Agent of Byzantium
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Sections of this book have appeared in different form in the July 1985, November 1985, and January 1986 issues of Amazing Science Fiction Stories, and in the August 1986, March 1987, April 1987 and December 1989 issues of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
For John and Steve, who went through it with me.
The Ifs of History: by Isaac Asimov
There have been so many occasions when the fate of humanity seems to have hung on the outcome of a single event that might have fallen this way or that with equal probability. What if Lincoln had said “I don’t feel like going to the theater tonight, Mother. I have a headache.” Or what if Gavrilo Princip’s gun had misfired when he aimed it at Franz Ferdinand of Austria?
My own favorite “if of history” involves a scientific discovery. Leo Szilard was a Hungarian scientist who had been driven out of Europe by Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. He knew that uranium fission, recently discovered, might make a nuclear bomb possible and he wanted to be sure Hitler didn’t get it first. He labored to get scientists in the field to practice voluntary secrecy and keep their discoveries to themselves.
Then, he and a pair of fellow exiles, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, labored to get still another exile, Albert Einstein, to write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, urging him to set in motion a secret project to build a nuclear bomb before Hitler did. Szilard knew that only Einstein possessed enough weight to be persuasive.
The letter was sent in 1941, Roosevelt listened and, late in the year, he finally signed a directive that set up what came to be known as the Manhattan Project.
Now he signed it on a Saturday, and our society being what it is, people are often reluctant to do anything on a weekend. I could imagine Roosevelt tossing his pen onto his desk on the particular Saturday, and saying, with a touch of irritation, “The hell with it. Let’s take it easy. I’ll sign it first thing Monday.” It would have been such a natural thing to do.
Except that he did sign it, and it was on Saturday, December 6, 1941. If he had waited till Monday, he might never have signed it for Sunday, December 7, 1941 was Pearl Harbor day and, after that, by the time things cooled down, the whole business about the Manhattan Project might have been one with the snows of yesteryear.
What would have happened? Would Germany have gotten the bomb first? Would World War II have ended without the bomb and would the Soviet Union have gotten it first during the Cold War? Would no one ever have developed the bomb? You could write three different stories about three different consequences from this one little if of history—if Roosevelt had yawned and said, “I’ll do it Monday.”
It’s not easy to write such an if-of-history story. One little change might give birth to another and still another, until a later period becomes radically, almost unimaginably, different from what we now consider reality. Or else such a change may produce a difference which, through some kind of social inertia manages to converge until a later period is reached which is almost identical with what we call reality except for a few amusing—or ironical—changes.
Science fiction writers occasionally dare the difficulty. There are two examples I have remembered with love over the decades. One is L.Sprague de Camp’s “The Wheels of If,” which appeared in the October, 1940, Unknown and which dealt with a world in which the Moslems had won the battle of Tours, and the Celtic Church had won out over the Roman Church in the British Isles. The other is Ward Moore’s “Bring the Jubilee” which appeared in the November, 1952, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and presented a world in which the Confederacy had won the Battle of Gettysburg and had established its independence. The latter was particularly touching because characters in it would fantasize the consequences if the Union had won the battle and America had remained intact. What a Utopian world they imagined would have resulted.
Well, now we have another attempt at an elaborate if-of-history. What if Justinian’s attempt at reestablishing the Roman Empire had not overstrained it? What if the Byzantine Empire had been able to hold off the Zorastrians of Persia and if Islam had never arisen to destroy the latter and permanently cripple the former. Might Byzantium have then carried Graeco-Roman culture, intact and in full, into the future?
Read Harry Turtledove’s imagined result.
Preface
I’m a science-fiction writer and a historian. The combination is not as uncommon as it sounds—to name just a few, Barbara Hambly, Katherine Kurtz, Judith Tarr, Susan Shwartz, and JohnF. Carr all use what they studied in college to give depth and authenticity to the worlds they create. In my case, the connection between the two is even tighter. Were I not a science-fiction reader, I probably never would have ended up studying Byzantine history. I was in high school when I read L.Sprague de Camp’s classic Lest Darkness Fall, in which he dropped a modern archaeologist into sixth-century Italy. I started trying to find out how much he was making up and how much was real, and I got hooked. The rest, in more ways than one, is history.
This book, then, draws heavily on my academic background. It’s set in the early fourteenth century of an alternate world where Muhammad, instead of founding Islam, converted to Christianity on a trading mission up into Syria. As a result, the great Arab explosion of the seventh and eighth centuries, which in our world spread Islam from the Atlantic to the frontiers of China, never happened. The Roman Empire (which in its medieval, eastern guise we usually call the Byzantine Empire) never lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and north Africa to the invaders, never had to fight for its life in Asia Minor or defend Constantinople in a siege that, if lost, would have sent the Empire crashing into ruin. Freed from such desperate pressure in the east, the Empire took a more active hand in Western Europe than it could in our universe. Over the centuries, it took Spain back from the Visigoths, Italy from the Lombards, most of the southern coast of France from the Franks. To the western states that kept their freedom, Constantinople was to be envied as much as it was feared.
In the east, the history of Rome’s ancient rival Persia also differed greatly from its fate in our world. Without the Arab invasions to lay it low, it remained the other great power in the world west of China, the one nation that could treat with the Empire as an equal. Sometimes the two states clashed openly; more often they quietly maneuvered to gain an advantage here, to stir up trouble in each other’s lands there. Each continued to dream of and work for the final victory neither had ever seen. Such is the world of Basil Argyros, soldier and agent of the Empire. It is perhaps a more conservative world than our own, at least in the sense of having changed less drastically from classical times. But no world, as Argyros learns (not always to his comfort), stands still forever. A final note on chronology: the Byzantines did not often use the Incarnation as the starting point for their era. The etos kosmou (year of the world) ran from September 1 to August 31 and was reckoned from the Creation, which Byzantine scholars dated to September 1, 5509 B.C. Thus etos kosmou 6814, the year in which this story begins, runs from September 1, 1305, to August 31, 1306.
I: Etos Kosmou 6814
The steppe country north of the Danube made Basil Argyros think of the sea. Broad, green, and rolling, it ran eastward seemingly forever, all the way to the land of Serinda, from which, almost eight hundred years before, the great RomanEmperor Justinian had stolen the secret of silk. The steppe was like the sea in another way. It offered an ideal highway for invaders. Over the centuries, wave after wave of nomads had dashed against the frontiers of the Roman Empire: Huns and Avars, Bulgars and Magyars, Pechenegs and Cumans, and now the Jurchen. Sometimes the frontier defense would not hold, and the barbarians would wash over it, even threatening to storm into Constantinople, the imperial capital.