AttilaAttila, 19th-century painting.Dagli Orti—REX/Shutterstock.com
With Zeno’s death and the accession of the Roman civil servant Anastasius I (ruled 491–518), Isaurian occupation of the imperial office ended, but it was not until 498 that the forces of the new emperor effectively took the measure of Isaurian resistance. After the victory of that year, the loyal subject of the Eastern Roman emperor could breathe easily: Isaurians had been used to beat Germans, but the wild mountain folk had, in their turn, failed to take permanent possession of the imperial office. Imperial authority had maintained its integrity in the East while the Western Empire had dissolved into a number of successor states: the Angles and Saxons had invaded Britain as early as 410; the Visigoths had possessed portions of Spain since 417; the Vandals had entered Africa in 429; the Franks, under Clovis I, had begun their conquest of central and southern Gaul in 481; and Theodoric was destined to rule in Italy until 526.
Anastasius IAnastasius I, portrait on the obverse side of a coin.CNG coins (http://www.cngcoins.com)
Christological controversies
If ethnic hostility within the empire was less a menace about the year 500 than it had often been in the past, dissensions stemming from religious controversy seriously threatened imperial unity, and the political history of the next century cannot be understood without some examination of the so-called Nestorian and monophysite controversies. Following the dispute over Arian Christology (the doctrine of Christ), those disputes became stigmatized as the great heresies to afflict the Eastern Empire. If the Church Fathers of the 4th century quarreled over the relations between God the Father and God the Son, those of the 5th century faced the problem of defining the relationship of the two natures—the human and the divine—within God the Son, Christ Jesus.
After Trinitarian Christianity became widely accepted as orthodoxy, Eastern Christological dispute was centred in two cities: Alexandria and Antioch. The theologians of Alexandria generally held that the divine and human natures were united indistinguishably within a single nature, though the questions of how they were related and whether in fact they were distinguishable were not settled immediately. The theologians of Antioch taught that two natures coexisted separately in Christ, the latter being “the chosen vessel of the Godhead…the man born of Mary.” In the course of the 5th century, those two contrasting theological positions became the subject of a struggle for supremacy between the rival sees of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Rome. When Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople in 428, adopted the Antiochene formula in his argument that the Virgin Mary could not rightly be called Theotokos (literally “God-bearer”), or the mother of Christ’s divine nature, he was perceived as stressing the human nature of Christ to the neglect of the divine. His opponents—first the Alexandrian patriarch, Cyril, and later Cyril’s successor, Dioscorus, and a monk named Eutyches—in reaction stressed Christ’s divinity and its relationship with Christ’s human nature through the Incarnation. Cyril and Dioscorus became exemplary advocates of the Christological position called miaphysitism, which held, in Cyril’s words, that in Christ the human and the divine were incarnated within a single (Greek mia) nature (physis). Eutyches took the more-radical position, in denouncing so-called Nestorianism, that Christ’s divinity was greatly more significant than, and overwhelmed, his human nature. Neither Cyril nor Dioscorus held that position, and with the latter’s approval Eutyches was anathematized. Eutyches soon convinced Dioscorus (apparently via subterfuge) that he had seen the error of his ways and recanted his perspective on Christ’s humanity; Dioscorus subsequently endorsed Eutyches (causing some controversy) for reinstatement to the Christian fold.
Meanwhile, the claim of the Roman church was made by Pope Leo I, who in contrast declared for dyophysitism—i.e., the Christological position that two natures, perfect and perfectly distinct, existed in the single person of Christ. That struggle for power and legitimacy between Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome came to a head at the Council of Chalcedon (451). There the pope’s view triumphed, thanks to the support of Constantinople, which condemned both Nestorius for his extreme emphasis on the human nature of Christ and Eutyches (and, by extension, Dioscorus) for Eutyches’ purported monophysitism.
Leo I, detail of a miniature from the menologion of Basil II, 10th century; in the Vatican Library (Vat. Gr. 1613 folio 412)Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
Chalcedon produced an indelible effect on Christian history beyond its immediate impact upon the purported orthodoxy of the Chalcedonian churches affiliated with Rome and Constantinople. The miaphysite, or non-Chalcedonian, churches—particularly the Coptic (Egyptian) and Syrian churches within the empire—were stigmatized as heretics, a situation that was not resolved until formal discussions in the late 20th century resolved many of the ancient disputes. (Ironically, both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches invoked Cyril in their claims to Christian orthodoxy.)
More important for the purposes of military and political history than the theological details of the conflict was the impact miaphysitism produced on the several regions of the Mediterranean world. Partly because it provided a formula to express resistance to Constantinople’s imperial rule, miaphysitism persisted in Egypt and Syria. Until those two provinces were lost to Islam in the 7th century, each Eastern emperor had to somehow cope with their separatist tendencies as expressed in the heresy. He had either to take arms against miaphysitism and attempt to extirpate it by force, to formulate a creed that would somehow blend it with dyophysitism, or to frankly adopt this position as his own belief. None of those three alternatives proved successful, and religious hostility was not the least of the disaffections that led Egypt and Syria to yield, rather readily, to the Arab conqueror. If ever the East Roman emperor was to reassert his authority in the West, he necessarily had to discover a formula that would satisfy Western orthodoxy while not alienating non-Chalcedonian Christians. The empire at the end of the 5th century
In the reign of Anastasius I (491–518), all those tendencies of the 5th century found their focus: the sense of Romanitas, which demanded a Roman rather than an Isaurian or a German emperor, the conflict between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches, and the persisting economic prosperity of the Eastern Roman Empire. Acclaimed and elected as the Roman and Orthodox emperor who would end both the hated hegemony of the Isaurians and the detested activity of the purported monophysites, Anastasius succeeded in the first of those objectives while failing in the second. While he defeated the Isaurians and transported many of them from their Anatolian homeland into Thrace, he gradually came to support non-Chalcedonian Christianity despite the professions of Orthodoxy he had made upon the occasion of his coronation. If his policies won him followers in Egypt and Syria, they alienated his Orthodox subjects and led, finally, to constant unrest and civil war.