For centuries the Roman empire had confronted the other great power of the Middle East, Persia. The ancient Persian empire had always challenged the Mediterranean world and its threats had forced all sixth-century rulers, like Justinian, to campaign on Rome’s eastern frontiers. Between 622 and 628 Emperor Herakleios battled to crush Persia’s power and eventually succeeded. The official dispatch of victory was sent to the patriarch, who read it to the people of Constantinople in the church of Holy Wisdom, capturing the triumphant moment:
Let all the earth raise a cry to God; and serve the Lord in gladness, enter into his presence in exultation, and recognize that God is Lord indeed. It is he who has made us and not we ourselves. We are his people and sheep of his pasture . . . For fallen is the arrogant Chosroes, opponent of God . . . his memory is utterly exterminated from the earth . . . he who was exalted and spoke injustice in arrogance and contempt against our Lord Jesus . . . and his undefiled Mother, our blessed lady, Mother of God and ever-Virgin Mary, perished is the profaner with a resounding noise.1
This was a Christian victory over a Zoroastrian leader who had forced the patriarch of Jerusalem, with his Christian flock and the relic of the True Cross, into a Babylonian captivity in Ctesiphon. With great solemnity, on 21 March 630 Herakleios restored the True Cross to its rightful place in Jerusalem.
The emperor now reimposed Roman administration in the eastern provinces of Palestine and Syria and installed a pliant, pro-Roman ruler in Persia, but both empires had been drained by the long war that exhausted their military forces. Although he knew the importance of intelligence provided by ‘the Saracens who are subject to our Christloving state’ – Ghassanid and Lakhmid tribesmen who lived in the desert that bordered eastern Syria and Palestine – imperial officials, insensitive to disturbances in the region of Arabia, refused to pay them the customary regular tribute. Whether this was an illconsidered change of policy or an initiative of local commanders, it led some tribesmen to give up their traditional role, leaving parts of the south-east frontier unobserved and unguarded. Raiders from Arab tribes soon found it much easier to ride north on their camels and attack the flourishing regions of Palestine.
The combination of a change in frontier policy and the introduction of Monotheletism proved fatal to imperial control in these regions: doctrinal disagreement increased divisions among the Christian population, while a traditional way of gathering intelligence was abandoned. From the early seventh century a contrary development towards greater political unity and a new religious purpose among the desert tribes of Arabia transformed their raiding into occupation of provinces of both the Roman and Persian empires. Inspired by the Prophet Muhammad, who dictated his vision of Islam (submission to Allah, God) as the final divine revelation to humanity, his family, his tribe and, gradually, many other Arab tribes adopted the new Arabic monotheism. In 622 Muhammad moved his community from Mecca to Medina and marked the event as the start of a new Muslim lunar calendar: year 1 of the Hegira (ah). He united many of the warring factions under his leadership so that they could regain Mecca in 629, where he destroyed the 360 pagan idols at the pilgrimage site of the Kaaba. Emphasizing the spiritual nature of Islam, he gave his followers a mission to spread their new faith beyond the deserts of Arabia. After his death in 632, they rapidly occupied the prosperous provinces of Palestine, capturing Jerusalem between 635 and 638, occupying Syria after 636, and Alexandria and most of Egypt by 642.2 The speed of their conquests must be related to the new monotheistic doctrine pronounced in their own language (classical Arabic), which was transmitted orally until written down in the Koran, a holy book intended to replace both the Old and the New Testaments.3
After witnessing a most serious defeat at the battle of the River Yarmuk, a natural barrier in Palestina 11 (636), Herakleios withdrew imperial forces behind the Taurus mountains of eastern Asia Minor and the Arabs established their capital at Damascus. From this base they overran the entire area of the Persian empire and raided Asia Minor almost every year, determined to capture Constantinople. This threat was real and continuous: the oncenomadic people integrated the cities and lands they conquered into the sphere of Islam, creating a new selfcontained power. Their ambition was frustrated initially at the Taurus frontier and later by the will and the walls of Constantinople, but emperors were never able to reverse the original Arab conquests of the 630s.
An immediate effect of the Arab campaigns was the catastrophic loss of tax revenue together with manpower for the army and mercantile activity.4 In addition to regular raids by land, the Arabs pressed the maritime skills of the Christian populations of Alexandria, Syria and Lebanon into service, to build ships and begin naval warfare against the islands of Cyprus, Rhodes and even settlements in the Aegean. When Herakleios died in 641, the disputed succession of his son caused a major crisis for about ten months, until his twelve-year-old grandson, Constans II, was acclaimed as sole ruler under the guidance of a council of regency. The new emperor’s age, repeated defeats suffered by imperial military units and the emergence of Islam with its claim to supersede both Judaism and Christianity, did not augur well for the survival of the empire. If the followers of Muhammad had indeed taken over the resources of the eastern capital, the history of the world would have been very different, but thanks to the regency council that sustained young Constans II, his own reign (c. 650–68) and those of his son and grandson (Constantine IV, 668–85, and Justinian II, 685–95 and 705–11), the city resisted. In the process of adapting to a greatly diminished territory, the East Roman empire was transformed.
The Arabs’ rapid conquests resulted in a tripartite division of the Mediterranean world into an eastern and southern littoral, dominated by Islam, a greatly reduced Christian empire based on Constantinople, and isolated and fragmented regions in the Christian West, still under Germanic pressures. In Carthage, Exarch Gregory saw the Arab advance as a chance to assert his independence, but his rebellion failed, and he was killed in 649. At the time witnesses underestimated the permanent nature of the Arab advance into the Mediterranean, though the continuators of Fredegar’s Chronicle recorded the defeat of Arabs near Poitiers in 732 (also noted by Bede in northern England). Anonymous Spanish chronicles of 741 and 754 both cite Emperor Herakleios’s nightmares about rats from the desert, who would ravage him (without specific references to Islam).5 Refugees arrived in Italy with stories of their flight from the Arabs, and the Roman Book of the Pontiffs reports that the Saracens were living in Sicily in the 650s, with no reference to the scale of the Islamic conquests. By the end of the eighth century, however, Paul the deacon mentions the Saracens, ‘unbelieving and hateful to God’, who had advanced from Egypt into Africa and captured Carthage.6
For Constantinople the emergence of Islam clearly marked a turning point, but the overall impact of the Arab conquests is highly disputed. The hundred-year-old thesis of Henri Pirenne – ‘Without Muhammad Charlemagne would be inconceivable’ – continues to provoke debate over the decline in Mediterraneanwide trade. But growing evidence for smallscale coastal transport, from shipwrecks and reports of piracy, and the co-operation of Muslim and Christian merchants (and rulers on Cyprus), suggest that the demand for papyrus, spices and eastern luxury goods in the West was met by continuing trade.7 New finds of imported ceramics at Classis add to the evidence of continuing contacts between Ravenna and the East Mediterranean, though less than in earlier centuries.8 In Constantinople the western regions of the empire took on much greater importance, both as a resource to assist the beleaguered East and as a refuge from continual pressure on the frontier now developing along the line of the Taurus mountains. The extent of imperial losses, particularly control of Egypt and its supply of grain on which Constantinople had depended for centuries, resulted in a search for alternate supplies nearer the capital and, probably, a change of diet.
The council of regency established in Constantinople from 641–50 had to concentrate all imperial military capacity to defend what remained of the empire against regular Arab attacks. And when Constans II turned twenty-one and insisted on ruling without its advice, his youthful bravado and inexperience almost led to his death four years later in 654. At a naval battle fought off Phoinike on the south coast of Lycia (in Asia Minor, today’s Finike in Turkey) he escaped from near disaster by disguising himself in the clothes of a loyal guard who perished, while the Arabs sailed into the Aegean capturing Rhodes and Kos and raiding Crete. The Arab armada intended to link up with land armies sent from Damascus in an attempt to besiege the capital, where only an act of God saved it. According to the Armenian historian Sebeos, ‘a great tempest stirred the sea . . . the waves piled up high like the summits of very high mountains and the wind whirled around over them, it crashed and roared like the clouds and there were gurglings from the depths’. For six days this violent turbulence broke up the Arab fleet, throwing its crews overboard, where a few survived by holding onto planks until ‘the sea opened its mouth and swallowed them’.9 The Arab military commanders waiting at Chalcedon to be transported across the Bosporus to besiege Constantinople were obliged to retreat. The capital had survived a serious military threat, but the Arabs had not given up their aim of capturing it and would try again in 667–9 and 717–18.
Challenged by the new Islamic monotheism, the government of Constantinople renewed its efforts to unite the Christians within the empire. Constans II was committed to the theology developed by his grandfather Herakleios – the doctrine of the single energy and will of Christ, rather than both the human and divine energies and wills – which had been promoted in the Ekthesis (statement of faith) of 638.10 The Monothelete doctrine had been debated in churches in Cyprus, North Africa and Italy, and its arguments over Christ’s single will must have been rehearsed in Ravenna, where Exarch Isaac upheld the imperial position. In Rome, however, Pope John IV had condemned the Ekthesis and opposition to Monotheletism was stiffened by the election of Theodore, son of a bishop from Jerusalem, as his successor.11 He was the first in a series of eleven Greek-speaking popes, elected between 642 and 715 and identified by their births in Syria, Greece (which designates the eastern empire), Sicily and southern Italy; their knowledge of Greek proved very important during the theological disputes of the period. Because this group marks such a clear break from the normal recruitment of bishops from among the Roman clergy, there must have been a distinct preference for such candidates and an organized pressure from Palestinian refugee communities in Rome to secure their promotion.12 Pope Theodore had been warned by Archbishop Sergios of Cyprus about the disagreements over Monotheletism and it was during his reign that the theological problem of Christ’s will or wills became entwined in political loyalty to Constantinople.
As we have seen, initial opposition to Monotheletism was led by eastern theologians, particularly Maximos the Confessor and his teacher and friend Sophronios, patriarch of Jerusalem, who had established the significance of the two wills operating in Christ. They were able to demonstrate that the divine will corresponded to the will of the Father, and the human will to the incarnate Christ, completely undermining the imperial position. In addition, they also championed the role of Rome as an apostolic foundation that sustained Christian orthodoxy against such heretical developments in Constantinople.13 In a public debate held in Carthage in 645, their arguments persuaded Pyrrhos, the Monothelete expatriarch of Constantinople, to recant, and Maximos accompanied him to Rome to be welcomed by Pope Theodore. In combination with Palestinian and Syrian monks, refugees from the Muslim invasions, Rome now became the centre of opposition to Monotheletism and championed the doctrine of two wills (Duotheletism). There Pyrrhos changed his mind again, and as the Book of the Pontiffs puts it, ‘went back again like a dog to the vomit of his own impiety’. Pope Theodore organized a gathering of local priests and clergy to condemn Pyrrhos, who fled to Ravenna, and from there returned to the East. The pope sent his own legates to Constantinople to convince the new patriarch, Paul, of the error of Monotheletism and their failure opened a schism between Rome and Constantinople.14
The schism put the authorities in Ravenna in a difficult position. Through the seventh century a series of experienced military officials, Isaac’s successors, continued to govern the exarchate, defending the territory and collecting taxes destined to support the East: Theodore Kalliopas (643–5), Platon (c. 645), Olympios (649–53), Theodore Kalliopas (for the second time, 653–66), Gregorios II (recorded in 666), Theodore II (678–87) and possibly two more known only from their seals (Anastasios and Theocharistos).15 In contrast to Arab threats to the Aegean, the Adriatic remained a relatively safe naval link between Ravenna and the eastern capital, while the Lombards constituted the primary land enemy that demanded the attention of successive exarchs during the crucial period from 641 to 685 when Ravenna was a vital outpost of empire.16 But the tension between the exarch, who represented the city’s political authority derived from the eastern capital, and the archbishop, its ecclesiastical authority, subordinated to Rome, came to personify the growing differences between East and West.
Monotheletism developed in response to the triumphs of Islam and generated little support in the West, where Maximos the Confessor’s sermons, writings and public debates promoted opposition. Under papal leadership this new theological split was added to the schism over the Three Chapters that dated back to the Fifth Oecumenical Council of 553. Although emperors intended their definitions of faith to unite Christian believers, their initiatives only deepened divisions. Worse, some western churchmen began to identify Constantinople as a source of unorthodox argumentation that generated heresy.
In 647/8 the regency council that ruled in the name of Constans II had issued an imperial edict known as the Typos tes Pisteos (Outline of the Faith), which forbade any further discussion of the Monothelete doctrine. To Pope Martin (649–55) this ruling countered ‘the statements of the holy Fathers with the utterances of the wickedest heretics to give no definition or acknowledgement of either one or two wills or operations in Christ our Lord’. He condemned both the Typos and Patriarch Paul (641–53), who had authorized an attack on the papal legates in Constantinople: ‘lawlessly and presumptuously he went so far as to have the altar of our holy See . . . consecrated . . . in the house of Placidia overthrown and destroyed, thus stopping our apocrisiarii from . . . receiving the sacraments of communion’.17 As part of his response, Pope Martin summoned a synod of 105 bishops to the Lateran palace in Rome to condemn those who had introduced such novelties to the faith. This put Archbishop Maurus of Ravenna in a very awkward position: he refused to attend and thus avoided declaring his support for either the eastern or western position on Monotheletism.
Once the synod had issued its anathema, Martin sent copies of it to ‘all the districts of East and West’.18 For Constantinople such flagrant opposition to imperial policy could not go unpunished, and Constans instructed the new exarch, Olympios, to have the Typos read in all the churches of Italy in order to get the clergy to agree with it. If the pope remained obdurate, he was to be removed. Olympios duly set out, leading the army of Ravenna, with plans to link up with the army of Rome and thus impose the imperial policy. But his plans to arrest the pope or to assassinate him as he officiated in the church of S. Maria Maggiore were frustrated, and by another miracle: the soldier designated to do the deed was blinded at the crucial moment!19 The exarch then abandoned his ‘wicked’ mission and was reconciled with Pope Martin. Instead of carrying out imperial instructions, he decided to attack the Arabs in Sicily, and the Book of the Pontiffs notes that the Roman forces suffered defeats and the exarch himself died of disease.20
As soon as Constans II learned of this disastrous failure, he sent another exarch, Theodore Kalliopas, and an imperial chamberlain Theodore Pellourios to arrest the pope. When Martin realized that he might not be able to escape a second time, he selected a group of his clergy to travel with him to the East and justify his own criticism of the Monothelete theology. But the imperial officials arrested him in the Constantinian basilica, a famous Roman church founded by Constantine I, and secretly put him on a ship that sailed before dawn so that his companions would not be able to accompany him. This opened a new phase in the campaign to enforce Monotheletism. Pope Martin was put on trial by the Senate in Constantinople; he was not allowed to discuss any aspect of the Monothelete theology and was condemned to death for assisting the revolt of Olympios, clearly a political charge. In June 655 the sentence was commuted to exile and Martin was sent to the Crimea, where he died a year later.21 Eugenius (654–7) was elected to replace him, and Rome rejected Patriarch Peter’s customary encyclical letter as ‘unintelligible . . . failing to be explicit about the operations and wills in our Lord Jesus Christ’.22
The emperor then summoned a council of all the bishops under his control to establish Monotheletism as the official doctrine of the church; it met in late May– early June 662.23 With the patriarchs of Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, together with the Senate of Constantinople, they condemned the Duothelete doctrine and put its defenders on trial: Maximos the Confessor, the monk Anastasios and Anastasius the papal legate were beaten, mutilated and ordered into perpetual exile.24 Constans believed that by uniting his Christian subjects the empire would secure a more effective defence, but his aim of winning over the many Monophysite communities living in the Near Eastern regions was not very successful. Their failure to resist the Arabs was probably related to the fact that the Muslim conquerors were willing to let Christians and Jews pay an extra tax rather than converting to Islam. Both groups may have been tempted to adopt this new status of dhimmi (non Muslim subjects) under Arab rule. Such concerns did not apply to bishops of Rome who could insist that the dangerously incorrect theology of Monotheletism had to be opposed. Although Constans II made an example of Pope Martin and Maximos the Confessor, he was still unable to convert the Christians of the West to his theological beliefs.
Part of Constantinople’s failure to reverse the Arab conquests and regain the provinces of the Near East was due to this obsessive concern with theology and the divisions unleashed by Monotheletism. While doctrinal differences remained a continuing preoccupation, the Arabs consolidated their control over Jerusalem and Damascus, making it much harder for the empire to contemplate a successful reconquest. In this upheaval Ravenna was the centre from which exarchs appointed dukes to rule over Rome and attempted to force the popes to accept the eastern theological definitions. The city remained pivotal to the Adriatic connection with Constantinople but lacked the resources to recreate its role as an alternative western capital – as it had been under Theoderic the Gothic king. Through Ravenna we can thus witness the waning of Constantinople’s influence and the rising defiance of Rome, in a process that divided the Mediterranean world into three separate sectors under the impact of Islam, leaving the eastern empire to adapt to its medieval form, which we know as Byzantium.25