The Early Centuries - Byzantium 01 (41 page)

On Whit Sunday,
1
5
May, Patriarch Sergius ascended the high ambo in St Sophia and read the Emperor's message to his people.
1
Beginning with the
jubilate -
'Be joyful in the Lord' - it was, predictably, more a hymn of thanksgiving and a* religious exhortation than a proclamation of victory; and though there was much vilification and abuse heaped on the dead Chosroes ('He has gone by the same path as Judas Iscariot, of whom the Almighty said that it were better he had never been born') it is noteworthy that there is not a word of disapproval of Siroes and his particularly revolting parricide. But the people of Constantinople did not care. While the Senate passed a resolution granting Heraclius the honorific title of
Scipio,
one and all began to prepare a reception worthy of the conqueror.

Leaving the signing of the peace treaty to Theodore, Heraclius had meanwhile begun the long journey home with his army. When at last he arrived at his palace of Hiera, opposit
e Constantinople across the Bos
phorus, it was to find what appeared to be the entire population of the capital waiting to greet him, olive branches and lighted candles in their hands. In the palace itself was his family: his sixteen-year-old elder son Constantine, who had already distinguished himself by his courage during the siege; his daughter Epiphania - all unconscious, one hopes, of the fate she had so narrowly escaped; his younger son by Martina, Heraclonas, now thirteen; and Martina herself, who had returned from the East with her new-born baby some months before.

It was, according to Theophanes, a happy if tearful reunion, after which the family might have been expected to pass on at once to Constantinople. Heraclius, however, had resolved not to enter his capital without the True Cross, which Theodore had been charged to bring as

1
The full text is preserved in the Paschal Chronicle.

quickly as possible. There was some initial delay, since for some time it could not be found; it was Shahr-Baraz who, in return for an assurance of the Emperor's goodwill towards him, eventually revealed its hiding-place. With this holiest of relics at last in his possession, Theodore hurried back; but it was well into September before he arrived at Chalcedon and arrangements could be made for the imperial homecoming.

The Golden Gate of Constantinople, that great ceremonial arch erected by Theodosius the Great in about
390
and incorporated into the newly built Land Walls some thirty years later, is a sa
d sight today. The plates of solid gold which covered it and to which it owed its name have long since disappeared; gone too are the sculptures, both marble and bronze, which adorned the facade. Worse still, its three openings have been bricked up so that it is no longer even a gate at all. It now stands, half-hidden by the long grass surrounding the
yediku
le
- the Castle of the Seven Towers, a few hundred yards along the walls from the Marmara shore - ignored and forgotten. It must, however, have looked very different on the morning of
14
September
628,
when Heraclius entered his capital in triumph. Before him went the True Cross; behind, surrounded by his victorious soldiers, lumbered four elephants who had also made the long journey from Persia - the first, we are told, ever seen in Constantinople. Among the cheering crowds there were many who remarked how their Emperor had aged during his years of campaign: certainly, there was little now to remind them of the stalwart young demi-god who had made his first entry into the city on his arrival from Carthage, eighteen years before. The years of anxiety and hardship had taken their toll: though still only in his middle fifties he looked old and ill, his body prematurely stooping, his once-glorious mane of blond hair now reduced to a few grey strands. But if he had worn himself out, he had done so in the service of the Empire; thanks to him Sassanid Persia, though it would struggle on for a few more years, would never again prove a threat to Byzantium.

The procession threaded its way slowly through the streets to St Sophia, where Patriarch Sergius was waiting; and, at the solemn mass of thanksgiving that followed, the True Cross on which the Redeemer had died was slowly raised up until it stood, vertical, before the high altar. It was, perhaps, the most moving moment in the history of the Great Church, and it could well have been seen as a sign that God's enemies had been scattered and that a new golden age of Empire was about to dawn.

Alas, it proved to be nothing of the kind. Just six years before, in September
622
- the very year in which Heraclius had launched his Persian expedition - the Prophet Mohammed had taken flight with a few followers from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina, thereby marking the starting-point for the whole Muslim era; and just five years afterwards, in
633,
the armies of Islam would begin the advance that was to take them, in the course of a single century, to within
150
miles of Paris and to the very gates of Constantinople. Christendom's most formidable rival - and for the next thousand years its most implacable enemy - was already born, and would soon be on the march.

Until the second quarter of the seventh century, the land of Arabia was
terra incognita
to the Christian world. Remote and inhospitable, productive of nothing to tempt the sophisticated merchants of the West, it had made no contribution to civilization and seemed unlikely ever to do so. Its people, insofar as anyone knew anything about them, were presumed to be little better than savages, periodically slaughtering each other in violent outbreaks of tribal warfare, falling mercilessly upon any traveller foolhardy enough to venture among them, making not the slightest attempt towards unity or even stable government. Apart from a few scattered Jewish colonies around the coast and in Medina and a small Christian community in the Yemen, the overwhelming majority practised a sort of primitive polytheism which, in the city of Mecca - their commercial centre - appeared to be somehow focused on the huge black stone that stood in their principal temple, the
Ka'aba.
Where the outside world was concerned they showed no interest, made no impact and certainly posed no threat.

Then, in the twinkling of an eye, all was changed. In
633,
showing a discipline and singleness of purpose of which they had previously given no sign and which was therefore totally unexpected by their victims, they suddenly burst out of Arabia. After three years they had taken Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after six, all Syria. Within a decade, Egypt and Armenia had alike fallen to the Arab sword; within twenty years, the whole Persian Empire; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then, after a brief interval for consolidation, the victorious armies turned their attention to the West. In
711,
having occupied the entire coast of North Africa, they invaded Spain; and by
732,
less than a century after their first eruption from their desert homeland, they had crossed the Pyrenees and driven north to the banks of the Loire -where, after a week-long battle, they were checked at last.

History provides few parallels for so dramatic a saga of conquest, and only one explanation: that the Arabs were carried forward on a great surge of religious enthusiasm, implanted in them by their first and greatest leader, the Prophet Mohammed. So, indisputably, they were; it is worth remembering, however, that this enthusiasm contained scarcely any missionary zeal. Throughout their century of advance, their attempts at the mass - or even individual - conversion of their defeated enemies were remarkably few; and they tended at times to show an almost embarrassing respect for the religion of the Jews and Christians who, as 'People of the Book', could normally count on their toleration and goodwill. What their faith gave to them was, above all, a feeling of brotherhood, of cohesion and of almost limitless self-confidence, knowing as they did that Allah was with them, and that if it were His will that they should fall in battle they would be immediately rewarded in paradise - and a delightfully sensual paradise at that, whose promised delights were, it must be admitted, a good deal more alluring than those of its Christian counterpart. In this world, on the other hand, they willingly adopted a disciplined austerity that they had never known before, together with an unquestioning obedience whose outward manifestations were abstinence from wine and strong drink, periodic fasting and the five-times-daily ritual of prayer.

The founder of their religion was himself never to lead them on campaign. Born of humble origins some time around
570,
orphaned in early childhood and finally married to a rich widow considerably older than himself, Mohammed was that rare combination of a visionary mystic and an astute, far-sighted statesman. In the former capacity, he preached, first, the singleness of God and second, the importance to mankind of total submission
(islam)
to his will. This was not a particularly original creed - both Jews and Christians, inside Arabia as well as out, had maintained it for centuries - but it seemed so to most of those who now heard it for the first time; and it was Mohammed's skill to present it in a new, homespun form, clothed in proverbs, fragments of desert lore and passages of almost musical eloquence, all of which were combined in that posthumous collection of his revelations which we know as the Koran. He was clever, too, in the way in which - although he almost certainly considered himself as a reformer rather than a revolutionary -he managed to identify his own name and person with the doctrine he preached: not by ascribing any divinity to himself as Jesus Christ had done, but by putting himself forward as the last and greatest of the
Prophets, in whom all his predecessors - including Jesus - were subsumed.

He was a statesman, above all, in his pragmatic approach. Despite his genuine spiritual fervour, he was never a fanatic. He perfectly understood the people among whom he lived, and was always careful not to push them further than they would willingly go. He knew, for example, that they would never abandon polygamy: he therefore accepted it, and indeed himself took several more wives after the death of his first. Slavery was another integral part of Arabian life: this too he tolerated. He was even prepared to come to terms with features of the old animist religion; as early as
624
he decreed that the Faithful should turn towards the
Ka'aba
in Mecca when praying, rather than towards Jerusalem as he had previously enjoined. He never ceased to stress, on the other hand, one entirely new and distinctly unpalatable aspect of his creed - the inevitability of divine judgement after death: often, it seemed, he described the torments of hell even more vividly than the joys of paradise. And the fear of retribution may well have proved useful when he came to weld his followers into a political state.

Mohammed died of a fever in Mecca - to which he had triumphantly returned - on
8
June
632;
and the leadership, both religious and political, passed to his oldest friend and most trusted lieutenant Abu-Bakr, who assumed the title of Caliph - literally, 'representative' of the Prophet. In the year following, the Muslim armies marched. But Abu-Bakr was already growing old; he in turn died soon afterwards - according to tradition in August
634,
on the very day of the first capture of Damascus - and it was under the second Caliph, Omar, that the initial series of historic victories was won. In one respect in particular, luck was on the side of the Arabs: the recent war between Byzantium and Persia had left both Empires exhausted, no longer capable of any serious resistance. For the former, the situation was further aggravated by the fact that the peoples of Syria and Palestine felt no real loyalty towards the Emperor in Constantinople, who represented an alien Graeco-Roman culture and whose lack of sympathy for their monophysite traditions had periodically led to active persecution. The Muslim tide, composed as it was of Semites like themselves, professing a rigid monotheism not unlike their own and promising toleration for every variety of Christian belief, cannot have seemed to them substantially worse than the regime it swept away.

The Arab invasion of Syria in
633
found Heraclius already back in the East. He had stayed in Constantinople only six months after his triumphant
homecoming, conscious all the time of the tasks that awaited him in the lands that he had so recently left. The provinces, for example, that he had reconquered from Persia - they must be re-established and reorganized, given a firm military and economic base to protect their future security. The doctrinal problems with the Eastern churches - they must be studied, thoroughly discussed and, if possible, resolved. Most important of all, the True Cross must be returned to Jerusalem where it belonged. With the coming of spring in
629,
accompanied by his wife Martina and his eldest son Constantine, he had set off across Anatolia for Syria and Palestine. On reaching the Holy City, he had personally carried the Cross along the Via Dolorosa to the rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Patriarch Zacharias was waiting to receive it back into his charge.

It was a measure of the good government that he had given the Empire - to say nothing of the security of his own position - that Heraclius was able to spend the next seven years in these eastern provinces, moving constantly from place to place, setting up his court in Damascus or Antioch, Edessa' or Emesa
2
or Hierapolis,
3
stamping out incompetence and inefficiency, reducing the power of the rich land-owners, improving and streamlining the administrative machine. Meanwhile, in the theological field, he made himself the champion of a new formula, recently developed by Patriarch Sergius in Constantinople, in the hopes that it might prove acceptable to the orthodox and monophysite communities alike, thus healing the rift which was assuming ever more dangerous proportions.

Sergius's proposal was, essentially, that although Christ had two separate natures, the human and the divine, these natures possessed a single active force, or energy. To put it another way, all that the monophysites would now be asked to accept was that the unity which they very properly perceived in the Saviour was one of energy rather than of nature. From the first this solution to the problem had been enthusiastically supported by Heraclius, who had proposed it to an Armenian bishop as early as
622;
and during these later years we find him returning to it again and again - with, it must be said, most encouraging results. At Hierapolis in
629
the monophysite Bishop Athanasius had endorsed it in return for being appointed Patriarch of Antioch, and in the following year the new Patriarch of Alexandria reported further notable successes. From Rome, meanwhile, Pope Honorius had intimated that he had no

1
Urfa.

2
Homs.

3
Mambij.

3°5

objection - although he made it clear that he took little interest in the matter one way or the other.

There was, nevertheless, a good deal of opposition from other quarters; and this opposition was led and orchestrated by a fanatically orthodox monk by the name of Sophronius. If Sophronius had remained in his monastery all might have been well, but in
634
an ironic fate decreed that he should be elected Patriarch of Jerusalem. Immediately, with all the authority of his new rank, he redoubled his attacks. The new doctrine, he thundered, was nothin
g but a bastard form of monophy
sitism, thinly disguised; as such, like the older heresy, it was a betrayal of all that had been achieved at the Council of Chalcedon. Suddenly, support for the theory of the single energy began to fall away. Erstwhile enthusiasts began to see fallacies and inherent contradictions, and the Emperor watched powerless while all that he had so patiently and painfully built up crumbled away to dust.

Nor was this the only blow that he was called upon to bear. In that same disastrous year of
634,
the armies of the Prophet first poured into Syria; soon afterwards, news reached Heraclius in Antioch that the modest Byzantine force sent against them had been utterly annihilated. A few months later the Muslims had occupied Damascus and Emesa and were laying siege to Jerusalem. Now it was no longer just the results of long and patient diplomacy that had been undone overnight; it was all that had been achieved in six years' hard campaigning. Shattered as he was by these events, Heraclius at once applied himself to the task of raising a full-scale army; and a year later no less than
80,000
men were drawn up outside Antioch, including several thousand Armenians and a large detachment of Christian Arab cavalry.

In face of this threat the Muslims withdrew their garrisons from Emesa and Damascus and fell back on the Yarmuk River, a tributary of the Jordan which meets it just south of the Sea of Galilee. In May
636
the imperial army advanced southward to meet them - but, instead of launching an immediate attack, waited for three months in apparent indecision. The delay was fatal. The Christians, exposed to the increasingly merciless heat of the Syrian summer, grew restive and demoralized while the brilliant young Muslim general Khalid harassed them with incessant forays while awaiting the reinforcements he had ordered from Arabia. Soon after these had arrived, on
20
August, a violent sandstorm swept up from the south; Khalid saw his chance and charged. The Byzantine troops, caught unawares and blinded by the flying sand blown full in their faces, gave way under the impact and were massacred almost to a man.