THE Heraclian dynasty in the seventh century had halted the advance of Islam: it had saved eastern Europe for the Greco-Roman tradition and afforded a barrier behind which the new barbarian nations of the west could be taught the Christian faith and Latin civilization; it had defended in Byzantium itself that hearth of light and fire that was to irradiate the Balkan Slavs, Bulgars and Russians. The East Roman empire had been in this respect an effective guardian to the new Europe. But while in the seventh century the Heraclian emperors had been forced to concentrate on the defence of their eastern frontier, the Slav races had infiltrated the Balkans (see p. 485) and settled there, a heathen population. They had had no civilizing contacts with the old Roman empire, with the Frankish empire mainly the contacts of frontier wars and raids, and with the Byzantine empire none at all. The Huns and the Avars had imposed a massive barrier. The seventh century, therefore, the century of the Slav immigration into Illyricum and the Balkan provinces, had brought to those lands and even to Constantinople a certain deterioration in culture. In Constantinople, towards the end of the seventh century, revolutions succeeded one another, after the assassination of Justinian II as well as before, and in the Balkans massacres and the capture of towns multiplied.
Help was at hand, however, with the advent to power of Leo, strategos of Anatolia, at a moment of extreme danger to the capital. The Arab army had invaded Asia Minor and was closing in on the Straits and Constantinople; but Leo also marched on the city, had himself proclaimed emperor in 717, and was at once supported by the senate, the court officials and the army. Leo III’s family had its origins in northern Syria: he proved not only a great general, but the founder of a dynasty, the Isaurian, whose rulers’ outlook was to some extent concentrated on the eastern frontier. Though they did attempt to check the Slavs on the north, Leo III and his successors all saw as the greatest of Byzantine problems the need of defence against, and advance against, the Arab forces of Baghdad, Mosul and Egypt.
Leo III’s first action after his coronation was to deliver the city of Constantinople from the third and last of the Arab attacks, in the summer of 717. The Arab general Maslamah actually crossed the Hellespont and brought a force against the walls of Constantinople, while a great Arab fleet besieged it by sea. The use of the new Greek fire, and the death of the Arab admiral, defeated the naval attack: while hunger, and a final intervention of Bulgarians on the Greek side, defeated the Arab land forces. In Asia Minor also the Byzantine army persevered in hard fighting, repelling an Arab invasion every year till Leo and his son Constantine won the decisive victory at Akroinon in 739, after which the Arabs were expelled from Asia Minor once for all. Constantine V (741–775) carried the wars against the Arabs beyond the frontiers of Asia Minor, the establishment of the Abbasid dynasty in 750 causing strife in Islam and favouring his offensive. He entered Arab territory in Syria in 746, and established the Greco-Arab frontier on a line running roughly from the south-eastern angle of the Black Sea to the Gulf of Antioch, thus holding for the Greeks the cities of Melitene and Mopsuestia: moreover, the Greeks had reconquered Cyprus, and Constantine’s fleet cleared the seas surrounding it, and those of the east Mediterranean, of Arab pirate shipping. He and his father had thus stabilized the situation on the eastern frontier and safeguarded the Asiatic themes; guerilla warfare continued, but for 200 years the Greek frontier in Asia Minor was substantially the same.
In the Balkans also the Isaurians fought hard, though less successfully. The Bulgars had established themselves south of the great bend of the Danube (see p. 487) and in 755 Constantine V found himself at leisure to deal with them. He planted in Thrace colonies of Armenians and Syrians, taken from the captured cities of Melitene and Theodosiopolis: he built a line of frontier fortresses, including Philippopolis and Sardica, and he led many campaigns against the Bulgars, who were themselves at times divided by faction. In 777 the Bulgar khan himself fled to Constantinople and accepted baptism: a vigorous offensive might have made the Bulgars permanently subject to the emperor: but danger from them seemed at the time small, and the opportunity was missed. The early Isaurians kept the Bulgars in check, but never established complete control over them.
The internal administration of the empire also profited from Isaurian measures. The dangerous frequency of attempts to seize the throne before their rise to power led Leo and Constantine to make every effort to establish a dynastic succession in their own family. Leo associated Constantine with him on the throne as early as 720, and had him crowned by the patriarch; Constantine in his turn associated with him his son Leo IV, while he had his four other sons made caesars. Imperial edicts also dealt with the law, the army and finance. Leo III issued a new legal code, the Ecloga, which sought to modify certain principles of Roman law by applying Christian standards to private morals and family life; this code not only became the working code of the Byzantines at the time but, mainly through translations, was influential later among the Slavs. To secure also the safety of the frontiers and the recruitment of the army, Leo III extended and reorganized the system of themes. In Asia Minor, to diminish possible danger from an over-strong strategos in charge of too large a theme, and to secure better administration, he subdivided the Anatolian theme, and the Opsikion (which faced the capital across the Straits). Soon afterwards, themes were created for Macedonia and Cephallenia in the Balkans, and, at the beginning of the ninth century, for the Peloponnese and Thessalonica. Measures were also taken to fill the empty treasury, such as the ‘doubling of the indiction’, which secured in the year September 727–8 a double payment of all levies collected at the indiction. (The indiction was originally a corn tax levied by the emperor Constantine I in 312, and reassessed every fifteen years: for its use as a dating cycle, see p. 13.) New taxes were also imposed and collected with a harshness that filled the treasury. The army was better paid and better disciplined; contingents from all the themes were welded into a single imperial army. The peasant of the eastern provinces also profited from the Isaurians’ solicitude for recruitment: efforts were made to halt the development of the great demesnes and prevent the disappearance of the small freeholder, and also the communities of free peasants working their village lands collectively for their own profit. The condition of the peasant population improved under Isaurian rule.
The iconoclast controversy begun under the Isaurian emperors is now recognized as not merely a quarrel about the use of icons (religious pictures or statues, as of Christ or the saints), but as a symptom of the orientalization of the eastern empire in the eighth century. Byzantium now faced east. The Arab invasions had deprived her of certain eastern provinces, and, in the seventh century, had even menaced Asia Minor; Arab fleets threatened Byzantine sea trade in the east Mediterranean. The danger of attack on Constantinople was real. Imperial attention was focussed on the defence of the eastern frontier, and though the danger from religious dissidence in Egypt and the once Byzantine parts of Syria and Armenia was lessened by their permanent loss to Islam, yet the religious views of the endangered and fighting provinces of the eastern frontier acquired a peculiar importance, with the advent of the Isaurian dynasty even a dominant importance, at Constantinople.
The question of the use of icons to the Christians of Asia Minor, Syria and Armenia was not merely a question of the superstitious use of icons, but of the use of icons at all. It involved deep questions of theology as well as the Persian and west Asiatic use of abstract art-forms and pattern, rather than naturalistic representation of the external world. For the dispute about icons was in one respect a continuation of the old Christological controversy; the east had farther found it easy to worship the godhead of Christ, the one nature and that divine, and had not accepted readily the Christological decisions of Chalcedon. The use of the sacred icons stressed the human nature of Christ as against the divine, which could not, as the iconoclasts claimed, be represented at all. Two centuries earlier, the mosaics of St Apollinare-in-Classe had represented the transfigured Christ on Mount Tabor by the symbolic cross, not by the human figure: but had not hesitated to represent St Apollinare and the apostles as men, according to the artist’s imagination. The iconoclasts now desired to ban all such humanistic representation. The influence of Arab practice and Persian art on the iconoclasts is now accepted; the buildings of the Isaurian emperors were inspired by the architects and influence of Baghdad. The emperor Theophilus (829–842) built himself a new palace on the Asiatic side of the Bosphorus in imitation of the caliph’s palace at Baghdad, and eighth- and ninth-century Constantinople came to rival Baghdad in general appearance. Moreover Islamic monotheism and the prohibition of the use of the human figure in the mosque and in Islamic art could not but influence the Christians in the eastern provinces: it has been claimed that the caliph’s ban (723) on the use of icons in Christian churches in his lands occasioned the iconoclastic movement in the empire.
Apart from the general persecution of those who defended the use of images (called iconodules by the iconoclasts), the movement had other important results. It involved a particular struggle of the emperors with the monks throughout the greater part of the empire: some monasteries had icons to which the populace were peculiarly devoted, and the monks defended the devotion: more-over, the question of military recruitment was affected by the traditional freedom to join a monastery: all these causes explain the iconoclasts’ efforts as directed peculiarly against the monks. The movement blackened the reputation of the Isaurian emperors, in spite of the fact that their military exploits saved Europe. It delayed also attempts at the conversion of the Slav races by the Greek church: and it contributed to the drifting apart of the churches of Rome and Constantinople. The Greek church was rendered all but helpless by the bitter imperial persecution: the Roman church openly reprobated the Isaurian emperors for their ban on images. When the long controversy was over, the process of estrangement had gone far; the popes were no longer, in the secular sphere, the subjects of the Byzantine emperor and synods in the western empire they had erected were attacking the cult of images at the very moment of the orthodox victory in the east.
The struggle began with a public pronouncement of Leo III against images in 726, and the removal and breaking of images of Christ in the capital and elsewhere. Popular riots followed in Greece and the Cyclades, and pope Gregory II openly protested, excommunicating the Italian exarch and denouncing iconoclasm as heresy. In 730 the emperor Leo III issued a formal edict against image worship, and deposed the patriarch Germanus when he refused to sign it; he replaced him by the syncellus Anastasius, and persecution began. The patriarchal schools, as likely to prove obstinate, were closed. In Italy, opposition was general, and a Roman synod of 731 excommunicated the iconoclasts. Leo III replied by transferring to the jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople those dioceses which hitherto had been under the secular rule of Byzantium but the spiritual jurisdiction of the pope, i.e. Calabria, Sicily, Crete and Illyricum. This action was peculiarly resented at Rome, and for several centuries proved an obstacle to the restoration of good relations between the two patriarchates: for when the iconoclast quarrel was at length ended, the papacy had acknowledged the Frankish emperor, and the east Roman sovereign refused, not unnaturally, to restore the dioceses.
Constantine V continued the struggle by an astute use of propaganda, patronage and persecution. He transported to Thrace colonies of Syrian and Armenian iconoclasts, he brought others to Constantinople, he wrote theological treatises himself. The army, mainly recruited in the eastern provinces, supported him, as did many of the secular clergy, including a number of bishops. In 753 more than 300 bishops assembled at the palace of Hieria across the Bosphorus (they did not however include the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem or Rome), condemned devotion to icons as ‘a thing hateful and abominable’, and excommunicated those who defended it. Fierce persecution followed next year: at Constantinople images in churches were broken, frescoes painted over, mosaics destroyed, paintings on wood scraped down and writing defending the use of icons burnt. Image worshippers, and particularly the monks, suffered arrest, imprisonment, exile, physical injury and in some cases, death. The monastic order seemed destroyed in Constantinople; but the iconoclast victory cost the empire the loss of all but southern Italy. In 751 the Lombard Aistulf had taken Ravenna and the exarchate, and was about to threaten Rome; the pope could get no help from the iconoclast Constantine V and in 754 made his journey to Pepin, seeking help. The Franco-Roman alliance that was to break the old relations of Rome and Byzantium was initiated. When the old emperor Constantine died in 775, nothing had been done to retrieve the position in Italy and the internal struggle over the icons still reft the empire.
Leo IV, surnamed after his mother, a princess of the Khazars of south Russia, Leo the Khazar, continued with some success his father’s wars against the Arabs, and against the image-worshippers: though here he was affected by the as yet secret devotion of his Athenian wife, Irene, to the cause of the monks, and used less violence. He died in 780, leaving the succession to his ten-year-old son, Constantine VI (780–797) and the regency to Irene (797–802).
The orthodox reaction under Irene could not come as a sudden volte-face, for the army and many officials were still iconoclast, the emperor’s brothers, the caesars, the puppets of ambitious rivals, and the need of military action against the Arabs still-acute. Irene intrigued against her rivals, made peace with the Arabs in 783, approached Charlemagne with the offer of the marriage of his daughter to the young Constantine, and sent the logothete Staurakios to lead an expedition to Greece against the Slavs. The campaign had some success and Staurakios celebrated a triumph at Constantinople and remained Irene’s principal adviser.
Meanwhile the empress prepared for the holding of a council which should disavow iconoclasm: she approached pope Hadrian I, who promised to send legates: she sought to win over the army. In 787 the council met at Nicaea, vindicated the monks, and restored the cult of images, distinguishing however between the veneration (proskunesis) which might be offered to them, and the adoration (latreia) which might be offered only to God. The empress signed the canons and there were shouts of acclamation for the new Constantine and the new Helena. But the reversal of iconoclast policy was only part of Irene’s personal struggle for power, and for that she needed the removal of her son Constantine, who was now seventeen and showing himself a vigorous leader in wars against Arabs and Bulgars. She persuaded Constantine to disgrace and blind one of the generals, which lost him the support of the army: she inspired him with distrust of his brothers, and suggested to him the blinding of the eldest and the cutting out of the tongues of the other four: she encouraged him to send his wife into a convent and form an illicit union with his mistress: the monks and the devout were scandalized. In July 797 she had Constantine himself seized and blinded, and was herself proclaimed empress. As empress, she could lavish favours on the monks, but could not control the intrigues for the succession that seethed in the palace (see p. 419). The treasury was exhausted, the realm disturbed and disorderly, and when Irene died in 802, her successor, the logothete Nicephoras, found it necessary to carry through a reorganization of the finances which involved the return of many monastic lands to the fisc and the abolition of many immunities.
Neither Nicephoras I (802–811) nor Michael I (811–813) openly renewed the campaign against images: this was left for Leo V (813–820), who proved an able defender of the empire. He defeated the Bulgars at Mesembria in 813, and after the death of the terrible khan, Krum, made peace with his successor. Confident through his military success, and doubtlessly encouraged by the news of the anti-iconodule synods of the west, pre-eminent among them the council of Frankfurt, which had denounced the council of 787, he now openly declared for iconoclasm. The cult of images was still, in fact, displeasing to the army; but when Leo ordered the acts of the council of 753 to be put in force again, he met with opposition, especially from the monks. That of Theodore, abbot of the Studite house in Constantinople, was particularly notable: he was a learned man, and respected as a good spiritual father to his monks and the upholder of the tradition of St Basil. He was to be the spearhead of the opposition to the later iconoclast emperors and four times exiled in the course of the struggle. He now declared at a palace conference that ecclesiastical matters were the proper business of priests and monks, and secular administration that of the emperor. This was a notable denial of the dominant interpretation of the imperial ruler as another Constantine, a thirteenth apostle, ruler in things secular and sacred. A claim for ecclesiastical independence, as such, was not new, for it had been made by Maximus the Confessor; but Theodore’s exposition of it was notable and evidence of the long bitterness of the quarrel over the icons: evidence also of the dislike of the church of Constantinople of being ruled by emperors who held views, not of the old Greco-Roman church, but of her more Asiatic provinces.
Though Theodore the Studite was exiled in 814 for his violent opposition to imperial iconoclasm, this policy was, in fact, less intransigent than it had been earlier. When the council of Constantinople met in 815, it proscribed image worship, but affirmed that the icons were not idols, thus echoing, consciously or otherwise, the doctrine of Charlemagne and his council of Frankfurt. Michael II (820–829) was iconoclast in background and outlook; but he desired to mitigate the sharpness of controversy and therefore banned all discussion of the veneration of images. His son and successor, Theophilus (829–842), was intelligent, learned, and ready to become the patron of art and letters; he enriched the capital and fostered the higher studies at his court. In his reign the example and influence of the caliph’s court at Baghdad was strong in Constantinople, and with regard for Arab learning and science went regard for Arab hostility to images. In 837 Theophilus appointed his son’s tutor, the greatest of the Byzantine scholars who admired Baghdad and deprecated veneration paid to the icons, John the Grammarian, to the patriarchal throne, and a short persecution of the iconodules followed. But when Theophilus died in 842, iconoclasm was found to have died with him. Michael III (842–867) succeeded his father while still a child, and it fell to the empress-regent, Theodora, to accept her counsellors’ advice and restore the orthodox teaching about images. The patriarch John refused to countenance such a move and was accused of sorcery. He was sent off to a monastery, the monk Methodius was made patriarch, and a council was held in February 843. The polite fiction that the late emperor had renounced his errors on his deathbed was accepted by the bishops, the veneration of images solemnly re-established, the exiles returned, prisoners were set free, and a triumphal procession made on the first Sunday in Lent, to the church of Santa Sophia, to offer thanksgiving for the return to orthodoxy. The day closed with a great feast given by Theodora at the palace. The orthodox church still keeps the first Sunday in Lent as the festival of orthodoxy.
The Isaurian and early Macedonian emperors were all confronted by a double enemy: the Slavs, now penetrating their Balkan provinces and settling in great numbers, and the fiercely hostile Islamic forces of the east, north Africa and the Mediterranean islands, the bases of their pirate fleet. Byzantine relations with the Slavs are mainly dealt with in chapter xxv: the wars of the Amorians and the early Macedonians with the Arabs were felt at the time to counter the greater danger and to be the supreme Byzantine task: their history is for a time a main strand in the skein of Byzantine foreign policy.
The wars of Byzantium with the Arabs in the first half of the ninth century were nevertheless affected by her relations with the Bulgars, whom she found a desperate enemy up till 820, but with whom she then made a thirty years’ peace. Since the death of Harun ar-Rashid in 809, the Abbasid empire had been weakened by civil war and revolts against the heterodox caliph, al-Ma’mun, but Theophilus’ forces were still no greater than those of the Arabs, and a struggle over the eastern provinces lasted most of his reign. The caliph’s army invaded Cappadocia in 831, and al-Ma’mun, three times invaded Asia Minor and took the passes in the Taurus that commanded access to the Anatolian themes. Possession of the passes in the Taurus and Anti-Taurus was, throughout these frontier wars, of the greatest strategic importance to both sides. Against al-Mu‘tasim, al-Ma’mun’s successor, Theophilus had more success, invading the country round the head waters of the Euphrates; but in 838 the Saracens retaliated by launching a great expedition and taking Theophilus’ birthplace, Amorium, on the borders of the Opsikion theme and Anatolia; the Byzantines, however, pushed them back beyond the Taurus. When Michael III succeeded Theophilus in 842 as a boy of four, the eastern war languished: his ministers were no generals, but the caliphate also was weak. Four caliphs were murdered between 861 and 869: but the emperor Michael himself was also murdered by his favourite, Basil the Macedonian, in 867. The twenty-five years of his reign had helped to heal the wounds of the iconoclastic struggle, and had seen the beginning of a revival of letters and secular science at Constantinople: but no great military success.
Basil I (867–886) had climbed to power by violence and treachery; but his accession marks the spring and flowering time of the medieval Byzantine empire. He founded a dynasty that ruled the empire for nearly 200 years (867–1056). The religious troubles were over: learning flourished through fresh study of the old Greek masters and access to the mathematical knowledge of Baghdad: buildings, mosaics, painting, illumination took on a peculiar beauty: and the military skill of the Macedonian emperors and their generals recovered some of the provinces lost to the caliphs and added military glory to internal recovery. The Macedonian period in Byzantine history saw the fine flower of a culture. Byzantium was a buttress to Europe: and if she was in less direct contact with the west than she had been in the age of Justinian, she was increasingly in a position to pass on Greco-Roman civilization to the Slavs.
Basil I was of Armenian stock, though his family had settled in Macedonia. He had been groom to caesar Bardas, and murdered his friend and patron in 866: he had been made associate emperor by Michael, and in 867 he had Michael murdered by a companion when he was in a drunken sleep. Basil was fifty-five years old and a hard drinker himself, a fine man to look at, though of only mediocre education. As emperor he proved intelligent, hardworking, a good administrator and a fine military leader. The empire found economic prosperity under his rule: successful warfare in those days paid immediate dividends in loot, tribute and ransoms, and Basil’s wars against the Saracens were successful. In the reigns of Basil I and his son Leo VI the eastern frontier was pushed eastwards: in Basil’s reign Egypt and Khurasan had become independent of the caliph of Baghdad, as had some small principalities on the frontier, like the amirates of Tarsus and Melitene; and the Byzantines profited from their enemies’ divisions. Between 871 and 882 they reconquered the passes in the Taurus which enabled them to pour into Syria; in 872 Basil defeated the Paulicians of the upper Euphrates country: they were an iconoclast sect who had not returned to orthodoxy and their position on the frontier made them potential allies of the Saracens. Basil suffered a Saracen defeat in 873: but when he died in 886 he had extended his frontier, thrown a bridge over the upper Euphrates and much improved the Greek strategic position. Byzantium was to gain also from the caliph’s recognition in 886 of Ashot Bagratuni as king of Armenia; he sent him a royal crown and saluted him as ‘king of kings’. An independent Armenia would be a useful buffer state for Byzantium, and soon after Basil also sent Ashot the Great splendid gifts and a royal crown. While the Byzantine emperor professed particular friendship for Armenia, he usually intrigued with the small principalities subject to her, with a view to the possible future annexation of Armenia.
In the west, Basil’s efforts against the Saracens met with mixed success: he could do little against them in Sicily, but in the Adriatic he defended the small Slav states of Dalmatia and kept the allegiance of Venice. Through the alliance of Basil, the western emperor Louis II, and the pope, the Franks were enabled to take Bari in 871; but the Saracens took Malta in 870, and in Sicily they held all the fortified towns except Taormina and Syracuse. When Louis II died the Byzantines took over the defence of Bari (876). The struggle with the Arabs was hard, though the Greeks in 880 regained Tarentum. It was on the cards that south Italy, Sicily, the southern shores of the Adriatic, the Aegean islands and Cyprus might all pass permanently to Islam, like the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean, and it was mainly the hard fighting of the Byzantine empire under the Macedonians that prevented this further Arab conquest, though the Greeks fought for a time with varying success. In Sicily, Syracuse fell to the Arabs after a long siege in 878: but the Byzantine fleet appeared in the Tyrrhenian Sea and won so resounding a victory over the Arab fleet near Lipari that Capua, Naples, Salerno and Benevento accepted the Byzantine protectorate. In 885 the Greek general Nicephorus Phokas, grandfather of the future emperor, campaigned in Calabria and Apulia, winning many towns from the Saracens, and attaching the small Lombard states more firmly to Byzantium; two new themes, the themes of Lombardy and of Calabria, were created in south Italy. In 887 the Greek fleet captured Cyprus and held it for seven years.
On the shore of the Adriatic, Basil’s success was no less important for the future. He had sent a Greek fleet in 868 to deliver Ragusa (Dubrovnik) from the Arabs, and with the co-operation of Venice the small towns and Slav settlements of the Dalmatian coast were defended and restored to order. The Croats and other Dalmatian Slavs returned to Byzantine Christianity and Byzantine vassalage; the orthodox bishoprics founded in south Italy contributed to the Byzantinization of south Italy, and to the spread of Greek Christianity among the Slavs. On a smaller scale, and contending with an alien civilization, Basil I, like Justinian, had made a reconquest of Italy.
Basil I died in 886, and was succeeded by Leo VI, ‘the Wise’ (886–912): he continued the Saracen struggle, though with less success than his father. The Saracens had held Crete since 826, and from this base in particular their raiding fleets harried the Aegean islands, now deserted by their inhabitants, and the coasts of the Peloponnese, Macedonia and Thrace. They had retaken Cyprus, and in 902 a fleet of corsairs penetrated the straits and threatened to attack Constantinople. Then, hesitating to embark on an attack that could scarcely have succeeded without an army and a long siege, they sailed on to the rich port of Thessalonica and took it with a brief assault. Besides an enormous plunder, they carried off many thousands of young men and women and sold them as slaves in the markets of Chandax (Crete) or Tripoli. So great a disaster necessitated the manning of a Byzantine fleet specially to retrieve it. It was led by Himerius: but nothing was achieved, for the corsairs, taking Thessalonica, had taken many more ships. The Byzantine fleet was again defeated in 911 near Samos, and left the Saracens in command of the Aegean, while the loss of Reggio had given them control of the straits of Messina in 901. They took Taormina in 902 and ruled undisputed in Sicily; the amir of Qairawan even spoke derisively of undertaking a new expedition against the city of ‘this foolish old Peter’, Byzantium was too busy with Bulgaria to play the part of protector of Italy: but the wave of Saracen success had, as it proved, reached its high water mark. Their eventual defeat in south Italy and Sicily was to be at the hands, however, not of the Byzantine emperor, but of the Normans.
Meantime, at home, the Hellenized Byzantine empire had stable government, economic prosperity and a splendid court. The basileus, still the Roman imperator, was the supreme war leader and the authoritative guardian and exponent of the law. He was the autokrator: his power, regarded as of divine origin, was absolute, although the empire was never totalitarian, and ecclesiastical and constitutional limitations of the imperial will developed in course of time. The emperor, when he appeared in public at the solemn seasons, wore the ceremonial garments prescribed by a rigid court etiquette: a long, straight robe stiff with embroidery and sparkling with precious stones, a jewelled crown and purple sandals. ‘By the beauty of ceremonial’, wrote Constantine Porphyrogenitus, ‘the imperial power appears more splendid, as in a surrounding glory, and strikes with awe and wonder both strangers and subjects.’ Around the emperor, the officials of palace and empire moved in a splendid circle: the old civil hierarchy of the Roman emperors and Justinian had never been abolished but had developed, in the 300 years between Justinian and the Macedonians, and become orientalized. Titles of honour and of official rank were now most often in Greek, though Latin ones like caesar, magister, protoasecretis, cartularius, and so on, also survived. The central government was organized in departments; in the countryside the old provinces had been replaced by the new organization of the themes. The civil servants of central and local government were well trained and well disciplined, and recruited for the most part from the senatorial class into which all holders of office passed. Greek was the sole administrative language.
A splendid industry and foreign trade made the empire rich, and Constantinople, to men of the ninth century, a city of almost fabulous beauty and riches. From the workshops and markets of the capital flowed a stream of luxury goods and articles of the finest workmanship, to Venice and north Italy and the Franks, to Naples and Rome and Marseilles, to Thessalonica, second greatest city of the empire; to the Slav hinterlands, and, by the Russian rivers to Kiev and the Baltic. A no less important trade flowed eastward, to Alexandria and, through Asia Minor, to Syria, Armenia and Baghdad, bearing the furs of Russia and Scandinavia, amber and slaves, the fine linens of Egypt, and cargoes of timber and grain for the east Mediterranean ports. Constantinople, with her merchants and her sea captains and her bankers, was the nodal point in all this web of trade. The industrial gilds of the city, the metal workers, painters, builders, workers in marble, the silversmiths, the craftsmen who worked in gold or silver or cloisonné ornaments, the weavers and embroiderers of silken textiles and ceremonial garments, the illuminators of manuscripts, each gild with its strict monopoly and each regulated by the prefect of the city, were at once evidence and creators of wealth. Economic prosperity went side by side with the efflorescence of letters in the ninth century.
The first two Macedonian sovereigns gave much attention to the restoration of orderly government and the reform of the law. Basil I sometimes himself presided in his supreme law court, supervised the recruitment to the civil service and sought to protect the small landholder. He found the laws of Justinian old and unsuited to his times, and those of the Ecloga in some respects useless and even bad: he desired to carry through a great new codification of Roman law, but only succeeded in issuing two preparatory manuals, the Prochiron (879) and the Epanagogè (886). In his desire to secure the succession of his dynasty, and not entirely for selfish reasons, Basil’s vindication of the imperial authority gave rise, for the first time in Byzantine history, to the idea of ‘legitimate’ succession, i.e. through an imperial family whose members were porphyrogeniti, born in the porphyry palace of the emperors, a condition which no usurper could satisfy.
Both this new insistence on hereditary succession to the empire, and the effort at administrative and legal reform, were carried further by Basil’s son, Leo VI. He married four times to secure a legal male heir, though both the Byzantine church and civil law reprobated a third marriage, and forbade a fourth. Plots to secure the succession had, however, developed, and in 903 Leo narrowly escaped assassination; when his mistress, the ‘black-eyed’ Zoe, gave him a son in 905, he married her and had her crowned empress, though this cost a struggle with the patriarch, Nicholas, whom he had to depose. He appealed to the pope about his marriage, and Rome did not condemn this fourth imperial marriage; the child, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, was crowned co-emperor in 911, and succeeded his father in 912 as Constantine VII. Leo VI’s reign saw an outburst of legal activity: he issued a complete new code, the Basilics, in sixty books, between 887 and 893, together with many novels. One of these, the Book of the Prefect, regulated the status of the industrial gilds at Constantinople, and is evidence both of the complex organization of the city and its centralized control by the government. The themes, henceforth twenty-five in number, were organized and the salary of their governors fixed. Even the Byzantine hierarchy was reorganized, and the metropolitans made dependent on the patriarch of Constantinople, who was appointed, and in practice could be deposed, by the emperor. The imperial edict stated the number of metropolitans and autocephalous archbishoprics as fifty-one each, and listed the bishoprics in their respective provinces.
In the intellectual and religious sphere above all, the Macedonian period was the daybreak of a new age. The iconoclast movement had been a spiritual invasion from the east: its defeat had cost many battles and sacrifices, but it had brought about the victory of orthodox Greek Christianity at Byzantium. Byzantium was now ready to take up a commanding and independent position, midway between the east and the west. She was also to be the scene, not merely of a renaissance of the old Greco-Roman learning and art, such as was illuminating the court of the Carolingians, but of Greek classical literature and also Greek learning as fertilized by Arab studies at Baghdad. While in language and literature her scholars remained purely Greek, their addiction to the secular arts and particularly the mathematical arts show Arab influence. The Arabs studied astrology as the work of the magi, and it was not for nothing that certain Byzantine scholars were surnamed ‘the magician’ (Lecapenus): throughout the early middle ages, a zeal for the higher mathematics was apt to give rise to accusations of the practice of sorcery. The beginnings of the new era of Byzantine enlightenment preceded, indeed, the advent of the Macedonian dynasty: the three greatest exponents of the new learning, Bardas, Photius and Constantine, the apostle of the Slavs, were trained under the Amorians, but their work bore fruit under the Macedonians. The defeat of iconoclasm had, by allaying something of party bitterness, made possible this enthusiasm for the Greek past and present splendour of Byzantium, the emergence of the medieval Byzantine empire, individual, independent and Greek. Iconoclasm had also brought about, however, the end of Byzantine universalism, in practice if not in theory: there was now a western and an eastern instead of a single Christian empire, and the see of Old Rome, to which all Byzantine theologians had been willing to accord a primacy of honour, was under the protectorate of the western empire. It was a situation in which the Latin and the Greek churches might easily drift further apart.
The brilliant revival of Greek studies is linked with the name of Bardas, chief counsellor and power behind the throne in the reign of Michael III: what Theoktistus had been to the empress-regent Theodora, he was to his nephew Michael. The conferment of the title caesar gave him a commanding position in the imperial family itself, and in the state, and he used his position for the revival of Greek literature and learning. The old Greco-Roman artes had not yet been formally assessed as seven in the east, as they had been in the west: but the mathematical artes, and beyond them ‘philosophy’ or the explanation of the physical universe and what lay behind its manifestation as apprehended by the senses, together with medicine and law, had been estimated as higher studies. These had languished at Constantinople under the iconoclast emperors. Under Bardas’ patronage and continuous supervision and support a school of these higher studies was founded in the Magnaura palace at Constantinople, whither the most illustrious masters in philosophy were summoned to teach. At its head was placed Leo of Thessalonica, the pupil of John the Grammarian, a man of outstanding learning in mathematics, medicine and philosophy, and reputed a magician; geometry, astronomy, including the study of the earth and planets, and philology, were all taught in the schools. Among the most outstanding of the scholars of this lay university were Constantine, also from Thessalonica, and Photius, the most brilliant of them all. The classical, pagan and scientific character of the studies did not go unattacked at the time: there were those who deprecated them as leading to a return to paganism, and who attacked Leo of Thessalonica as impious, and likely to go to hell with his friends Homer and Hesiod, Aristotle and Plato. The movement however could not be hindered; for that matter, Christian philosophers were too deeply in debt to Plato and the Neoplatonists, particularly in the east. As to Aristotle, he was in rather a different category. His logic was to prove a sharp instrument in the pursuit of knowledge later in the west; but he was known to be as much studied in Baghdad as Byzantium: his later philosophical teaching was determinist, and those who sought to account for certain phenomena not easy to explain on a determinist basis found acceptance of the Arab teaching on the influence of the stars useful. In the Byzantine empire as in the west astrology and magic fascinated many scientific minds in the early middle ages, and not only as a possible source of power through the plotting of the course of a man’s life beforehand or the summoning of demons by incantation, but as supplying a possible explanation of phenomena otherwise inexplicable. But while certain scholars fell under popular suspicion of sorcery, far the more important cause of the suspicion incurred by the ‘new learning’ was its preoccupation with a pagan literature. The foundation of the Magnaura schools as a centre for higher studies was not unprecedented, for Theodosius II had founded a similar university at Constantinople in 425: but here again there was a difference. The earlier scholars had expounded a literature that was Latin as well as Greek: the scholars of the Magnaura devoted their energies to the Greek classics and the literature of Hellenism, though a hint of Latin studies remained now and even in the eleventh-century university.
Beside this renaissance of Greek scholarship and the lay spirit, religious learning also was cherished, particularly in the monasteries. Orthodoxy had been defended by the monks, and intellectual activity was valued, particularly in the Studite house in Constantinople. The famous monastic rule (typicon) of Theodore the Studite gave due honour to the acquirement of all sorts of knowledge by the monks: grammar, philosophy and theology were taught there, as were the writing and illumination of manuscripts and the sacred chant and writing of hymns for liturgy and office. The monastery had a fine library, to which other than monks might have recourse, and a scriptorium, where manuscripts were assiduously copied. Saint’s lives were written, of use to the secular as well as the ecclesiastical historian: the ninth century is the golden age of Byzantine hagiography. If the central fact of Byzantine church history in the ninth and tenth centuries was the existence of two ecclesiastical parties: the moderates, who would admit the ex-iconoclasts to office, and, while not denying the Roman primacy, strongly resisted papal intervention in the internal affairs of the church of Constantinople, and the rigorists, led by the Studite monks, who suspected the ex-iconoclasts, and, for the support of orthodoxy, as they saw it, welcomed such intervention from Rome: then it must be admitted that both these ecclesiastical parties cherished a learning and literature of their own. That of the Magnaura was the more novel and the more brilliant.
Along with the revived interest in classical literature at Constantinople went a development of the art of illumination. While this word originally meant the brightening of manuscripts by the use of silver and gold leaf for initials or paintings, it has come to be used of any kind of decoration of manuscript texts (vellum of course affording a better surface for such decoration than other materials). Even line drawings can be described as illumination. The word ‘illustration’ had a similar history. Surviving Greek illuminated manuscripts are rare before the ninth century, and there is evidence that the Byzantine illuminators then increasingly practised the art so as to combine the traditions of the Syriac, Coptic and other near eastern scribes. They produced manuscripts with mixed oriental features but with the Greco-Roman tradition emphasized. Sometimes this was done by introducing into the background of figure compositions rustic villas, temples, altars, etc from bucolic manuscripts, or collections of mythological figures: there was now some classicizing of the illumination of holy books, as well as of wall decorations.
The earliest extant illuminated early Christian rolls or books (rotuli or codices) are few, but they are nearly all of near eastern provenance. From the end of the fourth century Christian holy books began to supersede illuminated rolls. The old Itala manuscript in pre-Vulgate Latin was illustrated in the classical manner; the Cotton Genesis (a Greek, sixth-century work), has a more developed classical tradition; and the codex Rossanensis, the Greek text of the first two Gospels, is believed to have been produced in Antioch about 500, but with more splendid materials; on leaves stained purple the text runs in silver, and, for the opening lines, in gold. The illuminated episodes in the life of Christ in the Rossano gospels are very early in type, with evenly spaced lines of figures and very little suggestion of background; the codex Sinopensis and the Vienna Genesis are in style very closely related. The Rabula gospel book, signed by Rabula its scribe and dated as written in 589, is a Syriac text, written in Mesopotamia. It has very early canon tables (see p. 265) in a decorative architectural setting; its ornament is similar to that of the Rossano gospels, but less finished. Several pages of illumination similar to that of Rabula are bound up with the Echmiadzin gospels, an Armenian text.
Of the ninth-, or early tenth-century Byzantine illuminated manuscripts, the Joshua Roll in the Vatican Library, the Paris psalter and the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus are perhaps the most interesting. The provenance of the Joshua Roll is much disputed. Professor Boase dates it as possibly sixth century restored in the ninth century, and some scholars have seen in it a ninth-century copy of an archetype of the earlier date. It has lines of figures such as those found in early near eastern rolls or picture cycles, but they are here joined by incidental scenery to make a continuous illustrated band. Dr Kurt Weitzmann, however, sees in the Joshua Roll a work of the tenth century, not the copy of an archetype, but composed newly as a roll from two elements: early Christian or Jewish figure cycles, and ‘insertion motives’ (mountains, temples, rustic villas, etc.) from classical pagan codices; he regards it as a work of the Constantinople scriptorium under Constantine VII, Porphyrogenitus. The tenth-century Paris psalter he regards as also a work from that scriptorium. Whatever their origin, the lively Hellenism of the treatment (in the Paris psalter the verse: Why sleepest thou, O Lord? is accompanied by a drawing of the Lord actually awakened and hastily getting out of the oval glory in which he was traditionally painted, in order to pursue his enemies), and the conventionally classical background sketches appear to show the revived influence of antiquity. All this classical detail in Byzantium influenced painting in Italy: as did the illuminated commentary on four of the Homilies of Gregory of Nazianzus (d. 390). This work was unique among patristic commentaries in that it explained Gregory’s classical references in marginal historiae, with illustration. The name of the commentator is actually unknown, but he seems to have lived in Syria or Palestine, and is usually known as the Pseudo-Nonnus, from an ascription to a nonnus (not necessarily a proper name, but a senior monk) in a late manuscript.
Among the scholars of this Greek renaissance, the following were of special eminence. John the Grammarian, surnamed Leconomantes, and by his opponents Jambres, Jamares, and Jannes, had won the special confidence of the emperor Michael II, who had entrusted him with the education of his son. He was actually sent as imperial envoy to the caliph of Baghdad, and his zeal for Arabic learning accounts for the suspicions held of him as sorcerer. With his brother Asbestas and their friends, he had built a special house for the pursuit of such studies (or of the mysteries of the occult), and held conferences there with scholars similarly interested. He was patriarch at Constantinople from 830 to 842; but he had no public teaching post.
An important step towards the public teaching of the secular sciences was taken when the emperor Theophilus became the patron of Michael Psellus (the elder), who became the chief instructor of Leo the Philosopher. So far famed was Leo’s mathematical learning, that the caliph Ma’mun invited him to come and teach in his house of Wisdom at Baghdad. Leo showed the invitation to the emperor Theophilus, who forbade him to go, but appointed him to lecture on mathematics at the church of the Forty Martyrs. Later he had Leo ordained bishop for the see of Thessalonica, where he continued his studies both of applied mathematics and the occult. After the ‘return to orthodoxy’, in 843, he was deposed by the new patriarch Methodius: but not before he had appointed the young Constantine, the future apostle of the Slavs, professor of mathematics at the cathedral school. On leaving Thessalonica, Leo returned to Constantinople and continued to teach until, about the year 864, Bardas founded the Magnaura schools, making Leo rector, and his pupils, Theodore and Theodegius, lecturers in geometry and astronomy.
While Leo had been the centre of one circle of scholars before his appointment to the Magnaura, another surrounded the young Photius (c. 820–891), who was related to the imperial Macedonian house. His family had been friendly to the monks and even suffered persecution from the iconoclasts, but the young Photius was fascinated by the new studies and the new, lay scholarship. He read in great libraries, heard famous scholars, and while still without official post taught in his own house and acquired a reputation for scholarship. He was at the centre of the movement which restudied the Greek classics; his labours were immense in the whole field of Greek literature and he soon attracted a band of young scholars: he taught grammar, logic and theology, and, even when employed in the imperial chancery and later when patriarch, he never gave up his scholarly interest in manuscripts and his pupils’ work. His Myriobtblion attested the width of his reading: his book on the Manichees his ability as a historian. Unlike Leo the Philosopher who was, in part at least, attracted to an alien learning, he gloried in Byzantine literature as a quasi-national inheritance from the Greek past. The Tiber had flowed into the Bosphorus, but it was so long ago that the Tiber was forgotten. The Homeric literature had long been and remained for the Byzantine citizen the heroic poetry of his own past, scarcely less familiar than the Christian scriptures.
It was the fate of the scholar Photius, the fine flower of the ninth-century Byzantine renaissance, to become both the patron of the Moravian mission which extended Byzantine Christianity and culture to the Slav races and the cause of a schism between the Greek and Latin churches. This latter was temporary only, but it preceded the increasing misunderstandings which led eventually to the disastrous schism between Rome and Constantinople. It showed the difficulties likely to arise over ecclesiastical jurisdiction when the patriarch of old Rome looked for protection to the western emperor and the patriarch of new Rome to the basileus. The immediate dispute in the Photian schism was over the validity of the election of Photius as patriarch of Constantinople, a matter of canon law; but the issue was complicated by the rival claims to jurisdiction in the Balkans involved in the question of the Christian missionaries in Bulgaria.
Modern scholarship has modified the views held thirty years ago about this schism, the character of Photius and his place in church history. The work of Byzantinists has now established that much of the older history of the Photian schism was based on the writings of medieval controversialists in the west: that, in fact, a western legend grew up about the Photian schism, which failed to give due weight to the existence of two parties at Constantinople itself in the ninth century, one willing to grant to the Roman patriarch a primacy of honour, the other a primacy of jurisdiction. The difficulties over the Bulgarian mission were not (the newer view says) allowed due weight; nor did the older view take into account the regard in which the eastern church held Photius, for his moral character as well as his learning: he was, in fact, canonized, like his opponent, Ignatius. Finally, the older view increased the length of the Photian schism by regarding it as one with the dispute of Leo VI with the patriarch Nicholas over his fourth marriage, a dispute ended in 920. The Photian schism is now held to have lasted from 867 to 869–70, and the ‘second’ Photian schism which pope Formosus tried to heal to have been a schism within the Byzantine church itself, between the moderates and the rigorists (now the extreme Ignatians).
The existence of the two parties in the Byzantine church preceded the struggle over Photius’ appointment as patriarch, and conditioned it. At the opening of 858, Photius was head of the imperial chancery (protoasecretis) and esteemed the leading scholar of the day; the patriarch Methodius, who had largely allayed the bitterness of parties during his tenure of the patriarchal throne, had been succeeded by the monk Ignatius, a son of Michael I. This devout and ascetic bishop commanded the respect of the Studites, and of those who accepted the Amorian dynasty only of necessity: he was especially hostile to Bardas, who had engineered the murder of Theodora’s chief minister, Theoktistus, driven Theodora into a nunnery (856), and placed his nephew, the eighteen-year-old Michael III, on the throne. Bardas for ten years (856–866) governed the empire in his nephew’s name, as magister, domestic of the schools, curopalate, and (from 862) as caesar: Ignatius remained loyal to Theodora and her memory. The young emperor led an irresponsible and (reputedly) a disedifying life; disedifying rumours as to Bardas also reached Ignatius. On the feast of the Epiphany, 858, Ignatius refused to receive Bardas to communion in Santa Sophia: a public humiliation. Bardas in return exiled Ignatius on a charge of treason, and had Photius (still a layman, though unmarried) elected by a synod to the patriarchate, no objection being raised. It is not clear whether Ignatius had, at the moment of removal, been willing to resign: if so, he withdrew his resignation and claimed that he was still patriarch; the Studites, and some of the rigorists, supported him. Bardas held a second synod, which accepted Photius, and within five days he was made a monk, received all the minor and holy orders and was consecrated patriarch; he celebrated on 25 December 858, in Santa Sophia. A great party struggle between the followers of Ignatius and Photius had begun, and Photius himself, to secure his position, notified his succession to the patriarchate to pope Nicholas I.
Nicholas showed himself ready, not to accept Photius, but to inquire into the validity of the appointment. His two legates summoned Ignatius to appear before them in a synod held at the church of the Holy Apostles (861), declared him deposed and accepted the election of Photius. The great majority of the Byzantine clergy did, indeed, accept Photius: but pope Nicholas, on the legates’ return, and on receipt of further information about Ignatius, declared his legates to have been bribed. They had, in fact, been very sumptuously treated by the emperor. At a Lateran synod of 863 Nicholas excommunicated Photius and his supporters and declared Ignatius still patriarch.
The quarrel between Nicholas and Photius, who disregarded the decision of the Lateran synod, was embittered by the rival claims of the two churches to jurisdiction in Bulgaria: and further, by Photius’ denouncement to the church in Bulgaria, and to the other eastern churches (866), of the doctrinal errors of the western church, especially her teaching on the celibacy of the clergy and the addition of the Filioque clause (see p. 102) to the creed. A council at Constantinople (867) excommunicated Nicholas, making the schism formal: the emperor Michael himself presided at the council. Byzantine feeling rallied to Photius as to a national hero opposing foreign intervention both in Bulgaria and the capital, while the other eastern patriarchs supported him.
The murder of the emperor Michael III (867) by the Macedonian, Basil I, however, brought about the fall of Photius. The new emperor had had Bardas murdered also, and could scarcely rely on the support of Photius, whom he therefore deposed, recalling Ignatius. He anticipated papal support, and papal legates, sent by Hadrian II, presided at a synod in Constantinople (Eighth Oecumenical Council of the Latins, 869–70) and declared Ignatius patriarch. The schism was ended; but the papacy found Ignatius as obdurate over Bulgaria as Photius had been, and relations deteriorated. The Byzantine clergy still favoured Photius: Basil recalled him from exile, he was reconciled to Ignatius, and when Ignatius died in 877, he succeeded him as patriarch. Pope John VIII, at Basil’s request, sent legates who in a synod of 879–80 solemnly accepted Photius and declared peace with the church of Constantinople.
Photius’ final deposition (887) was again due to a change of sovereign, and to the hostility of the young emperor Leo VI to his father Basil’s memory and his father’s ministers. To secure peace between moderates and rigorists, a peace likely to be disturbed by his action, he made his own brother Stephen patriarch, and exiled Photius. The extreme rigorists were, however, unappeased: they denounced Photius till his death in exile in 891 and demanded from the pope a further condemnation. They were actually in schism with the official church at Constantinople, refusing to communicate with her, but no ‘second schism’ occurred between Constantinople and Rome. Photius died in his distant monastery, reviled by the rigorists of his own church, but still in communion with Rome.
The cause of the next struggle within the Byzantine church was the affair of the emperor Leo VI’s fourth marriage, to his mistress Zoë. He had placed on the patriarchal throne in 901, Nicholas Mysticus (the imperial secretary) and expected complaisance; but Nicholas, though willing to baptize the child, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, would not recognize the marriage to Zoë, and twice forbade the emperor to enter Santa Sophia. Leo deposed Nicholas and replaced him with his own confessor Euthymius, a pious but simple monk, who, for the sake of peace between parties was willing to recognize the marriage and crown the young Constantine. Schism followed between the Nicolaites and Euthymian parties in the church. Nicholas Mysticus was re-established in 912, when Leo VI was succeeded by Constantine VII, and during the minority he struggled for influence with the empress Zoë and other rivals for power. He succeeded in humiliating the young emperor and vindicating his reprobation of Constantine’s parents’ marriage in 920, as also in mitigating the bitterness between parties in Constantinople. He published the tomus unionis, in which he legitimated the fourth marriage of the sovereign in this case, while severely castigating such a marriage in normal cases. Nicholas, the pupil of Photius, had vindicated the patriarch’s right to act as censor of the emperor’s morals. ‘Men grew accustomed to think that in all questions falling within his sphere, and above all, when any moral issue was at stake, the patriarch had undisputed rights against his master, the emperor.’ (Byzantium, p. 113.) And in this dispute at least, the patriarchal legitimation of the marriage was in accord with an earlier judgment given by the papal see.
The end of the Carolingian dynasty in the west, best marked perhaps by the accession of the Capetians as rulers of the west Franks, came thus when the Byzantine empire had entered upon a very splendid period of her history, from 842 (the return to orthodoxy) to 1025 (the death of Basil II). Successes in the administrative, military and naval fields, accompanied by the marked intellectual and artistic activities which had also been a feature of Byzantine life under the Amorians, came to full fruition in the tenth and eleventh centuries under the Macedonians. On the eastern frontier, the initial work of Michael III’s generals had brought stabilization, and this was followed in the tenth century by an interesting Byzantine offensive which recaptured Cilicia, northern Syria and even Antioch, the seat of the patriarch. Of equal importance was the recapture from the Arabs of the naval bases, Crete (960–1) and Cyprus (965). In the Balkans, the danger to Byzantium in the possible setting up of an independent Slav empire and patriarchate ended with Basil II’s victory over the Bulgarians in 1014: Bulgaria was organized as a province of the empire, its church Greek but semi-autonomous. Meanwhile, while in western Europe the Vikings raided far up the rivers, while defence was local and urgent and even the kings’ courts filled more with warriors than administrators or scholars: while learning had its home in the monastic libraries and was even there endangered: civilization, learning, the arts, even sophistication reigned in Constantinople. Byzantium in these centuries was the splendid heir of the Greek tradition.
concerning the Council of Constantinople, 869–70
Professor Dvornik, after thorough research, concludes that this council came to be reckoned oecumenical only by the blunder of certain Latin canonists in the late eleventh century, and that so to regard it was not in accord with the official tradition of the Roman see. See pt. ii, ch. ii, The Oecumenicity of the Eighth Council in Medieval Western Tradition in his work The Photian Schism mentioned in the bibliography.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
As for chapter viii: see also J. B. Bury, A History of the Eastern Roman Empire (A.D. 802–867), 1912; S. Runciman, Byzantine Civilisation, 1933; K. Weitzmann, The Joshua Roll, Princeton Univ. Press, 1948; G. Every, The Byzantine Patriarchate, 451–1204, 1947; F. Dvornik, Les Slaves, Byzance et Rome au ixe siècle, and The Photian Schism: History and Legend, 1948; for iconoclasm, see E. J. Martin, A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, 1932, and the account and references in The Photian Schism, p. 8 ff. See also G. Mathew, Byzantine Painting, 1950.