Justinian II., the last of the house of Heraclius, was a sovereign of a
 different type from any emperor that we have yet encountered in the annals
 of the Eastern Empire. He was a bold, reckless, callous, and selfish young
 man, with a firm determination to assert his own individuality and have
 his own way,--he was, in short, of the stuff of which tyrants are made.
 Justinian was but seventeen when he came to the throne, but he soon showed
 that he intended to rule the empire after his own good pleasure long
 before he had begun to learn the lessons of state-craft.
 
 Ere he had reached his twenty-first year Justinian had plunged into war
 with the Bulgarians. He attacked them suddenly, inflicted several defeats
 on their king, and took no less than thirty thousand prisoners, whom he
 sent over to Asia, and forced to enlist in the army of Armenia. He next
 picked a quarrel with the Saracen Caliph on the most frivolous grounds.
 The annual tribute due by the treaty of 679 had hitherto been paid in
 Roman _solidi_, but in 692 Abdalmalik tendered it in new gold coins of his
 own mintage, bearing verses of the Koran. Justinian refused to receive
 them, and declared war.
 
 His second venture in the field was disastrous: his unwilling recruits
 from Bulgaria deserted to the enemy, when he met the Saracens at
 Sebastopolis in Cilicia, and the Roman army was routed with great
 slaughter. The two subsequent campaigns were equally unsuccessful, and the
 troops of the Caliph harried Cappadocia far and wide.
 
 Justinian's wars depleted his treasury; yet he persisted in plunging into
 expensive schemes of building at the same time, and was driven to collect
 money by the most reckless extortion. He employed two unscrupulous
 ministers, Theodotus, the accountant general--an ex-abbot who had deserted
 his monastery--and the eunuch Stephanus, the keeper of the privy purse.
 These men were to Justinian what Ralph Flambard was to William Rufus, or
 Empson and Dudley to Henry VII: they raised him funds by flagrant
 extortion and illegal stretching of the law. Both were violent and cruel:
 Theodotus is said to have hung recalcitrant tax-payers up by ropes above
 smoky fires till they were nearly stifled. Stephanus thrashed and stoned
 every one who fell into his hands; he is reported to have actually
 administered a whipping to the empress-dowager during the absence of her
 son, and Justinian did not punish him when he returned.
 
 While the emperor's financial expedients were making him hated by the
 moneyed classes, he was rendering himself no less unpopular in the army.
 
 After his ill-success in the Saracen war, he began to execute or imprison
 his officers, and to decimate his beaten troops: to be employed by him in
 high command was almost as dangerous as it was to be appointed a
 general-in-chief during the dictatorship of Robespierre.
 
 In 695 the cup of Justinian's iniquities was full. An officer named
 Leontius being appointed, to his great dismay, general of the "theme" of
 Hellas, was about to set out to assume his command. As he parted from his
 friends he exclaimed that his days were numbered, and that he should be
 expecting the order for his execution to arrive at any moment. Then a
 certain monk named Paul stood forth, and bade him save himself by a bold
 stroke; if he would aim a blow at Justinian he would find the people and
 the army ready to follow him.
 
 Leontius took the monk's counsel, and rushing to the state prison, at the
 head of a few friends, broke it open and liberated some hundreds of
 political prisoners. A mob joined him, he seized the Cathedral of St.
 Sophia, and then marched on the palace. No one would fight for Justinian,
 who was caught and brought before the rebel leader in company with his two
 odious ministers. Leontius bade his nose be slit, and banished him to
 Cherson. Theodotus and Stephanus he handed over to the mob, who dragged
 them round the city and burnt them alive.
 
 Twenty years of anarchy followed the usurpation of Leontius. The new
 emperor was not a man of capacity, and had been driven into rebellion by
 his fears rather than his ambition. He held the throne barely three years,
 amid constant revolts at home and defeats abroad. The Asiatic frontier was
 ravaged by the armies of Abdalmalik, and at the same time a great disaster
 befel the western half of the empire. A Saracen army from Egypt forced its
 way into Africa, where the Romans had still maintained themselves by hard
 fighting while the emperors of the house of Heraclius reigned. They
 reduced all its fortresses one after the other, and finally took Carthage
 in 697--a hundred and sixty-five years after it had been restored to the
 empire by Belisarius.
 
                               
 
  Church Of The Twelve Apostles At Thessalonica. (_From "L'Art Byzantin."
                 Par Charles Bayet. Paris, Quantin, 1883._)
 
 
 The larger part of the army of Africa escaped by sea from Carthage when
 the city fell. The officers in command sailed for Constantinople, and
 during their voyage plotted to dethrone Leontius. They enlisted in their
 scheme Tiberius Apsimarus, who commanded the imperial fleet in the Aegean,
 and proclaimed him emperor when he joined them with his galleys. The
 troops of Leontius betrayed the gates of the capital to the followers of
 the rebel admiral, and Apsimarus seized Constantinople. He proclaimed
 himself emperor by the title of Tiberius, third of that name, and
 condemned his captive rival to the same fate that he himself had inflicted
 on Justinian II. Accordingly the nose of Leontius was slit, and he was
 placed in confinement in a monastery.
 
 Tiberius III. was more fortunate in his reign than his predecessor: his
 troops gained several victories over the Saracens, recovered the frontier
 districts which Justinian II. and Leontius had lost, and even invaded
 Northern Syria. But these successes did not save Tiberius from suffering
 the same doom which had fallen on Justinian and Leontius. The people and
 army were out of hand, the ephemeral emperor could count on no loyalty,
 and any shock was sufficient to upset his precarious throne.
 
 We must now turn to the banished Justinian, who had been sent into exile
 with his nose mutilated. He had been transported to Cherson, the Greek
 town in the Crimea, close to the modern Sebastopol, which formed the
 northernmost outpost of civilization, and enjoyed municipal liberty under
 the suzerainty of the empire. Justinian displayed in his day of adversity
 a degree of capacity which astonished his contemporaries. He fled from
 Cherson and took refuge with the Khan of the Khazars, the Tartar tribe who
 dwelt east of the Sea of Azof. With this prince the exile so ingratiated
 himself that he received in marriage his sister, who was baptized and
 christened Theodora. But Tiberius III. sent great sums of money to the
 Khazar to induce him to surrender Justinian, and the treacherous barbarian
 determined to accept the bribe, and sent secret orders to two of his
 officers to seize his brother-in-law. The emperor learnt of the plot
 through his wife, and saved himself by the bold expedient of going at once
 to one of the two Khazar chiefs and asking for a secret interview. When
 they were alone he fell on him and strangled him, and then calling on the
 second Khazar served him in the same fashion, before the Khan's orders had
 been divulged to any one.
 
 This gave him time to escape, and he fled in a fishing boat out into the
 Euxine with a few friends and servants who had followed him into exile.
 While they were out at sea a storm arose, and the boat began to fill. One
 of his companions cried to Justinian to make his peace with God, and
 pardon his enemies ere he died. But the Emperor's stern soul was not bent
 by the tempest. "May God drown me here," he answered, "if I spare a single
 one of my enemies if ever I get to land!" The boat weathered the storm,
 and Justinian survived to carry out his cruel oath. He came ashore in the
 land of the Bulgarians, and soon won favour with their king Terbel, who
 wanted a good excuse for invading the empire, and found it in the pretence
 of supporting the exiled monarch. With a Bulgarian army at his back
 Justinian appeared before Constantinople, and obtained an entrance at
 night near the gate of Blachernae. There was no fighting, for the adherents
 of Tiberius were as unready to strike a blow for their master as the
 followers of Leontius had been [705 A.D.]
 
 So Justinian recovered his throne without fighting, for the people had by
 this time half forgotten his tyranny, and regretted the rule of the house
 of Heraclius. But they were soon to find out that they had erred in
 submitting to the exile, and should have resisted him at all hazards.
 Justinian came back in a relentless mood, bent on nothing but revenging
 his mutilated nose and his ten years of exile. His first act was to send
 for the two usurpers who had sat on his throne: Leontius was brought out
 from his monastery, and Tiberius caught as he tried to flee into Asia.
 Justinian had them led round the city in chains, and then bound them side
 by side before his throne in the Cathisma, the imperial box at the
 Hippodrome. There he sat in state, using their prostrate bodies as a
 footstool, while his adherents chanted the verse from the ninety-first
 Psalm, "Thou shalt tread on the lion and asp: the young lion and dragon
 shalt thou trample under thy feet." The allusion was to the names of the
 usurpers, the Lion and Asp being Leontius and Apsimarus!
 
 After this strange exhibition the two ex-emperors were beheaded. Their
 execution began a reign of terror, for Justinian had his oath to keep, and
 was set on wreaking vengeance on every one who had been concerned in his
 deposition. He hanged all the chief officers and courtiers of Leontius,
 and put out the eyes of the patriarch who had crowned him. Then he set to
 work to hunt out meaner victims: many prominent citizens of Constantinople
 were sown up in sacks and drowned in the Bosphorus. Soldiers were picked
 out by the dozen and beheaded. A special expedition was sent by sea to
 sack Cherson, the city of the Emperor's exile, because he had a grudge
 against its citizens. The chief men were caught and sent to the capital,
 where Justinian had them bound to spits and roasted.
 
 These atrocities were mere samples of the general conduct of Justinian. In
 a few years he had made himself so much detested that it might be said
 that he had been comparatively popular in the days of his first reign.
 
 The end came into 711, when a general named Philippicus took arms, and
 seized Constantinople while Justinian was absent at Sinope. The army of
 the tyrant laid down their arms when Philippicus approached, and he was
 led forth and beheaded without further delay--an end too good for such a
 monster. The conqueror also sought out and slew his little son Tiberius,
 whom the sister of the Khan of the Khazars had borne to him during his
 exile. So ended the house of Heraclius, after it had sat for five
 generations and one hundred and one years on the throne of Constantinople.
 
 The six years which followed were purely anarchical. Justinian's wild and
 wicked freaks had completed the demoralization which had already set in
 before his restoration. Everything in the army and the state was
 completely disorganized and out of gear. It required a hero to restore the
 machinery of government and evolve order out of chaos. But the hero was
 not at once forthcoming, and the confusion went on increasing.
 
 To replace Justinian by Philippicus was only to substitute King Log for
 King Stork. The new emperor was a mere man of pleasure, and spent his time
 in personal enjoyment, letting affairs of state slide on as best they
 might. In less than two years he was upset by a conspiracy which placed on
 the throne Artemius Anastasius, his own chief secretary. Philippicus was
 blinded, and compelled to exchange the pleasures of the palace for the
 rigours of a monastery. But the Court intrigue which dethroned Philippicus
 did not please the army, and within two years Anastasius was overthrown by
 the soldiers of the Obsequian theme, who gave the imperial crown to
 Theodosius of Adrammytium, a respectable but obscure commissioner of
 taxes. More merciful than any of his ephemeral predecessors, Theodosius
 III. dismissed Anastasius unharmed, after compelling him to take holy
 orders.
 
 Meanwhile the organization of the empire was visibly breaking up. "The
 affairs both of the realm and the city were neglected and decaying, civil
 education was disappearing, and military discipline dissolved." The
 Bulgarian and Saracen commenced once more to ravage the frontier
 provinces, and every year their ravages penetrated further inland. The
 Caliph Welid was so impressed with the opportunity offered to him, that he
 commenced to equip a great armament in the ports of Syria with the express
 purpose of laying siege to Constantinople. No one hindered him, for the
 army raised to serve against him turned aside to engage in the civil war
 between Anastasius and Theodosius. The landmarks of the Saracens'
 conquests by land are found in the falls of the great cities of Tyana
 [710], Amasia [712], and Antioch-in-Pisidia [713]. They had penetrated
 into Phrygia by 716, and were besieging the fortress of Amorium with every
 expectation of success, when at last there appeared the man who was
 destined to save the East-Roman Empire from a premature dismemberment.
 
 This was Leo the Isaurian, one of the few military officers who had made a
 great reputation amid the fearful disasters of the last ten years. He was
 now general of the "Anatolic" theme, the province which included the old
 Cappadocia and Lycaonia. After inducing the Saracens, more by craft than
 force, to raise the siege of Amorium, Leo disowned his allegiance to the
 incapable Theodosius and marched toward the Bosphorus.
 
 The unfortunate emperor, who had not coveted the throne he occupied, nor
 much desired to retain it, allowed his army to risk one engagement with
 the troops of Leo. When it was beaten he summoned the Patriarch, the
 Senate, and the chief officers of the court, pointed out to them that a
 great Saracen invasion was impending, that civil war had begun, and that
 he himself did not wish to remain responsible for the conduct of affairs.
 With his consent the assembly resolved to offer the crown to Leo, who
 formally accepted it early in the spring of 717.
 
 Theodosius retired unharmed to Ephesus, where he lived for many years.
 When he died the single word {~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA~}, "Health," was inscribed on his tomb
 according to his last directions.