Again, Belisarius was being asked to do too much with too little by his wary emperor. He sent Antonina to Constantinople to petition Justinian, hoping that her friendship with Theodora might be of use.
But by the time Antonina arrived in the capital, Theodora was dead. Her death from cancer left Justinian in an agony of grief. As her funeral procession passed through the streets of Constantinople, Justinian reached out and attempted to fasten a necklace to her lifeless body, and then broke down in sobs. In his final years, he would often return to her mausoleum, the one he eventually planned to share with her, to light a candle to her memory. He refused to take another wife, not even to provide an heir to the throne, and would remain a widower for the rest of his days.
The year before her death, two dazzling mosaic panels were unveiled in the Church of St Vitale in Ravenna that capture the essence of Justinian and Theodora’s partnership at the height of their power. The mosaics, which are still there today, are complementary, portraying Justinian and his entourage on one side of the altar, and Theodora with hers on the other. Justinian carries a basket of bread for the Eucharist; Theodora holds the wine. Together, they form a dazzling commemoration of the Roman empire’s greatest power couple.
The Dear Leader
THE EMPEROR SURFACED from his grief and returned to work, the only consolation left to him. He heard Antonina’s plea and recalled Belisarius from Italy, awarding him an honourable retirement. Without Theodora to fuel his paranoia, Justinian greeted Belisarius like an old friend on his return to Constantinople, and erected a gilded statue of him in the Augustaeum.
The emperor accepted the dire assessment of the situation in Italy and dispatched a much larger force under the command of Narses, now in his seventies. Narses moved with great speed and crushed the Gothic army at the battle of Taginae in central Italy. Totila was mortally wounded and died in the nearby village of Caprae. The final battle took place later that year in the shadow of Vesuvius (near the long forgotten town of Pompeii), and the Goths were finished in Italy. The remaining Gothic forces agreed to head north outside the Roman frontiers, taking whatever they could carry with them.
The war was over. Justinian had won.
THEN, INCREDIBLY, Justinian recovered southern Spain for the empire as well. The Visigoths had ruled the province of Hispania for more than a century, but a civil war in 551 between rival chieftains led to a call for imperial help. Justinian dispatched a small detachment of two thousand men under the command of another octogenarian general named Liberius. Through force of arms and skilled diplomacy, Liberius brought Mediterranean Spain and the Balearic Islands back into the orbit of the Roman empire.
In 558 the plague returned to Constantinople. This outbreak was less acute but lasted longer. People wondered why, this time, it seemed to carry off so many children. We know now it was because the young lacked the immunity to Yersinia pestis that was hard won by the survivors of its first outbreak.
IN HIS FINAL YEARS, Justinian seemed to lose interest in fighting for imperial territory, preferring to use diplomacy and gold to pay off hostile neighbours. In 559, the Kotrigur Huns crossed the Danube and invaded Thrace, riding alarmingly close to Constantinople. It was an embarrassment for the emperor who had boasted of being master of all lands from Spain to Mesopotamia to find an enemy in his front yard, and Justinian was roused into action. To lead the counterattack, Justinian called one last time on the loyal Belisarius.
The general was no longer a young man, but had lost none of his tactical cunning. He brought together a tiny force of veterans, volunteers and guardsmen and set up camp near the Kotrigurs. That night he ordered the lighting of many fires to give the impression of a much larger force. The following day, as the Kotrigurs approached, he told his inexperienced volunteers to bang loudly on their shields, which baffled the enemy. As the horsemen charged towards the exposed foot soldiers, Belisarius’s veterans emerged from the woods behind them, armed with spears and arrows. Surprised by the attack on their rear, and spooked by the banging infantry in front of them, the Kotrigurs turned and retreated to their base near Arcadiopolis. It was yet another stunning victory for Belisarius against a much larger force.
At this point, the old imperial jealousy started twitching. Justinian stepped in to personally assume command from Belisarius, but only to bribe the Kotrigurs to withdraw across the Danube. For this dubious achievement, Justinian awarded himself a Triumph. On the way, the procession detoured to the Church of the Holy Apostles so he could light a candle at Theodora’s tomb.
JUSTINIAN HAD ONE FINAL indignity in store for Belisarius. In 562 the general was accused of conspiring with others in a plot against the emperor. Again, he was stripped of his wealth and honours until he was found innocent of all charges eight months later and allowed to return to his retirement. Belisarius died in March that year, at the age of sixty. A legend would arise, centuries later, that Justinian had had his eyes put out and sent him to Rome, where he lived out his final days as a blind beggar near the Pincus Gate. The legend is entirely untrue, but it lent extra poignancy to the story of the most gifted military leader of his age, who had been treated so shabbily by an ungrateful emperor.
JUSTINIAN DIED a few months later on 14 November at eighty-two. He had ruled the Roman empire for thirty-eight years, longer than anyone other than Augustus and Theodosius II. As with other long-reigning autocrats such as Louis XIV and Stalin, his death was welcomed in some quarters with relief, but with widespread anxiety in the larger population. The dead emperor’s body was laid out on a golden bier, and covered in fragrant honey and oil. After lying in state it was carried in a torch-lit procession from the Great Palace to the Church of the Holy Apostles, passing through streets filled with a hundred thousand weeping citizens. He was wrapped in a silken shroud embroidered with scenes from his greatest triumphs, then laid in a porphyry sarcophagus next to Theodora. Hardly anyone could remember a time when he hadn’t been emperor. How on earth were they going to survive without him?
AFTER A WEEK IN TURKEY, Joe and I still can’t get our mobile phones working, so we go into a Turkcell outlet to get new sim cards. Joe scans the back wall of the shop and spots yet another framed portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, hero of Gallipoli and the founder of the modern Turkish republic. We’ve seen his picture in restaurants, in ticket offices and on banknotes. In the Turkcell office, he looks like an old-fashioned movie star, nattily turned out in a tailored three-piece suit with a floppy white handkerchief.
Joe looks at the picture and then looks back at me like he’s about to ask something, but I widen my eyes and gesture for him to wait until we’re outside the shop. The cult of Atatürk is said to be the longest running cult of the personality in modern times. Travel advisories warn never to speak ill of him while in Turkey. There is a law that makes it a criminal offence to insult his memory, punishable by three years in prison.
Back on the street, I’m checking my Twitter feed for news of anti-government protests, and Joe asks, ‘So, why are there pictures of Atatürk everywhere in Istanbul?’
‘I think it’s because they still love him and what he did for the country. Most of them do, anyway.’
‘It’s a bit like Kim Jong-Il, isn’t it? Is he like the Dear Leader of Turkey?’
Joe is fascinated with North Korea. He’s amused and intrigued by the far-out weirdness of totalitarianism. At home he’s borrowed some of my books on totalitarian art and propaganda. I was drawn to those images when I was his age too. I always thought there was something particularly awful about being force-marched by a Dear Leader or a Great Helmsman towards some hellish utopia that lies just over the horizon.
‘It’s not really like that with Atatürk,’ I say, looking around to see if I’m being overheard. ‘He was quite a progressive leader. He introduced democracy, women’s rights, that kind of thing. And most of the memorials and statues were put up after his death. They want to remember his greatness. It’s not such a big deal.’
‘But it se
ems like everyone has to put his picture up, whether they want to or not,’ Joe retorts, smiling at my wariness. ‘And why are you whispering, Dad, if it’s not such a big deal?’
TO HIS DEFENDERS, Justinian’s greatness was self-evident: all they had to do was point to a map of the empire, showing a reincorporated North Africa, Italy and Spain. And it did seem, for a while, that the losses of the previous century had been an aberration and that Rome’s ancient supremacy, the normal state of affairs, had been restored.
But it was all an illusion. Justinian’s passing marked the end of the Roman superpower, and their dominion would never again stretch so far. In the centuries to follow, the empire would slide into a dark age. In time it would recover and become a great power once more, but it would never resume its place as the incomparable giant of Europe and the Middle East.
Justinian’s successors were saddled with debt and imperial obligations they could not fulfil. Imperial overstretch and the depredations of the plague led to a thinned-out military and poor lines of communication. Discontent towards the distant, unresponsive capital festered in the far-flung provinces, followed by counterproductive attempts to reassert imperial authority. Just three years after Justinian’s death, much of northern Italy was lost to another Germanic tribe, the Lombards. The Roman toehold on Spain was lost to the Visigoths within fifty years. North Africa would fall in the Muslim conquests of the seventh century.
Justinian was the last Roman emperor to speak Latin. His successors would speak and write in the same Greek language as their subjects. As use of Latin declined, another link to the ancient past was severed.
Justinian’s most impressive accomplishments survived the collapse of his military adventures and remain with us today: the codification of Roman law and the creation of the Hagia Sophia. But there was yet another, less obvious, accomplishment that would in the long run cement Constantinople’s place as the economic powerhouse of the eastern Mediterranean and sustain its empire for centuries to come.
Serica
IN 552, TWO NESTORIAN MONKS arrived at the Chalke Gate in Constantinople and requested an audience with Justinian. The monks presented the emperor with a remarkable story. The previous year, they explained, they had travelled from India to China, where they had witnessed with their own eyes the secret of manufacturing silk.* Justinian was intrigued: the method of producing the luxurious fabric had been, for centuries, a maddening and costly mystery to the Romans.
The arrival of slippery, smooth Chinese silk in the empire some six hundred years earlier had created a sensation in the Roman world, particularly among upper-class women, who adored its comfort, its rarity and its shimmering beauty. Conservative Roman men denounced the foreign fabric as immoral. Seneca thought a woman clad in silk was a shameful spectacle; the flowing fabric made her every curve visible to the public. She might as well, he concluded, be walking around naked.
No one in the empire could explain how this luxurious fabric was manufactured, and so it had to be transported all the way from China, passing through the hands of many middlemen, including the Persians, who all took their cut. By the time it arrived in Rome, it fetched a higher price than gold. Pliny the Elder complained of the vast sums of money flowing out of the empire’s borders so that a Roman lady might be able to ‘shimmer’ in public. Pliny estimated that the importation of silk drained more than 100 million sestertii a year from the Roman economy, more than a tenth of the annual budget.
Silk was just as popular in Justinian’s time, worn by court ladies and the Orthodox clergy, but the ongoing wars with the Sassanid Persians had disrupted trade and sent the price soaring. Justinian attempted to establish new silk routes that skirted around Persia, but without much success. The profits from the silk trade continued to flow out of the empire and into the hands of the Sassanids, which was why Justinian was so eager to hear what the Nestorian monks had to say.
The monks explained what they had learnt in China: silk thread was gleaned from a particular worm that ate only the leaves from a certain bush. They now proposed to make a return journey to China and smuggle out some of these precious worms, as well as saplings of the mulberry bush they fed from. The emperor gave the monks’ proposition his blessing. A deal was struck for an unknown amount of gold, and the monks set out on a mission of industrial espionage that took them around the northern edge of the Persian empire, across the Caspian Sea and through Central Asia, skirting along the edge of the Gobi Desert before dropping down to the silk factories of Xi’an.
The Chinese had mastered the production of silk thousands of years before the birth of Christ, and they did it this way: masses of newly hatched silkworms (Bombyx mori) are allowed to gorge on freshly cut mulberry leaves in warm, dry conditions. They feed until they have enough energy to produce their cocoon, which they spin around themselves from a gelatinous internal fluid that hardens on contact with air. The puffy white cocoons are left to settle for a week. Then they are steamed to kill the pupa inside, before it can hatch as a moth. The lifeless cocoons are then placed in hot water to unravel into a single, long strand. Five or six of these vanishingly thin filaments are woven together to form a single thread.
Bombyx mori.
Shutterstock
Having arrived in China, the monks procured some silkworm eggs or larvae, and smuggled them out by concealing them inside a hollow walking stick. Somehow, the monks were also able to transport small mulberry shrubs in earthenware pots on the 6500-kilometre journey. At the end of their two-year round trip, the monks returned to Constantinople, giving Justinian the silkworms and the shrubbery he needed to set up a native silk industry.
MANY HISTORIANS now regard this story as a fable, but in the later years of his reign, Justinian did establish silk production within the empire’s borders, near modern-day Beirut. True to his autocratic style, he made the industry a state monopoly, creating an ongoing revenue stream for the imperial treasury, and choking off the eastward flow of Roman gold to the Persians.
A little noticed consequence of the home-grown silk industry was that Justinian and his successors were suddenly much less interested in a proxy war they’d been running in the Arabian peninsula against the Persians. The Romans had a longstanding alliance with a group of Christianised Arabs known as the Ghassanids, who often warred against another Arab group called the Lakhmids, who were allies of the Persians. At stake for the two imperial powers was control of a new silk route that would reach Constantinople via the Red Sea, bypassing the Persian tax collectors.
Now that Romans could grow their own silk, Roman and Persian influence among the Arabs started to wane and they lost interest in the goings-on within the Arabian lands. This lapse would leave both great powers completely unprepared for the hammer blow in the next century that would cleave one empire in half, and destroy the other completely.
The Sunken Palace
IN THE YEAR 1544, a French scholar named Pierre Gilles arrived in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman empire. He came to stay for three years. Gilles was a natural scientist with a fondness for fish and marine life in general, but he also had some expertise in topography, the business of mapping the features of the surface of the Earth. These two separate disciplines would come together and lead him to make a strange discovery.
Nearly a century had passed since the conquest of Constantinople, but many of the Roman buildings were still in place, and although most of the great statues had been toppled, their broken remains were lying in the streets and squares. Gilles set about sketching and measuring these monuments. Drawing from life was forbidden to Muslims, and so his sketches attracted a small crowd of curious onlookers who marvelled at his ability to bring the scene to the page.
As the Frenchman fell into rudimentary conversation, he heard a story of a house in a street near the Hagia Sophia (now renamed the Aya Sofya) where the householder was somehow able to drop a bucket into the dark space below his floorboards and haul up a pail full of fresh water. Occasionally, it was said, this man wou
ld find a fish swimming about. Gilles was intrigued and decided to investigate.
The Frenchman took himself to the door of the house. Gilles explained himself as best he could, and the master of the house agreed to take him downstairs to his basement, where there was an opening in the floorboards. Peering into the inky blackness, he heard the slap and trickle of water, echoing through some kind of cool, cavernous space. The householder fetched a torch and the two men lowered themselves through the hole into a small skiff bobbing on the water’s surface. On the floor of the boat was a barbed spear. The master of the house passed Gilles the torch and he began to row across the mysterious body of water.
Through the torch-lit gloom, Gilles began to make out the trunks of gigantic stone columns, evenly spaced, rising dramatically out of the water to support the vaulted roof above their heads. At the base of some of the columns were stones shaped into ghastly, grimacing heads. The space was like a flooded underground temple, but this was no Christian house of worship: Gilles realised they were inside a vast underground water cistern, built in Roman times and long since forgotten. Gilles’s host paddled the skiff towards a point directly below the opening of a well where a single beam of light descended onto the water. A fish came up for air and was speared for the man’s dinner.
Justinian had commissioned the cistern in the sixth century to ensure an adequate water supply for his palace complex. Fresh water was scarce on the peninsula of Constantinople, so it had to be delivered by a chain of aqueducts that led all the way back to a reservoir near the Black Sea.
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