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brook. After they had reigned together four years Michael caused his uncle to be slain, and took another associate in the empire (866).

His new colleague was Basil the Macedonian, a young man of Slavonic descent, who had long been one of his booncompanions. When Michael was still a boy he had been impressed by the courage and strength of Basil, who had entered his service as a groom. The young emperor promoted him from one office to another, till he became Protostrator, or Count of the Stables-Marshal as he would have been called in a western monarchy. The new favourite was bold, ready-witted, and hard-headed; he could drink down the emperor himself at their feasts-a power which inspired Michael with the greatest respect. So trusting to the faith of the friend of his youth, Michael preferred him to the place of the murdered Bardas.

When not under the influence of the wine-cup, Michael the Drunkard-as his subjects named him-was a warlike and energetic sovereign. He often took the field against the Saracens and the Bulgarians, and sometimes met with success when courage could take the place of strategy. After a successful campaign beyond the Balkans he forced the Bulgarian king not only to do him homage, but to become a Christian, a change which did much in later years to make relations easier between the empire and its northern neighbours.

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Michael sometimes busied himself about things ecclesiastical his mother had brought him up as a fervent imageworshipper, and he distinguished himself when he came to years of discretion by the disgraceful outrage of exhuming and burning the bodies of Constantine Copronymus and the patriarch John, the chief representatives-lay and spiritual— of Iconoclasm. Another of his doings had a graver consequence: it was he who, offended by the austere morals of the patriarch Ignatius, deposed him and nominated Photius in his stead. The preferment of Photius was, as we have already stated when dealing with the Papacy, the original cause of

that breach between East and West which has never yet been healed,1

Basil I. murders

Michael had attained the age of thirty-one, and seemed destined to rule for many more years, when he was suddenly cut off. His friend and boon-companion, Basil, whom he had raised from a groom to be a Caesar, was the murderer. At the end of one of their debauches the Macedonian rose and bade some of his friends slay his benefactor. Michael was stabbed as he lay in a drunken Michael III., sleep, and the crown passed away from the Amorian house (867). Basil had already, as colleague in the empire, got the reins of power in his hands, and the murder of Michael passed unrevenged. No one raised his voice in behalf of the dead man's infant sons, and the new dynasty was inaugurated without a struggle or a civil war.

867.

The Macedonian, though he had shown himself an ungrateful traitor, was a man of great ability. He held firmly to his ill-gotten crown, and founded the longest dynasty that ever sat upon the Byzantine throne. It was not till 1056 that his house was extinguished. As emperor he did all that he could to make his subjects forget that he had once been the deep-drinking favourite of Michael III. He proved himself a hard-working sovereign, economical, prudent, and judicious, and the empire flourished under his rule. Some of his work was destined to be permanent; his code, a new revision of the laws of Justinian, superseding Leo the Isaurian's Ecloga, remained the text-book of the eastern empire down to its last days. His financial arrangements, which seem to have been excellent, were also destined to endure for nearly two centuries. In matters ecclesiastical he did his best to patch up the breach with the Roman church; he reinstated the deposed patriarch Ignatius, and sent Photius into private life; but though the ́cause of offence was removed the quarrel remained, and the exorbitant claims of the Popes prevented any reunion of the East and West. Finding this to be the case, Basil restored

1 See pages 453-4.

Photius when Ignatius died, and allowed things to take their inevitable course.

Except in Sicily the wars of Basil were generally successful. The empire of the caliphs was rapidly breaking up; the dynasty of the Saffarides had lopped off the eastern provinces of their realm, and Egypt had fallen into the hands of Ahmedibn-Tulun. Four caliphs had been murdered in nine years (861-9), and the incessant civil war which raged at Bagdad stripped the Saracen frontier of most of its defenders. The Christian arms, therefore, did not fare badly during the reign of Basil and his son Leo, and for the first time the East Roman boundary began to move eastward, and new themes were carved out of the captured territory. The Byzantine armies ravaged northern Syria and Mesopotamia as far as Amida and Aleppo. Cyprus was recovered, though only for a time, and the rebellion of the Paulician heretics on the Armenian frontier was suppressed. At the same time Basil's fleets won victories in the Ægean and the Ionian sea over the corsairs of Crete and Africa. We have already mentioned, in another place, how the admiral Oriphas aided Lewis II. to reconquer Bari, and how Nicephorus Phocas drove out the Saracens from Lucania and Bruttium, and added the southern peninsula of Italy to his master's realm. In Sicily alone was disaster met; the fall of Syracuse in 878 marks the practical extinction of the East Roman power in that island. But success elsewhere atoned for this single loss.

Wars of

Basil I.

If Basil had been succeeded by a strong and energetic ruler, the East Roman empire might have had an opportunity of extending its sway over almost all the provinces that had obeyed Justinian three centuries before. The caliphate grew more and more decrepit: Italy was, as we have already seen, a prey to anarchy for more than half a century, and the Slavs of Eastern Europe were being crushed by the newly arrived horde of the Magyars. None of them could have opposed any strong defence against a capable commander heading the well-armed and well-disciplined host that the

Eastern empire could send out. But the son and grandson of Basil, whose long reigns occupied the next eighty years, were a couple of narrow-minded and pedantic men of letters, equally destitute of taste and of ability for engaging in schemes of conquest. Leo VI., whom after generations called Leo the Wise, not for his practical cleverness, but because he had a taste for the occult sciences and wrote obscure prophecies, was the immediate successor of Basil. By some strange freak of nature the hard-drinking, unscrupulous, energetic Macedonian usurper was the father of a laborious compiler of books, the mildest and least stirring of men. Leo's prophetic oracles and his ecclesiastical writings are of small profit to the reader, but posterity must acknowledge that it owes him Reign of Leo the Wise, a considerable debt for publishing his Tactica, a 886-912. military manual giving an excellent account of the organisation, strategy, and tactics of the Byzantine armies, with useful notes as to the habits and manners of the enemies whom the army was called upon to face. It was probably fortunate for the empire that he never tried to put his bookknowledge of things military to practical use in the field.

In spite of Leo's feeble personality, and of the fact that his negligence occasionally allowed the foes of the empire to snatch unexpected advantages, this reign was a time of growth for the imperial borders. The new themes of 'Lycandus' and 'Mesopotamia' were won from the enfeebled caliphate; Apulia was conquered from the dukes of Benevento and the Italian Saracens, and formed into the theme of 'Langobardia.' Benevento itself was for some years in Leo's hands,1 and if he had shown a little more energy he might have pushed his army up to the gates of Rome, while the counts of central Italy were engaged in their endless bickerings with king Berengar. But the emperor neglected to support his generals, and with a tranquil mind let them fail for want of resources. Leo died in 912, leaving the throne to his only son Constantine VII., better known as Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 1 See page 460.

a weak literary man of the same type as himself. The new emperor was a boy of only five, and his whole reign was one long minority, for after he reached manhood he allowed others to govern for him, and remained buried in his books.

But in spite of the feebleness of Leo and Constantine, the empire was faring well. Its neighbours were too weak to trouble it with serious wars, though now and then a disaster occurred, such as the surprise of Thessalonica by the African pirates in 904. Such misfortunes were due to the misdirection of the empire's resources, not to their inadequacy for defence. The realm was never richer nor stronger since the days of Justinian; Constantinople had become the sole centre of the commerce of the Christian world, the one place where East and West could freely exchange their commodities. The revenue was abundant and easily raised, the army well paid and efficient, and only needed adequate generals to enable it to set out on a wide career of conquest. But the empire was not to obtain a capable ruler for many years; the days of John Zimisces and Basil Bulgaroktonos were still far off, and meanwhile the East Romans, under the feeble leadership of Leo and Constantine, remained in a condition of stationary prosperity, due to the well-organised administration of the empire. The Byzantine civil-service was well able to carry on the business of government, unless it was handicapped by the presence on the throne of a strong-handed tyrant, and whatever were their faults the sovereigns of the Macedonian house never deserved that name. There are worse things for any realm than a series of mediocrities on the throne.

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