IV

ORIGO

The Birth of Europe, AD c.330–800

THERE is a sense of impending doom about most modern attempts to describe the late Roman Empire. The fact of the Empire’s decline and fall is known in advance to virtually everyone, and it is all but impossible to recreate the perspectives of those long centuries when the eventual outcome was a mystery. Voltaire dismissed the history of the late Empire as ‘ridiculous’; Gibbon wrote that he had described ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’.

Yet contemporaries could hardly have shared the viewpoint of the Enlightenment. True enough, they were very conscious of living through difficult times. Nothing is more redolent of the age than the melancholy reflections of the late Roman philosopher Boethius (c.480–525). ‘The most unfortunate sort of misfortune’, he wrote in his Consolations of Philosophy, ‘is once to have been happy.’ On the other hand, if they watched the Empire’s decline, they did not necessarily foresee its fall. For many Christians, the end of the Empire came to be synonymous with Christ’s Second Coming, with Doomsday itself. But Doomsday was so often postponed that it ceased to play a part in practical considerations. What is more, it is doubtful whether the barbarians, whose incursions were the most visible symptom of the Empire’s weakness, had any intention of destroying it. On the contrary, they wanted to share in its benefits. The shocking sack of Rome in AD 410 occurred because the Emperor had refused to settle Alaric’s Goths in the Empire. From the modern vantage-point, the real marvels to contemplate are the longevity of the Roman Empire, and the growing interdependence of the ex-Roman and the ex-barbarian worlds. In the long run, this was the interaction which gave birth to the entity called ‘Christendom’, the foundation of European civilization.

At the death of Constantine, the division of the ‘known world’ into two simple parts, the Roman and the barbarian, generally still stood. On one side of the frontier the reunited Roman Empire held firm; on the other a restless mass of peoples, largely in the tribal stage of development, tilled the forest clearings or roamed the plain. Understandably enough, most Romans saw this division in terms of black and white. For them, the Empire was ‘civilized’—that is, subject to ordered government; the barbarians were, by definition ‘uncivilized’. Though the concept of the ‘noble savage’ certainly existed—as when the captive British chief, Caractacus, had been paraded through Rome—the crossing from the Empire to the uncharted lands beyond was seen as a step from sunlight into shade.

In reality, the distinction between the Roman and the non-Roman world could never have been so stark. Roman armies regularly fought under barbarian generals, who used barbarian auxiliaries to help repel the Empire’s barbarian foes. The countries adjacent to the frontier had been exposed to Roman influence for centuries. Roman traders and artefacts penetrated far beyond the imperial frontiers. Roman coins have been unearthed throughout Germany and eastern Europe. Hoards and graves have yielded stunning Roman gold, bronze, and silver ware, at Hildesheim near Hanover, at Lubsow in Pomerania, at Trondheim in Norway, at Klajpeda in Lithuania, even in Afghanistan. Important Roman trading-stations operated as far afield as south India.1

It is equally hard to be precise about the tempo of the Roman Empire’s decline. Three grand historical processes which begin to take centre stage after Constantine were already in motion; and each of them lasted for many centuries. The first was the relentless westward drive of the barbarian peoples from Asia into Europe (see pp. 215–38). The second was the growing rift between the Western and the Eastern halves of the Roman world (see pp. 239–51). The third was the steady export of Christianity to the pagan peoples (see pp. 275–82). These three processes dominated the period which were later to be dubbed ‘the Dark Ages’. A fourth, the rise of Islam (see pp. 251–8), exploded out of distant Arabia in the seventh century, and rapidly set the southern and eastern limits within which the others could interact.

For modern readers, one main problem lies with the traditional romanocentric and christianophile perceptions of European historians whose approach to ‘the Dark Ages’ has strongly reflected both their classical education and their religious beliefs. Of course, there is no reason why one should not put oneself in the shoes of a Boethius or a Gregory of Tours, and empathize with their gloomy judgements. If one does, the sense of impending doom can only be reinforced. On the other hand, there is no reason why one perspective should be accepted to the exclusion of all others. If only the sources were more abundant, one could empathize no less properly with the experiences of the advancing barbarians, of the pagans, or of the Muslim warriors. In which case the prevailing air would probably become one of excitement, of expectation, and of promise. According to Salvian of Marseilles, many Romans of good birth and education took refuge among the Goths and the Franks, ‘seeking a Roman humanity among the barbarians, because they could no longer support barbarian inhumanity among the Romans’.2

Migrations and Settlement

In the early centuries of the first millennium, few parts of the Peninsula were inhabited by the peoples who would later settle there permanently in well-defined national ‘homelands’. Much of the population beyond the Roman frontier was on the move. Tribes and federations of tribes, large and small, conducted an unending search for better land. From time to time the pace of their wanderings would be quickened by dearth, or by the violent arrival of nomadic horsemen, in which case, having tarried for decades or even centuries in one location, they would suddenly move on to the next.

The irregular rhythms of migration depended on a complex equation involving climatic changes, food supply, demographic growth, local rivalries, distant crises. For the Romans watching anxiously on the frontier, they were entirely unpredictable. Pressures would accumulate imperceptibly, until some unforeseen event would snap the restraints. Long intervals of quiescence would alternate with short, intense surges. As always, the act of migration depended on the delicate balance between the forces of inertia, the ‘push’ of local difficulties, and the ‘pull’ of greener grass over the horizon. The critical cause of any particular displacement might lie far away on the steppes of central Asia; and a ‘shunting effect’ is clearly observable. Changes at one end of the chain of peoples could set off ripples along all the links of the chain. Like the last wagon of a train in the shunting yards, the last tribe on the western end of the chain could be propelled from its resting-place with great force.

In this regard, the Huns caused ripples in the West long before they themselves appeared. A Hunnic Empire had been destroyed by the Chinese c.36/35 BC. Thereafter the Hunnic hordes, and the herds of cattle from which they lived, were based in what is now Turkestan. Their raiding parties could easily cover a couple of thousand miles a month. Mounted on swift Mongolian ponies and armed with bows and arrows, they could ride deep into Europe or the Far East and return in the course of a single summer. Like all the true nomads, they generated a huge motive force on the agricultural or semi-nomadic peoples with whom they came into contact. In the second century AD their base shifted to the north of the Caspian Sea; in the fourth century it was shifting towards what is now Ukraine. There, in 375, they encountered the Ostrogoths, a Germanic people who, exceptionally, had been moving in the opposite direction. The resultant clash pushed the Ostrogoths, and the neighbouring Visigoths, into the Roman Empire. Within fifty years another of the associated tribes, the Alans, appeared in what is now southern Portugal—almost 3,000 miles away. The Huns did not attack the Empire themselves until 441. The rate of migration, of course, was extremely slow. The Alans, who crossed the Dnieper c.375 and the Rhine in 406, and reached the Atlantic in the 420s, averaged perhaps 5 miles per year. The ‘sudden irruption’ of the Vandals, who shared part of the Alans’ journey (see below), maintained a mean speed of 2 km per week. Tribal columns weighed down with carts, livestock, and supplies could not hope to compete with the nomads.

Map 10. Europe: Migrations

Geographical considerations played a central role. The main obstacle to the free movement of peoples was not the imperial frontier but the mountains. All the tribes following the prehistoric trail across the Eurasian steppes, if they did not turn immediately south along the Black Sea shore, were automatically channelled to the north along the European plain. After that, there were only two possible southbound turns, through the Moravian or the Bavarian Gaps. To take the southerly route involved an early military confrontation with imperial forces on the Danube. To pass along the northerly route was to follow the line of least resistance, where inertia would carry the migrants direcdy to the Rhine. For these reasons, pressure steadily mounted on the Rhine barrier, until in the third and fourth centuries a veritable traffic jam of tribes was produced. The passage through the mountains into the Danube basin was impractical for the larger convoys. But it became the chosen route of the nomads; and the lush plains of Pannonia—later named ‘Hungaria’ after the Huns—formed their natural terminus. (See pp. 232, 296,316.) [CSABA]

Another obstacle lay with tribes that were blocking the path ahead. True enough, the Peninsula had many open spaces: the density of population was very low, even in the Empire. But much was wilderness. The dense forests, sandy heaths, and sodden valleys could neither be cultivated nor easily crossed; and the migrants had to compete for finite areas of cleared or cultivable land. It was difficult for the tribes to move without coming into contact, and potential conflict, with their predecessors on the trail. As a result, the bunching and mingling of tribes in some of the choicer locations of the European plain was inevitable. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that Celts, Germans, Slavs, and others did not overlap, and sometimes intermingle. The idea of exclusive national homelands is a modern fantasy.

The fluidity of migrant tribal groupings, and the chaotic nature of their movements, did not suit the purposes of those who tried to make sense of the migrations in later times. Chroniclers and historians were tempted to write in terms of discrete, permanent, and self-conscious tribes where no such entities had necessarily existed. It is far from certain, for example, whether the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who ended up in England were quite as distinct as the Venerable Bede portrayed them (see below). Yet once they were settled, all the peoples were keen to invent a unique pedigree for themselves. All have suffered, too, from the attentions of nationalist historians in our own day, who think nothing of projecting modern identities backwards into prehistory. In the absence of alternatives, it is difficult to know how one can describe the migrations except in terms of the traditional tribes. But some awareness of the drawbacks is necessary.

Such, then, was the setting for the massive historical process which, from the standpoint of the Empire, has been called ‘the Barbarian Invasions’ and which, from the parochial standpoint of Western Europe, has often been reduced to ‘the Germanic Invasions’. To the Germans it is known as the Völkerwanderung, the ‘Wandering of Peoples’—an apt term which could well be applied to its Germanic and non-Germanic participants alike. In reality, it engulfed the greater part of the European Peninsula, East and West, and continued throughout the first millennium AD and beyond, until all the wanderers had found a permanent abode. Its main events are only known from Roman sources, since the illiterate wanderers left few records of their own. Yet here is the process from which most of the later national groupings must trace their origins. To parody a phrase from a later age, it could well be called the Drang nach Westen, the Drive to the West, the road to permanent settlement. Without it, any concept of ‘Europe’ or of ‘Europeans’ would be unrecognizable. Anthropological analysis suggests that three main types of population were involved: the settled inhabitants of the Empire, living in cities or on rural estates; the barbarian tribes, living from primitive arable or pastoral farming; and the true nomads. One must also add the sea raiders, who, like the nomads, lived largely from plunder, and who operated over huge distances in the northern seas.

CSABA

IN the vast plains of Asia—he began—lived two brave, wild tribes. They were called Huns and Magyars. When their people grew numerous, the Huns set out for a new place to settle. After many hardships, they came to a land that was green with pastures, blue with swift-flowing rivers, rich with wooded mountains. But the land was not free. It belonged to the Romans, who called it Pannonia.

The bravest of the Huns was a young prince, Attila, so they made him their king. He took more and more land, and ruled his people with an iron hand. When his wife died, leaving him with two sons, Csaba and Aladar, he boldly demanded the daughter of the Roman Emperor for his wife [and] half the Empire for the dowry.

Finally, they clashed at Katalaun. The light cavalry of the Huns swept down on the Roman army like a furious whirlwind, only to be battered to pieces on their iron-clad ranks… Placid rivers turned into rivers of blood. The “Scourge of God” was broken…. Old in spirit, he died shortly afterwards.

Then Csaba decided to take the strongest men and return to far Asia … to the Magyars. He called his people together. “Dead or alive,” he promised, “we will come to your aid if you are in danger.”

When he had left, yet another vast army of foes marched against the Huns. Endless columns of ruthless warriors swept into their stronghold. The Huns fell on their knees and prayed for Csaba. Thunder, long, deep, ever increasing thunder answered them … A sparkling white streak appeared among the stars, forming a great arch like a rainbow. With the flashing swords and battlecries of thousands of men, and the clattering hoofbeats of thousands of horses, Csaba and his warriors swept down from the sky, scattering the terror-struck enemy.

Csaba and his army of spirits came back one last time, leading the Magyars to rejoin their brothers in this beautiful land of ours. After that, he never came back. But the sparkling skyway, “the skyway of the warriors”, has remained there forever.’

Folk tales are the repository of collective memory. They were designed to entertain, but also to reinforce tribal identity. Five hundred years separated the exploits of Huns and Magyars in Hungary. Yet the latter continued to feel an affinity for their predecessors and fellow nomads. In modern times, none but a Magyar family would dream of calling their son Attila.

From the technological standpoint, it is important to note that Iron Age agriculture was reaching the point where more was to be gained by tilling the same patch of ground than by constantly moving on. The barbarians were not simply seeking an adventure in the sun. They were looking for somewhere to put down roots.

From the ethnic standpoint, the peoples of the Peninsula possessed the most variegated connections. Subject to certain reservations, however, one can say that the Indo-European element already predominated by the first half of the first millennium. The majority of inhabitants of the Empire, though not Latins or Hellenes by origin, were thoroughly latinized in the West and hellenized in the East. With some notable exceptions, the barbarian migrants belonged to one of the other main Indo-European families (see Appendix III, pp. 1232–3).

Apart from the nomads, the non-Indo-Europeans would have included members of the Uralian-Finnic group; pockets of the original Iberian tribes of Spain; remnants of the pre-Latin population in the remoter parts of Italy; and unassim-ilated elements among the Illyrians, Dacians, and Thracians of the Balkans. The Jews had spread to all the major cities of the Mediterranean. The Uralian-Finnic group of peoples had already split into its component parts. The Finns, or Suomalainen had trekked across the subarctic taiga from their starting-point in Siberia. They occupied the lands between the end of the Baltic and the upper Volga, which would later become the heart of Russia. Ethnically, they were related both to the Huns and the Magyars and to several smaller units—the Cheremiss, Mordvins, Permians, Voguls, and Ostyaks—who stayed behind in the Ural region. More distantly, they were also related to the Altaic Group which includes Turks, Mongols, and Tartars. Their neighbours, the Lapps, were already engaged in their timeless peregrinations with the arctic reindeer. The Lapps called themselves ‘Sameh’; but, in the interests of confusion, the Nordic nations usually called them ‘Finns’. Hence the later Swedish province of Finnmark.

In the Caucasus, two other fragmented groups of peoples had few known connections. The north Caucasians are made up from the Abkhaz, Chechens, and Avars; the south Caucasians from the Laz, Mingrelians, and Georgians. In the 1920s an amateur linguist of Scottish origin, who assumed the russianized name of Nikolai Yakovelitch Marr (1864–1934), invented a theory which linked these Caucasian languages with Basque, Etruscan, and ancient Hebrew, thereby tying up all the loose ends of the European ethnic scene. Unfortunately, though patronized by the greatest of all Georgians, Marr’s theory has been comprehensively disproved.

The Asian nomads penetrated the Peninsula in waves that are spread over most of recorded history. The Huns, who appeared in the fifth century AD, were successors to earlier hordes who had ridden the same steppes, notably the ancient Scythians and the Irano-Sarmatians, whom Ptolemy reported as the overlords of the steppelands in the second century AD. They were the predecessors of the Avars, the Magyars, and the Mongols, who were all to reach central Europe. Other nomads restricted their movements to the vicinity of the Black Sea. One branch of the Turkic Bulgars had established a kingdom on the middle Volga. Another branch settled near the mouth of the Danube in the seventh century AD. The Khazars followed traces of the Bulgars, creating a kingdom stretching from the north Caucasus to the Dniester. The Patzinaks (Pechinegs) advanced into the Balkans in the wake of the Khazars. After them, another ephemeral state was built on the Black Sea steppes by the Cumans. The gypsies or ‘Romanies’ reached Europe from India in the eleventh century. One branch of the Turks impinged on the Caucasus about the same time; the main branch conquered the Balkans in the fourteenth century.

Of all these non-Indo-Europeans, few were to leave a lasting mark. The Basques and the Maltese have weathered the centuries, speaking languages unrelated to any of their neighbours. The Jews, too, kept their separate identity. The Finns and Estonians on the Baltic, and Magyars in ‘Hungaria’, succeeded in founding modern nations. The Lapps still follow the reindeer. The Tartars, last descendants of the Mongols, have survived in ‘Tatarstan’ on the Volga and, despite modern deportations, in the Crimea. Gypsies are still spread all over Europe. The Turks, who won and lost a vast empire, have kept a precarious toehold in Europe in the immediate vicinity of Istanbul. The Balkan Bulgars have so identified with the Slav world that the communist regime could persecute its Turkish minority in the 1980s, on the grounds that their victims were not ‘true Turks’ but turkicized Slavs. If Bulgarian officialdom were consistent, it would have to recommend the mass expulsion of all Bulgarians on the grounds that they themselves are not ‘true Slavs’, but slavicized Turkics. [GAGAUZ]

‘Indo-European’, it must be emphasized, refers essentially to a linguistic category (see Chapter I, pp. 49–50), and only by extension to the peoples who have used those languages as their native tongue. All the languages which belong to the group can be traced back to a common proto-Indo-European language spoken somewhere in Eurasia over 5,000 years ago. Since then the group has spread over a wide area stretching from Iceland to Ceylon and, through modern colonization, to all continents of the world. It has been said that ‘language is the single most valuable possession of the human race’; and there can be no doubt that the ‘Indo-Europeans’ form one of the most important linguistic communities of human history.3 (See Appendix III, p. 1232.)

The real problem, however, is to determine what, apart from their linguistic heritage, the Indo-Europeans may have in common. The old idea that language is necessarily linked to race has been discredited. Languages can be easily transferred from one racial group to another. Over a period of time, there need be no correlation whatsoever between a people’s ‘native language’ and their racial origins. (This can be easily demonstrated from the English-speaking world, where English has been adopted by millions of Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans.) In the case of Eurasia, it is by no means clear whether the brown-skinned Indo-element exported their language to their paler ‘European’ neighbours, or vice versa, or whether both adopted it from a third party. There is a popular tradition in Afghanistan that all Indo-Europeans came from there. By the same token, even if it exists, the so-called ‘European’, ‘Caucasian’, or ‘Aryan’ race group does not coincide with the Indo-European languages. The majority of Turks, for example, seem to be Caucasian by race but are manifestly non-European by language. [CAUCASIA]

Certainly, racial purity is a non-starter when applied to the European peoples in historic times. The population of the Roman Empire contained a strong admixture of both north African negroids and west Asian semitics. The barbarian tribes were constantly replenishing their genetic stock from captive women and prisoners. Though any visit to Ireland or to Scandinavia can easily demonstrate that racial types are no fiction of the imagination, language, culture, religion, and politics have been more powerful determinants of ethnicity than race. What is true is that any tribal or social grouping which lives together for any length of time needs to adopt a common language. Equally, to protect its sense of identity, it will often erect formal or informal barriers against interbreeding. In some cases, where membership is defined by criteria of kinship backed by religious taboos, miscegenation can be punished by expulsion. In this way, language and kinship do become intimately intertwined.

The Celts, who were the avant-garde of the Indo-Europeans on the northern plain, had moved well to the west by Roman times. They had founded some of the most advanced archaeological cultures (see p. 84). They had been associated with the spread of metal-working, and their possession of iron weapons may well explain their dramatic expansion. Celts stormed Rome in 390 BC and Greece in 279 BC, terrifying their victims by their huge stature, their red hair and ferocious temperament, and by their sickening habit of head-hunting. For twenty years at the close of the second centuryBC, in the shape of the Cimbri, who set off from Jutland in the company of the Teutons, they caused immense havoc in Gaul and Spain until caught by the Consul Marius. Having annihilated the Teutons at Campi Putridi (see p. 87), Marius annihilated the Cimbri at Campi Raudii, near Verona, in 101 BC. One or two setbacks, however, did not stem the tide. The Celtic Boii were known in ‘Bohemia’. Other Celts had settled in force in northern Italy, creating Cisalpine Gaul. They occupied the whole of the land to the west and northwest of the Alps, creating Transalpine Gaul. They crossed the Pyrenees, creating, among other things, Galicia: and they moved into the Rhineland. Already in the eighth century BC they had invaded the offshore islands, thereby creating the ‘British’ Isles.

Hence, when the Roman legions conquered much of Western Europe in the late Republican era, it was the Celts who provided the native resistance. During the Empire, they constituted the basic demographic stock of romanized Celto-Iberians in Spain, of Gallo-Romans in Gaul, of Romano-Britons in Britain. Many of their tribal names are recognizable in modern places that have entirely lost their Celtic connections—Boii (Bohemia), Belgae (Belgium), Helvetii (Switzerland), Treveri (Trier), Parisi (Paris), Redones (Rennes), Dumnonii (Devon), Cantiaci (Kent), Brigantes(Brigsteer). In due course, overwhelmed in many parts by the next influx of Germanic peoples, they set up their permanent strongholds in the far north-west, on the ‘Celtic fringe’ of Britain—in Ireland, western Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. In the fourth century AD, under pressure from the Anglo-Saxons, Celtic migrants from Cornwall crossed into ‘Finisterre’, thereby creating Brittany. Of the six Celtic languages which have survived into contemporary times, three belong to the Goidelic or Q-Celtic group, and three to the Brythonic or P-Celtic group. Cymru am byth! One branch of the Celts departed for Asia Minor. ‘O foolish Galatians,’ exclaimed St Paul when he visited these ‘Gauls of the East’ in AD 52 (Gal. 3:1). Three hundred years later St Jerome, who came from Trier, correctly noted that the Galatians spoke essentially the same tongue as the Gauls of his native Rhineland. [TRISTAN]

The Germanic peoples probably formed the largest barbarian population of the Roman period. First identified in southern Scandinavia, they were designated as Germani by Posidonius in 90 BC, by which time they were well into the task of settling the lands that have borne their name ever since. In the west they overlapped with the Celts, so that tribes such as the Cimbri and the Teutons have been variously designated as Celtic, Germanic, or germanized Celts. In the east they overlapped with the Slavs, so that controversies have raged over whether tribes such as the Venedi, who were mentioned by Tacitus, were Slavonic Wends, Germanic Vandals, or perhaps germanized Slavs.

The Germanic peoples are generally classified in three groupings. The Scandinavian group gave rise to the later Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic communities. The West Germanic group, centred on the North Sea coast, included Batavians, Frisians, Franks, Alamans, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. They are the principal ancestors of the later Dutch, Flemish, English, and lowland Scots communities; also, in part, of the French. The East Germanic group, to the east of the Elbe, included Swabians, Lombards, Burgundians, Vandals, Gepids, Alans, and Goths. They were largely responsible for the tribal traffic jam on the northern plain, and were among the principal actors in the crisis of the Western Empire, [FUTHARK]

The Germania of Tacitus provides a detailed survey of the customs, social structure, and religion of the Germanic tribes. They had traded with the Mediterranean world since Bronze Age times, and were adopting Roman farming methods, even viticulture. Their clans were united by kinship, and ruled in conjunction with a democratic assembly of warriors, the [DING] or ‘Thing’. Their religion centred on the fertility gods Njordr (Nerthus) and Freyr, on Wodin (Odin), the master of magic and god of war, and on Thor (Donar), protector of the farmers against giants, fairies, and evil of all sorts. There was no priesthood, since their war-leaders, who often took the title of king, combined both military and religious functions. They long resisted Christianity, though the Goths adopted Arianism at an early date (see below).

TRISTAN

BY the roadside at Menabilly, two miles north of Fowey in Cornwall, stands a tapering stone column some seven feet high. It bears a faint inscription, in sixth-century Roman letters: ‘drustans hic iacet cunomori fiuus’ (Here lies Tristan [or Tristram], son of Quonimorius). The earthworks of an Iron Age fort, Castle Dôr, rise in the vicinity. Excavations within its perimeter have uncovered evidence of its reoccupation in early medieval times. The neighbouring farm of Lantyan also suggests that here stood ancient Lancien—the palace of ‘King Mark, called Quonimorius’. The Forest ofMoresk or Morrois, the Evil Ford of Malpas, and the manor of Tir Gwyn or La Blanche Lande, and the monastery of St Sampson-in-Golant, all with names which recur in the later texts, are to be found nearby. There is little reason to doubt that the tombstone belongs to the historic Tristan.1

According to legend, Tristan, prince of the lost land of Lyonesse, fell passionately in love with Isolt, princess of Ireland, whom he had conveyed by sea to her marriage with his kinsman, King Mark. Fired by a secret love potion, their passion condemns them to a lifetime of illicit trysts and elopements. It ends when Tristan is mortally wounded by the King’s poisoned spear, and Isolt casts herself in death into their last embrace.

Centuries later, the tragic Celtic love story was versified in courtly romance throughout Europe. The earliest French fragment, like that in Rhenish German by Eilhardt, dates from 1170. The fullest German version, by Gottfried von Strassburg (c.1200), provided the main source for the libretto of Wagner’s opera (1859). There were early Provencal and early English versions. In the fifteenth century Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, like the French prose Roman de Tristan, combines the Tristan story with that of King Arthur. A copy of the French version, with magnificent illuminated miniatures, is preserved as Vienna MS Codex 2537 in the Austrian National Library.2 A Byelorussian Tristan composed in the sixteenth century, and now preserved in Poznań, constitutes the earliest item of secular Belarus literature.3 By then, the story was already 1,000 years old:

And then, anon, Sir Tristan took the sea, and La Beale Isoud… in their cabin, it happed that they were thirsty, and they saw a little flacket of gold, and it seemed it was noble wine … Then they laughed and made good cheer, and either drank to other freely … But by that the drink was in their bodies, they loved either other so well that never their love departed for weal neither for woe… .4

Like Tristan, the central figure of the Arthurian cycles remains a historical enigma. Most scholars agree that Arthur, ‘the once and future king’, must have been a Christian British warlord battling the tide of Anglo-Saxon invaders. But no one has identified him with certainty. The eighth-century chronicler, Nennius, called Arthur the dux bellorum, who had crushed the Saxons at ‘Mount Badon’. Welsh sources called him amheradawr or ‘emperor’. In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth said that he was born on the stupendous island fortress of Tintagel on the coast of Cornwall, and that he died at Glastonbury, by the shrine of the Holy Grail. Modern archaeology, which has discovered a late Roman monastic community at Tintagel, has strengthened the Cornish claims. But another study connects him with a Welsh leader, Owain Ddantgwain, King of Gwynedd and Powys, son of the Head Dragon, also known as ‘the Bear’, who died in 520.5 Somerset tradition holds that the hillfort at Cadbury Castle sheltered Arthur’s court at Camelot, whilst Glastonbury was the ‘Avalon’ where he died. In 1278 King Edward I ordered a tomb at Glastonbury to be opened, and found the caskets of a warrior and a lady. He took them to contain the remains of Arthur and Guinevere. A cross on the tomb, since lost, was said to bear the inscription HIC IACET SEPULTUS INCLITUS REX ARTURIUS IN INSULA AVALONIAE (Here lies buried the famous King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon).6

Ancient legends constantly renew their purposes. Just as medieval England’s Anglo-Norman Kings liked to link themselves with the pre-Saxon rulers of the conquered land, so Romantic Victorians sought to reinforce their sense of modern British unity by pondering the fate of the Ancient Britons. Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) spent forty-two years as Poet Laureate and fifty-five working on his much-admired, and much-derided, Arthurian epic, The Idylls of the King. It was an extended allegory of the eternal struggle between spirituality and materialism:

                              … their fears

Are morning shadows huger than the shapes
That cast them, not those gloomier which forego
The darkness of that battle in the west
Where all of high and holy dies away.7

The Germanic peoples were on the move throughout the imperial period. The Gothic federation left its resting-place on the lower Vistula in the second century AD, drifting slowly south-eastwards against the main migratory current. Two hundred years later, the Visigoths were established on the Black Sea coast north of the Danube delta. The Ostrogoths lay further east, in the Crimea and on the Dnieper steppes, precariously close to the advancing Huns. In that fourth century, some of the Frankish tribes may have been invited into the Empire as imperial foederati, and charged with the defence of the Rhine.

The Slavonic peoples pressed hard on the heels of their Germanic neighbours. Their prehistory is less well documented, since they had fewer contacts with the Empire, and has become the subject of many modern musings. The ancient ‘Slavonic homeland’ has often been viewed as a fixed reservation. The Polish ‘aboriginal school’ of prehistorians insists that it extended over the territory between the Oder and the Vistula ab origine, although it is more convincingly designated to a wooded zone further east, on the slopes of the Carpathians. For some inexplicable reason Western scholars love to relegate the proto-Slavs to the least likely and least comfortable of locations, in the middle of the Pripet Marshes. Whatever its bounds, the Slavonic homeland straddled the main prehistoric trail. It must have been overrun, and probably subordinated, by each of the great nomadic incursions. A Scythian chieftain was buried with all his treasures at Witaszkowo on the western Neisse. The memory of the Sarmatians lingered for 2,000 years, so that Polish nobles would claim Sarmatian pedigree, [CRUX] The migrating Goths and Gepids drifted slowly past, to no known ill effect. In the fifth century AD the passage of the Huns left few traces except for a tantalizing phrase in an Anglo-Saxon poem, the Widsith, which tells how ‘the Hraede with their sharp swords must defend their ancient seat from the people of Aetla by the Wistla wood’.4 The Huns’ successors, the Avars, created some sort of Slavo-Avaric confederation that first enters the historical record from Byzantine sources in the sixth century.

It is doubtful whether the proto-Slavonic language could have been deeply differentiated until the main migrations began in the middle of the first millennium. It is only known from scholarly reconstructions. Like Greek and Latin, it was marked by highly complex declensions and conjugations and by free word order. The Slavonic tribes are often thought to have developed a characteristic social institution, the [ZADRUGA] or ‘joint family’, where all the relatives of the chieftain lived together under fierce patriarchal discipline. They worshipped numerous deities such as Triglav, the Three-Headed One, Svarog, the Sun-Maker, and Perun, the God of the Thunderclap. Interestingly enough, much of their religious vocabulary, from Bog (God) to raj (Paradise), is Sarmato-Iranian in origin; just as many of their words relating to primitive technology, such as dach(roof in Polish) or plug(plough in Russian) is Germanic. Isolated though they were, they had clearly benefited from contact with their neighbours. (See Appendix III, p. 1223.)

A taste of the shaky sources, and of the scepticism, of Western historians may be drawn from the following description of the Slavs, which was compiled, with some poetic licence, ‘from the evidence of Procopius and of the Emperor Mauritius’:

The Sclavonians used one common language (it was harsh and irregular) and were known by the resemblance of their form which deviated from the swarthy Tartar and approached, without attaining, the lofty stature and fair complexion of the German. Four thousand six hundred villages were scattered over the provinces of Russia and Poland, and their huts were hastily built of rough timber… We may, not perhaps without flattery, compare them to the architecture of the beaver…

FUTHARK

RUNES or ‘matchstick signs’ form the basis of an alphabet which was used by the Vikings and which, from its first six letters, was known as ‘Futhark’. Runes were chiselled into wood or stone, often in long, snakelike inscriptions. There were two main variants—Common or Danish Futhark, and Swedo-Norwegian, each with sixteen basic signs:

Runic inscriptions have been found in great numbers, especially in central Sweden and in Denmark. They record voyages, legal agreements, and deaths, sometimes in skaldic verse. A silver neck-ring from Troons in northern Norway tells how the silver was won:

Forum drengia Frislands a vit	We went to the lands of Frisia
ok vigs fQtum ver skiptum	And we it was who split the spoils of war.

At Gripsholm in Sodermanland, a mother mourns her sons, Ingmar and Harald, who perished on an expedition to the Mediterranean:

peir fóru drengila fiarri et gulli	Like men they journeyed for gold,
ok austarla ame gáfu	And in the east they feasted the eagle,
dóu sunnarla á Serklandi	And in the south they died in Serkland.

There is a runic graffito in a gallery of St Sophia’s in Istanbul, and another on one of the lions of St Mark, brought to Venice from Athens.1

Runes, however, were not just used for writing. The 16-sign Futhark of the Vikings, which dates from ad c.350, had been condensed from the much more extensive Hallristningar or ‘Rune Hoard’, which was used from the Bronze Age onwards for the purposes of occult divination:

The Germania of Tacitus describes the reading of the runes:

They break off a branch from a fruit tree, and slice it into strips; they distinguish these by certain runes and throw them, as fortune will have it, onto a white cloth. Then the state priest… or the family father… after praying to the gods … picks up three of them, one at a time, and reads their meaning from the runes carved on them.3

In later times, among many variants, the 33-sign series found in Anglo-Saxon England and the 18-sign series of Armanen Runes found in the German-speaking world had much in common (see Appendix III, pp. 1234–5). Runes provide a gateway to the mysterious and strangely beautiful aesthetic world of the vikings.

Ogham, or Ogams, were a Celtic counterpart of Scandinavian runes, being used both for writing and for divination, especially in Ireland. Each sign consisted of simple vertical staves cut against a horizontal or slanting baseline. Each was primarily associated with a tree and with a letter corresponding to the tree’s name, but also, by alliteration, with birds and animals, with colours, with periods of the year, and with days of the week:

Europe’s native writing systems were an essential adjunct to pagan religion. Ogam and Runes, like the North Italic and the Etruscan, were rooted in times when the divination of Nature lay at the heart of all knowledge and understanding. Even so much of the associated lore and magic has survived the advent of classical and Christian civilization.

The fertility of the soil, rather than the labour of the natives, supplied the rustic plenty of the Sclavonians … The field which they sowed with millet and panic afforded, in the place of bread, a coarse and less nutritive food … As their supreme God, they adored an invisible master of the thunder…

The Sclavonians disdained to obey a despot… Some voluntary respect was yielded to age and valour; but each tribe or village existed as a separate republic, and all must be persuaded where none could be compelled … They fought on foot, almost naked … They swam, they dived, they remained under water, drawing breath through a hollow cane. But these were the achievements of spies or stragglers. The military art was unknown to the Sclavonians. Their name was unknown, and their conquests obscure.5

The Baltic peoples lived in still greater isolation. The Prussians to the east of the Vistula delta, the Lithuanians in the valley of the Niemen, and the Letts on the western Dvina spoke languages that scholars regard as the least evolved of all. They were once thought, erroneously, to form part of the Slavonic group, but are now judged closer to proto-Indo-European even than Sanskrit. Like all Indo-Europeans, the Baits must surely have migrated from the East at some point in prehistory, but nothing is known of their movements. They settled on the morainic debris of the last Ice Age, and stayed there among the dark pines and the shimmering lakes. Like the Finns and the Estonians, they seem to have been left alone until the tide of the peoples turned in the opposite direction in the first half of the second millennium, [LIETUVA]

LIETUVA

THERE is no shortage of authorities to confirm that the Lithuanian language is ‘the most archaic of all Indo-European tongues,’ or that ‘it has better preserved its archaic forms … than have other contemporary Indo-European languages’.2 Ever since Karl Brugmann published his Grundriss, or outline, of comparative Indo-Germanic languages in 1897, Lithuanian has been a favourite among etymologists of the Romantic persuasion.

It is true that the Lithuanian lexicon contains a core of words that any classicist would recognize: vyras ‘man’, saulē ‘sun’, mēnuo ‘moon’, ugnis ‘fire’, kalba ‘language’. Lithuania has kept dual as well as plural number, long vowels of nasal origin, seven-case declensions, and a verb system of tenses, conjugations, and moods not dissimilar to Latin’s. On the other hand, the Slavonic element in the Lithuanian lexicon is also very large: galva ‘head’ (Russian golova), ranka ‘hand’ (Polish ręka), paukŠtis ‘bird’, žiema ‘winter’, and sniegas ‘snow’ (Polish ptaszek, zima, andśnieg). Polish, too, has plural number, nasal vowels, and seven cases. Unlike Lithuanian (or French), most Slavonic languages have not lost the neuter form. In reality, Lithuanian is mainly characterized by features common to both the Baltic and the Slavonic language groups. Anyone who imagines that it is a close relative to Sanskrit is in for a disappointment.

None the less, the survival of Lithuanian is remarkable. It remained a local peasant vernacular throughout the long centuries of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (see p. 392), and was never used as a language of high culture or government. The Lithuanian Statutes, written in ruski or ‘Ruthenian’ were translated into Latin (1530) and Polish (1531), but not into Lithuanian. Starting with the Catechism (1547) of M. Mazvidas, however, Lithuanian was used for religious purposes. In the nineteenth century, Russian educators tried printing it in Cyrillic. But the Polish bishops of Wilno (Vilnius) successfully countered the ploy by supporting Lithuanian primary education in the Roman alphabet, thereby cementing Lithuania’s deep attachment to Catholicism. This makes it entirely appropriate for amateur linguists to cut their teeth on a scriptural text:

Ir angēlas
tare jiems:
‘Nesibijokties!
Štay!’
Apsakau jums didj dźaugsma
kurs nusidůs
vissiems źmonems. (Luke 2:10)

Despite Western conventions, it is important to view the barbarian migrations as a whole. They were not confined to the Germanic peoples, nor to the Roman frontline in the West. What appeared in the West as a sudden deluge at the end of the fourth century was just one act in a drama that was far more extensive both geographically and chronologically.

The first sign of the coming deluge occurred in 376, when the Ostrogoths, pressed by the Huns, petitioned the Emperor Valens to settle in Moesia. Some of them were allowed to cross the Danube, but were required to surrender both their arms and their children. Two years later, in August 378, they fought a pitched battle at Hadrianopolis (Edirne) in which the Emperor was killed. Thanks to the heavy cavalry of the Goths’ allies, the Sarmatian Alans, Rome’s invincible legions were decisively beaten. (In military history, that demonstration of the power of Sarmatian-style lances and their oversize chargers marks the debut of the most characteristic features of medieval warfare.) Four years after that it was the turn of the Visigoths. Their king and war-leader, Alaric, cannot have been indifferent to the Ostrogoths’ success. He was given the title of magister militum illyricorum as a sop. But in the course of a thirty-year adventure his imperial office did not restrain him from sacking first Athens (396) and then Rome (410). The immediate cause of Alaric’s wrath lay in the Empire’s refusal to accept the Visigoths for settlement in Noricum. Thereafter, he conceived a plan to take them to Africa. But his death at Cosenza caused yet another change of direction. Alaric’s successor, Athaulf, married the captured stepsister of the Emperor Honorius, whilst his brother Wallia gave the Visigoths respite by settling them in Aquitaine. The Visigoth kingdom of Tolosa (Toulouse) was short-lived. But it provided the springboard from which, some time after 507, the Visigoths set out to create their most enduring legacy in Spain.

The rampage of the Visigoths provided an opening for three more huge invasions. When the legions of Gaul were withdrawn to protect Constantinople from Alaric, the garrison of the Rhine was dangerously thinned. Some time around 400 the Burgundians took their chance to move into the area at the confluence of Rhine and Main. Thirty years later they were challenged by the Roman general Aetius, whose Hunnish auxiliaries drove them off. But in 443 they were back to settle permanently in the vicinity of Lyons. Henceforth the Burgundian Kingdom developed in the valleys of the Rhone and Saône, controlling the principal Alpine passes, [NIBELUNG]

At Christmas 406 a vast horde of barbarians crossed the frozen Rhine near Coblenz. Vandals, Suevi, and Alans poured into Gaul. The Vandals took a roundabout route to Alaric’s original destination in Africa. They crossed the Pyrenees in 409, the Straits of Gibraltar in 429, and the gates of Carthage in 439. They took 33 years to cover the 2,500 miles from the Rhine. From their Carthaginian base they took to the sea, seizing the Balearic Islands and Sardinia. In 455, under Genseric, they imitated Alaric and sacked Rome. The Vandal kingdom in Africa remained a major force until the restoration of imperial power in the following century. The Vandals parted company with their original companions, the Suevi and the Alans, in Spain. The Suevi created a kingdom in the far north-west, in Galicia; the western Alans went for the valley of the Tagus.

NIBELUNG

FOR several decades at the turn of the fifth century, the Burgundian court stood at Worms on the Rhine, the ancient Civitas Vangionum. Known as Nibelungs after a former chief, the Burgundians had been brought in as auxiliaries on the imperial frontier. They were to be driven out in 435–6 during battles with the Roman general Aetius and the advancing Huns. The names of three royal brothers Gundharius (Gunther), Gislaharius (Giselher), and Godomar (Gemot) are known from the later Lex Burgundiorum. After halting at Geneva, they moved on to Lyons, where in 461 they set up the first Kingdom of Burgundy, [LUGOUNUM] A plaque on the site of the former palace at Worms recalls that city’s distinctions:

Here Was
The Holy Temple Area of the Romans
The Royal Castle of the Nibelungen
The Imperial Residence of Charlemagne
The Court of the Prince-Bishop of Worms
Destroyed by the French in the Years 1689 and 1745.
More than One Hundred Imperial and Princely Diets
Took Place Here.
Here, Before Emperor and Empire, Stood
Martin Luther1

Further north, near the present frontier of the Netherlands, stands the cathedral of St Victor at Xanten (Ad Sanctos). St Victor, a Christian martyr of the late Roman era, is taken to be the prototype of the legendary warrior Siegfried (Victory-Peace).

At the time of the Burgundians’ sojourn at Worms, the Huns of Attila were still camped on the plains of the Middle Danube. They too form one of the many historical elements which, interwoven with the fantasies of myth and saga, form the basis for the most famous Germanic legends.

The Nibelungenlied is an epic poem of some 2,300 rhyming stanzas written in Austria in the early thirteenth century. Of 34 extant manuscripts, MS A is kept at Munich, MS B at St Gall, and MS C at Donaueschingen. All variants relate the adventures of the Burgundian court following the arrival of the invincible Prince Siegfried—dragon-slayer, guardian of the Nibelungs’ treasure, and owner of the magic cape of darkness. Siegfried saves the country from a Saxon army, overpowers the Icelandic princess Brunhild, who will only submit to a man that can defeat her in athletic contest, and, after ceding Brunhild to King Gunther, wins the hand of Gunther’s sister, Krimhild. The harmony of the two couples cools when Brunhild learns the secret of her defeat. Gunther’s retainer Hagen discovers Siegfried’s one point of weakness, kills him with a spear as he is drinking at a spring, and casts his treasure into the Rhine.2 (See Plate 9.)

Just as the unknown author of the Nibelungenlied transposed these pagan tales into the courtly and Christian idiom of medieval Germany, so Richard Wagner would transpose them, embellished, into the idiom of Romantic opera in Das Rheingold (1869), Die Walküre (1870),Siegfried(1872), and Götterdammerung (1876). The first complete performance of the Ring Cycle took place at the Festspielhaus, Bayreuth, in August 1876.

In the second part of the Nibelungenlied, the widowed Krimhild leaves Germany to marry the heathen Etzel (Attila). In due course, she invites her Burgundian relatives to visit her at Etzelburg/Gran (the modern Esztergöm). Her aim is to avenge her beloved Siegfried. After cutting off Hagen’s head with Siegfried’s faithful sword, she leads all the poem’s principal personalities into a bloodbath of common hatred.

Modern literary pilgrims can trace the road of the Burgundian party from Worms to ‘Hunland’. They go from the ‘See of the Three Rivers’ at Passau, where Krimhild’s brother was bishop, to the seat of Count Rudiger at Bechlaren (Pochlam), and on to the fortress of Melk, to the Roman gate of Traismauer, to Tulln, where Etzel awaited his bride, and to Vienna, where the seventeen-day wedding banquet was held. Yet at the end all is sorrow:

Hier hat die Mär ein Ende.
Diz ist der Nibelunge Not.
(Here the tale has its end. This is the Nibelung’s downfall)

In Britain, the departure of the legions in 410 gave a signal for the onslaught of the sea raiders. For more than a century, the Roman governors had sought to hold the forts of the ‘Saxon Shore’. Now the Romano-Britons were left to their own devices. Some Roman troops may possibly have returned for a decade or two after 418; but a vain appeal for assistance was made to Aetius in 446. Soon afterwards, all regular contact between Britain and the Empire was severed. Henceforth, the Anglo-Saxon longships brought not just raiders but mercenaries and colonists. In 457 Kent was surrendered to Hengest’s Jutes, a tribe that had worked its way from ‘Jutland’ in Denmark via Frisia. The Angles, who left a sign of their earlier abode in the district of ‘Angeln’ in Schleswig, took over Britain’s eastern coastlands. They sailed into the Humber, founding communities which underlay the expansive kingdom of Mercia, meaning the March or ‘Frontier’. The Saxons, under Aelle, first landed on the south coast, laying the foundation of the kingdom of the south Saxons (Sussex). Others—the middle Saxons (Middlesex) and the east Saxons (Essex)—moved up the valley of the Thames.

Thus began the long conquest and settlement of eastern Britain which resulted in the emergence of ‘England’. For three centuries and more, hundreds of local chieftains controlled their own minuscule statelets, until by a process of merger and annexation the larger groupings emerged. The most powerful of the later Anglo-Saxon principalities, that of the West Saxons (Wessex), did not eliminate its rivals until 940—five hundred years after the first Anglo-Saxon raids. In the meantime the hard-pressed Britons struggled to stem the tide. Their victory under the semi-legendary King Arthur at Mons Badonicus c.500 served to hold the Anglo-Saxons back, and to preserve the Celts of the West, [TRISTAN]

Whilst the Germanic tribes overran the Empire’s western provinces, the instigators of the cataclysm, the Huns, finally made their appearance in Pannonia. They built their tented capital on the plains of the Tisza (Theiss) in 420. In 443 they came under the rule of Attila (c.404–53). His was a name that became a byword for wanton destruction: ‘The grass never grew where his horse had trod.’ For several seasons this ‘Scourge of God’ wreaked havoc in the Empire’s Danubian provinces. In 451 he rode to the north and west, collecting assorted barbarian allies, including Gepids and Burgundians. He spared Paris, protected by the prayers of St Geneviève. But on the Catalaunian Plains near Châlons, on grassland well suited to his cavalry, he met bloody defeat at the hands of a coalition formed by Aetius from Theodoric’s Visigoths and the Salian Franks under the ‘Sea-born’ Merovech. ‘His retreat beyond the Rhine comprised the last victory achieved in the name of the western Empire.’ Attila then turned on Italy. Turin, Padua, and Aquileia suffered the earlier fate of Metz. ‘The succeeding generation could scarce discover the ruins of Aquileia.’ At Milan, Attila was offended by a mural in the royal palace which showed the princes of Scythia prostrate before the imperial throne. He commanded a painter to reverse the roles. In 452, on the shores of Lake Bolsena, he was somehow persuaded to withdraw by the Patriarch of Rome, Leo I. Suitably enough, having retired to the Tisza with an item of female loot called Ildico, he expired during the nuptial night from a burst artery, ‘suffocated by a torrent of blood … which regurgitated into his stomach and lungs’. The horsemen of the Hunnic horde dispersed as quickly as they had appeared. Shattered by the treacherous attack of their former allies, they were forced to cede their hold on the Pannonian station to the Gepids and the Ostrogoths, [CSABA] [EPIDEMIA]

Attila’s death gave the Ostrogoths the chance to assert their independence to the full. Advancing from Pannonia, they launched into a campaign of rapine in the Eastern Empire which did not cease until Theodoric received the usual prize, together with the titles of magister militum andpatriciusof Italy. Unfortunately for him, another barbarian warlord was in the field. Having casually deposed the last of the Western emperors, Odoacer had won his position at the head of a mercenary army operating in Sicily, Dalmatia, and even beyond the Alps. A fight to the finish was inevitable. The end came after a three-year siege of Ravenna and Odoacer’s murder by Theodoric. It was 493. The way was now open for the establishment of an Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy.

Similarly, Merovech’s grandson, Hlodwig or Clovis (c.466–511), king of the Salian Franks, was able to exploit his status as a Roman foederatus and to multiply his dominions in the disputed province of Gaul. Starting from the old Salian at Tournai, Clovis defeated the last ‘Roman’ general of Gaul, Syagrius, before conquering the rival Riparian Franks (in modern ‘Franconia’), the Alamanni, the Burgundians, and in 507 the Visigoths of Aquitaine. Putting all the lesser Frankish princes to death, and taking a Christian wife, Clotilda, he was baptized at Rheims, possibly at Easter 496. The result was a huge ‘Merovingian’ realm stretching from the Pyrenees to Bavaria. Clovis reputedly received a diadem from the Emperor in Constantinople, together with the honorific title of Consul. He died in his new capital, Paris, after a reign of thirty years. Without knowing it, he had founded what Lavisse called ‘not a nation, but a historical force’—a force which was destined to give rise both to France and to the German Empire.

EPIDEMIA

BY all accounts, many of Attila’s warriors were already stricken by a violent illness on the eve of their defeat by Aetius in 451. Some historians have concluded that it was the Huns who added smallpox to Europe’s pool of diseases.1 Others report that smallpox was already raging during the Roman plague of 165–80. It was certainly still killing large numbers in the eighteenth century. It claimed 14,000 in Paris in the epidemic of 1719, which preceded the discovery of vaccination by a couple of years. Even so, it killed Louis XV in 1774, and possibly Joseph II in 1790.

From time immemorial, all feared the shadow of pestilence. Russian folklore included the tale of the ghostly Pest Maiden, whom villagers kissed at their peril. In the Book of Revelation, there was the Fourth Horseman on his ‘pale horse’, ‘and his name that sat on him was Death’.

For the long-term historian, as for the epidemiologist, the crucial problem is to know why certain diseases, which exist in mild form for generations, can suddenly explode with devastating virulence. Environmental shifts, a mutant strain, or a fresh human habitat may all be contributing factors. Smallpox, for instance, was well known to medieval Europe without ever being the worst scourge of its kind. Yet on reaching the Americas it wreaked unparalleled havoc, virtually annihilating Aztec civilization, decimating the native Americans, turning 20 per cent of mankind into 3 per cent, ‘singlehandedly establishing and sustaining slavery’.2 Syphilis, ‘the Americans’ Revenge’, followed a similar career in reverse. In the Americas it had caused minor skin irritations; in Europe it killed and disfigured millions, [SYPHILUS]

Malaria was exceptional. Endemic since ancient times, when it had claimed Alexander the Great, it was never responsible for sensational epidemics. But it killed steadily and ceaselessly, especially in districts like the Campagna marshes near Rome, where the plasmodium parasite could breed in warm, stagnant water. Cumulatively, it ‘caused the greatest harm to the greatest number’.3

Every deadly disease has had its day, and every age its particular plague. Leprosy reached its peak in the thirteenth century. The Black Death cut its swathe in the fourteenth century (See Chapter VI) and several times later. Syphilis raged during the Renaissance and Reformation, and on into the Enlightenment. Tuberculosis reaped its crop among the Romantics, claiming Chopin, Siowacki, Keats, and countless others. Cholera was the scourge of Europe’s early industrial cities, and influenza the unlikely reaper of the early twentieth century. AIDS, the leprosy of the late twentieth century, arrived to shake the complacency of a scientific age, and to show that plagues were not just a curiosity of the past, [LEPER] [SANITAS]

In that sixth century, the barbarian conquests were consolidated despite the brief reassertion of the Empire under Justinian (see below). The Visigothic kingdom flourished in Spain, unlike its predecessor in southern Gaul. Under Leovigild, who made his capital at Toledo, it absorbed the Suevian realm. The Ostrogothic kingdom, which included several of the Danubian provinces as well as Italy, was taken over by the last of the east Germanic tribes to migrate, the Lombards. The Lombards, or Langobardi, ‘Long Beards’, had spent the century since the dispersal of Huns mastering the Gepids and the Avars beyond the Danube. But in 568 they turned south, and established a new hegemony centred on Pavia. Henceforth, the Italian peninsula was to be contested between the Lombards, the Byzantines in the south, and the ever-growing power of the Franks. The Franks, in fact, were expanding in all possible directions. They displaced a party of Saxons which had established itself on the northern coast of Gaul. On their eastern marches they were pressing on the main body of Saxons, and on the Thuringians. It was the Franks who contained the Avars in the Bavarian Gap, and then sent Germanic colonists to their Ostland or ‘Austria’ on the middle Danube. It was the resultant collapse of the Avars in the Danube basin which paved the way for the advances of the Slavs.

The western Slavs marched across the plain, up the Elbe, and up the Danube. The Wends or Sorbs of Lusatia, to the west of the Oder, and the Kashubs of Pomerania are still extant. Czech tribes took over Bohemia, the Slovaks the southern slopes of the Carpathians. These were the founders of the Great Moravian Empire which flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries. The Poles, or Polanie, the ‘people of the open plains’ first appeared on the Warta, an eastern tributary of the Oder. Related tribes occupied virtually the whole of the Vistula basin.

Plynie Wisla, plynie
Po polskiej krainie,
Po polskiej krainie,
I dopóki plynie
Polska nie zaginie,
Polska nie zaginie.

(Flows the Vistula, flows | Across the Polish land, | Across the Polish land, | So long as she keeps flowing, | Poland still shall stand, | Poland still shall stand.)

The eastern Slavs gradually moved north and east from the Dnieper into Baltic and Finnic territory, and into the forests of the upper Volga. Their centrifugal movements created divergences that underlay the later division between Ruthenians and Russians. If the Poles sang of the Vistula, the Russians were to sing of the Volga, which was to become their ‘native mother’.

The southern Slavs invaded the Empire in the sixth century, crossing the Danube in many places. In 540 they laid siege to Constantinople. They were to slavicize Illyria, Bulgaria, Macedonia [MAKEDON], and most of mainland Greece. The Croats, a people first mentioned in what is now southern Poland, colonized the upper Sava and the Dalmatian coast. Another group which settled on the upper Drava became known as Slovenes. The Serbs took over the region at the confluence of the Drava, the Sava, and the Danube.

The dynamism of the migrant tribes had serious implications for all their neighbours. Where the preceding population was not overwhelmed or absorbed, it was frequently shunted into motion. In the West, the Celts were swamped in Gaul and corralled in Britain. Only the Irish were secure from invasion. A Celtic people from Ireland, the Scots, migrated to the highlands of Caledonia and, by subjugating the native Picts, laid the foundations of Gaelic Scotland. In the same period, a migration of Celts from Cornwall laid the foundations of Celtic Brittany. Elsewhere, the Celtic Britons were pushed back by the Anglo-Saxons into the fastnesses of Wales.

In the East, in one of the darkest periods of the Dark Ages, the confusion in the Danube basin was not resolved for almost three centuries. The Slavs still evaded literary sources, and their struggles with the Avars and with the Germanic outposts are not well documented. The last piece of the jigsaw did not fall into place until the irruption of the nomadic Magyars in the ninth century (see p. 296). On the Pontine steppes, a jumble of peoples passed under the hegemony of yet another tribe of Asian adventurers—the Khazars. They in their turn submitted in the early seventh century to the overlordship of a Turkic dynasty from the North Caucasus. Though Indo-European Slavs were present within the jumble, they would not begin to form the dominant element until the founding of the Kievan state in the ninth century, [KHAZARIA]

The effect of the migrations on the ethnic and linguistic make-up of the Peninsula was profound. They radically changed the ethnic mix of the population in several countries, and in some parts introduced completely fresh ingredients. If in AD 400 the population of the Peninsula had been clearly divided between ‘Romans’ and ‘barbarians’, by 600 or 700 it was inhabited by a far more complex mix of semi-barbarized ex-Romans and semi-romanized ex-barbarians.

KHAZARIA

OF all the transient realms of the European plain, none has aroused more controversy than that of the Khazars. Yet from AD c.630, when it was taken over by the Turkic dynasty of Ashihna, to 970, when it was conquered by Prince Svyatoslav of Kiev, it played a vital role in the contacts between East and West.

The administrative organization of Khazaria reflected the variety of its subject peoples. The Khazar kagan or khan ruled over three principal provinces, seven dependent kingdoms, and seven tributary tribes. The chief province, Kwalis, was centred on the twin cities of Amol-Atil on the Lower Volga (the site of the future Tsaritsyn). Semender en the River Terek had been the dynasty’s earlier refuge after their expulsion from Turkestan. Sarkel was centred on the River Don, west of the Volga bend. It was ruled from a stone city of the same name built by ninth-century Byzantine engineers.

Of the dependent kingdoms, by far the most important was Khotzir in Crimea, the Khazars’ new headquarters. It had succeeded the realm of the Goths, who in turn had conquered the ancient Hellenistic ‘Kingdom of the Bosphorus’. [CHERSONESOS] It was ruled from Phullai, modern Planerskoe, on the coast; and it possessed a strong Jewish community active in the Black Sea trade. Other dependencies included Hun on the River Sulak (home of Attila’s descendants), Onogur on the Kama, Turkoi or Levedia on the Donets (home of the future Magyars), and three divisions of the Volga Bulgars. Of the tributary tribes in the northern forest zone, three were ethnically Slavic, three Finnic, and one unidentified.

Khazaria was famed for its commerce and for its religious tolerance. It was the traditional supplier of Slav slaves to the Mediterranean market (see p. 257); and in the tenth century an overland trade route began to develop along the line of Regensburg-Vienna-Cracow-Kiev-Atil.

Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and pagan religions all flourished under their own communal judges. The Khazar army was largely drawn from Iranian Muslims from the eastern province; and in 737 the Khan himself adopted Islam. But some time soon afterwards his successors converted to Judaism and made it the state religion. This conversion, surprisingly, finds no echo in contemporary Byzantine, Arabic, or Jewish sources; but it was already known to the monk Druthmar of Aquitaine, writing at Corvey in Westphalia in 864:

For in the lands of Gog and Magog, who are a Hunnish race and call themselves Gazari, there is one tribe, a very belligerent one… and all of them profess the Jewish faith.1

During the period of Arab expansion in the seventh to ninth centuries, Khazaria generally allied itself with Byzantium against the Arabs. During the Viking era, Scandinavians opened up the Baltic-Dnieper route, mastered Kiev, and possibly took over the khanate as a whole, [RUS’]

Jewish historians have naturally shown immense interest in Khazaria’s conversion to Judaism. Judah Halevi (1075–1141), writing in Toledo, idealized the Khazar Khan as a hero of the faith. The Karaites of Crimea called the Khazars mamzer, meaning ‘bastard’ or ‘false Jews’. But the Karaite scholar Abraham Firkovich (1785–1874) claimed that the Khazars had been Karaites. Arthur Koestler, writing in the 1970s, claimed that migrant Jewish Khazars begat the main body of Ashkenazy Jewry in Central Europe.2 The Khazar puzzle is still not fully solved.

Yet Khazaria lives on. In Greece, children do not wait at Christmas time for Santa Claus bringing gifts from Lapland. They wait for St Basil, coming from Khazaria.

In Spain, for example, the romanized Celto-Iberians received a significant injection of Germanics—with important Moorish and Jewish layers to follow. In Gaul, the Gallo-Romans received a stronger but uneven Germanic overlay—heavy in the north-east, light in the south-west. In Italy, too, the latinized Celto-Italics and Greeks imbibed a strong Germanic element, that was predominant in the north. In Britain, the Romano-British population was either absorbed or displaced, leaving two distinct communities—Celtic in the west, Germanic in the east, centre, and south. Caledonia (Scotland) was divided between the Germanic lowlanders and the Celtic highlanders. In Germany, the balance between west Germanic and east Germanic tribes shifted decisively in the former’s favour, since most of the latter had migrated. The Slavonic peoples took decisive control not only of the largest sector of the northern plain but also of the Balkans. Within the new Slavonic homelands, however, many non-Slavonic peoples, including the Vlachs, remained.*

Ethnic changes were inevitably reflected in language. The vulgar Latin which had been the lingua franca of the late Western Empire, was gradually broken down into a bevy of bowdlerized neo-latinate idioms—from Portuguese to Romanian. Latin pater drifted towards padre in Spanish and Italian, towards père in French, towards tata in Romanian.

The linguistic transitions were very slow. In the case of French, the vulgar Latin vernacular romanz of Gaul passed through three distinct phases—(eighth century), Old French (eleventh), Middle French (fourteenth)—before a recognizable variety of modern French was achieved. New grammar and new word-forms evolved as the old Latin declensions, conjugations, and inflexions were dropped. Bonum, bonam, bonas moved towards bon, bonne, bonnes. Rex became le roi; amat changed to aime, regina to la reine. The earliest text in ‘Romance’, the Strasbourg Oath, dates from 843—by which time the kings of France had stopped speaking Germanic Frankish altogether. Britain was one of several ex-Roman provinces where Latin was completely wiped out.

Greek persisted in the Eastern Empire, both as the official language and in many places, especially in Asia Minor, as the vernacular. But several areas, including the Peloponnese, were for a period wholly or partly slavicized. One should be wary of oversimplification. But the thesis advanced by the Bavarian scholar, Jakub Fallmerayer (1790–1861), in Ueber die Entstehung der Neugriechen (1835), merits attention. Fallmerayer’s work, which caused deep trauma amidst the Greeks of his day, argued that the Greek nation of modern times was largely descended from hellenized Albanians and Slavs, ‘with hardly a drop of true Greek blood in their veins’. This may have been an exaggeration; but it is less absurd than the notion that every modern Greek is a direct ethnic descendant of the inhabitants of ancient Greece. No modern European nation can lay reasonable claim to undiluted ‘ethnic purity’. [MAKEDON]

The dispersal of the Slavs encouraged the evolution of the three main Slavonic linguistic groups, and the well-springs of a dozen Slavonic languages. (See Appendix III, p. 1233.)

By the eighth century, therefore, the ethnic settlement of the Peninsula was beginning to achieve a lasting pattern. The eighth century, indeed, was the point when important social crystallizations occurred. Yet five more major migrations had to happen before all the basic population of the future Europe was complete. One of these five later migrant groups, the Vikings, were sea-raiders (see p. 293). Two more, the Magyars and the Mongols, were nomads (see pp. 296–8). Two others, the Moors and the Turks, were warriors of a new religion (see pp. 253, 386). Europe was conceived from the most diverse elements, and her birth was painfully protracted.

The Empire: From Rome to Byzantium, 330–867

From 330 onwards, ruled from the Bosporus, the Roman Empire changed its character. The Romanitas, the ‘Latinity’, of the empire was inevitably reduced. But political priorities shifted as well: henceforth the heartland lay not in Italy but in the Balkans and in Asia Minor. The provinces which lay nearest to the emperors’ concerns were not Gaul or Spain or Africa, but Egypt, Syria, even Armenia. Increasingly, the frontier to be defended at all costs lay not on the Rhine but on the lower Danube and the Pontic shore. Recognizing the shift, most historians drop the title of ‘Roman Empire’ in favour of ‘Byzantine Empire’. The emperors and their subjects, however, continued to think of themselves as ‘Romans’. Constantine had no intention of abandoning anything but a decayed capital city. The growing divergence of East and West was so slow that it was virtually imperceptible to contemporaries. For them, it was far less impressive than the sturdy strands of continuity.

What is more, there is no general consensus about the point where ‘Rome’ was truly supplanted by ‘Byzantium’. In its origins, the split can be traced back to Octavius and Mark Antony, whose rivalry had briefly divided the Roman world for the first time. In which case the gradual emergence of Byzantium, and the supremacy of the East, might be seen as belated compensation for the tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra. Diocletian, who deliberately chose the Eastern half of the Empire for himself, has been proposed as ‘the first Byzantine Emperor’. Other obvious contenders for the title would be Constantine, founder of Constantinople, Justinian, and Heraclius. At the other extreme, some historians might withhold the ‘Byzantine’ label until the Empire’s last links with the West were severed. In which case one would be talking of the ninth century, or even of the eleventh, when the Greek Church of the East finally parted company with the Latin Church of Rome. In this view, ‘Byzantium’ is not the foil to the Rome of late antiquity but rather to the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ of the Middle Ages.

This period of transition lasted for half a millennium. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the Empire’s links with the Western provinces were weakened to the point where imperial rule in the West was abandoned. The last remnants of ancient paganism were suppressed. In the sixth century there was a concerted attempt under Justinian (r. 527–65) to restore the Western connection, but it ended in failure. Then, with the influx of Bulgars and Slavs, the remnants of the Empire’s Latin-speaking population were overwhelmed. Byzantium was left entirely Greek. In the seventh century, the valuable Eastern provinces were overrun by the Arabs; and the territorial base of the Empire shrank to something remarkably akin to that of the ancient Greek world prior to Alexander’s conquests (see Map 5). In the eighth century, when the Arab tide was ebbing, the Empire was shaken by an amazingly protracted religious furore over icons, which was one of the sources of the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity. Protracted wars with the fearsome Bulgars were not damped down before a Bulgar khan had quaffed his wine from an emperor’s skull. The Iconoclast controversy came to an end in 842–3. Relations with Bulgars reached an important turning-point in 865, when their warleader was baptized by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Five hundred years of turmoil were moving to a close. At that date, the Roman Empire stood within two years of the founding of the great Macedonian dynasty, whose emperors were to bring it to a new apogee. Over the previous five centuries, the long procession of external and internal crises had changed the political, social, religious, and cultural life of the Empire out of all recognition. By then, if not before, Byzantium had truly succeeded the Roman world in every sense.

The fifth-century collapse of the Empire’s Western provinces came as the result of long decay. It is doubtful whether the barbarian invasions did more than catalyse a process which was already well advanced. Some, like Gibbon, have stressed the decadent luxury of the ruling class. Others have stressed socio-economic factors—monetary and price inflation, over-taxation, bureaucracy, agricultural decline, which in turn produced what Ferdinand Lot called ‘a regime of castes’. Ossification of the social strata was accompanied by ‘a total transformation of human psychology’.7Here above all was the classic case of imperial ‘overstretch’: the Empire could not sustain the military effort indefinitely. The imperial armies were so saturated by barbarian soldiers and ex-barbarian generals that the old distinction between Roman and non-Roman became increasingly irrelevant.

Yet the moment of truth was slow in coming. In the fourth century, Constantine’s successors were at least as alarmed by the Persians as by the western barbarians. Julian (r. 361–3), having spent many years in Gaul restoring the Rhine garrisons, was slain in Mesopotamia. Valentinian I (r. 364–75) again divided the Empire in order to continue Julian’s work in Gaul. Theodosius I (r. 378–96), son of a general, managed the crisis caused by the Ostrogothic invasion (see p. 229), and was the last to restore imperial unity. After his death, the division between East and West was made permanent, and the Western provinces were allowed to drift away. Of Honorius (r. 395–423), who ruled in Milan, at first under the regency of Stilicho the Vandal, it was said that he knew nothing of ‘Roma’ beyond the fact that it was the name of his pet chicken.

The last act of the Empire in the West, in 476, is instructive. A boy-emperor with the symbolic name of Romulus Augustulus was the latest puppet to be elevated to the imperial dignity by the squabbling army factions. But a delegation of the Roman senate, which travelled to Constantinople to obtain the usual agreement from the Eastern Emperor, did not ask for Romulus Augustulus to be confirmed. Instead, they begged the Emperor Zeno (474–91) to accept the over-lordship of the West for himself, whilst granting the title of Patrician to Odoacer, the barbarian general who actually controlled Italy at the time. In this way the principle of imperial rule was upheld in theory, though all practical government was surrendered. For centuries after 476, therefore, the emperors in Constantinople were able to maintain their claim to supreme authority in the West. None of the barbarian rulers in the ex-imperial provinces paid much attention to the claim. But its existence may explain why any alternative source of supreme authority was so slow to develop, [PALAEO]

Overall, therefore, the Empire’s strategy was more to absorb the barbarian challenge than to attempt any decisive solution. The problem was too large to be neatly solved. The emperors exacted tribute, both in money and in recognition, from the invaders. They settled them where possible in the lands they demanded, or acquiesced where necessary. They employed a whole gallery of barbarian generals—from Stilicho the Vandal to Odoacer of the Heruli—and recruited masses of barbarian soldiery, which steadily subverted political life in the Western provinces. In the end, it was largely immaterial whether the emperor gave his blessing to a puppet Caesar elected by barbarian troops or to a barbarian king. Yet it is important to realize that the Roman Empire was not destroyed by the barbarian invasions. It reeled under the blows and suffered great losses, both in territory and influence. But it held together for almost a thousand years after 476, and it succeeded in reasserting itself on several notable occasions. To suggest otherwise is simply to succumb to Western prejudice, [TEICHOS]

PALAEO

IN the fourth century a form of uncials or ‘inch-high letters’ made their appearance in the writing of the late Roman Empire. They were generally smaller, rounder, and more suited to the requirements of pen than imperial forms had been. They long coexisted with the traditional Latin script which used ‘square’ and later ‘rustic’ capitals without punctuation or gaps between words. But it was the start of the long process of evolution of Latin writing which led from the uncial and half-uncial stage, through Caroline minuscule and Gothic to the humanistic miniscule and italic of the Renaissance period. [CADMUS]

Palaeography, the study of ancient writing, is one of the auxiliary sciences vital to the historian’s and archivist’s craft. It often provides the only means for judging where, when, and by whom a document was written. Every period, every location, and every scribe reveal their own peculiarities.1Greek, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts passed through similar evolutions to those of Latin. All moved away from early formal styles to the cursive forms of later times. The records of the Ottoman chancelleries, written in an eccentric Turkish variant of Arabic, have the reputation of being unusually hard to decipher. (See Appendix III, p. 1227.)

Though the invention of printing, and later of typewriters, greatly facilitated the deciphering of documents, palaeography never became redundant. Many letters and diaries continued to be written by hand. In 1990 a team of German tricksters almost convinced the world that they had found the long-lost diaries of Adolf Hitler. The palaeographical skills of the forger exceeded those of the distinguished English professor who was hired to check his work.2

Justinian (r. 527–65) is mainly remembered for his codification of Roman law, and for a determined attempt to reassert imperial rule over the lost Western provinces. His legal reforms were certainly a lasting achievement; but from the standpoint of the Empire as a whole his preoccupations in the West must have seemed something of a diversion from more pressing matters. Justinian’s reign saw the Slavs appear on the Adriatic, and the Persians on the Mediterranean shore of the Levant. Constantinople was decimated by plague, and by the strife of the hippodrome factions, the Blues and the Greens. It was besieged by the Slavs in 540 and by the Avars in 562. Justinian caused an early scandal by marrying a so-called dancer called Theodora, the daughter of a Cypriot manager of the Greens. According to the Secret History attributed to Procopius, Theodora once regretted ‘that God had not endowed her with more orifices to give more pleasure to more people at the same time’. But she turned out to be an active and intelligent consort; it was a famous partnership. (See Appendix III, p. 1237.)

Justinian’s reconquest of the West centred on the exploits of his general, Belisarius, who set out on his first expedition to Africa in 533. His surprising success in destroying the Vandal kingdom at a stroke encouraged him to attack the Ostrogoths in Sicily and Italy. An isolated army of 7,500 men advanced on a realm which boasted 100,000 Germanic warriors. In 535 Belisarius took Palermo as reigning consul, and on 9 December 536 he entered Rome at the request of its frantic bishop. There, in 537–8, he withstood a mighty siege, where the walls of Aurelian held off the horde. At the critical moment, the defenders broke the heads of the Goths by hurling down the marble statues of gods and emperors ripped from Hadrian’s mausoleum. In 540 Belisarius took the Gothic capital of Ravenna. But thirteen years of war remained. Rome was subjected to two more punishing sieges. The occupation by Totila in 546 proved far more destructive than anything inflicted by Alaric or Genseric. The Gothic troops breached the walls, burned the gates, and deported the citizens. Most ominously, they smashed the arches of the aqueducts. ‘For forty days the imperial city was given up to the wolf and the owl.’ Then fortunes were reversed once more. In 553 the campaign of Narses, an ageing eunuch of the Palace, completed what Belisarius had begun: Italy was restored as an imperial province with a governor at Ravenna; the Ostrogoths and their horde were dispersed. In 554, the imperialists attacked Spain, driving the Visigoths into the central plateau and re-establishing a Roman province in the south.

On the face of it, Justinian had restored the Empire to much of its former glory. The Mediterranean, once again, was a Roman lake. Yet the glory was superficial: ‘Reste une grandeur caduque, même malfaisante’ (the grandeur which remained was decrepit, even noxious).9 Italy in particular was so ruined by Justinian’s wars, so oppressed by his governors and tax-collectors, that the inhabitants soon regretted the restoration. The Patriarch of Rome, resentful of interference in his ecclesiastical freedom, was driven to think of permanent separation. What is more, with the destruction of the Gothic horde, Italy had lost its defences. It fell an easy prey to the next wave of invaders—the Lombards. Apart from the lonely exarchate of Ravenna, the only parts to remain in imperial hands were in the south and in Sicily. Meanwhile all sorts of other enemies were looming on the horizon. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries Constantinople was repeatedly attacked. Huns, Ostrogoths, Avars, Slavs, Persians, and Arabs all made their bid for the ultimate prize. The Huns under Attila had ridden for the Bosporus on their outward journey. They reached the walls of Constantinople in 441. The Ostrogoths under Theodoric arrived after their victory at Adrianople. They reached the walls in 476.

TEICHOS

AN inscription on the Porta Rhegium records the reconstruction of the Land Walls of Constantinople in AD 447. A recent earthquake had seriously damaged the third line of the city’s fortifications, which had been built by the Regent Artemius, thirty years earlier; and repairs and renovations were urgently required. The Huns were on the Danube frontier, and had already made one successful sortie to the Bosporus. As a result, a magnificent, multi-tiered system of defences was erected in the last years of Theodosius II, all the way from the Golden Gate to the Golden Horn. The main rampart of the Artemesian Wall was raised to a height of 100 feet above the surrounding countryside; a massive, battlemented protective wall was erected in front of it, providing a high terraced walkway; an outer esplanade guarded by a third line of battlements separated the walls from a broad, brick-lined moat. The whole was equipped with ninety-six major bastions, a host of lesser watch-towers, and a maze of traps, dams, sally-points, and false approaches. Though numerous extensions and alterations were made to the city’s defences at other more vulnerable points, it was the main Theodosian Walls, the great Teichos, which withstood the repeated attacks of the barbarians for more than a thousand years.1 (See Map 9.)

There is no scene more redolent of Christendom’s early centuries than this great fortress of the Christian empire, magnificently impregnable against the puny attempts of all attackers. The Visigoths came and went empty-handed in 378, the Huns in 441, the Ostrogoths in 476. The Slavs tried and failed in 540, the Persians in 609–10, 617–26, and again in 781, the Avars in 625. The Arabs laid unsuccessful siege in 673–8, and 717–18, the Bulgars in 813 and 913, the Rus in 865 and 904, the Pechenegs in 1087, and the Venetians in 1203. The Crusaders broke into Constantinople in April 1204 from the seaward side (see p. 360). But the Theodosian Walls remained intact until the Ottoman siege of 1453. Their fall was to mark not only the end of the Roman Empire but the beginning of modern military history. Gunpowder seriously modified the art of fortification. (See pp. 448–50).

To stand by the Golden Gate at sunset is one of the most moving of experiences for any historian. Originally built by Theodosius I as a threefold triumphal arch beyond the city, the Porta áurea was incorporated into the Walls in 417; but it continued to serve as the starting station of the imperial processional route. (It is now the Yedi Kuleh, the Fortress of the Seven Towers, at the entrance to Istanbul.) In the eyes of the defenders, the barbarians, like the last rays of the setting sun, always came from the West.

Seen from Constantinople, the Slavs must have raised excitements like the Celtic and Germanic tribes had once raised in Rome. Though less well reported, their crossing of the Danube in 551 must have resembled the earlier surge of the Germanics across the Rhine. The impact was certainly similar. Whole provinces of the Empire—Illyria, Dalmatia, Macedonia, and Thrace—were turned into one vast Sclavinia or ‘Slavdom’. They so overwhelmed the Latin-speaking population that only small pockets were left—as Daco-Romans (Romanians) north of the Danube, or as scattered communities of ‘Vlachs’ to the south. They provided the main ethnic component of three later principalities carved out of former imperial territory—Croatia, Serbia, and greater Bulgaria. Sailing on primitive one-log boats, they even penetrated the Greek islands. They reached the walls of Constantinople in 540.

Persia had seen a major revival of its fortunes since the days of Alexander’s successors. Under the Sassanid dynasty, the eastern frontiers of Rome were ceaselessly contested. Under Ardashir I (r. 227–41) and again under the two Khosrus (also known as Chosroes)—Khosru I (r. 531–79) and Khosru II (r. 590–628), Persian resurgence reached the point where the latter could claim possession of the Mediterranean in a ‘ceremony of the sea’ performed near Antioch. They reached the walls in 609–10 and again in 625–6. The Avars made for the Bosporus, having been driven down the Danube by the Franks. They joined the Persians at the walls in 625. The Arabs poured out of the east like a desert sandstorm (see p. 253). They reached the walls in 673, and again in 717. [TEICHOS]

Heraclius (575–641) is the best-backed candidate for the title of ‘first of the Byzantines’. He had none of Justinian’s Western interests, and he gave the state a distinctly oriental flavour. He spent most of his reign dealing with one great enemy, only to find another more formidable to hand. In 617 the Persian host of Chosroes II marched to the Hellespont and called on Constantinople to surrender. They had already captured Damascus and Jerusalem (614), where they had seized the True Cross; and by occupying Egypt they had cut off the Empire’s corn dole—another relic of Roman times. It was a confrontation between Europe and Asia worthy of Herodotus:

Chosroes, greatest of Gods, and master of the earth, to Heraclius, his vile and insensate slave. Why do you still… call yourself a king? But I will pardon your faults if you submit … Do not deceive yourself with vain hope in that Christ, who was not able to save himself from the Jews, who killed him by nailing him to a cross. Even if you take refuge in the depths of the sea, I will stretch out my hand and take you…10

At which point the Avars rode in to landward and, having ambushed the Emperor before the walls, had to be bought off.

Yet in 622 Heraclius was able to launch a series of masterful campaigns that have been called the ‘first crusade’. A great Christian army marched to Jerusalem. Leaving Constantinople to the Perso-Avar siege, he led his troops into the heart of Persia, plundered the palace of Chosroes at Dastager, near Ctesiphon, and, as the crowning clause of the Peace in 628, recovered the True Cross. He was hailed in Constantinople as ‘the new Scipio’. If he had died then, he would have gone down in history as the greatest Roman general since Caesar.

In fact, Heraclius had softened up both the Roman and the Persian empires for the Muslim onslaught. When the armies of Islam appeared in the 630s, he could do nothing to hold them. Jerusalem, saved from the Persians, fell to the Arabs in 638. Three years later, with Heraclius on his death bed, the Empire’s wealthiest province in Egypt was on the point of falling. The first round in Byzantium’s 800-year war with Islam had been lost. None the less, all the main outlines of Byzantine identity were present. The Empire’s territory was reduced to its Greek heartland. The Greek language was the sole vehicle of culture. And the Patriarch of Constantinople, after the loss of his colleagues in Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, was left as the unchallenged leader of the Greek Church. The initial conflict with the Arabs raged for decades. There were two more great sieges of Constantinople, each broken by the supremacy of the imperial fleet and the ‘Greek fire’. There were numberless skirmishes and rearguard actions in the islands and the provinces. Roman Armenia was lost in 636, Cyprus in 643, Rhodes in 655, Carthage in 698. The Saracen wars of Justinian II (r. 685–95 and 705–11) reflected the general chaos of the age. After one battle, he ordered his guards to slaughter the only unit of his troops who had not deserted, to prevent them from deserting in the next. After the fall of Rhodes, the remains of the fallen Colossus were sold to a Jewish dealer for scrap. It was a sign of the times.

Iconodasm—’image-breaking’—was a movement which gripped the Empire in the eighth and early ninth centuries, and which in some respects was a sympathetic reaction to the puritanical values of Islam. At one level it involved a purely religious controversy over the place of images in Christian worship. The Iconoclasts followed the Muslim example in banning all representational art, accusing their opponents of iconoduly—‘idolatry’. An edict of Leo I the Isaurian in 726 decreed that the crucifix be everywhere replaced by a plain Cross. And in due course the order was given for all images of the saints, and especially of the Virgin Mary, to be whitewashed. At another level, however, a deep social and political struggle was in progress. By attacking iconodulous monasteries and sequestrating their considerable properties, the Iconoclast emperors were strengthening the hold of the State over the Church. Equally, they could be seen to be asserting Constantinople’s control over wayward provinces, especially in Europe. The chief Iconoclast, Constantine Copronymos (r. 740–75), ‘hammer of the monks’, was confirmed in his position in 754 by the packed Council of Constantinople, which was roundly anathematized by Rome. At one point all the monks and nuns of Thrace were assembled, and given the choice between instant marriage or exile in Cyprus. The Emperor survived open rebellion, engaging himself in victorious campaigns in Mesopotamia and in public works. [IKON]

The war of the images, however, was far from finished. Both the Empress Irena (r. 797–802) and Theodora, wife of Theophilus (r. 829–42), were ardent icono-dules. Theodora’s son, Michael III (r. 842–67), among many scandalous acts, exhumed and burned the body of Constantine Copronymos. Iconoclasm was proscribed. Religious peace had to await the murder of Michael, and the emergence of the Macedonian dynasty in 867. By that time, much damage had been done. Iconoclasm must be seen as one of the key factors which disrupted the bond between the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Rome, and which drove the Latin Church into the arms of the Franks.

In that same era, the Bulgars rose to a position of great power in the Balkans. Their ancestral chieftain, Kourat, had been an ally of Heraclius; and some time later they were settied on the Black Sea coast south of the Danube. In 717–18 they helped the Empire repel the Arab siege. They conquered seven Slav tribes of the locality, only to adopt the language and customs of the conquered. In the ninth century the warlike Krum declared war on the Empire and on Christianity. It was he, having slain the Emperor Nicephorus in 811, who toasted his victory in the emperor’s skull. He forced Byzantium to build the ‘Great Fence’—a new Roman limes. His successor, Boris, though baptized in Constantinople, was balancing his loyalties between the Greek and the Roman Churches. (See Appendix III, p. 1245.)

Byzantine civilization, as established by the ninth century, possessed several inimitable features which set it apart both from contemporary states in the West and from the earlier Roman Empire. The state and the church were fused into one indivisible whole. The Emperor, the autokrator, and the Patriarch were seen as the secular and the ecclesiastical pillars of divine authority. The Empire defended the Orthodox Church, and the Church praised the Empire. This ‘Caesaropapism’ had no equal in the West, where secular rule and papal authority had never been joined, [TAXIS]

The imperial court was the hub of a vast centralized administration run by an army of bureaucrats. Heraclius had taken the Persian tide of Basileus, and the despotic nature of the state machine was self-evident in its oriental ceremonies. ‘Byzantium’ became a byword for total subservience, secretiveness, and intrigue. The shell of some of the old Roman institutions was retained but was completely subordinated. The senate was an assembly of office-holders, organized in a strict table of ranks. The chief ministers of state under the eparchos (prefect), symponus (chancellor), andlogothete (chief justice) were offset by the chief officers of the court, all eunuchs, under the Paracomoenus (high chamberlain). By castrating its leading courtiers, the Empire protected itself neatly from the possibility of hereditary power in the palace, as often happened in the West. Military defence was divided between a central imperial reserve and guard of foreign mercenaries, commanded by the domestikos, and a system of themes or ‘military regions’, each commanded by its strategos.

IKON

RELIGIOUS icons form the most enduring genre of European Art. But they were never painted primarily as artistic works. They are aids to devotion. They are ‘gates of mystery’, ‘doors of perception’ into the spiritual world beyond the images. Their appreciation depends on the theological knowledge and the emotional receptiveness of the viewer.1 The Byzantine Empire long protected the leading centres, though the medieval West later produced important schools of its own.

The posture demanded from the venerator of icons is summed up by the Greek word hesychia or ‘watchful calm’. It requires patience, detachment, humility, and prayerful concentration. The Philokalia, a 5th-century Byzantine treatise and anthology of texts on ‘the Love of the Beautiful’, likens it to a cat transfixed by the task of catching a mouse.

Legend holds that St Luke was the first icon-painter, his subject the Virgin and Child. (See Plate 22.) Together with ‘Christus Pantokrator’, the Virgin always headed the repertoire. She appeared in three standard positions—the eleus, where She holds the Child to her face; the odititria, where She holds the Child on her outstretched arm; and the orakta, where her arms are raised and the Child is in her womb.2

During the long Iconomachia, the ‘War of the Icons’, St John Damascene (675–749) was the greatest of the Iconophiles or ‘Iconodules’, i.e. ‘slaves of the Icon’. Yet he stressed the distinction between the veneration of icons and the more profound adoration of God which icons facilitate. He also defined the three-level theological theory of images. Christ became Man; Man was made in the image of God; icons, therefore, were true images of the Godhead and the Saints.

Icons have always held a central place in Orthodox churches. The iconostasis or ‘icon screen’ separates the congregation from the church’s sanctuary, reserved for the clergy. It traditionally carried four rows of icons which represent, respectively, the company of saints at the top, the twelve feasts of the Church, the Twelve Apostles, and the twelve prophets. In the centre, the double doors are covered by six panels representing the Archangel Gabriel, the Mother of God, and the Four Evangelists. In Greece, they are ‘The Gates of Beauty’, in Russia ‘the Imperial Gates’. They are surmounted by the three larger icons of God in Judgement, the Trinity, and the Crucifixion. During an Orthodox service, an icon is often paraded through the Church to be kissed by the faithful.

Icons are painted on portable wooden boards. The painters use pure egg tempera colours on a white or gilded surface. Stylized postures, gestures, and faces convey the requisite air of reverence.3 The disregard for perspective is characteristic, [FLAGELLATIO]

Orthodox icon-painting passed through several distinct periods. The first ‘Golden Age’ ended with the Iconoclast controversy. Few specimens survive. The second period ended with the Latin conquest of Byzantium in 1204. The late Byzantine period saw the growth of national schools in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Russia. Novgorod, Belarus, and Pskov all possessed their own traditions until the latterday Russian Orthodox Church imposed an obligatory Muscovite style. Since then, Orthodox iconography has been remarkably insulated from developments in Catholic art. None the less, some important cross-fertilization did take place. A unique ‘composite Veneto-Byzantine style’ emerged in Crete. A similar blend of Catholic and Orthodox imagery can be observed in Ukrainian Uniate Art.4 [GRECO]

Despite the Church Schism (see pp. 328–32), Orthodox icons continued to be highly valued in the West. All the famous ‘Black Madonnas’ of Catholic Europe derive from Byzantine sources, [MADONNA] So, too, does the ‘Holy Face’ of Laon in Picardy, another extraordinary black icon, this time of Christ. Strongly reminiscent of ‘The Shroud of Turin’, the Sainte-Face is classed as a mandylion, that is, an image produced without human hands. Though painted on pineboards, it bears an incongruous Slavonic inscription—OBRAS’ GOSPODEN NAUBRUS’ (The Image of Our Lord on Cloth), probably of Serbian origin. It could be a copy of the Holy Shroud once displayed in Byzantium. At all events, it was obtained by Jacques de Troyes, archdeacon of Laon and the future Pope Urban IV, from ‘certain pious men’ at the Serbian monastery in Bari in southern Italy. According to a surviving letter dated 3 July 1249, the archdeacon sent it as a gift to his sister Sibylle, abbess of the Cistercian convent of Montreuil, whence it duly found its way to the Cathedral at Laon.5

Icons are honoured in all devout Orthodox households. Maxim Gorky recalled his grandparents’ house in Nizhny Novgorod in the 1870s:

When [my Grandmother] talked about God, her face regained its youth… . I took the heavy locks of her hair in my hands, and wound them round my neck. ‘Man can’t see God,’ she said ‘if he did, he’d go blind. Only the Saints can look him full in the face.’ To see her wipe the dust from the icons and clean the chasubles was very interesting…. She would nimbly pick an icon up, smile at it, and say with great feeling ‘What a lovely face!’ Then she would cross herself, and kiss the icon.6

TAXIS

IN September 641 Constans II was crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople in the ambo of St Sophia, ‘the Great Church’. The old Roman practice of acclaiming a new emperor in the Hippodrome was abandoned. The most important politico-religious ceremony in the Byzantine repertoire was finding its final form. Henceforth a diadem was laid on the Emperor’s head, instead of the traditional torque round his neck. Largesse was distributed; coins were struck. Co-emperors were crowned by emperors, empresses by their husbands. Conventional icono-graphic representations of the ceremony showed the emperors being crowned by Christ.

Political ritual played a central role in Byzantine life. Its aim was to reinforce the ideal of taxis, the changeless, harmonious, and hierarchical ‘order of things’. Elaborate spectacles were designed with immense concern for symbolic detail. Processions and public parades were organized on the slightest pretext, above all on Christian feast days. Imperial acclamations were accompanied by the chanting of Biblical texts and political slogans, by the declamation of poems and panegyrics, and by mighty shouts, which contrasted with the total silence that the Emperor’s presence otherwise required. Imperial bride-shows, weddings, and funerals were orchestrated with suitable shows of joy or lamentation. Imperial audiences were meticulously graded according to the status of the visitor. The exact distance between the throne and the prostrations of the visitor was prescribed in advance. The imperial Adventus or ‘arrival’ demanded calibration of the rank of the delegates sent out to meet him, the site and form of the greeting, the route into the city, the choice of church for the thanksgiving service, and the menu for the banquet. The imperial Profectio or ‘departure’, especially for battle, was marked by the distribution of alms, by the veneration of the Standard of the True Cross, and by the consecration of the army and the fleet. The Thriambus or ‘Imperial Triumph’, as inherited from Rome, involved displays of troops, captives, and booty, games and races in the Circus and Hippodrome, and the tra-chelismos or ritual trampling of the defeated enemy or usurper. The promotions of high officials were staged in a manner that left no doubt of the source of their success.

On all occasions, great attention was paid to clothing, to the insignia of office, to colour, and to gesture. Robing and disrobing ceremonies opened and closed all processions. The imperial crown, orb, sceptre, and akakia, the ‘pouch of dust’ symbolizing mortality, were always given prominence. The wearing of the purple was reserved for the Emperor and, in iconography, for Christ and the Virgin Mary. Byzantine body language stressed the ideal of agalma or ‘statuesque calm’.1

The most complete compendium of Byzantine ritual is to be found in the tenth-century manuscript De Ceremom’is aulae byzantinae or ‘The Book of Ceremonies of the Byzantine Court’.2 It contains 153 chapters or dossiers of instructions relating to practices and procedures over 600 years. It prescribes everything from the rules of dance and address to the length of the Emperor’s haircut.3 Imperial ceremonial was imitated and adapted by Patriarchs, by provincial administrators, by generals, by bishops, and eventually by rulers throughout the Christian world. In time, it supplied the basis for all sorts of monarchical and ecclesiastical symbolism far beyond the Empire. Charlemagne, for example, copied much from Byzantium, just as other Western sovereigns copied much from Charlemagne.3 [KRAL]

Not all, however, was one-way traffic. The practice of raising the Emperor aloft on the shields of his troops was borrowed from the Germanic tribes. It was first used by Julian in Paris in 361, and lasted, with intervals until the eighth century. The ceremony of chrisma, ‘anointment with holy oil’, seems to have been first adopted by the Franks and introduced to Constantinople by Crusaders in the thirteenth century.4 By that time, the christianization of monarchical ritual in Europe was universal.

Byzantium, however, was primarily a naval power. Its navy of 300 biremes, armed with battering rams and the ‘Greek fire’, could hold its own against all comers. Despite the great battle with the Arabs off Phoenix in Lycia in 655, Byzantine sea-power continued to dominate the Aegean and the Black Sea.

The Byzantine state practised unremitting paternalism in social and economic affairs. Trade was controlled by state officials, who exacted a straight 10 per cent tax on all exports and imports. State regulations governed all aspects of guild and industrial life. State factories, such as thegynaceum, the women’s silk-works, guaranteed full employment within the walls. The imperial gold coinage—1 nomisma = 12 milliaressia = 144 pholes—supplied the main international currency of the East. Such was the abundance of the state-run fisheries in the Black Sea that the workers of Constantinople regularly ate caviar.

Under its mantle of Greek culture, Byzantium sheltered a multinational community of the most diverse ethnic origins. Imperial brides could be Khazars, Franks, Rus. The population was Graeco-Slav in the Balkans, post-hellenic and Armenian in the Asian provinces. Beyond the serf villages of the countryside, Byzantine society was highly educated and refined. There was provision for church schools, state universities, academies of law, and for female education. Devotional literature predominated. But the tenth-century Digenis Akritas has been described as ‘the most splendid chanson de geste ever written’, and Byzantine historians from Procopius to Anna Porphyrogeneta (1083–1154) as ‘the finest school… between Ancient Rome and modern Europe’. Byzantine art and architecture developed absolutely inimitable styles. Despite or perhaps because of the iconoclastic restraints, the Byzantine icon made a lasting contribution to European art. Byzantium remained civilized, while most of the countries of the West were, in terms of formal culture, struggling in outer darkness.11

The Rise of Islam, 622–778

On 20 September 622 an obscure Arab mystic called Muhammad reached safety in the city of Medina. He had been driven from his native Mecca. He asked that a temple be built on the spot where his anxious disciples had greeted him. Thus, on Day One of Year One of the new religion, the first Muhammadan mosque was erected.

For more than a decade, the former camel-driver had preached his radical ideas without success, having received a vision of his destiny from the archangel Gabriel in a cave on Mount Hira. ‘Muhammad, in truth, in real truth, thou art Prophet of the Lord.’ Later, after this first Night of Destiny, he had experienced another mystical vision, the Night Journey to Heaven. Riding on a magical steed, he was transported to Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem, and thence through the spheres of the sky to the threshold of the Unseen Infinite. In 624 Muhammad armed 300 of his followers and routed an army sent to suppress them. In 628 he rode unopposed into Mecca on his favourite camel, at the head of 10,000 faithful. He struck down the heathen idols in the shrine of the Kaaba, and transformed it into the holiest shrine of his own following. After four more years of teaching at Medina, where the main body of the Prophet’s wisdom was recorded for the Holy Book, the Koran, he set out once more on the Farewell Pilgrimage to Mecca. In the Valley of Arafat he delivered his last message:

Listen to my words, my people, for in the year to come I shall not be with you … Hold your goods, your honour and your lives as sacred… until the day you return to God. Aid the poor and clothe them… Remember that one day you will appear before the Almighty and that He will ask you the reason for your actions … It is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights with regard to you. Treat them well, for they are your support… I have accomplished my mission, and I am leaving you a guide in the shape of the Lord’s Book and the example of His Messenger… You will not fail if you follow this guide.

As he fell to the ground, God spoke:

This day have I perfected for you your religion, and completed my Favour unto you, and chosen for you as your religion—Islam.12

Back in Medina, the Angel of Death entered the Prophet’s chamber, and the Prophet said, ‘Oh Death, execute your orders’. It was, according to the Christian calendar, 7 June 632.

The desert land of Arabia forms a stepping-stone between the mainlands of Africa and Asia. It had always maintained a fierce independence from the surrounding empires. It faced Egypt and Abyssinia to the west, Mesopotamia and Persia to the north, and India to the east. Notwithstanding its arid wastes and bedouin tribes, it participated in all the great civilizations of the region. The Kaaba at Mecca marked the spot where Adam came after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden and where Abraham rebuilt the sacred shrine. Mecca itself was a wealthy staging-post on the caravan route joining the Mediterranean with East Africa and India. In the early seventh century it was in close contact with the Roman Empire in Egypt and with the rival Sassanid Empire of Persia. It was an unexpected source for a new world religion; but it had many advantages as a secure base for Islam’s propagation.

Islam, meaning ‘submission’, was a universal religion from the start. Although it has always clung to Arabic as the sacred language of the Koran, it appeals to all nations, to all classes, and to both sexes. One of the most basic precepts is that all Muslims are brothers and sisters. In his lifetime Muhammad denounced the economic privileges of the ruling élite, the subordination of women, and the ‘blood laws’ of the semitic tribes. His call for social, economic, and political equality threatened the foundations of traditional societies. His insistence on the rights of the oppressed and of women, and on the duty of charity and compassion, spelled liberation for the masses. Here was a revolutionary creed, whose almost instantaneous military power derived from the fervent devotion of the faithful. It enjoined that soldiers were the equal of their generals, subjects of their rulers, wives of their husbands. ‘Better justice without religion than the tyranny of a devout ruler.’ Like Christianity, it professed ideals which often outstripped the practices of its adherents; but the force and purity of those ideals is manifest. ‘In the name of Allah, the all-Merciful, the Compassionate’, it spread and spread, like wildfire through the deadwood of a wadi.

Islam is said to rest on five pillars. The first, the confession of faith, consists of reciting the formula: ‘Lā ilāha illā Uãh, Muhammadu ‘rasūlu llāh’ (There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger). Whoever says these words before witnesses becomes a Muslim. The second, ritual prayer requires the faithful to wash and to touch the ground with their heads turned towards Mecca at daybreak, noon, sunset, and evening. The third, called Zakat, involves giving alms to the poor. The fourth is fasting. Every sane and healthy Muslim adult must refrain from food, drink, and sexual intercourse from dawn to dusk throughout the month of Ramadan. The fifth, the Hadj obliges every Muslim to make the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in his or her lifetime. Above all, the loyal Muslim is enjoined to respect the teachings of the Koran, whose 114 suras or chapters provide a source of law, a manual of science and philosophy, a collection of myths and stories, and an ethical textbook.

The caliphs, that is ‘the successors’ of the Prophet, quickly turned a united Arabia into the springboard for a theocratic world-empire. In their day they commanded unrivalled power, and wealth beyond tally, inspiring science, literature, and arts. Under Abu Bakr (r. 632–4), Omar (r. 634–44), and Othman (r. 644–56), their armies conquered Syria, Palestine, Persia, and Egypt in lightning succession. A fleet was constructed to protect Alexandria, and the Arabs soon became the leading sea-power of the Mediterranean. Under Ali (r. 656–61), a cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, civil and religious dissension broke out. But under the Omayyad dynasty unity was restored. Mo‘awiya (r. 661–80) established the capital in Damascus. Yazid I (r. 680–3) defeated Ali’s rebellious son Hussein—the seminal event in the history of the Shi‘ite sect. Abdulmalik (r. 685–705) suppressed an anti-Caliph in Mecca. Walid I (r. 705–15) saw the zenith of Omayyad power, before their long rivalry with the Abbasid dynasty ended in the bloodbath on the Zab in 750. Thereafter, under Al-Mansur (‘The Victorious’, r. 754–75) the Abbasids launched a 500-year reign. For a time, their capital in Baghdad was the centre of the world.

The transfer of Jerusalem from Christian to Muslim hands was an event of immense consequence. The city was, and is, sacred to all three monotheistic religions. But in the centuries since the Roman expulsion of the Jews, the Christians had guarded the Holy Places for themselves:

On a February day in the year AD 638, the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem riding on a white camel. He was dressed in worn, filthy robes, and the army that followed him was rough and unkempt; but its discipline was perfect. At his side rode the Patriarch Sophronius as chief magistrate of the surrendered city. Omar rode straight to the site of the Temple of Solomon, whence his friend Mahomet had ascended into Heaven. Watching him stand there, the Patriarch remembered the words of Christ and murmured through his tears: ‘Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet.’

Henceforth the Holy City was to be held by Islamic authorities. The Patriarch became a hostage to fortune. Christian pilgrims could not easily reach their goal, and chose increasingly to visit Rome instead. Christianity’s centre of gravity shifted dramatically westwards.

In that century following the Prophet’s death, the armies of Islam marched on relentlessly. Byzantium was unsuccessfully besieged on two occasions, in 673–8 and 717–18. But Kabul, Bokhara, and Samarkand were captured in the East, Carthage and Tangier in the west. In 711 the crossing of the Pillars of Hercules by Al-Tariq—henceforth called Jebel al-Tariq, or Gibraltar—brought the Muslims into Europe, overwhelming Visigothic Spain and breaching the Pyrenees. In 732, on the centenary of Muhammad’s death, they reached Tours on the Loire, a few days’ ride from Paris, in the heart of the Frankish kingdom.

As a result of these far-flung conquests, autonomous Islamic states, paying no more than nominal service to the distant Caliphs, emerged in Spain, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Persia, and in Transoxania. Islam progressed as far in one century as Christianity in seven. In Iberia the Muslim conquerors remembered their history and called the country El-Andalus, the ‘Land of the Vandals’, creating many new principalities. The emirate of Cordova, founded shortly after Al-Tariq’s arrival, established the most durable Muslim presence on the European continent. Together with its successors, the Almoravid empire and the emirate of Granada, it was to last for nearly eight centuries. At its height under Abd al-Rahman (r. 912–61), it covered the greater part of the Iberian peninsula, and claimed the caliphate of all Islam. It brought civilization of the highest order, and a major demographic influx of Arabs, Moors, Berbers, and Jews. There were repeated injections of North Africans into Spain from the eighth to the twelfth centuries, [MEZQUITA]

From that point on, Islam has had a permanent presence in Europe. First in the south-west, in Iberia, and later in the south-east, in the Balkan and Black Sea regions (see Chapter VII). The interaction of Christians and Muslims has provided one of the most enduring features of Europe’s political and cultural life. From the eighth century onwards there has never been a day when the adhan, the call of the muezzin, could not be heard morning and evening, summoning the faithful to prayer:

Allāhu akbar
ašhadu ‘an lā ilāha illā llāh
ašhadu anna Muhammadu ’rasūlu ’llāh
‘alā ’ l-salãh
hayyā ‘alā’ l-falāh
Allāhu akbar
ašhadu ‘an lā ilĀha illā llāh

(God is most great | I testify that there is no god but God | I testify that Muhammad is the prophet of God | To prayer, | Come on, to salvation! | God is most great | I testify that there is no god but God.)

At the dawn call, an extra summons is inserted after the fourth formula, al-salat khair min al-nawm, ‘Prayer is better than sleep’. All Muslims who hear the call must repeat its words, except after the fourth and fifth formulas, when they recite: ‘There is no power nor strength but in Allah’, and ‘Thou hast spoken truthfully and righteously’. Every adult and healthy Muslim is obliged to perform the Salat, or ‘ritual prostrations’, five times each day.

Meanwhile, with the Arabs on the Loire, the Franks steeled themselves to repel the Muslim advance. Charles Martel (c.688–741), mayor of the Merovingian palace, gathered an army which stemmed the tide. The Battle of Poitiers in 732 may well have been exaggerated by Christian apologists: the Arabs may have been obliged to retreat through over-extended lines of communication. They were, after all, more than 1,000 miles out from Gibraltar. But it inspired some magnificent passages:

The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or the Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mohammed.

Thenceforth, in the West, the Muslims were to be held on the line of the Pyrenees. Muslims and Franks were to contest the mountain passes for generations. One such encounter at the Pass of Roncevaux gave rise to the most famous of medieval legends, as celebrated in the chansons de geste. Two Frankish knights, variously known as Roland and Oliver or Orlando and Rinaldo, are hard-pressed by the Muslim army as they try to withdraw their forces to safety on the northern side. Oliver urges his companion to sound the signal horn to bring up reinforcements. Roland, more valiant than wise, fails to comply until the battle is already lost. When he finally blows the horn, bursting the veins in his head, it is heard all over Francia. Roland, swooning on his horse, is struck by mistake in the mêleé by the blinded Oliver:

‘Sir cumpain, faites le vos de gred?
Ja est co Rollant, ki tant vos soelt amer!
Par nule guise ne m’aviez desfiet!’
Dist Oliver: ‘Or vos oi jo parler.
Je ne vos vei, veied vus Damnedeu!
Ferut vos ai, car le me pardunez!’
Rollant respunt: ‘Jo n’ai nient de mel.
Jol vos pardains ici e devant Deu.’
A icel mot l’un a l’altre ad clinet.
Par tel amur as les vus desevred.

(‘Companion, Sir, did you intend this stroke? | For I am Roland who loves you so dear, | And you have not defied or challenged me.’ | Oliver said: ‘Now I can hear you speak | But see you not; God keep you in his sight! | I have struck you? Forgive me then I beg!’ | Roland replies: ‘I have come to no harm. | You have my pardon here and before God.’ | At this, each bows towards the other’s breast. | See with what love they to their parting come!)

‘Alas, sweet Francia, today you will be shorn of your good vassals.’

In the East, the Christian line was held by the Byzantine forces. But the Muslim presence was felt deep into the Slavonic hinterland. The Muslim world had a growing appetite for slaves, and raw-boned Slavs were a favourite commodity. Jewish traders and Vikings acted as the middlemen and the carriers, especially through Crimea [KHAZARIA] [RUS’,] but later in the Baltic and Central Europe [DIRHAM]. Such was the association of Slavs with the slave-trade that the two words ‘Slav’ and ‘slave’ have widely been thought to be synonymous. The Arabic word for eunuch, sakaliba, is also considered to derive from ‘Slav’. It is no accident that the first surviving eyewitness report of the Slavonic lands was written by a Moorish Jew, a merchant from Tortosa (see p. 454).