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Dynastic Marriages W chapter 6 Dynastic Marriages Even without a diplomatic service or foreign ministry, the Byzantines could and did exploit every tool of diplomacy, and this naturally in- cluded dynastic marriages intended to cement relations with powerful foreigners.1 That had not been a Roman practice, for lack of valid coun- terparts, but for the Byzantines there was the precedent of the dynastic marriages between the rival Hellenistic autocracies established by the successors of Alexander the Great. Initially ruled by his direct subordi- nates and then by their descendants or near enough, these Greek-speak- ing kingdoms not infrequently made peace agreements by marriages, though more frequently they warred, with or without divorces. Matters were rather more delicate for the emperor of the Romans. For himself, for a sister, or for his palace-born children, intermarriage with lesser mortals was inconsistent with the claimed position of the emperor as God’s viceroy on earth and overlord presumptive of all Christians, who must exist on a higher plane than all other rulers. Be- sides, the notion of consigning the daughter or sister of an emperor to the bed of a barbarian, howsoever Christian, or to a nomad’s tent, even if filled with golden treasure, or worse still a Muslim harem, was revolt- ing, offending both Greek racial pride and Christian propriety. Things were easier when emperors or their sons married the daugh- ters of foreign potentates. Justinian II, dubbed the “slit-nosed” (rhinotmetos), who ruled from 685 only to be dethroned, symbolically mutilated, and exiled to the remote outpost of Cherson in Crimea in 695, formed a dynastic alliance with the Khazars who ruled the adja- cent steppe. He married the sister of the qagan, Busir Glavan (Ibousiros 138 • Byzantine Diplomacy Gliabanos to the Greeks), who took the name Theodora—though it was with the help of the Bulghar qan or khan Tervel that he eventually re- gained the throne in 705 to misrule until 711, when he was overthrown again. A century later, Leo III (717–741), to seal his alliance with the steppe empire of the Khazars against the Muslim Arabs, whom they separately vanquished on their respective fronts, arranged the marriage of his son and successor Constantine V (741–775) to the qagan’s daughter, who took the name Irene—her son and his successor, Leo IV (775–780), was nicknamed “The Khazar.” Incidentally this Irene is remembered for two rather contrary accomplishments. The first was that, upon embracing Christianity, she acquired a reputation for intense piety. Under the year 6224 since the creation, that is, 731/732 CE, Theophanes Confessor re- cords: “In this year the emperor Leo [III] betrothed his son Constantine to the daughter of the Chagan....Hemade her a Christian and named her Irene. She learned Holy Scripture and lived piously, thus reproving the impiety [iconoclasm] of those men.”2 Her second accomplishment was that she introduced to the Byzantine court her national dress, a well-decorated caftan—the horse-nomads’ long coat that can be opened in front to mount the horse—which came to be called tzitzakion at the Byzantine court. Starting out as nomadic outerwear, it migrated to the very summit of middle-Byzantine court costume, for the tzitzakion was worn by the emperor himself and only on the most solemn occasions. This was explained much later by Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (912–959), himself a keen anti- quarian: “You must know that the tzitzakion is a Khazar costume that appeared in this God-protected imperial city since the empress of Khazaria.”3 In spite of this precedent, the official version was that the imperial family would not marry into lesser ruling families, no matter how great their pretensions. No requests were anticipated from religiously inimi- cal Muslim powers; the steppe powers were in no sense anti-Christian, but they too were to be refused. In De Administrando Imperio there is the crib of a suggested reply to fob off such requests [if] any nation of these infidels and dishonorable tribes of the north shall ever demand a marriage alliance with the emperor of the Romans, and ei- ther take his daughter to wife, or to give a daughter of their own to be the wife to the emperor or the emperor’s son. To this “monstrous and unseemly” demand, a typically arch reply is suggested: Dynastic Marriages • 139 [A] dread and authentic charge and ordinance of the great and holy Con- stantine is engraved upon the sacred table of the universal church of the Christians, Hagia Sophia, that never shall an emperor of the Romans ally himself in marriage with a nation of customs differing from and alien to those of the Roman order, especially with one that is infidel and un- baptized...4 Nothing could be more categorical—except that what directly follows is an exception: . unless it be with the Franks alone; for they alone were excepted by that great man, the holy Constantine, because he himself drew his origin from those parts...[and] because of the traditional fame and nobility of those lands and races. That was entirely spurious—Constantine never left instructions on mar- riage, and in any case he was born in Moesia Superior (now southern Serbia) whereas the Frankish confederacy emerged in the lower Rhine valley—but the fiction did justify dynastic alliances with the strongest power of west, the Francia of Charlemagne and his descendants, then the East Francia that became the Regnum Teutonicum, the Kingdom of Germany, in the tenth century with the Ottonian dynasty. In 781 Irene, widow of Leo IV “The Khazar” (775–780) and regent for her only son, the ten-year-old Constantine VI, arranged his betrothal to Rotrud, the six-year-old daughter of Charlemagne, still “king of the Franks” and not yet crowned emperor, as he would be in 800, but al- ready the ruler of much of western Europe. There was as yet no significant friction between the two empires, but with Charlemagne still expanding his reach and increasingly active in Italy, collisions were highly predictable, because the Byzantines still possessed the southern coastal enclaves of Naples, Reggio in Calabria, and Brindisi in Puglie, and also Venice as the residue of the extinct exarchate of Ravenna, and the port towns of the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic—though Istria at its head already belonged to the Franks. A precautionary dynastic alli- ance with the most powerful western potentate since Roman times was certainly prudent. Eschewing the barbarian sound of “Rotrud,” the Byzantines named her Erythro and sent the eunuch Elissaios to educate her in the Greek language and court manners. But in 786, when she was still only eleven, the formidable and scheming Irene broke off the engagement for rea- sons unknown—as for Constantine VI, he would end his life deposed and blinded by will of his mother. 140 • Byzantine Diplomacy In the absence of a dynastic alliance, relations with Charlemagne did not prosper, although direct warfare was avoided till much later. Charlemagne’s acceptance of the title of Imperator Augustus at his crowning by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day, December 25, 800, was a direct challenge to Byzantine supremacy, regardless of his own in- tentions. His official biographer Einhard or Eginhard or Einhart, monk, Frankish historian, and Charlemagne’s dedicated courtier, entirely blamed Pope Leo III for the deed: The [Roman populace] had inflicted many injuries upon the Pontiff Leo, tearing out his eyes and cutting out his tongue, so that he had been com- pelled to call upon the King for help. Charles accordingly went to Rome, to set in order the affairs of the Church . and passed the whole winter there. It was then that he received the titles of Emperor and Augustus [Im- perator Augustus], to which he at first had such an aversion that he de- clared that he would not have set foot in the Church the day that they were conferred, although it was a great feast-day, if he could have foreseen the design of the Pope. He bore very patiently with the jealousy which the Ro- man emperors [of Constantinople] showed upon his assuming these titles, for they took this step very ill; and by dint of frequent embassies and let- ters, in which he addressed them as brothers, he made their haughtiness yield to his magnanimity, a quality in which he was unquestionably much their superior.5 It is true that the pope and the Roman Church had a more urgent need of a western emperor to protect them than Charlemagne had need of a title—by then his personal preeminence and his hegemony within conti- nental western Europe were both unchallenged. The recent emperors of Byzantium had become heretical in Roman eyes because of their icono- clasm, but their even greater offense was that they were too far away to safeguard the popes from the savagery around them, not all of it barbar- ian—it was a Roman gang sent by disgruntled relatives of his noble pre- decessor Adrian I that attacked the commoner Leo III, driving him to es- cape to Charlemagne. The Byzantine view of Charlemagne’s coronation, as a calculated po- litical act by both sides, is much more plausible: [After he was attacked, Pope Leo] sought refuge with Karoulos, king of the Franks, who took bitter vengeance on his enemies and restored him to his throne, Rome falling from that time onwards under the authority of the Franks Repaying his debt to Karoulos, Leo crowned him emperor of the Romans in the church of the holy apostle Peter after anointing him with oil Dynastic Marriages • 141 from head to foot and investing him with imperial robes and a crown on 25 December.6 Irene, effectively emperor from 797 to 802 as regent for her son, would not compromise the imperial primacy by recognizing Charlemagne as Imperator Augustus.
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