed and treachery, in which he slaughtered both enemies and friends, and even his own family. Weary of the succession of civil wars in which he had himself been the final victor, he determined to set the civil above the military power. That could not be done in a capital which was also an armed camp, such as Nicomedia. There were other motives besides security for choosing a new site. A simple one was for the personal glory of Constantine and the immortality of his name. Another, more complex, was to provide a focus for the re-integration of the diverse peoples of the Empire, which was to be achieved, though not in Constantine's lifetime, through the Christian religion. To this religion Constantine himself was undergoing a gradual but politic conversion, impelled by reasons of state rather than by the miracles with which later piety garnished the story.

Constantine's instinct in choosing the site of his new capital was sound for another reason, which probably he could not have formulated himself. The ancient and medieval history of the Mediterranean world is the history of a flow of dynamic ideas--philosophical and religious, political and economic, technical and scientific. The flow was longitudinal, sometimes from east to west, sometimes from west to east. The earliest Emperor known to have explicitly recognized this tide in the affairs of men was Alexius I in the early twelfth century, who wrote that `once science was transmitted from the East to the West: now on the contrary, it is the Latin, coming from West to East, who descends upon the Greeks'. Sometimes, as in the days of which Alexius wrote, the ideological tide was associated with physical power, sometimes not. Nor was its flow uniform at any given time. There might be a confluence of different but powerful tides at the same moment; and territorial Greece was where such a confluence was most likely to occur.

The western tide carried to the East the principles of Roman law and administration, and the power of civil and military technology. The eastern tide carried to the West the influences of Greek philosphy and oriental religion. The two tides met along an axis running through the Greek-speaking lands, with its southern pole at Alexandria and its northern pole among the Greek colonies of the Black Sea, such as Cherson or Khersónnisos, in the Crimea. Constantinople lay near the centre of this axis. But the city was also ideally situated in a more practical sense at the confluence of two tides which, in the nature of things, flowed with equal and opposite force. The principal trade-routes between Asia and Europe passed through Byzantine territory. It was well furnished with ports, all of them in Greek hands. Constantinople, with its superlative harbour, became the natural centre of a system comprising a circle of ports which were in turn the natural outlets of vast commercial hinterlands. The site of the city was also eminently defensible. Indeed, there were times when it alone held out after all its territory had fallen into enemy hands.

Constantinople thus occupied a key point on the map not only strategically but ideologically and economically. Here, or approximately here, was the natural meeting-point of the tides of East and West, Christianity and paganism, Roman and Hellenistic and even oriental tradition. This is another reason why a new site had to be found. Athens, for instance--still a cultural centre of great wealth and influence, with its own university until the 6th century--was as closely associated with the past as the old Rome; Nicomedia was a military camp; Alexandria was too exclusively Greek. The city on the Bosporus had none of these defects. Its population, being entirely new, could be genuinely eclectic. Apart from senators and officials recruited from Rome, it was populated from all over the Empire. `Constantinople is dedicated, while almost all other cities are denuded,' St. Jerome wrote half a century later. Equally there is no doubt that Constantine intended his new capital to be completely assimilated to the Roman tradition.

His intention was defeated within a few generations. Latin might be the language of the courts and the administration, but Greek was already the language of the Church. It was also the lingua franca of the Near East: hence its name, the koiné or common tongue. It was unavoidable in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the new capital that it should become a Greek city. This was the certain consequence of Constantine's own choice of the Christian religion, which attracted him because of its highly organized character. How long the transition from a Latin to a Greek character took at Constantinople is not easily settled. Most scholars would agree that, although the legal conceptions of Rome continued to form the basis of the Byzantine constitution, Latin elements in the language and culture were fast disappearing by the 7th century. The eastern tide prevailed over the western, and Constantine unconsciously willed it so. Christianity was both the motive and the undoing of his plan.

In the 4th century Christianity was still only the religion of a minority, but it was a powerful and well-placed minority. Even in the reign of Diocletian, who somewhat reluctantly persecuted the Christians in the early years of the 4th century, they held influential posts at court and in the army. Proportionately they were more numerous in the eastern provinces, and Greek was the language of the church. Rome, despite the eminence of its bishopric, was still essentially a pagan city, where the old religion had its most lasting roots and the Vestal Virgins still performed their duties. It has been estimated that the proportion of Christians was about one in fifteen in the west, but nearer to one in ten in the east. Perhaps the decisive factor for Constantine was not, as he claimed, his vision of the monogram of Christ's name with the words `In this sign conquer' on the night before his victory over one of his rivals for the empire (312). It was rather the knowledge that the enemy forces contained a large proportion of Christian troops. He saw the value not only of their predominance in the army, but of their ecclesiastical organization as the framework of a civil administration. Moreover, the last of his rivals, Licinius, made the mistake of persecuting the Christians, and thus gave Constantine another motive for conciliating them.

By such accidents, which Christians accepted as the will of God, was the great decision made. To say this is not to belittle the doctrinal power of Christianity, but to emphasize that it was, at the turn of the 3rd to the 4th century, only one among many competing religions. Rome had always been hospitable to foreign cults, ever since the sacred stone of the Magna Mater was brought to Rome from Phrygia during the second Carthaginian War (204 B.C.). Isis from Egypt, Mithras from Asia Minor, and other foreign deities were admitted at the same time as Christianity. The profounder philosophies of Manichaeism and Neoplatonism attracted thoughtful pagans, and never entirely lost their charm. Christianity, to become acceptable, had to compromise with other popular creeds. Its angels were assimilated to the pagan daímones , and its elements of superstition, including necromancy and magic, were given more emphasis than devout Christians would have wished. Its deeper mysteries were a closed book to the first Christian Emperor.

Constantine's religious convictions are still something of a puzzle, as they probably were to himself. He retained pagan inclinations, especially towards Mithraism, which had come near to defeating Christianity as the established religion of the Empire. But in fact there was no established religion in Constantine's day. Not until the reign of Theodosius I, more than a generation later, did Christianity achieve that status (380). The effect, of Constantine's edict of toleration (313) was simply that there was no official religion at all. He himself was baptised only on his death-bed--a not unusual practice. At his funeral the ceremonial was pagan rather than Christian. Ambiguity, also, enveloped his intentions towards his new capital. He called it the `New Rome', and wished it to be unsullied by pagan cults. But temples as well as churches were allowed to be built there. Though it might be a replica of Rome even to the point of being built on seven hills, it was only under Constantine's successors that the city was invested with the trappings of a capital--a senate and magistracies. He claimed to have received the command of God to build Constantinople, so it must be primarily a Christian city. But Christianity was to prevail only gradually, and not by enforcement.

In the meantime religion had become a cause of bitter conflict, which was at least as much political as spiritual in character. Christianity was already torn by schism and heresy before Constantine adopted it. Churches took on local characteristics wherever they were founded. The Armenians, who were officially converted a little earlier than Constantine, formed a distinct sect from the first. So did the Georgians and Abyssinians, both converted in Constantine's life-time. Gnosticism, Montanism in Phrygia, Donatism in Africa, were deep-rooted survivals from the age before Constantine. He was himself obliged to intervene in the great controversy caused by the followers of Arius, who maintained that Christ was only of `like substance' with God ( homoioúsios ) and not `consubstantial' ( homooúsios ). Arianism was condemned by the bishop of Alexandria, whose orthodoxy was confirmed at the Council of Nicaea (325) under the personal chairmanship of Constantine; but it was only after a bloody conflict, which continued into the following generation. Constantine himself weakened later, when he belatedly appreciated how deeply entrenched Arianism was in the eastern provinces. It had to be condemned afresh at the second of the Church's seven Councils, held at Constantinople in 381; and even so it survived.

The ecclesiastical wrangle had also a political significance. It was in part a dispute between rival bishopries, notably Antioch and Alexandria, and in part the first harbinger of the struggle between the eastern and western churches. Only a small minority of western bishops attended the Council of Nicaea, though the few that came were gratified to find that Constantine took their side. They resented the intrusion of Constantinople into a leading role in ecclesiastical affairs. It was an upstart see, not to be compared in status with Rome, Alexandria, or Antioch, and not yet even associated with the name of any great saint, though St. Andrew was later to be claimed as the founder of the Church at Byzantium. A long and intricate battle was to be fought before Constantinople came to be recognized as a patriarchate equal, and eventually superior, to the other eastern patriarchates; and Rome never fully accepted it. The irresoluble character of this contest for primacy first became apparent at the Council of Sardica (343), on the frontier between east and west, which also left the issue between homoiousians and homoousians in suspense.

One reason for the deadlock was that the sons of Constantine, between whom he divided the Empire on his death, were themselves divided by force of circumstances on the doctrinal issue. Constantius II, who ruled in the east, was an Arian, though a vacillating one; his brother Constans, ruling in the west, supported the Alexandrian orthodoxy embodied in the Nicene creed. Their personal relations were amicable, and each acted as spokesman for the view held by influential opinion in his own provinces. But it is hardly surprising that men of a spiritually thoughtful nature were shocked by the worldly wrangling of the new religion. Such a man was the nephew of Constantine the Great, known to history as Julian the Apostate, who succeeded to the Empire after the death of his two cousins, Constans and Constantius, and ruled for three years (361-3). Although (or perhaps because) he had been brought up to the Christian priesthood, Julian reacted violently against it and tried to restore the old pagan religion. But his life was cut short in battle, and legend has it that he died acknowledging the victory of Christ.

After the pagan reaction had proved abortive, the internal disputes of the reinstated Church continued, though with temporarily abated force. The next Emperors were devout Christians. Valens (364-78) was an Arian, but he had other preoccupations than theological controversy. A fresh and more formidable invasion of the Goths brought about his defeat and death at the battle of Adrianople (378). Their western cousins, the Visigoths, poured into peninsular Greece before moving westwards towards Italy and Spain. A still greater danger to the Empire was the advent of Alaric, who made a feint at Constantinople itself (395) before moving on into Macedonia and Thessaly. The Danube frontier crumbled, never to be completely restored. Unable to resist the invaders, the Emperor Theodosius I (379-95) compromised with them and enlisted barbarian generals to command the imperial forces. Alaric himself was appointed military commander of Illyricum. Whether for this expedient, or because he made Christianity the official religion of the Empire, Theodosius earned the title of `the Great'. He was also the last to rule the Empire as an undivided whole.

The formal division of the Empire on Theodosius' death (395) between his sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west, was an important event in the history of the Greeks. Although they were not numerically predominant, they were diffused throughout the eastern Empire; trade with Asia was in their hands; theirs was the prevalent language, and especially that of the Church. In the undivided Empire, although not oppressed and allowed to retain their municipal institutions, they could not hope to compete for political influence with the Italians, nor could their language prevail against Latin, the language of the law-courts and administration. Although the Empire was administered in four great provincial subdivisions, none of the four closely corresponded to Greek territorial limits. But the division into two separate sovereignties contributed to the polarization of the Mediterranean world between a Latin and a Greek sphere of influence. One of the two poles was naturally Constantinople, which was becoming an increasingly Greek-speaking city.

The first Emperor at Constantinople who thought of himself as a Greek rather than a Roman came to the throne in 408. He was Theodosius II, the son of Arcadius, known to the Greeks as Kalligráphos , the `penman'. The nickname indicates his attachment to the cultivated arts, which held an increasingly honourable place at Constantinople. Unlike the West, the East enjoyed a golden age of peace and prosperity in the first half-century after the Empire was officially divided. A cultured aristocracy was emerging. The law was codified. Education enjoyed the highest prestige, and the university of Constantinople was founded in 425. The late 4th and the 5th centuries were also the period of a great expansion of monasticism, which played a powerful part in the intellectual life of the Empire, as well as in its politics and religion. Monasticism had originated in Egypt, and moved in a slow circle through Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia, to arrive in Greece under Theodosius the Great. A century later there were at least a hundred monasteries in or near the capital. While Constantinople was growing in spiritual strength and the arts of peace, the western empire was bearing the brunt of the barbarian invasions. Gradually the tribal leaders usurped control of the empire which they had first entered as vassals and allies.

The western empire was effectively ruled for thirteen years after the division (395-408) by the Vandal general, Stilicho. Still worse was to follow. Rome itself was taken by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410. For two more generations, a nominal Emperor was allowed to reign in the West, until the last puppet, appropriately named Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by Odoacer (who still acted nominally as viceroy of the eastern Emperor) in 476. Meanwhile the eastern empire had been more successful at controlling its unwelcome guests from the north. The power of the barbarian commanders of the Germanized imperial armies was broken by a massacre of the Goths at Constantinople (400). A more menacing enemy, the Huns under Attila, swept across the Danube a generation later, and threatened Constantinople itself (447). They were followed by the Vandals and the Ostrogoths, who reached the gates of the city more than once. But Constantinople was in no danger from the techniques of 5th-century warfare. In the reign of Leo I (457-74) the power of the barbarian troops and commanders was again broken by the importation of savage Isaurian mercenaries from Asia Minor. It was an expedient fraught with consequences for the future of the Empire, but it worked.

In the century following the accession of Theodosius I (379) and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion (380), Constantinople was troubled more by religious controversy than by foreign invasions. The Arian heresy was ended by the first Council of Constantinople (381), but the passion of all classes for religious debate, deriving as it did from a longing for the certainty of immortality, was not abated. A contemporary writer, Gregory of Nyssa, describes the theological ferment of the times:

`The whole city is full of it, the squares, the market places, the cross-roads, the alleyways; old-clothes men, money-changers, food-sellers: they are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophises about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire about the price of a loaf, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask `Is my bath ready?' the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing.'

It must never be forgotten that the theological controversies of Byzantium were matters of intense and agonizing reality to everyone, for all regarded their souls as being at stake, as well as the physical security of the Empire, which doctrinal error would put at mortal risk.

The fierce interest of public opinion was not the only reason why religious controversy was a political matter. The Church began at an early date to take on national characteristics, partly because its leaders allowed and even encouraged the use of the vernacular for ecclesiastical purposes. Hence the separation of local churches--in Egypt, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Persia, and Abyssinia as well as the west. Because there was a close connexion, from the time of Constantine the Great, between ecclesiastical and civil administration, local diversity helped to lead to political nationalism. Even within the Greek-speaking Church administration, there were rivalries between the great bishoprics of Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople, the last of which was long looked on as an upstart by the eastern as well as the western churches. At Constantinople itself religious disputes led sometimes to persecution and sometimes to bloody riots, which on occasion took on the character of class warfare.

For all these reasons the Emperor could not remain indifferent to the theological quarrels of which Gregory of Nyssa wrote. He was also obliged to take a stand by his own position in relation to the Church, which Constantine bequeathed to his successors. Although Constantine was personally indifferent to theology and inclined sometimes to heresy and sometimes to paganism, he felt compelled to play a dominant role in controlling ecclesiastical politics in the interests of peace and good order. He described himself as `a common bishop', but the Church more extravagantly described him as `the thirteenth Apostle' or even as `God's living image on earth'. His successors inherited a position not very different from that of head of the established Church, in a far more effective sense than that of the sovereign in the Church of England. The allegation of theocracy or `Caesaropapism' (meaning an identification of Emperor and Pope) was a much later exaggeration. But the Emperor had a crucial, if ill-defined, position in the Orthodox hierarchy.

It has been said that the relation of the Emperor and the Church was the only constitutional problem at Constantinople. Their powers were closely intertwined. The Emperor could, for instance, convene a Council and even try (not always successfully) to dictate a dogma, as Constantine had done at Nicaea. He could receive communion in the manner of a priest; he could preach sermons; on certain feasts he could serve at the altar. The vestments now worn by Orthodox bishops are identical with those once worn by the Emperor. He was the symbol of the fact that, in Greek eyes, the world had reached its final order. Both the Pope and the Patriarch were nominally his subjects, and did not deny it. The Emperor could always interfere in elections to the patriarchate, and later Emperors actually appointed their Patriarchs. In the 6th century Pope Gregory still acknowledged his subordination to the Emperor: `whatever he should do, we follow, if it is in accord with canon law,' he wrote to one of his deacons. The qualification was important, for it was also possible for either Pope or Patriarch to excommunicate the Emperor, as not infrequently happened. Equally, the Church exercised its influence in civil affairs as much as the Emperor did in ecclesiastical affairs. The good order of Byzantine life depended on an indissoluble harmony between Church and state.

The equality and harmony of the imperial and ecclesiastical power, first formulated by Pope Gelasius in the West (494), was again clearly expressed by a later Emperor, John I Tzimiskes:

`I recognize two authorities, priesthood and empire. The Creator of the world entrusted to the first the care of souls and to the second the control of men's bodies. Let neither authority be attacked; that the world may enjoy prosperity.' Tzimiskes reigned in the 10th century, but such was the conservatism of Byzantium that his words can be taken as simply a re-formulation of a doctrine established by Constantine the Great. Neither the Emperor nor the Church could willingly allow inroads into their power, least of all from each other. Any such attempt on ecclesiastical authority by the Emperor (for instance, the reforms launched in the 8th century by the Iconoclast Leo III, the Isaurian) could be relied upon to unite the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople in a way that no other force could do. The Emperor was the source of all authority, but he could only undermine the harmony of Church and state at his peril.

In later generations, the disturbance of this harmony came chiefly from the monasteries, which became immensely wealthy and a law unto themselves. But in the early centuries of Byzantium the source of disturbance was the emergence and reemergence of heresies. The sincerity of religious belief, and the vital concern of every Christian for his immortal soul, made matters of correct doctrine truly matters of life and death. No man could take them lightly, least of all the Emperor. Any Emperor who doubted this fact would be reminded of it by a dogmatic theologian, as Nestorius reminded Theodosius II (408-50):

`Give me the earth purified of heretics, your Majesty, and I will give you heaven in return. Subdue the heretics with me and I will subdue the Persians with you.'

The essence of Orthodox belief was that with the confluence at Constantinople of Roman and Christian theories of terrestrial and celestial empire, the world had achieved its final order, of which the Emperor was the symbol. Not only were Orthodox Christians superior to the rest of mankind; not only was all future improvement or innovation impossible; but also error was unthinkable. It was an unfortunate fact that Christianity was already divided when Constantine adopted it, so that it fell to him to arbitrate between equally dogmatic and irreconcilable factions. The same task fell to his successors.

Half a century after the Council of Constantinople (381) and more than a century after the Council of Nicaea (325), the issues had changed but the ferment was still there. In 431 a Council was convened at Ephesus, the third of the seven Councils recognized by the Orthodox Church as `oecumenical' or world-wide in authority. The crisis which had to be resolved at Ephesus was precipitated by Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who insisted on the humanity of Christ and refused to call the Virgin Mary the `Mother of God' ( Theotókos ). He was defeated by St. Cyril of Alexandria--a victory not without political significance in view of the rivalry of the two patriarchal sees--and Nestorianism was condemned. But that did not end the matter: the schism had a political sequel of great importance. Nestorianism attracted many of the eastern churches, and took root particularly in Persia, whence Nestorian missionaries spread as far afield as China. The victory of the Alexandrians also led them to carry their arrogance too far. At the second Council of Ephesus (449) the followers of Cyril insisted that Christ had but a single nature. This doctrine, Monophysitism, became a heresy in its turn.

The Emperor Marcian (450-57), asserting his right as the civil head of the established Church, convened another Council at Chalcedon (451), the fourth Oecumenical Council, in order to condemn the Monophysite heresy. It was the end of the domination of Alexandria, though not of the controversy. The official proclamation that Christ possessed two natures, not simply one, antagonized the Christians of Syria and Egypt, and consequently the Abyssinians too, who were converted by the Copts from Egypt. A large part of the eastern world was thus alienated from Constantinople no less decisively than Constantinople from Rome, with incalculable consequences when the onslaught of Islam began two centuries later. A vain effort was made by the Emperor Zeno (474-91) to reconcile the difference by means of his Enotikón , or Edict of Union (484), which sought to reverse the decisions of Chalcedon without denying their validity. But this desperate effort only resulted in the first formal schism with Rome, where the Pope denounced the Edict. The schism lasted till the accession of Justin I (518).

(Continues...)

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Modern Greece : A Short History

0571197949

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