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

The Great War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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