In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

by Tom Holland

  But this was not the only shadow darkening the millennial celebrations. Trouble was brewing beyond the frontiers of the empire as well as within them. In Virgil’s great poem, the Roman people had been promised a “dominion without limit”;9 but the truth was, as their strategists were perfectly well aware, that there were limits to everything. Just as there lay beyond the bulwarks of Iranshahr a terrifying immensity of nomad-infested grasslands, so likewise, beyond the northern reaches of Rome’s empire, there stretched a whole wilderness of bogs and forests: one that seemed positively to seethe with barbarians. The conundrum of how best to ward off these savages was one that had been perplexing the Roman high command for centuries. Too backward to be worth the effort of conquering, they were simultaneously too menacing simply to be left to run amok. A knotty problem—and one that had required an appropriately deft-fingered response. Roman frontier policy took many forms. Watchful defence on the part of the legions was punctuated by bursts of pulverising aggression. Submissive tribes could expect to be rewarded with grants of gold; defiant tribes with slaughter and ruin. On occasion, the Roman military also turned the barbarians’ seemingly inexhaustible relish for fighting to its own advantage by employing whole groupings of them—foederati—alongside the legions. Rome’s aim, of course, was quite simple: to maintain a crushing superiority. In this, for most of the long period of peace ushered in by Augustus, she had been resoundingly successful. Increasingly, though, along the entire northern frontier, there were alarming signs that the balance of power might be shifting. Raids across the Rhine had been going on for decades. Further east, across the Danube, a people called the Goths had recently launched even more brutal incursions. In the year of the millennium itself, they torched whole swaths of the Balkans. All this had come as a most unpleasant surprise to the Roman authorities. It seemed scarcely believable that warlords right on the doorstep of the empire were capable of planning, leading and executing such devastation. Barbarians were simply not meant to be capable of organising themselves on such a scale. Patently, however, what had once been scattered tribal groupings were now starting to cohere into something more. Their leaders, it seemed, freighted with Roman subsidies and plunder, had been deploying this treasure to broaden their own horizons. The richer in gold they were, the more weight they had to throw around. War bands that had once numbered hundreds might now very well number thousands. This, while hardly muscle on an imperial scale, did mean that barbarian kings were increasingly packing a heavy punch. They had become, in short, just that little bit more Roman.

  Which did not, of course, make them any the less contemptible. In fact, if anything, the clod-hopping of the Goths deep into the heartlands of the empire only confirmed the Romans in their scorn. The true, the ultimate shock to their complacency did not come from the North, but from the East. Rome was not yet, as she celebrated her millennium, prepared to acknowledge Persia as an equal. Nevertheless, barely two decades after Ardashir had seized the throne, she had been given a foretaste of what was to come. Shapur I, Ardashir’s son, had already expelled the Romans from Mesopotamia for good. The imperial high command, in a desperate attempt to preserve the remainder of Rome’s provinces in the East, had been obliged to denude the Rhine and the Danube of troops. Then, in 244, with the emperor himself on campaign in the East, there was yet another coup. The new Caesar, a hard-bitten warrior named Philip, was frantic to return from the front to Rome to shore up his position. He duly sued for peace. The truce, when it was agreed, came at monstrous cost—and Shapur made sure that the whole world knew it. It was Philip who would be portrayed on the cliff face just west of Persepolis grovelling before the triumphant Shahanshah. It was Philip as well, four years later, in the April of 248, who enjoyed the supreme honour of presiding over Rome’s millennium celebrations.

  A few months later, in 249, he was dead: killed in battle by a rival Caesar named Decius. Two years on, Decius himself was hacked to pieces by a Goth war band. A decade after that, the dignity of the imperial throne reached its nadir, when Shapur captured the latest emperor, Valerian, and used him from that moment on as his mounting block. For the Persians, a living, breathing Caesar was the ultimate in trophies; and they duly made sure to record Valerian’s humiliation alongside Philip’s on the cliff face just west of Persepolis. Even death did not bring an end to the humbling of the wretched emperor: his skin, flayed from his body after his death and dyed a lurid red, was lovingly preserved in a temple as one of the supreme treasures of the House of Sasan.10

  For the Romans, however, even worse was to come. More than the dignity of the imperial title was in meltdown by now. Events were slipping terrifyingly out of control. The more unstable the situation became, the more rival warlords were tempted to snatch after the ultimate prize. The more that happened, the more the eastern provinces were left exposed. The more that the Roman high command then moved troops to stabilise the front with Persia, the more it left the northern frontier open to the barbarians there. The more that the Goths and assorted other savage people then broke through to the rich, soft lands of the south, the more unstable conditions became. How to break this vicious circle? The dominion of the Roman people, it appeared, was locked into a death spiral.

  Yet, the empire did not, in the end, succumb. Instead, against all odds, and through a supreme and grinding effort of will, a new generation of emperors hauled it back from the brink. Grim, implacable and pitiless men, they forced upon their subjects a revolution no less far-reaching than the one presided over by Augustus. That “taxes are the sinews of the state”11 had long been a Roman maxim. Recently, though, amid the agonies of the age, those same sinews had atrophied. Warfare and anarchy had made it increasingly difficult to raise revenue. The authorities, in their desperation, had debased the coinage—but that had merely led inflation to gallop out of control. Rome had faced financial as well as military ruin. The surgery, however, when it finally came, was to prove brutally effective. To the iron-fisted warlords who now stood at the head of the empire, it appeared self-evident that only a massively enlarged military apparatus could hope to maintain the integrity of the frontiers—and that only a massively enlarged fiscal apparatus could hope to pay for it. Accordingly, over the course of a few decades, the number of soldiers and bureaucrats was multiplied by an astounding factor. The state that emerged from these reforms was to prove the most formidably governed that the Mediterranean had ever seen. Nowhere before had there existed a bureaucracy quite so complex and domineering; and nowhere before had there existed a military funded on quite so massive a scale. The light-touch autocracy established by Augustus had been transformed into something infinitely more heavy-handed: centralised, intrusive and absolute. It was a form of government that still retained the name of Roman; and yet there was a sense as well in which it marked a revolutionary change. So much so, in fact, that the new regime had gone so far as to found a second Rome.

  Byzantium, this new capital had originally been called. It stood on the western shore of the Bosphorus, a narrow strait that served—like the Hellespont some one hundred miles to the south-west—to separate Europe from Asia. Greek settlers had founded the city many centuries earlier—but despite the fact that it occupied a magnificently defensible site on the tip of a promontory, surrounded on one side by sea, and on the other by an estuary named the Golden Horn, its growth had always been limited by a seemingly fatal lack of drinking water. Such a drawback, however, was hardly the kind to put off a Roman autocrat; and sure enough, in AD 324, there had arrived in Byzantium a Caesar fully determined to found on its site “another Rome.”12 The name of this emperor was Constantine—a man who stood supreme as the very embodiment of the new imperial order. Born in the Balkans, proclaimed emperor in Britain, he had spent his life criss-crossing the empire, patching it back together in the teeth of a host of rivals, all of whom he had systematically hunted down and eliminated. Although he had won the decisive victory of his reign just outside the walls of Rome, Constantine had no particular ties of lo
yalty to the ancient capital. What he did have, however, was an unblinking appreciation of the empire’s defensive needs: of just how imperative it was to coordinate the eastern and northern fronts. Byzantium, midway between the Euphrates and the Rhine, could not have been more ideally suited to his purposes. A whole new foundation was accordingly planted on its site. A massive grid of monuments, squares and streets began to spread westwards along the course of the promontory, obliterating entire reaches of the original city as it went. Even its name was swallowed up. Although the people who lived on the site would continue to call themselves Byzantines, Byzantium itself had ceased to exist. On 11 May 330, amid a triumphant blaze of immodesty, its founder formally inaugurated it as the “City of Constantine”: Constantinople.

  Initially, of course, the inhabitants of the original Rome could hardly help but find the pretensions of this arriviste settlement faintly risible. Everyone knew that a city without an ancient pedigree barely ranked as a city at all. Rapidly though the population of Constantinople was soon growing, far more rapidly even than its founder had anticipated, so that in only a few decades it was bursting the landward walls he had built for the city, yet there still lurked, among those who lived there, a queasy consciousness of their own status as upstarts. Numerous efforts were made to counter this. Constantine himself—determined to purloin for his foundation the heritage that it so glaringly lacked—had stripped the Greek world bare of all its greatest treasures. The public spaces of Constantinople, adorned with famous trophies and statuary, “brazen statues of the most exquisite workmanship,”13 had come to rank as the world’s most stupefying museum. The city had even taken on the ultimate challenge: going toe to toe with Rome herself. Topographers, with a show of considerable creativity, had succeeded in establishing that Constantinople, just like her venerable predecessor, boasted seven hills. Architects had designed for her all the appurtenances of a cutting-edge imperial capital: palaces, forums, baths. Engineers had provided her with the aqueducts and harbours that any city with an ambition to equal Rome would require, if its inhabitants were to be kept watered and fed. Most strikingly of all, perhaps, Constantinople had been endowed with an ornament hitherto unique to Rome: an assembly of the great and good by the name of the Senate. This was the body, back in the distant past, long before the time of Augustus and the forging of his autocracy, that had guided Rome to the mastery of the world. It constituted a living link with the most primordial days of the empire. Now, the establishment of a Senate in Constantinople, and a Senate House, gave to the city a touch, however faint, of the long-vanished republic. It helped to put flesh on the bones of its proud claim to be the Second Rome.

  And as time passed, and the city continued to increase in scale and self-confidence, so she came to appropriate for herself an even more sensational ancestry. Two hundred years on from the founding of Constantinople, and it had become widely believed that Constantine’s original plan had been to establish his new capital on the site, not of Byzantium at all, but of Troy.14 This, of course, would have been to identify it with origins even more ancient than Rome herself; nor, despite the fact that the plan had self-evidently failed to come to fruition, did this prevent Constantinople herself from laying claim to the hoary mystique of the Trojan name. There stood, for instance, in the middle of a circular forum built by Constantine, a porphyry column; and on this column there stood an image of the city’s founder, crowned as though by the sun, with seven glittering rays. Constantine himself was said to have brought the stone for the column from Troy.15 Yet the most valuable relic of all to have been redeemed from the mists of the Trojan past, and the one that boded best for the future of the city, was not even on public display. Buried deep beneath the base of the column, so it was believed, lay an antique wooden statue: the Palladium itself. The story went that Constantine “had secretly taken it away from Rome, and placed it in his forum”:16 an ultimate trumping of the ancient capital’s snobbery.

  In truth, though, two centuries on from the re-founding of their city, the Byzantines could scarcely care less for what the people of Rome might think of them. Their conviction that the Palladium lay buried beneath Constantine’s column reflected something far more profound than merely a relish for one-upmanship. Much had changed. The same decades that had brought such suffering to Iranshahr at the hands of the Hephthalites had witnessed, in the western half of Rome’s empire, an even more calamitous intrusion of barbarians. Rome herself, the city which for so long had stood buttressed by the favour of the heavens, had been trampled underfoot. The whole of Italy had been subjected to the rule of a Gothic king. Other provinces, too—from Africa to Gaul—had slipped from imperial control, as the one-time foederati, roaming seemingly at will across the shattered landscape of the Roman west, had seized control of its commanding heights. Only the eastern half of the empire—the half ruled from Constantinople—had stood proof against this headlong slide towards disintegration. With Rome herself reduced to the humiliating status of a provincial city ruled by a barbarian warlord, there remained just the one capital left standing. The right of Constantinople to the title of the mistress of the Roman world was now beyond all dispute. Why, then, that being so, should anyone seriously have doubted that the Palladium had indeed been brought there from Rome?

  True, there were many in the eastern half of the empire who dreaded that their own doom was brewing, too. It seemed to pessimists that their dominion had become something terminally “shrunken, barbarised, and ruined.”17 Yet the truth was that the Roman state, even as these cries of despair went up, was very far from finished. The labour of surgery performed on the empire by Constantine, for all that it had ultimately proved inadequate to the preservation of its authority in the West, still gave to the emperors of the East a stately and a domineering tread. Certainly, in Ctesiphon, at the court of their pre-eminent rivals, no one ever thought to deny the continuing might of the Caesars. For all the success that Kavad had enjoyed in pillaging the empire’s eastern frontier, and in extorting renewed payments of danger money, the Romans too had enjoyed some triumphs of their own. In 504, for instance, one of their armies had gained a measure of revenge for the rape of Amida by sweeping deep into Mesopotamia, looting and slaving as it went, while in its wake a specially appointed death squad left not a single house standing. Even more tellingly, the Romans had capitalised upon the period of hostilities with Persia to remedy their previous lack of a forward command post. In 505, the Emperor Anastasius purchased a small estate named Dara, located just ten miles from the great Persian border stronghold of Nisibis. Barely a year later, by the time that a temporary truce was signed, a massive complex of walls and watchtowers had come to loom over the fields, where previously nothing but a village had stood. It was, as the howls of protest from Ctesiphon bore witness, an initiative fit to appal Persian strategists. The entire balance of power in the region had been transformed. The Roman frontier was now decisively re-militarised. Even Kavad, towards the end of his reign, had been brought to accept the implications. In 522, the old war-horse dispatched an embassy from Nisibis with a letter for the emperor. In it, he floated a startling proposition: “that you make my son Khusrow, who is the heir to my throne, your adopted son.”18 In part, the offer was a blatant attempt to forestall any meddling by Constantinople in the succession crisis that was even then brewing in Iranshahr; but it also signalled just how brightly Roman prestige had come to blaze again. Sure enough, a few months later, another Persian embassy made its way to Constantinople with instructions to negotiate an enduring peace. No Shahanshah, it went without saying, would ever have pressed for détente with an enemy that he regarded as contemptible. The Palladium, it seemed, was working its magic still.

  And certainly, even to a diplomat familiar with the scale and splendour of Ctesiphon, the capital of the rival superpower would have appeared touched by an almost supernatural quality of majesty. To approach Constantinople was to be dazzled by the most awesome cityscape in the world. So rapidly had it grown that the p
roud and ancient city of Chalcedon, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, now served merely as its gateway. The Persian ambassadors—boarding a ship in Chalcedon’s harbour and negotiating the waters that surrounded Constantinople “like a garland”19—would have found marks of urban sprawl wherever they looked: for the conurbation, spreading in a ribbon along the European coastline, had long since broken through even the outermost ring of walls. Inevitably, though, it was to what lay within those hulking fortifications that the visitor’s gaze was drawn: for it was there that human effort and ingenuity had most astoundingly enhanced the already stunning setting. Along the waterfront, once a bleak wilderness of mud and reeds, everything now proclaimed the voracious appetites of the capital: a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of harbours and warehouses, granaries and wharfs. Beyond them, packed so tightly together that visitors would often find themselves “cramped and walking in danger because of the great number of men and animals,”20 there spread the homes of the city’s almost half a million inhabitants: a concentration of people vaster even than Ctesiphon. Nevertheless, as the Persian ambassadors neared their destination, the skyline of Constantinople would have conveyed to them an impression, not of seething clamour, but rather of order, monumentality and space. Along the spine of the promontory, the smog bred of countless furnaces and hearths, and which hung in a pall over the lower reaches of the great conurbation, diminished upon the sea breezes, to reveal the hills that originally, before the arrival of Constantine upon them, had constituted the upper reaches of Byzantium, and now provided the New Rome, and the Roman Empire itself, with its mighty heart.