THE HOLY AUGUSTUS

The Byzantines were able to keep Constantinople safe because they were one of the few peoples living in the time between the fall of Rome and modern days who had a strong government and one that worked. The rest of the Roman Empire had been divided by conquest into a good hundred or more independent units. These were ruled by kings, princes, dukes, marquises, and counts, and some cities were even free republics headed by wrangling priors. Their boundaries were always changing, and nobody ever knew just who was governing whom today, and who would be tomorrow. But the eastern half of the Roman Empire had a single government which was almost always orderly.

The Byzantines were able to do it because they had a fine army, and when they needed it, a swift and deadly navy—to say nothing of a diplomatic corps with a well-paid staff of skillful, highly trained diplomats.

They were able to do it because of their Christianity. After Antioch (in Syria) and Alexandria (in Egypt) had been captured by the Arabs, Constantinople was the most important Christian city except Rome. And as far as the Byzantines were concerned, the state worked for Christianity, and Christianity worked for the state.

Finally, the Byzantine Empire was able to stand firm and to last so long because the Byzantines could afford to spend what they needed to. Their government was tremendously expensive. Their army and their navy with its strategoi and drungariuses (generals and admirals) cost them a lot of money and so did their extravagant ambassadors. The church with its own mighty army of high officials and lesser functionaries was very expensive too.

But as long as the Byzantines were not only able to support emperor, army, navy, diplomats, and the church, but were willing to do so, the Byzantine Empire flourished and was great. It was only after they began to economize, when a lot of Byzantines decided they were spending too much on the army, that their troubles began.

At the head of the government was the emperor, and he was certainly the most absolute ruler there could possibly be. Even in the earliest days of the empire, he was chief of the Byzantine state, commander in chief of the army and navy, the only one who could make laws, and the head of the Byzantine courts. In other words, he was equivalent to the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court of the United States rolled into one.

When he became basileus, he was even more than that. The Great King was master and owner as well as sovereign, and his subjects became slaves. They had to humble themselves on the ground before him, and foreigners had to as well. Beside that, he was the head of the Byzantine church (now known as the Greek, or Orthodox Eastern, Church), and in this connection took on another title, isapostolos, which is Greek for “equal to the Apostles.”

But in spite of his great power, in many ways he was a democratic emperor who was elected or at least chosen by a process carefully set down by law. First he had to be named by either the senate or the army. Then he had to be approved by whichever of those two bodies that had not named him in the first place. Finally he had to be hailed by the people. (This was true even when the emperor seized power or when an emperor named his son co-emperor so that he would be sure to succeed him. He still had to be approved and hailed.) But once the emperor was elected, he was “the emperor chosen by God,” for the Byzantines firmly believed that God guided them in everything they did. From then on, it was not only treason but wicked and sinful to oppose the emperor. That is, unless you were successful. If you led a successful revolution, it meant that God had chosen you to take the old emperor’s place!

The empress—the Augusta, or basilissa, as she was also called—was almost equally important. To be sure, in the long history of the Byzantine Empire, only three women actually mounted the throne to rule in their own name, and only one of these amounted to anything. This was the wicked Irene who wanted to marry Charlemagne and who blinded her own son so she could stay in power. However, she did not call herself empress. She called herself emperor of the Romans just as if she had been a man.

But even though she rarely ruled, the empress was not shut up in a harem, and many empresses had great power and even greater influence.

Ariadne, the widow of an early emperor, went before the people and told them that her husband was dead. “Choose us a new ruler!” they clamored. She named a palace official, and then she married him. He was a very good ruler.

Zoe, the daughter of another emperor, did even better. She married three men, and each in turn became emperor.

More than that. The nephew of her second husband persuaded her to adopt him and name him her co-emperor. Then he had her hair shorn and shipped her off to the Princes Islands, in the Sea of Marmara, as a nun.

The crowds surged around the palace. “Where is our lovely lady,” they shouted, “whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather ruled before her?” The usurper had to bring her back, but even that did not save him. He ended in a monastery himself.

Saint Theodora (the wife of an emperor and the mother of one) used her influence to end a religious dispute that had disturbed the state for more than 100 years, while another Theodora, who was far from a saint, saved it from revolution.

This happened when the Greens and the Blues (the rival political parties) joined forces and revolted against Justinian, the greatest Byzantine emperor of all. After they had burned much of the city, they surged into the Circus and called on the emperor to abdicate.

The mighty Justinian, who had even ordered a ship ready for a quick escape, was about to give in when suddenly his empress, Theodora, stood beside him. She was an ex-circus girl, one of the people herself.

“You can do what you want to,” she told him, her eyes flashing. “I am going to stay here. Anyone who puts on the crown must never take it off. If I die, I am going to be buried in imperial purple!”

The emperor was ashamed of himself.

“Drive them back to their warrens!” he ordered two of his toughest generals.

Within hours, the riots were put down.

But even when the empress did not do things like this, she was very important. For this reason a widower emperor remarried as soon as possible. Leo the Philosopher married four times and got into almost as much trouble as Henry VIII. If an emperor didn’t remarry, he made his daughter the Augusta.

“When there is not an Augusta,” wrote a Byzantine, “it is not possible to celebrate holidays or give banquets or entertainments in the manner prescribed by law.”

That may not seem important to us, but it was very important to the Byzantines. Since the emperor was God’s representative on earth, every official act of his life had to be like a church service, and in almost every one of the more than eighty occasions described in detail in an instruction book for emperors called The Book of Ceremonies, the empress took part.

It was something to see the royal pair on any great Byzantine holiday, for example, May 11, when they celebrated the founding of the city.

On this day the statue of Constantine the Great was paraded through the city in a golden chariot drawn by white mules, and the emperor sat in the Hippodrome waiting to pay honor to it. He was clad in robes that literally glittered. His principal garment was a tunic which reached almost to his ankles. This was called the scaramangion and was so stiff with brocade that it could have stood by itself. Over this was a shorter garment called the saigon. It was purple, gold-embroidered, and seeded with pearls. On his head he wore the stemmata, or imperial crown. It twinkled with rubies and sapphires of the purest ray serene. On his feet were the campagia, or special boots that only the emperor could wear. These too were of imperial purple, although some people say this imperial purple was really a deep crimsony red.

The empress sat at his side, just as splendid as he. Her garments were much like his, but on her crown was a plume made of precious stones. She wore earrings that dangled far below her shoulders, and sometimes a neckpiece made of oval or pear-shaped pearls. If he was a solid gold emperor, she was a solid gold empress too.

Yet in spite of all the splendor and glory (and this is only a little bit of it), the Byzantine emperor did not have to be royally born. In the Byzantine Empire it was just as easy to rise from a hovel to the throne as it is to be born in humble circumstances and become President of the United States.

Many of the emperors did.

An early emperor had been a butcher. Another had been a swineherd from Macedonia, and the great Justinian was this swineherd’s nephew. The savage Phocas was originally a centurion (a top sergeant). Still another had once been a donkey trader who moved from one country fair to another. Basil I was raised as a Balkan farm boy. He was very tall and strong and attracted the attention of the reigning emperor because he could tame horses. A later emperor had been a petty officer in the navy. Still another was originally a dockyard worker.

Many of the empresses were humbly born too. Besides Theodora, the circus girl, there was one who had been a cook, and a third who was the daughter of a saloonkeeper. Even Saint Theodora was brought up in poverty because her father, who had once been a courtier, had given all his money to the poor.

Horse scenes

Saint Theodora became empress when the emperor picked his bride by following an old custom of the Byzantine emperors. Wishing to marry, he sent messengers throughout his realm, telling them to bring back the most beautiful young women they could find. Seventeen were paraded before him, and when the one he was about to choose annoyed him by a flippant answer she made, he chose Theodora.

Theodora did not intend to stay poor like her father. One day, her husband, the emperor, looked out of the window and saw a rich, heavily laden merchant vessel sail in and tie up to a wharf.

“I wonder who owns it,” he mused.

“It is mine,” said the empress.

The emperor flew into a fury. His wife should not be engaged in trade like some huckster. He made her sell it, but he did let her keep the profits.

Because these rulers were the emperors chosen by God, the Byzantines bowed their knee to them as the ancient Egyptians had to the Pharaohs. But because they were from the people, and also because the Byzantines had sharp tongues and liked to be sarcastic, the people sometimes gave their rulers a rough time.

There were more than 100 emperors in the long period of the Byzantine Empire, and many of them were given nicknames. Some of these nicknames were far from flattering.

Here are just a few: Justinian Nose-Cut-Off. (This was Justinian II, not the great Justinian.) Constantine the Stable Boy. Michael the Stutterer. Michael the Drunkard. Constantine Born-in-the-Purple. Basil the Bulgar Slayer. Michael Thinks-He’s-a-Soldier. Even one empress had a nickname; Leo the Philosopher’s fourth wife was called Zoe Black Eyes.

The emperors had to put up with sarcastic epigrams, disrespectful poems, and uncomplimentary stories. Here is one of them: Michael Thinks-He’s-a-Soldier had a passion for city planning, but he hated to spend money. One day the Byzantines saw a principal avenue all torn up. The pavement had been removed and workmen were everywhere.

“What is happening?” asked one of them. “Oh, yes! I remember! That’s where the emperor lost one of his halfpenny dice when he was a small boy. He’s tearing up the pavement to find it!”

But in spite of all this, or maybe because of it, the Byzantine state was about as solid as was possible. Not even revolutions could really shake it.

One reason may have been the fact that since the emperors came from every class and were often changing, the Byzantines were constantly getting new and vigorous blood in their government. But another reason was the wonderful and well-organized body of bureaucrats who helped the emperor govern the empire. When there was a strong emperor, these men carried out his orders. When there was a weak emperor, they did the best they could, until a new, strong emperor mounted the throne.

There was really nothing like this group in any other government in the world until modern times. They were trained public servants, headed by high officials who were appointed by the emperor.

The most important of these officials was the Logothete of the Dromos. (The word logothete really means accountant, but it is like a secretary in the United States Cabinet.) He was also known as the Grand Logothete. He was secretary of state, minister of police, and secretary of the interior.

Besides that, there was a Logothete of the Treasury who was like the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States; a Logothete of the Military Chest, who was the paymaster general of the army and navy; and a Logothete of the Flocks and Herds who was in charge of all the vast imperial estates. Among other things, he ran the imperial horse farms where practically all the horses needed by the empire and the army were raised.

There was also the Sacellerius, or Controller General; the Quaestor, or Minister of Justice; the Grand Domestic, or commander in chief of the army; and the Grand Drungarius, or secretary of the navy. These are only a few of the most important officials.

Under these department heads—and even more important—were the humble clerks who really did the work of government. These clerks were banded together into a body called the logothesia which was almost like our modern civil service. They were well paid, and even the lowest-ranking workers had unlimited opportunities for graft. In those days, graft was not considered dishonest; it was more like the tip that you give to a waiter for his service.

The clerks were also rewarded with honors. Every Byzantine working for the government had two titles. One described his job, such as chief clerk to the third assistant to the eparch, or lord mayor of Constantinople. The other was the rank given to him to recognize his services. Around the emperor alone there were twenty-six ranks, ranging in order of importance from caesar down to nipsistarios, a man who sprinkled symbolic holy water on the sovereign. In the city and throughout the empire were sixty other ranks. The badge that was the symbol of each of these was as important to a Byzantine as his pay.

It was this government, and most of all its lower-rank employees, that really ran the Byzantine Empire, for nobody could get on without them. Emperors and even logothetes came and went, but the Byzantine civil service clerks were always there. If an army had to be sent to an overseas province, the clerks knew how many ships and how much time it would take to get there. If there was a famine, they knew how many bushels of wheat were needed to feed Constantinople, and where to get them.

They were for the most part plain citizens from all over the Byzantine state who had come to the capital not to get rich but just to make a living. They were noisy. They liked to argue. They were quarrelsome and jealous. As they jostled through the crowded streets toward their homes or pushed their way onto the crowded Mesé to buy silk for their wives or food for their larder, they reeked of garlic and highly spiced fish. But they kept the empire alive.

Horse and rider