Constantine IX Monomachos

Reign

Upon assuming imperial office, Constantine continued the purge instituted by Zoë and Theodora, removing the relatives of Michael V from the court. He opened the treasury to Zoë and Theodora, made large gifts to potential supporters to secure their loyalty, and initiated a round of senatorial promotions. He retained his mistress from his years in exile — a relative of his second wife — named Maria Skleraina. Eventually this arrangement was made official by means of a palace ceremony, and Sklerania was awarded the honorific Sebastē.

Early conflicts

By 1040 the situation in Byzantine Italy had become precarious. The permanent settlement of Normans in Southern Italy threatened Byzantine holdings, and a complicated series of diplomatic maneuvers to secure Byzantine control transpired between 1040 and 1042. These centered on Argyros, a prominent Italian from Bari, and culminated in the recall of the Byzantine general George Maniakes from his command in Italy. Fearing enemies at court, Maniakes had himself acclaimed emperor by his troops in September 1042. He transferred his troops into the Balkans and won several battles against imperial armies as he marched towards Constantinople, but in late 1043 he was struck by a projectile and killed in battle.

Immediately after the victory, Constantinople was attacked by a fleet from the Kievan Rus'. There is no direct evidence that the Rus' had colluded with Maniakes, but scholarly opinion remains divided. The Rus' raiders were defeated in a naval confrontation in the Bosporus by admiral Basil Theodorokanos by means of Greek fire. As part of the peace negotiations, Constantine married his daughter, Anastasia (by his second wife or Maria Skleraina), to the future Prince Vsevolod I of Kiev, the son of his opponent Yaroslav I the Wise. Constantine's family name Monomachos ("one who fights alone") was inherited by Vsevolod and Anastasia's son, Vladimir II Monomakh.

Constantine's preferential treatment of Maria Skleraina in the early part of his reign led to rumors that she was planning to murder Zoë and Theodora. This led to a popular uprising by the citizens of Constantinople in 1044, which came dangerously close to harming Constantine as he participated in a religious procession. The mob was only quieted by the appearance at a balcony of Zoë and Theodora, who reassured the people that they were not in any danger of regicide.

In 1045, Constantine annexed the Armenian kingdom of Ani, but this expansion merely removed a key border state between the empire and its enemies. Faced with the challenge of integrating a new people into the Byzantine polity, Constantine chose to persecute the Armenian Church in an attempt to force it into union with the Orthodox Church. In 1046 the Byzantines first came into contact with the Seljuk Turks. They met in battle in Armenia in 1048 and settled a truce the following year. In 1046, Constantine concluded a treaty with the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustansir Billah. The Book of Gifts and Rarities records that on this occasion Constantine gave the caliph a gift of 500,000 gold coins, over two tons of gold.

The Pecheneg revolt and civil war

By the time of Constantine's reign the Pecheneg people occupying the Bulgarian steppe had served as a buffer between the Byzantines and the Rus' for decades. In the 1040s however, under external pressure from the Oguz Turks, tens of thousands of Pechenegs migrated South of the Danube. After a period of war, crisis, raids, and Pecheneg civil war, these Southern Pechenegs were settled by the Byzantine administration in the North Balkans in 1046. This settlement proved controversial with the Macedonians.

That winter, Constantine was faced by the rebellion of his nephew Leo Tornikios, an officer in Adrianople. The reason for his rebellion is uncertain — possibly ultimately a family dispute — but the Macedonian tagmata under his command had become disaffected following their demobilization after the conflict with the Pechenegs, and Tornikos was able to draw in anti-government elements from across the empire. He was proclaimed emperor by the army in the summer of 1047. Constantine assembled an army from the jails of Constantinople but this was quickly defeated and Tornikios put the city under siege. Tornikios was on the verge of taking the city but declined to press his advantage and Constantine was able to re-man the walls. Eventually, Tornikios's army was won over by bribes and the rebellion was put down. Tornikios was blinded.

The revolt had weakened Byzantine defenses in the Balkans, and in 1048, the area was raided by those Pechenegs still North of the Danube. The same year, Constantine raised a force of 15,000 Pechenegs for his war against the Seljuks in the East, but they mutinied, raided across the Bosporus, and by 1050 the Northern and Southern Pechenegs regrouped South of the Danube in open revolt. The Pechenegs plundered the Balkans until 1053, defeating three Byzantine armies, before the Byzantines exhausted them through counter-guerilla tactics. Historian Anthony Kaldellis calls this "the worst string of Roman defeats in more than a century."

Later rule

Constantine's mistress Maria Skleraina died around 1046, and Constantine took a new mistress with the title sebaste: an "Alan princess", identified by Cyril Toumanoff as Irene of Alania, the daughter of the Georgian prince Demetrius and later wife of sebastokrator Isaac Komnenos. Zoë also perished in 1050, and by that point Constantine's health had declined substantially as well: his arthritis was so severe as to render him incapable of walking unassisted.

In 1050 or soon after, Constantine took the extraordinary step of substantially debasing the nomisma, from 24 karats to 18. The reasons for this policy remain obscure; likely it was a way of reducing the pay of inactive theme soldiers while compensating for a large budget deficit. Whatever motivated this action it was received without protest, unlike the much smaller debasement which took place under 100 years before under Nikephoros II Phokas; though much smaller, Nikephoros's currency debasement led to riots and had to be repealed.

It is in this later period of his reign that Constantine is also charged with demobilizing a large portion of the Eastern empire's standing army. Scylitzes, Kekaumenos, and Attaleiates all accuse Constantine of dismantling the Iberian theme, permanently relieving 50,000 standing troops in Armenia of their military duties at exactly the moment the empire had greatest need of them. Whether this was a mere fiscalization (i.e. an instance of the conversion of strateia from a military obligation to a tax, an ongoing process in the 11th century) or a genuine disarmament is unclear, as are the motives for this change and its true scope. The contemporary sources are universal in ascribing this decision to Constantine's greed, but this is a historiographic convention applied whenever a new tax is imposed; it is likely the motive was financial. In later years many of Constantine's contemporaries looked back at this moment as the ultimate cause of the disaster at Manzikert.

In 1053, the Normans overcame the Byzantine forces led by Argyrus in Southern Italy before the Byzantines could join with the forces of the Pope. Captured by the Normans, Pope Leo IX sent delegates to Constantinople with intent of allying against the Normans, but instead of normalizing Papal-Byzantine relations, this embassy served to fracture them.

Great Schism

In the year 1054 the tensions between the Patriarch of Constantinople Michael Keroularios and Pope Leo IX reached their boiling point, and personal papal legates of Leo arrived in Constantinople. Constantine warmly received the legates, who before long were openly feuding with Keroularios and the monks of Constantinople. During this feud Leo died, but instead of returning to Rome, they remained in the City with Constantine's encouragement. Constantine urged Keroularios to restore communion between the churches but the patriarch refused. The conflict culminated in the legates issuing an excommunication and placing the bull on the altar of the Hagia Sophia. Keroularios excommunicated the legates. The conflict persisted into late 1054 with more anathematizations following, and ultimately the hopes of Papal-Byzantine alliance in Southern Italy were dashed. Within a few years, the Pope would ally with the Normans instead.

Constantine fell ill in late 1054 and died on 11 January of the following year. During his sickness he was persuaded by his councilors, chiefly the logothetes tou dromou John, to ignore the rights of the elderly Theodora, daughter of Constantine VIII, and to pass the throne to the doux of Bulgaria, Nikephoros Proteuon. However, Theodora was recalled from her retirement and named empress.

Administration and legal reform

Inflation of the urban aristocracy

During his reign Constantine substantially expanded the urban aristocracy by his liberal gifts of titles. Indeed, entire new classes of titles and ranks were created whole cloth — thus the previously high-ranking proedros was now outranked by the prōtoproedros ("first among proedroi"). In the first place, the sheer number of new elites was unprecedented; so large was their number that the pensions or roga due to these title-holders became an encumbrance on the treasury. In previous centuries these titles functioned as government bonds, bought at a high up-front cost but paying for themselves partly by their pension and partly by their prestige. Constantine disrupted this normal functioning by lowering the price of titles, by giving titles away for free to secure political connections, and by decreasing the relative prestige of titles.

Not only was the volume of new title-holders unprecedented, but so was their composition. Constantine enfranchised the merchant elite of the professional guilds — higher-status professionals such as silk merchants who did not work with their hands. This outraged the old urban aristocracy; Psellos — himself of a merchant elite background — wrote that "The doors of the Senate were thrown open to the rascally vagabonds of the market".

Legal reform

By end of the tenth century, the power of the strategoi over the themes was being rivaled by the parallel civilian administration at whose head sat a judge (krites) or magistrate (praitor). But, unlike the theme commanders, these civilian administrators had no central administrator to whom they reported. To remedy this situation, Constantine created the office of epi ton kriseon, a kind of 'head judge' or 'verdict inspector'.

Parallel to the changes he instituted in administration of justice, Constantine attempted to reform the training of lawyers and judges. By his time the courts had moved far from the Justinianic ideal; even the ninth-century Basilika had fallen out of use. The judges of Constantine's times might consult the newly produced Peira of Eustathios Rhomaios, a compilation of cases from the early 11th century, or simply be expected to learn on the job. Constantine identified the root cause of this perceived deficiency as the lackluster legal education offered by the guild of notaries and sought its remedy in the foundation of a law school: in 1046, he re-founded the University of Constantinople by creating the Departments of Law and Philosophy, giving the direction of the law school to John Xiphilinus under the new title nomophylax. This seemingly commonsense measure drew intense opposition. On the one hand the guild of notaries was slighted, as were the teachers of rhetoric and philosophy who felt Xiphilinus's pupils would be preferred to theirs in the imperial administration. On the other hand, the high court judges of the Hippodrome saw Xiphilinos's teaching as too academic for the needs of the empire. In 1050 Xiphilinus retired to a monastery, and the law school built around him disappears from the historical record.

The school operated in Mangana, at the Eastern tip of Constantinople, which was also the site of a monastery and church founded by the emperor. Constantine patronized the Church and monasteries more broadly, including the Nea Mone of Chios and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This latter had been substantially destroyed in 1009 by Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah. Romanos III had secured the right to undertake such a restoration in a treaty with al-Hakim's son al-Zahir, but it was Constantine who finally set the project in motion, funding the reconstruction of the Church and other Christian establishments in the Holy Land. Constantine also provided the funds for the Hagia Sophia to celebrate the liturgy daily, rather than on Saturday and Sunday as had been customary.

Rural administration

Constantine seems to have taken recourse to the pronoia system, a sort of Byzantine feudal contract in which tracts of land (or the tax revenue from it) were granted to particular individuals in exchange for contributing to and maintaining military forces.

Arts and culture

In the years 1042–1050, Constantine kept a small group of intellectuals in his inner circle, including Michael Psellos, John Mauropous, John Xiphilinus, and Constantine Leichoudes. These men, especially Psellos, were the leading lights of the Macedonian Renaissance, and their role in governance has sometimes been called the "Philosophers' regime".

After the disintegration of this governmental clique following the death of Zoë, Psellos continued in the philosophy department of the university, leading an intellectual movement that advocated for returning to ancient Greek and even Neoplatonic philosophy. Other intellectual currents of the time include the reception of the mystical teachings of St Symeon the New Theologian following his canonization and the new poetry of Christopher of Mytilene.

The material arts continued to thrive under Constantine IX and the empire economic prosperity. Psellos's Chronographia records the marvelous gardens of the Mangana complex. Constantine had himself depicted in mosaic on the walls of the Hagia Sophia and in the Cloisonné enamel-work of the Monomachus Crown.