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

by Tom Holland

  Visionary the emperor might have been—but not to the point of pig-headed impracticality. The gamble that he had taken, in overriding the instinctive caution of his treasurers, and launching his western wars, had already brought him impressive winnings. The gold of the Vandals, the taxes busily being screwed out of the new provincials: these, if the situation in Italy could only be stabilised, would surely enable him to pause for breath, and reckon himself still well ahead. Accordingly, in 539, Justinian made his barbarian foes a shrewdly calibrated offer of peace: the rump of northern Italy, and half of Theoderic’s treasure. The cornered Ostrogoths were minded to sign—and so perhaps they would have done, had not Belisarius, convinced that total victory lay within his grasp, exploited the swirl of negotiations to seize Ravenna. A pyrrhic triumph: for much would be lost by his act of treachery. Justinian’s offer of peace, unsurprisingly, was rejected out of hand; the Ostrogoths picked up their lances once again; the murderous conflict ground on. As for Belisarius, his star was left much diminished. Recalled to Constantinople, he was greeted by his master with a notable froideur. Although permitted to show off the riches captured in Ravenna in the Senate, the great general was pointedly refused a second chance to grandstand in the Hippodrome. To the general’s admirers, this appeared the rankest ingratitude; but Justinian, scanning not merely the western front, but the entire sweep of his empire, could appreciate better than anyone the opportunity that Belisarius had lost him.

  That the emperor was a man of terrifying appetites, a megalomaniac “who has tried to seize the whole earth, and been captured by the desire to take for himself each and every realm,” appeared self-evident to his opponents: fit reflection of his demonic-seeming energy and ambitions.13 Yet Justinian, even as he laboured to reshape the world in the image of the heavens, had learned the hard way that the affairs of a mortal monarchy might always, if pushed too far, abruptly reach a breaking point. Back in 534, as he had sat in state to watch the parading of the Vandal king, neither he nor any of the cheering crowds would have been able to forget that only two years previously the Hippodrome had been piled high with corpses. A grim but not, perhaps, unprofitable lesson: unpleasant surprises might be lurking around the corner even for the most God-blessed of emperors.

  Justinian was certainly not oblivious to the danger that his window of opportunity in Italy might close at any moment. What had been risked by the opening of a western front, after all, was the same prospect as had haunted Roman policy-makers ever since the time of Valerian, and which threatened the eastern provinces with a stench of smoke and blood more terrible by far than any that Constantinople had known. Sat in the hurriedly renovated Hippodrome in 534, watching through no doubt narrowed eyes the strut and glitter of Belisarius’s triumph, had been the ambassadors of Khusrow. Their master, Shahanshah for a mere three years, had been much preoccupied at the time with stamping his authority on both his realm and his own household. Even as Justinian’s armies were sweeping westwards, the young King of Kings had been fighting for his life against a coup led by his uncle. Aspebedes, whose treachery was compounded by the fact that he was also the father of Khusrow’s beloved queen, had been a peculiarly menacing adversary. The death struggle had convulsed the royal household as well as the empire at large. By the time Khusrow finally emerged victorious, he did not have much in the way of male relatives left. Uncles, brothers and nephews: all had been ruthlessly culled. A brutal expedient—but one that had left the Shahanshah free to turn his attention to other, more profitable, matters. In 539, when two undercover Gothic agents crossed the border into Iranshahr and appealed to Khusrow for help, he listened to their urgings with great attention. The supposed eternity of his peace with Constantinople did not blind him to the potential advantages of stabbing the old enemy in the back. Envy of Justinian’s feats; anxiety as to what they might bode for Iranshahr; quiet confidence that the Roman military might be ill-prepared to fight simultaneously on two fronts: here were incentives aplenty. Only the one problem intervened: how was Khusrow, “the divine, virtuous and peace-loving Khusrow,”14 to get away with such flagrant treachery?

  It was his ever-dependable attack-dog, Mundhir, who provided him with the solution. To the plunder-hungry Lakhmids, the Eternal Peace had only ever been a minor inconvenience. Low-level skirmishes with the Ghassanids had continued unabated throughout the decade, and by 539 Mundhir and Arethas were busy amusing themselves by scrapping over the desert of Strata. Even though the Ghassanids, with perfect justification, could point to the fact that the region had a Latin name and was therefore self-evidently Roman, Khusrow gave his full backing to the Lakhmids. As orders went out across Iranshahr to prepare for war, he shamelessly escalated the crisis. By the spring of 540, he had worked himself up into a fury so self-righteous that he could feel himself perfectly justified in breaking the Eternal Peace with the Romans. Riding at the head of a mighty strike force, the King of Kings headed west out of Ctesiphon, along the Euphrates, towards the border. Unlike his father four decades previously, though, Khusrow did not intend to waste his energies battering the defences of the frontier itself. Rather, he planned to bypass them. Beyond him and his army, rich, fat and tantalising, lay the cities of Syria. Khusrow, by striking hard and deep at the very vitals of the province, aimed to put his great adversary to a searching test. Just how much of a distraction had Justinian’s wars in the West been to his level of preparedness at the opposite end of the empire?

  The grim truth was that few of the cities now in the path of “the wind of the East”15 boasted walls to compare with those that girded Dara. Fortifications built centuries earlier were in a state of crumbling disrepair. Nor was that the limit of dilapidation in the province. Cities across Syria appeared to have been swamped with squatters. Buildings that once lent them an aura of sumptuous monumentality had increasingly been converted into public quarries, so that in the centre of many a city, one-time splendid temples or arenas were now nothing but vagrant-filled shells. Elsewhere too, contours were similarly being lost, whether in statue-lined squares or along grand processional avenues, as public space after public space vanished beneath a sprawl of makeshift stores and workshops. What had originally been broad, marble-paved thoroughfares were becoming ever narrower, meandering, donkey-crowded lanes. Every so often, it was true, attempts might be made to impose at least a measure of regulation, “by clearing away the stalls which had been built by tradesmen in the colonnades and streets”16—but all in vain. The city authorities, however, were not fighting decline, but something no less awkward to keep in check: success. Syria was rich, exceedingly rich; and the spirit of commerce in the province had simply grown too flourishing to be pruned back.

  Everyone knew that Syrians were “natural businessmen, and the greediest of mortals.”17 It was hardly surprising, then, that disapproving moralists were inclined to see in the chaos and clamour of their cities monstrous infernos of worldliness. Such a perspective, though, was not entirely proportionate. The Syrians, for all their love of money, were much given to the contempt of it as well. The same people whose “devotion to profit takes them across the whole world”18 were also celebrated for their stylites. While they no longer lavished their wealth on beautifying cities, they did not merely squander or hoard it, either. “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor.” Here were words that pious Syrians—wealthy ones included—had engraved on their hearts. If the giving of alms to the poor lacked the ready visual impact that the construction of a theatre, say, or a bath-house would have done, then the poor most likely did not much care. Not all the decay of a city’s pagan monuments could disguise the emergence, obtruding through the shabbiness of the old, of an entirely new cityscape: one characterised by hospitals, orphanages and homes for the aged. Blithely indifferent to the miseries of the poor though many Syrian plutocrats remained, enough of them were not to have made some kind of a difference. Public welfare, in a Christian city, had become the surest mark of wealth.

  And Khusrow
knew it. Leading his army deep into Syria, finding city after city effectively defenceless, Khusrow soon discovered that those who were in the habit of giving to charity were quite prepared to cough up danger money, too. Bishops, frantic to protect their flocks from annihilation, had only to catch a rumour of the Shahanshah’s approach and they would scrabble to meet his demands for gold, no matter how outrageous. But Khusrow, even as he swaggered and plundered his way across Syria, had more in mind than mere extortion: he wanted to stage a spectacular. Accordingly, he aimed directly for the richest prize of all, “the fair crown of the East,”19 a city so globally celebrated that scholars in the far-off land of China invariably muddled it with Constantinople: Antioch.

  News of the Persian advance, in Antioch itself, threw the citizens into a state of disbelieving panic. Rich their city might have been—but it was also, even by Syrian standards, quite exceptionally run-down. Over the course of several decades, its wretched inhabitants had suffered a whole succession of calamities: riots, fires, earthquakes. The vast circuit of walls was so cracked and pockmarked that the city was, to all intents and purposes, without defences. Frantically, however, the people of Antioch did all they could to prepare for the looming onslaught: by sending to Palmyra and Damascus for reinforcements, and to Simeon on his pillar for a miracle. The news brought back from the stylite, however, could hardly have been any bleaker. God Himself, speaking to Simeon in a vision, had revealed His plans for Antioch—and they were terrible. “I will fill her with her enemies,” so the Almighty had declared, “and I will abandon the greater part of her population to the sword, and those who survive to captivity.”20

  And so it came to pass. Although Simeon himself, courtesy of a divinely dispatched mist, managed to avoid capture by the Persians, the people of Antioch were not so fortunate. Despite a valiant initial defence, their city was soon overrun, put to the torch, and left in ruins. Khusrow, pausing only to have a celebratory dip in the Mediterranean, then turned on his heels and returned to Iranshahr in triumph. He took with him long wagon-trains of gold and the survivors from Antioch—some thirty thousand people. Back in Mesopotamia, the Shahanshah settled these captives in a new city, built from scratch just outside Ctesiphon: a crowing statement of triumph, inscribed emphatically in fresh mud-brick. Its name was Veh-Antioch-Khusrow—“Khusrow-Made-This-City-Better-Than-Antioch.”

  To the Romans, and to Justinian in particular, the rape of Syria—and the flattening of its famous capital—was a bitter humiliation. Four years earlier, shortly before the invasion of Italy, the emperor had proclaimed his hopes that “God will consent to our establishing our dominion over all of those whom in former times the Roman people ruled, from the boundaries of the one ocean to the other, but lost by their negligence.”21 Now, so it began to be whispered, Justinian’s own negligence had turned Italy into a wilderness and Antioch into a desert. In the space of only a year, so it seemed, all his triumphs had turned to dust. Was it possible, some began to wonder, that the very attempt to repair the world had only worsened its fractures?

  Justinian himself had no patience with such pessimism. Amid all the sudden calamities that had engulfed him and his dream of fashioning a globe-spanning Christian order, he still maintained his invincible confidence that he was serving the will of God. But disaster was not done with him yet. As the calamitous year of Antioch’s sack drew to a close, a horror of barely comprehensible proportions was drawing near to the southernmost borders of his empire.

  It threatened not merely the fracture but the annihilation of the world.

  The Earth Shall Sit in Mourning

  Late summer, 541, and the Egyptian sun was at its most broiling. Those who lived along the shoreline might well have turned their faces to the sea, for the blessed relief that a breeze on the cheeks could bring. That August, however, there was something eerie to be seen out on the water—a sight fit, not to cool, but to chill the blood. Phantasms were sailing the sea. As the sun set and twilight thickened to darkness, dozens of spectral bronze ships, glowing like fire, grew more distinct on the horizon. Sitting on their decks were men with bronze staffs: “And those who travelled in these glittering boats, moving at an unearthly speed across the sea, were black—and they had no heads.”22 Soon enough, it became clear that these ghostly apparitions were not appearing merely at random, but were tracking along the coast; by the end of the month, one fleet of the bronze ships had left Egyptian waters altogether and were observed off Gaza. Meanwhile, a second fleet was heading westwards. Past the various mouths of the Nile it glided until, as August turned into September, it had almost left the delta behind. Ahead stood the greatest port in the entire Mediterranean, where the sight of red and orange light flickering on night-time waves was hardly a novelty: for its harbours boasted a watchtower of such stupefying height that the beacon which blazed from the summit of the structure could be seen up to fifty miles out at sea. Wonders, certainly, were nothing new at Alexandria.

  The very name of the city bore witness to its glamorous pedigree. Not even Constantinople could boast a founder to compare with Alexander the Great. Planted on the Mediterranean coast, fashioned out of the marble which had long served as the badge of cosmopolitan chic, and with the Pharos, its astounding lighthouse, to illumine the international shipping-lanes, the city had always defined itself as haughtily, indeed defiantly, Greek. Its inhabitants liked to call it “Alexandria-by-Egypt”—as though to do otherwise might risk their being submerged beneath the peasant-worked mud of the Nile. Geography could not be totally denied, though. Right from the beginning, Alexandria had been touched by schizophrenia. Alexander, travelling to the spit of land on which he would found his great city, had journeyed from Siwa, an oracle in the depths of the western desert, where Amun, the ram-headed king of the Egyptian gods, had revealed to him the secrets of his destiny—and instructed him, it may be, to found Alexandria.23 This was why, on coins minted by his successors, the great conqueror had often been shown sporting the two curling horns of Amun: an image that had perfectly fused traditions of Greek portraiture with those of the ancient and mysterious land that Alexander had brought beneath his rule. In similar manner, the greatest temple in Alexandria—a massive complex of shrines, libraries and lecture halls named the Serapeum—had been raised in honour of Serapis, a deity who combined a thoroughly Greek beard and robe with a primordially Egyptian lineage.a Artificially multicultural the god may have been—but that was precisely what had rendered him the perfect patron for a city such as Alexandria, created as it had been from nothing, and poised between two very different worlds.

  Yet if gods could be created, then so too, of course, could they be killed. Eight centuries had passed since the founding of Alexandria, and in that time the cults that had once dominated the city had passed into oblivion. It was hardly to be wondered at, perhaps, in a place that had played host to the gods of both Olympus and the Nile for so long, that certain marks of paganism should still have lingered—but as memorials now to a toppled order. Sail into the easternmost of Alexandria’s harbours, for instance, and there, dominating the water-front, the traveller would see a massive temple precinct, originally built by a Greek queen, and fronted by plundered obelisks—but which had served the city’s bishop for more than a century now as his cathedral. Not that the birth pangs of a Christian Alexandria had been easy, though. The Alexandrians were notorious for their “rebellion and rioting,”24 and the convulsions that had accompanied the overthrow of paganism had been predictably bruising. In 391, when a mob of Christians had attempted to storm the Serapeum, the pagans had fought back. They had barricaded the gates of the temple and, so it was plausibly reported, nailed Christian prisoners to crosses on its walls. Such resistance, of course, had only made the eventual capture of the temple all the sweeter. Its 750-year-old statue of Serapis had been hacked to pieces, the contents of its libraries destroyed,b and its various buildings either converted to Christian worship or left as mouldering shells. Alexandria, once the intellectual powerhouse o
f paganism, had been reconsecrated as something new: as “the most glorious and Christ-loving city of the Alexandrians.”25

  Christ-loving or not, though, it still maintained, in the opinion of a long succession of Christian emperors, its reputation as a nest of troublemakers. It had not gone unnoted, for instance, that Arius had originally been from Alexandria. In point of fact, however, the city’s tradition of enquiry into the nature of God—a uniquely brilliant and searching one—had always preferred to stress the opposite extreme to that of Arianism: downplaying the human nature of the Saviour, and emphasising the divine. Any hint of a counter-argument, any suggestion that Christ might after all have had two natures rather than one, would invariably prompt in the Alexandrians an explosion of mingled scorn and fury that was inimitably their own. One inheritance from their pagan forebears that they had most certainly not discarded was an unshakeable conviction that they were, quite simply, the cleverest people in the world. The Patriarch of Alexandria, with imperious immodesty, had even taken to calling himself the “Judge of the Universe.” Others, less flatteringly, labelled him “a new Pharaoh.”26 Certainly, the patriarchs had more than intellectual firepower at their fingertips. Intimidation might come physical as well. The trend-setter here was Athanasius, the bishop who had first definitively catalogued the books of the New Testament. Back in the fourth century, he had ruled Alexandria with a rod of iron, not hesitating to have his opponents beaten up or kidnapped if the situation demanded it. A century later, and it had been the turn of another patriarch, Dioscorus, to blend rarefied theology with the tactics of a gangland boss. Travelling to Ephesus in 449 for a showdown with the Nestorians of Antioch, he took with him an escort of paramilitaries so rowdy and intimidating that his fellow bishops, shocked to find themselves howled down every time they opened their mouths, termed the summit in outrage the “Robber Council.” Parabalani, these thugs of Dioscorus had been called: black-robed enforcers who worked ostensibly as hospital attendants, but who, whenever summoned by the patriarch, would cheerfully demonstrate their devotion to Christ through often spectacular displays of violence. Pagans, Jews, heretics: all felt their fists.