Yet, the empire did not, in the end, succumb. Instead, against all odds, and through a supreme and grinding effort of will, a new generation of emperors hauled it back from the brink. Grim, implacable and pitiless men, they forced upon their subjects a revolution no less far-reaching than the one presided over by Augustus. That “taxes are the sinews of the state”11 had long been a Roman maxim. Recently, though, amid the agonies of the age, those same sinews had atrophied. Warfare and anarchy had made it increasingly difficult to raise revenue. The authorities, in their desperation, had debased the coinage—but that had merely led inflation to gallop out of control. Rome had faced financial as well as military ruin. The surgery, however, when it finally came, was to prove brutally effective. To the iron-fisted warlords who now stood at the head of the empire, it appeared self-evident that only a massively enlarged military apparatus could hope to maintain the integrity of the frontiers—and that only a massively enlarged fiscal apparatus could hope to pay for it. Accordingly, over the course of a few decades, the number of soldiers and bureaucrats was multiplied by an astounding factor. The state that emerged from these reforms was to prove the most formidably governed that the Mediterranean had ever seen. Nowhere before had there existed a bureaucracy quite so complex and domineering; and nowhere before had there existed a military funded on quite so massive a scale. The light-touch autocracy established by Augustus had been transformed into something infinitely more heavy-handed: centralised, intrusive and absolute. It was a form of government that still retained the name of Roman; and yet there was a sense as well in which it marked a revolutionary change. So much so, in fact, that the new regime had gone so far as to found a second Rome.
Byzantium, this new capital had originally been called. It stood on the western shore of the Bosphorus, a narrow strait that served—like the Hellespont some one hundred miles to the south-west—to separate Europe from Asia. Greek settlers had founded the city many centuries earlier—but despite the fact that it occupied a magnificently defensible site on the tip of a promontory, surrounded on one side by sea, and on the other by an estuary named the Golden Horn, its growth had always been limited by a seemingly fatal lack of drinking water. Such a drawback, however, was hardly the kind to put off a Roman autocrat; and sure enough, in AD 324, there had arrived in Byzantium a Caesar fully determined to found on its site “another Rome.”12 The name of this emperor was Constantine—a man who stood supreme as the very embodiment of the new imperial order. Born in the Balkans, proclaimed emperor in Britain, he had spent his life criss-crossing the empire, patching it back together in the teeth of a host of rivals, all of whom he had systematically hunted down and eliminated. Although he had won the decisive victory of his reign just outside the walls of Rome, Constantine had no particular ties of loyalty to the ancient capital. What he did have, however, was an unblinking appreciation of the empire’s defensive needs: of just how imperative it was to coordinate the eastern and northern fronts. Byzantium, midway between the Euphrates and the Rhine, could not have been more ideally suited to his purposes. A whole new foundation was accordingly planted on its site. A massive grid of monuments, squares and streets began to spread westwards along the course of the promontory, obliterating entire reaches of the original city as it went. Even its name was swallowed up. Although the people who lived on the site would continue to call themselves Byzantines, Byzantium itself had ceased to exist. On 11 May 330, amid a triumphant blaze of immodesty, its founder formally inaugurated it as the “City of Constantine”: Constantinople.
Initially, of course, the inhabitants of the original Rome could hardly help but find the pretensions of this arriviste settlement faintly risible. Everyone knew that a city without an ancient pedigree barely ranked as a city at all. Rapidly though the population of Constantinople was soon growing, far more rapidly even than its founder had anticipated, so that in only a few decades it was bursting the landward walls he had built for the city, yet there still lurked, among those who lived there, a queasy consciousness of their own status as upstarts. Numerous efforts were made to counter this. Constantine himself—determined to purloin for his foundation the heritage that it so glaringly lacked—had stripped the Greek world bare of all its greatest treasures. The public spaces of Constantinople, adorned with famous trophies and statuary, “brazen statues of the most exquisite workmanship,”13 had come to rank as the world’s most stupefying museum. The city had even taken on the ultimate challenge: going toe to toe with Rome herself. Topographers, with a show of considerable creativity, had succeeded in establishing that Constantinople, just like her venerable predecessor, boasted seven hills. Architects had designed for her all the appurtenances of a cutting-edge imperial capitaclass="underline" palaces, forums, baths. Engineers had provided her with the aqueducts and harbours that any city with an ambition to equal Rome would require, if its inhabitants were to be kept watered and fed. Most strikingly of all, perhaps, Constantinople had been endowed with an ornament hitherto unique to Rome: an assembly of the great and good by the name of the Senate. This was the body, back in the distant past, long before the time of Augustus and the forging of his autocracy, that had guided Rome to the mastery of the world. It constituted a living link with the most primordial days of the empire. Now, the establishment of a Senate in Constantinople, and a Senate House, gave to the city a touch, however faint, of the long-vanished republic. It helped to put flesh on the bones of its proud claim to be the Second Rome.
And as time passed, and the city continued to increase in scale and self-confidence, so she came to appropriate for herself an even more sensational ancestry. Two hundred years on from the founding of Constantinople, and it had become widely believed that Constantine’s original plan had been to establish his new capital on the site, not of Byzantium at all, but of Troy.14 This, of course, would have been to identify it with origins even more ancient than Rome herself; nor, despite the fact that the plan had self-evidently failed to come to fruition, did this prevent Constantinople herself from laying claim to the hoary mystique of the Trojan name. There stood, for instance, in the middle of a circular forum built by Constantine, a porphyry column; and on this column there stood an image of the city’s founder, crowned as though by the sun, with seven glittering rays. Constantine himself was said to have brought the stone for the column from Troy.15 Yet the most valuable relic of all to have been redeemed from the mists of the Trojan past, and the one that boded best for the future of the city, was not even on public display. Buried deep beneath the base of the column, so it was believed, lay an antique wooden statue: the Palladium itself. The story went that Constantine “had secretly taken it away from Rome, and placed it in his forum”:16 an ultimate trumping of the ancient capital’s snobbery.
In truth, though, two centuries on from the re-founding of their city, the Byzantines could scarcely care less for what the people of Rome might think of them. Their conviction that the Palladium lay buried beneath Constantine’s column reflected something far more profound than merely a relish for one-upmanship. Much had changed. The same decades that had brought such suffering to Iranshahr at the hands of the Hephthalites had witnessed, in the western half of Rome’s empire, an even more calamitous intrusion of barbarians. Rome herself, the city which for so long had stood buttressed by the favour of the heavens, had been trampled underfoot. The whole of Italy had been subjected to the rule of a Gothic king. Other provinces, too—from Africa to Gaul—had slipped from imperial control, as the one-time foederati, roaming seemingly at will across the shattered landscape of the Roman west, had seized control of its commanding heights. Only the eastern half of the empire—the half ruled from Constantinople—had stood proof against this headlong slide towards disintegration. With Rome herself reduced to the humiliating status of a provincial city ruled by a barbarian warlord, there remained just the one capital left standing. The right of Constantinople to the title of the mistress of the Roman world was now beyond all dispute. Why, then, that being so, should anyone seriously have doubted that the Palladium had indeed been brought there from Rome?