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Isaurian
Dynasty (717-866)
Leo
III the Isaurian, Arab
siege of Constantinople, Iconoclasm, Constantine
V, Leo IV, Constantine VI, Empress Irene
Leo III (r.717-741)
The leader to emerge after the anarchy
following the death of Justinian II was Leo the Isaurian, one of the
few military officers who had made a great reputation amid the fearful
disasters of the last ten years.
Leo was a general of the " Anatolic " theme, the province
which included the old Cappadocia and Lycaonia. After
inducing the Saracens, more by craft than force, to
raise the siege of Amorium, Leo disowned his
allegiance to the incapable Theodosius and marched
toward the Bosphorus.
The unfortunate emperor, who had not coveted the
throne he occupied, nor much desired to retain it,
allowed his army to risk one engagement with the
troops of Leo. When it was beaten he summoned
the Patriarch, the Senate, and the chief officers of the
court, pointed out to them that a great Saracen
invasion was impending, that civil war had begun,
and that he himself did not wish to remain responsible
for the conduct of affairs. With his consent the
assembly resolved to offer the crown to Leo, who
formally accepted it early in the spring of 717.
Theodosius retired unharmed to Ephesus .
Leo Crowned Emperor
By dethroning Theodosius III. on the very eve of
the great Saracen invasion, Leo the Isaurian took
upon himself the gravest of responsibilities. With a
demoralized army, which of late had been more
accustomed to revolt than to fight, a depleted treasury,
and a disorganized civil service, he had to face an
attack even more dangerous than that which Con-
stantine IV. had beaten off thirty years before.
Constantine too, the fourth of a race of hereditary
rulers, had a secure throne and a loyal army, while
Leo was a mere adventurer who had seized the
crown only a few months before he was put to the
The reigning Caliph was now Suleiman, the seventh
of the house of the Ommeyades. He had strained
all the resources of his wide empire to provide a fleet
and army adequate to the great enterprise which he
had taken in hand. The chief command of the
expedition was given to his brother Moslemah, who
led an army of eighty thousand men from Tarsus
across the centre of Asia Minor, and marched on
CONSTANTINOPLE BELEAGUERED
the Hellespont, taking the strong city of Pergamus
on his way. Meanwhile a fleet of eighteen hundred
sail under the vizier Suleiman, namesake of his
master the Caliph, sailed from Syria for the Aegean,
carrying a force no less than that which marched by
land. Fleet and army met at Abydos on the Helles-
pont without mishap, for Leo had drawn back all his
resources, naval and military, to guard his capital.
In August, 717, only five months after his coronation,
the Isaurian saw the vessels of the Saracens sailing
up the Propontis, while their army had crossed into
Thrace and was approaching the city from the
western side. Moslemah caused his troops to build
a line of circumvallation from the sea to the Golden
Horn, cutting Constantinople off from all communi-
cation with Thrace, while Suleiman blocked the
southern exit of the Bosphorus, and tried to close it
on the northern side also, so as to prevent any
supplies coming by water from the Euxine. Leo,
however, sallied forth from the Golden Horn with his
galleys and fire-vessels bearing the dreaded Greek
fire, and did so much harm to the detachment of
Saracen ships which had gone northward up the
strait, that the blockade was never properly established
on that side.
The Saracens relied more on starving out the city
than on taking it by storm : they had come provided
with everything necessary for a blockade of many
months, and sat down as if intending to remain before
the walls for an indefinite time. But Constantinople
had been provisioned on an even more lavish scale ;
each family had been bidden to lay in a stock of corn
THE SARACENS TURNED BACK
for no less a period than two years, and famine
appeared in the camp of the besiegers long ere it was
felt in the houses of the besieged. Nor had Mos-
lemah and Suleiman reckoned with the climate.
Hard winters occasionally occur by the Black Sea, as
the troops learnt to their cost in the Crimean War.
But the Saracens were served ev^en worse by the
winter of 717-18, when the frost never ceased for
twelve weeks. Leo might have boasted, like Czar
Nicholas, that December, January, and February were
his best generals — for these months wrought fearful
havoc in the Saracen host. The lightly clad
Orientals could not stand the weather, and died off
like flies of dysentery and cold. The vizier Suleiman
was among those who perished. Meanwhile the
Byzantines suffered little, being covered by roofs all
the winter.
When next spring came round Moslemah would
have had to raise the siege if he had not been heavily
reinforced both by sea and land. A fleet of reserve
arrived from Egypt, and a large army came up from
Tarsus and occupied the Asiatic shores of the Bos-
phorus.
But Leo did not despair, and took the offensive in
the summer. His fire-ships stole out and burnt the
Egyptian squadron as it lay at anchor. A body of
troops landing on the Bithynian coast, surprised and
cut to pieces the Saracen army which watched the
other side of the strait. Soon, too, famine began to
assail the enemy ; their stores of provisions were now
giving out, and they had harried the neighbourhood so
fiercely that no more food could be got from near at
THE SIEGE RAISED
hand, while if they sent foraging parties too far from
their h'nes they were cut off by the peasantry. At last
Moslemah suffered a disaster which compelled him to
abandon his task. The Bulgarians came down over
the Balkans, and routed the covering army which
observed Adrianople and protected the siege on the
western side. No less than twenty thousand Sara-
cens fell, by the testimony of the Arab historians
themselves, and the survivors were so cowed that
Moslemah gave the order to retire. The fleet ferried
the land army back into Asia, and both forces started
homeward. Moslemah got back to Tarsus with only
thirty thousand men at his back, out of more than
a hundred thousand who had started with him or
come to him as reinforcements. The fleet fared even
worse : it was caught by a tempest in the Aegean, and
so fearfully shattered that it is said that only five
vessels out of the whole Armada got back to Syria
unharmed.
Thus ended the last great endeavour of the Saracen
to destroy Constantinople. The task was never
essayed again, though for three hundred and fifty
years more wars were constantly breaking out
between the Emperor and the Caliph. In the future
they were always to be border struggles, not des-
perate attenrxpts to strike at the heart of the empire,
and conquer Europe for Islam. To Leo, far more i
than to his contemporary the Frank Charles Martel,'
is the delivery of Christendom from the Moslem
danger to be attributed. Charles turned back a
plundering horde sent out from an outlying province
of the Caliphate. Leo repulsed the grand-army of
the Saracens, raised from the whole of their eastern
realms, and commanded by the brother of their
monarch. Such a defeat was well calculated to
impress on their fatalistic minds the idea that Con-
stantinople was not destined by providence to fall
into their hands. They were by this time far removed
from the frantic fanaticism which had inspired their
grandfathers, and the crushing disaster they had now
sustained deterred them from any repetition of the
attempt. Life and power had grown so pleasant to
them that martyrdom was no longer an " end in
itself" ; they preferred, if checked, to live and fight
another day.
Leo was, however, by no means entirely freed from
the Saracens by his victory of 718. At several epochs
in the latter part of his reign he was troubled by
invasions "of his border provinces. None of them,
however, were really dangerous, and after a victory
won over the main army of the raiders in 739 at
Acroinon in Phrygia, Asia Minor was finally freed
from their presence.
THE ICONOCLASTS
An Iconoclast paints over an image of Christ
If Leo the I saurian had died on the day on which
the army of the Caliph raised the siege of Constanti-
nople it would have been well for his reputation in
history. Unhappily for himself, though happily
enough for the East-Roman realm, he survived yet
twenty years to carry through a series of measures
which were in his eyes not less important than the
repulse of the Moslems from his capital. Historians
have given to the scheme of reform which he took in
hand the name of the Iconoclastic movement, because
of the opposition to the worship of images which
formed one of the most prominent features of his
action.
For the last hundred years the empire had been
declining in culture and civilization ; literature and
art seemed likely to perish in the never-ending clash
of arms : the old-Roman jurisprudence was being
forgotten, the race of educated civil servants was
showing signs of extinction, the governors of pro-
vinces were now without exception rough soldiers,
not members of that old bureaucracy whose Roman
traditions had so long kept the empire together. Not
least among the signs of a decaying civilization were
the gross superstitions which had grown up of late in
the religious world. Christianity had begun to be
permeated by those strange mediaeval fancies which
would have been as inexplicable to the old-Roman
mind of four centuries before as they are to the mind
of the nineteenth century. A rich crop of puerile
legends, rites, and observances had grown up of late
around the central truths of religion, unnoticed and
unguarded against by theologians, who devoted all
their energies to the barren Monothelite and Mono-
physite controversies.
Image-worship and relic-
worship in particular had developed with strange
rapidity, and assumed the shape of mere Fetishism.
Every ancient picture or statue was now announced
as both miraculously produced and endued with
miraculous powers. These wonder-working pictures
and statues were now adored as things in themselves
divine : the possession of one of themi made the
fortune of a church or monastery, and the tangible
object of worship seems to have been regarded with
quite as much respect as the saint whose memory it
recalled. The freaks to which image-worship led
were in some cases purely grotesque ; it was, for
example, not unusual to select a picture as the god-
father of a child in baptism, and to scrape off a little
of its paint and produce it at the ceremony to
represent the saint. Even patriarchs and bishops
ventured to assert that the hand of a celebrated
representation of the Virgin distilled fragrant balsam.
The success of the Emperor Heraclius in his Persian
campaign was ascribed by the vulgar not so much to
his military talent as to the fact that he carried with
him a small picture of the Virgin, which had fallen
from heaven !
All these vain beliefs, inculcated by the clergy and
eagerly believed by the mob, were repulsive to the
educated laymen of the higher classes. Their dislike
for vain superstitions was emphasized by the influence
of Mahometan ism. on their minds. For a hundred
years the inhabitants of the Asiatic provinces of the
empire had been in touch with a religion of which the
noblest feature was its emphati(!^ denunciation of
idolatry under every shape and form. An East-
Roman, when taunted by his Moslem neighbour for
clinging to a faith which had grown corrupt and
idolatrous, could not but confess that there was too
much ground for the accusation, when he looked round
on the daily practice of his countrymen.
Hence there had grown up among the stronger
minds of the day a vigorous reaction against the pre-
vailing superstitions. It was more visible among the
laity than among the clergy, and far more widespread
in Asia than in Europe. In Leo the Isaurian this
tendency stood incarnate in its most militant form,
and he left the legacy of his enthusiasm to his de-
scendants. Seven years after the relief of Constanti-
nople he commenced his crusade against superstition.
The chief practices which he attacked were the worship
of images and the ascription of divine honours to
saints — more especially in the form of Mariolatry.
His son Constantine, more bold and drastic than his
father, endeavoured to suppress monasticism also, be-
cause he found the monks the most ardent defenders
of images ; but Leo's own measures went no further
than a determined attempt to put down image-
worship.
LEOS CRUSADE AGAINST IMAGES
The struggle which he inaugurated began in A.D.
725, when he ordered the removal of all the images
in the capital. Rioting broke out at once, and the
officials who were taking down the great figure of
Christ Crucified, over the palace-gate, were torn to
pieces by a mob. The Emperor replied by a series of
executions, and carried out his policy all over the
empire by the aid of armed force.
The populace, headed by the monks, opposed a
bitter resistance to the Emperor's doings, more
especially in the European provinces. They set the
wildest rumours afloat concerning his intentions ; it
was currently reported that the Jews had bought
his consent to image-breaking, and that the Caliph
Yezid had secretly converted him to Mahometanism.
Though Leo's orthodoxy in matters doctrinal was
unquestioned, and though he had no objection to the
representation of the cross, as distinguished from the
crucifix, he was accused of a design to undermine the
foundations of Christianity. Arianism was the least
offensive fault laid to his account. The Emperor's
enemies did not confine themselves to passive resis-
tance to his crusade against images. Dangerous
revolts broke out in Greece and Italy, and were not
put down without much fighting. In Italy, indeed,
the imperial authority was shaken to its foundations,
and never thoroughly re-established. The Popes
consistently opposed the Iconoclastic movement, and
by their denunciation of it placed themselves at the
head of the anti-imperial party, nor did they shrink
from allying themselves with the Lombards, who
were now, as always, endeavouring to drive the East-
Roman garrisons from Ravenna and Naples.
The hatred which Leo provoked might have been
fatal to him had he not possessed the full confidence
of the army. But his great victory over the Saracens
had won him such popularity in the camp, that he
was able to "despise the wrath of the populace, and
carry out his schemes to their end. Beside insti-
tuting ecclesiastical reforms he was a busy worker in all
the various departments of the administration. He
published a new code of laws, the first since Justinian,
written in Greek instead of Latin, as the latter
language was now quite extinct in the Balkan
Peninsula. He reorganized the finances of the
empire, which had fallen into hopeless confusion in
the anarchy between 695 and 717. The army had
much of his care, but it was more especially in the
civil administration of the empire that he seems to
have left his mark. From Leo's day the gradual
process of decay which had been observable since the
time of Justinian seems to come to an end, and for
three hundred years the reorganized East-Roman
state developed a power and energy which appear
most surprising after the disasters of the unhappy
seventh century. Having once lived down the
Saracen danger, the empire reasserted its ancient
mastery in the East, until the coming of tb-s Turks in
the eleventh century. We should be glad to have
the details of Leo's reforms, but most unhappily the
monkish chroniclers who described his reign have
slurred over all his good deeds, in order to enlarge to
more effect on the iniquities of his crusade against
image- worship. The effects of his work are to be traced
mainly by noting the improved and well-ordered
state of the empire after his death, and comparing
it with the anarchy that had preceded his accession.
Leo died in 740, leaving the throne to his son,
Constantine V .
Constantine V
Constantine V., whom he had brought up to follow
in his own footsteps. The new emperor was a good
soldier and a capable man of business, but his main
interest in life centred in the struggle against image-
worship. Where Leo had chastised the adherents of
superstition with whips Constantine chastised them
with scorpions. He was a true persecutor, and
executed not only rioters and traitors, as his father
had done, but all prominent opponents of his policy
who provoked his wrath. Hence he incurred an
amount of hatred even greater than that which en-
compassed Leo HL, and his very name has been
handed down to history with the insulting byword
Copronymus tacked on to it.
Though strong and clever, Constantine was far
below his father in ability, and his reign was marked
by one or two disasters, though its general tenor was
successful enough. Two defeats in Bulgaria were
comparatively unimportant, but a noteworthy though
not a dangerous loss was suffered when Ravenna and
all the other East-Roman possessions in Central Italy
were captured by the Lombards in A.D. 750. At this
time Pope Stephen, when attacked by the same enemy,
sent for aid to Pipin the Frank, instead of calling on
the Emperor, and for the future the papacy was for all
practical purposes dependent on the Franks and not
on the empire. The loss of the distant exarchate of
Ravenna seemed a small thing, however, when placed
by the side of Constantfne's successes against the
Saracens, Slavs, and Bulgarians, all of whom he beat
back with great slaughter on the numerous occasions
when they invaded the empire.
CONSTANTINE V. DISSOLVES THE MONASTERIES
But in the minds both of Constantine himself and
of his contemporaries, his deaHngs with things reHgious
were the main feature of his reign. He collected
a council of 338 bishops at Constantinople in 761,
at which image-worship was declared contrary to all
Christian doctrine, and after obtaining this condem-
nation, attacked it everywhere as a heresy and not
merely a superstition. In the following year, finding
the monks the strongest supporters of the images, he
commenced a crusade against monasticism. He first
forbade the reception of any novices, and shortly
afterwards begun to close monasteries wholesale. We
are told that he compelled many of their inmates to
marry by force of threats ; others were exiled to
Cyprus by the hundred ; not a few were flogged and
imprisoned, and a certain number of prominent men
were put to death. These unwise measures had the
natural effect : the monks were everywhere regarded
as martyrs, and the image-worship which they
supported grew more than ever popular with
masses.
Empress Irene
While still in the full vigour of his persect
enthusiasm, Constantine Copronymus died in 775
leaving the throne to his son, Leo IV., an Iconoclast
like all his race, but one who imitated the milder
measures of his grandfather rather than the more
violent methods of his father. Leo was consumptive
and died young, after a reign of little more than four
years, in which nothing occurred of importance save
a great victory over the Saracens , crown
fell to his son, Constantine VL, a child of ten, while
the Empress"- Dowager Irene became sole regent, and
her name was associated with that of her son in all
acts of state.
The Isaurian dynasty was destined to end in a
fearful and unnatural tragedy. The Empress Irene
was clever, domineering, and popular. The irrespon-
sible power of her office of regent filled her with
overweening ambition. She courted the favour of
the populace and clergy by stopping the persecution
of the image-worshippers, and filled all offices, civil
and military, with creatures of her own. For ten
years she ruled undisturbed, and grew so full of pride
and self-confidence that she looked forward with
dismay to the prospect of her son's attaining his
majority and claiming his inheritance. Even when
he had reached the age of manhood she kept him
still excluded from state affairs, and compelled him
to marry, against his will, a favourite of her own.
Constantine was neither precocious nor unfilial, but
in his twenty-second year he rebelled against his
mother's dictation, and took his place at the helm of
the state. Irene had actually striven to oppose him
by armed force, but he pardoned her, and after
secluding her for a short time, restored her to her
form'er dignity. The unnatural mother was far from
acquiescing in her son's elevation, and still dreamed
of reasserting herself She took advantage of the
evil repute which Constantine won by a disastrous
war with Bulgaria, and an unhappy quarrel with the
Church, on the question of his divorce from the wife
who had been forced upon him. More especially,
however, she relied on her popularity with the
multitude, which had been won by stopping the
IRENE BLINDS HER SON
persecution of the image-worshippers during her
regency, for Constantine had resumed the policy of
his ancestors and developed strong Iconoclastic
tendencies when he came to his own.
In 795 Irene imagined that things were ripe for
attacking her son, and conspirators, acting by her
orders, seized the young emperor, blinded him, and
immured him in a monastery before any of his
adherents were able to come to his aid. Thus ended
the rule of the Isauriaji dy nasty. Constantine himself,
however, survived many years as a blind monk, and
lived to see the ends of no less than five of his
successors.
The wicked Irene sat on her ill-gained throne for
some five troublous years, much vexed by rebellion
abroad and palace intrigues at home. It is astonish-
ing that her reign lasted so long, but it would seem
that her religious orthodoxy atoned in the eyes of
many of her subjects for the monstrous crime of her
usurpation. The end did not come till 802, when
Nicephorus, her grand treasurer, having gained over
some of the eunuchs and other courtiers about her
person, quietly seized her and immured her in a
monastery in the island of Chalke. No blow was
struck by any one in the cause of the wicked empress,
and Nicephorus quietly ascended the throne.
Though containing little that is memorable in
itself, the reign of Irene must be noted as the severing-
point of that connection between Rome and Constan-
tinople, which had endured since the first days of
empire. Pope Leo III. crowned
Karl, King of the Franks, as Roman Emperor, and
transferred to him the nominal allegiance which he
had hitherto paid to Constantinople. Since the
Italian rebellion in the time of Constantine Coprony-
mus, that allegiance had been a mere shadow, and the
papacy had been in reality under Frankish influence.
But it was not till 800 that the final breach took place.
Solidus of Empress Irene 797
to 802
After
the passing of the
Moslem danger, the Byzantine government grew increasingly incompetent
and rife with palace intrigues. The Empress Irene (797-802) gained the
throne by blinding here own son, but she lost the throne in an
insurrection which were becoming increasingly common. the worst of a
long line of decadent rulers was Micheal III (842-867) "the drunkard"
whose favorite was a Macedonian horse trainer named Basil. Basil
eventually murdered Micheal and became emperor (867-886),founding the
Macedonian Dynasty, which was to rule during the most brilliant period
of Byzantine history
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