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Justinian
II (Greek: Ιουστινιανός
Β΄, Ioustinianos II, Latin: Justinianus
II) (669 – 11 December 711), surnamed the Rhinotmetos or Rhinotmetus (ὁ
Ῥινότμητος, "the slit-nosed"), was the last Byzantine
Emperor of the Heraclian
Dynasty, reigning from 685 to 695 and again from 705 to 711.
Justinian II was an ambitious and passionate ruler who was keen to
restore the Empire to its former glories, but he responded poorly to
any opposition to his will and lacked the finesse of his father,Constantine
IV. Consequently, he
generated enormous opposition to his reign, and it resulted in his
deposition in 695 in a popular uprising, and he only returned to the
throne in 705 with the help of a Bulgar and Slav army.
His second reign was even more despotic than the first, and it too
saw his eventual overthrow in 711, abandoned by his army who turned
on him before killing him.
First reign
Justinian II
was the eldest son of Emperor Constantine
IV and Anastasia. His
father raised him to the throne as joint emperor in 681 on the fall
of his uncles Heraclius and Tiberius. In
685, at the age of sixteen, Justinian II succeeded his father as
sole emperor.
Due to
Constantine IV's victories, the situation in the Eastern provinces
of the Empire was stable when Justinian ascended the throne. After
a preliminary strike against the Arabs in Armenia, Justinian
managed to augment the sum paid by theUmayyad Caliphs as
an annual tribute, and to regain control of part of Cyprus. The
incomes of the provinces of Armenia and
Iberia were divided among the two empires. In
687, as part of his agreements with the Caliphate, Justinian removed
from their native Lebanon 12,000
Christian Maronites,
who continually resisted the Arabs. Additional
resettlement efforts, aimed at the Mardaites and
inhabitants of Cyprus allowed Justinian to reinforce naval forces
depleted by earlier conflicts.
Justinian
took advantage of the peace in the East to regain possession of the Balkans,
which were before then almost totally under the heel of Slavic tribes. In
687 Justinian transferred cavalry troops from Anatolia to Thrace.
With a great military campaign in 688–689, Justinian defeated the Bulgars of Macedonia and
was finally able to enter Thessalonica,
the second most important Byzantine city in Europe.
The subdued
Slavs were resettled in Anatolia, where they were to provide a
military force of 30,000 men. Emboldened
by the increase of his forces in Anatolia, Justinian now renewed the
war against the Arabs. With
the help of his new troops, Justinian won a battle against the enemy
in Armenia in 693, but they were soon bribed to revolt by the Arabs.
The result was that Justinian was comprehensively defeated at the Battle
of Sebastopolis, caused
by the defection of most of his Slavic troops, while he himself was
forced to flee to the Propontis. There,
according to Theophanes, he
took out his frustration by slaughtering as many of the Slavs in and
around Opsikion as
he could lay his hands on. In
the meantime, aPatrician by
the name of Symbatius proceeded to rebel in Armenia, and
opened up the province to the Arabs, who proceeded to conquer it in
694–695.
Meanwhile
the Emperor's bloody persecution of the Manichaeans and
suppression of popular traditions of non-Orthodox origin caused
dissension within the Church. In
692 Justinian convened the so-called Quinisext
Council at
Constantinople to put his religious policies into effect. The
Council expanded and clarified the rulings of the Fifth and Sixth
ecumenical councils, but by highlighting differences between the
Eastern and Western observances (such as the marriage of priests and
the Roman practice of fasting on Saturdays) the council compromised
Byzantine relations with the Roman
Church. The emperor
ordered Pope
Sergius I arrested,
but the militias of Rome and Ravenna rebelled
and took the Pope's side.
Justinian
contributed to the development of the thematic organization of the
Empire, creating a new theme of Hellas in
southern Greece and numbering the heads of the five major themes- Thrace in
Europe, Opsikion,
the Anatolikon,
andArmeniakon themes
in Asia Minor, and the maritime corps of the Karabisianoi-
among the senior administrators of the Empire. He
also sought to protect the rights of peasant freeholders, who served
as the main recruitment pool for the armed forces of the Empire,
against attempts by the aristocracy to acquire their land- putting
him in direct conflict with some of the largest landholders in the
Empire.
If his land
policies threatened the aristocracy, his tax policy was no more
popular with the common people. Through
his agents Stephen and Theodotos, the emperor raised the funds to
gratify his sumptuous tastes and his mania for erecting costly
buildings. This, ongoing
religious discontent, conflicts with the aristocracy, and
displeasure over his resettlement policy eventually drove his
subjects into rebellion. In
695 the population rose under Leontios,
the strategos of
Hellas, and proclaimed him Emperor. Justinian
was deposed and his nose
was cut off (later
replaced by a solid gold replica of his original) to prevent his
again seeking the throne: such mutilation was common
in Byzantine culture. He was exiled to Chersonin
the Crimea. Leontius,
after a reign of three years, was in turn dethroned and imprisoned
by Tiberius
Apsimarus, who next assumed the throne.
Exile
While in
exile, Justinian began to plot and gather supporters for an attempt
to retake the throne. Justinian
became a liability to Cherson and the authorities decided to return
him to Constantinople in 702 or 703. He
escaped from Cherson and received help from Ibusirus
Gliabanus (Busir
Glavan), the khagan of
the Khazars,
who received him enthusiastically and gave him his sister as a
bride. Justinian renamed
her Theodora,
after the wife of Justinian
I. They were given a
home in the town of Phanagoria,
at the entrance to the sea of Azov. Busir was offered a bribe by
Tiberios to kill his brother-in-law, and dispatched two Khazar
officials, Papatzys and Balgitzin,
to do the deed. Warned by
his wife, Justinian strangled Papatzys and Balgatzin with his own
hands. He sailed in a
fishing-boat to Cherson,
summoned his supporters, and they all sailed westwards across the Black
Sea.
As the ship
bearing Justinian sailed along the northern coast of the Black Sea,
he and his crew became caught up in a storm somewhere between the
mouths of the Dniester and
the Dnieper
Rivers. While it was
raging, one of his companions reached out to Justinian saying that
if he promised God that he would be magnanimous, and not seek
revenge on his enemies when he was returned to the throne, they
would all be spared. Justinian
retorted, “If I spare a single one of them, may God drown me here”.
Having
survived the storm, Justinian next approached Tervel
of Bulgaria. Tervel
agreed to provide all the military assistance necessary for
Justinian to regain his throne in exchange for financial
considerations, the award of a Caesar's
crown, and the hand of Justinian's daughter, Anastasia, in marriage. In
spring 705, with an army of 15,000 Bulgar and Slav horsemen
Justinian appeared before the walls of Constantinople. For
three days, Justinian tried to convince the citizens of
Constantinople to open the gates, but to no avail. Unable
to take the city by force, he and some companions entered through an
unused water
conduit under the
walls of the city, roused their supporters, and seized control of
the city in a midnight coup d'état. Justinian
once more ascended the throne, breaking the tradition preventing the
mutilated from Imperial rule. After tracking down his predecessors,
he had his rivals Leontius and Tiberios brought in chains before
Justinian in the Hippodrome,
now wearing a golden nasal prosthesis. There,
before a jeering populace, Justinian placed his feet on the necks of
Tiberios and Leontios in a symbolic gesture of subjugation before
ordering their execution by beheading, followed by many of their
partisans, as well as
deposing, blinding and exiling Patriarch
Kallinikos I of Constantinople to Rome.
Second reign
His second
reign was marked by unsuccessful warfare against Bulgaria and the
Caliphate, and by cruel suppression of opposition at home. In
708 Justinian turned on Bulgarian Khan Tervel,
whom he had earlier crowned Caesar,
and invaded Bulgaria, apparently seeking to recover the territories
ceded to Tervel as a reward for his support in 705. The
Emperor was defeated, blockaded in Anchialus,
and forced to retreat. Peace
between Bulgaria and Byzantium was quickly restored. This defeat was
followed by Arab victories in Asia Minor, where the cities of Cilicia fell
into the hands of the enemy, who penetrated into Cappadocia in
709–711.
Justinian
was more interested in punishing his subjects at Ravenna and Cherson. He
ordered Pope
John VII to recognize
the decisions of the Quinisext Council and simultaneously fitted out
a punitive
expedition against
Ravenna in 709 under the command of the Patrician Theodore. The
repression succeeded, and the new Pope
Constantine visited
Constantinople in 710, giving in to some of the Emperor's demands
and restoring relations between the Emperor and the Papacy. This
would be the last time a Pope visited the city until the visit of Pope
Paul VI to Istanbul in
1967.
Justinian's
tyrannical rule provoked another uprising against him. Cherson
revolted and under the leadership of the exiled general Bardanes,
the city held out against a counter-attack and soon the forces sent
to suppress the rebellion joined it. The
rebels then seized the capital and proclaimed Bardanes as Emperor
Philippicus; Justinian
had been on his way to Armenia, and was unable to return to
Constantinople in time to defend it. He
was arrested and executed outside the city in December 711, his head
being sent to Bardanes as a trophy.
On hearing
the news of his death, Justinian's mother took his six-year-old son
and co-emperor, Tiberius, to sanctuary at St.
Mary's Church in Blachernae, but was pursued by Philippicus'
henchmen, who dragged the child from the altar and, once outside the
church, murdered him, thus eradicating the line of Heraclius.
Legacy
Justinian’s
reign saw the continued slow and ongoing process of transformation
of the Byzantine Empire, as the traditions inherited from the
ancient Latin Roman state were gradually being eroded. This is most
clearly seen in the coinage of Justinian’s reign, which saw the
reintroduction of the Loros,
the traditional consular costume that had not been seen on Imperial
coinage for a century, while the office itself had not been
celebrated for nearly half a century. This
was linked to Justinian’s decision to unify the office of consul with
that of emperor thus making the Emperor the head of state not only
de facto but also de jure. Although the office of the consulate
would continue to exist until Emperor Leo
VI the Wise formally
abolished it with Novel 94, it
was Justinian who effectively brought the consulate as a separate
political entity to an end. He was formally appointed as Consul in
686, and from that point,
Justinian II adopted the title of consul for all the Julian years of
his reign, consecutively numbered.
Though at
times done in by his own despotic tendencies, Justinian was a
talented and perceptive ruler who succeeded in improving the
standing of the Byzantine Empire. A
pious ruler, Justinian was the first emperor to include the image of
Christ on coinage issued in his name and
attempted to outlaw various pagan festivals and practices that
persisted in the Empire. He
may have self-consciously modelled himself on his namesake, Justinian
I, as seen in his
enthusiasm for large-scale construction projects and the renaming of
his Khazar wife with the name of Theodora. Among
the building projects he undertook was the creation of the triklinos,
an extension to the imperial palace, a
decorative cascade fountain located at the Augusteum,
and a new Church of the Virgin at Petrion.
Family
By his first
wife Eudokia,
Justinian II had at least one daughter:
By his
second wife, Theodora
of Khazaria, Justinian II had a son:
Fictional Account
Justinian, a 1998 novel by science fiction author, and
Byzantine scholar, Harry
Turtledove, writing under the name HN Turtletaub, gives a
fictionalized version of Justinian's life as retold by a fictional
lifelong companion the soldier Myakes. In the novel, Turtledove
speculates that while in exile Justinian had reconstructive surgery
done to fix his damaged nose.
Sources
Primary Sources
Theophanes, Chronographia.
