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

by Tom Holland

  The ambassadors, once they had disembarked and made their way up from the Golden Horn, would have approached these hills along a broad, sumptuously porticoed road: the Mese—“Middle Street.” Ahead, framed by colossal arches and gateways, stretched a succession of marmoreal open spaces. It was in the first of these, at the foot of a column pointedly adorned with depictions of Roman military triumphs, that the ambassadors would have been officially welcomed to the city; it was in the second, the circular forum built by Constantine, that the Palladium supposedly lay buried. It was not this forum, however, but a third, the square known as the Augustaion, that most magnificently embodied the capital’s pretensions. On its eastern flank stood the Senate House;a to the south, adorning a massive bath-house, was the city’s finest collection of antique statuary; to the west, marking the termination of the Mese, a domed and double-arched mass of brick and marble named the Golden Milestone. This was the monument from which imperial cartographers measured the distance to every known location: for just as the sun, and the moon, and the stars revolved around the earth, so too, it pleased the Romans to imagine, did all kingdoms revolve around Constantinople. She stood, in their confident opinion, upon the axis of the world. She was, quite simply, the “Queen of Cities.”

  Which explained why, in the final reckoning, the peace mission of the Persian ambassadors was doomed to fail. Just as the House of Sasan, upon the faintest scent of Roman weakness, was bound to return to the attack, so too did the Caesars, despite all the many calamities that had afflicted their empire, shrink from any public acknowledgement that their rule might be less than universal. Victory, eternal victory, was still what it had been to Virgil: their destiny and their due. Even at moments of terrible peril, when there would inevitably seem something shrill about this assertion, the sublime conviction with which it was made remained undiminished. To rule as the heir of Augustus and Constantine was to believe oneself entrusted by the heavens with the very reins of earthly power. The brute fact that there were kingdoms that did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman people could not, of course, be ignored; but it was possible, enthroned in a capital such as Constantinople, to ignore the implications. The city remained, in the opinion of the Caesars, the authentic cockpit of global affairs.

  This was a presumption only boosted by their own domestic circumstances. Set in the south-eastern corner of the Augustaion, between the Senate House and the marble crowd of ancient statues, there towered two bronze gates, or the “Chalke,” as they were known; and beyond them, stupefyingly immense, there stretched a labyrinthine complex so incomparable that it ranked, in the opinion of those privileged enough to penetrate it, as “another heaven.”21 Originally, the palace of the Caesars had been built in a severe and militarised manner, appropriate to its founder’s seriousness of purpose: for it had been modelled on the square plan of an army camp. Traces of the soldier’s sensibility that Constantine had brought to his refashioning of Rome’s empire were still to be seen in the corridors of power: in the sword belts worn by even quite junior officials; in the swagger sticks wielded by senior ministers; in the golds, purples and flaming reds that had always signified superior rank in the Roman army. Just because the emperor’s bureaucrats dressed up like soldiers, however, did not mean that they were soldiers. The legion into which they were enrolled when they joined the civil service did not actually exist. Similarly, the sharp angles of Constantine’s original palace had long since been swallowed up by extensions, so immense and sprawling in scale that for every new one being built, another would lie decaying and forgotten. Just as the language and rituals employed by the imperial bureaucracy were designed to be as incomprehensible to outsiders as possible, so might it take a lifetime to feel fully at home inside the great warren of the palace. There were gardens and judicial tribunals, pavilions and reception halls, banqueting chambers, secretariats, and even an indoor riding school. Sun-dappled terraces raised on brick stilts teetered over the breaking waves far below, while deep underground there stretched sepulchral store-rooms, kitchens and massive cisterns. The sheer vastness of it all made it seem a world unto itself. A man ensconced as the lord of such a palace might well feel that there was very little he could not do.

  Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that supreme power, in the empire of the Romans, had come to wear a civilian face. The age of Constantine, when an emperor was expected to live and die by the sword, was long past. The surest measure of what had been achieved back in that wrenching period of upheaval was precisely that it was now bureaucrats, and not soldiers, who ran the show. The warrior kings of Iranshahr found no equivalent in Constantinople. Rare now was the Caesar who rode out to war. An emperor best kept his grip upon the Roman state, not at the head of an army, but in a council chamber. In fact, it was perfectly possible for an emperor to have begun his career as a civil servant himself. Anastasius, whose niggardly bean-counting had so antagonised Kavad, had originally been a senior functionary in the imperial secretariat. Admirers who sought to praise him in heroic terms found themselves reduced to hailing his baldness: “his forehead gleams like silver.”22 By the time of his death in 518, he had managed to accumulate an astounding reserve of some 320,000 pounds of gold: an achievement worth any number of victories on the battlefield.

  Admittedly, the man who succeeded Anastasius as emperor had been the exception who proved the rule. Justin was a peasant who had trudged from the wilds of the Balkans to join the imperial guard in Constantinople, and his subsequent rise through the ranks was a story that provoked sneers and eulogies in equal measure. While the smooth bureaucrats of the secretariat could scarce forbear to cringe at their master’s lack of education, there were others who saw in his ascent to the purple a striking demonstration that anyone, even a boor from the frontier, could reach the summit of the Roman world. Nor was Justin himself so naïve as to imagine that a man of his background, in an environment where the pen was so much mightier than the sword, could conceivably rule without a literate colleague. Fortunately for him, the perfect candidate was ready at hand—one who was literate with a vengeance. Justinian, the emperor’s nephew and adopted son, was a man so perfectionist, so determined to lay his hands upon every possible lever of power, that the same officials who sneered at Justin for his backwardness found themselves appalled by the resolve of his young colleague to “write almost everything himself.”23 Justinian, a man of such restless energy that he famously never slept, would have had it no other way. His tirelessness was rivalled only by the soaring scale of his ambition. More than anyone before him, Justinian had recognised in the immense apparatus of state control that had its hub in the imperial palace a truly awesome opportunity. It was his aim, once he had only secured the succession to his uncle, not merely “to watch over the empire of the Romans, but, so far as was possible, to remake it.”24 Bureaucracy, in Justinian’s vision, was to become a mechanism for transforming the world.

  Small wonder, then, that the proposal brought by the Persian ambassadors, that Justin should adopt Khusrow as his son, should have been given short shrift. Blame for the breakdown in negotiations was pinned adroitly on a functionary; but it was clear enough whose conceit this best served. Justinian, his eyes already set firmly on the main prize, had not the slightest interest in permitting anyone, let alone a barbarian such as Khusrow, to rank as his brother. It was not merely his right, so he believed, but his duty as Justin’s heir to stand inflexibly on his dignity. Sure enough, in 527, when he duly ascended to the throne upon his uncle’s death, he did not hesitate to promote himself as a man who was set infinitely apart from the common run—heaven-appointed for the achievement of prodigious things. As such, so it seemed to him, he was owed the respect and awe that was owed to the Roman state itself. Even the Senate, that living embodiment of the venerable traditions of the republic, was obliged to display its subordination in as pointed and flamboyant a way as possible. Previously, whenever a senator had entered the imperial presence, he had simply crooked his right knee. Now, under
Justinian’s more exacting code of etiquette, he was expected to fall flat on his face, stretch out his hands and feet as far as he could, and humbly kiss the emperor’s slipper.25 Under such a regime, the Romans’ proud habit of referring to themselves as “citizens”—a tradition that reached back to the primordial days of the republic—fell increasingly into abeyance. Their new title, if a good deal less glorious, was certainly more accurate. When Justinian spoke to his people, he addressed them, quite simply, as “subjects.”

  Understandably, among the more independent-minded members of the Roman elite, there was a good deal of grumbling about this. Abuse, whispered behind the emperor’s purple-robed back, could reach feverish heights. “It seemed as if nature had removed every tendency to evil from the rest of mankind and deposited it in the soul of this man”: such was the considered verdict of one critic.26 Justinian, despite the paranoia to which he was gnawingly prone, was nevertheless haughtily contemptuous of such mutterings. Convinced of both the scale of the challenges he faced and his unique aptitude for tackling them, he had no intention of moderating his style a jot. More than any emperor since Constantine, he believed himself charged with a mission to redeem the world. To his critics, of course, this was nothing but the rankest hypocrisy; and yet even they, reluctant to believe that Justinian might actually be sincere, were forced to acknowledge his rare genius as an actor: “For he had a marvellous ability to conceal his real opinion, and was even able to shed tears, not from joy or sorrow, but contriving them for the occasion according to the moment.”27 Others were less harsh in their judgement of Justinian. There were many, throughout the reaches of the imperial bureaucracy, who found themselves invigorated rather than threatened by their emperor’s ambition, and identified profoundly with his goals. When they looked about them at the state of things, they saw, just as their master did, a broken and spavined order in desperate need of mending. When they heard Justinian declare, with a simple solemnity, “Our subjects are our constant care,”28 they did not doubt him. When they listened to reports of how he would sit up late, scribbling, forever scribbling, to the burning of his midnight oil, they could admire him for sharing in their own deepest fantasy: that the world might indeed be refashioned upon the scratching of a pen.

  “In the whirlpool and turmoil that we now experience, our affairs need the governing wisdom that comes from laws.”29 Any mowbed or rabbi would have concurred. That the written word might serve to alter the way in which entire peoples saw the world was fast becoming the guiding principle of the age. Justinian was certainly not alone in believing that authority could most profitably be derived from books. Nevertheless, as befitted the man he was, both a Roman and a Caesar, he was able to draw upon resources that far outscaled those available to the scholars of Iranshahr. The imperial palace’s archives were filled to bursting with documents. Whether contained in the finest ivory and written in silver ink, or simply scrawled on rough parchment and wood, they bore witness to an entire millennium of written laws. The Roman people, right from the earliest days of the republic, had always been intensely proud of their legal system. What were those of other peoples, they demanded, if not “ridiculous” in comparison?30 It needed no stories of fantastical law-givers, such as the Greeks were forever spouting, to explain how the “Ius,” the “Law” of Rome, had come into being, since it was so patently the product of long centuries of human effort. Whether couched as decrees of the Senate, as the rulings of private jurists, or as entire codes assembled by previous emperors, it could afford the Roman people a sense of living communion with their incomparable past. Its existence, just like that of the empire itself, bore witness to the majestic workings of time.

  Yet the Ius, for all that, represented a problem as well as a solution. If it was true, as Justinian ringingly declared, that “what medicine is to disease, so laws are to public affairs,”31 then there was much that first needed to be done before the emperor’s prescription could be applied to the sickening world. The sheer scale and antiquity of the Roman people’s achievements in the field of law had resulted in a legacy that was intimidatingly chequered. Justinian, however, was hardly the man to duck such a challenge. His first step, only a few months into his reign, was the appointment of a commission to harmonise the various unwieldy collections of laws issued by previous emperors; then, a year and a half later, he charged a second commission with the even more daunting task of collating the entire stupendous body of private writings on Roman law. Complete constitutions had to be revised; almost two thousand individual books called in and minutely sifted; tens of thousands of excerpts made. The resulting codification, achieved in record time, was so staggering an achievement that it appeared to many something more than human. Justinian himself presented it proudly as a process of restoration; but there was something about it as well of a revolution. “We have by means of old laws not only brought matters into a better condition, but we have also promulgated new laws.”32 The emperor saw no need to conceal the fact. He was himself, so he declared, nomos empsychos—the “living law.” Here, in this self-promotion, was the ultimate refinement of what whole generations of emperors had been working to achieve.33 Henceforward, the rules by which the Roman people lived and were bound were to have just the single fountainhead: the emperor himself, enthroned in his palatial citadel. No wonder, then, that Justinian should have sought, not merely to impose his stamp upon the long centuries of Roman legal achievement, but also to prescribe where and how that achievement should be taught. Private law schools were definitively banned. No teachers were to be licensed, save for those directly sanctioned by the state. Now, more than ever, the whole world was to be administered from the centre: from the palace of Constantinople.

  Yet this presumption begged in turn an awkward question. Well-muscled though the machinery of imperial government undoubtedly appeared to be, was it possible, nevertheless, that an excessive faith might have been put in its reach and potency? The mere existence of a law, after all, did not guarantee that it would be obeyed. The world beyond Constantinople was an infinite and a seething place; and even the capital itself, “the all golden city,”34 was perhaps less glittering, and less amenable to Justinian’s purposes, than he cared to admit. Certainly, immured behind the great bronze gates of his palace, he could have little appreciation of what festered beyond the marble-paved thoroughfares of the great metropolis, in the dark and squalid slums where no emperor would ever dream of muddying his dainty slippers. The imperial elite had long taken for granted that the masses were far too stinking and fractious to be permitted near the wellsprings of power. More than a century earlier, a massive programme of clearances had swept anything that was not marble and expensive from the vicinity of the palace: “for the imperial residence,” it was fastidiously explained, “requires extensive grounds hidden from all the world, so that within its precincts there shall be a place to dwell exclusively for those who have been selected for the due requirements of our majesty and for the government of the state.”35

  Yet, just as the Romans, despite half a millennium of autocracy, still referred to their realm as a res publica, or “republic,” so likewise, even in the Constantinople of Justinian, was there one ineradicable monument to the vanished age when everyone had ranked as a citizen. Back in Rome, chariot-racing had been as much a political as a sporting experience: for even the mightiest ruler had dreaded the howls and abuse of the crowds in the Circus Maximus, the city’s oldest and largest public space. Constantinople, as befitted the New Rome, had come to possess a no less magnificent arena for its chariot races: the Hippodrome. The most venerable monument to have survived Constantine’s flattening of the original Byzantium, it had been beautified with antique statues and obelisks, and enlarged so colossally that it had overrun the hill on which it stood. Supported along its entire southern end by massive brick struts, and boasting forty tiers of seating, it had no rival as the city’s theatre of dreams. It was certainly a venue for more than sport. The imperial government, on those irregular
occasions when it wished to publicise a policy, would do so in the Hippodrome. Whether it was the emperor’s ritual trampling of a defeated barbarian king, or the parading of a usurper’s head, or even the ceremonial burning of tax registers, spectacle was all. Justinian himself, on his accession to the throne, had made sure to stage his investiture before the crowds of the Hippodrome. Emerging from his palace down a winding staircase and into a spacious, open-air marble box, he had been greeted by the cheers of some sixty thousand of his subjects, the noise of their acclamations an almost physical blast against his face. Nevertheless, if there was indisputably advantage to be gained by an emperor from exposing himself to the crowds in this manner, there was also potential danger. The passions that the Hippodrome was capable of inspiring in the Byzantines were violent—and often literally so. For a long while now, rival teams of charioteers had been supported by rival gangs of racing fans, whose taste for fighting one another in the streets—and for menacing innocent passers-by—had draped a pall of intimidation across the entire city. Here, then, in the emperor’s own backyard, right on the doorstep of his government, was precisely the order of crisis that his great programme of legal reform was intended to resolve.