True, there were many in the eastern half of the empire who dreaded that their own doom was brewing, too. It seemed to pessimists that their dominion had become something terminally “shrunken, barbarised, and ruined.”17 Yet the truth was that the Roman state, even as these cries of despair went up, was very far from finished. The labour of surgery performed on the empire by Constantine, for all that it had ultimately proved inadequate to the preservation of its authority in the West, still gave to the emperors of the East a stately and a domineering tread. Certainly, in Ctesiphon, at the court of their pre-eminent rivals, no one ever thought to deny the continuing might of the Caesars. For all the success that Kavad had enjoyed in pillaging the empire’s eastern frontier, and in extorting renewed payments of danger money, the Romans too had enjoyed some triumphs of their own. In 504, for instance, one of their armies had gained a measure of revenge for the rape of Amida by sweeping deep into Mesopotamia, looting and slaving as it went, while in its wake a specially appointed death squad left not a single house standing. Even more tellingly, the Romans had capitalised upon the period of hostilities with Persia to remedy their previous lack of a forward command post. In 505, the Emperor Anastasius purchased a small estate named Dara, located just ten miles from the great Persian border stronghold of Nisibis. Barely a year later, by the time that a temporary truce was signed, a massive complex of walls and watchtowers had come to loom over the fields, where previously nothing but a village had stood. It was, as the howls of protest from Ctesiphon bore witness, an initiative fit to appal Persian strategists. The entire balance of power in the region had been transformed. The Roman frontier was now decisively re-militarised. Even Kavad, towards the end of his reign, had been brought to accept the implications. In 522, the old war-horse dispatched an embassy from Nisibis with a letter for the emperor. In it, he floated a startling proposition: “that you make my son Khusrow, who is the heir to my throne, your adopted son.”18 In part, the offer was a blatant attempt to forestall any meddling by Constantinople in the succession crisis that was even then brewing in Iranshahr; but it also signalled just how brightly Roman prestige had come to blaze again. Sure enough, a few months later, another Persian embassy made its way to Constantinople with instructions to negotiate an enduring peace. No Shahanshah, it went without saying, would ever have pressed for détente with an enemy that he regarded as contemptible. The Palladium, it seemed, was working its magic still.
And certainly, even to a diplomat familiar with the scale and splendour of Ctesiphon, the capital of the rival superpower would have appeared touched by an almost supernatural quality of majesty. To approach Constantinople was to be dazzled by the most awesome cityscape in the world. So rapidly had it grown that the proud and ancient city of Chalcedon, on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, now served merely as its gateway. The Persian ambassadors—boarding a ship in Chalcedon’s harbour and negotiating the waters that surrounded Constantinople “like a garland”19—would have found marks of urban sprawl wherever they looked: for the conurbation, spreading in a ribbon along the European coastline, had long since broken through even the outermost ring of walls. Inevitably, though, it was to what lay within those hulking fortifications that the visitor’s gaze was drawn: for it was there that human effort and ingenuity had most astoundingly enhanced the already stunning setting. Along the waterfront, once a bleak wilderness of mud and reeds, everything now proclaimed the voracious appetites of the capitaclass="underline" a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of harbours and warehouses, granaries and wharfs. Beyond them, packed so tightly together that visitors would often find themselves “cramped and walking in danger because of the great number of men and animals,”20 there spread the homes of the city’s almost half a million inhabitants: a concentration of people vaster even than Ctesiphon. Nevertheless, as the Persian ambassadors neared their destination, the skyline of Constantinople would have conveyed to them an impression, not of seething clamour, but rather of order, monumentality and space. Along the spine of the promontory, the smog bred of countless furnaces and hearths, and which hung in a pall over the lower reaches of the great conurbation, diminished upon the sea breezes, to reveal the hills that originally, before the arrival of Constantine upon them, had constituted the upper reaches of Byzantium, and now provided the New Rome, and the Roman Empire itself, with its mighty heart.
The ambassadors, once they had disembarked and made their way up from the Golden Horn, would have approached these hills along a broad, sumptuously porticoed road: the Mese—“Middle Street.” Ahead, framed by colossal arches and gateways, stretched a succession of marmoreal open spaces. It was in the first of these, at the foot of a column pointedly adorned with depictions of Roman military triumphs, that the ambassadors would have been officially welcomed to the city; it was in the second, the circular forum built by Constantine, that the Palladium supposedly lay buried. It was not this forum, however, but a third, the square known as the Augustaion, that most magnificently embodied the capital’s pretensions. On its eastern flank stood the Senate House;a to the south, adorning a massive bath-house, was the city’s finest collection of antique statuary; to the west, marking the termination of the Mese, a domed and double-arched mass of brick and marble named the Golden Milestone. This was the monument from which imperial cartographers measured the distance to every known location: for just as the sun, and the moon, and the stars revolved around the earth, so too, it pleased the Romans to imagine, did all kingdoms revolve around Constantinople. She stood, in their confident opinion, upon the axis of the world. She was, quite simply, the “Queen of Cities.”
Which explained why, in the final reckoning, the peace mission of the Persian ambassadors was doomed to fail. Just as the House of Sasan, upon the faintest scent of Roman weakness, was bound to return to the attack, so too did the Caesars, despite all the many calamities that had afflicted their empire, shrink from any public acknowledgement that their rule might be less than universal. Victory, eternal victory, was still what it had been to Virgiclass="underline" their destiny and their due. Even at moments of terrible peril, when there would inevitably seem something shrill about this assertion, the sublime conviction with which it was made remained undiminished. To rule as the heir of Augustus and Constantine was to believe oneself entrusted by the heavens with the very reins of earthly power. The brute fact that there were kingdoms that did not acknowledge the supremacy of the Roman people could not, of course, be ignored; but it was possible, enthroned in a capital such as Constantinople, to ignore the implications. The city remained, in the opinion of the Caesars, the authentic cockpit of global affairs.