More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Jones
Read between
November 30, 2022 - January 9, 2023
Often described as the last true Roman, Justinian had many detractors—for he did not care whom he trampled over as he attempted to rebuild his empire in the aftermath of the barbarian conquests.
Yet for others, particularly those who did not have to deal with him first hand, Justinian was a totemic emperor who deserved mention in the same breath as Augustus and Constantine. To them, he was a titan whose terrible magnificence shone far beyond the confines of his own times—so fiercely that many centuries later Dante Alighieri placed him in Paradise as the archetypal Roman: peerless lawgiver and a radiant, supremely gifted caesar, who appeared in the afterlife surrounded by a light as bright and blinding as the sun.
Like Justinian, Theodora rose a long way through society to reach the imperial palace. Her father was a bear trainer in the circus and her mother an actress. Theodora spent her youth and teens as a theater performer and—if her detractors were to be believed—far worse.
Malalas characterized her as charitable and pious.11 But Procopius gleefully repeated rumors that Theodora had once been a child prostitute who specialized in anal sex, a sharp-tongued teenage streetwalker who cracked dirty jokes and sold her body to large groups of men, a burlesque dancer who trained geese to peck barley grains from her knickers, and finally a courtesan to depraved imperial officials, in which capacity Justinian picked her up.12
Much of this sprang from misogyny,
Constantinople had survived the barbarian crisis that had engulfed the west, resisting attacks by Huns and Goths and although the imperial finances were still fairly robust, during the first decade of Justinian’s reign he would be forced to fight major wars on two fronts, put down a domestic rebellion that threatened to topple him altogether, and rebuild major parts of his capital city.
Just twenty months into Justinian’s reign, these lawyers had digested, edited, and compiled these statements into a single, definitive account of Roman law known as the Justinianic Code (codex iustinianus).
Most of the great jurists of the imperial era—men such as Gaius, Papinian, Ulpian, and Paulus—had lived and written during pre-Christian times. So their pronouncements were not only frequently contradictory but also flirted with irreligion. As they were pagans, their opinions were naturally devoid of Christian sentiment. And impieties did not please Justinian. So Tribonian was tasked with creating a single statement of Roman jurisprudence, in which the great works of the ancients were rationalized and improved by references to Almighty God.
The last of Justinian’s legal reforms, which followed directly after the publication of the Digest, was the creation of the Institutes (institutiones iustiniani), which was effectively an index to the Digest, designed for the use of trainee lawyers in the official imperial law schools at Beirut and Constantinople. This text served as a practical primer to the new law, and made sure budding young lawyers would be taught to think exactly as Justinian wished.
Constantinople and the eastern empire Justinian’s legal reforms marked the start of a new era in lawmaking and a particularly “Greek” era in legal history. And in the west, Roman law as laid down in the age of Justinian would come to have foundational status. In the twelfth century it was esteemed to the point of fetishism in the medieval universities that sprang up in Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and elsewhere (see chapter 11). As late as the nineteenth century the Napoleonic Code (Code Napoléon)—the great French civil law reform of 1804—was modeled explicitly on Justinian’s example.16
Indeed, it is possible to argue that any nation in the world today that has a codified law (as opposed to, say, the common law that dominates the legal system in the United Kingdom) owes a debt to Justinian and Tribonian.
Nicene Christians, which had tormented the western empire during the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, had been complicated by another dispute, between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites, who disagreed over the exact nature of Christ and the balance between his human and divine qualities.17 Today the issues at stake between these two groups can seem arcane to all but specialist church historians. But in the sixth century they were enough to cause popular riots and international diplomatic crises. Bishops had been murdered by mobs for professing views at odds with their congregations’; a
...more
So the prefect “tortured Isaiah severely and exiled him and he amputated Alexander’s genitals and paraded him around on a litter.” Other suspects had sharp straws inserted into their penises and were publicly humiliated in the forum. This was not merely cruel Roman sport, but imperial policy. Justinian subsequently decreed that everywhere homosexuals and “those detected in pederasty” should be gelded. Many died in agony. “From then on there was fear among those afflicted with homosexual lust,” wrote Malalas.18 It was a cruel demonstration of a prejudice that would endure throughout the Middle
...more
No emperor had embraced paganism since Julian, who had died in 363. Olympic Games had been banned since the time of Theodosius II in the 390s. Non-Christians were banned from serving in the army or the imperial administration. As we have seen, part of Tribonian’s goal in revising the law was to apply an explicitly Christian flavor to the pagan jurists’ writings collected in the Digest. This was not mere window dressing. The time was fast approaching when pagan beliefs would not only be marginal, but illegal.19
Another chronicler, Agathius, reported that the last headmaster of the Athens school was forced to leave not only the school and the city, but the empire itself. (In 531 he and several of his fellow teachers fled to Persia.) And this was more than mere relocation. In effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital—the city of Plato and Aristotle—where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations.
The closure of the Athens school was important. It did not kill at a stroke all non-Christian learning in the eastern empire.21 Nor did it immediately throw up an intellectual wall between the classical age and the dawning era of Christian hegemony in Europe and the west. But it was both significant and symbolic. For while scholarship in Persia and other eastern parts flourished, with libraries in Baghdad and other Middle Eastern capitals preserving and transmitting copies of the works of Aristotle and other non-Christian greats, Justinian’s reign, and the sixth century in general, was marked
...more
One reason that the label “the Dark Ages” has proven so hard to untie from the neck of the Middle Ages is that for hundreds of years—between the sixth century and the first beginnings of the Renaissance in the late thirteenth—the scientific and rational insights of the ancient world were forgotten or suppressed in the west.
By the start of the sixth century, one of the most keenly attended forms of public entertainment in Constantinople and other large cities of the eastern empire was chariot racing. In the capital, races took place in the Hippodrome, a huge, U-shaped racetrack in a stadium complex that backed onto the imperial Great Palace.
Over time the most ardent racing supporters had come to organize themselves into factions, and in Constantinople there were four: the Greens, Blues, Reds, and Whites. By far the largest and most powerful were the Greens and Blues, whose rabid members sat in blocs in the Hippodrome, and took “team” positions on religious and political matters, expecting their collective voices to carry weight among the imperial administration.
Hippodrome factions shared with modern European soccer ultras a pompous self-regard, a taste for violence, and a collective fixation on clothes and haircuts.*
As a young man rising through his uncle’s palace service, Justinian had been a prominent supporter of the Blues. But by the time he was crowned emperor, he was trying to shift his position, treating all the factions with disdain.22 Both approaches were problematic: emperors who overindulged one faction fueled ill feeling between the rival groups, but those who withheld their support entirely often pushed the factions into one another’s arms. This was what Justinian achieved in the winter of a.d. 531/32. It nearly cost him his throne.
During the next five days, Justinian lost control of his capital city. On Wednesday he lurched from acquiescence to vengeance, sending in the rising star of his army—a tough-minded general named Belisarius, who had been prominent in the recent Persian campaigns—to crack skulls with a band of Goth mercenaries at his back. “There
Muhammad had died on June 8, 632, and Khalid now owed his high military command to Muhammad’s earthly successor (khalifa or caliph) and leader of the believers (amir al-mu’minin), a slight, elderly former merchant with sunken cheeks and a thin, dyed beard, named Abu Bakr.
Now, as Khalid stood outside Damascus, he was setting his arm against his most dangerous foe so far. Damascus was one of the leading cities in Byzantine Syria, a prestigious imperial redoubt on the desert’s edge, a city as ancient as some of the oldest biblical tales, crisscrossed by streets and fine canals, run through by a broad thoroughfare known as the Street Called Straight, dotted everywhere with churches and home to the magnificent Christian relic of John the Baptist’s head.
Heraclius was wary of expending too much energy on enemies who were momentarily ascendant but whose resources, dedication, and unity could soon be expected to collapse. The Arabs were not the Persians. After all, it was not as though they were about to take over the world. Except—they were.
Like so much about the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, contemporary (and near-contemporary) accounts of the siege of Damascus are tangled and hard to reconcile.
Whatever happened, in 635 (or possibly 636) the city was formally handed over to the Muslims, under financial terms thrashed out in a peace conference at a covered market in the city center. “Damascus was conquered and its inhabitants paid the jizyah,” wrote the chronicler al-Tabari, who composed a monumental history of Islam during the early tenth century.5 (By jizyah, he meant a “head tax”: the financial levy imposed on Jews, Christians, and other monotheists, in return for which they could live and worship in peace.)
This appeal to the Muslims’ inherent zeal, along with Khalid’s canny cavalry tactics, chronic Byzantine internal dissensions, a plague outbreak, and a massive dust storm combined to grant victory to the Arab upstarts. Writing around four thousand kilometers away and a couple of decades later, one Frankish chronicler, well informed about eastern affairs, lamented that at the battle of Yarmuk, “the army of Heraclius was smitten by the sword of the Lord.”8 God had picked sides, and it seemed his favor belonged to the armies of Islam.
The siege of Damascus and the battle of Yarmuk laid the foundations for an astonishingly rapid Arab conquest of Byzantine Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.
Many of the seven thousand defenders were not able to evacuate by ship to Constantinople and were executed after the city fell.10 Heraclius died in the same year. Around the time of the fateful battle of Yarmuk, he had uttered words that turned out to be utterly prophetic: Sosou Syria (“Rest in Peace, Syria”), he said.11
The Arab conquest of Syria in 632–42 was one of the most astonishing accomplishments of its age. In the first place it finally and permanently cut off an eastern wing of the Byzantine Empire, which had been Roman territory for nearly seven hundred years; the border of Byzantium was now pushed back to the Amanus Mountains on the eastern edge of Asia Minor, beyond which it would seldom reach for the rest of the Middle Ages. Much more significantly, though, Syria was one of the first major triumphs of a new power that was about to sweep across the world, branching out to the borders of China and
...more
The creation of a global dar al-Islam (abode, or house of Islam) in the seventh and eighth centuries a.d. would have profound consequences for the rest of the Middle Ages, and indeed for the world today. With the exception of Spain and Portugal (and, later, Sicily), almost every major territory that was captured by early medieval Islamic armies retained, and still retains today, an Islamic identity and culture.
Battles refracted through the lens of faith continue to rage, often on the selfsame sites they did 1,500 years ago: Palestine, Jerusalem, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Libya. To take just one example, the city of Damascus was not besieged in just the 630s; it was assaulted by the armies of the Second Crusade in the 1120s, was besieged by Muslim Mongols and Turks in 1400, suffered religious massacres in the 1840s and 1860s, was bombed by the French in the 1920s, and has been fought over bitterly by the various factions of the present-day Syrian civil war.
all, one quarter of the world’s population follows some version of the faith professed by Khalid ibn al-Walid, Amr ibn al-As, and their companions as they stood before the walls of Damascus in the 630s.
The city of Mecca sits in a hot valley, roughly halfway down the western Arabian Peninsula, in the region known as the Hijaz.
Passing trade, however, was not Mecca’s only advantage. It was also a site for pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba, a cubic temple of black volcanic rock first built, or so tradition had it, by the Old Testament patriarch Abraham.14
Ka‘ba itself. Of all the gods and goddesses worshipped at the Ka‘ba, the most important was Allah, but in the early seventh century other names were also revered there: Hubal loomed large among them, as did the three goddesses, Manat, Allat, and al-Uzza.15 There was even a picture inside the Ka‘ba of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Traditional history suggests there were fully 360 idols in and around the site.
some cities and regions (notably the region we now call Yemen) there were thriving communities of Arab Jews and Christians. But in many more places pagan polytheism was the norm. Then there were what we might describe as pagan monotheists—believers in a single god who was not the same as the God of Christian or Jewish scripture.
In short, Arabian religion was diverse, shifting, and heavily localized, and this was only natural. Arabian society was essentially tribal, and despite the nearness of several regional superpowers—Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia, as well as Christian Ethiopia—none had ever been able to bring the Arabs under their command for long enough to sponsor or enforce the spread of a settled “state” faith. The best the Byzantines and Persians had been able to do was to enlist two northern Arabian tribal groups, the Lakhmids and Ghassanids, into their proxy wars. This was clientelism, not colonialism.
...more
From the middle of the fifth century a.d., the chief tribe in Mecca was the Quraysh—and it was this tribe into which Muhammad was born around 570.
When Muhammad was around two years old he spent time as a foster child with Bedouins in the desert.* One day his foster brother saw angels dressed all in white appear, remove Muhammad’s heart, clean it with snow, and return it, now purified, to his body.16 After this, throughout his youth, mystics and monks would predict that Muhammad was destined for greatness—or at least, these were the stories they later told, once greatness had descended upon him.
Of course, a new religion was nothing without a following. Muhammad was by no means the only prophet in early medieval Arabia, and the monotheistic, ritual-based faith he now devoted his life to promoting was still just one of hundreds of belief systems and cults alive among the tribes. His struggle, therefore, was to convince others to follow him in worshipping Allah correctly.
Muhammad’s message—that all other gods and idols were to be rejected in favor of Allah alone—was hardly a promising commercial proposition in a city whose economy depended in large part on polytheistic pilgrim tourists.
In 622—the foundational year in Islamic history, and the date from which the Muslim calendar begins—Muhammad also left Mecca. He had been approached by tribal elders from Yathrib, who asked him to bring the community of Muslims en masse to their city, where they would be granted an honored place, and Muhammad would be tasked with settling long-running feuds among the pagan tribes and sizable Jewish population of the city.
left Mecca, narrowly escaping an assassination plot. After an eight-day journey of about 320 kilometers—known as the hijrah—they reached Yathrib, which was later renamed Medina.* He drafted a deal known as the Constitution of Medina that united the bickering factions there in a community, or umma, bonded by faith—faith above blood, faith above tribal loyalties, faith above everything.
630, with ten thousand men at his back, he marched on his former hometown, swept into the city, smashed the idols in the Ka‘ba, and took political control. Having spent long enough resisting Muhammad, the Quraysh and the rest of the Meccans now converted to Islam. Only a few obstinate unbelievers held out, and they were executed. In
Tours and the surrounding areas were interesting fields of plunder, but it is no certain thing that in the 730s they were being lined up for full Muslim conquest.
Moreover, the battle of Tours alone was nothing when placed alongside two earlier defeats that stand as much more convincing examples of historical turning points for the caliphate’s expansion. The first was the failed 717–18 siege of Constantinople, described earlier. The second is the battle of Aksu, also in 717, in which an Arab-led army, bolstered by troops of Turkic and Tibetan origin, was wiped out by the Tang Chinese in the Xinjiang region of modern China. This defeat heralded a gradual winding down of the Muslim charge eastward; by the 750s the borders of the Islamic world and Tang
...more
The middle decades of the eighth century marked the point when the Islamic conquests hit their geopolitical limits, not only in Europe but across the world. Charles Martel’s victory in 732 ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Marwan II at the battle of Zab (Iraq) in January 750. Three months later Damascus fell, and after this the surviving members of the dynasty were hunted and assassinated, one by one. Marwan was murdered after he fled to Egypt and replaced by a Jordanian Arab called Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah—whose sobriquet translates to English as “blood spiller.” Al-Saffah was thus the founder of a new dynasty named the Abbasids, who claimed descent from Muhammad’s uncle al-Abbas and identified themselves with a plain black flag.*
