Birthday Greetings# 52

Happy birthday to Constans II Pogonatos, Byzantine emperor.  The term "pogonatos" apparently means "bearded" although since Constans became emperor at the age of eleven it was probably applied a little later.

There are times when its good to be emperor, when the people are subservient, the land is at peace and the tax dollars are just flowing in.  Then its party time in the imperial palace.  There are other times when it isn't so good to be emperor.  When the people are surly (or outright revolting), your predecessor left you a war which is going really badly and such tax revenue as you can extort has to be pumped straight into what's left of your army.  The reign of Constans was pretty much an ongoing example of option B.

Inspired by the then shiny and new religion of Islam the population of Arabia had exploded out of the desert sands and had overrun about a third of the empire smashing up a goodly proportion of the imperial military in doing so.  When one considers the size and power of the empire it seems a little unbelievable that a bunch of camel happy tribesmen could cause them so much trouble but the truth was all was not well with the empire Constans inherited.  A decades long war with Persia had left the army exhausted and the nation close to bankrupt but the issue went deeper than that.

Islam was not the first religion to cause trouble for the empire.  Christianity engendered an amazing amount of strife as well and since it was the official religion of the empire there was no getting away from it.  At the time the biggest sticking point was the dual nature of Christ.  Such as, did he have one (or do I mean two?).  The argument in favour went something like this; Christ was God and as such naturally had a divine nature.  But Christ was also Man deliberately designed be by God and as such he must have had a human nature as well.  This was important because the whole point of Christianity was that Christ suffered crucifixion, torment and death to absolve the world from sin.  However if his nature was solely divine it rather cheapened the sacrifice as a purely divine being could take as much or as little torment as it pleased.  The human nature was the part that suffered and that suffering was deep and genuine, hence the importance of the sacrifice.

Opponents of this view weren't really trying the cheapen the sacrifice of Christ, they just had a bit of difficulty acknowledging that at one point the being they worshipped pissed its nappies and wailed for its mother's breast milk.  If you were Byzantine this difference of opinion was certainly worth killing for and many people found it worth dying for.  The result was that the empire had been in a state of low grade religious civil war for decades.  As it happened the bulk of the dual nature believers were to be found in the western parts of the empire (including the capital) and the bulk of the single nature believers were found in the east and were just about to be overrun by Arabs.

The second problem was taxes.  Byzantium presented an image of being a glittering, sophisticated, highly advanced (for the time and place) civilisation and that was true.  However this civilisation was a thin veneer overlaid on top of a largely subsistence level economic base.  The only way the civilisation, and the army that protected it, could be paid for was by taxing the crap out of people who considered it a good year if they produced enough to eat.  The result was when the Arabs turned up they encountered an overtaxed, desperate population, religiously estranged from its political masters and deeply distrustful of the army supposedly protecting it due to the fact that its principal role was to ensure the taxes were paid.  Perhaps not surprisingly the armies of the Caliphate went through the eastern provinces of the empire like a knife through butter.

It is at this point that our boy Constans appears on the scene.  He was co-emperor with his uncle.  His uncle was widely suspected of murdering his father.  With the help of the army the eleven year old Constans had his uncle's nose slit and his aunt's tongue cut out and then settled down to rule with the aid of a regency council.  Eleven year olds, no matter how proactive they are in the field of relative mutilation, should not be allowed to rule by themselves.

For a while it didn't seem to matter as the Arabs were advancing through Armenia and eastern Anatolia.  At this rate there might not be an empire left to worry about.  Still Constans clung on for a few years and finally managed to sign at least a temporary peace which enabled him to keep what was left.  This was good as the Arabs had in the meantime discovered the ocean and were enthusiastically experimenting with piracy.  Constans mustered a massive fleet to drive them off but suffered a spectacular defeat which wound up with him swimming for his life.

Fortunately just when things looked at their worst the Arabs engaged in their own civil war and Constans was able to snatch back some territory from his now distracted opponents.  With that modest win under his belt he marched west into the Balkans.  The Balkans were technically imperial territory but had been pretty much completely overrun by Slavs.  Constans won a couple of victories and in an early example of ethnic cleansing transferred large numbers of Slavic captives to Anatolia to help make up some of the shortfall in his own population base.

Now sporting an impressive beard and with some sort of a record of success Constans decided to settle the religious situation.  Despite the Arab conquest of Syria, Palestine and Egypt there were still enough single nature followers in the empire to cause trouble.  Constans made a ringing appeal to his people.  The gist of his argument was "Look, failing an official statement from God nobody is going to know whether Christ had two natures or not so why don't we just put the entire thing aside.  We'll find out after we're dead and in the meantime how about a little Christian charity".  This ringing appeal to Christian unity had its effect.  Christians of both factions were united in rejecting the suggestion utterly.  Things weren't helped when Pope Martin over in Rome condemned Constans's attempts at peace making.

Constans reacted in a sensible way.  He had the pope kidnapped, condemned as a criminal and sent into exile on the Black Sea where he died. Strangely this didn't improve his relations with members of either faction.  Things got even worse after he murdered his brother.  Constans suspected he might have been making a bid for the throne although why he would want it is anyone's guess.  Constans tossed him in a monastery and, apparently deciding that wasn't permanent enough, had him killed. 

By this time Constans was cheerfully hated by the bulk of the population for any number of pretty good reasons.  The only people he hadn't mortally pissed off were the inhabitants of Italy, so he went there.  The empire ruled two large chunks of Italy, one based around Ravenna in the north east and the other around Sicily and Bari in the south.  Constans turned up in Syracuse, and then visited Rome where he promptly stripped all of the bronze and copper decorations from the public buildings to help pay for his army.  Said army got itself beaten in a couple of battles against the people running the bit of Italy in between the two Byzantine chunks and Constans retired back to Syracuse muttering to himself.

Constans apparently wanted to make Syracuse the capital of the empire.  He was tired of Constantinople where everybody had hated him for years and apparently wanted to set up shop in a place where the people had only hated him for a few months.  Before anything definite could be done about this proposal however one of his counsellors bludgeoned him to death in the bath with a soap dish.  We're still not entirely sure why.