4

THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM

Making the Desert Bloom

Hagia Sophia was not, nor intended to be, a modest building: “Every structure there has ever been,” so one enthusiast gushed, “must cower before it.”¹ It was also, of course, the duty of mortals to cower before the god who was glorified there, and whose cross, fashioned out of brilliant gold, blazed from the monumental dome of the cathedral, to the awe and wonder of the worshippers far below. “Pantokrator,” the Romans of Constantinople termed Christ: “The Ruler of All.” In Hagia Sophia, and in churches across the Greek world, He was imagined as presiding over a dominion without limits, surrounded by an exquisitely graded hierarchy of angels and saints, unfathomably distant from the indignities of human existence. Precisely the kind of deity, in short, to appeal to Justinian.

But there were ways too of approaching Christ that did not require the sumptuousness of gold and purple. In 527, five years before work began on Hagia Sophia, a small boy named Simeon had trotted through the bazaars and shanty-towns of Antioch, out through the olive groves that stretched southwards of the city, and up the slopes of a nearby mountain. Its rugged heights were no place for a child, nor for anyone with a care for comfort. The wilderness was a realm of danger: the haunt of bandits, lions and bears. To settle amid its crags was to abandon all that made for civilisation, to become a monachos, or “one who lives alone.” Yet the fact was, of course, as the Christian people well understood, that no man was ever truly alone—no, nor woman either. Demons, like flies around a butcher’s stall, swarmed wherever there rose the stench of sin; angels, serried in fiery ranks, served as the legions of God. Veiled from the gaze of fallen humanity, they blazed no less brilliantly for that. Only a monachos—a “monk”—could hope to glimpse them. Those men and women who chose to abandon the perfumed filth of human company, to fix their gaze upon the heavens, to devote themselves exclusively to the service of God, might hope to become suffused with the fire of the Holy Spirit, flesh and bone though they were: “If you will, you can become all flame.”²

It took more than withdrawal from the world for a man or woman to attain this happy condition, however. One monk, asked how salvation could be attained, promptly stripped stark naked and raised his hands to the sky. “So should the monk be,” he declared. “Denuded of all things, and crucified.”³ But in a world where martyrdom was no longer an option, what precisely did it mean to be “crucified”? Here was a question fit to stimulate some truly spectacular feats of self-abnegation. Most monks were content to submit themselves to the communal discipline of a mone—a “monastery.” They would “strip for the contest, spending their days in physical toil and their nights without sleep in giving praise to the Lord.”⁴ Some, however, looking to go the extra mile, might make a point of mixing ashes into their gruel, or subsisting entirely on waste scraped off the soles of sandals, or living like cattle, chained to cowsheds, and feeding on grass. One particularly creative act of renunciation saw a woman confine herself to a cell with a spectacular riverside view, and then, for the remainder of her life, refuse even once to look out through the window. It required suffering as well as solitude to become a true athlete of God.

Yet when it came to the training—ascesis—required to attain a truly miraculous pinnacle of holiness, there were few who would have denied the palm to the “ascetics” of Syria. Spectacular feats of self-mortification had long been a speciality of the region. One particularly venerable tradition had seen pagans climb pillars—styloi—and stay there for a week at a time, “communing with the gods on high.”⁵ The bathing of Syria in the light of Christ, even though it had scoured the demons from their temples, had not banished the close association between pillars and access to the supernatural. In around AD 430, a whole century before the young Simeon of Antioch abandoned his home town, another Simeon—a shepherd—had climbed a sixty-foot column on the edge of the Syrian desert. There he had remained, precariously balanced, not for a week, but for thirty long years, until in due course his soul had been gathered up to heaven. The challenge aimed at the demons by this unprecedented feat had been quite deliberate. Simeon’s prodigious austerities had easily eclipsed anything achieved by the pagans. To a people only recently deprived of their ancient gods, the withered, worm-infested and quite fabulously hairy body of the “stylite” had served as an awesome manifestation of the power of their new deity.^a Reports of the miracles achieved by Simeon’s prayers had spread as far afield as Ethiopia and Britain. In Rome, his adoring fans had taken to pinning pictures of his pillar to their doorposts. By the time of his death, he had become, quite simply, the most famous man in the world.

The lesson taught by a thoroughbred stylite could hardly have been more emphatic. Sumptuously though great cities might be adorned by monuments to Christ, it was in the wilds that God was likeliest to be heard. Even a child, if sufficiently precocious, might look to part the veil that obscured the realm of the angels and become a vessel for the transfiguring power of the heavens. This was why, almost seven decades on from the death of his illustrious namesake, the young boy named Simeon abandoned his home in Antioch and headed into the wilderness. His aim too was to spend what remained of his life on top of a pillar. Heavenly approval of this youthful ambition was manifest; only a short while before Simeon’s arrival on the mountain, a local monk had been granted a spectacular vision of “a child dressed all in white, and a glowing column, both of them whirling around in the sky.”⁶ Sure enough, when the boy finally mounted his pillar, after a whole year of heavy-duty training, he was formidably steeled. Not even the demons tugging on his arms, not even the spread of ulcers on his legs, could distract him from his course. Day and night, in rain and blazing sunshine, he kept up his prayers. The infant ascetic was seven years old.

Time passed. As childhood turned to puberty, and puberty to adulthood, and still the demons could not tempt Simeon down from his pillar, his reward was often to see “a great mass of cloud like a carpet of brilliant purple” rolled out before him.⁷ This was the dimension of the celestial; and sure enough, angels would often appear to the saint, sometimes flanking Christ Himself, sometimes holding a snow-white parchment on which they would write the names of all those mentioned in Simeon’s prayers in blazing letters of gold. As reports of these visions spread, crowds began to mass before his pillar. Many were the miracles performed by the saint, “more numerous than the grains of sand in the sea.”⁸ The dumb and the blind were healed, as too were a man afflicted by unfeasibly large testicles, “like a pair of clay jars,”⁹ and another who suffered from chronic constipation, the consequence of “a demon camped out in his colon.”¹⁰ Above all, though, Simeon offered blessings to those who could normally expect to receive none: lepers, whores and children, always children. By contrast, towards the mighty, he was unbendingly stern—as well he might have been, for the rich of Antioch, even by the standards of the time, were notorious for their arrogance and cruelty.

Far from resenting this, however, the local elite took great pride in Simeon. As his fame spread, so a day-trip up the side of the mountain to gawp at him silhouetted on the summit became the height of chic. Simeon, who had fled Antioch for the wilderness, discovered that Antioch had followed him. The opportunity to glimpse the authentic radiance of holiness in the stylite’s emaciated and ragged form was simply too precious to waste, even for the very grandest. And perhaps this was just as well: for tourist attractions, after all, did not come cheap. Pilgrims, whether shuffling up the mountainside on leprous stumps or borne in gold-fringed palanquins, needed to be watered, fed, and housed. Inexorably, the longer that Simeon remained on his pillar, the more the rocks that had once surrounded it came to be replaced by impeccably well-dressed marble. The very rage with which the saint berated the rich served only to quicken the flow of gifts to his shrine. This might have appeared a paradox; but it was not. Nothing quite like power, after all, to make the nostrils of the mighty flare; and the power of the divine, the power that made of Simeon a veritable lightning rod of the supernatural, was like nothing else on earth.

Even in far-off Constantinople, where there had always been a tendency to dismiss Syrians as morbid and prone to hysteria, a bona fide stylite had fast become a must-have accessory. As early as 460, a mere year after the death of the original Simeon, one of his disciples had climbed a pillar just outside the capital. There he had remained for the next three decades, lecturing heretics on their duty to submit to the Council of Chalcedon and causing anyone who might jeer at him to explode. A succession of emperors had revelled in his austerities, journeying to the pillar to gawp at his sores “and perpetually boasting of the Saint, and showing him off to all.”¹¹ Nothing but the best for Constantinople; just as Constantine had beautified his capital with the plundered statues of pagan gods, his heirs looked to endow the city with the potent mystique of the Syrian ascetics. Indeed, one emperor’s agents had gone so far as to pilfer a few portions of the elder Simeon’s corpse from Antioch, where the saint’s relics were jealously guarded as the city’s most precious treasure. Even those reminders of the stylite that could not be transported to Constantinople had been ostentatiously graced with the marks of an emperor’s favour: for the once lonely pillar on which he had stood, halfway to the sky, had ended up flanked by marble hallways and covered by a colossal dome. The precious wellsprings of holiness, even when they existed on the empire’s frontiers, right on the margins of the desert, were far too precious not to be stamped as imperial.

Nevertheless, there was, in the acknowledgement by Constantinople that certain locations might rank as hallowed ground, just the hint of defeat. The “New Rome,” as its title suggested, had been founded on the presumption that the sacred was readily transferable. Almighty God, who had created the heavens and the entire earth, was not to be pinned down for ever to a single spot. All very well for pagans to imagine that groves, or springs, or rocks might be sacred, and travel on pilgrimage to grovel before them; but Christians were supposed to know better. The charge of the supernatural properly attached itself, not to places but to relics. Of these, Constantinople could boast a quite astounding abundance: for the reach of the emperor was long and grasping, as the guardians of Simeon had discovered to their cost. The heads of prophets, the bodies of apostles, the limbs of martyrs: the capital had bagged them all. Indeed, Constantinople’s array of relics was so incomparable that it lent her precisely what her rulers had always most craved for their capital: the authentic aura of a holy city. Yet, as the crowds who continued to cluster around the elder Simeon’s empty pillar suggested, there were some things that could not be imported. The same pilgrim who travelled to Constantinople or Antioch to pray before the saint’s relics might nevertheless still wish to rub the stone that had once borne the stylite’s stinking feet. Foul-smelling though the ascetics of Syria notoriously were, yet in the air that had once been breathed by Simeon there hung, so many Christians believed, a lingering perfume-trace of paradise.

And there were places on the fallen earth that needed no stylites to sanctify them: places that had been touched not by saints but by the presence of God Himself. While human flesh, whether on the tops of pillars or in desert cells, might still become interfused with the Holy Spirit, it had once been possible, back in the mists of time, for men to talk directly with the Almighty. Abraham, of course, was the proof of that: a man graced with the promise that he would become a father of many nations. To his wife, Sarah, though barren and old at the time, God had granted a son; and that son, Isaac, fathered in turn a son named Jacob. One night, this same Jacob met a mysterious stranger by a ford and wrestled with him “until the breaking of the day.” When dawn came and the man asked to be released, Jacob demanded a blessing from him in return; and the stranger, with studied ambiguity, answered, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” And Jacob, who was now called Israel, found himself struck by a sudden realisation: “I have seen God face to face!”¹² Certainly, whoever the stranger might truly have been, his blessing would prove a momentous one. Twelve sons Jacob would father in all—the Children of Israel. These then travelled from Canaan to Egypt, where they and their descendants, gathered into tribes, proved themselves astoundingly fecund, “so that the land was filled with them.”¹³ Ultimately, so prolifically did the twelve tribes of Israel breed that Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, grew alarmed; and so he ordered them enslaved, “and made their lives bitter with hard service.”¹⁴ God, however, had not forgotten His promise to Abraham. As the instrument of His Chosen People’s salvation, He selected a man named Moses, a descendant of Israel who had been brought up in high privilege as an Egyptian—the foster-son of Pharaoh’s daughter, no less. Then, one day, seeing one of his countrymen under the lash, Moses struck the overseer down dead, and fled into the desert. There, while working as a shepherd, he came across a bush that was on fire: “And he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.”¹⁵ The voice of God was in the fire; and it told Moses to return to Egypt and to demand of Pharaoh that he let the Children of Israel go. For, as the Almighty explained, “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”¹⁶

Set as this episode was back in the distant reaches of time, and in the wilds of a tenantless desert, it might have been thought hardly the kind to have left much behind in the way of proofs. Christians, however, knew better. The echoes of the voice of God could never truly fade. When, in the fourth century AD, monks ventured into the barren wilderness that stretched to the east of Egypt, they arrived in due course at a narrow valley beneath the granite crags of two steepling mountains. They had not hesitated to identify this spot, from its palpable holiness, as the very place where Moses had seen the burning bush. Not only that, but they even discovered, in a yet further and clinching miracle, the bush itself, “still alive and putting out shoots.”¹⁷ The monks, confident that they were walking across rocks trodden by Moses, duly installed themselves in caves at the head of the valley. Over time, they added a small church, complete with a garden in which the bush itself, naturally enough, enjoyed pride of place. Two centuries later, with Justinian on the throne, the renown of the bleak and distant valley was secure across the Christian world. The emperor himself, nobly resisting the temptation to have the holy bush dug up and carted off to Constantinople, opted instead to stamp his mark on the desert by restoring and enlarging the monastery. In addition, at the base of the mountain, he built “a very strong fortress, and established there a considerable garrison of troops.”¹⁸ A touch of Roman power had been brought to the depths of the desert.

The ostensible justification given for this show of strength was the need to intimidate bandits. The walling of the bush served a further purpose, though: no one could see the fortifications and doubt that the hallowed earth enclosed within them was indeed impregnably Christian. This mattered: for Christians were not alone in laying claim to Moses as their own. The Children of Israel, whom the great prophet, in obedience to God’s instructions, had redeemed from slavery and led from Egypt, amid the thundering of flame-lit wonders, signs and deadly plagues, still had their descendants in the present: none other than the Jews. To the rabbis, Moses was both the fountainhead and the model of all their learning: the ultimate rabbi. Great though his achievement had been in securing the exodus, or “emigration,” of his people, even that had not been his most awesome feat. Leading the freed slaves through the desert to the east of Egypt, he had arrived at a mountain named Sinai; and “on the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people who were in the camp trembled.”¹⁹ Nothing daunted, Moses had vanished into the fiery depths of the cloud; and there, high on the peak of Sinai, he had spoken again with God, “face to face.”²⁰ The fruit of this conversation was the Torah itself. Portions of it were inscribed on tablets of clay and placed in a transportable chest named an “Ark,” which then accompanied and guided the Children of Israel on their journey through the desert. Other portions, though, were not written down, but instead kept hidden by Moses and taught exclusively to Joshua, his favourite pupil. This, at any rate, was what the rabbis taught—and as proof, they could point to the Talmud, which was, in their opinion, nothing less than the final revelation of the Torah that Moses had received on Mount Sinai, and which had been handed down, via assorted elders, prophets and scholars, directly to themselves.

Should Justinian ever have had this notion of a secret Jewish wisdom brought to his attention, he would doubtless have snorted with derision. Yet, he would also surely have been confirmed in his sense of just how urgent was the need to identify Moses, and all the prophets of the Old Testament, with his own faith. Above the valley where God had spoken from the burning bush there rose a particularly barren peak. The monks who lived in its shadow had long since decided that this was none other than Mount Sinai itself. The fort built at its foot ensured that no one could approach its summit without the knowledge of the monks themselves. Just in case there were any who might still miss the implications of this, they could always visit the church built by Justinian and admire a mosaic of the prophet pointing in awe at Christ. “On the mountain of the Father,” as an early enthusiast for the monks of Sinai exulted, “there stands a monument to the Son.”²¹ Moses was best commemorated not as a Jew, let alone as a rabbi, but as a Christian.

It was this that underpinned the monks’ claim to the scene of the prophet’s greatest triumph; just as it also gave to the universal Church its tenant’s stake in an even more precious prize. Moses himself had never made it to Canaan, the land that God had promised to Abraham; but the Children of Israel, after forty years of aimless wandering in the desert, had swept down upon their birthright to take possession of the land itself, and all its milk and honey. It was the story of what had happened next that constituted the greater part of both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures: the “Books”—or Biblia, in Greek. Unlike Mount Sinai, which it had required a band of intrepid monks to track down and identify, many locations with a starring role in the “Bible” had never been lost. Take, for example, Jericho, the first Canaanite city to be captured by the Children of Israel, after Joshua, their leader in succession to Moses, had ordered them to blow their trumpets and bring the walls tumbling down. Then there was Bethlehem, the birthplace of David, a shepherd boy who, in addition to rising to rule as king over all the tribes of Israel, had composed some of the most haunting passages in the Bible: songs and poems known as “psalms.” Most luminously of all, there stood Jerusalem, a city captured by David to serve him as his capital, and which had remained the stronghold of his dynasty until the calamitous descent upon Judah of the King of Babylon.

Yet all this, so Christians knew, had been only the opening acts of an ongoing drama. The Old Testament had been succeeded by the New, and ground trodden by Abraham, Joshua and David had been hallowed a second time by the footsteps of Christ Himself. In Jericho, He had healed a blind man, and in Bethlehem He had been born in a manger, and in Jerusalem He had been crucified and buried, and after three days had risen from the dead, and then, from the Mount of Olives, just outside the city, ascended to the heavens. Well, then, might Christians have felt proprietorial towards the scene of such cosmos-shaking events. As the self-designated heirs of Abraham and as the followers of Christ, they could feel themselves to have a double claim on it, after all. The land promised to God’s people was theirs, triumphantly theirs: a Holy Land.

Admittedly, there were many Christians, anxious about “restricting to a narrow strip of earth Him whom the heavens cannot contain,” who remained profoundly uncomfortable with this notion. The presence of God, so they sternly reminded the faithful, might be experienced in even the remotest, the most barbarous of lands: “Access to the courts of heaven is as easy from Britain as it is from Jerusalem.”²² Nevertheless, it is telling that the monk who issued this admonition—a translator of the Bible originally from the Balkans by the name of Jerome—did so from a cell outside Bethlehem. The year was 395, and already, as exemplified by Jerome’s own presence in the Holy Land, something unprecedented was afoot. Never before in history had so many pilgrims, from such a wide variety of starting-points, travelled such gruelling distances to the same destinations. Christians, unlike pagans, did not limit themselves to visiting their native shrines. Instead, from the moment when Constantine’s conversion had rendered the Holy Land safe for them to visit, a steady stream of Christian tourists had begun to head there from every corner of the Roman world. Pre-eminent among these had been the emperor’s own mother, Helena, who had set the trend for later pilgrims by virtue of being female, fabulously wealthy and obsessed with collecting relics. She herself, as befitted her imperial rank, had headed straight for Jerusalem, where she had scooped the most glamorous trophy of all: the very cross and nails used in Jesus’s crucifixion. But this sensational find represented only a starting point: for it had not taken locals long to wake up to the opportunities that might be provided them by the sudden arrival in their neighbourhood of a well-heeled Christian lady. Boom time for tour guides; and especially for those who knew where the bones of an Old Testament prophet might be uncovered, or perhaps an exercise book used by the infant Christ, or a robe once worn by the Virgin. The consequence of all this treasure-hunting had been not merely to fill the voracious reliquaries of Constantinople to bursting, but also to provide visitors to the Holy Land with an ever more impressive list of must-see destinations. After all, while a relic could be packed off easily enough to the capital, the same was hardly true of the site of its discovery. Once again, it was Helena who had most trail-blazingly demonstrated the implications of this. Rooting around in the foundations of a pagan temple after the True Cross, she had uncovered the sepulchre of Christ, no less: a thrilling example of just how spectacular the fruits of archaeology in the Holy Land might be. Two centuries later, with the seam of top-grade relics long since exhausted, there was barely an episode in the Bible that had not been identified with some specific pile of stones or patch of dust. It was hardly surprising, then, that pilgrims from every corner of the Christian world should have flocked to tour a landscape so imbued with the numinous. What had once been a trickle of visitors had swollen to become a flood. Their appearance in the Holy Land marked the arrival of a revolutionary new notion—that a specific place might be holy to peoples everywhere, no matter their place of birth.

And there were many Christians who came to the Holy Land not merely as visitors, but as settlers. Even Jerome, despite his occasionally sniffy attitude towards the local tourist industry, rejoiced in the multicultural character of Christian life there, and saw in it the fulfilment of God’s primordial promise: “What were His first words to Abraham? Go out, He says, from your land and from your kindred, and go to the land I will show you.”²³ While Constantinople, “the second Jerusalem,”²⁴ was ranked by Christians as the capital of the world, Jerusalem herself was prized as its centre. To walk the winding streets of the Holy City was to see people from every corner of the empire and beyond. In distant Sinai the monastery’s leaders were expected to be “learned in Latin, Greek, Syriac, Egyptian and Persian”²⁵ —but in Jerusalem Gauls, Armenians and Indians might need translators, too. Some of them might be lepers, some aristocrats, some scholars. Even a bona fide empress—Eudocia, the wife of Theodosius II—moved to the Holy City for a couple of decades in the middle of the fifth century. Nowhere else in the empire, with the possible exception of Constantinople itself, was more thorough-goingly cosmopolitan. Yet if Jerusalem was a city of immigrants, it hardly ranked as multi-faith. Few who lived there were immune to the suggestive power of a place that had witnessed the passion of Christ. A public reading from a gospel might be all it took to reduce them to sudden tears, displays of grief that would then ripple through the crowded streets, filling the colonnades and squares with wails and sobs. Certainly, those who lived in Jerusalem, and especially those who had moved there, had no doubt that they were better Christians for it. The sheer quality of the city’s virgins, “like fair flowers or priceless gems,”²⁶ was proof of that. Some, however, went further. By the sixth century, it had become a popular notion among the monks of Jerusalem, and of the Holy Land generally, that the rest of the faithful owed them a special debt of gratitude. Athletes of Christ, they served Him too as His particular bodyguards: “For, it is we, the inhabitants of this Holy Land, who keep it invulnerable and inviolable.”²⁷

Perhaps—but not exclusively so. Jerusalem, centre of the world though it may have been, and object of universal Christian devotion, was also, as it had been for five centuries and more, a possession of the Caesars—a city in a province named Palestine. It was hardly to be expected, then, that its Christian rulers would neglect the defences of such an incomparable jewel. Sure enough, a century or so after the conversion of Constantine, a great ring of walls was built to gird the Holy City. Yet the surest defences, it went without saying, were those raised not against mortal adversaries, but against supernatural foes. Jerusalem, which had once been just as pagan a city as Ephesus or Athens, filthy with idols and the smoke of sacrifices, had been systematically scoured clean of the occupying demons. In place of their temples, a great host of churches had risen. The process of renovation seemed a perpetual one. For as long as anyone living in Jerusalem could remember, the blows of hammers and chisels had provided perpetual accompaniments to the clanging of bells and the chanting of hymns. Justinian, predictably, ordered a new church commissioned by Anastasius to be completed in a particularly overweening style: so massive did it end up that entire streets had to be demolished before the blocks used in its construction could be transported to the site.

Yet, not even Justinian could hope to rival the holiest and most precious monument founded in Jerusalem by a Christian emperor. Helena, in addition to uncovering the sepulchre of Christ, had excavated the rock of Golgotha—the “Place of the Skull”—where He had suffered death. Although tomb and excavation-ground alike had been buried for centuries beneath a shrine to a particularly noxious demon, there could be no doubting the identification: for Helena had been shown the site by an angel in a dream.^b In 326, her son ordered a great domed church to be built over the site of Christ’s tomb, and nine years later it was consecrated: the Church of the Resurrection. Next to it, over the site of the crucifixion, another church was built. Together, these two edifices—pairing, as they did, the sites where Christ had died and then risen from the dead—constituted the absolute centre of the centre of the world: a single plot of earth around which the order of the cosmos, and time itself, revolved. Beneath a fissure in the rock of Golgotha, so Christians confidently believed, lay the tomb of Adam—the first man of all to suffer death. Abraham too, in obedience to a command from God that he should sacrifice Isaac, his beloved son, had journeyed to the same identical spot. But it had all been a test; and Abraham, even as he was raising his knife to strike Isaac where he lay bound upon an altar of stone, had been halted by an angel, who had provided him instead with a ram caught in a thicket. An unmistakable foreshadowing of what was to come: for aeons later, of course, it was not a ram that had been slain upon Golgotha, but the Son of God Himself. Who, then, could doubt that there was to be traced, in this awesome patterning of mysteries, the guiding hand of the Almighty? To stand before the rock of Golgotha, and to see there as well the altar on which Abraham had placed Isaac, and the tomb of the first man to die, was to know that there were contained many mirrors in the order of time: a truth that boded well for the future. A Christian Jerusalem at the heart of a Christian empire: here, surely, was the certain evidence of an order destined to endure until the end of things?

No God but One

Such was the sheer number of pilgrims who travelled from across the world to the Holy City that at times it appeared in danger of bursting at the seams. In 516, when a great army of ascetics descended upon Jerusalem, in a particularly rowdy demonstration of support for Chalcedon, ten thousand of them barged into a single church. A few years later, Justinian, looking to raise a monument proportionate to his self-regard, was obliged to extend the ridge on which his new church was being built, so that its foundations ended up “partly on solid rock and partly on air.”²⁸ Space was running out. Jerusalem, which even in the off-season had some eighty thousand inhabitants, was full to overflowing.

Yet, one part of the city—the most prominent of all—remained undeveloped. South of the Church of the Resurrection, beyond the multitude of golden crosses rising triumphantly above the crowded streets, there loomed a great, flat expanse of rubble-strewn and garbage-piled rock. Evidence, perhaps, that the site was of no great significance? Quite the opposite. The rock was the very spot commemorated by ancient prophets as “the mountain of the house,” a haunting phrase that Jerome, in his Latin version of the Bible, had chosen to translate as Mons Templi—“Temple Mount.”²⁹ In doing so, he had commemorated the most famous building ever raised in the city: a temple fashioned back in the mists of time by Solomon, the wise and fabulously wealthy son of King David, to serve Almighty God as His earthly house. Here, for anyone with a taste for church-building, was the obvious model to beat: Justinian himself, entering Hagia Sophia, was said to have cried out in triumph, “Solomon, I have vanquished you!”³⁰ The Temple itself, though, had long since been obliterated: for in 586 BC, after some four hundred years of existence, all its gold and cedar-wood had gone up in flames, together with the rest of Jerusalem, when the King of Babylon had stormed the city. True, the return of the Jews from their exile in Mesopotamia had seen them build a second, and ultimately even more imposing, Temple; but this too, in AD 70, had been put to the torch, after the Jews, resolved to throw off Roman rule, had risen in revolt and been comprehensively flattened for their pains. Roughly sixty years later, another, even more desperate, rebellion had resulted in an even more desperate defeat. The Promised Land was left a charnel-house. The Roman authorities, resolved to abolish the wearying cycle of insurgency and repression once and for all, promulgated a new set of title-deeds. The Jewish homeland became, by imperial fiat, “Palestine”—the name by which it would still be known in the time of Justinian. Furthermore, the Jews were banned from their own ancient capital altogether, so that for them even to glance at Jerusalem from the crest of a far-off hill was accounted a crime. The smoking ruins themselves were renamed “Aelia Capitolina” and rebuilt as a pagan city. This rebranding policy was so successful that by the time of Constantine, when the first Christian tourists began to turn up in the Holy Land and ask for the road to Jerusalem, many of the local officials had no idea where they were talking about, and pointed them vaguely in the direction of Persia.

This ignorance had not lasted for long, of course; but even as the Church set to cleansing the city of demon worship, it showed little enthusiasm for turning back the clock. Just as Christ had superseded the Law of Moses, so did His Holy City glitter all the more brightly for having been raised amid the rubble of the erstwhile capital of the Jews. It was not enough to succeed; others had to fail. Nowhere better served to express this presumption than the Temple Mount. Here, in the wake of repeated Jewish rebellions, a pagan emperor had raised a temple—the Kapitolion—to Jupiter, the king of the Romans’ gods. Christian emperors had refined the humiliation. While the Kapitolion was left to crumble into ruins, the Temple Mount was converted into a sterquilinum—a refuse dump. What better proof than the reek of shit and pigs’ carcasses that the Jews were no longer a Chosen People? It was to ram the point home that the Roman authorities, always suckers for a good procession, allowed the Jews, once every year, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, to star in a humiliating piece of street theatre. A band of Jewish pilgrims—pale, weeping and bedraggled—would climb up the steps of the Temple Mount, reach the perforated rock on the summit, and then start to blow on rams’ horns, wail and tear out their hair. It was, for any watching Christians, a most edifying spectacle. “For while the mob of wretches congregates and groans over the ruins of their temple,” as Jerome, with palpable relish, had once put it, “the manger of the Lord sparkles, the church of his resurrection glows and the banner of his cross shines forth from the Mount of Olives.”³¹

Scorn that was paid back by the Jews themselves with undaunted hatred. Time had not eased the trauma of the ruin that the Romans had wrought on their Holy City. The general whose legions had torched the Temple, so the rabbis taught, now shared a corner of hell with Jesus, where he was destined to be consumed by fire, reassembled and then burned to ashes again for all eternity, as punishment for his unspeakable crime. Four centuries on from the destruction of the Temple, Jewish horror at the sacrilege had, if anything, intensified. The rabbis, struggling to articulate what the Temple itself had once so eloquently expressed, had come to identify its ruins with a novel concept to which they gave the name of “Shekhinah”: the notion that God Himself might be present on earth. It was not, as the blasphemous and arrogant Christians taught, the rock of Golgotha that stood at the centre of the world, but the Temple Mount. There it was, upon “the foundation-stone of the whole of the universe,”³² that Abraham had brought Isaac to be sacrificed; that Adam lay buried; and that “the world itself, moulded from its dust, had originally been founded.”³³ Reading into the future the patterns cast by such a past, the Jews maintained an invincible confidence, amid all their desolation, that the Temple would one day rise again. Tantalisingly, back in the reign of Julian, they had enjoyed a brief glimpse of how such an eventuality might actually come to pass: for the apostate emperor, ever imaginative when it came to Christian-baiting, had ordered the Temple rebuilt. Only a few months’ preparatory excavations had been possible before Julian’s untimely death in Mesopotamia, however; and even those had been marked by the eruption on the site of “terrifying balls of fire”³⁴—which the Christians, naturally enough, had attributed to divine displeasure, and the Jews to arson. Ever since then, the site had remained barren; but still, three times every day, the Jews would solemnly pray for the restoration of its former glory. Only rebuild the Temple, they knew, and much else as well would be fulfilled: the humbling of Rome; the humiliation of its ruler, who would be forced to eat “dirt like a worm”;³⁵ and the coming of the Messiah.

As things stood, however, many Jews believed that Jerusalem under its Christian rulers was no less polluted than pagan Jerusalem had been: a sump of blood and idols. Ironically enough, those who did journey to the Temple Mount were likely to have been influenced, not by their own teachers, but by the example set by Christian pilgrims. Certainly, in the opinion of most rabbis, energies were better devoted to the study of the Torah, the holiness of which remained inviolably sacrosanct, than in trekking to the nest of heretics that Jerusalem had become. Nor was it necessary to inhabit the schools of Sura and Pumpedita, far from the Holy City, to hold this view: for there were rabbis in Palestine. An entire Talmud too. The scholars responsible for its composition might not have possessed the sheer exhaustive love of nit-picking displayed by their counterparts in the East; but that scarcely dented the growing weight of their authority. Indeed, the rabbis of Palestine were acknowledged to hold the advantage over those of Mesopotamia in several distinctive ways: they were more open to those who were not themselves scholars; they were better able to incinerate those who displeased them with a single glare; and they were more obsessively alert to the menace posed by menstruating women. Valuable though all of these attributes undoubtedly were, however, the Palestinian rabbis’ most trend-setting talent was for something more portentous: a rewriting of Jewish tradition so as to give themselves a starring role in it. Control of the past, not for the first time, promised control of the future.

As in Mesopotamia, so in Palestine, the rabbis had long since taken it for granted that they should serve as the leaders of the Jewish people. Needless to say, all of their various writings were designed to offer a ringing endorsement of this view. A version of history in which the Jews of Palestine, disoriented and demoralised by the shattering loss of the Temple, had turned for guidance to the rabbis, whose power and prestige had accordingly known no limits, was promoted with gusto. That the truth had been rather different, and that most Jews had for centuries been in the habit of looking for justice from city councillors, local magnates or even the Roman governor, had inhibited the rabbis not at all. They knew themselves, with a sublime self-confidence, to be the embodiments of God’s will—and, sure enough, over the course of the centuries, reality had come to blend with their ideal of what it should be. Their rivals as spokesmen for the Jews of Palestine began to fade from the scene. Their rulings and proscriptions were increasingly accepted. Their understanding of what it meant to be chosen by God started to verge on the definitive. Jewishness, in the Promised Land, had turned decisively rabbinical.

That this was so, however, did not owe everything to the rabbis themselves, and their obdurately learned ambition. A certain debt was owed as well to their bitterest and most inveterate foes. The Jews of Palestine, unlike those of Mesopotamia, were provincials in a Christian empire. As such, they were objects of neurotic fascination to their rulers. Attempts by the imperial elite to spell out precisely what Christianismos might be had repeatedly led them to define its presumed opposite: Ioudaismos. Even at Nicaea, Arians and Catholics had furiously accused each other of being Jews in Christian clothing. Over the subsequent centuries, the same smear would invariably be applied whenever one faction of the Church wished to charge another with heresy. As a result, Christians increasingly came to cast the Jewish faith in terms of a religio that could serve as a mirror of their own: chauvinistic and desiccated where Christianity was universal and fire-touched by the Holy Spirit. The Jews themselves, of course, would hardly have recognised this characterisation, nor the presumption of the Church that they subscribed to and practised a “religion” called Ioudaismos. Religio, after all, was a Christian concept; and so too, for that reason, was “Judaism.”^c

Nevertheless, the Church leaders’ great labour of ring-fencing their own faith did have far-reaching implications for the faith practised by the Jews. The border between the two was now more firmly patrolled than ever. Bishops and emperors were not the only ones who stood guard over it. Rabbis did as well. This duty, of course, was one that they had always claimed for themselves; but their neighbours were increasingly content, even relieved, to cede to them their role as the watchmen of God’s will. The Jews of Palestine, confronted as they were by the monumental and menacing edifice of Christian orthodoxy, had grown increasingly fretful about what their own frameworks of authority, and their own orthodoxy, might be. Rather than have it defined for them by the Christian Church, they preferred to turn to the scholars whose massive achievement in compiling the Talmud had been preparation for precisely such a moment. “Why should a rabbi be hailed as a king? Because it is by virtue of the Torah that kings rule.”³⁶Hardly the most rib-tickling of jokes, to be sure—but one that bore, by the time of Justinian, an unmistakable hint of truth.

And certainly, among the Jews of Palestine, there was a desperate need of leaders. The tide of affairs was palpably flowing against them. Christian authorities in the Holy Land viewed the continued presence of its previous tenants as both a challenge and an embarrassment. Although the Roman state, like the Church, recognised Judaism as a distinct and officially sanctioned religion, that hardly implied beneficence. Rather, toleration was the flip-side of a mounting obsession on the part of Constantinople with regulation of the empire’s Jews. A people hedged about with legal definitions, after all, were a people who could more readily be targeted with restrictions and indignities. Jewish noses were repeatedly rubbed in the brute fact of their second-class status. They were forbidden to join the army; to serve in the bureaucracy; to buy Christian slaves. Synagogues, although protected by law from being burned down or converted into churches, were permitted only to be renovated, and on no account to be built from scratch. Many Jews, it was true, had felt perfectly free to ignore this prescription—so much so that the ban had coincided with a golden age of synagogue construction. Almost every Jewish village had come to boast one. Even the humblest and most remote might be built out of stone, while the larger, urban synagogues tended to be so sumptuously decorated that it was only their orientation towards Jerusalem that made them readily distinguishable from churches. Nevertheless, even for those wealthy enough to have commissioned all the synagogues’ mosaics and gleaming marble, the prosperity these fittings proclaimed was not entirely good news. The boom-time in Palestine owed little to the natives and almost everything to incomers. The mass immigration of Christians into the Holy Land might have generated huge profits for individual Jewish hoteliers and relic-suppliers, but it threatened to swamp the Jews as a people. Those who had not been cowed or seduced into accepting baptism by the triumphant swagger of Christianity were finding themselves obliged to retreat to ever higher ground. By the sixth century, the Jews of Palestine probably numbered no more than 10 per cent of the total population.³⁷ Even though Christians might fret that the Jews were breeding “like worms,”³⁸ the reality was that they had long since become a minority in their own land.

And an ever more embattled one at that. Early in the reign of Justinian, that inveterate sponsor of intimidating architectural statements, a team of workmen climbed a mountain named Berenice, some ninety miles north of Jerusalem.³⁹ Their view from the summit was spectacular: in the distance rose the Golan Heights, a river-scored plateau that marked Palestine’s frontier with Syria; below stretched a glittering lake dotted with fishing boats, so broad that the locals proudly termed it a sea; along its shores, the fields were “a paradise, rich with wheat and fruit, with wine, oil and apples.”⁴⁰ In fact, so fertile was the land that even the women were renowned for the spectacular bloom of their beauty. The region was known as Galilee—and for centuries it had served as the stronghold of the rabbis of Palestine. Tiberias, a city picturesquely sited on the lower slopes of Mount Berenice, directly beside the lake, boasted the only batei midrash—“houses of study”—that could rival those of Mesopotamia for prestige. The city still remained, in the reign of Justinian, overwhelmingly true to its distinguished heritage: its councillors were all Jewish; it had no fewer than thirteen synagogues; even its bath-houses were rabbinically approved. Nowhere in Palestine could rival it as the conscience and watchtower of Jewish life.

Which was precisely why, in the opinion of Justinian, it needed to be reminded of its proper place. The Jews were not alone in laying claim to Galilee: Christians as well revered it as a region hauntingly touched by the sacred. Christ Himself had lived there for much of His life: He had toured its villages, delivered sermons from its mountains, walked on the waters of its lake. Galilee was second only to Jerusalem on the itineraries of Christian tourists. Granted, their behaviour was not always all it might have been: whether carving their names on furniture used by Christ or ogling the famously attractive Jewish women, they had a certain tendency to gaucheness. Yet although, as one Italian visitor ruefully reported, “there is no love lost between the Jews and us,”⁴¹ it was not pilgrims who were chiefly responsible for this mood of tension. As elsewhere in Palestine, so in Galilee: many Christians aimed to be more than tourists. Land was their truest heart’s desire—the soil once trodden by Christ. As a result, churches had come to colonise Jewish fields, whole villages of settlers to be planted throughout the region, and walls, bristling emphatically, to gird even the smallest monastery, the most insignificant Christian hamlet. Now, with the arrival of Justinian’s workmen on the slopes above Tiberias, the time had come for the rabbis themselves to be issued with a notice of imperial intent. A huge church, designed to glower over the streets below, was to be raised directly on the summit of Mount Berenice. A massive ring of fortifications, complete with the latest fashion in watchtowers, was to be constructed around it. As elsewhere in the empire, so in the very stronghold of Judaism, an emphatic statement was to be made: no defiance of the Christian faith anywhere but the gaze of the emperor, unblinking and all-seeing, would be upon it.

True, there was an element of bluff in this eyeballing of the rabbis. Justinian, who had thought nothing of driving the philosophers of Athens into exile, had no corresponding intention to force the closure of the schools of Tiberias. In fact, to a large degree, they served his purpose. The rabbis offered to the emperor a living assurance that there did authentically exist a religion such as “Judaism,” one with authority figures and a clearly defined orthodoxy: the mirror-image of his own. The alternative—to acknowledge that in the great ocean of belief there might still be those who swam untrammelled beyond the twin dragnets of Christianity and Judaism—was infinitely more unsettling. The rabbis themselves would probably not have disagreed. After all, it was hardly unflattering to their pretensions to imagine a world in which there were Jews and Christians, and no one else. It was telling, perhaps, that the watchtowers built on Mount Berenice were not confined to its summit. Although the presence of the great church clearly established where the supremacy lay, Justinian did not neglect to offer his protection to the Jews as well. The fortifications ran right down the slope of the mountain and enclosed the entire city.⁴² The Jews may have been second-class subjects—but they were at least within the fold.

There remained others, however, who were harder to sort. Not everyone who trod the sacred dust of the Holy Land could be categorised neatly as a Christian or a Jew. Much though both emperors and rabbis might have wished it otherwise, Palestine was simply too God-haunted, too dream-crowded, too memory-stalked for that. Right in the heart of the province, for instance, there was a people who openly derided both Christian churches and Jewish synagogues as abodes of idolatry, and all those who worshipped in them as upstarts. The Samaritans, inhabitants of a region midway between Jerusalem and Galilee named Samaria, claimed that they, and they alone, had preserved the unadorned wishes of heaven. “There is no God but One,”⁴³ they declared. “Let us believe in Him and in Moses, His Prophet.”⁴⁴ From these simple presumptions, so it seemed to the Samaritans, much else inevitably flowed: all the scriptures penned since the time of Moses, whether by Jews or Christians, were mere deluded vanity; the purity of the teachings that God revealed to His Prophet had been corrupted by any number of subsequent accretions; Jerusalem, far from being a holy city, had been promoted as such by David and Solomon for purely political reasons. In truth, it was neither the Temple Mount nor the rock of Golgotha that constituted the centre of the world, but rather a wooded peak in Samaria—Mount Gerizim. It was here—on a flat expanse of rock named the “Eternal Hill” by the Samaritans—that Noah’s ark had landed, Abraham had prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and the laws given to Moses had been preserved. To believe any differently, as the Jews and the Christians did, was to distort the primal teachings that God had revealed to the ancient prophets. It was to neglect the principal duty of humanity: due submission to God.⁴⁵

None of which, needless to say, did much for the Samaritans’ popularity with their neighbours. Jewish scorn for their pretensions ran particularly deep. For centuries, in a blatantly tit-for-tat manner, the rabbis had accused the Samaritans themselves of being the idolators—this on the supposed grounds that they were descended from pagans and worshipped a dove. As a result, far from embracing them as potential allies, most Jews refused even to sit down with them, let alone consume their wine or food—although the odd rabbi was prepared to grant that it might be legitimate to tuck into one of their boiled eggs.⁴⁶ As for Christians, the sanctions they applied would prove, in the long run, to be of an altogether more forceful order of brutality: an exercise in state-sponsored violence bred of wholly predictable tensions. Despite the fact that the Samaritans were permitted to serve in the Roman army, and indeed had long enjoyed an impressive reputation among their commanders for martial savagery, Christian relic-hunters had still ransacked Mount Gerizim, and Christian colonists had still flooded into Samaria. In 484, Samaritan patience had finally snapped. A bishop had been mutilated in his own cathedral; churches had been desecrated; open rebellion had blazed right across central Palestine. The provincial authorities, although initially taken by surprise, had been ruthless in crushing the revolt. Samaria had been left littered with some ten thousand corpses. All Samaritans, unsurprisingly, had been demobbed from imperial service for good. The crowning act of vengeance, however, had been to ban them from the sacred slopes of Mount Gerizim, and to build, on its previously unadorned summit, a church within a fortress. And on the church, as one Samaritan historian would bitterly record, “there was constructed a very high tower which was painted white, and from which lamps were hung to glow in the night, so that all in Constantinople and Rome might see them.”⁴⁷

There was, of course—as any Jew could have pointed out—nothing particularly ground-breaking about this display of imperial vindictiveness. The Samaritans, however, had not had four hundred years to adjust to the loss of their holiest sanctuary; nor could they quite bring themselves to believe that God would permit its continued desecration. Desperation and rage duly festered. A few decades on from the great revolt, when a small band of Samaritan insurgents, “prompted by the suggestion of a woman,”⁴⁸ sought to seize back the summit of Mount Gezirim from its Christian garrison, the incipient rebellion was quarantined only with difficulty; and in 529, when rioting saw a number of Jews and Christians killed by a mob of Samaritans, the spark proved sufficient to light a second conflagration. For a brief while, it seemed as though not only Palestine but the whole empire might be cut in two: for a warlord who shared with the long-dead pagan emperor the sinister name of Julian, a man variously described as a king, a messiah, or “a bandit chief,”⁴⁹ proclaimed the foundation of a Samaritan empire, blocking the roads from the north, and menacing Jerusalem. Adding yet further spice to the rebellion, the insurgents staged a number of highly pointed atrocities, of which the most spectacular was the incineration of a bishop on a bonfire fuelled by the relics of Christian martyrs. Insults such as these, of course, might almost have been calculated to provoke a devastating response. The imperial vengeance, when it finally came, was inevitably a terrible one. The rebel army, brought to battle, was annihilated with such efficiency that twenty thousand Samaritan warriors were left dead, including a summarily decapitated Julian. New, more impregnable fortifications were raised around the summit of the Eternal Hill, and the slopes of Mount Gezirim scoured clean of every last trace of a Samaritan presence. Meanwhile, across the rest of Samaria, the ruin was universal. Land that had once been hailed as “the most fertile in the world”⁵⁰ was now a wilderness of carrion, rubble and weeds.

As for the Samaritans themselves, there seemed nothing left to them but despair. Many, abandoning the god who had so transparently failed them, sullenly submitted to baptism; others, slumping into a numb isolationism, hunkered down in remote villages, where they ostentatiously covered any footprints left by visiting Jews or Christians with burning straw. Yet others, however, tried to keep the banner of rebellion flying—not by making a stand in Samaria, but by retreating beyond the border. As many as fifty thousand of them, fleeing the reprisals of Justinian’s death-squads, made a break for Mesopotamia, where they threw themselves on the mercy of the aged Kavad. The Shahanshah, rather than swallow the assurances of the Samaritans that they could deliver him Palestine, opted instead to put them all in chains and pack them off to toil in a gold mine. Nevertheless, back in Palestine itself, the Roman authorities remained twitchy in the extreme at any prospect of a Samaritan retrenchment just over the border. In the wake of the revolt, when twenty thousand Samaritan boys and girls were handed over to slavers, it was specifically decreed that they must be sold as far afield as possible— preferably in Persia or India. The prospect that any of them might grow up within striking distance of their homeland was altogether too alarming to be tolerated.

There was more to this anxiety than mere paranoia. Notwithstanding the milk and honey that flowed through the Holy Land, it bordered directly onto wilderness—and wilderness, as it had ever done, spelled danger. Right on the doorstep of Jerusalem, along the fifteen-mile road that led eastwards to Jericho, menace lurked behind every barren rock, so that what had long since come to be named the “Bloody Way”^d was as notorious for banditry as anywhere in the empire. South of Jericho, where steepling cliffs plunged down towards the aptly named Dead Sea, there was an even more intimidating landscape, formed of nothing but dust, salt and mud. It was here, in the wake of the burning of the Temple in the first century AD, that an army of Jewish rebels had made a last, doomed stand. But already, long, long previously, the region had borne spectacular witness to the incineration of a sinful people and to the full, devastating horror of where the angering of God might lead. On the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, where the mud bubbled at its filthiest and most stinking, two mighty cities had once stood: Sodom and Gomorrah. Their inhabitants, so moralists recorded, had been wholly given over to vice: to rape, to sex with people of their own gender, and to breaking wind in public.^eProvoked beyond endurance by such depravity, the Almighty had duly decreed the obliteration of the two cities. Fire and brimstone had rained down upon them. “The smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace.”⁵¹ Of Sodom and Gomorrah, nothing had remained, saving only the odd salt-caked ruin, to serve passers-by as an admonition and a terror.

The lesson was not entirely bleak, though. On the southern shore of the Dead Sea, there stood a church; and inside the church, there was a cave. It was said that Abraham’s nephew, Lot, graced by a tip-off from some angels, had sheltered here with his family: the only survivors of the annihilation of Sodom. The implication of this—that a righteous man, such as Lot, might be spared the ruin of a doomed people by fleeing into the wilderness—had not gone unremarked over the centuries. Samaritans were hardly the first refugees to have sought sanctuary beyond the borders of the Promised Land. Back in the days of their own persecution by Rome, Christians had done the self-same thing. Some of them, even after the conversion of Constantine, had refused to return from the desert to the temptations of everyday life: among the cliffs beyond Jerusalem, as on the mountains around Antioch or in the desert of Sinai, ascetics had looked to build for themselves a city of God. In the midst of a drear and bandit-haunted wilderness, the monasteries that dotted the eastern flank of Palestine aimed to blaze like bulwarks of paradise. Manned by warriors of God from across the empire, linked by paths that criss-crossed the wilds like the cords of a far-flung net, and buttressed by imposing stonework that gave them the look of fortresses, these lavras, as they were called, served the Church, in its great battle against the demonic, as an awesome first line of defence. Out in the desert, where Christ Himself had been tempted by the Devil, only the spiritual elite could hope to prosper. The weak fell away; the strong grew even stronger. This was why, in the Holy Land, it was the monks who constituted the shock troops of orthodoxy. Forged in the blast furnace of the desert, they brought to the practice of their faith a show of fortitude, of discipline, of steel. They, more than anyone, could be relied upon to embrace martyrdom at the hands of Samaritans; to stage public protests against any hint of concession to Monophysites; to press the imperial authorities to hold their nerve in the battle againstevery last enemy of God. Vital tasks anywhere—but in the Holy Land especially so.

“Arm yourselves against heresies, against Jews, against Samaritans, against pagans.” So had urged Cyril, a golden-tongued Bishop of Jerusalem back in the first century of the city’s existence as a Christian capital, warning converts there of the peculiar charge that God had laid upon their shoulders. “Many are your enemies: be sure you have ammunition.”⁵² Two centuries later, the marks of just how successful Cyril’s call to arms had been were everywhere to be seen, stamped on the face of the Holy Land: on the hill above Tiberias, on the summit of Mount Gerizim, in the mouldering shells of abandoned temples. There were, however, few visible traces of perhaps the most telling victory of all. Cyril, in the advice offered to his converts, had lingered on one particularly mortal threat: “If a book is not read in a church, then do not read it yourself, even alone.” Specifically, he had cautioned against those seeming-scriptures that “bore the title of ‘gospel,’ but were false, and full of deceit.”⁵³ Such a warning, of course, would have been valid anywhere; but in the Holy Land, especially so. Not every Christian who flocked there was necessarily orthodox, after all. A yearning to walk in the footsteps of Christ did not necessarily imply obedience to the Council of Nicaea. There were grounds for alarm as well as self-satisfaction in the cosmopolitan character of the Holy Land. Nowhere else in the world, as Cyril had well appreciated, were banned gospels, banned doctrines, banned identities, likelier to be available.

Moreover, immigrants were not the only heretics to be found in Palestine. Camped out on the frontier between Christianity and Judaism, on what had become, since the Council of Nicaea, an ever more brutally patrolled no-man’s land, there lingered still a few obdurate squatters. Jews who “honoured Christ as a just man”⁵⁴ and Christians who yearned to see the Temple restored: how were these to be categorised? As pestiferous impostors, came the ringing answer of the Church: “for, though they pretend to be both Jews and Christians, yet they are neither.”⁵⁵ Add to this unsettling mix the Samaritans, who were darkly suspected of having fostered the swarming plague of Gnostics, and it was no wonder that bishops such as Cyril regarded the melting-pot of faiths to be found in Palestine as so potentially toxic. To scholars of his generation, the threat from heresy in the Holy Land seemed as terrifying as ever. After all, if a Jew could be a Christian—and a Christian a Jew—then who was to say what further monstrous fusions of beliefs might be possible?

Answers to that, in the manuscript-littered libraries of the Holy Land, were certainly still there for those with eyes to see. Jerome, ever the assiduous bookworm, had reported in a tone of mingled horror and fascination his perusal of a gospel written in Hebrew that contained the noxious teachings of a sect called the Nazoreans. These, heretics who had the nerve to claim descent from the original Jewish Church that had existed prior to the arrival of Paul upon the scene, taught something truly shocking: that the Holy Spirit was not only female but the heavenly “mother”⁵⁶ of Christ. Nor was that the worst, by any means. To true connoisseurs of heresy, the Nazoreans ranked as mere beginners. The Church’s leading specialist in such matters, a bishop from Cyprus by the name ofEpiphanius, had identified an infinitely more sinister attempt to poison the faithful with the toxin of Jewishness. Explaining to his shocked readers the existence of Christians who denied the Trinity and held Jesus to have been merely a man who obeyed the Law of Moses, and who turned in the direction of Jerusalem when they performed their daily prayers, the learned bishop had fingered a teacher called Ebion: a veritable monster, so Epiphanius claimed, who had blended Judaism with “the repulsiveness of the Samaritans,”⁵⁷ not to mention a whole host of other heresies, too. In such a figure, then, could be caught the ultimate glimpse of a world in which Christians and Jews forgot their proper place: a world in which there was nothing to stop some innovative heretic from “taking an item of preaching from every sect, and patterning himself after them all.”⁵⁸

No wonder, then, that bishops such as Cyril and Epiphanius, backed up by the militant fervour of the province’s monks, and the muscle of the imperial Roman state, should have laboured long and hard to impose an orthodox model of Christianity on the Holy Land. No wonder either that the Jews, menaced as they were by such a project, should have regarded with an increasingly suspicious hatred those of their number who still thought to call upon the name of Christ. People such as the Nazoreans or the Ebionites, squeezed from both sides, duly found themselves pushed ever deeper into the shadows. There was nothing for them to do, in the battleground for rival faiths that Palestine had become, save to retreat into ever deeper oblivion. No-man’s land, in the final reckoning, had proved an impossible place to be. Certainly, by the time of Justinian, no bishop thought to bother himself with the Ebionites—nor any rabbi either. Their doctrines and their doings had become things so spectral as to have been almost entirely forgotten. The Christians and the Jews of Palestine, cordially though they might detest one another, could at least agree on one thing: hybrids were beyond the pale.

And perhaps literally so. If indeed the Ebionites and their like did manage to cling on to a precarious existence within the Christian empire, then it could only ever have been on the margins: on the Golan Heights above Galilee, perhaps, or in outposts planted deep in the desert.⁵⁹ To those defined by the Church as heretics, as to refugees from Samaria, it was no longer their traditional heartlands that held out the surest prospects of survival, but rather the wilderness. The result was a curious irony: for even as the frontier between Palestine and the desert was being colonised by the shock troops of Christian orthodoxy, by monks and ascetics, so also did it bear a certain ghostly witness to the world as it had been before the establishment of Christianity, when the borders between rival faiths had been less clear-cut, more fissiparous. Just as the massive stonework of a lavra, a desert monastery, proclaimed the triumph of the new, so also were there to be glimpsed, faint perhaps, but present all the same for those inspired to track them down, the broken traces of a far more ancient order. In the wilds between Palestine and Sinai, for instance, there stood shrines raised by tribesmen who still worshipped a whole multitude of gods: “polytheists” as they were contemptuously termed. Meanwhile, in the cliffs above the Dead Sea, it was not unheard of for mysterious scrolls to be excavated from “chambers in the middle of the mountain with many books in them”:⁶⁰ scrolls that might prove to contain versions of the Jewish scriptures, but fabulously ancient, and with strange and variant readings. Clearly, then, amid the dryness of the sands, prospects for the survival of otherwise long-forgotten manuscripts were not altogether hopeless; and perhaps, that being so, the same was true of long-obsolete doctrines too.

Out in the wilderness, after all, beyond the reach of the Christian empire, and the monks who had colonised its periphery, there was no one greatly to care which gods people might worship, nor which books they might read, nor which obsolete beliefs they might hug to themselves. Out in the wilderness, there was no one to patrol the frontiers of faiths that elsewhere, once and for all, had put up the barricades.

The Wolves of Arabia

Like sand borne on an easterly wind, hints of the strange and aberrant beliefs that simmered in the desert were occasionally still to be found even in the Holy Land itself. Some twenty miles south of Jerusalem, for instance, at a spot set among open fields named Mamre, pagans from beyond the frontiers of Palestine would gather every summer “to keep a brilliant feast.”⁶¹ The roots of this festival were quite fabulously ancient: for they had as their focus an oak that was the oldest tree in the world. Neither Jews nor Christians thought to dispute this sensational pedigree. Both were agreed that the tree was “as ancient as creation”⁶²—and that it had been a favourite of Abraham’s to boot. A well dug by the patriarch still stood beside it, and although the oak itself, thanks to the merciless attentions of Christian souvenir-hunters, had long since been hacked down to a stump, an unmistakable aura of holiness still attached itself to the mutilated trunk. In the first book of the Bible, it was recorded that Abraham, sitting in the shade of the oak, had played host to three mysterious strangers, who had delivered him the good news that his wife, Sarah, hitherto barren, was to bear him a son. Two of the strangers had then continued on their way; but the third, informing Abraham of His intention to wipe out Sodom, had stood revealed as none other than God Himself.

Nothing, then, could have been more offensive to Jews and Christians alike than the hosting of a festival at such a spot—and sure enough, both had made repeated efforts to redeem it from the polluted attentions of the pagans. As far back as the time of Jesus, a Jewish king had raised a large wall around both tree and well, with the aim of staking out the very place—the maqom—where Abraham “had stood before the Lord.”⁶³ Some three hundred years later, Constantine had gone one better by ordering a church to be constructed directly over the oak. As well he might have done: for Christians were agreed that the three strangers entertained by Abraham could only have been the Trinity, and that Mamre, as a result, had always been a place of “pristine sanctity, devoted to the worship of our Saviour.”⁶⁴ Certainly, in the stern judgement of Constantine, all pagan claims to the site were the merest falsehood and blasphemy. Stripped of all its obscene accumulation of idols and bloodstained altars, the oak stood revealed as what it had been way back in the time of Abraham: a thoroughly Christian tree.

The pagans, however, oblivious to this transcendent truth, had persisted in visiting Mamre. More than a century after Constantine had attempted to ban their summer festival, they were still flocking to the sacred oak, where they would sacrifice cockerels, pour wine and throw cakes into Abraham’s well, and ostentatiously abstain from sex. Such behaviour, at a time when paganism elsewhere in the Holy Land was being harried and bullied into extinction, required a deal of nerve. Nor was it greatly surprising that most of the festival-goers came from beyond the borders of Palestine. Indeed that they belonged to a people widely scorned across the Near East as “the most superstitious and ignorant in the world,”⁶⁵ and whose contempt for monarchs and their laws had long been notorious.

The Arabs, tribesmen who haunted the interminable wastes that stretched south of the Fertile Crescent, could boast a record of barbarism more venerable than the empires of either Persia or Rome. “Dwelling as they do in the distant desert, they know neither overseers nor officials”: a state of affairs so mind-bogglingly unnatural that even a king of Mesopotamia, back in the distant days when Solomon’s temple still stood in Jerusalem, had thought to make a note of it.⁶⁶ A thousand years on, opinions had barely improved. The Arabs appeared as reluctant as ever to put down roots. They were despised not merely as pagans, but as pagans who lived in tents. To an aristocrat in his palace, as to a peasant in his field, the inveterate shiftlessness of such nomads was both a menace and an affront. That the Arabs, in their disdain for the norms of civilisation, were possessed of an almost timeless quality of ferocity, like that of the deserts where they lurked, was widely taken for granted. Less than human, they were something more than beasts. In battle, it was not unknown for them to drink their victims’ blood, while even in their love-making, so it was darkly rumoured, “they were quite explosively violent—women as well as men.”⁶⁷ Nervous travellers venturing beyond the limits of cities and farms viewed the half-naked Arabs on their horses or camels as a menace no less deadly than the most ferocious desert predator: “For, like rapacious kites, which have only to catch sight of prey from on high to swoop down upon it with outstretched talons, they make off with whatever they can seize.”⁶⁸

An insult that would no doubt have delighted the Arabs themselves. To be as free and as feared as a bird of prey was, in many ways, everything they most desired. What other peoples condemned as shiftlessness, they prized as liberty. “I journeyed with a brown whip, its handle bare of its original thonging, with its lash hanging from its loop”:⁶⁹ to ride like this, alone with the horizon infinite all around, was to know oneself, with a rare and vaunting conviction, the utter opposite of a slave. Wherever Arabs gathered, whether in the shade of an embroidered tent or around a fire beneath the stars, they were sure to sing the praises of wine, slim-waisted women, and warriors who acknowledged no master. The nomads of the desert might have been despised—but they were also feared. When the Persians charged Dahag, the demon king, with having been one of their number, and the Romans condemned them for their slaving and kidnapping as agents of the Devil, the Arabs were being paid a form of tribute. Better a bandit than a dependant, after all. Who were the subjects of the Shahanshah or of Caesar to presume otherwise?

In truth, though, the Arabs were not quite the lone wolves of their victims’ paranoia. Their realm was an unremittingly harsh one, and no man could possibly survive amid the sand, salt flats and wind-weathered lava beds without others to watch out for him. Even to the hardiest and haughtiest warrior, family was everything. “We follow the ways of our forefathers, those who kindled wars and were faithful to the ties of kinship.”⁷⁰ This resounding brag expressed the very essence of an Arab’s identity. Extended networks of relatives blurred seamlessly into tribe. All men who could claim descent, however implausibly, from a single imam—a founding father—were to be reckoned his sons. Bound by a single inheritance of custom and achievement, of Sunna, warriors who might otherwise have torn each other to shreds were enabled to unite without loss of face, and turn on all those neighbouring bands of rivals who might have done the same. The great joy of an Arab’s life, even more than the pillaging of caravans or the slaughtering of camels in honour of some ivory-skinned beauty, was to feud violently with another tribe. Much was bound to derive from it: honour, excitement, maybe even a well or two. That there was an essential pointlessness to such contests, an unvarying and remorseless quality much like that of the desert itself, did not in any way lessen the enjoyment of those who indulged in them. The great deeds performed by a tribe’s ancestors, rehearsed as they were in glowing, if suspiciously interchangeable, verses by its poets, offered its warriors both backdrop and inspiration. Memories of ancient battles, if gilded with sufficient imagination, might serve to dignify even the most squalid scuffle. As a result, among the Arabs, past and present were barely distinguishable. While it might be possible for one particularly recent and stirring episode to serve the tribe who commemorated it as a line drawn in the otherwise interminable sands of time, all it needed was for some new victory to be won, some new livestock or women to be seized, and the line would promptly be erased and quite forgotten. Certainly, the lore that every tribe lovingly preserved about itself was concerned with nothing so tedious as chronology. It was known quite simply as ayyam—“days.”

Yet in truth, even in the remotest stretches of the desert, the Arabs were never wholly immune to the tug of great events in the world beyond. The ebb and flow of great power politics had even, on occasion, come to alter their entire way of living. Time was, for instance, when Arab merchants had been famously sweet-smelling: for frankincense, an aromatic spice that had once been burned in near-industrial quantities on pagan altars, was cultivated exclusively in Himyar, on the southernmost tip of their peninsula. Back in the age of Solomon, the queen of this incense-growing land—Sheba, as it had then been known—had visited the great king in Jerusalem, trailing perfumed clouds of glory in her wake; while more recently, among the Romans, its inhabitants had been famed as the happiest and most prosperous of men. All that, however, had changed with the toppling of the pagan gods. Christ demanded no incense. The trade between Rome and the frankincense growers of Himyar had duly withered. The Arabs, no longer renowned for their perfumes, became notorious instead for their reek of leather and camel shit. Caravans might still toil across the desert, but those who rode alongside them now tended to play the demeaning and insecure role of middle men. That it was worth the while of camels freighted with all the luxuries of India—pepper, gemstones and castrated pageboys—to plod their way across the sands towards Palestine and Syria owed everything to the whims of distant emperors, to the calculations of bureaucrats. A treaty renegotiated here, a customs post closed down there, and everything would abruptly change. Merchants, camel-drivers, bandits: all might find themselves ruined overnight.

Prey as they were to such insecurity, there had always been some Arab tribes eager to set their fortunes on a firmer footing. Some, like the Nabataeans, a people who occupied the southern fringes of Palestine, had exploited their position between the trade routes of the desert and the Mediterranean to create a fabulously wealthy commercial hub, centred on their pink-hued capital of Petra. Others, looking to take a short cut to power, had aimed to infiltrate the cities of other peoples and then to seize their commanding heights: a policy of playing cuckoo in the nest that explained why the kings of Edessa had been of Arab descent. Nevertheless, the independence of such states, menaced as it was by the domineering shadow of Rome, had always been a rickety thing. As early asAD 106, the kingdom of Nabataea had been gobbled up entire, and reconstituted as the province of Arabia—and although Edessa held out against formal assimilation into the empire for a further 150 years, it had never been left in any doubt as to its thoroughly subordinate status. Riches and sophistication: these, it appeared, might certainly be obtained by the Arabs. The price, however, was a high one: the loss of honour, of liberty, of all that made an Arab.

How, then, was this awkward circle to be squared? In 270, just a few decades after the annexation of Edessa, there had arrived a spectacular straw on the wind. Zenobia, the queen of an oasis city named Palmyra, midway between Antioch and Ctesiphon, had made a pitch for nothing less than the whole of the Roman Near East. Syria, Egypt and much of Asia Minor all fell to the sudden onslaught of her armies. Granted, her moment in the sun was fleeting: defeated outside Antioch in 272, she was taken to Rome, and paraded as a living trophy, while her desert capital was abandoned to slow decay and oblivion. The true significance of her comet-like blaze, however, had lain less in its trajectory than in the circumstances that had made it possible. Zenobia’s own defeat and humiliation had been paralleled, twelve years previously, by the fate of the Emperor Valerian. His captor, of course, had been a rival monarch, the lord of a dominion no less intimidatingly formidable than Rome’s: the recently established empire of Iranshahr. By using a Caesar as his mounting block, Shapur had proclaimed—in terms that no Roman emperor would ever again be able to discount—the arrival of an authentic equal upon the global scene. For the Arabs too, the implications of the rise to greatness of the House of Sasan had been momentous. The deserts where they lived had abruptly come to constitute the frontier not of one superpower but of two. Situated as they now were on the world’s deadliest geopolitical fault-line, they would never again be able to claim even the most precarious neutrality. Yet the deadly grinding of the twin tectonic plates of Rome and Iranshahr, even as it crushed for ever the independence of such cities as Edessa and Palmyra, spelled opportunity as well as calamity for upwardly mobile Arabs. In a war zone, after all, what more precious commodity than bands of seasoned warriors? Rome and Persia alike: both had urgent need of swords. The Arabs found themselves ideally placed to hawk their services to the highest bidder.

To the Romans, of course, there was nothing remotely novel about the employment of barbarians. As along the Rhine prior to the collapse of the western empire, so along the borders of Syria and Palestine, the imperial authorities were well versed in the hiring of tribes as confederates: as foederati. Even prior to the emergence of the Persian threat, back in the second century AD, the Romans had successfully bribed and cajoled a number of tribes into serving as a desert police force; and the example of this confederation, the Thamud, would long be commemorated by Arab poets.⁷¹ Understandably so, perhaps: for what it had served to demonstrate was that even the proudly and inveterately fractious tribes of the desert might, under certain circumstances, be forged into a shirkat—a “partnership.”⁷² Such a lesson, against the backdrop of escalating superpower confrontation, had certainly not gone unnoted by ambitious chieftains. Horizons had steadily expanded, wild fantasies taken wing. In 328, for instance, one Arab warlord had been buried beneath a tombstone that grandiloquently proclaimed him to have been “King of all the Arabs.” A title no less bogus than it was unprecedented—but most suggestive all the same. As Rome and Iranshahr competed ever more vigorously for the services of the desert tribes, so the potential pickings on offer for the tribesmen themselves had indeed grown steadily more lucrative. Although the confederation of the Thamud had long since imploded, having been struck down in sensational fashion, so Arab lore claimed, by a thunderbolt, other foederati had fast emerged to take its place.^f It is telling that Roman authors, from the fourth century onwards, began to use a new word to designate the Arabs, one that seems ultimately to have derived from shirkat: “Saracens.”⁷³Although the Romans themselves appear to have been wholly ignorant of the original meaning, and although the stereotype they had of the “Saracens” remained the reassuringly traditional one, of nomads, bandits and savages, the use they made of the new name did nevertheless hint at a new and emerging order. In the yawning deserts between Palestine and Mesopotamia, Arab tribesmen were no longer operating merely on a freelance basis. While they still indulged in their traditional pastimes—slaving, cattle rustling, raiding caravans and frontier posts—they increasingly did so as agents of the rival superpowers. “To the Arabs on both sides,” so the twitchy inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent began to observe, “war between Persia and Rome is a source of very great profit indeed.”⁷⁴

Nowhere better illustrated this than a town famed throughout Arabia as the epitome of power and glamour. Hira stood only a few miles south of Sura, on the southern flank of Mesopotamia; but it might as well have been a world away from the lecture halls of the rabbis. Situated in an oasis between the Euphrates and the desert, it served in every sense as a place of hybrids. Although a linchpin of Sasanian defences, the great bulwark that blocked access from the south to Ctesiphon, it was commanded not by a Persian but by an Arab. The Banu Lakhm—“Lakhm’s Sons”—had long been based in the region, where they had enjoyed a profitable existence as mercenaries in the service of the Shahanshah. Even under Peroz, despite all the tempting convulsions of his reign, they had remained loyal to the Persian crown. The decision had been a thoroughly calculating one—and in due course it had reaped spectacular reward. Kavad, ever innovative, had graced the Lakhmids with an unprecedented promotion when, shortly after the outbreak of war with Rome in 502, he appointed their youthful and brutally able chieftain, Mundhir, to rule as king over all the scattered Arab tribes that were then confederated to Iranshahr. Hira—a sprawl of settlements that alternated mud-brick walls with encampments, gardens with desert scrub, and wheat fields with herds of camels—provided the Lakhmid chieftain with the perfect showcase for this trend-setting fusion of royalty and banditry. Not for nothing, in the Lakhmids’ own language, did the city’s name mean “camp.”⁷⁵ Mundhir, who spent his time there living alternately in a palace and a tent, aimed to combine the best of Persian sophistication with the noblest traditions of his own people. Profits from plunder were spent not only on beefing up his offensive capabilities but on the manifold glories and pleasures of life as an Arab. From camel-archers to poets, brigands to dancing girls, Hira boasted them all. Even the odd scribe was to be found there: for the city, so it was plausibly claimed, was where the Arabs had first learned to put their language into writing. Unsurprisingly, it attracted a steady stream of migrants from across the desert, all hungry for the patronage that Mundhir could so swaggeringly provide. “A day and a night at Hira,” it was said, “are better than a whole year of medicine.”⁷⁶

No single place in the Roman sphere of influence could quite rival the dazzle of this appeal. That this was so, however, reflected not any lack of contacts between the Arabs and Rome, but rather their sheer range and antiquity. Along the western fringes of the desert, no particular exoticism attached itself to the notion that the realms of the nomad and the city might be blended. The Nabataeans, and many other tribes too, had been citizens of Rome for centuries. One of their number had even risen to become Caesar: Philip, the same emperor who had presided over the capital’s millennial celebrations, had hailed from a city on the frontier, to the east of the Sea of Galilee, and been derisively nicknamed “the Arab.” The existence of settlements such as Philip’s home town right on the margins of the desert were evidence enough of the whole-hearted relish with which the Arabs, no less than any other people of the empire, might embrace the pax Romana and settle down.

Nowhere, however, was this more apparent than in the Negev, the arid wilderness that stretched between the Sinai and Petra, and where, even as Mundhir was establishing his regime in Hira, vines and olives were being conjured from the sand. Take one of the paved roads—the strata—that criss-crossed the region, and in due course an entire city would materialise on the horizon, rising like a mirage above the desolation, a paradise of farmland, stone houses and baths. A miracle? Hardly. It was only through the most back-breaking labour that the ceaseless battle against the sands could hope to be won, only with the most exhaustive maintenance of cisterns, aqueducts and dams. Yet the cities of the Negev, for all that the water might sometimes taste brackish, and the scrub-flecked desert stretch away barren in every direction, did truly serve as outposts of the wider world beyond. Even in the most remote, an isolated settlement by the name of Nessana that served pilgrims on the road to Sinai as a final way-stop, there were bureaucrats who wrote in Greek and would-be lawyers who studied Latin. More than two centuries after Constantine had filched the Palladium for his new capital, there was even a copy of the Aeneid in the local library. In Nessana, time, as well as distance, might be dissolved: for the myths of which Virgil had sung were older by far than himself, older even than Rome. On frayed papyri in the depths of a lonely desert, the halls of Mount Olympus—where the gods of Greece had reclined on exquisite couches, partnered by ox-eyed goddesses, and served wine by eternally beautiful youths—still preserved a spectral hold.

Given enough time, then, it seemed that even “the wolves of Arabia”⁷⁷ might be domesticated into lawyers or literary critics. Certainly, from the perspective of such cities as Nessana—where the prodigious array of hydraulic works was accompanied by a quite striking absence of fortifications—it did genuinely appear as though the desert had been tamed. A comforting reassurance, perhaps—except that, in truth, the imperial authorities had no desire to see every last Saracen de-fanged. Along the limits of the empire, where Mundhir’s Lakhmids were conducting ever more audacious raids, there was an urgent need for attack-dogs of their own. Many a Roman base might boast an encampment of Saracens: a hira. Other concentrations of Arab foederati—entire cities of tents, thronged with a shifting population of warriors, horses and camels—lay under the command of tribal chieftains rather than Roman officers. The reign of Justinian would see the largest of these—a teeming settlement east of the Golan Heights called Jabiya—become to Syria and Palestine what Hira was to Ctesiphon: a key defensive stronghold. The tribesmen who lived there—the Banu Ghassan—were recognisably the mirror-image of the Lakhmids: for the “Sons of Ghassan” combined a ferocious loyalty to their imperial patrons with a haughty Arab chauvinism. Certainly, the Latin spoken in Jabiya owed little to the study of Virgil. The phrases familiar to the Arabs of the frontier derived not from poets but from the army. Over the course of the previous centuries, the sheer awesome immensity of Rome’s military apparatus had stamped itself indelibly upon the language spoken by the foederati. So it was, for instance, that the camps of the frontier-system—the castra—had provided the Arabs with their own word for fortress:qasr. So it was too that the strata, the paved roads built by Roman military engineers to link each camp along the frontier, had bequeathed their name to the entire desert south of Palmyra. Indeed, such was their impact upon the foederati that sirat—the form that the original Latin word had come to take in Arabic—could signify almost any kind of path.⁷⁸ The strata, those great gashes of gravel and stone scored in straight lines across even the most unforgiving of landscapes, had become for the Arabs the very quintessence of a highway.

Not that they themselves, of course, had much need of paving stones. What would their record of banditry have been, after all, without a talent for going off-road? In early 529, when Mundhir suddenly appeared in northern Syria, looting and burning almost to the walls of Antioch, the leaden-footed response of the provincial authorities was little different to that of some hapless farmer finding his sheep-pen being cleaned out. “For with such speed did he move, and with such ruthless calculation, that invariably he would be gone with his loot before the military authorities could even discover what was going on, let alone arrive to stop it.”⁷⁹ Fire of this order could only hope to be fought with fire; and Justinian knew it. A few months after Mundhir’s rampage through Syria, he crowned an Arab all of his own. His choice, predictably enough, had fallen upon the chieftain of the Banu Ghassan, a youthful but already seasoned warlord by the name of al-Harith—or, as he was known by his patrons, Arethas. Summoned from Jabiya to Constantinople, the Ghassanid prince was splendidly arrayed in the white silken cloak of Roman monarchy and a bejewelled coronet.⁸⁰ His promotion bore witness to Justinian’s customary eye for talent. Arethas, no less than Mundhir, was a man of boldness, charisma and vision. What was more, he positively revelled in a blood feud. Before long, the two warlords’ struggle had come to possess its own furious and deadly rhythm, as relentless as it was personal. To no one’s great surprise, the signing in 532 of a treaty between Justinian and Khusrow, for all its ambition to establish “an eternal peace”⁸¹ between the two empires, did little to dampen the mutual hatred of their respective Arab clients. Ghassanid and Lakhmid: both, across the desert sands, continued to eyeball each other.

Nor was it merely their political loyalties, or even their personal vanities, that rendered their mutual hatreds so unblinking. Neither Arethas nor Mundhir had any doubt that they were engaged in a conflict that was more than earthly. If Christians saw in the desert the ultimate arena, where athletes of God might test themselves to the limits of their endurance against entire armies of demonic adversaries, then it certainly needed no baptism for an Arab to recognise in it a realm alive with spirits. Many of these—whether borne on a scorching wind or haunting a bone-littered salt flat—were malevolent in the extreme; but not all were, by any means. Some—such as the owls that rose from the heads of men slain in battle—served as the guardians of individual warriors, while others stood watch over particular places. The favour of the divine might be experienced wherever there was water, or shade, or merely a landscape of startling beauty. The Arabs had little need of idols, let alone temples, to alert those who approached a god of his presence. Focus of their awe was much more likely to be a natural feature: if not a tree, as at Mamre, then a spring, or a mountain-peak, or a rock. Always, however, there was only the one certain measure of holiness. A god could be reckoned no god who did not on occasion keep his sanctuary free of violence. At certain times, in certain places, tribes who might otherwise have slaughtered one another with ferocious abandon would assemble upon ground staked out as hallowed—haram—and there join in festivities quite as joyous and peaceable as those staged every summer at Mamre. Of the Arabs’ major shrine, which lay surrounded by palm trees somewhere in the desert south of Palestine, and where the local people were reported to gather twice a year for a whole month or more at a time, it was rumoured “that even the wild beasts live in peace with men, and among themselves.”⁸² Not, however, that pacifism was necessarily on the agenda the whole year round. The gods of the desert, away from their shrines, rarely objected to bloodshed. On occasion, they might positively demand it. At Hira, for instance, there stood two stones sacred to a god named Dushara, which his worshippers would regularly make sticky with gore.⁸³ A second deity, al-’Uzza—the “Mighty Queen”—was graced with an even more spectacular draught of blood when, in 527, Mundhir sacrificed no fewer than four hundred Christian virgins in her honour. Such a goddess—one able to consecrate the soil of the Lakhmid capital as haram while simultaneously sponsoring the most flamboyant atrocities—could hardly have been better suited to the warlord’s needs.

Yet there remained something strangely pallid about her, and Dushara too, and all the various gods of the desert. Many, to their worshippers, were little more than names. Loyalty, as a result, was rarely a feature of Arab devotions. A deity who failed a tribe in battle, or neglected to keep it in food, or scared away the camels, would be dumped without a moment’s hesitation. Many were the oases where there stood altars “old in years, bearing inscriptions in ancient letters of unknown tongues,”⁸⁴ raised to gods whose very names had been forgotten. Temples would cheerfully be used to pen goats.⁸⁵ To Christian scholars—whose dread of demons such as Artemis was often a form of reluctant tribute paid to their inherent glamour—the Arabs’ gods seemed reassuringly dull. Even attempts to condemn them risked making them more interesting than they were. When Epiphanius, the same energetic cataloguer of heresies who had condemned the Ebionites, turned his beady eye on Dushara, he reported that the god’s worshippers, in a blasphemous parody of Christian belief, believed the deity to have been born of a virgin—a ka’iba. The bishop, however, had misheard: Dushara was not a god of a ka’iba but of a ka’ba—a “cube.” The allusion was to the stone, black and uncarved, that theNabataeans worshipped as an incarnation of the god, somewhere in a shrine to the south of the Dead Sea.⁸⁶ Dushara certainly had nothing so sophisticated as a virgin mother.

Meanwhile, many Arabs were turning to the worship of a god who did. Nabataean cities had grown crowded with churches; and even in the wilds of the desert, beyond the reach of either emperor or bishop, whole tribes were turning to Christ. There was often a fair degree of opportunism in this: for it was well known that the Romans would only ever bestow their patronage upon Arabs who ranked as fellow Christians. Yet, the Ghassanids—and Arethas especially—were the decided opposite of lukewarm. They refused, on principle, to abandon the distinctively Monophysite character of their faith. They built, resplendently solid amid the tents of their encampment at Jabiya, a massive church. They paraded, in their ongoing vendetta against the Lakhmids, a devotion to Christ that was quite as militant as Mundhir’s loyalty to al-’Uzza. Granted, the Ghassanids did not think to offer up virgins in sacrifice—but neither did they ever doubt, as they hacked down their pagan adversaries, that their swords were touched by the authentic fire of heaven.

And who was to say that they were wrong? Time was when any notion that the Saracens might have been blessed by the particular favour of God would have been greeted with hilarity—but lately, in the bringing of the desert tribes to Christ, there had been hints, just perhaps, of the workings of some broader, more mysterious providence. Many were the wonders, after all, that had assisted with their conversion. The presence in the desert of so many saints, so many Spirit-charged men of God, had certainly helped to deliver a steady stream of miracles to the Saracens. Their barren had been given children, and their sick had been restored to health: a record of medical achievement that no pagan could begin to rival. Stylites were particularly popular; and many were the tribes who would gather to gawp at them and their austerities in wide-eyed stupefaction. To Christians, most of whom had been brought up to loathe and dread the Saracens, the spectacle of desert nomads smashing idols before the pillar of a saint, pledging themselves loudly to Christ and even, in the ultimate act of renunciation, “vowing to forgo the flesh of donkey and camel,”⁸⁷ might be cause for considered reflection. One such, a bishop from Antioch by the name of Theodoret, had been brought to conclude that the Saracens, despite their illiteracy and their taste for slumming it in tents, were “endowed with an intelligence lively and penetrating, and a judgement fully capable of discerning truth and refuting falsehood.”⁸⁸ He had seen whole crowds of them gathered before the pillar of the original stylite, Saint Simeon the Elder himself—and had marked the effect. To a people wild and free such as the Saracens prided themselves on being, the show of a man prostrating himself before God, as Simeon had done, over and over again, might at first have appeared demeaning; but not after they had watched him persist with it for days and nights at a time. In submission, so the spectacle had taught them, lay the surest path to God. Saracens, even Saracens, might be brought to grasp that truth.

But there was an additional, and more haunting, reason why scholars such as Theodoret should have taken a particular interest in the Saracens: they were the only barbarians who featured in the Bible. Isaac had not been Abraham’s sole son; nor Sarah his sole bed-partner. Prior to the dramatic appearance of the Almighty at Mamre, the barrenness of the patriarch’s wife had prompted him to take as a concubine her maid, an Egyptian by the name of Hagar. Sure enough, the slave-girl had borne Abraham a son; but Sarah, bitter and jealous, had driven the mother and her newborn baby out into the desert. There an angel had appeared to Hagar and told her that Ishmael, her child, was destined to prove “a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him”⁸⁹—and the father of a great people. But which people? The answer to that, the clues being as glaring as they were, was self-evident. The Children of Ishmael, that “wild ass of a man”: who were these, if not the Arabs? Certainly, such an identification had long been accepted as fact.⁹⁰ And the potential implications of this Hagarene bloodline? They, by and large, had been left to hang. Perhaps, however, they should not have been. Like Isaac, so it was recorded in Holy Scripture, Ishmael had been circumcised by Abraham’s own hand; and, like Jacob, he had fathered twelve sons. Suggestive markers of the favour of God, surely? That, at any rate, was what numerous Saracens had begun to ask. Theodoret himself had cited the example of the nomads who roamed the wilds east of Antioch: “for, in that desert live those who are proud to derive their descent from their ancestor Ishmael.”⁹¹

Other Arabs, though, were not so sure. Hagar hardly ranked as the classiest of ancestors, after all. A slave-girl and a brood-mare, she had been a refugee to boot: driven not once but twice into exile by a resentful Sarah. The second occasion had followed the birth of Isaac, when Ishmael and his hapless mother had been obliged to take up residence “in the wilderness of Paran.”⁹² The location of this particular desert was much debated, with some scholars, including Saint Paul himself, identifying it with the Sinai. The overwhelming consensus, however, was that it could only have been the Negev. No other wilderness stood closer to the sites most associated with Abraham: Mamre, and the Church of Saint Lot, and Hebron, where the patriarch lay buried in a cave with Isaac and Jacob. Certainly, the Arabs of the Negev, when they accepted baptism, appear to have had a particular enthusiasm for naming themselves “Abraham”—as though to remind their fellow Christians that they, unlike other converts, had been blessed by the marks of God’s favour long before the time of Christ.⁹³ Yet this pedigree, even so, was a potentially awkward one for them to flaunt. How, after all, were the Arabs to lay claim to a primal inheritance from Abraham without also acknowledging their descent from a slave-girl? A measure of embarrassment, perhaps, was only natural. So much so, in fact, that it seems to have led one scholar, a contemporary of Theodoret’s by the name of Sozomen, to offer a particularly ingenious explanation for the origin of the word “Saracen.” “Mortified by the servile character of Hagar,” he explained, “the Ishmaelites decided to conceal the opprobrium of their origin by adopting a name which would imply that they were descended instead from Sarah, the wife of Abraham.”⁹⁴

An implausible theory—but a telling one all the same. Sozomen came from near Gaza, between the Mediterranean and the Negev, and was an experienced observer of the region. He had travelled to Mamre, for instance, and witnessed the crowds that gathered there: he knew full well that it was not only Christians who reverenced Abraham, but Jews and pagans too. This led him, in contrast to Theodoret, to contemplate a quite hideous possibility. What if the Saracens’ knowledge of their ancestry did not necessarily lead them to Christ? What if it led them in a different direction altogether?

After all, their origin being what it is, they practise circumcision like the Jews, refrain from the use of pork like the Jews, and observe many other Jewish rites and customs. That they deviate at all from the Laws of the Jewish people can only be ascribed to the lapse of time, and to the influence upon them of other, pagan peoples.⁹⁵

It was a devastating insight—and had an obvious corollary. Cleanse the Arabs of their paganism, and it might not be a Christian people at all that emerged from beneath the ordure, but something alarmingly different: whole tribes of Jews. In fact, according to Sozomen, this had already happened: “There are those of them who, by coming into contact with Jews, learn the truth of their origins, and so return to the ways of their kinsmen, and are persuaded to adopt Jewish customs and laws.”⁹⁶ Who precisely these Jews might be, Sozomen did not think to say; but it certainly suggested that Christianity, beyond the reaches of Roman control, was not the only option available to Arabs embarked on a spiritual quest.

Or indeed to Arabs who wished simply to dig in their heels and defy the superpower. In 524, at a time when Roman ambassadors were closeted with Mundhir, negotiating the release of two prominent prisoners, a delegation of emissaries from the distant kingdom of Himyar arrived unexpectedly at the summit. These ambassadors, to the Romans’ horror, brought news of an atrocity fit to put even those of Mundhir in the shade: the wholesale slaughter of the Christians of Najran. Even more terrifyingly, Yusuf, the Himyarite king, had sent a proposal of alliance to his Lakhmid counterpart: one that he suggested be sealed with the blood of the Christians of Hira.

Out of the blue, the ambassadors from Constantinople found themselves confronted by a nightmare of threateningly global proportions. An alliance of pagan and Jewish interests, forged well beyond the reach of Roman arms, was too hellish to be countenanced. With Iranshahr in firm control of the Persian Gulf, trade links to India were already being steadily asphyxiated; and now, with a Jewish kingdom established beside the Red Sea straits, there was pressure coming to bear on a second vital windpipe. The menace, however, was more than merely material. The Jewish character of Himyar was no mere pretension or show. Yusuf, although he had seized power by toppling a Christian regime, was not, by any means, the first Jew to rule the kingdom. In fact, there had been Jewish monarchs in Himyar for almost as long as there had been Christian emperors in Rome. In 440, when a massive dam had been repaired at Marib, the ancient capital of Sheba, the king had publicly dedicated it to the God of Israel: Rahmanan—“The Merciful.”⁹⁷ The same identical title, as it happened, was one much bandied about in the Talmud; nor was it surprising that the rabbis of Palestine, resentful as they were of their Christian masters, took a good deal of interest in the Himyarite monarchy. Granted, the enthusiasm of Yusuf and his predecessors for aping King David was hardly one of which they could entirely approve; and it may be that the presence of rabbis from Tiberias at his court reflected a desire on their part to temper some of his more flamboyant excesses. That, however, was not how it appeared to the local Christians, who predictably blamed the holocaust at Najran on the machinations of the rabbis—nor, of course, to the fretful Roman authorities.

To the profound relief of Constantinople, though, no sooner had the danger of an alliance between Hira’s pagans and Himyar’s Jews flared up than it was successfully being extinguished. Mundhir, far removed from Himyar, was bought off easily enough. Then, even as one Roman embassy returned in triumph from Hira, another set off for the kingdom that lay directly opposite Himyar, and which by great good fortune just happened to be Christian: Ethiopia. Not that the country’s king was entirely without his drawbacks. The “Negus,” in addition to being a Monophysite, was also quite insufferably conceited: for it was his claim, based as it was on a presumed descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, to rank as the world’s pre-eminent Christian monarch. Under normal circumstances, of course, the ambassadors of Caesar would have laughed this pretension to scorn; but the circumstances were hardly normal. A treaty was duly patched up. When the Ethiopians launched their invasion of Himyar, they made the crossing in a borrowed Roman fleet. In the wake of Yusuf’s overthrow and death, the conquered kingdom was transformed into an Ethiopian protectorate and Roman merchants were once again free to use its harbours and trading stations. Meanwhile, at Najran, a domed monument named the Ka’ba, on account of its cuboid base, was raised above the ruins of the cathedral: a memorial to the priests and virgins left slaughtered by Yusuf.

All of which, back in Constantinople, could be viewed with tremendous satisfaction. Imperial policy towards the Saracens appeared to be in excellent shape. Irrespective of the pestiferous brews of heresy and insurrection that might occasionally bubble up beyond the frontier, the Roman state clearly had the wherewithal—and the reach—to deal with them all. After the successful pacification of Himyar, it was evident that the Roman Empire remained what it had always been: a global superpower.

“Dominion without limit”: it seemed that the ancient maxim still held good.

^a Long after Simeon’s death, it was his hairiness which particularly enabled people to recognise him when he appeared to them in visions.

^b What is today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was rebuilt in the eleventh century after the original was destroyed by a messianic Egyptian Caliph, and it now contains the rock of Golgotha as well as the tomb of Christ. Whether either of these sites is authentically what Christian tradition has for so long presumed them to be is much debated. Ironically, the probability is that Helena’s excavations, and her son’s subsequent building works, served to obliterate memories that had been preserved by local Christians of the original sites.

^c The word Ioudaismos is overwhelmingly confined to Christian texts—most of which date from after the conversion of Constantine. “Judaism,” in the sense that it is used in modern English, was a Christian invention.

^d This is a translation of the biblical “Adommim.” According to Jerome, it was on this road that the traveller in the famous parable of the good Samaritan “fell among thieves.”

^e The tradition that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were prone to farting in public was Islamic.

^f In the fourth century, some units in both Palestine and Egypt were still described as belonging to the Thamud; but none, so far as we know, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire.