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

by Tom Holland

  By introducing the Parabalani onto the international stage, however, Dioscorus had fatefully over-reached himself. The Council of Chalcedon, summoned two years after the debacle of Ephesus, pointedly refused to legitimise the Monophysite doctrines that had been so subtly honed in Alexandria. The result was a stand-off. As self-confident in the superiority of their own intellects as they had ever been, most Alexandrians dismissed Chalcedon’s resolutions with predictable contempt. The threat of violence continued to smoulder—and occasionally to burst into flames. In 457, for instance, after the distant emperor had ousted the disgraced Dioscorus and foisted a replacement on the Alexandrians, an indignant mob hacked down the wretched new patriarch in one of his own churches and paraded his mangled corpse in triumph through the streets. No mob like an Alexandrian mob for combining intellectual snobbery with a taste for atrocities. Nevertheless, in the sheer scale of hostility to Chalcedon, there was something new. Rarefied debates about the nature of the universe were no longer, as they had been in pagan times, the sole preserve of the metropolis. Across the whole, vast expanse of Egypt—whether in the churches of obscure provincial towns or in monasteries out in the desert—few were those who doubted that Christ had only the single nature. Indeed, the province was so teeming with Monophysites that they increasingly came to be known simply as “Copts,” an abbreviation of the Greek word for Egyptians. At last, after centuries of scorning and exploiting its hinterland, Alexandria had come to speak for the whole of Egypt.

  The result was a display of mass disobedience fit to give even Justinian pause. Only in 536, buoyed by his successes in Italy, had he finally presumed to reprise the measure first attempted in 457, and impose his own choice of patriarch upon the recalcitrant Alexandrians: a step greeted by the Alexandrians themselves as “the opening up of the pit of the abyss.”27 Such hysteria was hardly surprising: for Justinian’s nominee, a monk from the Delta by the name of Paul, had known better than to take for granted the obedience of his new flock. Rather than risk the fate of his hapless predecessor, he had opted instead to get his own blows in first: a policy that had served to confirm for the Alexandrians all their darkest suspicions of the Chalcedonian Church. Their new patriarch, even by the autocratic standards of his predecessors, verged on the psychopathic: corrupt, brutal and with “a taste for spilling blood.”28 So uninhibited was his thuggery that Justinian, after a couple of years, was prepared to acknowledge something startling: that he might perhaps have made a mistake. Paul was duly sacked; a new patriarch, a Syrian by the name of Zoilus, was dispatched from Constantinople as his replacement; the Alexandrians, scorning their new leader as both a foreigner and a Chalcedonian, but finding him otherwise inoffensive, opted simply to ignore him. So ended Justinian’s project to reunite Egypt with the imperial Church: amid inglorious compromise.

  As, perhaps, had always been inevitable. The Copts were simply too numerous, too distant and too Monophysite to be brought to heel. Nor were these the only considerations weighing on Justinian’s mind. It was no coincidence, surely, that the squalid episode of Paul’s tenure in Alexandria coincided with a far more crowd-pleasing initiative: the closure, in an isolated Libyan oasis, of the very last functioning temple of Amun. This step, although clearly taken in accordance with the wishes of the heavens, was not wholly devoid of earthly calculation: for Justinian was keen to remind the Copts that he and they, despite their disagreements, were all of them lovers of Christ. Urgent though it clearly was to secure the unity of the Church, it was no less urgent to ensure the continued loyalty of Egypt—and thereby to secure for the vast population of Constantinople, and the soldiers of the eastern front, the incomparable harvests sprung from the flood-plains of the Nile. Every year, gliding downriver to Alexandria, great fleets of barges would bring hundreds upon thousands of tons of grain; and every year, giant ships would then transport the precious cargo onwards to the capital. Alexandria might have been a marble-clad cosmopolis of lecture halls and churches; but she was no less an entrepôt of warehouses, docks and silos. Had she not been, the New Rome would long since have found the flesh shrinking off her bones: “For Constantinople and all the region around it are fed, in the main, by Alexandria.”29

  Yet, in the summer of 541, as the ghostly fleet of bronze ships appeared along the Mediterranean coast, it was becoming terrifyingly clear that death too, as well as life, might be had from Egypt. In July, reports had reached Alexandria of an epidemic in the port of Pelusium, on the far eastern side of the Nile Delta, that had left the city a charnel house. Panic at this news, however, was unlikely to have been immediate: for sudden flare-ups of disease were common, and usually, “by the grace of God which protects us, do not last long.”30 The outbreak in Pelusium, however, had not abated. Instead, from coastal town to coastal town, it had begun to spread with lethal speed. Every time a bronze ship was spotted out on the night-time waters, people on the shore would abruptly find themselves struck down by a fever, and then, touching their groins, or their armpits, or behind their ears, discover painful black swellings—boubones, as they were called in Greek—until finally, it might be, staggering out into the streets, they would fall, and “become a terrible and shocking spectacle for those who saw them, as their bellies were swollen and their mouths wide open, throwing up pus like torrents, their eyes inflamed and their hands stretched out upward, and over the corpses that lay rotting on corners, and in the porches of courtyards, and in churches, and everywhere, with no one to bury them.”31 And so the pestilence raged; and as it raged, it drew ever closer to Alexandria.

  By September, the first headaches, the first buboes, the first rattling expectorations of blood, were being reported in the docks. Within days, the plague was general over the city, and far beyond. Alexandria, ever the intellectual powerhouse, boasted the most prestigious medical schools in the world; but even the city’s famous teaching specialists found themselves helpless before the spread of the mysterious pestilence, unable to diagnose it, still less prescribe any cure. The death rate rose inexorably, until “many houses became completely destitute of human inhabitants.”32 So putrid were the streets with piles of the dead, so thick with flies, so slippery underfoot with blood and melted flesh, that it was impossible to clear them. Those who dared to venture out into the fetid heat—whether to loot or simply to scavenge food—wore tags, so that their families could be alerted to come and bury them should they too be overwhelmed by the plague while abroad. Unless, of course, as was entirely probable, their families had themselves been struck down in the meanwhile. Nor, the observant noted, was it only humans who were perishing of the epidemic. Animals too were succumbing. “Why, even rats, swollen with buboes, were to be seen, infected and dying.”33

  Week after week, the pestilence continued its scything progress. Then finally it began to subside; until at last, four months after its first appearance on the streets of Alexandria, the dying was largely done. Yet the plague, “always moving forward and travelling at times favourable to it,”34 was still far from spent. Traders from Egypt might sail as far afield as Britain—and those who had survived the pestilence still needed to make a living. In the spring of 542, as the storms of winter died down, the ships of Alexandria started to put out to sea, bearing with them their freights of merchandise: papyrus and linen, spices and medicines, glassware and exotic sweets. Pet birds too, and even camels, were sometimes transported; and then, of course, travelling as stow-aways, there were always rats. On the rats were fleas; and in the fleas was Yersinia pestis, the deadly pathogen that, unknown to anyone, was spreading the plague.35 The science of bacteriology, it went without saying, lay immeasurably beyond the orbit of the scholarship of the age. Even the most brilliant of Alexandria’s doctors did not think to associate the spread of a pandemic so lethal and unprecedented with anything so commonplace as a flea bite. The result was, as ships fanned out across the Mediterranean, that the pestilence too, invisible and unsuspected, continued on its deadly way. Sometimes it happened, in the midst of a voyage, that
a vessel would be attacked so suddenly “by the wrath of God,”36 and to such devastating effect, that it would be left to drift aimlessly on the currents, manned by nothing but corpses, until it sank or ran aground. More commonly, a ship would dock in some distant port and then, a day or two later, the first buboes would start to appear on the groins and armpits of the locals. “And always, after beginning on the coast, the disease would then head on inland.”37

  In Constantinople, rumours of doom had been sweeping the city for months. Back in the autumn of 541, as Alexandria had been twisting upon the rack, a woman had fallen into a rapture and cried out to the Byzantines that death was arriving from the sea to swallow up the world. The following spring, with the first grain ships of the year looming off the Golden Horn, and granaries along the harbour front busily being filled, so mysterious apparitions began to be glimpsed. Whoever was touched by one of these phantoms would immediately fall sick. Within days, across the whole of Constantinople, thousands upon thousands were dying. At first, only the poor perished; but soon even the most exclusive quarters of the city were succumbing. Such was the lethal effect of the plague’s spread that entire palaces might be transformed into sepulchres, their mosaic floors littered with corpses, senators and servants alike left as pus-streaked food for worms. Even in the imperial palace, in the bedchamber of the emperor himself, the burning mark of the plague was felt; for Justinian too fell ill. That he went on to recover was proof that the pestilence, though virulent, was not necessarily fatal: for there were some, a small minority, who did survive infection. Whether this was necessarily a blessing, however, was debatable: for what pleasure could there be in life if spouse and children, friends and kin, were all of them dead? Certainly, to those who lived through that summer in Constantinople, the entire city appeared condemned. The streets were empty of the living; no business of any kind was undertaken, save for the burying of corpses; the butchers’ shops stood empty, the markets deserted, the bakers’ kilns unlit. “So it was, in a city prodigiously full of good things to eat, that starvation ran riot.”38 The pestilence, adding to all the manifold sufferings that it had already dealt, now trailed famine in its wake.

  To many of those who survived its passage, the plague appeared a calamity “by which the whole of humanity came close to annihilation.”39 An exaggeration? Perhaps—but then again, accurate figures were hard to come by. The imperial statisticians had tried to keep track of the death rate in the capital, but had fast been overwhelmed. In due course, confronted by the mounds of corpses in the streets, Justinian gave orders for them to be dumped at sea, and then, as the water turned into a soup of decomposing flesh, for vast pits to be dug on the far side of the Golden Horn. Within these, rows of bodies were laid and then “trodden upon by feet and trampled like spoiled grapes,”40 so that further corpses, when they were hurled down from the rim of the pit, would sometimes vanish into the mulch. To those haunted by such a hellish vision the entire world seemed to have become a winepress, in which countless multitudes were being crushed by the wrath of God. Even though the plague, by August 542, had finally spent itself in Constantinople, reports of its onward sweep across the rest of the empire, and beyond, did not diminish in horror. Asia Minor too, it was reported, had been visited by the pestilence, and Jerusalem, and the rubble-strewn shanty town that was Antioch. By December, it was endemic in Sicily, and by 543 across much of Italy, Spain and Gaul. That the West could boast no cities on the scale of those to be found in the East did not serve to spare it. In the most remote village, no less than in the darkest urban slum, the pestilence stalked down the living. “The world seemed returned to its primordial silence, for no voices rose in the fields, no whistling was heard of shepherds.” So it was reported of the Italian countryside. “Places where men once lived had become lairs for savage beasts.”41

  Meanwhile, along the eastern frontier of Justinian’s empire, where Khusrow had frantically constructed a cordon sanitaire, the plague was briefly halted in its tracks. One outbreak of buboes, in the ranks of the Shahanshah’s own army, had been effectively quarantined, and another in Media. But the pestilence could not be kept at bay for ever. By 545, it had breached the bulwarks of Iranshahr and was sweeping eastwards with a violence even more terrible, if anything, than it had displayed on its westward course. Across Mesopotamia, in particular, it raged for longer than it had ever done in Alexandria or Constantinople, so that all was “famine, madness and fury.”42 Nothing was proof against it. Time would see it spread as far afield as China. Never before in history had so much of humanity been united by a common experience of suffering. If some communities were wiped out utterly by the plague, and some were mysteriously spared, then most, if reports are collated, and the evidence carefully sifted, appear to have suffered a mortality rate of something around a third.43 Not annihilation, then, by any means; but a culling, nevertheless, on a wholly shattering scale.

  Always, however, after every visitation, the time would come when even “the evil stench”44 of the rotting corpses would lift, and people, rubbing their eyes, would emerge on to weed-covered streets or fields. Many of them—artisans, tradesmen, peasants—found the world they were returning to ripe with unanticipated opportunity. The ready supplies of labour that the wealthy had hitherto always taken for granted were suddenly at a premium. Demands that previously, before the coming of the plague, the poor would never have dared to push were now increasingly theirs to make. Inflation, as a result, began to gallop. By 545, just three years after the departure of the plague from Constantinople, Justinian was appalled to discover that wages in the capital had more than doubled. The emperor’s response to this unsettling state of affairs was his habitual one: he passed a law. By its terms, it was declared illegal for any labourer to be paid more than he would have received prior to the plague. The effect of this legislation, to Justinian’s bafflement and indignation, was minimal. Wages continued to spiral upwards. The world, it seemed, was not to be restored to its former condition simply on the say-so of an edict.

  And in truth there was barely a sinew, barely a muscle of the great machine of imperial administration that had not been left enfeebled by the pestilence. Physicians noted with interest that those who had contracted the plague and survived would invariably bear the stamp of their brush with death. Some were left bald; others with a lisp; others with a staggering, lurching gait. Almost all suffered a terrible lassitude, often for years. To this rule, it was true, Justinian himself stood as a notable exception; but he knew, none better, that what might be true of individuals was true as well of his entire dominion. Infinitely more than the feckless tribes of the barbarians, more even than the kingdom of Khusrow, the empire of the Roman people had always depended on a sizeable population for its healthy functioning. Civilian state that it essentially was, it could not hope to prosper without a hefty tax base. Now, in the wake of the plague, that tax base had suffered perhaps irreparable damage. Nor was that the limit of the danger. In provinces that only a few years previously had provided ready supplies of recruits for the imperial armies, whole villages, whole regions now stood denuded. This, at the best of times, would have posed a formidable challenge. At a moment when Roman forces were engaged in a number of debilitating conflicts, from Italy to Syria, it threatened catastrophe.

  As for Justinian himself, so devastating and unexpected had been the blow to all his ambitions that he might well have been expected to buckle under it. But he did not. Instead, grimly, doggedly, heroically, he set to shoring up his battered empire against utter ruin. From the summer of 548 onwards, he would be forced to do so without the woman who for over twenty years had been the companion both of his bed and of his councils: for in June that year, Theodora died. Justinian, who for the rest of his life would never cease to light candles before the mausoleum which he had built to serve the pair of them as their final resting place, could not endure to take another wife: henceforward, he would be married to his work. Day and night—“for he had little need of sleep”45—he devot
ed himself to the thankless task of compensating for the most precipitous drop in revenue that any emperor had ever faced. Ruthless austerity measures were imposed: courier services slashed, road maintenance abandoned, the civil service streamlined. Tax-collection was overtly professionalised, so as to throttle any prospect of evasion. Even the manufacture of silk was nationalised. Such measures won for Justinian, against all the odds, funding sufficient to bring his many wars to a seemingly satisfactory close. By the time of his death in 565, he had stabilised the eastern frontier by signing yet another “Eternal Peace” with Khusrow, and decisively defeated the Ostrogoths in the West. He had even acquired a whole new province in southern Spain. Only fitting, then, it might have been thought, that the body of the great emperor, as it lay in state, had been covered by a pall on which he was shown trampling down a barbarian king, of the kind that it had always been the traditional prerogative of the Roman people to crush. Happy days, so the image proclaimed, were come again.