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

by Tom Holland

  But the pall told only part of the story. Its portrait of the emperor as the youthful and Christ-favoured visionary who, in the joyous year of 534, had sat in triumph over the Vandals, veiled the withered corpse of an eighty-three-year-old man. Between the image of an empire restored to its ancient supremacy over most of the Mediterranean and the grim reality there stretched a similarly yawning chasm. In the opinion of Justinian’s critics—of whom, behind closed doors, there were many—the emperor’s cure had proved quite as deadly as the disease. In Italy, for instance, no matter how shrilly his propagandists might seek to deny it, “victory” had left the peninsula immeasurably less Roman than it had ever been under Theoderic. Over the course of two decades, the bloody and wearisome slog to overthrow the Ostrogoths had witnessed the abolition of the consulship, the flight to Constantinople of almost every senator, and even, during the winter months of 550, the most shocking of all the breaks with the past: the complete, albeit temporary, depopulation of Rome itself. Not since the time of Romulus had the Eternal City stood so empty, so abandoned to grass and swamps. Victory of such an order seemed scarcely different from defeat. Why, then, had Justinian waded through a whole mire of destruction to secure it? “Because he was bloodthirsty and murderous by nature,”46 some thought to whisper. That his reign had seen “the entire world drenched with human blood”47 was due, not to his desperate struggle against evil circumstance, but to the startling fact that he had literally been an agent of hell. Even his tireless burning of the midnight oil might be interpreted as evidence, not of his devotion to the Roman people, but of his diabolic nature. One servant had reported seeing Justinian late at night without his head; another that the emperor’s face had suddenly metamorphosed into a hideous and shapeless lump of flesh. “How, then, could this man have been anything other than a demon?”48

  Admittedly, those who pushed this particular theory did tend to have axes to grind.49 Justinian, never popular with the traditional elite at the best of times, had hardly risen in their estimation by taking such strenuous measures, in the years before his death, to slash the budget deficit. Nothing about him quite so infernal, in the opinion of stymied tax-dodgers, as what they bitterly dismissed as his “avarice.” Nevertheless, it was hardly necessary to believe that the imperial throne had genuinely been occupied by “the Lord of Demons”50 to dread that the gates of hell might be yawning increasingly wide. Zoroastrian priests were not alone in warning their flocks that time itself was destined to come to an end, amid a titanic death-struggle between good and evil. The same mood of mingled terror and hope that had inspired Mazdak to declare that the horizon was not far off, that the great climax of things was drawing near, had repeatedly haunted the imaginings of the Christian people, too. Christ Himself had warned His disciples what to expect: His own return, like lightning that “comes from the east and shines as far as the west”;51 His sitting in judgement over the living and the dead; His delivery of the wicked to eternal punishment, and of the righteous to eternal life. And the day and hour of these events? Not even the angels themselves, so Christ had declared, could be sure of that. Nevertheless, certain clues, certain signs, would herald for the faithful the coming of the Day of Judgement: “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.”52

  In the wake of Justinian’s reign, this was a message as unsettling as any in scripture. The plague, after its initial devastating eruption, had still not abated. By striking seemingly at random, at different times and in different places, it cast a perpetual shadow of menace. “Its recurrence,” so a lawyer in Antioch recorded in numb despair, “has seen me lose, at various times, several of my children, my wife, and many of my kin, not to mention numerous servants, both in town and in the country.”53 Time would see him lose a grandson as well: a pattern of bereavement repeated across the empire and far beyond. Yet pestilence was only one of the harbingers of the End Days to have afflicted the Roman people. Prior to the plague’s appearance, back in 536, a mysterious dust cloud had cast the world into darkness for months.54 Then, in December 557, a terrible earthquake had shaken Constantinople, rocking it so severely that the dome of Hagia Sophia had collapsed the following spring, necessitating years of repairs. Most ominous of all, in 559, an army of barbarians had crossed the frozen Danube and struck so far south as to menace Greece and the capital itself. Constantinople had been preserved from seemingly inevitable ruin only by the desperate summoning of Belisarius out of retirement: for the aged general, frail though he had become, had lost none of his aptitude for winning victories. Elsewhere, however, the rising tempo of barbarian assaults had proved less easy to repulse. Bands of migratory peasants known as Slavs had been infiltrating the Balkans since the 540s, when the plague had first harrowed the region. Then, from beyond the Danube, a tribe of peculiarly brutal savages, steppe-land nomads named the Avars, had started to make alarming demands for danger money. Most demoralising of all, perhaps, was the descent upon Italy in 568 of a shaven-headed, long-bearded people called the Lombards, who in next to no time had succeeded in dismembering Constantinople’s hard-won mastery of the peninsula for good. Less than a decade after the death of Justinian, and imperial control had been pegged back to a corridor of land between Ravenna and Rome. So much blood, so much destruction—and all in vain.

  How were these catastrophic eruptions to be explained? On one level, the answer was very simple. Nomads, by and large, had proved immune to the reach of the plague. As a result, whether descending across the Danube or from the Alps, they usually vastly outnumbered the local garrisons. Even Belisarius, in his last-ditch defence of Constantinople, had been able to muster only a few hundred veterans, and had depended largely for his victory on a rag-bag of peasants, and plenty of bluff. Elsewhere, for all the conscientiousness with which Justinian had devoted his tax revenues to the construction of fortresses along the empire’s frontiers, not even the most bristling of walls could be made serviceable without soldiers to man them. Time and again, as barbarian horsemen advanced into Roman territory, they would find themselves passing fields that stood overgrown, and villages that lay abandoned. Whole stretches of the empire, to all intents and purposes, were now “deserted.”55

  All of this had long been foretold. Christ had not been alone in warning of how the world was destined to end. Jewish prophets and Christian saints alike had predicted that fearsome and savage hordes would descend on God’s people “like a cloud covering the land”56 in the run-up to the End Days: hordes to whom, in the Bible, had been given the sinister names “Gog” and “Magog.” The hint of dark mystery in all this had been sufficient, as the world had become increasingly Christian, and barbarians ever more of a threat, to prompt much heated speculation. Who were Gog and Magog? Where were they lurking? Why would they not materialise until the end of time? The answers to these questions had been found, somewhat unexpectedly, in the biography of Alexander the Great. Historians had long known that the famous conqueror, in the course of his global travels, had discovered a mountain pass on the edge of the world, which he had sealed with “iron gates.”57 Over the centuries, this story had been much improved. By the time of Justinian, it was known for a fact that the gates had been faced with bronze; that the peoples they had served to imprison had been none other than Gog and Magog; and that Alexander, upon whom “the Spirit of the Lord rested,”58 had built them with the direct encouragement of an angel.

  To the Christian people of Alexandria, this was not wholly bad news, perhaps. It provided a welcome reassurance: that the founder of their city, despite his regrettable taste for sporting the horns of a pagan demon, had all along been a self-proclaimed servant of God.59 By and large, however, the implications were unnerving in the extreme. It was hard, with barbarians gathering outside the walls of Constantinople and the whole world seemingly on the move, to avoid the obvious conclusion: that yet another portent of the End Days had arrived upon the scene. The bolts set on Alex
ander’s gates, so many dreaded, were starting to crumple, and buckle, and give. Beyond them, straining to be released upon the world, were waiting Gog and Magog—fiends so terrible that they thought nothing of drinking the blood of babies and snacking on kittens. Before the onset of such invaders, then, who could say what the fate of the world would be?

  No wonder, in the final years of the sixth Christian century, that many in the empire of the Romans should have looked to the future with a peculiar foreboding: “Calamities are approaching, such as the current generation cannot imagine.”60 A sobering reflection: that the worst might be yet to come.

  The Great War

  Around Easter, AD 600, the plague returned to Galilee. So virulently did the outbreak rage that it had soon spread beyond the Golan Heights and into the wilderness of scrub and sand that bordered Palestine. Prominent among the frontier settlements devastated by its coming was Jabiya, the great tent city of the Ghassanids. There, the horror of the pestilence would long be remembered. “Like whirlwinds,” wrote one of their poets, “it left the smoke of its blazing passage.”61

  Arabs who lived beyond the frontiers of the empire had previously been spared the worst of the plague. Infection stalked the desert less readily than it did streets or fields. More than half a century had passed since the first appearance of the pestilence, and still the Arabs took for granted that it was a disease of “the land of the Romans.”62 To the Ghassanids, and to the Lakhmids as well, the culling of peoples along the entire sweep of the Fertile Crescent had spelled considerable opportunity: for the exhaustion and impoverishment of both their respective sponsors had inevitably resulted in a certain loosening of leashes. Back in the 540s, for instance, at the height of the devastation wrought by the pestilence, Arethas and Mundhir had been free to escalate their vendetta “without reference to either the Romans or the Persians.”63 Superpower patronage, amid the swirl of their own venomous hatred, became almost an irrelevance. The two sides increasingly battled in the names of heavenly, rather than earthly, sponsors. Mundhir, following his capture of one of Arethas’s sons, did not hesitate to top his earlier sacrifice of four hundred virgins to al-’Uzza by offering up the Ghassanid prince to the goddess al-’Uzza. Other Christian captives, so it was claimed, were tortured by the Lakhmid king until they agreed to join in her worship. News of these atrocities, brought to Saint Simeon on his pillar, so appalled the stylite that he promptly lent his prayers to the Ghassanids. Sure enough, in 554, Arethas had been graced with a stunning and climactic triumph. In a great battle fought at Chalcis, in Syria, a Lakhmid invasion force was annihilated. Simeon, borne from his pillar by the agency of the heavens to a hill overlooking the action, made his own personal contribution to the victory by asking the Holy Spirit to strike down Mundhir with a fireball—a request which the Holy Spirit obligingly met. Arethas hailed the Ghassanid dead, among them his own eldest son, not merely as heroes but as martyrs in the cause of Christ.

  Here, in this notion—that killing might be done as a service to the heavens as well as to secure plunder—was an intoxicating new possibility for the Arabs to contemplate. To the Ghassanids, in particular, it had fast become something more: the irreducible core of their identity. By 600, there could be no doubting their commitment to the image they had of themselves: as the shields of a Christian empire. Not even a host of insults from the increasingly twitchy Roman establishment—including, in 582, the exiling of their king to Sicily and a brief, disastrous attempt to dissolve their federation altogether—could shake their loyalty. In their own opinion, they were warriors of God or they were nothing. It was a potent conceit. Other Arab tribes, rather than dismissing the Ghassanids as Roman stool-pigeons, increasingly viewed them as they had previously viewed the Lakhmids: as cynosures of chivalry. So open was the table at the Ghassanid court, poets claimed, that Jabiya’s watchdogs had quite fallen out of the habit of barking at strangers. Even their recipes were of a quality appropriate to favourites of the heavens. No higher compliment could possibly be paid to a woman, for instance, than to compare her excellence to that of the local speciality, the tharidat Ghassan—a stew of brains and gravy.c

  The Ghassanids’ influence ran far deeper than haute cuisine, though. Their aura of glamour and invincibility served as invaluable marketing for their celestial patron, too. By 600, even the king of the Lakhmids had become a Christian. In Hira, as in Jabiya, stone churches were erected amid the tents. From the north to the distant south—where Najran’s Ka’ba preserved the glorious memory of the city’s martyrs—the margins of Arabia increasingly bore the physical signs of the Christian faith. To ambitious warlords, these promised not merely heavenly salvation in the hereafter, but ready access within their lifetimes to the dimension of the angelic. The conviction that a man of exceptional holiness, by virtue of his sufferings, might come to see through the veil of his tears the blaze of the heavenly hosts, their drawn swords flickering with fire, was held by many Arabs with a wolfish literalness. The military potential of a saint, after all, had been amply demonstrated by the fireball that had incinerated Mundhir. Many warriors, in the wake of their great victory at Chalcis, had duly flocked to Saint Simeon’s pillar, as though to be touched themselves with something of his power. Decades later, the Ghassanids continued to see in their own Christian piety a weapon more prodigious by far than any other in their armoury.

  A perspective fit to awe even those tribes that had not submitted to baptism. Between the belief of Christians in an unseen realm of spirits, and that of the Arabs, there was considerable overlap. Pagans as well as monks might claim to see angels. Dushara, for instance, was said by his worshippers to employ a particularly potent one as his lieutenant; while at Mamre, according to Sozomen, the draw for pagan pilgrims was precisely that “angels had appeared there to men.”64 All this, though, to fretful Christians, was anything but reassuring. That a pagan might be familiar with angels implied that some of them, at the very least, must in truth have derived from hell. The full, alarming implications of this were best illustrated by what had happened in a city on the edge of Palestine, where, at the height of the plague, demons in the form of angels had appeared to the terrified inhabitants and told them that they would be spared only if they worshipped a bronze idol. Clearly, then, when dealing with supernatural messengers, it was essential to be alert to the possibility of disinformation. Yet this in turn, ironically enough, was nothing with which the pagans of the desert would have disagreed. Just as it was possible for them to accept the existence of angels, so also did they dread the malignity of jinn, invisible spirits bred of fire, many of whom took an active pleasure in the sufferings of mortals. Even the Ghassanids had blamed the onset of the plague on their “stinging.”65 A Christian Arab, picturing combatants engaged upon a celestial battlefield, would doubtless have imagined very little to perplex his pagan counterpart. Between jinn and demons, it appeared, the boundaries were easily blurred. And between goddesses and angels too? Very possibly. Messengers from heaven appeared to have a definite preference for matching image to audience. Angels who manifested themselves in a Roman province, for instance, were as like as not to sport the medallions and “bright crimson belts”66 of imperial bureaucrats. Perhaps, then, in those reaches of Arabia as yet only semi-illumined by the blaze of Christ, it was only to be expected that they would adopt the look, and sometimes even the names, of pagan deities.67 Suspended as a goddess such as al-’Uzza was in an eerie, distorting half-light, midway between the past and the future, between paganism and the worship of a single god, who was to say what her future would be: whether as demon or as angel, or to be forgotten altogether?

  Certainly, in the decades that followed the onset of the plague, there could be little doubt that the border zone beyond the Holy Land was indeed extending ever further south, into Arabia. That this was so reflected not the strength of the Christian empire, however, but its debilitation. A pronounced shift had occurred in the balance of power, not just in the region of the Fertile Crescent, but along the
entire southern frontier. In Carthage, for instance, fretful commentators noted that, while the empire’s “once countless military units had dwindled in number, the plague, that ally of war, had not so much as touched the rancorous tribes.”68 It was as a consequence of this that the Berbers, natives of North Africa who lurked in the mountains beyond the reach of any imperial strike force, had begun to change from a nuisance to a threat. In Arabia, too, the desert nomads, spared the devastation of the pestilence, scented opportunity in the Romans’ agony. They may have lacked the teeming numbers of the Slavs or the Avars, but they too were increasingly on the move. By 600, entire populations of emigrants—muhajirun, in Arabic—had settled between Palestine and the Hijaz, the region of Arabia that abuts the upper half of the Red Sea. Tribes completely unknown to the imperial authorities only a few decades earlier—the Judham, the Amila and the Bali—now joined the roster of foederati. Whether they were truly to be reckoned as friends of the Roman people, however, or as troublesome intruders bought off with danger money, was not altogether clear. Bluff, even at the best of times, worked best without an excess of scrutiny.

  Indisputable, however, was the fact that the authorities in Palestine did need allies to patrol a buffer zone for them. The same collapse in manpower and revenues as had afflicted the northern and western fronts had resulted in particularly devastating cuts along the frontier of the Holy Land. Indeed, ever since the arrival of the plague, it had effectively been demobilised. Forts stood abandoned to weeds, jackals and the odd ascetic. A radical streamlining—but informed, nevertheless, by a certain brutal logic. Predatory nomads might be a nuisance—but they scarcely compared in terms of menace with the House of Sasan. Sixty years after Khusrow had plundered the cities of Syria, the frontier with Iranshahr remained Roman strategists’ supreme priority, and the source of all their nightmares. Such resources as the empire could muster continued to be lavished on its garrisons. The consequence was, at a time when even the previously booming cities of Syria were afflicted by contraction and impoverishment, that the border zone with Iranshahr alone defied recession.69