In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

Shored Against Ruin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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