Justinian

BOOK A

I am Justinian, Emperor of the Romans. Oh, they stole the throne from me once. They mutilated me. They shipped me off into exile. They thought- fools!- they were done with me. But I came back, and they have paid. How they have paid! And they will go on paying, too, so long as one of them is left alive. The Empire is mine, and I shall keep it.

I was born to rule. I could not have been more than four years old when my father, the fourth Constantine and the fourth generation of the dynasty of Herakleios to rule the Roman Empire, sat me on his knee and said, "Do you know, son, why we named you Justinian?"

"No, Papa," I answered. Up till that moment, I had never imagined my name had been given for a reason. It was just what people called me.

"I will tell you, then," he said. You could hardly see his lips move when he talked, so luxuriant were his beard and mustachios. They say his father, Constans, was hairier yet. I do not know. God never granted that I see my grandfather. Rebels on the western island of Sicily murdered him the year before I was born.

My father resumed: "Do you know who the first Justinian was?"

I shook my head. I had never heard of anyone but me with the name. Now I was jealous, for I thought I had it all to myself.

"He was an Emperor, too," my father told me. "He was a great conqueror and a great lawgiver. If you can be like him when the time comes for you to take the throne, you will make the family proud. That is why we gave you the name: to give you a mark to aim at."

If I said I knew then what he meant, I would be lying. But I already knew there had been a great many Emperors of the Romans, so I asked, "When did this other Justinian live?"

My father muttered under his breath and counted on his fingers. At last, he said, "The first Justinian died forty-five years before your great-great-grandfather won the throne for our line from Phokas the monster, the usurper."

"Good. People will remember me instead," I said, "for he has been dead a very, very long time." I tell this without embarrassment; as I said, I had but four years.

Then my father's mouth opened so wide, I could see not just his lips but his teeth and tongue and the back of his throat as well. He laughed loud enough to make two servants come running in to find out what had happened. He waved them away. When they had gone, he said, "That is not such a long time, son, not as we Romans reckon it. The first Emperor, Augustus, was six hundred years dead when Herakleios beat Phokas: more than six hundred fifty years now."

The number was too big to mean anything to me. I had learned to count to twenty, using my fingers and the toes that peeked out of my sandals under the hem of my tunic to help me along. I did not know what it meant to be a Roman, to live with the memories of all those years cloaked around me.

The next spring, the Arabs came to Constantinople. When I was a boy, I knew old men who said that, when they were young, no one at the Queen of Cities paid the Arabs any mind or had even heard of them. How the Roman Empire wishes that were true today!

Herakleios, my great-great-grandfather, beat back the Persians after years of desperate war and restored to Jerusalem the piece of the True Cross the Magians and fire worshipers had carried away when they conquered the holy city.

God rested on the seventh day. Herakles, I suppose, rested after his twelve labors. Herakleios's labors were greater by far than those of the pagan Greek, but did God who had Himself rested allow my forefather any rest? He did not.

Forth from the desert, from the abomination of the desolation, the Arabs swarmed like locusts. They had always been there, I suppose: tent dwellers, nomads, lizard-eating savages. But in Herakleios's time the heresy preached by their false prophet Mouamet made them all brothers and sent them out a-conquering.

And Herakleios, who had celebrated the return of the holy and life-giving wood to Jerusalem, now had to take it up once more and bring it to Constantinople. For the Roman Empire was weak after decades of war with Persia, and had not the strength to withstand the onslaught of new invaders. Palestine and its holy city were lost, and Syria, and Egypt with Alexandria beside it.

(And if we Romans were weak, the Persians were weaker still, and had fallen into civil strife after their war against us failed. The Arabs conquered them one and all, and they have remained under the rule of the followers of the false prophet until the present. They would have done better to leave us alone.)

The great Herakleios's son, Herakleios Constantine- my great-grandfather- ruled but a few months. He suffered from a sickness of the lungs, poor soul. May God have judged him kindly.

When he died, he left behind a young son, my grandfather Constans. But the great Herakleios's second wife, Martina, sought to raise her son Heraklonas, the half-brother of Herakleios Constantine, to the throne in Constans's place. She and Heraklonas got what usurpers deserve: her tongue was cut out, his nose was cut off, and they were sent into exile on Rhodes.

They stole my throne. They cut off my nose. They exiled me. They treated me as if I, fifth in the line of the great Herakleios, had no proper claim to the throne. How I treated them I shall tell in due course.

To return to my grandfather: in his reign, we Romans fought back against the Arabs in every way we could. We sent out a fleet to reclaim Alexandria by Egypt from them, though it remained in Roman hands only a year before the deniers of Christ took it back, and it has stayed in their possession ever since.

From Egypt, the Arabs swept west toward Carthage and the lands surrounding it, lands the Romans had regained from the Vandals during the reign of the Justinian for whom I was named. That was one of the reasons Constans went to Sicily, where he met his death: he used the island as a base from which to assail the Arabs in their movement against Carthage. And while my grandfather lived, Carthage stayed in Roman hands. How it was lost, again, will be told in its own place.

Even before this time, the Arabs, curse them, had done a thing the Persians never did in all their centuries of war against us Romans. They took to the sea, endangering the Roman Empire in that new fashion. Like all the line of Herakleios, Constans my grandfather was a man who believed in going straight at the foe. He assembled the Roman fleet, and met that of the Arabs off the coast of Lykia, the southwestern region of Anatolia.

Before the two fleets joined battle, my grandfather dreamt he was in Thessalonike. He told this to a man who knew how to interpret dreams, asking what it meant. And the man's face grew long, and he said, "I wish you had not dreamt this dream."

As I have said, I never met Constans, but I can imagine the fearsome glare he must have given the fellow. "Why?" he would have growled.

The man who could interpret dreams had courage, for he answered with what he saw: "Your being in Thessalonike signifies, 'Give victory to someone else,' for that is the meaning of the words. You would do far better, Emperor, not to engage the enemy tomorrow."

My grandfather went out and fought the sea battle anyhow. He-

Christ and all the saints, Brother Elpidios, that's Herakleios and those who sprang from him, right there in a sentence. They weren't always right, but they were always sure. So Justinian could see that in his grandfather, could he? Too bad he never could see it in himself.

Go on, go on, I pray you. I did say I'd break in from time to time. Go on.

– fought the sea battle, and was defeated. Indeed, he was almost killed. The Arabs boarded the imperial flagship. One brave soul there stripped the robe from his back and pretended to be him, while another helped him get across a narrow stretch of sea stained red with Roman blood to a dromon not under such fierce attack. Both those heroes died, but Constans came back safe to Constantinople.

The Arabs might have moved against the Queen of Cities then, but they fell into civil strife. In the fourth year of my father's reign, though, the deniers of Christ readied a great expedition, and in the spring of his fifth year they came.

We Romans had not been idle. My father, learning of the Arabs' preparations, ordered our shipwrights to work straight through the winter, building and refurbishing the vessels upon which, along with the great walls of Constantinople, our safety depended. On learning the foe's fleet had set out from Kilikia, where it had wintered, and was bound for the imperial city, he and his brothers- the two junior Emperors, Herakleios and Tiberius (my uncles, in other words)- decided to hearten the workmen and sailors at the Proklianesian harbor, and they took me with them.

When I think back on it, I am astonished by how much I remember of the day: the sights, the sounds, most of all the smells of fresh-cut wood and rope and pitch. Perhaps I should not be surprised. Till then, I had spent most of my time with my mother, the Empress Anastasia, and with the women of the palace. Now I was decked out in miniature robes of deep crimson- for I was a prince myself- and borne along in a sedan chair right behind those my father and my uncles rode. I kept peeking out through the curtains to see as much of the city as I could.

The Proklianesian harbor lies on the southern side of Constantinople, just east of the harbor of Theodosios, the largest of the city's anchorages. It is not a harbor for merchantmen or fishing boats: war galleys lie there.

I had never seen dromons before. They were long and lean, some with one bank of oars, some with two. The bronze rams they carried at the bow were green and pitted from the sea; some had gray or purple-red patches of barnacles growing on them. The dromons carried wooden towers amidships, from which archers could shoot down at the decks of enemy vessels. Each had sockets for masts before and behind the tower, but the masts were not in place now.

I had never seen or heard such men as those who worked on the dromons and would presently sail them either. The sun had burnt them near as black as Ethiopians are said to be, and sun and wind and spray carved harsh lines in their faces. Some of them wore wool or linen tunics that did not reach their knees, others just a cloth wrapped around their loins, commonly with a sheathed knife on the right side.

When they saw me, they smiled and pointed and called to me. I remember how white their teeth were against beards and dark faces. I also remember how much trouble I had understanding their Greek. Compared to what I heard in the palaces, it was clipped and quick, hardly seeming the same language at all.

My father and uncles had no trouble with it. In fact, when they talked with the sailors, they dropped into it themselves. I had never heard them speak like that before. Now, of course, I too talk like an educated man among clerics and accountants, and like a sailor among sailors.

A party of workmen came up the docks, past me, my father, and my uncles. Some of them were carrying bronze tubes, not sea-green like the dromons' rams but bright and shiny, the color of a freshly minted forty-follis coin. Others bore contraptions of hide and wood. After a moment, I recognized them as bellows, oversized cousins to the ones the cooks in the kitchens used to make their fires burn hotter. I pointed to them. "What are those for? Will the sailors blow on the sails with them to make the ships go faster?"

My father, my uncles, and everyone else who heard me laughed. I knew then I was wrong. That made me angry. I stamped my foot and screamed as if I were being made a eunuch.

My uncle Tiberius turned to Herakleios and murmured, "Constantine should clout him when he acts like that." Herakleios nodded. My father did not notice the byplay. Even though I was screaming, I did. I screamed even louder, just to annoy my uncles the more.

My uncle called to a swarthy, hawk-faced man who walked along behind the workers with the tubes and the bellows: "Attend us, Kallinikos!"

The swarthy man approached and bowed very low, first to my father, then to each of my uncles in turn, and last of all to me. I was surprised enough to quiet down. "How may I serve you, Emperor?" Kallinikos asked. He was an educated man; I could tell that at once. Yet his Greek had a guttural undertone I had not heard before. Since the Arabs burst out of the desert, Syrian accents have grown scarce in Constantinople.

"Tell the prince Justinian," my father said, pointing to me, "why these men are fitting our ships with the devices you have invented."

"Of course, Emperor." Kallinikos bowed first to my father and then to me. He did not bow again to my uncles. I liked that. To me, he said, "Prince, these tubes will project out across the water and onto any ship that comes close to one of ours a liquid fire that will cling and burn it up."

"How is it made?" I asked.

Kallinikos started to answer, then hesitated, looking to my father, who said, "We should not speak of that here on the docks, where so many men can listen. The making of this liquid fire is a secret, and we do not want the Arabs to learn how it is done. Do you understand?"

He spoke gravely. I nodded. As he had intended, he had taught me a lesson: that secrecy could matter not only to a boy but to an Emperor. I have remembered.

My father went on, "Kallinikos here, being a good Christian man"- he made the sign of the cross, as did my uncles, as did I, as did Kallinikos himself-"came here to the Queen of Cities from Heliopolis with his invention, not wanting it to fall into the hands of the followers of the false prophet." All at once he looked quite grim. "And soon we shall see just how much use it is to us, too."

Two years before, the Arabs had captured Smyrna, on the western coast of Anatolia, and Kyzikos, which lies under Mount Dindymos across the Propontis from Constantinople, to serve as bases for their assault on the Queen of Cities. When full spring brought good weather and reduced the chance of storms on the narrow sea between Kyzikos and Constantinople, the deniers of Christ sailed up and laid siege to our God-guarded imperial capital.

With my father and my uncles, I watched from the seawall as their fleet drew near. I had never seen so many ships in all my short life; they seemed to cover all the water of the Propontis. I pointed out to them. "See how the oars move back and forth like a centipede's legs," I said. I had smashed a couple of centipedes in the past few days; good weather brought them out, as it did the Arabs.

"They're like centipedes in another way, too," my father answered: "If they bite us, we will die."

Out ahead of their fleet rowed dromons much like ours, save only that they lacked wooden towers amidships. Faint over the water, I heard for the first time the chant their oarsmen and soldiers repeated endlessly: "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!"

"What does that mean?" I asked my father.

'God is great," he answered absently. He was paying more heed to those oncoming warships than to me.

Our own dromons put out from the Proklianesian harbor and the harbor of Theodosios to meet them. A great cry rose from the men and women watching on the seawall: "God with us! Christ with us! The Virgin with us!" They drowned out the chant of the Arabs. The patriarch John held up a holy icon of the Mother of God, one made by divine hands, not those of men.

And now this Leo, the one who's been ruling us these past fourteen years, he calls icons graven images, and says we should smash all of them? You ask me, only a man with the mind of a Jew or a Saracen would say such stupid things. No doubt you reckon me a foolish old man, Brother Elpidios, but I doubt you'll argue with me there.

Come to that, Justinian and I met this Leo before he was so much of a much. I wonder what my master will have to say of him. I know, Brother: each thing in its own place. Read on.

The sea breeze played with the patriarch's robes- gorgeous with cloth of gold and pearls and jewels- and fluffed out his great white beard.

After my encounter with Kallinikos, I looked for our dromons to breathe out fire like dragons and send all the ships of the misbelieving Arabs to the bottom at once. That did not happen, of course. Life is more difficult than it looks to little boy s.

The Arabs' dromons sprinted toward ours, their oars churning the water to a frothy wake. Behind them, the other ships of the deniers of Christ made for the Thracian coast south and west of Constantinople.

Some Roman war galleys broke through the screen the followers of the false prophet tried to set between them and the transports carrying Arab soldiers. My father, my uncles, I, John the patriarch- everyone on the seawall- screamed in delight when a dromon rammed a fat merchantman right amidships. The dromon backed oars after striking. The hole it punched in the other ship's side must have been huge; you could watch the merchantman wallow and start to sink. Heads bobbed in the water: sailors and soldiers, trying to swim for their lives. The archers aboard our dromons must have had fine sport with them, and sent many souls on to eternal torment.

But my father's exultation did not last. "It is not enough," he said. "They will gain the shore, in spite of all we can do."

He was right. From the suburb of Kyklobion less than a mile from the Golden Gate at the southern end of Constantinople's double land wall to the town of Hebdomon four or five miles farther west, the Arabs beached their ships and swarmed ashore, onto the soil of Thrace. Peering west and a little south, I could make out some of the nearer landings. At that distance, the deniers of Christ in their white robes reminded me of nothing so much as termites scattering when the piece of rotten wood they infest is disturbed.

Out on the sea, the fight between the Arabs' dromons and our own went on. From their towers amidships, our bowmen could shoot down onto the decks of the enemy war galleys, and the Arabs could not reply in kind. Little by little, we seemed to gain the advantage.

But that was not what I wanted to see. "Where is the liquid fire?" I demanded, and then, louder: "Where is the liquid fire?"

Tiberius and Herakleios looked at each other. I suppose they were hoping my father would slap me across the face and make me be quiet. If he tried, I vowed to myself I would grab his hand and bite it. I had done that before, and drawn blood. Mostly, though, he indulged me, which never stopped irking my uncles. And why should he not have indulged me? I was then his only son. I indulge my little son Tiberius the same way.

Someone told me what happened to Tiberius, there at the end. He was just like his father at the same age, only more so. Do you know that story, Brother Elpidios? You do? All right. Take no notice of an old man's maunderings, then.

"Where is the-" I was screeching now, like a cat when somebody steps on its tail. But a rising cry of wonder and delight from all along the seawall made my voice sound small and lost.

My father pointed out onto the Sea of Marmara. My eyes followed his outthrust finger. There in the water, not far out of catapult range from the wall, a dromon full of the deniers of Christ was burning, flames licking along the deck and smoke billowing up from them. Oh, Mother of Christ, it was beautiful!

The Arabs on the dromon ran about like men possessed, trying to put out the fire. They were not chanting their accursed "Allahu akbar!" anymore; they were screaming in terrified earnest. And as I watched them do their best to douse the flames, I understood why, for water helped them not at all.

One of those who followed the false prophet, lent strength, no doubt, by fear, picked up a great hogshead and poured it down onto the fire. It did not quench the flames. Instead, still burning merrily, they floated atop the barrelful of water and, where it stopped, they stopped, too, starting new blazes in those places. When the Arabs perceived that, their screams redoubled.

They might have learned as much merely by looking down to the slightly choppy surface of the sea, where more fire floated. Indeed, our dromon, the one that had projected the liquid fire onto the Arab warship, had to back oars quickly, lest the flames on the seawater cling to it and make of it a pyre to match its foe.

My father cried out in a great voice, "Fifty pounds of gold to Kallinikos, to whom God granted the vision of this wonderful fire!" All the people on the seawall cheered like men possessed. Danger was not banished from the Queen of Cities; far from it. But we took new heart from having a weapon our enemies could not match.

A few minutes later, my uncle Tiberius shouted in a voice that cracked with excitement: "Look! Another galley burns!" And, sure enough, the liquid fire was consuming a second Arab dromon. That victory was not complete, however, for our galley did not escape the liquid fire on the water and also burned. Some of its sailors swam to the base of the seawall, where the soldiers and people of the city let down ropes to rescue them. Others, poor souls, drowned.

Perhaps the deniers of Christ had intended landing marines at the base of the seawall. Along with the darts the catapults on their dromons could have hurled, such an assault would have stretched our defenses thin. They might have been able to make and then to take advantage of a breach in the land walls.

But if that idea had been in their minds, the liquid fire put paid to it. Their war galleys drew back from our fleet, and from the walls of the imperial city, protected by God. They made for the Thracian coast, there to guard the Arabs' great flotilla of transports from our dromons.

Seeing the Arabs' galleys withdraw, the men on the walls burst into cheers. "We've beaten them!" some cried. Others shouted out a Latin acclamation still used in the city: "Tu vincas, Constantine!"

I looked to my father, proud like any son to hear him praised. I expected him to show he was proud, too, and to show delight in the victory the Romans had won over the barbarians. But his long, thin face remained somber. "We've not won the war," he said, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else. "We've survived the first blow, nothing more."

I pointed out to sea, where those burning dromons still sent up thick pillars of smoke, and where the wreckage of other vessels, most of them belonging to the followers of the false prophet, bobbed in the waves. Our own warships protected the seawalls like a pack of friendly dogs guarding a farmhouse. "Look, Father," I said, maybe thinking he did not know what we had done.

He looked. Then he looked westward, where the Arabs were still swarming off the vessels that had reached the Thracian shore. "Now the battle begins," he said.

My father was right. The followers of the false prophet had not labored so hard nor come so far to flee when their first assault miscarried. It was to be four years before Constantinople saw the last of them. From April till September, the Arabs would attack the land wall or Roman troops would sally forth from it to raid their encampments at Kyklobion.

Sometimes they would catch the raiders before our men could regain safety. Then, often, they would kill them before our eyes to put us in fear. Sometimes our men would return in triumph, with prisoners and booty. I remember them singing as they led dejected Arabs up the Mese from the wall to the Forum of Constantine. Our headsmen put some of the prisoners to the sword, to avenge our own butchered men. Others were sold for slaves. Even besieged, our merchants would not turn aside from profit. The deniers of Christ should all have been killed.

They kept their war galleys busy on the Sea of Marmara. Thanks to the liquid fire, and thanks to the towers on our dromons that gave our archers the advantage over theirs, they quickly grew reluctant to fight great sea battles, as they had done when they came forth from Kyzikos. But they were always out hunting for merchantmen, and, because they were known to be hunting, few merchantmen put to sea. Deprived of much of the harvest of Anatolia that normally fed it, the city became a hungry place.

I did not know hunger. How could I? I was the Emperor's son. Having made its acquaintance since, I must say I do not regret missing the earlier introduction. But if those years when the Arabs besieged the imperial city were empty of bodily hunger for me, they were full of the spiritual hunger of loneliness.

When the weather began to grow chilly toward the end of the first September of the siege, the Arabs withdrew from their camps on Thracian soil, sailing back to Kyzikos to winter there. We rejoiced, though even then we expected they would return with the spring like migrating birds. And, near the time of Christ's birth, my mother presented my father with a second baby boy.

He named the boy Herakleios, partly because that name had been in the family for generations and partly, I think, because he had just made up his latest quarrel with my uncle of that name and wanted to put a tangible seal on their reconciliation. Herakleios proved a weak and sickly baby, which was an omen for the reconciliation as well.

Bearing my little brother left my mother weak and sickly, too. And, even for an Empress of the Romans with eunuchs and wet nurses and other serving women to attend her should she lift a finger, a new baby sucks time as greedily as it sucks milk. In looking after little Herakleios, my mother all but forgot about me. My father, with the weight of the Roman Empire on his shoulders, already seemed to have forgotten.

And so, by the time I had six years, I did whatever I chose, for who besides my father and mother would tell me no? Often I would gather up a couple of excubitores and, with them as escort, go atop the seawall to watch our dromons and those of the Arabs clash on the Sea of Marmara. The excubitores never protested when I put them to such work. Why should they? They were imperial bodyguards and I was the Emperor's son; therefore, their duty included guarding me. Aristotle could not have made a clearer syllogism.

When the warships did not put to sea, I sometimes had my bearers carry me to the land wall so I could peer down at the Arabs vainly trying to break into the God-guarded imperial city. I even went out to the lower, outer wall- once. When word of that got back to my father, he remembered me long enough to forbid it. That only made me want it more.

The bearers, as was natural, stood in too much fear of my father to give in to my wishes, and withstood even my fiercest tantrums. So did the excubitores. That wounded me to the quick. They were fighting men. Could they not see I wanted to put myself at the forefront of the battle?

When tantrums failed, another boy might have tried wheedling. Not I. I had a different plan. One morning on the inner wall, I turned to the excubitor standing alongside me and complained, "I'm too short to see anything from the walkway. Lift me up to the top of the forewall, Myakes."

The forewall running between crenellations is perhaps a foot thick and a little taller than a man's waist. It is so high it need not withstand stones from a catapult or the pounding of a ram, but only give cover to archers behind it.

Myakes frowned. He must have been thinking about something else, and only half heard what I said. "What was that, little Goldentop?" he asked, using a nickname the excubitores often gave me.