Oxford history of the christian church

VI. Increasing Pressures on Constantinople and the Widening Gap 1025-1204.

1. Impending threats.

The Byzantine Empire had weathered many crises ever since its inception in the fourth century. It had adequate military and naval defences; its reservoir of manpower was replenished by immigrant Slavs settling south of the Danube; and it produced a series of able leaders, either rulers usually from an established house or generals taking control as co-Emperors for minors or weaklings. During this time the Church, while maintaining its normal everyday life, had succeeded in overcoming challenges to its tradition and had moreover made a major contribution in bringing the South Slavs and the Russians within the orbit of the Orthodox Church and to some extent the Byzantine Empire. But with the eleventh century came the parting of the ways for Byzantium. During the later middle ages any pre-eminence in East Mediterranean politics was gradually lost until the Empire was finally submerged in a Muslim Ottoman world. The Orthodox Church on the contrary, not exclusively a Byzantine preserve, held its own and survived the political downfall.

When the powerful Macedonian ruler Basil II died in 1025 latent internal weaknesses and external pressures were not immediately apparent. But the kind of leadership which had previously served Byzantium so well was not forthcoming. The Macedonian successor was the Empress Zoe, a foolish elderly woman. The able and popular George Maniaces who might have been another Tzimisces was killed in 1043 while on his way to Constantinople to challenge the Emperor Constantine IX. For the rest, possible, though not outstanding, candidates, such as the Emperor Isaac Comnenus (1057-9) or Romanus Diogenes (1068-71) were pushed off the throne by cliques in Constantinople. The dominating feature of politics during the years 1025-81 was the constant manœuvring for the throne. The military claimants were from leading Byzantine families owning considerable estates in Asia Minor and in Europe. But they had to contend with rivals from a ministerial milieu who had gained the ear of the court. It was not until 1081 that a member of a military landed family, Alexius Comnenus, managed to outwit his rivals and to establish a dynasty which lasted a century, and rather belatedly gave some stability to the government. He was an able ruler, if also an adroit opportunist, but the odds were against him and his house.

In 1025 Byzantium may understandably have felt secure in its pre-eminence but relaxation in vigilance and changes in methods of defence were to prove fatal and demonstrated the weakness of its political system. Resting on the prestige and pre-eminence accruing from successful expansion during the years 843-1025, it was considered safe to replace the old system of military service by taxation (which was by no means always devoted to other methods of defence upkeep). Buffer states, such as Armenia, were taken into the Empire without establishing adequate frontier protection. Newly-acquired provinces, such as Bulgaria, were treated so unwisely that latent nationalism was fomented. The fleet was neglected (geography alone demanded adequate sea power) and reliance on Venice's naval resources was to exact a fatally high price in the form of trade concessions. Mercenaries, expensive and often unreliable, now formed the core of what had once been largely a force of native soldiers. And so Byzantium was at a loss when overtaken in the political field by circumstances unforeseen and beyond its control. ¹

For set against such inadequacies were dangerous outside pressures. In the East Turkish tribes were establishing themselves in Mesopotamia, North Syria, and the former Armenian Kingdoms, areas ill-disposed towards Constantinople, an attitude aggravated by an unwise religious policy. At intervals Turkish raiders were penetrating into Asia Minor strongholds. Some landed families at least were aware of the crisis in the east. Recently-acquired estates disappeared as the eastern frontier was breached. Military leaders protested at the central government's comparative unconcern with defence measures. But when from 1068-71 Romanus IV took control and went on campaign his efforts were treacherously undermined in Constantinople and he was deposed. The failure to drive back the Seljuk Turks resulted in the firm rooting of the Muslim kingdom of Iconium in central-southern Asia Minor.

There were further complications in the north and west. The Slavs under Byzantine rule were growing more restive. Independent principalities, such as Zeta or Croatia, were crystallizing. Though in fact most of the Balkans were firmly aligned to the Orthodox Church there was always readiness — as in the Bulgarian Boris's day — to play off Greek against Latin ecclesiastical authority. Discontent with both Byzantine overlordship and with the established Church was finding its outlet in the widespread dualist Bogomil heresy. Further threats came from across the Danube and north of the Black Sea where Turkic nomads, the Pechenegs and then the Cumans, were on the move. Beyond the Balkans in Hungary, now settled by the Magyars, a new political factor was emerging. Hungary was a country with obvious interests in the north-west Balkans and, though by no means immune from the influence of the Orthodox Church, it was however to throw in its lot with Latin Christianity and the West in spite of twelfth-century overtures from Constantinople where the Comneni recognized its value as an ally.

It was doubtful whether anyone in Byzantium really appreciated the changes taking place in the West, the Greek Church still less than the government. And yet it was from fellow Christians in the Latin world that one of Byzantium's greatest dangers, the crusading movement, was to come. The Byzantines had always rather looked down on the West, particularly its emperors who (despite the efforts of Charlemagne) were regarded as usurpers outside the genuine imperial tradition. The Pope, it is true, had always been accorded primacy of honour in Christendom but the rapid succession of popes and anti-popes in the tenth and first half of the eleventh centuries had hardly inspired respect. Further the attempt to control papal elections by the Germans, even if crowned as western emperors, only aroused suspicion in Byzantium, just as the efforts of Frankish missionaries had done earlier on in the Carolingian period. The mild contempt of Constantinople for the West came to the surface when the tenth-century Emperor Nicephorus II taunted the German Emperor's legate Liutprand of Cremona about the youthfulness and inexperience of the Saxon Church. And yet it was in Frankish and German lands that the pre-Gregorian reform movement was already under way, something undreamt of, and indeed never appreciated, in Constantinople.

In 1025 Byzantium still had two provinces in South Italy, Calabria and Apulia, which were under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople, though this was perpetually disputed by Rome. After Basil II's death his plans to strengthen the Byzantine position in Italy and to wrest Sicily from the Arabs never successfully materialized. The whole political situation was moreover radically altered by the infiltration of the Northmen into Italy and Sicily from the early eleventh century onwards. At first they were useful mercenaries in the service of both Latin and Byzantine, but they soon turned into aggressive and permanent settlers, first in South Italy and then in Sicily. The German Emperor, bent on controlling the papacy and Rome, was drawn into the struggle to evict them. The Byzantines were equally concerned, not only the Emperor but the patriarchate, since the loss of the South Italian provinces to the Normans would almost certainly mean the predominance of the Latin Church already strengthening its position in those regions. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the impending conflict in Italy, the continuous losses in the east and rising nationalist feeling in the Balkans were hardly appreciated in ecclesiastical circles in Constantinople where unwise and intolerant policies, particularly towards the non-Chalcedonians, often aggravated an already threatening situation.