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

New Wine in Old Bottles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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