XXXIII. Eagle’s Fall
Byzantine silk tapestry from Italy depicting Alexander the Great ascending to heaven
with the aid of two eagles, 11th century
Arnulf's Invasion
In 1027 the
catepanus of Trento was a certain
comes named
Ursus Videlianus. Ursus, according to the chronicler Egidius of Florence, had come under suspicion of financial malfeasance, probably involving the sale of imperial lands within the catepanate. The emperor recalled him to Pavia. Unlike in the case of John Aureus, however, the emperor’s words were apparently delivered by messengers rather than an armed force of the
milites Ungarorum. Instead of either appearing in Pavia to face the allegations or fleeing the country, Ursus chose instead to make an overture to
Arnulf II, Duke of Bavaria. Presumably Ursus was offering up Italy, or at least part of Lombardy, to Arnulf; it was hardly the first time a Bavarian duke had attempted such a conquest in the last century.
That Arnulf thought this opportunity good enough to act upon suggests that the empire of
Constantine did not seem to its contemporaries as formidable as a map might suggest. Perhaps despite all the emperor’s purges, there were still powerful discontents in Lombardy. Alternatively, perhaps the fact that Constantine had not seriously led an army since his teenage years led others to assume that he possessed no great martial strength. Indeed, the performance of the Italian army of the early 11th century was generally underwhelming, with most of its victories gained by peripheral marcher-lords against relatively feeble opponents. The emperor’s Magyars performed admirably throughout Constantine’s reign, but they did not constitute an army, and were more often used as bodyguards or special enforcers than in proper war.
The treachery of Ursus threw open the door to Arnulf, who led an army plundering through Lombardy. An attempt by
catepanus Antonius of Bergamo to arrest the progress of the Bavarians evidently failed, and Antonius was forced to take refuge behind the walls of Bergamo while the invaders laid waste to the countryside. The Bavarians reached as far as Cremona on the Po river, causing such great devastation that at least one Italian writer compared them to the Magyars of the previous century.
Italy, however, was not as brittle as it seemed. Brescia surrendered to the Bavarians, but Bergamo and Cremona resisted; their bishops and civic militiamen stood fast. The chroniclers make no mention of any parallel rebellion or uprising among the Lombard nobility in favor of Arnulf and Ursus, and the other
catepani presumably remained loyal or at least failed to throw their support to the invaders. With an underwhelming reception in Lombardy and the approach of Constantine at the head of a large army, Ursus and Arnulf withdrew to Brescia. Brescia’s bishop, however, had since thought better about his appeasement. In the absence of the Bavarians, the Brescians drove out the garrison Ursus had left and barred their gates to the retreating invaders. Turning upon the city, the Bavarians succeeded in storming the walls and subjected Brescia to a sack. The citadel, however, remained in control of the bishop and his men, rendering the city indefensible against the advancing imperial army. Arnulf and Ursus were compelled to withdraw further into the Trento catepanate.
A European War
It is difficult to imagine that Arnulf would have undertaken this enterprise were he not convinced of the support, or at least the ambivalence, of the recently crowned King
Henry III of Germany. Henry’s older brother, Liudolf II, had maintained a peaceable relationship with Constantine. The death of the queen-mother Helena, however, had weakened the position of the pro-Italian party, and the marriage of prince
Constantine to princess
Mathilde of France in the year of Henry’s coronation seems to have turned Henry against his uncle. The emperor had no doubt hoped to gain further legitimacy for his son and likely successor, but in the process had alienated his most dangerous neighbor.
Whether Henry originally intended to materially support Arnulf is unknown, but soon he would be dragged into the conflict regardless. Although the arrest and death of John Aureus may have damaged relations between the Hungarians and the Italians, King
Stephen of Hungary nevertheless clearly perceived the danger which German ambitions in Italy posed for him. Twenty years before, Arnulf had made a similar attempt to invade Hungarian Carinthia, and there had likely been smaller skirmishes in the intervening period. Stephen responded to the Bavarian invasion of Lombardy by launching his own raid over the border into Bavaria. Arnulf withdrew to protect his own territory, leaving Ursus to fend for himself. Trento was well-fortified, but this turned out to be irrelevant when the renegade catepan was murdered by his own men (who, at least one source claims, were paid off by Constantine).
Henry did not leave Arnulf to his fate as his brother had. He made his winter quarters at Augsburg with a large Saxon army, and there received emissaries from Constantine. Although Arnulf had not held Lombardy, he had caused great damage, and he and Henry might have expected some manner of conciliatory appeal from Constantine. Instead, however, the chief imperial envoy, Bishop
Silvanus of Florence, demanded reparations and allegedly insulted the German king. Upon leaving the king’s presence, or possibly on his journey back to Italy, Silvanus was abducted. A German account, while not disputing the bishop’s arrest, claims that Silvanus had attempted to meet in secret with the king’s feudatories at Augsburg to encourage a rebellion against him, while Italian sources merely describe the bishop’s arrest as an outrageous kidnapping and claim that Arnulf demanded ransom.
Constantine’s response was to lean on Pope
Demetrius to demand the release of Silvanus, although the pope probably needed little encouraging. With a possible threat of anathema hanging over him, Henry probably decided one bishop was not worth a confrontation, and prevailed upon Arnulf to release him. Nevertheless Henry remained defiant on all other issues, and Constantine was in a dangerous position. Henry still had a large army at Augsburg, and Arnulf was pushing Henry towards taking advantage of the apparent weakness of Lombardy to use that army against the king’s uncle.
The next step in Constantine’s playbook was to turn Henry’s attention elsewhere. This was done in a particularly dramatic fashion by a new imperial delegation, this time bound for Poland. The great Polish duke Boleslaw had recently died, but the emperor now offered his son,
Mieszko, what Boleslaw had long desired: a royal crown and an autonomous archbishopric. What the emperor desired in exchange was Miesko’s fealty – and, presumably, for Mieszko to support Stephen and Constantine against their common foe. As spring arrived, Henry thus learned that his uncle had performed yet another flagrant act of treachery against him, in one stroke both undermining the German church in “Sclavinia” and granting kingship to a man Henry viewed as his own vassal. Emboldened by a crown and by his new alliance with the Hungarians and Italians, Mieszko joined Stephen in an invasion of Bohemia, thus touching off a general war.
The conflict did not end quickly. Despite initial success, the Polish and Hungarian forces were driven out of Bohemia by Henry, who despite his relative youth demonstrated himself to be a tactician of considerable skill. As Poland itself came under threat, Miszko reached out to his old pagan allies, the Lutici, who took up arms once more and savagely raided into Saxony and Meissen alongside the Poles. Henry was thus prevented from undertaking a proper invasion of Poland, but he retaliated in the following year by inducing the Prince of Kiev to take some belated revenge for Boleslaw’s attempt in the previous decade to foist his son-in-law upon the Kievan throne. A Kievan army invaded Poland from the east and installed Mieszko’s half-brother as a pro-German proxy in Poland. Even the Lutici were checked, clobbered from both sides by Henry’s Saxons and the Obodrites, a neighboring pagan confederation which Henry had courted as his own ally among the Wends.
Constantine’s contribution to this conflagration was not decisive. He launched an attack on Bavaria in the vicinity of Brixen in 1028, but it seems to have accomplished little. While his
catepani in the north prosecuted the war to a limited extent by border raids and Italian
milites served under Stephen, the emperor’s personal commitment amounted to little. Italian chroniclers criticize Constantine for doing too little and being too cautious, but war-by-proxy was always the emperor’s favored strategy, and Germany was not the emperor’s only concern in these years.
The Venetian Coup
The revered Doge of Venice, Peter Urseolus, had made grand plans for the succession of his son
John Urseolus. John had been made the governor of Dalmatia (still acknowledged as a Byzantine protectorate) after its recovery from the Bulgarians and their allies by Doge Peter, and John’s connections to the east were further strengthened by his marriage to a Byzantine noblewoman,
Maria Argyre. His father secured John’s election as co-doge and thereafter abdicated and retired to a monastery around 1008, leaving John as sole effective ruler.
[A] John’s close association with the Byzantines might have offended Emperor Octavian, but Constantine does not seem to have taken any particular offense to John’s eastern connections. Venetian merchants, after all, still paid tolls to Constantine, and Constantine and Peter had always maintained a good relationship.
After a decade of peaceful and prosperous rule, John was confronted by the renewed hostility of the co-kings of Croatia, the brothers
Kresimir III and
Gojslav, who sought to restore Croatian control over the Dalmatian cities comprising the
ducatus Dalmatiae. Croatia too was a Byzantine satellite state – Kresimir held the same title of
patrikios that John Urseolus did – but when the Dalmatian cities called upon John to defend them from Croatian aggression, John could rely on powerful friends outside the empire to support him. Margrave
Marinus Candianus of Istria was John’s nephew thanks to his father’s marriage to
Hicela, John’s sister, while John’s younger brother
Peter had married a sister of King Stephen of Hungary. Both Marinus and Stephen supported their Venetian kinsman, and the Croatian kings were soon compelled to relent and vacate any portions of the Dalmatian coast which they had occupied.
Although he found prosperity at home and victory abroad, Doge John eventually created his own domestic problems. His Greek titles, wife, and wealth caused him to act more like an imperial prince than an elected magistrate. He treated himself to rare luxuries and attempted to make his own household a miniature imitation of the Constantinopolitan court by surrounding himself with servants and eunuchs. Having acquired the dogeship through his familial ties, he saw no problem with ruling the city as a family enterprise, and fresh from his victory over the Croats in 1019 he selected his younger brother
Ursus for the position of Patriarch of Grado. His other brothers, Peter,
Vitalis, and
Constantine (Emperor Constantine’s godson) also received plum positions in the government and church hierarchies. The final straw appears to have been John’s attempt to associate his eldest son
Basil (b. around 1005) with the dogeship in 1023. Evidently John had forgotten that the very same sort of attempt to continue a string of father-to-son successions had caused the ouster and near-destruction of the previous ruling family of Venice, the Candiani.
John remained secure for the moment, but the death of Emperor Basil II in 1025 gave his opponents the confidence to attempt his overthrow. In the following year, he and his family were chased from the city and took refuge in Istria. The Venetians elected
Peter Centranicus, a nobleman whose family had never held the dogeship, as their new leader, but the deposition of a doge with such extensive ties to Venice’s neighbors had severe and immediate consequences. In protest of the coup, Constantine of Italy and Stephen of Hungary revoked all Venetian trading privileges. Kresimir of Croatia, who now ruled alone after the death of his brother, took the opportunity to wage another war for Dalmatia (and to renounce his Byzantine vassalage as well).
For two unhappy years, Venice limped along as a near-pariah state, with the Byzantines as their only remaining friends. John fared little better at first – perhaps concerned that his nephew and host Margrave Marinus did not have his best interests at heart, he fled with his family to Constantinople in 1027 or 1028. In that latter year, however, Emperor Basil’s brother
Constantine VIII died, bringing an end to the male line of the Macedonian dynasty. His successor was
Romanos III Argyros, the husband of Constantine’s daughter
Zoe, who was also a kinsman (probably a brother) of Maria Argyre, the wife of John Urseolus. John, already present at the imperial court, convinced Romanos to withdraw his support for Venice and complete the city’s alienation from every last one of its neighbors. This spelled the end of the career of Peter Centranicus, who was deposed by the Venetians.
In his moment of triumph, however, John’s distrust of his nephew Marinus was proven quite well-founded. John’s return to Venice was pre-empted by the quick action of the Margrave of Istria, who presented himself (along with his army and navy) to the Venetians as an alternative candidate. He had his own serious problems – although they had not ruled for decades, the Candiani had themselves run into trouble for attempting to create a dynasty, and there was some concern that Marinus could not be an independent doge given that he still held Istria as a fief of the western emperor. Nevertheless, his Tusculani ancestry promised a restoration of relations with Emperor Constantine, and his forces and fleet in Istria would be of great value in protecting Venice’s Dalmatian possessions from the Croats (which he demonstrated soon thereafter by a successful raid against the Croats). Marinus was elected doge in early 1029, becoming the fifth Candiani doge (but the only one not to be named Peter). The election of Marinus ended the row with Constantine, but not with Stephen or Romanos, both brothers-in-law of the deposed John Urseolus.
Although John gnashed his teeth and raged against the injustice of it all, the more immediate concern of Emperor Romanos was the east, where his governor in Antioch had been soundly defeated after an ill-conceived attack against the Emir of Aleppo around June of 1029. Romanos prepared an expedition to return Aleppo to the status of Byzantine protectorate which it had held under Basil II. His expedition in the spring of 1030, however, failed in large part due to his own inexperience.
[1]
The Empires in the South
Constantine VIII had dispatched the
protospatharios Orestes to “Sicily” (probably meaning Langobardia rather than the actual island of Sicily, which was entirely in Saracen hands) with an army, presumably to defend against Sicilian raids or to keep hope alive for the invasion of Sicily which had faltered after the death of Basil. He was still there upon the accession of Romanos III, but like his emperor Orestes evidently had little military experience, and his army was surprised and slaughtered by the Saracens just a few months before the emperor’s own defeat in the east. This debacle inspired a new rebellion by the Lombards of the catepanate, whose insurrection was actively abetted by the southern Italian dukes. Now well into middle age, the “Wolf of Salerno” – Duke
Leo – had lost much of his hair (we are told he was quite bald) but none of his guile or ambition, and felt no great shame at breaking the peace which had been made between Constantine of Italy and Basil II.
Romanos, learning of this situation after his return from the east, intended to dispatch a new army but was hampered by the coup in Venice. The Urseoli doges, as acknowledged Byzantine subjects, had been ready and willing to provide the empire with their services at sea and in fact had been obligated by treaty to ferry the empire’s troops to Italy when the situation demanded it. Although Doge Marinus hoped to repair relations with Romanos, he was not prepared to transport a new Greek army on to Italian shores knowing that Romanos still hoped for the restoration of his brother-in-law in Venice. Although the Byzantine fleet was considerable, the Adriatic had been neglected in the reign of Basil II based on the assumption that the Venetians would ably look after the empire’s interests there. An attempt to take back Bari from the rebels by the
protospatharios Michael in September of 1030 seems to have suffered from logistical problems and ended up with a defeat on both land and sea, as the Salernitans and rebels surprised Michaels’ army as it approached the city and the Greek fleet was scattered by a storm.
Although the victory of his vassals in the south and the accession of his cousin Marinus in Venice were seemingly positive developments for Emperor Constantine, his diplomatic position was rapidly collapsing. The matter of Venice had severely damaged his relations with the Hungarians and Greeks, and his vassals’ support for the rebels in the south had brought him to the brink of war with Romanos. Moreover, in the same year his ally Mieszko had been driven from Poland, a pro-German duke had been restored to Bohemia, the Wends had collapsed into their own civil war, and Stephen was now exploring the possibility of a separate peace with King Henry. The emperor sent out emissaries to both the Germans and the Greeks looking for a way out.
Henry haughtily dismissed Constantine’s appeal. He was considering a new Italian invasion of his own, and the emperor’s eagerness for an end to the war only demonstrated weakness. Romanos, however, was receptive. Unlike Basil, who sought military solutions everywhere, Romanos was a career bureaucrat who had aspirations of military greatness but also fancied himself a man of culture and reason. Perhaps more importantly, he was also still embroiled with the war against the Arabs in the east, and southern Italy had proven to be only a source of loss and embarrassment. Constantine offered to reign in Duke Leo and renew the treaty between himself and Basil if Romanos would reconcile with Doge Marinus. Romanos, who had been rather quickly spending Basil’s great treasury, insisted on an extraction of an indemnity and a new pledge of allegiance from Venice, as well as a recognition that Dalmatia was held only on the sufferance of Constantinople, but in the end agreed to the rest of Constantine’s terms. A new catepan,
Pothos Argyros (no relation to the emperor is attested), landed in the south in early 1031 by way of a Venetian fleet, and with Leo muzzled by his sovereign the Byzantine forces managed to stamp out the rebellion and restore order once more, albeit with the province still plagued by the Sicilians.
The Fall
The German problem remained, and Constantine could no longer even count on Stephen, once his closest ally. Henry, however, was to be diverted yet again, this time by the enterprise of the young King
Lothair II of France, the son of the late Louis V. Possibly to fulfill his marital alliance with the emperor, but more likely to assert his family’s own longstanding claim to Lotharingia, Lothair invaded Henry’s kingdom in 1032. The attack was more of a raid than an attempt at conquest, and its chief objective was symbolic – the sacking of Aachen, demonstrating that Henry was not the unchallenged master of Charlemagne’s capital. Having made his point, Lothair did not stay long, and when Henry rode west with an army the French went home without offering battle.
The Aachen raid meant little in terms of the strategic situation. In the same year, Stephen and Henry agreed to a truce, and if a pinprick raid was the best Lothair could offer then he was unlikely to be a real impediment to an invasion of Italy. After the winter of 1032-3, however, German fortunes took an abrupt turn for the worse. The Poles deposed their Kievan-backed usurper and restored Mieszko, reigniting the war in the east, while tensions between the Obodrites and Saxons caused the confederation to switch sides and temporarily join the Poles and Lutici against their common foe. King Stephen, who had been compelled to surrender some Carinthian lands as part of the truce, reneged on the agreement scarcely a year after its creation and rejoined the war against Henry.
The German king continued to outmaneuver and outfight his enemies, but he could not put out the fires springing up along every border all at once. He campaigned with a furious and frenetic pace in 1033 and 1034, driving the Wends back from Meissen and checking the Hungarians near Brno. A general and warrior of great skill, his later chroniclers – and perhaps his contemporaries as well – dubbed him “Henry the Eagle,” a tribute to his swiftness, daring, and commanding aspect. Even his energy, however, was drained by the great exertions he demanded of himself and his army, and at winter quarters in 1034-5 his health gave out.. Hearing of a midwinter raid by the Hungarians into Bavaria, he insisted on leading the repulse, but had some sort of attack or fit (a seizure or heart attack has been suggested) and fell from his horse into the snow. His men recovered him, but attempts to nurse him back to health were in vain, and he died shortly thereafter.
Henry left no children. The closest dynastic successor was his nephew Otto, the son of Liudolf II, but Otto was a young boy. Duke Arnulf, himself an Ottonian albeit of the cadet Bavarian line, put forward his own candidacy and attracted many lords who may have preferred a grown and experienced man to a mere child. Many Saxons, however, resisted the Bavarian duke’s ambitions, and in the midst of war Germany had to undergo a succession crisis. The conflict was not extended – Arnulf soon triumphed over his nephew’s backers – but it was now the German king who was forced to buy peace. The war ended with the recognition of an independent Polish kingdom under Mieszko and the reciprocal recognition of Bohemia as a German vassal, albeit shorn of Silesia (annexed by the Poles) and Moravia (by the Hungarians).
King and Duke
Although King Arnulf had sued for peace, this was a temporary expedient only. He was, if anything, even more interested in southern expansion than Henry. In the early years of his reign, however, it was already becoming clear that he was not in a strong position to achieve his loftiest ambitions.
Bernard, the Billung Duke of Saxony, had originally favored the young Otto to succeed King Henry. At length and after some military clashes Bernard had accepted the coronation of Arnulf, but he kept Otto from Arnulf’s grasp and successfully demanded the recognition of Saxon customary law in his territory as part of the price for his loyalty. Bernard’s drive for autonomy had solid support from within his own country. Despite his Ottonian blood, Arnulf’s branch of the family had been solidly based in Bavaria for generations. Those Saxons on the Wendish frontier had also objected to the concessions which Arnulf had made to the pagans as part of his immediate post-election effort to staunch the kigndom’s bleeding and bring the destructive and costly war to an end.
Arnulf had sat upon the throne for barely a year when King
Rudolph III of Burgundy died with no male heir. His neighbors and relatives, King
Theobald of Provence and Duke
Hermann III of Swabia, were inevitably thrust into conflict for control of the realm. Constantine predictably backed Theobald, his client and brother-in-law, while Arnulf supported his vassal Hermann. This Burgundinian Crisis, unlike the one at Rudolph’s accession, is not well-attested in the historical literature, but the German tradition maintains that Hermann defeated Theobald and his Italian allies at the Battle of Martiniacum in 1036. Theobald did not come away empty-handed, as he was apparently able to take possession of Lyons and some other border territories which had previously been under Rudolph’s nominal control, but the crown of (Upper) Burgundy and the lion’s share of its territory fell to Hermann. The result was the establishment of a geographically unusual Alpine territory, a personal union of a duchy and kingdom usually referred to in modern texts as the “Swabian Kingdom of Burgundy.”
At first this seemed like a promising development for Arnulf. Burgundy’s strategic importance to the German monarchy was significant; it opened new routes (most notably the St. Bernard pass) into Italy and further extended the Alpine front which Constantine was obligated to fortify and defend. Once again, the emperor’s military effectiveness was shown to be disappointing. Having gained a royal crown, however, Hermann began to see Arnulf more and more as his equal rather than his sovereign, and his pride was only encouraged by Constantine and Lothair II of France, who immediately and quite correctly perceived that Hermann might be cultivated into a formidable rival of Arnulf. The emperor and the French king not only recognized Hermann but dispatched emissaries and gifts worthy of a king. Arnulf had hoped to seamlessly inherit the power and authority of the senior Ottonian kings, but as the growing ambitions of Hermann and Bernard demonstrated, the provincial interests of its great dukes were proving too difficult to control.
[B]
End of an Era
Constantine had outlasted his latest adversary, but he would not survive Henry by long. His health was already declining, possibly due to a heart condition. One morning in March of 1037, his servants entered his bedchamber only to find that their emperor had died quietly in the night.
The “Most Just Emperor” had lived to the age of 59 and logged a record-breaking 48 years of rule as the reigning emperor in the West. He wore the imperial crown for longer than any Roman Emperor, either Carolingian or ancient, who had ruled in the west, and he had ruled Italy longer than any single Lombard or Frankish monarch before him.
[2] The realm had not grown much in size under his care (aside from Duke Leo’s conquest of Lucania and the acquisition of Sardinia as a loose protectorate), but for most Italians his era had been one of peace and prosperity. He had ground down much of the restless Lombard nobility, supervised the return of the written Roman law to Italy, and given much fruitful attention to such varied internal matters as the maintenance of roads, the suppression of bandits, and regulation of the currency. Constantine was no great commander of men, but he had weathered serious threats to his crown and outlasted foes far more skilled in the art of war than himself.
Constantine’s death marks the end of the dynastic era scholars refer to as the period of the “Early Tusculani,” comprising the reign of three emperors which – with a few interruptions – spanned 90 years between the election of Alberic as King of Italy and the death of his grandson. Under Constantine, the early Italo-Roman state had arguably risen to the apex of its power and prosperity, but the emperor’s successes as a ruler and administrator were imperiled by his failures as a father. Having deliberately isolated his sons from power and responsibility after the rebellion and death of his eldest, Romanus, Constantine was succeeded by men who had no experience with rule and knew little outside of the comfortable life of the imperial palaces.
Map of Italy and its neighbors around the death of Constantine in 1037. Istria is colored
as being separate from Venice, as it was held as a dependency of Rome while Venice and
Dalmatia were vassals of Constantinople, but in 1037 these territories were all held by the
same man.
Next Time:
Pride Before Destruction
Footnotes (In Character)
[1] Before becoming emperor, Romanos’ career had been in the civil service as a judge and administrator.
[2] He nevertheless just barely failed to best the longevity of his contemporary Basil II, who ruled the Byzantine Empire for a month less than 50 years following the death of John Tzimiskes.
Endnotes (Out of Character)
[A] IOTL, John and his wife were killed by a plague before the end of his father’s rule, and Peter was succeeded by a younger son, Otto. ITTL, the plague has been butterflied away.
[B] There's an interesting parallel here to William the Bastard, who IOTL conquered himself a kingdom while still paying homage to another king for a duchy. Being an island does a lot to help you keep your independence, however, and Swabia-Burgundy is likely to be a transitory amalgamation ITTL.
