Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  Theodora instigated her own program of law reform to improve the status of Roman women. It became easier for women to own property, a husband could not take on a major debt without his wife giving her consent twice, the killing of a wife for adultery was outlawed, and rape became a crime punishable by death.

  The commission delivered its draft of the Codex of Justinian on 8 April 529, the first comprehensive and coherent body of Roman law in the empire’s history. It had been completed in just thirteen months, an astonishingly short period. Justinian crowed as he announced its publication: ‘Those things which seemed to many former emperors to require correction, but which none of them ventured to carry to effect, we have decided to accomplish at the present time, with the assistance of almighty God.’ Justinian presented all his reforms in this way, as the product of some unseen close collaboration between the emperor and the Almighty.

  Official copies of the Codex were sent out to the provinces to improve the administration of justice. This was followed by the Digest, which collated and harmonised the work of the ancient Roman jurists into a body of fifty approved books. A guide to the elements of Roman law for students, called the Institutes, was produced later. All in all, the emperor’s boast was correct: it was a stunning achievement.

  The influence of Justinian’s Codex lingers on, right up to the present day. Modern European civil law is founded on the work of Justinian’s commission fifteen centuries ago. Justinian and Tribonian are honoured with cameo portraits, mounted on the north wall of the chamber of the US House of Representatives, alongside images of other great law-givers of world history: Moses, Hammurabi and Napoleon.

  HAVING REWORKED ROMAN LAW into a new coherent whole, Justinian then set about stamping out the last flames of paganism in the empire. He introduced new laws against heretics and infidels, and against the pagan practice of homosexuality, which was to be punished with torture, mutilation and execution. The civil rights of Jews were restricted. Worship of the Egyptian god Amon was stamped out of the Libyan desert, and the cult of Isis in the Nile delta was shut down.

  Almost as an afterthought, Justinian ordered the closure of the Academy of Athens, a school founded by Plato himself, terminating a thousand years of philosophical education and inquiry in a stroke.

  Old Rome was an untidy warren of gimcrack tenements, temples and bath houses; it was only to be expected that polytheistic habits and practices would fester in such an unclean place. The New Rome on the Bosphorus, while not exactly grid-like, was planned, open and orderly. Old paths of spiritualism and the meandering backways of pagan belief were shut down and dismantled; the roads that brought people towards the Orthodox church were enhanced and straightened, all the better to gather the world into a single communion, with the God-appointed Justinian directing events at the centre. The Roman thought-world under Justinian became more transcendent, but also more oppressive, compared to life under the old gods.

  With his domestic reforms in place, Justinian now turned his mind to the growing threat from the one foreign entity with enough might and majesty to eclipse the Roman empire: Sassanid Persia.

  Dara

  IN JUSTINIAN’S TIME the Persian empire of the Sassanids sprawled across modern day Iraq and Iran, parts of Afghanistan, Arabia, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Pakistan. Sassanid Persia dominated western Asia in much the same way that Rome dominated the Mediterranean world. The two empires regarded each other warily, with a mix of respect, envy and antipathy.

  Sassanid Persia was ruled by a Shahanshah, or ‘king of kings’, named Kavadh, who lived in a staggeringly opulent palace in Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris River. The Shahanshah wore robes of richly coloured silk, his beard was decorated with gold, and his crown was so heavy it was suspended above his head from the ceiling. To the Persians, the Shahanshah represented an ideal of universal order and harmony, and he was depicted on coins with the sun and moon revolving around him.

  Like the Romans, the Sassanids maintained pretensions of world domination. In the palace at Ctesiphon three empty chairs were placed beneath the royal throne: one for the emperor of the Romans, one for the Great Khagan of Central Asia, and one for the emperor of China, reserved for the day when these rulers came to Ctesiphon as humble vassals of the Shahanshah.

  The traditional heartland of Persia was centred on the Iranian plateau, where Zoroastrianism, the state religion, was founded. But by Justinian’s time the empire’s cultural and financial energy had shifted west, to the cosmopolitan cities of Mesopotamia where Ctesiphon was located. The westward thrust of Sassanid Persia led to rising tensions with the Romans along the contested lands in Syria, where both sides built a string of fortresses and watched each other warily across the border.

  ALONG THAT IMPERIAL faultline stood the fortified Roman garrison town of Nisibis, constructed during Diocletian’s reign as a tripwire against a Persian attack.* But by Justinian’s time, the Persians had pushed the border further west and Nisibis had fallen into the Shahanshah’s possession.

  The Romans were unsettled by the presence of a Persian garrison right on their doorstep, and so a rival stronghold was constructed at the village of Dara nearby. In Ctesiphon, the new fortress was seen as an outrageous provocation. When peace negotiations with Kavadh broke down, Justinian reinforced Dara’s fortifications. In turn, the Shahanshah summoned an aristocratic general named Peroz and put him at the head of a 40,000-strong army with orders to prise Dara from the infernal Romans’ grip.

  THE PERSIAN FORCES gathering at Nisibis included thousands of foot soldiers and horse archers, accompanied by a 5000-strong contingent of heavy cavalry known as the Immortals, a name with a pedigree reaching back to the era of Cyrus the Great. Clad in heavy, plated armour, armed with maces, swords and lances, the Immortals rode into battle astride horses draped in chainmail. They were sometimes nicknamed clibanarii or ‘camp ovens’ for the suffocating heat they endured under all that armour. Sworn to personal loyalty to the Shahanshah, the chainmailed Immortal was the Asian prototype for that most characteristic figure of the Middle Ages: the knight in armour.

  Dara’s defence was, for Justinian, a point of pride as much as a matter of national security. To defend it, he sent his most brilliant general, a twenty-five-year-old career soldier named Belisarius, whom he promoted to Magister Militum of the East.

  The coming battle of Dara would give Belisarius his first taste of senior command. But the general’s inexperience was counterbalanced by a penetrating strategic intellect and a young man’s grasp of the emerging technologies that were changing the art of war. Throughout his career, Belisarius would regularly take on much larger armies and beat them, using the weight of their superior numbers against them. He possessed an uncanny ability to get inside the head of an opponent, to see the world from the enemy’s point of view, and then confound their expectations. Belisarius’s adversaries would go down not quite believing what was happening to them.

  In 530, Belisarius rode out to the Persian front, accompanied by Procopius, who was to act as his legal secretary, and who recorded an eyewitness account of his campaigns. In Dara the general mustered his forces: twenty-five thousand in all, a mix of regular Roman foot soldiers, mercenary horse archers and armoured cataphracts, the Roman counterpart to the Persian Immortals. Lacking the resources to withstand a siege against such overwhelmingly large enemy numbers, Belisarius resolved to stand and fight in open battle outside the fortress.

  PEROZ BROUGHT HIS PERSIAN forces up towards Dara, confident of victory, but reports of the Roman lines unsettled him. Belisarius had arrayed his infantry and cavalry in a wildly unconventional manner. The Romans had dug a central trenchline that zigzagged at right angles in front of their fortress, forming the shape of a set of bull’s horns. Belisarius had placed his main infantry force in the rear, behind the central trench, to protect them from being trampled by the Persian cavalry. Further forward, behind the parallel trenches to the sides, were two regiments of Hunnic mercenaries armed with powerful compo
und bows. In the corner angles of the trenches, Belisarius placed his cataphracts, the heavy cavalry.

  Peroz was taken aback. He had expected the conventional layout of infantry at the front and cavalry in the wings. Belisarius’s deployment seemed to defy commonsense. Peroz spent a day in his tent with his advisors, trying to figure out what the Romans were up to.

  Meanwhile the armies stood glowering at each other across the distance. Then a single horseman rode out from the Persian lines and taunted the Romans, demanding they bring forth someone to fight him in single combat. There was a buzz of chatter and a young man named Andreas came forward from the ranks. Andreas was a wrestling teacher and powerfully built, but had no combat experience. The Persian champion prepared for battle, but as he was doing so, Andreas broke into a jog, picked up a spear and hurled it into his opponent’s side, knocking him to the ground. Andreas then walked over to the helpless Persian and cut his throat with a small knife. A cheer erupted across the Roman lines and from up high on the fortress battlements.

  Then a second Persian horseman came forward, an older man, who pointed his horsewhip at the Romans and dared them to send forth another champion. Andreas answered the call again and was given a stallion to mount. The two horsemen charged at each other at a furious pace. As they readied their lances, the two horses crashed into each other at full speed, cracking heads, and the riders were flung into the dust. Now it was a question of who could get to his feet first. The Persian struggled up onto one knee, but Andreas was already there, standing above him, knife in hand.

  FOR THE PERSIANS, it was an inauspicious prelude to hostilities. But their morale picked up the following day when ten thousand reinforcements arrived from Nisibis. The Persians now outnumbered the Romans two to one. Belisarius sent a note to Peroz, reminding him of the blessings of peace. Surely, he wrote, a diplomatic solution would be preferable to a pointless war.

  ‘This is true,’ Peroz replied, ‘and I would have agreed to your suggestions, if the letter had not been written by a lying Roman.’

  Belisarius wrote back that his men would fasten these letters to their banners to motivate them.

  Peroz replied, ‘Tomorrow I will be in Dara. Prepare my bath and my lunch for me.’

  THE BATTLE BEGAN the next day at noon. The Persians advanced towards the central trench and fired off a shower of arrows; the Roman infantry formed a defensive crouch behind their shields. The Persians then launched a cavalry attack against the Roman left. As the Persians swung around the trench the Romans withdrew. Sensing a quick victory was close at hand, the Persian cavalry broke into a gallop to chase the retreating Romans, throwing up clouds of dust. In their haste, the Persians lost formation, and suddenly, Belisarius’s Hunnic horse archers were upon them, tearing into their exposed flank, firing off deadly arrows at short range. The forward thrust of the Persian cavalry collapsed, like a spear knocked down in mid-flight by a sideways blow to the shaft.

  Then Belisarius unleashed his masterstroke. Earlier in the day he had concealed six hundred Herulian horse archers behind a nearby hill. Now they came charging into battle and smashed into the other exposed flank of the Persian cavalry. Within twenty minutes, two thousand Persian horsemen lay dead or dying.

  As one side of the Persian attack was collapsing into a morass of dust and blood, the other side was bringing its superior numbers to bear against the Roman right. Again, as the Roman infantry retreated, Peroz’s Immortals charged in pursuit. Belisarius sent in his other contingent of Hunnic horse archers, which wheeled around into the rear of the Immortals, firing lethal, armour-piercing arrows at close range from their powerful compound bows. The Roman cataphracts crashed into the attack. Another five thousand Persians were cut down.

  All was not yet lost for the Persians. There were still thousands of foot soldiers yet to be deployed. But most of Peroz’s infantry were slave soldiers with little motivation to fight. Watching the terrible slaughter across the trench, many of them broke and ran, with the Roman cavalry in pursuit.

  It was a devastating, incomprehensible loss for Peroz. At sunset, the remnant of his army collected its dead and staggered back behind Persian lines. Peroz would have to take his bath that night in Nisibis instead.

  THE BATTLE OF DARA was a triumph for Belisarius, and a vindication of Justinian’s faith in his abilities, a sure sign that God was smiling on his endeavours. The emperor had more plans for his gifted general, but first his services would be needed in Constantinople, where simmering discontent with Justinian was about to boil over.

  The Deep State

  JOE AND I HAVE COME TO ISTANBUL at a time of civil unrest. Events within the city and around Turkey are breaking into international news bulletins. I’m keeping an eye out for any signs of protest, but the historic centre of the city is a tightly controlled tourist zone, isolated from the working heartland of modern-day Istanbul. Everything here in Sultanahmet seems calm.

  At the end of our third day, Joe and I find that everyone in the hotel café is talking about the day’s protests in Taksim Square against government plans to restrict access to Twitter and Facebook. Police evicted the protestors from the square with water cannons and tear gas.

  The protests had begun six months earlier, when local citizens organised a sit-in protest against a proposed commercial redevelopment of Gezi Park from a public space to a shopping centre. The protests escalated into mass demonstrations across the nation as a broader expression of discontent against the authoritarian Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Environmental groups led the initial protests, but they were soon joined by a much broader coalition of ‘the young and the old, the secular and the religious, the soccer hooligans and the blind, anarchists, communists, nationalists, Kurds, gays, feminists, and students’. Police clashed with the protestors in Gezi Park, pounding them with water cannons and tear gas. Prime Minister Erdoğan dismissed the protestors as looters, losers and extremists.

  Pro- and anti-Erdoğan forces have split the country. Erdoğan’s popular base is largely drawn from conservative Muslims, particularly in regional areas, who are unsettled by the rapid changes to Turkey’s economy and society. His financial support comes from construction companies and property developers who are driving the frantic redevelopment of Istanbul’s skyline. In this way he profits by the economic boom and the conservative backlash against it. Erdoğan’s opposition, which is mostly urban and secular, accuses him of corruption, which he adamantly denies.

  Another, much older, tension is being played out around these protests. Many Turkish politicians and journalists talk about something called the Deep State, a clandestine network that operates within Turkey’s most powerful national institutions – the military, intelligence organisations, the parliament, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, organised crime and the media. The interests of the Deep State are said at times to be anti-democratic, anti-Islamist, anti-Kurdish and anti-worker. No group can agree on how to categorise the interests of the Deep State, which indicates that it operates not as a single conspiracy, but as a loose coalition of interests that sometimes collude with each other for mutual benefit.

  The term ‘Deep State’ (derin devlet) grew out of an infamous incident in 1996, when a black Mercedes Benz crashed into a truck backing out of a service station in north-west Turkey. Three of the four occupants of the car were killed. They were an unlikely bunch: the three dead included the former deputy chief of the Istanbul police, a hitman from the ultra-right paramilitary group the Grey Wolves, and his girlfriend. The hitman was carrying a passport with the name ‘Mehmet Özbay’, the same pseudonym used by the assassin who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981. The fourth occupant, the survivor of the crash, was the leader of a powerful Kurdish clan and a member of the Turkish parliament.

  As the story broke and the identities of the four became known, a major public scandal erupted across the Turkish media. Why on earth, Turks asked themselves, were those four sharing a ride together? The crash exposed connections between politicians, security forc
es and the heroin trade. An inquiry set up to investigate the incident came to nothing. This was proof, it was said, of the power of the Deep State to smother any kind of scrutiny of its workings.

  Then in 2008, a police raid exposed an apparent plot by an ultra-nationalist group known as Ergenekon (the name comes from an old Central Asian fable of a she-wolf who rescues the Turkish nation). Journalists in the Turkish press claimed the gang had ties to the military and security forces, and that it was plotting a false flag operation to assassinate several secular intellectuals, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pahmuk. They were planning to exploit the resulting chaos to bring down the government.

  Prime Minister Erdoğan praised the police action, and linked the Ergenekon conspiracy to the Deep State. Erdoğan stated bluntly on Turkish television, ‘I don’t agree with those who say the Deep State does not exist. It does exist. It always has – and it did not start with the Republic; it dates back to Ottoman times. It’s simply a tradition. It must be minimised, and if possible even annihilated.’ Some journalists have accused the government of using the Ergenekon case to crack down on dissent.

  THE ROOTS OF THE DEEP STATE lie within the Turkish military. Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, empowered the military to uphold the new secular order and to covertly suppress Islamist political figures. During the Cold War, the United States set up a secret ‘stay-behind’ resistance group within the military’s Special Warfare Department to lead a counter-insurgency in case of a Communist takeover. In the following decades, this unit formed the core of the Deep State, taking it upon itself to keep the nation safe by suppressing and assassinating Communists, Islamists, Christian missionaries, journalists and dissidents. But the Special Warfare Department lost its rationale at the end of the Cold War, and some of its leaders drifted into ultra-nationalist groups such as the Grey Wolves.

  Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) now presents the single greatest threat to Deep State power since the establishment of the Turkish republic. The AKP wants to change Atatürk’s secular constitution to reflect the growing influence of pious Muslims in rural and coastal Anatolia.