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

Forging a New Heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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