supported himself against the envy of his equals, the discontent
of a powerful faction, and the assaults of his foreign and domestic
enemies. The Catholics, who accuse his religious innovations,
are obliged to confess that they were undertaken with temper
and conducted with firmness. Their silence respects the wisdom
of his administration and the purity of his manners. After a
reign of twenty-four years, he peaceably expired in the palace
of Constantinople ; and the purple which he had acquired was
transmitted, by the right of inheritance, to the third generation.
Constantine V. Copronymos. A.D. 741 [740], June 18 In a long reign of thirty-four years, the son and successor of Leo, Constantine the Fifth, surnamed Copronymus,[1] attacked, with less temperate zeal, the images or idols of the church. Their votaries have exhausted the bitterness of religious gall in their portrait of this spotted panther, this antichrist, this flying dragon of the serpent's seed, who surpassed the vices of pjlagabalus and Nero. His reign was a long butchery of what- ever was most noble, or holy, or innocent, in his empire. In person, the emperor assisted at the execution of his victims, surveyed their agonies, listened to their groans, and indulged, without satiating, his appetite for blood; a plate of noses was accepted as a grateful offering, and his domestics were often scourged or mutilated by the royal hand. His surname was derived from his pollution of his baptismal font.[2] The infant might be excused; but the manly pleasures of Copronymus degraded him below the level of a brute; his lust confounded the eternal distinctions of sex and species; and he seemed to extract some unnatural delight from the objects most offensive to human sense. In his religion, the Iconoclast was an Heretic, a Jew, a Mahometan, a Pagan, and an Atheist; and his belief of an invisible power could be discovered only in his magic rites, human victims, and nocturnal sacrifices to Venus and the daemons of antiquity. His life was stained with the most opposite vices, and the ulcers which covered his body anticipated before his death the sentiment of hell-tortures. Of these accusations, which I have so patiently copied, a part is refuted by its own absurdity; and, in the private anecdotes of
- ↑ [(For Constantine's reign see also cap. .xiix. , liii. , liv.) At the very outset of his reign Constantine's throne was endangered by the rebellion of his brother-in-law, Artavasdus, Count of the Opsikian Theme, who possessed much influence in the Armeniac Theme. Constantine lost Constantinople for nearly two years, A.D. 741-3, but finally vanquished Artavasdus and his sons in a brilliant campaign. It is to be observed that the Patriarch Anastasius supported Artavasdus, who restored image worship. For the chronology of Constantine's reign, see Appendix 9.]
- ↑ [More probably, like his other surname Kaballinos, from his devotion to the stables (Ranke).]
