Justinian

JUSTINIAN

I had peace with the followers of the false prophet, and had it on better terms than my father had managed to wring from them. Not only that, but Abimelekh faced yet another uprising against his rule. My judgment was that my eastern frontier was as safe as it would ever be. I called up the cavalry from the military districts of Anatolia and ordered the horsemen to cross into Europe, as my father had in his ill-fated campaign against the Bulgars.

I intended to campaign against the Bulgars, too, and sent their emissaries away empty-handed when they came to collect the tribute to which my father had agreed. But the campaign I had in mind would not merely put the Bulgars in their place; it would also deal with the Sklavenoi, some of whom were under the control of the Bulgars and some of whom, in their revolting freedom, plundered Roman settlements all on their own. The suffering the land south of the Danube had endured made that of Anatolia seem as nothing beside it.

As had my father and grandfather and great-great-grandfather before me, I took the field in person. If the soldiers would not perform well under my eye, they would never perform well. And the Sklavenoi were so barbarous, I was certain they could produce no leaders with the wit to stand against us.

They were also divided among themselves, each little Sklavinia existing in a state of squalid independence, as often at war with its neighbors as with the Roman Empire. Like a foolish man in a fight who covers up where he has been hit rather than trying to anticipate where he will be hit next, they (or at least those not dominated by the Bulgars, who had better sense) were not likely to come to the aid of one another.

I had been out to the Long Wall before, but no farther. Philaretos, the count of the Long Wall, greeted me at Selymbria, the town anchoring the wall to the Sea of Marmara. I had not seen him since Eudokia's funeral. "God grant that my granddaughter thrive," he said, "for she is all I have left by which to remember the girl."

"God grant it," I echoed, and said no more. He made the sign of the cross, thinking me pious. But what I meant was more on the order of, God had better grant it, for I intend to have nothing to do with it.

The Long Wall is different from that of the imperial city. Rather than alternating courses of brick and stone, it is built of hard, pinkish cement with chunks of brick embedded in the cement. It also, I must sadly say, differs from Constantinople's wall in its effectiveness, or lack thereof. Where, along with the protection of God, Constantinople's wall has kept the city inviolate since it was built, barbarians have repeatedly penetrated the Long Wall and plundered the suburbs it was meant to protect. Stretching more than thirty miles from the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, the Long Wall was too long to garrison adequately.

Still, though, it did offer the regions nearest the imperial city some protection. Passing beyond it, I felt I was leaving safety and entering land that, while nominally under the rule of the Roman Empire, was in fact detached from Romania. I aimed to make Roman rule real there once again, and nominal no more.

Had I wanted to push the army straight down the Via Egnatia, the military highway of the Romans for the past eight hundred years and more, I could have been in Thessalonike very soon. But I had planned a campaign, not a military parade, and so in search of Sklavenoi the army plunged off the highway and into the forested, sometimes marshy valleys that lay to the north.

I prayed at the church of St. Glykeria in Herakleia (or, as the antiquarians call it, Perinthos), and had my prayer answered the very next day, the army flushing out several little Sklavinian farming villages north of the town. The barbarians seemed utterly astonished at the presence of Roman soldiers in land they obviously believed to be theirs.

None of them spoke Greek. I had their headmen haled before me and asked them, "Would you sooner die or obey me?" I thought at first that my interpreter had suffered a coughing fit, but he was merely translating the question into their hideous, guttural dialect. Their answers were as full of choking, wheezing noises.

"They say they will obey, Emperor," the interpreter said.

"Good. I thought that would be a choice even a Sklavinian could understand," I said. "Since they say they will obey, tell them I am going to resettle their whole clan or tribe or whatever they call themselves in Anatolia. Tell them they can farm there and pay taxes to the fisc and furnish us with soldiers when we need them."

"Emperor, I can tell them they will farm," the interpreter said. "I can tell them they will give us soldiers. But I cannot tell them they will pay us taxes. Their language has no words for such things."

"What? They don't know about taxes?" I threw back my head and laughed. "Very well. Tell the poor barbarians what you can. They'll learn about the other soon enough. The officials of the fisc will give them detailed lessons, I have no doubt."

A small escort of Romans led the Sklavenoi down the Via Egnatia and then east toward Constantinople, whence they would cross into the empty lands of Anatolia. I allowed them no more than they could carry in their hands. Considering how little they had, I did not greatly deprive them.

The season being summer, the millet and barley in their fields were too far from ripe to feed my army. They did, however, have a good store of grain hidden in underground pits, as those familiar with their habits had foretold. We added that to our own supply, and our horses had good grazing in the fields.

It soon became clear that, although we had captured their villages, we had not sent all of the Sklavenoi off to the imperial city for resettlement. Some of them must have escaped into the woods and run off to warn their fellow tribesmen, for the next Sklavinian settlements we came upon were deserted, not only the people but also the livestock being gone.

I required no training in logic to realize the Sklavenoi from the abandoned villages were in turn surely letting more barbarians know we were on the march. A young officer familiar with the Sklavenoi, Bardanes the son of the patrician Nikephoros, confirmed my impression- not, I say, that it needed much confirmation. "Emperor, the next ones we meet will resist us," he said.

"No doubt you're right, Philippikos," I replied, and he beamed at me: he preferred that thoroughly Greek name to the Armenian one his father had given him as a sign of his ancestry. I went on, "I trust the army will be ready to meet their onslaught man to man, shield to shield."

"In an open fight, we'd smash them to bits," he said. "They aren't likely to give us an open fight, though. They'd rather spring ambushes, and"- he looked around-"this country is made for that sort of thing."

He was right, the land being rough and broken and woody, the roads leading north off the Via Egnatia no better than cattle tracks and, now that we had moved a couple of days' journey inland, sometimes disappearing altogether. He was also right about the Sklavenoi. As our horsemen, having no other choice, went up a game path in single file, javelins flew out of the woods and wounded one of them and two horses. After that, I dismounted some of the soldiers and sent them through the undergrowth to either side of the road. The Sklavenoi shot arrows, some poisoned, at them, but they caught and killed a good number of barbarians, too. Our advance through the Sklavinias continued.

Not all the Sklavinian chiefs and petty kings fled on hearing of our approach. Some yielded themselves and all their people up to us. I resettled them just as I had the Sklavenoi we had captured and overcome in war, although I allowed them to take along their livestock and carts and wagons filled with their belongings, the better to start their new lives in Anatolia.

You could never tell what would happen in any particular little Sklavinia. All depended on the will of the chieftain who ruled that patch of ground. Rather more of them, I think, chose to fight than to surrender. Their poisoned arrows were weapons not to be despised. Several of our men died from them, while others were mutilated: the sole cure the physicians knew was to cut away the flesh around the arrowhead to keep the venom from spreading throughout the victim's system. The physicians gave these poor fellows great draughts of wine infused with poppy juice before plying their scalpels, but screams still echoed through the gloomy forests of Thrace.

A certain Neboulos was kinglet of the largest and strongest Sklavinia not under the control of the Bulgars; it lay north and east of Thessalonike. This Sklavinian had the arrogance to send envoys to me warning me not to enter the territory he reckoned his. "You do that, he kill all your men, all your horses," one of these men said in bad Greek.

"He will have his chance," I said.

"He kill you, Emperor, in particular especial," the envoy warned redundantly.

"He will have his chance," I repeated, and sent the Sklavenoi away with the message that Neboulos could either yield or face the weight of Roman wrath.

That evening, our army camped by a stream with a marsh and reeds on the far bank. More reeds grew on the western bank, where we were encamped. I took my horse down to the edge of the stream to water it and to get a drink for myself, having been in the saddle all day. Nikephoros's son Bardanes (or, again to use his own coining, Philippikos) went down to the stream alongside me, intent on the same errands. Stooping to fill a cup of water for himself, he suddenly froze in place. Then he pointed to one of the reeds that seemed to me no different from any of the others. "Do you see that, Emperor?" he asked quietly.

"Yes, I see it," I said. "But what-?"

Bardanes did not answer, not in words. Instead, he reached out and yanked the reed out of the water. It had, I saw to my surprise, neither roots nor leaves, being merely a length of stem. A moment later, I got another, larger, surprise. A Sklavinian popped to the surface where the reed had been. Bardanes had dropped it and snatched up his bow. I quickly drew my sword.

At Bardanes' peremptory command in the Sklavinian language, the man came up onto the bank of the stream. Water dripped from his long yellow hair and from his beard. He was naked but for a sword belt. Bardanes spoke again. The Sklavinian loosed the belt and let it fall. A couple of the excubitores came hurrying up to take him away. He went off between them, careless of his unclothed state.

"How did you know he was lurking there?" I asked Bardanes.

"Emperor, hiding in the water is a favorite Sklavinian trick," he answered. Picking up the reed, he showed me its entire length had been hollowed out. "They'll stay down there for hours, even a day, at a time, breathing through one of these, waiting till their enemies go away. But you can usually spot them, because they cut the ends of the reeds straight across, where a naturally broken reed"- he pointed to a couple-"has a jagged end."

"Cunning," I said. "Barbarously cunning. With tricks like that, no wonder they've given us Romans so much trouble down through the years."

"I'm glad I spied this one," Bardanes said. "Who knows what mischief he might have done had you come here alone?"

"Who indeed?" I said. "Thank you, Philippikos."