3

NEW ROME

Shored Against Ruin

The Romans, although hardly a people given to false modesty, were sternly conscious of what their greatness owed to the realm of the supernatural. The sheer scale of their achievements made it hard for them not to be. A hint of the unearthly had always shadowed the parabola of Rome’s rise to global rule. Back when the city was founded, seven and a half centuries before the birth of Christ, it had ranked as little more than an encampment of peasants and cattle rustlers, scattered unpromisingly over seven hills in an obscure corner of Italy. A thousand years later, however, as the House of Sasan was making its own first pitch for world empire, Rome’s dominion had come to extend from the icy northern ocean to the sands of Africa. How on earth had it happened that a single city sat enthroned as the mistress of the world? The Romans themselves, for much of their history, had never doubted the answer. If the heavens had favoured them, then this could only be because they were the most god-fearing of peoples. “We stand powerful as much by our piety as by our force of arms.”¹

Yet, the Romans, despite enjoying the evident backing of the gods, had never quite been able to escape the faint gnawings of an inferiority complex. If their conquests in the West—in Spain, Gaul and Britain—had brought them mastery over tribesmen whom they could cheerfully dismiss as barbarians, then in the East it had been a rather different story. There, in lands once ruled by Cyrus and Alexander, there were civilisations that could hardly help but make them feel like parvenus. Most intimidating of all—the inventors of the Doric column and the hypotenuse, of philosophy and the cookery book—were a people who ranked as the veritable cynosures of sophistication: the Greeks. The Romans, who did not care to think of themselves as provincial, had always flinched from confessing too openly to their resulting cultural cringe. They, after all, were the ones who had conquered the Greeks—not the other way round. This was why, however much they might enjoy name-dropping Plato in their letters and conversation, they had never forgotten what they owed to their own ancestral rites and customs, which had helped to bring them all their greatness. Even the Greeks themselves, when they attempted to fathom the secret of Roman success, might find themselves agreeing with this analysis. “Their state,” pronounced Posidonius, a celebrated polymath who had died some fifty years before the birth of Christ, “is founded not only upon their manpower, but upon their traditional way of doing things.”² So potent were some of these traditions that they could barely even be put into words. Too much, far too much, was at stake. What, for instance, was the name of the god or goddess whose charge it was to protect and keep watch over Rome? Reveal it, and the whole city might be undermined. Only one man had ever had the nerve to do so—and he, unsurprisingly, had come at once “to a sticky end.”³

Yet, even when it came to state secrets such as these, the Romans could still not quite bring themselves to trust exclusively to their own cults. If it were true, as they tended to take for granted, that the most efficacious traditions were also the most ancient, then there could be no denying, yet again, the infuriating primacy of their most brilliant subjects. Centuries before the founding of Rome, so the Greeks claimed, there had stood on the Asian shores of the Hellespont, the straits that separated Asia from Europe, a city by the name of Troy; and this city, within its walls, had sheltered a most potent talisman. It portrayed Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess who, way back in the mists of time, had dropped it from the heavens, and given it her name: the Palladium. So long as the Trojans kept guard over this statue, so the story went, their city would stand impregnable—which was why, when an army of Greeks laid siege to Troy, they had found it impossible to break through the city’s walls for ten long and terrible years. Finally, though, their spies had managed to steal the Palladium—whereupon Troy had promptly fallen, and been razed utterly to the ground. And the Palladium? Its fate had been much disputed. Any number of Greek cities had claimed to be its final resting place—as well they might have done, since the Palladium was not merely a priceless status symbol but the ultimate in security guarantees. Yet in truth, as time would more than demonstrate, there was only the one city that could convincingly claim to have been endowed with its awesome power. As the Greek world was increasingly put in the shade by the rising power of Rome, so the conquerors had set to appropriating the past of the conquered as well as their lands.⁴ The origins of the Roman people, it had come to be asserted, lay not in Italy at all, but far to the east—in Troy. Romulus, the wolf-raised founder of Rome and its first king, had himself, so it was claimed, been descended from Aeneas, a Trojan prince. With the help of the gods, this Aeneas had escaped the sack of his city and sailed to Italy to make a new beginning. Nor was that all. Somehow—although by what precise means, no one could entirely agree—the Palladium had ended up in Rome. The future would be secure for as long as it remained there, carefully preserved in the Forum—the venerable and monument-crowded public space that had always served as the heart of the city. Link to a past immeasurably vaster and more ancient than the Romans’ own, the Palladium was also something very much more: “a pledge from Fate that the empire would never fall.”⁵

In AD 248, a couple of decades after the House of Sasan had seized the mastery of Iranshahr, the Roman people celebrated their millennium. A thousand years on from the founding by Romulus of the city to which he had given his name, however, and it was not only those who actually lived in Rome who could glory in the name of “Roman.” Thirty-six years earlier, each and every free man in the empire had been granted citizenship: an enfranchisement dismissed sourly by some as an underhand attempt to broaden the tax base, but which could also plausibly be viewed in a nobler light. The Romans, despite the brutal and ravening quality of their ascent to greatness, had always sheltered, at the back of their minds, the vague but gratifying conviction that their conquest of the world had been for the world’s own good. No one had expressed this more stirringly than a poet named Virgil. Back in the first flush of Rome’s global rule, he had written the Aeneid, a sweeping epic in which the Romans were ringingly admonished never to forget their god-given duty: “to impose the works and ways of peace, to spare the vanquished and to overthrow the haughty by means of war.”⁶ A mission statement calculated to delight the Romans themselves, of course; yet also with a resonance that was more than merely Roman. Virgil’s epic, as its title suggested, told the story of Aeneas; and while it certainly looked forward to the age when the descendants of the Trojan prince would rule the world, it looked back as well, to a heritage that derived from the East. Nor was it only Roman poets who bought into the seemingly implausible notion that an empire won amid slaughter and exploitation might embody a brotherhood of man: so too did Greek philosophers. Posidonius, a near contemporary of Virgil, had been the first of many to suggest that Rome’s dominion might be nothing less than an earthly reflection of the order of the cosmos. This notion, by the time of the Roman millennium, had come almost to be taken for granted. Rome had indeed, for a period of some two centuries, imposed “the works and ways of peace.” Never in recorded history had so many people lived for so long without experience of war. Given this, it was hardly surprising that distant provincials had become proud to call themselves “Roman” and hymned the world’s capital in gratitude. “Everywhere, you have made citizens of those who rank as the noblest, most accomplished and powerful of peoples … All the world has been adorned by you as a pleasure garden.”⁷

Except that increasingly, by the time of Rome’s millennium, there were weeds in the garden, and brambles. The order that for so long had kept it flourishing had slumped into disrepair. Repeatedly, over the preceding half-century, soldiers’ boots had trampled down its blooms. The decade immediately preceding the millennium had been particularly brutal. Rival generals had butchered one another with a wearying degree of savagery. The Roman people, standing in the shadow of the millennium, were perfectly entitled to shiver. They knew full well the ghosts that were being roused. A talent for imposing order was not their only inheritance from the distant past. So too was civil bloodshed. Romulus, the founder of Rome, had murdered his own twin brother. The line of kings that succeeded him had then been ended by a coup d’état, and the monarchy abolished. The republic that replaced it, and which had gone on to conquer the world, had itself, some four and a half centuries on from its establishment, collapsed amid murderous violence. The ambitions of rival generals—imperatores—had made the whole world to bleed. Many at the time had thought Rome herself doomed; and perhaps she would have been, had not a particularly ruthless “imperator” by the name of Caesar planted the banner of autocracy atop the corpse-littered rubble of the republic, and founded a second monarchy. Augustus, he called himself—the “Divinely Favoured One.” An immodest title—but well merited. Indeed, it was the measure of his success that the word imperator itself evolved, over the course of his reign, to mean something much more than “general”: what we, in an echo of the original Latin, now term “emperor.” Virgil, who began his great epic at least in part due to the promptings of Augustus, hailed his patron as a man fated to “bring back the Age of Gold”⁸—and an age of gold, by and large, was precisely what the world had been given. True, there had been the odd lunatic emperor: Nero, for instance, half a century on from the death of Augustus, was remembered with horror by the Roman people as a man who had killed his mother, married a eunuch, and burned down half of Rome. Yet even the civil war that followed his suicide lasted barely a year; and for 150 years after his death, the empire had enjoyed a golden age. All the more alarming for the Romans, then, as the millennium was ushered in amid the scrabbling after power by would-be Caesars, to imagine that gold might be reverting to iron, and evolution going into reverse: that emperors might once again come to rank as nothing more than rival warlords.

But this was not the only shadow darkening the millennial celebrations. Trouble was brewing beyond the frontiers of the empire as well as within them. In Virgil’s great poem, the Roman people had been promised a “dominion without limit”;⁹ but the truth was, as their strategists were perfectly well aware, that there were limits to everything. Just as there lay beyond the bulwarks of Iranshahr a terrifying immensity of nomad-infested grasslands, so likewise, beyond the northern reaches of Rome’s empire, there stretched a whole wilderness of bogs and forests: one that seemed positively to seethe with barbarians. The conundrum of how best to ward off these savages was one that had been perplexing the Roman high command for centuries. Too backward to be worth the effort of conquering, they were simultaneously too menacing simply to be left to run amok. A knotty problem—and one that had required an appropriately deft-fingered response. Roman frontier policy took many forms. Watchful defence on the part of the legions was punctuated by bursts of pulverising aggression. Submissive tribes could expect to be rewarded with grants of gold; defiant tribes with slaughter and ruin. On occasion, the Roman military also turned the barbarians’ seemingly inexhaustible relish for fighting to its own advantage by employing whole groupings of them—foederati—alongside the legions. Rome’s aim, of course, was quite simple: to maintain a crushing superiority. In this, for most of the long period of peace ushered in by Augustus, she had been resoundingly successful. Increasingly, though, along the entire northern frontier, there were alarming signs that the balance of power might be shifting. Raids across the Rhine had been going on for decades. Further east, across the Danube, a people called the Goths had recently launched even more brutal incursions. In the year of the millennium itself, they torched whole swaths of the Balkans. All this had come as a most unpleasant surprise to the Roman authorities. It seemed scarcely believable that warlords right on the doorstep of the empire were capable of planning, leading and executing such devastation. Barbarians were simply not meant to be capable of organising themselves on such a scale. Patently, however, what had once been scattered tribal groupings were now starting to cohere into something more. Their leaders, it seemed, freighted with Roman subsidies and plunder, had been deploying this treasure to broaden their own horizons. The richer in gold they were, the more weight they had to throw around. War bands that had once numbered hundreds might now very well number thousands. This, while hardly muscle on an imperial scale, did mean that barbarian kings were increasingly packing a heavy punch. They had become, in short, just that little bit more Roman.

Which did not, of course, make them any the less contemptible. In fact, if anything, the clod-hopping of the Goths deep into the heartlands of the empire only confirmed the Romans in their scorn. The true, the ultimate shock to their complacency did not come from the North, but from the East. Rome was not yet, as she celebrated her millennium, prepared to acknowledge Persia as an equal. Nevertheless, barely two decades after Ardashir had seized the throne, she had been given a foretaste of what was to come. Shapur I, Ardashir’s son, had already expelled the Romans from Mesopotamia for good. The imperial high command, in a desperate attempt to preserve the remainder of Rome’s provinces in the East, had been obliged to denude the Rhine and the Danube of troops. Then, in 244, with the emperor himself on campaign in the East, there was yet another coup. The new Caesar, a hard-bitten warrior named Philip, was frantic to return from the front to Rome to shore up his position. He duly sued for peace. The truce, when it was agreed, came at monstrous cost—and Shapur made sure that the whole world knew it. It was Philip who would be portrayed on the cliff face just west of Persepolis grovelling before the triumphant Shahanshah. It was Philip as well, four years later, in the April of 248, who enjoyed the supreme honour of presiding over Rome’s millennium celebrations.

A few months later, in 249, he was dead: killed in battle by a rival Caesar named Decius. Two years on, Decius himself was hacked to pieces by a Goth war band. A decade after that, the dignity of the imperial throne reached its nadir, when Shapur captured the latest emperor, Valerian, and used him from that moment on as his mounting block. For the Persians, a living, breathing Caesar was the ultimate in trophies; and they duly made sure to record Valerian’s humiliation alongside Philip’s on the cliff face just west ofPersepolis. Even death did not bring an end to the humbling of the wretched emperor: his skin, flayed from his body after his death and dyed a lurid red, was lovingly preserved in a temple as one of the supreme treasures of the House of Sasan.¹⁰

For the Romans, however, even worse was to come. More than the dignity of the imperial title was in meltdown by now. Events were slipping terrifyingly out of control. The more unstable the situation became, the more rival warlords were tempted to snatch after the ultimate prize. The more that happened, the more the eastern provinces were left exposed. The more that the Roman high command then moved troops to stabilise the front with Persia, the more it left the northern frontier open to the barbarians there. The more that the Goths and assorted other savage people then broke through to the rich, soft lands of the south, the more unstable conditions became. How to break this vicious circle? The dominion of the Roman people, it appeared, was locked into a death spiral.

Yet, the empire did not, in the end, succumb. Instead, against all odds, and through a supreme and grinding effort of will, a new generation of emperors hauled it back from the brink. Grim, implacable and pitiless men, they forced upon their subjects a revolution no less far-reaching than the one presided over by Augustus. That “taxes are the sinews of the state”¹¹ had long been a Roman maxim. Recently, though, amid the agonies of the age, those same sinews had atrophied. Warfare and anarchy had made it increasingly difficult to raise revenue. The authorities, in their desperation, had debased the coinage—but that had merely led inflation to gallop out of control. Rome had faced financial as well as military ruin. The surgery, however, when it finally came, was to prove brutally effective. To the iron-fisted warlords who now stood at the head of the empire, it appeared self-evident that only a massively enlarged military apparatus could hope to maintain the integrity of the frontiers—and that only a massively enlarged fiscal apparatus could hope to pay for it. Accordingly, over the course of a few decades, the number of soldiers and bureaucrats was multiplied by an astounding factor. The state that emerged from these reforms was to prove the most formidably governed that the Mediterranean had ever seen. Nowhere before had there existed a bureaucracy quite so complex and domineering; and nowhere before had there existed a military funded on quite so massive a scale. The light-touch autocracy established by Augustus had been transformed into something infinitely more heavy-handed: centralised, intrusive and absolute. It was a form of government that still retained the name of Roman; and yet there was a sense as well in which it marked a revolutionary change. So much so, in fact, that the new regime had gone so far as to found a second Rome.

Byzantium, this new capital had originally been called. It stood on the western shore of the Bosphorus, a narrow strait that served—like the Hellespont some one hundred miles to the south-west—to separate Europe from Asia. Greek settlers had founded the city many centuries earlier—but despite the fact that it occupied a magnificently defensible site on the tip of a promontory, surrounded on one side by sea, and on the other by an estuary named the Golden Horn, its growth had always been limited by a seemingly fatal lack of drinking water. Such a drawback, however, was hardly the kind to put off a Roman autocrat; and sure enough, in AD 324, there had arrived in Byzantium a Caesar fully determined to found on its site “another Rome.”¹² The name of this emperor wasConstantine—a man who stood supreme as the very embodiment of the new imperial order. Born in the Balkans, proclaimed emperor in Britain, he had spent his life criss-crossing the empire, patching it back together in the teeth of a host of rivals, all of whom he had systematically hunted down and eliminated. Although he had won the decisive victory of his reign just outside the walls of Rome, Constantine had no particular ties of loyalty to the ancient capital. What he did have, however, was an unblinking appreciation of the empire’s defensive needs: of just how imperative it was to coordinate the eastern and northern fronts. Byzantium, midway between the Euphrates and the Rhine, could not have been more ideally suited to his purposes. A whole new foundation was accordingly planted on its site. A massive grid of monuments, squares and streets began to spread westwards along the course of the promontory, obliterating entire reaches of the original city as it went. Even its name was swallowed up. Although the people who lived on the site would continue to call themselves Byzantines, Byzantium itself had ceased to exist. On 11 May 330, amid a triumphant blaze of immodesty, its founder formally inaugurated it as the “City of Constantine”: Constantinople.

Initially, of course, the inhabitants of the original Rome could hardly help but find the pretensions of this arriviste settlement faintly risible. Everyone knew that a city without an ancient pedigree barely ranked as a city at all. Rapidly though the population of Constantinople was soon growing, far more rapidly even than its founder had anticipated, so that in only a few decades it was bursting the landward walls he had built for the city, yet there still lurked, among those who lived there, a queasy consciousness of their own status as upstarts. Numerous efforts were made to counter this. Constantine himself—determined to purloin for his foundation the heritage that it so glaringly lacked—had stripped the Greek world bare of all its greatest treasures. The public spaces of Constantinople, adorned with famous trophies and statuary, “brazen statues of the most exquisite workmanship,”¹³ had come to rank as the world’s most stupefying museum. The city had even taken on the ultimate challenge: going toe to toe with Rome herself. Topographers, with a show of considerable creativity, had succeeded in establishing that Constantinople, just like her venerable predecessor, boasted seven hills. Architects had designed for her all the appurtenances of a cutting-edge imperial capital: palaces, forums, baths. Engineers had provided her with the aqueducts and harbours that any city with an ambition to equal Rome would require, if its inhabitants were to be kept watered and fed. Most strikingly of all, perhaps, Constantinople had been endowed with an ornament hitherto unique to Rome: an assembly of the great and good by the name of the Senate. This was the body, back in the distant past, long before the time of Augustus and the forging of his autocracy, that had guided Rome to the mastery of the world. It constituted a living link with the most primordial days of the empire. Now, the establishment of a Senate in Constantinople, and a Senate House, gave to the city a touch, however faint, of the long-vanished republic. It helped to put flesh on the bones of its proud claim to be the Second Rome.

And as time passed, and the city continued to increase in scale and self-confidence, so she came to appropriate for herself an even more sensational ancestry. Two hundred years on from the founding of Constantinople, and it had become widely believed that Constantine’s original plan had been to establish his new capital on the site, not of Byzantium at all, but of Troy.¹⁴ This, of course, would have been to identify it with origins even more ancient than Rome herself; nor, despite the fact that the plan had self-evidently failed to come to fruition, did this prevent Constantinople herself from laying claim to the hoary mystique of the Trojan name. There stood, for instance, in the middle of a circular forum built by Constantine, a porphyry column; and on this column there stood an image of the city’s founder, crowned as though by the sun, with seven glittering rays. Constantine himself was said to have brought the stone for the column from Troy.¹⁵ Yet the most valuable relic of all to have been redeemed from the mists of the Trojan past, and the one that boded best for the future of the city, was not even on public display. Buried deep beneath the base of the column, so it was believed, lay an antique wooden statue: the Palladium itself. The story went that Constantine “had secretly taken it away from Rome, and placed it in his forum”:¹⁶ an ultimate trumping of the ancient capital’s snobbery.

In truth, though, two centuries on from the re-founding of their city, the Byzantines could scarcely care less for what the people of Rome might think of them. Their conviction that the Palladium lay buried beneath Constantine’s column reflected something far more profound than merely a relish for one-upmanship. Much had changed. The same decades that had brought such suffering to Iranshahr at the hands of the Hephthalites had witnessed, in the western half of Rome’s empire, an even more calamitous intrusion of barbarians. Rome herself, the city which for so long had stood buttressed by the favour of the heavens, had been trampled underfoot. The whole of Italy had been subjected to the rule of a Gothic king. Other provinces, too—from Africa to Gaul—had slipped from imperial control, as the one-time foederati, roaming seemingly at will across the shattered landscape of the Roman west, had seized control of its commanding heights. Only the eastern half of the empire—the half ruled from Constantinople—had stood proof against this headlong slide towards disintegration. With Rome herself reduced to the humiliating status of a provincial city ruled by a barbarian warlord, there remained just the one capital left standing. The right of Constantinople to the title of the mistress of the Roman world was now beyond all dispute. Why, then, that being so, should anyone seriously have doubted that the Palladium had indeed been brought there from Rome?

True, there were many in the eastern half of the empire who dreaded that their own doom was brewing, too. It seemed to pessimists that their dominion had become something terminally “shrunken, barbarised, and ruined.”¹⁷ Yet the truth was that the Roman state, even as these cries of despair went up, was very far from finished. The labour of surgery performed on the empire by Constantine, for all that it had ultimately proved inadequate to the preservation of its authority in the West, still gave to the emperors of the East a stately and a domineering tread. Certainly, in Ctesiphon, at the court of their pre-eminent rivals, no one ever thought to deny the continuing might of the Caesars. For all the success that Kavad had enjoyed in pillaging the empire’s eastern frontier, and in extortingrenewed payments of danger money, the Romans too had enjoyed some triumphs of their own. In 504, for instance, one of their armies had gained a measure of revenge for the rape of Amida by sweeping deep into Mesopotamia, looting and slaving as it went, while in its wake a specially appointed death squad left not a single house standing. Even more tellingly, the Romans had capitalised upon the period of hostilities with Persia to remedy their previous lack of a forward command post. In 505, the Emperor Anastasius purchased a small estate named Dara, located just ten miles from the great Persian border stronghold of Nisibis. Barely a year later, by the time that a temporary truce was signed, a massive complex of walls and watchtowers had come to loom over the fields, where previously nothing but a village had stood. It was, as the howls of protest from Ctesiphon bore witness, an initiative fit to appal Persian strategists. The entire balance of power in the region had been transformed. The Roman frontier was now decisively re-militarised. Even Kavad, towards the end of his reign, had been brought to accept the implications. In 522, the old war-horse dispatched an embassy from Nisibis with a letter for the emperor. In it, he floated a startling proposition: “that you make my son Khusrow, who is the heir to my throne, your adopted son.”¹⁸ In part, the offer was a blatant attempt to forestall any meddling by Constantinople in the succession crisis that was even then brewing in Iranshahr; but it also signalled just how brightly Roman prestige had come to blaze again. Sure enough, a few months later, another Persian embassy made its way to Constantinople with instructions to negotiate an enduring peace. No Shahanshah, it went without saying, would ever have pressed for détente with an enemy that he regarded as contemptible. The Palladium, it seemed, was working its magic still.

And certainly, even to a diplomat familiar with the scale and splendour of Ctesiphon, the capital of the rival superpower would have appeared touched by an almost supernatural quality of majesty. To approach Constantinople was to be dazzled by the most awesome cityscape in the world. So rapidly had it grown that the proud and ancient city of Chalcedon, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, now served merely as its gateway. The Persian ambassadors—boarding a ship in Chalcedon’s harbour and negotiating the waters that surrounded Constantinople “like a garland”¹⁹—would have found marks of urban sprawl wherever they looked: for the conurbation, spreading in a ribbon along the European coastline, had long since broken through even the outermost ring of walls. Inevitably, though, it was to what lay within those hulking fortifications that the visitor’s gaze was drawn: for it was there that human effort and ingenuity had most astoundingly enhanced the already stunning setting. Along the waterfront, once a bleak wilderness of mud and reeds, everything now proclaimed the voracious appetites of the capital: a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of harbours and warehouses, granaries and wharfs. Beyond them, packed so tightly together that visitors would often find themselves “cramped and walking in danger because of the great number of men and animals,”²⁰ there spread the homes of the city’s almost half a million inhabitants: a concentration of people vaster even than Ctesiphon. Nevertheless, as the Persian ambassadors neared their destination, the skyline of Constantinople would have conveyed to them an impression, not of seething clamour, but rather of order, monumentality and space. Along the spine of the promontory, the smog bred of countless furnaces and hearths, and which hung in a pall over the lower reaches of the great conurbation, diminished upon the sea breezes, to reveal the hills that originally, before the arrival of Constantine upon them, had constituted the upper reaches of Byzantium, and now provided the New Rome, and the Roman Empire itself, with its mighty heart.

The ambassadors, once they had disembarked and made their way up from the Golden Horn, would have approached these hills along a broad, sumptuously porticoed road: the Mese—“Middle Street.” Ahead, framed by colossal arches and gateways, stretched a succession of marmoreal open spaces. It was in the first of these, at the foot of a column pointedly adorned with depictions of Roman military triumphs, that the ambassadors would have been officially welcomed to the city; it was in the second, the circular forum built by Constantine, that the Palladium supposedly lay buried. It was not this forum, however, but a third, the square known as the Augustaion, that most magnificently embodied the capital’s pretensions. On its eastern flank stood the Senate House;^a to the south, adorning a massive bath-house, was the city’s finest collection of antique statuary; to the west, marking the termination of the Mese, a domed and double-arched mass of brick and marble named the Golden Milestone. This was the monument from which imperial cartographers measured the distance to every known location: for just as the sun, and the moon, and the stars revolved around the earth, so too, it pleased the Romans to imagine, did all kingdoms revolve around Constantinople. She stood, in their confident opinion, upon the axis of the world. She was, quite simply, the “Queen of Cities.”

Which explained why, in the final reckoning, the peace mission of the Persian ambassadors was doomed to fail. Just as the House of Sasan, upon the faintest scent of Roman weakness, was bound to return to the attack, so too did the Caesars, despite all the many calamities that had afflicted their empire, shrink from any public acknowledgement that their rule might be less than universal. Victory, eternal victory, was still what it had been to Virgil: their destiny and their due. Even at moments of terrible peril, when there would inevitably seem something shrill about this assertion, the sublime conviction with which it was made remained undiminished. To rule as the heir of Augustus and Constantine was to believe oneself entrusted by the heavens with the very reins of earthly power. The brute fact that there were kingdoms that did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman people could not, of course, be ignored; but it was possible, enthroned in a capital such as Constantinople, to ignore the implications. The city remained, in the opinion of the Caesars, the authentic cockpit of global affairs.

This was a presumption only boosted by their own domestic circumstances. Set in the south-eastern corner of the Augustaion, between the Senate House and the marble crowd of ancient statues, there towered two bronze gates, or the “Chalke,” as they were known; and beyond them, stupefyingly immense, there stretched a labyrinthine complex so incomparable that it ranked, in the opinion of those privileged enough to penetrate it, as “another heaven.”²¹ Originally, the palace of the Caesars had been built in a severe and militarised manner, appropriate to its founder’s seriousness of purpose: for it had been modelled on the square plan of an army camp. Traces of the soldier’s sensibility that Constantine had brought to his refashioning of Rome’s empire were still to be seen in the corridors of power: in the sword belts worn by even quite junior officials; in the swagger sticks wielded by senior ministers; in the golds, purples and flaming reds that had always signified superior rank in the Roman army. Just because the emperor’s bureaucrats dressed up like soldiers, however, did not mean that they were soldiers. The legion into which they were enrolled when they joined the civil service did not actually exist. Similarly, the sharp angles of Constantine’s original palace had long since been swallowed up by extensions, so immense and sprawling in scale that for every new one being built, another would lie decaying and forgotten. Just as the language and rituals employed by the imperial bureaucracy were designed to be as incomprehensible to outsiders as possible, so might it take a lifetime to feel fully at home inside the great warren of the palace. There were gardens and judicial tribunals, pavilions and reception halls, banqueting chambers, secretariats, and even an indoor riding school. Sun-dappled terraces raised on brick stilts teetered over the breaking waves far below, while deep underground there stretched sepulchral store-rooms, kitchens and massive cisterns. The sheer vastness of it all made it seem a world unto itself. A man ensconced as the lord of such a palace might well feel that there was very little he could not do.

Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that supreme power, in the empire of the Romans, had come to wear a civilian face. The age of Constantine, when an emperor was expected to live and die by the sword, was long past. The surest measure of what had been achieved back in that wrenching period of upheaval was precisely that it was now bureaucrats, and not soldiers, who ran the show. The warrior kings of Iranshahr found no equivalent in Constantinople. Rare now was the Caesar who rode out to war. An emperor best kept his grip upon the Roman state, not at the head of an army, but in a council chamber. In fact, it was perfectly possible for an emperor to have begun his career as a civil servant himself. Anastasius, whose niggardly bean-counting had so antagonised Kavad, had originally been a senior functionary in the imperial secretariat. Admirers who sought to praise him in heroic terms found themselves reduced to hailing his baldness: “his forehead gleams like silver.”²² By the time of his death in 518, he had managed to accumulate an astounding reserve of some 320,000 pounds of gold: an achievement worth any number of victories on the battlefield.

Admittedly, the man who succeeded Anastasius as emperor had been the exception who proved the rule. Justin was a peasant who had trudged from the wilds of the Balkans to join the imperial guard in Constantinople, and his subsequent rise through the ranks was a story that provoked sneers and eulogies in equal measure. While the smooth bureaucrats of the secretariat could scarce forbear to cringe at their master’s lack of education, there were others who saw in his ascent to the purple a striking demonstration that anyone, even a boor from the frontier, could reach the summit of the Roman world. Nor was Justin himself so naïve as to imagine that a man of his background, in an environment where the pen was so much mightier than the sword, could conceivably rule without a literate colleague. Fortunately for him, the perfect candidate was ready at hand—one who was literate with a vengeance. Justinian, the emperor’s nephew and adopted son, was a man so perfectionist, so determined to lay his hands upon every possible lever of power, that the same officials who sneered at Justin for his backwardness found themselves appalled by the resolve of his young colleague to “write almost everything himself.”²³ Justinian, a man of such restless energy that he famously never slept, would have had it no other way. His tirelessness was rivalled only by the soaring scale of his ambition. More than anyone before him, Justinian had recognised in the immense apparatus of state control that had its hub in the imperial palace a truly awesome opportunity. It was his aim, once he had only secured the succession to his uncle, not merely “to watch over the empire of the Romans, but, so far as was possible, to remake it.”²⁴ Bureaucracy, in Justinian’s vision, was to become a mechanism for transforming the world.

Small wonder, then, that the proposal brought by the Persian ambassadors, that Justin should adopt Khusrow as his son, should have been given short shrift. Blame for the breakdown in negotiations was pinned adroitly on a functionary; but it was clear enough whose conceit this best served. Justinian, his eyes already set firmly on the main prize, had not the slightest interest in permitting anyone, let alone a barbarian such as Khusrow, to rank as his brother. It was not merely his right, so he believed, but his duty as Justin’s heir to stand inflexibly on his dignity. Sure enough, in 527, when he duly ascended to the throne upon his uncle’s death, he did not hesitate to promote himself as a man who was set infinitely apart from the common run—heaven-appointed for the achievement of prodigious things. As such, so it seemed to him, he was owed the respect and awe that was owed to the Roman state itself. Even the Senate, that living embodiment of the venerable traditions of the republic, was obliged to display its subordination in as pointed and flamboyant a way as possible. Previously, whenever a senator had entered the imperial presence, he had simply crooked his right knee. Now, under Justinian’s more exacting code of etiquette, he was expected to fall flat on his face, stretch out his hands and feet as far as he could, and humbly kiss the emperor’s slipper.²⁵ Under such a regime, the Romans’ proud habit of referring to themselves as “citizens”—a tradition that reached back to the primordial days of the republic—fell increasingly into abeyance. Their new title, if a good deal less glorious, was certainly more accurate. When Justinian spoke to his people, he addressed them, quite simply, as “subjects.”

Understandably, among the more independent-minded members of the Roman elite, there was a good deal of grumbling about this. Abuse, whispered behind the emperor’s purple-robed back, could reach feverish heights. “It seemed as if nature had removed every tendency to evil from the rest of mankind and deposited it in the soul of this man”: such was the considered verdict of one critic.²⁶ Justinian, despite the paranoia to which he was gnawingly prone, was nevertheless haughtily contemptuous of such mutterings. Convinced of both the scale of the challenges he faced and his unique aptitude for tackling them, he had no intention of moderating his style a jot. More than any emperor since Constantine, he believed himself charged with a mission to redeem the world. To his critics, of course, this was nothing but the rankest hypocrisy; and yet even they, reluctant to believe that Justinian might actually be sincere, were forced to acknowledge his rare genius as an actor: “For he had a marvellous ability to conceal his real opinion, and was even able to shed tears, not from joy or sorrow, but contriving them for the occasion according to the moment.”²⁷ Others were less harsh in their judgement of Justinian. There were many, throughout the reaches of the imperial bureaucracy, who found themselves invigorated rather than threatened by their emperor’s ambition, and identified profoundly with his goals. When they looked about them at the state of things, they saw, just as their master did, a broken and spavined order in desperate need of mending. When they heard Justinian declare, with a simple solemnity, “Our subjects are our constant care,”²⁸ they did not doubt him. When they listened to reports of how he would sit up late, scribbling, forever scribbling, to the burning of his midnight oil, they could admire him for sharing in their own deepest fantasy: that the world might indeed be refashioned upon the scratching of a pen.

“In the whirlpool and turmoil that we now experience, our affairs need the governing wisdom that comes from laws.”²⁹ Any mowbed or rabbi would have concurred. That the written word might serve to alter the way in which entire peoples saw the world was fast becoming the guiding principle of the age. Justinian was certainly not alone in believing that authority could most profitably be derived from books. Nevertheless, as befitted the man he was, both a Roman and a Caesar, he was able to draw upon resources that far outscaled those available to the scholars of Iranshahr. The imperial palace’s archives were filled to bursting with documents. Whether contained in the finest ivory and written in silver ink, or simply scrawled on rough parchment and wood, they bore witness to an entire millennium of written laws. The Roman people, right from the earliest days of the republic, had always been intensely proud of their legal system. What were those of other peoples, they demanded, if not “ridiculous” in comparison?³⁰ It needed no stories of fantastical law-givers, such as the Greeks were forever spouting, to explain how the “Ius,” the “Law” of Rome, had come into being, since it was so patently the product of long centuries of human effort. Whether couched as decrees of the Senate, as the rulings of private jurists, or as entire codes assembled by previous emperors, it could afford the Roman people a sense of living communion with their incomparable past. Its existence, just like that of the empire itself, bore witness to the majestic workings of time.

Yet the Ius, for all that, represented a problem as well as a solution. If it was true, as Justinian ringingly declared, that “what medicine is to disease, so laws are to public affairs,”³¹ then there was much that first needed to be done before the emperor’s prescription could be applied to the sickening world. The sheer scale and antiquity of the Roman people’s achievements in the field of law had resulted in a legacy that was intimidatingly chequered. Justinian, however, was hardly the man to duck such a challenge. His first step, only a few months into his reign, was the appointment of a commission to harmonise the various unwieldy collections of laws issued by previous emperors; then, a year and a half later, he charged a second commission with the even more daunting task of collating the entire stupendous body of private writings on Roman law. Complete constitutions had to be revised; almost two thousand individual books called in and minutely sifted; tens of thousands of excerpts made. The resulting codification, achieved in record time, was so staggering an achievement that it appeared to many something more than human. Justinian himself presented it proudly as a process of restoration; but there was something about it as well of a revolution. “We have by means of old laws not only brought matters into a better condition, but we have also promulgated new laws.”³² The emperor saw no need to conceal the fact. He was himself, so he declared, nomos empsychos—the “living law.” Here, in this self-promotion, was the ultimate refinement of what whole generations of emperors had been working to achieve.³³ Henceforward, the rules by which the Roman people lived and were bound were to have just the single fountainhead: the emperor himself, enthroned in his palatial citadel. No wonder, then, that Justinian should have sought, not merely to impose his stamp upon the long centuries of Roman legal achievement, but also to prescribe where and how that achievement should be taught. Private law schools were definitively banned. No teachers were to be licensed, save for those directly sanctioned by the state. Now, more than ever, the whole world was to be administered from the centre: from the palace of Constantinople.

Yet this presumption begged in turn an awkward question. Well-muscled though the machinery of imperial government undoubtedly appeared to be, was it possible, nevertheless, that an excessive faith might have been put in its reach and potency? The mere existence of a law, after all, did not guarantee that it would be obeyed. The world beyond Constantinople was an infinite and a seething place; and even the capital itself, “the all golden city,”³⁴ was perhaps less glittering, and less amenable to Justinian’s purposes, than he cared to admit. Certainly, immured behind the great bronze gates of his palace, he could have little appreciation of what festered beyond the marble-paved thoroughfares of the great metropolis, in the dark and squalid slums where no emperor would ever dream of muddying his dainty slippers. The imperial elite had long taken for granted that the masses were far too stinking and fractious to be permitted near the wellsprings of power. More than a century earlier, a massive programme of clearances had swept anything that was not marble and expensive from the vicinity of the palace: “for the imperial residence,” it was fastidiously explained, “requires extensive grounds hidden from all the world, so that within its precincts there shall be a place to dwell exclusively for those who have been selected for the due requirements of our majesty and for the government of the state.”³⁵

Yet, just as the Romans, despite half a millennium of autocracy, still referred to their realm as a res publica, or “republic,” so likewise, even in the Constantinople of Justinian, was there one ineradicable monument to the vanished age when everyone had ranked as a citizen. Back in Rome, chariot-racing had been as much a political as a sporting experience: for even the mightiest ruler had dreaded the howls and abuse of the crowds in the Circus Maximus, the city’s oldest and largest public space. Constantinople, as befitted the New Rome, had come to possess a no less magnificent arena for its chariot races: the Hippodrome. The most venerable monument to have survived Constantine’s flattening of the original Byzantium, it had been beautified with antique statues and obelisks, and enlarged so colossally that it had overrun the hill on which it stood. Supported along its entire southern end by massive brick struts, and boasting forty tiers of seating, it had no rival as the city’s theatre of dreams. It was certainly a venue for more than sport. The imperial government, on those irregular occasions when it wished to publicise a policy, would do so in the Hippodrome. Whether it was the emperor’s ritual trampling of a defeated barbarian king, or the parading of a usurper’s head, or even the ceremonial burning of tax registers, spectacle was all. Justinian himself, on his accession to the throne, had made sure to stage his investiture before the crowds of the Hippodrome. Emerging from his palace down a winding staircase and into a spacious, open-air marble box, he had been greeted by the cheers of some sixty thousand of his subjects, the noise of their acclamations an almost physical blast against his face. Nevertheless, if there was indisputably advantage to be gained by an emperor from exposing himself to the crowds in this manner, there was also potential danger. The passions that the Hippodrome was capable of inspiring in the Byzantines were violent—and often literally so. For a long while now, rival teams of charioteers had been supported by rival gangs of racing fans, whose taste for fighting one another in the streets—and for menacing innocent passers-by—had draped a pall of intimidation across the entire city. Here, then, in the emperor’s own backyard, right on the doorstep of his government, was precisely the order of crisis that his great programme of legal reform was intended to resolve.

And Justinian knew it. In the years prior to his accession, he had exploited the gangsterdom associated with the Hippodrome for his own ends. The most brutal racing faction of all, whose members deliberately aped the Hephthalites’ aura of menace by shaving the fronts of their scalps and “allowing the hair behind to hang down in a disorderly mess,”³⁶ had been sponsored by the heir-apparent, and deployed on the streets of the capital as paramilitaries. Once on the throne, however, Justinian had come to regard the continued employment of hooligans with mullets as incompatible with the imperial dignity. Gang warfare in the Hippodrome was henceforward to be suppressed without fear or favour. Yet, even as Justinian himself affected a stern neutrality between the rival factions, other, less scrupulous members of the elite remained eager to sponsor their thuggery. Senators, in particular, while far too cautious to challenge the emperor’s reform programme openly, had no compunction about stirring up trouble behind his back. The Hippodrome, despite all Justinian’s efforts to dampen it, remained a tinderbox.

Then finally, on 14 January 532, even as the emperor’s law commissioners were scribbling away furiously in the palace next door, it exploded. Three days earlier, two rival gang-members had been temporarily spared execution when the gallows had snapped. Now, in the face of Justinian’s refusal to confirm their reprieve, the two factions forged an unexpected alliance, combined their forces and sprung their comrades from the city jail. Intoxicated by their own daring, and perhaps encouraged by whispering senators, the gangs then went on a collective rampage. Looters fanned out across the most exclusive quarter in the world. Anything that could not be stolen was trashed or burned. The damage was something prodigious. Over the course of the succeeding days, many of the city’s most beautiful and venerable monuments were burned to the ground. From the Augustaion to Constantine’s forum, the whole of the Mese was reduced to smoking rubble. Justinian, holed up in his palace, attempted to stave off total disaster by means of increasingly frantic expedients. First, he dismissed some of his more notoriously venal ministers; next, he tried to bribe the faction leaders; then, he contemplated flight. Finally, screwing his courage to the sticking place, he resolved to dowse the flames of anarchy with blood—gallons of it. Squadrons of crack troops were marched through the smouldering ruins of the city, and stationed at opposite ends of the Hippodrome, where a raging but largely unarmed mob was amusing itself by calling for Justinian to be deposed. The order to attack was given; the troops advanced; the crowd was systematically hacked and trampled underfoot. Less a battle than a calculated atrocity, the massacre left the arena piled high with corpses. The death toll, so it was claimed, approached fifty thousand people.³⁷ If true, then one-tenth of the city’s population had been wiped out in a single day.

Justinian was now secure. The crisis turned out to have buttressed his mastery for good. Less than a couple of years later, in December 533, the commissioners whose work had so nearly been aborted by the riots delivered the second of their great law revisions: what they termed the Digest. No one, of course, thought to oppose it. The decimation of the Byzantines in the Hippodrome had made sure of that. In truth, however, the lesson taught the Roman people by the unleashing in their capital of such carnage was a primordial one. The first to demonstrate it, after all, had been Romulus himself, that fratricidal founder of the original Rome, whose twin brother, jealous and embittered, had presumed to challenge his authority by jumping over the unfinished wall of his infant city: an unforgivable and capital offence. Again and again, throughout the long and bloody course of their history, the Romans had served to prove the truth of the moral. Power without the sanction of violence barely ranked as power at all.

Yet Justinian himself, for all the savagery he had unleashed, did not care to dwell too closely upon the brute reality of what had taken place beyond his palace. Just as Virgil, back in the balmiest days of Roman power, had piously attributed the forging of the empire to the favour of the gods as well as to the swords of the legions, so similarly was it important for Justinian, in the midst of all his labours for the improvement of the world, to demonstrate that he had right as well as might on his side. Fortunately for his purposes, there lay, in the wake of the riots, the perfect stage to hand. The centre of Constantinople had been left gutted. “The city was a series of blackened, blasted hills, like the reaches of a volcano, uninhabitable because of dust, smoke, and the foul stench of building materials reduced to ashes.”³⁸ Among the many treasures destroyed in the inferno had been the Senate House and all the antique statues with which Constantine had long previously adorned the bath-house. Their loss had obliterated precious links with what was, by now, a very distant past. Yet, in truth, Justinian was pleased to see them gone. The Senate House had always loomed too large over the Augustaion for his tastes: its replacement, so he decreed, was to be built on a much smaller scale. Similarly, great works of art although the statues might have been, they had represented—to Justinian’s mind—not gods, but demons. Much that had once been taken for granted by the Roman people was now dismissed by them as dangerous superstition. The entire notion of the supernatural order of things celebrated by Virgil had long since been junked as a diabolical fantasy. Even the Palladium, secure and unharmed though it still lay beneath Constantine’s column, had been largely forgotten—with those who did preserve a memory of the statue likelier to regard it as an object of necromancy than a talisman.

The monuments that Justinian aimed to found upon the rubble of the old would be raised to the glory, not of the traditional gods of the Roman people, but of something very different: a single, omnipotent god. A god from whom everything to which Justinian laid claim, whether the governance of the world or “the power to make laws,”³⁹ directly flowed. A god who reigned eternal in the heavens—and yet who had been born a man back in the reign of Augustus, and put to death upon a Roman cross.

Justinian, rebuilding Constantinople, would stamp the city definitively, once and for all, as a Christian capital.

Joined at the Hip

Huge buildings spelled greatness. The Caesars had always appreciated this. Like the issuing of laws, the humbling of barbarians and the wearing of purple, the construction of towering monuments was very much part of what the Roman people expected of an emperor. Nor was Justinian minded to let them down. Even before the destruction of large swaths of Constantinople provided him with the perfect opportunity to rebuild the city to his own exalted tastes, he had displayed his relish for the empire’s grand tradition of architectural swagger. The initial focus of his energies, however, had lain not in the capital but far away, on the eastern frontier.

Here, in 530, the Persians had responded to the latest breakdown of peace talks in time-honoured fashion—by making a land grab. The object of their campaign had been that particular bugbear of their high command, Dara. Directly in front of the walls of the fortress, a Roman army, led by a brilliant young general named Belisarius, had met the Persians and put them to flight. “Such an event was one which had not happened for a very long while.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, it had been a close-run thing: Dara’s fortifications, jerry-built at immense speed, would not have withstood a concentrated siege. “And because the emperor Justinian perceived that the Persians, so far as it lay in their power, would never permit this outpost of the Romans, which was such a menace to them, to continue standing there, but were bound to persist in attacking it with all their might,”⁴¹ he had ordered a massive rebuilding programme.⁴² Dara was made to bristle. It was designed to be—and to appear—impregnable. Any passing barbarians were to look on it and despair. The emperor, aiming to ram the point home, even graced Dara with a new name: “Justiniana New Town.” Here, in the hulking silhouette of its ramparts, was the manifestation of a ruler with the world in his hands.

Or so he liked to think. In fact, the message conveyed by the militarisation of the frontier was altogether more ambiguous than Justinian might have wished. The rival pretensions of Dara and Nisibis, frowning at each other across the Mesopotamian flat-lands, could easily seem to make a mockery of both. “The nations are like a drop from the bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales.”⁴³ So it was written in the Tanakh. The Jews, lacking any empire of their own, treasured a distinctive perspective on international affairs. It reassured them that the great kingdoms of the world, despite all their clamour and posturing, were accounted by God “as less than nothing and emptiness.”⁴⁴ They knew that the true division of the world was not the one proclaimed by the battlements of Dara, between Roman and barbarian, but something quite else: between those who lived in the manner ordained by the Almighty and those who did not.

Given this, who was to say that the scattering of the Jews far beyond the limits of their ancestral homeland was not all part of the heavenly plan? “By your descendants,” God had told Abraham, “shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves.”⁴⁵ This assurance had long prompted many Jews to ponder the immense distances that separated them from the Promised Land, and to arrive at a daring conclusion. As one rabbi, back in the time of Constantine, had put it with forthright conviction, “The Holy One, blessed be He, exiled us among the nations in order that converts might swell our ranks.”⁴⁶ This, it might have been thought, was rather to contradict the emphasis that the Almighty had placed on the significance of Abraham’s bloodline; but it was also to assert that “Jewishness,” in the final reckoning, was determined less by blood than by obedience to the demands of the Torah. Accept that, and the Jews did certainly appear well placed to reshape the world. Mesopotamia was certainly far from being their only home away from home. Few were the points of the compass where they were not to be found. They had become, in a sense, more truly universal than any empire. Rather like the Greeks, they ranked not merely as a people but as the agents of a culture, of an entire way of understanding, interpreting and refashioning the world. The awesome power of their ferociously demanding God, the staggering antiquity of their laws, and the glamour of what seemed to many less a faith than a private members’ club: all had combined to make the Jews objects of rare fascination to those among whom they lived. Unsurprisingly, then, there was a venerable tradition of their admirers becoming “proselytes”—“which is to say, people who have been made into Jews.”⁴⁷ In Rome, the imperial authorities had been fretting about such conversions since the time of the republic. A whole succession of emperors had sought to regulate what they saw as a palpable and growing menace. A century and a half before Constantine, the circumcision of converts had been declared equivalent to castration: a crime that would see the perpetrator exiled to a desert island. Faint consolation to the Jews themselves though it might have been, there was testimony here to their faith’s profound appeal. The superstitions of conquered people were rarely honoured by the Roman elite with such hostility. The resentment and indignation of the rulers of the world were nothing if not a form of tribute.

But how, precisely, was a Jew to be defined? It was to answer this question, of course, that the rabbis of Mesopotamia, back in the time of Ardashir, had founded the famous yeshivas of Sura and Pumpedita, and embarked upon the great project of research that would culminate in their transcription of the Talmud. Mesopotamia, however, was not the world. No matter what the rabbis themselves might care to think, most Jews were largely oblivious to their existence. For the first few centuries after the founding of theyeshivas, the scholars who taught in them were more interested in ensuring that they were listened to in their own backyard than in establishing a global voice. Across the eastern reaches of Iranshahr itself, in much of the Roman world, and in the deserts and mountains that lay beyond the reach of both empires, rabbis were signally lacking. Authority lay instead with the leaders of what had come to be known as “synagogues.” These were communal meeting places where the Torah was studied and debated, and where Jewishness—Ioudaismos, in Greek—was rarely a given. Different communities, and different individuals, tended to define it much as they pleased. Often, it might seem as though the definition of a Jew was simply someone who described himself as such. Consequently, the boundary that demarcated Jews from non-Jews—“Gentiles,” as they were called—was never entirely stable. One Jew might take the high road that led to Persepolis and there, on the lintels of that Zoroastrian holy place, carve a summons to the people of Iranshahr to join his faith;⁴⁸ another, panic-stricken at the thought of falling for the insidious attractions of foreign women, and thereby jeopardising the purity of Abraham’s bloodline, might try and avoid so much as stealing a glance at a Gentile. Even therabbis, despite their burning ambition to distinguish themselves and their people as rigidly as possible from the world beyond, found it impossible to agree on who precisely qualified as a Jew. Some argued that proselytes were fully Jewish. Others maintained that they were “as injurious as sores.”⁴⁹ Neither side found it possible to establish a definitive answer. They had no option, so it seemed to the rabbis, save to agree to disagree.^b

Except that there did exist another option. Long before the founding of the great rabbinical schools of Mesopotamia, in an era so distant that even the title of “rabbi” itself had only tentatively begun to be employed, a small group of Jews had made a spectacular announcement: that a notorious troublemaker by the name of Jesus, recently crucified and supposedly risen from the dead, was none other than the “Christ.” More than that, indeed—that this same Jesus was also, in some mysterious manner, the Son of God Himself. These Christians—as they soon came to be known—had not initially thought of themselves as any the less Jewish for holding these startling beliefs. Nor had it ever crossed the minds of most of them that the Torah, that incomparable framework for living granted to His Chosen People by the Almighty Himself, might conceivably have been rendered redundant. Yet there were some, pushing the implications of their new beliefs to radical limits, who had soon arrived at precisely such a conclusion.

A few decades on from Jesus’s crucifixion, a group of Christians in Asia Minor received a letter that positively seethed with scandalous notions. Its author, a one-time student of the Torah called Paul, was the most spectacular rebel that the famously prescriptive Jewish educational system had ever bred. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”⁵⁰ In this revolutionary proclamation, Paul deftly cut what had always been, for Jewish scholars, the ultimate Gordian knot. No need, so Paul announced with a flourish, to pick at the problem one moment more. Whereas once it had been the Torah which gave to the Chosen People their roadmap to the purposes of God, now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such a Law was gone. The whole question of what it was that made for a Jew had been dissolved into irrelevance. No longer was there any obligation to follow the Torah’s rulings, to be bound by its strictures, to attend to all its endless finger-wagging: “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”⁵¹ The Gentiles too, so Paul had concluded, were heirs to the promise made by God to Abraham. No longer were the Chosen People defined by a lineage of blood, or by adherence to a law, but by the knowledge and love of Christ. Nations everywhere, in short, might now be ranked as the children of Abraham. All it needed was for the entire world to end up Christian.

Which, as mission statements went, could certainly not be faulted for any lack of chutzpah. Paul’s ambitions were quite as ground-breaking as they were global. Cults, and the divinities they celebrated, had hitherto invariably been local: attached to specific places, attached to particular peoples. Any suggestion that they might be something more, that they might be universal, was liable to strike most people as either offensive, or ludicrous, or both. Nevertheless, Paul had indeed breathed in something of the authentic spirit of the age. Enthusiasm for a brotherhood of man was increasingly in the air. Posidonius, after all, a whole century before Paul, had trusted that it would emerge as one of the fruits of Roman rule. Why, then, in a world dominated by the pretensions of would-be universal empires, should the pretensions of a would-be universal faith not find a ready audience? Sure enough, in the decades and centuries following Jesus’ crucifixion, the Christian mission to the Gentiles began to thrive. Cells planted in the time of Paul steadily renewed and replicated themselves. Across lands ruled from Ctesiphon, across lands ruled from Rome, they grew, and flourished, and spread. In each one, men and women from every conceivable background, class and race would meet as equals, in a shared room, before the gaze of a severe but loving God. Equals, because all of them—the senator no less than the kitchen-maid, the Greek no less than the Briton, the philosopher no less than the whore—might be sucked down into the glutinous bog of sin; equals, because all of them, thanks to the death of Christ upon the cross, had been rendered capable of winning salvation for themselves. Never before had there been preached a message of personal responsibility quite so radical, so democratic, or so potentially wide-reaching in its appeal. Christian thinkers, in their struggle to define the principles of their faith, were engaged in a project no less well-suited to the times for being so palpably quixotic: the fathoming of the purposes of God in an ever more globalised world.

In this respect, of course, they were not so far different from the rabbis of Mesopotamia. Their methods were similar, too: for Christian sages also drew for their ultimate inspiration upon the inheritance of Jewish scripture. However, whereas the rabbis identified the Torah as something ageless and unchanging, Gentile Christians viewed it—and the Tanakh generally—merely as an “Old Testament”: a cloud-dimmed glimpse of the Eternal Light that was Jesus Christ. This perspective, of course, begged an obvious question: what should a “New Testament” be?⁵² Already, in the century that followed Christ’s crucifixion, scholars had begun to compile collections of writings that could provide an answer. Paul’s letters were the first to be anthologised, and then variouseuangelia, or “gospels”—biographies of Christ. Just like the rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, the Christians who compiled these texts believed that it had been given to them to meditate upon the single most earth-shattering event in human history: an intrusion of the divine into the fallen world so cosmic in its implications that the entire order of the universe revolved around it. The surest fruit of this intrusion, however, was not a body of law, as the rabbis believed, but rather the knowledge in the soul of an individual believer that Jesus was truly the Lord. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” So Christ, according to one of the gospels, had declared. “No one comes to the Father, but by me.”⁵³

A ringing statement—but ambiguous all the same. It was given to few Christians to claim, as Paul himself had done, a personal vision of the risen Christ. How, then, in the absence of such direct communications, were the faithful to know what, precisely, “the way” might be? Jesus himself, when commanding his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” had instructed them to do so “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”⁵⁴ Here, however, was only further ambiguity—for who, or what, was “the Holy Spirit”? The answer to this question, one that many generations of Christian sages would labour at providing, did not come easily: for it touched upon the ineffable mystery that was the identity of God Himself. How fortunate it was, then, for the less intellectually inclined among the faithful, that the Holy Spirit might be experienced without necessarily being comprehended. Whether imagined as a dove, or as fire, or as a sound “from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind,”⁵⁵ it was, so Christians believed, the very breath of the divine upon the world. Whenever they felt themselves moved by the rapture of faith, a flickering-like ecstasy about their souls, then they could know themselves possessed by the Spirit. Not, however, that the evidence of its workings was confined to their inner lives. The Spirit was to be traced as well in the unity that it brought to the Christian people everywhere. No matter where these men and women might live, no matter what their status, they had all shared a single ceremony of initiation: an immersion in water that they termed “baptism.” “For by one Spirit we were all baptised into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.”⁵⁶ Without it, there could be no unity, no shared Ecclesia—no Church.

Which meant in turn that Christians everywhere could throw themselves into the business of constructing a globe-spanning bureaucracy and feel that they were thereby serving the purposes of their Lord. A relish for firing off letters was yet another way in which Paul had blazed a trail. Long-distance communications were cherished by the faithful throughout the Roman and the Iranian worlds as the lifeblood of the Church. The most trivial, as well as the most transcendent, topics were vigorously debated by Christians across the entire sweep of the rival empires. Not even a Caesar, not even a Shahanshah, could boast a perspective to match. Christians, well aware of this, positively gloried in the fact: “Any country can be their homeland—and yet their homeland, wheresoever it may be, is to them a foreign place.”⁵⁷ There seemed no limit to the expanding scope of their identity.

Yet it was not only by thinking on a global scale that the Christian Church had succeeded in fashioning itself, over the course of barely a few centuries, into the most formidable non-governmental organisation that the world had ever seen. It operated locally as well. Little more than a generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, Christians had already grown obsessed with the need for disciplined book-keeping. The paperwork of each individual church had duly been entrusted to an official chosen by the local congregation to serve as an “overseer,” or “episcopos”: a “bishop.” Soon enough, however, and these same bureaucrats had begun soaringly to outgrow their origins as mere functionaries. Three centuries on, and it had become the entitlement of a bishop to rule almost as a monarch over the congregation that selected him. He it was who would act as spokesman for local Christians in their dealings with the broader Church; move to resolve their problems and defend them in times of crisis; define for them their beliefs, and prescribe for them the texts they should read, and answer for them before God. “It is manifest that we should look upon the bishop even as we would look upon the Lord Himself—standing, as he does, before the Lord.”⁵⁸

Here, then, was authority such as even a Roman or a Persian aristocrat might appreciate. Although bishops tended to shun the silks and jewels beloved of the upper classes, the coarse wool of their robes could not disguise the fact that they too, like any great magnate, dealt ultimately in patronage. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.”⁵⁹ This injunction of Christ’s, while not always followed to the letter, had nevertheless inspired among Christians a tradition of charity that was capable of providing bishops, the men who administered its fruits, with immense reserves of largesse. In city after city, the Church had come to constitute not merely a state within a state but something altogether more exceptional: a welfare state. In a world where there were few safety nets for the destitute, or the widowed, or the sick, this might serve to endow the local bishop with an often brilliant aura of holiness—and holiness, to the Christian people, spelled power. Much, in turn, was bound to flow from this. With power, a bishop could impose discipline upon his flock; and with discipline, the Church could maintain itself as something truly universal—as “catholic.” Three centuries on from the lifetime of Christ, and there was nothing that would have borne a surer witness to the glory of His triumph over death, and to the workings of the Holy Spirit, than a Christian people who stood as one.

Certainly, as their propagandists never tired of pointing out, there was nothing in all the bewildering kaleidoscope of idolatrous cults that could remotely compare with the sense of common identity that most Christians did authentically share. That did not mean, however, that the Christian people enjoyed a perfect unity. Far from it. The world remained a realm of sin, and the body of the Church, as that of Christ had been upon the cross, was racked and twisted by the tortures inflicted upon it by the wicked. Not everyone who laid claim to the name of Christian was necessarily willing to acknowledge the authority of a bishop. “Beware of false prophets,” Christ Himself had warned, “who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves.”⁶⁰ Food for thought—for how to tell a sheep from a wolf disguised inside a fleece? Writing in Carthage, a famous and wealthy city in North Africa, a Christian philosopher by the name of Tertullian had proffered some helpful advice: “It is the sources and the originals of the faith which must be accounted the truth.”⁶¹ Nothing was to be reckoned authentically Christian, in other words, that could not be traced, generation back through generation, to the time of Christ Himself, and of His first followers, the apostles. If this was true for doctrine, Tertullian argued, then so also was it true for priests. Any bishop who stood in a line of succession from one of the original apostles served as the heir of a Christian who had been blessed by the hands of the Son of God. What better pedigree than that? “For, undoubtedly, it preserves what the churches received from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, and Christ from God.”⁶²

A clinching display of logic, it might have been thought—except that other Christians too could play the same game. Formidable and peerless though the organisation of the self-proclaimed “catholic” Church might be, it was not alone in looking back to the primal origins of the faith to sanction its doctrines. Indeed, there was a sense in which the very efforts of its servants to carve a straight path through all the wilds of potential belief—an “orthodoxy”—served only to open up alternative routes. The existence of a linked network of bishoprics across the span of the known world reflected an understanding of Christ’s teachings that had been shaped, above all, by Paul: an understanding that viewed the Church as a body universal, defined by faith rather than law, and ablaze with “the power of the Holy Spirit.”⁶³ All these presumptions, however, might readily be challenged. Why, for instance, should the Church not remain what it had been back in the very earliest days of its existence: a pure body of the elect, small to be sure, but untainted by the outside world? And how was it, if the Torah were a matter of sublime irrelevance, as Paul had taught, that Christ Himself had so emphatically stated the exact opposite: “till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished”?⁶⁴

Even this, however, was not to touch upon the profoundest, the most dizzying, the most perplexing question of all: what precisely was the relationship of the Holy Spirit to Christ, and of Christ, the Son of God, to His Heavenly Father? Once again, it was Tertullian—never one to shirk a challenge—who provided the most widely accepted answer. God, he explained, was Three: Father, Son and Spirit. Likewise, these three aspects of the divinity—the creator, the redeemer and the inspirer—were One. A paradox, of course—but one that Tertullian, who had not been expensively schooled in the subtleties of Greek philosophy for nothing, saw as expressive of the very essence of the divine. God, who was Three in One, and One in Three, was best thought of, he explained, as aTrinitas—a “Trinity.”

Yet even Tertullian, despite the triumphant swagger with which he had made his case, had been under no illusion that he had proved it: “The mystery stays guarded.”⁶⁵ Which was putting it mildly. Any number of slippery issues still remained to be pinned down. If God were truly One, for instance, did that mean the Son was not, as His title implied, subordinate to the Father but in every way His equal? The tendency in orthodox circles was increasingly to answer “yes”; but the fact that this implied a Son who was no less eternal than His own parent, an apparent illogicality that had worried Tertullian himself, ensured that there were plenty of Christians who scorned to agree. This, of course, in a Church where there were few means of enforcing a specific orthodoxy other than by exhortation and argument, they were perfectly at liberty to do; and it ensured that the spectrum of Christian beliefs held by the Christian people, rather than narrowing as time went on, came instead to embody a quite bewildering range of shades. It was all very well for the likes of Tertullian to argue that an impregnable mystery lay at the heart of the faith; but there were many Christians who found it difficult to leave the matter simply at that. Too much was at stake. The irreducible message of the Christian faith—that God, through the agency of Jesus, had somehow intruded into the mortal fabric of human flesh—raised as many questions as it answered, not only about the essence of the divine but about who precisely Jesus might have been. Equally God and equally man: such, three hundred years after the crucifixion, had come to be the favoured orthodoxy among the leaders of the Church. But it was not the only one. There were some Christians who argued that Jesus had been completely divine, with not a trace of the human about him. There were others who claimed that his body had provided a mortal shell for the heavenly Spirit, which was presumed to have descended upon him during his baptism, and abandoned him before he died on the cross. There were still others who insisted that Jesus had been the adopted Son of God—flesh and blood, like any other man, but no less the Christ for that. Not a permutation of beliefs, in short, but some group of Christians, somewhere, might choose to subscribe to it.

And it was precisely this range of opinion—hairesis, in Greek—that drove those who wished to affirm a single orthodoxy to distraction.^c Of course, every Christian sect liked to imagine that its own understanding of Christ constituted the way, the truth, the life; but it was the self-proclaimed “catholic” Church, by virtue of its sheer scale, which had the most weight to throw around. The most to lose as well if it did not. Painstakingly, over the course of the centuries, it had set itself to the formidable task of clearing any number of doctrinal booby-traps from the feet of the faithful. Understandably, then, its scholars and leaders had little patience for those who would sabotage such a project. Christians who rejected the Church’s authority were increasingly viewed not as fellow travellers but rather as souls lost upon crooked paths, agents of error who had wilfully chosen to abandon the one, true road of orthodoxy—as “heretics.” Nothing they touched so sacred or so precious, but they would attempt to sabotage it. “For their behaviour is exactly like that of someone who, when an exquisite mosaic of a king has been fashioned by a great artist out of rare stones, takes the mosaic completely to pieces, and rearranges the jewels, and puts them back together to make the image of a dog or a fox—and a poorly executed one at that.”⁶⁶

Such bitterness was hardly surprising. The efforts made by generations of Christian scholars to establish the truth of what Christ might have said and done had indeed been as punctilious as those of any master-mosaicist. Only the most finely calibrated measuring-rod—a canon, in Greek—had been deployed for the purpose. Just as was required by the most exacting standards of the historians of the day, no gospel had been passed as “canonical” that could not be shown, to the satisfaction of catholic scholars, to derive from the authentic evidence of eyewitnesses to the events described.⁶⁷ Increasingly, only four such gospels—two attributed to disciples of Jesus; one to a disciple of Simon Peter, the chief of the apostles; and one to an associate of Paul—had come to be regarded as measuring up. Yet still, a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years after the crucifixion, biographies of Christ continued to be cranked out. Of course, gospels such as these, composed at such a remove of time, could hardly have any great claims to biographical accuracy; but biographical accuracy, to those who composed them, was hardly the point. For many writers, the motivation might be as simple as a desire to entertain, by telling fabulous stories, and filling in some obvious gaps. What kind of games, for instance, had the infant Saviour enjoyed while playing with His friends? A host of gospels had not hesitated to provide the answer.⁶⁸ Christ’s favourite stunt as a child, so it was revealed, had been to make clay birds, breathe on the sculptures, and then bring them to life. Not, perhaps, quite as edifying an anecdote as those to be found in the four canonical gospels—but innocent enough, certainly. Other adjustments to Christ’s biography, however, might be altogether more momentous in their implications. Some, indeed, might strike directly at the heart of Christian orthodoxy.

When, for instance, a Christian named Basilides wished to demonstrate that Jesus had not died upon the cross, he made good the complete lack of evidence for this novel theory in the canonical gospels through a simple expedient: he wrote a whole new gospel of his own.⁶⁹ The story of the crucifixion, in Basilides’s reworking of it, contained a hitherto unsuspected twist. Christ, as He was carrying His cross through the streets of Jerusalem, had magically swapped bodies with Simon of Cyrene, a man who had come to His assistance. As a result, it was the unfortunate Simon who had been crucified. Christ Himself, meanwhile, watching from a safe distance, had stood “roaring with laughter.”⁷⁰

But how precisely had Basilides come by this startling revelation? No less than his adversaries, he had perfectly appreciated the vital importance of pedigree. A gospel was nothing unless it could be traced back to a heavyweight informant. This was why, in offering to the world his account of the crucifixion, Basilides had made sure to attribute it to the classiest, the most impeccable source he could find: Simon Peter himself. Critics of Basilides, however, snorted at this claim as grotesque. Any notion that details of Christ’s life and teachings might have been kept secret from his mass of followers and passed down only among a privileged few, was dismissed by them out of hand. The claims of Basilides to a privileged gnosis, or “knowledge”—one supposedly denied to less enlightened Christians—was dismissed by his orthodox opponents as the merest braggadocio. After all, as they never tired of pointing out, he was only one of a swarming, buzzing crowd. There were any number of “Gnostics,” all with their own pretensions, all with their own scriptures. “The Church has four gospels, but the heretics have many.”⁷¹ That being so, how could any of them be trusted? All were clearly fabrications. None could plausibly be attributed to an apostle. Certainly, Basilides’s laughable insistence that his gospel derived from a succession of whispered reminiscences, passed down from generation to generation and never even once put into writing, was precisely what served to brand it a fraud: “For it is evident that the perfect truth of the Church derives from its high antiquity; and that all these many heresies, being more recent in time, and subsequent to the truth, are nothing but recent concoctions, manufactured from the truth.”⁷²

Except, of course, that any rabbi, contemplating the pretensions of the Gentile Church, might well have made an identical point. The Tanakh, after all, long pre-dated even the earliest gospel. Christian thinkers, as they struggled to establish the parameters of their faith, were often rendered profoundly uncomfortable by this reflection. So much so, in fact, that one of them, a bishop’s son by the name of Marcion, was brought by it to take the ultimate step, and deny that he owed anything to the Jews at all. Rather than acknowledge the umbilical cord that linked the gospels to the Old Testament, he simply cut right through it. Christ, so he taught, shared nothing, absolutely nothing, with the Jewish god. One preached love and mercy and occupied the upper storeys of heaven; the other issued endless laws, punished all those who did not obey them, and smouldered away in the lower reaches of the sky. Some Christians, struck by the awful logic of this, were sufficiently convinced by Marcion’s teaching to establish a whole new church; others, the majority, shrank from it in horror. All of them, though, as they wrestled with the question of who or what Christ might have been, were wrestling as well with the issue of what their relationship to the Jewish past should properly be. If Jesus were truly the Messiah, then the failure of God’s Chosen People to recognise that fact could rank only as a monstrous embarrassment. Self-evidently, however, the blame for such a scandal had to lie not with Christ but with the Jews themselves. Increasingly, then, the claim of the Gentile Church to embody the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures required it to scorn the rival claims of the synagogues as thunderously as possible: “For I declare that they of the seed of Abraham who follow the Law, and do not come to believe in Christ before they die, will not be saved.”⁷³ The Torah was a dung-heap; its students pickers after trash; all its great array of dictates a mere monument to desiccation. Never before had there been an attempt at disinheritance on quite so audacious a scale.

The rabbis, rather than dignify the Gentiles who would rob them of their patrimony with a direct rebuttal, opted instead to hold their noses and maintain a dismissive hauteur. “Let a man always flee,” as one of them sniffed, “from what is repellent.”⁷⁴Nevertheless, even in their mightiest strongholds, even in the yeshivas, a rising tide was lapping at their feet. The danger signs had long been there to see. Christians were hardly a novelty in Mesopotamia. Indeed, they had originally arrived on its borders around the same time as the first emergence there of the rabbis themselves. Though Paul, back in the age of the apostles, had travelled westwards—to the cities of the Greek world, and to Rome—other missionaries had soon begun to turn their gaze towards the rising sun. The roads of the Fertile Crescent, after all, were quite as open as the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean. Already, by the time of the founding of the Mesopotamian yeshivas, in the early third century AD, there had come to exist, a mere two weeks’ journey north of Sura and Pumpedita, a formidable stronghold of Christian sages—and one that lost nothing in comparison to the schools of the rabbis.

Like Harran, its immediate neighbour, Edessa lay on the fault-line between the rival empires of Rome and Persia; but unlike Harran, which positively revelled in her idolatrous reputation, Edessa was famed among Christians everywhere as the “Blessed City.” Christ Himself, so it was said, had penned a missive to one of her kings. The very document itself was still to be found in the city’s archives: sure proof against scepticism. Nor was that all. Edessa laid claim to an even more sensational souvenir of Christ’s correspondence: His only known self-portrait, painted and sent by Him, so it was said, in response to a royal fan-letter. No wonder, given these indubitable marks of divine favour, that Christians should have believed that Edessa was destined never to fall. Certainly, the protective sympathy extended by her rulers towards the Church had enabled the city to become a veritable hot-house of Christian scholarship. The hymns, and the prayers, and the translations written there would serve to make Syriac, the language spoken by the Edessans, the lingua franca of the entire Christian Near East.

As the rabbis hunkered down inside their own schools, the influence of Edessa was already palpable in the streets that stretched beyond their walls. All very well for the rabbis to meet this challenge with an icy show of silence—but that hardly served to make it go away. A Christian, after all, was likely to have none of the compunctions about converting a Jew that a Jew might have about converting a Christian. Increasingly, in the competition between the two faiths for proselytes, it was clear which one was winning.

Yet mortal though the enmity between the rabbis and the leaders of the Gentile Church had certainly become, it was haunted by paradox. Relations between these two implacable rivals were shaped by a truth that neither could possibly acknowledge: both, in their struggle to define themselves, had need of the other. The more that Christians scorned the Jews as a people unchanged from what they had ever been, clinging blindly and obdurately to the wreckage of a superseded faith, so the more, ironically enough, did it serve to burnish the rabbis’ self-image. Here, from their bitterest opponents, was confirmation of their own most prized conceits: that they were the guardians of a timeless law; that there was no hint of novelty attached to their current project; and that the ancient prophets—Daniel, Abraham, Adam—had all been rabbis exactly like themselves. Christians, however, were not the only ones to have given their foes an involuntary boost. The rabbis, by refusing to engage in open combat with the Christian heretics, were effectively declaring that the minim no longer ranked as even faintly Jewish—and not to rank as Jewish was, of course, to a rabbi, a truly terrible fate. This, however, was not at all how the minim themselves saw things. The only effect of Jewish scorn on a Gentile bishop was to boost his self-confidence, and flatter his pretensions. “Do not marvel,” Christ had declared, “that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ ”⁷⁵ To the Gentile Church, the sense of itself as a daughter sprung from the womb of a withered and unregenerate mother had become a precious conceit. Just as the rabbis had every interest in dismissing Christians as bastard and unwanted spawn, so did Christians have no less an interest in casting the faith of their Jewish contemporaries as the failed parent of their own. Both, though, were wrong. The relationship between the rival faiths, that of the rabbis and the bishops, was not one of parent and child. Rather, it was one of siblings: rival twins, doomed like Romulus and Remus to mutual hatred, yet bred all the same of the identical womb.⁷⁶

And there were still places, to the disgust of both rabbis and bishops, where a strong sense of this endured. Three centuries on from the supposed arrival in Edessa of Christ’s letter, and there were few better spots from where to gauge the potentially infinite variety of human belief than “the Blessed City.” To stand on its citadel and gaze around at the horizon was, for a Christian sage, to be conscious of just how various was God’s creation. To the east was the empire of the Persians; to the west, that of the Romans. On the margins of the first, in Khorasan, it was the habit of “a single man to take many wives”; on the margins of the second, in Britain, “many men together take a single wife.”⁷⁷ The glory of the Christian faith, so it seemed to the scholars of Edessa, was that it provided all of humanity with a means of transcending such differences of custom: of giving people, no matter where they lived, one common identity as the children of Abraham. Yet what was the Christian faith? To lower the gaze from the distant horizon, to look down into the teeming warren of Edessa’s streets, was to doubt that there could be any single answer. There were some Christians walking the city who followed the doctrines of Marcion, and others who denied that Christ had suffered on the cross, and others yet who believed that the four earliest gospels should be read in the form of a single digest. To be sure, there was no lack of Christians either who were proud to account themselves members of a worldwide, orthodox Church—and yet their traditions were no less fiercely local for that. In every Christian community, not just Edessa, the cast of what people believed, and how they behaved, might be influenced by much more than their bishop. The festivals that were held in a city’s streets, the languages that were spoken in its markets, and the stories that were shared around its evening fires: all might serve to influence the character of its Church. This was why, in Edessa and in cities across Mesopotamia, it mattered a very great deal that the Jews were people of flesh and blood, and not mere faceless bogeys. They might be neighbours, colleagues—even friends.⁷⁸ The Christians of the East, almost without realising it, bore the unmistakable stamp of this. Certainly, to visitors from other Churches, they were liable to appear quite disconcertingly Jewish.

In Mesopotamia, for instance, Christians still refused to eat meat that had not first been drained of all its blood, exactly as prescribed by the Torah.⁷⁹ They celebrated the resurrection of Christ on a date arrived at by a specifically Jewish method of calculation.⁸⁰Even the title by which they habitually addressed their priests—rabban—sounded similar to, and had the same meaning as, rabbi. Granted, none of this implied any sense of kinship between Jewish and Christian leaders. Quite the contrary: the rabbis’ and priests’ consciousness of what they shared only made them all the more determined to draw rigid dividing-lines between their two faiths. Yet, in reality, those dividing-lines were often blurred. In Edessa, for instance, the mutual obsession of Jewish and Christian scholars with one another’s labours bore a particularly spectacular fruit: for the first translation of the Old Testament into Syriac was most likely made, not by Christians at all, but by Jews, who then subsequently converted and made a gift of their work to the Church.⁸¹ Yet in truth, to many Jews, it was not always apparent that an acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah did necessarily require them to stop being Jewish. Likewise, among the ranks of Christians, there were many who persisted in obeying the Torah and who regarded Paul, not as a saint, but rather as “a renegade from the Law”⁸²—the heretic of heretics. Some, indeed, saw no contradiction in hedging their bets even more comprehensively by invoking both the One God of the Jews and the Trinity of the Christians simultaneously. “By the name of I-Am-That-I-Am, the Lord of Hosts,” as one particularly all-inclusive curse ran, “and by the name of Jesus, who conquered the height and the depth by his cross, and by the name of his exalted father, and by the name of the holy spirits forever and in eternity …?”⁸³ Well, then, might those who sought to patrol the dividing-line between the two faiths have been appalled. “It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ, and yet to behave as a Jew.”⁸⁴ This assertion had been made by a celebrated saint of the early Church, Ignatius, a man supposedly appointed bishop of the great Syrian city of Antioch by Simon Peter himself; and yet it might just as well have been made by a rabbi. Jewish and Christian leaders alike, both had the same frontier policy: to create a no-man’s land. Both were equally threatened by an open, porous border.

Not, of course, that to plug one was necessarily a simple task. Those who lived in the Fertile Crescent could appreciate this better than most. The line that separated the empires of Persia and Rome did not, after all, follow the course of a natural barrier. Instead, it wound across featureless landscape, and divided peoples who more properly belonged together. Only with muscle, and resolve, and ceaseless effort could such a boundary possibly hope to be maintained. That Edessa, which in AD 216 had been formally annexed by Rome, would still remain, three centuries on, a possession of the Roman Empire, bore witness enough to the ability of the Caesars to hold a line.⁸⁵ Though Kavad, in 503, would put the city under siege, Edessa would not, unlike Amida, fall. Justinian’s great building programme at Dara, a hundred miles to the east, would serve only to hammer home the point. It took might to maintain a border. Might such as only the master of a mighty empire could command.

Two centuries and more before the time of Justinian, however, neither rabbi nor bishop wielded any such power. Great though the moral authority of both had become among the communities which they claimed to lead, it certainly did not extend to the building of watchtowers, to the manning of a frontier. Jews and Christians, though conscious of themselves as peoples with distinct identities, remained unclear where precisely the border between them lay. Jewish Christians and Christian Jews could still mill across it pretty much as they pleased.

Only a man who could lend to the rabbis or the bishops the full awesome power of a Shahanshah, or perhaps a Caesar, could hope to alter that.

But such a prospect, in AD 300, seemed scarcely imaginable.

Forging a New Heaven

To the rabbis, the notion that a Gentile king might end up a Jew was not inherently a ludicrous one. Nero himself, so it was confidently asserted in the Talmud, had been brought to repent of all his viciousness and become a proselyte. Even more startlingly, one of his descendants was supposed to have been a rabbi—and a particularly celebrated one at that.⁸⁶ The inherent implausibility of all this did not bother the rabbis themselves a jot. Rather, it served, in their opinion, only to render the miracle of Nero’s conversion the more astounding and edifying. After all, if even a notorious Caesar could be brought to follow the Torah, then who was to say what powerful Gentiles might become proselytes in the future?

Christians too, when they surveyed the kingdoms of the world, lived in hope. Memories of how Jesus had communicated with the King of Edessa were cherished precisely because they seemed to suggest that even great monarchs might be touched by the Holy Spirit. Clinching proof of this arrived in AD 301, when a Parthian king named Tiridates III, lord of the ruggedly mountainous and inaccessible land of Armenia, midway between the Roman and Persian empires, accepted Christ as his lord. Not only that, but he promptly ordered his subjects to follow suit. Since the Armenians had hitherto been devout worshippers of Mihr, this raised a good few eyebrows across Iranshahr, where the Zoroastrian priesthood, ever suspicious of interlopers, had already marked down the “Krestayne” as purveyors of witchcraft. There was, however, in this accusation, more than a hint of a grudging compliment. Not even their bitterest enemies could deny the Christians a quite spectacular success rate when it came to healing the sick. Rabbis, fully alert to what they regarded as the sinister potency of Christ’s name, urged invalids to guard against it, no matter what. The salutary tale was told of one rabbi who discovered, heartbreakingly, that his dying grandson had been restored to health by a magician’s whispering of the name of Jesus over the sickbed—and thereby been denied any prospect of eternal life.⁸⁷ Christians themselves, of course, furiously rejected any suggestion that their powers of healing might owe anything to necromancy. Rather, the ability of their holy men and women to work miracles, to cast out malevolent spirits and even to defy the laws of nature, was due, in their devout opinion, to the precise opposite: a power derived from heaven. The quite unanticipated acquisition of their first royal convert powerfully confirmed them in this view: for Tiridates had been brought to baptism after being cured of possession by demons. Only the name of Christ had been able to work the exorcism. Only the name of Christ had been able to convince the king that he was not, in fact, a wild boar. No wonder, then, knowing this, that Christians should eagerly have scanned the Shahanshah too for signs of lunacy, or any other ailment, and dared to dream.

Yet the challenge they faced remained a fearsome one. Not even the most proficient exorcist among them could doubt the menace and malignancy of their adversaries. Spirits flung down from heaven at the beginning of time still stalked the earth, hunting human prey; nor had Christ’s triumph over them on the cross wholly broken their grip on the empires of the world. The Persians, in their ignorance and folly, still worshipped fire; while in the teeming cities of the Romans, there was barely a square that did not stand filthy with the smoke of sacrifices paid to idols, and with the perfumes of incense burned in their honour. Christians did not deny that idols, images such as the Palladium, might be possessed of an authentically supernatural power; nor did they doubt that the spirits worshipped as gods by idolators truly existed. But to honour them, no matter how ancient the rites might be and no matter how passionately the Roman people might believe them essential to the maintenance of their empire, was akin to feeding the blood-lust of a vampire. An idol might be the loveliest in the world—and yet how did all its beauty serve it, if not as paint on the scabs of a whore?

Paul himself, arriving in Ephesus, a wealthy city on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, had risked a lynching to press home the point: that “gods made with hands are not gods.”⁸⁸ A bold thesis to push in Ephesus, of all places: for there stood in the city a temple so beautiful that it ranked as one of the seven wonders of the world. Artemis, the goddess enthroned amid its dazzling gold and marble, was a deity no less virginal or powerful than Pallas Athena—but Paul had been nothing daunted. True to form, he had refused point blank, even in the shadow of one of the holiest places in the entire empire, to make allowances for the sensitivities of those who worshipped there, or to compromise in the slightest with their convictions. As a result, not surprisingly, he had provoked a riot and almost been torn to pieces. A few years later, his continued refusal to renounce Christ had resulted in his execution by Nero in Rome.⁸⁹Peter, and many other apostles, had perished in the same wave of judicial murders. Thereafter, over succeeding generations, many other Christians, prosecuted by the imperial authorities for insulting the gods who had supposedly made Rome great, had likewise opted to pay the ultimate price—and joyously so. After all, by doing so, they could share in the suffering of their Saviour. To be baptised anew in one’s own blood was to be cleansed of every last taint of sin. The souls of those who died for Christ, ascending from the reek and shambles of the killing ground, were assured of eternal life. Nor was that the limit of their rewards—for the more spectacular their sufferings, so the more did they draw attention to the glory of Christ and His earthly Church. Each one perished as a “witness”—martyr, in Greek.

A point, unfortunately, entirely lost on the majority of their audience. Nothing quite like the relish of Christians for dying in the cause of their God had ever been witnessed before. When martyrs were made “to run the gauntlet of whips, or to be savaged by wild beasts, or to be roasted in iron chairs, so that they were suffocated by the reek of their own flesh as it cooked,”⁹⁰ the watching crowds were rarely impressed. Why should they be? A god best displayed his power by protecting those who worshipped him, not by demanding their deaths. The Romans knew this better than anyone. Because they had known how to bind themselves—religare, in Latin—to the gods, by offering them their due of sacrifices and respect, the gods had in turn bound themselves to the Roman people, and granted them all their greatness. It was this same bond—this “religio,” as the Romans termed it—that the superstition of the Christians appeared so grievously to threaten.⁹¹ The martyrs’ obduracy in the face of death struck the vast majority of their contemporaries as neither admirable nor heroic but as a sickness—the mark of deviant minds. It was also why, amid the agonies of Rome’s near collapse in the third century, the imperial authorities turned on the Christians with an escalating ferocity, in an attempt to appease the self-evidently angry gods, and purge the empire once and for all of the enemy within. “For it was our aim,” as one emperor put it, “to set everything right in accordance with the ancient laws and public discipline of the Roman people, and to ensure that the Christians too, who had abandoned the way of life of their ancestors, be returned to sanity.”⁹²

As wave after wave of persecution broke across the cities of the Roman Empire, both sides alike knew that much was at stake. War was being waged for control of the heavens themselves. It was not the fortitude of individual Christians, as their limbs were broken, as their flesh was made to melt, as their bodies were torn to pieces by wild beasts, that was being put to the test. Rather, it was the might and the potency of their god. By their deaths, so the martyrs believed, they were serving as the shock troops of the Holy Spirit. More and more, across the entire span of the fallen world, it was the breath of the divine that was being felt. In the bones and bloodied remains of the martyrs themselves—relics endowed with a terrifying holiness. In the miserable fates of those emperors who had presumed to persecute them: Decius, cut down by the Goths; Valerian, serving as a Persian king’s mounting block. In the routing, in their mightiest strongholds, of even the most ancient and powerful demonic spirits. Any Christian martyred in Ephesus, for instance, within sight of the great temple of Artemis, won a particularly glorious victory. Every drop of Christian blood spilled in the arena served as a fresh exorcism. The filth and stench of idolatry was being purged by the cleansing power of Christ. Inexorably, the claws of Artemis, that malignant demon, were being prised from the city.

There were some Christians in Ephesus, however, who were not called to die for their faith. For them, God had other plans. In 250, when the Emperor Decius launched the first full-scale persecution of the Church, seven young Christians sought to escape arrest by hiding in a cave near the city.^d There, so we are told, they were cornered, and sentenced to a living death. The entrance to the cave was bricked up. The seven young Ephesians, huddling together in their misery, fell asleep. Their slumbers, despite the wretchedness of their circumstances, proved deep and untroubled. Then, abruptly, the stones blocking off the mouth of the cave began to be moved. A shaft of light pierced the darkness. The seven sleepers awoke. Stumbling to the mouth of the cave, they found that labourers, seemingly oblivious to the wall’s original purpose, were shifting the stones. Even more strangely, the stones themselves were covered with bushes and weeds. Deeply puzzled, the seven young Christians decided to send one of their number down into the city to reconnoitre the situation. As the young man approached the outskirts, his perplexity deepened into utter bewilderment. The city appeared utterly transformed. No sacrificial smoke, no clouds of incense, rose from its walls; in the market place, temples had vanished, as though into thin air; on public buildings, all mentions of Artemis had been systematically chiselled out, while on a statue of Augustus, carved into the emperor’s forehead, was a cross. Rubbing his eyes in disbelief, the young man continued to the crossroads right in the centre of town, where a colossal idol of Artemis had always stood, as witness to her guardianship over the city. But even that was gone. In its place there now towered a giant cross, set there, according to an inscription, as “a sign of truth.”⁹³ Self-evidently, something awesome, something quite beyond comprehension, had taken place.

Only when the young man tried to buy bread with a coin bearing the head of Decius did he learn the full, astounding truth of what had happened. He and his six companions had been asleep for rather longer than the few hours they had initially presumed. A good deal longer, in fact. Two centuries in all the young men had been walled up inside the cave. The Almighty, observing “the faith of the blessed lambs,” had stationed an angel at the entrance, “a watcher, to be the guardian of their limbs.”⁹⁴ But not even the discovery that they were over two hundred years old could compare for impact with the sheer jaw-dropping scale of the transformation that had overtaken Ephesus, and the world beyond the city’s walls. Back in the time of Decius, fleeing the agents of persecution, they would all of them, no doubt, have recalled the terrifying vision of Daniel: of how four beasts, which were the four great empires of the world, ruling in succession over mankind, had emerged from a raging sea. And they would have remembered as well that the fourth beast was the deadliest of all: “terrible and dreadful and exceedingly strong; and it had great iron teeth; it devoured and broke in pieces, and stamped the residue with its feet.”⁹⁵ Sitting in the darkness of the cave before falling asleep, the seven young Christians would surely have had no doubt as to the identity of this beast; nor that what Daniel had been shown, in the vision of its terrifying depredations, was a prophecy of the persecution of the Church. After all, they themselves had witnessed the full horror of its savagery: “its teeth of iron and claws of bronze.”⁹⁶

Yet, Daniel had seen as well that the beast would ultimately be destroyed. And so it had proved. An empire once filthy with the pollution of idolatry, and beslathered with the blood of saints, had been transformed into something that no Christian back in the time of Decius would ever have imagined it becoming: the very mirror-image of the City of God. In AD 312—sixty-two years after the entombment of the seven sleepers and less than a decade after Rome’s persecution of the Church had attained a veritable peak of savagery—the miracle of miracles had occurred: Constantine, midway through his project of uniting the empire under his sole rule, had been granted a vision of a cross in the sky. A mysterious voice had commanded, “By this sign, conquer.”⁹⁷ Constantine, convinced that it was Christ Himself who had spoken to him, had done as instructed—and duly conquered. A century and a half later, the promise of victory in Daniel’s vision had been spectacularly fulfilled: “And as I looked, the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire.”⁹⁸ Proof of this, should the seven sleepers need it, was provided by what had once been the greatest building in the Greek world. Long since abandoned to rising swamps, the temple of Artemis was now nothing but a carcass: its blackened columns had toppled into the mud; its shattered silhouette was barely visible through marsh-fumes and clouds of insects; its body, if not yet destroyed, was certainly decayed beyond redemption. The fires that Daniel had predicted would consume the beast blazed now directly on its steps, as lime-burners fed the temple’s shattered marble into their kilns. Aside from these labourers’ huts, crudely erected on the margins of the colossal wreck, there were few other marks of human habitation. People rarely visited a place so accursed. Now, in Ephesus, it was churches which dominated the commanding heights, and Christians who held the reins of power. Only occasionally would the few men and women who remained true to the worship of the ancient goddess approach her ruined temple, scrape the silt from its toppled altars, and offer a clandestine sacrifice.

“The giving of divine honours to tombs and pestiferous ashes.”⁹⁹ So one Christian contemptuously dismissed the practice. Here, amplified across the centuries, was an authentic echo of the primal and magnificent scorn of Paul. As in the earliest days of the Church, so now, in the hour of its great triumph, it never crossed the minds of most Christians that those who clung to the love of gods other than Christ might conceivably have reasons for doing so aside from mere malignancy or backwardness. No other interpretation was necessary. Two centuries on from the reign of Decius, and the attitude felt by Christians towards their one-time persecutors was no longer one of dread, but rather of haughty and splendid disdain. The word they increasingly used to describe those who spurned baptism was pagani—“civilians.”^e This, of course, was to cast the Church itself as a heroic band of warriors, soldiers of Christ engaged in a mighty battle against the demons of hell; but it also served, very effectively, to imply that “pagans,” no matter the fabulous range and variety of their cults, their observances, and their gods, were all, in the sordid depths of their souls, essentially the same. The notion that there existed such a thing as “paganism” gave to Christians what any great army of conquest marching into enemy territory, trusting to its size and its superior fire-power, will always looks to find: a single body of adversaries that could be pinned down, brought to battle, and given a decisive knock-out blow.

A strategy which, as it so happened, had always been the hall-mark of the Roman way of making war. Shortly after news of the miracle of the seven sleepers had arrived in Constantinople, the emperor himself—the “imperator”—is said to have travelled to their cave, where they gave him his blessing, then piously expired. Theodosius II, the fortunate recipient of the sleepers’ benedictions, might initially have seemed an improbable heir to the grand traditions of Roman martial prowess. For all that his grandfather and namesake had been very much a warrior emperor of the old school, the younger Theodosius rarely left the gilded confines of his capital. His most tangible contribution to military policy had been purely defensive: girding the land flank of Constantinople, just over half a mile beyond Constantine’s original wall, with a truly massive line of fortifications. This did not mean, however, that Theodosius gave no thought to the prosecution of war against the enemies of the Roman people. On the contrary: he devoted himself to it daily. The true battles were to be won, not from the saddle of a war-horse, but in churches and chapels. As Theodosius himself put it in a solemn decree, “We are aware that Our State is sustained more by proper worship than by official duties, and physical toil and sweat.”¹⁰⁰ The literal truth of this pronouncement had been vividly demonstrated during the reign of his father, when a fiery and sulphurous cloud, self-evidently of divine origin, had descended upon Constantinople. Only the prayers of the emperor himself had succeeded in dispersing it, and thereby preserving the capital from the wrath of God. Understandably, given the evidence of such miracles, Theodosius had grown up quite exceptionally devout. He fasted, he sang psalms, he averted his eyes from all temptations. His prayers, in consequence, had come to attain a rare and much valued potency. Four long decades he had reigned—and throughout that time, even as barbarian depredations had shaken the western half of the empire to the point of ruin, the provinces ruled from Constantinople, despite the odd alarm, had stood firm. Proof, if any were needed, of just what might be achieved by an emperor, if only the heavens could be won to his side.

Plus ça change indeed. For all the revolution that Constantine had initiated in the affairs of the empire, the instincts of the imperial elite, amid all the toppling of the ancient gods from their thrones, had altered, in truth, barely at all. Glory, eternal glory, remained what it had ever been: the due of the Roman people. Idols might have been smashed, and temples gutted—but not that basic, guiding presumption. What, after all, when Christ first spoke to Constantine, had He promised the emperor, if not victory, plain and simple? Constantine himself, later in life, would recall the experience of his conversion as a single moment of transcendent and soul-wrenching rapture; and yet, in truth, his spiritual journey had been altogether more protracted, perhaps, than such a memory allowed. Long before his vision of Christ, before he was even emperor, Constantine had been casting around for a divinity sufficiently powerful to sustain the formidable scope of his ambitions. It had been necessary for such a god, his own quite stunning lack of modesty being what it was, to be one of such might, potency, and magnificence as to reign, in effect, alone. At various stages in his career, Constantine had imagined that this supreme god might be Apollo—the twin brother of Artemis—or perhaps the Sun. In the end, however, it was Christ who had passed the audition. Constantine had called on the One God “with earnest prayer and supplications that He would reveal to him who He was”¹⁰¹—and a cross of light had duly appeared in the sky. From that moment on, the emperor had not fought a single battle without first retiring to his tent to pray—“and always, after a short while, he was honoured with a manifestation of the Divine Presence.”¹⁰² Nobody, given the startling scale of Constantine’s achievements, could possibly doubt the truth of this. Who were his heirs to forget it? To rule in the great city founded by Constantine was to appreciate just what was owed by the Roman people to the favour of Christ. It was to know that they were protected by a guardian of literally incomparable power. It was to rejoice in the certainty that the empire, even amid all the convulsions and upheavals of the age, rested upon foundations of a truly adamantine solidity: those same foundations that were the proper knowledge of God.

Except that here was begged an obvious question: what precisely was the proper knowledge of God? The answer to this was not, of course, remotely as self-evident as Christians had always yearned for it to be. Back in the first century of the Church, Ignatius, the great Bishop of Antioch, had coined a most suggestive word, expressive of his desperate longing for there to exist a coherent and universally accepted framework of Christian belief: Christianismos.¹⁰³ Two centuries on, however, and although there certainly existed an immense array of Christians, what did not exist was any consensus among them as to what Christianismos—“Christianity”—might actually be. The concept had proved a chimera. When Constantine, fresh from communing with the Almighty, had turned for assistance with his great labours to the supposedly “catholic” Church, he had found to his consternation that he was dealing, not with a single, monolithic organisation, but rather with an uneasy coalition of often bitterly antagonistic constituencies. To be sure, many of the tensions afflicting the various churches of his empire reflected jockeying for worldly position among ambitious bishops—but not all of them, by any means. The great kaleidoscope of Christian faith, formed as it had ever been of a bewildering array of beliefs and practices, was still in its customary state of flux. Not even the miraculous conversion of an emperor had served to distract Christian intellectuals from their favourite pastime: obsessing over the nature of God.

Throughout the early 320s, as Constantine was busy crushing the last remnants of opposition to his rule and drawing up plans for his new capital, the Church had been tearing itself to pieces over that veritable mystery of mysteries: the identity of Christ Himself. In 318, an austere and impeccably learned priest by the name of Arius had ripped open an old wound by arguing—with seemingly impeccable logic but against the authority of his own bishop—that God must have preceded His Son. Tertullian, of course, had made the same identical point; but decades of persecution had decisively altered the terms of the debate. As Arius’s opponents were all too uncomfortably aware, any hint that the Son might be a secondary god, inferior to the Father, risked something truly monstrous: a blurring of what divided Christians from their pagan adversaries. If God were anything less than One, after all, why not go the whole hog and fall to worshipping Athena or Artemis? Inevitably, then, Arius’s teachings provoked outrage: outrage which in turn only encouraged Arius and his supporters to dig in their heels all the more. The result was deadlock. Yet again, it seemed that Christians were utterly incapable of reaching consensus on even the most fundamental points of their belief. There existed not one but a multiplicity of Christianities.

But this was to reckon without a powerful new factor in the equation. To Constantine, the squabbling among the leaders of the Church was, quite simply, intolerable. Self-evidently, God had appeared to him and granted him victory because it was the divine will that Rome’s empire be set on a new and heavenly footing. Who were Arius and his opponents, then, Constantine wished to know, to undermine his mission with their “subtle disputations on questions of little or no significance”?¹⁰⁴ After the failure of an initial attempt to restore harmony by knocking the two sides’ heads together, Constantine moved with his customary decisiveness. Briskly, in 325, he summoned bishops from across the empire, and from Iranshahr too, to something wholly unprecedented: anoecumenical, or “worldwide,” council. The venue chosen for this historic event, ostensibly because of its pleasant climate but in reality because of its location just south of Constantinople, was the city of Nicaea. Here, materialising in a blaze of gold and purple, “like some heavenly messenger of God,”¹⁰⁵ the emperor left the assembled bishops in no doubt as to what he wanted: an agreed and readily comprehensible definition of Christianismos. The bishops, suitably overawed, scrambled to obey. The followers of Arius, who constituted a decided minority in the council, found their protests being brutally sidelined. The Son, it was agreed, was “of one Being with the Father.” Furthermore, He had been both God and man in equal proportions: “one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Finally, just for good measure, the bishops made sure to add a mention of the Holy Spirit in their mutually agreed statement of belief. From now on, there was to be no more debate: God was definitively a Trinity.

It was not only Arius’s followers who were branded heretical as a result of this momentous decision: so too were a host of other Christian sects and factions. Like the ancient street-plan of Byzantium, even then vanishing beneath the imperious grid of Constantinople, the venerable sprawl of their beliefs was put on notice of obliteration. The presence at the great council of bishops from throughout the Christian world—not to mention the faintly menacing figure of Constantine himself—had given its deliberations an unprecedented degree of heft. In the wake of Nicaea, the Church found itself possessed, for the very first time, of a creed that it could plausibly promote as “catholic”—as universal. The dream of Ignatius—that there might be such a thing as “Christianity”—appeared suddenly and dazzlingly fulfilled.

True, the show of unity quickly fractured. A bare few months after the bishops had gone their separate ways, and a whole slew of them began to backslide. While Arius himself, if the gleeful reports of his enemies were to be trusted, was soon brought to an aptly salutary end, voiding his guts in a back alley amid a quite spectacular explosion of shit, there were many, to the frustration of the orthodox, who failed to draw the obvious moral from this. Far and wide the ordure of the arch heretic’s teachings had been splattered: even beyond the borders of the empire, where the Goths, although brought to Christ, had also been brought to believe with Arius, and against the creed formulated at Nicaea, that He was subordinate to the Father. Deviancy such as this, perhaps, was only to be expected from barbarians—but plenty of others had no such excuse. Many bishops, scorning what they had agreed at Nicaea, began openly to glory in the name of “Arian.” Even a son of Constantine had not disdained the title.

Then, in 361, something far worse happened. Julian, a nephew of Constantine, seized control of the empire and promptly proclaimed himself a pagan. Bold, charismatic and brilliant, the new emperor made a conscious attempt to reverse his uncle’s revolution. He restored subsidies to temples. He sought to undermine the Christian monopoly on charitable giving by organising his own. He even grew a beard. Such monstrous actions made it certain, of course, that the Almighty, provoked beyond endurance, would strike the apostate down. Sure enough, when Julian was duly killed on campaign in Mesopotamia just two years after coming to the throne, his death was received with a complacent satisfaction by Christians everywhere. Indisputably, however, they had been given a terrifying jolt. The leaders of the orthodox Church—nervously eyeing heretics on one flank and pagans on the other—lived in perpetual fear that the legacy of Nicaea, and their own authority with it, lay under mortal threat. This dread, over the course of the near century that separated the death of Julian from the appearance of the seven sleepers in Ephesus, saw them press hard for the rout of their many foes. Too much was at stake for them to do otherwise. Not just for the sake of Rome’s empire, not just for the sake of humanity even, but for the sake of the heavens themselves, they needed a truly crushing victory—one that would leave the demons, and their mortal agents with them, in full and terminal retreat.

And such a victory, sure enough, was precisely what they had achieved. To the seven sleepers, gazing around them in stupefaction at what their one-time pagan city had become, this would have been most apparent, perhaps, in the sheer physical ubiquity of churches, in the market place, on the main streets, even on the hill overlooking the ruined temple of Artemis. However, much more astounding—and more impregnable by far—was a structure that could not be seen. So novel was it, so revolutionary in its implications, that even the word increasingly used to describe it—religio—had quite lost its original meaning. Back in the time of Decius, there had been many different ways for mortals to bind themselves to the gods: for each and every sacrifice, if properly sanctioned by tradition, had ranked as a religio. That, however, was not at all what Christians meant by the word.¹⁰⁶ “What binds and ties us to God is piety.” Much else inevitably flowed from the presumption. Deep in their souls, Christians knew, as pagans did not, that “it matters not how you worship, but what you worship.”¹⁰⁷ Staining an altar with blood was not religio but superstition, plain and simple. Demons should be paid no honours, no sacrifices, no dues. There was One God, and One God only—and so there could be only one religio.

What the seven sleepers had woken to was a world that accepted such logic as invincible. Emperors, charged as they were with the protection of the Roman people, and desperate for heavenly assistance, now turned instinctively to those men who could most plausibly claim access to the court of heaven: the bishops of the Catholic Church. In turn, the bishops, granted access to the earthly court of Constantinople, had been able to persuade a succession of emperors that there was nothing likelier to boost state security than the proper entrenchment of Nicaean orthodoxy. It was this potent combination of interests that had spelled ruin for the temple of Artemis: for in 391, the great warrior emperor Theodosius I, grandfather of Theodosius II, had officially forbidden all forms of sacrifice, and the veneration of even household idols.

Nor had that been the limit of his efforts in defence of the Catholic Church. Even more gratifying to the bishops, perhaps, had been his harrying of an enemy subtler, less obvious, and much lighter on their feet than the pagans. A decade before the banning of sacrifices, Theodosius had officially defined all those Christians who disputed the Nicaean settlement as “demented and lunatic.”¹⁰⁸ The bishops, then, in their ongoing campaign against heresy, had increasingly been able to take for granted their right of appeal to Caesar. “Help me to destroy the heretics, and I will help you to destroy the Persians.”¹⁰⁹ Such was the rallying cry issued to Theodosius II by Nestorius, a brilliant Syrian theologian who in 428 had become Bishop of Constantinople. The bargain struck between emperor and Church could hardly have been spelled out more brutally; and indeed, there were those who thought Nestorius downright vulgar for drawing attention to it. Yet the alliance, in the final reckoning, was founded upon something nobler than mere cynical intolerance. Theodosius, after all, was a man of legendary piety; while Nestorius had been so famed for his holiness in his native Antioch that he had been specially imported to fill the capital’s vacant bishopric. Both men yearned to see the pillars of heaven planted on the fallen earth; and each was convinced that God had called upon him, personally, to achieve it. Their great labour it was, emperor and bishop alike, to complete the heroic project initiated by Constantine at Nicaea: to fashion a single Christianity; to shape the first religion.

Granted, tensions always remained. Beyond the limits of the empire, in Iranshahr, Christians tended to seize every opportunity they could to demonstrate their independence of Constantinople, since any hint that they might be fifth-columnists would see, “instead of incense, the dust of their demolished churches ascending to the sky.”¹¹⁰ Even within the empire itself, in great cities such as Antioch, the leaders of the Church rarely felt much obligation to kowtow to orders from the capital. If emperors were intimidating figures, then so too were bishops. The aura of God’s awful power always encircled them, and Constantinople was far away. The fashion for issuing stentorian pronouncements on the nature of Christ, honed by Nicaea and a host of councils since, was one that any bishop with a strong local power-base, not to mention a fondness for the sound of his own voice, was almost bound to indulge. In 451, a year after the death of Theodosius II, the largest oecumenical council that the Church had ever seen, attended by a full six hundred bishops, was held at Chalcedon, directly across the straits from the imperial palace, in a conscious effort to rein in this tendency. The new regime’s aim—just as Constantine’s had been at Nicaea—was to muzzle a taste for bickering that had come to threaten, in the opinion of the authorities, not only the unity of the Church but the very security of the Roman people.

At stake for the delegates, however, was no longer the relationship of the Son to the Father, an issue long since triumphantly resolved, but a no less awesome mystery: the identity of the Son Himself. How, Christians wanted to know, had His divine and human natures coexisted? Had they been wholly intermingled, like water and wine in a goblet, to constitute a mone physis—a “single nature”? Or had the two natures of Christ in fact co-existed within His earthly body as quite distinct entities, like water and oil? Had both His human and His divine essence experienced birth, suffering and death, or was it the most repugnant blasphemy to declare, as some bishops did, that God Himself “was crucified for us”?¹¹¹ Knotty questions—nor easily unpicked. The Council of Chalcedon, nevertheless, did its level best. A determinedly middle road was steered. Due weight was given to both the divine and the human elements of Christ: “the same truly God and truly man.” This formula, devised by a bishop of Rome and graced with the approval of the emperor himself, struck the Christians of both the West and Constantinople as eminently reasonable—so much so that never again would they attempt to revise or reverse it.^f

Elsewhere, though, there was consternation. By its opponents, Chalcedon was dismissed as—at best—a flaccid equivocation. Across the eastern provinces of the empire, and in Syria and Egypt especially, Christians committed to the belief that Christ’s human nature had been blended indivisibly with the divine refused to be bound by the rulings of the council. Chalcedonians, in reciprocal scorn, labelled these dissidents “Monophysites”—a name intended and felt to be profoundly insulting.^g Meanwhile, Christians from the opposite wing of the debate—those who believed it monstrous to imagine that God Himself might have been crucified, that God Himself might have died—felt no less bitterly betrayed by all the fine-spun prevarications of Chalcedon than did their Monophysite adversaries. Nestorius himself, had he not died a day before the arrival of his invitation to attend the council, would have been a prominent member of this faction. In an irony typical of the age, however, a couple of decades before Chalcedon, the man who had urged Theodosius to destroy the heretics had himself been convicted of heresy, disgraced and packed off into exile. He and his doctrines still had plenty of followers, though—Christians who felt that the erstwhile Bishop of Constantinople had been the epitome of orthodoxy. Many of them could be found in the famous schools of Edessa; but there were even more in Mesopotamia. In 489, when a Monophysite takeover of the Blessed City forced the closure of its university, the students and teachers simply decamped across the border. As one Mesopotamian bishop smugly put it, “Edessa went dark and Nisibis blazed with light.”¹¹² The Christians of Iranshahr—implacable opponents of the Monophysites and contemptuous of Chalcedon—had soon lost any lingering trace of loyalty to Constantinople. In turn, the Christians of the West—Chalcedonians and Monophysites alike—dismissed the Mesopotamians as heretics and labelled them “Nestorians.” Chalcedon, far from bringing unity, seemed to have riven the Church for good.

And certainly, as time went on, the rival positions hardened. The Chalcedonians, having seized the commanding heights of the Church’s infrastructure and claimed the prized title of “orthodox,” were in no mood to surrender their spoils. The Monophysites, never doubting for a moment that it was they who were truly the orthodox, proved equally intransigent: rather than accept the bishops foisted on them by Constantinople, they simply took to the countryside and preached their doctrines there. A succession of emperors, desperate to heal the breach, veered ineffectually between compromise and repression. When Anastasius daringly permitted a Monophysite phrase to be spoken in the capital’s churches, the outraged citizenry responded by toppling statues of the emperor, burning down entire districts of the city, and parading the head of a decapitated Monophysite on a pole, to the catchy refrain of: “A conspirator against the Trinity!”¹¹³ A few years later, when Justin purged the Church hierarchy in Syria of all those with Monophysite leanings, the exiled bishops positively revelled in their misfortunes, and infuriated Constantinople by posing stagily as martyrs.

As for Justinian—an emperor as forceful, energetic and egotistical as any in Roman history—he never doubted for a moment his ability to secure Christian unity. Following in the footsteps of Anastasius, he offered the Monophysites several dramatic concessions; like Julian, he was perfectly happy to depose an obdurate bishop or two and demand their silence if the situation required it. In addition, though, he unleashed a couple of tactics that neither of his predecessors had thought to deploy. The first of these, bred of Justinian’s sublime conviction that he had a genius for theology, was to invite Monophysites to Constantinople and grace them personally with his reflections on the mysteries of faith. Although this strategy, to the emperor’s own surprise, failed noticeably to shift the convictions of his guests, his self-assurance was barely dented by the disappointment. There lay another means to hand of seducing the Monophysites. Justinian, never a man to squander a potential advantage, and a political operator even when in the throes of his lust, could point to the fact that he had seen fit to take one of their number to his bed.

And not just any Monophysite. Even her bitterest critics—of whom there were many—grudgingly acknowledged that Theodora, consort and beloved of the emperor, was a woman of exceptional abilities. Shrewd, far-sighted and bold, she ranked, in the opinion of Justinian’s cattier critics, as more of a man than her husband ever did. Rumour had it that at the height of the deadly riots of 532, with Constantinople ablaze and Justinian twitchily contemplating flight, she stiffened the imperial backbone by declaring, with a magnificent show of haughtiness, that “purple makes for an excellent shroud.”¹¹⁴ Steel of this order, in a woman, was unsettling enough to the Roman elite; but even more so were the origins of the empress. Theodora, like an exotic bloom sustained by dung, had her roots, so it was darkly whispered, deep in filth. Dancer, actress and stand-up comic, she had also—long before puberty—been honing on slaves and the destitute a career even more scandalous. Her vagina, it was said, might just as well have been in her face; and, indeed, such was the use to which she put all three of her orifices that “she would often complain that she did not have orifices in her nipples as well.”¹¹⁵ The gang-bang had never been held that could wear her out. Most notorious of all had been her trademark floor-show, which had seen her lie on her back, have her genitals sprinkled with grain, and then wait for geese to pick the seeds off one by one with their beaks. Such were the talents, so her critics sneered, that had won for her the besotted devotion of the master of the world.

Yet, this sorely underestimated both husband and wife. Theodora had certainly been a whore: even her admirers admitted as much. What mattered to them, however, and to Justinian as well, was not her record of sin, but rather the radiant glory of her repentance. The one-time prostitute had emerged as a devout Monophysite, a committed student of famous theologians, a woman “more formidable in her understanding and sympathy toward the wronged than any individual ever.”¹¹⁶ Perhaps it was only natural that someone who had endured the pecking of geese at her private parts for public amusement should have empathised with the downtrodden. Whatever had prompted her own personal reformation, though, Theodora undoubtedly provided Justinian with a living, breathing model of all his noblest hopes for the Roman state. Above the gates of the Chalke, the great entrance to the imperial palace, there stretched a magnificent mosaic of Justinian and Theodora together, “both of them appearing to rejoice and celebrate festivals of victory.”¹¹⁷The message proclaimed by such an image, even if Justinian disdained to spell it out openly, was nevertheless something more than merely subliminal. Stern guardian of orthodoxy though he was, he did not deny to his wife the title of Christian, too. For all the seeming chasm of difference between Chalcedonians and Monophysites, it did not, in the opinion of Justinian himself, threaten the blessings that his empire might expect to receive as its due reward from God. In the ultimate reckoning, what united the Christian people was more significant than what kept them apart.

Most Monophysites—and Nestorians too—shared this view. Despite the festering bitterness of their disputes, none of them truly doubted that they all belonged to the same religion: that there was genuinely such a thing as Christianismos. Failure Chalcedon might have been—but not Nicaea. Two hundred years on from the great council, the only Arian churches were in the West: for there they could enjoy the patronage of barbarians who, of course, knew little better. And it was not only Arians who had been largely scoured from the Christian heartlands. The orthodoxies of Nicaea—that God was a Trinity; that the Son was equal to the Father; that Jesus had been more than merely man—were now so entrenched that few Christians were even aware of just how contested these doctrines had once been.

In 367, some four decades after the first formulation of the Nicaean Creed, a famously authoritarian bishop by the name of Athanasius had written to the churches under his jurisdiction. In these letters, he had prescribed the twenty-seven books that henceforward were to be considered as constituting the “New Testament.” The list had soon become canonical wherever Nicaea was accepted. Simultaneously, Athanasius had commanded that all gospels not included in his canon, and all letters falsely ascribed to the apostles, should be rooted out and destroyed. On this matter too, his guidelines had been widely followed: in due course, the gospels of Basilides, Marcion and every other Gnostic had been consigned to oblivion. Memories of these other Christians and their doctrines had inevitably faded. By the time of Justinian, a whole new history for the faith had come to be written. There was simply no recollection, in the history that the Church had succeeded in manufacturing for itself, of its authentic origins and evolution. Right from the beginning, most Christians now took for granted there had only ever been the one Christianity: a religion that was orthodox, catholic and Nicaean.

And it was this same presumption—that the essence of Christianismos was something both eternal and unchanging—which gave to Justinian’s revolution a distinctive, not to say unsettling, aura of paradox. “This was the commission entrusted to the Emperor by God: to watch over the whole Roman Empire and, so far as was possible, to refashion it.”¹¹⁸ The tone of veiled uncertainty—even nervousness—was telling. Was Justinian properly to be judged as a noble burnisher of ancient verities or as that most disturbing and dangerous of figures, a revolutionary? The question haunted his every move. If his legal reforms, which had served to forge the venerable laws of the Roman people into something novel and intimidating, were palpably shadowed by ambiguity, then so too was an even more awesome project: the modelling of his earthly realm upon the monarchy of the heavens. This, of course, had been the stated goal of a whole succession of emperors since the time of Constantine; but Justinian pursued it with a brutality and literal-mindedness quite without precedent. The emperor was not, by nature, a vicious man; but neither, to put it mildly, was he lacking in self-assurance. Not for him the carefully modulated ambivalence of his predecessors.

“It is our belief,” so Theodosius II had declared back in 423, “that pagans no longer exist.”¹¹⁹ The reality, as suggested by the battery of laws that Theodosius himself had continued to promulgate against paganism long after delivering this confident pronouncement, was rather different. “Ask no questions, hear no evil”: such had typically been the approach adopted by the imperial authorities towards those who persisted in the worship of the ancient gods. This turning of a blind eye had meant that peasants, even after baptism, could still dance in honour of Artemis and persist in primordial rituals; scholars still base their writings on antique pagan models; and philosophers still pursue a quest for wisdom—sophia—that did not have as its ultimate object a knowledge of Christ. Abominations all. Justinian understood, as the pagans in their purblind folly did not, that there existed only the one true wisdom: the “Holy Wisdom”—Hagia Sophia—of God. What cult—what philosophy—could remotely compare for timelessness with that? Each one was the merest dust upon the breath of the Holy Spirit. Crushing them for good would allow the world to return to the true, the only, the primal religion. This, in Justinian’s devout opinion, was no revolution but the ultimate in renewal.

And so it was, almost two hundred years after a pagan emperor had set himself to uproot the Church, that a Christian Caesar moved to extirpate what remained of paganism, and to rout the demons for good. In the highlands beyond Ephesus, where it was reported that Artemis, a terrifying hag as tall as ten men, still stalked the unwary, missionaries were commissioned to redeem the peasantry from their doltish ignorance of Christ—and with such success that a single bishop reportedly secured a full seventy thousand souls. Meanwhile, in the capital itself, agents were busy sniffing out any hint of demon worship in public life. Ferocious laws were passed against the practice. All Christians found guilty of idolatry were to be put to death, while pagans and heretics were to be granted three months’ grace—after which, if they had not converted, they were to be banned from teaching or holding public office, and rendered utterly destitute. Those who sought to escape baptism by committing suicide could expect their corpses to be treated like those of dead dogs. “For killing, in the opinion of Justinian, was hardly to be ranked as murder, if those who died did not share his beliefs.”¹²⁰

It did not take long for the ripples of persecution to spread outwards from Constantinople. In 529, news of the emperor’s legislation reached the one city that, more than any other, had remained most inveterately addicted to the pagans’ damnable teachings and fantasies. To what, after all, did the very name “Athens” bear witness, if not the primordial hold upon her of a demon? The great temple of Pallas Athena, the Parthenon, had long since been emptied of its colossal idol of the goddess, and safely converted into a church; but there remained, in the shadow of the Acropolis, schools where the doctrines of Plato and Pythagoras continued to be taught. Not for long, however. It needed no great training in philosophy to appreciate what Justinian’s decrees might mean for even the most eminent of pagan intellectuals. The choices that lay before them could hardly have been any starker: conversion, exile or death. The philosophers—to whom martyrdom appeared no less Christian a fate than baptism—opted for retreat. In 530 or 531,¹²¹they fled Athens and brought down the curtain on a thousand years of philosophy in the city. Dreading to remain anywhere within the reach of Justinian, they threw themselves on the mercy of his only genuine rival: the Shahanshah. Khusrow, delighted by the propaganda coup that this represented, duly offered the exiled philosophers an ostentatious welcome. Ctesiphon, however, would prove no second Athens. Barely a year into their exile there, the philosophers—afflicted with crippling homesickness—begged their new patron for permission to leave. Khusrow graciously agreed and even secured an assurance from Justinian that they would be allowed to live in peace back in their homeland, “without being compelled to alter their traditional beliefs or to accept any view which did not coincide with them.”¹²² What happened to the philosophers after that, however, is a mystery. Some have suggested that the philosophers did return to their homeland, where they lived in peaceful obscurity; others claim that they settled in that stronghold of pagan exceptionalism, Harran.¹²³ Wherever they ended up, though, one thing is certain: there was to be no resurrection of philosophy in Athens.

“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” So Paul, berating the Athenians for their idolatry, had asked.¹²⁴ Some five centuries later, there were few who could any longer doubt the answer. In 532, even as the Bishop of Athens was preparing to move into a villa recently vacated by the head of the school founded by Plato, Justinian seized the perfect opportunity to ram home the moral.¹²⁵ The deadly firestorm of rioting in the heart of Constantinople had left churches as well as bath-houses in ruins. The gravest loss of all had stood just to the north of the Augustaion: the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom—Hagia Sophia. Work to replace it began a mere forty-five days after its destruction; but Justinian had in mind something more, very much more, than mere slavish reproduction. The wisdom of God was to be made manifest in the most daring, spectacular, and colossal vaulted interior that had ever been built. A dome, in majesty “like the very firmament that rests upon the air,”¹²⁶ would be raised where previously there had been nothing but a gabled roof. Whether viewed from afar—looming vastly above the columns and towers of the Golden City, “so that it seems of a height to match the sky”¹²⁷—or from within—dazzling the eye with the radiance of its fittings, “almost like a second sun”¹²⁸—a new and spectacular edifice was to demonstrate to the Christian people the truth to which Justinian had dedicated his entire life: that heaven could indeed be built on earth.

It took less than six years to complete the Church of Hagia Sophia. When the triumphant Justinian, amid the gusting of incense, the clanging of bells, and the blazing of gold, presided over the dedication on 27 December 537, he knew himself in the presence of an authentic miracle. To stand beneath the great dome of Hagia Sophia was to know that God’s wisdom had descended on the fallen earth indeed. The agents of pagan folly had been routed. Order had prevailed over chaos. The empire of the Roman people, once and for all, had been brought to Christ.

But what of those beyond the borders of the empire? Here too, in the minds of Justinian and his advisers, there was cause for optimism. Religio—although a Latin word, and a concept that had been refined to a formidable degree of steeliness under the supervision of a whole succession of Caesars—was certainly not for Romans alone. The claims of “religion”—as Christians had come to define it—were global to a degree that far exceeded those of even the most ambitious emperor. Barbarians who had always stood proof against the might of the legions might certainly be brought to Christ. There was nothing, after all, to stop the Gospel from being preached to the outermost limits of the world. Then, that once achieved, the dome of the heavens would serve to make of the entire earth one immense and universal Hagia Sophia.

That, at any rate—in the court of Justinian—was the hope.

^a Constantinople actually had two Senate Houses: the original stood on the edge of Constantine’s forum, but the one in the Augustaion had largely superseded it by the sixth century.

^b One point on which all rabbis could agree was that the Amalekites, a people personally condemned to destruction by God Himself, could never become proselytes. By the time this ruling was formulated, however, no one had any idea where the Amalekites were to be found, or even if they still existed.

^c Among non-Christians, “hairesis” had come to signify a school of philosophical thought.

^d According to the Syriac writer Jacob of Serugh, there were actually eight sleepers: one who served as spokesman for the group, and seven others. Almost all other Christian sources, however, set the number at seven. The debate is pursued further in the pages of the Qur’an: “Only a few have real knowledge about them,” God admonishes, “so do not argue” (18.22).

^e Or possibly “rustic.” The precise meaning of the word has long been debated, but there is a general consensus now that it relates to the sense that Christians had of themselves as milites Christi—“soldiers of Christ.” The term was first used by Tertullian, but it was only after the conversion of Constantine that it began to appear on Christian inscriptions.

^f It remains to this day, in the words of Diarmaid MacCulloch, “the standard measure for discussion of the person of Christ, in Churches otherwise as diverse as Greek, Romanian and Slavic Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans and mainstream Protestants” (p. 226).

^g Western historians today are much more sensitive to the potential offensiveness of the title than they used to be, but have struggled to come up with a convenient alternative. “Anti-Chalcedonian” is even more of a mouthful than “Monophysite.”