THE BYZANTINE AND SLAVIC WORLDS
(Napisao: gosp. Marko Mareliæ - S. Francisco - USA)THE REIGN OF LEO III (717-740)
The Restoration of the Empire
The work of Leo III has sometimes been regarded as a second foundation of the empire. The policy of Justinian had been abandoned, once and for all. There would be no further expansion into the West, and much of what had formerly belonged to the Byzantine Empire was lost to the Muslims forever. Most of the Christians in this part of the world had embraced Islam, and the minor patriarchs in the Muslim Empire only continued to exist by the permission of the rulers of Islam. But the lands now controlled by Leo the Isaurian were compact and manageable, and an economic base for an empire, even if the empire was perforce much smaller than before, still existed. Constantinople recovered her prosperity under the reigns of Leo and his son, who between them ruled over fifty years, the tax system was reformed from top to bottom, and the army was put on a new basis stressing military efficiency and permanent professional service. A new revised law code (the Ecloga) was promulgated, a more humane Christian code than that of Justinian, which remained the dominant law code in the empire, with minor revisions, until its final destruction.
The Iconoclastic Controversy
Brief reference has already been made to an action of fundamental importance in the relations between the Eastern and Western Churches, the condemnation of images by the Byzantine emperors, an action known as iconoclasm. The first prohibition of images was made by the emperor Leo III in 725. Until this time images and icons, as well as naturalistic representations of Christ, had been very popular in Constantinople, and numerous monks had made their living by manufacturing them. Leo claimed that this practice was gross superstition, a survival of ancient pagan practices, and equivalent to idol worship. In this stand he was probably supported by most Greek theologians, who objected to any representation of the divine in human form, and it is probable that the Muslims and Jews, who both forbade the use of "graven images," had influenced the emperor against icons. (Leo was not himself a Greek, but a Syrian.) Nevertheless there was naturally a great outcry from the monks who made their living out of the images, and the people who used them no doubt gave little support to the emperor's policy. Leo retorted that the monks were idle and should be busy cultivating the land, and he did not mind at all if the monasteries were closed and their inhabitants turned to more useful occupation. His soldiers were then instructed to break all the images they could find.
The pope, who was the theoretical leader of the whole Christian Church, defended the use of images, claiming that they were aids to true devotion, but he was unable to deflect the emperor from his policy, a fact which deeply embittered relations between Rome and Constantinople. Leo's successors for more than a century, with one exception - the Empress Irene - continued the edicts against the images (the Iconoclastic Emperors), and councils were called in Constantinople to support the edicts. Several of the emperors, realizing that the chief opposition centered in the monasteries, persecuted the monks and closed the monasteries. During this period the popes had few dealings with the iconoclastic emperors, though they continued to regard them as their overlords, and Pope Stephen II in the middle of the eighth century appealed first to Constantinople to protect him from encroaching Lombards before turning to the Franks. When the "super-iconoclast" Emperor Constantine V refused this aid, it may well have been with a sense of relief that Stephen approached the Franks whose leaders, though not fully agreeing with the papal position on images, were at least not active iconoclasts themselves.
The struggle was brought to an end at last in 843 when the regent Theodora of Constantinople called another council which restored the use of images. Iconoclasm was dead, and the monks had triumphed. But even so there were no more sculptured icons in the Byzantine Empire; flat images took their place. By this time Charlemagne had been crowned emperor in the West (800); there has always been doubt if the pope would have dared to defy Constantinople by crowning an emperor in the West if there had not been a long heritage of strife between popes and eastern emperors during the Iconoclastic Controversy.
BYZANTINE RELATIONS WITH EASTERN EUROPE
Bulgar and Slav Invasions
The last article described at some length the invasions of the barbarians who delivered the coup de grace to the old Roman Empire; the later invasions of Northmen and Magyars will be dealt with in future articles. Mention now needs to be made of another great people who followed behind these warlike spearheads, and who inherited many of the lands vacated by those who finally settled in the empire. The origin of the Slavs is still not known, nor is it known for certain when they settled in Europe east of the Elbe. By the sixth century A.D. the most westerly groups of Slavs were already in that part of eastern Germany later known as Bohemia and Moravia. They had not yet been converted to Christianity. Unlike the bulk of their contemporaries, they seem to have been a peaceful people who possessed no political unity and were content to work for whatever masters dominated the lands they inhabited. Forced by pressure of Asiatic nomads, Slavs were also infiltrating into the Balkan peninsula, again settling there peacefully until the nomad warriors caught up with them and on some occasions forced them into open hostilities with the Byzantine Empire. Nevertheless it was the Slavic culture and language that survived, by an impressive demonstration of the formidable superiority of endurance over mere militancy. The Avars swept into the Balkans and were absorbed, while those offshoots from the Avars who remained north of the Balkans were defeated by Charlemagne and disappeared from history. The Bulgars from Western Asia, originally a people akin to the Turks and with a Turki language, made fierce inroads into the Balkans also and became serious competitors of Constantinople itself, which they almost captured on several occasions; but though they gave their name to a country which still exists today, their culture and language became entirely Slavic, and today, despite their origin, the Bulgars are a Slavic people. And though Kiev, the cradle of the Russian State, was probably founded by the Vikings from Sweden in the ninth century, the sea of Slavs again absorbed the handful of Swedes, and Russians today are also Slavs.
The Byzantine Empire was in no position before the end of the tenth century to resist this penetration into the Balkans even if it had wished to do so. The European hinterland of the empire became Slavic to the Adriatic Sea. The Slavs learned from Constantinople the arts of civilization, and the powerful radiation from Constantinople so attracted them that almost all the eastern Slavs joined the Byzantines and their patriarch in the escape from papal discipline in the eleventh century. And in the end, with their Byzantine teachers, the eastern Slavs fell to the Ottoman Turks, from whose domination they escaped only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A brief summary of the medieval history of these Slavic peoples will serve as a reminder that the Serbs and Bulgars as well as Greeks have roots as nations in the distant past, and that they did not spring full-grown from the decaying body of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century.
The Conversion of the Slavs to Christianity
A brief mention should be made at this point about the conversion of the western Slavs to Christianity. About 862 Rostislav, Prince of Moravia, asked that missionaries be sent to his country to instruct his people in Christianity. It may be supposed that the decision was not taken suddenly. The Slavs in Central Europe had been in contact with Christianity on their western boundaries for a considerable time, and the German clergy had been making efforts to convert them, at least since the reign of Charlemagne (768-814). But the Moravians could not resist all blandishments from the Christians indefinitely, and it must have seemed safer to Rostislav to receive instruction from distant Constantinople rather than from the comparatively local German clergy. The Byzantines took the request seriously, and two missionaries - St. Cyril and St. Methodius - set out, bearing with them a new Slavonic alphabet (called Cyrillic after St. Cyril, though it probably was not his own invention) based on the Greek letters into which the Bible and the Byzantine Liturgy could be translated for the use of the Slavs, who as yet did not have a written language. The mission was successful, but it naturally aroused the opposition of the German clergy, who complained to Rome. The two saints were summoned to Rome by the reigning pope Nicholas I (858-867), who was at that time engaged in a quarrel with Constantinople and striving to assert his authority there.
The two missionaries were received graciously by the pontiff, but both Nicholas and his successors insisted that the new Christian principalities (the Moravian, Bohemian, and Slovak tribes of the Slavs) must be subject to the German clergy and of course to the papacy; but the converts were permitted the use of the Slavonic Liturgy which was provided in the following years by Methodius. This privilege, however, was withdrawn in 885 at the insistence of the German clergy and the Slavs thereafter were forced to use the Latin tongue for their services. The Slavonic clergy who had been ministering to the needs of the converts for more than twenty years were allowed to go to Bulgaria by courtesy of the Byzantine emperor, and the Slavonic Liturgy which was devised for the use of the western Slavs was introduced to the eastern Slavs who were no doubt a potent instrument in their conversion. The western Slavic Churches, thus rudely thrust into the bosom of the West, remained under papal rule in later centuries and to this day, even after the division of the Eastern and Western Churches in the eleventh century.
THE RISE OF BULGARIA
Conversion of the Bulgars
Meanwhile the Bulgar khan, Boris I (853-888), also desired that his people be converted to Christianity, but he also preferred to take his instruction from distant Rome. However the pressure of geography was too great for him and his people ultimately became subject in religious matters to the patriarch at Constantinople, though at times the Bulgarian Church was virtually independent. At first the Bulgars had to use the Greek Liturgy of Constantinople, though after 885 they were permitted to use the Slavonic tongue, which by this time had become the vernacular of the whole Bulgarian people including the non-Slavonic ruling class.
First Wars with Constantinople
When Boris I abdicated and went into a monastery in 888 he was succeeded by his two sons in turn. The Bulgars then reversed his policy of peace with the Byzantine Empire, and they made a serious effort to conquer the whole of the empire in Europe, including Constantinople. Symeon, the younger son of Boris (893-927), who in the last years of his reign proclaimed himself to be Tsar (Slavonic form of "Caesar") and not a mere khan, ravaged the peninsula with a formidable army right up to the gates of the great city; and toward the end of his reign he attempted to secure the succession of the empire for himself by marrying his daughter to the reigning emperor. But in the end his policies collapsed, he lost to barbarian nomads lands held across the Danube (part of modern-day Rumania), while the Serbs, another Slavic people to the west, and the Croats, yet another Slavic people to the northwest, resisted continuously, backed by Constantinople. Symeon's empire collapsed before it had been properly consolidated into a unity, though his reign marked the golden age of old Slavonic literature, and the Tsar encouraged the translation of many Greek works into Slavonic. After his death Bulgaria remained politically independent, but the immediate dream of being the successor in Europe of Constantinople was over.
Incorporation of Bulgaria into the Byzantine Empire - Basil the Bulgar-Killer (Basil II, 976-1025)
The war was resumed before the death of Symeon's son Peter (927-969). On this occasion the Byzantine emperor invited the pagan Russians under Sviatoslav to discipline the Bulgars, but Sviatoslav proved unmanageable. He destroyed the Bulgarian Empire altogether, but then turned on Constantinople. The Byzantine emperor John I at last defeated him in 972 and assumed the Bulgarian throne. But soon afterward the Bulgar remnants in western Bulgaria discovered a leader (Tsar Samuel, 97601014) and returned to the attack. The result was a devastating war which lasted for forty-three years, during which countless atrocities were committed, and a large part of the population of both empires, including the best troops of the Byzantines recruited in Anatolia, were killed. The Byzantine emperor who conducted this war to the death gained the honorific title of Basil the Bulgar-Killer from his successes, and after the war was over he gave a mild peace to the survivors. For a time the Byzantines ruled triumphantly from the Euphrates to the Adriatic, and included part of Italy under their sway. But within fifty years the Seljuk Turks began moving into Anatolia, disastrously defeating a motley imperial army at Manzikert in 1071, and the oppressed subjects of Constantinople, preferring to be ruled by the less oppressive Turks, began to convert en masse to Islam.
Restoration of the Bulgarian Kingdom
In 1186 the Bulgars rose again under a new dynasty, and the Byzantines, fully occupied elsewhere, were unable to prevent the restoration of the kingdom. When the Latin crusaders took Constantinople in 1204, the Bulgars at once conquered almost the whole Balkan peninsula except Greece from the crusaders. But again the Bulgars were unable to hold their possessions for long. In the early fourteenth century they were subdued, first by their fellow Slavs, the Serbs to the west, and then by the Ottoman Turks at the decisive battle of Kossovo in 1389, which extinguished the independence of all the Slavs in the peninsula until the nineteenth century.
SERBIA AND CROATIA
Brief mention has already been made of Serbia. This Slavic country in the northwestern part of the Balkan peninsula was converted, like Bulgaria, to Orthodox Christianity in the ninth century. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the various Serbian princes united under a monarch, and the kingdom, free of foreign control, was ruled by the descendants of Stephen Nemanja for two centuries. In the fourteenth century, when the Greek empire of Constantinople had been restored after the Latin interlude, the Serbian king, Stephen Dushan (1331-1355), made a bid for control of the whole Balkan peninsula once more. But he, like so many of his predecessors, was unable to capture Constantinople, and shortly after his death his great kingdom, which extended from the Danube to the Gulf of Corinth, began to fall apart. The Serbians joined in the battle of Kossovo in 1389 against the Ottoman Turks, and their king - Stephen Lazar - whose defeat and death are celebrated in so many Serbian poems, was killed. Nominal independence was permitted to the Serbian kings for another seventy years until the country was finally incorporated into the Turkish dominions in 1459. The patriotic Serbs today, a militant people still, a majority group in Serbia, have not ceased to remember their few days of glory under the heroic Stephen Dushan.
The Croatian Slavs to the north of Serbia were converted to Christianity in the ninth century, but unlike the Serbs, from the beginning they accepted the leadership and authority of the Roman Church. After a short period of independence Croatia was conquered by the Magyars from Hungary (1091), though it was permitted to retain some measure of local autonomy under the Hungarian crown. The Ottoman Turks absorbed Croatia as well as most of Hungary in 1526, but never fully subdued it. When Hungary escaped the Turkish yoke, Croatia escaped too. Thereafter the fortunes of this Slavic people were bound up with those of Hungary until Croatia became part of the new south Slavic kingdom (Yugo-Slavia) in 1918. The Croatians, owing their allegiance to the Roman Church and their long-standing connection with the West through rule by Hungary (later Austria-Hungary) have always considered themselves superior to the Serbs and other south Slavs, and the feeling is reciprocated by the latter. The medieval schism between these Slavic peoples still has not been healed and still exists to this day.
Compiled by Marko Marelich
Retired Mechanical Engineer
San Francisco, California USA
October 3, 2005