by Tom Holland
And Justinian knew it. In the years prior to his accession, he had exploited the gangsterdom associated with the Hippodrome for his own ends. The most brutal racing faction of all, whose members deliberately aped the Hephthalites’ aura of menace by shaving the fronts of their scalps and “allowing the hair behind to hang down in a disorderly mess,”36 had been sponsored by the heir-apparent, and deployed on the streets of the capital as paramilitaries. Once on the throne, however, Justinian had come to regard the continued employment of hooligans with mullets as incompatible with the imperial dignity. Gang warfare in the Hippodrome was henceforward to be suppressed without fear or favour. Yet, even as Justinian himself affected a stern neutrality between the rival factions, other, less scrupulous members of the elite remained eager to sponsor their thuggery. Senators, in particular, while far too cautious to challenge the emperor’s reform programme openly, had no compunction about stirring up trouble behind his back. The Hippodrome, despite all Justinian’s efforts to dampen it, remained a tinderbox.
Then finally, on 14 January 532, even as the emperor’s law commissioners were scribbling away furiously in the palace next door, it exploded. Three days earlier, two rival gang-members had been temporarily spared execution when the gallows had snapped. Now, in the face of Justinian’s refusal to confirm their reprieve, the two factions forged an unexpected alliance, combined their forces and sprung their comrades from the city jail. Intoxicated by their own daring, and perhaps encouraged by whispering senators, the gangs then went on a collective rampage. Looters fanned out across the most exclusive quarter in the world. Anything that could not be stolen was trashed or burned. The damage was something prodigious. Over the course of the succeeding days, many of the city’s most beautiful and venerable monuments were burned to the ground. From the Augustaion to Constantine’s forum, the whole of the Mese was reduced to smoking rubble. Justinian, holed up in his palace, attempted to stave off total disaster by means of increasingly frantic expedients. First, he dismissed some of his more notoriously venal ministers; next, he tried to bribe the faction leaders; then, he contemplated flight. Finally, screwing his courage to the sticking place, he resolved to dowse the flames of anarchy with blood—gallons of it. Squadrons of crack troops were marched through the smouldering ruins of the city, and stationed at opposite ends of the Hippodrome, where a raging but largely unarmed mob was amusing itself by calling for Justinian to be deposed. The order to attack was given; the troops advanced; the crowd was systematically hacked and trampled underfoot. Less a battle than a calculated atrocity, the massacre left the arena piled high with corpses. The death toll, so it was claimed, approached fifty thousand people.37 If true, then one-tenth of the city’s population had been wiped out in a single day.
Justinian was now secure. The crisis turned out to have buttressed his mastery for good. Less than a couple of years later, in December 533, the commissioners whose work had so nearly been aborted by the riots delivered the second of their great law revisions: what they termed the Digest. No one, of course, thought to oppose it. The decimation of the Byzantines in the Hippodrome had made sure of that. In truth, however, the lesson taught the Roman people by the unleashing in their capital of such carnage was a primordial one. The first to demonstrate it, after all, had been Romulus himself, that fratricidal founder of the original Rome, whose twin brother, jealous and embittered, had presumed to challenge his authority by jumping over the unfinished wall of his infant city: an unforgivable and capital offence. Again and again, throughout the long and bloody course of their history, the Romans had served to prove the truth of the moral. Power without the sanction of violence barely ranked as power at all.
Yet Justinian himself, for all the savagery he had unleashed, did not care to dwell too closely upon the brute reality of what had taken place beyond his palace. Just as Virgil, back in the balmiest days of Roman power, had piously attributed the forging of the empire to the favour of the gods as well as to the swords of the legions, so similarly was it important for Justinian, in the midst of all his labours for the improvement of the world, to demonstrate that he had right as well as might on his side. Fortunately for his purposes, there lay, in the wake of the riots, the perfect stage to hand. The centre of Constantinople had been left gutted. “The city was a series of blackened, blasted hills, like the reaches of a volcano, uninhabitable because of dust, smoke, and the foul stench of building materials reduced to ashes.”38 Among the many treasures destroyed in the inferno had been the Senate House and all the antique statues with which Constantine had long previously adorned the bath-house. Their loss had obliterated precious links with what was, by now, a very distant past. Yet, in truth, Justinian was pleased to see them gone. The Senate House had always loomed too large over the Augustaion for his tastes: its replacement, so he decreed, was to be built on a much smaller scale. Similarly, great works of art although the statues might have been, they had represented—to Justinian’s mind—not gods, but demons. Much that had once been taken for granted by the Roman people was now dismissed by them as dangerous superstition. The entire notion of the supernatural order of things celebrated by Virgil had long since been junked as a diabolical fantasy. Even the Palladium, secure and unharmed though it still lay beneath Constantine’s column, had been largely forgotten—with those who did preserve a memory of the statue likelier to regard it as an object of necromancy than a talisman.
The monuments that Justinian aimed to found upon the rubble of the old would be raised to the glory, not of the traditional gods of the Roman people, but of something very different: a single, omnipotent god. A god from whom everything to which Justinian laid claim, whether the governance of the world or “the power to make laws,”39 directly flowed. A god who reigned eternal in the heavens—and yet who had been born a man back in the reign of Augustus, and put to death upon a Roman cross.
Justinian, rebuilding Constantinople, would stamp the city definitively, once and for all, as a Christian capital.
Joined at the Hip
Huge buildings spelled greatness. The Caesars had always appreciated this. Like the issuing of laws, the humbling of barbarians and the wearing of purple, the construction of towering monuments was very much part of what the Roman people expected of an emperor. Nor was Justinian minded to let them down. Even before the destruction of large swaths of Constantinople provided him with the perfect opportunity to rebuild the city to his own exalted tastes, he had displayed his relish for the empire’s grand tradition of architectural swagger. The initial focus of his energies, however, had lain not in the capital but far away, on the eastern frontier.
Here, in 530, the Persians had responded to the latest breakdown of peace talks in time-honoured fashion—by making a land grab. The object of their campaign had been that particular bugbear of their high command, Dara. Directly in front of the walls of the fortress, a Roman army, led by a brilliant young general named Belisarius, had met the Persians and put them to flight. “Such an event was one which had not happened for a very long while.”40 Nevertheless, it had been a close-run thing: Dara’s fortifications, jerry-built at immense speed, would not have withstood a concentrated siege. “And because the emperor Justinian perceived that the Persians, so far as it lay in their power, would never permit this outpost of the Romans, which was such a menace to them, to continue standing there, but were bound to persist in attacking it with all their might,”41 he had ordered a massive rebuilding programme.42 Dara was made to bristle. It was designed to be—and to appear—impregnable. Any passing barbarians were to look on it and despair. The emperor, aiming to ram the point home, even graced Dara with a new name: “Justiniana New Town.” Here, in the hulking silhouette of its ramparts, was the manifestation of a ruler with the world in his hands.
Or so he liked to think. In fact, the message conveyed by the militarisation of the frontier was altogether more ambiguous than Justinian might have wished. The rival pretensions of Dara and Nisibis, frowning at each other across the Mesopotamia
n flat-lands, could easily seem to make a mockery of both. “The nations are like a drop from the bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales.”43 So it was written in the Tanakh. The Jews, lacking any empire of their own, treasured a distinctive perspective on international affairs. It reassured them that the great kingdoms of the world, despite all their clamour and posturing, were accounted by God “as less than nothing and emptiness.”44 They knew that the true division of the world was not the one proclaimed by the battlements of Dara, between Roman and barbarian, but something quite else: between those who lived in the manner ordained by the Almighty and those who did not.
Given this, who was to say that the scattering of the Jews far beyond the limits of their ancestral homeland was not all part of the heavenly plan? “By your descendants,” God had told Abraham, “shall all the nations of the earth bless themselves.”45 This assurance had long prompted many Jews to ponder the immense distances that separated them from the Promised Land, and to arrive at a daring conclusion. As one rabbi, back in the time of Constantine, had put it with forthright conviction, “The Holy One, blessed be He, exiled us among the nations in order that converts might swell our ranks.”46 This, it might have been thought, was rather to contradict the emphasis that the Almighty had placed on the significance of Abraham’s bloodline; but it was also to assert that “Jewishness,” in the final reckoning, was determined less by blood than by obedience to the demands of the Torah. Accept that, and the Jews did certainly appear well placed to reshape the world. Mesopotamia was certainly far from being their only home away from home. Few were the points of the compass where they were not to be found. They had become, in a sense, more truly universal than any empire. Rather like the Greeks, they ranked not merely as a people but as the agents of a culture, of an entire way of understanding, interpreting and refashioning the world. The awesome power of their ferociously demanding God, the staggering antiquity of their laws, and the glamour of what seemed to many less a faith than a private members’ club: all had combined to make the Jews objects of rare fascination to those among whom they lived. Unsurprisingly, then, there was a venerable tradition of their admirers becoming “proselytes”—“which is to say, people who have been made into Jews.”47 In Rome, the imperial authorities had been fretting about such conversions since the time of the republic. A whole succession of emperors had sought to regulate what they saw as a palpable and growing menace. A century and a half before Constantine, the circumcision of converts had been declared equivalent to castration: a crime that would see the perpetrator exiled to a desert island. Faint consolation to the Jews themselves though it might have been, there was testimony here to their faith’s profound appeal. The superstitions of conquered people were rarely honoured by the Roman elite with such hostility. The resentment and indignation of the rulers of the world were nothing if not a form of tribute.
But how, precisely, was a Jew to be defined? It was to answer this question, of course, that the rabbis of Mesopotamia, back in the time of Ardashir, had founded the famous yeshivas of Sura and Pumpedita, and embarked upon the great project of research that would culminate in their transcription of the Talmud. Mesopotamia, however, was not the world. No matter what the rabbis themselves might care to think, most Jews were largely oblivious to their existence. For the first few centuries after the founding of the yeshivas, the scholars who taught in them were more interested in ensuring that they were listened to in their own backyard than in establishing a global voice. Across the eastern reaches of Iranshahr itself, in much of the Roman world, and in the deserts and mountains that lay beyond the reach of both empires, rabbis were signally lacking. Authority lay instead with the leaders of what had come to be known as “synagogues.” These were communal meeting places where the Torah was studied and debated, and where Jewishness—Ioudaismos, in Greek—was rarely a given. Different communities, and different individuals, tended to define it much as they pleased. Often, it might seem as though the definition of a Jew was simply someone who described himself as such. Consequently, the boundary that demarcated Jews from non-Jews—“Gentiles,” as they were called—was never entirely stable. One Jew might take the high road that led to Persepolis and there, on the lintels of that Zoroastrian holy place, carve a summons to the people of Iranshahr to join his faith;48 another, panic-stricken at the thought of falling for the insidious attractions of foreign women, and thereby jeopardising the purity of Abraham’s bloodline, might try and avoid so much as stealing a glance at a Gentile. Even the rabbis, despite their burning ambition to distinguish themselves and their people as rigidly as possible from the world beyond, found it impossible to agree on who precisely qualified as a Jew. Some argued that proselytes were fully Jewish. Others maintained that they were “as injurious as sores.”49 Neither side found it possible to establish a definitive answer. They had no option, so it seemed to the rabbis, save to agree to disagree.b
Except that there did exist another option. Long before the founding of the great rabbinical schools of Mesopotamia, in an era so distant that even the title of “rabbi” itself had only tentatively begun to be employed, a small group of Jews had made a spectacular announcement: that a notorious troublemaker by the name of Jesus, recently crucified and supposedly risen from the dead, was none other than the “Christ.” More than that, indeed—that this same Jesus was also, in some mysterious manner, the Son of God Himself. These Christians—as they soon came to be known—had not initially thought of themselves as any the less Jewish for holding these startling beliefs. Nor had it ever crossed the minds of most of them that the Torah, that incomparable framework for living granted to His Chosen People by the Almighty Himself, might conceivably have been rendered redundant. Yet there were some, pushing the implications of their new beliefs to radical limits, who had soon arrived at precisely such a conclusion.
A few decades on from Jesus’s crucifixion, a group of Christians in Asia Minor received a letter that positively seethed with scandalous notions. Its author, a one-time student of the Torah called Paul, was the most spectacular rebel that the famously prescriptive Jewish educational system had ever bred. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”50 In this revolutionary proclamation, Paul deftly cut what had always been, for Jewish scholars, the ultimate Gordian knot. No need, so Paul announced with a flourish, to pick at the problem one moment more. Whereas once it had been the Torah which gave to the Chosen People their roadmap to the purposes of God, now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such a Law was gone. The whole question of what it was that made for a Jew had been dissolved into irrelevance. No longer was there any obligation to follow the Torah’s rulings, to be bound by its strictures, to attend to all its endless finger-wagging: “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.”51 The Gentiles too, so Paul had concluded, were heirs to the promise made by God to Abraham. No longer were the Chosen People defined by a lineage of blood, or by adherence to a law, but by the knowledge and love of Christ. Nations everywhere, in short, might now be ranked as the children of Abraham. All it needed was for the entire world to end up Christian.
Which, as mission statements went, could certainly not be faulted for any lack of chutzpah. Paul’s ambitions were quite as ground-breaking as they were global. Cults, and the divinities they celebrated, had hitherto invariably been local: attached to specific places, attached to particular peoples. Any suggestion that they might be something more, that they might be universal, was liable to strike most people as either offensive, or ludicrous, or both. Nevertheless, Paul had indeed breathed in something of the authentic spirit of the age. Enthusiasm for a brotherhood of man was increasingly in the air. Posidonius, after all, a whole century before Paul, had trusted that it would emerge as one of the fruits of Roman rule. Why, then, in a world dominated by the pretensions of would-be universal empires, should the pretensio
ns of a would-be universal faith not find a ready audience? Sure enough, in the decades and centuries following Jesus’ crucifixion, the Christian mission to the Gentiles began to thrive. Cells planted in the time of Paul steadily renewed and replicated themselves. Across lands ruled from Ctesiphon, across lands ruled from Rome, they grew, and flourished, and spread. In each one, men and women from every conceivable background, class and race would meet as equals, in a shared room, before the gaze of a severe but loving God. Equals, because all of them—the senator no less than the kitchen-maid, the Greek no less than the Briton, the philosopher no less than the whore—might be sucked down into the glutinous bog of sin; equals, because all of them, thanks to the death of Christ upon the cross, had been rendered capable of winning salvation for themselves. Never before had there been preached a message of personal responsibility quite so radical, so democratic, or so potentially wide-reaching in its appeal. Christian thinkers, in their struggle to define the principles of their faith, were engaged in a project no less well-suited to the times for being so palpably quixotic: the fathoming of the purposes of God in an ever more globalised world.
In this respect, of course, they were not so far different from the rabbis of Mesopotamia. Their methods were similar, too: for Christian sages also drew for their ultimate inspiration upon the inheritance of Jewish scripture. However, whereas the rabbis identified the Torah as something ageless and unchanging, Gentile Christians viewed it—and the Tanakh generally—merely as an “Old Testament”: a cloud-dimmed glimpse of the Eternal Light that was Jesus Christ. This perspective, of course, begged an obvious question: what should a “New Testament” be?52 Already, in the century that followed Christ’s crucifixion, scholars had begun to compile collections of writings that could provide an answer. Paul’s letters were the first to be anthologised, and then various euangelia, or “gospels”—biographies of Christ. Just like the rabbis of Sura and Pumpedita, the Christians who compiled these texts believed that it had been given to them to meditate upon the single most earth-shattering event in human history: an intrusion of the divine into the fallen world so cosmic in its implications that the entire order of the universe revolved around it. The surest fruit of this intrusion, however, was not a body of law, as the rabbis believed, but rather the knowledge in the soul of an individual believer that Jesus was truly the Lord. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.” So Christ, according to one of the gospels, had declared. “No one comes to the Father, but by me.”53
