5

COUNTDOWN TO APOCALYPSE

New Wine in Old Bottles

The toppling of Yusuf was a victory for Christ as well as for Caesar. This presumption—that the interests of the two were indistinguishable—came naturally to the Roman people. Even those who journeyed beyond the horizons of the Mediterranean, and could appreciate the true immensity of the world, tended to take for granted that the empire ruled from Constantinople had no rival as a superpower, blessed and protected as it was by God. Even in the far-off island of Taprobane—the land we know today as Sri Lanka—Roman merchants found it easy to put their Persian rivals in the shade. One of them, seeking to demonstrate New Rome’s palpable supremacy over Iranshahr, placed two gold coins in the local king’s palm—one stamped with the image of Caesar and the other with the head of the Shahanshah. The Roman currency was magnificently and self-evidently the heavier: a fact that owed much to the watchful financial stewardship of Anastasius, but also, and more transcendently, to the favour of the Almighty. As one merchant, an Egyptian who had visited the markets of Ethiopia and navigated the tides of the Persian Gulf, piously put it: “The empire of the Roman people shares directly in the dignity of the Kingdom of Christ.” Its future was therefore assured: “It will never be conquered—not for so long as it serves to promote the spread of the Christian faith.”¹

The Church, of course, had been ambitious to plant the cross on the furthermost reaches of the world ever since the time of Paul. That the Roman state had a duty to contribute to this mission was, however, a more radical presumption. Traditionally, “the spread of the Christian faith” beyond the empire had been the achievement of the weak and humble: prisoners of war, and women abducted into the beds of barbarian chieftains. The overthrow of the Jewish regime in Himyar, however, pointed to the potential of an altogether more muscular approach. This lesson, if obvious to merchants, was hardly one likely to have been missed by Justinian himself. Accordingly, even as he set himself to the suppression of paganism and heresy within the limits of the empire, he fixed his unblinking gaze upon the sump that lay beyond. For the first time in Roman history, the conversion of pagan kings became enshrined as a priority of state. Imperially sponsored missionaries were dispatched east, to the mountainous wilds that stretched beyond the Black Sea, and south, past Egypt, to the land of Nubia. Here, bred of Justinian’s inimitable blend of piety, restlessness and self-regard, was something fatefully novel: an ethical foreign policy.

Missionaries alone, however, could never be expected to bring everyone to Christ. That much was evident. Fortunately, however, in his ambition to shape the world to his own purposes, Justinian could draw on traditions older by far than the Church. Some sixty years before the emperor’s accession, a Roman aristocrat in Gaul, despairing at the collapse of imperial authority all around him, had conjured up from the glories of the vanished past a poignant fantasy: “an armed Caesar, before whose advance both land and sea will quake, until at last, with the renewed power of his war-trumpet, he will serve to rouse the navies of Rome from their sleep.”² Such a Caesar, of course, had never materialised. Gaul, and the entire Roman West, had slipped from imperial control. The lands administered directly by the heirs to Augustus and Constantine had been reduced by half. That did not mean, however, that Roman pretensions had in any way been diminished. Quite the contrary. If the empire ruled from Constantinople were truly—as Justinian believed it to be—an earthly reflection of the monarchy of God, then its current truncated state was not merely a crisis of geopolitical proportions, but an offence against the heavens. Christians could not be truly Christian unless they were Roman as well.

A presumption with which even some barbarians might concur. In the West, where gangs of one-time foederati had been busy carving up the various provinces, the penalty of success had tended to be a certain nagging status anxiety. Naked gangsterdom might win a warlord temporary bragging rights, but it could provide little in the way of either prestige or long-term security. That, however, was precisely where the example of an ancient and ineffably glamorous monarchy had its uses. To any ambitious chieftain, the emperor in Constantinople, who ruled as both the deputy of God and the ultimate in earthly sophistication, was the obvious role-model to hand. This was why, decades after the collapse of imperial authority in the West, the face of power there remained both Roman and Christian. Gewgaws dispatched from Constantinople, rather than being scorned, would invariably be seized upon with delight. Churches and queens alike had an insatiable appetite for the shimmer of silks from the eastern empire. Most prized of all, however, were the antique titles that only Caesar had the power to bestow. In Gaul, when Anastasius appointed the king of a notoriously savage people named the Franks to the consulship—an office that reached back to the earliest days of the republic—the warlord was so delighted by this mark of esteem that he promptly took to sporting a purple tunic and tossing gold coins to passers-by. Another barbarian king, replying to an embassy from Justin, politely assured the emperor that “our homeland is a part of your world, nor does my royal administration in any way reduce your own sovereignty.”³ Total fantasy, of course—but no less mutually flattering for that. Upstart chieftain and distant Caesar: both alike had a stake in pretending that there still existed, in however shadowy a form, a unified empire, Roman and watched over by God.

As a result, the brute realities of regime change in the West might often be veiled behind a certain studied ambivalence. Nowhere served as more of a trompe-l’oeil than Italy, that original seat of empire, where the gauze of ambiguity had been woven with a particular brilliance and subtlety. In outward appearance, indeed, it seemed that nothing much had changed since the palmiest days of Roman greatness. In Rome itself, the Senate continued to meet, consuls to be appointed, and chariot races to be run. In Ravenna—the lagoon-girt and therefore readily defensible city on the Adriatic coast that had served the western empire as its final capital—the administration remained in the hands of impeccably Roman bureaucrats. Meanwhile, with a solemn and formal show of legality, Constantinople had entrusted the western empire’s defence to a band of some twenty thousand foederati diverted specially for the purpose from the Balkans: the so-called Easterly—or “Ostro-”—Goths.⁴ Their commander, a one-time hostage in the imperial household by the name of Theoderic, played the part of Caesar’s deputy to perfection. Whether addressing crowds in the Forum, slaughtering armies of savages beyond the Alps, or building palaces, aqueducts and baths, he demonstrated to glorious effect just how Roman a king of foederati might truly be. By the time of his death in 526, he had ruled as the master of Italy for longer than any Caesar, with the exception of Augustus himself. As a result, it seems barely to have crossed the minds of most Italians that they might not still belong to a Roman empire.

Justinian, however, had not been conned. He knew the sordid truth: a desperate imperial administration had bribed Theoderic and his Ostrogoths with the offer of Italy to remove them from the doorstep of Constantinople. He knew as well that the burnishing of Rome’s awesome inheritance, which he had made his life’s mission, required the proper ordering of lost provinces as well as of mildewed laws. Barbarian kings, no matter how sedulously they might ape the manners of a Caesar, were self-evidently an affront to God’s wishes for the world. Theoderic, for all the sheen of his classical education, had been given to murdering courtiers with his own hands, and sporting a moustache.⁵ And even that was not the worst. Monstrously, two whole centuries after the Council of Nicaea, there were churches standing in Ravenna in which it was openly denied that the Son was “of one Being with the Father.” Like a ghoul rising from a long-sealed sarcophagus, Theoderic had trailed after him the stench of evils that orthodox Christians had imagined buried for good. Not merely a heretic, he had been that veritable heretic of heretics: an Arian.

There was, in this devotion of Theoderic’s to a creed that most Romans had presumed extinct, compelling evidence of just how hospitable to otherwise vanished beliefs a wilderness might be. As in the deserts beyond Palestine, so in the forests beyond the Danube and the Rhine, heresies long since consigned to oblivion within the limits of the empire had demonstrated a striking ability to endure, and even to thrive. The Goths’ Arian loyalties had a venerable pedigree. In the late 340s, when a son of Constantine still sat on the throne, and Julian was lurking in the wings, a bishop named Ulfilas, of Gothic extraction and Arian sympathies, had headed north towards the Danube and embarked on a mission to convert his compatriots. If the stories subsequently told about him were something more than fantastical exaggeration, his success had been prodigious. Certainly, within a century of his death, he was being hailed as the Moses of the northern barbarians.⁶ This, for people who were all too painfully conscious of Roman snobbery, was a thrilling notion: they too, like the Children of Israel, might have been chosen by God to receive a Promised Land. The consequence was, when a group who called themselves the “Good,” or “Visi,” Goths, succeeded in winning Spain, they pointedly refused to abandon their Arianism in favour of Catholic orthodoxy. Theoderic too, even after he had won for himself the throne of Italy, clung to his Arian faith with a no less obdurate show of devotion.

Granted, he was careful not to force it down the throats of his Roman subjects. “We cannot impose religion,” he solemnly declared, “because no one can be made to believe against his will.”⁷ A statement of principle, no doubt—but calculating as well. In both Visigothic Spain and Ostrogothic Italy, the invaders constituted a tiny minority. They certainly had no chance of forcing the natives to renounce Nicaea and embrace the teachings of Arius. As it was, Theoderic was content to leave the Catholics in peace, fattening them up the better to fleece them. Meanwhile, even as he played with dazzling skill and sophistication at being a Roman, his Arian faith helped him to forge an ever more distinctive identity for himself and his followers, recruited as they were from a number of disparate sources. Long hair, an aptitude for running people through with lances while ululating loudly on horseback, and an emphasis on the humanity of Christ: such were the markers of Italy’s new elite. “A Goth on the make,” so Theoderic had once ruefully observed, “wishes to be like a Roman—but only a poor Roman would wish to be a Goth.”⁸ This appraisal, however, might have been unduly pessimistic. A few decades into his reign in Ravenna, there was no shortage of high-born Romans eager to master his native tongue. Given time, who knew just how Gothic they might end up?

But time, as events were to prove, was running out. No sooner had Justinian signed up to the optimistically titled “Eternal Peace” with Khusrow in 532 than he was turning his gaze westwards. Most of his advisers—well aware that the war with Persia had emptied the treasury so assiduously filled by Anastasius—were appalled. Justinian imperiously brushed aside all muttered objections. In a dream, an African bishop, martyred a few decades previously on a bonfire, had urged the emperor to conquer Carthage, which for almost a century had been lost to the Roman people. Who could doubt, then, that Christ was all in favour of the emperor’s new initiative? Certainly, the bishop’s murderers, a gang of unregenerate savages named the Vandals, could hardly have done more to brand themselves as enemies of God. Their theft of the wealthy cities and fertile wheat fields of North Africa had been only the first step in their career of iniquity. Like the Ostrogoths, the Vandals were Arians; unlike the Ostrogoths, they had been prompted by a blend of paranoia, fanaticism and their own force of numbers to strip the Catholic Church of all its privileges, to persecute its leaders, and to proclaim Arianism their state religion. Well, then, might Justinian thunderously denounce them as “the enemies alike of soul and body.”⁹ News that the Vandal court had abruptly succumbed to a vicious bout of in-fighting only strengthened his resolve, and his assurance that God was willing him on. Accordingly, it was not Italy but Africa upon which Justinian first set his sights.

In 533, when a great war fleet that had been assembled off the imperial palace weighed anchor and departed the Bosphorus, most of those watching it glide towards the setting of the sun feared the worst. Cavalry and infantry totalled only eighteen thousand men, and although their commander was Belisarius—the general who had so brilliantly defeated the Persians at Dara—the Roman military’s record since then did not inspire any great confidence. Before long, though, the people of Constantinople would be thrilling to a catalogue of barely believable accomplishments. The Roman task force, disembarking on African soil after a voyage of two months, briskly marched on Carthage, routed the enemy in a couple of great battles, and forced their surrender. The churches and cathedrals of North Africa, cleansed of all traces of Arianism, were lovingly restored to Catholic worship. Meanwhile, the defeated Vandal king, transported to Constantinople along with all his treasure, was paraded in chains before the cheering crowds of the Hippodrome. “Vanity of vanities,” he was heard to mutter wistfully, “all is vanity.”¹⁰

Hardly, of course, a message for which Justinian had much time; and sure enough, buoyed by his stunning victory, he did not hesitate to press for further conquests. In 535, Belisarius duly swept down with a fresh war fleet upon Sicily, where the garrison of Ostrogoths was routed with promising ease. A year later, and the long-awaited invasion of Italy itself was launched. By the early winter of 536, Belisarius was advancing upon Rome; and on 9 December, at the prompting of the city’s bishop, the ancient capital opened its gates to the imperial forces. “So it was,” as an aide to Belisarius exulted, “that Rome once again, after a period of sixty years, became subject to the Romans.”¹¹

Which was, of course, to overlook the awkward fact that Italy—officially, at any rate—had never ceased to be subject to the Romans. Certainly, to the Italians themselves, the news that they were being liberated came as something of a surprise. If there were many who welcomed with open arms what Justinian grandly termed a “renewal” of the Roman world, then there were many more who despaired of the slaughter and impoverishment that this “renewal” seemed to mean in practice. The Ostrogoths, unlike the Vandals, displayed an infuriating reluctance to crumple. Only a few weeks after the fall of Rome to Belisarius, they were back, camped out in such prodigious numbers before the walls of the city that “the people of Rome, who were entirely unacquainted with the evils of war and siege,”¹² hurried to their liberator and begged him to capitulate. Belisarius, playing the role of an antique hero from the city’s distant past to perfection, sternly refused. One year and nine days later, after an immensely creative and obdurate defence, it was theOstrogoths who were obliged to retreat. By then, though, the one-time “Head of the World” had effectively been decapitated. Rome’s aqueducts, which for centuries had provided the city with its life-blood of water, had been ruined beyond repair; its baths emptied; its harbours destroyed; its water-mills clogged with corpses; its senators, those who had not been captured and executed by the indignant Ostrogoths, reduced to beggary. Even worse was to follow. By 538, famine was rife across central Italy. Food shortages were so severe that innkeepers, so it was credibly reported, were reduced to spit-roasting the occasional guest, just to get by. The following year, the Ostrogoths, signalling as brutally as they could their determination to continue the fight, wiped out the city of Milan. Here, even to someone as supremely self-confident as Justinian, was unmistakable evidence that not everything was going according to plan.

Visionary the emperor might have been—but not to the point of pig-headed impracticality. The gamble that he had taken, in overriding the instinctive caution of his treasurers, and launching his western wars, had already brought him impressive winnings. The gold of the Vandals, the taxes busily being screwed out of the new provincials: these, if the situation in Italy could only be stabilised, would surely enable him to pause for breath, and reckon himself still well ahead. Accordingly, in 539, Justinian made his barbarian foes a shrewdly calibrated offer of peace: the rump of northern Italy, and half of Theoderic’s treasure. The cornered Ostrogoths were minded to sign—and so perhaps they would have done, had not Belisarius, convinced that total victory lay within his grasp, exploited the swirl of negotiations to seize Ravenna. A pyrrhic triumph: for much would be lost by his act of treachery. Justinian’s offer of peace, unsurprisingly, was rejected out of hand; the Ostrogoths picked up their lances once again; the murderous conflict ground on. As for Belisarius, his star was left much diminished. Recalled to Constantinople, he was greeted by his master with a notable froideur. Although permitted to show off the riches captured in Ravenna in the Senate, the great general was pointedly refused a second chance to grandstand in the Hippodrome. To the general’s admirers, this appeared the rankest ingratitude; but Justinian, scanning not merely the western front, but the entire sweep of his empire, could appreciate better than anyone the opportunity that Belisarius had lost him.

That the emperor was a man of terrifying appetites, a megalomaniac “who has tried to seize the whole earth, and been captured by the desire to take for himself each and every realm,” appeared self-evident to his opponents: fit reflection of his demonic-seeming energy and ambitions.¹³ Yet Justinian, even as he laboured to reshape the world in the image of the heavens, had learned the hard way that the affairs of a mortal monarchy might always, if pushed too far, abruptly reach a breaking point. Back in 534, as he had sat in state to watch the parading of the Vandal king, neither he nor any of the cheering crowds would have been able to forget that only two years previously the Hippodrome had been piled high with corpses. A grim but not, perhaps, unprofitable lesson: unpleasant surprises might be lurking around the corner even for the most God-blessed of emperors.

Justinian was certainly not oblivious to the danger that his window of opportunity in Italy might close at any moment. What had been risked by the opening of a western front, after all, was the same prospect as had haunted Roman policy-makers ever since the time of Valerian, and which threatened the eastern provinces with a stench of smoke and blood more terrible by far than any that Constantinople had known. Sat in the hurriedly renovated Hippodrome in 534, watching through no doubt narrowed eyes the strut and glitter of Belisarius’s triumph, had been the ambassadors of Khusrow. Their master, Shahanshah for a mere three years, had been much preoccupied at the time with stamping his authority on both his realm and his own household. Even as Justinian’s armies were sweeping westwards, the young King of Kings had been fighting for his life against a coup led by his uncle. Aspebedes, whose treachery was compounded by the fact that he was also the father of Khusrow’s beloved queen, had been a peculiarly menacing adversary. The death struggle had convulsed the royal household as well as the empire at large. By the time Khusrow finally emerged victorious, he did not have much in the way of male relatives left. Uncles, brothers and nephews: all had been ruthlessly culled. A brutal expedient—but one that had left the Shahanshah free to turn his attention to other, more profitable, matters. In 539, when two undercover Gothic agents crossed the border into Iranshahr and appealed to Khusrow for help, he listened to their urgings with great attention. The supposed eternity of his peace with Constantinople did not blind him to the potential advantages of stabbing the old enemy in the back. Envy of Justinian’s feats; anxiety as to what they might bode for Iranshahr; quiet confidence that the Roman military might be ill-prepared to fight simultaneously on two fronts: here were incentives aplenty. Only the one problem intervened: how was Khusrow, “the divine, virtuous and peace-loving Khusrow,”¹⁴ to get away with such flagrant treachery?

It was his ever-dependable attack-dog, Mundhir, who provided him with the solution. To the plunder-hungry Lakhmids, the Eternal Peace had only ever been a minor inconvenience. Low-level skirmishes with the Ghassanids had continued unabated throughout the decade, and by 539 Mundhir and Arethas were busy amusing themselves by scrapping over the desert of Strata. Even though the Ghassanids, with perfect justification, could point to the fact that the region had a Latin name and was therefore self-evidently Roman, Khusrow gave his full backing to the Lakhmids. As orders went out across Iranshahr to prepare for war, he shamelessly escalated the crisis. By the spring of 540, he had worked himself up into a fury so self-righteous that he could feel himself perfectly justified in breaking the Eternal Peace with the Romans. Riding at the head of a mighty strike force, the King of Kings headed west out of Ctesiphon, along the Euphrates, towards the border. Unlike his father four decades previously, though, Khusrow did not intend to waste his energies battering the defences of the frontier itself. Rather, he planned to bypass them. Beyond him and his army, rich, fat and tantalising, lay the cities of Syria. Khusrow, by striking hard and deep at the very vitals of the province, aimed to put his great adversary to a searching test. Just how much of a distraction had Justinian’s wars in the West been to his level of preparedness at the opposite end of the empire?

The grim truth was that few of the cities now in the path of “the wind of the East”¹⁵ boasted walls to compare with those that girded Dara. Fortifications built centuries earlier were in a state of crumbling disrepair. Nor was that the limit of dilapidation in the province. Cities across Syria appeared to have been swamped with squatters. Buildings that once lent them an aura of sumptuous monumentality had increasingly been converted into public quarries, so that in the centre of many a city, one-time splendid temples or arenas were now nothing but vagrant-filled shells. Elsewhere too, contours were similarly being lost, whether in statue-lined squares or along grand processional avenues, as public space after public space vanished beneath a sprawl of makeshift stores and workshops. What had originally been broad, marble-paved thoroughfares were becoming ever narrower, meandering, donkey-crowded lanes. Every so often, it was true, attempts might be made to impose at least a measure of regulation, “by clearing away the stalls which had been built by tradesmen in the colonnades and streets”¹⁶—but all in vain. The city authorities, however, were not fighting decline, but something no less awkward to keep in check: success. Syria was rich, exceedingly rich; and the spirit of commerce in the province had simply grown too flourishing to be pruned back.

Everyone knew that Syrians were “natural businessmen, and the greediest of mortals.”¹⁷ It was hardly surprising, then, that disapproving moralists were inclined to see in the chaos and clamour of their cities monstrous infernos of worldliness. Such a perspective, though, was not entirely proportionate. The Syrians, for all their love of money, were much given to the contempt of it as well. The same people whose “devotion to profit takes them across the whole world”¹⁸ were also celebrated for their stylites. While they no longer lavished their wealth on beautifying cities, they did not merely squander or hoard it, either. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.” Here were words that pious Syrians—wealthy ones included—had engraved on their hearts. If the giving of alms to the poor lacked the ready visual impact that the construction of a theatre, say, or a bath-house would have done, then the poor most likely did not much care. Not all the decay of a city’s pagan monuments could disguise the emergence, obtruding through the shabbiness of the old, of an entirely new cityscape: one characterised by hospitals, orphanages and homes for the aged. Blithely indifferent to the miseries of the poor though many Syrian plutocrats remained, enough of them were not to have made some kind of a difference. Public welfare, in a Christian city, had become the surest mark of wealth.

And Khusrow knew it. Leading his army deep into Syria, finding city after city effectively defenceless, Khusrow soon discovered that those who were in the habit of giving to charity were quite prepared to cough up danger money, too. Bishops, frantic to protect their flocks from annihilation, had only to catch a rumour of the Shahanshah’s approach and they would scrabble to meet his demands for gold, no matter how outrageous. But Khusrow, even as he swaggered and plundered his way across Syria, had more in mind than mere extortion: he wanted to stage a spectacular. Accordingly, he aimed directly for the richest prize of all, “the fair crown of the East,”¹⁹ a city so globally celebrated that scholars in the far-off land of China invariably muddled it with Constantinople: Antioch.

News of the Persian advance, in Antioch itself, threw the citizens into a state of disbelieving panic. Rich their city might have been—but it was also, even by Syrian standards, quite exceptionally run-down. Over the course of several decades, its wretched inhabitants had suffered a whole succession of calamities: riots, fires, earthquakes. The vast circuit of walls was so cracked and pockmarked that the city was, to all intents and purposes, without defences. Frantically, however, the people of Antioch did all they could to prepare for the looming onslaught: by sending to Palmyra and Damascus for reinforcements, and to Simeon on his pillar for a miracle. The news brought back from the stylite, however, could hardly have been any bleaker. God Himself, speaking to Simeon in a vision, had revealed His plans for Antioch—and they were terrible. “I will fill her with her enemies,” so the Almighty had declared, “and I will abandon the greater part of her population to the sword, and those who survive to captivity.”²⁰

And so it came to pass. Although Simeon himself, courtesy of a divinely dispatched mist, managed to avoid capture by the Persians, the people of Antioch were not so fortunate. Despite a valiant initial defence, their city was soon overrun, put to the torch, and left in ruins. Khusrow, pausing only to have a celebratory dip in the Mediterranean, then turned on his heels and returned to Iranshahr in triumph. He took with him long wagon-trains of gold and the survivors from Antioch—some thirty thousand people. Back in Mesopotamia, the Shahanshah settled these captives in a new city, built from scratch just outside Ctesiphon: a crowing statement of triumph, inscribed emphatically in fresh mud-brick. Its name was Veh-Antioch-Khusrow—“Khusrow-Made-This-City-Better-Than-Antioch.”

To the Romans, and to Justinian in particular, the rape of Syria—and the flattening of its famous capital—was a bitter humiliation. Four years earlier, shortly before the invasion of Italy, the emperor had proclaimed his hopes that “God will consent to our establishing our dominion over all of those whom in former times the Roman people ruled, from the boundaries of the one ocean to the other, but lost by their negligence.”²¹ Now, so it began to be whispered, Justinian’s own negligence had turned Italy into a wilderness and Antioch into a desert. In the space of only a year, so it seemed, all his triumphs had turned to dust. Was it possible, some began to wonder, that the very attempt to repair the world had only worsened its fractures?

Justinian himself had no patience with such pessimism. Amid all the sudden calamities that had engulfed him and his dream of fashioning a globe-spanning Christian order, he still maintained his invincible confidence that he was serving the will of God. But disaster was not done with him yet. As the calamitous year of Antioch’s sack drew to a close, a horror of barely comprehensible proportions was drawing near to the southernmost borders of his empire.

It threatened not merely the fracture but the annihilation of the world.

The Earth Shall Sit in Mourning

Late summer, 541, and the Egyptian sun was at its most broiling. Those who lived along the shoreline might well have turned their faces to the sea, for the blessed relief that a breeze on the cheeks could bring. That August, however, there was something eerie to be seen out on the water—a sight fit, not to cool, but to chill the blood. Phantasms were sailing the sea. As the sun set and twilight thickened to darkness, dozens of spectral bronze ships, glowing like fire, grew more distinct on the horizon. Sitting on their decks were men with bronze staffs: “And those who travelled in these glittering boats, moving at an unearthly speed across the sea, were black—and they had no heads.”²² Soon enough, it became clear that these ghostly apparitions were not appearing merely at random, but were tracking along the coast; by the end of the month, one fleet of the bronze ships had left Egyptian waters altogether and were observed off Gaza. Meanwhile, a second fleet was heading westwards. Past the various mouths of the Nile it glided until, as August turned into September, it had almost left the delta behind. Ahead stood the greatest port in the entire Mediterranean, where the sight of red and orange light flickering on night-time waves was hardly a novelty: for its harbours boasted a watchtower of such stupefying height that the beacon which blazed from the summit of the structure could be seen up to fifty miles out at sea. Wonders, certainly, were nothing new at Alexandria.

The very name of the city bore witness to its glamorous pedigree. Not even Constantinople could boast a founder to compare with Alexander the Great. Planted on the Mediterranean coast, fashioned out of the marble which had long served as the badge of cosmopolitan chic, and with the Pharos, its astounding lighthouse, to illumine the international shipping-lanes, the city had always defined itself as haughtily, indeed defiantly, Greek. Its inhabitants liked to call it “Alexandria-by-Egypt”—as though to do otherwise might risk their being submerged beneath the peasant-worked mud of the Nile. Geography could not be totally denied, though. Right from the beginning, Alexandria had been touched by schizophrenia. Alexander, travelling to the spit of land on which he would found his great city, had journeyed from Siwa, an oracle in the depths of the western desert, where Amun, the ram-headed king of the Egyptian gods, had revealed to him the secrets of his destiny—and instructed him, it may be, to found Alexandria.²³This was why, on coins minted by his successors, the great conqueror had often been shown sporting the two curling horns of Amun: an image that had perfectly fused traditions of Greek portraiture with those of the ancient and mysterious land that Alexander had brought beneath his rule. In similar manner, the greatest temple in Alexandria—a massive complex of shrines, libraries and lecture halls named the Serapeum—had been raised in honour of Serapis, a deity who combined a thoroughly Greek beard and robe with a primordially Egyptian lineage.^a Artificially multicultural the god may have been—but that was precisely what had rendered him the perfect patron for a city such as Alexandria, created as it had been from nothing, and poised between two very different worlds.

Yet if gods could be created, then so too, of course, could they be killed. Eight centuries had passed since the founding of Alexandria, and in that time the cults that had once dominated the city had passed into oblivion. It was hardly to be wondered at, perhaps, in a place that had played host to the gods of both Olympus and the Nile for so long, that certain marks of paganism should still have lingered—but as memorials now to a toppled order. Sail into the easternmost of Alexandria’s harbours, for instance, and there, dominating the water-front, the traveller would see a massive temple precinct, originally built by a Greek queen, and fronted by plundered obelisks—but which had served the city’s bishop for more than a century now as his cathedral. Not that the birth pangs of a Christian Alexandria had been easy, though. The Alexandrians were notorious for their “rebellion and rioting,”²⁴ and the convulsions that had accompanied the overthrow of paganism had been predictably bruising. In 391, when a mob of Christians had attempted to storm the Serapeum, the pagans had fought back. They had barricaded the gates of the temple and, so it was plausibly reported, nailed Christian prisoners to crosses on its walls. Such resistance, of course, had only made the eventual capture of the temple all the sweeter. Its 750-year-old statue of Serapis had been hacked to pieces, the contents of its libraries destroyed,^b and its various buildings either converted to Christian worship or left as mouldering shells. Alexandria, once the intellectual powerhouse of paganism, had been reconsecrated as something new: as “the most glorious and Christ-loving city of the Alexandrians.”²⁵

Christ-loving or not, though, it still maintained, in the opinion of a long succession of Christian emperors, its reputation as a nest of troublemakers. It had not gone unnoted, for instance, that Arius had originally been from Alexandria. In point of fact, however, the city’s tradition of enquiry into the nature of God—a uniquely brilliant and searching one—had always preferred to stress the opposite extreme to that of Arianism: downplaying the human nature of the Saviour, and emphasising the divine. Any hint of a counter-argument, any suggestion that Christ might after all have had two natures rather than one, would invariably prompt in the Alexandrians an explosion of mingled scorn and fury that was inimitably their own. One inheritance from their pagan forebears that they had most certainly not discarded was an unshakeable conviction that they were, quite simply, the cleverest people in the world. The Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperious immodesty, had even taken to calling himself the “Judge of the Universe.” Others, less flatteringly, labelled him “a new Pharaoh.”²⁶ Certainly, the patriarchs had more than intellectual firepower at their fingertips. Intimidation might come physical as well. The trend-setter here was Athanasius, the bishop who had first definitively catalogued the books of the New Testament. Back in the fourth century, he had ruled Alexandria with a rod of iron, not hesitating to have his opponents beaten up or kidnapped if the situation demanded it. A century later, and it had been the turn of another patriarch, Dioscorus, to blend rarefied theology with the tactics of a gangland boss. Travelling to Ephesus in 449 for a showdown with the Nestorians of Antioch, he took with him an escort of paramilitaries so rowdy and intimidating that his fellow bishops, shocked to find themselves howled down every time they opened their mouths, termed the summit in outrage the “Robber Council.” Parabalani, these thugs of Dioscorus had been called: black-robed enforcers who worked ostensibly as hospital attendants, but who, whenever summoned by the patriarch, would cheerfully demonstrate their devotion to Christ through often spectacular displays of violence. Pagans, Jews, heretics: all felt their fists.

By introducing the Parabalani onto the international stage, however, Dioscorus had fatefully over-reached himself. The Council of Chalcedon, summoned two years after the debacle of Ephesus, pointedly refused to legitimise the Monophysite doctrines that had been so subtly honed in Alexandria. The result was a stand-off. As self-confident in the superiority of their own intellects as they had ever been, most Alexandrians dismissed Chalcedon’s resolutions with predictable contempt. The threat of violence continued to smoulder—and occasionally to burst into flames. In 457, for instance, after the distant emperor had ousted the disgraced Dioscorus and foisted a replacement on the Alexandrians, an indignant mob hacked down the wretched new patriarch in one of his own churches and paraded his mangled corpse in triumph through the streets. No mob like an Alexandrian mob for combining intellectual snobbery with a taste for atrocities. Nevertheless, in the sheer scale of hostility to Chalcedon, there was something new. Rarefied debates about the nature of the universe were no longer, as they had been in pagan times, the sole preserve of the metropolis. Across the whole, vast expanse of Egypt—whether in the churches of obscure provincial towns or in monasteries out in the desert—few were those who doubted that Christ had only the single nature. Indeed, the province was so teeming with Monophysites that they increasingly came to be known simply as “Copts,” an abbreviation of the Greek word for Egyptians. At last, after centuries of scorning and exploiting its hinterland, Alexandria had come to speak for the whole of Egypt.

The result was a display of mass disobedience fit to give even Justinian pause. Only in 536, buoyed by his successes in Italy, had he finally presumed to reprise the measure first attempted in 457, and impose his own choice of patriarch upon the recalcitrant Alexandrians: a step greeted by the Alexandrians themselves as “the opening up of the pit of the abyss.”²⁷ Such hysteria was hardly surprising: for Justinian’s nominee, a monk from the Delta by the name of Paul, had known better than to take for granted the obedience of his new flock. Rather than risk the fate of his hapless predecessor, he had opted instead to get his own blows in first: a policy that had served to confirm for the Alexandrians all their darkest suspicions of the Chalcedonian Church. Their new patriarch, even by the autocratic standards of his predecessors, verged on the psychopathic: corrupt, brutal and with “a taste for spilling blood.”²⁸ So uninhibited was his thuggery that Justinian, after a couple of years, was prepared to acknowledge something startling: that he might perhaps have made a mistake. Paul was duly sacked; a new patriarch, a Syrian by the name of Zoilus, was dispatched from Constantinople as his replacement; the Alexandrians, scorning their new leader as both a foreigner and a Chalcedonian, but finding him otherwise inoffensive, opted simply to ignore him. So ended Justinian’s project to reunite Egypt with the imperial Church: amid inglorious compromise.

As, perhaps, had always been inevitable. The Copts were simply too numerous, too distant and too Monophysite to be brought to heel. Nor were these the only considerations weighing on Justinian’s mind. It was no coincidence, surely, that the squalid episode of Paul’s tenure in Alexandria coincided with a far more crowd-pleasing initiative: the closure, in an isolated Libyan oasis, of the very last functioning temple of Amun. This step, although clearly taken in accordance with the wishes of the heavens, was not wholly devoid of earthly calculation: for Justinian was keen to remind the Copts that he and they, despite their disagreements, were all of them lovers of Christ. Urgent though it clearly was to secure the unity of the Church, it was no less urgent to ensure the continued loyalty of Egypt—and thereby to secure for the vast population of Constantinople, and the soldiers of the eastern front, the incomparable harvests sprung from the flood-plains of the Nile. Every year, gliding downriver to Alexandria, great fleets of barges would bring hundreds upon thousands of tons of grain; and every year, giant ships would then transport the precious cargo onwards to the capital. Alexandria might have been a marble-clad cosmopolis of lecture halls and churches; but she was no less an entrepôt of warehouses, docks and silos. Had she not been, the New Rome would long since have found the flesh shrinking off her bones: “For Constantinople and all the region around it are fed, in the main, by Alexandria.”²⁹

Yet, in the summer of 541, as the ghostly fleet of bronze ships appeared along the Mediterranean coast, it was becoming terrifyingly clear that death too, as well as life, might be had from Egypt. In July, reports had reached Alexandria of an epidemic in the port of Pelusium, on the far eastern side of the Nile Delta, that had left the city a charnel house. Panic at this news, however, was unlikely to have been immediate: for sudden flare-ups of disease were common, and usually, “by the grace of God which protects us, do not last long.”³⁰ The outbreak in Pelusium, however, had not abated. Instead, from coastal town to coastal town, it had begun to spread with lethal speed. Every time a bronze ship was spotted out on the night-time waters, people on the shore would abruptly find themselves struck down by a fever, and then, touching their groins, or their armpits, or behind their ears, discover painful black swellings—boubones, as they were called in Greek—until finally, it might be, staggering out into the streets, they would fall, and “become a terrible and shocking spectacle for those who saw them, as their bellies were swollen and their mouths wide open, throwing up pus like torrents, their eyes inflamed and their hands stretched out upward, and over the corpses that lay rotting on corners, and in the porches of courtyards, and in churches, and everywhere, with no one to bury them.”³¹ And so the pestilence raged; and as it raged, it drew ever closer to Alexandria.

By September, the first headaches, the first buboes, the first rattling expectorations of blood, were being reported in the docks. Within days, the plague was general over the city, and far beyond. Alexandria, ever the intellectual powerhouse, boasted the most prestigious medical schools in the world; but even the city’s famous teaching specialists found themselves helpless before the spread of the mysterious pestilence, unable to diagnose it, still less prescribe any cure. The death rate rose inexorably, until “many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants.”³² So putrid were the streets with piles of the dead, so thick with flies, so slippery underfoot with blood and melted flesh, that it was impossible to clear them. Those who dared to venture out into the fetid heat—whether to loot or simply to scavenge food—wore tags, so that their families could be alerted to come and bury them should they too be overwhelmed by the plague while abroad. Unless, of course, as was entirely probable, their families had themselves been struck down in the meanwhile. Nor, the observant noted, was it only humans who were perishing of the epidemic. Animals too were succumbing. “Why, even rats, swollen with buboes, were to be seen, infected and dying.”³³

Week after week, the pestilence continued its scything progress. Then finally it began to subside; until at last, four months after its first appearance on the streets of Alexandria, the dying was largely done. Yet the plague, “always moving forward and travelling at times favourable to it,”³⁴ was still far from spent. Traders from Egypt might sail as far afield as Britain—and those who had survived the pestilence still needed to make a living. In the spring of 542, as the storms of winter died down, the ships of Alexandria started to put out to sea, bearing with them their freights of merchandise: papyrus and linen, spices and medicines, glassware and exotic sweets. Pet birds too, and even camels, were sometimes transported; and then, of course, travelling as stow-aways, there were always rats. On the rats were fleas; and in the fleas was Yersinia pestis, the deadly pathogen that, unknown to anyone, was spreading the plague.³⁵ The science of bacteriology, it went without saying, lay immeasurably beyond the orbit of the scholarship of the age. Even the most brilliant of Alexandria’s doctors did not think to associate the spread of a pandemic so lethal and unprecedented with anything so commonplace as a flea bite. The result was, as ships fanned out across the Mediterranean, that the pestilence too, invisible and unsuspected, continued on its deadly way. Sometimes it happened, in the midst of a voyage, that a vessel would be attacked so suddenly “by the wrath of God,”³⁶ and to such devastating effect, that it would be left to drift aimlessly on the currents, manned by nothing but corpses, until it sank or ran aground. More commonly, a ship would dock in some distant port and then, a day or two later, the first buboes would start to appear on the groins and armpits of the locals. “And always, after beginning on the coast, the disease would then head on inland.”³⁷

In Constantinople, rumours of doom had been sweeping the city for months. Back in the autumn of 541, as Alexandria had been twisting upon the rack, a woman had fallen into a rapture and cried out to the Byzantines that death was arriving from the sea to swallow up the world. The following spring, with the first grain ships of the year looming off the Golden Horn, and granaries along the harbour front busily being filled, so mysterious apparitions began to be glimpsed. Whoever was touched by one of these phantoms would immediately fall sick. Within days, across the whole of Constantinople, thousands upon thousands were dying. At first, only the poor perished; but soon even the most exclusive quarters of the city were succumbing. Such was the lethal effect of the plague’s spread that entire palaces might be transformed into sepulchres, their mosaic floors littered with corpses, senators and servants alike left as pus-streaked food for worms. Even in the imperial palace, in the bedchamber of the emperor himself, the burning mark of the plague was felt; for Justinian too fell ill. That he went on to recover was proof that the pestilence, though virulent, was not necessarily fatal: for there were some, a small minority, who did survive infection. Whether this was necessarily a blessing, however, was debatable: for what pleasure could there be in life if spouse and children, friends and kin, were all of them dead? Certainly, to those who lived through that summer in Constantinople, the entire city appeared condemned. The streets were empty of the living; no business of any kind was undertaken, save for the burying of corpses; the butchers’ shops stood empty, the markets deserted, the bakers’ kilns unlit. “So it was, in a city prodigiously full of good things to eat, that starvation ran riot.”³⁸ The pestilence, adding to all the manifold sufferings that it had already dealt, now trailed famine in its wake.

To many of those who survived its passage, the plague appeared a calamity “by which the whole of humanity came close to annihilation.”³⁹ An exaggeration? Perhaps—but then again, accurate figures were hard to come by. The imperial statisticians had tried to keep track of the death rate in the capital, but had fast been overwhelmed. In due course, confronted by the mounds of corpses in the streets, Justinian gave orders for them to be dumped at sea, and then, as the water turned into a soup of decomposing flesh, for vast pits to be dug on the far side of the Golden Horn. Within these, rows of bodies were laid and then “trodden upon by feet and trampled like spoiled grapes,”⁴⁰ so that further corpses, when they were hurled down from the rim of the pit, would sometimes vanish into the mulch. To those haunted by such a hellish vision the entire world seemed to have become a winepress, in which countless multitudes were being crushed by the wrath of God. Even though the plague, by August 542, had finally spent itself in Constantinople, reports of its onward sweep across the rest of the empire, and beyond, did not diminish in horror. Asia Minor too, it was reported, had been visited by the pestilence, and Jerusalem, and the rubble-strewn shanty town that was Antioch. By December, it was endemic in Sicily, and by 543 across much of Italy, Spain and Gaul. That the West could boast no cities on the scale of those to be found in the East did not serve to spare it. In the most remote village, no less than in the darkest urban slum, the pestilence stalked down the living. “The world seemed returned to its primordial silence, for no voices rose in the fields, no whistling was heard of shepherds.” So it was reported of the Italian countryside. “Places where men once lived had become lairs for savage beasts.”⁴¹

Meanwhile, along the eastern frontier of Justinian’s empire, where Khusrow had frantically constructed a cordon sanitaire, the plague was briefly halted in its tracks. One outbreak of buboes, in the ranks of the Shahanshah’s own army, had been effectively quarantined, and another in Media. But the pestilence could not be kept at bay for ever. By 545, it had breached the bulwarks of Iranshahr and was sweeping eastwards with a violence even more terrible, if anything, than it had displayed on its westward course. Across Mesopotamia, in particular, it raged for longer than it had ever done in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that all was “famine, madness and fury.”⁴² Nothing was proof against it. Time would see it spread as far afield as China. Never before in history had so much of humanity been united by a common experience of suffering. If some communities were wiped out utterly by the plague, and some were mysteriously spared, then most, if reports are collated, and the evidence carefully sifted, appear to have suffered a mortality rate of something around a third.⁴³ Not annihilation, then, by any means; but a culling, nevertheless, on a wholly shattering scale.

Always, however, after every visitation, the time would come when even “the evil stench”⁴⁴ of the rotting corpses would lift, and people, rubbing their eyes, would emerge on to weed-covered streets or fields. Many of them—artisans, tradesmen, peasants—found the world they were returning to ripe with unanticipated opportunity. The ready supplies of labour that the wealthy had hitherto always taken for granted were suddenly at a premium. Demands that previously, before the coming of the plague, the poor would never have dared to push were now increasingly theirs to make. Inflation, as a result, began to gallop. By 545, just three years after the departure of the plague from Constantinople, Justinian was appalled to discover that wages in the capital had more than doubled. The emperor’s response to this unsettling state of affairs was his habitual one: he passed a law. By its terms, it was declared illegal for any labourer to be paid more than he would have received prior to the plague. The effect of this legislation, to Justinian’s bafflement and indignation, was minimal. Wages continued to spiral upwards. The world, it seemed, was not to be restored to its former condition simply on the say-so of an edict.

And in truth there was barely a sinew, barely a muscle of the great machine of imperial administration that had not been left enfeebled by the pestilence. Physicians noted with interest that those who had contracted the plague and survived would invariably bear the stamp of their brush with death. Some were left bald; others with a lisp; others with a staggering, lurching gait. Almost all suffered a terrible lassitude, often for years. To this rule, it was true, Justinian himself stood as a notable exception; but he knew, none better, that what might be true of individuals was true as well of his entire dominion. Infinitely more than the feckless tribes of the barbarians, more even than the kingdom of Khusrow, the empire of the Roman people had always depended on a sizeable population for its healthy functioning. Civilian state that it essentially was, it could not hope to prosper without a hefty tax base. Now, in the wake of the plague, that tax base had suffered perhaps irreparable damage. Nor was that the limit of the danger. In provinces that only a few years previously had provided ready supplies of recruits for the imperial armies, whole villages, whole regions now stood denuded. This, at the best of times, would have posed a formidable challenge. At a moment when Roman forces were engaged in a number of debilitating conflicts, from Italy to Syria, it threatened catastrophe.

As for Justinian himself, so devastating and unexpected had been the blow to all his ambitions that he might well have been expected to buckle under it. But he did not. Instead, grimly, doggedly, heroically, he set to shoring up his battered empire against utter ruin. From the summer of 548 onwards, he would be forced to do so without the woman who for over twenty years had been the companion both of his bed and of his councils: for in June that year, Theodora died. Justinian, who for the rest of his life would never cease to light candles before the mausoleum which he had built to serve the pair of them as their final resting place, could not endure to take another wife: henceforward, he would be married to his work. Day and night—“for he had little need of sleep”⁴⁵—he devoted himself to the thankless task of compensating for the most precipitous drop in revenue that any emperor had ever faced. Ruthless austerity measures were imposed: courier services slashed, road maintenance abandoned, the civil service streamlined. Tax-collection was overtly professionalised, so as to throttle any prospect of evasion. Even the manufacture of silk was nationalised. Such measures won for Justinian, against all the odds, funding sufficient to bring his many wars to a seemingly satisfactory close. By the time of his death in 565, he had stabilised the eastern frontier by signing yet another “Eternal Peace” with Khusrow, and decisively defeated the Ostrogoths in the West. He had even acquired a whole new province in southern Spain. Only fitting, then, it might have been thought, that the body of the great emperor, as it lay in state, had been covered by a pall on which he was shown trampling down a barbarian king, of the kind that it had always been the traditional prerogative of the Roman people to crush. Happy days, so the image proclaimed, were come again.

But the pall told only part of the story. Its portrait of the emperor as the youthful and Christ-favoured visionary who, in the joyous year of 534, had sat in triumph over the Vandals, veiled the withered corpse of an eighty-three-year-old man. Between the image of an empire restored to its ancient supremacy over most of the Mediterranean and the grim reality there stretched a similarly yawning chasm. In the opinion of Justinian’s critics—of whom, behind closed doors, there were many—the emperor’s cure had proved quite as deadly as the disease. In Italy, for instance, no matter how shrilly his propagandists might seek to deny it, “victory” had left the peninsula immeasurably less Roman than it had ever been under Theoderic. Over the course of two decades, the bloody and wearisome slog to overthrow the Ostrogoths had witnessed the abolition of the consulship, the flight to Constantinople of almost every senator, and even, during the winter months of 550, the most shocking of all the breaks with the past: the complete, albeit temporary, depopulation of Rome itself. Not since the time of Romulus had the Eternal City stood so empty, so abandoned to grass and swamps. Victory of such an order seemed scarcely different from defeat. Why, then, had Justinian waded through a whole mire of destruction to secure it? “Because he was bloodthirsty and murderous by nature,”⁴⁶ some thought to whisper. That his reign had seen “the entire world drenched with human blood”⁴⁷ was due, not to his desperate struggle against evil circumstance, but to the startling fact that he had literally been an agent of hell. Even his tireless burning of the midnight oil might be interpreted as evidence, not of his devotion to the Roman people, but of his diabolic nature. One servant had reported seeing Justinian late at night without his head; another that the emperor’s face had suddenly metamorphosed into a hideous and shapeless lump of flesh. “How, then, could this man have been anything other than a demon?”⁴⁸

Admittedly, those who pushed this particular theory did tend to have axes to grind.⁴⁹ Justinian, never popular with the traditional elite at the best of times, had hardly risen in their estimation by taking such strenuous measures, in the years before his death, to slash the budget deficit. Nothing about him quite so infernal, in the opinion of stymied tax-dodgers, as what they bitterly dismissed as his “avarice.” Nevertheless, it was hardly necessary to believe that the imperial throne had genuinely been occupied by “the Lord of Demons”⁵⁰ to dread that the gates of hell might be yawning increasingly wide. Zoroastrian priests were not alone in warning their flocks that time itself was destined to come to an end, amid a titanic death-struggle between good and evil. The same mood of mingled terror and hope that had inspired Mazdak to declare that the horizon was not far off, that the great climax of things was drawing near, had repeatedly haunted the imaginings of the Christian people, too. Christ Himself had warned His disciples what to expect: His own return, like lightning that “comes from the east and shines as far as the west”;⁵¹ His sitting in judgement over the living and the dead; His delivery of the wicked to eternal punishment, and of the righteous to eternal life. And the day and hour of these events? Not even the angels themselves, so Christ had declared, could be sure of that. Nevertheless, certain clues, certain signs, would herald for the faithful the coming of the Day of Judgement: “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.”⁵²

In the wake of Justinian’s reign, this was a message as unsettling as any in scripture. The plague, after its initial devastating eruption, had still not abated. By striking seemingly at random, at different times and in different places, it cast a perpetual shadow of menace. “Its recurrence,” so a lawyer in Antioch recorded in numb despair, “has seen me lose, at various times, several of my children, my wife, and many of my kin, not to mention numerous servants, both in town and in the country.”⁵³ Time would see him lose a grandson as well: a pattern of bereavement repeated across the empire and far beyond. Yet pestilence was only one of the harbingers of the End Days to have afflicted the Roman people. Prior to the plague’s appearance, back in 536, a mysterious dust cloud had cast the world into darkness for months.⁵⁴ Then, in December 557, a terrible earthquake had shaken Constantinople, rocking it so severely that the dome of Hagia Sophia had collapsed the following spring, necessitating years of repairs. Most ominous of all, in 559, an army of barbarians had crossed the frozen Danube and struck so far south as to menace Greece and the capital itself. Constantinople had been preserved from seemingly inevitable ruin only by the desperate summoning of Belisarius out of retirement: for the aged general, frail though he had become, had lost none of his aptitude for winning victories. Elsewhere, however, the rising tempo of barbarian assaults had proved less easy to repulse. Bands of migratory peasants known as Slavs had been infiltrating the Balkans since the 540s, when the plague had first harrowed the region. Then, from beyond the Danube, a tribe of peculiarly brutal savages, steppe-land nomads named the Avars, had started to make alarming demands for danger money. Most demoralising of all, perhaps, was the descent upon Italy in 568 of a shaven-headed, long-bearded people called the Lombards, who in next to no time had succeeded in dismembering Constantinople’s hard-won mastery of the peninsula for good. Less than a decade after the death of Justinian, and imperial control had been pegged back to a corridor of land between Ravenna and Rome. So much blood, so much destruction—and all in vain.

How were these catastrophic eruptions to be explained? On one level, the answer was very simple. Nomads, by and large, had proved immune to the reach of the plague. As a result, whether descending across the Danube or from the Alps, they usually vastly outnumbered the local garrisons. Even Belisarius, in his last-ditch defence of Constantinople, had been able to muster only a few hundred veterans, and had depended largely for his victory on a rag-bag of peasants, and plenty of bluff. Elsewhere, for all the conscientiousness with which Justinian had devoted his tax revenues to the construction of fortresses along the empire’s frontiers, not even the most bristling of walls could be made serviceable without soldiers to man them. Time and again, as barbarian horsemen advanced into Roman territory, they would find themselves passing fields that stood overgrown, and villages that lay abandoned. Whole stretches of the empire, to all intents and purposes, were now “deserted.”⁵⁵

All of this had long been foretold. Christ had not been alone in warning of how the world was destined to end. Jewish prophets and Christian saints alike had predicted that fearsome and savage hordes would descend on God’s people “like a cloud covering the land”⁵⁶ in the run-up to the End Days: hordes to whom, in the Bible, had been given the sinister names “Gog” and “Magog.” The hint of dark mystery in all this had been sufficient, as the world had become increasingly Christian, and barbarians ever more of a threat, to prompt much heated speculation. Who were Gog and Magog? Where were they lurking? Why would they not materialise until the end of time? The answers to these questions had been found, somewhat unexpectedly, in the biography of Alexander the Great. Historians had long known that the famous conqueror, in the course of his global travels, had discovered a mountain pass on the edge of the world, which he had sealed with “iron gates.”⁵⁷ Over the centuries, this story had been much improved. By the time of Justinian, it was known for a fact that the gates had been faced with bronze; that the peoples they had served to imprison had been none other than Gog and Magog; and that Alexander, upon whom “the Spirit of the Lord rested,”⁵⁸ had built them with the direct encouragement of an angel.

To the Christian people of Alexandria, this was not wholly bad news, perhaps. It provided a welcome reassurance: that the founder of their city, despite his regrettable taste for sporting the horns of a pagan demon, had all along been a self-proclaimed servant of God.⁵⁹ By and large, however, the implications were unnerving in the extreme. It was hard, with barbarians gathering outside the walls of Constantinople and the whole world seemingly on the move, to avoid the obvious conclusion: that yet another portent of the End Days had arrived upon the scene. The bolts set on Alexander’s gates, so many dreaded, were starting to crumple, and buckle, and give. Beyond them, straining to be released upon the world, were waiting Gog and Magog—fiends so terrible that they thought nothing of drinking the blood of babies and snacking on kittens. Before the onset of such invaders, then, who could say what the fate of the world would be?

No wonder, in the final years of the sixth Christian century, that many in the empire of the Romans should have looked to the future with a peculiar foreboding: “Calamities are approaching, such as the current generation cannot imagine.”⁶⁰ A sobering reflection: that the worst might be yet to come.

The Great War

Around Easter, AD 600, the plague returned to Galilee. So virulently did the outbreak rage that it had soon spread beyond the Golan Heights and into the wilderness of scrub and sand that bordered Palestine. Prominent among the frontier settlements devastated by its coming was Jabiya, the great tent city of the Ghassanids. There, the horror of the pestilence would long be remembered. “Like whirlwinds,” wrote one of their poets, “it left the smoke of its blazing passage.”⁶¹

Arabs who lived beyond the frontiers of the empire had previously been spared the worst of the plague. Infection stalked the desert less readily than it did streets or fields. More than half a century had passed since the first appearance of the pestilence, and still the Arabs took for granted that it was a disease of “the land of the Romans.”⁶² To the Ghassanids, and to the Lakhmids as well, the culling of peoples along the entire sweep of the Fertile Crescent had spelled considerable opportunity: for the exhaustion and impoverishment of both their respective sponsors had inevitably resulted in a certain loosening of leashes. Back in the 540s, for instance, at the height of the devastation wrought by the pestilence, Arethas and Mundhir had been free to escalate their vendetta “without reference to either the Romans or the Persians.”⁶³ Superpower patronage, amid the swirl of their own venomous hatred, became almost an irrelevance. The two sides increasingly battled in the names of heavenly, rather than earthly, sponsors. Mundhir, following his capture of one of Arethas’s sons, did not hesitate to top his earlier sacrifice of four hundred virgins to al-’Uzza by offering up the Ghassanid prince to the goddess al-’Uzza. Other Christian captives, so it was claimed, were tortured by the Lakhmid king until they agreed to join in her worship. News of these atrocities, brought to Saint Simeon on his pillar, so appalled the stylite that he promptly lent his prayers to the Ghassanids. Sure enough, in 554, Arethas had been graced with a stunning and climactic triumph. In a great battle fought at Chalcis, in Syria, a Lakhmid invasion force was annihilated. Simeon, borne from his pillar by the agency of the heavens to a hill overlooking the action, made his own personal contribution to the victory by asking the Holy Spirit to strike down Mundhir with a fireball—a request which the Holy Spirit obligingly met. Arethas hailed the Ghassanid dead, among them his own eldest son, not merely as heroes but as martyrs in the cause of Christ.

Here, in this notion—that killing might be done as a service to the heavens as well as to secure plunder—was an intoxicating new possibility for the Arabs to contemplate. To the Ghassanids, in particular, it had fast become something more: the irreducible core of their identity. By 600, there could be no doubting their commitment to the image they had of themselves: as the shields of a Christian empire. Not even a host of insults from the increasingly twitchy Roman establishment—including, in 582, the exiling of their king to Sicily and a brief, disastrous attempt to dissolve their federation altogether—could shake their loyalty. In their own opinion, they were warriors of God or they were nothing. It was a potent conceit. Other Arab tribes, rather than dismissing the Ghassanids as Roman stool-pigeons, increasingly viewed them as they had previously viewed the Lakhmids: as cynosures of chivalry. So open was the table at the Ghassanid court, poets claimed, that Jabiya’s watchdogs had quite fallen out of the habit of barking at strangers. Even their recipes were of a quality appropriate to favourites of the heavens. No higher compliment could possibly be paid to a woman, for instance, than to compare her excellence to that of the local speciality, the tharidat Ghassan—a stew of brains and gravy.^c

The Ghassanids’ influence ran far deeper than haute cuisine, though. Their aura of glamour and invincibility served as invaluable marketing for their celestial patron, too. By 600, even the king of the Lakhmids had become a Christian. In Hira, as in Jabiya, stone churches were erected amid the tents. From the north to the distant south—where Najran’s Ka’ba preserved the glorious memory of the city’s martyrs—the margins of Arabia increasingly bore the physical signs of the Christian faith. To ambitious warlords, these promised not merely heavenly salvation in the hereafter, but ready access within their lifetimes to the dimension of the angelic. The conviction that a man of exceptional holiness, by virtue of his sufferings, might come to see through the veil of his tears the blaze of the heavenly hosts, their drawn swords flickering with fire, was held by many Arabs with a wolfish literalness. The military potential of a saint, after all, had been amply demonstrated by the fireball that had incinerated Mundhir. Many warriors, in the wake of their great victory at Chalcis, had duly flocked to Saint Simeon’s pillar, as though to be touched themselves with something of his power. Decades later, the Ghassanids continued to see in their own Christian piety a weapon more prodigious by far than any other in their armoury.

A perspective fit to awe even those tribes that had not submitted to baptism. Between the belief of Christians in an unseen realm of spirits, and that of the Arabs, there was considerable overlap. Pagans as well as monks might claim to see angels. Dushara, for instance, was said by his worshippers to employ a particularly potent one as his lieutenant; while at Mamre, according to Sozomen, the draw for pagan pilgrims was precisely that “angels had appeared there to men.”⁶⁴ All this, though, to fretful Christians, was anything but reassuring. That a pagan might be familiar with angels implied that some of them, at the very least, must in truth have derived from hell. The full, alarming implications of this were best illustrated by what had happened in a city on the edge of Palestine, where, at the height of the plague, demons in the form of angels had appeared to the terrified inhabitants and told them that they would be spared only if they worshipped a bronze idol. Clearly, then, when dealing with supernatural messengers, it was essential to be alert to the possibility of disinformation. Yet this in turn, ironically enough, was nothing with which the pagans of the desert would have disagreed. Just as it was possible for them to accept the existence of angels, so also did they dread the malignity of jinn, invisible spirits bred of fire, many of whom took an active pleasure in the sufferings of mortals. Even the Ghassanids had blamed the onset of the plague on their “stinging.”⁶⁵ A Christian Arab, picturing combatants engaged upon a celestial battlefield, would doubtless have imagined very little to perplex his pagan counterpart. Between jinn and demons, it appeared, the boundaries were easily blurred. And between goddesses and angels too? Very possibly. Messengers from heaven appeared to have a definite preference for matching image to audience. Angels who manifested themselves in a Roman province, for instance, were as like as not to sport the medallions and “bright crimson belts”⁶⁶ of imperial bureaucrats. Perhaps, then, in those reaches of Arabia as yet only semi-illumined by the blaze of Christ, it was only to be expected that they would adopt the look, and sometimes even the names, of pagan deities.⁶⁷ Suspended as a goddess such as al-’Uzza was in an eerie, distorting half-light, midway between the past and the future, between paganism and the worship of a single god, who was to say what her future would be: whether as demon or as angel, or to be forgotten altogether?

Certainly, in the decades that followed the onset of the plague, there could be little doubt that the border zone beyond the Holy Land was indeed extending ever further south, into Arabia. That this was so reflected not the strength of the Christian empire, however, but its debilitation. A pronounced shift had occurred in the balance of power, not just in the region of the Fertile Crescent, but along the entire southern frontier. In Carthage, for instance, fretful commentators noted that, while the empire’s “once countless military units had dwindled in number, the plague, that ally of war, had not so much as touched the rancorous tribes.”⁶⁸ It was as a consequence of this that the Berbers, natives of North Africa who lurked in the mountains beyond the reach of any imperial strike force, had begun to change from a nuisance to a threat. In Arabia, too, the desert nomads, spared the devastation of the pestilence, scented opportunity in the Romans’ agony. They may have lacked the teeming numbers of the Slavs or the Avars, but they too were increasingly on the move. By 600, entire populations of emigrants—muhajirun, in Arabic—had settled between Palestine and the Hijaz, the region of Arabia that abuts the upper half of the Red Sea. Tribes completely unknown to the imperial authorities only a few decades earlier—the Judham, the Amila and the Bali—now joined the roster of foederati. Whether they were truly to be reckoned as friends of the Roman people, however, or as troublesome intruders bought off with danger money, was not altogether clear. Bluff, even at the best of times, worked best without an excess of scrutiny.

Indisputable, however, was the fact that the authorities in Palestine did need allies to patrol a buffer zone for them. The same collapse in manpower and revenues as had afflicted the northern and western fronts had resulted in particularly devastating cuts along the frontier of the Holy Land. Indeed, ever since the arrival of the plague, it had effectively been demobilised. Forts stood abandoned to weeds, jackals and the odd ascetic. A radical streamlining—but informed, nevertheless, by a certain brutal logic. Predatory nomads might be a nuisance—but they scarcely compared in terms of menace with the House of Sasan. Sixty years after Khusrow had plundered the cities of Syria, the frontier with Iranshahr remained Roman strategists’ supreme priority, and the source of all their nightmares. Such resources as the empire could muster continued to be lavished on its garrisons. The consequence was, at a time when even the previously booming cities of Syria were afflicted by contraction and impoverishment, that the border zone withIranshahr alone defied recession.⁶⁹

And here, for those Arabs beyond the frontier keen to better themselves, was yet further scope for battening onto Roman gold. Not since the collapse of the spice trade had business conditions been more in their favour. It was not only Syria’s cities but its countryside that had been devastated by the plague. Repeated outbreaks had crippled agricultural production.⁷⁰ Passers-by, observing the overgrown fields, the rotting apples and grapes, the feral cattle, sheep and goats, were moved to quote the words of the prophet Isaiah: “the earth shall be laid utterly waste and be utterly despoiled.”⁷¹ Yet garrisons, of course, still needed food for their messes, provender for their horses and pack animals, leather for their armour, shields and tents. Under normal circumstances, the costs of overland transport would hardly have made it worth the while of Arab merchants to trade in such basic commodities; but circumstances, in the wake of the plague, were very far from normal. The Arabs, for the first time in many centuries, found themselves major players in a sellers’ market.

Nor was it only the Romans who offered them ripe opportunity for doing business. The same pestilence that had so devastated Syria had brought ruin to Mesopotamia as well. Formidable though the Persians continued to appear when viewed from the watchtowers of Dara, the truth was that they too, no less than their western rivals, had found the legacy of the plague a devastating one. Khusrow’s successes—no less than Justinian’s—appeared to have left his empire only the more exposed. In 557, in the greatest triumph of his reign, he had succeeded in annihilating the Hephthalites once and for all, so that of the people who had once brought such ruin and humiliation upon Iranshahr nothing had remained but the memory of their name. Yet that victory had come at high cost. The battle had been won in alliance with the Turks: “an ugly, insolent, broad-faced, eyelashless mob.”⁷² These new arrivals, gorging themselves on their winnings, had soon established themselves as a presence on Iranshahr’s northern frontier no less menacing than the Hephthalites had ever been. Nomadic, and therefore largely unaffected by the plague, they were even more numerous than the Avars, whose khan they imperiously dismissed as a runaway slave. Khusrow, pressured from the north by the Turks and along the western front, as ever, by the Romans, had duly found himself locked into a struggle to defend his borders no less desperate than the one faced by Justinian. Still, into his ninth decade, he had been obliged to remain upon the campaign trail. By the time that he finally died, in 579, he had, so it was reliably reported, “lost his appetite for war.”⁷³

The challenge of how to cope with the escalating crisis was inherited by his son, Hormizd. The solution attempted by the new Shahanshah—who would long be remembered for his “benevolence toward the weak and destitute”⁷⁴—was to accuse the Parthian nobility of hoarding wealth that could better be spent by himself on succouring his needy people, and to aim, as not even Khusrow had dared to do, at the permanent breaking of their power. There was, of course, in this attempt at increased centralisation, more than an echo of the policies adopted by Justinian in the wake of the plague; but the Parthian nobility, unlike their Roman counterparts, had never been content merely to snipe and moan from the sidelines. In 590, the leader of the Mihran, a renowned general by the name of Bahram Chobin, suffered a minor reverse at the hands of the Romans, and was sent an outfit of women’s clothes to wear by a contemptuous Hormizd. Such, at any rate, was the story later told; and whether true or not, it is certain that the onset of the campaigning season saw Bahram Chobin marching, not against the Romans, but directly on Ctesiphon. The news of his approach was sufficient to inspire two other Parthian dynasts in the capital to stage a coup. Hormizd was toppled, blinded and put to death, all in brisk succession. His young son was thrust on to the throne and proclaimed Khusrow II. Not since the dark days following the death of Peroz, a hundred years previously, had the House of Sasan appeared more beleaguered.

And worse was to come. Bahram Chobin went further than even his most audacious ancestors had done. Rather than rest content with the toppling of Hormizd, he took the ultimate, the blasphemous step: he declared himself king. Here, for the Zoroastrian Church as much as for the House of Sasan, was a manoeuvre that threatened the breaking of the universe itself: for how could the one hope to survive without the other? Bahram Chobin, it seems, did not shrink from answering this question in the boldest terms imaginable. He was, so he declared, the living embodiment of the Fire of Mihr is Great. If it were true, as seemed entirely probable, that the End Days were approaching, then clearly Iranshahr needed not so much a king as a saviour. This, mimicking the strategy of Mazdak, was precisely what Bahram Chobin claimed to be. Far from ducking the mowbeds’ charge that his rebellion threatened the end of the world, he seems openly to have revelled in the fact.⁷⁵

In the event, his occupation of the throne of Ardashir lasted no more than a year. Khusrow II, with the inevitable backing of the Mihran’s rival Parthian dynasts and the far more unexpected support of the new Caesar, Maurice, defeated the rebel Shahanshah, who promptly fled to the Turks. There, soon afterwards, he was assassinated by Sasanian agents. Order, it appeared, had been restored to heaven and earth. Yet this would prove to be a spectacular delusion. In truth, the presentiment of Bahram Chobin that the framework of things stood upon the brink of dissolution was to prove all too justified. Like the plague, the contagion of violence initiated by his rebellion was destined to spread far and wide. As in Ctesiphon, so in Constantinople—its effects would be cataclysmic.

Maurice, in his decision to override the advice of the Senate, and lend his backing to the House of Sasan, had been influenced by one prime consideration: the urgent need to save money. The gambit had initially appeared a great success: the restoration of a grateful Khusrow II to his throne had indeed resulted in a peace dividend. Fatefully, though, this had encouraged in Maurice a terminal delusion: that he could now afford to stint on the pay of his soldiers. Back in 588, the Army of the East, used as it was to lavish subsidy, had already mutinied over this issue. When the high command had sought to intimidate the fractious soldiery into submission by unveiling before their gaze the self-portrait of Christ from Edessa, “the mob, far from being brought to its senses, had gone so far as to pelt the ineffable object with stones.”⁷⁶ More than a decade later, in 602, it was the turn of the soldiers in the Balkans to explode into open insurrection. Phocas, their leader, and a man quite as contemptuous of proprieties as Bahram Chobin had been, opted to do what no Roman commander had ever done before: he marched on Constantinople. The proud boast of the Christian empire—that for centuries “no emperor had perished by the hands of either domestic or foreign foes”⁷⁷—was trampled brutally into the dirt. Maurice, apprehended in Chalcedon as he sought to escape the Balkan rebels, was beheaded, and his corpse exposed to the jeers of the Hippodrome. His replacement as Caesar, inevitably, was Phocas. Eight years later, the usurper too had been overthrown. His genitals were hacked off, his body skinned, and his head paraded through the streets of the capital on a pole. The toxin of something murderous, it appeared, was now well and truly loose in the New Rome.

Yet, if any man was fitted to the finding of an antidote, then it was, ironically enough, the same faction-leader who had toppled Phocas: an Armenian by the name of Heraclius. “Handsome, tall, brave, and a born fighter,”⁷⁸ the new emperor had already more than demonstrated his capabilities by seizing power in the wake of an almost unfeasibly ambitious operation: a naval assault from Carthage, where his father had been governor-general. Certainly, situated as he now was in the eye of a storm as violent as any in all of Rome’s long history, Heraclius faced the most searing test imaginable of his many talents. The cracking of the ages that Bahram Chobin had sensed in Iranshahr was increasingly being experienced in Constantinople, too. When crosses in the city began to shake and jump about, few doubted that it portended a truly cosmic evil. In the opinion of Theodore—the empire’s most celebrated living saint, and a man of such awesome holiness that he wore a fifty-pound metal corset and subsisted entirely on lettuce—the arrival of the Devil on earth was near: “There will be inroads of many barbarous peoples, and the shedding of much blood, and destruction and captivity throughout the world, and the desolation of holy churches.” Then, stated with a terrifying finality, the most shocking forecast of all: “The empire itself will fall.”⁷⁹

Such an eventuality, of course, could only herald the End Times—and yet astoundingly, within a mere decade of the ascent of Heraclius to the throne, it had become not merely a possibility, but a terrifying likelihood. The descent of Constantinople into factionalism had not gone unnoted in Ctesiphon. There, eager to escape the shadow of the great Parthian dynasts, and to give some colour to his still pallid authority, Khusrow II had recognised in the deposition of Maurice the perfect opportunity to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels. Never before had Iranshahr witnessed such florid mourning for a Caesar. Khusrow—despite describing himself as “the king who hates war”⁸⁰—posed, with a great show of indignant piety, as his murdered benefactor’s avenger. As was traditional, he launched his campaign by settling down before the walls of Dara. Abandoned to its fate by the distracted authorities in Constantinople, the great fortress duly surrendered, albeit after a three-year siege. Three years after that, in 609, Amida fell, too. Then, in 610, the supposedly Christ-protected city of Edessa opened its gates to the Persians. Suddenly, not only Syria but Anatolia and Palestine lay naked and defenceless before the armies of the Shahanshah. Not since the time of Cyrus had a Persian king been presented with such a deliriously tempting opportunity for westward conquest. Khusrow, scarcely believing his luck, decided to go for broke.

One army, plundering, slaving and killing as it went, struck so deep into Anatolia that in 614 even Ephesus, on the shores of the Aegean, was put to the torch.⁸¹ Meanwhile, a second task force, under the command of a Mihranid warlord by the name of Shahrbaraz, swung southwards.⁸² Its mission: not merely to loot but to annex. Its success was beyond Khusrow’s wildest hopes. By 615, the whole of Syria and Palestine belonged to the Shahanshah, with even hippodromes converted into polo pitches. Four years later, he ruled as the lord of Egypt, too. The dream that had haunted every King of Kings since the time of Ardashir—of an authentically universal, world-spanning monarchy—appeared close to realisation at last. The empire of the Romans, meanwhile, stood on the brink of annihilation.

“As for the fourth beast, there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth, which shall be different from all the kingdoms, and it shall devour the whole earth, and trample it down, and break it to pieces.”⁸³ Such had been the dream of Daniel; and an angel, explaining the vision, had foretold that the time was destined to come when the beast would be destroyed, “and given over to be burned with fire,”⁸⁴ and that the people of God would then inherit the earth. This, in the time-sanctioned opinion of the Church, had been a prophecy of the fate of Rome’s pagan order; but perhaps it was only to be expected that the Jews, tracking in amazed astonishment the implosion of the New Rome’s Christian empire, should have interpreted it rather differently. Surely now, many of them dared to hope, the coming of the Messiah could not be long delayed? Surely, with Gog and Magog “clashing mightily” and terror filling “the hearts of the nations,” the time had come at last when “Israel will be cleansed of her sins”?⁸⁵

Focus of all these expectations, only naturally, was Jerusalem. Here, when Shahrbaraz appeared before its walls in the early summer of 614, the patriarch flatly refused to countenance the appalling possibility that the Holy City might actually fall to pagans. Rather than negotiate terms with the invaders—as most other urban authorities, remembering the fate of Antioch, had hurried to do—he insisted on trusting to the protection of Christ.⁸⁶ Three weeks later, the Persian army stormed the city. The slaughter was something prodigious: some fifty thousand corpses were said to have been left piled up in the streets. A further thirty-five thousand Christians, including the patriarch himself, were hauled off into captivity. With them, exhumed from a vegetable patch where it had been buried upon news of the Persian approach, went the single most precious object in the entire Christian empire: the True Cross. A shudder at the humiliation of this had naturally run deep across the Roman world. No less naturally, it was taken for granted by most Christians that a calamity of such an order could only ever have been the fault of the Jews. Indignant rumour-mongers insisted that it was they who had acted as spies for the Persians, had opened the city’s gates, and had led the slaughter of Jerusalem’s virgins. Most terrible of all, it was claimed that in the aftermath of the siege, Jews had rounded up some 4500 Christian captives, had ordered them at sword-point to change their religion, and then, upon their refusal, had slaughtered every last one. True or not, such allegations were universally believed—and were only fuelled by the naked euphoria of the Jews themselves. No sooner had Jerusalem passed into Persian hands than a mysterious figure, “Nehemiah the son of Hushiel,”^d stepped forward to lead the city’s Jews up on to the Temple Mount, where they constructed an altar. Sacrifices, for the first time in five hundred years, were offered on the sacred rock in accordance with the Law of Moses. The opportunity had come at last, it appeared, “to found a temple of holiness.”⁸⁷

Yet, all these ecstatic expectations were soon cruelly dashed. The Persians, no less tolerant of Jewish pretensions than the Romans had been, did not have the slightest intention of permitting the construction of a new Temple, or allowing some upstart Jew to proclaim himself the Messiah. Only a few months into their occupation of Jerusalem, they arrested Nehemiah, accused him of sedition, and executed him. Whether in fact he had claimed to be the Messiah or not, it was clear that he could not, after all, have been the “son of man” foretold by Daniel, who was destined, after the burning of the fourth beast, to achieve “dominion and glory and kingdom.”⁸⁸

Meanwhile, far to the north, Heraclius was preparing to hammer a further nail into the coffin of Jewish hopes. Perilous though his circumstances certainly were, yet he had not despaired of them, nor of his empire. The decade that Khusrow had spent in making extravagant conquests, Heraclius had spent in firming up his power base. By 624, he was finally in a position to go on the offensive, confident that he would not be stabbed in the back. This, for his prospects of success, could hardly have been more critical: for the emperor’s campaigning plans were the height of ambition. Just as he had toppled Phocas by striking directly at him from across a prodigious expanse of sea, so now did he aim to repeat the trick by crossing the mountains of Armenia and “cutting out at its roots the very source of the evil—Persia.”⁸⁹ The gamble was a prodigious one: for Heraclius, straining every financial and logistical muscle to the limit, had mustered a task force that was effectively his empire’s last line of defence. Teetering on the edge of such peril, he too, just as the Jews had done, looked to scripture for reassurance: “And Heraclius, taking the book of Daniel, discovered in it written thus: ‘The goat of the west will come forth, and he will destroy the horns of the ram of the east.’ Then the emperor rejoiced, and was convinced that everything would succeed for him against the Persians.”⁹⁰

And so it did. Four long years Heraclius would be gone from Constantinople: a period of absence that would culminate in one of the most stunning comebacks ever recorded in military history. Relentless though the fighting was, and doomed though the Roman cause would certainly have been had the emperor and his tiny army ever been wiped out, yet the greatest aspect of this astonishing campaign was the one that pitched faith directly against faith. In Palestine, shortly before the sack of Jerusalem, heavenly armies had been seen clashing in the sky; and now, on the fallen earth, a battle no less celestial in its character was due to be fought. Heraclius, taking a leaf out of the Ghassanid book, did not hesitate to proclaim himself a warrior of Christ. In doing so, he put on the line not merely his own life and his empire’s survival, but the entire authority of the Christian god. As a stake, he wagered the most precious thing he had: Constantinople itself. In 626, when Khusrow ordered Shahrbaraz to advance directly to the shores of the Bosphorus, Heraclius did not waver in his conviction that the Christian people of his capital lay secure beneath the watch of the heavens. Not even the fact that the Avars were simultaneously descending from the north, complete with the very latest fashion in siege-towers and catapults, could persuade him to abandon his plan of campaign, and retreat from Iranshahr. His confidence, in the event, was to be richly rewarded. The Virgin Mary—whose silhouette, “a woman alone in decorous dress,”⁹¹ was said to have been glimpsed by the Avar Khan himself upon the battlements—stood directly on guard over the capital. It helped as well that the Byzantine navy, sallying out into the Bosphorus, succeeded in sinking the entire Persian transport fleet. The great siege lasted only a couple of weeks before both Shahrbaraz’s army and the Avars withdrew. The citizens of Constantinople, steeled by such an ultimate test, could know themselves truly the people of God.

Meanwhile, far distant in Iranshahr, Heraclius was busy demonstrating to the fire-worshipping subjects of “the destructive and ruinous Khusrow”⁹² that their own lord was heaven-cursed. Rather than aim at direct, immediate military conquest—an objective that was well beyond his resources—he made it his goal instead to demolish every conceivable underpinning of the prestige of the House of Sasan. This was why he chose to open his campaigning by sweeping down upon the Fire of the Stallion, storming the summit of the lonely mountain on which it stood, wasting the temple, and stamping out the sacred embers. Then, emboldened by a whole string of victories, he descended from the mountains of Media, and scythed a bloody course across the open mudflats of Mesopotamia, leaving canals, roads and villages polluted with corpses. Finally, in December 627, he began to target Khusrow’s own palaces. Their overseers were taken captive; the animals in the royal parks, from ostriches to tigers, barbecued and fed to his soldiers; the silks, and carpets, and bags of spices in the treasuries put to the torch. “Let us quench the fire before it consumes everything,”⁹³ Heraclius wrote to his great rival—but already, even as he sent the letter, the flames lit by his soldiers were to be seen from the walls of a terrified Ctesiphon.

Meanwhile, Heraclius had more than likely been in secret communication with Shahrbaraz.⁹⁴ The Parthian general, his troops stationed in ostentatious inactivity in Syria, had been in deep disgrace with Khusrow ever since the failure of the assault on Constantinople. Now, with the Shahanshah in headlong flight before Heraclius’ outriders, the Mihranid warlord prepared to add to his dynasty’s long record of treachery towards the House of Sasan, and stab Khusrow in the back. On 23 February 628, two of Shahrbaraz’s sons arrested the bedraggled monarch, who was suffering from chronic dysentery at the time, and imprisoned him in one of his own palaces. There, they set before him “a great heap of gold, and silver, and precious stones”⁹⁵—but no food. The wretched Khusrow was left to starve, and literally shit himself, for five days. On the sixth day, his captors shot him to death with arrows. With that, the great war—which had raged for twenty-five years and had spread destruction to the furthest limits of East and West—was over at last.

The victory belonged, decisively, to Heraclius. His insight, that in a world rendered a living hell by plague and war what mattered most was to have a convincing claim upon the favour of the heavens, had been proved correct in the most resounding fashion imaginable. Khusrow had not been defeated militarily: the walls of his capital would certainly have stood proof against the tiny Roman invasion force, and his western conquests were still staked out by Persian garrisons. Yet so meticulously had his prestige been shredded that all his authority had simply melted away—leaving his subjects to ponder the unthinkable, and ask themselves whether the House of Sasan itself might have been abandoned by its farr. Certainly, by the summer of 629, when Heraclius negotiated the treaty that officially concluded the great war, the key player was not the seven-year-old grandson of Khusrow who now sat perched precariously on the Persian throne, but Shahrbaraz. Ignoring the infant Shahanshah with high-handed disdain, the emperor and the Parthian dynast “agreed among themselves that all Roman territory occupied by the Persians should be restored to the Romans.”⁹⁶ Then, quietly, tipping his fellow negotiator the wink, Heraclius agreed to back Shahrbaraz, should the Mihranid chief wish to pursue his own royal ambitions. To no one’s great surprise, in April 630, Shahrbaraz duly made his power grab, murdered the child-king and proclaimed himself Shahanshah. A mere forty days later, he himself was dead—toppled in yet another coup. Assorted Sasanian wraiths, backed by assorted Parthian sponsors, now set to clawing one another to pieces. Heraclius could feel well content. Like a fish, Iranshahr was patently rotting from its head.

Yet, even as the House of Sasan snatched desperately after its disintegrating authority and prestige, Heraclius knew that there was an urgent need to preserve his own empire from suffering a similar fate. Even in Constantinople, that victorious and Christ-guarded city, a mood of exhaustion was manifest: in the suburbs left wasted by the Avars, and in the churches stripped bare to fund the war effort. Elsewhere, in the provinces only just evacuated by their Persian occupiers, marks of ruin were even more omnipresent: in the forts now blackened and gate-less; in the fields overrun by bandits; in the weed-choked streets of ravaged cities. Burned, looted, depopulated—entire swaths of the empire lay mouldering in a state of the most gangrenous misery. Clearly, then, urgent as it was to restore to the redeemed provincials the long-atrophied habits of obedience to Roman rule, more urgent still was the need to reassure them that the victory won by Heraclius had indeed been a victory won by God. This was why, in his negotiations with Shahrbaraz, no more urgent demand had been pressed by the emperor than the return from its ignominious captivity of the True Cross. On 21 March 630, stripped of all his imperial regalia and walking humbly on foot, as Christ Himself had done on his way to Golgotha, Heraclius entered Jerusalem, bearing with him the precious relic. Men reported that the manner of his arrival had been the result of advice given him by an angel, who had personally instructed him to take off his diadem, and to dismount from his horse. A supreme honour for Heraclius to receive: orders direct from the heavens to imitate the last journey of his Saviour.

The restoration of the True Cross to Jerusalem was the profoundest demonstration imaginable of the great victory that had been won in the cause of Christ. It also served as a ringing statement of Heraclius’s intent: never again would he permit the Christian empire to be pushed by its enemies to the edge of oblivion. On his approach to Jerusalem, he had made a point of stopping off in Tiberias, where he had been hosted by a wealthy Jew notorious, under the Persian occupation, for his persecution of the city’s churches. Asked by Heraclius why he had so mistreated the local Christians, the Jew had answered disingenuously, “Why, because they are the enemies of my faith.”⁹⁷ Heraclius, grim-faced, had advised his host to accept baptism on the spot—which the Jew had prudently done. Two years later, this order was repeated on a far more universal scale. From Africa to distant Gaul, leaders across the Christian world received news of a startling imperial decision: all Jews and Samaritans were to be brought compulsorily to baptism. Heraclius, conscious of how close he had come to defeat, and of the debt he owed to Christ, was not prepared to take any second chances. From now on, the Roman Empire would be undilutedly, and therefore impregnably, Christian.

But what of those who lay beyond the reach of the empire? In 632, the same year that saw Heraclius issue his decree on the forcible conversion of the Jews, barbarian horsemen, “harsh and strange,”⁹⁸ descended upon Palestine, ravaging the undefended margins of the province and then disappearing as suddenly as they had arrived. Who were they, and what did they portend? No one could be entirely certain. There were some Christians, however, notwithstanding the triumphant return to Jerusalem of the True Cross, who feared the worst. Dread that the end of time might be at hand had not entirely been abated by the great victory of Heraclius. “To see a savage people emerge from the desert and run through land that is not theirs, as if it were their own, laying waste our sweet and organised country with their wild and tamed beasts”⁹⁹—what could be more ominous than that?

Perhaps, then, indeed, when the End Times arrived, it would be upon the winding shadows of the indignant desert birds.

^a “Serapis” was the Greek form of “Osiris-Apis”: Osiris being the Egyptian god of the dead, and Apis a sacred bull who manifested himself at regular intervals in Egypt. There was a massive Serapeum at Saqqara, to which Alexander made offerings, and it was this that inspired the cult of Serapis in Alexandria.

^b No source explicitly states that the scrolls stored in the Serapeum were destroyed by the triumphant Christians, but it is hard to imagine what else might have happened to them.

^c Muhammad himself agreed. A celebrated hadith recorded the Prophet’s praise of his favourite wife. “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘The superiority of Aisha over other women is like the superiority of Tharid to other meals.’ ” (Sahih al-Bukhari: Vol. 5, Book 57, 114).

^d Almost certainly not his real name. The original Nehemiah had served as a governor of Jerusalem back in the fifth century BC, under the original Persian Empire. A book in the Bible is named after him.