Diplomacy gone to seed: a history of Byzantine foreign relations, A.D. 1047-57

International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2004 by Paul A. Blaum

    Who needs pearls with a skin as fair as yours
    What price gold with hair as blond as yours.
    Precious stones are just a bore
    With riches such as yours
    A plague on the base world
    Now that you have a realm such as yours.

Christopher's encomium is more than corroborated by Michael Psellus, the Emperor's friend and adviser (and impartial observer):

    His beauty, we are told, was that of Achilles or Nireus. But
    whereas, in the case of these heroes, the poet's language, having in
    imagination endowed them with a body compounded of all manner of
    beauties, barely sufficed to their description, with Constantine it
    was different, for Nature, having formed him in reality, and brought
    him to perfection, with the fine skill of the sculptor shaped him
    and made him beautiful, surpassing with her own peculiar art the
    imaginative effort of the poet. And when she had made each of his
    limbs proportioned to the rest of his body, his head and the parts
    that go with it, his hands and the parts that go with them, his
    thighs and his feet, she shed over of them severally the colour that
    befitted them. His head she made ruddy as the sun, but all his
    breast, and his lower parts down to his feet, together with their
    corresponding back parts, she coloured the purest white all over,
    with exquisite accuracy. When he was in his prime, before his limbs
    lost their virility, anyone who cared to look at him closely would
    have likened his head to the sun in its glory, so radiant was it,
    and his hair to the rays of the sun, while in the rest of his body
    he would have seen the purest and most translucent crystal. His
    personal characteristics, too, contributed to the general harmony of
    the man, his refined speech, his charming conversation, and a
    singularly attractive smile which exercised an immediate fascination
    over those who saw him." (4)

In his scheme of governance, Constantine IX was considered by many to be a purely civilian emperor whose chief focus of attention was the court and Constantinople. It seems true enough that Constantine's reign and that of his immediate successors, Theodora and Michael VI Stratioticus, show an overall continuity in both domestic and foreign policy. The losers under their system were the military aristocrats, particularly those of Asia Minor, while the civilian or bureaucratic party came increasingly to dominate the government and direct its actions. So at least has been canonical view of historians until recently. Upon closer examination, we see that the line of demarcation between military and bureaucratic parties in Byzantium cannot be drawn so sharply and that Constantine IX may have had entertained a more coherent, holistic policy of reordering the state than has been supposed up until now. Without question, his reign was characterized by severe internal tensions within the Empire, exacerbated by various stresses--some financial, some religious, some ethnic. But these conflicts might have been far less destructive in their consequences had not the outside world become so much more volatile and dangerous in the thirteen years that he ruled. Once the Seljuk Turks plunged into Byzantine Armenia and discovered its vulnerability to attack, the balance of power changed forever in the Middle East. Thus, immediate adjustments were demanded of a system that had hitherto seemed to be in good repair. Because this ominous paradigm shift occurred under Constantine's watch, his own generation and those that followed held him accountable. Few disputed the verdict of John Zonaras a century later: "That man [Constantine IX] will be judged responsible by the impartially minded for the subjection of the eastern parts of the Empire by the barbarian spear." (5) How much of the Emperor's ill-starred legacy can be traced to his own foreign relations is a question requiring careful analysis. Michael Psellus tells us: