Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

But Constantine VI had taken no active role in events before he had been thrown into prison, and he would take none on the throne. Lacking a single shred of ambition, the young prince was content to let life happen and would soon prove to be hopelessly incompetent. When an Arab army invaded imperial territory, he was immediately frightened into negotiating a peace that managed to be both humiliating and prohibitively expensive. The resulting accusations of cowardice provoked him to take the field himself, but his first sight of the enemy caused him to lose his nerve and panic, further tarnishing his reputation. The disaster convinced him to restore his mother to power; then, having made this awful decision, he marched off to yet another disastrous defeat at the hands of the Bulgars. The disgusted imperial guards in Constantinople hatched a plot to get rid of both Irene and her incompetent son, but news of it somehow leaked out. The badly frightened emperor acted with all the vigor of a bully, ordering the tongues cut out of the offending men.

Such mindless cruelty cost Constantine VI any remaining support in the army, and Irene decided to get rid of her pathetic son once and for all. Constantine was already blaming his Bulgar debacle on his soldiers, and it was easy for her to convince him to punish the frustrated troops by tattooing the word “traitor” on the faces of a thousand of them. As Irene had forseen, this act made him the most reviled man in the city. Stripped of any friends or allies, Constantine VI was now helpless before his most formidable enemy.

In May 797, Constantine’s infant son died, and while the emperor was distracted in mourning, Irene struck. As he was riding home from the Hippodrome, some of her palace guard burst out of the underbrush and tried to seize him. He managed to escape to the docks but was soon caught and dragged to the Great Palace. There, in the very room where he had been born twenty-six years before, Irene had him blinded so brutally that he died.

She had never really been a mother to him, busy as she was with the affairs of state, and like all imperial heirs he had been raised by a swarm of nursemaids and tutors with little time to grow close to either of his parents. Even so, the vile murder deeply shocked the empire. Irene had violated the maternal bonds that every member of society, from the highest patrician to the lowest stable hand, held sacred. She had lost a part of her humanity, and though her subjects tolerated her continued rule, they could never respect her. She was the first woman to rule the Roman Empire, not as a regent or an empress but as an emperor, but she wasn’t to enjoy it for long. Guilt robbed her of her energy, and when the Arabs sensed weakness and invaded, she immediately offered an immense tribute the empire couldn’t afford. Trying to bolster her flagging popularity, she took to riding around on a golden chariot pulled by the finest white horses and sprinkling gold coins to the crowd. The assembled populace took the money, but their love couldn’t be so easily bought. They were well aware that thanks to her promises of tribute to the Saracens, the treasury was quite empty, and flinging what was left into the crowds brought her only increased scorn. The only surprise was that the revolt, when it came, was sparked not by a disaffected Byzantine but by a barbarian in the far west.

The trouble started in Rome, where Pope Leo III was growing more unpopular with each passing day. He had risen from peasant stock and as such was hated by the powerful Roman senatorial families who believed that the papacy should be reserved for members of the nobility. Their hatred was so intense that in 799 they sent a gang to ambush the pope as he was walking in the streets, ordering their henchmen to gouge out his eyes and rip out his tongue. Thankfully for the pontiff, in the excitement of the attack, the mob merely left him unconscious with his vision and speech intact. Smuggled out of the city before his assailants could correct their mistake, Leo fled to the court of the Frankish king and waited for tempers to cool. The moment he was gone, his enemies tried to depose him, charging him with everything from public drunkenness to adultery. Leo angrily denied the charges from the safety of his shelter, but it was clear that the two sides had reached an impasse. Some sort of trial would have to be held, but that involved damaging complications. Who was qualified to sit in judgment of the Vicar of Christ?

The answer, of course, was the emperor of Constantinople, the temporal head of Christendom, but not only had she disgraced herself by killing her own son, she was also a woman and therefore in western eyes disbarred from ruling. Leo needed a champion, and he turned not to the East but to the far more immediate power of the Franks.