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

The thirty-nine-year-old Constantine VII, though he had given no indication of it before, proved capable of decisive action. When the desperate Lecapeni brothers plotted to overthrow him just days after hailing him as senior emperor, he struck first, surprising them at a dinner party and sending them off to join their father in exile. Some of the remaining relatives were rounded up and castrated, but the emperor didn’t indulge himself in any bloodbaths or vicious recriminations against the family that had held him down for so long. Romanus had ruled well, and Constantine VII was intelligent enough not to let his bitterness blind him from following his example. The agrarian policies were continued, the aristocracy was checked, and Romanus’s laws were kept in place. Where Constantine VII differed with his predecessor at all it was to favor the Phocas family—longtime enemies of the Lecapeni.

To replace the long departed John Curcuas as commander of the empire’s eastern armies, Constantine VII chose the even more brilliant Nicephorus Phocas—the young nephew of the man from whom Romanus Lecapenus had snatched the throne years before. Nicephorus was a boorish man who lacked even the rudiments of tact or taste, but the empire hadn’t seen a general of such ability since Belisarius was hurled against the barbarians more than four hundred years before. In four years of campaigning, Nicephorus and his gifted nephew John Tzimisces broke the mighty Syrian emir Sayf al-Dawlah, capturing cities on the Euphrates and even reaching Antioch.^* To the terrified Muslim armies on the Syrian frontier, he was soon known as the “Pale Death of the Saracens,” and Arab forces would flee the field at the rumor that he was on the march.

Propelled by its newfound power, the empire was reinvigorated and optimistic. When the Magyars raided Thrace, hoping that By zantium would be too distracted with the collapsing Syrian frontier, an imperial army inflicted a crushing defeat, completely annihilating the hapless raiders. Dignitaries and ambassadors from the caliph of Córdoba to the crowned heads of Europe came flocking to Constantinople, where they were dazzled with the breadth of the emperor’s knowledge and the splendor of his court. Entertained in the sumptuous palace known as the Hall of the Nineteen Couches, visiting guests would recline to eat in the ancient Roman fashion, clapping in wonder as golden plates laden with fruit would be unexpectedly lowered from the ceiling. Cleverly concealed cisterns would make wine splash from fountains or cascade down carved statues and columns, and an automatic clock in the city’s main forum would complete the imperial tour de force. Most impressive of all, however, was the emperor himself. An accomplished artist and writer, Constantine VII so overwhelmed the Russian regent princess Olga that she converted to Christianity, planting the seeds of Orthodoxy in the land that would one day call itself the third Rome.

The only concern that troubled the emperor’s mind was his son Romanus II. In 949, the young man had most inappropriately fallen in love with an innkeeper’s daughter, a devastatingly beautiful Spartan woman named Theophano. The match wasn’t suitable by any stretch of the imagination, but perhaps a lifetime spent as a pawn in Romanus Lecapenus’s hands convinced Constantine VII not to inflict the same treatment on his own son. Making a solemn vow not to interfere, he sat back stoically as the two were married, gracefully maintaining the fiction that she belonged to a worthy and ancient family. Nine years later, Theophano presented her husband with a son, and the happy couple named him Basil, after the founder of their dynasty. As much as it could be in those uncertain times, the future of the imperial family seemed secured. A year later, Constantine VII was dead of a fever that neither the healing waters of a local spring nor the purifying cold of a mountaintop monastery could cure, and the genuinely mourning empire passed smoothly to his son Romanus II.

Though the dashing new emperor was more interested in hunting than administration—and was besides completely under the thumb of his wife—he was smart enough to stay out of his general’s way, and the empire’s recovery continued unabated. As Romanus II enjoyed himself, domestic policy was run by his closest adviser, a gifted eunuch named Joseph Bringas. Under the chamberlain’s able hand, the arts flourished, the University of Constantinople was chaired with new faculty, and the economy boomed. The land laws of Romanus’s grandfather had given peasants more protection than they had seen in centuries, and merchants carrying the wealth of India and China flooded into Constantinople’s busy markets. The empire was prosperous and peaceful, and Romanus II—or more likely his wife—decided the time had come to flex the imperial muscle.