CHAPTER IV
The Battle of Actium had two tremendous results. First of all, it ensured that the political spotlight remained firmly focused on Italy and the west. The largely Greek-speaking lands of the eastern Mediterranean had been the territory of Mark Antony, according to the agreement that he had reached with Octavian after Philippi, and if Antony had been victorious he would have almost certainly continued to favour them in any way he could. Under Octavian Rome was still supreme, and would remain so for the next three centuries until Constantine the Great deserted it in 330 for his new capital of Constantinople. The second consequence of the battle was that it established Octavian, at the age of thirty-two, as the most powerful man who had ever lived, the undisputed master of the known world. The problem for him now was how best to consolidate his position. The Republic was effectively dead, so much was plain; but Julius Caesar’s open autocracy had proved fatal to him, and his great-nephew was determined not to make the same mistake. For some time yet, at least in appearance, the old republican forms had to be observed. Every year from 31 to 23 BC Octavian held the consulship, using this as the constitutional basis of his power; but his assumption, on 16 January 27 BC, of the new title of Augustus was a clear enough indication of the way things were going.
It is thus impossible to put a definite date to the establishment of the Roman Empire. It was a gradual process–but perhaps it was better that way. In his youth Augustus was certainly hungry for power; once he had gained it, however, he mellowed and became a statesman. His other achievements are harder to quantify. He reorganised the administration and the army; he established permanent naval bases on the North African coast and even in the Black Sea. Rome was now the unchallenged mistress of the Mediterranean–in which, between 200 BC and 200 AD, there was a greater density of commercial traffic than at any time in the next thousand years.24 In 26–25 BC he personally pacified the rebellious tribes of northern Spain, establishing no less than twenty-two colonies, their inhabitants all Roman citizens; later he–or, more accurately, his generals–doubled the extent of the Roman dominions. More important than any of this, he moulded the old Republic into the new shape that its vast expansion had made necessary, and somehow reconciled to it all classes of Roman society, rallying them to the support of his new regime. It was said of him that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble, but he did more: he found it a republic and left it an empire.
That empire included the Roman province of Syria, acquired during the wars with King Mithridates early in the first century BC. It was not considered particularly important by its administrators, but it was there, during the reign of Augustus–perhaps in BC 5 or 625–that there was born into a humble but deeply pious Jewish family the man who was probably to reshape the world more radically than any other before or since. This is not the place to consider either the personal impact that Jesus Christ had on his contemporaries; even the long-term effects of the religion which he founded might have been very different had not Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judaea from 26 to 36 AD, reluctantly yielded to the clamourings of the populace and given his authority for the crucifixion. Yield, however, he did. Within thirty years St Paul, the first and arguably the greatest Christian missionary, had carried the new message throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Within three hundred years, as we shall shortly see, the faith that he preached was to be adopted by the Empire itself.
What, in the 500-odd years of its existence, had the Roman Republic achieved? The first thing to remember is that the Romans always saw themselves as heirs of the Greeks. Since the second century BC in the eastern Mediterranean the two civilisations had existed side by side, and though politically they might take very different forms, culturally the Romans liked to think that they were continuing the Greek tradition. In literature, for example, the two greatest Roman writers, Virgil and Horace–both of them, incidentally, personal friends of Octavian–openly acknowledged their debt to their Greek predecessors. Virgil’s tremendous epic, the Aeneid, is clearly inspired by Homer (though the style and language are more sophisticated) and embodies the all-important myth of the city’s connection with Troy–through the Trojan hero Aeneas, who escaped at the time of the Greek conquest and after many wanderings made his way to Italy, where his descendants, Romulus and Remus, founded Rome. The Eclogues and Georgicstoo, even if they cannot be traced directly back as far as Hesiod, follow a venerable Greek bucolic tradition. Horace, born in 65 BC (five years after Virgil), had actually studied in the Academy of Athens before fighting on the side of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi. His family property in Apulia had been confiscated by the victorious Triumvirate, but his friend Maecenas (to whom he had been introduced by Virgil), a patron of almost legendary wealth and generosity, brought about his reconciliation with Octavian and gave him the farm in the Sabine hills where he settled happily for the rest of his life. It was there that he wrote his celebrated Odes,26 which he proudly claimed to have modelled on early Greek lyric poets like Alcaeus, Pindar and Sappho. Prose writers were restricted by the fact that the novel had not yet been invented, but there were brilliant letter-writers like Pliny, orators like Cicero, and above all the great historians: Livy, Tacitus and–by no means least–Julius Caesar himself.
In the visual arts the same influences are clearly traceable. Such was the Roman admiration for Greek sculpture that the Emperors and nobles filled their palaces and gardens with copies of statues by Phidias and Praxiteles; many famous Greek works of art are nowadays known only by their Roman copies. Original Roman sculpture, splendid as it could often be, admittedly never quite succeeded in capturing the spirit of the Greek: there is no Roman equivalent of the Elgin Marbles, let alone of the greatest piece of classical sculpture in existence, the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus in the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul.27 In the art of painting a fair comparison is a good deal harder, if only because–apart from those on vases–so few Greek examples have survived. Of Roman paintings–if Roman they can be considered–by far the most astonishing are those funerary portraits, mostly dating from the first and second centuries AD, found in the region of Fayum, some eighty miles southwest of Cairo. Together, these portraits constitute the most outstanding body of painting to have come down to us from the ancient world.
But the Roman achievement extended well beyond the field of the arts. The Romans were legists, scientists, architects, engineers and of course soldiers. It was in these last two capacities that they built up their astonishing network of roads the length and breadth of Europe, with the primary object of getting an army to its destination in the shortest possible time; if these were to be passable in all weathers it was essential that they should be properly paved, and it was self-evident that they should run, wherever possible, in a dead straight line. The first stretch of the Appian Way was finished as early as 312 BC, and the year 147 BC saw the completion of the Via Postumia, running from sea to sea–from Genoa on the Tyrrhenian to Aquileia on the Adriatic. Such communities as these, and countless others like them which in the early days of the Republic had been little more than settlements, were now prosperous cities, with temples and public buildings conceived on a size and scale unimaginable in former times.
All this had been made possible by perhaps the single most important discovery in the history of architecture. To the ancient Greeks, the arch was unknown. All their buildings were based on the simple principle of a horizontal lintel laid across vertical columns; although they were able to use this principle to create buildings of surpassing beauty, such buildings were severely limited, both in their height and in their ability to carry weight. With the invention of the arch and its extension, the vault, vast new possibilities were opened up; we have only to think of the Colosseum, or those mighty constructions like the Pont du Gard near Nîmes, or the tremendous 119-arch aqueduct at Segovia in Spain, to understand the size and scale of the architecture of which the Romans were now capable.
Thoughts of the Colosseum, however, evoke other, less happy associations. The Romans were talented, efficient and industrious; they produced fine artists and writers; they spread their remarkable civilisation across much of the known world. Why, then, did they display such a passion for violence? Why did they flock, in their tens of thousands, to witness gladiatorial contests which were invariably fatal to at least one of the participants, to cheer while innocent and defenceless men, women and children were torn to pieces by wild animals, or as those animals in their turn were subjected to slow and hideous deaths? Has any European people ever, before or since, publicly demonstrated such a degree of brutality and sadism? Nor are we speaking exclusively of the mob; the Emperors themselves, over at least the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, again and again descended to levels of depravity which may occasionally have been matched elsewhere, but have certainly never been surpassed. The historian Suetonius tells us gleefully of the pederasty of Tiberius who, during his years of retirement in Capri, trained young boys to swim around him and nibble his most sensitive areas under the water; of the gluttony of Vitellius, who according to Gibbon ‘consumed in mere eating, at least six millions of our money in about seven months’;28 of the brutality of Caligula–his nickname means ‘little boot’–who, not content with incest with one of his sisters, regularly offered the other two ‘to be abused by his own stale catamites’,29 set up a public brothel in the imperial palace and had innocent men sawn in half to entertain him at lunch.
But there were good Emperors too. The golden age of the Roman Empire extended from 98 to 180 AD, when ‘the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.’30 It began with Trajan, who broadened the frontiers of the Empire to cover Dacia (embracing roughly the present territory of Romania) and Arabia Petraea, which extended from Phoenicia in the north down to the shores of the Red Sea. He also enriched his capital with some of its most magnificent buildings, and governed his vast empire with decency, firmness and humanity–qualities all too seldom seen in first- and third-century Rome. It continued with his successor and fellow-Spaniard Hadrian,31 perhaps the most capable Emperor ever to occupy the throne, who spent much of his twenty-one-year reign visiting every corner of his vast empire–including Britain, where in 122 he ordered the construction of the great wall from the Solway to the Tyne which still bears his name. Then, with Hadrian’s death, came the Antonines: first Antoninus Pius, whose long, peaceful reign gave the Romans a welcome breathing space after the endless exertions of his two predecessors, and finally the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations–written in Greek, probably during his long campaigns against rebellious German tribes–is the only work in existence which allows us an insight into the mind of an ancient ruler.32 But alas, that golden age ended as suddenly as it had begun, with the succession of Marcus Aurelius’s son Commodus who, with his harem of women and boys–300 of each–returned Rome to the worst days of imperial degeneracy.
The story of the Roman Empire in the third century makes unedifying reading. Historians tell of the blood-lust of Caracalla–declared Caesar at the age of eight–who in 215 ordered on a whim a general massacre in Alexandria in which many thousand innocent citizens perished, and of the sexual ambivalence of his successor, Elagabalus, who took his name from the Syrian sun god (with whom he identified) and who in 219 made his ceremonial entry into Rome rouged, bejewelled and dressed in purple and gold. He it was of whom Gibbon wrote:
A long train of concubines, and a rapid succession of wives, among whom was a vestal virgin, ravished by force from her sacred asylum, were insufficient to satisfy the impotence of his passions. The master of the Roman world affected to copy the dress and manners of the female sex, preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonoured the principal dignities of the empire by distributing them among his numerous lovers; one of whom was publicly invested with the title and authority of the emperor’s, or as he more properly styled himself, of the empress’s husband.
With rulers like these, the corruption inevitably spread downwards through Roman society, to the point at which law and order broke down almost completely and the government was in chaos. It is a sobering fact that the Emperor Septimius Severus, expiring at York in 211, was the last Roman Emperor for eighty years to die in his bed.
Just ninety-five years later, that same city of York was the scene of another imperial death, the consequences of which were considerably more important to world history. The reigning Emperor at the time was Diocletian, who had soon found his empire too unwieldy, his enemies too widespread and his lines of communication too long to be properly governable by any single monarch. He therefore decided to split the imperial power into four. There would be two Augusti–himself and an old and beloved comrade-in-arms named Maximian–and two rulers with the slightly inferior title of Caesar, who would exercise supreme authority in their allotted territories and would ultimately become Augusti in their turn. The supremacy in northwestern Europe–with special responsibility for the reimposition of Roman rule in rebellious Britain–he entrusted to one of his most successful generals, Constantius Chlorus, who became one of the first two Caesars. The other Caesar was Galerius, a rough, brutal professional soldier from Thrace, who was given charge of the Balkans.
Then, in 305, there occurred an event unparalleled in the history of the Roman Empire: the voluntary abdication of an Emperor. Diocletian decided that he had had enough. He retired to the enormous palace he had built for himself at Salona (the modern Split) on the Dalmatian coast, and forced an intensely unwilling Maximian to abdicate with him. Overnight, Constantius Chlorus found himself the senior Augustus, but he was not to enjoy his inheritance for long. A few months later, on 25 July 306, he died at York, his son Constantine at his bedside. Scarcely had the breath left his body than his friend and ally, the delightfully named King Crocus of the Alemanni, acclaimed young Constantine as Augustus in his father’s stead. The local legions instantly took up the cry, clasped the imperial purple toga round his shoulders, raised him on their shields and cheered him to the echo.
At this time Constantine was in his early thirties. On his father’s side his lineage could scarcely have been more distinguished; his mother, Helena, on the other hand, far from being–as the twelfth-century Geoffrey of Monmouth (and, more recently, Evelyn Waugh) would have us believe–the daughter of Coel, mythical founder of Colchester and the Old King Cole of the nursery rhyme, was almost certainly the offspring of a humble innkeeper in Bithynia.33 (Other, less reputable historians have gone so far as to suggest that as a girl she had been one of the supplementary amenities of her father’s establishment, regularly available to his clients at a small extra charge.) Only later in her life, when her son had acceded to the supreme power, did she become the most venerated woman in the Empire; in 327, when she was already over seventy, this passionate Christian convert made her celebrated pilgrimage to the Holy Land, there miraculously to unearth the True Cross and thus to gain an honoured place in the calendar of saints.
But let us return to Constantine. The first thing to be said is that no ruler in all history–not Alexander nor Alfred, not Charles nor Catherine, not Frederick nor even Gregory–has ever more fully merited his title of ‘the Great’; for within the short space of some fifteen years he took two decisions, either of which, alone, would have changed the future of the civilised world. The first was to adopt Christianity–the object, only a generation previously, of persecutions under Diocletian more brutal than any that it has suffered before or since–as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The second was to transfer the capital of that empire from Rome to the new city which he was building on the site of the old Greek settlement of Byzantium and which was to be known, for the next sixteen centuries, by his own name: the city of Constantine, Constantinople. Together, these two decisions and their consequences have given him a serious claim to be considered–excepting only Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed and the Buddha–the most influential man who ever lived.
Immediately after his acclamation, Constantine had naturally sent word to his co-Augustus Galerius, now ruling from Nicomedia (the modern Izmit) across the Bosphorus; but Galerius, while very reluctantly agreeing to acknowledge him as a Caesar, refused point-blank to recognise him as an Augustus, having already appointed a certain Valerius Licinianus, called Licinius, one of his old drinking companions. Constantine did not seem particularly worried. Perhaps he did not yet feel ready for the supreme power; at all events, he remained in Gaul and Britain for another six years, governing the two provinces on the whole wisely and well. Only after the death of Galerius in 311 did he begin preparations to assert his claim, and not until the summer of 312 did he move across the Alps against the first and most immediately dangerous of his rivals, his brother-in-law Maxentius, son of Diocletian’s old colleague the Emperor Maximian.34
The two armies met on 28 October 312 on the Via Flaminia, some seven or eight miles northeast of Rome where the Tiber is crossed by the old Ponte Milvio.35 This Battle of the Milvian Bridge is principally remembered now for the legend related by Constantine’s contemporary, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea–who claims to have heard it from the Emperor himself–according to which
at about midday, just as the sun was beginning to decline, he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription ‘Conquer by This’ [hoc vince]. At this sight he himself was struck with amazement, and his whole army also.36
Inspired, it is said, by this vision, Constantine soundly defeated the army of his brother-in-law and put it to flight, driving it southward towards the old bridge. This was extremely narrow, and Maxentius had somewhat pessimistically constructed next to it another, broader one on pontoons, on which he could if necessary make an orderly retreat and which could then be broken in the middle to prevent pursuit. Over this the remains of his shattered army stampeded, and all might yet have been well had not the engineers in charge of the bridge lost their heads and drawn the bolts too soon. Suddenly the whole structure collapsed, hurling hundreds of men into the fast-flowing water. Those who had not yet crossed made wildly for the old stone bridge, but this too proved fatal. Such was its narrowness that many were crushed to death, others were trampled underfoot, still others flung down by their own comrades into the river below. Among the last was Maxentius himself, whose body was later found washed up on the bank. His severed head, impaled on a lance, was carried aloft before Constantine as he entered Rome the following day.
His victory at the Milvian Bridge made Constantine absolute master of the western world from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, from Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlas Mountains. Whether it also achieved his conversion to Christianity is unclear; it certainly marked the point at which he set himself up as protector and active patron of his Christian subjects. On his return to Rome he immediately subsidised from his private purse twenty-five already existing churches and several new ones; he presented the newly elected Pope Melchiades with the old house of the Laterani family on the Coelian hill, which was to remain a papal palace for another thousand years; and next to it he ordered the building, once again at his own expense, of the first of Rome’s great Constantinian basilicas, St John Lateran, still today the cathedral church of the city. It is all the more surprising to find his coins for another twelve years associating him not with Christianity but with the then popular cult of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, and refusing to accept Christian baptism, which he was to continue to postpone until he was on his deathbed a quarter of a century later.
This same note of caution is evident in the Edict of Milan, which Constantine promulgated jointly with his fellow Augustus (and by now another brother-in-law)37 Licinius in 313, describing its purpose as that of
securing respect and reverence for the Deity; namely by the grant, both to the Christians and to all others, of the right freely to follow whatever form of worship might please them, to the intent that whatsoever Divinity dwells in heaven [my italics] might be favourable to us and to all those living under our authority.
The two Augusti might have spoken with one voice on religious toleration, but they agreed on little else, and another ten years of civil war were necessary before Constantine could finally eliminate his last rival. Not until 323 was he able to establish peace throughout the Empire, under his rule alone.
Constantine by now seems to have been a Christian in all but name, but at this point the Christian Church was split by the first great schism in its history. This was the work of a certain Arius, presbyter of Alexandria, who held that Jesus Christ was not co-eternal and of one substance with God the Father, but had been created by Him at a certain time as His instrument for the salvation of the world. Thus, although a perfect man, the Son must always be subordinate to the Father, his nature being human rather than divine. The ensuing dispute quickly became a cause célèbre, which Constantine resolved to settle. He did so by summoning the first universal Council of the Church, which was held between 20 May and 19 June 325 at Nicaea (the modern Iznik), with some 300 bishops taking part. The proceedings were opened by the Emperor himself, and it was he who proposed the insertion, into the draft statement of belief, of the key word homoousios–meaning consubstantial, ‘of one substance’–to describe the relation of the Son to the Father. Its inclusion was almost tantamount to a condemnation of Arianism, and such were the Emperor’s powers of persuasion that by the close of the conference only seventeen of the assembled bishops maintained their opposition–a number that the threat of exile and possible excommunication subsequently reduced to two.
But Arius fought on. It was not until 336, during a final investigation of his beliefs, that
made bold by the protection of his followers, engaged in a light-hearted and foolish conversation, he was suddenly compelled by a call of nature to retire; and immediately, as it is written, ‘falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out’.38
This story, it must be admitted, comes from the pen of Arius’s leading opponent, Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria, but the unattractive circumstances of his demise are too well attested by contemporary writers to be open to serious question. Inevitably, they were attributed to divine retribution: the archbishop’s biblical reference is to the somewhat similar fate which befell Judas Iscariot.
Constantine’s dream of spiritual harmony throughout Christendom was not to be achieved in his lifetime; indeed, we are still awaiting it today.
When Constantine first set eyes on Byzantium, the city was already nearly a thousand years old. According to tradition, it was founded in 658 BC by a certain Byzas as a colony of Megara; there can, at any rate, be little doubt that a small Greek settlement was flourishing on the site by the beginning of the sixth century BC, and none at all that the Emperor was right to choose it for his new capital. Rome had long been a backwater; none of Diocletian’s four tetrarchs had dreamed of living there. The principal dangers to imperial security were now concentrated on the eastern frontier: the Sarmatians around the lower Danube, the Ostrogoths to the north of the Black Sea and–most menacing of all–the Persians, whose great Sassanian Empire now extended from the former Roman provinces of Armenia and Mesopotamia as far as the Hindu Kush. But the reasons for the move were not only strategic. The whole focus of civilisation had shifted irrevocably eastward. Intellectually and culturally, Rome was growing more and more out of touch with the new and progressive thinking of the Hellenistic world; the Roman academies and libraries were no longer any match for those of Alexandria, Pergamum or Antioch. Economically, too, the agricultural and mineral wealth of what was known as thepars orientalis was a far greater attraction than the Italian peninsula, where malaria was spreading fast and populations were dwindling. Finally, the old Roman republican and pagan traditions had no place in Constantine’s new Christian empire. It was time to start afresh.
The advantages of Byzantium as a strategic site over any of its oriental neighbours were also self-evident. Standing as it did on the very threshold of Asia and occupying the easternmost tip of a broad, roughly triangular promontory, its south side washed by the Propontis (which we call the Sea of Marmara) and its northeast by that broad, deep and navigable inlet, some five miles long, known since remotest antiquity as the Golden Horn, it had been moulded by nature at once into a magnificent harbour and a well-nigh impregnable stronghold, needing major fortification only on its western side. Even an attack from the sea would be difficult enough, the Marmara itself being protected by two long and narrow straits: the Bosphorus to the east and the Hellespont (or Dardanelles) to the west. No wonder that the people of Chalcedon, who only seventeen years earlier had founded their city on the flat and featureless shore opposite, became proverbial for their blindness.
Constantine spared no pains to make his new capital worthy of its name. Tens of thousands of artisans and labourers worked day and night. On a site on the old acropolis–formerly occupied by a shrine of Aphrodite–rose the first great church of the city, St Irene, dedicated not to any saint or martyr but to the Holy Peace of God. A few years later it was to be joined–and overshadowed–by its larger and still more splendid neighbour St Sophia, the Church of the Holy Wisdom. A quarter of a mile away towards the Marmara stood the immense Hippodrome, the Emperor’s box having direct access to the imperial palace behind it. All the leading cities of Europe and Asia, including Rome itself, were plundered of their finest statues, trophies and works of art for the embellishment and enrichment of Constantinople. At last all was ready, and on Monday, 11 May 330, the Emperor attended a mass in St Irene, at which he formally dedicated the city to the Virgin. On that day the Byzantine Empire was born.
And yet in fact there had been no real change. To its subjects it was still the Roman Empire, that of Augustus and Trajan and Hadrian. And they were still Romans. Their capital had been moved, that was all; nothing else was affected. Over the centuries, surrounded as they were by the Greek world, it was inevitable that they should gradually abandon the Latin language in favour of the Greek, but that made no difference either. It was as Romans that they proudly described themselves for as long as the empire lasted, and when, 1,123 years after its foundation, that empire finally fell, it was as Romans that they died.
Of those years, Constantine himself was to live for another seven. Then, in the spring of 337, already a sick man, he travelled to Helenopolis, a city that he had had rebuilt in memory of his mother, where the hot medicinal baths might, he hoped, effect a cure. Alas, they failed to do so, and on the way home to the capital he grew rapidly worse until it was plain that he would be unable to complete the journey. It was therefore not in Constantinople but in Nicomedia that this extraordinary man, who had for years been a self-styled bishop of the Christian Church, finally received his baptism. When the ceremony was done, Eusebius tells us, ‘he arrayed himself in imperial vestments white and radiant as light, and laid himself down on a couch of the purest white, refusing ever to clothe himself in purple again.’
Why, it may be asked, did he delay this baptism for so long? The most probable answer is also the simplest: that this sacrament conferred complete absolution from all sins, but unfortunately could be celebrated only once. It stood to reason, therefore, that the longer it was deferred the less opportunity there would be of falling once again into the ways of iniquity. This last supreme example of brinkmanship was perhaps a fitting conclusion to Constantine’s reign of thirty-one years–the longest of any Roman Emperor since Augustus–which ended at noon on Whit Sunday, 22 May 337. He was buried in his newly-completed Church of the Holy Apostles. By virtue of this dedication ‘he caused twelve sarcophagi to be set up in this church, like sacred pillars, in honour and memory of the number of the Apostles, in the centre of which was placed his own, having six of theirs on either side of it.’
Constantine’s undivided rule did not last long. On the death of the Emperor Theodosius the Great in 395 the Empire split again and, although the supreme authority was firmly rooted in Constantinople, a series of semi-puppet emperors reigned in Italy (mostly in Ravenna) for the best part of another century. During this period, however, the Italian peninsula–and indeed much of western Europe–was transformed.
Those who transformed it were the people contemptuously known to the citizens of the Empire as the barbarians. Of their many and various tribes, two only are of interest to us at this point in our story: the Goths and the Huns. They could hardly have been more different. By the end of the fourth century the Goths were a relatively civilised people, the majority of them Arian Christians. Although the western branch, that of the Visigoths, was still ruled by local chieftains, the Ostrogoths of the east had already evolved into a united and prosperous central European kingdom. The Huns, on the other hand, were savages: an undisciplined, heathen horde, Mongolian in origin, which had swept down from the central Asian steppe, laying waste everything in its path. Both tribes, at different times, posed major threats to the Empire. Surprisingly, perhaps, it was the Goths who attacked first.
During the last years of the fourth century, the Visigothic chieftain Alaric had spread terror from the walls of Constantinople to the southern Peloponnese; in 401 he invaded Italy. The Empire somehow managed to hold him at bay, and for several years more it continued to do so; but it suffered from two huge misconceptions. The first was that all barbarians were alike: undisciplined hordes of skin-clad savages who would be no match for the highly trained imperial army. This delusion did not last long. The second–that Alaric was bent on the Empire’s overthrow–unfortunately lasted a good deal longer. The truth was quite the contrary: he was fighting not to destroy the Empire but to establish a permanent home for his people within it, in such a way that they might enjoy their own autonomy while he, as their chieftain, would be granted high imperial rank. If only the Western Emperor Honorius–away in Ravenna–and the Roman Senate could have understood this simple fact, they might well have averted the final catastrophe. By their lack of comprehension they made it inevitable.
Three times between 408 and 410 Alaric besieged Rome. The first siege starved it out; the Romans were obliged to pay an enormous ransom, which included 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 of silver. The second ended when they agreed to depose the Emperor; the third, which had begun when Honorius, safely entrenched in Ravenna, refused to go, resulted in the sack of the city. Even then, it could have been worse: Alaric, devout Christian that he was, ordered that no churches or religious buildings were to be touched and that the right of asylum was everywhere to be respected. A sack, nevertheless, remains a sack; and the Goths, Christians though they may have been, were very far from being saints. When the traditional three days allowed for pillage and plunder were over, Alaric moved on to the south, but he had got no further than Cosenza when he fell victim to a violent fever–most probably malaria–and within a few days he was dead. He was only forty. His followers carried his body to the river Busento, which they dammed and temporarily deflected from its usual channel. There, in the stream’s bed, they buried their leader; then they broke the dam, and the waters came surging back and covered him.
The Huns–who, unlike the Goths, were barbarians in more than name–had first smashed their way into Europe in 376 and destroyed the Ostrogothic kingdom; their first contact with the civilised world, however, had had little effect upon them. The vast majority still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked food–though they liked to soften raw meat by putting it between their own thighs and their horses’ flanks as they rode. For clothing they favoured tunics made from the skins of field mice crudely stitched together. These they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until they dropped off of their own accord. Their home was the saddle; they seldom dismounted, not even to eat or to sleep. Attila himself was typical of his race: short, swarthy and snub-nosed, with beady eyes set in a head too big for his body and a thin, straggling beard. Within a very few years of his accession he had become known throughout Europe as ‘the scourge of God’: more feared, perhaps, than any other single man–with the possible exception of Napoleon–before or since.
Not until 452 did he launch his army upon Italy. All the great cities of the Veneto were put to the torch; Pavia and Milan were ruthlessly sacked. Then he turned south towards Rome–and suddenly, unaccountably, stopped. Why he did so remains a mystery. Traditionally, the credit has always been given to Pope Leo the Great, who travelled from Rome to meet him on the banks of the Mincio–probably somewhere near Peschiera, where the river issues from Lake Garda–and persuaded him to advance no further.39But it seems hardly likely that the pagan Hun should have obeyed the Pope out of respect for his office alone. He would surely have demanded a substantial tribute in return. Quite different possibilities have also been suggested. There is reason to believe that his followers, having devastated all the surrounding country, were running seriously short of food, and that disease had broken out in their ranks. Meanwhile, troops were beginning to arrive from Constantinople to swell the local imperial forces. Finally, since Attila is known to have been incorrigibly superstitious, could it not be that Leo reminded him of how Alaric had died within weeks of his sack of Rome, and suggested that a similar fate befell every invader who raised his hand against the holy city? We can never be sure. All we know is that if the King of the Huns thought by sparing Rome to ensure his own survival, he was mistaken. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already innumerable wives, his exertions brought on a sudden haemorrhage. As his lifeblood flowed away, all Europe breathed again–although not, as it soon became clear, for long.
By comparison with the Goths and the Huns, the Vandals–the last of the great barbarian peoples to have cast its shadow over the unhappy fifth century–had little direct influence on the Empire, but their effect on the Mediterranean was greater than that of the other two put together. These Germanic tribesmen, their creed fanatically Arian, had fled westward from the Huns some half a century before and in 409, after invading and laying waste a large area of Gaul, had settled in Spain. There they had remained until 428, when the newly crowned King Gaiseric led his entire people–probably some 180,000 men, women and children–across the sea to North Africa. Just eleven years later he captured Carthage,40 the last imperial stronghold on the coast, which he effectively made into a centre for piracy. By now he had built himself a formidable fleet–the only barbarian ruler to do so–and, particularly after his conquest of Sicily in around 470, was the undisputed master of the western Mediterranean.
In the early summer of 455, Gaiseric launched his most fateful expedition–against Rome itself. The reaction there was one of panic. The elderly Emperor Petronius Maximus, cowering in his palace, issued a proclamation–not, as might have been expected, calling upon all able-bodied men to rally to the defence of the Empire, but announcing that anyone who wished to leave was free to do so. His subjects had not awaited this permission. Already the terrified Romans were sending their wives and daughters away to safety, and the roads to the north and east were choked with carts as the more well-to-do families poured out of the city with all the objects of value that they wished to save from Vandal clutches. On 31 May the palace guard mutinied, killing and dismembering Petronius and throwing the pieces into the Tiber. For the fourth time in less than half a century–and but for Pope Leo it would have been the fifth–a barbarian army stood at the gates of Rome.
Once again, the long-suffering Pope did what he could. He was unable to stop Gaiseric altogether, but he did manage to extract a promise that there would be no wanton killing and no destruction of buildings, public or private. On this understanding the gates of the city were opened, and the barbarians passed into an unresisting city. For fourteen relentless days they systematically stripped it of its wealth: the gold and silver ornaments from the churches, the statues from the palaces, the sacred vessels from the Jewish synagogue, even the gilded copper roof–or half of it–from the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Everything was carted down to Ostia, loaded into the waiting ships and carried away to Carthage. True to their word, however, they had left the people and the buildings unharmed. They had behaved like brigands, certainly, but not, on this occasion, like Vandals.
After the sack of Rome, one might have thought that the Vandals would have been satisfied. One would have been wrong. Over the next few years they systematically ravaged Campania and occupied the Balearic Islands, Corsica and Sardinia. Then it was the turn of Sicily, after which, for good measure, they sacked the western shores of Greece. As this unedifying story shows all too clearly, the Roman Empire of the West was by now sick unto death, and the abdication in 476 of its last Emperor, the pathetic child Romulus Augustulus–his very name a double diminutive–need cause us no surprise. He was toppled by another Germanic barbarian named Odoacer,41 who refused to accept the old plurality of emperors, recognising only the authority of the Emperor Zeno in Constantinople. All he asked of Zeno was the title of Patrician, in which capacity he proposed to rule Italy in the Emperor’s name.
Five years before, in 471, a boy of about seventeen named Theodoric had succeeded his father as paramount leader of the eastern Goths. Although he had received little or no formal education during the ten years of his childhood spent as a hostage in Constantinople–he is said to have signed his name all his life by stencilling it through a perforated gold plate–he had acquired an instinctive understanding of the Byzantines and their ways which was to serve him in good stead in the years to come. His main objective on his accession, like that of so many barbarian leaders before him, was to find and secure a permanent home for his people. To this end he was to devote the better part of the next twenty years: fighting sometimes for and sometimes against the Empire, arguing, bargaining, threatening and cajoling by turns, until, some time in 487, he and Zeno made an agreement. Theodoric would lead his entire people into Italy, overthrow Odoacer and rule the land as an Ostrogothic kingdom under imperial sovereignty. And so, early in 488, the great exodus took place: men, women and children, with their horses and their pack animals, their cattle and their sheep, lumbering slowly across the plains of central Europe in search of greener and more peaceful pastures.
Odoacer fought back, but his army was no match for that of the Goths. He withdrew to Ravenna, where Theodoric blockaded him for more than two years until the local bishop arranged an armistice. It was then agreed that Italy was to be ruled by the two of them jointly, both sharing the imperial palace. In the circumstances this solution seemed remarkably generous on the part of Theodoric, but it soon became clear that he wished only to lull his rival into a false sense of security; he had not the faintest intention of keeping his word. On 15 March 493 he invited Odoacer, his brother, his son and his senior officers to a banquet. There, as his guest took his place in the seat of honour, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove through the body of Odoacer from collarbone to thigh. The other guests were similarly dealt with by the surrounding guards. Odoacer’s wife was thrown into prison, where she died of starvation; his son, whom he had surrendered to the Ostrogoths as a hostage, was sent off to Gaul and executed. Finally Theodoric laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself–as Odoacer had never done–in the imperial purple and settled down to rule in Italy.
He was to do so, quietly and efficiently, for the next thirty-three years, and the extraordinary mausoleum which he built for himself–and which still stands in the northeastern suburbs of Ravenna–perfectly symbolises, in its half-classical, half-barbaric architectural strength, a colossus who himself bestrode two civilisations. No other Germanic ruler, setting up his throne on the ruins of the Western Empire, possessed a fraction of Theodoric’s statesmanship and political vision. When he died, on 30 August 526, Italy lost the greatest of her early medieval rulers, unequalled until the days of Charlemagne.
The scene is now set for the appearance of perhaps the greatest of all the Byzantine Emperors–and Empresses–after Constantine himself. Justinian was born in 482 in a small Thracian village. He came from humble stock, and was already thirty-six when in 518 his uncle Justin, a rough, barely literate soldier who had somehow risen to command one of the crack palace regiments, succeeded the eighty-seven-year-old Emperor Anastasius on the throne of Constantinople. Precisely how he managed to do so remains unknown; there was almost certainly a coup of some kind, and it is more than likely that his nephew had a hand in it.
Justinian must have come to Constantinople as a child; he would not otherwise have been known as a man of wide education and culture, of a kind that he could not possibly have acquired outside the capital. His uncle was consequently only too happy to defer to Justinian’s infinitely superior intelligence and to allow him, as his éminence grise, effectively to govern the Empire. He had been doing so with consummate ability for two or three years when he met his future wife, Theodora. She was not, to put it mildly, an ideal match. Her father had been a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome, her mother a performer in the circus, and she herself had done little to improve her acceptability into polite society. The descriptions of her depravity given by her contemporary Procopius in hisSecret History can–one hopes–be taken with more than a pinch of salt;42 but there can be little doubt that at least in her youth, as our grandparents would have put it, she was no better than she should have been.
By the time she caught the eye of Justinian, however, she was in her middle thirties–beautiful and intelligent as ever, but with all the wisdom and maturity that had been so noticeably absent in earlier years. Such obstacles to the marriage as presented themselves were quickly overcome, and in 525 the Patriarch43 declared Justinian and Theodora man and wife. Only two years later, on the death of Justin, they found themselves the sole and supreme rulers of the Roman Empire. The plural is important. Theodora was to be no Empress Consort. At her husband’s insistence she was to reign at his side, taking decisions in his name and participating in the highest affairs of state. Her future appearances on the public stage were to be very different from those of the past.
Justinian is probably best remembered today for the sublime monument he left behind him: the third Church of St Sophia–the first two having been destroyed by fire–which he built in five years between 532 and 537.44 Almost as astonishing was his complete recodification of Roman law: removing all contradictions, ensuring that there was nothing incompatible with Christian doctrine, substituting clarity and concision for confusion and chaos. For our purposes, however, his greatest achievement was his recovery of the Empire of the West. To him it was clear that a Roman Empire without Rome was an absurdity, and he was fortunate in having as his instrument the most brilliant general in all Byzantine history, a Romanised Thracian like himself named Belisarius.
The first territory to be singled out for reconquest was the Vandal kingdom in North Africa. Belisarius was given his orders, and on or about Midsummer Day 533 the expedition set sail: 5,000 cavalry and 10,000 infantry–at least half of them barbarian mercenaries, mostly Huns–travelling in 500 transports, escorted by ninety-two dromons.45 The Vandal king Gelimer and his men put up a spirited resistance, but the Hun cavalry–hideous, savage and implacable–was too much for them. In two separate battles, that cavalry charged; on both occasions the Vandals turned and fled; and on Sunday, 15 September 533, Belisarius made his formal entry into Carthage. Gelimer himself did not surrender at once. For three months in the depths of winter he wandered in the mountains; in January 534, knowing that he was surrounded, he sent a request for a sponge, a loaf of bread and a lyre, his messenger explaining that he needed the first for a sore eye, and the second to satisfy a craving for real bread after weeks of unleavened peasant dough. As for the third, it appeared that he had devoted his time in hiding to the composition of a dirge bewailing his recent misfortunes, and was eager to try it out. Not until March did he give himself up.
Now it was the turn of Ostrogothic Italy. With an army surprisingly reduced in size–some 7,500 men altogether, though once again containing a large contingent of Huns–Belisarius sailed straight to Sicily, which he took without a struggle. Then, in the late spring of 536, he crossed the Straits of Messina and pressed onward up the peninsula, meeting no resistance until he reached Naples–which, on its eventual surrender, paid a heavy price for its heroism. The murder, rapine and pillage which followed was appalling even by the standards of the time, the pagan Huns in particular having no compunction in burning down the churches in which their intended victims had taken refuge. The news soon spread to Rome, where Pope Silverius hastily invited Belisarius to occupy the city, and on 9 December 536 the Byzantine army marched in through the Porta Asinaria near St John Lateran, while the Goths hurried out through the Porta Flaminia.
But if Silverius had hoped to spare Rome yet another siege, he was disappointed. Belisarius himself knew perfectly well that the Goths would be back and immediately began defence preparations; it was just as well that he did, because in March 537 the Gothic army took up its positions around the walls. The ensuing siege–which began with the cutting of all the aqueducts, thus dealing Rome a blow from which it was not to recover for a thousand years–lasted for a year and nine days. It might well have continued even longer had not substantial reinforcements arrived just in time from Constantinople. Even then the struggle was not over. The Goths refused absolutely to give in, and for another three years the peninsula was to be fought over, ravaged and laid waste from one end to the other.
The end came in a manner which, in the minds of many, reflects little credit on Belisarius. He had slowly closed in on Ravenna–now the Gothic capital, just as it had been the Byzantine one–and by the spring of 540 he had the city surrounded, by his army on land and by the imperial fleet at sea. One night a secret emissary arrived from the Gothic court with an extraordinary proposal: they would deliver up the crown to Belisarius on the understanding that he should proclaim himself Emperor of the West. Many an imperial general would have seized such an opportunity; the bulk of his army would probably have supported him, and with the Goths at his back he would have been more than capable of dealing with any punitive expedition from Constantinople. Belisarius’s loyalty never wavered, but he suddenly saw a means of bringing the war to a quick and victorious end. He immediately signified that the offer had been accepted, and the imperial army marched into the city.
As the chief Gothic nobles were carried off into captivity they must have reflected bitterly on the perfidy of the general who had betrayed them. Belisarius, on the other hand, was unmoved. The Goths’ proposal had been in itself perfidious; were they not all of them rebels against the imperial authority? War was war, and by occupying Ravenna as he had done he had saved untold bloodshed on both sides. In May 540 he took ship for the Bosphorus feeling, we may be sure, nothing but satisfaction with a job well done. After his recovery of North Africa the Emperor had awarded him a splendid Triumph; what might he not expect this time, having delivered the whole Italian peninsula, including Ravenna and even Rome itself, into Justinian’s hands?
Alas, there was no feeling of victory in the air when he returned to Constantinople. Neither Justinian nor his subjects were in any mood for celebration. In June 540, only a few weeks after the fall of Ravenna, the troops of the Persian King Chosroes had invaded the Empire and destroyed Antioch, massacring most of its inhabitants and sending the rest into slavery. The general’s presence was urgently required–not in the Hippodrome but on the eastern front.
Fortunately it turned out that Chosroes had been out for plunder rather than conquest; in return for 5,000 pounds of gold and the promise of another 500 each succeeding year he turned happily back to Persia. Even so, Belisarius never received his reward. He was unlucky enough to fall foul of the Empress Theodora, and in 542, while Justinian–stricken by plague–lay between life and death, she relieved the general of his eastern command, disbanded his magnificent household and confiscated all his accumulated treasure. In the following year, when the Emperor was sufficiently recovered to reassert his authority, Belisarius was pardoned and restored to favour, up to a point; but it was a sadder and wiser man–though he was still under forty–who returned in May 544 to Italy.
He found all his work there undone. Justinian had obviously been informed of the Goths’ offer of the throne to Belisarius, and was terrified lest any of the Commander’s successors should succumb to the same temptation. Accordingly he had entrusted Italy to no less than five subordinate generals, giving no single one of them authority over the rest; left to themselves, they had simply divided up the territory between them and settled down to plunder it. Within weeks the demoralisation of the Byzantine army in Italy was complete, and the way was clear for the rise of by far the most attractive–and, after Theodoric, the greatest–of all the Gothic rulers. His name, according to the evidence of every one of his coins, was Baduila, but even in his lifetime he seems to have been universally known as Totila, and it is thus that he has gone down in history.
On Totila’s accession to the Gothic throne in 541 he was still in his early twenties, but wise before his time. He never forgot that the majority of his subjects were not Goths, but Italians. In the days of Theodoric and his successors, relations between Italian and Goth had been close and cordial; since the victories of Belisarius, however, the Italian aristocracy had thrown in its lot with the Empire. It was therefore to the humbler echelons of Italian society–the middle class, the urban proletariat and the peasantry–that the young ruler made his appeal. He promised them an end to Byzantine oppression. The slaves would be liberated, the great estates broken up, the land redistributed; no longer would their taxes be used to maintain a huge and corrupt court, to build vast palaces a thousand miles away or to pay protection money to distant barbarian tribes of whom no Italian had ever heard. He struck an immediate chord. Within three years virtually the entire peninsula was under his control, and in January 544 the Byzantine generals in their various redoubts simply gave up. Respectfully they informed the Emperor that they could no longer defend the imperial cause in Italy. It was their letter, almost certainly, that decided Justinian to send back Belisarius.
Belisarius did what he could. Almost at once, however, he saw several defections by imperial troops–many of whom had received no pay for well over a year–and realised that it was no longer just the Goths who were actively hostile to the Empire; it was the vast majority of the population. With the forces at his command he might just succeed in maintaining an imperial presence in Italy, but he could not hope to reconquer the whole peninsula. In May 545 he wrote personally to the Emperor:
Sire, you must be plainly told that the greatest part of your army has enlisted and is now serving under the enemy’s standards. If the mere sending of Belisarius to Italy were all that were necessary, your preparations for war would be perfect; but if you would overcome your enemies you must do something more than this, for a general is nothing without his officers. First and foremost you must send me my own guards, both cavalry and foot-soldiers; secondly, a large number of Huns and other barbarians; and thirdly, the money with which they may all be paid.
But from Constantinople there came no response. The following year, after yet another long siege, Totila captured Rome. Immediately he sent ambassadors to the Emperor offering peace on the basis of the old dispensation as it had been under Theodoric, but Justinian refused to listen. To have done so would have meant writing off ten years’ campaigning, and admitting the defeat not only of his armies but of his most cherished ambitions. Nor, on the other hand, would he give his general the support he needed.46 And so the situation in Italy deteriorated into a stalemate, and early in 549 Belisarius, frustrated and disillusioned, was ordered home.
He found the Emperor deeply depressed. Theodora had died of cancer some months before; her husband was to mourn her for the rest of his life. He also had a major theological crisis on his hands–of the kind that arose in Byzantium with distressing frequency–and while he was still determined on the reconquest of Italy he was for the moment incapable of giving the matter the attention it deserved. Not until 551 did news from the peninsula finally sting him into action. Totila had staged a full-scale revival of the traditional Games in the Circus Maximus, and had personally presided over them from the imperial box. Meanwhile his fleet was ravaging both Italy and Sicily, and had recently returned to Rome loaded to the gunwales with plunder. This double insult was too much. At last Justinian decided on an all-out effort. Whether he offered Belisarius command of a third expedition is uncertain; such an offer is nowhere recorded, but would probably anyway have been refused. Belisarius had had enough. The Emperor’s choice was his own first cousin, Germanus, but Germanus died of a fever before even setting sail. His second was even more surprising: a septuagenarian Armenian eunuch called Narses.
Narses was no soldier. Most of his life had been spent in the Palace, where he had risen to be commander of the imperial bodyguard, but this was more a domestic appointment than a military one. Justinian had, however, sent him to Italy in 538, ostensibly in command of a body of troops to swell the Byzantine army during the Goths’ siege of Rome but in fact to keep an eye on Belisarius, whose youth, brilliance and unconcealed ambition were already making the Emperor uneasy. There Narses had shown himself to be a superb organiser, strong-willed and determined; thirteen years later he had lost none of his energy or his decisiveness. He also knew his Emperor better than any man alive, and easily persuaded him to make available a far greater army than he had intended for Germanus: at least 35,000 men, most of them barbarians but also including a number of Persians captured during the recent war with Chosroes.
Not until the early summer of 552 did Narses begin his march into Italy. Still lacking the ships to transport his army, he was obliged to take the land route, advancing round the head of the Adriatic to Ravenna, where he provided what was left of the local troops with their long overdue arrears of pay. He then headed south across the Apennines and down the Via Flaminia towards Rome, Totila marching northward up the same road to block his path. They met near the little village of Taginae, for what was to prove the decisive encounter of the entire war. The Gothic army was progressively outflanked and out-fought and finally, as the sun was sinking, took flight. Totila himself, mortally wounded, fled with the rest but died a few hours later.
For the Goths all hope was now lost, but they did not surrender. Unanimously they acclaimed Teia, one of the bravest of Totila’s generals, as his successor and continued the struggle. Narses meanwhile pursued his journey south, city after city opening its gates to the conquerors. Rome itself fell after a brief siege–changing hands for the fifth time since the beginning of Justinian’s reign–but still the old eunuch marched on. Totila, he had learned, had deposited vast reserves of treasure and bullion at Cumae on the Bay of Naples; Narses was determined to lay his hands on it before it was spirited away. Teia was equally determined to stop him, and at the end of October, in the Sarno valley just a mile or two from the already long-forgotten Pompeii, the two armies met for the last time. Teia was felled by a well-aimed javelin, but even after his head had been impaled on a lance and raised aloft for all to see, there was to be no retreat: his men battled on until the evening of the following day. By the terms of the subsequent treaty, the Goths undertook to leave Italy and to engage in no further warfare against the Empire. Justinian’s grandest ambition was realised at last.
History offers few examples of a campaign as swift and decisive as that of Narses being successfully concluded by a general in his mid-seventies–nor, surely, any more persuasive argument in favour of castration. Almost unbelievably, however, just as the ancient Armenian was marching his men into Italy in the spring of 552, another, smaller Byzantine expeditionary force had landed in Spain under the command of a general older still. His name was Liberius, and he is recorded as having been Praetorian Prefect of Italy sixty years before, in the days of Theodoric. At the time of which we are speaking, therefore, he cannot possibly have been less than eighty-five.
By now Spain was firmly in the hands of the Visigoths, who had first arrived there–in the wake of several other barbarian tribes–in 416, and who in 418 had made a pact with Rome by the terms of which they agreed to recognise the sovereignty of the Empire. The position was thus very much the same as it had been in Italy under Theodoric, with a Roman landowning aristocracy living comfortably on its estates, perfectly satisfied with the status quo and doubtless grateful that the immense distance separating them from Constantinople reduced imperial interference to the point of imperceptibility. For them and their Visigothic masters, the first warning of the approaching storm came with Belisarius’s recovery of North Africa from the Vandals in 533, and his eviction of a Visigothic garrison from the port of Septem (now Ceuta) the following year. An attempt by the Visigothic king Theodis to seize it back in 547 ended in disaster; his protests that the Romans had cheated by attacking on a Sunday while he was in church did not alter the fact that his army had been annihilated, and he himself met his death shortly afterwards at the hands of an assassin.
Then, in 551, Theodis’s second successor, King Agila, found himself faced with a rebellion led by his own kinsman, Athenagild, who appealed to the Emperor for help. Here was precisely the opportunity Justinian had been waiting for. He ordered that a small force–perhaps a thousand or two at the most–should be detached from Narses’s army and sent under Liberius to Spain. It met with little resistance: the Visigothic army was split down the middle. Before long Liberius effectively controlled the whole area south of a line drawn from Valencia to Cadiz, including Cordoba. In 555 Agila was murdered by his own troops and Athenagild assumed the throne without opposition.
Had the new king agreed to rule as an imperial vassal, all would have been well; such, however, had never been his intention, and he made it clear to Liberius that he expected him and his army to withdraw as soon as they conveniently could. The old man–who was clearly every bit as good a diplomat as he was a general–agreed in principle, but gradually persuaded Athenagild to negotiate; finally the two reached an understanding whereby the Empire kept much of the territory it had conquered. But there were nowhere near enough soldiers available for adequate garrisoning, and the lines of communication were dangerously long: Justinian was soon forced to acknowledge that a good 80 percent of the Iberian peninsula lay beyond his control. On the other hand he retained the Balearic Islands–which, together with Corsica and Sardinia (reconquered respectively by Belisarius and Narses) gave him a firm base in the western Mediterranean–and he could boast that his empire now once again extended from the Black Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
So, technically, it did; but the Visigoths continued to flourish. Ruling now from Toledo, Athenagild and his successors in a series of highly successful campaigns managed to extend their authority over more and more of the country, until finally in the early seventh century the last imperial enclave, centred on Cartagena, was liquidated. By the end of that same century the two separate communities, Roman and Gothic, that had characterised Spain for the past three hundred years had similarly ceased to exist. In the year 700 it was thus a relatively united Gothic people that inhabited the Iberian peninsula, but only a single decade of the new century was to pass before that people was called upon to face a new and terrible enemy.
Justinian is believed to have been the last Byzantine Emperor to have spoken Latin more easily than he did Greek–though he was fluent in both. Two centuries after Constantine the Great had transplanted his empire into the Greek world, the hellenisation of the Empire was almost complete. From its foundation by Augustus it had always embraced both the Latin and the Greek civilisations, and with the passage of time these had continued to diverge, developing in their own very different ways. The Greeks, for example, having been spared the worst of the barbarian invasions, had rapidly outclassed the Latins in learning as well as in general sophistication, and felt themselves to be immeasurably superior. Their passion for disputation, however, kept the Eastern Church in almost continual ferment and led to the development of several serious heresies; and succeeding Patriarchs, if they recognised the supremacy of the Pope at all, did so with increasing reluctance. Excepting only the Papacy, the Byzantine Empire was almost certainly the most religiously orientated state in the history of Christendom. Already in the fourth century St Gregory of Nyssa had written:
If you ask a man for change, he will give you a piece of philosophy concerning the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you enquire the price of a loaf, he replies: ‘The Father is greater and the Son inferior’; or if you ask whether the bath is ready, the answer you receive is that the Son was made out of nothing.
In later centuries this tendency showed no sign of diminishing; indeed, it is arguable that without it the Byzantines would never have developed the most deeply spiritual art that the Mediterranean world has ever known. Their artists were instructed to depict the Spirit of God: a tall order perhaps, but one which, in their icons, mosaics and frescos, they fulfilled again and again.
The Mediterranean world as it existed under Justinian was very different from the one known to the Emperors of the first and second centuries; Constantine the Great and the barbarian invasions had seen to that. However much the Byzantines might protest to the contrary, their Roman Empire had little in common with that of Augustus and his successors. From Rome itself power and authority had long since departed; and Constantinople, by virtue of its geographical position alone, could never dominate the western Mediterranean as Rome had done. No longer were the Middle Sea and the lands surrounding it subject to a single power; no longer could it be described as a Roman lake, still less–even after Justinian’s reconquest of Italy–as mare nostrum. Even such tenuous claims in that direction as could be made in the sixth century were, all too soon, to be dramatically revised.