Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  Chatrang

  AS THE GRAND strategic games of Heraclius and Shahrbaraz rolled back and forth across Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, thousands of smaller strategic struggles played out on the tables of west Asia.

  The game of chess is thought to have originated in northern India, between the third and fifth centuries. The Indians named it chaturanga, which means ‘four divisions’, a reference to the pieces that represented infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots. The game’s popularity carried it into Sassanid Persia, where its name was Persianised into chatrang.

  Chatrang was played on a chequerboard of eight by eight squares. Each player had sixteen pieces: a shah (king), a vizir (prime minister), two pil (elephants), two asp (horses), two rukh (charioteers) and eight piyadeh (foot soldiers). Players would call shah when the opposing king was threatened, and shah mat – ‘The king is finished’ – when it could no longer escape the enemy.

  The conquering Arabs, fond of mathematics and games of strategy, took up the game eagerly. They called it shatranj. Pilgrims and traders brought shatranj to western Europe, where it evolved into modern-day chess. In Europe the powerful vizir became a queen, the elephants evolved into bishops, the horses became knights, and the charioteers retained the title of ‘rook’, but took the shape of castle turrets. The eight little piyadeh became pawns.

  Chess seems to have taken off quickly in Constantinople, even though killjoys in the Orthodox Church condemned it as a form of gambling. Princess Anna Comnena mentions it in passing in the pages of the Alexiad, describing it as a ‘game invented by the Assyrians and thence brought to us’. She writes that chess was a comfort to her father, the emperor, who would occasionally play it in the early morning to dissipate the worries that had beset him through the night.

  ON MY EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, my favourite uncle gave me a handsome illustrated book titled Chess for Children. Inside, the origin of chess was told as a fable:

  There was once a great Shah of Persia, a ruler who loved games so much he appointed a learned man to his court, to act as his official Vizier of Games. The Shah asked the man to invent a game of strategy so that he might hone his skills as a military leader. The Vizier went away and came back to him with the game we all know as chess.

  The Shah was delighted with chess. He admired the way it could produce such complexity from simplicity. He adored the struggle and the drama embedded in each turn of the game. After playing it for many days he summoned the Vizier to him.

  ‘Chess is the greatest diversion anywhere on earth!’ cried the Shah. ‘I am very pleased and you may name your reward.’

  The Games Vizier thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘Sire, my wish is a simple one and can be reckoned according to the squares on the chessboard.’

  ‘How so?’ inquired the Shah.

  ‘For the first square I should like a single grain of rice. For the second square I would like two grains of rice. For the third square, double it again to four grains, eight for the next, and so on.’

  The Shah admitted to being bewildered. ‘This would be a modest reward indeed for such fine and clever work, but I will grant you this wish.’

  The Shah’s treasurer withdrew to his chambers to calculate the exact amount of rice owed to the Vizier of Games. The treasurer returned to the throne room, his face full of amazement.

  ‘Sire,’ he reported, ‘it seems Your Majesty now owes his Vizier of Games more than 18 billion billion grains of rice.’*

  This was more rice than could be grown in Persia in a million years. The Shah could not fulfil his rash promise to his Vizier, and so, even though it grieved him, he had no choice but to chop off the man’s head.

  Collins

  The fable is told to illustrate the power of exponential sequences. It’s fun to imagine the shah’s treasurer following the tally of grains across each square of the board: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 gets you to the end of the first row without too much fuss. On the second row the numbers begin their steep ascent: 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16,384, 32,768 . . . By now the Shahanshah is into a serious commitment of rice and we still have six more rows to go. Shah mat!

  The Message from the Prophet

  THE TRUE CROSS, recovered from Persian captivity, had one more journey to make. On 21 March 630, Heraclius entered the holy city of Jerusalem, not as a conquering emperor, but as a humble pilgrim, barefoot and stripped of his imperial regalia. In his hands he carried the holy relic down the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where it was handed over in a moving, candlelit ceremony.

  Heraclius then unleashed a campaign of forced baptism of the Jews in the city, in retaliation for their real or imagined treachery, which only deepened their longstanding resentment of Roman rule.

  ACCORDING TO MUSLIM TRADITION, when Heraclius entered Jerusalem, he was brought a letter, written by an obscure Arab desert leader:

  In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. This letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah and his Apostle, to Heraclius, the ruler of the Romans. Peace be upon him who follows the right path. Furthermore, I invite you to Islam and if you become a Muslim you will be safe, and Allah will double your reward, and if you reject this invitation of Islam you will be committing a sin by misguiding your subjects.

  Heraclius, it was said, had no idea as to the identity of the author of this audacious message; nonetheless the Muslim accounts say he treated the demand respectfully and expressed some curiosity about this ‘Muhammad, slave of Allah’. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad sent similar letters to Khusrau, to the Negus of Ethiopia, the governor of Syria and the rulers of Egypt and Bahrain. The likelihood that such a letter was ever written or conveyed to Heraclius is a matter of some debate between secular and Islamic historians, but it is beyond dispute that the followers of Muhammad were soon to make their presence known to Heraclius.

  Yarmouk

  A GRATEFUL SENATE awarded Heraclius the title of ‘Scipio’, ranking him with the legendary commander who defeated Hannibal. His place in the pantheon of the greatest Roman generals seemed secure.

  A German historian once argued that if Hitler had died in 1938, historians would remember him as Germany’s most successful statesman. Something like that is surely true for Heraclius. Had he suddenly dropped dead after returning the True Cross to Jerusalem, Heraclius would have been accorded a place alongside Augustus and Constantine. Instead he is remembered as the emperor who lived too long.

  On the surface it seemed Heraclius had restored the status quo ante bellum, but everything had changed. Twenty years of ruinous warfare followed by plague had left the empire a burnt husk of its former self. Roman lands were littered with blackened churches and fortresses, ravaged croplands and empty villages.

  The emperor sent his bureaucrats to Palestine, Syria and Egypt to pick up where they had left off, but things just weren’t the same; the Romans had been absent for so long, and they had been kicked out so ignominiously. It was like the British returning to Singapore after the Japanese occupation; all the pomp and circumstance in the world could not disguise the fact that everyone had seen the mighty empire take a beating. Still, Heraclius’s authority among his people was immense, and he spent the next seven years travelling from province to province, patiently rebuilding Roman administration in Damascus, Edessa and Antioch. But the ineffable prestige of the Romans, once so useful in subduing lesser peoples, had been punctured.

  THE FIRST SIGNS of the coming cataclysm were felt as distant tremors on the desert frontiers, as flickers on the empire’s nerve endings.

  In 629, just a year after the cessation of hostilities, a Roman garrison in Palestine was attacked by a group of Arab raiders. The Romans drove them off and the raiders retreated into the desert. Rumours filtered into the empire of turmoil among the Arab tribes, and of movement along the borders. The Romans had once called these desert Arabs ‘Saracens’, but these new Arab insurgents preferred to call themselves muhajirun or ‘emigrants’.

  There were
more raids, this time on small towns and settlements. The raiders would hit hard, plunder and disappear before the imperial troops could regroup and counterattack. The Roman military position in Syria and Palestine was starting to fall apart.

  The Arabs were well known to the Romans as soldiers and traders. Both the Romans and the Persians had employed Arab mercenaries to fight proxy wars on the desert borders. Over time these tribes had come to rely on Roman gold, but now the war was over and money was tight, so Heraclius cancelled the annual tribute. The Arab border tribes angrily ended their alliance with the Romans. Intelligence from the Arabian peninsula was completely cut off, which left Heraclius completely unprepared for the coming storm.

  IN 634, HERACLIUS WAS IN ANTIOCH when he received a report that a massive army of muhajirun had poured into Syria. The Roman army sent to drive them out was utterly destroyed. A year later, the Arabs took Damascus.

  It was a shocking yet preposterous turn of events. The Romans were accustomed to seeing the desert dwellers as a lesser people – sometimes an ally, sometimes a nuisance – who would pick over the scraps left behind by the great powers. How had they become so organised, so lethal? Procopius had written a century earlier: ‘Saracens are by nature unable to storm a wall, but are the cleverest of all men at plundering.’ Now, somehow, they had learnt to storm a wall – and to take the city behind it.

  Heraclius received an anxious letter from Yazdegerd III, the latest (and, as it would turn out, the last) Sassanid shah of Persia. Yazdegerd was similarly bewildered by a sudden flood of Saracens across his borders. The two powers agreed to assault the Arabs simultaneously: Heraclius would prepare to attack in Palestine while the Persians would mount a counterattack in Iraq. But just as Heraclius was gathering his armies, the Arabs cannily proposed peace negotiations with the Persians, and Yazdegerd’s government, exhausted and broke, were only too happy to come to the table.

  Heraclius, no doubt sick at heart at the prospect of having to win back Syria all over again, assembled a massive allied imperial force at Antioch of fifty thousand Romans, Christian Arabs, Slavs, Franks, Georgians and Armenians. The muhajirun fell back to a position near the river Hieromyax, known by the Arabs as Yarmouk, south of the Sea of Galilee. On 15 August 636, the armies confronted each other on a dusty plain, edged by a deep ravine known as Wadi-ur-Ruqqad.

  THE ROMAN FORCES WERE LED by an experienced Armenian general named Vahan. His frontline infantry soldiers were armed with spears and swords; behind them were lines of missile troops carrying javelins and composite bows. Supporting the infantry was Vahan’s heavy cavalry, his cataphracts, draped in scale armour.

  The Arab leader, Khalid ibn al-Walid, was the most gifted Arab general of his time, having already won four quick victories against the Persians in lower Mesopotamia. Khalid had brought an army to Yarmouk that was half the size of the Roman forces, but his soldiers were masters of desert warfare, accustomed to navigating their way from waterhole to oasis, riding on camels and horses.

  The first day of battle began with skirmishing and duelling. On the second day, Vahan launched an impressive frontal attack, which forced Khalid’s right flank to retreat. The battered Arab infantrymen staggered back into their camp, but their wives jeered and threw rocks at them until they were shamed back into battle. The day ended with heavy casualties but inconclusively.

  On the third day, Vahan again tore into the Arab right flank, but on the fourth, Khalid’s army launched a fierce counterattack. Still, the Roman cataphracts had wounded and blinded so many of Khalid’s soldiers, it became known as the ‘Day of Lost Eyes’. On the fifth day, there was no battle, but Khalid moved his troops to cut off every possible escape route for the Romans.

  At the dawn of the sixth day, Khalid unleashed a full attack on the Roman left flank. The Roman positions suddenly collapsed under the pressure. Then the Arab forces wheeled around and moved in for the kill. The remaining Romans were encircled. Some soldiers fell into the ravines of the wadi. Others escaped and ran for their lives, but most were slaughtered; the Arabs were taking no prisoners that day. Khalid and his mobile guard chased the escaping Romans all the way to Damascus where they were caught and killed.

  IN ANTIOCH, HERACLIUS was brought the news of his army’s destruction at Yarmouk. Now unable to defend the city, he was forced to retreat with his remaining forces over the Taurus Mountains into Asia Minor. After decades of bitter sacrifice, the Roman province of Syria was lost to him again. It seems Heraclius also resigned himself to the loss of Palestine, because he took the precaution of transporting the True Cross from Jerusalem to Constantinople for safekeeping.

  It was just as well. The next year the Arab high command sent its forces to conquer Jerusalem, putting the city to siege for four months, until the Roman authorities surrendered in April 637. The city watched the disposition of its new Arab rulers closely. Were they Christians, pagans or something else? Jewish hopes in the city soared when Caliph Umar ordered the rubble to be cleared from the Temple Mount, the site of the legendary Temple of Solomon, which the Christians had been using as a garbage dump. Jewish leaders were heartened when the new Arab rulers of Jerusalem referred to them respectfully as ahl-al-kitab, People of the Book.

  Three years later, Egypt fell to the disciplined fury of the muhajirun, opening the way for the Arab conquest of North Africa. Conquest was followed by consolidation, as the Arabs picked up the Roman habits of administration in their newly won lands.

  In the space of thirty years, the Romans had lost two-thirds of their empire, won it back, then lost it all over again. In the east, the Arab gains were even more spectacular as huge swathes of Sassanid Persia fell to the unstoppable Arabs: the conquest of Iraq was completed in 638, followed by the whole of Iran. Yazdegerd III, the last Shah of the Sassanids, fled to his easternmost city of Merv, where he was murdered in the street. He was thirty-four years old. Yazdegerd’s children died in exile in China. And just like that, the empire of the Sassanid Persians was gone forever.

  THIS THIRD DRASTIC change in the fortunes of his empire left Heraclius a broken man, and he retreated to his palace in Heira. His people were inclined to blame his misfortunes on his incestuous marriage to Martina. To his critics, it seemed their marriage was cursed: of their ten children, three had died in childhood, one had a paralysed neck and another was a deaf-mute.

  Heraclius was now sixty years old. The full crown of blond hair had fallen away, his body was stooped and he was afflicted with oedema, a build-up of fluid in the legs, which caused him terrible pain. It was said that at this time, Heraclius was also beset by hydrophobia, an anxious fear of water, which kept him stranded outside Constantinople, afraid to cross the Bosphorus. His officers ordered the construction of a pontoon bridge of boats, which allowed the emperor to cross the water to the capital.

  His oedema worsened, confining him to bed. When death came for him in January 641, Heraclius must have welcomed it.

  George of Pisidia, the court poet who had accompanied Heraclius on his brilliant campaign through Persia, wrote some sombre lines during Heraclius’s final years:

  Suddenly fades the splendour that surrounds

  And all the unstable vanity of human glory

  Stretches out and again constricts . . .

  The whole course of life

  And the soft lump of everything human

  Passes like a ball inflated with air.

  A Terrible Foreboding

  ISLAMIC HISTORIES RECORD that on the dawn of the first day of the Battle of Yarmouk, as the two sides stood glaring at each other across no-man’s land, a Christian unit commander named George rode forward from the Roman lines towards the Arabs, shouting that he wanted to change sides and was ready to become a Muslim. George was welcomed into the ranks by Khalid and renamed ‘Jirjah’. It’s recorded that Jirjah was killed on the first day of battle.

  Reports of the religious views of the Arabs were certainly mystifying to the Romans. The Arabs accorded respect to Christians and Jews, but
required them to pay a jizya, a special tax levied only on non-believers. There were Christians in the conquered lands prepared to convert to the new religion simply to avoid the tax.

  It’s difficult to fathom the intensity of the spiritual terror suffered by medieval people after a defeat at the hands of an army sworn to a different faith. In the bitter aftermath there would be no shortage of holy men in the streets crying out that the cataclysm was God’s punishment for some perceived wickedness or heresy among them.

  A further defeat could unleash a far more dangerous thought: could it be that the ‘infidel’ is right, that we have been wrong all along? Do I choose a martyr’s death or do I choose, like Jirjah, to gallop over to the winning side? For God must surely be with the winners. Such uncertainty could induce crippling anxiety, for what was at stake was not just your life in the here and now, but the everlasting fate of your immortal soul.

  For all their imperial confidence, the ancient Romans never could entirely shake a melancholic sense of the transience of their glory. A premonition of a faraway doom lingered in the mind of a Roman general one night in 146 BC as he watched his men put the city of Carthage to the torch. The annihilation of Carthage, Rome’s most hated enemy, should have been a jubilant moment; instead he wept and muttered to a Greek companion, ‘I have a terrible foreboding that one day the same doom will be pronounced on my country’.

  In 146 BC, that reckoning was a long way off. The Roman empire was just beginning its steep ascent towards domination of the entire Mediterranean. In the following centuries, the Roman world would periodically lurch into cycles of crisis, recovery and then reinvention at the hands of Augustus, Diocletian and Constantine. It was easy to assume the empire had a fixed place in the scheme of things.

  But at the time of Heraclius’s death in 641, the Romans of Constantinople were acutely conscious of a fall from grace, a demotion from superpower status to being just one among many powers in the Mediterranean. Decades of warfare and plague had left the Romans grief stricken and highly strung, an emotional state exacerbated by one of the most powerful aspects of Christian belief: an expectation that the return of Christ was imminent. Every churchgoer in Constantinople who recited the creed knew of the promise that Christ would ‘come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’, a moment when the dead would be resurrected, the wicked condemned and the whole world redeemed. Heraclius had been all too successful at equating the fortunes of the empire with God’s plan for the world. What did it mean when the Arabs, of all people, driven by a mystifying faith, had conquered so many of their lands?