The World

Houses of Constantine, Sasan and Spearthrower Owl

CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES: WIFE KILLER AND THIRTEENTH APOSTLE

In 304, Diocletian fainted in public and decided to retire, the first emperor ever to do so; he withdrew to grow cabbages at his palace in Split (Croatia).^* Forcing Maximian to do the same, Diocletian promoted Constantius and Galerius to be Augustus of west and east. Sensing danger from Galerius, Constantine galloped westwards. After he had met up with his father in Gaul, they crossed to Britannia to fight the Picts, but in 306, in York, Constantius died. A German king acclaimed Constantine as Augustus. Taking control of Britannia, Hispania and Gaul, Constantine, thirty-four years old, repelled a Frankish raid and captured their kings, whom he fed to the lions in the amphitheatre of his capital Triers. Muscular and hefty with a thrusting jaw, blunt nose and cleft chin, Constantine led his troops from the front and killed anyone who stood in his way, but he was also a thoughtful and cautious man.

Maximian backed his son Maxentius to become emperor and offered his pretty teenaged daughter Fausta to Constantine, whose first wife had died. The couple went on to have three sons, but the alliance with Fausta’s family had become fraught. After his father-in-law had tried to have him assassinated, Constantine outmanoeuvred the old emperor, forcing his suicide. Fausta was now stuck with a husband who had effectively killed her father – while her brother Maxentius still ruled Italy.

Constantine issued edicts of religious tolerance, suggesting sympathy for the Christianity embraced by his mother Helena. In 312, while he was close to a temple of Sol Invictus, Constantine saw a ring around the sun. Christians insisted that Jesus Christ was the ‘light of the world’ – the sun – and Constantine concluded he had received a sign from Christ. As he marched into Italy, he ordered his troops to inscribe the Ch-Rho – the first two Greek letters of the word Christ – on their banners.

As Constantine advanced on Rome, Maxentius lacked confidence, hiding his regalia, including an exquisite sceptre with a blue orb for the world, on the Palatine Hill. At Milvian Bridge, Constantine routed Maxentius, who fell off his horse into the Tiber; his head was later paraded round Rome atop a lance.

Now Constantine revealed himself as a Christian sympathizer. Even though the sect’s absolute moral certainties ruled out compromise with the Roman pantheon, Constantine moved slowly, building new churches on the site of the tomb of St Peter and a splendid, still-standing basilica at the Lateran. Yet his triumphal arch featured Sol Invictus, Companion of Unconquered Constantine. But victory is always the most persuasive religious argument: Constantine believed Christ had won his battles for him.

Constantine ruled only the western empire; his colleague as Augustus, Licinius, ruled the east. In 313, the two Augusti met and Constantine married his half-sister Constantia to Licinius. But the empire was too small for two Augusti. When the showdown came in 324, Constantine, lightly wounded, smashed Licinius near the old Greek town of Byzantion. His sister Constantia, mother of his nephew, negotiated Licinius’ surrender – but Constantine quietly killed husband and child. He was no saint.

Constantine now emerged as a Christian emperor, promoting the hierarchy of the Church in parallel with that of the state, and enforcing a new morality: he abolished crucifixion in honour of Jesus, banned murderous games, fortified marriage, discouraged adultery, made Sun-day the Christian sabbath, fixed the dates of Christmas (already celebrated as the winter solstice) and Easter and persecuted the Jews, whom he called ‘murderers of the Lord’.^*

Accustomed to being a divine ruler, Constantine ranked himself high on the hierarchy between God and man, seeing himself as the thirteenth apostle. But now he had to deal with the fissiparous debates about the relationship between God, Christ and the Holy Spirit that were already leading to murderous feuds. How divine was Jesus? Many Christians regarded all three as divine, but Arius, an Alexandrian priest, believed Jesus was a divine-touched human subordinate to God. Salvation was a matter of life and death; factions fought the Christological debates in the streets of Alexandria. Constantine ordered the burning of Arius’ writings, and at Nicaea he dictated a compromise formula that became the orthodoxy. A religion that believed in one absolute truth and one unwavering route to salvation could not compromise.

Constantine discovered that the Christians were more difficult to regulate than anything else.^* Except his family.

In 326, Constantine arrested his eldest son, Caesar Crispus, and ordered his killing by poison. Somehow his wife Fausta – mother of three of the emperor’s sons and two daughters – was implicated. Either Crispus had conspired with his glamorous stepmother or he had had an affair with her. She seems to have denounced him to Constantine. She had given birth to a child just three years earlier, so her marriage to Constantine was at least active. But Constantine had killed her father and brother, a record that might cast a shadow over any marriage.

A year after Crispus’ execution, he ordered Fausta’s arrest. Constantine’s mother Helena (now aged seventy-five) made a sinister intervention: she criticized his killing of Crispus and convinced him the boy had been seduced then framed by Fausta. As a result Fausta was boiled to death in the steam baths. It is ironic that this murderous mother-in-law would become a Christian saint. Helena, promoted to Augusta, was dispatched on an imperial mission to rediscover relics of Jesus in Aelia Capitolina, once known as Jerusalem.

The most successful archaeologist of all time, Helena swiftly identified the location of Jesus’ crucifixion and tomb, beneath Hadrian’s Temple of Venus, then uncovered pieces of the True Cross itself, and finally commissioned the transformation of Aelia into the Christianized Holy City, centrepiece of a new Christian Holy Land in which splendid churches marked the vital events of Jesus’ life, grafted on top of its discredited Jewish sanctity.^* Helena brandished a letter from her son – one of the many through which we can hear his emphatic, magniloquent voice: ‘I have no greater care than how I may best adorn with a splendid structure that sacred spot, which, under Divine direction, I have disencumbered of the heavy weight of foul idol worship.’ The Temple of Venus was demolished, replaced by a basilica to mark the Holy Sepulchre and Golgotha, with another church on the site of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. Afterwards, Helena delivered her splinters of the True Cross and the nails of the crucifixion to Constantine: she set the nails in his helmet and bridle.

As she died in Constantine’s arms, he had already decided to found a new capital in the east. After reviewing and rejecting Troy, Chalcedon and Thessalonica, in May 330 he dedicated a new city on the European side of the Bosphoros at Byzantion, with its superb harbour and defensible peninsula – just across from the site of his victory over Licinius. Declaring that God had told him to name it after himself – Constantinople – he planned a New Rome, with its own senate, but also an imperial–Christian capital. His palace stood on its acropolis. Hulking Christian basilicas vied with a huge hippodrome and a forum featuring a porphyry pillar with the pagan-style naked emperor, himself, on top, radiating sunrays.

His conversion made Christianity as attractive and powerful as the Roman empire itself: power is always the lodestar of faith. Three centuries after Jesus’ obscure death, Christ now became the central moral figure of western civilization: millions converted. In 319, Constantine’s neighbour Iberia (Georgia) followed suit,^* while in Africa, Ezana, king of Aksum in Eritrea and Ethiopia, who had finished off Kush and expanded into Yemen, had long interacted with merchants and missionaries from Alexandria. Around 350, he converted too. But Constantine’s conversion led to new tension with Persia, where the Sasanians were coalescing around the belly of a pregnant queen.

THE CROWNED EMBRYO AND THE PAGAN EMPEROR

In 309, Persian grandees murdered their king, then crowned the unborn foetus – the embryo king – within the belly of the queen without knowing if the baby would turn out to be male.

They got lucky: the baby was Shapur II, who by the time Constantine had founded Constantinople, had emerged as a forceful autocrat. Shapur spent his first years chastising the Lakhm Arab tribes of Iraq, whom he recruited as allies under Amr, the self-styled king of all the Arabs,^* and then, still barely out of his teens, managed to fight off the Huns. Constantine’s Christianity made Shapur question the loyalty of his many Christians. Armenia, itself Christianized, appealed for Constantine’s help and he prepared for war. He had already named his three sons by Fausta as Caesars, along with his half-brother’s sons, while a nephew Hannibalianus became king of kings, prospective ruler of Persia. But as he moved east Constantine, now sixty-five, fell ill, so he sent Constantius, his middle, favourite son, ahead to repel Shapur. When Constantius, still in his teens, heard that his father was dying, he rushed back. Constantine was baptized on his deathbed, as Constantius organized a family massacre of the late emperor’s half-brothers and six nephews.

The three sons met to divide up the empire: Constantine II the eldest, now twenty-one, who regarded himself as the main heir, got Britannia, Hispania and Gaul; Constans Italy and Africa, Constantius the east, where he soon halted Shapur. However, the brothers quickly fell out and two were killed, leaving Constantius as sole emperor. But he was thinly stretched.

Only two male Constantinians had survived his family hecatomb – his cousins Gallus and Julian, who lived quietly on a Cappadocian estate, lucky to be alive. Gallus was ambitious; Julian eschewed politics and studied philosophy. Constantius appointed Gallus as Caesar, who then unwisely presided over the games in Constantinople, prerogative of Augusti. Constantius had Gallus beheaded, and wondered whether to kill Julian too. The emperor’s wife Eusebia, a cultivated, kindly Macedonian, now brought Julian to the emperor. Constantius agreed to let him study philosophy in Athens, where he rejected Christianity and embraced the worship of the sun god.

Constantius needed a partner in the west even though he was ‘suspicious’ of Julian’s popularity. But, encouraged by Eusebia, he raised Julian to Caesar and sent him to Lutetia Parisiorum (Paris).

Julian surprised everyone (especially himself) by defeating the Alemanni, but in 360 Shapur attacked in the east backed by an army of Hunnish auxiliaries. Already both the Roman and Persian armies deployed large corps of ‘barbarians’. Constantius ordered Julian to send half of his legions eastwards. Julian had just lost his sole ally, Eusebia having overdosed on fertility drugs. In Paris, he was declared Augustus. Constantius rushed back to destroy him, but died of fever on the way.

Now sole emperor, Julian tilted the empire back towards paganism, attacking Christianity and restoring pagan temples, even giving Jerusalem back to the Jews so that they could rebuild the Temple. One man, his uncle, had imposed Christianity; the nephew could have overturned it – if he had been lucky. But his most urgent business was Persia, where he planned to take Ctesiphon, rowing his army of 65,000 down the Euphrates and along a canal into the Tigris. When he disembarked, he showed his confidence by burning his flotilla but failed to destroy the Sasan army. Ctesiphon did not fall and Julian retreated, harassed by Sasan cavalry. On 26 June 363 near Samara, he rushed towards the fighting, forgetting to pull on his mail. A javelin struck him in the side. His Greek doctor tried to sew up the torn intestine, but Julian died – and the Romans, desperate to get home, gave Shapur everything he demanded.

In the chaos after Julian’s death, which ended the Constantinian dynasty, an irascible general Valentinian was chosen as Augustus, appointing his brother Valens as eastern emperor, but both were forced to firefight invasions of barbarians. When Valentinian died of a stroke when enraged in 375,^* Valens faced the armed migration of Germanic Goths, known as the Thervingi, cousins of peoples who lived in Ukraine and Russia.^* Valens had hired them as foederati or allies and granted them lands, only for Roman officials to steal those lands: the furious Goths went to war. In 378, at Adrianople (Edirne), a Gothic horse archer got a bullseye, hitting Valens in the face.

In 378, as Valens fell, so, far to the west, did the ruler of Tikal in Mesoamerica when Spearthrower Owl, a warlord from Teotihuacan, the magnificent city in the Mexican valley, ordered Tikal’s conquest.

FIRST CROCODILE AND RUGILA THE HUN

Spearthrower’s general Siyah Kak (Fire-Is-Born) marched six hundred miles southwards to defeat Tikal’s ajaw, Great Jaguar Paw, who was defeated, captured and most likely sacrificed. While some scholars doubt that a leader could have arrived from Teotihuacan, people certainly moved between the two cities – and it would not be the last dynasty founded by a stranger steeped in the mystery of faraway places. Much of this narrative remains mysterious but probably Fire-Is-Born became regent – Lord of the West – while Spearthrower Owl appointed his young son, First Crocodile, as ajaw of Tikal. Spearthrower Owl ruled for many years, but this was not the end of the dynasty of First Step Shark: Spearthrower married his son First Crocodile to Lady Kinich, daughter of Great Jaguar Paw, uniting the two families. First Crocodile ruled for many decades and when he died he was entombed with a headless crocodile and nine young sacrificed humans, the youngest being a boy of six, along with a censer statue of an old god sitting on a stool of human bones. This conquest marked the apogee of Teotihuacan.^*

The body of Valens was never found. The Goths marauded through the Balkans while Burgundians, Saxons, Franks and Vandals penetrated the Roman borders. The fall of the Roman empire was more of a fragmentation, less an event than a transformation. The barbarians were already not so much at the gates as in the kitchen and bedroom: the empire’s borders were porous, its peoples and especially the army already a hybrid honeycomb of Romanized Christian barbarians. If the Romans were scared of the Goths, the Goths were even more terrified by what lay behind them.

Out on the steppes of Eurasia, a people called Huns were galloping westwards, and among them was the family of Attila. Originating far to the east on the vast grasslands, precisely where is unknown, they were not a single people but a federation of ferocious raiders and pastoral nomads. Their language is unknown too, but it was probably Turkic in origin. Their migration may have been connected to the splintering of the Xiongnu. Now living east of the Black Sea, the Huns were drawn westwards by meteorological changes, dynamic leadership, the need for new pastures and news of rich plunder. Remarkably symbiotic with their horses which they were first tied on to at the age of three, they had honed the horse archery of the steppes into a conquering machine that could fight in any season and cover vast distances. Each warrior travelled with two or three remounts, armed with their composite bows and iron-headed arrows, guarding families who travelled in big wagons, stopping to camp and cook around cauldrons, served by enslaved prisoners. In war, they advanced in units of a thousand or more, their recurve bows firing arrows at 125 miles per hour. ‘In five seconds 1,000 arrows could hit 200 of the enemy,’ writes John Man, ‘another 1,000 in the next five … a rate of 12,000 shots per minute, equivalent to ten machine-guns.’ Once their enemies were wounded, they lassooed them and dragged them off their feet or from their horses. Until the spread of gunpowder a thousand years later, such mounted archers were a deadly threat to sedentary societies.

They worshipped the sky god, Tengri, their shamans divining the future, but their kings also revered a numinous sword of war that enabled its bearer to rule the world. Their faces were scarred by grieving rituals, while Hunnish skeletons show that the skulls of some of their children, boys and girls, had been bound in order to create loaf-shaped crania – all of which horrified the Romans. A warlord named Rugila, along with his brothers Octar and Mundzuk, unified the Huns and others into a confederacy, conquering and co-opting the Ostrogoths and many other peoples, which suddenly galloped towards the Roman empire, which was at the time divided between the sons of Emperor Theodosius, one in Ravenna, the other in Constantinople.

Two extraordinary characters, one male, one female, were at the centre of this clash: one was a Hun, Rugila’s nephew, who became engaged to a Roman princess, and other was a Roman emperor’s daughter who married a barbarian king.

ATTILA AND EMPRESS PLACIDIA

Galla Placidia was the daughter of Emperor Theodosius, who had held the empire together for twenty stormy years. When he died, he left his two sons, his daughter and the empire in the care of a half-Vandal paladin named Stilicho. While the empire was divided between his sons, Stilicho fought barbarians on all fronts, among them a former Roman ally, Alaric, king of the Visigoths, whose ancestors had killed Emperor Valens and now invaded Italy. But in 408 the weak young emperor Honorius, jealous of Stilicho’s supremacy, had him executed – with disastrous consequences.

In 410, Alaric besieged Rome, forcing its citizens to starve and eat each other, then he sacked the city, smashing the urns of Augustus and Hadrian in their mausoleums – and leaving with a special prisoner, the emperor’s twenty-year-old sister Princess Placidia, whom he married to his son Ataulf. Placidia found herself queen of the barbarians who had destroyed Rome.

Yet the marriage was short. Ataulf was assassinated, and his successor humiliated Placidia, who was forced to walk through mocking crowds for ten miles before she was returned to her brother. Yet her life was an exercise in strength and survival. Now that she was safely back at court in Ravenna, Honorius married her in 417 to a general with whom she had two children, a daughter Honoria, as irrepressible as her mother, and a son. When Honorius died, she fled the ensuing chaos to join her nephew Theodosius II in Constantinople, negotiated military assistance for her cause, then presided over the expedition that restored her and her son, Valentinian III, to power in the west.

Ruling as Augusta and regent, educated and haughty, she built her own palace and chapel in Ravenna while she played off barbarian kings and her own half-barbarian generals. Her chief commander was a half-Goth called Flavius Aetius who had spent his youth as a hostage at the Hunnish court, where he had befriended the Hunnish warlord Rugila. When Aetius threatened her, she dismissed him. Aetius fled to Rugila, who lent him an army which he used as leverage against Empress Placidia. In 432, she appointed him her military supremo, magister utriusque militiae. Placidia and Aetius managed the transformation of the empire, settling their allies the Franks and Goths in the west, but losing Africa to the Vandals.

To the east, Aetius’ friend Rugila was expanding into central Europe and menacing Theodosius in Constantinople, who paid him with 350 pounds of gold and prayed for his death. In 435, Rugila was struck by a thunderbolt, more likely smallpox, leaving the confederacy to his nephews, Bleda and Attila. The brothers forced Theodosius to double his tribute to 700 pounds of gold, open markets with the Huns and return two cousins who had defected. When the latter were handed over, Attila immediately had them impaled as the Romans watched.

Although Attila and Bleda blackmailed Theodosius, they helped Empress Placidia and Aetius defeat an invasion of another Germanic tribe, the Burgundians. But they wanted more gold. In 440, they crossed the Danube to plunder Roman cities, stopping only when paid yet more. Bleda was then killed by Attila, who, wielding the sacred sword of world rulership, united ‘Scythia and Germania’ from the Caspian to the Danube. He held court at his capital of wooden houses built around a huge wooden palace with all the Roman comforts – wine, carpets, couches and a bathhouse. An African jester named Zercon^* performed for the frequent Roman envoys, who were offered ‘attractive women for intercourse, a mark of honour among the Huns’, recalled the Roman diplomat Priscus, before adding primly, ‘We plied the women with foods but refused intercourse.’ He was fascinated by Attila, remarking that he was ‘short of stature, broad-chested with a large head, small eyes, thin beard flecked with grey, snub nose’, and that he moved with ‘haughty gait, eyes darting, his power and pride apparent’. Attila was illiterate, so his Roman secretary Orestes handled his correspondence. While a ‘lover of war, he knew restraint, excellent in council, sympathetic to supplicants, gracious to those under his protection’. But he was lethal too – ‘I’ll have you impaled and fed to the birds,’ he would say – and Attila’s capital usually featured a ‘spy’ or two impaled on stakes.

Theodosius II, after completing new walls that would make Constantinople near impregnable for almost a thousand years, stopped paying Attila – and ordered his assassination, suborning a Skirian ally, Edika, to do the job. But the plot was exposed, and Attila relished the revelation of Roman duplicity. ‘Theodosius’s father was royal; I’m Attila son of Mundzuk,’ said Attila. ‘I’ve preserved my nobility, Theodosius has not. Now who’s the barbarian; who’s civilized?’ But Constantinople was unconquerable and Attila needed loot for his voracious chieftains: should he conquer Persia or go west? As the Vandals settled in Africa, with Goths, Franks and Burgundians in Spain, France and the Low Countries, Attila received a surprising invitation:^* a royal proposal of marriage.

ATTILA’S BLOODY WEDDING – AND JUSTINIAN’S BRIDE

In Ravenna, the sexagenarian Empress Placidia was retired; her son Valentinian III ruled, but her reckless, restless daughter Honoria, aged around thirty, bored by the dreary existence of an Augusta, craved adventure and started an affair with her chamberlain Eugenius. When it was discovered by her mother and brother, they had the paramour executed and betrothed her to an antique senator, at which the Augusta wrote a letter to Attila. A fragrantly named eunuch, Hyacinthus, secretly carried it with her ring to the Hun.

Attila accepted her indecent proposal, suggesting she deliver half the western empire as dowry. Placidia was outraged. Valentinian beheaded Hyacinthus and ordered Honoria’s execution, but their mother interceded. Honoria was swiftly married to the old senator. ‘Honoria shouldn’t be wronged,’ wrote Attila when he heard that his fiancée was under arrest. If she didn’t receive the sceptre of sovereignty, he continued, he would avenge her. Perhaps the longueurs of marriage killed Honoria; perhaps the drama killed Placidia; but both died as Attila and his horde of Huns, Goths, Burgundians, Gepids, Alans and Lombards crossed the Rhine and ravaged Gaul, while Aetius mustered his equally barbarian coalition of Romans, Franks, Burgundians and Visigoths. At Troyes, Attila was confronted by its bishop, who demanded mercy as a man of God.

‘I am Attila,’ laughed Attila grimly. ‘Scourge of God. What mortal could stand against God’s scourge?’ He spared Troyes. In battle, near Châlons, Aetius halted Attila, the Roman-Visigoth troops trapping the Hun in a circle of wagons. Attila, refusing to be taken alive, prepared for the traditional nomad’s self-immolation on a bonfire of wooden saddles. But the Huns got lucky, killing the Visigoth king, who was burned right there on his own saddle-pyre. Aetius did not wish to destroy the Huns, for that would leave him at the mercy of the Goths.

At dawn, Attila was amazed to find the Romans had gone – and he led his horde back to Hungary.

In 452, he invaded Italy, successfully taking Milan, but disease ravaged the Hun forces, which withdrew, consoled with Roman gold. The following spring, the polygamous Attila married a new bride, Ildico. After a hard-drinking wedding banquet, he staggered to bed where he haemorrhaged and drowned in his own blood.^* Ildico awoke to find herself covered in blood and Attila dead beside her. The next day, ‘when a great part of the morning was spent, the royal attendants suspected foul play and, after a great uproar, broke down the doors’, wherein, wrote Priscus, they found the king with no wounds, blood everywhere and the beautiful girl ‘with downcast face weeping beneath her veil’. Ildico had unknowingly saved Europe, but she is never mentioned again: she may have been sacrificed and buried with Attila.

Soon after Attila’s death, a young Thracian swineherd of Scupi (Skopje) named Justin escaped from raiding barbarians to set off for Constantinople, where he arrived with nothing more than the rags he wore and some bread but managed to get a job among the Excubitors – the security unit that guarded the Sacrum Cubiculum, the octagonal bedchamber of the emperor.

Constantinople was now one of the biggest cities in the world, ruled by its emperors from the Mega Palation – Great Palace – linked by secret passageways to the hippodrome and forum. Enriched by the agricultural wealth and tax income of Egypt, Syria, Greece and the Balkans, administered by a sophisticated court and civil service, often directed by the castrated chief chamberlain, the Great City had an increasingly Greek-speaking population of 500,000^* whose twin obsessions were soteriology – the quest for salvation – and sport. Their Christianity was viciously divided between Christological sects, while the prizes of the hippodrome, where contests could be watched by 100,000, were ruthlessly competed for by five chariot-racing teams, each sporting a different colour, that, in modern terms, were a mix of sports fanatics, soccer hooligans, mafiosi and paramilitary. The emperors called themselves the vicegerents of God, and, apart from their plenitude and panoply of monarchy, the only real tests of God’s approval were domestic order, the absence of natural disaster and victory in war, particularly against nomads in the Balkans and the Shah of Persia.

Justin, the Illyrian peasant boy, distinguished himself against the Persians before returning to the palace as Comes Excubitorum, count of the bodyguards. He had summoned his sister Vigilantia and her son Peter Sabbatos from Skopje to join him and his wife, who adopted the boy, giving him a new name: Justinian.

At this point, the emperor was Anastasius, a sexagenarian courtier who struggled to cope with the latest Christological controversy and his own succession. In July 518, as Anastasius, now aged eighty-seven, sank, Justin and his nephew Justinian were at the centre of the court intrigues. Sacred emperors were meant to be above grubby ambition since only someone who did not covet the purple could deserve it. But Justin had Justinian, now in his thirties, do the dirty work. Amantius, eunuch provost of the bedchamber, gave Justin a bounty to bribe the guards to back his candidate, but instead Justinian diverted it to win support for his uncle. When the emperor died, Justin was given the task of announcing his death to the hippodrome, where Justinian rallied the crowd to demand a general. But there were two; fighting broke out between the supporters of Justin and his rival. Justinian was almost killed but finessed his uncle’s acclamation. In the imperial box, the eunuchs handed over the regalia of an emperor to Justin, who then addressed the crowd. This was how emperors were made in Constantinople.

Emperor Justin, around sixty years old, was experienced but uneducated; Justinian, aged thirty-six, was ‘short with a good chest, a good nose, fair-skinned, curly-haired, handsome’, wrote a contemporary, John Malalas, ‘round-faced with receding hair, florid complexion with greying hair and beard’. He was the obvious heir, but all leaders loathe their own mortality, and the idea that anyone is qualified to succeed them. Justinian almost fell into disfavour – for the sake of love.

His paramour was Theodora, a blonde actress twenty years younger, daughter of a bear trainer in the hippodrome, who had performed in live sex shows on stage with penetration of all orifices by multiple partners and geese eating grain off her private parts – according to the embittered courtier Procopius, whose satire was only funny because it was partly true.^* Eschewing bear pits and sex shows, she embraced religion with humourless solemnity, but it was the meeting with Justinian that truly changed her life.

QUSAY AND JUSTINIAN: FROM CONSTANTINOPLE TO MECCA

Justinian was determined to marry Theodora, but the law banned noble-actress marriages and Empress Euphemia disapproved. Finally, in 521, Justin legalized the mésalliance but also allowed an investigation into Justinian’s schemings. Justinian worked his way back into favour with a plan to show that God favoured the Justin dynasty: war against Persia.

Both empires were fighting proxy wars using Arab allies from Syria to Yemen. The Sasanian shah backed the Lakhm Arabs of Iraq and Justin, advised by his nephew, recognized the sheikh of the Ghassan tribes, headquartered on the Golan Heights, as king, patrician and phylarch. The Arab potentates fought so viciously that their imperial masters struggled to restrain them. In southern Arabia, the Romans vied with the Persians. Himyari (Yemen) had been conquered by the Christian kings of Axum (Ethiopia). But then a Himyari king, Abu-Kariba, expelled the Africans, defied Axum, Constantinople and Persia: he converted to Judaism and conquered Arabia as far north as Yatrib (Medina). When the Jewish king Yusuf persecuted his Christians, King Kaleb of Axum got Justin’s backing to retake Yemen. The African army crossed to Asia and overthrew Yusuf, who rode his steed into the sea. The Christians won – for now.

Between the three Arabian kingdoms were the small towns of Arabia that contained Christians, Jews and pagans, stops on the caravan routes that ran from the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf to Egypt and Syria. One of them was Mecca, which was both trading centre and numinous shrine, governed by the family of a sheikh named Qusay, who had come up from Himyari and become the guardian of its Kaaba, a black meteorite surrounded by a pantheon of statues.^* After Qusay’s death around 480, his sons and grandsons ruled Mecca, the founders of the most powerful family in world history.

Back in Constantinople, Justinian succeeded his uncle and proceeded to demonstrate his high-mind Christian legitimacy, persecuting Jews and Manichaeans, building new churches with a new design feature, the dome, codifying the laws and fighting Persia. Yet rolling the iron dice of war is always a gamble. The shah unleashed his Arab ally, King al-Mundhir, who raided Roman Palestina, Egypt and even the outskirts of Antioch, where he captured two Roman generals (whom he ransomed) and 400 nuns (whom he burned alive as sacrifices to al-Uzza).

Justinian promoted a Thracian general who had started in Justin’s bodyguard. Belisarius, whose strapping figure and good looks were in stark contrast to the meagre, gingery Justinian, was married to Antonina, daughter of a chariot racer and best friends with Theodora from their racy youth. Belisarius, whose staff included Procopius the pornographic historian, was an innovator who, starting with his own regiment, devised a new army of multipurpose heavy cavalry and light mounted archers. Justinian and Belisarius formed a winning partnership, though the emperor, arch-manipulator, never forgot that a triumphing general was a threat. Now Belisarius won victories against the Persians but was let down by his unruly Arabs, and the shah was soon advancing into Syria. Just when it seemed things could not get any worse, they did.

JUSTINIAN: SOLOMON, I HAVE SURPASSED YOU

In January 532, Justinian ordered the hanging of some chariot-racing hooligans of the Greens and Blues, but the ropes broke and the thugs escaped. At the hippodrome, the crowd shouted at Justinian to pardon the escapees. When he refused, the factions, united and shouting the war cry ‘Nika!’ – Victory! – stormed the prison, and then went berserk as fire raged. Besieged in the Mega Palation as a new emperor was acclaimed in the hippodrome, Justinian wavered, ready to escape by boat. But Theodora declared that she preferred to die as an empress. ‘Purple,’ she said, ‘makes the best burial shroud.’

The couple had a surprise up their sleeve: Belisarius – leading his vanguard of bucellarii (biscuit eaters) and Balkan foederatii – arrived from the front and burst into the hippodrome slaughtering 30,000 people, an astonishing 5 per cent of the city’s population. Justinian was there to stay.

Reeling from this fiasco, Justinian had to make an Eternal Peace with the new shah, Khusrau, at the cost of 11,000 pounds of gold. Humiliated, Justinian learned that his ally, the king of Vandal Africa, based in Carthage and also ruling Sicily, had been overthrown in a coup by a nobleman Gelimer. In 533, Justinian dispatched Belisarius and 92 warships, 30,000 sailors and 15,500 troops. The general discovered that Gelimer was away in Sardinia and, after resupplying in Sicily, sailed for Africa. In March 534, he took Carthage, first deporting and annihilating the Vandal ruling class, then returning to Constantinople for his triumph which ended with the triumphator wisely kissing Justinian’s feet before 100,000 spectators in the hippodrome.

Next Justinian used the killing of his ally, the Goth queen of Italy, as a pretext to retake Rome. In 535, Belisarius and a small army captured Sicily, Rome and Ravenna, before going on to take southern Spain.

Justinian celebrated these triumphs by embellishing Constantinople to reflect his vision of Christian empire: he raised a 230-foot column topped by an equestrian statue of himself in armour, and built thirty-three new churches and, most dramatic of all, a monumental church, Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom).^* ‘Solomon,’ he mused, looking up at Hagia Sophia, ‘I have surpassed you!’ But invincibility is always temporary.

In 540, the Persian shah invaded Syria in response to the raids of Justinian’s Arab king al-Harith, who had attacked the Persian ally al-Mundhir. The proxy war spun out of control: al-Mundhir hit back, captured al-Harith’s son and sacrificed him to the sun goddess, al-Uzza. The feud did not end until al-Harith killed al-Mundhir in battle, but behind this sideshow was a Sasan shah who was Justinian’s match as conqueror, builder and lawgiver. Khusrau Anushirvan – Immortal Soul – had spent the years of peace liquidating any family rivals and crushing a new religion founded by a Zoroastrian priest called Mazdak, who had fused the dual cosmology of Ahura-Mazda and Manichaeanism with revolutionary ideas of equality and charity that had much in common with Christianity, together with a strain of feminist hedonism. Mazdak taught that wives were not owned by men, and his critics denounced Mazdakites as socialistic swingers. Seeing a threat to Zoroastrianism, Khusrau buried many of these Mazdakites alive with just their feet showing, telling Mazdak to admire his ‘human garden’ before using him for archery practice. Despite his human garden, Khusrau was more tolerant and eclectic than Justinian, inviting Indian, Christian and Jewish sages to his court, men who were soon joined by the pagan Greek philosophers expelled by Justinian. ‘We studied the customs and conduct of Romans and Indians and accepted those that seemed reasonable and praiseworthy,’ Khusrau explained. ‘We haven’t rejected any because they belonged to a different religion or people.’

It was no coincidence that he championed the Indian game of chess: now the Immortal advanced into Roman Syria, and avoiding time-wasting sieges, stormed the eastern capital, Antioch. Khusrau enslaved thousands, who were sent on a death march eastwards to populate a new city named Veh-Antioch-Khusrau (Khusrau’s-better-Antioch).^*

Justinian recalled Belisarius from Italy and sent him to Syria, but then fell desperately ill – infected by a catastrophic pandemic that Procopius called ‘a pestilence, by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated’.

JUSTINIAN’S PANDEMIC – AND THE KILLER BIRDS OF MECCA

The pandemic forced Khusrau to retreat, but by summer 541 it was hitting Constantinople with lethal randomness, killing 10,000 a day at its height. Between 20 and 40 per cent of the city perished. This was the bubonic plague, carried by fleas bearing the bacterium Yersinia pestis that nested in the fur of marmots in the Tian Shan mountains of central Asia, and probably transmitted by the migrations of Huns and other steppe nomads, then spreading via rats in cities and on ships, travelled southwards into India, on to Persia and Egypt, then westwards to Constantinople.^*

The conditions were set for disaster: in 536, a volcanic eruption had spurted dust into the atmosphere, and ‘the sun,’ recalled Procopius, ‘gave forth its light without brightness’; temperatures fell, harvests failed, people weakened.^* The disease started innocently but killed quickly:

they had a sudden fever of such a languid sort from its commencement and up till evening … Not one of those who had contracted the disease expected to die. But not many days later, a bubonic swelling developed; and this took place not only in the particular part of the body which is called

bubon

, that is, ‘below the abdomen’, but also in the armpit, beside the ears, on the thighs. There ensued with some a deep coma, with others a violent delirium [wrote Procopius]. Those who were seized with delirium suffered from insomnia and distorted imagination; for they suspected that men were coming to destroy them, and they would become excited and flee, screaming loudly … The bubonic swelling became mortified [as gangrene set in] and the sufferer, no longer able to endure the pain, died. Death came immediately, in others after many days; and with some, the body broke out with black pustules about as large as a lentil [the rash later called Black Death] and those did not survive even one day, but died immediately.

In March 542, Justinian issued laws to prop up the economy, referring to the ‘encircling presence of death’ that had ‘spread to every region’. When he fell sick he had to at least preserve order in this charnel house, but the city was veering out of control: ‘Initially each man attended to the burial of the dead of his own house; but afterwards confusion and disorder everywhere became complete.’

Conspiracy theorists spread panic in a way that sounds very familiar. ‘They love to conjure up causes which are absolutely incomprehensible to man,’ observed Procopius, ‘and to fabricate outlandish theories of natural philosophy. But for this calamity it is quite impossible either to express in words or to conceive in thought any explanation, except indeed to refer it to God.’ That at least let the politicians off the hook: no one expected Justinian or Khusrau to be able to deliver safety as modern leaders are; only God could wreak or end such havoc. ‘A chastening sent by God’s goodness’, wrote Justinian, that should have made workers better people ‘but instead I hear they are turning to avarice’. In Constantinople, Procopius saw how ‘the bodies even of grandees were left unburied’. Finally Justinian ‘deployed soldiers from the palace and distributed money … Tombs were filled with the dead, then they dug graves around the city.’ The ‘evil stink’ was unbearable. When even the mass graves were full, ‘they mounted the towers of the fortifications, and tearing off the roofs threw the bodies there in complete disorder, piling them up until all the towers were filled with corpses and they put the roofs back.’

When news spread that Justinian was infected – ‘for he too had a swelling of the groin’ – the hierarchy was shaken: ‘it wasn’t possible to see a single man clad in the chlamys [cloak of an officeholder]’. A lockdown ruled: ‘in a city which held dominion over the whole Roman empire, everyone dressed befitting private station and remained quietly at home’. Khusrau too was infected. But both emperors recovered. ‘Where the swelling rose to an unusual size,’ wrote Procopius, ‘it discharged pus and they survived.’

After four months, the plague receded, only to rebound again in waves. The pandemic proved a super-propellant, one of those catastrophes that propelled tectonic changes. As many as 25 per cent of Europeans and many Persians died; agriculture suffered; revenues fell. The two empires were weakened.

In 548, Theodora died of cancer at the age of fifty-one. Justinian sobbed as she was buried in the Church of the Holy Apostles. He lived for another twenty years, struggling to hold on to Italy and Africa which, as in so many wars, were easier to conquer than to hold. His wars were expensive in an empire desolated and haunted by the plague, ruled obstinately by this pedantic, righteous and geriatric megalomaniac. Berber tribes rebelled in Africa; Rome was repeatedly won and lost as Belisarius and his generals fought a Gothic insurgency before Germanic peoples from the north, the Lombards, moved south to challenge the Romans, turning Justinian’s glorious adventure into an interminable quagmire. Yet Constantinople kept southern Italy for centuries.

In 562 Justinian finally made peace with Khusrau, paying further gold subsidies. The treasury was bare, though taxes were still collected from plague-scourged agricultural heartlands. Justinian’s less eminent successors must share responsibility for the sequel.

Justinian, soi-disant ‘conqueror of many nations’, lived on, gripping the sceptre with sclerotic fingers, and refusing to name a successor. But Theodora had arranged the marriage of her niece Sophia to Justinian’s nephew, Justin, now serving as his kouropalates, palace director. By November 565, when Justinian died aged eighty-three,^* Justin II already controlled the Mega Palation, announcing that Sophia would rule with him as Augusta. At the lying-in-state of the embalmed old maestro, Justin kissed him saying, ‘You, my venerable father, are joyful in the ranks of the angels … You see God.’ Already forty-five, Justin II was determined to prove he was God’s choice. So, in denial about his overstretched resources, he prepared to confront Iran where Khusrau the Immortal, flush with Roman gold, was keen to expand into Arabia.

Khusrau’s Arab ally, King Amr the Burner (who often incinerated his captives as human sacrifices), clashed with the African king of Himyari, a Christian from Axum called Abrahah (an ex-slave of a Roman merchant), who now marched on Mecca with a corps of elephants.

The Meccans, now led by Abdul Muttalib, nicknamed Whitestreak because of his hair, guardian of the Kaaba, sheikh of the Quraysh clan, leader of regular caravans to Palestine, in 570 repelled the Ethiopian and his pachyderms using a targeted assassination: Abrahah was strafed by a killer flock of sacred birds which dive-bombed him with rocks. The elephants were defeated, the African king dismembered. This semi-mythical victory – the Year of the Elephant – took place the very year that a child named Muhammad^* was born in Mecca.

* They were very special cabbages: ‘If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor,’ Diocletian replied to an envoy who asked him to return to politics, ‘he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace this calm and happiness with the storms of insatiable ambition.’ Much of his palace survives in Split.

* Slavery was inimical to Christian ideals; many early Christians had been slaves or freedmen, indeed it was in some senses an egalitarian slaves’ religion. Now it was no longer acceptable to enslave Christians nor to have sex with slaves: a master had to free an enslaved woman then marry her in order to have sex. Of course these rules were unenforceable: slavery – usually the enslavement of non-Christians – thrived in Christendom for another two millennia.

* As for Arius himself, he returned from exile to Constantinople where his theological incontinence led to a faecal explosion: while walking in the Forum, ‘a terror arising from the remorse of conscience seized Arius’, expressed in ‘a violent relaxation of the bowels’. Rushing behind the Forum, ‘a faintness came over him, and together with the evacuations his bowels protruded, followed by a copious haemorrhage, and the descent of the smaller intestines: portions of spleen and liver gushed out in effusions of blood, so that he almost immediately died’. Heresy was a messy business: the churchman Socrates Scholasticus noted that tourists still pointed to the spot decades later. But Arius’ homoiousian views on the humanity of Jesus appealed to many of the Germanic tribes that converted to Christianity during the 360s.

* Already viciously persecuted, Jews were banned from Jerusalem for the next three centuries, though many risked death to worship there covertly and secretly visit the Temple Mount and its walls to pray.

* Georgia was not the first. In 301, Tiridates III, the king of Armenia, the buffer state between Rome and Persia, had converted after a Christian saint cured his mental illness – though this was done partly to assert his independence from the stridently Zoroastrian Persians.

* Empires throughout history favour the appointment of one ruler – a king – as intermediary to control their unruly subjects, in this case their Arab allies. The Assyrians too had appointed kings of the Arabs. This was the start of a long relationship between the Sasan shahs and the Lahkm Arab kings, but strangely the tomb of Amr was found in Roman Syria, suggesting that he later defected from Iran to Rome, the first of many such switches by Arab leaders between superpower patrons. Soon the Romans would find their own Arab protégés.

* Apart from the ill temper that killed him, Valentinian cultivated a brutish image, travelling the empire accompanied by a cage containing two bears, named Innocence and Goldflake, to whom he fed unfortunate dissidents. In a heart-warming landmark for wildlife conservation, Innocence was returned to the wild for having loyally eaten Valentinian’s victims.

* Later the Thervingi became known as the Visigoths (western Goths) and moved westwards, soon followed by their eastern brethren, the Ostrogoths.

* The world’s biggest cities were Constantinople, Ctesiphon/Seleucia, Pataliputra (Patna), Rome, Nanjing, Antioch, Alexandria and Teotihuacan.

* During their Roman negotiations, Attila and Bleda received a human gift – Zercon, a lame noseless dwarf from Mauritania, who had been captured in Africa. He survived as a jester at the court of the Huns performing in a mixture of Latin and Hunnish, to the delight of King Bleda, who dressed him in a suit of armour and screamed with laughter at his skits. Zercon hated it and escaped. Bleda sent cavalry to bring him back at all costs and asked him why he had fled. Zercon replied that it was because he had no wife, at which Bleda, roaring with laughter, gave him a daughter of one of his wives’ maids, presiding over the marriage. Now he was inherited by Attila.

* Aetius and Attila remained friendly. Aetius sent him two Roman scribes to serve as secretaries. Attila sent him Zercon the African dwarf, whom he had never liked and whom Aetius passed on to his original owner, Aspar, the half-barbarian general who had found him in Africa. After that, Zercon vanishes from history.

* Most likely Attila’s haemorrhage was a symptom of oesophageal varices, bleeding veins suffering by alcoholics. He was buried in a coffin, sealed with gold, silver and iron, at a secret site, after the sacrifice of gravediggers and servants. Three sons vied for power: Dengizich was killed by the eastern Romans, his head paraded through Constantinople, then displayed at the hippodrome where ‘the whole city turned out to look at it’. But none of the sons possessed Attila’s prestige, and the confederacy disintegrated, liberating his former allies, the Ostrogoths, who would ultimately conquer Italy itself.

* The people of the eastern Roman empire called themselves Romaioi – Romans; Arabs and Turks called the empire Rum – Rome; medieval western Europeans called them Greeks. Byzantine is an exonym invented by western scholars in the seventeenth century and popularized by nineteenth-century British historians to describe the particular Greek Orthodox culture after AD 500.

* Procopius, legal official and obsequious court historian, knew both Justinian and Theodora, but in secret he wrote Anekdota, a semi-satirical cross between the Daily Mail and Saturday Night Live in which he accused the emperor of being an avaricious war-crazed demon and Theodora of being a vicious nymphomaniacal vamp. He would have been executed for treason had his authorship been revealed.

* There were said to be 365 gods, but the chief ones were the gold-handed god Hubal, who offered divinations, the goddesses Al-Lat, Manat and al-Uzza, for whom humans were burned as sacrifices, a couple Isaf and Nailah who had been petrified for copulating there, and Jesus and Mary, all of them under the aegis of the chief god, Allah.

* No longer based around the chunky Roman basilica, this was a new conception of sacred space: a gigantic brick square with its knave 260 feet long, crowned with a sixteen-sided 115-foot dome, still one of the most gloriously successful buildings ever raised. ‘Its interior is not so much illuminated from without by the sun but the radiance comes into being from within,’ wrote Procopius; its dome ‘somehow flies in the air … overlaid with gold’. At its launch, much of the city participated in the procession led by the emperor and his ever more meticulously calibrated courtiers – marking the sacralization of the emperor, the vicegerent of God himself, who now insisted on being approached with elaborate ceremony, ushered by eunuchs, before being greeted with a full prostration like a Persian monarch. It also heralded a new, more popular Christianity in which people participated in a calendar of saintly festivals. All across his empire, monumental sacred spaces were created, in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Sinai and Ravenna, where, in mosaics that still exist, we can see Justinian and Theodora as they saw themselves, he decisive, russet-haired and rosy-cheeked, she skinny, intense, pale, sanctimonious, imperious.

* At Ctesiphon, he celebrated with a vast new palace, funded by Justinian’s gold, where the throne hall boasted an archway 121 feet high, 85 feet across, 164 feet long – for centuries the world’s largest.

* In 1894, Alexandre Yersin, a French scientist from the Pasteur Institute investigating an outbreak of the plague in Hong Kong, discovered the bacillus, named Yersinia after him, and the fact that it was present in both the rats and the humans infected with the disease, proving the means of transmission. New palaeogenetic research shows that the Justinian plague probably hit Britain, Spain and Germany too.

* Far away, either in Iceland or in east Asia, these massive volcanic eruptions were spurting clouds of dust into the sky, generating what today’s scientists call a ‘dust-veil event’ that may have created the conditions for a rising world crisis: it changed the weather in ways that may have forced nomadic peoples to leave the steppes and ride westwards to attack the Roman and Persian empires – and that may have brought rats closer to humans, perfect conditions for a pandemic.

* Belisarius had died the year before in the wake of a last heroic command when he defeated a nomad army approaching Constantinople. Not long afterwards he faced a trial for conspiracy against Justinian, judged by a city prefect, Procopius, probably the historian and his former secretary. Justinian pardoned him. It is not known when Procopius died.

* ‘Have you not seen how your Lord dealt with the owners of the Elephant?’ recounted Abdul Muttalib’s grandson, Muhammad, in the Quran. ‘Did He not make their treacherous plan go astray? And He sent against them birds in flocks, striking them with stones.’