“After all this running about, the council itself will be a relief,” he told the Master of Offices one cold February day.
“That’s as it should be,” Lakhanodrakon replied calmly. “Let the country bumpkins from Sicily or Rome see the proper way to do things. If everything is planned well in advance, it will go properly when the crucial moment comes and there’s no more time for planning.”
“You’re not the one getting blisters,” Argyros muttered, too low for his boss to hear. But that was unfair, and he knew it. Lakhanodrakon was doing enough work for two men, each half his age. The first bishops began arriving in mid-April, a bit earlier than the Master of Offices had expected. Thanks to his elaborate preparations, though, they were housed without difficulty. There were representatives from all five patriachates: that of Constantinople, of course, and Antioch, Jerusalem, Rome, and Alexandria. The Alexandrian contingent, led by Arsakios himself, was the last sizable one to reach the imperial capital. The Egyptians virtually took over the monastery of Stoudios, in the southwestern part of the city. They behaved as if it were a citadel under siege, not a place of worship and contemplation. Muscular monks armed with very stout walking sticks constantly patrolled the grounds, glowering at passersby.
“Egyptians!” Lakhanodrakon snorted when that was reported to him. “They always act as though they think it would pollute them to have anything to do with anyone else.”
“Yes, sir,” Argyros said, but inside he wondered. He had watched Arsakios disembarking from his ship. The patriarch of Alexandria had been friendly enough then, distributing blessings and coppers among the longshoremen and other dock laborers at the Theodosian harbor. The grin on his foxily handsome face, in fact, had been enough to rouse the magistrianos’s ever-ready suspicions. But diligent checking had turned up nothing more incriminating than the fact that Arsakios had brought a woman with him. If only the priests who held to their vows of celibacy were allowed to take part in the ecumenical council, Argyros thought, Nikephoros could hold it in St. Mouamet’s little church, not Hagia Sophia. Nevertheless, he filed the information away. No telling when a hint of scandal might come in handy.
The Emperor and his courtiers gathered in the Augusteion to greet the assembled prelates before they went into the great church and called the council to order. Argyros stood in the first rank of the magistrianoi, behind George Lakhanodrakon, whose position of honor was at the left hand of Nikephoros Ill’s seat.
NikephorosIII , Autocrat and Emperor of the Romans, rose from his portable throne and bowed to the hundreds of clerics in the square. They in their turn performed the proskynesis before him, going down to their knees and then their bellies as they prostrated themselves. Sunlight flashed from cloth-of-gold and pearls, shimmered off watered silks, was drunk by plain black wool.
After the bishops, priests, and monks had acknowledged the Emperor’s sovereignty as vicegerent of God on earth, most of Nikephoros’s courtiers went back to their duties. Several magistrianoi, however, Argyros among them, accompanied Lakhanodrakon as they followed Nikephoros into Hagia Sophia. The churchmen came after them.
The atrium of the great church was magnificent enough, with its forest of marble columns, their acanthus capitals bound with gilded brass. Then the clerics passed through the exonarthex into the nave, and Argyros heard gasps. He smiled to himself. Throughout the Empire, churches were modeled after Hagia Sophia. The models and their prototype, however, were not identical.
For one thing, Hagia Sophia was huge. Counting the side aisles, the open space under the dome was about eighty yards square; that dome itself reached sixty yards above the floor. With forty-two windows all around the base admitting bright beams of light, the golden mosaic and cross in the dome seemed to float above the rest of the church, as if, as Prokopios had written, it were suspended on a chain from the sky.
Justinian had lavished the wealth of the entire Empire on the church. Rare marble and other stone faced the columns and walls: white-veined black from the Bosporos, two shades of green from Hellas, porphyry out of Egypt, yellow marble from Libya, red and white marble from Isauria, multicolored stone from Phrygia. All the lamps were silver.
Before the altar, itself of solid gold, stood the iconstasis with its images of Christ, the Virgin, and the Apostles. Another portrait of Christ ornamented the crimson altar curtain; He was flanked by Paul and Mary. It hurt Argyros to think of destroying such beauty, but he heard some of the bishops hiss when they saw the icons and other divine images.
The Emperor ascended the pulpit. His courtiers stayed inconspicuously in one of the side aisles, while the churchmen gathered in the central worship area.
NikephorosIII waited for silence. He was the one man recognizable to everyone in the empire, for his features appeared on every coin, gold, silver, or copper. He was between Argyros and Lakhanodrakon in age and, like the Master of Offices, had the heavy features and strong nose associated with Armenian blood.
“Dissension, friends, is the worst enemy our holy church knows,” Nikephoros declared. His words echoed in the church; he was a soldier-Emperor, used to pitching his voice to carry on the field. He went on, “When this controversy over images came to our notice, we ached in our soul; it is unbecoming for religious men to be in discord, as you are properly men of peace. Thus we have summoned you together for this council. Examine the reasons behind your turmoil, and with the help of the Holy Spirit seek an end to it, and to the evil designs of Satan, who through envy creates the disturbances among you. Hear now the words of Constantinople’s holy patriarch Eutropios, who shall convey to you the thoughts that have occurred to us concerning the propriety of icons.”
Eutropios began his statement, which Nikephoros and his officials intended as the point of departure for the council. Argyros was pleased to hear two or three phrases from his own little treatise in the patriarch’s oration.
The clerics gave Eutropios varying amounts of attention. Many of those from the lands close to Constantinople—from the Balkans or western Asia Minor—were already familiar with his arguments. The western bishops, those under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Rome, could be expected to follow-along. Ever since ConstansII had installed his own candidate on the Roman patriarchal throne to replace the pope who fled over the Alps to the Franks, Rome remained subservient to Constantinople. The clerics about whom Argyros worried came from the three eastern patriarchates. Even aside from the heretical tendencies in their sees, the prelates of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem still looked on Constantinople as an upstart town a thousand years after its founding. The magistrianos stiffened. “Look there,” he hissed to George Lakhanodrakon, pointing into the delegation of Arsakios of Alexandria. “That’s Sasopis! The skinny fellow there, next to the bishop in the green robe.”
“Do the best you can to keep an eye on him,” the Master of Offices said. “It wouldn’t do to drag him out of the opening session of the council in chains.”
“No,” Argyros admitted reluctantly. “But what’s he doing with Arsakios? Alexandria’s already had its synod on icons.” He stopped. “What did that synod decide?”
“I don’t recall hearing,” Lakhanodrakon said. He ran his hands over his bald pate, adding in a worried tone, “We’re about to find out, I think.”
Indeed, Eutropios was running down: “Just as Christ’s two natures are linked by a single will, may everyone be joined in concord at the close of our discussions here.”