Constantine V
gigatos | March 29, 2022
Summary
Constantine V (Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Ε′) is traditionally said to be ”Copronymic” (Κοπρώνυμος, i.e., ”in the name of shit”, or ”whose name is shit”, from the ancient Greek ”κόπρος” (“excrement”) and ”ὄνομα” (“name”) – a nickname with which he was definitively affixed in the aftermath of the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (787), which solemnly condemned the iconoclastic heresy of which he had been one of the most ardent propagators) -, “Caballinos” or “the Ordurer”, born in July 718 in Constantinople and died on September 14, 775, is a Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775. He was the son of Leo III the Isaurian and his wife Mary, and was proclaimed co-emperor by his father in August 720.
Constantine V is one of the figures most blackened by later chroniclers and historians: the main promoter of iconoclasm, and at one time a persecutor of monks, he was systematically described as an odious tyrant by later Byzantine historiography, of essentially clerical (and monastic) origin, and of iconodule bias. As for the contemporary literature of the iconoclasts, nothing has been preserved. It must therefore first be said that he remains a poorly known figure, and that an objective evaluation of his personality and action can only be made by a very critical reading of the sources, restoring his stature, which is very important in the history of the Byzantine Empire.
Constantine received his main nickname of “Copronym” (literally, “in the name of shit”) from a ridiculous anecdote peddled by malicious chroniclers: during his baptism by the patriarch Germain I of Constantinople, he would have defecated in the baptismal font, spreading a foul odor, and the patriarch would have then had these “prophetic” words: “This child will fill the Church with his stench”. His other common nickname of “Caballinos”, hardly more amiable (“the horseman”), refers to his allegedly unbridled taste for horses and chariot races in the racetrack. He is also often accused in monastic literature of debauchery and homosexuality (although he married three times and had six children by his third wife, but this too is reproached, as third marriages are in principle forbidden).
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Youth
Constantine was born in Constantinople in July 718, at the end of the one-year blockade of the capital by the Arabs (who broke camp in mid-August), and the year after his father Leo III the Isaurian conquered the imperial throne (March 717). He was baptized at Saint Sophia the following Christmas, at the same time as his mother Mary was crowned empress. The associate of Léon in his seizure of power was the Armenian general Artabasde, strategist of the Armenians, to whom Léon III gave his elder daughter Anne (born about 705) in marriage, and whom he names curopalate (commander of the guard of the palace) and count of Opsikion. At once, a misunderstanding settles for the succession of Léon III. Constantine was proclaimed co-emperor in August 720. In 732, his father made him marry the princess Tzitzak, daughter of the Khagan of Khazars, who was baptized under the name of Irene. Constantine was with his father at the battle of Akroinon in May 740, and the glory of this victory against the Arabs was also reflected on him.
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Conquest of power
Leo III died on June 18, 741, while Constantine V was almost twenty-three years old. He was crowned emperor by the patriarch Anastasius of Constantinople, and a week later decided to leave on a campaign in Asia Minor against the Arabs. He entrusts the capital to the magister Theophanes Monôtios. Once in Bithynia, he must meet his brother-in-law Artabasde, always count of Opsikion, but their two armies clash immediately, and that of Constantine V is routed. The young emperor fled towards the south. As for Artabasde, he goes to Constantinople and announces the death of Constantine V. Theophanes Monôtios makes him open the doors. The faithful of Constantine V, who do not believe in his death, are arrested, and Artabasde is crowned in his turn by the patriarch Anastase.
But Constantine V reached Amorium where he gained the support of the theme of the Anatolics, and then of that of the Thracésians. In the autumn 741, he leads his army to the Bosphorus, but he does not have a fleet to cross, and must return to Amorium for the winter. Artabasde proclaims one of his sons, Nicephorus, co-emperor, and names the other, Nicetas, supreme commander (monostratêgos) in Asia Minor.
In spring 742, Artabasde himself directs an army towards the topic of the Thracésians. He and Constantine V confront each other near Sardis, and this time it is Constantine V who is victorious. Artabasde returns to Constantinople. Nicetas, who is in the theme of the Armenians, advances with his army to meet Constantine V, and the two clash in August at the bloody battle of Môdrinê (Nicetas is defeated. In September, Constantine V crossed the Bosphorus while Sisinnios, strategist of Thracésiens, crossed the Hellespont. The two join to besiege the capital, where Artabasde is henceforth locked up.
The siege of Constantinople lasted more than one year. Artabasde tried to send a fleet across the Hellespont to get resources, but it was captured near Abydos by the Cibyrrheots. It tries an exit on the side of the ground, but must withdraw in the city with heavy losses, of which Théophane Monôtios. Meanwhile, Nicétas reconstituted his army in Asia and tries to help his father, but it is definitively beaten and made prisoner near Nicomédie by Constantin V. In spring 743, the famine having settled in the capital, Artabasde must let a great part of the inhabitants leave. On November 2, Constantine V seized the city by a surprise attack.
The victor shows himself lenient towards the numerous partisans of Artabasde: this one, his two sons and only some of their close relations are blinded and locked up in a monastery (the patriarch Anastase of Constantinople is whipped and walked in public on a donkey in a humiliating ritual, but he keeps his post; some others have simply their goods confiscated. The overly powerful theme of Opsikion, which had been the basis of Artabasde”s power, is divided.
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Military reform
Constantine V proceeds on the other hand to an important military reform: the creation of a branch of the army distinct from the topics, known under the name of tagmata (” the regiments “), probably taken largely on the old Opsikion. It is a permanent army of 18,000 men who are stationed in Constantinople and its surroundings, in Europe and in Asia. The six divisions that can be distinguished in it bear the names of former units of the guard or garrison of the capital. The two main ones are the Scholes and the Excubites, which become cavalry units of four thousand men each, the soldiers of both being distributed on both sides of the Bosphorus to make military conspiracies more difficult. Another division of four thousand men, Vigla (of the Latin vigiliae), is more especially charged with the monitoring of the Great Palace, and during the military campaigns of the provision of the sentries of the camps. There are also the Optimates, a body of two thousand muleteers in charge of the transport of the luggage, which are halfway between a tagma and a theme.
It is thus about a permanent army at the disposal of the emperor, all around the capital, and which is useful to him for the small military campaigns decided quickly, and also as spine for more important expeditions. On the other hand, the dispersion of the troops in the region of the capital between numerous units belonging either to the themes or to the tagmata, makes military plots less likely. Finally, the presence of the soldiers of the tagmata in Thrace allows Constantine V, from the beginning of his reign, to widen the zone where the imperial authority is exerted in Europe to the detriment of the “Sklavinies”.
In 746, Constantine V probably used the tagmata for the first time in an expedition on Muslim territory, taking advantage of the troubles that accompanied the end of the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. He seizes Germanicia, the native city of his father, and the close localities of Dolichê and Sozopétra. He does not seek to preserve these cities, but establishes their Christian inhabitants as colonists in Thrace. But all operations were suspended in 747 by a particularly virulent return of the plague: in Sicily and Calabria in the autumn of 745, in Greece and in the islands of the Aegean Sea in 746, it reached Constantinople at the beginning of 747 and raged there for a year, with very heavy losses. The imperial court was moved to Nicomedia. The patriarch Nicephorus I of Constantinople, in his Breviarium, indicates that the city of Constantinople is for a moment practically emptied of its population. When the plague subsided in 748, Constantine V repopulated his capital with other inhabitants from Greece and the Aegean islands.
In 751, the emperor took advantage of the overthrow and death of Marwān II, the last of the Umayyads of Damascus, As-Saffah, the first Abbasid, being busy consolidating his power, to lead another expedition into Muslim territory. He besieged the stronghold of Melitene and seized it, had it completely destroyed, and transported its Christian inhabitants once again to Thrace. These transfers, accompanied by the fortification of the cities in the region, allowed the Empire to re-establish its sovereignty. It is undoubtedly in these years that the city of Andrinople, lost for a long time, becomes Byzantine again. On the other hand, it was in 751 that the Byzantine Empire definitively lost Ravenna, conquered by the Lombard king Aistolf. From then on, the Empire only possessed Calabria and more or less Venice in peninsular Italy. Constantine V, during his reign, had many diplomatic exchanges with the papacy, the Lombards, and the king of the Franks Pepin the Short (with, among other things, the presence of Byzantine ambassadors at the plea of Gentilly at Easter 767), but he never engaged in any military operations in the West. Its two fields of intervention are the Balkans and the east of Asia Minor.
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Reaffirmation of iconoclasm
In 752, Constantine V launched a campaign throughout the Empire to reaffirm the validity of the prohibition of the cult of images, decreed by Leo III the Isaurian in January 730. It should be stressed that between these two dates, no act of the two successive emperors is known in relation to this question. At the most, one can point out some allusions to the fact that Artabasde, in the concern to ensure himself of the supports, would have authorized again the icons, but nothing indicates that he formally abrogated the edict of Leo III the Isaurian. However, the question certainly remained pending, because the Churches not controlled by the Empire (notably the Papacy) refused iconoclasm, and theologians, like John Damascene in Palestine, maintained the polemic there. However, Constantine V, since the beginning of his reign, had other urgent concerns.
Emissaries were sent throughout the Empire to encourage bishops to organize synods and public meetings on this question; the text entitled Warning of an Elder on the Holy Images (Nouthesia gerontos) shows one of these synods convened by a bishop Cosmas, in Cilicia, and where he had to confront the iconodule monk George of Cyprus; the numerous scriptural and patristic references put forward by the bishop indicate that the theologians of the Palace must have compiled arguments to be circulated. Constantine V himself, a keen theologian, wrote treatises such as the Peuseis (“Questions”), the text of which we have preserved in part in the refutation made by the patriarch Nicephorus I of Constantinople (Antirrhetici I and II).
This campaign led to the holding of the Council of Hieronymus from 10 February to 8 August 754. Bringing together 338 bishops for six months, it was an event of great dimensions. However, the claim of the emperor to present it as an ecumenical council is very curious: neither the papacy nor the Eastern patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem are represented; moreover, the patriarch of Constantinople, Anastasius, died in January, and Constantine V presents his successor, whom he himself chose, only at the closing session of the council, on August 8, so that none of the five traditional patriarchs of the Church appears in this council. No previous ecumenical council had been so much an act of pure imperial authority. It seems that Constantine”s main gain from the whole campaign was a strengthened authority over the Empire”s clergy and religious matters. But after the Council of Hieronymus, he did not launch any persecution against the iconodules, probably thinking that he had subjugated them definitively.
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New military campaigns
In 755, Constantine V made a new expedition into Muslim territory, this time further north: he seized the border fortress of Camachum, which he kept, and then the Armenian city of Theodosiopolis, for which he proceeded as in the two previous expeditions: the Christian inhabitants were sent to colonize Thrace.
The Byzantine expansion in Thrace leads besides to an attack of the Bulgarians in 756. After having defeated these last ones under the walls of Constantinople, the emperor launches a military campaign in Thrace and beats the Bulgarian army during the battle of Marcellae (756). In 757, a campaign made of non-decisive skirmishes in Cilicia leads the emperor to accept a truce and an exchange of prisoners with the Arabs, which allows him then to turn against the Bulgarians and the Slavs.
In 759, an expedition was organized against the Slavs of Macedonia, part of whose territory was conquered. In 760, a large-scale campaign took place against the Bulgarian Khanate: a fleet was sent along the coast of the Black Sea, and the troops landed in the region of the Danube Delta, which they ravaged; meanwhile, the emperor himself advanced with a land army and met the Bulgarians near the fortress of Markellai (he forced the Bulgarians to withdraw, but at the cost of heavy losses on both sides. He finally agreed to a truce, but did not pursue it further, because an Arab army invaded the territory of the Armenian theme and killed its strategist.
In 762, the khan Vinekh, who had signed the truce with the emperor and sent hostages, was overthrown and apparently killed by Teletz, who had decided to resume the war (but the internal events of the Bulgarian state at that time are very uncertain, both in terms of chronology and the events themselves). This coup de force involves the flight in Byzantine territory of a part of the Slavic element of the Bulgarian khanate; the refugees are installed in Bithynia, among the Optimates. In the spring of 763, Constantine V launched a new campaign, on the same principle as the previous one: he sent a fleet with nine thousand soldiers to land near the Danube delta, and during this time himself, from June 16, marched northward by land. The confrontation with Teletz took place on June 30 near Anchialos; the Byzantines were victorious, but with heavy losses on both sides. On his return to Constantinople, the emperor celebrated a triumph.
In June 766, Constantine V launches again an attack against the Bulgarians by repeating the same system: a fleet sent along the coast, and a ground army which he commands himself. But this time, it is less lucky: in July, the fleet is taken in a storm and largely destroyed, with very many drowned soldiers. The emperor had the bodies recovered and buried, and returned to Constantinople after this failure.
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Interior plots
During the summer 763, after his victory in Anchialos, Constantine V makes arrest the hermit Stephen the Young, who, installed on the mount Saint-Auxence, acquired a great influence; His motives are that Stephen refuses to sign the decree of the council of Hiéreia and is the center of a movement of agitation on this subject among the monks, but especially that he exerts an influence considered deleterious on members of the aristocracy, including on officers and high dignitaries of the Great Palace, near which one accuses him of carrying out a campaign of denigration against the emperor and of conversion to the monastic life. Stephen, after a period of relegation on the island of Proconnesus, then of incarceration in Constantinople, is lynched on November 20, 765 by soldiers of the tagmata indignant of the attitude judged provocative of the hermit towards the emperor.
This event will soon reveal a malaise in the entourage of Constantine V. In August 766, on the return from his failed expedition to Bulgaria, the emperor, exasperated by the deafeningly hostile behavior of a part of the monastic milieu, organized a show of derision in the hippodrome: monks and nuns, dressed in secular garb, had to parade in front of the public holding hands. A few days later, nineteen very close collaborators of the emperor are arrested and accused of plot; the two principal ones are two brothers, Constantin Podopagouros, logothete of Drome, and Stratêgios, Domestics of Excubites (both are in particular accused to have plotted against the emperor with Stephen the Young. Among the other conspirators are Antiochos, strategist of Sicily and ex-logothete of Drome, Ikoniatès, strategist of Thrace, the count of Opsikion, and several other characters hardly less important. On August 25 takes place in the hippodrome a spectacle of humiliation of the conspirators, and on 26 Podopagouros and his brother are decapitated while the others are blinded. In the following days, the eparch of Constantinople, Procopius, is arrested in his turn and whipped, and on August 30, the patriarch Constantin II of Constantinople, apprehended, is placed in detention in the palace of Hiéreia; officially deposed in November 766, he will be executed in October 767.
These events lead to a radicalization of the internal policy, in particular religious, of Constantine V. He gives a dominating place henceforth to the army in his government, leaning particularly on the elite division of Scholes. He names a whole series of new persons in charge in whom he has any confidence: Antonios, Domestics of Scholes, Michel Mélissène, strategist of Anatoliques, Michel Lachanodrakôn, strategist of Thracésiens, Manès, strategist of Bucellaires. The religious watchwords are radicalized, since the worship of the relics and the prayers to the Virgin and the saints are also condemned, what the council of Hiéreia had refused, and a policy of repression against the hostile monks is led. This policy does not affect all Byzantine monasticism, and it is more or less generalized here and there according to the zeal of the collaborators: in his province, Michael Lachanodrakôn gives to the monks and to the nuns to choose between the marriage or the blindness and the exile, and before 772 he would have made the monasticism disappear. Confiscated monasteries were used to house soldiers. But other examples show that this policy is not systematic: thus saint Anthousa founded around 740 a double monastery of men and women in Mantinée, in Paphlagonie; she received the visit of the emperor and his third wife Eudoxie on the occasion of a difficult pregnancy of the latter towards 757, and then her establishment was covered with benefits by the empress, who even offered her vast grounds; the monastery, very prosperous, counted nine hundred monks towards the end of the reign of Constantine V. This is certainly not an isolated case, and one must be careful not to believe that all the monks were opponents of the Council of Hieronymus.
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End of the reign
In 770, the Arabs, resuming their raids against Asia Minor, reached Laodicea the Burnt, in Lycaonia, sacked the city and deported its population. The following year, more raids were organized in Greek territory and the Arabs brought back even more prisoners, while the Byzantines attacked their territory on the side of Byzantine Armenia. In 772, they besieged the fortified city of Syke in Pamphylia. Constantine V then ordered an army formed by troops of the Anatolics, Bucellarians and Armenians to block their retreat, but this army was routed and the Arabs returned triumphantly to their homes. The emperor then asked the caliph Al-Mansur for a truce, without success.
Impotent against the Moslems, Constantine V turns over once again against the Bulgars: in spring 774, it embarks on a large fleet accompanied by the tagmata in direction of the delta of the Danube, while the cavalry of the topics advances by way of ground. The Bulgarians quickly ask for the peace, what the emperor accepts (perhaps in consideration of a threatening time in Black Sea), but it keeps the cavalry mobilized in Thrace. In autumn, learning by his spies that the khan Telerig was preparing to deport far from the border Slavic populations reputedly favorable to the Byzantine Empire, Constantine V seized this new pretext, attacked by surprise, and won a great victory over the Bulgars.
In the spring of 775, a new expedition was mounted, always according to the same principle, but this time the emperor took command of the army. But the scenario of 766 is repeated: the fleet going up the coast of the Black Sea is destroyed by a storm in front of Mesembria, and Constantine V orders the retreat. The khan Telerig then makes overtures of peace, but it turns out that it is a ruse to discover the identity of the Byzantine spies in Bulgaria, which he makes all execute. At the beginning of September, Constantine V takes the head of an expedition of reprisals, but arrived at Arcadiopolis, he is seized by a strong fever, accompanied by the appearance of boils on the legs. He died during his return journey to Constantinople, at the age of fifty-seven.
Constantine V married three times:
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External links
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