c The word Ioudaismos is overwhelmingly confined to Christian texts—most of which date from after the conversion of Constantine. “Judaism,” in the sense that it is used in modern English, was a Christian invention.
d This is a translation of the biblical “Adommim.” According to Jerome, it was on this road that the traveller in the famous parable of the good Samaritan “fell among thieves.”
e The tradition that the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were prone to farting in public was Islamic.
f In the fourth century, some units in both Palestine and Egypt were still described as belonging to the Thamud; but none, so far as we know, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire.
5
COUNTDOWN TO APOCALYPSE
New Wine in Old Bottles
The toppling of Yusuf was a victory for Christ as well as for Caesar. This presumption—that the interests of the two were indistinguishable—came naturally to the Roman people. Even those who journeyed beyond the horizons of the Mediterranean, and could appreciate the true immensity of the world, tended to take for granted that the empire ruled from Constantinople had no rival as a superpower, blessed and protected as it was by God. Even in the far-off island of Taprobane—the land we know today as Sri Lanka—Roman merchants found it easy to put their Persian rivals in the shade. One of them, seeking to demonstrate New Rome’s palpable supremacy over Iranshahr, placed two gold coins in the local king’s palm—one stamped with the image of Caesar and the other with the head of the Shahanshah. The Roman currency was magnificently and self-evidently the heavier: a fact that owed much to the watchful financial stewardship of Anastasius, but also, and more transcendently, to the favour of the Almighty. As one merchant, an Egyptian who had visited the markets of Ethiopia and navigated the tides of the Persian Gulf, piously put it: “The empire of the Roman people shares directly in the dignity of the Kingdom of Christ.” Its future was therefore assured: “It will never be conquered—not for so long as it serves to promote the spread of the Christian faith.”1
The Church, of course, had been ambitious to plant the cross on the furthermost reaches of the world ever since the time of Paul. That the Roman state had a duty to contribute to this mission was, however, a more radical presumption. Traditionally, “the spread of the Christian faith” beyond the empire had been the achievement of the weak and humble: prisoners of war, and women abducted into the beds of barbarian chieftains. The overthrow of the Jewish regime in Himyar, however, pointed to the potential of an altogether more muscular approach. This lesson, if obvious to merchants, was hardly one likely to have been missed by Justinian himself. Accordingly, even as he set himself to the suppression of paganism and heresy within the limits of the empire, he fixed his unblinking gaze upon the sump that lay beyond. For the first time in Roman history, the conversion of pagan kings became enshrined as a priority of state. Imperially sponsored missionaries were dispatched east, to the mountainous wilds that stretched beyond the Black Sea, and south, past Egypt, to the land of Nubia. Here, bred of Justinian’s inimitable blend of piety, restlessness and self-regard, was something fatefully noveclass="underline" an ethical foreign policy.
Missionaries alone, however, could never be expected to bring everyone to Christ. That much was evident. Fortunately, however, in his ambition to shape the world to his own purposes, Justinian could draw on traditions older by far than the Church. Some sixty years before the emperor’s accession, a Roman aristocrat in Gaul, despairing at the collapse of imperial authority all around him, had conjured up from the glories of the vanished past a poignant fantasy: “an armed Caesar, before whose advance both land and sea will quake, until at last, with the renewed power of his war-trumpet, he will serve to rouse the navies of Rome from their sleep.”2 Such a Caesar, of course, had never materialised. Gaul, and the entire Roman West, had slipped from imperial control. The lands administered directly by the heirs to Augustus and Constantine had been reduced by half. That did not mean, however, that Roman pretensions had in any way been diminished. Quite the contrary. If the empire ruled from Constantinople were truly—as Justinian believed it to be—an earthly reflection of the monarchy of God, then its current truncated state was not merely a crisis of geopolitical proportions, but an offence against the heavens. Christians could not be truly Christian unless they were Roman as well.
A presumption with which even some barbarians might concur. In the West, where gangs of one-time foederati had been busy carving up the various provinces, the penalty of success had tended to be a certain nagging status anxiety. Naked gangsterdom might win a warlord temporary bragging rights, but it could provide little in the way of either prestige or long-term security. That, however, was precisely where the example of an ancient and ineffably glamorous monarchy had its uses. To any ambitious chieftain, the emperor in Constantinople, who ruled as both the deputy of God and the ultimate in earthly sophistication, was the obvious role-model to hand. This was why, decades after the collapse of imperial authority in the West, the face of power there remained both Roman and Christian. Gewgaws dispatched from Constantinople, rather than being scorned, would invariably be seized upon with delight. Churches and queens alike had an insatiable appetite for the shimmer of silks from the eastern empire. Most prized of all, however, were the antique titles that only Caesar had the power to bestow. In Gaul, when Anastasius appointed the king of a notoriously savage people named the Franks to the consulship—an office that reached back to the earliest days of the republic—the warlord was so delighted by this mark of esteem that he promptly took to sporting a purple tunic and tossing gold coins to passers-by. Another barbarian king, replying to an embassy from Justin, politely assured the emperor that “our homeland is a part of your world, nor does my royal administration in any way reduce your own sovereignty.”3 Total fantasy, of course—but no less mutually flattering for that. Upstart chieftain and distant Caesar: both alike had a stake in pretending that there still existed, in however shadowy a form, a unified empire, Roman and watched over by God.
As a result, the brute realities of regime change in the West might often be veiled behind a certain studied ambivalence. Nowhere served as more of a trompe-l’oeil than Italy, that original seat of empire, where the gauze of ambiguity had been woven with a particular brilliance and subtlety. In outward appearance, indeed, it seemed that nothing much had changed since the palmiest days of Roman greatness. In Rome itself, the Senate continued to meet, consuls to be appointed, and chariot races to be run. In Ravenna—the lagoon-girt and therefore readily defensible city on the Adriatic coast that had served the western empire as its final capital—the administration remained in the hands of impeccably Roman bureaucrats. Meanwhile, with a solemn and formal show of legality, Constantinople had entrusted the western empire’s defence to a band of some twenty thousand foederati diverted specially for the purpose from the Balkans: the so-called Easterly—or “Ostro-”—Goths.4 Their commander, a one-time hostage in the imperial household by the name of Theoderic, played the part of Caesar’s deputy to perfection. Whether addressing crowds in the Forum, slaughtering armies of savages beyond the Alps, or building palaces, aqueducts and baths, he demonstrated to glorious effect just how Roman a king of foederati might truly be. By the time of his death in 526, he had ruled as the master of Italy for longer than any Caesar, with the exception of Augustus himself. As a result, it seems barely to have crossed the minds of most Italians that they might not still belong to a Roman empire.