Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

But by now, many other, more general complaints had been added to their original grievances. Most were the perennial grousings of urban populations throughout history: high taxes, corruption, and religious sectarianism.

If these numbers were true, then around 7 percent of Constantinople’s population was slain in a single day. And even if it was an exaggeration, this was still a phenomenally bloody occasion, and a terrible warning of the power of the emperor and his capacity for cruelty.

Together, Isidore and Anthemius have been compared by modern historians to Christopher Wren and Leonardo da Vinci.

years between 532 and 537, stands in comparison with the most magnificent buildings ever constructed.

The Hagia Sophia was the centerpiece of a singular campaign of urban renewal driven through with the same energy and speed that had characterized the emperor’s changes to Roman law. And the renovation of Constantinople was in turn only one part of an empire-wide monumental building program, which included marvels such as four giant pillars at Ephesus topped with statues of the evangelists, and a city founded in what is now Serbia to commemorate the place of the emperor’s birth and provide a palatial home for a new archbishopric of “Justiniana Prima.”

Much farther from home in the early 530s the emperor secured what he came to regard as the signal achievement of his long reign. This was the conquest—or, rather, reconquest—of North Africa from the Vandals. The province and its prestigious capital, Carthage, had been wrenched from Roman hands during the tumult of the barbarian migrations. So its recapture would be both a lucrative enterprise, given the continuing prosperity of the region under Vandal rule, and a fillip for Roman pride. Justinian’s Carthaginian project was made possible in strategic and practical terms because in September 532 the emperor agreed a treaty with the Persian king of kings, Khosrow I. This new monarch had come to power in autumn 531, aged around eighteen. He needed time to secure his shaky domestic position, so he agreed to end a bitter war that had been raging between Rome and Persia around Armenia for four years. The deal Justinian’s ambassadors struck with Khosrow was known as the Eternal Peace. This title was bombastic and inaccurate, and the treaty’s terms obliged Justinian to pay Khosrow eleven thousand pounds of gold in return for a cease-fire. Nevertheless, it left the emperor free to focus on campaigns in the west.

“When Gelimer reached the Hippodrome and saw the emperor sitting upon a lofty seat and the people standing on either side and realized as he looked about in what an evil plight he was, he neither wept nor cried out,” wrote Procopius.37 He recited again and again the words of the Preacher at the start of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”38 This enigmatic display was enough to convince Justinian to show mercy. Gelimer had gamely served his purpose in entertaining the public, so he was pensioned off with his family to live out a long retirement in Asia Minor.

Balanced against this, though, was the fact that defeating the Vandals had reactivated trading networks between north Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the effect of which lasted a long time: there would be a Byzantine presence in Carthage until the end of the eighth century. And most immediately, the Vandal campaign provided a road map to further conquests in the central Mediterranean. Justinian’s next target was Ostrogoth Italy, where Rome’s “other” capital was, like Carthage, in barbarian hands. However, rebuilding the old Roman Empire would not prove so easy as regime change in one of its former provinces. And this was not only because the costs were vast. Justinian’s vision of Roman reconquest was complicated by the appearance of an enemy far more obdurate and deadly than any number of barbarian armies. It was Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused bubonic plague.

As usual, Belisarius performed brilliantly, sweeping through Sicily before setting his sights on the Italian mainland. But he did so amid ominous portents, which seemed to suggest that the very universe, and not only the Roman Empire, was twisting into a strange new shape.

The deathly gloom was probably the result of a massive volcanic eruption, perhaps in North America, perhaps in Iceland, perhaps in the mid-Pacific, which released gargantuan clouds of ash and dust. And it was followed in 539 or 540 by another vast volcanic eruption, probably at Ilopango in modern El Salvador.40 Together these natural explosions spewed out several dozen cubic miles of rock and pumped more than one million tons of sulfur and

ash into the earth’s skies, ushering in one of the sharpest global environmental crises in human history. As a result the world’s climate changed for as much as a decade. Temperatures fell by at least 2 degrees Celsius globally, and summers effectively disappeared. From Ireland to China, crops withered and harvests failed. Agricultural production collapsed. Tree growth slowed—in some cases trees died where they stood. Procopius was sure it marked a major and historic shift in imperial fortunes. “From the time when this thing happened,” he mused, “men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”41 The first round of deaths were manmade. Beneath leaden skies, Belisarius led Byzantine forces on a rampage north through Italy, taking Reggio and Naples before riding bloodlessly into Rome, whose citizens chose not to resist him. By May 540 he had fought his way to the royal capital at Ravenna, and a truce was eventually drawn up by which Italy was partitioned between the Ostrogoths north of the river Po, and the Byzantines to the south. Although the Ostrogoths’ king, Vitiges, was deposed and taken back to Constantinople, his people were subjected to a surprisingly gentle peace. But clemency was a matter of necessity, for in June of the same year a Persian army under Khosrow I invaded Byzantine Syria and sacked the great city of Antioch, burning and plundering it with terrible loss of life. Another cycle of war between Rome and Persia loomed. Al...

dragging on until the 560s, and the Persian conflict for two generations more. Then, amid all this, came the plague. Although its origins cannot be precisely placed, the disease may first have originated in the Tian Shan (which today separates China from Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan), and followed the Silk Road trading superhighway west. So it was by no means an unknown ailment by the sixth century a.d.—outbreaks had occurred in the Roman world as recently as the 520s. Yet plague had seldom been anything more than an intense, local phenomenon, until, somehow, between the 520s and 540s, possibly in southeast Africa, around the ivory markets of what is now Zanzibar, the disease mutated into a super-lethal strain. It then met with environmental conditions ripe for easy infection—the climate crisis of 536 contributed to this by weakening human and rat populations and forcing them into closer-than-usual cohabitation.42 And it spread rapidly along the long-established and booming trade networks around the Mediterranean. In July 541 the population of the small Egyptian delta town of Pelusium (now Tell el-Farama) started dying in droves, their armpits and groins swollen and bla...

Bubonic plague in fact continued to sweep and swirl around the Mediterranean world for the rest of the decade, resurfacing time and again all over the world until 749.

But the economic disruption was real: wildly fluctuating wheat prices,

rapid wage inflation as ready laborers vanished, an overwhelmed inheritance system, and a near-total crash in construction. It compounded the strains on Justinian’s fiscal system, which was already stretched by the emperor’s military adventures. Tax rates soared, and remained high for many years.

Belisarius was busy on the other side of Italy, fighting over the city of Rome with a tenacious and powerful Ostrogoth king called Totila. All the same, here was a moment to celebrate a rehabilitation of Byzantine fortunes in Europe, and perhaps even the first step toward restoring something of the Roman Empire in the west.

For in retrospect Theodora’s death marked, or at least coincided with, a turning point in Justinian’s fortunes.

Divisions between Chalcedonians and Miaphysites were harder than ever to reconcile after Theodora’s death, for her strong support for the latter had offered balance within the imperial palace, allowing Justinian a degree of insurance in his religious policy.

And by laying claim to barbarian lands—such as Carthage—Justinian was increasingly exposed to the nasty divisions between Arians and Nicene Christians.

And his great attempt at religious healing—a gathering of the Church known as the Fifth Ecumenical Council, held in Constantinople in the early summer of 553—was an expensive, public failure. Hardly any western bishops attended, and in the end the council served best to highlight the dismal fractures in the Church and the seeming impossibilities of agreeing to a common position on the precise nature of Christ—as well as hinting at a future in which the Churches of Constantinople and Rome, much like the Roman empires that had nurtured them, would strike out in separate directions.

Time and again, the Ostrogoth had the better of Justinian’s generals, and repeated surges of tens of thousands of troops into Italy were required to stop it from being overrun. Only in 552 was Totila finally defeated. In 554 Justinian issued a decree known as the Pragmatic Sanction, which declared Italy a province of the empire with its capital at Ravenna. (Separate government systems were established for the island states of Sardinia, Sicily, and Corsica.) But even then, Italy remained unstable. For while the Ostrogoths had been destroyed, so had much of the Italian countryside.

Italy was considerably poorer than it had been at the outset of the war, because the Byzantine army had pursued victory so doggedly they ended up slashing the value of their prize. So although Italy was theoretically theirs, Byzantine control of the territory was patchy at best.

Within three decades of the Pragmatic Sanction’s promulgation, many of Justinian’s hard-won gains in Italy had been lost, the colony too feeble to defend itself when another power threatened. Although the Byzantine Empire would retain an interest in Italy and its islands until the tenth century, after Justinian’s day the prospect of reconnecting the two old halves of the Roman Empire seemed to diminish with every passing generation.

One of the reasons that Justinian had such difficulty crushing the Ostrogoths in Italy was that he was also troubled sporadically throughout his reign by the Persians in the east. His main tormentor in those parts was Khosrow I.

The detailed history of Justinian’s wars with Khosrow lies beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say, however, that besides the long-standing historical tendency of two neighboring empires to jostle for position and preeminence, Byzantium and Persia both nursed an economic interest in the lucrative Silk Road mercantile trails that ran through their borderlands. The economic and geographical reality of this was the chief reason why their “Eternal Peace” of the 530s lasted less than ten years.

The empires sponsored proxies in a war between rival Arab tribes on their borders, and they clashed directly over sensitive border spots like a triangle of territory known as Lazica, which lay on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. There was precious little respite, and seemingly no end to the financial and military demands that the war place on Constantinople.

A year later a coalition of barbarian Slavs from beyond the Danube—a tribe called the Kutrigurs—overran imperial defenses and menaced the walls of Constantinople itself.

His nephew Justin II reigned for thirteen years, during which time he shored up the parlous imperial finances, but acquired a reputation as a tyrant and a miser, who was troubled by the Lombards in Italy, tribal raids across the Danube, and perpetual difficulties on the Persian border.

Tiberius eventually became emperor in his own right, although without very much more success than Justin. His greatest historical legacy, perhaps, was that he was a native Greek speaker for whom Latin was a comprehensible but nonetheless foreign language. After him, Greek would become the tongue of the palace and the empire, as Constantinople sloughed off ever more of its cultural ties to the “old” Rome and the world of the western Mediterranean.

Maurice was the author of a seminal military text known as the Strategikon, which became staple reading for aspiring officers across the west for nearly one thousand years.

In Persia, Maurice achieved a significant coup when he interfered in a Persian succession dispute to depose Hormizd IV and replace him with his son Khosrow II. Maurice formally adopted Khosrow, and agreed a new “perpetual” peace with Persia. But things did not go so well in Italy, where Byzantine territory was now designated the Exarchate of Ravenna.* There, the Lombards remained an immovable presence. Maurice fell out frequently with Pope Gregory I the Great, who resented the patriarch of Constantinople’s claim to be the “ecumenical” leader of the entire Church. And in the Balkans, Maurice spent his entire reign struggling to hold the Avars at bay.

This was a frightening new insertion of violence into imperial politics, and this would become something of a Byzantine specialty: hereditary monarchy attenuated by murder.

Phocas’s killer, Heraclius, was, in a sense, the real heir to Justinian.

Under his rule, Byzantine ambitions in Italy were quietly downgraded from dreams of conquest to

maintenance of what was held. The Balkan front was shored up. North Africa was secured, but a small Byzantine presence in Visigothic Spain was abandoned, finally ending Roman interests in old Hispania. And the Persian question was spectacularly settled in the favor of the empire—although the effort came at near-fatal cost to both sides. In other words, after Heraclius’s reign, the empire’s territorial transformation from Rome to Byzantium was complete. It was now a Greek-speaking state, focused on dominating the eastern Mediterranean, with power concentrated in Constantinople and its most important geopolitical rivals lying to the south and east. That was how it would remain, more or less, for eight and a half centuries. But there was one last twist in the story. The defining struggle of Heraclius’s reign was the war with Persia.

To make matters worse, the chaos they sowed in the east had enabled Slavic tribes like the Avars to sweep into the Balkans.

His policy of marching his armies behind banners showing icons of Christ, giving an explicitly holy aspect to his war of reconquest, would echo loudly several centuries later during the Crusades. And just as would happen during the Crusades, Christ seemed to grant his people dazzling success.

Six centuries of intermittent war between the Roman and Persian empires died with Khosrow II. Heraclius adopted a new style of title: he would no longer be Augustus, but basileus (βασιλεύς), a Greek term implying an equivalent majesty to the Persians’ king of kings. Every Byzantine emperor would follow the tradition.

Khalid was a Muslim—a member of the Quraysh tribe, and one of the first followers of Islam.

In Arabia he had fought rival tribes and other would-be caliphs. Outside it, he had stormed Iraq and bested Persian troops.

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.

The siege of Damascus and the battle of Yarmuk laid the foundations for an astonishingly rapid Arab conquest of Byzantine Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. In 638 Jerusalem was surrendered by the patriarch Sophronius—who handed over control of the city in peaceable fashion but later bewailed its fate in sermons, telling the faithful that the arrival of the “vengeful and God-hating Saracens” was more clear evidence of God’s irritation with Christian sinfulness.

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.

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 the Atlantic seaboard of Europe, establishing an Islamic state that covered more than twelve million square kilometers. Between Muhammad’s death and the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate in 750, Arab armies appeared everywhere from central Asia, through the Middle East and north Africa, throughout the Visigothic Iberian Peninsula, and even into southern France. They imposed Islamic governments and introduced new ways of living, trading, learning, thinking, building, and praying. The capital of the vast caliphate they established would be Damascus itself, crowned with its Great Mosque—one of the masterpieces of medieval architecture anywhere in the world. In Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock was built on top of the site of the old Jewish Second Temple—and its gleaming dome became an iconic

landmark on that city’s famous skyline. Elsewhere, great new cities like Cairo, Kairouan (Tunisia), and Baghdad grew out of Arab military garrison towns, while other settlements like Merv (Turkmenistan), Samarkand (Uzbekistan), Lisbon, and Córdoba were renewed as major mercantile and trading cities. The caliphate established by the Arab conquests was more than just a new political federation. It was specifically and explicitly a faith empire—more so than the Roman Empire had ever been, even after Constantine’s conversion and Justinian’s reforms; even after a promulgation late in Heraclius’s reign that all Jews in Byzantium were to be forcibly converted to Christianity. Within this caliphate, an old language—Arabic—and a new religion—Islam—were central to the identity of the conquerors and, as time went on, became ever more central to the lives of the conquered. 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. The spirit of scientific invention and intellectual inquiry that thrived in some of the larger and more cosmopolitan Islamic cities would come to play a key role in the Renaissance of the later Middle Ages. T...

continued to inform foreign affairs in the modern world. The roots of the Sunni-Shia divide can be traced back to the days of the very first caliphs, while the Arab-Persian division that emerged in the eighth century lives on in the modern Middle East in the geopolitical rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The complex legacy of conflict and coexistence between Muslims, Jews, and Christians springs partially from the early medieval Arab conquests. 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. During the last of these conflicts, a notorious battle took place in a district of Damascus known as Yarmuk Camp. This is an incredible legacy. But it is not all. For more than anyth...

faith professed by Khalid ibn al-Walid, Amr ibn al-As, and their companions as they stood before the ...

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.

It is impossible to know whether this number should be taken literally. What we can say is that early medieval Arabia was a rich melting pot for cults and deities. In 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.