Fighting Emperors of Byzantium

John Carr

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781783831166
• eBook ISBN: 9781473856264
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

This lively history chronicles every Byzantine Emperor who personally fought in battle, from Constantine the Great to Constantine XI.

The Eastern Roman or 'Byzantine' Empire had to fight for survival throughout its eleven centuries of history. Military ability was therefore a prime requisite for a successful Emperor. In Fighting Emperors of Byzantium, historian John Carr explores the personal and military histories of the fighters who occupied the imperial throne at Constantinople. They include men like its founder Constantine I , Julian, Theodosius, Justinian, Heraclius, Leo I, Leo III, Basil I, Basil II (the Bulgar-slayer), Romanus IV Diogenes, Isaac Angelus, and Constantine XI.
Byzantium's emperors, and the military establishment they oversaw, can be credited with preserving Rome's cultural legacy and, from the seventh century, forming a bulwark of Christendom against aggressive Islamic expansion. For this the empire's military organization had to be of a high order, a continuation of Roman discipline and skill adapted to new methods of warfare.

Chapter One

From Rome to Byzantium: Constantine the Great and his Successors

Late in October 312 Flavius Valerius Constantinus, commanding a Roman army composed mainly of Gauls and Britons, scanned the wooded hills north of Rome. After weeks of hard marching across Europe, over the snowy Alps and down through the plains of Italy, fighting most of the way, he was finally within sight of his goal. One more battle and Rome, the seat of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, soon to celebrate a thousand years since its founding, would be his.

If ever a conqueror fervently believed he deserved such a prize, that man was Constantinus – better known to subsequent history as Constantine. To his 90,000 infantry and 8,000 cavalry, the great bulk of them Gauls, Teutons and Britons who would gladly follow him into hell, he was the man most fitted to assume the mantle of Roman emperor in the face of a half dozen lesser men who also were after the imperial throne. The general himself, just under 40 yet well aware of the perils of overweening pride – a host of recent unfortunate emperors had been assassinated for their arrogance – tried not to let the adulation go to his head. His motive for seeking the supreme post was no mere crude lust for power. Something had recently happened to him which utterly altered his thinking on the nature of human governance.

Lording it in Rome was Maxentius, a high-liver of questionable morals at best, a bestially cruel occultist at worst. For six years he had ruled propped up by the spears of the Praetorian Guard which he knew could eliminate him at any time if he stopped doing their favours. Having lost three battles to his advancing rival already, Maxentius had set up his forces for a stout defence at Saxa Rubra, or the Red Rocks, on the Via Flaminia a few miles north of Rome. Constantine was not unduly worried; his army’s morale was high, and not just because it was unbeaten in the field. For Constantine was under a growing conviction that his successes so far were the result of something mysteriously greater than good generalship or even the fortunes of war.

As Constantine himself much later told his biographer Eusebius of Caesarea, in the early afternoon of 28 October, when battle was imminent, his attention was caught by a flaming cross appearing in the sky together with the words IN THIS CONQUER. ‘At this sight,’ writes Eusebius, ‘he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also.’ Though Constantine was a Roman, he claimed to see the words written in Greek (en touto nika). That same night, he said, he dreamed that a voice directed him to adopt the symbol of Christ – the letters X and P (known as the chi-rho, or the first two letters of Christos, the Greek name for Christ) and put it on his soldiers’ shields. The X was bisected vertically by the P, whose loop became a symbolic halo. Constantine ordered every shield emblazoned in that way, and it was thus arrayed that his men advanced to confront the forces of the pagan Maxentius.

Modern scholars, of course, have tried to pick this legend apart. In fact, just where and when Constantine experienced his life-changing vision is not clear. Early chroniclers such as Lactantius and Eusebius assumed that it was at Saxa Rubra on the eve of the assault on Rome; Constantine himself appears not to have been too precise when describing the events. Most historians guardedly accept Eusebius’ version, though some suggest that the famous vision could have appeared rather earlier in the campaign, and that it might not necessarily have even been a Christian one.¹

In our supposedly rational post-Enlightenment era, commentary on this event has ranged from polite scepticism to outright disbelief. Serious academic historians, it is assumed, are like modern journalists, having little truck with signs and heavenly portents. The mystic experience has been variously explained away as either a solar atmospheric phenomenon or a blatant lie manufactured to boost the spirits of the many Christians in Constantine’s army as well as the contingents of Mithras-worshippers whose own emblem was a cross of light. Even Eusebius confesses that he found the story hard to believe, relenting only when Constantine ‘with an oath’ affirmed the truth of what he saw.

Our concern here is not with the spiritual significance of the flaming cross in the sky – one either believes it or not according to the presence or absence of faith on the reader’s part – but with its military effect, which was enormous. First, Constantine was never known for any kind of mental instability – in fact, throughout his career as soldier and emperor he was a paragon of clear-headed resolve and coolness. Such a personality carries great weight with the ordinary soldier of the line, who in the end is the best judge of his commander. Any falsity or cynical propagandizing in Constantine would have been detected by his men, who adored him precisely because of his honest and forthright reputation. The influence of Helena, his devoutly Christian mother, helped mould his character, though we don’t know whether he was a Christian believer himself at the time; very likely he was masking his true beliefs to avoid alienating the dominant pagan element in the empire. But if he swore that he saw the cross in the sky, his men were overwhelmingly prepared to believe him. Knowing the nature of soldiers, he could not have got away with a lie, even the most persuasively uttered one.

Second, the cross gave Constantine’s army an ideal to fight for that was much more powerful than a mere desire for adventure or conquest or booty. God Himself, it seemed, was issuing the marching orders to overthrow the corrupt pagan regime in Rome. If men are to fight, they fight best for something they consider above and greater than themselves, something that will blunt the natural fear of death. If there was one moment in time when the pagan establishment of antiquity received its death-blow from newly-emerging Christian military power, this was it. Whether the vision was dreamed up by court and scribe as a propaganda narrative, or whether it was real, just as Constantine insisted it was, it tore up the narrative of European history and changed the script.

But should Christians have taken up arms in the first place? The question depends on Jesus Christ’s view of war and military affairs as recorded in the Gospels. The simple answer is that, as military affairs are a symptom of a fallen world, they were not the concern of Christ, whose true concern was not with symptoms but with the underlying spiritual disease. Individual soldiers, however, were a different matter. He sympathized with them as having to do a sometimes unpleasant and dangerous job under orders. He also seems to have approved of the idea of discipline as encouraging a faithful life. Then what are we to make of Jesus’ stern reaction in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the apostle Peter drew his sword and sliced off the ear of a hapless synagogue employee in a vain attempt to avert his master’s arrest?² ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword,’ Jesus pronounced, and healed the victim’s ear for good measure. We can view this as a key moral distinction between those who initiate aggressive violence out of evil and egoistic impulses and those who are compelled by defence or the orders of superior officers to do violence to their fellows; by implication, the latter can be excused.

Peter’s rash act (if indeed it was he) can be considered the first recorded instance of someone taking up the sword in defence of Christianity. Yet violence, holy or otherwise, was very far from the minds of those who made up the early Christian communities in the latter centuries of the Roman Empire. The tenor of the new creed at first was intensely pacifist. But along with this pacifism came a profound rejection of the Roman emperors’ claim to divinity. Consequently, to the Roman authorities the Christian rejection of the state’s claims upon one’s soul was nothing short of treason. It was Nero who first violently persecuted the Christians, burning them ‘to light up [his] games’.³ The persecutions were to continue on and off for the next 300 years.

Roman society in the early Christian era suffered a protracted and gradual decay. The upper classes had become enervated by the accumulation of wealth and idle luxury, while the poverty level among the rest of the population was rising. Farming, trade and industry progressively declined, with the result that all classes had less incentive to work and create. The only organization retaining any vigour was the army which, in order to guard the vast outreaches of the empire, had to be manned mainly by mercenaries. These were men from many ethnic groups whose profession eroded any sense of allegiance to a cause or particular society. They were ready to follow anyone who could secure enough booty to keep them paid and satisfied. Any mercenary commander who could deliver this gained the power to usurp the imperial throne. Between 192 and 284 no fewer than thirty-three soldier-emperors seized power this way; most were assassinated when the soldiery’s preference fixed on someone else as a better source of handouts.

It took Diocletian (284–305) to restore some order and tenure to the imperial office. His attempt to hold the empire’s administration together took the form of a rigid socialist dictatorship with himself – the earthly representative of Jupiter, no less – as sole dictator. Diocletian, a hard man who had risen through the military ranks from humble farm slavery, was the first to realize that the empire had become too large and unwieldy to be governed from a single centre. Boldly in the circumstances, he decided that the empire should be formally split into eastern and western halves, each under an Augustus who would have a Caesar, something like a vice president, under him to be groomed for the eventual succession. Perhaps Diocletian’s most radical reform was to fix a twenty-year term limit to each Augustus’ reign; but during those twenty years an Augustus would exercise near-absolute power in order to safeguard the realm from external and internal foes. To everyone’s surprise, Diocletian stuck to his own rule, stepping down in 305.

Diocletian established his palace and seat of government at Nicomedia (modern Izmit) in what is now Northwest Turkey on the Asian coast of the Sea of Marmara. Within a few years this city had attained, in Edward Gibbon’s words, ‘a degree of magnificence which … became inferior only to Rome, Alexandria and Antioch in extent or populousness’. In 286 he hand-picked a trusted general named Maximian to share the office of Augustus in the West. More momentously, he moved the seat of western imperial power from Rome to Milan. Diocletian picked Gaius Galerius to be his Caesar in the East, while Constantius Chlorus became Caesar in the West. This tetrarchy (meaning four sources of authority) of two Augusti and two Caesars under them appeared to work fairly well at first, but simmering religious issues helped undermine it.

Diocletian is an intriguing figure. He began life as a slave in the province of Dalmatia (present-day Croatia) but managed by sheer ability to rise in the ranks of the army and become a general. Uneducated, he nevertheless proved a genius in the science of governing. The sole surviving marble bust of Diocletian shows a wide Balkan head framing the habitual grimace of one who has experienced much of the world and of human nature, little of it good. To him, the new doctrine of Christianity simply pandered to human weakness, hence it was a political disease to be fought. Partly because of his hard-knocks life, he took a dim view of humanity in general, believing that the people, officialdom and the ‘barbarians’ needed to be cowed into absolute submission if the Roman state was to operate at all. ‘Byzantinism,’ writes one authority, ‘began with Diocletian.’⁴

Though a complete despot, Diocletian was a conscientious and hard worker. By the time he voluntarily stepped down in 305, in the twenty-first year of his reign, he was also ill, which may have made the decision easier. Utter confusion followed Diocletian’s departure. The two points of apparent stability were Rome, where Maximian’s son Maxentius ruled, and York, the seat of Constantius Chlorus whose son Constantine was already highly popular with the garrisons in Britain and Gaul. When Chlorus died at York in 306 the western army acclaimed Constantine as his successor. The scene was set for a clash.

The Roman army, however, had long ceased to be a ‘national’ one in today’s commonly accepted sense of the term. There were far too few genuine Roman – not to mention Italian – men available to give the army a unified make-up. Inevitably, the great bulk of Rome’s far-flung legions had to be made up of mercenaries from the ethnic groups that Rome had conquered, and even from outside the frontiers. Of these, the Germans proved the most efficient at the business of fighting. It was Germans who were best able to rise through the ranks to the ultimate office of magister militum, the formal title of the commander-in-chief. The army was kept separate from the civil authorities but completely under the emperor’s authority.

Mercenaries, by nature or necessity, tend to be rootless men. Having cut most of their ties to family and community, some take up arms out of a wish for adventure, of economic need or to run from the law. They, too, search for inner solace and by the end of the third century a great many had found it in Christianity. After all, had not Christ been humble, despised and spurned and ultimately crucified by supposed ‘social superiors’? In some such manner the teachings of Jesus became the religion of legions of soldiers and sergeants and probably a good number of junior and field officers as well; senior commanders, on the contrary, were largely the products of, and addicted to, wealth and the perks of pagan power.

This is not the place to go into the complex causes of the decline of the Roman Empire, which even now are not completely understood. Gibbon was probably on the right track when he theorized that a long period of peace and prosperity under the Antonine emperors ‘introduced a slow and secret poison’ into the state, as such periods regrettably seem to do in any age. Social and personal ties were loosening. Thoughtful commentators were aware, somehow, that ‘the world has grown old’.⁵

A sense of imminent cataclysm was at hand. This left the military, manned by vigorous men from the provinces, as the only truly energetic element in Roman society. It was this structure that attracted growing numbers of dispossessed to the legions, from ex-slaves and criminals to unemployed farmers and artisans.

Christianity has been blamed for being a factor in the decline. But this begs the question of what is meant by ‘decline’. The old Roman order had long been decaying from within, a result of the inexorable infections of economic inequality, cultural and spiritual bankruptcy and corruption at the top; Christianity merely gave it the coup de grâce. And it was Constantine’s soldiers with the symbol of Christ on their shields who physically delivered that coup at the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber.

Constantine I (313–337)

The great nine-ton marble head that gazes out portentously from its incongruous position on the wall of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome impresses us with its air of strength and purpose. The firm-set lips suggest a no-nonsense resolve, though the large, staring eyes betray thoughtfulness behind the tough exterior. The head has been described as intimidating and contemptuous, but of course it is extremely risky to try to read the inner man into a sculpture, however brilliantly done. Flavius Valerius Constantinus did not enter the world with the best of advantages. Born around 274 at Naissus (present-day Niş in Serbia), he was the eldest son of Constantius Chlorus, the Caesar of the western empire after Diocletian. He may well have been illegitimate, as his mother Helena, described by some as a ‘barmaid,’ was Chlorus’ legal concubine, a sort of half-way house between having a wife and a mistress.⁶

Constantius Chlorus had earned his spurs as a competent officer who had been assigned to hold the fort in the north, as it were, while Maximian was busy trying to consolidate his own position. As Chlorus was suppressing the German tribes as far as the Danube, Maximian was not doing so well, and so in 288 Diocletian took over operations in the north-west for two years before urgent business in the Middle East two years later drew him back. Around 290 Diocletian, to keep an eye on both wings of his sprawling domain, transferred his headquarters to Sirmium on the Danube, not far from present-day Belgrade. He obviously didn’t think much of Maximian’s ability to hold down the West. At Milan in 291 Chlorus was appointed Caesar to Maximian. Until then Chlorus maintained his liaison with Helena. But with his promotion, officialdom decreed that for appearances’ sake he must be formally married, but not to just anybody. As for strategic reasons he needed to cement his relationship to his boss Maximian, as a means of holding the ruling caste together, he could have no objection to the order to marry Maximian’s stepdaughter Theodora. Though Helena and her young son were necessarily sidelined, and Chlorus sired no fewer than six children with his new bride, there is no sign that any resentment clouded the arrangement or that mother and son were disadvantaged at court, as later developments were to show. Within a couple of years, Constantius Chlorus had pacified the troublesome Rhine region and had returned to Britain in triumph, sailing grandly up the Thames and praised as ‘restorer of the Eternal Light’. Later Chlorus moved his headquarters to York as a buffer against the aggressive northern British tribes.

Constantine was not in Britain to share these successes, having been seconded to Diocletian and his Caesar Galerius in the East. Of Constantine’s early character we have few indications; all our sources agree that he was a sober and clever youth, but with a character more suited to soldiering than education and officialdom. His second-string official status at court could well have helped him develop a core of steel that he would later put to effective use against the imperial establishment. Relations with his father appear to have been good despite the latter’s required second marriage, a fact which also impressed itself upon the soldiery. With the tetrarchy solidly established in 293 as a new structure for the empire, Constantine started his military career in the hot and dusty climes of what are now Turkey, Palestine and Egypt.

As the 20-year-old son of Constantius Chlorus, Constantine was given the rank of military tribune. He acquitted himself well in combat on several fronts, with the Persians in the East and the Sarmatians along the Danube. He may well have been present at the discomfiture at Carrhae (now Harran in Turkey) in 296, a sad echo of the massacre of 25,000 Romans at the hands of the Parthians at the same spot 243 years before. The following year Constantine was transferred to the Danube front to fight the Sarmatians by the side of Galerius. A much later report has him personally seizing a Sarmatian ‘savage’ by the hair and throwing him at Galerius’ feet, and then riding through a swamp to clear a way for a decisive attack on the enemy. By such or other means, Galerius could not have failed to appreciate that here was a man of no mean ability. A frisson of anxiety must also have gone through him, as officers of ability were too prone to becoming rivals for the throne and hence deadly foes overnight. Galerius couldn’t afford to let Constantine out of his sight, and kept him, in effect, as a hostage in his court.

By the time he turned 30, Constantine had much to be proud of. As a battle-seasoned senior officer, he rode at Diocletian’s side on the emperor’s inspection tours of the garrisons. His ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue
• List of Plates
• Chapter 1 From Rome to Byzantium: Constantine the Great and his Successors
• Chapter 2 Goths, Huns and Theodosius
• Chapter 3 Justinian I, The War Manager
• Chapter 4 Heraclius, Christian Soldier
• Chapter 5 Leo the Isaurian Saves Europe
• Chapter 6 Blood on the Floor: A Cacophony of Emperors
• Chapter 7 The Macedonians
• Chapter 8 The Bulgar-Slayer and Lesser Figures
• Chapter 9 Rear-Guard Heroism: Romanos Diogenes
• Chapter 10 The Komnene Revival and The Crusades
• Chapter 11 Angeli and Latins
• Chapter 12 Constantine Goes Down Fighting
• Epilogue
• Notes and References
• Sources and Further Reading
• Byzantine Emperors 313–1453